In our final episode of 2022, we talk with author Gary Roe about how to get through these last days of the year while coping with crucibles and being grieved by losses that grow even more intense. He shares the best practices he’s packed into his book SURVIVING THE HOLIDAYS WITHOUT YOU, offering tips on being kind to yourself, finding ways to honor loved ones you’ve lost and accepting and believing a fundamental truth: this holiday will be different, but it can still be good.

Highlights

Transcript

Gary Schneeberger:

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Gary Roe:

Holidays are, to say they're hard, I mean, that's what we say they are hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard for somebody who's grieving. And the reason is that life is hard. But holidays have this unique sort of ability, Christmas and other holidays, Hanukkah, whatever the holiday might happen to be, to surface our losses and kind of throw them in our faces. We have so many memories packed around holidays, that the holidays are basically kind of an emotional minefield for people, I think. And what makes it even more difficult is, well, it's the holidays. You're supposed to be happy. I mean, here in the USA it's fa-la-la season.




Gary Schneeberger:

Fa-la-la-la season, the most wonderful time of the year. All is calm and all is bright. That's what the songs tell us about this time of year. But what if we just don't feel that way? Hi, I'm Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show. In our final episode of 2022, we talk with author Gary Roe about how to get through these final days of 2022, while coping with crucibles and losses that seem to grow even more intense. He shares the best practices he's packed into his book,,Surviving the Holidays Without You. Offering tips on being kind to yourself, finding ways to honor loved ones you've lost, and accepting and believing a fundamental truth, this holiday will be different, but it can still be good.

Warwick, just to level set for everybody, we just finished the series Gaining from Loss and as fate would have it, we were trying to get Gary to be on that series, and we didn't connect until later. And then we realized, you know what, this episode is airing on December 13th, Christmas is a couple weeks away, we're in the middle of the holidays, and the holidays were what prompted us to do the series Gaining from Loss to begin with. So this is really a value add to anybody who's listened to that series that specifically is going to hone in on some of the challenges we face on gaining from loss during Christmas, New Year's and this time of year, right?




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely. The holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, Hanukkah, I mean, we celebrate different holidays in different ways depending on our backgrounds and faith traditions, but just in general this season, the holidays, can be very tough. We can remember those we've lost, maybe, and some families have broken relationships for sometimes decades. It can be a time of joy and just incredible grief and loss all mixed in.

And Gary Roe here is really an expert on this, and I just loved reading his book, Surviving the Holidays Without You, which that title says it all. But Gary, just tell us a bit about the backstory. Because you have an amazing background. I mean, you are a former missionary, pastor, as the hospice chaplain, a grief counselor for hospice in Texas. I mean, gosh, that's got to be one of the most challenging vocations I can think of being a hospice chaplain. I mean, my gosh. But just tell us a bit about yourself and growing up, and just a bit about the backstory. Because what I find is typically our backstory illuminates where we are, often there's a reason why we do what we do. So just tell us, Gary, a little about you. What was life like for you growing up?




Gary Roe:

Thank you. Life was tough for me growing up. If you had told me anywhere along the way that I would be a missionary, a pastor growing up, or if you had said, "Oh, you're going to be a grief counselor and you're going to write books on grief," I would've looked at you like you were from another planet. I mean, I was raised in an environment of, I guess, mixed messages. I lost large chunks of my childhood to the evil of sexual abuse, multiple perpetrators over multiple years. And all the perpetrators were family members. So that started things complicated for me, and skewed my understanding of family, safety, love, God, everything from pretty well the beginning.

I lost both of my grandfathers by the time I was six or seven. One grandmother never knew who I was because of dementia. And so my nuclear family and extended family constantly felt like it was shrinking. My parents' marriage was not good. It was very volatile, very unpredictable. And as a result of that, I think I walked on eggshells all the time growing up. I grew up very, very shy, extremely introverted. But I had this idea that if I could just somehow perform well enough that I could escape more abuse, that I could get the approval that I wanted and needed, and that I could finally prove myself lovable, somehow. And so that's what I did. I basically turned into a performing animal in school.

I was a competitive swimmer growing up. So in that venue, too, I poured everything that I had into basically people pleasing, performing for other people, and trying to get the love I needed. Along the way, my life was falling apart, my family was falling apart. In the midst of that, in junior high school, I had a best friend that sat right in front of me in homeroom, the first period of every day. After Christmas break, he didn't come back. I asked the teacher about him. Turns out he died over Christmas break. I was clueless, because he was one of those school friends. We didn't interact outside of school.

And that's the first time I can remember ever asking the question why? That one made no sense to me. Nice guy, just wonderful friend. And that really got me to thinking about a lot of things. Long about that time, I had been wondering for a while, I thought, "With everything that's going on, I really believe that God exists, but if he exists, I really need to know him. I mean, I don't have what I need here. I don't have the support I need. So if he's real, I really need to get to know him."

And so one of my parents graciously drove me to a church that was down the way and dropped me off there. And I went to Sunday school and worshiped by myself from about the age of 10 on. And a Sunday school teacher took me under his wing at one point and basically introduced me to Jesus. And I wish I could say, just to dispel a myth here, that a lot of people would say, "Ah, you come to know Jesus and things go well for you." No, that's not the way it worked for me. I came to know Jesus and the difficulty went up on steroids almost overnight.

My parents ended up separating and divorced. My mother had been drifting into mental illness for years, but we had no idea what that was in the '60s and mid '70s. And so she had a mental breakdown, and as a result, I bounced over and lived with my dad. I was with him for about six months. It was the best six months of my life up and to that point. He was healthier than he had ever been. And then one Sunday making lunch, he dropped in front of me of a heart attack, never regained consciousness. They were able to resuscitate his heart and kept him alive on machines for about a week. But then at the age of 15, I got to nod my head that I was in agreement that they should unplug those machines, because I knew my dad would never want to live like that. And I was the closest relative that he had.

At that point, I honestly thought, "Great, my life is over." I laugh about it because I was laughing about it then. "I cannot believe that this is happening." My mom got out of inpatient psychiatric care, moved into the apartment my dad and I lived in. It was worse than ever before. She made a suicide attempt, went back into psychiatric care, and I was functionally orphaned and just living in an apartment. I don't know how the bills got paid, I don't know how it happened. Child services didn't get involved. I don't know how that happened either. And I was going to school. I was working. I was on the swim team. I was busy constantly. And that probably saved my life.

Thankfully, another family that I'd known for 10 years, they were a swimming family, so I knew all their kids. They said, "Why don't you come live with us?" And they were an amazing family. If I could picture a family opposite, if there is such a thing, so different from the family that I was raised in. And from the very beginning, when I walked into their house, they had a cake in the kitchen that said, "welcome home." They did not adopt me. There was no paperwork involved. It was just, I went and I lived with them for the last three years of high school.

And that experience in their home, as I watched them parent their other kids and they interacted with me, completely changed the perspective of my life. I would say, in summary, I knew Jesus. I had a relationship with Jesus, but they really taught me what it meant to really do life with Jesus. I actually experienced his love for me through them. And that was absolutely life changing.

And I can remember at 16 saying to myself, "well, if this is the way life is going to be, I'm going to get hit. I'm under no illusions that I'm not going to get hit again. And so how do I prepare myself? Can I prepare myself for the hits of life? And if I can't prepare myself, because I know I'm not in control, then how can I use the hits that come and turn them around and use them for good, not just for myself, but for those around me? Because if I can't do that, what's the point?"

I mean, that's really what I thought. And so surprise, I graduated from high school and went to school and studied psychology. And from there I went to seminary, and have been in full-time Christian ministry my entire adult life in some shape, form, or fashion.




Warwick Fairfax:

One of the things we say on Beyond the Crucible all the time is, "You don't always really have a choice about what happened to you." There's nothing you could have done without getting to all the details, whether it's sexual abuse, your mother's mental challenges and psychiatric issues, your dad dying of a heart attack in front of you. All of those things, they weren't your fault. There's nothing he could have done about any of them.

But we do have a choice, when bad things happen is we can hide under the covers and be angry and say, "This is not fair." Everything that happened to you was not fair. It was a combination of unfair, reprehensible, awful, unjust, pick the adjective. It was a combination of all of those things. And you had every right to be angry and be bitter. But you said, "It may not have been right or fair or just, but I will not let those factors that I went through define me. I will not let those determine who I am. I will not let evil win, if you will." I mean evil, not so much in people, but in good versus evil-




Gary Roe:

Yes.




Warwick Fairfax:

... in that biblical construct. So you made a choice to move ahead with your life. And just as a young kid, various astute, thinking, "If I can use my pain to help other people, it creates purpose." Doesn't make everything go away, but you made a lot of good choices, if that makes sense, that were so helpful. And I want listeners just to both understand clearly you made some good choices to not let the most terrible things were done to you define you.




Gary Roe:

Just to be clear, just so there's no misunderstanding on listeners parts, my life has not been smooth inside or out since the age of 16. Probably my greatest struggle in life has been with anxiety, and that probably doesn't surprise anybody. I went through a period of anxiety and panic attacks when I was really wondering, "Oh, my goodness, where is this coming from?" And turns out it was coming from unresolved grief about my dad and trauma about all the images involved in that, et cetera. And that was 10 years after he died. And anxiety continued to be an issue. It continued to be something that I work on, let go of, learn to manage, I guess, and learn to just how much can I handle and what kind of stuff I can handle.




Gary Schneeberger:

It's also very encouraging, I hope, listeners, this is encouraging to you to hear Gary say what he just said. Because yes, he's written 20 books. Yes, he's counseled folks. He's given insight, and we're going to talk more about that as we move on here about how to cope with grief during the holidays, but he doesn't have it, by his own admission right there, he doesn't have it all together. His lessons are hard learned. His lessons aren't just academic, although I'm sure there's part of that in there. He's learned things through the crucibles of his life that he can then pass along that, as we say at Crucible Leadership, to live a life on purpose dedicated to serving others. That's what his crucibles have led him to. That's what your crucibles can lead you to.

And your losses can lead to gains just as Gary's losses, incredibly difficult, painful losses. But I want you to go back and listen listener to the way he talked about them. He didn't sound depressed as he was talking about them. He didn't sound crushed while he was talking about them. They're still painful, I'm sure. But he's moved past them. He's moved through them, and he's found joy on the other side of that. That doesn't mean that they go away. It means that he has tapped into joy. He's found, like our series that just ended, like this bonus episode of that series, in some sense, he's gained from that loss. And we're going to continue to talk with him here so you can gain from some of the things he's learned as he's gone through his losses.




Warwick Fairfax:

I want to transition to your book, because one of the reasons, I know you've written many books, but this book, Surviving the Holidays Without You, as we said at the very beginning, the holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, Hanukkah, whatever the holiday is, it can be really challenging. They're times of joy, but of tremendous grief at the loss of a loved one. Oh, I mean, you could easily go back and think grieving the perfect family, whatever that means that you didn't have, remembering what wasn't.

Just talk about some of those things. I mean, in your book, you offer so many good thoughts about the danger of isolation, and this year's holidays will be different, but they can still be good. I know in your first chapter you talk about why holidays are so hard, and you start out with this thought of expectations. So talk a bit about, well, why holidays are so hard? Which we've talked a little bit about, but just amplify that a bit. And just what is the role of expectations in making holidays so hard?




Gary Roe:

Holiday are to say they're hard. I mean, that's what we say they are hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard for somebody who's grieving. And the reason is that life is hard. But holidays have this unique sort of ability, Christmas and other holidays, Hanukkah, whatever the holiday might happen to be, to surface our losses and kind of throw them in our faces. We have so many memories packed around holidays that the holidays are basically kind of an emotional minefield for people, I think. And what makes it even more difficult is, well, it's the holidays. You're supposed to be happy. I mean, here in the USA, it's Fa-la-la season, where everybody's supposed to be happy, upbeat, spend a lot of money.

And for a grieving person, they normally, we normally feel like we're on a different page than the people around us, because we are on a different page. Our loss has changed us, but it hasn't necessarily changed our friends, maybe some of our family, depending on what the loss was. And so it's almost like we are different people now traveling a different road and our world has changed, but the world around us has not changed. And it is blazing on just as if nothing happened.

How dare people have the holidays and celebrate and decorate, when here I am, don't they understand what has happened here? And then you put on top of that the individual grieving person's life situation. Now what do we mean there? Well, their emotional health, their mental health, their job situation, their financial situation, their relational situation. Do they have a good support network? Are they fairly isolated? What is their spiritual life like? And how does that contribute, or how does it not contribute to all of this? All of those things are in the mix too.

So it's almost like this time of year is an injection of grief adrenaline into a person's system that raises everything that they experience as a grieving person to new heights. Now, expectations play a huge role in that, because we all have expectations and we all know that the danger is, expectations are sneaky, because we don't even know we have expectations. But when we go somewhere and we expect someone to remember our loss and support us, that's an expectation. When we expect people to be sympathetic, even after a month, because that's what I've found in talking to people in my own experience, most people who know us will be sympathetic to our loss for about a month. And then they'll expect us to do the impossible, they'll expect us to go back to who we were before, because that's the person that they miss. And that person's not coming back.

We are traveling this road now and we can heal and grow and we can become better people. Yes, we can, but we won't be the same people. So we have expectations of other people. Other people have expectations of us. And the hardest ones though, and I bet you can guess where I'm going, is the expectations we have of ourselves, that, "Okay, I'm going to go in here and shop and I'm not going to break down. I'm not going to feel grief. I am going to go to this party and I am going to be okay." We expect Herculean, super human stuff from ourselves when we're grieving.

And so the expectations we have of ourselves thinking through those, just to become aware of them, even three or four of them, I expect myself to be upbeat when I feel terrible. I expect myself to interact with others as if my loss didn't happen. I expect myself to find joy in these holidays, just like I found joy last year before my loss. Or I expect if you're one of those people responsible for doing the holidays for your family, oh, bless you, then you might think, "Okay, I've got to keep up the act and I have to do an even better job this year." Expectations can really get us when it comes to the holidays, when we're grieving.




Warwick Fairfax:

Just talk a bit about that concept of just being kind to yourself, lower your self-expectations, things will trigger you. Yes, the holidays are different, but just don't expect yourself to be stiff upper lip and move on, smile and just get over it. Because that's such good advice.




Gary Roe:

Yes, I could not agree more. I mean, grief is a storm and we didn't ask for it, and we didn't cause it. But like all storms, it comes to us and it envelops us. And we can attempt to fight the storm, that doesn't work well. We can try to flee from the storm, that doesn't work well either. Or we can freeze in the storm. None of those three work. The only thing we can do is exactly that. We ride the storm out, we meet the storm head on. And grief, it doesn't come from outside of us, it is within us. And so what is in us, especially grief, needs to come out.

So getting the grief out is a phrase I use a lot and just, "What do I need to do?" "Well, you need to get the grief out." "How do I handle this?" "Well, get the grief out." Find ways, practical, healthy ways to get the grief out. Talking out loud, writing, art, building something, tearing something apart, exercising, and thinking as you exercise and giving your brain that time to go, just kind of process things in a different way. All of these things are so, so helpful.

It's almost like we all have a grief reservoir inside of us and we don't even know it, but it's raining on our reservoir all the time. There's losses happening to us every day. We see it on the media, we see it on social media, we experience it personally, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss. And so sometimes it's just drizzling. Sometimes we've got a thunderstorm going on, sometimes it's just a fog, other times it's a flash flood, sometimes it's even a tsunami. And so if we have a grief reservoir, the important thing is we've got a dam, and we just need to make sure our spillways are open, so that we have opportunity, that we're getting some of the grief out, we're talking about it, we're writing about it.

And when it hits us all of a sudden in what we call a grief burst, which is we're just walking along minding our own business, and then there's a grief trigger and all of a sudden it's like a lightning bolt, and the emotions are overwhelming. That's scary. It's embarrassing, if you're in public. But it's also, I think, necessary, because none of us can be fully proactive about expressing our grief. We're always going to have this buildup and it's healthy. It's like a pressure release of grief, where it comes flooding out of us all at once.

It's like a God designed, built-in defense thing for us emotionally. So all of those things together, the one thing that doesn't work is stuffing our grief, because grief will be expressed one way or another. And if we don't express it, then it will leak. And leaks are usually trouble or we end up regretting things. And you know what? We have enough regrets already. So finding ways to express our grief is really, really, really important.




Gary Schneeberger:

And one of the ways that you talked about doing that at the holidays I thought was really both enlightening and seems boundlessly helpful, this idea of, I think you called it having some memory sharing among your loved ones. If you're facing this holiday for the first time without someone who's been there the whole time, have a memory sharing party, where people talk about their favorite memories about the person who's no longer with us. Why is that so helpful?




Gary Roe:

It's huge because one of the things I hear from a lot of grieving people, and I've experienced it myself too, is that nobody brings up my loved one. I want to talk about them. Or if I do bring up my loved one, everybody gets uncomfortable and goes silent and walks away or changes the subject or all of those things. That hurts. And so when we can gather people or when people can come together and it doesn't need to be a lot of people either, and the understanding is, let's say we lost Steve this year, we're going to share memories about Steve. We're just going to talk about Steve and see where it goes. And yeah, we know we're going to cry. Yeah, parts of a are going to be painful and difficult.

But what I hear from people that do memory sharing, and when I've been involved in memory sharing, it's kind of scary going in because you don't know what it's going to be like. Everybody's concerned about expressing too much emotion. But what happens is as people begin to talk, the grief begins to come out in healthy and natural ways. And it is emotional. Part of it is painful, but what everyone says, and what I would say is, "Oh, but that was so good. I'm so glad we did that." Because otherwise, Steve is the elephant in the room. And everybody knows that Steve is the elephant in the room, because we are always hyper aware of who is missing.

So this memory sharing, is just massively important. Even at, let's say, a grief event where people are coming, if I hold a grief event on surviving the holidays, for example, and 20 people come, I'll often say, "It doesn't really matter what I say today. I could say Mary had a little lamb over and over again, and you all would leave thinking that this gathering, this event was the best thing since sliced bread." "Why?" "Because in this room you know that the other people get it, and you're going to share your story here. And they're going to listen and they're going to share their story." And lo and behold, that's the way it works out every single time.

So we heal when we get to share the story. And so we need places to share the story, to share memories. So memory sharing is an excellent and easy way to do that. The one thing I would say is that if listeners want to do that as a group or as a family, that the people coming, you just let them know that that's what you're going to do, so that they know beforehand that we're going to talk about Steve when we get together. The other thing I would say is that we're not going to linger before we talk about Steve. Steve is the elephant in the room. And we're going to talk about Steve quickly. In other words, soon after we gather together, we're going to dive into that. Because if not, sometimes the anxiety about that can just build a little more than it needs to.




Warwick Fairfax:

Just talk about how we often feel alone in grief and nobody gets it. Nobody can understand. But somehow by sharing... And you say later, you've got to find the right people, the safe people to share with. But talk about why it's so important to share and just to get over just this sense of isolation and feeling lonely and feeling nobody gets it. Nobody understands my heart is shattered into a billion pieces. So talk about that sense of combating loneliness.




Gary Roe:

Yes. Grief is naturally lonely. I don't see how it can't be lonely. And so then the goal becomes, there are a lot of people grieving, so to put it in kind of a funny way, we get to be lonely together. We all get that this is lonely. And so we get to travel this lonely road together, sympathize with one another, hopefully, empathize with one another too. But the loneliness, we get into danger, and we all know this, when we attempt to chase that loneliness away. When we deny it, when we try to run from it, when we try to fill those holes in our heart with things that can't possibly measure up and fill that.

And so we're not really good at this. I'm not really good at this, which is acknowledging my loneliness and sitting with it and feeling it and grieving about that. And recognizing that almost every person I encounter, I would personally say every person I encounter, is dealing with their own hidden loneliness. And it's a shame to me that I can meet 10 people today all suffering from their own hidden loneliness. And it never comes up. We transact business. We go to the grocery store, they scan my items. Maybe somebody pushes my cart to the car, because my grocery store does that. You don't have choice. And then you're just interacting with people that there's so much potential.

But it's really on each one of us about how we're going to deal with our loneliness. And if we're willing to share it with other people. Many times we would be very surprised at the responses. Some people might run from us, sure, some people don't want to go there, sure. But what about the person that does want to go there with us, and this is back to what Gary brought up about memory sharing, what a great way to love the people around you is to initiate that time. To give them the gift of an opportunity to express their grief in a safe place, where they can't really do that anywhere else.

So if we can view our loneliness as this is inevitable as a human being in this world, this loneliness, especially when we're grieving. And we can say, "I am going to use this loneliness rather than going on a self pity party here. I am going to use this loneliness, recognize other people are grieving and are lonely too. And I'm going to talk about it every opportunity I get. I'm going to think of creative ways that I can mention my loved one's name, that I can share a little bit of their story."

And what comes to mind is where I think we're all familiar with the Salvation Army and with the bell ringers and the kettles. And there was a son who, an adult son, lost his dad, and his dad was a bell ringer for the Salvation Army every Christmas. So what he decided to do the first Christmas was he had never rung, he'd never been a bell ringer. He decided, "I'm going to ring a bell and I'm going to do it for dad, and I'm going to tell people I'm doing it for dad." So that when people put money in the bucket, he said, "Merry Christmas. I'm here and I'm doing this for my dad. He passed away this year. He did this for 10 years. So Merry Christmas to you, and I'm glad I get to be here."

He said people would stop in their tracks, some people would just kind of look at him and walk on. But a lot of people stopped and conversations happened. Because so many people had lost loved ones either that year or the year before or the year before or they had lost their own dad or whatever the case might be. Good things happen. I mean, good things happen when we are willing to be vulnerable and share a little bit of our story and our grief. Now, does it always work out great? Of course not. Of course not. But at least we've gotten some of the grief out. And so no matter which way you slice it, it's positive.




Warwick Fairfax:

In your case, being a pastor, a missionary helping people in hospice, you've used your pain, your grief to benefit a lot of others. And I know, in my case, in some small way, when I use my story to help other people, it doesn't make the pain, the grief go away, but it makes it a little bit easy to deal with, like drops of grace. So just as we close here, just talk about maybe those drops of grace, and why an eternal perspective. And maybe pain for purpose, while there's some, I don't know, a little bit of relief from the grief, at least the intensity of the pain. I don't know if that question makes any degree of sense. And forgive me if it's a little bit convoluted a question, but you probably get where I'm coming from.




Gary Roe:

I think I do. I really think that this is, well, this is true for me, the times that I have learned the most in life were in the crucibles, I'm almost willing to say that the times that I really am able to love other people and really make a difference seem to be at the times when I am hurting. And so these are unique, crucibles are unique opportunities. They are unique opportunities for us to grow beyond what we thought was possible for ourselves and unique opportunities to love the people around us. I can think of nothing more overcoming, if we could put it that way, of turning pain to purpose, then taking a tragedy and turning it around and finding a way to use what happened to serve other people, to love other people where they are, to make a difference in other people's lives. It's just huge.

And so that strength, I think, really comes from an eternal perspective, because if I know, just speaking for me, that Jesus Christ lives in me and His resources are measureless, then I'm not just limited to my own smarts or dumbs or my own abilities. It goes way beyond that, just because He's in the mix. So if eternity is in the mix and we believe it's always in the mix, then there are things way beyond ourselves that are possible, if we are willing to humble ourselves and to basically receive the healing over time and to cooperate.




Gary Schneeberger:

That sound that you just heard listeners is not the captain turning on the fast and seatbelt sign, I think I heard Santa's sleigh bells and he's about to land the sleigh. And we got to get out because he's going to come and we can't see him or we won't get any presents and all that good stuff.

But before I do that, there's a couple things I want to do with you, Gary. One, as you were talking, and I wrote this down probably 25 minutes ago, talking about how even in the midst of trying times during the holidays, it can still be good. One of the things, Warwick, found this PDF that you have of eight tips for handling grief in the holidays. And the last one you sum up by saying, "This holiday will be different, but it can still be good." Not trying to edit the expert, but I read that as, this holiday will be different and it can still be good. It's not a but situation. I think it's a both and, it can be different and it can be good.

But what stuck in my head and what I wrote down is when you think about the movie, It's a Wonderful Life, we've all seen it, think about what happens in that movie. A whole lot of what happens in that movie is not wonderful. It's the ending of that movie that makes it a wonderful life. And I think that perspective, if we bring that to the holidays and we know that there's going to be bumps in the road, there's going to be bumps in the sled as we're going over the hills, if we can find a way at the end, it can indeed turn out to be wonderful.

That fa-la-la-la time doesn't have to be that every moment of every day as we're going through Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Years. But if we can do some of these things that you talk about, we can indeed land on that place that is a wonderful life. And I would not be a wonderful cohost if I did not give you, our guest, the chance to let listeners know how they can find out more about you and your books and your perspective. How can they find you online?




Gary Roe:

Well, you can find me on my website. It's just my name, garyroe.com, G-A-R-Y-R-O-E.com. Don't go looking for me on social media, because you won't find me. I basically got off of all social media recently. It was just a personal decision. So I'm trying to handle everything through my website. There's a Contact Gary box on almost every page. There are a number of free resources under the resource tab, free eBooks, a free email course, et cetera. So if you've resonated with anything I've said, please come visit me and we can dialogue some more. And hopefully, I can be of some help, somehow.




Gary Schneeberger:

Excellent. Warwick, I know I kind of landed the sleigh after you already asked the last question, but the last word is yours, if you have one.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, thanks Gary, as in Gary Schneeberger. So Gary, Gary Roe, I love that sentence that we just heard the holiday willnbe different, but it can still be good. I mean, I would love if you could offer listeners a word of hope this holiday season, and maybe it's around, it will be different, but it can still be good using pain for a purpose. You've said so many wise things. But just there are probably a lot of listeners going into the holiday season with trepidation and anxiety, as you write in the book, "I just want to get through it. I've got to do this. It's going to be a lot of work, a lot of memories. I just want to survive it. Thriving is not an option. I just want to survive." So what's a word of hope for listeners who are approaching the holidays with trepidation, anxiety, and maybe even fear and dread?




Gary Roe:

Yes. This may sound a little trite, but on my calendar every day I write the word today in big letters on top of today. What am I saying? All I'm responsible for is today. I don't know what's coming at me tomorrow. I don't even know what's coming at me today. But in other words, the whole one day, one thing at a time, one moment at a time, beginning to discipline ourselves, if we can, to just say, "Just one thing at a time." That's one way we can really be kind to ourselves.

And the other thing I would say is, please remember now is not forever. What you're going through now, one thing that we are can be absolutely convinced about of grief and life is things will change. They will change. So now is not forever. Just do what's in front of you. Take one thing at a time, one day at a time, and please be kind to yourself along the way, kinder than you think you need to be. And very patient with yourself. Because this is just, as we said before, hard, hard, hard, hard.




Gary Schneeberger:

And those are the final words of our episode. And I think a great final thought as we find ourselves today. If you're listening to this when this goes live, it's December 13th. We've got a couple weeks until Christmas. And taking some of those lessons and going into the holiday with that perspective, it's going to be hard, but it can still be happy. You can still find the happiness in the hard. I think that's what we've talked about today.

And that's what we try to talk about all the time here at Beyond the Crucible. So until we're together the next time, and that will be in 2023, when we are together the next time, remember this, we do know that your crucibles are difficult. We do know that losses are painful. We've all been through them, everybody on this call, two of whom are named Gary. We know that's the case, but we also know it's not the end of your story. Those crucibles, those losses can be the beginning of a new chapter in your story that can lead to the best destination possible, because that destination is a life of significance.

We put a bow on the package of our special fall series by exploring the wisdom we heard from all five of our guests. The insights they offered form a roadmap for how to find gain out of even the most devastating losses: be patient, work to change what you cannot accept, understand there is room for your pain on the other side of your loss, intentionally cultivate joy as you continue to grieve and live as a good ancestor to those who come after you.

Highlights

Transcript

Warwick Fairfax:

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




Gary Schneeberger:

The wounds we carry with us are not obstacles to simply get over. Rather, our wounds are the way through. And loss gives us new eyes to see the grace threaded through all humanity. She ended her thoughts on this subject by saying this, "A beautiful world waits for us on the other side of loss." I'll say it again so you absorb that. Write it down. Keep it in your planner. Put it on your phone, "A beautiful world waits for us on the other side of loss." A world so expansive it has room for our pain.

Those words spoken by our guest, Kayla Stoecklein during our special fall series Gaining from Loss, make up just one of the nuggets we discussed today as we put a bow on the package, the gift that has been that series. Hi, I'm Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show. Warwick and I dedicate this sixth episode of the series to exploring the wisdom we heard from all five of our guests. The insights they offered form a roadmap on how to gather the gains out of even the most devastating losses. Number one, be patient. Number two, work to change what you cannot accept. Number three, understand there is room for your pain on the other side of your loss. Number four, intentionally cultivate joy as you continue to grieve. And number five, live as a good ancestor to those who come after you. And here's a pro tip before you keep listening. Have a pen and paper handy to take notes, not as homework, but as inspiration for soul work.

I think the place to start, Warwick is really to ask the question that may be on the minds of people who are listening right now. Maybe they didn't hear all of the episodes. We encourage you to go back and listen if you did not hear all of them. But why did we do this series? What was the impetus for doing Gaining from Loss?




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, this time of year, the holidays, the Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, a lot of holidays at this time of year, and it can be a time of celebration and joy, but it can also be a time of contemplation and sadness. It could be the loss of loved ones. I mean, as we speak, I've lost both my parents. My mother died five years ago. My dad, gosh, 30 years ago. I know you've lost your parents. There's that sense of loss. And for some, their families, there may be challenges at the Thanksgiving table or Christmas dinner table or what have you. There could be tension. There could be conflict. There could be absence of ones who may be alive, but there's broken relationships. So there's a missing seat for the worst. In one sense, the worst reason is there's unreconciled relationships. So sometimes, the holidays, they can be a time of joy, but they can be a time of contemplation, sadness, and sometimes a deep sense of loss. So that's kind of why we thought of the holidays as a great time to talk about a series on loss.




Gary Schneeberger:

And it seems, I mean kind of counterintuitive, right? The holidays are supposed to be, it's the most wonderful time of the year. And as you said, it is not always, in our individual experiences, it's not always the most wonderful time of the year because as you said, we've lost some loved ones along the way. We've got some conflict with members of our family and the learnings that we have to talk about here, we hope listener will help you navigate some of that rough terrain as you work your way through the most wonderful time of the year. One thing that I thought was really interesting, Warwick, and this entire episode, let's say this at the outset, this entire episode is kind of based on the tent poles of this conversation that we're going to have is based on the most recent blog at crucibleleadership.com, which summarizes the key learnings of this series.

But one of the things that that blog talks about is we struggled a bit with what to name this series. It didn't occur to us until we were so busy planning the series and arranging guests that a few days before the series was about to hit record, and we were going to start talking to guests, it was like, "Oh, we don't have a title for this thing. What are we going to call it?" And we knocked a few things around and we landed on Gaining from Loss, but we were worried a little bit. I'll admit I was a little worried that will people think that's a little too glib? Is it too cute, Gaining from Loss, get it? Loss and gain? And will people really at a deeper level, at a more meaningful level, be like, "Yeah, loss is not something you gain from." Why did we ultimately land on choosing that title?




Warwick Fairfax:

At Crucible Leadership and Beyond The Crucible, we're all about giving people hope. In every episode of this podcast, we talk about our guests' worst day, how they bounced back from that, how they found hope and healing. So that's really what we want for our listeners, is even if today's their worst day to feel like that, there is hope in life. There is redemption in the broad sense of that word. And so loss is painful, whether it's loss of a loved one, a physical tragedy, and we've had a lot of different kinds of loss in the podcast overall the last several years, certainly in this series we have.

And so what hope, what gain can you find from that loss? I mean, you can't undo what happened such as the death of a loved one. What can you learn from that is there's some way, while it's devastating and you wish it never happened, is there some hidden blessing, some hidden gain that you can get from it. And it sounds counterintuitive. It almost sounds heartless cold, lack of empathy that each guest we had said that they did gain something from it. They learned something from it. It did give them, there was some hope that came out of it. So it sounds very counterintuitive, but there is something you can gain from loss. You never want the loss. Nobody wants loss like the loss of a loved one. But what can you learn from it? Is there some gain that you can get from tragedy? It's kind of I think what we said along.




Gary Schneeberger:

Right. It was funny because the first episode that we did, I was still concerned enough about it that I asked our first guest, Shelley Klingerman, is that, "Would you say that you gained from your loss?" And she said yes. And then I asked that same question of every other guest, all five guests that we had, and all of them said, yes indeed. They had gained something from their loss. So from that perspective, we landed on a good place with the title. And here's an interesting side note, and let me preface what I'm about to say, listener with this is not me trying to evangelize you. I'm not proselytizing when I quote from the Bible here. I'm doing it to show that this idea of gaining from loss wasn't something that Warwick and I and the Beyond the Crucible team sort of figured out all on our own. We're not that smart.

From the Bible, and I just heard this in church. Here's why I'm bringing it up at all, because it's like first and foremost in my mind and made me go, "Well, there's nothing new under the sun." And this idea of gaining from loss has been around a while. This last Sunday, which is as we're recording this episode, was only three days ago, our pastor at our church preached out of Philippians 3. And in that chapter of the Bible, if you're not familiar with it, it's Paul, the Apostle Paul saying this. Now, just let me back up and give the back story, as Warwick likes to do, the back story of the Apostle Paul, he was Saul. He was not a follower of Christ. He was a persecutor of those who followed Christ. He was pretty high up in the hierarchy of people who were not Christians at that time.

So he had a lot of gain in his life in terms of how he was living day to day in the things that meant something to him. But then he has an encounter with Jesus. He becomes a follower of Jesus. And he loses all that worldly stuff that he had, but he also, once he starts following Jesus, ends up getting imprisoned and beaten. And he suffers many, many, many, many in our language, crucibles. In these verses in Philippians 3, this is what Paul says about the idea of gain and loss. He says this, "Whatever gain I had, I count it as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord. For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ." Again, we're not having church up in here. I bring that up to say, in the first century, there was a guy talking about gaining from loss. This is not a new subject for us to be discussing, is it?




Warwick Fairfax:

It's not, Gary. And it's funny when you mentioned to me as we were preparing that you were going to mention this, what you didn't know that this is Philippians 3:7 through 14. It's one of my life verses. As I was recovering, as listeners would know pretty well by now, losing my family's 150 year old media business in Australia with a failed $2.25 billion takeover bid. I felt like I betrayed my father, my great-great grandfather, John Fairfax, 4,000 plus employees at the company, caused ill feelings in my family. I mean so much was gone. But my faith and my faith in Christ as the cornerstone anchor of who I was, and I clung to these verses again in the NIV, that whatever were gains to me, I now consider loss for the sake ofChrist. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I have lost all things.

And in the old NIV version, it says, "I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ to be found in him.", and so forth. So I took this extremely personally that John Fairfax Ltd., 150 year old multi-billion dollar business. It's lost, it's garbage, it's rubbish. It's nothing compared to knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord. So in a broader sense, yeah it was a lot of money, but a higher purpose, a higher calling, a life of significance as we call it. But there were more things that are important than money, status, position, empires. Nothing wrong with success, but there's more to life than empires. And then at the very end, one of the things I kept almost like a mantra on a daily basis going down to verse 13, but one thing I do, forgetting what is behind is training toward what is ahead. I press on toward the goal, to win the prize, which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

So I was thinking, okay, I'm going to forget what is behind. Okay, I made mistakes, cataclysmic mistakes, yes. It was a $2 billion loss, but I'm going to forget about that. It's a daily basis of forgetting. It's not one and done, and I'm going to move ahead with my life. That ended up being Crucible Leadership, took a while to get there, and it was an evolution, but I was not going to be stuck in the pit. I was going to move forward. And as we'll hear, I've learned a lot from my loss. There's been a lot of gain from my loss in my own life, with people we have on the team, friends such as yourself, Gary, and the work that we do in providing hope to others. So I've gained a lot. None of that would have been possible without the loss. Would it have nice to not go through that loss? Sure, that would be nice. The editorial cartoons and all of the stuff and the pain over several decades, sure. But have I gained from the loss? Oh no question. It's been a lot of gain and blessing from that loss. So I can testify to that. So yeah, that verse is life verse life passage for me that I clung to as I tried to claw my way out of the pit, from my perspective divine help.




Gary Schneeberger:

Right. And two points to make off of what you just said before we get into the main course of what we're going to talk about, one is this podcast wouldn't exist if you did not gain from loss. I mean, you wouldn't have created Beyond the Crucible. Beyond The Crucible is a concrete evidence of your gain from loss, right?




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean it is. And when I feel, like I was up at Seton Hall a few days ago, actually the end of last week as we're recording this, when I'm giving speech to a university in northern New Jersey and giving speech to a first year class at Seton Hall with the Buccino Leadership Institute, what I was talking about your worst day doesn't have to define you and there's hope and redemption in a broader sense. It was clear that it was meaningful to them. And the questions I was asked was just profound and size of questions. Those are drops of grace. It's like okay, the loss was bad, but I'm using that loss in some ways, in this case to help some students at Seton Hall to hopefully have some sense of hope and calling and redemption in a broader sense. So those moments make it feel like okay, there's a hope, there's meaning, there's purpose. Those events are deeply meaningful as we move forward from our loss.




Gary Schneeberger:

Yeah, and there's the second point that I want to emphasize before we get into the main course, and that's this. Your loss and the gain that you got from it and are still getting from it, is circumstantially different than other people's. I mean, that's a hallmark of what we've discovered on now more than 140 episodes of Beyond The Crucible, is that emotions that run through loss, that run through crucibles, we have discovered are remarkably similar even when the circumstances of that loss, of that crucible is much different. So all the guests that we're going to talk about have had different losses than you, have had different losses than me, but there are some emotional touch points with what they have to say, with what they've been through emotionally, similar to what you've been through emotionally and me and everybody else we've talked to in 140 episodes.




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, it's so true, Gary. I mean, I go back as listeners would be aware where Crucible Leadership in my book and Beyond The Crucible, my book, Crucible Leadership, Embrace your Trial to Lead a Life of Significance. It was birthed at 2008 when I gave a talk in church about what I went through and lessons learned. And since it's a church, what I felt like some lessons God was sharing with me, at least in my life, when weeks and months afterwards, people would come up to me and say, "You know what, Warwick? What you shared really helped me." And I'm thinking there aren't any former media moguls in the congregation. This is a collection of just different folks in Maryland where I live. And so I think there's this universality of pain and loss and vulnerability, which is remarkable to me.

I remember just one of our earliest guests on the podcast a few years ago, David Charbonnet, who was a Navy SEAL that was paralyzed in a training accident in southern California where he lives. And he became a paraplegic through that. And I remember saying to him, "David, I feel apologetic because what I went through is nothing compared to what you went through." And in a very gracious and profound way, David said, "You know what, Warwick? Your worst day is your worst day. It's not a competition." And so every guest we've had, we've had quadriplegics, paraplegics, victims of abuse, people who've lost businesses, lost loved ones, every kind of crucible you can imagine, they all have the same heart and same spirit. It's not a competition to who's had the worst day, who's had the worst tragedy. They're very generous with that. And so yeah, I think I've learned a lot from that, that we can gain from these tragedies that happen to us. And our guests all have that broader perspective of hope and they don't judge other people. And yeah, it's remarkable. I just feel privileged to learn from the folks we've had on the series and certainly this last series, a ton. Yeah.




Gary Schneeberger:

Well, let's get into some of that stuff that you learned and that I learned. There are sort of five takeaway learnings, listener that we're going to go through. These are all based on things that one guest told us as we were going through it. So five things, five guests. Each point is something one of those guests talked to us about when we interviewed them. What's a practical action step that will help you gain from loss? The first point is be patient. And that came from our guest, Jason Schechterle. He was barely a year into his dream career as a police officer in 2001 when his squad car was hit from behind while it was stopped. It was hit by a taxi that was traveling more than 100 miles an hour. The explosive fire in which he was trapped for minutes left him in a coma for two and a half months, initially robbed him of his eyesight and led to severe scarring and disfigurement as he endured 56 surgeries to first save his life and then improve his life.

But even though the physical and emotional trauma of all of that was heavy, he has come to live by the motto he encourages those he talks to as a motivational speaker to live by. And he gave us, he told us, I actually saw him speak and he had it on a slide where he was speaking. I took a picture of it and we talked about it in his episode of the series. And what he says is sometimes the most beautiful inspirational changes will disguise themselves as utter devastation. Be patient. That one, obviously when I first heard him say it, struck me as really... Sorry to steal your word, profound, but also made me realize he would be a fantastic guest for the show. Right?




Warwick Fairfax:

It's really true. I mean Jason is such an inspiring person. He's filled with hope. I mean as some people might know, who had people go through medical tragedies, being a burn victim is I guess about as painful experience as you can possibly experience, as painful as humans can experience. And that was certainly his experience with 56 surgeries. And it took him years to just physically grapple with that. But accepting the fact that he is disfigured, I mean he won't go to places like Disneyland because he's afraid of the effect it will have on kids. He doesn't want to scare them, which is so sad. But he's just filled with hope and grace, and you have to listen to the podcast to just hear all the details. But it's a miracle that he's alive. He happened to be two minutes away from one of the best burn centers in the country, apparently in Phoenix.

And there was a police car very near and several hundred feet away a fire engine. I mean, they could put out his burning patrol car, and he wouldn't have had his last child if he had died because his last child was born right after the accident. So he was just full of grace, full of gratitude for just being alive and his attitude to life, a lightness in his spirit despite the pain and the real physical challenges he has even today, it's just inspirational. It's hard to even understand how somebody could have the attitude that he has and to feel like his life is a blessing. I mean, later on in that blog that you wrote, you sort of end this section with a quote that he says in which he says, "I have gained everything and lost nothing." It's like, how can that be? But he's just made that choice to be positive and his life and story is such an inspiration. It's mind boggling to consider his attitude to life given the excruciating pain that he's gone through and have to live with.




Gary Schneeberger:

Both physically and emotionally, right?




Warwick Fairfax:

Yes.




Gary Schneeberger:

I mean there's a lot of yes, there's physical trauma for sure, but the emotional trauma in many ways was just as bad in its own lane. But the point he made there about being patient, there were a number of times, two and a half months in a coma, 56 surgeries. There are a number of times that Jason Schechterle could have said, "That's it, I'm done. I'm not going to keep fighting. As you've said many times, I'm going to lie in bed, pull the covers over my head and just kind of do nothing. And then eventually death will come naturally, and that will be that." His point was be patient. Tomorrow's going to be better than today. It's that optimistic view that good changes come disguised as losses if you wait them out, if you have resilience as you've pointed out. They can reshape themselves into gains, into blessings. And one of the things I'm going to love about this episode is I get to ask you questions I've never heard you answer before, which is kind of fun. And the first question I want to ask you on this idea of being patient is you talked a little at the top of the show here about your crucible, your big crucible of losing the family media dynasty, $2.25 billion. How was being patient part of your bounceback story of moving beyond your crucible? How did that look for you?




Warwick Fairfax:

I think for me, obviously I'm pretty self aware, I'm afraid, so I have my faults, but I have very high perseverance and patience, and elite in the perseverance sense. But there can be, am I always patient when my kids were younger in the '90s and like most dads, it's like, can we leave already? And then we would stop for five minutes on some rest stop on a freeway and it would be half hour, 40 minutes. I mean, how long does it take to go to the bathroom and get a snack? But I'd say 80%, 90% of dads across the country or the world have that sense impatient feeling. Let's get going, let's get to where we're trying to go. But living that sense of patience, yeah, I mean for me it was just devastating. But just one more day, how can I move forward? It took a while in the '90s.

I think for me, what kind of fueled maybe my patience was my faith, just that verse we talked about in Philippians 3, forgetting what is behind, training to what is ahead, losing $2.25 billion family business is, rubbish. It's nothing compared to for me, my faith in Christ. So I guess my patience was fueled by my faith and I just clung to that, that nothing is more important than my faith. And again, in this case, my faith in Jesus, that was sort of an anchor for my soul that kept me going. And the love of my wife, who's American, we've been married over 30 years and my kids, that unconditional love. And then gradually step by step as I took baby steps, and again, listeners are familiar with this, where I started off in an aviation services firm in Maryland in the late '90s doing business and financial analysis, got on a couple nonprofit boards, became a certified International Coach Federation executive coach, after the talk in church, started writing my book, Crucible Leadership. And then from there, Beyond the Crucible the podcast and so forth.

So my patience, the anchor for that was my faith as well as the support of my wife and my family but as I had small steps, again I almost think of them as drops of grace, no matter how small. I was like, okay, I don't think I thought of it in these Jason Schechterle terms that maybe tomorrow can be better than today. Today was better than yesterday. Hey, I got a job. I'm actually doing something that I can do. I was pretty good at Excel back then and could do financial analysis. So yeah, inherently, I'm somebody with very high perseverance. I can't relate to what Jason went through, that level of pain. That's Olympic level, more than Olympic level of patience and perseverance. I don't feel like I needed that level. But that being said, it was yeah, my inherent, I guess I have a lot of perseverance in my wiring, values. I'm not sure how you look at it. My faith, support of my family, and then meaningful work where I felt like I was making a difference, even in some small ways. It was a combination of things that helped fuel my patience and perseverance.




Gary Schneeberger:

Yeah, and all of this talk about being patient in the aftermath of loss made me think of, and I didn't have time to look it up, so I may be remembering it wrong, I don't know. But I seem to remember reading a story at some point in my career where it said that when you lose a job under circumstances that are not ideal to you, a loss, one of the worst things you can do is just jump into something else right away. In other words, breathe, take some time to make sure you're doing what you're going to do. It's one of the principles of Beyond the Crucible is find out what it is that you're really wired for, passionate about and go pursue that. And that's another element of patience in the wake of a loss/crucible experience. All right, that's point one, be patient, how you get beyond a loss and turn it into a gain.

The second point is to work to change what you cannot accept, not to accept what you cannot change, but to change what you cannot accept. Those words came from Shelley Klingerman. She would be the first to tell you, and she did on the podcast episode where we interviewed her. They weren't original to Shelley Klingerman, she heard them somewhere and she repeated them on the show. But Shelley's story is that her brother Greg, who was a police officer, was murdered last year in an ambush while he walked to his car after work. She was devastated by the loss, but refused to let, here's the word that you used earlier, Warwick, that evil act be the period on the sentence of Greg's life. She refused to accept what she could not change and instead dove into changing what she could not accept. So she launched a nonprofit called Project Never Broken, which is committed to extending hope and healing through stressing resiliency to other law enforcement officers and their families struggling through the aftermath of trauma.

Shelley dedicated herself to change what she cannot accept. And I've got my own story of how that has played out in my life will hopefully be helpful and instructive to you listener, especially as the holidays roll around. Relationships with family members can get sticky, can feel like it's not the most wonderful time of the year. And if you listened 90 episodes ago or 40 episodes ago to the podcast in which Warwick interviewed me, I had a colorful crucible filled upbringing and early adulthood. Some of the fallout of that has been at times some tension in family relationships. There was one relationship a couple years ago, and I'll say it. It's with my sister Jill. She's not going to be mad at me for saying that because we worked to change what we didn't want to accept that there was a cleave between us, that there was a broken relationship there.

My determination when that happened just a few years ago when there was a falling out between me and my sister, my determination was simply to love her. My determination to change what I couldn't accept. I would not accept that I would never speak to my sister again as long as I lived, so I was committed to change it. How was I committed to change it? I was going to love her every chance I got. When I wrote my first book on my sort of manifesto for public relations called Bite the Dog, I dedicated it upfront to five people. One of them was my sister Jill, who taught me how to write, not necessarily arranging words into sentences, but how to form letters at that age. She's seven years older than I am. And through a series of events that led to her being made aware of the fact that I did that, she called me up one day, apologized for what she could own in that frame of the relationship.

And I immediately, again talking about change what you cannot accept. I could have stood my ground and said, as you can do this Christmas around the table folks, you can say, "Well you treated me badly and you cannot forgive." I forgave instantly because what was more important to me than whatever "rights" I thought I had that were violated and I didn't do everything either, I chose to change what I couldn't accept. I couldn't accept I'd never speak to my sister again. So when I had the opportunity, boom, like that, relationship mended, forgiveness extended, and we are today close as ever.

I've got texts in my phone filled with I love yous and photos and all those kinds of things. That is a real world example, especially as the holidays approach that some of you may be dealing with a strained relationship with a family member. If you're going to sit around the table with them, even if you're not going to sit around the table with them this holiday season, commit yourself to change what you cannot accept. Don't accept the broken relationship. Commit yourself to change it. I know Warwick, you can't go through life. You can't go through life without having situations that you won't accept, that you don't want to accept and that you want to commit to change. I know you've had some experience with this too.




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, I have. But I just want to comment on what you said because it's really profound as well as Shelley Klingerman. I mean one of the things that you mentioned is you have broken relationships and you basically said this. I think we can get too hung up on who was right. And one of the things that I say at least to myself, and to really anybody is being right is overrated, who's right and who's wrong. And certainly in a marriage, it's like I'm not saying, oh, just confess things you've never done and all that. I'm not trying to be silly about it, but trying to minutely figure out, okay, how much is my fault? Their fault? My attitude is if there's a 50-50 chance that what I did was wrong, I'd rather just say I'm sorry. And I feel like from my paradigm, if I've confessed to something that maybe really wasn't my fault, I think God will forgive me for that.

I don't think He'll hold it against me if we confess too much. I don't think He really holds the ledger that way. So be focused more on, as Gary said so eloquently, focused more on the relationship than "who's right and who's wrong." And it takes two people. I mean, Jill could have pushed back despite every in entreaty and reach out that Gary did and said, "No, forget it.", and then nothing Gary could have done then. But fortunately that wasn't the case. It could have been. It sometimes is, but it wasn't here thankfully. And that was a blessing. So yeah, be focused on you can't heal everything but be focused on forgiveness and less focused on who's right and who's wrong.




Gary Schneeberger:

Here's something that I don't want to stop you, but while this is going on, this idea of being right is overrated. I challenge you, listener to go visit a cemetery and look at the headstones. I will give you $100 if you can give me a picture of a headstone that says, "He was right. She was right.", on someone who's passed away. That's just not the way life works when we're no longer here. So live your life that way. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I wanted to make that challenge to our listeners.




Warwick Fairfax:

Very well said. And I think what I love about Shelley Klingerman's story is losing her brother, he was just coming out of some federal building, FBI building I think. And he was just ambushed. He wasn't even on the job as they say. He would just for no apparent reason. And so I love what Shirley Klingerman says, "I'm not going to let evil win.", which means I'm going to find a way to make something good happen out of this devastating loss. And she turned her energy into Project Never Broken. Yeah, she could have used her energy to be bitter and angry, but she used that energy in a positive way. A lot to be learned from that, and I love the phrase work to change what you cannot accept. So yeah, I mean in my case, as listeners know, growing up in a very large family media business, where there's a lot of wealth, there's often a lot of broken relationships.

It's just money and power tend to distort your thinking, your values. Everybody's clawing for position at least to a degree. And there was broken relationships for many decades, even some decades before I was born. It's just factions in the family. It doesn't really matter who was right and who was wrong, but there was certainly some ill feeling and obviously when I launched the takeover and some other family members were on the other side of it, that caused ill feeling. And one of the things, and I wrote the book is I never wanted to write a tell-all book that said I was right, they were wrong. Because that's lame, boring and untrue. I made plenty of mistakes.




Gary Schneeberger:

Even though some publishers wanted you to do that in Australia.




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I mean because dirt sells so to speak. I get it. I mean that's why you have tabloids and certain sections of the newspaper world that it's all about stuff on celebrities that you know and bad stuff they've done. But that was never my mindset. Yes, some family members had thrown my dad out as chairman in '76, 11 years before I did the takeover in '87. But I really never focused on things I thought maybe weren't appropriate. I made certainly my share of mistakes in doing the takeover most of all. But yeah, I think over time, relations and I get asked this when I speak, relations are actually pretty good. Even a family member that probably had the most angst towards me over the years, when I sent him a book, he said, "Thank you for writing it. It was courageous and appreciate you doing it."

So I felt like that was a good sign. So yeah, I mean in my own way I try to, certainly for me, I really try not to hold grudges, which is a process. I got to say it's not a one and done, and forgive and it's a muscle to be exercised in this whole relational forgiveness area that we're talking about is from my faith paradigm, we forgive because we've been forgiven. Who of us are perfect? Who of us haven't done things we're not proud of? So if we want to be forgiven, we should forgive others. So it's a mantra philosophy to live by from my perspective.




Gary Schneeberger:

Right, and it makes me think, this whole idea makes me think, again, listeners who heard my episode of the podcast, episode 50 in which Warwick interviewed me of the Alcoholics Anonymous, the AA idea of all you can do as you're trying to come back from your alcoholism and trying to live a life without alcohol. My sponsor told me all you can do is deal with your side of the street. That's the only thing you can clean up is your side of the street. You're not responsible for the other side of the street. So you do your best to forgive, to extend forgiveness, and to hopefully receive forgiveness, to make amends, to apologize, do those things. But you're not in control of the ultimate solution. And I think what Shelley Klingerman said here is you work to change what you cannot accept. That doesn't mean it's going to go away, but you work to change it. And that will lift the weight off your shoulders. And it certainly has begun to do that for her, even though her brother was tragically murdered just a little over a year ago.

So those are our first two points, be patient and work to change what you cannot accept. Our third key point from the Gaining from Loss series is to understand there's room for your pain on the other side. As you move beyond your pain, beyond your crucible, there's still room over there on the other side for your pain. And that wisdom came from Kayla Stoecklein. Kayla lost her husband Andrew to suicide in 2018, leaving her a widow with three young boys to raise and an unexpected uncertain future to face. What she learned was as she moved forward tentatively at first, was that it's a daily choice to welcome and acknowledge the pain, and it's a daily choice to welcome and chase the joy.

This is another thing she said that was deeply meaningful, deeply resonant to me, "The wounds we carry with us are not obstacles to simply get over. Rather, our wounds are the way through. And loss gives us new eyes to see the grace threaded through all humanity." She ended her thoughts on this subject by saying this, "A beautiful world waits for us on the other side of the loss." I'll say it again so you absorb that. Write it down. Keep it in your planner. Put it on your phone, "A beautiful world waits for us on the other side of loss, a world so expansive it has room for our pain." What are your thoughts, Warwick, about Kayla's experience and then your own experiences with understanding that truth, that the world on the other side of our crucible is expansive enough to welcome, to house our pain?




Warwick Fairfax:

Kayla and her story are so profound. I mean her husband was a lead pastor at a large church in southern California, committed suicide at age 30. She was about the same age. She had three boys five and under. There was all sorts of anger understandably. Her husband had mental health challenges that they were trying to get him help for. So there was anger at probably, and she's a person of faith, I would imagine her husband, God, I mean a whole series of things of how could this happen? How could you be in this position?

But she's still in her early 30s and I was just amazed at the profound level of wisdom. She wrote a book Rebuilding Beautiful: Welcome What is, Dare to Dream Again, and Step Bravely into What Could Be. Rebuilding a beautiful life in a sense, which wasn't perfect before her husband Andrew committed suicide, but it wasn't bad. It's just rebuilding a life. And one of the most profound learnings that she shared that we're talking about here is she didn't run from pain. She acknowledged it. As she puts it, welcomed it. In my words, she ran to the storm, ran headlong into the hurricane, if you will. I mean, who does that? You think when you see a storm, you run from it. And obviously if it's a hurricane, yes, if it's a real hurricane, I don't think it's smart or brave to head to the middle of it.




Gary Schneeberger:

Thank you for that disclaimer, Warwick, for all our listeners.




Warwick Fairfax:

Yes, exactly.




Gary Schneeberger:

Legal Department thanks you.




Warwick Fairfax:

Yes, Beyond the Crucible leadership listeners head into hurricanes. We were just following the Warwick and Gary. No, please don't blame us for that. And I think that is so true and I think in my own way, I'm a very reflective person. I'm just wired that way. I'm pretty self-aware because I'm very reflective and I want to know why I'm thinking the way I'm thinking. If I'm fearful, I got to understand why I'm fearful. Because if I'm fearful about something, if I know what it is, first step to dealing with it is to know what it is. And if it's personal, obviously I'll typically talk to my wife Gale. But there's no question in coming back from the pain of losing a $2.25 billion business, 150 year family business where I felt like I let my father down, my great great grandfather, John Fairfax, my parents, 4,000 plus employees at the company.

There was instability before. Eventually, other people took it over and went from there. There was a huge amount of pain. So yeah, Gale and I talked a lot. I had a period of counseling. I'm a great believer in that is appropriate where that's helpful and with friends. So I've never been one to run away from the pain. I want to understand it, deal with it in the sense that you can't really turn the spigot off and say, "Okay, today I won't be in pain. Today, I won't be in agony. I won't be grieving. It's ended. Okay, I'm good." You cannot control your emotions. I don't care who you are, how smart you are, how evolved you are. But what you can do is acknowledge it and understand it. Sometimes you might have a wave of, maybe not clinical depression, but depression or fear or some negative emotion. The first step is you understand it. Your loved ones will typically be able to help you decipher it. Maybe it is not that hard for your friends and family. And then as you understand it and acknowledge it, it does help in that sense heading into the storm to understand it. Because then sometimes understanding it can help. I mean, one small analogy, when I think of my own family and because of the wealth and money, there's a fair share of dysfunctional relationships.

As I've looked at relationships with people and tried to understand, well why do they act the way they act? As I've understood their own hurt, their own challenges from their upbringing, understanding has made it easier for me to forgive and accept in the sense of not like it, not condone it, but as I understand it, it does make sense even with me, if I understand, oh I understand why I'm fearful or maybe I was triggered by something from my family business days. It does help me deal with it. And obviously as we've talked about earlier, as you use your pain and as I guess we heard earlier from Shelley Klingerman, as you use your pain for something positive, that's another help. But certainly, understanding your pain, why it exists, where it came from, if other people caused it, as I often say, hurt people hurt people. Well why the people that hurt us, why were they hurt? Where did that come from? So understanding our pain and its origins is not the total solution, but it's definitely a step in the right direction of being able to maybe not get beyond it but live with it better and maybe reduce its effects some, I'd say.




Gary Schneeberger:

Yeah. Now here's something that I didn't realize until just now and I wrote the blog on which this conversation is based. Each one of these steps is kind of a step, a ladder if you will. You start after your loss, you start being patient. Don't expect it to get enormously better overnight, step one. Step two, work to change what you cannot accept. once you're able to move forward, once you're ready to tentatively step ahead, work to change what you cannot accept. See how you can try to find the gain within the loss, how you can affect change in an area that may have been affected by what you lost. Then the third point that we just talked about, understand there's room for your pain on the other side. So as you work through it, as you walk through it, there's room for your pain when you get there. So you don't have to leave it on the road. You can take it with you. There's room for it when you get there.

Now we get to our fourth point, again an interlocking point that flows naturally from point three. And that is intentionally cultivate joy as you continue to grieve. And this wisdom came from Marisa Renee Lee, whose mother lost her battle with breast cancer when her daughter was only 25 years old. In the near decade and a half since then, Lee has crafted a successful career working on Wall Street and in the Obama White House. Her successes, she says have come not in spite of or even because of the loss that she's lived through. She's been able to live with the loss and thrive beyond it because she's also never stopped living with the love that was there that made it a loss.

As she points out in her book Grief is Love: Living with Loss, we're taught that grief is something that arrives in the immediate aftermath of death. And while that's certainly true, it's not the whole story. Here's the key point. Grief is the experience of navigating your loss, figuring out how to deal with the absence of your loved one forever. It's understanding that the pain you feel because of their absence, because you've experienced a great love. That love doesn't end when they die, and you don't have to get over it. In fact, she says a critical key to managing grief is to find joy to accompany it through such means as leaning into celebrations, is one of the things that she says. She also talks about, and I love this and this hit me so hard when we were doing the episode. I actually called her by the wrong name and I called her by her mom's name because her point is be a Lisa, and her mom's name was Lisa. And Lisa, her mom was someone who supported others, who gave to others, who helped others. That is a key point. Point four, cultivate joy as you continue to grieve. Continuing to grieve is okay. Find joy within it, right?




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely. I mean, Marisa Renee Lee, she was and is such an inspiring person and just highly intelligent Harvard undergrad, worked in the Obama White House on a number of initiatives, including My Brother's Keeper, which is a project for helping young African American boys and men. She worked in Wall Street. I mean she is an inspiring person to see. She'd say this is a person who, nothing will get her down. She will get through anything, intelligent, funny, nice, personable. But she is very open about it. And I think she has so many lessons for us because we often feel like if we're intelligent, driven, highly evolved people, that if we lose a loved one, for instance, that three months, six months, a year, we should be able to get over it. With enough counseling, read enough books, enough intelligence, enough capacity, we can get through anything.

Our culture tends to teach us that in a sense. And she's there to say no. I mean grief never really goes. You learn to live with it. You learn to balance joy and grief. But I mean, she lost her mom when she was 25. From the age 13 on, she was in grieving mode because her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and later breast cancer. So she's had a lot, many years of dealing with grief, of losing her mother's physical capacity to be the mother she was, and then losing her mother ultimately in death. So she still grieves. She still has moments of anguish and agony, but she's learned to balance both grieving and not stop living. She's able to love and she puts it so eloquently, the more the love, the more the grief. It's kind of inevitable.

And I love the title Grief is Love: Living with Loss. She figures out ways to deal with things, as you mentioned, celebrating things, talking about being a Lisa, her mother. She's learned to try to bring humor into it. So she still grieves and we can't control our emotions. A lot of our guests talk about you can't control your emotions. You've got to learn to live with them, not ignore them, not stuff them, experience them and you learn to be able to live and experience, head towards them without it necessarily controlling you. Just some profound learning from Marisa as well as some of the other guests.




Gary Schneeberger:

This is the most exciting part of the show for me, because I've always wanted to ask you this question or a variation of this question ever since we started working together more than three years ago now. If this point and this point is point four is intentionally cultivate joy as you continue to grieve, listeners probably want to know this as much as I do. How did you find and cultivate joy, Warwick in your "lost years", in those terribly painful years after the failure of the takeover that led you to have to basically leave Australia? How did you find joy in that time?




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, it's a good question, Gary. So for me, after the $2.25 billion takeover failed and my wife's American, so we moved to the U.S. in the early '90s, which Australian newspapers have since called My Life in Exile or something. And when I went back to my mother's funeral, she died at 95 and this was five years ago. It's like Young Warwick as they always call me, comes back from exile. So listeners who are in the United States, just to let you know, you're living in exile I guess. But I don't think it's that bad to place myself. But this is exile and I guess they call me Young Warwick because my father was SirWarwick, and it's like, do I have to be 85 before I'll stop being called Young Warwick? I mean, I'm not that young anymore, but oh well.




Gary Schneeberger:

I'd be happy if someone would call me Young Gary, to be honest with you.




Warwick Fairfax:

I guess it all depends on the context, but yeah, for me, I guess finding joy in the early '90s or through the '90s, we had young children. I have two boys and a girl, and so they were young, so just being able to play with them in the backyard with my oldest son, who life was grimmest I guess when my kids were youngest. And so therefore with my oldest son for instance, we'd throw baseball in the backyard. I grew up playing cricket, so not exactly the best baseball thrower in the world, but I figured it out, get a glove and throw and kick a soccer ball. But from the '90s on, certainly soccer is very popular here.

And just the unconditional love of my wife Gale was just her acceptance. So just being joyful in the little things with my kids, birthday parties, birthday cakes for the kids, wrapping toys at Christmas, all those little things. I remember one year I got my daughter, it's boy, girl, boy, my daughter this little red tricycle. And so of course you assemble it the night beforehand. How hard can it be? It was literally a three or four hour experience assembling this tricycle. It's like, this is unbelievable. It sort of fills you with joy in one sense. And then as there were things that I could do and do well, like getting a job with a aviation services company and getting good performance reviews for doing finance and business analysis like, okay, that was a little drop of grace, a little drop of joy. And as I started doing meaningful work and on two nonprofit boards, feeling like I could contribute. So each of those little steps were drops of grace that gave me a degree of joy. That's something I can do and not screw up. But it started in those, the harshest days, the hardest days in the early '90s was just having a young family that just knew me as daddy and they loved me unconditionally as kids do, and just being able to play with them. Those were moments of joy that was definitely helpful as I look back.




Gary Schneeberger:

The fifth point in the blog, which is on crucibleleadership.com, which is kind of a ribbon on the package of our conversation here today, is live as a good ancestor to those who come after you. And I'm really excited to get your views on this because you talk about your ancestors and their influence on you. So it will be interesting to hear how you receive that exortation to live today as a good ancestor to your progeny who come after you. But that came from, that bit of insight came from Steve Leder, the senior rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, who says that even after officiating 1,000 funerals, more than 1,000 funerals, it wasn't until his own father died that he felt like he truly understood the effect of death on him. When his father died, he realized that, and he said that the thing that it taught him was to make the most of what he called our blessed lives with the people we love.

His father's death taught him that thing. And one of the things he said to us, and that he says a lot, I think, and it's an inspiring way of inspiring others in how you live now that you're beyond your crucible. He says this, "I often tell people that a great way to think about your life is to live as a good ancestor. We don't think of ourselves as ancestors when we are alive, but we're all going to be ancestors after we die. A very instructive question to ask while alive is this. Am I living as a good ancestor for the generations to come? Most likely that will lead to a very meaningful life." So first, what was your takeaway from our talk with Steve Leder and then how does the idea, how are you hoping your progeny will look back on their great-great-grandfather, as you have talked often about your great-great-grandfather? But first, talk about Steve Leder.




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, Steve Leder is such an impressive person. He's highly intelligent. He's senior rabbi, as you mentioned at Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. It's I believe, the oldest Jewish congregation in Los Angeles. It's a very big synagogue. And Steve is an inspiring person because he mentioned, as you said, he officiated maybe 1,000 funerals, but just that sense of loss, he had new learning and meaning from it when his dad died and he's very open about, they grew up in not a very wealthy background in Minnesota. In fact, his dad and uncle owned a junkyard. It was a tough life that he grew up in, and his dad was a tough guy and he was harsh almost in some sense. So it wasn't an easy relationship. It wasn't easy to win his favor, from Steve to his dad. So he was open about that.

But when he died, I think he began, I love his book titled The Beauty of What Remains. You begin to really look at what's important. There are a lot of things that he valued about his dad and some things he's open about saying he doesn't want to copy, that he learned a lot in that process. And just that sense, that excellent question about how to live your life as a good ancestor, some of the people we've had on the podcast and we talk about live your legacy today, again we talk about this and others do. You think about your funeral. What is it that you want your family, loved ones and friends to say about you? Typically won't be, "Oh, he or she had millions of dollars and the big title and controlled a massive company." It would be more husband, wife, mother, father, friend. It's just who they are as people and their character. That's typically what will matter to others. So live your legacy, live as a good ancestor today.

I mean, it's such good advice. And I guess for me, some people, some families don't really know a lot about the history well, and one of the benefits of coming from a wealthy, well-known family...




Gary Schneeberger:

There's books about it.




Warwick Fairfax:

Exactly, there are books about it. So there is a book written in like 1941 about John Fairfax, my great-great-grandfather who died, so he died in the 1870s. So obviously I was born a long time after that and so I missed him. But I have a good sense of who he was. And while, as I've said a number of times, I haven't really lived his business legacy. He was a good businessman. And those business genes I think died out over the years. My dad really wasn't a business guy, so I don't know whether those genes went, but they died out a long, long time ago I'm afraid.

We're more newspaper reflective journalist types, if you will. But what I learned from him is he was, as I sometimes say in faith-based circles, he was the model of what it means to be a business person for Christ, in that sense. He was a good father, a good husband. His kids loved him. His wife loved him. He was a good employer. I mean, when he died, his employees said, "We have lost a valuable friend." I mean, this is the 1800s. There was no work laws. There was no unions. You could pretty much do whatever you wanted to as an employer. And so he's somebody that he just lived his values, his beliefs. I'm not sure he preached it, but he lived it. And so that sense of that role model of just being a good husband, a good father, to the best of my ability, to care for people around, to empathize in some ways in terms of his character, that's definitely a part of what I value in life and the legacy that I want to leave.

And then with my father, yeah, my father wasn't perfect. He was married three times. He certainly made his share of mistakes. As I say, who of us are perfect? Yet he had this sense of integrity doing the right thing no matter what. In 1976, when other family members threw him off as chairman, he could have tried to fight it by doing his own takeover or taking on the board in some sense for wrongful dismissal. And he analyzed a lot of these things. But at the end of the day he said, you know what? For the sake of me, because he saw me as sort of the next generation that would come after him, and the family members that took after him, for the sake of the company, he felt it was the right thing to do.

I think one more example, I talk about in the book, in the 1941 election, I think it was, a conservative, Robert Menzies was prime minister. He was a good friend of my dad and his then first wife, well they wrote an editorial saying Australia's in World War II and he believed the Labor guy, John Curtin, was the best person to be prime minister. Well, Robert Menzies felt betrayed and he wouldn't talk to him pretty much for the rest of his life. Well, he went on to be one of Australia's longest service serving prime ministers in the late '40s and '50s. It's not like his career was done, even though he was super successful and he never forgave that. So I guess from my dad, I've learned you do the right thing, being on two nonprofit boards as listeners know, being an elder at my church and my kids' school board, even though I admire greatly the leaders of both organizations, I try to encourage but also try to ask tough questions, do the right thing no matter what. They may be friends, I may admire them. My job is to represent the congregation or the community.

So I've learned a lot from my great-great-grandfather John Fairfax and my father Sir Warwick Fairfax. So my own way, assimilating those legacies that they've given me, I want Crucible Leadership to be successful and Beyond the Crucible. It's not about money or numbers of books being sold. It's just trying to have an impact, be it big or small. I try to be, my kids are now older from 31 to 20s. I've always tried to be a present dad and be around them and with my wife. So yeah, I mean I try to live that legacy and hopefully, that's having an effect on my kids' humility is one of my highest values. So when I see my kids who we're not poverty stricken by any means. We are very, if not extremely comfortable.

When I see them with, like my youngest son was looking to get a different car, I was like, yeah, he had a Hyundai Coupe. And it's like, yeah, I think I'm going to get a used Mazda CX-5 small SUV. And it's like he wasn't saying, "Hey dad, can you help me get a new Ferrari or something?" And not only did he not ask for a new one, he got a fantastic deal. He found some dealer in Minnesota and he lives in Indiana. And so I can't tell you that blesses me to no end, that I don't have to preach to humility to him. He's living it. So I mean, when you see concrete evidence of your kids living your values of humility and integrity, doing the right thing. So I feel like I've learned those points, those aspects of legacy from my dad and my great-great-grandfather. And when I see evidence as I see a lot of my kids living, not just my legacy, but their ancestors' legacy. I mean, it blows me away. I mean, it fills me with talk about joy, immense joy and pride when I see that. Again, I'm not perfect. They're not perfect. Who's perfect? But when I see them living those legacies, it does fill me with joy and gratitude, immense joy and gratitude I have to say.




Gary Schneeberger:

And I know this to be true, your son's father, when he was in charge of John Fairfax Limited, drove a Honda to work.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, actually, that's funny. I have driven Hondas in the U.S., there's no question. Back then, this is funny. It's pretty much the same thing. I drove a red Toyota Camry.




Gary Schneeberger:

Oh Camry, sorry.




Warwick Fairfax:

And that was kind of a bit of reverse snobbery in that I've always prided myself on being humble. That's not an oxymoron. And so while the executives that I hired drove the Mercedes and Daimlers and whatever they were driving, I pull with my red Toyota Camry into the executive parking lot. And yeah, there was kind of humble. Part of me was like, look, I'm humble. Look at the car I'm driving. I'm not doing this Daimler, Mercedes. Look at me. I'm pretty humble. I'm pretty good, huh? I feel like I lose a few points for that one, but hey, I was young, but yeah, I prided myself on my humility, if that's contradiction in terms, which kind of is a bit.




Gary Schneeberger:

No, if we're grading on the curve, you'll still come above the CD level. So that's good. One of the places I wanted to go, so we've gone through all five points and I'll wrap them up when we wrap up this episode. But one of the places I wanted to go just before we leave listeners, because a member of our team, Casey Helmick, who does the podcast, production, oversight, ideas for the show, when we were talking about doing this wrap up episode was like, "Well, it would be really interesting if you guys.", this isn't Casey's voice, by the way. I don't know why I'm changing my voice to sound like that. He doesn't sound like that at all. Casey said, "It would be very interesting if you guys talked about what of those five guests that you talked to, what if anything, surprised you?" And I'll go first because I mean, instantaneously this leaped to my mind as I pondered that question for half a second, and what surprised me, and it's surprising that it surprised me because as I said, this is more than 140 episodes of this show.

We've heard a lot of stories of people who've been through some pretty traumatic crucibles. But when Jason Shechterle said, and you said it earlier, Warwick, and I almost was like, no, don't say that, but all that was, it was a trailer for what I'm saying now. It was a preview. My surprise was Jason summing up his experience by saying, "I have gained everything and lost nothing." Now if you're only a listener to this show, based on what we've described, Warwick and I both think we're pretty good with word pictures, but you don't really know exactly, you can't feel exactly what Jason has been through unless you see Jason say these things. So my encouragement to you is on our Facebook page, actually if you go to YouTube and search for Crucible Leadership, we have a YouTube page and there's a video clip of Jason saying that very thing, "I've gained everything and lost nothing."

Watch the video clip. Look at the man. You can see what he's been through. We've told you what he's been through. He tells you what he's been through on the show, but you can see what he's been through. And this is a man who said, "I've gained everything and I've lost nothing." If I could live my life, that's my challenge coming out of this series, Warwick, I want to live my life by that motto. I want to be the guy who says, "No matter what happens to me, I've gained everything and I've lost nothing." That to me was the most profound, moving, challenging thing I've heard as the co-host of this show and certainly from this series. What was your surprise moment?




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, I mean just before we get to that, I mean what you just said, Gary is so true and so profound and when you see him and the video clips are certainly online as we speak on our social media, when you look at him, it's like 56 surgeries. He is disfigured. He went through fourth degree burns. I mean that's as much as you can go through. There is no more than fourth degree. The level of pain he went through, the fact that there are consequences, pain. He doesn't want to scare kids at places. It limits where he can go. He's lost, I think one or two fingers I think on one of his hands. I mean it's been life changing physically, emotionally. So when he says, "I've gained everything.", it's like when you look at him as he says that. So I would encourage listeners go to us on LinkedIn and Facebook and look at those clips and ponder what Gary has said.

It's just like, how in the world could anybody say that I've gained everything? It makes no sense in one sense, but it just shows the profound wisdom that he's learned. So for me, a number of them, I think one of the guests that really stood out to me is Kayla Stoecklein, and as we mentioned, lost her husband Andrew to suicide in 2018. And just the sense of she really headed into the grief and sort of in my words, head into the storm. And I think this is amplified too by Marisa Renee Lee is sometimes people, and especially men, I think in our culture are told, suck it up. Get beyond your grief. If you're a tough guy, a tough person, you can get beyond it. And that's just not true. Whether it's pain or grief, you've got to really head into it and experience it.

Not for the sake of wallowing, but the only way to get beyond grief if it's even possible. The only way to get through grief is to head straight for it. The path to getting through grief is heading to grief, if you will. Again, it's not wallowing forever. Yes, counseling, wisdom from friends, mentors, loved ones, that's all important, but you can't ignore your feelings. You've got to face them. And I think as we've found in our series and certainly on Beyond the Crucible, very often your purpose, your calling is found from the ashes of your crucible, from your pain. So there can be a blessing that comes out of grief, out of loss. As I mentioned, that is the case with me. A few years ago, even maybe six months ago, I don't know that I would have said quite this. But I now view what I went through as a blessing. I never would have got out of John Fairfax because I felt like it was founded by a person of faith, my great-great-grandfather and by my dad. I would have felt like I was betraying my legacy, betraying my heritage. So I could never have left voluntarily. But maybe there was some divine force up there saying, "We're going to free you one way or the other from your gilded cage. We're going to get you out." I don't know if that's true or not. I have no idea. But I sometimes wonder.




Gary Schneeberger:

I know someone who does think it's true, Rabbi Steve Leder, do you remember? It was off air, but as we were saying goodbye to him, because he had a call that he had to go on. Right before he took that call, he said, "And losing that company was the best thing that ever happened to you." He said that to you right there after spending an hour with you in conversation.




Warwick Fairfax:

So yeah, that's a great point, Gary and Rabbi Steve Leder is right. It was a blessing that had happened. The best thing that ever happened to me? Maybe I'm still not quite there at saying the best thing, but it certainly was a blessing. Just my kids can grow up as normal kids. They never would have grown up that way in Australia, in the Fairfax sort of goldfish bowl in Sydney. It's like being a Bush or a Rockefeller or a Kennedy. I mean it's impossible. Everybody knows who you are. So yeah, head into the storm. Don't ignore it. Feel your feelings and out of that, you might find a greater purpose that actually makes that loss a little easier to deal with. The pain doesn't go away, but there are ways to make it easier to deal with by heading into the storm. It sounds counterintuitive. Again, we're not advising people to head into hurricanes. This is a metaphor. Don't take this too literally. Metaphor with a capital M.




Gary Schneeberger:

So that puts the plane on the ground for this episode of Beyond the Crucible as we wrap up our series Gaining from Loss. Let me review what we've gone through in our discussion. We've gone through five points, five, not two hands, Gary, just one hand. We've gone through five points of what our guests not only unpacked from their own stories, but offer to you, our listeners as a roadmap for you to follow, to move beyond your loss and to find gain in the wake of it. Point one, be patient. Point two, work to change what you cannot accept. Point three, understand there's room for your pain on the other side of your loss. Point four, intentionally cultivate joy as you continue to grieve. And number five, live as a good ancestor to those who come after you. You pool all those together, and those become a roadmap to help you do what this series title that we were a little worried about at the beginning, but aren't now, Gaining from Loss. You put those all together and what you get is gain from loss. Any final thoughts, Warwick? We're already over time. What the heck? We can take another couple minutes if you have another thought before I close.




Warwick Fairfax:

I think one of the things we say here all the time, if you had to say, what is the thing that you most say on Beyond the Crucible and Crucible Leadership? It's your worst day doesn't have to define you. It's probably one of, if not the most quoted phrases that we use. And so you may have suffered a loss, a horrific loss. You may be thinking about the holidays with grim trepidation, not hopeful anticipation. It might be like, oh my gosh, our holidays reminds me of everything I lost. I think of the so-called families that seem to have it all, the idyllic Thanksgiving, the idyllic Christmas and New Year, and we're just a dysfunctional mess. Or even if we're not, we're just grieving the loss of our mother and father, brother, sister, son, daughter. That may be your reality.

I don't diminish the pain. We acknowledge it, I acknowledge it. But what we want to get across is your worst day doesn't have to define you. You don't have to be defined by loss. Each of our five guests were not defined by the loss. They found a way to use that loss for a higher purpose in the case of Shelley Klingerman, to just not accept what happened. Find a way to use that devastating loss to honor her brother. So don't let your worst day define you. And there is hope amongst the grief and the loss and the pain. So find your way through grief to live a joyful life on purpose. It's possible to both to be grieving as we learned from Marisa Renee Lee, as well as have the joyful, purposeful life, which we believe at Crucible Leadership is a life of significance, a life on purpose, dedicated to serving others. You want joy and fulfillment in life. We believe it's through leading a life of significance. So it is possible to get on the other side of grieving through loss, at least to a point where you're able to carry on with life.




Gary Schneeberger:

And that is the last declarative words to be spoken on this episode. I'm going to ask before we go, listeners, I'm going to give you a question. Again, our blog on this subject is at crucibleleadership.com. And as we do with every blog, the ending of it are some questions for reflection for you as the reader of the blog. And here's one of those questions for you to ponder as we say goodbye for this episode. And that is this, what are you doing now or what can you do today to cultivate joy, even as you grieve a loss, en route to creating it as a gain? What can you do today to cultivate joy? That's the question for you to ponder. Until next time, we understand, we do. Hopefully, this episode proved it. We understand that your crucible experiences are painful. We understand that they are devastating. They are losses for sure.

But we also know from our own experience and from the experience of not just of these five guests that we had here, but the almost 100 guests that we've talked to on the show since it started and that's this, your crucible experiences, your losses aren't the end of your story. They can be, in fact the beginning of a new story. And that new story can be the greatest story, the greatest headline, and have the greatest ending than you've ever imagined. All you have to do is to not stay under the covers and to get up and put one foot, as Warwick says all the time, one small step, one small step, one small step, one small step. That will lead you in the end to the place that our guests often end up at. They talk about ending up there, and that is a life of significance.

This week, we talk with Marisa Renee Lee, a former official in the Obama White House and a regular contributor to Glamour, Vogue and The Atlantic. She discusses at length the struggles she endured after her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, then battled and succumbed to breast cancer when Marisa was just 25 years old. She set that emotional journey between the covers of her book, GRIEF IS LOVE: LIVING WITH LOSS. In it, she offers a roadmap for readers to help them navigate the complexities of sadness and joy that accompany not just the loss of a loved one, but the loss of anything you love.

Highlights

Transcript

Gary Schneeberger:

Hi, friends. Here at Beyond The Crucible, we often get a chance to dive into some of the hardest moments of someone's life, everything from facing loss to trying to find your purpose in life.

This summer, we've been working extremely hard to pull together a full e-course, our first, filled with more than three hours of lessons learned on how you can find and fully embrace Second Act Significance. To gain access to this course, visit secondactsignificance.com. That's secondactsignificance.com.

Now, here's today's podcast episode.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Marisa Renee Lee:

When we took my mom off treatment, I wrote her a letter. And I promised her that I supported her decision and I was going to be just fine. We were the ones having honest conversations about the fact that her time was limited, and what did she want, where did she want to die, what did she want for her funeral? We had that kind of relationship and I felt like I needed her to know that I was going to be okay.

And I made the mistake, as a younger person, thinking that okay meant going back to work, going back to life and just going back to being who I consider myself to be. But what I didn't realize is the moment you lose someone you love, like someone who you consider to be one of yours, whether it's a parent or a spouse or a child or a best friend, you stop being the same person that you were before.




Gary Schneeberger:

So, what does okay look like after you've been through a devastating loss? How does the new person you become in the aftermath of that loss go on living even as you go on grieving?

Hi, I'm Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show. This week, Warwick and I talk with the final guest in our special fall series, Gaining from Loss. She's Marisa Renee Lee, a former official in the Obama White House and a regular contributor to Glamour, Vogue, and The Atlantic. She discusses, in length, the struggle she's endured since her mother succumbed to breast cancer when Marisa was just 25 years old. She set that emotional journey between the covers of her book, Grief is Love: Living with Loss.

In it, she offers a roadmap for readers to help them navigate the complexities of sadness and joy that accompany, not just the loss of a loved one, but the loss of anything one loves. And the first healing step on that journey, she says, is giving ourselves permission to grieve even as we continue to love who or what we are grieving.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, Marisa, again, thank you so much for being here. I just loved reading your book, Grief is Love, which was full of just so much profound wisdom. Anybody that's had loss, which is so many people, it is just raw, it's honest, it's impactful, and we'll obviously get into this book quite a bit.

But I'd love just to start, from what understand, you grew up in New York State, I think maybe upstate New York. Now you're in the Hudson Valley now, maybe that vicinity, I'm not sure, but talk a bit about your upbringing and obviously your mom and dad. And before we get to the loss, it's all intertwined, but what was life like for Marisa growing up?




Marisa Renee Lee:

Thanks so much for having me. It's always a little embarrassing listening to your bio being read. I try not to cringe. But thank you. Thank you both for inviting me on today.

Childhood honestly, was pretty, I would say ordinary and unremarkable. I had two parents who loved me very much and also loved each other, a little sister who drove me crazy, lots of friends. Both my parents were very active in my school life and in our community, from coaching basketball to serving on the PTA, being a Sunday school teacher. That was our life. Mom and dad both worked, but they were very clear that their work was all about providing the best possible life for me and my little sister. And it was really lovely and fun. Until one day, everything changed.

I was 13 and it was probably right around this time of year actually. And one day, my mom got really sick and she just never got better. And it would take years and lots of misdiagnoses, but ultimately, by the time I was 16, doctors discovered permanent damage in her brain that was caused by Multiple Sclerosis. So, it was a long journey to that diagnosis.

And my life at home, our family life, went from a very carefree, fun, sort of average existence to one that was much more stressful, and at times, overwhelming and disorienting. With a parent who went from being very able-bodied, and active, and involved to being disabled and in and out of the hospital, and sometimes bedridden or in a wheelchair. So, that was a really big challenge for me as a young person.




Warwick Fairfax:

So, everybody grows up differently. I mean, some people grow up in an environment where they don't know happiness. They know tragedy, maybe dysfunctional family, just a really hard upbringing. But it seems like there's two parts to your life.

One is before age 13 and after age 13. Obviously, when your mother died, when you're 25, there's another separation in the timeline. But talk about, at times, can you even remember what life was like pre-13? Because it just probably seems like a couple centuries ago. But it felt like there was a time, as you say, when life maybe not perfect, but was pretty good.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah.




Warwick Fairfax:

And it went from pretty good to, I don't know if it was awful, but just really painful. It was just this dichotomy.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. And it's funny because, in my mind, and I should talk to my dad about this, I don't know if this is actually exactly how it happened. But I remember my parents going to New York City for their wedding anniversary and that's November 1st. And then I remember my mom, soon after that, becoming a different person and a different parent and a sick person. And I think the biggest thing that changed was I went from this very carefree existence and that's what childhood is supposed to be, right? To becoming a mini adult overnight, it felt like.

And I don't have any regrets for the time I spent as a teenager or a young adult helping to care for my mom and helping to care for our family. But it was a really big shift from what I knew before then. And it was hard. And it was also the '90s, so nobody was talking to me about my feelings. Nobody was suggesting that I go to therapy because it's complicated and challenging having a sick parent.

It was more, okay, this is the situation and we're all going to do the best we can. And we love each other, and we'll do what we can to support each other, and just keep moving forward. That was my parents' attitude, that was my attitude, my sister's attitude. And that's what we did. But it was really hard.




Warwick Fairfax:

So, talk about that period when you have the diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis, and later on, obviously, breast cancer. And it felt like it just got worse. I mean, it didn't get easier, you know?




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah.




Warwick Fairfax:

I mean, one major illness is enough, but more, I mean, it's hard to understand. But just talk about those years because it felt like you didn't have a normal childhood, normal high school or teenage years. You were sort of robbed, in a sense, of that.

So, probably one stage of grief is, is the person I thought I would be and the person my friends were, I wasn't. So talk about just, and I think you were one of the primary caretakers, caregivers. So just talk about those teenage years, which seems radically different than the teenage years of your friends, I'm guessing?




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah, it was. So, it's interesting. In order to write a book, that is at least partially based on your life experiences, you have to unpack a lot of shit. You really have to get at what is the truth, what was I really feeling, what was I really experiencing then? And what do I feel now? And work through a lot of that. Grief is Love required a lot of time in therapy.

And one of the things that I realized as an adult was that there was definitely a feeling of resentment. I didn't want to admit, when I was younger, how hard it was or how burdensome it was or how frustrating it was at times to have to play that role in my family and to have a sick parent, because the last thing that I wanted to do was make things harder for my mom, or frankly, for my dad either.

But in particular, I could see that she was in pain and still very much, every single day, trying to be a present, supportive parent to us. It didn't matter how sick she was, she was still going to find a way to get things together for our birthdays, to make sure that Thanksgiving and Christmas were special, to let us have whatever parties and gatherings we wanted to have with our friends when we were younger.

It didn't matter how much pain she was in or what she endured, she continued to keep that focus on us. And as a result, I wanted to do everything I could to make her life easier. And so, for me, that meant doubling down on being best in class with academics, and extracurriculars, and everything at school. And trying to create as many normal teenage childhood experiences as possible, so she didn't feel like her illness was having a negative impact on me.

It was exhausting and it had long-term health, mental and physical health, implications for me. Not talking about all of these complicated feelings. When you ignore your emotions, they don't go away. They manifest in other ways. And so for me, from the time I was probably around 14, 15, until today, I'm almost 40 years old, I've had all sorts of stomach problems. And I know that it started with mom gets sick with some mystery illness that nobody can figure out and the stress that put on me as a 13-year old.

I always say, whenever I have a chance to talk to people about my childhood and adolescence, I hope that young people hear about Grief is Love and hear my story, and find ways to get the support they need if they're struggling with either a sick parent or the loss of a parent, because it's really hard.




Gary Schneeberger:

We call this series Gaining from Loss, and for you to find the gains that were attached to that loss, those losses that you experienced, you had to do the soul work, as Warwick calls it, to get through and really dig in. And your book really helped you to do that.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah, a hundred percent. It was a really hard book to write. Like I said, there was a lot of therapy, there were a lot of tissues and there was definitely some chocolate and some bourbon involved. But at the end of the day, I feel like the process of putting Grief is Love together was absolutely a healing experience for me.




Gary Schneeberger:

Hm.




Marisa Renee Lee:

And that is something that I'm grateful for. I don't know if I would have done all of this healing, all this soul work, as you just called it, if not for the book.




Warwick Fairfax:

That is profound. I want to get to the main loss of your mother and the book. But I think one of the things that you are saying is there was this dichotomy as you were dealing with the grief of your mother's illness. You were not letting it defeat you. You were being a strong, young woman. You were getting great grades, you would end up getting into Harvard College, which is obviously extremely impressive. And later on, as we've heard, you served in the Obama administration, worked in finance. You were not letting this defeat you. You are plowing through, pushing ahead, which is wonderful. It's an amazing thing.

But yet, at the same time, there was the other dichotomy of not letting yourself deal with the loss of the dream of who your mother was and your childhood. And you talk about this a lot in this book about this misnomer, that if I admit weakness or grief, I'm a weak person. Therefore, I'm a strong person, I will not let this defy me or defeat me. I'm plowing ahead.

So, there was some good in the sense that it's great to be in, from my perspective, driven to succeed, to achieve. I think that's wonderful. But there was the good and the bad. So, talk about this almost yin-yang thing, as you were dealing with this.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah. I mean, I really believed that if I was honest about what I was feeling, that I would just be taken down by these feelings, and just end up in this super depressed and overwhelmed space that I would never come out of. So instead, I just tried to just bury them, just swallow them, shove them down and ignore them, which doesn't work. And in my case, manifested in both physical and longer-term mental health consequences.

I still struggle with anxiety from time to time. And I also bring that back to when my mom got sick and my childhood and my adolescence. And one of the things that I lift up in Grief is Love, that I think is really important for people to understand, especially overachievers who just want to keep plowing through the hard things. The only thing that makes difficult and challenging emotions easier to deal with is acknowledgement.

Naming our feelings is what reduces their power over us. And I think we often assume the reverse. And that's not just me saying that, that is actual research on the brain and emotion and healing. So if you are going through it right now, whether it's grief or something similar, and you're like, "Oh, I can't bring myself to even acknowledge it because that'll make it worse," that's actually what makes it a little bit better.




Warwick Fairfax:

So, how old was your mother? How old were you when she passed? So, just talk about that because you were going through grieving up until that point and you thought life was tough, it got exponentially tougher, the grief probably got exponentially worse after. And it probably seemed pretty bad before. So, just talk about what happened and the impact it had on you.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah. So, it's funny you ask the age piece because I get really hung up on that. Because when my mom first got sick, I was only 13, she was only 37. And as a almost 40-year old, that feels crazy to me now. And then, when she was diagnosed with the cancer, I was 22 and she would've been 42, which was, is officially up here, that's younger than my husband is now.




Warwick Fairfax:

Hm.




Marisa Renee Lee:

And then when she passed away, I had just turned 25 and she had just turned 49. And so, it blows my mind sometimes thinking about how young she was when all of these things happened to her.

But as I was graduating from college, my mom had been having a bad, probably, let's call it three to six months, where she was in and out of the hospital a bunch, constantly going to the doctors. She's in a lot of pain and she wasn't a complainer. So, I knew that there was something wrong. My dad knew, my mom knew. We believed her, but a lot of doctors said that, basically, they thought it was in her head.

My grandmother had just passed away quite suddenly that fall. And folks thought that this was just kind of an emotional response that was manifesting in physical ways. She continued to seek out different doctors and support, and eventually ended up being seen by an orthopedic surgeon, thinking there was something wrong with her bones because nobody could figure it out. And the guy that she saw was actually also a family friend. So, he was really listening to her and very committed to uncovering what was going on.

And he found lesions on her spine. And he said and I will never forget this because I then saw him at a friend's graduation party a few weeks later. He said that was the worst day in his entire career. To be with someone that he knew on some level, so knew that she'd already been sick for all of this time and had gotten the runaround from all of these other doctors, and he found cancer at the bones. And had to tell her that, on top of the MS. He said it's a moment he will never forget.

And so, after the cancer was identified in her bones, we did follow up appointments with oncologists and learned that it was stage four breast cancer that had migrated throughout her skeletal system. And this was the week I was graduating from Harvard. And so, I went from doctor's office in upstate New York back to Cambridge, did all of the end of school year, senior week fun festivities, with just a cloud of grief and stress hanging over my head. And then I decided to spend a year at home with my mom and dad, just kind of helping them figure out how to navigate this very complicated diagnosis, or set of diagnoses, and health situation.

About two and a half, three years later, we took her off of treatment for both diseases, because at that point the cancer was in her brain. She was having problems with her lungs, her body had just had enough. And so, we made the decision together as a family. And then, a few weeks after we made the decision, we thought we had six months, a year, or something like that.

But six weeks later, we were hanging out in the living room. She was having a bad day, but she'd had so many bad days in the course of my life with her, that it didn't really didn't register that day was going to be the bad day, you know? And she and I shared a joke, and then she collapsed, and was gone a few hours later.

And leading up to her death, again, my type A, Harvard, Wall Street brain was like, I'm going to make the spreadsheets. I got my lists. I'm going to do everything I can to prepare myself, to prepare her, our family, for her to die. And I thought that because I was so organized around her death, that would make the grief easier on the other side. And it just wasn't true. I mean, it knocked me on my ass and I didn't understand why. And I spent months berating myself for having so many feelings about an ordinary occurrence.

We're all going to lose our parents someday, right? That's what I would tell myself. It's really not that big of a deal that your mom died, which is crazy. And it was awful. Until one day, and I don't know what shifted for me, I wish I could remember it, but I honestly don't know. But it was one day, six months after she passed away, I wrote in my journal, "There's nothing wrong with me."

Where the problem sits is in how our culture treats people who are grieving and how we talk about and describe grief and loss. Because what you see on TV and in the movies, where somebody dies, everybody puts on black and goes to the funeral, and then everybody goes back to life a few days or a week or so later, that's bullshit. That's not how it works.

And so, I wrote to myself and I said, "I'm going to write a book about grief that's not going to be super sad and depressing, that will tell the truth about what grief really is, and that will be a New York Times bestseller."

So, we're still waiting on the New York Times, but I think I checked the other few boxes okay.




Gary Schneeberger:

67% is good.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Right?




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah. No, you sure did. So talk about that. I mean, life is pretty tough beforehand. And you're driven, Harvard, Wall Street. You've got the spreadsheets. And people might think, and you write about this in the book, Marisa is a great, she's that strong, black woman. She's driven, she's like a role model for other women, maybe other black women. She's doing it all. I mean, she is not letting anything defeat her. And there was this, I don't know if there was subconscious expectation within yourself.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Oh, yeah.




Warwick Fairfax:

But on the one hand, you had had this appearance of, boy, Marisa is intelligent, she's impressive, she's driven, she's somebody you admire, she's an amazing person, which is great for people to think that. That's not bad, that's awesome. But yet inside, and you write about having trouble sleeping, taking all sorts of stuff to try, inside you were breaking apart. I think you'd write about being in stairwells of hospitals where they know to leave you alone.

So talk about, there was the public Marisa, but then there's the private, internal, that people didn't know that was there. So, just talk about the overwhelming, almost tsunami, tidal wave of grief, that hit you that other people probably didn't really see.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah. When we took my mom off treatment, I wrote her a letter. And I promised her that I supported her decision and I was going to be just fine. We were the ones having honest conversations about the fact that her time was limited, and what did she want, where did she want to die, what did she want for her funeral? We had that kind of relationship and I felt like I needed her to know that I was going to be okay.

And I made the mistake, as a younger person, thinking that okay meant going back to work, going back to life and just going back to being who I consider myself to be. But what I didn't realize is the moment you lose someone you love, someone who you consider to be one of yours, whether it's a parent or a spouse or a child or a best friend, you stop being the same person that you were before.

I didn't understand that at 5:37 PM on February 28th, when my mom died, that there was a part of me, for better or worse, that died with her. And now, what I needed to do to be okay was figure out who am I in this world without this woman who was both my mom, but also she was someone who I had oriented my life around to some extent since I was 13 years old. So, there was a lot of my identity tied up in her as well.

And because I thought that the grief would be easier, because I was prepared and organized, because I believed that I was strong and I'd already been through a bunch in life. And so, I didn't think it would be as hard as it was going to be. And then, because I promised her I would be fine, but didn't really know what that meant, I forced myself to go back to work two weeks after we buried her, to continue running a non-profit on the side while I worked on Wall Street during the height of the financial crisis. To try to be okay, even though I very much was not okay.

And because I had all of these messed up ideas about grief and loss, and who I was, and what I was meant to do, I didn't feel comfortable sharing with anyone else just how bad it was. But literally, every day, I was able to get myself up, get myself dressed. Sometimes it was hard, and only on three or four hours sleep, but I could get myself ready for work, get on the subway. But the second that I started to leave the subway stop at Wall Street in New York City, and climb the stairs to head to my office, I would start having a debilitating panic attack.

I could make it to the basement of the investment bank where I worked. And that's where I would spend the first, I don't know, 45 minutes, hour. I truly don't know how much time I've spent down there. And there was one friend who knew about my morning routine, the only other woman in the entire banking department. And she would come down whenever I emailed her, when I was starting to put myself back together, and she would bring me a Xanax from my desk, a cookie and a soy latte.

And that was my routine for months. And I just was like, "Oh, I guess this is what it's supposed to be." I don't really know what else to do. I'm not asking for help. That's what I did until it stopped. And so, I think it's really important when you're dealing with grief, or some other deeply challenging emotion or experience, to give yourself permission to just be with the feelings and to find your way through it. And to ask for help. Because you can't do this stuff on your own.

Healing is a very individual experience and your grief is very much yours alone. But that doesn't mean you have to do it all alone. And as supportive as my community of friends and family were at that time, I just didn't feel comfortable opening up to how bad it was because I thought that was wrong.




Warwick Fairfax:

I mean, that's so profound and so sad, but so real for everybody that's been through grief. I want to kind of pivot because you're talking about some of the themes in your book. And I love the title of your book, Grief is Love. Just talk about what you mean by that because there's some profound truth.

And before I let you answer that question, one of the sad and good things about tragedy is you can learn profound wisdom. It's not a wisdom that you want. You don't want to learn wisdom this way.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Mm-hmm.




Warwick Fairfax:

It's like, please, can you give it to me some other way? For whatever reason, the way the universe, God, however you view it, not everybody does, but there's the opportunity to learn profound wisdom through tragedy. And you certainly have, from my perspective. Whether you wanted to or not, you have. So, talk about Grief is Love because there's a profound concept behind that title.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah. So for me, the title and the whole experience of writing the book was actually born from another loss. After years of infertility, and IVF, and egg donors, and doing literally everything in my power to get pregnant and sustain a pregnancy, including letting an acupuncturist electrocute my uterus, my husband and I lost the pregnancy a few weeks later. And I am a practical and progressive woman. So it wasn't even for me about the pregnancy itself, but it was more about the hope for our future life as parents, and the hope that we held for that child, having that taken away.

And this was at the end of a years long process. This was the last chance, the last opportunity, this is where everybody was placing their bet and it didn't work out. And when it didn't work out, I was both devastated that it didn't work out. I was also physically very sick from the fact that it didn't work out. And all I wanted was my mom. And at that point, she'd been dead for almost 12 years.

And I realized then, I was like, I'm definitely not over this. I never really understood what that whole getting over it thing meant, but I was like, I'm clearly not over it. I wish my mom were here to help me figure out what to do, to help me feel better, to take care of me. And she's not and it sucks.

And then, a couple months after that loss, when I was still dealing with both the physical and the emotional consequences, we all found ourselves living in the midst of a pandemic. And the only thing I could do was just write my way through it. And as I realized that there's no point in trying to get over it, and what you actually have to do is learn to live with your losses, I sort of understand that that is true because of the love that we share with people.

If somebody dies, who you have no connection to you at all, you are probably going to feel bad or maybe feel bad for their family. You're going to feel a little something if you are a person with some degree of empathy, right? But it's not the kind of thing that's going to continue to come up for you, that you're going to have to continually deal with. Whereas, when you lose someone who you share an unconditional love relationship with, your brain is forced to figure out what it looks like to exist in the world without them. And as a part of that, you need to reconcile all of this love that you shared with someone who's no longer here. And it's like, what does that look like? How does that work?

And I finally realized that the pain that we feel is because, fundamentally, that grief is inextricably connected to the love that you share with someone. And what I realized is love is both feeling and action. And I started thinking about this a lot as I became a new mom, when I was wrapping up this book. And it's like, okay, if love is both feeling and action, we grieve because these people that we love so much, that we shared so much of our life with, are no longer here because they can no longer act on that love.

And that hurts, that sucks, especially when other losses take place or things happen in life where you really want them there. But I think you can continue to both feel their love for you and continue to hold love for them.

Just because my mom's not here, I'm not going to forget about her. They're always going to be things that make me think about her, that make me miss her, or where I'm forced to acknowledge the absence. And so for me, fundamentally, I came out with, oh yeah, grief is just another form of love. And unfortunately, it's often a painful form of love.




Warwick Fairfax:

One of the things that you state, and there's so many profound statements, truths that you say. One that really struck me in particular is you say, "Grief, like love, is also limitless," which means we have to find a way to live with it. The profound truth is not like, okay, I'm a strong person. I'll take three to six months and then we'll be done. I'm going to find a way through it. And obviously, we're very different.

Both my parents, well my mother was extremely driven in a lot of ways, so I have some of her perseverance. But left to my own devices, I'd have a little bit of that mentality, is that I'm a strong-willed person, with perseverance. I'm pretty, if not very-well, aware of my feelings, faults, all the rest. I'm pretty self-aware. Okay, I have the intelligence like Oxford, Harvard Business School, I have the capacity, the intelligence, and the emotional understanding. I have what I need. Let's power through this, let's make it go away.

Because talking about it does help, no question. But it's not like it makes it go away.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah.




Warwick Fairfax:

It makes it easy to live with. It's so profound that it's limitless. It doesn't go away. I mean, maybe it's obvious, but to me that's a revelation for most people that go through grief. It's like, oh really? Oh, you mean it's okay to have days when something triggers me?




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yep.




Warwick Fairfax:

And I lost my dad who was in his late eighties when he died, as I was from marriage number three. And my dad died in early '87, that's like 30 plus years ago. I still miss him. I will have dreams occasionally where he's in it.




Gary Schneeberger:

I've been looking for the right time to say this to you, Marisa. My mother passed away in 1994 and she was only 63, which now that I'm 57-




Marisa Renee Lee:

That's young.




Gary Schneeberger:

I can put only in front of 63, I couldn't then.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yes.




Gary Schneeberger:

But that was 28 years ago. Working on the preparation for this show, studying your story and the insights that you've gained about how grief doesn't end, just like love doesn't end. You may be able to tell, if anybody is watching this on YouTube or you see a clip, you've been around for 140 episodes. You know, listener, that I like to wear hats. I'm a little fancy in terms of, but I also like to wear rings a lot. The problem is I can't wear rings on the show because they clack on my microphone.

But today, right before we got on this call, I have behind me a bookcase. This is going somewhere, trust me.




Marisa Renee Lee:

I trust you.




Gary Schneeberger:

I have behind me a bookcase and I have things stored in there. And one of the things I have stored in there is what you'll see here on my finger. That is a dollar bill that was folded into a ring and it was folded into a ring more than almost 40 years ago by my mother.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Oh.




Gary Schneeberger:

And as I was preparing this area to go with this show, to interview you, I was hit with a wave of grief. We talked to another guest last week about grief doesn't come necessarily in a linear process. They're waves and they can come when you don't expect them. And I was hit with this wave of grief about missing my mom. And I thought, you know what, I'm talking to Marisa Renee Lee today about the loss of her mother. I'm going to bring my mom with me to this episode.




Marisa Renee Lee:

I love it.




Warwick Fairfax:

There you go.




Gary Schneeberger:

And that grief that I felt in that loss, and I'm not going to lie and say that every day I think about her, I don't. Weeks, months can go by where I don't. But in that moment, I did. In that moment, the love washed over me just as the grief washed over me, and I thought, I'm going to honor her in this way. And I just want to thank you for both being honest about your grief experience and the lessons that you've learned, but then also inspiring me to bring mom to the show today.




Marisa Renee Lee:

I love it. I love it. Gary, I brought my mom too. I realize, you guys, you probably can't see this, but there's our picture-




Warwick Fairfax:

Oh, wow.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Our last Christmas. Yeah, I'm with you.




Warwick Fairfax:

Wow. You know what? And thank you for sharing that, Gary. I mean, what I love about what you're saying, and you talk about this in the early chapters, is just the permission to grieve your way. Everybody's different.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yes. Yes.




Warwick Fairfax:

Everybody processes grief differently. And we often think that we need to be caring for others. You spend a good part of your life, you know, it's not about me, it's about others. And you write later about you've got to actually care for yourself. A lot of studies these days say, like in the airplane, you've got young kids, "Put the oxygen mask on yourself first." If you can't care for yourself, and this is in the later chapters, you won't be able to care in your case for your husband and your son, or you won't be a good friend or anything.




Marisa Renee Lee:

That's true.




Warwick Fairfax:

If you care for other people, you should care for yourself. So that's, in the way, the chapters. But I love just this permission to grieve. It's not weakness to say, "Hey, I'm not doing well." It's actually to me-




Marisa Renee Lee:

It's human.




Warwick Fairfax:

It's human. To me, it's a sign of strength, it's a sign of courage. It's being brave enough to say, "I'm not okay." It's not weakness, it's profound strength.

Talk about some of these lessons that listeners can hopefully understand. Grieve your way.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yes.




Warwick Fairfax:

You have permission to grieve. It's not weakness, it's courage, to actually grieve and find a safe place, safe person, where you can say, "Hey, you know what? I'm not doing okay. I'm just doing terrible."




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah. I think in American, and generally in western culture, we glorify all things positive. Like, I'm good. I'm okay. Turn your lemons into lemonade, blah blah, blah. But if you look at the research, as human beings, we are born with, I'm not going to remember off the top of my head, but five or six innate emotions. And half of them are things that we have come to judge and categorize as negative.

And it's like, how can it actually be negative if we were all born to feel these different things and to feel in this way sometimes? It's normal to be sad. And I'll tell you, being the parent of a baby right now has been a great reminder of the fullness of the human experience and the full spectrum of emotions that we should all be expected to experience. I'm sick of this sort of pull yourself up by your emotional bootstraps mentality. And instead, I want to see people giving themselves permission to just be human, to have a hard time, to have a bad day, to not feel like your best, most perfect Instagram-worthy self 24/7.

It's just not real. You can't live like that. And so, I wanted dig into a bunch of those themes in the book. But just to go back to what you said, a few things. Permission to grieve felt really important to me, because when I sat down to write the second version of this book, because the first version was one that I knew wasn't right, and I realized one day that it wasn't right because it focused too much on grief and less on healing.

I wanted to write a book that got at what has enabled me to live this full, hot pink, joyful life in the midst of multiple significant losses. And one of the first ingredients, and it was the first chapter in the book and also the longest chapter in the book, is permission. I finally had to stop trying to live up to either my own warped expectations, or other people's expectations around my personal emotional wellbeing, and give myself permission to feel however I feel each day about my mom, about the pregnancy loss.

When I was writing the book, there was also a lot of grief around going through the adoption process. That was just a really hard, stressful thing. So, once I started giving myself permission, it felt a lot easier to identify what are the things that can help me through this difficult time. Whether it's talking about and giving some voice to my feelings, or I find writing to be very therapeutic, or going to a counselor, or just going for a walk, or doing a meditation.

I felt like I couldn't get at the what's going to help me get through the really hard moments without first giving myself permission to feel and acknowledge the hard moments. And then one of the other things that I want to make sure people understand, we talked about how grief is limitless, how there is no timeline. And one of the things that I find a lot of people get really stuck on around grief is the idea of the five stages of grief.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, brilliant woman, brilliant writer, researcher, but she herself makes very clear that that book and her five stages, that wasn't written for you or me, or for you, Gary. That was written for people who were dying themselves. And so, we have taken this dated framework, that wasn't even supposed to apply to bereaved people, and we have applied it to bereaved people in a way that I think, in more cases than not, causes harm.

Because when you hear something like stages, you think that there are these sequential steps, like AA, or the developmental milestones that we look for in our little children, that you're supposed to go through in this very ordered way. And when that doesn't happen, you're like, "Oh, I messed up. Now I feel like shit and it turns out I'm grieving wrong." No, that's not true. That's just absolutely not true.

So no timelines, no stages. Please give yourself permission. And I think that, while I'm very much opposed to the whole taking lemons and turning them into lemonade, I do think that grief and joy can exist simultaneously. If you are honest and open about what you're experiencing, I think that does sometimes create space for joy. And I'm not talking about the overwhelming sense of happiness that maybe you had on your wedding day, or when your child was born or whatever. But even just a moment where you know, you look outside and the sun is shining and you feel a little bit better for 90 seconds.

And so, I want to make sure that people honor the fullness of their experience, which can include some joy or some laughter, even when you're deep in grief.




Warwick Fairfax:

There's a lot of wisdom here. I mean, just a couple of the thoughts. Being vulnerable for a purpose, so to speak, or just expressing the fact you're not doing well. One of the things you obviously write about, certainly by implication, is you have to choose wisely. There can be some family members, who we love very dearly, who want to fix us. And they'll be like, "Oh. Thanks so much for sharing, Marisa. You need to do X. Do counseling."




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah.




Warwick Fairfax:

Counseling is not bad, but it's like, "Here's a five point plan how to help."




Marisa Renee Lee:

Or another common one is the like, "But you have this and you have this and you have that. So, don't be sad, don't be whatever."




Warwick Fairfax:

You have a wonderful husband and a baby.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah, yes.




Warwick Fairfax:

You should be full of joy.




Marisa Renee Lee:

You should be fine.




Warwick Fairfax:

You should do meaningful-




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah.




Warwick Fairfax:

So, you want to find people that, not just a safe place, but a wise place. The safe and wise people will sit there and listen. They might say I'm sorry, they will be very short on answers and long on listening and empathy. And not everybody's wired that way. And if that's family member, that's great. If it's not, nothing against family.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah.




Warwick Fairfax:

But find people that will listen and not try and fix you, right?




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah. Figure out who your crew is. Who are the two people, maybe three, who you can text when you're going through it, who aren't going to jump to solutions and are just going to meet you with compassion and empathy.




Warwick Fairfax:

Indeed. You talk also about grace, grace for yourself and grace for others. And that's not easy. I know, you write in the book about a very good friend, I think in college, who was playing for the Irish women's soccer team, and had a big match. And it's like, she's thinking, "This is one of the highlights of my career." You're thinking, "This is my best friend, you need to be here."




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah.




Warwick Fairfax:

And it took a while to get through that one, in different perspectives. But just having grace for you, for others, and forgiveness, that's important. Grace for yourself and other people. And if people talk about agree to disagree, but some people have, you might think, "Well, I would never do that. If I was on X soccer team, I'd drop it in a heartbeat." And you might think, "Well, I feel that's wrong."




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah.




Warwick Fairfax:

It may or may not be. But talk a bit about grace for yourself and grace for others, because it's easy for anger to just multiply, and start getting angry at other people rightly or wrongly.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah. I think when you're hurting, it is hard to leave room for other people's imperfections of any kind. And when you're hurting, and you have expectations around how people in your life are supposed to support you and then they don't, it's really hard. And I think in some instances, frankly, proper boundaries may make most sense. If it's someone who's not interested in apologizing, or trying to meet you halfway and show you the care and love and support that you need, you probably just need to put up some boundaries and go find a different friend or family member to support you.

But when people are on your team and really want to be there for you, and bearing in mind the understanding that, as far as I can tell at this point, grief doesn't go away. So, you want to keep people in your life who really want to be there for you for the long haul because it's going to keep coming up. You're going to continue to be triggered by it. I just think it's really important to be willing to forgive and to extend grace because we're all human and most days we're all doing the best we can.

And then, I think it's equally important for you to extend grace to yourself. When you are grieving, grief takes over your body and your mind. And I'm not just saying that. There is scientific research that shows the direct impact that grief has on your brain. And that impact makes it hard for you to do the things that you've become accustomed to do, or in some cases, for you to do things the way that you're used to doing them because you're not yourself when grief has taken over.

I just think that grace, it really is a two-way street and I want people to think about grace as a key ingredient in living with loss.




Warwick Fairfax:

That's so well said. I know, as we are getting to the summary stage, a number of things you've said that are so profound is you don't get over loss, you don't get over typically grief. At least not from my perspective. You learn to balance grief and love, and living with grief, and living with your family and career. It's all different strands in the same stream, if you will. It's just part of life. There will be things that trigger you. Whether it's, my case, a loss of a family business, a loss of my dad, loss of my mother.

There will be things that come up and it could be simple as, I remember years ago, it's probably not a great example. But when my kids were small, they know I grew up obviously very wealthy. And when we had Christmas trees, we had staff to put stuff up, the Christmas ornaments up. Sounds kind of bizarre. And I remember my kids were small, and they said, "Well, daddy, that's so sad that you didn't do it as a family." And when they said that, I was just struck by a wave of grief and loss. Because it's like, you know what? You're right. I would've loved to grow up in a family where you're doing it.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah.




Warwick Fairfax:

Most people take that for granted. Now that was part of, gosh, I guess I grew up different. In some ways, there's a loss of what others had, the simple Christmases rather than the stuff. That's a small example. But there will be things that trigger us, for some reason, out of the blue. And that's just part of life.

And what you're saying, and I want listeners to hear this, don't expect to get over loss. You might learn to live with it better, I don't know. But you learn to live with it. Does that make sense?




Marisa Renee Lee:

100 percent.




Warwick Fairfax:

Because sometimes people think if I read the right books, have the right counselor, and you talk about this, if I just found the right counselor, he or she could really flip the switch and I would be, "Praise God, I'm healed. No grief, that's awesome."




Marisa Renee Lee:

I mean, unfortunately, I just don't think that's how... You know, I'm almost 15 years into my journey following the loss of my mom. And the research that I looked at about, not just how grief impacts your brain, but also how love imprints on your brain. You are never going to forget about your father or about the fact that you know had this family business that is no longer a family business. You're never going to forget about those things.

And because they stay stored, and because you're never going to forget, there are always going to be moments, some joyful, some painful, that trigger you. It's just baked into who you are. And there's nothing wrong with that.




Gary Schneeberger:

This is a perfect time to listen to the captain, who's just turned on the fasten seatbelt sign, indicating that we have begun our descent to end this very fascinating and helpful discussion, and this cap on our series, Gaining from Loss.

I want to do a couple things, Marisa, before I let Warwick ask the last question. First thing, very important, how can listeners find you and find out more about you online? Where can they get their hands on your book and learn more about what it is that you do?




Marisa Renee Lee:

So, you can buy Grief is Love pretty much anywhere books are sold. Amazon, Target, local book sellers, Barnes & Noble, et cetera. You can find me, I'm Marisa Renee Lee on all social platforms and that's also my website. So please, please do follow along on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. And I hope that you will consider buying the book.

It's not perfect. I don't know that there is a perfect book on grief, but I'm really trying to normalize the experience of grief and loss for people, and ensure that everyone has access to the things they need to heal from loss.




Gary Schneeberger:

And that's a perfect segue into the second thing I want to do here, because as I've said a couple of times, this is the last episode with a guest of our series Gaining from Loss. And there's something that I found, that you wrote for Vogue Magazine last October, called How I Learned to Find Joy During Times of Grief.

And the sentence that you have, that sort of sets up the five areas that you talk about, I think is a great capstone for this series. Because you say this, "As I've worked to manage my grief over the years, here's how I've learned to cultivate joy."

I would edit that a little bit, at the end of this series, for the context of this series to say, "As I've worked to manage my loss over the years, here's how I've learned to," I'll take out cultivate joy and with your permission, slide in, "create gain from the loss."




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yes.




Gary Schneeberger:

But here are the five things, and I want to do this. I've never done this before, but you've got the kind of mind I think is going to make this work out really well. I want to play this as sort of a fast money on a game show thing, where I'm going to tell you, I'm going to say, "Here's the first point that you said about this idea of how you manage grief over the years to find joy."

You have five points, and I don't want you to have to dive too deeply into it, but the first couple thoughts that come to your head when I say, "Here's the first thing you wrote that you do that." And the first thing that you wrote to cultivate joy, through grief and through loss, the first thing you wrote is, identify what you need and take it. Couple sentences on what you meant by that.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yes, yes. Honestly, this gets back to what Warwick was saying about feelings. Figure out what you're feeling and then figure out what you need in order to access joy. It may be that today is just a day for you to sit with some sad feelings and let them wash over you so that tomorrow can be more joyful. Or it may be something more specific, like going to counseling. But whatever it is, figure it out and take it because you deserve to be happy.




Gary Schneeberger:

Excellent. Point one wrapped. Point two, set boundaries and stick to them. Couple sentences on that.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah, this is a big one. I think especially with the approaching holiday season here in the States. I think it's really important, if you are having a hard time to not force yourself into a bunch of shoulds, for lack of a more technical term, like, "Oh, I should do this work thing. I should go to that event. I should celebrate Thanksgiving in this kind of a way, even though I'm pretty sure it's going to make me feel like shit." So, get rid of the shoulds and set boundaries around what you are and aren't comfortable doing while you're grieving.




Gary Schneeberger:

The third point is going to sound like, we've culled it from Crucible Leadership, Beyond the Crucible texts, because Warwick uses this exact phrase, it's in the new e-course that we've created. And your third point is to identify an accountability partner. What do you mean by that?




Marisa Renee Lee:

Oh, yeah. That's super important. So I don't know about the two of you, but I am really good at being hard on myself. And also, sometimes, not so great at doing the things that I know I need to do to care for myself. I preach about it, I talk about it all the time, but it's hard to put into practice when you have a full-time job, a new house, and a new baby.

And so, I have a couple of girlfriends who we hold each other accountable, to do the things that we know we need to do to, in order to pour into our families and pour into our work. And so, figure out who in your crew you can link up with and just be text buddies around, what are you doing for yourself today? What are your plans for the weekend? How are you making sure that you're getting the rest and the care that you need?




Gary Schneeberger:

Three-fifths of the way through, the fourth point of how you live with joy after loss is celebrate something, period. Anything. Talk about that.




Marisa Renee Lee:

So, my mom was a big celebrations person, so I'm all about celebrating wins even if they're teeny tiny ones. So, if you're having a hard time and today you manage to both get out bed and brush your teeth, feel free to celebrate that. It's okay. Give yourself a pat on the back.




Gary Schneeberger:

Awesome. And one of the things that you may celebrate, because I picked this up in some of the research, you love the Godfather, so do I.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Oh, I do love-




Gary Schneeberger:

If we ever meet, we have to watch, eat some cannoli and watch The Godfather. Here's your last point. And I love this point, not only for your story, Lisa. I'm sorry, Lisa.




Marisa Renee Lee:

That's my mother's name.




Gary Schneeberger:

I'm going to back up. Well, okay, I'm not going to back up. I'm just going to say-




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah, it's okay.




Gary Schneeberger:

Marisa. Wow. Hello, Dr. Freud. That is fast.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah.




Gary Schneeberger:

That's awesome. I mean-




Marisa Renee Lee:

She came to visit. Yeah.




Gary Schneeberger:

Well, because I'm talking about her, right?




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah.




Gary Schneeberger:

And that's the fifth point. The fifth point here is, and I love this for your story and for our series, your fifth point is Be a Lisa.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yeah. So for me, Be a Lisa is all about giving back. And there is research that points to, when we are in service of others, it usually does help our own mental and emotional wellbeing. So when I say Be a Lisa, I mean find something you can do for somebody else.




Gary Schneeberger:

Excellent. Warwick, I'll let you have the last couple of questions. But that sounds a little bit like what we say at Beyond the Crucible, live a life of significance, a life on purpose dedicated to serving others, right?




Warwick Fairfax:

Just as we kind of sum up here, I love as you talk about the legacy of your mother and living her legacy in a sense. And I also love just the way that you've managed to use the loss to help so many. And I've found, in my own way, and I'm sure you are finding this, as you write about the pain and people say, "Marisa, what you've written really helped me," it doesn't make the grief go away, but maybe it makes it a couple degrees more manageable.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Yes.




Warwick Fairfax:

It's sort of drops of grace to a person that maybe feel like they're wandering through the desert and looking for an oasis.




Marisa Renee Lee:

Absolutely.




Warwick Fairfax:

I've found that it's not necessarily a reason to do it, but it's a byproduct. So, just as we summarize here, I often like to ask, what's sort of a word of hope that you would give people? Because maybe today is somebody's worst day, or worst year, worst decade. What's a message of hope that you would give to that person?




Marisa Renee Lee:

Well, it's funny that you use the word hope because I would say, "Choose hope." Keep believing that there is something better than the worst pain of grief. Because there is. And while we know the grief doesn't go away, it's not the devastating on-the-floor-of-an-investment-bank panic attack situation, that it was 15 years ago.

Now, it's more subtle and less overwhelming. And I have managed to create a big, full, joyful life in the absence of my mother while also creating space for her. But I think you can only do that if you are committed to hope and if you really believe that there is something better than the worst pain that you experience when you lose someone you love.




Gary Schneeberger:

That sound you've heard, listener, is the plane on the ground. That Marisa has landed the plane, and we've landed this series, Gaining from Loss. So, thank you, Marisa Renee Lee. Thank you, listeners, for being with us. Warwick and I will be back next week with a wrap up of all the things we've learned. See you then.

Rabbi Steve Leder thought that after officiating more than 1,000 funerals, he understood death and the loss experienced by those it leaves behind. But it wasn’t until his own father passed away that he felt in his heart, rather than just knowing in his head, the depth and breadth of losing a loved one.

The lessons he’s learned and the applications he’s still living out have made clear to him that the losses we experience in life can be the fuel for living more intentionally. He says that we can craft a life today that will make us good ancestors to our family that follows.

Highlights

Transcript

Gary Schneeberger:

Hi friends. Here at Beyond The Crucible, we often get a chance to dive into some of the hardest moments of someone's life. Everything from facing loss to trying to find your purpose in life. This summer we've been working extremely hard to pull together a full e-course, our first, filled with more than three hours of lessons learned, on how you can find and fully embrace second act significance. To gain access to this course, visit secondactsignificance.com. That's secondactsignificance.com. Now here's today's podcast episode.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Regardless of your beliefs, if you've ever suffered a terrible loss, it's not the end of the relationship. It's not the end of love. And we can take these terrible losses and use them to ennoble our lives. Dostoevsky said his greatest fear was that his life would not be worthy of his suffering. That is such a powerful idea. We all go through hell, all of us, and there are many forms of hell. There's the hell of losing someone you love. There's the hell of Alzheimer's. There's the hell of failure. There's the hell of public shame. There's the hell of betraying. There's the hell of being betrayed. There's the hell of cancer. There's the hell of a kid in trouble. The hell of addiction. We all go through hell. But the point is not to come out of hell empty handed, that is the point.




Gary Schneeberger:

And that friends is also the point of our special fall series, Gaining From Loss. Hi, I'm Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show, and you've joined us today for our conversation with Rabbi Steve Leder, senior rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. And the author of, The Beauty of What Remains. In this conversation with Warwick and me, Rabbi Leder describes that even after officiating more than 1000 funerals, it wasn't until his own father died that he felt in his heart rather than just knowing in his head the depth and breadth of losing a loved one. The lessons he's learned and the applications he's still walking out have made vivid to him that the hells we experience in life can be the fuel for living more intentionally, the fuel to crafting a life today that will make us good ancestors to our family that follows.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, Steve, Rabbi Leder, thank you so much for being here. I love just some of the concepts in your book, and we'll dive into it in a bit, The Beauty of What Remains, just what we can learn from loss and death. And I know obviously the death of your dad was pivotal in your story, but before we get into that, I'd love just a little bit of the background, behind the scenes. I know you grew up in Minneapolis, so talk a bit about what life was like for you and how you decided to become a rabbi. I'd say, what was your background and your journey?




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Well, I grew up in the first ring of suburbs outside of Minneapolis called St. Louis Park. And despite the fact that it was in the middle of Minnesota, it was a small little Jewish ghetto. I walked to school in the morning with a hundred Jewish kids just from my block. Now this was only about a 20 square block area, but it was all I knew. I'm the fourth of five children. My dad and my uncle who lived two houses down owned a junkyard together called Leder Brothers Metal. And that's where I learned about humility and hard work. My dad grew up on welfare. He too was one of five. My parents were 17 and 18 when they got married and had the five of us before they were 30 and no safety net.

And I was kind of raised in this culturally rich Jewish environment with a tremendous amount of catastrophic thinking. There was catastrophe lurking around every corner. We weren't poor but we lived like we were poor. I was the first and only in my family to go to graduate school, and my father sat me down my junior year of college and said, "Steve, I think you have a couple of choices here when you graduate, you could go to law school and run Leder Brothers, or you could not go to law school and run Leder Brothers." Those were my two career choices.

But because this was such a kind of blue collar upbringing, every creative pursuit was summarily dismissed throughout my childhood. You want to be a writer? Forget it. You want to be an actor? Forget it. You want to be a musician? Forget it. An artist? Forget it. You go to law school and you run a business. That was the way up and out. The one exception to that worldview was the synagogue. That was the one endeavor above reproach. That was the one place my parents would drive me too. If you wanted to play hockey, you were on your own. You wanted to play baseball, you were on your own. But the synagogue somehow was acceptable and it was there that I was allowed to express myself and be creative. And it was there that I met erudite, educated people. And I remember thinking at that age, if I could ever have a job where I got to wear a suit and a tie every day, wouldn't that just be the most remarkable thing?

Because really the business my family was in was a very dangerous, gritty, dirty, freezing cold and very hot kind of life. That was really it for me. I always just loved being there and expressing myself. I remember telling my dad, my senior year of college that I was going to apply to rabbinical school and his first response was, "Rabbis are beggars. Why would you do that?" So we had a kind of difficult time about that. And yet, once I was ordained and was in Los Angeles, my parents had a condo in Palm Springs and they would drive in on Saturday morning to hear me preach. And it wouldn't matter if there were 200 or 2000 people out there. All I saw was one set of teeth smiling and it was my dad. So he came around and ended up being quite proud of what I chose to do.




Warwick Fairfax:

I mean that's an amazing story because it sounds like, it wasn't like there was all these options here open to you, and you obviously wanted to live a different life than your parents and your uncle, that I guess was in business. And that's not a judgment, it's just, it's your life and you wanted to do something different. So it's interesting, and I love in the book how you talk about, I think you were at a Jewish summer camp and so... Rabbis are in t-shirts and shorts, and they're throwing baseballs and "I didn't know rabbis could be cool" and-




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Because the rabbis where I grew up in my home congregation were these very old stuffy, kind of Germanic, and like yellow teeth and greasy hair and they were scary. And then I go to this Jewish summer camp, which my parents sent me to by the way, because I got arrested for shoplifting when I was 14 and I was smoking weed every day in junior high school. They kind of woke up and decided I might benefit from some parental supervision because I was the fourth of five. They were kind of done by the time I showed up. And I remember going to this Jewish summer camp in Oconomowoc Wisconsin, on Lac La Belle, Gary, where your roots are.




Gary Schneeberger:

All right.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Yeah. And I remember seeing rabbis, as you said, Warwick in t-shirts and shorts, who could throw a baseball. And I remember it very distinctly. I was 15 and I thought to myself, wait a minute, rabbis can be normal people. How is that possible? And it blew my mind, and I loved everything about the place and I really never looked back.




Warwick Fairfax:

So fast forward, you end up in Los Angeles in a very prominent synagogue, Wilshire Boulevard Temple, which from what I understand is maybe the oldest Jewish congregation in Los Angeles, and very prominent, and several campuses. So that's... To lead a synagogue like that and that history is obviously a tremendous honor. I think you've been there since 2003. So talk about that. I mean that's sort of an amazing journey.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Well, I've actually been there since 1987.




Warwick Fairfax:

Oh wow.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

I've been the senior rabbi since 2003, I believe. But I was there in 1987. I started July 15th, 1987. I was 26 years old when they hired me. I knew nothing. But I really loved my culture, my people, I loved our narratives and I knew how to work hard, really hard. And those things combined to really, kind of wed me to the congregation. I was ordained with a class of 70, only two of us are still at the congregations where we began. Most clergy have 2, 3, 4, 5 jobs in the course of a career. I am now in my 36th year at Wilshire Boulevard Temple. It's very unusual, but there's an old saying in my business that congregations get the rabbi they deserve, and rabbis get the congregation they deserve.

It's like a marriage and we have a really good marriage. I have always worked very hard to put the congregation's interests first, and they've worked hard to keep me here. And together we've really grown. When I showed up, the congregation had 1800 families and now it's 2700. We had one campus and only a Sunday school, and now we have three campuses, three early childhood centers, two elementary schools and three Sunday schools and we have sleepaway camps and a conference center. So it's a lot of fun to run. It's obviously a lot of pressure too, but anything worth doing involves pressure, I guess.




Warwick Fairfax:

I want to make sure we get to some of the things in your most recent book, The Beauty of What Remains, and I'm sure that continues in the book, that's going to be coming out soon, For You When I Am Gone, because this series is about loss. And I think I find it interesting to say or that you've said, I think you gave maybe a thousand different eulogies. You had one that was really very widely respect and you thought, I've got this eulogy stuff down. After about a thousand, I think, you know what they say, practice makes perfect, had a lot of practice, maybe I'm not perfect, must be getting somewhat close. But then your dad died, which sort of transformed your thinking. So, I love the thinking behind that title. Talk a bit about what lies behind the title of The Beauty of What Remains.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Regardless of your beliefs, if you've ever suffered a terrible loss, it's not the end of the relationship. It's not the end of love. And we can take these terrible losses and use them to ennoble our lives. Dostoevsky said his greatest fear was that his life would not be worthy of his suffering. That is such a powerful idea. We all go through hell, all of us. And there are many forms of hell. There's the hell of losing someone you love, there's the hell of Alzheimer's, there's the hell of failure, there's the hell of public shame, there's the hell of betraying, there's the hell of being betrayed. There's the hell of cancer, there's the hell of a kid in trouble. The hell of addiction. We all go through hell. But the point is not to come out of hell empty handed. That is the point.

Can you come out of hell with something that ennobles your life and gives you... And can you find some purpose within it? And I think that idea from Dostoevsky is, can we be worthy of the suffering we've endured? That's the mission. And that can actually make our lives more beautiful. My father's death has changed my life. I miss him, it hurts. But I am also leading a much more beautiful life today than I was while he was alive. And it is due in no small part to the fact that he died.

Kafka said the meaning of life is that it ends. It really is that simple. And I remember the moment that I realized that. I'm trying to tell this story quickly. So you're right. I was a rabbi for 31 years before my father died, and I had officiated more than a thousand funerals for sure. And I thought I kind of understood death pretty well. And then my dad died and I moved from rabbi to son. A lot of the book is about that evolution, and what the rabbi thought he knew that the son actually realized was wrong. So I'm sitting in the small room with my family, my four siblings and our spouses and the kids and my mom. And we're waiting for the rabbi to come in at the synagogue into that small room in the hallway and lead us into the chapel to see my father's body in the casket.

And then the caskets closed and then the funeral would begin. People would be allowed in. And the young rabbi walks into the room and I remember saying to myself, I know exactly how the rabbi feels right now, but I have no idea how I feel. I am in a new universe. And then the rabbi walked us in, and keep in mind I had stood next to a thousand families while they looked at their loved one's dead body. And to be honest with you, it didn't really affect me very much. I could have eaten a sandwich standing there, I was there to help them, but it was vicarious. And I had that professional shard of ice that one has to have in these situations. So he walks us into the chapel and I approached my dad's casket and body, and I looked down and I remember I put my hand on his chest because I didn't want to feel his skin because I knew it would be cold.

So I put my hand on his chest. Now to understand the power of this, you have to know something about my dad and about me, throughout our lives we looked almost identical. Like if you saw a picture of my father at 10 years old and a picture of me at 10 years old, you could not tell the difference. And I looked down and my first thought was, that's how I'm going to look when I'm dead and my son is bending over my casket. I am going to die. 55 years old and all those funerals, it had never really occurred to me in the core of my being, I am going to die. And that realization changed my life for the better. And that's also why I called the book, The Beauty of What Remains. It applies to the memory of my father, but it also applies to the precious time I have left, which now is more beautiful to me than it ever could have been otherwise.




Gary Schneeberger:

We've called this series Gaining from Loss, what you have just described, Rabbi was a gain from your loss. And it hasn't been a one time gain that you kind of put in your pocket. It's a gain that you put in your heart and it informs your living moving forward. Right? I mean it's not an overstatement to say, as I think you may have said earlier on, it's changed your life.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

It changed my life. And this concept, by the way, a gain through loss, I'll tell you where my mind is going, and it may be of interest to you guys and your listeners, which is the concept of sacrifice. So we tend to think of sacrifice in our culture as a net loss, as a negative. She made so many sacrifices. He made the ultimate sacrifice. But the Hebrew word, the biblical Hebrew word for sacrifice, Korban, comes from the same family of words as Krovim relatives, Kiruv to gather in, Krovim I'm sorry, Krovim are relatives. Karov means to be close or near. In other words, from a psycho linguistic standpoint, the biblical concept of sacrifice was the way you got closer to God and to the people who matter. And it's a counterintuitive way of thinking about it. But the idea being, you never are poorer by giving. And it's not a net loss, it's a net gain. And if you think, well, let's just try an experiment quickly, Warwick what are the two most important things to you in your life?




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, I'd say my faith and my family, my wife and my three kids.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Your faith and your family. What are the two things you have sacrificed the most for in your life?




Warwick Fairfax:

Probably both of those groups.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Exactly. So we really do feel the closest to and the richest from the things we sacrifice the most for, it is a gain through loss.




Warwick Fairfax:

Wow. I mean that is so profound. I mean, there's so much in this book to really dive into. I mean, a lot of it's counterintuitive, at least for those of us who are living and not a few heartbeats away from death, which hopefully most of the listeners are there. I mean, just even in some of those early chapters when you talk about, most people are afraid of dying and what you say is that people who are actually are dying in those last stages. They're not afraid of dying. If they have any fear, it's more they want to make sure that their loved ones are okay.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

That's right.




Warwick Fairfax:

I think, even your dad, I think, it's like, "Steve, just tell me you're going to be okay." I mean, that that's some profound learning that we can have from those who are having their last breaths.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Yes, death is as natural as any other part of our lives. And the closest thing I... Look, and by the way, let's be clear, I'm talking about people who are literally actively dying a day or two away from death. I've been at hundreds of those bedsides. I always ask, "Gary, are you afraid?" And the answer a hundred percent of the time is no, not for themselves. And the closest thing that I can compare it to for the living is imagine yourself with the worst jet lag you've ever had in your life, right? You are just a freaking zombie. What do you want to do? All you want to do is get to that hotel, get into bed, darken the room, pull the covers up over your head and go to sleep. You're not anxious about going to sleep, you're not depressed about going to sleep, you're not sad about going to sleep.

It's the most natural thing in the world. That's the closest analogy I can give you, to what it means to be a day or two from death. Now you might say, "Well what about the people who die suddenly? Steve aren't they afraid?" No, because they don't know it's coming. You get hit by a bus, you don't know it's coming. So really this fear of death is not, it's really catastrophic thinking. It is not how it goes down.




Warwick Fairfax:

It seems like, as you thought about your dad's death and what happened, and just more generally, you have one chapter, you talk about Psalm 23, which is you rightly say, in Christian and Jewish funerals, it's prominent in almost all. And this idea that we don't stay in darkness forever, that we move forward despite very real losses. And I love how you say, somewhere you move, rushing past the pain isn't fair to our heart. So talk about how that there is darkness with death, but yet it's not the end. Obviously if you're a person of faith is not the end for them, but it's also not the end for us who are living.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Right. That's right. The verse you're referring to is, Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil for thou are with me. The poet is telling us, it is a long dark valley, but we walk through it. We can put one... And sometimes in life, just being able to put one foot in front of the other is a profound act of faith. And grief is one of those times. By the way, also, if you think deeply about this metaphor of grief being a valley of shadows, if you think deeply about a shadow, no matter how long, no matter how dark, it's actually proof of light, you cannot have a shadow unless a light is still shining. It's obstructed, in the Psalm, it's the sunlight obstructed by mountains because you're in a valley, in grief it's obstructed by loss.

I often say to people, grief is love obstructed. It's there, it's shining, but it is obstructed. A shadow is proof of light, pain and grief are proof of love. And also I think... Now this is where I think the poet misses the point and where, by the way, I'm 62 years old, my entire generation missed the point and every generation to follow, because we were all raised under the thinking of Elizabeth Kubler Ross who divided death and dying and mourning and grief and loss into stages, five stages. And that implies that grief is a linear process. And what I learned in the aftermath of my father's death is that grief is an entirely non-linear process. Kubler Ross, you would think, okay, first I'm going to feel A then B, then C, then D, then E, and then I'm done, like grief is some kind of rash that clears up.

In the book I say that, anyone who thinks the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, knows nothing about grief, because grief is non-linear. Therefore you cannot do it wrong, you cannot do it out of order. And the only expert in your grief is you. And I feel that grief, for me at least, and I think for many is much more like waves. I think waves are a better metaphor, because they come very close together and they're very large and very aggressive at first. But they do spread out. They do become less frequent, they become less aggressive. The undertow is not quite as powerful. And it is equally true that you can have days, weeks, months, years even, of calm, beautiful seas. Your back is turned one day and some rogue wave of grief just rises up and takes you down. And that's the truth of it.

Now, that grief taught me something that made my life better. To extend this wave metaphor. Before my father died, I was the kind of guy who when confronted with a wave, a wave of anything, a wave of anxiety, a wave of hard work, a wave of illness, didn't matter. I would plant my feet in the ground, stick my chest out and say, come on, I'm stronger than any wave. I am going to hold my ground. But we all know what happens to someone whose default setting is such, when a new kind of wave hits them, a typhoon, a tsunami that they have never, ever experienced before.

You end up being thrashed, turned upside down, smashed against the rocks, scared, grasping, flailing, gasping for air. That's what happens when you try to stand up to a certain type of wave. So what I learned is there's a better way, which is, when you see these and feel these enormous waves coming, you lie down and you float with it, until you can stand up again. And I also discovered that while you're floating, if you reach your hand out, very often there's someone standing near you who will take your hand and help lift you from that suffering. And that changes your entire life. The Talmud says the prisoner cannot free himself. That's a very powerful insight, particularly for men, by the way.




Gary Schneeberger:

This last several minutes of conversation, what pops in my head is something I read in an interview that you did, talking about the pandemic, where you talked about coming out of the pandemic, the emotion that you felt. Somebody asked you how did you feel going through that emotion? And yeah, there was a lot of grief for a lot of people, and we've been focusing a little bit on death. But you started out by talking about all kinds of things that can cause loss and grief. The pandemic was one of those things. And you said that, when asked what was your emotion coming out of that, you said gratitude.

And it's led me to want to ask you this question, and I've asked other guests, I mean, have you found gain from loss? But I want to ask you this is, it sounds like what you're talking about, we tend to think the opposite of grief is joy. It seems to me maybe what you're talking about, especially that idea of if you reach your hand out while you're resting, there's a hand there to help you go through it. Maybe is it possible or in your view is the opposite of grief, gratitude? Is that a fair statement to make?




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Very. First of all, I don't think there is an opposite of grief.




Gary Schneeberger:

Okay.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

All of life is separation and loss. Blessings don't come any other way. So I'm not sure. I don't think it's a binary reality. You're either grieving or you're something else. Quite to the contrary. So what I discovered in writing the book, what I realized I was really writing about was dualism, was the duality that death forces us to confront. The dualities, right? The dualities of love and loss, light and darkness. Let's talk about memory for a moment. The duality of memory. Clergy are full of cliches about memory. May his memory be a blessing. You'll always have her in your memory. Da da da. Yeah, that's all true. But yeah, it's true that memory is beautiful, but it is equally true that it really, really hurts. It's both. It's like, in the book I say, it's like being caressed and spat on at the same time.

And so for me, listen, I love my father. I feared my father. I loved my father. I feared my father. I lovde my father. I feared my father. My father was a great father. My father was a terrible father. There's dissonance, there's dichotomous tension in all of us all the time. And death forces us to look at that. I'm alive, I'm going to die, I'm alive, I'm going to die. Everything matters. Nothing matters. Everything matters. Nothing matters. Now what it did for me, is I finally understood that making peace with the irreconcilable nature of life's dualities is a resolution. Making peace with the fact that these things cannot be resolved is a resolution and it brings me peace.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, I mean that is profound. I mean there it is, duality. And I can relate to so much of what you said. My mother died five years ago at age 95. My dad, who was a lot older, died in his eighties back in January 87. So long time ago. And even though my dad has died, whatever that is more than 30 years ago, there's still maybe not waves of grief, but maybe ripples. I'd look at a photograph or there'll be memories with both of them, of joy and others of sadness. Things that I loved about them to things that I didn't appreciate quite so much. And there is that duality. But I love what you talk about is through loss, there is gain in the sense, you talk about death as a great teacher, if it impels us to serve the living, I mean we appreciate the best about them.

You write elsewhere, you appreciate the things that you didn't like about them, you make a choice not to be like that. I think we can be the captain of our own ship in terms of our character and life. We can choose to live differently. You, in your books say the way you parent is different than the way your father parented. You try to, as we all try to, do a little bit better.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

That's right.




Warwick Fairfax:

Hopefully your kids will endeavor, nothing against you, try to do it a little bit better than you. And so the virtue of a cycle goes on. So talk about just some of these profound lessons that you feel like death can tell us about life, what's important. You say elsewhere, nobody wants your crap, which I love that phrase. It's like, I'm sure with your congregation, it's not all about how many millions or billions you accumulate. Nothing wrong with that. But I don't think you've given too many eulogies in which you said, "Okay, here we're going to walk through this person's balance sheet and income statement. How many houses and cars?"




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Here's the simplest example, and I talk about this in my new book, which is now out called For You When I'm Gone, I ask the question in the book, I make an observation about headstones. Now I spend a lot of time in cemeteries. And despite the fact that we all, every one of us is unique, we lead unique lives. If you walk through a cemetery, you will see an extraordinary universality to inscriptions on headstones. Why? Because when you have to distill a person's life down to 15 characters per line and four lines total, that's like half a tweet. You are engaged in a very, very enlightening act of essentialism. What do you see on headstones? You don't see anybody's resume, their net worth, where they went to college, where their grandchildren went to college, their children's GPA, their jean size, their zip code, none of it.

None of it. What do they all say? Loving husband, father, grandfather, brother, friend. Loving wife, mother, grandmother, sister, friend. That's it. It all comes down to the tiny handful of relationships we have that matter. It all comes down to this simple profound fact that it is not what we have, but who we have that defines our life. Now the question is, are we living that way? And this is why death is such a powerful teacher. In fact, I think death is the only teacher. And I wish there was another way to be awakened.

I've always wanted to write a book of how to have your second child first. But you can't, right? It's a great title, but you can't write the book. You have to experience these things in order to learn from them. You cannot do it theoretically. I was at a thousand funerals before my father's. I thought I knew a lot. I knew nothing. Nothing. This is why I'm so interested, as both of you are, in pain and in death, because they are the things that shake us up. Marshall Mcluhan said, "I don't know who discovered water, but it wasn't the fish."

Right? Now, when does a fish discover water? When it's yanked out of the water and wriggling on a hook. That's when a fish figures out it was in water. That disruption, it takes something disruptive to enlighten us. I wish there was another way, but I certainly haven't found it.




Warwick Fairfax:

It's so true. I mean, in probably a hundred plus guests we've had on the podcast, I can't tell you how many people have said how loss was a great gift. We had an Australian woman who dove into a suburban pool in Sydney. She was 13, became diagnosed as a quadriplegic. She was athletic. A couple decades later, she's a consultant speaker. And she said, "What I went through was a gift." That to me, I'm not saying that's right, but there's a sense of loss can teach us. Even in my own case, losing 150 old family media business on my watch, I've learned so much from that. There's even gift in there.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Well, I'm sure-




Warwick Fairfax:

It's a crazy concept.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

In its own way it probably liberated you, right?




Warwick Fairfax:

Indeed. Well said.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Yeah. Yeah.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well said.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Yeah, yeah. Because I'm sure as hell happy. I'm not running Leder Brothers Metal. I would be rich and bored. So look, I think we have to be careful here. I am not trying to idealize pain and loss. I am not for a moment saying that that woman's life was worth becoming a paraplegic or a quadriplegic. What I think we are all saying is, but neither is it worthless, if you have to go through hell don't come out empty handed.




Warwick Fairfax:

And that's really, you summarize it so well. We don't choose the catastrophes, the crucibles, the calamities that happen to us. Whether it's death, a car accident, alzheimer's, a cancer diagnosis. None of us choose that. None of us want to go through that. But if you have to, at least have some good come out of it, learn something from it.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

And if nothing else, it deepens our ideally, it deepens our empathy for the suffering of another.




Warwick Fairfax:

Amen. It so does. There's one quote you say in some articles that you talk about living as a good ancestor. I love that phrase. And other people talk about what do you want your eulogy to be. Live that eulogy today. I mean a couple different writers have come across have said that, and that's so profound. Because you don't want to be on your deathbed with your, I think, what two kids is it? Saying, yeah dad was pretty good, but I wish A and B. I mean none of us are perfect, but you hope that they say, dad may not have been perfect, but he gave us his all. He loved us deeply. He spent time with us. It wasn't all about his day job. He was a good man and a good dad. And I respect him, I admire him. I feel blessed to have him as a father. I mean, it's probably something along those lines, I'm guessing.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

In the new book. The first chapter is about regret. And I discovered something, again counterintuitive. I'm very interested in these counterintuitive things about life. In looking at what most people regret at the end of life, I discovered that what most people regret most is not something they did. It's something they didn't do. It's not the mistakes of commission, it's the mistakes of omission that people regret most. Because as I often say to people, you cannot have a better past, if you missed an opportunity, you cannot have a better past. So regret ideally should impel us like loss, like pain, to march into a better future.




Gary Schneeberger:

I am not going to regret my omission to say that sound you heard listener was the captain turning on the fasten seatbelt sign. And for the first time in 140 episodes, I get to say the reason that we're going to have to land the plane here is that rabbi Leder needs to catch a connecting flight in a few minutes.




Rabbi Steve Leder:

That's right.




Gary Schneeberger:

Before I go, rabbi, please tell listeners how they can find out more about you on the internet, how they can find your books, how can they learn more about Steve Leder?




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Well, thank you. I appreciate the question. My books are all on Amazon. Just go to Steve Leder, L-E-D-E-R. The new one came out in June. It made the New York Times bestseller list, which I'm really proud of. It's a team effort to get that far, believe me. I'm on Instagram. That's one great way to follow me and kind of keep up with what I'm thinking and doing. And that is @steve_leder. Again, L-E-D-E-R. I have a website, steveleder.com. You can find me at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, at that website. And that's the easiest way to kind of connect. And I actually do answer all of my DMs myself on Instagram. So if you want to communicate, that's a great way to do it.




Gary Schneeberger:

Awesome. Warwick, we've got a couple minutes left before we have to bid farewell to the rabbi. What's your final question?




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, you have so many profound quotes in the book that we've just been discussing, but there's one kind of... At the end and it says, the older I become and the more distance from my father's life and death, the more I realize how incumbent it is upon us all to make the legacy we inherit more beautiful and more authentically our own. Not only by living as our loved ones lived in their finest moments, but also by choosing what not to carry forth from their worst. So if you think about your father's death and loss, how would you summarize just some of the most profound lessons, that you learnt from that experience, that you want your congregation and especially your kids to learn from the death of their grandfather?




Rabbi Steve Leder:

Let's start with the negative and end with the positive. I did not and will not continue to raise my children to fear me. I grew up with a dad who said I don't want to have to hit because if I do, I break bones. I do not want to raise my children to believe that there is catastrophe lurking behind every corner. And I do not want to have the kind of marriage my parents had, which was horrible. And I don't want to be belittling and judgmental in the way my father was. Those are the negatives. Those are the things I've tried to leave behind. On the positive side and there are many. My father had an amazing ability to enjoy a moment, in the moment. He would often, when he was eating something delicious and usually cheap and plenty of it, he would just look at me and say, "Are we living?"

Like, is this not the greatest thing ever, this hot fudge sundae? Are we living? Or walking in the sunshine, he grew up in the cold and the sunshine was a miracle to my father. So those things, the appreciating the extraordinary nature of the most ordinary things, a slice of a ripe avocado made my father so happy. So I try to remember those things. And also, he was really funny. He really loved to laugh and he was wicked smart, and he worked so hard for so long. And those are things that I hope I can enhance and bring more deeply into the world. And it was shown to us sometimes in very odd and difficult ways. But he was fundamentally committed to all five of his children being good people. And I hope that I have done the same, not only with my children, but with my entire congregation. And that to me will be honoring the best of my father.




Gary Schneeberger:

What you have just heard listeners is what gaining from loss sounds like with Rabbi Steve Leder who has a plane to catch. So until we are together the next time, thank you for being with us.

It is fair to ask what gain Kayla Stoecklein experienced from the loss of her husband, Andrew, to suicide in 2018. What good could possibly come from where she found herself after such a devastating tragedy? What beauty could be birthed from those terrible ashes?

In our conversation with Kayla this week, she answers all those questions in ways that will inspire you as much as they surprise you. She discusses with Warwick the moving and meaningful truths she’s packed into her book — Rebuilding Beautiful: Welcome What Is, Dare to Dream Again, and Step Bravely into What Could Be – which documents her journey of, as she puts it, discovering how loss gives us new eyes to see the grace threaded through all humanity.

Her encouragement to all of us? A beautiful world waits for us on the other side of loss. A world so expansive it has room for our pain.

Highlights

Transcript

Gary Schneeberger:

Hi, friends. Here at Beyond the Crucible, we often get a chance to dive into some of the hardest moments of someone's life, everything from facing loss to trying to find your purpose in life. This summer, we've been working extremely hard to pull together a full e-course - our first - filled with more than three hours of lessons learned on how you can find and fully embrace Second-Act Significance. To gain access to this course, visit secondactsignificance.com, that's secondactsignificance.com. Now, here's today's podcast episode.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Kayla Stoecklein:

While we were away from him the following day for just a little bit, taking some of those next steps, we were getting a guest speaker for Sunday, we were making a plan for that team rally that was supposed to happen that evening. We were calling other pastors, asking questions, picking their brains on inpatient facilities while we were away from him making a plan to take care of him, take care of his mind, and take care of his health. He attempted suicide and it was an absolute blindside. We had no idea how sick his mind really was, how big his pain truly was, and we just had no idea. And so, he was rushed to the hospital and they ran a bunch of tests on his body and the doctors delivered the most terrific news that there was nothing that they could do to save his life. And so, on August 25th, 2018, he took his last breath. And with that, I took my first in this very unexpected life as a widow at 29 years old with three little boys that were two, four, and five.




Gary Schneeberger:

You may wonder after hearing those heartbreaking life-changing words, how this week's guest Kayla Stoecklein fits into a series we're calling Gaining from Loss. What gain was there in her losing her husband in such tragic fashion? What good could possibly come from where she found herself emotionally and circumstantially after such a devastating tragedy? What beauty could be birthed from those terrible ashes?

Hi, I'm Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show. In our conversation with Kayla, she answers all those questions in ways that will inspire you as much as they surprise you. She discusses with Warwick the moving and meaningful truths she's packed into her book Rebuilding Beautiful: Welcome What is, Dare to Dream Again and Step Bravely into What Could Be, which documents her journey of as she puts it, "Discovering how loss gives us new eyes to see the grace threaded through all humanity." Her encouragement to all of us, "A beautiful world waits for us on the other side of loss, a world so expansive, it has room for our pain."




Warwick Fairfax:

Kayla, again, thank you so much. I just loved reading your book, Rebuilding Beautiful. And it's worth really stating exactly what you have on the front cover of this book, it says, Welcome What Is, Dare Dream Again and after Rebuilding Beautiful, the title it says, and Step Bravely into What Could Be. I like to think I'm a reasonable writer, but I've got to say this was superbly written, deeply profound, moving and we'll get into what your loss was. My loss was very different. As listeners know, a loss of 150-year old family business. And yes, there was mourning, there was grief. Very different. You can't compare crucibles. But so much, if not all of the book, even though I haven't suffered your loss, I deeply related to. I mean, it was just profound, overwhelming, it was a gift to be able to read this, and obviously we don't know each other.

I'm not somebody that says things if they don't mean it, so I'd just be nice and say thank you, it was an interesting book. I don't know what I'd say, but I wouldn't say what I just said. I don't believe in being nasty, but I don't believe in false praise. So this really was a gift to be able to read this and I got a lot out of it from my own personal loss situation. So before we get to the loss, tell us a bit about Kayla Stoecklein growing up, your family, just what was life like pre-loss. So I know you grew up in Southern California, I believe, so just tell us about what life was like for Kayla growing up.




Kayla Stoecklein:

Yeah. I've lived in Southern California my whole life, still live in Southern California and growing up had an older sister, parents who were married, grew up going to church every Sunday. It was a huge part of my upbringing and had a great suburban middle class upbringing. Yeah, no complaints.




Warwick Fairfax:

What were your dreams growing up pre-meeting Andrew?




Kayla Stoecklein:

Yeah. I think every little girl dreams of one day getting married and being a mom and having a family, and so, I think I held tightly to those dreams and I always knew I wanted to work as well. And so I didn't never really knew what that would be, but I was excited to go to college and figure it out. I think I changed my major three or four times and still ended up with a degree that I don't even use. But I think there was a covering over my childhood and I had a great upbringing and my parents did the best with the tools that they had been given and the families that they were raised in. And they did get divorced when I was a senior in high school and led me into this new journey where I really felt like I was on my own at 18 years old and left home and never went back.

And I met my husband sophomore year of college. I was a sophomore, he was a junior and we fell in love really fast. There's a saying at Christian colleges, "ring by spring" and I had that ring by spring. We were engaged when, goodness, I think I was 20 years old, we got engaged and 21 when we got married, he was 22 and we just started our lives and he was called to ministry. So I was excited to learn how to be a pastor's wife and learn the ins and outs of ministry and I had grown up in the church, but I had no idea what it meant to actually be on staff and lead a church. And so, I was eager to learn and excited to do it all with him.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, it's funny you mentioned that. I have three adult kids, like 31 into 20s. They all went to a Christian college, Taylor University in Indiana, which is very missional wonderful place. But none of them either gave or got a ring by rings, it's like we were hoping. But hey, given that my dad was married three times, my mother twice and I was from the last marriage of each, I said, you want to find the right one who obviously from my perspective is a person of faith and also it's good to be cautious, but maybe I gave too much of the caution sermon. I don't know. But yeah, it didn't happen to my kids. But that's all good.

So you got married to Andrew and from what I understand his dad was a pastor of a pretty big church in Southern California and then he became lead pastor and his dad passed away. I'm sure no church is perfect, but sounds like it was a great church and being a pastor's wife is not easy, lead pastor's wife, everybody thinks you're meant to be this role model and you're human doing your best and a lot of stress and pressure. I know Andrew obviously had his challenges, so talk about what life was like pre-loss, just being married, you began to have small kids, pastors' wife. What was life like for Kayla in that season of life?




Kayla Stoecklein:

Yeah. Like I said, we got married very young and just went straight into ministry. And his parents had started the church when Andrew was three years old, and so he had grown up in it. It was like the fourth sibling, part of the family. They all just deeply loved the church and cared for the church. And so, Andrew was on staff as the creative arts' director when his dad was diagnosed with leukemia in 2011, we were only married for a year, andrew was 23 years old and he just totally stepped up in a million ways and was preaching regularly on Sundays and there were a lot of Saturdays as well. His dad modeled for him that you show up and speak on Sunday no matter what. As best as you can, you show up and speak on Sunday and don't let anything get in the way of that.

And so even while his dad was sick and battling leukemia, we were recording message series from the hospital room. He would show up and be wheeled onto the stage and his wheelchair. He just tried his best to still lead the church through his pain, and that was modeled for Andrew. And so Andrew did the same. He led the church through his pain and through the loss of his dad. His dad passed away in 2015 and his dad was his mentor, his dad was his hero, his dad was his best friend. And so, it really was a catastrophic loss for Andrew, and I don't think Andrew really took the time he needed to take to grieve that loss. He took two weeks off and then went straight back to work and preached an incredible series on heaven. And his heart was for the church, he wanted to lead the church through their pain.

And it was modeled to him that you just keep going and so you just kept on going and we kept on having babies. We had our first boy in 2012 and our next boy a couple years later and our third boy a couple years after that. And so, our home life was also very busy, you don't really find rest at home when you work all day and you come home to toddlers and babies. But life was full and it was good and it was beautiful and it was meaningful. And I found so much purpose in supporting Andrew and being a pastor's wife and being a stay at home mom and supporting the Women's Ministry and supporting the MOPS Ministry. And it was a really beautiful, meaningful life. And on paper, I think Andrew and I both had everything we could have ever asked for and more.

He was in his lead role at the church. I was married to this very successful, handsome, driven guy, I had the mom car, we had the beautiful home, we had the three beautiful blue eye boys. Life wasn't easy, the pressures of ministry and the learning curve of ministry, it was huge. We had a lot to learn. Andrew was very young and I think he felt like he had a lot to prove and big shoes to fill, his dad's shoes to fill. And so we were really young, had a lot to learn and then burnout happened.




Warwick Fairfax:

So talk about that, because obviously that's a bit of a backstory to the loss, anxiety, burnout. Tell us about that. And I'm sure you've thought about a massive amount and I don't know how much of that was related to his dad dying so young and Andrew being so young and just the expectations and the family business in a sense, except this is for the Lord. And I have a feeling that probably played a factor in some of the challenges. So it took a bit about pre-loss, just some of those challenges Andrew faced in that period.




Kayla Stoecklein:

Totally, Andrew felt the pressure to carry the mantle of responsibility at the church, for sure took that very seriously. And also, I think he felt the pressure to carry his family. He was the oldest son in the family, and so, he felt this pressure to take care of his mom and to help take care of his sister and his brother, and also our little family that was growing. All of the pressure, the years of just running fast and running hard and not stopping and never grieving the huge loss that he had, I think all of that just totally caught up with him. And he started experiencing panic attacks in the fall of 2017. And that was the first just warning sign of something is not right. And it's like I describe it as we have this dashboard and then the lights start going off, it's time to get your oil changed, it's time to pull over, it's time to check the brakes.

And I think some of those lights started going off on Andrew's dashboard. Andrew had just shown up and done so much and he was a superhero in all of our eyes, and so, we just all assumed he was capable, he could handle it, he had done it, he would continue to do it, and nothing was going to get in his way of his calling. And so, at first we thought, well, maybe it's just a thyroid problem. He had had a thyroid problem in high school and so we thought, "You know what, we'll just go see a doctor, get some medication, I'm sure the panic attacks will go away." So we kind of shrugged it off, no big deal. But the panic attacks kept getting worse and worse and worse. And it got so bad that he ended up in the hospital in April 2018.

So he had suffered for over six months from these panic attacks that were very debilitating, happening three to four times a week, and he was still showing up and preaching on Sunday. There was even a Sunday, it was Easter Sunday in 2018 and he had a massive panic attack in the bathroom in the offices right before he was supposed to be on stage to preach. And somehow some way he did, he got on stage, he worked through it and he's on stage speaking, I'm in the green room crying and I'm like, "What in the world is happening? What are we doing? What are we sacrificing for the sake of the church? And is it worth it?" And so the following week, he landed in the hospital and that's when we said, "Enough is enough. Something's going on here. These panic attacks aren't going away. It's not a thyroid issue. What is happening?"

And so we all decided, Andrew agreed that it was time for him to take a sabbatical. And his sabbatical had no end date really and truly the lead staff at the church and the board of directors told him, "Take as much time as you need." And our family was telling him the same thing, "Take as much time as you need." And that was really hard for a guy that's very driven for success, that loves his job, that deeply, deeply loves the church. I think it was really hard for him to stop, to give himself permission to rest and to heal. And so, he went on the sabbatical in 2018 and just a few weeks later, we were sitting in a psychiatrists' office and he was diagnosed with depression and we all were able to connect to all the dots and it just made sense for him.

And I was a little surprised, and I'll never forget sitting there and I had nothing to say but the doctor looked at me and said, "Your husband has depression." And I was so shocked and so stunned that I didn't say anything. And then we walked out to the car and got into the car and I turned and looked at Andrew and I said, "How did we end up here?" I was just so shocked and so surprised and it really caught me off guard. When I married this guy, 21 and 22 years old, I never thought depression would be a part of our story. But Andrew and the doctors were both very confident that he was on the low end of the spectrum and that with rest and medication and time off work, that he would be back to himself and back to work in no time.

And so, we took the sabbatical very seriously. We were seeing a therapist together for two hours every single week. He was seeing a psychiatrist every other week. He was taking medication for the depression and anxiety. He was spending time with mentors. We went on a two week road trip, just the two of us to spend time on our marriage. We had people over to pray over our home, to pray over him, like we were coming at it from every angle and really truly doing everything we could to help him rest and heal. And by the end of the summer in 2018, the doctor thought he was getting better and Andrew thought he was getting better, and so they thought the next right step in his healing journey would be to go back to work. And so, he went back to work August 1st, 2018 and hit the ground running and gave two powerful weekend messages on the topic of mental health.

And he talked about his journey with depression. He talked about suicide. He gave out the suicide hotline number. He quoted statistics from the NAMI website out of anybody, he would've known where to go for help, he had the resources, he had the phone numbers, he would've known where to go. And then headed into the third weekend, he was ready for Sunday, we had a big team, volunteer team rally. We were supposed to have that Friday night. So he was looking forward to that. And his mind was still very fragile, he had told our family and told our staff that he was at about 65% when he went back to work and was helping to ease back into ministry over time. But anybody in ministry could probably tell you it's really hard to ease back into ministry. Ministry is a full on thing, just this full on beast of itself.

And so, he had a really bad day in the office that week and his fragile mind just could not process some of the information that he received at work, and he just spiraled. And the spiral was big enough and loud enough for our lead staff and for our family to say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This guy is much sicker than I think we realized. And maybe he wasn't ready to go back to work and maybe we need to take some more steps for his healing and maybe he needs to go to an inpatient facility. Maybe he needs to take a longer sabbatical." I don't know what he needs, but maybe he needs more time. And so while we were away from him the following day for just a little bit, taking some of those next steps, we were getting a guest speaker for Sunday.

We were making a plan for that team rally that was supposed to happen that evening. We were calling other pastors, asking questions, picking their brains on inpatient facilities while we were away from him making a plan to take care of him, to take care of his mind and take care of his health. He attempted suicide and it was an absolute blindside. We had no idea how sick his mind really was, how big his pain truly was. And we just had no idea. And so he was rushed to the hospital and they ran a bunch of tests on his body and the doctors delivered the most terrific news that there was nothing that they could do to save his life. And so, on August 25th, 2018, he took his last breath. And with that, I took my first in this very unexpected life as a widow at 29 years old with three little boys that were two, four, and five.




Warwick Fairfax:

I mean, it's probably hard for listeners to get their hearts around what you just have said. I mean, obviously you've found miraculously a way to move forward, but in those weeks and months after, you obviously did a lot of gut churning, reflection, what did we miss? What did the doctors miss? What could we have done? A swirl of questions and what could I have done better to a swirl of anger, whether it's at God, doctors, people at church, whoever, it's like, couldn't somebody have done something? Maybe anger at Andrew? Why couldn't you have taken care of yourself years ago? Or talk about some of the swirl of emotions in those weeks and months after. Because I'm sure it was, I can't think of the word to describe it, just horrific as an understatement. But what were some of the swirl of emotions and thoughts in those weeks and months afterwards?




Kayla Stoecklein:

It's a sea of would've, could've, should'ves. When somebody dies by suicide, you're just surrounded and engulfed in a sea of could've, would've, should'ves because the truth is, anybody that loved him and knew him would've done anything in their power to save him. We just had no idea how bad it really was. And I often describe his death like a child drowning at a swimming pool at a birthday party. He was really truly surrounded by people that loved him and we just had no idea he was drowning, we had no idea how bad it really was. And it took me a long time, it took me a long time to let go of some of those regrets to work through some of those regrets and the things that I missed. One of the main things I missed, Andrew did talk about suicide and there was a conversation that we had at our kitchen counter a few months before he died.

And he was telling me he was up in the middle of the night and he was struggling with suicidal thoughts, and I just totally did not take him seriously and reacted out of my own exhaustion. It was a really hard summer on my end as well. I was caring for our three boys while he rested and they're home for the summer, so that was a full-time gig, and also trying to care for him and living with an unpredictable spouse. His depression, I never knew what version of Andrew I was going to get coming out of the bedroom in the morning if he was going to be happy or sad or angry or exhausted, if he would spend the whole day in the bedroom or if he'd spend time with us. I just never really knew what I was going to get. And so, I was exhausted and isolated in my own ways.

And his therapist described that I was also co-burdening his depression, so I was carrying his depression with him. And so in that moment when he told me he was struggling with suicidal thoughts, I wasn't able to respond with the heart of love. I just totally reacted out of my own exhaustion and emotion and said all the things you're not supposed to say to someone that's struggling with suicidal thoughts. So I had to work through that, and part of working through that for me was writing and sharing all the things I did wrong and the things that I wish I would've said. And I wrote a whole blog about the things that I wish I would've said. And once somebody tells you they're struggling with suicidal thoughts, it's time to lean in, it's time to ask questions. Questions like, do you have a suicide plan? What problem are you trying to solve through suicide? Do you know when and how you would do it? How often do you think about it? It's time to take it seriously.

I should have picked up the suicide hotline. I should have picked up my phone and called the suicide hotline number or texted the crisis text line or called his therapist and his psychiatrist and two of his best friends and his family members and told them, "Hey, this is serious. Hey, this is much scarier and much worse than we thought it was and his life is actually in danger and he's contemplating suicide." I just had no idea how bad it really was, and I really truly believed it would never happen. And I know I'm not the only one that has had that experience. I know for many of us, we don't know what to do with the word suicide. We don't know how to respond to the word suicide. We don't even know how to say the word suicide out loud.

The truth is the word suicide made me feel so uncomfortable and I didn't know what to do with it. And so, I just totally ignored it and never brought it up again. And looking back, I wish I would've asked him about it every single day. I wish I would've asked him, "Are you struggling with suicidal thoughts today? What does that feel like? How can I help you?" I wish I would've told his psychiatrist and his therapist that he was struggling, but I had no idea. There's a huge learning curve when it comes to mental health and everybody's mental health journey and journey with depression or suicidal ideation or whatever the diagnosis may be, is so unique to that individual. And so, I think Andrew was even lost within himself. I don't think Andrew even fully understood what was really going on in his own mind.

And his psychiatrist said something to us after he passed away that was really helpful that I've held onto. He told us that 90% of suicides are impulsive. And so, it's this in the moment overwhelming flood of pain and pain that many of us are incapable of understanding unless we've lived it, unless we've been there, unless we've been that close to the edge. There's an author Ann Voskamp and she wrote a blog about suicide and she described it as being trapped in a burning building and the only way to escape the flames is to jump from the window.

And so, I really truly have no idea what those final moments were like for Andrew. I have no idea what it must have felt like to live with the pain he was living with. And so, at the end of the day, there's so much grace for him, there's so much grace for me and the things I didn't understand and the things that I've missed, and I've made so much peace with that and just had to let go of those would've, could've, should'ves in order to move forward and rebuild a brand new life without him.




Gary Schneeberger:

And what you just said about grace being threaded through life, there's a line that you've said "loss gives us new eyes to see the grace threaded through all humanity." We've called this series Gaining from Loss, which in some people's eyes be a little controversial, how can you gain from loss? But that is one thing for sure that you have gained in the way that you live your day-to-day life through loss, is that you have received new eyes to see the grace that is threaded through all humanity, right?




Kayla Stoecklein:

Right. Yeah. It's given me so much compassion and empathy and my pain has given me access to this steeper stream of humanity that I never had access to before because I'd never experienced that kind of pain before that kind of loss before. And so, it's like when you're the person walking around the grocery store with unseen pain, it makes you realize that there are thousands of other people walking around the grocery store with unseen pain and that you are not the only one going through something difficult, that there's tons of other people going through very similar things and grieving very similar losses and walking through their own prescription of pain.

We all have our own prescription of pain and we're all going through or have just gone through or just about to go through something difficult. And so, it's totally given me empathy and compassion and grace for the grumpy person at the cash register at the grocery store, for the grumpy mom on the sidelines of the soccer fields, for the stranger that cuts you off on the freeway. It's like grace upon grace upon grace upon grace. We truly have no idea what it's like to walk in anybody's shoes but our own.




Warwick Fairfax:

And that's so profound. I think one of the things I'm guessing you must have had to deal with is forgiveness, forgiveness of Andrew, of yourself. It's easy for outside people who haven't gone through this to say, "Well, how many of us are experts in suicide?" We don't study it, we don't take courses because, I mean, there's a lot of things we could do in terms of, I don't know, take a lot of courses about what happens if a kid falls in a pool and there's about to drown or there's all sorts of things you could prepare yourself for, but it just seems so abstract. So yeah, I've got three young kids to take care of. I don't really have time to read and take courses and all that. And so, it's almost impossible to really know how bad it is until it is. And as that psychologist said or psychiatrist, if it's an impulse, even if you were an expert at everything, it may not have made a difference.

So how did you come to peace with both forgiving yourself, others, God? Because I would've thought one of the key steps to moving beyond, as you call it the pit, your worst day is that sense of forgiveness. You must have given where you are now, how did you manage to do that, forgive yourself, Andrew, and the world, everybody?




Kayla Stoecklein:

Yeah. I think it's an ongoing process. I think it took me years to forgive Andrew, to forgive myself, to forgive the team that was surrounding him. I think it takes embracing every sharp edge of our pain, it takes allowing our pain to transform us and teach us and allowing ourselves to feel everything we need to feel and work through those feelings, work through those feelings of anger, work through those feelings. For me, my loss and my grief brought me all the way to the edge of myself, and I struggled with my own suicidal thoughts, which gave me even greater empathy and compassion for Andrew. And I've even changed my language in the way that I talk about suicide. And before Andrew died, I would've said things like committed suicide and now I say died by suicide. I don't use the word committed because committed is a word we attached to phrases like committed a sin or committed a crime or committed a murder.

And all it does is heap further shame and blame onto the shoulders of the person who died. And even that small shift in language has changed to everything for me and it's given me compassion and empathy for Andrew. Even that phrase alone extends forgiveness to Andrew, and that phrase alone too will change the way that my boys grieve this loss. And I hope that they're able to discover that same empathy and compassion and forgiveness for their dad that I've been able to discover as well and really truly believing that the suicide isn't anybody's fault, that it wasn't my fault, it wasn't Andrew's fault, it wasn't the doctor's fault, it wasn't the church's fault. At the end of the day, it's a horrific tragedy and no one is to blame. And I think it takes a long time to get there. But I think when we do get there, we're set free. I think unforgiveness keeps us in chains and when we're able to make peace with our circumstances, when we're able to make peace with what happened, were set free.




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah. Again, forgive me for being a broken record, but what you said is, again, just so profound about embracing the pain. And I want to pivot as you both unpack your story as well as talk about lessons that listeners can learn from your story. Pain reads a lot of reflection, there can be wisdom from pain, the most unwelcome wisdom you want, but you're gifted that, to use your words, it's a sacred gift, which I love that phrase. So you have several sections in the book in this new book, Rebuilding Beautiful, which again, I love the title, that's such an magnificent phrase. Embrace, heal, explore, dream, live. that first one, embrace, about embracing your pain. And let me just interject for a second, what's fascinating about this is I identify with this book so much, but yet I haven't had this kind of a loss.

I met my wife in Australia, we've been married over 30 years and every day I say thank you Lord, and I don't take that for granted at all ever, especially with my dad being married three times, my mother twice. I'm very familiar with the consequences of divorce, which is horrific, certainly on the kids. But yeah, all of the things you talk about, and again, I don't want to take up your time, but just so that listeners understand that even if you haven't lost a spouse, you might have had other kinds of loss. Maybe you're dealing with a Parkinson's diagnosis. We've had people on the podcast with that or a loss of a limb, there's all sorts of losses that are horrific and tough to get over. And so, the circumstances are different, but I don't know if you can say it's equal, the pain, I have no idea what that means, but it's certainly deep. Please go ahead.




Gary Schneeberger:

I've been here, Warwick, I'm going to do what you may not do and ask you because you've said it to me, you read Kayla's book and each one of the points that you were reading through, you felt that experience yourself from your own crucible experience of losing the family media dynasty. I mean, it is applicable. The truths that she speaks are applicable in how you do that. So I just want to make sure that I tap you on the shoulder and make sure that you share that.




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely. Yeah. So just briefly, because I don't want to take away from you Kayla and your story and wisdom. But yeah, I mean, for me, growing up in this 150-year-old family media business, I was founded by a person of very strong faith, a strong businessman for Christ as I've ever come across. There was this history of service to the community. We had the equivalent of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post in our country. I grew up in this very wealthy family business, dedicated my whole life to going in that, did my undergrad at Oxford Wall Street, Harvard Business School. It was all about duty and services to the country. And didn't matter if that was my vision, it was my duty kind of thing. So maybe Andrew felt it was his duty to go to his family business in a sense, the church, nothing wrong with that.

Then when I did the $2 billion takeover and it has fell out of family control under my watch. Yeah, it wasn't just a business. I felt like I betrayed my dad, my ancestor, this sacred cause, I wasn't clinically depressed, I wasn't suicidal, I didn't ideate that way, but I was not in a good place because I just kept crucifying myself like, how could I have been so dumb? I had a Harvard MBA, how could I have made such stupid assumptions? Of course, animosity amongst my family. I don't try to hurt anybody, I'm not that kind of person. But just trying to understand the pain, try and understand what happened and gradually trying to forgive myself, which was years and years. And every once in a while, I fall off the wagon and have a unforgiving thought to myself. I mean, just it can be a sacred gift and you are right.

It does give you compassion. I mean, I'm empathetic by nature, I like to think, but it has increased my compassion and not judging other people and pain for a purpose. And so yeah, I could go through every single chapter of your book and describe how it relates to my loss. And that's the universality of what you've written, Kayla, is it's not just about suicide, it's about loss in general. And this is just profound. I mean, as I said, I could go on forever about what it means to me. So yeah, the first section is embrace. I love embrace the friction or as you colorfully say, embrace the suck, very to the point, don't run away. I mean, there's a lot of shaking off the shame. Is that what would you say is in terms of embracing the loss, what's the most profound thing? Because you have a lot of thoughts in those three chapters.




Kayla Stoecklein:

There's a quote by the author Jerry Sittser, it's beautiful quote, and he wrote a beautiful book called A Grace Disguised that I would highly recommend to anybody that's going through a season of grief. And in this quote, he was having a conversation with a friend and describing what it looks like to go through pain and to go through loss and to feel everything you need to feel. And in this conversation, they were talking about what that is and they were talking about the quickest way to reach the sunrise, the quickest way to get through what you're going through, isn't to head west chasing the sunset, but it's to head east plunging into the darkness until you reach the sunrise. And so, I think that embrace part for me has been that deep dive, that plunge, that willing to go head first into the trauma and the pain, willing to show up for the hard work of healing, willing to feel everything we need to feel.

I think so often in western culture in America, we don't like to feel pain, we don't like to feel uncomfortable. We like to avoid pain at all costs, we like to numb our pain at all costs. I know I could have walked into a psychiatrist office and walked out with a giant bag full of prescriptions because of the things that I've gone through, would've been very easy for me to do that. And not that that's wrong, I think medicine is incredible and can be a beautiful gift to people that are struggling, but for me, I saw what the medication did to my husband. And so, I wanted to go on this journey of healing as natural as possible and as holistic as possible.

And I'll never forget sitting in the therapist office and explaining to her, "This hurts like hell. When is this not going to hurt as much as it hurts? I don't want to get up and live with this pain for another day. I want to be out of my body. I don't want to feel any of this." And she looked at me in the eyes with tears in her eyes, I was crying and she had tears in her eyes too and said, "Kayla, the way that you're feeling is exactly how you're supposed to feel." And that was such a gift to me and such an encouragement to me that I didn't need to run away from my pain, I didn't need to run away from the feelings. I needed to allow myself to feel the feelings, I needed to allow myself to welcome the reality of what is and all that was lost and grieve every single loss.

When you lose a spouse, it's like there's a million other losses that I had to grieve not just the loss of Andrew, but the death of a million little dreams and big dreams that I had of a life with him and what I thought my life was going to look like for the rest of my life. And it's an ongoing grieving process, it's an ongoing embrace and it really truly is like spreading wide our arms and welcoming every jagged sharp edge of our story. And I think when we do that, when we allow ourselves to feel it, when we allow ourselves to plunge through the darkness, we really truly do reach the other side. And for me, it took three years. It took three years to finally come up for air. It took three years to finally see the light again and to really believe that life could be beautiful again and start to see that life could be beautiful again even if that life was without Andrew.




Warwick Fairfax:

Again, I have to think of another word other than profound because it just gets annoying for me to say.




Gary Schneeberger:

Meaningful.




Warwick Fairfax:

Thank you. There you go. What you just said was so meaningful. I'll say insightful for the next section. You're right, you cannot find your way out the other side unless you go through the pain. It is so true. I love the phrase you say, "Our wounds are the way through." It's just so good. So the next step, you talk about kind of healing because one of the things I know you had to do is find your identity. I mean, it sounds like you're struggling a bit with your identity when you were married to Andrew and who am I, am I anybody else other than the pastor's wife. And it was a bit of a challenge in that season, but it probably got even worse once he went. So talk about just you've embraced the pain, but how do you begin to heal and find your identity?




Kayla Stoecklein:

Yeah. Yeah. That was a huge and continues to be a huge part of my healing journey. And so much of who I was was wrapped up in who Andrew was because he was the lead pastor of our church because our lives revolved around Sundays, revolved around Andrew, everything was working towards Sunday. He was larger than life, he had a big personality, he was very charismatic, he was very intense, very driven. And there really wasn't a lot of room for my dreams or ambitions or ideas in a marriage with Andrew. And so, I let go of a lot of that. And that was hard, when we were married, letting go and making peace with like, "Okay, this is what my life is going to look like and this maybe isn't what I thought it was going to look like, but this is beautiful too and I can find purpose and meaning here too." And I did, I found purpose and meaning in the Women's Ministry and serving in the Mom's Ministry and then also just serving Andrew.

And I was an excellent pastor's wife. I mean, I really truly was an excellent pastor's wife and was there in the front row every single Sunday that he was preaching, had our three boys with their hair done, ready to go, got there early, got them checked in and I would bring him lunch, in between services I would have dinner ready for him when he got home. Very intentional. I woke up at 4:30 every morning to spend time on my own with my Bible and reading and journaling and exercise so that the house could be peaceful and I could be ready for the kids when they woke up. If that's what I was going to be called to do for the rest of my life, I was going to do it well. And I found purpose and meaning within it and it was beautiful.

And there was a lot of sacrifice, a ton of sacrifice in that marriage as well. A lot of sacrifice of self, of sense of self in order to do this, what felt like this bigger calling, this bigger mission, this calling that was bigger than both me and Andrew leading a local church, doing the work of God. It's so interesting when your career and your spiritual life collide and it was just like we were serving together this thing that was so much bigger than us and that felt like such a huge honor to be able to do that with him, and I was so honored to be his wife and so proud.

After he passed away, I had a friend over and we were packing up my house and I was crying and I said to her, "It feels like I'm packing up my pride," because I was so proud of my life. I was so proud of the life that we had built together. And so after he passed away, it really was this unraveling of, okay, if Andrew's not here anymore, if Andrew isn't leading and driving our family, I kind of describe it like Andrew was in the driver's seat and I was in the passenger seat and I was just along for the ride and there to support him however I could and take care of our kids however I could. And after Andrew passed away, life invited me to slide into the driver's seat. And here I am, 29 years old in the driver's seat with these three little boys in the backseat. And I'm looking across the horizon and I'm wondering, "Where in the world am I going?" And I have three boys that are sitting in the backseat asking me too, "Mommy, where are we going next?"

And so it's been an adventure trying to answer that question. It's been an adventure unraveling my identity and asking myself, who am I now? And also asking myself, who do I want to become? And it's taken an awakening of some of the interests and hobbies and passions that I had before I was married. It's been going back to, what are those things that bring me life? What are those things that I like to do? What are those passions and gifts? What's my calling apart from Andrew? What am I called to do? And it's been really fun just to get super curious about the answers to that question. And what I've realized too in this season of life is that to be human is to step in and out of a hundred different versions of self. And the person that I was when I married Andrew was a completely different person than I was leading up to the months when Andrew died.

And the person I am today is a completely different person than I was when Andrew passed away. And the person I'll be in five, 10 years is a completely different person than I am today. And so, what's been super helpful for me in this season of life is to consider that future self, consider that future version of myself and get really curious about who they are, where they are, who's by their side, what do they have in their hands, what is the work that they are pouring their life into, and then working towards those goals and beginning to dream beyond the destruction of my reality and taking action on some of those dreams and making some big moves and pushing through fear. I think a lot of it is fear. I think a lot of us can get in rebuilding journey and our healing journey, I'm sure you experience this too with your loss, we can get stuck in a cycle of fear, and fear can really stop us from being able to move forward, from being able to rebuild a life that's beautiful.

And so, it's taken an embrace of even the fear, an embrace of willing to work through the fear and push through the fear to step into the realized dreams to, for me, an actual physical move has been a huge part of our healing journey. And I physically moved an hour towards the coast. We live just by the beach now, but an hour towards the coast from where we lived before in order to have a fresh start, in order to take back the power of our story. Where we lived, the church was pretty large, the church is about 4,000 people. And my boys were going to a private Christian school. And so a lot of the staff and a lot of the families went to our church and knew my husband and I felt like all they saw when they saw me was the grieving widow.

And I thought for my boys, if we stay here, we had a great home, it's a great school, it would've been fine. But I was really curious, what would life look like if we left? What would life look like if we chose to have a fresh start? And so, we did, we moved. And really what I realized when we moved is that we took back the power of our story and now we get to tell our story on our own terms to who we want, when we want, how we want. And we get to write a whole new story too. We get to make new friends and find new community and discover who we are here in this new city, in this new community, in this new life.




Warwick Fairfax:

So talk about how you took some of those first steps into feeling to use your words that you're worthy of the beautiful gift of love and began to just find a purpose and identity for Kayla.




Kayla Stoecklein:

Yeah. To go from the safety and covering of a marriage and a worn in love that I shared with Andrew. It's like we had been through so much together that we had this worn in comfortable love. And then all of a sudden, overnight becoming a single mom and widow, it's been a journey of answering that question for myself and asking myself, Am I worthy of love? What does love look like here? And knowing that first and foremost, I'm deeply loved by God and that God has taken care of us and continues to take care of us and provide for us, and he has every single step of the way. And then getting curious, what does love look like here? And not just romantic love, it's like how do I find that intimacy and that connection and friendships with others and community has been a huge part and allowing others to love me, allowing others to share in my pain has been huge for my healing.

I'll never forget, there was a moment that I had with one of my best friends just a few weeks after Andrew had passed away. She was over at my house and I had just got done putting the kids to bed and I came out to the living room and I just totally collapsed on the floor. And she came over and she just laid on top of me and wept with me. And I allowed her to love me in that moment. I allowed her to love me without words and to share in my pain without words and just to be with me. And I think sometimes our pain can isolate us from that love if we allow it to. Our pain can totally make us feel like we're left out or we're unworthy or we're less than. And some of us end up in a rebuilding beautiful journey and we feel like it's our fault.

We feel like it was a series of poor life choices or bad decisions or bad business deals or whatever it may be. We may think that we ended up here and it's our fault and we can get stuck in that sinkhole of shame and pain and feeling totally unworthy of even of a new kind of beautiful life. And so, it has taken us to curiosity of what does love look like here and how do I allow God's love in? How do I allow the love of others in? And even for me too, what does romantic love look like here? Do I want that? And getting really curious of do I want that? What does that look like? And I've explored that a bit. I talked about it in the book a bit about going on dates and trying to figure that out and navigate that.

And it's a really strange reality to be 30 years old with three little kids and find myself on dating apps again, what does that even look like here? But I know considering my future self and considering 45, 55, 65 year old Kayla and how proud she would be of I'm 33 today, a 33 year old Kayla, and her willingness to show up and try, her willingness to show up for those dates or show up and try to write the book or show up and try to live in the new city and show up and try to make new friends.

I know that 65, 75, 85 year old Kayla will be so proud of 33 year old Kayla for being willing to show up and try. And I think that's what it takes to rebuild a new beautiful life. It's just being willing to show up and try and try the best that we can to make lemonade out of lemons and to create something that's beautiful again in it's own unique way. It's never going to be the same beautiful that it was before, my life is never going to resemble the exact same beauty as it did before, but beauty is still possible and it just looks completely different than it did. And making peace with that and finding my home here. And what does that look like here? And I'm still answering that question.




Gary Schneeberger:

I'm going to pull a phrase from this prep sheet that you filled out. And it was funny because you sent it to me like 15 minutes before we started and they're like, "Oh, I'm a little late." I'm like, "No, you hit deadline, you're fine. Everything's good." And now we're going to use it. So for sure it's actually good that you filled it out and you hit deadline, but you say this and it sums up a lot of what you've been saying in the last five minutes or so, we ask a question of what advice would you give someone who's gone through a painful loss, what we call a crucible experience. And the first half of what you say is really all you need to say. And you say, "Allow the crucible to be your greatest teacher." And that's really what you've just described there, you allowed that crucible experience and what you learned from it to teach you some things about how you then moved forward beyond that crucible, didn't you?




Kayla Stoecklein:

My pain has been one of the greatest teachers of my life and continues to be one of the greatest teachers of my life. And I would've never asked for it or wanted it or signed up for it. But because I've surrendered to it, it really truly has transformed me into a completely different person than I was before Andrew died, and it's given me eyes to see humanity and eyes to see the world in a completely different way than I could before. And I'm so grateful for the lessons that I've learned from my pain and for the wisdom that I've gained from my pain and for the life experience that I've had and the way that I can love and lean in with other people that are walking through difficult situations in ways that I would've never been able to lean in before. So it truly can, I really truly believe for all of us, no matter what that pain may be, it can be one of greatest teachers of our lives if we allow it in and we allow it to transform us.




Warwick Fairfax:

And I love what you just said about just using your crucible in service of others with now your second book and you speak, and I love that phrase, "Choose your own adventure." So as you talk about the adventure that Kayla Stoecklein is in, a lot of life you didn't choose, but now you're in a place where you didn't choose the past, you didn't choose the loss, but you're choosing your own adventure, what's the adventure that you are choosing?




Kayla Stoecklein:

Yeah, I had this moment when I made that big move to the coast and I was standing in my living room and I had the Christmas tree on in the corner and the fire going in the fireplace, and I had just got done putting the boys to bed, and I had that moment where I realized I was standing in a life that I chose. It was the first time in the last few years that I had been walking through this really intense grief and pain, that for the first time it felt like I was standing in a life I chose. And it was so empowering that it brought me to tears. And I was standing in my living room weeping, I can't believe that this really horrible, terrible thing happened and I can't believe how beautiful and meaningful and wonderful my life is too.

And that's the duality of walking through something like this. It's like you learn to hold the joy in one hand and you learn to hold the sorrow in the other hand and moving forward is embracing both. And so, I think that choosing my own adventure today is making new memories with my boys, spending as much time possible with my boys because they're growing up so fast. My oldest is turning 10 next month and my others are eight and six, and I'm just watching them get taller and their voices get deeper and they're getting so handsome and big and I'm realizing how fleeting it all is. So I think my adventure is right in front of me, it's my kids and this season of life and trying to soak it up as much as I possibly can and leaning into this work that I've been invited into as well, and sharing my story and talking about my pain.

And I'm really excited for this next season because I'm going to be taking a sabbatical that I haven't stopped to rest in the last four years. And so, my next adventure is going to be a sabbatical and truly taking a break and giving myself a bit of respite. Because, for me, I think what I've realized is I can't keep reliving my trauma and I can't keep talking about my pain if I'm going to move forward, and I need to give myself a break from doing that. So I'm really excited. And I think rest is spiritual, rest is talked about all throughout scripture, even God rested when He made the world, and it's such an important rhythm of life. So super excited for that adventure. I'm taking a whole year off next year.




Warwick Fairfax:

As you look at what's happened to you, this terrible, I don't know if it's C.S. Lewis, somebody talked about hard joy. I wish I could think of who said that, but what you've gone through is so unspeakably tough, how could anybody survive it, but you've managed to. I mean, you're living really a life of significance, which we call a life on purpose, dedicated to serving others. You do that every day with your role model and you speak, and even if you take a sabbatical, your books are still out there, it's going to be helping people. So as you just sum up the trajectory of your life from your loss, how would you talk about what we call your life of significance? You've turned that pain to me into a life of significance, a massive life of significance, how would you describe that in your own words?




Kayla Stoecklein:

I think I'm just so grateful to be a part of any of it and to know that I play a small part in a much bigger story and that my life is a life of service and that really my loss has taught me to hold loosely to everything. And so, it's said, "Living with unclenched hands, living in surrender, not clinging too tightly to anything," and just being so grateful for the work that I have in front of me today and knowing that it might be completely different than the work that I have in front of me tomorrow. And just trying to stay as present as possible as I can to the moment, to the calling, to the work, whether it be sitting with my boys at the skate park or sitting at the beach staring at the ocean or going on a walk with a friend or showing up for a conversation like this. I'm just so grateful to be a part of it and to have a small role to play in the much greater story that God is writing.




Gary Schneeberger:

Listeners who have been through the 140 some episodes before this one are accustomed to me being a little bit more of a busy body in a conversation than I've been in this one. But I wanted to make sure, Warwick, that you had a chance to truly ask all your questions, but you did raise the idea of we're getting close to the end. So that's my cue to jump in for you, Kayla, and say, how can listeners who have been impacted, who have been touched by what you've talked about, how can they find out more about you? How can they get your books? How can they learn more about you and your journey?




Kayla Stoecklein:

Yeah. I'm most active on social media on Instagram. My Instagram handle is Kaylasteck and my website is kaylastoecklein.com, and my book is on Amazon, Barnes & Noble. A lot of those places, wherever you like to buy books and also Audible, I was able to record both the audiobooks for both Fear Gone Wild and Rebuilding Beautiful. So, that was such a great joy.




Gary Schneeberger:

And as a guy whose last name is Schneeberger and nobody knows how to spell it, how can people spell Stoecklein so they can find you online?




Kayla Stoecklein:

Yes, it's S-T-O-E-C-K-L-E-I-N.




Gary Schneeberger:

And Kayla with a?




Kayla Stoecklein:

K.




Gary Schneeberger:

There you go. Warwick, I suspect you may have another question or two, and I will leave that to you before I close.




Warwick Fairfax:

So what you're doing in taking a sabbatical, your boys are young, but you could be around the world giving all sorts of talks, having a big impact. And I'm not telling you what to do, maybe I am, but I'm all for, it's like evangelism begins at home as they say. It's like what will it profit the world if you're running around speaking everywhere and ignoring your voice. Not that you ever would, but it could be tempting like, "I could do so much good." But I think God wants us the ministry at home is just as important as the other works. I applaud you for what you're doing and it's all of service, it's all of significance, not just what people see. So I don't know whether that's a question or an admonition or a commendation for what you're doing, but any final thoughts as we close here?




Kayla Stoecklein:

Thank you. No, no, just thank you so much for having me, and it's been such an honor to be here and to chat with you guys. Thank you. And thank you for the encouragement, it means a lot.




Gary Schneeberger:

Well, I will have a final thought, but it's not going to be long, listeners, so don't worry. And it's not going to be me, it's going to be, I like Warwick, have about 150 sheets of paper in which I've taken notes on things that Kayla has written or said. And I'm going to leave you, listener, with one of the things that she's written in her book, and I want you to really listen to it because what we've just talked about for the last hour or so is a very painful and very dramatic loss. The series is called Gaining from Loss, and Kayla has made a, I'll say it, profound case for what she's gained from her loss. But we're aware the losses that the vast majority, we hope, who are listening have experienced, have not been as dramatic. They're still painful and they're still losses and they're still grapefruit to pull from this conversation with Kayla Stoecklein.

And I'm going to leave you with some words that Kayla wrote in her book that you can apply to your own life regardless of the nature of the circumstances of your loss. This is what Kayla wrote, "In the aftermath of a loss, we don't have to stay camped out in the cemetery. A beautiful world waits for us on the other side of a loss, a world so expansive, it has room for our pain." Well, I do have a microphone, but it's an expensive one, I'm not going to drop it. But that is indeed a mic drop moment from our guest, Kayla Stoecklein. So until next time, listeners, thank you for spending time with us and we will see you next week.

Jason Schechterle was a rookie Phoenix police officer in 2001 when his stopped squad car was slammed from behind at more than 100 mph and burst into an inferno. The unimaginable burns he suffered left him in a coma for two and a half months. He woke up unable to see, his appearance dramatically altered by his injuries and the surgeries he underwent to treat them. He struggled emotionally with what had happened to him – but never gave up the fight, or gave up hope that he’d win it.

In this second episode of our special fall series GAINING FROM LOSS, Schechterle takes us on the journey of how he received the emotional and physical scars he still carries – but also how he found hope and healing that underscores a critical truth: the power of the human spirit can never be underestimated or extinguished. The motto that’s guided him through it all? Sometimes the most beautiful, inspirational changes will disguise themselves as utter devastation. Be patient.

Highlights

Transcript

Gary Schneeberger:

Hi friends. Here at Beyond The Crucible, we often get a chance to dive into some of the hardest moments of someone's life. Everything from facing loss to trying to find your purpose in life. This summer we've been working extremely hard to pull together a full e-course, our first, filled with more than three hours of the lessons learned on how you can find and fully embrace Second-Act Significance. To gain access to this course, visit secondactsignificance.com. That's secondactsignificance.com. Now, here's today's podcast episode.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Jason Schechterle:

The fire was all consuming. The entire car was engulfed. The danger that they were in was significant and I'm trapped with my seatbelt inside this car. They got me out in 90 seconds. From impact to the time I was out was 90 seconds into an ambulance and I was two and a half miles away from what I would argue as the best burn center in the United States, the Maricopa County Hospital. And I was on their trauma table in less than eight minutes. Having suffered burns to 43% of my body. My neck, head, and face being the worst, they were fourth degree, which that's a term I didn't know existed until after this. I thought third degree was worst you can have, but fourth degree means it's down to the last layers of muscle and to the bone.




Gary Schneeberger:

That chilling description is just a sliver of the story our guest this week, Jason Schechterle recounts in recalling the car crash in 2001 that changed his life in unimaginable ways. The young Phoenix police officer was in a coma for two and a half months. He woke up, unable to see. His appearance dramatically altered by his injuries and the surgeries he underwent to treat them. He struggled emotionally with what had happened to him, but he never gave up the fight or gave up the hope that he'd win it.

Hi, I'm Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show. In this second episode of our special fall series, Gaining from Loss. Schechterle takes us on a journey of how he received the emotional and physical scars he still carries, but also how he found hope and healing that underscores a critical truth. The power of the human spirit can never be underestimated or extinguished. The motto that's guided him through it all: sometimes the most beautiful inspirational changes will disguise themselves as utter devastation. Be patient.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, thank you so much Jason for being here. I really appreciate it. It really is truly an honor to have you here and listeners will discover why I'm using that word. But before we get to the loss, which is what this series is about, I'd love to hear a bit of the backstory of Jason Schechterle, what growing up was like, hopes, dreams. So what was life for you kind of growing up.




Jason Schechterle:

It's an honor to be with you and to meet you, Warwick. Thank you for giving me a chance to share with your audience today. When I look back at my childhood, it was just nothing short of perfect. I mean, I grew up in a couple of great decades. I turned eight in 1980 and turned 18 in 1990. You can't get any luckier than that right there to grow up in the eighties. I mean, it was 2the best decade. But yeah, so much freedom out riding horses and dirt bikes and four wheelers and grew up on a little bit of farmland out by Phoenix International Raceway. Great parents, older brother and sister. One set of my grandparents lived with us, which grandparents are the greatest thing in the world and went to good schools, played sports, had great friends.

I describe it as painfully easy and beautiful because it did not do much to prepare me for what life actually will hold down the road. I didn't face anything but good as I grew up. There were no divorces. We grew up with not a lot of money. I would say lower middle class if you had to put a description on it. But yeah, my childhood was absolutely amazing.




Warwick Fairfax:

So what were your hopes and dreams growing up? I mean, every kid growing up kind of typically has things, gosh, when I grow up I'd like to do X. What was that for you?




Jason Schechterle:

Oh, man. I loved sports and I was good at several of them, but I wasn't great at any of them. And I got really into golf and dreamed maybe about playing professional golf. All kids have big dreams, as they should. You should dream very, very big. I remember wanting to be a train conductor. I thought it would be cool to ride the railroad. I wanted to be an over the road trucker. And it's funny because to this day, I'll be 50 years old this year and my favorite thing is still to drive. So I had just all these little back and forths with, oh, I don't know what I'll do.

But I really thought about, I grew up with a family of service members, my brother, my dad, my grandfather, they all served in the military. They all had great experiences, great stories, great attitudes, never heard anything negative even from the older generation who were in several of the wars doing some pretty difficult things. And PTSD as we know it today, I never heard or saw that as a child when I was talking to the older generations. And then when I was a teenager, I thought about being a police officer and just was always enamored by a uniform, wanting to wear a uniform, wanting to serve others. It's a beautiful thing. And when you're overcome with that sense, once it's inside of you, it doesn't go away.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, that was really the DNA of your family. It was modeled by your father, grandfather, brother, it's we're here to serve. That's the purpose of life, to serve our others, to serve our brothers and sisters and our family. And so it's makes sense. But from what I understand, you didn't go straight into the police force. You had a bit of detour, right?




Jason Schechterle:

I had quite a bit of a detour. I succeeded a little bit at the game of golf, ended up with a college scholarship and then it did not take me very long to figure out, yeah, I'm pretty good, but I can't do what these guys could do. And also at the time I recognized that I'm, you'll hear me say this word a lot because it's just how I live my life is with gratitude. I am grateful that I recognized at a young age that I needed some structure and discipline in my life and college and education was not my path to gain that. And so I decided to follow in the footsteps of the rest of the men of my family serving the military. I wanted to kind of take it easy. So I joined the Air Force.

There was no way-




Gary Schneeberger:

Come on, the Coast Guard is easier, isn't it?




Jason Schechterle:

No, no. I don't know why people give the Coast Guard a hard time and you should actually watch what those fools do out there in the rough seas. They are truly some of the best. But I definitely knew Army and Marines that I needed a nice dorm room, I needed good food and things like that. So went into the Air Force a little bit naive because I knew I like, Oh yeah, I think I might be a police officer someday, so I'll be a police officer in the Air Force. Well, unbeknownst to me, being a police officer in the military is a little different. And here's a guy who grew up in Phoenix, never seen snow in 18 years of life. And all of a sudden I found myself in Grand Forks, North Dakota, walking around nuclear airplanes at 40 below zero.

And that was one of those times in life that quietly to yourself you think, how did I get here? That was the first time I remember thinking, how did I get here? But it was great. I spent two beautiful winters up there. I spent a year in Korea. I got sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for the 1994 Haiti refugee crisis. I did my four years and it was exactly what I wanted and needed. It gave me the structure and discipline, got me outside of my comfort zones, got me outside of my hometown and then I was ready to return and begin my life.




Warwick Fairfax:

So you returned and joined the police force in Arizona, I'm assuming?




Jason Schechterle:

Actually that was the plan, but I failed at it a couple of times. I think it was a combination of a lack of maturity, just not being ready for it and life, of course, changes on us very quickly. I met and married my beautiful wife, Susie. We had a couple of kids, a daughter and a son. And I actually ended up with a really great job with one of the main power companies here in the state, Arizona Public Service. And I started out at the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant and then I got into an apprenticeship program to be a lineman working on the overhead and underground power lines. Really great job. Outside every day, different locations. I was making a lot of money for my age in the nineties and having no college degree or anything.

And I really thought life was set. So that was just kind of the daily life. I was a dad, a husband, and just that good old fashioned blue collar work that I still love that term. And that all changed when I was actually 26 years old. So I had been home for four years. On March 26th, 1999, there was a Phoenix police officer named Marc Atkinson that was shot and killed in the line of duty and Warwick, I can't explain to you why it was Marc or why it was his critical incident, but it changed my life in that moment. I just knew I had to be doing that job. I had to be wearing that uniform that he was wearing and that set my new path.




Warwick Fairfax:

So it's '99, you joined the police force and then time goes on until the event that changed your life. So how long had you been in the police force before the event that you're about to tell us about?




Jason Schechterle:

Well, I graduated the academy in January of 2000. First graduated class of the new millennium. And like I think most people, I was so full of excitement and enthusiasm as well as the comfort of my career is going to be what I make it. I'm going to have a 25, 30 year career. I want to be a homicide detective someday. I might want to work in these other areas, but then at the end, I'm going to collect my pension and ride off into the sunset. I remember having that comfort and confidence that that's how life would go and my career would go. But yeah, I loved every minute of going to work. This job, I still talk in the present tense. It's kind of funny.

Being a police officer, especially for me in the city I grew up in, and to be doing it with the calling and the reasons that I was doing it, that kind of honor, humility, pride, when you put the uniform on, it really opens up your ability to do the job in the right way and for the right reasons. And so for that I enjoyed it. I mean, I absolutely could not wait to go to work, but as it turns out, I only got to do it for 14 short months.




Warwick Fairfax:

So just before we go to what happened after those 14 months, just so listeners can kind of get a sense of the life of Jason Schechterle, it just seemed like almost a perfect life. You had wonderful parents, you had a history of service, of serving in the military, you had a stint in the Air Force. Now you're being in the police force, which is something you'd been thinking about for a long time. You had a wonderful wife, two great kids. It would seem like life for Jason Schechterle couldn't be much better. You knew what you were going to be doing for the next 25, 30 years until you got your pension, maybe get into homicide. It seemed like you were just blessed. But tell us, because the audience, the listeners may not know. Tell us what happened on that fateful day and I guess it was March 26th, 2001. So tell us about that day.




Jason Schechterle:

Yes, and I hope that the listeners are paying attention to the date you just said because ironically two years to the day after Marc Atkinson was killed and the reason I became a police officer. It was on the anniversary of his death. And I went to work that day with that emotion in mind. And you're also right in saying my life was pretty perfect and blessed. I mean, to have my parents healthy and married, all four of my grandparents at the time were still alive and married. I hadn't even experienced death in my family at 28 years of age. That's pretty remarkable. So blessed is a good way to say it, but also doesn't prepare you for things that as life unfolds, adversity's coming and it comes in different forms and puts you on different paths.

But I went to work that day and it was a routine Monday night and I'm going to work my 10 hour shift and go home and crawl in bed and went through about eight and a half hours of my shift and then I answered up for a call that I didn't need to answer up for. It wasn't in my area of responsibility, but the officers there were busy at the time. It was an emergency call. So of course, I grabbed the radio and I said, "I'll head that direction."

And as I was responding to that call, because it was an emergency call, I had my lights and siren on, I was going pretty quick. But I came to a red light in downtown Phoenix, a very busy part of Phoenix. And you still have to come to a complete stop as a first responder when you have your lights or siren on, you stop for red lights. So you're just not flying through intersections and causing accidents. And it only takes a second and a half to clear an intersection. And just as I was going to proceed, my patrol car was struck from behind by a taxi cab. The driver was suffering an epileptic seizure at the time and according to the investigation, he was doing 115 miles an hour when he ran into me.




Warwick Fairfax:

So what happened next?




Jason Schechterle:

Well, what happened, the sequence events after that is something that I was fortunate enough in time to put together through the use of the listening to the police and fire dispatch tapes, personally talking to everybody on scene because at that speed, that violent of collision, of course, I was knocked unconscious. Thankfully, I was knocked unconscious. It is one of many reasons that saved my life because I wasn't yelling and screaming and sucking in all that incredibly hot air that would have killed me very quickly.

But my car burst into flames, traveled 270 feet through the intersection and came to stop 50 feet from a fire truck that was sitting right there. I mean, you talk about miracles, timing, twists of fate so much went into those two cars being in that position at that moment and never want to lose touch with the human side of what we go through. It doesn't matter what we're doing. Doesn't matter our background or what clothes we put on every day to go to work. We're human beings and we are designed to feel an amazing range of emotions. And as first responders, a lot of times you have a little bit of information. You have a little bit of time to prepare for how you're going to approach something or think about your training or whatever. Very rarely does the world literally blow up right in front of you. And for these four firefighters, that's what happened.

And it was a police car and there's a pretty serious camaraderie in the first responder community and I know that heightened their senses of the importance of what was going on and they were able to drive their truck, that 50 feet pull up right next to me and all four of them had their own individual specific jobs and they did just some amazing things in a short amount of time. A couple of police officers arrived on scene not knowing what they were facing and thinking that it was one of their friends who was dying inside of a fire and the fire was all consuming. The entire car was engulfed. The danger that they were in was significant.

And I'm trapped in my seatbelt inside this car. They got me out in 90 seconds from impact to the time I was out was 90 seconds into an ambulance and I was two and a half miles away from what I would argue is the best burn center in the United States, the Maricopa County Hospital. And I was on their trauma table in less than eight minutes. Having suffered burns to 43% of my body, my neck, head, and face being the worst. They were fourth degree, which that's a term I didn't know existed until after this. I thought third degree was the worst you can have. But fourth degree means it's down to the last layers of muscle and to the bone. My shoulders, my hands were third degree. The tops of my thighs, my chest, my stomach, my back were not burned.

Again, another thing that helped save my life was my bulletproof vest protecting me. Burns are a unique injury. They will keep on burning. So if your chest gets burned to the extent that my arms and face were the way it becomes constricted, your lungs can't expand and you will succumb to that injury very, very quickly. So I was very lucky in that regard. And outside of the burns, I had two cracked ribs and a mild concussion. I would've gone home just a couple of hours after the accident, had the car not caught on fire.




Warwick Fairfax:

How do you get your arms around the combination of the tragedy and the horror and the miracles? I mean, it's just a strange combination of emotions and circumstances.




Jason Schechterle:

It is a strange combination and it's difficult in its beauty, if that makes sense. So I was in a coma for two and a half months. For me, it was a blink of an eye because medically induced coma. So a lot of medication and one of them is kind of an amnesia drug. So for me, it was a blink of an eye and I wake up. Now I'm completely blind, obviously I'm incredibly sick, I'm still in danger of not surviving these injuries. But I wake up to this harsh reality of you've been in a car accident, your car caught on fire. It was slow learning of getting answers.

But what you were saying, I was constantly on one side was wow, this is the most devastating thing I could have ever predicted to be involved in a fire. And what is life going to be like now? I'm blind. I can only imagine. At the time, I had no idea, but my appearance is forever changed and it's probably horrific. It's disfiguring, it's disgusting. What are my kids going to think of me? How am I ever going to be a public? And I've lost my job. But then it was the why am I the one that got a firetruck in their intersection? What about all these other people who deserve that same thing? What has my wife gone through for the two and a months I was in a comma and she's still here by my side? What have the doctors done to fight for me? What did those firefighters go through? Yes, the miracles and the timing, but for the actual collision, every single thing went in my favor. And if you remove just one second of one part of that sequence of events, I'm not sitting here sharing the story with you.

So the contradiction, the force of that, it's just a interesting thing to go through because you're so elevated with gratitude and thankfulness and happiness like, okay, I'm alive no matter how bad things are. I survived, I'm alive. And what has my family gone through and I got to fight for them, but also the miracles and how do you even try to process that? And I'm a spiritual man. I wouldn't consider myself real religious. I think spirituality is very personal. I never questioned God. I wasn't angry at God. I recognized a lot of this stuff is way too big for me to answer. What I have to embrace is what I can control. And all I can do is live my life starting right now to the best of my ability. What that means, I have no idea.

Obviously, there were a ton of dark days. I mean, I cried so much every day with thoughts of what are my children going to think of me? I have lost my job. I am facing so many years of reconstructive surgeries, therapy, burn injury is a pain that all these years later, it's hard for me to even try to put it into words because thankfully, our minds and our bodies tend to forget the negatives and hang onto the positives. And I really have to dig deep to go back and think about the actual physical pain. But the mental and emotional pain, it's always right here.

I would cuss and yell at people who were there to love and support me. I would not talk. And I don't want to say I was depressed, I didn't have the energy. I was incredibly frail. I was incredibly sick, I was incredibly tired and there just was no clear path to what the future was going to hold. But I was very grounded from the beginning that you're here, a lot of people fought for you when you couldn't fight for yourself, and there is beauty and strength in vulnerability. It's not something we want to talk about or that we like. But there is. And I just had to get to a point and thankfully I did where I accepted what happened and then I accepted the challenge of making the most of my new life.




Warwick Fairfax:

So Jason, as I'm listening to this, I'm wondering, I can imagine for weeks or months there was excruciating pain. There might have been guilt almost that gosh, I'm not going to be able to play ball with my son and he's not going to remember how I was. I mean, all lots of human emotions, I don't know how will this affect my marriage? And maybe there might have even been a little survivor's guilt. The person two years before who inspired me to join the police force, he wasn't so lucky. How come I survived? I mean, survived in pretty tough shape but survived nonetheless.

So you probably had all sorts of series of guilt, not that any of it was your fault, it just bad things happen for whatever reason. But whether it's survivor's guilt or what's this going to do to my family? And obviously the pain, I've heard this is from burn victims is probably as tough a pain as exists that any human can possibly experience that none of us who haven't been through can understand. But I mean, how did you get through those weeks and months? Clearly you're in a good place now, which you're going to get to, but how did you get through those weeks and months with the physical pain, the emotional pain, the guilt, the sea of negative emotions? How in the world did you get through those first few weeks and months?




Jason Schechterle:

Well, thankfully it came pretty quickly when you're talking about the timeframe involved here. It was only about three weeks after I woke up that I had two profound realizations that to this day I still am grateful for and live my life by. And first and foremost, I wasn't targeted by this individual. He made a lot of mistakes and caused a lot of damage. But he wasn't trying to hurt a police officer. He certainly wasn't trying to hurt Jason. So I didn't have to deal with, or I chose not to be angry at him. I chose not to look at it that way. And the most important thing that occurred to me was no matter what happens in this life, I think we have to have accountability. It's very easy to say, why me? It's very easy to be angry at whatever faith you have, whatever you believe in, it's very easy to take out your personal struggles on people who love you or to just give up.

But no matter what happens, you have to realize, well, everybody has their own story. I'll tell you what it was for me. Here's this tragic moment in time that happened when two cars collided and one caught on fire. I did not catch on fire, get burned, be in that hospital or have my life completely changed because of that moment. If you go back to me giving up a college golf scholarship to join the military, only spending the required four years in the military, failing at becoming a police officer several times and then postponing becoming one until I was truly moved to do so by the calling of another officer dying, you can go back a solid 10 years of my life and see that every choice that I made is what led me to that intersection, to that fire and into that hospital bed. And therefore, every decision I make starting right now will take me where I need to go.

And that really laid the foundation for me to say, okay, I'm at least going to put in the effort and I had no idea what I could accomplish. And I'm still in the midst of, yes, a lot of sadness, anger, frustration, fear, anxiety, all the things that you have to go on a journey within yourself. It is not possible to overcome anything in life by thinking that we are designed to simply say, okay, and then just move on. There's not one setback, not anything that just says, okay, I'll just move on. That's not possible. You have to go on a journey within yourself. And I allowed myself to do that. Sometimes by, I didn't really have a choice. If I went to therapy because I wanted something to get better, I'm going to have to suffer the pain that is involved in that therapy. But I still just had that foundation of I'm going to continue to strive for the next hour.

I didn't have to get through a whole day, I had to get through the next hour and see what I could see from there. I did have to get to tomorrow. And I'm a big fan of cliches and sayings and I think they are powerful. And when they mean something to you, so you'll often hear me saying little quotes, but it's true that the sun comes up tomorrow and the world does not care about your broken heart. So you just got to keep going. And that turned into at least the start of some positive momentum. While I could also continue every day, no matter how I felt when I was at home, when I was in the midst of the fear and the tears and the anger and the pain, I was still surrounded by the sound of my children's voices, the blanket of gratitude that I was alive, the love and support of my wife and family, my friends that had fought so hard to help me get through this. I was constantly being lifted up and propped up.

And I often say that I was, even though I was the least prepared person for this, because I had led such a blessed easy life, I was also completely set up to not fail. I was still getting a paycheck from the department because I was injured in the line of duty. So we didn't have to worry about that. And I was able to go to any doctor I wanted to across the country once I got to a point where I could choose what kind of plastic surgeries I wanted to have, what kind of things I wanted to make better. I moved on to having really big events happen in life like carrying the Olympic torch, meeting the President of the United States, throwing out the first pitch at a DBacks game. And a lot of people might think, well, what do those things matter with what you're going through? And in a lot of ways that's true. They were inconsequential except in the moment that kind of inspiration is incredible even if it's for five minutes. And then the memories of it last forever.

And then most importantly, the day that I finally got the perspective that I truly needed and I could truly understand the why of this was on October 29th of '02 when our third child was born. And now to have an entire life that shouldn't even exist, I was able to say, you know what? This wasn't about getting me out of a car or getting me through one or two surgeries, but everything that I'm doing, everything that my wife is doing, everything that my entire support system is doing helped to bring this life into this world. And now we are talking about something that is easy to say it was this horrible, tragic accident, but it can end up having endless generations of positivity on the world. And that is, that's an incredible thing to be able to look at and have perspective on.




Gary Schneeberger:

And when I heard you speak the first time, Jason, I whipped out my camera and snapped a slide that you put up because you said this, which fits in exactly with what you just said. Sometimes the most beautiful inspirational changes will disguise themselves as devastation. And your last line was beautiful, Be patient. That's what you just described. Everything that you just talked about was you being patient through each of those valleys because at the other side of the valley was a peak and you found that. You were patient and you worked through it. I think the inspiration I hope listeners take away from this part of the conversation for sure.




Jason Schechterle:

Well I'm glad you bring that up because I want to point out, for as much as I love cliches and things like that, I did get tired of stealing from everybody else. And that quote, I actually came up with myself. It could be attributed to me. And I loved it when people like you, snapping a picture of it or somebody writes it down because it is word for word very true. And yes, it's how I lived until it finally dawned on me that every time something got better, it was like, oh, if I'd have known this a year ago, if I'd have known this five years ago, it would've made it easier to be patient. Being patient, that's not one of our strong suits. None of us. None of us. We want it right now. But it's very true. You got to be patient in your grief, you got to be patient in your struggle. But it's going to work out. And I'm living proof of that today.




Warwick Fairfax:

Wow. I mean, that's such a great quote. I want to talk about gains and what you do now, but one of the things I don't want listeners to miss is when you go through a crucible or a tragedy, rarely can you undo what happened. You couldn't undo the car crash and the consequences of what happened. That was life altering. You couldn't control the, I think it's what? 56 plus surgeries or something, some massive number.




Jason Schechterle:

Yes.




Warwick Fairfax:

The pain, the therapy, you know it's going to help, it's going to hurt, I don't know, something unimaginably. But you had a choice. You could choose to live, you could choose to say, I'm going to press on for the sake of my kids and now my three kids, my wife, and try to find purpose amidst the pain or I can choose not to live. So there's one thing listeners are probably wondering. When you go through something like what you've gone through, there's typically immense anger, whether it's at God, some higher power. Obviously, you had every right to be angry from what I understand about. The Ford Motor company and Ford, Crown Victoria, which understand it has a history of police cruisers getting on fire and obviously accountability is important, but you clearly didn't wallow in the sea of bitterness, you forgave. Again, forgiving doesn't mean condoning. Doesn't mean the guy that had the epileptic fit, from what I understand, it wasn't the first time he had it. So you had a list of things, again, not to condone, but to forgive, you clearly must have made that choice. If you get the difference I'm trying to make between condoning and forgiving, but you couldn't be where you are now if you hadn't dealt with that anger and bitterness at some level.




Jason Schechterle:

Certainly not. And you keep saying the right word, it is a choice. And just as I described, I made so many choices over so many years of my life that got me into this situation. Not knowing, I mean, you make choices every day, dozens or hundreds. And very rarely do we think about the consequences, the ripple effect that it might have across the rest of your life. But having that foundation gave me the freedom and the permission to know that my choices now will completely dictate where I'm going to go. And you make the best choices that you can with the information you have at hand.

And I would make choices in the midst of anger. I would make some choices. It could have been, you know what? I'm not going to therapy today. I don't feel like being in pain today. I want to sit here and I'm not giving up. I'm not quitting, but this is what I need today and it's okay to not be okay. You just cannot be strong and successful and perfect every single minute of every day. You talk about a recipe for failure, but it is my choice. And I see examples of that all the time.

So when I learned to deal with the survivor's guilt and you brought up Ford Motor Company, yes, 33 officers and countless civilians across this country have burned to death in these rear end fueled fires because of the Ford Crown Victoria. So do I have survivor's guilt? Sure. Do I ask why me in that regard? Of course, I do. But then I have the choice to be grateful that you know what? This is a pretty strong appearance and a pretty strong voice to speak for those people.

I don't know why it was me. I don't know if I was chosen. These are questions too big for me to answer. All I can do is live my life the best way that I can. And I did go out and become a voice for them and a face for them. That's what got me. If it wasn't for them, I don't know if I would've ever stuck my face in front of a camera. I don't know if I would've ever given interviews. But because of the people who had gone before me, because of the potential of people who would go after me, I had a role to play and that gave me a lot of strength. Still being a husband, still being a father, still being a son. For people who didn't give up on me, who am I to give up on them? That's a choice that is easy to make when you look at it in the right sense.

So often in life people say, Oh, I was standing at the crossroads of life. You're standing at a crossroad 15 times a day. I mean, at a minimum. If you choose this path, you don't get to know what's down the other road because you can't go that way. But whatever road you go down, you have to accept whatever's coming. All the roadblocks, all the speed bumps, all the detours and accidents and everything. And so I think it's the perspective of the power of choice and what a blessing that no matter what you believe in, that is how we are allowed to live our lives, our own free will and our own free choices.

You have both been through plenty in your life and I think if you go back and look at choices that you made that you thought were good at the time, they might not have worked out. Is there any point in saying, Oh, I made a bad choice, or I wish I wouldn't have made that choice? No, I made that choice. Here's the consequences and here's the choices I'm going to make starting right now. And that momentum just keeps you going forward.




Warwick Fairfax:

And that's powerful what you just said, Jason. Talk a bit about what you do now and just some of the gains that you've experienced. And you've touched on some of the gains already, but the series is called Gaining from Loss. So talk about what you see as the gains and how you've really turned those gains into a mission, a purpose that you have beyond yourself.




Jason Schechterle:

Yeah, it is, going back to that statement that the last two words are be patient. I have the incredible fortune now to say, and I mean this, I have gained everything and lost nothing because even though I still have limited eyesight, even though I lost half my fingers, even though my appearance is not as attractive as maybe it would've been had I still had the look that I had before, but I gained a bigger family with my child. I see what my children now that they're grown, what these three kids are doing in life, the way they lived their life, the compassion they have toward other people, the kindness, it's just perfection. So it's all gain and no loss. I did for a time return to work. I did achieve my dream of becoming a homicide detective. I did it for almost three years. That can never be taken away from me. I gained something, I didn't lose it.

When I changed careers and then found my new calling of being a public speaker and having no idea how to do that, I was not a good speaker 12 years ago when I started doing it professionally for a living, getting paid for it, for the lack of a better word. But I worked at it and it was choices to learn and to get better and to tell my story. And then people along the way helped me. I gained the perspective of other people's stories, of their kindness, of their compliments, of their criticisms and knowing that I get to help other people. And if you leave somebody better than you found them, you can never be a failure. You can never say you've lost anything. I wouldn't trade a day of my life, I would not take away a single moment of anything I've gone through because you erase one thing and it ends up erasing so many things that are good. So yeah, it's amazing. But I'm very proud and it makes me smile. I've gained everything and lost nothing.




Gary Schneeberger:

That sound that you just heard in case you didn't know it, listener, that's the captain turning on the fasten seatbelt sign indicating that we're going to begin our descent into wrapping up this conversation. We're not there yet, we're just starting it. Before we do that, I want to ask you one question, Jason, and then give you a chance to tell listeners a little something. But at the start of this conversation, based on what you just said about all the gains that you've had through your journey, you indicated when Warwick was asking you about your childhood and then your young adulthood that you had lived in your words, a perfect life, different circumstances, different perspective, maybe different definition of that word perfect. But would you say, can you say you've regained a life that in some ways is perfect now?




Jason Schechterle:

For sure. I have gained, I don't know that I would use the word perfect. We always put adjectives on different things. When I talk about my childhood and I say it was perfect, that's more of my choice and my hindsight being 20/20 to say, you know what? It was that good. And I am so thankful for how I grew up, who I grew up with, where I grew up, everything about it. So that's what the word perfect means. Is my life perfect now? No in the sense that I do have physical limitations, I do have struggles. I am getting older, I have my worries, I have my anxieties, but what I have now is just the peace and serenity of I am right where I want to be and I'm right where I need to be. I don't know if it was destiny, I don't know if it was fate. Again, great words that we can use. I can't answer those questions, but I don't want to be anywhere else than where I am.




Gary Schneeberger:

And before I let Warwick ask you the last question or the last couple questions, I want to give you the chance to let people know how they can find out exactly where you are and they can find out maybe how to hire you to speak. They can find out more about your story. How can they find you online, Jason?




Jason Schechterle:

Yes, I am incredibly easy to find and I'm the only one. I don't have a team. I'm the only one who answers my emails, my social media. I'm very active on Instagram and LinkedIn and I've got a pretty unique last name. So once you figure out how to spell it and you look it up, my website is burningshield.com. I have a book titled Burning Shield that you can get on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. My email is jason@burningshield. There it is right there.




Gary Schneeberger:

There it is right there.




Jason Schechterle:

My email is jason@burningshield.com. Again, I'm the only one who gets those emails and I will answer you right away. If you just want to ask a question or inquire about my speaking. I am very easy to find. If you type my name into Google, it's humbling and kind of comical at how much comes up.




Warwick Fairfax:

Wow. So Jason, as I'm kind of listening to you, I'm almost hearing you say that you feel blessed. I don't know if we've used that word. It doesn't mean what happened to you wasn't horrific, but yet you're with your family, and which I'll ask you about here in terms of what you do now, one of the things you wrote, I think is just pretty profound stuff in terms of blessing is something that your wife said, Susie. And she said, "I can't tell you why Jason's appearance never bothered me, but I've never missed how he looked before the night of March 26th, 2001. I didn't marry the face. I married the man. He's the same human being." I don't know if everybody's wife would've said that, but to have somebody that says it's not about the face, it's about the man, his character, who he is, that's pretty amazing stuff. I mean, that alone is a reason to feel pretty blessed, don't you think?




Jason Schechterle:

Oh, feeling blessed is constantly I'm covered in it. I think about that all the time. And when you talk about my wife and when she made that statement, we got married very young, and regardless of my life changing event, accident, appearance, whatever, we change and our significant other is going to change as they age, and we are different people. Marriage is very difficult. And for her to have that foresight back then and that commitment to the, for better or worse, the part of the vow, most people take for... like I did in the police academy, that's going to be a 25 year career. It's going to be easy. I'm going to have fun, I'm going to collect a nice retirement. I think that's how a lot of people go into marriage is they just say the words not realizing those words are in there because they mean something.

And yeah, I could never have done this alone. I know I said on stage Gary, when you heard me, I'm 2% of who I am today, barely 2%. The other 98% is my wife, my children, my parents. I lost my dad five years ago to cancer. My doctors, those firefighters who I still keep in touch with because I want them to see, look at what you did that night, look at what it turned into. Not often do we get to see the fruits of our labor and I am going to always go out of my way to make sure that people who helped me in the beginning see that it was worth it. I want them to have some peace and serenity over that like I have. So yeah, I am incredibly blessed. Beyond words.




Warwick Fairfax:

So as we close out here, and that is profound what you just shared, Jason. Talk about what you do. I think you have a scholarship fund for kids of officers who've been severely injured and you speak and just an advocate. So just talk about what are the things you do that you're pouring your life into, at least vocationally and your calling.




Jason Schechterle:

Yeah, my new calling for sure was being a public speaker. And I'm a very lucky individual that I had two aha moments. The first was when Marc Atkinson was killed and the second came about when New York City firefighter who had been at 9/11 and then was going through a divorce. He heard me speak and he told me that I changed his life and I owned a business at the time. I was just being Jason and I walked out of that room, got on the phone, put my business up for sale and said, "I know what I need to be doing."

And to be able to touch other people's lives, to be able to maybe shape their perspective. Of course, I love talking to law enforcement and first responders, but I love talking to Fortune 500 companies and people in real estate. We're all human beings and we all have life happening to us. I don't think we should compare adversities. Whatever we're going through, we have to embrace it. And I am very blessed that I have an opportunity to have that platform. Not everybody does. I don't take that lightly. I don't take it for granted. It's something that I can't... I'm leaving on an airplane tomorrow to go speak to the Washington State Fire Chiefs Association. And I can't wait to share this story with them. I can't wait to say thank you for what you do every day and speak for all the people that you dealt with who I bet would say thank you for that call you went on 15 years ago or 20 years ago. And give them a little bit of perspective.

So I just remain so inspired and so excited about the future. And I love what my kids are doing. I'm so proud of them, blessed to have those three individuals in my life. So it's just a constan, every day I wake up and I'm inspired. I'll go to bed at night like you should, and I'll let the weight of the world come down. I will think about my adversity. I will think about, and it's not the 20 year ago adversity, it's not the burns, it's what I'm going through now at my age and worrying about my kids and their future or worrying about my speaking and how I'm going about that. But I do let the weight of the world come down on me. But I wake up every day, two goals.

Number one, I'm going to leave this day better than I found it. And it's simple. Put a shopping cart away, smile at somebody at the gas station, leave a meeting positively beaming. It's amazing how you can live your life when you can leave the day better than you found it. And the other thing I dedicate myself to every morning is whatever moves me today, I'm going in that direction, I can tell you very honestly, I woke up this morning and I was excited to do this podcast. I mean, Warwick, I'm incredibly honored to meet you and the life that you have lived for you to give me a chance to be on your show, that's very humbling and it means a lot to me. So I was very excited.

When I wake up tomorrow, I don't get to do this show. So I have to find something else and that will be my motivation. What is tomorrow? What does it hold? What can I find? You can always find something to be grateful for. You can always find something to be inspired by and then just go in that direction each and every day and the days start clicking by and it gets really, really good.




Gary Schneeberger:

It's interesting that you mentioned Jason that soon you're going to be getting on a plane because our plane in this conversation has just landed. Perfect landing on your part, four point landing. I think that's actually a term that works. As I close, you said in the show, Jason, you said that you like to use and maybe sometimes you appropriate other people's quotes, not that you steal them, but you use other people's quotes and you're very proud of the fact that the one I sent back to you that I took the picture of at your speech was one that you came up with. That was in fact original from you. Well, I'm now going to appropriate that quote in closing the show, and I'm going to tweak it just a bit for Crucible Leadership and that is this: Listener, remember this as we close this episode of our series Gaining From Loss. Sometimes the most beautiful inspirational changes will disguise themselves, we'll say it our way, as crucibles. Be patient. As you're being patient, next week we'll be back with another episode of our special series Gaining from Loss. See you then.

We kick off our fall series GAINING FROM LOSS with Shelley Klingerman’s story of grit in the face of grief after her brother, Greg, a 30-year veteran law enforcement officer, was shot to death in an ambush while leaving a government building – a senseless and evil act.

From that tortuous crucible, Klingerman has dedicated herself to celebrating the essence of Greg and helping his fellow officers via the nonprofit she founded not long after his killing: Project Never Broken. Her organization extends hope and healing through stressing resiliency to other law enforcement officers and their families struggling through the aftermath of trauma. Through every step, she is committed to no longer accepting the things she cannot change, but changing the things she cannot accept. 

Highlights

Transcript

Warwick Fairfax:

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




Shelley Klingerman:

I will not let this take more than one life, and I have a family and I did find myself... My family did suffer early on until I was just able... Those waves come further. But make no mistake, my kids walked in on me just crying and I'm like, I can't do this. If I do this and I'm not here for them, then again, more than one life is lost. And if I go, then how does that affect my kids? And I just was not willing to make that an option.




Gary Schneeberger:

Not willing to give up, to give into the pain, to give into the loss. Shelley Klingerman determined early on after her brother was slain that those options were not on the table, not just to protect her family, but to honor the life and legacy of the loved one she lost.

Hi, I'm Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show. This week, Warwick and I kick off our fall series Gaining From Loss with Klingerman's story of grit in the face of grief after her brother Greg, a 30-year veteran law enforcement officer, was shot to death in an ambush, a senseless and evil act. From that torturous crucible, Klingerman has dedicated herself to celebrating the essence of Greg and helping his fellow officers via the nonprofit she founded not long after his killing - Project Never Broken. Her organization extends hope and healing through stressing resiliency to other law enforcement officers and their families struggling through the aftermath of trauma. Through every step, she is committed to no longer accepting the things she cannot change, but changing the things she cannot accept.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, Shelley, again, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it. Before we get to I guess the event that changed your life and your family's life, I'd love to hear a little bit about the backstory of you and your brother and growing up and just a little bit of the kind of backstory of you, your family, your journey before kind of the main event that we'll talk about.




Shelley Klingerman:

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure and a privilege to be here and share my story, which I will be very honest with you, I have not done much since it happened. So I promise you there will be weak moments as I tell you, just because it's new for me, and I will get through it.

But to answer your question, I was brought up in a very traditional, what I will say is an all American family. I equated us to the Cleavers. My mom was a teacher. My dad was a fireman, and it was just Greg and I, and they were incredibly present parents. We were very middle class, never wanted for anything and just absolutely knew that we were the center of our parents' world without being completely self-absorbed about it. But I had an amazing upbringing. There's nothing that I could say that was traumatic in my childhood.




Warwick Fairfax:

Do you ever look back and obviously you know a lot of other people now and think in some sense we were privileged, not in terms of money but unconditional love, a brother and a sister that love each other, parents that loved you? You probably have friends that go, "Shelley, that wasn't my upbringing." I mean, you don't know what you don't know when you were a kid. As you look back, you think, gosh, we were pretty blessed growing up.




Shelley Klingerman:

Oh absolutely. My dad especially, I didn't know that everybody's dad didn't start their car in the winter and have their windshields cleared off and had the car warm. I honestly just thought that's what dads did. So very much so, I had grown to greatly appreciate the solid loving background and upbringing that I had.

And you talk about Greg and I, we were very different. Greg was quiet. He was introverted. He was incredibly smart. We weren't close where we really hung out, but the way that we were brought up there was absolutely a loyalty and a dedication to family. So again, just to put a point on that, I also didn't know that it wasn't normal for my dad to go visit his uncle who had never had kids or been married, and he would go sit with him every evening at the nursing home. And again, I just thought that's what you did. I thought that's how every parent treated their... It was his uncle.

My mom's mom lived across the street from us because her dad passed away shortly after he retired. So my grandma moved in across the street, and I didn't know that everyone's grandma didn't come over for dinner every night or you went across the street to their house at five o'clock every evening for dinner. So yeah, just to bring it back around, I'm very grateful and absolutely do now see what an amazing upbringing I had. And I would say that my mom, dad, Greg and I were like a tent. We were the four poles in a tent. So when we talk about what happened recently, when you pull one of those four poles out that you make up that tent, it collapses, and that's kind of what happened.




Warwick Fairfax:

Just before we get to that, so you grow up, go to college and obviously you went one direction. I mean every person has their own direction, career, life. So just talk about what you did after college and before the event, which we'll get to in a second. What were you pursuing career-wise and purpose-wise? What was your direction in life, if you will?




Shelley Klingerman:

Yeah. Again, I said that Greg and I were different. So Greg went in law enforcement. Again, he took a path of public service like my mom, teacher, dad, fireman. I kind of went in a different direction because as I said, we were opposite. So I was more extrovert. I was very social. I was very involved. My career path took me... I started working. My first job out of school was a corporate job in a Fortune 500 company. And while I was there, many of my experiences are what brought me to write the book that I wrote based on a lot of the actual things that happened to me. But I also was an entrepreneur at heart and I really didn't know what that meant. I really didn't know what an entrepreneur was. To be honest, back in the, I'll date myself, early '90s, that wasn't so much a thing, and I remember getting on-




Gary Schneeberger:

Oh, Shark Tank. It's before Shark Tank so nobody knew.




Shelley Klingerman:

I remember getting a magazine called Entrepreneur Magazine. I don't know how I got on the subscription, but it would show up on my desk and I'm like, "What is an entrepreneur? How is it that you could literally be your own boss?" Because I was so just all I had been exposed to was a corporate environment. But what I do know now is that burning desire to do something that was mine and I was willing for it to be my success or my failure. But I always had that and I just didn't know what it was, and it was that entrepreneurial flame and fire. And I ended up doing some things entrepreneurial while I was still at Sony. So if we were to look at my past, I did multiple things while I was working full time and that was me I think pursuing that entrepreneurial thread that I had.




Warwick Fairfax:

So you work your way up the corporate ladder and you wrote this fascinating book, Vigilance: The Savvy Woman's Guide to Personal Safety, Self-Protection Measures and Countermeasures. I love the name of your company, the Stiletto Agency. I mean, maybe it's kind of obvious I guess, but why the Stiletto Agency? Because you could pick a hundred different names.




Shelley Klingerman:

I wanted something to be bold. I wanted it to be somewhat feminine. And if you look at the logo and you look pretty closely, it was a play on words of a stiletto heel, and then the heel is actually a knife. It's not a true stiletto knife, but it's a form. So it was kind of like bold, edgy. It had to do with the empowerment, the safety. So that's where that came from.




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah. I get that. One last question on this before we get to the main event. Why the sort of passion around helping women learn safety and empowerment and protection, what led you to going down that track?




Shelley Klingerman:

As I had touched on before, it was my personal experience traveling young as a young professional in the early '90s. And I really quite frankly wasn't prepared, and I found myself in some situations that I should have recognized to avoid altogether. Once I was in what I would call cringey situations, I didn't necessarily know how to get myself out of them. Potentially, sometimes I would go to close business because I had a quota that I had to meet and the person on the other side of the table was more interested in asking me what I was doing after my day was over rather than talking about the business at hand. And I just really was left with not knowing what to do and had to kind of think on my feet in some situations. And there's again, I found myself in a few that I shouldn't have been in because I should have recognized how to avoid them, which is what led me to write the book.

I have three kids, two girls, and I quite frankly wanted them to be more prepared to go out into the world than I was. My company was an awesome company, but they did nothing to teach me how to travel on my own, again, as a young professional. So I started when I was 23. I wasn't even old enough to rent a car yet, so they would have to sign waivers. So I was certainly not necessarily prepared to know how to handle some of these professional situations.




Gary Schneeberger:

I'll jump in and say one thing about the book, or two things about the book. One, it was featured in the New York Times, which is kind of awesome so that your insights into how women can be vigilant and protect themselves was featured in there. But also Shelley, after you and I worked together for a little bit, I still can't be on an airplane and overhear a conversation where a young woman is talking to a young man and it's probably innocuous, I don't know. And she talks about, "Well yeah, I live here." And I remember one time, the first time that happened after I had read your book, I texted you after I got off the plane going, "You wouldn't believe what just happened on this..." I mean truly, it makes all of your radar go up, not in a bad way where you see bad people around every corner, but to keep you vigilant, to keep you aware of your surroundings and aware of how you're interacted. So I wholeheartedly endorse your book for that reason.




Shelley Klingerman:

Thank you.




Warwick Fairfax:

So let's talk about kind of the event that changed your life, because listeners are probably wondering, "I wonder what that was." So just talk a bit about that event that day and-




Shelley Klingerman:

Yeah. So Greg was a 30-year law enforcement FBI task force officer, and he was just exiting his office one day and walking to his car and was ambushed and murdered. It was not a targeted event. The suspect was really there, I believe, to kill everybody in the building, but it was Greg's heroic actions in his last moments that alerted them to what was going on, and they were able to come out and engage. So he fought to the last seconds.




Warwick Fairfax:

That obviously changed your life, your family's life, parents. He had, from what I've read, two kids, didn't he? A son and a daughter.




Shelley Klingerman:

He did. He had twins that were 18.




Warwick Fairfax:

So talk about just the... You've obviously set up some things since, but just talk about those days, weeks, months. Just you mentioned before that event changed your whole life, the four tent poles, one was gone. Just talk about, I know it's an obvious question but forgive me, but just talk about how that changed your life and your family's life, that event.




Shelley Klingerman:

Yeah. So I mean I can kind of go down a couple paths. I noticed early on that the emotions that I was experiencing were absolutely of course deep sadness and just strong anger, and anger is a very effective emotion that comes with a lot of energy. I, again, recognized early because I know myself and that energy needed to go to something that was productive and not destructive. I and my family had committed that this act would not be left where it was.

So just a story. As we were talking about the services for Greg, my mom, we grew up Catholic. My dad went to a Catholic school. My kids go to a Catholic school. We were raised Catholic. She still goes to church, God-loving. And before when we sat down to talk about the services with the priest, my mom just stopped and it's kind of out of her character, and she said, "Before I talk about anything, I need to know why. Why would God let this happen?" And our priest said very matter of factly, my mom's name is Dottie, he said, "Dottie, make no mistake, God had nothing to do with this. This was an act of pure evil. The way God responds is he will give the strength to make something good come of this."

And it was honestly in those moments of hearing that where I committed that I would do something. I didn't really know what at the time, but I was determined to make something good come of this evil, and it would not end at that evil act and evil would not win. And that is really where my conviction came. The nonprofit came a little bit after. I mean that conversation happened within two days. So that was the first thing, that conviction, and then the noticing of these emotions and the energy that comes with that. And it just kind of naturally came that I would... Again, I didn't do this alone. My family was part of it, but we committed to honoring, memorializing Greg's life and legacy because Greg was one of the good guys. Greg was actually making a difference on this earth, and we cannot glorify evil and not raise the stories and the lives and the legacies of those who truly are doing good. So that's really what the mission.

I called Mary Siller, who is with the Tunnels to Towers Foundation, just out of the blue, and I reached out to them just through their website and ended up getting on the phone with her and I said, "I think I'm getting ready to embark on something real similar to what you did to memorialize your brother in the sacrifice he made on 9/11. What do I need to know? What are the avoidable things as I start out?" And she gave me the most sound advice that I have gone back to over and over. And she just said, "Whatever you do, make sure his essence is seen in what you do. Just whatever he would still be doing if he were here, let that drive your organization." And that's absolutely what we have gone back to. What would he want, what would he do? He was very much a mentor. He was very much a trainer, a leader. So that's where the hope, help and healing comes from. He would not want any of his brothers to be sad or to be struggling at his loss.

A little side note though is that the community that I'm from, Terre Haute, is a community about the size of 60,000. Our police force is about 130. We have lost three officers in the line of duty in the last 10 years. There are officers that are serving that have lost three of their brothers in the last 10 years. Then to ask them to put the uniform on the day after they've lost one of their own knowing that right now, and you mentioned it earlier, this environment is not necessarily an easy environment to operate in. They feel it. They see it. Then you add on that their wives are concerned every time they walk out the door. Their kids see what's going on. So they have all of that to contend with. This organization exists through him to make sure that his brothers have the resources, the backing, the support that they need to continue to do their job because that's what he would want.




Warwick Fairfax:

I want to talk a bit about the organization, but just before we get there, there're going to be listeners hearing this who've been through loss. They've lost a loved one or they've gone through some tragedy. And one of the things we say at Beyond The Crucible is when you go through a crucible experience, you have a choice. You can't undo what happened, whether it was a mistake you made or something horrific that was done to you, which is this case. And obviously you know this unfortunately too well, there's one path that leads to anger, bitterness, proverbially hide under the covers and say, "I'm going to be angry, bitter and sad for the next 30, 40, 50 years," and eventually life ends and the pain stops. Some obviously cut that short by sadly taking their own life. They just cannot take the grief, the anger, the whatever.

And another path is one that you've taken, which is, this was wrong, this is awful, but how do I get beyond this? How do I not just be a pool of grief for the next 50 years? I mean, how did you make that choice? Because not everybody makes the choice that you did who's been through your circumstances. And I'm not here to judge. I'm just saying one maybe is hopeful and leaves a legacy perhaps, and one is not very helpful. So how did you make that choice to go the direction that you did?




Shelley Klingerman:

Well, I think I'm a bit stubborn. I'm a bit feisty and-




Gary Schneeberger:

Really?




Shelley Klingerman:

I know. And to be quite honest, it's kind of what I said before, evil will not win. So if I gave up and my family gave up, we would've lost more than one life out of this family because to your point, you stop living and that was not an option because then evil would win. So I truly believe that we are being given God's strength to just look evil in the face dead on and be, we will be way bigger. This act will not end the way you hoped. We will outshine it, and we will take your evil act and we will compound it a hundred times for good. So it is just an attitude and a mindset and just a grit and a fight mentality.




Gary Schneeberger:

I know he's going to ask you about the foundation in particular, but I want to ask you, because you're the first guest we've had on this series and we've wrestled a bit, believe it or not, with what we were going to call this. It occurred to me earlier in the week, we're going to record Shelley at the end of the week and we don't have a name. And so we started kicking around names, and there was concern on our parts that what we ended up calling it Gaining From Loss might be misinterpreted, right? The idea that how can anything good come out of loss. But what you've just described, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but would you say that you have indeed, as much as you lost and it was great, you have gained something through that process as well that you are putting toward memorializing and carrying forth Greg's legacy? Is that a fair statement?




Shelley Klingerman:

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think so. And I think that at the end of the day, more people will know who he was and the good that he did maybe than otherwise. I mean, he was an incredibly humble person. So we are learning things about him that we didn't even know. I mean important work that he was doing that was truly making a difference for local and honestly at a bigger level national security just because of the jobs that he was working on. So yeah, I think it would be fair to say that I've gained.

What I'm talking about today, this organization was not on my radar 16 months ago. I mean I, to your point earlier, was kind of doing my own thing. You deal with the cards you're dealt and we were dealt this card, and I've had people say, "Well, is this the way that he was supposed to go out?" And at first I was like, "Absolutely not." This was again evil, pure evil that appeared on this earth. But I will say that he was a badass, to be honest. He was a warrior and more people know that now because of this. And I truly think that people have been inspired by his story, and the good guys, which he was, do make a difference. It's a kind of long roundabout way to answer, but it is the circumstance you're given, so you find the good. And yes, I've gained. I have gained so many friends that I would've never met through this loss. And Gary, we worked together on a conference for law enforcement and at the end of that conference what I have surmised is that we lost one, we will help many.




Warwick Fairfax:

There's something that you said to us before in preparation for this, something that you wrote to us, which I found very profound. You said that you should basically do something that makes you feel like you're affecting the situation. And you mentioned the saying, "I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I'm changing the things I cannot accept." I mean that's a profound thought you had. Just tell us a bit about what you meant by that.




Shelley Klingerman:

Yeah. And again, I have to say those are not my words. I've seen that quote, but I have adopted that. And yeah, doing something has been the most transforming thing that I could possibly do because again, if I did nothing, if we did nothing, evil would win, and it is not going to win. So by doing something, you're processing grief, you're taking action, that is the most therapeutic thing that I have found that has worked for me. To your point, completely respect that's not how everybody processes grief. Sometimes they need to go and be secluded and be quiet. That's just not how I'm made up. I mean I am more of an extrovert. So by me feeling like I am doing something and taking action is how I am working through this grief.




Gary Schneeberger:

I go back to what you said at the very start of our conversation when you said, "And then I got subscribed to Entrepreneur Magazine and I had no idea how that happened." I think as you've told this story and we see the arc of your life, I think we have an idea why that happened because that entrepreneurial spirit that was birthed in you helped you birth this organization, Project Never Broken.




Shelley Klingerman:

Yeah. No, I would agree. And again, truly, I did not register. So to your point, maybe somebody knew something more than I did at a time and I was meant to have that magazine because I didn't subscribe to it because I didn't even know what it was.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, I want to ask about Project Never Broken, but just before we do, let me make a comment that obviously we're all wired differently. Some are extroverts, introverts, artistic, mathematical. So how we process grief is different, but yet I think there are some lessons for all of us that however you're wired, to your point, to me, evil wins if you are just never get out of bed and are angry, bitter, and if you let evil defeat you, then evil does win. So no matter how you are wired, there are some lessons for everybody. And your attitude is evil won't win, I'm going to turn this evil for good. So that might mean different things for different people, but I feel like there's some overarching lessons from your response that's true for everybody. Is that fair?




Shelley Klingerman:

Oh, I hope so. I hope so. Yes, evil should never have the last say.




Warwick Fairfax:

So let's talk about Project Never Broken because you could have supported the legacy of your brother in many ways. Why this way? I mean tell us about Project Never Broken and what led you to set up this nonprofit and just honor him and his legacy this particular way.




Shelley Klingerman:

Again, I think it's that essence. He was very much a trainer. Everyone wanted to be mentored by him. He always stepped up. He would have wanted people to move on in a productive way. So this hope, help and healing represented what he would still be doing if he were here. The honoring resiliency is the second part of that and it's kind of what we're talking about here. How do you come back? You need to recognize people who do get back up on their feet. I heard something recently, fall seven, stand eight. No matter how many times you get knocked down, you got to get back up, and that's the resiliency and we need to honor that because that's what we're asking everybody to be in this day and age.

As far as the name of the organization, that's actually got a deep meaning too. My dad was in Vietnam and he was in infantry, and the logo or the motto on his uniform, which I actually have his patch. I'm going to grab it right here. This was his patch that he wore on his uniform, and it says Nunquam Fractum, which translates directly to "never broken". So that's where the name of the organization came from. My dad fought in Vietnam and it didn't break him. Greg fought to the bitter last moment, it didn't break him. And so this will not break me, my family or my community. So Nunquam Fractum translates directly to "never broken". If you look at the logo, if you go and search it, you'll see three stitches that connect Nunquam and Fractum, and that represents the hope, help and healing. Then there's a little flag on the logo that's 129. That was Greg's badge number. And then the logo appears worn, and that represents the 30 years of service. So there's deep meaning behind the name of the organization and it's very intentional as to why it's called that.




Warwick Fairfax:

So what's your vision for your organization? I mean, what is your hope that this will do?




Shelley Klingerman:

Never Broken, so that we will provide those resources to our law enforcement and first responder community. Mental health is a big factor for them. There's compound trauma and stress that sometimes doesn't get recognized because they are who we look to for help, but who's helping them? And Greg absolutely would want his brothers and sisters to be supported. So that's what the mission of the organization is doing.

And we're having a little fun too, again, pulling in his personality. So for the one year anniversary date of the loss, we collaborated with a local brewery and we brewed a custom brew. They called it Nunquam Fractum, and it released on July 7th. And so we intentionally did not want that day to be heavy. We didn't want it to be sad. He would not have wanted that. So we had a kind of, if you would say, a party at the brewery and everyone came and toasted Nunquam Fractum. And I would say that be the person, live the life that hundreds of people come back to honor and memorialize you, and that's exactly what happened. That speaks a lot when that many people will come back and celebrate you.

And then we had a concert. Greg was in a band in high school. It was called Overland. We put together a concert called Overland Over Time. That was something that I was always joking with he and some of his band mates that they should do a reunion concert. And then I had been just joking that for a few years, and when this happened, we made it happen. We did a kind of tribute concert called Overland Over Time, and they had hand-drawn their logo, was literally hand-drawn and then they filled it in with markers really. They were just fabric markers. So we took that and we digitized because we had the original... One of the band guys had his original. They literally hand drew it. And we digitized it and we produced shirts that said Overland, just like 1985 when they played.

Another fun thing we did is when Greg would go visit somebody and they weren't in their office, he would leave drawings and we turned all of the drawings that we had into T-shirts. So again, the essence that Mary had suggested, when anybody would see those shirts he drew himself the same way every time, it just makes you smile because that's him. And it was always him in some kind of a battle and he was always winning. It was either a shark eating a little small swimmer or it was like he was blowing up a little person. So we've had fun with it too. But again, that's his essence and that's just who he was. I said he was really humble, and I always define that by he didn't think less about himself, he just thought about himself less. He was always about the person he was with.

And then Greg did some undercover work in his early years. He was on a drug task force and did undercover work and he was really, really good at it because he could blend in. He could blend in to any crowd that he was in. Unlike me, I stand out because I talk loud and I'm very social. He could stand back and observe and be a bit of a chameleon and a wallflower. He's really, really good at his craft.




Warwick Fairfax:

So talk about how, maybe it's again obvious that they might always feel supported because they're thinking of others, but you are here to try and think of them more, right?




Shelley Klingerman:

Yeah, absolutely.




Warwick Fairfax:

Talk a bit about that.




Shelley Klingerman:

Yeah. And to that point, we literally just partnered with a national organization called The Wounded Blue last week and Project Never Broken and another non-profit organization that was created for much of the same reason that Project Never Broken was it's called Peacemaker Project 703. That family's officer was responding to a domestic violence call and was shot and killed within seven seconds of being on scene.

To your point, they're doing the job that we ask them to do and that we call them to do and they do it very selflessly. They literally put their life on the line for complete strangers. So they have to know in order to continue to do that job that somebody has their back because we are making their operating environment very difficult with all the things that are at play right now that we don't have to run through. We know what the environment looks like. I want them to know, Project Never Broken wants them to know that we have your six, that we are here for you and we know that you are human and we cannot expect you to do these things that we are asking you to do without having some kind of consequence because it's a consequence of the job. They still will sign up to do it. They don't really ask for anything, but we just need to offer it. And they need to know that there is help and resources there.

I've had one traumatic event. I've had one big T trauma that it knocked me on my butt. I cannot imagine day in, day out having what is called small t trauma, which adds up and compounds to even bigger effects and not having some way to ask for help. So we are here to be on scene to offer that help and let them know if you need to go talk to someone and you want to do it in a very confidential way, we will help make that happen, and we will also be very public in our support as well.




Gary Schneeberger:

And that event that you spoke about that you had, which is last week when we're taping this, it's in October for those who were listening to this, was called the Law Enforcement Survival Summit. I'll thank you publicly. I was honored that you asked me to come down and capture some of the stories of the folks, the speakers who were there and some of the attendees who were there. But one of the things that really struck me about that, that goes to the point that you just made, that in that event, one of the really strongest aspects of that event was the peer teams. Right? Those people, those officers who had gone through sometimes small t trauma, sometimes large T trauma, but they were there to watch the attendees, not in a creepy way, but to watch people who were listening to the speakers to see if they were triggered by anything, see if something made them sort of feel bad under assault again in some way, and they were there to talk them through that. That's part of the mission of what this summit was about, right?




Shelley Klingerman:

Correct. And it's interesting, I've never sat at a table with so many individuals, so many humans who have been physically shot. I mean it was nothing for me to be the only person at the table that had not been shot. And it was interesting to me that I heard stories all through the week, probably much like you did, Gary, but it's interesting that officers that were involved in some of those shootings and they were not the ones to be shot, they literally would have preferred to have been physically wounded as opposed to the emotional wounds that they were healing from because people cannot see those emotional wounds, and we know how that happens with trauma, and we know that's kind of what the mental injuries are. They would prefer to be physically shot because they can see that heal. Everyone knows that they were hurt. And so they expect certain behaviors.

When you can't see their wounds, and it's much like some of the illnesses that people have that are not outward facing, those are the harder ones for them to get over, and it's mental for them. If they were shot, they could see that wound healing and they kind of healed along with it. When you don't have something to heal, how do you know that you're getting better? It was very interesting. Again, this was all new to me. I mean I've only been in this space for 16 months, but what I am learning is shocking.




Warwick Fairfax:

What you're saying, Shelley, is so profound that if you're not in law enforcement, which I'm not certainly, it's tough to understand, but you have to make, same in probably Afghanistan, Iraq, or Vietnam at times, you have to make split second decisions and you hope that your training allows you to make the right one. I'm sure in the vast majority of ones, you do. But even if you make the right one and you're told, as they say on the police shows, it was a good shoot, right? They analyze. You did everything right. You followed the book. There's still this, I'm sure, sense of trauma. Could I have done something different? Could I have deescalated it without shooting? Even when every expert says, "Nope, you followed the book, you did everything right," it's just traumatic. So maybe 30, 40 years ago, people I guess were probably told, "Suck it up. Be tough," which is a common thing, especially to say to men.

But now hopefully we're in a different place where people realize it's tough. It's not weakness to seek strength. I think a strong person says, "I can't do it all. I need counseling. I need help. I need somebody to help heal me, and it takes time." So do you feel like we're in a place where a lot of the officers you know are willing to say, "You know what? It's not weak to ask for help. It's just smart. And if I don't seek help, it's going to affect my family and those I love?" Because you know what they say hurt people hurt people, and you don't want to hurt the people you love, but you will unless you seek help. So talk a bit about, because I'm sure that's probably part of what you do at Project Never Broken, do you feel like the message is getting out that officers in the line of duty are realizing they have to seek help, it's not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of courage?




Shelley Klingerman:

I do. And I think the program that was put on last week was a great example of that because these officers who have been in lots of different situations, when they tell their story, the officers in the audience, you would just see heads nodding. They're not ever situations that I've been in because I'm not even brave enough to do the job, I'll be honest. I am not wired that way to run to danger. They all are. And when these presenters who had been through horrific situations would tell their story, it's kind of like military likes to talk to military peers, law enforcement likes to talk to law enforcement. So you would see heads nodding, yes. I think that there's a long way to go because that culture is just kind of that brave, strong culture. However, I do think that by talking about it and putting people up there who are brave enough to share their stories and be vulnerable have more impact than we could ever know.

So to answer your question, yes, we will continue to do that. We do that on those conference fields. And then we do kind of mini workshops where I've already in conversations to bring a couple of those speakers who were on stage to come back and do a more intimate workshop with a smaller group of people because that's where the conversation happens. But yes, by those who have been through situations, they're willing to be vulnerable and share it. You can absolutely see heads start to nod, and I think you just have to keep doing it and doing it and doing it until more understand than don't, that what you just said, being weak is actually a sign of strength.

And to that fact, if these things didn't bother these guys and women, that wouldn't be human. They're humans, and they absolutely respond to calls of child abuse, of child fatalities. And if they have a child, I've heard this in separate occasions more than 10 times, when they respond, they see their child's face on that child who didn't survive. So if that ever gets to not affecting them, that's where we need to be concerned. They're human, and they have human emotions. And for so long, I think there was just this perception and this culture that they cannot be bothered by that, and we do not want that. As officers on the street, we don't want them feeling like that's how they have to behave. We want them to be able to process this.

Just like I said, working on this nonprofit is processing grief for me. They need to be able to talk about what they've seen so that they can process it, work through it, and it does not carry with them as they go back out on the street. And again, it's a very different environment for them now. So they need to go out there present in the moment, not carrying a lot of this with them as they clock in. It's safer for them and it's safer for the community.




Gary Schneeberger:

That is a good time for the captain to turn on the fasten seat belt sign indicating that we will begin our descent into closing up our conversation. Before we do that, couple things. One, I just want to amplify what you said. My father was a cop as you know. That's the reason you asked me to come out there. I wanted to come out there to honor him. And he died last year at 93. I didn't know much about... He's one of those guys from that era in the '50s and '60s who just didn't talk about those things that happened. I'm his youngest son. I didn't hear any of those stories of things that happened. I know that he went to his grave not telling many people that.

And the great thing about living to be 93 is that you're around a long time. The bad thing is a lot of your friends and all the people that you shared the front lines with have gone, and he had no one he could share those things with. And I could see that he just avoided it, and I think his life was less rich because of it. When I was at the event, what I came away with, one of the things I came away with was that my dad could have used that, even though he did not as far as I know, he'd never talked about he'd ever shot anybody. Some of those small t traumas were truly small t, but I know he went through some things that he did not feel comfortable talking about.

Before I let Warwick ask you the final question, Shelley, however, I would be remiss if I did not give you the chance to let our listeners know where they can learn more about Project Never Broken.




Shelley Klingerman:

Yeah. You can visit projectneverbroken.org or follow us on social on Facebook at Project Never Broken.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, thank you again, Shelley. I mean, probably a lot of questions, but a couple questions occur to me. When you go through a loss like this, it would be normal if anger overwhelmed you. Not that you weren't angry, of course, you were angry. But sometimes anger and bitterness, at least from my perspective, can be like poison. The people that do the evil typically could care less, which is galling about they often don't have remorse. They're just maybe too messed up or evil or what have you. But at least from my perspective, there's a sense of forgiveness. Forgiveness doesn't mean condoning evil, but I often think if you don't forgive, it's like drinking poison.

So I'm assuming that you did, again, not condoning evil, but how did you manage to sort of or did you forgive? If you get kind of what I'm asking, because I'm not saying condoning evil, but how did you manage to avoid anger and bitterness just overwhelming you, so to speak?




Shelley Klingerman:

Oh, I don't know that I can say I've forgiven. I just don't know that I've even come to that. This is still an open case. I mean, the trial starts in federal court in May.




Warwick Fairfax:

Oh my gosh.




Shelley Klingerman:

So I'm not sure I've just even gotten to that yet. I will just say I redirected and I took control of what I could affect and the change that I could affect, and that's how I have moved forward. So I don't have to forget or forgive or anything at this point. I am just not letting you control anything. You are a non-factor, and I am marching forward doing my thing. So I don't know. That's a good question. It's still open, so I don't know how I will be. I don't know. Forgive, to me, is a... I don't know. That's something I'll have to really pray about.




Warwick Fairfax:

It's a tough thing. I mean, certainly what I went through is nothing like what you went through. But yeah, for me, losing a family business, it was more forgiving myself, my own mistakes. Again, it's not even in the same league as what you're going through. It's very different. But just as we finish, there are other people that are listening that are going to go through loss or tragedy, some may be similar, some may be extremely different. What would a word of hope you would offer listeners who've gone through profound tragedy and loss?




Shelley Klingerman:

Again, it's going to be different, but what worked for me was taking control of the situation. Again, it wasn't a situation I wanted to be in, but I was not going to let anything other than my own objective and mission drive my action. So I spend my energy being very intentional about the outcomes that I want, and I just do not have time. And again, I will not let this take more than one life. And I have a family and I did find myself... My family did suffer early on until I was just able... Those waves come further.

But make no mistake, my kids walked in on me just crying and I'm like, I can't do this. If I do this and I'm not here for them, then again, more than one life is lost. And if I go, then how does that affect my kids? And I just was not willing to make that an option. So take control, turn away from whatever that is and do good, affect change, be the change, take action on something you're no longer willing to accept. Again, that phrase that I borrowed from someone else, but it fit for me.




Gary Schneeberger:

And listener, that is a great phrase on which to land the plane - do good. That's been the focus of what Warwick's tried to do with Beyond The Crucible since its start, which Facebook told me through its memories function, this podcast started just over three years ago. So look at that. I had hair when it started. Kidding.

But until the next time we are together, listener. We do know that crucible experiences are painful. We're in this season right now, this series right now where we're talking about loss, which is a crucible experience, truly devastatingly, traumatically with a capital T, to Shelly's point, painful. But as we believe just occurred on this show, there is hope in that there is still gains that can come from loss. Do good. Don't give up hope. Keep moving forward. We'll see you next week.

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

Highlights

Transcript

Warwick Fairfax:

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

Gary Schneeberger:

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

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

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

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

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

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




Nancy Koehn:

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

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

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

Yeah.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

Yeah.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

No. No. You're right.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely. Absolutely.




Nancy Koehn:

That is the potency of great leadership in crucibles.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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




Warwick Fairfax:

Right.




Nancy Koehn:

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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

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

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

It's an 800 mile journey.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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

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

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

Yes.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

It was incredible.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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

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




Nancy Koehn:

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

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

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

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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

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




Nancy Koehn:

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

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

Well said.




Gary Schneeberger:

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

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




Nancy Koehn:

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

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




Gary Schneeberger:

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




Nancy Koehn:

Thank you for that.




Gary Schneeberger:

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

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

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

Highlights

Transcript

Warwick Fairfax:

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




Gary Schneeberger:

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

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Gary Schneeberger:

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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




Warwick Fairfax:

Exactly.




Nancy Koehn:

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




Warwick Fairfax:

Exactly.




Nancy Koehn:

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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

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




Nancy Koehn:

It's unbelievable, isn't it?




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Gary Schneeberger:

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




Nancy Koehn:

Paperback and hardback.




Gary Schneeberger:

That's right.




Nancy Koehn:

Audio and ebook.




Gary Schneeberger:

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




Warwick Fairfax:

Well done.




Gary Schneeberger:

Sorry. Yes.




Nancy Koehn:

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

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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




Gary Schneeberger:

Just a smidge, yeah.




Nancy Koehn:

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely.




Nancy Koehn:

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




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely.




Nancy Koehn:

And it's incredibly important.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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




Gary Schneeberger:

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




Nancy Koehn:

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

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

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




Warwick Fairfax:

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

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

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




Gary Schneeberger:

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

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

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

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

Adversity, Dr. Taryn Marie Stejskal says in this latest edition of our best-of series, is a trip we take. Resilience paves the road we walk to move beyond it. As one of the foremost international experts on building and exercising resilience in business and in life, Stejskal has crafted the Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People through exhaustive research into the subject … and informed by her harrowing experience of being stalked in high school by a man who eventually assaulted another victim.  It’s not the absence of crucibles that determines our future, she tells Warwick, but what we learn from them and how we apply that wisdom.

Highlights

Transcript

Warwick Fairfax:

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




Gary Schneeberger:

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




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

When we recognize that we have a choice, all of sudden we've gone from being disempowered to empowered. And when we have a choice that's power, we always have a choice, even if the choices aren't good, and that choice is in any inflection point, in any trauma we experience, in any grief, in any loss, in any unfair treatment, in any moment where there's a lack of equity or care or empathy, we get to ask ourselves a really fundamental, oversimplified question, which is, am I going to allow this to make me bitter? Or am I going to allow this to make me better?




Gary Schneeberger:

Now there's a question to write down, fold up, stick in your pocket and pull out to ask yourself the next time you get the wind knocked out of you or worse by a crucible experience. Hi, I'm Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show and the communications director for Crucible Leadership. The woman posing that question is Dr. Taryn Marie Skejskal, one of the foremost international experts on resilience, in both leadership and in life. On today's episode, she discusses with Warwick, her voluminous research and her personal experience with a stalker while in high school that led her to identify the five practices of particularly resilient people. She unpacks each one and concludes that while adversity is a trip all of us will take in our lives, resilience paves the road that allows us to move beyond those difficult moments.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, Taryn, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Just love this whole subject of resilience. I think we mentioned off air, I'm an executive coach and heard you on WBECS, which is a great forum for coaches and really thousands of people around the world, so it's an awesome community. Resilience is something certainly I can relate to in Crucible Leadership. We talk about a lot, but you've done a lot, whether it's working with folks in Hollywood, the former executive leadership development head at Nike, and you've done work at Cigna. And now with the Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People, it's an amazing story. But I'd like to get a bit behind the scenes in what led you to have such a passion for resilience, something about your background growing up? There's always a story behind the story. So what led you on this journey to this passion for resilience?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Yeah, it's a great question, actually. And there's a quote that says something to the effect of, I can't remember who said it, maybe the two of you know and you can help me, but it's this idea that our lives are lived forward, but understood backward. And so oftentimes when I think about resilience, it wasn't until many years later that I understood that a particular experience or moment led me to resilience, until I was able to many years later sort of look back and connect the dots. Because so often our lives, I think look like maybe a jumble of dots and it's not until we look back that we can draw that line through and see a clearer pathway. What I will say is that I don't think resilience is for the faint of heart.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

There's some kind of internal medal. There's some desire to really show up for challenges in life and to figure out how do we continue to do that better over time. And I'm also a believer that so often concepts and ideas, it's not so much that we come up with them, but that the concept or the idea finds us. So if I share that in a little bit of a different way, I think resilience found me through a number of experiences that I had in my life. And the first time that resilience tapped me on the shoulder, I was probably 14 years old. And without knowing it, there was a morning before school where I was getting dressed and there was a man outside of my window. And when I went over closer to the window, it was dark in the morning to turn off my stereo. For those of you that are of the Millennial or Gen Z, a stereo is something that played music before your cell phone.




Gary Schneeberger:

It was your iPod before your iPod.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

It was my iPod before my iPod. Sometimes people used to carry them around on their shoulders, a very heavy iPod. So see me later. And I'll tell you about phone booths and butter churns too, and other obsolete devices. So when I looked at the bottom of my window, it was on the ground floor. There's this face at the bottom of my window. And as the light went down, this person's face, this man's face and he stood up. And so he's standing just outside my window outside and I'm standing on the inside.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

In my 14 year old mind, I'm trying to figure out what the heck is going on. And what we do in those moments is we scan very quickly through all of our prior experiences to say, what else have I seen that might look like this to help me understand what's happening? And the only experience that I had had to that point at 14, that was even close to that was one time my dad came home from a business trip and he was outside the window and he was playing a trick on us or something like that, knocking on the window, trying to scare us.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

And so that's what I pulled out my mind in that moment within a fraction of a second or a second. And I said, "Dad?" And he said, "Take off your clothes. You're beautiful." And I thought, not dad. And so I went and called from my parents and they heard someone running down the street when they went out on their upstairs deck. And for us, we thought that was maybe just going to be the end of the story. We called the police. We made a police report. And I remember the woman that came to our home said, "You know what, there's nothing to worry about here. It's probably just someone passing through the neighborhood, probably just a fluke."




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

And then eight months later, my parents were out of town, I always kept that window closed. And then the window in the back of the house, I think we didn't have air conditioning at the time. So the window in the back of the house was open for ventilation. And I'd gotten this new bikini from The Gap and I had taken off the bikini and I was completely naked. And I heard that voice again that was etched in my memory. I didn't know he was there until he spoke. And he said, "I've been waiting a long time for this."




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

And for me, as a 15-year-old, there were three inconvenient truths there. One, I was naked in front of a man for the first time. Two, my childhood bedroom, that should have been one of the safest places for me as a young girl growing up, became profoundly unsafe. And three, this wasn't a fluke as we had hoped or as we had believed and what this journey led to was him coming back several times over the course of my high school career and each time his behavior accelerating or elevating.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

He never got in the house, although the last two times that I'm aware he was there, he did attempt to break into the house. Once when I was home by myself, he was throwing patio furniture up against a sliding glass door that thankfully didn't shatter. And there was a time where I was babysitting at the house behind my house. And I saw the figure of a man in the yard and he was advancing toward the house. And someone started ringing the doorbell. And when we went to the doorbell to the door, no one was there. And then there was a little girl who was a friend and her father came to pick her up. And I said, oh, were you at the other, were you at the other door, ringing the doorbell? And he said, no, I just got here.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

So what happened, short story long or long story short, depending on how you want to think about that, is two things. One, I went away to college and his behavior, I think, continued to accelerate or continue to downgrade. And he ended up attacking and brutally raping a woman in my neighborhood and went to prison for 20 years. And I realized by the time that I was in my mid-twenties, when I was getting a master's in marriage and family therapy, we were going through the DSM, the diagnostic statistical manual, where you learn how to diagnose psychological or psychiatric diagnoses. And I was like, "Huh. I actually meet all of the criteria for post traumatic stress disorder." And I didn't realize that.




Warwick Fairfax:

And as you look back on that, you probably thought, well, I guess they were wrong. This wasn't a one off thing. This lasted months, sounded like it lasted years.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

It lasted years.




Warwick Fairfax:

And you probably, did you have one thought, was why me? But then you think as bad as it was for me, I could have been my neighbor. That must have been a weird ... Part of you was maybe grateful, part of you was horrified. I imagine there was a whole sea of emotions. That must have been a hard thing to deal with. And then now clinically understanding what you are reading, how did you process all that of anger and you don't often think of anger and gratitude in the same moment. I'm angry, but I feel bad for my neighbor. I know it's awful to say this. I'm just so glad that wasn't me. It sounds awful to say that, but you have to be thinking that, right?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

That's just the nature, Warwick, I think, of survivor's guilt, is that tension, that paradox, that exists of both gratitude and sadness, a deep empathy for if you're crossing the street and the car swerves and it hits the person next to you, you're like, "Oh my God, thank goodness I wasn't hit." And "oh my gosh, I feel terrible that this other person was." And that paradox of I'm safe, but this other person wasn't, this didn't happen to me, but it could have. Navigating paradox in the human mind is not something that comes naturally to us.




Warwick Fairfax:

It needs a lot of, I guess, training and processing. So it's easy maybe for listeners to hear, oh, we can understand why Taryn's mission of life is about resilience, given what you've gone through. Is it that simple? Do you look back and say, if this hadn't happened, what would've happened to my life, maybe I would've done something totally different than resilience and all the work you've done on there. Do you ever think to yourself, what would Taryn be without that episode? What would you have done?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Right. Well, I think that's one of the principles of how I think about resilience, because the definition of resilience after a decade and a half of research, is simple and powerful. It's the idea that we allow ourselves to effectively address challenge or the challenge, change, and complexity that is in our path. And when we address that challenge, change, and complexity, we find a way over time to not allow those things to diminish us, but instead to alchemize that trauma, that grief, that loss and to allow ourselves to be enhanced by that experience. And so on the one hand, I think it would be very easy for me and for other people that have faced difficulty to be walking around saying, "If I hadn't had this stalker, if I hadn't experienced two decades of PTSD, what could I have become in my life?" And instead I think that the crux of resilience is that when we flip the script and instead of saying why did this happen to me, to ask ourselves instead, why did this happen for me?




Warwick Fairfax:

And that's so profound. That's so empowering. We talk in Crucible Leadership all the time about failures and setbacks. And you have a choice, our language, to either hide under the covers and wallow and say, oh, why did this happen to me? Or in the case of failure, it can be, why was I such an idiot? Because sometimes we bring crucibles on ourselves. Sometimes it is our fault. Sometimes it's not. Either way, it's pretty difficult.




Warwick Fairfax:

But you have a choice, but you made a choice. I'm not going to be a victim for my whole life. This was terrible, but I refuse to just cower and wile away the next 40, 50, 60 years of my life until it ends. But you made that choice. Not everybody makes that choice. As you study this more than I do, what led you to make that choice to refuse to be a victim, refuse to just sit back and just let life fade away.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Yeah. Well we're only given and I'll quote another person whom I can't give you the name, but, "We're only given this one wild and precious life." The first thing to understand is that so often we don't believe that we have a choice or people don't believe that they have a choice. So the first step is to recognize that you have a choice. It's not a default to say, well, this horrific thing came to me and therefore my future is circumscribed to be this. We are the authors of our lives. We're the architects of our lives. We have free will for a reason.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

There's also that quote of "Life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we respond." So for whatever reason, I've always understood that I had a choice. I didn't have a choice about the experience, but I do have a choice about how I respond and the type of life that I live in response to that. And living a great life, living a whole life. That's the best revenge. And I use the word revenge loosely, of course, but not allowing ourselves again, going back to the definition of resilience, not allowing ourselves to be diminished by our experiences and instead find a way to alchemize that trauma, that grief, that loss and figure out how we make it beautiful, how we make the testimony. That's redemption.




Gary Schneeberger:

I'm going to jump in because so much of what Crucible Leadership talks about and so much about what you talk about, Taryn, it's as if it was typed on the same typewriter. That's one of those other old machines that kids today don't know much about, but there's a quote, one of the first quotes you have on your website from someone whose name I'm going to mispronounce and I apologize to her in advance, Pema Chödrön.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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




Gary Schneeberger:

She writes, "Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know." And Warwick has said this, "In our lowest moments, we find strength, courage and perseverance we never knew we had." You are talking about, you're both talking one side of the same coin, in that the crucibles that we go through, the trials we go through, those things, if we address them correctly, if we look at them through the right lenses, they're a leaping off point to a better life.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

This is an oversimplification, so bear with me. But when we recognize that we have a choice, all of sudden we've gone from being disempowered to empowered. And when we have a choice that's power, we always have a choice, even if the choices aren't good. And that choice is in any inflection point, in any trauma we experience, in any grief, in any loss, in any unfair treatment, any moment where there's a lack of equity or care or empathy, we get to ask ourselves a really fundamental oversimplified question, which is, am I going to allow this to make me bitter? Or am I going to allow this to make me better?




Warwick Fairfax:

It's funny as I'm listening to you, Taryn, it's hard for me to just stop nodding in violent agreement, if that's a word, just because obviously listeners would know this, but when I read what you've written, I just feel like I've lived your thesis if you will. And everything that you are saying makes sense. Again, my experience was obviously radically different, but again, as listeners would know, I grew up in a very large family media business, 150 years old, had the Australian equivalent to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, TV, radio, I always say the heir apparent was a massive company. I launched a 2 billion plus takeover for variety of reasons. My dad had died and felt like the company wasn't being run along the ideals of the founder, it wasn't being run well. And whether it was at a good or bad decision, it's a whole question.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Warwick Fairfax:

It was pretty heavy on a lot of levels, but eventually as I clawed my self-esteem back, yeah, there was a choice. Am I going to let this define me? I own it. My whole Crucible Leadership, I talk very openly about my mistakes. I have a book coming out in the fall that goes into pretty exhaustive detail about my stupidity and naive assumptions. And then explain how those can help others don't do some of the things I did. But as you're saying, as I started to claw my way back, find things I could do without screwing up and find things that I was gifted at, all the things you talk about, resilience is making a choice. It's all true. It's not like there's no pain. It's unrealistic to say, oh, there's no scar or no scab, but I can talk about it now in a way that's vastly less painful.




Warwick Fairfax:

I don't know whether that's true for you. Obviously you talk openly about what you went through, but I'm sure there's some pain, but it's probably a lot easier to talk about than it was. Because you are using your pain for a purpose. I know that's an off used aphorism, but it's true. It all makes sense to me, obviously. Very different background, very different stories. But it's funny, we have a lot of people on the podcast that talk about crucibles and we've interviewed people like Navy Seals that have been paralyzed and I'll often apologize because I didn't go through anything like what you've been through or some of the people we've had victims of abuse and all sorts of things. And they all say this. They say, it's not like a competition of crucibles. Your pain is just as real to you as anybody else. And these are people who have gone through things a hundred times worse than I have, but I'm astounded how they can be so generous. Anyway, you get the idea.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Well I'd say two things about that, Warwick, if I may. One is so often we say to people without really thinking about it, when some type of loss or challenge or trauma befalls, as we say to people, well, everything happens for a reason. And anyone who's ever been on the receiving end of that have sat on their hands so that they didn't strangle you, strangle me when they said it. So I appreciate that. Thank you everyone for your grace.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

What we realize is when we say to people, everything happens for a reason, that orients people to look outside of themselves for a reason. Well, why was I disabled? Why did I experience this childhood abuse? Why did I have this stalker? Why did I develop PTSD? You know, no one can answer those why questions except for us. So we can spend our lives, searching to the answer for why, we can spend our lives searching for the reason.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Or we can take back that power just as we do when we recognize that we have a choice and we can say, here's how I'm going to make meaning out of what happened. So what I hear you saying is you're in a place now where you can look on what has happened in the past and say, here's how I make meaning of what happened. And when we look instead internally to make our meaning, when we look instead to answer our own why questions, that's when healing occurs.




Warwick Fairfax:

Do you feel, and maybe this is obvious, but certainly in my own life, as I find I'm using what I went through to help others, there's a healing component, like a healing balm. It doesn't all go away, but there's something very healing when you're using what you've been through to help others. Obviously you have your own experience, but you actually, unlike me, you've done a lot of research on this. Does that make sense, there is a healing component to using what you've been through to help others?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Absolutely. I'm very hesitant to use the word failure, because I actually believe that very, very, very, very, very few things that we experience in life fall under the umbrella or the actual truth of being a failure or a mistake. So my team used to come to me and say, "Oh my gosh, we've made a mistake." And I'd say, "Well, have you made this mistake before?" And they would say, "Well, no, no we haven't." And I would say, "Well, in that case, it's a lesson." So the first time it's a lesson. The second time, it's a mistake.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

So Warwick, you're not going to take down the family business again. You learned from that, right? And to your point, and I know we're going to talk about the five practices of particularly resilient people, this empirically based model that really helped us understand what are those key behaviors that allow us to capitalize on, to harness our own human resilience in the moments when we face challenge, change and complexity. And one of those elements, the fourth practice is the practice of gratiosity, right? And the practice of gratiosity is twofold. And we'll talk about the other ones. We'll start with number four.




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

The practice of gratiosity is a compilation of two words, gratitude and generosity. And it's the ability to after some time, instead of saying why is this happening to me, to say why is this happening for me, to stop looking for an external reason or to answer that why question and to take on, to empower ourselves, to create our own meaning. And then to look on a challenge, even if we wouldn't have chosen it and to say, I can see the good in that. I didn't want to take down the company. I didn't want to have a cancer diagnosis, and yet I can see the good in what has occurred.




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah. Just to give an obvious example, for me, I love that notion of gratiosity. I'm basically a reserved, maybe a bit shy kind of person, that's reflective advisor. I'm not a Rupert Murdoch take no prisoners executive. That is just not me. I'm not this larger than life bomb-throwing individual. I'm more nuanced. So I was trapped in a role that I was not designed for, but out of a sense of duty and family history, I felt like loyalty is a big deal for me. I had to do this. Well, once that was over and I recovered from the experience, which took me a lot of the '90s. It's like, well, I can be whoever I want to be.




Warwick Fairfax:

So now with my writing and podcasts and executive coaching, being on two nonprofit boards, I found I actually am good at being a reflective advisor at listening. Well, I wouldn't have had that opportunity trapped in a family business. That's my gratiosity, if you will. It's very obvious to me. What can I be thankful for? Well, I was trapped in this gilded cocoon, if you will. Plenty of money, but I was trapped, living the life of somebody five generations before. Does that make sense? It's empowering to have that attitude of gratiosity for what you've been through. At least it's obvious for me anyway, in my case. But does that make sense?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Yeah, it absolutely does. I love just hearing the real time application of here's the practice and you're like, here's how that shows up for me. And then it's just what you said, because the second part is that the osity, the generosity is the ability to share those lessons, not mistakes, not failures, but to share those lessons with others as you are doing so that others may learn those lessons through you vicariously.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

What I'll just say to close out this dialogue, what you shared, Warwick, is a really wonderful example of this idea that your story doesn't have to become your narrative, which I want to touch on for a moment.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Gary Schneeberger:

I love watching this after all these podcasts, I love watching this because it's like, you're getting executive coached right here, Warwick. I love it.




Warwick Fairfax:

Maybe you'll think of something, Taryn, that I disagree with, but it's been tough so far. I've been wholeheartedly agreeing with everything, but keep going.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Well, I love it. The same wavelength, it's a lot of fun. And one of the things that I share in the context of my work is this idea that our story is what happened to us. It's the thin description of our life. My mother left me when I was a child. People didn't show up for me. We never had enough food. So there's a sense of feeling financially or with regard to food, feeling insecure. Those are stories. Those are things that happened.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

What I've realized over time is that the danger isn't so much in what happens to us. It's how we incorporate those experiences into our narrative. And our narrative is our identity. Our narrative is our self worth. So I could have said, I had this stalker, I developed PTSD, and therefore the value that I believe I can bring to the world has been diminished, because I've translated my story into becoming a narrative about my identity and who I am. And so what I love about what you're saying is that we differentiate between our story, what happened to us, and then what we tell ourselves about what that means in terms of our identity.




Warwick Fairfax:

Because what it can mean is whether it was your fault or not your fault, you can say, well, because of what happened, therefore I have no value and I have no worth, which it's hard for me to understand. Now failure is one thing. I get why somebody could think that, but when it's not your fault at all, somehow, and you've researched this, which I have and somehow, no matter whether it's your fault or not your fault, it can lead to a tremendous sense of lack of self worth, lack of self respect, which how do you achieve anything? How do you do anything? So it's just so sad, but by being able to switch that narrative story, Gary, one of the things you end every podcast with is why don't you just tell Taryn in terms of the story, crucible's not the end of your story. So just share that because it's unbelievable. It's just exactly what you're talking about, but share that, Gary.




Gary Schneeberger:

What we try to encourage listeners with at the end of every episode is that they're crucibles, those trials, tragedies, traumas, those things that have gone wrong, failure and setback. They aren't the end of their story. In fact, we say they can be the beginning of a new story, a better story if you learn the lessons of them, as you've talked about, Taryn. If you learn the lessons of those things, it can be a better story because where it takes you, as you've learned those lessons, is to a new life, which at Crucible Leadership, we define as a life of significance.




Warwick Fairfax:

And that basically it means a life on purpose dedicated to serving others. Whatever that means for you. Everybody's life of significance will be different. As you hear that, it's like, that's in part what you're talking about, about changing the narrative, using the narrative for good. So just as you're saying, it's like, wow. Jaw's dropping again here, so.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Right. Well, and this notion that you bring up, Warwick, you use the word fault, like whose fault is it? Was it my fault? Akin to that is this idea of responsibility. And what I've seen over time and being a marriage and family therapist and having worked with a variety of people that have had neurological injuries, spinal cord injuries, brain injuries, as a result of car accidents and falls, this idea of responsibility or who is at fault or am I at fault or who is at fault? That's a tremendously important inflection point in our healing. It's tremendously important that we get this notion of responsibility right. A dear friend of mine and a mentor, Richard Pimentel, who was responsible for the Americans with Disabilities Act, and there's a wonderful movie that was made about him by a dear friend of mine, Steven Sawalich, called The Music Within. Richard Pimentel talks about this idea of responsibility and he helpfully breaks it into two components, response and ability. And in the moment when something happens, what is our ability to respond?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

And when we think about all of these things, like you shared Gary, these crucible moments, the challenge, the change, the complexity, the loss, the grief, the unfairness, really accurately getting to a place where we are assigning responsibility is key. It's key that we don't blame everybody else and not figure out what percentage of that is our own, because when we blame everybody else, it means the control for our healing and our maturation is also outside of ourselves. And conversely, when we take on too much of that responsibility, if you're a victim of being targeted or a stalker you've been raped or abused in some way, and you think that was my fault. We need to look accurately at in fact, what was your ability to respond? And really get that right, as part of the healing process.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Gary Schneeberger:

Yeah. We have four more to go.




Warwick Fairfax:

We have more practice that there isn't one thing I'd be curious about is the whole aspect of forgiveness. Certainly for me, part of it was forgiving myself. I was young, 26, young, naive. I had had no intention to hurt, to cause pain to anybody. And there was thousands of people in the company and all. I mean the company went on, but still part of it is forgiving others. But part of it's forgiving yourself. Is that part of the component of being able to move on from a challenging experience, that whole assigning responsibility. And I've done a lot of that internal work of how much was my fault, which a fair amount, not all, accepting, forgive, but talk about forgiveness and how that relates to the whole responsibility deal.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Yeah. Forgiveness is a tremendously important element. So once we have accurately assigned responsibility and that can take some time and PS, it's always good if we have some skin in the game relative to responsibility, we shouldn't take none of it. And we shouldn't take all of it indeed, but accurately assigning that responsibility, I love that you're talking about forgiveness. Forgiveness, oftentimes for many people, not for everyone, but comes from, you talked about Warwick, being a man of faith. It often comes from having a spiritual or a religious practice. And it is often informed by those experiences. And for me, there's really three important things that we need to understand about forgiveness. The first one is forgiveness is for no one else but ourselves. And so often people say, well, I'm not going to forgive that person. They don't deserve that forgiveness. Maybe they don't. But fortunately it's actually not for them. The forgiveness is for us.




Warwick Fairfax:

That's the scary thing is, we say this too, and I don't claim that everything you say, we say, because we're not that smart, but the notion that why is forgiveness important? Because you are worth it. You're worth it. And they win if you are bitter. For you to get out of that prison of bitterness, you are worth forgiving that other person or yourself, because then the power is removed. So yeah, please continue because I can't help but agree.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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




Warwick Fairfax:

Exactly.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

So when we forgive someone, that's a choice, that's a decision that we make. It's not the same as continuing that relationship, going back to that relationship, continuing to be part of whatever is happening.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Right? Exactly. Exactly.




Warwick Fairfax:

People confuse those two things.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Exactly. So if you're someone who's been in an abusive relationship, you can forgive that person and you don't need to reconcile with them. Forgiveness is not reconciliation. That's two. The third part of forgiveness is oftentimes it takes time and it takes many times for us to say, I forgive you. I forgive myself. Oftentimes we are the hardest people to forgive. Forgiveness of self can be the most difficult forgiveness. And for me coming from a Christian faith background, it says in the Bible, I think one of the disciples or someone said to Jesus, they said, well, how many times do we forgive that person? And Jesus says seven times 77 times.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

That's right.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

It doesn't mean that we reconcile and we allow someone to continue to perpetrate something against us, but seven times 77, that gets us into the four hundreds. And what I've found with the experience with the stalker, or I was in an abusive relationship where I was nearly strangled to death. And I've probably had to say 300 times, not directly to that person, but in my mind, I forgive you. I forgive you. I'm letting this go. I forgive you. So the third part is oftentimes we can be the hardest ones to forgive. And don't be fooled, forgiveness is not once and for all. That resentment, that anger, that lack of forgiveness, it can sneak back in and it can take 400 times until we really let that go.




Warwick Fairfax:

We'll move on here in a millisecond. But this forgiveness is so important. I often think forgiveness is a bit like weeding. So weeds will crop up. And I've unfortunately had a lot of practice at this, both with myself and some other folks, family, advisors. Something will come up and sometimes you have people in our lives who, as soon as you've caught up with the last thing they've done, they do something else. It's like hey, I'm trying to catch up. Can you just give me a moment before you do the next thing that I'm going to be angry about?




Warwick Fairfax:

But when I find these things, these little weeds crop up, I say okay, I'm not going to go there. I nip it in the bud. So it is like weeding, you cannot let it grow and flourish. You've just got to get on it, if that makes sense. So talk a bit about some of the other elements, because it's vulnerability, productive perseverance, connection, and I think the last one, possibility. Talk about why those are all important as we try to be resilient people.




Gary Schneeberger:

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




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Yeah. So the great thing is this is an empirically based model. So when we talk about the five practices of particularly resilient people, it's based on having interviewed hundreds of people and collected thousands of pieces of data, where I asked people to think about a time when they faced a significant challenge and what did they do? What actions did they take in those moments to effectively address that challenge?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

And after coding that variety of data, what that gave birth to or what that gave rise to was The Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People. So first and foremost, to appreciate that this is an evidence based or an empirically based model is really key because there's lots of things out there that are like, oh, the five PS of resilience and productivity and positivity. And I like alliteration as much as the next person, maybe a little more being a writer, maybe you two.




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, indeed.




Gary Schneeberger:

Indeed.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Empirical-based is important. So the first practice that emerged, which is really a foundational practice of resilience is the practice of vulnerability. And I thought when that emerged, as someone who has survived trauma, I spent my whole life trying to be invulnerable. I was over programmed to be invulnerable, to not show emotion, to not respond because of needing to be in those crucible moments with a stalker where I needed to think quickly to keep myself safe.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Yeah. That's the second part. The first part is, so what is vulnerability in the first place, right? I'm glad you asked. So vulnerability is allowing our inside self, our thoughts, feelings, experiences, to the greatest extent possible to match our outside self. In psychology we would call this congruence, that what we're feeling and experiencing, we allow ourself to show that to the world. And I think for the vast majority of us reaching congruence or 100% congruence, our internal life is being lived on the outside. That's a lifelong process. That's a lifelong pursuit of vulnerability.




Warwick Fairfax:

And it's rare because most of us-




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

It's rare. It is rare.




Warwick Fairfax:

Put on a mask. Again, this is probably getting boring for the listeners. That's one of my highest values of trying to make sure who I am on the outside is who I am on the inside. It's an extremely high value of mine and I find, as you share with people, like, I'm blessed. I did my undergrad at Oxford and I did an MBA to Harvard Business School. I was embarrassed to go to Harvard Business School reunion because people would say, well look what you've done. You've failed spectacularly. In business, this is not cool.




Warwick Fairfax:

But you go to these things and people aren't treating you like a leper. A lot of people who had business failures have been in business school and when they treat you like you're a human being, it's like, really? They're not saying unclean like in the Bible, leave the town. It's like, wow, because we have this notion in our head that if people really know how stupid I am or what I've been through that nobody will want to be with us, we'll be like a leper. And when that story is broken, it's another step of healing. Does that make sense?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

It absolutely does. The first thing is you had a business lesson, you didn't have a business failure. If you took down the company twice, then that would be a failure, or a mistake. But you learned from the first time. You're brilliant.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Onward and upward, my friend.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Yeah. Well we're short on time. So I'll just say one more thing about vulnerability, which is precisely what you said, Warwick, which Brené Brown has talked about vulnerability and its role in what she calls living a wholehearted life. Vulnerability also showed up as a foundational practice of resilience. And so I asked myself sort of just that question, which you were alluding to, which is if vulnerability seems to be so important in Brené's work of living a wholehearted life and now being a foundational element of resilience, why aren't we all running around living these fabulously vulnerable lives? What gives?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

It's this idea of the vulnerability bias or exactly the sort of story that we tell ourselves in our heads, which is if people really knew, if people really knew this part of me that's on the inside that I don't want to show on the outside, three things would happen. I call it the three Ls that keep us from, block our vulnerability. People wouldn't like us, they wouldn't love us, and they might leave. And when you threaten people with ostracism, what that's shown is the parts of the brain that are associated with physical pain, light up. And we don't want to experience even the threat or the fear of that physical pain. So better not to be vulnerable and better to stay quiet.




Warwick Fairfax:

Right, because if they reject my mask, that's one thing. If they reject the real me, infinitely worse. So many, if not most, don't want to take that risk. Hence the world we live in, whether it's politicians or Hollywood or wherever, it's a sea of masks. But yeah, so what would you like to talk about just in the closing minutes we have just about some of the other aspects, these wonderful principles of resilience.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Yeah. Well, I'll give you a quick overview of the last three and then if we ever want to talk more about them, we absolutely can. So the second principle, the second practice of particularly resilient people is the practice of productive perseverance. Remember when I told you I liked alliteration. So it's this idea of knowing when to maintain the mission despite challenge. And that's very much aligned with Angela Duckworth's work on grit.




Gary Schneeberger:

Great book.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Great book. And it's more than that, because grit is not synonymous with resilience. Grit is a fractional component of resilience, but it's not the whole story. So knowing when to maintain the mission despite challenge, and recognizing that in the face of a significantly changing environment or a disrupted environment, that we need to pivot and go in a new direction.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

This is very much an art and a science, because if you want to become a Navy Seal or graduate from the Naval Academy, those sort of markers are well defined. And it's good to put your head down and to be gritty in those situations, but in an environment relative to global pandemic COVID-19, where things are shifting and changing, we also must pick our heads up and look at how the environment is shifting and changing so that we can continually evaluate if the path that we're on is the right one, lest we become a Kodak or a Blockbuster or a Blackberry.




Warwick Fairfax:

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




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Connection in the midst of this pandemic is really the new currency. We're all wondering how do we connect with a remote distributed workforce, with our elderly parents, with our grandparents. I held a 70th Zoom birthday party for my mom back in December. And connection's always been important in terms of resilience and it's no less important now. And again, inherent within each of these practices is a paradox and connection seems simple because it's twofold. It's the connection to ourselves. Trusting our gut, knowing our value, listening to the still small voice within, cultivating and listening to our intuition on the one hand, and then on the other hand, cultivating and developing relationships externally with our family and friends and community. And that's all well and good until those two things are at odds.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

So that's connection. We talked about gratiosity, gratitude plus sharing generosity. And the last is the practice of possibility. It's the practice of at its core, being able to prioritize or privilege progress over perfection. And the paradox therein of the practice of possibility is being able to navigate the tension between risk and opportunity. In these moments, in order to be resilient, we must hold both risk and opportunity, hold both danger and possibility and allow both to be true.




Warwick Fairfax:

But there's something about possibility and forward movement that I know in economics, there's this fundamental law of business is you're either growing or you're declining. If your status quo, then you're about to decline. It's one of those ironclad business laws. And I feel like maybe it's true in life too, perhaps, that if you have a possibility outlook of how can I grow, how can I improve? How can I use what I'm going through to help others, as you're looking forward to possibility, then healing can continue. If you start trying to hunker down and not move forward, then I don't know. Do you feel like life's a bit like that too?




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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




Gary Schneeberger:

I've been in the communications business long enough to know that's a good place to land the plane, what you just said. That is a bow atop the package to mix my metaphors. Taryn, I would be totally, totally, completely lacking in my job as the cohost of the show if I did not give you the chance before we go to let our listeners know how they can find out more about you, specifically on this thing called the internet.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

Yes, yes. The internet, the internet.




Gary Schneeberger:

Yes.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

We'll invite you to take a look at the show notes for all the various and nuanced places to catch up with me. Two great places to spend some time, one is on our Instagram page, @drtarynmarie. We've got a wonderful resilience movement happening there and basically daily updates and resilience motivations. So that's really, really fun. And the second part is there's lots of free resources, articles, podcast recordings, those types of things on our website, which is resilience-leadership.com. We'd love to see you there.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well, thank you so much Taryn, for being here. It's so inspiring. Just all of your work on resilience and I am sorry, I just couldn't help but agree with everything you're saying. And I'm just looking at one of your quotes. I think from Robert Ingersoll on connection, we rise by lifting others. It's just so true. Well, some of these things I know that may seem trite, like pain for a purpose, but as we try to understand what happened, yes, look at responsibility, vulnerability, but as we try and use those to help others, there is a healing component.




Warwick Fairfax:

It gives you a reason to get out of bed every morning. How can I use my pain in a forward looking way to help others? And so thank you for the work that you do and all the research and just being vulnerable yourself, because that helps people relate to you. If you are able to share something very personal, it says, well, if Taryn can do that, maybe it's okay if I do that. So the research is critical, but so is showing up as a whole person in every sense of the word whole, if that makes sense. It really does help the research and being vulnerable, the two together is a powerful combination. So thank you so much for everything you do and thanks for being on the podcast and very much appreciate it.




Taryn Marie Skejskal:

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




Gary Schneeberger:

Thank you. Well, that certainly was a different kind of discussion than we've had before. Based again, as we said earlier, on experiential crucibles, but then really deep research about the power of resilience. And if you enjoyed what you heard here on the show today, listener, Warwick and I have a little favor to ask you. And that is that you would just click like on the podcast app on which you're listening, share this with some friends, put it on social media, so that we can get the word out about the show. Because the more people know about the show, the more we can get guests, great guests like Dr. Taryn Marie. And until the next time we're together, we ask you to remember this, which is the motto of Crucible Leadership when you get right down to it. And that is that your crucible experiences are indeed painful. No one is doubting that.




Gary Schneeberger:

The conversation with Dr. Taryn Marie hit on that. It's very real. That pain is legitimate. What you're feeling is legitimate, but what you're feeling is not the end of your story. You can, as discussed on the show today, learn the lessons, learn what is meant to be taught to you through your experiences, apply those lessons to your life. And when you do that, we have discovered that it is by far not the end of your story. It is in fact, the beginning of a new chapter in your story and a new chapter that can be the most fulfilling one yet. Why is that? Because the direction it will take you, as we heard in this conversation today, and as we've heard in previous conversations, the direction it will take you when you learn the lessons of your crucible and apply them, is the most fulfilling direction of your life, because what it leads to in the end is a life of significance.