Shackleton’s mission had changed for good from one of discovery to one of survival for himself and his men. On this episode of BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE, Harvard Business School Professor Nancy Koehn, who profiles Shackleton in her Wall Street Journal best-seller Forged in Crisis, explains in detail how the British polar explorer’s only hope was to forget the disasters he and his crew had endured and “face forward” with grit, ingenuity and improvisation. “Crisis leaders get better and better and better,” she tells host Warwick Fairfax. “You can see it iteratively if you study them like I do.”

Highlights

Transcript

Warwick Fairfax:

Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership.

Gary Schneeberger:

Last week we promised you an unbelievable conclusion to our story of Arctic Explorer, Ernest Shackleton. And here it is, as told by the woman who wrote the book on it, Harvard Business School, Professor Nancy Koehn. Sit back and enjoy and be a little amazed. We hope you've enjoyed our series featuring some of the most insightful and instructive episodes we've done here at Beyond The Crucible. We'll be back with new shows next week.

Welcome everybody to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Gary Schneeberger, the co-host of the podcast and the communications director for Crucible Leadership. And you have clicked play. We hope you've clicked subscribe to a podcast that deals with a subject most of us know all too well, crucible experiences. Now, crucible experiences are those things in life that are painful, traumatic, can feel like they take the wind out of our sails, can feel like they take the trajectory out of our lives that they put us on a path that we necessarily didn't want to go on. And we talk about crucible experiences here because we believe and our experience and the experience of our guests, has shown us that if we learn the lessons of our crucible experiences and if we apply those lessons moving forward, we can not only move as the title of the show says, we can not only move beyond our crucibles, but we can move into a more rewarding life that's rooted in our vision and our values that helps other people and that ultimately leads us on a path to significance.

And today's episode is pretty special because it's the second part of a conversation that we began last week with the host of the program, Warwick Fairfax, who is the founder of Crucible Leadership and his guest Nancy Koehn. Now Nancy is a historian at the Harvard Business School who focuses on crisis leadership and how leaders and their teams rise to the challenges in high stakes situations. For the purposes of this episode of Beyond the Crucible, she's also the author of a book called Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times. And it is one of the individuals of the five that Nancy Koehn profiles in that book, the case study she unpacks in that book. One of those five people is Ernest Shackleton and he is the subject of last week's episode and this week's episode.

Ernest Shackleton was a British explorer, a polar explorer who about 100 years ago was on a quest to discover the South Pole. The problem was another explorer, a rival explorer, discovered the South Pole first, but Shackleton had arctic exploration in his blood, so he wasn't going to give up on still traversing that area. So he hatched a mission in 1915 to travel across Antarctica. And the plan was to leave early in the year. When others found out about Shackleton's desire to leave early in the year in 1915 to travel across Antarctica, they told him, "Mm. Maybe you don't want to do that. The pack ice, the ice flows are looking pretty bad this time of year and going south might not be the best idea for you or your men." Shackleton heard that advice, but he did not heed that advice. So in January of 1915, he set out with his crew to travel across Antarctica. Problems started immediately and we talked about those problems last week on Beyond the Crucible.

Pack ice did indeed impede the progress of the ship to the point that the ship was dead in the water. And not just for days, not just for weeks, not just for a couple of months, but for several months. In fact, it wasn't until late autumn in 1915 that the situation changed in any marked way and it didn't change for the better. The pack ice around Shackleton's ship actually destroyed the ship. The ship sank and the men had to scramble out of the ship, climb up on the ice flows and try to figure out what they were going to do next. Shackleton was faced at that moment and that was where we left the conversation last week with Warwick and Nancy Koehn. Shackleton was faced with what was he going to do next? And Warwick asked Nancy Koehn a question at the end of last week's episode, "How did Shackleton muster up the wherewithal to move on?"

How did he forget what had come before? How did he forget the mistakes he made that led his men to the precarious position that they were in? How did he face forward as Nancy Koehn said and tackle a new mission to rejigger what he was after? He could no longer even ponder traveling across Antarctica. He now had a different mission. And that mission was the life of his crew. Saving the life of his men and getting them home safely to England. So when we left this conversation last week, Warwick asked Nancy Koehn, "How did Shackleton muster up the perspective, the boldness, the courage to take a step forward and move out in this new mission?" And what we're going to hear now is part two of that episode in which Nancy Koehn answers Warwick's very specific question.




Nancy Koehn:

It's a question for all kinds of crisis leaders that come out of the mists. I mean Andrew Cuomo in New York State. Abraham Lincoln who never managed anything more than a two person law office and becomes president at the center of the Civil War and a huge administrator. So I don't have a scientific vector leads to vector leads to vector analysis. Here's how I answer that question. And I'm going to use a quote from Mr. Lincoln again. This is from his annual address in December of 1862 to Congress. "Our occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is knew so we must think anew and act anew." And that is to me, a microcosm of what happens in a crucible, a really searing crucible, or a real crisis.

You realize, "Holy cow, this is really terrible. I got to raise the level of my game. I don't know how I'm going to do it. I can't see how to get through the day, much less how to get through the month or the week or the year, but I got to step it up. I got to find. I got to do, I just got to find my muscles." And it's in that realization, I've got to do it. And the next step, it's all steps. It's not like your eagle wings suddenly come available and you rise up into the heavens or you're Rocky and you've drunk the raw eggs and now you've beat Apollo Creed. It's not like that. It's the first step and then it's the next step and then your confidence builds and people's confidence in you builds. And so, you rise to the occasion. And I think that's what happened with Shack.

I think he thought as soon as that ship got stuck, I got a brand new game. What are my key priorities here? My key priorities, for him initially were, morale of my men since suddenly, everything stopped. Where we were going is over. What are we going to do? How do I keep them from doing what the men did on Scott's expedition under week leadership, which is collapse inward into disunity and then the disaster that can happen from that in life or death situations.

And then you deal with that and then you're like, "Oh, the ship's going to collapse. It's going to get cracked. We're going to be without a ship, then what do we do?" And so this constant meeting with the self to say, "We're going to figure this out next and then we're going to figure this out." And in the doing of all that, you are stoking, you are building, you are lifting the 15 pound weights of those muscles and they are getting stronger. And crisis leaders, they get better and better and better, that's what's so interesting. And you can see it iteratively if you study them like I do.




Warwick Fairfax:

And what you just said is so critical. I mean as you know, the title of the podcast is Beyond the Crucible and Crucible Leadership is the whole website and brand. But a crucible really tests the measure of a leader.




Nancy Koehn:

Yeah.




Warwick Fairfax:

The flame is turned up and how do they respond? And the people you've all mentioned, certainly Shackleton as we're talking about here, he rose to the occasion, he became a better leader. It's the test. The good goes to the top just like the whole molten blast furnace deal. It's the same thing.




Nancy Koehn:

Yeah.




Warwick Fairfax:

So talk about some of those key attributes that when things got most difficult, his leadership just rose to such an amazing level. What were some of those key things that really, we can learn so much later, today?




Nancy Koehn:

Let me answer that question by telling your listeners just a tiny story. So the men decamped from the ship, abandon ship, put some supplies, three lifeboats and about 120 of the photographer Frank Hurley's negatives including some just instant moving film footage in September. And they're making camp on the ice. Shackleton by the way, perhaps lesson number one, puts great attention into who's going to be with whom in which tent. And then specifically, he takes what he calls his doubting Thomases of the folks that are negative, that are like, "Well I'm not sure how we can do this..." But he puts the spreaders of potential psychological and collective contagion in his tent, adding new luster power to the keep your friends close and your enemies closer. That's really important how you manage and deal with people.

But the ship goes down, the men are in the camps with lots of routine. He's got a routine. The duty roster varies every single week. Everyone sticks to a routine, everyone exercises, everyone socializes after dinner, moving around to tents because we don't want people getting too alone and too negative and too isolated. All these different aspects of managing morale. But then in November, mid-November, the ship goes down and he sees it in the morning starting to crack and the ice starting to open. And in a course of about eight hours, the course of a working day, the ship falls with its broken mast and all, it's like ropes everywhere, through the ice. And then the ice closes over and it's gone. And there's literally no line on the rise. Now for a team of naval men, scientists, soldiers, enlisted men, officers, this is like the world coming to an end.

They're 2000 miles from anybody. They have no Waze or GPS or text messages, there's no Facebook posts, no one's knows where they are. I mean the men, they're shell shocked. They're in the worst state they've been. They stagger their tents, Shackleton paces the ice because he can sense how this is just a game changing moment for his team and whether he can keep them unified and following orders and trying, believing they can get home and he paces the ice. And later in his diary he will say, all life long. And he will say, "A man must shape himself to a new mark the minute the old mark goes aground." So what's he saying? He's saying I got to raise the level again. There's a new mark. We don't own a ship anymore. All our bearings are lost. I've got to do something different.

Next morning. This is really important. This is, if you will, lesson number two. He walks around the tent with Frank Worsley, the navigator and they have cups of hot tea and milk for the men. And he says, "Lads get your tea. Come on here, gather around." And he does a little town hall meeting and the first thing he says is, "Ship and stores gone. Now we'll go home." And in later years, when the men were interviewed, some of them were interviewed by the BBC about how did they survive. By the way, to almost a man, they said the Boss, which was a nickname for Shackleton, made us believe we could do it.

Many of them were cold, the whole world had just dropped away. We were in a new incredibly low point. And there he is saying, "Well, face forward, ship and stores gone. So we're going home." And that kind of ability, second lesson, for the leader to show up no matter what he was feeling inside, we know he is pacing, he was anxious, he was uncertain, didn't know how he was going to shape himself to a new mark. To show up before his men confident, strong, looking out after their welfare, facing forward.

That is incredibly important because in a crucible everything is magnified, magnified impact, everything is heightened. So how you show up for yourself actually affects your ability to access your resilience muscles. So I think that was really important. He showed up every day no matter whether he slept or not with his courage muscles tight and the men believing that he knew what to do next, that was really important. A third thing that he did that I think was very, very important was to manage the energy of his men. We never talk about that, but energy is really important to morale and morale's really important to action and unity. And so, for example, he knew how to, when men seemed to be flagging after dinner, he'd like say, let's have a dancing contest on the ice or let's play the banjo. He insisted when they left the shift that they keep this banjo from when they enlisted men because it was mental medicine.

And he would try and get the men involved in something that was a social recovery exercise. Or to use an even more pointed example on a boat journey that he and five other men will make in 1916 to get help, he would see a man flagging. His energy flagging and spirit start to halt and he'd order up hot milk for everyone. And what he was doing was just like a mother soothing a child by giving them something to drink or soothing a partner. But he would never single out the man because he didn't want that person to be embarrassed. So he just had this depth understanding of energy and its relation to how we feel and how confident we are. And he used that over and over and over again to literally manage the energy and take care of his flock. So that's something else that's very, very important about his leadership.




Warwick Fairfax:

I mean he's learning all this at a time where, I mean I can't imagine there were many books about leadership empathy in the early 1900s, it would've been much more mechanistic then. Obviously, the science of leadership has gone on a lot since then. But he just seemed to learn about, as you said, the importance of starting with the internal, managing himself. I mean, just saying to the men, "We'll get you home." I mean the chances of them getting home and when they were locked on the ice in 1915 was a billion to one. I mean it would be almost zero. No communications.




Nancy Koehn:

No. No. You're right.




Warwick Fairfax:

But yet somehow he led them to believe in the virtually impossible, which is remarkable to me.




Nancy Koehn:

So two comments on that. I think important insight were first, many years ago I stumbled on this definition of real leadership that I love. It's at the beginning of the book and I can claim no credit for it other than stumbling on it. It's from an American writer named David Foster Wallace who wrote this in a Rolling Stone article many years ago. And he was following John McCain around on the campaign bus when McCain was running in 2000 making his first run for the presidency. And this is what David Foster Wallace wrote, "Real leaders are individuals who help us overcome the limitations of our own weaknesses, selfishness, laziness and fears and get us to do harder, better things than we can get ourselves to do on our own." I think this is just such a great definition and it's with me always and it describes Shackleton very well.

So what he was able to do is, he kept raising the level of his game without textbooks, without Harvard Business School seminars, in the chivalric code of the British Navy for God's sake. Empathy was not a word we were teaching people. We put stripes on their navy blue coats. But the fact that he could do these things and keep raising his level of the game, including lots of improvisation, lots of powerful signaling because he knew that men take signals from what he did. Not just words, not just actions, was, he was in a sense, helping the men do harder, better things than they could get themselves to do.

And so when the BBC says, "How did you do it?" In the 1930s when they come back and interview all these survivors, they say the Boss made us believe we could do it. It's a perfect illustration of the impact a leader can have by, as Bono the rock singer once said, making the impossible possible. And that is the most nurturing or empowering aspect of my research. I have discovered all kinds of people, including Churchill, let's not forget late May 1940, who make the impossible possible by learning how in a crucible to raise the level of their game and help others do the same thing.




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely. Absolutely.




Nancy Koehn:

That is the potency of great leadership in crucibles.




Warwick Fairfax:

And that is such a great connection you make there Nancy in May, June 1940. France has fallen, most of Europe is gone. America's year plus away from entering and the betting money would be on Britain's not going to be able to hold off against the might of the German Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe. And somehow he makes a whole nation believe we're going to hang on. Which I mean, how do you do that? It's millions of people believed, "You know what? Winston says we can survive. Well you know what? We can survive."




Nancy Koehn:

And millions of people, and all those RAF base commanders who are like, "Okay, we're sending them all up now." Remember there's a story from the summer of 1940 when Churchill goes to visit some base and says, "And how many spitfires do we have in reserve?" And he says, "None. They're all up in the air."




Warwick Fairfax:

Right.




Nancy Koehn:

Right? But the point is that you don't need to do it with enormous amounts of reserve and slack. You just need to do it. And he did and he made people believe they could do it. It was so important. The whole world history hinged on those months in some very real sense.




Warwick Fairfax:

Oh absolutely. So I want to get to how Shackleton was able to get his folks off the ice. But you know mentioned just as you said, the power of just giving his men belief, just managing emotions, mixing people up, troublemakers, even people of different classes, officers, crew, the whole games, animal, vegetable, mineral, all those... Managing people with food and drink, I think you mentioned. Just so many tools that he'd managed to keep morale up and so they were on the ice for a very long period of time. But then eventually, there's a turning point when he launches his folks to get to Elephant Island. I talk about they're on this ice flow floating hundreds of miles off course. He's looking for an opening the ice where he can launch these lifeboats. And so talk about that part of the story where eventually, they're able to launch their three lifeboats.




Nancy Koehn:

Just to pick up the last scans of the story. So the Endurance goes down in the ice, it's gone forever. In November of 1915, the men then pass December, January, February and almost all of March in that same berg. Seal and penguin meat start to dry up. So the morale is very low. It's late March, they're waiting, all the men are watching Shackleton most keenly for the ice to break up enough for them to launch three roughly 22 foot each lifeboats, open lifeboats and sail northwest. They have some rough idea from what's called a sextant. Today we regard as a crude navigational device that charts the angle between the sun and the earth's line horizon to make navigational coordinate estimates. They're waiting for the ice to break up so they can sail northwest. This is up the western side of what is an archipelago of islands on the South American side of Antarctica.

And they're hoping to get far enough north to an island where a trading ship, some kind of ship will find them or where they can find an island called Paulette Island where Shackleton knows previous expeditions have cached supplies. So, that's the goal. And they set off and finally, the ice breaks up enough. Shackleton doesn't want them to go too early because they don't want to get stuck in ice in those lifeboats, so they're really... Then they've lost their navigational, their transport capacity. And eventually the ice breaks up enough, Shackleton gives the go ahead and with water that they've melted from ice in barrels and supplies. They leave their camp and they have some supplies and they head northwest. It's an incredibly horrible journey that lasts five nights and six days and in the end, the first three days they just basically go round in a circle.

And then eventually, as they get close Shackleton fears, the men are dehydrated. Some of them have probably the early stages of dysentery from contaminated water. Their eyes are glazing over, he's worried he's going to lose them. It's terribly cold. And Shackleton decides to sail quickly to an island much farther south than he hoped to reach, an island where no one will find them. Basically, it's a big rock in the South Atlantic called Elephant Island. And that's where they end up in early April 1916. It's the men's first moment on dry land since December 1914. There's fresh water, they're ecstatic to be on dry land. They stagger up, drink. Immediately set up camp and then Shackleton starts trying to rehabilitate them physically. But he knows, here we go, lesson number four, you never don't get a straight GPS map to get out of a crisis or a crucible. You navigate point to point with lots of uncertainty and lots of pivots. Shackleton's like, "No one's going to find us here. I need the next step."

And he immediately, probably by the next morning possibly even the evening they arrive, decides we're going to have to sail for help. Everyone can't stay here because we won't ever be found and we can die. So he starts making plans right away to say, take one of the lifeboats, reinforce it, put a canvas mast on the top of it. It's an open lifeboat, rowboat basically, put a canvas deck, mast up, sail, put 2000 pounds of rocks in the bottom to give it some heft, right? Some ability to withstand the waves of the South Atlantic. And he decides he and five carefully chosen men will sail back to South Georgia Island and the Whaling Station where they know they'll find civilization. And that's the next two and a half weeks of time and attention. The men all getting ready to outfit one of the lifeboats, the James Caird it was called, to make this incredible journey across what anyone that sails will tell you are some of the world's most difficult seas.




Warwick Fairfax:

I think you mentioned, that's an 800 mile journey.




Nancy Koehn:

It's an 800 mile journey.




Warwick Fairfax:

So gale force winds. And I think you're right, there was some massive wave that was bigger than any wave that Shackling had seen. And he had had some experience on the seas and somehow, they made that 800 mile trip, which in itself as you ride is almost unprecedented, certainly was remarkable they even made it.




Nancy Koehn:

It's still considered the greatest open boat journey in the history of navigation, that's a long, long history my friends. Several years ago, an explorer and a environmentalist named Kim Jarvis reconstructed the journey with a carefully reconstructed boat, same supplies. Now they had a big diesel powered steamship following them for safety and things and they barely made it, right? So no one's really done it as Shackleton did, even Jarvis. And he's an extraordinary seamen and an explorer and they get... This is April 20th, 1916, they get to South Georgia. The rudder is damaged. The boat has been banged around in a hurricane a few nights before they arrive at South Georgia. Hurricane so bad that it actually sinks 500 person passenger boat that's about 300 miles away. They don't know that. And so, they have to tuck in, they have to dock or come into the island on the opposite side of the island from the Whaling Station, which is where help is. The rest of the island's all uninhabited and completely unchartered.

And so, the next part of this incredible story that just keeps getting harder, is Shackleton and the two really tough smart, good guys he's brought along. The other three men that he brought along were men that he didn't want to leave on the island because they were doubting Thomases and he didn't want them spreading pessimism and negativity on the island, Elephant Island while he left to try and get help. Again managing morale. So the next part of the story is Shackleton and his two men companions, Tom Crean and Frank Worsley, take some nails out of the boat, make some impromptu crampons by nailing those nails into the back of the bottom of their boots. Set out with some rope and a kerosene lamp and a small fire, kerosene fire. And they set out over this. And it's just this incredible 36 hour journey across this mountainous, mountainous island where they're almost dead a couple of times including just, I'll give you one example of improvisation.

Another important aspect of leading ourselves in crucibles and leading others is, they get too high and nightfall's coming and Shackleton's worried they're going to die at so high in altitude and they can't get down fast enough. So Shackleton says, "Let's just sled down." And they coil up this big rope flat like a rug made of rags and they sledge down into the darkness not knowing what they're going to find. And they fall more than 2000 feet in like 18 seconds and they fall into a snow bang safe, in a much lower altitude, much warmer. And they stand up solemnly and shake hands and carry on. And after 36 hours of trudging, they get to the Whaling Station and they knock on the door and no one recognizes them because everyone's given Shackleton up long ago for dead. The men haven't shaved or bathed in months.

And Shackleton's first question is, "When did the war end?" And the Clark there at the Whaling Station says, "It's still going on. The world's gone mad." And so then the next chapter of the story is Shackleton's again... It's so incredibly hard that even Shakespeare couldn't have thought this up, right? Or some disaster film screenwriter. His next journey, next chapter is to try and get a boat that can get back through the waters that they just traversed to get his 20. There're 22 men still left on Elephant Island and he spends the next... So that's May 12th when we get to the Whaling Station, he spends the next four months, it'll be all of May, all of June, all of July and all of August, trying to get a boat that can get through what has now become pack ice again and actually get its way all the way.




Warwick Fairfax:

And it takes him three or four tries, I mean-




Nancy Koehn:

It takes him four tries, four different boats. Each of the first three tries, they encounter pack ice and he's afraid they're going to get trapped. And so they turn back, to go back to port.




Warwick Fairfax:

So talk about the scene, I think you write. Maybe, is it August 1916?




Nancy Koehn:

Yes.




Warwick Fairfax:

Where he finally is on the steamer. I think you write the Yelcho from the Chilean government loan him and he is pulling in and the see him. I mean talk about that scene because, I mean that's like months after he's left.




Nancy Koehn:

It's incredible. Even telling it right now, I take a deep breath because it's so incredible. So he had gone gray with worry, I mean in the interim and he started to drink. Shackleton could put back one or two in London, but he hasn't drunk thus far on the expedition. But he starts drinking, he's so worried. He goes gray and he has this basically a tugboat from the Chilean government where they have gone and gotten the boat and they're like coming back from Santiago to Elephant Island and the men spy the boat. They're outside picking up barnacles to make soup because they don't have any penguins or seals and they're running all on food and they spot a ship and all the men pour out from these overturned lifeboats that they're using as shelters. And they built these little impromptu, these bivouaced shelters.

And they pour out and Shackleton's on a steamer with Worsley and Crean, these two men, they come to him all the way and he starts counting the men and he gets to 22 and Worsley said, it was like he lost 30 years off his face. His face breaks into the smile, the wrinkles disappear. And he says, "Oh my God, all 22, they're all alive." He jumps into a lifeboat from the tugboat, the Yelcho and he starts sailing and saying, "Lads, I'm here." And he starts throwing cigarettes from the boat to them as they get there. They all pile on really quickly. He doesn't even go ashore to see the setup. He's so worried about pack ice. He just gets them all on the Yelcho. They sail for Chile. Huge celebration because everyone had given them all up is dead. And then they sail on to London where it's August 1916 and World War I is still raging and a number of the men, most of the men on the expedition who have lived through this incredible, incredible survival story enlist.

And the last piece here is tragically, or not the last piece, but the last piece of this expedition piece is tragically, two of those men are killed in combat almost right away. So it's like to do all that and then die of machine gunfire. But that's what happened.




Warwick Fairfax:

Some of them, weeks after they got back, it wasn't very long.




Nancy Koehn:

It was incredible.




Warwick Fairfax:

The last chapter I find really interesting is Shackleton, I guess hadn't got over the polar bug, even though it's after World War I. Society is fundamentally changed. The world is different. The whole polar exploration fever is gone, like many things are gone, the world is totally different, but not for Shackleton. And so somewhere around 1921, he decides, okay, let's do it again. And I think you're right, Was it like eight of his crew? I mean, let's do it again. It's like, who are these people? Why would you want to do this again? What leader can inspire people to do something I don't know, almost say suicidal. Again, it's...




Nancy Koehn:

A great crucible leader. So he sends the call out in 1920 to go again and it goes out to four corners. All of his men have scattered, the war's over. He himself has been lecturing in the United States trying to recoup some of the money for the debts he owes for the expedition on the speaker circuit in America. But I mean, no one cares about the pole anymore. No one care even cares about individual heroism, that just got wiped away in the mass carnage of the First World War. And so, he sends a call out and then it's more than eight, I want to say it's 12 men answer. And like, "Yes sir, boss, here we come." And they all gather and the ship takes off in late 1920 and they guess what? They go just like they had in 1914, they go to South America to pick up a few more supplies.

And then last port of call is again South Georgia, the Whaling Station. And that night, the first night they get there, Shackleton has a massive heart attack and dies in his sleep in his cabin and his men bury him there. And then they go on and travel along the Vassel Bay, which is this bay that they wandered in on the Endurance as the currents carried them. And back to Elephant Island just to take a look at their place where many of them spent five months and then they come back. And it's more of just a reliving, I think of the cohesion and the triumph of the human spirit that that journey was. And then the expedition just fades into the midst of history. No one cares. They got home, the men go on with their lives. The BBC gets interested in the story and does a series of radio interviews in the 30s and then they slip back in the midst of history. And no one, no British school kid, no explorer aficionado was talking about Ernest Shackleton-




Warwick Fairfax:

Wait, wait. I think as you write, they were talking about Scott.




Nancy Koehn:

They were talking about Scott who died on the way back... Exactly the martyred, lousy, insecure leader who effectively martyred his men. And God, queen and country, or king and country, but they still died. And so beginning in the 1980s though, it's almost like a phoenix rising, partly by the efforts of Roland Hunt and other very good are polar explorers. A larger story starts to come out both about Scott and Ernest Shackleton. And then, it's again almost like from underground, this collective global cottage industry or grapevine of real interest in this story and of the impossible being made possible just comes to be incredibly popular. There are Shackleton schools, there are Shackleton societies. I get emails every single week and have for 20 years about people wanting to talk about Shackleton. And right now, in the COVID-19 crisis, everyone I know wants to understand how they endured and triumphed in this life under their circumstances.




Warwick Fairfax:

There is something about the intrigue of the epic failure. And being Australian, as you probably know, one of the key military episodes in Australian history is Gallipoli. For Australia, we became a nation in 1901. But in reality, we became a nation in, I think it was 1915, somewhere like that in Gallipoli where just real briefly, as you know, it was on the shores of Turkey. Turkey was an ally of Germany in World War I. The British commanders dithered and just made sure that the Turkish forces had plenty of time to get machine gun nests on the hills and it was just horrifically executed. And then these poor Australians were landed there on the shores of Gallipoli with these high hills and mountains, machine gun nests, no hope of success. But yet, even though it was a failure, just the heroism and the courage amidst that, has defined a nation, even now, straight in cricket teams when they go to England will stop on the way as a morale boost.

So anyway, Gallipoli's a whole other thing, but there's something about the epic failure. But in this case, it is more than just the epic failure, it's just what Shackleton learned, his ability to move on. So as we summarize here, for leaders today who may never have heard of Shackleton, what are the two or three things of why Shackleton holds so many lessons for CEOs, leaders of nonprofits, leaders in the COVID-19 crisis that we're all going through, corporate leaders, governmental leaders, when everything is so uncertain. What are the key nuggets would you say that we need to learn about Shackleton?




Nancy Koehn:

Well, just to present them in uncharacteristically succinct form, you have to step into the fear. You take the step. Courage is not the absence of fear, as Mandela said. It's the willingness to walk into the fear and square your shoulders and tighten your core and realize you are still standing and can take the next step. People behind you can take the first step. So step into the fear. Feed and water yourself and your people carefully, both emotionally and physically and mentally. Keep your fingers tightly on the pulse of the morale of the people around you. Face forward and learn. Let go of what was and what didn't work in the past. Learn from it and then move forward. Especially in crucibles and crises, there's just too much at stake to spend a lot of time rehashing the past.

I said on the Charlie Rose interview I did several years ago when my book came out, I said, I learned and Shackleton learned that why is never the question. Why me? Why this? How the suffering? Why the calamity? Why the failures? It's never why. It's what can I make in this wreckage and how can I redeem, reclaim? And just as a crucible, it's about high flames literally, and it's ability to reshape things. How can I be forged into something better and stronger and more committed to service?

Another lesson that's really important in Shackleton that we haven't talked about that I see over and over in these leaders who make these... These ordinary people who do extraordinary things or these people that make the impossible possible is, they ultimately in the doing, in this forging in the crucible cross the bridge from the narcissistic, "I need to do this. This is my bullet list. This is my agenda, this is my career." They cross the bridge to a more powerful place called thou or we. So, you discover, these people each discover, Lincoln discovers it, all that narcissistic quest for public office and power becomes, "I got to save the union. We have to save our country. And it's the crossing of that bridge from I to thou, or I to we."

When you discover that who your most powerful, most luminous, most noble self is, is actually in service to others and that that's the best way to serve yourself, that you find your ruby slippers, right? The secret weapon, your superpower that you've never known you'd had. So Shackleton discovers that and keeps growing in that commitment to the mission with God as my witness, I'll bring them all home alive.

And then last but not least, this ability to keep improvising and pivoting, right? Improvising with, "Okay, well we're going to sail for South Georgia now." Improvising for, "Oops, well we'll sledge down the mountain so we don't freeze up here." Improvising, but always in service to this worthy mission. I will bring them home alive come hell or high water, I will do it. And that of course, the constant engagement with the mission right? Helps sure up your endurance muscles and your ability to say... Shackleton once said, I just love this. "Obstacles are just things to overcome after all," right? That's a really empowered statement. So all those things are really critical to individuals in a crucible who will ultimately use that experience to lead other individuals in a crucible.




Warwick Fairfax:

Just to summarize here, because I know we need to probably bring it to conclusion, but yeah, I mean to me, a crucible really tests the metal of a leader. But these five people, they became better people. Maybe there were the raw materials there, who knows? Somehow it forged them into something that they weren't before that. And as you say very well, the ability to move forward, not brood on the past. The ability to realize it's not about me, it's about other people. It's about, as we say in the Crucible Leadership of life, the significance of life on purpose, focused on others. All these great leaders did that.

And the reason it's so important for us to study them and why your work is so important is, there is a reason we call them great leaders because great leaders don't happen every day. They're very rare. It's like finding diamonds. You could look through a lot of rock to find a diamond. And so that's why studying them and what you do, the work is so important because you know, who else are we going to learn from? There are very few people that we hold up as role models or to learn from, unfortunately.




Nancy Koehn:

Well, but maybe it's not quite such a small circle of people or small group of people, Warwick. And I'm still studying courageously. A research associate and I are writing a case right now about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the emotional intelligence and awareness of not just John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, but a few other people, including people like Adelaide Stevenson and Tommy Thompson who was the former ambassador to the Soviet Union who was called in. And the emotional intelligence piece that is as important as any of the military expertise in that conference room in the White House in helping resolve this without nuclear war becoming the logical end of our action. So the more I've studied this, this phenomenon of great leaders, the more I'm convinced that great leaders are made, they're not born. And if that's the case, then there's lots and lots of potential greatness out there.

And I think it also comes in many different shapes and sizes. We cover in our lives, people who end up exerting a lot of power, a lot of authority, a lot of influence. But I went to chemotherapy, I saw great leaders on the infusion floor in those nurses, right? I've seen school principals who are great leaders. There's a woman right now in Ohio who's the health secretary who's facing death threats because she knows a lot about social distancing and healthy protocols. And a certain small group, very small group people's very angry and armed. And she's a great leader and she's getting greater by the day as she holds this idea about, "Your health, the collective health of Ohioans is my charge and I'm obligated by that. I will discharge that obligation."

So I think that one really important message for people in crucibles or helping someone in a crucible is out of this can come your greatness, but you have to work at and you have to say, "My project here isn't just to get through this. It's to get better and stronger and fuller and more empathic and more compassionate and more competent. And I'm going to work on that as I navigate through these high winds and big waves." That's really important. You have to decide that for yourself and then you have to stick to it. So that piece is a covenant that you make with yourself and it's really powerful, but it takes work. Real work, but incredibly rewarding work as well.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well said.




Gary Schneeberger:

Normally, at the end of a podcast, I will launch into what I consider the three takeaways. But I've been in the communications business long enough to know that when there's this much Harvard Business School in the house and it's been summarized so well, I'm not going to bother doing that because I think Nancy has summarized it all very well, listener. I will say two more things. The second one, Nancy, I'm going to give you the chance to let people know where they can get your book. But the first thing I want to do to draw the balloon strings together of everything that we've talked about here is to say something that Nancy says in her book, listener, and something that we say on Beyond the Crucible all the time. Because I think one of the joys of co-hosting this podcast is seeing people from different backgrounds, different crucible experiences, land at the same place without ever having communicating.

So here's what Nancy writes in her book. She says, "It takes reserves of emotional awareness and discipline for leaders to balance attention to the path ahead with knowledge gleaned from the past." Here's what we say at Crucible Leadership, "Learning the lessons of your crucible to chart a course to a life of significance is critical." Two ways of saying the same thing. Balance what came before with what lies ahead and focus on a life of significance. Nancy, I would be absolutely remiss if I didn't let the listeners know how they can learn more about you and get this fantastic book for themselves.




Nancy Koehn:

Well, let me answer the second thing first. The book is fantastic, not because I wrote it, it's because these people live such brave lives and they're loving lives as well. These are not just superheroes with cloaks and leaping tall buildings. These are ordinary people who lived magnificent lives and they're inspirational just to... It was an inspiration to me just to have the privilege to write about them. So it's available almost anywhere books are sold. I read the audio if you like audio books and you like the audience to be the voice. I choke up a little bit at the end about Rachel Carson. So that's just a little tease. And then I have done an extraordinary amount of media, videos. I have a very active social media life, which I conduct purely around lessons of leadership. So there's no pictures of my horse or my dogs or my outfit problems or eating potato chips. There's no vitriol or exuberance. There is lessons every day.

Right now I'm running a classroom called, that you can find on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, Every Day a New Lesson Leading Yourself in Crisis Insight Number, we're up to 64 and with resources there. And then my website, which is just launched in a new form, is called nancykoehn.com. And it has videos, articles, podcasts, radio interviews. I do a regular spot on NPR and we have links to all of those on all kinds of leadership topics. So there's just a plethora of material for the interested listener.




Gary Schneeberger:

And for folks who are listening, and as I often say about Warwick, since he has a silent W in the middle of his name, Nancy Koehn so you know, is spelled listener, K-O-E-H-N.




Nancy Koehn:

Thank you for that.




Gary Schneeberger:

And those social media accounts that Nancy talked about as well as her website, it's nancykoehn.com, Nancy K-O-E-H-N.com. So thank you listener for spending time with us here at Beyond the Crucible. Warwick and I have a couple of favors to ask you. If you've enjoyed what you've heard here in this incredible story about Ernest Shackleton, one, would be to click subscribe on the podcast app that you're listening to this to right now. That does a couple of things for us. One, for you, it helps make sure that you don't miss any episode of the show so that you can continue to get these interviews and these discussions of the key elements of Crucible Leadership. And then second, we would ask, visit crucibleleadership.com where you can find blogs that Warwick's written. You can take an assessment to see where you fall on your own journey to a life of significance. And hopefully, that will add even more fuel to your fire to reach that life of significance.

So until the next time we're together, thank you for spending time with us. And remember, that crucible experiences, as we just saw in this interview with Nancy Koehn, can be extraordinarily painful. They can be very difficult, they can be hard to move beyond. But if you stay after it, if you continue to, as Nancy said, put one foot in front of the other and continue to take one step at a time. It's not the end of your story by any stretch of the imagination. It is in fact, the beginning of a new story that can be the most rewarding story of your life because it is one that leads to a life of significance.

When you work hard at something over an extended period of time that you’re passionate about, one of your highest hopes is that what you’ve created will be appreciated by others and will be beneficial to them.

But it’s always a nice surprise to experience just how beneficial it is for you too.

That’s been the experience of the entire Beyond the Crucible team as we’ve readied our first-ever e-course, Discover Your Second-Act Significance, which is hosted by our founder, Warwick Fairfax, and cohosted by me.

The course leads you on a journey of self-discovery from feeling stuck to awakening your passion, helps you craft a vision rooted in your talents, and guides you into unleashing a more fulfilling life that leaves a legacy you’ll be proud of. Plus, it’s all presented in a way that allows you to go through it at your own pace.

While there are a lot of things we can tell you about the course – like it’s three one-hour long video modules, over a dozen downloadable worksheets, and insightful clips from our nine-part podcast series on Second-Act Significance that ran all of April and May – frankly, this blog is more than an advertisement.

Even as the guides of this course, Warwick and I learned a lot…

For me, the “a ha” moment was coming to understand the nature of the journey we were guiding people on. After we finished the Second-Act Significance podcast series, I wrote a blog that recounted some of the key learnings guests have shared from their experiences. You may remember the star of that blog – which you can read here – was a friend of mine in the late ’90s, Albie Pearson, baseball’s 1958 American League Rookie of the Year.

I won’t get into all the details of Albie’s story again, but the key point was that despite his success as a pro ballplayer, he faced a moment in which he was forced to ponder, “Is this all there is?” Was the life he was living his destiny, his calling? Was he following a vision he was off-the-charts passionate about and living on purpose, dedicated to serving others – what we call a life of significance?

We don’t mention Albie by name – strangely enough – in the e-course. But we do talk about that feeling of “Is this all there is?” that so many people experience when their first acts aren’t as fulfilling as they’d hoped.

And I realized, smack in the middle of recording the e-course, that the journey we were guiding people on when it comes to second-act significance is not so much “from setback to significance,” which Warwick and I have said hundreds (maybe even thousands) of times in describing the path from moving beyond a failure or setback.

I realized that the journey when you feel stuck – perhaps even successfully stuck – and unfulfilled is a little different. And out of my mouth popped the phrase “From ‘Is this all there is?’ to ‘This is all I want.’ That was a powerful moment for me. Moving from dissatisfaction to satisfaction. It’s different than moving from setback to significance, but definitely an emotional and circumstantial cousin.

Another eye-opening aspect of directing people through this course was the depth that gets added to the learning when you move beyond storytelling as a learning tool and add in the soul work of the worksheets we’ve included. Warwick found the one called “The Younger You” particularly moving and meaningful.

It asks questions about your earlier days like “What was most fun for me?” “What was decidedly not fun?” and “What inspired me when I believed that everything was possible?” That third one really resonated with Warwick, who said he had to think back to what he really wanted to be when he was young. He’d never thought about it at all.

He thought, as the fifth-generation heir to his family’s 150-year-old media dynasty, that he needed to be the next Fairfax to take the reins of that business. But the worksheet got him thinking deeply about the things that inspired him when he was younger. One of the first thoughts to leap to mind was his love of science fiction dating back to the late ’60s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was fascinated, captivated by the vision of the future it painted, with then-unthinkable technology like a talking computer and video conferencing – a commonplace reality today.

As an adult, he was drawn to Star Trek: Next Generation, perhaps because Capt. Jean Luc Picard was a philosophical thinker who reminded him of his dad. Those influences, and his love of history, a passion he inherited from his father, made Warwick realize he’d always been a bit of a dreamer, a reflective person. He connected the dots to realize that much of what he loves about leading Crucible Leadership – drawing stories out of podcast guests, encouraging vision, passion and vulnerability in our audience — could be traced to those “younger days.”

What we’re most excited about, though, is the journey this e-course can take you on. It really is designed to help make the learning actionable and more concrete. Yes, we always hope that our podcasts and blogs make an impact, but the e-course takes it to another level through concrete tools we haven’t offered before.

So, if that sounds like something you think may benefit you, or maybe even a friend or family member, please visit www.secondactsignificance.com to learn more. You can also listen to our recent podcast episode on which Warwick and I discuss the origins of the course and why it may be the first one we offer, but it certainly won’t be our last. You can listen here.

We look forward to guiding you on your journey to achieving second-act significance!

Reflection

Learn more about our new e-course…

Nancy Koehn was on track for an administrative leadership role at Harvard Business School, where she taught the history of leadership to the world’s best and brightest. But a series of personal crucibles — the death of her father, a divorce that came without warning and decimated her finances, a cancer diagnosis — caused the floorboards of her personal and professional lives to crumble beneath her. Her career aspirations drydocked, her sleep interrupted nightly at 1 or 2 a.m., she sought solace in the love of her intellectual life: history. When she picked up a book on Abraham Lincoln to help pass the agitated hours, she discovered in the trials of the 16th president that there was not only a way through her setbacks but a way beyond them. 

Highlights

Transcript

Warwick Fairfax:

Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership.




Gary Schneeberger:

We conclude our special greatest hit series with a two part episode that today focuses on a fascinating story of an Arctic Explorer recounted for us by a Harvard Business School professor. You will not believe the crucibles this man and his crew faced or the way the tale concludes next week.

Welcome everybody to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Gary Schneeberger, the co-host of the show and the communications director for Crucible Leadership. And you have happened upon a podcast, hopefully subscribed to a podcast that deals in crucible experiences. Those are those moments in life that really can change the trajectory of your life. They can be painful. They often are quite painful. They can be failures, they can be setbacks. But what they have in common is they are things that can kind of knock us off balance a little bit and that we have to recover from.

And focusing on crucible experiences here at Beyond The Crucible is the title of the podcast, is to help you, the listener, get beyond the crucible. Many times we do that by interviewing guests who've had powerful crucible experiences themselves and have bounced back from those experiences to live a life of significance. And today we have a slightly different, a slightly more in depth guest that we will tell you about in just a minute. But first, I want to welcome the architect of Crucible leadership and the host of the show, Warwick Fairfax. Warwick. I know that you are personally excited about our guest today.




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely, Gary. Very excited to have Nancy here and should be a fantastic discussion.




Gary Schneeberger:

The Nancy to whom Warwick referred is Nancy Koehn, a historian at the Harvard Business School where she holds the James E Robison Chair of Business administration. Koehn's research focuses on crisis leadership and how leaders and their teams rise to the challenges of high stakes situations. Her recent book, Forged in Crisis, The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times spotlights how five of history's greatest leaders successfully navigated crises and what we can each learn from their experiences.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, thank you. So Nancy, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I love what you do in focusing on leadership and in particular how organizational leaders today can learn from some of the great leaders in history. And you have this remarkable book, Forged in Crisis, in which you have five very different leaders with five different stories, but some commonalities in how they approach leadership from within and then without. So yeah, I love that you teach this and you're teaching it to MBA students at Harvard Business School. So yeah, as obviously we discussed, I went there in the eighties and have very fond memories of the class discussion. I also have an abiding interest in history. My dad and I who - I grew up in a large family media business, one of the ways we communicated was through history. So I found this book fascinating. So Nancy, before we get into the book, tell me a little bit about yourself and what led you to write this book because I know you have some personal history that kind of led to this.




Nancy Koehn:

So I'm from a middle class family in the middle west of America. And I went to Stanford as undergraduate and then went to Harvard and just never left, got a PhD a master's, a couple of masters', and then ended up the Harvard Business School in my very late twenties. And knowing how way leads onto way, I found myself recently tenured. This is now about, let's see, 16 years ago. I was just recently tenured. Very difficult journey, very important bridge for academics to cross over into lifelong job security and great academic possibility in terms of what you do. And then two things. First thing is I was writing a case, a Harvard Business School case. We teach in these units of analysis a strange product called the Harvard Business School case, which is a real life piece of action. Not usually a history case, but I'm a historian. So I write history cases that we then teach to MBAs and executives as a way of drawing out lessons or insights or watch outs or things that they can take unto themselves, absorb in order to make better decisions.

And I was writing a case about Ernest Shackleton and I was so caught up in this story and how this person just raised the level of his game so extraordinarily and so consistently over these two years that these men, he and his team were stranded on the ice in the second decade of the 20th century. And then in the middle of that, and here it really gets the root of your question, Gary, my life started falling apart very quickly and in very large, as Sylvia Plath would say, chunky blocks. In mid 2002, my father who was 72 and spry and energetic dropped dead. My mother, who is someone prone to depression, just kind of collapsed inward like a black hole in terms of her own sense of the world and her sense of her place in it.

And then not many months, less than a couple of seasons after my father died and my mother's life was turned inside out and I and my sister with it trying to care for her. And my brother and my husband, who I'd been married to for just about 15 years one day said, "I don't love you anymore. I'm leaving. I have a lawyer and we're going to get all your Harvard retirement and all the money that you made," because I was the only one who had worked full time during our marriage. And those floor boards caving in under me were even harder than my father's because I loved him so much and I was so surprised. And I lost a lot of weight. I kept on teaching at the Harvard Business School, although my students were talking about making bets on how much weight I had lost week by week. And they were calling me the disappearing Professor Koehn.

And then not long after that, again just a couple of seasons, I was diagnosed with pre cancerous conditions. And not long after that I was diagnosed with breast cancer even though I had no risk factors. In the middle of this, there's this torturous divorce going on because I don't have any money other than my Harvard retirement and I'm trying to hold onto it in a no fault divorce state. And then I got cancer again. Most of it happened in the span of three years. All of it happened in the span of about five. And in the end, in the no fault divorce, I lost most of my money and then I had to figure out what to do.

And my career at the Harvard Business School, which had this administrative upward trajectory... I was interested in administration. I wanted to be a contributor and a leader at the school. That immediately ended because I was sick. And cancer, that's serious. My whole life was completely transformed. And I went through just astounding kind of self questioning and grief and self-flagellation and the constant asking why, which is not the right question. But I didn't know that at the time. And in the midst of all this, now to answer the question, this is all important though. In the midst of the early parts of the crisis, right after my ex-husband had walked out, I couldn't sleep. Everyone listening to this podcast who's endured a crucible moment knows what I'm talking about. And so I would go to sleep and wake up at 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM. Well, there's not much on television. You can't really vacuum at 2:00 AM. And one night in the midst of the existential wanderings I was doing metaphorically, I picked up a book of Lincoln's writings, a modern library edition of Lincoln's writings.

I never read much Lincoln. I was trained as a European historian. And I started reading. At the very back of the book, so this would be the second inaugural, and there's one speech after that and some memos and some letters and reading backwards into time. And the more I read, the more I realized... And this took about three days, I'm reading a couple hours each night. I remember sitting, my dogs, my spaniels are on the bed. And I said, "You think you have problems, Miss Nancy? Lincoln had it a lot worse." That was the beginning.

So my quest, which I couldn't see at the time, was much more than historical. It was personal, was to find lighthouses, examples of individuals that had just soul crushing calamity, crucibles. And then try and understand how they not only navigated through these extraordinary storm. They're extraordinary, they're inside and then they're out. But the most powerful ones, the ones that involve the most suffering and the most change are inside. And I wanted to understand how did he not only navigate the storms, but then in the process got better? And so that is where Forged in Crisis came from.




Warwick Fairfax:

Wow. So as you're doing this it, obviously you're a historian. But was part of it like, "I'm going through this massive crisis. Any one of these would derail many people."? A lot of it was, most of it was unfair, whether it's health, husband, father. Were you curious, "How did these great leaders get through it? Because, A, I would like from an academic point of view to know. But B, maybe that could help me too?" Was there sort of a dual purpose behind the whole analysis and book?




Nancy Koehn:

Completely. Completely. And I don't think I really recognized the personal so obviously. I had been at Harvard Business School then for, what, I don't know, 12, 13 years. I'm a very serious historian. I do my homework. I'd cut my teeth doing serious archival work on my previous two, three books. So I knew how to do the detective work. And I was just fascinated historically that people hadn't answered and been interested in these questions. No one asked, "What was Shackleton's interior life look like on the ice when the ship goes down?" No one had asked, "How did Lincoln really manage this internally when his personal life was falling apart and he's at the center of the Civil War storm?" And then I started looking for other people like this and the same kind of questions. And this great personal, again largely unseen at the time, personal fuel helping me move forward. So I was extra conscientious as a historian and as someone who was becoming so interested in leadership about doing my homework because I was feeding off of what I was learning.




Warwick Fairfax:

So you had a powerful motivation. And this is again, probably blindingly obvious. But as you were researching it and thinking about these great leaders, it probably took your mind off what you were going through and what for most normal people would be a combination of anger, bitterness, to use a Lincoln word, a little melancholy perhaps. That would be normal for most people. Did it take your mind off it as you were researching your book?




Nancy Koehn:

Yes and no. It's like a toggle switch. You kind of go, "Oh yeah, I could use that." Or, "Oh yeah, that happened to me too, Mr. Lincoln." But here was something that happened to me early on and I do think it was grace that happened. So this was early on in the beginning of this terrible years, I can't say annus horribilis because I had so many years, five of them were so awful. So I can't use the Queen's expression.




Warwick Fairfax:

Exactly.




Nancy Koehn:

She said, "It's an annus horribilis for the royal family."




Warwick Fairfax:

Exactly.




Nancy Koehn:

Anyway, I had this moment of grace and it was really early on. Colin, my ex-husband had just walked out and I remember standing there by my car and I kind of thought of Oprah Winfrey who I really didn't know very much about. And I remember thinking to myself, and I shook my hand at the sky a little bit like Scarlet O'Hara halfway through Gone with the Wind, Vivian Lee. And I said, "With God as my witness, I'm not going to get angry. I'm not going to be a victim. I'm going to make something good out of this even if I have no idea what." And I returned to that over and over and over like a personal covenant.

I didn't have any idea, was going to try and get better. I didn't have any idea what was going to happen in my life. I didn't know how I was going to get to the next day, much less the next month. But I just knew that and I kept coming back to that over and over and over again. And honestly it saved me. That was really important. I think it was grace. I don't think it was Nancy. But it was really powerful.




Warwick Fairfax:

No, that is so big and I want to get to these five leaders. You mentioned bitterness. When I think of some great leaders, obviously Lincoln is one, Churchill was another, they knew how to deal with bitterness. With Churchill, he had some challenges with Baldwin and obviously Neville Chamberlain and he disagreed with what he did. I remember there was one instance when I guess Clement Attlee won the '45 election. And Churchill's thinking, "Hey, I saved Britain. This is the thanks I get? Thank you so much." And so then one of his buddies started laying into Clement Attlee and Churchill basically said, "Don't you dare do that. The people voted for him." So he disagreed with his policies, but he wasn't bitter. And so I think of a Lincoln or a Churchill, they had many attributes. But the ability to not be bitter and to tackle the issues of the day, that seems to be a number of hallmarks of great leaders.




Nancy Koehn:

Could not agree more. Lincoln says at one point in the war, in one of the nadirs of the Union Army's fortunes, he says, "What I traffic in is too vast for malice," and over and over. Martin Luther King, there's so many great leaders who understand this. You got to close that bitterness vitriolic eye for an eye door most of the time because it won't take you and the people that you influence, because Churchill still exerted enormous influence in '45. 95% of the time it takes them nowhere good. Maybe 99% of the time. So the emotional awareness and discipline, Warwick, to do that I think is one of the pillars of people who make themselves into great leaders.




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely. So one final comment before talking about the five and then we're going to focus on Shackleton. What I love about what you do, because I'm not a historian, I love history, but definitely not a historian. But when I read history, whether it's Lincoln, Churchill, or even my dad loved English history. So I was sort of brought up on Wellington and Nelson even though I'm Australian, Anglophiles I guess. And so when I read about them, having gone to Harvard Business School and in my own little way sort of write and think about leadership, I read about people in history and think, "What are the key leadership attributes? What are the lessons today?"

Which I feel like that's the lens you're looking at because you teach at Harvard Business School. And historians, they're wonderful at what they do. But they don't always look at it through a leadership lens because that's not what they're there for. They are to write a history and that's fine. But you look at it through a different lens, which I think is amazing. So let's talk about these five because they're very different. Shackleton, Lincoln, Douglas, Bonhoeffer I'd heard of them. I must confess Rachel Carson, before your book I hadn't. But her story is equally amazing.




Nancy Koehn:

It's unbelievable, isn't it?




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah. So sort of a race against time to write Silent Spring as she was going through cancer. There are so many leaders. But why these five? Because it's an interesting selection.




Gary Schneeberger:

I'm going to jump in for just a second to say these five leaders are profiled in Forged in Crisis. So here's the book that we're talking about. Just want to make sure that Nancy's-




Nancy Koehn:

Paperback and hardback.




Gary Schneeberger:

That's right.




Nancy Koehn:

Audio and ebook.




Gary Schneeberger:

There you go. So the five leaders that Warwick is speaking of are masterfully profiled in this book.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well done.




Gary Schneeberger:

Sorry. Yes.




Nancy Koehn:

Thank you, Gary. I love you. So you know what's interesting, Churchill by the way was on the cutting room floor and there are a number of people that didn't make the book that were cut that because I probably had 12, it ended up as five. I originally was going to write about seven and then it was year 10 and I thought, "God, I'm never going to finish." So it got limited to five. I'm a slow writer. I'm just a slow writer. I'm a careful writer and I think I'm a better writer for being a careful writer in terms of reader comprehension and ease. But in any event, I think they chose me, Warwick. I think they chose me.

There was something early on about reading just a little bit for example of Carson's story, who about whom I knew almost nothing. Rachel Carson, the woman who more than any other single individual just for listeners that don't know her story, really founded the modern environmental movement with just an extraordinary book, a pathbreaking book, a revolution making book she published in 1962 called Silent Spring while she was battling metastasizing breast cancer. And so it was a race against time. But I didn't know much about her. I remember my mother reading the book when I was a little girl and loving it. But I just read a little bit, I thought, "Talk about unexpected calamity. Talk about the world caving in around you. Talk about someone who's going to access her courage and resilience and mission purposeful like worthy mission muscles."

And I knew, I just knew. And so these people chose me and the hard part was making it only five. But I needed to publish the book before I died, so I could have been at this for 20 years. As it was, it was 15. So that's really what happened. I got to know each of them incredibly well. And just one last thing because I care so much about these people, I know them. Mr. Lincoln will always be Mr. Lincoln, not Abe. Not Abraham, right? Rachel will always be Rachel, Dietrich is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I think about them all the time because I spent a couple of years with each of them. There was a moment, whenever I'm at the edge of the cliff or however big the fall is, I think of them and I take sustenance or I take a lesson for myself from one of these people. So they made a major impact on my life.




Warwick Fairfax:

That's amazing. So I want to focus a bit on Ernest Shackleton because I'd heard of him in the whole polar exploration race. I know you talked about this, but for modern listeners they may not be aware. In the early 1900s the whole polar race was a bit like I guess the space race in the sixties. And I guess it was an era of king and country and glory and Britain, Norway, and I guess US and some other folks. It was pre World War One, a very different era. So talk a bit about Ernest Shackleton and who he was and kind of what made him tick. I know the real story begins in 1914, but sort of a backdrop to who he was and F Scott and that whole kind of deal.




Nancy Koehn:

So he was Irish born, born in 1874 and his father wanted him to be a doctor, but from a young age he loved the sea even though he was born in County Kildare north of Dublin. And he spent some time as a ship boy and then as an officer on the Merchant Marine. And then he gets a chance right after the turn of the century, this is the 1800s into the 1900s, to join what as you were saying, Warwick, was one of the ships from Britain racing south against ships from other countries, teams from other countries trying in what is called the heroic age of Antarctic exploration or polar exploration to be the first team to discover the South Pole for their country. That's why it's like a lot like the space race. Who will get to the moon first? Who will get the manned spacecraft up first?

And he does this. He tries this twice. Two different efforts in the first 10 years of the 20th century, learns a lot from a bad captain in the first expedition, a lot from a failed expedition that he captains between 1907 and 1909, and then comes home short of the pole. Doesn't get to the pole in either expedition and then comes home. And the pole was actually discovered in 1911 by a Norwegian named Roald Amundsen in what today is still an unequaled feat of really polar exploration on either end of the earth. Astounding story, a really courageous leadership and very smart decision making and great bravery and team cohesion. And after the pole's discovered, Shackleton who's, motivated this is important, motivated by fame, a real narcissistic drive to do this for God, King, and country and be the man, the man who does it gets a new idea.

He's like, "Well, the pole's gone. Darn it. Didn't get that I need to do another first." And he gets this idea, I think it's really as early as late 1912, that he'll be the first to lead an expedition that will sled across the entire Antarctic continent from one end, from the South American end to the Australian end and cross literally the magnetic pole in the process, collect scientific samples, but be the first and they'll do it for Britain. And that is the beginnings of this extraordinary story, a story of a failed mission on the one hand. But the story of a different kind of even more important success that begins in 1914.




Warwick Fairfax:

I'm curious about his motivation. Just reading your book, he starts at age 12 or something, 16 I guess it is, and then by his early twenties he has his captain's mast or whatever it's called. He is really an adventurer. But the thing with Robert Falcon Scott who was very sort of prominent and famous and royal geographic society, obviously it failed, but for some reason, I don't know why, Scott decides to blame everything on Shackleton, which would seem like unfair, grossly unfair. But was that a bit of a turning point or a motivation? It's like this axe to grind or, "I'm going to prove them wrong," or what part did that play in his whole motivation do you think, the Scott episode?




Nancy Koehn:

It's a great question. So just for our listeners, Robert Falcon Scott, this well known naval commander was the captain of the first expedition, the head of the first expedition Shackleton was on in the first five years of the 20th century. It fails miserably. The men don't get along, Shackleton and Scott particularly, like oil and water. And the men almost die on the way home. They don't get very far. And as far as they get, they almost die trudging back to base camp. And when they get back to England, Scott publishes a memoir and a book about the expedition and the scathing, just scathing indictment of Shackleton. So Shackleton's just beyond angry, doesn't respond publicly. But I think a great deal of what motivated him to try and do it again on his own terms was partly anger about what Scott had said. But even more important, this is important, what he had learned about bad leadership from Scott.

So really an interesting lesson that several of the people in my book, as my editor said, the fantastic five, learn is you can educate yourself about how to lead well by actually learning what doesn't work by people who are actually really lousy at leading. And there are plenty of those people. And they're textbooks too so to speak. And so Shackleton, I think part of his leadership is actually formed out of his reaction to all the things he sees Scott doing wrong. And that's a very important influence on all the expeditions he will have after that one with Scott.




Warwick Fairfax:

That is fascinating. It's such a great point for listeners to understand is observing poor leadership can teach you a lot and can help you understand, "Okay. When it's my turn, I'm going to do it differently." And obviously Scott found his demise in, when was it? Like 1911-12, somewhere in there. I don't know if that was poor planning, poor leadership. He got to the South Pole finding that Roald Amundsen had beat him anyway and then he dies on the way back. But I don't know. Do you have a view on that? Was it just another example of poor planning and leadership, the ultimate failure? He lost his life.




Nancy Koehn:

It was. He lost his life and all the teammates, the polar team, the team for the pole that had gone with him. I do. And in fact, it was reading so carefully about that expedition, it was a race in 1911 for your listeners between Scott's team from Britain and Amundsen's team from Norway. Both men were actually starting from points not that distant on the Australian side of the continent racing south. And Amundsen's team is just over and over by every metric such a success. And Scott's expedition is a terrible failure ending in the most important loss of all, which is the lives of all the men that went to the pole with him. And my work is incredibly influenced by a much greater scholar of polar exploration. A guy named Roland Huntford at the University of Cambridge, the world's foremost expert on the subject.

And there's just no question in my mind I think or in his mind, many, many scholars' minds that it was insecurity, it was poor planning, it was the inability that comes out of insecurity not to make tough decisions that all good leaders have to make. It was the inability to say no to some of his men. It was flying by the seat of his pants. Improvisation can be important, but this was really uncalled for improvisation that killed Scott and his men. So yes, the blame rests squarely at the feet of Robert Falcon Scott and his poor leadership.




Warwick Fairfax:

And you compare that with Amundsen as you write, maybe it was a Norwegian thing, but just the planning using cross country skis and sled dogs, which there's probably more of a use for that in Norway than Britain. I think you write that he actually was ahead of schedule, just something ridiculous.




Nancy Koehn:

Amundsen story is an extraordinary one of courageous leadership, careful planning, team cohesion. Couple of things to keep in mind just to seal this for you. The men, the Amundsen team make their way to the pole and back to base camp two weeks early. So that's how fast they're traveling. No one has ever come close to equaling this kind of feat with sled dogs and loaded sleds that are getting lighter as they go. Secondly, the men gained weight on their way to the polar plateau to the pole and back because they were so well supplied. And third, they had so many supplies coming home that as they got within a few days' sled ride from base camp, they through all kinds of things, kerosene, other supplies out to lighten their load. Some of those supplies were found 50 years later. This is an astounding story of good leadership. There's a wonderful book for your listeners that are getting hooked here called The Last Place On Earth by Roland Huntford that you will not be able to put down. You won't even look at Netflix for three days while you read it.




Warwick Fairfax:

That is great. So let's talk about the 1914 expedition. And one of the things that fascinated me was the way he recruited his crew. There's a lot for modern leaders to understand. So tell the listeners a bit about his recruiting methods, which still to this day people don't tend to use. Business school professors such as yourself will tell leaders, "This is how you need to recruit." And they'll say thank you and ignore you or ignore most people. But I digress. So talk about his recruitment mechanisms.




Nancy Koehn:

No, no. So they were unusual there, but they're very relevant to turbulent times, which you might say we just have a wee little bit of here in the pandemic.




Gary Schneeberger:

Just a smidge, yeah.




Nancy Koehn:

And the way I would characterize what he did was to hire for attitude and then kind of tweak, skill develop, do some nurturing of certain skills but hire for attitude. So Shackleton, who incidentally my friends had 5,000 applicants for about 27 spaces on his expedition team, he would ask every one that came into his office in London to do a kind of what today we call like a short audition, "Sing a song, do a dance. Let's have a little play acting here." And the idea that he was looking for was a kind of healthy pragmatic optimism. Not sugarcoating it, right? You're going to the South Pole, it's dangerous. The stakes are always life and death.

So it's not sugarcoating, it's not all is well when all is not well. But it's a pragmatic kind of optimism and can do attitude. It is rumored, we can't really corroborate this, but it makes a good story that he placed an ad in the London Times that read something like this. "Men wanted for hazardous journey, long nights, cold days, danger all around. Safe return uncertain, honor and glory in case of success." So it's not really your typical monster.com, Craigslist kind of ad. But what he's doing there is literally trying to self select, attract people who are ready for that kind of environment and who not only can get by but in a sense thrive or are attracted to it.




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely.




Nancy Koehn:

So that's what he does. And I'll tell you one last comment, Warwick. I know this case, this story, I thought I knew it well and I wrote the Harvard business case and I spent a year researching it. Now I feel like I know it kind of the age spots on my hands. And so I know it really well. And there's not a time that I teach this case that I don't think that his hiring of these particular men with this particular set of attitudinal characteristics was so important. Shackleton's leadership mattered a great deal, but he had the right material.




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely.




Nancy Koehn:

And it's incredibly important.




Warwick Fairfax:

As you say, hire for attitude, train for skill, which is so important. But so few leaders even to this day do that. They hire for qualifications. And I love the categories that you write, that you have these three categories, mad, hopeless and possible. Obviously it's the possible. He had a sense of humor, which I find very endearing. So talk about, so it's 1914 and I love as you write that the day that Britain declares war on Germany, he gets the approval from King George the fifth. It's an amazing concurrence of events. So he sets forth, he goes to Argentina and then he reaches South Georgia Island. So pick up the story from there. He's got his crew, it's like late 1914 and he has a big decision to make, a momentous decision.




Nancy Koehn:

Yeah. So he and his now 27 man crew and some sled dogs, which they haven't yet trained, and a cat, a stowaway cat named Chippy set sail from South America to their last port of call, which will be an island southeast of the tip of South America called South Georgia. There's a whaling station there and it's the last place they can take on supplies and post mail. And they get there in early December, 1914. And the whalers all say to them, they've been out, they say, "Captain, the waters south of here are just chalk a block with icebergs. You're going to hit pack ice and you may get in trouble. Really recommend you hole up for a while and hope some of this melts." And Shackleton who's restless, he's chasing fame and he's out to do something that's going to work this time and be the first, isn't really very patient.

And so he makes the decision after a relatively short kind of layover in South Georgia that he and his crew are going to go ahead and try and navigate their way through the ice down. Now, they're a little bit northwest of where he wants to be. So they're going to be heading southwest. Northeast, so they're going to be heading southwest. And that's in December of 1914. And they are by the third week in January along the coast of Antarctica, they can see it. It's 80 miles away, it's in sight. Shackleton elects one night, this is the third week of January, he elects one night to say, "Instead of tucking in here and unloading, let's just sail a little bit farther along the coast. They're now heading west along the coast." I want to get the right place to make base camp.

And in that decision, both the decision to head south anyway despite the warnings and then in that tiny little decision to just sail a little bit further along lies the fate of the expedition because one night the ice freezes, these are huge bergs, freeze around the Endurance, which was the name of his ship. And it's locked in immovable ice. They can't blast themselves out. They can't pick themselves out with shovels and pick axes. They're stuck. They can't motor themselves out with diesel power. They're stuck. And then they're floating aimlessly on the current.




Warwick Fairfax:

And they're stuck for a very long time. They're stuck-




Nancy Koehn:

They're stuck. That's January, third week of January. They're stuck for the rest of the month, February, March, April, May, June, July, August. In August, the boat starts getting rammed terribly by just these broken bergs and it starts to get damaged. It's just like a vice now is crushing the ship. And so Shackleton makes a decision right in very early September to abandon ship. He'd been planning for it. He could tell the ice was going to get the ship.




Warwick Fairfax:

By then, it was like hundreds of miles away from where he wanted to be because the ice flows are just moving. And so a lot of things to admire about Shackleton. But let's look at those two decisions. The decision to go when everybody said, "The ice is as bad as we've ever seen it. The flows are really far north." And then the decision to not go to the little inlet and he wanted to go to, Vahsel Bay or the original place. So what motivated that decision? Because I think as you write, he didn't really maybe write this down, but you have to think if he was the leader that he was, he realized in hindsight what a colossally bad decision. But what do you think motivated him to make either of those really cataclysmic decisions that were so fateful?




Nancy Koehn:

So I've taught this case many, many times nowto all kinds of groups around the world. And I think Shackleton was a man in a hurry and that made him reckless. I don't think there's any way he gets a pass here. He made the wrong decision going south. They should have waited. That was the wrong decision. I don't think the second decision, "Let's sail a little further along," was of the same order of magnitude. But that first decision is a big deal and it places him... If it was a traffic accident, the cop would give him 90% of the blame for the accident. It places the ship getting stuck and what followed at his feet. And I think he knew that by the way. He never said anything about it. But I do think that part of what he was doing and the extraordinary leader that emerges out of this big mistake is partly owning the responsibility for something he realized he was a big, big part of, he was culpable for.




Gary Schneeberger:

There's an interesting couple of sentences, Nancy, that you wrote in the book that kind of talk about where Shackleton went from there. This is what you write. "His consistent ability to face forward was the thing that allowed him to become successful from that failure. Again and again, he refused to become mired in what had already happened, what had not worked, what had been missed, who was to blame for the most recent setback or disappointment." That is a critical piece, not just for what happened to Shackleton, but for our listeners who are trying to bounce back from their own crucibles.




Nancy Koehn:

Absolutely. I just marvel at this. So there's a passage in Matthew, I think it is, where Jesus says, "The farmer that constantly looks backwards over the problems his plow has harvests no crops." And it's a little bit of the same thing, right? When the stakes are high and there's a lot to do in front of you, you just can't keep looking back and scratching your head and pointing fingers and miring yourself in bitter accusations.

Everything can't be a tribunal of the past going forward. And so this was one of those instances, there were many to come on the ice where it's like, "Okay, this happened. What do we need to learn from it? And then how do we literally turn ourselves around to look at the future and what we're doing next?" And that's about self discipline. So much of what I have learned about how these people did it has to do with self-regulation. And he did and that really helped his men, who by the way also made mistakes along the way. But he didn't stop with a tribunal to prosecute and then punish someone. We moved forward, we learned from it and we moved forward.

Or think of Mandela, think of Nelson Mandela coming in to the presidency of the Republic of South Africa after 18 years, talk about a chance to get bitter, and decades of apartheid to get bitter. And basically saying, "Yes. We're going to kind of figure out a way to reconcile. But we're not going to spend the next 10 years punishing all the folks that kept apartheid alive," or Lincoln with, "Malice toward none, with charity toward all, with firmness in the right of God gives us to see the right." And Lincoln's plan for reconstruction still in its infant stages when he was assassinated in April of 1865, was not about tribunals and blame and looking backwards. This point that you're both making, Warwick and Gary, is really important about leaders, particularly in crucibles and crisis. And for all the rest of us, we've got to turn our necks and our bodies around and look forward.




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely. And I want to talk about how we move forward. But I think to me, one lesson is even great leaders make colossal mistakes. Shackleton made mistakes. I'm sure Lincoln, he had his challenges. Some people criticize him for moving a bit too slowly on emancipation. And it was a challenging time. That's a whole nother discussion. It's a very nuanced discussion. Churchill, I think he was on the wrong side of India, on the right side I think of Israel. And so there were times in which he made really colossally stupid decisions as we all do. And so it's easy to look back and say, "Well, he was a bit bitter about the treatment he had from Scott. He missed being the first one on the South Pole. So he does this. Let's cross the whole of the South Pole." From what you've written, a number of folks said, "That seems kind of challenging, risky, maybe insane. But we're human. It's like, gosh, king, country, glory."

So even great leaders can make mistakes. But I think in certainly in my own life, as listeners know, with growing up in a large family media business and the whole two billion dollar takeover that I launched literally months after I graduated from Harvard Business School, it's like, was I not paying attention? The education is fantastic, but at least for me, my emotions and my dad dying earlier that year, there's all sorts of emotions which we don't need to get into here that I talk about in other podcasts, to cloud your judgment. And so I like to think of myself as a reasonably sane, intelligent person.

I look back and think, how could I have made such a colossally stupid decision? Emotions get in the way we do. But I think your focus is not so much on what was a clearly a cataclysmically poor decision, it's the miraculous way that he was able to move on. So there's some great attributes of leadership, but most people don't do this. Most people wallow in bitterness and anger. How did he move on? What about him enabled him to flip the switch saying, "Okay, I'm responsible for getting my crew here. But time to move on."




Gary Schneeberger:

Well, how did he do that indeed? How did Ernest Shackleton completely leave behind the failures of his journey up until this point and move forward with a new journey, with a new mission after this? Stuck in the ice for months, knowing that it was in large part mistakes on his part that got him there, how was he able to take a breath, forget what went before, and focus on a new journey ahead? And that will be what we discuss, what Warwick and Nancy Koehn talk about in great detail on the next episode of Beyond the Crucible. We've split this episode up like this into two parts because there is such richness in the details of the story of what Shackleton, after doing some things wrong, what Shackleton did right moving forward to get beyond his crucible.

And as an on ramp into what that discussion will be like next week on Beyond The Crucible, here's some analysis that Nancy Koehn offers in her book, Forged in Crisis, in discussing some of the lessons that came from Ernest Shackleton's experience, his failure, and then the way he overcame that failure and moved beyond that crucible. Here's what Nancy writes in her book. "Shackleton jettisoned one objective to walk across the continent and embraced another to save his crew. This is an important lesson that all leaders operating in great turbulence must learn, how to let go of former goals and embrace new ones, even dramatically different objectives as circumstances demand."

Those are the insights that we're going to hear next week on part two of our interview Beyond The Crucible with Nancy Koehn. So until that time comes, listeners, thank you so much for spending time with us and please remember that your crucible experiences, while very painful, while things that will knock you off the trajectory that you're on, just as they stopped Ernest Shackleton from pursuing his expedition for months stuck in the ice trying to figure out how to move forward, those things, while your circumstances will obviously be very different, those emotions and the things that you must do to overcome, to move beyond those crucibles are things that are universal.

That's what we'll talk about next week. But remember that those crucibles, just as Shackleton discovered, those crucibles are not the end of your story. Those crucibles in fact can be, if you learn the lessons of them, if you apply the lessons of them, if you move forward one step at a time, those moments can become a new chapter in your story and a rewarding chapter in your story, perhaps the most rewarding chapter in your life story because it leads at the end to a life of significance.

Adversity, Dr. Taryn Marie Stejskal says in this latest edition of our best-of series, 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.

Highlights

Transcript

Warwick Fairfax:

Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership.




Gary Schneeberger:

Our greatest hits tour of some of our most helpful and illuminating episodes continues this week with a deep dive look, courtesy of one of the world's top experts on resilience, of the key questions we can ask ourselves and the actions we can take in the light of them when setbacks and failures come.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

When we recognize that we have a choice, all of 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?




Gary Schneeberger:

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, co-host of the show and the communications director for Crucible Leadership. The woman posing that question is Dr. Taryn Marie Skejskal, one of the foremost 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. 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 Fairfax:

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'm an executive coach and heard you on WBECS, which is a great forum for coaches and really thousands of people around the world, so it's an awesome community. Resilience is something certainly I can relate to in Crucible Leadership. We talk about 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. And now with the Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People, it's an amazing story. But I'd like to get a bit behind the scenes in 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 Marie Skejskal:

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 and you can help me, but it's this idea that our lives are lived forward, but understood backward. 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 draw that line through and see a clearer pathway. What I will say is that I don't think resilience is for the faint of heart.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

There's some kind of internal medal. 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. And 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 before your cell phone.




Gary Schneeberger:

It was your iPod before your iPod.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

It was my iPod before my iPod. Sometimes people used to carry them around on their shoulders, a very heavy iPod. So see me later. And I'll tell you about phone booths and butter churns too, and other obsolete devices. So when I looked at the bottom of my window, it was on the ground floor. There's 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.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

In my 14 year old mind, I'm trying to figure out what the heck is going on. 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 Marie Skejskal:

And so that's what I pulled out 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. You're beautiful." And I thought, not dad. And so I went and called from 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."




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

And then eight months later, 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. 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."




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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 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 Fairfax:

And he was outside the window all these times? He wasn't in the ...




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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 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 started ringing the doorbell. And when we went to the doorbell to the door, no one was there. And then there was a little girl who was a friend and her father came to pick her up. And I said, oh, were you at the other, were you at the other door, ringing the doorbell? And he said, no, I just got here.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

So what happened, 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 continue 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-twenties, when I was getting a master's 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. And I was like, "Huh. I actually meet all of the criteria for post traumatic stress disorder." And I didn't realize that.




Warwick Fairfax:

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 Marie Skejskal:

It lasted years.




Warwick Fairfax:

And you probably, did you have one thought, was why me? But then you think as bad as it was for me, I could have been my neighbor. That must have been a weird ... 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 are reading, how did you process all that of anger and you don't often think of anger and gratitude in the same moment. I'm angry, but I feel bad for my neighbor. I know it's awful to say this. I'm just so glad that wasn't me. It sounds awful to say that, but you have to be thinking that, right?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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 the 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 this 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 have. Navigating paradox in the human mind is not something that comes naturally to us.




Warwick Fairfax:

It needs a lot of, I guess, training and processing. So it's easy maybe for listeners to hear, oh, we can understand why Taryn's mission of 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've done something totally different than resilience and all the work you've done on there. Do you ever think to yourself, what would Taryn be without that episode? What would you have done?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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. And so on the one hand, I think it would be very easy for me and for other people that have faced difficulty to be walking around saying, "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 that 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 Fairfax:

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, our language, to either hide under the covers and wallow and say, oh, 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.




Warwick Fairfax:

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. But you made that choice. Not everybody makes that choice. As you study this more than I do, what led you to make that choice to refuse to be a victim, refuse to just sit back and just let life fade away.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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." 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. We are the authors of our lives. We're the architects of our lives. We have free will for a reason.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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, 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 Schneeberger:

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, but there's a quote, 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 Marie Skejskal:

Yeah, Chödrön, I think one of the first female Buddhist monks.




Gary Schneeberger:

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 are talking about, 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 Marie Skejskal:

This is an oversimplification, so bear with me. But when we recognize that we have a choice, all of 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, 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 Fairfax:

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 are 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 to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, TV, radio, I always say the heir apparent was a massive company. I launched a 2 billion plus takeover for variety of reasons. My dad had died and felt like the company wasn't being run along the ideals of the founder, it wasn't being run well. And whether it was at a good or bad decision, it's a whole question.




Warwick Fairfax:

But after three years the company goes under, too much debt. Australia got in a recession. So I never thought of it as 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 naivety. I didn't mean to hurt anybody or do anything bad, but just the thought of "I single handedly brought down a 150 year old family company". If my Wikipedia entry is not favorable, I have one it's like, young hotheaded kid could have had it all in blue. It's pretty much what it says. And so that may never change. I don't know. So for me, the '90s were a challenging time as that look what I did. And I felt like I 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 and God in some sense.




Warwick Fairfax:

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 naive assumptions. And then explain how those 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 is making a choice. It's all true. It's not like there's no pain. It's unrealistic to say, oh, there's no scar or no scab, but I can talk about it now in a way that's vastly less painful.




Warwick Fairfax:

I don't know whether that's true for you. Obviously you talk 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. Because you are using your pain for a purpose. I know that's an off used aphorism, but it's true. It all makes sense to me, obviously. Very different background, very different stories. But 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 like a competition of crucibles. Your pain is just as real to you as anybody else. And these are people who have gone through things a hundred times worse than I have, but I'm astounded how they can be so generous. Anyway, you get the idea.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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 have 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.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

What we realize is when we say to people, everything happens for a reason, that orients people to look outside of themselves for a reason. Well, why was I disabled? Why did I experience this childhood abuse? Why did I have this stalker? Why did I develop PTSD? You know, 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.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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. 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 Fairfax:

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, like 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 you actually, unlike me, you've done a lot of research on this. Does that make sense, there is a healing component to using what you've been through to help others?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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, no we haven't." And I would say, "Well, in that case, it's a lesson." So the first time it's a lesson. The second time, it's a mistake.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

So Warwick, you're not going to take down the family business again. You learned from that, right? 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 helped us understand what are those key behaviors that allow us to capitalize on, 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, right? And the practice of gratiosity is twofold. And we'll talk about the other ones. We'll start with number four.




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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 Fairfax:

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 reflective advisor. 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. 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.




Warwick Fairfax:

So now with my writing and podcasts and executive coaching, being on two nonprofit boards, I found I actually am good at being a reflective advisor at 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. 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 Marie Skejskal:

Yeah, it absolutely does. I love just hearing the real time application of here's the practice and you're like, here's how that shows up for me. And then it's just what you said, because the second part is that 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 Fairfax:

Exactly. From in our case, we talk about be who you were designed to be. Some people grow up in families where there've been lawyers for generations or doctors and you can do anything you want so long as you're a doctor like mom or dad and lawyer and this same thing. It's often common. So talk about some of these other principles that you have of these resilience principles, because they're really fascinating. So where would you like to go next on our tour?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

What I'll just say to 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 Fairfax:

Please continue. I love that. If it's hard for me to keep stop nodding, but forgive me please.




Gary Schneeberger:

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 Fairfax:

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 Marie Skejskal:

Well, I love it. 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.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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. 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 Fairfax:

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. Now failure is one thing. I get why somebody could think that, but when it's not your fault at all, somehow, and you've researched this, which I have and 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 it's just so sad, 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 story, crucible's not the end of your story. So just share that because it's unbelievable. It's just exactly what you're talking about, but share that, Gary.




Gary Schneeberger:

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 Fairfax:

And that basically it means a life on purpose dedicated to serving others. Whatever that means for you. Everybody's life of significance will be different. As you hear that, it's like, 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's like, wow. Jaw's dropping again here, so.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Right. Well, and this notion that you bring up, Warwick, you use the word fault, like 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 a result of car accidents and falls, this idea of responsibility or who is at fault or am I at fault or who is at fault? That's a tremendously important inflection point in our healing. It's tremendously important that we get this notion of responsibility right. A dear friend of mine and a mentor, Richard Pimentel, who was responsible for the Americans 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. 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 Marie Skejskal:

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. And conversely, when we take on too much of that responsibility, if you're a victim of being targeted or a stalker 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 Fairfax:

I think that's so true. And I want to make sure we cover all these aspects easily.




Gary Schneeberger:

Yeah. We have four more to go.




Warwick Fairfax:

We have more practice that there isn't 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, naive. I had had no intention to hurt, to cause pain to anybody. And there was thousands of people in the company and all. I mean the company went on, but still part of it is forgiving others. But part of it's 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, forgive, but talk about forgiveness and how that relates to the whole responsibility deal.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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 indeed, 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 it is often informed by those experiences. 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 person. They don't deserve that forgiveness. Maybe they don't. But fortunately it's actually not for them. The forgiveness is for us.




Warwick Fairfax:

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 are worth it. You're worth it. And they win if you are bitter. For you to get out of that prison of bitterness, you are worth forgiving that other person or yourself, because then the power is removed. So yeah, please continue because I can't help but agree.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

The first component to understand about forgiveness is it's for you. It's not for anyone else, but you. Second thing to understand about forgiveness is that forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation.




Warwick Fairfax:

Exactly.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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 part of whatever is happening.




Warwick Fairfax:

Nor is it the same as accountability. There are still consequences, sometimes legal consequences. Doesn't mean that we're lessening accountability or responsibility.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Right? Exactly. Exactly.




Warwick Fairfax:

People confuse those two things.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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. 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 Fairfax:

Which is a biblical way of saying forever. Unlimited. Forever is basically what it's saying.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

That's right.




Warwick Fairfax:

It's a metaphor, which is ... Yeah, exactly.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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 four hundreds. And what I've found with the experience with the stalker, or I was in an abusive relationship where I was nearly strangled to death. And I've 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 Fairfax:

We'll move on here in a millisecond. But this forgiveness is so important. I often think forgiveness is a bit like weeding. So weeds will crop up. And I've unfortunately had a lot of practice at this, both with myself and some other folks, family, advisors. Something will come up and sometimes you 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 do the next thing that I'm going to be angry about?




Warwick Fairfax:

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, possibility. Talk about why those are all important as we try to be resilient people.




Gary Schneeberger:

And also I'll add something to layer on top, how they're all connected. Because you started at four. So how would they all connect, those four?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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. 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, oh, the five PS of resilience and productivity and positivity. And I like alliteration as much as the next person, maybe a little more being a writer, maybe you two.




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, indeed.




Gary Schneeberger:

Indeed.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Empirical-based 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 Fairfax:

And probably not to talk about some of these experiences. Most people have gone through trauma. They won't talk about it. They're not going to be vulnerable about it.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Yeah. That's the second part. The first part is, so what is vulnerability in the first place, right? 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 ourself 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 lifelong pursuit of vulnerability.




Warwick Fairfax:

And it's rare because most of us-




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

It's rare. It is rare.




Warwick Fairfax:

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 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, like, I'm blessed. I did my undergrad at Oxford and I did an MBA to Harvard Business School. I was embarrassed to go to Harvard Business School reunion because people would say, well look what you've done. You've failed spectacularly. In business, this is not cool.




Warwick Fairfax:

But you go to these things and people aren't treating you like a leper. A lot of people who had business failures 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. And when that story is broken, it's another step of healing. Does that make sense?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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 a failure, or a mistake. But you learned from the first time. You're brilliant.




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah. I haven't done any failed two billion dollar takeovers since, so there you go. Learned my lesson. So that's awesome. So we-




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Onward and upward, my friend.




Warwick Fairfax:

Indeed, that leads to productive perseverance. What is that phrase? Fascinating phrase.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Yeah. 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 sort of 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? What gives?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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 keep us from, block our vulnerability. People wouldn't like us, they wouldn't love us, and they might leave. 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 Fairfax:

Right, because if they reject my mask, that's one thing. If they reject the real me, infinitely worse. 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. But yeah, so what would you like to talk about just in the closing minutes we have just about some of the other aspects, these wonderful principles of resilience.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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, the 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 Schneeberger:

Great book.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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 disrupted environment, that we need to pivot and go in a new direction.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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, 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 Fairfax:

Hence productive perseverance, awesome phrase. So how does that lead to connection?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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, 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.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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 Fairfax:

But there's something about possibility and forward movement that I know in economics, there's this fundamental law of business is you're either growing or you're declining. If your status quo, then you're about to decline. It's one of those 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. 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 Marie Skejskal:

Absolutely. Yeah. I think if we're not evolving, if we're standing still, we're probably devolving, right?




Gary Schneeberger:

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 atop 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 Marie Skejskal:

Yes, yes. The internet, the internet.




Gary Schneeberger:

Yes.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

We'll invite you to 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, @drtarynmarie. We've got a wonderful resilience movement happening there and basically daily 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 Fairfax:

Well, thank you so much Taryn, for being here. It's so inspiring. Just all of your work on resilience and I am sorry, I just couldn't help but agree with everything you're saying. And 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. Well, some of these things I know that may seem trite, like pain for a 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 Fairfax:

It 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 are 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. So thank you so much for everything you do and thanks for being on the podcast and very much appreciate it.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Thank you so much. Such an honor to be here.




Gary Schneeberger:

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. And until the next time we're together, we ask you to remember this, which is 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.




Gary Schneeberger:

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. 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.

We’re launching Beyond the Crucible’s first-ever e-course – Discover Your Second-Act Significance — in October. In this episode, host Warwick Fairfax and cohost Gary Schneeberger pull back the curtain of its creation, discussing — among other things — what each of them learned while filming the course. The hope is that by sharing what those who take the course can expect, they’ll discover a path to move from asking themselves “Is this all there is?” to a life that is everything they’ve always wanted.

To learn more about the Discover Your Second Act Significance e-course, and to sign up to receive the latest updates, visit www.secondactsignificance.com .

Highlights

Transcript

Warwick Fairfax:

Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership.




Warwick Fairfax:

One of the things this eCourse talks about is we get to the point, "Is this all there is?" We realize there's more to life than baseball records. It's really that the pivot is to doing something that sings to your soul, but also is something that you believe does make the world a better place in some way, be it big or small, but big to your heart, big to your soul, and that's what we talk about as a life of significance, life on purpose dedicated to serving others. So the end goal is the same, how you get there might be different. It might not be a crucible, it may be more of a feeling stuck, is this all there is moment, but both paths, you want to get to a life of significance.




Gary Schneeberger:

Did you catch the word Warwick said at the start of that, eCourse? There's a lot more conversation about that subject, about this new opportunity for you, our listeners, to dig more deeply than ever as you chart a course to a life of significance. Hi, I'm Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show. We're expanding our brand and launching Beyond the Crucible's first ever eCourse, Discover Your Second Act Significance, in October, and we pull back the curtain of its creation in this episode of the show.




Gary Schneeberger:

Our hope is that by doing so, by sharing not only what you can expect from the course, but what Warwick and I learned from it while filming it, that you'll discover a path to move from asking yourself, "Is this all there is?" to a life that is everything you've always wanted. It's an offbeat episode to be sure, but it couldn't be more on point with what we've endeavored to do since our founding.




Gary Schneeberger:

I say it's going to be offbeat, listener, because this is a truly historic episode in the life cycle of Beyond the Crucible, in our little Beyond the Crucible universe. We'll get into all those details or at least many of them as we chat, but the headline here is we are expanding. Beyond the Crucible and Crucible Leadership has been since its creation, first and foremost, primarily a storytelling brand. Don't worry. That's not going to change. Stories are and will remain our bread and butter, but we've got some additional meat for the sandwich, you might say.




Gary Schneeberger:

We're moving beyond sharing crucible stories with you, sharing just crucible stories with you to giving you new assets and offerings to help you navigate that critical journey to a life of significance in the wake of setbacks, failures, and dissatisfaction. We have an exciting new offering we're debuting this October, in fact, drum roll please, our first ever eCourse. That's pretty exciting, isn't it, Warwick?




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely. It's been quite a journey to get here, which we'll discuss, but yeah, it's been an evolution in terms of where we've come from to have an eCourse, our first ever eCourse. A lot of work went into it, but it's been quite the journey.




Gary Schneeberger:

That first ever eCourse, listener, is called Discover Your Second Act Significance, and it's designed to do three things. It's designed to, A, guide you on a journey from feeling stuck or in pain to beginning a journey of discovery to awaken your passion. B, it's designed to help you craft a vision rooted in your talents and beliefs. And C, it's designed to unleash a more fulfilling life for you that leaves a legacy you'll be proud of. As listeners hear this Warwick, some of them are probably wondering, "Why the change? What, in a big picture 30,000-foot level view work, prompted this change in what we're going to do?" Change is a bad word, this addition to what we're going to do, to the mix of what we're going to do. What prompted it?




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah. It's a good question, Gary. Basically, brands and visions, they evolve. I've often used this, actually, used this analogy in the eCourse in which I talked about Walt Disney. He didn't have this big vision of Disney World and even full length animated pictures. His vision was started off in the late '20s and early '30s to produce animated cartoons that were more compelling. That was the extent of the vision.




Warwick Fairfax:

So way back when, my vision originally was if my story about growing up in a 150-year-old family media business, $2.25 billion takeover, listeners, as familiar with that story, and originally, it was if my story can help others, then I'm happy to share it. I wrote a book, Crucible Leadership: Embrace Your Trials to Lead a Life of Significance. That came out in October last year 2021, and it has comprised of my story, members of my family, stories from historical faith and inspirational leaders.




Warwick Fairfax:

So the original vision was publish the book, and then that expanded from there into a blog, we wrote about various subjects, social media, then this podcast, Beyond The Crucible, sharing my story and lessons I've learned, but also stories of others. Then as we did this we thought, "Well, if the podcast and the things we're learning, if we can put this in an eCourse, then that's something that will be good too."




Warwick Fairfax:

So it evolved from just my story to stories of others and how can we use my story and stories of others to help people and then help people not just in the book and podcasts, but in workbooks and now an eCourse. So it's really evolving to a point where we want the material at Beyond the Crucible to be able to help others in very practical, tangible ways.




Warwick Fairfax:

So it's really, it's not so much a big shift, but it's a gradual evolution of the brand from my story to how can people use my story and the stories of others, and what we get into in the eCourse, the refining process to help others bounce back from their worst day to lead a life of significance. So it's really been an evolution of the brand or the vision.




Gary Schneeberger:

From behind the curtain, if you will, how this grew, where this idea was birthed, really, came from our most recent podcast series, the Second Act Significance series. The stories from those guests were so inspiring to us that we could just see it, right? I mean you could see it, couldn't you? You could see that there was a curriculum of sorts in some of the learnings we had from what those folks that we spoke with talked about how they were living a life of dissatisfaction. They were feeling like they were playing out of position. They were feeling like there had to be mortal life than what they were going through, and they shared their journey of how they found that. Something clicked for you and for the rest of the team that said, "There's a deeper learning here that we can present to people, right? This is an opportunity for us to present deeper avenues of learning to folks who have engaged with us from the beginning."




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely. As we were listening to this in recording and then listening afterwards, we began to think, "Gosh, the guests we had on Discover Your Second Act Significance, the podcast, there were some common themes, and we often talk about how do you bounce back from your crucible, but this was different. How do you bounce back from being stuck? I think you coined a phrase of like, "Is this all there is?" How do you, say, copyright Gary Schneeberger, but how do you bounce back from "is this all there is" moment? That's extremely common. You could be stuck in a job 10, 20, 30 years and it's like, "I don't like this." You might have days and your worst moments, not every day, in which you say, "I hate my life," and that maybe not be quite that vivid, but you have moments where you're thinking, "This is not fun. I feel like I'm in prison."




Warwick Fairfax:

So we thought there is another level of learning that we can put together in an eCourse with worksheets and some very practical tools to really mine the wisdom of our podcast guests and the learning here at Beyond the Crucible in a way that helps our listeners at another level. So we just, as we listen to it, thought, "This whole concept of second act significance in how you get unstuck and how do you get beyond the is this all there is feeling, it just seemed to almost call out for an eCourse, for a deeper level of learning."




Gary Schneeberger:

Right. So the eCourse, as we said, is coming in October. More details will follow. It is made up of three video modules that contain roughly one hour long videos to watch. There's also more than, and this is my favorite part of it, there are more than a dozen worksheets, you hinted at them a little bit, for attendees to download and work through. Don't think of this as, "Oh, no." Don't hit stop and think this is homework. It's not homework. It's something that work that you've said many times. It's soul work in a sense. It's digging deep inside how you're wired and what you've learned from your past and charting a course for a vision that will lead you to a second act of significance.




Gary Schneeberger:

I've got to believe, Warwick, after founding this brand, this has to be one of, I mean, I know getting your book published was enormously exciting, but this has to be one of those really exciting pivot points for you in that you're taking the learning to the next level. You've been a storyteller, you are a storyteller on the show, whether you're talking about your own story or you're interviewing people, but now, you're moving into this, I mean, we had a team meeting today as we're recording this episode. One of the members of the team referred to you as having moved into a teacher mode, and that wasn't puffery. That was the things that you've extrapolated that have been presented that this eCourse will advance. They're truly teaching moments, aren't they?




Warwick Fairfax:

It is, and it's something that we'll talk about later. On Friday, you, Gary and I presented in the Washington DC area something not quite the same as this, but it was also teaching around Crucible Leadership and how you get beyond your worst day. This was for coaches, executive coaches. Again, there was a lot of teaching in there combined with stories. So yes, it's an evolution. This particular eCourse, what we love about it is it's three parts, but it can be available to anybody. It just takes the learning and the stories, especially with the worksheets, to a whole other level.




Warwick Fairfax:

So what we're about here at Beyond The Crucible is all about helping you get beyond your worst day, having a vision that you're off the charts passionate about, and leading a life of significance, a life on purpose dedicated to serving others. Yes, stories, hopefully, my story and the stories of others in the book and the podcasts are helpful, but to get to just a more concrete level of exactly how do you do this, in this case, how do you get beyond the is this all there is moment when you're in your cubicle or as we'll talk about later, I have my own cubicle moment, which we'll discuss, how do you get beyond that? We've got some very practical tools.




Warwick Fairfax:

So the bottom line is the more we can help come up with actionable material that helps you, the listener, get beyond your worst day, get beyond the is this all there is moment, and that makes us, frankly, feel more joyful and fulfilled because we're helping you have more practical tools to get where you want to go, to get to a place where your soul truly does sing. Maybe it's like a symphony. Maybe it's like the hallelujah chorus that they sing at Christmas. It's like Handel's Messiah and all that. A little off track here, wasn't that in the Diehard movie? I'm pretty sure there was-




Gary Schneeberger:

Yeah, at the end.




Warwick Fairfax:

There was the hallelujah chorus.




Gary Schneeberger:

Yeah, when the vault opens at the end and the bad guys-




Warwick Fairfax:

Exactly.




Gary Schneeberger:

... for a moment get their hands on those bearer bonds but not for long, the hallelujah chorus goes off. Yup.




Warwick Fairfax:

So I guess the point of the story is we all want that kind of chorus echoing in our brains and our souls as we achieve our life of significance. That's the chorus you want to hear. Hopefully in some small way, this eCourse will help you get there.




Gary Schneeberger:

One of the things that's really interesting about the course, when you do something like this and many hours went into preparing this course from many members of the team, not just you and I who host the eCourse, but one of the great things about this process is that as the people who see the sausage made as it were, we watch it a lot. We watch rough cuts of it and we watch barely almost finished cuts of it and then we watch final cuts of it.




Gary Schneeberger:

One of the things that really hit me about this, and it's interesting that you brought up that conference that we were just at in DC because that was a worthwhile, very helpful course for coaches, and there was a price tag affixed to that, and there was value, I think, we would both say, there was great value that was delivered by that. Watching this eCourse, even though I'm involved in it, watching it develop, watching it, going through the worksheets, doing the work, there's great value in this course, isn't there?




Warwick Fairfax:

There really is. We're going to get into this a bit because, obviously, part of the goal of this is not just why we did it, but a behind the scenes look, which we're discussing now, and as well as some things that we learned. So for me, one testimony to the value of it is when you and I, in a sense, to a degree gone through this eCourse and we're getting value from it already.




Gary Schneeberger:

Right, and that goes back to the vision that you set out when you founded all of this, right? You had a vision to help people. I would imagine watching this eCourse, developing this eCourse, and then proofing it, watching it as it plays back, watching it take shape from the level that those who attend are going to be able to see has to be enormously fulfilling because what it represents, right Warwick, it's a continuation. It's an addition onto. It's a growth of your vision, your vision that was birthed out of your own crucible.




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah. There's tremendous satisfaction in feeling like not just my story, which is there in part, but just the learning that we've developed over the course of time at Beyond the Crucible, including the learning we have from our guests. I learned something every episode we have of Beyond the Crucible that is very meaningful to me. I've learned so many things. Not to bore you with all the details, listeners, but just a couple things. We had Mike and David Charbonnet on our very first podcast, and David Charbonnet was a Navy Seal that was paralyzed in a training accident, and his dad was a Navy Seal. How do you come back from that? He was as good as it comes from his dad's perspective as a fellow Navy Seal.




Warwick Fairfax:

I said to him, "Boy, I felt like what I went through with the family business was nothing compared to what you went through."




Warwick Fairfax:

He said, "Warwick, your worst day is your worst day."




Warwick Fairfax:

That was a gift for me. It's like, "Wow, you mean it's not a competition? You mean it's okay for me to feel like it was pretty painful to me?" So I guess there's so many things, but we've had other podcast guests that said what they went through was a blessing.




Warwick Fairfax:

I mentioned her all the time, but Stacy Copas, who was an Australian woman at age about 13 dove into an above ground pool in the suburbs of Sydney and this diagnosis of quadriplegic and suicidal, substance abuse. I mean, all sorts of things she went through, but over time, she now speaks and coaches, and she now says what she went through was a blessing. How can that be being diagnosed as a quadriplegic? Her point, again, this is her truth, would be that the person she is now, she wouldn't be that person without what she went through, which made her, to some degree, a different person. Just she's learnt so much.




Warwick Fairfax:

So all that to say is what we've tried to do is combine the learning that Gary and I are learning from our podcast guests, from thinking about some of these issues and then putting it together in a way that provides concrete learning with worksheets and specific steps that can help you not just get beyond your crucible, but lead a fulfilling and joyful life, a life of significance. So it's very exciting to be able to put all this, the learning of not just us but so many others together in a format that can help you. So yeah, it's very fulfilling.




Gary Schneeberger:

Speaking of the learning, let's talk a little bit about what we learned because I think one of the things that speaks to the value of something that is designed to educate you in some way is if you as the creator of it learn, and I use this as an example and I'm sure this happened for your book too. I recently published a book on the films of James Bond, the James Bond film series. I wrote and researched all the stuff in that book and when I read the book after it came out, I was like, "Dang, that's pretty insightful," or "Oh, I forgot that," or "That taught me something. I learned something."




Gary Schneeberger:

When we can learn from those things we create, I think that speaks to the power of the learning that comes through it, and in this eCourse, in this eCourse, Discover Your Second Act Significance, we have moments like that and I'll share one of mine. The aha moment for me where I learned something in doing this eCourse was after we finished the Second Act Significance Podcast series, I wrote a blog that recounted some of the key learnings that guests had shared from their experiences. I was reminded as I was doing that of a story of a man I knew more than 25 years ago in my youth, as they say, and he's the 1958 American League Rookie of the Year, Albie Pearson.




Gary Schneeberger:

Albie, I knew him because my spiritual father at the time was Albie's, still is, Albie's son-in-law. So I got to know Albie, and Albie told me this great story knowing I was a baseball fan about how as a boy he didn't have a lot of friends. So he would swing a bat and he would pantomime games and he would fancy himself, imagine himself hitting a home run in the World Series to lead the Yankees to victory.




Gary Schneeberger:

Now, for the vast majority of young boys, and I did some of that myself, for the vast majority, that's just a childhood pipe dream. That's never going to come true, but it actually happened for Albie, sort of, right? He wasn't playing for the Yankees and it wasn't the World Series, but he did hit a home run against the Yankees, but here's the moment that he told me about that stuck with me for 25 years. As he was rounding the bases, he sensed a voice speak to his heart and it asked him a simple question, "Is this all there is?"




Gary Schneeberger:

Albie was a Christian and as he was growing up dreaming about playing in the big leagues, he felt that God was asking him to, "Join my team," maybe to be a pastor, but Albie didn't think much about it being focused on wanting to play baseball until he was rounding the bases having hit that home run. That was when that came back to him, the question of is this all there is made him realize that there was something more for him, something more in line with his vision and his values. So Albie became a pastor after his baseball career ended, and he worked with disadvantaged youth for 50 years.




Gary Schneeberger:

It's funny to me in the actual eCourse work, we don't mention Albie by name, which is strange, but we do talk about that feeling of is this all there is that so many people experience when they're not fulfilling, they're not in lives, jobs, careers, circumstances that are fulfilling as they hoped. I realized smack in the middle of recording the eCourse that the journey we were guiding people on when it comes to second act significance is not so much as we say all the time from setback to significance. It's something a little bit different.




Gary Schneeberger:

It's not about moving from failure or setback, I realized the journey when you feel stuck, maybe even stuck when you're living a successful life and unfulfilled, it's a little different. Out of my mouth while we're recording the eCourse popped this phrase, "Going from is this all there is to this is all I want." That was an incredibly powerful moment for me, moving from dissatisfaction to satisfaction. That's one of the things, one of the chief things this course not only talks about but helps people map out and pursue and grab and achieve, right?




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean that's one of the exciting things about this course because we talk a lot about crucibles, but this is a little different. This is you're in your cubicle, is this all there is? Albie Pearson, great example, he's doing great in baseball, but it's like, "Okay. Is this all there is?" I mean, it reminds me of somebody that we covered during our summer series, Lights Camera Crucible, and Roy Hobbs in The Natural. He had a is this all or is moment? He might have even used those words when his longtime girl from back in Iowa, I think, was he from, Roy Hobbs?




Gary Schneeberger:

Yup. He was from the farms of Iowa.




Warwick Fairfax:

Gosh, what's her name? Not Glass, but it's-




Gary Schneeberger:

I'm going to say the angel of light because I can't remember her name either.




Warwick Fairfax:

Iris. Iris.




Gary Schneeberger:

Iris, there you go.




Warwick Fairfax:

There we go. Yeah, there we go. He's in the hospital after somebody tries to poison him, and it's like he was out of the game for years, and he is going to get maybe one more game. He's like, "Gosh, things sure didn't work out the way I thought they would because I could have been the best there ever was. I go down the road of my town and everybody would say, 'There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was.'" Basically, Iris then, he didn't say, "Is that all there is?" She said, "Then what?" "What do you mean and then what? For a baseball player, what is there more than the best there ever was? There is no higher pinnacle."




Gary Schneeberger:

Right, than being the goat, right.




Warwick Fairfax:

Right, exactly. Yeah, the greatest of all time. Absolutely. She made him realize, "You've inspired a whole lot of young boys, a lot of young kids with just your determination and coming back from years in the wilderness," and he ends up going back to the farm with Iris and the son he never realized he had.




Warwick Fairfax:

So I think one of the things this eCourse talks about is we get to the point, "Is this all there is?" and we realize there's more to life than baseball records. It's really that the pivot is to doing something that sings to your soul, but also is something that you believe does make the world a better place in some way, big or small, but big to your heart, big to your soul. That's what we talk about as a life of significance, life on purpose dedicated to serving others.




Warwick Fairfax:

So the end goal is the same, how you get there might be different. It might not be a crucible, it may be more of a feeling stuck, is this there all there is moment, but both paths you want to get to a life of significance. That's where true joy and fulfillment, and that's what Albie Pearson did, helping disadvantaged youth, and he's had definitely a life of significance, a very joy-filled, fulfilling life.




Gary Schneeberger:

Absolutely.




Warwick Fairfax:

So it is a tremendous example.




Gary Schneeberger:

In the eCourse, we include several video clips of guests who were in our Second Act Significance Podcast series who talk about their learning moment. So in addition to you and I talking about and unpacking some of those learnings, those who take the course are going to be able to hear from the guests on the show, point them in the right direction, and that I think is, again, speaks to the educational value, the inspirational value of what we've put together. So Warwick, I've talked about what my big takeaway was from the eCourse that surprised me. What was it for you? What takeaway from the course surprised you as we were creating it?




Warwick Fairfax:

A number of things. Probably one of the first things that comes out is one of the fascinating worksheets we have is The Younger You worksheet, and it looks at what are the things that you thought you could do when you were young, when you thought everything was possible? Why that's fascinating to me is that when I was growing up, I never thought about, "Oh, what is it I'm going to be when I grew up?" because I knew what it was, take a leading role in heading up the family media business. That's what my parents wanted. That was almost ordained from birth. So the idea of what are your skills, what's your vision, irrelevant question. It was all mapped out.




Warwick Fairfax:

So I never thought back about, "Gee, what did I want to be when I was young?" I didn't think about that at all. I thought I just needed to be this leading figure in this 150-year-old large family media business, but as I thought about it, what are the things that inspired me when I was younger? I thought a number of things. For instance, I've always loved science fiction. It was started by, I think, it was a 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, really a pathbreaking film that was a lot of deep meaning and not the easiest movie to understand.




Warwick Fairfax:

I mean, there's debates still to this day about the meaning of that movie, but ever since then when you saw technology that back then was just a pipe dream they had on this space plane, a space shuttle going from earth to the orbiting space station, you had on the back seats in front of you a TV screen that you could watch. Well, we have that now in airplanes, but I mean, thinking about it in '68 is almost ridiculous. You had a talking computer, you had video conferencing. I love the brand names. It was a PanAm space plane, which is a large airline that went out of business a long time ago, but it used to be the US carrier, international carrier, the most prestigious.




Warwick Fairfax:

You're flying international, you want PanAm. They didn't have AT&T. It was Bell Telephone. It was just amazing. Then obviously, not obviously, but I got into a lot of other things. I read books by Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov, two of the leading figures in science fiction literature. I've always been a big fan of Star Trek, every version for me, and there's, of course, a lot of debate out there. My favorite is Star Trek: Next Generation with John Luke Picard, maybe because he was very philosophical a bit like my dad, so how I could see my dad in him, and I've also always loved history, whether it's English kings and queens with my dad being a big Anglophile or I loved American history, so whether it's books about Roosevelt or Lincoln, Washington. So just this idea of being very reflective and what can we learn from other people's stories, that's something that was back in my earliest years. I've always been a bit of a dreamer, a reflector.




Warwick Fairfax:

So as we were thinking about that worksheet, it's like, "Gosh, I learned a lot about myself that it's easy now or easier to trace back some of my interests as a young kid growing up to what I do now." There's a direct correlation in my interest. Now, I never thought about that before. So that was a huge one. There were several aha moments, but that was certainly one of them.




Gary Schneeberger:

Let's play it out a little differently. Let's say that the takeover of the family media business had succeeded for the long term, that you were and still are in charge of this big company, and you're a businessman. I've heard you say it many times, you've never been a take no prisoners kind of guy like Warren Buffett or somebody like that, right? Imagine that that had succeeded. You're feeling, "Is this all there is?" You do this worksheet exercise about what brought you alive, what inspired you when you were younger. You think about those things. That's the kind of thing that we want those who take this eCourse to encounter, right? If they're living a life that's not fulfilling, to tap into those things that were fulfilling to them when they were younger because that can be an arrow pointing to where they should go, can't it?




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely, because I wasn't living a life that was filling me with joy. It's a life of duty and obligation. It had nothing to do with my gifts, my design, my vision, what I was passionate about. It wasn't even what my dad was passionate about. It was my great great grandfather, that is his vision, a noble vision, but it wasn't my vision or my dad's vision. It was just crazy stuff, but yes, I mean, hopefully, this worksheet can help you avoid some of the cataclysmic mistakes I made and not spend your life in service of somebody else's vision. Makes no sense.




Gary Schneeberger:

Now, another learning that you've talked about, and this is where I'm going to confess, I'm going to confess here on the podcast right now to you. I'm extraordinarily jealous that you came up with this phrase because I'm a word guy too and you're the inventor of a crucible experience, but you also coined the phrase cubicle experience, which makes me jealous every time I see it, every time you say it that I didn't come up with it, but talk about ... That's another thing, right? That's another learning that as you were going through this course, you got a chance to unpack to see why that was so impactful. Talk a little bit about your cubicle moment and what that illustrates for people who will take this eCourse for how they can move beyond, "Is this all there is?"




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, absolutely. So we talk a lot about crucibles, but as we've discussed with Discover Your Second Act Significance, the eCourse, it's about you could be in a cubicle, in an office, wherever, for 10, 20, 30 years and you're having this is this all there is moment. Well, so for me, I reflected back to 2003, and for a number of years from about the mid '90s, I was in Maryland where I live and I was working for an aviation services company doing financial and business analysis and I was getting good performance reviews, but I had a is this all there is moment. I was literally in a cubicle, little bit of a come down from running a two billion dollar company, but I needed something to do. I was desperate and I was pretty good at spreadsheets back in the day. I didn't even have the best cubicle.




Warwick Fairfax:

For who live on the East Coast somewhere between Florida and Maine, there's a freeway called I-95. It goes all the way down the east and seaboard, and it's very busy because you've got enormous percentage of the population of the US live somewhere off that freeway. Well, I felt like my cubicle was like I-95 in terms of the corridor that went by. So it wasn't even the quietest cubicle, which of course, it might have a bit back in the day.




Warwick Fairfax:

So I guess my cubicle moment was, my is this all there is when I thought being a person of faith, I felt like I wasn't using all the gifts and abilities that God had given me. It wasn't about arrogance. It's just I've got more to offer and I'm not using it all. So I went to a woman, an executive coach who did mid-career assessments and she said, "You have a great profile to be an executive coach."




Warwick Fairfax:

I didn't know what that was. Went to my first International Coach Federation Conference in Denver, and the rest is history, became a certified executive coach, and that was one of many small steps, which we'll talk about that led me to where I am, but I just had this moment of I'm getting good performance reviews and getting salary increases and all, but I had this is this all there is moment and I quit. It took some degree of courage. Yes, we had some savings, but it's like, "I'm not going to keep doing this." That wasn't a crucible moment. It was indeed a cubicle moment. I did indeed feel stuck, and I hadn't really thought about that in quite as much depth before this eCourse and before the podcast series we had on second act significance.




Gary Schneeberger:

Yeah, and there's another key learning that comes in this eCourse, and let's wrap up our here's what we got from the eCourse discussion on this point because it's one that I've noticed you've made a lot in recent weeks and months, and that's this idea not just of fellow travelers but of having two different kinds of fellow travelers. It's been fun to watch you as you've worked on this eCourse, as you spoke to that conference in DC. You now have solidified this idea of the importance of fellow travelers to there being two types of fellow travelers. That is, again, something key that's going to come out in this eCourse for people, and it's something that you have learned more deeply the importance of by working on this eCourse, right?




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely. Yeah. We talk about two types of fellow travelers. One type is those who encourage, and by the way, we have a blog that's coming out. In fact, it should already have come out by the time this podcast comes out. So more details on what our fellow travelers that'll all be in that blog. Basically, one kind is what we call encouragers, those who believe in us and support us. It's easy to find naysayers, those who say, "We knew you couldn't do it." There's a phrase in Australia they call the tall poppy syndrome. Basically, I love Australia, but there are some in Australia who anybody that achieves things outside of sports, it's like, "Oh, I guess you think you're better than us. What's your problem, mate?" It's like just because you want to achieve something doesn't mean you're looking down on other people. There's nothing wrong with achieving things in whatever field of endeavor.




Warwick Fairfax:

So encouragers, those who, yes, they might ask us tough questions but they believe in us, they support us. When we fall down, they pick us up. We all need encouragers. Life should not be a solo sport. We need people to help us.




Warwick Fairfax:

The other kind of people that can help us are what we call complementers, and by that we don't mean so much people who give us false praise, but those who have complementary gifts to us. So none of us are designed to have all the gifts. We might be mathematical. We might be people that go step-by-step. We might be those who want to just jump first and then figure it out later. We're all wired different ways, and you need people with different skills as we have on Beyond the Crucible. I've often sometimes somewhat frequently mentioned I think I write reasonably well, I'm a reflective advisor. Hopefully, some degree of wisdom is I listen to others and ponder and-




Gary Schneeberger:

You love selling, and you love selling.




Warwick Fairfax:

I was just going to say, and I hate selling and promoting. So obviously, you have a whole public relations background and you help me with that amongst many other things. We have a team that includes folks that love selling and are very good at it, and that's okay. I don't have to be good at everything. So fellow travelers, encouragers, and complementers are great. A lot of the folks that we interviewed on the podcast, Second Act Significance, had those. So you'll hear more about that, but just realizing the importance of that in my own life was also definitely a learning from this eCourse.




Gary Schneeberger:

Right, and all the things that we just talked about, from the Younger You worksheet, from the importance of fellow travelers, those things all baked into this eCourse, and there's learnings associated with that. There's ways to dig deeper. There are stories, for sure. Our podcast guests appear in this eCourse and talk about the importance of some of these very things that we've talked about, but the worksheets and the work that you do, we encourage people in this eCourse to keep a journal, to write down what they're learning from the worksheets and from the sessions that they're watching to take good notes, to reflect on those notes, to make sure that the learnings stay with them when the video's done and that they can apply them.




Gary Schneeberger:

This is an important part too. We don't say, "Okay. Here's three one hour videos. Watch them all in one sitting." No. We encourage those who take this course to watch one video at a time and then to spend a week on each module. There are three modules. So you're looking at a three-week process at least because when you're talking about something as important as finding significance in the next act of your life when you feel stuck in this act of your life, there's no need to rush it. In fact, if you do, you might not do it exactly the way that you want to do it. This is designed for people, this course is designed for people to take it their own speed so that they can get through it and get the most out of it, isn't it?




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely, and that's why, as you said, we have, I don't know, a dozen worksheets. It's a lot of worksheets.




Gary Schneeberger:

Yeah, there's a lot of worksheets there.




Warwick Fairfax:

The worksheets, the learning, we've got a lot of things we flash on the screen as we're talking. So we try to make it as actionable and as specific as possible to help you get unstuck from your is this all there is moment to, "My heart is singing because I have a vision that I'm off the chart's passionate about that's helping me lead to a life of significance and, oh, by the way, I actually have a team of fellow travelers that's helping me get there and encourage me to get there."




Warwick Fairfax:

So we try to be very specific about how all those steps will work so that you can indeed get unstuck, and that to use your phrase, which is very good, you'll transition from and shift from, "Is this all there is?" to, "This is all I want," which is another way of saying a life of significance because when you have a life of significance, you do indeed say, "This is all I want. I feel happy and joyful and fulfilled, and I'm blessed and I'm grateful."




Gary Schneeberger:

Yeah, and that's not just your story. That's a story of many of the folks who appear in this course who tell their stories and there's inspiration. It's not just learning and action steps. There's inspiration. Other people have done this. So it's eminently doable and it's not just the two of us who have done it, but also all the guests who appear and co-teach with us in this eCourse.




Gary Schneeberger:

Here's the warning part of all of this as we think about what's next. Anytime, we've all had this experience, right Warwick? We go to a seminar, we really enjoy it, take a lot of notes, fill up a whole notebook, head home, we're walking on air, we have the best intentions, we're going to apply all these great things that we learned, and then life gets in the way. Our routines demand our attention, but here's the good news. This course addresses that.




Gary Schneeberger:

How do we keep that from happening? What should someone thinking about taking this class be prepared to do to fight back against the tyranny of the urgent or of the ordinary as they pursue that second act of significance? What advice do you have for people who they're all excited after they take this course, they can come back to this very podcast episode and they can hear your advice? How do they stay in the game? How do they make sure they don't have a repeat of the cubicle moment? How can they keep moving, as you say, taking one small step forward every day?




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah. I think it's a good question, Gary. Part of it is leaning into, "Why am I doing this?" You think about the pain of is this all there is moment. Pain is very focusing in saying, "I don't want to just sit in this cubicle for the next 30 years. I don't want to be on my deathbed thinking about in those last few moments of breath that we'll all have I left a lot on the table. I mean, there's a lot of things I wanted to do and I didn't do them." You're filled with regret.




Warwick Fairfax:

So part of it is, think about the pain, but also think about the joy that would be to start doing some of these things. And so one of the things that we learnt is one of the critical things is just taking a first step because a first step will help fuel you into moving. One of the things, just a brief teaser, one of the folks we had on the podcast, which, obviously, a number of you have already listened to it, Eric and Emily Orton, Eric Orton was part of the Broadway play, Wicked. I think he was in the traveling production crew. If you're on that Broadway play, you've got a ticket for life almost. It's going to go on for a long time. He opened a small off-Broadway play. That didn't do as well. His partner closed it.




Warwick Fairfax:

So he's in a temp job at the top of a skyscraper in Manhattan looking out over the Hudson River and he sees sailing boats go by, and he's thinking, "I like to learn to sail." Now, at that moment when you're thinking about it, that actually was, as he relates, the scariest, toughest moment because he knew nothing about sailing. He doesn't have that much money, probably not a whole lot of extra spare time at that point, got a family to help support, but once he took those sailing lessons, "You know what?" I can do that," he ended up sailing around the Caribbean with his wife Emily and their kids and founding The Awesome Factory, how to make your dreams become reality.




Warwick Fairfax:

A couple things he just dig down deep, remember the pain, is this all there is moment. Think about how life could be, and once you start taking baby steps, "Hey, this can really happen," it'll fuel you to move forward, and as you have those fellow travelers, those who encourage you saying, "You know what? You took that baby step, you took those sailing lessons, that was fun, wasn't it?"




Warwick Fairfax:

"That was so cool. I love it. Just being out in the water and I forget all my cares and just the wind and the sails. I don't know. I feel like there's something there. I don't know where it's going to lead exactly, but I just want to do it."




Warwick Fairfax:

So really think about the pain, think about the future, your future vision. Have those people as fellow travelers and taking that first step. Probably of all the things, that thing will be so profound in helping you keep moving forward. If you don't take any steps, that will tend to encourage you the other direction, but you take that first positive step, it will help turn this eCourse into something that will hopefully be one part of potentially changing your life.




Gary Schneeberger:

Well said. To learn more about the Discover Your Second Act significance eCourse, get a pen, I'll wait. No, you can come back and you can find it at the end of this episode, but to learn more about the course, visit www.secondactsignificance.com. I'll say it again. I'll say it a little more slowly, www.secondactsignificance.com. More details than we've given here because Warwick doesn't like to promote too much, so we haven't given all the details away here. You'll find more details there. You'll find out how to sign up, all kinds of details, and that will be updated as we get closer to the actual release.




Gary Schneeberger:

So Warwick, this time's flown by. This has been fun and enlightening to do. This may be our first eCourse, but it's not going to be our last. I've heard you say in a couple of times now as podcast series or ideas have come up in meetings or conversations, "Hey, that would make a good eCourse." So as we close, what is the value you see for our friends as we add eCourses or webinars, as some call them, to our offerings right alongside the podcast, right alongside your blogging and speaking, our free online assessment? What's the value, you think, as the Beyond the Crucible universe grows to absorb eCourses? What's the value long term, short term and long term for folks by that expansion?




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah. Gary, it helps make the learning actionable, more concrete, certainly at another level. I mean, we always hope that our podcasts and blogs and everything we do is actionable, but I just think it takes it to another level and it gives people very concrete tools. The worksheets are a great example in which you can take away, you can work on it. It's really a series of steps in this eCourse from module one to module two to module three, each one building on the other.




Warwick Fairfax:

One of the things I would say when I'm coaching is vision is good, reality is better. So we don't want you to just come up with your vision of a life of significance and that vision will grow and evolve and expand as we talked about earlier in this podcast with originally it was a book, now it's blogs, social media, podcasts, speaking workshops, and now eCourse. It's evolved and grown as all good vision should.




Warwick Fairfax:

So we not only just want you to come up with a vision for a life of significance, we want it to become reality. We don't want you just thinking and dreaming about being fulfilled and joyful. We actually want you to be fulfilled and joyful. We want you living a joy-filled, fulfilled life. If in some small or hopefully not so small way, this eCourse, Discover Your Second Act Significance, can help you get there, then that would be wonderful. That's our vision.




Warwick Fairfax:

The vision that we want to have become reality is that your visions will become reality and that you would lead a life of significance, that you would be unstuck, you wouldn't be saying, "Is this all there is?" you would be saying, to quote Gary Schneeberger, "This is all I want." That's our vision.




Gary Schneeberger:

That Warwick sounded a lot like the plane hitting the runway. That sounded like the captain landing the plane right there. Good job. Before we go, though, I thought this would be fun. I want to present to you, listener, one of the questions from one of our worksheets for you to ponder as you think about the eCourse and whether or not this is something that you think you need, that you know you want. We have a worksheet called The Ideal Life Worksheet. One of the questions that it asks is this. As we close here, we ask you to ponder this question, and by ponder, that means think about. That means write some stuff down. Talk to some people who know you. See if they have any insight on this question.




Gary Schneeberger:

Here's the question. The question is, what does your ideal day look like? If you had a planner and you could speak into being what your ideal day was, what would you write down? What would you want to see baked into your ideal day? Just writing that down is going to give you a whole host of things that will help point you toward that life of significance, that this isn't all there is, there's more. That's where there's more is at is what the answer to that question might be.




Gary Schneeberger:

So before we go, let me say it again. The website to learn more about the eCourse is secondactsignificance.com. Check it out. If you have any questions, there are forms on the website at crucibleleadership.com, where you can send us some questions that we'll be happy to answer. Until the next time we're together, remember this, crucible experiences are painful and difficult, we know that. We also know that cubicle experiences like Warwick has described, cubicle experiences can be frustrating, can be discouraging, can make you, both in different ways, make you want to, as Warwick has said many times, pull the covers over your head and just stay in bed, but neither one is the end of your story.




Gary Schneeberger:

You can learn lessons, you can apply those lessons, you can take baby steps, you can keep moving forward, and as you do that, whether you're facing moving beyond a crucible or moving beyond a cubicle moment, the end result is the same, is rewarding, is not this is all there is, it's all you've ever wanted, and that is a life of significance.