The 3 Important Truths Any Crucible Will Teach You #165

Highlights

• How we discovered the emotions similarities between crucibles (3:20)
• How the blog came to be (8:44)
• Crucible type 1: Business crucibles (11:04)
• Crucible type 2: Physical crucibles (14:29)
• Crucible type 3: Life crucibles (21:39)
• Crucible Type 4: Emotional crucibles (27:52)
• Crucible type 5: “Quiet” crucibles (32:42)
• Lesson 1: Mindset is everything (38:47)
• Lesson 2: Don’t go it alone (42:22)
• Lesson 3: One small step (45:54)
• Warwick’s message of hope to listeners (52:34)
• Reflection questions (55:30)

Transcript

Warwick Fairfax:

Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond The Crucible. When something happens to you, whether it’s setback, failure, physical, emotional, crucible, whatever it is, you can be angry and bitter and say, “This was unfair. I was an idiot. I’m a terrible person. What they did to me was so unfair,” and just be wrapped in a cauldron of bitterness and anger, as we often say on Beyond the Crucible, it’s like drinking poison. It just erodes your soul or you can say what happened to me, whether it’s a physical emotional crucible, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right. What I did was wrong, but that’s happened and there can be life altering circumstances and consequences, but how do I move forward? I think the key for many, if not, all of our guests, is just that phrase that you said so well, that it didn’t happen to them, it happened for them, is how can I use this crucible that happened to me to help others?

Gary Schneeberger:

Using our worst days to help others, to have their best days? That’s the undergirding philosophy, the bedrock exhortation of Beyond the Crucible and we explore it on this week’s episode in detail, that you can apply to turn your own trials into trials. Hi, I’m Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show. Warwick and I take a tour of what we’ve learned ground also covered in the new blog at beyondthecrucible.com, three critical lessons all five crucible types can teach us. We’ve discovered and keep discovering with each new guest we interview that while crucible experiences vary greatly in their circumstances, they come with many similar emotions, whether it’s a business crucible or a physical crucible, an emotional crucible or a life crucible, or even the quiet crucible marked by feeling stuck and wondering, is this all there is?

And those three important truths that help you navigate your way up from and out of the pit, realizing that mindset is everything, not going it alone and taking the first right step, then the next right step. Putting those truths together are the key to being able to consider your crucible not as something that happened to you but as something that happened for you. The subject that we’re talking about this week listeners, as we do from time to time, once a month, about the current blog at beyondthecrucible.com, and that blog is Three Critical Lessons All Five Crucible Types Can Teach Us. So we’ve got kind of three young at front side and a number and five on the backside and a number. The idea there is there are lessons that we’ve learned in doing this show that hold true across what we’ve identified in doing this show five crucible experience types.

So what we’ve discovered, and I’ll start here with you Warwick, the fascinating thing for me in co-hosting this show with you is when this first hit me, and I don’t even remember what guest it was, but there’s your story of having failed in the takeover ultimately after it was successful of the family media company in 1990 at a cost of $2.25 billion, that’s your crucible moment. And that … as you’ve said many times, you’re kind of a support group of one there, right? I mean, there’s not a lot of people who’ve been through that. Yet, there was a guest we had and the guest said something that sounded just like something that you’ve said about how you had to bounce back, how you had to rediscover your identity, how you had to find your purpose and your significance.

In that moment, I as the co-host said, “Hey, listener, did you hear that? Warwick’s story and our guest’s story are completely different in circumstance, but listen to the emotion behind them.” That really has proven true, hasn’t it, as we’ve done guest after guest crucible after crucible, those emotions are remarkably similar, aren’t they?

Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, it’s very true, Gary. There’s the sense of loss, whether it’s physical or some other crucible, which we’ll get into. The sense that who I am now is fundamentally different. The thing about crucibles, as we discovered from our survey when … as you know, we surveyed 11,000 plus people and 72% of them said that they had an experience that was so traumatic that it fundamentally altered the course of their life. So when you have that life altering crucible, there’s the before the crucible and the after. The commonalities are themes such as choice, which you talk about a lot. You can’t always choose what happened to you. Sometimes what happened to you has irreversible consequences. Often in the case of a physical crucible, but you have a choice.

Are you going to let it define you as we say? Are you going to let your worst day define you, this horrendous thing that happened to you or mistake you made or are you going to somehow turn that pain, that setback for good in a way that helps others? So that sense of choice. Another thing we talk a lot about is a sense of identity. Some folks we’ve had on there were very defined as we’ll talk more about by their profession and who they were. Then, when that changes, who am I if I’m not that former life, that former person. So it really, where’s my identity? So that sense of emotion, identity, choice about not letting your crucible define you. Those are common across every crucible, every background, nationality, gender, race, circumstance.

That’s the amazing thing we’ve discovered is there are certain emotions, choice, identity, it’s true for every guest we’ve had. Those have all been issues.

Gary Schneeberger:

Right, and it’s truly been a discovery, right? When we started doing this thing 166 episodes ago, we didn’t know. I mean, we’re talking about business crucibles and you had a failure and a setback and that doesn’t define you. As we talked to more guests and we heard more stories, we broadened the tent under which people can come. It’s not … we have discovered that it was truly episode by episode, a discovery process of learning that even when the circumstances are different, the emotions are the same.

Warwick Fairfax:

I mean, it’s just amazing, the commonalities, as you said before, I can feel like I’m in a self-help group of one. I mean, “Hey, I’ve lost two billion dollars in 150 year old family business. Anybody else? Anybody else want to put their hand up?” It’s like-

Gary Schneeberger:

Crickets. It’s crickets.

Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, I can feel like, well, nobody can relate to what I went through. Truth be told, I’ve never really met anybody that I feel like, “Oh, you went through what I went through.” I mean, maybe there are some people in family businesses, maybe a little bit the same, but I’ve never really met that person. Yet in chatting with the folks we have on Beyond the Crucible, there is something about the commonality of tragedy, just the sheer factor of being human identity, loss, failure, setback. How do I overcome that? That’s part of what it is to be human. It just shows that we all have differences, but there’s so much that unites us. There’s so much that we have in common. So when you feel like they felt shame like I did, they had identity issues like I did, they had days in which they struggled to get out of bed.

Maybe they did eventually, but they had days when they were just so angry at themselves, so disappointed in themselves. It’s remarkable how those emotions are pretty much identical, even though the circumstances are different. I mean it never ceases to amaze me.

Gary Schneeberger:

Right, and from what you just said, so from those emotional experiences that folks have in going through a crucible experience as they’re coming out of a crucible experience, that bridges to what we’re talking about in this blog, three critical lessons all five crucible types can teach us. It’s interesting to me, Warwick, I came upon in this blog that I wrote at beyondthecrucible.com, I came upon this idea that there are five crucible types because I went through all the guests and sort of said, “Okay, their story was this. Their story was that.” I didn’t have a preconceived notion of that. What was interesting about how this whole thing came to be is that a member of the team who’s been with us a little less time than certainly than you did, since you founded it, and even me, been around about five years, had this idea of unpacking some of the crucible types that people go through.

When I began to do that, that’s when I found … what resonated with me as a more of a long-termer was what we’ve been talking about so far. People say the same … I mean, if I say anything on this show a lot, it’s “Did you hear that listener? Their emotions are the same.” So it was a marriage of sort of a new perspective from the team and an older perspective from me, which is where this blog comes from. I had no preconceived notion when I went into this, how many … we’ve never done this before. How many crucible types are there? I identified in going through the list of every guest that there are five types of crucibles that we have tended to focus on.

So let’s run through those briefly because … and listener, just a word of note here, we’re not going to dive deeply into every … we’ll give examples of folks who fall into these categories, but we’re not going to dive deeply into their stories because the purpose of what we do here isn’t to wallow in the downbeat, isn’t to stay in the pit. These are the crucibles that led people to the pit. What we talk about is how you get out of it, and that’s going to be the three critical lessons these five types teach us. It’s important to understand, especially for Beyond the Crucible, which started its lifecycle as crucible leadership. That shifted in part because we realized they weren’t all business crucibles. And that’s our first type of the five crucibles was business crucibles.

That grew out of, I think, Warwick, your experience. Then also, this idea that … as you wrote a book on leadership, that perhaps focusing on leadership crucibles was going to be what we were going to do. We’ve discovered somewhat quickly as we move through it that business crucibles, while important are not all that we do, but business crucibles, those are those crucibles like yours, like a gentleman like Hank McLarty who we talked to, who was a hotshot financial planner. He believed in his own press. He said he drank the Hank Kool-Aid. I’ll never forget that. Then, he sort of took a fall where he lost his job and he ended up in a hotel for an extended period of time with his two sons needing to live off of the free breakfasts in the hotel because that’s how far he had sunk into the pit.

So those business crucibles, still important to Beyond the Crucible, not our sole focus anymore, but we still have them, and they’re still very, very common among people who are listening to this show, right?

Warwick Fairfax:

With the business crucible, that sense of identity is often the searing tip of the spear, if you will, of the pain. Who am I if I’m not Hank McLarty, A-listed, successful finance guy? It just strikes at the core of who you are, because in the business world, as you are successful, you begin to believe you’re on press. “Hey, I’m this hotshot executive and I can do no wrong.” And everybody says, “Wow, I saw you on the front cover of Business Week and saw you on CNBC. Man, you’re just incredible. You’re amazing.” You think, “Yeah, I kind of am.”

Gary Schneeberger:

Right.

Warwick Fairfax:

It’s hard to understand praise, and the dangerous thing is you believe that, and then, your whole identity gets wrapped up in “Hey, look at me. I’m COO. I’m CEO, I’m VP.” And eventually, that’s going to end, either … not everybody has to resign, but eventually you might retire, maybe your company is bought out, they’re bringing new folks. One of these days you will leave that job.

Gary Schneeberger:

Right.

Warwick Fairfax:

It’s a 100% certain, that you’ll be the top dog and then you’re not going to be. And pretty much everybody has gone through that. You go to your country club, if you’re COO or CEO, that’s kind of what you do and playing with your golfing buddies and it’s like, you’re not the top dog anymore. It’s like, “Huh, you feel bad about yourself because I’m not who I was. I’m just a regular Joe, huh.” So that sense of identity, that sense of shame, if you will, it’s extremely common and it is pretty dangerous to have your identity wrapped up in who you are and being the CEO or whatever in a business organization. For most people, that’s normal operating procedure. It’s really hard to withstand the temptation or the siren call of success. So yeah, it’s a different kind of crucible but yeah, there’s the financial loss, obviously, but the identity is often … it’s often harder than the actual financial loss, which can happen in business crucibles.

Gary Schneeberger:

Yeah, and that’s a good segue into the second kind of crucible that we’ve identified in this blog because there’s an identity factor to the physical crucible that we’ve talked to many guests about, and those are individuals, I think of one of the first guests we talked to David Charbonnet, the Navy SEAL, who was injured in a training accident and became a paraplegic and ended his Navy SEAL career, that was his identity, that’s who he was going to be. We discovered that even if your identity is not wrapped up in being an athlete … and we have a guest coming up that we’re going to talk to Janine Shepherd who went through that she was a competitive Olympic level cross-country skier for your home nation of Australia, terrible accident.

That those dreams never came through, but other dreams came through, and you’ll hear more about that listener in a full show. Again, her identity a little bit wrapped up in being that athlete, and she had to learn that wasn’t really at all what her identity was. There was a whole different identity for her, and she had to pursue that. So both business crucibles and these physical crucibles have at some part of their root, this idea of identity, but it’s different with physical crucibles because it’s an identity that … your identity as the fifth generation heir to the family media business is unique. Being a quote-unquote able-bodied healthy, whatever that looks like for you, person, and to have that taken away through accident, trauma, injury, illness, that can really make you … I mean, in some ways, worse than being an audience of one.

You’re an audience of a lot of people who have gone through this and it’s hard to know how to move next. So what did those from physical crucibles, what’s your reactions … I mean, your remembrances of the guests we’ve talked to who’ve been through physical crucibles?

Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, I mean, so well said. So true, I mean, David Charbonnet was one of our early guests, and he and his dad were both Navy SEALs and David Charbonnet was injured, became a paraplegic in a training accident in Southern California. Understandably, his identity was all wrapped up in being a Navy SEAL, and he literally said, “Who am I? If I’m not a Navy SEAL? This is what I was born to do.” His dad said, “My son is as good a Navy SEAL as is out there.” And one Navy SEAL doesn’t say that about another, even if it’s your son, unless you feel like it’s true. You just don’t do things like that. I think of Michelle Quay, who was injured at about 10 years old, and her native Taiwan now, lives in California, she never grew beyond what she was at that age.

So she has to use the sort of walking sticks. When you go to the grocery store. She can’t reach the top shelf. She has to ask somebody for help or maybe knock it over with one stick and hopefully catch it with the other hand. I mean, most of us don’t think of going to the grocery store as this massive ordeal, which we feel embarrassment almost. She hasn’t used the word shame, but just certainly embarrassment, feeling awkward, feeling like I’ve got to ask somebody for help for something that’s so simple for 90% of people. So yeah, that sense of identity and the things that were so simple are now so hard, and having to come to terms with that and not be angry and bitter, that is not easy.

Gary Schneeberger:

No, and one of the things … and it just popped in my head, we didn’t talk about this beforehand, that’s why I love these episodes because things just pop in our heads as we’re talking, but one of the things, if you go back and listen to or even watch … especially watch on YouTube, those shows involving physical crucibles, I think there’s a higher percentage of guests there who watch their faces, listen to their voices. I think of Michelle when I say this, there’s joy all over them. They’ve been through some of the most traumatic things people can go through in terms of limitations on their bodies, on their minds, on their movements, and yet there’s laughter and there’s joy, and there’s complete comfort in that they have found their identity on the other side of that pit, getting out of that pit, they found their identity.

I think if we did the research on it, we would find physical crucible guests are the ones who are … when they talk about what it’s like on the other side of that crucible, they’re filled with joy because maybe they didn’t think they’d ever be able to do anything again. Ryan Campbell, the Australian … he was a younger guy, set this record for how far he flew a plane, and then he had a plane crash and he became physically disabled. There was joy as he talked about what he’s able to do now. I think there’s an appreciation that comes from when you weren’t able to do what you were accustomed to doing. You learn to do new things, you do get some skills back, but you learn to do new things. You find a new purpose, and that just bubbles out of these folks. That’s been my experience anyway in when we’ve talked to them.

Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, I mean it’s very true. I think of another Australian, Stacey Copas who was injured at, somewhere around 14. She dove into a suburban Sydney above ground pool, which typically aren’t deep. She was diagnosed as a quadriplegic. Now she got some movement in her hands, but it fundamentally alter the course of her life, I mean, she was an athlete in high school.

Gary Schneeberger:

Right.

Warwick Fairfax:

And I don’t know that she studied that hard or took life too seriously, but ever since, it’s just transformed her thinking. She’s a speaker, consultant in Australia, and she would … yeah, there were moments of maybe suicidal ideation or substance abuse challenges during those early years, understandably, but she would look at that and say pretty much something like this, that she is grateful for what she went through.

Gary Schneeberger:

Right.

Warwick Fairfax:

And she also was a somewhat early guest, and I remember thinking, how in the world could you possibly be grateful for what you went through? I think what she means is obviously nobody wants to go through that, but she became a different person. She became somebody that had some empathy and care for others. She really had a mission. It sort of transformed her.

Gary Schneeberger:

It is, we hope, an immense encouragement to those who listen to the show, as is the perspective of our next kind of crucible that we identified. That’s the life crucibles. These are those that we group together people who life just maybe bit them, maybe they bit life. For whatever reason, there was something about their circumstances in life that knocked them off their feet, that knocked them in the pit. I think first one that came to my mind as I was writing this blog was Donte Wilburn, the young man that we spoke to who was by his own … I mean, he came out and said it. He was a drug dealer. He learned to deal drugs when he was in high school, and he did it through college, and he discovered he wanted the cool things that the kids that he knew, that he looked up to in high school had.

He talked to one of them, “Where did you get this stuff.” And the guy said, “Well, here, I’ll show you,” and taught him how to deal drugs. Donte’s life began to spin out of control, and he ended up one night with a gun, right in the middle of his forehead, and it could have killed him. He could have been killed in a drug deal gone bad, he could have gone to jail, he could have gone to prison because of that when he got caught and he didn’t. From that was birthed his life of significance. And we find over and over again, those guests who have had life crucibles, get bounced around, get knocked off their feet, things happen to them, they cause things to happen to themselves, and they end up learning lessons. We’re going to talk about those lessons that’ll teach you, but where they end up is at a place where they’re helping other people and they’re living life, “on the straight and narrow”.

They circumstances that knocked them off their feet, they found a way to have those removed from their life, and they’re moving forward, helping others, offering hope to others. You know who else falls in this category of life crucibles? One of the 4,872 guests from Australia, we’ve had on the show. Katie Folks, I think falls in this category too. The Olympic rower, who through really no fault of her own, there was a “scandal”, involving a team member in the Olympics who stopped rowing. That became … I mean, they became a byword in Australia. The prime minister went after them, but that’s a life crucible of a different stripe and yet, certainly knocked her off her feet, knocked her in a hole. So, life crucibles maybe be one of the wider categories that we can get into. There’s a lot of different things that you can cause or that can happen to you, that can knock you off your feet.

And Katie is an example of a story that it wasn’t her … she didn’t do anything to make it happen. She just had to live with the fallout from it, right?

Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely. Well said. I mean, Katie Folks is a good example where she was a cox of women’s eight that was in the Olympics. Katie is somebody who is a strategist. She is disciplined, she is determined, she’s competitive back in the day in high school and that’s from my college at Oxford at Balliol, which is a little bit more intramural. I did rowing, it was my favorite sport. So in a very small way, I can identify with Katie a little bit, but she was really good at what she did. Somehow there was a woman in the boat that had some … I think, some challenges and had been known occasionally to stop rowing in the middle of a race, but they felt like she had this under control. It’s sort of an anxiety attack, if you will. So, they might have even been in the final, I mean, they weren’t like in the first heat, if you will, of the Olympics.

I think they had a pretty decent shot to medal from what Katie said. So when somebody stops rowing, I mean, you never see that. Okay, occasionally maybe you lose your roar and there’s a challenge with the boat. That happens, but I don’t know that that’s ever happened before. So it’s not Katie’s fault, but yet she and her whole crew are branded as people that gave up in Australia. I mean, America takes sports seriously, but Australia takes sports as seriously as any nation on earth. So when you let down your country like that, the prime minister of Australia at the time said, these rowers were Un-Australian.

Gary Schneeberger:

Right.

Warwick Fairfax:

That’s about the worst condemnation you can possibly have.

Gary Schneeberger:

Yeah.

Warwick Fairfax:

Was that unfair? Sure, but I guess in the heat of the moment, the prime minister said that, so she had to bounce back from that crucible. It’s not her fault, but she is one of the condemned crew, the crew of shame, if you will. She has bounced back and coaches people on resilience and strategy and has done well. Yeah, she had to both forgive maybe prime minister, the public, the media who condemned them and in some sense had to forgive that other rower. She’ll probably never know quite how and why that happened, but powerful lessons of forgiveness and not letting other people’s opinion of you define you, especially in this case when it wasn’t her fault. There’s no merit whatsoever. It’s completely unfair that she should be tarnished with that same brush.

Gary Schneeberger:

Right.

Warwick Fairfax:

Yet life isn’t fair, and sometimes people will condemn you when you’ve done nothing wrong. That unfortunately happens.

Gary Schneeberger:

Yeah, and that can be the shot across the bow that creates the life crucible, which is our third category of the five crucible types that we talk about in this blog, three critical lessons all five crucible types can teach us. I want to say we’re not getting in great depth and detail to each individual story. We’re using them just as examples of the kinds of crucibles. We will do this, this just came to me. In the blog, we can hyperlink when we name these names of some of the folks we’re talking about, their podcast episodes, so you can hear how that whole story goes from stem to stern, speaking of boats. The fourth category of crucible that we identified going back through our lists of 165 episodes before this one is the emotional crucible, somewhat a cousin for sure, to the life crucible, but when I think of emotional crucibles, Warwick, I think first and foremost of Esther Fleece, who was the first person we ever interviewed.

Esther is a long time friend of mine, and she found herself, she was abandoned by both parents, legally while she was still a teenager in high school. The emotions attached to that, you’ve said the word four or five times in this episode, shame hit her and that fueled her crucible. Another one who falls into this emotional crucible is Chris Singleton, whose mother was murdered in a mass shooting at a church. Again, nothing that he did, nothing that she, Esther, did to make this happen, but the emotions that come in the wake of that, being disowned by your parents or losing a parent, just a couple of the examples of how emotions can boil over, can take over and really knock you down into the pit.

Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely, Gary. So yeah, Esther Fleece is … yeah, she’s a good example of, she did nothing wrong, but as a teenager, she’s abandoned by her parents. She fortunately had friends in church that took her in and she didn’t let it define her, but there is a sense of shame when that happens, and you feel like as a young kid, it’s inevitable, there can be a tendency to think, “Well, what did I do wrong?” That’s never fair or right, and there’s a sense of, “Oh, I’m different than the other kids,” whether it’s going to basketball games or, “Oh, my mom and dad are out there and gee, where are they? Well, they abandoned me. Oh, wow, really? I’m so sorry.” And you just get into the conversation for the 83rd time and you’re feeling bad, and it’s hard to bounce back from something like that.

I mean, when your parents abandon you, that can just cause a searing emotional hole in your psyche and your sense of self-worth.

Gary Schneeberger:

Right.

Warwick Fairfax:

It’s just inevitable that … not consciously, but psychologically, it’s just, why was I not worth loving? What’s wrong with me? It’s just incredibly a hard thing to cope with. Chris Singleton, just … somebody killing his mother in a church in Charleston, South Carolina just for reasons of hate. She was a person of great faith, a leader in her church in many ways. Just bouncing back from that and not letting that seething hatred, which would be very understandable, define him. Obviously, you don’t condone it. You want justice to be served, but that sort of searing hatred, it can destroy your life. Chris is wise enough to know that and has found a way to not let hatred define him, but it’s just not easy to bounce back from that.

You want to continue and have a normal life. Everybody wants to hear the story for the hundredth time and he’s happy to tell it, but he wants … and he used the circumstance of his mother’s death to enable him to be a speaker and a writer, and really to talk about at a bigger level about bringing people together and unity. It will be easy for those two people, Esther Fleece and Chris Singleton, to be defined by those emotional crucibles, by their worst day and neither of them let those days define them.

Gary Schneeberger:

No, and as a great example of how for Esther, that’s true … here’s the funny part, I’ve known Esther for 20 years. When I knew her, she was Esther Fleece. She’s now Esther Fleece-Allen, and I defaulted to Esther Fleece, and here’s where her healing has come to life, right? Abandoned by her parent, she is now a wife and mother and married to a guy named Joel Allen, and she’s Esther Fleece-Allen, and her identity back to that subject, identity has been redeemed from out of the ashes of the similar kind of thing where her parents left her. She’s now a parent, and it’s a beautiful thing that points to the power of learning the lessons of your crucible, marching forward in those lessons and looking at a life of significance, what that looks like. Esther Fleece-Allen is a great example of that.

The final example that I’ve come up with of the five types of crucible experiences that we can have … and this is an interesting one, the quiet crucible. This one we didn’t think about for the longest time, and then, we did a series on second act significance. What does it look like when the first act of your life was okay, maybe even successful, but it felt like there’s something missing. Is this all there is? How do you go about pursuing a second act? Can you pursue a second act? Can that be more fulfilling, more lived on purpose, dedicated to serving others? That’s the quiet crucible, those, “Is this all there is” moments. A couple of ones stick out to me where it picked the one that you want to talk about. Robert Miller, who was a successful lawyer but never stopped wanting to be a rockstar, or Nancy Volpe Beringer, who as a young girl wanted to make clothes or play with making clothes, and she wasn’t able to do that.

She became a union rep, did that for her whole career, but in retirement, got on Project Runway, became a fashion designer and found her calling. So there’s a case of people who in their second act, even late in life, found that life of significance that you talk about so often.

Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, it’s an interesting category, the quiet crucible. We delved into this quite a bit in our E-course second act significance. What we found is there are people that it wasn’t necessarily a searing, devastating crucible, a mistake, a setback. It was this feeling of being stuck. Even in my own life, I talk about my cubicle moment in which in the early 2000s, I was working for an aviation services company in Maryland, and this is just kind of pre-internet, so they didn’t really know who I was. Of course, I didn’t really advertise it and Australia is a long way away, but after a number of years working there, I felt like I was playing small. From my faith perspective, I felt like God had given me talents, abilities, and I wasn’t really using them all, getting good performance grades, but I just felt like there’s more than what I’m doing and so, I left.

Yeah, that quiet crucible and Robert Miller is a great example. His family was musical. His dad I think played the trumpet. So he had these visions of playing in a rock band, but he then became a lawyer, I think it was corporate bankruptcy law in New York City. As he puts it, the problem he had was, he was too successful. He was really good at what he did. He was bringing in lots of money. Well, how do you stop that when you’re doing very well and can afford a nice lifestyle for yourself and your family? Most people don’t, and I’m not judging or criticizing that at all. I get it. Eventually, as the decades wore on, and I think it was close to 60, it’s like, “I would really like to try that rock band,” which for most people would sound insane at that time of life.

I mean, talk about the country club. Can you imagine saying to other partners in the boardroom at whatever law firm he was in, “Hey, I’m thinking about quitting and starting a rock band.” It’s like, “Excuse me.”

Gary Schneeberger:

Right.

Warwick Fairfax:

I mean, been in an accident, what is your problem here? I mean, it just wouldn’t go down too well but he did. He got a band together almost like on Craigslist, advertised with folks, and now, he has this successful jazz Latin fusion band, and he has his own podcast that’s very successful, interviews a lot of musicians and talks about vision. Yeah, I mean these folks, whether it’s him or Nancy Volpe Beringer, they felt like I’m doing okay. And Nancy was working for an education union in New Jersey, and it’s like, yeah, I’m doing well and I’m getting paid a fair amount of money for what I’m doing because I’m making a good contribution. Both of them is like, “Is this all there is?” And if you just stay at your job, and it’s not a judgment but if you feel like, “Is this all there is,” you never want to be on your deathbed thinking, “I wish I would’ve tried this. I didn’t. I left something on the table.” It just gnaws away at your soul.

It’s a different kind of crucible, but that gnawing away your soul of, “I could have tried this, but I didn’t,” that’s painful in a different way, but those emotions, I don’t know if they’re excruciating, but they can certainly be painful, this sense of I could have tried, but I never tried. What if, what if, what if, what if. It’s a terrible haunting thing to think of.

Gary Schneeberger:

So those are the five types of crucibles that we at Beyond the Crucible have interacted with, interviewed people with. We’ve gone through some of those ourselves. The business crucible, the physical crucible, the life crucible, the emotional crucible, and the quiet crucible. Now, here’s the point in the show that’s phenomenally fun because out of those five types that we just discussed, and you just heard us talk about wildly different people who were in those … who’ve been through those experiences, we’ve discovered … again, there’s that word discovered. We’ve discovered as we’ve been doing this show that there are those universalities of how you get out of the pit. How do you move beyond your crucible. And that’s the three critical lessons in this blog, three critical lessons all five crucible types can teach us.

And we believe experience will bear this out from what we’ve found in doing this podcast, there are three critical lessons every one of these kinds of crucibles can teach us. So let’s go through those one at a time. I’m going to read the whole thing as it appears in the blog, the whole description. Then, I’ll ask you to talk about it Warwick. The first one is this, mindset is everything. Our guests have universally come to view their crucibles, not as things that happen to them, but as things that have happened for them. The traumas and tragedies they’ve experienced, they’ve come to believe, do not define them, but have refined them. Developing that perspective we have discovered through this show is the only way to build a ladder to climb out of the pit. What’s your reaction to that?

Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, I mean, this is profoundly true. It’s sort of related to the word choice that we use a lot. When something happens to you, whether it’s setback, failure, physical, emotional, crucible, whatever it is, you can be angry and bitter and say, “This was unfair. I was an idiot. I was just … I’m a terrible person. What they did to me was so unfair,” and just be wrapped in a cauldron of bitterness and anger, as we often say on Beyond the Crucible, it’s like drinking poison. It just erodes your soul or you can say what happened to me, whether it’s a physical emotional crucible, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, what I did was wrong, but that’s happened and there can be life altering circumstances and consequences, but how do I move forward? I think the key for many, if not, all of our guests, is just that phrase that you said so well, that it didn’t happen to them, it happened for them, is how can I use this crucible that happened to me to help others?

Back to one of the first folks we discussed, David Charbonnet. He wasn’t able to be a Navy SEAL anymore because he was paralyzed. He was a paraplegic, but he then as I mentioned, ran this clinic for vets in Southern California, in San Diego. So he has a mission. He can say to these other vets, I know what you’re going through. I get it. You’re not the same as you were. There’s a sense of loss, anger, bitterness. I was there too. I can’t solve all of those things, but what I can do is with this equipment, is give you maximum range of movement that is possible with the technology that exists today. That gives people some level of hope. These elite warriors, it’s like, “Okay, I’ve got a mission here to be as functional as I can, and hopefully beyond that, to have a mission of helping others.”

So mindset is everything. Mindset, in fact, in some sense, changes everything. If you just say, “Okay, what happened was awful,” but the ultimate mindset shift is when you can achieve the Stacey Copas level of mindset shift and say, in some sense, I’m grateful for what happened because I would not have been the same person that I am today without that. I wish it hadn’t happened, but yet in some sense, I’m grateful because it’s made me a better person. It’s refined my character, it’s made it better in some ways.

Gary Schneeberger:

I love how this just worked out. Listen, that’s how I’m going to play the last two. I’m going to ask the question. I’m going to read the statement from the blog. I’m going to throw it to you. I mean, this is your life. This is your life’s work now. This is your life’s legacy that we’re building right here. So I’m not going to talk much more than what I’m saying right now. I’m going to read what’s in the blog, point two and then I’m going to throw it to you, Warwick. Point two is this, don’t go it alone. Moving beyond your crucible is a team sport, what our podcast guests have done, what Warwick stresses is so important to do is to find and lean into fellow travelers, families, friends, colleagues, professional counselors and coaches will provide insights and strategies to help you find the strength and resilience to rise out of the pit. Go.

Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, it’s also so true when you’re in that pit, in your worst moment, you need a friend. I think of a recent guest, Adam Vibe Gunton. He was in a very bad way, being addicted to heroin, and a lot of people tried to help him and finally, he found somebody that would just sit with him and be, didn’t try and fix him, didn’t try and say, “I’ve got these five points. Hey, maybe that substance abuse program you went through didn’t work, but I’ve got this great one. It’ll work guaranteed in five easy steps over a week, and you’ll be healed forever.” And just almost like a used car salesman, which it’s never that easy, whether it’s substance abuse or the kind of heroin addiction that Adam Vibe Gunton had. He had somebody that would just sit with him and be with him and be his friend and just listened, grieved.

That was a game changer for him to have that kind of friend that didn’t judge him, but was with him in the pit and in the pain. That really helped him get out of it as he found also a mission to help others. So just having people in there with you is huge. Certainly in my own life I had … it wasn’t easy, especially in the 90s, people tried to help me, but I wasn’t easy to help, but certainly for me, it really starts with my wife, Gail. We’ve been married, gosh, it’ll be 34 years later this month. She has always been my greatest advocate and didn’t judge me for the mistakes I made. Loved me unconditionally. That’s a great gift that I appreciate, no end. I mean, having fellow travelers, as you try to climb out of that pit who will listen to you, won’t judge you, won’t try and fix you, but will be there to help you and encourage you.

And as you’re saying, I’m a screw-up. I’m an awful person. It’s like, “Yep, you may have made mistakes,” but certainly from my faith paradigm, a helpful comment to me would be, “God loves you. Yes, there are consequences of your actions, but we’re all loved unconditionally by our Creator from my perspective.” Just who can encourage you and say, look, “Okay, you made some mistakes, but look, you’ve got a lot of strengths and there are things you can do to help others.” And just that sense of not being alone and having somebody that believes in you and will encourage you, that is like rocket fuel that can absolutely increase your ability to get out of that pit and be functional and contribute to society.

Gary Schneeberger:

Point three in the three critical lessons all five crucible types can teach us is this take the first right step, then the next right step. Very few of our guests have gone from tragedy to triumph in a one and done leap. This is not a time for Evil Knievel to jump over 35 buses, right? It’s an incremental gains are the order of the day for recovery. As you allow your crucible to teach you more about how you are designed, what you’re off the charts passionate about, you can begin to set your feet on the path of what a life of significance looks like for you. It will not just lead you out of the pit, it will lead you to a life lived on purpose, dedicated to serving others, your thoughts.

Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, I think back to another episode in my journey in the 90s after the failure of the 2.2 billion dollars takeover, my wife is American, we moved to Annapolis, Maryland. We’ve been here ever since 30 years ago or so. Through the first part of the 90s, I sent out resumes. I mean, there was no work for an ex-media mogul. It’s like, “I’m humble, I work harder. Sure, right? Whatever.” I was unemployable. It was just … yeah, we had some savings fortunately, but it was terrible. So eventually, I got kind of desperate as much for just having a job for my own sense of self-worth and something to do during the day that wasn’t just the mind-numbing, sending out resumes and hearing crickets. So I went to a temp agency in Maryland and they said, “Well, let’s test you on Microsoft Excel,” because back in the day when I worked in Chase Manhattan Bank and banking after Oxford, before business school, I was actually pretty good at Excel.

I guess I must have done well. He says, “Well, you’re pretty good at this. We can find you a temp job for a couple of months in Columbia, Maryland for the headquarters, the US headquarters of HEAD sports that make skis and tennis rackets and a few other things.” So they needed help with some budgeting. It was sort of close to summer, but a lot of people do budgeting around August depending on your fiscal year and all. So that led to then me, getting a temp job at a local aviation services job, that became a permanent job. The point of that story is, that first step was going to that temp agency, swallow my pride and get a couple of month temp job because I was pretty good at Excel. For somebody with a Harvard MBA that feels like a lot of rungs below where I should have been.

So far below, I’m like on Mount Everest or was I on Mount Everest. I’m trying to look down through the clouds, down to sea level, and it’s so far down I can’t even see that far. Even a telescope probably wouldn’t let me see that far. It felt that way but desperate times calls for desperate measures. Another example I can think of is Eric and Emily Orton. Eric was involved in the Wicked Production, a theater production and was doing very well. He started with a producer, another play that ended up folding and it just wiped him out financially. So he has a temporary job in the top of some Manhattan skyscraper in New York City. He’s looking out on the Hudson River and he sees a sailboat and he’s thinking, “I think I’d like to learn to sail.”

Now, where’s that going to lead? I mean, it ended up leading to taking his whole family around the Caribbean on the sailboat. Then, he has this whole business called the Awesome Factory of helping people achieve their dreams, but that first step was, I think I’d like to learn how to sail. How in the world is that going to help? I don’t think he had any clue, but he felt in his gut this was the first step. Often that first step, that first right step is often the hardest step and was for Eric Orton. It was for me to swallow my pride and go to that temp agency and be willing to get just temporary job at HEAD sports. So the first step is often key, and it’s often the hardest. You got to trust yourself, trust the process because it can be that first big step no matter how small that step is to getting out of the pit.

Gary Schneeberger:

And one of the great things at … I mean, we are here at Beyond the Crucible, we’re here to help people do these things, to help them understand that they need a shift in mindset. It’s one of the things the podcast does, but there’s blogs and other assets that we have that can help people in that regard. We’re here to be someone who can help you understand, don’t go it alone. We’re here to encourage them to take that first step and then that next right step. You have a series right now, that’s going on on social media where you talk about take the next right step, take the next right step. Here’s what it looks like. It’s a team sport. I think you’d agree, Warwick, we’re all wearing the same uniforms for the listeners. We’re on their team. We want to help them move beyond their crucible to a life of significance.

So as we wrap up here, let me just go back over. We talked about three critical lessons all five crucible types can teach us. Those three critical lessons where mindset is everything. Don’t go it alone. Take the first step, then the next right step. We also unpacked five different crucible types, the business crucible, the physical crucible, the life crucible, the emotional crucible, and the quiet crucible. It’s a lot of information, but here’s what I hope you take out of it, and that’s this, all kinds of circumstances lead to crucibles, but the emotions tend to kind of group together a little bit. That I think from my perspective, offers great hope that they’re not insurmountable. The fact that we have done … this is our 166th show, the fact that we’ve done that is a pretty good sign that they are not insurmountable because we keep finding people who have surmounted them, who have overcome them.

Before I get into the reflection questions that end every podcast we do that’s based on a blog, Warwick, I want to ask you the question, you ask guests all the time, as the host of Beyond the Crucible, what is a message of hope on this subject, on critical lessons to learn as you go through five crucible types, what is a message of hope you want to offer to our listeners who are going through it right now, who were in the bottom of the pit or somewhere from the bottom of the pit to the top of the pit right now.

Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, I think listen to a number of the guests we’ve had on Beyond the Crucible. Listen to any guest really, or every guest, and I think you would find that your worst day doesn’t have to define you. I think you would find there is hope. You can get out of the pit. As dark as it might seem, we had one guest back to Adam Vibe Gunton. He said the pit was so deep it was bottomless just when he thought it couldn’t get worse, it did. So that’s about as bad a pit as you can get. Every guest we’ve had has shown that your worst day, your worst setback, your worst mistake, the worst thing that was done to you, doesn’t have to be the end of your story. There is a way out. So use, leverage the stories of these other guests and the lessons that they offer to say … to help you understand that there is hope.

That first point about mindset is everything. Another way of putting it is your attitude is everything. If you say, look, the world is over. It was my fault what was done to me was awful, I’m giving up. Then it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you say, “This was awful. What I did was terrible, I’m not going to let this define me. I’m not going to have my identity wrapped up in the bottom of the pit and the mud and the slime forever. I’m going to maybe believe in something more than that, whether it’s God or some other philosophy, your creator. I’m going to find something worthwhile in my life to contribute to others,” which is what we call a life of significance, and a mindset attitude is everything. That’s probably … when you think of what’s the first right step, the first right step is changing your mindset, is changing your attitude.

It’s making a choice that I’m not going to hide under the covers. I won’t be defined by my worst day. I will find a way to get out of this pit. I don’t know how it’s going to happen. If we’re going to take one step, one step, one step, I’m going to have help getting there, but I will not let this defy me or defeat me. That attitude shift, that mindset shift is the key to having hope, to getting out of the bottom of the pit and the bottom of your crucible.

Gary Schneeberger:

With that kind of wisdom and hope, listener, you’d expect maybe this guy created the whole Beyond the Crucible platform, wouldn’t you? That’s true, and I’ve been in the communications business long enough, as I say all the time. I know when the last words have been spoken, and our host and creator and founder just did speak the last word. So as we always do on these podcasts about blogs, I’m going to leave you, listener with some reflection questions you can go through to apply what you’ve heard in this show and what you can read on the blog, which is at beyondthecrucible.com. The first question is this, of the five crucible experience types listed in this blog, in what category would you place your most challenging setback or failure, as you’re looking to plot your crucible on those five crucible types that we listed, where would you put it?

Unpack a little bit, why would you put it there? Why does it feel like that’s where it belongs? Second question is this. As you think about your most challenging crucible, in what ways did it happen for you, not to you? How can you use those learnings to fuel your journey beyond it? This is where a great time to jump into what Warwick encourages all the time, journaling. Write that down. Use this question too as something to start journaling about. It didn’t happen to me, it happened for me. Here’s why I think that, and dig in and find those lessons and apply them to getting out of the pit. Then, three, the third question is this, what’s the next right step you can take on your journey to a life of significance? In some cases, it may be the first right step you have to take, but what is that step?

And then commit to taking it. Commit to doing it, right? A step thought of isn’t a step, it’s just an idea. A step acted on is indeed a step. What Warwick has described, what we’ve tried to unpack here on this show and what the blog talks about is that’s the goal. Start moving. To get out of a pit, you have to start moving, start moving upward, then start moving outward. What you’ll discover is what we know to be true from all the episodes of this show that your crucible experiences, like we said right here in this episode, they don’t define you, they refine you. They’re not the worst day of your life. They do not, it can feel like it for sure, we know that, but you have hope of moving beyond it and it becoming the best day of your life because the destination it can lead to. If you dig in, learn the lessons, take those steps, one foot in front of the other. Where you’ll end up is the best destination you can hope for and that is a life of significance.

If you enjoyed this episode, learned something from it, we invite you to engage more deeply with those of us at Beyond the Crucible. Visit our website beyondthecrucible.com to explore a plethora of offerings to help you transform what’s been broken into breakthrough. A great place to start, our free online assessment, which will help you pinpoint where you are on your journey beyond your crucible, and to chart a course forward. See you next week.