The Restorative Mindset: Transforming Pain Into Purpose With Andrew Bennett

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Markel and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change-proof.

Hey everybody, it's Adam, and I am so stoked for the Change Proof podcast today. I hope you are as well. I have an incredible guest. I mean, just an amazing man with amazing— gosh, I could come up with a better word than amazing. He just has life experiences that are compelling. They're real. They are so touching. Well, I'll just tell you a little bit about him, and then we can settle in for this amazing conversation. Andrew Bennett is a keynote speaker, a workshop leader, a coach, 2-time TEDx presenter, And a professor at the American University in Washington, DC. He also teaches in the White House Leadership Development Program. He specializes in leadership, organizational culture, and personal development. He's also a world-class magician and a member of London's Magic Circle. I can tell you right now that you're gonna love this conversation. You're gonna wanna share it with friends and colleagues alike. So sit back, get settled in, relax, and enjoy my conversation, my interview. Yeah, that was no joke. I mean, we got into it, and by it, I mean like the serious stuff, the things that are just universally so for all of us. That's why they're universal. We all deal with loss. We all are probably still processing some level of loss in our lives, whether it's loss of life, loved one, business, or opportunity, or any number of other things that fall in that category of loss. And that was just some of what we covered today. But I love this guy. I love how he speaks. I love how he communicates. I think he is a master at, at those things, and he just feels to me like a genuinely good human. Fortunately, got introduced to him through another really good human, a dear friend of mine. So it's probably no surprise that when you, You meet good people and you have good people in your lives that you will be in the company of other good people. That's just kind of how it works, right? That's the law of attraction. And I think somebody once said that we're always either affecting people or infecting people. There's an in-your-face statement if ever you'd hear one. And this is, this is definitely a gentleman, Andrew Bennett, that is affecting people. He's been affecting people for a long time. And I would imagine he has affected you and me and many others today with this conversation. We talked about the restorative mindset. We talked about the magic that it is to work through our setbacks and our losses and our disappointments in life and to see something that's truly transformative on the other side of that. It wasn't actually part of our podcast, but in doing some research on him, I was looking at his website and looking at a video that part of his team, I think, must have created for him. And he was telling the story of how when he was a young boy, he lived on a farm with his grandparents. In fact, it was his grandparents who raised him, and he had a very close relationship with his grandfather in particular. And we know that his grandfather was the one that brought him to magic, taught him, gave him what he needed, the first 3 lessons of magic, these 3 lessons of appear, disappear, and restore, and how that Changed his life as a young boy, gave him a direction, gave him something purposeful to be working toward instead of perhaps leaning into the sadness of losses that he'd experienced, including eventually the loss of his grandfather as well to suicide as a result of mental illness. And those 3 lessons, of course, have stayed with Andrew, and he's been teaching them in a different context of leadership and organizational organizational development ever since. And that's amazing. He was sharing that when he was on this farm, there was a tree, and this big elm tree had survived a blight that had wiped out all the other elm trees on farms in that area some years ago. But that particular elm tree had a— the time when his grandparents bought the farm and the people that were selling the farm, they had a big, like, a bull, a male, a bull. I don't know what else to say. And this bull was tied to the tree by use of this large chain. And when they sold the farm, they took the bull, but they left the chain is how the story goes. And eventually this big elm tree, just its bark grew and grew and grew as trees do and grew over the chain. You've probably seen something like that before, you know, where something was embedded in a tree and then the bark just sort of surrounds it and then eventually grows over it. And later on in life, Andrew discovered that from a scientific perspective, that the reason that this elm tree on that particular farm survived when all the other elm trees had perished was because that steel, the iron from the chain, was actually what gave this tree some nutrients in order to survive what was attacking it. So interesting that in this instance that you can see that even something like that, where there's this thing that is difficult or this thing that is a challenge or an adversity even can ultimately serve to make us stronger. And just such a beautiful example of how that tree survived and thrived as a result, in that instance, of the iron that it was getting from this chain that was wrapped around it, which you would never think somehow or another that that would be a good thing for the health and the longevity, the longstanding of a tree. But I heard Andrew tell that story, and it reminded me of a lot of the conversation that I had with him today. And, you know, he's had a fascinating career working for Ross Perot for, I think, 10 years, where Ross was in fact his mentor, and what the various pivots along his journey have been, and just really talking through how everything has led to these moments, these opportunities for greater service to others, for clarity, for The kind of success that I think to me is real success, which is how you feel about your day-to-day life, how you feel about the work you do in the world, how you feel about the lives that you impact, how you feel moment to moment, which sometimes, you know, can be reflected in other areas too. I mean, there are certainly signs of success in your bank account, but they're not the only signs of success either. And I just loved having this conversation. And I would say if there are other people in your life that would also really lean into some of the wisdom that was shared today, great things that Andrew was able to craft in the way of this conversation. Please share this episode with a friend or a family member or a colleague, because I think it's just fundamentally important that we share good messages. So we'd appreciate if you did that. Of course, if you've not yet left a review for the podcast, I will once again make that request and ask that you do it. Whatever the, the platform is that you consume this, you know, 5-star review is very helpful to us. If you've got a comment or a question, you can always go to adamarkel.com/podcast and leave a comment there for any guest and/or myself, and we will be the ones to answer that directly. Appreciate that. And lastly, you know, when it comes to this moment in time, this snapshot in time, and my ever-present sort of awareness of the level of resilience in the moment mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually is so important to be cognizant of that. And we have a test to give you or a tool that you can use to test your own resilience in 3 minutes or less. You can go to resiliencerank.com, resiliencerank.com, and in 3 minutes for free, you can get your own resilience assessment and see this snapshot in time, how mentally, emotionally, physically, and even spiritually resilient you are. We'd love to serve you in any way we can. So of course, always let us know how we can do that even more. For now, I will just say ciao. Okay, Andrew. So I'm thrilled to be sitting here in this seat. You and I, just before we hit record, we were chatting a little bit about this whole podcast thing, which, you know, it was a new thing not so long ago, honestly. And now it's a regular thing. It's a common thing. And yet after 300 or more than 300 episodes at this point, I still do it because it feels so good each time I get to meet somebody that I don't know well. You know, I don't have an intimate relationship, but in through the conversation and through the, the being real with each other, I get to know and learn things. And I think Martha Stewart said it best recently as she was being interviewed after winning the COVID the swimsuit cover for Sports Illustrated at age 81 or 82. And she said, Something to the effect of when you're through changing, you're through. And this is a woman who's reinvented herself.

Oh, I get it.

Over and over.

It took me a minute.

Yeah. When you're through changing, you're through. So change is, is so fundamentally important to us. I know that in my core. Like, I don't have to think about that. It might call a core belief, which I think is what drives me to not only to continue to podcast and to continue to do the work I do in the world, not just because I wanna be a in some way of value to others and in some educational sense to pass on knowledge, but because I'm still learning. In every one of these conversations, we explore this unknown area, this uncharted territory with somebody for the first time. That is exciting. It excites my sort of 5-year-old self, the curious kid that's inside. So my first question for you is, despite, you know, everything that I've said previously about who you are in the world, your CV, the bio, and how you're introduced when you speak to audiences and all that good stuff. What is one thing, Andrew, that is not part of that bio that you would love for people to know about you? 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 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 help you to be resilient.

That's a great question because it cuts right to the core of it all, Adam. The thing that's not in the bio— the stuff that we put in our bio is we want to be credible. We want to look Good. We put the stuff out there that is all of that. We want to establish ourselves. What's not in my bio is all the stuff that's gone on in my life behind the curtain. I've had a lifetime of kind of unbelievable loss. You hear my story and I mean, I told it yesterday. I've been working in the White House the last 3 days and someone came up to me after we were on a break and he said, have you ever read the Book of Job? And it does kind of read a little bit like the Book of Job. So what's not on the resume is the real stuff of life that's gone on while I've pursued achievement and all that stuff.

Yeah. It's so interesting in the sense that I think people think, well, that's good. You know, probably shouldn't lead with the loss maybe, or somehow or another that wouldn't help you to move forward. So they think it's intuitive that you would, you know, that wouldn't be a part of things. You know, I think there's an element of that being true, and it's a question of context and a question of timing as to when those things happen. But it sounds to me like even though that's not in the introduction, let's say, that as part of your work in the world, that you are transparent about the losses that you've experienced. Did I get that right?

You sure did.

So you mentioned you're in the White House, have been for a couple days, but it's not your first trip to the White House. So why don't you just give us a little bit of this, a sense of why do you spend time in the White House? What is that all about?

Well, it's an amazing opportunity to have a positive influence because if you follow the news, which I've actually stopped doing because it was kind of so toxic in me, I didn't like the way my mind was working when I was subjecting myself to so much of the news, quote unquote news. So I stopped. But we know that's focused so much on all the toxic stuff. And there are tons of people in our government, who are doing amazing work and wanting to be part of something better. And this was an opportunity for me to be part of that. The opportunity came through my teaching at American University, and the White House went to American because American has one of the best programs for public administration in the country. We're here in DC, so they came to American looking for who are the people that could help us. I was asked to do that. And it was, it is this amazing opportunity to be part of something good. And it's just so interesting because I've never experienced— most of my career has been in the private sector, in the business world. So we kind of know how that is. And the agenda is to grow your business and be profitable. And we know the business metrics. It's different in government. It is much more For government employees, it is much more mission-driven. You don't have the business metrics like revenue. And then you add this dynamic of not only is it focused on achieving a mission, and that's how your success is measured, but you've got the political dimension to it. So the people that I've been working with the last 3 days in the White House have been government employees. It's the White House Leadership Development Program. And so it's 20 top leaders from across the federal government, various agencies. They do a 1-year detail to the White House. They spend 80% of their time working within the cabinet on policy, but then they have 20% of their time that's for developmental experience. And so things like time with me, and they're government employees. They're like, you know, these people are very senior people and they've been, many of them been with the government for 30 years. They're, it's a marathon. But they're being led by people who are political appointees who, you know, a lot of the time it's a very different agenda. And so it's extremely challenging when people get critical about people who work for the government. I think it's important to make a distinction between people who work for the government and politicians and the people that work in the government at this dynamic of wanting to pursue a noble mission to make this country better for its citizens and this more shorter-term political agenda that can oftentimes be about power. It's so interesting, but I'm so thrilled to report that people I've worked with there, to a person, I would work for any one of them in a heartbeat, and they are really good people. We get to know each other as human beings. And these are really good people with their feet on the ground and good hearts. Yeah. I haven't met a person that I have felt like— before my first time in the White House, I started making up stories about what they were going to be like. And I was thinking, oh, you know, the egos, and they're going to be like, I've been there, done that, seen it all. Jaded, cynical, complete opposite. They are humble, They're curious. They want to figure things out. They want to make things better. It's just not even—

I mean, people, right, Andrew? I mean, that's the one thing, if you've lived long enough and you've had enough experiences with people, bare, you know, of outside of just a, a little homogenous group perhaps, then you realize that people are just people, especially if you travel the world and that kind of thing, which you and I have both had the blessing to do. My dad is a, was a civil servant. He retired after his 30 years, put his 30 years in as they did back in the day and retired at 55. But so I grew up in a house where the mission was always at the front. Money was never at the front, in part because there wasn't much money. I mean, so that sort of, again, just makes sense that that wouldn't have been what my father was putting his focus on. If that had been the case, of course, he probably would've not stayed and he would've been really disgruntled. Mm-hmm. And the fact is he wasn't, he was always inspired to do his work, as I recall. And now I've had the good fortune in my work in speaking and facilitating workshops to work with municipal organizations like the City of Palo Alto just recently. And you just meet a lot of people. As you said, there's this— you and I probably won't take this track in our conversation today, but I think it does just make sense to hone in on that distinction between people that are in public service roles as part of politics and those that are committing a lifetime of service or, you know, extended years of service to the public good. So, quote, civil servants. I wouldn't consider a politician or a political appointee a civil servant in that respect. So yeah, I think that's an important distinction and not pointing, you know, to say one is, you know, better or not. I just know that having grown up in a house with that, that their focus was not on, you know, whether it was red or blue or anything like that. It was always just, hey, Are we taking care of the kids? Like, my dad was a— he ran a park. He was a parks supervisor, recreation director, and a preschool teacher. And so those were the things he was concerned with and not who was, you know, sort of in power at the time. But of course he was—

And that was— you were out on Long Island, right?

You know, technically it's a suburb of New York called Queens. You may have heard of

it. Well, yeah, I'd say tiny little suburb, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

That place.

Yeah.

I've heard of that place.

Yeah. A lot of people. That's where I grew up. Yeah. So in an apartment building, and it's funny because you're sitting in a gazebo with this beautiful green background, which I imagine must include like, looks like rhododendron or something like that. We also live in a treehouse, so it's just pretty funny to see. I'm not in that background at the moment, but—

But it's there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right?

We live in treehouses. That's our— that seems to be the common thread in our lives these days between the East and the West Coast. So, I would love to track back to what you said earlier about loss. Mm-hmm. So, let's go into whether it's into the White House or it's into some other area where you are either consulting or facilitating. And we started this thread with, hey, you know, my life, there's been a lot of loss. That's not something that's in my, you know, sort of whatever, 30-second intro elevator pitch, et cetera. So, could you give us a little sense of what that is and where does it integrate If you're willing to share in the teaching that you do, in the facilitating.

Yeah, I really appreciate your deep listening and your question on this, Adam, because it is everything in my work now. The two have come together. When I first started out in business, I was very blessed because my first mentor in business was Ross Perot. I was his personal assistant when I was 23 years old. And he was my mentor for 10 years. In those early days, I was very much focused on climbing the ladder. And so it was all about business and it was about strategy and it was about execution and it was about the right tactics and just like classic, how do you be successful in business? And over the years, as my personal life and some of the pain from my personal life became more acute and required me to pay attention to it, It started to influence the way I was feeling about work. And thank God I followed that to let my personal experiences influence my work. So it's brought me to this place where I'm helping people look at leadership from a much deeper perspective. Leadership, not just in the context of their jobs, but in the context of life and What's the impact you want to have as a leader that will make this world a better place? And it might just be your corner of the world. It doesn't have to be world-changing. But I started the loss experience before I was 3 years old. My mother and my 7-year-old sister were killed by a drunk driver. And so my father, my older brother, and I moved in with my mother's parents. And about a year later, my father remarried. And he took my older brother and they started a new family. I stayed with my mother's parents, and I didn't find out until many years later some of the reasons that was. But we were in a very small town of 421 people in northwestern lower Michigan, and my father lived 2 miles away, yet I only saw him on my birthday and Christmas. And so many years later as an adult, I started to become aware of my fear of rejection, and it tracks back to my experiences of my father's absence and seeming conscious choice to not have me in his life. It created a lot of pain. So I was raised by my grandparents. They were amazing people. Wonderful people, funny as hell. My grandpa got me into magic. I've been a magician my whole life, had my own TV show when I was 14 and put myself through college. And Grandpa was my hero and he was my agent and my writer and my chauffeur. But when I was 13 years old, he had a mental breakdown and for the next 3 years he was in and out of mental institutions. And when I was 16, he came back. We lived on a farm, cherry farm, and he'd been out for 3 years. He came back, he'd been home for 2 weeks, and one morning he went down to our barn and took his own life. So by the time I was 16, I'd lost my mother, my sister, my father, and my adopted father. And then a few years later, my grandmother, who had just been the rock in my life, A beautiful Irish, tough Irish woman who kept it together through all this stuff that had happened in her life, kept it together and was my rock. She contracted spinal myelitis and it made her quadriplegic overnight. And so I watched this woman for 9 months, quadriplegic, having to spasm for every breath, breathing through a hole in her neck. And so here was this beautiful, courageous woman who had suffered so much and she had this cruel ending. That was when I kind of said, you know, there can't be a God. It's just, I didn't feel like God, you know, had like pinpointed me to hurt, to have suffered, but I just felt like this is just a random crapshoot and stuff happens. And then a number of years later, so after all of that pain, I just really poured myself into work and climbing ladder and all of those kind of conventional measures of success. I wanted to have the right car and the right title and a house on the golf course, and I got all of that. And the house on the golf course, I had saved my money for years, and shortly after moving in, my wife and I became really ill and we found out the house was infested with toxic mold. And so it was condemned by the health department. We tried to get the builder to fix it. The builder had deeper pockets and resisted fixing it. And so we ran out of money to pursue that. We lost the house. We went bankrupt. We moved into an apartment on the 3rd floor of a 3-story apartment building. And one afternoon, lightning struck the roof right above our bedroom and started a fire. We had just moved in. My wife hadn't gotten renter's insurance. We lost everything. So within the span of 3 months, we lost everything materially, financially. We lost 3 of our 4 cats. We didn't have children, but it was at that point that I just felt like, what's this all about? I just felt like I'd gut punch after gut punch. And then shortly after that, my wife and I divorced and I was at rock bottom. Just absolutely the worst place I'd ever been in my life. I just was suffering from depression and it was really, really tough. And so I was lying in bed one night and I looked up and I said, God, why did you leave me? I heard, I don't know if it wasn't an audible voice. I don't know if it was my subconscious. Who knows? Who cares? Because it was a good thing. But I heard this message, Andy, I never left you. You left me. I'm always here and I always love you. And that's when things started to turn around. And the next morning I was reflecting on magic for whatever reason, and I remembered the first 3 lessons that you learn in magic. The first thing is you learn how to make something appear, then you learn how to make something disappear, and then you learn how to restore something that's been torn or broken or cut. put it back together again magically. And for whatever reason, those came to mind. I was journaling and I wrote down appear, disappear, restore. I was 7 years old when I was introduced to those first 3 lessons. And Grandpa and I sat down on the floor under the Christmas tree and looked at my magic set that they gave me that was appear, disappear, restore. And so I was at rock bottom and I remembered these 3 things and I dawned on me, What if I think about what I want to appear in my life? What if I think about what needs to disappear from my life? What do I need to restore in my life? And I started just making a list of all the things I wanted that needed to go away and all of that. And I just put all of my attention into what are the things I need to do and stop doing? What are the ways I need to behave and choices I need to make? The decisions I need to make to live into that. And that became like the structure for my work. So, you know, the last 3 days were in the world. What do you want to appear as a result of your leadership? What needs to go away? What needs to be restored? And it leads to really important foundational conversations about what's real about leadership and about making a difference in the world.

I am marinating in what you just said. That's a word my daughter uses. Our daughter Chelsea introduced me to that, and it's something really just— there's something I'm just sitting with in much of what you just said. But I'll say, I think when you hear a story like the one you just shared with us, when you hear a story, life experiences, because every single part of that, it's just part of the experience of being alive. And there are a lot of people, I'm sure, at this very moment that are— I mean, I would imagine there are a lot of people crying at this moment, and other people are uncomfortable maybe. And it could be that it's reminiscent. It reminds them of some pain and some loss that they've endured, that they've dealt with. It could be that it's just something that's kind of inconceivable, and then that we don't necessarily even know how to sit with that or how to talk about it. So I want to just first thank you for sharing those experiences with me. And by me, the extended me to everybody who's listening to this now. Life is really messy and not in a bad, not in a way that means that it ought to be less messy. It's just a personal—

No, it's the whole spectrum of, I mean, it's the good, the bad. It's just reality.

Yeah. I—

You're going to have joy. You're going to suffer. And that's all part of it. I mean, I know so much of your work is about resilience, and it's so important. That's why your work is so important, to help people realize that whatever you're going through, it's not the end. Even when you are suffering, I think part of resilience is realizing— I think something that's very helpful in being resilient is realizing that those really hard times, this too shall pass.

And that's such a great use of that particular advice that people hear, that phrase that's been said. I feel like this too shall pass is such an interesting phrase because we apply it often to the things in life that are difficult. And it's a way to just know that it's not permanent. It's not a permanent state of being. Just because you're unhappy in this moment doesn't mean it's a foregone conclusion that you will be unhappy in the next moment. Or 100 moments from now. That we know is certain. But this too shall pass, I think, doesn't often get applied when it comes to the things that we love or the things that we're enjoying. Oh, yeah. The moments like when your kids are young and as at the stage of life that we're at now that we actually, because we got started early with our kids getting, having kids and all that kind of thing, is that we're getting to see now the next generation of babies being born and Experiencing, re-experiencing what it's like to see a child walk for the first time or put 2 words together or 3 words together or things of that sort. This too shall pass is for everything. It's agnostic to the law of the universe, which is change. This is the reason why I wrote a book about change called Change Proof, because change itself is the thing we have to learn to embrace. That is the greatest form of resilience I know. Because it's the one thing we cannot— we can't evade it. There's no avoiding it. And that change is ever-present. So to me, it's, you know, as the Romans, I think, wrote on a sundial long, long ago, it's later than we think. So to be in this moment and to say, this too shall pass.

Yes.

It's a gorgeous day. Well, this too shall pass. Yes. It's a rainy day. This too shall pass. Then we're less kind of brought through the rinse cycle, you know, the beach where you see, you know, that whitewash of just like things getting tumbled around and thrown to the ground. It's, I think there's a more peaceful existence, a more serene existence that's possible for us as, as human beings. And part of it, I think, has ties to what you just said, this concept of this too shall pass and how you move from one state in one moment to the next state in the next moment. And can you do that gracefully?

Yeah. I mean, what I'm feeling as you mentioned this too shall pass with all the good stuff, I'm feeling grateful.

Exactly.

Yes. That time with your grandchildren will pass. And so it allows you to savor it. Maybe that consciousness of that allows you to look at that child and savor it in a way that maybe you wouldn't, that you might take for granted. There's a real gift. I think I often say I'm grateful to be grateful.

Yes.

That the sufferings, one thing it's given me is an appreciation for when things are good and I don't take it for granted.

Yeah. That's why I used the word earlier, marinating. Your word savoring is just as— feels just as right to me. I was savoring listening to you share your experiences because first of all, you're an expert at communication, clearly, and a great speaker, I'm sure. But to hear you share those very powerful and difficult times of your life in such a— well, in a way that I think for a lot of people, they— it's an old expression in speaking and in helping teach people how to facilitate, as I think you and I have both been involved in, you don't typically tell a story you're still bleeding from. That's right. And so you're not still bleeding from the things you shared. They're still obviously relevant in your life.

Yeah. No, absolutely. And as you said, there may be people who listen to this and it's helpful. It may be— it may create anxiety for people, but people need to know that the last 12 years since that remembering of appear, disappear, restore and me going to work on it, The last 12 years have been the best 12 years of my life. I met my wife, Jennifer, who's the greatest blessing. You know, she's right up there with Nin and Grandpa as far as my angels. And the last 12 years have been the best 12 years of my life. And to your point, a huge amount of healing has taken place so that I can help others heal themselves. It's important for anyone to know that, yeah, you can't heal people. You can't help people when you're still in it.

Yeah. And it's probably the great, you know, like what was it? Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning. I mean, here's a guy, I use him, so I used to refer to him more frequently in my resilience trainings. Not so much now, but his story, you know, for anybody that doesn't, isn't familiar with that name, Man's Search for Meaning sold millions and millions of copies a long time ago. He was a person who endured something pretty horrific. He was in a concentration camp. In Germany in World War II, where people were being murdered all around him, and it was likely that he would also die in a gas chamber or what have you. And he didn't. And in part what that book is about and what his teaching, his meaning therapy and teaching afterward revealed was that he was looking at his life as some— and the difficulties as things he would be able to help other people In some way based on later. And that, I think, is just— it's profound that while you don't know why something is happening and why you are in fact suffering in the moment, to understand that it will be of great value and maybe even service to others later isn't just a little thing you say to yourself to get, you know, like, oh, every cloud has a silver lining kind of BS, or I don't know.

It's a lot more than that.

It's a lot more than that. And it's true on top of it, which helps.

Yeah. I never told my personal story until about 10 years ago, and it was after I met Jennifer, my wife, and we had been dating for about 6 months, and I had written a short story about my grandfather's suicide, and it was a cathartic exercise for me. I didn't ever intend to share it with anyone, but we had grown very close, and I shared it with her and she read it and she said, you need to start talking about this to your audiences. And so the first time I ever told the story, I was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and it was about 600 people and you could have heard a pin drop. And then there was at the end afterwards, a woman came up and she said, May I hug you? And she kept saying, I needed to hear you today. I needed to hear you today. And I have no idea what was going on. She didn't tell me, but that's when I realized the importance of sharing your suffering. And like you said earlier, making sure that you're as whole as you can be so that that story can be part of a lift, a healing for other people. But yeah, since I've been sharing that story, it's just been incredible. One of the people from the White House, we finished our 3 days together yesterday, and at the end of the day, there was an envelope that I discovered afterwards when I was packing up, and I read this message from this person and holy smokes, she was talking about the impact the time had on her, and it was incredible. And I just thought, if that's what can happen, By virtue of talking about your suffering, by, you know, pulling back the curtain from the resume and having an honest, just sharing your human experience in the interest of helping others.

Yes.

Holy smokes.

Holy smokes. Well, I'll just say this, whether it's an intention or it's a prediction, I don't know. It's probably a bit of both, but I have a feeling people who are listening to this conversation today have already gotten a great deal out of it. And there'll be people who for sure needed to hear exactly what you shared with us today. That is a certainty. There's so many things I want to cover, and, and I know we don't have much time left, so I will say this just to double down on the point you made just a second ago. When I was a lawyer, I mean, I was under tremendous stress and I was really unhappy in my chosen profession. At that point, 18 years. And I had some moments where I was really, I felt out of control and was having some difficulties that I think a lot of people deal with today. Sleep issues. People dealt with it then, but trouble falling asleep or staying asleep and all that kind of stuff, waking up in the middle of the night. So when I share with people today about how I ultimately put me in the hospital, led me to have this kind of very stark moment of truth, which was that my life was out of control, or I felt like I was out of control. And that's what was producing the anxiety. And I had an anxiety attack, but it was really all at the root of it was that I'm a control freak. That's why I went into the law in part. And here I am living a life that I feel so— there's so much out of control. Mm-hmm. And it's producing this intense helplessness inside so that my body just said, you know, okay, here's how we, you know, get your attention.

Right.

You know? Yeah. It's so obvious looking in hindsight at these things and understanding what was going on. But when I share that story from stage, it's what you said. And it was my wife, Randy, who said to me, because when I got out of the hospital from that event, the last thing in the world that I talked about or would want to talk about was that I found myself In an emergency room having a mental breakdown when I was supposed to be at my son's, like, junior baseball game. And so I share that story, and it's so interesting because even though I've shared it now many times at the behest of my wife, which she always knows best anyway, I've learned that. I just, I couldn't share it when I still felt shame about it. So that was—

That's right.

You know, like, when we think about, well, when are you not bleeding from something? I'm just, Tracking our conversation and where people might be able to think for themselves as to when can I share something? When would it be cathartic, but maybe also valuable to other people to share things? It's leadership because I train in that space too. You know, we only trust people that we feel safe around.

Yeah.

That's the only people we ever trust are people that we feel we're safe with. I never feel safe with somebody if I don't feel like I see through them. If I can't— if I don't know them transparently, on some level, I don't trust them. If they're hidden, if they're good at keeping their cards close to their vest and all that good, all that stuff that we're taught in a whole variety of ways is the safer approach. That's part of that success recipe. You know, don't be too, I don't know, be strong and I don't know, aloof. I don't know. But I don't trust people like that. Yeah. We have trust issues in leadership now, big time, because younger folks are more intuitive. They are like, you know, you and I might be like version 12 of the iPhone if we're lucky. You know, they're version 14.

Yeah.

And their kids will be version 16 and so on. Those versions don't go backwards. They're evolutionarily more advanced. It shouldn't be any surprise to people that millennials and Gen Zs are more finely tuned to something that we were less finely tuned to when it comes to, you know, what they want outta life or what they want out of a leader. So I just feel like, you know, there's that element. So just the, Close the loop on that thing. I think when we stop feeling shame about a difficult event, that was a signal point for me that this was a time that I could speak about it. And now I—

Interesting.

Speak about it all the time. And people always come up, as you said, and say, I had that happen to me last week or last month, or people on my team are experiencing anxiety, and it really helped to hear how you walk through that. And what do you do? So that's part of what my work is about, is that there are ways to develop your resilience before you end up in a hospital bed with something like I had, which thankfully was just a, a thing that came and went. But a lot of people end up sick and it's not a came and went, it's not a one-day event kind of thing. So.

That's right.

Yeah. Anything? So I said a bunch of things there. Anything there that you wanna just lean into?

Well, it made me curious. What was it? Made you realize it's time to talk about this?

Yeah. I mean, I was reading at the time some books. I wasn't into personal development as growing up in Queens. It's just like a jungle, man. I don't know. Went to school and afterward figured out, you know, I can't be— I was a teacher for a little while and I go, people around me are telling me to leave. There's no future here. And I figured out financially speaking, having come from a civil servant's home, That I really need to make a lot more money than my dad did if I wanna have a bunch of kids, which is what we wanted to do. And, you know, live in a home as, or live in a house as opposed to an apartment house.

Mm-hmm.

So I just got on that path, the one you described, that kind of, you know, corporate warrior path, that business warrior mentality. And so that was part of my armor. So when I began, when I had this moment where it was like a real kink in the armor and I couldn't ignore it, I felt relief that I was not having a heart attack at that moment, and I felt shame and embarrassment in the next moment that I was putting my wife through it and that I was so, such a weak, in such a weak state, man. It was just like self-loathing to the max. I didn't know what to do with any of it, and I wasn't gonna talk about it. So I just, I got a book that you probably have read or heard of called The Road Less Traveled by Scott Fitzgerald.

Oh, yeah.

That book changed my life, my friend.

Yeah, it was a very important book in my life too, Adam. I went and saw Scott Peck speak many years ago, but it's still an important book people should read.

Really? Yes. My daughter just recently read it. She was having some challenges in her final year of school and she saw it in my bookcase and I said, yeah, take it.

Yep.

Take it with you. And she loves it. So you know what? That's why we write books too. And I think part of my last couple of questions here with you is I want to track to the fact that the experience of having read a book that changed my life and very much inspired me to write Pivot originally.

Mm-hmm.

It's a book about personal transformation and reinvention out of the law, out of my legal career into the work I do now. And then I recently, a book called Change Proof, which is this book about resilience and change in organizational settings, et cetera. In part because I know that book can have that kind of an impact on people. I'm, I'm a living proof of that. So you are in at the early stages of a book that you're writing. And my dad was a, who's a writer, by the way. He retired to become a book writer.

Oh, I didn't know that. Okay. Yeah.

It's funny. He was superstitious about talking about his books all my life. Oh. He would never talk about them until they were done. Bizarre. I get it. But that was his thing. Or I should say it's bizarre. It was his thing, you know? So I don't know if you're willing to talk about your book that's not yet finished, but if you are, I would love to know about it.

I get the superstition because there's this part of me that's like, I don't want to talk about it because it may not happen. It's, as you know, it's really hard. I was talking once to our mutual friend Steve Farber.

Yes.

Who's had some great books, right?

Yes. Yes, he has.

Great books. And I was asking him about, you know, How'd you do it and everything? And he said, well, you sit down in front of your computer and you strain until blood breaks out in your forehead.

That sounds exactly like what I would expect to come out of his mouth.

So yeah, I'm in the early stages and, you know, I celebrated 30 years of private practice in doing leadership development, organization development recently. I turned 60 a couple years ago. There's these milestones and they cause you to reflect. And as I've looked back over my adult career, all these corporate things, and in the last 10 years or so, a lot in the federal government, the things that have really meant the most to me have been seeing individual people change their lives. Those are what really mean a lot to me. And I've had some big projects. I have done 39 multi-year projects with companies like Google and Habitat for Humanity and It's where I'm on site with them for 4 days a month and helping people change, but the real-world part of it. And so I've had all these projects and there's been great things that have come out of that, but it's been the individuals that I've seen find so much more meaning in their lives, happiness. And then also feeling like just getting enough messages from people to say, Andrew, you need to share your story. Your story needs to get out there in a bigger way. And so I've set about writing the book and it's called The Restorative Mindset: The Magic of Finding Inner Peace. And so it's very personal and it's for people who want to write a new chapter in their lives, whether that means they've experienced a significant loss and they're at a point where they're ready to start moving forward. Whether they have just felt like there's got to be more to life than what I've been experiencing. I want something new and different. Maybe it's that they feel a calling, that there's something calling me, but I can't quite identify what it is, but I'm supposed to be doing more. So it's for people that are wanting to write a new chapter and it's all built around the, what I call the restorative mindset, the appear, disappear, restore. approach. So it's personal.

Yeah.

Not a leadership book per se, although leaders are human beings and teams can write new chapters. And working with an organization in Boston that's about to write a new chapter for itself with a CEO who— it's a pharmaceutical company and they've had a lot of success. And he's— the CEO is saying, I want us to think about the impact we're having and not think so much about the money. And I want us to have some conversations, some serious conversations about how we can serve people more equitably.

Yeah. I can't wait for that book to be in its— the stage where the world will get to enjoy it. And I know it will be amazing. So I can't wait for that. And I'm already bought in. Whatever your preorder list is, I'm first in line or maybe only behind people family and friends that have heard about it already. So, Andrew, thank you for that. And to my audience and those of you that support this show, which we so appreciate, a couple of quick reminders here. First of all, more information about Andrew is in the show notes. So if you wanna find out more about his work and get URLs, websites for contacting and finding out more, et cetera, all be in the show notes. And that's a great place for you to go because I think there's also some really great language that Andrew shared with us that you can pick up in there and share, pass on. Of course, great to use attribution when you use a quote, put somebody's name next to it, you know, in your LinkedIn post or when you share it with colleagues, do that too. We'd appreciate that. And if you have a question or a comment, something you want us to see, adamarkel.com/podcast, and you can leave A comment there for myself, for Andrew, and it'll be us. We don't have a bot for that, not using AI to answer these things. So that's good too. And Andrew, want to thank you for the time and the intimate conversation that you were willing to have today. I so appreciated it, but also felt, feel that I needed it. So thank you for that.

Thank you, Adam.

Well, again, final reminder, if you love this episode, please share it with a friend or a colleague, somebody that you know could benefit from it. Again, personally or professionally. That is also how the podcast reaches more people. So it's—I'm being selfish in that respect. I don't mind doing that. So please share it, and if you can provide a rating on whatever platform it is that you consume this, that also helps. So if you give it a five star, if that feels right to you, or whatever it is, we appreciate that feedback, and it's super helpful. So for the moment, I will say again, thank you, and ciao for now.

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