Crucibles are painful. The reality is that many if not most of us have had searing challenges that fundamentally altered the course of our lives. With those challenges come wounds. Some are obvious to us and to others, such as physical wounds and disabilities. Some may not be so obvious. They may be internal, and others may not see them every day or even at all. It could be the loss of a loved one, abuse, getting fired or losing a business. We can sometimes mask what people see, saying we are fine.
But crucibles and indeed wounds have consequences, even if we find a way to move on from them.
While we might be able in some sense move beyond our wounds, wounds leave scars that may never fully heal. Wounds under certain circumstances can reopen and might make us feel triggered.
So how can we get beyond our wounds and not have them affect us so much?
1. Accept that our wounds will never fully heal. This is tough. We all want our wounds to go away. We want to be free of them. We don’t want to keep reliving our worst day, whether it was abuse or financial failure. We are sick and tired of getting triggered. But the reality is that we will never be completely free from our wounds. So the first step is acceptance. These wounds are a part of you, the new you – for better or for worse.
2. Take an inventory of what your wounds are. Why would we want to do this? Once we have accepted that our wounds will always in some sense be a part of us, we need to know what they are before we can learn to deal with them more effectively. Some may be obvious like physical wounds and disabilities. But some may need some thought to fully identify what they are.
3. Analyze why they hurt so much. The why matters. Especially for the wounds that seem to get triggered often, delve into why these wounds are so painful and why it might seem so hard to let them go. The solution to trying to ease these wounds, not necessarily to eliminate them, depends on understanding more deeply why they are still so painful.
4. Consider the circumstances that trigger these wounds. Certain situations might seem to trigger these wounds, and the scabs seem to open. Why is this? What people and what situations seem to trigger flare ups of those wounds?
5. Anchor yourself in your truth. To be able to deal more effectively with your wounds, you need to know what truth, your truth, is; not the lies you or others are telling you. Often our wounds are triggered by us or others saying that we are not worthy enough or are even worthless. They or us might say that we are indeed defined by our worst day and that redemption and forgiveness is impossible. That is not true. Reject the lies.
6. When your wounds are triggered, deal with it immediately. You might feel only mildly triggered by a situation or what someone says, and you might feel that on a one to ten scale your triggering is only a two or a three. But a bit like weeds, that triggering of the wounds you have can grow and get worse.
7. Have a proven system for dealing with those wounds when flare ups happen. When you feel triggered, know how you are going to anchor yourself in truth, what you know to be true. For some it might mean reading Scripture and then praying about it or praying with a trusted friend or family member. For others it might mean reading or viewing some truth that you might feel is sacred to you and summarizes what you believe to your very core. Meditate on those thoughts and truth, and consider asking someone else to sit with you as you process these thoughts.
8. See your wounds as a blessing. This may be the hardest step of all. How can our wounds be a blessing? They are so painful. As most if not all of our podcast guests have affirmed, our wounds can be used for good to bless others. Nobody wants wounds. But if we have them why not try to make something good come out of them? Begin to consider how specifically our wounds can help others. What type of people can they help and in what situations?
Wounds are painful. They remind us of the depths of our crucible, and how much others have hurt us or what a terrible person we might think we are. Having a system of dealing with situations or people that trigger our wounds is helpful. Some solutions may be obvious, such as reducing or avoiding being around people or situations that continually trigger our wounds. This may not always be easy to do.
While we may never be fully able to get over our wounds and avoid having them getting triggered, we can try to reduce how many flare ups we have and reduce the severity of those flare ups.
And by using those wounds to help others, it can give our life added purpose. That is what the guests on our podcast have done in almost every case. By using our wounds to help others, it can give our wounds purpose and meaning, which ironically in certain cases can reduce the pain of those wounds.
When we can say our wounds are actually a blessing, that reframing is a victory that has so much power.
Reflection
Identify your wounds. What are they? Make sure you identify more than just the obvious ones.
How do your wounds get triggered? Consider what situations or people trigger those wounds. Think about how you will minimize those situations and come up with a game plan for dealing with those wounds when they are triggered.
Think deeply about how your wounds can be a blessing. Start to consider to what people and in what situations your wounds actually can be an asset. It might enable you to reach people and help them that others may not be able to.
We share inspirational stories and transformational tools from leaders who have moved beyond life’s most difficult moments to create lives of significance.
He Gained A Lot After Losing His $300 Million Business: Gregory Vetter
Our guest this week, Gregory Vetter, describes the shock and loss he felt over losing the $300 million dollar salad dressing business he and his brothers built using their mother’s recipe.
They were forced to file for bankruptcy, he says, because of a legal battle with greedy and unscrupulous investors. He may have lost millions of dollars, but not his entrepreneurial spirit — going on to launch new businesses and help other entrepreneurs with a big idea do the same.
You’ll want to pay special attention when he tells us the lesson his crucible taught him about the four things money can’t buy.
To explore Beyond the Crucible resources, including our free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment, visit beyondthecrucible.com.
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and leave a comment at our YouTube channel and be sure subscribe and tell your friends and family about us.
Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Warwick Fairfax:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond the Crucible.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Over the 12 weeks, what we found was that initially the cohort had a Beck Depression Inventory score of, I believe it was about 32, which is in the severe range. By the end of the study, the mean Beck Depression score had dropped to 14, which is in the mild region.
Gary Schneeberger:
That's our guest this week, Dr. Thomas McCormack, describing his research into how adding a spiritual component to psychiatric care can have a powerful impact the medical discipline he pioneered. Ruachiatry takes a 12-step approach to helping patients find healing, especially in the wake of crucibles, by leaning into such things as finding peace through surrender, embracing reconciliation, and choosing forgiveness.
Warwick Fairfax:
Tom, great to have you here. Tom is Dr. McCormack. He is a psychiatrist educator, thought leader and integrates spirituality and medicine. He graduated with honors from Wake Forest University, got his medical degree from Emory. Fellowships at Duke. He has a thriving multidisciplinary practice in Athens, Georgia, and he specializes in complex and treatment-assistant psychiatric cases. Dr. McCormack, Tom is an expert psychiatrist and has written a book, Hidden Medicine that really talks about the integration of spiritual with the physical and the biological, and talks about the 12 steps of Ruachiatry. Did I get that close to right?
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Yeah, that's right War.
Warwick Fairfax:
Okay. So before we get into that, which I found fascinating because it really offers help to folks spiritually really holistic medicine I guess you could say. So tell us a bit about the backstory of what a young Tom McCormack was like growing up and how you got interested in medicine. Where was that journey because not everybody grows up saying, "I want to be a psychiatrist one day." Probably didn't think that when, I guess you were six or seven, I'm guessing. So what was life like for young Tom and what led you to your life's calling?
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Yeah. Well first thank you guys for having me, Warwick and Gary. And look forward to talking to you guys today. Yeah. Starting from the start, when I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia and growing up from a really young age, I knew I wanted to be a physician. Honestly, it was probably like three or four years old. I remember watching the old 1970s television show called Emergency, and I just really-
Warwick Fairfax:
Yes.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
You remember that? All right.
Warwick Fairfax:
Oh yeah.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Same generation. Good.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Well anyway, the role of the physician, the doctor really resonated with me. I just thought it was neat. And so I started saying ... My parents tell me now that I wanted to be a doctor from a really, really young age. I went to a great college preparatory school from seventh grade onward and was blessed to have a wonderful education. And the further I got in my education, I began to see science as the way to truth. And as a person of science, I overemphasized that and really abrogated anything spiritual to the backseat. I wasn't sure that existed and science seemed to explain the natural world and what occurred, and so I went with that.
So growing up really wasn't a person of faith to any large degree, and that got worse in college as it often does. I really looking back was very selfish young man and was all about me, myself, and I. I'm embarrassed to say that, but it's the truth. And I studied very hard in medical school initially ... I'm sorry, in undergraduate. My first semester, just a month or so into school, I got a very severe case of mononucleosis. And it was so severe I thought initially it was just pharyngitis strep throat or something like that. And so I really blew it off. I thought, oh, this will get better in a few days and just gargle and that sort of thing. But by the time I actually sought medical help, it was my roommate and my suitemates who said, "You've got to go down to student health." I couldn't move at that point, Warwick. I was so fatigued. My throat hurt so badly I could not swallow. I'd lost a lot of weight in a really short period of time and they knew something was wrong. And so they took me to student health. I had an enlarged liver, enlarged spleen. I just let this go and they diagnosed me with mononucleosis.
I was actually in the hospital just for supportive care for almost two weeks and missed a lot of class. And obviously I was taking a pre-med track, and so I was taking biology and chemistry among other things. And I got way behind and met with my advisor after I was discharged and he said, "Tom, I really think you ought to withdraw from some classes. Probably the harder ones, like the science classes." And where I went to school was at that time pretty small college and they didn't have where you could take chemistry one or biology one second semester, you had to take it first semester. And so if I dropped out, I couldn't take the chemistry two. Anyway, I couldn't take it second semester, so I'd be a year behind on the pre-med track. And I just thought, that's unacceptable. I don't want to waste a year. So I foolishly did not take that advice and kept going forward and ended up getting two Cs and both in biology and chemistry, the rest for A's and Bs.
It was very humbling. I had never gotten a C in my life, let alone in a class, but I think on a paper test, I don't think I'd ever gotten Cs. I've done very well. And I met with my pre-med advisor and he said, "Tom, you're obviously not going to medical school, so you might want to think about another major." And indignant, I said, "No, sir. Well, I am going to medical school." I was respectful, but I said, "Eat my dust and I'm going to get a new advisor, somebody who's more encouraging." Always said respectfully. Anyway, so I did. And the rest of my time at Wake Forest, I studied really hard and almost had a 4.0 the rest of the time. And so it did help bring my grade point average up. So by the time it was time to apply to medical schools, the same advisor I met with, because he was in charge of the pre-med committee, he met with me and said, "Oh, well, we highly recommend you to medical school." I didn't say I told you so. He might not have even remembered what he told me three and a half years earlier. So he said, "Where do you want to go?" And I said, "My state medical school." He said, "You should have no problem getting in there with your grades and your activities and your MCAT scores." And I thought, "Great. That's where I want to go."
After applying, I got a interview very early on, which was a good sign. It's a rolling admission. And the interviews went great at my state medical college and I truly expected to get an acceptance letter any day now. And so every day from October my senior year in college on through my graduation, I checked the mailbox and there was nothing there. It got humbling, but then scary and I was puzzled like, "Why don't they let me know?" And they didn't put me on the wait list, which usually they'll do if they think, "Ah, he's okay, but we're not sure. Maybe something will open up." But they just didn't let me know. And graduation came around and I still hadn't heard. So I went home that summer in late May of '92 and still checked the mailbox every day, really hoping to get a letter, but my confidence was waning.
And then one muggy day in June, I grabbed my trusty dog, Murph, and we went down to the mailbox and I found a very thin letter, which I knew spelled bad news. Opened it on the spot and there was a few line rejection and I was just crestfallen. Everything I'd worked for one, be a physician since a very young age and worked really hard to overcome some early academic setbacks have been taken from me, and I was led to believe I was a really good candidate. And on paper, I was. I was just puzzled. I started tearing and I thought, geez, what do I do? I didn't want to go back to my home. I knew my parents were there and they'd start asking questions and scrambling around, and I just didn't feel like facing that. I felt like I needed to process it. So I had my dog and I thought, well, I'm just going to go for a walk and try to clear my head. But my head was swirling. I was so upset and tearful.
I hadn't made it very far. Made it to the house next door, and I stopped in the middle of the road and I'm embarrassed to say this is how I addressed the almighty. But I stopped and said something along these lines, God, I'm not really even sure you exist and if you do, why in the world would you let this happen to one of your children? This isn't fair. I worked hard for this. And I said, "I'll tell you what, if you exist, you need to show me right now. I'm not asking you to get me into medical school, but I've worked hard for this and I'm lost, and you need to show me what path you want me to take. And if you do that and show your reality, I'll follow you the rest of my life." And not expecting any answer whatsoever, and to my shock, immediately I felt an otherworldly presence. I don't know how else to describe it. Words don't do it justice. It felt as though this piece instantaneously embraced me. I came to realize in retrospect that whoever listened to me ... I prayed a silent prayer. Heard me, and then responded, and I wasn't expecting that, and I felt a duty to figure out who or what that was.
So that started my journey of spiritual exploration. Long story short, I made it back to my house. I went in, my parents were very upset and they started scrambling immediately. Well, let's pull some strings. They knew some people. And I didn't really care. I just thought it's going to be okay. And my dad said I remember, "Why are you so calm?" Because they were not. And I didn't want to explain to them. I thought they might think I was crazy or lost my mind. So I just said, "Yeah, I think it's going to be okay." And they looked at me puzzled. So they got on the horn behind the scenes. Turned out my mom knew the dean from another medical school in Georgia that I hadn't applied to. It was a newer medical school. It was kind of geared to rural medicine, which wasn't really my interest. And she called him and he surprisingly said, "Well, I'd be happy to interview Tom. I can't guarantee he'll get in." But it seemed like there was hope because I would be a very good candidate for their program. And I thought, well, maybe they'll open the spot for me. But still weren't really sure this was the right way. It didn't feel right.
So the next week when I was heading down south for that interview, got dressed up in my Sunday best, and I lingered on the couch and my mom came in and said, "Tommy, you've got to go. You're going to be late. I set all this up." I said, "Yes, ma'am." So I walked to the back door and I kissed my mom and dad.
And y'all remember back in the days when phones were on the wall. Anyways, our laundry room. And the phone on the wall rang literally as I was touching the doorknob to leave. And I remember my mom answered it and said, really puzzled, was like, "Yes, yes." And so I stopped like, "What's going on with her?" And she said, "Yeah, he's right here." And she put her hand over the phone and thrust it in my direction and said, "It's for you." And I was like, "Who is it?" And she goes, "It's for you." And thrust it in my face. And I answered the phone. And on the other end, I had been waitlisted at a private medical school in my state, and it turned out the dean of admissions was calling me and said, "Tom, a spot has opened up. Would you be willing to accept this spot and join our class of 1996? Classes start next week so there's not much time." And I said, "Yes, sir," and I hung up the phone. They're like, "What happened?" I told them and it was just jubilation ensued. And that really started me on this spiritual journey that wow, something cared, listened to me. And even though I was disrespectful and he answered my prayer and gave me the desires of my heart, not because it was my desire, but because looking back it was his will and I finally surrendered and submitted.
Warwick Fairfax:
You're in medical school. So tell me what led you to psychiatry? Because not everybody wants to do that. Some one of these surgeons. There's a lot of different specialties. Neurology. A lot of things you could go into. But why psychiatry?
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
So I saw a flyer in my fourth year in our medical school, and it said, "The law school is looking for medical students to be a mock expert witness in a medical malpractice case for our moot court, and we'll pay you, and it's on a Saturday morning." And I was like, "That sounds fun and I could make a little money." So anyway, I signed up for that and I went to court. They were very serious. They acted like it was a real case. And because this was the law students, they got a grade for this. It was important to them. I was just there getting paid. But they gave me a transcript of, okay, your doctor so-and-so and it was a malpractice case that had to do with surgery. I supposedly tied the suture wrong, and then they were also suing the company that made the suture.
Anyway, so I got up there on the stand as the expert witness and really enjoyed it. And I think did a pretty good job because afterwards the judge caught me on the way to the parking lot and said, "Hey, young man." I said, "Yes sir, your honor." And he said, "What's your name?" Introduced ourselves. And he said, "You were really good up there." I said, "Well, thank you, your honor. I appreciate that." He goes, "Have you ever thought about doing that for a career?" And I was like, "Doing what?" He said, "Being an expert witness." I said, "No." And he said, "Well, you might want to consider it." He said, "I think you're really good at it. And that's needed in law for us to have experts to give judges guidance on these things." And I thought, "Oh, okay." And so I went home and I looked it up. I was like, "What is he talking about?" And I found forensic psychiatry. And I was like, "I would love that. That sounds great." So my goal then, I was like, "I think I want to be a forensic psychiatrist."
In order to do that, you have to do at least a four-year residency in psychiatry. And again, I didn't really know what that was. I had a psychiatry rotation, but I thought, "Well, gee, if I'm going to go into this, I better do another rotation." So I did one with a private practice, which was more my speed, and I loved it to my surprise. And that was the goal. I was like, "I'm going to be a forensic psychiatrist." And my wife supported me, and my family was very puzzled. My dad was a dentist, so he was used to doing things and fixing things and then boom, we're done. See you next year. And he just said, "You're doing what?" He goes, "We paid for four years of medical school for you to do that?" He just didn't understand it. He later came to appreciate it. He never did understand it because he doesn't have that bent at all. But at any rate, that's what I chose. And it was the road less traveled and never looked back. I love it. I've been blessed to get a great education and have wonderful people around me, and it's been fantastic. Good fit for me.
Warwick Fairfax:
So before we get into the 12 steps of Ruachiatry, which I found fascinating, talk a bit about the spiritual and the physical, and the biological, because it seems like ... And obviously you talk about this a lot in the book, doctors are trained medically that they focus on that and not always thinking about holistically. It's like, I'm not trying to make fun of doctors, but if your cholesterol is high, you need to take a statin. Okay. That could be helpful in some cases. But what about diet and exercise? Isn't preventative helpful? Again, some might actually say, "Hey, before I give you a statin," but some might not. Depends on the doctor and their background, their training, their medical philosophy. But I think what you're advocating is more for holistic, not just physical. And again, obviously you're a doc, not against medicine. But talk about how holistic is maybe a better approach, including the spiritual. So talk about your philosophy of medicine, which not every doctor may share necessarily. What's your philosophy of, I guess, healing rather than curing or preventative medicine? Just talk philosophically about what your approach is.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Yeah. Like I said, early in my training, I had become a spiritual person based on my own experience. And simultaneously as I was going through my own spiritual journey, had the privilege of obviously starting to see patients. And what I've found was that even when they were really sick or in despair, there was an undeniable tendency for those with a religious foundation to have better coping but also better health outcomes in general. And so it puzzled made that, why aren't we talking about spirituality at all in our medical curriculum, both in medical school and then I found later in residency as well. When I was in residency, this puzzled me and I was at Duke and there was attending named Harold Koenig at Duke who is an expert in spirituality and medicine. And I started reading his stuff and found that there are over 3000 studies showing the benefits of having a religious faith background. And again, it just puzzled me.
We are trained in medical school on what's called the biopsychosocial paradigm, and that was introduced by a fellow named George Engel in 1977. And so that is standard in medical curricula in the United States. But even though medicine had a spiritual beginning ... If you look back centuries, even millennia, the people who were doing most of the medical treatments ... Back then, of course they were herbs, not for pharmaceutical company and whatnot. But they were the shaman or the medical man or the priest and that sort of thing. And the fact that that had been totally ignored in modern medicine was puzzling to me. So finding this information that it can be helpful and seeing that in my own practice, I really started to think, well, we need to integrate this into medical care. And something in the '90 when I was training was called the biopsychosocial spiritual approach. So they tried to add the spirituality component to it and it never really caught on to a large degree Warwick. And again, the further I got, I thought this is really helpful. I don't know why that could be.
When I went through my own both physical and spiritual battles as I aged, I felt like there needed to be a more systematized approach to this for patients because somewhat selfishly to some degree, I'd had a lot of problems back in 2019. My dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and watching the greatest guy become a shell of himself and being robbed of his humanity and watching my poor mom having to take care of him, and then COVID hit and we were trying to keep him out of a nursing facility, but it became increasingly hard to keep him at home. I just thought he'll die if he goes there. He'll never get out with COVID and who knows how long that's going to last.
But also with COVID, there were challenges. I had some physical illnesses turning 50 for the first time in my life that were pretty serious and even had to take some time off of work. In addition to time away from practice from COVID was trying to help mom with dad to some degree. And all this along with just ... I had three teenage kids running a private practice that I owned and trying to be there for my wife as well was overwhelming. And so I decided to try to systematize it honestly initially for my benefit. And I found it to be wildly beneficial and always wanting to help patients. As I went along, I thought maybe this could be turned into some kind of paradigm that we could help patients. In 2022, I also suffered some trauma in my church that I'd attended for over 20 years, and there was really intense spiritual warfare. That led me ... And my father had passed recently. Led me to start writing.
I actually started writing with my pastor. He had a PhD and had written books before and such, and I had written anything since college and I thought, I don't know what I'm doing and I don't know if anybody will read this or publisher probably wouldn't be interested. And he and I started writing together and it was not far into the process where Dr. Mills said to me, he said, "Tom, I think this is your book." And I was scared. I said, "No David, I really need you. I need you to help me with this." And he said, "No." He said, "I think you have a message to say here and I think it's for you." And he said, "Look, I'm in the business and people may not hear it from me that they expect me to say these things, but coming from you, it might be seen differently." And again, I didn't like what he said, but with trepidation, I went out on my own and over the next couple of years wrote the book at night and on weekends and things of that nature.
And finally got it done in 2024 and approached a friend of mine who's a ghostwriter, and he said, "Well, let me look at the manuscript." I said, "Okay." And he looked at it and he said, "Tom, I think you've got something here." He said, "I really think this could be a special book." And I was like, "Really? Wasn't expecting that. I was expecting to self-publish it and just be Vanity Press or something." And he said, "Let me edit it and put some polish on it and then I'm going to introduce you to my publisher." And I said, "Wow. Okay." And so he did that, and this was late 2024 and Greenleaf Publishing accepted later in the year and early 2025, we started the process of having them help me edit it a lot on coming up with cover and all the things that I'm sure you're aware of having written a book go into. And it's due October 28th and really excited about it. I hope it helps a lot of people.
Gary Schneeberger:
Warwick, I want to jump in here just for a second because I think we're at a pivot point in the conversation, and I want to make this point because you've described Tom as we've been going through your story, your first crucible situation. You didn't get into law school and you used this phrase when you were talking about who you were at that time. You said that you were all about me, myself, and I. That was your words about where you were at then. You've then just described another round of crucibles with some health challenges for you, your father passing away, some problems in your church. And it seems like in those situations your focus was not totally on yourself. For people who are listening to this and their crucibles are going to be different in detail, but the emotions will be the same, what's the difference? Why did the second way that you dealt with it not being me, myself and I, how did that help you get through those crucibles that you faced?
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Yeah. That's a great question. Well, as a person of faith, I came to believe the word of God that says that the highest two commandments are love the Lord your God with all your heart, strength, mind and also love your neighbor as yourself. And going into medicine being really clearly in retrospect, a calling from a young age, I just grew to love people and started seeing myself as less important. That I was a vessel for God to use to help people. And that was my mission in life. I came to see that very differently. And because of that deep desire to help people and show them the way I also became convicted that I can't show people the way if I don't have it myself. It's the same with physical health.
And what I mean by that is in medical school, there's a very famous cardiologist who literally wrote the book Cardiology, and he would lecture to us and then I would see him between lectures go outside and chain-smoke. And I just thought, wow, this is like a world-famous cardiologist who would tell everybody not to smoke and he's not doing it. I wasn't being judgment. I just thought that's a little hypocritical. As I practice medicine, I don't want to do that. I don't want to tell people. Or you said, "Hey, diet, exercise," and then have me be out of shape and that sort of thing. So same thing happened here. It had been helpful for me and I wanted to get the message out and see if I could help other people.
Warwick Fairfax:
So let's talk about Ruachiatry. Before we get into the 12 steps. At a high level Ruachiatry what's the philosophical underpinnings? What does it mean?
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Yeah, ruach in Hebrew means spirit, and iatry obviously comes from a Greek word iatrea which means treatment of. And so this is a spiritual treatment that I came up with. I coined that term for better or worse, but I think I wanted to give it one term that maybe would be memorable to incorporate the spiritual component that's been neglected in medicine. So yeah, that's it in a nutshell.
Warwick Fairfax:
And it's interesting. You did a study with Ruachiatry, with people I think that had depression, and you have a bunch of things like the Beck Depression inventory that I guess I'm sure psychiatrists, but all know what that means. The rest of us probably don't. Talk about how in that study using these principles actually had very significant health benefits. Talk about that because must've been affirming to you.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
So in seeing it being helpful in my own life, I thought, well, if I'm going to have a systematic approach to help patients, I want some empirical evidence that it is in fact helpful, not just my own experience. And that's how the study came to be. It was a 12-week study where we had people who were treatment resistant, which we defined as having three or more standard of care antidepressant treatments to deal with their depression and also psychotherapy. And during the trial before people signed up, we told them, Hey, during this 12 weeks you cannot change your medication or your therapy scheduled if you're currently in psychotherapy. And we had a number of people signed up. Now some of them dropped out because they were so severe that they needed changes in their treatment, but most of the people stayed. And what we found at the end of the 12 weeks, we met with them weekly and went over the 12 steps each week or met them at their own pace. Some people, if they had a spiritual underpinning got through steps one and two pretty quickly, other people might need to spend more time there and such.
But anyway, over the 12 weeks, what we found was that initially the cohort had a Beck Depression Inventory score of ... I believe it was about 32, which is in the severe range. By the end of the study, the mean Beck Depression score had dropped to 14, which is in the mild region. So over a 50% drop and also just improvement in their functionality.
Warwick Fairfax:
So let's talk about these steps. So steps one through three, acceptance, searching, and submission. Just give us a bit of an overview of the first three steps of Ruachiatry.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Yeah. The first step you have to accept your powerlessness over your illness. And this might seem self-evident, but it is actually harder in practice because people have a lot of psychological mechanisms to deal with illness. And the first step of any kind of grieving for the loss of a loved one or just loss of functioning and health is denial. And it's very common, especially early on. The sooner we physicians can move our patients toward acceptance, the better, the quicker they are on the road to help. And so that's super important.
And then the second part of step one is commitment. Once you've accepted, "Hey, I'm powerless over this and I need help of a physician or therapist or a team," then saying, "I am committed to fighting this. I'm going to take the first steps to dig my heels in and say, 'This is hard. I don't want to do this. I'm a peaceful person. I don't want to fight, but I'm in a fight and I've got to be committed to that fight.'" Step two is searching, like I mentioned earlier. And this is where I encourage people to embark on a journey to fulfill their personal responsibility, to decide for themselves if there is a higher power, which one? Who is it? And because this acknowledgement can help people have hope and better cope with illness. And so to me that's foundational.
Gary Schneeberger:
Step two is interesting to me because I have an AA background. I went through AA in the early '90s. And the idea of a higher power of my own understanding worked for a while because I did not grow up Christian, not even nominally. But eventually as I was walking through my recovery, I started to think, God of my own understanding, isn't my own understanding what got me in this position to begin with? How is that going to help me necessarily? It wasn't enough for me. Now you will not find a greater advocate for AA. But that didn't work for me. And my story, people have heard it on the podcast because Warwick interviewed me for our 50th episode. It was a little stunt on our host interviews, cohost. But I do believe at the end of the day, God healed me of that. And I don't refer to myself as a recovering alcoholic. I believe I leaned into that and God just plucked it out of me. But that part of what you said about who is that God of your understanding, I think that's an important part for people because it's our understanding that for me, it got me in trouble. That's what made me an alcoholic and I couldn't get away from it. And I think that's probably true through your experience over a lot of different kind of illnesses, right?
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
It is. And that's great insight. Actually the 12 steps were born out of that because that's already in our lexicon. It's already in medical parlance from AA, which started in the 1930s. And because of that, I started looking into AA. We had to do substance abuse stuff during residency, but it's not really my specialty. But in looking at the research and is there a branch of medicine that talks about spirituality at all? The only branch is addictionology and AA is the foundation of that. And that's where I came up with the idea of 12 steps. I actually contacted the folks from National AA in New York, and they were very encouraging and said I could use it as a template, but I just had to put a disclaimer that I'm not affiliated with AA at all and that sort of thing, which I put in the book of course.
But yeah. A study out of Stanford not too long ago, I think it was 2021, had 10,500 and something subjects. And their conclusion was that AA is a free resource that doesn't take professionals or physicians and that it works. And it works fantastic for the malady of alcoholism if people are active in the program. And just saying, "Wow. If that could be applied to general medicine and psychiatry as well, what would that mean?" If we could have something that worked that was free ... We're always talking about, oh, healthcare costs and stuff, what would that mean if a part of our sickness is due to spiritual issues? And so that's how I came up with the 12 step approach.
Warwick Fairfax:
So after searching before we move to step four, you've got submission. Submission is not a very popular word in our culture, but you talk about once we identify the spiritual power greater than ourselves, we decide to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. Submitting ourselves to a higher power to God. So talk before we get to the next one after that, why is submission important? Because it feels like counter cultural. How could submission help me?
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
It is probably same with Australians as it is with American. Yeah, submission is a dirty word, right? It has a connotation of groveling at the feet of somebody who's conquered you. So you've lost and you're having to against your will do something you don't want to do. But in spirituality, it has a different connotation. If you've identified in step two, a higher power that hopefully is benevolent and powerful enough to help you with your illness, submission should be a reasonable idea. Why wouldn't I submit to somebody who loves me and is powerful? We submit to our parents. We a lot of times, submit to the state for better or worse. But they still are sinful entities and they're not all powerful. So if there is something that's all powerful and willing to help, why the heck wouldn't you consider submitting? But yeah. Submission is hard even for people of faith. We have our own strong self-will, we also have a system in place that the Bible says is run by the devil. The Bible says our three enemies of the world system, which he runs, the flesh, which is our own fallen physical nature with its appetites that we want gratified. And then the devil himself and his spiritual cohorts that are out to get us. So that's where submission comes from and it's super important.
I find that a lot of people who are believers tell me, "Hey, Dr. Mac, these first three, I got those." And I say, "Wait a second. Let's go through them and just make sure." Because I find even with believers, they obviously have submitted to some degree, but most of us have an area of our life that we say, "You know God, you can have 95%, but I'm going to hold this little piece for myself." Whether we're willing to admit that or not. Nobody is completely submitted usually and just identifying, "Hey, are there any areas you haven't turned over to God? And let's explore the reason for that." But the more you get to know God and know who he is, it just makes sense. Wow, why wouldn't I turn everything over to him?
Warwick Fairfax:
Let's talk about the next step you've got. Step four is trauma and lies. You've got step five, choosing forgiveness, which we talk about a lot. Traumas we inflicted upon others. I have to say, the worksheets you have in here were really impressive. You've got a worksheet for inventory of traumas that you've suffered, and the questions here are so specific and clear. Who hurt you? What did they do? Was it intentional? Unintentional? Lies, I believe a result of my hurt, truth according to my higher power, degree of current resentment, ask God for their strengths to forgive. And then flip it the other way, when we've inflicted harm on others, the worksheet says, whom did you hurt? What did you do? Was it intentional or unintentional? What could you have done instead? What was the nature of your character defect involved? Had you forgiven yourself admitted to God, another person, the nature of your answers? Powerful questions. Talk about these. Trauma and lies, choosing forgiveness and then traumas be inflicted upon others. Let's talk about those steps.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Sure. So steps four through nine, I call radical renovation. You're cleaning out the house, so to speak, and this is really hard work, and it takes that commitment we talked about in step one. And because of that, a lot of times for people who've had a harder time, it might involve a competent psychotherapist to help them work through this or maybe a Ruachiatry coach somebody who's trained in the principles of Ruachiatry. But step four is super important, and I tell people, take your time, especially on step four and five. It's so foundational and fundamental because we are according to the Bible, born with a fallen nature. And people say, "Our baby's sinful?" Well, if you ever had a two-year-old, you can see how selfish they are and throw tantrums. Yes, from the womb we are innately sinful. I don't mean we sin all the time, but we have that nature. And because of that, it's easier for our spiritual foes to blind us. And those who are fortunate enough to either grow up with a faith background from their family or who come to their senses because either God plucks them out or somebody tells them about it, they're now spiritually awakened and they can see things differently. But everybody has trauma to varying degrees.
And what I talk about in the book is trauma with a big T, a capital T, and then traumas with a little T. Now traumas with a big T, as far as your physical health, it could be having some terrible injury, compound bone fracture or things of that nature, cancer and things of that nature as well. And then other traumas could be things that we would all say, "Oh gosh, yeah." War, rape, watching somebody die horrifically. These sorts of things are big things that most of us don't have to go through, but some people unfortunately have. But we all have little T traumas, and these are things that we accumulate during our life. Hurt people, hurt people and we're all hurt people. And so these accumulate, and what I've found is that a lot of little T traumas can add up to big T trauma. And so we all need to look back and say, "Hey, before I was a person of faith, these things have accumulated and I need to go back, unlock the cellar door and see what's down there and deal with it, not just bury it."
And so this is a hard step, firstly, admitting and looking in the mirror and saying, what are the traumas? But who hurt me, whether it's a person or an institution. And I tell people, go back to childhood, write down everything. And so this list can be super long, which is great. It should be because you have traumas. And trauma is in the eye of the beholder. And what we found with resilience research is that what I see as traumatic, you fellas might look at it and be like, "Well, that's a piece of cake." Because we all have different coping mechanisms and see things differently. But it doesn't matter. If I experienced it as traumatic, I have the same physiologic response, I have the same psychological response and so it's traumatic to me. So going through in every individual listing these things is super important and who did it? And then identifying was it intentional or not?
What I've found is that traumas that are either born of happenstance, acts of God or war things you couldn't control or just accidental, they weren't purposeful ... Somebody hurt you, but they didn't mean to. It wasn't malicious, but they still hurt you. Those are easier to forgive even if the person doesn't come to you and ask for forgiveness. It's a lot harder when we look and say, "Gee, that was intentionally inflicted and they were trying to hurt me and that sort of thing." So that's an important aspect.
Step five goes on to another foundational truth. And that is so important. If you don't forgive completely and fully, you are carrying around what the Bible calls a root of bitterness. So this understandable anger based on you've been hurt. It can grow over time. And what I tell people is that it grows into resentment. Meaning again, sentiment comes from sentire, which is Latin that means feeling it. And so you're choosing to feel the same emotion you felt when you're hurt again and again. And it's just simply madness. And so just recognizing that this is a prison of your own choosing. And when you choose forgiveness, you choose to set two captives free. You set the person free who did this to you, but you set yourself free as well. And forgiveness is hard, especially if the person does not apologize and was malicious about it. But it's so important and it's really necessary. And that can take some time, as I mentioned.
And then looking at our own selves in the mirror. Hey, hurt people, hurt people. I've hurt people. It's not just all about me. What have I done and what potential character defects, looking at what's gone on in my own journey and identifying and look in the mirror and saying, "These are things I need to correct in order for me to be whole." And then seven is making amends where you can .this isn't always advisable nor possible to do, but when it is, it's important to reach out to people whom you've hurt and offer genuine remorse and try to make it right if you can.
Warwick Fairfax:
It's fascinating that you talk about this because Beyond the Crucible, we talk about forgiveness a lot. And we say, as obviously, I'm sure you would believe that forgiveness doesn't mean condoning what was done to you. It doesn't mean what was done to you was right, acceptable, moral. But you do it because obviously as people of faith, because we've been forgiven, those who've been forgiven much should forgive. So we often say that choosing not to forgive is like drinking poison. It just corrodes your soul. And the other thing with forgiveness is I often tell people and our church and all, it is rare that somebody will say, "I apologize," in my opinion. It can happen but most of the times they'll say, "Well, I'm sorry if that hurt you." Sorry if is never ... I tell all my kids, sorry if is not an apology. That just does not cut it.
So you've got to realize when bad things are done to you, you will rarely get the satisfaction because of the world we live in. It just won't happen most of the time. So we've make amends in the last few steps we've got from fear to faith, vigilant and sober. And then I think you've got drawing closer to God seeking spiritual wisdom. So really from eight instead of a turning point. So talk about that turning point from theater, faith and vigilant and sober drawing closer to God. Talk about how that helps your spiritual recovery if you will.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Sure. Four, five and six deal with anger, which sometimes it's like you said, if you're heard, it is justified. And so step eight deals with the other emotion that I find to be very problematic and where people get stuck and that's fear, which is very common in today's world, the state of flux that our world is in. The political discord. Obviously the pandemic that happened. There's a lot of fear and some of it's certainly understandable, but I've seen it grow in my practice with folks presenting with anxiety is super common. I think there's a spiritual way to combat it in addition to certainly some people need therapy and medicine also, and I'm not against that. To get them fully there, I think going from fear to faith is a big leap and trying to help people understand how to do that. And again, that's a process, right? Fear didn't happen overnight. A lot of times it's grown over time and additional things have happened that make one more fearful. And so that's the step there.
As far as vigilant and sober, sobriety doesn't always necessarily just mean from alcohol or drugs, although think it's best to be sober from those as well. We are all influenced. We say, "Oh, so-and-so got a DUI. They were under the influence of alcohol, right? Oh, that's bad." We can be under the influence of negative spiritual enemies as well and just unwittingly not know about it. So being sober in that regard, and like you alluded to earlier, think on things that are good and positive. We found out through research lately that thoughts are things. They actually have mass and they're not a separate thing. They're part of our soul, our mind, will and emotion. And so they're important. What you think determines your destiny to a large degree. And so reframing things from fear to faith and having that foundation is super important. And then being vigilant. Once you've cleaned out from steps four through nine, now you got to keep it clean. And so that's where the vigilance of the guard on the wall comes into play.
10 through 12 are more ... I was drawing closer to God. And James says in the Bible that draw close to God and he will draw close to you. And I found that to be true in my own spiritual walk. And so Step 10 talks about seeking spiritual wisdom. There is worldly wisdom, and it is not bad. I'm not against philosophy. But the issue with human philosophies, even from the most brilliant people, Plato, Socrates, these folks and others, is that the philosophy from spirituality is fixed. And it's this rock that doesn't change over the millennia. Whereas human philosophy, there are lots of different schools of thoughts and it can change with time just like science and new discoveries can. And so it's a shifting sand, so to speak. And so you shouldn't rely on it for your spiritual wellbeing, but certainly there's wisdom to be had from secular searches of philosophy.
But scripture and then lastly, prayer and meditation. And I go into depth about these things that whatever you decide is your higher power, study the orthodox teachings of your faith and get their spiritual books that they feel are inspired and principles are worth living by. And then prayer. I know for a fact that some spiritual being heard me, I believe it's God and Jesus, but at any rate, prayer works. There are lots of studies on that too that aren't talked about in medical school or even in general life, but prayer does work. And adding with that, a meditation upon scripture, meditation on truths, the health benefits of meditation are well-known. But the goal of meditation, unlike transcendental meditation for example, isn't to empty your mind, it's to fill your mind with truth and have that be the focus of your thoughts.
Warwick Fairfax:
There might be somebody here who maybe today is their worst day, and it's like, "I feel spiritually empty, bankrupt. There is no hope. I'm not sure anybody cares about me. There's no higher power that cares." They might be in a very dark place. What would a word of hope be for somebody that maybe today is their worst day and they just feel spiritually bankrupt? They might hate themselves, hate other people hate the world. They might be in a very dark spiritual in soul place. What would a word of hope be for that person?
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Yeah. I would say to that person, you are so important. You have no idea the importance that you carry. You are made in the image of God. As difficult as that is to fathom, it's the truth in my opinion. And if you haven't already, I would encourage you to explore, especially the God who claims to be the creator of you and everything. Who claims to be all-powerful and who claims to be omniscient so he can hear your prayers. He knows everything at all times and he's omnipresent. He's not bound by location. So whether you're in the middle of the desert or in church, he hears your prayers just the same. And he also claims to be Jehovah Rapha, which means God the healer. He claims to be the great physician. And if you reach out to him and really earnestly search, you'll find the truth. There is hope. But it doesn't come in things that the world offers. Their passing away as the Bible says. And the only thing that won't pass away is our souls. And you're going to spend eternity somewhere and why not go ahead and surrender your own will to God so that you can be one of those people who is assured that you're going to spend forever with a loving God.
And also remind people you will eventually be healed. If you're a believer. People think, oh, you die and you can either go to heaven or hell, sort of true. But the truth of matter is God made a perfect world. He said everything was good and it got wrecked by us and the influences that influenced us negatively. But the good news is he promises he's coming back and he's going to restore everything to its perfect state. In fact, at some point, he is going to make a new heaven and a new earth because this one's a mess and he's going to remake us. Our bodies will die, but he's going to give us new bodies that will be eternal and that will be without sin, sickness, or death. So if you're a believer, you have that assurance, you will get out of your trouble at some point. And the Bible says even that our troubles in light of eternity are light and momentary. And they may not feel light. They may not feel light. You may say, "Dr. McCormack, you don't know what I'm going through." I do. I sit with people in pain every day, and I've been through my own. There is hope and there's a way out. So I'd encourage you to examine what you believe about a higher power.
Gary Schneeberger:
Folks, I've been in the communications business long enough to know when the final word on the subject has been spoken, and our guest, Tom McCormack, also known as Dr. Thomas McCormack, has just spoken about the substance of what we're talking about, but I've still got a little housekeeping left to do, and that is Tom, to have you let our listeners and viewers know how can they find out more about your book Hidden Medicine and more about you on the internet.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Yeah, thanks Gary. I have a website called www.hidden-medicine.com. Usually you could find me if you type in Hidden Medicine or Dr. Thomas McCormack. But also the book Hidden Medicine is available now on Amazon for pre-sale. It will be in bookstores everywhere on October 28 so coming up real shortly. And it's my sincere desire that it helps a lot of people give some clarity to some of these things that a lot of people find confusing. Really tried to write it for lay people. And my second hope is that the medical community will embrace it and realize that yeah, there are things beyond medicine and surgery and therapies that we're missing. We've left untapped and we need to tap into that.
Gary Schneeberger:
Folks. Now, the plane is indeed fully on the ground. Time to gather your peanut bags and head off the plane. Warwick, we just got done speaking with Tom McCormack, which felt weird to me because he's Dr. Thomas McCormack. So I always felt strange every time I called him Tom. I don't know why. It's the old soul in me. I can't refer to a doctor except by doctor, but we did it. He had some very interesting things to talk about from his own experience, his crucible, not getting into medical school, some other ones that followed after he was a doctor already, and then his new book, Hidden Medicine, some things that he talked about there. So what is the little bow on the package you'd like to put on our conversation to hit on? What was the most important thing that Tom had to say to us?
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. Dr. McCormack, Tom and his book, Hidden Medicine, it's so interesting because he's a psychiatrist, so he's not against medicine, Western medicine, but what he is I think advocating is for a more holistic view of health, which includes the spiritual side. And he talks about negative forces. Some could call it spiritual warfare, which he talks about a bit in his book, but negative influences. If we are watching the wrong things that just pull us down and just make us feel depressed about life, angry at ourselves, angry at others, just indulging that. It can be through substance abuse, alcohol or drugs. Those are things that erode our soul in addition to obviously they can hurt our health. He's advocating just be aware of that. Be aware of those forces that can really pull us down if we let them. Life is tough enough, but just really talking about things in his 12 steps of Ruachiatry that really fill us up. And he talked about things like forgiveness which should talk a lot about on this podcast, which doesn't mean condoning. It can be forgiving others, forgiving yourself, and just it can be making amends, filling yourself with truth. From his perspective and our perspective that could mean that the truth of the scriptures of the Bible. But whatever your spiritual religious paradigm is, fill yourself with truth.
Avoid the negative influences. Focus on the positive and didn't really get this into this in our discussion, but focus on what we call a life of significance. In the book, he does talk about one of the highest forms, I think spiritual, psychological health talks about other ... When you're focused on, from my perspective, a higher purpose or on helping other people, that's certainly, I think to me, a good part of spiritual health and soul health. So really, I think the big message is when we are told to focus on what we eat, avoid foods that are unhealthy. fill yourself with healthy foods, well, the same is true in spiritual health. Avoid influences that bring your soul down and fill yourself with influences that are good for your soul. That will both help your overall wellness as well as your overall outlook on life. So what's fascinating is he comes at it from a psychiatric clinical perspective, and his view is soul health, in my words and our words really [inaudible 00:59:15]. Avoid the things that drag you down. Fill yourself with truth, whether it's biblical truth or whatever truth you think is meaningful to you. Fill yourself with truth. That is the path to spiritual health and soul health.
Gary Schneeberger:
And remember this until the next time that we are together that we understand. We know your crucible experiences are difficult. Warwick knows that. Tom knows that. I know that. You've heard us all talk about that either here or in other episodes of the show. But know this also. That it's not the end of your story. Your crucible is not the end of your story. If you learn the lessons from it, and if you apply those lessons moving forward, you can chart yourself a course to the greatest destination you can ever reach, and that 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.
Applying the Actionable Truths 8: Perseverance
Arriving at the place after a crucible where you believe you have what it takes to overcome setbacks and failures is only possible, we discuss today, if we’re able to muster and maintain perseverance.
That’s why it’s the 8th actionable truth in our Beyond The Crucible Roadmap — essential for turning trials into triumphs. And listen closely — you won’t want to miss Warwick sharing what he learned about perseverance in bouncing back from his $2.25 billion dollar crucible.
To explore Beyond the Crucible resources, including our free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment, visit beyondthecrucible.com.
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and leave a comment at our YouTube channel and be sure subscribe and tell your friends and family about us.
Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Transcript
Warwick Fairfax:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond the Crucible.
Those early challenges are often the hardest. Once you just build that muscle of perseverance, it will feel like it's easier to move forward and maybe the vision becomes a bit more possible because you think to yourself, "I may not be perfect, but you know what? I think I have what it takes."
Gary Schneeberger:
I have what it takes. Arriving at that place after a crucible is only possible, we discussed this week, if we're able to muster and maintain perseverance. That's why it's the eighth actionable truth in our Beyond the Crucible roadmap, essential for turning trial into triumph. So keep listening. You won't want to miss Warwick sharing about what he learned about perseverance as he was bouncing back from his own $2.25 billion crucible.
Welcome friends to this episode of Beyond the Crucible. It is one of the episodes that certainly in 2025, Warwick and I have most looked forward to doing because it is on what we have been calling since the start of the year are Beyond the Crucible roadmap. And just to reset you, since we do this once a month, we call it the series within a show, we do one episode per month, this is for the month of October. And just to reset you, the Beyond the Crucible roadmap is our refreshed way, it's not an entirely new way, but it is more laser focused that we help you to get from your worst day to your greatest opportunity. And we have dubbed that the Beyond the Crucible roadmap. Why? I'm going to tell you why. I'm going to read it exactly from the page. We describe it as how we help people turn their worst day into their greatest opportunity. We provide them essential actionable truths to inspire hope, enable and equip them to write their own life affirming story. That sounds like something that is worth pursuing, doesn't it? We think so and we hope-
Warwick Fairfax:
Absolutely.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah. Thank you, Warwick. We think so, and we hope you have been thinking so and we'll think so after we finish this episode of it. The roadmap, just to let you know for the back story, the roadmap has been built from our proprietary statistically valid research into how people experience crucibles and what we've learned from our own experience and from the experiences of the guests we've had on the podcast about what it takes to turn trials into triumph.
The most revolutionary news for us in all of this though, is that in analyzing this roadmap, we identified what we're calling the actionable truths of the brand. To pass these life-changing truths along to you, our listeners and viewers, this year, we're going to do something similar to what we did last year with our series within the show. As I said, once a month, we're going to talk about this, featuring stories from Warwick's book Crucible Leadership. That's what we did last year. Now we're going to spend 2025, we have spent 2025 up until now going through each of the 10 actionable truths one per month and exploring the ways they can help you make your way guide your path, walk your steps along this roadmap that we're talking about.
And Warwick, as I always do in these episodes, I'm going to ask you this question. Level set for us in our discussion why actionable truths? What do we mean by that phrase? Because it's not something you hear people talk about every day.
Warwick Fairfax:
Indeed. At Beyond the Crucible, our focus is to help you figure out how do you get beyond your worst day to lead a life of significance? So what we have now is what we're calling beyond the Crucible roadmap, how you go from trial or crucible to triumph, which we call a life of significance. We have found that there are 10 actionable truths that are catalysts in helping you move along your journey from your worst day to where you're living a life-affirming vision. So in other words, you're triumphing and leading a life of significance. These actionable truths have always been part of our thinking and were actually chapters in the book I wrote Crucible Leadership.
Gary Schneeberger:
So that being said, how do these actionable truths actually help us move from crucible to a life of significance, move from trial to triumph? Because that's what we're all about here. And I'm going to tease just a little bit because that name, actionable truths, continues to impress me that that was what we came up with because truth isn't truth if you don't act on it. And that's really how you get from trial to triumph with the actionable truths, isn't it?
Warwick Fairfax:
That's certainly right. I mean, these actionable truths we view as accelerators, enablers. It helps us move from a crucible or trial to a life of significance or triumph. So I think you could make a good case that without these actionable truths, you're going nowhere. It's like having an engine without fuel, or as we often refer to in The Fast and the Furious series, if you don't have nitrous oxide, you have a great car, but nothing's happening. So basically without these actionable truths, you could well be stuck at your trial, your worst data pit of despair. So get out of that pit to begin to move forward and to bring your vision to reality, to a space where you're really living a life significance. I think you can make a very good case that these actionable truths are absolutely critical.
Gary Schneeberger:
And we are on, as I said at the outset, actionable truth number eight. And just to help you understand, folks, the process of how this all works, this is the vision portion of the roadmap. Before this, we dealt with the trial. That's your crucible. That's the first big grouping. The second one is processing. You're processing what happened to you. Now you've launched a vision. You've said, "Okay, here's the vision I want to pursue." You've created a vision. So it's the last step of the vision category that we're going through.
So Warwick, now that we're here, now that we're at perseverance, why is it the critical eighth step after a crucible to begin the journey of recovering from a crucible? As you were going through this in preparation, this one seems particularly important in this process that we've been describing.
Warwick Fairfax:
One of the keys to moving beyond your worst day, your crucible is perseverance. Without perseverance, you're probably going to be stuck in the pit and the vision won't happen. Your life significance won't happen. We define perseverance as continuing to move forward in pursuit of your vision, even in the face of difficulties and obstacles. Perseverance is hope, believing in your heart of hearts that there is a brighter future ahead.
Now, we know that perseverance is not easy. You might feel knocked down. This is your worst day. You're in the pit of despair, and it's not easy to move beyond your crucible. It's not easy to move forward. But perseverance is like a muscle. With practice and some effort that muscle will grow. And really the key is that perseverance requires you to take one step at a time. And it might seem that step might seem very small. As we'll get into later, I found that very true in my own life, the power of one small step. And one step begins to form another step, and pretty soon I think you'll find that muscle of perseverance, which might've felt non-existent before, will grow and will improve. And you'll find that you have more perseverance than you thought possible.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, that's one of the great things about these actionable truths is that they can grow, we can get better at them as we go. It's not like you're born with a certain level of perseverance and then that's all you get and it goes away. No, you can build it.
And I am going to do what I do every episode. Here's my enormous dictionary, which is twice as big as my head, The American Dictionary of the English Language by Noah Webster, his first dictionary from 1828. And here's what his definition of perseverance is, and it's fascinating. He says this about perseverance, "Persistence in anything undertaken, continued pursuit, continued pursuit, or prosecution of any business or enterprise begun. Patience and perseverance overcome the greatest difficulties." He quotes someone named Clarissa saying in this definition. That to me is a big thing.
And Warwick, this is a good time, I think, to point out to folks, because I got a little confused as we were... Not confused. I was a little tangled up as we were prepping, and I haven't talked to you about this. But we talk a lot about the importance of resilience in bouncing back from your crucible. And I think sometimes people can think they're sort of the same thing. But I found an article which defined perseverance, not Webster, but an article that defined perseverance as this, "A continued effort, the determination to reach a goal and work at it until you do." Right? Here's resilience. Resilience is, "The ability to be happy and successful after something difficult or traumatic has happened to you." I think perseverance and resilience are sort of cousins. They're not the same thing, but one flows into the other. And certainly resilience, though talk about it a lot, it's not one of the actionable truths that we have. But I think having them hand in hand really makes a huge difference in your ability to go from trial to triumph. Right?
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, it's a good point. I think perseverance breeds resilience. Without perseverance, you can't have resilience. So how do you get resilience? It's just when things seem to be going wrong, you just keep pressing on. It's continued effort, as the dictionary talks about. It's continued pursuit of a goal. It's not giving up, not backing down. So perseverance is, yeah, I mean perseverance is critical and you will, I think, be more resilient. If you keep having perseverance and you say, "Okay, I didn't give up the last time. I won't give up this time. It's not going to defeat me. I'm going to keep going." And that comes from just having continued perseverance over the course of your life. It is a muscle that can grow, that can breed resilience and some degree of self-confidence, "Okay, being there done that. I've been through worse than this before." It can actually lead you to having a calmer spirit in the face of trials because you've had perseverance and you've been therefore resilient. So they are cousins, but I would say it's not impossible to have unless you have perseverance first.
Gary Schneeberger:
Right, right.
Warwick Fairfax:
If that makes sense?
Gary Schneeberger:
And that's why the eighth actionable truth is indeed perseverance. And as we have done with all of these sections of the roadmap, in this particular section, in the vision section, there are three stages in our research, qualitative and quantitative, that have shown us people experience in this vision section of the roadmap. And the first one is experimenting with new conditions, trials and first failures. Warwick, how does perseverance help us as we do this, as we walk this out?
Warwick Fairfax:
As we formulate our vision, we'll, undoubtedly a trial runs an experiment. Some will work, some won't work. That's the nature of experiments. And so you've got to have perseverance to be able to cope with those trial visions that didn't work out. Maybe you need to retool the vision, go in a different direction. It's critical.
So to bring our vision to reality, we'll also need help. We'll need help from what we call fellow travelers, people who both encourage us and come alongside us to move our vision forward. And we might find that some team members don't work out. They may not be a good fit, and that will lead to conversations that are often pretty challenging. We'll need to have perseverance to deal with those setbacks of potentially picking the wrong team members or team members moving on. So you need perseverance to be able to bring your vision forward through the trials, and you need to have perseverance as you're bringing team members on board. Some will work out and some won't work out. Life is not easy and bringing a vision to reality is not easy too. So perseverance is absolutely critical.
Gary Schneeberger:
I'm not a science guy. I'm a word guy. So I'm not sure of the word, but we've all seen those things where it's like a flow chart or something that you do this and then this can happen. And then you go this way and it moves up and down and it walks you through a process. I think perseverance is something bad happens. You start this new first failure, you start this first step and you hit a roadblock. And two things can happen. It can go down. You can stop. You can give up. As we say all the time. You can lie under the covers and bed with the covers over your head. Or the second one's perseverance.
I think perseverance is, in many cases, the first action toward the next goal that you have to take after a crucible. Because if you don't muster that, if you don't muster the, I'm going to walk through the wall, if I have to walk through the symbolic wall that is stopping me. If you have those stumbles and trips that follow your crucible, stopping isn't an option. So you have to have the perseverance to go through it. I think this is where the pursuit of a life of significance really can bog down of all the things on the roadmap. If we don't develop perseverance and act on that, we can high-center, we can get stuck, right?
Warwick Fairfax:
It's so true. Without perseverance, you're proverbially stuck in bed, you're not moving forward, the vision isn't happening. You're stuck. So it's absolutely critical. Without perseverance, you're probably still in the pit of despair. I mean, why keep going? What's the point? You just give up. So perseverance is critical.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah. The second major point from our research that shows as people go through in this stage of vision is growth and new skills. And that includes preparing for major change. In this particular part of the map work. What are the benefits of perseverance? And I think I know what you're going to say, not just because we talked about it beforehand.
Warwick Fairfax:
So when you think about growth and new skills, there's growing the team, growing the vision, but there's also growing yourself as a person. And they're starting with the internal so to speak. One of the first things you need to do is to think of growth and skills with you as a leader, growing and self-awareness and character and skills and abilities. And so we talk about growth and the holistic sense of the word. There'll be days in which they feel like bad days and you'll feel like, "I'm not the guy, I'm not the person. I feel wholly inadequate to the task." And you might feel like you don't have the skills and abilities. And maybe you might feel that the crucible you went through, the damage you did to yourself or the damage that was done to you caused some level of damage, enough that it's holding the vision back from reality.
So you can get in this doom loop of, "I'm not good enough and as a human being, I'm not courageous enough. I don't have enough character. I don't enough skills and abilities and perseverance," means despite all of this, putting one step in front of the other and say, "Okay, I'm not perfect. Yes, I've made mistakes. Yes, maybe I feel a little broken or a lot broken," but it's just moving forward. And sometimes it might be, depending on the severity of the illness might be, okay, maybe I need some counseling, some therapy, maybe I need to talk to friends. What do I need to do to be able to move forward to be able to, at least in some sense, heal from some of the internal damage? Are there skills and abilities that I don't have? I might have aptitude but not training. How can I get trained in that?
So there's a whole internal level of perseverance that fuels growth, and it might mean that you need to bring new team members on board. So sometimes you start with a vision. You've got one or two people on your team, either unofficially or on the payroll, and as the vision, the organization grows, you might feel they were great at one time in the journey, but you need people with different skills. And you've got to be willing to say, "Okay, maybe I need to let some people go and bring new people on board." It doesn't need to be done in a malicious way, but if you have a vision, you want to make sure you've got the people around you. And perseverance means having sometimes loving but difficult conversations. Perseverance means having the courage to have those difficult conversations.
Gary Schneeberger:
Is it safe to say, and I didn't thought about it until you just said it, that as your vision changes and grows, evolves, that your persistence in many ways has to change and grow and evolve. What you just described was different levers to push and pull on persistence depending on what's happening with your vision. That seems to be a true statement, right?
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. I mean, as you grow in your perseverance and persistence, you will have higher perseverance, higher persistence, you will give up less. You won't stop at the first roadblock. You will have more courage, more conviction, whether it's things you need to work on about yourself, whether it's your team, maybe you've had a couple of difficult conversations with folks. It's never going to be incredibly easy, but it'll be easier the next time you have that difficult conversation.
So it is like a flywheel in that the more that you have perseverance and persistence, those boulders will seem a little smaller. They may not be in reality, but will feel smaller to you. And so those early challenges are often the hardest. Once you just build that muscle of perseverance, it will feel like it's easier to move forward and maybe the vision becomes a bit more possible because you think to yourself, "I may not be perfect, but you know what? I think I have what it takes. There's an obstacle here. I don't have the answer today. But between me and my team, we'll figure it out. We did before. No reason to believe we won't do it again."
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah. The third big area in this vision section of the roadmap is preparing for big change, grand trial and revelation and insight. How does perseverance help us move along in this section of the roadmap?
Warwick Fairfax:
So when we're trying to get from our worst day to a life-affirming vision that leads to a life of significance, there's often going to be inflection points, significant change where we'll need a high perseverance. The first one is just deciding to get out of bed, proverbially speaking, and we feel so angry at ourselves, so angry at others. When this doom loop of depression at some level and anger, resentment. We're just worn out. The first huge step of perseverance is to say, "Okay, I'm not going to be defined by this worst day. I'm going to think of one positive step." And we often talk about this, whether it's walk around the block, reading a book, having lunch with a friend, preferably one that can encourage us. That's a huge step.
As we begin to have a glimpse of a life-affirming vision, it's easy for voices in our head, so to speak, to say, "Oh, it'll never work. You're hopeless. Give it up." And we need to quiet those voices of despondency and self-incrimination and say, "Okay, it's just a glimpse. Let me talk a friend or two, a potential colleague. Let me make some trials and experiments. Perseverance will lead you to say, "Okay, I don't have all the answers today, but maybe tomorrow, next month, I will." And as we bring team members on, that will require perseverance too. Some will work out, some won't work out. Even the ones that do work out, there might need to be challenging conversations. Maybe you'll need to move people to different seats on the bus. That's not easy. And ultimately, we might find this vision has grown so big or maybe changed that we might find maybe we're the ones that need to get off the bus. Maybe we need to hand the vision over to somebody else, maybe to our team.
And that also requires character and perseverance because if this vision is not about us and about helping others and fulfilling some higher purpose, we don't want to be the roadblock either. So at these inflection points of proverbially getting out of bed when you feel so bad about yourself or about life, when you have the glimpse of a vision that seems daunting, you're trying to get the right team members on board. Or when you feel like maybe you're at a point in life where, yeah, maybe I'm at an age where I don't want to do it this more, or life circumstances change, or you just feel like it's gotten beyond you, you need to be willing to hand it off. So perseverance is really critical.
Gary Schneeberger:
We've been talking a lot almost exclusively here about taking action in the spirit of perseverance, taking action toward perseverance. But there are some things, and I'm thinking about my own struggle with alcoholism, my perseverance there was to not do something. I had to manifest the lack of grabbing a drink and having it. That was my perseverance. I had to persevere through not doing the thing that I was doing. That's part of it too that we can't overlook. In some crucibles, perseverance can mean not doing something that will go the opposite of the vision that you want to create, right?
Warwick Fairfax:
It's such a good point. There are things that can enhance our life and character, and there are things that can drain it. We can hang out with the wrong people, the wrong crowd in the neighborhood, maybe as teenagers or twenty-somethings, and maybe they're doing things that are not helpful, maybe destructive, but we're part of the gang. We want to be accepted. So we end up going down a road where we're doing things that are actually hurting people. Somehow we convince ourselves maybe that's not the case. There may be things that we're watching or other maybe we're just feeling this despondent lethargy, so we're just binging on Netflix or video games. Again, it's not bad in itself, but you don't want to just sit and watch a screen for 23 hours a day or play video games all night or whatever it is. So there's all sorts of coping mechanisms in which we can just check out of life. So we have to have the perseverance to not do the things that are pulling us down.
And everybody has different temptations, different tendencies that can pull them in a direction that's not helpful. As we talked recently on the podcast about gratitude. Well, maybe we have a tendency to indulge the doom loop of negativity and we go down the road of, "This wasn't fair what happened to me. I'm such a terrible person." And you spend hours recycling everything they did to you, everything you did wrong, and this endless doom loop that just pulls you down, which is almost designed to sap you of any perseverance to do anything constructive. That's where you need to just stop it and just say, "I'm not doing that." Maybe have the perseverance to do what we talked about recently with gratitude that will tend to fuel our perseverance ironically. So it's a very good point, Gary. You've got to be willing not just have the perseverance to do things, but to stop doing things that are very destructive to you. Inevitably, they won't be just destructive to you. There'll be destructive to those that we love and care about. That's the way destruction seems to work. Typically, it's not just restricted to ourselves.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, for sure. We have arrived at my favorite part of these actionable truths episodes. I think I want to have Scott develop for the last one some theme music when we get to this part. Here's the theme music where we talk about Patient Zero at Beyond the Crucible, and that is our founder and host, Warwick Fairfax. Examples of this actionable truth in action from Warwick's experience with Crucibles. So the question to you, Warwick, is this, talk about your experience with perseverance, how that's looked in your life as you've walked through crucibles.
Warwick Fairfax:
It's funny, I remember as I was writing a book a number of years ago, Crucible Leadership. There's a lot of things I write about that I'm not good at. I don't like sales and I'm not this upfront kind of person. I'm more retiring, so to speak, or certainly my younger-
Gary Schneeberger:
You and I have that in common, by the way.
Warwick Fairfax:
Maybe not, but that's why you need a team.
Gary Schneeberger:
That's right. Amen. Amen.
Warwick Fairfax:
People with different skills and aptitudes and characteristics.
Gary Schneeberger:
Fellow travelers.
Warwick Fairfax:
Amen. Well said. So I've talked a lot about things I'm not good at, but ironically, perseverance is not one of them. I have very high perseverance. For me, where perseverance maybe wasn't helpful, and you could arguably call a stubbornness, was I'm very idealistic and I was driven to bring the vision of my family's 150-year-old media business back to the vision of the founder, my great-great-grandfather, John Fairfax. My father died in early 1987. A few months later, I finished my MBA at Harvard Business School and I ended up launching a 2.25 billion takeover of the family company. So this was both to restore the vision of the company to the founder, and I felt that management were making poor decisions and needed to be changed. So I was idealistic and I had very high perseverance of that mission to launch the takeover, change management, bring the vision back to the ideals of the founder.
But because of my perseverance, when challenges arose, for me, there was no breakpoint. There was no stopping. There was no abandoning the takeover. So a saint of you would've been not to do the takeover. As I've mentioned in other podcasts, earlier in 1987, I had some advisors, some good ones who said, "Warwick, the numbers don't add up. If there's a hostile corporate takeover from a takeover raider," which was one of the things that I was right about, "get together with the family. I mean, just figure out another way." But of course I wanted to take over, change management, bring the vision back to the ideals of the founder. So ignored that advice. I didn't give up. I went right through that obstacle of good advice and listened to the bad advisors that said, "Sure, for a good fee, we are happy to do it for you." Whether it's exceeded or not. In the long term, I think their focus is more on the takeover being concluded.
So I think the lesson for me is not to abandon perseverance, but given that I have very high perseverance, be very careful where I channel that muscle of perseverance, make sure it's the right goal with the, I mean my motives, I think objectively were good, but make sure it's the right goal. And if for some reason a roadblock comes that says maybe you need to change the vision or change the team, don't say, "No changes. We're going to keep going with the same vision, same team." You have to be careful where you channel perseverance because it can lead, if unchecked, to decisions that are unhelpful.
So for me, where perseverance was helpful is in the 1990s after the takeover failed, that decade of the '90s was very difficult. We moved to the US where my wife is from, and perseverance helped me slowly begin to try to move on from that searing crucible of losing my family's 150-year old media business. It wasn't about the money, which has never been a particularly huge motive for me. It was feeling like I let my father down, my great-great-grandfather down, John Fairfax, somehow God down, because I felt like God had this vision, I thought to bring the vision back to the image of the founder, and I kind of let God down with the vision, which as a person of faith, was absolutely devastatingly painful and searing.
So perseverance led me to realize objectively, yes, of course I made mistakes and I get into them in great detail on my book. But objectively speaking, there were divisions in my family going back decades. It was a very challenging situation irrespective of what I did or didn't do, even if I hadn't launched the takeover, those challenges and divisions, they were going to be very difficult to solve.
What's interesting as a person of faith is there's one passage I would say that has been key to fueling my perseverance through the challenges. It has been a bit like rocket fuel for my perseverance. I have high perseverance innately, but this just really helps take it to another level. So it's Philippians 3:7-14. It starts off, "But whatever was to my profit, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord. For His sake. I've lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him. Not having a righteousness of my own that comes through the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith."
So that sense that ultimately the things of this world are meaningless. So just reading through the scripture over and over again, having the perseverance to do that fueled my growth and character and my growth and understanding God's purposes, is ultimately the things of this world, even a big media company, is nothing compared to knowing the Lord.
And so then later on in 12 through 14, it says, "Not that I've already obtained all this or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I did not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it, but one thing I do, forgetting what is behind is straining toward what is ahead. I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." So forget what's behind. Forget those past mistakes. Yes, I made them, but endlessly dwelling on them does not help me at all. Strain toward what is the head. Press on toward the goal. So really part of it is, Lord, where do you want me to head?
So one of the things that fuels perseverance is when we link it to our innate values and beliefs. If we feel like, okay, I'm not perfect. I made mistakes, but I need to move forward. The vision is too important. And so when you anchor your vision in your beliefs, it really helps fuel your perseverance. And this is almost like a mantra. I must have gone through it every day in those early years. Forgetting what is behind is straining toward what is ahead. Straining toward what is ahead requires a lot of perseverance. So that scripture fueled my perseverance.
Gary Schneeberger:
And it's interesting you talking about leaning into that scripture because what you're talking about there as you're going through what you're going through is the second actionable truth that we talked about in the series, and that's self-reflection. But here's what it's not. It's self-reflection, it's reflecting on. You're putting that stuff away, you're reflecting on it, but you're not ruminating on it. That's not self-recrimination, it's not self-rumination. It's self-reflection. And it's taking the good stuff and moving aside the stuff that isn't going to help you. And that's what you talked about here. And that's one of the things I love about this roadmap is that as you're talking of your experience, we can go back and map it to areas of what we've been through and where we're headed. And what you just described is self-reflection. You went through self-reflection and that self-reflection fueled your perseverance. Is that fair?
Warwick Fairfax:
Absolutely. It's self-reflection in order to learn, but to move forward. To throw away the things that are holding me back, like I'm a terrible person and I destroyed 150-year-old media company, it's all my fault. Well, I made mistakes. It wasn't all my fault objectively, but that's the past. Where do I go now? From my faith perspective, where do I feel God calling me?
So as we get into the 1990s, I found it almost impossible to get a job with the resume that basically said form a media mogul. I could say I work hard and I'm humble, I like to think, but it's like I couldn't even get an interview.
Gary Schneeberger:
Right. You're the only person still that I know, Warwick, who had to dumb down his resume to get a job. I know a lot of people who've inflated it, but never dumbed it down except you.
Warwick Fairfax:
Oh, I definitely did. It didn't really feel that bad at the time because, I don't know, it didn't. But so eventually I got a job at a local aviation services company in Maryland where we live.
But then there was an inflection point and I felt like I was not using all the abilities that God gave me. I was doing well, but I felt like I could do more. And so that required perseverance to say, "I'm going to leave this job. I'm comfortable. I'm doing well. But I'm not doing, I feel like everything that God called me to do and not using all my skills and abilities. So I left. That was a big step, an inflection point. That required perseverance. So that led me to pursue training and certification as an International Coach Federation executive coach.
In 2008, I gave a talk in church to illustrate, a sermon. The pastor of my church in Annapolis, Maryland asked me to give this ten-minute sermon illustration. I'm not this charismatic speaker type. I don't typically like being upfront, but fine. If I can do something that helps, I will. That ten-minute sermon illustration led me to decide to write my book, Crucible Leadership. That required monumental levels of perseverance. Imagine writing a couple hours a day, because I couldn't do more. It was too painful, about some of the worst days of your life, some of the biggest mistakes. I mean, it was unbelievably painful, but I kept moving forward. I'm reminded as we often say, what Margie Warrell, a fellow executive coach in Australia, and she says, "For the sake of what?" Well, for the sake of what was I writing this book? To help people get beyond their worst days and live a life as significance. Paying for a purpose, to use that oft-use phrase. That's, okay, this is painful, but there's a reason for why I'm doing it. That fueled my perseverance.
And just getting the book published, it took years. I tried to get some folks in interested in Australia. And because my name and the family is prominent, I could definitely talk to book publishers, some of the major ones and literary agents. And it was like, "Well, this is an interesting story, but it's quite a lot of years ago now. And we want the sensational version where you dis on family members." And I wasn't willing to do that. I'm happy to talk about my own failures, but I really don't want to get into bad-mouthing other family members. It just was not part of my value set. So that didn't happen. So it took a few more years in which one publisher said, "Really, to publish a book," it was called Crucible Leadership, at the time, some thought maybe it would work in the business leadership space. Well, you need a brand, you need a following, you need an email list and social media following, blogs. And so that led me to found Beyond the Crucible. And that actually led to this wonderful team that we have and the podcast blog and social media. Well, none of this would've happened without perseverance. I want to get this book published.
And so before we got the book published, we actually had launched this podcast and blog and social media, and now it's not just to get the book published in of itself. I love telling stories that people who bounce back from their worst days, and some of the thoughts I have on how you get beyond your worst day to live a life and significance. But at each step of the road, when you go back to those early days in the early 1990s when, I wasn't clinically depressed, but it was not in a good place, it took perseverance to get out of bed and say, "Okay, I'll send out a few more letters to trying to get a job." And none of which happened. And took perseverance and a bit of humility to go to a temp agency that found temp jobs for financial analysts. That was the first step to getting that job at the Aviation Services Company. It was not easy just to keep moving forward.
So certainly in my story, perseverance has led me to be stubborn. But when I've focused it on areas that really I feel like the Lord is leading me to and using my skills and abilities for my own vision, not an inherited vision, it's been incredibly valuable.
Gary Schneeberger:
And again, I have a cheat sheet of some of the stuff that you talked about here, what you just talked about as you were telling your stories, and one thing that sticks out about everything that you just mentioned. Yes, perseverance was a big part of it, but another big part of it, and I think it's important for us to point out this is, if not a cousin of perseverance, it's in the same zip code, same neighborhood, same family, somewhere, a second cousin twice removed, but courage. Everything that you just mentioned, you can't be afraid. You have to summon the courage to take that step forward, right? Even little steps require big courage sometimes. And that's what I think you've described as you've talked about that, about your experience. Help people understand that connection. To manifest perseverance, even in a little step, it does require summoning courage, doesn't it?
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, that is well-said. I mean, courage does fuel perseverance. And what I'd say it fuels courage is conviction. I've always been an idealist. What led me to launch the takeover was not about me, it wasn't about ego. I mean, I'm pretty self-aware, not very self-aware. I don't believe that was it. It was more, as I said, to change management and bring the company back to the ideals of the founder.
So now what leads me forward with Beyond The Crucible is a desire to help people. That powerful conviction gives me courage. I mean, for me, I'm basically more on the shy, retiring end of the spectrum, certainly was. For me to speak, which I did a fair amount as part of the book launch, that's not a normal, natural thing for me to do. It's not my happy place. It's not a comfortable zone for me. So why did I do that? Because the message is important. So I got some training and help from somebody that was very good at helping people learn how to speak and craft a good speech. I think I got to the point where I was actually adequate, if not good, certainly judging by the response of the audience.
Gary Schneeberger:
Absolutely. Yep.
Warwick Fairfax:
But that required hard work, and yes, it required courage to say, "Okay, this is not my happy place. Yes, there's a possibility people could mock or laugh or fall asleep, which is probably worse than ridicule. Just people are asleep. Wake me up when this is over." So yeah, courage is really a requirement for perseverance. What fuels courage is conviction, which is why we say all the time that you want to anchor your vision, your life of significance in your deeply held values, your faith. That's what fuels courage, which fuels perseverance that fuels you accomplishing your life for significance.
Gary Schneeberger:
All right, so we've reached the end of the road here. We've covered a lot of ground. You've brought a lot of insight to this part of the roadmap. What's the number one takeaway you'd like listeners and viewers to draw from this episode in particular? This just feels like a especially important episode of the Actionable Truth Series. What's the one truth within this truth that you want people to walk away with?
Warwick Fairfax:
I mean, obviously perseverance has to be channeled in the right direction, otherwise it can be seen as stubbornness. So be careful what you devote your life to, and I'm especially sensitive in light of the takeover. But to come back from your worst day and move forward, it does require a high degree of perseverance. To begin to formulate a life-affirming vision that leads to a life of significance will require perseverance. And to bring that vision to reality with the great team will require high perseverance. High perseverance is almost the price of admission. You want to move forward from your worst day because it will not be easy. There are days in which it'll be excruciating. You've got to have perseverance. And it really, yes, perseverance requires a lot of courage, and that's why we really talk a lot about getting out of the pit.
One of the things we find with pretty much every guest we've had is one of the things that's helped propel them forward is they've come up with a vision that's often, I don't want anybody to go through what I went through. I want to help people come out of the pit who've been in the similar pit to me. And that vision, that life-affirming vision is so strong that it almost compels them to have perseverance because it's just such a strong conviction. So I'd say perseverance is often fueled by conviction. But certainly your vision to become reality, you've got to have a high perseverance. And it all starts with what's one step I can move the ball forward today? Forget about tomorrow.
And that's one of the things that I really haven't mentioned that I think is going to be helpful to folks is I have a very good ability to compartmentalize. So I'm not focused on tomorrow or the next day. And I'm a strategic planner by nature, so I do tend to think ahead, but I tend to think of, "Okay, what do I need to do now?" I remember when I was in university at Oxford, I would think, "Okay." This is back in the early '80s, there was sort of worry about the Soviet Union and cruise missiles and nuclear war, and it was in the paper and people were demonstrating. It was a reality. I remember thinking, this is a silly device, but it was effective because all my whole degree depended on those final exams. That's the way they do that at Oxford. I would just say, "Okay, I've got my exam at this time today. I'm not going to worry about anything after this exam. I won't have this useless device that's going to be nuclear war. The world's going to end. I'm not going to worry about the rest of the next three or four exams. All I'm going to do is nothing else matters, just this exam."
You don't have to use my mental device, but perseverance. One of the keys to it is, okay, what's this one step? I'm not going to worry about the other steps. And what if this and that. What's this one step I need to do today? And be very disciplined about blocking everything else out of your brain. What's this one step I'm going to focus on? Once you accomplish that, then the next step and the next step. You've got to be disciplined about just crowding out of your mind, clearing your mind of anything other than that one step, no matter how small. Don't say, "Well ah, but that's pointless. What if there's..." No. Focus on that. So one of the things that fuels perseverance is laser-like focus on that step and ignoring everything else other than that one step. One step leads to another, and that leads to perseverance, if not high perseverance.
Gary Schneeberger:
That was laser-like focus work on landing the plane on our conversation here on the eighth actionable truth that we've been discussing in depth here today.
Folks, each month, just to remind you, we will take a look at a new one and how it is connected to the previous one to build out our Beyond the Crucible roadmap. And next time we'll be discussing, and I'm going to call for it, Warwick. I'm going to call for the drum roll. Scott, give me a drum roll. Next time we will be discussing redemption.
So until the next time we're together, folks, please 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 along the road map 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.
The Healing Power of Hidden Medicine: Dr. Thomas McCormack
That’s our guest this week, Dr. Thomas McCormack, has done pioneering research into how adding a spiritual component to psychiatric and medical care can have a powerful impact.
The medical discipline he pioneered — rouachiatry — takes a 12-step approach to helping patients find healing, especially in the wake of crucibles, by leaning into such things as finding peace through surrender, embracing reconciliation and choosing forgiveness.
He covers it all in his book soon-to-be-released book Hidden Medicine: Uncover the Spiritual Forces That are Silently Sabotaging Your Healing … and Learn How to Defeat Them.
To learn more about Dr. McCormack, visit www.hidden-medicine.com
To explore Beyond the Crucible resources, including our free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment, visit beyondthecrucible.com.
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and leave a comment at our YouTube channel and be sure subscribe and tell your friends and family about us.
Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Warwick Fairfax:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond the Crucible.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Over the 12 weeks, what we found was that initially the cohort had a Beck Depression Inventory score of, I believe it was about 32, which is in the severe range. By the end of the study, the mean Beck Depression score had dropped to 14, which is in the mild region.
Gary Schneeberger:
That's our guest this week, Dr. Thomas McCormack, describing his research into how adding a spiritual component to psychiatric care can have a powerful impact the medical discipline he pioneered. Ruachiatry takes a 12-step approach to helping patients find healing, especially in the wake of crucibles, by leaning into such things as finding peace through surrender, embracing reconciliation, and choosing forgiveness.
Warwick Fairfax:
Tom, great to have you here. Tom is Dr. McCormack. He is a psychiatrist educator, thought leader and integrates spirituality and medicine. He graduated with honors from Wake Forest University, got his medical degree from Emory. Fellowships at Duke. He has a thriving multidisciplinary practice in Athens, Georgia, and he specializes in complex and treatment-assistant psychiatric cases. Dr. McCormack, Tom is an expert psychiatrist and has written a book, Hidden Medicine that really talks about the integration of spiritual with the physical and the biological, and talks about the 12 steps of Ruachiatry. Did I get that close to right?
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Yeah, that's right War.
Warwick Fairfax:
Okay. So before we get into that, which I found fascinating because it really offers help to folks spiritually really holistic medicine I guess you could say. So tell us a bit about the backstory of what a young Tom McCormack was like growing up and how you got interested in medicine. Where was that journey because not everybody grows up saying, "I want to be a psychiatrist one day." Probably didn't think that when, I guess you were six or seven, I'm guessing. So what was life like for young Tom and what led you to your life's calling?
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Yeah. Well first thank you guys for having me, Warwick and Gary. And look forward to talking to you guys today. Yeah. Starting from the start, when I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia and growing up from a really young age, I knew I wanted to be a physician. Honestly, it was probably like three or four years old. I remember watching the old 1970s television show called Emergency, and I just really-
Warwick Fairfax:
Yes.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
You remember that? All right.
Warwick Fairfax:
Oh yeah.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Same generation. Good.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Well anyway, the role of the physician, the doctor really resonated with me. I just thought it was neat. And so I started saying ... My parents tell me now that I wanted to be a doctor from a really, really young age. I went to a great college preparatory school from seventh grade onward and was blessed to have a wonderful education. And the further I got in my education, I began to see science as the way to truth. And as a person of science, I overemphasized that and really abrogated anything spiritual to the backseat. I wasn't sure that existed and science seemed to explain the natural world and what occurred, and so I went with that.
So growing up really wasn't a person of faith to any large degree, and that got worse in college as it often does. I really looking back was very selfish young man and was all about me, myself, and I. I'm embarrassed to say that, but it's the truth. And I studied very hard in medical school initially ... I'm sorry, in undergraduate. My first semester, just a month or so into school, I got a very severe case of mononucleosis. And it was so severe I thought initially it was just pharyngitis strep throat or something like that. And so I really blew it off. I thought, oh, this will get better in a few days and just gargle and that sort of thing. But by the time I actually sought medical help, it was my roommate and my suitemates who said, "You've got to go down to student health." I couldn't move at that point, Warwick. I was so fatigued. My throat hurt so badly I could not swallow. I'd lost a lot of weight in a really short period of time and they knew something was wrong. And so they took me to student health. I had an enlarged liver, enlarged spleen. I just let this go and they diagnosed me with mononucleosis.
I was actually in the hospital just for supportive care for almost two weeks and missed a lot of class. And obviously I was taking a pre-med track, and so I was taking biology and chemistry among other things. And I got way behind and met with my advisor after I was discharged and he said, "Tom, I really think you ought to withdraw from some classes. Probably the harder ones, like the science classes." And where I went to school was at that time pretty small college and they didn't have where you could take chemistry one or biology one second semester, you had to take it first semester. And so if I dropped out, I couldn't take the chemistry two. Anyway, I couldn't take it second semester, so I'd be a year behind on the pre-med track. And I just thought, that's unacceptable. I don't want to waste a year. So I foolishly did not take that advice and kept going forward and ended up getting two Cs and both in biology and chemistry, the rest for A's and Bs.
It was very humbling. I had never gotten a C in my life, let alone in a class, but I think on a paper test, I don't think I'd ever gotten Cs. I've done very well. And I met with my pre-med advisor and he said, "Tom, you're obviously not going to medical school, so you might want to think about another major." And indignant, I said, "No, sir. Well, I am going to medical school." I was respectful, but I said, "Eat my dust and I'm going to get a new advisor, somebody who's more encouraging." Always said respectfully. Anyway, so I did. And the rest of my time at Wake Forest, I studied really hard and almost had a 4.0 the rest of the time. And so it did help bring my grade point average up. So by the time it was time to apply to medical schools, the same advisor I met with, because he was in charge of the pre-med committee, he met with me and said, "Oh, well, we highly recommend you to medical school." I didn't say I told you so. He might not have even remembered what he told me three and a half years earlier. So he said, "Where do you want to go?" And I said, "My state medical school." He said, "You should have no problem getting in there with your grades and your activities and your MCAT scores." And I thought, "Great. That's where I want to go."
After applying, I got a interview very early on, which was a good sign. It's a rolling admission. And the interviews went great at my state medical college and I truly expected to get an acceptance letter any day now. And so every day from October my senior year in college on through my graduation, I checked the mailbox and there was nothing there. It got humbling, but then scary and I was puzzled like, "Why don't they let me know?" And they didn't put me on the wait list, which usually they'll do if they think, "Ah, he's okay, but we're not sure. Maybe something will open up." But they just didn't let me know. And graduation came around and I still hadn't heard. So I went home that summer in late May of '92 and still checked the mailbox every day, really hoping to get a letter, but my confidence was waning.
And then one muggy day in June, I grabbed my trusty dog, Murph, and we went down to the mailbox and I found a very thin letter, which I knew spelled bad news. Opened it on the spot and there was a few line rejection and I was just crestfallen. Everything I'd worked for one, be a physician since a very young age and worked really hard to overcome some early academic setbacks have been taken from me, and I was led to believe I was a really good candidate. And on paper, I was. I was just puzzled. I started tearing and I thought, geez, what do I do? I didn't want to go back to my home. I knew my parents were there and they'd start asking questions and scrambling around, and I just didn't feel like facing that. I felt like I needed to process it. So I had my dog and I thought, well, I'm just going to go for a walk and try to clear my head. But my head was swirling. I was so upset and tearful.
I hadn't made it very far. Made it to the house next door, and I stopped in the middle of the road and I'm embarrassed to say this is how I addressed the almighty. But I stopped and said something along these lines, God, I'm not really even sure you exist and if you do, why in the world would you let this happen to one of your children? This isn't fair. I worked hard for this. And I said, "I'll tell you what, if you exist, you need to show me right now. I'm not asking you to get me into medical school, but I've worked hard for this and I'm lost, and you need to show me what path you want me to take. And if you do that and show your reality, I'll follow you the rest of my life." And not expecting any answer whatsoever, and to my shock, immediately I felt an otherworldly presence. I don't know how else to describe it. Words don't do it justice. It felt as though this piece instantaneously embraced me. I came to realize in retrospect that whoever listened to me ... I prayed a silent prayer. Heard me, and then responded, and I wasn't expecting that, and I felt a duty to figure out who or what that was.
So that started my journey of spiritual exploration. Long story short, I made it back to my house. I went in, my parents were very upset and they started scrambling immediately. Well, let's pull some strings. They knew some people. And I didn't really care. I just thought it's going to be okay. And my dad said I remember, "Why are you so calm?" Because they were not. And I didn't want to explain to them. I thought they might think I was crazy or lost my mind. So I just said, "Yeah, I think it's going to be okay." And they looked at me puzzled. So they got on the horn behind the scenes. Turned out my mom knew the dean from another medical school in Georgia that I hadn't applied to. It was a newer medical school. It was kind of geared to rural medicine, which wasn't really my interest. And she called him and he surprisingly said, "Well, I'd be happy to interview Tom. I can't guarantee he'll get in." But it seemed like there was hope because I would be a very good candidate for their program. And I thought, well, maybe they'll open the spot for me. But still weren't really sure this was the right way. It didn't feel right.
So the next week when I was heading down south for that interview, got dressed up in my Sunday best, and I lingered on the couch and my mom came in and said, "Tommy, you've got to go. You're going to be late. I set all this up." I said, "Yes, ma'am." So I walked to the back door and I kissed my mom and dad.
And y'all remember back in the days when phones were on the wall. Anyways, our laundry room. And the phone on the wall rang literally as I was touching the doorknob to leave. And I remember my mom answered it and said, really puzzled, was like, "Yes, yes." And so I stopped like, "What's going on with her?" And she said, "Yeah, he's right here." And she put her hand over the phone and thrust it in my direction and said, "It's for you." And I was like, "Who is it?" And she goes, "It's for you." And thrust it in my face. And I answered the phone. And on the other end, I had been waitlisted at a private medical school in my state, and it turned out the dean of admissions was calling me and said, "Tom, a spot has opened up. Would you be willing to accept this spot and join our class of 1996? Classes start next week so there's not much time." And I said, "Yes, sir," and I hung up the phone. They're like, "What happened?" I told them and it was just jubilation ensued. And that really started me on this spiritual journey that wow, something cared, listened to me. And even though I was disrespectful and he answered my prayer and gave me the desires of my heart, not because it was my desire, but because looking back it was his will and I finally surrendered and submitted.
Warwick Fairfax:
You're in medical school. So tell me what led you to psychiatry? Because not everybody wants to do that. Some one of these surgeons. There's a lot of different specialties. Neurology. A lot of things you could go into. But why psychiatry?
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
So I saw a flyer in my fourth year in our medical school, and it said, "The law school is looking for medical students to be a mock expert witness in a medical malpractice case for our moot court, and we'll pay you, and it's on a Saturday morning." And I was like, "That sounds fun and I could make a little money." So anyway, I signed up for that and I went to court. They were very serious. They acted like it was a real case. And because this was the law students, they got a grade for this. It was important to them. I was just there getting paid. But they gave me a transcript of, okay, your doctor so-and-so and it was a malpractice case that had to do with surgery. I supposedly tied the suture wrong, and then they were also suing the company that made the suture.
Anyway, so I got up there on the stand as the expert witness and really enjoyed it. And I think did a pretty good job because afterwards the judge caught me on the way to the parking lot and said, "Hey, young man." I said, "Yes sir, your honor." And he said, "What's your name?" Introduced ourselves. And he said, "You were really good up there." I said, "Well, thank you, your honor. I appreciate that." He goes, "Have you ever thought about doing that for a career?" And I was like, "Doing what?" He said, "Being an expert witness." I said, "No." And he said, "Well, you might want to consider it." He said, "I think you're really good at it. And that's needed in law for us to have experts to give judges guidance on these things." And I thought, "Oh, okay." And so I went home and I looked it up. I was like, "What is he talking about?" And I found forensic psychiatry. And I was like, "I would love that. That sounds great." So my goal then, I was like, "I think I want to be a forensic psychiatrist."
In order to do that, you have to do at least a four-year residency in psychiatry. And again, I didn't really know what that was. I had a psychiatry rotation, but I thought, "Well, gee, if I'm going to go into this, I better do another rotation." So I did one with a private practice, which was more my speed, and I loved it to my surprise. And that was the goal. I was like, "I'm going to be a forensic psychiatrist." And my wife supported me, and my family was very puzzled. My dad was a dentist, so he was used to doing things and fixing things and then boom, we're done. See you next year. And he just said, "You're doing what?" He goes, "We paid for four years of medical school for you to do that?" He just didn't understand it. He later came to appreciate it. He never did understand it because he doesn't have that bent at all. But at any rate, that's what I chose. And it was the road less traveled and never looked back. I love it. I've been blessed to get a great education and have wonderful people around me, and it's been fantastic. Good fit for me.
Warwick Fairfax:
So before we get into the 12 steps of Ruachiatry, which I found fascinating, talk a bit about the spiritual and the physical, and the biological, because it seems like ... And obviously you talk about this a lot in the book, doctors are trained medically that they focus on that and not always thinking about holistically. It's like, I'm not trying to make fun of doctors, but if your cholesterol is high, you need to take a statin. Okay. That could be helpful in some cases. But what about diet and exercise? Isn't preventative helpful? Again, some might actually say, "Hey, before I give you a statin," but some might not. Depends on the doctor and their background, their training, their medical philosophy. But I think what you're advocating is more for holistic, not just physical. And again, obviously you're a doc, not against medicine. But talk about how holistic is maybe a better approach, including the spiritual. So talk about your philosophy of medicine, which not every doctor may share necessarily. What's your philosophy of, I guess, healing rather than curing or preventative medicine? Just talk philosophically about what your approach is.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Yeah. Like I said, early in my training, I had become a spiritual person based on my own experience. And simultaneously as I was going through my own spiritual journey, had the privilege of obviously starting to see patients. And what I've found was that even when they were really sick or in despair, there was an undeniable tendency for those with a religious foundation to have better coping but also better health outcomes in general. And so it puzzled made that, why aren't we talking about spirituality at all in our medical curriculum, both in medical school and then I found later in residency as well. When I was in residency, this puzzled me and I was at Duke and there was attending named Harold Koenig at Duke who is an expert in spirituality and medicine. And I started reading his stuff and found that there are over 3000 studies showing the benefits of having a religious faith background. And again, it just puzzled me.
We are trained in medical school on what's called the biopsychosocial paradigm, and that was introduced by a fellow named George Engel in 1977. And so that is standard in medical curricula in the United States. But even though medicine had a spiritual beginning ... If you look back centuries, even millennia, the people who were doing most of the medical treatments ... Back then, of course they were herbs, not for pharmaceutical company and whatnot. But they were the shaman or the medical man or the priest and that sort of thing. And the fact that that had been totally ignored in modern medicine was puzzling to me. So finding this information that it can be helpful and seeing that in my own practice, I really started to think, well, we need to integrate this into medical care. And something in the '90 when I was training was called the biopsychosocial spiritual approach. So they tried to add the spirituality component to it and it never really caught on to a large degree Warwick. And again, the further I got, I thought this is really helpful. I don't know why that could be.
When I went through my own both physical and spiritual battles as I aged, I felt like there needed to be a more systematized approach to this for patients because somewhat selfishly to some degree, I'd had a lot of problems back in 2019. My dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and watching the greatest guy become a shell of himself and being robbed of his humanity and watching my poor mom having to take care of him, and then COVID hit and we were trying to keep him out of a nursing facility, but it became increasingly hard to keep him at home. I just thought he'll die if he goes there. He'll never get out with COVID and who knows how long that's going to last.
But also with COVID, there were challenges. I had some physical illnesses turning 50 for the first time in my life that were pretty serious and even had to take some time off of work. In addition to time away from practice from COVID was trying to help mom with dad to some degree. And all this along with just ... I had three teenage kids running a private practice that I owned and trying to be there for my wife as well was overwhelming. And so I decided to try to systematize it honestly initially for my benefit. And I found it to be wildly beneficial and always wanting to help patients. As I went along, I thought maybe this could be turned into some kind of paradigm that we could help patients. In 2022, I also suffered some trauma in my church that I'd attended for over 20 years, and there was really intense spiritual warfare. That led me ... And my father had passed recently. Led me to start writing.
I actually started writing with my pastor. He had a PhD and had written books before and such, and I had written anything since college and I thought, I don't know what I'm doing and I don't know if anybody will read this or publisher probably wouldn't be interested. And he and I started writing together and it was not far into the process where Dr. Mills said to me, he said, "Tom, I think this is your book." And I was scared. I said, "No David, I really need you. I need you to help me with this." And he said, "No." He said, "I think you have a message to say here and I think it's for you." And he said, "Look, I'm in the business and people may not hear it from me that they expect me to say these things, but coming from you, it might be seen differently." And again, I didn't like what he said, but with trepidation, I went out on my own and over the next couple of years wrote the book at night and on weekends and things of that nature.
And finally got it done in 2024 and approached a friend of mine who's a ghostwriter, and he said, "Well, let me look at the manuscript." I said, "Okay." And he looked at it and he said, "Tom, I think you've got something here." He said, "I really think this could be a special book." And I was like, "Really? Wasn't expecting that. I was expecting to self-publish it and just be Vanity Press or something." And he said, "Let me edit it and put some polish on it and then I'm going to introduce you to my publisher." And I said, "Wow. Okay." And so he did that, and this was late 2024 and Greenleaf Publishing accepted later in the year and early 2025, we started the process of having them help me edit it a lot on coming up with cover and all the things that I'm sure you're aware of having written a book go into. And it's due October 28th and really excited about it. I hope it helps a lot of people.
Gary Schneeberger:
Warwick, I want to jump in here just for a second because I think we're at a pivot point in the conversation, and I want to make this point because you've described Tom as we've been going through your story, your first crucible situation. You didn't get into law school and you used this phrase when you were talking about who you were at that time. You said that you were all about me, myself, and I. That was your words about where you were at then. You've then just described another round of crucibles with some health challenges for you, your father passing away, some problems in your church. And it seems like in those situations your focus was not totally on yourself. For people who are listening to this and their crucibles are going to be different in detail, but the emotions will be the same, what's the difference? Why did the second way that you dealt with it not being me, myself and I, how did that help you get through those crucibles that you faced?
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Yeah. That's a great question. Well, as a person of faith, I came to believe the word of God that says that the highest two commandments are love the Lord your God with all your heart, strength, mind and also love your neighbor as yourself. And going into medicine being really clearly in retrospect, a calling from a young age, I just grew to love people and started seeing myself as less important. That I was a vessel for God to use to help people. And that was my mission in life. I came to see that very differently. And because of that deep desire to help people and show them the way I also became convicted that I can't show people the way if I don't have it myself. It's the same with physical health.
And what I mean by that is in medical school, there's a very famous cardiologist who literally wrote the book Cardiology, and he would lecture to us and then I would see him between lectures go outside and chain-smoke. And I just thought, wow, this is like a world-famous cardiologist who would tell everybody not to smoke and he's not doing it. I wasn't being judgment. I just thought that's a little hypocritical. As I practice medicine, I don't want to do that. I don't want to tell people. Or you said, "Hey, diet, exercise," and then have me be out of shape and that sort of thing. So same thing happened here. It had been helpful for me and I wanted to get the message out and see if I could help other people.
Warwick Fairfax:
So let's talk about Ruachiatry. Before we get into the 12 steps. At a high level Ruachiatry what's the philosophical underpinnings? What does it mean?
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Yeah, ruach in Hebrew means spirit, and iatry obviously comes from a Greek word iatrea which means treatment of. And so this is a spiritual treatment that I came up with. I coined that term for better or worse, but I think I wanted to give it one term that maybe would be memorable to incorporate the spiritual component that's been neglected in medicine. So yeah, that's it in a nutshell.
Warwick Fairfax:
And it's interesting. You did a study with Ruachiatry, with people I think that had depression, and you have a bunch of things like the Beck Depression inventory that I guess I'm sure psychiatrists, but all know what that means. The rest of us probably don't. Talk about how in that study using these principles actually had very significant health benefits. Talk about that because must've been affirming to you.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
So in seeing it being helpful in my own life, I thought, well, if I'm going to have a systematic approach to help patients, I want some empirical evidence that it is in fact helpful, not just my own experience. And that's how the study came to be. It was a 12-week study where we had people who were treatment resistant, which we defined as having three or more standard of care antidepressant treatments to deal with their depression and also psychotherapy. And during the trial before people signed up, we told them, Hey, during this 12 weeks you cannot change your medication or your therapy scheduled if you're currently in psychotherapy. And we had a number of people signed up. Now some of them dropped out because they were so severe that they needed changes in their treatment, but most of the people stayed. And what we found at the end of the 12 weeks, we met with them weekly and went over the 12 steps each week or met them at their own pace. Some people, if they had a spiritual underpinning got through steps one and two pretty quickly, other people might need to spend more time there and such.
But anyway, over the 12 weeks, what we found was that initially the cohort had a Beck Depression Inventory score of ... I believe it was about 32, which is in the severe range. By the end of the study, the mean Beck Depression score had dropped to 14, which is in the mild region. So over a 50% drop and also just improvement in their functionality.
Warwick Fairfax:
So let's talk about these steps. So steps one through three, acceptance, searching, and submission. Just give us a bit of an overview of the first three steps of Ruachiatry.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Yeah. The first step you have to accept your powerlessness over your illness. And this might seem self-evident, but it is actually harder in practice because people have a lot of psychological mechanisms to deal with illness. And the first step of any kind of grieving for the loss of a loved one or just loss of functioning and health is denial. And it's very common, especially early on. The sooner we physicians can move our patients toward acceptance, the better, the quicker they are on the road to help. And so that's super important.
And then the second part of step one is commitment. Once you've accepted, "Hey, I'm powerless over this and I need help of a physician or therapist or a team," then saying, "I am committed to fighting this. I'm going to take the first steps to dig my heels in and say, 'This is hard. I don't want to do this. I'm a peaceful person. I don't want to fight, but I'm in a fight and I've got to be committed to that fight.'" Step two is searching, like I mentioned earlier. And this is where I encourage people to embark on a journey to fulfill their personal responsibility, to decide for themselves if there is a higher power, which one? Who is it? And because this acknowledgement can help people have hope and better cope with illness. And so to me that's foundational.
Gary Schneeberger:
Step two is interesting to me because I have an AA background. I went through AA in the early '90s. And the idea of a higher power of my own understanding worked for a while because I did not grow up Christian, not even nominally. But eventually as I was walking through my recovery, I started to think, God of my own understanding, isn't my own understanding what got me in this position to begin with? How is that going to help me necessarily? It wasn't enough for me. Now you will not find a greater advocate for AA. But that didn't work for me. And my story, people have heard it on the podcast because Warwick interviewed me for our 50th episode. It was a little stunt on our host interviews, cohost. But I do believe at the end of the day, God healed me of that. And I don't refer to myself as a recovering alcoholic. I believe I leaned into that and God just plucked it out of me. But that part of what you said about who is that God of your understanding, I think that's an important part for people because it's our understanding that for me, it got me in trouble. That's what made me an alcoholic and I couldn't get away from it. And I think that's probably true through your experience over a lot of different kind of illnesses, right?
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
It is. And that's great insight. Actually the 12 steps were born out of that because that's already in our lexicon. It's already in medical parlance from AA, which started in the 1930s. And because of that, I started looking into AA. We had to do substance abuse stuff during residency, but it's not really my specialty. But in looking at the research and is there a branch of medicine that talks about spirituality at all? The only branch is addictionology and AA is the foundation of that. And that's where I came up with the idea of 12 steps. I actually contacted the folks from National AA in New York, and they were very encouraging and said I could use it as a template, but I just had to put a disclaimer that I'm not affiliated with AA at all and that sort of thing, which I put in the book of course.
But yeah. A study out of Stanford not too long ago, I think it was 2021, had 10,500 and something subjects. And their conclusion was that AA is a free resource that doesn't take professionals or physicians and that it works. And it works fantastic for the malady of alcoholism if people are active in the program. And just saying, "Wow. If that could be applied to general medicine and psychiatry as well, what would that mean?" If we could have something that worked that was free ... We're always talking about, oh, healthcare costs and stuff, what would that mean if a part of our sickness is due to spiritual issues? And so that's how I came up with the 12 step approach.
Warwick Fairfax:
So after searching before we move to step four, you've got submission. Submission is not a very popular word in our culture, but you talk about once we identify the spiritual power greater than ourselves, we decide to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. Submitting ourselves to a higher power to God. So talk before we get to the next one after that, why is submission important? Because it feels like counter cultural. How could submission help me?
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
It is probably same with Australians as it is with American. Yeah, submission is a dirty word, right? It has a connotation of groveling at the feet of somebody who's conquered you. So you've lost and you're having to against your will do something you don't want to do. But in spirituality, it has a different connotation. If you've identified in step two, a higher power that hopefully is benevolent and powerful enough to help you with your illness, submission should be a reasonable idea. Why wouldn't I submit to somebody who loves me and is powerful? We submit to our parents. We a lot of times, submit to the state for better or worse. But they still are sinful entities and they're not all powerful. So if there is something that's all powerful and willing to help, why the heck wouldn't you consider submitting? But yeah. Submission is hard even for people of faith. We have our own strong self-will, we also have a system in place that the Bible says is run by the devil. The Bible says our three enemies of the world system, which he runs, the flesh, which is our own fallen physical nature with its appetites that we want gratified. And then the devil himself and his spiritual cohorts that are out to get us. So that's where submission comes from and it's super important.
I find that a lot of people who are believers tell me, "Hey, Dr. Mac, these first three, I got those." And I say, "Wait a second. Let's go through them and just make sure." Because I find even with believers, they obviously have submitted to some degree, but most of us have an area of our life that we say, "You know God, you can have 95%, but I'm going to hold this little piece for myself." Whether we're willing to admit that or not. Nobody is completely submitted usually and just identifying, "Hey, are there any areas you haven't turned over to God? And let's explore the reason for that." But the more you get to know God and know who he is, it just makes sense. Wow, why wouldn't I turn everything over to him?
Warwick Fairfax:
Let's talk about the next step you've got. Step four is trauma and lies. You've got step five, choosing forgiveness, which we talk about a lot. Traumas we inflicted upon others. I have to say, the worksheets you have in here were really impressive. You've got a worksheet for inventory of traumas that you've suffered, and the questions here are so specific and clear. Who hurt you? What did they do? Was it intentional? Unintentional? Lies, I believe a result of my hurt, truth according to my higher power, degree of current resentment, ask God for their strengths to forgive. And then flip it the other way, when we've inflicted harm on others, the worksheet says, whom did you hurt? What did you do? Was it intentional or unintentional? What could you have done instead? What was the nature of your character defect involved? Had you forgiven yourself admitted to God, another person, the nature of your answers? Powerful questions. Talk about these. Trauma and lies, choosing forgiveness and then traumas be inflicted upon others. Let's talk about those steps.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Sure. So steps four through nine, I call radical renovation. You're cleaning out the house, so to speak, and this is really hard work, and it takes that commitment we talked about in step one. And because of that, a lot of times for people who've had a harder time, it might involve a competent psychotherapist to help them work through this or maybe a Ruachiatry coach somebody who's trained in the principles of Ruachiatry. But step four is super important, and I tell people, take your time, especially on step four and five. It's so foundational and fundamental because we are according to the Bible, born with a fallen nature. And people say, "Our baby's sinful?" Well, if you ever had a two-year-old, you can see how selfish they are and throw tantrums. Yes, from the womb we are innately sinful. I don't mean we sin all the time, but we have that nature. And because of that, it's easier for our spiritual foes to blind us. And those who are fortunate enough to either grow up with a faith background from their family or who come to their senses because either God plucks them out or somebody tells them about it, they're now spiritually awakened and they can see things differently. But everybody has trauma to varying degrees.
And what I talk about in the book is trauma with a big T, a capital T, and then traumas with a little T. Now traumas with a big T, as far as your physical health, it could be having some terrible injury, compound bone fracture or things of that nature, cancer and things of that nature as well. And then other traumas could be things that we would all say, "Oh gosh, yeah." War, rape, watching somebody die horrifically. These sorts of things are big things that most of us don't have to go through, but some people unfortunately have. But we all have little T traumas, and these are things that we accumulate during our life. Hurt people, hurt people and we're all hurt people. And so these accumulate, and what I've found is that a lot of little T traumas can add up to big T trauma. And so we all need to look back and say, "Hey, before I was a person of faith, these things have accumulated and I need to go back, unlock the cellar door and see what's down there and deal with it, not just bury it."
And so this is a hard step, firstly, admitting and looking in the mirror and saying, what are the traumas? But who hurt me, whether it's a person or an institution. And I tell people, go back to childhood, write down everything. And so this list can be super long, which is great. It should be because you have traumas. And trauma is in the eye of the beholder. And what we found with resilience research is that what I see as traumatic, you fellas might look at it and be like, "Well, that's a piece of cake." Because we all have different coping mechanisms and see things differently. But it doesn't matter. If I experienced it as traumatic, I have the same physiologic response, I have the same psychological response and so it's traumatic to me. So going through in every individual listing these things is super important and who did it? And then identifying was it intentional or not?
What I've found is that traumas that are either born of happenstance, acts of God or war things you couldn't control or just accidental, they weren't purposeful ... Somebody hurt you, but they didn't mean to. It wasn't malicious, but they still hurt you. Those are easier to forgive even if the person doesn't come to you and ask for forgiveness. It's a lot harder when we look and say, "Gee, that was intentionally inflicted and they were trying to hurt me and that sort of thing." So that's an important aspect.
Step five goes on to another foundational truth. And that is so important. If you don't forgive completely and fully, you are carrying around what the Bible calls a root of bitterness. So this understandable anger based on you've been hurt. It can grow over time. And what I tell people is that it grows into resentment. Meaning again, sentiment comes from sentire, which is Latin that means feeling it. And so you're choosing to feel the same emotion you felt when you're hurt again and again. And it's just simply madness. And so just recognizing that this is a prison of your own choosing. And when you choose forgiveness, you choose to set two captives free. You set the person free who did this to you, but you set yourself free as well. And forgiveness is hard, especially if the person does not apologize and was malicious about it. But it's so important and it's really necessary. And that can take some time, as I mentioned.
And then looking at our own selves in the mirror. Hey, hurt people, hurt people. I've hurt people. It's not just all about me. What have I done and what potential character defects, looking at what's gone on in my own journey and identifying and look in the mirror and saying, "These are things I need to correct in order for me to be whole." And then seven is making amends where you can .this isn't always advisable nor possible to do, but when it is, it's important to reach out to people whom you've hurt and offer genuine remorse and try to make it right if you can.
Warwick Fairfax:
It's fascinating that you talk about this because Beyond the Crucible, we talk about forgiveness a lot. And we say, as obviously, I'm sure you would believe that forgiveness doesn't mean condoning what was done to you. It doesn't mean what was done to you was right, acceptable, moral. But you do it because obviously as people of faith, because we've been forgiven, those who've been forgiven much should forgive. So we often say that choosing not to forgive is like drinking poison. It just corrodes your soul. And the other thing with forgiveness is I often tell people and our church and all, it is rare that somebody will say, "I apologize," in my opinion. It can happen but most of the times they'll say, "Well, I'm sorry if that hurt you." Sorry if is never ... I tell all my kids, sorry if is not an apology. That just does not cut it.
So you've got to realize when bad things are done to you, you will rarely get the satisfaction because of the world we live in. It just won't happen most of the time. So we've make amends in the last few steps we've got from fear to faith, vigilant and sober. And then I think you've got drawing closer to God seeking spiritual wisdom. So really from eight instead of a turning point. So talk about that turning point from theater, faith and vigilant and sober drawing closer to God. Talk about how that helps your spiritual recovery if you will.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Sure. Four, five and six deal with anger, which sometimes it's like you said, if you're heard, it is justified. And so step eight deals with the other emotion that I find to be very problematic and where people get stuck and that's fear, which is very common in today's world, the state of flux that our world is in. The political discord. Obviously the pandemic that happened. There's a lot of fear and some of it's certainly understandable, but I've seen it grow in my practice with folks presenting with anxiety is super common. I think there's a spiritual way to combat it in addition to certainly some people need therapy and medicine also, and I'm not against that. To get them fully there, I think going from fear to faith is a big leap and trying to help people understand how to do that. And again, that's a process, right? Fear didn't happen overnight. A lot of times it's grown over time and additional things have happened that make one more fearful. And so that's the step there.
As far as vigilant and sober, sobriety doesn't always necessarily just mean from alcohol or drugs, although think it's best to be sober from those as well. We are all influenced. We say, "Oh, so-and-so got a DUI. They were under the influence of alcohol, right? Oh, that's bad." We can be under the influence of negative spiritual enemies as well and just unwittingly not know about it. So being sober in that regard, and like you alluded to earlier, think on things that are good and positive. We found out through research lately that thoughts are things. They actually have mass and they're not a separate thing. They're part of our soul, our mind, will and emotion. And so they're important. What you think determines your destiny to a large degree. And so reframing things from fear to faith and having that foundation is super important. And then being vigilant. Once you've cleaned out from steps four through nine, now you got to keep it clean. And so that's where the vigilance of the guard on the wall comes into play.
10 through 12 are more ... I was drawing closer to God. And James says in the Bible that draw close to God and he will draw close to you. And I found that to be true in my own spiritual walk. And so Step 10 talks about seeking spiritual wisdom. There is worldly wisdom, and it is not bad. I'm not against philosophy. But the issue with human philosophies, even from the most brilliant people, Plato, Socrates, these folks and others, is that the philosophy from spirituality is fixed. And it's this rock that doesn't change over the millennia. Whereas human philosophy, there are lots of different schools of thoughts and it can change with time just like science and new discoveries can. And so it's a shifting sand, so to speak. And so you shouldn't rely on it for your spiritual wellbeing, but certainly there's wisdom to be had from secular searches of philosophy.
But scripture and then lastly, prayer and meditation. And I go into depth about these things that whatever you decide is your higher power, study the orthodox teachings of your faith and get their spiritual books that they feel are inspired and principles are worth living by. And then prayer. I know for a fact that some spiritual being heard me, I believe it's God and Jesus, but at any rate, prayer works. There are lots of studies on that too that aren't talked about in medical school or even in general life, but prayer does work. And adding with that, a meditation upon scripture, meditation on truths, the health benefits of meditation are well-known. But the goal of meditation, unlike transcendental meditation for example, isn't to empty your mind, it's to fill your mind with truth and have that be the focus of your thoughts.
Warwick Fairfax:
There might be somebody here who maybe today is their worst day, and it's like, "I feel spiritually empty, bankrupt. There is no hope. I'm not sure anybody cares about me. There's no higher power that cares." They might be in a very dark place. What would a word of hope be for somebody that maybe today is their worst day and they just feel spiritually bankrupt? They might hate themselves, hate other people hate the world. They might be in a very dark spiritual in soul place. What would a word of hope be for that person?
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Yeah. I would say to that person, you are so important. You have no idea the importance that you carry. You are made in the image of God. As difficult as that is to fathom, it's the truth in my opinion. And if you haven't already, I would encourage you to explore, especially the God who claims to be the creator of you and everything. Who claims to be all-powerful and who claims to be omniscient so he can hear your prayers. He knows everything at all times and he's omnipresent. He's not bound by location. So whether you're in the middle of the desert or in church, he hears your prayers just the same. And he also claims to be Jehovah Rapha, which means God the healer. He claims to be the great physician. And if you reach out to him and really earnestly search, you'll find the truth. There is hope. But it doesn't come in things that the world offers. Their passing away as the Bible says. And the only thing that won't pass away is our souls. And you're going to spend eternity somewhere and why not go ahead and surrender your own will to God so that you can be one of those people who is assured that you're going to spend forever with a loving God.
And also remind people you will eventually be healed. If you're a believer. People think, oh, you die and you can either go to heaven or hell, sort of true. But the truth of matter is God made a perfect world. He said everything was good and it got wrecked by us and the influences that influenced us negatively. But the good news is he promises he's coming back and he's going to restore everything to its perfect state. In fact, at some point, he is going to make a new heaven and a new earth because this one's a mess and he's going to remake us. Our bodies will die, but he's going to give us new bodies that will be eternal and that will be without sin, sickness, or death. So if you're a believer, you have that assurance, you will get out of your trouble at some point. And the Bible says even that our troubles in light of eternity are light and momentary. And they may not feel light. They may not feel light. You may say, "Dr. McCormack, you don't know what I'm going through." I do. I sit with people in pain every day, and I've been through my own. There is hope and there's a way out. So I'd encourage you to examine what you believe about a higher power.
Gary Schneeberger:
Folks, I've been in the communications business long enough to know when the final word on the subject has been spoken, and our guest, Tom McCormack, also known as Dr. Thomas McCormack, has just spoken about the substance of what we're talking about, but I've still got a little housekeeping left to do, and that is Tom, to have you let our listeners and viewers know how can they find out more about your book Hidden Medicine and more about you on the internet.
Dr. Thomas McCormack:
Yeah, thanks Gary. I have a website called www.hidden-medicine.com. Usually you could find me if you type in Hidden Medicine or Dr. Thomas McCormack. But also the book Hidden Medicine is available now on Amazon for pre-sale. It will be in bookstores everywhere on October 28 so coming up real shortly. And it's my sincere desire that it helps a lot of people give some clarity to some of these things that a lot of people find confusing. Really tried to write it for lay people. And my second hope is that the medical community will embrace it and realize that yeah, there are things beyond medicine and surgery and therapies that we're missing. We've left untapped and we need to tap into that.
Gary Schneeberger:
Folks. Now, the plane is indeed fully on the ground. Time to gather your peanut bags and head off the plane. Warwick, we just got done speaking with Tom McCormack, which felt weird to me because he's Dr. Thomas McCormack. So I always felt strange every time I called him Tom. I don't know why. It's the old soul in me. I can't refer to a doctor except by doctor, but we did it. He had some very interesting things to talk about from his own experience, his crucible, not getting into medical school, some other ones that followed after he was a doctor already, and then his new book, Hidden Medicine, some things that he talked about there. So what is the little bow on the package you'd like to put on our conversation to hit on? What was the most important thing that Tom had to say to us?
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. Dr. McCormack, Tom and his book, Hidden Medicine, it's so interesting because he's a psychiatrist, so he's not against medicine, Western medicine, but what he is I think advocating is for a more holistic view of health, which includes the spiritual side. And he talks about negative forces. Some could call it spiritual warfare, which he talks about a bit in his book, but negative influences. If we are watching the wrong things that just pull us down and just make us feel depressed about life, angry at ourselves, angry at others, just indulging that. It can be through substance abuse, alcohol or drugs. Those are things that erode our soul in addition to obviously they can hurt our health. He's advocating just be aware of that. Be aware of those forces that can really pull us down if we let them. Life is tough enough, but just really talking about things in his 12 steps of Ruachiatry that really fill us up. And he talked about things like forgiveness which should talk a lot about on this podcast, which doesn't mean condoning. It can be forgiving others, forgiving yourself, and just it can be making amends, filling yourself with truth. From his perspective and our perspective that could mean that the truth of the scriptures of the Bible. But whatever your spiritual religious paradigm is, fill yourself with truth.
Avoid the negative influences. Focus on the positive and didn't really get this into this in our discussion, but focus on what we call a life of significance. In the book, he does talk about one of the highest forms, I think spiritual, psychological health talks about other ... When you're focused on, from my perspective, a higher purpose or on helping other people, that's certainly, I think to me, a good part of spiritual health and soul health. So really, I think the big message is when we are told to focus on what we eat, avoid foods that are unhealthy. fill yourself with healthy foods, well, the same is true in spiritual health. Avoid influences that bring your soul down and fill yourself with influences that are good for your soul. That will both help your overall wellness as well as your overall outlook on life. So what's fascinating is he comes at it from a psychiatric clinical perspective, and his view is soul health, in my words and our words really [inaudible 00:59:15]. Avoid the things that drag you down. Fill yourself with truth, whether it's biblical truth or whatever truth you think is meaningful to you. Fill yourself with truth. That is the path to spiritual health and soul health.
Gary Schneeberger:
And remember this until the next time that we are together that we understand. We know your crucible experiences are difficult. Warwick knows that. Tom knows that. I know that. You've heard us all talk about that either here or in other episodes of the show. But know this also. That it's not the end of your story. Your crucible is not the end of your story. If you learn the lessons from it, and if you apply those lessons moving forward, you can chart yourself a course to the greatest destination you can ever reach, and that 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.
Her life was in complete upheaval. Her future was uncertain. But her mind was made up.
Our guest this week, Sharon Land, recounts how a devastating relationship crucible, plus the health crisis of suffering a stroke in her 30s, led her to pursue true wellness — first for herself, and then for others as a licensed holistic therapist, high performance mentor and transformational guide.
To explore Beyond the Crucible resources, including our free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment, visit beyondthecrucible.com.
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and leave a comment at our YouTube channel. And be sure subscribe and tell your friends and family about us.
Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Warwick Fairfax:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond the Crucible.
Sharon Land:
That was when I realized that I was in a very, very unhealthy relationship. Lost everything and left with just basically whatever I could fit in my car, and drove 1,000 miles away. And that's when I said, "I never want to be in this position again, and I'm willing to understand how I got there and how I can never be there again."
Gary Schneeberger:
Her life in complete upheaval, her future uncertain, but her mind made up. Our guest this week, Sharon Land recounts how this relationship crucible, plus the health crisis of suffering a stroke in her 30s, led her to pursue true wellness, first for herself and then for others as a licensed holistic therapist, high-performance mentor, and transformational guide.
Warwick Fairfax:
Well, Sharon, thank you so much for being here. Really looking forward to our discussion. I love learning a bit about you. You're a licensed holistic therapist. I like how in the material you describe yourself as a guide, a spiritual Sherpa. For those who haven't climbed Mount Everest or gone to Nepal recently-
Gary Schneeberger:
Me.
Warwick Fairfax:
... the Sherpas are those guides that help you up impossible mountains. Without the Sherpa, you're in trouble. So it's a wonderful metaphor. And you have a book, The Healer's Journey: Discover the Healer Within You. It's a great phrase. You've got the Prismatic program, which we'll hear about, the Transformational journey, the Live Your Legacy Retreat. Love that. Living your legacy, talk quite a bit about that.
So just before we get into what you do now, tell us a bit about the backstory and a young Sharon growing up, because very often we find the seeds of our purpose can be in just some of the stories and our life experiences. So what was life like for a young Sharon?
Sharon Land:
Yeah, and thank you for having me, and so good to meet both of you. Life for Sharon, I grew up on the East Coast in the US and two parent household, and really was born into kind of a spectrum of gifts. And did not know and wasn't guided and wasn't mentored that they were okay and how to work within them. So many people spend their lives seeking the opportunity to be able to see, to tap into their gifts of who they are and how they can show up in the world. And I was born into this big, loud spectrum of that. And so it was an interesting beginning.
And by all practices, I think my parents did the best that they could and they did all of the right things based upon whatever wisdom and guidance were provided at the time when I was born. But people who were born in the late '60s and '70s, I think most of us would say that we were quite feral and raised in a way that's a little bit different than how we know that perhaps we can be raised in a different way. So I don't fault my parents for being just very much like many other parents, just doing their best.
But one of the things that was resounding throughout my lifespan was that there was always some sort of a conflict, and that conflict started to show up in the physical disease. So I suffered very, very early on with debilitating migraines. And as I continued to progress throughout my life, it turned into lots of different things. So always with the best of intentions, the outcome wasn't the best for me. So it really just taught me to continue to conform, to mask, to pretend, to work harder, to work with the mental aspect of maybe it's just changing your perspective and maybe it's just realizing that there's something wrong with you and you just need to adhere to the way that everybody else is. And that led to a deeper conflict inside of me.
And I believe that a lot of people, especially high performers, all have this experience in their life where they didn't feel like they were really quite aligned. And maybe there's some sort of a major issue or maybe there's just a lot of chronic issues along the way and circumstances along the way that inform them that they have to perform in order to be seen, they have to perform in order to be loved, they have to perform in order to be worthy of space, literally taking up space in this world. And I was one of those.
So I spent a long time trying to outperform my past and find out who I was. And by the structures that we had set, I was doing all of the right things, but my body and my mind and my heart and my spirit all told me that I wasn't. So the big catalyst for me, one of the catalysts for me was I had a stroke and I was in my 30s, which was kind of unheard of at that time to be so young. And that was a big wake up call for me because, again, I was the one who was a perfectionist. I did everything right and wasn't perfect, but there was always the moving goalpost of trying to chase perfection.
So that allowed me to really take a look at my life. And I changed my life in many, many ways at that time. But it wasn't until much later that I had my crucible moment. And that was when I realized that I was in a very, very unhealthy relationship and lost everything and left with just basically whatever I could fit in my car, and drove 1,000 miles away. And that's when I said, "I never want to be in this position again. And I'm willing to understand how I got there and how I can never be there again, for myself, but also for my children."
Warwick Fairfax:
So it's probably unknowable, is your sense that some of the illnesses, the migraines, do you feel as you look back, that might have been related to just feeling like in almost like a psychological straitjacket, that you were trying to conform and that caused physical challenges? As you look back, do you see a connection between the way you thought you had to live and the physical illnesses?
Sharon Land:
100%. And now what I know is that I was living a life of survival, and we have this beautiful spiritual intersect within our physical bodies called our nervous systems that are wired for truth and wired for our basic needs and wired for safety. So as much as we might be programmed to believe that we're getting what we need or that there's something about you that needs to change or whatever, our nervous systems will always let us know. And the longer we live within that conflict, the more it's going to show up in our physical bodies. And that's by divine design, and that's a sign of health.
So it started with migraines and unfixable things. At one point I was diagnosed with lupus. But the interesting thing is that there are two different forms of activation within our nervous systems. We have the high end of activation, which is what we know most about, and then we have the low end of activation. So high end is irritability, superhuman capacity to be able to leap tall buildings with a single bound if we need to, get people out of a burning building. That's the sympathetic nervous system, and that's designed to help to keep us safe, right? But we also have something that when the thing that is creating the activation for us isn't addressed, then we go to another state within that survival mechanism, which is the dorsal vagal nervous system response, which puts us into a position of paralysis, disassociation, de-realization from our lives, de-realization and de-personalization from who we are. And in that survival, we fawn, we people please, we placate, we in many times get into a situation where we feel very hopeless.
So what I learned not just was that the physical aspects we're a result of not being honored, what I learned is there's a bio-scientific aspect to our survival that we live within that is going to affect if we constantly stay in our high-end or sympathetic nervous system response, it will affect kind of the brain, the brain stem, and then also our entire spine. So in all of the people who I've worked with, which are many, first responders all typically have some sort of spinal injury, police officers, firefighters, military and nurses, people who are first responders. And the majority of women speaking, just kind of acculturation, the majority of women all have autoimmune issues. 80% or more than 80% of people who are diagnosed with autoimmune issues and diseases are women. And the structures that we live within create a situation where there's kind of an unsolvable unfixable, unresolvable, repairable circumstance.
So that places us many times into the dorsal vagal, which the dorsal vagal affects things like our throat. Thyroid disease is one of the number one treated diseases within women. And that's all falls into the autoimmune, right? That's here. Digestive, IBS, our intestinal tract, reproductive. There is a warehouse now of fertility clinics across the world, but the majority here in the United States. All of that affects women. So there's a correlation to it's not just the family systems that we grew up in, but it's literally societal systems, it's structures, it's grid work that are creating a natural conflict that we live within. So I think that the root of it is very interesting and it's also very complex, and the solution can be very beautiful and liberating, and not just for yourself, but also for the collective, which is why we're here, right?
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, and we'll get to this, I know one of the things you talk about is doctors, as good as they can be, seek to try to cure, and I love the phrase you use, rather than to heal. Very often for me, if I get stressed, it will sometimes often go to my stomach. That's sort of common. So yes, I could take all sorts of acid-reducing things, which in moderation is okay, you don't want to overdo it because that causes other things. But okay, so what's causing this stress? Let's see if we can reduce it. And then, hey, presto, my stomach feels better. I mean, that's a common thing that many people go through.
But so you had challenges growing up and have to try to fit in and maybe fulfill all the people's expectations and your own, but then the stroke and then just the breakup of your relationship with kids, I mean, that must have A, been devastating, but it would tend to lead to all sorts of other physical manifestations. I mean, obviously the stroke is a physical manifestation itself, but the breakup of a relationship, and when you feel like you lose everything relationally and financially, did it lead to some challenging physical characteristics?
Sharon Land:
Interestingly enough, there was definitely a stress response, so in the moment while I was going through it, high levels of cortisol in my body, so there was a lot of inflammation, but I was far enough along in my healing journey, I was armed and I had a lot of great protective factors within the practices, so spiritual practices, physical practices. So I was kind of like Forrest Gump. So I just ran, and that was how I just metabolized. So I just kept running and running and running. And then one day I was like, "Well, I'm done running," metaphorically and physically.
It was the first time in my life that I ever lived alone. And I was in my late 40s. I had never in my life ever lived alone. Both of my children were out of the house and so it was just me. And I lived in something called my launch pad. I called it my little launch pad. And in the beginning, I didn't even want to have furniture in it because it was so liberating to literally empty, internally and externally, every single thing that I had been carrying around. So interestingly enough, I became healthier and healthier with every day and every minute that I spent.
And always, there's these beautiful universal coincidences, right? So I met incredible healers along the way throughout my life that made such beautiful impact for me and helped me to catalyze my experience and alchemize my experience from it being the greatest wounding that I ever, ever could have experienced, to finally listening to the nudges all of my life, to honor who I truly am and to step into who I am here to be and serve in the ways that I am meant to be and stop hiding. So it was the womb that birthed me into my greatest, greatest, greatest expression. And so for that, I am so grateful.
Warwick Fairfax:
One of the things we say at Beyond the Crucible, and we've had people with every crucible you can imagine, whether it's financial loss, victims of abuse, people who've made just terrible life decisions, losing loved ones, children, and this phrase has come up, "It didn't happen to you, it for you," and that sounds hard to understand, but pretty much every guest we've had who obviously people we've had on the show have moved to more of a life-affirming vision, they say, "It was terrible, but I learned some things," in many cases, I remember a woman by the name of Stacey Copas, she was a teenager in the suburb of Sydney. She dove into an above ground pool, which of course her parents said, "Don't do that, Stacey," but you know, kids ignore their parents, and she became diagnosed as a quadriplegic. Obviously she went through, as you would imagine, suicidal ideation and substance abuse.
But subsequently, as she moved forward, she said, "What I went through, I'm grateful for because the person I am now who's a strong person, dedicated to helping others and coaching and speaking," so it's hard to wrap your arms around that. How in the world could that be positive? So it seems like in your case you did too. You might've been in this small place with no furniture, but you found a way to turn it into a positive, as you put it, your mission was birthed out of that horrendous experience. So it's an amazing... I mean, you've got to reframe what happened, because we often say you have a choice.
You could have been angry and bitter and say, "That person, I didn't deserve that. I can't believe that," and just go the cycle of anger, bitterness, which is understandable. Oe you could say, "Okay, it wasn't right, it wasn't fair, but I need to find a way to move on, forgive, but not condone." And so you must have gone through that, that must have been... All those emotions there that you made a choice you would not be defined by this experience. You would not be in this victim mode and be angry and bitter for the rest of your life. You made a choice, right?
Sharon Land:
Yeah, it was 100% a choice. And also to your point, I'm so mindful when I'm working with people to not say, "This is probably going to be the best thing that's ever happened to you," because there's so much complexity that goes into it. We have to take into acculturation, we have to take into realistic things that are going on in the world where we are literally oppressed. So I do believe that we don't need to experience such tragic experiences in order to be able to alchemize and become who we are. And I have zero regrets. Zero regrets.
But the thing that really motivated me was that I raised my head above the rubble of my experiences in my life. And I knew that I had to take personal responsibility for who I am and who I was when I showed up in my relationships. So I never wanted to be the hero, I never wanted to be the victim, and I never wanted to be the villain. And actually, when I was working with somebody, they said, "You were a victim." And I said, "I will not wear that T-shirt. I won't ever wear that T-shirt."
And the thing that was the subtext for me was that for whatever reason, not saying that it wasn't intended or ever tried or whatever, there were places and spaces inside of me and inside of my life that I didn't experience love. And I vowed that every place that I allowed my metaphorical footsteps to be, that it would be with love and that I would no longer allow myself to hate or anger or self-betray or self-destruct because of an outward experience or an inward experience.
And it sounds so simple, but greeting yourself in all of those moments, you realize how, regardless as to where it came from, it's yours to hold, it's yours to honor, it's yours to live and embody. So love is what we're all here for. But the only way we can experience the true bounty of love is to live the experiences of our life and allow it to live through us. And that creates the wisdom. Wisdom isn't kept up here in our head. That's just information, right?
Warwick Fairfax:
Wisdom tends to come through life experience. Do you feel like, and I want to get to what you do now, but do you feel like since you've had that mentality that yes, there's physical benefits, but that you approach life differently, relationships are different, I don't know, when you're in a better space, if you attract, I don't want to say better relationships, better environments, that somehow... Do you feel like those things changed a bit as you became more who were intended to be and were straitjacketed less by expectations or bitterness, that it changed the way you relate to the world and the way the world related to you, if that makes any degree of sense?
Sharon Land:
It makes complete sense. So what shapes us in the beginning is how we're responded to in our lives. So when we're super little infants before in the womb, whatever. And so the way that we relate to ourselves, the way that we relate to the world and the way that the world interacts with us is shaped based upon that frequency. So the undoing of the misinformation will allow you to be able to show up differently.
But the interesting thing for me in my own experience, what I'm here for, is not just to be off on my own slaying dragons. Part of what I realized is that it's easy to heal in a vacuum. It's easy to say that you've done all of the things and do it all on your own and live in a bubble, in a glass house. But I think it was Ram Dass who said, "If you think you're enlightened, go and spend a week with your family." It's kind of the same thing, right? It's not easy because we are here for connection. We're wired for connection. We're here to work as a union, in union with another. So it's not until you can join safely, openly, abundantly with fullness of who you are, that you really can, in my opinion, say that you can serve well.
Warwick Fairfax:
I want to make sure we get to what you do now, because I think a lot of what you talk about is you're not against Western medicine. It can be helpful, but so often in the West, doctors seek to cure. They want to give you a tablet for everything, and it's like, but what's the underlying cause of it? It might be lifestyle, psychological, eating habits. And it's like back to the stomach ache thing, which I don't get that often, but you sort of read some holistic books on that and it's like, okay, don't eat as many tomatoes and don't eat... I don't know, there's a series of things you shouldn't eat because that tends to activate your stomach. Okay, well I can do that. It's not a magic cure, but it helps. Well, a doctor isn't going to say, "So how many tomatoes did you eat this week? You eat lots of ketchup?" I mean, they're not going to ask that question. That's just one sliver. It's like, "Well, here's an anti acid reduction." "Okay, that's great."
So just talk about your perspective on, again, you're not against medicine, but just healing as opposed to curing. And it seems like in our Western medical culture, it does seem to be changing a bit. There are some enlightened doctors that are beginning to talk about this. As you would know better than me, there are doctors who talk about holistic medicine, and they're licensed doctors, but they also talk about other things. Not many, but some. Just talk about how you view that, the curing versus healing and how you work with people that you work with.
Sharon Land:
So first interesting to note on my roster all of the time, I have at least one doctor, one nurse, one practitioner, one PA, and they come to me because they're living in conflict. There's something that's showing up in their lives and they can't figure out what's going on. So we go through the process of their own healing journey and becoming more of who they are and understanding who they are and why they are where they are, which is fascinating and beautiful. We walk the line, we walk the line of the esoteric and however much they embrace. And then it's so fun to see the progress of, "Okay, well I know that this is this, but I'm still going to go to the doctor because my cholesterol is high." And the doctor will say, "Okay, well you need to go on a statin," right? And they'll say, "Well, I don't want to go on a statin, but I can't tell them it's because I'm working with my inner child right now and I really think that I'll be able to reduce my cholesterol by whatever."
So they figure out a way to walk the line of the healing work and live authentically to who they are, and also not cause any harm to how they're showing up currently where their feet are planted right now in their professions. So we have context which is very important to our healing, which I think is a big part of it. So Western medicine is designed, especially here in the US, as emergency medicine. So it makes complete sense that when somebody shows up to the emergency room, to the doctor's office, to the clinic, to the whatever, things have gotten to a point of it's critical. There's some sort of critical piece. So I would never say, we don't need a doctor to help with a broken bone or to help with a heart attack when it's happening or whatever.
Now, what caused the heart attack? That's a whole different story. How we can never get there again, that's a whole different story. So for instance, we're still so misinformed, even through our traditional training and teaching for doctors, for instance, women in menopause, one of the number one risk factors of women in menopause is not them losing their minds because their hormones are dropping, it's heart disease, it's cardiac disease. And because they've gone untreated for as long as they've gone, they're at a much higher risk. And also there is a prevalence of heart attacks or heart arrhythmia or issues within the heart. So when I say root cause, I'm not always just saying trauma. I'm saying what is it the root of what your needs are?
Warwick Fairfax:
And that could be physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual. It could be all sorts of different roots. And so how do you explore those? So talk a bit about holistic healing. And there's different spiritual practices that you obviously have to tailor to whoever's with you. If you have some corporate executive, there's probably going to be some Eastern traditions they're really not too open to or any. So it depends on the person, but you probably have a whole bunch of tools that you can find, I'm guessing, one that will fit for them. "Okay, you don't like this? That's fine, how about this other one?"
Sharon Land:
Right.
Warwick Fairfax:
So talk about how that works as you're dealing with folks. What does holistic healing look like? It's not in conflict with Western medicine, but it's different. So what do you try to do with somebody that says, "Hey, Sharon, I kind of need help," what does that look like, holistic healing?
Sharon Land:
So it's very much of how you've just introduced it, so it's meeting the person where they are. One of the skills that I would say that I'm very strong with is I'm very intuitive and I'm able to read people pretty quickly, and from the most purest of lenses. So not in a critical, "There's something wrong with you," or whatever, but just like, "Okay, where are you?" I ask myself that question when I'm talking to somebody, "Where are you?" I ask, "Where is this person? Where are the pressures?" Many, many times I've worked with people who work on Wall Street, and a very typical secret that they hide for a long time are panic attacks. They're having panic attacks, anxiety, literally. Some where they're hiding from their partners. They'll go and hide in an office room where they know that people don't normally go and they'll lay on the floor because they're having a panic attack.
So I might see that, I might know that, but asking the direct question, "Are you having a panic attack?" Or, "Are you doing whatever" would be very, very unsafe? And make them put their walls of protection up more. So to navigate and find our way into what feels right for them in that moment to help to address things, I feel is an art. And it's very, very important because my dedication to myself when I was going through the last pieces of my healing is I do not want any place that my metaphorical feet go or physical feet go, that aren't with love and acceptance. And I feel the same way with all of the people that I'm blessed to be able to work with. Every single place we go has to come from a place of, "I'm ready." And that readiness takes as long as it takes.
Warwick Fairfax:
Probably this sort of intuitive dance. I can think of obviously there are differences between men and women in our society, certainly Western society, men are taught to sort of buckle up, be strong, don't admit weakness, don't be vulnerable, and certainly a lot of male anyway, Wall Street executives to admit they have panic attacks, that's admitting they're weak, which they're taught is you never, ever do. You just say, "Oh, things are good, I'm fine." But that could be perfectionism. It's like, "Gosh, the market's down. My whole sense of self is defined by the stock market. If it's up, I'm a good person. If it's down, I'm a bad person." So obviously try to disconnect that. But obviously with some male Wall Street executives, it's got to be challenging. But over time you build up a relationship and they trust you and sort of lock by block, drip by drip, the truth, their truth comes out. So you're probably very good at what you do that once trust is built, one way or another, they'll let you know what the problem is, right? It'll come out.
Sharon Land:
Yes. And I really believe that it's never about what's right and wrong, although there are very few things that I'll be like, "That's right and wrong." But it's really about understanding the organic essence of who you are and why you're here and looking at what you're surrounded with to see what is not in alignment with that. So I give an example, and I say this many times, because then I have people who are the opposite, where they read all of the books and they see all the memes and they're on social media and they're just like, "I have CPTSD," and, "I have this," and, "I was traumatized and I'm abused and I want to fix it all now. I just want to fix it now." And I'm like, "All right, pump the brakes and we're going to again come with our agreement, which is no more suffering."
That's one of the first things that I have every single client come to an agreement with me and some put it up on their computers, no more suffering so that they can remind themselves every single day that suffering is a choice. Pain is going to happen regardless, but suffering is a choice. So I give this example of a city block, so let's just say we're on a city block and somebody plants a tree next to a fire hydrant and it's a sapling and there's plenty of space for the two of them to coexist. But 100 years later, that tree has continued to grow and it's now grown around the fire hydrant.
So I can walk by and say, "That fire hydrant's not supposed to be there," or, "That tree's not supposed to be there. So we got to fix it." If I were to go in and try and eradicate that fire hydrant from the tree and we'll just benefit the tree over the fire hydrant because the tree is living and the fire hydrant is not. So what would happen to the tree if I removed that fire hydrant in completion? It would probably die because for 100 years it has accommodated and it is coexisted with, even though it's not in alignment, it's not supposed to be there, you can see in the leaves and in the branches the reflection of the fire hydrant and the impact and the impression that made on it.
So bit by bit you work with, you sit, you rest, you digest, you observe, you allow the healthy aspects of self to come through and do its magic, and then you go back in again and you allow yourself to be guided. And that's the beautiful thing of the work with me is that it's not in a can, it's not a program where I walk people through paces and whatever. It's a dance of just that, where we're guided. And in the beginning it doesn't feel very organic. But in the end, one of the reflections that I get from everyone that I work with is like, "Wow, I came in asking for tools," and I'll look at them and I'll joke and I'll say, "You need another tool like you need another window on your house. You don't need another tool. You've got a whole extra garage and shed just to hold all of the tools that you have just to be able to exist in your life. What you need is to be able to show up and organically be you and trust yourself."
Warwick Fairfax:
A different perspective. That's really interesting the metaphor of the tree and the fire hydrant. Some things will heal and maybe some things, to a degree, won't exactly heal, but you learn to live with them and they become part of your new you and your new purpose. And obviously, there's extreme example of people with physical challenges, there are some wounds that it's not possible to physically heal, but you learn to become the new you. Somehow you weave it into your purpose and helping people understand patience. And I imagine you give people skills so that when they're not with you in a session, they're able to self-diagnose, help.
By nature, I'm a very reflective person, that has its pluses and minuses, but usually, if something's wrong, I want to know why and where. I don't brush over it. I'm just not wired that way. So I'd love just as we kind of begin to close, I mean you've got so many great things, you've got the Prismatic program. I love this whole Live Your Legacy. We don't often think enough about legacy and purpose. And I'm guessing in what you do... Or maybe I should ask a question, this is maybe an obvious question, but to what degree does it help somebody to have purpose and feeling like life is not just about them, it's both and yes, it's about being the best person you can be, but it's also about making a contribution in the world, whatever that means to you? Do you feel like that has a place in healing and moving forward when you see your purpose in the world and there's some other centered nature to it?
Sharon Land:
Yeah. And some would argue that we have multiple purposes, right? And I believe that too. So for me, it comes down to personal responsibility. And so we're responsible for the energy that we bring to every single situation. So I'm responsible to the energy that I'm bringing here and with whether it's going to the store, getting a coffee, meeting with the clients, [inaudible 00:40:51] with my partner, with my children. So to me, your legacy has a lot to do with the essence of who you are. And that's beautiful. It's like a fingerprint. It's all very different, some similarities between others, but the essence of who you are is that feeling that you're left with after you're gone, and that's spirit also.
So living your legacy isn't always necessarily about the job that you do, but really getting to know the essence of who you are so that everywhere you go it's purpose-filled and you don't need a tangible, binary transactional proof of that. And to live, to me, it's so beautiful to be able to live in a way that you know that whether things go the way that you want them to or think they're supposed to or don't, that somebody listens to you, understands you or doesn't, that you are exactly where you're meant to be, doing and saying exactly what you're meant to be saying and what you are-
Warwick Fairfax:
And that will leave a positive influence on your kids, friends, somebody you meet at the grocery store, these imperceptible imprints, you will leave if you're your best self, you'll leave a positive mark. And so that your legacy doesn't have some big nonprofit. It can be in 100, 1,000 relationships, meeting conversations, that can be part of your legacy. It may not be tangible, but it may still be beautiful, if that makes sense.
Sharon Land:
Yes, yes, exactly.
Gary Schneeberger:
I've been uncharacteristically quiet in this entire conversation, partly because truly Sharon, I can tell, I've been through enough of these with Warwick, when he's really interested in what a guest is having to say. So every time I think I'm going to be able to jump in, he has a follow-up question, which is great.
Warwick Fairfax:
Sorry about that.
Gary Schneeberger:
No, that's what makes the show what it is. But I'm curious, one of the things that we stand for, that Warwick stands for at Beyond the Crucible a lot, we encourage people to find that life of significance, what he defines as a life on purpose, dedicated to serving others. And when we talked before we started recording, you told me something that I've circled on my paper that tells me you are indeed living that life of significance. And you said this to me, that you've discovered the giver is always the receiver.
Sharon Land:
Yeah.
Gary Schneeberger:
Is that a fair analysis of all that you've been talking about right here on this episode?
Sharon Land:
Yes, yes, yes. There is no greater gift than to see someone in their fullest expression, and especially when we all have living examples, we see it, we've experienced it, people close to us or people who we've known in the media where there was such a deep pain within them that they felt they couldn't live in their expression and it ended poorly for them. So to me, most of my life, I was like the Cyrano de Bergerac of helpers. So I was always behind the scenes, never really seen whatever, and the one whispering the whatever, and that there was a great gift in that. But now that I find that I am doing it in a way where I am divinely guided to do, and being front and center, being interviewed by you, by being on stages, by speaking, by being on television and all of that, I believe that there's such beautiful alignment and that the more I can give from a place of safety, truth, presence, authenticity, life is good.
Warwick Fairfax:
When you're who you are and you're giving to others out of the very essence of what makes Sharon Sharon, and you're helping people and once in a while, probably very often, they say, "Sharon, you got me through this tough time. I've never been more fully who I am. I've never been more joyful. Life isn't necessarily easy, but yet I have a bigger smile on my face than before we met," that has got to give you so much joy in which you say, "Well, thank you," and it's okay to be filled with joy when you somehow make a small or a big difference. It's okay to feel that pleasure and satisfaction, and at least from my spiritual time, I say that, "Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Jesus for the opportunity." And yeah, I greatly, it means a lot to feel like you're doing something and making a difference in the world, be it small or big, nobody may know, maybe many will know, but you know. And that matters. Does that make sense?
Sharon Land:
It totally makes sense. I'm in partnership with someone and we have a wonderful relationship, and so we go to the gym together and I work with professional athletes, and so no one knows. No one knows that I'm working with that particular professional athlete. I don't go out, I have no need to tell anyone who my clients are. Actually the Live My Legacy retreat is such a high touch, bespoke experience to protect the identities of the people that are coming. But it's so great that when I see my client on the TV screen, as we're at the gym working out, at least I have someone who I can like... You know? There's joy in that because we both love them because many times we work together and we have some things that we do together. So we both know this particular client and we absolutely adore who we're working with and honor them. So yeah, it's a beautiful thing. It's beautiful.
Gary Schneeberger:
I'm going to jump in again here because I'd be remiss, Sharon, if I didn't give you the chance after all you've talked about here that you help people with, if I didn't give you the chance to tell our listeners and viewers just how they can find out more about you and your services on the worldwide web. So where can they go?
Sharon Land:
Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Well, my website is sharanjeanland.com. My Instagram handle is @SharonJeanLand. You can find me also on LinkedIn. And I love working with community and I love creating movements for other individuals. I have a few different ways that I work with individuals and groups, and I would say my primary is more of a high touch service where I'm working one-on-one as a mentor. And when we speak holistically, we're talking about all areas and aspects.
So from professional, business, personal, relational, physical health, financial health. And I was just talking with someone this morning before our call and said, "You're only as strong as your weakest link," so I wouldn't feel like I was doing my job if I wasn't able to help to work within all of the complexities of all of the moving parts of somebody's life. So I do that from my own personal success and experience and failures and things that I've learned from, and I really do it well and am able to really get in there and help individuals not have to completely obliterate their lives in order to be able to move forward in a different way. So I'm a little bit of an artist when it comes to that.
We do have our Live Your Legacy Retreat coming up in October, and it's a very small, intimate group, which we do have space for the right person who is a high performer, looking to really understand the essence of who they are and understand the legacy that they're here to live and create a greater alignment within themselves. So it's a wonderful opportunity to be able to just take space, which most high performers don't ever feel like they have time for. Yeah, and we have some performance where we work with some high performance people who are professional athletes and out there on the big international stages. So I work with people globally as well. So acculturation is really important and I love that piece as well.
Gary Schneeberger:
So Warwick, as always, the last question or questions, because you get to pick if you want to ask one or two or three or four, the last question or questions are yours for Sharon.
Warwick Fairfax:
So Sharon, there might be somebody listening and watching today that maybe they feel like today's their worst day, they might feel like the mistake they made is unforgivable or what was done to them might just seem so painful, and maybe that's manifested itself in illnesses. What would a word of hope for that person be? Because today they might feel pretty hopeless and that there is no path forward. What would a word of hope be if today was somebody's worst day?
Sharon Land:
Well, to be aware of the fact that it's one of your worst days is a blessing and a gift and a sign of your health and a sign of your capacity to grow and serve and expand. Even though you might feel hopeless, to recognize that says that you have something there. And it doesn't have to be a huge phoenix rising moment for you. And that some of the best ways to show up in life are making small, tiny measurable steps in percentages of 1%, half percent, 10% differences in your life. And if you feel down, it's okay. Let yourself feel down. Remember what it feels like, remember where you are right now, and honor all of these experiences that you have physically and emotionally and spiritually because this is a sign pointing you in a direction of where you can go to help to address where you're meant to go.
Gary Schneeberger:
Friends, I've been in the communications business long enough to know when the last word on a subject has been spoken. And our guest today has indeed spoken it not only the last word, but she's also spoken... Go back and listen to this and watch this again. You, Sharon, are a master dropper of metaphors. Love it. There's like three or four things I've written down. The metaphors that you speak about the things that you encounter and how we can overcome them are grand. So bravo for that.
So Warwick, we're just minutes after we closed our conversation with Sharon Land, and it was a wide ranging conversation that people will notice when they watch it you are particularly engaged in. So I'm dying to know what's the big takeaway that you got from our time, our chat with Sharon?
Warwick Fairfax:
Sharon has an interesting view of wellness. One of the things she talks about is in Western medicine, we can be so focused on the cure that we don't consider other ways of healing, other approaches. And she's not against Western medicine, that can be very helpful. But I think what she's advocating is looking beyond just trying to cure the disease to what are some of the factors that led to it? So she looks at the whole person, emotional, spiritual, and physical. Some obviously as we know, diet and exercise can definitely help in terms of making you healthy and lowering cholesterol, and there are some things we all know about, but just looking at overall wellness, certainly high stress can lead to adverse health consequences. The exact connection, it's not easy to tell, but I think it's known that there is some connection. So what are the ways we can reduce stress as well as just increasing wellness overall?
And it's interesting hearing about Sharon's story. She shares that when she was 12, 13, and a teenager, obviously as a child you're not really in charge of your health, your parents are, and she went through a number of challenges. But what was interesting is when she said that she had a stroke in 2005 and then a committed relationship she was in broke up, those were absolutely devastating. But I sense from what she said that as devastating as it was, she has some tools to help her that she didn't have when she was a child that helped her deal with those better and bounce back.
So she has a number of private clients, some are probably pretty well-known athletes, but it's obviously all confidential and she wants to protect that, and she's able to just give them a wide variety of tools, different spiritual modalities, so to help people just get in touch with who they are, what are some of the causes of it? How do you manage some of those things? How do you accept maybe the new normal? Just doing more than just traditional medicine, as good as that is, but just try to deal with the whole person.
And as people are bouncing back from their crucibles, you've got to deal with the whole person. You've got to deal with how you process your crucible to bounce back. You've got to understand the causes. You've got to make a choice to move forward and not wallow in what you went through. There are consequences that sometimes won't change. You've got to learn how to live in the new normal. So she dwells in a space that definitely has overlap with what we do.
So yeah, medicine is useful, but there are things that you have to do beyond just taking traditional medicine, which is helpful, to deal with the whole person, the underlying causes, what's leading to stress, is it unresolved conflict? Using prayer or other spiritual modalities. So it was very thought-provoking discussion about what does wellness mean in the broad sense of the word?
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, those areas that you said that she overlaps with Beyond the Crucible, I was struck by one at the end of the process, the life of significance process. She said this, which I just thought I've never heard a guest phrase it this way, but it's so true with what we know from our own experiences and the experience of the guests. She said this, that she's discovered the giver is always the receiver. There's a life of significance right there. As you give, you receive. I mean, talk about that a little bit. That's a pretty profound statement, and it definitely aligns with what we do.
Warwick Fairfax:
It sure is. I mean, that's such a great point, Gary. One of the things we say is, yes, you've got to understand what happened, your crucible, you've got to have times of reflection. We talk about this quite a bit in the Actionable Truths series that we're going through. But really one of the things that we say is one of the keys to getting out of the pit of despair is to have a vision, a life-affirming vision that leads to a life of significance, a life on purpose, dedicated to serving others. And very often, for many, if not most of our guests, their life-affirming vision comes out of the crucible, "I don't want anybody to go through what I went through. I want to help people that went through what I went through to bounce back."
So when you're focused on helping others and you see that you've made a difference, and somebody says, "Boy, Gary, Warwick, what you did, it kind of helped me," and when you feel like what you're doing is making a difference, it's kind of a bit easier to get out of bed in the morning. It feels like life has purpose. It's easier to be grateful. It's easy to be thankful. And there's some level of internal emotional, spiritual healing which, who knows, might have physical benefits too. But yeah, when we're focusing on giving and not just receiving and focus on helping others, there's definitely some, I think, overall wellness and certainly spiritual and emotional benefits.
Gary Schneeberger:
Folks, until the next time we're together, please remember this truth. We know your crucible experiences are hard. Warwick's been through them, Sharon's been through them, I've been through them. But we also know this, they're not the end of your story. That's what we talked about here today. In fact, they can be the beginning of a new story that can be the best story of your life because where it's going to lead you is to 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.
