Our guest this week, John Ulsh, spent 18 days in a coma after he and his family were in a high-speed head-on car crash. And that was just the beginning of the ordeal he endured.
Given just a 3 percent chance to live, enduring more than 45 surgeries to piece his broken body back together, he has not let the pain keep him from discovering his purpose: helping others overcome adversity and finding strength in their struggles.
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Transcript
Warwick Fairfax:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond the Crucible.
John Ulsh :
I spent 18 days in coma, so by the time I was out of my coma, my family was all home. So I knew they were alive, I knew they were. I mean, once I could start the process. So I didn't have the same experience the rest of my family had because I went through the hardest parts that my kids and my wife were suffering through in a coma.
Gary Schneeberger :
Those 18 days were just the beginning of the ordeal our guest this week, John Ulsh, endured after he and his family were in a high-speed head-on car crash. Given just a 3% chance to live enduring more than 45 surgeries to piece his broken body back together, he has not let the pain keep him from discovering his purpose, helping others overcome adversity and find strength in their struggles.
Warwick Fairfax:
Well, John, it's so good to have you here. Very much enjoyed reading your book, The Upside of Down. Love that title. What a profound title. So we'll get into that here in a bit, but I want to get to your story. But let's just start with who you are. So I'll just read a brief bio. So John Ulsh is a dynamic speaker, coach, and accomplished athlete whose life exemplifies resilience and transformation. After surviving a devastating car accident with his entire family, a tragedy that led to over 45 surgeries and numerous additional setbacks, John discovered his purpose, helping others overcome adversity and finding strength in their struggles. John has been featured in People Magazine, Men's Fitness, on Good Morning America. John blends his personal comeback journey with professional success, including 425 million in real estate sales.
From a devastating accident to tackling Spartan Races, which we'll touch on, that's pretty fascinating. John now empowers others to turn setbacks into comebacks. So I loved reading your book. Let's just talk a bit about your story. So what was life like before The Crucible, which was life-changing? What was life like for you, John, your family, the rhythms of life? What was the before for John Ulsh?
John Ulsh :
So I was 36, had been married since 22. Two children, an eight-year-old and four-year-old that we'll talk about later, successful business. And I would often tell people we were probably living that American Family Dream, making good money, not great, fantastic out of this world money, but more than enough to live a very nice lifestyle. Putting our kids in private school. We were doing the American Dream. Healthy, I was a marathon runner. We had an old pair who helped us manage our kids because both my wife and I worked. So yeah, I would say, if there was this stereotypical mid-30s family dream, that's probably where we were.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, life was good. So tell us what happened that day. I think you were out with your family and what was that day like? I think I remember reading somewhere, you actually ran a whole stack of miles that morning. Just tell us about that day.
John Ulsh :
Yeah, so it was December 1st of 2007. In central Pennsylvania, December 1st can be 60 degrees and it can be snowing. That particular day, it snowed. That year, Thanksgiving was very late, so this was the Saturday immediately after Thanksgiving. So we were still in that Thanksgiving weekend, Black Friday was the day before, which was a big day in my wife's retail world. Yeah, so that morning, like I said earlier, I was a marathon runner, and so that morning in a dusted snow cold morning at 6:00 AM, I knocked out 12 miles, which was my normal routine when I was just trying to stay marathon-ready, but not necessarily training for one. And so we left and drove about an hour south of where we live for our eight-year-old daughter Katie's swim meet. It was the first swim meet of the season, indoor obviously. And we were going down to a high school, close to the Maryland border.
And so that was an early meet. And so our son James, who was four at the time, we persuaded him to come along, behave himself. And if he was well behaved, which a four-year-old in an indoor swim meet for four hours could be challenging, that we were going to go cut down a Christmas tree after we were done. And so that was our carrot and stick. And so we got through the swim meet. It was a great swim meet for our daughter. She was six to eight as an age group for swimming and she was eight and that day swam four events, won for all four events, swam an IM, which is four laps. So the pool for an eight-year-old is a pretty big, big deal. So we were leaving the swim meet a little bit after lunchtime, noon in a pretty good mindset.
Again, we're going to go get a Christmas tree now. Our daughter had a great swim meet. Our son was relatively well behaved, and so we pulled out of this high school where the swim meet was. And instead of turning left and going home exactly the same way that we had just come down, we decided to turn right. This area is called Mercersburg, and there's a boarding prep school there called Mercersburg Academy. And so we thought, well, they'll have holiday decorations up. It's just right down the road, why don't we drive through campus and then just go home up onto Route 81, which is a major highway that runs up and down Pennsylvania to go home. So we were just going to jump two exits farther down to come back. We drove through the campus, we're driving on this 55 mile undivided country road, very rural area, a lot of farming in that area.
And off to the right is a ski hill called Whitetail Mountain. And I remember my wife saying to our kids, "Oh look, they're blowing snow. We'll probably be able to go skiing really soon." That's the last memory I have. A car coming the other direction through a straightaway across the center line at the very last second, there were no skid marks on the road and the police estimated our impact speed to be 125 miles an hour. They estimated we were traveling 55, he was traveling 70, two objects traveling in opposite directions. It's their combined speed that creates the impact speed. So if you hit a telephone pole at 55, you hit a telephone pole at 55 because he was traveling and there were no skid marks. They take that combined speed. So it was a devastating impact. Speed. We went driver to driver. He was a single driver. He died instantly. And honestly, he was not wearing his seatbelt either on top of all this. So his probability of life was even more deterred by the fact he didn't have a seatbelt on. He and I went driver to driver.
And so my wife was sitting in the front seat, unconscious, broken hand, broken foot, broken ribs, laceration from the lap belt, severed her skin, broken collarbone, all the types of injuries that the seatbelt itself would cause. My daughter was in the back passenger seat. She was cut by the seatbelt, broken collarbone, but she was conscious. She was the only one who stayed conscious. My son James, was in a booster seat being four. He was directly behind me. My seat came back, broke his leg in two places, and then we later learned that the lap belt actually severed his small intestine but didn't cut his skin. So he was already in the hospital legs set before they even realized he was going septic and that his small intestine had been clear severed from the seatbelt, but no cut in his skin.
I took the blunt of it. I was given less than a 3% chance to survive. My internal injuries were what's killing me. My spleen ruptured, my diaphragm ruptured, my left lung completely collapsed. My right lung partially collapsed. And those were the internal bleeding issues that were killing me. On top of that, my left foot was shattered when the engine block collapsed onto my foot, the energy traveled up, my left leg shattered my pelvis, four and a half inches in the front and then snapped the back of my pelvis. Split my tailbone long ways, and then fractured L1 through L4 of my lower vertebrae. So the four lowest vertebrae were all fractured just from the impact. My son and I were flown. So Penn State's Medical Center is located in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It isn't in state college where the university is.
Technically the closest non-trauma hospital was University of Maryland and Baltimore where we were. But Penn State has these emergency helicopters, they call Life Lion because Penn State is the Nittany Lion. So they use the called the Life Lion. They actually keep one in my hometown. So they keep one at the hospital and they keep one in my hometown for the sole purpose of reaching into this very rural part of the state. That helicopter saved my life. It was able to get there. The first responders, the first person on the scene was somebody who came minutes after the accident. It was not a very busy road, so it wasn't like there were cars all over the place. He found our daughter, Katie, crawling between the front seat crying, "Daddy don't die." We know this because he would later send a letter to my wife because he didn't think I survived, just stating what he saw, what happened, giving his story to my family.
Obviously, I had survived and had this opportunity to read his description of it, but my son and I were flown to Hershey and my wife and my daughter were taken to Hagerstown, Maryland, which was the closest non-trauma hospital. And then would later have to be transported by ambulance later that day to Hershey because I was going to die. So my son was in for 15 days, mostly related from his bowel. My wife spent five days in the hospital when my daughter was transported up to Hershey. She was never admitted back in. She refused to go into the children's wing of the hospital, and so they didn't sign her in. My father took custody of her and then slept in my wife's room with my daughter, so she could be by her mom through this.
But I spent 18 days in coma. So by the time I was out of my coma, my family was all home, so I knew they were alive, I knew they were. I mean, once I could start the process. So I didn't have the same experience the rest of my family had because I went through the hardest parts that my kids and my wife were suffering through in a coma. So the other challenging part for me is because my back and pelvis were shattered, I was non-weight bearing for 10 weeks. So when I came out of the coma and within a week they transferred me out of the hospital and I got moved into a nursing home where I would have to spend eight more weeks laying flat on my back, not being able to be raised more than 15 degrees. So I would argue that the darkest angriest parts of that period of my time were in the nursing home.
If you've ever spent any time in a hospital overnight, you're consciously aware of the fact that you'll never get any rest. Somebody is coming in to check some vitals, there's all kinds of noise out in the hallway. All night long, somebody is coming in to check on you. In the nursing home, the third shift would come in at 11:00, I would see my nurse aide and my nurse, and then I wouldn't see somebody again until 6:00 AM unless I needed them, unless I hit a button and called for them. They were going to leave me alone. Well, I was in excruciating pain. I couldn't move my legs at all. And so, I would lay in that bed at nighttime, not able to sleep in pain and spend a lot of time, one, wishing that I hadn't survived.
Warwick Fairfax:
So as we talk about the way back, you've talked about it quite a bit in the book. You mentioned you've had 45 surgeries and I think maybe you mentioned to Gary this year might be the first year in forever basically when you haven't had a surgery, at least in living memory, so to speak.
John Ulsh :
Absolutely. Yeah. As of now in 17 years, this would be the first year where I didn't have at least one.
Warwick Fairfax:
So just talk about, I mean, it is just one of the things where I think your abdominal muscles weren't connected, which how can you sit up without that? And your back was in a body cast, just the number of surgeries, the narcotics that had to fill you with just to make the pain bearable, which seemed like if it ever really made the pain bearable. But those first few weeks, months, it just seemed like every day was excruciating pain in one surgery after another and you had an issue with the blood clot in your leg. It's just the number of issues which just it's mind-numbing to read about. Just talk a bit about those days just to give people an idea of how bad it was.
John Ulsh :
So they opened me from sternum to pelvis when I arrived at the hospital, all because of all these ruptured organs and internal bleeding. And so, they left me that way for three days while they tried to stop the bleeding. My medical records show that I took 36 units of blood in the first 12 hours. And so men hold about eight units of blood. So that's how often I was just bleeding out. I'm also O+, which is a very, I can only take O+. So I was wiping out a blood bank in a major university hospital with the amount of blood I was taking. And so after two days, they just decided that the risk of infection was too high. So they went to close me and they couldn't pull my abdominal muscles back because I was so swollen between the blood plasmas and all the trauma and the shock that they couldn't pull my abdominal muscles shut.
So they just pulled my fascia layer, the top layer of my skin shut, stitched me up with big blue sutures because, well, a plastic surgeon wasn't brought in to reattach my skin because they knew that if I survived, they would have to cut me back open So it wasn't put together. So to this day, I have big tick marks like you would see in somebody who 30, 40 years ago had major open heart surgery where they didn't tape it shut and make it nice, clean straight line. But because of that, you're right, I couldn't sit up. And so when they would eventually decide that they were going to be able to fix it, which was nine months afterwards, they realized, because I spent all that time laying on my back, my bowel had grown adhered to the scar. And now because I had no abdominal muscles, it was stuck and it wouldn't unstick itself.
And so when I finally went into have that surgery, they determined that I had a hole in my heart that nobody knew about. Now I had already 19, 20 surgeries, I had had a stethoscope obviously stuck on me by every type of doctor in the world. So I'm going to an anesthesiology appointment as a pre-op to my surgery coming up the next week. So I just have a nurse, and she puts a stethoscope and she says, you have a heart murmur. Now my wife is with me, because I can't drive a car. She's like, "He doesn't have a heart murmur." Next thing, the doctor comes in and he puts a stethoscope and he's like, "Oh, you 100% have a heart murmur." So I get a call from my doctor, you got to go see a cardiologist before we do this surgery.
And of course, I get to the cardiologist and he's like, those doctors don't know how to use a stethoscope. Every cardiologist thinks that everybody else doesn't know how to properly listen to a heart. So he puts this stethoscope, he hears it immediately, and he's like, "Okay, well." And he starts with a, "If we had a time machine," which I would tell you any conversation that ever talks with, if we had a time machine, generally isn't a good way to start, right?
Warwick Fairfax:
No.
John Ulsh :
But the determination was that at some point over time, the heart tissue died out in the last, somewhere between month four and month seven after the car accident. And that nobody else has this because nobody else should have survived what you went through. You should have died of five other things. So at the time, they determined I was the only person left in the United States and possibly the world who had what would be called a traumatic VSD, a hole between the right and left ventricle. And solely because of the fact that anybody else before this hole would've opened up, would've died from all the other complications.
And it made a huge deal because nobody knew what would happen when they tried to reattach my abdominal muscles and they put all this extra stress on my heart, would the hole get bigger? So when I ended up having the surgery, I had a general surgeon in there to separate my bowel, a plastic surgeon who was going to try to recreate what they could of my abdominal muscles and a cardiologist sitting on the sideline just in case my heart started having issues. 12 hours, and I ended up back on a ventilator just because my organs, my liver shut down when we pushed all this because that was all living out in like a woman in her third trimester just because I had no abdominal muscles. And when they put all the organs back, they all were not acclimated to being back inside my chest cavity. And so they had struggled. So I spent 15 more days just from that surgery in the hospital.
Gary Schneeberger :
I'm going to jump in just for a second, Warwick, because you've mentioned a couple times, John, just how unlikely the fact that you were still living was. You were told you had a 3% chance of living. I did some research this morning and I just typed in 3% chance of. And I did a news search for what else is a 3% chance of, here's what I found. There is right now a 3% chance of a city killer asteroid hitting earth in 2032. That'll tell you just how rare your surviving this is. That's remarkable that you're here to tell this story. So I just thought I'd toss that in there so we can see the perspective.
John Ulsh :
Gary, with your permission, I'm going to borrow that in my next keynote because I have never had somebody actually dive into what is a 3% chance. So I always say I could have won the lottery. That would've been better than, you know.
Gary Schneeberger :
I'll give you a bonus one. The other one I came, which is a little bit funnier, is as of right now, our recording of this episode, the Dallas Cowboys have a 3% chance of winning their division in the NFL. And they're not having a good season. So there's another 3% chance right there.
John Ulsh :
Well, I'm a big Philadelphia Eagles fan, so that doesn't hurt me in any way.
Gary Schneeberger :
Good, good, good.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, 3% is low. So one of the remarkable things is back in 2008, 2009, as you write in your book, obviously you had to have a lot of opioids, narcotics, just to try to numb the pain, which didn't seem like it helped all the way, obviously, but you were determined. I think you're right. There was one part of my new normal, I refused to accept being trapped by narcotics. You would not want to be defined by that. So even before it became mainstream to be worried about it, you were on it and you sought alternative therapies, massage, meditation, biofeedback, which I've not heard of.
So talk about that because you talk about you wanted to reclaim your life, you wanted to be in control. So there's the whole mental aspect that, and you're right with the whole narcotics, there were times in which you knew all you had to do is press a little button, instant relief. The willpower not to press that button when you're excruciating pain, that's Olympic level mind control. So talk a bit about that. Because that was one of those keys to your coming back. You couldn't control a lot of things, but this is one thing you were determined to control. I'm not going to be governed by narcotics for you and for your family. So just talk about that because that seems pivotal in your journey.
John Ulsh :
Yeah, as you mentioned, this is pre-narcotic epidemic. So my pain management doctors were not interested in having me not take them. I had numerous doctors going through all these surgeries saying, "You need these, these are what they're here for. Don't mess around with them." But I had reached the point within two years that I was taking 90 milligrams of morphine twice a day, significant amount. I would have nurses say, "Well, if we gave 90 milligrams to a cow, their heart would explode." But that's how tolerance, that's sort of obviously why you can understand how the addiction happens. Because what happens is you take 30 and three months later, 30 doesn't mask the pain anymore. So the doctor says, "Okay, well, now we're going to give you 60." And you go through another three, six months of taking 60 milligrams and your body builds up tolerance and it doesn't work anymore. Then they give you 90.
So at some point you start to say, well, if 90 doesn't do it, I'll just give myself 120. You just start dosing yourself. And when you had unlimited access before it was so controlled as it is today, you just get a two months of prescription filled instead of your 30 days. One of the things that I benefited from because I was in such bad shape, my wife would put my pills together for a week at a time, an AM and a PM. And so, I never controlled my own narcotics. I didn't even know where they were. And so if I took an extra pill, I then had to go ask for a pill. So it wasn't like I was in control of my own medication, which now in hindsight was huge. But when I decided to go off of it, it was mostly because the big aha for me is I attended a wedding of a friend in that summer two years after, and I have no memory of the wedding.
I started writing this book at that point as a memoir to my kids because I was starting to forget the stories. As you know in the beginning of the book, there's a lot of out-of-body/drug-induced hallucinations of different rooms. I was forgetting that part of my... I would go to speak to nurse aides. One of the things that's real unique about my story is I lived in a nursing home for 10 weeks. I was 36, I got better. Most people don't enter as a patient in a nursing home and proceed to become better. So I had a very unique insight that I could give men and women who were going to become nurse aides, what it was like to be in a nursing home, what kind the care that's not taught in a textbook that benefited me or made me feel better.
And so, I would start to forget. I would be there and the same instructor would be there, a whole new class. And the instructor would say, "Tell this story." And I'd be like, "I don't remember that story." And so, I could see me losing my mind from the narcotics. The question was, as you said, nobody could say I didn't need it, that I could function with all these shattered bones still in place and still put together with titanium. I still, at that point, could hardly use my left leg at all. My left leg feels like it's asleep all the time. It's just that pins and needles from the nerve damage. I only walk today because I can feel my big toe on my left foot. I can't feel the rest of my foot.
But if you've ever heard stories of people with frostbite or diabetics who are having to lose toes, they try to save the big toe because that is your balance, and that ultimately allows you to walk. So you can lose your four other toes, but you need your big toe to walk. And by a miracle, that's the one part of my left leg and my foot I can feel, which allowed me to learn to walk.
Warwick Fairfax:
So what's interesting to me is, and we'll shift here in a second to the eight pillars. But the resilience and creativity you used was amazing. Because you were a marathon runner and you realized, okay, that's what part of life is over. But you did the 2007 Turkey trot, and then I think it's what? Somebody at the YMCA, they started mentioning about the whole Spartan Races just going over obstacles and climbing some huge mountain. That's just remarkable. And one of the things I'm fascinated in, you write that the old John Ulsh wouldn't have been able to do that, because you didn't have the upper body strength what was needed. So you shifted to something that you couldn't do before, but you could do now. Talk about reframing. Talk about that because that probably is part of how you felt like you were reclaiming your life, your sense of self. Because that was huge in your recovery, those Spartan Races and all that part of the journey.
John Ulsh :
Yeah. So the trigger for me, there was two years after I was still going to three days a week of outpatient rehab. I could use a cane around my house, I could use a walker. If I had to be moved like 150, 200 yards into a stadium or doing it, I got to be put in a wheelchair. I couldn't travel that far with just even a walker. And so I'm sitting in my office at home and my daughter, who's now eight, is out front juggling a soccer ball, loves soccer, but I'd be out there all the time when she wasn't on practice. And I look up and she's not there, and she comes in the door and she's crying. And I ask her what's wrong. And I just assumed she hurt herself. And ultimately she said, "I miss my old daddy, the one who would come outside and train with me."
And honestly, after everything I'd been through at that point of 28, 30 surgeries taking all these narcotics, I just realized that if I believed I lived so my kids would have a dad, I was honestly not living up to her expectation of what that looked like. And so literally the next day I go to rehab, I quit. I basically told him, "Look, I was a college athlete. I was a marathon runner. I know I can push myself harder than you're willing to." And my therapist was a younger man, it was probably my third therapist there by that point. And he's like, "I get it. We are mostly healing people that have just had knee replacements, and hip replacements, and shoulders, and orthopedic stuff related to old age." And I was not your typical patient. I left, drove down the street to my local YMCA, just happened to roll in at 10:00 AM at exactly the same time that United Cerebral Palsy had a program for teens with Down syndrome.
And so I started working out that day with 17- to 19-year-old special needs adults, young adults with Down syndrome. And for the next year, that became my motivation. But what drove me was this concept that after the first day, I woke up in the middle of the night, sore, shoulders hurting. And for the first time in over two years, something other than my back pain, my leg pain, my pelvis woke me up. And it became a battle between pain I could control and pain I couldn't control. And so, it became a control issue more than anything. So if I went to the gym and pushed myself hard enough to be sore, and the next morning my legs are sore, my arms are sore. I could be okay with that because I was like, that's because I literally tore muscle, pushed, and now my body's healing.
And I did this to myself of my own. And by the way, it was positive because now I'm building strength to counteract shattered back missing abdominal muscles, and it became this what I could control and what I couldn't control. And so if you talk to marathon runners, you talk to elite athletes, they all have that high, if you will, that comes from pushing your body beyond its normal limits. It became my replacement for narcotics. And then, obviously, the biofeedback was introduced. So as I was working through getting off narcotics, I was finding alternative things that I could supplement. And like you said, the running was never going to... I kept telling everybody when it first happened, I'm going to get my life back. At some point I had to let go of the fact that my life was never going to come back to what it was. Could be, its a great goal, but I had to come to terms with what my life was going to be. And that I could reinvent it on any level I want to, but I wasn't going to get back what it before.
And maybe in hindsight it wasn't as great as it looked. Obviously, reflecting back on our lives, you can always say, well, that was the golden years, or that was the best times. Was it when you were living it? Probably not. And so, the working out made me stronger, and bigger, and stronger, and that led to finding alternative challenges that I could put myself through that were going to be not running marathons anymore because I was never going to run a marathon again. Spartan Races is great because you have to have strength, and it's not... The best guys are fast too, but I was there just to challenge myself.
Warwick Fairfax:
It seems like working out in the Spartan Races were a step along the journey to reclaiming your life and finding you purpose. You obviously didn't realize where it would lead. It was just as you write later, what's the next step? Well, this next step is getting fitter and the rehab place won't give me what I need. So that's a remarkable part of the journey that this fitness regimen and Spartan Races led to some national opportunities with Good Morning America and Men's Fitness. That's an amazing journey.
John Ulsh :
It was very organic at that time, and it was really just, I think really when I started to work out with these young adults with special needs is the first time that people really took interest and just wanted to ask questions. Or a lot of people, including ones that related to Spartan, would be like, well, if you can do this and I know your story, this kind of goes back to what off-air when Gary said about his tooth. People come with me all the time and I really have no excuse not to get into the gym or to take better care of my health. Because if you're doing it and you got this litany of issues, then I kind of don't have the right to complain about a sore knee.
Warwick Fairfax:
I want to shift to these eight pillars because one of the things I've found in my own life and with most, if not all, of the guests, is when you go through great challenge and pain, you are the great wisdom. And we say this all the time, believe it or not, when you go through a crucible, you have a choice. You can proverbially hide under the covers and be angry at God, angry at yourself, angry at others, and be in just a doom loop of anger, rage, and depression. And that's understandable. You can say, this wasn't fair. I don't like what happened, but how can I move forward? And clearly, you made a choice, a very difficult choice to move forward. But by doing that, the wisdom you have in these eight pillars is I feel like we could spend a lot of time on each one of these. This is, at least, from my opinion, profound stuff that you have here.
And this is obviously hard-won wisdom. This is wisdom that you never wanted to learn, at least not that way. Can I read a book? I mean, not this way, but sadly, to learn profound wisdom, you need profound challenge and pain. So let's just go through some of these. That first pillar you have is commitment, and it's the foundation of which all transformation begins to talk about. Why is that the first pillar? Commitment to overcome a challenge.
John Ulsh :
Again, I'll speak for my experiences. There's plenty of times where I kind of knew what I should be doing or what the next steps are, but I wasn't in the right space, so I didn't spend enough time evaluating where I was. In many cases, I didn't have the right tools, whether they were physical tools or whether they were the right people in my life. And ultimately, this ability to yield and accept that this is not a linear journey can be overwhelming. So I often say, I was not a patient person before the car accident. I would say patience was shoved down my throat when you get paralyzed and get stuck into a bed. And so, I learned to be patient. But out of that experience, I also learned that I could still go hard when I was ready. So you talk about health-related issues, you talk about work, relationship-related issues, you can hear it from every person and you can know that it's not doing the right thing. But until you're ready, until you're truly prepared to take on this thing, you won't succeed.
And so, I've had plenty of times where I just had to give myself enough grace to say, I'm just going to sit because I know I need to tackle this again because I had another setback. But I'm either still mad that I took the setback that I had, the other surgery that I had to deal with something that something in my life has gone sideways again, whether that was relationship, or job, or health. And so I'm not going to do it, but I'll be ready. I think that's the biggest challenge for me is always been, I know I can do it again because I've done it before, but I'm not committed to it right now. You can argue about smoking. We all know smoking is bad. We still know probably some people who smoke. They're not ready to give it up. And so to me, the very first step is this idea of commitment because you've got to be ready to do something before you can take the first step.
Warwick Fairfax:
That's profound. And that really feeds into this next step, understanding the source of your problems. And one of the things, again, I'm not trying to be nice for the sake of nice, but you have so many profound things in here and you really do. One of the things you say here is under this step is my mindset, my fears, and my self-doubt were just as big of obstacles as my broken body. That's not obvious to people. But talk about that because part of understanding the source of your problems, you could say, well, the source of John Ulsh's problem is pretty obvious, his body is broken, and every bone that exists in his body. It's pretty obvious that's the source of these problems, but yet it's not that simple, right?
John Ulsh :
And honestly, very seldom is. And again, in my experience even coaching and working with other people, I often say, what do you think are your challenges? What are your problems? And they might rattle off four, or five, or six. And one of my favorite exercises that's in that book is ask yourself why five times. So when someone says, I don't exercise, my question is why. I don't have enough time in my day. Why? My work is overwhelming all the time. Why? Because I have challenges getting everything done in a day. Why? I don't block enough time in my day to do it. Your problem isn't exercise your problem's time blocking. You could do this. My kids would be like, I do this to them all the time when they were teenagers. But that's the truth.
And the other part of it is if there's generally when you have five or six things on that list, I would bet almost every time we can get it down to one. That if you tackled that one thing first, so in my case, it was the mental fear. It was the fear of having to start this, and hurting, and not being as good as I was as an athlete or as my ability to get myself stronger. It wasn't a question of whether it would be good for me to build stronger muscle to put myself through it. It was this fear that I was no longer myself.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, just some of the other pillars, you've got a step to create an effective plan. You've got the whole mental stuff of mistakes, mindset, method. Execution is huge. Mistakes, momentum, motivation, sustaining forward movement. The key to execution isn't perfection, it's persistence. That is excellent, excellent stuff. Keeping score, the wrong way and the right way to measure progress. Tracking the wrong way, tracking of the outcome, not the effort. Getting caught up in external comparison. I've certainly done that compared to what I could have been, been there. Tracking consistency is the right way. Measuring small improvements to get quantitative growth. Step seven, that was very profound, falling in love with the process. You would know this as well, if not better than I do, was elite athletes always do this.
Growing up in Australia, Australians love tennis. I'm a big fan of what used to be the big three, Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, and Rafa Nadal. They love training. They live for training. Novak Djokovic is one of the most fittest athletes on the planet. He spends hours stretching every day, hours. We're not even talking about weightlifting and running. He's manic about nutrition, about what goes in his body. The fact that he is, I don't know, he's almost 40. He may not win another major, but he is probably the fittest 40-year-old tennis player in history by light years. It's just staggering. That's probably one of the most elite athletes on the planet, but he loves all that stuff, which you kind of have to. So yeah, just talk about any of those things because, look, we could spend a long time in each of these. These are profound things. But that whole loving the process when you're going through the spot and stuff, and the training, and its agony, but yet you must have loved the process somehow, right?
John Ulsh :
Yeah. Honestly, when I have 15 minutes to do a TED talk or 15 minutes at an event, that's the one I focus on because at the end of the day, that is your win. If you love the process, you want the finish line to keep moving, you want the goalpost to go farther away. You want to get back to doing what you just did this morning, the soon as you can get back to it. And you're right, you'll never find an elite athlete who doesn't love the process. I've been fortunate to speak to a lot of athletic departments of Division 3 schools. Division 1 being the high level, this is two levels lower. These young men and women, at the very least, if they're seniors, have competed eight years, four years of high school, four years of college. If they're golfers or tennis players, they might've started at four or five to do that.
So they would've committed at that point, 18, 17 years of their lives to something they're never going to be pro at. And the only way they have that ability to commit is because they literally love practice. They love the locker room, they love the camaraderie of teammates. That's what they love. And if you can't reach that point in any goal, whether it's business, relationships, health, and you will almost always return back to the common norm because take weight loss, you can lose all that weight because you force yourself to go to the gym and you force yourself to watch what you eat, but you hate it the entire time. And we see it all the time. Three years later, they're back to where they were after they hit their goal. Because they just never found joy in the process. And so, I constantly talk to everybody from kids to adults saying, find joy in what you're doing and it'll never be a job.
Find joy in what you're doing and you'll want to get up and do it. If you're doing it for all the wrong reasons, it won't become a habit. It won't become a shift in your life. It'll become just another taxing thing on you that you have to get done. And if anything, you're at least determined to do it every day, but you don't like it. So we all know successful people in business or we perceive them as successful, but they don't like their job, but they're the kind of people who fill obligation. So therefore they show up, but they don't love it. And they're not going to become the CEO, and they're not going to go out on their own and start a new company. They're going to do the minimal process, but they don't love it. And if they ever found something that they loved, I can guarantee you with that work ethic, they would be successful.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, so well said. The last lines of the book that I thought was so profound was actually in the acknowledgments. It's rare that... The acknowledgments, usually all the people have helped you and you're very grateful. You don't often find something incredibly profound in the acknowledgments, but you have written such a thing, John. And the last lines of this, and when you're acknowledging you're being grateful, this is in the context of being thankful. And finally to the setbacks, you were brutal, relentless, and at times completely unfair. But you were also my greatest teacher who taught me resilience, perspective, and how to build a life I never could have imagined before everything fell apart. Who thanks their setbacks? So talk about that because that's reframing at Olympic levels. I don't think I've ever heard anybody or read anybody in acknowledgements write what you wrote.
John Ulsh :
Again, it was, if we talked a little bit earlier, I look at this experience as something that's open doors. It's 110% rebuilt my perspective on value of things. Writing this book alone, having to relive through this over and over again through each edit on top of having to write it the first time, having to relive it over and over again allowed me to see a lot of my shortfalls, a lot of things that I was okay just ignoring at the same time without the challenges. And I think, or you could say the same, but without the challenges, you aren't who you are today. And if you like who you're becoming and you feel like you're on the right path, then you've got to give credit to what shifted you off of the path you were on. In my case, it was immediate. It was, everything's fine, then everything's upside down. For some people, it's over a period of time of things falling apart.
It doesn't matter. But either way, the journey, the path you're walking on now gets shifted. And I want to believe that where I am today is where I should be. I want to believe that I've taken as much from the setbacks that I can get from them constantly trying to... One of the reasons I love being on podcasts now versus being keynotes is because of both you and Gary have asked me questions I didn't really think about. Gary giving me this 3% statistic that I will now, I'll do my own research. What it does is it answers a question really fast. It's like looking at a photo of my car as you see the pictures. If I put a picture of my car, I don't have to explain 125 mile impact speed. You could see it in the physical visual of it. And so, I kind of look at this as, yeah, these things that were out of my control, the path that I've now been shifted on. It wouldn't have happened without these setbacks. I by no means think, I'm also... I'm learning constantly.
Warwick Fairfax:
Just one last question before we wrap is we talk a lot at Beyond the Crucible, that your crucible didn't happen to you, it happened for you. I have a feeling you probably have a similar perspective. So talk about... I'm sure there's not just cost physically, there's probably been cost in your family, in your life. There's been all sorts of costs. But talk about how, if it's true, do you identify with that? It didn't happen to me, for me. What's your perspective in your story in that whole paradigm and gratitude and all?
John Ulsh :
I look at it as something that has come into my life. I didn't invite it. It certainly came into my life. And then we're back to what does it serve? It is common phrase to say, everything happens for a reason. And I think that's, I've had literal discussions with people that I don't necessarily think... I mean, I always say sometimes the reason is that person's just an idiot. But I do believe that what we are handed, there is a silver lining in everything. You have to be willing to look for it. People ask me, would I turn left instead of turn right out of the school parking lot? My answer's always yes, I would turn left so that my children wouldn't have gone through what they have gone through. Not for me.
This journey has built me in so many different ways, positive and negative, but I am one of those people who also identify a lot of their self-worth in giving to others, good or bad, I know that about myself. And so, I look at this as an opportunity to give and give. I would argue that one of the reasons I was able to get out of a bed and out of a wheelchair is because I didn't want to disappoint my family. And so, I use that instead of as a negative, as a positive. And instead of framing it in a way that you're just constantly worried about taking care of other people to being, yes, I'm just constantly worried about taking care of other people, particularly my family. And that's okay.
Gary Schneeberger :
John, you just mentioned taking care of other people. That's important to you. One of the ways to do that is people contact you on your website and you're a coach. You do keynote speeches, you do podcasts. How can people find you on the web so they can maybe find opportunities for you to help them?
John Ulsh :
So the easiest place is just johnulsh.com, so J-O-H-N-U-L-S-H .com. So if you go there, you'll see everything from my speaking to links to all my social medias, to all those types of places. We work a lot on Instagram right now just because it's a great place to put little segments of stuff that I've done to give a lot of people. But we're on LinkedIn and we're on TikTok. When I say we, I have people who help me make sure that I'm at the spots where the people that need to hear it. But yeah, johnulsh.com is the easiest place, you can message me there. I love answering stuff. So again, if your listeners say, "Hey, jump on my Instagram and send me a direct message," I'm going to respond to it. I don't always have the answers. Sometimes people just want... I mean, after I speak, I like to hang around.
Sometimes people just want to tell me their own journey, which is great because then I'm learning from their journey. And I would love to walk away from any event. And again, that's why I love podcasting because we're now having a conversation and I'm learning and I'm growing. Instead of me standing in front of an audience and just presenting. And Gary and I, we talked about this a little yesterday. To me, the most valuable thing is your listeners go out today and they talk about what we talked about. Because if we read my book and you don't share it, or you listen to this podcast and you don't share it with someone else, then we're not exponentially growing at the level that we should and we're not giving to others, right?
It's great that somebody can take something to this. But the most valuable thing that will happen today is probably the conversations that the three of us had and helping ourselves grow as people. And so if I can leave here today, go see somebody that I'm about to have a meeting with, and just talk about what we just talked about and tell your story. Now, not only am I spreading it, but by the way, it is proven the best way to learn is teach, right?
Gary Schneeberger :
Yeah. Warwick, as always, the last question is yours. So take it.
Warwick Fairfax:
So John, again, thank you for being here. There may be a person who today might be their worst day. They might feel there's no hope. They're angry. It could be themselves, God, other people. What would a word of hope be for somebody who they might feel like today is their worst day?
John Ulsh :
So here's my constant answer to that. Give yourself grace. The biggest thing I ever learned was when I wasn't having my best or I wasn't in the right headspace, to be okay with that. If you're a driven person, which I'm a driven person, I would guess that you guys are. You don't do what you do if you're not. Some days it's just not there, and that's okay. It doesn't mean it's not there tomorrow. And so there was a lot of times where I could have benefited from just giving myself the grace to be okay with the fact that I'm not hitting it out of the park today. I'm not on my game. I'm not feeling my best, and that's okay. I constantly felt like if I wasn't going forward all the time, I wasn't progressing.
And it's one of those things, Rick, when you look at the mile high view of the year, it's going to look like a chart that goes from left to right, completely up. But if you look at it on day to day or week to week basis, it looks like an EKG. It's just all over the place, right? That's just our reality. And we get so tied in like I do into yesterday wasn't as great as it should have been. Now I feel bad. You got to let that go. Give yourself the grace to know that if you look at it from a perspective of what you've accomplished over the last month, then you probably are on the right trajectory.
Gary Schneeberger :
Friends, I've been in the communications business long enough to know when the last word's been spoken on a subject. And our guest today, John Ulsh, has just spoken it. So Warwick, we've just had a fascinating, I always say that, a fascinating episode, because they are fascinating episodes with our guest, John Ulsh. Talk about what the big takeaway of this episode was for you that our listeners and viewers should know about.
Warwick Fairfax:
It was an incredible discussion with John Ulsh. He's gone through so many surgeries. I think it was 45 from his accident back, was it 18 years ago? It was a while ago, and the accident itself was horrific. He lives in Central Pennsylvania. He was at a swim meet with his wife, and son, and daughter. And somehow they were just on this small country road and a guy driving on the other side of the road, he wasn't drinking or anything. He just, I think, was on his phone, and he just veered just over the median at the last moment. And it was a horrific accident. All his family were injured, but the one who was injured the most was John. He was given a 3% chance of living. It was that bad. Umpteen surgeries, his abdominal muscles were detached. He had to have a back brace. It was just the pain was so bad, they had to give him so much narcotics that it was very difficult to get off of that because that just really controlled his life. It was just a horrific accident and years and years of recovery.
But what's amazing, not just his journey back, but his resilience. He wrote this book The Upside of Down, which is a profound title. How could down have any upside? It's really, we talk about this obviously at Beyond the Crucible. How can there be any benefit from a crucible? Well, as we say all the time, we feel in the lessons often. There can be things that help us grow and become a better version of ourselves, a different version. Nobody wishes to go through a crucible, but as John puts that there can be a silver lining. And just the commitment that John made just to accept that one of the things he talks about is yielding to the fact that he will never be the same. He was an athlete, he was a marathon runner, he ran 12 miles the day of the accident.
It was a snowy early December in Pennsylvania, and so we can't do that anymore. But now he does these Spartan Races, which have obstacles, and you're going over logs, and climbing, crawling under barbed wire. And he says he couldn't have done that before because he didn't have the upper body strength. But there are things that he does now that maybe he couldn't before. And he was featured in Men's Fitness magazine and Good Morning America, and now he speaks really about resilience and just talks about having commitment, loving the process, even when the process can be very painful. One of the interesting vignettes he mentioned is he was in constant pain through those first few months, maybe first few years. But when he started working out to train for this Spartan Race, he would be in pain because of the exercise. That was good pain, because that was pain that he inflicted on himself he could control.
In some strange way, it helped him deal with the bad pain that was pretty difficult to control. So the lessons he has learned, talk about hard-won lessons. Who wants to learn those kind of lessons? I don't think anybody does, but it's just the amount of wisdom he had. And certainly the things that he said that were similar to what we say in different language. But yet his commitment, and one of the single most profound things he said was at the very end. And we often ask guests, somebody might be listening today, and perhaps today is their worst day, what would a word of hope be for that person who today was their worst day? He said something I don't think I've ever heard anybody say. And we're probably, I think we're going to reach 300 episodes in February. So we've had a few guests and a few episodes.
Gary Schneeberger :
Few guests.
Warwick Fairfax:
The thing that John said that was so profound is he said to that person who today might be their worst day, he said, you got to give yourself grace. Maybe today wasn't a good day. You'll get back at it tomorrow or maybe the next day. But it's okay to give yourself grace and say, "Okay, today I'm not going to try that again. I'm just going to give myself a break." That is such profound advice. We all have days in which life isn't going well. We're not at our best, and it's like, okay, it's okay to push the pause button and say, "Okay, I'm going to give myself grace today. I'll get back at it tomorrow, but today I'm going to give myself a break." That was profound advice, and now I'm going to remember that. Give yourself grace. Certainly something I need to think and reflect about, because I don't always do that to myself. I'm pretty tough on myself, so give yourself grace, profound advice.
Gary Schneeberger :
So until The next time we're together, please remember this. We know your crucible experiences are tough. Goodness, we heard how tough John's was. You know how tough Warwick was. You know how tough mine has been that I've talked about. But here's the good news on the other side of that, it's not the end of your story. In fact, if you learn the lessons from your crucible and you apply those lessons moving forward, the destination it can lead you to is the best destination you'll ever reach in your life, 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.
People, certainly many of us, have a tendency to try to control everything and everyone. Sometimes we tell ourselves that we have the best of intentions. We are merely trying to help people, which may come across as trying to fix them. They may be our family, friends or coworkers, and we care so much about them. We are just trying to offer some “friendly advice.”
The problem is that when we try to help others or try to fix a certain situation, others may perceive this as controlling. It is their life and they may resent us trying to tell them what to do and fix situations that they might feel don’t need to be fixed, or at least not how we want to fix them.
Crucibles can make this worse. When someone we truly care about is going through a devastating crucible, we desperately want to help them. We feel we know the solution that will help make them and the situation better.
The problem is that we will not always be right. We may not have the correct solution to help others or the right answers to fix every situation. Moreover, we are not God. What right do we have to impose our solutions on others or our answers on every situation or crucible that arises?
So how do we let go and stop trying to fix everyone and every situation?
1. Accept that it is not our role to fix people and fix every situation. We are not God. This is a tough proposition to accept. We might care so deeply about the person. How can we sit here and do nothing? We have to make a choice. We need to ask ourselves whether it is really our role to fix other people. Deep down we know the answer to that question.
2. Realize that our perspective on someone and any given situation won’t always be right. There might be information we don’t have or perspectives that we are not aware of. We are often so sure that we are right. We know what needs to be done. It is obvious. We can jump into action without fully thinking through whether we have a full perspective. We might not even have fully listened to the person we are trying to help. Don’t they have a right to be heard?
3. People have the right to be “wrong” and follow their own path. Even if we are convinced we have all the information and a full perspective on the person or the situation, which is often not the case, we have to let it go. We can try to help someone, but if they say no, even if we are convinced that the person is not making the right choice, it is their life. People have the right to live their own lives, irrespective of what we might think.
4. Treat people the way you would like to be treated. Would we like to be controlled or told what to do in any given situation? Those of us who think we have all the answers typically hate it when others tell us what to do. Why would we try to “force” someone to make a certain decision or live in line with our viewpoints, when we would hate it if they did that to us? That makes no sense. Next time, we are tempted to try convince people about something, consider how you would react if you were them.
5. Analyze why we have to fix a given person or situation. Sometimes it might be that we just care so much about them. Or it might be that the crucible or the pain or challenge that someone else is going through, might trigger something within us. Perhaps we have gone through a similar crucible, and we feel we know the way back. Just because one path worked for us, doesn’t mean it will work for everyone else.
6. Let go and let God. For those of us who believe in a higher power, be it or God or some other religious or spiritual perspective, we need to realize that we are not in control. Someone else is and perhaps the other person or situation is unfolding for a reason, often a reason we cannot understand at the time. There are many things in life we can’t control or fix. When we have tried to help, even if we have done it the right way and have not been too pushy, we need to let it go when the person does not want our help. Believing in some higher power or spiritual force, can give us the hope that while we may not be able to fix the situation, perhaps someone else might be able to or there might be some higher power that might be at work.
7. Confess and apologize when we have stepped over the line and have been controlling. Sometimes other people will call us out. Sometimes we might be self-aware enough to realize when we have told others what to do again, and that it was not appreciated. At that point, we just need to say we are sorry. You might be surprised that others might actually offer us some grace and will appreciate our contrition.
8. Focus on “fixing” ourselves. Rather than focusing on other people’s issues and problems, how about focusing on our own issues and problems. Especially when we are trying to bounce back from a crucible and get beyond it, our energies and time would be well spent in trying to move forward and become the best version of ourselves.
It is not easy for those of us who feel we have the answers to other people’s problems to hold back. This is especially true when it involves other people and other situations we deeply care about. We have to exercise some self-control. It is not our responsibility to fix others. When people make choices that we feel are not good, we can offer to help and offer to provide some thoughts; but we cannot step over the line and be controlling. Once we are told no, then we need to back off.
That is where the line is. Offer to assist but don’t insist. I am reminded of the serenity prayer by Reinhold Neibuhr which is widely used by Alcoholics Anonymous, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
The path to peace in part comes from giving up the urge to control everything and everyone. Even with ourselves we won’t be able to fix everything we want to, or at least not all at once. We need to let it go.
Reflection
Identify who or what we are trying to control.
Reflect on why we are trying to control them or a given situation.
Make a decision to stop controlling the situation or the person.
We share inspirational stories and transformational tools from leaders who have moved beyond life’s most difficult moments to create lives of significance.
Redemption. It’s what we all want — what we all need — after a crucible. How do we get there — and stay there when in walking out our vision for a life of significance when life gets challenging.
That’s what we talk about this week. You’ll want to pay special attention when we talk about the value of keeping a purple file.
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. Let's say that you are truly living your new purpose. You might not be in the beginning stages. You might feel like, "Yep. I know what my vision is. I feel like I know what my purpose is." You're actually living in light of the fact that you have been redeemed. It's not just a theory. It's a fact. You're living there.
But life is not easy, and there will always be temptations and challenges. There'll be a time in which you feel, "Maybe my life is not worthy of redemption." Maybe you'll feel like your mistakes were just too big, or what happened to you is just too powerful to overcome. It's possible to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.
Gary Schneeberger:
Redemption. It's what we all want, what we all need after a crucible. But how do we get there, and how do we stay there, when in walking out our vision for a life of significance, we get a little bit wobbly? That's what we talk about this week, and you'll want to pay special attention when Warwick and I talk about the value of a Purple File.
Welcome, friends, to this episode of Beyond the Crucible, and you've joined us for one of our fun episodes here in 2025, which we call the Actionable Truths of the Beyond the Crucible Roadmap. What that is is a fresh way of looking at how you can go from your worst day to your greatest opportunity. It's not new, but it's refreshed. It's, as we like to say, it's laser focused on how you can do it. We describe it as this, and I'm going to read it as I have done every episode of what we're calling the series within the show.
This is now the ninth episode that we've done in 2025, but here's how we describe these episodes. It's how we help people turn their worst day into their greatest opportunity. We provide the essential actionable truths to inspire hope, enable and equip them to write their own life-affirming story. That's what this episode is about, and the roadmap, just so you know, has been built from our proprietary statistically-valid research into how people experience crucibles and what we've learned from our experience and the experiences of our guests as to what it takes to turn trial into triumph.
And so this revolutionary road, as I've said, takes us to this place where we're analyzing the roadmap that we've identified what we're calling the actionable truths of the brand. To pass these life-changing truths on to you, our listeners and viewers this year, we're doing, as I said, a series within the show, and this is the ninth episode of that series within the show, similar to what we've done before when we've done stories from Warwick's book, Crucible Leadership.
So we've been spending 2025 going through each of the 10 actionable truths, one per month, and exploring the ways they can help you make your way along the roadmap. So Warwick, I ask you this question. I've asked you this question, this is the ninth time now, every time we do one of these episodes to help people, help listeners and viewers really know, drill down into what we're talking about. Level set us for our discussion on the ninth of these truths, and explain a little bit about, why actionable truths? What do we mean by that phrase?
Warwick Fairfax:
At Beyond the Crucible, our focus is all about how you get beyond your worst day to lead a life of significance, a life on purpose dedicated to serving others. What we have now is what we're calling the Beyond the Crucible Roadmap, how you go from trial, in other words, crucible, to triumph, life of significance. So we've found that there are 10 actionable truths that are catalysts in helping you move along your journey from your worst day to when you're living a life-affirming version. So in other words, you're triumphing and living a life of significance. So what's interesting is these actionable truths have always been part of our thinking and were actually chapters in the book, Crucible Leadership.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, and it's interesting. I like revisiting this, because landing on the phrase actionable truth wasn't something that just happened like that. We really had to think about that, because you don't really think all the time that truths need to be actionable. But they absolutely have to be. If you're going to move from setback to significance, you've got to act on these truths. Right?
Warwick Fairfax:
Absolutely. A truth can't be a theory. It's got to be lived in fact, in reality. So truths that are just on some plaque on your wall, that's nice, but if they had nothing to do with how you lead your life, it's just not very helpful. A philosophy is great, but you've got to live your belief system and philosophy. So that's why we came up with these phrase, actionable truths. They're truths, but we believe they're absolutely actionable.
Gary Schneeberger:
Right, and that goes into the next question I'm going to ask you that I ask you every time we do one of these episodes. That's this. How do these actionable truths help us move from setback to significance? How do they work? How does this ... I almost stole the words you're going to use. How does this help us move from setback to significance?
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, I mean, these actionable truths, we view as accelerators, enablers to help us move from crucible, to trial, to triumph of life of significance. You could actually make the case without these actionable truths, that you'd be stuck, you'd be stuck in despair, stuck in the pit, that you wouldn't be able to go from trial to triumph. So these actionable truths, these accelerators or enablers, they're absolutely critical to help us all move along the journey from despair and our crucible to triumph, to our life as significance.
Gary Schneeberger:
I just thought of a phrase. You said despair, and what clicked in my head was from despair to repair.
Warwick Fairfax:
There you go.
Gary Schneeberger:
That's what you can look at at how this works.
Warwick Fairfax:
Absolutely.
Gary Schneeberger:
I just love when that happens, when things pop in my head like that. It shows that we're onto something here, Warwick. So here's what we're going to do this episode. Folks. We're going to unpack truth number nine, and that truth is in a section of the roadmap. Remember we talked about the Beyond the Crucible Roadmap? That is in a new section of the roadmap than the last few episodes have been, about where we bring our post-crucible vision to reality.
So that's what this section of the roadmap is about. You've created the vision, a couple of steps. Now, we're moving into how you make that vision a reality, and the first step in doing that is experiencing redemption. That's the actionable truth today. Actionable truth nine is redemption. So Warwick, how would you define redemption, and why is it the critical ninth step after a crucible to launch us into fully recovering from a crucible?
Warwick Fairfax:
We talk a lot at Beyond the Crucible about not being defined by our worst day, our crucible. In a sense, redemption means living a new and fulfilling life, where you have truly put the past behind you. It's for a reason that we call our podcast Beyond the Crucible. It means you're truly living beyond your crucible. Your worst time is, indeed, being redeemed. Your life, indeed, has been redeemed. Now, as a person of faith, when I think of the word redemption, it has a biblical construct. Biblically, redemption means being bought back or rescued from bondage, in particular, sin. More broadly, redemption means being rescued from our past, being freed from our worst day and our life having new meaning.
Gary Schneeberger:
And as I have done every episode ... This is the ninth time I've done this, folks. I just love reaching for this big dictionary. This is Noah Webster's first dictionary from 1828. It's the American Dictionary of the English Language, and here's how Webster defines, one of the ways he defines redemption in this dictionary. It's right along the lines of what you just said, Warwick. It's deliverance from bondage, distress, or from liability of any evil or forfeiture, either by money, labor, or other means. Right?
So I think what we're talking about here, right, is the other means part of that. There are other things, the mistakes, the setbacks, the traumas, the tragedies of your life. One point that we haven't talked about beforehand, but as I was going through this, I think is interesting to discuss, is I'm going to go back to the truths that we've discussed so far. So here's some other truths that we've discussed. We've discussed self-reflection, faith, vision, perseverance, and those are all things, really, Warwick, that we do, that we manifest. Right?
Redemption isn't something we can manifest. It's something that we accept. In other words, all the ones that we've talked about so far, the first eight actionable truths that we've talked about, link together, and they lead you to redemption. Right? Is that fair? It strikes me as that's what we're talking about, and one of the reasons why maybe redemption, when we started to sort of talk about how we were going to address this episode, seemed like a little bit of a different kind of actionable truth than the other ones.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. It's very true, Gary. Yeah. Leads me back, which is sort of the foundation of how I look at redemption, is biblically, it means you both accept that we're being redeemed and, again, from a Christian worldview, by Christ's death on the cross and resurrection. So he redeems us from our sin. He pays the price. Then, we have to both accept that we've been redeemed, and then we have to live in light of that. If you say, "Sure. I believe in the biblical construct of redemption, but I'm living a life where I feel depressed, down, I'm angry at myself, I'm not moving forward," a pastor or another person of faith might say, "Well, you say you believe in redemption, but your life seems to indicate that you don't believe in it."
Gary Schneeberger:
Right.
Warwick Fairfax:
I think more broadly, maybe we believe redemption is possible. Maybe we don't, but let's assume that we do, that we can move on from our past mistakes or past hurts that were done to us. Redemption, more broadly, means living in light of that, that we're not going to be defined by that worst day. Somehow, we'll use that pain for a purpose. We'll find something positive that came out of the hurt and the damage. So we both have to accept that our life can be redeemed in the broadest sense, meaning we don't have to stay in the pit of despair and bondage for the rest of our lives.
We have to accept that we're worthy of being redeemed, of our lives being redeemed. You've got to accept that philosophically, if you will, or from a belief system. But then, you have to live a life in light of that that says, "I don't just believe it in theory. I'm living a life of redemption." It starts with accepting it, but then, to experience it, you have to actually believe in it on a day-to-day basis.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah. If you-
Warwick Fairfax:
You'll believe, proven by your actions.
Gary Schneeberger:
Right. An interesting way that I just thought of it is we say all the time here at Beyond the Crucible, "Your crucible didn't happen to you. It happened for you." As we look at redemption, right, this happened both to you and for you. Right? Redemption happens to you and for you. Right? That's unique among the things that we talk about here.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. That's very well-said. So redemption happening to you means you've got to accept it. Redemption happening for you means you've got to live it and experience it. So that's well-said.
Gary Schneeberger:
So as I mentioned before, folks, we are now in a new section of the road map, and this section, we have called reality. That's where redemption fits in. As we begin to bring our vision to reality, we have to embrace that redemption that we've experienced that's happened to us and for us. There's three stages that our research, both qualitative and quantitative, have shown us people experience in this section, in this reality section of the road map. The first one is this, consequences of attempt, new life and new role. Warwick, how does redemption play a role at this juncture of the road map?
Warwick Fairfax:
Redemption is a challenging concept, certainly a challenging concept to live. Sometimes, especially in the early days after our crucible, we may think that we are unworthy of being redeemed. The mistakes we made, the people we hurt were so horrendous, so severe that if anybody does not deserve to be redeemed, it's us, or we might think that what was done to us was so horrific that we just don't want to be seen. Nobody could love us. Nobody could want us anymore. From a different perspective, we might also think that our life cannot be redeemed. It is over. We are defined by what was done to us.
So living in light of redemption means believing that our life does have value and purpose, irrespective of what happened to us or the mistakes we made. It means truly believing that our worst day does not define us. You have to really believe this, and it means, as we've been saying, that our crucible didn't happen to us. It happened for us. It also means believing that what we have learned and experienced in our crucible can be used for a higher purpose and to help others. We have to believe that our life does have value and purpose.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, and it goes into, right, the next, the second stage of this part of the road map, is this. It's new challenge of temptation and rededication. What does that look like when we're in, at the redemption stage?
Warwick Fairfax:
So we might believe that redemption is possible, and we might be beginning to live in light of that. But it's always easy to backslide. We spoke recently about the concept of wounds. We did a podcast and a blog, and we talk about crucibles having aftershocks. You're, quote-unquote, "over it," but something triggers you to remind you of something that happened before. So we might be living in light of redemption, but we can be triggered. There can be aftershocks.
So we can begin to think about our worst days and our worst mistakes, the terrible things that were done to us, and there might be seeds within us that begin to say, "You know what? Maybe we're not really worthy of redemption after all." Those dark thoughts, like dark clouds, begin flooding into our consciousness. So this is where I think it's very important to anchor our lives in some belief or faith system. We have to believe that our lives have purpose, and value, and meaning, and that our lives are worthy of redemption. So that's where we talk all the time in bouncing back from your crucible, getting beyond it, you have to anchor your journey in some belief and faith system.
So when you feel like the winds and the hurricanes are attacking you and saying you're not worthy, you have to say, "No. I believe that every person has value. I have value. I have worth. I'm not going to listen to the lies." So we believe that when we begin to feel that we're not worthy of redemption, let's say it's, on a one to 10 scale, it's a two out of 10 kind of thought. It's not like a hurricane, but it's a niggling, nagging dull pain, if you will.
That's where we need to nip that thought in the bud and say, "I'm not going to listen to the lies. It's not true. I have value. Sure, I made mistakes, but I've moved beyond that. Beginning to live a life of purpose and value, and I'm not going to listen to the lies that I'm worthless, that my life cannot be redeemed." So we've got to not listen to the lies. We've got to move forward, not look back. Again, yeah, we need to live in light of the truth and not the lies.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, and here's the interesting part, folks. Our experience, both individually, me and Warwick, and from the many guests that we've had, that's not the easiest thing to do, what Warwick just talked about. That's why the third step of this part of the roadmap is here, and that third step is this, final attempts, right, your final attempts to live your vision in reality, and last-minute dangers. Right? The last-minute dangers, those things that, as we say, can lead you to want to get in bed and pull the covers up over your head.
Those things can come. Those aftershocks that Warwick was mentioning can hit the Richter scale pretty hard at this point. So Warwick, talk about, what's the role of redemption in this last stage of reality on the roadmap? Because it plays a huge one. We really have to make sure we're hanging onto it here. Right?
Warwick Fairfax:
Absolutely. Let's say that you're truly living your new purpose. You might not be in the beginning stages. You might feel like, "Yep. I know what my vision is. I feel like I know what my purpose is." You're actually living in light of the fact that you have been redeemed. It's not just a theory. It's a fact. You're living there. But life is not easy, and there will always be temptations and challenges. There'll be a time in which you feel, "Maybe my life is not worthy of redemption." Maybe, you'll feel like your mistakes were just too big or what happened to you was just too powerful to overcome.
It's possible to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory, even when everybody would say, "Warwick, Gary, you're having an incredible impact. Your life is a testimony to the power of redemption." Everybody you know, or at least all the good people you know, let's say friends and family, may be saying that, but you may not be feeling that on any given day. That's where it's critical to have a system and a plan for ensuring that we live in light of redemption and that we live in light of that fact every day, that our worst day doesn't define us, and our crucible didn't happen to us, but for us.
Some of the things that we can do when we might feel like we're about to backslide is anchor our faith in our belief and faith system, which we've talked about. But also, it's really important to have fellow travelers. So you, or I, or listeners and viewers might be thinking, "I thought I was living a life of redemption, but I'm not making much impact. I don't know. Am I really worthy of redemption? After all, I made such big mistakes, and what was done to me was just so awful." We can begin to get in a bit of a negative doom loop.
That's where talking to our friends, family, colleagues, what we call fellow travelers can be helpful, because they said, "Look, I think you underestimate," they might say to you or me, Gary, or others, "You underestimate the impact you've had on others, your family, your friends, your colleagues. I don't think you understand the impact you've made. You just continue to undersell yourself, underrate yourself. You're having a massive impact. You are a person of worth and value. It doesn't mean you're perfect, but you're making a difference." Listening to that, it can be helpful. I remember in another context, one of our guests talked about in a Purple File, and they-
Gary Schneeberger:
I was just thinking of that. I'm not kidding you, Warwick. I was just thinking of that. That's amazing. Please, go on. That's awesome.
Warwick Fairfax:
No. So you talk about, what is a Purple File, and why can it be so helpful?
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah. So the guest ... That's absolutely amazing. The Purple File that you're talking about, Warwick, is something that our guest, Dennis Gillan, several episodes ago ... Dennis Gillan is a suicide prevention speaker who lost two brothers to suicide, and that's a very difficult job for him to be and to revisit those tragedies in his life. He can feel very exposed on stage when he's speaking. And so he created this Purple File in which he sticks letters of encouragement that he's received from his speeches and from other areas of his life so that when he is feeling, like it says here in the last stage of what happens in the reality section, that last-minute dangers, right, that, "Oh. I'm not doing so well. I'm not really redeemed. I'm not ..." right, the Purple File, he goes to. He's got all of these letters of encouragement that reinforce in him that he has indeed been redeemed, that he is indeed living a life of significance.
I created one, I mean, the moment we did the episode. In fact, before we did the episode, I saw his article in Inc. Magazine. That's what led us to ask him on the show. I actually held up very proudly, like a kid who did well, "Look. Look. I've got a Purple File." But I've done nothing But add to that over the time since we've been there. I put something in that file last week that I got from another former guest that we had. Lauren Sisler sent me a very nice card about just what my friendship and counsel have meant to her. That's in the Purple File.
So what that does is when you feel like there's this last-minute danger of you're going to let go, "I'm not redeemed. I'm not making the difference," a Purple File, you can keep it close at hand. You can read that, pull through it throughout all over a year. I have things from my grandmother who's been gone for 30 years, things that she said to me. You can put those things in the file, and it helps you weather those storms that make you question your redemption and your impact.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. It's such a good example. Very worthwhile doing that. One of the things I think of in my life, in our family, I've been blessed to be married to my wife, Gale, for over 35 years. I have three adult kids. Ever since our kids we're young, one of the things we do at birthdays and other special times, such as Mother's Day or Father's Day, we will go around the table from youngest to oldest, and we will offer words of affirmation. Now, encouragement is one of my highest values, so I have no trouble offering words of encouragement. As I've said before, when you're encouraging, if you see something, say something, and be specific about exactly what was the thing that the other person did that you feel was just so wonderful and you respect.
I find it more difficult, to be honest, when the shoe is under the other foot, and it's like my birthday or Father's Day, and everybody's offering words of affirmation to me. Still to this day, I don't find that easy, which obviously means like all of us, I'm a work in process. But when I hear my kids say, for instance ... It was very important to me to be a present dad, and they said, well, they say, "You were at a sports games or dance recitals. You helped us with homework. When we're trying to seek jobs and figure out where to go in life, you're always there to encourage, and coach, and counsel."
They remind me of just, not just Beyond the Crucible, but I've ... very involved with my church and kids' school, which we'll get into later, and different things that I've done. It reminds me, well, I'm not perfect, but I guess I am having an impact. My kids and my wife love and respect me, so that must mean something. The people I work with, I'd like to think, at Beyond The Crucible, I think value what we do and hopefully respect me, and I think they do, and the organizations I work with. So those are touch points to remind me, when the negative voices enter in, which they can, and they do from time to time with me, that my life does have value, and I am living in light of redemption both biblically and more broadly.
Gary Schneeberger:
Now, we're at the point in the show which is my favorite point of these series within the show on the roadmap, but I'm sad about this one, Warwick. Because it's the second-to-last one. Next week will be the last of the ten-part series. So this is the second-to-last time I get to turn our to patient zero, as I like to call him, and that's you, the host of our show and the founder of Beyond the Crucible, and to ask you. Because you've experienced all these actionable truths. You've acted on all these actionable truths that we've talked about. So talk about your experience even in more depth than you have so far. You've said it on a couple of occasions. We're going to get back to that, and we're going to revisit that in a bit. Run us through your experience with redemption.
Warwick Fairfax:
So I grew up in a 150-year-old family media business in Australia founded by my great-great-grandfather, John Fairfax, a person of great faith. By the time I grew up, it was a massive media company with newspapers, TV, radio stations, magazines. It had in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age in Melbourne, and the Australian Financial Review, equivalent to the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. So it had a massive perceived impact in the nation of Australia, a very respected company.
So I prepared my whole life to go into the family media business, to take a leading role one day. That was certainly my parents' and my father's hope. So I did my undergraduate degree at Oxford University, worked on Wall Street, graduated from Harvard Business School. So my father died in 1987. He was in his eighties. I was a child of his third marriage, and that was as I was finishing graduate school. In August 1987, I launched a $2.25 billion takeover, because I believed, as, indeed, my parents believed, that the company was straying from the vision of the founder, and the company was not being well managed.
So despite all my efforts bringing in new management, which increased operating profits 80%, there was so much debt we had to file for bankruptcy in 1990. In part, this is because other family members sold out. They didn't, frankly, believe in my vision and didn't really believe the takeover was necessary. At the October '87 stock market crash, had our asset sale program. In the 1990s, we moved to America, where my wife is from.
Those were challenging years. I wasn't clinically depressed, but I was certainly in a bad way. I felt terrible about myself. I certainly did not feel very worthy of redemption. In hindsight, I looked back and realized it wasn't all my fault. There was conflict within the family going back decades before the takeover, but it was challenging. In the 1990s, what made it so challenging is I felt like, from my faith perspective, God put me on this earth to redeem the company in the image of the founder, a person of great faith.
When faith became important to me through an Evangelical Anglican church at Oxford, I felt like in my naivety, "Oh. I know what God's purpose is for my life. It's just to redeem the company and the image of the founder." So when the company went under on my watch, I felt like not only did I let my father down, my parents, the 4,000-plus employees, caused rifts within the family, I felt like God had an image or a vision for the company of its redemption, and I destroyed it. How could somebody that was a destroyer of redemption be redeemed? That's not possible.
Not only that is, not just how could my life be redeemed, but how could I possibly have the kind of impact that I might've had at John Fairfax Limited? I mean, my vision was to have an impact on the nation of Australia by having quality newspapers that wouldn't be sensational, that would treat people well, and really restore the company to the image of the founder. How could I have that kind of massive impact? To me, the answer was, well, you never will, and maybe that doesn't matter.
But I didn't look at it that way in the nineties. In the nineties, it was like I could have had a big impact, and I blew it. How could somebody that's caused so much damage on a national scale, how could that person's life be redeemed or be worthy of redemption? I don't know that I articulated fully that way, but I think that's what I was feeling. And so I had to dig down deep into my faith. What's interesting is when you go through a crucible, it either turns you away from your faith or pulls you towards it. Fr me, I just dug down deeper.
So there were several scriptures that I really meditated on a lot. One was Psalm 139, that as children of God, our lives have inherent value. Then, in Philippians 3 it says, in part, forgetting what is behind is training toward what is ahead. I came to realize that God loves us unconditionally, because we're all going to make mistakes. From a faith's perspective, we're all sinners. More broadly, that means we're all broken. We all have life-defining challenges, or they might feel life-defining, and that the mistakes we've made doesn't impact God's unconditional love for us, and that his love for us does not depend on our perception of our worth or the size of our vision or impact.
This was a game changer for me, because I came to realize I can have an impact in my life. But it's not about trying to match the impact that John Fairfax had, which feels like impossible. He was such a wonderful employer, husband, father, and elder at his church. I mean, he just ... As a businessperson for Christ, from my perspective, how could you even approach that? It's just give up. I mean, it just ... A friend has written a book about him that will come out soon, and the more I read about him, it's just my sense of intimidation just really grows.
This historian, who was a person of faith, said , "If there was dirt and bad things about John Fairfax, I would write about it. I haven't found anything." He spent years and years researching this guy. Nothing. You know? So I had to realize that for me, I had to begin to live in light of my own unique skills and abilities and to pursue a vision that was authentic to me. Growing up in the family and media business, I was pursuing a vision that was authentic to my great-great-grandfather, John Fairfax, but not to me. I never thought, "Gee. This is a vision I want to live with and pursue."
It's like, "Well, how could I be against helping the nation of Australia and be the leading figure in a quality media company?" That's not wrong. It just wasn't my vision, and the skills and abilities that were needed was more of a chief executive, general manager, somebody that could make tough decisions. While I can make tough decisions, I don't like living in the limelight, and certainly, I don't see myself as a chief executive, general manager type, and the stresses, and the conflict within the family. It was always going to be a very, very challenging role, but it didn't fit my skills and abilities and certainly wasn't my vision.
So my journey of redemption, it took many years. It began by finding work in the 1990s in the US in the Aviation Services company. I then became an international coach, Federation-certified executive coach. I was on two nonprofit boards, my kid's Christian school in Annapolis, Maryland, where we live, and being an elder of a evangelical church here, Bay Area Community Church. So my journey with Beyond the Crucible, that started in 2008 when the pastor of my church asked me to give a sermon illustration of a message he was giving. I didn't think of myself back then as a great public speaker. I wasn't sure how my message could be helpful, but I shared my story. What's amazing is even though, as I say fairly often, there weren't any former media moguls in the audience ...
Gary Schneeberger:
Right.
Warwick Fairfax:
It's, as I say, also, it's a self-help group of one, "Hey. My name's Warwick. I'm a former media mogul, and I lost 2.25 billion." You know?
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah.
Warwick Fairfax:
Well, who's going to say, "Yeah. Me too"? You know?
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah. Right.
Warwick Fairfax:
Nobody. So yeah. I mean, what was interesting is weeks and months after, people said, "Your story and your message really helped us." So that made me think, "Well, maybe there's something here." So I began a journey of writing my book, Crucible Leadership, that took years to write, because imagine writing about your worst day for many, many pages. It was unbelievably painful. There are other elements in the book, my family, and historical, and faith leaders, and leadership lessons. There are other elements, but the elements about my story was painful.
So from that book, we now have a podcast. I've done some speaking. I write blogs, post on social media. So what I love about Beyond The Crucible is the vision for Beyond the Crucible is anchored both in my belief system and in my journey. When we say that your worst day doesn't have to define you, and your crucible didn't happen to you, it happened for you, those are very personal concepts. I absolutely believe that my crucible does not have to define me. I make sure and attempt through prayer and counsel to live in light of that every day, to not look back, not look in the rearview mirror and go, "Oh my gosh. I can't believe what I did."
It happens at times, but I try to make sure that I don't dwell on that, that it's a brief stop on the way, not a place I'm living in for days, or months, or let alone years. So every day I try to live in light of these concepts that redemption is possible, that I'm not defined by my worst. I am not defined by losing a $2.25 billion, 150-year-old family media business, that I'm not defined by my worst mistakes.
Gary Schneeberger:
One of the phrases, and we haven't brought it up yet, one of the things that was written in the roadmap to explain all of its aspects, in this section about redemption, this ... I don't know who wrote it. I can't remember who wrote it, but this was written. We haven't mentioned it yet, but it's exactly what you just said. "Your worst day can be redeemed. We are all worthy and capable of turning failure, loss, and trauma into a catalyst for transformation, growth, and a renewed sense of purpose." That's what you've just described you've been through. That's why it's always good to revisit patient zero in these discussions.
Warwick Fairfax:
Well, that's well-said. When I talk a lot about Beyond the Crucible, why did we have this? Why did we start this? Because not only do I want to get beyond my crucible, I want to help everybody that's been through a crucible, which, from our research, means pretty much everybody on the planet has been through a crucible at some point. That is to say-
Gary Schneeberger:
Who's telling the truth? Who's telling the truth in the research? Yeah.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. Exactly. Those that say, "Nope. I haven't been through anything," they're in denial, is kind of what our researchers have told us.
Gary Schneeberger:
Right.
Warwick Fairfax:
So we've all been through crucibles, and so it's my mission, it's our mission to help people realize they're not defined by their worst day, that there are seeds of redemption, seeds of a life-affirming vision in that crucible, maybe as many of our guests have been through. They don't want anybody else to suffer what they've experienced. They don't want anybody else to make the mistakes they've made. And so I'd say pretty much everybody on our podcast, their life-affirming vision grew out of their crucible. They're living lives of redemption, and they're feeling gratitude and joy as they seek to help others.
And so we believe redemption is possible. I'd say every guest we've had on our podcast believes redemption is possible, so yeah. I mean, it's a very personal thing to me. It's our mission, a mission of redemption, and obviously, there's a faith-based definition of that. But certainly, in a broader sense, every life is worthy of a second chance. Every life can be redeemed so that something positive can happen from the pain that we've all experienced.
Gary Schneeberger:
Indeed. So Warwick, we've covered a lot of ground here, as we always do on every episode of the show, but particularly on this series within the show on the Beyond the Crucible Roadmap. I'll ask you what I ask you at the end of every one of these episodes, and that's this, what is the one big takeaway you'd like folks who are listening and watching to take with them from this episode on redemption?
Warwick Fairfax:
In the aftermath of a crucible, it's always easy to believe that we are not worthy of redemption, that we do not deserve a second chance. Through certainly a good part of the nineties, I was just ripping myself apart. There's this image of flagellation in which, in time's gone by, some people, from my perspective, mistakenly try to purify themselves by getting a whip and literally cutting their back to pieces. That's literally what self-flagellation means.
Metaphorically, I was doing that. I was just saying, "How could I have been so dumb? I had a Harvard MBA. How could I believe that family members wouldn't sell out to a company run by a 26-year-old? What sane person would want to be trapped in a company run by such a young person? It made no sense. How could I have used the wrong advisors and not listened to the right advisors?" I mean, there was an endless list, it seemed, of how I was sort of crucifying myself.
But we have to believe that we're not defined by our worst day. We have to believe in the concept of redemption. We have to forgive ourselves. Doesn't mean that we, as we often think, condone all our mistakes or condone the things that were done to us, but we have to forgive both ourselves and others. We have to believe that we're worthy of redemption. We have to believe that we're not broken beyond repair, that our life can have purpose and meaning, and we have to believe that we can, indeed, move beyond our crucible. So when we see our vision become reality, and we see purpose in our lives, and that we're helping people begin to have joy, we begin to see tangible evidence of redemption in our lives.
We've got other people, fellow travelers that will say to us, "Your life has been redeemed. You do have purpose. You are making a tangible impact on others. You are growing. You're evolving. You are becoming a new person," maybe, from my perspective, a person we're always intended to be. We're at a point where we can begin to even be grateful for where we are and what happened to us, even though the journey might've been painful.
So many guests on our podcasts have said, "What I went through, I wish I'd never gone through, but I'm grateful for it in some sense. Because the person I am now with the capacity to help people and a message, it wouldn't have happened without that crucible." They truly do believe that the crucible happened for them and not to them. So this is living in light of redemption, when we've moved beyond the past and are living in light of who we truly are, focused on our purpose and helping others.
That is redemption, and that's what living in light of redemption is. It's a glorious thing. It's a fulfilling thing, and it gives us great joy. I would say living in light of redemption helps bring joy to others, helps get them out of their own pain and worst day. It's sort of paying it forward, if you will. We've been redeemed in order to be a person of redemption that helps redeem others.
Gary Schneeberger:
What you've just done there, Warwick, you've landed the plane. We have finished this latest episode of the series within the show on the Beyond the Crucible Roadmap, this one on redemption. This is the ninth, folks, just so you remember, the ninth actionable truth we're discussing in depth this year. Next month, we'll take a look at the 10th one, the final one, and how it's a goal we aim for and hope for after a crucible. At this point, Warwick, I'm going to call right now. Scott, get ready, because I would like to see, or hear, sorry, I would like to hear a USC Marching Band kind of drum roll for this. So let's go, because the next one is what we talk about all the time, and that is ... The next actionable truth is significance.
So, friends, until we're together next time, please remember this. We want you to understand what we talk about, what we mean when we talk about actionable truths, but more important than understanding them, to Warwick's point way in the beginning of the episode, you can hang them on a wall, the truths. That's great, but you have to apply them. You have to hang them in your heart. You have to hang them in your feet. You have to walk it out, because when you do that, that's when true transformation happens in your life. We'll 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.
Justice Denied, But She’s Still Pursuing It: Kristin Louise Duncombe
Our guest this week, Kristin Louise Duncombe, describes this week the horror of the molestation she suffered as a preteen girl at the hands of an American diplomat who was also her best friend’s father.
Even after her abuser was exposed, he was not brought to justice by the American government for decades — and still, to this day, never for his abuse of Kristin. That’s why she’s still fighting to bring her story to light.
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Transcript
Warwick Fairfax:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond the Crucible.
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
It all came pouring out that, in fact, I wasn't the only victim. There was girls throughout the community that he had been molesting on a regular basis as he had been doing to me, and an investigation was conducted, and six months later, the State Department said, "Case closed."
Gary Schneeberger:
That's our guest this week, Kristin Louise Duncombe, describing the horror of the molestation she suffered as a preteen girl at the hands of an American diplomat who was also her best friend's father. Even after her abuser was exposed, he was not brought to justice by the American government for decades, and still to this day, never for the abuse of Kristin. That's why she's still fighting to bring her story to light.
Warwick Fairfax:
Kristin, thank you so much for being here. I really enjoyed learning about you and reading one of your books, and it's an honor to have you. So I'm just going to give just a brief introduction so people will know a little bit about you. So Kristin is Kristin Louise Duncombe. She is an author, therapist and coach. She's done in addition to therapy, she's a therapist, does couples counseling, life coach and is an author who's lived in Europe since 2001, currently in Paris at the moment.
She's written a number of books, including Trailing: A Memoir, Five Flights Up and her most recent book, OBJECT: A Memoir. And we're going to be spending a lot of time focusing on the background to OBJECT and that book. So I just launch in and we often ask people, so what was life like before The Crucible? Or what was the background? And your Crucible was at such an early age, it's hard to really answer that question, but just talk about what life was like for you, because you grew up, I guess, as a child of somebody in the US diplomatic service. So just talk about what was life like for young Kristin?
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
What I can tell you is, well, two things. One, that person that I was is still very much here and who that person was, I was a super anxious child. I had all sorts of anxiety disorders that, this was the late seventies before everyone was sort of savvy about therapy and people didn't take their kids for diagnoses. So none of this was diagnosed. But what I can tell you, looking back at all the symptoms, is that I had emetophobia, which is the fear of throwing up. I had hypochondria, which is the fear of disease. This is at a very young age, 7, 8, 9. I already had all those problems. I also had a tic disorder, so I would sit there in class and became the ridicule of so many classmates doing things like this just compulsively.
So I was an extremely anxious child, and I was quietly creative because as a kid I was a voracious reader and I dreamed of writing books, and that was always my objective.
But then after the various things took place in my life that I think we'll go on to talk about in greater depth in this interview, happened, I think that I developed a very big persona, I think, and who knows, maybe I would've developed that persona anyways, I don't know. But I think that for me, one of the results of the things that I went through as a child, and we haven't named it yet in the interview, but dealing with childhood sexual abuse, is that I learned to disguise the anxiety.
As a younger child, having all of that free-floating anxiety, I found things to focalize it on. I'm going to throw up. I'm afraid someone's going to throw up, or I think I have leukemia, or all the things that I went through as a kid. But then once I was actually a little bit older and in this situation where I was being regularly abused by my best friend's father, suddenly there was something very concrete to be anxious about. And I think that I coped with that by becoming a character.
Warwick Fairfax:
So let's talk about that abuse, that sexual abuse that you suffered, which obviously is the focus of your latest book, OBJECT. So just talk a bit about what happened, how it happened, just what country were you in when all this happened? So yeah, just talk a bit about that.
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
Yeah, yeah. And I'm always happy to talk about it because I feel that... And just disclosure, I'm not about to say something extremely graphic, but one of the things that I am bothered by is how language masks the reality of what we're dealing with. And so to tell you the full story, when I was 10 years old, that's when my family moved to West Africa, to the country called the Ivory Coast, Cote d'Ivoire, and the US Embassy community there was very small, very close-knit. This again was before all the major security problems and everything.
So you could just sort of walk into the embassy. There was the Marine Guard there, and it was just a totally different life. So a small, close-knit community. I went to the international school, I went to fifth grade, met this girl who was also a new student. Her name was Rose, another American kid whose dad was one of the diplomats at the embassy.
So my parents got to know their parents. The name of this person in question that I'm about to tell you about is William Mulcahy. So William Mulcahy was a senior diplomat with USAID, and he was my best friend, Rose's, father. And their family, the Mulcahy family was an Irish Catholic family from Massachusetts, lots of children. Rose was the baby. She was the last child still at home. And because, as I was saying, I was the middle child in my family of three, I think I kind of got lost in the shuffle sometimes. When the doors were thrown open at Rose's house that I could just go hang out there as much as I wanted, I went. Rose and I became inseparable, best friends. And it was something that I yearned for, especially after the earlier years of having been anxious and kind of bullied at school back in the States and all of that.
So early into my friendship with Rose, her father, who was a very, very jovial, popular, well-loved community member, everyone loved Mr. Mulcahy. He was like the quintessential grooming pedophile, because everyone was wrapped around his finger. He started molesting me. And when I say molesting, what I mean is that I was 10 and he was a 50-year-old man who would regularly at any moment come up and put his hand down my pants or put his hand up my dress, or put his hand in my bathing suit and do what he was moved to do.
And the reason I'm specifying that is that I think that one of the things that became so much part of the mental, I don't even know what to call it, but the mental game that happened to me as a child is that it could literally happen at any moment. For example, in my book, there's a scene where Rose and I are making pancakes, and he comes home, and Rose's mom is having a migraine.
So he sends Rose just to the back of the house to give the aspirin and some tea. And just in that brief amount of time, he came at me and he did his thing. But maybe that endured 20 seconds and then it was over. Then there was other moments where he had more free access to me, like driving me home from a sleepover date with Rose, where he could take things further. But it's just to say that I lived with this constant uncertainty about what is going to happen next. And the reason I'm clarifying that is because what I was saying earlier about, there's still sort of a shy, nervous child here, but that child also kind of became a character. Both parts, both of those parts of me are real, and there's no way for me to know, if all of that hadn't happened with Mr. Mulcahy, how would I be today? Maybe I would just simply be a nervous wreck. I don't know.
But I really got accustomed to shape-shifting, because when he would do those things to me, I would go just frozen and let him do it. And then the minute someone came back into the room, "Let's flip pancakes, it's your turn." And so that becomes a coping mechanism that has benefits and disadvantages. The benefit is, because of course, I still have some of that capacity to shape-shift in my life today, and it means I can just show up for a podcast. I'm not nervous. I know that I can show up and get along and it will be okay, and it's all sincere. I'm not trying to suggest that-
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, I get it.
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
But the part of that capacity to shape-shift and really just fit well into any situation that can be a disadvantage is when you actually need to have a stricter boundary, and you're so adept at just breaking into role that you lose sight of, "No, no, no, I shouldn't be shape-shifting here. I should be saying no." And so that is something that in my adult life I have had to really learn how to do, how to stop accommodating and shape-shifting so much.
Warwick Fairfax:
So how long did this go on for, this abuse by this man?
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
The abuse? The abuse went on for two years. It stopped when I was 12. And I mean really just to drive the point home, the Mulcahy family was very good friends with my family. So we would have Thanksgiving together, Christmas, New Year's, things like that. And oftentimes the molestation, it would just be happening under the table while we were all having family time. So it was very confusing. And then what happened is that he, Mr. Mulcahy molested another child, a new kid that had just arrived at post. And what was pieced together later is the reason she told on him was because she hadn't been there long enough to know of his great reputation and everyone loved him and all of that.
Because what came out after this girl, it was a 10-year-old girl, told on him, her father immediately went to the security people at the US Embassy, who I think did act appropriately insofar as they took the allegations seriously and they sent him back to Washington. He was sent back to Washington in a matter of three days. He had three days to close up his life. But what was totally inappropriate, and this is really the crucible that I'm with today, is that no one in the community, including his own wife, was told the truth about why he was leaving.
The story that was spun was that he had been given this big promotion and was needed in Washington and it was urgent, and he needed to be there in three days. So overnight, the community rallied around the Mulcahy family, helped them pack up, sell their car, get rid of everything else, and then we drove in a convoy. It was a convoy of six or seven cars of families, so devastated that the beloved Mr. Mulcahy was leaving. There was a champagne toast for him at the airport.
And then off they went, Mr. Mulcahy, his wife and his 12-year-old daughter, Rose, my best friend. And a few days later, it all came pouring out that, in fact, I wasn't the only victim. There was girls throughout the community that he had been molesting on a regular basis as he had been doing to me. And an investigation was conducted. And six months later, the State Department said, "Case closed." They said, "We need to protect William Mulcahy's civil liberties. He has diplomatic immunity," and at the time, at least in the United States, there's no federal law against pedophilia, so there isn't even a crime to charge him with.
So he did not lose his job. He was not prosecuted. His family continued to not get the information about, or his wife, I should say, about what he was actually up to, because jumping around in the story, 22 years later, he was finally stopped.
By then he had retired from the Foreign Service and was serving as a Eucharist Minister on Cape Cod, Massachusetts in charge of the children's program. And he was caught red-handed raping an 8-year-old girl. And that is when he was finally arrested. And then there was an opportunity to, for all of us victims, from way back when to discuss and liaise, and to expose what had actually happened because everything had been kept silenced and under wraps. And anyways, this is a very long-winded way of saying, so as it turns out, several of his own children, including my friend, Rose, were long time victims at his hands, and everyone was just under the cult of silence.
Warwick Fairfax:
So I'm thinking, when did your parents find out? And I think from my understanding, they tried to do something. And I'm curious, did you ever talk to your friends, that you're thinking, gosh, maybe they were molested or was, it kind of sounds like, I guess two different questions, but when did your parents find out and what they did do?
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
So my parents found out the night that the Mulcahys left. We took them all in this convoy to the airport. They left. And that night, sometime that afternoon, I mean I was an oblivious 12-year-old, so I don't know the exact details of how it happened, but after they were on the airplane flying back to the states, the security officer at the US Embassy notified the various families that he knew were in the Mulcahys sphere and said, "There's been this allegation, check it out in some way, shape or form with your child or your children." And so all around the community that night, parents were having conversations with their children, and that's when the truth came out.
It was that night that I said to my parents, because they couldn't believe it. The way they even set up the conversation with me was, "It's so awful. Poor Mr. Mulcahy, he's such a lovely man. It's so awful that someone would accuse him of this. You wouldn't know anything about it, would you?" And I told them, that night, I told them everything and it was a major crisis in the community.
Warwick Fairfax:
Did they believe you?
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
Oh, they believed me immediately. They believed me immediately. But it was so emotionally violent, it was actually for me, when I think about that trauma in my life, and I know this might sound a little bit strange, but for me, the almost bigger trauma than that ongoing thing that I was in with Mr. Mulcahy, was when it was all exposed and the limelight was on me, and it was being named what he had been doing to me and what I had been enduring and how awful it was and how disgusting and how perverted, and that was so incredibly traumatic. It was deeply humiliating.
It was, the same thing was happening to other girls in the community. So yes, then we had to have these community meetings where the focus was on what he had done to us, it was just extremely humiliating. And my parents, along with some of the other parents and the doctor at the US Embassy tried to fight back to get some sort of resolution to... And no one was thinking in terms of money, nothing like that at that time. The focus was, wait, he's not going to be prosecuted? So they did try to fight back.
And I have in my files printed out, in an old manila envelope, I have copies of some of the cable telegrams that went back and forth because this was 1982. As you know, I don't even think there was faxes yet. It was all a totally different... But what happened is, is that the State Department told the adults, and that includes my parents, and excuse my language, but I'm just going to say it, "Just shut up and fucking move on because he is not going to be prosecuted. And your role as US diplomats is to represent your country with a good attitude. Move on."
And that is what happened. And I personally, now this many years later, I'm in touch with many of the victims from the time, and everyone's got their own reaction to what happened.
I personally am not angry with my parents for not doing more because I understand how a silencing happens. Sometimes people say, "I can't believe your parents didn't do blah, blah, blah, and they should have done blah, blah, blah." But I feel like that is the attitude of someone that thinks it's easy to be A, a whistleblower and additionally to be a whistleblower when your entire life is dependent on the person you're supposed to be blowing the whistle against. So it's quite a parallel. I felt like I had to just go along with what Mr. Mulcahy said, because who would believe me? He was Santa Claus at the Ambassador's Christmas party.
Everyone loved him. He was so popular, and the complicating facts, even I loved him. He was like the jolly, nice... It was a very confusing and complicated thing.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, I mean, it's such a horrific story. I mean, the actual abuse is horrific, but the lack of justice, as I think you've mentioned, feels worse. There are lifelong consequences from abuse, but I think as you've indicated, there's as much lifelong consequences when nothing is done, obviously, whether it's a state department or the church or certain religious denominations or probably other organizations, Hollywood, you could pick your institution. It's widespread and people want to cover things up for... It's like they're more concerned with saving their institution than doing what's morally right.
I want people to understand just the gravity of what you went through in the life altering consequences, because you write in your books and in your first memoir, Trailing, it just felt like, I think you say that in your current book, that you were left feeling extremely unimportant. And the self-image. And so that played itself out in relationships with men. And so just talk about how the consequences weren't just the abuse itself, which is bad enough, but the sense of what it did to your sense of self-agency and self-image. So just talk... Because that played out over the next 20 years with marriage and being in Africa, and just talk about that journey.
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
Yeah, no, I mean it's such an important question, and I thank you for the opportunity to speak to it because I think that for me, the major consequence of the abuse and then how it was handled, the cover-up in this message that what happened to those girls doesn't matter, but what happens to him does matter.
We have to protect his civil liberties, because I have a letter where my dad said, "But what about the civil liberties of the children?" It's like it just didn't exist. We didn't have those liberties. No, I just think that for me, the major consequence, as I was describing earlier, is I learned early how to get along. I learned how to... Yeah, the best way to say it is to shape-shift, to show up and be able to make any situation okay, to be able to join with people easily, to be able to fit in, even if it's not a fit.
And what that meant for me as I turned into a teenager and then a young woman, and all the politics, the things that play out between men and women started, is that I... The easiest way for me to say it is I would get chosen, and I thought, "Well, if you choose me, then I have to make your choice worth it." I never thought, "Well, okay, you are choosing me, but am I choosing you?" Because I was totally outside of myself. I was living... And the reason I call the book OBJECT, is that at a certain moment, and I think this happens to a lot of girls and women, even if they haven't been sexually molested that way, but just because of the way society is and with all the pressure on what you look like in being sexy and appealing and all of that, I lived not as the subject of my own life.
And I like to clarify that when you're a subject, you are functioning from the inside out. You're inside yourself looking out and deciding, "What do I think about that thing or that person, or what do I want? What do I desire?" And you're staying oriented towards what you want. I functioned as an object. An object is outside of themself, constantly looking at themself to figure out how do I appear in this moment? Do I appear pleasant? Do I appear accommodating? Do I appear sexy? Do I appear nice and generous and kind?
And it's all about appearances. And so what happened for me is that I allowed myself to be chosen over and over and over again, and ended up in one relationship after another that I didn't really want to be in. Not trying to make it sound like everyone I was involved with was a horrible monster. No, I fortunately got chosen by some nice people, but I did also get chosen by some pretty horrible people too. And my teenagehood and my young adult life is largely characterized by rolling from one dysfunctional relationship to the next. And in each relationship, what I was doing was just trying to accommodate.
Warwick Fairfax:
What's interesting about your story is, you felt like you were an object in which your choice, your viewpoints were irrelevant. An object doesn't have choice. It's an object.
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
Right, no, an object has no choice.
Warwick Fairfax:
And so therefore, your goal was to be, in this case, whatever the guy wanted you to be, and what would appeal to him, and personality, dress, everything. And your choice didn't matter. So if somebody liked you, then you had to make them happy. And with your husband, is it Tano-
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
Tano. That's not his real name, but the reason I gave him that name in all of my books is that he's Argentinian. And for anyone that knows Argentina, you know the Argentines, they give people nicknames.
El Tano means the Italian, like so many Argentinians, he's from an Italian... Yeah, so he's Italian. Yeah.
Warwick Fairfax:
I'm with you. And so as you paint him, he wasn't like this horrendous person. He had issues, but I think that's probably fair. But the point is not so much him, but as you're getting to know each other and the US and New Orleans, and it's like he's older and he wants to be this medical doctor in Africa in different places, which is a very noble thing. And you had a degree in counseling. It's like, well, how do I do that there? And I don't know, he says, "It'll be fine so long as we're together." I think it's probably every third page that he says that, which it's not bad in of itself, but there's a context of the comment. And so it just felt like it could have been anybody else. It didn't have to be Tano, it could be whoever, but it's just like my choice and my career and my interests don't matter.
But there was another episode in which it feels like you are becoming more stronger and more your own advocate, and this is obviously after the book was published, the original book, when you were going to take your kids on a cross-country trip in the US, because you were more present, your husband was running around the world doing laudable work, but you were the caregiver who was there 24/7 with your daughter and son. And so naturally they gravitated to you and your stories and history and family, and you wanted to take your kids on a cross-country trip, and your husband said, "Well, I'm not going to the US." It's like that seemed to be the straw that broke the camel's back.
And for somebody who's a people pleaser, it's like, not this time. So it felt like, I don't want to say a breakup is never a victory, but in terms of your own development, standing up, it felt like it, it was a huge victory for you, for Kristin. So just talk about that episode and what that says about who you are becoming at that moment.
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
Yeah, no, it's such a great question. And so just to give a little context for the listeners, because what we're talking about is my first book ends with us reunited, me and my husband because in the first book we split up because he's having an affair and the whole thing, and we are reunited in Paris, and we make our home here. But my second book, which I didn't send to you, but it has to do with when he wanted me to become a trailing spouse again, and I said no. So already I had found a new sense of... I mean, I think one of the best things that actually happened to me is that affair that he was having early in our relationship because that was so unacceptable, it forced me to get, excuse my language, get some balls and be like, "I'm not putting up with this crap."
And that's when I took our daughter, she was two at the time, and I left him and I came to Paris, blah, blah, blah. In the middle of the two books that you're referring to, I refused to become a trailing spouse again until I get worn down and I become a trailing spouse again. But there's some other interesting lessons that happen in that book. And the third book that, it starts with this scene that you're talking about when my kids are at an age where they just are so interested in travel and they want to know more about the United States, because for them, the United States is Washington once a year to go see my parents, and my daughter had studied in her history class in French school, they had studied the American dream.
And so we had talked about Jack Kerouac. And anyways, that's where the idea came from, that we could take this great American road trip. And the straw that broke the camel's back is that when I asked my husband if we could plan this, his answer was that I was out of my mind that I would ever expect him to give a single dime ever again to the evil United States of America. And then he said, "Because look what they just did in Afghanistan." And then he cited this thing that had happened in Afghanistan, which admittedly was horrible, but it was one of those things, it's like, "How is that my fault?" It's not my fault that the US government bombed Kunduz, Afghanistan. It is simply not my fault.
And I think that that fury of being made responsible for something, and that I had been for all the 20 years we were together, he made me responsible for things like that. It finally just was too much, and I just snapped. I had never... The night that I told him I wanted to separate, that was not planned.
I had not been thinking of it. I mean, deep down, for many, many years I had been thinking, "This is so not the life and the relationship I want to be having," but I never ever thought that I could leave. And that literally just came out. And it's so amazing. I don't know if this is an expression or if I just think it's an expression, but sometimes when I talk about this, I say, it's like how the expression goes, the worst part was saying it, saying, "I want to separate. I cannot do this any longer." Once I said that, I was filled with relief.
Warwick Fairfax:
So I want to talk about how you have evolved since, because there are lifelong consequences from abuse and being felt like unimportant, and the scars never go away, but you learn to deal with them and hopefully improve. And obviously you counsel a lot of people, so you know all this better than I do. But where would you say you are now in terms of your own agency, self-respect, where you are, because probably a spectrum from object to subject, from I'm fully worthy to I'm fully unworthy. Where would you say you are on your healing journey now, what's Kristin [inaudible 00:35:22]-
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
That's such a great question and I'm going to answer it totally honestly, I've already kind of alluded to it. So I think that I'm mentally and emotionally healthier than I've ever been because I feel safe with myself. I feel centered in myself. I feel very much like the subject of my own life. But as I was referring to a moment ago, I feel like I haven't tested this new me out there in the choppy waters. For example, and it's fun to say this too, in speaking to two men, I think I'm a little bit afraid of men. I don't mean afraid like, "Oh, I'm going to get jumped." I'm afraid of that too. But I don't know how the new me would be in a dating context. And I guess I'm a little bit afraid to try, which I should clarify.
And if anyone reads my book OBJECT, they'll get a nice big dose of what it means to be newly on the apps post long, difficult marriage, because I did do all the apps.
And that's really what launched me into my main healing journey is because I got out of my marriage and I started dating, and oh boy, it was like I regressed right back to where I left off, and there I was getting chosen like crazy and just accommodating. And there was part of that that was great, how wonderful to feel desired and wanted and solicited after many years of feeling unimportant, et cetera.
But I learned a lot in those years of dating. And what I learned is the model that I am in with men that I'm dating, it's not a healthy one. And that's when I really stepped back and have really taken years now just to be on my own and to not find any sense of my value or my worth coming from my desirability to men, which for me is big and important because so much of my self-worth came from feeling like a successful object, but now I'm getting older, and I would like to date, but I just don't quite know how to manage all of that.
Gary Schneeberger:
I want to take another run at the question that Warwick asked you three minutes ago. In the context of what we say a lot at Beyond the Crucible, because dare I say, before I ask this question, I will say, you are the first guest I'm going to ask this question to that I don't know what the answer's going to be.
We have a thing that we say about crucible experiences. They didn't happen to you, they happened for you, because guests will talk about the lessons that they learned from the trials and tragedies and traumas they've gone through have helped them as they've moved forward in their life. And as you're talking about this, how would you answer that question? Are you at a place, have you arrived at a place, will you ever arrive at a place, where you look at the things that you've described so far in this episode, the things that you've lived through, that you've written about, that it didn't happen to you, it did indeed happen for you in some way?
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
Assuming I'm understanding the question because my answer is going to probably sound very quick to just agree with that. But yeah, I think it's already totally happened. Everything that's happened to me in my life, I feel like, "Oh, well, that was a good story." And ultimately I am a storyteller. And so I feel that the material that my life has brought me is something that I have been able to use to make, A, as a writer, I've been able to use it to make sense of the story, but just more largely as a person, I feel that those things happened for me because they have allowed me to tell my story. Just digressing a little bit, but I think it fits. One of the best compliments I ever got, and I will never forget this, I hold it so close to my heart, came from a writer that I very much admire and who was a mentor for me when I was learning early, in the early days of learning how to put a book together.
And he said to me, he's like, "The thing that you have going for you is that you run straight into danger, and that's how you get a good story to tell." And he said, "So your problem isn't lack of story, but you run so quickly into every danger zone, you have too much story. So you have to figure out what's the main story line."
But to add something to that, I think that for me, this idea of it happening for you, I think what I'm still figuring out now is how to feel, I hate to use this word, but for lack of a better one, how to feel entitled to insist that the stories I have to tell are important. Because in particular, this one about the State Department covering up this Mr. Mulcahy's abuses and what that led to, by covering up his crimes, they paved the way for him to rape and molest children for another 22 years.
That's serious. There's a whole trail of victims, and something that has been extremely hard for me in terms of feeling important and continuing to feel like that I have the confidence to keep talking about my book and to keep promoting it, is that I feel like the mainstream press has not treated my story with any importance. I tried to get a mainstream publisher, I was told across... I got lots of requests from agents, expressions of interest, but everyone told me, and this is why my Substack is called a Dime a Dozen, and the reason it's called a Dime a Dozen is one agent told me sexual abuse stories are a dime a dozen. And if you are not famous, and if you don't have a major platform, no one's going to buy the book. So for that reason, passing. And that message is-
Warwick Fairfax:
Is sexual abuse in the State Department a dime a dozen?
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
That's what I say.
Warwick Fairfax:
I mean, [inaudible 00:43:44].
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
And so now I'm beyond the publishing part of it because the book is out there now, I just did it myself, but I continue to write to different newspapers in either... Every time there's a letter or every time there's an article in a newspaper where you can write a letter to the editor, if it's something related to abuse, me too, if it fits, I write. My letters never get chosen to be published. I understand, there's thousands of people in writing, so I'm not such a prima donna that I think, "Oh, you should be choosing me." But I've also written heads for papers, don't get any feedback.
I've contacted reporters at certain specific papers to say, "Hey, I'm sitting on this story. Don't you think this could be an important story?" And no one is interested. And every time that happens, every time I get a rejection or get ignored, and that's the thing in this business, you don't quite know when to conclude that you're just being ignored because some people, you write to them and then three weeks later they do write back to you.
But some people you write and then you never hear from them ever again. So it's like you don't even know what the parameters are. Like, have I been ignored? Have I not been ignored? But every time I have to grapple with this stuff, the thing that still lives inside of me is, "Oh, I feel unimportant and I feel deflated." And then I have to find it in myself to just say, "Okay, well, you know what, that's how you feel, and that's fine, you can feel that way, but you have to proceed anyways."
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, I mean, that's to me, the ultimate shift, I mean, at least from my perspective, I'm a person of faith. So in my paradigm, I think it's true of many religious philosophies and to my Christian faith, like Psalm 139, we're wonderfully and created by God. We have inherent value as human beings, we are worthwhile, we are very valuable. And I think there'd be other religious and philosophical ways of thought. So to me, I know what I'm saying sounds obvious, but self-worth can never come from another human.
Good marriages, as you know, you do a lot of counseling, happen when both parties feel that they have inherent self-worth and they're not looking for somebody else to validate their self-worth. That's not... They like them, like being with them, but they don't need validation from anybody because they believe they're inherently valuable. And I believe everyone in the planet is inherently valuable.
So you have value within yourself no matter what the state department or the journalists do or don't do. And doesn't mean, sometimes it's not about you want to win, but the fight itself is worthwhile. The fight means, and I know you know this, you're standing up for other young girls, or sadly young boys who are abused. If you save one person-
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
Because there were some boys in that as well.
Warwick Fairfax:
If you save one person, it's worth it, right? If you help one person who is now an adult, have a better tomorrow than they had today and have a couple more ounces of self-worth, I know you know this. That's why you're in the fight, if you will, to help people. But that kind of make sense, is that you probably do it in your counseling, helping people understand that you cannot find self-worth in another person. It has to come from within, whatever that means to you. Does that kind of make sense? And sometimes-
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
Oh yeah, totally. But I mean, I think it's so interesting because for myself, I feel that it's a new type of self-worth that I have, that what I am actually pissed about and what I want, because I just feel that it would help me. I think it would make me feel better. I would like an acknowledgement from the State Department. That's all I want. I want an apology and an acknowledgement that they did wrong by a community of girls. And that's one of the reasons-
Warwick Fairfax:
And they've never done that.
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
No, no, no, no, no, no, nothing. 10 years after the cover-up took place when I was having a series of mental health problems, I was 22 years old. Another sexual abuse story took place where my parents were posted at that time in Nigeria. It wasn't the US diplomat, it was one of the Nigerian guards. He molested a little boy and he was fired and the family was repatriated, and there was a whole big thing. And my mother went to the person in charge of the investigation and she said, "So what's the deal? This happened in my family 10 years ago, and we were told to just shut up and move on, and now my daughter's having all these problems, blah, blah, blah." And when she did that, next thing you know, they were giving her a name and a number, and they said, "Well, tell your daughter to get in touch with this person at the State Department because they will pay for her therapy."
So the story's a little bit more complicated than that, but I had to fill out, what's called a tort claim where I had to quantify the number of times Mr. Mulcahy did X, the number of times he did Y, the number of times he did Z. And I sent that in, and a couple of weeks later, I received a check in the mail for $20,000 to cover the cost of therapy. That was in 1992.
Warwick Fairfax:
This wasn't a gag or they weren't asking you to be silent for that, were they?
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
No, they were. What they said is that by accepting that money, I would go away and stop bothering them.
Warwick Fairfax:
Did you take it?
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
Oh yeah, I took the money.
Warwick Fairfax:
Okay, okay.
You didn't have to sign something-
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
Now you're trying to bother them. I consider it, and I mean, I am not a lawyer, clearly, but I consider it all null and void because now the years have gone on, and I think, "You jerks, this 22-year-old kid who was in major mental breakdown, and you give her 20,000 bucks, which was nothing compared to what that guy did-"
Warwick Fairfax:
Just to pay her off basically.
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
Yeah.
Warwick Fairfax:
So that she'll go away. I mean, it's a sobering story. I guess you've already answered this, but when people say, "Who is Kristin now?" Can you say, "Well, what happened to me did not defeat me. I'm still here and I'm not living my life as a victim? Doesn't mean I'm a hundred percent whole, whatever that means." But how would you characterize yourself as somebody who said, "This is tragic, but-"
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
Well, okay, so now I'm going to throw a curveball in and we don't need to get into the details of it, but it's just to say, I mean, that is a big, huge story in my life, but it's not like the only bad thing that's ever happened to me. So I don't even think of the sexual abuse as like, that is the one singular thing that makes my life difficult. No, I think that it's one of several complicated things that I've had to deal with in my life, one of which is what we started with. I mean, moving countries every couple of years also creates a complicated, I mean many wonderful things about it as well.
But no, I have never felt like I'm just hopelessly damaged, nothing like that. But I think what was complicated for me is, how to say this, the damage, if I can use that word that has been inflicted or that has manifested in me, is also my strength. So the parts about me that I think are good and help me have a relatively happy and successful life in spite of difficulties, it's also the stuff that sprang from difficulty.
Warwick Fairfax:
And that's the thing that, just to elaborate on what Gary was saying earlier about it didn't happen to you, it happened for you. I mean, we have had many guests with quadriplegic, paraplegics, abuse, and we've had a number of people say things that I find psychologically incomprehensible. They're saying they're grateful. I mean, we had a woman, Stacey Kopass, who dove into an above-ground pool in the suburbs of Sydney. She was diagnosed as a quadriplegic and she had suicidal ideation, substance abuse, everything you would expect, and her truth, and look, I'm not here to argue with her truth, it's her life, her story, she says, "Yeah, I was some athletic, carefree girl, and the person I'm now, a speaker, consultant, coach wouldn't be the person I'm now." And she says she's actually grateful for it.
I find that incomprehensible, but she's not the only one who said that. When more than one people say that, it's hard to say, "Well, you are wrong. You can't be grateful." It doesn't mean that she's glad that it happened. It doesn't mean that somebody's lost a loved one. It doesn't condone what happened.
Gary Schneeberger:
I am going to jump in and do what I do at the ends of episodes. I try to guess when I think Warwick's asked kind of a second to last question, but I also want to make sure, Kristin, that I give you the opportunity that listeners and viewers can find you on the internet because you are a counselor and they can learn both more about your books, but they can also learn about your counseling services. Let people know where they can find you on the worldwide web.
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
So the easiest way to find me is to just type my name in, Kristin Duncombe or Kristin Louise Duncombe, either works and instantly a bunch of things will come up, including my website, which is KristinDuncombe.com.
Gary Schneeberger:
And help people who may not be champion spellers how to spell both of those words.
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
K-R-I-S-T-I-N D-U-N-C-O-M-B-E, Duncombe, Kristin Duncombe.
Gary Schneeberger:
Excellent. Warwick, last question or two questions that are as usual as always yours.
Warwick Fairfax:
So Kristin, there might be somebody who is listening today and maybe today's their worst day. Maybe they're being abused, maybe they've felt othered, if you will, that they don't matter. They don't have any self-worth and they're just an object. And I mean, you can feel an object without abuse. There's different levels of abuse, different levels of challenges, but somebody that feels either abused or that they really don't matter. They're just an object. What would a word of hope be to that person?
Kristin Louise Duncombe:
Okay, so I think that question's a little bit complicated because of course it's so case-by-case what feeling that way could feel like to any person. So what I would say, just sort of generally speaking to anyone who's struggling with just their sense of self. I would say, you know what? It's awful and scary when you feel so blue, you don't have to figure this out right now this moment, it is okay to just, whatever your safe place is, if it's climbing into bed, if it's vegging out in front of the television, if it's taking a walk, if it's going and having an ice cream, whatever it is, you don't have to overcome that scary feeling right now today. Just find a way to be safe with yourself, and then let's get a plan in place for some more over time things that you can do to move out of that belief system.
But the reason I start with just, you don't have to manage this right now is because what I have learned, both dealing with my own issues, but also as a therapist, is that so often when painful feelings come, they are exacerbated and compounded by this reaction that most of us have, which is, "Oh my God, I've got to make it go away right now. I can't live with this. It's horrible." And then we do everything to try to make it stop. And I think that the best thing you can do is just say, "Okay, there it is. Those horrible feelings. I feel like absolute, you know what, and I accept it for right now, I'm just going to accept it. I'm just going to deal with it by staying still or whatever." Because fighting it usually only makes it worse. So that's actually what I would say.
Gary Schneeberger:
Friends, I've been in the communications business long enough to know when the last word has been spoken on a subject, and our guest, Kristin Louise Duncombe has just spoken it.
So Warwick, we've just concluded our interview with Kristin Louise Duncombe, and wow is my summation of it, which is why I don't give the summations here, you do, because you'll have something much more intelligible to say, much more profound to say about it. But Kristin's story, it's heart-rending story, and yet at the end of the story, she was happy, she's optimistic about the future, and she's living a life of significance. And there's a lot of stuff to choose from, what's the one thing that stands out to you about Kristin's story?
Warwick Fairfax:
What's heart-wrenching about Kristin's Louise Duncombe story is she was a child of parents that were diplomats. They were in the US State Department and they were living at the time in Africa, the Ivory Coast. And what makes this story so heart-wrenching, is that she was abused by somebody that was also working for the US Diplomatic Service for the US government.
And he was somebody that was well-known to the small circle that was in the US Embassy, in Ivory Coast. He was this fun-loving person that everybody liked, but he had this dark side in which he sexually abused, not just Kristin, but a number of other girls her age that were part of the diplomatic service part of, the kids. And as horrifying as that abuse was, what was worse from Kristin's standpoint is the US State Department as then was in the early eighties, they did nothing.
They swept it under the rug, much as some people in some churches, some other institutions, Hollywood have done. And he was called back, but he wasn't reprimanded. They were told to keep quiet, not to say anything. Her parents tried to fight for her, but they just... It's not easy because their livelihood is in the State Department. They tried to fight even 10 years after, when more abuse happened by somebody else at a different embassy, they tried to fight for Kristin. What was horrifying is the State Department did nothing. And to this day, there's been no apology. She's not looking for money, she's looking for justice, for an apology. And what that did to her, the abuse was bad enough. It made Kristin feel like she doesn't matter, that she has no value, because what happened wasn't acknowledged and this guy would go on to abuse people for maybe decades after.
And so that's the tragedy, is not just the abuse, but it made her feel worthless, that she didn't matter. In her recent book OBJECT, she views herself as an object in that the only value she has is by being pleasing to other people and other men. If she makes them happy, she has some value, but feeling an object, it makes you feel that you have no inherent value. The good news is that there is still scars, but she spent her life counseling, coaching, speaking up for others, advocating, and she's somebody that laughs, is definitely in a better place.
But the tragedy is just the pain that she went through, of feeling that she was an object without value, which has colored her relationship with other people and men for decades. So that's the tragedy of what happened. So I guess the summary is, the abuse was horrific, the cover-up for her and the lack of recognition, it made it, in her words, so much worse. And that was so tragic.
Gary Schneeberger:
As you listen to her story, I mean one of the most heart-rending episodes we've had, but you should know that she laughs frequently. As we were preparing to go on this recording, we asked her how to pronounce her name and she told us it's not Duncom, it's Duncombe. At which point I looked at my picture in the camera and said, "I know all about that. I have been done with combs forever." This is an example, folks, of an episode that we understand your crucibles are tough. We understand that, you listen to Kristin's story, it is tough. You've heard Warwick's story, it is tough, but here's what else we know. And Kristin's living proof of it, that they're not the end of your story.
In fact, if you learn the lessons of what happened to you, you can turn them into an opportunity for you. And what it can do for you is it will drive you toward a destination that can be the greatest destination you'll ever reach, and that is a life of significance.
Welcome to a Journey of Transformation with the Beyond the Crucible assessment, and like 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.
Embrace Your Wounds To Conquer Their Power Over You
Aftershocks from a crucible you have experienced are common, as are wounds that be might independent of those crucibles.
As we discuss this week, it’s critical you identify and create a strategy to neutralize those wounds and aftershocks as you pursue your life of significance.
How? Warwick’s got eight tips for you in his latest blog at BeyondTheCruciible.com, Wounds Are Inevitable. Here’s How to Minimize Their Pain. We cover them all in this episode, from taking an inventory of what your wounds and aftershocks are to analyzing why they hurt so much, from dealing immediately with them when you’re triggered to coming to the place where you se them as a blessing.
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. We know that we can't just brush off our crucibles... well, hopefully, we should know, but we ignore these aftershocks about crucibles and our wounds at our peril. The key is when you feel triggered by these aftershocks and wounds, is to deal with them immediately and not let them fester and get worse.
Gary Schneeberger:
Aftershocks from a crucible you've experienced are common, as are wounds that might be independent of those crucibles. As we discussed this week, it's critical you identify and create a strategy to neutralize those wounds as you pursue a life of significance. How? Warwick has eight tips for you in his latest blog, and we cover each one of them in this episode. Welcome, friends, to this episode of Beyond the Crucible. I've never used this phrase to describe an episode like this, it's kind of like we're going from page to screen, or from page to soundtrack, if you're just listening and not watching this. But this is another one of those episodes, Warwick, in which you and I discuss your latest blog at Beyondthecrucible.com, and it's a subject, dare I say, that you and I, and probably everybody who's listening to us right now or watching us, knows pretty well, isn't it?
Warwick Fairfax:
Absolutely. Well said.
Gary Schneeberger:
And what is that subject? That subject is of the blog is, Wounds Are Inevitable, Here's How to Minimize Their Pain. It's all about wounds, what we do with those wounds. And we've prepared... we've got some pretty good insights, I think, for you, folks. So Warwick, I'm going to ask you off the bat what led you to write this blog, which as I said is called Wounds are Inevitable, Here's How to Minimize their Pain? What was the leading for this particular blog? Because I know there's always something different perhaps that strikes you and leads you to write.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. I've been reflecting on the fact that our major crucibles may well be obvious, and one of the reasons they're obvious is the searing pain obviously is something that we remember, and hopefully, we've gotten over that worst day, that searing crucible. But one of the things I've been reflecting on is we can often ignore the aftershocks of those crucibles, or indeed other wounds that come up, so you're over the crucible, but sometimes, something triggers it, somebody says something, you read something, and it feels like you go back to that worst day. It's not quite the searing pain because you're over it, but it's a bit like an earthquake, it's like an aftershock, it's not like a 9 out of 10 pain, but maybe it's 3, 4, 5, it's something, it's meaningful. And then sometimes, other wounds come along and maybe they don't have anything to do with the original crucible.
We might think, "Okay, look, it's not a 9 out of 10 pain, it's like a 3 or a 4, it's not that big a deal," and we ignore it because we know what searing pain is and it's just... maybe it's not a paper cut, but it feels like painful but not life-threatening. And so we just blow right past it. So the problem is we know that we have to deal with crucibles, or at least everybody, and who's been guest on our podcast, you, Gary, and I know that you've got to deal with crucibles, many in our audience know that, but what we can't ignore is what we see as minor wounds, aftershocks, but the reality is, if we don't deal with these aftershocks and wounds, they can fester and get worse.
It's like if you cut yourself and there's dirt all over that cut, you think, "Well, I'm not going to die from this cut, let's just ignore it." And it gets worse and, "Ah, do we need antibiotics? It looks like it's infected, but not a big deal, let's just ignore it. "That minor wound can get worse. So the smart play is not to get too into this medical analogy is you get out the Neosporin, stick a bandaid on it, and you're fine. You don't just... not even going to wash the wound, you do something because that would be dumb, and most of us don't want to be dumb, right?
Gary Schneeberger:
Right. And I'll take us into the ocean, one of the things I've thought about as I was reading the blog and as we were preparing for this episode is that wounds, as we talk about them here, as you talk about them in the blog, aren't necessarily crucibles... they can be, but they're not necessarily the crucibles you've been through, but they're the barnacles that kind of stick to you, like barnacles stick to a ship going through the water, they're the barnacles you pick up over time that stick to you in the aftermath of a crucible, I think, is the way I look at it. That's a fair analysis, isn't it?
Warwick Fairfax:
Absolutely. That is a terrific example, because barnacles eventually will slow us down, they'll have an effect. And so what do you do? You clean the barnacles. It's like anything in life, you've got to do maintenance, clean it, get rid of the stuff that's slowing you down. People with boats, they will regularly clean the hull, get the barnacles off, that's what you do with boat maintenance, people know that. Well, we shouldn't treat ourselves not as well as our boats or other things that we own, it's like you could have a dinghy, you still got to scrape the barnacles off, at least if you live near the ocean. In my case, when I think of aftershocks and wounds, I kind of relate it back to the crucible, which, for me, the biggest crucible of my life was the failed $2.25 billion takeover I did of my family's 150-year old family newspaper business.
It was in 1987, I was 26 years old, just back from Harvard Business School, and for a variety of reasons that I've mentioned elsewhere, the takeover didn't succeed. And the pain was searing not so much because of the money, because that's not really been a huge motivator for me, but the fact that I felt like I let my family down, my father, my mother, 4,000 plus employees, my great-great-grandfather, John Fairfax, who founded the company in 1841, a person of great faith, and even in some sense, God, because I felt like God had a plan to resurrect the company, the image of the founder, and whether that was right or wrong, that was my belief. And so I felt like when I failed, I let God down. So obviously, if he'd wanted it to succeed, it would have despite my failures and my mistakes. So all that has to say is this is a long time ago.
I would say that through prayer, my wife, friends, meditating on scripture, a variety of means, I feel like I'm now in a good place and that it's, quote, unquote, "over," so to speak, I don't really think about it every day, although I do talk about it often on the podcast. And I don't get into a ball of pain after I talk about it on the podcast, it's like we talk about it often, Beyond the Crucible, what does that mean? Well, this is what it means for me, it's not like I ever think about, but it doesn't really cause me searing pain. Now, that being said, sometimes, there are what they call aftershocks. So to give you an example, a couple of years or so ago, right about the time when my book Crucible Leadership came out, there was an editorial cartoon in an Australian paper, and as Gary and I talk, and Gary's a former newspaper man, so he gets this editorial cartoons, they're never favorable, nobody ever looks at it and go, "I love that cartoon." And I know it's about me, but that was so awesome.
I don't know that that's existed in the history of newspapers, maybe, but I've never seen one. So there was one of me signing books at a table or something, my book, and it basically said, "Warwick will give you a copy of his book for a price." Well, it's like, who sells their book for free? It was a stupid cartoon, silly. If you want to have a go at me, at least make it a good one. But it was just silly. But yet, it's like, seriously, they're going to have a go... I mean, can't they leave me alone? They're going to have a go at me because of a book. And so it was somewhat triggering, there were aftershocks, even though in my head I knew it was silly, you can't necessarily stop the emotions immediately. So that's sort of one example.
Gary Schneeberger:
And it's important to say, Warwick, it's important to say too on the subject of cartoons, one of the reasons that hit you so hard is because during the takeover, the cartoons were savage that were drawn and published about you. So it's not just that this particular cartoon might've been goofy, that doesn't matter, you had a wound, you have a wound about cartoons because of the crucible, and that's a great example of that, barnacle has been there, and you don't have to necessarily treat it if no one's writing cartoons about you, when someone did it, it brought it back up, right?
Warwick Fairfax:
Excellent point. Very good point. So that's right. Back in the takeover days, and after it launched the takeover in late August 1987, there was one cartoon that showed me as sort of Genghis Khan, like a Mongol raider near China. Genghis Khan occupied a lot of that part of the world. And so it had me on horseback with the mustache, and the fur hat, and some like spear. And basically, he said, "Young Warwick," as he used to call me, because my dad was Sir Warwick, "Fairfax launches a takeover with his band and basically destroys a company in a day that took 150 years to build." I was cast as this ruthless Mongol raider. So yeah, there were others, but yeah, it's excellent point. It was certainly triggering of the takeover and the cartoons back in the day. And so this crucible has had other manifestations because of all the uncertainty when I was growing up, there was a huge expectations that I would one day lead the company.
So I went to Oxford, worked on Wall Street, graduated from Harvard Business School. So there was incredible sense of duty, obligation, expectations, and given though a family, in fighting back decades, there was a lot of uncertainty as to what would happen, how was it going to look? Would I be able to fulfill my father and my parents' expectations? So a lot of stress, and uncertainty, and unknowable consequences, and the future was unknowable, certainly back when I was growing up, all that's to say is when you grow up with a lot of uncertainty and with a lot of parent money, people tend to look at you like, "Oh, you haven't done anything," and you want to prove yourself. And all sorts of things going on, it's tended to make me somebody that really doesn't like change. I've had enough change and uncertainty in my life that I like my rhythms, and I don't really change.
That being said, I realize that I don't like change. And so if we have to change, do things, move, redo the house or whatever necessary changes are, I don't know that I love it, but I recognize, "Okay, I don't like change, I'm not going to just not do it just because I don't like change." All that's to say is that in my case, there are aftershocks, there's triggering. When I go back to Australia to visit family, that is pretty much always triggering because I'm back in Australia, I'm reminded of the family, and wealth, and all of that, that's produces challenging relationships where it can, and just the takeover and it's aftermath has been challenging for everybody in my family, they've got their own wounds from that.
And so I'm reminded of that and reminded of my own crucible. And so being in Australia, it makes what seems distant a lot more present. So I'm not going to not go back and see family, but I realize there are going to be some challenges, I'm going to hit some barnacles, some speed bumps, and it is what it is, and then I just try and deal with it the best I can.
Gary Schneeberger:
Right. You've just gone through sort of your experience with those wounds. Now, we're going to turn to, from your blog, eight points, this time, I won't even joke that they're not seven points, that there is often... I guess I did joke anyway, sorry, but there's eight points in the blog that can help people navigate through the wounds that they're encountering as they're moving beyond their crucible. And the first one of those is... and this one's critical, folks, this one is... there's a reason why it's kind of the umbrella one over all the other points, and that's this, "Accept that our wounds will never fully heal." That's not discouraging news, you can read that as like, "Oh, geez, it's never going to heal. Next." But really, it's not discouraging news, it's realistic news. Talk a little bit about that.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. The first step to dealing with a problem is acceptance, accept that you have a problem. If you said, "Nothing to see here. I'm done with my crucible, I'm so over it. I don't recognize any aftershocks, I don't recognize any wounds. It didn't happen, it's not happening. It's not real, it's a figment of my imagination," well, that's not healthy. It's like, "Gee, do I have a cut on my arm? Nope, no cut to see here. I'm ignoring it. I'm moving on." Well, that's just not smart. And so I think one of the things we have to realize is that aftershocks will happen from our crucible, that's inevitable. I don't know that those aftershocks will ever fully go away, their wounds are going to come up from time to time.
So in that sense, yes, an individual wound may lessen, it doesn't mean that they will fully go away. There'll be scabs and scars from crucible, that's just inevitable. So you got to accept the fact that wounds are a part of life, and there will always be scars and scabs. And the question is, are you going to accept that or ignore it? Are you going to deal with it or just say, "Nothing to see here"?
Gary Schneeberger:
Right. And those wounds can have long contrails on them. I go back to the story that you told just a few minutes ago about that cartoon that was done in Australia about you, you hadn't had a cartoon done on your work in 30 years, you probably hadn't thought... Right. You hadn't thought about... I would think you hadn't thought about, "Oh, cartoons," but then when one hits, it triggers it. So you hadn't even thought about that, you might have assumed it went away. You certainly hadn't thought about it, but there it was. And that's a great example, isn't it, of how they don't go away and they can come up and be just as vivid when they come up as they were when you first experienced them?
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, excellent point. I think of another example that... people wrote about the takeover, and my mistakes, and somebody wrote one of my least favorite titles, A Man Who Wouldn't Wait," basically, if I'd waited, I would've inherited enough shares from... well, I did from my dad and then from other family members, and I could have been in a controlling position anyway. So I get the point, there is some point to that, but obviously, I had my reasons, wanting to change management and restoring the vision of the company, the founder, and some takeover fears back in '87. So I had my reasons, right or wrong. So that wasn't helpful, but then a number of years after the takeover, there was a book written saying that the company hadn't been run well in the '90s and 2000s. And rather than saying, "Okay, it was up to the present owners, shareholders, management," it's like, "Well, it all started with Warwick's takeover." So really, it's Warwick's fault.
The fact that the company wasn't run well in the '90s and 2000s, and maybe some would say maybe even today, it depends on what commentary you read. It felt like it all boils down to things would've been fine had the Fairfax family still maintained control, despite the fact that we're fallible people, and there was infighting, the future's unknowable, but to say that everything would've been great, I mean, come on. So that was like, "Are you serious?" I mean, not only... okay, you want to blame me for the takeover, I deserve certainly some degree of blame, but now you want to blame me for something where I wasn't even in control, the '90s and 2000s, that was somewhat triggering when that came out a number of years ago. It's like, "Come on, can you leave me alone? I mean, really? Is every problem in the world my fault?" It felt that way,
Gary Schneeberger:
Right. And one of the ways is... in your second point, one of the ways that you can inoculate yourself a little bit on those things coming up and surprising you is the second point of your blog, and that's, "Take an inventory of what your wounds are." Really right to use a phrase you use a lot at Beyond the Crucible, do a little soul work. What are your wounds? Explore what those wounds are. That's really important to do, isn't it?
Warwick Fairfax:
It is. Some may be obvious like, okay, I had this sear in crucible, but are you aware of what the potential aftershocks are? Like if an editorial cartoon comes out, it's going to be triggering, because of what you just said about the takeover, and some of the bad editorial cartoons years ago, or somebody writes a recent book, or if there's rapid change, I'm not going to like it. And there are other wounds from my upbringing and different things that makes me sensitive to certain things. The point is know what your wounds are. Some may be obvious, but some may be less obvious. So when those aftershocks or those wounds... not every wound that you have has to relate to your crucible, it could be other more minor, what you perceive as more minor issues, be aware of that. So when you start feeling irritable and angry, it's like, okay, I'm not totally sure what it is, but I think there could be... there's a few possibilities of why I'm getting triggered.
And so if you have an idea of what those wounds are, then it's a matter of, okay, well, it could be an aftershock, or I could be getting triggered by one of these other wounds. At least you have some idea of, as we'll talk about in the moment, where to look. But if it's like, "Nope, all I have is that crucible, which is big enough, but I don't have any other wounds," or, "I might have any other wounds, but I am clueless to what they are, and I don't care what they are because I'm moving on, I'm not looking at the past." That's not smart. Be aware of what your wounds are, because if you've accepted the fact that you do have them and you have an idea of what they are, then it's going to make it a whole lot easier to deal with.
Gary Schneeberger:
Right. This blog and preparing for this podcast triggered me or got me thinking about one of my big wounds... and it's not a big wound, it's a very big wound, but it's not like... if it was part of an iceberg, it wouldn't be the stuff underneath the water line, this one I know is up here, it's bobbing above the water, and that is this feeling that I am less than, I am not good enough. And it stems from a lot of things in my childhood, my parents were divorced, youngest kid in the family, your parents get divorced, you think, "Oh, what did I do? It's my fault." I was an overweight kid that it got picked on a little bit, I stuttered as a kid. So all these things that kind of roiled up, to the point that, still, even though I've shed a lot of those things that led to that feeling, I still feel that. And the story that came to mind that I hadn't thought about in more than 20 years, I think, I was the director of public relations for a large international nonprofit.
And I thought I was doing a good job, but I got called in. The vice president who was over me called, said, "Hey, can you come into my office?" And Warwick, the whole time I walked to go to this man's office, I'm like, "I'm going to get fired. I'm going to get fired. The vice president is summoning me to his office, I'm going to get fired." That's my... "I'm not good enough, I'm less than, oh, my gosh, what else could it be?" I got in, I sat down, I actually got promoted to be vice president of communications for the organization. That is the wound makes you so myopic that you can't see any other possibility but the worst one. That's just one example of what untreated wounds out of left field can hit you. That is not... I'm sure that's... that probably doesn't surprise you about that's how hard wounds can hit you sometimes, right?
Warwick Fairfax:
Boy, that is such a good example. The fact the vice president's calling you in, your default is, "Am I going to get fired? I'm going to get a talking to dressed down, it's going to be bad," rather than, "I don't know what's going on. This is kind of interesting. I guess we'll find out." That would be, I wouldn't say more normal, but for others, it might be, "This is kind of weird, but oh, well," it'd be more that reaction. And I think this is something that a lot of people deal with. And so knowing that, it helps you know how to deal with it. And if somebody, let's say a boss, in the past or at some point says, "Look," let's say we're in your newspaper days, "hey, Gary, you're a lousy editor, lousy writer." You can say, "Okay, I don't like that, but I know that's not true. There are things that don't do well, but I know how to write, I know how to edit." You'll be respectful.
But rather than say, "Okay, I'm not good enough, you're right." But that's where the truth in you says, "Okay, what this person's telling me is not true," your psychological default might be, "Oh, my gosh, I'm not good enough." But the fact that you're aware of that wound means if somebody says something that's clearly not true, you can counteract it rather than going into a tailspin. Does that make sense, Gary?
Gary Schneeberger:
Oh, absolutely. And I'm in a place now, and I talk about it often, when companies that I've worked at do like a 360 evaluation of you, they have people who work... any evaluation of me, I don't look at, "Here's what Gary does well," because I know what I do well, I want to know the things done... said constructively that I don't do necessarily well in their eyes so I can get better at it. So I have gotten better at some of those things, I can hear criticism now that's constructive. But yeah, this idea that the sky's falling all the time if somebody in a position of authority wants to talk to me, that's still not gone away, that still hasn't been gone, I still wonder, "Why is he not talking to me," or, "What's happening?"
When I walk in the room and people start not having a conversation anymore, "They're trying to keep something from me." So that's something that's... Right. I think one of the points to get back to the blog in this discussion, one of the points that you make throughout the blog is that these things don't go away, that's your first point, they can be with you forever, and you have to work to kind of push them back, push them back. And the third point, let's go to that, the third point to Wounds Are Inevitable, Here's How to Minimize Their Pain, your third point is, "Analyze why they hurt so much." So talk about that because that's a critical point as well.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. For me, the aftershocks with these editorial cartoons such as the one that was a few years ago, or books are written about the company going maybe not being as well run as it could be in the '90s, in 2000s, why is all that triggering? Because it reminds me of the takeover and, "Gee, this is all my fault," which wasn't, but certainly, a lot of it... I mean, a fair amount of it was, but it triggers the memories of what went wrong and the takeover. And if I don't change, which I don't, it's like, well, that's because of all the uncertainty that I went through growing up. And for you, your example, Gary, is a perfect example, why do you feel like, oh, you're being called into the principal's office, and he's going to get fired when vice president calls you in, it's like, well, because of the divorce, and being a bit overweight, as you've said, as a kid, all of that is going to tend to make you feel like, oh, you're not good enough.
So you know exactly why those wounds are triggering. It's not like, "Gee, why do I feel this way? That is so weird," it's like, "I may not feeling this way, but I know why I feel this way." And that's a huge difference, you know your why, in terms of these words, it's not a surprise. I'd say for me, I'm very aware of what those aftershocks are, what those wounds are, and what triggers them, and why they hurt so much. I'm aware. And that's another step on the road to dealing with them, is you've accepted them, you've taken inventory of them, and you know the why, you know why they hurt so much. It's really, really important.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, as is point four in the blog. And again, I say it every time we do one of these episodes, Warwick, you stack them like stairs, climbing the stairs. And the fourth point that you make is, "To consider the circumstances that trigger these wounds." What is it about the wounds, the aftershocks that you have, what is it that triggers them? Why is that important, and how do you do that?
Warwick Fairfax:
Just understanding those circumstances, there may be friends, family members that reminds you of your worst day or reminds you of your failings. And with family members, it's not always easy, though sometimes, in the extreme, when some family members just are really incredibly triggering, there are some who have chosen to distance themselves from those people that maybe they feel like they verbally abused them all the time. So there might be some people for your own mental and emotional health, and maybe if you're... a family that you need to distance yourself from. So you want to consider situations and people that might trigger those wounds, and by definition, to the degree you can, try to avoid those circumstances. As I've mentioned, it's not always possible with close family members, or me, or my family is basically in Australia, what can I do? "Never go back to Australia?" No, but yeah, so far away, I don't go back all the time, but you just have to consider the consequences.
So understanding those circumstances and considering what triggers your wounds and aftershocks, that's important, because to the degree you have any agency or control, you want to try and minimize when those wounds come up. It's not like, "Gee, if I go outside without sunscreen and lie in 100 degree heat, I'm going to get sunburnt," or maybe you might want to minimize those circumstances, "Do I do that? Either put on sunscreen or just go out with sunglass?" So it's kind of obvious, but we do need to consider the circumstances that trigger these wounds and aftershocks.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah. I have done something, this is interesting, this point's interesting to me, I have in the business context, as a leader, I've sort of reversed engineered this point to what I call manage people, manage to the wound of the folks who are on my team. And by that, I mean, identify, in conversations and getting to know them, what are those wounds? And then find ways to pack good stuff around those wounds that won't trigger them. So for example, say that someone on my team is very unsure of him or herself, has very low self-confidence. My job, in that case, if I'm going to manage to the wounds, is finding ways to uphold them, finding ways to compliment them, and being specific about it so that those wounds can, over time, at least even if they don't get rid of them, can at least abate a little bit.
And I think that certainly works in the business context, but I think they can also work in the personal context, your family, your friends, you can look at their wounds, we can tend to see the wounds that people have. And I think it's a good exercise when you're off of your wounds, when you're not doing things to abate your wounds, you can help others by coming at them in the opposite spirit that their wounds create. Does that make sense at all?
Warwick Fairfax:
It makes a lot of sense. I think one of the things I found is crucibles, aftershocks of the crucibles, wounds, can make you more empathetic of other people's wounds, of other people's pain. So for instance, if somebody struggles with self-esteem, which is many people, it's not just a few, you can... and I do this, I'm sure you do the same thing, Gary, whether it's somebody on my team, somebody at church, in my community group at church, or various things I'm involved in, I will go out of my way to find something to encourage them. I certainly do that with my wife, my kids. And not just things that are meaningless, but find something that's specific and praiseworthy. One of the things I say is if you see something positive, say something and be specific. And so in another context, for many years, I was on the board of my kids' private school, it was a Christian school, and I've been an elder at my church, Bay Area Community church, which is a Christ-centered evangelical church for many years.
When staff members of either organizations present to us about what's going on, I'll make it a point to say... and often, it's just, they're doing an incredible job, I'll say, "Well, thank you, Joe, Mary," whoever it is, "this is fabulous. I really like the fact you did A, B, and C, and this is really taking us to another level." And I'm so focused on that, if at times, I don't say anything, because I feel like other people can say something too, like the lead pastor of our organization, or friend of mine who's president of the school board that I was involved in, they almost look at me like, "Well, Warwick hadn't come, he didn't say anything." It's like they just assume my role is the encourager, which is I'm happy to wear that label if they want to put it on me, but the point is, I'm making a point of trying to be encouraging.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, for sure. Point five in the blog at Beyondthecrucible.com, which is called Wounds are Inevitable, Here's How to Minimize Their Pain. Point five is this, "Anchor yourself in your truth. Find that anchor." You talk a lot about an immovable anchor for your soul and bouncing back from a crucible, here, you're talking about anchoring yourself in your truth to beat away those barnacles, those aftershocks, those wounds that crop up. Why is that so important? And how do you do that?
Warwick Fairfax:
So when you're triggered by wounds, whether it's aftershocks, or the crucible of my takeover, or just growing up in an uncertain environment, not liking change, need to ask yourself what is true and what are lies, basically. And you've got to know what your values and belief systems are, what your truth is. And so when those wounds are triggered, and people will say... or maybe the bad voices within yourself, if you will, sometimes we have these... maybe put it another way, these negative thoughts that creep into our head, it could be, "Warwick, Gary, you're not good enough. You were never good enough. You're not worthy." And you hear these negative thoughts, you can say, "Well, that's not true. I'm not perfect, but those are lies. I will not listen to the lies. I'm going to anchor myself in truth." And so for me... I mean, I think for both of us, it will be the truth of the Bible, it will be biblical truth, and that is one thing that I do.
I would say, "Well, I'm a child of God." I think of Psalm 139 were beautifully and wonderfully made, I think of one of my go-to passages is in Philippians 3, when I'm getting triggered by the whole takeover, and, "Look what I did, and I'm so dumb, and had a Harvard MBA, how could I made some of these stupid mistakes?" Which certainly in the '90s, there was a lot of that self-talk, very negative. But then I would... Philippians 3, basically 7 through 14, I won't read the whole thing, but there are passages that I'll cling to, that this is my truth, which is from biblical truth. It would be, I'd say... repeat these words to myself, which is what's written here, "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 whose sake I've lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him." And that it goes on from there.
So basically, what I say is, "Look, I've made a lot of mistakes, but as important as John Fairfax Limited, the newspapers are, compared to knowing Christ, it's like rubbish. So when I hear the lies in my head, those negative thoughts, I anchor myself in truth, and my truth that I anchor myself is in the Bible. So for others, it may be other texts, other religious ways of thinking, books, biographies, whatever your truth is, anchor yourself in those truths, in those truths that reinforce your fundamental beliefs and values so that you can reject these negative thoughts, which, very often, are lies. When you have a negative thought that says, "I'm worthless and I'm not good enough," that's a lie. We are all worthwhile, reject the lies, or somebody blames you for things you never did or just tries to pull you down, just reject that saying, "That is not true. I will not accept lies. I'm anchored in my truth."
Gary Schneeberger:
Very good point. The sixth point is also a very good point, the sixth point is, "When your wounds are triggered, deal with it immediately." And I wrote something on my sheet here, you can see it, it's right there. I wrote... it just popped in my head when I read that, "When your wounds are triggered, deal with it immediately," I wrote, "Don't ruminate, fumigate."
Warwick Fairfax:
Boy, that's an excellent example. I know in some areas, there are termites, and you don't want to ruminate on, "Oh, my gosh, there's termites all over my house." You want to get the pest control people and fumigate them. They come in, they tent the house or the condo, and they fumigate it with all sorts of chemicals that kill the termites. So yes, don't ruminate, fumigate. Excellent, excellent point. So really the point here is when wounds are triggered, you don't want to let them fester and bleed, and let's ignore the antibiotic, and washing it, and the Band-Aid, you want to deal with that wound immediately. So to go back to that example of that editorial cartoon of me having the audacity to charge for the book I wrote, Crucible Leadership, that irritated me, it sort of angered me a bit, it says, "Come on, really?" I mean, that's so lame, silly, and can't they leave me alone?
So yeah, it was definitely triggering. Well, one of the things I did, obviously, I talked to, Gale, my wife, about it, but I called you, Gary, because you've been in newspapers, you get the newspaper well, you were part of the team, you kind of helped me edit my book, and so you're very well aware of what's in the book. And so we were able to talk about it. And so one of the things I do, which we'll get to in a moment, is I have my own way of dealing with things, praying about it. But basically, when that happened, that aftershock, I guess you'd say, that wound from the takeover, I dealt with it immediately and then it went away. It doesn't always go away in five minutes, it could be a day, a few hours, it really depends, but I'm able to move on because I recognize what it was, it harkens back to earlier cartoons and then also to the takeover.
And if it's maybe me not wanting change, I think, "Well, that's because of A, B, and C when I was growing up." And I realize it and say, "Okay, we do need to make these changes. Let's go ahead." But I realize I'm getting triggered, and if it's about things that my family or my house, I'll talk to Gale and we'll talk about it and make sure we know, well, what specifically is triggering it, analyze it, and then deal with it. So when you get triggered, don't ignore it, and don't say, "Oh, this is silly, I'm going to move on." That's not smart, deal with it at once.
Gary Schneeberger:
And your very next point, again, the staircase, your very next point, number seven, "Have a proven system for dealing with those wounds when flare-ups happen."
Warwick Fairfax:
Absolutely.
Gary Schneeberger:
You've intimated a little bit that you have a plan. Talk a little about that.
Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, absolutely. So for me, as soon as I get triggered by a wound, flare up, aftershock, I deal with it immediately, "Okay, what the heck is going on?" Sometimes, I'm not sure. And so very often, I will say... I'll have a conversation with Gale, and I'll say, "Gale, I don't know, I'm feeling anxious, fearful. Something's triggering me, I'm not sure what it is." Even though I'm very self-aware, sometimes, I won't know. But that'll just really bug me, I have to know, I have to know. Because I want to deal with it. I can't deal with it if I don't know. It's like, "Gee, I have an ache somewhere in my body, is it my leg? Is it my arm?" "Gee, I don't know." "Well, how in the world can you fix it if you don't even know where it is on your body? You've got to figure out where, what's going on?"
And so I'd say 9 times out of 10 or more, Gale will be able to figure it out. So, "Okay, now I know what it is, what's the next step?" "Well, then we'll pray about it." And I'll sometimes say, "Gale, can you pray this for me because I'm just struggling?" And she'll pray, and that almost always makes an enormous amount of difference. As part of this process, I will often read scripture, like the passage from Philippians 3 or Psalm 139 that I mentioned beautifully and wonderfully made. I'll anchor myself in the truth saying, "This is true. I will not listen to these lies that are floating around in my head." So that's my system, and it does work. I deal with it immediately, I'll talk to Gale, or if it's maybe something to do with what I do at Beyond the Crucible, you and I, Gary, might talk, or maybe if it's something to do with church or whatever, maybe one of the other elders, or whoever the relevant person is that might know something about the issue and me is sort of the larger point.
And once I've understood it, then I anchor myself in truth, partly to the scripture, and by praying with somebody, about having somebody pray for me. Part of this whole journey is we talk a lot Beyond the Crucible about the need for fellow travelers, we don't get beyond your crucibles or your flare-ups, wounds, and aftershocks without fellow travelers. And it's not a matter of weakness to say, "Gee, I'm scared. I don't know why I feel bad about myself. I don't know why I'm triggered." It's a sign of self-confidence and strength that you're willing to ask somebody for help. And most people that I know are willing to pray. If you say, "Can you help me? Can you pray for me?" Who's just going to say no. If they care about you at all, like your spouse, loved one, good friend, they're going to say, "Yes, of course," they'll pray for you or pray with you. So you got to have a system, figure out what works for you, but have a system for dealing with it. Deal with it immediately, figure out a system that works for you.
Gary Schneeberger:
All right, folks, the blog, as we've been talking about is called Wounds are Inevitable, Here's How to Minimize the Pain. We've reached the last point, point eight. Let's go through the first seven though, just as a review. First point is, "Accept that wounds will never fully heal." Second point is, "Take an inventory of what your wounds are." Point three, "Analyze why they hurt so much." Four, "Consider the circumstances that trigger those wounds." Five, "Anchor yourself in your truth." Point six is this, "When your wounds are triggered, deal with it immediately." Point seven is this, "Have a proven system for dealing with those wounds when flare-ups happen." And here folks is point eight, and it's something you've heard before at Beyond the Crucible, but it's a little bit of a different context, and this is going to be fascinating to talk about. Point eight is this, "See your wounds as a blessing." Warwick, talk a little bit about that one.
Warwick Fairfax:
Beyond the Crucible, we have spoken about how our crucibles can be a blessing. You, Gary, coined the phrase that, "It didn't happen to you, it happened for you," which is a brilliant truth. It requires a lot of strength and a lot of perseverance to reframe it that way, but not only can crucibles be a blessing, but these aftershocks and wounds can be seen as a blessing, because I think one of the things that I've realized with my crucible and things I've been through, that there are ways that I can use them to help others, obviously, my story, you are not defined by your worst day, you can come back and have a fulfilling life, your crucible isn't the end of your story. We talk about life being about having a life of significance, a life on purpose dedicated to serving others. We say that a lot.
And one of the things we've found on the podcast is, I'd say most, if not everybody, on this podcast have been able to say what they went through was traumatic, it was awful, they certainly wouldn't wish to go through it again or have anybody go through it, but somehow, there's been blessing in those crucibles and they've actually been grateful for it. I remember one of the first guest that we had that mentioned this with Stacey Copas, an Australian woman in the outskirts of Sydney who dove into a pool as a teenager, an above-ground pool, and was diagnosed as a quadriplegic. She was merciless with herself because her parents said, "Hey, Stacey, don't do that," because kids obviously typically ignore their parents when it comes to things like that.
But she went through some really challenging years, but she would now say that what she went through was a blessing because her calling of consulting, and speaking, and helping other people wouldn't have happened without that. And it's not that there aren't consequences, not that she probably wished it didn't happen, but she's found a silver lining, some blessing in that. And as I've found just with my own book, and when I gave that talk in church many years ago in 2008, which I've spoken about, which that my pastor wanted a sermon illustration to illustrate some points he was making, and I gave a 10-minute sermon illustration, and somehow, what I said seemed to help people, which I thought, "How can stories from a failed takeover bid help anybody?" Because it's not like a common that challenge people have, but somehow it did. So then it led to me writing my book, Crucible Leadership.
When my book came out in 2022, I began speaking about what I went through. And again, people said, "Boy, this is helpful." So there's been some measure of healing when you feel like what I'm doing talking about my crucible can help people. So when you see your wounds, that can be a blessing that can help others. Like in your case, when you maybe had that self-image issue, when you sense others have that, you're attuned to it, probably like laser-like focus, "How can I be a blessing to them? How can I offer a word of encouragement?"` You don't need to think about it, you probably do it automatically because you know what it's like to feel less than.
So it doesn't mean there aren't consequences of wounds, but there's that oft-used phrase, pain for a purpose. When you feel like you have these wounds, but it makes you more sensitive to others, and you can be a blessing. When I'm so focused on encouraging people, when you grow up in this family business, when you feel like people think everything's handed to you and you didn't have to work hard, and there's just this sort of negative talk, and some people can say pretty negative things and have done, it makes you very attuned to try to say positive things, at least has in my case, to try to empower people and encourage them. So certainly, wounds can be a blessing, and it's helpful to see a wound as a blessing, as part of the healing process.
Gary Schneeberger:
That, folks, is the end of our discussion of the meat and potatoes of the blog, which is called Wounds are Inevitable, Here's How to Minimize the Pain. We hope you've learned a little bit about how to do that in this discussion. Warwick, as always, when we do these episodes, I want to pick your brain a little bit about what's the one truth? Hopefully, folks will take all eight points with them, but what's the one kernel that you hope that listeners and viewers will be left with from this discussion?
Warwick Fairfax:
Crucibles are real, they're painful, but so are aftershocks of those crucibles and our other wounds. So we know that we can't just brush off our crucibles... or hopefully, we should know, but we ignore these aftershocks of our crucibles and our wounds at our peril. The key is when you feel triggered by these aftershocks and wounds is to deal with them immediately and not let them fester and get worse. Don't just blow past them saying, "I'm tough. Hey, this is not a crucible. It's a wound. I can deal with it. I don't need any fellow travelers. I don't need help. I don't need prayer. I don't even need to know what they are exactly other than, yeah, it's something, it's an aftershock, it's a wound. I don't know what it is, but nothing to see here, let's move on." That's not a smart play, that's actually dumb, because those wounds will tend to get worse, they either get better or they get worse. They don't stay the same, that's part of the law of life.
So when you feel triggered by aftershocks and wounds, deal with them immediately, get help from friends, or depending on how severe those wounds are, maybe you might need counseling, maybe they're recurring so often that maybe it's something that's worse than just a flesh wound, maybe you need to get some professional help, some folks that really can help you. But the key is deal with it immediately, don't let them faster, don't let them get worse.
Gary Schneeberger:
Or as we say... or as we said in this episode, don't ruminate, fumigate. Copyright 2025, Beyond the Crucible, for sure. Folks, as we always do on these episodes that focus on Warwick's blogs, he's come up with three points of reflection for you to take with you as you leave us. The first one is this, identify your wounds. First place to start, identify what they are. Make sure you identify more than just the obvious ones. Dig deep, go down a little bit deeper. And this is where we've encouraged you before to journal about some things, to just kind of get below the surface. As I mentioned earlier, there's the stuff that's above the waterline, the stuff below the waterline, get to the stuff below the waterline in point one. In reflection point two, 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're triggered.
Again, this is something that you can write down so you can have a plan of attack, a plan of action when those things are triggered, because as we've discussed here, those moments being triggered are not fun moments. So do what you can to counteract that when they come up. And then the third point of reflection from Warwick's blog is this, think deeply about how your wounds can be a blessing. All right, let that sit for a bit, your wounds can be a blessing. Think about that. Start to consider what people and in what situations your wounds can actually be an asset. It might enable you to reach people and help them in ways that others might not be able to help them. And that, folks, puts a wrap on this episode of Beyond the Crucible. Please know this, until we're together next time, we understand that your crucible experiences are difficult, they're tough work.
And I talked about not just our crucibles on this episode, we also talked about the wounds, the barnacles, the aftershocks that are associated with those crucibles. But we know this to be true as well from our own experiences and from the experiences of our guests on this show, and that is this, your crucibles are not the end of your story, and I'll add, because of this episode, your aftershocks, your wounds aren't the end of your story, aren't a brick wall that stops your story. Because if you learn the lessons of them, if you move past them, even if they never go away, if those wounds never go away, but if you move past them emotionally, you can end up on the journey you're on, will take you to the most worthwhile destination you could ever imagine, and that is a life of significance.
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