Life can be confusing. Finding a life you love, a calling you feel off-the-charts passionate about, is not easy. We can be discontented when we are not living a life we love and are trying to satisfy the expectations of others, including friends and family. We can feel trapped in a life that we don’t want to lead. But even when we are leading a life we feel called to, with a mission that we feel is important and that we believe will lead to a life of significance, a life on purpose dedicated to serving others, there can still be problems. We might feel that we could so much more. There are so many people who need our help. We could do so much more for so many. We are letting ourselves and others down. We are not content.
It is possible to be discontented irrespective of the situation. And it is possible to be content in many different situations. So how do we find contentment?
1. Contentment is not found solely in what we are doing. No matter how noble the cause, contentment is not found in that cause. It is found within.
2. Dig deep into your own beliefs and values. Many major religious ways of thought and spiritual perspectives teach us that contentment is not found in things or as the Bible says in the things of this world.
3. Ask yourself if your identity is wrapped up in the cause you are devoting your life to. If the answer is yes, you have a problem. Contentment will be virtually impossible in this case. It will always tend to feel like you are not doing enough. You’re disappointing yourself and others. You are on a treadmill that you can’t get off – and, if anything, is getting faster.
4. Decouple your identity from your mission. You really need to do a gut check. Can you keep going with your mission and not have your whole sense of self wrapped up in the cause? If the answer is no, you may be faced with a hard decision. You might need to consider getting out and handing your mission to someone else. Isn’t the mission about more than you? If you truly care about the success of the mission and it is not about you, then you should be willing to hand it over to someone else.
5. Either way, do some deep soul work and self-reflection. Ask yourself why you tend to get your whole identity so wrapped up in what you do. Is there some hurt or some need that was not met growing up? You might need to consider counseling, or at least coaching, depending on the issue. At a minimum, talk to some friends and family about why you get your sense of self so wrapped up in what you do.
6. Make a decision that you will no longer have your identity wrapped up in what you do. Life is made up of a series of decisions. Decide today that you are going to take a different path, the path where contentment is from within and not based on what you do or what others think of you.
7. Pursue some practices that will help to make this decision a reality. Depending on your spiritual frame of reference, have a daily practice of prayer or meditation, start to daily read the Bible or some other spiritual writings you feel drawn to. Associate and get involved with other like-minded people who can support you becoming the you you want to become. This could be groups at church or some other spiritual groups.
8. Get grounded in your new spiritual paradigm. Once you feel that your inner soul life is heading in the right direction, you have a decision to make. Can you continue pursuing the vision that you are off-the-charts passionate about that leads to your life of significance without having your identity and self-worth wrapped up in it?
9. Either way, live your life based on your inner soul. Don’t live to please others or to fulfill your own unrealistic expectations. Enjoy what you are doing as a byproduct of who you are and what you believe. Focus more on the joy of the journey rather than continually striving for goals which can often be unattainable. When our identity is wrapped up in what we do, we continually the move the goalposts, which will virtually ensure we will never be satisfied.
Life is about the journey not just the destination. Achieving our goals and making our mission and vision become reality is not the only thing that is important. It matters a great deal who we are and how we treat people along the way. We are actually defined by who we are, our character, which is often measured by how we show up to others and how are with them. We may indeed achieve some great goals and our mission may succeed beyond our wildest dreams. But at the end of the day, when people are looking back at us, if we have lived our life rightly, people will remember more than what we achieved, they will remember who we were.
Reflection
How much do you have your whole sense of self, your identity, wrapped in what you do, including your cause or mission?
Decide today that will not have your identity wrapped up in your mission and will pursue spiritual practices that support the you that you want to be, whose identity is decoupled from what you do.
Enjoy the journey and focus on the inner work, in part your character, rather than obsessing about the mission. You might find you actually accomplish more.
We share inspirational stories and transformational tools from leaders who have moved beyond life’s most difficult moments to create lives of significance.
We take a look this week at the fifth actionable truth our research has shown us helps you move from trial to triumph: character.
It’s one thing to have beliefs and values, it’s another thing to live them out. So we have to make a choice. Are our beliefs and values going to be a bumper sticker or something hanging on a corporate wall … or are they going to be real? That’s the sum and substance of this week’s conversation.
To come back from our crucible, we really need to live what we believe. That is a critical step on the journey to getting beyond our crucible and leading a life of significance.
To explore Beyond the Crucible resources, including our free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment, visit beyondthecrucible.com.
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and leave a comment at our YouTube channel. And be sure subscribe and tell your friends and family about us.
Have a question or comment? Drop us a line at info@beyondthecrucible.com Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and leave a comment at our YouTube channel and be sure subscribe and tell your friends and family about us.
Have a question or comment? Drop us a line at info@beyondthecrucible.com
Transcript
Warwick Fairfax:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond the Crucible. To move beyond your crucible, it's not enough to know what your beliefs and values are. You have to live them. And this is where character comes in and it's so important. One way of putting it, as we've discussed is character is your belief system in action. So, think about back to that pit analogy. You might say you have beliefs and values, but if that's not making a difference in how you live, I guess I still have this image in my mind that you're still stuck in the pit.
Gary Schneeberger:
Still stuck in the pit, knowing what you believe, the values you hold most dear, but not living them out loud. The antidote to that, we discussed this week in our ongoing look at how our actionable truths accelerate your journey from trial to triumph, is character. Putting into practice what you say is most important to you, walking the walk that you talk, is the key to a life of character that will fuel your life of significance.
Warwick, we have landed on another of our episodes of what we call The Series Within the Show, and this is on our Beyond the Crucible Roadmap. And this is, folks, just to refresh your memories. This is not an entirely new way, but a more laser-focused way of helping you get from your worst day to your greatest opportunity. And we've named it, as I said, the Beyond the Crucible Roadmap.
We describe it this way and I'm going to read it directly off my notes so I get it right, and that is this, how we help people turn their worst day into their greatest opportunity. We provide the essential actionable truths that inspire people to inspire, hope, enable, and equip them to write their own life-affirming story. The roadmap has been built from our proprietary statistically valid research into how people experience crucibles and what we've learned from our experience and the experience of our podcast guests on what it takes to turn trial into triumph.
And the most revolutionary news for us in all of what I've just said, folks, is in analyzing this roadmap, we identified what we're calling the actionable truths of the brand. To pass these life-affirming truths along to you, our listeners and viewers, we are going to do what I said at the outset, our series within a show. Once a month, we're going to unpack some more actionable truth for you to apply to your crucible experience and your bounce back from your crucible experience. So Warwick, as I always do when we have these kinds of episodes, I'm going to ask you why actionable truths? What do we mean by that term?
Warwick Fairfax:
So at Beyond the Crucible, our focus is always how do you get beyond your worst day to lead a life of significance? That's what we're about. That's what our mission is. And we have what we call Beyond the Crucible Roadmap that helped you go from trial, in other words, your crucible, to triumph or what we call a life of significance. A life on purpose dedicated to serving others. So the question is, well, how do you get there from worst day to triumph, from crucible to a life of significance? And we've found that there are 10 actionable truths that we view as catalysts that help propel you forward on your journey to get from your worst day to a life-affirming vision. A time when you're actually triumphing and you're living a life of significance. So these actionable truths have always been implicit in our thinking. You can find them in my book, Crucible Leadership. But now, we're really drawing them out to making them explicit and really helping folks understand how do you go from your worst day to a life of significance? And the key is really following these 10 actionable truths.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah. And it's interesting, and we talk about this sometimes here, is it wasn't the first phrase that popped into our heads, hey, I know what these are, are actionable truths. We really had to explore them. And I think it comes out when we have these episodes of just why we called them that. And I want to ask you this question and maybe you can touch on that. How do these actionable truths we have identified, how do they help us move beyond setback to significance?
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, it's a good question. And really, just to touch on what you're asking, Gary, these are indeed truths, but truths that aren't lived out are not actionable. And interestingly enough, this whole thought about a truth being lived out will come up a bit or a lot in our discussion.
Gary Schneeberger:
Good foreshadowing work. Good foreshadowing.
Warwick Fairfax:
So, this particular actionable truth, it's absolutely true that it doesn't have a lot of meaning without it being actionable. So these actionable truths we view as accelerators or enablers, they're almost like rocket fuel for your engine. It's great to have an engine, but without fuel, your car's going nowhere. So they really help accelerate you on the journey to get from your worst day to a life of significance, from trial to triumph. And I think you can make a good case that without these actionable truths, you are not escaping the pit of despair. You are not escaping your worst day, you were just stuck there, potentially permanently. So they're absolutely critical to getting out of the pit, getting beyond your worst day and living that life-affirming vision, that life of significance that we all want to lead.
Gary Schneeberger:
I love the fact that you used the word accelerant because it really is. It really is. And that wasn't something that came out of the initial research on this, it's something that you just developed as we were talking about it, but it really is, folks, if you've seen a Fast and Furious movie, I've seen all 10 of them, they do accelerants in their engines pretty much all the time. They put some nitrous oxide stuff in there and it makes the engines go faster. That's what we're talking about here is an accelerant that will help you propel you along your journey, right? That's the sum and substance of it. It's an accelerant that propels you along this journey.
Warwick Fairfax:
Absolutely. Maybe we should have just called them nitrous oxide.
Gary Schneeberger:
There you go.
Warwick Fairfax:
[inaudible 00:06:47] need some nitrous oxide. But if you're not a fan of Fast and Furious, you might be like nitrous oxide? What's?
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, it's an additive. You can pump into your engine to make it go faster, basically.
Warwick Fairfax:
But without advocating that your average car user put that in their engine at home.
Gary Schneeberger:
Correct. Yes, yes. This is not, take your Toyota Corolla and put nitrous oxide in it. This is something that Vin Diesel wants to drive really fast and really furiously, but that's just an example of how that can work. This is our fifth episode Warwick, on unpacking these truths. And I'm going to read because I think it's important to talk about where we've been so far. So you guys who are listening and watching, you can go back if you've missed one, you can revisit one because these are all interconnected. They all hook together. So, I'm going to start at the beginning. We began to stroll through the roadmap talking about where the trial begins, and that's the crucible. And then where it begins to move toward the beyond, step two, actionable truth two is self-reflection.
Then we turned to what we determined as the critical turning point to begin the forward motion to changing circumstances we find ourselves in after a crucible. It's the second step in which we move into truly processing what we've been through, and that's where we are now. There's three steps in the processing phase. The first step in that which we discussed a couple of months ago, is authenticity. That's the first step of processing, authenticity. The second step, which we did last month was faith. Now, we're going to do a conversation, we're going to unpack what this fifth point is, the last point in the processing phase, and that is indeed, character. So let me pose this question to you, Warwick. Why is character so critical as the fifth step after a crucible in the journey of recovering from a crucible? What's the importance of character?
Warwick Fairfax:
So, if I had to define character, it's really living out your beliefs and values, your faith, in your everyday life. Beliefs and values are not very meaningful unless they lived out. Having them as a bumper sticker in your car or putting them on the wall of your conference room or read about a whole bunch of values, that's great. But if beliefs and values aren't lived out, they're almost useless. They're not really very helpful. So, we believe that people of character, they don't just talk about their beliefs and values, they live them. In fact, sometimes, it's better to actually not talk about them so much and live them.
So, we've spoken about the need to self-reflect after a crucible, the need to be authentic to your true self and the need to ground your journey as you're getting out of the pit in your beliefs and values. In other words, faith. But to move beyond your crucible, it's not enough to know what your beliefs and values are. You have to live them. And this is where character comes in and is so important. One way of putting it as we've discussed is character is your belief system in action.
So think about back to that pit analogy. You might say you have beliefs and values, but if that's not making a difference in how you live, I guess I still have this image in my mind that you're still stuck in the pit. These truths, these, in this case, the actionable truth of faith, it has to be lived out, which is character. It has to be lived out on the journey. So, that's really what character is. It's living out your most cherished, deepest [inaudible 00:11:07], belief and values is your faith. That is the definition of character as we look at it.
Gary Schneeberger:
Right. And speaking of definitions of character, every episode in this series within the show, folks, I have pulled something from what I call Webster's 1848, right? Is that right? 1828. I haven't been in it so long, I forgot. Every month I have to get into it more often. Webster's 1828, Noah Webster's first dictionary, the American Dictionary of the English language. And I pull, here's the definition of the word that we're talking about today. And this one's particularly fascinating. It says, by way of eminence, distinguished or good qualities, those which are esteemed and respected, that's character, and those which are ascribed to a person in common estimation. "We inquire," it says here, "Whether a stranger is a man of character." And it occurs to me, Warwick, as I read that definition, and as I heard you talk about it, that character might be the first totally outward-facing calling card that we have in the actionable truths, right?
If we're going through the other ones, a crucible... I've been through crucibles, I haven't talked about. People don't know that about me necessarily even if I interact with them quite a bit. They don't know about my self-reflection habits, they may not know much about my authenticity if they're not around me much and they may not know a lot about my faith. But your character tends to, as this definition from Webster says, your character tends to follow you around. People know about your character, people talk about your character or lack thereof. And this seems a little bit like the first calling card of our actionable truths. Character is something people I think, know about us, even if we don't know them very well. Is that anywhere near the bullseye of what might be true?
Warwick Fairfax:
It is. No, it's an exceptionally good point. When you say somebody is a person of character, you mean good character, you don't mean bad character. And typically, I'd like to think most people's beliefs and values tend to be altruistic. Yes, I guess you could have a belief and value system in which I'm going to rip people off, crush everybody that I can. It's all about greed and money. But typically, the issue for most of us, it's not that we have bad beliefs and values, it's just we don't live them. That's for most people. So if you live your beliefs and values, assuming that they're good ones, by definition you'll be a person of character, a person of good character. And the way we judge people typically is not so much what they say about how their belief systems are, it's more are they living them out. That's how we assess people.
We're not saying, I just gave you this test on your belief and values, depending on your faith or spiritual background, and you aced that test, that's great. Most people could care less. If you know everything about your religion, faith system, whether it's Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, whatever it is, your average person says, "Well, that's great. I'm glad you have a belief system and that's fine." But they're more interested, are you living that out? How does that manifest itself in the way you treat other people? That's what people are interested in. And to the degree that you don't, they might say, "Well, I'll probably spend a bit less time with you because it's not an enjoyable experience because you're living out something is very different than what you say you are. And I don't know this whole antagonism and crushing people and I don't know, I don't really want to be around people like that." So people will distance themselves from you. So, yes, being people of character, good character, it has a huge influence and impact in your life and others.
Gary Schneeberger:
And it has, right... As we've said, as we've been talking about here, it goes before you, right? People will know before you meet them in many cases whether your character is good or bad or known or unknown. And I just think that's why the Webster's Dictionary is so helpful and why this conversation is so helpful.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. And just to your point, people who are people of character, of good character, word will travel. That person, we've heard about Gary, he's a person of character. He's a person of good character. We've heard about him, we know people that know him. Certainly, bad news travels fast. I don't know if good news travels quite as fast, but it will travel and you get a reputation. And so, your character does matter. It's nice to be with people when they say to you, "I've heard a lot of good things about you, great to meet you." As opposed to, "Oh yeah, I've heard all about you." Which typically means something very different.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, for sure. So, let's move on now, Warwick. There are two stages of our research, qualitative and quantitative, I said at the beginning, and they've shown us that people experience, in this still early section of the roadmap, this idea of again, needing to process what's going on. The first thing that they have to process is overcoming fear. How does character help us overcome fear?
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. It's a good question. It's one thing to have beliefs and values, and as we've said, it's another thing to live them out. That's character. It's a strange thing, having beliefs and values inside where nobody gets to see them, that's fairly safe. But we can often be afraid that if we start living out our beliefs and values, and let's assume maybe we didn't so much before, that maybe they weren't like us. You were the fun-loving guy or woman that was sarcastic, put people down, hey, it was all in jest. It was all fun. Of course the person you're putting down didn't feel it was so fun, but all your buddies thought it was just hilarious and maybe you, I don't know, drank too much. Or maybe you cut some corners at work and hey, everybody does it. And you're showing your buddies how to cut corners and wow, that's pretty nifty. And boy, I'm learning a lot from this person.
And then you start changing. Maybe you are not as sarcastic, you don't drink as much, you don't cut corners at work. And it's like, well, hang on, you're going soft. You're getting all boring. Where's the color? You're some black and white boring person if you've got religion, I mean, what's the deal here? And we fear that, that our friends will reject us or we might have a different fear. We might feel that these beliefs and values, our faith, that it's impossible to meet the mark. We're going to fall short. And we might think that maybe we'll feel like we're a hypocrite. We have these beliefs and values, we can't possibly live them. And maybe others that we know well hear about, gee, we have this set of beliefs and values and say, aha, got you. You didn't live it out that time. Maybe you were short with that person, you yelled at them or impatient, so much for your faith, your belief and values. You didn't exhibit it there.
So we have this fear that either other people will mock us because we've changed or that we're not meeting the mark of what we say that we'll do or we feel like internally, within us, that we're hypocrites. We're just not living up to what we believe. So it might make us almost like a turtle. We just go into a shell and it's like, it's scary being outside. Let's just keep those beliefs and values inside us because if we stick our heads out, we'll get mocked by others or by ourselves. So, it can be pretty scary if not very scary, living out your beliefs and values, your faith. It sounds good in theory, living them out and being a person of character. But in the real world, it can be scary and we don't want to be mocked and we don't want to feel like, oh, we're going to fail because we're not going to be that good every day. So, there's a lot of fear involved with living out your beliefs and values and being a person of character.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah. I think sometimes, that character and faith right behind that, character, faith, authenticity, those things are often in this section about fear, are often at war maybe, with being liked, being applauded, being someone everybody wants to hang out with. Generally speaking, and I've gone through this, we've talked about my experiences in the years I was an alcoholic. I was the life of the party, I was all those things. I stuck my turtle's head inside my turtle shell a little bit after I got sober because I wasn't sure people were going to like the new not imbibing version of Gary. So, I know exactly what that feels like and it was hard.
It's hard to build character after you've had an experience where you've lived a certain way that you weren't exactly manifesting character. It wasn't actually something that was even in you, but then when you develop it to live it out in front of other people, that can be really scary because the fear is exactly what you just described. The fear is, oh my gosh, they're not going to like me anymore. They only like me because of X, Y, and Z, that didn't show a lot of character. That seems to be what's at odds here as we're coming back from a crucible, is these three in a row that we've talked about, authenticity, faith, and now character, seem sometimes they can be in opposition to living a life on purpose dedicated to serving others. The goal of moving beyond a crucible.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, that's really true. Especially if you've lived one way and you're making a change that's discernible if not significant. You have to ask yourself, well, do I still want to be with these friends? Maybe they're living a lifestyle that I didn't really respect, but hey, we're all in the same boat together, so, who am I to judge? And again, it's not about judging people, but we're all doing this together. But when you start making a change and they're mocking you, I think in general, if you have some degree of self-respect, you don't want to be around people that mock you or put you down.
Most people of character will say that a person of character doesn't mock, tease in a mean way. So that's tough. And we will talk about this here in a moment, but it really requires a lot of inner soul work. We say a lot at Beyond the Crucible that the inner work precedes the outer work. Doing that inner soul work saying, what are my beliefs and values? Do I believe in them or is it just some bumper sticker? If I believe in them, shouldn't I try to live them out. And okay, I may not be perfect, but who is? And this is probably a different subject, but related, you have to give yourself grace. We're all human. We're not going to be our best selves every day. We're going to be short, cranky, maybe 90% of the time we do a great job. Maybe a lot was going on and that job you did that day wasn't your best work. Maybe there were reasons, maybe you had a family emergency.
There's all sorts of things that can happen in which you don't live up to your highest standards. It's inevitable that we'll fall short. Well, you've got to give yourself grace. It doesn't mean you're bad in your beliefs and values just because you can't live them every day. It's more from my perspective, the way God assesses us. Obviously from a Christian perspective, we're saved by grace through Christ's death and resurrection. But it's more, as you evaluate your life over the course of the decades, as a whole, did you live your beliefs and values? Yes, you fell short, but if you did some sort of balance sheet of your life, would people say this person has a legacy of love and grace and forgiveness, humility, integrity? Or is it no, this person really has a legacy of yelling at people, ripping people off and fragile ego. What would people say at your funeral?
And really, that's really what it's about. It's not falling short on any given day, it's over the totality of your life, are you living at your beliefs and values? Are you a person of character? So that's really how you got to measure it. But yeah, it's not easy when you have obviously some decisions to make.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah. And here's the good news, folks, because we all do it. Like Warwick said, we all will fall short of the character and the goals we have for our character. Here's the good news, we talk a lot about forgiveness here at Beyond the Crucible. There can be a precursor to that on the other side of that equation, and that's apology. So when you do fall short of the character that you want to live out, it's most people, and trust me, you can't have an alcoholic background as I have without knowing the power of apology and then without knowing just how many people, an overwhelming majority of people will extend that forgiveness to you when you muster the courage to offer that apology. So it's not a dead end, right? Feeling like you haven't done everything right. No, no. What am I going to do? Apology can make a lot of headway for you in that regard.
Warwick Fairfax:
And what's interesting is often, the last person to offer grace to ourselves is us. It's very often that other people will forgive us, give us some slack, especially if we're contrite and apologize and say, "Yeah, that wasn't so smart. Yeah, I'm sorry." But yeah, I think we have to learn to be better at giving ourselves grace. It doesn't mean you just keep doing dumb and bad stuff and hurting people. That's not true grace. But when you try to change, you're making progress, you fall short. If other people are willing to cut you some slack and give you some grace, we should. That's an area that I think many of us need to grow in.
And why is all this important? What does this have to do with character? Well, if you make one mistake and you are not living out your beliefs and values, we don't want people to just abandon the whole mission and say, "Oh, forget that. I failed two weeks ago." That was two weeks ago. Keep going. Don't abandon the journey to live out your beliefs and values. It's not like one strike and you're out. That's not the way to look at it. So cut yourself some slack, give yourself some grace that will actually help you be a person of character.
Gary Schneeberger:
Absolutely. Let's move on now to the second step in the process of processing how to come back from your crucible. And that's this, committing to change, right? That's the next step. You've got to commit to change. That can be a difficult thing. How does leaning into your character help us accomplish that?
Warwick Fairfax:
This is where you really have to make a choice. Are our beliefs and values, our faith, our most cherished things that we believe in? Is that going to be a bumper sticker? Is that going to be a plaque on a wall? Is that going to be like Enron, the company that all these wonderful mottos about how to treat people and did the exact opposite? Is it's going to be like a number of corporations that don't live their values? Certainly, some do, but some don't. Are they going to just be something that is inside us but never lived out or is it going to be real? And that's where, especially when you're coming back from your crucible, we need to live what we believe. If we say we have certain belief systems and values, a certain faith, we need to live that out. And that's absolutely critical to get from your worst day, from your crucible, to get beyond and to lead a life of significance.
And as I think about accomplishing goals and our vision, and obviously, it's our hope at Beyond the Crucible that these will be laudable goals and visions that lead to a life of significance, a life on purpose dedicated to serving others. And that's great to have a lofty goal and a lofty vision, especially if it's tied to a life of significance. But I think it's, a life is as much about the journey as a destination. How do we treat people? Even if we're accomplishing these lofty goals, and maybe it's cleaning up a park in a downtown neighborhood or providing water in certain countries in Africa or Asia. It could be all sorts of things. Having a company with sustainable products, there could be many laudable goals.
But if in the process of trying to achieve these worthwhile goals, we're snapping at people, we're firing them, it's like, look, this is important, we're trying to help people. You're not cutting it. You need to go and just firing people without giving them a chance. Really, what does it matter what the goal is if you don't have character along the journey?
So for me, character, which is how we live out our beliefs and values, our faith, is as important if not more important than our goals and our vision, irrespective of how worthwhile those goals and vision are, it's absolutely critical. So we need to make a commitment to change, to be people of character that truly lives out our beliefs and values. Yes, we might get flack from our old buddies, we might get flack from ourselves saying, "Gosh, this is so hard and I failed yesterday." But really, the key step is, okay, maybe I'll fail. Maybe some of my friends won't like it. Okay, well maybe lose some of those friends, get new ones that like to new you and respect who you are and cut yourself some slack, give yourself some grace, but you've just got to make that commitment to change.
It won't be easy. Not everybody's going to like it, but if these beliefs and values are going to mean anything, I need to live them. I need to be a person of character. Otherwise, what's the point? So you've got to make that line in the sand decision. I'm going to be a person of character, a person of good character, and I'm going to live out my beliefs and values and that's going to be one of the most important things in my life. Being a person of character. That is not some hypocrite, that never lives out their beliefs and values. Who wants to be that person? How can you look at yourself in the mirror? It's one thing to give yourself some grace from occasional mistake. It's another thing to say, yes, your character is basically a barren desert with the odd oasis of drop of water in there, but by and large, your character is just this wasteland.
Is that who you want to be? Is that how you want to be perceived? Your legacy? Eulogies at your funeral? You want to make life easier for your family so that they find it easy to think of good things to say rather than, gosh, I've got to give a 20-minute eulogy and I got nothing. I can't think of one good thing to say. It's so sad. Don't do that to your family and friends. Make it easy for them.
Gary Schneeberger:
Warwick, we've reached my favorite part of these episodes work. It's my favorite part of these episodes because we get to examine how, who I call Patient Zero. And that is you, the host, Warwick Fairfax, how these actionable truths have helped you move from trial to triumph in your own life. And I'll ask you straight up and very succinctly, how did character help you begin to move beyond your crucible, which you've talked about many times on this show?
Warwick Fairfax:
When you go through a crucible as I have, and I think many of us and many listening and watching will have gone through, it's a huge test of your beliefs and values, your faith, and it's also a huge test of your character. I would say, one of my most cherished values, if you will, is being authentic and living out my beliefs and values. I don't want to be a hypocrite. I realize I'll fall short. But living out what I believe has always been of paramount importance to me, from my earliest memory, I've always wanted to be a good person, a person of character, if you will. For me, my beliefs and values is centered in my faith in Christ. And my faith became really, the anchor for my soul, the anchor for my life at an evangelical Anglican church at Oxford.
And that church at Oxford University, really, it changed my life. And that faith was certainly tested after my failed $2.25 billion Takeover of my family's 150-year-old media company. That takeover, I launched a 1987 after my father died. He was in his 80s at the time, I was from his third marriage. And three years later in 1990, the company ultimately went into bankruptcy. It had too much debt it was part of the takeover. And that whole episode was a massive crucible. Not so much because of the money I'd lost, but it was more that the company was founded by my great-great-grandfather, John Fairfax. And he bought the small paper, the Sydney Herald, which became the Sydney Morning Herald when he bought it in 1841. And he was a person of great faith. And over the generations, his company became a very large company with newspapers, magazines, TV, newsprint mills, radio stations. But it was my belief, rightly or wrongly, that the company had strayed from the values of the founder who was a person of great faith.
And so, when takeover failed, it was devastating because I felt that God had a plan to resurrect the company and the image of the founder, and I blew it. It was beyond excruciating. It was absolutely devastating. So, I had to do something of soul work, and I came to believe that if God had wanted the takeover to work out that it would have. And despite my mistakes, which were many, I came to believe that God had a different plan for my life. So, this is really where character comes in. I committed my life to Christ in late March 1982 when I was at Oxford. And would I abandon my faith? Would I just go into my shell? Would I live out my beliefs and values or would I abandon them? Would I be angry at God somehow saying, "Hey, how come I grow up in this sort of challenging family with lots of infighting?" And it was a very difficult situation that I grew up in.
Would I be angry at God? The universe? Other family members? Some of them had thrown my father out as chairman in 1970. So, there was a lot of things that I could be angry about if I'd wanted to and just be a person of anger and bitterness and resentment and wallow in what might have been, what could have been, but what will never be? Yes, there could have been a dark pit that I would've lived in and wallowed in forever, for decades. The company went under in 1990, that's a lot of decades to wallow in, if I'd taken that path, made that choice. But fortunately, and I think through the grace of God, I made a different choice.
I never blamed anybody else other than myself. It wasn't quite as simple as all my fault, although that tended to be what I thought at the time in the early '90s. But I never blamed God. It was my mistakes. So I never drifted from my beliefs and values. If anything, I doubled down and clung to it even more. So in that sense, I really did try to live my beliefs and values. The way it really works out for me in day to day and I talk about this, I guess, a fair amount in my book, Crucible Leadership, if you ask me in terms of character, what are your highest values in terms of how do you want to live that out day to day? I would say integrity and humility. Those are my highest values that I'd like to think form my character, at least how I want my character to be.
And so, integrity is, I think, I would look at it, is doing what you say you're going to do. Being an honest person, being a person that doesn't shade the truth, cut corners at work. The person of integrity is somebody that you can trust. They do what they say. They don't lie. Obfuscate, tell half-truths. They do what they say they're going to do. And humility to me means that they're humble, they don't think of themselves more highly than they should. And given that I grew up with a lot of parent money, at least perceived parent money and a very large family business in Sydney, Australia, people don't tend to think of people like that as humble. And so, it was really important to me to be a humble person, to not think of myself as any better than the next person.
We're all different. We all have different upbringings. Just because you grew up poor or wealthy or whatever background, that's really not the issue. It's more the character of your heart that matters. So integrity and humility were absolutely crucial. And obviously, when you grow up in a wealthy background, humility tends to be somewhat uncommon. You don't see it every day, unfortunately. Parent money tend to make people arrogant, also insecure, but certainly, arrogant. So it's always been of utmost important to me to be a person of character that lives out their beliefs and values.
For me, I'm certainly not perfect. I can be short, I can be impatient. That's certainly true. But to me, it matters how I treat people. I try to listen to people. I try to treat people as I would like to be treated, often called the Golden Rule in the Bible, and I try to be a person of integrity and humility. So to me, I'll make mistakes, I'll fall short, but it's important to me to try to be a person of integrity and humility, a person of faith that lives it out, a person of character, every day. I would say it's more important to me to be a person of character who lives out their believes and values and their faith than accomplishing any vision or goal. We have visions and goals at Beyond the Crucible and that's important, but living out my beliefs and values and being a person of character, that's absolutely critical.
Gary Schneeberger:
That question you just answered, Warwick, and that I asked you, I'll phrase it up again. I asked you, how did character help you to move beyond your crucible? Now, I'm going to ask you, how does character help you to lead Beyond the Crucible? How does character, the actionable truth of character, living out your faith in character, how does that help you in what you do with Beyond the Crucible?
Warwick Fairfax:
It's an interesting question. I do try and live what I believe. I try to surround myself with like-minded people. They don't necessarily have the same faith as I do, but they have to have a common vision. They have to believe that life is not about us. It's about other people. It's about a higher purpose. It's about how you treat people along the journey. I want fellow travelers, as we call them, with those sets of beliefs. And at Beyond the Crucible to the best of my ability, which again, I certainly fall short, but it's important to me how I treat my team members, how we treat the guests we have at Beyond the Crucible. We have a variety of guests with a lot of different backgrounds, belief systems. I try to respect everybody that's on the podcast, irrespective of whether I believe in all of their belief systems or not. That's irrelevant.
They have, from my perspective, the God-given right to believe what they believe, to follow their path. That's a part of being a person of character, is respecting them, giving them space to tell their story, listening to them, asking deeper questions so that the innermost truth comes out. That's important to me. Not believing that I'm better than anybody else. So, it's important to me that I try to live these values out at Beyond the Crucible every day in everything I'm involved in. Whether it's Beyond the Crucible or being an elder at my church or... There's a variety of things that I'm involved in, that being a person of character that listens to people, is curious about their story, is not judging them or not mocking them. I hate mocking and teasing. I try never to do it to other people. It's just something that you might think it's funny, but typically, other people, they might laugh, but they don't typically think it's funny, especially if you've got a good one that hits the mark, that there's some truth to it.
Some families feel that's really fun and maybe it works for them, and if it does, without dragging them down, okay. But for me, no. I always try to listen to people and just build them up to offer words of encouragement. So yes, it's really, really critically important to me at Beyond the Crucible and with my family and elder at church and everywhere that I try to my utmost ability, live out my beliefs and values and be a person of character. I'd say that's, I probably shouldn't say this, but likely is more important to me, than achieving whatever visions and goals we have at Beyond the Crucible.
Not that that's not important, but it's never enough. With goals and vision, there'll always be another level and you can just drive yourself crazy because it's hard to achieve all of them. But being a person of character, we'll have our bad days, but everybody can be a person of character. This doesn't depend on background, wealth, where you live, who you're married to, how many kids you have, none of that is relevant. Everybody has the ability today to be a person of character, live out their beliefs and values. It's a choice. It's a lifestyle. It's a decision. You just have to say, yes, I'm going to fail, but I will be a person of character. I will be somebody who people respect and the right kind of people want to be around.
That's completely possible. You can do it today. It doesn't take a six-month or a five-year training program. You don't need a PhD. How do you do this again? And what is this like? And I get it. I need a lot more instruction. I need a lot more coaching. It's a decision. It's an action of the will to be a person of character. Everybody can do it. It's just saying, I'm going to live what I believe. I'm not going to be hypocrite. I'm not going to pull people down. I'm going to be a person of character. Everybody can do that today.
Gary Schneeberger:
Well, I don't say this to you often on the show, but I'm going to say it now. You were wrong when you said you probably shouldn't have said that because you not only made a very important point for folks who were listening and watching to know, but you also... It doubled as the captain turning on the fasten seatbelt sign indicating that we've begun our descent to end our conversation. Before we do end the conversation, now, Warwick, I'm going to ask you what I always ask you to do at the end of one of these episodes, and that is, hey, we've covered a lot of ground here. What's one takeaway you'd like our friends to come away from this episode with?
Warwick Fairfax:
Having beliefs and values and faith is important. I do not denigrate it. I have my beliefs and values, my faith in Christ. It's the anchor. It's the driving force of my life. I pray. I read scripture. I'm in a live group. I go to church. I'm very passionate about my faith in my own understated way. I believe that thrusting it on other people, it's just not my way. So yes, having belief and values and having faith is important, but faith that is not lived out, that's character, is not very helpful. I would say it's almost a waste. It's pointless. Faith that is not lived out makes us look like hypocrites. It might make us feel like a hypocrite and faith that is not lived out, as I said before, it makes people say, "Well, if that's what a person of faith is, who needs it? Clearly it's something that I don't want."
Why would you want people to say who needs that faith? It's meaningless. If you really believe to your core in those belief in values and your faith, you don't want people to think it's pointless and it's worthless. That will be devastating to most of us. So having character is really, really important. And I think as we've said, to come back from your worst day, your crucible, it's critical to live out our beliefs and values day to day, which is character. The end goal that we have here at Beyond the Crucible is to lead a life of significance, a life on purpose, dedicated to serving others. Is it really possible to lead a life of significance without character? Without living out your beliefs and values? I would say it really is not. Your vision, your goal, however noble it is, it will be pointless.
Most people will see, well, yeah, it was a great vision, but my gosh, they walked on so many people. They mistreated so many. It was really pointless. You will get no respect. It definitely, if not greatly, will adversely affect your ability to accomplish that vision. So, a life without character, a life without living out your beliefs and values, it's a pointless life. That's a life that nobody wants to live. That's a legacy and a funeral service and a eulogy that wherever we are in the next life, if you look at it, if for some reason, you can look down or maybe heaven forbid, it's look up and listen to that eulogy, it won't be pleasant. We want to be people of character. We want to live out our beliefs and values every day. There are a few more important things in life than living out your beliefs and values and being a person of character.
Gary Schneeberger:
Well, folks, gather up your peanut bags and your empty bottles of water because we have landed the plane. Our host, Warwick Fairfax got us on the ground. And remember, as we depart, this is just the fifth actionable truth that we'll be discussing in depth this year, in 2025. Each month, except for our summer series, which is coming up. So each month for another month at least, we will take a look at a new one and how it's connected to the previous one to build out the Roadmap. And the next time, the one we will be discussing, and I'm calling on you, Scott, get ready. Get your best Ringo ready, because right now we need a drum roll because the next actionable truth we're talking about is vision. So until the next time we're together, folks, remember this. We want you to believe these truths that we talk about, but we also want you to act on them because that's what's going to help you move along the Roadmap from trial to triumph. We will see you next week.
Welcome to a journey of transformation with Beyond the Crucible assessment. Unlike any other, this tool is designed to guide you from adversity to achievement. As you answer a few insightful questions, you won't just find a label like the Helper or the Individualist. Instead, you'll uncover your unique position in the journey of resilience. This assessment reveals where you stand today, the direction you should aim for, and crucially, the steps to get there. It's more than an assessment. It's a roadmap to a life of significance. Ready? Visit beyondthecrucible.com. Take the free assessment and start charting your course to a life of significance today.
His Greatest Adrenaline Rush? Serving Others: John Graham
John Graham shipped out on a freighter to Asia when he was 16, hitchhiked through the Algerian Revolution at 19 and was on the team that made the first ascent of Mt. McKinley’s North Wall at 20, a climb so dangerous it’s never been repeated. He hitchhiked around the world at 22, working as a correspondent for the Boston Globe in every war he came across.
A U.S. Foreign Service Officer for fifteen years, he served in Libya during the 1969 revolution and in one of the most difficult and dangerous areas in Vietnam during the war there.. For three years in the mid-seventies, he was a member of NATO’s top-secret Nuclear Planning Group, then served as a foreign policy advisor for Sen. John Glenn. During a posting at the United Nations, however, his life began to turn. He became deeply involved in U.S. human rights initiatives, including the fight against apartheid in South Africa.
Still, something was missing. In 1980, a close brush with death aboard a burning cruise ship in a typhoon in the North Pacific forced him to accept a deeper meaning for his life. He found it in 1983, when he became and still works as a leader of the Giraffe Heroes Project, a global nonprofit moving people to stick their necks out for the common good—and giving them the tools to succeed
To learn more about John Graham, visit www.johngraham.org
To explore Beyond the Crucible resources, including our free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment, visit beyondthecrucible.com.
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Have a question or comment? Drop us a line at info@beyondthecrucible.com
Transcript
Warwick Fairfax:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond The Crucible.
John Graham:
This voice comes booming out of the storm, and it says basically, "Here you are. You're lecturing on a cruise ship. You get out of this one, you lecture on another cruise ship. It's a pretty copacetic way to earn a living, right? And yeah, yeah, yeah, you helped end apartheid. That's good. But you seem to have left those ideals behind, John. And so you have to make a decision here. This is the crunch point. You have to make a decision. Either you keep on with what you started at the UN and devote your life to peace and justice issues, making the world a better place, and we'll see what will happen out here. On the other hand, if you don't do that, you might as well die out here because the rest of your life won't be worth living."
Gary Schneeberger :
That's our guest this week, John Graham, describing the moment he thought he was going to die during a fire on a cruise ship in the middle of a typhoon. On a lifeboat losing hope that he would be rescued, he says that voice he describes shook him, but not because of what it said to him, but because of what it said about him. A seeker of adventure since age 16, crisscrossing the globe in search of his next jolt of adrenaline, he took the voice's exhortation to heart, and stopped living for himself and began living to serve others. That's the life of significance he's built over more than 40 years now through his work with the Giraffe Heroes Project.
Warwick Fairfax:
Well, welcome, John. It's so good to have you. I really enjoyed watching the video and just learning a bit about you from stuff on the website and other sources, and you've lived a fascinating life, really a life of adventure. It's hard to believe one individual could have as many experiences as you have, which is just incredible. And I understand you grew up in Washington state, I think I saw somewhere in the Tacoma area.
So I'd love to hear a bit about the backstory of were there clues in your childhood, your upbringing, that led you to being such an adventurous person who done things that most of us have never even thought of doing, but you've just had a remarkable journey. So any clues in your childhood as you look back, saying, "Well, I can see how I ended up where I ended up and doing what I'm doing"?
John Graham:
Well, thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here. And clues, you know, it's interesting because Tacoma, Washington, where I grew up, is a very ordinary little city in America, and I come from a very ordinary middle-class family. Nothing exciting ever happens in Tacoma. Nothing exciting ever happened in my family, and I just grew up with a nice mom who cooked good meals, and my dad worked selling advertising for the local newspaper. And I was miserable because I was constantly being bullied by other kids in school.
So I grew up very smart. One thing I had going for me was that I was really smart, but I hated being kicked around by the bullies. And I grew so fast that I was uncoordinated, so I couldn't throw a football or kick a soccer ball or whatever. I couldn't do athletics, and it was a pretty miserable teen for me.
And then everything changed. I won't get into all the details, but by some series of miracles, I ended up when I was just 17 years old at the crucial point, the really beginning of my life, when I shipped out on a freighter to the Far East, and I don't know why my mother, a good Catholic Croatian, let me go because she knew perfectly well that a 17-year-old on a ship in those years was going to face some significant, how shall I say it, moral challenges. In those years, this is like 1959 or so, there were no container ships. These were big cargo ships run by 50 or 60 really tough guys. And they were totally different than my father or the people that I knew in Tacoma, Washington. And I soon found myself on this freighter heading for the Far East.
And the very first night, or maybe it was the second night, one of the seamen comes up to me on the deck and begins making sexual advances, 17-year-old boy. And another guy, a big Black guy named Roy, he must've weighed 250 pounds, he grabs this other seamen who had accosted me, shoves him up against the bulkhead, and there was a magnificent stream of cussing. I never heard cussing like that in my life. He was magnificent. And Roy beats the guy around the head and tosses him down on the deck.
And that evening, I went back to the cabin and I thought, "Oh my God. Oh my God. There's a whole new world out there." And I went up to the mirror and I practiced taking an imaginary person and shoving him up against the bulkhead. And then I practiced cussing like Roy because Roy all of a sudden became the model of manhood I'd never had. My father, I loved my father, of course, he was a nice guy, but a very, very weak man. He was constantly being shoved aside by other more aggressive males everywhere he went, and I was being bullied and so I needed a strong role model, and I didn't have any until Roy. And here was this right as 250-pound guy, and he was perfect.
The next year I found myself hitchhiking in Europe, and by then, I began to realize that the world was a huge, more colorful place than I'd ever thought because that trip in the Far East was, well, it started after Roy. The first port of call was a small port in the Philippines where the ship was three times as long as the dock. We were picking up coconuts, I think. And it was the first stop. And so Roy says, "Come on with us." And I went with all the seamen down to the local little village there where they promptly took me to a local dive because they were convinced they were going to give me life lessons they knew I'd never get in school, and I won't go into detail, but they sure did.
Anyway, I got roaring drunk and a brawl broke out. The next morning, I woke up with a hell of a hangover, and it lasted all the way to Hong Kong. But nevermind, I had seen the world, and the world was not my dad. The world was not Tacoma, Washington. The world was huge and colorful and exciting, barroom brawls and seamen and stuff, tearing into pirates. Whew. And I resolved then that that's what I wanted my life to be like.
So anyway, the next year, I'm hitchhiking and I see from the youth hostel in Zermatt that there's a war still going on in Algeria, the colonial war between the French and the rebels. And so I said, "Hey, a war? That's cool." And so I hitchhiked down to Morocco. I stepped across the border. There's no border because it's a war, right? And I'm smart enough though to put an American flag on my chest so that the rebels don't take me for a Frenchman and shoot me. On the contrary, the rebels were great. They stopped cars going in my direction at gunpoint and told the driver to take me wherever I wanted to go.
So I'm hitchhiking through Algeria, and the next role models I got were a detachment of French foreign legionnaires who ran the power plant and still did in Olinghamville. And there were three guys, and they were surrounded by the rebels, thousands of rebels, three guys with a couple of shotguns and a rifle, but they had tattoos all over the place, and they were French foreign legionnaires, which as you know, means that they probably escaped from a jail someplace, so they were big tough guys.
And I remember we were having dinner out on their patio and a machine gun opens up not that far away, and I dive under the table. They just laugh. "Ha! Oh, no. They try. They're just scaring us. We operate the power plant. They shoot us, the power goes out. They can't do that here." So we got Roy and we got these French legionnaires. From then on, my life path, I thought, was set. I needed to be like these guys, these tough guys. And so everything I read, every movie I saw, I wanted to be John Wayne, et cetera, et cetera.
At the same time, I needed to make myself that kind of a person. So when I went to college, I finally began to grow up a little bit, and I rowed crew for Harvard, and I put on about 30 pounds of muscle, and all of a sudden I became 6'5" really tough guy myself so I could start doing all kinds of adventures. And I did.
Second year in college, I'm with a bunch of people, a bunch of guys in the mountaineering club, and we make the first direct descent of the North Wall of Mount McKinley in Alaska, the most dangerous climb in North America. It's still one of the most epic climbs in North American mountaineering. And we dodged death a half a dozen times, carasses, rock falls, avalanches, rushing rivers, whatever.
And I kept surviving all this stuff, you know? And I became convinced not only did I want to be like Roy and the French foreign legionnaires and John Wayne, I was going to live through it all, that none of these physical adventures was ever going to do me in. So I then began to live a life where nothing mattered but the next adrenaline rush.
So I'm going to stop right now because this is how you... And I'm trying to answer your first question without getting ahead.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, yeah, no. No, it's-
John Graham:
But that's how, that was the first shaping moment of my life, and it took a couple years of absolutely wild-ass adventures. I kept walking away from it in one piece, and it was a frigging miracle, but a lot happened after that, but that was the beginning.
Warwick Fairfax:
I love what you said. I think in the '60s, you were at University of Adelaide. Can you describe your activities there? It's hard not to fall off your chair laughing with you. I mean, so you write here, "I spent almost all my time in mines and prospecting the Outback, drinking beer and chasing girls. Heck, I was 22. A bar fight in Tennant Creek in the geographic center of Australia was memorable."
I mean, you were one adventurous guy. It's just I love your just sense of humor and authenticity, and you were just living your life, just experiencing the world. So that's just, that's incredible.
John Graham:
Well, and I kept walking away from it all because when I graduated college, I was then totally hooked on being an adventurer. The only thing I wanted to do was live a life with these kinds of adventures. And so I hitchhiked around the world, took a year off and hitchhiked around the world, ended up in Australia, as you pointed out, chasing girls and drinking beer. But that was only going to be for a year or so. I still needed to find some way of being an adventurer. I wasn't independently wealthy, so how was I going to do that?
Well, I could have... On the way to Australia, I got a contract with the Boston Globe to write foreign correspondent articles for them, and I did so on every war I went across. So on the way to Australia, I stopped off and walked into the wars in the, let me see if I get this straight, Cyprus, Laos, and Vietnam. Yes. So I wrote stories, and of course I lived through all that stuff, wrote some terrific stories.
So when I got to Australia, I had a choice of becoming a correspondent. The Boston Globe wanted to hire me, but I also got a letter from the US Foreign Service offering me a job, as I passed all the tests, as a US Foreign Service officer. And that seemed like what I wanted to do because after all, foreign service could be adventurous as well. So I ended up joining the Foreign Service as a way of continuing my adventures, and it didn't disappoint because they didn't send me to fancy embassies in Europe. My foreign service career was mostly in jungles and deserts in wars and revolutions, which was perfect for me.
So I joined the Foreign Service, and very shortly thereafter, after the second, third year of foreign service, I find myself in Libya during the 1969 revolution. And oh, I loved it. I just loved it. It was perfect for me. It was scaring the bejesus out of everybody else in the American Embassy because the minute they saw cars burning in the streets and mobs throwing rocks, they got scared. But for me, that was what life was about, mobs throwing rocks and burning cars. I knew I was going to live through it because I always did.
So I went through the revolution in Libya, and then I demanded to the State Department that they send me to Vietnam, and not only that, but they send me to the most difficult and dangerous spot they had, and they did that. I became the advisor to the mayor of Hue, a small city in the northern part of what was then South Vietnam, but it was in the far north, just 50 miles south of a then-demilitarized zone that separated north and south. So it was a very dangerous place to be, and I had a dangerous job. Part of it was simple enough, administering an aide program, but the other half was a political officer, intelligence, counterintelligence, bullets whistling by my ear. And I was in the middle of a shooting war in Vietnam for a year and a half.
But it's toward the end of that time in Vietnam that that first crucible happened. So I'm going to stop here because I'm sure you've got some commentary before I tell you what the crucible was.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, I mean, it's just incredible, John. A lot of people in the State Department, front offices, as they say in the UK, they would want to go to the cushy jobs in Paris, Rome, Vienna, live the good life. For you, it's like, "Nah, send me to the jungle. Send me to the place where bullets are flying because I want an adventure." And there's probably some in the State Department said, "Okay, John, I don't want to do that. Most people don't. So therefore, plenty of opportunity to go where it's dangerous." Right?
So you always had this love for adventure, so you've got to do the perfect thing. You're with the State Department and they pay you to go all around the world and have adventure. What could be better?
John Graham:
They kept promoting me because I was strong and tough and smart, and I kept doing great work for them, and so they kept promoting me, and I became fairly unusual, moving up into the higher ranks of the Foreign Service at an early age because I kept surviving all these situations. But I just loved it and the Foreign Service was great for that.
Warwick Fairfax:
Something happened in Vietnam that was, you've had more crucibles than that, but that was one of the defining moments. That was the beginning of the change in direction of your life. So just talk about what that was and how the impact of the before John Graham person and the after because it seems like you didn't shift immediately, but it was a huge moment in your life. So talk about what happened and why it affected you so much.
John Graham:
Yeah, it's still hard to talk about. I wrote a memoir and the section on this, it took me months to write because I kept crying.
I was in Vietnam and I was then no longer a kid. What was happening to my life was way beyond youthful exuberance. I was stuck in, I was totally committed to a life fueled by nothing but adrenaline. And yet, as I learned soon, I had a softer part of me.
I grew up in a household and I was a very gentle kid. I mean, I had a doll named Sammy, and my mother, a Croatian, basically a Croatian peasant-lover, she had a time clock that about age four or five boys stopped playing with dolls and went on to manly things. Well, I didn't. She took the doll away. I got it back, the hair fell off. I sewed the doll's hair on myself, and I loved little Sammy until my mother finally took him away for good. But there was a soft side to me, and yet the bullies, the bullies forced me to abandon that.
And so I began to, the way I like to put it is like nailing a large sheet of heavy plywood over my heart. And then when Roy and the ship and the legionnaires, and then the life on the Foreign Service and mountain climbing and all that risk-taking, it just bounced off that piece of plywood and I became tougher and tougher, but I also became totally self-absorbed. My life became extremely selfish. The only thing that mattered to me was the next adventure. And it was great because I knew that I would never be killed because that's who I had become. So I kept walking into all these things and loving it.
And then at a certain point in Vietnam, when I was like 28, I realized that I really wasn't a kid anymore and I was there in a fairly senior position where decisions that I was making involved people's lives. And it all came to a head in the spring of 1971 when the North Vietnamese attacked South Vietnam from the north and tried to take over the country. They didn't succeed for three more years, but this was the first attempt.
And the North Vietnamese, all of what surrounded Hue, there was only one narrow road south, but the North Vietnamese had almost surrounded the city. I was inside it. The American military had left under the troop withdrawal agreement. So there were only a few of us civilians still left in Hue, and we were almost surrounded by the North Vietnamese. And we knew we couldn't get out because even if the army managed to send a helicopter, we knew that all our South Vietnamese allies would be clamoring to get on the helicopter and we'd have to shoot them off the skids. So we were trapped, and it mattered that whether or not Hue would fall or not.
The South Vietnamese were really poor troops, and they fell back onto the city until at one point the North Vietnamese tanks were only six miles away from the city walls on the north, and the South Vietnamese troops had broken and ran, or most of them anyway. But my job then was to create martial law in the city. And it was a Kafka-esque situation. I mean, half the population had fled south to Da Nang. The rest were totally terrified. Artillery was booming. The North Vietnamese were advancing, and I couldn't get out, and my fate depended upon whether or not the South Vietnamese could refit themselves and make a fight of it.
But for that, they needed ammunition and the ammunition had to flow through Hue, and the city officials and most of the city infrastructure had fled and collapsed. So my job was to create a stable base area to get that ammunition to the troops. And I realized that I couldn't do that because the city was completely overrun with deserters from the South Vietnamese divisions who had broken and ran, and we had to deal with the deserters, at least I saw that that way.
So I remember going to the deputy mayor, who was one of the few officials that hadn't fled, and I demanded that he set up a firing squad and started shooting these deserters, even though I knew these deserters were all farm boys who had been dragooned off their patties maybe just the week or the month before, and thrown into the front line. They were scared, so they got drunk and behaved badly and were all looting and raping and pillaging and keeping the city from becoming a stable base area. So I figured, "Oh, well, let's just set up a firing squad and start shooting them."
So that all happened one night. And like I say, it was a Kafka situation, me and the deputy mayor screaming at each other, and they set up a firing squad. And I realized that night that here I was, my home was 8,000 miles away. I hated the war. I knew it was wrong and evil. I knew the US was losing. I didn't really give a damn because I was only there for the adrenaline rush. I didn't really care who won the war. What I cared about was me, me, me and another adventure. But now, now people were dying because of my decisions, and those farm boys were the next batch to die because of my adrenaline rushes.
And I just remember putting my head down and just weeping, like, "Jesus, what on earth have I become? What on earth have I become? How can my life... How could I have let my life become that shallow?" And it suddenly hit me, all the adrenaline rushes and everything, it was all for me, and now I was senior enough so that people were dying because of my rush for adventure. And that was the lowest point in my life. It was the lowest point of my life. That was the first crucible.
Turned out that a few hours later at daybreak, the clouds finally cleared and fighter bombers from US carriers off the coast reached the city and blew apart the North Vietnamese army that had surrounded the city and my life was spared. And so I came back from the war, again in one piece, but I wasn't in one piece. I guess now you call it PTSD, but it was worse than PTSD because my whole life had been shattered.
I remember going to... The State Department sent me to California as a reward to go to Stanford for not getting killed in Vietnam. And so I was in California, and I went to a lot of what were then called encounter groups, which were groups where you sat down with other people and you sort of spilled your guts and hoped to learn something. And I did. I went to youth encounter groups, and I began to explore who I was. Was I this vicious John Wayne warrior, or was I the kid that sewed the hair back on my little doll Sammy? And who was I?
And I had a lot of people in these encounter groups who were really brave and smart, and they said, "Will you get off the John Wayne thing, John? We think there's a nice guy in there. We think somewhere in John Graham, there is a useful human being and you're denying it. You're denying it." And I finally began to realize that they were right.
And that was the first time I began to pry this heavy load of plywood off my heart, and I began to be more of a father to the two kids I had, and I began to develop real, genuine friendships and stable work relationships. It took a long time, but I began to crawl out of the self-centered hole because I had no choice. I mean, I was desperate once I realized the hole I'd fallen into and how deep it was.
Warwick Fairfax:
So in that moment, yeah, just to explore that, when you're at the bottom of that pit, what were you thinking? You wanted a life of adventure, but in your lowest moment, who did you think you'd become? How would you describe your view of yourself at that lowest point?
John Graham:
Well, self-centered monster. I had the lowest opinion of myself. I began to realize that the adventurers were great fun, but they were shallow. And the fact is that to do what I was doing, it was important for me not to give a damn about the rest of the world. So I didn't. I was in the middle for years in the Foreign Service of all kinds of suffering, poverty, violence. I didn't give a damn. I didn't care about other people. All I cared about was myself.
Warwick Fairfax:
What was some of those glimmers of, as you said to yourself, "I don't want to be this person I was in Vietnam or this adventurer that only cared about myself," what was the glimmer of a vision of who you wanted John Graham to be? Or maybe the elements that were there that were being suppressed, if you will? What were some of those glimmers of the image that was there that you wanted to let out of the John Graham that you wanted to be back then?
John Graham:
Well, they were more than glimmers. It was interesting because the Foreign Service kept providing me a perfect platform for where my life was headed, only now it wasn't bloody adventures. After a couple years after Vietnam, I ended up at the United Nations, and by then my life had really turned around. I had a lot of spiritualist experiences, meditation and stuff like that, and I really come to realize of who I really was, that I really wanted to make the world a better place, to use that phrase. I wanted to use my skills and my resources, which were plentiful, to undo what I had done and to start doing things that made the world a better place. And then the American State Department sent me to the United Nations, which was absolutely perfect because the United Nations under Jimmy Carter was trying to do a better job with the world, and they put me in charge of American policies toward all of Africa, and eventually toward all of the so-called Third World.
So I had this whole panoply of a couple billion people suffering in wars and revolutions, and I was in a position to do something about it. So I began working for peace and justice issues at the United Nations with the same vigor and the same smarts and the same courage that I'd used to survive physical adventures. I started finding adventures at the UN, and they were adventures because I was then so much imbued, so much enthused by wanting to do good in the world, I went way past where Jimmy Carter wanted to go, where the American government wanted to go. So I got into all kinds of trouble by pushing policies at the United Nations. And because of a curious relationship, I had a lot of autonomy at the UN, and I pushed for things on my own and, in a sense, almost creating my own little state department up there.
I suppose the biggest thing that happened, and there were a number of incidents, was my work with South Africa when it was still an apartheid state. Apartheid, of course, being a system of brutal racism then in South Africa. And the first thing I did when I got the job at the UN was travel to South Africa and see for myself, and it was just awful. The oppression of Blacks by the white racist regime in South Africa was just awful. And it was sustained by military equipment, guns, and police equipment, and communications gear all supplied by Europe and the United States because there was huge amounts of money to be made in shipping guns and military equipment to the South African whites, which they then used to kill Blacks, keep them in line.
So I came back from South Africa looking for a touch point, something I could do, and I realized that if I could get the UN to shut off the supplies of guns and military equipment to the South African military and police, that would cripple their efforts to enforce apartheid. And that's what I set out to do. And the first thing I had to do was to earn the trust of the African delegates because America's relationships then, and probably still, were terrible. We didn't give a damn about our Black and brown brothers. We only cared then about the Cold War, whether they'd vote on our side or that of the Soviet Union. And so we didn't care much for them, and they didn't care much for us, or it took me a while.
But I approached the African delegates on the Security Council quietly and basically said, "Hey, I'm on your side. You probably don't believe me, but I'm really on your side. I will help you develop a plan to put pressure on my own government to institute an arms embargo on South Africa to cut off the supplies of military equipment. And if the US cuts it off, the Europeans are going to have to follow suit. So, what do you say?" And they said, "Oh, we don't trust you." But then gradually, after lunches and walks, they began to trust me. And I even gave them documents for which I could have been fired or even jailed, which showed who in America was responsible for the guns trade, and who in Congress, and there were plenty of racist senators at that time, who in Congress were turning a blind eye to what America was doing to prop up the Afrikaner regime, the apartheid regime in South Africa. I did all of that.
It all came to a head once and I'll never forget this. I got notice of an angry telegram sent to my boss, the Secretary of State, just vilifying American hypocrisy for saying all the right things in speeches, but then doing nothing to institute an arms embargo to keep guns away from the South African military, and this foreign minister from Africa was furious. But the thing was in the middle of his message, I recognized a couple of sentences that I myself had drafted three weeks before, given to my level contact in New York, he had sent them back to his boss in Africa, and they'd come rocketing back. So I said, "Whoa, that's terrible. Oh my goodness, what are we going to do?"
And at that point, I finally let loose and went to my own government and says, "Look, we have to do something. We look like utter hypocrites on this issue." And I convinced my own government finally to face down the racists in Congress and in the administration and to agree to institute a really tough arms embargo on South Africa that really did cut off the supply of arms, and the Europeans weren't happy, but they had no choice but to follow suit.
And so on April, April, April 19... Where was it? April 1980, I guess it was, '81. No, '79, '80, '80, 1980, the UN adopts this arms embargo in South Africa. And in time, that arms embargo was, as I knew it would be, decisive in ending apartheid.
Gary Schneeberger :
I'd love to jump in here because we've heard two sides of your story up to this point, right? You talked a lot about the adrenaline rush of climbing Denali and being in war and covering wars and doing all those things. And you've just described very passionately your work for the government. And I'm wondering if there wasn't, I don't know if it was an adrenaline rush in that, but doing good, did being involved in those situations looking for a good outcome, rather than being involved in situations that gave you adrenaline rush just for your own thrills, was there some of that in what you were doing? Did you get an adrenaline rush of a different sort maybe from that?
John Graham:
Oh, Gary, perfect question. Yes, of course. Yeah, these were incredible adventures, but they were adventures not so much of testing my body, but testing my spirit, testing my resolve, testing my emotions, but they were a lot more adventurous than hanging by a rope over a cliff or dodging a bullet. I had found the adventures of my life and the fact that they were saving lives instead of costing them, the fact that I was doing good was perfect.
It was so perfect, for example, that now, I guess I'm an extremist, but I was as hooked on doing good as I had been hooked on daredevil pursuits, and I realized that I couldn't stay in the Foreign Service because it was too slow. I wanted to change the whole frigging world, and the Foreign Service was too slow. And not only that, but I was now a pretty senior guy, and I made a lot of enemies from people that didn't want to make these changes, so I was going to get fired anyway. So, I quit. I quit the Foreign Service at really the top of my game because I could see the handwriting on the wall.
So there I was in New York City in 1980, '81 without a job, but I was looking for new ways to change the world. And because I'd always had a good gift of gab, I thought I could do it by giving speeches. And boy, was I wrong about that. I thought I was changing the world, but I couldn't figure out how to do that. And then I ran out of money. A friend comes, says, "Hey, you can make some money lecturing on cruise ships."
So I applied and my very first application was accepted, and so I found myself, and I was able to take my then-13-year-old daughter Mallory, as a guest lecturer on a cruise ship heading from Vancouver to a trip to the Orient. Small by today's standards, 500-and-some passengers or so. And Mallory and I board the ship and head out to sea, and it goes up through Alaskan waters and it heads across North Pacific.
Well, anyway, even before I gave my first lecture, the ship catches fire, and Mallory and I are awoken in the middle of the night 140 miles off the coast of Alaska. And there's a voice that says, "I'm very sorry, but there's been a small fire in the engine room and we're putting it out, but the ship has got some smoke in it so we ask you all to come up to the ship's lounge. We'll be serving free liquor and we'll put the fire out and it'll all be fine by morning."
So Mallory and I are disarmed by this, and we open the door, and sure enough, the ship is full of smoke, so we go up to the lounge with the lounge in the dining room. They're also full of smoke. And not only that, but any fool can see that the smoke coming up the stairwells that we've just come up is getting blacker and thicker. Whatever is going on, the fire's getting worse, so people are getting worried. All these passengers are out there on the deck because there was too much smoke inside, and it was October in the Gulf of Alaska, and it was cold. So people were tearing down curtains and using tablecloths to stay warm because we hadn't been warned to take warm clothes or even life vests. We had been lied to over the intercom.
So we're sitting out there, people are beginning to mumble, then they yell that we're told to go into the fantail, the rear of the ship, the stern, and everybody collects there. And they bring out the ship's orchestra. Would you believe that? They do. It's true. It's true. That is a true story.
Warwick Fairfax:
It's like they must have read about that.
John Graham:
The ship orchestra. Yeah, yeah.
Warwick Fairfax:
They must have read about the Titanic, right?
John Graham:
Well, of course, of course, of course. And not only that, but when the movie-
Warwick Fairfax:
You know, like in the '50s movie or whenever it was, playing. You remember that scene?
John Graham:
Yeah, of course, of course. Only they weren't playing Nearer, My God, to Thee. They were playing show tunes from Oklahoma. I remember going... Many years later, I went with Mallory to see the movie Titanic, and we just held each other's hands because of the parallels were so exact.
Anyway, the fire gets worse and worse, and we're all told to go to the lifeboat stations finally. And Mallory and I go up to lifeboat number two off the port bow, and it says that it's made for 48. Well, there's like 60 people there, but it's okay because it's so cold. We're crammed together in that little lifeboat. And by some miracle, the lifeboats, six of them, eight of them, whatever, are lowered from the burning ship and they began to drift away. And it's still about three, four o'clock in the morning. It's still dark.
The thing is though, is that a typhoon is bearing down on us, and we knew that because they had distributed seasick pills the night before, a warning that the next day would be choppy because of the typhoon. So where we land in the seas are relatively calm, and at dawn, a huge tanker answering the SOS arrives. That's good. But the tanker is way too big to maneuver to the tiny lifeboats, and the lifeboats are too small to grab the swaying rope ladders off the... So we're still stuck.
And then helicopters start arriving from shore bases 140 miles away, Canadian and American helicopters, and they start lifting people out of the lifeboats one at a time on a little metal chair at the end of a chain, and so it's slow work. 500 people have to be pulled one by one from the lifeboats. And as long as the seas are calm, the helicopters can fly. They get maybe seven or eight people in the helicopter. They fly to the deck of the tanker, drop the seven or eight people, come back for another load. And there's three or four helicopters going as fast as they can.
The trouble is is that the typhoon is coming on, and by about noon, the typhoon is so fierce that the helicopters can't fly anymore. It's just too damn dangerous. Our only hope then is that a Coast Guard cutter, which had been rushing out there to the scene from Sitka, a Coast Guard cutter would find us. But now we're in a typhoon, and the visibility is getting less by the minute. And not only that, but the seas are rising and it's getting worse and worse. At a certain point, we're in seas that are 25, 30 feet high in a little lifeboat. That's like watching the water go up and down like a five-story building. And the winds are 60 knots or so. And I've been in mountain climbing situations enough to know that we're all dying of hypothermia.
Now, who's left? Almost everyone's been rescued by the helicopter. There's only eight of us left in lifeboat number two, and we're all dying of hypothermia. And I recognize that we're going to be dead in seven or eight hours. I could see that. And so if we're still in the lifeboat and not thrown out from the typhoon and the high waves, we'd be dead anyway. They'd just find our bodies in the lifeboat.
And then so there we are. And up until this point, as you know from my stories, I've always walked away from anything that was dangerous, and I thought in the beginning, "Oh, wow, another adventure. Cool. Okay." So I'm in a lifeboat with eight guys in the middle of a typhoon, 140 miles off the coast. Our only hope is for a Coast Guard cutter trying to find us with visibility down to 100 meters. The chances of that happening are really slim. The key thing though was it was going to be dark in half an hour, and if they couldn't find us in the daytime, they would never find us at night because we had no lights, no flares, no reflectors, no radio, nothing. So once it was dark, we for sure we were dead. And it was, at that point, maybe a half an hour until dark.
So here comes the crucible. I realized that finally this may be my last adventure and that I may not get out of this one. But on the other hand, damn it, I've turned my life around. I'm not the self-centered bastard I was in Vietnam. In fact, I helped end apartheid for God's sake. And I didn't understand. And I'm not a religious man, but I remember turning to the allness or whatever you might call it, call it God, call it whatever, and saying, "I don't get it. I thought the world was a useful, I mean, an orderly place." I went to a Jesuit with high school. Order in the universe, crystals, salt crystals, all that, order in the universe. "There's no order here. Here I am. I got 40 years, 50 years left to do your work, God, to do good in the world, and you're wiping me out. It makes no sense whatsoever. It's just plain stupid."
So my prayer becomes this angry bleed, I'm screaming at God, and I get this answer. The other seven guys didn't hear a thing, but for me, it was real clear. And this voice comes booming out of the storm, and it says basically, "Here you are. You're lecturing on a cruise ship. You get out of this one, you lecture on another cruise ship. It's a pretty copacetic way to earn a living, right? And yeah, yeah, yeah, you helped end apartheid. That's good. But you seem to have left those ideals behind, John. And so you have to make a decision here. This is the crunch point. You have to make a decision. Either you keep on with what you started at the UN and devote your life to peace and justice issues, making the world a better place, and we'll see what will happen out here. On the other hand, if you don't do that, you might as well die out here because the rest of your life won't be worth living. It's a choice. Make a choice. Shit or get off the pot." God didn't say that, but that was the message.
So I look up, and my famous ego is just depleted, and I just look out of the teeth of this storm, and I just say, "Okay, it's a deal." And in that instant, and here's another example that most people just don't believe it, in that instant, and I swear it was almost to the second, the Coast Guard cutter Boutwell comes crashing through this storm out of nowhere and aiming right at us. It would have cut us in two had the lookout not seen us. And so we get, I get rescued. I go back to New York. I keep my promise. I never look back.
Warwick Fairfax:
So talk about the next part with your wife, Ann Medlock, and the whole concept of the Giraffe Project because that's really been, I mean, as amazing as the work you did with the State Department, this is really your life's work.
John Graham:
It has been, yeah. What is it now? 42 years. I came back, I'd known Ann. I'd known Ann a little bit because we were both members of a writer's group, but I was still married to my first wife at that point, so we were just friends. And then I came back from Prinsendam and started doing these lectures that were going nowhere, but Ann had started the Giraffe Heroes Project. And the concept was very simple, but very ancient. She was looking for heroes, looking for people sticking their necks out, hence the metaphor. And she would tell their stories any way she could because she was convinced that the world needed to hear the stories of heroes because there was too much gloom and doom. And if people were going to be hopeful, they had to have the stories of heroes.
Well, people have felt that way for, I don't know, since neanderthals. Cultures have tried to create more heroes in their culture by telling the stories of other heroes. I mean, the troubadours in the Middle Ages, same thing. And Ann became the troubadour of our ages when she started the Giraffe Project. And while my lectures were failing, what she was doing became an instant success. I mean, there was an essay on her in the New York Times a year or two after she started, and it was growing fast. And I thought at first it was lightweight. I mean, telling stories, come on. You had to be serious. If you're going to save the world, you had to be like me. You had to be giving these great weighty speeches and write letters or write articles in Foreign Policy magazine and stuff. Now, storytelling captured people and I began to see that.
And so two things happened. I began to realize the power of what Ann was doing, and I also fell madly in love with her, my first marriage then being over. And it was a crazy time. It was just absolutely wonderful. After one of our sessions in this writer's group, Ann asked if anyone wanted to go see the new movie, Superman. And I answered, "Yes," in a voice so loud and aggressive no one else would dare say "yes" as well.
She and I go off to see the movie. We questioned whether her hand moved over mine or mine over hers, whatever. Went to an Irish bar. That was a Tuesday night. On Friday, I moved in for good. So our courtship lasted three days, and we were crazy in love, still are. And I became also a big fan of the Giraffe Project, and the two of us began operating it together. Then now we're talking 1982, '83, '84. And now we're talking about 2025, so it's been a lot of years, but we're doing the same thing that Ann started doing. We're finding heroes and telling their stories, only now it's like 1,500 stories that we've told. They're all cataloged on our website, giraffe.org, and we have written a whole school's curriculum. That took a decade and a million dollars to do it. A whole school's curriculum, helping kids build lives as courageous and compassionate citizens.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, it's so well said, John. I feel like where you are now and maybe the last 40 years is the adventure of a lifetime, the ultimate adrenaline rush in that sense because when you do good for others, and maybe somebody says, "Hey, John, thanks. That really made a difference," or, "thank you for sharing my story. I felt seen and heard," and again, you're not doing it for the adrenaline rush. You're not doing it for the attaboys or "thanks, John," but it can help you make you think, "well, you know what? Today was a good day. I may have done some dumb stuff in my life, but today, I did something good. I helped somebody." And again, you don't do it for the reason, that reason, but there's a side benefit that it's like, "Maybe I'm not such a messed-up person after all, or maybe I am, but I still can do some good for people." We all can feel that way.
And does that make sense? I feel like you've lived the adventure of a lifetime that's at a different level, and it's sustainable because when you do good for others, that sense of feeling inside, "Boy, this is a legacy that my kids, grandkids, my friends, this is something they can respect. This is something I can leave behind. This is a kind of adventure." That's the ultimate adventure, in a sense. Does that make sense?
John Graham:
Oh, it does. I put it also in this way, in that I am more, in all my endeavors now, more than a little bit selfish because there's so much pleasure, so much meaning in my life, so much satisfaction out of doing this. And of course, I feel good that I've helped this person, but I also feel really good that I've helped myself because yet another example of being able to use my skills and experience to do good.
And a curious sort of thing too, I just want to add this, is that I don't regret, if you will, that first half of my life, despite, as you put it, all the backsliding and stuff, because it makes me credible with tough audiences, not this audience. I mean, you guys aren't a tough audience. You're pushovers. You're good guys. But I talk to maybe a C-suite audience in a boardroom or maybe 2,000 people at a corporate gathering, and they're all skeptical. And the only way to get past their skepticism, if they give me 45 minutes to talk, I'll spend 35 minutes telling these horrendous stories until everyone's on the edge of their seat, "What the... How can that guy, how could he possibly have..."
And then when they're at the edge of their seats and they realize that I've done more tough stuff, more dangerous stuff than the whole room full of them put together, they'll listen, and I'll make the pivot to, "You know, I learned something more about adventuring. I learned something more about meaning. Here's what I've learned." They listen to me. And so in the last two minutes, I can say, "You'll find the same thing. I'm not saying you're going to die on a cruise ship or from a mountain climbing fall, but I am saying there will be, there are adventures in your life, there are tests, there are challenges, and you need to look at that in terms of how much meaning they will give or subtract from your life. You need to look at that and be serious about it because that's what saved my life and that's what made me who I am, and I suspect that's true for you too."
And at that point, these tough-minded, cynical business people are listening. And I reach audiences like that because of my backstory. I often say that if you're going to hire me as a lecturer, what you're really hiring is my biography because my biography is my way in to a lot of audiences who wouldn't listen to me otherwise.
Gary Schneeberger :
We, folks, have reached the point of the show where I normally say something and I'm going to check before I say it because our guest, John Graham, has been through a whole bunch of crucibles that you've heard about, and I want to make sure none of them have to do with planes. And so far, I'm not seeing it. So I'm going to say that sound you heard, folks, is the captain turning on the fasten seatbelt sign, indicating that it's time to begin our descent to close this conversation. We're not there yet, though. I'm going to turn it over to Warwick in a minute to ask some more questions.
I have a thought, John, that when I ask you this question, you're going to set a record for number of websites you list because I would be remiss if I didn't give you the chance to let listeners and viewers know how to learn more about all the incredible things they've heard about. So what are some good online places they can go to learn more about you and about the Giraffe Heroes Project?
John Graham:
Okay. Well, the first URL is real simple, giraffe.org. That's the Giraffe Project, 42 years. And you get through there, there's an easily searchable database of 1,500 inspiring stories of Giraffe Heroes, notices of our books, et cetera, et cetera. So, giraffe.org.
And then my personal website is my name, johngraham.org. It's pretty much got the stories that we've talked about so far, plus the other useful stuff that you might find on a personal website.
I'd love to give a note to my new memoir. It's called Quest: Risk, Adventure, and the Search for Meaning. You can get it from Amazon or order it from any bookstore.
Gary Schneeberger :
Warwick, John's life has been interesting. It has been informative. I'll turn it over to you to ask the last question or two.
Warwick Fairfax:
Well, John, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, and you've had an incredible story from an adventure-seeker, somebody who really lived for the adrenaline rush to somebody that maybe still is an adventure-seeker, but you're doing it in an area that's so much more lasting, really to help people, to just really uplift people have taken risks to do something good for others, and I love just what you do at the Giraffe Heroes Project.
So there may be people here that maybe they're going through the dark night of the soul. Maybe they're just saying, "Look, isn't life about me, about money and power?" And maybe they're saying, "Well, if only I get across the next mountain ridge, then I'll finally be happy." For somebody that's going through that dark night of the soul, what's maybe a different vision for your life, the vision that's a legacy that you want to lead, or a vision that you can be proud of, an adventure that's sustainable? What would your advice be to that person that's going through that dark night of the soul and, "Hey, life's all about me and the next rush"?
John Graham:
Take some time off. Go for a quiet walk in the woods. Look up with a starry sky because you've got to silence the clatter and clamor first before you can begin to seriously think about what makes your life meaningful. And if it's a dark night of the soul, what may seem to make your life meaningful is getting back at the bastards who are making life miserable for you or something like that, I guarantee you it's not that.
Find that meaning. And if you start with the meaning is my kids and grandkids, that's great. That's a great place to start. But then look at your skills. There's a reason why you're smart or not smart. There's a reason why you're good at math or not good at math, a reason why you have artistic talent, there's a reason why you're able to give a good speech, or there's a reason why you're shy. There's reasons for all of this. It's like why does an eagle have claws? I mean, they're there for a reason.
So part of it is just taking stock of who you are, and then from there, looking at things that are meaningful that make use of who you are so you feel comfortable in your own skin. But mostly the key is to look for how you can be of service and how much meaning that can bring to your life. And again, the service can be something absurdly simple, and you start with a service to your own family, your own community. And maybe if you have the proper skills, maybe it is getting involved, running for office or whatever. That's not true for most of us, but it is for some. But look, be an honest searcher. Yeah, okay. Bumper sticker: be an honest searcher.
Gary Schneeberger :
Folks, I have been in the communications business long enough to know when the final word's been spoken on a subject. And our guest, John Graham, has just spoken.
Well, Warwick, wow. We just got done interviewing John Graham who, I dare say, talked in depth about more and more incredible crucibles than I think any guests we've had before. Not that other guest crucibles, we're not comparing crucibles. We say that all the time. But John had some really, really, really challenging crucibles, big-ticket items, if you will.
Where do we start? What's your big takeaway from John's life and how he's turned it around?
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. John has led an amazing life, a life of adventure, a life of adrenaline rush from his perspective. The first part of his life, he just lived for adventure. He seemed to feel like he led this charmed life where he could take these unbelievable risks and nothing would happen. I mean, at age 16, he hitchhikes on a freighter, and from this kind of pretty ordinary life in Washington state and in Tacoma, he's on this freighter with these incredible characters, and learning a lot about life that you don't learn at school.
At 19, he's there during the revolution in Algeria. I mean, he's just leading this incredible life. Later, he ends up in Vietnam when he's with the Foreign Service and incredibly dangerous circumstances in the '70s. All these things that he's done, and despite all his adventures, he's also an incredibly smart guy. I mean, he went to Harvard undergrad. He was magna cum laude. That is the highest honors you can get. We don't use those words in Australia, so I had to learn that when I came to America, but I know that means a lot. So he did a grad degree at Stanford. He even did a stint in Adelaide.
And looking at his resume, this has got to be the funniest, craziest, amazing resume I've ever read. He talks about his time at University of Adelaide in the '60s, and he said, "Yeah, I spent almost all my time in mines and prospecting the Outback, drinking beer and chasing girls. Heck, I was 22. Had a bar fight in the geographic center of Australia." I mean, he's done it all.
And so I think the first half of his life, it was all about the rush, about adventure. And really, he had two crucibles that turned his life around, or at least turned the direction of his life. One was in Vietnam in which he was in a town that was surrounded by the North Vietnamese. He was with the South Vietnamese. And it looked like he wasn't going to get out of there. He had to make some very difficult decisions to stop people deserting, and listen to the whole podcast for more detail, but he had to do things that maybe he wouldn't have done normally in less chaotic situations. And he was thinking, "What am I doing here? Why are we here in general?" Which obviously a lot of people have thought subsequently in Vietnam, but he just felt like there was no purpose, there was no meaning. For him, it was all about adventure, about the rush of adrenaline. And it's like there's got to be more than just a rush, a sense of adventure.
And so that was the beginning of a change of direction. And then he then went on to spend more time in the State Department. One of the high-water marks of his life was when he was in the UN and he was covering Africa and really helped in the Carter administration in the late '70s lobby to stop the US supplying arms to the white apartheid regime in South Africa. Not a popular stance at the time because countries are making a lot of money from arms. But he did some amazing things.
But then he got out of the State Department because he was probably making some enemies with some unpopular, pretty courageous decisions. So then he thought, "Well, I can tell colorful stories, and so I'm going to just do the cruise ship routine and tell stories." And I guess in hindsight, from his perspective, I think he felt like he backslid a little bit. He was doing some good in the State Department, but now I guess he felt like there's more to life and just giving speeches on ships. Nothing against that, but for him, it felt like he was copping out a bit.
So it only happens to somebody like John Graham, there's a fire on a board ship. They have to abandon ship, and of course there's a typhoon bearing down. I say, "Of course" because for John Graham, a fire on board a ship is just not enough. You've got to have more adventure, more challenge. Of course, there's a typhoon and he's on the last boat, and the Coast Guard off of Alaska, they can't get them, excuse me, the helicopters can't get them off in the midst of a typhoon, that kind of storm. And so he reaches this really ultimate crucible moment where he is just sort of yelling at the wind, and he's not religious, but yelling at God, so to speak, saying, "Come on, what's the deal?" And he feels like God's basically saying to him, "You've got to," in colorful language, "stop what you're doing and change direction. You choose. Do you want to just live your life in this sort of ordinary life doing the cruise ship routine?"
He'd done good before, but somehow I guess he felt like he was just going to go on a path that really didn't have the same level of merit perhaps. And as soon as he made that decision, "Okay, God or whoever you are, I'm going to change my life. I'm going to really use who I am and my skills for good," as soon as that happens, the Coast Guard cutter comes, and if it hadn't come then, he would've died. Night would've fallen. He would've died of hypothermia.
So ever since then, he's changed his life. He and his wife, Ann Medlock, together worked on this project called the Giraffe Heroes Project, which seeks to find people who stick their necks out and make a difference in the world. And they've shared, I don't know if it's like thousands, a couple thousand, a lot of stories of ordinary people doing heroic deeds. And so his life is totally different. He's somebody that lives a life of purpose and meaning and encourages other people to live lives of purpose and meaning.
And the ultimate rush, if you will, which may not even be the right word, but is the ultimate sense of joy and fulfillment is when you're helping others. And he helps so many people and tells so many stories. He's now in his early 80s, he has so much fulfillment and satisfaction, he's doing so much good with Giraffe Heroes Project.
Gary Schneeberger :
Yeah. And one of the things that was really interesting to me is after we were done with the recording proper, he said to you that he had to do this show because he saw, as we see after talking to him, that what Beyond the Crucible stands for and what his life now stands for and what the Giraffe Heroes Project stands for are so much the same, as we found on a number of occasions. Lots of overlap, even in language.
So you guys are both in the same business, got there through different crucibles in different ways, for sure, but what we say all the time, "Crucibles can differ in circumstance, but they can be resonant with each other in emotion," and I think we found that in John's story.
Warwick and I have a couple of favors to ask of you. If you've enjoyed this show and if you enjoy the show generally, we ask you on your favorite podcast app, if that's where you're listening, to subscribe to the show, put a comment, rate the show there. That will help more people find us. And if you're watching us on YouTube, we ask you to like our YouTube channel and to leave a comment there so that we know what you think about what we've talked about here today with John Graham.
And what we've talked about here today, folks, is what we know to be true. And John's stories, and I said, "Stories" on purpose, that wasn't a slip, John's stories make crystal clear what we say all the time, that we know your crucibles are difficult. We know that they can knock you for a loop. They can cause some really traumatic things to happen in your life. But we also know this, that your crucible experiences aren't the end of your story. In fact, if you learn the lessons, as John explained how he did, if you learn those lessons and you apply those lessons as you move forward, where those crucibles can lead you, those lessons that you learn from those crucibles can lead you to a new destination that will be the most rewarding destination of your life, and that destination is a life of significance.
Welcome to a journey of transformation with Beyond the Crucible Assessment. Unlike any other, this tool is designed to guide you from adversity to achievement. As you answer a few insightful questions, you won't just find a label like The Helper or The Individualist. Instead, you'll uncover your unique position in the journey of resilience. This assessment reveals where you stand today, the direction you should aim for, and, crucially, the steps to get there. It's more than an assessment. It's a roadmap to a life of significance.
Ready? Visit beyondthecrucible.com. Take the free assessment and start charting your course to a life of significance today.
The Valuable Lessons in Others’ Mistakes
How can other people’s mistakes or misfortunes, whether they were their fault or not, benefit you? We may agree we can learn from our own mistakes and misfortunes, but we can also learn from the mistakes other people made and the misfortunes other people have faced.
This week, we discuss Warwick’s latest blog at BeyondTheCrucible.com to discover what we can learn from what others have gone through. Action steps like hit the reset button, understand the why and decide to live differently can help us avoid facing the same situations; and even if we end up facing them, it might give us more insight into how to handle those situations and bounce back faster.
To explore Beyond the Crucible resources, including our free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment, visit beyondthecrucible.com.
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and leave a comment at our YouTube channel. And be sure subscribe and tell your friends and family about us.
Have a question or comment? Drop us a line at info@beyondthecrucible.com Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and leave a comment at our YouTube channel and be sure subscribe and tell your friends and family about us.
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👉 Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Transcript
Warwick Fairfax:
Welcome to Beyond The Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond The Crucible. To be able to calmly analyze what happened and what are the lessons in other people's misfortunes and mistakes, we've got to be able to forgive. Because very often those mistakes and misfortunes, like in the case of abuse, may have directly affected us, may have caused us immense pain. And so forgiveness doesn't mean condoning, but you've got to find a way to forgive them for what they did.
Gary Schneeberger:
Forgive them for what they did, come to terms with how what happened to them has affected you. That's what we discussed this week as we unpack Warwick's latest blog called How Others' Mistakes Can Teach Us Valuable Lessons. He explains the difference it can make in our lives to hit the reset button, understand the why, and to decide to live differently. Warwick, we are back again this week with the kind of episode that we do about once a month, and that is, it's based on a blog that you've written.
It's available right now at beyondthecrucible.com, and it's called How Others' Mistakes Can Teach Us Valuable Lessons. Very, very intriguing subject for us here at Beyond The Crucible, and I really wanted to start with asking you, what was it? Because this one isn't a typical one that you've written before. What was it that prompted you to write on this particular subject?
Warwick Fairfax:
That is a really good question, Gary. What did prompt me to write this blog and want to discuss the subject? I find I often write blogs, think of things to discuss based on things I'm struggling with, things I'm pondering. And we often talk about how do we bounce back from our own crucibles? How do we get beyond them? How do we learn from our own mistakes or from maybe bad things that happened to us? Some of which may not be our fault. And that's very valuable. You have to learn the lessons from your crucible to be able to bounce back and find a vision that leads to a life of significance, a life on purpose dedicated to serving others. So that's very helpful.
But I was thinking to myself, "Well, what about learning the lessons from mistakes and misfortunes that others have gone through, maybe even their own crucibles?" And it's complicated because sometimes other people's mistakes and misfortunes can actually become our crucibles. We've had people that have grown up in abusive backgrounds, and those mistakes in this case of others have led directly to their own crucibles and sometimes other people's mistakes and misfortunes can lead to our own mistakes and misfortunes and even crucibles.
Gary Schneeberger:
And to make it even more complex, is that those mistakes and misfortunes many times don't manifest themselves to the people to whom they happen as crucibles. So there are situations that maybe others don't see as crucibles that affect us as crucibles. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. So there's a lot of uneasiness around this subject, I think, in some ways.
Warwick Fairfax:
Absolutely. And sometimes it could be a friend who suffered a physical misfortune or maybe abuse or what have you. It doesn't affect you directly, but you are their best friend and you grieve for them. And it's something that's just present. And whether it's something you've experienced directly because of somebody else's mistakes and misfortunes, whether it's mistakes and misfortunes of others that have not really affected you directly, that have not led to a personal crucible for you. Maybe you've just read about somebody, watched a documentary, learned from history. There are many tragic circumstances that we can learn from. And so either way, we talk a lot about learning valuable lessons from our own crucibles.
Well, I think we can't ignore the opportunity to learn valuable lessons from other people's mistakes and misfortunes, whether they affected us directly or not, they're extremely valuable. And when I think of my own life, there were mistakes and misfortunes in my own family that affected me in some sense, but certainly they were things that I could learn from. So just to give some examples, I think of my parents. My father was married three times, my mother was married twice, and I saw the consequences of growing up with divorced parents. So I was fortunate in that I was from the last marriage of each. So I wasn't shuttling from one parent to another parent, and that's normal for many.
So in that sense, I was fortunate. But I remember thinking to myself as I was growing up, "I don't want to go through what my parents did. I would like ideally, if I could, marry one time or at least to my level best, to marry the right person and be the right person." You need both, in my opinion, for a happy marriage. And I'm blessed. I've been married to my wife for, gosh, this month it'll be 36 years. So yes, those trials of my parents provided a very valuable lesson for me in that sense. Another lesson I can think of was in my father's younger years, when he was in his thirties, maybe forties, and he was in his first marriage, he grew up in a very wealthy background.
As listeners know, he was head of a very large what became 150 year old family media business in Australia. And he was a lot older when I was born. So when he was younger in the 1930s and early forties, he had nannies to help raise his kids, which was somewhat normal back then. And there was a time in the thirties where he and his first wife went to England for a year without his very young kids. That might seem just unbelievably strange, almost wrong, but that was somewhat normal for wealthy parents back in the day. And so when I was growing up, fortunately my father was a lot more present and we spent a lot of time together. And as listeners probably know, one of the ways we bonded was talking about history.
He loved history. So when I was very small, I'd say, "Daddy, tell me some history." And we'd have these great conversations. So he was present for me. But all that's to say is as we were having young kids in the nineties, I was very focused on, I want to be a present dad. I don't want to take some job as whatever, investment banking, management, consulting, whatever profession that is somewhat common for Harvard Business School graduates, as I then was to do. Nothing wrong with that per se, but I wanted to make sure that I would be present as my kids grew up. And as it happens when we have birthdays, Father's Day, Mother's Day, we give words of affirmation.
And when it's Father's Day or my birthday, my kids will talk about, "Hey dad, you're always there for my sports game or dance recital or choir, what have you." That's like about the first thing they say on the list. You are present, you were there. So clearly it mattered to them. It mattered to me. So I wouldn't have been so focused I don't think on being a present father if not for the lessons from my parents and my father in this particular case. It's not like I suffered the consequences of my father's mistakes. Maybe some of my older siblings did. I did not. So it didn't directly affect me, but I was able to learn from it because I didn't want the path that he led when he was younger.
So all that's to say is well... And I guess some other lessons I've learned quite a few, I guess. I'd like to think. Growing up in a very wealthy family business, you can have your identity wrapped up, in my case, of being a Fairfax, a descendant of the founder, John Fairfax, my great-great-grandfather. And it's like, who am I if I'm not a Fairfax? Being a person of faith, I'd like to think my identity is in Christ and as a child of God, but I didn't want my identity to be wrapped up in that, which maybe it was to a degree and I was in charge of this family business, but sometimes people with wealth can think they're better than other people. Even when I was very, very young, it was like, "That will not be me."
That's the one reason that humility is one of my highest values. I don't want people to think that I think that I'm better than anybody else because I'm not. We're all different. It doesn't make me better. So growing up in a wealthy background made me very focused on the value of humility, not thinking of myself more highly than I should, and not thinking that myself is better than anybody else. I mean, those are just some lessons that I've learned from my background and my parents, in some cases, my parents' mistakes. So I guess all this to say, just to sum up as we sort of start this discussion, there are often valuable lessons we can learn from others.
They may have affected us or not affected us, but either way, I think why wouldn't we want to learn these valuable lessons from other people? Because it's really a rich territory to mine from.
Gary Schneeberger:
And it's rich territory to mine from and there's many opportunities to mine it because, let's face it, as we go through life and bump into each other, family, friends, total strangers. We're bumping into each other, we're going to get a little bit of us on other people for good or ill. And when it comes for ill, when it comes for mistakes and how the mistakes of others affect us, you're absolutely right. You've got to be able to, in order to get to your life of significance, to live out your vision, you've got to be able to adapt to learn the lessons of those situations as well, which is why this blog is so valuable, I think.
Warwick Fairfax:
It's so true. Gosh, we've had unfortunately a number of people who've suffered abuse, and we've had people that suffer from alcoholism. I mean a number of things. And it's often the case that those who've been abused will abuse others, maybe even those who have been alcoholics can become alcoholics, I don't know. But certainly in the case of abuse. And so I think we have the opportunity to break that generational cycle so that we're better for our kids, our stepkids, our families. We can break the cycle.
And so that's why this isn't just some academic exercise. This is very, very important to learn these lessons, especially when there's been generational mistakes, generational misfortune. There are some cases where we can chart a different course. So learning these lessons can be not just valuable to us. They can be valuable to all those we love and care about.
Gary Schneeberger:
Well, let's dive in then to how we learn those lessons, the lessons we can learn and how we can apply them. Again, the blog is called How Others Mistakes Can Teach Us Valuable Lessons. Warwick's been talking about kind of the on-ramp to the discussion. Now here's the meat and potatoes of the discussion, the points from the blog. And the first point there, Warwick, is hit the reset button. So why is that both important and a good place to start?
Warwick Fairfax:
So often with mistakes and misfortunes, there can be a sea of emotions. We've used some examples. Let's say you've been abused. You might have this incredible sense of anger, of feeling like a victim. This is so unfair. But before you can start thinking about, well, how do I learn from this? You have to find a way to kind of hit the reset button and understand what happened, understand the pain that you've suffered, but try to look at it in an objective manner because when you're full of a sea of emotions and anger, it's very difficult to almost clinically analyze it. Again, that doesn't mean that we condone what happened.
It could be family members who've lived lives in a way that hurt themselves or hurt you, so you can feel sorrow for what they went through anger for what they did to you. It might include family members or those you care about who've suffered a life-altering injury or illness. You might feel angry at what happened, angry at God, or the universe, however you sort of frame it. You might feel this incredible sense of injustice. But for us to be able to calmly look at it, you've got to hit the reset button and separate the often understandable emotions from what happened.
Gary Schneeberger:
And then point two logically follows... I love this when you do a blog, everything is a step. Everything is a stepping stone to get where we're going. And the second point that you have is a critical one that we talk about quite a bit at Beyond The Crucible, and that is to forgive.
Warwick Fairfax:
So it really is a point that follows on from hit the reset button, to be able to calmly analyze what happened and what are the lessons in other people's misfortunes and mistakes. We've got to be able to forgive because very often those mistakes and misfortunes, like in the case of abuse, may have directly affected us, may have caused us immense pain. And so as I mentioned a minute ago, forgiveness doesn't mean condoning, but you've got to find a way to forgive them for what they did. If it's, let's say, some tragedy that somebody you love went through such as an illness or life-altering physical challenge, maybe that forgiveness might be to try and forgive God or some higher power.
And from my perspective, from a Christian perspective, it's not that God causes things. He might allow things for reasons that we can't often possibly understand or fathom. But however you look at it, you've got to find a way to not be consumed by anger and find a way to forgive. You can't learn and understand the lessons of what happened to others or as to what others did that affected you. Unless you can calmly look at the situation and say, "Yes, I have to hit the reset button." You've got to find a way to forgive. If you can't forgive, I think it's almost impossible to learn any lessons from situations that might be rich territory you learn from.
Gary Schneeberger:
And you've talked often about forgiveness really is for yourself. Forgiving other people is really for yourself in the sense of you release the hold that whatever occurred because of the other person is having on you. So talk about that a little bit, that forgiveness, yes, you forgive another person, but the chief beneficiary is yourself, right?
Warwick Fairfax:
It's so true. When we talk about even people who've been victims of abuse, the reason you forgive certainly one reason is because if you don't forgive, we often say it's like drinking poison or being in a prison. You're consumed with anger and angry people sadly often take out their anger on other people. Anger leaks and you cannot control typically where that anger will manifest itself. You might end up being angry with people who you love dearly who had no part in the abuse that you went through.
It's not their fault. They may be wonderful people, but you take it out on them. That's not right, and then it will cause you more anguish and angst. "How could I have done that? It wasn't their fault." So anger tends to leak. It's really important to forgive. You don't want to be that person, and you don't want to be consumed by anger. It's just anger can just destroy your life.
Gary Schneeberger:
And your third point kind of is what helps with forgiveness. If it's hard for you to get to the point, folks, where you're able to find forgiveness for the things that we're talking about. Warwick's third point, understand the why can really help you in your walk toward finding forgiveness for those whose misfortunes and mistakes have impacted your life. Explain a little bit how that works, how understanding the why is so critical.
Warwick Fairfax:
I know in my own life with some challenging circumstances that I've faced with my family, understanding why they were the way they were, maybe some of the things that they went through may have been very damaging. In some ways helps me forgive. It doesn't mean condoning, but it's like I can see or suspect some of the reasons that they behaved the way they did. Again, doesn't mean it was acceptable, it doesn't mean I condone it, but it does help to forgive if you understand the why. So in the case of some of the guests we've had on the podcast, very often people that abuse have been abused themselves. It's sadly statistically very common. That does not at all make it right.
It does not at all mean that you should condone it, but if you imagine, "Gosh, my father and mother were the way they were..." And again, just looking at some of the guests we've had, you can say, "Well, that wasn't right, but I understand it." Those two statements are really important. It was not right. But I understand some of what may have led them to behave that way. I will choose a different course. I will choose not to behave the way they did because life's about choices. I understand the why and I'm not going to make the same mistake.
Gary Schneeberger:
Good. Fourth point, again tied to that, and that's understanding something else that's very critical and that's understand what they might've done differently. So once you grasp the why, you sort of have an idea of why they turned out the way they did, they acted the way they did, then you can understand what they might've done differently. And it's important to really reach around in there because you can't get to the next point without going through this point like many of these points. So talk a little bit, Warwick, about why understanding what they might've done differently is a key piece to what you're talking about.
Warwick Fairfax:
It's very true. I think really the example of my father that I mentioned, being married three times and with his younger kids, especially from his first marriage not being as present, he was working very hard in the newspapers those days. And then as I mentioned, he was away for a year with his first wife when his two kids, a son and a daughter, were very young. So I think there are lessons to be learned. And what's interesting is my father did learn those lessons and I was the beneficiary of the lessons that he learned. Because when I was growing up and he was in his sixties and early seventies through the time that I was younger, he was a very present father.
I mean, it was clear to me... And yes, you could say he was more like grandfather age, but he was still through a lot of that time, chairman of John Fairfax Limited, the family media company, a lot going on at the time. We had newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, magazines, newsprint mills, and it was a very large company. So if he wanted to, he wouldn't have to be present. He could have worked all kinds of hours, but he didn't. We would go on different holidays, vacations, we would go on camping trips to the Outback and the May holidays in Australia at the time, and then we'd go up to far northern Queensland in the August holidays, which is sort of a tropical.
He was a present dad. And so the fact that he learned those lessons meant that I had a different upbringing than my older brother and sister from my father's first marriage. So he understood what he might've done differently by definition, and that led me to have a very different upbringing and a very close relationship with my father. I mean, it was hugely helpful. So obviously I realize that my father, my mother, it's complex, but I think ideally both of them would have married once, would have made sure they married the right person and being the right person. And certainly there are lessons.
I think just more generally when you look at your own circumstance with your parents, or maybe you have friends from high school, maybe they kind of experimented with drugs, marijuana or what have you, and that led to cocaine or various other things. You might think, "Gosh, we were such close friends when we were in elementary and middle school and we just went in different directions and maybe we still would have been close friends if they'd made different choices. But their lifestyle made it almost incompatible to be friends because we just had different values and my life and their life have gone very different directions."
So you can look back and say, "Gosh, I wish they'd made different decisions because it's ruined their lives." So I think understanding whether it's our parent's close friends, or just maybe those we know and think to ourselves life is about choices, but what choices might they have made that have their life so different?
Gary Schneeberger:
And that's a great place to pause for a second because it occurred to me as I was looking through these points, and we've gone through four of them so far, folks. Hit the reset button, forgive, understand the why, and understand what they might have done differently. And what's interesting to me about that work, we haven't talked about this beforehand, but those four points are all about being others focused to help yourself. Focusing on the experiences and the behavior of others as a way to help yourself.
And now we're going to pivot into ways that you can focus on yourself to help yourself. And the fifth point is break the cycle. So talk about why breaking the cycle is important, but also talk about this idea of looking, examining others to help ourselves, but then also pivoting and helping ourselves.
Warwick Fairfax:
That's a really interesting perspective, Gary. I hadn't really thought about that until you mentioned it. I guess you're right. The first four points are focused on learning from others, understanding the why, forgiving, understand what they might have done differently, and now we're going to be pivoting to how those lessons and others can help you. We talk sometimes about the inner journey precedes the outer journey. Well, in this case, the reflection on others and what you can learn from them proceeds how you move forward and the lessons you take from them. So I guess this particular one, breaks the cycle.
As we said, it is often the case that we don't learn from history. Sadly, there's a reason we study history because there have been mistakes that countries and leaders of countries have made, and history does tend to repeat itself because we tend not to learn the lessons. How could it be possible? I guess it's just human nature, maybe a lack of curiosity, a lack of desire to learn. I'm not sure. But with break the cycle, it's an opportunity to learn from others' mistakes and just chart a different course. We said before that it's all too common for people who've been abused to abuse their own children.
We need to say, "What was done to me was wrong. I cannot, I will. I refuse to do it to my loved ones, kids, spouse. I'm going to chart a different course. I'm going to understand why they acted the way they did to the best of my ability. I'm going to forgive, not condone. I'm going to hit the reset button and I'm going to make a decision that I will not live the way that maybe my parents did or others that I loved did." Maybe back to the example of friends in high school, maybe they did drugs, and some people may have more of a tendency than others. Maybe you're under stress and just, "Gosh, I'd love something to ease the pain and just numb what I'm going through."
And it's like, "But I remember Billy growing up and nah, I will not succumb to that temptation. I will not do what he did, even though I may be tempted, but no, I'm not doing that." So making a decision to break the cycle can be so helpful. In my case, my parents had this spoken and unspoken expectation that I would go into the family media business. They never said, "Hey, Warwick, look, this is what I did," in the case of my father. "But you don't have to go into it. It's been here 150 years. Empires fall, empires rise. Nothing goes on forever, at least in this world." But he was not able to do that. That was certainly a lesson that he was not able to learn.
So with my own kids, my oldest son had a birthday yesterday, and we do words of affirmation. And one of the things I said is, "Money and success is really not what I'm focused on. I want you to be happy and I'm grateful for the person that you are. And really faith and character to me is what's important." So I've never said to my kids, "You've got to achieve A or achieve B and be an accountant, a lawyer, or find your own entrepreneurial business." I've never said any of that. So I've really tried to break the cycle of ideally, not obviously always under our control, but to the best ability I could to marry once, not three times in the case of my father.
But I've also tried to break the cycle in terms of not putting expectations on my kids to be in some family business or to achieve some benchmark of success. And so I think there's real opportunities in breaking the cycle for you to have a better life and for your kids and loved ones to have a better life. So breaking the cycle, it's a decision. It's an absolute line in the sand decision is I will break the cycle. I will live differently. I will be different. I'll make my own mistakes. I'm not perfect, but I'll do my level best to break the cycle.
Gary Schneeberger:
I've never thought about it in the terms I'm about to express it. In all the years that we've worked together, all the years that we've hosted the show, I imagine that there are people, whether they speak it to you or not, who think when they think of Warwick Fairfax. They think, "Man, that guy, bad luck, lost the media company and he missed out on some prodigious riches." What you've lived though, what they don't understand though is you have accumulated even more prodigious riches in a different way.
And that's really what you're talking about right there when you're talking about it's not about money and wealth and power and all that stuff. It's about sitting around the table talking to your family about what you appreciate and love about them. That's the rich life, right?
Warwick Fairfax:
That's very well said. Very well said. I mean, I'm fortunate we're still very financially comfortable, but as comfortable when you grow up in a business that's very large, and I made a $2.25 billion takeover, there's a few more zeros. Money and wealth, fame, houses, large companies don't necessarily make you happy. They typically don't because as we often say, you don't want your money and possessions to own you. You want to own them. And typically it's the other way around. They own you. I mean, there may be a few less zeros, but my kids didn't grow up with the expectation of having to go into the family business. They grew up in the US where the name Fairfax doesn't really mean as much.
I mean, they were just able to be normal people with normal friends, and they all work hard, have strong faith and character, and they didn't have to grow up with all of that wealth. So yes, I mean, when I think of my wife and my kids, what do you want to be rich in? To me, you want to be rich in family, in faith, in significance, in the things that really build up your soul. Building up your soul and the souls of others is I think a lot more valuable than really building up your bank account. Where do you want to be rich in? Your soul, your friends or your bank account? I mean, which is going to make you more eternally happy. I think it's pretty clear.
Gary Schneeberger:
And it's also pretty clear because what we're talking about folks is Warwick's blog, which is called How Others Mistakes and Misfortunes, he's added, can teach us valuable lessons and what we've been talking about, what that summation was just about Warwick is that you learn valuable lessons about what's really important in life through the way that you were raised and the experiences you had when you were younger. And actually, I didn't even realize this, but 0.6 of the blog is what I just said without saying it, and that is learn the lessons.
You've learned the lessons, right? Talk about that. Why is learning the lessons so important? You've just expressed how you learned them. Why is it so important for everybody to do that?
Warwick Fairfax:
It's kind of funny. I literally just talked about that, didn't I?
Gary Schneeberger:
I know.
Warwick Fairfax:
But so I think gratitude comes, at least in my case, from learning those lessons. So again, back to my situation, I wanted to marry somebody that loved me for who I was not being the heir to some very large family fortune and family business. I was looking for faith and character and common interests and common outlook in life. So there were lessons I learned from the fact of my parents being married multiple times, from my father not being as present a dad with his kids from his first marriage as he was with me, of some of my family having their identity wrapped up in the family media business. I mean, there was really, as I think about it, a treasure trove of lessons for me and my family.
There were many, many lessons. I mean almost a cornucopia of lessons that I could learn, if you will. So I didn't know that I was very grateful for it growing up because I was affected by that in many ways. I mean, what I've been through, and I think I've talked about this quite a bit in my book, Crucible Leadership. In one of the chapters on authenticity, I say I grew up in the world of the inauthentic. And by that I mean the dinner parties and cocktail parties that we had growing up with ambassadors, prime ministers, the odd visiting Hollywood person, the rich and the famous. So many of them were just concerned about their image and bragging about who they'd met and the business deal they'd done.
And it's like I became almost allergic to that. And so one of my passions is being authentic, which I really try to my level best ability to be authentic. Well, why? Because I hated the whole inauthentic putting on the mask. So another lesson that I've learned so many of my values and the way I want to live my life is because of the lessons that I have learned.
Gary Schneeberger:
Very well said, and again, builds right to the next point, point number seven. You mentioned in talking about point number six that some of the lessons that you learned, you didn't really learn them when you were younger because you were kind of in it, but you learned them later. This seventh point is something that you learned later, that you experienced later in your life. And that seventh point is find an anchor for your soul. We talk about that a lot here at Beyond The Crucible. Why is that so important to how others mistakes can teach us valuable lessons?
Warwick Fairfax:
I think as you try to lead a life of significance, a life on purpose dedicated to serving others, it's really important to find an anchor for your soul because I think it's often the case that those who've made mistakes, whether they abuse people or they have their identity wrapped up in their wealth and money, maybe they marry the wrong people. It's often they don't have this anchor for their soul. They don't really have the set of beliefs and values that govern every decision they make. So maybe they're thinking of getting married to the man or woman of their dreams, and are they thinking about, "What's the anchor for my soul? And do my set of beliefs and values correlate with what that other person's beliefs and values are?"
That other person might seem like a wonderful human being that we respect, but if you have fundamentally different beliefs and values, it's not about whether you're right or they're right or you're wrong, they're wrong. That's not so much the point here. It's really important to have a common set of beliefs and values, from my perspective, for marriage, if you're going into business with somebody. Maybe they don't have quite the same belief and values, but some of them better be the same. If your values are humility and integrity and theirs are like arrogance and win at all costs, and let's crush the little guy. That's incompatible.
I don't care how much money they have, how much expertise, maybe they have a patent on some game changing invention. Run, flee, it will not work. So finding an anchor for your soul, it's very practical, whether it's thinking about who you will marry or be in relationship with, who you'll be in business with, it's absolutely critical. As you move forward, you're trying to learn the lessons of other people's mistakes and misfortunes, some of which may have been your crucible. You're trying to learn these lessons and choose a path that's different. Well, in choosing that path, it's my belief that we need help. We need help from other people, but I believe that we need help from a higher power.
In my case, it's my faith in Christ. And as I was trying to bounce back from the adversity, I went through losing a $2.25 billion business, just being incredibly self-critical of the mistakes I made. Having an anchor in my faith and scripture memory like Philippians 3, forgetting what is behind, straining toward what is ahead to win the prize, which God has called me heaven in Christ Jesus. There are a number of scriptures, a number of key biblical thoughts that helped me move forward, and that helped me find that anchor for my soul, which would really govern every decision that I made, whether it was marrying Gail, the person I did.
Whether it was, I guess in about 2003 when I was working for an aviation services business, doing marketing and business analysis. I just felt like God saying, "You're playing small. You're not using all your gifts and abilities for me." It's not so much about the job being above me, beneath me, but that anchor for my soul helped me through some executive coaching, through somebody that did mid-career assessments, said, "Warwick, you have a great profile based on some assessment tests to be an executive coach." And that led me ultimately on the path that I am now with Beyond The Crucible.
I talked about the details of this story elsewhere, but that anchor for my soul has led me to make better decisions than I would have otherwise.
Gary Schneeberger:
Friends, I want you to do something for me at this point, in this episode. I want you to take a look at a calendar, find a calendar in your house or on your phone, just look at a calendar. And I would like you to, if you can, circle the date, don't do it on your phone, but circle the date on your calendar if you can, mark the date on your phone because this is a truly paradigm shifting day in the history of the Beyond The Crucible podcast. And that's this. If you listen to these episodes-
Warwick Fairfax:
Do we need a drum roll?
Gary Schneeberger:
You know what? Yes, please. Scott, drum roll. Very good, Warwick. Because folks, if you've listened to any of these blog episodes in the past or you've read the blogs, you notice that Warwick's blogs, and I've teased him about it on the show several times, always have seven points. Well, guess what? That find an anchor for your Soul was the seventh point, which means this episode, this blog has eight points. It's a first. That's why I wanted you to circle the date on your calendar because on this date, Warwick Fairfax went beyond seven points for his blog and arrived at eight.
And it's a good reason why, because we've been talking about all of this stuff, all this stuff about how others' mistakes can teach us valuable lessons because the lessons that we learn can help us get through crucibles or avoid crucibles. So the first eighth point in the history of Beyond The Crucible blogs is this, decide to live differently. Warwick, why was that the point that you picked and how does it relate to the whole reason for Beyond The Crucible? And that is to get beyond crucibles, to navigate through them, and perhaps when you can, avoid them. How is decide to live differently tied up with overcoming crucibles?
Warwick Fairfax:
So you might've hit the reset button, you might've forgiven, understood the why, understood what they, others, might've done differently, you might've broken the cycle, you've made that desire known, you've learned the lessons from what happened to others, and you found an anchor for your soul that's going to guide every decision moving forward. But ultimately, that decision to change has got to come to fruition. It's good to have a plan, but a plan is not very helpful unless you execute the plan, unless you live the plan. So you've got to make a decision to live differently. You've got to make a decision to proactively and positively decide how you'll make a change moving forward.
In the 1980s, as I was thinking about who I would marry, really what became important to me is to find a woman that had strong faith and character and who I enjoyed being with. And I didn't want to do it three times like my dad. And so I made active decisions in terms of who I chose to go out with, that they would frankly meet that kind of criteria, if you will, that people of faith and character, that we had a common worldview and common interests and how we wanted our lives to look. I decided that I would be a present dad, and as I've mentioned with my own kids, when we do words of affirmation as we did yesterday at my son's birthday. My kids say, "You were present at my dance recitals, sports games," what have you.
So I made a decision to live differently. I made a decision that... And it took a while to make sure... I wanted to make sure my identity wasn't wrapped up in what I did. I had to realize my identity was at one point when I was younger, wrapped up in being a Fairfax, not so much in the money and power, but more in, "Somehow maybe it's God's plan for me to resurrect the company and the image of the founder." So my identity as being a Fairfax had a bit of a different hue, if you will, than money and power. It's more about calling, but still from my perspective in terms of my anchor for my soul, identity should be in God, should be in Christ, at least that's my faith perspective.
Not in the things that we think we can do, even if those are beneficial things. I've really tried to live differently than aspects of how I grew up and some aspects of my family, people that I ran into. I want to live authentically and be a humble person to the best of my ability, which was not always the case with people that I ran into growing up at some of these cocktail parties with my parents. So I think more generally, we might have grown up with all sorts of tragedies, whether it's being victims of abuse, alcoholism, maybe parents who were married multiple times, friends who've made poor lifestyle choices in terms of drugs or what have you.
Or maybe we have friends that we grew up in the neighborhood and we've done okay, but they've done fabulously well and have much more money than we have, but their lives may be miserable. That power and money and multiple houses all over the globe, that's fine, but that may not be where true happiness lies, which I don't think it is. So we need to make a decision not just to learn the lessons of all these crucibles or mistakes and misfortunes that others may have gone through. Some of them may have deeply affected us. We need to make a decision to live differently. And really that's a day by day decision. Yesterday might've been a good day.
You might've made a good decision. You got to make a good decision today too, and tomorrow and the next day and the next day. You got to keep making those good decisions. And how do you do that? It's back to some of the points we discussed earlier. Learn the lessons, understand what others may have done differently, find an anchor for your soul when you're making each of those decisions. Make sure that that's in line with your fundamental beliefs and values.
Gary Schneeberger:
And that's really a good resonant way to land the plane on this conversation on a very helpful and serious note. I'm going to then put a pin in that and make a joking note and say, deciding to live differently. You did that with this blog because you have eight points, not seven. So you did indeed decide to live differently in writing this blog. So bravo for you. As I always do, Warwick, I'm going to ask you, there's a lot of stuff that we've covered.
There were eight points, there were myriad kind of sub points and all those points. What's the one takeaway that you hope our listeners and viewers take away from this, I think very helpful and hopeful conversation?
Warwick Fairfax:
We're very focused and rightly so at Beyond The Crucible on learning the lessons of our crucibles, we often say they didn't happen to us. They happened for us. Whether those crucibles were our mistake, whether they were misfortunes that happened to us that were not our mistake at all. It could be physical crucibles, for instance, or an illness. But there are also valuable lessons that we can learn from others' mistakes and misfortunes. Some of those mistakes and misfortunes may have affected us. Their mistakes could be something that really caused a crucible within us. Sometimes maybe you had a mom or dad that was successful and maybe they made mistakes or maybe something happened to them that wasn't their fault at all, and you went from having a large house to a lot smaller one.
But whatever those mistakes and misfortunes are, there are such valuable lessons that we can learn from. I've outlined, gosh, a number of them, quite a lot actually as I think about it. That I have tried to learn from in terms of mistakes and misfortunes that my parents and others that I knew growing up went through like my dad being married three times, my mother twice. The sense of having your identity all wrapped up in being a Fairfax, people at cocktail parties, just with the lack of authenticity, arrogantly talking about their success, many mistakes and misfortunes that I've had the privilege of learning from. And so why not allow yourself to learn from these mistakes and misfortunes that others went through?
Whether they affected you or not, it's a chance to be different, to live different, to love differently, to just be a present father or mother. It can have generational impact. Generational challenges can be broken. That cycle of abuse, it can end. Your kids and family may not have to experience what you experience. So challenges can be life altering. They can be tough to grow up with, but every day we have a choice. Are we going to live differently? Are we going to decide to be a different person to care for those around us? Are we going to decide not to live life all about us, but to live a life of significance, a life on purpose, dedicated to serving others?
We have that choice. So there's such rich territory to learn from in the mistakes and misfortune of others. So just don't allow those mistakes and misfortunes to go past without you learning from them. There are rich territory and they can be so valuable that can lead you to live a life that is really truly in line with your belief and values. It really does make you feel like you can leave a legacy in terms of character and faith and how you treat others that you and others could actually be proud of. So it's very important.
Gary Schneeberger:
And there's also folks rich territory in the points that we've covered from Warwick's blog on this episode. The blog, again, if you want to go read it at beyondthecrucible.com, is called How Others' Mistakes Can Teach Us Valuable Lessons. And as we always do, we're going to leave you with some reflection questions that Warwick has prepared for you to kind of ruminate on what you've heard in this episode. First one is this, what mistakes that others have made and misfortunes that others have faced can you learn most from? That's a good one. Second one, what lessons do those circumstances have for you?
That's where you might want to get out one of these, a pen and write down what some of those lessons that those circumstances have for you, what are they? And you don't have to... Here's the beauty of it. That's why it's called reflection, because it can take time. You don't have to do it in five minutes, and then you're done with it. Keep reflecting on it because you'll find some very, very good answers there. And then the third point is, what specifically will you do in your life so that you will live your life differently? The eighth point, the miraculous eighth point in Warwick's blog was decide to live differently. So all of this wraps up our episode here at Beyond The Crucible.
Please know this, folks. We understand your crucibles are difficult. We understand that the mistakes and misfortunes of others can add difficulty to your life, but we also know it's not the end of your story when you go through a crucible. In fact, if you learn the lessons of that crucible, if you apply those lessons to your life, it's actually the beginning of the most rewarding journey of your life. Because where it ends, where it leads you to is a life of significance. Welcome to a journey of transformation with Beyond The Crucible assessment. Unlike any other, this tool is designed to guide you from adversity to achievement.
As you answer a few insightful questions, you won't just find a label like the Helper or the Individualist. Instead, you'll uncover your unique position in the journey of resilience. This assessment reveals where you stand today, the direction you should aim for, and crucially the steps to get there. It's more than an assessment. It's a roadmap to a life of significance.
Ready? Visit BeyondTheCrucible.com. Take the free assessment and start charting your course to a life of significance today.
From a Life Sentence to a Life Restored: Judy Henderson
At age 18. Judy Henderson married the man who would become the father of her two children. What began with hopes of family and stability turned into 12 years of domestic abuse, a period she later recognized as foundational to her vulnerability in subsequent relationships.
In 1982, she was wrongly convicted of capital murder in a case tied to her then-boyfriend’s criminal activities. He was acquitted at trial; she was sentenced to life in prison without parole. At 32,Henderson entered the Missouri prison system with no history of criminal behavior and little understanding of the legal process that had condemned her.
What followed was not just the passage of time, but a metamorphosis. Angry and disoriented at first, Henderson turned inward to confront her past and embrace her faith. Therapy sessions and support groups — particularly those for survivors of domestic abuse — helped her understand the patterns of trauma that had shaped her decisions. She came to recognize herself as a battered woman, a term she had not known before incarceration.
Her eventual release came in 2017 through the clemency of then-Governor Eric Greitens, who made history as the first Missouri governor to personally visit a prison to deliver news of a commutation. Now in her seventies and living near her family in Missouri, Henderson works for Catholic Charities and remains an active advocate for criminal justice reform.
She recounts it all in her new memoir, When the Light Finds Us: From a Life Sentence to a Life Transformed.
To learn more about Judy Henderson, including how to buy her memoir, visit www.judyannhenderson.com
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Transcript
Warwick Fairfax:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond the Crucible.
Judy Henderson:
It happened very quickly, and it seemed like I was not even in my body. I was just stepping out looking at this from afar. This was the most violent thing I had ever witnessed in my life. And to see somebody that I was just shocked that he even had this personality. I wasn't even aware that he had another side to him, that he was affiliated with other types of people until all of this happened.
Gary Schneeberger:
That's just a sliver of the story that our guest this week, Judy Henderson tells about the unbelievable day that landed her in prison with a life sentence convicted of a crime she didn't commit. But it was while behind bars that Henderson began to discover the patterns of abuse and trauma that helped her make sense of her past and fueled the future of helping other incarcerated women. Speaking of incarcerated women, Judy Henderson is no longer one of them. Stay tuned. You won't want to miss the detail of how she won freedom after 36 years.
Warwick Fairfax:
Well, Judy, it's so wonderful to have you. I'm trying to think of the right, I don't want to say, I enjoyed... I found reading your book was incredible experience. It was really heartbreaking, but yet there's incredible hope. We've had a lot of challenging stories on a podcast that people have been through all sorts of crucibles, but my gosh, it almost feels like the Mount Everest, or maybe I should say Mount Sinai of Crucibles, what you've gone through and survived which is triumph for the human spirit. And I know you're a person of faith, triumph of... I'd like to think amidst the challenge and the darkness, maybe God's goodness or breaking through in you and then using you in so many wonderful ways.
So, it is truly an amazing story. So I want to begin at the beginning, and we often say on Beyond the Crucible, what was life like before the crucible? And while things did get pretty incredibly challenging, it felt like there was never a time in which life was perfect. There was always challenges. So just talk about, before we get to the biggest crucible perhaps, what was life like for you growing up? I understand, I think you grew up a bunch of different places, but mostly Missouri, but what was life like for young Judy growing up? Who were you like? What did you love to do? What was the young Judy like?
Judy Henderson:
Well, growing up, of course, being the oldest of age, you have a lot of responsibilities. So growing up, I didn't have what I would say, much of a childhood that I can recall. I loved going home or going to my grandparents during the summertime, and I would switch between the two parent or grandparents. Well, it was my vacation away from all the chores, away from all the baths, away from all the ironing clothes. And I got to work out in the field. I got to drive a tractor, which it was fun. The one thing I didn't like though was that one grandmother, she had an outside bathroom, so I would have to go through the chicken coop to get to the bathroom. And the chickens chasing me, that was not fun. She'd always have to be out there shooing away and everything. But when I would go to my grandparents, it was fun. There's things in the book about my trips to my grandparents. And when I thought there was certain chocolate that I could eat, but it really wasn't chocolate. It looked like chocolate.
Warwick Fairfax:
I remember that. Was it laxative, I think?
Judy Henderson:
It was laxative, yes. That was horrible. So yeah, that was not much fun, but I always enjoyed being there. It was so peaceful and quiet. You can imagine with eight children. So, I always enjoyed those times. I was in Brownies at one time that my mother had me in. And so those are great memories too. There's trips we would take to Big Bear, which is in California Resort, and we had good times there. I have pictures of those. But yeah, life was tough. Being the oldest of eight children, you have a lot of responsibilities. And I loved my mother, so helping her do the chores, do the things with all the kids, it was just something that, I guess, came natural. Because I would watch my mother, she was very picky about how the house looked and how the kids were dressed.
My high school years weren't so great. We went to a certain church that had very strict dress rules that was not in style with the other girls in the high school that I went to. And I couldn't date until I was 18 years old. So all the girls would be talking about things that they did, parties they went to, but that was not the lifestyle that I was allowed to live. So that part of my high school years weren't the greatest. And then what occurred with an assistant pastor was not something that it took me a long time to get over. And I don't know that I ever got over it until I received therapy during my incarceration.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. Just to go back a bit, it seems like your mother obviously liked things just so, but you had felt like a good relationship with her throughout the years. She felt like sort of a rock that was there for you. I'm sure it's probably not perfect, but she felt like overall that she was a good mother that really cared about you, was with you.
Judy Henderson:
Yes.
Warwick Fairfax:
And your dad, it sounds like he maybe drank too much and it seemed like it often happens when he drank, he became a different person and was violent with your mother and you. So talk about that. I mean, it's probably a number of people that can relate to that, but they can be the good dad and the bad dad. And when his drinking, it became a different person. Talk about that uncertainty at home that you experienced.
Judy Henderson:
Yes. And you wouldn't know when his anger would get out of control. Because we did have so many children, I had so many siblings, there was always things going on in the house and noise. My father, it was like, I was the one that he always wanted to pick on, and that was okay. It was okay for me because I felt like I don't know that I could stand by and watch him do that to my other siblings. I felt very protective of them, but I didn't understand his anger. I always felt like it was my fault.
And so at the end of each time that I would get a beating from him, I would just write him a little note and put it on his pillow, and tell him I was sorry for what I did to cause him to do that. So, I always felt like things were my fault. If I had done this different or done that different, he wouldn't have gotten mad or he wouldn't have started drinking or he wouldn't have beat my mother. So, I took the responsibility for all of that, and it wasn't my responsibility to do that. It was hard to go through, but...
Warwick Fairfax:
Really, one of the next events in your life was you started dating this guy, Charlie, who they often seem charming at first. To some guys it's the thrill of the chase. And once they catch what they're chasing, for some sadly, the interest is not as much as in the chase, which is exceptionally sad. So talk about Charlie, and from what I'm saying, things changed when you got pregnant. Well, they suddenly got worse. And then you felt forced to marry him, because obviously this a long time ago. So talk about the whole Charlie getting pregnant, marrying that whole episode in your life.
Judy Henderson:
Yes. So he was the first boy I'd ever dated, and he was like a knight and shining armor at the time whenever I first met him, because we had went to... This is after the minister did what he had done. And I went to a dance hall for teenagers and that's where a few of us got in a car and decided to go out to a country road. And I got out of the car and was walking with one of the guys, and he started taking advantage of me. And then Charlie came up and he was like saved me, by knight in shining armor.
He pulled the guy off of me, and then him and I started dating. And we ended up putting the guy in the car, he did, and we ended up dropping him off. And then Charlie and I started dating. And him being the first guy I'd ever been out with on an actual date, it was like, "Wow, it was exciting." I finally got to do the things that the girls in high school used to do. I felt like one of them a little bit.
And then I got pregnant. And my father, of course, he was absolutely furious. I thought he was going to have what they called a shotgun wedding, because he said that he's going to marry me. He wanted to go get his gun and do something about it, and my mom stopped him. So it did end up marrying Charlie, but it didn't end up I was hoping it was. It didn't end up like a little white picket fence around a little house with loving children and a loving husband and all the things that a little girl dreams about.
Gary Schneeberger:
Warwick, I'm going to jump in for a second. I just want to make the point for the listeners and viewers here, and you said it at the outset of this show, and you said it a little bit when you were asking the last question of Judy, and these are profoundly sad events and memories. I just want to assure you folks, if you are watching and you are listening, this is not going to be a profoundly sad show forever. I encourage you to continue listening because there are truly some miraculous things that happen. And you can pick up on it in Judy's voice and in her visage, if you're watching that she's not living in those places anymore. And there's a reason why, and we will get there. So bear with us, we'll get there.
Warwick Fairfax:
But before we get there, it gets worse.
Gary Schneeberger:
Right, exactly.
Warwick Fairfax:
So hang on there. You might feel it's pretty tough now. Well, it is going to get tougher. So anyway, from what I understand, once you had a child, Angel, your first child, it seemed like Charlie, drunk, was abusive, maybe had other women. I mean, it went downhill and eventually, understandably, you got divorced. And you would hope at that point, "Okay, maybe it's going to get better." But then you meet Greg. So talk about Greg, who he was, why he was attractive, and how he sort of just brought you in-
Judy Henderson:
He did.
Warwick Fairfax:
... sucked you in a sense. Talk about Greg.
Judy Henderson:
Yes, he did. I met Greg through some other friends, and we were getting ready to... This was in April, so I want people to know, and I don't know if I should bring it up now or wait until later about the timeline of how this all occurred. Because after 12 years of an abusive marriage, then I finally had the courage to divorce Charlie in June. I attempted suicide because he wouldn't leave me alone. He would tear up my clothes and shoes where it was hard for me to go to work. So I attempted suicide. And out of that suicide, my psychiatrist said, "You need to move out of that town and move where your parents are, your family."
So I did, and that was in September and October, I was in the psychiatric ward for 30 days. I ended up moving down there and I bought a business and it was a successful business. My children and I moved into our own home, and then I started meeting friends and going out to dinner. And that's where I met my co-defendant, Greg, that I started dating. He was a businessman. He was a real estate broker. He had been in the ministry at one time, and that should have been a red flag for me, had been in the ministry and he wasn't now, so hmm. Yeah.
Now I can go back and say, hmm. But I didn't see that. We were at my aunt's one time for 4th of July, and she and I were in the pool and she said, "Why is he reading a book on manipulation, Judy?" And I said, "Well, he has multimillion dollar property he said he has to sell. So I'm sure it has something to do with work." And again, I never saw any red flags, he was taking care of business. But during that time, I was supposed to have been taking medications and I did not because I've never liked pills or things such as that. So my mind still wasn't quite right from all the abuse that I had already been through. My thinking wasn't right. I later found out there's different kinds of addiction, not just drugs and alcohol, but my addiction was love. I wanted so badly to be loved that I would be a people pleaser.
I would try to be the caretaker, always trying to help people. I again, with Greg being so polite and nice and charismatic, I never saw a anger side of him. He never raised his voice at me. He was very gentle. And whenever I came home from work one day after picking my son up from the nursery, I walked in and suitcases were sitting in the foyer. And I go, "Who suitcases are these?" And I said it out loud and around the corner, then Greg walked up and he said, "They're mine." I said, "What are you doing?" He said, "I just felt like it was time for me to move in and take care of you and the children." He said, "We're going to be a happy family." We're going to do all these wonderful things that he talked about.
And I said, "Well, that's just not something that I'm accustomed to is having somebody live in my home, a male live in my home." And he said, "Judy, it's going to be fine. I'm going to take care of you and the kids. You need me." And of course, I was at that stage where, "Oh. Okay, yeah, okay." I was so good at business, I could do that and I could come out on top. But whenever it came to this part of my life, it was like I just lost all control. I lost all my senses.
Warwick Fairfax:
So talk about leading up to when things get worse is Harry Klein and how Greg was just so manipulative, and you kept pushing back. "And no, but Judy, it's going to be okay, trust me." And you resisted, but...
Judy Henderson:
I did.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, resisting a master manipulator like Greg is sort of like, I don't know, resisting lava coming down a volcano in avalanche. I mean-
Judy Henderson:
Correct. Yeah. Exactly.
Warwick Fairfax:
... you're not going to last too long. It's like, resistance is futile as they say in some science fiction shows. So talk about the whole Harry Klein episode and the shooting, and just-
Judy Henderson:
Yeah. I try...
Warwick Fairfax:
... how those [inaudible 00:17:57] steps are interesting.
Judy Henderson:
Well, yeah. And he was in the middle of a divorce too. He had been separated from his wife for quite a while, and he said, "Judy, he said, I need $10,000 to get this divorce. I need this." And that was the final thing that he said and assured me, no harm would come to Harry Klein that he just needed to talk to him. He needed this money. It was things that had to be done if we wanted a happy life, but it would all turn out okay. And so, I had forgotten about it because he didn't mention it for a few weeks. And then all of a sudden when I came home one day, he said, "Okay, today's a day." And I said, "What do you mean today's a day? Today's a day whenever I want you to contact Harry Klein. I want you to take him out to a certain area." And I said, "But I don't know what to do. I don't know anything about this. What do you mean?"
Warwick Fairfax:
It seemed like he wanted you to get together with Harry Klein almost romantically in a sense, which-
Judy Henderson:
Yes.
Warwick Fairfax:
... must have seemed weird to you because, "Okay, but Greg-
Judy Henderson:
It did.
Warwick Fairfax:
... I thought we're in a relationship, why would you want me to do this with this other guy?" But obviously, he knew that Harry Klein maybe was attracted to you to a degree and it was a device. And so he gets you out in a car somewhere in the country, and somehow ends up shooting him a couple of times. It wasn't like it was in the heat of the moment.
Judy Henderson:
No.
Warwick Fairfax:
I think you got injured in one of the ricochet bullets or something.
Judy Henderson:
Correct.
Warwick Fairfax:
And so then there's this cleanup and let's rush away. And I think you end up in Alaska to escape. As you said, your dress had blood on it. You must've been like, "Well, what's happening? Everything happened so quick."
Judy Henderson:
It happened very quickly and it seemed like I was not even in my body. I was just stepping out, looking at this from afar. And I couldn't believe what was [inaudible 00:20:25]. This was the most violent thing I had ever witnessed in my life. And to see somebody that I was just shocked that he even had this personality, I wasn't even aware that he added another side to him that he was affiliated with other types of people until all of this happened. So it was a total unbelievable like a movie.
But yes, he ended up taking me to Alaska where I did attempt suicide again, because if I was going to die, which I fully believed in my heart that he would kill me, why would he not kill me? I was a witness to all of this. So I attempted suicide again, and I had to be life-flighted to the hospital. They had to stop in between the helicopter [inaudible 00:21:22] because they thought they lost me, and they revived me and I was shipped life-flighted to another hospital in Anchorage. And he was so furious whenever I came to that, he said, "Come on, we're going right now. We're leaving." I mean, the doctors in all the medical reports, they said, and they believed that I was being abused. They said that I was being guided by this gentleman. So I left.
Of course, I left. I was scared to death. The whole time I was scared. Then when we got home, he choked me so bad that he had to go get turtleneck sweaters for me to wear so nobody would see my marks. So I thought, "Well, I'm going to die now. He's not going to ever let me go."
Warwick Fairfax:
Somehow the police found you in Alaska and they arrested you both, took you back to Missouri. And then as bad as things were, it feels like they get worse. And you're thinking, "Okay. Well, I didn't do anything." Yes, maybe in hindsight if you were even thinking this way, which you probably would, it's like, "Well, maybe it wasn't so smart to invite Harry Klein." Maybe I was culpable for something, but you think, "I didn't do murder." And you really conned into it all. You were obviously a victim in all this. But at the trial, Greg, the master manipulator manipulated that situation in which somehow he is like this innocent little lamb and you are this awful killer.
Judy Henderson:
[inaudible 00:23:13].
Warwick Fairfax:
So talk about how through manipulating lawyers, and he's saying, "Don't worry, Judy, I've got this." Oh, he had this all right. He was manipulating it to your downfall. So talk a bit about that whole lawyer stuff leading up to the verdict.
Judy Henderson:
Sure. So we had the same attorney represent both of us, which is a constitutional issue and that cannot happen today because of what occurred in my case, and it made case law. But an attorney cannot represent two defendants on the same case. You can't defend one and protect another one. And let one go to prison. That is no defense for one of you, and that happened to be mine. And Greg wanted it to be one attorney representing both of us so he could set in on all the meetings, and here our strategy, here what my defense was, what evidence we were going to use. But he always said, "Don't worry, you didn't do this, so you're not going to be found guilty. The jury won't find you guilty and you will be fine." So I told my attorney, I said, "Well, I'm going to testify aren't I?
And he said, "No." He said, "Unless you want to come up with a lie, an alibi of where you were, and it wasn't at the scene." I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "Well, you can say you were shopping with your mother, and your mother can confirm that by taking the stand." I said, "I would never, never implicate my parents or my mother in something like this." That was just insane. I was starting to come to a little bit and think, "This is crazy. This is a crazy situation and I don't know what I'm going to do."
So I even asked the attorney at one point, he was at my mother's place of business, and I called and I asked him, "I'm ready to make a plea bargain. Go talk to the prosecutor." And he left and he came back and he said... And he wasn't gone very long. And he said, the prosecutor said, "No deal because he's got somebody else to testify." And the prosecutor then testified later that my attorney never went to him and asked, "Tell him I wanted to testify." What Greg, my co-defendant was doing was while he was being in my meetings, he was still speaking to two other criminal attorneys that he ended up hiring after I was convicted. And he fired that attorney, and he ended up having these other two that got him acquitted. And he never did a day of time for that murder ever.
Warwick Fairfax:
And he just sort of manipulated your attorney, paid him off, or who knows. So talk about, then there's the verdict and you're still probably thinking at that point, "Surely they can't find me guilty because I did nothing wrong." And then what did you hear from the judge? What was about it?
Judy Henderson:
Whenever they do jury instructions, they give them all these options of a lesser charge, lesser charge, lesser charge. So I thought, there's no way they're going to find me guilty of murder. No way. So whenever they came in and they told me to stand, the judge was going to read the verdict. I just heard my mother screaming because they found me guilty of capital murder, which carried life without parole or the death penalty. So the jury still had to go back out and find me guilty of one of those. I would get one of those sentences. And we did not know which it was.
Of course, my mother was just hysterical. My family was so distraught, and I was froze. I was froze because I could hear her screaming and I thought, "Okay, Judy, you can't show any emotion. You have to be brave. You have to be protective of your parents and your mother." And so, I just looked back at her and told her, "Mom, it's going to be okay. It's going to be okay. I'm good. I'm okay." So the jury went out and they took me back to my cell. So I thought, "Okay, I could get the death penalty." And Warwick, if I had received the death penalty, I would've been executed when I had served 18 to 20 years. I wouldn't even be sitting here with you today. But they came back and they gave me life without parole for 50 years.
Warwick Fairfax:
I want to talk a bit about your prison time, but before we do that, I know it's like about a year later, but it's talk about salt on the wounds doesn't feel like it's sort of, I don't know, hydrochloric acid on the wound. But in terms of Greg's trial, so talk about that. He gets acquitted and he pays for four women prisoners to claim that you confess that you did it. And he uses his smooth talking preaching skills on the stand, and he manipulates and cons the jury, and he gets acquitted and is a free man. I mean, when you heard that trial and you wanted to testify, but once the prosecutors heard there were four women prisoners who claimed under oath that you confessed. At that point, they weren't going to touch you as in have you on the stand. So at the risk of asking an obvious question, what did you feel like when this... I don't say, man, this person thing, creature of when you say Greg was acquitted. I mean, that must have been one of the lowest points.
Judy Henderson:
It was, it was, because I thought, what am I going to do now? Where is my hope going to come from? How am I going to survive this? How am I going to prove I did not do this?
Warwick Fairfax:
Talk about those early days, weeks, months in prison. Obviously, you were battered, bruised, but you weren't this hardened criminal type. This wasn't like, "Here we go again. It's not my first rodeo." I mean, it's for you, it was you. I think to talk about fresh meat, the early times. I mean, talk about those experiences and how it changed you and you almost had to change to survive. You've had kids depending on you.
Judy Henderson:
Right. And that's where my fight, that's where I got my courage and strength to be able to do what I needed to do because of the love that I have for my children and family. I had no choice. I could not give up. I could not sit there and think that I was not going to come home. I had to fight for this. I mean, Greg, even when he was going to trial, he put a contract out on me in prison. And one of the offenders befriended me and I thought she was a friend.
Then come to find out she carried a shank. She was a crude criminal and she was going to take my life if I did not do something about it. And so, I did. I took her to the bathroom and we did what we needed to do. And I had to let population know, don't take my kindness for weakness because here is what I can do. Here's what I am capable of doing. And that was very sad to me that I had to be violent like that, but I had no choice. I had to save my life.
Warwick Fairfax:
One of the things you say in your book about this, Madam Officer's view you said, "Anger became my fuel, my armor against the crushing weight of grief. I pictured Greg's face letting the rage simmer and build. In the prison gym, I pushed my body to its limits. Each rep, each lap forging me into something harder, less breakable." You had to become not like, I guess, they used to tease you about being a princess. You had to become something very different than a princess.
Judy Henderson:
Yes, I did.
Warwick Fairfax:
Some tough woman that you don't take on Judy Henderson, or you'll be sorry. But it-
Judy Henderson:
Yes, that's right. And what it was crazy is we were housed in a... We had male and female there. So there was guys there, so we got to play handball, racquetball. So I became very active. I started lifting weights. Actually I ended up, before I left there, becoming probably about 16 years into my sentence, I became a certified personal trainer and group fitness trainer. So, I did not only start lifting weights when I got there, I did it until I came home. And I taught others how to love themselves and love their bodies and love who they were. And so, it was a total transformation work. It was so uplifting and so inspiring to know that I do not have to stay a victim. I can be a victor, I can make the decision. I can let that anger fuel me to either be better or I can get better. And I be darn, I was going to get better and I was going to fight. I was coming home to my family and my children.
Gary Schneeberger:
This would be a good time, Judy, to mention how you maintained your relationship with Angel, your daughter. Even in the midst of all of that in prison, even in the midst of what you've been describing, even before perhaps these revelations of good that you found. I mean, you told me in a conversation we had before we were recording, that you just had this bond that you refused to allow even bars to break with your daughter.
Judy Henderson:
Yes.
Gary Schneeberger:
"She was 13, and I was going to fight and scrape and scream until I got my freedom to let her know if there's a wrong, you have to fight to make it right." Talk about that. That brought you strength, right?
Judy Henderson:
Yes.
Gary Schneeberger:
It certainly brought her strength, but it brought you strength too, continuing that bond with your daughter, right?
Judy Henderson:
Yes. My daughter was my life and there was not anything I wasn't going to do to get back with her except escape. Because I know five lifers that I did time with all escaped and tried to get me to. And I said, "Why would I do that? I could never see my children or my family again if I did that. Never. I'm going out the right way and I'm getting my freedom." And everybody thought I was crazy. But anyways, that's beside the point here I'm today so I wasn't too crazy. So yes, I was determined to keep that bond with my daughter. We talked frequently. My family made sure that she came up to visit me all the time. I had a lot of visits with my family. They took very good care of me while I was incarcerated. And we had heart-to-heart talks, very honest, very transparent about her dating.
She wanted to know, "Mom, how do I fix certain dishes like sweet potatoes, pancakes?" And so I would tell her over the phone, she would break up with a guy and her heart would be breaking. And of course, I'd be standing on the phone crying. Then the sergeant would call me to the office and she'd say, "Judy, are you okay?" I said, "Yes, my daughter, just her heart's breaking right now. This guy just broke up with her." I know to them it was very probably crazy, but I wanted to be active in every aspect of her life, no matter what it was.
I wanted her to feel safe to be able to talk to me because that's something I never had. And so, I mothered her from afar and she ended up becoming... She graduated Summa Cum Laude from UMKC in Kansas City and now she is the executive director, CEO of Mother's Refuge, which is a home for babies and their mothers. So, we still are rescuing people, and moms and babies. And so she never gave up hope. She gave me hope, she gave me strength, and she gave me a reason, as did my siblings and my parents to fight because I knew I was not going to give up until the truth came out. I refused.
Warwick Fairfax:
I guess, they considered you a troublemaker in Missouri because you wouldn't just give in and they couldn't break your spirit, which not all, but some prison officials seem to want to do. And you went to Arizona, which is more of a maximum prison with drugs and all sorts of things going. But because they had more money, from what I understand, there were more programs. And so, I think you read Dr. Lenore Walker, the Battered Woman syndrome who you met earlier. There were programs you went through about battered women. And I think another doctor that helped you understand that counseling, there was faith-based things.
I think I saw somewhere Kairos Prison Ministry that there was a Catholic Prison Program. There were a number of programs both faith-based and more just psychological help. Talk about how that helped you understand what you were going through, just your brain being wired to be a victim. You were learning what you had. Again, you were not an alcoholic but you had a different... I don't know if it's illness, but something that says, "Oh, I'm getting beaten and it's my fault somehow." So talk about how the therapy that you received, which you then helped other women. You set up your own programs, I think PATCH and other things, to talk about both being helped and helping other women in prison. Because that felt like a turning point for you-
Judy Henderson:
It was.
Warwick Fairfax:
... in terms of purpose and healing.
Judy Henderson:
Yes, it was work. Well, first I had to realize how did I get here, what happened? All the things that happened in my life. I had to try to understand those. And so then I started my therapy and everything whenever I got to Arizona. And that's whenever I started the Women Against Violence Group for battered women so I could help them. And I had good therapy when I was in Arizona. Adults Molested as Children was one great program that really helped me understand that all those things that happened to me, I didn't cause that. I didn't say the wrong thing. I didn't look the wrong way. So all these other women, there's so many women in there that are battered and abused, and they don't know how to be parents, they don't know how to be mothers.
And it broke my heart because I thought they don't even know how to talk to their children. So, that was something that I wanted to get involved in, was starting getting involved on the ground level of pioneering these programs, parenting classes, the parents, the PATCH program, which the parents and their children where they would have one-on-one visits without security, without officers being around. It would just be them and their mother cooking and playing games, and watching television in a very safe environment. Then I got involved with 4-H Life, which was a federal grant through one of the universities that created this program where you involved a whole family unit, the grandmothers, the cousins, the aunts, the uncles, because this appeared and it was several generational curses all through the family. One goes to prison, then the other one goes to prison, then the others go to prison. So, this had to be broken.
And the only way to do that was to get these families together so they enjoyed the family unit coming together and seeing how much their loved one in prison had grown and wanted a different lifestyle. And so, it was so rewarding. And whenever I did the Women's Against Violence Program, the governor's office even came to the program and took from that program back to the governor's office how powerful it was and how it was really opening and changing the women's lives. And they started a task force against domestic violence in Arizona.
Warwick Fairfax:
There's a moment that was maybe one of the most incredible moments in your life in which you had tried to appeal for your release for years and he got close. And then that particular governor of Missouri, you're back in Missouri in prison at this time and died in a plane crash. It's like, you must have looked, "Seriously Lord? We were so close." He died in a plane crash. But then there's another governor, Governor Eric Greitens, and he seemed to take your appeal seriously. And you had some student lawyer and some other lawyers and people in the legislature had a whole small, maybe big army of people really trying to help you. And one I think got in his intern in his office.
But there was an incredible moment where your daughter drove, I don't know, a couple of hours to some event that Governor Greitens was out to talk to him personally. We're at a point, just so that listeners know the scene. What you spoke about earlier, these two of these four women recanted their statements that they signed affidavits according to your lawyer. That was a game changer. So at that point, that's what began to fuel the hope with these petitions, those two women changing their stories. So talk about how Angel goes to this event, and what happened to that event when your daughter heroically is doing battle for her mom, because that's an incredible scene.
Judy Henderson:
Yes, she did it. So someone had vandalized the Jewish cemetery, and so Eric Greitens put out a plea for everyone to come and try to help clean the cemetery up. So she decided she was going to drive four and a half hours to where the cemetery was, and she was going to volunteer to do that because she knew he was going to be there. And she was supposed to go to the capitol and speak with legislators on some bills that were coming up. And she told her husband, David, "I just feel led. God is leading me to..." Because they're great Christians also, and people of faith to go to this Jewish cemetery. "I'm supposed to go." And he said, "Then you do that, you go. There's other people that's going to the capitol, you're supposed to go there," and to the cemetery. So she did. And there was hundreds of people, there was all these security guys around that was not going to let anybody get close to the governor or the vice president, he was there also. So you know how tight the security was.
So Angel, she started picking up the trash and doing what needed to be done. And actually, I don't know what it was, but somebody, she got to park right up close to where all of this was occurring instead of parking miles away and having to walk up there, because there were so many people there. So toward the end, he was thanking everybody for coming and helping. And she was in the back and she said, "Mom, it was like God just parted the waters." And all these people just started shifting and she got right up there next to him. And he shook her hand and he held her hand and she said, "I just want you to know that I want to tell you about my mother." And she gave him my name and she told him where I was, and that I had lived that parole for 50 years and I'd been incarcerated and I didn't do the murder.
And she just felt such a shift in her fight that she had made a connection with him, and they even took a picture. And so she goes back home, she gets a copy of the picture, she puts it in an envelope to thank the governor for talking with her. And then my female attorney, she starts going to the governor's office. I mean, she's a pit bull. She was not going to stop visiting that governor's office and getting other senators and legislators involved. My daughter being one of those women just were resilient. They was going to persevere. They were going to conquer this.
Warwick Fairfax:
Talk about that special day when you get called to the warden's office and you're thinking, "Okay, what now? What more can they do to me?" You're not thinking, "Oh, this is going to be fun." It's going to be a, "Here we go again." And yet the governor, Eric Greiten was there himself. And what did he tell you and what happened after that?
Judy Henderson:
So whenever they wanted me to go up to the visiting room, because they said I had a visit. I rebelled and said, "No, my attorney would not come and visit me without letting me know and letting me have my makeup on and my hair done and everything." She just wouldn't do that. And they said, "Judy, either you're going to go or we're taking you to the hole." I said, "Okay, it looks like I'm going," because I'm not going the hole. So I went up there and I was freaking out because I thought it's got to be bad news because it wasn't a visiting day. And for my attorney to come, something had to have happened. And of course, because of my past not getting any good news about anything, I was thinking, "Well, this isn't good." Plus it was his first year in office. No governor ever does something like this their first year in office, no governor because of their political career that comes first.
So about an hour later I was waiting and waiting and I said, "If my attorney's here, where are they? Something's not right." And so they get a phone call in the back where I was strip searched and ready to go in. And they said, "They're ready for you." I said, "Oh, okay." So I walk in and I see the governor's attorney that had been there to see me about three weeks earlier just asking me random questions, but tell me, "Not make any promises. I don't know what's going to happen. It's his first term. I don't know how this is going to go, but I'll report back to him and tell him about our meeting." And my attorney was there with him also. And so he came, I saw him first in the visiting room.
I said, "Justin, what are you doing here?" And he said, "Well, there was something else I needed to ask you." And he said, "Actually, there's somebody that's been waiting to meet you for a long time." And I said, "Why would somebody want to meet me?" He said, "Well, turn around and you'll see." And I turned around and there was the governor right behind me. How he got in that visiting room and snuck up behind me, I have no idea because those are steel doors that you hear. That had to have been a God thing. So I just started bawling because I thought, "This has got to be good news. He's here. He's here." So, I just fell to my knees and just sobbing. And he grabbed me by the shoulders gently and he said, "Judy, he said, it's okay. He said, this is good news."
He said, "Let me help you get up and we're going to sit at the table and I'm going to talk to you for a minute." So he did. And he said, "I want to apologize on behalf of the state of Missouri for what has happened to you and that nobody came to help you, and I'm here to do that today. And I want to read something to you." And he pulled out papers with a golden seal on it. And he said, "On this day, I'm going to commute your sentence to life..." Or how do you say it? "I'm going to commute your sentence to time served and you will be released today." I said, "What did you say?" He said, "You are going home today." I said, "Today? I am leaving today?" And he said, "Yes, you are leaving today. You are going home." Of course, I started just bawling my eyes out again.
So he said, "Before I leave, I just want you to know that this is something that we had to do and we had to do it now." And he said, "I know that you always told your family you don't want any publicity," which I never did. So for me to do this book, this is a God thing too. Yeah. And so he said, "I want you to know there's no publicity out there, there's no media out there because we know you would not have wanted that." And he said, "And this isn't about me, and I didn't want it either." And he said, "But me and my staff are going to get out of the way. And there's people here that's been waiting to see you for a long, long time waiting for this day."
And so they left and opened the door. And in what my daughter and my son and my entire family and my two attorneys and one of the attorneys that had been with me for 36 years pro bono that believed in me, he was there with his wife. And it was the most glorious day. Even whenever I had to go down to my cell to pack my property, the staff said that they... That was 1600 women in the yard cheering me on and just thrilled and happy and crying and hugging me.
And they said that that morale and that prison was like that for a week that they had never seen. That was like a miracle. All the women thought, "If it can happen for her, it can happen for us." And it was so ironic because the last person's hand I shook as an offender when I walked out out of there was the woman that took the contract to kill me. And she said, "Where are you going, Judy?" And I said, "I'm going home, Pam. I'm going home." And so we did a high five. And I said, "I made it." She said, "Good." And so that gives me chills just thinking about it. So God, he had me the whole time, Warwick and Gary, he had me. And now, I want to just give back. And where I work is a good place that I can help so many people for so many different reasons. So, I'm highly blessed and favored. But what he does for one, he'll do for another. So I always tell the women, "Don't give up. Don't give up hope."
Warwick Fairfax:
So you've said some incredible things in your book just as we sort of sum up some of these things a bit. You said, once you heard from the governor, you said, "I sat there stunned into silence right now after 13,149 days, after 315,576 hours, after 18,934,560 minutes, freedom was no longer a distant dream but an immediate reality. You also say, prisons stole irreplaceable years. Yet in this place designed to break spirits. I also discover a deep truth. Even in chains, our choices remain our own."
Just a couple more. "In the crushing silence of solitary confinement, I chose to fill the void with whispered stories of hope and redemption. As I stepped beyond those gates, I held my head high. I wasn't just leaving prison, I was carrying with me a hard-won truth. No matter what life throws at us, we always have the power to choose who we become in the darkness. And when we make that choice, we can welcome that light when it comes to us, when it finds us again at last." So your journey is so incredible. As you look back, what are the lessons? We talk about sometimes hard-won lessons. I mean, this is sort of the Olympic level of hard-won lessons. Nobody wants to learn lessons the way you did. I'm sure you didn't either. But as you look back, what are some of the lessons you feel you've learned within yourself or maybe from God? What are some of the key lessons that you've learned throughout your experience?
Judy Henderson:
The key lessons for me is that women take on. And not just women, there's abused men also, that God created us to be happy, to be fulfilled, to be joyous, to enjoy our life and to help others. And I know now he has shown me so many different ways that things could have been different, and I could have had the courage to stand up and do what needed to be done, but Satan is always there to steal, kill, and destroy.
And you have to know and believe in your heart that God created you for a purpose. And we all need to find out what that purpose is. And I was able to find my purpose, and I praise God for that. But you have to remember that there's always hope. There is always hope. Don't ever give up, and know that there is people there that genuinely love and care about you no matter what your plight is or what turns you make, that they are there to help you through it. And you just have to trust and believe that they are going to... God's guiding you, and he's bringing them into your life for a reason.
Warwick Fairfax:
So, I'm assuming that you can't survive what you've been through without forgiveness. One of the things, believe it or not, we talk about a lot is bitterness and anger. And we do use this phrase is like being in prison or drinking poison. And they typically could care less the people you're angry at unfortunately, which is galling. And we also say this, "Forgiveness doesn't mean condoning evil behavior." But how did you manage, which I'm assuming you must have. How did you manage to forgive all the people? And he had a long list, but Greg is probably at the top of the list. How did you manage to forgive him? Because that must not have been easy.
Judy Henderson:
It wasn't easy. It wasn't easy to begin with, but the only person that that anger was hurting was me. It wasn't hurting them. Nobody else cared that I was angry or that I refused to forgive anybody. That wasn't hurting anybody but myself. So I decided, there's two things you can do with anger and bitterness. You can either get bitter or you can get better, and I chose better. And the only way to completely heal that anger is to forgive those that did what they did to you through the years. And so, I was able to do that. And with that forgiveness, getting that junk out of yourself, you are able to have room for joy and for happiness, and for love and helping others. I reached back and helped those that needed the help the most, people like me that was in the same spot I was in.
Gary Schneeberger:
Normally at this point in the show folks, I say, that sounds you heard was the captain turning on the fast and seatbelt signs indicating, it's our time to descend. I'm not going to say that this time because this has felt a little bit like a marathon. We've covered a lot of, as Warwick put it, some sad ground that ends up in a very unsad place. So I'm going to break the tape, if you will, and we finished our race, and what's left of our race now is to talk to the winner. And Warwick will come back and talk to Judy in a second. But Judy, I'd be remiss at this point in our conversation if I didn't give you the chance to let people who've heard your story today know how they can learn more about you on the internet and other places. How can they find out more about Judy Henderson?
Judy Henderson:
Okay. Well, we do have a website set up that is, you go to judyannhenderson.com and it will take you to several things on my website. I just love the way it's been laid out, the way it looks. You'll see pictures of me and my children in younger years. And my mother and I who passed away during my incarceration, and some of my brothers who passed away during my incarceration, and ways to get in touch with me. So, feel free to do so. Buy a book, "When the Light Finds Us: From a Life Sentence to a Life Transformed," and you'll get a lot more. There's so many miracles in that book. And you're going to see where God was with me every step of the way, where I was. There was not just one contract killing, but two, that we didn't discuss the first one, and how God already knew what was going to happen before it happened. And he saved me without my mother even knowing that what she did saved me. And so, that's how they can reach me.
Gary Schneeberger:
Now, with a last name like Schneeberger, a co-host a podcast with a guy whose first name is Warwick with a W in the middle, I would not be doing what I should be doing. How do you spell that URL for your website? Because there are different ways to spell Judy and Ann. So how would you spell that so they can find you?
Judy Henderson:
Okay, so listen very carefully. Capital J, everything else is small letters. I don't know if that makes a difference because I still don't know all about technology, but it's capital J-U-D-Y-A-N-N-H-E-N-D-E-R-S-O-N.com. C-O-M.
Gary Schneeberger:
Fantastic. C-O-M. Bravo. Well, played. Thank you for that.
Judy Henderson:
Thank you.
Gary Schneeberger:
Warwick, as always, the last question or questions is or are all yours?
Warwick Fairfax:
Well, Judy, thank you so much for being here. I mean, this is tough terrain that we're discussing, but it is a story of hope when it would seem like there's no reason for hope, is triumph for this human spirit. I think from our perspective, triumph of God can enter in even in the darkest places where it would seem like the light can't shine in, so to speak. As you say, "When the light finds us." We ask this question often, believe it or not on this podcast. So it would be this. There may be somebody listening and watching right now, and maybe they feel like they're at the bottom of the pit. Maybe it's even another woman who's in prison. Maybe she's a lifer, maybe somebody's abused or could be some other, maybe somebody's lost a loved one. They might think that this is their darkest day. Nobody cares about them. God cannot love somebody like them. What would a would've hoped to somebody who today might feel like to them like their worst day?
Judy Henderson:
Okay, so what I would say to them is God's promises are always yes and amen. And what he does for one, he will do for another. He's not a respecter persons. So all that he's taken me through and I'm here today with numerous people trying to kill me, and all the abuse that I've suffered, that he has the plan. He didn't create you for you to suffer, for you to go through pain and agony. You may not think you have the courage and the strength, but when you were born, he gave you everything at that moment that you would need to get through any trial, any tribulation, whatever you're facing, and don't ever try to pray for more strength because then he's just going to give you more trials to build you.
So I learned that the hard way. I kept praying for more strength. Why would I do that? He already gave me everything I needed whenever he created me. So, use what he gave you and know that he has something very special for you or you wouldn't have gone through what you have. You have a message. Without a mess, there's no message. Without a test, there's no testimony. So, you stand up and you believe in yourself, and you believe that there is a God Almighty that can take you out of the pits of hell and give you a blessed, loving, fun life.
Gary Schneeberger:
Friends, I've been in the communications business long enough to know when the last words have been spoken on a subject. And Judy Henderson not only just spoke it, but actually is sort of tempting me to enter messaging jail because she said, "If there's no mess, there's no message." That's beautiful.
Judy Henderson:
Thank you.
Gary Schneeberger:
So, I will appropriate that and I will give you credit, Judy, just so you know. But that is fantastic. But Warwick, we've just finished a fascinating, heartbreaking but also heart uplifting in the end conversation with Judy Henderson. A whole bunch to talk about, but let's narrow it down. What are the takeaways that listeners and viewers should be zeroing in on? What are some of the one or two of the big learning points from her very hard to hear at the time story?
Warwick Fairfax:
Gary, when I was reading Judy Henderson's book, When the Light Finds Us: From a Life Sentence to a Life Transformed, this is one of the hardest books I've ever had to read. It was certainly until it gets better. Just when you think things couldn't get worse, it gets worse. She was abused by her father, by a minister at her church, taken advantage of by her first husband, and then conned and tricked by a relationship we have with a man called Greg that ended up being almost framed for murder and serving 36 years in prison. Having two young kids, it just a crushingly sad story. But amidst devastation and the pain and the agony and just abject injustice, unfairness, abuse of just proportions, it's hard to really fathom. There is hope. The triumph of the human spirit, the triumph of faith, the triumph of God breaking in, just there was a number of moments where it might've been a Catholic ministry.
Christian ministries come in. There were times when counselors came in and slowly, she just saw that God hadn't abandoned her. She saw that what she went through wasn't her fault. Your brain gets rewired through abuse, and it means that she was prime target for somebody like Greg to take advantage of her and ended up being convicted of a murder she didn't commit. So what's amazing is just the joy in her spirit, the love she has for her kids. She was able to parent her kids even in prison. She has a daughter that's a head of a ministry, and grandkids, great grandkids, that curse of generational abuse has been broken. So amidst the abject sadness of a life that was so unfair of what happened to her being wrongfully convicted of a crime she didn't commit, there's hope. She was a survivor. She was a fighter.
She literally had to fight to survive in prison. And we didn't get into all the details, but throughout a lot of her time in prison, she was focused on helping other people. She would do paralegal work because she had... As you do, I guess, when you're in prison, she learned a lot about the law. She would help other prisoners, because typically you can't pay for high-priced legal help in prison. She would help them with their cases, in some cases successfully. She set up almost a beauty parlor in prison to help other women just feel better about themselves. She helped set up programs for battered women to help them. As she was getting counseled, she set up programs to help other women get counseling. She set up PATCH where they would set up a trailer outside prison that made it look like a living room where the women didn't have handcuffs on and could be with their kids and their families in a more normal environment.
Gary Schneeberger:
Right.
Warwick Fairfax:
She said, rather than getting bitter, you get better. She spent a lot of her prison life caring for other women, caring for other people, advocating for them, which she still does. So, she was not defeated by her crucibles. She used her crucibles as a jumping-off point, as a leverage point to help other women and be advocates for them. And she just stay close to her family, not get bitter, forgive. I mean, it's hard to imagine a human being could become the person that she became. Many people would've been defeated and would be incredibly bitter, and she's not. It's just hard to fathom, other than, as I said before, the triumph of the human spirit and really the triumph of faith and of God entering into her life. She is a person of very strong faith, and that just comes through throughout our discussion.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah. The thing I think people should look for is... And I've said this before about guests on the show, we see it a lot. They've gone through these terrible crucible experiences. Say they're at an 11, right? 11 of crucible experiences on a 1 to 10 scale, and yet the joy that comes through in their voice, in their face, in their laughter is at a 15. That to me, that was the story of this conversation we just had with Judy. You heard her talk about the things that she went through. A couple of times, she got choked up in talking about them, but in the fills between the stories, she is all joy. And that to me is the greatest sign that whatever you're dealing with folks, whatever crucible that you have, there's joy on the other end of it if you just press in. Fair statement work?
Warwick Fairfax:
So well said. I think what it shows is that it's hard to imagine anybody having a worse crucible than Judy Henderson. Maybe as bad, I don't know. But to me, it feels like Olympic level of crucibles to be wrongly convicted of a crime he didn't commit. To be abused throughout her life, including by a church minister, to serve 36 years in prison. That seems Olympic level of crucible. But she found a way to not be defeated by, to forgive, to use her crucible to help others. And you're right, she has this joy. I mean, she has so much joy that people want her to succeed so to speak. When she shares as she left that prison, hundreds, if not a thousand women are cheering for her, that's not normal. Maybe one or two buddies will cheer for you, but I said that's unusual. And there was this joy in that prison for a week after, that doesn't happen.
That shows you the mark that she made on those other women in prison, that shows you the kind of person, the joy and spirit she had. So she's truly an inspirational person, and I'm glad that just the life that she's living now is filled with joy and purpose and meaning. So, it's just an incredible story. It is a story of hope despite just the tragedy that a lot of a life has been in some ways.
Gary Schneeberger:
Really, folks, until the next time that we're together, we'd ask you to do a couple of things. One, if you've enjoyed this conversation, if you've taken away some message from the mess that Judy described. We'd ask you if you're listening on your favorite podcast app, to give us a rating for the show. If you're watching us on YouTube, give us a rating there, and also leave a comment. What did you like about this episode? What questions might you have about other things that we could have asked Judy? Let us know, please, at our YouTube page, Beyond the Crucible.
And until that next time we're together, please remember this, we know your crucibles are difficult. Folks, you just listened to extraordinarily difficult crucibles that Judy has been through. You've heard Warwick talk about his crucibles that he's been through before, but here they both sit on the other side of those crucibles because they learned lessons from their crucibles. They applied those lessons, and those lessons have helped carry them to the same place you can go if you learn the lessons of your crucibles and apply them to your journey forward. And that place is a life of significance.
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