Your soul is the you that you don’t have to think about, where your essence, your truest self, lives. But how do you discover what your soul reveals about you? More important, how can drawing on the insights you find there help you bounce back from a crucible and lead a life of significance? Crucible Leadership founder and BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE host Warwick Fairfax and cohost Gary Schneeberger take a deep dive into those questions, offering up 7 ways to live with your soul top of mind. The beliefs, values and passions you find there, Warwick says, will allow you to begin living your legacy today.
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Transcript
Warwick F:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership. If you’re doing something that’s not in line with your dreams, aspirations, skills, your personality, whether it’s personally and professional, what tends to happen is, the more you ignore who you truly are in your soul that leads you into the desert. There are these words that people have used, like the land of smoldering discontent. Day by day, you die. Your inner self dies and your passions, and you become just this almost like this robot, this hollow man, hollow woman of just nothing. There are people that they don’t feel joy or pain. They’re just numb. They’re just numb to life.
Gary S:
Wow! That sounds pretty depressing. Doesn’t it? But don’t worry. This week’s episode is all about how you can avoid what Warwick just described. It’s a roadmap for how you can, as he puts it, begin living your legacy today and the joy and fulfillment you’ll find when you do. Hi, I’m Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show and the communications director for Crucible Leadership. Pull up a chair or listen wherever it is you may be multitasking as we discuss how to live in a way that’s true to the real you, the inner you that is aligned with your essence, your soul.
Gary S:
We cover seven practical steps in all, each one, a stone to lay in the road that will carry you to your life of significance.
Gary S:
Listener, we have a great show today. We always know it’s going to be a great show when we’re not exactly sure what we’re going to call it. Whatever name was on this podcast before you clicked play, we’ve thought of after we’ve recorded it, because we don’t know exactly what to call it yet. A working title at some point was soul work, but Warwick explain to folks what it is that we’re going to be traversing today, the subjects that we’re going to be talking about.
Warwick F:
Yeah. Soul is an interesting word. I think we often talk on Beyond the Crucible, and indeed, as part of Crucible Leadership as, how do you live a life of significance? We talk about, well, it starts with how you’re designed and wired, and your skills, abilities, and talents, and then lining them up with your fundamental beliefs and values, finding a vision that you’re off the charts passionate about, getting a team together and living a life of significance. That’s all good and that’s all true, but one of the things I think we’ve come up against in chatting to guests and in reflection is there’s something maybe beyond just wiring and design.
Warwick F:
It’s our inner essence, our soul, and what is that? I mean, in a sense, philosophers and religions and spiritual folks have been talking about the word soul for probably thousands of years. It’s not a new topic. The sense of a soul is it makes you, you. Every human being that’s ever lived has a unique soul. It’s a combination of wiring, but more than that, personality, perspective, passions, characteristics, quirks. It’s what makes you as a conscious human being. Human beings have consciousness. So, what makes you, you?
Warwick F:
For want of a better word, and as I said, theologians and philosophers have been talking about it for thousands of years, it’s your soul, it’s who you are. We wanted to chat about what is soul and how do you get more in touch with it? And how do you live your life more in touch with your soul? If a soul is who you are, shouldn’t you be paying attention to it and living in light of it?
Gary S:
Right. Two points based on what you just said. We were talking about what to cover during the show here, and something popped in my head that I said that your soul is the you that you don’t have to think hard about. It’s the you that is just you. It just kind of comes out, and to make your point about the thousands of years that talk of soul has been waged, I found a quote that goes back to Aristotle, who said this, “The soul is the first activation of the potentiality for life that is in organic, physical, or natural bodies.”
Gary S:
Back in Aristotle’s time, back when people only had one name a piece, they were talking about the importance of soul as it pertains to how you live your life.
Warwick F:
Yeah, and that’s true. I mean, it’s funny in the Christian tradition and others, you talk about the body may die, but the soul doesn’t. The sense of the soul being eternal, which is a hard thing to get your head around, that’s not an uncommon thought within religious and spiritual tradition. This concept of eternity and soul, it’s a fascinating topic. It’s not easy to understand, to be honest, but it’s an important one of understanding, what is a soul and what does that mean? Do I know what mine is, and how do I live in light of who I truly am? While it may be difficult, I don’t think these are questions you want to ignore.
Gary S:
Right. It’s a critical aspect of Crucible Leadership, because when we describe crucibles, there’s a lot of words you can use for a crucible experience. It was devastating, it was life-changing, it was soul-crushing, is one of the things people use to describe a truly traumatic crucible. The idea, in the context of Crucible Leadership, this conversation, how do you get in touch with your soul? How do you sort of elucidate what’s in there? Your soul is that thing that gets crushed sometimes, that gets wounded, that gets battered when you go through a crucible experience. That’s fair, isn’t it?
Warwick F:
Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, soul-crushing is a good word. If it’s soul-crushing, you must have something to be crushed. What is that thing that’s getting crushed? When you say to somebody, boy, was that soul-crushing. He said, I’ll absolutely, but why? Why was it soul-crushing? What was it that got crushed? And how do you maybe stop it getting uncrushed or revamped, redeemed, if you will? Yeah, it’s an important question. I think most people, whether they’re religious or not, have a sense that they have a soul. They have an inner essence that’s beyond just wiring and gifts.
Warwick F:
It’s more than that. It’s deeper than that. It matters hugely. People intuitively have a sense that they have one and that it matters, even if they don’t fully understand it, because if philosophers and religions grapple with this subject, it can’t be easy.
Gary S:
Right. Now, although I often say I’m a word guy, so I’m definitely not a scientist, but I did, Warwick, a little bit of an archeological dig to find out, when’s the first time that this idea of doing soul work came up in Beyond the Crucible? I found in the March 10th podcast with Bryan Price. I remember the moment. I had to look up the date, but I remember kind of the moment and the discussion. You and Bryan Price, who’s a leadership … He runs something called the Buccino Leadership Institute at Seton Hall University.
Gary S:
One of the things he does is he has a crucible class with his students where they talk about their crucible experiences. But as that conversation was wrapping up, Bryan had talked a little bit about what he calls, what others call imposter syndrome. This idea that I don’t deserve the things that have happened to me. I’m an imposter. I’m living falsely in some way. I have a transcript from that end of that conversation, and this is what you said to Bryan Price when we were talking with him. “None of us are perfect. Getting over the whole imposter syndrome, I mean, that’s really important. It’s almost, I’d say soul work. To be really effective leaders, you’ve got start at the root.”
Gary S:
“That’s often at the soul level. You’ve got a good foundation at a soul self-image level, you’re going to be so much more effective and compassionate. You have a bunch of weeds or some issues at a soul level, you’ll find it very difficult to care for other people. So, you’re really dealing with what I’d call soul work.” That was the first time I remember you talking about the need to care for the soul. One of the things that we talked about is that you can’t really, because the soul is your essence, you can’t really sort of shape your soul or change your soul, but you can discover it. You can peel back layers of the onion to find out what’s in there, and then how do you manage those things that you find there?
Warwick F:
Yeah, I think that’s true. I mean, just understanding that you have one is important. I think you can nurture it and help it flourish. On the other hand, you can ignore that. Sometimes parents, maybe their kids went on a path that wasn’t helpful, whether it’s drugs or getting involved with people that lead them into a life of crime. You’ll hear parents say, Johnny or Mary, they’re a good person. They’ve just been around the wrong people and they’ve gone down the wrong path, but I think often the case, that’s often the case, of what is that soul? I think sometimes, and we’ll get into this, sometimes we ignore who we are and we live somebody else’s life or somebody else’s path and that direction lies misery.
Gary S:
Right. That’s part of your story. I mean, that’s a part of your story, the idea that as the fifth generation, heir to the family media dynasty, that’s what you were designed for by family fiat or however that worked, that was your role, and it didn’t take into consideration your talents, passions, things that you wanted to do, let alone, did you have the soul? Was your soul one to be a media tycoon? That was a question that no one ever asked and no one ever thought to ask, right?
Warwick F:
Yeah. I mean, that’s true. I mean wiring and soul, it’s sort of interweaved. I’m basically a reflective advisor, probably more on the shy, introverted end of the spectrum, and to be this upfront leader where I’m having to make a hundred decisions before breakfast, the way that your average media tycoon does, and you’re responsible for thousands of people, I mean, that just wasn’t me, but yet, because growing up at 150-year old family media business and having dearly loved my parents and my father, I didn’t want to let them down, or let my dad down and ancestors. I found that I was trapped.
Warwick F:
I mean, I’ve mentioned on another podcast recently, it sounds like a strange analogy, but it’s almost like the Royal family. It’d be like asking Prince William, who is the heir apparent after his dad, Prince Charles, has he ever thought about doing something else? He would say, “Well, no,” because if he did, his father and grandmother would be devastated. So, the issue of, what does your soul want is irrelevant. Yeah, I mean, it never seemed to be an option, and the challenge is, when you’re living somebody else’s life, that can, maybe it’s not soul crushing, it erodes the soul. It starts getting eaten away. It’s almost like acid.
Warwick F:
It’s just sort of it erodes it. When you’re not helping your soul flourish, watering it, nurturing it, and letting weeds grow, it’s really almost a guaranteed path to misery. Happiness and joy and fulfillment won’t happen.
Gary S:
Right. The reason behind this podcast is that we’re about to turn a corner. We’ve already, if this were a court of law, we’ve entered into evidence, the fact that we have souls, and that living in line with those souls is important. I’ll finish this aspect of the discussion before we turn into seven ways to stay true to yourself, seven ways to live within the parameters, live out of your soul. Here’s a quote that summarizes a little bit of what you were just saying by the author, Daniel Defoe, wrote this. “The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished or the luster of it will never appear.” What we’re going to talk about, these seven items that you’ve identified that are in a blog of yours, that if not already available at crucibleleadership.com, will soon be available at crucibleleadership.com, is basically things you can do to polish the diamond that is your soul, to make sure that that the luster of that essence is not lost.
Warwick F:
Yeah. I mean, I think that’s true. Really, the first step is recognizing that you have a soul, that all humans have a soul, as we’ve been talking about, and in essence, that makes them different than any other human being. You need to ask the questions of, why was I put on this earth? What gives my life meaning? What are my passions? I mean, what is life about, and in particular, for me? And realize that you have a God given soul, at least from my perspective, and you have every right to live in line with it.
Warwick F:
One of the things that why this is so important, because a lot of people will say, oh, soul I don’t really get it. Who cares? I just want to get a job.
Gary S:
It sounds all oogity boogity.
Warwick F:
It’s all ethereal, and who cares? Let’s get a good job and do something that at least I don’t hate and enjoy the weekend and I just keep going, which is obviously, in the world of Crucible Leadership and life of significance, so we think life should be focused on others and for a higher purpose, but really at a soul level, it matters because if you’re doing something that’s not in line with your dreams, aspirations, skills, your personality, whether it’s personally and professional, what tends to happen is, the more you ignore who you truly are in your soul that leads you into the desert.
Warwick F:
There are these words that people have used, like the land of smoldering discontent, day by day you die, your inner self dies, and your passions, and you become just this, almost like this robot, this hollow man, hollow woman of just nothing. There are people that they don’t feel joy or pain. They’re just numb. They’re just numb to life. You don’t want to be this numb automaton that’s like, it’s given up and his soul has been crushed in this eternal purgatory of frustration. That’s what can happen if you ignore your soul and don’t live in light of it and listen to everybody else. You don’t want to be that person. That’s a land of pain, and you don’t want to be that person.
Gary S:
That is great advice for the listener and falls in line with another quote that I have that I found from, I don’t know why this is sort of the literary episode of Beyond the Crucible, but this is from the poet, Walt Whitman, who said exactly what you’re talking about. He said it this way, “Re-examine all that you have been told. Dismiss that which insults your soul.” Dismiss that which just does not feel right, does not feel like that’s what you’re supposed to do. Again, the reason we’re having this discussion on Beyond the Crucible for Crucible Leadership is because what you were just describing about living life as an automaton, that’s the antithesis of where crucible leadership aims to aim people, which is to a life of significance.
Gary S:
A life on purpose dedicated to serving others, where there’s joy and there’s happiness and there’s meaning, and to live outside or contrary to your soul is the opposite of that. It’s those things that Whitman says, insult your soul. Those are things we should dismiss from our soul.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. I may have got it wrong. It might be Thoreau, but I think somebody like that said, that people live lives of quiet desperation. They’re not yelling and screaming or crying, but it’s just, we all have known them. There’s just this deep inner sadness, and it gets worse as the decades go by and you feel sorry for them. Boy, they just seem, they don’t necessarily complain but they just seem unhappy at such a deep spiritual level. Maybe it comes out in sarcasm, maybe they’re negative, maybe they’re pessimist, but it’s just, there are always reasons. Maybe that drives them to substance abuse.
Warwick F:
I mean, I’m no expert, but people who get into substance abuse, there’s always a reason, and it’s probably a soul-crushing reason. These things matter. Anyway, I think we’ve probably outlined if you have a soul, why it matters.
Gary S:
Right. Lest you think listener that this is going to be a depressing, if you found that to be sort of a downer, we’re not trying to be a downer. The idea is to sort of set the stage for why is soul so important, and what Warwick’s talking about. That’s why this discussion is important, not just in general, but in the concept or in the construct of Crucible Leadership. This is an important conversation to have. Now we’re going to turn the corner and to help you understand ways to discover things that do not insult your soul. The first one of those is what, Warwick?
Warwick F:
Yeah. I mean, we’ve been talking about recognize you have a soul and we all have them. Hopefully listeners, you understand this now of, we have one and why it’s important. I think really, after you recognize that you have one, the next step is really to examine your fundamental beliefs. We live in a fast-paced world, technology, people are climbing the corporate ladder, and we typically, we don’t take time to think, who am I? What do I believe? What does it matter what I believe? Well, if you don’t know what you believe, how in the world can you figure out what your soul is and live in light of it? I mean, to make this practical, you can say, okay, great, I have a soul, but I have no idea what that is, and what do I do with it?
Warwick F:
The first step is, we all have beliefs. Now, it could be a religious tradition. It could be spiritual or philosophical. You’ve got to do some work, and it matters. What you believe matters. It’s not about what other people believe or what other people think you should believe. That’s not the relevant thing is, every human being, because we have consciousness, we have beliefs. I think pretty much everybody has strong convictions, a set of strong convictions.
Warwick F:
Well, figure out what those beliefs are. Now, maybe you were raised in a religious tradition and you don’t buy into all of it. You may buy into some of it. Maybe you don’t go to church every Sunday or synagogue or mosque, or whatever it happens to be your religious or spiritual tradition. But there may be parts that you like. For instance, in the Christian tradition, maybe you like this whole idea of servant leadership and the golden rule, do unto others as you’d have them do onto you. You might say, you know what? That part of the Christian tradition, well, I buy it, I like that.
Warwick F:
Well, examine the parts of your religious, spiritual or philosophical traditions, and ideally write them down, think about it. What are those things that I feel like at the core of what I believe as me as a human being? That’s the first key step. Know what you believe and honor that treasure that. I mean, let’s assuming you don’t believe in something you think is … Hurt everybody or self-centered. I’m an idealist. Most of us, if you ask people their fundamental beliefs, it’s not typically rip people off, cheat, steal, kill.
Warwick F:
I mean, if you’re a psychopath, okay, but let’s assume that you’re a vaguely sane person, I honestly believe that people have fundamental beliefs that should be honored and treasured, almost without exception. At least for sane, functional human beings, which I think is most of us, I think that’s true.
Gary S:
Those beliefs are, I mean, if … Let’s use a metaphor, if your soul’s a plant, it’s in a planter, your beliefs are one of the seeds that is dropped in there. Your soul grows from those beliefs, and identifying what those beliefs are, really taking the time to think about them helps you understand your soul better, helps you live out of your soul better. Again, it’s not like you can adopt new beliefs that will change your soul. You can adopt new beliefs all the time, but you can see the beliefs that are embedded in your soul and live within the parameters of those. That leads to a life that’s far more joyous than the opposite, what Whitman was talking about.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. I think one way of looking at it is, if you asked, hey, just met John on Mary, tell me about them. Who are they? That’s a common question. Well, this will be a little bit more direct or curious, if you said, so, tell me, what is it that they believe? I don’t mean just so much religion, but in terms of their fundamental beliefs, who would you say they are? Well, if you were told over the next five, 10 minutes, this is fundamentally what they believe, and you would be a fair ways along the path to understanding who they were as a person.
Warwick F:
It wouldn’t fill in everything, but it would fill in some core elements of who they were when you start asking that question. Think of it that way. If that’s true, then we should know what we believe. That’s really the next key point, I’d say.
Gary S:
Yeah, and then, hand in glove with that, beliefs. I mean, we say that, if you did a search on the Crucible Leadership website for these two words being together, beliefs and values come together a lot. Then the third one would be the third point to make sure that you’re living in line with your soul, is it involves your values. Explain that a little bit.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. You’re right, Gary. We talk a lot about beliefs and values, and it’s funnily enough in the book that I have written, Crucible Leadership, which comes out in October this year.
Gary S:
Look at you, bravo. Way to go, October 19th, Crucible Leadership.
Warwick F:
There you go. It’s funny, I have a couple chapters that track exactly these two points. I have a chapter called faith, which is really … I’m a very open about my own Christian faith, but I talk about your leadership needs to be anchored in some fundamental belief system. It could be a religious, spiritual, philosophical tradition, but then I talk about how those beliefs work themselves out in your life, is the next chapter, which really talks about character. That’s a similar way of talking about values, which is, what are your fundamental values? Which is sort of like, how do you live your life, is what values are about.
Warwick F:
Like I mentioned in the blog, two of my highest values are integrity and humility. For me, that comes out of my Christian faith. Those are two of the early disciples, Jesus highest values. There’s a link between my beliefs and values, but it could be different for others. It could be kindness, generosity, compassion. I mean, those are all, I would argue biblical values as well, but your values is part of the outworking of your beliefs in your life. Understanding your beliefs is important, but understanding your values, that paints some more brush strokes on your painting of understanding what your soul really is. The two do work together.
Gary S:
Yeah. And I want to talk to listeners right now who are like, well, okay, that sounds great, but well, how do I know what my values are? I mean, how do I figure that out? I want to share just a little bit, and we haven’t talked about this before because I wanted to surprise you with it. But I did an exercise probably a month ago with this thing. If you’re on YouTube, I’ll show it, but I’ll say it if you’re not. There’s this little deck, it’s called the One Core Values thing, which is done by a book called The One Thing Core Values, but they’ve worked with a company called The Best-Self Thing. All this deck is, is about 200 cards with words and phrases written on them and what your values can be, making a difference, wealth, wholeheartedness, wonder, resourcefulness, responsibility, self-expression.
Gary S:
They list all of these values across a spectrum. The idea behind how this works is you go through the deck of all these words and the ones that resonate with you, put them in a good pile. The ones that don’t, put them in the discard pile. If you have more than eight or nine or 10, whittle them down. The idea behind doing this is to continue to revisit those words until you identify the three words that are the three most fundamental core values that you have.
Gary S:
I went through this exercise and I actually created a little bit of art for my house with my three. My three are hope, grace, and legacy. Those are the three governing values of my life. Now, you don’t have to go out and necessarily listener and spend money on this particular box, but you can consider words, consider values, consider things, and really ask yourself the question, is that important to me? Discard those ideas that aren’t important to you and lean into the ones that are, and you can whittle down through … There’s a lot of values in the world. There’s a lot of people with a lot of different values, and there’s a wide swath of differences between them.
Gary S:
Take some time, do as Warwick said, back on March 10th, the soul work to discover, what are your most deeply held values? It’s not necessarily going to be something you can get to in a minute and a half if you just do some thinking that … A red light. You may have to dig in a little bit, and I’m telling you, from my perspective, learning that hope, grace, and legacy are the three values that govern my life has already, in a month, been revolutionary for me as I move forward.
Warwick F:
Yeah. I mean, Gary, that is an excellent suggestion. We might put that in the show notes. If you Google core values, and because I’ve done a lot of executive coaching, I’ve done this from time to time, you can find a number of different books, a number of different lists on the internet of core values. What they do is what that One Core Value concept that Gary mentioned, is they’ll start with maybe a hundred and they’ll say, get your top 20, or top 30, top 20, top 10. Then they’ll say, get your top three, probably no more than three to five.
Warwick F:
As you whittle them down, I think pretty much everybody, certainly the vast majority, you know when you’ve found the right one, you just know this is me. I look at it. This is who I am, I believe passionately. I think what you mentioned, grace, hope and legacy, you look at those words, and you go, that’s who Gary is, so at least, that’s certainly part of how you would describe Gary, right, because of those three words.
Gary S:
Right. What’s interesting about it is that I wouldn’t have necessarily picked these three words if I was just grabbing … If someone asked me, before I did the exercise, what are three words? I would have picked some … I’d probably gone easy. I’d have picked faith or things like that. Going through the exercise of however you do it can help because you’ll discover, not only what feels right to your soul, what is born there, but you may surprise yourself at what’s in there when you go through those words and how you react to them, just as you described Warwick, how you react to those words when you see them, you’ll know, and it may surprise you. That’s a good kind of surprise to have because it can help you moving forward.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. The homework assignment for this aspect, it’s clear whether it’s the One Core Values, which we can put on the show notes, or you can Google values lists. There’s several of them. Find a list and do the exercise of 20, 10, and ideally there’s three or five. Several people do this. They all tell you do the same method. Start with a big list and whittle them down to the few and you’ll know when it’s there. That’s absolutely mission possible. Gary did it. We can all do it. Right?
Gary S:
This hangs on the wall next to the couch where, if we’re watching television or something, so I’m constantly reminded of those are my values.
Warwick F:
That is a good thing to do.
Gary S:
The next point, sorry. I am so lost in my values that I forgot to enter, play my role of moving the show along. The next point then, that was the third point, the fourth point again, to live out of your soul and to make sure that you’re staying true to yourself, Warwick. What’s the fourth point for listeners?
Warwick F:
Yeah, it’s really … This sounds so obvious, but sometimes the important things in life are, but we don’t do it, you want to live in harmony with those fundamental beliefs and values. There are times when I’ve coached people, and as a coach, I say this with a straight face. I say, “Okay, so help me understand what your fundamental values are.” Fundamental beliefs and values. And they’ll tell me something. I’ll say, “Okay, great, so to what degree are you living your personal and professional life in harmony with those beliefs and values?” “Well, not very.” Then I’ll say with a straight face, “No joke.”
Warwick F:
What would you prefer to do, to change the direction of your personal and professional life or to change your values and beliefs? As a coach, I’m not judgmental. It’s not my life. You have every right to change your beliefs and values if you want to and make them more in harmony with what you’re doing professionally and personally. Well, 99% of sane people aren’t going to say, oh, good point. I’m going to continue the way I’m living personally and professionally, and I’m going to change my belief and values. I mean, who does that? I can’t think of too many sane people. Again, I’m just asking, honest to goodness with a straight face, I’ll say, “Well, gee, I guess I’m not living in harmony with that, with my beliefs and values, is that a problem?”
Warwick F:
Well, now that I think about it, yes. It’s not like they’re idiots. They just haven’t thought about it. Who does? Everybody’s too busy. As a coach, what are you going to do next week? What’s plan for moving in a direction of living in harmony? Intuitively, rational human beings understand this is a problem. Therefore, you don’t want to change your fundamental beliefs and values. You have every right to if you want to, but if they truly are your fundamental beliefs and values, trying to change them might mean, oh, I’m not going to live in line with my soul.
Warwick F:
I’m going to reject my soul. Well, you can try that, but that way lies almost guaranteed pain and suffering. Why do that?
Gary S:
That in itself can be a crucible. That in itself, living outside of your soul can be a crucible.
Warwick F:
Right. You want to think about, okay, let me look at my career decisions, my personal, my family decisions, what am I doing? It’s funny. I think of a podcast we recorded just a couple of days ago that’ll come out here at some point in the not too distant future with John Sikkema. He was an Australian business guy working 80, 90 hours a week. He was doing incredibly well, but he was coming home exhausted, having migraines, and he had zero quality time with his family and kids. He was just a hollow shell. His marriage was not looking good. It probably wouldn’t have lasted if he hadn’t changed directions.
Warwick F:
He was a person of faith, but really, I don’t think he felt like he lived his faith day to day, at least certainly not … He didn’t bring his whole professional and personal life in harmony. He wanted to be successful and the thrill of the deal. But when he started realizing, gosh, I’m not really living in harmony with what I believe and he started moving in harmony with that, he still worked a lot of hours, well, actually, he worked less hours, but then he did a lot of volunteer work, but when he was at home, he was more fully alive.
Warwick F:
His marriage got better, his relationship with his kids. When he was living in harmony with his fundamental beliefs and values, his life completely turned around, and his business was just as successful, maybe more. There’s a tangible example of the pre-living in harmony fully with his beliefs and values and the post was dramatic, and that’s true for, I’d say most, if not everybody. Not only are you miserable, you make everybody around you who love you and who you love miserable if you’re not living in harmony with your fundamental beliefs and values, because you’ll be angry, snarky, people at work won’t like that either.
Warwick F:
It has massive consequences personally and professionally. You want to get that in gear. You want to get that in harmony. Your life won’t change overnight, nobody’s does, but just begin to think, we’ll talk about later about how you do this, but start to make some changes so that your life is in harmony. You can’t ignore this.
Gary S:
Right. One of the things you said early on in what you were just saying Warwick is we have these fundamental beliefs and values and then we don’t live out of them because we don’t remember them or we don’t think about them. One of the things I like to do, which is why I hung hope, grace, and legacy on the wall next to where I sit most of the time when I’m just sort of chilling out for the night, but the stoics, who no one will confuse of being Christian religious people necessarily, folks like Seneca and guys like that, they have all kinds of wisdom. One of their sayings from the stoics is memento mori, which means, remember you may die like now. There’s a coin that the stoic society, there are cells where it says memento mori on it.
Gary S:
I keep this in my pocket because this is a reminder to me, if legacy is a value of mine, how am I living right now, knowing that I could … On the back of the coin that says you could leave life right now, knowing that’s true, am I living right now in a way that would make my legacy one that I, my step-kids, who will live on after me, can be proud of? Am I living in light of that? There are little tips and tricks and things you can do to keep your values in front of you, to keep your values top of mind so that you are indeed living in harmony with those values.
Warwick F:
Yeah, and sometimes the concept is simple, the execution can be difficult, but I think for most people that have families, that are part of a family, that have kids, have a wife, have a husband, have parents, have uncles, brothers and sisters, that includes most of the population. We have family somewhere. Not everybody, sadly, but most do, is am I spending time with them? Do I care about them? Am I asking how they’re doing? I’m always complaining about how badly I’m doing? It’s not wrong to share what’s going on when you’re in pain, nothing wrong with that. But am I spending at least some time saying, well, how are you doing?
Warwick F:
If I have young kids, am I with them in their soccer games, their dance recitals? Or was it like, mom and dad, how come you’re never there at my game? Well, I’m sorry, work was busy. Those years are precious. You will lose them for 99% of people. I don’t know too many people that ignoring their kids and spending zero time with them is part of their fundamental values and beliefs.
Gary S:
Correct.
Warwick F:
I don’t know pretty much anybody who would stand up and saying, let me explain why I will defend this perspective and I will ignore my family. I’d say then don’t get married. Don’t have kids. But if you’re going to make that decision, that contract, and sort of another point to this is, you can have a blessing, and I’m certainly not perfect, but certainly one of my fundamental values was spending time with my family, Harvard Business School graduate, not everybody does, and I was fortunate that I just made that choice, had some flexibility. I was pretty much at all of my kids’ soccer, dance recital, plays, not every one of them, but the vast majority.
Warwick F:
One of the things we do in my family is to write cards to each other. On birthdays, we talk about what we admire about the person’s birthday. When it comes to me, whether it’s father’s day or birthday, all of my kids, my boys are more athletic. They’ll say, dad, you were always there at my soccer game. You were there at my tennis match. They’re now in their 20s, every single birthday for, I don’t know, as long as they’ve been able to say these things, which is a long time now. These things matter, your kids, your family, these matters. You want to be able to, and as the decades go by, have those good memories.
Warwick F:
You don’t want to say, I’m so sorry, son, I’m sorry, daughter. I blew it. Forgive me. I will try and live different now. Redemption is always possible, but do you want to have that conversation when your kids are in their 20s, 30s, 40s? I think you want to avoid that. Building a legacy starts now, not at the day before you die. That’s not the right time to change course. It’s better than never, but that’s why these things matter.
Gary S:
It’s true that you can … It’s never too late to begin to live in harmony with your values. Because there’s always an opportunity. One of the things, it occurs to me about this discussion, soul work is like housework. It’s never done, and that’s a good thing, right? It’s not necessarily a good thing for housework, because it’s like, geez, the house is messy again? You always got to keep cleaning the house, but in the same way, soul work is like housework. It’s never finished. You can keep working at it. It’s never too late. It’s never too late to continue to dive in and discover and live out of that essence of who you are, and that’s what you’ve been describing, and what point five of your blog also describes. Share that with …
Warwick F:
Yeah, it’s funny. It just occurred to me, as you were saying, maybe this should have been another point in there, but part of living in line of your values and beliefs is there’ll be times when you don’t, even if you’ve tried to turn a corner, and that’s where apologizing and forgiveness can be helpful. Maybe it should have been in the points, but I didn’t think about it, but so-
Gary S:
As you go to point five, it’s kind of … I can place it in point five. Explain what point five is and I think we can place that.
Warwick F:
Well, absolutely. Yeah, good point. Basically, you want to visualize, what would your life be like if you were living in harmony with your fundamental beliefs and values? What would your career be like, your personal life? This sense of, what do you feel God or the universe is calling to you? What makes you, you? What is your purpose in life? What do you want your legacy to be? This is part of the directional aspect. What are your passions? I think every human being wants to feel like, on their death bed, or as people have often said, in their eulogy, you want to feel like your life mattered, it counted, you made a difference.
Warwick F:
We talk about, in Crucible Leadership, a life of significance, a life on purpose dedicated to serving others. What do you want your life to be like? That’s part of nurturing your soul, is your soul, I believe, wants to make a difference in the world. I think that’s where we’re wired. It’s funny, in the Christian Faith, they say, we’re born here, we’re here for God’s glory or to live that out in some sense in our lives. I think, more generally, whatever light you feel like the universe has put in you, you want that light to flourish. You want that light to illuminate the world to make a difference.
Warwick F:
We’re wired for idealism. Just ask these questions, and they might seem big, but you start asking yourself these questions, thoughts will come into your head. What do I believe matters? What do I feel called to? You may not have every answer, but you’ll have the beginnings of it. I mean, it can take a little time, but ask these fundamental questions in life, and just briefly back to forgiveness, I think part of you got to forgive yourself for making poor decisions, and part of the soul work of the weeding is, I can be impatient at times, and I wouldn’t say I’m … I don’t get massively angry or anything, but I can get a little short.
Warwick F:
Well, over the years, when I’ve done that with my kids, or my wife for that matter, certainly, I’ll say, look, I’m sorry. I was a little short, I’ve had a bad day. I was impatient. That’s like weeding, just apologizing is part of keeping that soul healthy. If you have a lot of weeds cropping around, that’ll make you feel bad, and how to achieve your life’s calling. But yeah.
Gary S:
That fits in with what point five is, what would your life look like if it was in harmony with your beliefs and values? Well, I would think most people’s beliefs and values don’t involve treating your family poorly, so when you do living in line with not wanting to do that, is to apologize, is to do better next time. That’s one of the things that you want to do. To your point Warwick about how you want to be remembered, one of the reasons that I picked legacy is one of my top three core values.
Gary S:
Have you ever had that thing, where if a genie granted you three wishes, what would you ask for? It’s always, I’d ask for three more wishes, right?
Warwick F:
Right, exactly.
Gary S:
For me, having legacy there allows me to put any other word in there, because my legacy is going to be, do I value people? Is friendship important? Is uniqueness important? Is advocacy important? All the words that are in this deck will be reflected in my legacy, and that’s one of the reasons why I chose it and one of the reasons why living your life in light of what your legacy is going to be, what you’re going to leave behind is such an important thing to do, we believe at Crucible Leadership.
Warwick F:
It’s funny, as you’re talking, the phrase occur to me, live your legacy today. Today is the day you want to live it. If you have lived your legacy each day. I think it can look back in your 80s, 90s deathbed, however long you have, and you’ll say, you know what? I made some mistakes, but I lived my legacy, and in the Christian tradition, we all want to meet our Maker and have him say, “Well done, good and faithful, servant.” Whatever your spiritual belief that you want, the sense of some eternal beings, certainly of friends and family to say, “Well done, you lived a good life. We’re proud of you. You made a difference.”
Warwick F:
That’s really what living in light of your soul is and finding that calling. Yeah, I mean, that’s part of that. It really sort of dovetails into the next point.
Gary S:
Right. I was just going to say that’s a perfect transition point. Bravo for you.
Warwick F:
Exactly. That point is really about, because it might seem, gosh, what does God or the universe want? What’s my calling? What’s my legacy? Wow, those are big questions. I think you asked trusted friends and family, who was the real me? What do you feel like lights me up? Why do you think I was put on this earth? What do you think matters to me? Those close friends and family, they know who you are. I think, those of us who have kids, I mean, you get an idea of how their wired, but what matters to them, what they believe.
Warwick F:
Our friends and family, they know this, and that can help you figure that out. We’ll get into this in the last point of … Because it can sound esoteric, but as you begin to get at least the idea of what continent, what country is my calling, then you can begin to explore how to get there. But you got to at least know what continent or country is, your calling, and what … I mean, you might feel like, I just love kids, and maybe it’s teaching them, maybe it’s counseling. Maybe it’s helping kids who are disadvantaged, have some advantages. I don’t know. I don’t know quite what it is, but I know it’s got to involve kids because I love kids.
Warwick F:
You found the country. You might not have found the exact city or zip code, but you found the country. Then you begin to explore that. I think for many of us, if you ask the big questions, we might at least be able to figure out what country that we want to begin explore in. Your friends and family, to use this example, might say, well, John, Mary, boy, I see the way they’re with kids or they love coaching kids on the soccer field or baseball. I don’t know, they just have this pied piper, this magic ability to connect with kids.
Warwick F:
Something like that sure seems like some calling in some fashion, whether it’s being a teacher, a coach, a counselor. I don’t know what it is, but then you’re beginning to make headway in terms of what you feel like is your God or universe given calling.
Gary S:
Yeah. I loved this point from the blog and this discussion here, this idea of asking trusted friends and family members who they see as the real you, because it’s up until now, we’ve been talking about identifying sort of what’s in your soul, what are the … Then somebody else’s observations can be again, like the exercise of looking through words that describe values. Oh yeah, that one fits me. When people ask you questions who know you well, it can elucidate those things as well. I went on the website called Psych Central. I have no idea if that’s a good website or not, but one of the things that I was looking up is, what are some questions to help you know yourself better?
Gary S:
Here’s some things that your friends and family can have insight on about you that you may not have. For instance, have them ask or tell you what they think your strengths are. Interesting. They can tell you, what do you like to do for fun? Ask your friends, “What do I like to do for fun,” and see what they say back. Ask your friends and family this idea of what are my values is one of the questions this Psych Central article has. I love this one, if I wasn’t afraid, I would fill in the blank. Imagine what your friends and family would say to that and what that could unlock for you as you do the soul work we’re talking about.
Warwick F:
Yeah, that’s a great one.
Gary S:
Yeah, what do I like about my job? What do I dislike? I love that one too, because our friends and family are the ones that we go to and complain about our jobs about. We tell them the good things, but we also sort of unload on them so they can come back to us and they can describe for us and help us see, you don’t like when this happens, you don’t like when that happens, you don’t like when this happens, all things that help move the ball down the field as you’re trying to do this soul work and live in light of who you truly are.
Gary S:
Then the question that we talk about a lot at Crucible Leadership, what are you, I’ll add Warwick’s adjective, what are you off the charts passionate about? What am I off the charts passionate about? You have an idea what that is, the seeds of that are in your soul, but your friends and family have observations that can help you unlock that.
Warwick F:
Absolutely, and this is one we’ve talked about beforehand. There’s the reverse of what you’re passionate about or what really fills you with joy, there’s the negative, right? Which is, what is in the world that really makes you angry, that really frustrate you, say that this is wrong? It’s funny, this occurs a fair amount in Crucible Leadership in the sense of, it’s not always the case, but often you’ve gone through a tragedy, whether it’s abuse or physical or emotional, and there can be the sense of the Crucible Leader, if you will, they’ve been through it, and they might say, I don’t want another living soul to go through what I went through.
Warwick F:
It’s wrong and I’m going to do everything I can to help others bounce back, get through it, and hopefully, still others avoid going through it. Often, negative experiences can be the birth of a calling, a soul-driven calling, if you will, that sense of wanting to help people avoid the pain that you went through. So, it can either be positive, or even from a negative, they can still lead to what you feel is your life’s calling, your life’s work.
Gary S:
Well, that’s your story. It’s why we’re here. That’s why there’s a Beyond the Crucible Podcast because something very traumatic, very soul-crushing happened to you, and out of that, out of the ashes of that, was birthed a calling.
Warwick F:
Well, that’s true. I think most listeners would know having grown up in a 150-year-old family business for a variety of, in hindsight, stupid reasons, having done a $2.25 billion takeover, lost a family business, didn’t help family relations, employees. I mean, the business went on, but it was traumatic. I felt like I was living somebody else’s life. Yes, now, out of that pain, I want to help people understand their true purpose, live lives of significance, significance lives on purpose, dedicated to serving others.
Warwick F:
I want people to live in light of their fundamental beliefs and values, accomplishing a calling that will make a difference in the world. Yeah, I mean, which I like to feel like as best I can, I’m doing … I want others to, so having lived through a lot of pain and at least emotional and financial, I suppose. Yeah, out of that pain, it gave me a vision, a calling of how I want to help other people. We always talk on Crucible Leadership and this podcast, you can’t compare pain. I mean, we’ve interviewed people who suffered physical abuse, who are paraplegic, lost a financial business, somebody that had Parkinson’s, but all these people, they’re using their pain to help others. It’s just amazing.
Gary S:
We’ve gone through the six points in a seven point blog, which will be on, if it’s not already there at crucibleleadership.com, it’s called Seven Ways to Stay True to Yourself. We’ve gone through what we … If we’re in an orchard, we’ve gathered the apples, they’re in the basket. What is step seven? Is baking a pie with the apples. What do we do with all this information that we’ve gleaned about how to live true to ourselves, how to do … We’ve done the soul work, now how do we apply that work to our lives?
Warwick F:
Change isn’t accomplished in one day, but rather than saying, it’s all too hard and do nothing. Real change, like turning an ocean liner, happens in small increments. You want to think to yourself, what’s one small step I can do today to live in light of the real me, in light of my soul? What’s one small step I can take to bring my life personally and professionally in line with my fundamental beliefs and values? To use my example earlier, maybe you have an idea that I love working with kids, well, start talking to friends and family, where do you see that? Start, gee, I haven’t really been a teacher, but let me understand that, being a coach.
Warwick F:
Do I want to go in the medical side as a psychologist? I mean, start chatting to people, maybe volunteer on the side and different things. Some things you’ve got to get certified in and that’s fine, but have some exploratory conversations with folks. Gee, what do you do? What do you enjoy about? You might say, boy, that really sings to my soul and you take the next little step to explore that profession potentially. Think about what one small step will you make, if it’s personal, it might be okay, I can’t quit my job right now, and I’m working at 80-90 hours a week, but okay.
Warwick F:
Maybe I can’t make three of my son or daughter’s soccer game this week, but what one game am I going to make? I’m going to make a commitment. I will make one game this week, no matter what, and if I get fired for that … Well, nobody will fire you for going to one kid’s soccer game, but it’s like, pick one. I know you’ve got a bunch of deals going on or you’re trying to work really hard, or wherever it is. Okay, but what’s the one thing that I can drop so I can go to my kid’s soccer game?
Warwick F:
Life isn’t changed overnight, but pretty soon, one small step will link to another small step. Listeners have heard this, but I think it’s a good example. I didn’t wake up one morning and say, oh, I want to live a life of significance at Crucible Leadership. I want to do a blog and a podcast, and here we go, and here’s a book. It didn’t all roll out like that. It was, over time, as, probably the biggest significant one small step is, is I was working in a local aviation services company doing financial and business analysis.
Warwick F:
Yeah, I could do that pretty well, but I wasn’t feeling like I was living in light of my soul. I came to a point where I felt like almost had this internal conversation with God, or I felt like God, well with me is, is like, you’re not living in light of how I made you. You’re playing small. Not that it’s wrong to do what I did, but you’re not fully using your gifts and talents that I’ve given you. I felt like I was dishonoring God with not truly being who he wanted me to be. I just knew. So, I quit my job. Not everybody can do that. But fortunately, I was able to. Went to a executive coach that did mid-career assessments. She said, boy, you have a great profile to be a coach, executive coach, because I love listening and asking questions.
Warwick F:
Well, that wasn’t the end point. That was a step. As I did that, I found my leadership voice. I didn’t know that I could lead my way out of a paper bag after what … If you’d said, are you a leader? Me? I screw everything up. I am so not a leader. I wouldn’t say that now. In my own way, I think I do lead. Well, that executive coach thing led me to be on my church board and kids’ school board. I found, gosh, I can lead. I gave a seven minute talk in church one time about my experiences, and that people said, boy, your story helped me.
Warwick F:
That led me to begin to write Crucible Leadership. Well, all of those were mini steps. The first step was saying, you know what? I didn’t say it this way, I’m not living in light of my soul. I’m not fully utilizing my gifts and talents. I can’t keep staying here. Now, in my case, I was able to quit. Not everybody could, but you can at least begin to think on the side, okay, who am I? What am I being called to? That one step of listening, in my case, to, I believe was the Lord, led me on a path that I am today in Crucible Leadership.
Warwick F:
But it all started with this sense of I’m not living in harmony with my soul. I didn’t use those words, but that would be one way of translating it. That was one significance step that led to a lot of small steps that led me where I am today, and that was … I don’t know, that was a long time ago. That was like 2003, I think, is when that internal conversation happened. Think of one small step, that one small step can be a lot bigger than you think.
Gary S:
What I love about, and this isn’t the first time that you’ve talked about the power of one small step and the need to sort of break this idea of bouncing back from a crucible into small steps because it can be overwhelming otherwise. One of the reasons I love that, Warwick, is for something you said earlier in this show, where you talked about live your legacy today. One of the things that makes one small step powerful, if it’s one small step that’s moving you toward that life of significance, is that, that one small step is one stone in the road towards your legacy. Those two things go hand in hand as you’re moving forward.
Warwick F:
That’s such a good point you’re making, Gary, is we said earlier that you can live your legacy today by going to the kids’ soccer game, by maybe apologizing to your wife or husband. That might not seem like your whole life is going to turn around, especially if you’ve lived a legacy that was not very positive, might even be damaging, and they’ll say, well, great, you apologized today. I’d like to see a few more because you’ve got about a thousand to one right now. You’re really behind the eight ball.
Warwick F:
Okay, but one apology can lead to another, one soccer game can lead to another, and they can begin to see … Kids can begin to see their father or mother, for instance, or family member, differently. You string a bunch of those things together, your legacy will change, but it’s one bigger step than you realize in changing your legacy.
Gary S:
I didn’t even call for the plane to land. That was just the plane landed. It was like one of those, it wasn’t an emergency landing, but it was a landing where we were busy listening to music or reading books or doing something else while the plane was in flight. That was a great place to stop our conversation today. Let me say this, listener, to you. All of these points in written form are unpacked, as I’ve mentioned a couple of times on Warwick’s latest blog, in Warwick’s latest blog on crucibleleadership.com.
Gary S:
The blog is titled, Seven Ways to Stay True to Yourself. You know you’re in a better spot, listener, than we are right now because you know what this podcast is called as you’re listening to it. As we’re recording it, we have no idea what we’re going to call it yet. I can tell you that the blog is called Seven Ways to Stay True to Yourself, but I can’t tell you what the podcast is called, and you know that, and we don’t. So, you should feel good about that, that you have some information that we don’t have, but thank you for spending this time with us.
Gary S:
Until the next time we are together, we ask that you would remember a thread that ran throughout this conversation, that crucible experiences are indeed difficult. They’re painful, they’re traumatic. They can truly knock you for a loop, but they are not, they are not the end of your story, and they are not the end of to talk about one of the things we talked about here. They’re not the end of your legacy either. If you learn the lessons of that crucible, if you, in consultation with, and living from what you know to be true out of your soul, if you learn the lessons of that crucible, you apply the lessons of that crucible as you move forward, that crucible experience from those ashes, that crucible experience can lead to an exciting new chapter in your life.
Gary S:
Far from the end, it’s a new chapter in your life, a new chapter in the story of your life, and it can be the most rewarding one yet, because in the end, as we’ve talked about here, it can lead to a life of significance.
There are times in life we may feel we are not being true to who we really are, to our authentic selves. This feeling deep in our gut that we are living someone else’s vision, perhaps someone else’s life, gnaws away at us. Our friends, even those who love us, may feel content about our lives. But we don’t! We have sold out. We have given up. We feel deeply unhappy and beyond frustrated. We are living, as some have said, in the land of smoldering discontent. But we have lived in this barren land without hope for as long as we can remember. Is there any alternative? Is there a way out?
Sadly, so many live these lives of quiet desperation — to use another phrase. How did we get here? It may have come from listening to the expectations of our parents or our friends. Perhaps in school we were told we were good at math, even though we also were good at music. But with math you can become an engineer which may be perceived as a better and safer career track than music. But just because you were good at math does not mean you love being an engineer. You listened to the advice of others and so began your journey into the land of frustration.
Deep down, this is more than just using your gifts and talents in the most rewarding way. It is living in light of your soul. You have not been true to what you believe you were put on this earth to do. You feel there is some purpose God or the universe has for you, and you are not living this out. That thought is killing you!
So how do you live in light of your soul, your true inner self, the inner essence of who you truly are?
1. Recognize that you have a soul.
All humans have a soul, an inner essence that makes them different than anyone else. Within your soul is your purpose, what you were made to do. Those things that light you up, fill you with hope, that give your life meaning. When you think, “Why was I put on earth?”, your soul — your inner self — provides the clues to that answer.
2. Examine your fundamental beliefs.
We live in a fast-paced, busy world, where few people have the time or make the time to reflect. What’s the point? Life is so busy and competitive. Get a job, hopefully a good one, work your way up the corporate ladder; hopefully have a family life and some pleasurable hobbies and interests. Isn’t that all there is to life? The short answer is no. To find the beginnings of the answer as to who you are, consider your fundamental beliefs. If you were raised in a religious, spiritual or philosophical tradition, think about what elements of those traditions do you really believe in and think are very important. You may not buy into everything in that tradition, but some elements may really resonate with you. For instance, in the Christian tradition, you may really be moved by the concept of servant leadership or doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, the so-called Golden Rule.
3. Reflect on your values.
Our beliefs often inform and influence our values, but it is worth writing down what we feel are our values. Write down a few words that describe the values you most believe in. For instance, for me two of my highest values are integrity and humility.
4. Consider to what degree you are living in harmony with those fundamental beliefs and values.
When you think of your life, the career decisions you have made, the decisions you have made in your personal and family life, how much is that congruent with who you really are? Are you living your own true authentic life, or are you living someone else’s life?
5. Visualize what your life would look like if it was in harmony with your fundamental beliefs and values.
What would your career look like if it was in complete harmony with what makes you, you, your soul? Perhaps you would no longer refer to your career as a career, but as a calling. What do you feel God, or the universe, is calling you to? What is your purpose in life? What do you want your legacy to be?
6. Ask some trusted friends and family members who they see as the real you.
These have to be people that are for you and do not have any agenda other than to help you live in light of who you truly are. Perhaps even ask them, “Why was I put on this earth?” You may find someone says something that rings true, or sparks in you an idea or thought that could lead you in a positive direction.
7. Take one small step to live in light of the real you today.
Finding your purpose is no easy task. But once you have a clearer idea of your fundamental beliefs and values, what lights you up, your almost God-given or universe-given passions, then it is easier to take the next step. What is one step you can take today to live more in line with who you are? It could be thinking of your work differently. Perhaps you will think of your family and friends differently, and how you interact with them. Living on purpose can cause us to treat others differently. If you find your values are kindness and generosity, for instance, if you consciously try to live today like that; that can have a significant effect on how you treat others at work and at home.
Life is a journey. But as you take one step at a time, one day at a time, with purposeful steps to live in light of your fundamental beliefs and values, your true self, your inner soul, your life may well look quite different. Days of purposeful living add up to weeks and months even years of purposeful living. Over time, your life will change, grow and evolve and your purpose – which is deeply in line with your fundamental beliefs and values, your soul — will come. It will not be easy to plan; life rarely is. Trust the process, trust yourself and you can indeed live in light of your soul. That leads to a life of joy and fulfillment.
Reflection
Examine your fundamental beliefs. Write down elements of them that are central to what you believe you and life is all about.
Consider your values. Write down the values that you believe are the core of who you are, no more than three to five.
Take one small step today to live in light of the real you. Take one step forward this day that is line with your fundamental beliefs and values, that would begin to make your soul soar.
To explore Beyond the Crucible resources, including our free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment, visit beyondthecrucible.com.
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Some people may look at John Ramstead’s life and say he’s lost a lot. Crucibles cost him his dream of being a Top Gun fighter pilot, almost ruined him professionally and financially and nearly killed him in an accident that led to dozens of surgeries over two years — and still left him with physical challenges. Yet Ramstead, an in-demand leadership coach and successful podcast host, says those “losses” helped him find the most important things in his life: his faith and his purpose. He recounts it all in his new book On Purpose, With Purpose: Discovering How to Live Your Best Life — which offers readers insights and action steps to find the true north essential to navigating the journey of their lives.
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.
John R:
When you’re fighting a combat mission or you’re on an airliner flying along, the way those instruments up in the cockpit work is they have to have a navigational reference. They have to know where True North is so they can, not only set a course, but make a course correction when it needs to happen. Here’s the deal, we’re the pilot in charge of our own life. Our life is constantly being pushed off track, health, relationships, the economy, pandemics. If we don’t have a True North, which I believe for me, it’s my faith, but it’s also the identity.
John R:
As I moved from that person I saw in the mirror to my identity in Christ, and those got in alignment, making decisions, what to say yes to, what to say no to became very straightforward, because remember, folks out there listening, whatever you say yes to, you are saying no to something else.
Gary S:
That’s a clever metaphor about navigating through life from today’s guest, John Ramstead, but it’s more than that too, because John was a Top Gun fighter pilot who knows a little bit about the importance of knowing where True North is. Hi, I’m Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show and communications director for Crucible Leadership. On this week’s episode, John’s second time chatting with Warwick, making him our first return guest. He discusses his new book, On Purpose With Purpose: Discovering How to Live Your Best Life. He recounts, in the book and in the interview, the cavalcade of crucibles that cost him his pilot seat, almost ruined him financially, and set him on an arduous two-year path as he recovered from a terrible accident.
Gary S:
Some people may look at his life and say, he’s lost a lot, but that’s not John’s perspective. His is that all he’s lost has helped him find his purpose and that all important, True North.
Warwick F:
Well, John, thanks so much for being here. I loved reading your book On Purpose With Purpose, and so exciting, it’s coming out this month in April. You really weave in some just incredible stories, funny stories with some just profound points about what it takes to really lead and to be a leader with significance. It’s awesome. Before we get into the book, just, I know we’ve chatted before, so listeners will be familiar with this, but just give us a few highlights of your story that sets the stage for your book, just kind of the cliff notes version, if you will, some of the key way points, in your life.
John R:
Okay. Well, first of all, great to be with you guys, Gary, Warwick, and love what you’re doing, bringing context and I think growth to crucibles. Having been through post-traumatic stress through some things I’ve been through, I love this concept I’ve been learning about called posttraumatic stress called post-traumatic growth, and that’s what you guys are facilitating. Grew up in Minnesota, had a dream to go in the military, applied to the Naval Academy and ROTC, got in. Chose ROTC. Then I was in college when the movie Top Gun came out. I’m told, as I’m applying to flight school, I never knew if this was true, but we were told one out of every 10,000 people applying get to fly a jet.
John R:
I literally almost quit right there. That’s a whole story, but literally, actually I did quit and realized I was giving up on myself. That’s something we could circle back to, but got down to flight school. There are some great stories there. Flew the F-14. Like you said, I’m so excited, I get orders to go to Top Gun. Then a few days later, I get hit with a line drive in the eye, blow out fracture, nerve damage. I’m done. My entire identity is wrapped up in being a fighter pilot, being a Naval aviator, and it’s gone. I was a pilot who couldn’t fly, an engineer who’d never engineered anything.
John R:
That transition was really difficult. I actually started a company, and because I was not ready, I was still angry and bitter and immature and trying to figure out who the heck I was, I succeeded in my first company blowing up both a friendship and the company. Then I put 90 hours a week into a startup, grew to having a net worth on paper of millions, I mean walk away money, and the 2000 turned, internet bubble pops, 90 days later, not only is it gone, but I’m six figures in debt and I’m on the street, but you got to keep moving forward. You have no choice.
John R:
There’s these times in our life, these crucible moments that we don’t feel prepared for, and choosing to pause or stop or not move forward, not wake up the next day, I guess that’s always an option, not a good one, but you don’t feel like you can. It’s painful. But rebuilt from there and then got into the financial industry and had to manage an entire team and a practice through 2008 in the financial meltdown. We actually did really good, but that was hard. I’m like, you know what? Enough of this. I’m tired of working for these big companies. I want to get back to being an entrepreneur, and this is now in 2011.
John R:
I just started with a new group, new partners, new company, going to grow it from the ground up. That’s when I had that accident you mentioned that put me in the hospital for two years. Had a severe traumatic brain injury. During that period of time, had no income for two and a half years. My health was gone. I was in chronic pain. Cognitively, I had recovered slowly, but 23 surgeries. Here’s the thing, you reinvent yourself and you’re working hard and you’re on a track, and now you literally cannot do it anymore. I could not show up as CEO or managing partner or any role and succeed when you can show up eight to 10 hours a week. That was the most I could work.
John R:
Going through that, I had to reinvent myself. Then building a coaching practice solo with no resources, and then the pandemic hits. Warwick, a year ago, dude, we had the big Mo going on. I had never been more fired up. As soon as they announced the lockdowns and then they continued, 90% of our events, which were in-person speaking, coaching training were just canceled. It just stopped, and I have 11 people on my team. Then guess what? You just got to turn back and trust God and say, okay, I wonder what I’m going to learn this time.
John R:
Then now, like I’m sitting here, you see me I’m tethered to oxygen. I was one of those few people that got COVID and they put me in the ICU for a week, and it was really ugly for a couple of days, were very concerning, and the hardest part, I think, in that scenario was the family can’t come visit and we’re FaceTiming, and they don’t know each FaceTime if it might be the last time. I mean, it was that bad. I’m not using hyperbole there. I saw, after I got home, I’ve been home now for two months, still on oxygen, tore up my lungs and affected my heart. But I also saw in that, especially I think in light of what happened in my accident, now nine years ago, it really shook my kids. They thought maybe this time they really were going to lose their dad.
John R:
That is a snapshot. But man, there’s been … In each one of those, there’s been other crucible moments, but man, it’s been a life that I don’t think is actually that different than most of the people out there. We have these significant highs, but then we have these valley times that we have to go through. What’s allowed me to keep moving forward is how I’ve been able to put those in context and think about them, which I was not very good at in the beginning, but the more and more you go through them. What I love about what you’re doing is you’re showing people how to move through those adversities and those valley times.
John R:
Honestly, there was times where God just did not make sense to me. I don’t see his plan. I don’t see his will. Why is this happening? But I learned actually how to think about that, I think, accurately and differently in a way that was helpful.
Warwick F:
Well, I mean, you’ve had … We talked off-air that maybe your next book would be on resilience. I mean, you’re in a sense an expert on resilience, not by choice, but by circumstance.
John R:
That’s true. Yeah.
Warwick F:
Lord, I want to be the world’s top gun level expert on resilience. Bring it on. That wasn’t a mission you signed on for, but for whatever reason, God signed you up for the mission.
John R:
By the way, it’s not a mission I would have signed up for either, I’ll tell you that.
Warwick F:
Yeah. I want to talk a bit about your book is, it’s so fascinating, On Purpose With Purpose, and there’s so many good things in here. Just the way you started off talking about being the pilot, in control of your life. You talk about early in your career, you felt like you were living the expectations of others and how you can rewrite the script of your life. Talk about kind of how you felt that in some sense you were living other people’s lives and expectations, because for anybody that knows you a bit, it’s like, boy, John Ramstead, he’s a guy that’s in control. He’s a fighter pilot, fighter pilots don’t live other people’s lives. They kind of take control of the throttle and here we go. It’s like, really? But I find that fascinating. Talk a bit about that whole living in light of other’s expectations.
John R:
Yeah. When you don’t have a very specific, I think destination for yourself, what you are trying to create in your life, what it matters to you, and you don’t have a plan, then you are part of somebody else’s plan. What happened is I fell into that trap unintentionally because when I got out of the military Warwick, that was my identity. That was everything about who I was. I didn’t grow up in an environment where I was around anybody of wealth or tremendous success, and couple that with a young kid who felt completely unworthy of success outside of what I’d been doing in the military, right?
John R:
My self-image was low. I always compensated for low self image. I used to joke saying, you know what? I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I will outwork anybody, and that’s what I did. I just tried to outwork everybody around me. There’s definitely some good things that can come out of that, but there’s also some consequences. What I realized was that I was under the thumb of the tyranny of they, and it was unintentional. What do they expect of me? How do they define success? The people in my company, the people in the community, the people at my church, my family, how do they expect me to show up to be able to succeed in this environment that I found myself in? Certain companies have cultures, right?
John R:
Some of those cultures, their values were completely out of alignment with my own. Now that I’m really in touch with those, my number one, one of my top values is family. But if you go back then and you look and say, okay, John’s working 60 to 80 hours a week, I’m out almost every night, in either a social event, a networking event or a charity event, and I’m traveling two to four days every single week, and I’m exhausted on the weekend. Sunday, I’m just grumpy and nauseous because I’m gearing up, not to get through Friday Warwick, but to survive mentally through Monday night when I can come home and my head can hit the pillow at midnight.
John R:
I never had any problem falling asleep because I was exhausted, because I had so much work to do. I’d come home at 10:00, 11:00 at night and I’d work until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and then I’d get up at 5:00. No wonder, over time, even though I had all these different successes, and you know what? I look back also during those period of times, when I made some big decisions either to leave a company, like I was talking to my wife about this the other day, that one of the technology companies that I rose to the management level, and I realized I’m totally out of balance. I got a call. I talk about it in the book. I got a call, I’m sitting there in this moment of just almost anguish, despair, dread about my future at this company.
John R:
Because I had heard that I was going to be promoted, and I knew the guy, and he worked harder than me, and a recruiter called. He said, “John, hey, I heard things are going great at your company. But hey, can I run something by you?” I’m like, dude, absolutely.” Guess what? I made a complete career change. I burned some bridges. Now, in hindsight, I honestly wish, I don’t know if I’d made a different decision, but was there a way to actually look at my role and do things differently from a different perspective with a different purpose?
John R:
What I learned actually back then, the reason that I was so consumed with hours is I didn’t really trust people. I was a total control freak. I didn’t let people go do their best because I knew it would reflect on me. Some of that self-image thing was creeping back in. I blamed everybody around me, my boss and the culture for this feelings I was having. I’ll tell you right now, looking back on it now, I take responsibility for those results that I actually had back then, and that’s not how I saw it. I saw myself as a victim of all these things around me.
Warwick F:
It’s almost like, as you’re sharing, it’s interesting you put it in the introduction, because it’s a prologue to your whole book because you didn’t do the interior work. You were running a hundred miles an hour trying to achieve the expectations of your bosses and the shareholders. Not thinking, will this affect my family? I don’t know. This is what it takes to be successful. If I don’t do it, the guy next door is going to do it, and I don’t want him to outwork me. It’s just living some role where without thinking, okay, what destination, what’s my True North? Some of these key concepts, it sounds like you weren’t really asking yourself at the time.
John R:
No, think about what we’re all taught, right? Get a good education and work hard and everything will be fine. That’s kind of what I was taught. I don’t know if that is really the mindset of the generation coming in the workforce now, but man, that is so far from the truth if we’re having some real talk here.
Warwick F:
Yeah.
John R:
If you’re not doing work and that is connected to something that’s meaningful to you, that’s purposeful, and you’re not doing it as that best version of yourself, we can talk about that too. That whole concept of joy, which is internal. My inner game, what I’ve discovered, determines that outer game. I was totally focused for the first, until I was 45 years old and had an accident, on that outer game.
Warwick F:
But don’t you think that, that’s most people in the business world, most aggressive, hard charging folks, that they’re focused on the results and they’re not really thinking about, who am I, what are my values? A lot of people in that they don’t contemplate or reflect. They just move and they just act. Don’t you think your experience is not uncommon, right? There are a lot of others like that.
John R:
No, it’s not uncommon at all. Unfortunately, it’s almost epidemic. I have been able, over the last year, because of Zoom, have mastermind groups and trainings and forums with literally thousands of mid-level to very senior leaders. Fortune 50 type leaders. One of the things I do when we jump in the room, I say, hey, everybody just do a one word check-in. What is the preeminent emotion you’ve been feeling over the last week?
John R:
Something that kind of shocked me, and it’s been consistent and it’s in 80% to 90% of the words are depressed, anxiety, stressed, restless, words like that. Very few of the words are excited, fulfilled, joyful. I think that there’s a lot of us out there, whether we’ve gone … We’re in the middle of a storm, like Warwick, I know you went through. I’ve been through, you’re coming out of a storm or you’re going into one.
John R:
Cause you know what, there’s kind of three cycles, right? Sometimes there’s that calm. There’s a storm coming. What I realized was, when adversity hits, nothing ever remains the same. You either emerge from that adversity stronger or you emerge from it weakened. The question is, there is going to be another storm. I got to the point in my life, I said, I realized is, what can I do to emerge and set myself up so that when it does happen, I not only emerge stronger, but help those around me emerge stronger with me?
Warwick F:
Absolutely.
Gary S:
Can I jump in really quickly? Because you said something at the start of unpacking all that, John, that I think is really important for listeners to understand, and Warwick talks about it a lot. You said that your identity was caught up in what you were doing in the military. You were a fighter pilot. How much do you think the pain of your crucibles, the changing of trajectory of your crucibles has been tied to maybe your identity coming from external forces, not from your own passion?
John R:
Well, it came into sharp relief, Gary, after my accident, when I had to rebuild everything, I’ll never forget. I was actually sitting there with a coach of mine, and I’m trying to figure out what’s next. I said, I need to figure out how I’m wired, then I can figure out what I should do next. He goes, “You know what? What if he asked yourself that question differently? What if you asked yourself, how did God wire you and what did he wire you for?” That, Gary, started this process where I started to really, this whole quest of self-awareness, to look in the mirror and say, what is it that I really do see if I actually pull back the curtain? Because it’s kind of ugly in there.
John R:
What are those limiting beliefs? What’s in my identity. Are there things that people said to me that are lies about who I am and my capabilities that I’ve accepted as truths. As an example, when I was getting into business, I had a corporate job and I was going to go start that first company with a friend who didn’t graduate college. I had a family member that was really concerned. They were very conservative, grew up in the depression, and they thought I was an idiot putting my family at risk, and they told me that I would never succeed as an entrepreneur, and that they were ashamed of me and embarrassed that I would put my family in that situation.
John R:
Now, that stuff sinks in. I told you, that company that blew up, I was, I think, making decisions and taking actions and working so hard as much to prove that person wrong, or more to prove that person wrong than actually trying to do the best thing for my company, my team, my customers. That was always front of mind. But I went through this process of saying, okay, here’s what I see. I have what I call my should values, right? I’ve adopted all these values that make me show up in a way that’s appealing at work and where I’m at.
John R:
Are they really in alignment with those core values, the ones that are wired into me? What are my passions? What are my beliefs? How do I root out some of these lies that I’ve let into my identity? Because what I realized was there was this enormous gap between that identity that I was allowed being given to me externally to an identity in Christ that already existed. What I have discovered for me is, the bigger that that gap is, the more stress, and anxiety, and panic and indecision and ambiguity that we experience in the moment.
John R:
As I really worked to close that gap, and God helped me, and people who were coaches and mentors and disciplers helped me to close that gap, I got to tell you, that stress and that anxiety just melted away. In that, I’ll tell you this before, Gary, that whole concept of purpose, what I should do and why. It’s our big why. we all talk about it. I never felt like I honestly really connected to it. I was compensating with my work ethic, and I felt like it was this mystery. Either I wasn’t worthy of being connected to something meaningful or I didn’t have the tools to root it out of the ground and find it like it was a treasure hunt.
John R:
I realized, my whole life I’ve been going about it backwards, because as I was on this journey to close this gap between my identity and my true identity, the one I saw in the mirror and then the real one, the best version of me, it’s like the fog cleared from the playing field and my purpose was right there in front of me and they have been the whole time.
Warwick F:
I find that fascinating, because it seems like the core of your book is this quest for identity, True North, destination that it’s feels like the foundation is that. You have so many things you put in there, like when that softball accident happened, you talk about you couldn’t get past that broken heart. You’ve felt like smoldering discontent that obviously, who is John Ramstead identity? It’s being a fighter pilot. It’s being the number one through the whole ACE of the base story, which we’ll get to, hopefully, the one in 10,000. You’re the best of the best. You’re about to go to Top Gun. Who is John Ramstead? He’s one of the top fighter pilots in the US Navy. That’s who you are. You had that sense of identity. Then, okay, I’m going to outwork anybody.
Warwick F:
I’m the guy that can work anybody else under the table, because I just will, I have that determination. So, you had these series of identity, and then after that accident, it seems like things change. You have this wonderful quote about that accident, talking about identity. You say, “though, from the outside, the accident might’ve looked like a tragedy, God used it to bring me to my life’s purpose, having to dig deep into my true identity as I did after the accident resulted in living my life more fully than I ever have.”
Warwick F:
In some way, that was unbelievably painful, but you mentioned 20 plus surgeries. Be it in some sense, there was beauty or purpose that came out of that tragedy. Was that the culmination of a journey of, after you went through that, that you really found who your identity was and your purpose?
John R:
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. In John 10:10, Jesus says, “I came to give you life,” and so that you may live it to the full. How many of us actually feel, say scale of one to 10, here’s my 10 dude, Paul gets the tar beat out of him, cane, whipped, thrown into a Roman nasty prison in the basement, shackled to a wall, and what does he do? He busts out in praise songs. I’m like, okay, that’s a 10. A one is you’re barely hanging on. I got to tell you when I ask people that today, like, where are you on that scale? I have never had anybody rank themselves over an eight. The majority of people are a four or five. I actually, when I really, and actually created … To assist in to actually figure out where you are on a scale like that. I’m an engineer, right?
John R:
I like to have a process. I was a 2.1. I actually calculated it, and I’ll show you how to do that, but here’s the thing. But if I’m a two, this is at the height of my career before my accident, running a company, working those hours, recognition in the community, I was so out of alignment, my identity was so external, and I was miserable. That place of smoldering discontent. I could not have told you, Warwick why, I just knew I was unhappy. My big focus is, for me, because I’m honestly a simple guy, it’s what is that next small step?
John R:
That became my mantra in recovery. What is the small step that I can take today? If I’m a two, what would a three look like? Do I need to bring my passions more fully into my life? Do I need to maybe work at honoring my values a little bit better? Do I need to work on some mindset issues? I only could work on one or two things at a time. I just had to think through and pray and say, God, what is the one thing today that I need to work on? It’s like 10 years later. Totally, we overestimate what we can do in a year, but under estimate big time what we can do in 10 years. You know what? This is a journey.
John R:
Through this, we’ve come up with a model that my whole family knows, and that is excellence is the standard. But grace is the word, because guess what? I’m going to have bad days. There’s days I might feel like a victim. There’s days I’m working on some of my anger issues and I blow up at my son, but I want to get to a place of excellence. I want to get gooder. I want to improve. Guess what? I’m going to give myself some grace. I’m going to go to my son and I’m going to apologize. This was a shift, and I’m going to ask him to help me be accountable and share with him, here’s the relationship I want to have. I just hurt our relationship.
John R:
I want you and I to be best friends, because I didn’t have that with my dad until it was a lot later, or my mom, our whole lives. Today, Warwick, my marriage is we walk down the street holding hands, and my kids, every one of them, I’ll guarantee you they’ll either call or text me today. I am as close to my kids that I’ve ever been beyond anything I’ve even ever hoped for as a father. Just focusing on those little things. Something else too, I got to tell you, it was an exercise, I was with Lance Wallnau. You might know Lance.
John R:
He had me take out this huge piece of paper and turn it sideways. Like one of those ones you draw on, like when you’re doing a conference, like a retreat, the ones that you peel off and stick on the wall, but you turn it sideways. He had me draw a line all the way through it. He goes, “John, I want you to plot on here, highs and lows, but from a spiritual perspective, where were you spiritually? What’s the earliest high or low that you can remember?” I marked that. Then we have the lines, and he goes, we’re going to do it in pencil because I want you to make them start making them relative to each other, the peaks and the valleys.
John R:
Then we looked at all of these things and said, hey, what was happening that turned the peak into a downturn? What was happening through the valleys? What caused the upswing? Are there anything here in common? But then he asked me a really important question because there was a number of valley times. He goes, “Do you look at some of those?” Some of them, I haven’t even shared in public. They were very painful, personal trauma. Some things, especially in my childhood. Do you go look at those things from a place of pain, anguish, fear, or do you look at those from a place of learning and equipping?
John R:
Because he shared with me, that’s how God sees it. Each one of those are these beautiful treasures, because the first thing God said to me at the accident, if you remember this, the first word, the Lord of the universe standing next to me, he said, “All things work together for good, for those that love the Lord.” I’m thinking about that and I’m looking at some of these very painful things in my past going, okay, how does that work together for good?
John R:
Well, instead of seeing that as something that defined me or something painful, I asked myself, is that something that could equip me to do better today or/and help somebody else that maybe has that either in the past or was going through something I think similar. It was a process, I’ll tell you that. But I would say that today I’m in the healthiest mental place I’ve ever been because I look at all those valley points now from a place in context, really from, talking about transforming my mind to the mind of Christ.
John R:
From a place of equipping and learning, not a place of pain or doubt or regret. Even though some of that is there and some of it kind of creeps in, then I got to ask myself, where’d that come from, and why did it come in there?
Warwick F:
Absolutely. It’s interesting you mentioned Lance Wallnau. You have a very interesting quote of his, and from a spiritual perspective, may make sense, but people may be not familiar with this. You mentioned in your book, Lance says something like, God calls tells you to do something or gives you a vision and just surrendering our life purpose for which you’ve been created. It’s almost like maybe the creator has a plan, maybe we don’t fully realize it. Rather than saying, well, what do I want to do? It’s almost like what you’re saying is, what was I made to do? What was I designed to do? What was the God given passions that are within me?
Warwick F:
It seems like there’s, it’s not just an internal, there’s almost an external part of finding your purpose. Is that some of what you and Lance were kind of grappling with?
John R:
Yeah, 100%. I noticed as I’m … There’s been a evolution in my prayer life, I would say, before the accident, I was going to church and all those things, but my prayer was here’s the desires of my heart, here’s my business goals, here’s my plan, here’s this. It was almost like the spiritual ATM. It was very immature. It’s like my three-year-old grandson, right? It’s like juice, snack. Then as it evolved, it was like, God, what is your will for my life? I was looking for that assignment. If you actually looked through the Bible, as I’ve now read, because I didn’t do it till after the accident, cover to cover, those assignments, Moses, Jacob, Isaiah, others, they’re actually kind of few and far between.
John R:
What we’re called to do is to love God with all our hearts and love others. We’re called to disciple nations, which is to talk, I think about the gospel and the kingdom, and be ambassadors to that. What I realized was, in all this, having been in God’s presence and realized, not only that he cares about me personally, and I’m not special. This is everybody. But he is, I knew in that moment, he was moving big time in this world and it’s accelerating. I truly believe it’s why I’m alive. I have a part to play in some way.
John R:
My prayer today Warwick is God reveal your will to me that you’re doing in the world. Reveal to me what you’re doing in the life of Warwick in Gary. What are you doing through crucible leadership or this company, this client that just hired me, and what do I need to do to adapt, to grow, to change in order to partner with you and join you in what you are already doing? I got to tell you, some of that is a big stretch. I’ve got to tell you, I’m just being real, some of that has prompted some serious crisis of faith, because that gap felt really big between where I was and serving in that capacity.
John R:
I got to tell you, but think about this, everybody talks about the Ephesians 2:10 calling, right? We want to find the calling part, but what’s the first part of that verse? That you are Christ perfect workmanship. That does not have dependent events. That doesn’t mean you have to go get ready to get ready to get ready.
Warwick F:
Well, I think what you’re really reinforcing is the notion of the being of the leader over the doing of the leader. Metrics are overrated. Nothing wrong with metrics, but metrics, if a leader says, gee, my vision is to grow the company 20% per year for the next five years, you always know that’s the wrong answer. Every leadership textbook will say, well, that’s not a vision. It’s sort of like, I think what you’re really emphasizing is just the being of a leader rather than what you accomplish, how many books I sell, you sell, how many workshops you have, how many leaders you help. That’s not the relevant thing is, am I doing what I feel called to do today?
Warwick F:
Next year and in the next 10 years, am I being who I’m meant to be? The metrics will take care of themselves, but that’s a backwards way for most leaders to think. They think of numbers and doing, which is not wrong rather than, am I being who I’m called to be?
John R:
Well, yeah. From a leadership perspective, you’re spot on. Think about this. What does it say in scripture, that there is no love greater than this than to lay down your life for me. If I’m in leadership, what if I said, you know what, there is no love greater than this if I was to lay down my agenda to serve the agenda of others? I got to tell you, this was modeled to me, believe it or not, by my commanding officer when I was first in the military. I went up to him one day and I said, “Listen, I want to stay in the Navy as a career.” I didn’t know the softball thing was going to happen. I said, “What advice would you give to me?” I’ve always reached out to people who have succeeded at what I want to do and get their input.
John R:
As a junior officer, and he goes here, “Do this, John. Do your job with excellence. And every day, you go find somebody in this squadron that you can serve, senior to you, junior to you, enlisted officer in your department or not and you help them succeed, and you might never get any credit or rewards or recognition, but trust me, those in charge, those that care are going to notice. If you just do that from a place of integrity, you will never have a problem with your career.” What was he saying? Serve others. A rising tide lifts all boats. I think the reason I had the business success I did, Warwick, is my philosophy was always, if I help other people to succeed in that role, max out their comp plan, be invested in them personally, know their families and their kids and what’s going on outside of work.
John R:
And I just help them succeed as a person, and I have enough people do that, just as a by-product of that, I’m going to do just fine. That’s what I was doing this whole time. But that success that I was looking for, for myself had never been defined where that goes. I was like in this mode of constantly working and serving with really no direction or end in sight, and I think that’s what just wore me down to a nub.
Warwick F:
I want to talk just briefly about some of the key principles in your book. I don’t want to give the whole thing away because obviously you need to read the book to fully understand them, but you found your true purpose. You have this wonderful chart there, page 24 of the book, in which you’ve got personal assets, talent, skills, experience, and passion, and you’re on the upper right. You found your calling, working with leaders, empowering them. How do people, at least at a high level, find that true purpose, that sense of joy and fulfillment you have despite all the pain that you have? As you say, you’ve had more joy, more fulfillment, greater marriage, greater relationship with your kids.
Warwick F:
You’re serving your clients. Life is pretty good, even amongst the physical pain, but there are some key building blocks that you outlined in your book of True North, destination, accurately describing your present position. Just touch on some of those key elements that listeners will then … Hopefully their appetite will be whetted to then read the book, is what are some of those key building blocks to help you get to where somebody like you are in a sense in terms of that sense of joy and purpose?
John R:
Yeah. Think about it, when you’re flying a combat mission or you’re on an airliner flying along, the way those instruments up in the cockpit work is they have to have a navigational reference. They have to know where True North is so they can, not only set a course, but make a course correction when it needs to happen. Here’s the deal, we’re the pilot in charge of our own life. Our life is constantly being pushed off track, health relationships, the economy, pandemics. If we don’t have a True North, which I believe, for me, it’s my faith, but it’s also the identity.
John R:
As I moved from that person I saw in the mirror to my identity in Christ, and those got in alignment, making decisions, what to say yes to, what to say no to became very straightforward, because remember, folks out there listening, whatever you say yes to you are saying no to something else. I am a born people pleaser, right? The next thing is, think about you jump in the car and you pull out your Apple maps or Google, and you’re going to go somewhere. You’re running an errand and now you got to go to a different spot.
John R:
What’s the first thing you do? Type in the destination. That app is useless without a destination. It doesn’t even know where to start. It can just show you a map of where you’re at. Of course, I can look around and see where I am. What is that destination that we have in our own life? What is that purpose? Why are we doing this? What is that outcome that we’re striving for, both short-term, long-term, and that legacy we were creating? I want to live a life, Warwick, so the use of my life would outlive my life.
John R:
I’ve got clarity on that one. I should have died 10 years ago, and I realized in that moment, that is not how I’d lived my life. The other thing that we talk about is your present position. Who’s ever pulled up that map and you’ve typed in that destination and it really has, Waze is actually the worst of this man. That’s why I don’t use it anymore. It doesn’t know where you’re at. Then, so you’re trying to make a guess because I’m not familiar with this part of town, and I always go the wrong way. Then I’m on a one-way street, and then it adds like eight minutes to my trip and I’m now I’m late and now I’m frustrated. It’s no different than our own life.
John R:
If we don’t know where we are at, our values, our passions, our mindsets, we can’t figure out, hey, where we’re at and then compare that to the better version of ourselves and start making some progress. Really, the last chapter is where it all comes together for people to create a strategic action plan, and that’s a place called convergence. That’s where all this comes together to move up into the right in that chart, like you talked about, to that 10-10 life. That’s a life fully alive. All of these work together.
John R:
What I’ve discovered is, and this is hard for a lot of busy high capacity folks, I have never found anybody that’s moved into what I would call an extraordinary life, a life fully alive without first slowing down in order to speed up. Even if it’s honestly, just carving out 10, 15 minutes a day or a few times a week to start determining, hey, what are those small steps I need to be taking today? It doesn’t take a lot, but those small incremental changes.
John R:
Then you start getting awareness on all this, and all of a sudden, the fog on that in front of you just starts to lift a little bit, and then what that does this got me excited. Then I took the next step forward and the next step forward and the next step forward, and all of a sudden, 10 years later. But I got to tell you, two years into it, I’d already restored and healed my marriage and relationship with my kids. There were some beautiful milestones along the way.
Warwick F:
I mean, your story is kind of remarkable, and most people, they don’t think. They just act. As you said, I want to go to a good college and I want to get a good job, and I want to work my way up, and nothing wrong with all of that, but is life more than going to a good college and making lots of money and moving up, whether it’s in the military or in the business world? For most people, it’s like, well, what else is there? That’s achievement. I mean, it’s just such … I don’t mean to put people down, but it’s just a superficial way of looking at life. You’re not living true to who you are, your own identity, your own True North. You haven’t really marked out a very clear destination other than I want to work my way up.
Warwick F:
Because that’s what the destination is, just work my way up to the top of the ladder, and then what? I say, you outlined just some key principles and it’s just remarkable that your accident seems to have been just that key point where you could start thinking about your talents and your passions in that upper right quadrant, and getting your marriage to the point where it is. But you had to have a lot of conviction. I’m just trying to find it here. There’s some interesting point here where you were trying to reset your life, and you have this fascinating quote.
Warwick F:
You said, “there were people around me who thought it was irresponsible of me to pursue my passion. They told me to accept my new normal. What I heard was they felt I should settle for an ordinary life.” These are probably well-meaning people, but you wanted to reset your whole life in light of your God given purpose. But yet, it felt like some people were saying, well, no, no. Right? That probably wasn’t helpful.
John R:
Yeah, that was coming out of the accident. I had a well-meaning doctor, Warwick, sit wife and I down. This is as about a year and a half into my recovery. At this time they really knew the extent of my brain injury and physical limitations. He goes, “Listen, I just want to set expectations. I just want you to know John probably won’t be able to be a greeter at Walmart.”
Gary S:
Oh my goodness.
John R:
They kept talking about the new normal that we had to adapt to. I’m like, dude, I ain’t going to have no new normal. I’m going to have the old normal back. I hate the word new normal. Here’s the deal though, I do have it and it is different. When I said, okay, here’s a guy, two years, two and a half years no income in a hospital bed, chronic pain, brain injury. I had seven figures in debt because of the medical bills. I had a lien against me. I said, you know what I’m going to do? I can’t go work, so I’m going to go start. God led me into this. That’s a whole nother story, but a coaching, I’m going to start my own coaching business out of our house.
John R:
Talk about being the most likely to succeed in the entrepreneur lottery. Here’s the deal. I looked at my wife and I said, we’re going to do this. She goes, “If this is what God wants you to do …” Everybody else thought I was nuts, to put my family at risk, to go do … Now, I’ll tell you something because God gave me a vision, and this is what led to my purpose. This was just a lot of time in this whole process, but I’ll never forget it. This is after I’m recovering from a whole reconstructive surgery to my shoulder, very painful, in bed, reading the Bible, and I heard God speak to me. It wasn’t external like at the accident, but it was very clear.
John R:
He said, “John, I want to use this life I’ve given you to equip and inspire leaders in my kingdom.” That led me into coaching, and I want to share with people, I would go to meet with somebody. Let’s say Warwick is somebody that might either hire me or refer me to somebody. This is back. I could literally work eight to 10 hours in a week. I would go, schedule a meeting with Warwick at 8:30, because that’s the earliest I could, say, get to Denver. I’d meet from 8:30 to 9:30, and then I would schedule one other meeting at 10:30. I would go to my car and sleep. I’d set my alarm for 45 minutes, and I would pass out because I had no cognitive energy.
John R:
Then I could have a second conversation, let’s say with Gary, and I would be done. Wiped out in bed in a dark room for the next two days. I’m telling you, because God … I had to do something, and calling people, showing I couldn’t network, but calling people, developing a list, learning web, all the parts to develop a business like this, most of it to me is not enjoyable. All this stuff that I’m sharing with you guys when you are on purpose doesn’t mean that every element of your life is just like ye ha, being a fighter pilot, being out at sea for six months and all the stuff we had to do, 80% of it kind of blew, but that 20%, …awesome!
John R:
When I’m sitting across from somebody and they connect with who they are, they connect with their faith, I help them make decisions that save their company and save hundreds or thousands of employees’ lives, or I’m with somebody and I see them change who they are, and they tell me that their marriage has been restored, their relationship with their kids has been restored, all that stuff and the stuff that I don’t like to do, but needs to be done, so worth it. I think we also have to keep that in context too Warwick that. The stuff that we’re talking about, being on purpose and connecting all these, just doesn’t make everything all cotton candy, and roses.
John R:
What it does though, there’s thorns in those roses and it makes me very comfortable, happy to move through some of that because I know that I’m moving towards something meaningful, not only for me, but in partnership with God, if that makes sense.
Gary S:
That is an excellent time. I would normally say something just simple and not inspired like, the captain’s turned the fasten seatbelt signs and we’re getting close to having to land the plane, but because I’m talking to a former Top Gun pilot, I’m going to probably mess this up, but I’m going to say the tower has connected to us. It’s time to make sure that you’ve locked your seven point harness, that you’re strapped to your ejector seat, and we’ve got to be putting the F-14 down on the carrier in just a little bit. But Warwick, I know you have some further questions to ask John. Before we get there though, John, let me … I’d be remiss if I didn’t give you the opportunity to tell listeners where they can find out more about Beyond Influence and where they can find out more about your book.
John R:
Yeah. Thanks Gary. You know what? You did a really good job on that.
Gary S:
Well, thank you.
John R:
The book, just go to beyondinfluence.com/book. All the links are there on how to pre-order. If you guys pre-order the book and then leave a review, we’re in the middle of producing our audio book, you’ll get a copy of the audio book for free for just leaving us a review. That’s where you would just let us know that you’re signing up for that. We’re excited about this. My goal is to make this a best seller. We want to bring this out into how people lead, because I really think we can change organizations, ministries, families, and cultures by helping other people become a better version of themselves. When you start on that journey, not you master it, but you’re on a couple steps into it, you can help somebody else. One helps a hundred, that’s 10,000 helps another a hundred, it’s millions. God’s moving right now big time work.
John R:
Warwick And Gary, it’s why you’re doing the work you’re doing. We’d love for you guys to be part of what we feel is a movement, and it’s God’s movement that we’re joining him in, and I believe that’s what where my message in the book. So, beyondinfluence.com/book, and it’s at every bookstore, On Purpose With Purpose, or you type in Ramstead, R-A-M-S-T-E-A-D, at any place you buy books and you’ll find it. Thank you for letting me share that with your crew, Gary.
Gary S:
Absolutely. Warwick.
Warwick F:
Yeah. I mean, boy, I really enjoyed just the concepts in your book of living on purpose. There’s a couple of quotes you have at the end of the book that talks about, sometimes, as we say in Crucible Leadership, amidst the ashes of your crucible, you can find your purpose. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, that’s what happened to you. You say these couple of things, you say, “I experienced a lot of obstacles on my path towards my vision and destination. Most of you have too press on, you can do this. My accident could have been a showstopper, but God used it to bring me to my life’s purpose.”
Warwick F:
Then, in the about the author section, there was this wonderful quote it’s just talk about synchronicity between what we’re both doing. You say this, “John had a personal encounter with God at the accident site who shared with him that he would be getting a second chance. With his life hanging in the balance, John emerged with a profound vision of how to live a life of significance.” Now, we didn’t write that, you did.
Gary S:
Don’t worry Warwick’s not going to call his attorney about that. It’s just that-
Warwick F:
We can all use the word significance, but …
Gary S:
It shows how universal that concept is, right?
Warwick F:
Absolutely. For listeners you may be going through the darkest pit, the darkest trial, and it may seem pointless, and whether you believe in God or not, certainly God or the universe can use it for a purpose. It’s just remarkable how he has. I mean, maybe this is an unfair question, but I think of myself, of my own crucible with the whole family business. I don’t know that I ever could have left that if the family business hadn’t gone under. I’ve never been in the military, but the whole loyalty and duty is pretty hardwired in me. The idea to abandon a150-year-old business, abandon the mission, I couldn’t have done it.
Warwick F:
There’s no way I could have done it. I would’ve felt like I was dishonoring my family and my ancestors. I couldn’t have left. God, I think said, okay, I’ll figure out a way for you to leave. You’re leaving. I don’t know, maybe I’m just stubborn or stupid, but for yourself, do you think you would have found your own joy and purpose without that horrific accident with the horse riding accident connecting to that steel fence?
John R:
It’s an interesting question, right? People say, could you go back and take it back and not do it? Because the answer is, in reality, you can’t, but I would say with total integrity that the person that I am today, the father, the husband, what I get to do in the world, I know for a fact I would not be doing it today had it not been for the accident. I would not be the person I am had it not been for the accident. It’s like, you know what? My vine had fruit on it and God lopped the vine off, the one that had, I thought, some nice fruit on it. That’s good fruit. What grew back was something so much better. You know what? It’s just on my heart. Maybe I could share with something to anybody listening that’s in that dark place.
John R:
Because I’ll never forget. Being at Craig Hospital with a severe brain injury and being in that environment, I mean, I was in so much pain, in addition to my brain not working and being told that I couldn’t be a greeter at Walmart. Imagine all this stuff like … My wife went from being a stay-at-home mom to be my caregiver and having no idea how we were going to survive. We were under the assumption for a while that there is no way for me to earn income, a living. In that, the darkest days, I saw people around me that were not injured as much as me, but they started focusing on, I think the victim side of thing.
John R:
Why did this happen to me? They started focusing on the loss. They started focusing on, I saw them despair, and what I witnessed, Warwick, is them spiraled down into a place that’s scared the wadding out of me, because God told me. He said, all things work together for good for those that love Lord. I held onto that with my fingertips, my fingernails, because it gave me hope. Even though there were some days, literally, I had to have God’s strength to get through the next five minutes, because they’d give me morphine and it would last for an hour and a half. They only could give it to you every four hours. That’s how much pain I was in.
John R:
That last hour and a half before they could give me another dose was absolutely excruciating. I was out of my mind for weeks and weeks and weeks. I’m like, you know what? Maybe, maybe tomorrow could be better than today. When I got to tomorrow and it was worse, I said, maybe next week could be better. I said, well, you know what? I have these amazing people around me and they’re praying and I have my friends, and I am alive. What could I possibly be grateful for when all the evidence is against it? Well, I’m grateful that I’m still here with my family, and maybe next month could be better. I started looking at things from a place of hope and a place of expectation, and I was learning to trust God and what he was doing through all this.
John R:
I know for a fact, that is the reason, some people marvel at it, that I was able to get through all of this, I think, with the way that I did. Anybody that’s out there, that right now, this feels like your darkest day, that today is worse than any other day that you’ve been, I just want to tell you, and I’m sure, Warwick, you would echo this, that trust me, next week, and it doesn’t feel like it, and the evidence isn’t there it can be better, and next month can be better, but what I’ll tell you is, a year from now, it will be better.
Gary S:
I have been in the communications business long enough to know when a Top Gun pilot has just landed the plane, and that’s what we have just heard from John. Thank you listener for spending time with us on this fascinating episode. Our first return engagement with a guest, John Ramstead, the author of On Purpose With Purpose: Discovering How to Live Your Best Life, which releases on April 27th, which if you’re hearing this on the day that we drop the episode is a week from now, but you can find it at his website beyondinfluence.com, back slash or forward slash, John?
John R:
Forward slash.
Gary S:
beyondinfluence.com/book, right?
John R:
Yes, sir.
Gary S:
That’s where you can find it to pre-order if it’s before the 27th of April, and you can order it there if it’s after the 27th.
John R:
Yeah, and if you leave a review, we’re going to … Just let us know. We’ll have a form on there and we’ll send you a free copy of the audio book as soon as it’s out of production.
Gary S:
Fantastic. Listener, until we are together next time, thank you for spending this time with us. If you’ve enjoyed this conversation, if you find hope, if you find perspectives that help you overcoming your own crucibles, moving toward a better time, moving forward on purpose with purpose, if these conversations help you do that, we would ask that you subscribe to the podcast, for one. Two, we’d ask that you’d leave a review at the app on which you’re listening of the show. Be honest, tell us what you think of it, but that helps more people find the show and hear discussions like this.
Gary S:
We ask you to remember, as you move on right now, that your crucible experiences are hard, they are painful. John describes some terribly painful crucibles that have happened to him, even just recently with his COVID challenges, but what his life proves, what Warwick’s life has proven, what your life can prove, is that your crucibles are not the end of your story. In fact, they can be the beginning of a new chapter in your story. They can be the most exciting chapter in your story, because where that chapter leads, where your book is going to wrap up at is what we call here, and what John called in his book, a life of significance.
Adversity, Taryn Marie Stejskal says, is a trip we take. Resilience paves the road we walk to move beyond it. As one of the foremost international experts on building and exercising resilience in business and in life, Stejskal has crafted the Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People through exhaustive research into the subject … and informed by her harrowing experience of being stalked in high school by a man who eventually assaulted another victim. It’s not the absence of crucibles that determines our future, she tells Warwick, but what we learn from them and how we apply that wisdom.
Learn more about Stejskal and her practical and empirical insights into resilience by visiting www.resilience-leadership.com or her Facebook page and her Instagram account.
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.
Taryn S:
When we recognize that we have a choice, all of a sudden we’ve gone from being disempowered to empowered and when we have a choice, that’s power. We always have a choice, even if the choices aren’t good. And that choice is in any inflection point, in any trauma we experience and any grief and any loss and any unfair treatment and any moment where there’s a lack of equity or care or empathy, we get to ask ourselves a really fundamental, oversimplified question which is am I going to allow this to make me bitter? Or am I going to allow this to make me better?
Gary S:
Now there’s a question to write down, fold up, stick in your pocket and pull out to ask yourself the next time you get the wind knocked out of you or worse by a crucible experience. Hi, I’m Gary Schneeberger, cohost of the show, and the communications director for Crucible Leadership. The woman posing that question is Dr. Taryn Marie Stejskal, one of the four most international experts on resilience in both leadership and in life. On today’s episode, she discusses with Warwick her voluminous research and her personal experience with a stalker while in high school that led her to identify the five practices of particularly resilient people.
Gary S:
She unpacks each one and concludes that while adversity is a trip all of us will take in our lives, resilience paves the road that allows us to move beyond those difficult moments.
Warwick F:
Well, Taryn, thank you so much for being here, I really appreciate it. Just love this whole subject of resilience, I think we mentioned off air I am an executive coach and heard you on WBECS, which is a great forum for coaches and thousands of people around the world, so it’s an awesome community and resilience is something certainly I can relate to, in Crucible Leadership we talk about it a lot, but you’ve done a lot. Whether it’s working with folks in Hollywood, the former executive leadership development head at Nike and you’ve done work at Cigna.
Warwick F:
And now with the five practices of particularly resilient people, it’s just kind of an amazing story. But I’d like to get a bit behind the scenes and what led you to have such a passion for resilience? Something about your background growing up, there’s always a story behind the story, so what led you on this journey to this passion for resilience?
Taryn S:
Yeah, it’s a great question actually, and there’s a quote that says something to the effect of, I can’t remember who said it, maybe the two of you know, you can help me, but it’s this idea that our lives are lived forward but understood backwards. And so oftentimes when I think about resilience, it wasn’t until many years later that I understood that a particular experience or moment led me to resilience, until I was able to many years later sort of look back and connect the dots, because so often our lives I think look like maybe a jumble of dots and it’s not until we look back that we can sort of draw that line through and see a clearer pathway.
Taryn S:
What I will say is that I don’t think resilience is for the faint of heart, there’s some kind of internal mettle, there’s some desire to really show up for challenges in life and to figure out how do we continue to do that better over time. And I’m also a believer that so often concepts and ideas, it’s not so much that we come up with them, but that the concept or the idea finds us. So if I share that in a little bit of a different way, I think resilience found me through a number of experiences that I had in my life.
Taryn S:
The first time that resilience tapped me on the shoulder I was probably 14 years old and without knowing it there was a morning before school where I was getting dressed and there was a man outside of my window. And when I went over closer to the window, it was dark in the morning, to turn off my stereo. For those of you that are of the millennial or Gen Z, a stereo is something that played music.
Warwick F:
Yes.
Taryn S:
Instead of your cellphone.
Gary S:
It was your iPod before your iPod.
Taryn S:
It was my iPod before my iPod, sometimes people used to carry them around on their shoulders, so a very heavy iPod. See me later and I’ll tell you about phone booths and butter churns too. And other obsolete devices. And so when I looked at the bottom of my window, it was on the ground floor, there was this face at the bottom of my window and as the light went down this person’s face, this man’s face, and he stood up. And so he’s standing just outside my window, outside, and I’m standing on the inside, and in my 14 year old mind I’m trying to figure out what the heck is going on?
Taryn S:
And what we do in those moments is we scan very quickly through all of our prior experiences to say what else have I seen that might look like this to help me understand what’s happening? And the only experience that I had had to that point at 14 that was even close to that was one time my dad came home from a business trip and he was outside the window and he was playing a trick on us or something like that, knocking on the window trying to scare us.
Taryn S:
And so that’s what I pulled out of my mind in that moment within a fraction of a second or a second, and I said, “Dad?” And he said, “Take off your clothes, your beautiful.” And I thought, not dad.
Warwick F:
Oh my God.
Taryn S:
And so I went and called for my parents and they heard someone running down the street, when they went out on their upstairs deck. And for us, we thought that was maybe just going to be the end of the story. We called the police, we made a police report, and I remember the woman that came to our home said, “You know what, there’s nothing to worry about here, it’s probably just someone passing through the neighborhood, probably just a fluke.” And then eight months later that my parents were out of town, I always kept that window closed, and then the window in the back of the house, I think we didn’t have air conditioning at the time.
Taryn S:
So the window in the back of the house was open for ventilation, and I’d gotten this new bikini from the Gap, and I had taken off the bikini and I was completely naked and I heard that voice again that was etched in my memory. I didn’t know he was there until he spoke and he said, “I’ve been waiting a long time for this.” And for me, as a 15 year old, there were three inconvenient truths there. One, I was naked in front of a man for the first time, two, my childhood bedroom that should have been one of the safest places for me as a young girl growing up became profoundly unsafe, and three, this wasn’t a fluke as we had hoped or as we had believed.
Taryn S:
And what this journey led to was him coming back several times over the course of my high school career and each time his behavior accelerating or elevating.
Warwick F:
And he was outside the window all these times?
Taryn S:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). He never got in the house, although the last two times that I’m aware he was there, he did attempt to break into the house. Once when I was home by myself, he was throwing patio furniture up against a sliding glass door that just thankfully didn’t shatter, and there was a time where I was babysitting at the house behind my house and I saw the figure of a man in the yard and he was advancing toward the house and someone starting ringing the doorbell. And when we went to the door no one was there.
Taryn S:
And then there was a little girl who was a friend and her father came to pick her up and I said, “Were you at the other door ringing the doorbell?” And he said, “No, I just got here.” So what happened sort of short story long or long story short depending on how you want to think about that, is two things, one, I went away to college and his behavior I think continued to accelerate or continued to downgrade and he ended up attacking and brutally raping a woman in my neighborhood and went to prison for 20 years and I realized by the time that I was in my mid 20s, when I was getting a Masters in marriage and family therapy, we were going through the DSM, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual where you learn how to diagnose psychological or psychiatric diagnoses.
Taryn S:
And I was like, huh, I actually meet all of the criteria for post traumatic stress disorder. And I didn’t realize that.
Warwick F:
And as you look back on that, you probably thought, “Well, I guess they were wrong, this wasn’t a one off thing,” this lasted months, sounded like it lasted years.
Taryn S:
It lasted years.
Warwick F:
And you probably, one thought was, “Why me?” But then did you think, “As bad as it was for me, I could have been my neighbor”?
Taryn S:
That’s right.
Warwick F:
That must have been a weird, I mean, part of you was maybe grateful, part of you was horrified. I imagine there was a whole sea of emotions, that must have been a hard thing to deal with and then now clinically understanding what you’re reading, how did you process all that of anger? You don’t often think of anger and gratitude in the same moment, like I’m angry, I feel bad for my neighbor, I know it’s awful to say this, I’m just so glad that wasn’t me.
Taryn S:
Right.
Warwick F:
It sounds awful to say that but you have to be thinking that, right?
Taryn S:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). But that’s just the nature, Warwick, I think of survivor’s guilt, is that tension, that paradox that exists of both gratitude and sadness. A deep empathy for, if you’re crossing the street and a car swerves and it hits the person next to you, you’re like, oh my God, thank goodness I wasn’t hit and oh my gosh, I feel terrible that the other person was. And that paradox of I’m safe but this other person wasn’t, this didn’t happen to me but it could’ve, navigating paradox in the human mind is not something that comes naturally to us.
Warwick F:
It needs a lot of I guess training and processing. So, it’s easy maybe for listeners to hear we can understand why Taryn, her whole mission in life is about resilience given what you’ve gone through. Is it that simple? Do you look back and say, “If this hadn’t happened, what would’ve happened to my life? Maybe I would have done something totally different than resilience,” or all the work that you’ve done on there, do you ever think to yourself what would Taryn be without that episode? What would you have done?
Taryn S:
Right. Well, I think that’s one of the principles of how I think about resilience because the definition of resilience after a decade and a half of research is simple and powerful, it’s the idea that we allow ourselves to effectively address challenge or the challenge, change and complexity that is in our path. And when we address that challenge, change and complexity, we find a way over time to not allow those things to diminish us, but instead to alchemize that trauma, that grief, that loss and to allow ourselves to be enhanced by that experience.
Taryn S:
And so on the one hand, I think it would be very easy for me and for other people that have faced difficulty to sort of be walking around saying, “You know what, if I hadn’t had this stalker, if I hadn’t experienced two decades of PTSD, what could I have become in my life?” And instead I think sort of the crux of resilience is that when we flip the script and instead of saying why did this happen to me? To ask ourselves instead why did this happen for me?
Warwick F:
And that’s so profound, that’s so empowering. We talk in Crucible Leadership all the time about failures and setbacks and you have a choice, in our language, to either hide under the covers and wallow and say why did this happen to me? Or in the case of failure it can be why was I such an idiot? Because sometimes we bring crucibles on ourselves, sometimes it is our fault. Sometimes it’s not. Either way, it’s pretty difficult. But you have a choice, but you made a choice, I’m not going to be a victim for my whole life, this was terrible but I refuse to just cower and wile away the next 40, 50, 60 years of my life until it ends.
Warwick F:
But you made that choice. Because not everybody makes that choice, you’ve studied this more than I do, what led you to make that choice to refuse to be a victim, refuse to just sit back and let life fade away?
Taryn S:
Yeah. Well, we’re only given, and I’ll quote another person whom I can’t give you the name, but we’re only given this one wild and precious life. And the first thing to understand is that so often we don’t believe that we have a choice, or people don’t believe that they have a choice, so the first step is to recognize that you have a choice. It’s not a default to say, well, this horrific thing came to me and therefore my future is circumscribed to be this.
Taryn S:
We are the authors of our lives, we’re the architects of our lives, we have free will for a reason. There’s also that quote of life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we respond, so for whatever reason, I’ve always understood that I had a choice. I didn’t have a choice about the experience, but I do have a choice about how I respond, and the type of life that I live in response to that and living a great life, living a whole life, that’s the best revenge. And I use the word revenge loosely of course.
Taryn S:
But not allowing ourselves, again going back to the definition of resilience, not allowing ourselves to be diminished by our experiences and instead find a way to alchemize that trauma, that grief, that loss, and figure out how we make it beautiful, how we make the testimony. That’s redemption.
Gary S:
I’m going to jump in because so much of what Crucible Leadership talks about and so much about what you talk about, Taryn, it’s as if it was typed on the same typewriter, that’s one of those other old machines that kids today don’t know much about.
Warwick F:
Indeed.
Gary S:
But one of the first quotes you have on your website from someone whose name I’m going to mispronounce and I apologize to her in advance, Pema Chödrön.
Taryn S:
Yeah, Chödrön, I think, one of the first female Buddhist monks.
Gary S:
Yeah, she writes, “Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.” And Warwick has said this, “In our lowest moments we find strength, courage and perseverance we never knew we had.” You’re both talking one side of the same coin in that the crucibles that we go through, the trials we go through, those things, if we address them correctly, if we look at them through the right lenses, they’re a leaping off point to a better life.
Taryn S:
Yeah, this is an oversimplification so bear with me but when we recognize that we have a choice, all of a sudden we’ve gone from being disempowered to empowered. And when we have a choice, that’s power. We always have a choice. Even if the choices aren’t good, and that choice is in any inflection point, in any trauma we experience, in any grief, in any loss, in any unfair treatment, in any moment where there’s a lack of equity or care or empathy, we get to ask ourselves a really fundamental, oversimplified question which is am I going to allow this to make me bitter or am I going to allow this to make me better?
Warwick F:
It’s funny, as I’m listening to you, Taryn, it’s hard for me to just stop nodding in violent agreement if that’s a word, just because obviously listeners would know this, but when I read what you’ve written, I just feel like I’ve lived your thesis, if you will, and everything that you’re saying makes sense. Again, my experience was obviously radically different, but again as listeners would know, I grew up in a very large family media business, 150 years old, had the Australian equivalent of The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, TV, radio, I was sort of the heir apparent.
Warwick F:
It was a massive company, launched a 2 billion plus takeover for a variety of reasons, my dad had died and I felt like the company wasn’t being run along the ideals of the founder, it wasn’t being run well. Whether was that a good or bad decision, it’s a whole question, but after three years, the company goes under, too much debt, Australia got in a recession. So I never thought it was PTSD, but I had my own crucible moment in that a lot of the trauma I went through was brought on by my own idealism and naivete, I didn’t mean to hurt anybody or do anything bad but just this thought of I’ve single handedly brought down a 150 year old family company.
Warwick F:
My Wikipedia entry is not favorable, I have one, and it’s like young hot headed kid could’ve had it all and blew it is pretty much what it says. And so that may never change, I don’t know, so for me, the ’90s were challenging times, look what I did and I felt like I’d let my family down and as a person of faith, and the founder was a person of faith, I felt like, gosh, I’d let down the universe or God in some sense. It was pretty heavy on a lot of levels, but eventually as I clawed my self esteem back, yeah, there was a choice, am I going to let this define me? I own it, my whole Crucible Leadership, I talk very openly about my mistakes, I have a book coming out in the fall that goes into pretty exhaustive detail about my stupidity and naïve assumptions.
Warwick F:
And then explain how this can help others. Don’t do some of the things I did. But as you’re saying, as I started to claw my way back, find things I could do without screwing up and find things that I was gifted at, all the things you talk about, resilience, it’s making a choice, it’s all true. It’s not like there’s no pain, it’s unrealistic to say, “There’s no scar or no scab,” but I can talk about it now in a way that’s vastly less painful. I don’t know whether that’s true for you, obviously you talked openly about what you went through, but I’m sure there’s some pain but it’s probably a lot easier to talk about than it was.
Warwick F:
Because you’re using your pain for a purpose, I know that’s an oft used aphorism, but it’s true. Yeah, it all makes sense to me, obviously. Very different background, very different stories, but everybody, it’s funny, we have a lot of people on the podcast that talk about crucibles, and we’ve interviewed people like Navy SEALs that have been paralyzed and I’ll often apologize because I didn’t go through anything like what you’ve been through or some of the people, we’ve had victims of abuse and all sorts of things. And they all say this, they say it’s not a competition of crucibles, your pain is just as real to you as anybody else.
Warwick F:
And these are people who have gone through things 100 times worse than I have, and I’m astounded how they can be so generous. Anyway, you get the idea.
Taryn S:
Yeah. Well, I’d say two things about that, Warwick, if I may. One is so often we say to people without really thinking about it when some type of loss or challenge or trauma befalls, as we say to people, well, everything happens for a reason. And anyone who’s ever been on the receiving end of that has sat on their hands so that they didn’t strangle you, strangle me, when they said it. So I appreciate that, thank you everyone for your grace. And what we realized is when we say to people everything happens for a reason, that orients people to look outside of themselves for a reason.
Taryn S:
Like why was I disabled? Why did I experience this childhood abuse? Why did I have this stalker? Why did I develop PTSD? No one can answer those why questions. Except for us. So we can spend our lives searching to the answer for why, we can spend our lives searching for the reason, or we can take back that power just as we do when we recognize that we have a choice and we can say here’s how I’m going to make meaning out of what happened. So what I hear you saying is you’re in a place now where you can look on what has happened in the past and say, “Here’s how I make meaning of what happened.”
Taryn S:
And when we look instead internally to make our meaning, when we look instead to answer our own why questions, that’s when healing occurs.
Warwick F:
Do you feel, and maybe this is obvious, but certainly in my own life as I find I’m using what I went through to help others, there’s a healing component, a healing balm. It doesn’t all go away, but there’s something very healing when you’re using what you’ve been through to help others. Obviously you have your own experience, but actually unlike me you’ve done a lot of research on this, does that kind of make sense, that there is that healing component to using what you’ve been through to help others?
Taryn S:
Yeah, absolutely. I’m very hesitant to use the word failure because I actually believe that very, very, very, very, very few things that we experience in life fall under the umbrella or the actual truth of being a failure or a mistake. So my team used to come to me and say, “Oh my gosh, we’ve made a mistake,” and I’d say, “Well, have you made this mistake before?” And they would say, “Well, no we haven’t.” And I would say, “Well, in that case, it’s a lesson.” The first time it’s a lesson, the second time it’s a mistake.
Taryn S:
So, Warwick, you’re not going to take down the family business again, you learned from that. And to your point, and I know we’re going to talk about the five practices of particularly resilient people, this empirically based model that really helps us understand what are those key behaviors that allow us to capitalize and to harness our own human resilience in the moments when we face challenge, change, and complexity, and one of those elements, the fourth practice, is the practice of gratiosity, and the practice of gratiosity is twofold and we’ll talk about the other ones. We’ll start with number four.
Warwick F:
Yeah, absolutely.
Taryn S:
The practice of gratiosity is a compilation of two words, gratitude and generosity, and it’s the ability to after some time instead of saying why is this happening to me? To say why is this happening for me? To stop looking for an external reason or to answer that why question and to take on, to empower ourselves to create our own meaning. And then to look on a challenge, even if we wouldn’t have chosen it, and to say I can see the good in that. I didn’t want to take down the company, I didn’t want to have a cancer diagnosis, and yet I can see the good in what has occurred.
Warwick F:
Yeah, just to give an obvious example for me, I love that notion of gratiosity. I’m basically a reserved, maybe a bit shy, kind of person that’s a reflective adviser, I’m not a Rupert Murdoch, take no prisoners executive. That is just not me, I’m not this larger than life, bomb throwing individual, I’m more nuanced. So I was trapped in a role that I was not designed for but out of a sense of duty and family history, I felt like loyalty is a big deal for me, I had to do this.
Warwick F:
Well, once that was over and I recovered from the experience, which took me a lot of the ’90s, it’s like, well, I can be whoever I want to be. So now with my writing and podcast and executive coaching, being on two nonprofit boards, I found I actually am good at being a reflective adviser and listening. Well, I wouldn’t have had that opportunity trapped in a family business. That’s my gratiosity, if you will. It’s very obvious to me, what can I be thankful for? Well, I was trapped in this gilded cocoon, if you will. Plenty of money, but I was trapped living the life of somebody five generations before.
Warwick F:
So, yeah, does that make sense? It’s empowering to have that attitude of gratiosity for what you’ve been through, at least it’s obvious for me anyway in my case, but does that make sense?
Taryn S:
Yeah, it absolutely does. I love just hearing the realtime application of here’s the practice and you were like here’s how that shows up for me, and then it’s just what you said, because the second part is the -osity, the generosity, is the ability to share those lessons, not mistakes, not failures, but to share those lessons with others as you are doing so that others may learn those lessons through you vicariously.
Warwick F:
Exactly, in our case, we talk about be who you were designed to be. Some people grow up in families where they’ve been lawyers for generations or doctors, and you can do anything you want so long as you’re a doctor like mum or dad, or a lawyer, it’s the same thing, it’s often common. So talk about some of these other principles that you have of these resilience principles, because they’re fascinating, so where would you like to go next on our tour?
Taryn S:
Yeah, well, what I’ll just say to kind of close out this dialogue, what you shared, Warwick, is a really wonderful example of this idea that your story doesn’t have to become your narrative, which I want to touch on for a moment.
Warwick F:
Please, continue. I love that. It’s hard for me to stop nodding but forgive me, please keep going.
Gary S:
I love watching this, after all these podcasts, I love watching this because it’s like you’re getting executive coached right here, Warwick, I love it.
Warwick F:
Maybe you’ll think of something, Taryn, that I disagree with, but it’s been tough so far, I’ve been wholeheartedly agreeing with everything. But keep going.
Taryn S:
Well, I love it, I love that we’re on the same wavelength, it’s a lot of fun. And one of the things that I share in the context of my work is this idea that our story is what happened to us. It’s the thin description of our life. My mother left me when I was a child, people didn’t show up for me, we never had enough food, so there’s a sense of feeling financially or with regard to food feeling insecure. Those are stories. Those are things that happened. And what I’ve realized over time is that the danger isn’t so much in what happens to us. It’s how we incorporate those experiences into our narrative.
Taryn S:
And our narrative is our identity, our narrative is our self worth. So I could have said I had this stalker, I developed PTSD, and therefore the value that I believe I can bring to the world has been diminished because I’ve translated my story into becoming a narrative about my identity and who I am. And so what I love about what you’re saying is that we differentiate between our story, what happened to us, and then what we tell ourselves about what that means in terms of our identity.
Warwick F:
Because what it can mean is whether it was your fault or not your fault, you can say, well, because of what happened, therefore I have no value and I have no worth. Which it’s hard for me to understand, failure is one thing, I get why somebody could think that, but when it’s not your fault at all, and you’ve researched this which I haven’t, somehow, no matter whether it’s your fault or not your fault, it can lead to a tremendous sense of lack of self worth, lack of self respect, which how do you achieve anything? How do you do anything? So that is just so sad.
Warwick F:
But by being able to switch that narrative story, Gary, one of the things you end every podcast with is, why don’t you just tell Taryn in terms of the crucible’s not the end of your story, because it’s unbelievable, it’s just exactly what you’re talking about, but share that, Gary.
Gary S:
Yeah, what we try to encourage listeners with at the end of every episode is that they’re crucibles, those trials, tragedies, traumas, those things that have gone wrong, failure and setback, they aren’t the end of their story. In fact, we say, they can be the beginning of a new story, a better story, if you learn the lessons of them as you’ve talked about, Taryn. If you learn the lessons of those things, it can be a better story because where it takes you as you’ve learned those lessons is to a new life which at Crucible Leadership we define as a life of significance.
Warwick F:
And that basically means a life on purpose, dedicated to serving others. Whatever that means for you, everybody’s life of significance will be different. But as you hear that, that’s in part what you’re talking about, about changing the narrative, using the narrative for good. So just as you’re saying it it’s like, wow. Jaws dropping again here, so, amazing.
Taryn S:
Yeah, right. And this notion that you bring up, Warwick, you used the word fault, whose fault is it, was it my fault. Akin to that is this idea of responsibility. And what I’ve seen over time and being a marriage and family therapist and having worked with a variety of people that have had neurological injuries, spinal cord injuries, brain injuries as the result of car accidents and falls, this idea of responsibility or who is at fault or am I at fault or who’s at fault, that’s a tremendously important inflection point in our healing.
Taryn S:
It’s tremendously important that we get this notion of responsibility right. And a dear friend of mine and a mentor, Richard Pimentel, who was responsible for the American With Disabilities Act and there’s a wonderful movie that was made about him by a dear friend of mine, Steven Sawalich, called The Music Within. And Richard Pimentel talks about this idea of responsibility, and he helpfully breaks it into two components, response and ability. And in the moment when something happens, what is our ability to respond?
Taryn S:
And when we think about all of these things like you shared, Gary, these crucible moments, the challenge, the change, the complexity, the loss, the grief, the unfairness. Really accurately getting to a place where we are assigning responsibility is key. It’s key that we don’t blame everybody else and not figure out what percentage of that is our own, because when we blame everybody else it means the control for our healing and our maturation is also outside of ourselves.
Taryn S:
And conversely, when we take on too much of that responsibility, if you’re a victim of being targeted or a stalker or you’ve been raped or abused in some way and you think, “That was my fault,” we need to look accurately at, in fact, what was your ability to respond? And really get that right as part of the healing process.
Warwick F:
I think that’s so true. Do you think, and I want to make sure we cover all these aspects, these five-
Gary S:
Yeah, we have four more to go. We have four more to go.
Warwick F:
Five practices, there is one thing I’d be curious about is the whole aspect of forgiveness. Certainly for me, part of it was forgiving myself, I was young, 26, young, naïve. I had no intention to cause pain to anybody and there was thousands of people in the company. The company went on, but still, part of it is forgiving others but part of it is forgiving yourself. Is that part of the component of being able to move on from a challenging experience, that whole assigning responsibility and I’ve done a lot of that internal work of how much was my fault, which a fair amount, not all, accepting. But talk about forgiveness and how that relates to the whole responsibility deal.
Taryn S:
Yeah, forgiveness is a tremendously important element. So once we have accurately assigned responsibility and that can take some time and, PS, it’s always good if we have some skin in the game relative to responsibility. We shouldn’t take none of it and we shouldn’t take all of it. But accurately assigning that responsibility, I love that you’re talking about forgiveness. Forgiveness oftentimes, for many people, not for everyone, but comes from you talked about, Warwick, being a man of faith, it often comes from having a spiritual or a religious practice and is often informed by those experiences.
Taryn S:
And for me, there’s really three important things that we need to understand about forgiveness. The first one is forgiveness is for no one else but ourselves. And so often people say, “Well, I’m not going to forgive that, they don’t deserve that forgiveness.” Maybe they don’t, but fortunately it’s actually not for them. The forgiveness is for us.
Warwick F:
That’s the scary thing is we say this too, and I don’t claim that everything you say we say because we’re not that smart, but the notion that why is forgiveness important? Because you’re worth it.
Taryn S:
Yeah, right.
Warwick F:
And they win if you’re bitter. For you to get out of that prison of bitterness, you’re worth forgiving that other person or yourself, because then the power is removed so, please continue because I can’t help but agree.
Taryn S:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah, so the first component to understand about forgiveness is it’s for you. It’s not for anyone else but you. The second thing to understand about forgiveness is that forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation.
Warwick F:
Exactly.
Taryn S:
So when we forgive someone, that’s a choice, that’s a decision that we make. It’s not the same as continuing that relationship, going back to that relationship, continuing to be a part of whatever is happening.
Warwick F:
Nor is it the same as accountability.
Taryn S:
Right.
Warwick F:
There is still consequences, sometimes legal consequence, it doesn’t mean that we’re lessening accountability or responsibility.
Taryn S:
Right, exactly.
Warwick F:
And people confuse those two things, right?
Taryn S:
Exactly. So if you’re someone who’s been in an abusive relationship, you can forgive that person and you don’t need to reconcile with them.
Warwick F:
Sure.
Taryn S:
Forgiveness is not reconciliation, that’s two. The third part of forgiveness is oftentimes it takes time and it takes many times for us to say, “I forgive you, I forgive myself.” Oftentimes we are the hardest people to forgive, forgiveness of self can be the most difficult forgiveness. And for me coming from a Christian faith background, it says in the Bible, I think one of the disciples or someone said to Jesus, they said, “Well, how many times do we forgive that person?” And Jesus says, “Seven times 77 times.”
Warwick F:
Which is a biblical way of saying forever, unlimited.
Gary S:
Forever.
Warwick F:
Is basically what it’s saying.
Taryn S:
That’s right.
Warwick F:
It’s a metaphor, yeah, exactly.
Taryn S:
It doesn’t mean that we reconcile and we allow someone to continue to perpetrate something against us, but seven times 77, that gets us into the 400s
Warwick F:
That’s a lot.
Taryn S:
And what I’ve found with the experience with a stalker or I was in an abusive relationship where I was nearly strangled to death, and I have probably had to say 300 times, not directly to that person but in my mind, I forgive you. I forgive you, I’m letting this go, I forgive you. So the third part is oftentimes we can be the hardest ones to forgive and don’t be fooled, forgiveness is not once and for all. That resentment, that anger, that lack of forgiveness, it can sneak back in and it can take 400 times until we really let that go.
Warwick F:
And we’ll move on here in a millisecond, but this forgiveness is so important. I often think forgiveness is a bit like weeding, you know? So, weeds will crop up and I have unfortunately had a lot of practice at this both with myself and some other folks, family, advisers. Something will come up and sometimes we have people in our lives who as soon as you’ve caught up with the last thing they’ve done, they do something else, it’s like, hey, I’m trying to catch up, can you just give me a moment before you lob the next thing that I’m going to be angry about.
Warwick F:
But when I find these things, these little weeds crop up, I say, okay, I’m not going to go there. I nip it in the bud. So it is like weeding, you cannot let it grow and flourish, you’ve just got to get on it, if that makes sense. So talk a bit about some of the other elements, because it’s vulnerability, productive perseverance, connection and I think the last one is possibility. Talk about why those are all important as we try to be resilient people.
Gary S:
And also I’ll add something to layer on top, how they’re all connected, because you started at four, so how do they all connect, those four?
Taryn S:
Yeah, so the great thing is this is an empirically based model, so when we talk about the five practices of particularly resilient people, it’s based on having interviewed hundreds of people and collected thousands of pieces of data where I asked people to think about a time when they faced a significant challenge and what did they do? What actions did they take in those moments to effectively address that challenge? And after coding that variety of data, what that gave birth to or what that gave rise to was the five practices of particularly resilient people.
Taryn S:
So first and foremost, to appreciate that this is an evidence based or an empirically based model is really key. Because there’s lots of things out there that are like, the five P’s of resilience and productivity and positivity. I like alliteration as much as the next person, maybe even a little more, being a writer, maybe you too Warwick.
Warwick F:
Indeed.
Gary S:
Indeed.
Taryn S:
But the empirical base is important, so the first practice that emerged which is really a foundational practice of resilience is the practice of vulnerability. And I thought, when that emerged, as someone who has survived trauma, I spent my whole life trying to be invulnerable. I was over programmed to be invulnerable, to not show emotion, to not respond, because of needing to be in those crucible moments with a stalker where I needed to think quickly to keep myself safe.
Warwick F:
And probably not to talk about some of these experiences, most people who have gone through trauma, they won’t talk about it. They’re not going to be vulnerable about it.
Taryn S:
Yeah, that’s the second part. The first part is, so what is vulnerability in the first place? I’m glad you asked. So, vulnerability is allowing our inside self, our thoughts, feelings, experiences, to the greatest extent possible to match our outside self. In psychology we would call this congruence. That what we’re feeling and experiencing, we allow ourselves to show that to the world and I think for the vast majority of us, reaching congruence or 100% congruence, our internal life is being lived on the outside, that’s a lifelong process, that’s a life long pursuit of vulnerability.
Warwick F:
And it’s rare.
Taryn S:
It’s rare.
Warwick F:
Because most of us put on a mask, again, this is probably getting boring for the listeners, that’s one of my highest values of trying to make sure that who I am on the outside is who I am on the inside. It’s an extremely high value of mine and I find as you share with people, I’m blessed, I did my undergrad at Oxford and did an MBA at Harvard Business School, I was embarrassed to go to Harvard Business School reunion because people would say, “Look what you’ve done, you’ve failed spectacularly,” I mean, in business, this is not cool.
Warwick F:
But you go to these things and people aren’t treating you like a leper. A lot of people have had business failures who have been in business school, and when they treat you like you’re a human being, it’s like, really? They’re not saying, “Unclean,” like in the Bible, “Leave the town.” It’s like, wow, because we have this notion in our head that if people really know how stupid I am or what I’ve been through, that nobody will want to be with us, we’ll be like a leper, right?
Taryn S:
Yeah.
Warwick F:
And when that story is broken, it’s another step of healing, does that kind of make sense?
Taryn S:
It absolutely does. The first thing is you had a business lesson, you didn’t have a business failure, if you took down the company twice then that would be failure or a mistake. But you learned from the first time, you’re brilliant.
Warwick F:
Yeah, I haven’t done any failed two billion dollar takeovers since, so there you go, I learned my lesson.
Warwick F:
So that’s awesome.
Taryn S:
Onward and upward my friend.
Warwick F:
Indeed, okay, that leads to productive perseverance. What is that? That’s a fascinating phrase.
Taryn S:
Yeah, exactly. Well, we’re short on time so I’ll just say one more thing about vulnerability which is precisely what you said, Warwick, which Brené Brown has talked about vulnerability and its role in what she calls living a wholehearted life. Vulnerability also showed up as a foundational practice of resilience, and so I asked myself just that question which you were alluding to which is if vulnerability seems to be so important in Brené’s work of living a wholehearted life and now being a foundational element of resilience, why aren’t we all running around living these fabulously vulnerable lives?
Taryn S:
What gives? And it’s this idea of the vulnerability bias, or exactly the sort of story that we tell ourselves in our heads which is if people really knew, if people really knew this part of me that’s on the inside, that I don’t want to show on the outside, three things would happen. I call it the three Ls that block our vulnerability. People wouldn’t like us, they wouldn’t love us, and they might leave.
Warwick F:
Exactly.
Taryn S:
And when you threaten people with ostracism, what that’s shown is the parts of the brain that are associated with physical pain light up. And we don’t want to experience even the threat or the fear of that physical pain, so better not to be vulnerable and better to stay quiet.
Warwick F:
Right, because if they reject my mask, that’s one thing, if they reject the real me, infinitely worse.
Taryn S:
That’s right.
Warwick F:
So many if not most don’t want to take that risk, hence the world we live in, whether it’s politicians or Hollywood or wherever, it’s a sea of masks. So what would you like to talk about just in the closing minutes we have just about some of the other aspects of these wonderful principles of resilience?
Taryn S:
Yeah, well, I’ll give you a quick overview of the last three and then if we ever want to talk more about them we absolutely can. So the second principle, second practice of particularly resilient people, is the practice of productive perseverance. Remember when I told you I liked alliteration? So it’s this idea of knowing when to maintain the mission despite challenge and that’s very much aligned with Angela Duckworth’s work on grit.
Gary S:
Great book.
Taryn S:
Great book and it’s more than that, because grit is not synonymous with resilience. Grit is a fractional component of resilience, but it’s not the whole story. So knowing when to maintain the mission despite challenge, and recognizing that in the face of a significantly changing environment or a disruptive environment, that we need to pivot and go in a new direction. And this is very much an art and a science, because if you want to become a Navy SEAL or graduate from the Naval Academy, those sort of markers are well defined. And it’s good to put your head down and to be gritty in those situations.
Taryn S:
But in an environment relative to global pandemic COVID-19, where things are shifting and changing, we also must pick our heads up and look at how the environment is shifting and changing so that we can continually evaluate if the path that we’re on is the right one lest we become a Kodak or a Blockbuster or a BlackBerry.
Warwick F:
Hence productive perseverance. Awesome phrase. So how does that lead to connection?
Taryn S:
Well, connection in the midst of this pandemic is really the new currency, we’re all wondering how do we connect with a remote distributed workforce, with our elderly parents, with our grandparents, I held a 70th Zoom birthday party for my mom back in December, and connection’s always been important in terms of resilience and it’s no less important now and again, inherent within each of these practices is a paradox. And connection seems simple because it’s twofold, it’s the connection to ourselves, trusting our gut, knowing our value, listening to the still, small voice within, cultivating and listening to our intuition on the one hand.
Taryn S:
And then on the other hand cultivating and developing relationships externally with our family and friends and community. And that’s all well and good until those two things are at odds.
Warwick F:
Right.
Taryn S:
So that’s connection. We talked about gratiosity, gratitude plus sharing generosity and the last is the practice of possibility, it’s the practice of at its core being able to prioritize or privilege progress over perfection. And the paradox therein of the practice of possibility is being able to navigate the tension between risk and opportunity. In these moments, in order to be resilient, we must hold both risk and opportunity, hold both danger and possibility and allow both to be true.
Warwick F:
But there’s something about possibility in forward movement that I know in economics there’s this fundamental law of business is you’re either growing or you’re declining. If you’re status quo, then you’re about to decline, it’s one of these ironclad business laws. And I feel like maybe it’s true in life too perhaps that if you have a possibility outlook of how can I grow, how can I improve, how can I use what I’m going through to help others as you’re looking forward to possibility, then healing can continue.
Warwick F:
If you start trying to hunker down and not move forward, then I don’t know, do you feel like life’s a bit like that too?
Taryn S:
Absolutely. Yeah, I think if we’re not evolving, if we’re standing still we’re probably devolving, right?
Gary S:
I’ve been in the communications business long enough to know that’s a good place to land the plane, what you just said. That is a bow on top of the package to mix my metaphors, Taryn, I would be totally, totally, completely lacking in my job as the cohost of the show if I did not give you the chance before we go to let our listeners know how they can find out more about you, specifically on this thing called the internet.
Taryn S:
Yes, the internet, the internets.
Gary S:
Yes.
Taryn S:
We’ll invite you take a look at the show notes for all the various and nuanced places to catch up with me. Two great places to spend some time, one is on our Instagram page, Dr. Taryn Marie, we’ve got a wonderful resilience movement happening there and basically daily kind of updates and resilience motivations. So that’s really, really fun. And the second part is there’s lots of free resources, articles, podcast recordings, those types of things on our website which is resilience-leadership.com. We’d love to see you there.
Warwick F:
Well, thank you so much, Taryn, for being here. It’s so inspiring just all your work on resilience, and yeah, I’m sorry I just couldn’t help but agree with everything you’re saying. I’m just looking at one of your quotes, I think from Robert Ingersoll on connection, we rise by lifting others. It’s just so true, some of these things, they may seem trite like pain for purpose, but as we try to understand what happened, yes, look at responsibility, vulnerability, but as we try and use those to help others, there is a healing component.
Warwick F:
It kind of gives you a reason to get out of bed every morning, how can I use my pain in a forward looking way to help others, and so thank you for the work that you do and all the research and just being vulnerable yourself. Because that helps people relate to you. If you’re able to share something very personal, it says, well, if Taryn can do that, maybe it’s okay if I do that. So the research is critical, but so is showing up as a whole person in every sense of the word whole, if that makes sense. It really does help. The research and being vulnerable, the two together, is a powerful combination.
Warwick F:
So thank you so much for everything you do and thanks for being on the podcast, we very much appreciate it.
Taryn S:
Thank you so much, such an honor to be here.
Gary S:
Thank you. Well, that certainly was a different kind of discussion than we’ve had before, based, again as we said earlier, on experiential crucibles but then really deep research about the power of resilience and if you enjoyed what you heard here on the show today, listener, Warwick and I have a little favor to ask you and that is that you would just click like on the podcast app on which you’re listening, share this with some friends, put it on social media, so that we can get the word out about the show because the more people know about the show, the more we can get guests, great guests, like Dr. Taryn Marie.
Gary S:
And until the next time we’re together, we ask you to remember this, which is sort of the motto of Crucible Leadership when you get right down to it, and that is that your crucible experiences are indeed painful. No one is doubting that. The conversation with Dr. Taryn Marie hit on that, it’s very real, that pain is legitimate. What you’re feeling is legitimate. But what you’re feeling is not the end of your story. You can, as discussed on the show today, learn the lessons, learn what is meant to be taught to you through your experiences, apply those lessons to your life.
Gary S:
And when you do that, we have discovered that it is by far not the end of your story. It is in fact the beginning of a new chapter in your story, and a new chapter that can be the most fulfilling one yet. Why is that? Because the direction it will take you as we heard in this conversation today and as we’ve heard in previous conversations, the direction it will take you when you learn the lessons of your crucible and apply them is the most fulfilling direction of your life because what it leads to in the end is a life of significance.
Gregory Robinson’s crucibles piled up in his youth: raised without a father, kicked out of the house at 16, eking out a day-to-day existence swiping soap from restaurants to wash up and making ends meet hustling pool while flopping with other boys from hardscrabble backgrounds. But his life began to turn around after a stint in juvenile detention set him on a path to get a job, join the military and build the responsibility and resilience that has led him to help others employ the principles that have made him The Unbreakable Man. The key, he says, is to never let defeat defeat you.
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Transcript
Warwick Fairfax:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership.
Gregory Robinson:
I rode the bus home with them. That was my first party ever. So we went to the white section of town that us as kids had heard stories about. That’s just how it was. So we all got off the bus and all my friends disappeared. And so here I am, excuse my jokes, but it’s how I am. I was in no black man’s land.
Gregory Robinson:
So I’m here and pickup trucks and rebel flags and the whole shebang, had no idea how to get home. So I pushed away my panic. And I remembered my landmarks from taking the bus from school to home and vice versa. So I took all the main roads and expressway and I walked home. I was supposed to be home by 6:00. I got home by 6:30. So I look back on it now, so that was a three and a half-hour walk across the City of Tampa.
Gregory Robinson:
So I get home and my aunt’s at the door and she said, “Go back where you come from,” slammed the door in my face and that was the beginning of me being on my own. So I tried to go to school for a while, high school and I kept myself clean through my grandmother’s old house that I still had a key to. So I’d wash up in the sink and things of that nature. We called it a sink bath as kids.
Gregory Robinson:
I’d read by candlelight and still do my schoolwork plus try to maintain myself and tried to forage for food. But then it comes to a point to where you’re trying to survive and go to school. You can’t do both at the same time.
Gary Schneeberger:
Where do you begin moving beyond a crucible like that? 16 years old, homeless, family relationships strained, unable to envision a future for yourself because your circumstances make it difficult to envision dinner or a shower for yourself.
Gary Schneeberger:
Hi. I’m Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show and the communications director for Crucible Leadership. Today’s guest, Gregory Robinson, did find a way to craft a life of significance from the ashes of that experience and other crucibles that knocked him off his feet in the years that followed from juvenile detention to the horrors of war that left him with PTSD.
Gary Schneeberger:
As he tells Warwick, his road back was paved with refusing to let defeat, defeat him and turning to God when there was nowhere else for him to turn. It’s a message and a hope he shares with men today through his podcast, The Unbreakable Man, which he started to help others who have been through pain like he has, find joy.
Warwick Fairfax:
Wow Greg. Thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate it and look forward to hearing about your story. You’re in the Chicago area?
Gregory Robinson:
Yes, sir.
Gary Schneeberger:
Midwest. Midwest rules.
Warwick Fairfax:
My wife has a lot of family in the Chicago area. We actually lived there at one point before we moved to Maryland. So yeah, I just wanted before we get into all of your story, just to hear a little bit about your background and growing up in Tampa. It wasn’t the easiest one. You had some challenges. Talk about some of your early childhood experiences and crucibles and a bit about your parents and just about the early story.
Gregory Robinson:
Early stories. okay. Obviously, as you said before, I’m from Tampa, Florida. That’s my hometown, home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the world champions. I just had to get a plug in there.
Warwick Fairfax:
How do you decide who to cheer for, the Buccaneers or the Bears? How do you decide?
Gregory Robinson:
I lived here long enough to where I root for them both. We used to have, my wife and I had a joke. When they were in the same conference and they played together, we would draw an imaginary line down the house. But no, growing up in Tampa was very tough. My hometown, obviously I loved it, in spite of all the things that went on during my life.
Gregory Robinson:
I come from an alcoholic family. My mother and father were very … They grew up in the segregated South and were very old-fashioned the way people did business. The family story goes that my mother became pregnant in high school during her senior year and my father was from the other side of town, the other side of the tracks, but within the black community. My father’s parents already had him slotted to marry someone else who was from his part of town. So they didn’t marry, but the family agreed to pay a stipend to my mother’s family to take care of me.
Gregory Robinson:
That was the agreement. I didn’t learn this until many, many, many years later the whole story, how that all went about. But one of the things that I can say about my story, at least in that aspect, is I was 15 years old, going on 16, two weeks from my 16th birthday and I was at a little corner store not far from my house. And the local beer truck driver walks into the store and he walks up to me and he says, “Are you Greg Robinson?” I’m like, “Yeah. Who are you?” I won’t tell you what I said because I was 16 years old.
Gary Schneeberger:
We can imagine.
Gregory Robinson:
Right. And he says, “I’m your father.” This isn’t a Star Wars tie-in, but I looked at the store owner who was like family, as well, because it was a neighborhood place and I asked him and he said, “Yeah. Yeah, Greg, that’s your dad.” So the realization hit me that this man who I had seen for as long as I can remember, who had a beer route in my neighborhood was my father. And so my first football game that I went to was two weeks later, went to see the Tampa Bay Buccaneers with my dad. You can’t make this stuff up.
Warwick Fairfax:
Right. That must have been surreal. You’re 16 years old and you find out who your father was, even though you’d seen him around the neighborhood. Do you ever have a conversation with him because when you’re young, you don’t get a lot of stuff. What’s up with somehow your family felt like my mom wasn’t good enough for you? It’s hard to get your head around. I can’t think of a diplomatic way to say this. He is driving a beer truck. It’s not like okay, so what makes you better than my mom’s side? All those thoughts, as a 16-year-old must be going, “I don’t get this.”
Gregory Robinson:
You’re right. It was surreal, but I learned a lot about my dad over time. He was a Vietnam vet. So not long after I was born, he got drafted. He left college to go to the Army. He was Army Airborne. He came back home, had a lot of issues from PTSD. At that time, they called it battle fatigue and combat stress, all the different names they’d come up with over the decades.
Gregory Robinson:
And I had met him once or twice, but I was too young to remember what he looked like. So as the family story goes, they told me much later, when he came back from Vietnam and he was married obviously, he took a job with Budweiser and purposely took a route that was in my neighborhood so he could watch me grow up. So with that said, I learned to have a lot of respect for him because he to me, in my eyes, in spite of all the bad things that happened, he was a man of great integrity and he was honorable in what he did.
Gregory Robinson:
He later ended up divorcing the first wife, but he and my mother never got together. The drinking got the better of her and so what I developed over time in my late 20s/early 30s was compassion for them both because then I understood why my mother was the way she was when I was younger. But when you’re growing up in a hard situation, for lack of better words, you know all the hole-in-the-walls. You guys know what a hole-in-the-wall is, …joints little side hustle stand that people would sell liquor out of their garages as a makeshift bar and that becomes your normal.
Gregory Robinson:
Then you have brothers and sisters like I did. I was the oldest, so I took up the mantle of being a surrogate father and my mother wasn’t around and then defending them against, “Mr. So-and-so” or Mr. This, boyfriends and things of that nature. So I was the one who took my brothers and sisters to school, taught them how to fight, fend off the bullies and who cooked and made sure they were clean and all those things for many years.
Gregory Robinson:
And then as I went on, I was given over to my grandmother as my guardian when I was about 8 or 9 years old roughly I think it was and my mother asked my grandmother to keep me until she came back. Well she never came back, but I would see her on and off. So yeah, life was tough.
Gregory Robinson:
But I made it. I did fairly well in school. I was very artistic, a very good illustrator. My escape was books. I was an avid reader, loved science fantasy, science fiction and nonfiction and history and learning about cultures and different places. And so what that allowed for me, looking back in hindsight is to develop a broad mind in spite of my situation and where I was at. So you had to deal with all the other stuff.
Gary Schneeberger:
I know that Warwick’s going to ask some more detailed questions about much of what you’ve just described because you’ve sketched in broad brush strokes what you went through. But one thing I always like to do and it doesn’t happen all the time on the show, but when it does, I want to point it out for listeners, especially listeners who aren’t viewing it on video, as we’re seeing it right now as we’re talking to you.
Gary Schneeberger:
But those things that you just described, Greg, so many times as you were describing very traumatic things that happened to you, you smiled. You have the perspective now as an adult who’s processed those things. You smiled. And I just point that out to the listeners so that they can know.
Gary Schneeberger:
We talked at the outset about we are at Beyond the Crucible, we try to be in the hope business and offering hope to people. And as people are struggling right now listening to this in their own crucibles which probably are wildly different than yours and wildly different than Warwick’s, there’s something beautiful about the fact that as you tell those stories, there’s a smile on your face because you’re on the other side of them and that smile is available to all of us if we process the lessons of our crucibles and we do the things that you’ve done like forgive and learn and move on.
Gary Schneeberger:
So I just wanted to point that out in case listeners didn’t hear it in his voice. Greg right now, he is smiling. He’s got a beautiful smile. He is smiling right now even as he talks about those things. I know there’s more to talk about as we unpack more of those details, but I wanted to get that point across because that’s what we’re hoping for, to encourage people there is hope on the other side of your crucible.
Warwick Fairfax:
That’s well-said, I just, to your point Gary, as Greg is talking, you sense this sense of peace, sense of calm, sense of forgiveness. I’m sure we’ll get into more later the phrase the peace the passes understanding comes to mind. So just to flesh a bit more of this out. Obviously, I’ve got to imagine it was very tough for your mother being rejected by your dad’s family and it probably contributed to some of her challenges. Did you feel like maybe this is an obvious question, but she was never the same after that, after feeling rejected? That might have been not the sole cause of her issues, but was that a big part of it?
Gregory Robinson:
I would definitely say so. But at the time, like I said, I was young and it took me many years to come to grips and get past my own anger and other things that I had developed over time by feeling rejected myself. But I will tell you this story. I’m going to jump for probably about 15 years or so, but I think it’s really relevant. I left and went into the military after I went to Job Corps at around 18 or so. So I was gone for more or less about eight years.
Gregory Robinson:
I had developed on my own. I was always my own man. There was no one to tell me what I could and couldn’t do, besides the military, of course. But there was no mom or dad to say no, you should go here son or do this. And I was visiting home one particular time right before my dad had passed away. I was probably about 31, I think, at the time. And we were talking, he and I and my uncle. I should point this out. I come from a family of veterans.
Gregory Robinson:
So my dad was Army Airborne in Vietnam. My uncle Johnny, my dad’s brother, was Airborne Ranger, who was the younger of the two and he followed my dad to Vietnam. And then there’s me who is another veteran and a combat veteran who was in the Navy, a corpsman and attached to the Marine Corps infantry. So we’re all together and we’re talking and I’m about to go away again for the weekend. I’d visit every other weekend during the month.
Gregory Robinson:
My dad, he says, “Hey son?” I said, “Yes sir, Pops.” He says, “I love you, son.” And I turned around and I looked at him because he was very old-fashioned. I’m sure you guys know what I mean. I went up to him and I hugged him and my uncle hugged us, too. And I said, “I love you, too, Dad.” And so I stopped, I said, “Dad, you know what?” I said, “You know I’ve got a place up in Northern Florida and how about I get you to come on up for Christmas this year?” It would have been our first Christmas together.
Gregory Robinson:
And I said, “By the way, I could bring Mom up, too.” And so he just looked at me. He smiled and he giggled because he knew exactly what I was up to. But it was worthwhile to see the smile on his face and the understanding because she was his long lost love and vice versa. So I was hoping to make some mending in the process, but he passed away before it could all transpire.
Warwick Fairfax:
That’s so sad. As you’re talking, there’s a lot of things you could be bitter about, about what happened to your mother after that, your dad’s family. When you’re a young guy like your dad, it’s tough to buck your whole family and they’re telling you what to do. It’s not easy as a young person, but it’s just so sad. You can’t help but think what might have been if people had left him alone. Maybe they wouldn’t have made it, but maybe they would have made it. Do you find yourself in the what ifs? What would have happened if people kept messing around?
Gregory Robinson:
Actually not anymore. Despite how hard it may have been, I’m very thankful, as odd as it may sound, that I went through all the things that I went through because I believe it helped to mold me into making me the man that I am today, to have the strength to be able before you and Gary and talk about things like this and to be able to look back introspectively and say, “Well hey, you know, despite everything that has happened in my life, I’m still here.”
Gregory Robinson:
And I’m happy and I say that genuinely. I’m pretty much at peace. We all still have our things that we go through, but overall, I’m happy. I’ve got a great wife. I’ve got great kids. I absolutely love what I do and despite me being reticent about even writing a book initially and the only reason I wrote the book is people had talked to me about it for years, I was actually inspired by God to write the book.
Gregory Robinson:
He said, “Here. You need to write this, son.” And I was like, “Well …” And He said, “No. You need to write it.” So what do the scriptures say? Obedience is better than sacrifice. So I did…
Warwick Fairfax:
It’s like … I haven’t been in the military, but I imagine when your superior in the military says, “Greg, you need to do this,” you go, “Yes, sir,” or “Yes ma’am.” Not a whole lot of debate, right? Well it’s similar with God right? If God tells you to do something else, it’s yes, sir. Let’s go. Right?
Warwick Fairfax:
But just before we get to what you’re doing now and some of your experience as a Navy Corpsman, I want to understand after things weren’t working too well at home with your mom, you spent some time with your grandmother. But at age 16, it sounds like there was a time where …
Gregory Robinson:
Approximately about 8 or 9 until I was right at 16 years old and this goes into talking about racism to a point and how the Old South was because I had got invited to … Because I was the first one in my family to go to integrated schools. So my grandmothers on both sides were just like in the movie that made a few years ago that came out. That was my grandmothers on both sides.
Gregory Robinson:
And I think a side note that’s very important in regard to that, remember my grandmother and my father on my mother’s side worked for an old Jewish family on the other side of town around Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa. That’s just how it was. And when she would work when I was younger, she would take me to another house sometimes during the summertime when I was out of school and I’d play with their son, who became a friend of mine.
Gregory Robinson:
I got to be about 10 years old or so and started learning some things and understanding because you’ve got to remember, I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s. And so this was at the end point somewhat of the civil rights movement. And my grandmother stopped, I think it was Christmas Eve or a couple of days before Christmas and we picked up all these toys and these clothes and they were all hand-me-downs. And I was at the age where I had a little knowledge.
Gregory Robinson:
And I looked at everything and I told my grandmother, I said, “I don’t want these little white boys’ hand-me-down things.” And she turned around and she looked at me and she slapped me across the face. And she had tears in her eyes and she said, “Don’t you ever say anything like that again because you have no idea.” And that’s just how she left it.
Gregory Robinson:
And as I got much older, I really understood where she was coming from because she was like, “These people have a good heart. They’re doing something for me or for you because they love me and vice versa. And here you have the audacity to be ungrateful.” I’m using my own words in that sentence. But that’s really what it come down to and we had the nerve to be arrogant when you don’t understand the full concept of what’s going on here. And so I took that as a big lesson and I never forgot it. That’s the kind of woman that she was.
Gregory Robinson:
So the whole family was blue collar. My other uncle was a high school dropout. He started working construction at the age of 15 and built his own business and was a contractor by the age of 30. So yeah, a lot of hard times, but a lot of hard lessons, too, at the same time.
Warwick Fairfax:
The couple years before you get into the Job Corps and Navy maybe somewhere around 18, from 16-18, those were some of the toughest years.
Gregory Robinson:
Yeah. I would say 16-18 were the toughest. It was like building a pyramid. You start with a very strong foundation, just horrid things and you pinnacle out to a point. During that time, I was on my own. I dropped out of school because I got kicked out of the house. I’m going back to my previous story. Some friends of mine from school, I rode the bus home with them. That was my first party ever. So we went to the white section of town that us as kids had heard stories about… That’s just how it was.
Gregory Robinson:
So we all got off the bus and all my friends disappeared. And so here I am and excuse my jokes, but it’s how I am. I was in no black man’s land.
Gregory Robinson:
So I’m here and a pickup truck, rebel flags and the whole shebang, had no idea how to get home. So I pushed away my panic. And I remembered my landmarks from taking the bus from school to home and vice versa. So I took all the main roads and expressway and I walked home. I was supposed to be home by 6:00. I got home by 6:30. So I look back on it now, so that was a three and a half-hour walk across the City of Tampa.
Gregory Robinson:
So I get home and my aunt’s at the door and she said, “Go back where you come from,” slammed the door in my face and that was the beginning of me being on my own. So I tried to go to school for a while, high school and I kept myself clean through my grandmother’s old house that I still had a key to. So I’d wash up in the sink and things of that nature. We called it a sink bath as kids.
Gregory Robinson:
I’d read by candlelight and still do my schoolwork plus try to maintain myself and tried to forage for food. But then it comes to a point to where you’re trying to survive and go to school. You can’t do both at the same time, at least during my timeframe. It’s not like now where you have all sorts of programs and agencies that’ll reach out to help. You’re just a young kid and you’re just out there.
Gregory Robinson:
So I got involved with a family of con men who took me in, so at least I had a semi roof over my head. And I hustled pool and just all sorts of things I did just to make ends meet. So what I learned in my salvation about things like that, you have to meet a person at their need. You can’t just come to them with a bible and talk about Jesus loves you and everything will be fine, when he’s like, “Right now, I’m hungry,” or “right now, I need a warm bed,” or “right now, I need a drink of water,” or “right now, I need three bucks to get downtown so I can get to the food pantry, so can catch the bus.”
Gregory Robinson:
And so that’s where I was at. So my saving grace during that timeframe after being on the streets for almost two years is I got arrested by a store detective in a store called Zayre’s that doesn’t even exist anymore.
Gary Schneeberger:
I remember Zayre’s. Yeah.
Gregory Robinson:
Yeah. I stole a half T-shirt of the Cincinnati Reds sports team. Don’t even like the Cincinnati Reds, but I needed a clean shirt. So the detective arrested me and I had some social security card that I found on the street someplace that I would use as my alias. That’s just how it was. So he pulls up the guy’s records and he had a rap sheet as long as both of my arms combined. He says, “Are you sure you’re this guy?” “No. No. No.”
Gregory Robinson:
So they actually sent me, put me in juvenile detention. I went back to school while I was in juvey and mind you at that time because the situation was I had a warm place to sleep, roof over my head, I had three square meals a day and I was going to school for free. So when I talk about meeting the need of people, those are the kind of things that I like to talk about.
Gregory Robinson:
So while I was in juvey from that point, I heard about Job Corps on the radio and once I got out, they let me out because they found my mother, I took a bike that I had acquired and I found a local Job Corps office.
Gary Schneeberger:
For those who aren’t watching on YouTube, Greg just did the air quotes with his hands when he said acquired. Just so you know.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yes.
Gregory Robinson:
And I rode the bike down to the Job Corps office, through the phone book, which I know kids nowadays couldn’t do that. And so I went and filled out an application by hand. I had to have it signed by one of my parents, so I took it to my mother. She refused to sign it, so I forged her signature and I dropped my application in the mail. So about a month later or so I think it was, I got a one-way ticket on Trailways, which doesn’t exist anymore either. I’m telling my age. I don’t care. I left for Job Corps five days before my 18th birthday.
Warwick Fairfax:
Wow. So from what I understand, Greg, that then led you to joining the military to be a Navy Medical Corpsman.
Gregory Robinson:
Yes, sir. It’s actually a hospital corpsman. Veterans will forgive you because they understand that you don’t know.
Warwick Fairfax:
Sorry. It sounds like that began a change in the direction of your life it seems, just being in the military. So just talk about that. It wasn’t easy. You were deployed in some pretty dangerous places from what I understand.
Gregory Robinson:
Oh, yes sir.
Warwick Fairfax:
So just talk about that experience. But it sounds like that was the beginning of a turning point.
Gregory Robinson:
It was very much so. Basically, it was really easy in a sense for me because you had already been out on your own for years and for lack of better words, no offense to anyone, but you weren’t a momma’s boy. You weren’t coming from home. But my first tour overseas was actually in a little small country on the West Coast of Africa, funded by ex-patriot American slaves and then their sister country is Senegal, which is their British counterpart.
Warwick Fairfax:
The first was Liberia?
Gregory Robinson:
Liberia, yes sir.
Warwick Fairfax:
Okay. Yeah.
Gregory Robinson:
And so we were there from August 1990 until New Year’s Day 1991 and we were actually relieved. The Marine Corps anti-terrorist team called out and the acronym for it is called FAST Company and so I was attached to a mechanized infantry unit at the time, where I had some really great friends, actually to this day. So it was a very odd situation.
Gregory Robinson:
One of the things I vividly remember when we were flying in from the ship to the helipad at the embassy compound was as we were looking from the doorway of the helo, we saw these Seabees, if you know what Naval Seabees are. They had these huge green camouflaged bulldozers and they were pushing lumber on a beach or so we thought. And it looked like the consistency, what I remember, of Raggedy Ann dolls. There we go telling my age again. And as we got closer, we realized that they weren’t Raggedy Ann dolls, they were bodies.
Gregory Robinson:
And they had ran out of space in the hospitals and the cemeteries and the other places that were used for makeshift graves. So they were bringing the people as far in from the beach as they could so they wouldn’t be swept out in the sea from the high tide, when the high tide came up because the embassy compound was on a cliff face and went straight up. That was my first experience and I was 22, maybe 23 years old at the time. I think I had my 23rd birthday … Yeah. I was 22 years old at the time. And I had been in a few years already at that time. So that was my first experience.
Warwick Fairfax:
Seeing that, it must make you think how can this kind of thing happen? All these questions are probably flooding in your mind. What could lead to such horrific scenes? You probably saw some really difficult things in your tours of duty. That probably wasn’t the last.
Gregory Robinson:
It does, but speaking again as a veteran, all those things about politics and your ideas and what you look like and you don’t look like and where you’re from and all those things, they all go out the window because it all comes down to you’re looking out for this guy that’s beside you and the other guy that’s beside you and vice versa and so everybody just wants to go back home to their own dysfunctional backgrounds and families when it’s all said and done. So you’re just, you’re friends and family. And that’s what makes especially combat veterans so close.
Warwick Fairfax:
It sounds like you found a real sense of camaraderie in the military. So somewhere along the lines, as we get to Unbreakable Man, it sounds like there was a turning point where you were maybe at one of the lowest points in your life and you could have gone one direction, but you went towards faith. Let’s talk about that pivotal moment where you chose faith, chose God if you will and not perhaps an alternative.
Gregory Robinson:
Well there are so many moments, but I’ll go to a funny one. This is after I had actually contemplated suicide at one time. I had just gotten …
Gary Schneeberger:
Now normally, someone doesn’t say I’m going to a funny one after talking about contemplating suicide. So our listeners are dying to hear this story.
Gregory Robinson:
Well, I’ll go back to the first one, the suicide portion. I just really got into a very bad point in my life between the PTSD that I had that I didn’t even know that I had at the time because I just assumed because of the type of people that I came up around in the military, was always normal.
Gregory Robinson:
And what I mean by that, it’s the best way I know how to describe it is when you have let’s say 100 individuals who came up together in an insane asylum for 10 years, just as an example. For them, that’s their normal. But then one day you unlock the door and you tell those 100, “Okay, go out and be with the rest of the world.” And they’re like, “But this is our world.” And so when they go out with the normal population, they’re like, “Who are all these strange people?” They say, “We’re not the strange ones, you’re the strange ones.”
Gregory Robinson:
And that’s what it’s like in my eyes is being a combat vet with PTSD because once you are discharged, especially combat vets, there is no turn-off switch. You just don’t go back to just being Greg Robinson the homeless kid who used to be out in the street. You’ve now had training and you’ve had education and indoctrination into a totally different culture and lifestyle. So whether it be four years or if it’s 20 or 30 years, you’ve still been indoctrinated. And that’s much what it was like being around the Marine Corps.
Gregory Robinson:
But now pushing forward, moving to the funny story. How I came into salvation was actually this lady had come to work for me on the job and she was a sanctified woman. And so every now and then, she’d talk about God. And I really didn’t want to hear it because I had seen almost everything as far as I was concerned. I had dealt with Hare Krishnas, I had dealt with Jehovah’s Witnesses, I had dealt with Methodists, I had dealt with Baptists and Muslims and so on and so on. So to me, it was all just one big melting pot in my eyes.
Gregory Robinson:
And I had grown up seeing hypocrites, these guys that call themselves preachers in the church and they’re hanging out at the same bar that I’m at on Saturday night until about 1 o’clock in the morning because they’ve got to go home early because they’ve got church in the morning. And there was one particular day, just kind of like what I’m doing, I kept people laughing and I was notorious for telling jokes. That particular day, I was telling a dirty joke.
Gregory Robinson:
And so as I was telling my dirty joke, she kept interrupting me, so I got irritated because I couldn’t get to my punchline. I said, “Just let me get to my punchline, say whatever you want.” So I went to go finish again and she says, “When you coming to church?” So I got so irritated that I said, “You know, fine. I’ll come to church, just let me finish my joke.” And she looked at me because she knew I was old-fashioned and she says, “I got you.”
Gregory Robinson:
So now I knew because I gave my word, I had to go to church. So I said, “Well, I know what I will do.” In my mind, I said, “I’m going to go to church to fulfill my obligation and I’m never going to come back.” So lo and behold, I go to church, I get convicted, I went two other times and on the third time, I brought my wife with me. I didn’t know why I brought her with me. I know now why.
Gregory Robinson:
And then we went to church and the pastor at the time made an altar call. And I really don’t remember going up, but I went up to the altar. He made an altar call the second time and my wife went up and our daughter who is now 19, will be 20 this year, she was 9 months old sitting in a car seat, as the assistant in my church watched over her while my wife and I were giving our lives to God. That’s my story in a long-winded, shortest version as I can get it how I came to know and understand God.
Gregory Robinson:
So from that day, actually when I got home that evening, I remember I was taking my daughter upstairs to put her in the crib. And something came over me and I told God, I said, “You know, God. I want to make a deal with you.” And I said, “I’ll tell you what. If you keep my daughter and then allow her to go through the things that I went through as a child and teach me how to be a father and how to be a husband because I didn’t have any examples, that I promise you I will serve you until the day that I die.”
Gregory Robinson:
I’ve got a great kid. She’s in college. She’s beautiful. She takes her brains from her mother and a little bit of her father’s attitude, but she’s still here. I’ve been in the church. I mark my time in the church by her. So I’ve been in the church almost 19 years.
Warwick Fairfax:
It sounds like that experience changed your whole life, led to Unbreakable Man. You charted a journey that was different than the one that you grew up with. Your daughter grew up radically different than you did.
Gregory Robinson:
Yes, sir.
Warwick Fairfax:
The Bible talks about sin can go to seven generations, which basically means forever. It’s just a biblical way of saying forever. I think sometimes virtue or faith can go to generations. So you’ve charted a new course. Without getting too much on a side track, as listeners know, I grew up in a very different background, a very wealthy background in Australia, large family business, but it was founded by a man of great faith. He was an elder at his church, a wonderful husband, great father. He treated his employees well. He did everything that a man of God, a man of Christ should do.
Warwick Fairfax:
That faith, it got a little watered down a bit over the generations as money and power crept in and money and power tends to erode faith, but that legacy of faith lasted in some fashion for generations. And so the legacy you’re leading, I don’t know how many generations that would last, two, three, four, five, 10. I don’t know. But you’ll have kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, great-great-great-grandkids that you’ll never meet unless you live to Biblical 175 or something. Who knows? But let’s assume it may not happen.
Warwick Fairfax:
You have a legacy that’s going to change from what you grew up with. So that’s something to I don’t know, if the words are to be proud of at least to be filled with joy about, right, to seeing what will happen with your daughter and generations.
Gregory Robinson:
Yes. I’m extremely thankful that God gave me an opportunity to be more than that because I know for a fact that I should have been dead at least a decade ago, if not 20 years ago from all the things that I went through. But for whatever reason, God had his hand of mercy upon me and as the scripture says, God is the father of the fatherless.
Gary Schneeberger:
This is a perfect time to bring up because of what Warwick said about your stories being so different, right? You laughed when he said that, Greg. When he said, “Yeah, my background was much different than yours.” And it’s true and yet, your crucibles and the things that you’ve gone through and the impact that has had on you. We discover this all the time on this show.
Gary Schneeberger:
No, not everyone has grown up with a 150-year-old family media company that they lost in a failed takeover bid to the tune of, as I like to tease Warwick about now, $2.25 billion nor has everyone listening to this show, Greg, gone through what you’ve gone through from being on your own at 16. You told me that you would take soap out of restaurants so that you could wash yourself and then your war experiences.
Gary Schneeberger:
But one of the things you said, Greg, that cements how the emotions of your crucible, Warwick’s crucible, I’m not giving the details of mine at this moment, but my crucible, everybody’s crucible tends to have certain emotional touch points. Getting beyond them, you said … We ask all guests what’s one bit of advice you would give someone to get beyond your crucible? And this is what you said.
Gary Schneeberger:
And I say this because that’s the advice that you follow, that’s the advice Warwick followed and that’s the advice that you’re encouraging the listeners to follow and that advice is this and I love the way you phrase it. Don’t let defeat, defeat you. How can people do that if you’re counseling, coaching, meeting someone where they’re at and they feel defeated, how do you tell them what’s the first step they can take?
Gary Schneeberger:
Warwick talks a lot about what’s one small step you can take to move towards your goal? What’s your advice to how do you not let defeat, defeat you?
Gregory Robinson:
To be frank, I think I’m kind of a hard man in some ways. So my best piece of advice is to be flawed, meaning to … And sometimes it’s really hard when you’re in a bad situation, but you need to be able to take a look in the mirror and say, “Why am I in this situation? What is a thing that I could do to improve? What are my resources that I can maybe get for help.” Humble yourself. Allow yourself to take advice. It doesn’t mean all the advice is going to be the best advice, but nonetheless, it’s going to be advice and it’s going to help you to get to the point where you need to be if you allow it.
Gregory Robinson:
Because one of the things that I teach on, you mentioned in my bio about I call myself the caretaker of the 12 principles of resolve and this is something that God had given me not even a year ago now and it’s an acronym based off the word father. The first principle is to be flawed. The second is to be faithful. The third is to be accountable. The fourth is to be authoritative. The fifth is to be honest. The sixth is to be humble. The seventh is to be earnest. The eighth is to be an executor. Oh, I forgot my T. Yeah, T is to be trustworthy and the second T is to be tenacious. I’m going to skip down to R because I know I did the others already, is to be respectful and to be a rewarder.
Gregory Robinson:
And it’s actually broken down in three tiers, the first four, the second four and the last four. But the most important I think out of all of them is the very first one, to be flawed. Because you’ve got to recognize your issues, idiosyncrasies, whatever word you want to use, to look at yourself first and address those things and then figure out what you need for help. And of course, all three of us know being men of faith, the most important place you can go for help is to go to the king first because if you don’t go to the king first, then you can’t get to God.
Warwick Fairfax:
Amen. I love that phrase that you use. I think also you mentioned be flawed and ask for help. We all have flaws and we all have our own experiences. You’ve obviously gone through tough upbringing, PTSD in the military. Mine … You can’t compare crucibles. Mine feels like it’s trivial compared to what you’ve gone through. But losing a 150-year-old family media business that was founded by a person of faith and being a person of faith in my naïvety and poor theology, I felt like God had a plan to resurrect the family company in the image of the founder and I blew God’s plan. Obviously, if God had wanted it to happen, it would have happened.
Warwick Fairfax:
But aged my late 20s at about 30, I was just devastated. So we all have our crucibles. But yeah, it’s so true to just admit that you’re hurting, that it’s not easy. Get help from wise folks. So just link that for me. You mentioned the 12 principles and you have a ministry, Unbreakable Man. Tell me about this mission. What is that mission about? What is your passion? Where do you feel like God is calling you today? What’s his mission for you in life would you say?
Gregory Robinson:
My mission is to help other men. That’s putting it very simply, but when I talk about my job is to equip, enrich and to empower men to be better versions of themselves according to God’s base design in character because if you do that, then everything else will fall into place. What I mean by that, I’ll use a Biblical description. We all know that God created the man first and then he created Eve from the rib of the man to be his helpmate.
Gregory Robinson:
And Adam was the head of his household. He was the high priest. We know that’s how things were done at the time. And if Adam had to did what God instructed him to do and he had to chastise his wife and say, “Hey, you know what God said.” But instead, he allowed his wife to do what all of our wives do to us. They come up to us and they say, “Honey please.” And they bat their eyes and maybe they rub you on the back and bring you your favorite meal. And so he was cursed.
Gregory Robinson:
And so he went along with his wife. And when God came into the garden, he says, “Adam, where are you?” And then Adam didn’t answer. And he called him again and he didn’t answer. And he finally called him a third time if I remember right. He said, “Well, I’m over her.” He said, “Well come see me.” He said, “I can’t because I’m naked.” He said, “Well how do you know you’re naked?” So right there, he gave himself away and then of course, you know the rest of the story.
Warwick Fairfax:
Sure. How does this link with what you’re trying to teach? All of us sin. Men and women, we all fall. As scripture says, we all fall short of the glory of God.
Gregory Robinson:
Really what I’m teaching is, when I talk about the principles and then I tie in with this, this is about teaching men how to be real men, again according to God based character and design. And for so long, men haven’t been taught that. And as society pushes forward, we get further and further and further away from that, where we have women who don’t understand their places in the household. I know it’s old-fashioned, but it’s the truth. You get men who don’t understand their places in the household.
Gregory Robinson:
I’ll give you a good example. You gentlemen may or may not have seen it. There’s a commercial that comes on TV about Tide. I think it’s Tide. And it’s these two dads who are washing clothes, a black dad and a white dad, both men and the kids are playing around them. And they’re talking about detergent and what gets the clothes cleaner better. And one of, I think, the wives walks out of the house with a briefcase. There’s nothing wrong with women working, but what I’m saying is that the roles that God has designed for men and women is now completely reversed.
Gregory Robinson:
And the scripture even talks about it. It says how in the last days where the children shall be your oppressors and the women shall have rule over you. And so because we’re out of order, then everything is upside-down and it’s topsy-turvy. So if the husbands know how to be real husbands. For those who are married because you know how the world is today, that they’ve totally destroyed the institution of marriage.
Gregory Robinson:
And it used to be a term of shame if you came home and you were pregnant and you weren’t married. They would send the daughters off to a place with an aunt or an uncle or an old family member someplace in the country. And that’s not to say that my situation was any better because it wasn’t. But the point is that I’m on this side now serving God and I know better now and I understand.
Gregory Robinson:
And if we could teach men these things based upon these principles and understand who they are, what it means to be flawed, what it means to be faithful, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, then we could get them back on track. And I think a lot of the problems that we have in society would be remedied and it would start from that base foundation.
Warwick Fairfax:
Is there an element of servant leadership in which you try to teach men? Because I know the whole role of men and women is a complex subject to discuss in our day and age, but scripture talks about a man should love his husband as Christ loves the church, basically lay his life down. So there’s the sense of leadership. The scripture talks about servant leadership, but not … I know that you are not talking this, about not so much domineering, but more of a servant’s heart. You try to teach men just that husbands are meant to have a servant’s heart as they love their wives.
Gregory Robinson:
Yes. The scripture you’re talking about, it says how men should love their wives as Christ loves the church. So when I speak of leadership, I don’t mean the old-fashioned, domineering, beat your chest, drag the woman by the hair. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about leadership based upon scripture and biblical principles, meaning the scripture says that as a man who wants a wife, he needs to understand her.
Gregory Robinson:
So we know that women are emotional. Men are not so emotional and each one has a specific design by God in their roles. So your job is to teach your wife and children according to God’s ways. But if no one ever teaches you that and you don’t understand that, then there’s no way for you to know. And that’s why you have so many men that are so far from the church and so distant in relationships because now what they have is they have their mothers trying to raise men when you need a father to raise it. But how can a father learn how to be a man unless his father is in his life? When I say father I mean as in marriage.
Warwick Fairfax:
And so many young guys don’t have role models or what it means to be a man of God or even a man of character to not abandon families, to be around to love their kids, not yell and scream, but resolve things peacefully as partners. You try and teach young guys what it really means to be a real man, which is not to dominate. It’s not to abuse or to hit or strike, but just to love, be a servant leader. Leadership can take many forms and often what we think of leadership is not what young folks think leadership is.
Warwick Fairfax:
It’s not my way or the highway. It’s more of a servant leadership, loving your wife as God loves us. So that’s got to be a tall order to try and teach in Unbreakable Man. That’s a real cultural shift. How do you get this through to young guys? It’s you’re speaking a foreign language. What the heck are you saying, Greg?
Gregory Robinson:
I start off with the book and then you engage them in conversation. Because once they get past what you look like on the outside, meaning usually where I work, I’m usually in a shirt and a tie and a jacket, clean-cut is just how I am. And then when they start really talking to you, they’re like, “Wow, you do understand.” So now you’ve met them at their level and so now you can talk to them because you’re not a foreigner so to speak. You’re not someone who hasn’t been in their shoes or worse.
Gregory Robinson:
And they can tell when they talk to you whether you’re sincere or genuine or not. So the authenticity comes out and then I’m able to say, “Hey, this is what you need to do.” “Wow. I never thought about it like that.” And then you’re able to engage more and more and more. And then what I find is they just start absorbing like sponges because they’ve never had anyone to sit down, another man, and to tell them these things. Not all kids or not all young men, but a lot of them.
Gregory Robinson:
And then most young women want to be married, so when they hear it, they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” It’s like, “Well wait a minute. Before you say yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s some stuff in here for you, too.” It’s not really for you per se, but …
Warwick Fairfax:
Well you have a daughter, right? So you’re obviously saying be very careful that the man that you fall in love with, you want to make sure you pick the right one.
Gregory Robinson:
Yes, sir. And I take it very seriously because I told you earlier in my story about being a father. I asked God to teach me because I had no idea. Because what I did when I got married the first time and don’t laugh at me too hard when I say this, but I took what I saw as a kid, friends who had fathers because when I was a kid, the ones who did have fathers, we were kind of jealous. You’ve got a dad and I don’t have a dad to go home to. I can’t say, “Hey Dad, can you throw the ball with me? Can you do this with me?”
Gregory Robinson:
Between the TV shows and everything else that you saw like the Huxtables, Father Knows Best and et cetera, et cetera. I’m really showing age there, Father Knows Best. But I just hodgepodged it in my mind and used that as my reference point on what I should do as a husband and as a father. And the majority of stuff that I did was absolutely wrong because none of it was God centered.
Gregory Robinson:
So when I got married the second time and I had my daughter and she was a baby still before my second child was born. I told you guys my story, how I asked God to teach me how to be a father and a husband. Because I was horrible at both and didn’t even realize it. So what God did for me is because I humble myself and just like the scripture says, the king says, “Take my yoke and learn of me.” We talk about yoke and the kids say, “You mean like an egg?” No. It’s not an egg.
Warwick Fairfax:
Not that kind of yoke.
Gregory Robinson:
It was an old fashioned device that they put around a horse or a beast of burden’s neck to control them.
Warwick Fairfax:
Oxen, that kind of thing.
Gregory Robinson:
Yes. Yes. Exactly. So I took God’s yoke and took my time and I learned and God taught me and I listened. I didn’t buck too much and rebel. I think God did a fairly decent job with me, so I try to set myself a better standard for my daughters so when they grow up they know exactly what to look for. This is how my dad was. My dad was always faithful. He loved my mother greatly. He’d do anything for us. We never had to want for anything, but he was a disciplinarian. He guided us. He taught us right from wrong.
Gregory Robinson:
So now they know what to choose. They know what to look for because of the standard their dad set. And then my standard came from my dad, which is our mutual father which in heaven.
Warwick Fairfax:
Amen.
Gary Schneeberger:
That is an excellent point to do what I normally say, Greg. Normally at this point in the show, I say it’s getting about time to land the plane. The captain has turned on that fasten seat belt sign. But in honor of you, as a huge Star Wars fan, I’m going to say we’ve come to the point in the show when Han Solo is going to bring down the Millennium Falcon. It’s time to land that ship, but before we do, I would be remiss if I did not give you the chance to let our listeners know how they can find out more about you, more about the Unbreakable Man and more about your book, Bad, Bandages, Bullets and Beyond. How can they find out more about you?
Gregory Robinson:
You can find me on Amazon. I’m listed. You can find a link for the book. My email or my website, actually I’ll do my website. That’ll be easier. It’s a long one so you’ve got to pay attention.
Gary Schneeberger:
All right. We’ll have it in the show notes, too, but go ahead.
Gregory Robinson:
It’s theunbreakableman.live, all one word, dot live. And then my email is great@theunbreakableman.live. Or you can find me on Instagram, as well. It’s also under theunbreakableman and you can find me on Facebook, as well. I’m not a huge social media fan, but it is what it is. So Instagram, Facebook, website and then via email if you want a hard copy of the book, I’ll send you a signed copy.
Gary Schneeberger:
Fantastic. Warwick, the last question is yours.
Warwick Fairfax:
Well thank you so much, Greg, for being here. You have an inspiring story. You’ve had some tough journeys growing up, as well as in the military, but just your ministry, the Unbreakable Man, just really trying to care for young guys, the 12 principles of resolve. It’s very inspiring because there’s a lot of young guys out there that don’t have a role model of what is it to be a real man? It’s not like in the movies, some tough guy that beats everybody else up. There’s a time and a place for defense and to protect your family and all this, a time and a place for that.
Warwick Fairfax:
Being a real man is a lot more than just being tough. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong to be tough, but being compassionate, having a servant’s heart, being faithful, honoring your family, honoring God. That’s a mission that there’s not a lot of people doing that and they need a lot more people in the game, a lot more people in that company of troops if you will, right? You need a whole lot more soldiers on that mission trying to help young guys understand what it is to really be a real man and what it means to be an Unbreakable Man. So thank you for your ministry. It’s a tough mission field, but it’s really needed. So thank you.
Gregory Robinson:
Thank you.
Gary Schneeberger:
That sound that you heard, listeners is not the plane landing on the … It’s Chewbacca being excited that the Millennium Falcon has landed. Before we go, let me rewind a bit of our conversation and leave you with some take-aways from this very enlightening, moving conversation with Greg Robinson.
Gary Schneeberger:
Number one and this is so good, don’t let defeat, defeat you. There’s a movie. I can’t remember the name of it now, but this line has stuck with me. There’s a movie I love in which this kind of shyster character says after his get rick quick scheme fails again for the 18th time, he tells his associate, “Remember defeat is always momentary.”
Gregory Robinson:
That’s right.
Gary Schneeberger:
When you say that don’t let defeat, defeat you, that’s what pops into my head. It is not the end of your story if you determine to pick up the pieces and move forward. Greg ran into brick walls at many junctions of his life, but he never let the disappointment, even the devastation of the defeat keep him defeated. He moved beyond his crucibles. He realized he is flawed and found a way to find advice to move beyond that crucible. The second point goes back to you, we, me, everyone.
Gary Schneeberger:
We need to recognize that we are flawed, embrace those flaws and use them to empower yourself to overcome the most damaging ramifications of these flaws. Be humble enough to take coaching to help you overcome your flaws. Be authentic enough not to hide them. Be brave enough to learn from them.
Gary Schneeberger:
And then the third point take-away from our conversation with Greg and this is infused throughout this episode and that is this: Smile. Watch this episode on our YouTube channel. I will include it in the show notes. You’ll see how many times, even when describing terrible tragedies that Greg’s face breaks into a smile. Here’s the key take-away there: Finding joy amid the pain is critical to overcoming your crucible.
Gary Schneeberger:
And speaking of overcoming your crucible, listeners thank you for spending your time with us today talking about how we do that, how we move beyond our crucibles. Warwick and I would ask do us a little favor. If you enjoyed this conversation, click like and subscribe on the podcast app on which you’re listening to this.
Gary Schneeberger:
You can also, if you want to know where you are on your journey to move beyond your crucible, we heard about Greg’s journey and moving beyond his crucibles today, you can discover where you are by going to crucibleleadership.com and taking our life of significance assessment. You can find out exactly what your personality type is as you’re navigating your road back and you can find great next steps for how to do that.
Gary Schneeberger:
So until the next time we’re together, please remember this, that your crucibles are painful, they’re real, they knock you off your feet. But they are not by any stretch of the imagination, they are not the end of your story.
Gregory Robinson:
Amen.
Gary Schneeberger:
I’m smiling right now saying that because Greg smiled so much in this episode. They can be the beginning of a new story, a better story, a more rewarding story and the reason why it happened for Warwick, it’s happened for me and it definitely happened to Greg Robinson our guest today, those lessons that you learned from your crucible can set you up in a new chapter of your story that is so rewarding because at the end of the day, it leads you to where Greg has been led, where Warwick has been led and that is to a life of significance.
