#137: Finding Your Worth With Lysa Allman-Baldwin

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, And master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel. I am feeling very peaceful and very blessed. I had an opportunity this morning to meditate. I've probably called this out before and admitted the fact that I am a very poor man. I've been a crappy meditator, I would say, to the point where I just sort of gave up even trying to meditate. I don't know if you all can relate to that, but at a certain point, having tried it a few times, and I don't know how much real effort I put into it, it just sort of seemed futile that somehow my mind was such a torrent or that there were caged animals in there or something. I just couldn't control what was going on inside of my head, that it just didn't make a lot of sense. And so instead, for me, it became a practice of trying to become still a little bit. A practice of prayer. I'm a very spiritual person, so the opportunity to pray was always welcome and to this day is one of my favorite things to do. It's such a pleasurable thing that I guess maybe even I felt guilty that I'm only supposed to pray for a reason, but praying just feels good. So it's only recently that a business partner of mine gave me a book on mindfulness and I started reading it. I took it into the sauna. You guys know I love to read in the hot tub and the sauna was a new place for me to start to really devour some books. And at a certain point I decided, you know, I'm going to try this again because this book about mindfulness is really a book about meditating and it gave some really simple ways to look at it and look at it differently. And one of those little distinctions was the fact that every time the mind wanders, every time my mind would wander away and think about this or that and you're like, why on earth is that popping into my head kind of stuff? As opposed to judging it or feeling that somehow I was doing it wrong. This is, I guess, the perfectionist in me trying to do things perfectly again. A recovering perfectionist. In reading this book, I realized that the whole practice of meditation is just about every opportunity that— and I say opportunity, every time the mind wanders, it is an opportunity. It's this opportunity to gently, lovingly, kindly Draw it back into the present moment and not get sucked into whatever that thing was, that little sort of chasing the rabbits down little holes and off into directions. And you just— I just don't have to do that. It doesn't mean that the rabbits won't be running around. And it doesn't mean that there aren't these distractions because those don't, at least in my now experience, they don't go away. Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. But the practice of meditating, I didn't realize, was this practice of just guiding my mind back to the present moment. So it wasn't about trying to stop those things from happening and somehow getting good enough at it or perfect enough that those things wouldn't happen any longer. In fact, quite the opposite. So I guess that took a lot of pressure off the process and it became quite a bit more enjoyable. And for the last few months now, I've been sitting quietly in the morning and allowing for meditation, which has been a joy. So I got to do that this morning. It was It was sunny outside in Southern California. We were expecting rain, so you don't have to feel jealous or anything wherever you are and the weather's different. We're supposed to have a very rainy couple of days and all that. But I was very much looking forward to this morning for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I'd be able to sit with all of you now and have this incredible guest on the show today that was introduced to me through someone else that I absolutely adore. checked out the episode where I interviewed Judy Whitcraft some months ago, who was the author of the Namaste email series for many, many years, probably more than 20 years. And really love and respect Judy and her work and her devotion and her spiritual path and just the ways in which she has touched so many people's lives and really touched my life, touched the lives of my wife and our daughters. And, and I'm not sure if our son Max ever checked her out, but, but really a special woman. And so by extension, I have a very special woman that I get to interview today and speak with, have a conversation about. I'm going to read a little bit about her from her bio, and then we'll do what we normally do, which is dig right in and see where we're led and where spirit will take us today. So without further ado. For almost 25 years, Lisa Allman Baldwin has fed her wanderlust for everything the world has to offer. by writing travel and feature articles for numerous print and online publications. A few years ago, however, Lisa's travels crossed paths with a very personal inner journey which resulted in her new book, I Cried and People Loved Me Anyway. It's a story of how, due to a series of events that happened within a very short period of time, her life completely fell apart and she was literally ready to check out. We'll find out more about that in a moment. However, through faith, self-forgiveness, and a lot of unconditional love, she moved from the depths of despair to living a truly authentic life. Lisa's website, authenticityandpurpose.com, showcases her experience as a gifted and sought-after motivational speaker, writer, and workshop facilitator. Lisa, it's wonderful to have you on the show today. Welcome.

Thank you. Thank you. Lovely to be here.

Yeah, we're grateful to have you. The bio says quite a bit about you and some of the paths you've traveled, but what's not written in this bio, in this introduction, that you would love for people to know about you right now?

Well, I think like a lot of people, we have grown up in family systems where we weren't always supported in being our authentic self, whether it was we talked a lot or we were dancing around and Wouldn't sit in the chair or what have you. And it's no fault or blame on our parents or our relatives where we grew up because everybody was born into their own family system and the people before them was born into their own family system. But we live in a society where everything says you're not enough the way you are. Mm-hmm. And so even if you don't subscribe to that, we're marinating in that all the time. You turn on the TV and you see you need to drive this car and your weight is wrong, your height, your age, your educational experience, where you live, how much money you make, all of that. So what I grew up in— well, first on the kind of religious or spiritual, and again, this is no blame on my family or anything, but I grew up in what I would call today a fire and brimstone type of environment. And as a child, I never could reconcile this Person, they said, God, that was benevolent and sent you here for a purpose and would do anything for you and is supporting and loving. But if you don't do the right things, you're going south of the border.

All you know what's gonna cut— break loose.

Right, right. And even if you do walk the straight and narrow, whatever that means, probably still not gonna get all the way to the pearly gates, if that's the way to say it, because we were born sinners. And so I never could reconcile this person that was loving and everything on this side, but on this side was waiting for the hammer to fall. So as a child, we don't have words to language that. We just understand that the people taking care of us, they must know what they're talking about because we intuitively know they're feeding us and clothing us and putting a roof over our head. And so whatever they're telling us, that must be it. But still in here, something is off. But again, we're not old enough to be able to language that. So we had to continue going to church. And then, like a lot of people, they turn 18, we don't have to go anymore. So my sisters and I stopped going. So for 25 years, I didn't go to church, had no spiritual background, wasn't even sure there was a God because I just couldn't reconcile this person. But about 15 years ago or so, my then-husband and I moved from San Francisco to the Midwest. And his family went to a Unity church. It's called Unity Temple on the Plaza in Kansas City. And they asked, you know, do you want to go with us to church? And I said, sure, why not? Thinking it's going to be a one-time deal. And I went to Unity and their messages were all about that they believe in Jesus as a wayshower, but that we have all the abilities that Jesus had and that he was only showing us all the potential that we have, that he also has, that he was not the exception. He was the example. And basically that there were many paths to God, whether it's Buddhist or Hindu or Catholic or Jewish, there were none of that were wrong. And none that had the one path, the one way to that. And basically, it was, this is what we believe. What do you think? And I remember thinking, nobody ever asked me what I thought, as far as the spiritual community. Hmm. So I was like, okay, this is a little bit different. So we went back another time, and I'm in my back of my head, it's like, yeah, this is how they get you in the door. Right.

The hammer's about to fall.

It's coming anytime.

Yeah.

And the next week it was the same thing, and the next thing it was the same week. And it wasn't like Black church. A lot of Black churches, you're there for 3 hours, and what I call I'm getting the beatdown for 3 hours— hammered, hammered, hammered, hammered, hammered. And Unity Church was an hour. They had some music. They had a little meditation. They had a 20-minute message, a little more music. Bye-bye. Have a good week. We'll see you next week.

It's like the TED Church.

I was like, okay. So that kind of got me started on, well, who am I really? If I take all the layers of these things off, I'm a sinner, first of all. So that puts you way down the list of whatever the list is. And who am I? And what do I think? And what do I believe? And is there a higher presence somewhere that maybe the name is not God, maybe it's spirit, maybe it's people call Buddha, or, you know, whoever? And that there are— I really had no exposure to any other religions other than I knew of Jewish, Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist. Didn't know anything about—

Just the names and what you saw from a distance, right?

Just what I saw from a distance, yes. So that was kind of a different awakening. Of who am I in this flesh body? Is that it? And learning that many traditions believe that we are a link in a chain of consciousness that goes on forever and ever and ever. So that really was a different trajectory in my life.

That's quite a pivot moment in the spirituality compartment of our lives, which I think is— we— they're not compartments, obviously. I think we compartmentalize things from time to time, but we either feel ourselves to be spiritual beings that are connected to everything Or we feel something else.

Right.

Right. So when you start to feel that way and that is your experience, or at least it's the experience that you want to have, which it's hard to imagine those 2 things not being one and the same anyway, but your perspective on life changes. So that's a pivotal moment for you, especially coming out of a background where, yes, you know, it's kind of you had one experience of what religion or what spirituality was like,

right?

And then you, at a certain age of maturity or of emancipation, you just go, Not for me. And a lot of people, I mean, it's been an exodus from the church.

Right.

And I don't mean the church in the church, like, I mean, from all organized religion, there's been an exodus across the board for a lot of years, which, I mean, not a good trend if I was in the religion business. Not a great trend, right? So here you are having almost turned away from that. Did it cause you to turn toward it? Is that where this has gone? You start to ask these really deep questions of yourself and

Right. It was more, not necessarily in the beginning turning toward it, but realizing there was something else. Because it was, to me, it was this way with the rules and the regulations and where you're going— north if you follow the rules and south if you don't— and nothing. But now I'm in the middle, like, well, maybe there is something else. And hearing that if we choose to believe this, that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, That's totally different from humans who, you know, you have to get it right, you have to get it perfect. And then whatever your personality is on top of that, where that all fits in there. So that was very, very different and eye-opening. And to be— I think I was around 40 when that happened.

Right.

So you're navigating a life 40 years believing whatever it is you're believing about yourself or The systems you grew up in and again, what society tells you about yourself, totally different now because I have the choice of what I believe or even to think about it. I'm being asked, what do you think?

Yeah.

So it's really, yeah, what do I think? What do I believe? Why do I believe that? Why do I don't believe that? You know, it's a completely different paradigm of how you live and question what's your purpose here.

So looking back now on that, What's been the ripple effect? I mean, I know that's probably— there's a lot that you could cover there, but maybe pick one or two things because this show is great in that, for me anyway, it's really interesting that everybody's got so many pivot stories. I mean, we've all pivoted so many times in our lives and some are micro pivots and you go, oh, you know, in the moment that was just right for me or the right thing to do, or this is where I learned this thing or that thing. But this is a major— I mean, that to me is a macro pivot. That you're talking about, to go from sort of a non-interaction or a non-spiritual sort of orientation at that point, at 40 years old, into one that is like very open and asking these kinds of questions and inviting more of them. I would imagine a lot of things sort of changed for you.

Yes. And also up until that point, you feel like everything's up to you. You're out there alone. If I choose not to go with the side that says the hammer might be falling, then it's all on me. So everything from support, spiritually, emotionally, physically, everything's up to me and on top of that, I don't know if this is attributed to Virgos, but I'm a Virgo. So Virgos have everything very organized and know what's going on and all that stuff and then I learned controlling behaviors from my family of origin, but what I know now is that was a coping mechanism to protect yourself from being hurt, but I can see how my controlling behavior has affected everything up to my life, probably from early teens all the way up to being 40. So it shows up in your finances, it shows up in your relationships, it shows up in your jobs, it shows up in everything because you're trying to control everything because you're out here on your own. No one has your back because you rejected this other thing and there's— you don't think there's anything else. But now there's this entity, spirit, God.

So I just want to— I want to get this clear. So the experience is being out on your own without sort of a safety net because you've rejected These dogmatic rules about how you get north or what ends you up in a different place.

Right, right.

Got it.

And so I felt like I have to manage everything. No one has my back, basically. You're out on the ledge, like you say, no safety net. And so it's my job to make sure I don't fall off the cliff. So you start with controlling behaviors because that's your thing to help you feel safe. And you don't know what you're doing it and you look back It's unfortunate, you know, I can look at the people and things and places I ran over, but I didn't know at the time that that was me trying to protect myself from being hurt. Because if I can control everything, then I can't get hurt.

Right.

Yeah.

So does that mean you were playing it safe? And because I, I'm feeling like that this conversation becomes more universal in this moment. There are a lot of people who are probably either sort of slowed down on the walk or have gotten off the treadmill, or maybe they're listening a little more intently in the car or something right now because they themselves You know, have control features. I said at the beginning, I'm sort of a recovering control freak myself, and control is all about fear. I mean, ultimately, it's the other side of the coin of fear. Like, if we can control stuff, we don't have to be afraid of stuff, right?

Right.

So that was true for you. What did it do? How did it show up? Was it you being so safe in things or sticking with things that you would otherwise have not stuck with, but the fear had you doing that?

I think it's a little of both. Like I said, it shows up in your finances, your relationships, your—

Well, how did it show up in your finances, for example?

That, well, one of my family of origin things I was told was, you're not going to make money at that, or my career choice was wrong. So I wanted to be a— I always had a fascination with foreign languages, and I lived in California about 30 years, my formative years, and was always fascinated that there could be people in the room that spoke a different language, had different food, different music, different religious traditions. And living in California, there were a lot of people, you know, obviously spoke Spanish from all over the world. And that's just kind of what stuck with me. So I knew in 8th grade that I wanted to be a translator. And so I took Spanish as my major all through high school. And that's what my 2 degrees are in. I have an AA degree and a BA degree in Spanish language translation. So I had it for 13 years. But I was told, you're not going to make any money at that. It had to be something that I guess seemed, I don't know, corporate or something like that. And I don't think the person that told me that was really trying to be mean about it or anything. I think it was just their experience of you work, you save, you save for retirement, you need to bank up your money. I think that's where it was coming from. Now, but at the time you don't know that. All you hear is you're not good enough. And then the society I lived in, I lived in a suburb. So this was in the early '70s. I lived in a suburb of LA and we had moved there from a different state. And this was the year before busing started where the inner city kids were brought to the suburbs. So we lived with primarily white people, but nothing— I have 2 sisters, but nothing— it was just everyday life to us. You know, we noticed, but it had— where we lived before, it wasn't an issue. There was smatterings of other, and there were a few other Black people. But then the busing came. I say it in the book, it was an experiment fraught with disaster from the beginning because there was no cross-cultural understanding of the 2 groups. It was— there was forced. So the suburb people were forced to take these people in, and the inner city people were forced to go somewhere that they knew nothing about. But the messages were, because we live with white people, that we sound like them, we dress like them. I guess they assumed we had money like them, what have you. So here's another layer of you're not good enough just the way you are.

Yeah.

So we've got the childhood one, and then you add that one. And then, like I said, you turn on the TV, you know, where you live, what you drive, how much you weigh, how tall you are, how old you are. And again, that's just around you all the time.

Yeah, what Barbie dolls look like.

All of it. All of it. And so, you know, when you're told for decades, from a variety of different forums, you're not good enough the way you are, that stuff gets way down in there. And it's so far down there, you don't even know the level of how that's affecting you. But now I've got this unity. And then I also ended up going to Centers for Spiritual Living, which I also went for 7 years. I'm still a member of both organizations, but the same New Thought teachings.

Yes.

That you get to choose what you believe. You have all the tools necessary to live a happy and fulfilling life. Here are some guidelines of how you can apply them to your life. But by the way, you were born perfect. There's no striving that you have to do to be perfect. Just be. If you like this music or you like this food or this whatever, Sure, there are things that are common or traditional with whatever your race is or your religion or your language or your country of origin. There's nothing wrong with any of those things, but that we get still within that we're all individuals and like what you like and like what you don't like. If there's something you want to change about yourself, go ahead. But you don't have to strive for this perfection. So now—

Or live inside of a box. Based on identity rules that say you're supposed to like this or you're supposed to be like that.

Right, right. And you're supposed to date this person, you're supposed to have this sexual orientation, and you're supposed to— supposed to— it's the have, the shoulds, and the should nots.

Exactly. So many more rules, more dogma.

More rules and more dogma.

We can't just throw religion under the bus, right? Because it's just one aspect of where it is.

It's just one aspect. And there's nothing wrong with religion. People should be able to choose what suits them. And there's some very great things out of each world religion. And if you decide that that's your guiding principle, there's nothing wrong with that. But society says, nope, needs to be this one, or needs to be this one, or you were born into that one, so you're rejecting your family if you don't do that.

You're a round peg. You're supposed to be in that hole.

In that hole. Right, right, right. So here we are in this Unity and Centers for Spiritual Living New Thought environment. It's like, oh yeah, I don't have to believe that about myself. Again, what do I think? How do I want to be? Why do I think I'm here? As opposed to someone telling me why I'm here. Why am I here on this earth? And at any given point in my life, I can change my mind about things.

Square that circle.

Square the circle, get in another peg that I think, okay, this works for me now, or this one works for me.

Right. You mean not even locked in? It's not even like you have to make a choice that's gonna last the rest of your life?

Right, right.

Unbelievable concept, right?

What a concept. Exactly, exactly.

What was it that said that reality, what a concept? You remember that? Is that Robin Williams maybe or something?

I think so. Maybe from Mork and Mindy. Mork and Mindy, was that? Yeah,

maybe. Yeah, maybe. You and I, I think we watched some of the same shows growing up.

Probably, probably. Yeah, yeah.

What a concept. So here you are, you're in your early 40s and you're having what feels like a revelatory experience now. Right. Like this is a complete revelation to how you've been brought up to think and what you rejected and how those rejections of those things ended up keeping you on another track. It's so interesting how I think in childing and looking at the things that we reject, how those things have just as much control over as if we had gone the path that people had told us to go. Wow, the pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about, and it's the That's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So Be sure to go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. You know, like if we just followed someone else's rules of the road and you end up in your— some point in life and go, well, it doesn't really feel like my life because I've just been sort of living according to these other rules, my parents' rules or religion's rules or whoever's rules, right? And there are also these folks that have rejected those things. And now we're living in rejection.

Yeah,

of those things, because that was another set of rules that just enabled us to break free and feel like we're emancipated. But in actuality, we're still not really living according to free choice.

Right. I think the thing is that it's finding our own voice. Finding our own voice. And you don't feel like you have a voice if you're trying to control everything or you're trying to make people Say, this is who I am, and you're banging the table. This is who I am.

Right.

Or you're controlling everything.

Your worthiness, as you said earlier, like that everything is sending a message to you as you're a young woman growing up, and you just keep hearing, I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy. When then you suddenly have people say, well, worthiness is determined— 2 things, I guess, that you get to determine now whether you feel and are worthy or not. So that's right, kind of where you stand in this moment. And for everybody listening to this or watching this now, you go, okay, so all right, it doesn't— whatever the past has been, right, in this moment I get to make a choice to just simply take a breath right now, take 10 seconds and go, hmm, yeah, I'm deserving. Worthiness is a funny word. In so many ways it really relates to proving that we're proving our worth. And I'm a TEDx speaker. Our company trains people to do TEDx talks, get them, deliver them, all that kind of thing. And it's interesting because just recently in training, working with a client, we were looking at her message which has a lot to do with the distinction between worthiness and deserving.

Right.

And we were looking at the actual statement that TED has. Its statement is more than a motto. It's a talk that's worth sharing or worth spreading. Or it's actually not even a talk. It's an idea worth spreading. That's this, I believe, the exact language for TED. And that word, the word worth. is a really interesting word in that motto because there are a lot of people that look at that and think immediately, I don't have an idea worth spreading. I mean, I have an idea. I have an idea I'd like to share with people.

I

have an idea that might help a lot of people, but is it worth spreading? Right. There's this whole worthiness thing that's tied up in that whole deal. And people go, well, I'm not Brené Brown. I don't have a message like she does. I'm not Elizabeth Gilbert. I'm not Simon Sinek. And then they're done.

And we talk down our own greatness because we don't really believe that it's there, that we have to, like you said, have this bright idea, or I have to be an author to be able to affect positive change, or I have to be someone who's up in front of people or what have you. And you can make a huge change in someone's life because you passed them in the grocery store and you said, hello, how are you? And really not just Passing, how are you? How are you? You could change somebody's whole perspective on the rest of their day or what have you. Somebody cares. Somebody sees me.

And do you see yourself? Right? Because it's so interesting, this again, these ideas of being seen and being heard and all that kind of thing. It's like, well, do you also see yourself for who you are? And the fact that there's nothing— again, in 10 seconds you could go, nothing's broken. Okay, here's my new mantra for the day. You know, it's like nothing's broken.

Right.

I'm not broken. There's nothing broken.

There's nothing broken. I never was broken. Never was anything to fix.

There's nothing to fix, right?

That's what we're trying to do, is we're trying to fix—

yeah, exactly— to be more perfect and to someday be worthy, right? Be worth something, like worth admission into the pearly gates or whatever, right? Right. Oh yes, I finally— I think I'm good enough. I think if I don't screw up in the next 10 minutes, I think I'll be okay.

I might

get in,

right? Right. Right. And we can easily see the worthiness in other people, but then we don't see it in ourselves. So even when we are able to do that— What do you make of that? That's not living into and accepting who we are. If we're all one in a link in a chain of consciousness that goes on forever, ever, that means we're all at some level on that spiritual plane. So if you see beauty and love and worthiness and everything in another person, if we're one Link, that means you too. So you can't just say that person was this, this, this, and this, but I'm not, or I wish I was like them, or what have you. It takes years to accept, to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and say, I'm awesome. I'm beautiful. I'm cool.

I'm hardly perfect, whatever perfect is, but I'm still awesome. Like, literally with my belly fat, I'm still awesome. With my receding hairline or my whatever, whatever, whatever, right? I'm still just freaking awesome. There's not another being exactly like me. Not even close.

Right. Not even close. And there never will be. Yeah, I want to lose 10 pounds, but that doesn't make me unperfect or unworthy. It's like, that's just a goal I want to do for me. But I'm all that and 2 bags of chips today. No kidding. That's what you can say.

You are, Lisa. Oh my goodness.

Yeah.

Oh, did you— have you seen this new movie? It just come out in the last week, I think, the one about Mr. Rogers. Have you checked that out?

I haven't seen it yet, with Tom Hanks.

Yeah, in his career, he doesn't have to choose anything but a great role at this point, you know, and he delivers on what you'd expect from a quality actor like that, experienced and all. But the story itself is pretty remarkable. I mean, I absolutely advise, or recommend, or whatever the right words are, that checking it out for everybody is a good idea. You know, typically promote movies, but this is a good one. And the work he was doing for so many years, and I think he impacted so many of our lives. I mean, this— kids today probably might not even know who the guy is. I mean, right, you know, they're not growing up— they might— our kids grew up more with Rafi and with Barney than they did with Mr. Rogers.

Mister Rogers, right.

Yeah, I mean, but he was really working at that root of worthiness.

Right.

Yeah.

And what's interesting is, and I haven't seen the movie and I've only seen one or two trailers, but I do remember there was one trailer, and since you saw the movie you can tell me if this is correct or not, but there was somebody or some entity or something that was trying to say that Mr. Rogers was a fraud and wasn't that happy. And so that brief snippet I saw, that's a perfect example of People who don't know their own light. Yeah. You're spending time trying to discredit someone who has nothing but wonderful things, you know, an outlook on life, but to discredit that and spending time to show how someone else is a fraud. Well, if you believe in your light and your worthiness, you don't have time for that. That wouldn't even come into your consciousness because you're so happy and full of life like Mr. Rogers. You're trying to help other people feel that same way. When I saw that clip, I thought, yeah, that's where most of us are walking around. That little 5-year-old who got smacked on the hand for just twirling around in their little tutu, just being happy. So we're walking around as kindergartners in adult bodies and picking up all the things that— this is the person, this is not real, this is not real, who does that person think they are? Instead of what's going on in here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We are walking around, all of us, we're like dinged up in many ways. Our self-images and other things are dinged up from very early on, and the trauma really of experiences, of adverse experiences in childhood, which are so diverse. I mean, there's just no one definition for how you can sort of give a kid the wrong impression of him or herself.

Mm-hmm.

And not allow for that child to understand or have a real felt experience of what love looks like or what unconditional love feels like for them.

Right.

Meaning love for them regardless of whether they were good or bad, got good grades, bad grades, were tall, were born with a disability or whatever. I mean, it's just like any number of things. It really is so interesting how that is still a thing ongoingly that we are all still I think mostly working on the same stuff we were working on or would have been working on if we were conscious of it 500 years ago or 1,000 years ago, whatever it was.

Right. But I think that the distinction though is a lot of us do is we grow up and we're blaming our family of origin. Okay. So a couple of things is, and I didn't realize this until I became a parent. When we're little, we don't realize our parents are people, they're parents. So in our mind, they're supposed to know everything. They're supposed to do it right. They're supposed to do everything perfect. They should have known, should have, would have, could have, should have known. Right. And then you become a parent and you're like, no, I'm still a person. I am a parent, but I'm still the person in there. But I think that where our work needs to come from and our really understanding of ourselves is, first of all, our parents may be coming from their own place of woundedness because that's how they're a person. So they came from something and they're working through their own identity woundedness. Who knows what they came from and their parents and parents' But the work is to see— let's say you had a horrible childhood, let's just say—

Hmm.

To see the gifts and the lessons in there that you would not have had if you didn't have this experience, and how you can use that to figure out what it is you're here for, and how you could help somebody else who's out there striving, that's suffering. You would not be able to help them if you didn't have A, B, C, and D happen to you, but it did. And there are lessons and blessings in there. And as a spiritual person, where was my responsibility in there? Maybe I didn't have it as a child because I didn't have the language on it, but where was my responsibility to have my voice in that?

You

know, if it was possible, you know, every— like you said, every situation is different, you know, may not have been.

Right.

But there's no way that I could be doing the work that I'm doing now without having those very, very hard challenges of my childhood, which were, you know, numerous things.

Right.

So I'm grateful for them, and I'm grateful for the people who, not in a way that I would have picked, taught me those things through their own woundedness. And I understand that they're people too. Now—

Well, that's a lot of compassion that you— I mean, the language that you're using, it just feels like compassion.

It's still work. It's still work because we want to default to they shoulda, they coulda, they woulda, if they had.

What is blaming? So remember you said in that movie, and you're right, there's somebody that's trying to take— he wants to find what's wrong in Mr. Rogers and basically call him out, you know, call him out as

a fraud.

Fraud, right? You know what, let me reframe this just a bit because there's a couple things I want to get at. I want to talk in this context about the politically correct world that we're living in, or part of our world that is so hell-bent on political correctness,

right?

And I think that deserves a little nod, especially in what we're talking about. And then I want to use our remaining time to talk about forgiveness

and

in particular where forgiveness dovetails to any of this and how it builds resilience or where you think it fits in, in how we move forward as individuals and as a world as well. So yeah, let's start with the political correctness thing though.

Well, I think that that's another way where we're trying to manage our outside circumstances to make ourselves feel better. So if we discredit somebody else or they should be doing this or they should be wearing this or driving this or what have you. That's all so we don't have to deal with this.

Yeah, we shame them on Twitter. We call them out for their crap or their inconsistency or whatever.

Right, right. So if I can chip away at them a little bit, it's an unconscious way I'm trying to make myself feel better about me. But if you really feel good about yourself and you're worthy and you're happy and everything, and granted there are stressful things that happen in the world, you know, there's fires, floods, murders, all that stuff. But if you're coming from a place of understanding and worthiness and compassion and empathy and standing up for things that you feel are wrong, that's totally different from the blame and trying to peg down everybody else. Why do we have these shows after all the big award ceremonies that says the blacklist of the dress, the wrong dress? Right. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Why? Why are you spending time on that? If you didn't like the dress when she went by, okay, that isn't something I'd wear. I don't think it looks that flattering on her. Move on. I mean, you know, But we have websites and shows and we go through the whole thing. Who was dressed right? Who was dressed wrong? Who fell getting out of the limo? Who this, who that? Who had to go through the back door because they weren't welcome on the red carpet? I mean, is that all we have time for? And how does that affect your life day to day when you're all done talking about that? How does that affect how you treat your family? How does that affect how you make your living? How does that affect how much money you make? Are you seeing these people in the grocery store? I mean, how is it affecting you at all? And the answer is, it's not. But that's what we're spending time on.

Hmm.

That's what we're spending time on. So to answer your question about the forgiveness, so years ago, someone showed me a book called Radical Forgiveness by Colin Tipping. And I use it a lot, some of the examples in the book, when I do my motivational talks. And he talks about the difference between traditional forgiveness and radical forgiveness. So in traditional forgiveness, he says, we take the stance that we were wronged somehow. Somebody did something to us or took something from us or robbed us in some way. And so we need to forgive them, which, you know, we always hear forgiveness is for ourselves to move on. He says that radical forgiveness is taking the stance that nothing that ever happened to you, you were never wronged, that nothing was out of order. Now, it's hard to say that Somebody was raped or something like that. Abused. Right, yeah. You don't say— it's hard to kind of grab the concept. And it's more of a— says radical forgiveness. It's a radical concept to accept. But that nothing was wronged. You weren't wronged in some way. There was some divine order, that there was something for you to learn or glean in that, either about yourself and/or how to help other people. And the part of it is forgiving yourself. Forgiving myself for not having a voice or for not seeing that these people were coming from X perspective or that there was anything wrong in the first place. There was lessons and blessings that I was supposed to learn and radically forgiving the overall picture as opposed to the individual things.

So the distinction there being, it's looking back and saying there was nothing sort of wrong or bad to begin with. And that is radical when you think of the level at which some people have been intentionally harmed by other people. And you go, hmm, yeah. So how does forgiveness either contribute to our being able to go forward in a really empowered way? How does it contribute to resilience? What is it? Is it a big part of the work that you now do when you— I know you speak publicly, you work with folks and—

Do workshops. Yep. There's a thing in the book that he talks about. He calls it a forgiveness centrifuge, and he equates it to like if we put something in a juicer and spin it around and separate the parts, or like a plasma machine or something. And it helps us separate the facts of what happened in our life from our interpretation of the facts. So our fact may have been like your father left the family when you were little, but your interpretation is because it was because of you, that you did something bad or wrong, or you should have been this or been that. And so you walk through your life with this abandonment story, right? That he left because of me.

Making meaning out of things.

Making meaning out of things, right, right. And so in my case, that is what happened. He didn't leave physically, but he left emotionally and mentally. But that— my abandonment story, that carried out through everything, especially with relationships with men later on. So in the back, even though I did get married and did have sexual relationships, in the back, it's always like, This person's not going to stay.

They're going to leave.

Because the one person who had, in your mind, you're saying, that had a real stake in your success left, whether it was physically or emotionally, no one's going to stay. So that always shows up because you attract people either who leave or you do things to control to make sure they don't leave. And so that's why the relationship might not work out, or you end up doing that with other things. And that same thing happens, like I said, with your job or this, that, or the next thing. And so it's separating the facts from your interpretation of the facts. So it works the same way with positive things. So I have a friend who, when she was growing up, she got nothing but wonderful support. She was told she was smart and she was resourceful and she played well with others and all of the great things we want to hear, right?

Yeah.

But her interpretation was, with all of those accolades, she had no room for error. So if she messed up, everyone would see she really didn't have it all together. And that she was a fraud. So that played out in her weight. She had gained a huge amount of weight over her lifetime. Yeah, and that's no blame on her family. You know, they did all the quote-unquote right things, but it was her interpretation. That's nobody's fault either way. It's how we interpreted it. So once we can understand the difference between the facts and our interpretation, your life changes altogether. There's a freedom.

There's a liberation from—

It's a liberation.

And what's interesting too, and it's always difficult to look back on circumstances where it's such a black and white thing, where you go, there's no way that that thing should have happened. I mean, we can think about children that are molested when they're young. Right. There's no way on earth that that should have ever happened. And yet in this moment, which is forward, it's not as it's happening, you would never watch something or stand idly by. It's now. And looking back on something like that, there's no changing it at all. We get that. There's absolutely no changing it. But what you do have and what can happen now is really the owning, the owning of that experience and not making it, putting it through that lens of judgment of right, wrong, or otherwise, but just the owning of the full experience itself. Do you believe that that creates a liberation, that there's a freedom that comes from simply owning as opposed to what a lot of us do? Which is to suppress through a variety of means, right? Whether it's eating or it's drinking or it's drugs or it's just some other controlling feature of our personalities that have now created this bubble of safety for us, right? But whatever those things are, we're not really owning that experience. We're doing everything in the world we can to stuff it down, to avoid it ever happening again, or to sort of even forget that it ever happened in the first place, right?

Right. Mm-hmm, and we get stuck in that. We get stuck in that because there is no recognition of what it was here to teach us, what we learned from it, the blessings from it, and we stay stuck in our victimhood. That's the whole thing. We get to stay stuck in our righteousness and our victimhood, and this is where it is. Like you said, it shouldn't have happened, wouldn't, couldn't, and I'm just gonna hold on to that. Well, that's a heavy backpack with a lot of rocks in it.

No kidding, huh?

To wear.

Yeah.

And as soon as you start opening up that backpack and looking at their rock and like, oh, that one's not serving me anymore, put that one over here. And oh, this was a good teaching I got from my childhood, let's leave that one in there. And then pull all the other ones, you'll find there's a whole bunch of them that don't belong in there. And then you can start putting the light stuff that does belong in there. And that's what we do. And but these things go in Phase it. So I'm 15 years into this new thought and, you know, not saying life is perfect, but life is certainly different in different aspects and unraveling all my old— a lot of my old stories and everything. But then we get to the point where, you know, like you read in my intro, all these things happen in a row and then you forget, you forget. So I can look now at things and the book I have and everything, which that was not in my plan, life plan at all.

It was.

That way. No, but all the things that happen at the time they're happening, we can't see, like they say, the forest for the trees, and you forget all these tools and everything. They went out the window. So you get to the desperation point and you're ready to check out.

It can happen to anybody.

It can happen to anybody.

So it doesn't matter who you're talking to or where you think they are in their life or where they might be on some level. This is a human—

Human condition.

Yeah, exactly. Reality, what a concept. I have so enjoyed this conversation and I know our folks have as well. We'll have full show notes with more information about where you can find Lisa, find out more about her and her book and the work that she's currently doing, which is beautiful. Lisa, my last question for you is, what is a particular ritual? We talk a lot about the power of rituals on this show and in particular how those rituals create resilience in our bodies and our minds and our emotional being, the emotional places that we live that landscape. What is a ritual that you've been— either new, something new that you've been doing, or something you've been doing for many, many years that have helped you to really get grounded

and

stay?

Well, like you, like you mentioned about meditation, I've been meditating probably a good 15 years, really, when I started coming into Unity. And it's just not about, like you said, trying to control your brain from thinking all over the place. It's just pulling yourself into the present moment. So I meditate every morning, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, sometimes longer, however I feel that particular day. Sometimes it's in the silence. Sometimes I use— there's a meditation app I use called Insight Timer where they have recorded messages. So it's just however I feel that day. But I just feel it's like just bringing me back to the present moment. No matter how long we're here on this earthly plane, how many revolutions around the sun, it's always too short. It's always too short. So make every moment you can, whatever it is, even if you're facing financial troubles or trouble with your kids or looking for a new house or whatever it is, you always have the present moment. You can take 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes for yourself to just settle in. I'm breathing. I am breathing. Some people are not breathing today. Yeah. I'm breathing. I'm awake. Something else has my back. Yes, I'm struggling with whatever right now, but there's a greater force at work here and I'm taking 2 minutes just to pull into that. So that's one thing I do. I journal, just getting everything out of my head, not trying to necessarily find an answer to things. But when I look back over my journals over the years, you know, you see, wow, that seems so dark at that time. But look at where we are now. But that's just a daily thing. And then the one thing— and I want to show you this here. Yeah. So this is a picture of me when I was about 6 months old. I keep this on my desk with other pictures, and I look at that little girl and say, you know what? Smiling.

So easy, right?

This is how you got here.

Yeah.

And this little girl got lost.

Hmm.

But I'm here for you, and I have your back. And so you will always have me. You have a more enlightened me, much older me, and you're worthy. You're beautiful. This is who you came here to be, and I still get to be that in a 56-year-old body.

Yeah, that's so beautiful, Lisa, to have that picture of you. And you've inspired me. I will get and find, and it'll be fun to have a picture of me as a baby and, and be able to look over and go, hmm, look at you, look at how you've grown, right?

Right.

But that baby is just so unaffected by so much of this complicated stuff, right? The confusing stuff that we could We could talk about for days and days and days, but I have so enjoyed this. By the way, I love Insight Timer. We use Insight Timer before bed.

Yeah, it's great, isn't it?

Yeah, which is terrific. And obviously, you know, in this moment, in the present moment, what's really lovely— and again, you know, there's so many things that are both inspirational, motivational, all that kind of stuff, and sometimes other people think they're soft. I share this a lot of times with business audiences when I do public speaking. typically about how it is that we create greater resilience because it's in greater resilience that we perform better. We perform better and we can perform longer. And these are good things in business, you know, to be able to do better for longer periods as well. But in this moment where we have that heavy bag that all of us do have, you know, we have this satchel on our shoulders that is filled with stuff, some of us lighter and some of us heavier. Right.

But

in this moment, there really isn't anything that needs to be I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today.

Yeah.

You think about it, so much of our worry and our obsession and our stressing and things of that sort are about the moment next, right? Worrying about the moment to come and somehow thinking that we can change the moment that passed. We can never change that. We know that, but yet we still get drawn into that,

right?

The moment that's to come is going to take care of itself. And it doesn't mean we don't plan or think about the future.

Right.

It's just that in this moment, we can breathe a little differently, right? Even right this moment, we can breathe knowing we're totally good right now.

Right.

We're really, really good right this second, right?

Yeah.

So I so appreciate you, Lisa. I so appreciate the goodness that you brought to this conversation.

Thank you. Thank you.

For everybody that you will, no doubt, like we all do, want to practice this. And I say that because my morning ritual has a lot to do with before the morning comes, which is knowing when we wake up tomorrow, it's— well, I'll just ask you this, Lisa. Do you want to wake up tomorrow?

I do want to wake up tomorrow. I feel I have more to do here for however long I'm here.

Me too. And when we lay down at some point tonight to go to bed, to go to sleep, there won't be a guarantee. We won't go to sleep with a contract from our maker or You know, right, to say, yeah, you get to wake up tomorrow.

Yeah,

there's a good chance that that will happen, but there's no guarantee of it,

right?

And as you said earlier, when we do wake up tomorrow— and that's my prayer, that's my hope for everybody, that we all do wake up again tomorrow— there will be people who are not waking up,

right,

at that same moment. And it is a moment that can be sacred if we choose it to be.

Mm-hmm.

That waking moment doesn't have to be an immediate jump to the feet. Or jump to the cell phone to check on things, or turning on the TV, or getting the coffee, or—

Right.

It just doesn't have to be in that moment.

Right.

That much. It can simply be this recognition and this appreciation for that being a gift, as you said earlier, a gift.

Right.

And it truly is. So this is the waking ritual as we wake up, recognition of that gift, that gratitude in the moment for the breath, for anything.

Yeah. And that all day I get to keep waking up to who I am. So I get 2 things. I get the physical waking up and the gratitude that, yes, I woke up. Like you said, some people didn't wake up, but I get to keep waking up. And every moment I get to choose how I wake up to how I am, who I am, who I want to be. It's constant.

And that's truly a gift that keeps giving. Yeah,

it's a gift that keeps giving. Yeah.

So these 4 words are part of my Lexicon these for many, many years, and and it's this recognition that it is a gift that keeps giving if we want it to. And those four words are I love my life. I love my life.

Yeah.

Lisa, do you love your life?

I love my life. I love myself. That's where everything stems from. I love myself.

Awesome. Mwah!

Thank you. Mwah!

Ciao for now, everybody.

Okay, thank you.

Wonderful conversation.

Bye, everyone.

Okay. Bye-bye now.

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