Mike Valentine was a blue-collar kid who grew into a blue-collar young man, a longshoreman’s son who began working as a steelworker as a teenager, walking his first skyscraper beam at 14. His was a hardscrabble existence: He spent the next decade and a half addicted to alcohol and beset with its devastations — bar fights, car accidents and times behind bars. All that changed when his daughter was born — and he turned his attention to living life in pursuit of a worthy purpose. Today, as founder of On Purpose Now, he helps clients address the psychological, emotional, practical and spiritual aspects of life and business to awaken dormant energy and harness real power. What have his 30,000 hours of coaching others through crucibles and crossroads taught him? That every one of us has a gift to give, a purpose to live and a vision to build … and that the purpose most people want to aim for is characterized by love, grace and peace. In this episode, he tells BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE host and Crucible Leadership founder Warwick Fairfax that pain offers us a great awakening. “What we find at ground zero,” he says, “is the bottom of our hearts.”
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Transcript
Gary S:
Welcome, everybody, to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Gary Schneeberger, the co-host of the podcast and the Communications Director for Crucible Leadership. And you have clicked play, we hope you’ve clicked subscribe to this podcast, because Beyond the Crucible is a podcast that deals with how you deal with crucible experiences in your life, those difficult moments in your life that can really shake you up, that can really kind of knock you sideways, can sometimes leave you feeling as if life will never be the same again. And our purpose, and you’ll hear it extremely well in today’s episode, I think, our purpose in talking about those moments is to give you hope and actionable tips on how you can move beyond them.
Gary S:
Our guest today, Warwick, is someone who can really help us with that. And Warwick, by the way, listener, is Warwick Fairfax, who is the host of this program and the founder, the architect of Crucible Leadership. Warwick, this is going to be a good one, I think, and it will offer great actionable steps for listeners.
Warwick F:
Absolutely, Gary. I’m very excited to have Mike here, and yeah, it should be a great discussion.
Gary S:
The Mike that Warwick just referred to is Mike Valentine. And I’m going to tell you just a little bit about him, listener, before we get going here. Amidst the shadows of life-defining challenges, Mike Valentine activates a rare ability to bring to light the transformative power of purpose and produce real results. With the combination of a strong backbone, kind heart and direct approach, Mike has been professionally coaching people from all walks of life for more than 25 years. Mike has spent over 30,000 hours in developing leaders and scaled the ladder in three industries. His experience as a seasoned entrepreneur and corporate executive balances his training as a leader, and now his unique role as a life-purpose coach.
Gary S:
Mike has taught corporate leadership development, worked with personal and family relationships, and the realization of peak performance and human potential. The fires of life have tempered Mike’s character and left a burning devotion to helping others live happier, healthier lives, expressed through trans-personal purposes. For the last 12 years, Mike has pioneered On-Purpose Guidance Systems, which transcend the usual approaches by unlocking the power of true intention to create sustainable change and real results. His integral expertise, addressing the psychological, emotional, practical, and spiritual aspects of life and business, awakens dormant energy and harnesses real power. With this methodology, Mike supports people in all walks to make the shift to live On Purpose Now.
Warwick F:
Well, Mike, it’s so great to have you, and appreciate you coming here on the podcast. I really love that whole On Purpose Now theme. It definitely just certainly feels like it makes so much sense. We talk here a lot in Crucible Leadership and, in this case, Beyond the Crucible podcast, about living a life of significance. We’ve actually used the phrase, a life on purpose; who knew we were both kind of subconsciously on the same wavelength? But before we get to kind of On Purpose Now, which I’d love to hear you unpack it some more, it would be great to hear some of the back story, some of the circumstances, some of the challenges, maybe even crucibles that… There’s always a reason behind our vision, there’s always a reason behind our passion, and I’m sure you have a burning passion for helping people live on purpose. So Mike, tell us a bit about Mike Valentine and how you grew up, and kind of maybe the path that led you to where you are now with On Purpose Now.
Mike Valentine:
I was born in Baytown, Texas, which is the East of Houston. If you know Houston, that’s not the brighter side.
Gary S:
Yes.
Mike Valentine:
My dad is, or was… he passed a little over a year ago, but was a union longshoreman, and his best friend was a union iron worker. And by the ripe old age of 14, I was hanging iron in downtown Houston. So much of what I learned about living on purpose, I learned walking a beam. And it’s way too simplified, but it really is simple. There’s death three inches either direction, or less, and it’s important to land the next step.
Warwick F:
Right. You don’t land the next step, that could be your last step.
Mike Valentine:
Yeah, the second one doesn’t matter yet. Unbeknownst to me, that was part of my training, learning to live fully in the moment, to be right at the edge of death. And in the late ’70s, early ’80s, we didn’t wear safety harnesses. And so the only thing between me and death was gravity, and it was pulling for it. Unbeknownst to myself, that was some of the training to really learn how to stay present, in the moment, take the next step, maintain balance, be sure you got your tools with. You don’t want to drop them. There’s a lot of good training in that. But prior to that, I don’t know…
Mike Valentine:
I was sharing with Gary when we spoke before that when I was seven years old, my parents went to Mexico, and they came back and shared of the starving children in Mexico begging for money and food. And a boy, that they had connected with and taken a liking to was my age, seven. And they told me about it. And I remember my heart sinking and my throat welling up. You didn’t often cry in front of my dad for no reason, but it was right there. And when they finished telling me, I don’t know if it was exactly then, but shortly after, I decided I needed to get my second bike in shape. That young man could use my bicycle. And if he had my bike to beg, he could get to more people faster.
Mike Valentine:
So I went to the garage and started to repair my spare bike. And my dad came out and said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m getting my bike in shape for…” I believe his name was Juan. “I’m going to get my bike in shape for Juan, and we’ll send it to him.” And my dad said, “Oh, don’t be silly. You can’t do that.” And honestly, he may as well have told me I can’t help my fellow man. I know he didn’t intend that; he was being practical. In hindsight, I can see that. But I developed stomach ulcers, worrying about other children who didn’t have…
Mike Valentine:
We were lower-middle class America, but we had the necessities, we weren’t hurting, and I had a spare. And if I couldn’t give my spare bike to that young man, how would I help people? It presented a very unique dilemma. At seven years old, I developed stomach ulcers, and we didn’t know that was very young to have stomach ulcers. And one day, as I was crossing the backyard, they doubled me over and… I didn’t go unconscious, but I was in deep pain. And when the pain passed, I had a sense of something that easily, now I can say, was purpose. I certainly couldn’t say it then, but I would say now, that something in me knew the world lives in fear, and it doesn’t have to.
Warwick F:
So just talk about that experience. You’re seven years old, and you probably didn’t… you certainly wouldn’t have thought in those terms. My sense is, even at seven, Mike, your worldview and your father’s was very different. I’m sure you didn’t say, “Yes, I have a different worldview than my dad.” Who does that at age seven?
Mike Valentine:
No, I wouldn’t have said that, either.
Warwick F:
But yet you clearly did. Again, doesn’t mean that your father was a bad person, but your view of the world and how it should operate, maybe even your sense of values, was a bit maybe different. So talk about… In hindsight, as you look back at a seven-year-old Mike Valentine and your dad, talk about the difference in your dad’s frame of reference and how he saw the world and how you saw the world, even at age seven.
Mike Valentine:
And that continued until his passing. You’ve hit the nail on the head there, very keen insight on your part. Of course, you’re right, I could not say, “Oh, I have a unique worldview to yours and let’s work this out diplomatically.” That wasn’t an option. But that desire to live in service of something greater than my own existence, I would say from that day, until I was 28, haunted me. Within the setting that I lived in, both in my home and in the environment… Union ironworkers are not generally the most enlightened trade on the planet. I was in an environment that had, in my opinion, no chance to really, not only fertilize and grow and expand that in dialogues with people, but couldn’t even talk about it.
Warwick F:
It almost feels like, and I don’t want to put words in your mouth, that your dad maybe thought like, “My job to take care of my wife, my kids, my immediate family. That’s my job.” If you’re an ironworker, it’s take care of your brothers in your local union. It’s like every other people can take care of themselves, but it’s not my job to take care of other families, of people in other countries. That’s not what I’m here about. Kind of family first kind of deal. Was that kind of a bit of the mindset? Do you think of your dad and-
Mike Valentine:
That’s exactly right. And I would say this… And thank you for saying my brothers, because they were. No question, I hold no superior place on the planet than those guys. I’ll tell you, I think that all of us, unbeknownst to ourselves, we met God on the beam. We didn’t know that’s what we were doing, but fear can’t walk the beam, and you need something greater than that to take the next step. And so I have gone back. In fact my dad passed, like I said, just a little over a year ago. I spoke with his best friend this weekend and a few times in the last year, and I’ve been able to have some of these conversations; he’s 78. And it’s interesting to see his response. He’s still bidding work for the high rises in Houston. But that’s exactly it: take care of my tribe and protect it fiercely, up to and including with arms, if needed.
Mike Valentine:
It’s really interesting, Warwick, you struck a nerve in me that I haven’t had the chance to really express, I don’t think, very often. If you were to watch my progress from there, you would say, “Well, he became a typical ironworker.” How much you drink, who you can beat up in the bar, the women that you hang with, became the measure of manlihood. And seeing no option, I did; I stepped right in, I would say, in hindsight, unfortunately, but it was all I could see. But I was conflicted and contradicted inside. I could not understand, and so I drank more Jack Daniel’s to anesthetize it.
Mike Valentine:
And then I actually loved being on the beam, because there was freedom there. There was total freedom on the beam. At the edge of death, and fear dissolving with each step, there’s total freedom walking the beam. I almost set… My old tool belt is on a statute to my right here. It’s here to remind me there’s a day’s work.
Warwick F:
As I’m listening to you, Mike, it almost… And I can relate to this in some small way, although we couldn’t have grown up more differently. I grew up in a very wealthy… back in Australia. Upbringings couldn’t be more different, radically different, but yet I can relate in one sense. It almost feels like you were living somebody else’s purpose, somebody else’s life, somebody else’s worldview. Protect your tribe, protect your family, protect your brothers in the union, kind of “Live a hard life,” whether it’s alcohol, women, that’s the environment you were around, I’m guessing.
Warwick F:
So that was sort of normal for your tribe, the expression you used, but somehow I sense that it’s like, “Is this all there is? Do I just want to live somebody else’s life, somebody else’s purpose?” There was something within you that said… I felt like I said, “No, I’m not against this, but I want to be more than this.” Does that feel somewhat where you were, that you were to some degree living somebody else’s purpose or some other group’s purpose?
Mike Valentine:
I haven’t actually looked at it that way, but that’s spot on. That’s exactly where I was, but not knowing how to talk about or shift to, or bring forth my own, which like you said, was very different. But that’s exactly it. So I excelled at football for four or five years, and at 14, I found Jack Daniel’s whiskey, and it became a dear friend for the next 14 years. And at the end of that trail of tragedy, there had been 33 automobile accidents, 12 vehicles totaled and four trips to jail. And knife fights, gunfights, street fights. And then, as miracle, crucible, or divine intervention would have it, a young lady was born into my marriage. And the day I sat… Her name is Whitney, and the day… She’s 32 now.
Mike Valentine:
The day that I put her on the couch, bringing her home from the hospital, my dad was actually running the video camera, and it’s just… liquid started to flow from my eyes, and that didn’t happen often. I’m a pretty tough guy by then. Strapping 26 year old guy that… So I turned away and I didn’t know, I didn’t understand what was happening. I certainly didn’t want my dad to see, and I didn’t want it on video. But within the next two days, I knew that I had been struck by love. I knew that love had come in a package that I couldn’t deny, and it had been absent, because… And I could tell it was absent when it became present.
Mike Valentine:
As fate would have it, within those two days, I ended up putting my mom… my sister and I ended up putting my mom in rehab for cocaine abuse. And so I had a fairly good crucible right here, a daughter, two days old, a friend of my mom’s had gone to the house I grew up in and committed suicide, struck out heroin and beat his brains in with a golf club. And my mom walked into that situation and I came home, and my wife and my daughter’s mother told me what had happened. And my aunt said, “You have to do something.” And I said, “I can’t do something. I have a two-day-old child. And by the way, I love her, and I’m a little mixed up about all this.” And then by the end of the conversation, I realized she was completely right, that there was something that needed to be done.
Mike Valentine:
Fortunately, I had some conversations, and my mom was… either she was going willingly or I was calling for the straight jackets, but I had I had had those conversations. And she went willingly, and she’s been clean and sober for 33 years now. But that was a major. And I would say what we find… In my deepest belief, what we find in ground zero is the bottom of our hearts. And I’m someone who went over and over until I figured that out. And then I’m like, “Oh, maybe I don’t have to go to these extreme bottoms to activate the bottom of my heart, or the depth of love and care.” I have, since then, come to believe that people who will have conversations… but it’s there for all of us. So it’s evolved to, we all have a gift to give, a purpose to live and a vision we would love to build and create of a better self and world. And it generally is some expression of love.
Warwick F:
So that was, obviously, a key turning point in your life, that bottom. In hindsight, as you were kind of engaging in behaviors that probably weren’t that helpful to you, maybe there was somebody within you, like maybe the seven year old boy saying, “I don’t want to live this life, sort of crying to get out.” It’s like, there’s got to be something different. And then you just… The birth of your daughter and then your mother and her challenges, it sounds like that was just a pivotal moment where you said, “Okay, I’m not going to live the same way anymore, I’m not going to continue these behaviors that are destructive to myself and my family. I’m going to change.”
Warwick F:
So what caused you… Because some people hit that bottom… And you would probably know better than me, just some of the folks, brothers, they don’t change. The bottom continues like for the rest of their life, however long that is. But you made a choice. What led you to make a choice to live your life differently, live your life on purpose, as you would say?
Mike Valentine:
I’m going to respond in a paradoxical, and by the time I’m finished, it may sound like a political answer, not a political party. But A) I would say that it was so piercing, the experience of love for my daughter, so piercing, it was undeniable. It was a burning bush for me at that point in life. It’s like something lit up the bush and said, “Mike, you need to turn some things around.” And then the compelling love to mold myself into something that could exist as somewhat of a father. I’m sorry, I’m getting touched to think of it. She’s 32, and I have three grandsons now. And I’ll be 58 on Sunday. So-
Gary S:
Well, happy early birthday.
Mike Valentine:
Thank you. It was just so piercing that it was irrevocable in my mind. And I would say that that is an act of grace. I don’t see how I deserved or earned that in any way.
Gary S:
It’s interesting to me to hear you describe the part about getting to the bottom of your heart, as an adult, as an adult who’d been through some very difficult, very trying, very painful experiences. Some happened to you, some of them you set into motion, as you acknowledged here. But just that phrase, “getting to the bottom of your heart,” is interesting to me, because of the story you told about being seven years old. You have given an interview…
Gary S:
I read an interview that you gave about that story. And you said something in that story that was really interesting to me. You ended the story by saying, although you couldn’t say it then, when you weren’t able to give your bike to that child who was begging, who was roughly your same age, “Although I couldn’t say it then, it was a sense of purpose in my DNA,” you told this reporter, “in my genes to help others. I was incarnated to help people discover their gift, their purpose, and create their future.” To me, when you talk about getting to the bottom of your heart after some very difficult experiences in adulthood, it sounds to me like that may describe what you found at the bottom of your heart. Is that fair?
Mike Valentine:
That’s what it evolved to. I’ve never heard it said back to me, and thank you for that. And the way you just shared it, Gary, that’s beautiful. Though, you could say that giving him my bike meant helping them discover their gift, purpose, and vision. We could translate it now. And it took years though, to get that clarity. So I was going to back to Warwick’s question right there. So I would say it’s an act of grace that I don’t see any way that I earned. And then paradoxically, I did take practical steps. I got involved in my mom’s recovery, I got interested in… I had no concept of God, I had never owned a Bible. It had all been dark for as long as I could remember, probably since I was seven, maybe.
Mike Valentine:
My mom told me to… We were in the rehab room and I said, “Mom, I don’t even have a Bible.” And she said, “Well, here, take this one out of the drawer.” And it says, “Gideon’s. Placed here by Gideon’s, please do not remove.” And I’m like, “Mom, it just can’t be right to steal a Bible. It says right here, don’t steal it.” She said that “It’s better you steal it than live without it, son.” So my first was Gideon’s.
Warwick F:
Boy, those were very profound words from your mother.
Mike Valentine:
She was right in hindsight, but it didn’t… something didn’t feel quite right, but… And I didn’t end up going particularly a religious or Christian route-
Warwick F:
Sure.
Mike Valentine:
… but I tuned in. And then what evolved from there for me… Like you said, it is a mystery to me, how some people go to bottom and they have a peak, if you will, a glimpse of the bottom of their heart, but they don’t activate what’s there. And that’s become much of my trade, is you’ve been to enough bottoms, let’s go back to one of them and see what you didn’t pick up, that treasure that lies there. But what I did do in a practical way is I loved that daughter so much. And one day, her mom and I had an argument and I said, “You’re going to have to explain this to our daughter, how you’ve handled this,” and drove off in an anger.
Mike Valentine:
As I was driving, I heard myself say, “You’re going to have to explain to our daughter how you handled this.” And I realized I was talking to me. And she became the symbol of that love and the symbol of the desire to find that, eventually evolve, as Gary said, to the belief that we have a gift to give, a purpose to live and a vision to build.
Warwick F:
It almost feels like your daughter became this talisman or the symbol of your purpose. You can’t but have helped think, when my daughter reaches seven years old and she wants to give a bike to a kid in Mexico or some other thing, I’m going to say, yes, I’m going to encourage it. I love my dad, but I’m going to take a different path, and my daughter will grow up differently. That had to be in the back of your mind.
Mike Valentine:
Well, amazing that you bring that up. I said my daughter has three boys. Over the years, her and I cleaned out closets, drawers and toy boxes around Christmas, so that to make room for the new stuff coming. But where we took it was into the streets of Houston to the homeless people. We went, ourselves, and delivered it. She handed her things. We picked out the little girl in the front yard, and she is a very tenderhearted, young lady, a beautiful young lady. And just before the onset of coronavirus, she took in two foster children, one, three months old and one three years old. And she didn’t mention it. It is kind of typical of us to do very kind things, but not talk about them at all.
Mike Valentine:
She took pictures of her foster children. And I’m like, “My goodness, that’s one, two, three, four, five boys in your home?” Between three months and 11 years. So I don’t know, but I do believe that that tenderness… And I did have the chance. Not only to maybe say, “Let’s get this bike fixed up and package it,” at her will, but to also learn how to express that in my life as an example, hopefully, that had some positive effect on her.
Warwick F:
Well, that is so powerful. I think the listeners, we can all see the genesis of your vision for helping others, see the gifts, the diamonds maybe in the rough, may;be even the grace that comes with being in the bottom that had to have fueled a passion, a mission for you in life to help others live lives on purpose. I talk a bit about it. I think you can understand the genesis of this, but talk a bit about On Purpose Now and the tools and the principles that you give people, many of whom may well be in the bottom, or certainly being through transition. Maybe they’re not at the bottom, but they’re living life aimlessly and they’re thinking, “Is this all there is? I punch a clock, I go to work, but is this all there is?” And so talk about what you do helps people, whether they’re in the bottom or just maybe they’re just drifting through life, as many of us do.
Mike Valentine:
It’s the full range, Warwick, from… I have pioneered, organically discovered a method to work people through the events of their past and release the fear and look at the decisions they made about their view of life, their self, their capacities, and the other people involved. And when we’re afraid, we make decisions… I made five things. Those make up the root belief system, or the ego, in my approach. And so I’ve reenacted now 38 rates. And by reenacted, I don’t mean we reenacted the physicality of it, but through visualization. What happened next? What did you decide? What happened next? What did you decide?
Mike Valentine:
So it’s the range of people who’ve been deeply abused, all the way to the executive who wants to achieve the next level. The heartache is the same. And I don’t mean to discount the impact of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, at all. But from rape to one of, I would say, milder cases, I could not understand why this guy seemed so depressed and what was moving with him, and we finally got to the work, and his heartbreak was as a junior in high school, he was cut from the baseball team, the varsity baseball team. And the way he learned was approaching the fieldhouse to see on the list that he’s not on the team and all his baseball buddies were there, and that broke his heart.
Mike Valentine:
The day he believed love failed him was the day that he started to invest his faith in fear. By then he was 17, so… So the process is a pathway of endarkenment. So I start with, you have that gift to give, a purpose to live and vision to build, and most people say, “I have no idea how to discover it.” And I say, “Oh, that’s easy. We’ll go through your deepest heartbreak, grief, guilt, and shame that you’ve experienced in life. That’s where you left it. So we’ll just go back there and find it.”
Mike Valentine:
It’s so curious to me, Warwick, that they know it as well as I do. I’ve been down that trail with between two and three thousand people. But when we get there, to this place I call ground zero, and you look at this fear-based belief system, diagrammed on a wall, you’ve had this idea of what this is. I know I’m my worst enemy, but I graph it with a series of beliefs, associated behaviors and emotional results, the wonderful resentment and guilt and remorse.
Mike Valentine:
When you see the diagram, the ego is an addict. It’s addicted to fear. And for me, I would just put as my top behavior, those 14 years, believe all these things. I’m not good enough. I deserve to be beaten, raped, abandoned, thrown to the trash as a series of beliefs. And my top line behavior is just get some more whiskey. So take the whiskey out and now get some more food. Take the food out and now it get some more adrenaline. And eventually, through an iterative process, I saw that this system is going to get ahold of anything; a wife, a work assignment, inadequacy in creating technology solutions. It could get hold of anything. So there’s nothing to do, but let it be. Growing awareness, admitting that I have a fear-based system that leads me to guilt and shame, and my ego’s an addict, and accepting it. I do that when I do.
Warwick F:
Because part of dealing with things is you’ve got to recognize it and accept that we all have certain behaviors. Whether it’s in-built or learned, it doesn’t really matter, but… I know I do. We all have certain things, and part of it is recognize and accept it, and just saying, you’re not a awful person just because you have certain fears. Some people are claustrophobic, some people are afraid of heights, which obviously could be a bad one if you’re an ironworker, to be afraid of heights. But we all have different fears, and recognize, accept it. That’s the first step to be able to deal with it, which obviously, I’m sure, is what you help people understand. Right?
Mike Valentine:
That’s step one, to expose all of… My goal in the deeper work I do of our initial interaction is to diagram on half a piece of paper, a hundred percent of what’s holding you back in life, and that’s your call or the call of the person going through the process, I can’t know. But I know what it feels like at ground zero with them. Again, it’s fascinating. I’ve been there more than the people I’m working with, but they often know, this is it, this is ground zero. We look at this diagram a bit like you would look at 9/11. Wow, those buildings are really crumbled there. And this is really a mess. It’s interesting, it’s almost like the darkening of the shadow against this darkness of it. The light is so much brighter.
Warwick F:
So talk a bit about that. I get the part about understanding your fears and some of these challenges. Talk about how the light becomes visible as you recognize the darkness, if you will, as you recognize the fears. How does that work?
Mike Valentine:
Well, I think we could use today’s environment.
Warwick F:
Sure.
Mike Valentine:
I think there are… Well, no discount to the tragedy of lost lives and ill people and what they’re going through, and yet there are some spiritual gifts embedded within this, putting the whole world in timeout and obliterating our future. It brings us into the moment. And the light is in the moment, but that’s not enough. If you will, the circuitry, the organism, a willingness. My part Is willingness, intention and honesty. I’m willing to see something new there. And somehow pain is a great awakener. It almost presses it out and up.
Mike Valentine:
So it’s not always a visual light, but it’s like, for example, what would you have liked to have had there when you were so embarrassed being cut from the baseball team? I would like to have had a sense of connection and friendship, maybe a love or adventure. He saw baseball as quite the adventure, he loved to play. So maybe he would have said connection, friendship, and adventure. And I’m like, “That’s probably what you abandoned right there, so let’s recollect it.” And what I said earlier, that I think that all of our purposes are some form or some branch of love, and so we could just pull that out and say, “Okay, now create your purpose to live with friendship, adventure, and connection.”
Warwick F:
As you’re talking, I almost feel like if you could go back in time to your seven year old self, you could have probably mapped your purpose out, right there, saying, “Talk about the pain of not being able to give a bike to this kid in Mexico.” What about that just fueled your sense of purpose? And I don’t know whether you would have said, “I just want to help people, and I want to care for them.” There was a genesis of your probably lifelong vision right there, at seven years old. If you go back in time, use some of your principles and methodologies, I know it’s seven, it’s hard to figure it all out, but there was a genesis of a vision right there, amidst that particular ground zero, if you will.
Mike Valentine:
For sure. And I can patch it back for you. At my very first cut of bringing it to language, this was not too long after the post ironworking era. So my first way of languaging my purpose was very simple. Excuse me. Live constructively and help others do that as well. So you could say, exactly, that was right there at the seven year old event. I was living constructively, now I can get to work, I can put this bike back together, and I can help… I wanted to see him… I literally could see this young man, my age, getting around faster. I wasn’t going to tell him to stop begging, I was just going to tell him do it better.
Warwick F:
And there’s the other side of, the light is the cost of not living on purpose at age seven, was ulcers, was bad ulcers. And so when you don’t live on purpose, there can be an emotional, even a physical consequence, as there was for you and beyond. But that’s everybody’s story in a sense, if you’re not following your purpose.
Mike Valentine:
I think so. You could fast forward it right into today. I think that we’re in a bit of a global crucible. We are definitely in uncertain and redefining times. And back to what you were saying there, at this place of ground zero, so first of all, I brought my willingness and intention. There was, in my opinion, an opportunity of grace. And then my daughter became symbolic of my purpose, as you said, but then I stayed with it. I refused to believe that I couldn’t live in that level of connection and love to something greater than myself.
Warwick F:
Absolute, and that’s… Go ahead.
Mike Valentine:
Over time. Not a hundred percent, for sure.
Warwick F:
No, no. But I think that’s one of the other things that I’m sure you talk about it, is life’s about choices. It’s easy to say, I have no options. This is the life I’ve lived, my dad’s lived, my grandfather’s lived. This is just what we do, and whatever. I’m reminded I went to college in England and certainly, years ago, the whole class system was so strong that if you ever dared to say maybe you want to go to college, “Well so you think you’re better than me? You think you better than your dad? What’s your problem?” That your tribe would say, “Don’t you dare go outside of the tribe because that’s wrong. You’re trying to…” Et cetera. Which is incredibly destructive way of thinking, but yet…
Warwick F:
I think what I’m assuming what you talk, if not preach, is that we have choices, how we want to live our lives, we don’t have to live what other people say we should. And so that’s probably a key part of living on purpose, wouldn’t you say, is choose, make that choice to live on purpose, to use your gift for the world.
Mike Valentine:
I walk people through a series of questions. The first one is, do you want to live on purpose now?
Warwick F:
Right.
Mike Valentine:
And we might sit at the table with a cup of coffee and get to know each other, and I would say that, “That’s my question to the world.” The most predictable and almost a hundred percent of response is, “I don’t know what that is, I don’t know what that means, and I don’t know how to do it.” So I stay with the original question that I didn’t ask you if you know what it is, what it means and how to do it, I asked you, do you want to live on purpose, giving what you know about the idea of purpose? I don’t think anyone’s directly said no. Some people have walked away and never came back, I take that as a no, or at least not my style of purpose. I don’t think anybody has said, “No, I don’t want to live on purpose.”
Mike Valentine:
I’ve come to believe, Warwick, that the idea of purpose is in the mind of every human. It’s the like the question of God, it’s in there. I think that, “What am I doing here?” is in the mind, already, for all of us, I think is-
Warwick F:
We all want to live on purpose. One of the things, I think, I’m sure you talk about too, is the whole concept of legacy. As you’re on your death bed, what do you want your life to be? I made millions of dollars, or I had a nice house, or maybe I lived a life, in your terms, on purpose, that somehow made the world a better place and cared for others? Which do you want your legacy to be? 99.9 percent of sane people, it’s obvious what they’re going to pick. I’m not against money, but it’s like, legacy, purpose, they’re sort of two sides of the same coin, if you will, or they’re related.
Mike Valentine:
You bring up an interesting thought I’d love to share, if I may. A young man I have been working with for several years, close to 33, called and said, “My mom’s got cancer. She’s terminal. And they don’t have any hope. Stage four here and there and all over her body. Would you meet with her?” And I said, “Well, I think so, but I don’t quite know what I would say.
Warwick F:
Right, right.
Mike Valentine:
I’m certainly not someone who cures cancer.” I probably wouldn’t have taken this call. And he said, “But I just want her to find if it’s even just a moment of peace between here and her death. And I just would… if you’d be willing to talk to her.” I said, “Of course. For you, I’ll talk to her.” So we scheduled it and he had shaven his head, she had lost her hair. And when they came through the double doors downstairs here, they were both weeping, arm-in-arm. And I got them into the conference room and sat them down, and I said, “Just cry, guys. Just let it out.” And maybe a long minute, they…
Mike Valentine:
She had very bright blue eyes, and I learned later she was my age. But her name was Joyce. And when she finished, I said, “What did the doctors say?” She said, “They say I have nine months.” I said, “What do you think?” She said, “I don’t have nine months. I have six or five.” I said, “Has your birthday passed?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “No more birthdays for you. Right?” She said, “Right.” I said, “So if you had six, you won’t see next Valentine’s Day, but you will get through Christmas.” And she cried a bit. And I said, “What are you most afraid of?” She said, “I don’t think my kids are going to be… I’m afraid my kids won’t be all right.” And I said, “They won’t. They’re going to miss you. They might go off on tangents, rebelling at your loss. Nothing we can do about that.”
Mike Valentine:
She said, “I am afraid that I’m not right with God.” I said, “Then you’re probably not.” She said, “How do you know?” I said, “Well, people who are probably don’t have that question.” She said, how do I get right with him?” I said, “You probably know that answer better than I do.” Anyway. I walked her through a process called a but reduction worksheet. And I said, “What do you most want to live between now and your death and to leave behind about this six months that you think you have ahead?” She said, “I want to live with grace, dignity and respect.” So I said, “Okay, your purpose is to live with grace, dignity and respect.”
Mike Valentine:
She said, “But my kids want me to prepare my eulogy and funeral, but I don’t have the energy all the time. And we went through it all, my kids may not be okay. I’m going to miss them. I didn’t get to live as long as I want to.” Pretty heavy stuff. And at the end, I said, “Are you still afraid that you’re not right with God?” She said, “Now I feel grace, dignity and respect in this moment.” I said, “Don’t forget this moment. Plan this moment into your mind, because if you can do it right now, you can do it again tomorrow. And maybe you’ll do it twice tomorrow, and three times the next day.”
Mike Valentine:
We had a long conversation. I said, “About this eulogy, do you want to write it?” She said, “No, I don’t want to write it. That doesn’t seem right to me.” I said, “Do you want me to write it?” She said, “Yeah.” So I took out a piece of paper and I said, “You tell me what you want your funeral to look like.” And we put it together. Her son, balling. And I asked her what music she wanted, she named three songs. One of them was Amazing Grace by Elvis Presley. And-
Warwick F:
Wow.
Mike Valentine:
So I queued them up on YouTube. And when I finished writing her eulogy, I read it to her and she said, “That’s it.” I said, “Your eulogy and your purpose are the same thing. The only way to make this true about you when you die is to live it today.” And something happened for me in that conversation. I’ve been teasing around this for years, and it got clear, with her having a shortened period of time and facing that reality.
Warwick F:
Right.
Mike Valentine:
So flipped the paper over to her son and I said, “We’re going to have a funeral today in the conference room. You read the eulogy, I’ll play the music.” And we had a funeral in the conference… her funeral in the conference room.
Warwick F:
Wow.
Mike Valentine:
The wrinkles from her face started to disappear. But my point is that what you’re saying, the legacy. We could say legacy, however you would use terms. But what you want people to say about you when you’re gone, you live today, now.
Warwick F:
And those are clues to what your purpose should be, as you’re-
Mike Valentine:
For sure.
Warwick F:
… writing that eulogy. That is such a brilliant concept. What you did with that woman is just… that was an act of grace, an act of love. That’s an amazing thing that evolved, but that can apply to all of us. Right? What-
Mike Valentine:
I was terrified what I would say. I’m like, “A woman who’s facing death, I don’t know what to say.” And on the elevator, I said, “Well, just show up and say whatever I’m moved to say.” That’s one of those things that I’m for sure came through me, but not from me.
Warwick F:
Well, certainly, as a person of faith, half of life is just showing up and trust, if you’re a person of faith, that there’s some higher power that will give you the words when you need it, kind of thing. Trust the process and trust that there’s something out there that will help you. So, wow. When you’re talking on purpose, maybe this is a dumb question, but is there a sense that on purpose, somehow it needs to benefit others? Like, if somebody said, well, my purpose is all about me and getting rich, and I don’t care if my family lives or starves, who cares? It’s all about me. That’s my purpose. Is that even possible or is that like some weird psychotic…
Mike Valentine:
Thank you for the question. There is much confusion about a purpose or a goal. Everything you mentioned is a goal. Those aren’t purposes. There is some other place, some other time, some future, and therefore, not accessible in this moment. A purpose, like she said, to live with dignity, respect, and grace, you can do that now. And then from there, yes, you establish those goals. But starting in the center of that… To live with grace, dignity and respect, now, how will you do that? I need to have some conversations with my children about what I want to be sure they know-
Warwick F:
Absolutely.
Mike Valentine:
… about how I love them.
Warwick F:
As you’re talking, I’m almost thinking back to legacy. For those who were reasonably sane, just to make that as an assumption, if you asked about the whole eulogy thing, I can’t figure of almost anybody on the planet will say, “I don’t care about my family, I don’t care about my kids, it’s all about me.” Then they’re being self-deceived. They’re not being honest with themselves. So to me, how can a purpose not have some sense of altruism, some sense of serving others? Because it almost feels like that’s not purpose, or not a purpose that anybody that I know could have. Does that make sense?
Mike Valentine:
Completely. I think it extends as service. So I think the three most common words used in people’s purpose are love, grace and peace. You could see the core negative emotions or fear-based emotions is fear, sorrow and anger. So now we’ve got to balance. And then I think that most everyone’s purpose is an extension of love, grace and peace in some way. And again, I didn’t make this up. Prior to doing work, I learned it as I did the work. And I would bet… I haven’t done it, but if I were to go back and look at the written purposes that we’ve put out for maybe a few thousand people, I don’t think I would find more than 45 words that are woven together.
Warwick F:
That is just profound: love grace and peace. I’d be hard pressed to think of three better words than that. That’s awesome. But talk about people that you’ve seen, that you work with, that you’re blessed to be around, who are living lives on purpose. What’s the difference between the before and after? Just their spirit and their bearing, talk about the difference that living a life on purpose makes.
Mike Valentine:
For some people, it looked exactly the same, but you can tell something is different on the inside. I would say that’s at least half, or maybe a small majority. And other people change everything, because their life was… But it seems like for the small majority of people, their life is fairly aligned with what’s important already, they just-
Mike Valentine:
… have been… You can look at it like a spiral. Get an education, add a house, a wife, some children, some money, a few toys, spiraling in toward the center of your heart. And I’m saying, let’s cut across the grain, go to the center and spiral out. And so it’s already somewhat aligned for most people, it doesn’t necessarily… We have a friend in common, she has a… Well, she’s about to make some pretty drastic changes. But she stayed with what was important, she didn’t knee-jerk towards a whole different life. But it migrates towards, let’s say to live with grace, peace and love.
Mike Valentine:
If you were to reiterate that in your mind, bringing intention, honesty, and practice to that daily, it would reshape things around you. Your goals would be different, they’re set differently. But I’ll share one young man, he played pro baseball, he had hit a grand slam in the last high school baseball game and the first college one, so two in a row. A pretty accomplished guy, who was running a real estate company, a mortgage bank. And he met with me and said, “I’m thinking about designing a coaching company, and I hear you’ve got a lot of content.” And I said, “What’s the matter with your neck?” He said, “Well, I got a crick in my neck, my back hurts.”
Mike Valentine:
“Your eyes are bloodshot, you look kind of red. How many hours are you working?” He said, “16 a day.” I said, “How many days?” He said, “Seven or so.” I said, “We’re not building any company. That’s not happening.” And I said, “You have a gift to give, a purpose to live and a vision to build a better self and world.” And we got to work right away. He’s a go getter guy, with all the tools to be an extraordinary person, and already extraordinary at that point.
Mike Valentine:
He shed two companies and focused on the one that was the broadest expression of his purpose, which is residential real estate and growing a brokerage, even though the other company made more money. And then he took Fridays off at noon, and then he took Fridays and Tuesdays off, and now he coaches his 11 year old son’s baseball game, and he got his neck straightened out.
Warwick F:
I love how you’re describing this, because sometimes people think this road to Emmaus moment, the scales come off, Paul lives a radically different life, or some spiritual epiphany. But it’s not always like that. I love that phrase you mentioned of sort of the inward spiral and the outward spiral. As we often say on Crucible Leadership and Beyond the Crucible, there’s nothing wrong with success, but in service of what? And so is it imbalanced, so you’re working 16 hours a day? Are you able to take vacation with kids or do something meaningful? But just as you were talking about that person, that friend you were working with, just the outwardly life may not look that different, but yet there was more of an outward focus and an inward focus that led him to make subtly different choices about what businesses to focus on.
Warwick F:
To you, his life may be profoundly different to the others, it may be just a slight shift, but it doesn’t mean selling your business or going and being a missionary, some foreign country. It can be just a change in perspective of what you’re already doing is what you’re saying, which is just… to me, it’s an interesting thought.
Mike Valentine:
Certainly, he got clear about his purpose and then his goals look differently. I would say that underneath there’s a treadmill, for most people, the fear-based belief that I’m not good enough, I’m unwanted and/or I’m unlovable. And so when I finally get that money, prestige status, political office, home, relationship, finally, I’ll be happy and live with purpose. And I’m saying it’ll never work.
Warwick F:
That almost feels like a good summary in a sense, is, do you want to live a life on fear or on purpose? Right? And most people choose on fear. “I’m afraid of what my dad might think,” or what my friends or my tribe, so to speak, to use the term we used earlier. “I’m living life based on fear or obligation rather than on purpose.” That feels like a dichotomy.
Mike Valentine:
Spot on, fear or purpose. Fear or purpose. I say that my craft is a life purpose guide, or that’s my role, but really, my skill is fear hunting.
Warwick F:
What a great phrase, fear hunting. Wow.
Mike Valentine:
That’s my skill, is to go down the darkest tunnels and eliminate the fear. And the elimination of the fear of the purpose is so obvious. We don’t have to go chase the purpose, we just have to admit the fear. And at that point, that choice becomes obvious, exactly the way you said it, fear or purpose.
Gary S:
I would actually go see that movie, The Fear Hunter. I would, absolutely. Whether Robert De Niro was in it or not, I would go see that film. Gentlemen, we’re at the point where we’ve got to begin to land the plane. It’s been a robust discussion about purpose and significance and overcoming crucibles. And I would be remiss, Mike, if I did not give you the chance to let our listeners know how they can reach you, how they can learn more about On Purpose Now and how they might be able to engage with you.
Mike Valentine:
My website is OnPurposeNow.com, so you can go there. You can send me an email at Mike@OnPurposeNow.com. And either way, I’ll reach out or see how we can connect. On my 55th birthday, I decided that the sports I like do not watch time elapsed, they watch time remaining in the game. And I took an app and decided, if I get a good, long, healthy run of it, I’d like to go 88 years. And on Sunday night at midnight, I’ll have 30 to go. Right now, I have 30 years and two days and about eight hours, but who’s counting?
Gary S:
Well-
Mike Valentine:
It’s not morbid to me, it helps me-
Gary S:
Absolutely.
Mike Valentine:
Today counts, I’m clicking them off. But my point is, those who would choose a pathway… I think there are many paths, one way. The way is love. I’m talking about a pathway, and purpose is a path, as is many of the spiritual teachings. Many paths, but the way is love. Those who want access to the path of purpose, I’ll be here. So shoot me an email, learn what you’d like on the website. I am, hopefully, next week, going to launch from a no-cost workshop, Zoom workshops, and they’re fear hunting workshops. Face the fear, feel the freedom. I’m going to do a few of those.
Mike Valentine:
As COVID-19 took over, I realized that demand and value of what I do has gone up, but the price people will pay is probably going down. And I asked myself a question that I’m going to stay with until we get the all-clear sign, which I think may be some time from now. And my question was, how can I help people do for a 10th of the cost better than 70% of the impact? And so I’m challenging myself with that in this crucible time. All this color that I’ve talked about, can I activate it without being at the bottom?
Gary S:
That is an inspiring thing that you’re doing and obviously, it will be a helpful and healing thing that you’re doing for many of our listeners, and certainly for the people who have engaged with you. Speaking of our listeners, I have been… this conversation has truly been fascinating, between you and Warwick, Mike. And I’ve sort of taken three notes, three takeaways that I want our listeners to have as we close up. Three key takeaways, I think, from this discussion. And the first one was at the very beginning. And I love the way that you expressed this, Mike, the idea of putting one foot in front of the other and doing it one step at a time. This is a skill, listeners, that Mike learned walking steel beams. And not steel beams on the ground, he was walking them well above the ground. Because he was not harnessed to the beams, it could have dire consequences had he fallen.
Gary S:
But when you’re up there and you’re walking those steel beams, when you’re putting one foot in front of the other, one step at a time, the second step doesn’t matter. That’s the first step to walking out a vision, to finding your purpose. Your path to moving beyond your crucible and living a life of significance begins with a single simple step. And as Mike says, fear cannot walk the beam, so walk bravely and boldly. So there’s take away one, I think.
Gary S:
Takeaway two, Mike told me a moving story about looking for the treasure that lies in the bottom that you’ve hit, the crucible experiences that you’ve been through. As tough as it’s been, what good came out of what happened to you, or what good could come out of it? Finding beauty in the ashes of your life is one of the most certain ways to keep yourself out of another fire. And then I think the third point that we had a great discussion of here is the idea of building a vision. Warwick talks about living a life of significance, Mike talks about living on purpose. They use some of the same language.
Gary S:
But here’s a hint as you’re looking to live a life of significance, build a purpose, craft a vision. It’s almost always, as Mike said, rooted in love, loving yourself and loving others. That will fuel your purpose, listener, and it will likely revolve around these three things that Mike said. Fuel the purposes of the clients he works with, which touched Warwick when he said it. The three things that your vision, your purpose almost always will revolve around when you get right down to it is living in love, grace and peace.
Gary S:
As we sign off on this episode of Beyond the Crucible, we hope that those are things that you do indeed find the wherewithal to walk in as you pursue your life of significance. Thank you for spending time with us on Beyond the Crucible. Warwick and I have just a little favor to ask on the app that you’re listening to this podcast on now, click or tap subscribe. What that will do is make sure that you don’t miss fascinating conversations like the one we just had with Mike Valentine. And then it’ll also help us tell more people about those conversations, so that they can begin to chart their own course for moving beyond their crucibles.
Gary S:
Until the next time that we’re together, please remember that crucible experiences are painful and they happen. We have research that shows they happen to… Almost half of people are willing to admit they’ve had crucible experiences. And they are painful, but they do not have to be. And in fact, in most cases, are not the end of your story. They can be, if you learn the lessons of them, if you find the purpose in them, if you cast a vision from them. Those crucible experiences can be the start of a new story, a new chapter in the book of your life. And the most rewarding one of all, because it’s a chapter that leads to a life of significance.
Listening is one of the most necessary, and least practiced, leadership skills in business and life today. And lest you think lack of listening is a new phenomenon, brought on by the last few decades of tech advances that have created tech distractions, think again. Harvard Business Review found in 1957 that people remember only about half of what they hear, even when they’re trying really hard to dial in. In this episode, BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE host and Crucible Leadership founder Warwick Fairfax explains why great leaders listen — and how they can do it better to get past crucible moments and avoid additional ones. One of the critical keys, he tells co-host Gary Schneeberger, is asking good questions of your team to gather information from them that can help enhance your vision and, just as important, signal to them clearly that you’re not just paying “ear service” to the insights they’re sharing with you. “The price of engagement from your team,” Fairfax notes, “is listening.”
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👉 Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Transcript
Gary S:
Welcome, everybody, to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Gary Schneeberger, the co-host of the podcast and the Communications Director for Crucible Leadership. You have clicked play. We hope that you’ve pushed the little button that says record on a podcast that deals in painful experiences that we have in life that we call crucible experiences. They are those things that can happen to us. They can be sometimes caused by us. They can be professional, personal, sometimes both. Many times both. But what they all have in common is that they’re things that knock the wind out of us. They’re things that can knock us off the trajectory of our lives and make us feel like we’ve lost our way. Our purpose in talking about them is to help us move beyond them, hence the name of the show, Beyond the Crucible.
Gary S:
We don’t talk about crucible experiences here so that we can wallow in them. We talk about them so that we can move beyond them. Helping us do that, as always, is the architect of Crucible Leadership, and that is Warwick Fairfax. Warwick, we have a pretty interesting conversation, I think, I hope, I pray, on tap today for listeners.
Warwick F:
Absolutely, Gary. Looking forward to it.
Gary S:
We are going to be speaking today, listener, about a topic that should be near and dear to your hearts because you’re listeners to our podcast, and that subject is listening. Listening and leading. In particular, how listening impacts leading. I want to get our conversation kicked off by reading a quote about listening in a leadership context from a book that I’ve recently read. Here’s the quote, just to set the stage for what we’re going to talk about. Then when I’m finished with the quote, we’ll let Warwick take it from there and we’ll start our conversation.
Gary S:
But the quote is this: “Good listening allows leaders to hear ideas that will make their visions better and their plans to implement those visions more likely to succeed. Good listening allows leaders to learn of potential pitfalls and roadblocks that enable them to cast their vision in ways that increase the likelihood of success.” Before I turn it over to you, Warwick, to begin the discussion, do you have any idea who wrote that?
Warwick F:
Well, I was going to guess Stephen Covey, but I’m not sure.
Gary S:
It’s not Stephen Covey. It is, in fact, Warwick Fairfax.
Warwick F:
No. What?
Gary S:
That, listener, that is just a teaser of the book that Warwick is publishing that will be out early next year, sometime next year, that is called Crucible Leadership, and it talks about some of these very subjects that we talk about on this podcast. So I fooled him there. He didn’t know I was going to read that. But that’s a good sign, Warwick, that when you write about something, when you hear it, it surprises you that you wrote it. So that’s a good sign. If it helps you, it’ll absolutely help the folks who buy the book.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. Well, I probably shouldn’t disagree with that, right, if I wrote it.
Gary S:
Absolutely. It’s a good jumping off point for a conversation about the importance of listening as it pertains to the practice of leadership.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. Great leaders listen. Listening is an absolutely critical component of leading. But it’s interesting, often the people that get promoted to be leaders, they’re not often promoted because they listen. They’re promoted because they get stuff done. They’re action men, action women. It’s like their listening time is just to get stuff done. You want leaders who get things done. You don’t want philosophy professors or people who are contemplative. I tend to be more contemplative and reflective myself, but ultimately leaders get stuff done. So that’s good, but sometimes in getting things done they feel like they know what they want to do, they know where they want to go, they tell the team, “OK, let’s go.” So the thought of listening, it’s like, “Look, I don’t have time to listen. We’ve got to get stuff done here. Let’s stop twiddling our thumbs. Let’s go. Let’s start the engines. Let’s hit 60 in 2.3 seconds. Let’s go.”
Gary S:
I think listeners probably can relate to that. I think they’ve worked in situations where there have been bosses like that, where they’ve maybe felt steamrolled sometimes by ideas that the boss has. The boss doesn’t necessarily listened. Whether that’s in work in a large corporation, if it’s in even a group setting that you’re in, if you’re in the PTA or if you’re in some organization like that. There are people who are at the head of organizations or associations or even just friendship groups who sometimes do less listening than they probably should and certainly less listening than is valuable. So one of our organizing principles as we talked about what we’re going to talk about is just helping establish for listeners, Warwick, why is listening so critical for leaders?
Warwick F:
Really, the price of engagement is listening. If you want to succeed, if you want to accomplish your goals, you will listen. If you want to fail, and most leaders don’t like to fail, if you want to fail in achieving your objectives, then don’t listen. So there really isn’t any choice to effective leadership but to listen. I’ve heard it said often, people don’t necessarily have to feel like everything they say gets to be part of the solution. They have to feel heard. If people feel truly heard, they’ll be willing to accept a direction even if it wasn’t maybe one they chose to go to because they feel like the leader heard them. And that’s really the most important thing. So if you want your team to be committed to your vision, you’ve got to be willing to listen to them. And really listen.
Warwick F:
I mean, we live in a society today where people prize authenticity. They want you to be real. If you’ve gone to a bunch of seminars and you go through the motions and say, “Aha. Yeah, I hear you. Interesting. Hmm. Thank you,” but nothing happens, people can spot that a mile away. They can tell if you’re listening or not. You can’t fake it and make it. You will fake it and fail. So if you’re going to do it, you’ve got to really do it, not just pretend. Pretending doesn’t work.
Gary S:
Right. All of us have heard the phrase, “So and so is paying lip service to something.” You can’t pay ear service to something, either. You can’t fake it until you make it, as you say. You can’t fake your way through it. And it’s interesting, for our conversation I pulled an article from Fast Company magazine of a couple years ago, and it has 6 Ways to Become a Better Leader. One of the things that they talked about was this very thing. In fact, Fast Company’s number one way to become a better listener was, “Listen to learn, not to be polite.”
Gary S:
It’s not just about hoodwinking people into thinking that you’re hearing them. It’s not just about being for the appearances of it. You really want to learn something. Whether or not, as you said Warwick, whether of not after you’ve heard what they’ve said, you heed what they’ve said. You’ve got to make it clear to them that you really value their input.
Warwick F:
That is so true. I mean, really, leaders are learners. Leaders are curious. I don’t care how successful you are or how bright or how many achievements you’ve made, leaders typically are successful and they’ve achieved a lot and they’re driven. They don’t get to where they are without that. But you can never assume you are the font of all wisdom and you have nothing to learn from anybody, from any of your team, from any book, any person, any human that’s ever lived. I mean, that is gross arrogance and more than arrogance, it’s just stupidity and it’s wrong. If you’ve hired a good team and if you have any sense, you will. If you’ve hired a bunch of yes-men and yes-women, then that’s a whole other problem. But assuming you’ve hired people of intelligence and ability, they collectively will know things that you will not.
Warwick F:
You add up the sum of all those components, and that is a powerful amount of knowledge and wisdom and energy and drive, perhaps more than even you have. So why would you not want to listen to your team that undoubtedly will make your ideas better? That’s what great leaders do. They listen to their team because… Another facet, if you’re head of some company, you might have somebody in sales, in manufacturing or marketing, and each of those people are subject-matter experts in their area. You as a leader will know something, but you’re not dealing with customers every day. You’re not dealing with front-line workers and machinery every day. They will have information, expertise and learning that you don’t, and collectively that’s an enormous amount of understanding. So it just makes sense to listen to their perspectives because it may give your information and insight that you don’t have. Not listening to your team, it makes no sense at all.
Gary S:
One of the aspects of what you just said, playing off from that, Warwick, is that if you over time do not listen to your team, to those experts, to those folks who are on your team because they have skills and talents and abilities and perspectives that will help you achieve your vision and achieve your mission, if you don’t pay attention to that, if you don’t listen, over time that will degrade their desire to share with you. The very thing that they have that they can offer, if a leader’s not listening, they can learn to be quiet. We’ve all seen it. Hopefully not all of us have experienced it, but we’ve all seen it in meetings. If a leader doesn’t listen, people don’t feel comfortable sharing. If the people you have on your team who are there because of their expertise and their talents don’t share, that doesn’t give you a chance to listen and it can lower your chances of success.
Warwick F:
Absolutely, Gary. Certainly if you’ve got good people on your team, they’re people that can work elsewhere. Good people, highly valued. If you don’t listen, what’s going to happen is, in our mobile job market or at least before COVID, obviously, it was pretty mobile and not quite as mobile now maybe, but in general the labor market is mobile, they’ll leave. In fact, good leadership, people who listen, it’s not really that common, unfortunately, which we’ll talk about in a bit why that’s so. But because of that, people enter the workforce, enter your company, enter your organization somewhat skeptical. They won’t assume you want to listen. They will assume you may not. So even if you ask them, “Hey, we’re about the launch this initiative, I’d love people’s opinions,” you might hear crickets.
Warwick F:
You’re actually going to have to work. It’s a bit like fishing. You’re going to have to throw that line out a few times. You’re almost guilty until proven innocent in the area of listening just because it’s so rare. So you’re going to have to work hard. Now once you’ve earned people’s trust over the months and over the years, people will share. But it’s like a starter engine. You got to crank it a bit for that to happen. So if you have a few times where you’ve just gone ahead like a bull in a china shop and not listening, that’ll take a while to undo because it’s back to what they expect.
Warwick F:
Bosses don’t listen. So you’re not starting from a level playing field. You’re starting from a position where they’ll assume you probably won’t listen, even before they even know you. So then you’ve got to work at it and convince them that you really care and that you really want to listen.
Gary S:
Yeah. It’s tenuous, too. That connection is tenuous, as you pointed out. Just one time. It only takes one time to not listen, to be the bull in the china shop, to go ahead and push through, where people will think, “Whoa, OK, my ideas aren’t appreciated.” You’re right, not feeling appreciated, not feeling heard, is one of the things that can lead people to walk out the door, and that can severely dampen your chances of getting your vision enacted and making it a reality.
Warwick F:
Just as we talk about making the vision reality, you don’t have to listen to everybody but you have to listen to somebody. One of the things that we say in Crucible Leadership, if could be 100 percent of your vision but it might get 0 percent buy-in. Well, it’s better if it’s 80 percent of your vision and 100 percent buy-in. One achieves a lot, the other achieves nothing. So leaders fear, “If I listen to my team, it’s not even going to be close to what my vision is. It’ll be some watered down monstrosity that’s not going to go anywhere.” That’s the fear. But if you’ve got a smart team, that won’t happen. Again, you don’t have to listen to everybody, but when they look at the final vision, they’ve got to be able to say, “That part of the vision, that idea, that was mine.”
Warwick F:
I think of one example from history. I think I read it in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals, a fantastic book about Lincoln and his diverse cabinet, diverse in terms of politics and ideas. In his second inaugural address, in one of the most famous speeches in the English-speaking language in American history, he talks about “with malice towards none and charity towards all.” Lincoln could write a good speech. The Gettysburg Address. The guy knew how to write a speech and deliver it. Well, as reported in this book, he actually asked some of his senior cabinet, “Hey, I’ve got this draft but I’d love your input.” Now I don’t think we know exactly what happened, but you’ve got to assume that some of their input went into that speech.
Warwick F:
I don’t know that we know, was “malice” from one person and not the other, or “charity.” But can you imagine being his team? Lincoln, by this time we’re looking at the second inaugural in 1865. I mean, they knew him by then. The guy was amazing. It’s like, “He’s asking me for my opinion on the second inaugural. Oh. My gosh. Wow.” Well, if Lincoln can do it in an area where he was superbly good at, maybe the rest of us can listen to our team, too.
Gary S:
Right. And it’s another one of those situations, it only takes one time. Doing that one time. I mean, if that was the only time that the member of Lincoln’s team saw something that he said go into a speech that the president gave, I would imagine his descendants are still living off that, if he’s passed that story down. It only takes one time to build that confidence, build that camaraderie that allows a team to help your vision become reality. Because a vision not made reality isn’t worth much, except maybe telling old stories after. “I had this great vision once.” But a vision that becomes reality because there’s team buy-in, even if it’s only, as you said, 80 percent of your vision, that vision is one that can change the world and lead to a life of significance.
Warwick F:
If there’s one thing leaders hate and visionaries hate, is a vision unfulfilled, a vision not becoming reality. That should motivate leaders to listen because the alternative is failure. The alternative is not achieving success and your vision not becoming reality. The more you’re passionate about the vision that you have, the more that you should want to listen to your team. So that should, in theory, be motivating.
Gary S:
Right. So we’ve talked about why listening is so critical. Let’s turn the page and talk about why listening can be so difficult. Just to set the stage again for this part of the conversation, I found a Harvard Business Review article that talks about listening to people and it gives, in three paragraphs, a pretty good summary of why listening is hard and that listening is hard. That’s important. But here’s just a couple of paragraphs from this article, “Listening to People,” from the Harvard Business Review.
Gary S:
“It can be stated with practically no qualification that people in general do not know how to listen. They have ears that hear very well, but seldom have they acquired the necessary aural skills which would allow those ears to be used effectively for what is called listening. For several years we have been testing the ability of people to understand and remember what they hear. At the University of Minnesota, we examined the listening ability of several thousand students and of hundreds of business and professional people. In each case, the person tested listened to short talks by faculty members and was examined for his grasp of the content. These extensive tests led us to this general conclusion.” Listener, hear this.
Gary S:
“Immediately after the average person has listened to someone talk, he remembers only about half of what he has heard, no matter how carefully he thought he was listening.” The fascinating thing, Warwick and listeners, about this article, just in case you think a lack of listening and that listening being hard’s a new invention, this article from the Harvard Business Review was published in the September 1957 issue. This is a problem that has existed throughout the generations. 63 years ago, the science, the study were still around “how do we make people listen better?” And we’re still struggling with that today. Because listening is hard. Why is it hard, Warwick?
Warwick F:
This is going to sound a little simplistic. It’s because most people, they don’t want to listen. They don’t care. They’ve got big egos. And leaders tend to have big egos. You don’t get to be successful by saying, “Oh, it’s really not me, it’s my team.” I mean, it would be nice if a few more humble people became leaders, but yeah, it’s hard to listen. Even if you agree with the textbooks conceptually, if you don’t want to, if you don’t care. I think great leaders are curious. They want to learn. They want to listen. They want to know, understand people of different cultures and backgrounds. That’s what it takes to listen. You’ve got to really have this abiding desire to care, to learn. You’ve got to be humble, park your ego at the door and say, “Look, I might have ideas, but I’m not the font of all wisdom. There might be other ideas that are better than mine.”
Warwick F:
So really, it really is a matter of the heart. You do what you care about. If you care about something, it’s amazing how good a job you’ll do. Whether it’s at work or if you want to be a good baseball player or an artist, a painter, ballet, you name the activity that you’re passionate about, you will do really well — assuming you have some skill — because you care about it. Well, the same is true for listening. If you really care about it, you will be able to do it. That is the sad reality is, you’ve got to care. You’ve got to want to listen. You’ve got to believe that other people are valuable and have valuable opinions and are worthy in of themselves and are worthy of listening. It’s really a matter of the heart and the character. It’s sad but true.
Gary S:
I’m going to give a couple of quotes here and I promise you I’m not going to fool you with quotes from you this time. But here’s a couple quotes about just the difficulty of listening, why listening is so difficult. One is from Stephen Covey, who you thought the first quote was from, which you’re in good company when you’re saying things that Stephen Covey says as well. Stephen Covey said this about listening. “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand. They listen with the intent to reply.” A similar perspective came from someone I believe to be even wiser than Stephen Covey. My mother, Martha Schneeberger. When I was growing up, just barely in double digits, maybe right before mid double digits, my mom said to me, “Gary, a good ratio when you’re interacting with people is to listen twice as much as you talk. To limit your lips and let your ears rule the day.”
Gary S:
What’s fascinating to me about that, Warwick, is that in this article that I spoke about in Fast Company, about how to be a better listener, one of the things that they say in here is, “Pay attention to your talk-listen ratio.” That’s one of Fast Company’s pieces of advice, too. Mom was right. It says, “If you’re a note-taker during meetings or conversations…” This is fascinating, listener. Think about this. “If you’re a note-taker during meetings or conversations, try keeping track of how much you listen versus how much you talk,” says Fast Company. “Mark off a section of the paper and write down the names of all the people on the conference call or in the meeting. Whenever a person talks for more than a sentence or two, put a check mark by his or her name. This includes you, too, by the way. The visual representation of comparing listening to talking might hold some lessons for you.” I thought that was fascinating.
Warwick F:
That is such a good point. It reminds me of a story of when I joined a board a number of years ago. The board president told me and the other new board members, “Remember that you have two ears and one mouth.” That was his subtle way of saying that should be the ratio. When I’m on boards I tend to be pretty active in my opinions, so I have to say, yeah, I think I’m pretty reasonable at listening but that, I think, was a challenge for me. Yeah, I mean, it’s one of the worst things you can do is be listening to somebody and just be looking for an excuse or a way of inserting what you perceive is your wisdom. As you put it, it’s paying lip service to what’s being said.
Warwick F:
Because people can tell if you’re not really listening and you’re just looking to exposit on some of your perceived brilliance. They can just pick that. So one of the things that’s interesting to observe about new leaders is when they come into a new position, for the first few months they will listen. They will learn the culture before making any big changes, and I think you mentioned to me, you used to work in newspapers for many years. That’s one of the things you practiced.
Gary S:
Yeah. Absolutely. I would, if I took over a newsroom or I took over any team in any position I had, people who were not happy with the previous administration would always come to my office and say, “Well, what about this? And change that and do this.” I was always in knowledge-acquisition mode. I wanted to hear what was going on. I wanted to hear people say those things to me, but I needed to understand how things were run. I needed to understand how the people who ran them and how the people who carried out what was being done, how they felt about what was being done before I could change anything. To come in before you hear and observe how things are done and change how things are done, you’re operating from no place of knowledge.
Gary S:
So you can cast a vision, in Crucible Leadership language, you can cast a vision for how you want this department, this newspaper to run, but you’re not going to get buy-in if you’re basing it off just your first impressions. I think that’s one of the great things that listening does for us, is it helps us move off of first impressions or assumptions or prejudices or those pre-conceived notions or our own expertise, and allows us to have the wisdom in many counselors, as the Bible says. It allows us to have that and then act on that information to make that vision come to life.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. And that’s such a good example. Great leaders, whether they’re coming into a newsroom that they’re leading or an organization, they want to get all the information. What’s happening so far? What are the challenges? What are we doing well? Armed with all that information over the first few months, they’re in a far better position to make a determination about where the company or the newsroom needs to go. The people in the newsroom or the organization are much more likely to listen because you spent the first few months listening to them. You can say, “Well, I’ve heard A, B, and C from person X, Y and Z, and based on this, this is where I feel like we should be going.” People realize you’re listening, they realize you respect them, and you’ve got much greater chance of succeeding with enacting your vision. I mean, it sounds so simple and in a sense, it is. But just having that wisdom to listen first before you make a whole lot of changes, it’s such a good example.
Gary S:
Yeah, and it’s the kind of thing that leads back to what you were talking about, the enacting 100 percent of your vision or advancing 100 percent of your vision or sticking to your guns on your vision so strongly that you don’t even open up the floor to input, could leave you with a vision that’s stalled. As opposed to 80 percent of a vision is a pretty darn good percentage, right? If you have an 80 percent field goal percentage in basketball, you’re a pretty good shooter, right?
Warwick F:
Exactly. One of the things I mention in the book, Crucible Leadership, that will be coming out next year, the image I have which hopefully will help leaders who are really reluctant to do this. There’s a statue in Florence by Michelangelo. It’s called the statue of David. It’s one of the greatest sculptures ever made. I actually had the good fortune in 2018 of seeing it. It is amazing. So just imagine you think your vision is like the statue of David. It’s like perfection. You’ve got to be willing to give your team the hammer and chisel and make a few changes. If you think your vision is like the statue of David, emotionally, psychologically, that’s hard because they might desecrate perfection. I get why it’s hard. But you’ve got to realize, well, maybe your vision isn’t that good.
Warwick F:
I mean, not to burst people’s bubbles. Maybe it’s pretty good. Maybe it’s even great. But you know what? Maybe it could even be greater, and why would you want to settle for merely good when you could settle for great or fantastic? So it’s a decision of the will. It’s like you might say, “I don’t want to do this because they could desecrate perfection,” but you’ve got to proverbially give people the hammer and chisel and say, “Okay.” Your hand may be trembling as you give the hammer and chisel over. It’s like, “Oh boy, here we go.” Sweat may be pouring off your brow but you just go to do it. You got to make the leap and let them do it and you might find, much to your surprise, it’s even better. Really, listening, it’s a decision of the will. It’s a choice.
Warwick F:
Do you want to be successful or do you want to fail? Do you want your vision to be greater or do you want it to be lesser? Do you want your vision to happen at all or do you want to sit it in some dusty file cabinet gathering dust? I mean, the choices are pretty clear. If you want to be successful, if you want your vision to become reality, you will listen. You will make that choice even though it may not be what you want to do. Leadership is about choice. Choose the path of success rather than failure. Choose the path that will get your team on board and will stop the good people leaving. The bad people often don’t leave because they might feel like, well, they’ve nowhere else to go.
Warwick F:
The good people, they’ll leave in a heartbeat. They won’t put up with stupid stuff, and not listening is just really the height of stupidity. So for so many reasons, keeping your good team members on board, being successful, not failing, having your vision become reality. There’s so many reasons why listening just makes sense. You’ve got to get over yourself and over your ego and you’ve just go to do it.
Gary S:
That is an excellent time to turn around and talk about the last aspect of this, and that is how do you do it better? How do you become a better listener? I’m going to go back to the Fast Company article because there’s an example in here that they give that is really their third tip for becoming a better listener in a business context, is this: “Ask more questions. One of the simplest ways to be a better listener,” Fast Company writes, “is to ask more questions than you give answers. When you ask questions, you create a safe space for other people to give you an unvarnished truth.”
Gary S:
I want to say this to the listener, and it’s fair game, Warwick, because you on some podcast somewhere praised your team at Crucible Leadership, which includes the marketing folks at Signal, includes myself from ROAR, but I’m going to throw a little praise your way because you are excellent as a leader at asking questions. I want listeners to, as you listen to podcasts, go back to other podcasts and listen. You will hear Warwick say one of the most common phrases he’ll say in our business meetings, but also in the podcast when interviewing a guest. He’ll end a statement that he makes with the phrase, “Does that make sense?”
Gary S:
We get transcripts from the podcasts and if I type in, “Does that make sense” it will pop up five or six times. But that is one of the things that Warwick does very well, not to embarrass him as he’s said to us when he’s praised us in this podcast, not to embarrass him, but that is one of the chief ways. Ask questions. That’s fair. I’ve heard you say more than once, Warwick, that you’re not a take-charge Rupert Murdoch leader. You are a reflective adviser and you lead by asking questions.
Warwick F:
Thank you for that. I mean, it’s funny. I laugh in one sense at myself because, especially on the boards I’ve been on, sometimes I’ll try to make a point and I feel like, I don’t know, it’s like it doesn’t really get heard. But then I ask a question and it might be getting to the same point, and people will say, “Oh, good point.” It’s like, “What do you mean, good point? I just asked a question.” At least for me, I find asking questions a whole lot more effective. But you’re right, I mean, it starts with, you’ve got to care. If you don’t care, at least as a leader you want to be successful and have your vision become reality. So it requires discipline.
Warwick F:
Let’s say you’re meeting with your team. You want to ask them questions. “So how’s it going in your area?” You want to care about them as individuals. “How’s the family?” People are holistic people. They don’t just park their human selves at home. So you do want to care about them as individuals. But just ask how’s it going in their area, what do you need, what can I do to help, what are some of the challenges, do you have any ideas of how to solve those challenges. And be disciplined in the sense that don’t be too quick to offer solutions. In fact, it’s probably not helpful because sometimes one of your subordinates, one of your team members, may ask you, “So what do you think I should do? I’m not sure about this.” Basically give me the solution. A wise leader doesn’t take that bait.
Warwick F:
There’s a time and a place for help, but the first line of defense, if you will, should be, “Well, that’s a great question. I’d first like to hear what you think. What do you think? So you’re having this problem with a certain customer. What are the issues? What do you think you can do to solve it?” Be a good coach. Good leaders are good coaches. I’ve taken the odd coaching course and I’m an executive coach, certified, have done some, obviously, a lot of coaching courses. Be a coach. So really, I think often the best way to lead is by asking questions. If you’re a good leader and you’re experienced, and let’s make that assumption, you will ask good questions because you’ve been there. You’ve been in their shoes. Focus on asking good questions that help your team members find the answers themselves. That is part of the art of great leadership. Be a little slow to offer solutions to every question that comes up.
Warwick F:
I’m not saying never offer advice. More offer advice in terms of in principle how to solve problems rather than, “Oh, let me write a 10-page business plan that solves your problem in your area.” That is not really helping them.
Gary S:
Right. It also makes for, I’ll say this, it also makes for meetings and team discussions that are more robust. If you’ve got a leader in those meetings, going back to Fast Company’s thing, if you’re putting check marks by people who are saying more than two sentences at a time and the leader of the meeting has 17 check marks, people check out, right? People grab their phones. People start doing things and they’re not paying attention. The great thing about meetings that we have at Crucible Leadership, all virtual, but still there’s times when you will say at the end of a discussion of a topic, “Okay, Gary. Okay, Alex. Okay, Cheryl. Okay, people on the team, what do you think of that?”
Gary S:
It creates engagement on the team in the task at hand. That is critical for that whole idea of, it enhances your vision and floats all boats. If the leader has created the boundaries, you got to give people a crayon so they can color within those boundaries so that they can be part of the solution. Listening is critical to that. Asking questions. If you never know as a member of a meeting when the leader is going to ask you a question, you pay attention in that meeting.
Warwick F:
One of the things I really believe really and strongly, don’t just ask the senior vice presidents or the senior leaders of your team. You’ll have senior members and junior members, typically, in your team. All age groups, all levels of experience. Yeah, I mean, it’s easy to think, “Oh, let me ask somebody who’s got 20 years of experience at doing X.” One of the things I try to do is ask all people. Because A, it’s important for them to feel heard, but B, they might actually offer some thoughts that you weren’t expecting. So whether they’ve been there one year, two years, five years or whatever, you want to ask opinions of all the members of the team, not the ones with the PhDs and 30 years of experience.
Warwick F:
I mean, obviously that’s really valuable. But you want everybody to be heard, and it will often be surprising where some fantastic idea comes from. It often comes from places that you wouldn’t have expected. So, that’s really important, too. Don’t just listen to the people with the long pedigrees that have been there forever. That’s helpful. Got to listen to everybody. Everybody has to feel heard because you want everybody’s wisdom and you want everybody to be firing on all cylinders, all moving together. So that’s listening to everybody, not just the senior leaders is so important.
Gary S:
Right. In the same way that being followed as a leader because of your title is the least thing you want, you want people to follow you because of your character and because they identify with your leadership and they feel heard and all those things. Same thing. If you only, as a leader, ask questions or seek the opinions of those with the titles, you’re doing it wrong, too. It’s not going to lead to the best result. So the example you gave is a really good one.
Gary S:
We’ve come to that part of the show, Warwick, where it’s time to begin to land the plane, as I like to say. The captain’s turned on the “fasten seatbelt” sign. One last point, I guess, I want to make about listening and the fact that it’s hard and how to overcome it. One of the reasons it’s hard is that it’s just hard. Let’s go back to that Harvard Business School study of 63 years ago. Its conclusion was this: “Immediately after the average person has listened to someone talk, he remembers only about half of what he’s heard, no matter how carefully he thought he was listening.”
Gary S:
Listening is hard because it’s hard. You really have to put effort into listening, and that’s been what we’ve talked about here. How do you put that effort into it? I think the best way, and I’d love to hear your opinion on this, the best way to get over the hardness of it, the best way to improve in it, is the same way that you improve in tennis: practice, practice, practice. Is that fair?
Warwick F:
It is. It’s like you say, well, riding a bike for the first time is hard. When you first start riding it when you’re a kid, you’re wobbling and doing circles all over the place. Well, as you practice more, it gets easier. The same is true of listening. I do believe that at the core of it, you got to care. You got to park your ego at the door. But even if you might have only just heard 50 percent of what they just said, it’s ask follow-up questions. “Person A, I heard you say A, B, and C. That was really interesting. Talk more about that. Now when you said this, I was a bit unclear of what you meant.”
Warwick F:
People don’t mind if you ask them, “Hey, can you talk about it more,? or, “I might have missed that point you made. Can you say that again?” They don’t mind if you’ve missed something if you ask, “Can you please repeat that, rephrase it, explain more?” It doesn’t really matter whether you’ve only heard 30, 40, 50 percent of what they said if you’re in a dialogue and you follow up with more questions because, by the end of it, you have a conversation with somebody for 10, 15, 20 minutes, you will remember the core things. If you want to do what good coaches do, there’s always the phrase “mirroring,” which is, “So you’ve mentioned a number of things, Paul, Sally. What I heard you say is these three things. Is that fair that these are the three most important things that you think that we should pay heed to?”
Warwick F:
They’ll either say, “Yes, well, that’s pretty close but…” At that point, they’re going to feel heard. If you can summarize the three most important things they’ve just said, and if you got it wrong, you got two, well, they’ll tell you. So it requires practice, but it also requires a bit of perseverance and a bit of conversation and you will remember the most important things if you have a dialogue with them and you ask more questions.
Gary S:
That is the perfect place for the landing gear to be down and the plane to be on the runway. Let me summarize what I think are three good takeaways, listener, from this episode about listening and leadership. One, the price of engagement of your team is listening. You can’t pay ear service to them. You have people on your team for their skills, for the talents, for their abilities. Listening lets you benefit from their expertise.
Gary S:
Second point. Leave your ego at the door. In fact, leave it behind the door. Don’t even bring it in the room. Be curious. Care. Want to learn. Be humble. You are not the font of all wisdom. But you can accumulate all wisdom by being an active and interested listener.
Gary S:
And then the third point, which we just finished up talking about here. Practice, practice, practice. Listening’s hard. It was hard 63 years ago when Harvard Business Review wrote this article. When it comes to truly hearing others, practice may not make perfect, but it certainly makes less imperfect. And that is a jumping off point where you can start turning things around and you can start building better teams and building better leadership.
Gary S:
So thank you, listener, for listening to our podcast today talking about listening. Want you to know that Warwick sends emails out regularly with some of the very kinds of tidbits that we’ve discussed on the show today. You can go to crucibleleadership.com and you can sign up to receive those emails on a regular basis so that you’ll always be on the leading edge of the things that Warwick is discussing and discovering about crucibles and how to find your way through them, find your way beyond them as this podcast is called, Beyond the Crucible.
Gary S:
So until next time that we’re together, thank you for spending time with us and remember this as you’re sitting there right now in your car, in your home, listening to this. You might be in the middle of your crucible, but remember, that crucible experience is not the end of your story. In fact, it can be, if you learn the lessons of that crucible, you apply the lessons of that crucible, and you do indeed listen to those around you to help you move beyond that crucible, that experience can be the jumping off point to the greatest chapter in your life because that chapter will lead, in the end, to a life of significance.
In times of crisis, such as the times we are now living in with the health concerns surrounding COVID-19, uncertainty about the economy and many people feeling excluded, leadership becomes even more critical. Clear and decisive leadership would seem to be the order of the day. You feel that you need to move now — less talk, more action. But yet when you give the call to act, nothing much seems to happen. Why is that? Why does it seem no one is listening to you – at least not well enough to get what needs to be done accomplished?
The question you should be asking is not why your team is not listening to you, but why are you not listening to your team? Good leaders listen. The price for the commitment of your team, which enables bold, decisive action, is for you to listen.
Here are some tips for listening that enable better leadership, especially in crucible moments:
1. Your team must feel heard.
It is not enough to go through the motions and pretend to listen. Your team must feel you are really listening to them and taking their input on board. They must know you really hear them and are not just paying them “ear service.”
2. Your team must feel that you care.
Your team can feel lack of authenticity a mile away. They have to believe you care not just about their opinions but about who they are. People are whole beings, with hopes and dreams. They do not leave these at home. Again, they need to feel that you care about them.
3. You have to adopt someone’s input into your plans.
While you may not have to accept everyone’s input, on all subjects if month after month and project after project passes, your team makes suggestions and NO ONE has their input included in your organization’s plans, clearly they will feel you are not listening and don’t care about them or their opinions
4. People need to be heard, more than they need their opinions to be accepted.
What this means is that if people feel you genuinely hear them, they are OK if their specific opinion is not included in the final outcome. Again, so long as someone or some people’s input is included over time. People feel a greater need to be heard than to be right.
5. Trust your team.
If you are a good leader, you will have hired a diverse group of people with diverse skills. They will have expertise in their specific areas that you may not have. Combined, they well may have more skills and certainly knowledge than you have. You can’t know everything, and you are not doing their jobs day to day. So a smart leader will probe and ask good questions to ensure sound plans are being enacted, but their bias will be to trust the great team that they have assembled. The bottom line: why wouldn’t you listen to the team of all stars that you have assembled? If you have not built such a team, why is that? Could it be that you are too insecure to surround yourself with bright, able and driven people?
6. Be flexible.
It is great to have a plan and a direction. But circumstances change. The economy could change. The market could change. Or perhaps some members of your team could have a brilliant idea that could alter the trajectory of your plans. Determine your course, but be willing to modify it as you receive input about the one constant you and your team face: change.
7. Be curious.
A curious person is someone who wants to learn. A curious person is humble, because they know that they don’t have all the answers. Great leaders are lifelong learners. They always want to get better, to grow and to learn more. Listening is a key way to do just that.
At the core of leading well is listening. It’s a matter of the heart, a matter of character. Do you really care about your team? Do you really value their opinions? If not, examine yourself. Do you have an overinflated ego? Do you feel you have nothing more to learn from others? Do you feel that you have all the right answers? If that is you, you have a choice. Change! Care more, listen more, let you and your team grow together. Or leave! Let someone else take your place who will lead better.
To accomplish the organization’s goals, to lead well, even to lead decisively, you need a leader of your team who will really listen. The goals of your organization are too important to play around. Either lead well and listen, or get out of the way.
Reflection
Are you really listening to your team’s input, or are you just going through the motions?
How much do you really care about your team and their lives? If you don’t, examine your heart.
What do you need to do today to demonstrate to your team that their opinions matter?
To explore Beyond the Crucible resources, including our free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment, visit beyondthecrucible.com.
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and leave a comment at our YouTube channel and be sure subscribe and tell your friends and family about us.
Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Fewer than 10 percent of those living with Parkinson’s Disease are under 60. Tim Hague is one of them. As a nurse for two decades, he sensed immediately what was wrong when, at age 46, he noticed a tremor in his left toe. His self-diagnosis was soon confirmed, and in the months that followed he pressed deeply into his Christian faith to grasp “Why has God done this to me?” But he refused to wallow in regret or self-doubt, and just three years later he was competing on, and winning, The Amazing Race in his home country of Canada. The platform the show provided led him to see Parkinson’s as winning the lottery, as he began a successful speaking career and launched a nonprofit to put his medical training to use helping others with the disease. In this episode of BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE, he tells host and Crucible Leadership founder Warwick Fairfax that he’s learning every day to live the lessons of his book, Perseverance: The Seven Skills You Need to Survive, Thrive, and Accomplish More Than You Ever Imagined. “I have to believe that there is something good in this for me,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense otherwise.”
To learn more about Tim Hague and his book, PERSEVERANCE, visit www.timsr.ca
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and leave a comment at our YouTube channel. And be sure subscribe and tell your friends and family about us.
👉 Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Transcript
Gary S:
Well, welcome, everyone, to this episode of Beyond the Crucible. I’m Gary Schneeberger, the cohost of the podcast and the communications director for Crucible Leadership, and you have dialed in to, pressed play on, hopefully pressed subscribe to, a podcast that deals with our crucible experiences. Those are things most all of us have been through: painful times, trying times, failures, setbacks, those things that can be so upsetting to the applecart of our lives that it can feel like they changed the trajectory of our lives. And we do indeed talk about them here, and we do indeed go over them here, but not because we want to live there, not because we want to wallow in them. We go over them as a jumping-off point to discuss how to overcome them, how to move beyond them, because it is in moving beyond them that we can chart a course to a life of significance.
Gary S:
Here with me for this episode of the show, as always for every episode of the show, is the architect of Crucible Leadership and the host of the podcast, Warwick Fairfax. Warwick, we’ve got an interesting, and dare I say what will be an inspiring story, I think, for listeners today.
Warwick F:
Absolutely, Gary. Great to be here, and wonderful to have Tim with us.
Tim H:
Thank you, Warwick.
Gary S:
The Tim … That was Tim right there, listener, and Tim is … I’m going to give him the introduction that he deserves. Tim is Tim Hague, who is a retired nurse of more than 20 years, who devotes his time to professional speaking and writing, and is founder of the Parkinson’s wellness center U-Turn Parkinson’s. He’s the author of the best-selling book Perseverance: The Seven Skills You Need to Survive, Thrive, and Accomplish More Than You Ever Imagined. Side note: I’ve read much of the book. It’s worth getting. Get it, listener. We’ll tell you how at the end of this podcast.
Gary S:
He has spoken for TEDx and is sought after across North America for his motivational and inspiring topics, which are living your best and the power of perseverance. After having been diagnosed with young onset Parkinson’s disease at the age of 46, Tim and his son went on to win the first season of the reality television series The Amazing Race Canada. He is an outspoken and effective advocate on behalf of people living with Parkinson’s around the world, and I will tell you at the end of the podcast how to find out more about Tim and his work.
Gary S:
So, Tim, welcome. Warwick, take it away.
Tim H:
Thank you.
Warwick F:
Well, Tim, just awesome to have you, and I know we’ll get into this in a bit, but I love the concept in your book: perseverance, surviving, thriving. You don’t often think of those concepts together, perseverance and thrive. So I’d love to hear more about that in a bit. But tell us a bit about Tim Hague and your story and how that kind of led up to your crucible experience. Yeah. Just tell a bit about yourself, and yeah. That’d be a great place to start.
Tim H:
Sure. Well, thank you again for having me on the show. It’s a pleasure to be with you today, and yeah, my life was an interesting story right from the beginning. We all say we started when we were born as a small child. So was I, but it started off in Iowa with a 20-year-old mom who found herself pregnant by a 30-something-year-old married black man. She ended up being sent to Texas to have me, put me up for adoption. I was adopted by a family from Kansas who not only adopted me, but then adopted five more like me in addition to the three kids that they already had. So that’s a total of nine that I grew up in. Eventually I moved to Canada after making my way through life, and there’s lots of story there that I’ve just skipped over, but made my way to Canada. My wife is from Canada. We met in Bible school back in the day.
Tim H:
In Winnipeg, I grew up. I like to say that I was born in Texas, raised in Kansas, but I grew up in Winnipeg, and there’s a whole long story to that as well. But an important part of that is learning to live in the cold. You mentioned before we got started here today, the brutal weather of winters, and like I said then, I like to say it’s only the strong who live here.
Gary S:
I am with you, brother. I’m in Wisconsin, so I feel your pain and your shivers.
Tim H:
But also the strength. You have the fortitude to live in it.
Gary S:
Indeed.
Tim H:
I like to think that living in Winnipeg has taught me a lot in the terms of persevering. I was being prepared for, if you will, dealing with Parkinson’s, because perseverance is a big part of living with Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s disease is not a quick, get it and you die five years later. This is a lifetime kind of disease. This is a marathon of a disease that requires perseverance, and we can go into more of how I define perseverance as we go here.
Tim H:
But at this point, I’ve been married to my wonderful wife Cheryl for 34 years, have four fantastic children all grown up. My youngest two are twins, and they just turned 22. My oldest son … he’s married, have wonderful daughter-in-law. They have two children, 4 and 17 months, having a great time with them, of course. Then I do travel and speak a fair bit, wrote the book and am executive director of U-Turn Parkinson’s here in Winnipeg.
Tim H:
So that’s the Coles Notes of Tim Hague right now.
Warwick F:
Wow. So I’d love to hear a bit more about just the experience with Parkinson’s. Before we get there, before that happened, I think you were 46. Were you-
Tim H:
Yes.
Warwick F:
… at the time when you got Parkinson’s? Tell us about how was your life? I mean, obviously I have a younger brother and sister who are adopted, and sometimes that works out great. Sometimes it just varies in the family. So how was your life just growing up a bit differently? I mean, many people have been adopted, and then moving from Texas to Kansas. Pre-Parkinson’s, how would you describe your life?
Tim H:
Life was fantastic. My parents came off the farm in Missouri, grade-eight educations, but fundamentally strong Christians, sound foundation of faith that we were raised with, and they made it very clear early on that Christ was the center of life and that that’s what everybody was based on, that we were made in His image, that there was fundamental worth to all of us regardless of what our origins were. And so there was never any question in our minds whatsoever that we were loved. We simply were, and they did everything they could to provide for those nine kids. They put a roof over our head. They put clothes on our back, food in our bellies, got us an education, and while they certainly didn’t maybe have the appreciation for higher education that others might, they did everything they knew to do to prepare us for life and to get us the education and set us out on our own the best that they possibly could.
Warwick F:
It sounds like you had a loving home that they … It’s one thing to kind of preach Christ. It’s another thing to live it and to show kids who you’ve brought into your family that unconditional love and acceptance. But it sounds like they actually did live what they preached, if you will.
Tim H:
I have been in church all my life, and I can give you every reason why you should ever leave the religion, the faith, the church. I’ve seen it all. One of the things that keeps me so grounded to my faith is that my parents lived out what it meant to be adopted as sons of God, that to be brought in from somewhere where you didn’t belong, where you weren’t born, and to be made a son and an heir and to have full rights as if you were born there … They’ve lived that out, and yeah, it has greatly impacted my faith journey to the good.
Warwick F:
Wow. That’s wonderful. I mean, a lot of folks, obviously as you would know, don’t grow up in a loving home with that unconditional love, and that obviously tends to bring lifelong challenges of self-worth and what have you, and that’s a blessing to have that. So it sounds like you made your way to Canada. You became a registered nurse, met your wife in Bible school. It feels like life was pretty good.
Tim H:
Life was…
Warwick F:
Did you feel like, “God, you’ve blessed me. I don’t know where I would have grown up elsewhere, but you’ve put me in a loving home. I have a loving wife, loving kids.” Did you say thank-you-Jesus things? That’s pretty awesome.
Tim H:
Yes.
Warwick F:
I mean, was that kind of your life? I don’t mean to sugarcoat it, but does it feel like that was your life, in a sense?
Tim H:
In large part, yes, because I always had what I needed. We were never rich. We didn’t have vacations every year. We didn’t travel. We didn’t do things. But we had what we needed, and I was always cognizant of that. I was aware of the fact that my experience as an adopted child was so very different from lots. Now, did we face discrimination? Yes. Mom and Dad were white. We were all mixed race and brown of some nature or another. So we had hard times.
Tim H:
I always like to joke that the one father, I was dating his Latino daughter, and I was never the right color brown for him. I was always too black for the white man’s daughter, too white for the black man’s daughter, or vice versa there, and the wrong shade of brown for the Latino man’s daughter. I never quite fit except at home.
Warwick F:
Right. Certainly, I mean, there’s discrimination now. Certainly years ago it probably wasn’t better. So yeah. Growing up in that environment, that’s just, sadly, probably fairly normal is discrimination by the narrow-minded and the unenlightened, if you will.
Tim H:
Absolutely. Our first pastor showed up at home to tell Mom and Dad the mistake they had made in adopting this black baby. So we told him we disagreed with his theology and moved on.
Gary S:
It’s amazing you said just a few minutes ago that the foundation of your faith was strong because of your parents, and to have a person who’s in leadership, quote unquote, in the faith to come and say something like that … That shows how strong the faith that you lived and were taught is, that you were able to dismiss that, I’ll say it, ignorant comment from someone in leadership. That shows the strength of that, and that strength undoubtedly serves you well as you continue to bump into crucibles throughout your life.
Tim H:
Absolutely.
Warwick F:
Yeah. Just on that note, there’s a real sad dichotomy between the unconditional love of your parents and the narrow-mindedness of that pastor who, I guess, not to be judgmental here, but obviously wasn’t attuned to biblical teachings and the teaching of Jesus that we’re all children of God, and so I don’t know. Maybe he missed a couple chapters or something, or a lot of chapters, but sad but true. There’s many people that … That’d be a whole other discussion, how many pastors over the centuries and Civil War have proclaimed Jesus while yet denying Jesus in so many ways, which is, I find, impossible to understand, but that will be another discussion.
Warwick F:
So it sounds like life wasn’t perfect, in this sense. It’s not like you were rolling in money and could go to Disney World every year or anything, but you had a wonderful upbringing, loving wife, found a wonderful home in Winnipeg. So tell us about when Parkinson’s happened. At 46, and you would know much better than I, you don’t expect that at that age. So tell us how that whole episode happened.
Tim H:
Well, the diagnosis came about somewhat unremarkably. I had been a nurse at that point for 18 years, and Dad had Parkinson’s. Now, it wasn’t a big deal for us that he had Parkinson’s at the time, because he died ultimately of complications to heart disease. He had diabetes, and then Parkinson’s came along later and kind of layered into that, and we were always more concerned about the other.
Warwick F:
This is obviously your adoptive father.
Tim H:
Yes. This is my adoptive father.
Warwick F:
Obviously this wasn’t a hereditary deal, obviously, but that’s a coincidence.
Tim H:
Well, interestingly enough, I know my birth mother. I’ve known her for many years, and my maternal grandfather by blood also had Parkinson’s when he died. So it was coming at me on all fronts. But yeah. I had been nursing for 18 years when I noticed a tremor in my left big toe, and I knew at that point that it was either probably MS or Parkinson’s. I had seen lots of both, and I’d self diagnosed in about five minutes, and then went on a number of months to see my doc and see a specialist and be formally diagnosed in February of 2011 at 46 with young onset.
Tim H:
Now, how did I feel about that? I was ticked is how I felt about it. I was not excited by this diagnosis. I knew very well what it would likely mean for me long term, and I simply was not happy. Me and God had to do some business over this one just because it’s a rough diagnosis. So yeah. That’s how it came to be.
Gary S:
You told me, Tim, when we talked earlier that a very, very small percentage … I mean, tell the listeners the percentage of people who are diagnosed with Parkinson’s at that age. It is not common at all.
Tim H:
It’s under 10 percent that are diagnosed with Parkinson’s under the age of 60. Typically, Parkinson’s is an older-person’s disease, and you’re typically diagnosed over 60. When I was diagnosed, I knew no one under 60 who had Parkinson’s, and I spent … It was a fair while before I met anyone my age with Parkinson’s. I call it one of my two lotteries that I’ve won.
Warwick F:
What was the other one?
Tim H:
The other one was The Amazing Race.
Warwick F:
That’s interesting, and we’ll get into this in a moment, but it’s interesting, two lotteries that you have won. Yeah. I know the listeners are going to be thinking, “Okay. Winning Amazing Race … I get how that’s winning a lottery. How is getting Parkinson’s winning a lottery?”
Tim H:
Well, not all lotteries are good, but the second lottery that was good only happened because I won the first lottery. I am convinced that had I not come down with Parkinson’s disease, I never would have made it onto The Amazing Race.
Warwick F:
So before we get there, again, maybe this is obvious. I mean, you were obviously feeling angry, frustrated. Was there like, “Well, God, you’ve blessed me in so many ways. I have a wonderful wife,” … I’m sure you had kids by then. It’s like, “Well, what’s up with this? I know you talk about this grand plan you have. I’m not getting how … How’s this help anybody? What’s the deal?” I mean, I’m assuming you went through that conversation with yourself, God, just friends.
Tim H:
Absolutely. It was extraordinarily frustrating, because here you are, a young man in the prime of life, not even middle-aged yet, and now you’re faced with this chronic, debilitating disease that has no hope to it. There is no hope in Parkinson’s, and to date, there are precious few things that control our symptoms, and there is no cure for it, and we’ve been working on a cure for a long time. Michael J. Fox Foundation has now spent alone over a billion dollars on research for a cure, and we’re really no closer to a cure than when he started.
Tim H:
So yeah. I was frustrated when I was diagnosed, but I had to spend that time with God and walk through what I think most people walk through, that question of, “Is God good? Why has he done this to me? Why has he allowed this to be done to me? What is my relationship going to be with him in light of this?” And I had to come all the way around that and determine, is God a good God? Well, at the end of the day, yes, I believe that God is a good God. I believe that he is God and that I’m not, and so if he is a good God, if he is, and I believe that fundamentally, then I have to believe that there is something good in this for me. It doesn’t make sense otherwise.
Tim H:
The logic doesn’t work, at least for me, to say that if you’re going to believe that he’s a good God and then to turn around and say, “Well, this isn’t. There’s nothing good in this,” and that he means no good in this and it’s just death and destruction and curse, those things don’t fit together. But I do believe he is good. I do believe he has my best interest at heart, and I do believe he will make this life worth something in the end, whether I understand it entirely or not.
Warwick F:
I’d imagine there was some keys to try to … How would I say it? Maybe the word is “accept,” because unlike most people, being a registered nurse, you knew far more than your average person. You knew the life expectancy, the progression of the disease, the statistics. You probably knew much of this before the diagnosis, didn’t have to go on the Internet or read a bunch of books. You probably knew most of what you were being told, and so it’s not like, “Oh, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” or “I’m going to have some false hope or some miracle.” Miracles can happen, but there’s a reason they call them miracles, because it’s kind of rare.
Warwick F:
But it sounds like you did some wrestling with God, and there are, I’m sure, others listening maybe that don’t have Parkinson’s, but they’ve been through tragedy, whether it’s loss of a loved one or abuse. There’s all sorts of things, and they’re probably asking themselves, to the degree they have any faith, “How could a good God allow suffering and pain?” It’s a question I don’t think any of us will fully be able to answer, at least not on this Earth. But you had to do a lot of wrestling to make sense that, well, maybe God can use it somehow.
Warwick F:
So obviously there’s not a whole lot you can do about the physical side, it sounds like, based on your knowledge, which is far more than mine. If that’s not something devoting a whole lot of energy to the physical if you felt like, “Okay. I’m not going to be able to invent a cure here. So I don’t know that investing my energy in that is going to be the best use of my time” … I’m guessing you probably thought that, but yet, how did you go through a sense of, “How can I accept this and somehow use it for good in some fashion?” How did you get to the point where you got beyond not the physical side, but the emotional and spiritual devastation that that diagnosis would have caused?
Tim H:
Well, I haven’t been very successful at it yet, but I’ve always considered myself a bit of an entrepreneur, and so I just came to the conclusion that if this is what God’s given me, if this is what life has dealt me, if this is the road I’m supposed to travel, then there must be something I’m supposed to do with it. So I do what I do and just start a business, and I’m shocked that my wife let me get away with it, but that’s what we did. We started a charity. So as a nurse, my desire is of course to work with people, help people, and so that’s what we did. We channel that energy and any negative and the things that I need to work out through the charity.
Tim H:
Fortunately, Warwick, there is a bit of physical that you can do. One of the best things that you can do beyond the medications that we take is exercise, and so I’ve always exercised a lot. I’ve run one sprint-distance triathlon in my time, only one full marathon. I never liked the long, long distances, but I’ve run lots of half marathons, and so we continue to run and continue to work out, and a lot of our work through the charity is around…
Warwick F:
What is that charity again? What does it do, the charity?
Tim H:
U-Turn Parkinson’s. It is a wellness center for people living with Parkinson’s. Our goal there is to help them physically, help them figure out their day-to-day, what you do with your life now that you have this disease, the intellectual side of wellness, the spiritual, the social, the emotional, and look at that entire sphere of what it means to live well with Parkinson’s.
Gary S:
Now, we’re going to get on, I assume, very quickly to The Amazing Race. Before we do that though, I want listeners to hear what Tim just said. In his previous career, in his career before Parkinson’s, he was a nurse. He was dedicated in his career to helping people. His crucible experience came. He was angry. He was frustrated. He worked through that, and his vision and his path out of beyond the crucible, as this podcast is called, is doing the same sort of thing in a different way, helping people.
Gary S:
To all listeners out there who are on the front end of the crucible and you’re still in the anger and frustration stage, know that, as you work through it, it may very well be what you were doing before the crucible that brought you satisfaction, that brought you significance, you can do perhaps in a different way. And I would guess, Tim, you would say, in no less a rewarding way, by moving on, learning the lessons of your crucible, and finding perseverance and vision to continue to help.
Tim H:
Absolutely. It gives me no end of joy and meaning in life to see that I can take everything that I spent my years on in nursing, my education and all those years at the bedside and in management, and now turn them to a charity that’s still helping people. My life hasn’t … It’s drastically changed, but in a lot of ways it hasn’t. Fundamentally, I’m still doing much of what I ever did, just in a very different capacity, and I’m very grateful for that.
Warwick F:
As you’re helping people, I often find there’s sort of a healing balm, if you will, that as you’re focused on helping others it gives meaning to life, and maybe it doesn’t make the pain less, the physical pain, but maybe the emotional and the spiritual. Maybe it lessens it a bit or … Do you know what I mean? There’s a spiritual, emotional healing component when you’re using your pain to help others. Does that make sense?
Tim H:
Absolutely, because it goes back to that question of, “Is God a good God?” In the midst of this diagnosis, you could say, “Well, this is miserable.” Well, it is. There has never been a day gone by that I have not wished that I didn’t have Parkinson’s, but in the midst of this, you can see the purpose, the reasoning, the continuation of the life, the continuation of the journey, that everything that I’ve been taught and learned and experienced through life was building me to this moment, and it allows me to now walk this part of my journey with as much confidence as I did prior to Parkinson’s, and in some ways more.
Warwick F:
That’s one of the fascinating things, I think, about a crucible is … You, I’m sure, as … Well, nurses around the globe right now with coronavirus, are in the front lines in a very dangerous environment, as you would know better than I would, but they do such wonderful work. But it’s another thing to come alongside somebody, saying, “I know what it is to have suffering. I know what it is every day to physically have challenges. I’m not sitting here above you as some clinician. I’m with you in this.”
Warwick F:
So when you say to somebody, whether they have Parkinson’s or maybe other diseases or other challenges, they can’t say to you, “Well, Tim, you don’t know what it’s like.” You can say, “Well, I do. Trust me. I do,” especially for Parkinson’s, but even with MS or other diseases or challenges. You don’t have the same symptoms as other diseases or abuse survivors or whatever, but you know what it is to suffer and every day to have to get up in challenging circumstances, and that gives you a platform that you didn’t want, didn’t ask for, but a platform you didn’t have before. Does that make sense?
Tim H:
Yeah. Absolutely it makes sense. So the question then becomes for me is, how will I then respond? I meet lots of people who struggle with that point. They get everything I’ve said up to this point, but now they have to decide, “Will I choose to walk forward in this? Or will I continue to fight it?” and I choose to walk forward in it, because I see a lot of added misery in trying to fight it. There are lots of people who pour their heart and soul into a cure. They just want to be cured. They just want it to be fixed. They want it to go away, and there’s very little hope in that, whereas there’s lots of hope that can be given, can be gained by accepting, learning contentment, learning perseverance, and being able to walk forward, trusting in a good God who says he’s got our back. I know some people will balk at that statement right there and say, “Well, that’s just a crutch,” and I’ll say, “Amen, brother. What’s yours?”
Tim H:
We’ve all chosen to believe in something. We have all chosen to believe in something.
Warwick F:
Exactly, and I do want to get to The Amazing Race, but what you’re saying is so profound. I want listeners to really understand that accepting things, whether it’s a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, MS … It could be a business failure. It could be losing a loved one, losing a child. We had somebody on the podcast a while ago that lost his 19-year-old son to a stroke out of nowhere. It’s like, how does that happen? Perfectly healthy one day, but it can happen.
Warwick F:
So there are some things you can’t change. Death is not something that we can change. You may not like it, but what’s the alternative to acceptance? To me, it’s almost madness or despondency. So I think, for many people who have gone through crucibles, the first step to moving on is acceptance, and the alternative to acceptance is so much worse.
Tim H:
It is.
Warwick F:
Don’t you think?
Tim H:
I agree, and of recent, it’s comes to light more and more in the Parkinson’s community that it’s very likely that a lot of our Parkinson’s is being caused by environmental pesticides, chemicals, stuff that we have done to ourselves. So again, I have to come back to this idea of blaming God, this idea that it’s somehow God’s fault. Is it God’s fault that we’ve poured all this crap into our environment? If that’s what’s given me Parkinson’s, that’s probably not God’s fault.
Warwick F:
So just talk about The Amazing Race and kind of what you’re doing, because it sounds like The Amazing Race Canada was a pivotal moment that launched you into what you’re doing now in your work on perseverance and thriving, not just surviving. So talk about how that was really a pivotal moment in your journey back.
Tim H:
Well, it’s what provided us the … It launched us into the charity and into the speaking and gave us this platform. It was my wife’s idea. She was always a bit of a fanatic of the American show, always said we were going to apply if it came to Canada, and true to her word, when it did, we did. Only, we didn’t, because we discovered that we had to be gone for several weeks, an extended period of time, away from family, completely cut off. So she decided that it would be best for Tim Jr. and I to apply, for multiple reasons, but one being that she said they would love my Parkinson’s. She said they’ve done all kinds of other things, but they’ve never had anyone on the show with Parkinson’s, and the short story is she was right. They did love the story, and that’s what got us on the race.
Tim H:
The race was that classic underdog story. I like to call it that Cinderella story, that come-from-behind win that nobody expected, because, Warwick, we sucked. Day in and day out, we struggled. Whether it was just getting lost over and over again or my Parkinson’s, we were not the bright, shining stars that you would anticipate winning The Amazing Race. We came in last twice, hit both of what they call a non-elimination leg where you should be sent home but they save you, managed to survive those, managed to survive the entire thing, made it to the end, and only because of the advice of my wife did we actually win.
Tim H:
She had told us right before we ever left … She said, “Tim, pay attention. There’s going to be something you need along the course of the race that you’re going to have to repeat or need for something at the end,” and right at the beginning, we noticed these flags and flowers that kept showing up. We memorized them, and the very last task of the race was needing to put the provincial or territorial flag and flower on a giant map, and I was the only guy that finished it of the three teams. The other two teams never finished it. I did it in two tries in about 10 minutes.
Warwick F:
That’s challenging. Now, how many provinces are there in Canada?
Tim H:
There are seven provinces, three territories.
Warwick F:
You had to know all of the provinces and territories and flags and flowers? That’s tough. I know Americans might say, “Well, hey. There’s 50 states.” Actually, there’s more provinces than there are states in Australia. I think we have five, from memory. Still, who memorizes state flowers and stuff like … Well, provincial flowers in your case.
Tim H:
Nobody.
Warwick F:
So that’s amazing. So you were the only team that did it?
Tim H:
Mm-hmm.
Warwick F:
What was it like having you and your son kind of around The Amazing Race? I mean, that must have been an incredible experience. I mean, he was probably doing his best to help his dad, and you’ve got probably more years and hopefully some more wisdom, and so between the two of you, you probably made a great team.
Tim H:
I like to think we did more or less. Again, we struggled a lot, but it was fantastic running the race with him. I mean, there were a couple of times that he simply saved our hide. I needed the strength of a young man. That got us through it, and that was huge, and so we had a great, great time running the race together. It was unbelievable.
Warwick F:
When you look at it, you can’t help but think there was the hand of providence there, because having watched The Amazing Race a bit before, the odds of you coming last twice and two non-elimination rounds is probably really, really remote.
Tim H:
Yes.
Warwick F:
So the odds were stacked against you, but somehow there was a hand at work perhaps that said, “You know what? Tim Sr. and Jr. … They’re going to win this thing,” even though it didn’t look likely. That’s an amazing story in itself, right?
Tim H:
Well, it is, and this is what I try to wrap perseverance around is that perseverance is something that can be learned. It’s practical and tangible, and that this story of The Amazing Race is such a classic example of perseverance. I’ve said so many times, we could have given up. We could have stopped. We could have chucked in the towel. Nobody would have ever said, “But, guys, you were so close. You were doing so well,” because we weren’t. We simply were not, and yet we chose to persevere. We chose to stay in the race. We chose to stay in our lane that we had been called to, and in doing so, we won.
Tim H:
Now, people say, “Well, yeah, but I’m not going to go win a reality television show and win a bunch of prizes and money and whatnot.” Well, maybe not. Maybe you’re going to win something far more important. Maybe you’re going to win your kid or your spouse or the job or the … Who knows what? But it’s about not just rolling over with the diagnosis, not just rolling over with the event, no matter how bad it is, but having faith that this has entered your life for a purpose and that you’ve been given and will be given all that you need to walk this journey if you will just stay on the journey.
Warwick F:
I think what Tim is saying here is so profound. I really want listeners to hear that, because we talk about this in Beyond the Crucible quite a lot. Sometimes you’ve gone through a tragedy. In my case, it was totally different. It was, you might have heard, losing a 150-year-old family media business in Australia founded by a person of very strong faith, and as a believer myself, that alone felt like, “Yep. God had a plan, and I blew God’s plan,” which is poor theology, but in my early 30s that’s what I thought.
Warwick F:
So not at all physical. I’m not at all comparing. No tragedy is comparable to another. Whether it’s that or physical or financial or losing a loved one, you can say, “Okay. This is awful. I’m going to be angry. I’m going to hide under the covers, and for the rest of my life, whether it’s five years or 50, I’m going to be bitter, angry and never leave the home.” That is a choice, but to me, that’s not really a particularly productive choice. You could have made that choice, but you chose not to and said, “Okay. This is awful. I never would want that on anybody, but how can I use it? It sounds a bit trite, but, “My pain for a purpose” and you have to inspire others.
Warwick F:
So talk a bit more about this message of forgiveness. I know there’s a number of messages, excuse me. Perseverance. That will be a whole other book. Maybe that’s a second or third book, forgiving what the world puts at you, but talk about some of the steps in perseverance and how you try to help others with Parkinson’s, but even beyond that, just people who’ve gone through tragedy. What are some of those steps to perseverance and wholeness and wellness?
Tim H:
Well, one of the first things for me is to be honest and say that very few days are easy. Most days are hard. When you wake up with this disease and it impacts you right from the get-go, most every day is hard, but therein lies the part of the emotional side and the intellectual side. Who ever promised that life was going to be easy? Nobody promised me that. I mean, the fact remains that I have been given so many things all my life, as we talked about. I have been blessed.
Tim H:
I was not born in the slums of India or Nepal or Nicaragua and many of the other places I’ve had the opportunity to visit around the world. I was born in North America, which set me ahead of 90 percent of the world from the get-go. A nursing career, a family, everything that I’ve been given, and now to think that because I’ve been given Parkinson’s that this somehow changes everything? It doesn’t. Parkinson’s gave me The Amazing Race. It added blessing to my life. Where I’ve been given so much, it’s added more.
Tim H:
So one of the skills I talk about in the book is let go of the happiness myth, letting go of this idea that I’m supposed to be happy all the time, that nothing’s ever supposed to impact my world in a negative way, because that’s just not accurate. It’s not the truth. Understanding the nature of luck. I had a boss who always said to me, “Tim, 80 percent of success is just showing up every day. The rest is probably going to take care of itself,” and I find it amazing, like on the Race, every day that I just show up, how lucky I get, and I’m using that tongue-in-cheek very much, but the more I just show up and do what I feel I’m supposed to do, the luckier I get.
Tim H:
I accept limits. I accept the fact now, I didn’t always, that my doctors were right, but I had to choose. I was always that guy who could do everything. I could be juggling 12 balls and look at the other four coming at me and integrate them in and keep going. I could just always handle lots. I can’t handle lots anymore. Parkinson’s has taken my nursing career away from me. I have to be very careful of how many things I take on in a given day, because I do nap every single day probably at least an hour, because I have to. My body won’t work otherwise. So I’ve had to come to terms with and accept the limitations that this disease has placed on me.
Tim H:
Then the other skills I’ll leave for the book, but there are seven things that I’ve listed there that I’ve learned and am learning that perseverance can be learned. It’s practical, positives steps that we can take to genuinely influence our lives to the good.
Warwick F:
There’s so many profound things you’ve said. One of the things that I’m thinking about a lot as you’re speaking is accept limits. Now, your limitations are clear with Parkinson’s. I mean, those who understand it, and you understand it very well, would know there are specific limitations. Those who are paraplegic, quadriplegics … They have very defined limits. But even those who might feel like they don’t have physical limitations … We have limits, whether it’s geographical, where you were born, maybe background, race. There’s all sorts of things. Maybe that’s not a good example of limit, but that will have-
Tim H:
But they impact our-
Warwick F:
… certain consequences that they will impact you even if it’s because of other people’s bigotry or narrow-mindedness. But even things like talents. Some people are very athletic, and others are not. They might be more artists and painters, and maybe their buddies in high school were standout basketball players. You know what? I have two left feet. I could train my heart out, but if we’re both training equally as hard, my buddy will always win because he’s naturally gifted. That’s a limitation. It doesn’t mean you can’t try to play basketball, but your odds of being in the NBA is zero, pretty much.
Tim H:
As good as naught.
Warwick F:
Yeah. I think it’s a myth. We all have limitations, and often we want what we don’t have. I’m somebody that did well in school, I’m not terrible athletically, but I’m not particularly tremendous, so I’m never going to be as good as my buddy or whatever. Limits is not a bad thing. Just use the areas that you … This is a bit different than what you have, but what you have gifting in. Accept that you can’t do everything, and try to channel your energies into areas that are more in light of how you’re limited. I don’t know if that makes sense at all, but my point is it’s not just for people who have Parkinson’s, this concept of accept your limits. Is that a fair statement?
Tim H:
Absolutely, and it’s reminiscent of a book I’m reading right now called The Hope Quotient by Ray Johnston, where he talks about finding what you’re gifted in, finding what you’re good at, and that’s the flip of accepting limitations. Limitations are the things that I’m not good at or can’t do, but find what you do love, what you are good at, and focus on those things, and take that and run. And that’s what I’ve tried to do with my nursing is find ways of taking what I know, what I do, and integrating it into this life that I now lead.
Warwick F:
So as we kind of begin to wind up here, just talk a bit about how you’ve used the concepts of perseverance in the nonprofit you run, and talk about how you’ve integrated that to really try to help people. How do you do that?
Tim H:
It’s something that we in large part try to live for the people that we’re around every day. A lot of the folks I interact with on a day-to-day basis are seniors. They’re older, 65 plus for sure, a lot of 70 plus. So not only is life in its, if you dare call it, golden years, but their young years are gone. And they’re into the latter part of life, but to nonetheless live out that things don’t have to be as bad as they seem, that we can still find hope, that we still can find joy. We can still be excited to get up every day and to exist as we are. I look like this. I didn’t anticipate looking like this or feeling like this or being like this, but that I can find hope and joy and a way forward regardless. And then we talk a lot about all of these skills and things as we go.
Warwick F:
These are primarily people with Parkinson’s?
Tim H:
Yes.
Warwick F:
Obviously most of them would be older, and do you find as you’re talking to people in, as you say, their golden years about some of the principles of perseverance in your own life experience … Do you find that you can see glimmers of hope …
Tim H:
Oh, yeah.
Warwick F:
… in their eyes, and maybe they feel like, “OK. Maybe I can be productive. Maybe I have some wisdom to offer friends, kids, grandkids”?
Tim H:
We’ll call this guy Charlie. Charlie sat around at home for probably years after his diagnosis. The first day he showed up at the center, scraggly beard, hair all over the place, exceptionally overweight, could barely understand him. His voice was very affected by Parkinson’s, had a hard time walking, moving. He talks better. He walks better. He has lost weight. He has a smile on his face again. His wife has thanked us profusely for everything that this has done for their marriage, their relationship, for him, and just the fact that we’ve been able to get him off the couch exercising a little bit and giving him a community, and that, Warwick, is what ramps me up every day.
Warwick F:
So it sounds like that’s a good test case, because it sounds like there were things you did physically and in terms of wellness that also emotionally and spiritually … When you combine all those factors, the health, wellness, emotional, spiritual, there’s not just changes in demeanor. There’s even somewhat increased … I don’t know. Not mobility, but-
Tim H:
Yeah increased mobility.
Warwick F:
… increased functionality, in some sense, that doesn’t cure things, but it makes a little bit of difference physically in well being, but certainly probably a lot of difference emotionally and spiritually, and that person probably had very little hope and how has hope and actually has life, in some sense. So that must be so rewarding.
Tim H:
It is so rewarding. It is thrilling, and we have literally watched him come back. It’s just been absolutely amazing. So therein is my hope.
Warwick F:
To me, that’s a message that I think we can all learn from, in the midst of our crucible: there is hope. Sometimes you can change your circumstances. Very often you can’t. There are lifelong, typically unalterable changes to your life. It doesn’t mean you have to like it, but OK. As you said, you choose to accept the limitations that there are, and so now what? You choose to let go of anger and either forgive other people. Sometimes that crucible is because of what things are done to us, or not be angry at the universe or God, because what good would that do? It doesn’t really help you.
Warwick F:
Anger never helps you. It’s not productive no matter how understandable it is, and then channel it in a way that helps other people, which you’ve really … I mean, you’re sort of a role model, if you will, of how you deal with crucibles in a productive manner and live life and have hope. And you’ve given a lot of other people life and hope, many you know, many you probably don’t know. They’ve heard your story, read your book, listened to your talks, and that’s leaving a legacy that your kids and grandkids and beyond can be proud of, right?
Tim H:
Yeah. I certainly hope so, and thank you for that. I certainly hope so.
Gary S:
That is an excellent place to begin the process of what I like to call landing the plane. So we’re not going to touch down yet, but I can see the guys on the runway waving those flashlights. Before we do that, I would be remiss, Tim, if I did not give you the chance to let listeners know how they can learn more about you, get your book. Where can they go to find out more information about you?
Tim H:
Timsr.ca. That’s timsr.ca, and you can see all the work that I’m doing there as well as the book, and I hope you have the opportunity to pick it up, and hope you enjoy it and that it’s encouraging.
Gary S:
Speaking of the book, I wanted to kind of end on something on page … I think it’s on page 222, from what I printed out from the Kindle that I was looking at. You’re talking about this in the context of your Parkinson’s, these two paragraphs I’m going to read. But as I read it, I thought, “This is a recipe for perseverance in the time of COVID-19.” Here’s what you wrote, and listener, pay close attention to this scenario that Tim describes and the emotions and the actions that grow from it. This is what Tim wrote in Perseverance.
Gary S:
“In Malcolm Gladwell’s book David and Goliath, he talks about the people of London during the Luftwaffe bombing in the Second World War. Gladwell describes the incredible transformation that occurred in some who survived the bombings day after day. They came to expect to survive. I love that,” Tim writes. “They took precautions to protect themselves, but they’d go about their daily lives as best they could all the while growing less terrified of the daily bombardment. This is the lesson I try to apply to my life with Parkinson’s,” Tim writes. “Some days it may be terrible, and I can anticipate that it will get worse. It will likely one day be debilitating and may even impact my death. However, today I’m very much alive and well. I’m learning to expect or survive each day and, more than that, to live the best of my ability.”
Gary S:
Obviously that’s about your experience with Parkinson’s, but is that fair to apply that to what we’re … To me, it seems a fair analysis of what we’re going through with COVID right now.
Tim H:
Absolutely. I think it’s fair to apply to all of our struggles. Every struggle, every person will be different, but we have to learn to survive, and in surviving, we suddenly realize, “Oh. I can do this. I survived last week. I survived the week before. I survived yesterday. I think I’ll survive today, and if I’m going to survive today, well, can I do a little better than just survive? What can I actually do to thrive? How can I live my best today? What does my best look like today?”
Gary S:
I have been in the communications business long enough to know that a statement like that is when you drop the plane on the runway. Let me summarize for you, listener, the, I think, three takeaways from our discussion today with Tim Hague. First, it is normal and it is okay to get angry in the aftermath of your crucible, just don’t stay there. Find the strength, the vision, and yes, the perseverance to move beyond the crucible, as this podcast is called. Process your emotions with friends and family. If you’re a person of faith, press into that. Dig deeper and see what the bigger picture might be, even what the blessing in your crucible might be.
Gary S:
Second point I think is a good takeaway from our discussion, in bouncing back, expect to stumble. Sailing will not always be smooth. Your boat will take on water. You’ll hit choppy water. You’ll veer off course, but do not let that encourage you to quit. As Tim’s life proves, even if you think you suck, you can still win the amazing race that is life.
Gary S:
Finally, the third point, which is the title of Tim’s book. The third point is to persevere. Tim talks about it. Warwick talks about it in Crucible Leadership, and perseverance is not a pill you take. It’s a skill you learn. So seek joy knowing that it is eternal, unlike happiness, which is circumstantial. Accept the limits that your crucible has brought, but do not give up. Think differently and find a community. At the beginning of the day to the end of the day, perseverance is not a solo sport. It’s a team sport. It’s a team pursuit, and it’s best done in group.
Gary S:
So listener, thank you for spending time with us today in this very inspiring conversation with the very inspiring Tim Hague. Warwick and I have a little favor to ask you. If you feel like you were blessed, if you learned some things here, if you were inspired, if you found hope, if you found a little healing from anything that we talked about either on this podcast or on previous ones, please click subscribe on the app on which you’re listening to this right now. That does a couple of things. One, it makes sure you will not miss any episodes down the road where we talk to other guests who offer their perspective on what it means to pursue a life of significance, and it will also allow us to continue to attract guests like Tim who have true inspirational stories to tell.
Gary S:
So until next time when we’re all together, thank you again, listener, for spending your time with us, and please do remember, as this conversation has brought out, that crucible experiences are indeed painful. Crucible experiences can indeed, as we talked about here today, make you feel sometimes like you want to just stay in bed with your head under the covers. Tim described a man he helped at his non-profit who lived like that for a while, but that needn’t be your story, and your crucible experience needn’t be the end of your story. In fact, it can be the beginning of a new chapter, a new book in your story, and it can be the most rewarding chapter and book of your story that there is, because at the end of the day, it can lead you to a life of significance.
Ernest Shackleton and the men he was leading on an expedition to cross Antarctica had piled up a breathtaking number of life-threatening crucibles by late 1915. Stuck motionless in polar block ice for months, hundreds of miles off course with no way to communicate their location to anyone who could help, Shackleton and his men were running low on the supplies they had already been forced to ration in miserly fashion when their greatest disaster struck: The ice that had trapped their ship now closed in to crush it, leaving the men fully exposed to the bitter cold with no choice but to traverse the ice floes that surrounded them in desperate search of safety. Shackleton’s mission had changed for good from one of discovery to one of survival for himself and his men. On this episode of BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE, Harvard Business School Professor Nancy Koehn, who profiles Shackleton in her Wall Street Journal best-seller Forged in Crisis, explains in detail how the British polar explorer’s only hope was to forget the disasters he and his crew had endured and “face forward” with grit, ingenuity and improvisation. “Crisis leaders get better and better and better,” she tells host Warwick Fairfax. “You can see it iteratively if you study them like I do.”
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Transcript
Gary S:
Welcome everybody to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Gary Schneeberger, the cohost of the podcast and the communications director for Crucible Leadership, and you have clicked play. We hope you’ve clicked subscribe to a podcast that deals with a subject most of us know all too well, crucible experiences. Crucible experiences are those things in life that are painful, traumatic, can feel like they take the wind out of our sails, can feel like they take the trajectory out of our lives, that they put us on a path that we necessarily didn’t want to go on. We talk about crucible experiences here because we believe in our experience and the experience of our guests has shown us that if we learn the lessons of our crucible experiences.
Gary S:
If we apply those lessons moving forward, we can not only move as the title of the show says, we can not only move beyond our crucibles, but we can move into a more rewarding life that’s rooted in our vision and our values that helps other people, and that ultimately leads us on a path to significance. Today’s episode is pretty special because it’s the second part of a conversation that we began last week with the host of the program, Warwick Fairfax, who is the founder of Crucible Leadership and his guest Nancy Koehn. Now, Nancy is a historian at the Harvard Business School who focuses on crisis leadership and how leaders in their teams rise to the challenges in high stakes situations.
Gary S:
For the purposes of this episode of Beyond the Crucible, she’s also the author of a book called Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times. It is one of the individuals of the five that Nancy Koehn profiles in that book, the case study she unpacks in that book. One of those five people is Ernest Shackleton and he is the subject of last week’s episode and this week’s episode. Ernest Shackleton was a British Explorer, a polar explorer who about 100 years ago, was on a quest to discover the South Pole. The problem was another explorer, a rival explorer discovered the South Pole first, but Shackleton had Arctic exploration in his blood. He wasn’t going to give up on still traversing that area.
Gary S:
He hatched a mission in 1915 to travel across Antarctica, and the plan was to leave early in the year. When others found out about Shackleton’s desire to leave early in the year in 1915 to travel across Antarctica, they told him, “Maybe you don’t want to do that. The pack ice, the ice flows are looking pretty bad this time of year and going South might not be the best idea for you or your men.” Shackleton heard that advice, but he did not heed that advice. In January 1915, he set out with his crew to travel across Antarctica, problems started immediately. We talked about those problems last week on Beyond the Crucible.
Gary S:
Pack ice did indeed impede the progress of the ship to the point that the ship was dead in the water, and not just for days, not just for weeks, not just for a couple of months, but for several months. In fact, it wasn’t until late autumn in 1915 that the situation changed in any marked way. It didn’t change for the better, the pack ice around Shackleton’s ship actually destroyed the ship. The ship sank, and the men had to scramble out of the ship, climb up on the ice flows and try to figure out what they were going to do next. Shackleton was faced at that moment, and that was where we left the conversation last week with Warwick and Nancy Koehn. Shackleton was faced with what was he going to do next, and Warwick asked Nancy Koehn a question at the end of last week’s episode, how did Shackleton muster up the wherewithal to move on? How did he forget what had come before?
Gary S:
How did he forget the mistakes he made that led his men to the precarious position that they were in? How did he face forward, as Nancy Koehn said, and tackle a new mission to rejigger what he was after? He could no longer even ponder traveling across Antarctica. He now had a different mission, and that mission was the life of his crew, saving the life of his men and getting them home safely to England. When we left this conversation last week, Warwick asked Nancy Koehn, how did Shackleton muster up the perspective, the boldness, the courage to take a step forward and move out in this new mission? What we’re going to hear now is part two of that episode in which Nancy Koehn answers Warwick’s very specific question.
Nancy K:
It’s a question for all kinds of crisis leaders that come out of the mists. I mean, Andrew Cuomo in New York state, Abraham Lincoln who never managed anything more than a two person law office and becomes president at the center of the Civil War and a huge administrator. I don’t have a kind of scientific vector leads to vector leads to vector analysis. Here’s how I’d answer that question and I’m going use a quote from Mr. Lincoln. This is from his annual address in December of 1862 to Congress. “Our occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” That is to me, a microcosm of what happens in a crucible, a really searing crucible or a real crisis. You realize, “Holy cow, this is really terrible. I got to raise the level of my game.
Nancy K:
I don’t know how I’m going to do it. I can’t see how to get through the day, much less how to get through the month or the week or the year, but I got to step it up. I just got to find my muscles.” It’s in that realization that I’ve got to do it and the next step. It’s all steps. It’s not a giant, something like your eagle wings suddenly come available and you rise up into the heavens or you’re Rocky and you’ve drunk the raw eggs and now you beat Apollo Creed. It’s not like that. It’s the first step. Then it’s the next step, and then your confidence builds and people’s confidence in you builds, and so you rise to the occasion. I think that’s what happened with Shackleton. I think he thought as soon as that ship got stuck, “I got a brand new game. What am I key priorities here?” My key priorities for him initially were morale of my men since suddenly everything stopped. Where we’re going is end, over.
Nancy K:
What are we going to do? How do I keep them from doing what the men did on Scott’s expedition under weak leadership, which is kind of collapse inward into disunity. Then the disaster that can happen from that in life or death situations, and then you deal with that. Then you’re like, “Oh, the ship’s going to collapse. It’s going to get cracked. We’re going to be without a ship. Then what do we do?” This constant kind of meeting with the self to say, we’re going to figure this out next and then we’re going to figure this out. In the doing of all that, you are stoking, you are building, you are lifting the 15 pound weights of those muscles and they are getting stronger. Crisis leaders, they get better and better and better. That’s what’s so interesting, and you can see it iteratively if you study them like I do.
Warwick F:
What you just said is so critical. I mean, as you know the title of the podcast is Beyond the Crucible and crucible leadership is the whole website and brand. A crucible really tests the measure of a leader. The flame is turned up and how do they respond, and the people you’ve all mentioned, certainly Shackleton as we’re talking about here, he rose to the occasion. He became a better leader. It’s the test. The good goes to the top just like the whole molten blast furnace deal. It’s the same thing. Talk about some of those key attributes that when things got most difficult, his leadership was just rose to such an amazing level. What were some of those key things that really we can learn so much for today?
Nancy K:
Let me answer that question by telling your listeners just a tiny story. The men decamped from the ship, abandoned ship with some supplies, three lifeboats, and about 120 of the photographer Frank Hurley’s negatives, including some moving film footage in September. They’re making camp on the ice. Shackleton, by the way, puts great attention into who’s going to be with whom in which tent. Then specifically he takes what he calls his doubting Thomases, the folks that are negative, that are like, “Well, I’m not sure how we can do this.” He puts the spreaders of potential psychological and collective contagion in his tent, adding new luster or power to the, keep your friends close and enemies closer.
Nancy K:
That’s really important how you manage and deal with people. The ship goes down. The men are on the camps with lots of routine. He’s got a routine. The duty roster varies every single week. Everyone sticks to a routine. Everyone exercises, everyone socializes at dinner by moving around tents. After dinner, moving around tents because we don’t want people getting too alone and too negative and too isolated, all these different aspects of managing morale. Then in November, mid November, the ship goes down and he sees it in the morning, starting to crack and the ice starting to open. Then in the course of about eight hours, the course of a working day that the ship falls with its broken mast and all it’s ropes everywhere through the ice, and then the ice closes over and it’s gone and there’s literally no line on the horizon.
Nancy K:
Now, for a team of Naval men, scientists, soldiers enlisted men officers, this was like the world coming to an end. They are 2000 miles from anybody, they have no Waze or GPS or text messages. There’s no Facebook posts. No one knows where they are. I mean, the men are just, they’re shell shocked. They’re in the worst state they’ve been. They kind of stagger their tents. Shackleton paces the ice because he can sense how this is just a game changing moment for his team and whether he can keep them unified and following orders and trying believing they can get home. He paces the ice, and later in his diary, all night long and he’ll say, “A man must shape himself to a new mark the minute the old mark goes aground.” What’s he saying? He’s saying, I got to raise the level again. There’s a new mark. We aren’t on the ship anymore, all our bearings are lost. I’ve got to do something different.
Nancy K:
Next morning, this is really important, lesson number two. He walks around the tent with Frank Worsley, the navigator and they have cups of hot tea and milk for the men. He says, “Lads, get your tea. Come on here, gather round.” He does a little town hall meeting, and the first thing he says is, “Ship and store is gone, now we’ll go home.” In later years, when the men were interviewed, some of them were interviewed by the BBC about how did they survive, by the way, to almost a man they said, “The boss,” which was their nickname for Shackleton, “Made us believe we could do it.” Many of them recalled that. The whole world had just dropped away. We were at a new incredibly low point and there he is saying, “Let’s face forward. Ship and store is have gone, so we’re going home.” That kind of ability, second lesson, the leader to show up no matter what he was feeling inside. We know he’s pacing, he was anxious.
Nancy K:
He was uncertain. He didn’t know how he was going to shape himself to a new mark to show up before his men confident, strong, looking out after their welfare, facing forward. That is incredibly important because in a crucible, everything is magnified, magnified impact. Everything is heightened, so how the leader, how you show up for yourself actually affects your ability to access your resilience muscles. I think that was really important. He showed up every day, no matter whether he slept or not with his courage muscles tight and the men believing that he knew what to do next. That was really important. A third thing that he did that I think was very, very important was to manage the energy of his men. We’re going to talk about that. Energy is really important to morale, and morale is really important to action and unity. For example, when men seem to be flagging after dinner, he’d say, “Let’s have a dancing contest on the ice or let’s play the banjo.”
Nancy K:
He insisted when they left the shift that they keep this banjo from when he enlisted men because it was mental medicine. He would try and get the men involved in something that was a kind of recovery, social recovery exercise. To use an even more pointed example on a boat journey that he and five other men will make in 1916 to get help, he would see a man flagging, his energy flagging and spirits starts to fall and he’d order up hot milk for everyone. What he was doing was just like a mother kind of soothing a child by giving them something to drink or soothing a partner. He would never single out the man because he didn’t want that person to be embarrassed. He just had this depth of understanding of energy and its relation to how we feel and how confident we are, and he used that over and over and over again to literally manage the energy and take care of his flock. That’s something else that’s very, very important about his leadership.
Warwick F:
I mean, he’s learning all this at a time where, I mean, I can’t imagine there were many books about leadership empathy in the early 1900s. It would have been much more mechanistic than obviously the science of leadership has gone on a lot since then, but he just seemed to learn about, as you said, the importance of starting with the internal, managing himself. I mean, just saying to the men, “We’ll get you home.” I mean, the chances of them getting home when they were locked in the ice in 1915 was a billion to one. I mean, it would be almost zero. No communication, yet somehow he led them to believe in the virtually impossible, which is remarkable to me.
Nancy K:
Two comments on that, I think important insight, Warwick, first many years ago, I stumbled on this definition of real leadership that I love. It’s in the beginning of the book and I can claim no credit for it other than stumbling on it. It’s from an American writer named David Foster Wallace who wrote this in a Rolling Stone article many years ago when he was following John McCain around on the campaign bus when McCain was running in 2000, making his first run for the presidency. This is what David Foster Wallace wrote, “Real leaders are individuals who help us overcome the limitations of our own weaknesses, selfishness, laziness, and fears, and get us to do harder, better things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.” I think this is just such a great definition and it’s with me always. It describes Shackleton very well. What he was able to do is he kept raising the level of his game without textbooks, without Harvard Business School seminars, the chivalric code of the British Navy for God’s sakes. Empathy was not a word we were teaching people.
Nancy K:
They’d put stripes on their Navy wool coats, right? The fact that he could do these things and keep raising his level of the game, including all lots of improvisation, lots of powerful signaling, because he knew that men take signals from what he did, not just words, not just the actions was he was in a sense helping the men do harder, better things than they could get themselves to do. When the BBC says, “How did you do it?” In the 1930s when they come back and interview all these survivors. They said, “The boss made us believe we can do it.” It’s a perfect illustration of the impact a leader can have by as Bono the rock singer once said making the impossible possible. That is the most kind of nurturing or empowering aspect of my research. I have discovered all kinds of people, including Churchill. Let’s not forget late May 1940, who made the impossible possible by learning how in a crucible to raise a level of their game and help others do the same thing. That is the potency of great leadership in crucibles.
Warwick F:
That is such a great connection you make there, Nancy. May, June 1940, France has fallen, most of Europe has gone, America is a year plus away from entering. The betting money would be on Britain’s not going to be able to hold off against the might of the German Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe and somehow he makes the whole nation believe we’re going to hang on, which that’s… I mean, how do you do that? It’s millions of people believe, you know what if Winston says, we can survive or you know what we can survive.
Nancy K:
All those RAF base commanders, they’re like, “Okay, we’re sending them all up now.” I remember there’s a story from the summer of 1941 when Churchill goes to visit some bases, he says, “How many Spitfires do we have in reserve?” He says, “None, they’re all up in the air.” The point is that you don’t need to do it with enormous amounts of reserve and slack, you just need to do it. He did, and he made people believe they could do it. It was so important. The whole world history hinged on those months in some very real sense.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. I want to get to how Shackleton was able to get his folks off the ice, but you mentioned just, as you said, the power of just giving his men belief, just managing emotions, mixing people up, troublemakers, even people of different classes, officers, crew, the whole games, animal, vegetable, mineral. Managing people with food and drink, I think you mentioned. Just so many tools that he managed to keep morale up, and so they were on the ice for a very long period of time, but then eventually there’s a turning point when he launches his folks to get to Elephant Island. Talk about they’re on this ice flow, floating hundreds of miles off course. He’s looking for an opening in the ice where he can launch these lifeboats, and so talk about that part of the story where eventually they’re able to launch their three lifeboats.
Nancy K:
The boat, just to pick up the last skeins of the story. The Endurance goes down in the ice. It’s gone forever in November 1915. The men then pass December, January, February, and almost all of March. In that same berg, seal and penguin meats start to dry up. The morale is very low. It’s late March. They’re waiting. All the men are watching Shackleton most keenly for the ice to break up enough for them to launch three 20, roughly 22 foot each lifeboat open lifeboats and sail Northwest. They have some rough idea from what’s called a sextant, what today we regard as crude navigational device that charts the angle between the Sun and the Earth’s line horizon to make navigational coordinate estimates. They’re waiting for the ice to break up so they can sail Northwest. This is up the Western side of what is an archipelago of islands on the South American side of Antarctica.
Nancy K:
They’re hoping to get far enough North to an Island where a trading ship, some kind of ship will find them, or where they can find an Island called Paulet Island where Shackleton knows previous expeditions have cached supplies. That’s the goal, and they set off. Then finally the ice breaks up enough. Shackleton wasn’t wanting to go too early, because they only get stuck in ice in those lifeboats really, then they’ve lost their navigational. They’re setting their transport capacity. Eventually the ice breaks up enough, Shackleton gives the go ahead. With water that they’ve melted from ice in barrels and supplies, they leave their camp and they have some supplies and they head Northwest. It’s an incredibly horrible journey that lasts five nights and six days. The first three days, they just basically go round in a circle.
Nancy K:
Then eventually as they get close, Shackleton fears the men are dehydrated. Some of them have probably the early stages of dysentery from contaminated water. Their eyes are glazing over. He’s worried he’s going to lose him. It’s terribly cold. Shackleton decides to sail quickly to an Island much farther South than he hoped to reach where no one will find them. Basically, it’s a big rock in the South Atlantic called Elephant Island, and that’s where they end up in early April 1916. It’s the men’s first moment on dry land since December 1914. There’s freshwater. They’re ecstatic to be on dry land. They stagger up, drink, immediately set up camp and then Shackleton starts trying to rehabilitate them physically. He knows, here we go, lesson number four. You don’t get a straight GPS map to get out of a crisis or a crucible.
Nancy K:
You navigate point to point with lots of uncertainty and lots of pivots. Shackleton’s like, “No one’s going to find us here. I need the next step.” Immediately, probably by the next morning, possibly even the evening they arrive decides we’re going to have to sail for help. Everyone can’t stay here because we won’t ever be found and we can die. He starts making plans right away to take one of the lifeboats, reinforce it, put a canvas mask on the top of it. It’s an open lifeboat, rowboat basically, put a mast up, canvas deck, excuse me, mast up, sail and put 2000 pounds of rocks in the bottom to give it some kind of haft, some ability to withstand the waves of the South Atlantic. He decides he and five carefully chosen men will sail back to South Georgia Island and the whaling station where they know they’ll find civilization. That’s the next two and a half weeks of time and attention. The men are all getting ready to outfit one of the lifeboats. James Caird, it was called just to make this incredible journey across what anyone that sails will tell you or some of the world’s most difficult seas.
Warwick F:
I think you mentioned that’s like an 800 mile journey.
Nancy K:
It’s an 800 mile journey.
Warwick F:
Gale, force winds. I think you’re right. There was some massive wave that was bigger than any wave that Shackleton had seen and he had had some experience in the seas. Somehow they made that 800 mile trip, which in itself, as you write is almost unprecedented. Certainly, it was remarkable that they even made it.
Nancy K:
It’s still considered the greatest open boat journey in the history of navigation, that’s a long long history my friends. Several years ago, an explorer and an environmentalist named Tim Jarvis reconstructed the journey with a carefully reconstructed boat, same supplies. They had a big diesel powered steam ship following them for safety and things and they barely made it, right? No one’s really done it as Shackleton did. Even Jarvis and he’s extraordinary seaman and he’s an explorer. They get, this is April 20th 1916, they get to South Georgia. The rudder is damaged. The boat has been banged around in a hurricane a few nights before they arrive at South Georgia it’s so bad. The hurricane is so bad that it actually sinks 500-person passenger boat that’s about 300 miles away. They don’t know that, and so they have to tuck in and they have to dock or come into the island. On the opposite side of the island, from the whaling station, which is where help is. The rest of the island is all uninhabited and completely unchartered.
Nancy K:
The next part of this incredible story that just keeps getting harder is Shackleton and the two really tough, smart, good guys he’s brought along. The other three men that he brought along were men that he didn’t want to leave on the island because they were doubting Thomases and he didn’t want them spreading pessimism and negativity on the Elephant Island while he left to try and get help. Again, managing morale. The next part of the story is Shackleton and his two men, companions Tom Crean and Frank Worsley take some nails out of the boat, make some impromptu crampons by nailing those nails into the back of the bottom of their boots. That was some rope and kind of kerosene lamp and a small fire, kerosene fire, and they set out over this and it’s just this incredible 36-hour journey across this mountainous island, where they’re almost dead a couple of times, including just, I’ll give you one example of improvisation. Another important aspect of leading ourselves in crucibles and leading others.
Nancy K:
They get too high and nightfall’s coming and Shackleton’s worried they’re going to die. It’s so high in altitude and they can’t get down fast enough. Shackleton says, “Let’s just sled down.” They coil up this big rope flat like a rug made of rags and they sledged down into the darkness, not knowing what they’re going to find. They fall more than 2000 feet in 18 seconds. They fall into a snowbank safe, in a much lower altitude, much warmer, and they stand up solemnly and shake hands and carry on. After 36 hours of tredging, they get to the whaling station and they knock on the door and no one recognizes them because everyone’s given Shackleton up long ago for dead. The men haven’t shaved or bathed in months, and Shackleton’s first question is, “When did the war end?” The clerk there at the whaling station, “It’s still going on. The world’s gone mad.”
Nancy K:
Then the next chapter of the story is Shackleton’s again, it’s so incredibly hard that even Shakespeare couldn’t have thought this up, or some disaster film screenwriter. His next journey, next chapter is try and get a boat that can get back through the waters that they just traversed to get his 20 or 22 men still left on Elephant Island. He spends the next, so that’s May 12th when they get to the whaling station. He spends the next four months. It’ll be all of May, all of June, all of July and all of August trying to get a boat that can get through what is now become pack ice again, and actually get its way all the way-
Warwick F:
It takes him three or four tries. I mean, he-
Nancy K:
It takes him four tries, four different boats. Each of the first three tries, they encounter pack ice, and he’s afraid they’re going to get trapped, and so they turn back to go back to port.
Warwick F:
Talk about the scene, I think you write maybe is it August 1916, where he finally is on the steamer. I think you’re right, the Yelcho from Chilean government loaned him. He’s pulling in and the men see him. Talk about that scene because that’s months after he’s left.
Nancy K:
It’s incredible. Even telling it right now, I take a deep breath because it’s so incredible. He had gone gray with worry in the interim and he started to drink. Shackleton could put back one or two in London, but he hasn’t drunk thus far on the expedition. He starts drinking. He’s so worried. He goes gray, and he has this basically a tugboat from the Chilean government where they have gone and gotten the boat. They’re coming back from Santiago to Elephant Island and the men spy the boat. They’re outside picking up barnacles to make soup because they don’t have any penguins or seals and they’re really low on food. They spot the ship and all the men pour out from these overturned lifeboats that they’re using a shelters and they built kind of weaseling properties, bivouacked kind of shelters.
Nancy K:
They pour out and Shackleton’s on a steamer with Worsley and Crean, these two men that had accompanied him all the way and he starts counting the men. He gets to 22 and Worsley said he was like, “He lost 30 years off his face.” His face breaks into the smile, the wrinkles disappear and he says, “Oh my God, all 22. They’re all alive.” He jumps into a lifeboat from the tugboat, the Yelcho and he starts sailing and saying, “Lads, I’m here.” He starts throwing cigarettes from the boat to them as they get there. They all pile on really quickly. He doesn’t even go ashore to see the setup. He’s so worried about pack ice. He just gets them all on the Yelcho. They sail for Chile, huge celebration because everyone had given them all up as dead. Then they sail on to London, where it’s August 1916 and World War I is still raging and a number of the men, most of the men on the expedition who have lived through this incredible, incredible survival story, enlist, and the last kind of piece here is tragically, or not the last piece, but the last piece of this expedition piece is tragically, two of those men are killed in combat almost right away. It’s like to do all that and then die in a machine gunfire, but that’s what happened.
Warwick F:
As you mentioned, some of them weeks after they got back, it wasn’t very long.
Nancy K:
Yes, yes. It was incredible.
Warwick F:
The last chapter I find really interesting is Shackleton, I guess hadn’t got over the polar bug. It’s after World War I, society is fundamentally changed, the world is different. The whole polar exploration fever is gone. Many things have gone. The world is totally different, but not for Shackleton, and so somewhere around 1920/21, he decides let’s do it again. I think you write was it eight of his crew. I mean, let’s do it again. It’s like who are these people? Why do you want to do this again? What kind of leader can inspire people to do something, I don’t know, almost say suicidal again. It’s like-
Nancy K:
A great crucible leader. He sends the call out in 1920 to go again. It goes out to four corners. All his men have scattered, the war’s over. He himself has been lecturing in the United States trying to recoup some of the money for the debts he owes for the expedition, on the speaker circuit in America. The world, I mean, no one cares about the pole anymore. No one even cares about individual heroism. That just got wiped away in the mass carnage of the First World War, and so he sends call out and then, it’s more than eight. I want to say it’s 12 men answer in like, “Yes, sir, boss. Here we come.” They all gather and the ship takes off in late 1920, and they, guess what, they go just like they had in 1914. They go to South America to pick up a few more supplies. Then last port of call is again, South Georgia, the whaling station.
Nancy K:
That night, the first night they get there, Shackleton has a massive heart attack and dies in his sleep in his cabin. His men bury him there. Then they go on and kind of travel along the Vahsel Bay, which is this bay that they wandered on the Endurance as the currents carried them and back to Elephant Island, just to take a look at their place where many of them spent five months and then they come back. It’s more of just a kind of reliving, I think, of the cohesion and the triumph of the human spirit that, that journey was. Then the expedition just fades in the midst of history. No one cares. I got home. The men go on to their wives. The BBC gets interested in the story and does a series of radio interviews in the 30s, and then they slip back into the mist of history and no one, no British school kid, no exploree aficionado is talking about Ernest Shackleton.
Warwick F:
I think as you write. They were talking about Scott.
Nancy K:
They’re were talking about Scott who died on the way back… Exactly. The martyred, lousy, insecure leader, who effectively martyred his men. God, King and country, but they still died. Beginning in the 1980s, it’s almost like a Phoenix rising, partly by the efforts of Roland Huntford and other very good polar explorers. A larger story starts to come out both about Scott and Shackleton, and then it’s again, almost from underground, this collective global kind of cottage industry or grape vine of real interest in this story and about the impossible being made possible just comes to be incredibly popular. There are Shackleton schools, there are Shackleton societies. I get emails every single week and have for 20 years about people wanting to talk about Shackleton. Right now in the COVID-19 crisis, everyone I know wants to understand how they endured and triumphed in these life and death circumstances
Warwick F:
There is something about the intrigue of the epic failure. Being Australian, as you probably know, one of the key military episodes in Australian history is Gallipoli. For Australia, we became a nation in 1901, but in reality we became a nation in, I think it was 1915, somewhere like that, and Gallipoli where just real briefly, as you know, it was on the shores of Turkey. Turkey was an ally of Germany in World War I. The British commanders sort of dithered and just made sure that the Turkish forces had plenty of time to get machine gun nest on the hills, and were just horrifically executed. Then these poor Australians were landed there on the shores of Gallipoli with these high hills and mountains, machine gun nests, no hope of success, but yet even though it was a failure, just the heroism and the courage amidst that has defined a nation.
Warwick F:
Even now Australian cricket teams, when they go to England, we’ll stop on the way as a kind of a morale boost. Anyway, Gallipoli is a whole other thing, but there’s something about the epic failure, but in this case, it’s more than just the epic failure is just what Shackleton learned his ability to move on. As we sort of summarize here, for leaders today, who may never have heard of Shackleton, what are the two or three things why Shackleton holds so many lessons for CEOs, leaders of nonprofits, leaders in the COVID-19 crisis that we’re all going through, corporate leaders, governmental leaders? When everything is so uncertain, what are the key nuggets would you say that we need to learn about Shackleton?
Nancy K:
Well, just to kind of present them in uncharacteristically succinct form, you have to step into the fear, right? You take the step. Courage is not the absence of fear as Mandela said. It’s the willingness to walk into the fear. Kind of square your shoulders and tighten your core and realize that you are still standing and can take the next step. People behind you can take the first step. Step into the fear, feed and water yourself and your people carefully, both emotionally and physically and mentally, keep your fingers tightly on the pulse, the morale of the people around you, face forward and learn, right? Let go of what was and what didn’t work in the past, learn from it, and then move forward, especially in crucibles and crises. There’s just too much at stake to spend a lot of time rehashing the past.
Nancy K:
I said on the Charlie Rose interview I did several years ago when my book came out, I said, “I learned and Shackleton learned that why is never the question. Why me, why this, why the suffering, why the calamity, why the failures, it’s never why. It’s what can I make in this wreckage and how can I redeem, reclaim? Just as a crucible, it’s about high flames literally, and its ability to kind of reshape things. How can I be forged into something better and stronger and more committed to service. Another lesson that’s really important in Shackleton that we haven’t talked about that I see over and over in these leaders. These ordinary people who do extraordinary things, or at least people that make the impossible possible is they ultimately in the doing, in this forging, in the crucible, cross the bridge from the narcissistic, I need to do this.
Nancy K:
This is my bullet list. This is my agenda. This is my career. They cross the bridge to a more powerful place called thou or we. You discover these people, each discovers, Lincoln discovers all that narcissistic quest for public office and power becomes, “I got to save the Union. We have to save our country.” It’s the crossing of that bridge from I to thou or I to we. When you discover that who your most powerful, most luminous most noble self is, is actually in service to others, and that, that’s the best way to serve yourself that you find your ruby slippers, right? That secret weapon, your super power that you’d never known you had. Shackleton discovers that and keeps growing in that commitment to the mission with God is my witness. I’ll bring them all home alive. Then last but not least this ability to keep improvising and pivoting, right.
Nancy K:
Improvising with we’re going to sail for South Georgia now. Improvising for we’ll sledge down the mountain, so we don’t freeze up here. Improvising, but always in service to this worthy mission, I will bring them home alive. Come hell or high water, I will do it. That, of course, the constant engagement with the mission helps shore up your endurance muscles and your ability to say as Shackleton once said, I just love this. “Obstacles are just things to overcome after all.” I think that’s a really empowered statement. All of those things are really critical to individuals in a crucible who will ultimately use that experience to lead other individuals in a crucible.
Warwick F:
Just to summarize here because I now need to probably bring it to conclusion. I mean, to me, a crucible really tests the metal of a leader. With these five people, they became better people. They became, maybe there were the raw materials there who knows, but somehow it forged them into something that they weren’t before that. As you say very well, the ability to move forward and not brood on the past, the ability to realize it’s not about me, it’s about other people. It’s about, as we say in Crucible Leadership, a life of significance, a life on purpose, focused on others, all these great leaders do that. The reason it’s so important for us to study them and why your work is so important is there is a reason we call them great leaders because great leaders don’t happen every day. They’re very rare. It’s like finding diamonds. You can look through a lot of rock to find a diamond, and so that’s why studying them and what you do, the work is so important because who else are we going to learn from? There are very few people that we hold up as role models or to learn from unfortunately.
Nancy K:
Well, but maybe it’s not quite such a small kind of circle of people or a small group of people Warwick. I’ve come and I’m still studying courageous leaders. We’re writing a case, a research associate and I are writing a case right now about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the emotional intelligence and awareness of, not just John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, but a few other people including people like Adlai Stevenson and Tommy Thompson, who was the former ambassador to the Soviet Union who was called in. The emotional intelligence piece that is as important as any of the military expertise in that conference room of the White House in helping resolve this without nuclear war becoming the logical end of our action. The more I’ve studied this, this phenomenon of great leaders, the more I’m convinced that great leaders are made, they’re not born. If that’s the case, then there’s lots and lots of potential greatness out there. I think it also comes in many different shapes and sizes. We cover, in our lives, people who end up exerting a lot of power, a lot of authority, a lot of influence.
Nancy K:
I went through chemotherapy. I saw great leaders on the infusion floor in those nurses, right? I’ve seen school principals who are great leaders. There’s a woman right now in Ohio who’s the health secretary, who’s facing death threats because she knows a lot about social distancing and healthy protocols, and people of certain smaller group, very small group of people are very angry and armed. She’s a great leader and she’s getting greater by the day as she holds this idea about your health. The collective health of Ohioans is my charge and I’m obligated by that. I will discharge that obligation. I think that one really important message for people in crucibles or helping someone in crucible is out of this can come your greatness, but you have to work at it and you have to say, “My project here isn’t just to get through this, it’s to get better and stronger and fuller and more empathic and more compassionate and more competent. I’m going to work on that as I navigate to these high winds and big waves.” That’s really important, but you have to decide that for yourself and then you have to stick to it. That piece is a covenant that you make with yourself, and it’s really powerful, but it takes work real work, but incredibly rewarding work as well.
Warwick F:
Well said.
Gary S:
Normally, at the end of a podcast, I will launch into what I consider the three takeaways, but I’ve been in the communication business long enough to know that when there’s this much Harvard Business School in the house and it’s been summarized so well, I’m not going to bother doing that because I think Nancy has summarized it all very well, listeners. I will say two more things. The second one, Nancy, I’m going to give you the chance to let people know where they can get your book. The first thing I want to do is to kind of draw the balloon strings together of everything that we’ve talked about here is to say something that Nancy says in her book, listener and something that we say on that Beyond the Crucible all the time.
Gary S:
I think one of the joys of co-hosting this podcast is seeing people from different backgrounds, different crucible experiences land at the same place without ever having communicated. Here’s what Nancy writes in her book. She says, “It takes reserves of emotional awareness and discipline for leaders to balance attention to the path ahead with knowledge gleaned from the past.” Here’s what we say at Crucible Leadership, learning the lessons of your crucible to chart a course to a life of significance is critical. Two ways of saying sort of the same thing, balance what came before with what lies ahead and focus on a life of significance. Nancy, I would be absolutely remiss if I didn’t let the listeners know how they can learn more about you and get this fantastic book for themselves.
Nancy K:
I’ll answer the second thing first. The book is fantastic, not because I wrote it. It’s because these people live such brave lives and they’re loving lives as well. These are not just superheroes with cloaks and leaping tall buildings. These are ordinary people who live magnificent lives and they’re inspirational just to… It was an inspiration to me just to have the privilege to write about them. It’s available almost anywhere books are sold. I read the audio. If you like audio books, and you’d like the audience to be the voice. I choke up a little bit at the end about Rachel Carson, so that’s just a little tease. Then I have done an extraordinary amount of media videos. I have a very active social media life, which I conduct purely around lessons of leadership.
Nancy K:
There’s no pictures of my horse or my dogs or my outfit problems or me eating chips. There’s no vitriol or exuberance. There is lessons every day. Right now, I’m running a classroom called, that you can find on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, every day, a new lesson leading yourself in crisis inside number we’re up to 64 with resources there. Then my website, which has just launched in a new form is called nancykoehn.com. It has videos, articles, podcasts, radio interviews. I do a regular spot on NPR. We kept links to all of those on all kinds of leadership topics, do there’s just a plethora of material for the interested listener.
Gary S:
For folks who are listening, and as I often say about Warwick since he has a silent W in the middle of his name, Nancy Koehn so you know is spelled, listener, K-O-E-H-N.
Nancy K:
Thank you for that.
Gary S:
Those social media accounts that Nancy talked about as well as her website, it’s nancykoehn.com, nancyK-O-E-H-N.com. Thank you listener for spending time with us here at Beyond the Crucible. Warwick and I have a couple of favors to ask you. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard here in this incredible story about Ernest Shackleton, one would be to click subscribe on the podcast app that you’re listening to this to right now. That does a couple of things for us. One for you, it helps make sure that you don’t miss any episode of the show so that you can continue to get these interviews and these discussions of the key elements of crucible leadership. Then second, we would ask visit crucibleleadership.com, where you can find blogs that Warwick’s written.
Gary S:
You can take an assessment to see where you fall on your own journey to a life of significance, and hopefully that will add even more fuel to your fire to reach that life of significance. Until the next time we’re together, thank you for spending time with us and remember that crucible experiences, as we just saw in this interview with Nancy Koehn can be extraordinarily painful. They can be very difficult. They can be hard to move beyond, but if you stay after it. If you continue to, as Nancy said, put one foot in front of the other and continue to take one step at a time. It’s not the end of your story by any stretch of the imagination. It is in fact, the beginning of a new story, that can be the most rewarding story of your life, because it is one that leads to a life of significance.
