In times of crisis, such as the times we are now living in with the health concerns surrounding COVID-19, uncertainty about the economy and many people feeling excluded, leadership becomes even more critical. Clear and decisive leadership would seem to be the order of the day. You feel that you need to move now — less talk, more action. But yet when you give the call to act, nothing much seems to happen. Why is that? Why does it seem no one is listening to you – at least not well enough to get what needs to be done accomplished?
The question you should be asking is not why your team is not listening to you, but why are you not listening to your team? Good leaders listen. The price for the commitment of your team, which enables bold, decisive action, is for you to listen.
Here are some tips for listening that enable better leadership, especially in crucible moments:
1. Your team must feel heard.
It is not enough to go through the motions and pretend to listen. Your team must feel you are really listening to them and taking their input on board. They must know you really hear them and are not just paying them “ear service.”
2. Your team must feel that you care.
Your team can feel lack of authenticity a mile away. They have to believe you care not just about their opinions but about who they are. People are whole beings, with hopes and dreams. They do not leave these at home. Again, they need to feel that you care about them.
3. You have to adopt someone’s input into your plans.
While you may not have to accept everyone’s input, on all subjects if month after month and project after project passes, your team makes suggestions and NO ONE has their input included in your organization’s plans, clearly they will feel you are not listening and don’t care about them or their opinions
4. People need to be heard, more than they need their opinions to be accepted.
What this means is that if people feel you genuinely hear them, they are OK if their specific opinion is not included in the final outcome. Again, so long as someone or some people’s input is included over time. People feel a greater need to be heard than to be right.
5. Trust your team.
If you are a good leader, you will have hired a diverse group of people with diverse skills. They will have expertise in their specific areas that you may not have. Combined, they well may have more skills and certainly knowledge than you have. You can’t know everything, and you are not doing their jobs day to day. So a smart leader will probe and ask good questions to ensure sound plans are being enacted, but their bias will be to trust the great team that they have assembled. The bottom line: why wouldn’t you listen to the team of all stars that you have assembled? If you have not built such a team, why is that? Could it be that you are too insecure to surround yourself with bright, able and driven people?
6. Be flexible.
It is great to have a plan and a direction. But circumstances change. The economy could change. The market could change. Or perhaps some members of your team could have a brilliant idea that could alter the trajectory of your plans. Determine your course, but be willing to modify it as you receive input about the one constant you and your team face: change.
7. Be curious.
A curious person is someone who wants to learn. A curious person is humble, because they know that they don’t have all the answers. Great leaders are lifelong learners. They always want to get better, to grow and to learn more. Listening is a key way to do just that.
At the core of leading well is listening. It’s a matter of the heart, a matter of character. Do you really care about your team? Do you really value their opinions? If not, examine yourself. Do you have an overinflated ego? Do you feel you have nothing more to learn from others? Do you feel that you have all the right answers? If that is you, you have a choice. Change! Care more, listen more, let you and your team grow together. Or leave! Let someone else take your place who will lead better.
To accomplish the organization’s goals, to lead well, even to lead decisively, you need a leader of your team who will really listen. The goals of your organization are too important to play around. Either lead well and listen, or get out of the way.
Reflection
Are you really listening to your team’s input, or are you just going through the motions?
How much do you really care about your team and their lives? If you don’t, examine your heart.
What do you need to do today to demonstrate to your team that their opinions matter?
To explore Beyond the Crucible resources, including our free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment, visit beyondthecrucible.com.
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and leave a comment at our YouTube channel and be sure subscribe and tell your friends and family about us.
Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Fewer than 10 percent of those living with Parkinson’s Disease are under 60. Tim Hague is one of them. As a nurse for two decades, he sensed immediately what was wrong when, at age 46, he noticed a tremor in his left toe. His self-diagnosis was soon confirmed, and in the months that followed he pressed deeply into his Christian faith to grasp “Why has God done this to me?” But he refused to wallow in regret or self-doubt, and just three years later he was competing on, and winning, The Amazing Race in his home country of Canada. The platform the show provided led him to see Parkinson’s as winning the lottery, as he began a successful speaking career and launched a nonprofit to put his medical training to use helping others with the disease. In this episode of BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE, he tells host and Crucible Leadership founder Warwick Fairfax that he’s learning every day to live the lessons of his book, Perseverance: The Seven Skills You Need to Survive, Thrive, and Accomplish More Than You Ever Imagined. “I have to believe that there is something good in this for me,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense otherwise.”
To learn more about Tim Hague and his book, PERSEVERANCE, visit www.timsr.ca
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and leave a comment at our YouTube channel. And be sure subscribe and tell your friends and family about us.
👉 Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Transcript
Gary S:
Well, welcome, everyone, to this episode of Beyond the Crucible. I’m Gary Schneeberger, the cohost of the podcast and the communications director for Crucible Leadership, and you have dialed in to, pressed play on, hopefully pressed subscribe to, a podcast that deals with our crucible experiences. Those are things most all of us have been through: painful times, trying times, failures, setbacks, those things that can be so upsetting to the applecart of our lives that it can feel like they changed the trajectory of our lives. And we do indeed talk about them here, and we do indeed go over them here, but not because we want to live there, not because we want to wallow in them. We go over them as a jumping-off point to discuss how to overcome them, how to move beyond them, because it is in moving beyond them that we can chart a course to a life of significance.
Gary S:
Here with me for this episode of the show, as always for every episode of the show, is the architect of Crucible Leadership and the host of the podcast, Warwick Fairfax. Warwick, we’ve got an interesting, and dare I say what will be an inspiring story, I think, for listeners today.
Warwick F:
Absolutely, Gary. Great to be here, and wonderful to have Tim with us.
Tim H:
Thank you, Warwick.
Gary S:
The Tim … That was Tim right there, listener, and Tim is … I’m going to give him the introduction that he deserves. Tim is Tim Hague, who is a retired nurse of more than 20 years, who devotes his time to professional speaking and writing, and is founder of the Parkinson’s wellness center U-Turn Parkinson’s. He’s the author of the best-selling book Perseverance: The Seven Skills You Need to Survive, Thrive, and Accomplish More Than You Ever Imagined. Side note: I’ve read much of the book. It’s worth getting. Get it, listener. We’ll tell you how at the end of this podcast.
Gary S:
He has spoken for TEDx and is sought after across North America for his motivational and inspiring topics, which are living your best and the power of perseverance. After having been diagnosed with young onset Parkinson’s disease at the age of 46, Tim and his son went on to win the first season of the reality television series The Amazing Race Canada. He is an outspoken and effective advocate on behalf of people living with Parkinson’s around the world, and I will tell you at the end of the podcast how to find out more about Tim and his work.
Gary S:
So, Tim, welcome. Warwick, take it away.
Tim H:
Thank you.
Warwick F:
Well, Tim, just awesome to have you, and I know we’ll get into this in a bit, but I love the concept in your book: perseverance, surviving, thriving. You don’t often think of those concepts together, perseverance and thrive. So I’d love to hear more about that in a bit. But tell us a bit about Tim Hague and your story and how that kind of led up to your crucible experience. Yeah. Just tell a bit about yourself, and yeah. That’d be a great place to start.
Tim H:
Sure. Well, thank you again for having me on the show. It’s a pleasure to be with you today, and yeah, my life was an interesting story right from the beginning. We all say we started when we were born as a small child. So was I, but it started off in Iowa with a 20-year-old mom who found herself pregnant by a 30-something-year-old married black man. She ended up being sent to Texas to have me, put me up for adoption. I was adopted by a family from Kansas who not only adopted me, but then adopted five more like me in addition to the three kids that they already had. So that’s a total of nine that I grew up in. Eventually I moved to Canada after making my way through life, and there’s lots of story there that I’ve just skipped over, but made my way to Canada. My wife is from Canada. We met in Bible school back in the day.
Tim H:
In Winnipeg, I grew up. I like to say that I was born in Texas, raised in Kansas, but I grew up in Winnipeg, and there’s a whole long story to that as well. But an important part of that is learning to live in the cold. You mentioned before we got started here today, the brutal weather of winters, and like I said then, I like to say it’s only the strong who live here.
Gary S:
I am with you, brother. I’m in Wisconsin, so I feel your pain and your shivers.
Tim H:
But also the strength. You have the fortitude to live in it.
Gary S:
Indeed.
Tim H:
I like to think that living in Winnipeg has taught me a lot in the terms of persevering. I was being prepared for, if you will, dealing with Parkinson’s, because perseverance is a big part of living with Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s disease is not a quick, get it and you die five years later. This is a lifetime kind of disease. This is a marathon of a disease that requires perseverance, and we can go into more of how I define perseverance as we go here.
Tim H:
But at this point, I’ve been married to my wonderful wife Cheryl for 34 years, have four fantastic children all grown up. My youngest two are twins, and they just turned 22. My oldest son … he’s married, have wonderful daughter-in-law. They have two children, 4 and 17 months, having a great time with them, of course. Then I do travel and speak a fair bit, wrote the book and am executive director of U-Turn Parkinson’s here in Winnipeg.
Tim H:
So that’s the Coles Notes of Tim Hague right now.
Warwick F:
Wow. So I’d love to hear a bit more about just the experience with Parkinson’s. Before we get there, before that happened, I think you were 46. Were you-
Tim H:
Yes.
Warwick F:
… at the time when you got Parkinson’s? Tell us about how was your life? I mean, obviously I have a younger brother and sister who are adopted, and sometimes that works out great. Sometimes it just varies in the family. So how was your life just growing up a bit differently? I mean, many people have been adopted, and then moving from Texas to Kansas. Pre-Parkinson’s, how would you describe your life?
Tim H:
Life was fantastic. My parents came off the farm in Missouri, grade-eight educations, but fundamentally strong Christians, sound foundation of faith that we were raised with, and they made it very clear early on that Christ was the center of life and that that’s what everybody was based on, that we were made in His image, that there was fundamental worth to all of us regardless of what our origins were. And so there was never any question in our minds whatsoever that we were loved. We simply were, and they did everything they could to provide for those nine kids. They put a roof over our head. They put clothes on our back, food in our bellies, got us an education, and while they certainly didn’t maybe have the appreciation for higher education that others might, they did everything they knew to do to prepare us for life and to get us the education and set us out on our own the best that they possibly could.
Warwick F:
It sounds like you had a loving home that they … It’s one thing to kind of preach Christ. It’s another thing to live it and to show kids who you’ve brought into your family that unconditional love and acceptance. But it sounds like they actually did live what they preached, if you will.
Tim H:
I have been in church all my life, and I can give you every reason why you should ever leave the religion, the faith, the church. I’ve seen it all. One of the things that keeps me so grounded to my faith is that my parents lived out what it meant to be adopted as sons of God, that to be brought in from somewhere where you didn’t belong, where you weren’t born, and to be made a son and an heir and to have full rights as if you were born there … They’ve lived that out, and yeah, it has greatly impacted my faith journey to the good.
Warwick F:
Wow. That’s wonderful. I mean, a lot of folks, obviously as you would know, don’t grow up in a loving home with that unconditional love, and that obviously tends to bring lifelong challenges of self-worth and what have you, and that’s a blessing to have that. So it sounds like you made your way to Canada. You became a registered nurse, met your wife in Bible school. It feels like life was pretty good.
Tim H:
Life was…
Warwick F:
Did you feel like, “God, you’ve blessed me. I don’t know where I would have grown up elsewhere, but you’ve put me in a loving home. I have a loving wife, loving kids.” Did you say thank-you-Jesus things? That’s pretty awesome.
Tim H:
Yes.
Warwick F:
I mean, was that kind of your life? I don’t mean to sugarcoat it, but does it feel like that was your life, in a sense?
Tim H:
In large part, yes, because I always had what I needed. We were never rich. We didn’t have vacations every year. We didn’t travel. We didn’t do things. But we had what we needed, and I was always cognizant of that. I was aware of the fact that my experience as an adopted child was so very different from lots. Now, did we face discrimination? Yes. Mom and Dad were white. We were all mixed race and brown of some nature or another. So we had hard times.
Tim H:
I always like to joke that the one father, I was dating his Latino daughter, and I was never the right color brown for him. I was always too black for the white man’s daughter, too white for the black man’s daughter, or vice versa there, and the wrong shade of brown for the Latino man’s daughter. I never quite fit except at home.
Warwick F:
Right. Certainly, I mean, there’s discrimination now. Certainly years ago it probably wasn’t better. So yeah. Growing up in that environment, that’s just, sadly, probably fairly normal is discrimination by the narrow-minded and the unenlightened, if you will.
Tim H:
Absolutely. Our first pastor showed up at home to tell Mom and Dad the mistake they had made in adopting this black baby. So we told him we disagreed with his theology and moved on.
Gary S:
It’s amazing you said just a few minutes ago that the foundation of your faith was strong because of your parents, and to have a person who’s in leadership, quote unquote, in the faith to come and say something like that … That shows how strong the faith that you lived and were taught is, that you were able to dismiss that, I’ll say it, ignorant comment from someone in leadership. That shows the strength of that, and that strength undoubtedly serves you well as you continue to bump into crucibles throughout your life.
Tim H:
Absolutely.
Warwick F:
Yeah. Just on that note, there’s a real sad dichotomy between the unconditional love of your parents and the narrow-mindedness of that pastor who, I guess, not to be judgmental here, but obviously wasn’t attuned to biblical teachings and the teaching of Jesus that we’re all children of God, and so I don’t know. Maybe he missed a couple chapters or something, or a lot of chapters, but sad but true. There’s many people that … That’d be a whole other discussion, how many pastors over the centuries and Civil War have proclaimed Jesus while yet denying Jesus in so many ways, which is, I find, impossible to understand, but that will be another discussion.
Warwick F:
So it sounds like life wasn’t perfect, in this sense. It’s not like you were rolling in money and could go to Disney World every year or anything, but you had a wonderful upbringing, loving wife, found a wonderful home in Winnipeg. So tell us about when Parkinson’s happened. At 46, and you would know much better than I, you don’t expect that at that age. So tell us how that whole episode happened.
Tim H:
Well, the diagnosis came about somewhat unremarkably. I had been a nurse at that point for 18 years, and Dad had Parkinson’s. Now, it wasn’t a big deal for us that he had Parkinson’s at the time, because he died ultimately of complications to heart disease. He had diabetes, and then Parkinson’s came along later and kind of layered into that, and we were always more concerned about the other.
Warwick F:
This is obviously your adoptive father.
Tim H:
Yes. This is my adoptive father.
Warwick F:
Obviously this wasn’t a hereditary deal, obviously, but that’s a coincidence.
Tim H:
Well, interestingly enough, I know my birth mother. I’ve known her for many years, and my maternal grandfather by blood also had Parkinson’s when he died. So it was coming at me on all fronts. But yeah. I had been nursing for 18 years when I noticed a tremor in my left big toe, and I knew at that point that it was either probably MS or Parkinson’s. I had seen lots of both, and I’d self diagnosed in about five minutes, and then went on a number of months to see my doc and see a specialist and be formally diagnosed in February of 2011 at 46 with young onset.
Tim H:
Now, how did I feel about that? I was ticked is how I felt about it. I was not excited by this diagnosis. I knew very well what it would likely mean for me long term, and I simply was not happy. Me and God had to do some business over this one just because it’s a rough diagnosis. So yeah. That’s how it came to be.
Gary S:
You told me, Tim, when we talked earlier that a very, very small percentage … I mean, tell the listeners the percentage of people who are diagnosed with Parkinson’s at that age. It is not common at all.
Tim H:
It’s under 10 percent that are diagnosed with Parkinson’s under the age of 60. Typically, Parkinson’s is an older-person’s disease, and you’re typically diagnosed over 60. When I was diagnosed, I knew no one under 60 who had Parkinson’s, and I spent … It was a fair while before I met anyone my age with Parkinson’s. I call it one of my two lotteries that I’ve won.
Warwick F:
What was the other one?
Tim H:
The other one was The Amazing Race.
Warwick F:
That’s interesting, and we’ll get into this in a moment, but it’s interesting, two lotteries that you have won. Yeah. I know the listeners are going to be thinking, “Okay. Winning Amazing Race … I get how that’s winning a lottery. How is getting Parkinson’s winning a lottery?”
Tim H:
Well, not all lotteries are good, but the second lottery that was good only happened because I won the first lottery. I am convinced that had I not come down with Parkinson’s disease, I never would have made it onto The Amazing Race.
Warwick F:
So before we get there, again, maybe this is obvious. I mean, you were obviously feeling angry, frustrated. Was there like, “Well, God, you’ve blessed me in so many ways. I have a wonderful wife,” … I’m sure you had kids by then. It’s like, “Well, what’s up with this? I know you talk about this grand plan you have. I’m not getting how … How’s this help anybody? What’s the deal?” I mean, I’m assuming you went through that conversation with yourself, God, just friends.
Tim H:
Absolutely. It was extraordinarily frustrating, because here you are, a young man in the prime of life, not even middle-aged yet, and now you’re faced with this chronic, debilitating disease that has no hope to it. There is no hope in Parkinson’s, and to date, there are precious few things that control our symptoms, and there is no cure for it, and we’ve been working on a cure for a long time. Michael J. Fox Foundation has now spent alone over a billion dollars on research for a cure, and we’re really no closer to a cure than when he started.
Tim H:
So yeah. I was frustrated when I was diagnosed, but I had to spend that time with God and walk through what I think most people walk through, that question of, “Is God good? Why has he done this to me? Why has he allowed this to be done to me? What is my relationship going to be with him in light of this?” And I had to come all the way around that and determine, is God a good God? Well, at the end of the day, yes, I believe that God is a good God. I believe that he is God and that I’m not, and so if he is a good God, if he is, and I believe that fundamentally, then I have to believe that there is something good in this for me. It doesn’t make sense otherwise.
Tim H:
The logic doesn’t work, at least for me, to say that if you’re going to believe that he’s a good God and then to turn around and say, “Well, this isn’t. There’s nothing good in this,” and that he means no good in this and it’s just death and destruction and curse, those things don’t fit together. But I do believe he is good. I do believe he has my best interest at heart, and I do believe he will make this life worth something in the end, whether I understand it entirely or not.
Warwick F:
I’d imagine there was some keys to try to … How would I say it? Maybe the word is “accept,” because unlike most people, being a registered nurse, you knew far more than your average person. You knew the life expectancy, the progression of the disease, the statistics. You probably knew much of this before the diagnosis, didn’t have to go on the Internet or read a bunch of books. You probably knew most of what you were being told, and so it’s not like, “Oh, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” or “I’m going to have some false hope or some miracle.” Miracles can happen, but there’s a reason they call them miracles, because it’s kind of rare.
Warwick F:
But it sounds like you did some wrestling with God, and there are, I’m sure, others listening maybe that don’t have Parkinson’s, but they’ve been through tragedy, whether it’s loss of a loved one or abuse. There’s all sorts of things, and they’re probably asking themselves, to the degree they have any faith, “How could a good God allow suffering and pain?” It’s a question I don’t think any of us will fully be able to answer, at least not on this Earth. But you had to do a lot of wrestling to make sense that, well, maybe God can use it somehow.
Warwick F:
So obviously there’s not a whole lot you can do about the physical side, it sounds like, based on your knowledge, which is far more than mine. If that’s not something devoting a whole lot of energy to the physical if you felt like, “Okay. I’m not going to be able to invent a cure here. So I don’t know that investing my energy in that is going to be the best use of my time” … I’m guessing you probably thought that, but yet, how did you go through a sense of, “How can I accept this and somehow use it for good in some fashion?” How did you get to the point where you got beyond not the physical side, but the emotional and spiritual devastation that that diagnosis would have caused?
Tim H:
Well, I haven’t been very successful at it yet, but I’ve always considered myself a bit of an entrepreneur, and so I just came to the conclusion that if this is what God’s given me, if this is what life has dealt me, if this is the road I’m supposed to travel, then there must be something I’m supposed to do with it. So I do what I do and just start a business, and I’m shocked that my wife let me get away with it, but that’s what we did. We started a charity. So as a nurse, my desire is of course to work with people, help people, and so that’s what we did. We channel that energy and any negative and the things that I need to work out through the charity.
Tim H:
Fortunately, Warwick, there is a bit of physical that you can do. One of the best things that you can do beyond the medications that we take is exercise, and so I’ve always exercised a lot. I’ve run one sprint-distance triathlon in my time, only one full marathon. I never liked the long, long distances, but I’ve run lots of half marathons, and so we continue to run and continue to work out, and a lot of our work through the charity is around…
Warwick F:
What is that charity again? What does it do, the charity?
Tim H:
U-Turn Parkinson’s. It is a wellness center for people living with Parkinson’s. Our goal there is to help them physically, help them figure out their day-to-day, what you do with your life now that you have this disease, the intellectual side of wellness, the spiritual, the social, the emotional, and look at that entire sphere of what it means to live well with Parkinson’s.
Gary S:
Now, we’re going to get on, I assume, very quickly to The Amazing Race. Before we do that though, I want listeners to hear what Tim just said. In his previous career, in his career before Parkinson’s, he was a nurse. He was dedicated in his career to helping people. His crucible experience came. He was angry. He was frustrated. He worked through that, and his vision and his path out of beyond the crucible, as this podcast is called, is doing the same sort of thing in a different way, helping people.
Gary S:
To all listeners out there who are on the front end of the crucible and you’re still in the anger and frustration stage, know that, as you work through it, it may very well be what you were doing before the crucible that brought you satisfaction, that brought you significance, you can do perhaps in a different way. And I would guess, Tim, you would say, in no less a rewarding way, by moving on, learning the lessons of your crucible, and finding perseverance and vision to continue to help.
Tim H:
Absolutely. It gives me no end of joy and meaning in life to see that I can take everything that I spent my years on in nursing, my education and all those years at the bedside and in management, and now turn them to a charity that’s still helping people. My life hasn’t … It’s drastically changed, but in a lot of ways it hasn’t. Fundamentally, I’m still doing much of what I ever did, just in a very different capacity, and I’m very grateful for that.
Warwick F:
As you’re helping people, I often find there’s sort of a healing balm, if you will, that as you’re focused on helping others it gives meaning to life, and maybe it doesn’t make the pain less, the physical pain, but maybe the emotional and the spiritual. Maybe it lessens it a bit or … Do you know what I mean? There’s a spiritual, emotional healing component when you’re using your pain to help others. Does that make sense?
Tim H:
Absolutely, because it goes back to that question of, “Is God a good God?” In the midst of this diagnosis, you could say, “Well, this is miserable.” Well, it is. There has never been a day gone by that I have not wished that I didn’t have Parkinson’s, but in the midst of this, you can see the purpose, the reasoning, the continuation of the life, the continuation of the journey, that everything that I’ve been taught and learned and experienced through life was building me to this moment, and it allows me to now walk this part of my journey with as much confidence as I did prior to Parkinson’s, and in some ways more.
Warwick F:
That’s one of the fascinating things, I think, about a crucible is … You, I’m sure, as … Well, nurses around the globe right now with coronavirus, are in the front lines in a very dangerous environment, as you would know better than I would, but they do such wonderful work. But it’s another thing to come alongside somebody, saying, “I know what it is to have suffering. I know what it is every day to physically have challenges. I’m not sitting here above you as some clinician. I’m with you in this.”
Warwick F:
So when you say to somebody, whether they have Parkinson’s or maybe other diseases or other challenges, they can’t say to you, “Well, Tim, you don’t know what it’s like.” You can say, “Well, I do. Trust me. I do,” especially for Parkinson’s, but even with MS or other diseases or challenges. You don’t have the same symptoms as other diseases or abuse survivors or whatever, but you know what it is to suffer and every day to have to get up in challenging circumstances, and that gives you a platform that you didn’t want, didn’t ask for, but a platform you didn’t have before. Does that make sense?
Tim H:
Yeah. Absolutely it makes sense. So the question then becomes for me is, how will I then respond? I meet lots of people who struggle with that point. They get everything I’ve said up to this point, but now they have to decide, “Will I choose to walk forward in this? Or will I continue to fight it?” and I choose to walk forward in it, because I see a lot of added misery in trying to fight it. There are lots of people who pour their heart and soul into a cure. They just want to be cured. They just want it to be fixed. They want it to go away, and there’s very little hope in that, whereas there’s lots of hope that can be given, can be gained by accepting, learning contentment, learning perseverance, and being able to walk forward, trusting in a good God who says he’s got our back. I know some people will balk at that statement right there and say, “Well, that’s just a crutch,” and I’ll say, “Amen, brother. What’s yours?”
Tim H:
We’ve all chosen to believe in something. We have all chosen to believe in something.
Warwick F:
Exactly, and I do want to get to The Amazing Race, but what you’re saying is so profound. I want listeners to really understand that accepting things, whether it’s a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, MS … It could be a business failure. It could be losing a loved one, losing a child. We had somebody on the podcast a while ago that lost his 19-year-old son to a stroke out of nowhere. It’s like, how does that happen? Perfectly healthy one day, but it can happen.
Warwick F:
So there are some things you can’t change. Death is not something that we can change. You may not like it, but what’s the alternative to acceptance? To me, it’s almost madness or despondency. So I think, for many people who have gone through crucibles, the first step to moving on is acceptance, and the alternative to acceptance is so much worse.
Tim H:
It is.
Warwick F:
Don’t you think?
Tim H:
I agree, and of recent, it’s comes to light more and more in the Parkinson’s community that it’s very likely that a lot of our Parkinson’s is being caused by environmental pesticides, chemicals, stuff that we have done to ourselves. So again, I have to come back to this idea of blaming God, this idea that it’s somehow God’s fault. Is it God’s fault that we’ve poured all this crap into our environment? If that’s what’s given me Parkinson’s, that’s probably not God’s fault.
Warwick F:
So just talk about The Amazing Race and kind of what you’re doing, because it sounds like The Amazing Race Canada was a pivotal moment that launched you into what you’re doing now in your work on perseverance and thriving, not just surviving. So talk about how that was really a pivotal moment in your journey back.
Tim H:
Well, it’s what provided us the … It launched us into the charity and into the speaking and gave us this platform. It was my wife’s idea. She was always a bit of a fanatic of the American show, always said we were going to apply if it came to Canada, and true to her word, when it did, we did. Only, we didn’t, because we discovered that we had to be gone for several weeks, an extended period of time, away from family, completely cut off. So she decided that it would be best for Tim Jr. and I to apply, for multiple reasons, but one being that she said they would love my Parkinson’s. She said they’ve done all kinds of other things, but they’ve never had anyone on the show with Parkinson’s, and the short story is she was right. They did love the story, and that’s what got us on the race.
Tim H:
The race was that classic underdog story. I like to call it that Cinderella story, that come-from-behind win that nobody expected, because, Warwick, we sucked. Day in and day out, we struggled. Whether it was just getting lost over and over again or my Parkinson’s, we were not the bright, shining stars that you would anticipate winning The Amazing Race. We came in last twice, hit both of what they call a non-elimination leg where you should be sent home but they save you, managed to survive those, managed to survive the entire thing, made it to the end, and only because of the advice of my wife did we actually win.
Tim H:
She had told us right before we ever left … She said, “Tim, pay attention. There’s going to be something you need along the course of the race that you’re going to have to repeat or need for something at the end,” and right at the beginning, we noticed these flags and flowers that kept showing up. We memorized them, and the very last task of the race was needing to put the provincial or territorial flag and flower on a giant map, and I was the only guy that finished it of the three teams. The other two teams never finished it. I did it in two tries in about 10 minutes.
Warwick F:
That’s challenging. Now, how many provinces are there in Canada?
Tim H:
There are seven provinces, three territories.
Warwick F:
You had to know all of the provinces and territories and flags and flowers? That’s tough. I know Americans might say, “Well, hey. There’s 50 states.” Actually, there’s more provinces than there are states in Australia. I think we have five, from memory. Still, who memorizes state flowers and stuff like … Well, provincial flowers in your case.
Tim H:
Nobody.
Warwick F:
So that’s amazing. So you were the only team that did it?
Tim H:
Mm-hmm.
Warwick F:
What was it like having you and your son kind of around The Amazing Race? I mean, that must have been an incredible experience. I mean, he was probably doing his best to help his dad, and you’ve got probably more years and hopefully some more wisdom, and so between the two of you, you probably made a great team.
Tim H:
I like to think we did more or less. Again, we struggled a lot, but it was fantastic running the race with him. I mean, there were a couple of times that he simply saved our hide. I needed the strength of a young man. That got us through it, and that was huge, and so we had a great, great time running the race together. It was unbelievable.
Warwick F:
When you look at it, you can’t help but think there was the hand of providence there, because having watched The Amazing Race a bit before, the odds of you coming last twice and two non-elimination rounds is probably really, really remote.
Tim H:
Yes.
Warwick F:
So the odds were stacked against you, but somehow there was a hand at work perhaps that said, “You know what? Tim Sr. and Jr. … They’re going to win this thing,” even though it didn’t look likely. That’s an amazing story in itself, right?
Tim H:
Well, it is, and this is what I try to wrap perseverance around is that perseverance is something that can be learned. It’s practical and tangible, and that this story of The Amazing Race is such a classic example of perseverance. I’ve said so many times, we could have given up. We could have stopped. We could have chucked in the towel. Nobody would have ever said, “But, guys, you were so close. You were doing so well,” because we weren’t. We simply were not, and yet we chose to persevere. We chose to stay in the race. We chose to stay in our lane that we had been called to, and in doing so, we won.
Tim H:
Now, people say, “Well, yeah, but I’m not going to go win a reality television show and win a bunch of prizes and money and whatnot.” Well, maybe not. Maybe you’re going to win something far more important. Maybe you’re going to win your kid or your spouse or the job or the … Who knows what? But it’s about not just rolling over with the diagnosis, not just rolling over with the event, no matter how bad it is, but having faith that this has entered your life for a purpose and that you’ve been given and will be given all that you need to walk this journey if you will just stay on the journey.
Warwick F:
I think what Tim is saying here is so profound. I really want listeners to hear that, because we talk about this in Beyond the Crucible quite a lot. Sometimes you’ve gone through a tragedy. In my case, it was totally different. It was, you might have heard, losing a 150-year-old family media business in Australia founded by a person of very strong faith, and as a believer myself, that alone felt like, “Yep. God had a plan, and I blew God’s plan,” which is poor theology, but in my early 30s that’s what I thought.
Warwick F:
So not at all physical. I’m not at all comparing. No tragedy is comparable to another. Whether it’s that or physical or financial or losing a loved one, you can say, “Okay. This is awful. I’m going to be angry. I’m going to hide under the covers, and for the rest of my life, whether it’s five years or 50, I’m going to be bitter, angry and never leave the home.” That is a choice, but to me, that’s not really a particularly productive choice. You could have made that choice, but you chose not to and said, “Okay. This is awful. I never would want that on anybody, but how can I use it? It sounds a bit trite, but, “My pain for a purpose” and you have to inspire others.
Warwick F:
So talk a bit more about this message of forgiveness. I know there’s a number of messages, excuse me. Perseverance. That will be a whole other book. Maybe that’s a second or third book, forgiving what the world puts at you, but talk about some of the steps in perseverance and how you try to help others with Parkinson’s, but even beyond that, just people who’ve gone through tragedy. What are some of those steps to perseverance and wholeness and wellness?
Tim H:
Well, one of the first things for me is to be honest and say that very few days are easy. Most days are hard. When you wake up with this disease and it impacts you right from the get-go, most every day is hard, but therein lies the part of the emotional side and the intellectual side. Who ever promised that life was going to be easy? Nobody promised me that. I mean, the fact remains that I have been given so many things all my life, as we talked about. I have been blessed.
Tim H:
I was not born in the slums of India or Nepal or Nicaragua and many of the other places I’ve had the opportunity to visit around the world. I was born in North America, which set me ahead of 90 percent of the world from the get-go. A nursing career, a family, everything that I’ve been given, and now to think that because I’ve been given Parkinson’s that this somehow changes everything? It doesn’t. Parkinson’s gave me The Amazing Race. It added blessing to my life. Where I’ve been given so much, it’s added more.
Tim H:
So one of the skills I talk about in the book is let go of the happiness myth, letting go of this idea that I’m supposed to be happy all the time, that nothing’s ever supposed to impact my world in a negative way, because that’s just not accurate. It’s not the truth. Understanding the nature of luck. I had a boss who always said to me, “Tim, 80 percent of success is just showing up every day. The rest is probably going to take care of itself,” and I find it amazing, like on the Race, every day that I just show up, how lucky I get, and I’m using that tongue-in-cheek very much, but the more I just show up and do what I feel I’m supposed to do, the luckier I get.
Tim H:
I accept limits. I accept the fact now, I didn’t always, that my doctors were right, but I had to choose. I was always that guy who could do everything. I could be juggling 12 balls and look at the other four coming at me and integrate them in and keep going. I could just always handle lots. I can’t handle lots anymore. Parkinson’s has taken my nursing career away from me. I have to be very careful of how many things I take on in a given day, because I do nap every single day probably at least an hour, because I have to. My body won’t work otherwise. So I’ve had to come to terms with and accept the limitations that this disease has placed on me.
Tim H:
Then the other skills I’ll leave for the book, but there are seven things that I’ve listed there that I’ve learned and am learning that perseverance can be learned. It’s practical, positives steps that we can take to genuinely influence our lives to the good.
Warwick F:
There’s so many profound things you’ve said. One of the things that I’m thinking about a lot as you’re speaking is accept limits. Now, your limitations are clear with Parkinson’s. I mean, those who understand it, and you understand it very well, would know there are specific limitations. Those who are paraplegic, quadriplegics … They have very defined limits. But even those who might feel like they don’t have physical limitations … We have limits, whether it’s geographical, where you were born, maybe background, race. There’s all sorts of things. Maybe that’s not a good example of limit, but that will have-
Tim H:
But they impact our-
Warwick F:
… certain consequences that they will impact you even if it’s because of other people’s bigotry or narrow-mindedness. But even things like talents. Some people are very athletic, and others are not. They might be more artists and painters, and maybe their buddies in high school were standout basketball players. You know what? I have two left feet. I could train my heart out, but if we’re both training equally as hard, my buddy will always win because he’s naturally gifted. That’s a limitation. It doesn’t mean you can’t try to play basketball, but your odds of being in the NBA is zero, pretty much.
Tim H:
As good as naught.
Warwick F:
Yeah. I think it’s a myth. We all have limitations, and often we want what we don’t have. I’m somebody that did well in school, I’m not terrible athletically, but I’m not particularly tremendous, so I’m never going to be as good as my buddy or whatever. Limits is not a bad thing. Just use the areas that you … This is a bit different than what you have, but what you have gifting in. Accept that you can’t do everything, and try to channel your energies into areas that are more in light of how you’re limited. I don’t know if that makes sense at all, but my point is it’s not just for people who have Parkinson’s, this concept of accept your limits. Is that a fair statement?
Tim H:
Absolutely, and it’s reminiscent of a book I’m reading right now called The Hope Quotient by Ray Johnston, where he talks about finding what you’re gifted in, finding what you’re good at, and that’s the flip of accepting limitations. Limitations are the things that I’m not good at or can’t do, but find what you do love, what you are good at, and focus on those things, and take that and run. And that’s what I’ve tried to do with my nursing is find ways of taking what I know, what I do, and integrating it into this life that I now lead.
Warwick F:
So as we kind of begin to wind up here, just talk a bit about how you’ve used the concepts of perseverance in the nonprofit you run, and talk about how you’ve integrated that to really try to help people. How do you do that?
Tim H:
It’s something that we in large part try to live for the people that we’re around every day. A lot of the folks I interact with on a day-to-day basis are seniors. They’re older, 65 plus for sure, a lot of 70 plus. So not only is life in its, if you dare call it, golden years, but their young years are gone. And they’re into the latter part of life, but to nonetheless live out that things don’t have to be as bad as they seem, that we can still find hope, that we still can find joy. We can still be excited to get up every day and to exist as we are. I look like this. I didn’t anticipate looking like this or feeling like this or being like this, but that I can find hope and joy and a way forward regardless. And then we talk a lot about all of these skills and things as we go.
Warwick F:
These are primarily people with Parkinson’s?
Tim H:
Yes.
Warwick F:
Obviously most of them would be older, and do you find as you’re talking to people in, as you say, their golden years about some of the principles of perseverance in your own life experience … Do you find that you can see glimmers of hope …
Tim H:
Oh, yeah.
Warwick F:
… in their eyes, and maybe they feel like, “OK. Maybe I can be productive. Maybe I have some wisdom to offer friends, kids, grandkids”?
Tim H:
We’ll call this guy Charlie. Charlie sat around at home for probably years after his diagnosis. The first day he showed up at the center, scraggly beard, hair all over the place, exceptionally overweight, could barely understand him. His voice was very affected by Parkinson’s, had a hard time walking, moving. He talks better. He walks better. He has lost weight. He has a smile on his face again. His wife has thanked us profusely for everything that this has done for their marriage, their relationship, for him, and just the fact that we’ve been able to get him off the couch exercising a little bit and giving him a community, and that, Warwick, is what ramps me up every day.
Warwick F:
So it sounds like that’s a good test case, because it sounds like there were things you did physically and in terms of wellness that also emotionally and spiritually … When you combine all those factors, the health, wellness, emotional, spiritual, there’s not just changes in demeanor. There’s even somewhat increased … I don’t know. Not mobility, but-
Tim H:
Yeah increased mobility.
Warwick F:
… increased functionality, in some sense, that doesn’t cure things, but it makes a little bit of difference physically in well being, but certainly probably a lot of difference emotionally and spiritually, and that person probably had very little hope and how has hope and actually has life, in some sense. So that must be so rewarding.
Tim H:
It is so rewarding. It is thrilling, and we have literally watched him come back. It’s just been absolutely amazing. So therein is my hope.
Warwick F:
To me, that’s a message that I think we can all learn from, in the midst of our crucible: there is hope. Sometimes you can change your circumstances. Very often you can’t. There are lifelong, typically unalterable changes to your life. It doesn’t mean you have to like it, but OK. As you said, you choose to accept the limitations that there are, and so now what? You choose to let go of anger and either forgive other people. Sometimes that crucible is because of what things are done to us, or not be angry at the universe or God, because what good would that do? It doesn’t really help you.
Warwick F:
Anger never helps you. It’s not productive no matter how understandable it is, and then channel it in a way that helps other people, which you’ve really … I mean, you’re sort of a role model, if you will, of how you deal with crucibles in a productive manner and live life and have hope. And you’ve given a lot of other people life and hope, many you know, many you probably don’t know. They’ve heard your story, read your book, listened to your talks, and that’s leaving a legacy that your kids and grandkids and beyond can be proud of, right?
Tim H:
Yeah. I certainly hope so, and thank you for that. I certainly hope so.
Gary S:
That is an excellent place to begin the process of what I like to call landing the plane. So we’re not going to touch down yet, but I can see the guys on the runway waving those flashlights. Before we do that, I would be remiss, Tim, if I did not give you the chance to let listeners know how they can learn more about you, get your book. Where can they go to find out more information about you?
Tim H:
Timsr.ca. That’s timsr.ca, and you can see all the work that I’m doing there as well as the book, and I hope you have the opportunity to pick it up, and hope you enjoy it and that it’s encouraging.
Gary S:
Speaking of the book, I wanted to kind of end on something on page … I think it’s on page 222, from what I printed out from the Kindle that I was looking at. You’re talking about this in the context of your Parkinson’s, these two paragraphs I’m going to read. But as I read it, I thought, “This is a recipe for perseverance in the time of COVID-19.” Here’s what you wrote, and listener, pay close attention to this scenario that Tim describes and the emotions and the actions that grow from it. This is what Tim wrote in Perseverance.
Gary S:
“In Malcolm Gladwell’s book David and Goliath, he talks about the people of London during the Luftwaffe bombing in the Second World War. Gladwell describes the incredible transformation that occurred in some who survived the bombings day after day. They came to expect to survive. I love that,” Tim writes. “They took precautions to protect themselves, but they’d go about their daily lives as best they could all the while growing less terrified of the daily bombardment. This is the lesson I try to apply to my life with Parkinson’s,” Tim writes. “Some days it may be terrible, and I can anticipate that it will get worse. It will likely one day be debilitating and may even impact my death. However, today I’m very much alive and well. I’m learning to expect or survive each day and, more than that, to live the best of my ability.”
Gary S:
Obviously that’s about your experience with Parkinson’s, but is that fair to apply that to what we’re … To me, it seems a fair analysis of what we’re going through with COVID right now.
Tim H:
Absolutely. I think it’s fair to apply to all of our struggles. Every struggle, every person will be different, but we have to learn to survive, and in surviving, we suddenly realize, “Oh. I can do this. I survived last week. I survived the week before. I survived yesterday. I think I’ll survive today, and if I’m going to survive today, well, can I do a little better than just survive? What can I actually do to thrive? How can I live my best today? What does my best look like today?”
Gary S:
I have been in the communications business long enough to know that a statement like that is when you drop the plane on the runway. Let me summarize for you, listener, the, I think, three takeaways from our discussion today with Tim Hague. First, it is normal and it is okay to get angry in the aftermath of your crucible, just don’t stay there. Find the strength, the vision, and yes, the perseverance to move beyond the crucible, as this podcast is called. Process your emotions with friends and family. If you’re a person of faith, press into that. Dig deeper and see what the bigger picture might be, even what the blessing in your crucible might be.
Gary S:
Second point I think is a good takeaway from our discussion, in bouncing back, expect to stumble. Sailing will not always be smooth. Your boat will take on water. You’ll hit choppy water. You’ll veer off course, but do not let that encourage you to quit. As Tim’s life proves, even if you think you suck, you can still win the amazing race that is life.
Gary S:
Finally, the third point, which is the title of Tim’s book. The third point is to persevere. Tim talks about it. Warwick talks about it in Crucible Leadership, and perseverance is not a pill you take. It’s a skill you learn. So seek joy knowing that it is eternal, unlike happiness, which is circumstantial. Accept the limits that your crucible has brought, but do not give up. Think differently and find a community. At the beginning of the day to the end of the day, perseverance is not a solo sport. It’s a team sport. It’s a team pursuit, and it’s best done in group.
Gary S:
So listener, thank you for spending time with us today in this very inspiring conversation with the very inspiring Tim Hague. Warwick and I have a little favor to ask you. If you feel like you were blessed, if you learned some things here, if you were inspired, if you found hope, if you found a little healing from anything that we talked about either on this podcast or on previous ones, please click subscribe on the app on which you’re listening to this right now. That does a couple of things. One, it makes sure you will not miss any episodes down the road where we talk to other guests who offer their perspective on what it means to pursue a life of significance, and it will also allow us to continue to attract guests like Tim who have true inspirational stories to tell.
Gary S:
So until next time when we’re all together, thank you again, listener, for spending your time with us, and please do remember, as this conversation has brought out, that crucible experiences are indeed painful. Crucible experiences can indeed, as we talked about here today, make you feel sometimes like you want to just stay in bed with your head under the covers. Tim described a man he helped at his non-profit who lived like that for a while, but that needn’t be your story, and your crucible experience needn’t be the end of your story. In fact, it can be the beginning of a new chapter, a new book in your story, and it can be the most rewarding chapter and book of your story that there is, because at the end of the day, it can lead you to a life of significance.
Ernest Shackleton and the men he was leading on an expedition to cross Antarctica had piled up a breathtaking number of life-threatening crucibles by late 1915. Stuck motionless in polar block ice for months, hundreds of miles off course with no way to communicate their location to anyone who could help, Shackleton and his men were running low on the supplies they had already been forced to ration in miserly fashion when their greatest disaster struck: The ice that had trapped their ship now closed in to crush it, leaving the men fully exposed to the bitter cold with no choice but to traverse the ice floes that surrounded them in desperate search of safety. 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.”
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Transcript
Gary S:
Welcome everybody to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Gary Schneeberger, the cohost 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. 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. We talk about crucible experiences here because we believe in our experience and the experience of our guests has shown us that if we learn the lessons of our crucible experiences.
Gary S:
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. 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 in their teams rise to the challenges in high stakes situations.
Gary S:
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. 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. He wasn’t going to give up on still traversing that area.
Gary S:
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, “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. In January 1915, he set out with his crew to travel across Antarctica, problems started immediately. We talked about those problems last week on Beyond the Crucible.
Gary S:
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. 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?
Gary S:
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. 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? What we’re going to hear now is part two of that episode in which Nancy Koehn answers Warwick’s very specific question.
Nancy K:
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. I don’t have a kind of scientific vector leads to vector leads to vector analysis. Here’s how I’d answer that question and I’m going use a quote from Mr. Lincoln. 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 new, so we must think anew and act anew.” 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.
Nancy K:
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 just got to find my muscles.” It’s in that realization that I’ve got to do it and the next step. It’s all steps. It’s not a giant, something 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 beat Apollo Creed. It’s not like that. It’s the first step. 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. I think that’s what happened with Shackleton. I think he thought as soon as that ship got stuck, “I got a brand new game. What am I key priorities here?” My key priorities for him initially were morale of my men since suddenly everything stopped. Where we’re going is end, over.
Nancy K:
What are we going to do? How do I keep them from doing what the men did on Scott’s expedition under weak leadership, which is kind of collapse inward into disunity. Then the disaster that can happen from that in life or death situations, and then you deal with that. 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?” This constant kind of meeting with the self to say, we’re going to figure this out next and then we’re going to figure this out. 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. 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 F:
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. A crucible really tests the measure of a leader. 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. Talk about some of those key attributes that when things got most difficult, his leadership was just rose to such an amazing level. What were some of those key things that really we can learn so much for today?
Nancy K:
Let me answer that question by telling your listeners just a tiny story. The men decamped from the ship, abandoned ship with some supplies, three lifeboats, and about 120 of the photographer Frank Hurley’s negatives, including some moving film footage in September. They’re making camp on the ice. Shackleton, by the way, puts great attention into who’s going to be with whom in which tent. Then specifically he takes what he calls his doubting Thomases, the folks that are negative, that are like, “Well, I’m not sure how we can do this.” He puts the spreaders of potential psychological and collective contagion in his tent, adding new luster or power to the, keep your friends close and enemies closer.
Nancy K:
That’s really important how you manage and deal with people. The ship goes down. The men are on 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 at dinner by moving around tents. After dinner, moving around tents because we don’t want people getting too alone and too negative and too isolated, all these different aspects of managing morale. 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. Then in the course of about eight hours, the course of a working day that the ship falls with its broken mast and all it’s ropes everywhere through the ice, and then the ice closes over and it’s gone and there’s literally no line on the horizon.
Nancy K:
Now, for a team of Naval men, scientists, soldiers enlisted men officers, this was like the world coming to an end. They are 2000 miles from anybody, they have no Waze or GPS or text messages. There’s no Facebook posts. No one knows where they are. I mean, the men are just, they’re shell shocked. They’re in the worst state they’ve been. They kind of 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. He paces the ice, and later in his diary, all night long and he’ll say, “A man must shape himself to a new mark the minute the old mark goes aground.” What’s he saying? He’s saying, I got to raise the level again. There’s a new mark. We aren’t on the ship anymore, all our bearings are lost. I’ve got to do something different.
Nancy K:
Next morning, this is really important, 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. He says, “Lads, get your tea. Come on here, gather round.” He does a little town hall meeting, and the first thing he says is, “Ship and store is gone, now we’ll go home.” 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 their nickname for Shackleton, “Made us believe we could do it.” Many of them recalled that. The whole world had just dropped away. We were at a new incredibly low point and there he is saying, “Let’s face forward. Ship and store is have gone, so we’re going home.” That kind of ability, second lesson, the leader to show up no matter what he was feeling inside. We know he’s pacing, he was anxious.
Nancy K:
He was uncertain. He 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 the leader, how you show up for yourself actually affects your ability to access your resilience muscles. 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’re going to talk about that. Energy is really important to morale, and morale is really important to action and unity. For example, when men seem to be flagging after dinner, he’d say, “Let’s have a dancing contest on the ice or let’s play the banjo.”
Nancy K:
He insisted when they left the shift that they keep this banjo from when he enlisted men because it was mental medicine. He would try and get the men involved in something that was a kind of recovery, social recovery exercise. 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 spirits starts to fall and he’d order up hot milk for everyone. What he was doing was just like a mother kind of soothing a child by giving them something to drink or soothing a partner. He would never single out the man because he didn’t want that person to be embarrassed. He just had this depth of 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. That’s something else that’s very, very important about his leadership.
Warwick F:
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 have been much more mechanistic than 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 when they were locked in the ice in 1915 was a billion to one. I mean, it would be almost zero. No communication, yet somehow he led them to believe in the virtually impossible, which is remarkable to me.
Nancy K:
Two comments on that, I think important insight, Warwick, first many years ago, I stumbled on this definition of real leadership that I love. It’s in 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 when he was following John McCain around on the campaign bus when McCain was running in 2000, making his first run for the presidency. 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. It describes Shackleton very well. What he was able to do is he kept raising the level of his game without textbooks, without Harvard Business School seminars, the chivalric code of the British Navy for God’s sakes. Empathy was not a word we were teaching people.
Nancy K:
They’d put stripes on their Navy wool coats, right? The fact that he could do these things and keep raising his level of the game, including all lots of improvisation, lots of powerful signaling, because he knew that men take signals from what he did, not just words, not just the actions was he was in a sense helping the men do harder, better things than they could get themselves to do. When the BBC says, “How did you do it?” In the 1930s when they come back and interview all these survivors. They said, “The boss made us believe we can 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. That is the most kind of nurturing or empowering aspect of my research. I have discovered all kinds of people, including Churchill. Let’s not forget late May 1940, who made the impossible possible by learning how in a crucible to raise a level of their game and help others do the same thing. That is the potency of great leadership in crucibles.
Warwick F:
That is such a great connection you make there, Nancy. May, June 1940, France has fallen, most of Europe has gone, America is a year plus away from entering. 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 the whole nation believe we’re going to hang on, which that’s… I mean, how do you do that? It’s millions of people believe, you know what if Winston says, we can survive or you know what we can survive.
Nancy K:
All those RAF base commanders, they’re like, “Okay, we’re sending them all up now.” I remember there’s a story from the summer of 1941 when Churchill goes to visit some bases, he says, “How many Spitfires do we have in reserve?” He says, “None, they’re all up in the air.” The point is that you don’t need to do it with enormous amounts of reserve and slack, you just need to do it. 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 F:
Absolutely. I want to get to how Shackleton was able to get his folks off the ice, but you 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. Managing people with food and drink, I think you mentioned. Just so many tools that he 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. Talk about they’re on this ice flow, floating hundreds of miles off course. He’s looking for an opening in 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 K:
The boat, just to pick up the last skeins of the story. The Endurance goes down in the ice. It’s gone forever in November 1915. The men then pass December, January, February, and almost all of March. In that same berg, seal and penguin meats start to dry up. 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 20, roughly 22 foot each lifeboat open lifeboats and sail Northwest. They have some rough idea from what’s called a sextant, what today we regard as 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.
Nancy K:
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 Paulet Island where Shackleton knows previous expeditions have cached supplies. That’s the goal, and they set off. Then finally the ice breaks up enough. Shackleton wasn’t wanting to go too early, because they only get stuck in ice in those lifeboats really, then they’ve lost their navigational. They’re setting their transport capacity. Eventually the ice breaks up enough, Shackleton gives the go ahead. 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. The first three days, they just basically go round in a circle.
Nancy K:
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 him. It’s terribly cold. Shackleton decides to sail quickly to an Island much farther South than he hoped to reach 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 freshwater. 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. He knows, here we go, lesson number four. You don’t get a straight GPS map to get out of a crisis or a crucible.
Nancy K:
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.” 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. He starts making plans right away to take one of the lifeboats, reinforce it, put a canvas mask on the top of it. It’s an open lifeboat, rowboat basically, put a mast up, canvas deck, excuse me, mast up, sail and put 2000 pounds of rocks in the bottom to give it some kind of haft, some ability to withstand the waves of the South Atlantic. 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. That’s the next two and a half weeks of time and attention. The men are all getting ready to outfit one of the lifeboats. James Caird, it was called just to make this incredible journey across what anyone that sails will tell you or some of the world’s most difficult seas.
Warwick F:
I think you mentioned that’s like an 800 mile journey.
Nancy K:
It’s an 800 mile journey.
Warwick F:
Gale, force winds. I think you’re right. There was some massive wave that was bigger than any wave that Shackleton had seen and he had had some experience in the seas. Somehow they made that 800 mile trip, which in itself, as you write is almost unprecedented. Certainly, it was remarkable that they even made it.
Nancy K:
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 an environmentalist named Tim Jarvis reconstructed the journey with a carefully reconstructed boat, same supplies. They had a big diesel powered steam ship following them for safety and things and they barely made it, right? No one’s really done it as Shackleton did. Even Jarvis and he’s extraordinary seaman and he’s an explorer. 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 it’s so bad. The hurricane is 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 and 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 is all uninhabited and completely unchartered.
Nancy K:
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 Elephant Island while he left to try and get help. Again, managing morale. 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. That was some rope and kind of 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 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.
Nancy K:
They get too high and nightfall’s coming and Shackleton’s worried they’re going to die. It’s so high in altitude and they can’t get down fast enough. Shackleton says, “Let’s just sled down.” They coil up this big rope flat like a rug made of rags and they sledged down into the darkness, not knowing what they’re going to find. They fall more than 2000 feet in 18 seconds. They fall into a snowbank safe, in a much lower altitude, much warmer, and they stand up solemnly and shake hands and carry on. After 36 hours of tredging, 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?” The clerk there at the whaling station, “It’s still going on. The world’s gone mad.”
Nancy K:
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, or some disaster film screenwriter. His next journey, next chapter is try and get a boat that can get back through the waters that they just traversed to get his 20 or 22 men still left on Elephant Island. He spends the next, so that’s May 12th when they 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 is now become pack ice again, and actually get its way all the way-
Warwick F:
It takes him three or four tries. I mean, he-
Nancy K:
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 F:
Talk about the scene, I think you write maybe is it August 1916, where he finally is on the steamer. I think you’re right, the Yelcho from Chilean government loaned him. He’s pulling in and the men see him. Talk about that scene because that’s months after he’s left.
Nancy K:
It’s incredible. Even telling it right now, I take a deep breath because it’s so incredible. He had gone gray with worry 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. 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. They’re 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 really low on food. They spot the ship and all the men pour out from these overturned lifeboats that they’re using a shelters and they built kind of weaseling properties, bivouacked kind of shelters.
Nancy K:
They pour out and Shackleton’s on a steamer with Worsley and Crean, these two men that had accompanied him all the way and he starts counting the men. He gets to 22 and Worsley said he 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.” 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 as dead. 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 kind of 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. It’s like to do all that and then die in a machine gunfire, but that’s what happened.
Warwick F:
As you mentioned, some of them weeks after they got back, it wasn’t very long.
Nancy K:
Yes, yes. It was incredible.
Warwick F:
The last chapter I find really interesting is Shackleton, I guess hadn’t got over the polar bug. It’s after World War I, society is fundamentally changed, the world is different. The whole polar exploration fever is gone. Many things have gone. The world is totally different, but not for Shackleton, and so somewhere around 1920/21, he decides let’s do it again. I think you write was it eight of his crew. I mean, let’s do it again. It’s like who are these people? Why do you want to do this again? What kind of leader can inspire people to do something, I don’t know, almost say suicidal again. It’s like-
Nancy K:
A great crucible leader. He sends the call out in 1920 to go again. It goes out to four corners. All 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. The world, I mean, no one cares about the pole anymore. No one even cares about individual heroism. That just got wiped away in the mass carnage of the First World War, and so he sends call out and then, it’s more than eight. I want to say it’s 12 men answer in like, “Yes, sir, boss. Here we come.” 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. Then last port of call is again, South Georgia, the whaling station.
Nancy K:
That night, the first night they get there, Shackleton has a massive heart attack and dies in his sleep in his cabin. His men bury him there. Then they go on and kind of travel along the Vahsel Bay, which is this bay that they wandered 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. It’s more of just a kind of reliving, I think, of the cohesion and the triumph of the human spirit that, that journey was. Then the expedition just fades in the midst of history. No one cares. I got home. The men go on to their wives. The BBC gets interested in the story and does a series of radio interviews in the 30s, and then they slip back into the mist of history and no one, no British school kid, no exploree aficionado is talking about Ernest Shackleton.
Warwick F:
I think as you write. They were talking about Scott.
Nancy K:
They’re were talking about Scott who died on the way back… Exactly. The martyred, lousy, insecure leader, who effectively martyred his men. God, King and country, but they still died. Beginning in the 1980s, it’s almost like a Phoenix rising, partly by the efforts of Roland Huntford and other very good polar explorers. A larger story starts to come out both about Scott and Shackleton, and then it’s again, almost from underground, this collective global kind of cottage industry or grape vine of real interest in this story and about 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. Right now in the COVID-19 crisis, everyone I know wants to understand how they endured and triumphed in these life and death circumstances
Warwick F:
There is something about the intrigue of the epic failure. 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, and 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 sort of dithered and just made sure that the Turkish forces had plenty of time to get machine gun nest on the hills, and were just horrifically executed. 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.
Warwick F:
Even now Australian cricket teams, when they go to England, we’ll stop on the way as a kind of a morale boost. Anyway, Gallipoli is a whole other thing, but there’s something about the epic failure, but in this case, it’s more than just the epic failure is just what Shackleton learned his ability to move on. As we sort of summarize here, for leaders today, who may never have heard of Shackleton, what are the two or three things 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 K:
Well, just to kind of present them in uncharacteristically succinct form, you have to step into the fear, right? You take the step. Courage is not the absence of fear as Mandela said. It’s the willingness to walk into the fear. Kind of square your shoulders and tighten your core and realize that you are still standing and can take the next step. People behind you can take the first step. 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, the morale of the people around you, face forward and learn, right? 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.
Nancy K:
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, why 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? Just as a crucible, it’s about high flames literally, and its ability to kind of 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. These ordinary people who do extraordinary things, or at least 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.
Nancy K:
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. You discover these people, each discovers, Lincoln discovers all that narcissistic quest for public office and power becomes, “I got to save the Union. We have to save our country.” 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? That secret weapon, your super power that you’d never known you had. Shackleton discovers that and keeps growing in that commitment to the mission with God is my witness. I’ll bring them all home alive. Then last but not least this ability to keep improvising and pivoting, right.
Nancy K:
Improvising with we’re going to sail for South Georgia now. Improvising for 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. That, of course, the constant engagement with the mission helps shore up your endurance muscles and your ability to say as Shackleton once said, I just love this. “Obstacles are just things to overcome after all.” I think that’s a really empowered statement. All of those things are really critical to individuals in a crucible who will ultimately use that experience to lead other individuals in a crucible.
Warwick F:
Just to summarize here because I now need to probably bring it to conclusion. I mean, to me, a crucible really tests the metal of a leader. With these five people, they became better people. They became, maybe there were the raw materials there who knows, but somehow it forged them into something that they weren’t before that. As you say very well, the ability to move forward and 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 Crucible Leadership, a life of significance, a life on purpose, focused on others, all these great leaders do that. 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 can 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 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 K:
Well, but maybe it’s not quite such a small kind of circle of people or a small group of people Warwick. I’ve come and I’m still studying courageous leaders. We’re writing a case, 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 Adlai Stevenson and Tommy Thompson, who was the former ambassador to the Soviet Union who was called in. The emotional intelligence piece that is as important as any of the military expertise in that conference room of the White House in helping resolve this without nuclear war becoming the logical end of our action. 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. If that’s the case, then there’s lots and lots of potential greatness out there. 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.
Nancy K:
I went through 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 people of certain smaller group, very small group of people are very angry and armed. 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. I think that one really important message for people in crucibles or helping someone in crucible is out of this can come your greatness, but you have to work at it 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. I’m going to work on that as I navigate to these high winds and big waves.” That’s really important, but you have to decide that for yourself and then you have to stick to it. 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 F:
Well said.
Gary S:
Normally, at the end of a podcast, I will launch into what I consider the three takeaways, but I’ve been in the communication 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, listeners. 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. The first thing I want to do is to kind of 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 that Beyond the Crucible all the time.
Gary S:
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 communicated. 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 sort of 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 K:
I’ll 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 live magnificent lives and they’re inspirational just to… It was an inspiration to me just to have the privilege to write about them. It’s available almost anywhere books are sold. I read the audio. If you like audio books, and you’d 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. 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.
Nancy K:
There’s no pictures of my horse or my dogs or my outfit problems or me eating 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 inside number we’re up to 64 with resources there. Then my website, which has just launched in a new form is called nancykoehn.com. It has videos, articles, podcasts, radio interviews. I do a regular spot on NPR. We kept links to all of those on all kinds of leadership topics, do there’s just a plethora of material for the interested listener.
Gary S:
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 K:
Thank you for that.
Gary S:
Those social media accounts that Nancy talked about as well as her website, it’s nancykoehn.com, nancyK-O-E-H-N.com. 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. Then second, we would ask visit crucibleleadership.com, where you can find blogs that Warwick’s written.
Gary S:
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. 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. In this interview with BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE host and Crucible Leadership founder Warwick Fairfax, Koehn explains how her search for lighthouses of hope in the lives of great leaders who were dented by crucible experiences helped her find healing through FORGED IN CRISIS, her best-selling book about their trials and triumphs. Host and guest take a deep-dive look at the incredible story and important leadership lessons of British polar explorer Ernest Shackleton — a conversation they conclude in next week’s episode.
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👉 Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Transcript
Gary S:
Welcome everybody to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Gary Schneeberger, the cohost 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.
Gary S:
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 F:
Absolutely, Gary, very excited to have Nancy here, and it should be a fantastic discussion.
Gary S:
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 F:
Well, thank you. 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 approached leadership from within and then without. I love that you teach this and you’re teaching it to MBA students at Harvard Business School. This obviously we discussed, I went there in the ’80s and have very fond memories of the class discussion.
Warwick F:
I also have an abiding interest in history. My dad and I, who 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 led to this.
Nancy K:
I’m from a middle class family in the Middle West of America. And I went to Stanford as an undergraduate and then went to Harvard and just never left, got a PhD and a masters, a couple of masters, and then ended up at the Harvard Business School in my very late 20s. And as we now knowing how way leads on to way, I found myself recently tenured, this is now about, let’s see, 16 years ago. I’ve 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.
Nancy K:
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 has 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. Now, I was writing a case about Ernest Shackleton, and I was so caught up in the 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.
Nancy K:
And then in the middle of that, and here gets to the root of your question, Gary, my life started falling apart very quickly and in very large, as Sylvia Plath would say, hunky blocks. In mid-2002, my father, who was 72 and spry and energetic, dropped dead. My mother, who had always been 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 had 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.
Nancy K:
And those floorboards caving in under me were even harder than my father’s because I loved him so much and I was so surprised. I lost a lot of weight. I kept on teaching at the Harvard Business School and 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, same, 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.
Nancy K:
So the middle of this, there’s this torturous divorce going on because I don’t have any money other than my Harvard retirement, and trying to hold onto it in a no-fault divorce state, and then I got cancer again. And as all that happened. most of it happened in the span of three years, all of it happened in the span of about five. 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, “Oh, that’s serious.”
Nancy K:
My whole life was completely transformed and I went through just astounding 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 to know. 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 the 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.
Nancy K:
And one night in the midst of the existential wanderings I was doing metaphorically, I picked up a book of Lincoln’s writings, Modern Library Edition of Lincoln’s writings. I never read much Lincoln, I was trained as a European historian. And I started reading Warwick at the very back of the book. So this would be the second inaugural, and that’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… This took about three days, I’m reading a couple hours each night. I remember sitting in bed, my Spaniels were on the bed, and I said, “You think you have problems, Ms. Nancy, Mr. Lincoln had it a lot worse.” And that was the beginning.
Nancy K:
So my quest, which I couldn’t see at the time, it was much more than historical, it was personal, was to find lighthouses, examples of individuals that had just so crushing calamity, crucibles, and then try and understand how they not only navigated through these extraordinary storms. They’re extraordinary, they’re inside and then they’re out, but there’s some… but the most powerful ones, the ones that involve the most suffering and the most change are inside. And I wanted to understand how these people, not only navigated the storms, but then in the process got better. And so that is where Forged In Crisis came from.
Warwick F:
Wow. So as you’re doing this, obviously you’re a historian, but it was part of like, “I’m going through this massive crisis.” Any one of these would derail many people. Most of it was unfair, whether it’s health, husband, father. Were you curious of, “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 a dual purpose behind the whole analysis and book?
Nancy K:
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 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 been interested in these questions. No one asked like, “What will Shackleton’s interior life look like on the ice when the ship goes down?” Well, 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.”
Nancy K:
And then I started looking for other people like this and the same questions and this great personal again, largely being 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 F:
Wow. 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, or 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 and-
Nancy K:
Yes and no, it’s like a toggle switch. You go, “Oh yeah. Like I could use that” or, “Oh yeah, that happened to me too, Mr. Lin… 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. You can’t say annus horribilis because I had so many years that were so awful so I can’t use the Queen’s expression for the Royal family. Anyway, I had this moment of grace and it was really early on, my ex-husband just walked out. And I remember him standing there by my car and I thought of Oprah Winfrey, who I had… 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 Scarlett O’Hara halfway through Gone with the Wind, Vivian Lee.
Nancy K:
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 it was like a personal covenant. I didn’t have any idea I was going to try and get better. I didn’t have an idea what was going to happen in my life. I didn’t know how I was going to get through 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… It was grace. I don’t think it was Nancy. It was really powerful.
Warwick F:
No, that is so big. And I want to get to these five leaders that you mention. When I think of some great leaders, obviously Lincoln is one, Churchill was another, they knew how to deal with bitterness. With Churchill, I mean, he had some challenges with Baldwin and obviously Neville Chamberlain. He disagreed with what he did, I remember there was one instance when I guess Clement Attlee as you know, won the 45 election and Churchill is thinking, “Hey, I saved Britain. This is the thanks I get, thank you so much.”
Warwick F:
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 have 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 K:
I could not agree more. Lincoln says at one point in the war and at 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 you … We’re not Martin Luther King. There’s so many great leaders who understand this. You just can’t, 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. Even 45, it won’t take them… 95% of the time. It takes them nowhere good. Maybe 99% of the time, 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 F:
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… even my dad loved English history. So I was brought up on Wellington and Nelson as even though I’m Australian as Anglophiles, I guess are. And so when I read about them having gone to Harvard Business School and in my own little way, 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 the 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’re there to write a history and that’s fine, but you look at it through a different lens, which I think is amazing.
Warwick F:
So let’s talk about these five because they’re very different. I mean, Shackleton, Lincoln, Douglas, Bonhoeffer I’d heard of them, I must confess Rachel Carson in your book, I hadn’t, but her story is equally amazing.
Nancy K:
It’s unbelievable.
Warwick F:
So yeah, it’s 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 S:
And 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 that we’re talking about. Just want to make sure …
Nancy K:
Paperback and hardback. Audio and ebook.
Gary S:
So the five leaders that Warwick is speaking of are masterfully profiled in this book. Sorry. Yes.
Nancy K:
Thank you, Gary. I love you. So what’s interesting is that Churchill by the way, was on the cutting room floor. And there were a number of people that didn’t make the book that were close… because I probably had 12 that ended up as five. The book was… I originally going to write about seven and then it was, that was like was year 10. And I thought, God, I’m never going to finish. So it got a little bit, 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 these… but in any event, I think they chose me. Warwick I think they chose me.
Nancy K:
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 it, just an extraordinary book, a path breaking 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 just … something I knew, I just knew.
Nancy K:
And so these people chose me and it wasn’t… 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. 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 about them and I take sustenance or I take a lesson from myself from one of these people. So they have made a major impact on my life.
Warwick F:
That’s amazing. I want to focus a bit on Ernest Shackleton because I’d heard of him and the whole polar exploration race. I know you talk about this, but for modern listeners, they may not be aware in the early 1900’s’ the whole polar race was a bit like, I guess the space race in the ’60s. 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 I, a very different era. So talk a bit about Ernest Shackleton and who he was and what made him tick. I know that the real story begins in 1914, but there’s a backdrop to who he was and Scott and that whole deal.
Nancy K:
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’s boy and then as an officer on the Merchant Marine, and then he gets a chance right after the turn of the century, this was the 1800’s into the 1900’s to join, what, as you were saying Warwick, was one of the ships from Britain racing, South against ships, from other countries and 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 a lot like the space race, who we’ll get to the moon first, who will get the ship up for the man’s spacecraft first.
Nancy K:
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 a polar exploration on either end of the earth. Astounding story of really courageous leadership and very smart decision making and great bravery and team cohesion. And after the pole’s discovered Shackleton motivated, this is important, motivated by fame real narcissistic drive to do this for God, King and country and be the man, the man, who does it, gets a new idea.
Nancy K:
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 beginning in, I think that’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 failed mission on the one hand, but the story of a different kind of even more important success that begins in 1914.
Warwick F:
I’m curious about his motivation. I mean, just reading your book. I mean, he starts out what, like at age 12 or something and by 16, I guess it is. And then by his early 20s he’s has he’s captain’s master or whatever it’s called. He’s really an adventurer, but the thing with Robert Falcon Scott, who is very prominent and famous and the Royal Geographical Society, some 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 that seemed to be, if it was that a bit of a turning point or like a motivation, it’s like this ax to grind or I’m going to prove them wrong, or what part did that lay in his whole motivation? Do you think the Scott episode?
Nancy K:
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, as far as I get, they almost die trudging back to base camp. And when they get back to England, Scott publishes a memoir, a book about the expedition and a 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…
Nancy K:
So really an interesting lesson that several of the people in my book, at least 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, after that one with Scott.
Warwick F:
That is fascinating. It’s such a great point for listeners to understand is observing poor leadership can teach you a lot and it can help you understand, okay, when it’s my turn, I’m going to do it differently. And obviously Scott found his demise and was it, when was it like 1911, 12, somewhere in there when I don’t know that was poor planning, poor leadership, he got to the South Pole finding that Roald Amundsen had beat him anyway. Then he dies on the way back. But I don’t know. Do you have a view on that with just it’s another example of poor planning and the ultimate failure?
Nancy K:
Well, it was, he lost his life and all his crew mate, all his, all the teammates to the polar team that he goes out to the team for the pole that had gone with him. I do. And in fact, it was that 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 as 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. 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.
Nancy K:
And there’s just no question in my mind. I think in his mind, in 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. Ultimately 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 F:
And you compare that with Amundsen and as you write maybe it was the Norwegian thing, but just the planning using cross country skis and sled dogs, which is 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 K:
So, but the Amundsen story is an extraordinary, one of courageous leadership, careful planning team cohesion, a 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 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 threw all kinds of things, kerosene other supplies out to lighten their load. Some of those supplies were found 50 years later.
Gary S:
Wow.
Nancy K:
This is an astounding story of good leadership. There’s a 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 this.
Warwick F:
That is great. So let’s talk about the 1914 expedition. And one of things that fascinated me was the way he recruited his crew. I mean, that, 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. I’m sorry. Talk about his recuiting mechanisms.
Nancy K:
Well, 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 community,” and the way I would characterize what he did was to hire for attitude. And then 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 everyone that came into his office in London to do a 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 healthy, pragmatic, optimist, not sugarcoating it, you’re going to the South pole, it’s dangerous.
Nancy K:
The stakes are always life and death. So it’s not sugarcoating. It’s not they’re all as well when all is not well, but it’s a pragmatic optimism and can do attitude. It is rumored. We don’t really… 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 days, long nights, cold days, danger all around, safe return uncertain, honor and glory in case of success.” So not really your typical monster.com Craigslist kind of ad. But what he’s doing here 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 are attracted to it. And that’s what he does.
Nancy K:
And I’ll tell you one last comment Warwick, I know this case, the story I thought I knew it well, and I work at the Harvard Business School. I spent a year researching it. Now. I feel like I know it like of the age spots on my hands. 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. Not that, Shackleton’s leadership mattered a great deal. He had the right material and it’s incredibly important.
Warwick F:
Yeah. As you say, “Hire for attitude, train for skills.” 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 he had these three categories mad, hopeless, impossible. I just obviously it’s the possible, I just, he had a sense of humor, which I find very endearing. So talk about, so it’s 1914 and I love this, you write that the day that Britain declares war on Germany, he sets, we get 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 islands. So pick up the story from there, he’s got his crew and it’s like late 1914. And he has, he has a big decision to make a momentous decision.
Nancy K:
Yep. So he and his now 27 men crew and some sled dogs, which they haven’t yet trained and a cat, a stowaway cat named Chippy set sail from South America and took their last port of call, which will be an island, south east 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 to get there in early December, 1914 and the whalers all say them, they’ve been out. They say, “You know, captain, the water South of here are just chockablock with icebergs. You’re going to hit pack ice. And you may get in trouble, really recommend your 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.
Nancy K:
And so he makes a decision after a relatively short 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 South. They’re a little bit Northwest of where he wants to be. So they’re going to be heading Southwest and Northeast. And when getting 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, “Let’s just instead of tucking in here and unloading, let’s just sail a little bit farther along the coast where they’re now heading West along the coast. I want to get the right place to make base camp.
Nancy K:
And in that decision, local 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 around… these are huge bergs, freeze around the Endurance, which was the name of his ship. And it’s locked in an immovable, vice. They can’t blast themselves out. They can’t pick themselves out with shovels and pickaxes. They’re stuck. They can’t motor themselves out with diesel power that they’re stuck. And then they’re mostly floating aimlessly on the current.
Warwick F:
And they’re stuck for a very long time.
Nancy K:
Their stuck… that’s January 3rd 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 burgs. And it starts to get damaged. It’s like the vice now is crushing the ship. And so Shackleton makes a decision right in very early September to abandon ship. He had been planning for it. He could tell the ship was going to get…
Warwick F:
By then it was 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, “You know, the ice is as bad as we’ve ever seen it, the floes are really far North.” And then the decision to not get into a little inlet and he wanted to go to Vahsel Bay, the original place. So what motivated that decision, is 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 K:
So I’ve taught this case many, many times down to 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 a wrong decision. I don’t think the second decision, well, let’s say a little further along was of the same order of magnitude. But that first decision is a big deal. And it places him, it was a traffic accident. The cop would give him 90% of the blame for the accident. It places him, 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 in the extraordinary leader that emerges out of this big mistake is partly owning the responsibility for something he realized he was a big part of. He was culpable of.
Gary S:
An Interesting couple of sentences, Nancy that you wrote in the book that 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 and for our listeners who are trying to bounce back from their own crucibles.
Nancy K:
Absolutely. I just marvel at this… 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 harvest no crops. And it’s a little bit of the same thing.
Nancy K:
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 many to come right on the ice where it’s like, “Okay, this happened when 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.
Nancy K:
We moved forward, we learn from it and we move 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 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, as God gives us to see the right.” So, and Lincoln’s plan for reconstruction still in its infant stages when he was assassinated in April, 1865 was not about tribunals and blame and looking backwards at 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 got to turn our necks and our bodies around or look forward.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. And I think I want to talk about how we move forward, but I think to me, there are… one lesson is even great leaders make colossal mistakes. I mean Shackleton made mistakes. I’m sure Lincoln, he had his challenges. Some people criticize him for moving a bit too slowly on emancipation. It was a challenging time. That’s a whole another discussion. It’s a very nuanced discussion. Churchill, I think he was on the right side of India, but on the wrong side… On the wrong side of India, excuse me, 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, yeah 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 challenging, like risky, insane, but we’re human. It’s like, “Gosh King, country, glory.”
Warwick F:
So even great leaders can make mistakes. But I think, and certainly in my own life, as listeners know, with growing in a large family media business and the whole $2 billion 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. And just, there’s all sorts of emotions, which we don’t need to get into here. But I talked about in other podcasts, that cloud your judgment.
Warwick F:
And so I like to think of myself as a reasonably sane, intelligent person, but 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 where your focus is not so much on what was 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. That was, I’m responsible for getting my crew here, but time to move on.”
Gary S:
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.
Gary S:
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 move 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.”
Gary S:
Those are the insights that we’re going to hear next week on part two of our interview on 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.
Gary S:
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.
Life has not always been easy for Warwick Fairfax. That’s a statement many in his native Australia never would have associated with the fifth-generation heir to arguably the country’s most influential media empire. But then he launched a multi-billion-dollar takeover of the company that failed spectacularly — leaving him with regrets, self-doubt and uncertainty about his future. More than 30 years after the takeover fell apart, the founder of Crucible Leadership and host of BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE will speak in detail for the first time about what motivated his bid to assume control of the company and why he thinks it wasn’t successful in a book from Morgan James Publishing due to be released early next year. On this episode of the podcast, Fairfax discusses with co-host Gary Schneeberger why he initially didn’t want to write a book at all, why he changed his mind and what readers can expect when it hits stores. “It’s a collection of stories and parables about life and leadership — about me and my family, history’s greatest leaders and biblical and inspirational figures,” he explains. “If writing about my story can help people and give them hope, it’s worth going through the pain.”
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👉 Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Transcript
Gary S:
Welcome everybody to this episode of Beyond The Crucible. I’m Gary Schneeberger, the cohost of the podcast and the Communications Director for Crucible Leadership. And you have clicked play. Hopefully you clicked subscribe to a podcast that deals in crucible experiences, those events in life that can be extraordinarily painful. You know them when you experience them. They’re failures, they’re setbacks. There are things that maybe happen to you. There are things that maybe you do some things that bring those things on yourself, but the organizing characteristic that they all have is that your life is changed after them. The trajectory of your life can be shifted because of them and we talk about these experiences on Beyond The Crucible, not so that we can feel sorry for ourselves or wallow in them, but so that we can learn from them, so we can apply the lessons of them to live a life of significance, to point ourselves on a path to a life of significance.
Gary S:
And the host of the show and the architect, the creator of Crucible Leadership, the man who authored this idea of going from crucible to a life of significance is here with me now. And it’s Warwick Fairfax. Warwick, welcome.
Warwick F:
Great to be here, Gary, and very much looking forward to this.
Gary S:
Yes, this one is going to be a special one, listeners, because, and I will admit I have a flair for the dramatic and I’m also an old newspaper guy, so I love the idea of breaking news. I love being the first one to report news to you. So we have some news that we’re going to break here on Beyond The Crucible today about Warwick and about Crucible Leadership that is extraordinarily exciting. It’s both good news for Crucible Leadership and good news for Warwick. And Warwick, with that buildup, with that setup, tell the listeners just what the news is that we’re breaking today.
Warwick F:
Absolutely, Gary. Well, Crucible Leadership and I have a book publishing deal with Morgan James Publishing, which I am super excited about. It’s been a long journey, but this is a huge milestone for me and for Crucible Leadership.
Gary S:
Yeah. I mean, let’s stop here and make sure the listener heard that. There is a book now coming, authored by Warwick about Crucible Leadership. And we’ll talk here in detail about just what that book’s going to contain. Because I’ll let you in on a secret, I’ve read the manuscript and it’s good stuff. And when that comes out next year you will, listener, really understand some aspects of both Warwick’s story and Crucible Leadership that haven’t quite been elucidated in the way that there’ll be elucidated in the book. And I want to say one more thing before I turn it back over to Warwick and we start talking about the book, but he mentioned that the publisher that he signed with for this book is Morgan James Publishing. And I just want to read what their corporate motto is, so that you have an idea of the kind of book this will be, the kind of story this will tell, the kind of hope, I think, this will engender for you who read it.
Gary S:
This is Morgan James’s corporate promise, their corporate slogan. “To educate, encourage, inspire, and entertain.” And having read Warwick’s book, I can tell you it does all four of those things. So Warwick, how did this all begin? What made you decide to write a book in the first place?
Warwick F:
Well, the funny thing, Gary, is for many years writing a book about my story is the last thing that I wanted to do. I had no interest in writing a book. So you might ask, “Well, why is that?” So as listeners would know, I grew up in a 150-year-old family business started by my great-great-grandfather, John Fairfax, that grew to be this huge company with newspapers, TV stations, newsprint mills, magazines. It had thousands of employees and so it was a lot of pressure. A lot of expectations on me. I prepared my whole life to go into it. Certainly seen by my parents as the next generation. So I went to Oxford like my dad and some other relatives, worked on Wall Street, got an MBA at Harvard Business School. And in early ’87, my dad died. He was in his late eighties. There was turmoil within the company and, I guess, a different vision. The company wasn’t being well run, at least as far as I and my parents thought, so I launched this $2.25 billion takeover.
Gary S:
That is, listeners, I’d like to say to Warwick, that is billion with a B.
Warwick F:
Absolutely.
Gary S:
That is billion with a B.
Warwick F:
I’m afraid so. And so right from the beginning, things went wrong. Other family members sold out. There was the October ’87 stock market crash. And within three years the company went under. Australia suffered a big recession in late 1990. And so my dream of restoring the company, the ideals of the founder and have it being well-run was ended. And so the question some people would ask over the years, “Well, Warwick, why don’t you write your story?” The story of what at time was one of the biggest takeovers in Australian corporate history, of a organization that had the Australian equivalent to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. Iconic names, iconic mastheads. And that was the last thing I wanted to do because it was so painful. I mean, I am a person of faith.
Warwick F:
I, in my naivety, felt like maybe this was something that God wanted to resurrect in the image of the founder, who was also a person of great faith, which was a bit naive at the time and simplistic. And it was just… It caused friction with other family members. I didn’t do it, at least consciously, against other family members even though there was friction between some and my dad over the decades, but it was so painful that it’s like, “Why would I want to write a book about something that was so painful?”
Warwick F:
And the other thing is when you mostly write these sort of books, it’s a tell-all book in which you’re meant to diss and basically say, “Well, look at these other family members and look what they did to my dad and they’re this and they’re that,” and name names. The last thing I want to do is cause more pain within my family and books that say, basically, I was right, they were wrong, whining books, or as we say in Australia, whinging, which is almost worse than whining, it’s just typically boring, untrue and self-serving. And so it’s like it was A. It was painful and B. writing a tell-all book to cause more pain, I mean, that’s just not what I’m about. So, forget it. I wanted to move on with my life, not relive something that was so painful.
Gary S:
Right. And that does sound, in one sense, like it would be an easy decision for you to make. “I don’t want to write this book because it’s going to be painful and I’m not going to throw people under the bus and I’m not going to blame other people for some missteps that I took.” But in one sense, it had to have been not easy, too, because it’s true that pretty much everybody in Australia wanted to hear your side of the story or at least wanted you to talk about your side of the story. This was big headline-dominating news about the takeover. You did not do a lot of interviews in the press at that time. So it’s still safe to say today, it was safe in the late eighties, early nineties, it’s safe today, your side of the story is not really known in Australia. Is that fair?
Warwick F:
Absolutely. Yeah. It was not known. And it’s funny, growing up in a media business you’d think I’d be a bit more open to talking to the media, but even at the time during the takeover years, those three years, I gave no interviews, which in hindsight was obviously a very significant if not colossal mistake. Not talking to the media, whatever you may think of them, is rarely the right strategy. Figure out how to handle it well, and obviously, Gary, you’ve had a lot of experience in media. Not talking, they’ll just write whatever they want to write. So I remember there was a equivalent to the New York Times Sunday Magazine, a competitive newspaper, and the headline in the sunday magazine, I guess it was Saturday, that was when the big paper came out, the headline was Warwick Fairfax, The Man Behind the Mask. And all these people were trying to guess at who Warwick Fairfax was.
Warwick F:
Some people that they interviewed saying, “Warwick’s the most secretive, enigmatic person I’ve ever known. I don’t know what he is thinking.” Well, it’s because I didn’t really talk about it. I never really gave interviews. I’ve given a couple in more recent years, but I really have not got into any level of detail about why I did the takeover or what I was thinking. I’ve just been very, very, extremely careful even when I’ve talked to the media.
Gary S:
Right. And that’s a great set up, Warwick, for what this book, which is going to be called, we believe, Crucible Leadership, same as the brand, the same as your life practice is called. But this is a good point to pivot on that question of, yeah, it’s been more than 30 years. People have not heard your side of the story. You didn’t want to write the book that people wanted you to write, yet you’ve now written a book and it’s going to be published. What changed? What changed in your vision for what the book could be? And what was the impetus for that change from you from that switch going from, “I don’t want to write a book,” to, “Hmm. Maybe I’ll write a book?”
Warwick F:
That’s an interesting question. Really, the answer is in 2008, the pastor of the church we go to in Maryland, it’s a large-ish nondenominational church, and my pastor was giving a message on the life of David. He was King Saul’s right-hand man, a very successful commander, and as often happens when you’re super successful, your boss tend to get jealous. Well, back in those days, jealous meant he’d try and kill you, which typically doesn’t happen in the corporate world. But when you’re a king back in the day, the rules were a bit different. And so he was running away, hiding in some cave and feeling pretty sorry for himself. So my pastor wanted to give a message of a righteous man falsely persecuted. I said, “Well, that’s not really me. I mean, I brought a lot of pain on myself, a lot of missteps, but fine. If you want me to give a seven, 10 minute talk about my story and what I feel like I learned, and because it’s a church, what I feel like God was teaching me, I will.”
Warwick F:
And I’m not Mr. Public Speaker. I’m more of a shy, retiring person, my personality, but I guess I must have given it in a vulnerable, authentic, “Here’s the story and what I went through.” What was amazing to me is weeks, months after, people would come up to me and say, “You know what, Warwick? What you had to say really helped me.” And I’m thinking, “How could that help anybody?” I mean, I don’t know too many former media moguls in the congregation. It’s just a cross section of just regular folks from different jobs, different walks of life, different problems, different challenges, just like any group of people have.
Warwick F:
But somehow, I guess, by me sharing my story, which is failure on really quite an epic scale, larger than most people will fail on, and just being authentic and vulnerable about it, somehow that resonated with people. And so that was the big shift because I thought if by writing about my story, it can help people, now it’s worth going through the pain. And it was painful writing about these episodes. That’s pain worth going through. So that seven, 10 minute speech in church in 2008, that was a significant shift in my thinking.
Gary S:
And to hear you explain that the way that you explained it right now, and I hope you hear this, listeners, we’ve had 10, 15 guests who’ve been on this podcast and they’ve said versions of the exact same thing that Warwick just said. “If talking about my pain, if reliving my crucible experience and how I bounced back from that, if that can help somebody, then I’ll do it.” So the very same thing that has led guests of Beyond The Crucible to come into our little studio and have a chat, or our virtual studio and have a chat with us, is the very thing that led you to realize that this is something you want to set, at the time when you started it maybe typewriter to paper, but certainly a computer to a whatever it is that happens inside a computer. To gigabytes. Computer to gigabytes. It made you realize that you could type this story out and it would have an impact.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. And so really, that began a journey and I mean, we’re now 2020. That’s 12 years. That’s a long time. I mean, it took a long time and there was some reasons for that, but certainly one significant reason and we’ll get into this more in a bit, but the core of the book is really my story. And so when you’re writing about some of the dumbest, stupidest decisions you’ve made and writing about them in exhaustive detail, explaining what you did and what you were thinking, what you were not thinking and what you should have been thinking, I couldn’t write for more than maybe a couple hours a day, max. And then I needed a breather to recover from the experience and to get my equilibrium back before I went into the lion’s den again. So that was certainly one significant reason why it took so long, but I was committed to doing it because I felt like by talking about this, it could help people.
Gary S:
Right. And so that’s one part of the book. Unpack a little bit about it because one of the things that’s fascinating to me about the book is that you’ve got, there’s a little bit of personal memoir in it about your story as you’ve talked about, but there’s far more than that in there as well. There are other perspectives that you bring to the table. So explain to the listener what you try to bring to the book in terms of the content, and then how you think that content will help with the subject of what this podcast is about, helping them move beyond their crucibles and become crucible leaders themselves.
Warwick F:
It’s funny and we’ll get to this probably in a bit, but the whole concept of Crucible Leadership, it came out of the book, but I didn’t, when I started writing it, I didn’t have that notion. So often one lesson learned is when you have this vision, it may not be fully formed, but just take a few steps. I wrote a blog a while back now, something like vision and the fog or something to that effect. You might not have the total picture. If you have a sense that this is right, this is what you need to do and the vision will become clearer and clearer as you keep going down the path. So at the time, and I’ve always loved leadership, I’ve been a student of leadership. I’ve loved history, I’ve read about history, about great figures in impossible situations, whether it’s Lincoln or Churchill doing amazing things.
Warwick F:
And so what I wanted to do is write my story, but I wanted to do it through the lens of leadership and lessons learned. And so it’s really a series of parables, a series of stories, and it’s organized around key leadership principles. So there’s chapters on vision, shared vision, how you get a group of people on the same page, how you implement it, character. Obviously there’s a chapter on crucibles, even a chapter on faith, by which obviously my faith in Christ is the most important thing in my life. But truly I talk about faith in a general sense. What governing system of beliefs is the anchor of who you are as a person and a leader, whatever that might be. It could be a religion or some other way of thought. And so I’ve got all these chapters on different leadership themes, but then in each chapter I talk about my family, certainly a key part of my story.
Warwick F:
And typically it’s like, “This is what I did. Don’t do what I did. Instead, do the opposite. Do something else.” And so you see my story, it’s all laid out there, but you’ll see it through different lens. It’s like watching a movie and by looking at different camera angles, the story appears a bit different. So I’m writing about my life. It’s really that way. If I’m talking about my vision or what character traits are important to me or how I try to get people on the same page with my vision, which was obviously largely unsuccessful because I was a bit clueless. So that’s one part of one strand. But then I talk about my dad, who greatly influenced me. And then the founder of the media company, John Fairfax, who as good a businessman, wonderful dad, wonderful husband, elder at his church, person of great faith. I mean, an amazing person. You’ve got the Fairfax family strand.
Gary S:
Right. And he was your great-great-grandfather, so the listeners know. Yeah.
Warwick F:
Exactly right. So 150 years ago, I was fifth generation. A long time ago, so that you’ve got the Fairfax family strand. Then you have an historical strand. I’ve mentioned I’ve loved history. The way my dad and I communicated in some ways was history. He loved history and we would talk about that. He’d tell me these amazing stories of great leaders faced with incredible, impossible situations. So you’ll have that strand. You’ll hear stories from Lincoln, Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt.
Gary S:
Walt Disney is one of my favorite parts of the book. One of my favorite parts of the book.
Warwick F:
Walt Disney, exactly. Walt Disney. Gandhi. Some English heroes because my dad and I loved English history. Lord Horatio Nelson and Duke of Wellington. A collection of leaders, but all looking at it through a leadership lens. And typically historians write about history, which is appropriate, but I’m looking at it through what can we learn today as leaders, be it in a big organization or small, from these great figures in testing times? So that’s another strand. And the third strand is really the biblical inspirational strand. And so there you’ll hear stories of biblical figures such as David, Ruth, Samuel, Daniel, Joseph, as well as inspirational figures like Gandhi.
Gary S:
And Jesus. I mean, you talk about Jesus. He had great leadership abilities.
Warwick F:
And Jesus. Absolutely. And Jesus. Yeah. People think about how can we lead with the character of Jesus, but Jesus has something to teach us about organizational principles and how the faith was able to grow over the first few hundred years to a remarkable degree. What were some of those key leadership characteristics? So with the biblical inspirational strand, it doesn’t really matter whether you believe in the Bible or not. These are historical figures and what can we learn from them? So it’s really, when I think of those three strands, you’ve got the Fairfax family strand, the historical strand, the biblical inspirational strand, the book is largely a collection of stories and parables. Because I often think the best way to learn is through stories. And that’s really what this is, a collection of stories all around leadership.
Gary S:
I’m going to steal. Here’s the first preview of what’s in the book, listener. I’m going to read a paragraph from the introduction to the book to summarize what Warwick just talked about, about what the book is and isn’t. What it isn’t is, as Warwick has intimated, it’s not, “Here are the seven tips of all the things I did right that you should follow and then you’ll be perfect and successful like me.” It’s not that kind of book. It’s not a seven tips book. It’s a book of stories, as he said. But this is what he wrote. This is what Warwick wrote in the introduction to the book. “Crucible Leadership isn’t a one size fits all formula, but an extremely personal journey. So don’t expect a how to manual because that’s not my approach. Instead, I leverage the learning power of story and insightful questions to help leaders transform past trials and hard-won insights into a new, exciting, enriching, an uncompromised present and future.” That’s pretty inspiring. That makes me want to go grab the book right now.
Warwick F:
Yeah, I mean, to me, as I think about what’s different about this book is a lot of people write “10 steps to losing weight in two weeks,” or “the five ways to get into the C suite and be CEO. Here’s the five year plan.” And I mean, that’s definitely an approach, but I often think life is not simple. I mean, it took me years to get over my crucible experience, which we’ve talked about in other podcasts and blogs and what have you. Life is rarely linear. Three steps forward, maybe two steps back. And so I think it’s often better to talk in stories and principles and then the reader can apply them to their life. “Okay, so how does that apply to me? And I might be going at a different pace than others.”
Warwick F:
And so the other thing that’s really different is many leadership books talk about, “I was a successful CEO. Learn from me.” Or, “I’ve interviewed the top 10 CEOs in the last 10 years. What can we learn from them?” And that can be useful. Learning from people who’ve succeeded, that can be helpful. But this is more looking at it from another perspective which is, “I made some incredibly stupid mistakes. Okay, I was young, but they were stupid nonetheless. What can we learn from those stupid mistakes as well as leaders from history and from my family?” And so very few people write books about, “I was an idiot. Read this book and don’t make the mistakes I did.” That’s just not a popular genre for maybe somewhat obvious reasons. Who wants to write that book? I didn’t.
Gary S:
Yeah. True. True.
Warwick F:
But the only reason I did-
Warwick F:
Yeah. It was because if it’s going to help people and it’s like, maybe what helps me a bit is just my faith. My perspective is, because I believe God loves me unconditionally, I’m okay with telling people I was an idiot and made some colossally bad mistakes with significant consequences, both monetarily and my family. I mean, I’m certainly very comfortable now. Don’t have as much money as I could have. Money isn’t really that important to me, but still reliving all this and telling the world about how stupid you are, the fact that my faith is a definite help there, but still I’m human. It’s difficult, but that’s just not a normal genre. “Look at me. I was stupid. Read my book.” It’s just, people don’t write those books.
Gary S:
Right. Again, having read the manuscript, I’ll say you’re a little self-deprecating when you say, “I was stupid.” You made mistakes as you’ve acknowledged on every episode of Beyond The Crucible, but you also learned some things. You also learned and applied some things about transparency, about character, about helping others, living life on purpose and having that purpose be motivated by helping other people. And that’s been who we tried to bring in as guests for Beyond The Crucible because of your example. So you’re a little bit hard on yourself, I think, when you want to end your description of your story as, “I was stupid. Follow me.” No, it was, “I made a mistake. I learned from those mistakes.” You learned when you gave that speech to your church that people were moved by that. And I think you’ve found that since we started the podcast with people writing to you, emailing you and saying, “Wow, what you’re talking about’s really helped me.” That’s your hope for this book as well, right?
Warwick F:
Absolutely. And I mean, that is a fair point. That is well said. I mean really Crucible Leadership and the podcast Beyond The Crucible, it really grew out of the book because as I realized, I grew up with about as much money and power as you could have. We were old money. I get in all the exclusive clubs and all, very well respected in the community and the country. But I realized money, power, status, it doesn’t make you happy. It’s really significance. As we say in Crucible Leadership, living a life on purpose, dedicated to serving others, that’s really the secret to happiness. And that’s really what we advocate, espouse here, and that’s what the guests we’ve had on the podcast have really talked about. I mean, they really found from their crucibles, which is typically very different than mine but still unbelievably painful, that what really helped bring them back, in part, was living a life of significance. And so that’s the core theme of the podcast, the book and everything we do at Crucible Leadership is living a life of significance.
Gary S:
One of the things, if you’re listening to this podcast in audio only, listener, you’re not seeing Warwick as he’s talking. I am, because we’re recording this for YouTube. And I just got to tell you, Warwick, it’s really fun for me to see the joy in your face as you talk about this experience, as you talk about this quest that you’ve been on in some sense for 12 years, since you started writing the book, but even going back further, more than 30 years since the takeover bid. And I can see in the way that you talk about it, that you’re pleased, again, not because you’re getting a book published so much as you are getting a book published that you believe will help people with the same kinds of emotions that you went through when you had your crucible experience.
Warwick F:
Absolutely, Gary. I mean, when I think about it, really living a life of significance, that is one of the keys to coming back from a painful crucible experience, almost irrespective of what that is. Yes, there’s some soul work admitting failures, reconciliation, just, I mean, whatever the things are that you feel called to do. Maybe you were in the wrong position like I was. You needed more of a Rupert Murdoch take no prisoners or at least some kind of hard charging, decisive, executive. I am more a reflective adviser. It was a terrible fit. That’s many lessons learned I talk about in the book.
Warwick F:
But probably the biggest one is, as I began to do things that were within my gifting and focus on serving others, I have been over the years on two nonprofit boards, my church board, and previously being on my kids’ school board, and now with Crucible Leadership, I’ve done a lot of executive coaching with my blogs, writing, podcasts. All these things in different endeavors in which I’m endeavoring to help other people, as that’s happened, healing has happened bit by bit, layer by layer. Yeah. There’s always a scar. In your bad moments, you always remember.
Warwick F:
It’s, “Oh my gosh, why did I do that?” But living a life of significance, it’s almost the, I hate to use buzzwords, but like the secret sauce. The magic potion, if you will. I mean, it doesn’t solve everything. It doesn’t happen overnight, but in terms of making significant strides to getting over a really painful crucible experience, finding your life of significance is one of the key ways to moving forward and having a fulfilling, even joyful life.
Gary S:
We just had… As we’re recording this, we released a new episode of the podcast that’s available to all of you listeners with Cathleen Merkel. And one of the things that stuck out that Cathleen said in our interview with her was that you can be 80 or 90 and it’s not too late to live your life in the most contented way that you can. That’s her way of saying to live a life of significance. It’s never too late to begin that process of pointing your compass toward a life of significance and walking that out. And I think we’ve discovered that throughout what we’ve done so far, what we’re going to continue to do on Beyond The Crucible. But that’s the message of those stories that you talk about in your book, Beyond The Crucible.
Gary S:
It’s the story of your great-great-grandfather, John Fairfax. It’s the story of your father, Sir Warwick Fairfax. It’s your story. It’s the story of those historical and religious and inspirational figures you’re talking about. It’s never too late to turn what the world views as a failure, what maybe even you view as a failure, it’s never too late to turn that around, learn the lessons and point yourself towards significance.
Warwick F:
And that is so true because it’s easy to say, “Well, I’ve been thinking about writing a book since 2008. I could have started earlier, but obviously I didn’t because it was all too painful.” And it’s 30 years since the company went under. It left family control. It still exists as an entity, but it’s more than 30 years since I did the takeover. That’s a long time. But yet this is a dream come true to get a publishing deal with a company as well-respected and prestigious as Morgan James Publishing. But yeah, it is never too late. Doesn’t matter what age you are. You want to keep moving forward and living your life of significance to the best ability you can. So never say, “Oh, well, I’ve missed my time.” It doesn’t matter whether you’re 20, 30, 40, 50, 80, 90. It’s always easy to say, “Oh, it’s too late.” But it’s never too late. While we’re here, you always have that opportunity to live your best life in line with what you feel is your purpose.
Gary S:
Well, that is, I mean, that’s a very resonant point. And I think, as I like to say, there comes a time in every podcast when we have to land the plane. Maybe this time I’ll say we have to temporarily shelve the book. We’ll be back, listener. We’ll talk about this more often down the road. But before we go, Warwick, there’s a question and I haven’t previewed this question with you. I just want to get your reaction to this question. I want to see your reaction to this question when I ask you, and that’s this. “You’ve had books written about you and the takeover of Fairfax Media. Now you’re writing your own book. Now it’s going to be published. You’ve written your own book. Now it’s going to be published. Tell the listeners which one is more rewarding.”
Warwick F:
I tell you which one is more fun. It is not fun reading books about you. My least favorite book was written in the early nineties called The Man Who Couldn’t Wait. And the idea was if I’d only waited, I would’ve inherited enough shares to be in control of the company one day. And obviously, because there’s a grain of truth in that, that’s particularly painful, but yeah, reality is who knows? But certainly… And my book isn’t, “Look. So there. Here’s my story,” because I’m somewhat unsparing, but it’s a lot more rewarding to write a book about your story, than read other people’s versions and this isn’t it a “Look. So there. I told you so.” It’s quite the reverse, but yeah, it wasn’t easy, but yeah, it’s more fun to have a book. At least you’ve had a chance to express things your way rather than read some other book that’s, yeah, has a different agenda. Put it that way.
Gary S:
Right. And the time is right for this for you in the sense that you have put some tread on your tires since that experience with the takeover and you’ve learned some things. And I think, I mean, is it fair to say had this book been published even five years ago, perhaps that was premature for what you understand now about how to bounce back from crucible experiences? Is that fair, that this is the time, this is the best time for this?
Warwick F:
Yeah. I mean, as a person of faith, I always believe that things happen when they’re meant to happen. I mean, you try your best to move things forward and all that. But yeah, I think this is the time. Certainly in the nineties, I was too shell shocked. I mean, I couldn’t have written a book or even begun to write a book. I didn’t really have enough perspective. 2008, by then life had started turning around for me and I had more perspective. But yeah, I mean, now’s the time. Certainly a couple of decades ago it wouldn’t have been. I couldn’t have written it. I would not have been at all ready to share my story. I mean, it was just about years in which it’s like, “Gosh, if I write the story, what will people think? Will I hurt people’s feelings? And what about this? What about that?” I mean, it’s almost hard for me to remember all of the things I was so fearful of, even back in the 2000s around the time I was thinking of writing the book. So yeah, now is the time.
Gary S:
All right. At that we will close the book for now. For sure, listener, we will continue to talk about this publishing journey that Warwick’s on now that he’s got a contract for it, now that there’s a publisher that we’re working with very closely, he’s working with very closely, Morgan James Publishing. This will be out next year. As soon as we know when that’s going to be, we’ll keep you updated. We’ll make sure you know, so until that time comes that we’re together again on Beyond The Crucible to talk about Crucible Leadership. And the book is called, by the way, Crucible Leadership: Embrace Your Trials to Lead a Life of Significance. That’s the working title right now. So we’re still early in the process, but we’ll keep you updated as we go along things about the book. If you have any questions about the book, visit us at crucibleleadership.com.
Gary S:
There’s a contact form on there. You can email us and we’ll pass those along to Warwick so that he can answer any questions you might have about the book and his experience or about Crucible Leadership. If you enjoyed what you’ve heard on this podcast, if you’re excited about the book and you’re excited about further podcasts where we have guests or Warwick and I are just talking about aspects of Crucible Leadership, we do ask that you would subscribe to the podcast so that you, one, that makes sure you never miss an episode and two, that allows us to get this kind of hope and healing that Warwick was talking about in his own experience, the same thing that he talked about to his church all those years ago, 12 years ago now, it will allow us to get these podcasts into more hands and help more people move beyond their crucible.
Gary S:
So until the next time that we’re together, do remember that Crucible Leaderships are painful. We don’t doubt that. We know that. Warwick has talked about his here today, but they do not have to be the end of your story. In fact, they can be, if you learn the lessons of them, you apply those lessons and you move forward with purpose, they can be the best part of your story. A new chapter, the best new chapter, because it leads at the end of the journey to a life of significance.
A crisis is the ultimate test of your leadership and your character, in particular in your ability to maintain the cohesion of your team. A crisis can be a bit like a centrifuge, which tends to push people away, and dissipate team unity. Whether the team drifts apart or comes together is largely dependent on you, the leader.
We are currently in a health and economic crisis with the coronavirus in much of the world. Additionally, in the U.S. and now in other countries, there are widespread protests over the brutal treatment of an African American man, George Floyd, who was killed while being arrested by police. Concerns about racial injustice is an issue that permeates not just cities and states, but also organizations.
Crises can cause division, be it on racial or ethnic lines, political philosophy or just on what is the best course of action. Some people on your team may believe they know what should be done, often with different plans than you, or they may be fearful and believe that the situation is hopeless.
The job of a leader is to bring calm and to keep the team united and moving forward. Let’s not dwell on the past and how we got here, unless it is germane to figuring out how to proceed. Instead, let’s focus on what we should do next. How can we stay together during this crisis and find our way out of here?
A great example of a leader bringing his team together in a crisis is Ernest Shackleton the British leader of a polar expedition to Antarctica more than 100 years ago. In 1915 Shackleton’s ship was trapped in pack ice. By November of that year, the ice was crushing the ship and the ship sank. Shackleton’s original mission had been to cross Antarctica. His new mission was the survival of his team.
What made moving on from the original mission hard was that Shackleton had gotten his team in this life-threatening mess due to some poor decision-making. He decided to sail south for Antarctica when he was advised that the ice floes were particularly widespread at the time, and to proceed would be very risky. How did Shackleton get his team home? We unpack his remarkable story of overcoming seemingly insurmountable crucibles in an upcoming two-part Beyond the Crucible podcast with Harvard Business School Professor Nancy Koehn, who wrote the book Forged in Crisis, in which Shackleton is one of the featured leaders.
In the current climate you are in, you might be struggling to keep your business afloat, or your restaurant open. Your crisis might not threaten your life or the life of your team as it did with Ernest Shackleton, but it might be very dire to you in different but very real ways.
How do you get your team through a crisis?
1. Take Responsibility
The crisis might be your fault or it may not be. You are the leader. You may feel calm or more likely you may feel terrified and out of your depth. While transparency is often a good thing, in this scenario you need to project calm and that there is a way out. You need to project the belief that survival for your organization and your team is not only possible, but that it will happen.
2. Maintain Inner Health
For you to be able to project the aura of calm, authoritative leadership, you have to do the inner work. In an earlier blog we spoke of how to maintain calm amid fear. We mentioned several tools, be it reflection (prayer or meditation for instance), a walk in nature, listening to music, spending time with loved ones. If you are fortunate enough to have mentors or trusted colleagues outside of your team, they can be a great source of encouragement.
3. Make a Positive Step Forward
Each day or at regular intervals, make one positive step forward. Each small win builds morale in the team. It makes the seemingly impossible, feel just a bit more possible. A series of small wins can add up to considerable progress. Like the flywheel, the more progress you make a bit at a time, can make the energy and enthusiasm of the team grow and can make the progress of the team grow.
4. Be the Engine of Hope
You have to believe! You have to make the team believe that survival and getting out of the mess you are in, is possible. Every day, you have to provide hope. You have to channel your inner Franklin Roosevelt or your inner Winston Churchill. During President Roosevelt’s inaugural address in 1933 in the depth of the Great Depression, he said that “the only thing we have to fear is… fear itself.” Prime Minister Churchill gave a speech to the British Parliament in June 1940, when Britain seemed to be virtually alone against the might of Nazi Germany that was preparing to invade Britain. In this speech, Churchill said, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
While few of us are facing crises at the levels Roosevelt or Churchill faced, and we might think we are not even close to being the kind of leader each of them was, look at what they did. At its heart, they gave their people, their teams, hope. That hope moved mountains. We need to be “dealers in hope,” as another famous leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, once said.
There are other important things you have to do to make a team successful in a crisis, that include good communication and ensuring that each team member knows their role. It is important to encourage the team daily, including conversations of hope and encouragement with each team member. You need to pay attention to team members that may be more difficult, be it because of skepticism about whether “survival” is possible or just because they may be difficult for some to get on with.
Always remember, in a crisis, team divisions are exacerbated. The management of the team, team communications, team member roles are definitely important. But the leadership of the team by you as the leader is paramount. Inspiring hope, even when you are filled with fear, and helping your team take one more step, are the keys to not just survival but to achieving success amidst almost certain defeat.
Reflection
Have you taken responsibility for the crisis you are in, and how are you moving beyond it?
What positive steps forward are you taking each day?
Are you the engine of hope for your team in the crisis, and if not, what ways can you show that not just survival but success is possible?
To explore Beyond the Crucible resources, including our free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment, visit beyondthecrucible.com.
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and leave a comment at our YouTube channel and be sure subscribe and tell your friends and family about us.
Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Growing up in Communist East Germany, Cathleen Merkel was taught her value came from doing what others expected of her, working hard and not upsetting the established order of things. Then the Berlin Wall fell, and she grew from a girl into a woman with dreams and passions of living a free and successful life. There was just one problem: the goals she pursued professionally and personally dead-ended a couple of times and didn’t really fulfill her even when they were going well. So she took a deep look at herself, asked close friends to help her see where she’d veered off course and finally discovered who she really was and what vision she wanted to cast for her life. The result, she tells Crucible Leadership founder and BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE host Warwick Fairfax, is that she has found meaning and significance as a coach and mentor who helps high-achieving female leaders reinvent their lives and careers. She walks alongside them as they realize true joy is rooted not just in job description, but in total life satisfaction.
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and leave a comment at our YouTube channel. And be sure subscribe and tell your friends and family about us.
👉 Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Transcript
Gary S:
Welcome everyone to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Gary Schneeberger, the cohost of the show and the communications director for Crucible leadership, and you have happened upon, you’ve clicked play on a podcast that deals in what we call crucible experiences. Those are the things that happen in life. Sometimes they happen to you. Sometimes there are things that for whatever reason have been caused in your life, and they are painful experiences. They are experiences that can change the trajectory of your life, can make you sometimes feel like you just don’t want to get out of bed, can make you feel sometimes like you want to bury your head in the sand. But we talk about those experiences not so we can wallow in them or not so we can even celebrate them per se. We talk about them to offer hope and healing that there’s another side to those experiences, and we interview guests like the guests that we’re going to interview today who have moved beyond those crucibles, hence the title of our show, to offer you insight from their experience of how you can do the same thing.
Gary S:
With me, as always, thankfully, is the architect of Crucible leadership and the host of the podcast, Warwick Fairfax. Warwick, it’s good to be together again.
Warwick F:
Absolutely, Gary. Great to be here.
Gary S:
So the guest I indicated we were going to be speaking with today is Cathleen Merkel. I’m going to tell you a little bit about Cathleen before we start asking her some questions. As a thought leader in the mindset and self-leadership space, Cathleen supports high-achieving but worn-out women create a more content and balanced life without sacrificing their hard-earned success. Cathleen focuses on women who lost their sense of purpose, who feel they’re running in a hamster wheel trying to please everyone but themselves. She helps you to turn your careers, your social connections and personal life around so that you will start feeling fulfilled and excited again about the days to come.
Gary S:
With over 15 years of experience in retail media and broadcasting, engineering, and property investment, geez, that’s an impressive resume, Cathleen has not only experienced the challenges and opportunities of being a female leader herself. She’s also been leading and supporting various leadership development initiatives within large, complex multinational matrix organizations. I feel very non-qualified to be here. Only by deeply experiencing her very personal life challenges, as she says, hitting a wall experiences, has Cathleen been able to redefine her own purpose, deciding to bring ease and content to as many women as possible on the planet. The best part about that whole bio I just read is she ended it with an exclamation point. She’s excited about what she does. She’s excited about how she’s bounced back from her crucible, and I’m looking forward to the conversation we’re going to have Warwick.
Warwick F:
Well thanks, Gary, and Cathleen, welcome. Wonderful to have you. I’d love to just start hearing a bit about your story as that led up to your crucible experience, but tell us a bit about Cathleen Merkel and your background, who you are and how that led to your crucible.
Cathleen M:
Cool. So first of all, thank you for having me and thank you for a very impressive introduction. It sounded a bit bigger than I still feel. So thanks, Gary.
Gary S:
You’re welcome.
Cathleen M:
Well, I am German born. I was born in East Germany actually in the early ’80s. I never really realized how much my childhood and the way I was raised has characterized my whole path. I never realized it until maybe five, six years ago. I had a very loving kind of childhood. I had fantastic parents, but they were very young when they had my sister and me. They were 19 when they had my sister, and then three years later, I was born. They were quite overwhelmed with us, I would say, being so young. But it was quite normal at the same time for Eastern German times.
Cathleen M:
What was also quite normal for the communist part of Germany was to be raised in a sense of be strong, show up at your best. So I still remember that my parents took us to a restaurant, and my mom would literally sit down with us before we go, how we should behave, and I was three years old and not to make any noise and not to do that and not to do X and not to do Y. It was really, really strict, and it was all about, how are we being perceived. It was not about just enjoy your childhood, be a child, you all be noisy from time to time. That was kind of the characteristic of my whole childhood, loving, but very, very strict, very this is what you should do. This is what I want you to do.
Cathleen M:
It kind of in reflection restricted me understanding who I really was because imagine you grew up that way, then you go to school, then you have a constant competition with your sister who’s better at school, then you have this constant expectation setting off this is how you need to deliver at school and when you come home from school, this is what I want you to do at home because we are working women. So you have to do housework as well and do it perfectly. There were just expectations all the time. I never felt fully enough. I constantly felt I need to ask for acknowledgement for recognition. It caused a lot of trouble at home. It caused me to become a real rebel. I was just really kind of becoming quite an angry child and frustrated child, but more, I kind of nurtured myself with this anger. I didn’t necessarily let it out, and I couldn’t wait for me to leave home.
Cathleen M:
I remember when I was 15, I was saying to my mom, “When I’m 16, can I go to England and become an au pair?” She literally stood in front of me crying, and she was like, “You can not do this, and you will never leave us, and this is not acceptable.” So it was always about us, us, us, but never about, “This is your path.” I don’t blame them. I understand now that this was the culture. This was how my parents were raised as well. It’s okay for me now. But it made me the person I was years ago, in particular, my early 20s when I started my career, and I noticed about myself that I was someone who was very black and white.
Cathleen M:
Someone who was very right or wrong, this is my way, this is how it should be. Someone who was constantly just running towards success, and success, I didn’t even know how to define it as success was literally you have a great job, you are independent, and you can put some money to the side so that at some point, you can buy a house or whatever it is. So I was literally just living along the lines of this life and this definition of success, not quite understanding what I missed out on. Just to dive into different experiences. In Australia, I mean, I just love that people go for a gap year after school, first of all and experience the world a little bit, and then we come back, and then we decide what we’re going to do.
Cathleen M:
I would have loved to do that, but I didn’t because I was just not the person who she could do it and that I really wanted it. I thought, “No, let’s go the safe path.” That’s what my parents taught me.” That really kind of build my path up until I would say my early 30s if not… Yeah, early 30s, 100% that I was that way. I remember that I became really, really brief, when in my mid-20s, I was in a very good role. I was in my first manager role, so looking after two big retail department stores, partnering some senior managers there, all of these things.
Cathleen M:
But at some point, a few things around me happened. First of all, I had a brilliant circle of friends and a lot of them were traveling or living abroad and just testing it. I had this moment of, “I need to go as well.” I just held it inside for years and years that I had to do it. The second thing was my relationship at this point of time, which was significant for me broke down. The third one was that the company changed leadership, changed the culture not in the better way, and at some point, I was indirectly made redundant.
Cathleen M:
So basically, they chose a path to transfer me to a different location I would never go to in order to present to me the choice of, do you want to stay, or do you want to leave, which really hit me, right? You have always been on a success path you have achieved and suddenly in your ’20s, you sit down, and you’re like, “What’s going on right now? This is massive failure. I can’t deal with this.” That was really tough for me, and it took me a few weeks to cry, to feel sorry for myself, to talk to people, all of these things of grieving you go through in certain situations of loss. It was, for me, a loss of the current life as I had lifted.
Cathleen M:
But then it didn’t take me long to follow my gut and to say, “Well, this is also an opportunity, and I’m a huge believer that if a door closes, another door has got to open. You just don’t know yet what the door is going to be.” I opened the door of traveling. So I took my backpack, and I traveled South Africa, and I traveled Ireland in particular. I’ve always had a love for the UK and Ireland, and I went onto this bus tour, and it still makes me smile so much because I went on my own. But on this bus tour, obviously, I met so many people, and a lot of your people were there, lots of Australians-
Warwick F:
Right, a lot of Australians.
Cathleen M:
… Kiwis, some Americans. I was definitely the only German there. That was just absolutely life-changing because I was surrounded by people who lived their lives, who just embraced every day. Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of alcohol involved in those weeks as well. But we had so much fun together, and the most important thing was I suddenly could let loose. I could let my hair down because people were just people with each other. We accepted each other for who we were. There were no expectations of how you should be. Quite a few of the people, and still, I have a lot of friends from that bus tour now who I visit regularly. It’s just brilliant, but a lot of the people said to me, “You’ve got to do what you really want to do, and you are far too young to get stuck into a life that was designed by the people for you. That really stuck with me.
Warwick F:
I mean, that’s an interesting question. Well, I want to cycle back to growing up because that comment, you’ve got to do what you want to do, it’s like, that must have been a very alien concept. What do you mean, I have choice? I don’t understand that word. In a different way, I can relate growing up at a family business. So you mentioned growing up in East Germany. There was it sounded two different influences. Your parents were obviously very strict, had very high expectations. I mean, telling a young child, three years old, you got to be on your best behavior, I mean, they’re three year olds. Come on. Really? I mean, let a kid be a kid, at least at that age.
Warwick F:
But how much of the things that influenced you that helped you form who you were on that high achievement track. How much was the East German communist mindset? How much was your parents? Because it sounds like your parents also… I mean, how much was each influencing you if that makes sense?
Cathleen M:
So my parents have been influencing me up until a certain point, I would say until I left Germany or just a year before when I have learned this transition to change. Because I don’t think I would have achieved, and I would have been as ambitious as I was and still am without the way my parents raised me, to look forward, to make sure you are safe. They have never said you need to be a millionaire or anything like that. Quite the contrary. But they always wanted me to be safe, basically. That means you have to have a secure job and so on and so forth.
Cathleen M:
So I think that made me really successful. Also, they gave me a lot of values, right? Reliability, honesty, trust, community, which is really important to me, i.e., to really stick together, Particularly on my dad’s side, that’s something that’s very important to support each other, to be there for each other, regardless as to whether we go through good times or bad times. The value I discovered for myself, and that’s my strongest value still is freedom. Given that my parents grew up right in Eastern Germany when the wall was up, it was pretty great. They weren’t allowed to travel. My mom was allowed to travel to our Western family from time to time. But we as a family had to stay behind because the state would never let us go as a whole family. So it was always restricted. We were never allowed to go on nice holidays and so on. So they didn’t know anything else. But this restricted life.
Warwick F:
They probably grew up with fear. I mean, at least in the West, you hear about the East German police, the Stasi-
Cathleen M:
Stasi. Yeah.
Warwick F:
… I think they were called. I mean, it’s like, even though if you’re a regular person, why would they care about you? But probably just the fear of what might happen to friends and whispers and rumors. Did you feel that was somewhat of a fearful mindset that yes, be safe, work hard, but-
Cathleen M:
Yeah.
Warwick F:
Yeah. It sounds like the opposite of freedom. I don’t know how you would describe. How would you describe that kind of mentality that your parents especially grew up with and influenced you?
Cathleen M:
So it’s very different because my mom actually grew up in a very Western way. My grandpa was always in business. He owned his own business, and they had a lot of family in the West. So there was always this Western mentality, and she was the one who was allowed to travel from time to time to the family. My dad, however, he was spied on by the Stasi. We found out by reading files afterwards and listening to the tapes that were recorded about our family. He was spied on by his best friend who later hung himself. So there were some really challenging stories in the whole family.
Warwick F:
Oh my gosh.
Cathleen M:
My dad was really restricted, and he was threatened by the Stasi because he was very successful in sports, and he was even considered for the Olympic team. So therefore, they obviously wanted to make sure that he would never go with my mom to the West and all of these things. It was very, very restricted. So what I’ve never experienced, however, was fear necessarily. I don’t know if they simply hadn’t shown it or if they just didn’t have it. But what I noticed and still notice is a very, very restricted mindset.
Cathleen M:
So the best example is when I decided to leave Germany, and I moved to the UK. I gave up the flat, and my dad helped me renovating the flat to hand it over to the next tenant. He said to me, “I have absolutely no idea how you’re doing this. You just take challenges, and you go with the flow, and you go to the next stage in your life and take opportunities.” He still says to me jokingly from time to time, “I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder which family you’re really from,” because I am just so different, my approaching, I think.
Warwick F:
Right. You would understand this, but many listeners wouldn’t just because the wall came down in 89. That was an incredible time, and it’s a long time ago. I remember at the time I had a internship, if you will, at a newspaper actually in Chicago. I was in some editorial meetings. Every week, it was like, “Well, Poland, looks like something’s happening there and Czechoslovakia and Hungary.” It was just incredible. It’s just like, “How is this possible?”| It seemed like a miracle at the time. Then there was, gosh, German unification, is that going to happen? Because both East and West has to approve that. Some of the West were like, “Do we want our poor Eastern cousins coming? It’s all of the money will be sucked into the East.” People are human. I get that, all of that stuff, but that mentality that a lot of East Germans grew up with, that wouldn’t have just ended in 89.
Cathleen M:
No.
Warwick F:
You can’t change the way you think overnight. I’m sure it took years to say, “Is it okay to think for ourselves?” So that had you on a certain mindset, which you’ve talked about success and achievement, which is great. But it felt like freedom wasn’t a concept that evolved later. So talk about how you’re on this track of success and achievement, but then you’ve had a couple of challenges. You mentioned one. I guess you weren’t fired, but they’re kind of almost gave you an offer that you kind of really did want to refuse. It was like, some backwater, and if you had any self-respect, you wouldn’t take it. But talk about how your life changed from the achievement, be responsible to… Yeah, be achieve and be responsible, but a bit of freedom. Talk about how that shifted with some of those crucible experiences.
Cathleen M:
So crucible experiences always make me think. As Gary said before, and I hit a wall, and I hit a wall plenty of times in my life. Some were bigger, and some are smaller. The big walls make me think hugely, and they make me reflect, and they make me step back. Most importantly, what I realize in those situations is the wisdom I have around me. So the biggest influence for me are the people around me. So in those times that I mentioned before I moved to the UK, there’s one significant relationship I was in. He played a huge role in slowly but surely shifting my mindset towards I can make my own choices, and I started doing more of that.
Cathleen M:
The friends I was referring to who lived abroad, they certainly were an eye-opener for me, and I started traveling more, not necessarily always for weeks or months, but just short travels. I always met fantastic people, and I don’t know how it happens. They are still a part of my life. They contributed to the significant change, and they were eyeopening for me. I had just great conversations about what the world has got to offer, and I became more and more curious. So that is one part of him. The other part that happens to me is when I step back and I think about what was just happening, in particular, think about what was going on for me, and that’s also what I do with my clients to help them reflect on what’s happening in your life right now, not just in your career, for example.
Cathleen M:
So what is happening for me? How am I feeling? What does not make me happy? Because often those situations show me, “Hey, what are you doing here?” And really then to reflect on, “Okay, what is it I really want to do and to trust myself that I can make changes happen.” I am someone who absolutely believes you can be in your 80s and 90s. You can still make changes happen to live your most content life. So I moved obviously to the UK, and again, I was surrounded just by brilliant people and people who gave me a very open feedback. I remember in my second role in the UK, in a second organization, I was a manager at this time, but fairly senior manager working with quite some senior stakeholders as well.
Cathleen M:
I remembered that my manager at the time gave me planned feedback. She was far more German than I was, on a very, very regular basis. This feedback included things like, some people don’t dare to approach you. Right? I was, “Oh, yeah. That’s not what I want from anyone. Well, how can that be?” She said, “Well, you can come across quite strong, quite powerful. You have strong opinions, and it can be highly intimidating.” So I realized I was eating my life. I was a strong independent woman. I had experience in different organizations. So therefore, I was absolutely fine sharing those opinions. But my style was quite tough to do for people who were not German, to be quite frank because I was really so direct all the time and was so black and white and all of these things. That put people off.
Cathleen M:
So plus, the second piece was that throughout my childhood, and I said to you before, and I fed myself with anger and with frustration and a lot of sadness as well, when you’re constantly pray for acknowledgement, for recognition, for parents saying, “I’m just proud of you”, regardless, which I haven’t experienced until I was 23, I think. You start building a wall. I certainly did. I build a massive wall around me, and that wall was I didn’t really show who I really was, the real Cathy. Well, I had a strong divide between professional me and personal me. So at work I’m strong and blah, blah, blah and very professional and so on.
Cathleen M:
That really got in my way in particular in terms of leadership. So that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t successful. It doesn’t mean that people didn’t like work with me. But there were also people who said, no, I really don’t like that, and I’m not enjoying working with you, and sometimes I’m a bit scared.
Gary S:
This is a good time. I think to bring up something you and I talked before we began this recording, Cathleen, just a couple of weeks ago. One of the things that you said to me when we were talking about having you on the show was you expressed a little bit of surprise, especially when I told you about Warwick’s story, right? He did the takeover of the family media dynasty in the family for 150 years founded by his great, great grandfather. The takeover failed, lost $2.25 billion, I always like to say with a B. Your response to that was feeling like, “Wow, why would you want me on the show?”
Gary S:
What you just described, though, that emotion that you felt, the wall that you felt around you, the things that you’ve been talking about, I want listeners to focus on that because that’s why you’re on the show. We wanted you because your experience, it’s not so much about the details of your crucibles, whose crucible. It’s not sort of a game of who has the worst crucible. It’s the emotions attached to them. There are so many people listening right now who’ve had crucibles like yours who have not even failed at a job and been fired, but basically been made redundant, been sort of pushed aside for reasons they don’t quite understand.
Gary S:
There’ve been people who’ve been confronted with things about their performance or things about their personality that may be hard to take. Those kinds of emotions are the very things that our listeners are going through and your response to them are the very kinds of things that will help them get over that. I remember one of the things that you said about pursuing the jobs that you were pursuing and success wasn’t everything that you thought it was. Growing up in the environment that you grew up success was a great goal. You aimed at it because it was not something that was easily achieved in Communist Germany. But when you achieved it, and I think a lot of our listeners are there, and I think a lot of your clients are there, you reached for the brass ring and in some sense found that it was kind of lead. Is that fair?
Cathleen M:
Yeah, 100%. I’m really glad that you highlight the emotions because that is for me the most important piece of those moments as well. The emotions I realized in that moment and what I did with them and every crucible moment before me, every wall brought that out of me and dismantled that wall. But I couldn’t have done it alone, and that is the second piece I’m focusing on with my people now and with my clients, I call them my people. So I just love working with them and really being their support mechanism along their ways. But it is building those communities and realizing when you have some great inspirations around you and to really cherish those.
Cathleen M:
But in this moment, I particular spoke about when my boss at this time gave me feedback, I literally hit the wall. I thought about the expectations that other people had on me, how I should behave again. So something that came back from my childhood, how I should present myself in order for those people to feel more comfortable with me being still on a success path. Yeah? This is what you need to deliver and trying really to constantly keep everything in check and being a great leader. So that was big wall number two that hit me down.
Warwick F:
I mean, what’s interesting to me is there’s a couple challenges here. One is when your boss says, “You’re driven, you’re successful, that’s great, but you kind of put people off with the directness and are hard charging.” This is a woman boss, right? Yeah. So it wasn’t like, “Oh, she doesn’t get it.” It’s like, “Okay. Well, I don’t really have that line I can use because she’s where I am in a sense.” Then it’s like, “Gosh, I’ve failed. Right? I haven’t been what I need to be. I have fallen short of the mark. I need to work harder. I need to be more successful. I need to work harder at seeming… get the job done but in a way that helps people embrace it because if people don’t embrace it, stuff doesn’t get done, numbers fall, I’m not successful.”
Warwick F:
But there’s the broader one in which you came to see life isn’t all about just achievement, monetary success, career, position maybe with some of the influences on trips in Ireland and UK and elsewhere and community, you began to see, “Okay. Life is more than just about the brass ring and success.” You can be successful, and I think you’ve said elsewhere, have good health, friends, travel, family. So how did that shift for you? Because you were on that, I think you used the word hamster wheel of success. How did you kind of, as we say both and, right, be successful and actually enjoy life? Because it’s easy to be successful and really be miserable too.
Cathleen M:
Oh 100%, and I was. I was. It’s exactly what you said. You spoke for my soul basically, just this way of, “I need to work harder now because I need to meet those expectations as well.” That was exactly it, and I was in the hamster wheel, and I didn’t see any more what was going on in left and right. I was stuck, so to say. After work, I would go out with friends just to kind of get some distraction. But that was it. I didn’t live healthy. I didn’t really look after myself. I was just focused on delivering.
Cathleen M:
It literally hit me I was close to a burnout. So I was really exhausted. I found myself not being able to sleep anymore for months and months, and therefore, I didn’t necessarily deliver in my best way. Other people would still have said to me, you still go far beyond a hundred percent, but it wasn’t enough for me. So constantly beating myself up, having very toxic relationships, all of these things. I really hit that wall.
Cathleen M:
I remember that I asked my boss as to whether I can take some time off. She said to me, “You need to go home and sleep. You need to take distance from whatever is going on here.” She approved it, and I went traveling again. So I’m not saying, by the way, to your listeners, traveling is the solution for everything. It’s a nice to have. It’s a nice to have, and I’m very, very grateful for my experiences. But solo travels helped me reflect differently. They helped me to disconnect. So whatever the way for you is to disconnect from that situation, make most of it.
Cathleen M:
I went to Indonesia. In particular, I spent quite a bit of time in Bali and basically I Googled solo yoga holidays for women because I wanted to be safe, I wanted to become healthy again, feel good about myself and disconnect. I found this place that I visited since four times, I think, to get a top up because it’s just so beautiful. What I have experienced was I learned how to look after myself, but I only learned to do that because other people started looking after myself there. The people there are just devoted to pay attention to you to make sure you have the best time of your life.
Cathleen M:
I started nourishing my body and my soul again. I had life-coaching sessions. I had nutrition sessions, Ayurvedic. That sounded very German, Ayurvedic. Food and massages and all of these things, and I had a lot of meditation sessions and yoga. But the most important thing was I was surrounded by kindness, unconditional kindness, which I haven’t really received a lot, or I didn’t quite know what that was. I started simply being myself. I remember when I left after three and a half weeks there, one of the guests said to me, “My goodness, it’s beautiful to see the real you.” I was literally standing there in tears because I could feel those walls were gone. I was just feeling so amazing about myself.
Warwick F:
So did you feel like in that moment that for the first time, you met Cathleen Merkel?
Cathleen M:
Yes.
Warwick F:
That you didn’t really know who she was? “So this is who I am? Who knew? Maybe I can smile. Maybe I can forgive myself if I make a mistake.” It’s like-
Cathleen M:
Exactly.
Warwick F:
… that must have been a strange experience to meet yourself in a sense, the real you for the first time.
Cathleen M:
It was strange and beautiful. I actually got goosebumps listening to you describing me. It was just absolutely stunning, and I was crying because I was just so full of gratitude and joy about it. Suddenly, it felt like a rock fell off my shoulders, and it felt light and easy, and life started feeling just super easy. I remember coming back, and I went back to my job. There were two things that had completely changed. No, three actually. The first one was I was to me that I rediscovered there, and I attracted people, and I don’t mean no attraction in a romantic way, but people were more drawn to me, approaching me, and some of them said, “Who are you?” Who knew me before and who were good friends of mine. They took the Mickey out of me, and they noticed that there was a difference.
Cathleen M:
The second thing was I was completely focused on what’s right for me, what do I really want from life? That’s when my coaching education started and that’s when I decided to become a qualified coach and started this journey then. The third one was that the pressure was off. I approached the days with kindness, with openness, and with ease. I still did a good job. But because the way I went about it and that is, for me, pure leadership that comes from within, that comes from a position where you are at ease with yourself, where you’re good to other people and where you have empathy and pure listening skills, and you can just be present with others.
Cathleen M:
Suddenly, work turned out to be far more successful because I could have different levels of conversations, I could challenge differently, and I realized it’s not about having a massive to-do list to work on. It’s about how you are with other people and deliver with those people on the bigger goals.
Warwick F:
It’s interesting you’ve said some profound things I want the listeners to hear. I mean, just part of it was this voyage of self-discovery, just the incredible gift to have a community that loves and cares for you unconditionally. You didn’t have to do anything to earn their love or their friendship. Just being who you are is enough. If you make mistakes, we’re all human. Sometimes we’re impatient, say a cross word, and it’s part of being human. It’s okay. They forgive you, and you forgive them, and that is such a freeing thing, a community that just loves you for who you are.
Warwick F:
The second thing I think you said was amazing is you’re so focused on success. But by focusing less on the outcomes, caring for those around you, still having targets and goals you want to achieve, but by caring for those around you, who knew you became even more successful. By letting go, you soared even higher. I mean, it’s truly remarkable. Yeah. I mean, I want to switch gears here and talk about what you’re doing now, but there was a couple of epiphanies if you will, a couple of turning points, right? The community that loves you unconditionally and by letting go sort of open hands, empathizing with people, you became more successful. I mean, do you reflect back and say that was some remarkable learning that you went through, it’s a remarkable growth?
Cathleen M:
Yeah. Sometimes I still have situations when old Cathy and new Cathy come together, and I fall into old habits. But what’s really lovely now is I remember that letting go is the key. When I am kind of bound up about something or I try to put too much pressure on something, the moment is really beautiful when I’m able to step back because I now have a trigger. I realize inside of me when the moment has come, and I wait for a few days, and then things fall into place. It’s just absolutely brilliant. It’s got a lot to do with your mindset and obviously your self-belief and also realizing, hey, not everything necessarily goes in the direction that you had planned. Right? But that’s life, and that’s discovery as well. So yeah, 100% loads of epiphany moments that still accompany me every day.
Warwick F:
So talk a bit about what you’re doing now. Because what’s so exciting to me is often in crucibles, we go through something, and we want to help others, fellow travelers if you will, and which is a good metaphor to use since you love traveling. I get it. I kind of like traveling a bit myself. But I love the way that you’re using what you’ve been through to help others, and in particular, women business leaders because you understand that mindset of wanting to achieve and it’s still not easy for women business leaders, even in the 21st century. A lot of barriers and just preconceptions, and yes, be successful but yet be whole human beings with health and family and friends.
Warwick F:
There’s probably a lot of your people as you put it, your clients who you talk about, and it’s like, “Well, how do you do that Cathleen?” I mean, if I back off, it’s much harder for me than the guys I work with. I’m sure that you will hear that. I’m sure that’s true. So I can’t afford to back off. If I back off for a minute, I’m off the track. When I’m off the track, you’re permanently off-track. I’ll never be VP, senior VP, CEO, whatever. So when you work with these folks, how do you get them to change their mindset and be what for you is the real Cathleen? For them, it might be the real Mary, the real whoever it is. How do you get them to change the mindset, that you can be successful but yet be whole?
Cathleen M:
That’s a journey for everyone. So first of all, for me, it’s important that I don’t get them to change their mindset. They want to do that so that they come to me usually when there are at their own breaking point. So they realize something is completely off here right now. One of my clients, I’m not going to use any names obviously, but she came to me, and she said, “My whole life feels completely off. I gained more and more weight. I feel really uncomfortable in my own skin. I have hardly any time for my kids. I’m working 24/7, and actually, I don’t love the job.” But again, this is the habit we moved ourselves into, right? We run, we run, run, and we want to be successful at work because that gives us the quickest acknowledgement and reward. So therefore, we keep doing that.
Cathleen M:
What we started with is really to reflect up on the whole life and to say, “Okay, what are the areas that you feel really passionate about that work really well for you and that rock your boat basically.” But we also look at the areas where people or those women in particular are missing out, and they say, “This is not enough for me. I’m not putting enough effort into it,” or, “I’ve kind of totally forgotten about it.” And then really highlight the whole person here. So that’s something really important. I work with female leaders across industries and to run their own businesses or who work in organizations. All of them usually come to me with, “I need to do something about my career.” As soon as we look at the whole life because they are one person and not someone as I described before and who is different at work and different in their personal lives, then they realize, “Oh there’s more to it than my career. I lost purpose in my life, and I lost connection with myself.” So that is number one.
Cathleen M:
Number two is also that we remember a lot, who are you at your best? When did you enjoy yourself the most? So if you were your best friend, basically, what have you experienced at this time? Then I have massive aha moments in terms of, oh wow, that’s years ago. What was present in this time? What was different about your life? Then slowly but surely build a plan to say, “How can we get there again with the current circumstances?” What we do along the way is we talk a lot about mindset, about creating healthy habits. We talk a lot about boundaries.
Cathleen M:
So something that I have never understood until a few years ago that I’m now helping my clients with is to set healthy boundaries step by step. I’m not saying to a woman who worked 16 hours a day and who really struggles to switch off, now, please work seven and a half hours a day. It’s completely unrealistic. So we need to start somewhere and then slowly but surely kind of help them to step back from I’m only at work. That we can only do by exploring obviously the support network around them and to say, “Okay, who can help?” Or, “Is everything really as necessary and important as it seems to be? Where does this need for delivering in this area come from?” So needs are being explored and so on.
Cathleen M:
We are looking into the future where you build a really compelling vision. That’s the most important thing. Where are we heading towards? Who is the person that I want to be? Along that path, there are loads of tears, and there is a lot excitement at the same time because I’m helping out these women to dismantle the wall and to really break it down. I have cried a lot, and those tears were so healing and helpful, and it happens to those women as well. What is needed, however, is a lot of kindness. So my clients often say to me, “My goodness, you’re really direct and challenging, but you do it in such a kind and empathetic way.” So the kindness I received, I 100% give back.
Cathleen M:
I want them to feel non-judge because they are the biggest judges. So I don’t want to give at anything to, and I want to make them feel at ease. So the personality and the way I approach this is really important. I do that, and that’s the last piece, one-to-one, but I love working groups. So bringing different women from different backgrounds together and work with them as a community and build the community so that they know, A, I’m not alone, and B, I can get support literally by just looking around me and opening up more and talking about it. It’s okay.
Warwick F:
You know what? As you’re talking, there’s so much wisdom that you’re communicating. I almost feel like your role is you’re an advocate for these women leaders. You were there to try and help them be who they want to be. We often live our lives based on shoulds. “I should do this, I should do that.” But it’s like, “Well, but what do you want to do? Where were you most joyful in life?” It’s like, “Well, no, but I’m not allowed to be joyful.” That’s wrong. Okay? It’s about duty. It’s about obligation. It’s about performance. That’s what it’s about, which you obviously grew up in one sense and helping them say it’s okay to be your best self. It’s okay to do what you want to do. Life’s about choices.
Warwick F:
They might say, “You know what? When I was most joyful, I was helping with a local nonprofit, maybe a food pantry.” But it’s like, “Well, I can’t do that.” Well, the income might be a lot lower, but if that’s what you passionate about, is it really all about money? If that’s what you want to do, why is that wrong? Or, “Gee, maybe I’d like to teach.” Well, teachers make almost nothing. It’s like, well, that’s okay if that’s what you want to do. If you want to keep doing what you’re doing but think differently, great. But it sounds like you were really an advocate for women leaders be who they want to be and you help eradicate that awful word, should, an obligation. Does that make sense?
Cathleen M:
100%, yes. I really feel you get me and what I’m saying. So it makes 100% sense. One piece I want to add to that is now we have obviously the additional facet of a lot of women trying to get into more senior roles, and there’s obviously the topic around equality between male and female leaders. That’s absolutely important to talk about. But I spoke to a female leader, highly successful this morning, and she said, “Oh my God, it’s so nice to be in a position where I know I can be my most authentic self and actually be successful with it.” I thought I have to be really powerful and strong and almost male. This is something I wanted really be an ambassador for as well. Be you.
Warwick F:
What you’re saying, I think one of the most important things I think we’ve discussed is obviously, my upbringing is radically different growing up in a family media business. But the last thing I thought I could do is be me. I had to fill a role and be some Rupert Murdoch, take no prisoners executive, and I’m more of a reflective advisor, listener kind of person. It’s a terrible fit. But it’s just the more that we are us, the more successful we are. It’s a misnomer, at least from my perspective, that people in general, men and women want you to be a certain way. If you’re who you are, you’ll actually be more successful. You found that in your own life.
Warwick F:
So it’s like, stop trying to live up to male expectations, people expectations. Be who you are. Maybe I’m idealistic and optimistic, but I actually think if anything, you’ll be more successful if you’re authentic. Because when you’re authentic and vulnerable, it makes you approachable. If you’re approachable, you get on with people. If you get on with people, well, you have that successful team. Does that make sense?
Cathleen M:
Totally. Yeah.
Warwick F:
Being who you are doesn’t make you less successful. It’ll probably make you more successful. Take a risk. Be you, right? You probably tell every person you deal with, right? Be you. Take a risk. It might work. They just-
Cathleen M:
Yeah. My slogan is to be the real you. Yes.
Warwick F:
They just might like you. Right?
Cathleen M:
Exactly.
Gary S:
That is a great opportunity now. What was just shared between you guys is a great place for us to begin the process of landing the plane. We’re not going to land it yet. The fasten seatbelt, sign is on. But we’re starting to begin our descent. But one of the things I love about interviews that we do on this show is when… Because very few people have the experience that Warwick has had. But to have a guest on like you Cathleen who basically I was going to jump in and make the point that you made Warwick is that you didn’t feel like you could be you, right? From the moment you were born, literally, you were the heir apparent to the family media dynasty. You could not be you.
Gary S:
Cathleen, you felt that same sort of thing, and you certainly work with people who feel that same sort of thing in different ways. There are listeners out there who are in the same boat, who feel like they, male and female, they can’t be themselves. One of the things that you guys both talk about, and this is my favorite part of the show is when two people who haven’t met before, Warwick and the guest talk about the same things in the same ways without ever having compared notes. What you’re both describing is a life of significance. That’s what we call it in Crucible leadership.
Gary S:
What you are leading your clients to, Cathleen, is significance beyond job description, right? Life beyond job description. That’s where significance is found. Success can be found in job description in a certain sense. But significance and success is found in a life that extends beyond, not instead of job description, but beyond the job description. Is that right?
Cathleen M:
Loving this. I want to write that down. Yes.
Warwick F:
Yeah. I mean, yeah. Obviously, we talk a lot about significance here. Yeah. I mean, for much of my life, it was all about making sure that I fit a certain role and a bit like you. I worked very hard, got good grades in school, did my undergrad at Oxford, worked on Wall Street, then got a grad degree at Harvard business school. I mean, it’s check the box, be… Just do whatever it takes to fit the roles. I was gung ho on that.
Warwick F:
But realizing I grew up in a very wealthy background. As much status, prestige, and wealth, as I guess you could probably want. Maybe there’s never enough. We had a lot of all of the above. We were old money. But one of the things I’ve realized is success doesn’t satisfy. There’s always another rung. Even as a CEO, there’s always somebody that’s better, quicker, faster, got better numbers, got more market share, got more this, more that.
Warwick F:
It’s like an athlete. You’re never going to be the… It’d be one or two that might be the greatest of all time, whether it’s Roger Federer in tennis or whoever. But there aren’t too many that is going to say, “Yeah. I was the greatest of all time.” Really? Really? But what satisfies is significance, which to me is living a life on purpose and helping others. That’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re using your experience and your background to help other women leaders be their true selves, which I’m sure fills you with more joy than you could possibly describe.
Cathleen M:
100%.
Warwick F:
The act of helping people. That is a life of significance. You wake up every day thinking, “Who can I help today? What joy is going to come my way as I help unlock peoples’ inner potential in themselves.” Does that kind of resonate?
Cathleen M:
Yeah. Exactly. That’s exactly it. I fulfill my purpose by helping other people fulfill their purposes. But also, it’s just so hugely rewarding when you see people grow and develop and stepping out of their shoulds. As you know, right, it’s just beautiful, and suddenly, there’s a sense of calm inside of me that says, “This is all okay.” Now, realize that actually this morning, we are in the middle of the coronavirus outbreak, right? There’s quite a bit of crisis around us here. We are on proper lockdown. I hear a lot of panic, and I see a lot of panic and people become more and more nervous.
Cathleen M:
I realize in myself that I’m super calm and just like it’s going to be okay, and I’m focusing on all the good things, and that is, we can give back. We can support others. We can really help people reflect upon their lives because of the situation. If they haven’t done it before, this is now a massive opportunity to have your own breakthrough moments. That is just more valuable than any money in the bank account. That’s what makes my life now far more purposeful.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. A life on purpose focused on others. It brings such joy. As you say, when we’re all stuck at home and sheltering in place, this is a time of forced reflection. Like it or not, of, what is my life about? Yeah. Life on purpose focused on others, it’s really the secret to joy, and everybody wants joy and significance in life, right?
Cathleen M:
Yeah. I hope so.
Warwick F:
So yeah. Well, they may be don’t realize that. Maybe you didn’t realize it growing up. But there was an inner voice saying, “I want to be me. I want that joy of just freedom and helping others.” You have a wonderful journey, right? The wall loosely has broken down, but literally and figuratively, right?
Gary S:
I’m a smart enough communicator to know when kind of the last word has been spoken. That was a great last word talking, from where we started, about the communist Germany, a situation in the Berlin wall and now the other walls that have come down in your life and in the lives of your clients. I would be remiss as the runway comes into clearer focus if I did not let you, Cathleen, let our listeners know how they can get in touch with you so that they can engage you if they’re so inclined. So how can people find you?
Cathleen M:
Yeah, sure. So first of all, there’s the website, that’s cathleenmerkel.com. You find me on Instagram and Facebook under Cathleen Merkel and LinkedIn obviously as well. Join my Facebook group that’s called Legendary Leaders. That’s the community for females in leadership. It doesn’t have to be an organizational leadership role, but if you want to be a part of a great community, that’s the place. Last but not least, I’m a fellow podcaster too. So tune in. I hope my podcasts episodes really inspire you to live your best life and to liberate yourself from all the shoulds, and the name of it is Legendary Leaders.
Gary S:
I mean, I knew already that you were a podcaster. But if people are watching this on YouTube, you can tell that all of us are podcasters because we have these really big microphones. So it’s clearly we’re not… If we’re doing Zoom meetings in the midst of this pandemic, we all have big microphones that we’re just talking to our friends with because we have them. So I am going to land the plane at that point. One of the things I want to do for you, listeners is give you some takeaways of what Cathleen and Warwick have talked about today. I think they’re three really strong main points from Cathleen’s story that I think can benefit you in your own crucible experience.
Gary S:
The first is take time to heal after you’ve had a crucible. You can wait. You truly can wait to hop on the horse again. The main reason to wait is to heal and to make sure that’s the horse you want to ride. That’s Cathleen’s story. She waited, she didn’t go right back into the same thing she was going after, and take time to heal after your crucible. That’s the first point. The second point that was made throughout this conversation by both Warwick and Cathleen is to lean into the people around you after your crucible experience. They will give you hope. They will give you resilience. They will give you insight. The kinds of insight they will give you is not only insight into the things that you do well, but insight into those things that you might be able to work on so that you can do them well down the road even better than you’ve been doing them. That can make a huge impact in how you move as we call the show beyond your crucible experience.
Gary S:
The final point I want to make sure we hit and summarize for people because we talked about it in detail here is it’s okay. It’s okay, listener to reach for the brass ring. Absolutely, it’s okay. Warwick said many times he’s not anti-success. Cathleen, clearly not anti-success. She’s working with very successful clients. But when you reach for that brass ring, make sure it’s truly brass. Make sure it’s not lead. Make sure it’s not only focused on the monetary aspects of things or the professional aspects of things or the job description aspects of things. Make room, make opportunity to help other people and to find what Warwick calls a life of significance and what I can tell Cathleen agrees is a life of true significance.
Gary S:
That will wrap us up on this episode of Beyond the Crucible. Warwick and I would like to ask you listener to do a favor for us, and that is, on the podcast app that you’re listening to this right now, if you click subscribe, that will ensure a couple of things. One, it will ensure that you’ll never miss an episode of our podcast. You’ll never miss an episode of Beyond the Crucible. The second thing it will do, it will allow us to reach more people with truly inspiring stories like what Cathleen has shared here today.
Gary S:
I have to say to you, Cathleen, before we sign off that I’ve done this with Warwick now about 20 times we’ve done interviews with people. I have never seen him more relaxed or perhaps more inspired in the context of a conversation than he was here in talking with you, and that is a testament to both your experience and your story with the way you articulated and the hope you offer. You guys are singing from the exact same page of the song book when it comes to that. So thank you for that.
Gary S:
Listeners, thank you for spending this last hour with us. Remember, yes, crucible experiences come up in your life. Yes, they’re difficult. But they are not the end of your story, far from it. They can be as Cathleen described, as Warwick has described, and then they’re both living proof of this. Crucible experiences can be, if you learn the lessons of them, if you apply the lessons of them and you point yourself in a direction that allows you to move beyond them, they can be the start of an entirely new chapter in your life, an entirely… You can discover the true you as Cathleen did, the true Cathy, as she said. You can describe the true you or find the true you by pointing yourself toward a life of significance.
Tommy Breedlove isn’t one to make excuses. Yes, the physical and emotional violence he endured as a boy led him to become violent himself as a teen, landing him in jail for his 19th birthday. But when he was mentored by a fellow inmate and inspired to avoid another trip behind bars, he took responsibility for his recovery. He toiled at low-wage jobs by day and studied hard at night, landing a position at a prestigious financial services firm just three years later. And yet, while his career skyrocketed — promotions, pay raises, the respect of his bosses and envy of his colleagues — the bottom fell out of his life again at 36. Lying in a ditch, unsure how he got there literally and figuratively, he once again had to summon the strength and courage to bounce back. In the aftermath of this second setback, he tells Crucible Leadership founder and BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE host Warwick Fairfax, Breedlove decided to strip himself of all the identify-hiding masks he’d worn on his way up the corporate ladder — and discovered how to love himself and let others love who he really was. Those breakthroughs have led him to a rewarding career as a best-selling author and in-demand leadership coach and speaker, sharing with clients and audiences his hard-earned insights on discovering their life’s purpose and living legendary lives.
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👉 Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Transcript
Gary S:
Welcome, everyone, to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Gary Schneeberger here, the co-host of the show and the Communications Director for Crucible Leadership, and you have hit PLAY, you have, we hope, hit Subscribe to a podcast that talks about our crucible experiences. Those are those moments in life, those failures, setbacks, those painful things that can happen in our lives that can change the trajectory of our lives, can really lead us to places where we sometimes don’t feel like moving on. But what we talk about here, why we talk about them here, is to encourage you, listener, to move on, and we interview guests, who have done that very thing.
Gary S:
And with me, as always, is the architect of Crucible Leadership, Warwick Fairfax. Warwick, I predict we will have, and you’ll understand why I’m saying this, listener in a bit, I predict we’re going to have a legendary show today.
Warwick F:
Absolutely, Gary. Well said.
Gary S:
And the reason that I use legendary, listener, you’ll hear as I read the bio of our guest, Tommy, who has the coolest last name ever, Tommy Breedlove. Tommy Breedlove is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author of the book, Legendary, and Atlanta-based business relationship and mindset coach, who is a regular featured keynote speaker at global events. Tommy started his 20-year corporate career at one of the largest financial consulting firms in the world and eventually became a shareholder, the international practice leader, and a member of the board of directors for one of the largest public accounting and financial firms in the Southeast US.
Gary S:
At the top of his career, Tommy experienced a transformational moment, inspiring him to walk away from the corporate world, to change his life, and follow his true calling. Tommy now serves clients and audiences everywhere by empowering them to build and live Legendary lives. He guides people to discover a life of significance. You’ve heard that before, listeners, here at Beyond the Crucible. He guides people to discover a life of significance while building a lasting legacy. The simple tools he shares shows them how to work in their zone of brilliance, obtain financial freedom, and live with meaning and balance. The goal is to help everybody to become the person they’ve always wanted to be.
Gary S:
When Tommy isn’t speaking or serving his clients, he enjoys traveling the world, hiking, and spending quality time with his wife and two dogs. And I will add, Tommy didn’t write this in his bio, but I will add that by the time our time is over today, listener, you will realize that Tommy Breedlove is a beautiful human.
Tommy B:
Oh, yes.
Warwick F:
Wow, thank you, Gary and Tommy. Awesome to have you. I just love the whole concept of Legendary leadership and helping people live lives of meaning and significance. I’d love to get into that here in a bit, but I like to start with your story, and in particular, I think you’ve had a couple of crucible experiences. Tell us a bit about Tommy Breedlove and who you were growing up and just some of those early experiences as they formed who you are, or who you were, anyway.
Tommy B:
I’d be happy to, Warwick and Gary, and it’s honor to be here. You guys are my people.
Warwick F:
Yeah, thank you.
Tommy B:
I could just tell you’re in my tribe the first time we spoke, so I’m super thankful and grateful to be here. And by the way, I’ve been asked this so many times lately, Breedlove, I was born with that name. It’s not a name that I came up with. It’s actually legitimate. I was born with it. But for some reason, I get asked that a lot, especially at the grocery store. “Is that your real name?” I’m like, “Yeah. I was born with that.” So thank you.
Tommy B:
So I’ll start at the beginning, Warwick. I grew up in humble beginnings in South Atlanta in the Southeast United States in the State of Georgia, and it was a good hard-working part of town, but not many people from that area went to college, graduated college, and would be what I’d call in the professional world. They were mostly mechanics, worked at the airlines, Coca-Cola, Ford Motor Company, and just good, solid, hard-working part of the world. And my mom and dad always wanted something more for me, and so I had incentive to be the first person to ever go to college and graduate college and to be a little bit more than what my family was before, just in the terms of financial and money success.
Tommy B:
Unfortunately, inside and out of this home, I grew up with a significant amount of abuse of all kinds and of violence. And so the worst thing that happens to a young child when they grow up in that particular, they never feel any safety inside or out of the home. Unfortunately, I became what I hated, and I became the violence. So instead of at 18 years old, me heading off to college to be the first person in my family to go into this new charted territory, I unfortunately committed a violent crime, was charge with two felonies, and looking at seven years in prison and thought my life was over.
Tommy B:
Fortunately, due to some luck and some good lawyering, it was dropped down to two heavy misdemeanors. I was sentenced to two years and ended up spending my 19th birthday incarcerated. So that’s the first crucible moment I had in my life, and I’ll go ahead and go to the second one, but I want to talk about a little bit about what it was like to be incarcerated. The most amazing thing happened to me there is an African-American gentleman stepped across racial lines, which is very unusual in an incarceration setting, stepped over the lines, he saw something in me, he loved me, he mentored me, he coached me, and he said, “You’re not going to end up like me, and you’re not going to end up in this revolving-door system.”
Tommy B:
And so it was the first strong male mentorship that really had appeared in my life, and because of his guidance, his grace, and his love, I picked myself up, dusted myself off, got out, and went to work, listen to this, for a nuclear waste container factory during the day. Very hard work for $6 an hour. Went to community college at night, ended back at the University of Georgia, and then I went from literally jail to Deloitte, which is one of the largest financial consulting and public accounting firms in the world, in three years just by hard work, not wanting to go back in that system, and getting rid of that violence out of my life.
Tommy B:
So let’s fast forward to crucible number two. So I was just going to be that guy that out-worked you. I came from a different part of the tracks. Here I am in the top of the game in one of the largest financial institutions in the world. So I was just going to out-work, out-hustle, and out-move people, and I did. So fast forward until I was 36 years old, I had moved on to a different firm, but there I was, corner office all of glass, fancy cuff links, nice car, you name it, power, prestige, money, what I thought was going to make me happy in life. And I’m not one of those people that don’t think money’s important. I think it’s very important, but for me, as a young man, I was living the life that wasn’t me. I was wearing all of these masks and armor, I was the tough guy, the cool guy, important guy, couldn’t-ask-for-help guy, couldn’t-show-weakness guy. And it was all because I didn’t deal with those wounds and demons and mistakes from my past.
Tommy B:
And so when the money, the title, the success, the next big paycheck, or the prestige, when that wouldn’t fill me up, I turned to everything else, all the darkness that you read about and see about in the Wolf of Wall Street and all these other horrible stories. And there I was at 36 years old almost at the top of my game in my career, and found myself laying in a ditch in Atlanta, Georgia, in downtown Atlanta, staring up at the blue sky, asking myself, “Why did I get here, who am I, and where am I going?” And just really, I don’t know if it was that little boy who never thought he had a chance, I don’t know if it was some divine power, but every fiber in my body says, “You’ve got to get up, and you’ve got to fix this.”
Tommy B:
And so that was crucible two at my moment. I get up, and I went, some people call it, well, the sexy word is a spiritual transformation. Really what it was was hitting rock bottom, and I decided to do something about it. Took massive action in my life, personally, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and eventually, the most amazing thing happens to me when I just became me, when I just became Tommy, and felt self-confidence, self-respect, unconditional love for myself. My marriage became the best that it had ever been, my network and friendships increased 10X, negative influences disappeared out of my life, and financially and business, I went from junior partner to senior partner, to board of directors, to running the international practice of this large firm. Literally 5X’ing my income in three years just by being a decent human being, living with significance and integrity.
Tommy B:
And at that point, all of these alpha men and women started reaching out to me from my network, and said, “Look, man. You didn’t give up your drive and ambition, but you seem more at peace, your relationship is the best it’s ever been, you seem more fulfilled. What drug are you taking, and how do I do that?” They thought there was just some quick easy fix. And by about the 20th person, I realized, “This is my calling. This is my career.”
Tommy B:
So I decided to walk away from the game and do one-on-one business relationship and mindset coaching. I run retreats, I run Master Minds, I do a lot of public speaking. Eventually, the tools and systems that I found that changed my life, that I’ve seen change countless of others’, really from a state of making them the best human they could possible be, that’s how this book, Legendary, came to be. It’s a simple read with a lot of simple tools of how do we live our best life from purpose to time to mindset to unconditional love to financial confidence to intimate relationships with our significant others. It’s a simple playbook and tools and stories of how I did it and how countless of others have done it through this system.
Tommy B:
And so those were the two crucible moments in my life, and Warwick and Gary, I’ll let you take it from here.
Warwick F:
Wow. That is an amazing story. So our bounce back is often informed by the crucibles that you went through. Your second crucible was undoubtedly influenced by your first crucible. So talk about that. As you were growing up, you mentioned you suffered abuse. I think from what I understand, were you bullied at school? Some kids are captain of the football team, and others are picked on. Talk about who you were, because that probably influenced your self-image. Who were you as a kid growing up?
Tommy B:
Really good question. So it flipped. I went from being the skinniest, youngest kid in an all-boy neighborhood, usually between one and three years younger than everyone else, to a big alpha kid, because I became tough and cool. So I went from being this nerdy picked-on kid, and when we switched high schools, I became the cool kid. But I want to step back because the violence for me, there was a lot of bullying in my neighborhood, because it’s an all-boy neighborhood, good hard blue-collar part of the world. I would consider that more normal than not normal. I know that sounds probably weird in these times, but that’s just how we grew up as young men. We liked to beat each other up, and I happened to be the youngest skinniest. The problem was what was happening inside the home.
Tommy B:
There was a very close family member that I experienced every type of abuse you can imagine, and that was the part that was simply overcome. So because of that, I was able to become what I call like a chameleon. If I was around the cool kids, I could become the cool kid. If I was around the nerdy kids, I could become a nerdy kid. I could literally from a humor to a fun to, again, wearing all this armor just to survive, I became that kid, so I went from being the nerdy, picked-on kid in the neighborhood.
Tommy B:
That part of the world during that time, there was a lot of racial friction and violence as well, so I experienced that in and out of school, in the playgrounds, on the streets, and so that made it very difficult. And what I was told way later in life is I never felt this sense of safety. But I never dealt with those wounds and those insecurities and those fears that come up for you, and we have all them, we all have our mistakes, we all have our wounds, we’ve all had things done to us. Some more extreme than others, but there all very real, and they all change us.
Tommy B:
So fast forward to high school when I became the cool kid, and even at school, I probably look like I had it going on, but I started running with the wrong kids at night, more violent kids, more kids getting into alcohol and drugs. And then they started carrying guns, and then we were fighting. And I was very thankful that I committed that violent, I wasn’t thankful that I hurt someone, but I was very thankful that it happened when it happened, because it changed my life because I would’ve probably ended up in a ditch and dead if I would’ve kept running with the same crew that I was running with.
Warwick F:
So listening to your story, I just wonder who was a young Tommy Breedlove? I would imagine abuse just robs you of your soul, of who am I as a person. When you put on masks, sometimes it’s like, well, who was the real Tommy beneath the mask. Did you even know who you were as a young kid or as an adolescent?
Tommy B:
That’s a great question, and it’s interesting. I’m going to fast forward and then come back to the question. Once I hit college and into my professional financial consulting and public accounting career, it was like my childhood didn’t exist. I guess it was this unconscious mental block. It went away. I never talked about it, I never addressed it, I never talked about my childhood or the friends. And so it became this unconscious mental block or wall or armor, because I didn’t want to deal with that. I’m just moving forward now. And so as a young man, if I had to look back and take an educated guess is I became whatever I needed to become. And so there was no authenticity, there was no vulnerability.
Tommy B:
It’s interesting. I don’t know how everyone feels about this. My sister’s also had challenges throughout her life. It’s interesting how we’ve dealt with them. She simply is, in my opinion, in denial. She says those things didn’t exist, those didn’t happen, but if you look at the trend of our lives and how unproductive and the mistakes that we’ve made, they tend to, she experienced the same thing I did, but she just never chose to deal with them in the way that I dealt with them. And so for me, I think it was because I became whatever I needed to become, whether it was at home, whether it was on the street, whether it was at school. I just needed to fit in, and I needed to be liked, because I knew if I didn’t fit in and I wasn’t liked, the consequences were horrific if not severe.
Tommy B:
And I think, regardless of the type of abuse that you experience, I think the worst is what gets down in your soul, into your emotional, and when you start believing, and I’m going to say something pretty harsh here, so forgive your audience. I hope this doesn’t come across, but it’s true. When you’re told you’re a piece of shit as a young puppy, and you start believing it, there’s nothing more soul-sucking. So you do everything in your power with your mask and your armor to prove you’re not that. But deep down in your soul and spine, you do believe that’s who you are, and it creates a really tough thing to overcome when you at your core have been told and taught and it beat into you at a young age, it’s really hard to overcome that.
Gary S:
Is safe to say, Tommy, based on what you just said, that you don’t know who you really are, you’re wearing masks all the time. Is it safe to say that that guy who wore the cuff links, the cuff links in the corner office, that was part of a mask, that was a different mask?
Tommy B:
Totally. It was a mask. The jokes, the constant … I was still the kid in the locker room, how we talked to each other, how we treated each other, not asking for help. The fancy ties, the suits, the watches, the cars, it was all armor. It was all shiny things. It was literally that little boy, saying, “See me, hear me, love me. And I’m valuable, and I’m important. See? See how fancy I am? See how cool I am? See how big my office is? Oh, look. I have a TV hanging from the ceiling. Oh, look. Here’s my title.” And if I would’ve been someone who had a lot of self-confidence and self-respect, those things would’ve been like, “Hey, I earned these.” But for me, it was a mask. It was just simply tools to make me hopefully feel better. The problem is they would only make me feel better for a second.
Warwick F:
Sadly, some really important lessons. The tragedy is whether it’s the abuse of being told that you were worthless, it robs you of your soul, it robs you of your individuality. If somebody had said back then, “Who was the real Tommy?” You might’ve said, “I have no idea,” if you gave truth serum so that you didn’t just joke about and just fob it off or something. And for any individual to say they don’t know who they truly are, and that just robs you of your soul, of your individuality.
Warwick F:
Me, I obviously grew up radically different. As listeners will know, I grew up in a wealthy family media business in Australia, which couldn’t be more different. But yet, not quite the same as you. I’ve had close family members at times say, “Yep, you’re wonderful.” At other times, you’re kind of worthless, or somewhere along those lines, and certainly in that environment, who you are as an individual was irrelevant. It’s like, “Okay, there’s a goal. You have to run this 150 year old, several thousand person organization, and there’s a person you have to be. Therefore, equip yourself to be that person.” So what mask do you need?
Warwick F:
In my case, it was the corporate mask, so Oxford, Wall Street, Harvard Business School. Off you go. So what I wanted to do as an individual, which we’ll talk about later in terms of your passion and your design and your skills, totally irrelevant. So even though we couldn’t have grown up more different, that sense of “I don’t know who I am,” that is a terrible, terrible feeling. Obviously, I don’t know your family, but I think, at the risk of offering a value judgment, I think you’ve chosen the better course.
Tommy B:
Indeed.
Warwick F:
Even to other family members, because it’s easy to say, “I’m not going to deal with it.” If you don’t deal with it, it’s this chain around your neck your whole life. And so I’m sure it wasn’t easy to get through it, but I’m sure you have a much better idea now of who Tommy Breedlove is than you did when you were a kid.
Tommy B:
Yeah. Absolutely. And I want to say this, Warwick, and it’s interesting to say. The consequences were almost my life, twice, literally, whether it would’ve been in a jail cell, and who knows what happens to that, or a revolving-door system into the penal code, or just flat losing my life at 37. So it came with severe consequences. I think you brought up a good point. I don’t know how this happened, but I’m thankful it happened. It’s interesting the way you were growing up. Two things that have fallen in my lap. I have my general coaching mindset relationship, but I also have these niche practices that I don’t really advertise, because these people don’t like you to advertise this.
Tommy B:
Legacy wealth families, as well as celebrities and celebrity adolescent kids, have fallen in my lap, and it doesn’t mean that the pressures, the shadows that you have to live in, the almost unreal expectations and pressures from family that they put on themselves, and with those responsibilities and those pressures come real challenges, real insecurities, real fears, but we can’t ever let them see you sweat. And so I hear this on a regular basis is it doesn’t, and I want to say this for anyone for listening, it doesn’t matter where you come from or what your story is, we all have our story, we all have our wounds, we all have our mistakes, we all have our fears, and we all have our insecurities, and they’re all very real, they are all very relevant, and we can’t compare and compete ourselves to others, because our story is ours.
Tommy B:
And if you asked a million people to put their mistakes and tragedies and wounds into a pile and go pick them back up, pick up someone else’s, they won’t pick up someone else’s, because we know our wounds, right? But it doesn’t make them any less, it doesn’t make them any more unimportant, but I want people to hear this, too, is that you’re not alone. You’re not alone, you’re not alone in your fears, your insecurities, your wounds, and it’s never too late to stop living that story that we’ve been telling ourselves and start living our lives. So I do want to put some hope out there as well.
Warwick F:
No. I think that’s well said. I want to get to Legendary leadership here in a moment, but just to fast forward to the second crucible, there’s a lot of folks out there, a lot of listeners, that they want to be successful, and like you, there’s nothing wrong with being successful, but in part depends on how you define success. Nothing wrong with having money. Money brings freedom, it enables you to have nice vacations. I remember back when we could actually go outside our homes, because we’re living in the coronavirus world, at least as we’re recording this, a bit over a year ago, my daughter was working, I have three kids in their 20s, my daughter’s working in Australia. We’d gone back there for a lot of family gatherings. I didn’t want to go back again. So we figured out, “Why don’t we meet halfway.” So we had Christmas on the big island of Hawaii. It was fabulous.
Tommy B:
Fabulous.
Warwick F:
Not the cheapest place to go at Christmas, but it was worth it. And so I’m not against doing nice things, and money gives you that opportunity, so I think that’s great. But as you say, money in and of itself doesn’t satisfy. It gives you the opportunities to enjoy things and to help. So here you were, growing up in more of a blue-collar background. You’re working hard, you’ve gone through some tough times earlier, and you were making it, you were hitting every hurdle, you’re doing incredible things. The money, as you say, the shiny cuff links and everything, but yet, somehow, despite your meteoric rise, you felt hollow. So talk about that sense of hollowness, because a lot of people would say, “Tommy, you’ve made it. What’s there to be unhappy about? The nice car, the nice house. It’s all with the American Dream. What’s there to be unhappy about? How could anybody be dissatisfied with all of that?”
Tommy B:
Yeah. I think you make some really good points. I want to recap what you said, and so I think money is A, it’s important, especially for those of us who want to make massive positive impact in the world. The more money we have, the more impact we can make, and I think it’s super important. But it’s also a ridiculously powerful magnifying glass, and if you’re an insecure ass, it’s going to magnify that insecure ass-dom to a point that you wouldn’t believe it. But if you’re an amazing human being, who wants to be of service and make impact and employ people and grow a positive force and movement for good, it’ll do that. And so for me, because I was that little boy, and we all have our own demons.
Tommy B:
Here’s the thing about the shiny things. To me, life is about experiences, events, and the people you love, and more money will give you the freedom to experience more, to have more, and to do more. The shiny things, it doesn’t matter if it’s a fancy new Corvette or a Ferrari, or everything in between, that’s not going to fulfill you inside, because if you don’t have unconditional love and respect for yourself, and you’re struggling with your mindset, i.e., that inner voice that says, “What if they figure out I don’t know what I’m doing? What if they figure out I’m scared? What if they know my deepest, darkest desires?” We all have some level of that.
Tommy B:
And so regardless of the amount of money you make, you’ve got to have unconditional love and respect for yourself, you’ve got to do the work to build your mental, emotional, and spiritual fortress, not just your business and financial fortress. And so for me, I was missing all those pieces.
Warwick F:
As you were in that ditch.
Tommy B:
Yep. I was still that-
Warwick F:
That sense of unconditional love that gives you. I love how you put it. That self-love, that “I am worthy of being loved. I am worthy of being admired.” That wasn’t there, as you were sitting in the ditch.
Tommy B:
It didn’t exist, and my wife and I have talked about this subsequently is she was able to love me when I couldn’t love myself. I had zero self-respect and love for myself. I was never taught that, I didn’t know what that meant, I was incapable of receiving love, and so for me, it was just this little boy who didn’t feel valuable, who didn’t feel enough, who didn’t feel worthy, and who didn’t feel lovable. And it was up to me to rewire my heart, my brain, and my soul, so that I develop that self-confidence, to start mastering that mindset. And so that little boy still was just screaming in all the wrong ways, just trying to be the tough guy, cool guy, important guy, sexy guy, funny guy, whatever mask I wanted to wear, and it was never going to be enough, and that’s what put me in the ditch.
Warwick F:
It’s easy to say you believe in yourself, love yourself, give back to others, but how did you flip that switch, because that was years in the making, years of pain, trauma, abuse, maybe some mistakes. How did you change that mindset? Because that ditch seems like it was a pivotal moment in your life, maybe the pivotal moment. How did you flip that switch so you actually could think, “Maybe my wife loves me, and you know what? I’m worthy of her loving me, I’m worthy of family and friends admiring me.” How did you flip that switch?
Tommy B:
There is no switch is the honest answer. What I had a burning desire for at that time, staring at that blue sky, not knowing where my car was, why I was half-dressed, and what the hell just happened to me? What happened to me was this intense fear that A, I didn’t want to die, and B, I didn’t understand this, but there was this burning desire to just change. There was no switch of all of sudden developing self-respect and unconditional love. And I say this all the time, and I’ll tell you exactly how I did it. I say this all the time is we need to keep ourselves in physical shape, and we’ve got to do that. We go walk, we exercise, we lift weights, we play basketball, whatever we do, but you’re not going to stay in physical shape and/or get in shape if you don’t exercise those muscles every day.
Tommy B:
And so your heart muscles, your self-respect muscles, your mind muscles, they’re muscles as well, and you’ve got to nurture them, work on them, and flex them every single day so that you build that mental and emotional fortress so during times like we’re in right now, this COVID virus hit, or family does hit, or tragedy hits, or business failures hit that you will be ready, willing, and step in, and you’ll have the self-confidence and courage to lean in. And so it didn’t happen for me overnight, because I hadn’t flexed any of those muscles. I just had a fear and a burning desire to change. It looks like Gary’s dying to say something, so I want to stop.
Gary S:
I can sense the conversation’s about to turn to how you did indeed bounce back, and one of the things that was so beautiful for me in your book, and I’ll hold it up here for folks who are watching on YouTube, you can see it right there, was this idea, because it’s so simple and yet so powerful. And I think it probably, and I’d love to hear your reaction to it when I say it and ask you the question, is probably very instrumental in your bounce back from that ditch, and that’s the purpose formula that you draft in your book, right? How do we find our purpose? And this is the purpose, listeners, or the purpose formula that Tommy prescribes in his book, Legendary. Pretty simple. The purpose formula is “We love it” plus “We are talented at it” plus “The world needs it.” Add those three things together, and that equals our purpose. Even if you hadn’t made the formula in your head yet, how was coming to that realization instrumental in getting you figuratively and literally out of that ditch?
Tommy B:
For me, the truth and the transparent answer is I didn’t find my purpose for another three years. And thus, because my life transformed, I started developing my mind muscles, my heart muscles, etc. When I got to the top of the game and knew if I stayed in this world that I would have eight figures in the bank account when I retired, but I wouldn’t be happy and fulfilled, that’s why I knew I had to leave at the top of the game, because I was so conscious and so aware and had done so much work with coaches, mentors, myself, I knew that I wasn’t working in my purpose, and I would never be fulfilled or happy. That’s the moment that I knew that I’ve got to use my God given talents, all of these people were reaching out to me, these ambitious, driven professionals, “Hey, I don’t want to give up my ambition or drive, I want to be financially confident, but I want to have better relationships with my family and friends. I want to have a better network, I want to cultivate unconditional love, I want to be the master of my mindset.”
Tommy B:
So my purpose fell into my lap by doing all of these right things, but that’s the reason I left the financial world is because I knew it wasn’t my calling, I knew it’s starting to suck out my soul, and the money would never fulfill me and make me happy. So it took great courage and great fortitude to walk away from that kind of paycheck and distributions every month, but I knew I had to do it, because it was bigger than me, and I was going to use my God given talents in things I enjoy. I’m telling you when I’m talking on a podcast or on a stage or doing a retreat or doing one-on-one coaching, I am not more fulfilled. Time literally stops, because I love it. I love seeing people realize the best of themselves. And so I didn’t have that in the financial world, and there was no amount of money that was going to fulfill me.
Tommy B:
And so I didn’t find it until later, and here’s something I believe about purpose, and I want everyone to hear this. Every single human being on Earth has a purpose, and that purpose changes depending on the season of our lives. But everyone of us until our last breath on this beautiful planet has a purpose. It’s just for us, and it’s an art and science to find it, but the simple formula is this. You’re super good at it, and if you don’t know what you’re super good at, go ask your closest friends and network and family. They’ll tell you what you’re super good at. You enjoy doing it, and whatever you believe, the planet, your friends, your community, or whatever this world needs, you use those two things to go do something bigger than yourself to serve, for lack of a better word. That’s where you find fulfillment, and it can be inside of the career or outside of the career. So I just wanted to say that.
Tommy B:
I didn’t find my purpose in that ditch. I knew, however, I was meant for something great. I didn’t realize why I was still on this planet. All the things I had done and been through, I was like, “There’s no reason I’m still here, so I’ve got to trust that. So I’ve got to find it.” And so that was part of my journey.
Gary S:
And that’s not altogether different. In fact, it’s very similar to what Warwick talks about and Warwick’s own experience. I don’t want to tell your story, Warwick, you can tell it, but the idea that it can take a while. As you’re moving beyond your crucible, as you’re moving beyond those moments, it’s not instantaneous. You said it earlier in this discussion, Tommy. It’s not a switch that you can flip, necessarily, to move beyond those things that you’ve struggled with. It is a process.
Gary S:
Warwick talks about it in depth in the Crucible Leadership model, and it’s always exciting for me to come in and see two, I’m looking at two guys on the screen, who could not have more different backgrounds, and yet, and more different experiences, but the emotions of what you went through and the way that you, bit by bit, reclaimed your sense of purpose in both of your cases is inspirational, and I hope that’s what listeners get from this is that you don’t have to be Tommy and go through the things he went through, you don’t have to be Warwick and go through the things he went through. The emotions of how they processed what they went through, that’s the formula for getting you beyond. Sorry, Warwick, I cut you off.
Warwick F:
Yeah, yeah. No worries. It’s all good. I love what you’re talking about, Tommy. Just finding things that we love, that we’re talented at, and the world needs, I think that’s so true. And purpose, I think, really is, purpose is when it’s a God given purpose, a purpose from within you, it is very fulfilling, and it does bring joy. But I keep thinking about the Tommy in the ditch, and you made a decision. You didn’t really have all this figured out. I didn’t when I was trying to claw my way back. I didn’t have the whole Crucible Leadership model figured out. That kind of stuff comes afterwards as you look back, unfortunately. It’s good for other people. It doesn’t really help us at the time, but we make our way through and muddle through.
Warwick F:
But part of it, I think, is you make a choice, and you made several choices. One was, “You know what? I know maybe I don’t like myself, I certainly don’t love myself, but I am going to work on that. For better or worse, I’m going to be the authentic Tommy Breedlove. So be it. Forget the mask. I’m done with the mask. I’m going to be myself, and I’m going to work on,” and I love that phrase you use, that of self-love. It’s like exercise. We all use different things. For me, faith is a huge deal, so just the thought that we’re all loved by God unconditionally. Over time, as I read, meditated, prayed, and fortunately, I’m sure, like you, I have a wife that loves me unconditionally. That was a huge help. But over time, it’s like, “I’m going to be the real me, and that’s it.” So that’s a choice, and just the sense of purpose of trying to do something that really makes the world a better place.
Warwick F:
So talk a bit about that, because to me, that was key for you. You made a choice, forget the mask, to be authentic, and in some ways, you wanted to do something that was purposeful. Does that feel true, that choice you made?
Tommy B:
So true, so true, and I’m going to talk a little bit before that and right at that moment. So there’s so many who keep saying, over and over again, that it’s the absolute most powerful thing, that maybe we’re going to say today is we, as human beings, like to feel like we’re in control, but we are in absolutely control of nothing with the exception of one thing, and it’s our choices. Including in those choices are our mindset and attitude, so choices, mindset, and attitudes. The rest we can influence, we can inspire, we can lead, and we can do the best we can, but at the end of the day, all we have in our control is our choices, mindset, and attitude.
Tommy B:
So pre-ditch, I was completely unconscious, I had the wall up, and the truth be told, this is kind of a cute story, is my wife and I were going through all of these wedding counselors, because we were trying to figure out why we were so unhappy and blah-blah-blah-blah. And so about the second or third visit of every single one of those counselors, the counselor would be like, “Heather, why don’t you stay home, and Tommy, we need you to come back.” At first, I thought they were going to say, “Hey, Heather’s the problem, and Tommy, you’ve got it all figured out.” But that’s not what they were saying. They were seeing this deep darkness, they were seeing this wall that I wasn’t even letting them penetrate. I was completely closed, I couldn’t feel, and so I was closed. I don’t know I had the ability to choose something different. That’s how closed I was.
Tommy B:
But one of those counselors said something to me that I’ll never forget. He says, “There’s a facility in Tennessee that can do more for you, Tommy, in seven days than I can do in 10 years.” And when I woke up in that ditch, I remembered that, and I made the choice to listen to a man who’s in this profession, go to this place in Tennessee where they cut me open for four days and 30 others. I knew I wasn’t alone, I could feel again. They let me know that “Hey, this is going to be okay,” and then they gave me three days of tools to put it all back together, and that was my catalyst to start participating in my own rescue, investing in myself, and making me and my mindset, my emotional, my spiritual, my physical life my number one priority so that I could serve others better.
Tommy B:
And so I finally knew I could choose, and the first choice I made was to listen to that guy, because I hadn’t listened to him for four years before, and say, “Hey, there’s something out there that can help me find who I am,” and it’s called the Living, I’m going to give them a prop, they give me nothing, it’s a Living Center Program in a place called Onsite Workshops outside of Nashville, Tennessee. And that seven-day program was the catalyst for me becoming the man, human, and person I am today.
Warwick F:
That’s awesome. I keep reflecting on that phrase, “Investing in yourself,” which sounds self-centered, but it’s really not. It’s in a sense, other-centered. I’m sure your wife and those who know you are very grateful that you’ve invested in yourself. It’s almost denying, as those negative voices never quite go away.
Tommy B:
Ever.
Warwick F:
It’s a bit like exercise. “Hey, I worked out in a gym yesterday. I’m good for the next six months.”
Tommy B:
Not at all.
Warwick F:
Life’s not like that. Same as spiritual and emotional, because there is the voice, that one that said, “Hey, Tommy. You’re worthless,” in a bad moment. That never goes away totally.
Tommy B:
And loud.
Warwick F:
It’s like, “Okay. I hear that voice. I’m not going to let you gain traction, okay?” Whether it’s yoga, meditation, prayer, whatever spiritual practices work for you, use that to help you realize that I believe every human being is perfectly and wonderfully made and loved by God or some spiritual force, however you look at it. Claim that truth, and that’s the internal. The external is just what you’ve done, which I love, is just this whole concept of purpose and significance, because I feel like as we’re able to contribute to the world, there’s a healing balm in that. As you’re helping others, you take your focus off yourself in terms of self-centeredness, and you do that, you help people all over the country, all the world.
Warwick F:
So talk a bit about how clearly you love Legendary leadership, and it feels like, I’m not saying that because, “Oh, you like it. You’ve written a book,” but it’s more there’s a sense of purpose, there’s a sense of excitement. I’m not just going to get this big paycheck and the corner office at the 50th floor of some big building. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you’re changing people’s lives. Right? It’s not about the speaking and endorsements. So talk about how you know who you are. I think to the best degree you can, you actually feel that you’re worth loving. Am I right?
Tommy B:
Indeed, indeed. 100% now. Still have bad days, though.
Warwick F:
Correct, but you’re focused on helping others. So talk about how Legendary leadership has transformed your life and transformed others’ lives, this mission you’re on.
Tommy B:
Yeah, absolutely. I can’t tell you … So when people usually … So one of the hardest investments we make, and I want to go back to something you said, is investing in yourself. It’s not selfish. There’s the great faith-based joke is the guy, the flood’s coming, and the guy’s sitting on top of his house. And then the boat comes by and says, “Jump in,” and he’s like, “No. I’m waiting for God to save me.” The helicopter comes in and says, “Jump in.” “No, I’m waiting for God to save me.” And then he drowns. “God, what happened?” He goes, “Well, I sent two things.” So you’ve got to participate in your own rescue, and I believe in order to be the best leader, husband, man, woman, family member that you can is it starts and ends with you. And so I’m very rigid.
Tommy B:
For me, living a life of significance and purpose and serving is about every day getting up, making sure I have my gratitude exercises, my physical exercises, my meditation, my daily readings, my prayers. I literally spend 90 minutes to two hours every day working on myself, my fortress, in order so I can serve and love people to my fullest. And some of the stuff I do is pretty heavy. I’m in the pain and purpose business. I carry the weights and burdens of pretty successful people but also help them find their purpose.
Tommy B:
And it’s interesting that you talk about serving and finding. It’s interesting. If you looked at my client base, I have everything from people just getting started in their life to as the wealthy as they come, and it’s interesting to see how similar people are. It’s no longer anecdotal. It’s statistical. And so it’s interesting. It doesn’t matter, sometimes, how much money they make, people are like, “I’m still not happy. I’m still not fulfilled. Why do I find myself looking at the stars at night?” And almost 100% of the people, whether it’s in a group setting or on a stage or one-on-one, almost 100% of us, and it’s almost statistical, we all struggle in our relationships with our family members, our significant others, and sometimes our friendships. It’s 100%, so we’re not alone.
Tommy B:
And so for me, building and living a Legendary life is doing the best we can every single day, and I’m going to give you some of the things that it includes, and these are things that I believe deep down inside. And this book is all about simple tactics, great stories, and easy, actionable things that you can do in the following categories. And to me, you can’t overwhelm yourself and start on all of them. You’ve got to start simple, dream big, start small, but just start daily exercising these different parts of your mind, heart, soul.
Tommy B:
And so for me, it begins and ends with purpose, is we’re all here for a reason. We’ve got to figure out what that reason is why. And to me, the only real asset we have in life that’s literally depreciating every day, that’s a business term, is our time. And so how do we reconquer our time, and how do we prioritize our time to do the best we can. I believe that financial freedom and confidence is as important as it can, especially in the Western world. It helps us make impact, it helps experience life, and it helps us have freedoms we wouldn’t have. Then it moves into how do we cultivate networks and leverage our friends, our family, our colleagues to surround ourselves with the best people possible, but also come from a place of service?
Tommy B:
And then it takes a dramatic turn. It takes a turn into, “Okay. Now, we need to start developing unconditional love and respect for ourselves,” but a lot of us alpha individuals have a real problem with receiving love and giving love. How do we that? How do we be a little more vulnerable? And then it talks about how do we have better intimacy with our friends, family, and significant others? How do we master, you talked about it, that critic that can get so freaking loud sometimes, and tell us we’re not good enough, and, “Hey, you are this bad person, and what if they figure …?” And so it takes a wholistic approach, and it talks about the power of choices, but to me, it’s a simple playbook on how to live the best life.
Tommy B:
And I’ll tell you why I chose Legendary. In a world of constant self-promotion, “See me, see me, see me. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. I’m important. Here’s me getting out of the car. Here’s me getting out of a jet. Here’s me important. Look how pretty I am.” And we’re all guilty of it on some regard, right? But to me, Legendary is something that’s given to us by our communities, our societies, and our tribes. And you can either be a beautiful legend, and it doesn’t have anything to do with rich or fame, or you can be a horrible legend. And this playbook is all about when we leave this world, we take the U-Haul of stuff with us, and no one’s going to read our resume, but when we leave this world, we’re going to leave ourselves, our communities, and this planet a little bit better than we found it. And to me, that’s the journey, building and living a Legendary life choice.
Warwick F:
I think that is so true. As you’ve been talking about some of the … We all have pain, and some of the wealthy or Hollywood folks or different people. I grew up with that. For whatever reason, we were on the map with my parents, and my mother would throw incredible parties, so Hollywood people would come to Australia and stuff, and it’s like, “We’re used to good things in Hollywood, but the stuff that Lady Fairfax has in Sydney, it’s another level than we’re used to,” so that just tells you something. So there was legendary parties, to misuse your phrase.
Warwick F:
But yet, you can be really successful and famous and be empty. And to me, what fills the emptiness is yes, you’ve got to love yourself, and there’s that self-work you need to do, but you have to live a life on purpose, which to me in some way makes the world a better place. It could be through an invention, it could be through a non-profit, it could be in a corporate arena. That can have very diverse arenas, but when you’re living life on purpose, doing something, as you put it, that the world needs, which is other-focused, that gives even the wealthiest, most successful person, that can often be the most depressed person, meaning, as well as people on the other end of the economic spectrum. And it also feels like maybe I am worth loving in some weird way as I’m helping others. So that sense of other-focus, to me, it’s difficult have a sense of purpose which isn’t in some ways other-focused on some level. Does that make sense?
Tommy B:
100%. Couldn’t agree more. Gary, looks like you’ve got a question, brother.
Gary S:
Yeah, well, I have a thing I do in every podcast, Tommy, where I say it’s about time to land the plane. We’re not landing yet. The captain’s turned on the Fasten the Seatbelt sign, and the gear may be coming down, but I want to summarize for the listener here that is really, really interesting to me. Folks who’ve listened to this podcast since its inception know Warwick talks about the importance of living a life of significance. To hear you describe a Legendary life, there’s so much overlap there in the way that that comes together, and that’s one of the truly great things about being part of this podcast is to see people from different walks of life, who’ve arrived at the same place through different circumstances, to help people with that very thing.
Gary S:
Tommy, there was something today. It’s funny that you talked about Facebook. I sent you a Facebook friend request yesterday, and you were kind enough to say yes. And I saw a video you posted on Facebook today. It was just you, and you were so excited, and you’re like, “I just have to share this with everybody really quickly.” And you were actually there in your home studio with your good microphone, and you were just doing this short, it’s 15, 20 seconds long, but this is what you said. You quoted someone, but this is what you said, and I think it’s a great way to begin the process of hitting the runway. You said this, is a quote that you quoted. “I cannot do all the good the world needs. The world needs all the good I can do.” That, to me, summarizes Crucible Leadership and summarizes A Legendary Life. Is that fair?
Tommy B:
That is completely fair, and when I read that, it was part of my daily routine that I was just talking about that I read that, and I had this, “Oh, my God. That is genius.” “All the good that I can do.” It’s about something bigger than us, it’s about service, it’s about impact, it’s about significance, and what I like about it, I wish there was three million or billion other Tommys and Warwicks and Garys in the world, because we all are beating this drum of “We can do this. You can do this. We can overcome things, and you can actually be happy and successful.” And Warwick might be strawberry, and I might be chocolate, and you might be vanilla, and this person over here chocolate chip, but there’s a flavor for everyone. And find your flavor, find what voice resonates with you, find what message resonates with you, whether it’s books or podcasts or mentors or coaches or your tribe or your inner circle or your friends, find it and go chase it and take one small step. So I love that.
Tommy B:
And that quote, I can’t remember who said it. It was Janis something, and I just read it for the first time. It’s laying around in me somewhere, but I don’t want to go digging during the podcast. Let me show this. This is kind of crazy. There’s my daily readings. And so I just think this message, and candidly, if I’m going to be fully transparent, I’m angry. I’m angry that so many amazing, beautiful, ambitious, driven people who want to serve, they’re unhappy, they’re unfulfilled, they don’t know what they want to do. And I think, and I’m not one of those martyr/victim people, but I think we’ve done a piss poor job in our society of teaching people money, emotional health, mental health, and spiritual health. And it’s all a wholistic stew, and if we take one ingredient out of the stew, the stew doesn’t take good. You take salt out, the stew’s shitty. Forgive that word. The salt’s not so good, but you know what I’m saying?
Warwick F:
The stew?
Tommy B:
Yeah, the stew. The stew. And so I forget the word there, but what we want to do is there’s just baby steps that we can do, and it’ll be a little hard. If you’re not happy with where you are in life, just go find the nearest mirror, look in it, and just say, “I want to change,” and then take one small action. Pick up a book, listen to a podcast, just move.
Warwick F:
And you’re right. We don’t really teach it in schools or anywhere, I suppose, families, community groups, churches. I guess we could all do better, but getting to the point that you’re at, and I like to think I’m at, where you accept who you are, you believe that you were worth loving, you are contributing to society in a purposeful way, you have people that are for you, and they’re not for the mask version of Warwick or Tommy or Gary. They’re for the real version. When you’re your real self, and somebody says, “You know what? I like the real Tommy. The other Tommy was okay. This one’s better. It’s really you.”
Warwick F:
It’s quite something when the mask is down, and people love you for who you are, and you’re contributing to society. That, to me, is a Legendary life, a life on purpose, a life of significance. That is possible, it is mission-possible. Not mission impossible. It’s not an easy road to get to. It is possible, you’re an example of it, I’d to think in some small way I try to be, but being authentically you, in a way living on purpose and helping others, it is possible, it’s worth the effort, it’s worth getting out of the ditch.
Tommy B:
And the work never stops.
Warwick F:
It’s worth it. Exactly.
Gary S:
Yeah. I can see that-
Tommy B:
The work never stops. Yep.
Gary S:
No, I can see the guy in the ground with the flashlights doing this. So we’re getting to the point that we’re going to land, but I would be remiss after all of this great content, all of this great experience that you’ve shared with listeners, Tommy, if I didn’t give you the chance to tell people where they can find you, and not just you, but also choose goodness where you do a lot of your work from. So how can people connect with you, find your book, and learn more about how to live a Legendary life?
Tommy B:
Well, the book is everywhere, and I was going to say even in your airports or bookstores, but no one’s going to the bookstores or airports. So it’s all over Barnes & Noble, Amazon. You can get the book anywhere. Because of what’s happening in the world right now with COVID, if you go to TommyBreedlove.com/gifts, the first thing I give you is my purpose statement about here is my purpose right now during this season of my life, and the formula and a blank page for you to work your own, as well as my Legendary lifetime, what we talked about, my daily routine to help me be the best person possible, to hopefully build theirs. What we’ve added to that is the Financial Competence and Freedom chapter, as well as the Mastering the Mindset chapter for free, because I think there’s an undercurrent of fear, insecurity, “What am I going to with my money?” And so these two chapters are so vitally important, and I also share my story, so you get the preface as well.
Tommy B:
So if you go to TommyBreedlove.com/gifts, you can get two free chapters of my book, Legendary. I put so much content out there on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, whatever your flavor is, it is all about us being a little bit better than what we are, hope, innovation, love, grace, and being more financially free. So @TommyBreedlove on Instagram. Of course, I’m on Facebook at Legendary Choice, which is under the Tommy Breedlove brand, and as well as on LinkedIn. I put stuff out there every day just to be inspirational. Know that you’re not alone, and know that you’re worthy enough and valuable, and we’re all in this together. And I think right now, we’re craving connection, and we’re craving vulnerability and authenticity more than we ever were, so let’s all give people the gift of going second, let’s be honest and vulnerable, and here’s to all of us, Crucible Leadership and building and living Legendary lives.
Gary S:
Fantastic. Let me, for your listeners, summarize some takeaways of this robust conversation that we’ve had today. One thing, I think, comes through loud and clear from Tommy’s story is that mentoring matters. You can find it anywhere. Tommy found it in jail. Not only did Tommy find it in jail, but he found it from an unlikely source in jail. So look around you, see the people that you admire, see the people who are doing things like you wish you were doing things, like you aspire to be doing things. And then ask for help, see if they will help you. Most people when asked to give some counsel, some advice, to pass along their wisdom, will jump at the chance. And having a mentor who will pour into your life in that way can make all the difference in the world. Tommy’s living proof of that.
Gary S:
The second takeaway, this is very powerful as Tommy and Warwick are talking about their crucible experiences and their bounce backs from those crucible experiences, is do not compare your crucible to other people’s crucibles. Your worst pain, your worst setback is just that, your worst pain and your worst setback. Tommy gave a great example of if we took all of our crucibles and threw them in a bucket, and then everybody went to pick them out, we wouldn’t pick out other people. We’d pick out our own, because that’s our worst pain. So that’s what you have to find your way back from is your worst pain. And to paraphrase the title of the podcast, that’s where moving beyond your crucible begins, by digging into your pain and learning the lessons of it.
Gary S:
And then the last thing that we can take away from this is find your purpose. Tommy has a great, great formula for how to do that. It is “We love it, we’re talented at it, the world needs it. That equals our purpose.” And the other important point there, both for Warwick and his life and Tommy and his life, is that it may not happen immediately. It probably won’t happen immediately after your crucible, but you do have a purpose. And even if it doesn’t happen immediately, keep after it, because the world needs your purpose, and the world needs you.
Gary S:
Thank you, listener, for spending time with us today on Beyond the Crucible. You can do us a little bit of a favor by on the app that you’re listening to right now, click Subscribe. That will ensure that you never miss conversations like this one we had with Tommy Breedlove today, and it’ll also help us make sure more people get a chance to hear the insights that Tommy has to offer on how to confront a crucible, learn from a crucible, and bounce back from a crucible. If you’d like to learn more about Crucible Leadership and the resources that we offer, you can visit us on the web at CrucibleLeadership.com.
Gary S:
So until the next time that we’re all together, thank you truly for joining us here on Beyond the Crucible, and I’m going to steal a word from Tommy and say, “You’re all beautiful humans,” and remember that your crucible experiences are not the end of your story. It wasn’t the end of Tommy’s story. You already know it’s not the end of Warwick’s story. It’s not the end of your story either. But you dig in, you learn the lessons from them, you apply those lessons, and you push yourself to live life on purpose, as Warwick says. It can be not the last chapter of your book. It can be the next chapter, the best chapter, because where it leads is to a life of significance.
Conflict and leadership frequently go hand-in-hand. Add to the mix a global pandemic that comes with stay-at-home orders, shuttered schools and remote working, and millions find themselves living day-to-day in a powder keg of anxiety and stress. How best to navigate this unprecedented confluence of circumstances to minimize its affect on your family relationships and your business’s bottom line? Crucible Leadership founder and BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE host Warwick Fairfax and podcast co-host Gary Schneeberger discuss the indispensable role grace and tolerance play in not just avoiding flare-ups, but encouraging each other at a time when encouragement is more essential than ever. It all starts, they explain, with doing the same kind of self-audit that’s critical to learning the lessons of a crucible experience. Then, once you understand how your unique stressors and anxiety triggers affect you, you can take practical steps to defuse tensions with others and keep lines of communication and productivity operating smoothly. “The core of grace,” Fairfax says, “is treating other people like you’d like to be treated.”
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👉 Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Transcript
Gary S:
Welcome, everyone to this episode of Beyond the Crucible. I’m Gary Schneeberger, the co-host of the podcast and the communication’s director for Crucible Leadership. And I’m thrilled to welcome you to the latest episode of a podcast that deals in what we call crucible experiences. Crucible experiences are those moments that we go through in life that are by definition, painful, they’re failures, they’re setbacks. They’re those things that either we cause in some way, or it’s things that are visited upon us that can change the trajectory of our lives, can really knock us off our feet. And the reason that we talk about them though, is not so that we can camp out here and feel bad. We talk about them in the hopes of helping you if you’re going through the same thing, overcome those things, learn the lessons of those crucibles, and apply those lessons to a vision and a passion and a life on purpose that leads to significance.
Gary S:
This particular episode many times, we will talk and by we I mean, myself and who I’ll introduce in a minute, the host of the program Warwick Fairfax. Sometimes, most of the time we talk to guests. But today it’s going to be Warwick and I talking about some pretty big ideas, some principles that undergird what Crucible Leadership’s about. And Warwick, we do as I said, have a big picture show today for the listeners, don’t we?
Warwick F:
Absolutely Gary, I’m very much looking forward to it.
Gary S:
We are going to talk today listener about the subjects of Grace and Humility. I’m sorry, not Grace and Humility. Humility is good too, but we’re going to talk about Grace and Tolerance. And both of those do require humility on our parts, but our focus is going to be on grace and tolerance as the antidotes to anxiety and stress.
Gary S:
Right now as we’re recording this, anxiety and stress are perhaps more prevalent in memory for many of us who are hearing these words, because we are in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic as we’re recording this. So certainly, that’s one of the reasons why we’re wanting to address this topic, but stressful times, which can lead to stressful reactions occur every day and have occurred long before COVID-19 and will occur long after COVID-19. And our hope here in having this discussion is to give you some tips and some insights into how to manage those stressful times in ways that manifest grace, in ways that manifest tolerance, so that we can overcome anxiety and stress.
Gary S:
Warwick, this is a pretty big subject, where do we begin in having this discussion?
Warwick F:
Well, I think a good place to begin is just the situation we are in right now because it provides a good case study really, with the challenges of dealing with stress right now with the coronavirus and most of us around the world are being asked by relevant authorities federal, state, local to shelter-in-place, to minimize the amount of times we’re going outside, wear marks if you go to the grocery store. And we’re in a situation where we’re working from home, some of us have been furloughed or laid off. Some have young kids at home, maybe adult kids, we actually have our three adult kids at home with us. One of them has got two weeks to go before he finishes his senior year and another one’s working from home and another’s about to go to grad school. So everything is happening.
Warwick F:
Just this last week, a couple days the internet went out, which it’s like if you got kids studying for exams, and everything it’s like that’s sort of a disaster. I have my own home-based business and there’s all sorts of things that causes stress both from a health perspective, from an economic perspective. And in times of stress, we’re often not at our best.
Gary S:
Right.
Warwick F:
Sometimes we’re at our worst, unfortunately. And that can manifest itself in getting a bit stir crazy and wanting to get out but not get too near people, and wondering what’s going to happen with our job and health. And as we get stressed, we often get a little frayed at the edges, we can be a little temperamental, and when we’re under stress being humans, unfortunately, we then can take it out on people who we’re around, which it will be for many of us our family, maybe for some it might be roommates, whoever it is.
Warwick F:
And you have a bunch of people in close quarters for weeks now and who knows how many more weeks more. Things can happen and that’s really where these times of stress and frayed reactions and feelings and emotions, it’s where we most need grace and tolerance. So we’re talking specifically about the impact of the coronavirus on stress. But there’s a broader context where you might be at work, maybe your company’s being merged with another company, maybe you get laid off. There’s all sorts of things that happen in our lives that increase stress, it’s part of being human. So the question is, when that happens, how do you try and mitigate and lessen the challenges of stress, which tends to make you lash out and react in very intolerant ways, very ungraceful ways. Often on those we love or those we work with. So that’s the challenge.
Gary S:
And that’s a very good explanation and a framework, some breadcrumbs of what we’re going to talk about and it’s important to note, a couple things I think about grace and tolerance. One, Warwick and I have been talking about this. One I think, is that this is not a magic potion to get … The things that we’re going to talk about here, having and exhibiting and extending grace and tolerance to each other is not. If I were Muhammad Ali, I would say, “It’s not a pill you take. It is a commitment you make.” It’s not overnight. It’s not something that happens necessarily even easily. It takes work. And we’ll go through how that plays out. But the other thing I think it’s important to talk about at the outset here, is that the reason why we’re talking about this, stress in and of itself can be difficult on relationships, but it can degrade relationships if you take things out on each other, your stress and anxiety.
Gary S:
And in the workplace, it can degrade productivity. So what we’re really trying to do in giving you these tips, is to give you ways to avoid that degradation of productivity and relationship to move beyond that in a way that will allow you to manage your stress, manage your anxiety, and also not just manage your relationships but continue to have your relationships thrive.
Gary S:
And Warwick, before we move on. I wanted to share with the listeners, we’re both subscribers to Harvard Business Review, you for better reasons than I am because you graduated from Harvard Business School. But I find their insights fascinating and every day they send a Management Tip of the Day. And a couple days ago, here’s the Management Tip of the Day, it’s just a couple of paragraphs that they sent about this very subject in the workplace specifically, but that is after all, what Crucible Leadership talks about life in the workplace.
Gary S:
But this is what Harvard Business Review their leadership Tip of the Day of a couple days ago from this recording. When you’re under constant stress, it’s not always easy to be patient and understanding with your co-workers, add in or your family members. But being judgmental doesn’t help anyone. How can you find and demonstrate empathy for your colleagues when you’re emotionally depleted? First, accept that we’re all coping with this coronavirus crisis differently. For example, you may find it helpful to pay close attention to the news, while other colleagues may prefer to limit the amount of information that they take in. Also, be generous in your interpretations of others when they send a terse email or look grumpy on a video call. It’s more than likely that their mood has nothing to do with you, or work.
Gary S:
Do your part by being honest about what you’re feeling at the moment and clearly communicating your needs. And remember that your co-workers and your family members are likely suffering in ways that you don’t necessarily understand. Don’t try to compare suffering. Here’s the payoff here. Instead, lean into compassion, empathy and kindness. That, to me seems like a pretty good formula for grace and tolerance, doesn’t it?
Warwick F:
Oh, absolutely. It’s in times of stress in particular, that we want to, in a sense, amp up our levels of grace, compassion and tolerance to others. I like what you said earlier about, it’s basically a decision it’s not a pill you take, it’s really grace and tolerance or a choice. When you’re under stress, if you just go into autopilot, what tends to happen is you react, the slightest little thing, it’s almost like you’re dry kindling, you’re just waiting for a spark. Some family member, it’s often worse with family members because the more we care about, the more they can set us off. It’s just sadly, human nature. But even at work, you’re just waiting to snap, you’re ready to go, ready for bear and boom, let’s go.
Warwick F:
And that’s where you got to make a choice to say, “Okay, you understand that,” but you’ve got to dial it back a bit before you react. And that’s where some of these tips that we’ll get to in a moment, I think are helpful. But it really starts out with recognizing when you’re under stress, you will tend to react both at home and at work. And you’ve got to make a choice to go down a path of dealing with it. And certainly a big part of that is having compassion, giving somebody the benefit of the doubt. And even if you know that was a bit on called for, that snarky comment that they make in your meeting and something they thought was humorous. Other people might have laughed at it, but you’re not laughing because it’s at your expense. And rather than just, okay, fine payback time. I’ll wait for my opportunity in the meeting. And I’ll think of some other witty retort. It’s like yeah, just let it go.
Gary S:
Right.
Warwick F:
Is it really worth, amping up the battle of snarky comments and payback? It’s silly. It really starts with making a choice.
Gary S:
It is giving the other person, you said it, the benefit of the doubt. Webster’s Dictionary defines this, I’m a word guy so that means I string a lot of words together, sometimes more than I should. Webster’s Dictionary defines it very concisely. Webster’s defines grace as courteous goodwill. Very simple explanation. And the thing about it is to truly exhibit and extend grace to another person. It doesn’t matter if they deserve it. In fact, many times they’re not going to, in your mind deserve it, you extend it anyway.
Gary S:
I’ve heard it said Warwick, on the subject of forgiveness. And these are similar concepts forgiveness and grace, that the idea of forgiveness is taking the sin of another on yourself. Someone does something to you, and you just don’t make them pay for it. You pay for it on their behalf so that the relationship can continue. Similar sort of thing applies in grace. You don’t have to have someone ask for forgiveness. You don’t have to have someone say, “Oops, I messed up,” to extend grace. In fact, many times, that’s not going to happen. It’s a decision, like you said, it’s a choice to extend to them. This courteous goodwill as Webster’s calls it.
Warwick F:
Yeah, absolutely Gary. It’s very well said. As people of faith, we often think of grace in a more religious or biblical context where, literally, from a biblical perspective, it’s more, Christ, death on the cross for mistakes, sins, if you will. And so from a spiritual perspective, Grace means unmerited favor. It’s doing something to somebody that they don’t deserve. And looking at it more broadly, we’re not extending them grace and forgiving them if you will, because they necessarily deserve it. It’s because it’s the right thing to do because it’s funny and I will talk more about tolerance. But I think in our culture, everybody wants people to be tolerant of them, like be tolerant of me, okay? I don’t care if I’m tolerant to you, you should be tolerant.
Gary S:
Right.
Warwick F:
You should be forgiving, you should be understanding. Well, that’s fine, but it’s not nearly enough. We need to focus as much frankly, we need to focus more on being tolerant of other people, of being forgiving of other people, of showing them grace. And you’re right, forgiveness is a whole other subject. I think we’ve talked a little bit about this before. But yes, there’s time and places where something happens that may be particularly egregious or offensive and you will feel like you need to bring something up not in a big meeting, typically one-on-one and say, “Hey,” calmly, “What you did hurt me or offended me or I didn’t really appreciate that.” And they might say, “Oh, gosh. I’m sorry.”
Warwick F:
Unfortunately, because people are pretty human. And more times than not, they’ll say, “Well, sorry, you felt that way. I don’t see it myself and it’s your problem. Why can’t you take a little ribbing or a little whatever?” And okay, you tried, but not everything needs a pitched battle of, let’s have a big meeting. And you got to forgive me and I’ve got to forgive you or whatever it is.
Warwick F:
So often, showing grace is irrespective of whether they apologize and sometimes they will, sometimes they won’t. Sometimes you’ll feel called to ask, sometimes you won’t. If you want others to show grace to you and tolerance, you have to be prepared to do it to them. That’s just the way it works.
Gary S:
Absolutely. And since you brought up tolerance, and I love to look in the dictionary, I looked up the Webster’s definition of tolerance, which is a little bit longer than its definition of grace, but it’s also just a very good way of looking at what tolerance truly is. Here’s what Webster’s dictionary says tolerance is. Sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices, differing from or conflicting with one’s own. Now that, there’s no way to have commerce and by that social commerce with any people who you work with, who you live with, who you’re friends with. There’s no way to have social commerce, social interaction with people, where you’re not going to have different ideas, different beliefs, different practices that bump into each other.
Gary S:
And what tolerance addresses is this idea that you can have sympathy for, and indulgence for those things. You don’t have to necessarily change your view, or change their view, but you can have respect for, sympathy for, indulgence for those beliefs and that with a health dose of grace as well, allows us to move on in the relationship in healthy ways.
Warwick F:
Yeah, it’s so true. I feel like we live in an age of particular intolerance to pretty much anything, whether it’s other people’s religions, culture, race, background, politics. We live in an age in which we tend to think my view is right. And the other view is not only wrong, it’s abhorrent. It’s almost evil. So there’s my view, that’s good. And there’s other people’s views that are evil. It’s taking intolerance in a sense to the ultimate extreme.
Warwick F:
And as you well said, you don’t necessarily have. Take politics, you don’t have to necessarily agree with somebody else’s political perspective. But you should respect their right to have it and the fact that you believe in your view, and that’s great. But it doesn’t mean because they believe differently than you whether it’s about politics, or faith. You should be tolerant and understanding and believe that they have every right to believe what they do.
Warwick F:
And I think one of the keys to tolerance is trying to have empathy, the more you understand somebody, the less chance that you will be intolerant. Part of and this would be a whole other discussion, part of where bigotry arises is crass, maybe willful ignorance of somebody else’s culture, somebody else’s race. It’s all these stereotypes you put on. The more you try and understand somebody’s culture that may be very different than yours, and respect that. In fact, while understanding probably, helps with respecting, if you really try and empathize, that helps tolerance but you just have to make a decision that believe in your views strongly. That’s great, but be tolerant and willing to understand other people and don’t assume other people’s motives are evil just because they’re views are different. They just might have a different perspective on the world.
Warwick F:
It’s a very alien concept in our world, which is, understand me but I don’t want to understand you because you’re wrong or evil.
Gary S:
Right.
Warwick F:
That’s the age we live in, which is a whole other discussion, but very sad.
Gary S:
Right. And here listener, is where we’re going to turn the corner a little bit. We’ve talked in theory, and in some example of what the dangers of how damaging a lack of grace, a lack of tolerance can be. We’ve talked about why they’re important to manifest so that we don’t in the aftermath of our crucibles, or in the midst of our crucibles, that’s often when this comes up, right? If we’re talking about stressful times, lead to stressful reactions that can be in the midst of a crucible. That is often in the midst of a crucible. And if we don’t manifest grace and tolerance in those moments, that’s when we degrade our relationships. That’s when we degrade the productivity in our workplaces.
Gary S:
So in Crucible Leadership, what we’re about is to help you move beyond the crucible as this podcast is called. So let’s now Warwick, talk about some concrete action steps that listeners can take, if they find themselves, okay, I buy it. I buy it that grace and tolerance are important. How do I do it? How do I get there? What are some steps people can take?
Warwick F:
I think the first step is really the internal. We need to do an internal audit. We need to understand or first recognize that we are under stress, that we’re anxious, and that we’re fraying at the edges and snapping at other people. And one of the things that I find helpful is to understand why. Sometimes I’m stressed, or I’m snappy, and it’s like, “Okay, why is that?” Sometimes I think talking to others can help, which we’ll talk about in a moment.
Warwick F:
The first step is recognize that you’re under stress, and try and understand why. Often it won’t be rocket science. If you’re at home, it may be, I’ve got a bunch of young kids and they’re running around, and I’m trying to do Zoom calls, and I’m trying to work and I can’t think. They asked me to help with homework, which at a young age is not too bad once they get into high school, I can’t remember calculus and what is this? They’re asking me to help and I don’t know. I send my kids to school. Why should I have to do all this stuff? You just get grumpy or maybe you got laid off, which would be totally understandable to be under stress. How am I going to put food on the table? And especially in the time we’re in, it’s often doesn’t a psychologist to help us figure out okay, why are we under stress? What are our triggers? What are those things? So the first step is really do an internal audit and understand that.
Gary S:
And I think right there, and the idea of doing an internal audit, I love that because it’s very similar to the overall Crucible Leadership idea of to come out of your crucible, learn from your crucible, understand your crucible, do an internal audit to process your crucible. So in the same way, do an internal audit to process that stress and anxiety so that you can begin the march toward grace and tolerance.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. And really another tip that follows from that is, admit your fears and anxieties to others, or those you live with. Some people are better at doing it than others. There are some men perhaps in particular that believe that we’re islands and suck it up and don’t admit weakness and what have you which is stupid, really. But because chances are those that you love that you live with, or roommates, wherever it is. They’re under stress too and saying, “I’m having a bad day, I’m anxious about, I watch the news and maybe I watched too much, and what’s going to happen will my company close?”
Warwick F:
Maybe all sorts of things, but just admitting your fears helps, because one of the things that does is if you have a loved one who’s admitted to you that they’re fearful and anxious. Miraculously, it’s easy to show them grace and tolerance, because now you understand why they’re snapping. And it’s easier to forgive and understand. It works both ways.
Warwick F:
There’s some strange thing as you admit your fears and anxieties. In some strange way it can actually be calming in a sense because there’s somebody in it with you, you got a community that you can talk about it with each other. So ideally before you snap and we’re human, we’re going to snap sometimes.
Gary S:
Right.
Warwick F:
Before you snap, how about actually admitting your fears and anxieties, before it happens. You’ll get more grace and tolerance and you might avoid snapping, which will make your loved ones or roommates very thankful if you snap less.
Gary S:
Absolutely. And one of the blessings that I have found in the shelter-in-place period that we’re in as we’re recording this podcast, my wife and I are both working from home. And one of the things that we’ve been able to do when that stress and anxiety hits either one of us is able to take the time to do exactly what you just said. Admit our fears and anxiety to each other in real time. Whereas if we’re both at the office, that’s a lot harder to do. You got to pick up the phone, you got to call. Are you going to get them? No, we can walk into each other’s office areas that we have at home, and we can share those experiences and defuse them.
Gary S:
Just the other day, it worked where we just went for a walk. We went outside, we walked the dog, it took 15 minutes. And what was a very anxious moment, what was a very stressful moment, just all went away and we had a meaningful conversation over those 15 minutes, we had a few laughs over those 15 minutes and the rest of both of our days, improved markedly just by taking that time. So it’s yes, shelter-in-place, working in the same house can lead to stress but what you just said about admit your fears and anxieties, there’s great opportunity in the situation where you are sheltering in place to do that in real time for each other. And it’s a huge, huge way to not degrade relationships, for sure.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. And so, after you’ve done the internal audit, and admit your fears and anxieties to those you love that you live with or your roommates, that sets a good foundation really for the next tip or next step, which is to be flexible. If ever there was a time for flexibility, it’s right now as I mentioned before. Working from home, Zoom calls, what have you when you have all sorts of distraction and kids or roommates doing stuff, it’s not easy. You might be used to your commute, pick up coffee on the way to work. Maybe your favorite coffee shop at lunch, we have certain rhythms.
Warwick F:
I think a lot of people, they love their rhythms. That’s certainly me, I like my rhythms. And when it comes to my way of doing things being changed, I find that challenging. When I can’t do what I’m used to doing, I think a lot of people are like that we recognize that the routines being changed, that we’ll call stress. Add that to the fears and anxieties and it’s like, boy, I love going to work and chatting with my buddies or people there or going to the gym. Won’t be able to do that for a while. They’re just routines or exercise class, whatever it is. There are routines that we really enjoy and they’ve been totally upended. Who knows when we’ll be able to go to a restaurant again or wherever it is. So, recognize it is stressful, but it’s important to be flexible and to say, “Okay, this is not easy, but he’s talking to me forever.” And just give yourself a bit of grace in a sense.
Gary S:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s got to start with you, it’s got to start with being able to understand that again, not just in a pandemic, but in work situations that can cause stress and anxiety, to be flexible to, “roll with the punches.” To understand that not everybody has the same rhythms to use your word Warwick, not everybody has the same rhythms as you do. And you have to work with other people.
Gary S:
And back to what I was saying earlier, when you’re doing social commerce or you’re working together, you’re going to bump into each other. It’s bumper cars to some extent, right like in the carnival that’s going to happen, so how do you not knock each other off the roads? You have grace and tolerance. If you bump into each other, you recognize that people have different ways of doing things. And you look for the patch of grass, that common ground that you can find, and you manifest your flexibility and that can help you really move down the road to what we’re talking about here.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. Really after flexibility, that we began to talk about, it’s really tied to that too. Grace starts at home. Grace starts with yourself. Obviously, you got to show grace to others. Many of us and certainly I would be included in this are often our harshest critic. It’s like, why did that irritate me? I realized with shelter-at-home it’ll pass one of these days. Why do I keep getting frustrated? The smartest thing when you snap is immediately if you do it because we’re human we’re going to do it, is to apologize and say, “I’m sorry. That was a bit uncalled for.” If you can’t do it immediately, do it the next hour, the next day. Whenever it is, trust me, people will appreciate it. Even if they don’t ask you that. They will appreciate somebody. It’s a beautiful thing when you apologize and nobody’s even asked you to apologize. That’s the ideal form of apology.
Gary S:
Absolutely.
Warwick F:
But have grace with yourself realize it’s a tense time and we are going to snap a bit and stuff will happen. It is related to something else we talked about an earlier podcast is, obviously, we have to do some of the things to reduce stress. Whether it’s prayer and meditation, taking a walk, listening to music, various tips we’ve mentioned earlier. There are ways that we can reduce stress, but ultimately, even if we do all those things, we still snap, and we still need grace. So yeah, grace begins at home. That’s the first step of grace anyway.
Gary S:
Yeah, and it’s again, similar to the overall Crucible Leadership idea that you have to understand yourself. If you’ve had a crucible experience, you have to forgive yourself for your failure, you have to learn the lessons of that, you have to find a way to move beyond whatever it is in your crucible experience that you lay on yourself in order to then understand how you were refined by your crucible experience, understand how you are designed and what your vision can be. And then to turn that vision into reality. All of that whole step, what we call the refinement cycle in Crucible Leadership begins with self-analysis and having grace and having tolerance for other people in times of crisis and anxiety, starts with having grace for yourself.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. And if you can have grace for yourself and forgive yourself for snapping, that I think makes it a little easier in some ways to have grace and tolerance for others. Recognize your own failings. Recognize the log in your own eyes, so to speak. You want other people to have grace with you. Well, similar to tolerance, we need to have grace with others, we need to be understanding. Those we love, we know what their hot buttons are, we know what they’re fearful of. So when they snap at something, it’s like, “Okay, I get it.” They may be fearful about providing for the family or fearful about the kids or fearful about an aged parent that they’re not able to visit or a cousin. There’s all sorts of things that we can be stressed about. And so, understanding what that is in others, also helps showing grace.
Warwick F:
It reminds me of something that we have spoken of is this saying, “Treat other people the way you would like to be treated”, which is the so-called golden rule that happens to be the words of Jesus but the concept none the less whether you’re a person of faith or not. That’s really the key. The core of grace is treat other people the way you want to be treated. That’s huge. Showing grace to others will help reduce … there can be a cycle of stress and antagonism. And the more that we show grace to each other, the more that we can break the cycle of antagonism, which left to its own devices can get pretty ugly.
Gary S:
Right. Hopefully, you heard that point listener. The idea of having grace with others breaks the cycle of anxiety, fear, tension and then somebody says this or somebody butts heads here or to go back to my analogy about bumper cars, you stop really bumping into each other at high velocity when one of you raises their hand first and in basketball lingo says, “I’ll take the foul.” Right? When one of you says I will extend grace to you even though you don’t “deserve it,” I will extend grace to you because we both deserve it in the sense of having our relationship restored.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. I love that bumper car image you use Gary because, with bumper cars at least they have some rubber edge around them. But-
Gary S:
Right.
Warwick F:
… let’s imagine you’ve got two cars coming at each other. These days, even a minor fender bender costs thousands of dollars, it’s unbelievable. But if both of you are going 50, 60 miles an hour head on collision, that’s what a total of 100 miles an hour at impact or something, massive damage will be done. And so what tends to happen is the cycle of reaction without grace and tolerance, it can build up and you can say something or do something that not only will you regret, it could take days, or maybe even months to undo. You can say sorry, but you can’t take it back. Words can really hurt.
Warwick F:
And so you don’t want to have a major car accident that cost the equivalent of thousands and thousands and weeks or more to heal. That’s why the easiest thing is avoid the big train wreck, avoid the big car wreck, get out of the cycle of antagonism because you say something that’s really unkind. Even if you say sorry, the words are out there, especially with those we love, they really damage to the core. You just don’t want to even get to DEFCON 5, whatever it is, you just want to stay out of the nuclear war zone. It’s not worth it.
Gary S:
And I was going to save this toward the end. But since you just talked about the destructive power of words, in that conflict cycle, I have a quote that I dug up about grace from Elie Wiesel, the concentration camp survivor and author. And this is so powerful to me, but it’s about the power of words as grace, words extended in grace and this is what he said. Listen to the power of this. “Words can sometimes in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.” Words themselves can attain the quality of deeds. Kind words, in times of stress and conflict and anxiety can be just as powerful as acts of kindness, as things that we do to help each other that are tangible. Our words can take flesh, if you will, and they can lead to true healing as if we performed an act of kindness for someone. That to me, from someone who’s been through what he’s been through is an extremely powerful endorsement of how words uttered in grace, have great impact.
Warwick F:
Yeah, absolutely Gary. That is very profound. Words of grace can have a profound impact. Just I think as we’ve said before, we may be physically distant, but we’re not necessarily don’t have to be socially distant. And so just calling a friend and maybe you have an elderly parent or elderly friend, maybe there’s somebody that’s shut in with, cancer and they have preexisting condition and all, and they’re at the most risk of coronavirus. People already, health has been compromised. Just calling to say, “Hey, how are you? How are you doing?” Just listening and maybe taking their minds off what they’re going through. And maybe it’s talking about sports or whatever it is that nobody can watch anymore, but maybe recalling some favorite baseball game you went to and wasn’t that fun and whatever it is. Those are conversations of grace. Words of grace that can be healing and can definitely reduce stress. And I think that is so profound.
Gary S:
Yeah, and the idea too that, when we’re in conflict and stress, and we’ve done things, we snapped at our wives or we snapped at a co-worker we’ve not, as the Harvard Business Review story talked about where we’re grumpy on a video call. When we’ve done those things we tend, most of us if we’re honest deep down in our hearts, we know that we were a bit off base, we know we’ve done it. And for someone to offer you a word of grace as you’re dealing with that guilt or that shame, or that, “Oh, geez, I shouldn’t have done that.” When someone offers and extends you unmerited favor, unmerited courteous goodwill. That is an act in and of itself, because it releases you from the bondage you feel for having lost your cool.
Warwick F:
Yeah. I think that’s true. When we do those things extend grace, it definitely reduces stress, increases tolerance and just as a harsh word can generate a forest fire so the word of grace can be just like cool, refreshing water that just lowers the temperature. Both are power. One’s far more productive, and the other is far more destructive.
Gary S:
Right? There’s one more tip Warwick that is a summary tip that you had. And all of these things listener by the way, if you go to crucibleleadership.com. Warwick’s got a blog there where he discusses this very topic about how grace and tolerance are the antidote to anxiety and stress. But the last point in that blog, let’s share that with the listeners now.
Warwick F:
Yeah, the last tip was, it’s helpful to channel your energy in productive ways. One of the things we talked about having grace and understanding for each other reduces stress. But rather than being fixated on, “When am I going to get out of my house? When am I going to get to work?” Try and channel it in productive ways. Maybe there are some business plans you can work on, maybe something that you didn’t have a chance to do and so focus on that, if it’s your business, when things open up, how you take it to the next level? Even if you’ve been laid off. Okay, well, maybe I’d been on this treadmill for a while. Am in the ideal career track? Maybe there’s another career track I could pursue. Use that time, both from a work perspective and a home perspective.
Warwick F:
I know Gary, you’ve shared that you’ve got kids at home, high school, and you’ve been able to use that time to have some fun family time. You came up with some creative ideas, I think that maybe you and your wife wouldn’t have necessarily had time to.
Gary S:
Right. We were going to take a traditional spring break vacation. And we live in Wisconsin and we were going to go to Minneapolis and we were going to visit some friends there, some family there. So we had two tickets bought and the Airbnb all lined up, and then the shutdown hit and we couldn’t go. We had a couple of choices, right? It was stressful and it was anxiety filled. And we could have just said, “Oh, dang it,” and buried our heads in the sand like some people do in crucible experiences. And we decided, “Okay, let’s do a shelter-in-place, Spring Break vacation with the kids. And let’s take advantage of this time.”
Gary S:
To your point Warwick, about channeling your energy in a productive way. So we had themed days throughout how much of that vacation we were going to take. One day it was game day, where we played a bunch of board games of different stripes. I have to say this for the record, I won at Monopoly so I was very happy with that day. But we had a movie night one day, we cooked dinners. And since then, since even that spring break at home, we have established a routine where we every week we set a schedule where one of us there’s four of us, myself, my wife, and my two stepchildren, we each cook dinner one night. We pick whatever we want to cook, we make it and the one who’s either not a parent or not a kid who’s not cooking is the one who has to do the dishes that night too. So we found ways to build relationship, to show grace for each other, to find constructive and productive things to do to build harmony, which is the exact opposite of conflict and stress.
Warwick F:
Yeah, the beauty about playing games together, which we did recently too. I’ve three adult kids in their ’20s and they’re all with us at the moment. It produces fun and laughter. And yeah, it’s a way of actually bringing people together where normally, we’re running off to activities, whether it’s high school sports or work, or friends or whatever else we’re all doing, and so we’re spending far more time. So that’s really trying to turn a negative into a positive. And how can I use this time at home productively both from a professional work perspective, but also a family perspective?
Gary S:
Right.
Warwick F:
Try to write make a challenge an opportunity. That’s also part of the Crucible Leadership way of thinking. Channel crucibles into opportunities.
Gary S:
Right. One of the other definitions, it’s not Webster’s definition, but one definition that we could hang on grace and tolerance is turning negative situations into positive situations. You don’t need grace for someone if a situation is wholly positive. If there’s a negative aspect to it, that’s where grace needs to manifest itself. That’s where tolerance needs to manifest itself. So your words Warwick, about turning negatives into positives is a great definition for what grace and tolerance are all about.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. Grace and tolerance, they help build relationships. Unmerited favor is by most people is greatly appreciated. Doing things for a neighbor, doing unplanned for things with family, coworkers, calling somebody up, having a video call. A neighbor called me up a couple days ago and no agenda other than, “Hey Warwick. How are you doing?”
Gary S:
Right.
Warwick F:
I said, “Wow! That was cool.” There’s opportunities to actually build relationships, as you say, to make a positive out of the negative in these stressful times.
Gary S:
Yeah. So we’ve talked listener, so far about the theory, the 30,000 foot level over what grace and tolerance are and why they’re important to extend to each other, what the drawbacks are of not doing that. Warwick’s walked us through some excellent tips about how we can find and offer grace and tolerance to each other. And Warwick, as we get to the point where I like to say it’s time to begin to land the plane. It would be worthwhile, I think, to discuss with listeners. Why do we do this? At the end of the day, what are the benefits? We’ve both received grace in myriad ways from myriad people. What does it feel like? What is the benefit to being a recipient of grace? Why is it worth this effort? Why is it worth the decision? It’s not a pill you take. It’s a commitment you make. Why is it worth that commitment?
Warwick F:
I keep coming back to just, we live in this world of such judgmentalism such intolerance. Everybody thinks they’re right. I think everybody else is either wrong or evil. And this is really before the coronavirus hit. So there’s an opportunity here as we’re all stressed out, and we’re talking about showing grace and tolerance to each other. If when we get out of this coronavirus pandemic that we’re in, if we were actually able to live in a world where people would make a choice, make a commitment to try to show grace and tolerance to people who are different than them. Maybe it’s different religion, race, political party. Not assuming that anybody that’s different than you, or believes differently than you are evil.
Warwick F:
If just like a spark and light off a wildfire and devastate a forest, maybe a few sparks of grace and tolerance as those of us who make a commitment and a choice to do that with others, that can also spread. And maybe people can see some examples of once in a while, you’ll see maybe two politicians, Republican, Democrat, left, right. And they say, “We pretty much disagree on every issue you can possibly think of, we pretty much never ever vote. But he or she is my friend. He or she is my buddy and I love and I respect them, even though we pretty much never agree on a thing.” Those are role models of grace and tolerance, those are models where they might disagree, but they don’t impugn the other person’s character or motives.
Warwick F:
You can have good motives and good character, and believe differently on certain issues. So that’s why the more we do this, the more hopefully our world become a little less intolerant and a little bit more tolerant and a little bit more full of grace. And who of us wouldn’t want to live in a world that was more full of grace and tolerance? Isn’t that more fun? Isn’t that less stressful a world to live in? That is within our power, if we would just start and those ripples can then become greater and greater and maybe the ripples will grow into maybe tidal wave is a bit optimistic but a bigger wave perhaps, that would be a wonderful goal. A wonderful dream, maybe a wonderful ideal to strive for.
Gary S:
Absolutely. And it’s true I think, that you really don’t have a chance to move beyond a crucible, title and podcast, if you don’t have grace for yourself, if you don’t receive grace from others, and if you don’t extend grace to others, is that a fair statement?
Warwick F:
Absolutely, no question.
Gary S:
Well, we have reached that time in our podcast, where the landing gear is down. My seatbelt is fasted, so we’re ready to land the plane. Let me leave you listener with some takeaways I think that came from this discussion that Warwick and I have had today. The first one would be that grace and tolerance are not pills you take but decisions you make. Why do you make those decisions so as not to degrade relationships and professional productivity? How do we do it? How to We make those decisions and those commitments? Well, as I read at the top of the show as Harvard Business Review says, “We do that by leaning into compassion, empathy and kindness.” That’s takeaway number one.
Gary S:
Takeaway number two is the same about grace and tolerance as it is about Crucible Leadership, about bouncing back from your crucible. And that is do a self-audit. Why are you feeling like you’re feeling? Is it fair that you’re feeling this way? Is it fair to others? Are there other perspectives that may be more true, that may offer more insight for you on your journey? Like bouncing back from your crucible, the journey starts with self-reflection. From there, you can build a life of grace and tolerance just like from there in your crucible experience and bouncing back from that, you can build a life of significance after doing some self-reflection.
Gary S:
And then the last thing I think listener, we want to leave you with is check out Warwick’s blog on crucibleleadership.com where he unpacks some of the tips, all the tips that we talked about here today and I’m going to run through them. After doing an internal audit, here are five other things that you can do that are listed and unpacked in the blog. Admit your fears and anxieties to others, be flexible, have grace with yourself, have grace with others, and channel your energy in some productive ways.
Gary S:
Thank you listener for spending time with us today on Beyond the Crucible. As always, we appreciate the opportunity to offer what we hope is hope and healing through your own experience in not just what’s going on right now with COVID-19. But what’s going on in those crucibles in your life that you have gone through or maybe going through right now.
Gary S:
We have a little favor to ask of you, on the podcast app that you’re listening to this show on right now. We would ask If you click Subscribe, that does a couple of things for us. It allows us to reach more people with these kinds of conversations and also the interviews that we do with people like yourself who’ve been through crucibles, and people who have perspectives on how to help you get beyond those crucibles. It also will ensure for you that you won’t miss any episodes that we have in the future.
Gary S:
So until we’re together next time, thank you again for being with us. And remember this, that crucible experiences are very real and very painful. They can be very full of stress, full of anxiety, they can knock you off balance, but they are not. We hope you’ve learned in listening to our podcasts and in following Warwick on Crucible Leadership. Crucible experiences aren’t the end of your story. They are in fact, if you dig in, if you self-reflect, as we’ve talked about today, they can be the start of a new chapter in your story. And that chapter can be the most rewarding of your life because what it points toward, what it leads to, is something we all should pursue and that is a life of significance.
For 11 harrowing years, Ed Kressy descended deeper and deeper into the madness of methamphetamine addiction. From believing the FBI was trying to pin the 9/11 attacks on him, to not bathing or brushing his teeth for months, to considering himself married to the voices in his head that tormented his thoughts, his grip on reality slipped away a little more each day. It was a far cry from the life he had known, he tells Crucible Leadership founder and BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE host Warwick Fairfax: a college education, a good job, home ownership in San Francisco. But then the alcohol he turned to in his teens to feel like “there was something I was good at” finally caught up to him, fueling his hellish cycle of helplessness and hopelessness. It was only after actually getting arrested by the FBI that he found his way back through the combined power of spirituality, self-improvement and service. Today, he gives back to his community by volunteering with the police and California jails and prisons — truly significant work that has, ironically, earned him a community service award from the FBI he once so feared. “Being a value to others,” he says, “was ultimately serving my own dreams.”
To learn more about Ed Kressy, including information on his book My Addiction & Recovery: Just Because You’re Done with Drugs, Doesn’t Mean Drugs Are Done with You, visit www.edkressy.com
To explore Beyond the Crucible resources, including our free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment, visit beyondthecrucible.com.
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and leave a comment at our YouTube channel. And be sure subscribe and tell your friends and family about us.
👉 Take the free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment to discover where you are on your journey of moving beyond your crucible and how to chart your personal course to a life of significance: https://beyondthecrucible.com/assessment/
Transcript
Gary S:
Welcome everyone 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, subscribe, listened to a podcast that deals in what can be a difficult subject; in crucible experiences. Those painful moments in life, failures, setbacks, those things that kind of knock us off our feet, derail us, change the trajectory of our lives. But the reason that we talk about them is because it’s extremely important. We interview guests and we talk about these experiences in order to offer hope to folks maybe like you who are listening who are going through those experiences now. So we don’t want to camp out here, we don’t want to wallow in those moments. We want to learn from those moments, we want to leverage those moments so that we can begin the path of bouncing back from those moments and leading a life of significance.
Gary S:
Here with me as always is the founder of Crucible Leadership and the host of the podcast, Warwick Fairfax. Warwick, we’ve got a good one today.
Warwick F:
Absolutely. Great to be here Gary.
Gary S:
So our good one today, our guest today is Ed Kressy. And I’m going to tell all of you a little bit about Ed. I’ve got to say before I read Ed’s bio that we always ask guests to submit biographies to us that I can read on air. Ed’s has the best lead, the best beginning I’ve ever had someone to submit to us. And as a former journalist I like to think I know a little bit about leads. Here’s the Ed Kressy story in a few sentences.
Gary S:
Ed Kressy is probably the only person who was once arrested by the FBI then went on to turn his life around and receive a community service award from the director of the FBI. He transformed his life from drug addiction, mental illness, and criminal activity to follow a path of spirituality, self-improvement, and service to others. Ed volunteers in maximum security prisons and jails, helping incarcerated men and women gain skills for empowerment, entrepreneurism, and self-advocacy. Ed volunteers for law enforcement, helping the San Francisco Police Department and FBI better serve communities affected by incarceration and addiction. He’s achieved his lifelong dream of becoming a writer by publishing work in The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Vox. His book, My Addiction & Recovery: Just Because You’re Done With Drugs Doesn’t Mean Drugs are Done With You is being published in April of 2020. Ed, welcome to Beyond the Crucible.
Ed K:
Thank you Gary, thank you Warwick. It’s great to be here.
Warwick F:
Well Ed, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. You have just some amazing experiences. I’d love to start with just your story and how that led up to your crucible. But just tell us a bit about Ed Kressy and your background and kind of who you are, how you grew up, and how that led to some of the challenging experiences you had.
Ed K:
Sure. I grew up with a lot of opportunities, a lot of privileges. My childhood was idyllic in many ways. I grew up in the beautiful countryside of Massachusetts. When I got into junior high and high school, what had happened was I was just kind of a different kid. I was very uncoordinated, I couldn’t play sports or compete in gym class. I loved to read. I would come home from the library with these big stacks of books because I always liked to escape into the world of fantasy more so than I could feel comfortable in the reality of the world around me.
Ed K:
I was very sensitive, I would cry quite easily. So where I went to high school, reading, crying, being uncoordinated, not exactly a campaign platform upon which one might run for class president.
Warwick F:
Yeah, I get that.
Ed K:
So I’ll tell you Warwick, one of the very first things I felt good at was drinking. When I started to learn how to drink around 14 years old, progressing into very heavy drinking when I was 16, I began to feel like I have a talent. I have a skill. I have some way I can feel like I’m an effective part of the world around me. The only other thing in my life up until then which had made me feel like that was writing. When I would write my stories or assignments in English class back in grade school, sometimes the teachers would call me up to the front of the room to read my assignments. These are some of the first times I felt like I was good at something. The kids who would bully me during recess would sometimes come up to me after I’d read one of my stories aloud and tell me that they liked it, clap me on the shoulder.
Warwick F:
Wow, that is quite the dichotomy. They bully you and then say, “Hey Ed that was a really great story.” And part of you seeks affirmation through drinking because I’m assuming when you drank, I was pretty shy in school and not particularly athletic so I can at least relate at some level. But when you drink it makes you less shy, less inhibited, and probably you felt accepted. Hey boy, Ed’s really quite something when he drinks, right? He’s quite the personality. And so those are two very different things get affirmation, drinking and writing. It’s an amazing dichotomy as you look back.
Ed K:
Absolutely. The one thing that for people to understand about alcoholism and drug addiction as I’ve learned is that drinking and drugs usually are not our problem. They are our attempt at a solution. And as you alluded to, Warwick, my problem of not fitting in, my problem of feeling that I couldn’t find acceptance within my peer group, that was something I solved through drinking and through getting high. My dream of being a writer, that was something I could push to the side because writing, as we know, Gary you especially, writing takes discipline. Writing takes perseverance. Writing takes being able to fail and get back up again. I didn’t have the self-confidence and the belief in myself to do any of that. But drinking and getting high gave me the illusions, the false beliefs in myself. Drinking, getting high, just like you said Warwick, made me feel like I was somebody. Made me feel like I could contribute to the world around me. These are the reasons I pursued a lifestyle of heavy drinking and deep, devastating addiction to drugs for so many years. They solved the problem basically of me being me.
Gary S:
I’m going to jump in at this point and normally listeners you know that Warwick is the chief questioner here and that’s not going to change in this episode. But Ed and I share more than just being writers, people who grew up to be writers. Ed, I also have an alcoholic background. And when I hear you say, “Fitting in, found something you were good at,” I was quote unquote popular, whatever that means in those ages, athletic and those kind of things. But it was a sense of camaraderie that I could build with people when those kinds of things happen. And I say that to you to say hey brother we have affinity there but also for the listener. There are people regardless of what their crucibles may be and what they struggle with and how they deal with that. But your definition of an addiction, it’s the symptom, whatever that might be. Drugs, alcohol, other forms of distraction from what it is you can most productively be putting your time toward, that’s a symptom. The disease, the addiction is what that underlying root is, that problem is. Why you do what you do.
Gary S:
One of the most insightful things I learned at Alcoholics Anonymous was, it’s not how much you drink that makes you an alcoholic, it’s why you drink. And for me, why I drank was to change the way I felt. And I’m certain there are listeners right now, alcoholism might not be your problem, it may be drug addiction. Those kinds of things may not be your problem but there is something in your core perhaps about how you feel about yourself as Ed described, as I’ve described. There’s something in the core about how you feel about yourself that you feel you need to change.
Gary S:
And sometimes in doing that it can be unhealthy. Sometimes in doing that, Warwick you have experienced this in some way by trying to be good enough to take over the family business, even though that wasn’t necessarily your vision. You didn’t necessarily feel like that was where you were supposed to go. So I think all of us who had crucibles have a bit of that in us, that idea that if we behave in this way or if we change our behavior in this way or if we try this thing, that’s going to put us in a better position. And sometimes it can actually, instead of putting water on the fire that is our crucible, it can add gasoline to that fire. Is that fair, Warwick?
Warwick F:
Yeah, I think what you’re saying Gary is profoundly true. We all want to fit in, self-worth. I’ve had my own struggles but they were different. I can relate to what Ed’s saying in the sense that I was very shy, went to a kind of exclusive boys school, but I wasn’t very athletic. Because my family was so wealthy, prominent status, owning a huge media company, I was far different than the other boys and so… I didn’t get bullied a lot, but some, one or two. And some would taunt me saying, “Oh Warwick, you think you’re better than us,” just because my family had a bunch of money and my dad had some cars, one of which was a Aston Martin that was almost identical to the one that James drove in Goldfinger, funnily enough. But that’s another story. That was kind of cool. And I would say, “No, I don’t.” I worked very hard and got good grades and so I don’t know maybe that’s, I don’t know quite how I cope with it all but that sense of not belonging, not feeling accepted, I can absolutely relate.
Warwick F:
So we’re understanding a bit of the why behind some of the really challenging circumstances that happened later. I’m just fascinated by the dichotomy between writing and drinking. Writing you can fail, drinking, I almost wonder can you fail at that? You just drink and will have the desired effect. I don’t know, I guess failing and not failing maybe don’t think about it that way. But maybe did it feel easier than writing, in a sense? I don’t know if that question makes sense Ed.
Ed K:
It makes perfect sense. It did feel easier. Addiction, Warwick and Gary, was beautifully put what you were saying. Addiction usually serves a purpose. The purpose is oftentimes to push us along pathways we otherwise would’ve never undertaken. That’s eventually when we get to living a life of significance and we get beyond our crucible moment, usually we can look back and see our addiction as driving us towards a goal we otherwise never would’ve pushed ourselves towards.
Ed K:
The other part of addiction is, it’s a way of avoiding going after our dreams. I’ve always felt that for the addicts and the alcoholics, certainly the way I was and maybe many others, it’s a matter of adopting goals versus pursuing dreams. For many people goals and dreams are the same thing. A woman’s dream is to be a business owner so her goal is to own a business. A man’s dream is to be a marathoner so his goal is to run a marathon. A goal is something we want to achieve, a dream is someone we want to be. For many people they’re very closely related. For me, and of many other addicts, the dream is to feel normal.
Warwick F:
Right.
Ed K:
The dream is to feel accepted. The dream is to be a writer, the dream is to just feel comfortable in my own skin. No business ownership, no home, no athletic pursuit is ever going to make that dream happen. So instead we pursue these goals. For me I earned a college degree, I owned a home, I had a carer with an organization that went on to be named the number one best company in America to work for by Fortune Magazine. I pursued and I achieved these goals, but they were essentially meaningless because they never were going to get me to my dream of feeling normal, feeling Warwick like you said, like I belong. And they weren’t going to get me to my dream of being a writer.
Warwick F:
And I want to talk a little bit about that next phase of your life, college and working for one of the most admired companies in America. But I almost have this picture of you in a desert and you see an oasis, but it turns out to be a mirage. You get there and it’s not there. So no matter how much you succeed, the nice home, the nice cars, it’s like that in of itself doesn’t necessarily make you feel good about yourself. And so you keep assuming this mirage. When you get there it’s like, “I thought I was there but it just vanished right into thin air.” But you feel like okay it’s over the next sand dune. Do you follow what I’m saying? It feels illusory, that you keep pursuing something you can never attain it by just drinking or success. Do you feel that, that you’re constantly pursuing something but never getting there in a sense?
Ed K:
The oasis, yes, that’s a wonderful image. It’s a condition of comfort versus happiness. As human beings we’re hard wired not to be happy but to be comfortable. Or to put it in another way, to be safe.
Ed K:
Comfort and happiness are not the same thing. For me I could be very comfortable in that world of addiction as I abandon more and more of those goals and sank deeper towards my crucible moment, as I sunk into psychosis and threw away my home, my life savings, my career much more to addiction. I remained comfortable. I knew I could survive as a drug addict from one day to another. I knew I could survive. I’d done it for years, for decades. However, pursuing my dream, becoming a writer, I did not have the belief in myself that I could survive going after my dream. I feared failure but even more so I feared success. Instead of going after that dream which would’ve been very uncomfortable, I stayed in that unhappy yet comfortable world of addiction.
Warwick F:
So last thing before we get to your crucible moment. It’s fascinating you use that phrase fearing success. There’s a woman by the name Marianne Williamson who spent a lot of time in the coaching world and I’m sure it’s on YouTube somewhere. She has this great book, I think it’s Return to Love. And she’s spiritual in that broad sense of the word. She has this wonderful phrase that our deepest fear is success. Our deepest fear that we will be successful beyond measure. I can’t do it justice, but that’s exactly what she talks about.
Warwick F:
So let’s talk about the crucible moment because you graduated college and you’re doing very well. You achieved a lot considering like a lot of us growing up your self-worth wasn’t that high, which is interesting. But talk about the success, the job, the cars. So where were you just before things all went downhill so to speak?
Ed K:
Sure, on the surface I had a lot. I had a lot of help. I came from a relatively privileged background so my college education was paid for and my down payment on my home was paid for. I worked hard and I got to a point where I had that career, I owned that home, I was competing in kickboxing as an amateur. I was never very good at kickboxing but I would get in the gym and I would train a lot. And on the surface I did have a lot of trappings of success. Yet I had been a drug addict all along. I would binge use on weekends. I followed this path for years.
Ed K:
It was like my life became like a seesaw. On one side was the home and the career and the relationships and the beautiful motorcycle I used to ride. On the other side was my addiction, my binge using every weekend. One can maintain a seesaw like that for some time. I maintained it for years, but eventually something’s got to give.
Ed K:
For me, in 2000, the seesaw kind of plunged onto the one side. I began using methamphetamine every day. I graduated from snorting meth to smoking it. That’s when the psychosis began to set in. I started to hear disembodied voices claiming to be from the police department and the FBI threatening to kidnap and torture me to death. I believed they were trying to pin 9/11 on me, that they were hiring cults and motorcycle gangs to come and kill me. I would rip apart my electronics and punch holes in my dry wall looking for hidden surveillance devices. I would see airplanes and helicopters following me, pictures of myself in newspapers and on the internet. This was my life for years and years. I used to carry a .357 pistol everywhere I went because I was afraid of people coming after me. I’d come to in the mornings with a 12 gauge shotgun on my chest. That’s where I’d fallen asleep or passed out the night before waiting for gangsters to kick down my door.
Ed K:
It gets worse and worse. Eventually I got to a point in 2007 after bouncing in and out of jails. I was stripped naked and locked into a padded cell for 24 hour observation by the Sheriff’s Department. I bounced in and out of rehabs, destitution, I had long since thrown away my life savings. I was nowhere near employable. Living in this little flop house hotel. Hadn’t showered or brushed my teeth in months. Given away my beloved dog, the only creature left really that I felt cared about me or I felt that I was able to extend love to. I’d given my dog away. It was just terrible. My physical surroundings were very bad and my mindset was much worse. I was a drain on my communities, I was stealing from welfare. I used to get food stamps and go buy steaks and then trade the steaks to my drug dealer for meth.
Ed K:
Warwick and Gary I could go on and on and on. I think your listeners get a sense of my poor decisions, my poor choices, my mistakes led me to a point where my only three options were basically to get locked up, to get covered up, like six feet of earth covered up, or to get sobered up. I could’ve maybe gone in to long term homelessness and avoided some of that, but basically I was at the end of the road.
Warwick F:
So I’m assuming at that point your self-worth was, I don’t know, rock bottom probably doesn’t do it justice. It’s probably lower than rock bottom, but did you ever think of hurting yourself, suicide, or the best thing for humanity would be for Ed Kressy not to be around? Did you ever get to that kind of point?
Ed K:
Ironically, when I did get to that point and I stayed there for years, the worst of it was after I got clean. Because like we were saying, drugs are usually not our problem, drugs are our attempt at a solution. And so listeners, that’s one reason why it’s often so hard for an addicted person like me to quit drugs. Because when we quit now we have no more solution. After I got clean I had nothing left to tamp down that negativity I felt towards myself and which I projected onto the world around me. So Warwick, the answer to your question is yes, I was suicidally depressed, yet ironically the worst of it came after I got clean off the meth.
Warwick F:
Wow, because that sort of medicated the pain. So it sounds like just sort of on the street, in a flop house, you lose your house, car. I mean, dog, that’s got to be as bad as anything that you lost, because you loved the dog and the dog loved you. That probably felt worse than losing the house. So you’re in this terrible place. How in the world did you begin to make that hard decision to try to move beyond that? And I’m fascinated when you said it got worse as you got sober. How did you even begin to think why change? A lot of people don’t change. I’m assuming you know much more than I do, but to just continue in that addicted lifestyle for the rest of their lives. How did you make a choice to go a different path?
Ed K:
I got to a point, there was one night where… The only clothes I owned basically was this filthy tuxedo because I worked at the strip clubs and got fired. And I would wander around the city of San Francisco at night in this filthy tux. I found myself in a fancy hotel lingering outside a ballroom where a wedding reception was taking place thinking I’m going to go in and blend in wearing my tuxedo. As I stood at the doorway to that wedding reception in that hotel ballroom, I realized that in the past few years five couples had gotten married, 10 of my closest friends. One of them had asked me to be the best man. Warwick, do you know how many of those weddings I had shown up to? Yeah, zero. Not one. 10 of my closest friends married, I didn’t attend a single wedding.
Ed K:
More than that, for years I’d been hearing these disembodied voices, and I considered them my spouses. I had gotten so attached to this life of the disembodied voices and the FBI conspiracies that I believed I was married to these voices. Something inside me clicked. The wheels turned. I realized Warwick, I was certainly never going to become a writer. I was never going to be able to contribute to relationships. I was not going to be an effective part of the world around me. I didn’t know what a life of significance was at the time. I wouldn’t have been able to use those words or explain what they meant, but something inside me realized it was either a life of significance or no life whatsoever.
Ed K:
It was that moment somewhere deep inside me I found the strength to do the very, very hard work that continues to this day of turning my life around, pursuing that path of significance, and bringing something to the world around me rather than taking and taking and taking. Which had been what I was all about for many years.
Gary S:
I want to pause here for just a moment for the listener and rewind sort of the last seven or eight minutes that we’ve heard Ed talking. Ed, your story is fantastic in the sense of not great but it’s a big story. It’s a story with a lot of elements that many of us, even those of us who have addictive pasts, have not experienced. And I want to make sure the listeners hear that story and think there’s no relevance to you and your own crucible experience. Because the point we’re at now, what Ed just said, that he had two choices. He could live in his crucible as out sized as that crucible was, as hard as it maybe some of us to understand it, he could live in that crucible or he could learn lessons from it. He could move beyond it and point himself towards significance. That is what all of us face in the crucible experiences in our life.
Gary S:
So you, listener, as you’re hearing these words, please don’t be lulled into thinking that Ed’s story doesn’t have relevance to you because the experiences of your crucible aren’t the same as his. The emotions of your crucible, not feeling worthy, feeling like there’s no hope at times, feeling like how am I going to get out, feeling like you can’t overcome it, you’ll never be able to bounce back from it. Those emotions that Ed described, those are universal. Those are things that apply to your situation, your failure, your setback, every bit as much as they apply to Ed’s. And as we continue this conversation, as Ed talks now and Warwick and Ed talk about the further bounce back and then the true life of significance that Ed’s found, remember that those emotions are universal to all of us who had crucible experiences.
Warwick F:
Absolutely, very well said. Pretty much every human struggles with self-worth if they’re honest. And how do you overcome that? That’s so true. So, Ed you’re in this low point and I’m sensing that you had a choice, which was to either continue the lifestyle that was so destructive of yourself and relationships. I mean missing weddings of 10 close friends, that’s obviously going to not do your self-esteem any good. It tends to increase the sense of self-loathing and self-hatred, if you will. But I’m sensing this concept of significance, this concept of serving others that something in there was pretty key to begin as baby steps of trying to get beyond just this addictive lifestyle that you were facing. Does that make sense Ed? There’s something about significance that was part of the key to pulling you out of that. Is that true?
Ed K:
If I was going to pursue my dream I was going to need self-confidence. I was going to need to believe in myself. Becoming a writer, that was maybe a little bit too big of a jump for me to take right away, especially with my self-confidence. And Gary, as you put it so well, my sense of hopelessness, my feeling that nobody understood me, my beliefs that the world was just not going to cooperate with my achieving my dreams, all those feelings. In order to overcome them, I took the smaller steps of serving my communities. I became a volunteer, first responder through the fire department. I worked for a political campaign for a guy who became a close friend and was really about improving his neighborhoods and quality of life to the people around him. I would volunteer everywhere I could. I would go to the SCPA and collect donations outside a Macy’s window at Christmas time or around holiday times.
Ed K:
I began to find these ways to serve my communities. They were kind of smaller ways. I could bite off little chunks, I could become a volunteer for a few hours. Even if I couldn’t make that big leap to becoming a writer, this was a little pathway that I could take. I didn’t realize it at the time. Looking back I see that being of value to others, giving my time in order to serve others, that was ultimately serving my own dreams, which hopefully as I continue my writing career will actually serve others more and more. That was the pathway.
Warwick F:
Yeah, I think another really important thing for listeners to hear and just more generally about Ed’s path is it’s often baby steps. It’s really the path to getting beyond just this feeling of self-worth. While my background is very different I can relate on one level that as listeners know, when growing up in this 150 year old large family media business. I was a person of faith founded by a strong person of faith. So when that two billion dollar takeover kind of went bust and bankrupt and I felt responsible for losing 150 year old family legacy and my sense of self-worth was at rock bottom, there weren’t too many jobs for out of work media moguls. Moved back to the US where my wife is from, it was grim. I just felt like anything that I would touch I’m just going to mess up.
Warwick F:
But I remember I guess had done financial analysis years ago after Oxford and before Harvard Business School on Wall Street. So I knew I could do analysis. And I went to some temp agency and took some Excel spreadsheet test and I guess I must’ve been pretty good. So I got some part time job at some local sports company. It was actually Head Sports as in Head racket and skis at the time had a place in Maryland. And so for a few months they needed help doing their budgeting and I could do spreadsheets. Just tell me what you want and I could do something. Well it was a small little baby step as well. I actually accomplished something and didn’t screw it up, wow.
Warwick F:
So for me it wasn’t initially service to others. And from then I got financial analysis, business analysis for a aviation services firm. And little bit by little bit and then the analogy for what Ed’s going through. So part of my what I call almost drops of grace, if you will, gosh there’s something I can do and contribute. From there I got into coaching and on two nonprofit boards, a Christian school board that my kids went to, an Elder at my church, and obviously the volunteer things aren’t paid but it’s like gosh. I have a strategic mindset. I can help with strategic planning and governance. There’s something I can do and contribute, even with coaching, which didn’t pay a whole lot at the time. Somehow I can help others a little bit by little bit.
Warwick F:
Again our backgrounds probably couldn’t be more different, but my self-esteem was pretty low. Little bit by little bit there were things I could do that contribute and serve others that gradually was almost like building a mountain or building a wall. Brick by brick my self-esteem would bounce back a bit. Does that resonate with you, that little bit by little bit your self-esteem might get, I don’t know, one percent better than the day before as you were volunteering and helping all these folks?
Ed K:
Yes, absolutely. The work is very hard to do to live a life of significance. In order to do the hard work we need inspiration. So when we serve others and we can see how others are overcoming their own obstacles. Oftentimes that gives us that inspiration to do that hard work to overcome our obstacles. That’s definitely how it was for me.
Warwick F:
So talk about the next chapter in your story. You mentioned before, okay you made a decision that you were going to try to tackle addiction. You’re doing things to help others, volunteering in your community. But you said it almost got worse when the numbing effect of addiction wasn’t there. How did you keep going and do the hard yards? What was the motivation to get through what almost, I don’t know if it was worse, but I thought really hard. How’d you get through that?
Ed K:
It got very hard when I discovered was just because you’re done with drugs doesn’t mean drugs are done with you. I mentioned the suicidal depression. I continued to experience psychosis, extreme paranoia around the FBI and the police department. What really got me through most of all was spirituality. I came to understand that there is according to how I choose to believe things, there is a spiritual presence, a God, a universe, a great spirit, whatever the proper name is. I don’t completely understand that spiritual presence but I believe in the existence of this spiritual presence and the constant pursuit of spiritual understanding, the constant pursuit of spiritual meaning in life. That was what started as a flimsy little reed that I could cling to to start dragging myself out of that dark psychosis and suicidal depression. The more I pursued a path of spirituality, the more I started to define what it meant for me, the more incredible, amazing people inspired me, persons of faith based background, persons of spiritual background.
Ed K:
The one thing that really resonates, or one of the things that most resonates with me is that the spiritual is the non material. So when we think of what is spirituality? One definition I like to use is that if it’s non material then we might consider it spiritual. So, significance, a life of significance. Absolutely, to me that is something that falls under my definition of the spiritual. This is my path.
Warwick F:
Yeah. So when you think of the spiritual, I know for me and my faith based perspective, I believe that God loves us just because we’re all children of God kind of thing. And we don’t have to achieve things. It’s a love that doesn’t depend on us doing anything. Does your spiritual framework, does it give you a sense that you don’t have to achieve things for the world, for the universe to believe you have value?
Ed K:
Yeah, I believe this life is one stage in a vast journey. And what we do in this life somehow will affect what that next stage of the journey will look like. I’m a part of a faith based community myself. I’m part of a Christian community. It’s a wonderful community. I’ve found that by learning from these members in my community, by learning from the persons with backgrounds in Zen, in Buddhism, persons of Muslim faith, that all the ideas, all the wisdom that’s passed along by so many incredibly people hopefully has planted some small seed of wisdom within me that will continue to grow as-
Warwick F:
And so as you were meeting people in different spiritual communities, did you feel that they accepted you for who you were, warts and all kind of thing?
Ed K:
Absolutely. People believed in me when I couldn’t believe in myself. People saw value in me that I didn’t see in myself. The more good I put forth the more I served others, the more I tried to give to the world around me, the more the world gave back in the form of these incredible people who just kept coming into my life.
Warwick F:
And that’s something very important for the listeners to know because to get beyond crucible experiences, whether it’s addiction or what have you, yes I think spirituality both Ed and I can agree can be a big help. But also friends that know who we are, that realize the mistakes we’ve made, but they love and care for us anyway. And that unconditional love, that is sort of like rocket fuel. People that really know you and they love you anyway, it’s like really, if they now everything how in the world can they still want to be around me and be my friends? You might not have understood it at the time, but you appreciated it. And so that probably also through spirituality and some friends who love you unconditionally, those probably were a big help I’m guessing in going through those hard early years. Is that fair?
Ed K:
Addiction and mental illness that I found is overcoming the stigma.
Warwick F:
Yeah.
Ed K:
Yeah, the symptoms of the schizophrenia like condition that I had when I was on meth and it persisted in some form or another, even to this day at times. The symptoms themselves, at least after I quit meth, they never bothered me nearly as much as the fact I tried to hide them. I tried to conceal a big part of myself. So Warwick, yeah, the friends I had, the people in my life, the way they accepted me warts and all, that was such a big part of me being able to express myself, to overcome stigmas, and get into the learnings from that crucible experience into the benefits. And I’d just love to add, of all the help I received, people in law enforcement ironically gave me some of the most meaningful help. Of all the people out there I’m so grateful to the FBI, the police department, protectors in general, firefighters, persons in the military. Along with faith based communities and spiritual practitioners and many others. People in law enforcement really had a belief in me, gave me second chances. And as a result, I’m able to give something back to my communities.
Warwick F:
Now talk about that because I know you went from a point being paranoid that the FBI’s out to get you to receiving an award from the director of the FBI. Obviously that’s amazing but there’s some irony in that. So talk about how that happened and what that felt like.
Ed K:
Yeah, well I was terrified of the FBI. Years after I quit meth I still believed the FBI was trying to pin 9/11 on me. I believed I had inadvertently befriended a 9/11 hijacker when I was kickboxing in Bangkok in 2000. I had all these beliefs and basically it was terror. A lot of fear, a lot of terror. I learned through these amazing people I mentioned, I learned that I would need to face my fears. If I was ever going to pursue my dream, if I was ever going to live that true life of significance, it’s like the writer Joseph Campbell says, “In the cave you fear to enter lies the treasure you seek.”
Ed K:
Or Nelson Mandela, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” For me, there was so much fear and I learned I was going to have to face it. Basically I get to meet some people who are FBI agents. I made it known to them that I wanted to serve the FBI as I had served the fire department when I’d been a volunteer first responder. From there I was nominated to this selective FBI Citizens Academy where basically they take people and they put us through a six week one night a week course on how the FBI fulfills its mission of protecting Americans.
Ed K:
Along the way I discovered that the FBI, I didn’t really know this, but they do have a strong interest in serving communities, or what I should say is they have a strong interest in further serving communities who are affected by incarceration and addiction. I’m so grateful to the FBI because they allowed me to not only have a second chance but to contribute my particular unique strengths and insights into their work. And this is how I ultimately wound up in Washington D.C. in May of 2019 shaking hands with the director of the FBI. I was one of 57 Americans to be honored with this community service award. Warwick, 12 years ago the Ed Kressy that would’ve been in an FBI office would’ve been a lot different circumstances. I wouldn’t have been shaking hands with the director, I’ll tell you that.
Ed K:
So just speak so highly to the FBI, to the police department, to the fire department. All these wonderful spiritual practitioners and individuals and faith based communities that when a second chance is extended, yes it benefits the receiver me, but a second chance can also benefit the giver, society just as much if not more so.
Warwick F:
And what’s sort of stunning to me here is that one would hope, a spiritual community’s definitely not perfect, but in their better moments you would hope that they would reach out and accept you. But you found love and acceptance from law enforcement. You think law enforcement are all about convicting people, putting people away. But they kind of gave you a second chance. They knew your record so to speak or the things that you struggle with but yet they accepted you and welcomed you anyway. Talk about how that felt? Because that’s an amazing story that I think most of us don’t really think about, that law enforcement accepting us and almost wanting to give us a second chance. Talk about that and how that felt.
Ed K:
Yeah, absolutely. By no means do I intend a blanket endorsement of law enforcement. I don’t mean to endorse everything that law enforcement does or has ever done.
Warwick F:
Sure.
Ed K:
But what I can say with complete confidence is that there are individuals within places like the FBI and the police department who just like you say Warwick, who are truly dedicated to protecting, to serving individuals such as myself who are committed to giving chances for life’s turnarounds. I found that there are organizations and then there are people within those organizations. And they’re often two different things. When we can form these bridges of trust, when we can focus on what we have in common, what are our common interests, and pretty much those interests are going to relate to making society better and making things safer and better quality of life for everyone.
Ed K:
When we can focus on these things, they tend to expand. In life whatever we focus on tends to expand. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t things wrong. It doesn’t mean that we need to fix what’s wrong with our society, because there is a lot wrong. At the same what I’ve learned is let’s also really focus on what’s right. Let’s focus on these FBI police formerly incarcerated and currently incarcerated individuals. Let’s focus on these human beings who are bettering themselves, who are bettering their communities, who are serving others. Because when we focus on the work that these individuals are doing, that work is going to expand. And that goodness and those benefits are going to extend throughout society.
Warwick F:
Right. And as you are extended grace, forgiveness, you want to extend that to others, to people that have been incarcerated and help them get beyond it because you would know better than I, where they call it recidivism, if that’s the right word, if people going back to jail and committing crimes can be higher than we would like. And just trying to help stop that cycle. So talk a bit about your life of significance now. You use that phrase the cave that we fear to go in. I guess two different questions. What’s your life significance now, and for Ed Kressy what is that cave that you fear to go in?
Ed K:
Well, first the significance in addition to serving law enforcement, I volunteer inside maximum security prisons and in jails coaching as Gary was saying earlier, coaching incarcerated men and women on employment, entrepreneurism, and self advocacy. As obvious as it sounds to say, I’ve discovered that if my birth circumstances had been the same as the women and men I work with behind prison and jail bars, I would’ve been on the other side. These women and men have taught me very powerful lessons.
Ed K:
To get to the other point, the fear is really in just being honest and expressing myself. Honesty not so much as opposed to being dishonest, but really overcoming that stigma. Being forthcoming about the mental health challenges that I have faced. Being forthcoming about the fact I don’t consider myself mentally ill as mentally enhanced. You hear about people who viewed reality in different ways yet have served their societies incredibly well. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, the list goes on and on. So the fear is in just being honest, overcoming stigmas, and in doing so bringing more and more value to the world around me in some small way like so many incredible people have brought value to my life.
Warwick F:
I think that’s so true. You mentioned Abraham Lincoln. He suffered from what they called at the time melancholy. That was the word that they used. I don’t know that we know quite what that means, but he did suffer bouts of depression, of just feeling low, in the blues. What does that mean? I don’t know, but it means something. There was something that he struggled with, but yet obviously he was able to, despite that, contribute. It didn’t stop him contributing to the country and the Emancipation Proclamation and so many other things. So that’s important for the listener to know.
Warwick F:
You served so many people in so many communities and just the sense that people accept you for who you are. Because we all have made our mistakes. Some are more public than others. And just saying it’s okay. You try to atone as best you can. You try to avoid making the same mistake. But we’re all human and just that sense of accepting that it’s okay to be broken. Is there any person on the planet who’s not broken in some fashion? I’ve not met them. Some are better at hiding it than others. Some people’s failures are less obvious than others, but we’re all broken in some ways. It’s just part of being a human. Does that make sense? If you realize as you talk to other people and got to know them, how many perfect people have you met that have never struggled, never had divorce, never made mistakes. Have you met too many of these perfect people in your travels?
Ed K:
Well one of the most inspiring books I’ve read, and first of all I should say by no means do I mean to compare myself to Dr. Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln.
Warwick F:
Yeah.
Ed K:
These people are inspiring. But Nelson Mandela, I’ve read his book twice, Long Walk to Freedom. I think he fits well into the mold of a human being who like the rest of us is flawed, or was flawed, yet he perseveres nonetheless and you can look at the wonderful things, the amazing things he’s done for the world and his spirit continues to do.
Gary S:
We have arrived at that point in the show when it’s time to drop the landing gear and begin to land the plane. But as we ease into that Ed, there’s something that you’ve written several times as we’ve corresponded and you included it in the sheet that we had you fill out before we began the interview. This is a statement that you made that I want the listeners to hear because A, it applies to your life as well I believe listener. And Warwick, with all the work that I’ve done for Crucible Leadership, this sounds like something we could’ve written for Crucible Leadership, what I’m about to read that Ed wrote here.
Gary S:
“Examine whatever you’re doing at a given moment. Any action you’re taking, thought your thinking, words you’re uttering. Does it contribute to your spirituality, to your self improvement, or service to others? If not, change what you’re doing.”
Gary S:
What’s your reaction to that Warwick, and Ed maybe you can expand on that.
Warwick F:
Yeah, I think that’s true. When I think about self-worth, it’s tied to significance because if you try to build money and success, I grew up with about as much money and power as you can. And I didn’t see too many people that really felt that good about themselves or certainly had happy lives. But happiness, joy, self-worth, it really is tied to significance, tied to serving others. When you’re about trying to help other people, in Ed’s case trying to help people with addiction and incarceration, just try to get beyond that, live productive lives, that’s where self-worth comes from. Self-worth comes from serving others. When you serve yourself, it doesn’t build self-worth. I don’t think human beings are wired that way. Whoever wired them that way, whether it’s the cosmos, spirituality, or God, we were wired to serve others. And only in that can we receive joy and happiness. Does that resonate with you Ed on your own journey to a life of significance?
Ed K:
Absolutely. The more we help others, the more we help ourselves. The more we give, the more we get. The more we can bring to the world around us, the more the world gives us. And I’ve found that it’s not so much that reality influences our thoughts nearly as much as it is that our thoughts create the reality around us.
Gary S:
Ed, you’ve talked a couple times about your book. Tell listeners a little bit about it. What’s it called? What does it cover? And how can they get it when it is out in April of this year?
Ed K:
Oh, yeah. Gary, thanks so much. My book is called My Addiction and Recovery. The subtitle is Just Because You’re Done With Drugs Doesn’t Mean Drugs are Done With You. It’s available right now on my website, www.edkressy.com. That’s just my name dot com. And the book covers the story that we’ve been talking about. How second chances, yes they benefit the person who receives the second chance, but they also benefit society and the persons who give those second chances.
Warwick F:
I just want to say, I think of that cave you mentioned that we’re all afraid to go into. It sounds like growing up for you that was writing. And there’s a lot of things you’re doing now to contribute to society with law enforcement and people behind bars who suffer addiction. But the fact that you’re writing, that to me is a wonderful thing. Because it was something that you were afraid of probably your whole life. And you’re doing it. When we conquer our deepest fears and pursue our deepest longings, ones that can actually be productive, that’s a beautiful thing. Don’t you think? I think it’s a wonderful thing that you’re writing. Because that can’t have been easy. To get to a point where you could do that, that says a lot, doesn’t it?
Ed K:
Yeah, well think about your life, look back upon your life years and years from now, what do you want to have looked back upon? What do you want to have to show for it? It probably won’t be a bank statement. It probably won’t be a financial statement. It probably won’t be a home or car. What you’re going to want to have to show for your life when you’re ready to go to the next stage of the journey is I believe many of us in some form, or all of us perhaps in some form will, what are we going to want to look back upon? It’ll be just like you were talking about Warwick, that life of significance, that having brought something of value to the world around us. These are probably the things we’re going to want to look back upon at the end of our lives and say that we’ve done.
Gary S:
That is an excellent place, Ed and Warwick, to end our conversation today. Listeners, thank you for spending time with us listening to this truly moving conversation about Ed’s story. And we hope that you see the application for it in your life, even if the circumstances are different. And we’re going to leave you with two practical thoughts as you move on beyond listening to this.
Gary S:
The first of those thoughts is a suggestion. If you’re struggling with moving beyond your crucible, take a page from Ed’s book. Find an opportunity to serve others. It doesn’t have to be big, it doesn’t have to be grand. It doesn’t have to have a business plan attached to it. It just has to be focused on helping others. What you will find is that in addition to helping others you’ll find what Ed’s described, what Warwick’s described and many things that he’s talked about and written about in Crucible Leadership. It helps others, but in the process of helping others and getting your mind off of your crucible, off of your bounce back, off of your trials and struggles, you’ll also help yourself. So, that’s practical tip number one as a suggestion.
Gary S:
Practical thought number two is a favor we’d like to ask you. If you’ve enjoyed, if you’ve felt that you’ve learned something, you’ve been edified by this conversation, we would ask you to subscribe to Beyond the Crucible on the podcast app that you’re listening to it on right now. Doing so will ensure first of all for you that you’ll never miss an episode. And it will help us share this and the messages that come through here. Stories like Ed’s that will help us share the content of Beyond the Crucible to more people to help them recognize that their crucible experiences can be the start of a great new chapter in their lives that lead to a life of significance.
Gary S:
So, until next time when we’re together, thank you for spending time with us and we look forward to the next time.
