Visionaries who are also mavericks, who prefer to conquer what needs to be conquered as a solo expedition, often find themselves foiled by crucibles that could have been overcome had they taken a team approach. Crucible Leadership founder and BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE host Warwick Fairfax unpacks why some leaders reject the aid of a team as they pursue their vision while others embrace tackling a mission together — and why the latter are usually more successful than the former. Yes, pursuing your vision with a team requires more patience on your part and a willingness to share the credit and let others have a substantive say in the goals you’re going after. But the benefits of camaraderie, the right mix of skills needed to get the job done and valuable input that can actually make your vision better while helping make it a reality are more than worth it.
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Transcript
Warwick F:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership. You’ve got to realize you’re going to have to share the credit. But after all, is it about the vision or is it about your ego? And you pretty much have to choose. If it’s about your ego, then give up the vision because the chance of it succeeding, it’s not impossible, but it’s pretty low. So check your ego at the door. Learn a bit of humility and say, “Look, if this vision is so important, I just need to have a bit of humility and realize I might need to hire some great people. Some of whom might be better, quicker, faster, smarter than I am.” But what’s wrong with that, if it will help you accomplish the vision? The only reason it’s wrong is, if you’ve got a fragile ego, well, if you’ve got a fragile ego, then get a stronger ego, and if you can’t do that, give up and don’t try to accomplish the vision.
Gary S:
Those are some pretty direct words from Warwick on this week’s episode, but they are critical words if you want to make your vision a reality in the wake of your crucible, or to avoid a crucible. Hi, I’m Gary Schneeberger, the co-host of the show and the communications director for Crucible Leadership. What Warwick and I talk about today is the essential role, the indispensable role really, a team plays in you accomplishing the mission or goal for which you are charting a course. You’ll learn key tips like the aforementioned need for humility. Plus the value of selecting a team based on character, and not just job talent. Surrounding yourself with individuals who have the skill sets that will best serve your vision and why you need to be patient and not rush the process or skip vital steps along the way. If it’s true, as you’ve likely heard, “That without a vision, the people perish, then without the steps laid out here, your vision will likely perish.”
Gary S:
What we’re going to talk about today, listeners is I don’t know, maybe it’s a subject that you are a little wary of and it is… Here’s the title I’ve come up with as an organizing construct for what we’re doing. Without a team, a vision is just daydreaming. That’s what I came up with on the top of my paper right here. That’s what I wrote down. Warwick, why is that if it is, I hope it is. Why is that a good summary of the importance of teamwork to bringing a vision to reality?
Warwick F:
Typically to get a vision, to get a dream to happen, you can’t do it alone. It’s tempting to want to do it alone, but nobody has all the gifts, all the skills, all the experience to make a dream, to make a vision become reality. And so pretty much in the vast majority of cases, if you don’t have a team, your vision as we say is dead on arrival, it won’t happen. And so that is the cold, hard reality. How much does your vision matter? If it matters to you a lot, rightly or wrongly from your perspective, you are going to need to consider having a team. It’s not really an option in the vast majority of endeavors to not have a team for that vision to happen.
Gary S:
Now you use the phrase cold, hard reality. That’s not usually used for things that are sunshine and puppy dogs, right? That phrase is normally used for things that can be arduous, that can be difficult, that can involve friction and headbutting and those kinds of things. Why did you choose those words? Why are people especially leaders, why are they loathe sometimes to not just embrace a team, but create a team to help them enact their vision?
Warwick F:
It’s an interesting question. Think about the profile of a typical visionary. They’re typically passionate, determined, surrender is not an option. They’ve got perseverance, but very often they want to do it themselves. They’re impatient. When you have a group of people, it can take so long, endless meetings, endless discussion. The team doesn’t get it, after all it’s not their vision, it’s your vision. Visionaries are like, “I just want to do it myself. People are just annoying. They just get in the way. I just want to get this thing done. Let’s just go, let’s make it happen.” People can be a pain in the neck, a drag, it’s just get out of the way, people are the enemy at times.
Warwick F:
I mean, I’m overdramatizing a bit, but the typical founder just the whole team thing, it can certainly make things longer. Why would I want to do that? Now, sometimes they’ll grudgingly do that, but it’s kind of kicking and screaming. It’s not like, “Oh, joy. I have to have a team, right?” It’s like, “Oh, joy. I need to go to the dentist.” Well, if you need a filling, if you don’t go to the dentist, you’re going to be in pain. So ultimately it’s like, I may be afraid of dentists, I may not like them, but I’m going to go because what choice do I have? Pain or solve the pain? But you don’t go, “Oh, joy. I’m going to the dentist. It’s the highlight of my day.” So typically leaders feel about getting a team the way they think of going to the dentist, it’s a necessary evil.
Gary S:
I mean, here’s another thing that undergirds these teams are by definition filled with people. People are by definition folks with opinions and views on how to do things and the larger your team, and by large, I don’t even mean 8,000 people. If you’ve got five or six people on your team, you’re going to have five or six different opinions about pretty much every aspect of that vision. And I think one of the challenges, one of the roadblocks to creating a team is this idea that as we go through things, we’re going to go two steps forward, one step back, or one step forward, and two steps back. We’re going to butt heads. We’re not going to see eye to eye.
Gary S:
We’re not going to get along and we’re not going to move the ball down the field. Which is an interesting metaphor, because in order to move a ball down the field in a football game, you got to have a team, right? I mean, one person out there… Tom Brady, as we’re recording this episode, Tom Brady just won his seventh Super Bowl. But Tom Brady hasn’t won a single one of those without a team. We can have a separate podcast if he’s the GOAT or not, even Tom Brady needs a team to make his vision a reality.
Warwick F:
It does, but for all those would be Tom Bradys, it’s like the problem with the team is, I’m throwing to a particular route and the receiver is on the wrong route. So it gets intercepted. I mean, what a pain? I was hoping people would block right, but they didn’t block right, and I got sacked. So it’s like, even people that want to be, would be Tom Brady’s. It’s like, yeah. You know what happens? It sounds good in theory, Gary, but I’ll get sacked when the receiver will go the wrong route and I’ll get intercepted. That’s what team means, if anyone wants to be cynical, you need it, but you don’t want to get sacked or intercepted either.
Gary S:
Right. Before we move on into some of the tips on how to create a team, we should stop and camp out a little bit about, what does success look like with a team? I mean, if you can’t make a vision a reality without a team, what does it look like with a team? I brought up Tom Brady and he’s won seven Super Bowls all with a team. But a couple of quotes that I pulled together that I thought were extremely interesting, and here’s football again, not that I want to camp out here all day, but Vince Lombardi, the legendary football coach of my Green Bay Packers said this once, “Individual commitment to a group effort, that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, and a civilization work.” If you prefer to move out of the sports arena and get into the leadership business space, here’s something Andrew Carnegie said, “Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision.” Exactly what we’re talking about. “The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objective. It is the fuel that allows common people to obtain uncommon results.”
Warwick F:
Absolutely. I mean, those are great quotes. I mean, a great team will be comprised of a diverse set of backgrounds and the skills who, as committed, if not more committed than you are to the mission, it’s really a case of one-and-one equals three. That’s what a team does. It’s greater than the sum of its parts. So picture you have a team that’s even more committed than you are to the vision. They’re all on the same page that the diverse set of skills and things that just go like it’s autopilot. I mean, there’s a beauty of a team when it works well. I mean, I can think of probably my favorite sport to participate in growing up was rowing or crew as they say here. And I rowed in eights, obviously eight people in a rowing shell.
Warwick F:
And I remember one time when I was rowing for my college at Oxford, Balliol College, and the boat I was in was probably they were little bit more talented, maybe a lot more talented than I was, but when you’re rowing with seven other people and you’re rowing in complete unison, the boat is flying through the water. It’s steady. It’s just a beautiful thing. Obviously, when you’re not rowing together and the boat’s going side to side, and it can be a little painful, but when you’re all rowing in unison, I mean, to me, I often think of rowing as the ultimate team sport, because if one person’s not rowing hard, it makes everybody else’s job so much tougher. So it’s a feeling you never forget when you’re in that zone so to speak, as they say in sports, where everything is in complete harmony, and it’s just graceful, it’s movement and you’re all functioning as one, that’s the feeling of a great team.
Gary S:
Yeah. And we haven’t talked about this beforehand, but it just popped in my head. One of the things that you write about in your upcoming book, Crucible Leadership: Embrace Your Trials to Lead a Life of Significance coming this fall from Morgan James Publishing, one of the things you write about, one of the people you write about there, you talk about historical figures and their successes and the things that they learned through their crucibles. And there’s one that sticks out to me. And we haven’t talked about this in advance, but with all that Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, you talk about Louie Howe one of his advisors. And to me, that’s an example of Roosevelt people think he’s this like grand, he did it all by himself. And nobody really does anything by themselves, but Louie Howe was very critical to Roosevelt’s ability to achieve the successes he achieved in his presidency.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. As listeners probably know, in the early ’20s Roosevelt got polio, which is very rare even back then for an adult. And his legs pretty much were paralyzed. He could move very ungainly with these massive heavy braces. And it seemed like his political career was finished. This was an era where if you had polio, it was like a life death sentence. You meant to just sit at home while the rest of your years away, somehow it was a shameful thing, even though clearly it’s not your fault. But with the help of his wife, Eleanor and Louie Howe, they helped him realize, you know what, life’s not over. Louis Howe helped Eleanor go around the state of New York speaking. And she was more of a introverted, shy person, but very determined woman.
Warwick F:
She kept his name in the political press circles and Louie Howe was just master behind the scenes campaign director and really helped Franklin Roosevelt become governor of New York and then ultimately president. But, yeah, he had an amazing team Louie Howe and Franklin’s wife, Eleanor, that really believed in him and his mission, certainly without Eleanor but without both of them, nobody would really have heard of Franklin Roosevelt, other than somebody that was on the ticket of a Democratic candidate that lost in the early ’20s, but he wouldn’t have become president.
Gary S:
And it goes back to what I said is the organizing construct for this conversation, without a team, a vision is just a daydream. Without those folks that you’ve just talked about, his wife and Louie Howe, Franklin Roosevelt was a daydream. Maybe he wanted to be president, maybe he wanted to rise to… But he could not have made it happen. And I think it’s safe to say, right? Anybody, any person that we could think of who’s achieved greatness has a team underneath them.
Warwick F:
Absolutely.
Gary S:
There are very few mavericks who don’t have at least some people behind them who are helping them along the way.
Warwick F:
That’s so true.
Gary S:
So you’ve put together in a recent blog, some tips, some guidelines for people, for leaders to navigate how to create a team. It seems to me, one of the ways to avoid some of those conflicts we talked about early on, and you just hinted at it a little bit. One of the ways to avoid those conflicts is to get the right people on the bus, as Jim Collins would say. You want the right people on the bus, in the right seats. And there are ways that you can go about compiling a team that can both help your vision become reality and also help you from going crazy in the process. Right?
Warwick F:
Absolutely. I mean, there are some key things you need to look for in a team. I think as you’re doing that, the first thing you need to do is really change your attitude. And we’ve talked about this a little bit in our discussion here, but you need to stop the whining, stop the complaining. Or as we say in Australia, stop the whinging, which is like whining squared. It’s worse than whining, whinging. No whinging. It’s like, “Okay, I know it’s going to take longer. You’re going to have to talk about the vision a gazillion times, and they’re not going to get it initially. So you can have to talk about it more and engage them.” And we’ll talk a bit about how you do that in a moment. But, yeah, it’s going be a pain in the neck and it’s going to be difficult, but ultimately it’s worth it because there’s a difference between succeeding and failing.
Warwick F:
And if you really care about your vision, then you know what? You just got to suck it up and do what it takes to get the right people and get them all engaged. So really, before you start hiring people, change your attitude, okay? Quit whining, quit whinging, quit complaining, and realizing this is going to make your vision succeed. So if there’s one thing that you should never remember as you’re doing this, is your vision important or not? Do you want your dream to succeed or fail? It’s a binary choice. It’s yes or no. If your vision is that important, suck it up, change your attitude and get your head in the game, so to speak and realize you need a team. So that’s the first thing, change your attitude.
Gary S:
Is there a little bit of maybe in some cases, ego that pops into this, the reason for not wanting to have a team, I used the word maverick a little while ago. Is there this maverick go it alone, independent, do it myself, I don’t need anybody. Can ego play in there and is that part of what you have to suppress and change in your attitude?
Warwick F:
Yeah. I mean very insightful point. Absolutely. You’ve got to realize you’re going to have to share the credit, but after all, is it about the vision or is about your ego? And you pretty much have to choose. If it’s about your ego, then give up the vision because the chance of it succeeding, it’s not impossible, but it’s pretty low. So check your ego at the door. Learn a bit of humility and say, “Look, if this vision is so important, I just need to have a bit of humility and realize I might need to hire some great people. Some of whom might be better, quicker, faster, smarter than I am, but what’s wrong with that if it will help you accomplish the vision. The only reason it’s wrong is if you’ve got a fragile ego, well, if you’ve got a fragile ego, then get a stronger ego, and if you can’t do that, give up and don’t try to accomplish the vision.
Gary S:
Do some ego pushups and that will help build your ego muscle, not in the way that we tend to think of it, which is an overactive ego, but to have a more elastic ego, one that can bring other people into the team, into the vision. And that leads logically, Warwick, to your second point.
Warwick F:
Yeah, absolutely. And so this is where you could read 10 different leadership books and they will say this point, but it’s very rarely done. So it’s not always you have in management something in which all leadership management experts agree, but which typically doesn’t get done, which doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. There are a lot of things in life in which experts disagree, not this one. And that’s what this is. And that’s basically, you hire for character and attitude and alignment to the mission first, skill second. So basically if you had to boil it down to its most critical character first, skill second. Now, typically what happens is, let’s hire the person with the most experience and Ivy League degrees. And look, there’s nothing wrong with Ivy League. I mean, I did, my undergrad as listeners know at Oxford and got my MBA from Harvard Business School.
Warwick F:
So I’m not against education, but just because you went to the so-called right schools and even if you have experience, which is obviously helpful, it’s character, that’s the most important thing. And so people might say, “Well, what do you mean by character?” And so what I mean by that is, part of it is what Jim Collins talks about in Good To Great level five leaders. Yes, you want people that are driven and determined, but you want people who are humble back again to the ego. You might have to check your ego at the door or your team does too, because you cannot get on with a team if everybody wants to be the prima donna and have the lights shine on them all the time. So you want them to be driven, but they need to be humble.
Warwick F:
They need to be team players. They need to want to learn from others. If they say they’re going to get something done, they will get it done. There are certain key characteristics that you want. And here’s the thing is, some people talk about hire for character or hire for attitude, train for skills. Why do people say that? Because skills, at least if you have some degree of natural ability or some degree of aptitude, if you are good with numbers and are detail orientated, if you train somebody in accounting, they can usually get it. I’m not talking about training somebody that hates math and is not detail orientated. That’s probably not a good use of time. But assuming there’s some degree of natural aptitudes, let’s assume there’s some degree of training, rather than hire the best accountant or the salesperson who has this great degree, who are the people that you feel like have the right aptitude, the right character?
Warwick F:
That’s really the most important thing. And it flies in the face of what people do. Why? Because if you’re an HR manager or a line manager and you say, “Okay, who did you hire? Well, I hired somebody with 20 years experience at GE or X, big company. Their undergrad was at Cornell or Dartmouth or somewhere.” Okay, great. And so some other person might say, “Well, I didn’t hire that person. I hired somebody with five years experience at a smaller company. And they went to a state school in Nebraska.” If that doesn’t work out, what happens? You passed up the Ivy League person with 15 years of experience with GE, for somebody with a smaller company that went to some small college in Nebraska, really?
Warwick F:
That’s the problem. If it doesn’t work out, it’s like, well, look at the pedigree. How can you… So people are risk averse and how in the world do you measure character? I mean, I described it, but it’s not quantifiable. Therefore, it feels risky. And people hate risk. So that’s why people might say, I hear what you’re saying, but… That’s the problem.
Gary S:
I found an article from… speaking of Ivy League schools and speaking of Harvard. The Harvard Business Review wrote an article a few years back on eight ways to build collaborative teams and among the eight factors that they listed that lead to success go right to the point that you’re just talking about. Their fourth point was ensuring the requisite skills for the team to be successful. And here’s what they wrote, the folks who wrote this article. Human resources department that teach employees how to build relationships, how to communicate well and how to resolve conflicts creatively can have a major impact on team collaboration. So there you’ve got HR departments who aren’t looking at the location or the pedigree of the university, or the education as much as what are those “softer skills”, those relational skills, those being able to work together skills, people who can find that, that is a huge determiner in how successful a team will be.
Warwick F:
It is. And it reminds me of Daniel Goleman’s work in emotional intelligence. There’s a lot of notoriety the last 10, 15 years or more. And he talks about these softer skills, like the ability to persuade, but the ability to listen, to empathize, those are critical components when you have people on your team that want to listen and they want to compromise in a good sense. They want to find, okay, where’s the win-win in this with other team members. They can empathize with others. It’s extremely hard to teach those skills. You either wired that way, or it’s linked to your innermost values, people’s innermost values and wiring tend not to change. Try to train people for values. It’s not impossible, but training people for skills is infinitely easier than values and inherent wiring.
Warwick F:
Yeah, I think more and more people realize it’s important. What it really comes down to is you got to have some guts, some courage to do what you know is right. And take some risks in hiring people that may have a little less pedigree, a little less experience. They have the raw talent, but more than the talent, they have the character, the attitude. It’s funny, I came across this in the paper today, speaking of Tom Brady. Okay? I’m sure you’re familiar with this. So here’s his scouting report, his NFL draft evaluation about Tom Brady. “Poor build, skinny, lacks great physical stature and arms strength, lacks mobility, and the ability to avoid the rush, lacks a really strong arm. Can’t drive the ball down field, does not throw a really tight spiral, system type play who can get exposed if forced to ad-lib, gets knocked down easily.” That’s the scouting report. I think from memory, I think he went in the fifth round or something.
Gary S:
Yeah, fifth or six round. Yeah.
Warwick F:
So if you look at that, it’s like, “Well, okay, case closed.” But what’s this missing? Some of that’s true. I don’t think he’s the most mobile quarterback in the world, but what’s that missing? It is missing his heart, his character, his work ethic, his ability to learn to grow. I mean, the way he keeps himself fit, physically and nutrition is off the charts. He’s what? 43 or something?
Gary S:
He’s 43. You’re right.
Warwick F:
So, why would you hire Tom Brady? Well, not based on the scouting report, right? You would never draft the guy based on this, and it’s not all wrong, what this is saying. It just misses stuff. It misses his heart and his determination. And that’s why he’s as great as he is. Do you want to be the one that misses a potential Tom Brady on your team, because of some superficial evaluation that misses the heart? No.
Gary S:
Right. And yet it is true. And I think the third point that you bring out in your blog about the importance of teams and how to construct them, it is true that you do need people who have, as you put it, a diverse set of skills, skills are important, you can’t ignore them. So, what’s the key about finding a diverse set of skills in the folks you put on your team?
Warwick F:
Well, first of all, you got to recognize that you need it. And I know it may sound obvious, if you’re in a organization, yes you’re going to need engineers, manufacturing types, research and development, marketing, sales, finance, you’re going to need a broad range of skills. But sometimes what happens is, if you’re a can-do person that wants to get something done yesterday, some of these people are going to be like chains, you’re going to have an accountant saying, “Well, I’m not sure about the cost analysis here. It’s looking a little dubious.” You’ll have marketing and sales saying, “I’m not sure if the market really wants that product.” The engineer is like, “I’m not sure we can design a product that will actually function properly. Certainly not at a cost effective price.”
Warwick F:
So it sounds good. But inevitably, depending on your personality, typically people with diverse skills have diverse personalities. The type of personality required to be in marketing sales and an accounting or engineering is radically different in almost all cases. So you first got to realize some of these people are going to be annoying to you, but they’re doing their job. Let them do their job even if it’s like, “Oh my gosh, here we go.” Wait, because the engineering folks saying, I don’t think we were quite ready yet. Sometimes they will be overly cautious, but sometimes it’s like you know what? Maybe it’s not ready. If you’re building a car, do you want the wheels to fall off. If the engineering saying, “One of those parts seem a little brittle and the tests don’t look good.” Well, maybe you might want to wait.
Warwick F:
I mean, imagine if you flying an airline, you are not going to ignore the safety folks saying, “Yeah, we’re all worried about that engine. It’s causing some problems more often than it needs to.” So I think part of it is recognizing you will need a diverse set of skills. And the other thing comes back to humility. You’re going to find people on your team because they have skills that you don’t, that in their area, you might feel like, boy, I’m a moron. I’m an idiot compared to them in their area. And that’s okay. You cannot be the expert at everything. Park your ego at the door, assemble a team who know more than you do in their area, because collectively the sum of all those wonderful people will be a set of skills and capabilities that will be mind blowing.
Warwick F:
So it sounds obvious, but people don’t tend to like to hire the best and the brightest in their areas. In part because of ego, and in part because their personalities will be different and you will get annoyed. You will get frustrated. Inevitably, you know you’re going to get frustrated, certain people with different skillsets that you know you need them, but it’s going to be frustrating.
Gary S:
And for listeners who are also viewers, who are watching this on YouTube, you may notice on my sport coat I am wearing six lapel pins and to Warwick’s point about a variety of skills and they can be annoying. And sometimes there can be headbutts. These are six lapel pins of The Avengers. You’ve got Captain America, Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man, The Hulk, and Black Panther. You got strength, you got speed. You got stealth, you got smarts. You’ve got all these different things going on. And the unit, The Avengers, is greater than each individual member. But boy, if you’ve seen the movies and read the comic books, they can fight. They end up saving the earth, but they get bruised themselves from themselves sometimes in getting there. And that is true sometimes of many teams in the real world.
Warwick F:
Yeah. I mean, they needle each other. I mean, I don’t know if it was The Avengers, but wasn’t there a superhero movie where they had like a civil war or something between them?
Gary S:
Yep. That was The Avengers. Captain America and Iron Man, they’re at the top of my lapel pin. It’s right here.
Warwick F:
Yeah. On opposite sides of your sport coat, funnily enough.
Gary S:
Yeah, I planned that.
Warwick F:
So you don’t want to be like that movie. You want to realize, “Okay, come on. We don’t need to have a war. We’re on the same team, we have different strengths, but let’s harmonize here.”
Gary S:
In your experience Warwick, do you have an example of what you’ve been talking about here for the last few minutes plays out? Do you have an example, be it personal or historical that you could point to that can help listeners understand in real time, real terms, how this way of compiling the team works?
Warwick F:
Yeah. I mean, obviously there are ones in history. You think of Abraham Lincoln, he had a team of rivals who were… They were so-called a team of rivals because they were his opponents for the Republican presidential nomination. And they each thought that the better man hadn’t won. So initially they didn’t respect him, but because he felt like they were the best people for the job, he assembled a very diverse group of people who were on his cabinet. So committed was he to the team that I remember one of them, Samuel Chase, I believe was treasury secretary. And the guy was really good treasury secretary, but the guy had a massive ego and he just did whatever he could to undermine Lincoln. Eventually he went one step too far.
Warwick F:
He kept submitting his resignation as some political ploy to try to get more power and eventually reluctantly Lincoln accepted it. But then what he ends up doing is nominating him to be chief justice at the Supreme Court. And this is a guy that did his level best to undermine Lincoln, but Lincoln said, “He’s the right person for the job.” And so that’s was remarkable, but it wasn’t easy, but he assembled a diverse group of people, irrespective of the opinion that they had of him because the country and in the throes of Civil War at the time he assembled them, probably about to go to war. He needed the best people, whether they liked him or not. So that’s really taking team and putting your own personal agenda aside, just at the ultimate level.
Gary S:
Yeah. And that is again, one of those situations where if he had not done that, what we think of Abraham Lincoln, the greatness we see in Abraham Lincoln, those are behind the curtain greatness things that we don’t tend to think about. That’s why the book Team of Rivals is so interesting because it opens the gates on those things that we don’t hear about all the time in the history books or in the movies, where they have the… I mean, movies are all about the hero, right? And I mean, going back a few podcasts ago, the idea of heroic leadership tends not to work. As we discovered with our guests, Joe Badaracco, heroic leadership tends not to work. And in fact, this communal team leadership is the way that things get done that last. I think that’s the safe thing to say.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. And if you want to read one single book about a historical figure and how they were able to assemble a team, it’s Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It’s written as a historical book, but it’s a great book. There’s a lot of lessons for leaders. And what’s the pay off? After he died, these people, that were his rivals, not only were they in tears, but they were praising him as the greatest leader they probably had ever known. I mean, that was… How do you turn people that disrespect you, think you’re this country bumpkin from Illinois, which was way out in the middle of nowhere in 1860, to this deep level of respect? I mean, that’s an amazing transformation.
Gary S:
And another book that comes to mind as we’re talking about these things is actually a book that was the focus of just about half of our podcasts ago, podcast 25, 26, which was ironically the first of two episodes we’ve done that we’re two partners and both of them ended up being because we did another one later, that was also about an Arctic explorer that went around Antarctica, go figure. The book I’m thinking of is Nancy Koehn’s book Forged in Crisis. There are some elements in her chapter on Arctic explorer, Ernest Shackleton that talk about some of the very things we’re talking about here, how do you hire people? How do you find people to be on your team that are going to lend the greatest opportunity for success to your efforts? And she unpacked some things about Shackleton that are a little bit different than what we might expect are the “wise decisions” to make in bringing people on board, literally.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it was a incredible discussion. It was podcast 25 and 26. And really her book is interesting. I mean Forged in Crisis, it deals with some great leaders, it deals with Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer that we’ll explain here in a little bit, Abraham Lincoln, the great abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, Dietrich Bonhoeffer who Lutheran pastor in Nazi Germany that died for his opposition to Hitler. Rachel Carson, that many think is the founder of the modern environmental movement. But Ernest Shackleton was interesting because he was driven in the early 1900s. Think of the space race in the 1960s, US Soviet Union. Well, there was this race to be the first to discover the north pole or south pole between a whole bunch of different countries. And Ernest Shackleton had this vision of being the first to cross Antarctica from one to the other.
Warwick F:
So he leaves in late 1914 and by 1915 he gets stuck in this ice floe basically. He unfortunately was impatient enough that when all the experts said, “Don’t go, the icebergs, the ice floes were as big as we’ve ever seen them.” He decides that he was just going to press ahead anyway. So he gets his team stuck in January, 1915 in an ice floe. And they’re there for about 18 months or so in this ice floe. Finally, he escapes in a small boat and in about August, 1916, he finally rescues his people and he rescues all of them. So, what were his hiring practices, because clearly they’re going to need it. They don’t know it’s going to be this bad, but they’re going to go through a lot. So what kind of people did he hire? And here’s where he didn’t…
Warwick F:
Yeah, he wanted skills obviously, but he really hired for attitude. He was so thorough. One of the things that Nancy Koehn, the author of that book says is that he had 5,000 applicants for 27 spaces. And he was looking for attitude. He would have them do an audition, sing a song, or do a dance, do some play acting. And he was looking for healthy, pragmatic, optimistic people. And he told them, he didn’t sugar coat it. I mean, he said, “It’s not going to be easy.” It’s reported that he placed an ad in the London Times that said this, “Men wanted for hazardous journey, long days, long nights, cold days, danger all around, safe return uncertain. Honor and glory in case of success.”
Gary S:
Yeah. Sign me up.
Warwick F:
So it’s like, “Hey, you got a pretty good chance of dying, but maybe you’ll get some glory who knows?” But he was looking for this pragmatic, optimistic, can-do attitude. Well, if you’re in the middle of… stuck on a boat in Antarctica and it’s absolutely freezing, gale force winds, having people have a pragmatic optimist spirit can do, that’s the difference between life and death. If he just went out and, okay, these are the people who have maybe been on the most polar expeditions and then all about whatever it takes, but they have a crummy attitude, they’re defeatist. I mean, I don’t know if that’s possible to have that, but maybe some better than others. They may well have died. So in this case, hiring for character and attitude was the difference between life and death for him and his team, literally. So I mean, it was really remarkable what he did in 1914 when he was hiring people.
Gary S:
And that’s what we’re talking about for what listeners are going to face in their leadership responsibilities. Probably not literal life and death, but it can be life and death of your company. It can be success of your division. It can be the impact of the nonprofits you lead or the neighborhood association that you run. And these things that Warwick is talking about, these teamwork overlays, how do you pull a team together? These insights will prove invaluable again, not in a literal life and death situation, but it is the difference between in many cases, your vision becoming a reality and your vision being just a daydream, never getting out of your head or getting out of your head and then getting high centered somewhere along that path. I mean, that’s fair to say.
Warwick F:
Absolutely, Yeah. I mean, I can think of a more contemporary example of really hiring for the right personality. I’ve been fortunate to be on the elder board of my church and the board of my kids’ school and was involved in governance in both organizations. And in hiring people for the boards of both places, yes, we were looking for a diverse group of people and experiences and talents, but we were also looking for attitudes. And so we had them fill out this application. And certainly one of the questions in both is, do you believe in the mission of the organization, you could be a wonderful human being, but not really be on board with the mission. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are, if you don’t believe in the mission of the organization, then forget it.
Warwick F:
But then we also said, so are you the kind of person that has to be right all the time? Because there’ll be times in which maybe there’s a decision between investing in project A or project B. It’s not a moral issue, typically where there’s disagreement. I mean, it can happen, but hasn’t in the organizations I’ve been involved in, and you might be the only one that believes project A should be invested in and everybody else believes project B. Okay, well, you got to park your ego at the door and say, ” Okay, maybe I lost out on that one, but it’s okay.” Be willing to listen to your fellow board members, speak your truth. Absolutely. We want people that are going to be wallflowers and stand up for what they believe in. But we don’t want people who are ego driven that have to dominate and control.
Warwick F:
And so we specifically look for that. We ask for examples for these things. We even ask people that know them, give us references and we ask them, so tell us about this person. So we spend a lot of time on character and attitude, and what’s the result of being in the vast majority of cases, almost all I’d say, we have had terrific board members on who are collegial, speak their truth not wallflowers, but yet are willing to work together and don’t have to be the prima donna. So even in this state, you don’t have to be Lincoln or Shackleton. It can work today. Those are two non-profits that can work in your non-profit, your team, your board, whatever it is, it is possible to hire for character and attitude.
Gary S:
And the other thing, as you’re hiring for character and attitude, as you’re bringing a team together, the fourth point that you make in your blog is you as the person who is assembling this team, you as the leader, you need to be the chief evangelist for your vision. So as you’re looking to build a team to bring your vision to reality, while that’s going on, while that work is happening, while that team you assembled is moving things down the track, you’ve got to maintain your role as the leader, as the evangelist for that vision. Don’t you?
Warwick F:
Absolutely. And so you might be asking in case I got this diverse team, and a lot of good different skills, and a good attitude. So what do I, as the founder do, do I just sit there and see everything happen on autopilot? Well, no. Your chief job is to be the chief evangelist, the chief visionary. It’s your vision after all, as the leader of the organization. If you have no vision, then I would question why do you want to be the leader of the organization? Step down, let somebody else have a go. But assuming you actually have a vision and some passion, which is required to lead anything anywhere, anytime, do not pass go, kind of thing. Then your job is to get everybody on board with that vision. And so it’s not just a matter of, well, I gave one speech once five years ago.
Warwick F:
Isn’t that enough? No, you need to constantly give that speech, but not only do you need to give that speech in that talk, you need to ask people. So how do you see that vision working out in your area? In engineering, in sales and manufacturing, in your department, in your division, in your group? How does that work? Ask them. If they say, “Well, I have no clue.” That’s obviously the wrong answer, but there are many right answers. And so you’ve got to enfold them. And the other thing as I write about in my book is, if somebody has a good idea, it’s okay for that to be a contributor to the vision. As I say, 80% of your vision with 100% buy-in is better than 100% of your vision with 0% buy-in.
Warwick F:
So it’s okay, again, I use this analogy, the Michelangelo statue of David in Florence, which we were fortunate enough to actually see for the first time, a few years ago. You’ve got to be willing to give the hammer and chisel to your team members and let them contribute to the vision. Because if it’s 80% of your vision, it’s still a win. So part of it is constantly communicating your vision. And the second part of it is making sure that your team knows what it means to them and can contribute to it. All that creates buy-in. You have to have your team bought into the vision and unified. If you don’t have that, you’re in trouble. It’s like sand in the gears. The car’s not going too far.
Gary S:
Right. And let’s pause just for a second and put the big tent of Crucible Leadership around this discussion. All the things that we’ve been talking about listener, are ways to avoid a crucible or ways to potentially avoid. You can’t control all outside forces, but if you don’t have a team, the way that Warwick has described it, if you haven’t assembled them, hired for attitude and a little bit of skill, but complimentary skill, any of those things gone wrong if you’re not conveying the vision that your vision to them, and you’re not becoming an evangelist for it, and you’re not reinforcing that, all of those things can lead to going back to Shackleton, getting stuck in the ice. And that can lead to a crucible happening as you’re trying to move down the road of taking your vision from your head to the reality of making it happen.
Gary S:
So from a Crucible Leadership perspective, this discussion is great for leadership in general, but it’s also extremely important for Crucible Leadership because it’s one way that you can’t ever inoculate yourself completely from crucibles, but you can put some things in place to help you avoid them. Or if you hit them like Shackleton did, when he hit the ice, he was able to overcome that crucible because he had applied these lessons of bringing together a good team.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. I mean, life is tough. Crucibles are going to happen to you, but you don’t need man-made, woman-made, people-made. You don’t need human-made crucibles. You can make your own crucible. You can build your own iceberg that can sink your Titanic. It’s possible to do that, but why would you do that? And so, if you don’t want to hit the iceberg and sink your ship, well, make sure you hire people of character that don’t have some vendetta or some agendas saying, “I have a big ego, at the first chance I get, I’m going to stab you in the back and see if I can remove you as leader.” If you’re working with some big organization, it’s quite possible, they’ll talk to your superiors, they’ll befriend them, just like you’ve seen in the movies or Shakespeare for that matter.
Warwick F:
And they’ll say the classic lines of “Joe or Mary, they’re great people. I mean, Joe is really is a great person. I feel like that may be past it a bit. Maybe they’re not quite up with the times”, and little bit by little bit, they’ll throw some shade against you. Happens in, I’m sure superhero movies all the time. Those subtle things that the best villains are ones that smile, but say the subtle nasty things behind your back. So you don’t want to hire those people. And you don’t certainly want to turn people into that, which you can by ignoring their comments, not listening to them. So yeah, you can make icebergs if you want to. And here’s the thing from the other side, and in Crucible Leadership, we have this perspective, your vision often comes out of your own crucible.
Warwick F:
Maybe you’ve had a devastating failure or setback could be not your fault. And it’s like, I don’t want anybody else to go through what I’ve gone through. And this vision is, as I’ve said, in a different context, burning a hole in my heart, I want this to happen. If your vision has come out of your crucible, the last thing you want to have is that vision derailed. So if the vision is that important, if it’s has its origin in your crucible, which in my experience often is the case, it’s too important to fail. Therefore, park your ego at the door, hire the right people, be the chief evangelist of your vision. Listen to them. So from a crucible leadership perspective, don’t make icebergs where there are none, don’t make crucibles where they don’t have to be any. And if you’ve gone through a crucible, isn’t it this whole thing you’re doing this vision too important for it to fail? That’s why these things are so important.
Gary S:
Because we’ve been talking about teams. And because I’ve used this as an excuse to talk about The Avengers, and I got to wear my Avengers pins today for the show, rather than say, it’s getting to be time to land the plane, the captain’s turned on the fasten seatbelt sign. I’m going to say, Nick Fury has said it’s time to begin landing the Quinjet. It’s time for The Avengers to be on the ground and go fight whatever nefarious things are happening. So we’re getting to that point where it’s time to do that. But there’s one more point Warwick in your blog that I see as a book end to your first point, right? Your first point was you need to build a team. And sometimes ego gets in the way, sometimes the worry of head butting and tension and problems get in the way. The other thing you have to remember on the back end of it is to be patient, that is also critical. You can stop it before it ever starts, and you can stop it before it finishes, because you’re impatient and you rush it. Right?
Warwick F:
Exactly. I mean, that’s one of the most important things as the founder, as the visionary, you have to be patient. I mean, visions can take time. Maybe you didn’t have the right team members. Maybe it’s not the right time in the marketplace. It takes time to get a team on board, be it unity around whatever aspect of the vision that it is. You’ve just got to be patient. I think in my own case, you talked about Crucible Leadership and the book it’ll be coming out later this year. Well, the vision was birthed in 2008. That’s like more than 12 years ago, at my church where I gave some sermon illustration. My pastor wanted me to, and I talked about my experiences and what I learned in the family newspaper business, and my mistakes and failures and what I felt like since it was a church, maybe God had taught me, or I just learned in general.
Warwick F:
And when people felt like, gosh, they could relate to this in some weird way, which is strange. Because there weren’t too many media moguls in the congregation, but anyway, the vision was birthed is the point. Well, it’s taken more than 12 years to get to the point where I’m going to have a book published. And we don’t have time to get into all the details, but it took forever. Over the course of last few years, I’ve assembled a great team who have branding, marketing, public relations, communications skills, book cover design skills. We’re just going through a period now, we’re trying to just nail down the book cover. That’s not easy. It’s really difficult.
Gary S:
No. As someone involved in those discussions, I can testify to that.
Warwick F:
But we’re getting there and you just got to be patient because, I mean, it won’t be quite at this level. I don’t think because, I’d like it to be. But I think of Thomas Edison and the light bulb, he tried 1,000 different filaments before, I think it was a cotton thread or something with something coated on it. I mean, it’s like sometimes genius happens just because you’re Mozart and you wake up one day and boom out comes a symphony. But even in creative areas, in many, if not most cases, greatness or even things that are good come out of just persistence and hard work. And a lot of discussion and fine tuning.
Warwick F:
So, all I have to say is, and look it’s taken me more than 12 years with this book and it’s been worth it. The team, where I’m now, the endorsements I’m fortunately gratified to be getting, it’s worth it, but be patient. Your vision is too important. If your vision is that important, have the courage to be patient and assemble the right team, with the right attitude, get them on the same page, be the chief evangelist, but be patient. Your vision, your dream is too important. Be patient.
Gary S:
This is a perfect confluence of circumstances for me to say what I’m about to say. So you mentioned endorsements. And there have been some great endorsements for the book that people will be able to see both in the book and as we roll out the book and promote it when it comes out in the fall. We talked earlier about Nancy Koehn’s book Forged in Crisis. And you said that there were other things you could say about the book, but you didn’t want to get into… We don’t have time because Nick Fury has told us to land so we can go save the world. But I will say this as the PR guy on the team, one of the endorsements, listener, we hope you’ll become reader. One of the endorsements is from Nancy Koehn herself, from the Harvard Business School. And she said of Warwick’s book, Crucible Leadership, Embrace your Trials to Lead a Life of Significance.
Gary S:
Nancy Koehn recommends it with these words, “Nuggets of leadership gold.” Now, if I were going to do it, I’d say that’s the end and let’s get out. Let’s end the show and direct people to review the blog to get all of these tips, wind up for them, but I’ll give you as always the last word before I summarize.
Warwick F:
Vision is hard. It’s hard to make it reality. And I’ve known certainly in my own life with my book or even school or church board. I remember one time, I had this vision of governance was important in one of those organizations and the president of the board at the time, was like, “Yeah, not really seeing it at the moment.” And I was convinced this was absolutely critical, so I was like, “Okay.” Well like a year or so later, he’s like, “I think we need to do governance study and bring in take governance to the next level.” Okay. Well, it requires patience. Whether you’re on a nonprofit board or whether it’s a vision you have, it requires patience. And if it’s that important, park your ego at the door, get the right people with the right skills and the right character.
Warwick F:
Who want to play as a team, who want to learn from others. They don’t have to be right all the time. Consciously and subconsciously, I’ve tried to do that with my own team at Crucible Leadership. And we have all those things, people who are driven, who believe in the mission, but who can park the ego at the door and don’t have to be right at any given front. And we have discussions. We come to consensus, we have all those things. Well, that doesn’t happen by accident. I wanted people who were driven, who believed in the mission, but I wanted people that will play nice with each other. If you had a big ego, trust me, you would not be on this team. And frankly consciously looking for it. You get great benefit out of that. Talented people who can park the ego at the door that passionately believe in the mission. Your vision, and your mission deserves that, don’t compromise on that. Find the right people, be patient and more than likely good things will happen.
Gary S:
Well, we began this conversation listener with me saying the organizing construct for what we were going to talk about was this idea that without a team, a vision is just a daydream. I can say being part of both this podcast and part of Warwick’s vision to bring Crucible Leadership to life and his book to life that he has assembled a team. He definitely has checked his ego at the door. I don’t know how many times I have said to him in phone conversations, “Well, as George Bush used to say, you’re the decider you can decide to do what you wish to do.” And Warwick gets insight, gets opinion, seeks the counsel of those he’s brought on board. And that leads to the vision that’s in his head is not a daydream. It’s a reality. And you’re going to see it in October of this year, when the book comes out. First part of the tangible vision of Crucible Leadership, or maybe the next part.
Gary S:
Perhaps the first part was the website. And somewhere after that, is this podcast Beyond the Crucible. And speaking of this podcast Beyond the Crucible, listener, as we park for this week, Warwick and I do have a favor to ask you. Please, if you have enjoyed what you’ve heard, just click like on the podcast app that you’re listening to this on, share it with friends. This looks really good on social media. It’s got a nice logo with Warwick’s face on it. It’s very nice. I actually have a T-shirt made of it that I wear sometimes, never on the show, but I do wear it sometimes just because I’m proud of the show.
Warwick F:
Funnily enough, I don’t wear it.
Gary S:
To be clear. It’s the only T-shirt there is that has been made. I own it. And Warwick is way too humble to wear his own face on a T-shirt. So click like, subscribe, please, and share it with friends. Because the more people who know about this show, we just found out yesterday that the show has begun to chart on Apple iPod charts in the US, and Australia, and Japan. And a lot of places, it’s not charting in the top five, but it has begun to chart. It’s gathering momentum. You can help us continue with that momentum. And until the next time that we’re together, listener, thank you for spending this time with us. If you remember nothing else about this show, remember that your crucible experiences can be difficult.
Gary S:
They are life-changing in many cases, they certainly were for Warwick. They certainly were for me, but they are not the end of your story. They weren’t the end of Warwick’s story. They weren’t the end of my story. They’re not the end of your story. They can be in fact, the beginning of a brand new story that will be the most rewarding part of your life, the most rewarding story of your life. Because when you get to the page that says the end in that story, you will have arrived at a life of significance.
He was born with Poland’s Syndrome, a rare disease that left his right hand malformed and his muscle development non-existent. But Johannes Atlas was also born to parents who, as he puts it, “refused to baby him.” Their support led him to overcoming his physical challenges on a variety of sporting fields and his emotional challenges by believing — as him mom and dad told him often — he was “enough.” Coming under the tutelage of business mentors as a young adult and inspired by his faith, Atlas has launched a growing speaking career and is encouraging others to overcome their own crucibles en route to a life of significance through his Pressing Toward the Mark events.
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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
Warwick F:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership.
Johannes A:
My dad is very wise, just a lot of wisdom. I mean, he has a lot of insight that he shares with me, just things that blow my mind at times. And so yeah, and just how they raised me and everything. They really just normalized it, and really gave me that how-can-I attitude because in that I had to figure it out how I can do this. And so, I think that was something that my dad really helped me with. Super grateful for it today because I mean, it’s made all the difference. And not even just for me physically, but in business, in self development, in just a lot of areas. I then asked myself, “Okay, well, how can I do this?” And so, it’s transferred from physically, how can I do this, to how can I in my emotions, in my career, in my relationships. And so, it’s given me a figure-it-out mentality.
Gary S:
A figure-it-out mentality. There may not be a better phrase to describe the mindset we need to overcome the crucibles we encounter on our journeys through life. That’s what today’s guest, Johannes Atlas, has discovered as he’s navigated through life being born with a rare disability known as Poland syndrome, which left him with physical abnormalities affecting his right hand that caused some emotional challenges he spent decades sorting out.
Gary S:
Hi, I’m Gary Schneeberger, the co-host of the show and the communications director for Crucible Leadership. Johannes, he goes by Joe, explains to Warwick that he’s found his footing thanks to the wisdom of mentors, and the belief that Poland syndrome or not, he is enough. It’s a message he shares these days through his public speaking and his Pressing Toward The Mark events.
Warwick F:
Well Joe, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it. It’s funny, you were telling us off-air just about the origin of your full name, Johannes. I want you to just tell our listeners, I think it’s a pretty neat story about your dad and his thinking.
Johannes A:
So yeah, my dad, he made me Johannes. He actually comes from Johannesburg in South Africa. And it translates to King. And so yeah, he really liked the name. He actually wanted to name me Johannes Charleston Atlas, would have been the full thing, but then my mom threw in Patrick. So, it’s Johannes Patrick Charleston Atlas.
Warwick F:
There you go.
Gary S:
Wow. That’s a name of royalty right there, young man.
Johannes A:
Thank you. I appreciate that.
Warwick F:
And I have a feeling, as we’ll get into later, when you think of king it probably has more than one meaning. That’s a spiritual meaning, and an earthly meaning. As a person of faith, that’s pretty cool to have a reminder in your name, every day it’s like okay, I know who my king is, right?
Johannes A:
Right, right.
Warwick F:
So, that is so cool. So, now you grew up in California, did you?
Johannes A:
Yes, California.
Warwick F:
Right. And you’re there at the moment?
Johannes A:
Yes.
Warwick F:
Okay. So yeah, just tell us a bit about growing up, about your family and background, and just tell us a bit about Joe Atlas, and as you grew up.
Johannes A:
Yeah. So, I was born with Poland syndrome, so you can see the difference on my hand. For people who might just be listening, to give you an idea my right hand will literally fit in the palm of my left hand. So, one thing that I’m grateful for growing up in regards to my parents, is that they never babied me. They never gave me any special attention, they just treated me like normal. And on top of that I played a number of sports growing up, so I played baseball, basketball, football, tennis, Muay Thai. And in playing all these sports it allowed me to figure it out. And that’s the thing I’m most grateful for was the mentality that it gave me as to figure it out, because there was certain things, and not even just in sports, but there was just everyday life things that I wouldn’t be able to do like everyday individuals would.
Johannes A:
I would have to figure it out in my own kind of way. And so, I didn’t really become conscious about my hand until about high school. And so, of course in high school everybody wants to fit in and be cool, and so because I wanted to fit in and be cool ideally this thing wasn’t cool to me. So yeah, that’s where I would hide my hand in my pocket, I mean, on a regular basis. Unless I was doing something where I needed both of my hands, my hand was always in my pocket just to hide from the circumstances or from situations from being teased and being made fun of, I just hid my hand in my pocket all the time.
Johannes A:
And so, in those moments was when I … Was when the baggage for me, my emotional baggage was really started, unconsciously. I didn’t really know that what was happening, but it wasn’t until some years later, I’ll get into that. But so, after high school was when I would really want to … I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and really just grow as a person, because I felt … I was feeling stuck, a little bit, and I felt that me, hiding my hand in my pocket, it was becoming a problem. And so, I got involved with this finance firm and it was … Though we taught about finance, it was more like a leadership and self-development course. And so, super grateful for that as well. And within that, it was a lot of teaching you to believe in yourself. And so, within that, between that and …
Johannes A:
I grew up in church, and then at a certain point I started speaking at church as well, was where I’d actually gotten the desire to want to become a motivational speaker. And so, I remember the Sunday too, where just during Sunday … Excuse me. During church on Sunday, there we go. So, you know how we have … There’s altar call at end of service.
Warwick F:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Johannes A:
And so, during altar call it was breaking my heart to see Sunday after Sunday people coming up and getting prayed for. But I mean, just some of those are just the most macho-y men coming up and crying, and just to see them dealing with life was just … It hurt my heart. And it was in those moments where I was like, “Lord, we can do something. We need to do something about this, because it’s just not making sense why some of these things are going on.” And so, that was where I really started wanting to become a motivational speaker, and I have … From there, I started doing videos on Facebook, and on Instagram, and some on YouTube as well. And I then, in the beginning of 2020, I’d actually started my first event. It was called Pressing Toward the Mark conference.
Johannes A:
And it was right before COVID hit, perfect timing. And then I ended up going on tour with this guy named… I spoke in Texas, and in L.A. as well. And then it wasn’t until May of last year that I had this experience with God where he opened my eyes to my own baggage. And I was able to then free myself from the things that I was dealing with for over the past number of years.
Warwick F:
Boy, that’s a remarkable story. I just want to delve a bit into your parents, and how they raised you in a way that was probably so helpful, but just … Because I think most listeners, and me included, until we started speaking I’ve never heard of Poland syndrome. So, how does it come about? I mean, I’m assuming it’s in the womb, or it’s some genetic thing. But for listeners who may never heard of Poland syndrome, what is it? I mean …
Johannes A:
Yeah, so it’s characterized by the underdeveloped chest and arm muscles. It’s all characterized on one side of the body. So, it’s all on my right side. So, on top of my hand being smaller than my left, I don’t have any chest muscle on the right side of my body. So, there’s no cure for it, they don’t know what causes it, it’s not genetic, it’s not like my mother was smoking or drinking, or anything. Nothing crazy in the womb, it’s just like a freak thing. It just happens.
Warwick F:
And it’s not like it’s hereditary, it’s not like you can go back a few generations and there been others in your family with it, it’s just … It sounds like it’s fairly rare, and often when things are fairly rare they don’t really understand what it is, because there’s so many things to focus on. So, as you were growing up, I mean obviously you must’ve felt different than the other kids. How did that affect you where you were, I don’t know, three, four, five, six? At a young age. Obviously you were aware of it, but how did that affect you, emotionally, physically, just in general?
Johannes A:
It’s funny because I remember there was just certain moments from elementary school where I think it was on my part, where I was trying to fit in with the wrong crowd. And I wasn’t quite fitting in. And just, I got into a couple fights in elementary school, and just not getting teased and made fun of for my hand, but just for, I guess in a sense, for being different. Wasn’t directly correlated to my hand, but was just being different in a sense. And so, it was in elementary school is when, I just realized this not too long ago actually, was that was when I was really seeking that acceptance. And that was something that I couldn’t seek in other people to give, I had to seek that for myself and give myself that acceptance that I was looking for.
Johannes A:
But yeah, no, it was just in elementary school was kind of where it started a little bit. But then, eventually as I started getting older, I found my crowd to fit in with.
Warwick F:
Obviously not that many of our listeners will have Poland syndrome, but it’s inevitable when you’re in elementary school, kids always want to fit in. And kids can be mean, anybody that’s different, they look different, they’re from a different part of the country, maybe they’ve moved, anybody that’s different gets teased. I don’t know what it is. I think you could go to any culture, at any age, at any time, and it’s just … I don’t know. From a spiritual perspective, I guess you could say the fallen nature of humans. But it’s so sad that anybody that’s different will get teased. I mean, and probably you’ve seen it in others, and whether it’s your skin color’s different, maybe you’re not as athletic, or you’re a bookworm, or you’re … I don’t know what. You’re quiet, or whatever it is, anybody that’s different gets teased.
Warwick F:
I mean, you’ve probably obviously seen that. But I don’t know, it’s pretty sad. You would think that kids would give each other a break, but not always.
Johannes A:
Yeah, it’s a weird part of human nature, and it’s not until sometime after high school, or sometime after grade school that we really start to come together more as a unit. The teasing kind of really stops. It’s more of kid stuff, but … Typically, not all the time. But typically I guess it’s when we get older then the … We become more unified at that point.
Warwick F:
I want to kind of talk a little bit about what you said about your parents not babying you, and that’s probably, in hindsight, was a remarkable gift. Because a lot of parents would’ve, “Oh, we’re so sorry, Joe. This is awful, and we’re going to put you in … We’re just going to baby you, we’re going to protect you, and put our arms around you, and we’re going to make you safe from the world.” Which is a noble goal, but not always … Maybe wouldn’t serve you. So, talk about your parents’ attitude, and in a sense, if it was, the blessing that it was in terms of how they handled all that.
Johannes A:
Yeah. So, and just as you were saying, yeah, my parents, they never … Just like you were saying, they never babied me. The thing was, it was never really a huge topic of conversation. But there was one thing that I … When I was little, I would kind of put my hand up like a chicken wing, so I’d put it up like this. And so, my dad would tell me all the time, “Hey, put your hand down.” Because I would, just for no reason, just for no reason, I would have my hand up.
Warwick F:
Right.
Johannes A:
And so, he trained me in that to put my hand down. Within that, them allowing me to play sports, and then my dad also helping me with that a little bit, to help me figure out how am I going to do this. Because when I played baseball, I would catch and throw with my left hand. So, I would catch the ball, I’d have the glove on my left hand, catch the ball, take it off, grab the ball then throw it really. It was a quick little exchange. But it was just little things like that he helped me figure it out.
Warwick F:
For most people, that wouldn’t be easy. I mean, I grew up in Australia, so we played cricket. So, maybe you would’ve been better off there because there’s no gloves. Unless you’re the wicket-keeper. So, you would’ve been, at least in fielding, would’ve been fine. But-
Gary S:
Well, and there was a professional baseball player, Jim Abbott, who had the same … I mean, it wasn’t Poland syndrome, but he did the same thing. Caught with a glove, took it off, and threw it. And he threw a no-hitter with that … It is a triumph of the will to be able to pull that stuff off. And I would imagine, Joe, that doing that the confidence that gave you right from little league on, each step you took, that helped build confidence and helped you overcome some of those hidden doubts about yourself.
Johannes A:
Yeah. No, it definitely did. Because just like you were saying, it gave me that hey, I can do this. And me having to figure it out, and let me know hey, you can do this. You can figure it out if you’re willing to. So yeah, no, it definitely did.
Warwick F:
And it’s really remarkable, because your dad could’ve said, “You know what, Joe? Forget baseball. Any kind of football, pick anything like that you can’t do it. Just accept your limitations.” Some parents, maybe a lot, would’ve said that. But he’s like, “Okay, now don’t think of yourself as limited. You just have to adapt, be smart.” And that’s so good. I mean, I think of an earlier era with polio, like Franklin Roosevelt had polio, there was a time in which in, after the ’50s, if you had polio it was meant to be a shameful thing. You would stay home, don’t go out. Somehow they were almost blamed for it, which is kind of crazy. But I like to think we’re a bit more enlightened now.
Warwick F:
So, the way your parents handled it was so wise. It’s just, again, don’t think of yourself as even challenged, just okay, there are some challenges, but let’s figure out how to adapt. And that’s a big lesson I’m sure you probably share with other people. We all have limitations, some a bit more obvious than others. But just figure out a way around it. I mean, your parents set you up for success, and not all parents do that. But, I don’t know. I mean, as you look back do you feel like boy, the wisdom that they had is truly remarkable in terms of how they really tried to help you?
Johannes A:
Yeah. No, I definitely do. Especially in regards to my dad, because we grew up in church. My dad was a minister, and so I used to … My dad is very wise. Just a lot of wisdom. I mean, he has a lot of insight that he shares with me, just things that blow my mind at times. And so, yeah, and just how they raised me and everything, it was they really just normalized it, and really giving me that how can I attitude. Because in that, I had to figure out how I can do this. And so, I think that was something that my dad really helped me with, and super grateful for it today. Because I mean, it’s made all the difference, and not even just for me physically but in my … In business, in self-development, in just a lot of areas. I then ask myself, “okay, well how can I do this?”
Johannes A:
So, it’s transferred from physically how can I do this, to how can I in my emotions, in my career, in our relationships? And so, it’s given me a figure-it-out mentality.
Warwick F:
That’s awesome. So, you mentioned your dad was somebody that went to church, and faith was important. So, what role did that play in your family, and you, as you were dealing with challenges in growing up? How did that all weave itself in the spiritual side?
Johannes A:
Having that spiritual advisory, growing up, because I was born and raised in church. And so, I mean, just a lot of the … Just hearing stuff Sunday after Sunday. Especially as a kid, I didn’t really know what was really going on, I didn’t really understand what was … Everything that was going on, but as I gotten older … It was after high school when I had got my first job, I had quit going to church. Because I started working Sundays. And so, then those next few years was when I really started my heathen backslide. And so, yeah. But then after a number of years I really felt that pull to come back. I felt that in my heart, and I wanted to go back. My parents, they weren’t, “Hey, you need to go back to church. You need to get back in …” It was nothing like that, but I wanted to.
Johannes A:
And so, then kind of going, getting back into church. But even with that, growing up I’ve been, in a sense, a voice of reason for a lot of my friends growing up, helping them with a number of things. I remember in, again, in elementary school actually, where I have a thought that I wanted to be a counelor. Just because I would help my friends a lot with stuff that they’re going through, and things like that.
Warwick F:
You use apparently a phrase, that you were … Maybe you were seven or eight, you were the playground mediator. So, talk about what did that look like? You’re on the playground, people are having fights, teasing each other, what did that look like for you being the playground mediator?
Johannes A:
It was kind of cool, just helping my friends when … Dealing with some of the problems that they were dealing with, whether it be personal or at home, or between some of their friends I’d kind of help them bring resolution to it all. And whatever that they were dealing with, to, “Hey, it’s not that serious, guys. Let’s just have fun and be friends. We all came here to have a good time.” And just bring the level of aggravation down a lot was … It was fun. It was definitely rewarding, I’ll say that.
Warwick F:
And that’s also remarkable, because again you could’ve been internally focused, and feeling sorry for yourself, which would be company understandable. But it sounds like you weren’t focused or obsessed with yourself, you were focused on others. Even at an early age, which is truly remarkable. I don’t think too many kids your age, seven or eight, would’ve been thinking, “Hey guys, we don’t need to fight here.” And thinking of others. So, as you look back do you feel like that’s, I want to say not normal, to be focused on others as much as you did? But sounds like you did.
Johannes A:
I think I can definitely attribute that to growing up in church, because the greatest commandment’s in the Bible, love God with your everything. Second is to love your neighbor as yourself. And so, and just not being so focused on me all the time, I just always just hey, what can I … How can I help? What can I do? Just having that servant leader’s heart was something that, again, growing up in church I’m super grateful for.
Warwick F:
Well, and that shows a tremendous degree of empathy, and one of the things, I’m sure you probably talk about this, it’s easy to wallow in our own challenges sometimes, as self-inflicted sometimes, at no fault of ours at all. But either way, it’s easy to feel sorry for yourself, and as understandable as that is it sometimes is more healing, or more rewarding when you’re focusing on trying to help others. And it sounds like you’ve done that your whole life. For listeners who may have other challenges, talk about how focusing on others in some ways is sort of healing, or at least … Why is that the way to go? I know obviously the Bible talks about that, which we agree on, but why is that helpful rather than being obsessed with your own challenges and problems? Why is that really a better way to go, focusing on others and trying to help them?
Johannes A:
I feel like when it comes to helping others, in helping others we really help ourself. So, we are a spirit, and the Bible says that there is one spirit. And so, we all have the spirit of God within us, whether you know or believe that, or not. Everybody has the same spirit. And so, it’s like when I go to counsel somebody I’m secretly kind of counseling myself as well. And just on helping somebody deal with whatever they might be dealing with. But in helping somebody through a challenge, through some kind of struggle, it also simultaneously helps to minimize what I am going through. Not in a sense that saying that what I’m going through is not a big deal, but it takes the pressure off of me and helping to focus on somebody else, but also to realize that hey, what I’m dealing with, it’s not as big as I think it is.
Johannes A:
Or it’s not as great as I feel it is. Or though hey, it may be a big deal but if I’m helping somebody else to go through what they’re going through, I know that I can make it through what I’m going through. If I’m able to help somebody else while I’m still struggling. Or whatever the case is. But in just helping others, it does such a tremendous work in us, while we don’t even realize it may be doing a work in us but it’s subconsciously and secretly doing a great work in you when you take the time to help somebody else though we may be struggling.
Warwick F:
I think that’s so true. It’s also empowering because when you’re not focused on your limitations, and you’re focused on helping others, it’s probably empowering. It’s like, well, look what I can do. Yes, I can do baseball and other things, but I’m impacting people’s lives. I mean, look at the impact I’m having. It probably makes you feel maybe a little less challenged, and a little bit more empowered, and capable of look … You can say obviously God, through you, which I think we can agree with, but look what I can do. Look at the change I can make in my world. I mean, that’s an empowering, uplifting, and energizing concept. I mean-
Gary S:
And I’ll jump in here, Warwick, because what you just said reminds me of something you’ve said about your own crucible. When you said, “Hey, I can do something.” I remember you talking about that job that you got at the aviation services company, and it wasn’t … You weren’t leading a multi-billion dollar company, but you came to a point where you said I can do this. After feeling like after the failure of the takeover, that there wasn’t much you could do, you found that success. And it’s remarkable, listener, catch this, Warwick’s crucible and Joe’s crucible are extraordinarily different. But the emotions that they’ve expressed about hey, I can do something, that was powerful. Wasn’t that powerful for you, Warwick?
Warwick F:
Yeah. I mean, it’s obviously always a challenge comparing crucibles, because I feel like what I went through is nothing compared to Joe, and his situation in terms of the challenge. But yeah, I mean, more generally, yeah. I mean, there was a time in which lost a 150-year-old family business founded by a strong person of faith in my family for generations. And it fell under my watch, yeah, I was feeling pretty bad about myself, and everything I touched I just destroy. And maybe I should just go away and hide, and maybe I won’t hurt people. I mean, I don’t know if it was quite that graphic. Maybe a little bit, but little bit by little bit, as you do things, you’re not screwing up, you actually can help people or do something positive, it’s like, well … I call it a drop of grace. It’s a little drop of grace.
Warwick F:
Like a little drop of water in the dessert. It’s like wow, I can do that. And little bit by little bit, you connect enough drops of grace and you got a pool. And, I don’t know about an ocean, but maybe like a big pond. Maybe even a little lake. But it’s … Yeah. I mean, I found it very helpful. It’s not every once in a while I’ll read something, or somebody writes some article and it’s like, oh yeah, that’s right. That was me. Yeah. But it is true. I mean, in my own very different way, as you’re focused on others it is so empowering. So, talk about high school, teased a bit, but it sounds like you got through that. I mean, how’d you get through the whole high school thing? Was that the pinnacle of teasing, if you will? Or gee, I’m different, kind of thing?
Johannes A:
Yeah, that really was it. And it was then that, how I kind of dealt with it, was I would just … I mean, consistently, my hand was always, always … My hand was always in my pocket. Unless I was doing something where I needed both my hands, it was just, my hand was always in my pocket. And honestly, that also carried over until when I got out of … Even though I got out of high school, it wasn’t until that I got involved with the Riverside Chamber of Commerce where that was a position where I was really nervous to get into, because being involved with business, business 101, you look somebody in the eye and you give them a firm handshake. And that was the thing that I was really nervous about was because I didn’t want to be reminded of the reactions and the faces that I would get when I would go to shake somebody’s hand.
Johannes A:
Whether it be pull back, or they would shake my hand and freak out, or just various things. And so…
Warwick F:
And that’s a challenge-
Johannes A:
For that.
Warwick F:
… because in our culture, we tend to shake hands with our right hand. Now, obviously some people are left-handed, but the majority, I don’t know what the percent is, the majority are right-handed. So, culturally you lead with your right hand. I never really thought about it until now, but even if you’re shaking a left-handed person’s hand, my guess is they’ll still stick out their right hand because why just make life difficult? They just say, “Oh well, here we go again.” But that’s got to be … Yeah. Because then people feel awkward, and they’re like …
Johannes A:
Exactly.
Warwick F:
Which, even if you weren’t feeling awkward, you are going to feel awkward once they feel awkward. So, it’s like-
Johannes A:
It’s funny you say that, too, because I’ve tried to shake with my left hand a few times, and exactly that. It was a awkward moment at that point. So, yeah.
Warwick F:
Yeah. Well, at least during COVID, and one of the small blessings there, the whole elbow bump. It’s like, okay. I can do that, I can do an elbow bump. So, nobody’s shaking hands these days. But speaking of that metaphor of drops of grace, it sounds like that Riverside Chamber of Commerce, that was somewhat of a significant step for you in your outlook, and your feeling that you can contribute. So, talk about how that really helped change your thinking, or grow your thinking a bit.
Johannes A:
Yeah. So, in doing that, because it’s, like I say, Riverside Chamber of Commerce, where I’m in a room with a lot of … A bunch of business owners, and we’re all just talking, and connecting, and networking. And so, it’s obviously a lot of shaking hands. And so, in just doing that I was … Like I said, I was literally nervous to do it because I did not want to be reminded. But at that point, I was really wanting to get out of my comfort zone. And so, I got into it anyways, and so I started shaking people’s hands. And some people noticed, and other people didn’t. And it wasn’t really a big deal. And it was kind of within that, and just the habitual shaking of hands that I started to … I learned to begin to get over it a little bit. Even after being involved with the Chamber of Commerce, there was still a little bit part of me that wasn’t until about eight nine months ago, that I really got over it.
Johannes A:
But there was still a little bit a part of me that still stuck, that still held on to that ill-feeling I had toward it.
Warwick F:
Yeah, I don’t know if you’ve felt this, but there’s this concept where if you seem to be over it and not awkward or embarrassed by it, somehow it helps other people not be embarrassed by it, or feel awkward. Have you felt that with other people? If you’re like, “Hey, this is cool. It’s okay,” that it’s easier for other people to relax and not worry about it? Have you found that?
Johannes A:
Yeah. Sometimes I’ll make little jokes about it, and it does kind of help ease some people’s tension about it a little bit. Or they’ll go to shake my hand, and they’re like, “Oh.” They’ll make a comment, and I’ll make a comment and say something funny, just to … Yeah, I have noticed that, and it’s … Yeah. You’re right. And it’s only when I made it a big deal that it’s been a big deal to people. When I don’t make it a big deal, then it’s not a big deal to people. It’s interesting how that works out, but yeah.
Warwick F:
It’s an important lesson. So, what was the role of being an ambassador at the Riverside Chamber of Commerce? What did that involve?
Johannes A:
So, in being an ambassador we were pretty much just helping new businesses coming in to the community, and pretty much just situated, come in and network, how can we help you, in what ways can we assist them at that point. Invite them out to different events that we had, pretty much getting … Because we would have events from time to time, and it was pretty much getting as much people as possible to come out, and network. And talk about their business. Because Riverside, it’s a big business city as far as … It’s small businesses. And so, it was a lot of just pretty much getting the community to build itself.
Warwick F:
And I imagine you had all sorts of different businesses, maybe people from different cultures, different backgrounds. So, talk about how that felt like helping a lot of very different people? Because I’m guessing it was a lot of different people, a lot of different backgrounds. So, how did that feel helping those folks?
Johannes A:
Yeah. When I was involved, I was a little bit more on the backend of it. I didn’t really get to the front to see all the different businesses and whatnot. But no, it was rewarding in a sense to see the different businesses, and people come out and network, and come back and talk about it a little bit later where some people would come back to our meeting that we had every week, and they would say how much some of the events that they’ve came to made a difference. And some of the networks and connections that they made at that point.
Warwick F:
Okay. So, talk a bit about what you do now with Pressing Towards the Mark, and … Yeah. Just the things that you do now.
Johannes A:
Yeah. So, with Pressing Toward the Mark conference, that was actually a God-given idea. I remember I was driving home and then just God dropped the idea in my mind, was like, “Hey, have an event at the … Have an event.” And he was like, “Call it Pressing Toward the Mark.” And I’m like, “Lord, that’s dope. I love it.” So, I really had no idea how it was going to work or anything, but God told me to do it so I’m like, “All right, I’m going to do it.” And so, I just started getting everything going. I found the venue and I started marketing, and finding people to come to the event. So, that was my first event. And so, with Pressing Toward the Mark, it was really just about pressing toward your goal. Whatever goal you have in mind, whatever it is that you want out of life it’s pressing toward that and making sure that you achieve what you want, because we only have one lifetime.
Johannes A:
And so, might as well get what you want out of this life.
Warwick F:
And so, what are some of the keys from your perspective, about pressing towards the mark? How do people do that? What’s some of your key philosophies there?
Johannes A:
In Pressing Toward the Mark, one of them was to … You have to really believe in yourself. And between believing in yourself, having mentorship, and growing was where my key points in that. So, with believing in yourself, the Bible says that as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. And so, if you don’t have the belief in yourself, if you think lowly of yourself, that’s something that we have to become aware of and heal from that, in that sense, to be able to believe in ourselves so that we can achieve what it is that we’re looking to achieve at that point. And then, having mentorship. I had my mentor there as well, and so I pointed that out to the audience, to have people to come in and help to give you positive criticism, or help direct you. What could you have done better? What could you have done different? And things of that sort, to better guide you down the route that you’re going.
Johannes A:
And then growing. Growing as a person is the other huge part of that, is because we can’t excel past who we are. And so, we have to grow to the point of what it is that we’re looking to, whatever it is that we’re looking to grow towards, what it is that the goal that we’re looking to achieve. We can’t grow past that, or we can’t move past that unless we grow to who that person is, and in the thinking of the mind of that person who it is that you’re wanting to be, you have to become that.
Warwick F:
You said a couple very important things, just the importance of mentors. Sometimes we have this attitude, I don’t need help, I can do it all myself, but it’s amazing … You’ve probably found, when you’ve asked, there are probably people that actually are happy to help you, that want to help sometimes, but they go, “Nobody cares, nobody wants to help.” But if you found in your own experience where maybe you’ve asked people to come alongside, that you have found people that actually want to help you get to where you want to go? Has that been your experience?
Johannes A:
Oh, definitely. Definitely. Once you just start talking about what it is that you’re wanting to do, and your mission, your goal, people, yeah. A lot of people are very willing to help. But I think simultaneously, I’ll say with me in the beginning, when I first got started into it and I would have conversations with people, there was still that part of me that didn’t necessarily believe in myself. So, my baggage for me was that I’m not enough. What I ended up making my hand mean about me, was that I’m not enough. And so, when opportunities, when that’s one way how it affected me, when certain opportunities would come around, because I had that belief about myself was that I’m not enough, I messed up certain opportunities. But yeah, people are definitely willing to help. Willing to-
Warwick F:
Yeah. So, how did you overcome that concept of I’m not enough? Because some of it’s internal, but you have a daily physical reminder, and if you choose to go that way you can say … You can look down, okay, I’m not enough. I mean, how did you overcome that concept? Because if you hadn’t overcome that concept life would’ve been very different for you. How’d you get past that?
Johannes A:
So, it was a moment. It was literally in a moment that that was happened. So, some time, it was in last May. I was praying, because at a certain point in my life I was just … At this point in my life, I was just really just feeling stuck in a sense. I was wanting to grow, but I wasn’t sure what was going on. And so, I prayed, I’m like, “Lord, open my eyes up to me beyond the limitations of my understanding.” And so, because at that point I was ready for the answer. It was within about a week and a half to two weeks, I got an answer to that prayer. And so, I remember I was standing right here in my room, and I’m … God had opened my eyes up to a moment back into high school when I … There was moments when I would get teased, and I got made fun of, that he opened my eyes up to that moment.
Johannes A:
And it was in those moments that I took on that identity of I’m not enough. So, those were the moments of my innocence, my trauma that I had then made it mean about me that I’m not enough. But when you look at the moment, none of that means that I’m not enough. None of that means that. When I really look at the moment from a camera’s point of view, nothing in that situation means I’m not enough, but that’s just the identity I then attached onto it. So, once God had opened my eyes up to that, I then, at that point, just affirmed the opposite. And I told myself, “I am enough. Who I am as a person, I am enough.” And really just in saying that, I had to really feel that, really emotionalize that. And from that point moving forward, there … I had to keep in mind too, because there were certain moments that, moving forward, that would trigger that feeling of I’m not enough.
Johannes A:
But then when they would come about, I would catch it. And I would affirm that I am enough. And it’s just a consistent thing of hey, no, Johannes, you are enough.
Warwick F:
Joe, what you’re saying is so profound, because every human being are going to have days when they think, “You know what? I’m not enough. I’m worthless, I’m …” You may not say it out loud, but inside there’s hardly a human that hasn’t had that thought once in a while. Maybe often. And so, being able to affirm no, I am enough, you have a spiritual foundation obviously. I think of Psalm 139 that says, “I am beautifully and wonderfully made.” And it’s hard to say, I mean, really? But from God’s perspective, everything happens for a reason, and he all makes us different. We look different, we have different background skills, but in his eyes we are all perfectly made. It sounds a strange thing to say, but biblically that’s what it says, right?
Johannes A:
Right.
Warwick F:
And so, if you think you’re enough, and God says you’re enough, what more do you need. You and God together, it’s not a bad team. So-
Johannes A:
A good duo, right there.
Warwick F:
Yeah. So, that’s important. And whatever people’s spiritual beliefs, I think just that concept that you are enough, you just have to own that concept. Whatever your anchor is, it might be a different faith, or a different philosophy, spirituality, it’s got to … Unless you start with believing that you are enough, you can’t really do anything. That’s the rock in which you’ve got to found your ability to contribute to the world, and move forward. So, that sounds like that was huge. You’ve had mentors, what are some other aspects of really helping people press towards the mark, and achieve their goals. I mean, how do people grow beyond that?
Johannes A:
I would say it does vary person by person. I mean, a lot of it starts with awareness, and you have to be self-aware in seeing … Being aware of who you are as a person, being aware of your strengths, and your weaknesses, the things that you struggle in. And in being aware of that, just notice. It firstly starts with just noticing where the struggle is. And when you notice it, hey, it’s not right, it’s not wrong, it’s just what is. And so, then at that point you then have to have the desire to … Or, yeah. You have to have the desire to want to grow at that point. It’s easy for us, as human beings, just to stay where we are, to stay in our comfort zone. But it’s like you have to have the desire to really want to grow and get out of our comfort zone. And so, at that point, once you become …
Johannes A:
You start becoming aware of it, for me hey, I noticed that I was … I struggled getting out of bed in the morning. I struggle with procrastinating a lot, I struggle with my discipline. Notice those areas where the areas of struggle, and then become aware of it. And in becoming aware of it, then you start working on doing something about it. Sometimes just take little baby steps, sometimes just hey, if I struggle getting out of bed in the morning, then let me put my alarm clock across the room. Find one little step, just take little baby steps instead of trying to conquer the whole mountain at the first step.
Warwick F:
Yeah. I mean, one of the things we talk about in Crucible Leadership, is small wins. I mean, I’m not somebody by nature that moves a million miles an hour. I’m a sort of thoughtful person, which can be good. But so, sometimes the mountain can seem overwhelming, but it’s like if you look back, okay, what did I accomplish today? Okay, I did this, this, and that. Okay, if you connect enough small wins it ends up being a big win. But rather than saying, “Oh, that’s impossible, I’ll never, like in your case, be a motivational speaker, I’ll never do this and that.” Okay, what’s a small win? Maybe I can talk to somebody, maybe I can prepare, maybe I can practice with friends and neighbors. I mean, there’s probably a series of small steps you’ve taken to get to your goal.
Warwick F:
Rather than saying, “Okay, gee, I don’t know if I’ll be able to speak at, I don’t know, Staples Center, or something in L.A., or some massive auditorium. And gee, that feels a little far away.” Okay, well maybe one day. But let’s start a little smaller. Maybe there’s some place locally. You know what I mean? Sometimes you can set the bar so high that unless you do that today, then I’ll fail. Well then, okay, just small step at a time, right? Does that make sense?
Johannes A:
Yeah. Yeah, no, definitely. And that’s something that I really been attaching onto more and more. And I have it written at the top of my white board here, just 1% every day. Just a 1% gain every day, and at the end of the year you’ve grown 365%.
Gary S:
That is a fantastic word, and I will take my one small step as the cohost of the show, to say that I think that I also heard the captain turn on the fasten seatbelt sign, and it’s getting to the point that we’re going to be moving toward landing the plane. Joe, before we do that, and Warwick asks you another question or two, are there places in social media that folks can find you? One of the things I thought fascinating about your story, and it went by really quickly, but you mentioned that you got your start in reaching out and helping people manage those things that torment them, those things that challenge them by using YouTube videos. And that is a fascinating way to leverage that technology to live a life of significance. But how can people, if they want to know more about Joe Atlas, and your speaking, and your conferences, how can they find you?
Johannes A:
Yeah. So, right now I’m working on a website, that’ll be up pretty soon here. It’s JoeAtlasSpeaks.com. It’s not up yet, but when it does come up … Facebook, you can look up my business page. It’s Speaking To The You In You. That’s the name of my company, and then on Instagram it’s J-O underscore speaks.
Warwick F:
So, I know one of the things you talk about is … And that’s been your whole life, is not letting crucibles, not letting challenges define you. For those people that may be listening right now, and they’re going through a crucible, it could be physical, personal, a marriage breakup, a death of a loved one, getting fired, I mean, how do you avoid letting your crucibles, letting your challenges define you? What’s the way out?
Johannes A:
I would say that whatever the situation was, whatever your crucible was, however it made you feel, you are completely valid for how you feel. That’s first and foremost, I want people to know that. You’re completely valid for how you feel. But now, looking at it, knowing what you know now, do you want to continue to feel that way? And that’s a big thing that people sometimes, we as people, have to take the time to answer. Do we want to continue to feel that way? And then, if not then what is it that I want to do moving forward, but wherever that area that brings us the most hurt, or trauma, wherever the area of our struggle is, we have to work to bring resolution to that area so that we can move forward in what we’re dealing with.
Gary S:
I have been in the communication business long enough, gentlemen, to know when the last word on a subject is spoken. And Mr. Joe Atlas, you spoke the perfect last word in our conversation for today. Well, so I’m going to do what … I mean, there’s a lot. I’ve pulled three takeaways, I think listeners can take from our conversation. There’s a lot more than that, but the three that sort of leapt off to me, and Joe, I got to tell you I do this in every episode, and it took exactly 45 seconds of you speaking when I wrote down number one. So, you’re the fastest person to the finish line on a takeaway that I’ve done yet.
Johannes A:
Awesome.
Gary S:
But takeaway one from this conversation, listener, I think is this. Take the time in the midst of your crucibles to, as Joe did, figure it out. There’s no timer on moving beyond your crucible in most cases. It’s not like an action movie where the hero has to diffuse a bomb before the numbers on the dial get to double zeroes. You can press into the pain, face the challenges, look at the lessons you’re being taught, and then apply them as you press ahead at your pace. Second takeaway, believe you can bounce back. Truly believe that. We hear the word mindset a lot these days, it’s a popular term. And as Joe put it, he built a figure-it-out mentality in navigating life with his physical challenge. He was encouraged by his parents that there was no limitation he could not conquer. You find that encouragement in your own crucible.
Gary S:
It might be your parents, your spouse, your friends, whoever it is find a person or people who give you support that you need to conquer your crucible. And then the third point, give to others. Become a mentor. Help them with the challenges they face, talk to them about their emotions. Help them articulate and pursue their goals. Again, as Joe put it, funny, as all three of these points I say as Joe put it, as Joe put it help them press toward the mark. Help them understand that they are enough. Listeners, thank you for spending this time with us on Beyond the Crucible. Warwick and I have a little favor to ask you. If you enjoyed this conversation, if you got some insight and some hope and encouragement from it, we ask that you would click subscribe on the app in which you’re listening to the show. We also ask that you drop by and leave us a rating.
Gary S:
The more ratings and subscriptions we get, the more people we can bring these insights, like Joe Atlas has shared with us today, to more folks. And until that next time that we are together, please remember this. Your crucible experiences are painful. Joe described some very painful, traumatic situations. He did it with some lilt in his voice, but the pain was real of what he experienced. But the beauty of that, it was not the end of his story. It was just the start of his story. And it can be the start of your story, your crucible can be, if you learn the lessons of them. If you apply some of the lessons we talked about here. And the reason that it can be the start of your story is that it brings you to a place, you learn those lessons, you leverage those lessons to a place that allows you to pursue a new story that can be the most rewarding one of your life. And it is rewarding because as it has done for Joe, as it has done for Warwick, it leads at the end of the day to a life of significance.
Bringing a vision to reality is not easy. You might have a vision for a new business you want to start. You might want to take your department at your company to the next level. Or you might have a nonprofit you want to start that you just know will help people that so need to be helped. But once you have such a vision, what do you do with it? Getting a team on board with your vision is not easy. How can anyone fully grasp the vision you have? How can anyone be as passionate about it as you are? And therefore, how can anyone do as good a job as you would in making it a reality?
But the paradox is that without a team, typically our vision won’t happen. It will be dead on arrival – if it actually arrives. If we want our vision to become reality, in most cases we have to have a team by our side to make that vision a reality. So how do assemble a good team? If we are honest with ourselves we often have a lot of internal resistance to bringing on a team. We will have to overcome the following preconceptions we may well have in building that team:
A team won’t get the vision
Everything is going to take so long; implementation by committee is a nightmare
Inevitably there will be division and conflict which, of course, will make things take even longer
How do we move beyond these mental and practical blockages? Here are some tips to assembling a good team and alleviating at least some of the above challenges.
1) Change your attitude.
Your vision almost certainly will not become reality without help. That means you need a team. And yes, it might seem like things will take longer as you discuss steps and initiatives with your team. But remember, you want your vision to happen, so time spent hiring the right team and making sure that your team is on the same page is time well spent. Your desire for your vision to come to fruition should fuel your patience.
2) Hire for character, attitude and alignment to the vision.
In typical hiring practices, we look for those most skilled and qualified for the job. Do they have great experience at great organizations? Do they have good grades from great schools? While this is not wrong, qualifications and experience, while important, are not the most important hiring criteria. Character, attitude and alignment to the vision are. You can train for skills — at least to a large degree — but it is much harder to train for character, attitude and alignment to the vision. You want people who are driven, yet humble (Level 5 leaders, as Jim Collins calls them in Good to Great). They put the team first, before their own success. They don’t always have to be right. They truly want to listen to others. They are curious and love to learn. They are reliable. They get done what they say they will get done. They are also 100 percent committed to the vision. When you find people like this, do not let them go!
3) You want a team with a diverse set of skills.
In particular, you want a team with a different and a complementary set of skills to yours. If you are a founder or a visionary, you will often be driven and passionate about your vision. You may well be entrepreneurial and impatient to get moving immediately, and may not want to take too long thinking things through. “What we need is action and action now!” is one of your favorite phrases. Fair enough. But you might want to surround yourself with some thoughtful and reliable implementers who will think things through step by step. Depending on your organization, you may well need engineers, manufacturing and operations people, research and development, marketing and sales, financial people. A diverse range of skills. In a smaller start-up business or non-profit, you might just have two or three people on your team. Figure out what key skills are needed to compliment your own, even if the personality of those types of people really annoy you. You might find engineers frustrating because it seems like all they say is that your dream is not practical. The financial folks might say that what you are trying to sell is too costly. The sales and marketing people might say that there is no market for your product. But the collective wisdom of a diverse team is powerful.
4) You need to be the chief evangelist for your vision.
Your primary job as the founder and visionary, is to get your team on board. You do that in two ways. First you talk about your vision often, at all times and in many ways. Second, you ask your team what the vision means to them and to their department. What does the vision look like in engineering, manufacturing, finance, and marketing and sales? Then ask them, how the vision could be improved. Yes this is risky, but if the vision is improved, why turn away a good idea?
5) You need to be patient.
By this stage, you have hopefully hired the right team; character, attitude, and alignment to the vision first, skills second. You have a team with a diverse set of skills that are complementary to your own skills. You have also continually communicated your vision to your team and asked them for input into the vision. Once you have done all this, you need to be patient. You need to honor the process. You need to wait. Yes, “wait,” that dreaded word. Trust your team! Yes, that means honoring the process, allowing your team to have input each step of the way, listening to push back, working it through, getting resolution. It all takes time. A lot of time sometimes. But it is worth it.
Being patient, hiring the right team with character, attitude and who are aligned to the vision, with a diverse set of skills, takes time. It also takes time continually reminding your team of the vision and continually listening for input. Why bother with all of this? Because your vision is important. The world needs your vision. So you need to be patient, hire the right people, honor the process, including listening to your team’s input. If your vision is too important to fail, it is too important for you to be impatient.
Reflection
Think about your attitude. If you are a go-it-alone impatient visionary, what is the first step you need to take in changing your attitude?
What are the critical character and attitude qualities you need for your business or non-profit to succeed; and how will you ensure that your hiring practices are changed to include these qualities as well as ensuring that new hires are aligned to the vision?
What processes and mechanisms will you put in place to ensure that your great and committed team is heard and has buy in, so that your vision truly does become reality?
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/
What do you do as a thought leader when crucible experiences force you to face that you’re a “practice struggler”? That’s the situation Kaley Klemp faced when she and her husband, Nate, hit a patch in their marriage so rocky they wondered if it might be the end. But they fought their way back by changing their mindsets from seeking fairness from each other to showing radical generosity to each other. In the process, they applied some of the very team-building skills each had learned in their careers to bolstering their relationship — a journey they capture in their new book, THE 80-80 MARRIAGE: A New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship. Kaley explains in this interview with Crucible Leadership founder and BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE host Warwick Fairfax that strong marriages, like strong leaders, need ample doses of vulnerability and authenticity.
To learn more about Kaley Klemp and The 80-80 Marriage, visit www.kaleyklemp.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/
Transcript
Warwick F:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership.
Kaley K:
My husband and I tangled our handlebars on a bike ride and, as we fell, he fell harder and also hit his head. And so there was this dual experience of traumatic brain injuries and not having a community. I was not near family where … And I didn’t have many people. I was brand new. There wasn’t even a friend network to go to. And so, in that space, my husband and I ended up, we just hooked each other’s negative thinking patterns and instead of moving closer together in that crucible, there was a moment where we really started to move apart. And there was a conversation where both of us said to each other, “You aren’t the person that I married. I’m not sure what’s happening here, but this isn’t going to work.” So there was very much a moment where we weren’t sure we were going to make it as a couple.
Gary S:
For a married couple, crucibles don’t get much more serious than that. In the midst of an already difficult time, confronting the thought that the love you vowed would last forever might not even last a few more months; yet, that is exactly where today’s guest, Kaley Klemp, found herself a few years ago.
Gary S:
Hi, I’m Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show and the communications director for Crucible Leadership. On today’s episode, Warwick talks to Kaley about how her relationship with her husband, Nate, got to such a perilous crossroads and how the two of them were able to pull it back from the precipice. The key, you’ll hear, was in changing their paradigm from marriage being about “fairness” to making it about radical generosity. It’s impossible, Kaley argues, for any relationship, particularly a lifelong romantic one, to be 50/50. That’s why the Klemps wrote, The 80/80 Marriage, which makes the compelling case that both spouses have to be committed to giving more than they expect to receive to make wedded bliss a reality. And here’s the bonus for professionals like the Klemps and many of you, our listeners: The principal she discusses are wise practices for the boardroom as well as the living room.
Warwick F:
I’d love to hear a little about Kaley and maybe where you grew up and your family, just a bit about kind of the background of who is Kaley Warner Klemp and what makes you, so to speak.
Kaley K:
I love that question. Well, thank you, Gary. Thank you, Warwick. I’m so delighted to be here. So I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, which happens to be where I live now. And little girl, one of the things that I think is kind of neat about my past is that my parents decided when I was in kindergarten that I would be in the bilingual class in my elementary school. And so I’m not sure if you know much about Boulder, Colorado. It is not well-known for its diversity, and yet, I got to be in classrooms in kindergarten through sixth grade where for that entire period of time, I think I was the only girl in my class who spoke English at home. And it’s a neat place to start to develop perspective and empathy. And I have to think that some of that fueled my desire to understand people even more that shows up in my life today. I’m the oldest of three kids. We got a brother and a sister. My folks are still right here in Boulder. I’m really lucky that my family is awesome.
Warwick F:
Well, I think you would tell me earlier that Nate’s parents are also from Boulder and I think you said what? All your families is pretty much within 45 minutes or at least your parents and Nate’s parents. You have a daughter. I mean, that’s… I’m assuming you probably get on reasonably well with them all. I mean, it could be a blessing or not.
Kaley K:
Thankfully, we don’t live under one roof. I think that would be too close. But I know, it’s been Warwick such a gift that if I think about it through the lens of my nine year old, it really is a village that’s helping to raise her. Today, actually, she is with my parents up skiing in the mountains. So there’s something really magical about… I think my in-laws are phenomenal. I’m one of the just luckiest people in the world that all of the mother-in-law stories don’t apply for me. She’s actually wonderful. And I didn’t grow up near my grandparents. My parents were both from Michigan and my grandparents, when I was little, I was in Colorado, and they were in Michigan and Florida. And seeing my daughter’s closeness with her grandparents, I wouldn’t trade lives with anybody except maybe her.
Warwick F:
Well, That is so neat. My parents are no longer living, but they were in Australia, and I’ve lived here since the early ’90s. And my wife’s parents were from Ohio, so we saw them and then spent part of the year in Florida. So we saw them quite a lot. But I think people don’t appreciate it. A little bit off track here, but life in Australia is very different than here, because Australia’s the same size geographically as the United States, but there’s not that many people, not a whole lot in the middle. So if you are from Sydney which I am, pretty much all your friends, they’ll go to university… Sydney University, University of South Wales.
Warwick F:
I have an older sister that has four daughters and they all live pretty near. Now if you’re more than 20 minutes, you’re like, “Oh, my gosh. The other side of the Harbour Bridge.” You’re like, “Forever.” So I didn’t realize in Australia, being near family’s not that uncommon, because if you’re from Sydney, why would go somewhere else? Nothing against Melbourne, but you just get used to Sydney. In America, it’s very different. People are everywhere, like obviously your experience in Michigan.
Warwick F:
So it sounds like you had pretty good upbringing and I think I saw some of the TEDx talk when you’re a little girl and the whole peanut butter and jelly shoelace thing. That’s so, so neat. I guess some maybe some perfectionist tendency I think is probably the story. But there was a good point there. It was a fun image and fun story.
Kaley K:
I appreciate you watching. Yeah, indeed, I was… Some perfectionist tendencies for sure and a bit of a precocious little girl to scold my mother on her sandwich making skills.
Warwick F:
So before we get into 80/80 marriage, what lead you on the path that you’re on, because you just have a passion for leadership and helping leaders think maybe more holistically from everything from values inventory to Enneagram mindset? Was it something about your upbringing or family? What led you on the journey that you’re on? What’s the origin story, if you will, of why you do what you do?
Kaley K:
Yeah. That’s a great question as well. So I can actually trace it to a moment. So my dad, when I was growing up, he was an entrepreneur and ran a software company once upon a time when computers took up entire rooms rather than in our pockets. He laughs now about it, like, “I remember having to program in the middle of the night, because it was the only time it was cool enough or the computer would overheat.”
Warwick F:
Oh, jeez.
Kaley K:
So totally different world. But he was part of an organization called YPO or Young Presidents Organization. And when he sold his company, he was asked to come facilitate some events. And in 1999, he asked me… I was in university… so he said, “Hey, do you want to come see what I’m up to? Do you want to come participate in this event that I facilitating?” I said, “Sure.” How interesting could it be?
Kaley K:
So I went to the event and that was the moment in 1999 where I absolutely fell in love with this tool set and knew that I wanted to be committed to it. And really specifically what it was that through that experience, I saw people see themselves more clearly, see some of the patterns and the choices that they have been making in their lives more clearly and that facilitated a path for them to actually make different choices and to do things differently in their lives going forward. So as you saw in my TED talk, I don’t think that should get us very far, but I actually think deep self-understanding and making choices can. And seeing that happen for person after person, I was hooked. It was like, “Okay. I want to do that.”
Warwick F:
Hmm. So there’s something about just helping people understand who they are. I think people intellectually realize that that’s important, but somehow that particular vision resonated very deeply. Because somebody could have said, “Oh, that’s neat. But okay, that’s important.” But why did you feel like that was for you? Why did that tug at your heartstrings or why that piece of music, if you will, really feel like, “This really fits who I am and what I believe in.”
Kaley K:
Gosh. That’s an excellent question. I think it was mostly about having people… To your point, it was that they saw themselves more clearly, but I think they also were able then to see the ways that they were creating… I’m going to call it suffering. And there are different flavors of that… certainly very acute, dramatic and also more subtle, almost like a rock in your shoe kind of suffering. But in seeing that, they could realize what some of the things we have been doing were costing them, and that to me… I think what tugged at my heartstring was recognizing, “This was a way that I could participate in people making their own lives better.”
Kaley K:
And then I think about… and gosh, again, this goes back to COVID where there’s so much about contagiousness… the idea of if I can help people be contagious for good in their own lives and in the companies that they’re leading, in the teams that they’re on, in the families that they’re members of, that I think really pulled at my heart.
Warwick F:
Right. Because I think, probably a bit like you, good leadership can make such a difference. I have three kids. They’re in their 20s. And I’ve done my fair share of helping them prep for interviews and somewhat good at that, got a lot of practice, and throw out all these questions, “Why do you want this job?” And “What about you really fits here,? and “What are your strengths?” And then the awful question is “What are your weaknesses?” How do you answer that and still be positive, but yet be honest?
Kaley K:
Exactly. And have it not feel like the person on the other side is like, “That’s not a real weakness. Thanks for trying.”
Warwick F:
Yeah. Like when I applied to Harvard Business School, you don’t want to write, “Well, I’m a bit of a workaholic, and I’m so dedicated to studying that all my other life goes by the wayside.” It’s just so trite. But what I tell them is, “Assume that most bosses you’ll work for won’t be good.” They might be really good, but it’s not like 90% of bosses are clued in, empathetic, strong leaders, but yet listen. It’s just, don’t assume that’s normal, because it’s just not. It’s typically if you have an issue in performance, the time you find out is when the pink slip happens and you’re fired and it’s like, “Well, I just don’t like giving negative feedback and it just makes me feel uncomfortable. So I feel better if I just ask you to leave that way we don’t… It’s easier for me.”
Kaley K:
It’s so funny. I was-
Warwick F:
And that’s normal.
Kaley K:
… actually having this conversation this morning with somebody who runs people and talent. And the conversation that we were in is the imperative of early and direct feedback for exactly the reason that you’re saying that if you give constructive feedback early, then people know what to work on, they know where they stand, there’s clear expectations and there aren’t surprises later on. For the piece that we were talking about, that’s really interesting that I think you’re alluding to is the hidden cost of trust when there isn’t that conversation. Because then people who they think they’re doing well, because they also aren’t receiving feedback, start to have that worry in the back of their minds, “Is that pink slip coming for me?” And so, there’s a distrust of absence of feedback or too much positive feedback, if there isn’t the balance of constructive feedback.
Warwick F:
Yeah. So obviously in the family business I grew up in, which listeners will know, was a large, 150-year-old family media business. There were times, especially when it was it founded, where it was run very well. John Farifax, my great-great-grandfather, he was… Everything he… It would have been… I don’t if he did the 80/80 marriage, but he had a wonderful marriage, great relationship with his kids, an elder at his church, his employees loved him and he grew a very successful business. It’s really everything was in balance. But there were days in more recent past when it wasn’t really so well run.
Warwick F:
But I can think of one episode that really illustrates, perhaps, good leadership, some of the things you probably advocate, is years ago, before I went to Oxford, I had an internship at J. Walter Thompson, which was a big advertising agency back in the day, about four or five ad agency mergers ago. And there was a guy out from Canada who was running the Australian operation, and he made a point at these all hands meeting appraising people. It so happened that that local agency had the local Kellogg’s account.
Warwick F:
And so he said, “I’ve been chatting to the J. Walter Thompson folks back in the U.S. and North America and they said that the work that you’ve done here on Kelloggs has created some of the best work that Kellogg has seen worldwide at J. Walter Thompson.” He said that to the team, and I thought, “Boy, that’s good leadership. He’s praising them specifically in amidst their peers who also worked there.” So that sounds like a normal thing to do, but that’s not normal, that kind of specific praise. One of the things I say, one of my little adages is, “When it comes to praise, if you see something, say something…
Kaley K:
Absolutely.
Warwick F:
… and be specific and encourage.” It’s one of my highest values. But anyway, that’s a whole other discussion.
Kaley K:
I think that the specificity is one of the things that so often also gets lost. The generic email that says, “Hey, team, good job.” It means a little something, but very quickly finds its way to the delete folder; whereas, the specificity of the recognition, who said it, to whom, I think to your point has it stick and feel really more significant and true.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. So before we get to 80/80 marriage, I know, speaking of origin stories, from what I understand, there was a bit of an origin story, 2007 was not a good year. I know I’m reminded of Queen Elizabeth who she had a year she called her annus horribilis, a horrible year, in which Windsor Castle almost burnt down and it was pretty tough year for her. Pretty remarkable woman. What is she, like 95, and still riding horses? It’s unbelievable. I think her husband’s like 97, and I think they’re trying to discourage him from driving as much as before, because he’s had of couple accidents. But look, we all would have over 95. So talk about 2007 and why that was such a tough year and how that was part of the back story of where 80/80 marriage and the book came from.
Kaley K:
Yeah. It’s a hard story in some respects, because, as you were saying, Gary, when we started the show, it’s not necessarily fun to go back and relive. We refer to them as the dark years. So the backstory of 2007 is that… So I’m originally from Colorado. I went to school in California, more of a West Coast mountain past, and moved out to New Jersey to be with my brand-new husband. And people would ask, “Oh, you’re newlyweds. How’s the extended honeymoon?” And that was not our experience. The way it happened was my younger sister, about to turn 20, was a student at Boston and was a pedestrian hit by a drunk driver. And so, she was in the hospital. She was in a coma. Experienced quite a number of physical injuries. Spent some time in a wheelchair. Traumatic brain injury. And that was the beginning of this year of our marriage.
Kaley K:
Right on the heels of that, literally weeks later, my husband and I tangled our handlebars on a bike ride and as we fell, he fell harder and also hit his head. And so, there was this dual experience of traumatic brain injuries and not having a community. I was not near family, where… And I didn’t have many people. I was brand new. There wasn’t even a friend network to go to. And so, in that space, my husband and I ended up, we just hooked each other’s negative thinking patterns and instead of moving closer together in that crucible, there was a moment where we really started to move apart. And there was a conversation where both of us said to each other, “You aren’t the person that I married. I’m not sure what’s happening here, but this isn’t going to work.” So there was very much a moment where we weren’t sure we were going to make it as a couple.
Kaley K:
And so, as I fast forward to two springs ago, out on a hike… which now we do date nights also, but really most committed date hikes… there was that backdrop and looking back and wondering. Really the catalyst of this book, The 80/80 Marriage, is about the context of modern marriage and looking at, “Hey, now against this backdrop where we’re with our partners, we want things to be fair. We treat each other as equals. And oh my goodness, the list of things that we are trying to accomplish in a day, a week, a month, really is quite extensive. How do you do that and stay connected and in love?”
Kaley K:
We often would refer back to 2007 and say, “What do we wish we had known then? How do we wish we had been able to establish our mindset? Gosh, if we could go give advice to ourselves back in 2007… who knows how stubborn we would have been and whether or not we would have taken good advice… but we’re do we wish we had laid a different foundation?” And now, when I work with leaders and with couples and based on the hundred interviews that we did with couples to say, “What are the tools and what are the practices that help those really work?”
Gary S:
Can I go back to 2007? Because I want to get one little slice of emotion from you in that you and your husband at that time professionally were making it work. You were in a professional context working with leaders. You were thought leaders. And you came to a point where you realized, I think… you tell me if this is what happened… but you were thought leaders who realized that maybe you were practice strugglers. What did that feel like? As your advising people, “Here’s the proper way to navigate work relationships,” you’re having trouble navigating your marriage relationship. What kind of dissonance did that cause for you emotionally?
Kaley K:
That’s a great question, Gary. If I were going to look back and analyze what I was doing at that point in time, I was using work as a way to escape from how hard things were in my personal life. And so, in some ways, I think I was able to compartmentalize and say, “Hey, professional relationships are different from intimate relationships.” And out of one side of my mouth, I think I might still say that’s true. But I think they are actually much more closely connected than I would have given them credit for. I think the dissonance, to your point, was happening from the perspective of saying, “I can’t do this” and the facing into the struggle and the sadness and then not having the cover story of… I don’t know about you, it’s easier said on a podcast or on a Zoom or give a talk and here’s the shiniest, most palatable version of myself to then trying to turn off the camera and really cry quite hard.
Warwick F:
It’s interesting that you were both successful, obviously. You’ve got a whole consulting, coaching career. You mentioned husband. Is he an academic, consultant? He’s pretty successful in his own right.
Kaley K:
Yeah. Yeah. At that point in time, he was getting his PhD. So we both… We met at Boulder High, which I think is such a cute part of our story. We were chemistry lab partners. I will save you all of the puns. And then, both went off to Stanford, and then I stayed in California when he went to New Jersey. So he was getting his PhD at Princeton. But to your point, winning teaching awards, publishing his dissertation, doing research, to then be a professor at Pepperdine where many, many students were looking up to him in the same way that leaders would look to me. And so, there is a moment, too, of, “Are we taking our own advice and what advice do we have to take?”
Warwick F:
Well, it is interesting. The old joke when you may be chatting to… I don’t know… some support folks. For instance, if you have an Apple computer and you have an issue, the support teams are so incredible. They’re so helpful. But you wonder if they get off the phone… You could be talking to them for an hour about something so stupidly simple and says, “That’s okay. No, that’s fine. I can help you with the next step.” And they get off the phone with their significant other and probably zero patience and maybe start yelling and it’s like, “Okay. So you seem to be so good professionally, so calm, so patient. And then when it comes to family, where is that person? Where did they go? Is it captured by aliens? What is the deal here?” It’s probably something that you find that not only other people, but did you find that you and your husband professionally how you dealt with people was very different than how you dealt internally?
Kaley K:
Gosh. I’m thinking about my nine-year-old daughter who she will come home from school and she would have a fit or be upset or no manners. I’m like, “I don’t understand. Your teacher says you’re so good.” She said to me once, “Mom, I used up all my good behavior at school.” And so I think-
Warwick F:
Sounds like you can identify with that a bit, huh?
Kaley K:
I guess. And so that’s the story that I’m thinking about where I think there can be a moment where it’s “I used up all my patience” or “I used up all my good behavior” or “I used up all my good questions. And I think there’s a bit of… I’m going to call a reprioritization where in recognizing… And I think about this a lot in present day is, “Who are my most important relationships and am I treating them as such” or “Am I using up all my good behavior with strangers and giving my most precious relationships… my husband, my daughter, my family, my dearest friends… the dregs?” And if that’s the case, “How can I adjust where I’m spending my time and energy so that I’m nurturing those that I would say are most important?”
Warwick F:
It’s funny how often we devote so much time to professional lives. Obviously, you want to look and act professional, be understanding, because if you don’t, it’s not good for your career. Nobody wants to work with somebody that’s just rants, raves, impatient. It’s not a good way to get promoted or to get business. So, that’s an obvious, it’s going to hurt my career, paycheck. I can’t do that. At home, it’s not the same. But I know you do a lot of things like 360-degree feedbacks, Enneagram, values inventory. Do you ever laughingly say, “I wonder if I did a personal values inventory about what’s important to me?”
Warwick F:
I don’t do as much executive coaching with… I’ve got a book coming out next year and do a bunch of other things. But one of the things that I would sometimes ask clients, “Tell me about your values and then to what degree do you think that you’re living your values?” Then I would say with a straight face… if they say, “Well, I’m not really living that…” “Okay. Would you prefer to change your values or change what you’re doing?” And I would say it with a straight face, because as a coach, it’s the client’s choice. If they want to change their values, who am I to judge somebody else, some other human being? I actually, as a coach, really believe not judging other people’s paths. Everybody has their own journey. Well, 99.9% of sane people aren’t going to say, “I’m going to change my values.” Okay. Well, then… Just so many people that are going so fast, they’re not thinking, “I actually may not be living my values.” So if you probably rated values, I’m guessing family wouldn’t be, I don’t know, value number 80, I’m guessing.
Kaley K:
Right. Right. Exactly.
Warwick F:
It’s probably up there somewhere. So if you did a values inventory and then compared how much is Kaley living some of those… I’m not picking on you. All of us would be in there. You’d be like, “Hmm. I teach this stuff. I have a values inventory. Hundreds if not thousands of gone through it.” And then, “Okay. Hmm.” You probably had that moment.
Kaley K:
Oh, my goodness. For sure. And I think you pointed to it. There’s the cobbler whose children have no shoes. In doing the work with and for other people, there can be a forgetfulness around doing the work for yourself. And in some ways, this is a really beautiful bridge to 80/80 that we start with the mindset of radical generosity. So instead of 50/50 fairness to stretch to 80/80, to radical generosity.
Kaley K:
But what you’re describing is one of the foundational principles of shared success. And first is really, “Do you know your own values?” And then, “Have you had the conversation with your partner to ensure that those values align.” So to your point, we actually now have a chalkboard in our kitchen. We’re that family. We put our values. And we’ll have conversations often on our hikes where we’ll ask, “Hey. Are we living in alignment with these? Are we choosing love or are we choosing something else? Are we choosing impact or are we choosing something else? And if we’re choosing something else, to your point, is there a different value that now is superseding the ones we have or is there an adjustment that needs to take place in our lives?”
Kaley K:
And what I’ve found and what we’ve found is that knowing those values lets you set clearer priorities and that installs your boundaries where you can say yes and no to things with a much clearer conscience, because it’s rooted in… Love is a value of ours. That quality of relationship which shows up with my job or with my husband, with my family, that’s important. And if I’m not living that, gosh, I need to make different choices.
Warwick F:
I think what you’re saying is so important, and I think it was Socrates who said something like, “Unexamined life is not worth living.” Well, you’ve got to know yourself, but you’ve also got to know your partner, the person that, in your case, married to and what you collectively think is important. And so many people, they’re so busy with to-do lists and if you have young kids, “I got to take my kid to soccer, ballet, whatever it is.” And it’s who’s doing what and where and “I got to work late.” It’s you have conversations on to-do lists, rather than who are we, what are we about?
Warwick F:
So talk about this, because I’m fascinated with everybody talks about fairness, 50/50, how do you split things up? And so this whole idea of radical generosity… So talk about the old paradigm and the new paradigm. What’s the difference between the typical, “It’s all got to be 50/50. Split it down the middle,” which it’s hard to argue against fairness. It doesn’t sound like such a terrible concept. But talk about how what you’re advocating is radically different.
Kaley K:
Yeah. Well so, if fairness worked, I would say we should keep it. The trouble is that it doesn’t actually work, and it takes me to introduce, there was this brilliant story where a couple was talking about their relationship with their parents and they were saying, “So we did Father’s Day with your family, and so we’re going to do Mother’s Day with my family. Well, for your family, we left on Friday and came back on Sunday, so for my family, we should leave on Friday and come back on Sunday.” And it was hilarious, because what they were talking about, when they actually unpacked it, both of them said, “Neither of us wants to go for the same duration. We only want to go Saturday for lunch.” And yet because we had to make it fair, there was all sorts of kind of horse trading around things that they didn’t actually even want.
Kaley K:
So one way it doesn’t work is because you end up advocating for things that you don’t really even desire. And the second reason it doesn’t work is it’s actually a psychological principle, which is called availability bias. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it. But the idea is I know everything that I do in service of our relationship. So I know every soccer practice that I drop off at. I know every thank you card that I write. And I also know every invisible hour that I spend thinking about Thanksgiving dinner and who’s gluten-free and what we should serve and how to arrange it so that it’s COVID safe, et cetera, et cetera. My partner doesn’t know most of those things, and I don’t know most of the things that they’re up to. Some things I can see where I watch him drive the trash cans down the driveway to have the trash go out, but I miss, “Hey, did he have to have a conversation to fix something that happened in our finances or who’s waiting for the cable guy?” There’s so much that’s invisible that fairness ends up being where I completely overestimate the things that I’m doing and underestimate the things that you’re doing. So we can never even get to an accurate picture to strive for fairness.
Warwick F:
Boy, that is so well-said. And some of it, too, there’ll be things that each person is good at and not good at. In my case, I married an American girl, who I met in Australia. We’ve been married actually a little over 30 years and very blessed. And she’s very creative. She’s an interior designer by profession, and she’s just… We have a wonderful home. She’s incredible cook. I’m not. So if we did 50/50 fairness about cooking, the family would suffer. That wouldn’t be so… Now, obviously, happy to wash dishes and all that and take lead on that. My kids are in their 20s, so they’re obviously at an age where they actually can help with that. But she’s creative, so she really doesn’t like numbers. That’s not right or wrong. It’s how she’s wired. So she’s happy for me to do the finances and because I’m from Australia, it can be a little bit complicated between Australian stuff and U.S. stuff and it gets a tad complex.
Warwick F:
But when it comes to major decisions, whoever’s taking the lead will make sure the other person’s informed and you’re on the same page. But we’ve come to a rhythm where we both do what we’re good at and interested in. If something needs to be fixed, I’m pretty detail orientated, so I’m like the secretary basically, which I’m happy to be my wife’s secretary. I have no problem with that. “Warwick, you need to call this contractor or this and arrange this.” Got it. I’ll make it happen. And so it happens. So I don’t know. It’s more just making sure each person does what they can contribute. So I don’t know. Does that make sense or fit at all?
Kaley K:
Yeah. Well, so I think you’re saying two things that are really connected. So one is about you would miss out on joy if you tried to make it totally fair to the point of she enjoys cooking. Not only would the family suffer… I’m not …cooking too much… but there’s a space where she enjoys it. So trying to make it fair actually is in that negative. I think the other thing that you’re speaking to you though is intentional roles. That one of the things that we found especially in our interviews is that people will end up doing things just because they do. And we fondly refer to it as the wing-it approach.
Kaley K:
There was one couple we were talking with, and I thought it was so funny where the dad was saying, “I don’t know exactly how this happened, but I’m the toothbrush guy.” There was no conversation about it, but if he’s not there, the children don’t brush their teeth. He’s like, “There’s something very strange about this.” But there’s a way that you and your wife it sounds like have made really wise choices where you say, “I’m going to take the more detail-oriented things. I’m going to take more of the financial piece.” And she says, “I’m going to take the creative or the design or the cooking piece.” But you both know, so there’s not toe stepping nor is there resentment where she’s like, “How come I’m not doing that?” And you’re like… You’re also not saying, “How come you’re not balancing this account?”
Warwick F:
Right. Right. It’s true. I don’t know where it fits, because I’m no expert on marriage or whatever, but certainly other concepts that… words like acceptance and forgiveness. For instance, I grew up in a very wealthy background, so I’m not like Mr. Fix It. Yes, I can assemble an Ikea piece of furniture, but if you want me to-
Kaley K:
You’re better than I am.
Warwick F:
If you want me to build a deck, no. I’m not the build-a-deck guy.
Gary S:
It’s funny. I did not grow up in a very wealthy background, and I can’t do that stuff either. I can hammer a nail in the wall, but that’s about it.
Warwick F:
So it’s not just me. Okay. That’s good to know.
Kaley K:
We’re all in good company here.
Gary S:
There you go.
Warwick F:
Yeah. I guess my point is my wife’s dad, he was a oral surgeon and did fine and all that. But he was Mr. Fix It. So it’s like, “Well, my dad can do this and this. Why do you have to call someone?” Well, fortunately, we had the means to do that, but I don’t have any interest in that nor am I good at it. And so, we each had some things in which we had to accept about the other. And then, when we make mistakes, obviously, I’m a big believer in forgive and communication, I’m hypervigilant about communication. I’m often accused of over-communicating.
Kaley K:
Is there such a thing?
Warwick F:
If I think there’s 1% chance there’s an issue, make sure there’s not. I’m very vigilant that way. So acceptance, forgiveness, where does that fit into the 80/80 concept, because obviously these are not new concepts. What’s your thought about all that?
Kaley K:
I think that that would fit in that mindset pillar. We think about mindset and structure as being the two pillars. But in this mindset of radical generosity, there’s, in some ways, three mutually reinforcing positive things. So one is this idea of contribution. So I want to show up giving my best. But I think what you’re describing is wearing the glasses of appreciation, rather than those of criticism. That as you’re contributing the gifts to us and the family, I notice those, I speak to those, I recognize those, I appreciate you for them, rather than wearing my glasses always a deficiency where, “How come you can’t fix that” or “How come your cooking isn’t great” or whatever it might be that, as we are giving to the relationship from a spirit of radical generosity, as we’re seeing our partners through those glasses of appreciation, so if they’re seeing them through radical generosity.
Kaley K:
And then, there’s clearing, which is really when something happens because we’re human. We make mistakes. We’ll say things that are off. To reveal that inner experience, ‘Hey, when you said that, I felt embarrassed.” And to make a request about it, “My request is that in front of our friends you present me in a positive light.” And what I noticed and we were talking about candor earlier and its importance in leadership, I think in intimate relationships is just as important, because that little tiny thing, if you clear it right away, it is that. It’s an opportunity for knowing each other and closeness. But if that little tiny thing somehow gets reinforced or gets bigger or grows legs and runs away, before you know it, there’s a significant issue that, in some ways, has a very addressable root, had you caught it early.
Warwick F:
I think it’s so true. You talk about radical generosity, the thought came to mind is radical encouragement. Again, as I mentioned, it’s one of my highest values. But encouragement begins at home. Rather than tell your friends, “Oh, my husband/my wife, boy, I really like A or B.” Well, how about telling them? And, as you said, cut them some slack when they make mistakes.
Warwick F:
One of the things I think people are loathe to do in our society is apologize. People think apologize is weakness and vulnerability, which I think it’s strength. It’s okay. I have this attitude, which I don’t always live. If there’s a 50/50 chance I’m responsible, why not apologize? I’m a person on faith, so it’s like I think God will cut me some slack if I apologize for something I wasn’t guilty of. The universe won’t hold it against me. I think it’s okay. Err on the side of… I’m not saying you go overboard, apologize things that you know is totally not your fault. But there are certain principles to me that are really… That whole radical generosity, encouragement, vulnerability, being willing to listen and admit maybe that you were wrong and… I don’t know. I feel like that doesn’t always happen. And that’s where snowballs happen.
Kaley K:
I think that you’re naming something so powerful, which is it is vulnerable. And I appreciate Brene Brown so much for helping translate vulnerability into an expression of courage, because certainly that’s how I experience it. But there is a trust enhancement in a vulnerable act which can be revealing if something hurt my feelings, even if my inner voice is saying some version of, “You should be bigger than that” or “You shouldn’t let little … bother you.” But just, it’s vulnerable to say, “Gosh, that affected me.” And it’s also vulnerable to say, “I’m sorry” and to own your part and to recognize that sometimes intention and the experience that the other person has, they don’t match and to be able to clean that up where you say, “Gosh. That wasn’t my intention and I’m so sorry that it landed that way.”
Warwick F:
So just talk about as with the 80/80 book and all and you had successful consulting, speaking, how has that whole between 2007 and writing this book, how has that shifted maybe your paradigm or maybe career direction or… I don’t know… if it has. I have a feeling it’s caused a shift, not just internally, but in terms of what you do and where you see yourself going.
Kaley K:
Well, so especially since writing or beginning this process of writing the book about two years ago, a lot has really shifted. So as I think about my work, the paradigm has become really different. That I would say I am certainly guilty for the first 13 years of my marriage really thinking about me and what my career is going to be, and being supportive and really jazzed about the things that my husband was doing, but saying, “I have my things and you have your things” and not thinking about it in terms of, “How do we win together?”
Kaley K:
And so, being in the conversation just from a different perspective where instead of saying, “They would be good for me to take on this client. Would it be good for my career to do this keynote?” Really asking the question, “What’s in the best interest of us and our relationship and our family?” It’s a little cheesy, but I’ll tell you anyway. So we named our family unit. So the first two letters of each of our names, so it’s Kajona and –
Gary S:
Awesome.
Kaley K:
And so we’ll ask, “Was that in the best interest of Kajona?” We’ve made really different choices based on, “Okay. What’s in the best interest is for me to not travel that week” or “What’s in the best interest is for you to cut down to 50% time. What’s in the best interest is for us to get outside help for that.” But framing it differently has absolutely done a paradigm shift.
Gary S:
And it’s interesting that we started talking about you worked a lot with leaders in professional contexts, and now you’re spending time in personal relational contexts. None of us think twice about doing what you just said in professional contexts. Is this in the best interest of XYZ Corporation? Is this in best interest of my team? Why is it so hard or harder to do it in the context of relationships? I hear you say that about your family, about Kajona and I think, “Wow. That’s revolutionary.” It’s not revolutionary in business. Why is it revolutionary in personal relationships?
Kaley K:
It’s a great question, Gary. I think there’s actually, there’s two sides to that. I think what you’re describing happens in excellent organizations where that is explicit. Make the decision that’s best for the organization first, and I will hear leaders say, “Make the decision that’s in the best interest of the organization, not the decision that you think I’m going to like.” And I think in a lot of organizations, there actually can be a slipping back into, “Well, gosh, what will advance my career,” rather than, “What’s in the best interest of the organization?” “What will make me look good” versus “How will this promote the product or the service or the company or whatever it is that we’re up to?”
Kaley K:
Answering your question now, I think it’s one of the great mysteries of life that many of the things that are natural in organizations… For instance, almost every organization I’ve worked with has a mission or a vision and a set of values. And yet, many, many family units don’t. At least they don’t have it explicitly stated. I think some of it is recognizing that the lines are blurry. I think certainly now where home and work as intermingled as they have ever been. But I think there’s also a space where some people feel resistant to the idea of running their family like a business, that they’re like, “I want to work to be work and I want family to be family.” And I respect that mind. I think, however, bringing in some of the best tools from both sides is really valuable. Bring in that planning those values from the corporate into your family. Bring from your family that idea of radical generosity, which in a corporate setting is often phrased as “assume positive intent.”
Warwick F:
You raise a really fascinating point that when in an all corporate organizational setting, you say, “What’s in the best interest of the organization?” Well, your family unit is an organization, so what’s in the best interest of this family organization as a whole, because we’re a unit? Not about my interest or his interest or her interest. What’s best for the team. And if you ask the right questions, if you’re people of good will, you can probably come up with the right answer.
Warwick F:
Then you maybe go back to your values list. So if we have to choose between my career, your career or other organizations, which organization is a highest priority in our values list? It’s probably your family organization is the most important, more important than other organizations or careers. And then that’s a value judgment. I’m guessing it’s probably the way yours is. So if that’s true, then let’s make sure we put the values of the family organization first and let’s talk about what that looks like. It’s not about winners and losers. Let’s collectively agree. And it’s probably mission possible. It sounds like you can have the big war, but with the right questions and the right mindset, those things can get resolved. Does that make sense? People that think that way, right?
Kaley K:
I think that’s right. And I think maybe we’ll mix in too many metaphors here, but I think about it also like sports teams, that if you’re only thinking about your own stats… I recently watched The Last Dance. If Michael Jordan were thinking exclusively about his own stats, they would not have been world champions all those years. And you could see if you watched that, there was a mindset shift where it went from “I’m going to score the most points. I’m going to have the most rebounds. I’m going to be the MVP” to “We’re going to win as a team and as a unit.” And with that mindset shift, totally different things became possible.
Warwick F:
But what you’re saying is if you want to win in marriage or in life, don’t think about your own stats.
Kaley K:
Yes.
Warwick F:
That’s kind of what you’re saying.
Kaley K:
Win as a team.
Warwick F:
Yeah. It seems like it’s a … So one other thing you talk a lot about here in Crucible Leadership is we have the paradigm which we talk about we’re not against success, but what we say is we want people to lead a life of significance, which means a life on purpose dedicated to serving others… however, each individual, however they look at that paradigm. So it’s pretty clear to me as I see what you’re doing, but talk about what a life is significance looks like now, given where you are now and given what you’re just doing with 80/80 marriage. I could guess, but rather than guess, what does that look like for you?
Kaley K:
I would love to hear your guess. My greatest dream, Warwick, is that this book would have an impact so that couples have additional tools to be able to win as a team and that, in my world, the more teamwork, the more generosity, the more love, that there is in the world, the better place it gets to be, and that if these tools can serve in that way, that feels to me like a very significant contribution.
Warwick F:
Can you imagine a generation of kids growing up in families where their parents practice radical generosity and that’s modeled for them, so they, in their turn, with their partners, husbands, wives? That will cause a ripple-like revolution, a positive revolution, a blessing, if you will.
Kaley K:
That is a dream that I would love to see come to fruition.
Gary S:
That sound was the captain turning on the fasten seatbelt sign. We are going to be landing the plane soon. Before we do that, there’s couple things I want to do and I know Warwick will want to ask you another question I’m sure. But one thing, Kaley, first of all, how can listeners get a hold of you, find out about the book, find out more about you and the services you offer?
Kaley K:
Absolutely. So the easiest place to find out about the book is 8080marriage.com.
Gary S:
And those are 8-0-8-0, right?
Kaley K:
8080marriage.com. Exactly. And if you are an Instagram person, every day we put a tip or a challenge out on Instagram. So follow us there on Instagram. It’s also 8080marriage, so 8-0-8-0-marriage. And then, you can find out more just about me either on that site or at kaleyklemp.com.
Gary S:
And those are both with Ks, correct?
Kaley K:
They are. K-A-L-E-Y-K-L-E-M-P.
Gary S:
See with a last name like Schneeberger, I’m always very, very focused on the spelling of things. I want to ask you one last question before I let you go and then Warwick will finish up and that is: For people who are listening to this, our listeners who are hearing themselves in some of the crucible-like experiences you’re talking about, and they don’t know where to begin, they don’t know what to do what’s next. I’ve heard this. This makes sense.
Gary S:
But now what? One of the things Warwick has talked about much on the show, of late in particular, is the power of one small step. You may not have to have the entire road map before you start moving toward a solution, moving beyond your crucible, but there is one small step. What in your estimation, in your advice, in your wisdom, what’s one small step listeners who find themselves maybe trying to live a 50/50 marriage and they want to get to an 80/80 marriage? What’s one small step they can take?
Kaley K:
Well, so I think there is an internal step and there’s an external step. So the internal step is to change your self-talk from fairness to generosity. At anytime that moment of resentment arises, just to change it to say, “And in this moment, what would radical generosity look like?” That’s an internal shift. If you want more externally, I would say absolutely a small step is read the book. Whether you implement it or not, it’s a great place to start.
Gary S:
Bravo. The PR guy in me applauds that answer. Warwick, back to you?
Warwick F:
Yeah. Wow. That’s awesome. So I think you’ve said before there’s probably been a shift in really,… I think the whole 80/80 marriage and how to have more fulfilled marriages and relationships is probably your passion I’m guessing. So we also talk a bit here about legacy. As you think of what you would like your legacy to be, how does the 80/80 marriage and that whole thing play into what you would like to feel like you’ve left the world in terms of all this?
Kaley K:
Gosh. It feels like such a big question.
Gary S:
That’s why it’s the last one.
Kaley K:
Right. Do I get to define my own legacy? For me, it’s relationships across the board. So if the work that I do with leaders through 15 commandments and conscious leadership and drama-free office creates healthier relationships for our people as they spend so much of their time at work, and then, those more connected, more generous relationships for people at home. If relationships are enhanced, gosh, it would be incredible if that were a piece of the legacy that I got to leave.
Gary S:
Well, that right there was the sound that… I’ve been in the communications business long enough to know when the last word’s spoken and that was it. Normally, I try to wrap up in some key takeaways, but here we talked about transparency on this episode, and I’m going to be transparent enough to say that I’m not nearly as good as Kaley. So I wrote notes, but I’m not going to say them. Listener, your key takeaways are: Listen to the show again, because Kaley really unpacks things extraordinarily well. That’s her area of expertise. And this isn’t a 50/50 exchange where I’m anywhere near as good as she is in doing that. So please go back, check out her website, listen to this show and dig into the insights that she offers, because the insights she offers can indeed help you through your crucibles.
Gary S:
And speaking of crucibles, until the next time we are together to talk about crucible experiences to offer. Warwick has said this, “We operate in the realm of hope.” That’s what we do. We try to provide hope that you can move beyond your crucible. So until the next time we’re together to talk about those things, please remember this about your crucible experience, whether it’s professional or personal or a mixture of both. Right now, it seems extraordinarily painful probably. It will not always feel that way. If you learn the lessons that your crucible is trying to teach you, if you dig in, if you’re transparent, if you’re vulnerable, if you’re authentic and you see inside what the crucible’s trying to teach you, and learn those lessons and apply them moving forward, your crucible in that case will not be the end of your story. In fact, it will be the beginning of a better story, a new chapter in your story. And why it is a better story is because that chapter in that book leads to a different destination and that destination is a life of significance.
From the tragic beginnings of being orphaned then abused by his guardian uncle, to his adulthood as a crack addict who fathered seven children by five woman, Marvin Charles was an unhappy story just waiting on a sad ending. But then he got sober and embraced God as his anchor — and dramatically rewrote his destiny. Divine Alternatives for Dads — D.A.D.S. — the nonprofit he founded 20 years ago after navigating the legal system to put his family back together, has helped 5,000 men reclaim their roles as fathers and learn the practical and emotional skills to knit their own families back together.
For more information about Marvin Charles and D.A.D.S, visit www.aboutdads.org
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
Warwick F:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership.
Marvin C:
The freedom that I had caused me to be arrested all over this country. It caused me to live a lifestyle that caused me to become an alcoholic addict. Now, I was free, and the thing about freedom is usually when a person gets free, they move into a particular community and they stay in that community, and so they become accustomed to that community and all that goes on in that community. If it’s drugs and alcohol, when you’re in a community or an environment that does that, and you don’t try to get out of that, because everything else seems strange to you, or unappreciative, you didn’t know that. Well, I did that. I did that for 20 plus years.
Marvin C:
I wound up having seven children from five different women, and then the desire to get clean came and went, but I never could hold that down because I didn’t have any focus.
Gary S:
That doesn’t sound too much like the fruits, at least the good fruits of freedom, does it? Yet that’s the life, today’s guest, Marvin Charles, lived for decades. The life he desperately wanted as an orphaned and abused child who just wanted to live life on his terms.
Gary S:
Hi, I’m Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show and the communications director for Crucible Leadership. You’ll hear today in Warwick’s extremely moving conversation with Marvin, how sometimes the things we long for to ease our pain can actually cause us more pain. Sometimes our crucibles, if we don’t process them wisely, can lead to more crucibles. But here’s the good news that Marvin’s story underscores. From your greatest pain can come your greatest triumph. He’s found a life of true significance through learning the lessons of his missteps and applying them to help men, many of whom are living just like he used to, embrace their role as fathers, and build lives of joy. He does it all through Divine Alternatives for Dads Services, acronym, DADS, the Seattle nonprofit he’s been running now for 20 years.
Warwick F:
Well, Marvin, thank you for being here. I love what your organization does. Divine Alternatives for Dads Services. I love what Gary just read about, what was it? Embracing a living God for a larger purpose?
Gary S:
That’s exactly it. Yep.
Warwick F:
Boy, that is powerful. Marvin, before we get into DADS and what you do, I’d love to hear a bit about you in the Seattle Area, understand. I’d love to hear a bit about your background growing up, early memories, kind of set the scene of who is Marvin Charles, and how did he grow up and a little about your family story.
Marvin C:
I’d be glad and honored to do that, Warwick. I’m born and raised in Seattle. I had what was called, I don’t know if you remember the program, Leave it to Beaver.
Warwick F:
Right.
Marvin C:
That was my family. It was the urban perspective of that, but I guess later on it became the Cosby, but trust me, all I knew was Leave it to Beaver. I had a sister, Marion and I. We were we had a mother and father in our home. My mom prepared lunch for us, we walked to school together when things were much more sensible during that time. It was the early ’60s. Then one day we came home from school and my mother was on the couch and she was on the couch for a couple of days, and then they rushed her off to the hospital and we never seen her again. Well, she passed away.
Marvin C:
I remember I was nine years old. My sister was seven, and my aunt and uncle came over. My father was there. He was a guy who spent a lot of time working. She took care of the home and the children and he worked and provided the resources that it took. But when this part of our life was stopped, we had to move to live with our aunt and uncle. This was the aunt and uncle that you had to dress up to go over to their house. They had plastic on their furniture. It’s the one you really didn’t want to go there, but so now we were living there.
Marvin C:
I remember the first thing my uncle told me was that wasn’t your mother, that’s not your father. You guys belong to the state, but we’re going to take care of you. I was nine years old. If I didn’t know anything else, I knew that at nine years old, that’s not what you tell a nine year old.
Warwick F:
When you heard that, you’re nine and they’re saying, we’re your aunt and uncle, but you belong to the state. Emotionally, what are you hearing from them?
Marvin C:
Well, you know what? Mind you, our mother had just passed away. I couldn’t get past that aspect of it. I remember running out the house and going next door and my cousin coming to get me, his son, “What are you doing? Why are you doing this?” It was what I knew that I was in for. I couldn’t even wrap my heads around what he said or what was taking place, it’s what’s getting ready to happen next. I stayed in that mind frame for six years when we went to move with my aunt and uncle. The first I got, I remember I was playing with my sister in my room, and I broke the window, my glass window pane, and so he made me go outside, get some bricks across the street in a lot, bring them back, crush them up on newspaper, then kneel in them while I held two other rocks over my shoulders.
Marvin C:
If I lowered my elbows below my shoulder, he threatened to hit me with this strap. That was the first punishment at 10 years old. That can give you a snapshot of what I was faced with for the next six years. Then I wore a Catholic uniform to a public school so all the kids made fun of me. It was really an alienation that from the time I was 10 years old till I was 16, that was really humiliating. I spent a lot of time living in my head, really living in my head. Didn’t have friends that I could play with or people I could count on. I always kid and joke about it, but I’m very serious about it. I felt like I never went to prison because I did a long time in prison because I had already did six years in prison, and that was my mindset.
Marvin C:
At the time I was 16, I really couldn’t take it anymore. I would complain to my guidance counselor at school, and I lost my door key. The guidance counselor said, listen, don’t run away. If you run away, run to the youth center, because if you don’t, the police will get you and just bring you right back. That was the only advice that … I have marinated on that advice for a long time, and so I lost my door key, came home one day, begged my sister to leave her key out. She left her key out. My uncle came home, stepped on the mat, found the key and was waiting for me when I came to the door, and he said, Listen, I want you to go get another brick from across the street.”
Marvin C:
I knew what punishment I was slated for. When I went to go get the brick, I just took off and kept running, and I ran to the youth center. They called him and told him that they had me and that there was no need for him to come looking for me, and they set a court date and they brought us together a week later. I remember my aunt, I’m sitting between my aunt and uncles the most. I was 16 years old. I was scared to death. I didn’t know what was going to take place. The judge asked my uncle, he said, “This child has told us about a number of different things that had taken place, and I want to know, are they true?”
Marvin C:
My uncle said, “Yes, your honor. I believe if a child lives in my household, he must abide by my rules and regulation.” The judge slammed the mallet down and said, I make this child a ward of the courts. I don’t think my uncle was expecting that.
Warwick F:
When the judge slams that hammer down, what do you think he was saying? He was giving a judgment about his rules and regulations on your uncle? What was that judgment that, that judge gave to your uncle, would you say?
Marvin C:
That I was to not go back to that household.
Warwick F:
But do you feel like in some sense he was condemning your uncle’s behavior or your uncle’s disciplinary philosophy or something?
Marvin C:
I think, for me, all I saw was I’m free. I mean, it’s like, I can imagine this, and I know this is probably not a ethical topic to speak about, but I just imagined myself what a slave must’ve felt like when they got a chance to see freedom and nothing stopped them. That was how passionate I was about just being free. Free of the stuff that I was faced with for the past six years. That was a good thing, but it was dangerous as well, but I only came to know that later.
Gary S:
Yeah.
Warwick F:
Right. I want to pick up that in a second, but your uncle obviously showed you plenty of discipline, but did he or your aunt give you an equal measure of love, that unconditional love that every human spirit craves sort of like milk? Was that any part of it?
Marvin C:
I don’t think so, and that’s something I’ve had a lot of time to ponder about. What gives me the significant understanding about that is because love wouldn’t allow me to go off the rails later on in my life, which then I realized I was recreating the same situation into my own children’s life. Why was that?
Warwick F:
Yeah, and that’s a scary thing that … I love history, and sadly history tends to repeat itself. Most of us throughout the last several hundred or thousand years, we don’t learn. People will persecute others, take advantage. You hear about people who are raised alcoholic homes and they become alcoholics, or they’d been abused as a kid and they abuse their own kids. I can’t imagine how you could possibly do that. I’m not a psychologist, but it seems like it’s all too common.
Marvin C:
But here’s why, because truth be told, you don’t know anything else. You only do what you know. If you were raised in an environment that those behaviors that you were faced with are what you learned, so then you come and grow up and then you’re faced with the same circumstances that you … I don’t mean the behavior part of it, but a circumstance like now I’m a father and I have a family, and I have to raise my family. I remember specifically using these words, my uncle used to say, “I want you, and I want you like you came into this world.”
Marvin C:
Now, that meant, go upstairs, take all your clothes off because I’m getting ready to spank you, so you knew when he said that, right?
Warwick F:
Yeah.
Marvin C:
When I became a father and started having children around me, I would use the same language. I want you, and I want you like you came in this world. Where did that come from? I didn’t like it when he was doing it to me.
Warwick F:
You probably didn’t even realize what you were saying in the context where it came in the heat of the moment. Out it comes, but that is haunting, I guess.
Marvin C:
It was. To be honest with you, when I got free from that situation, I moved into another foster home that the state paid my friend’s mother to give me a place there. He had his nieces and nephews living there and he and his mom and her boyfriend, and all I would do was clean up and wash dishes, and mop, and clean because I didn’t know anything else. The kids would make fun of me. They would say, “What are you …” I’m 16, 17 years, and all I know how to do is clean up behind people. I started getting a little looser with that. It was the ’70s and things were going on in black communities across this country.
Marvin C:
I went and saw the movie Super Fly. Now, all of a sudden, for the first time in my life, I know what I want to be. I don’t have any restraints. I don’t have any people saying, you ought to do this. You ought to do that. I thought the utmost that a person could have is freedom, and I had plenty of it. So I went and got clothes and looked like him, I went and got my hair fixed like him. I went and did all of these things. Now, I spend the next 20 years trying to do everything I thought he did. Now, I didn’t know. I just saw a movie. A movie lasted two hours. I spent 20 years trying to live into that movie.
Warwick F:
Is that what you were talking about earlier about you crave freedom and you got it, but yet there was a side of freedom that you didn’t appreciate. What was that side that you learned later about? Freedom is a wonderful thing, but there was something about it that didn’t seem so positive. How would you frame that?
Marvin C:
The freedom that I had caused me to be arrested all over this country. It caused me to live a lifestyle that caused me to become an alcoholic addict. Now, I was free. The thing about freedom is usually when a person gets free, they move into a particular community and they stay in that community, and so they become accustomed to that community and all that goes on to that community. So, if it’s drugs and alcohol, when you’re in a community or an environment that does that, and you don’t try to get out of that because everything else seems strange to you, or unappreciative, you didn’t know that. Well, I did that. I did that for 20 plus years.
Marvin C:
I wound up having seven children from five different women, and then the desire to get clean came and went, but I never could hold that down because I didn’t have any focus. Then I realized one day I went to a treatment center that I stayed there for 90 days. That 90 days of clarity gave me something that I had not known. First of all, halfway through there, I met the person of Jesus Christ. Somebody asked me, “Don’t you want a personal relationship with Jesus?” Which I had no idea what that was.
Warwick F:
You didn’t really have much of a faith upbringing, either from your parents or uncle and aunt, they weren’t like even religious or church going?
Marvin C:
Not at all. In fact, he said, “I want you guys to go to church.” His statement was, “And don’t wake us up to take you. You need to make it there.” So, there was no real strong preference of that in our household. It was before my mother passed away, but at nine, that just fleeted out away. My lifestyle, certainly that didn’t compliment it at all. You know what I mean? This Jesus that I knew was this kind of Jesus, anytime I was in trouble, Lord, if you get me out of this, I won’t do it again.
Warwick F:
Kind of what they call a transactional relationship.
Marvin C:
Exactly, and I never kept up my end of the deal. You know what I mean?
Warwick F:
Yeah.
Marvin C:
Yeah, that’s what took place, but when I got to this treatment center, I met this person called Jesus, and I was in a place, my children were scattered throughout the foster care system. My girlfriend was still using and I had two babies by her. What I realized, and this is, I think the epiphany that I had, I had children who were growing up in the foster care system just like me. I recreated the same thing in their life, and if I didn’t like it, how could I do the same thing to them? I think that’s when the wheels started turning for me.
Marvin C:
All I knew how to do is Jesus, if you are who you say you are, then help me. You have my undivided attention. I’ve created something in their lives that I didn’t like it, and I didn’t realize that my disobedience has caused this, and I need you to help me get out of this. That was all I was looking for.
Warwick F:
What was the paradigm shift? Because you’re living a life where you’ve got a number of different relationship, different kids with different folks. I mean, there’s a shift in thinking. What was the old way of thinking? How did that shift … I mean-
Marvin C:
That’s a great question. In my former life, after leaving my aunt and uncle and turning 18 years old, I managed to graduate my high school. But after seeing the movie Super Fly, all I wanted to do was be a pimp, and I lived that lifestyle very well all across this country. But when I picked up this crack cocaine habit that I started really doing myself bad. I started being with women and I wasn’t treating them good, and I wasn’t treating myself, and they weren’t treating me.
Marvin C:
The lifestyle just started being really wonky, really up and down, and I got tired. I literally got tired of living. Then, one of the mothers left me my son, who was my third child, his name was Marvin. He was five years old, and I didn’t have any stability for him. I knew that that wasn’t right. I tried to get in other relationships and play house and do these things, but none of that was working. It came to the point where, if I really want to get clean, I’m going to have to set my son someplace, and I don’t know any place that’ll be appropriate for him, but I got to weigh this.
Marvin C:
I took him to his mother’s house, which was not a good place at all. She lived with her grandmother, all her sisters, they all had children, and he was in the midst of it, and I wasn’t very well liked by that particular family, but I had to put my son somewhere. I went into treatment and I had to really deal with this thought. The first thought was, I just need to get off these drugs. I just really need to reframe myself. What is it like to think clearly without being under the influence? Can I make some reasonable decisions?
Marvin C:
That was a turning point that this gave me an opportunity to really see life through life’s lenses. I still didn’t know what to do. I was 40 plus years old. I got seven kids. I don’t have a trade, I don’t have a degree, I don’t have anything, but I trusted the Lord enough to guide me and lead me. Three months in treatment, I got out. The mother of my two youngest children came in as I got out, and so the courts gave me the opportunity to say … Let me throw this piece in. I left one of our drug-filled environments with my seven month old daughter, because I was mad about guys coming in and out of my house and saying, I want to see your old lady, and so I just grabbed the baby who I had been changing diapers and feeding for the seven months since she was born.
Marvin C:
I went to the hospital to leave her on the steps of the hospital, and I got to the hospital and I couldn’t do it. I went to a woman’s shelter and they told me, “Take her to the CPS office.” So, I did that. CPS is a child protection agency. I went there, I took my daughter there and they treated me like I was public enemy number one. They were right to do so because they had been coming … I had two other children who were in custody of the CPS, and they had been coming to our house, knocking on the door, and we’d tell everybody to be quiet, and I wouldn’t respond. Now, I’m showing up on their doorstep, and they’re like, “So, now what do you want us to do?” I just was determined.
Marvin C:
I said, “Listen, I don’t know what to do.” Well, there was a lady who came out of the back and said, “Listen, in order for us to do this, the mother’s going to have to sign off.” I said, “No problem.” She drove me in the baby back to our drug-filled environment, I told the mother, “We need to sign and give this child up. I want to go get myself together.” She signed the paper reluctantly, and then the lady left with the baby. I went to say goodbye to the baby. I got locked out of the house so instantly I became homeless. I knew that I’m 40 plus years old, this is no way for a 40-year-old man to be living.
Marvin C:
You don’t have anything to do with your life. That stayed on my mind once I got into treatment, and when somebody introduced me to Christ, I said, “I’m here, I surrender. Show me what to do.”
Warwick F:
You were sort of at the bottom of the pit, the bottom of the crucible. It sounds like before you saw that movie, Super Fly, you were maybe drifting through life, maybe life’s unfair. I didn’t have a great life. People weren’t nice to me. It’s all about me. I don’t know. Was there a conscious plan? Who cares about everybody else? Nobody else cares about me. The world’s not fair, it’s so messed up. I’m just going to enjoy myself and just get through each day as best I can. Was it like something along those lines?
Marvin C:
That was my script. It’s about me. I’m going to take care of me. Everybody always said I was bad. Well, I’m going to be a bad man. You know what I mean? I went from Hollywood, to New York, to Washington, DC, to Florida, to Texas. To me, for a while, that was a life. Allowed me to do pretty women, plenty money, but that’s the lure. That was the lure because it was not substantial.
Gary S:
It’s true, isn’t it, Marvin, that it was about you, you just said that, you were living for yourself, but you mentioned, as you were going through those years, you had several children.
Marvin C:
Yes.
Gary S:
I think you even said, at one point when you and I talked before this, that you had brought Marvin Jr into a crack house with you. While you’re living for yourself, you are creating a family, and at what point did you realize, as you were coming back from your crucibles, as you were trying to come to yourself and live a more responsible life, did you … What was that epiphany moment when you said, oh my gosh, I’ve got these kids and I have a responsibility to them. When did that happen for you?
Marvin C:
Again, when I stood in front of that hospital to leave my seven month old daughter on the steps, I realized that she didn’t ask for this. None of my children asked for that. Why does this seem so familiar? It’s because I was left, and because I was left, it doesn’t give me the right to leave somebody else. There has to be something different. It has to be. What I came to the understanding was, and I think this happened in treatment, but if I don’t do it, nobody else is going to do it for me.
Marvin C:
If I don’t make the attempt, whatever it was, if I don’t make the attempt, so when I entered into this relationship with Jesus Christ, what I did was … I didn’t, don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like a light bolt of lightning came out of the sky and hit me and said, no, no. I had to work at this relationship, and I didn’t know anything about Jesus, I didn’t know anything about the things that he does in people’s lives. All mines were experience, and so here was my first experience. I got a treatment. I knew I still loved the mother, who I’m married to today, but she was still using, and the thought about …
Marvin C:
When you’re in recovery of drugs and alcohol, they tell you, “You need to leave your past behind you.” Well, I found that very difficult to do. I got children, but how do I do that? It caused me to have to lean on this person, Jesus. You have to guide me because I don’t know what to do. I’m scared to death. I don’t have the experience that most people have. So, who do I trust? It came down to just this, Warwick, I had to trust Jesus for everything. For everything. I didn’t know how to do that. I remember I would ask people, “Hey man, does Jesus talk to you?”
Marvin C:
People would look at me like, well, he’s crazy, but I didn’t know anything to do. I’ll tell you this, let me add this little piece here. That same son that talking to you about, he’s named Marvin, he’s 31 years old today, and the mother of his children passed away six months ago, and he’s gotten his children, and he and I had a volatile relationship for years. About six years ago, he came into my office, and we have a Bible study in my office and he sat down. I was late that day. I walked in and he’s in the middle of the Bible study, and he’s ranting, and he’s raving, and he’s talking loud and crazy.
Marvin C:
I sit in the corner and I’m like, wow. There’s about 25 men in this room. We call this Bible study park bench to Park Avenue, because you got people who come out of the ivory towers and people who come out prison sitting in the same room together. Then one of the brothers got up and said, Here, man, here’s what we do in this room.” And they picked him up. My son is 6’8″. I have two of them, one 6’7″ and one 6’8″. They sat him in the chair and the brothers got around him and laid hands and prayed for him. He got up and he went and sat down, and I saw what he did, and I knew he’d been angry at me, and I apologized over the years because God made me understand that there was a lot of damage I did, but nothing ever happened.
Marvin C:
When I sat down in that chair that day, and I began to say, “Man, I used to drag you from crack house to crack house. I used, I wasn’t real responsible. I did all kinds of things, and I’m sorry. I know I’ve told you this before, but I … And I think the fact that I’ve made that a mens’ comment to him in the room full of 25 men, it did something. It broke something, because he got up, he came over to me, he got on his knees, and he put his arms around my calf and he said, “Dad, all I ever wanted to do was make you proud of me.”
Warwick F:
Oh wow.
Marvin C:
Wasn’t a dry eye in the room. Wasn’t a dry eye in the room, and I’m thinking, God only you could have done that. I’ve tried to do this for years, but it didn’t work, but you did it.
Warwick F:
Well, I guess His timing. That’s powerful. It sounded like, obviously the big shift in your life was with faith in Christ, I mean, your faith gave you an anchor for your soul that you probably never had before. It gave you a purpose and a reason for living that maybe you didn’t have. I mean, was that part of the shift?
Marvin C:
You’re so spot on. I need to add a little bit to that story. When I got out of treatment and we fought for our kids, Jeanette and I fought for our kids through the system, which is why we started DADS because we had a victory. We had several victories. Well, here was one of the victories that gave me an astronomical belief in Jesus, more so, I tell my favorite line is, you can’t beat me having faith in what God will do for you. Here’s what happened. We were just putting our house together, our family together, children were coming home. We had to get jobs, and my wife and I, and we were really trying to debate, okay, maybe you ought to stay home with the kids and I go to work because we can’t afford daycare with four kids in our house and all of that.
Marvin C:
That worked itself out. Then one day I came home from work and the phone rang. I answered the phone and somebody said, “Is this Marvin Charles?” Well, I thought it was a telemarketer. I said, “Yes.” The lady said, “Well, there’s a lady who’s been looking for you for 43 and a half years and she’s your mother, and she lives right down the street from you.” I was like, what? I couldn’t believe it. Jeanette had just went to pick the kids up to bring them home. I said, this lady just called and said, “My mother has been looking for me and she lives right down the street.” We loaded the kids up when we went to that house, and there was this lady standing on the corner with her daughter and her niece, and it was my sister and my mother.
Marvin C:
I got out of the car and I grabbed this woman and we looked identical. So, she told me, “I had you when I was 14 years old, and my mother had a baby who was born seven months after you and the state wasn’t going to … Because my mother was on welfare and they weren’t going to take care of both of us, so they took you and put you up for adoption.” Then the next day I asked her about my dad, “Where’s he at?” She said, “Well, the last time I know he was living in Oakland.” We contacted him. I jumped on a plane to see him. Shortly after that, she jumped on a plane to see him. Now, mind you, when I was in treatment, the first prayer I prayed from this new relation with Jesus Christ was Lord, help me put my family back together again.
Warwick F:
The amazing thing is you probably didn’t know that you were adopted, right?
Marvin C:
Well, yeah, my uncle told me that, I belong to the state. That’s what that meant.
Warwick F:
Okay, but you didn’t know that you had a mother and…
Marvin C:
No, no I didn’t know none of that. I had none of that.
Warwick F:
That is so unbelievable.
Marvin C:
Let me tell you what happened, Warwick. My mother jumped on a plane and went down to visit my dad. He asked her to marry her. She said, yes, they come back to Seattle. Now, I have this whole family that God put together.
Warwick F:
But that was one powerful prayer. Power of prayer, but I’d like to hear a bit about DADS, but I think there’s a part of your story, where, from what I understand, you got this award from The Atlantic Family Center. You put your family together, and as you put your family together, it gave you a vision of a mission and ministry, so talk about how you put your family together and then how that shifted into this whole movement, this ministry that you have.
Marvin C:
Really, it was out of complications that really the ministry came alive. My wife and I, after putting our family together, and then I went … We did Good Morning America, we did some TV overseas, and when we came back, and after the dust settled, there was a real simplistic question that evolved. During that time was a crack epidemic and it was really strong in communities all over this country, and we felt like we had got a reprieve from it. So, we said there were people that we got high with, we did time with, we did crime with who were faced with the same situations. How could we take what we’ve learned from navigating the system and help other people navigate the system. We literally called ourselves systems navigators.
Warwick F:
Just so the listeners know, because not everybody might understand the story, you had like six kids, they were foster care, but you brought all your kids together. You dealt with the system, got housing, got clean, got a job, to talk just a little bit about that as we shift to what you do now, because you were living what you now help other people. Because that’s a miracle in of itself. It couldn’t have been easy what you did.
Marvin C:
See, we never looked at it like that. We looked at it like God gave us the ability to navigate the child welfare system, the child support system, the state system, where they give you money to take care of your family, but at some point, you have to pay that back. So, we were saying, okay, how do we do that? Well, I’ll tell you, this was the motivating moving factor. One day I come home from work. I got one job, it’s paying for all six of us in this house to take care of this family. We got a rental property.
Marvin C:
Money wasn’t coming very fast at all, but we were making the best of it. Now, mind you, you got to keep this in mind. I told you about the high part of life that I lived when I had no cares in the world. Now I got all these cares and not enough money to take care of it. Because of my relationship with Jesus, I was tempted a lot of time to go and resort back to some other mindsets, but that’s what God delivered me from. Why would I go back there? So, how do I keep and maintain this? Well, then one day the child support system emptied my bank account out and I didn’t know what to do. I never had child support system, but my wife did, because the children were in the foster care system, it created a debt with child support. A lot of folks don’t know. Right?
Warwick F:
Yeah.
Marvin C:
She convinced them that, “No, it’s not my money. It’s his money. But because we’re married, he put my name on the bank account.” I don’t know how she did it, but she convinced them, they put the money back.
Warwick F:
Wow.
Marvin C:
Then what happened was she said, “Do you know how many other people are suffering through this? Just this aspect of it?” So, she worked with her child support counselor and built a very good relationship with them. So much so till literally, we would on the weekends go and talk to people who were having the same problem. I set up a little office in our house, where during the week the kids would go off to school, and from 10 o’clock to two o’clock, she would literally be working with clients or fathers in the community who had some of those same issues.
Warwick F:
That was part of the birth of DADS, of Divine Alternatives for Dads so it took a bit about, I think we understand how it was birthed. Talk about what that does and just the important mission that you have. What is that?
Marvin C:
Our mission statement is to give fathers hope by walking together in supportive community, helping navigate systems, relational and legal barriers which separate fathers from their children. We really believe that once you inform a father of the opportunities that fathering or fatherhood gives them, it changes the whole mindset of a father. It changes. I always say the greatest gift that a father can give is to prepare his children for a future that he will never see. Men get that. There’s another simplistic thing that we found out over 20 years ago.
Marvin C:
Most fathers want to just be heard, and there are not opportunities system-wise where they get heard. I have a conference room in my office here, and that table, we called the strongest table in the State of Washington because it has everybody’s tears, everybody’s complaints, everybody everything, and they get to leave it right there. Because of that work that we’ve been able to do, we found out some significant things. In low income communities, when fathers have children, most fathers are there in the hospital when the child is born. Then I ask fathers, how many of you were there when your baby was born? They all raised their hands.
Marvin C:
How many of you signed the birth certificate? They all raised their hands. Well, what they don’t know is they didn’t sign a birth certificate. What they signed was a paternity affidavit, which is a promissory note to say, you will pay child support for this child, even if you find out it’s not yours, because this is a legal binding document. Now, I don’t tell him not to sign it. What I say is just know what you’re doing. Understand. It’s a lot of things like that, that we’ve … Information we’ve come across the last 22 years and we try to share with people. Don’t get mad at the system. Don’t get mad at the mother. These are some of the things you’ve done. You just took it for granted when you were doing it. How do I know? Because I did it.
Warwick F:
It sounds like there’s two levels. There’s the practical level navigating child welfare, helping them get clean, helping them get a job, helping them get housing, all of the things that you need to do to get your kids back. So, there’s the practical, but it sounds like there’s sort of the spiritual soul component in which people don’t change unless they have a reason to, unless you can shift their thinking. I imagine some of it might be, look, like you, I wasn’t treated fairly, life is unfair. The system is messed up. Nobody cares what I think. Nobody wants to listen to me. Why should I care about anybody else when nobody cares about me?
Warwick F:
That whole thinking says, that’s probably not an easy … It’s not easy to shift that thinking, but somehow, that’s a lot of the heavy lifting you do, is trying to shift this. Some of what they say is true, like life is unfair. There is systemic issues. There are objectively things that do make life unfair. It’s not all their fault, but it’s easy to wade into all of that and just say, well, life’s unfair, so why should I care? How do you shift that thinking? Because it can’t be easy.
Marvin C:
Well, it’s not easy unless you think about it or you see it through a different set of lenses. Let me give you an example. The mentality that I had to have in order to embrace this person called Jesus Christ was a significant embrace, a significant way of thinking. But then I thought about it, and I said, well, whatever the devil asked me to do, I went and did it. I had no problem. If he said, I want you to go up in this bank with two 45’s, one in each hand, I would do it. Christ who is the preventer of me of sin and sin in my life and living a righteous life wouldn’t ask me to do any of those things. So, how do I find what he ask me to do more complicated than what the devil did?
Marvin C:
I had to seek and nourish my understanding on that. That’s the same thing I try to bring and preach to men that walk through my door.
Warwick F:
What’s the answer to that? Because that’s a really good question. Why is it harder to do what God wants you to do?
Marvin C:
Because it was easier for me to do what the devil want, and this stuff that God wants me to do is new to me. But guess what? Being a pimp was new to me until I took the challenge of trying to do it, right? So, give Christ the same opportunity. That’s what I had to do, and so I do this to men all the time. Here’s one of mine trade secrets. A man will come in and he’ll talk to me about what the mother’s doing, and how come the mothers were late, and this is … I let them talk for 30 minutes, and I purposely let them rant and rave for 30 minutes about what the mom does. Then I stop them and said, “I thought you were here because you wanted to see your child.” “I do.” “Well, you’ve talked for 30 minutes and haven’t mentioned the child one time.”
Marvin C:
If I was a judge, I wouldn’t see anywhere in the world that you wanted to be involved in the child’s life. That’s the first linchpin. You can’t tell me that it’s about your child, but all you’re doing is talking about the mom and the unrighteousness. You’re going to have to get over that. That’s not going to work. You catch them at the doorway with that understanding.
Warwick F:
It does. There’s something about maybe all human beings, no matter what they’ve been through, when they have a son or a daughter, when you say, you’ve got a responsibility to care for them, do you feel like there’s something, maybe a God given anchor, a thread, something that you can build on that it catches?
Marvin C:
Yes. Yes, exactly. Because most of them will resort back to the thinking, not initially, but they will resort back to the thinking, I don’t want my child to grow up like I grew up.
Warwick F:
I want to give my child a better life, a better opportunity than I had.
Marvin C:
Because of the significant turn of events in their life, they get away from that. It’s like being on an island, they get away from that thinking. I said, “No, I’m a perfect example.” What we say to men is, “Just go get yourself together. You know why? Because one day your child is going to knock on your door, and what are you going to tell them? You know what they’re going to say? If you’re not together, they’re going to say, “You’re just like what mom said you were.”
Warwick F:
That is a powerful motivator, isn’t it?
Marvin C:
Yes.
Warwick F:
And the vision, I’m sure of your son, you’d apologize, but the power of when an apology is accepted, when you’ve been forgiven, that moment, I’m sure you share, because I talk about vulnerability for a purpose. That story probably helped a lot of other guys. You can have that moment with your son and your daughter, and that’s something that you probably treasure forever in your heart.
Marvin C:
It’s crazy because they treasure it just as much, and that’s what DADS try to say is, you’re sitting here complaining about not being with your son, but what most men won’t do is think, and I mean think that their child is somewhere missing them just as much.
Warwick F:
It is interesting. The Bible talks about sin can be passed down through seven generations, basically means forever. It’s sort of a metaphor, but yet virtue can have the same effect. Obviously, as we talked about off air, I grew up in as different a background as you did. I mean, very, very different background, but one of the things I remember is the fellow that started the family media business. He was a strong a man of Christ as you could possibly get. He was an elder at his church.
Warwick F:
This is like in the early 1840s, he came out from England with nothing. He was a very good husband, very good dad. He’s employees loved him. When he died, his employees said we’ve lost a kind and valued employer. Yet, every aspect of his life was in balance. He was successful, but yet, he had incredible relationship with his kids. As I said, elder at his church and with his wife. Well, that faith lasted several generations. As the family became more successful, became a little bit more traditional, and a little less Christ centered, but that positive legacy has lasted for generations.
Warwick F:
I’m the fifth generation. The impact, you talk about how there might be people that you have an effect on that you don’t know. Well, that’s my great-great-grandfather. Very few people will know their great, great-grandkids, it’s almost technically impossible unless you live to 150, but yet, that positive aspect and the effect that he’s had on my life, my dad was a little bit more ecumenical, good guy, but a little bit sort of intellectual, not quite the same faith set in us, but that influence that he’s had on my life, John Fairfax, my great, great grandfather. It’s hard to quantify. That’s a touch stone. That’s a legacy.
Warwick F:
Well, the people that you work with, they have a chance to affect five generations in their family, kids that they’ll never know. That’s a blessing that can, maybe not last forever, but last for a long time.
Marvin C:
I would challenge you to say forever.
Warwick F:
Exactly.
Marvin C:
Yes, right. Because children nowadays are equipped or have access to equip their selves on their own. Well, I’m a prime example of what that will do. I don’t want my seven … I had another daughter at 54, so I’m 65 years old, so I just need you to know that. But the difference is she was raised up … She’s being raised up in a two parent home, and she has no idea about the other part of it. Her siblings come to her and said, “You don’t know how good you have.”
Warwick F:
You’ve got it so good. You’re sort of …
Marvin C:
Right, but like you said, she has a relationship. We’ve sent her to a Christian private school, and we tell her, we do not hide from it. This is where we came from, this is what we do. Our communication level is so open. She has a group of friends that she’s closely connected to. I look at what I’ve learned from her and her being raised in that environment. Yes, I do see the impact that I could have on my youngest child’s life for generations.
Warwick F:
What I love about what you said, I’m sure this is part of what you do in DADS is like change, obviously from your perspective, or from mine, have a focus in faith, Christ-centeredness, but at age appropriate levels, don’t hide who you were. Don’t hide the pain because again, my case is very different, but my dad was married three times, my mother, twice. Fortunately, I was from the last marriage of each, but I’ve seen the devastation that divorce can have, even in wealthy affluent families. In some cases, maybe lack of parents being around, lack of love, nannies raising kids, which is not very healthy.
Warwick F:
I was sort of paranoid a bit about divorce. I was very careful. I wanted to make sure my wife, who we’ve been fortunately married over 30 years to have somebody of character who loved the Lord. I’ve told that to my kids. You got to be careful. Make sure from my perspective that your wife or husband has a strong faith and character. Well, I don’t hide from my kids. You don’t want to be like my dad or mom in the sense of all the marriage. You don’t want to be like that. At age appropriate levels, the challenges we’ve been through can help our kids, help our grandkids. Does that make sense?
Marvin C:
Yes. It makes a lot of sense. I’m sharing with you that my son who now has his two children is not married, but he has a young lady friend, and they’ve agreed to parent these two children. I had to go to her job, my wife and I, and tell her how much we appreciate her. She said to me, I’ll never forget this. She said, “Anytime a guy friend that I’ve been with parents shows up, it’s usually to tell me to leave their son alone.”
Warwick F:
Interesting.
Marvin C:
I said, “No, that’s the least of my worry. I want you to know that we’re here to support you because just to be with him and be willing to take on this responsibility, we know it’s not an easy one.” I really wanted to tell her, I wish you guys would get married, but I felt like I was way out of place with saying that, but that’s my prayer. That’s my prayer. If you’re willing to put that time and energy in, then that’s warranted. I see something taking place in the lives of these two grandchildren.
Warwick F:
It’s amazing, the power of unconditional love and support, instead of like I don’t know, a spring in a dry land. If a plant gets a little bit of unconditional love, it’s like they can change people. That’s what you do with the guys you work with and the girlfriends, wives of the guys you work with. I mean, it has an impact. I’m sure you see that.
Marvin C:
Yes, it does. Warwick, we’ve seen over pretty close to 5,000 men in the last 20 years that we’ve been in existence. It has a major impact on the lives of the children that are connected to these families.
Gary S:
That is a term, a perspective that we talk a lot about, Marvin, at Crucible Leadership and Beyond the Crucible, the idea of the legacy that you leave and certainly your life of significance, your legacy is in the lives of those 5,000 men. As we get to the point now where we’re going to bring the plane in for a landing, I wanted to have you unpack a quote that I’ve seen you give, because we’ve been talking a lot about … You’ve talked a lot about your personal experience with struggling with your own fatherhood and then embracing your fatherhood.
Gary S:
We’ve talked about the way you’ve helped other men do that. Warwick talked a little bit about his situation, but backing up to a 30,000 foot level, you said something, and I want you to explain this to our listeners. You said that fatherlessness is like aids to society. Explain what you mean by that, because I think it’s a powerful metaphor for what the lack of involved fathers does in society.
Marvin C:
I’ll talk about the disease and then I’ll talk about the cure. I’ve often said that fatherlessness is like the AIDS virus. If you know anything about AIDS, AIDS doesn’t kill you. What it does, it breaks down your immune system, and the infection that you catch is what kills you. Well, fatherlessness is the same way. If you take a father out of the home, the family doesn’t die, but what it does is open the family up for infection, teenage pregnancy, at risk youth behavior, all of those things that has impacted the society in which we live in.
Marvin C:
What we believe in DADS is, one of the cures is, how do we reengage the father back into the lives of the children? And in some cases, maybe even the family, but I think that what we try to do is draw the attention to the father, how important his life is to the children that he’s fathered. I think that there’s not enough understanding for men to understand the value that they are to their children. Number one is, and I’m guilty of this, and most people in the world are, is we never listen to children.
Marvin C:
My wife showed me a prime example one day in our office. There was this father and this mother who had a five-year-old son, and my wife had the mother in her office, and I had the father in my office, and the child kept running back, saying, “Mommy, look at this. Mommy, look at this.” Then he’d run to the dad in my office and say, “Daddy, look at this, look at this.” That child showed the mother and the father, what Jeanette and I are pointing it out, the importance that both of them were to him. A lot of times when adults make those decisions, they don’t look at the importance of the father and the mother to that child’s life.
Marvin C:
They only see their own importance. That’s how I think if we can get people to understand the importance that both of them are to that child’s life, it could change the matter.
Warwick F:
Wow. That’s wonderful as we kind of begin to sum up here. I mean, a lot of people I’m sure in the Seattle Area and beyond look at what you do with DADS, Divine Alternative for Dads Services and say, well, Marvin, this is like a miracle. You’re changing families lives, fathers lives. Wow. I mean, how do you do it? Obviously, the Lord has his hand on everything you do, but what would you say, in summary, is some of the keys of why what you do makes such a massive difference?
Marvin C:
There’s a scripture that I came upon in my early days of recovery. This preacher, when I wasn’t familiar with the Bible, where to go, he said, “Just go to Psalms 119 and read that every day.” That’s 175 verses that I read every day, and I read them. Well, then there was two that jumped out at me that I think described it to the T for me. Psalms 119, the 67th verse says, “Before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now I obey your word.” I could see myself in that scripture, going astray. Then, a couple of verses down from that is the 71st verse, and the 71st verse says, “It was good for me that I was afflicted, or I might not have sought your way.”
Marvin C:
I said, that’s me all the way. That is me. I want folks to know that I believe that I could never get right enough with Christ to where I could make a difference in anybody’s life. But when he pointed me to those scriptures, I realized that the ground was level at the foot of the cross, and I had just as much of an opportunity as anybody else and I use those scriptures to let people know that you have the same opportunity. It’s about what you want to do though. You can’t blame that on anybody else. You have to make a choice. Nobody could stop you. That’s been the meat of my sermon.
Gary S:
I have been involved in the communications business long enough, and I’ve been a Christian long enough to know when the last word in a conversation is spoken, and you just spoke it, Marvin. Before we go, though, before I close, I want to give you the chance so our listeners can know more about DADS. How can they find DADS on the internet? Where can they go to learn more about your organization?
Marvin C:
Our web address is www.aboutdads.org. Again, that’s www.aboutdads.org.
Gary S:
Excellent. Warwick, any final thoughts before I close?
Warwick F:
Well, only it’s just remarkable what I hear, Marvin, talk about the work you’re doing with dads. You do all the practical things, which are really necessary in terms of helping dads get clean who have substance abuse issues, housing, negotiating with the whole child welfare system, but nobody changes without a reason. You give them a reason, a faith underpinning from your perspective and mine, a faith in Christ. You help them realize that they are fathers, and that has a spiritual eternal significance, legacy significance. You give them a reason to change.
Warwick F:
Nobody changes without a reason, and it’s even then it’s hard. It seems that the spiritual anchor, the underpinning is transforming lives. As you say, what’s exciting, it’s transforming lives of maybe grandkids, great, great-grandkids they might never know, but they will hear the stories of lives being changed and their great, great grandfather, or whoever it was, led the start of a shift in their family. I mean, that’s an amazing vision, amazing legacy that you have in so many people’s lives.
Marvin C:
Well, thank you.
Gary S:
That ding that you heard, listener, is the captain turning on the landing gears, that sign that says it’s time to land. So, we’re landing the plane at this moment. As I like to do at the end of episode, sometimes I’ll pull some key takeaways, three key takeaways. There was one moment here. I’m just going to go with one key takeaway from our conversation with Marvin Charles, and there was something that Marvin said when he was talking about going through his crucible and how he, on the other side of that crucible, he and his wife took what they learned going through their crucible and applied it to help others.
Gary S:
He used this phrase about … They had a victory. They had a victory over their own crucible, and from that, they’ve applied it to the creation of DADS. I think the takeaway on that point is your victory, regardless of what your crucible is, your victory in overcoming your crucible can be and often is the jumping off point for your life of significance. The lessons you learned and applied, and the actions you’ve taken in moving beyond the failure, setbacks, and missteps of your life can be offered to help others to do the same thing with their failures, their setbacks and their missteps.
Gary S:
Out of your pain can be birthed your purpose. That’s what we’ve just talked about for the last hour with Marvin Charles. Until we are together next time, listener, thank you for spending time with us. Warwick and I have a little favor to ask you. On the app that you’re listening to this podcast right now, we’d ask that you’d click subscribe. That will ensure that you’ll never miss an episode and it will also ensure that we’re able to get really, truly, we hope hopeful and helpful content like our conversation with Marvin into the smartphones and the computer desktops of more people.
Gary S:
Again, until the next time that we are together, please remember that your crucible experience is painful. We know that. All three of us have been through crucibles of our own, but here’s the good news, that crucible experience that you’re going through, or maybe you’re starting to come out of is not the end of your story. In fact, as it was for Marvin, it can be the beginning of an entirely new story, an entirely more fulfilling story, an entirely life-changing story for you and for others, because where that story takes you, as you begin to write it, as you learn the lessons of your crucible and walk through them, that journey can take you to a totally different destination. That is a life of significance.
