Conscious Recovery: Empower Yourself By Removing The Toxicity From Your Life With TJ Woodward

Well, I guess I'll just dive right in. One thing that I have been talking about the last year or so is something that I had kind of not really brought to the forefront before, and that is sometime around 1987 or 1988, I found myself suicidal. And that was because I had not addressed a lot of the trauma, disconnection, and shame in my life. I was a person in recovery at that point and started to work on myself, but I did find myself feeling really desperate and not knowing how to heal myself. And I met a woman who changed my life, who literally saved my life. So I guess I'll just start out with that.

Holy smokes. Yeah, we're gonna just go right into— I mean, I wouldn't say the deep water. It, I would say it's the deepest water because I honestly cannot think of anything In this moment anyway, that feels more tragic than the loss of life that results from suicide. And I know that there's a lot of people could debate that or what have you. I just think that when we come to a place in our lives where there's, that is the only option or feels like the only option feels like the best option, there's been a whole series of dominoes that have tipped before that, that need to be examined. And in terms of military service, the, the suicide rate, among that group is staggeringly high. I've spoken personally, been very honored to give resilience keynote and workshop to military servicemen and women, and yet the suicide rate is staggeringly high in other areas as well. In fact, for a lot of people, this is not a political statement whatsoever. We have a very vigorous debate about the Second Amendment, about gun laws, etc., etc. That's not what this is about. But when you just take a look at the greatest cause of death that involves a firearm, it is suicide. It is not, you know, mass shootings, even though it's a massive issue, and it's not murder and things like— it's people using a gun, using a firearm to take their own life. So that's not debatable. That's a hardcore fact.

Yeah. And we're in a time right now where we're seeing the suicide rates going up, and I, really like to have a conversation about the deeper root causes. As you said, it's, it's so seductive to have it be a political conversation about gun control or the Second Amendment. But we also really need to look at— so people can have that debate, and that's an important one for people. But really, I'm interested in what's really going on here, what's happening in our country and in our world that we're seeing these rates increase. And it was a long time ago for me that I had that experience, and I know how I found my way out of it. It's become my life's work and my life purpose to share that now. So I'm really grateful. We are taking the deep dive right now into the deep end, as you said.

Yeah. So let's go there. Maybe just from a chronological standpoint, maybe we start as far back as you want. I mean, I think all these things, if I was gonna pick a first domino in my life or what I would imagine would be universally true, it's that it starts with some trauma that occurs early on. So you pick it up wherever you want, TJ.

Yeah, I'm actually gonna go pre-trauma. I remember coming into the world and being very, very happy, and it's something I always talk about because at the core of each and every one of us is this state of internal perfection. And for some people that, like, what are you talking about? Right? And if we look at a very small child, I, can you imagine looking at a baby and saying this baby is somehow flawed or broken? We come into the world as a blank canvas, at very least, and then we get programmed by the world. And I remember being a very young child, pre-programmed human, and just being absolutely filled with joy and connection and love. And I remember watching the news and seeing war. I remember hearing people say things that were racist and the way men talked about women back in the day. And all of these things created this sense that I needed to protect myself. And this wasn't really conscious because I was a little kid. I just felt afraid and something within me shut down. It was as if there was a protector that came in to protect my heart from this trauma that was happening around me. The issue, of course, was that it was also protecting me, and I'm using air quotes for anyone listening. It was protecting me from the love and connection that I truly desired. And as I work with people throughout the years. And as I talk with people now, that seems to be such a common experience. We come into the world filled with love and joy, and then the world happens and we get domesticated by the world. And that trauma is a really big umbrella, but any of that can be a traumatic experience, especially to our spirit.

Yeah, isn't that true? I have some history, like a 5-year-old, 6-year-old kid getting bullied. And feeling not fully accepted by the tribe, that kind of thing. And I could point to that and go in my own life where my guard went up and I developed a really strong on-guard demeanor, I would say, which helped me get through that early-stage bullying, helped me to turn the tables on some of that bullying at some point, turned me into a lawyer that was vicious in the courtroom and vicious outside the courtroom, frankly. So I could look at it that way for myself. But I think what you said is even so much more subtly true, which is that at a certain point, we just kind of develop the kind of thick skin, as maybe our parents or grandparents might have called it back in the day, that thick skin that helps you to be resilient in the face of a kind of a world that can be rough at times, to say the least. And that itself can be traumatic to the soul. Yeah. As you say, of like an innocent child that just basically wants to be love and be loved and be loving and all that kind of thing.

So absolutely. And that seems to be such a common experience. And in my work, I have a framework that we come into the world whole and perfect, and there's still a place within us that is unharmed and unharmable. And recognizing that as a starting point, then we can start to look at those events in our lives that caused us to develop what I call core false beliefs. And I add the word false. A lot of people talk about core beliefs, but I add the word false because these are lies we've picked up about ourselves. And then, as you so eloquently said, then we come up with what one might call a defense mechanism or a strategy. I actually call them brilliant strategies. The brilliant strategy could be anger. The brilliant strategy could be closing down. Yeah. And there is something brilliant about them in that they saved our life in some way. They helped us feel safe in some way. The issue, of course, is there's a light and a shadow to everything. So I love the way you framed it. Yeah, I became this amazing lawyer and I used all of that to become successful. And yet there's also a part of that that was actually keeping me from the life I truly desired. And you said it so perfectly. We all want love and connection. At the deepest level.

It's so interesting. I'm just tracking in my own mind as I'm listening to you how perfect this, for me anyway, the conversation is, the timing of it, having had some conversations both with one of our children, our only son, we have 3 daughters and a son, and, and having a conversation with him recently about something like this, and a friend who is dealing with very difficult illness to which there's no cure, and it's Absolutely life-threatening called ALS, what people might know as Lou Gehrig's disease. And speaking to him about just how he is making some changes to his life, he is in therapy and using certain modalities of therapy that I want to hear more about what it is that you are are doing with your clients because I think there's a lot of people just like my friend who are dealing with. the aftermath of some of these brilliant strategies. And by that, I mean it's 20 years later, it's 30 years later. And the strategy that was helpful to me, or to all of us, let's say, at various points in our early lives, whether it was 5 years or 10 years old or 15 years old, but that, that brilliant strategy is no longer actually a viable strategy when you're 35. It may be not helpful. In fact, It might be the cause of dis-ease in your body now. And I'll use anger as an example. I know my friend has got a lot of repressed anger, a lot of rage, repressed rage. I think a lot of us do. I mean, we're living in a really angry world. I don't think that's the cause of the pandemic. The pandemic, if anything, is just, or the political divide or any of these things, just revealing the fact that we all have become really good at repressing our anger and our rage. And when we're so depleted, which dovetails to our work about resiliency, because when we're depleted, we just don't even have the capacity to hide it anymore. It just, it literally just bubbles over into so many different areas. That's

right. Now science is starting to measure what many of us have been pointing to actually for decades or centuries, and that is all of this has an effect on us physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. And we're starting to even see, as we've known, that this actually causes disease in our body. Right? And I like the way you put it because it's really repressed. And what happens when something— you look at the physical world, if we put a lid on something, if it's steaming or boiling, it's going to blow. And if we actually allow it to come out, then that sense, that explosion doesn't happen, right? And so how do we actually work with what's happening in the world? Because you talked about the pandemic and we're coming out of that pandemic, but part of the byproduct of that, or it's all interlinked in a really interesting way. Yeah. is this idea of polarization. And we have been told over and over and over again, we're living in a very polarized country. And I actually think it's more that we've been conditioned to have polarized thinking. The people I meet, the people who I meet, when we sit down and have an authentic conversation, we find so much common ground. We—

Isn't that true? Oh my God.

It's so true, right?

Yes.

And yet we find ourselves like battling because we're so deeply entrenched in this idea that My opinion is who I am, and I need to be right. And then there's so much division that happens and so much anger, and all of that creates dis-ease, as you said. And so how do we actually start to heal that? That's the conversation I am really interested in having.

Let's, let's go there. Your work, as I understand, includes helping people that have addictions. I will personally throw out a big statement here. I think everybody's addicted. I don't know anybody who isn't addicted. It's just a question of what you're addicted to. I And some addictions are more challenging than others, I suppose. And some are societally acceptable and some are not.

That's right. Like,

is an addiction we love, right? Our country loves people who are addicted to consuming and buying stuff, right? That's a great addiction.

And we're addicted to drama right now. We're addicted to polarization. We're addicted to us and them. And that's not new. That's something that's been going on for thousands of years. And I think originally we had our tribe because we needed a tribe to stay alive. And now we're finding that having this idea of like these different camps is actually not allowing us— we're seeing life expectancy for the first time in our country going down. So we want to take a look at that. And yeah, I—

It's a shocking measurement, right? I heard that recently.

It really is for the first time, and I don't know how long. And I do work with people with addiction, and I agree with you wholeheartedly. If we use the simplest definition of addiction, which is looking for someone or something, some behavior or substance outside of ourselves To try to heal something that feels broken within, and that becomes repetitive where we, in some way, it becomes an automatic response. That to me is addiction. And in that way, everyone has some form of addiction, as you said.

So I would love, TJ, just to talk about the work that you are doing, and we'll dovetail with just the broader group of people who, let's say, are addicted on some level to something. So it might be that you're talking about people with substance abuse, addictions. But I would imagine there's gonna be a great overlap to any form of addiction. I'm making that assumption. You can challenge that if I'm wildly off base, please.

You are 100% correct because based on that definition, if I'm looking for something or someone outside of myself to try to assuage something that feels disconnected within, then it can become addictive, right? And so my framework is Conscious Recovery. It's a book, it's workbooks, it's, I do clinical trainings at treatment programs. And it's based on the core understanding that underneath all of our behavior is an essential self that's whole and perfect. We kind of opened the show with that, right? To realize there's something within us that is, that did come into the world unharmed and unharmable. And that recovery, if we use that term, or we could say wellness, or we could say living the life of our dreams, is about reconnecting with that. And what's involved to be able to acknowledge that is also looking at what created the disconnection from that. And in Conscious Recovery, I identify the root causes of addiction as unresolved trauma, spiritual disconnection, and toxic shame. And I think all of us on some level can relate to that. And when we believe we're broken or damaged, we're going to look to the world to try to fix that. And that can become an addictive cycle. Because as we know, no one can really fix something that feels broken within. And what I'm saying is not only can no one fix that, but we're fundamentally not broken anyway. Yeah, it's a very different framework.

I'd love to touch on all 3 of those. So if we could start with unresolved trauma and then move through those 3, that would be terrific. And by that, I mean, you don't have to do a little mini dissertation on what you've already written, where people are going to get your book, it'll be a part of the show notes. So that I'm sure will People will be able to read it at depth. I would love it if there's an example, for example, of what that looks like.

Absolutely. I won't do a TED Talk on each of these. I

mean, TED Talks are getting shorter and shorter, so it's possible. That's right.

So maybe we will, right? Unresolved trauma. Let's start with that. We talked a little bit about that already, but I think when we think of trauma, we think of the obvious trauma, like someone who has gone to a war zone, maybe a child who loses their parents. There are things that are obvious trauma. We wanna look at it and take a broader look and say anything that is counter to this idea or this knowing of our internal wholeness and perfection, any way we get programmed to believe we're damaged or that we're limited, any idea of us and them and good and bad and right and wrong, all of that can be a traumatic experience. Brief example, when I was in kindergarten, I couldn't tie my shoes. This could be so insignificant for one person, but for me, I actually remember that moment. I was terrified. I remember looking around at all the kids. I can literally see the floor and the metal desk. I can feel the experience. And this was quite a few years ago. I decided at that moment that I was stupid. And that core decision, that core false belief got buried deep in my unconscious. And it took me about 40 years to unravel that. So, something that can seem so insignificant for one person can be deeply traumatic for another person.

Yeah. I won't get into the details of it, just not for any other reason than it won't serve us, not worthy of the time. But having spoken with my son recently about what I've been referring to as objective truth, there's just something that he had decided when he was 14 years old. I compare it to something I decided when I was about that age, same as you in kindergarten when I got put in the corner. And it's like the thing that was happening and the belief that we assign to that experience is not necessarily the objective truth. And that's what I'd called into the conversation with my son. I said, so now looking back at that, you're now 24. This was happening, you know, 14 years, 10 years earlier. Like, was that the objective truth? And he's like, no, I don't think that it was the objective truth. But yet it still was the meaning that you gave it. You know, we're meaning-making machines. So You make meaning, it becomes this core false belief. I think your language is just so spot on there. And that in and of itself can be a traumatic experience for people. That's what I'm hearing you say.

Because ultimately, it really is what we decide that becomes the trauma, not what happened. And we're not minimizing what happened. Obviously, if someone is sexually abused, that's a traumatic experience. But really, what did I decide about myself? And the key here is actually simple. And yet sometimes we miss it. And that is usually these core false beliefs are developed when our brains aren't even developed, right? So I decided at age 5 that I was stupid, but it wasn't cognitive, right? My brain wasn't developed. It was an experience. And I took that in and I put a lid on it and I didn't tell anybody. And I walked around from that moment until I was literally until I was 40 with that core false belief. unconsciously running the show. And I tried to talk myself out of it through therapy, through support groups. I'm like, change that narrative, change that story.

Right.

I said, well, of course I'm not stupid. But the deeper work is, how do I care for the 5-year-old? How do I allow myself to feel that? And it's an interesting process because in some ways I go back and actually change the past, not what happened, because people get worked up about that. I'm not saying we change what happened, but I can actually have a different conclusion as a 5-year-old, not as an adult, but say to this 5-year-old, as you said, that's not really the truth. Allow them to feel what's present. If someone would've just allowed me to feel that, I probably wouldn't have buried it. And of course, I'm not saying I'm not blaming my teacher. I'm not blaming the other kids. That's not what it's about. It's about how do I go back And from a place of tenderness, reparent myself as that 5-year-old.

Yeah. It's so profound. I wanna drop another resource to the audience as well. In addition to your book, there's a book by an author by the name of Michael Brown. He's from South Africa. He wrote a book called The Presence Process. It's an amazing book also on this topic. We had Hale Dwoskin, who's this one of the founders of the Sedona Method process, et cetera. Standing on the shoulders of his mentor, Mr. Levinson. I mean, so this is work that has a long history and it's probably, at least from my vantage point, it's probably the most difficult work that I've experienced as a human being. Like, I don't know, I can wrestle my way through even the gnarliest of tech issues and I'm not a tech person or marketing or sales or any of those things. I've been a serial entrepreneur, business person for a long, long time. I know what it's like to come up against a brick wall and You know, literally break through it because you have to do that as a business leader. But when it comes to your own, and I'll go back to your words, your own core false beliefs, you could take the strongest person, like the most seasoned, accomplished individual, whether that person has been a multiple gold medalist, worked with people like that, CEO of Fortune 50 company, doesn't matter what sort of heights they've achieved. You see those people come to failure at times, like tragic failure. You see it in the news these days all the time. The CEO of NBC just recently had to step— was actually fired, not even stepped down. Right? So you go, why is this happening? How does this happen? How does Will Smith get up out of his chair and destroy his career in an instant? Like, just destroy decades of work to become the top of his game. You go, how does that happen? It goes back to exactly what you're talking about. It goes back to some 5-year-old, 6-year-old, 7-year-old kid, precognitive, not even a fully developed brain that makes an assessment about yourself, your self-worth, your self-esteem in that moment that is then unquestionable. It literally is like a program running a person's life up to the time when they're 95. Doesn't matter how long. And if you don't deal with it, if you don't do that kind of hard work, it is literally there with you for the duration.

Yes. And Carl Jung said it so beautifully, until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our life and we will call it fate. And the reason that many of us are afraid to look is that it calls into question unconsciously or subconsciously our entire worldview. And so it's not conscious. No one walks— I mean, I wasn't walking around saying, No one better tell me I'm smart because I know I'm stupid. That's not what was happening on the conscious level. But because I had the vibration that I'm stupid, I kept unconsciously choosing situations to replicate it. See, I am. See, I can't do that. See, it's true.

To prove you're right. This is the irony of the whole thing.

Exactly. And it's not happening consciously, so it doesn't get shifted consciously. This is why the deeper work can be so challenging, because We are asking ourselves— we're asking ourselves to look at something that feels very, very deeply true at a vibrational level, and we're asking ourselves to question that. There are some frameworks that are really aggressive about it. You know, beat down that story, change that story. I don't think it's very effective. I think it has a very temporary effectiveness, if you will. We really want to get down and take a look because on some level what we can say is, yeah, this is difficult work. Nowhere near as difficult as continuing to walk around with this frequency and vibration and watching ourselves over and over and over again choosing these same situations. If you look at someone who's highly successful, like a CEO type, it's possible— this isn't true for everyone, but it's possible that that's actually a strategy coming out of a core wound. And that strategy is to become highly successful. And so to challenge that would be to say to them, on some level, Everything you're doing, everything the world is applauding you for is really coming out of a wound. Not very many people say, oh yeah, let me take a look at that.

It's

until— it's when something falls apart. Obviously, I don't know Will Smith and I don't know what happened with that slap, but a moment like that where he's like, oh, now I need to take a look, right? And that's not about him. I don't know his journey. But for many of us, we get to a point where it's like something collapses. A divorce, a bankruptcy, the loss of a business. And then we say, now let me take a look. And then, as my friend Dr. Sue Morter says, life is difficult and challenging until it's not.

And then there's a moment.

Yeah, me too. She's

so wonderful work. Yeah, phenomenal.

She's the person that said, only ego would want ego to die. It changed my life in that moment.

Yeah, that's a great quote as well. So this is all under this, the umbrella the heading of Conscious Recovery. So that was part 1, and that was a very TED-like experience, I think, for us. So thank you for that.

Part 2 is spiritual disconnection. And when we think about spiritual disconnection, many of us automatically go to a disconnection from something outside of ourselves, like the idea of a higher power or God. That may be true. What I'm really talking about is a disconnection from our essential self. Going back to the conversation we had that we come in deeply connected spiritually and For some people, that word doesn't work. So we might say our essential self, our true nature, our authentic being, all these different words that describe that place that we came in as again. And, you know, our brain wasn't even developed, so we're purely absorbing energy. And so through a series of events, through this trauma, we disconnect from that true nature. That's where all these core false beliefs develop. And then we forget who we are and we start to believe The lie that we're broken or damaged or limited. So obviously—

Or stupid or not good enough or ugly or fat or whatever other things that we have started to believe.

Yeah. And so the journey home, if you will, is a journey not outward to achieving something, but to returning to a place within us that already exists. Right. So we can call off the search and rest in this deeper truth. And that involves unlearning all the stuff we've ever pretty much ever believed about ourselves in the world that keeps us limited, that keeps us polarized. And really, it's the core of each and every one of us.

When I called it hard work earlier, I wasn't, I wasn't trying to be dramatic about it. I just think it truly is to unlearn what you learned for the last 20, 30, 40, 50 years, whatever it might be. That's not easy. To call it easy, for anybody to say that, I think is being disingenuous. So

It might be simple, but it takes effort, right? And for many of us, it takes an event. We're willing to look, but it doesn't mean it needs to be that way. But for many of us, it gets painful and then we're willing to do the work.

Yeah. It's sort of like how much self-sabotage can you actually tolerate before you've just gone, all right, maybe if I look at all the, all the crap that's happened in whatever scenarios they've happened in, you go, the common denominator in all those situations is only one thing. That's me. Right? You're the only common denominator in every situation, regardless of whether you've been the victim or you victimized someone else or whatever other gradients there are about it. So that's really interesting. Someone once shared with me this quote, and then we don't know who it's from. I don't know who it's from that said, problems are great. And pregnant pause so that somebody can go, I don't know what you mean. Like, that's crazy. problems are not great. No. No. No. No. Problems are great because they show you where your problems are. And I think that's ultimately similar to what Carl Jung had said. When we have blind spots in life, that is the greater problem. Yeah. But when we, when we have an understanding, at least, that the problems exist, it is without a doubt a better situation. And it is the first, maybe it's the first step on that road to recovery. So toxic shame, I believe, was the third part that you mentioned earlier. Can you say a little bit about that and provide an example of what toxic shame is?

Yeah. Once we have these traumatic events and once we have disconnected from who we really are, as I said, we develop these core false beliefs. And these core false beliefs really can be used synonymously with shame. And we know the basic definition now. Guilt is I believe I've done something wrong. Shame is I think I am wrong. And there's a very different way we work with those 2 because it's not behavioral and it's not a mental process to talk ourselves out of shame or to act ourselves out of shame. And we hear a lot of models, whether it's a therapy model or a support group model that says, act your way into right thinking or opposite action, some of the different modalities. And what we're saying is with shame, it's really about Where did this originate? Where are these core false beliefs still alive within me? As we have said, turn toward them. I love that you say looking at the common denominator here is me. I want to add something to that, to be careful, because I'll speak for myself. I went from blaming the world to blaming myself, and I stayed there for many years, maybe even a decade. Oh, it's my fault. That's not what we're saying. We're saying you have the power within you to heal this. And the person that keeps showing up for these situations is me. So, for example, if a person's walking around with a core false belief that they're not lovable, they're literally vibrating with that frequency. They walk into a room of 50 people, they will unconsciously or through frequency find the person to confirm the core false belief, and then it's easy to blame them. Oh, they're unavailable. And that process of, oh, I'm the one who chose them can be so powerful. But we're not saying, oh, look, it's my fault I'm choosing them. Oh, wow, I keep choosing them because of the shame, because I believe I'm broken or damaged. It's not about the situation. And obviously, if someone is in a situation where they're being abused, you do want to leave the situation and take care of yourself. Ultimately, though, the deeper work is I'm the one choosing this, and I'm choosing it because I believe I'm damaged, broken, or unworthy. How can we actually heal that? And then we can start to see the situations and relationships in our life change almost magically with a lot less effort because it's not, let me learn how to have great communication skills, or how do I find someone that's more available for me? We talk a lot about like getting rid of toxic relationships, and usually we think, oh yeah, that person's toxic. What we're saying is, what is it about me that keeps choosing it? Not through a place of judgment, but from a place of compassion and, and really curiosity. How can I start to shift this so I feel worthy of choosing a person that's more available for me?

Yeah. And I so appreciate how you plussed what I said earlier and added a layer of empathy and compassion to that statement about us being the common denominator. I'm going to play the same role right now, but on purpose this time. Simply to create, I guess, in all transparency, a bit of perturbation, which for people that may not be familiar with that sounds like a fancy term or whatever. The word perturb is in it, perturbation. So I'm saying what I'm about to say. I guess you could call this a trigger warning, and I'm not meaning to trigger. It's not literally what I want to do, but it could perturb some people when I say this, and I'm gonna say it because I feel like you know the space is open. This is a moment where somebody that may just need to hear what you're sharing, what we're having a conversation about, so that they can actually choose to, whether it's to read your book or something else, or to simply go, you know what? I'm gonna get serious about doing some of this work now because too many things have gone sideways in my life. There have been too many failed relationships or failed whatevers to just allow my life to not be all it's possible and capable of being. That's my intent in many ways in doing the work I do, in having a podcast where I have amazing guests like you to talk about really difficult things. I don't get to talk about this kind of stuff with that many guests. More often than not, this show is about the workplace. And I wanna ask you some questions before long about the workplace because it is where people— here's a simple connection. We bring all of our traumas with us to work. So anybody that thinks somehow there's a door and you walk through the door, or, or employers or leaders think that When their people walk through the door, they should leave their trauma at the door. Again, that's an old paradigm, a way of thinking from the 20th, last century. It does not work now. It's not gonna work in the post-pandemic world. It's not gonna work among millennials and Gen Zs. They're just too conscious beings. They are too conscious to buy into that. So we are holistic. You're gonna take yourself with you wherever you go, whether you like it or not. So the trauma shows up at work and And that's why I'll just say, I think this is highly relevant. Not that I expect that your conscious recovery work necessarily is a thing that every workplace is going to say, hey, we should really start that. Although I think it would make sense, frankly, for the most conscious of leaders to go, hey, we ought to be thinking about this. And we ought to get this guy TJ to come in honestly and speak to some people here, maybe even lead some of this work.

Yeah. And honestly, it's what I do. And I'll just say that I wrote my book Conscious Creation, which is my newer book, Based on exactly what you're saying, it's kind of conscious recovery for everyone. So it's really like, what is the life I want to create? I actually do go into organizations and help them look at how they consciously create their lives and their organization. And it starts with making peace with the past and overcoming core false beliefs. I've created a 5-step process that's an acronym using MOVIE, M-O-V-I-E, and it's making peace with the past and overcoming core false beliefs. Because as you said, we're in a new era. I've just been watching a show, I won't name it, but I've been watching a show set in the '60s and I'm like, yeah, that's what it used to be like. Everything was just shut down. We weren't addressing anything. And the new generations are coming in saying, no, we, we wanna be more conscious. I mean, there's a light and a shadow to all of, but the great news is we are no longer saying, let me leave my trauma at the door because we're realizing it's not possible and it doesn't work. It's not really effective for the individual or the organization.

Yeah. And there's a term that folks who are in leadership roles who are listening to this right now might be aware of, maybe not. It's called the trauma-informed workplace. And I think that's what we're talking about here is how to— just as you'll put lots of attention and focus into things like resiliency training, which is where our work dovetails, or into DE&I training and other things, you'll want to be thinking about trauma-informed workplace strategy and process and, and exercise to help people to deal from the things that have been ailing them for a really long time. So I'm just gonna go right to that statement that I provided a warning about, which is that victims can be perpetrators. And I remember when I first time I heard that statement, and it was really confronting, and you could take it the wrong way. But hopefully, based on the context you provided already, TJ, what that looks like is that person that goes into that party that's feeling that low, you know, I don't have a lot of self-love and find somebody in that party that can confirm that for them. So that person now becomes the bad guy, the bad person who victimizes that other person who's ready to be victimized because that's their core belief. Like, you're just confirming for me that I'm not lovable. I'm not worthy. So that's where the victim becomes the perpetrator because that person turns the tables on that other individual, makes them— in some ways gives them the opportunity To do that thing, it's a very—it sounds complicated and a maze. It absolutely is. But again, I think that's one of those areas where it's not a blame the victim. So I'll just say that right out loud. I'm not talking about blaming a victim, but victims, when it is that perpetuate that desire to be right and to confirm what they believe about themselves that is false, they need accomplices in it. And that is not okay. It is not okay for them, and it is not okay for the person that they make that accomplice, in my opinion.

Yeah. And so I applaud you, and I know that you're very careful with your language, as will I be, because sometimes when I talk about this and I write about it in Conscious Creation and Conscious Recovery about victim consciousness, sometimes people will say it sounds like you're victim blaming or victim shaming. And so right out of the gate, I want to say, First of all, if you're gonna show the clip, please show the whole clip. Right? Because there might be one sentence that sounds super provocative, but it's actually about empowerment. It's not about continuing to blame. As long as I'm blaming someone else, because blame is a low form of consciousness, it actually keeps me stuck, right? So if I keep blaming the person that we call the perpetrator, then I'm stuck in the cycle and I'm giving them all my power. When I say, I'm choosing this. Again, it's not I'm blaming myself or that the person is absolved of what they're doing. What I'm saying is that actually pulling that power back and starting to heal the core false belief actually will be much more empowering than continuing to say this person shouldn't be doing that. That's what we see right now in our political environment. That's what we see in the workplace. That's what we see in relationships. How many books are now written about removing toxic relationships or removing yourself from a toxic work environment? What usually happens is someone says, my boss is toxic, so they shouldn't be toxic. I'm going to empower myself to leave. The issue with that is we've given that boss all the power instead of saying, what needs to be healed within me? And again, I want to be clear, I'm not saying suck it up and stay in that work environment. That's the 1960s formula. What we're saying is, yeah, maybe I do leave that situation. The issue, though, is if I don't do the deeper healing, I'm just going to go choose it again. Yeah. And we do bring all of our unresolved trauma to the workplace. And the greatest point of empowerment is to shift from blame to accountability. Again, not self-blame, but to say, oh my gosh, I can heal this. I can have a different perspective on myself. I can have a different frequency. Because ultimately, we teach people how to treat us. And that statement can be provocative too. And again, I'm not saying what someone does is right or wrong. It's like, If I want to heal, I'm going to unplug. I'm going to do the deeper work that we've been talking about, and then I'm going to find myself choosing different environments, including a work environment.

Beautiful. I think it's a perfect segue into talking about work. And just again, quick sort of context set for this. When we are asked to deliver keynote presentations or workshops or even in our consulting business that we have under the name WorkWell, that enterprise is asked to retrain or relearn, which involves that unlearning stuff too, this concept of resilience. Because so many people think of resilience now and having heard it so many times and this word becoming very, very popular in the last several years, it's another euphemism for suck it up for a lot of people. They think just be resilient means just, alright, that's just another way, a nicer way to say suck it up. Right?

Right.

So It's so interesting how powerful people and organizations can co-opt even terms like that for their own ends, which we know in a marketplace, in a capitalist marketplace, ultimately the end is profit. And, and I'm bought into that. I have no issue with that at all. My philosophy and our company's research informs us that resilience is not about endurance. So if you truly want to bottom line profit, be your guiding North Star, then what you don't wanna do is drive people to the point of exhaustion. You don't wanna drive them to the point of depletion. You know, back to Will Smith, my own philosophy on that was I got to share it in an article about a week after the incident. And I said, look, you know, not even talking about his early life experiences and childhood trauma, etcetera, which became more widely known afterward. I said, he just to me was The person in that seat was depleted. And when we are depleted, you know, we don't make good decisions, especially when our emotions are triggered. Yeah. So you— emotion goes up and intelligence goes down, as the saying goes, and you could do something really sabotaging, which was what we saw. So we're in a work environment right now where people are exhausted. They are depleted. They are stressed out. They're anxious, having difficulty sleeping. And on and on and on. And as a result of that, we saw many people leaving the workforce. Now a term being used is quietly quitting. Many people are dialing things back so they could just survive. I wanna get your take on, on what is toxic in the workplace as far as you could tell, and where is some of the things that we've already talked about dovetail in terms of what I would like to say is art of resilience is about how we recover. So it's not about that endurance model, burn the candle, till you can't burn anymore, run, you know, one marathon after another till you can't run any longer. It's simply about how you integrate recovery principle into your daily routine so that you have greater longevity, greater capacity, and that ultimately creates greater profit all around. So with that in mind, recovery in our language is used a little differently than how you think, or at least how we've spoken about Recovery at this point. Can you share your thoughts on that? I would love that.

Yeah, there's so many different avenues I could go down. Um, I work in behavioral health, and most of the organizations I work with are behavioral health organizations. And one would think, well, these are therapists, these are counselors, these are coaches, these are people who understand the principles of self-care and self-love and bringing your full self into the room and not thinking that it's about crushing it and dominating, but really about the true resiliency that you're talking about, not like I can take— I can do anything. I'm superhuman. You would think, or one would think, that that exists there. But many clinicians are trained to say, leave your stuff at the door when you walk in, just like you said. And that's such an old paradigm, right? So even in that environment, many counselors or therapists believe— let me— I've sat in clinical supervision meetings. This is some time ago. They've literally said, imagine that you take all your problems and put it in a little box and put a bow on it. Just leave it on the shelf by the door and you can pick it up when you walk out. That is the exact opposite, right? So when I go in and do a one-day experience for staff in a behavioral health setting, it really is about reconnecting with their essential self. It really is about rediscovering passion and purpose. The deeper self-care is not an extra day off or a spa day, right? Because that's not going to change the deeper issue here. And it's not about this fragmentation of only bringing part of yourself into the room. So the organization, the individual, and it's the collective. And when I go into a company, we have to look at it as the individual and as the structure itself. And if I'm using my making peace with the past as the first step, we need to look at that individually and collectively. In other words, what trauma needs to be healed and You go into companies and we can feel it. We can feel what is the collective trauma here because it's really apparent something happened. And I do a whole timeline where people break into small groups and the groups are someone who might be there for a week and someone else who's worked there for 2 decades. And they share the story, they share the timeline, and then we look at what the collective traumas have been. Because if we're not making peace with the past, we're just dragging it with us everywhere. Very different than Forget your past, pretend like it's not there. Let's just move forward and crush it and dominate. So as we make peace with the past, we can start to look at what the core false beliefs the organization has made, not just the individual. So we're looking at it, I guess we would say micro and macro, but we're looking at every individual bringing themselves and all of their history, but also the organization. And in a very simple way, Some of these sound like such buzzwords, but authenticity, transparency, and vulnerability is the new model. And so what does that mean? Those sound great, right? So like, I had the honor of hearing the fire chief of Beverly Hills Fire Department speak at a conference this last weekend, and he talked about the old— it was like a militaristic, just crush it, just do it, just man up. And he said that COVID unraveled all of that. And one of the things that he did, and He spoke publicly, so I think this is safe. He said, you know, symbolically, I took my badge off and put it on the desk and invited people to come in. And that's unheard of in that system before. It was like, I'm the boss, I have the bars on my— I don't know all the military things, but it's very hierarchical, right? And he's saying we need to remove that. And what he saw happening in his environment was COVID was polarizing people based on What are their opinions about masking? What are their opinions about vaccines? It became so political. And he said lifelong friends became enemies. And it was very— now I'm projecting. He didn't say this. I could imagine how heartbreaking and difficult that was for him. That was a very long-winded way of saying we need to have some authentic conversations here because it's there whether we acknowledge it or not.

Indeed. And again, just to use another— whether it's a buzz term or not, I just say I think it's accurate, which is Psychological safety in the work environment is really fundamentally important because in, in an environment where people feel safe to express themselves in a reasonable and in a civil way, right? So I'm not saying psychological safety is an excuse to be passive-aggressive or something else, but, right? But in that environment, people will be able to express how they're feeling. So if they are anxious, if they're feeling that they need to take care of themselves, they need to go to therapy, want to go to therapy, or they're feeling disconnected from their families and really crave more time at home or time when there's an important event. Like, we have 4 kids, and, and when the kids had dance recitals or had sporting events and things of that sort, when you can't attend those things, it's like a little piece of you kind of just breaks off or dies inside. It, it's like you can't get it back. So when you feel that you're able to express what's truly important to you, things are quite a bit different environmentally and culturally. So, so I couldn't agree with you more. I, I think this is, this has such a place in the work environment, and yet organizations are probably, and people listening to this for sure are in leadership roles in, in the human resources area and talent development and Every area, frankly. I'm gonna say this to you. If you're making the pitch again, you're having a conversation with a leader or with a decision maker and you're saying, listen, this is important. I heard somebody say this once, which is that your budget is a reflection of your value. So often it is the case that somebody might wanna have you come in or even frankly wanna have Workwell, our company, come in, but they go, well, but we just don't, we don't have a budget for that, or we don't have enough budget for that. I kind of chuckle inside. To think, well, then you don't value it. You know, like it's not really important to you or can't find the money, find the budget for it. But that's also aggressive. And I dare say, I don't say that to people because it's not for me to say it to 'em, honestly. But my question to you is, if you're pitching somebody on why this is not like soft skill or some other term that makes, that dismisses the importance of this next to let's, we need sales training, we need leadership training. It's like, I mean, come on. Yeah. A lot of that stuff's just window dressing. If what you have are people who are broken, you want to perform Olympic quality, gold medal standards for things, and these people are not at their best, they're never gonna perform like that no matter how much training you bring in for that. So I'm asking you to make a quick pitch if you could for why this, you know, how do you have that conversation with folks?

I start with looking at what the issues are, right? And so Across all industries now, it's staff retention and it's burnout, right? Even if they're not identifying as such, any HR person, any CEO is going to say, you know, we're burning through people. People are finding a better offer. They're demanding more money. They're wanting more time off. So those are all the issues, but those are symbolic. Those are symptomatic of something. So what's the deeper issue? Yeah, people want more money. Yeah, people want flexible schedules. Yes, people don't want to come into the office at 6. 5 days a week anymore. But there's something deeper, and that is people want to be acknowledged and heard, and they want to be empowered, right? And it's a paradox because on one hand, I can't motivate another person. They have the motivation within them. But I can create a safe container for someone to actually access that and to become empowered from the inside out, right? So I too can tell a story, and I went in to do a training at an organization. And my training is usually 6 hours and this is what I do. And I come in for 6 hours and the person said, this is great. This is absolutely what I want to do. I can give you 2 hours. They're going to pay me my full, right? They paid me for the full day, but they're going to give me 2 hours.

Yeah.

And I'm like, on one hand I could say, well, isn't that great? I'm getting paid for a full day, but I'm only doing 2 hours. But on the other hand, how heartbreaking and interesting is it?

Yeah.

That we're going to come in and talk about doing a wellness reset and help someone reconnect with their passion and purpose so they can be more fulfilled in their own personal lives and in their work, and therefore more productive in the workplace. But we can only do 2 hours, and not from a place of judgment, but from a place of curiosity. And what happened is I went in and did the 2 hours, and they're like, oh my gosh, we need more. So, from a business perspective, great. I'll come back in and I'll do the full 6, and you'll pay me again for my full day. But it's just information, right? Because This is the days of these quick fixes and Band-Aids, the days of like crush it and dominate and give someone skills they need to be more effective. That's not what we're talking about. This is about really taking a deeper dive into what motivates a person, how we can reconnect with our passion and purpose, who we are. And therefore, the effectiveness is a byproduct of that. It's not what we're going in to do. We're going in to help someone actually Have a healing experience.

Indeed. Yeah. Like to say we, to create a culture of wellbeing, a corporate wellness culture is one where we want to crush it without crushing our people. I mean, so the idea, the sort of the impetus to crush it, want to crush it, that being the goal, especially when the stakeholders are public owners, that kind of thing. A lot of pressure. Completely get that in a variety of respects from my professional past. We just can't crush our people at the same time because that is a self-defeating and self-sabotaging—

Because it's not effective. It's not that it's wrong. It's just it's not effective. And it— even if it seemed to be effective in the past, it no longer is. So how do we pivot to a new way? Because what we're saying is when someone is truly empowered and has the safety to be vulnerable and to actually connect, And then the company does start to crush it. That's the byproduct of it, right? Because there's nothing more powerful than a workforce who is seen or heard and honored, right? And if people can bring their own— once I get in touch with who I've come here to be and I'm in an environment where I'm allowed to do that, wow, tenfold success, right? Other than just trying to fit people into these boxes like we used to do. It's an exciting time to be alive. And for some, it's like, oh my gosh, what do I do with this? The ground does not feel solid. Yeah. Indeed. TJ, I'm

gonna leave it there with you. I just have so enjoyed this conversation. I feel like we can do a part 2. So I'm gonna— I'd love that. Extend that invitation to you. Our audience, just a couple of quick notes, end notes here. First of all, finding out more about TJ, his work, his workshops, all of his services, book, etcetera. You can find those in the show notes. So please check those out. If you've got a question for TJ or myself, go to adamarkel.com/comment. You can leave your question there. And again, as always, I promise it will not be a bot. It will not be AI. It will be us. Okay? I promise that. If this episode has something in it that you feel would be helpful to someone else, as I often will make this request, I, especially given the conversation we had today, would implore you to share that. Share that with a friend, a family member, a colleague. that you think could benefit from it. And that will be a gift. And I say that not because of any other reason than in my own personal journey. This is not something— these kinds of things, I didn't learn this in high school. I didn't learn this in college, having multiple graduate degrees, et cetera. I've been a lawyer for 18 years. Didn't learn this in any of that stuff. This is just not— fortunately, today we have more access to this kind of information than we did 20 years ago. And that's a good thing. So again, sharing it with somebody else could be the beginning of quite a bit of some integration that is super helpful to them. And collectively, even within your organization, as TJ pointed out, we sometimes— there's a collective trauma that exists within an organization, doesn't understand why it can't hit on all cylinders despite throwing a lot of money at the problem or hiring and rehiring and retraining and all that stuff that just becomes this winch repeat cycle that, that you just don't always understand. And, and so bringing somebody in that can help with that to identify where that even that collective corporate trauma may exist is a really brilliant idea, I think. So check, think about that further. And lastly, if you have a rating, if you can, wherever you're consuming this podcast, whether it's on iTunes or Spotify or wherever it might be, if you can give us that 5-star rating, if you feel called to do that, it's helpful to us only because It will inform the algorithm, which will then inform everybody else about what we're doing here, and hopefully more people will get to hear it. So once again, TJ, thank you so much for all of your insights today, for your time, and what was a really enjoyable conversation for me personally.

Thank you. I loved this, and I would love to do a part 2. So everyone watching, I so appreciate you being part of this journey.

Beautiful. Ciao for now, everybody.

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