Mentioned in this episode:
Episode 09 with Chad R. Allen
Frozen Top Ten (blog post)
UNFROZEN: Stop Holding Back and Release the Real You (book)
Mentioned in this episode:
Episode 09 with Chad R. Allen
Frozen Top Ten (blog post)
UNFROZEN: Stop Holding Back and Release the Real You (book)
Share this one with a young woman you love (teen+). There is so much we can relate to here and their examples are powerful for helping others realize that their voice matters.
Mentioned on this episode:
The Sound of Gravel: A Memoir by Ruth Wariner
The Polygamist’s Daughter: A Memoir by Anna LeBaron
Shannon Thomas – Healing from Hidden Abuses
Thank you for subscribing, rating and reviewing the podcast on other platforms! It really does make a difference!
Hey, it’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence Podcast. Today, we have Part 2 of extra special interview with Anna LeBaron and Ruth Wariner. Now, these ladies are both authors, they’re cousins, and they’re polygamous cult escapist. And if you have not heard Part 1 of this interview, you need to go back. Stop this right now, and go back and listen to Part 1.
So many amazing things that they share about the way that they met, their interaction, and how that’s been healing for them. It’s fabulous. Now, in today’s interview and today’s episode, we’re going to dig a little bit more into what it was like for them to not have and then find their Voice of Influence.
Andrea: Welcome back to the podcast Anna and Ruth!
Anna and Ruth: Hi!
Andrea: Okay, so we’re we left off in the last episode was that you were discussing the fact that sharing your stories, even quoting your stories out there for each of you was healing for you. But it kind of brought up some other things with other family members know that it’s difficult for them. So have either one of you had any resistance to sharing your stories with the world?
Anna: Oh my gosh, I know that for me having witnessed other people in our family, having written their stories and then listened as people reacted to and responded to the things that we shared, the difficult situation to be in telling such an intimate details about your family. And then finding out those things have impacted other people sometimes in negative ways.
And that has been a reality for me hearing from family and then hearing from others who hear from family where you know that what you’ve done by sharing your story has impacted others negatively and that’s a hard thing.
Ruth: Uh-hmmm. It is.
Anna: It’s a hard thing to process and navigate and work through; however, I knew that it will impact people just because I’ve seen it happen so many times before because there have been so many books written about our family, even made for TV movie that was just horrible and horrifying to watch myself.
Ruth: It was for me too, yeah.
Anna: Just watching what happened, and the fact that these things transpired in our lives and then having to _____ them through other people’s lives.
Ruth: Through another perspective, absolutely.
Anna: And the key was that, it’s somebody else’s perspective.
Ruth: Yeah.
Anna: So when I watched that made for TV movie in 1993 on television, it was impactful and that it was told through somebody’s eyes that I wasn’t very familiar with. And so the scenes and the things that played out, I was a little bit surprised like “Oh my gosh, these things are odd or unreal.” But it was actually very real but it wasn’t my perspective. The story wasn’t told [crosstalk].
Ruth: It wasn’t your experience.
Anna: And so when I started writing, I had gone to the place where I knew that everyone has a story and every story matters. And even me writing my story was going to impact people that my story mattered. And so, me being able to tell my story even knowing that people were going to be having to make shift their inside….
Ruth: In their own understanding.
Anna: Their own understanding of what happened. Those shifts were going to happen and it was going to be difficult for some people, I just felt like I needed to…I’ve known, I needed to tell my story for decades.
Ruth: Me too.
Anna: And had to go through a long healing process personally before I could get to the point where I could tell my story and share that was really intimate, really impactful things that happened to me with the world.
Ruth: And that was something, as I was writing, it was a conflict that I had honestly I was writing because it was so important for me to be honest and for me to share my truth and my experience because I hadn’t felt this as a child. And really when I started writing my book, it was more for family. I wanted my younger siblings to remember our mother and to know who she was because they didn’t have a memory of her.
But I wanted them to know who she was through the experience that I have with her from my perspective and that part of it was really important to me. And so my memoir ended up becoming more of a we-moir I guess. It was about our family experience but I was very concerned about how that was going to affect my family. And that definitely influenced the way that I wrote about the religion in the book because I have so many family members that are wonderful and I adore that are still practicing polygamous and practicing Fundamentalist and still believe that my dad is the prophet.
I knew that I was writing and I took that into consideration. But at the time I was ready to share my manuscript with the publisher, I had my siblings that I’m closest to, which are all of my mother’s children, I had them read it and I want a feedback from them. And I wanted them to be okay with the way that I told the story. But it was impossible obviously to break outside and to get feedback from people outside of my nuclear family.
So my brother Matt, he was still in the religion. He still lives in Colonia LeBaron, he read it and he loved it. So for me, that was important and he also helped me. You know, I had been 20 years removed from my childhood in LeBaron when I first started writing and I was reflecting and remember. I used a lot of photographs. I’d been back to the Colonia LeBaron a few times and it helped with my writing and my memories.
But he definitely helped fill in a lot of little memories and little stories that we both remembered. We spent a lot times of impactful conversation about what happened. And I remember asking him, I’m like “Did this happen? Is this true?” You know, because it was so bizarre to me after having left the town for 20 years basically. It was important for me that it was okay with him because I didn’t want to hurt our relationship in real life.
It was exciting that he was able to not only understand my perspective. And he said that, he said “I know that this is your perspective.” He was very understanding of that and not only understanding but he was excited for me and he wanted to know as the book was being released. He wanted to know how it was doing.
So that part, I felt really good about that my mom’s family, the family that I’m closest to was okay with the story. And not only okay with it but they loved it and they all said that it was healing for them to read from my perspective and understand where I was coming from and really understand why we ran away. That was a very big part of me for my little sisters to understand that.
Andrea: Because you played a big part in getting your sisters out as well.
Ruth: Yeah, my mother passed away in a tragic accident and we lost a little brother and they were 5 months, 2 and 4 years old. And my brother Aaron was only 10, and I a special needs brother who was Luke was 17 and I was 15. And we grew up with a stepfather, another polygamous man who also believed in my father and his priesthood. He then incredibly _____ us as we were growing up and I found out not long after my mom died that he was continuing to abuse my special needs brother.
And it was at that point that I called my brother Matt working in the States – he was only 18, already out on his own. He left home at 14 and has been working hard labor in construction for those four years. I called him. I explained situation the situation. And you know, after my mom died, there was this part of me that was so profoundly just this really strong primal mother bear instinct that I had for my sisters because my stepfather even right after my mom’s funeral wanting to take my little 4-year-old sister and be alone with her.
And I was like “There’s no way you’re taking that little girl anywhere without me.” And you know, he had apologized for his abuse of all different kinds. He apologized and everybody was like “He’s repented, you need to forgive him.” And that’s how the community responded to him. When I found out about my brother, I was like “There’s no way, we’re staying. There’s no way that he’s gonna start taking my little sisters and being alone with them.”
And so I called my brother Matt. My stepfather had left. He had work in the States so we didn’t know when he was coming back. And I called my brother, I told him exactly what was going on and I said “You are not gonna leave us here anymore.” I was just like “There was no way.” My mom wasn’t there anymore. She wasn’t keeping us and that had always been. She had been the rock. She was the person that did everything for us.
And he came down literally the next night and in an old ____ station wagon. We throw all the kids stuff in the car. We turned off the lights and we literally just lurched out of town so nobody would notice in the middle of the night. It was terrifying because we didn’t know when he was coming back. We didn’t know his family was going to see us leaving. And by the time we got to the border, the sun was rising and going into the border at Arizona.
It was probably a few of the longest seconds of my life as we were waiting. I don’t know for people that have been in border town situations, the lines are long. And it was always frightening to me to cross the border either to Mexico and or to the United States, but it was something that we were definitely well practiced with. But we had never crossed the border without my mom.
And my brother was in the car. I was in the car with my sisters and I was teaching them how to say, you know, to say Americans, so that when they ask us our nationality, we’d all be ready to say American. The border patrol woman, I remember she shined a flashlight inside the car. She looked at each of us and said “Why were you in Mexico?” And so my brother said same thing that my mom had always used to say and it was “We were buying clothes for the kids over the weekend.”
She looked around. She didn’t have any reason to believe that we were newly orphaned or that our mother had just passed away. We were taking the kids away from their father and she let us through. And that was literally the moment in my life definitely when my time and my childhood in LeBaron….it was like that night that cut my life into parts. Yeah, coming out of that was we were safely lived at my grandmother. So that part of it was good but also left behind my family and life that I knew and I was raising a family at that point, my little sisters. My grandmother wasn’t in position to take care them by herself, so I stayed home with them and her with them and then eventually moved out when I was 19 with my sisters and I raised them in Southern Oregon.
When I was raising my sisters, I first just a teenager, a woman in her early 20’s, a single parent with them and you know, it was so important for me for them to understand what had happened that they have a memory about. But since the book has come out, I’ve had a little bit of resistance from the people in Colonia LeBaron, my family there. And I think really the hardest thing for them, you know, my half sisters like I said who they’re wonderful parents and they’re wonderful people but they don’t understand the situation that I left in. I think that they’re the most resistant that I’ve had or had been from people that haven’t even read the book. They haven’t read it and they don’t understand the perspective.
I’ve had one sister in particular call me out pretty _____ on social media on Facebook publicly. She hadn’t had a conversation with me in years and in fact, I don’t know her very well. She’s quite a bit older than I am. But I also realized too that she’s in her 60’s or in her late 50’s, and she remembers my father. She remembers the man who was charismatic and who was a leader and who created this church.
He was obviously very confident and a visionary and that’s the person she remembers him being and I don’t have that connection with my father. And I think that just the fact that I’m questioning whether or not what he said was true, whether or not he was a prophet has really impacted her personally that I would consider that “no, he was not a prophet.” Does that make sense?
Andrea: Oh yeah.
Ruth: Yeah, so that part of it is very personal and very real for her in a way that’s not for me and I understand that.
Andrea: Yeah, Ruth, this idea that the people who have provided the most resistance to your book and to you. Those people haven’t even read the book that sounds a lot like growing up and not having a voice, not being able to share the story, to share your perspective. When other people were telling you, you needed to forgive your step father, when they were saying he’s repentant, you know, you need to just forgive him now; did that cause you to question your own perspective?
Ruth: Oh I definitely did not feel this in to and the fact that so many people supported my stepfather in spite of knowing this had he’d been definitely affected the way that I felt about myself. I’ve struggled with feelings of very insecure feelings and also not knowing how to value myself because I didn’t feel valued. I didn’t feel heard, and that was definitely part of it. The way that the community reacted, but really more importantly the way that my mom reacted and her decision to stay, had a profound impact on my life.
I did struggle with a lot of self doubt. I thought I was going crazy like I know. I had always been very intuitive that there was always something about my stepfather that really bothered me. I didn’t want to be around him. And even before he became abusive, he was very religious and I knew there was something that wasn’t right about him. So part of me learned to trust that little voice inside me, that intuition that I felt and that I felt very alone in feeling.
But as my stepfather became more and more abusive, I realized that there was something real about the way I felt and that I needed to listen to that. And it was the same intuition that when I found out he was abusing my special needs brother, it was that intuition again that told me I needed to leave. And because I had been right before just in that instance, especially in regards to my stepfather, I knew that I needed to listen to it.
Andrea: Yeah, your book indicated that you’re really resolute at that point. You just knew.
Ruth: Oh yeah. No doubt.
Andrea: Whereas before, you might have been questioning but then when it happened to somebody else and when it was possible that it might be happening to other people in your family that mother bear said “No.”
Ruth: No way.
Andrea: So Anna, Ruth mentioned her mother and the fact that her mother stayed was a significant difficulty for her, what it was like for you knowing your mother and her background and the fact that after you left, she stayed?
Anna: Well my mother is still alive so that was one of the things that I had to consider strongly in deciding to write my book. For the longest time, I thought I’ll wait until she passes because she didn’t know a lot of these things that happened to me and I know it would just break her heart to read about them. But then that’s not how things ended up being which I wrote the book even though she was still alive and with us. And I knew that it would impact her life to read these stories and for me to talk about the ____ of polygamy that she’s still very strongly believes in and resonates with and that guides her faith and her practices.
And so I had to overcome some of that resistance within my own self to talk about the things that happened to me knowing that it would be very difficult for my mother to read those things and to share those things like a lot of people don’t tell their parents when negative things happened to them. There’s just some kind of silence or something that happened inside of children when bad things happened to them and telling others is just hard especially telling your own parents. And so that was something that I had to overcome.
Andrea: Why do you think that it is the way that is? Why is it so hard to tell your parents?
Anna: When things are happening to children, oftentimes they’re being told don’t tell and threatened and bullied into not telling so that’s part of the experience. But then you also have that internal dialogue that happens that makes you afraid to speak up or to say what’s happening.
Ruth: Absolutely! I think there’s a tremendous amount of my experience with the same and that there was a tremendous amount of emotional manipulation from stepfather. He was always saying….as I was watched my mom, she has 10 kids and was 38 when she died and she had three special needs kids. It was a tough situation and I had watched her suffer so much. And so when my stepfather was abusive, he asked me not to tell because he didn’t want me to hurt her and so that was something that was very sensitive to me.
And because of the narcissistic personality that he had, he knew the part of me that was easy to manipulate. And there’s also the part in children that blames ourselves and so it’s scary to tell somebody else that we may have done something wrong. It was hard for me really as a child not to blame myself to what was happening in my life and to not have as sense of shame for myself and my body and who I was. And that made it harder to talk about for sure.
Andrea: Yeah. So Anna, you eventually did share your book with your mother, right?
Anna: Yeah, I did.
Andrea: Will you tell us about what that experience was like?
Anna: When I started writing, I knew I needed to tell my mom that I was writing and she was actually very nervous about what I was going to say. So one of the things that I did during the process of writing book was I just maintained some contact with her periodically and sporadically letting her know what was happening in the publishing process, because it was a very long process.
So it was several years of updating her and letting her know where we’re at and then I told her that once I had turn in the entire manuscript to publisher that I would get on the plane and come visit her and talk with her and read it to her. And I wanted her to know what was in the book or what was going to be written about before that book showed up on her doorstep delivered by the postman.
I didn’t want her to be blindsided and to _____ understanding that her choices, her actions and decisions impacted my life so negatively. I didn’t want her to sit with that alone. I wanted to be there beside her and allow her to see that I had grown and matured and healed. I wanted her to see with her own two eyes in flesh and blood. I wanted to be in her presence to be a comfort to her heart with my very presence.
Ruth: Giving you that space that you talked _____.
Anna: I know that like so many people in my family, especially my immediate family. My mother’s children – they have a lot of conflicting feelings as well as I do. I have conflicting feelings about my own mother because she holds to those faith practices that were so devastating to so many people’s lives. So there’s a lot of conflicting feeling even though I feel tenderly towards my mom, there’s still that aspect of being in a relationship with her that’s in conflict with my own values, moral standards and things that I hold as dear in my own faith practices.
So that conflict is there. It’s internal and it’s ever present in every interaction I have with her, however healing or whatever. But I will say that having her grieved and mourn while I was reading even though she regretted because one of the things that you touched on earlier is that there are people in the community we’re born and raised in, they’re still believe that Joel was the prophet. I will say that there is nobody that I’m aware of that’s alive today that believes that Ervil was any kind of prophet at all, not even my own mother who followed him through his death.
Ruth: Wow, I didn’t know that.
Anna: She does not believe that he was a true prophet anymore. She does believe that there’s another that was and you’re probably familiar with that thinking that would cause her to kind of shift gears in that way. So just knowing that she shift and make that shift away from that kind of thinking and that mentality that kind of keeps you _____ sort of kind of stuck. In her mind, she’s not stuck. She has a different [crosstalk] than I do. But from where I was sitting, she was very stuck and the fact that all of her children have now left that way of thinking as far as that who she believes as a prophet currently.
It’s just a lot of conflicting feelings that’s where I was going with it. There’s conflicting feeling in this relationship that I have with my mother and yet, the community that she’s involved in right now doesn’t require her to not have contact with people that are outsiders or considered outsiders. So for that I’m grateful because I have been able to have this experience with her even though internally there’s still that conflict.
Ruth: Absolutely. That makes sense. It totally makes sense and that’s something about my story that has been really hard for me as to not have that opportunity to have a conversation with my mom.
Anna: Is there a part of you…now, I’m talking and…I’m having a little…
Ruth: She’s having a little interview right now.
Andrea: Please, please, please feel free.
Anna: Is there a part of you that can look at my experience with my own mother and think she might have had that thing response.
Ruth: She might have and that’s a good question you know when I think about my childhood. Had my stepfather been the one who passed and not her, would she had married another polygamous and stayed?
Anna: I have not thought about that.
Ruth: Yeah, so you know that’s a good question and I spent years in therapy. And my idea about my mother was always that she would have eventually left because all of my stepfathers’ wives did leave him eventually and you know that we would be friends because I still felt so close to her as a teenager when she died and there were so many feelings of betrayal that I didn’t get to resolve with her.
And thinking back during my therapy actually and this is something that my therapist said to me, she said, do you think you’d have a close relationship with your mother had she survived? And my initial feeling was, yes of course. I would have forgiven her. It would have been amazing. She would have been my friend and I would have known her as an adult and all of my life’s problems would have been solved.
But you know, that might not be the case. I mean, I don’t know extensive the abuse might have been towards my other siblings and how disturbed I might have been have my mother never left. Those are all unanswered questions for me.
Anna: Well, I have siblings. We have _____ feelings with my mother.
Ruth: Yeah, I can imagine.
Anna: Because she still believes those things and still practicing and still…she’s walking down that road.
Ruth: Yeah and hearing your story about your relationship with your mom too, I realized that mine probably wouldn’t have been very perfect either. I probably wouldn’t have been dealing with a lot conflicts and in fact it is true for me and my brother and I. My brother, Matt and I were very close when we’re young. And when he decided to go back to LeBaron and take a second wife, he has 15 children now and has been married a few times but that’s something that’s hard for me.
It’s been hard for us to be able to continue to have that close relationship and relate to each other’s experiences in life because the decisions that my mother made and that my stepfather made in polygamy were so devastating to my life. And so it’s hard for me to watch and go back to it even though I don’t think his situation is not as harsh as ours was growing up. So he has evolved in that since and he’s not nearly as abusive. They have a better lifestyle than I did when I was there but yeah definitely the way women and children were treated, it’s hard for me to watch. It hard for me to see that happening again in my family.
Anna: Agreed.
Andrea: At what point did you each begin to believe that you voice actually did matter, that you mattered and that you expressing your thoughts and feelings, that people might actually listen? At what point that that actually happens for you?
Anna: Well, I’ll just start and kind of ____ with what was being said earlier about therapy.
Andrea: Please do.
Anna: It was for me was when I started my down the road in the healing path that I took when I accepted an invitation from a friend that offered to make an appointment for me with the lay ministry counselor at her church. And I didn’t know I needed therapy but she could obviously see the signs that I was in distress emotionally. And so she made that appointment for me and then after an hour with this woman, she wisely referred me to a licensed professional therapist and that began a five-year journey of what my therapist called ‘peeling back layers of an onion.’
And when I first sat down in her office with her emotionally, I was very stuck. I was very shutdown. When you’re raised in that environment and even after getting out, finding your voice, finding your feelings, or finding expressions for the emotions and the thoughts was really big part of my healing process. I learned how to cry, how to grieve, which those are things that I…I was a grown woman with children of my own and did not know how to express grief. I didn’t know how to express emotions.
I had what I called ‘a very limited range emotionally.’ I couldn’t go very far negative, I couldn’t go very far positive just because being raised in and groomed for eventually becoming just wife, you’re taught to shutdown emotionally.
Ruth: You have to.
Anna: You’re taught to restrict your emotional expressions and so you live a very limited human experience without that big wide range of emotion that’s possible and that’s very normal.
Ruth: That’s human.
Anna: That’s very human and so just being able to tap into and access that emotional expression was such a big part of my healing journey. Just having tears come out at the corner of eyes, you know, it took my five years to heal.
Ruth: To give yourself permission to feel.
Anna: Yeah. And so the way I talk about it now is because I’m now able to express the negative emotions, grief, and anger and you know rage, sometimes I have permission for that expression in a healthy environment, in a healthy way. There’s a healthy expression of anger and just having access to those negative emotions and the freedom to express them has given me access to the range on the other’s end of spectrum to all the joys and the peace and love in its very wide space.
Ruth: Yeah, it’s so inspiring. That’s amazing.
Andrea: How did other people respond to you when you did start to express yourself? The people that were around you, did they notice sudden change? Did they accept this new expression of your humanity?
Ruth: Good question.
Anna: It wasn’t sudden. Like I said, it took five years for me to open that inner space inside of me that had just been held down for so long. And then I mean, once the dam broke I think I cried for days and months to have let all that grief out that had just been held in for so long. Even years after that, my healing journey has been decades long and I would say that my sister that’s closest to me, Cecelia, that I write about a lot in the book just because we have so many shared experiences.
She has said probably in the last two years or so, that’s why I’m saying this is a decade long process. So none of it was instant, none of it happened quickly. But she has watched me just locked them into the person that I naturally am, the person that’s me, the real me. And just seeing from her perspective and from her eyes and hearing her talk about what she sees in me and how beautiful it is to her that I have finally found my voice. That I have found my full expression of who I am and just seeing that through her eyes and having her expressed that to me has been such a powerful experience.
Ruth: Yeah, I can imagine.
Andrea: How about you Ruth?
Ruth: We’re still healing. We’re still in the process, we’re still finding our way and I’m still finding ways to express my voice to say what I have, find the confidence within myself too. Express myself and to feel those feelings too.
Anna: Yeah because you are.
Ruth: For me while I was raising my sisters, I really feel like I was on autopilot for so many years and I just got up. I got up and I make sure everybody was fed. I was in a state of survival for many years. And when I finally finished graduate school and started teaching and I had the benefits to get help. I started to go first to counseling and I started there and sat down in a group situation with a minister and there were other.
You know, there were other people who have just suffered tragedy and I started to talk about my mom and my brother and my little sisters and my situation. I was shaking and crying and after the meeting, a couple of people walked up to me afterwards and asked about how long it had been since my mom passed and we left LeBaron, and I said, it had been 15 years. And they were like “You know, you looked like it something that happened yesterday.”
And I realized, you know, there was so much going on inside of me that I had not given myself the permission to feel and to heal and in a lot of ways raising three kids by myself was a distraction from who I was and how I was suffering. So because I was so young, I think it was something that I eventually became okay because I started to seek counseling and help.
When I was about 30, I was 29 I guess when I first started going to therapy. And I think I was ready, you know, I was ready to express that trauma and I was ready to begin to let go of it. It was definitely…I felt like I started to learn about who I was really when I was going to college. I took a lot of world’s religion classes and I was just fascinated by the idea of comparative religions and the philosophy. I wanted to dig so deeply into that because I wanted a loving God, and I wanted a God that was not what I grew up with.
So I just looked for that everywhere and I found little negative truth everywhere and it ended up becoming a very personal journey for me that part of it. And I really felt like sitting in some of those classrooms and thinking about those things and feeling inspired, I remember sitting down just being lit up with inspirations about what I was learning and how exciting it was that I got to choose what I believed in. Yeah, so I think it started there and then it was the way that the therapist called it peeling away layers of an onion. It was definitely like that for me too and it’s still is that way.
I was seeing a therapist for ____, gosh I think I still go, I probably need to. But that’s where I really started to find different ways and started to break away from that fundamentalist way for women where they didn’t really get to express their feelings or ask for what they wanted. And even as I was raising my family, when my sisters finally moved out, when they were teenagers going up to college and everything and I was on my own for the first time, I think I was 33 years old. I’ve been in therapy for a few years at that point.
But I had a major identity crisis because I had never learned, like I taught my four younger siblings all how to drive and we always were in the car together. We took our trips together. We did all together and I always listen to their music. You know, they were listening to Pearl Jam and all the 90s, big 90s rock people. And you know, I love that music too, but it was always their choice. It was what they wanted and so when my youngest sister moved out, I literally like “What do I like? What do I want?” And I was in my mid 30’s.
I had never considered those things before again, because I never had the permission to do it. I was on this earth the way I was raised and as I was on this earth to get married and have children, period. There was no room for wants and desires and choice. And I found a tremendous amount of healing and freedom and realizing that I had that choice. Yeah and it’s been actually…it was intimidating at first having so much choice and trying to decide and really taking responsibility for my life and what I wanted to do with it. Those were huge steps for me. Therapy definitely helped me get there.
But you know now, it’s fun for me. It’s exciting to plan a trip and go somewhere and you know, to have the freedom and money to be able to do that. So that it was a tough road but really, it has been incredible to me to realize that who I am inside of me that what God gave me was a spirit that could survive and that’s stronger than the circumstances I grew up in. It’s powerful. It’s been empowering for me to recognize that.
Andrea: Wow, I look at both of your stories and I realize that you both left your families, the polygamous cult at a young age. And Ruth, you were 15?
Ruth: That’s right.
Andrea: And Anna you were 13?
Anna: 13
Andrea: Just think about that for a minute. You know the children who are out there who are 13 years old or 15 years old, how strong they are and could be. I was also just really struck by the idea that what you did and the way that you have continued to heal since then has said so much about what it means to escape this feeling of being trapped and emotional manipulation or physically being trapped. So I would like to ask you to consider here for a minute, what would you want to say to someone, be a young woman or an older woman even a man, who feels like they are trapped in a situation that is not good for them? What would you want to say for them?
Anna: I’ll just go first.
Ruth: Go for it.
Anna: What I would say is find a safe person and talk about your experience, about the feeling of being trapped and then see where that conversation goes. Brene Brown talks about safe people in her book, Daring Greatly and the Gifts of Imperfection and even Rising Strong. There are safe people in the world whether that’s a friend that you can have a cup of coffee with, a small group of people that you’ve come to trust with your stories. When you tell someone your story, it’s important to have someone like Brene Brown quotes that somebody that has earned the right to hear your story.
Ruth: I love that.
Anna: So that’s my thing. It’s finding the safe person, someone that has earned the right to hear your story and even if that friend, a mentor, a counselor, or somebody that a minister type person that you have trust their guidance or just a professional counselor. Find someone and speak.
Ruth: Absolutely and Brene Brown too when I read one of her books years ago said that there is a tremendous amount of shame in silent and shame grows in silence. And that makes so much sense to me so I think the methods to speak to someone and to speak your truth, to say your truth and to talk to somebody is very important. And that was definitely my grandparents for me having a place to run to when we escaped.
And also what were important for me in my survival was that intuitive voice and listening and trusting yourself and what’s inside of you and you know develop your intuitive muscles and question your feelings about situations that are uncomfortable. And even though things might seem okay, I think it’s so important that we listen to ourselves. For me I feel like it was that part of my intuition that warned me and told me there was something terribly wrong with our situation when I was LeBaron.
You know, listening to that and trusting that gave me so much strength and it literally saved my life. And we are given this intuition to protect us. I feel that it is a tremendous gift from God. It’s something that I’ve always felt very blessed to have and you know finding that part of ourselves and realizing that is…it is stronger than a situation and it is possible to get help and survive and finding the people you trust, that was a big part of my life for sure in addition to that.
Anna: The part that helped me all along was reading books that shaped the way I thought and felt and thought. And I say books mentored me.
Ruth: Uh-huh, I think me too.
Anna: Because I was a voracious reader and for anyone that feels stuck in a circumstance whether it might any kind of trauma or abuse, there’s a really great resource from an author named Shannon Thomas. She has a book called Healing From Hidden Abuse and that is a resource that I would recommend to anyone who has been through to any type of abuse situation. And she calls them hidden abuses because there are so many abuses that don’t need marks and scars in the body. They leave marks and scars on the skin of your heart and your soul and your spirit. And so healing from those types of abuse that may not be visible for the human eye or the people around you, or even to yourself. So that’s the great resource that I’d love to recommend people who are beginning a journey. It helps you recognize what’s happening around you.
Ruth: What’s the name of the author again?
Anna: Shannon Thomas.
Ruth: Shannon Thomas.
Anna: She’s a license professional therapist specialized even this type of…helping people heal from this type of abuse. So I think a lot of people…you don’t have to grow up in a polygamous cult…
Ruth: Absolutely. It’s just an extreme situation but it happens everywhere.
Anna: Right, it resonate with the things of our story.
Ruth: It’s universal – a lot of universal aspects to our stories.
Anna: And the other part was when work with the therapist who’s very recently been involved in my life in the last few years and she was able to tell me that it was post-
traumatic stress that I being triggered by posttraumatic stress just being able to name it so was so helpful to me. And it was like a relief to me like “Oh my gosh, of course.” You know, it never occurred to me what I’ve gone through was traumatic or even trauma.
Ruth: Well, we didn’t recognize because that’s the way everybody was treated.
Anna: It was normal. It was our normal.
Ruth: It was our normal.
Anna: And so having her identify that and named it made the healing process go a little bit quicker for me.
Ruth: That’s great.
Anna: And the other part of it is that healing is the moment, you know, you can have moment in time where you make huge strides and you think “Okay, this is it.” And then you realize a little bit later “Oh healing is a process.”
Ruth: Yeah, I thought I was better _____. I need more help.
Anna: I still need more work so healing has been long process for me decades long journey. And so I want to encourage anyone listening that if they’re just getting started or they’re significantly down the road and ____ if there’s bump down the road that make you realize, oh I need to kind of seek something out, seek more then it’s okay.
Ruth: I think to your point of stories and books, I’ve always been influenced by them. But I have had experiences that are often just from reading people’s stories even if they’re fiction. But if I can relate to a particular character, I’m one who needs meaning in a story. I don’t always just read for entertainment although that’s been sometimes, but I really love having takeaways and being able to resonate with characters and learn from them and find meaning.
And there have been some books in my life and stories and books that helped created little _____ shifts. I don’t know if you ever read like that amazing good books like you could just feel your self changing and growing as you’re reading because the stories are so incredible. And that’s been a huge part of my healing process. And I think that’s so important for us to find our voice and to find the ability to express it and tell it.
Andrea: Some great advice. I want to close with one more question and this is related to each of you and your mission now, like how do you want to use your voice in the world? You each have a platform now. You’re authors, you’re speakers who would you want to hear what you have to say? And what is it that you want to drive home?
Ruth: The first word that comes to my mind with my own story and my own speaking practice is courage. To empower people to feel courageous, to take responsibility for their lives and to know that who they are is stronger than what they grow up with their current circumstances. And that we all have within us the power to change and to create a life that we live and make choices that are positive and impactful both in our lives and the lives of others.
And also too, I think it’s important that we tell these stories in spite of how sometimes hard they can be in a way that’s powerful and empowering and not victim minded if that make sense. I think it’s so important for us to tell our stories in a way that it doesn’t make other or ourselves feel like a victim because I don’t think that’s naturally who we are. I know for me personally, I had learned victim behavior and I held on to that pattern and it created a lot ____ in my own life.
And I was able to recognize that in myself and the choices I was making that brought that about and how I felt like a victim even after I became adult mature woman. That was something that helped me change quite a bit. I think that’s so important for people to understand.
Anna: For me, I would say that one of the biggest ideas that helped me has been one that I’ve been pursuing for the past decades, or a little more than a decade and that’s the idea of freedom. And the way that was defined by one of my spiritual mentors is freedom is becoming the person that you were created and redeemed to be. And so find that freedom journey that I have been on. I hope that any time I have the opportunity into the lives especially of women. And just because I’m a woman I resonates, I find that women can relate to me even though men have related and spoken out and sent things to me about the way my story have impacted their lives, mostly it’s women that I kind [crosstalk].
Ruth: It has been for me too.
Anna: It’s an incredible privilege and honor to kind of enter to people’s stories and hear them and listen to them tell their stories. Everywhere I’ve been hearing people say “me too,” even though it’s not polygamy other things that resonates. And being able to kind of point out the path for where people can begin their own freedom journey that’s a privilege for me and shining the light on “Here’s my story. This is where I began my freedom journey and here’s the path, I’m shining the light on that path.” So that others can begin walking their own that’s been important to me.
Ruth: The freedom to be yourself.
Anna: Yes!
Ruth: Absolutely!
Anna: Yeah.
Ruth: It makes sense.
Andrea: Wow, this has been just truly an honor. It’s been an incredible experience to hear you interact with one another and hear your story, your collected stories and then to really honestly be a witness over the past couple of years, myself personally, to see you guys really stepped into your Voice of Influence in the world. And I want to thank you for your courage and for your freedom that you have found, that you have courageously pursued and that you are now offering others. So thank you so much for your Voice of Influence. Thank you for being on this podcast.
Ruth: Thank you for having us.
Anna: Thank you. It has been an honor.
Ruth: It’s been an honor.
Andrea: Right before we leave here, Ruth, where can people find you?
Ruth: Through my website. I hear from a lot of people through email basically. My website is through ruthwariner.com and my book comes out in paperback this spring. So it’s available in I guess wherever books are sold.
Anna: Tomorrow.
Ruth: Tomorrow but it’s comes out tomorrow but it’s going to be in the future.
Anna: The paperback is already out.
Ruth: Yeah that’s a lot interesting. And my paperback is out and it’s great. I’m really interested about the paperback actually because there’s an interview with me in the back of the book and it’s also got the addition with the book club questions so that’s enough and it’s a beautiful book. And I’m super excited about this next page and about writing again and yeah. This has been awesome.
Andrea: How about you Anna?
Anna: My website is annalebaron.com. I’m on social media AnnaKLeBaron, my social media handle everywhere. So you can connect with me this way. My book is in store everywhere. Both of our books are audible.
Ruth: Yeah, we both write our audiobooks.
Anna: So our journeys have been a lot both similar so my book just came out a month ago, just released.
Ruth: Hers is called the Polygamist’s Daughter and mine is the Sound of Gravel.
Andrea: Awesome. Thank you so much and I hope that you have a wonderful lunch together and time together and so glad that it has worked out.
Ruth: Thanks for being a part of this and for welcoming us. You’ve been a wonderful host.
Anna: Thank you, Andea.
Andrea: Thank you!
I would love to hear from you. Share your personal reactions and reflections below, on social media or join our Voice of Influence Community Facebook Group.
Mentioned on this episode:
The Sound of Gravel: A Memoir by Ruth Wariner
The Polygamist’s Daughter: A Memoir by Anna LeBaron
(This is an approximate transcript.)
I’m on the line with authors, cousins, and polygamous cult escape’s; Anna LeBaron and Ruth Wariner. I really knew that I wanted to interview both of these authors for this podcast because I’ve witnessed the emergence of their own voices into the world as an advanced reader for each of their books.
And because of that, I’m also aware of the difficulties that they faced as young girls and women trying to find their voice, while in similar environments but in unique circumstances. In fact, Anna and Ruth didn’t even know each other until recently. But we’ll get to that in a minute.
So I knew that I wanted to interview each of them. But a month ago, it occurred to me that it would be really fascinating to do a joint interview, and they agreed. And so that’s why we are here today.
Now, I’m breaking this interview up into two different episodes. But don’t worry; you won’t have to wait long. If you’re listening right away to part 1, part 2 will be out later this week. Now, let’s get to it with Anna and Ruth.
Andrea: Anna and Ruth, welcome to the Voice of Influence Podcast.
Ruth: Hi, thank you for having us. This is exciting.
Anna: Hi Andrea this is a long time coming.
Andrea: Hi! Yes, it really is. It’s actually amazing when I think that to a couple of years ago when you and I met online to how this has come and this is just a full circle in the sense. So I’m so honored to have you here and excited that we’re getting to do this together. So thank you!
Anna: I’m excited to talk to you and I’m excited to get to meet you in person in a few days basically.
Andrea: Yes, like after we air this interview, the full interview very next week that Monday, you’re going to be at my house and I’m so excited. And Ruth someday, we’re going to meet too.
Ruth: Oh yes, we are.
Andrea: There’s no doubt about it.
Ruth: I keep making it a habit to meet people online and then become real life friends with them.
Andrea: That’s a very good habit to have. Okay, so I want to introduce you guys to the Influencers that are listening with us today. I’m going to read your bio just to start out with.
Anna LeBaron is one of more than fifty children of infamous, and polygamist cult leader, Ervil LeBaron. Anna LeBaron endured abandonment, horrific living conditions, child labor, and sexual grooming. At age thirteen, she escaped the violent cult, gave her life to Christ, and sought healing. A gifted communicator and personal growth activist. She’s passionate about helping others walk in freedom. Anna lives in the DFW Metroplex and loves being Mom to five grown children.
RUTH WARINER is an internationally renowned speaker and author of the New York Times bestselling memoir THE SOUND OF GRAVEL. At the age of fifteen, Ruth escaped Colonia LeBaron, the polygamist Mormon colony where she grew up, and moved to California. She raised her three youngest sisters in California and Oregon. After earning her GED, she put herself through college and graduate school, eventually becoming a high school Spanish teacher. She remains close to her siblings and is happily married. The Sound of Gravel is her first book.
So it is significant that you guys are cousins but you didn’t meet until just recently. So Anna, since you kind of got the ball rolling on that, why don’t you tell us how you met?
Anna: Oh my gosh, that’s a fun story! I love telling it if it wasn’t so…it was very emotional. Here’s how we meet, let me just start from the beginning because you have to start there. I was on Twitter one day and Ruth’s publicist (that I was following because of another author) posted a tweet saying “Here’s this new memoir coming out in January. It’s a must read.” And there was nothing on there that would have alerted me that Ruth was my cousin.
So I tweeted the author of the book. And one of the things that I enjoyed doing is promoting new book. And so I tweeted the author and said “Ruth, I can’t wait to read your book. Do you already have a launch team,” thinking that that would already be a work on progress and I could join in and read and promote the book because I love memoir.
So a little bit later that day, I’m reading a Goodreads review on the book and I haven’t think I told you this, Ruth. When I was reading the Goodreads review because I thought “Well, shoot. I’ve already offered to promote book, I should see if it’s any good.”
So I’m reading the review and the review was amazing but there’s still wasn’t any clue that there was any connection between myself and the author. Then in the comments of the Goodreads review, someone says “I’ve read a lot of books about polygamy and this is one of the great ones.” And I went “Whatttttttttt?”
So in my mind, I’m thinking “There’s a lot of polygamous communities and I wonder which ones she’s part of.” So I went back to her Twitter feeds, found her website, started scrolling through her history tab, and long before I see a picture of her father, my Uncle Joel. And my blood kind of ran cold at that minute and I went “Oh no!” Then I kept scrolling and I’ve seen my father’s mug shot from when he was arrested.
And there’s a long story behind, that whole sentence that I just said. I sat there and went “Oh my gosh what have I done? I’ve tweeted the author publicly and she’s part of my family that we haven’t spoken to of more than four decades because of the events that transpired more than four decades ago that separated our family.”
So I felt horrible at that moment in time and didn’t want to go and delete the tweet because that would even make it more awkward if Ruth had already seen it. And so there was a little bit of awkwardness there while I decided what to do.
Andrea: Now, would she have known who you were based on your Twitter handle? Did it say Anna LeBaron, would she have recognized that?
Ruth: It did say Anna LeBaron. When she tweeted me the first day, I was in New York City, which is why my publicist was tweeting about me because I was doing a media event and I was also recording my audio book. It was in October of 2015, and I was stuck in the studio for three days and she had reached out to me literally on the first day that I was in the studio.
It was a Wednesday afternoon and I saw that the Twitter handle, and I was like “Who the heck is Anna LeBaron?” Because I didn’t know, and so at that point literally, I was in the studio for 10 hours that day. And when I got back to my hotel room, I Facebook messaged one of our aunts and I just asked her if she knew who Anna was and what her story was.
So she responded almost immediately, Irene Spencer was her name, and she said that Anne was a really positive person and had nothing but wonderful things to write about her. And that point I don’t think I even realize then that it was Ervil’s daughter. I knew she was my cousin but not that it was Ervil’s daughter.
And then the next day, I still hadn’t responded to Anna, and she tweeted me back and totally apologizing for reaching out to me so casually and not understanding that I was her cousin, which I totally understood. So I private messaged her at that point.
You know, my initial thought when I found out that she was Ervil’s daughter, because she tweeted me that she was at that point, so I private messaged her and I said “Hey, if you want to talk, if you want to connect, and if you want to help promote my book, I’d love that.”
But I wanted her to read a copy first, you know, before we decided to meet or to talk on the phone or to do anything just so that she knows who I was. And I wanted people to believe in the story and to love the story because that really – it’s the springboard for making things happen.
Andrea: It’s also very, you know, the story itself is an intimate story, so if they don’t understand that and yeah…
Ruth: Yeah, and it was an opportunity for her to get to know who I wasn’t and for her to know if she wanted to meet me and to help me with my book. So we set up a time to call. I had sent her the book to her home in Dallas in the meantime right when I got home back to Portland, Oregon. And we set up a time to call within a week and a half, within the first two weeks of the initial tweet. She had finished my book at that point she received it. She finished it.
Andrea: I’m sure!
Ruth: And it meant for a very emotional conversation, obviously. I mean, both of our stories are so intense and emotional and so profound and powerful that the phone conversation…I heard her voice when we called each other for the first time and it was like “Oh my gosh, she totally sounds like LeBaron.”
Andrea: Really?
Ruth: It felt like family right away totally and so interesting because even though our families broke apart so many years literally – I was born in 1972, and the brothers and the churches had already split at that point. And so, I had never in my life thought about my Uncle Ervil and his children or what they might be doing in life.
So it was such a shock but also such a nice surprise to realize that because I had ran away from the LeBaron when I was so young, I didn’t have that family attachment that I left and I really felt like I’ve missed out on not knowing my sisters and my half sisters from my dad’s side of the family.
So it was a delight. She was a delight and I was so excited that we were able to connect. And it was so interesting to meet too because even though our family had split, there was so many similarities in our stories which I thought was, you know, really speaks to that mentality, the mentality that we were raised with and how that affected our lives.
But as we were talking on the phone, she said, “You know, Ruth, I have sisters in Portland.” And I was like “Are you kidding me?” Like I had no idea that Ervil LeBaron’s children were here in Portland. So at that point, my husband, Alan were like “We really need to meet these women.”
So Anna ended up visiting that December. So it was literally within three months. She was up here. I met two of her sisters that live here and it was an incredible experience. It was amazing and it was enlightening in the sense that it was familiar and I felt connected to family again, to the LeBaron side of my family. And so that part of it was very special for me.
Andrea: Wow!
Ruth: Yeah.
Andrea: Anna, let’s go back to that phone conversation when Ruth sent you her book and you read it. What was it like for you to read The Sound of Gravel?
Anna: Well, it was completely an emotional experience, like overwhelmingly emotional. I cried my way through it, and I had received the book the day before our scheduled conversation phone call. I started at that night, stayed up until probably 2:00. I could not put it down.
It was so riveting. I couldn’t put it down until my eyes just refused to stay open. I woke up at 5:00, made a pot of coffee and kept right ongoing and I finished the minute before our conversation was going to happen.
Andrea: Really? Oh my goodness, I just get goose bumps.
Ruth: So did I.
Anna: I was so grateful to have completed and finished reading the book because my heart was just split right open at that point when the phone rang and I was talking to Ruth. And just experiencing her life through her eyes and through her writing and then getting to talk to her after the history that our family shares, was an honor. It was emotionally impactful and I won’t ever forget that conversation ever, just because of what it meant to both of our families.
Ruth: And there has been a ripple effect, don’t you think?
Anna: Yes
Ruth: From just our conversation and then meeting in person.
Anna: Uh-hmm
Ruth: So it was early December, right that you’d came?
Anna: Yeah.
Ruth: And Alan and I picked her up at the airport and we were supposed to videotape it, but I was pretty emotional and nervous. So I forgot to take pictures of that moment but…
Yeah, I saw her waiting outside the airport and I was just like “Oh my God, she even looks like me.” It was pretty incredible so yeah. The familiarity with her reminded me so much of LeBaron and my childhood.
Andrea: Now, I think it’s pretty important for us to give some context, just a little bit more context about the background at this point, because you’re saying Ruth that when you saw Anna and knowing it was Ervil’s child and everything that you were feeling familiarity. You were not having bad feelings it sounds like about it, but can you tell us why that is so significant?
Ruth: Well, I had never known my father. I was three months when he was killed. And when I was a child, I had always been told that it was Ervil LeBaron that had my father assassinated. And so, you know, later on we found out that definitely it was true and it was a scary childhood because Ervil had been like literally this very real threat and shadowy ghost that haunted our community. There were threats.
He and his church members were threatening our people, as we used to call them, are the ‘LeBaron people.’ So he had always been like that monster in childhood, that terrifying thing that I knew had my father killed. But when I talked to Anna, I realized, the meeting was so important for me and meaningful for me because I had escaped too.
And so once I talked to Anna and she told me her story, I identified so well with that part of it. I identified profoundly with her experience and her need to get away and her need to tell her story. And so there was that connection and I also because I was able to break a way. I knew that it wasn’t, in spite of what had happened with our fathers and me having grown up without a dad as a result.
That was not her responsibility or was not her family’s responsibility. And you know, I think because of our stories in our childhoods, I had a natural compassion for her and her story that really reflected unto me.
I mean, it helped me be more compassionate for myself too, understanding that other people had gone through similar stories. Again, like I never imagined in spite of how scary the idea of Ervil was growing up, I never imagined that he might be inflicting that kind of horror unto his own family in different ways.
And you know, after reading Anna’s book, it was incredibly eye-opening and so heartbreaking too. But yeah, for me, it was meaningful to reconnect that part of the family because I had shut the door on them in a lot of different ways. And so it was that opportunity to heal even a little more and a little deeper.
Andrea: So Anna were you nervous? I mean, it sounded like you were nervous when you realized who Ruth was. Were you nervous to break that ice? Were you nervous about what she would think of you?
Anna: Yes. I was absolutely nervous about that because there’s always been a stigma attached to being Ervil LeBaron’s child and because of the atrocities that he was responsible for and that he had ordered and committed against people that we love and care about.
So wearing that stigma and that shame has been a part of my life, of my entire life. And knowing that we were not welcome in that community where Ruth and I were born into and raised in – I was born there too but we left when I was 9 months old. And our whole family had left in the part of that community.
We knew that with Joel’s family and the impact that our father had on that entire community of people that cared and loved and respected and even revered Joel, my father’s brother, and so we knew that there was this Chinese wall, this big huge chasm between the two families.
Ruth: Definitely that was my feeling about. That was definitely me growing up in LeBaron and Joel’s as my father – he was also the prophet of our community and the prophet of our church. And that’s definitely what my mom believed and what our family believed. And they still in Colonia LeBaron believe that my dad was indeed a prophet.
He was 49 when he was killed. He had 42 children and seven wives at that time, and you can imagine the whole in our community and how that affected so many of us. And for me, my dad was more like that mythical Christ-like figure in my life. He was one of the founders of our church and a spokesperson for God, I mean that was I was always taught.
And so, I think there still is, even today, there is a fear. And I don’t know if it’s a fear or a judgment, and I don’t know what the word would be exactly to describe what the LeBaron’s feel – the Joelites which I hadn’t realized. We always called Anna’s family the Ervilites and the Joelites, but I didn’t know that until I met Anna. So now, we distinguished our families between the Joelites and the Ervilites. But yeah, it’s been a wound to that community that has not yet healed, I would say definitely.
Anna: So when I tweeted her not knowing who she was…and here’s the thing, if I had known who she was, I would never have sent the tweets. We would have never met.
Andrea: Wow!
Ruth: That’s right.
Anna: Because I wasn’t familiar with the name Ruth Wariner…
Ruth: Yeah, I took my mother’s maiden name. I have never had the legal name LeBaron even though my dad was Joel LeBaron. And lots of different reasons behind that but all of my mom’s children were named after her. Her name was Wariner, and so people have always been that confused, right? And I knew Anna was a LeBaron. I knew she was my relative when I saw her name but there was really no way that you would know that name.
Anna: If I had known who she was and who’s daughter she was, I would have known my place, and my place would be no contact, don’t reach out, or don’t reach that. It’s not my place to bridge that gap.
Ruth: Right and you would have no idea either that I escaped too.
Anna: Right.
Ruth: She wouldn’t have known my story was what it was and that we have similarities in that way.
Andrea: Sure!
Anna: So it was a memoir and I love memoir so…
Ruth: Yeah, nonfiction.
Anna: So I just randomly and off the cuff just tweeted the author and…
Ruth: And Anna had worked on books before. So you had already been interested and she had been working on social media – she’s very good at it by the way. But yeah, so she had a history in promoting books. So it was kind of a natural fit. I mean, interestingly enough about how it all came together. But you’re right about that, I hadn’t thought about that myself that you wouldn’t have reached out to me had you known that I was a LeBaron. That’s interesting.
Anna: Right. So I’m grateful that I didn’t know that she was and that I had the audacity to tweet one of Joel’s daughters and then make this connection that has just become part of our story.
Ruth: It has been.
Anna: And I say that you’re part of my half away ever after.
Ruth: I think so too and in fact, I’m going to write about this in my next book when I get to meet you. It would be awesome.
Anna: And I should write about it in mine too.
Ruth: Yeah, when I’m writing that getting published and reading my audio book. It’s going to be so exciting.
Anna: I’m excited to read that. Can I help you with that one too?
Andrea: I’m in.
Ruth: We’ll take all the help we can get as we know all three of us are authors, we need help from each other for sure.
Ruth: Absolutely!
Anna: That was an experience that I will never forget. I’m grateful that I didn’t know who you were so that this connection could become something what it is now and just so special.
Ruth: It is very special. And Anna is awesome, not only she’s doing tremendous good in the world but are her sisters. They live two neighborhoods away from me. They’re so close, 20-minute drive from my house here in Portland and so that’s been pretty awesome.
Andrea: Wow that connection, a family connection. It sounds like the healing that has come with that has been so significant even beyond… I mean, writing a book about your story, there’s so much healing that can take place with that. But then like you had no idea what would happen when you came together. I mean, you would never been able to orchestrate it. You never would have been able to ask for it. It was such a gift, it sounds like.
Ruth: Oh a tremendous gift, a tremendous blessing for sure.
Anna: For both of us.
Ruth: For both of us and I feel like I’ve been connected in a way to my father in a way that I haven’t been before. And actually, I’ve met a couple of times now with Anna and her family, her siblings my family too. And just hearing their stories and their perspectives about what the stories were about my dad, you know, and what the stories about that side of my family that I didn’t know a lot about. It’s been amazing.
Andrea: Now, Ruth, one of the things that you’ve mentioned was by meeting Anna and hearing her story and having compassion for her, you were able to have more compassion for yourself. Can you expound on that a little bit?
Ruth: Part of my journey with what happened in my life, there’s been a lot of…you know, growing up in fundamentalism that way, I didn’t feel…gosh it was such a big family but not only that, just the beliefs about women and their place. And there was also a lot of abuse in my childhood, and so I was always very hard on myself in my journey. And I separated with a lot of guilt because my mom really wanted her family to be raised in the fundamentalist church that my dad started.
So that guilt and the shame has been, you know, it’s been a lot of suffering and my sufferings has been a teacher in a lot of ways but it’s also been torture in a lot of ways. And just seeing that Anna and her sisters have done so well with their lives outside the church that they grew up in, and to see how far Anna had come, I could see the same in my own life that I was able to do the same thing. Does that make sense?
Andrea: Yeah. It almost sounds like by seeing somebody else experiencing what you experienced in the sense, there was almost like permission.
Ruth: Yeah, to give yourself permission to forgive yourself and forgive the situation.
Andrea: That you’re not the only one and…
Ruth: Yeah that’s right.
Anna: And to know how far you’ve come.
Ruth: Yeah exactly that was part of it too, absolutely!
Anna: They were huge steps.
Ruth: They were huge steps and it was awesome too that it kind of fell in line with the publication of my book. I mean the timing of it that way. I met her in December and it came out in January, and it was time for me to heal and it was time for me to let go a lot of those things, yeah.
Andrea: So, Anna, I can only imagine that there were a number of things that this has brought about healing in you, what for you have you noticed in particular this interaction with Ruth? How does has impacted your healing process?
Anna: Well knowing Ruth, knowing what she has been through and having read her book, knowing our family history, and being able to process that in terms of that I’ve been a part of the healing for both of us. Just knowing that what I’ve done and how I am, just me being myself on social media. And doing the things that I’m gifted at, and just being the person that I’m created to be has helped. It’s just amazing that I can be myself and make an impact in the world and that me being myself is enough.
Ruth: Uh-hmm I love that.
Anna: That has been one of the biggest realizations that has come about in the past two years. Is that I can be myself and engage with the world and make an impact and that is enough.
Ruth: It’s enough and it’s enough to create miracles.
Anna: I know.
Anna: I’m just thinking about it. It still gives me chills. I mean, out of all the billions and billions of people…
Ruth: Tweets
Anna: And tweets yeah. All the billions of tweets online and I just happened across the one, that to me is not an accident.
Ruth: I don’t think that’s either. Not at all.
Anna: So I’m eternally grateful.
Ruth: Yeah, I’m too. It’s been awesome. And now, we get a book to do a book reading together.
Anna: I know, oh my gosh!
Andrea: Ah you do?
Ruth: Yeah.
Anna: So by the time this podcast airs, it will be in the past so probably not fair to talk people…
Ruth: Oh yeah sorry, sorry.
Andrea: Maybe if you record it. You could record it and then air it on your social media channels and we can go back.
Anna: It’s going to be on Facebook Live.
Andrea: There you go.
Anna: Well, combine it on there.
Ruth: Yeah that sounds good.
Anna: We’re not just being really cruel.
Ruth: Oh no.
Andrea: So how did you choose what you would each read from your books for this joint book reading?
Ruth: We haven’t done that yet.
Andrea: Ohh!
Ruth: We’re going to lunch after our interview with you and we’re going to decide that.
Andrea: Cool.
Anna: How exciting.
Ruth: I know it is exciting.
Anna: Oh this was like so much fun.
Ruth: Well, it is a lot of fun but it’s also as you know I am Andrea, is it Andrea?
Andrea: Yeah, Andrea uh-hmm.
Ruth: I know that it’s so interesting because as you point it out earlier, I mean, it’s such a sensitive topic like what do we talk about. It’s like “Should I say something about Anna’s father in public and in front of an audience live? You know, those are good questions.
Anna: And then I say, do I say anything about her father and what happened between us?
Andrea: How beautiful is it that you guys get to asked each other that question. You get to have lunch and discuss what you’re comfortable with and it sounds like you’re both pretty comfortable with a lot of things. So you’re not going to have a hard time figuring this out. The healing has taken place in each of you individually and then in the relationship between the two of you seemed to have freed you to be able to offer what other people might need to hear from you. So you don’t have to worry about all that fear and trepidation of what the other person’s is thinking but you’re able to just…
Ruth: Be ourselves like what I was saying earlier. There’s an authenticity on that. I think that’s really important and that will have an impact on people who hear our stories.
Anna: One of the things that I have read about that I love the idea of is holding space for someone. And I think Ruth and I have done that for each other very well. We hold space for each other to kind of navigate.
Ruth: And be ourselves like you said.
Anna: Yeah, it is.
Ruth: And that is so important and that is so impactful on other people because then they see that they can do the same on their own lives.
Anna: So I’m navigating this relationship as tenuous as it started out and keeping in mind that each of our family which they’re very large and many people are impacted. I know from my perspective and from where I’m sitting, me telling my story has upset the applecart for a lot of people.
Ruth: Yeah, I can imagine.
Anna: And so having both of us in a short period of time, you know, relatively speaking and both of us telling our stories and people being able to see the impact of our family history on each of our lives. And then all the people that are impacted by the fact that we’ve decided to tell our stories. So I feel like in a way, I’m holding space for a lot of people to kind of navigate through the feelings that are brought up and bubble up as a result even if they haven’t read the books. Just the fact that the books are out there impacts people’s lives.
Ruth: Absolutely.
Anna: And so there’s that little bit of “Ahhhh!” You know, or you just hope for the best outcome possible.
Ruth: That’s exactly for everybody involved, yeah absolutely. And I think another important part to this is that Anna and I can be a support for each other because of the type of stories that they are, because of the impact it’s having on our families. We have an understanding for that part of our lives and that the choices that we made to tell our stories and I think that’s been important too.
Anna: But it applies to even small families.
Ruth: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Anna: Normal families, you know.
Ruth: Yeah absolutely…normal.
Anna: Normal family where you know people grow up and there’s any type of trauma or abuse…
Ruth: It happens everywhere.
Anna: Anybody that finds their voice and speaks up and tells the story of what happened that the whole family is going to be impacted.
Ruth: Right, I agree.
Andrea: Man, that is a really good place to break for this part of our interview because I’m really looking forward to continuing this interview and digging more into of how you each found your voice and what this means for the future of both of your families and what not. So thank you for what you have offered us in this short first segment and first part of our interview. And I’m really looking forward to finishing this in the next episode.
Ruth: Thank you, Andrea, this has been wonderful.
Anna: Thank you!
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Hey, hey! It’s Andrea Joy Wenburg and you’re listening to the first episode – the About episode of the Voice of Influence podcast. In this episode I’m going to share with you just a little bit about myself and the premise of the podcast and what you can expect.
So I am Andrea Joy Wenburg, author of UNFROZEN: Stop Holding Back and Release the Real You. I grew up in Holdrege, Nebraska. I loved my experience there. I had lots of great friendships, amazing teachers and opportunities to learn and grow. And what I found out there was that I could sing. Now, this podcast isn’t about the singing voice, but it relates so give me just a minute to tie it all together for you.
I found out that I could sing and it was something that I really loved to do. I would get up in front of an audience and sing and I felt like I could really connect with the audience. I felt like they were hearing my message and when I was particularly in the zone – feeling the message in the song, I felt like I was really connecting. And I thought, “you know what? I want to do this for the rest of my life. I want to connect with an audience like that.”
So I ended up going to school at Belmont University in Nashville, TN because I thought I wanted to be a recording artist. I wanted to stand up on stage and connect with an audience.
Well, it didn’t take me too long to realize that I actually don’t have the drive to do what it takes to pursue that dream and that though I wanted to be the next Sandi Patty (a gospel singer at the time), I realized when I got down there that there were a lot of other girls wanting to be the next Sandi Patty, as well. So it became evident that I didn’t have that start quality or the drive to pursue that dream.
I redirected my focus to helping other people find and use their voices. I went back to school in Nebraska to become a music teacher. Now, what was interesting is that I refused to even apply to this school when I was in high school because I thought, “I’m never going to be able to stretch my wings in Nebraska.”
Well, when I got back to UNK, my experience with a vocal instructor there went above and beyond any music experience I had in Nashville, which was surprising to me. When I stepped into Dr. Foradori’s office, she asked me “So, Andrea, do you know about this or that” and I said, “Ya, I get all this!”
But as we got going in lessons she realized I didn’t know as much as I thought I did. And at one point she said to me, “You know, Andrea, once you really understand what it means to connect your breath, you’re going to carry with you a foundation for singing that’s going to carry with you no matter what you sing. Once you understand this one concept and it really clicks inside of you and you get that, it’s going to totally transform the way you sing everything else.”
Eventually I did get that concept and it did totally transform the way that I sang everything else. I did have that support underneath of me with breath and what it took for me to sing like I wanted to sing.
Now, I say all of this because since then I have focused more on what it means to find and develop a voice of influence in the world, because there is something else that I really care about.
I’m somebody who cares a lot about – and I think maybe everybody does – that we want to know that we have a seat at the table. And when I say seat at the table, I’m thinking like when you walk into a cafeteria and there’s a bunch of people sitting and you wonder, “where do I fit?”
And when I say seat at the table when talking about is when you walk into a room and there’s a bunch of people sitting around maybe it’s like a cafeteria and you’re wondering, which table do I fit at? Where do I fit?” This is something that I really struggled with in my life. I wondered “where do I really fit?”
Well, it’s nice to have somebody turn around and say, “Well Andrea, why don’t you sit down at our table. We want you to sit here.” That feels great because then you feel like you belong and are excepted and you connect. With other people. The thing that I really realized, though, was that’s not the only thing I want. I also want to know that when I say something, it matters. That my voice makes a difference. So, if you’re sitting at that table and you’re thinking, “I don’t really feel like these people are listening to what I have to say.” Or you start to speak up and they say, oh that’s stupid.” Or they write you off. Or they say it doesn’t matter, or whatever. They don’t have a respect for what you have to say for your vioce.
That’s a little harder place to be in. Because then it feels like you are being used, not like I belong and I making a difference, “they invited me to sit here, but I’m not actually getting to have an impact on the dialogue.” Which is different than saying, I want to have all of my ideas taken for everybody to believe everything that I say, and that the buck stops here, kind of thing. I’m not saying that.
I’m saying that we want to have our voice matter in the dialogue of life.
So, when I think about that, and I think about the voice of influence and what that means how that relates to what it means to have a voice, I realized that there is something really special about this idea of the connecting of breath on the one side, and how that applies to the way that we connect with other people with our voice of influence. When we have certain things, When we change certain things about the way that we speak that or message or the way that we are communicating, when we change those certain things, or we get those certain things, then our voice, no matter where we go, in our relationships, at home, at work, or in the world. Whatever audience you’re trying to speak to, when you really carry with you that voice of influence, it will matter more with everybody, everywhere you go. And your voice and message has a better shot of actually making a transformational difference in the life of the person you are speaking with.
Because, when we really do have that voice of influence, it’s not just about saying, “this is what you should do, this is what I want.” That sort of thing. It’s not necessarily that, because we can always try to shame people into doing what we want them to do. But that’s not the kind of person I think you are. You are the kind of person who really once to make a difference in the heart of a person. Because you know that when somebody changes on the inside, it’s going to come out in so many different ways on the outside. And that is way more powerful than just changing and outward thing.
So, this podcast is about developing a voice of influence, understanding where it comes from, why we are the way that we are. Who we are. What we really want to say, and how we can say it in a way that is truly a transformational kind of message.
That is the basic premise of this podcast.
I want to mention that last year I published a book called UNFROZEN: Stop Holding Back and Release the real you. And that book is actually my story about me and my voice. So, if you are ever interested in reading or listening to that book – I am currently working on the audio version and it will hopefully be out very soon. So, if you are listening to this in the near future, it’s probably out. You can look it up on Amazon or find it here.
It’s my story about me, and trying to understand what my voice is like. Coming to grips with the fact that I am super creative, but also really sensitive and that being creative, sensitive and having a lot of intensity – that those things altogether became both a great power, and a great struggle. And something that could actually get in the way of me using my voice and connecting with other people.
That is what the book is about, and I would encourage you to check it out if you’re interested. And now I want to tell you what you can expect from this podcast.
We are going to be on a regular rhythm of 1, 45 minute interview and one short after show kind of episode where I will be speaking for maybe five minutes, reflecting on something that came up in the episode before that. The interviews will be interviews with experts, leaders, Thought leaders – people who really have well-developed voice of influence or something they can really speak to that would be helpful or interesting to you.
It’s really important to me that you don’t just listen to the interviews and forget them. So I want to offer these little episodes that you could listen to on the way to work or whatever, and be something you could chew on that would really make your voice matter more.
That’s the basic rhythm, that we will have an interview and then a short segment. And for April we will be doing an interview and a short segment, two times each week. We will be doing a lot of those episodes in here in April 2017 and after that we will settle into a rhythm of an interview on Monday and a short segment on Thursday each week.
That is the basic premise and what you can expect from this podcast. I also want to let you know that I’ve opened up a Voice of Influence Community Facebook group for message-driven leaders. So if you are interested in communicating with other people who want to develop their voice of influence, and discuss different things that come up on the podcast, then that would be a great place for you. I would love to have you.
And the final thing I want to mention to you is that in every beginning and ending of the podcast, we say, “Your voice matters, but you can make it matter more.” And what I mean by that, is that inherently, because you are a human being created by God, your voice – your thoughts and feelings and how you express them, that matters. And no matter what anyone tells you, I believe that you matter, and your voice matters.
However, I do think that there are some people who are able to develop that voice in such a way, that we can make it matter more. Meaning, we can make a bigger difference. So although you really cannot matter anymore or less in one sense, in another sense, in the sense of how much impact you have on the world, and relationships and things like that, you can make your voice matter more. You do that, by developing it. You do that by using it.
It’s just like when I was in Dr. Foradori’s voice studio and she would have me sing, and if it didn’t come out right, she would have me mimic her, or she would give me the tools that I needed, or she would suggest that I try something new and feel something different in my mouth or that sort of thing. And she would also help me find the right music for my voice. Which, I think is like finding the right message for your voice of influence.
There are many different correlations that I will be making or referencing here on the podcast, but my point in the end is that I really hope you will take the time to develop your voice of influence. And rather than just be somebody who sings every once in a while in the car so that nobody else can hear them, if you are listening to this podcast, it is because you don’t just want to sing in the car. It’s because you want your voice to matter beyond the immediate where you are at right now. You wanted to matter in your relationships, in your home, in your work, and in the world.
So, that’s what we’re here for. I am so glad that you are here. And I hope that you will join me in the voice of influence community Facebook group. You can find a link to that here or search for it in Facebook.
Thank you so much for being here in this about me episode. I am truly honored that you have given me a few minutes of your time today and anytime that you come back, man! I am really honored that you would take the time to be with us. So thank you.
You can find Espen Klausen at his website http://www.espenklausen.com.
Hey, hey! This is Andrea Wenburg and you are listening to the Voice of Influence podcast and this is episode 01. That’s right, this is the very first interview that I’m publishing on this podcast. A
nd Espen is the perfect person to start us off. Espen is excellent at communicating and connecting with his clients and people that he cares about in his relationships, his work life and as a speaker. I think you’re going to find that this interview is something you’re going to want to come back to over and over again. I’ve already listened to it a couple of times and I’ve thought, “I have got to write some of this down, because this is good!” Let’s get to it with Espen.
Espen Klausen, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and speaker based in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. His work in public community mental health includes individuals, couples, and family therapy with clients of all ages and he conducts psychological assessments. He is the lead psychologist for several County programs. He consults for Social Services. As a speaker, he runs seminars on a wide range of subjects for professionals groups, company wellness programs, ministries, County departments, and community groups.
Andrea: Espen Klausen, it is so good to have you with us.
Espen: Thank you. I’m very happy to be with you.
Andrea: This is of course very fun for me because Espen happens to be married to one of my bestfriends from high school, so I’ve known Espen for quite a long time. And through my work in ministry or just in trying to help other people on a one-on-one kind of basis, Espen has often served as somebody that I could come to with questions about different things and sort of like a consultant. I’ve really appreciated your help through the years, not only for attempting to help, but for myself as well, Espen.
Espen: Ah yeah. I believe I show up as a cameo in your book.
Andrea: You do, you do and very important one too because I was really struggling at that time, and I appreciated you and Chris and the way that you guys came around me. I really appreciate that. Anyway, I’m so glad to have you here to talk about Voice of Influence with the Influencers that are listening. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about what you do?
Espen: Wow, what do I do?
Andrea: Right. I know, your bio kind of indicates that you do everything.
Espen: Yeah, and being in community mental health, you have to be ready to do everything. You have to be a generalist. You don’t want to go working for the county and be “Oh, I’m only working with trauma,” because we want to help everyone and you don’t know who’s going to walk through that door and we cover crisis and then certainly you don’t know who’s going to show up and need the help right there. You’d be willing to do everything and work with everyone. That’s also been the training I’ve pursued.
So a lot of general public mental health which is what I wanted in seeking this line is working with a lot of people that underprivileged, underserved people with multiple mental health problems, medical problems, poverty, difficult life situations; and the hardest of cases to deal with where they have few outside resources.
Andrea: Yeah, that sounds like really important work. It occurred to me that the listeners are probably hearing your accent and wondering where you from. And also, how did you get from there to where you’re at right now? Maybe a little overview of why you are doing what you’re doing, how you got this point?
Espen: Yeah, and I know you’re very intrigue with how people are finding the voice and it’s kind of the same story. Growing up, I always knew that I wanted to help people. And as a result from early on, I’ve pursued becoming a medical doctor. In Norway, that’s where my accent is from, you know, I often joked I got it for $1.99 on eBay because nobody else would bid for it, but I got it from Norway that’s where I was born and raised.
So I was pursuing medical school. The way we do things in Norway is in Norway, you start medical schools straight out of high school. There’s no premed college or something like that. Once out from high school, you go for medicine that’s one long education. I studied hard in high school. Got the insane grades that’s needed in Norway to get into medical school, but as it turned out, I didn’t get into the medical school I wanted.
So I decided to wait a year and collect some… we call them “study points,” which would make more qualified to potentially get into medical school I wanted to. So I decided to take the dare to study abroad. And when I said study abroad, that has two meanings – my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, who you know well, was going to college and was an American. So I decided to study at her college for that year.
But then what happened was – I took a psychology course just a few weeks and I’m like “Why in the world am I pursuing medicine?” Yes, helping others is a part of my voice, but my voice is multifaceted and has certainly other elements than that. It is part of that meeting people where they’re at, helping people on a very personal level. And I quickly fell in love with psychology and the opportunities that it had. It was a possible self that until this point I have never even considered.
I actually think that’s one of things that lead to us, having too few mental health workers and people in psychology and related fields is most people just don’t even think about it as a career choice until they happen to take a psychology class. And I just recognized “Wow, yeah this is where my voice is.” Since then, I continue education in psychology, three years of college, graduate school, and now having been a professional in psychology over the last 9 or 10 years.
Just every year, I discover more, more of my voice and refining it within that field. So how I got to America of course then is loving education. And once here, just discovering psychology and choosing to finish my career here and of course, I got married to my wonderful wife too and got established here.
Andrea: So when did you begin speaking then?
Espen: Well, I was probably around 2 years old when I started speaking but okay…
Andrea: You’re very funny.
Espen: Yeah, yeah okay. I usually joke way too much and say “Hey, waited this long to have a joke,” that’s kind of unusual.
Andrea: I was going to say … I think that was part of your voice. This is part of who you are is you’re funny and you’re witty.
Espen: It is. Sometimes people are…oh I sometimes come to a talk because I get to have fun and I might learn something at the same time. You want to keep people entertained particularly in this day and age. Yeah, I guess early start would be in my graduate training. It was research-focused. You’re expected to become a scientist. You’re expected to do research and you’re expected to disseminate research, which means you’re going to do presentations.
Through my research, I was lucky enough to get a lot of opportunities for it. And that picked up interests, which means I was interviewed by radio shows and that was the early beginning to it. But I never thought of that as much of a career or as a society career. Starting to work for the county, people started liking what I was saying; social services, social workers there, and other people started coming to me for advice. They wanted to learn and they like what I had to say and people started asking me to training or “Can you do this talk?”
And the more and more I was doing that, I started recognizing that I had the ability to meet people where they’re at in more than a one-on-one situation or more than a family or a group. I could do it with a bigger audience and that people appreciated what I had to say. I also found that one of the things in the world that I found the most rewarding is seeing people have a light bulb moment. And that also flavored the way I speak, the way I talk, or the way set up main points are in ways that give people light-bulb moments. I speak in such a way that by the time I give them their main points and take-home message, is exactly the same time that their brain is making the same main points.
Andrea: How do you know that that’s what happening? Is it intuition or is it just kind of an observation?
Espen: No. It is observation. And for most people, this is akin to having a baby where you show them something new. They may be looking all around or bubbling or whatever but you show them something new and exciting they’ve never seen before and you just see the face changed. And you knew they were interested. It’s just the sudden change, the sudden dawning on their face.
And for most people when they have a light-bulb moment, actually the face looks much light bulb. And my understanding is, it is probably because it is the same face. It is the same reflex. It’s the brain that’s recognizing something new.
Actually, one of the rewarding things for a person is when we make new sign-ups connections. When our brain makes new connections, it is pleasurable for most people. But it’s pleasurable when their brain is making those connections, not when they’re just being fed information. Or if just being fed information is work that your brain has to focus on and make itself concentrate to put it in the storage banks.
And when our brain can make its own a new connections when…I like to call it, when we can learn when our brain is just putting two and two things together and go like “Ah so that’s how that works.” Or sometimes it create a light-bulb moment where I present things in a way where I just know that what I’m saying is going to connect to their own experiences, where they’re be interpreting what they did experience before. And that’s when I know things they’re thinking in and that’s when I know how things are going to be remembered and put into actions.
It’s one of the reasons I work educating people who have children with certain mental health issues, particularly something like autism or ADHD where very often parents who are new to the diagnosis don’t understand how it works. Now, I can understand certain principles and suddenly there are dozens of life experiences with their child that just in a few flash seconds are getting re-interpreted in seeing in a totally different life. They report this “Oh, there’s so many things that suddenly makes sense now.” And when people have that experience, it’s one of the most rewarding things there is for me.
Andrea: So do you think that you’ve always been pretty good at leading people to these light-bulb moments in a sort of way by allowing them to connect to their own experiences, allowing them to come to their own conclusions. It kind of sounded like you’re saying, you’re sort of putting the two pieces in front of them and letting them add them up. Have you always been good at this or is it something you’ve developed overtime?
Espen: That certainly something I’ve developed overtime. This sharing knowledge, sharing, understanding, it’s something…I have memories of doing this when 5, 6 years old. I was probably labeled as precocious and…
Andrea: Probably huh?
Espen: Yeah, probably. But that was just sharing information and probably whether the person was really interested or not. It was probably the information that was relevant to that person, or now I’m a know-it-all or certainly I was that way in high school in class “Ah there goes Espen, he is raising his hand again.” So that’s something I developed overtime. Certainly something that has been important is a lot of my training in psychology is understanding people psychology, understand how people’s past affect the way they look at things certainly has helped me tuned in to that.
But that really boiled down to…has been my philosophy that has developed over the last decade and a half which is that meeting people where they’re at. And part of this is too much training and acceptance to commitment therapy or other which sometimes called Third Wave CBT. It does look very little like…it might be very different in what people…I’m unfamiliar with first and second wave CBT is, but it goes down to their values and what’ s important for them.
Andrea: Okay so CBT. I don’t know what that…
Espen: Yeah, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
Andrea: Thank you.
Espen: I’m going to make an example of meeting people where they’re at and I how your values don’t matter. I guess this is a perfect example where I was at the other end of things. Many years ago, my health was bad. I was 45 pounds heavier than I am now. My cholesterol and triglycerides were really bad. I lost three weeks of work staying home with…we couldn’t figure out what’s going on and we realized, it was bad asthma. Certainly my obesity at the time didn’t help.
So I went out to testing with my pulmonologist. My lungs were tested. My heart was tested and the doctor told me…I have a hard time doing this without going to his heavy accent, which I know coming from me but the doctor said “Dr. Klausen.” “Yes.” “You wanna be healthy, right?” “Fit right?” “Yeah, I do want to. Yeah. Sure, I agree with those values.” And then “Okay, you have to go exercise one hour, five days a week.” “Okay, okay. Yes, I need to do that.” And so I really realized that that was really important. So I went home and I did not do that.
The thing is, like most people, I agree with health and I agree with fitness. But they’re not my core values. A couple of years later, I had a conversation with my daughter. It was more like her having a monologue and she was talking about her life, about she’s going to graduate high school, graduate college…
Andrea: How old was she?
Espen: She must have been 4 years old.
Andrea: And she was talking about graduating.
Espen: Right, you know.
Andrea: Okay, go on. I just want to get some context here.
Espen: Yeah. And okay, one day she’s going to get her masters and she graduated on her PhD. And I said, “If you wanna stop with a masters, it’s okay, but a PhD is fine.” And she said you know, “Okay and getting married.” She was just spluttering on about her coming life. And in the middle of that conversation, I had this realization as I was picturing it that the way my health was going, I might not be there to see that. Now, my daughter matters to me but beyond this, what are my core values?
And one of the things that’s rewarding to me is being a witness to other people’s lives. That’s one of the privileges I had been being a therapist. People share their lives with me and I get to be a witness to their life. And I realized that to the most important person in my life, I might not be there to be a witness to her life. And my diet changed. My exercise changed and I did what my doctor told me. It had to relate back to my core values.
If we speak to someone, if we teach someone, if we try to get people to change or tell them what they should change, it’s irrelevant and it’s not going to do anything unless it meets them where they’re at and it relates to their core values.
Andrea: Such an incredible point, so important. And I love this idea and I certainly want to do that. That’s something I always want to do, but I think it’s kind of hard to figure that out. But what I’m hearing you say is that what we need to do is almost to listen first to understand where their core values are, and what they do care about so that we can get to that point where we can speak to those instead of just throwing information at somebody and expecting it to stick.
Espen: Yeah. Even in Evangelism or spiritual direction, you have to start with what you believe. Or in life and change in general, what’s important to you or what you want in life or what are you missing in life and that’s the starting point. And even if you have this goal mind for them that’s different, the goals you want them to pursue has to be related back to where they’re at and what they want.
Andrea: Ah, that makes a lot of sense.
Espen: It relates to a flipside of this, that relates to that that’s very actionable thing I’ve learned overtime that it both related to my growth but also my relationship for the people I work with. And I do this whenever I do speaking engagements for a company in learning about that company. I do this in a group level, the company level, but I do this in individual therapy level but also with friends.
But a big principle for me is, learn something from every single or every single organization. So every client I have, I learn something from. Every client I meet is on the inside of something, whether it’s how something is actually done on what that requires or what does it entails to actually be doing tattoos. What it’s like to have autism? What it’s like on the inside? What it’s like to actually being social worker removing children from a home when it’s necessary? What it’s like to be a police officer and the various levels of that? What’s the experience of actually being incarcerated?
In every client I see have their own inside experiences which something, and I can learn from that, from someone being on the inside. And that in turn how I can relate to future clients and get a lot of credibility but then I also learned from them. We often feel like we’re in this in a lot of positions in life, particularly one word – the professional, we feel like we have to be the one that knows everything and the other person is the person that has to learn. But people get so much more open to learning when they feel like they taught you something. It’s now two-way street.
Andrea: I’m sitting here like raising my hands going “Yay!” I hear yeah, I do. This is great! This is so true! I mean, I feel like people want to be known and they want to be respected in some way and they don’t want to just be written off. They want their voice to matter. So when their voice matters to you, when you’re able to communicate, you actually care what they’re saying and where they’re at then they can come back with being more open to maybe what you have to offer them as well. And it’s not that sort of top down teaching that you’re talking about, it’s a dialogue which is significant.
Espen: Absolutely, absolutely! And the more educated we are, we will have a tendency to focus on logical thinking and logical arguments, but that definitely has its limits. Our brains have many different learning centers. But two primary areas of our brain are roughly dividing, up here is our outer cortex and it’s our midbrain. Now, the midbrain is a part of the brain that we share with most animals. The outer cortex of the brain is fairly unique to us humans. Dolphins and dogs, they have a little bit of it but nothing like humans.
Now, the outer cortex, it can learn from reading. It can learn from talking. It’s the part of the brain that can put two into together and learn things that technically nobody ever taught you. It’s the intellectual part of the brain and is very deliberate and that part of the brain can adjust quickly. You learn something and then learn you’re wrong and you learn something else and say “Okay.” It adjusts quickly. “Hey, Obama is the President.” “Well, Donald Trump got elected.” “Okay, now my knowledge changes about who’s the current President.” That’s the outer cortex.
Very often when we talk to people and the more we’re academically trained, we tend to do this and that’s the part of the brain we’re talking with, except even more powerfully is our midbrain.
Our midbrain is where our instinctual understanding is. It’s where our emotional understanding is, and it’s where a lot of our automatic thoughts come from. The thoughts we don’t have any control over. You see chocolates and you have a good or negative experience to that – I’m imagining most of your listeners have a good experience to that, good reaction. And my reaction is “Yuck!” I don’t know, I just laughed the credibility of your whole audience but I apologize for that.
But the midbrain only learns from experience. You could talk all you want, it only learns from experience. And that means that for people to learn on that level, you have to give them an experience and you also going to be so much more effective if you can talk about things in ways that it speak with their experience or utilizes their experience; otherwise, you’re only working to change one part of their brain.
Another aspect of that is when things get busy, things get stressful, or things get overwhelmed, our outer cortex tend to shutdown or tends to get overwhelmed and then we tend to leave our decisions to our midbrain. This is one of the reasons why people that are stressed tend to eat unhealthy. So if you’re very busy and your brain, your outer cortex is filled and overwhelmed with all of these other things you have think about and now we have to make a choice about what to eat. With outer cortex is busy, they just going to go with your experience of what taste good and that’s usually not a healthy stuff, so deep change requires experience.
Andrea: Okay, so is that why story is so important? I mean, I hear a lot about telling stories and how important stories and all that. Is this the reason why stories are so important?
Espen: That is a big part of it. And in a way, that’s the strength of a book like yours. There are personally that books I kind of like to read tends to be very academic because I, myself is, kind of an outer cortex person. But if I wanted to influence my life, if I wanted to influence my instincts and my emotions and how I react to things then I probably should have a book that tells us story and a story that gives me an experience where I can feel like I’m in that person’s life. And going through as I’m reading some of what they’re experiencing, that’s kind of has more transformative power on the midbrain level.
Andrea: Because you’re kind of experiencing with them sort of like empathy and so because of empathy you’re able to – it’s feeling like you are also having the experience in the sense?
Espen: Right, you’re providing the person with an experience. A parallel is, sometimes we use Jaws as an example, so most people are afraid of sharks. Intellectually, I can teach a person that out of more than 200 species of sharks, there’s only five that will ever attack a human being and even then they will only attack a human being if they don’t have any better options.
So if you’re in an open water and you see a shark coming your way, you’ll probably still say – and I can give them all education about a shark and they may even agree with me “Okay, I realized now these sharks are safe.” But if they’re down in the water and they see a shark coming their way, they still feel scared because their experiences with sharks still the sharks are dangerous.
And they may tell me “But I’ve never had experiences with sharks.” “Well, have you seen Jaws?” “Well, yes.” “Well then you’ve had experiences with shark.” It may not been real in person but you have that experience. When we read stories or we watched movies, we had the experiences. It’s how they’re set up and that is affecting our emotional reactions through things.
Andrea: Yeah. Okay, so what do we do when we encounter something a story or an emotional experience that is negative or that kind of leads us to make conclusions that might be incorrect or how do we deal with that?
Espen: Yeah, that relates to something that – I think these days there’s actually a problem with American culture. I’m not just picking America. We have at least as big of a problem with this back where I grew up in Norway. There’s a tendency these days to think about “Hey, if I did this or watch this and nobody got hurt then there’s no repercussions of that.” But that’s not true because our midbrain learn from our experiences. Our whole brain learns from our experiences and the automatic thoughts and the feelings we’re going to have in the future are going to be based on the experiences we’re having.
So one example I often use when I speak on this is, if someone watches pornography and we could go into the whole exploitation things of whoever’s involved in pornography. But if we set that aside, the person is “Okay, I’m done watching pornography, nobody was hurt. I had a good time and I will move on and nobody knew about it, so it had no consequences.” Well, that’s not true. It does mean that the person had exposed their midbrain to this experience and the more likely to have sexualized thoughts in the future. It does have effects.
There are plenty of clients I’ve worked with where their brain tends to think too violently. And I have to confront them about “Hey, you need to stop watching violent movies.” I’m not a big prude when it comes to violence and say “Hey, if you don’t have a problem with watching violent movies, but if you’re already having a problem with having too many violent thoughts to begin with, don’t create more.” But it can be negative thinking if someone already has a sense that the work is really dangerous.
Maybe their early life experiences or more recent experiences in a relationships or something like that have a lot of negative experience that people are dangerous, that people are bad, or that only bad things happen in life then they should not be seeking out more experiences through TV, through movies that give them more of that experience.
The midbrain had already had – I was about to say incorrect experiences. They’re not incorrect, they were their experiences but they’re not indicative about the way the world is in general.
Andrea: Uh-huh. How do people know that though? I think of people who might even watched news and almost feels their own anxiety about the world and they continue to go back to it. And even maybe leave it on and it gets sort of keeps fueling that negativity, how do they even know that that’s not wise? We just need to tell them?
Espen: That’s get difficult and that’s getting almost…and this gotten more difficult over the last decade because our news world now tends to be so over saturated. We have news channels; they’re on 24/7. And if someone sees a terrorist attack, if they keep the news channel on, they’re maybe hearing about that terrorist attack for 24 hours. And you don’t hear the stories about the wonderful things that are happening in the world or every town in the world where there was nothing happening.
A big thing that comes to all of these things is being connected, talking with people, and being a witness to other people’s lives. The more our lives get limited, the more our experiences also get biased. It’s usually good for people that have a wide-range of I call it the purviews of someone’s life. If someone’s life is work and home and either work or home starts having difficulties, then half of the world is having difficulties.
Andrea: Right.
Espen: The more activities we have, the more people’s lives were involved with, the more settings, the bigger the purview of our life, the more chance there is of their being stressed in life. That’s one of the reasons some people end up starting to shrink their life because the smaller your life is, the less life there is for them being stressed. However, when they’re now stressed for difficulties then that suddenly fills a huge portion of your life and you may not have safe places in life to go to to deal with the stress.
That it’s why in marital counseling…I’m all for married couples need to have a lot of shared interests and activities. But they do need to have some things in their life that are separate, because any relationship is going to have difficulties. And there are times where they need to step out of their own life or times when they have to step back just so we can recognize when we’re thinking incorrectly or when we’re getting too stuck on things.
But if we have nowhere to step out to to do then we’re not able to get that step back so that we can come back in and having a constructive conversation. It’s not just related to what you’re involved in in your life, but it is also where you find your stress relief. If all your ways of dealing with stress is backed up in your partner then the moment there’s stress in the relationship with that partner, you have no way of dealing with that stress. That means you have no way of getting to a point in a spot where you can calm down with your partner and have those good conversations.
Andrea: Yeah that’s great! I think of actually young moms who have young kids at home maybe and maybe they’re not working. I’m thinking of myself you know a few years ago and how limited my world view was at that point just because I didn’t have connection outside of, you know, just few people around me. And that was because mostly because my time was taken up with little children. I think that definitely set me up for was to, you know, when you’re only with other moms with little kids, they’re also having the same struggles. So it does sort of feed that, I think. So it makes a lot of sense.
Espen: Wait, wait, wait…little kids can be stressful?
Andrea: I know right.
Espen: Huh, okay huh.
Andrea: You know when they wake up at 4 o’clock every morning and you’re getting five hours of sleep every night. You kind of have a limited worldview.
Espen: Yeah, exactly. It’s hard to step away from that.
Andrea: Yeah. I think that’s one of the things that I’ve really appreciated about you know, once my kids did get into school, I kind of sorted to take more long lines of writing and finding a place for my voice. But I think that what you’re saying sounds to me like, it’s wise to find a place for your voice outside of just your own immediate family at times because you kind of need that bigger perspective. And to be tapped into something other than just what’s right here in front of you all the time because that can be awfully stressful.
Espen: Yeah, and a mistake sometimes people make is…it’s nice if that things stepping out is relaxing and fun that’s nice. But people for this day and age have the notion that it has to be. But very often the things that are most useful and helping us to distress or take that step back or get different perspectives, they may not be fun or they may not relaxing.
For some people, getting their husbands or their wives to watch the kids for a couple of hours so they can go on and sit down and write, it may feel like work and it may not be distressing. But it might actually reduce their stress for the rest of the week because their mind was able to go to something else and they also make it easy for them because the brain was able to go to something else. It’s easier to step back into the stressful part of life with a different perspective on it, where were not so stuck in our head and stuck in the stress.
Andrea: Oh man! This has been great, Espen! So many value bombs here. I feel like whoever is listening – the influencer who’s listening is definitely going to go back and listen again and take note if they haven’t already. And I’m pretty sure we’re going to have you back on again sometimes to talk about some other things. But this has been really, really helpful and I love this idea that you know, you’re telling us how we can sort lead people to this light-bulb moments instead of just telling people what to think, because it’s not as effective as when they’re able to put those two and two together and have their own experience of understanding something.
That’s so significant for anybody wanting to have a voice with somebody else. And not only that, you also mentioned this idea of being a witness to somebody else’s life, learning from them, letting that be a dialogue instead of a top down kind of teaching time. Which I think has always for me been the most significant interactions and the most significant learning that I’ve had. So I can certainly attest to that as somebody on that side but then also, I’ve seen it myself as well.
One of the reasons why the book ended up what it was from my book because it was going to be something where I just taught. And then as time went on and as I kept working through it and everything, I felt more and more led to just share my story in a way that would also give people that experience but then allow them to learn something at the same time. And I’m so glad because I do think you’re right. I think all these things are just really important. They’re so valuable to the Influencer that’s listening.
So thank you so much for everything, Espen! Do you have any parting words of wisdom for us?
Espen: When we’re in the presence of someone else, we share one environment. But everyone exists in two environments at the same time. We have an external environment that we share. We may sit in the same room or maybe in the same coffee shop. We may even order the same coffee prepared to Starbucks’ perfectness of consistency, same drink and we share an external environment.
But each of us also exists in a second environment and that’s our internal environment. They have an environment of emotions, of physical states, and of automatic thoughts, that’s a combination of our past experiences running headlong into the external environment that’s around us right now. The result of that is whenever we meet with someone else; we’re not in the same place only in the same external environment, but we’re interacting not just with that person but with their internal environment.
And that internal environment we don’t know unless we listen to them. And they may not even say what an internal environment is. Few people do unless they specifically say “Hey, I feel sad and right now, I’m having this thought popped up.” But it’s not usually how people talk or sometimes we can get to that level. But you hear it on how they talk and what directions they go. How they react through things and that’s the real reality that we are interacting with. It’s also where healing takes place. It’s where pain takes place, but it’s also where close relationships are really being formed. It’s in the interactions between your internal environment and their internal environment and that’s a very precious place.
Andrea: Indeed! Thank you so much, Espen!
Espen: Thank you, Andrea!
The assessment was surprisingly short, so I knocked out the 23 questions in a few minutes and then clicked, “submit.” In just a few seconds the report came back and I did a double take. It couldn’t be right!
Bare with me for a moment as I explain the Fascinate® concept (or skip this paragraph and watch the 1 min. video at the bottom of the page). It was developed by Sally Hogshead, an internationally award winning copywriter and hall of fame speaker. She’s really good at coming up with words for marketing. She wanted a way to make it easier for small businesses who can’t afford big ad agencies to identify the best words to use and tone to take when marketing their products and services, so she created a little quiz. Well, that quiz turned into a researched assessment that has now been taken by over 1,000,000 people and is used with huge companies and individuals, to help them identify the voice of their brand. (And if you haven’t heard me say it before, every person has a personal brand. It’s what people think of you when you aren’t around.)
There are 7 Advantages. The assessment pairs your top two Advantages to create your archetype, as displayed in this graph.
Well, before taking the assessment, I was sure of my spot on the matrix. I knew I had to be a Catalyst: #1 – Passion (the language of relationship) and #2 – Innovation (the language of creativity). But when I clicked “submit” and my assessment came back, Passion wasn’t my number 1 advantage. It was number 4! I was shocked and a little taken aback, because though Innovation was #1, my #2 came out as Power.
“Power?!” I thought. My stomach rolled a little. I shrank back and took note of my response. Power is the language of confidence. Power is something I’ve never wanted to convey. I’ve seen Power play out before, and it’s not always pretty. “Surely the assessment is wrong!” I demanded.
But then I read the name and description of my archetype, The Maverick Leader:
You lead with a bold and unconventional vision
You are unafraid to take the lead and happy to propose a new direction for a product or market strategy
You’re always full of new ideas, and almost a little restless. You definitely make sure there’s no dull moments in your meetings
If something starts to feel familiar, you’ll probably start experimenting to see whether higher goals can be achieved
“Oh. Well, maybe they’re onto something here. Because all of those bullet points fit me like a glove.”
Upon further reflection, I had a huge revelation: “I’ve been calling my ‘Power’, ‘Passion’ and trying to hide it all my life!”
Let’s just take a moment and read that again.
“I’ve been calling my ‘Power’, ‘Passion’ and trying to hide it all my life!”
That’s right. All my life I heard things like, “you’re so passionate” or “you’re so deep.” But no one ever said to me, “you’re so powerful.” So I never associated power or confidence with my intensely passionate responses. When I read the full description of my archetype, I knew that the assessment was right and I’d been so afraid of displaying my intensity and confidence that I hid it. Why? Because I didn’t want to alienate myself from other people. I didn’t want to stand out. I didn’t want them to be annoyed with me or think I didn’t care about them when I shared my opinions or insights. I worked to develop my relational advantage so I could speak that language with people instead of just shooting off my opinions whenever they came up in me.
It sure seemed to me that “powerful” people got what they wanted sometimes, but if they achieved their objectives by using shame, judgment and sheer force, they didn’t get to people’s hearts and souls where change really happens. I knew. I’d found myself in that very position before – on both sides of the exertion of power. I didn’t want to be like that. I didn’t want to be compelling in an aggressive way. I wanted to be compelling in an invitational way.
But seeing power as an Advantage, I realized that maybe it wasn’t not all bad. Maybe power was just like any other trait or gift. It’s most helpful when fueled by love, and truly dangerous when fueled by fear and stress.
Since that rainy night in October, I’ve determined to step into my own “Power Advantage” and explore it. Maybe I was created this way for a reason. Maybe I’m supposed to be more bold.
And so I’m trying this power thing on for size. I’m leveling up my game and doing bold things like asking big-time entrepreneurs and leaders to be on my podcast. And they’re saying yes. The crazy thing is that I fully expect them to say yes when I ask.
I’m realizing more and more that all I’m doing is stepping into who I’ve been created to be. I’m not trying to become more “powerful” or “successful.” I’m trying to figure out how to best steward the gifts I’ve been given.
What about you? Do you wonder if there are untapped resources inside of you, just waiting to be explored and used for the good of others?
Oh – and if you would like to find out your own Fascinate Advantages®, [ CLICK HERE ]
It was pretty darn cute. But I took note of their pattern. They didn’t methodically work their way around the store, they just smelled something, reacted to it, then set it down and wandered a few steps before doing it again. It was only when they began to get hungry that they finally made their decisions so they could go to lunch.
Being on this journey to figure out what the heck I’m trying to accomplish with my book, blog and business feels a bit like wandering around, sniffing all of the scents, trying to figure out where I should commitment. I’ve been told that everything changes once you really know who you’re writing for and what you’re offering those people, but I don’t want to decide! I want to grab all of the candles and bring them home.
But as Marie Forleo says, “if you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one.” Ugh.
Sometimes I wonder if I have what it takes to actually make a decision! I’m constantly thinking of ways I could contribute, so much so that I get lost in the mingling aromas of the ideas and don’t even know what I’m smelling anymore.
But that’s part of the dilemma creative people face. The world of possibilities looms so large that it’s tempting to freeze right in our tracks. We often need community and mentors to guide us in our decision making processes. So I sought out help.
Podcasts, online courses, articles, books and great conversations have stretched and challenged me to hone my message so it aligns with who I am and makes a significant contribution to the world. And just as I’ve said from the beginning of my blogging journey, and as evidenced in my book, I want to help you do the same.
I see creative, sensitive, empathetic people hold in their thoughts and lock their voice in like I see with timid singers and it pains me. These people have insights and perceptions that could make a significant impact in their relationships and the world, and yet they stay quiet for any number of reasons. It’s quite a bit like this little movie clip I love so much.
Maybe that’s you. Maybe you don’t share your opinions because you don’t want to make other people feel as you’ve felt in the past – run over by someone else’s agenda. Or maybe you don’t share your wisdom because you’re worried people would think YOU think you’re full of yourself. Maybe you hold your voice in until you can’t hold back anymore and it explodes. Maybe you just don’t think your voice matters that much.
But what if you developed your voice and let ‘er rip like these kids?! Wouldn’t it be amazing to move with more confidence, humility and power instead of holding back? What if you’re voice has more potential than you realize?
Well, that’s why I’m here. I may still be sniffing around a little, but I’ve found a good stopping point for now. Just as I used to help singers find their authentic voice and develop as a singer, I always have and always will do what I can to guide others as they find and develop their voice of self-expression so they can make the difference they are born to make.
Do you believe your voice matters when you use it? Do you feel completely confident every time you step onto any stage in life, knowing that you know exactly what you want to say and how you can deliver your message so the people listening will be moved by your words? If so, you don’t need to waste your time on this website because you’ve already got what I have to offer: compelling communication strategy.
But if you know you have more to offer than your voice is delivering, you’re in the right place. If you have something you want your loved one, your team or the world to hear and yet you can’t seem to get it to come out right or it just doesn’t seem to be making the difference you know it could, stick around.
In April I’ll be launching a new podcast entitled “Voice of Influence.” It’s been a year in the making and the name of it changed recently when I had a massive breakthrough about the message and focus of the show. The podcast (previously “Brand Revelations”) will feature interviews with experts and leaders who share the story of their own voice of influence, as well as practical advice based on their area of expertise. I will also have short segments where I bring you into my “voice studio” and share actionable insights that you can apply, one at a time, to make your voice matter more.
I do not consider myself to be a writer. I’m a thinker. A strategic activator. I want to share ideas and begin or further the dialogue. I want to call out your deeply authentic voice because I want to hear it and I believe it matters. A couple of months ago I started offering more videos, and I will continue to do so. But I also want to try audio. So I started recording audio and today I’m going to share with you an edited transcript of that audio, along with the opportunity to listen. Just press play – or read – or both. Whatever works best for you. Then let me know what you’re going to bring to 2017!
I understand why so many people are discouraged with 2016. It’s been a doozy! Between the bloodshed around the world, the US presidential election and the loss of so many pop culture icons, let alone your personal pain and loss, I completely understand why you might be ready to move on.
But if you are ready to kick 2016 to the curb, please don’t throw your hands in front of your face, turn away and then say, “I hope you treat me well, 2017 because 2016 sure didn’t.”
I get it. Truly, I do. Some circumstances can leave us feeling frozen as victims to our circumstances. But I would be remiss if I stayed right here and didn’t call out the deeper, stronger YOU.
In 2016, WHO YOU ARE didn’t change. WHO YOU ARE came out more powerfully because of what happened in 2016. That’s what’s going to happen in 2017, as well. Whatever happens in 2017, it is going to call out the depths of who you are and ask, “How are you going to meet me?” 2017 doesn’t have anything to say about who you are, but it will definitely call you out.
Most likely, you’re not a victim to 2016. Because WHO YOU ARE doesn’t have to change based on your circumstances.
We put the blame on 2016 – circumstances – other people – God – whomever. And we say, “It’s your fault that I feel so crummy.” And there is some truth to that because we are effected by one another. But we have a choice about how we’re going to respond to our circumstances.*
There is something really critical about the moment that you realize that you feel oppressed. Because in that moment you can’t be complacent anymore. It’s that moment that you look at yourself in the mirror and say, “Am I going to fall to my circumstances or am I going to rise up? Am I going to let other people tell me who I am or am I going to tell other people – show other people – who I am?!”
Are you going to let other people and tell you that your voice doesn’t matter – that your contribution doesn’t mean anything? Or are you going to look at them and say, “But it does. And I’ll show you how.”
Grit says, “Ya, knock me down, but I’m going to get back up and keep going.” You can choose to lay down and give up. I’ve certainly done that before. But the thing is that most of us have a choice. There are people in this world who are seriously oppressed. But that is not most of us. Most of us have choices. Most of us could rise to the occasion. Most of us could get up and look at our circumstances and say, “I’m going to keep going.”
I look at 2017 and I’m nervous. But I’m also excited. I want to keep pressing on and moving forward, no matter how many people pay attention.
What does it mean for you to show grit in 2017? Are you going to blame 2016 for everything negative thing that happened to you and to your ideals? Or are you going to look at 2016 with grit in your teeth and say, “thanks for the experience. It’s time for me to show 2017 WHO I AM.”
Remember who you are. Own it. Keep moving forward and build momentum as you head into 2017. How? Be sure to listen to the voices that help you do so and use discernment to tune out the ones that don’t. Subscribe to this blog, follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and/or SoundCloud. I plan on being a voice that helps you remember WHO YOU ARE.
*If you truly have no voice in your circumstances, whatever they may be, I want to encourage you to seek out help from someone who will listen to you and possibly help you move out of them. I know it may be complicated, but know that I’m for you.