The Mission Driven Mom Podcast

Audrey Rindlisbacher
  • 5.0 (60)
  • Self-Improvement
  • Updated Biweekly

For moms and women who want to increase their confidence, and discover and develop their unique gifts, while strengthening themselves and their families. *Over 50 5-Star Reviews*

  1. 6d ago

    EP 174 Why Am I Struggling?

    If you've been trying your heart out to be the very best mom or wife or steward of your health, and you're not making much progress, please stop beating yourself up. It really may not be an effort issue. Resources from the Episode: The Mission Driven Life: The 7 Laws of Life Mission and How to Live Them Episode 172: Confusion, Clarity & Vision with Jennifer Hudye  AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 174: Why Am I Struggling? Audrey: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about questions that women and mothers ask me a lot. They're questions that I've really grappled with, and I want to tackle some of those questions in the weeks to come. Things like: Why am I struggling so hard, and things don't seem to be getting better? Or, how do I trust myself more? Or, what if I do everything right and things still don't get better, or they don't go the way I want them to? These are important questions. These are hard questions. And I want to dive into that first question today and talk for a minute about why we can put in so much effort and struggle so much and work so hard, and things still don't seem to get better. Why doesn't that effort yield more fruit? So if you've ever experienced this, I want you to think about an area in your life where you struggle quite a bit, or where you feel like you've put in a lot of effort. Maybe it's in your marriage, in your parenting, in your health. Maybe you've consumed books or talked to experts or gone to therapy or taken courses, tried different practices or ideas that you found out there, and you just feel like things really aren't that much better. I want to pose a question to you, or an idea. What if you really don't need more effort? You're already doing it. You're already trying so hard. What if you actually need to learn something that you don't already know? What if you need to change the way that you think about this thing? Blaine and the Viola Audrey: I'm going to tell you a story that will really exemplify what I'm talking about here. My husband has a dad who was very into music. His family was into music. They had a family band growing up. His dad, my father-in-law, played multiple instruments. And so it was very natural in his family that when they were, you know, in elementary school or so, Dad would put each of them on an instrument. And for whatever reason, my father-in-law chose viola for Blaine. He said, "I think you would be great at viola. I think that's the perfect instrument for you." And somewhere in elementary or middle school, he handed him the viola. I think they had a couple of little introductory lessons, and that was pretty much it. Now, high school rolls around. He's played the viola a tiny bit. He's watched his dad play string instruments. He has a couple of books, and he decides he wants to get better at it. He really likes playing his viola. So he signs up for orchestra at school, but his dad won't pay for any lessons, and he doesn't have any money for lessons. So he's in the school orchestra. It's pretty small. He gets in daily practice because he's there at orchestra. He follows along. He does the best he can. He's not great at counting. He's struggling to keep up. But sometime in that school year, the orchestra teacher told all the kids that there was an all-state orchestra they could attend if they so desired. And for Blaine specifically, the teacher said, "Well, I think they have the orchestra pretty much full, but they might be able to make room for another viola. You could go check it out." So Blaine decided to go. There's something about being in the music, being in the sound, sitting amongst all of the other players and playing beautiful pieces, that is very meaningful for Blaine. It's very nutritive. He really, really, really loves it. He'd already kind of had a taste of that from high school orchestra. So he signs up, he goes to this all-state orchestra, and they put him last chair, but he doesn't care because he just wants to play. And he picks up his viola and they play some Beethoven piece. I can't remember which one it was. And he said a few notes in, he was hooked. It was a really large all-state orchestra, and they let him sit in last chair. He fumbled along. He did the best he could, but it gave him a taste, and he really, really wanted it. So that summer he decided, "Okay, well, I can't have lessons, and I've learned some this year in school. So I'm just going to practice three hours a day." This is some serious dedication and a high level of effort. So he's practicing virtually every day for three hours. He promises me it was really that long. He's doing the best he can. He sees maybe a little bit of improvement. I don't know. Not much. He goes back to high school orchestra. He stays in the all-state orchestra, close to the end of the chairs. Never really had lessons. He went to college and wanted to play viola in college. And for the first time in his life, he got a really good teacher. It was a university professor at a big, huge university. And here was his big chance. In order to be in the music program, he had to have these private lessons. And so for a year at college, he had these private lessons with this professor and made very moderate improvement. Really not a lot. Well, time goes by. [He's dating as well?] He's doing his college studies. He's kind of disenchanted because by this point, it's been four or five or six years of viola in his mind. He has finally had high-level lessons, and he just isn't very good. And it's dissatisfying, and he has other priorities. And then we marry, and then we have children, and he sets it aside. We carried this viola around with us for the next, you know, 20-plus years. He'd pick it up every now and again, play a little bit of a piece that he used to play, talk about it, dream about someday when he'd play viola again, but he never really did much about it. The Best of the Best Audrey: Well, a few years ago, he had more free time, and he decided, "I'm going to pick the viola back up. I want to do it right this time. So I'm going to get a really great teacher." So he starts asking around. We're north of Dallas, in Plano. It's a large city. And most of the biggest cities around us all have a city orchestra. There's Richardson, there's Plano, there's Frisco, I think there's McKinney, and there's the actual Dallas Symphony. There are all these symphonies around, and so there are viola players. And he started asking around among all of them, and he had a teacher that was highly recommended to him. She had all the credentials and an impressive history. Very highly recommended. She played in a couple of these city orchestras. And so she was the best of the best, right? She was going to be the best teacher he ever had. Well, pretty quickly, she jumps him into a pretty difficult piece. She tells him she wants him to compete in this local competition where you play in front of judges and you get a score. So he's playing his heart out. He's working, working, working, trying to get this piece together. He goes, and he does kind of a moderate job. Months go by, and he's trying really hard. He practices his heart out. I mean, he's practicing for about two hours a day and going to these lessons with this teacher. And after several months had gone by, he's having these conversations with me about, "This is still so hard, and I don't know if I'm improving, and I don't feel like I'm getting much better." Eventually he finds this volunteer orchestra. It's just a small volunteer orchestra, but he loves playing with them. He signs up and starts going. And with this teacher, month after month, for well over a year, I think about a year and a half, he'll practice for about two hours a day, and he'll show up, and she'll say, "Did you even practice? Why aren't you doing this better?" She would compliment him some, but sometimes she was hard on him. But she had this incredible reputation, and everybody thought highly of her. And so for a long time, he just kept telling himself: "Well, it can't be her, because she's the best of the best, and she's the best teacher I've ever had. And everybody told me she was awesome. And I'm working my butt off. I'm trying so hard, and it's just not coming together. What in the world am I going to do?" Finding the Right Teacher Audrey: And I'm listening to all of this, and I was encouraging him to look around for perhaps another teacher. Well, fast forward. He eventually finds two more teachers. He calls around to basically all of the violists in every symphony that he can find within driving distance. He asks people, "Who else do you know that teaches viola?" He gets the names of some other people that are highly recommended. He hires two other teachers while he keeps his old teacher. He tries out these new teachers. They're both significantly better than his current teacher. But one rises to the top, and he starts making progress quickly. Every week he's doing significantly better. And every week he comes home with, "Did you know there's a principle for how to hold the bow? Did you know there's a principle, or a fundamental, or a tactic, or a basic for this, that, or the other?" And this probably won't come as a surprise to you, but one of the things that this teacher said almost at the very beginning was: "You don't have the fundamentals down. You don't understand the basics. You're not playing viola in accordance with the principles that govern playing well. And so I have a trick or a strategy for all of these things, and we are just going to try things, and you're going to practice the fundamentals." He still has the volunteer orchestra, so he still has to practice the pieces for it. But rather than doing these harder pieces and practicing pieces all the time, now he's coming home doing a jillion scales and different bowing e

  2. Sep 22

    EP 173 Mission Driven Story: Martin Luther King Jr.

    I want to tell you about one powerful night in a kitchen in Montgomery, Alabama. The man at the table was twenty six years old. He had a doctorate he had just finished, a wife asleep in the next room, and a baby daughter who had just been born. He also had a movement he never asked to lead: he was voted in. And the threats had started coming, sometimes thirty or forty per day. His house had even been bombed with his wife and daughter inside. All of these realities laid heavily on him and he couldn't sleep, so he got up and made himself a cup of coffee. He never drank it. Resources from the Episode: Mothers of Creation - Provo, Utah - September 26th Episode 36: Meeting Life With Nonviolent Resistance The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau I Have a Dream, Martin Luther King Jr., March on Washington, 1963 A Way Out of No Way, Andrew Young   AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 173: Mission Driven Story: Martin Luther King Jr. My call to the ministry was not a miraculous or supernatural something. On the contrary, it was an inner urge, calling me to serve humanity. Introduction AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, founder of The Mission Driven Life and author of The Mission Driven Mom. Martin Luther King Jr. was a truly mission driven man, and he exemplifies a theme that we're talking about over these months through the summer and into the fall, and that is true vision. A real visionary, someone who knew what vision was and held onto it all his life. AUDREY: I want to talk to you about some of the amazing things that he did that we're not as aware of nowadays, and point you to his autobiography. It is not technically an autobiography. It is a compilation put together by someone after he died from all original sources: his speeches, his journals, his letters, refocused into the first person. But it all comes originally from him, and it's in chronological order. It is beautiful. I loved reading it. I have watched many of his speeches and read articles and a couple of other books. Letter from Birmingham Jail is one of my favorites of all time. AUDREY: There are some incredible stories and experiences I'm going to share with you, and I'm going to read some selections from his autobiography because he says it far better than I could. Reading it really nurtured my soul. It increased my faith. It told of miraculous experiences. A Caveat AUDREY: I'm going to give you one little caveat at the beginning: he is a controversial figure in some people's eyes. Two things I think are important to point out. One is that some of his closest friends did say after he died that he had affairs. There are FBI tapes under lock that will come out, I think, next year. AUDREY: I can't speak to any of that. I don't know. I do know that the FBI did things that even the most conservative individual thinks are pretty shady, and I don't know how that interaction played back and forth. I don't know what they have under lock and key or what will come out. Maybe there is a chance that Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't exactly the man he positioned himself to be. But I do know that what he writes about rings true to me. I know that the principles he dedicated his life to served beautiful purposes and beautiful ends. He lifted our nation. He made our nation better through the vision that he held and the way that he sacrificed himself for it. So I don't want to discard all the good that he was and all the good that he did. I want to share with you the experiences that are undisputed, that we know actually happened, the things we know he said and did that I believe are truly admirable and worth learning about and worth looking up to him for. AUDREY: I also had a conversation with someone recently that was very fascinating. They were saying they think maybe he wasn't really peace loving and didn't really practice nonviolent resistance. That seemed very bizarre to me. I was like, we have videotapes. We have evidence of that kind of thing. Like anything, we're rewriting history. We're telling the bad parts of the story and not always the good parts. I just want to share with you the things that have elevated and inspired me, the truths I know he teaches, and what we know for sure: that he made a conscious choice to give his life for his vision, and he did bring that about to the betterment of the people around him and our nation, and I truly believe, probably the world. AUDREY: This isn't meant to be a full picture of everything about him. It's a mission driven story in the sense that he was a man truly dedicated to some true principles, and he lived those out. He did love God. He did everything he could to try to love humanity. He did love his family. If he had some faults, some weaknesses, some committed sins, I can't speak to that. But he did exemplify many of those mission driven qualities, and he was, for sure, a true visionary who changed the world. Childhood in Atlanta AUDREY: He was born in January of 1929. He had, in his own words, a marvelous father and mother. They didn't argue much or have very many falling outs, and they were very significant in determining his religious attitudes. He said: It is quite easy for me to think of a God of love mainly because I grew up in a family where love was central and where loving relationships were ever present. AUDREY: He said this made him a more optimistic person: "I lean more toward optimism than pessimism about human nature because of my childhood experiences." And he also says, "I think that my strong determination for justice comes from the very strong, dynamic personality of my father, and I hope that the gentle aspect comes from a mother who is very gentle and sweet." AUDREY: He tells about an experience he had with a little boy when he was young: From the age of three, I had a white playmate who was about my age. We always felt free to play our childhood games together. He did not live in our community, but he was usually around every day; his father owned a store across the street from our home. At the age of six, we both entered school, separate schools, of course. I remember how our friendship began to break as soon as we entered school. This was not my desire, but his. The climax came when he told me one day that his father had demanded that he would play with me no more. I never will forget what a great shock this was to me. I immediately asked my parents about the motive behind such a statement. We were at the dinner table when the situation was discussed, and here, for the first time, I was made aware of the existence of a race problem. I had never been conscious of it before. AUDREY: He was middle class in Atlanta. They lived, I guess, in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and those were the people he mostly associated with. But he saw no color differences. It didn't make a difference to him what color this little boy was. They were just friends. As my parents discussed some of the tragedies that had resulted from this problem, and some of the insults they themselves had confronted on account of it, I was greatly shocked, and from that moment on I was determined to hate every white person. As I grew older and older, this feeling continued to grow. My parents would always tell me that I should not hate the white man, but that it was my duty as a Christian to love him. The question arose in my mind: how could I love a race of people who hated me and who had been responsible for breaking me up with one of my best childhood friends? This was a great question in my mind for a number of years. AUDREY: He always had a resentment toward the system of segregation. His mother talked to him about slavery and about the Civil War, and she tried to explain the divided system of the South as a result of that: the segregated schools, restaurants, theaters, housing, drinking fountains, waiting rooms and bathrooms, as a social condition rather than a natural order. So she tried to explain, this isn't how things need to be. This isn't how God intends them to be. This is how humans are making it for each other. She made it clear that she opposed this system and that I must never allow it to make me feel inferior. Then she said the words that almost every Black southerner hears before he can yet understand the injustice that makes them necessary: "You are as good as anyone." AUDREY: So at a very young age, he has this really great friendship with this little white boy. He believes that we can all get along and be friends, and then it's shattered in this revelation at age six. His parents try to help him through it and help him see the truth about it, but he really, really struggles. AUDREY: He learned a lot from his father too. He says: The thing I admire most about my dad is his genuine Christian character. He is a man of real integrity, deeply committed to moral and ethical principles. He is conscientious in all of his undertakings. Even the person who disagrees with his frankness has to admit that his motives and actions are sincere. AUDREY: His father was the pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, and he wielded great influence in the community and perhaps won the grudging respect of some whites. He says, "With this heritage, it is not surprising that I had also learned to abhor segregation, considering it both rationally inexplicable and morally unjustifiable." AUDREY: What the Civil Rights Movement owes to Martin Luther King Jr., we also owe to his parents. They were the ones who pulled themselves up, got some education, became leaders in the community, and lived this middle class lifestyle. They believed in Christian love in the face of social injustice, even though they were the ones being acted against. They instilled in King a love for all mankind, or tried to at least, and tried to help him see that the system was broken, but

  3. Sep 15

    EP 172 Confusion, Clarity & Vision with Jennifer Hudye

    Have you ever imagined how things would turn out in the future—the perfect man you'd marry, the beautifully obedient children you'd have— and then, years later, when things were messy and hard, you wondered what had gone wrong?  I did.  And what I had to learn was that the image I was holding all that time was not a vision. It was an expectation.  Resources from the Episode: Mothers of Creation - Provo, Utah - September 26th Vision Driven Global - Jennifer Hudye's company Vivid Vision - the Vivid Vision process, and the free Vivid Vision Mindmap with question prompts and templates for building your three-year vision Conscious Copy & Co. - Jennifer's messaging and copywriting company AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 172: Confusion, Clarity & Vision with Jennifer Hudye Introduction AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. I’m honored to have Jennifer Hudye with us today. AUDREY: I’ll read a tiny bit about her. She’s the founder and CEO of Vision Driven, which sounds awesome and very much aligns with us: a company devoted to helping people get crystal clear on their next big vision and then actually live into it. In 2016, she partnered with Cameron Herold, the author of Vivid Vision and a top coach to CEOs and COOs, and became a driving force behind the Vivid Vision process. Since then, she and her team have guided more than 2,000 companies, many run by leaders like Tony Robbins, Joe Polish, and Brendon Burchard, in crafting a compelling picture of their future. I also know you have a sister company called Conscious Copy & Co., where you help business leaders and individuals get their messaging out through copy. And I thought it was fascinating that you’ve been doing this almost since you started walking, building businesses in your teen years, launching them and selling them. You’ve had a bit of a wild ride, a different adventure than the average person, so I was really excited to talk to you about all of that. AUDREY: Before we dive in, I want to read a little section from the book Vivid Vision. I’ll tell you in a bit how I got my hands on it and why it’s been so helpful to me personally. Moms especially, as I read this paragraph, I want you to replace the word “organization” or “company” with “family,” and think about your own family culture. No one else in your organization [family] knows with any certainty what it is you want to build. At best, they guess. If you want your team [family] to build what you see, you must provide them with the means of understanding it. Otherwise, you will get different ideas of what to build. Everyone will grasp a different part, but no one will put it all together. No one will comprehend what it is you want to build as a whole. The result? Confusion. Everyone will have a unique, subjective experience, drawing a picture that looks nothing like anyone else’s. AUDREY: In other words, your family is without alignment. So before we get to the concept of vision, which I want you to define for us, I’d love to start with this word: confusion. I saw one of your videos where you talked about what confusion is, and it was fascinating. I think if we talk about confusion the way you teach it, it will help us contrast it with vision. What Confusion Really Is JENNIFER: First off, thank you so much for having me, Audrey. I’m grateful to be here. My definition of confusion is thinking you should know something, but you don’t. AUDREY: Wow. JENNIFER: Confusion oftentimes has two components. The first is getting caught up in the how of something before you’ve ever identified the what, the where, and the why. Say you want to go on a cross-country road trip. You start driving, but you haven’t plugged in a destination. Then you start to feel this sense of confusion: “I don’t even know how I’m going to get there.” Well, have you identified where you’re going in the first place? We do this in so many places in our lives. JENNIFER: The second component is fear: the internal story we tell ourselves about why we can’t have what we want. I’ve guided over 10,000 people and leaders through the Vivid Vision process over the last decade, and I can tell you that more often than not, it’s either the how or fear, but the fear is underneath it. Confusion can be a really convenient cover-up for avoiding the truth. AUDREY: Yes. JENNIFER: Because what if you state what it is that you want, and then you don’t get it? AUDREY: You don’t get it. That’s right. JENNIFER: What does that mean about you? So we have these fears running in the background, and we label them as confusion. We label them as being stuck, because that’s actually more convenient than knowing what we want. Because if we know what we want, then we have to be responsible to the knowing. [Speaker to verify against audio: the next paragraph may be Jennifer continuing rather than Audrey.] AUDREY: And then when we fall short, it’s a new way for us to be a failure. It lowers our status in our own eyes and creates even more self-deprecation and that horrible self-talk. And we don’t want to go there. So fascinating. Abraham Maslow, in one of his books I love, has a chapter called “The Need to Know and the Fear of Knowing.” I think that’s what you’re pointing to: we need to know, but we’re afraid to know, because knowing anything makes us responsible for that knowing. And the truth can liberate us. That’s a core idea we talk a lot about at The Mission Driven Mom, that the truth has the power to make us free. But often that truth is painful, and it must be faced and championed. That’s the work. The Opposite of Clarity JENNIFER: On the topic of confusion and being stuck, I’ve found a lot of people think the opposite of clarity is confusion. I haven’t seen that, working with clients or in my own experience. The opposite of clarity is the unknown. Clarity is the known: I have the information, the education, and the insight within myself to make a decision and move forward. The unknown is the opposite. I don’t have the information, the education, or the insight. It’s the open void. But there isn’t emotional baggage that comes along with the unknown. JENNIFER: For example, when I went to college, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I’m partially dyslexic and I hate reading, which is ironic because I ended up building a writing company. In my first year I took some law classes and realized, wow, I really hate this. This is not for me. So for about two years, I didn’t know what I wanted, but I wasn’t emotionally distressed about it. I thought, okay, I just need to go try things, see what I like, and that will give me some clues about what I do want. JENNIFER: As moms, or as we get older, we understand that for kids. We give them a lot of grace in those periods where they don’t know what they want. We say, no problem, go try what’s on the buffet menu, go have experiences. But then we don’t give ourselves that grace. And so we get locked in confusion, which is that middle ground between the known and the unknown: thinking we should know something, but we don’t. And that’s like an e-brake on our own evolution. Vision vs. Expectation AUDREY: Wow, that’s profound. And I think it’s exacerbated by our social media age, where you look out into the void and it looks like other people know what you think you should know. That creates even more internal turmoil: why haven’t I arrived? AUDREY: I’d love to hear your thoughts on something. I know this personally because I’ve done it many times myself: I thought I was setting a vision, but I was actually setting an expectation. How would you distinguish between clarity, vision, and expectation? I feel like those words get jumbled into one thing, and we think they’re all the same, but they’re very different, and knowing the difference can help us. How would you define vision and hold it as something separate? JENNIFER: That’s a great question. I think of expectation as how it needs to look in the process of getting somewhere. There’s a little bit of a white-knuckle grip on it, and a deflection from reality. AUDREY: Yes. JENNIFER: The definition of vision is simply a painted picture of something in the future. If you were to take a time machine into the future, what do you want it to look like, and how do you want to feel? You can do that in different time frames. I think there’s a lot of value in a ten-year vision. In our process, we use three years. JENNIFER: But I think it’s so important to hold that vision lightly, to say, “I would like this reality, or something better,” knowing that we don’t have all the insight and sometimes life will redirect us somewhere even better than we could have imagined. Whereas expectation says it needs to look this way, and it needs to look this way in how I get there. It’s almost like getting in the way of this amazing energy called life, because we think we know better. Which I have done. Anyone listening who’s thinking, “I’ve done that,” I’ll put both my hands up. AUDREY: Yes. One hundred percent. And I hadn’t thought about it quite this way until you explained it, but what I see in myself and in the women I work with is that expectation is often a stumbling block, whereas vision creates forward movement. I think expectation is a stumbling block because expectations are often completely arbitrary. They don’t come from a place of knowing, like you’re talking about. You’re not learning how to get there. You’re not being intentional. You’re layering life with something you hope is going to show up, but it’s not part of a plan. You don’t know how it’s going to come about, or you don’t have a clear sense of the reality and what you’d need to know to get there. AUDREY: A vision is a very intentional pro

  4. Sep 8

    EP 171 Vision Panel: Mothers of Creation Speakers

    Have you ever had someone you love decide to walk out of your life?  Cadie did. Someone very close to her decided a few years back that they didn't want to be in her life any longer, and there's been no contact since. While Cadie was sharing with us her pain and struggle over this loss, we all had a profound realization: Even though she has no contact with this person, Cadie still has a relationship with them!  Resources from the Episode: Mothers of Creation Conference - Provo, Utah - September 26th The Power of TED - David Emerald's work on the creator orientation and the empowerment dynamic Tracie references The Karpman Drama Triangle - Stephen Karpman's original framework for the victim, rescuer, and persecutor roles Episode 159: The Six Victim Types with Lindsey Wright  Episode 166: Creator Orientation, A Panel Discussion  Episode 169: What Vision Actually Is  AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 171: Vision, A Panel Discussion Introduction AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. So happy to have you back with us again today. We have our beautiful panel of upcoming speakers for our Mothers of Creation event this fall. We've got Tracie Hyde, Lindsey Wright, and Cadie Hatch with me. Today we're going to talk about the final key theme of this event, and of this whole process of moving from our problem stories and the places where we feel immensely stuck to really moving forward, having some serious success, and making things different on a long-term basis. AUDREY: We've talked about the victim types, and how understanding them creates a spark and turns us on to the fact that we are being a victim and we need to be different. We've talked about how creator orientation gives us new hope. Cadie talked about how it makes us feel liberated, and Lindsey talked about how it helps her feel relief, like a new beginning, turning toward others, all of these beautiful things. But then how do we maintain it? We get that we're acting like a victim, and that we could be a creator instead, and we want to be that. Vision is at the heart of how we stay there. It's how we get to the end result. So let's start by putting some words around what we mean when we say vision. How would you describe that? What Do We Mean by Vision? TRACIE: Vision is something we hold in our mind that we have done the work to spiritually create before we bring it into the world. It's something we have in the forefront of our mind. In victim mode, we're reacting to problems, and the problems pop up like whack-a-mole and we're just whacking them down. But with vision, we actually have something we carefully and intentionally created in our mind that we are walking toward, working toward. AUDREY: That's a beautiful description. Any other thoughts or descriptions around that? We've talked in previous podcasts about how sometimes our expectations and our ideals can get us into trouble. So what's the difference between an expectation and this idea of vision? Vision Versus Expectation LINDSEY: The culture can say, just envision it. If you want a million dollars and an island in the Bahamas, just imagine it and then it will happen. That's not what we mean. For me, vision is based in reality, meaning it isn't unrealistic. It's based on principles. It's something that, like Tracie said, we've spiritually created. This thing we're holding in the mind, this way we want to show up in the world. But it's realistic. AUDREY: I would add one other little caveat, and I think it's what you're getting at, Lindsey. It's within the realm of our control. One of the things that really trips me up in the expectation realm is two things. One, I have to remind myself that if my expectations are higher than God's, then I'm in the realm of the impossible and the ridiculous. But also that I can't have expectations for other people. I can only have expectations around my responses and my creations. Those are the things I can hold and that I can control. So that would be part of how I would flesh out what we mean by vision. Cadie, you were going to add something. CADIE: That was what I was going to say. I can have a vision of what I want my relationships to look like, but I can't control what the other person in the relationship is going to want or do next. It's unrealistic for me to force that on them. So a question I have been finding helpful is, what kind of person do I need to be to live this vision I'm thinking about? I can't control their response, but I can control mine. Who do I want to be as I get older? What kind of person do I want to be? What would that look like in this relationship? Then it's all my responsibility to be that person. AUDREY: Great point. Another word that's used in some of the sources we're using to prepare this event is outcome. Fear Versus Faith AUDREY: Cadie, Tracie has given the example in past podcasts and past discussions about her family gatherings. Maybe she knows what she doesn't want. One of the words we haven't used yet is fear versus faith. I think that's a very important fundamental difference here. When we're in the victim mentality, we're very fearful. You can see threads of this if you go back and listen to the ways we described problem stories and problem situations. There are a lot of fears about what we're going to do, what other people will think, how we're not going to show up and be enough, all of that. Creator orientation is a place of faith, and faith is a principle of action and power. So we're taking action around a predetermined outcome. The reason Tracie kept talking about this spiritual creation is because we've gone to the work of deciding what it is we want instead. AUDREY: So much of what's happening in victim is that something has happened in life. We've been in an accident, or someone has betrayed us, and it's something we didn't want to have happen to us. In that sense we are kind of a victim of life, but we don't want to be in victim orientation. We want to take that experience, turn it into a challenger, and show up as a creator. But we cannot do that without determining what we want instead, now that these are my new circumstances. When my father passed suddenly when I was sixteen years old, that was my new circumstance. There was no going back. There was no changing it. There was only accepting it and creating new visions and outcomes of who I was going to be, how I was going to show up for the people around me, how I was going to be in my family. Vision is that outcome we predetermine, that we spiritually create, like Tracie kept saying. We hold it in our mind. We cling to it to keep us in that creator orientation. Willing to Do the Work LINDSEY: I love what Cadie said about holding this creation in our mind, this outcome. But we're also willing to do the work. We're willing to act in faith. We're willing to take responsibility. So the vision is based on reality, and it's based on what we can actually control, but we're also willing to do the work. We don't just set the vision and then expect it to happen. We're taking the responsibility to make it happen. [Speaker attribution uncertain in this passage. Voice matches Lindsey’s earlier "based in reality" language, but verify against audio.] AUDREY: That's a good component of vision. And creating the vision is a big part of taking ownership. We can't just decide to stay a creator. If we don't do the work to build out a new vision for ourselves in this new reality we find ourselves in, then we will flip back into [victim] orientation. There's no other way for it to go, because we don't know why we're being a creator. We lose sight of it constantly, and those negative emotions and reactions to a situation we didn't choose, or don't like, are going to overwhelm us if we're not hanging on to a new vision for ourselves, our lives, our way of being. It's indispensable to staying in creator orientation. [The recording says "flip back into creator orientation" here. Corrected to victim, which is clearly what was meant. Confirm before publishing.] Cadie’s Story: A Relationship With No Contact CADIE: If I could share a little experience on this, I would love to. I have a person in my life who I have a very close relationship with. Some years ago this person decided they didn't want to be involved in my life anymore. You might be able to say in some terms that this person abandoned our relationship. When that happened, it was a pretty traumatic experience for me, and I felt like I legitimately was the victim of that circumstance. And I didn't want to be. CADIE: One of the ways I know I am in drama is that I obsess over the same event over and over. It gets replayed over and over. That's a huge part of victim. That's all I thought about. When I didn't have to be thinking of anything else, that was what I was thinking about. So I knew I was stuck, because victims are always stuck. And I wanted to change that. It took me a long time to be able to change it. MDM is such a wonderfully faith based community, and there are some circumstances in which I could not get out of victim by myself. On that one I had to turn to God and ask him to help me. He got me out of victim on that one. CADIE: However, just like Audrey was saying, I can easily flip back into victim if I dwell on that problem. But the thing that keeps me out of it is this idea of a vision of what that relationship could look like someday. I cannot control this other person at all. But like I was saying before, what kind of person do I need to be so that if this person came back to me, we could start a relationship again? I need to be the kind of person who has an open heart and is willing to forgive. I need to be the kind of person who is able to have maybe challenging conversations, but with empathy and love. I can't control the other person, but my vision is of who I want to be. [Unrecoverable

  5. Sep 1

    EP 170 She gave up art school to have a family

    I'm re-sharing an episode from a few years ago, about a mother who really inspired me. When I first told this story, women heard echoes of their own deepest desires in it. I think you might too.  It's about a woman named Jennie Butchart. Resources from the Episode Mothers of Creation - Provo, Utah - September 26th The Butchart Gardens - Brentwood Bay, British Columbia. Jennie's sunken garden, now a National Historic Site of Canada As a Man Thinketh by James Allen - the garden of the mind passage Audrey reads The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale - both quotes on becoming an intentional creator Episode 158: A Husband's Take: What Saved Our Marriage - the conversation with Blaine that Audrey references   AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 170: Mission Driven Story — Jennie Butchart Introduction AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom, where we are empowering moms with principles and purpose. In preparation for our upcoming Mothers of Creation event this fall in Utah, I wanted to re-share with you a podcast I did a few years ago about a mother who really inspired me. Many women heard echoes of their own deepest desires in this true story, so I hope that you also catch the vision of how you can create and contribute in meaningful ways and bring your family along on the journey with you. A Gift Set Aside AUDREY: Our story today begins with a little girl named Jennie Kennedy. She was born into a modest middle class family and had a relatively happy childhood, but by the time she was twelve years old both her parents had passed away. She was orphaned and sent to live with her wealthy aunt, sort of a Pollyanna true story. Jennie's aunt was able to send her to a good school, one of the better schools in Canada, and there Jennie really thrived. She was intelligent and she loved to learn. She also proved to be an especially gifted artist. She excelled in her art classes, and her teachers and school administrators noticed her artistic ability. That is why, in her late high school years, she was offered a scholarship to go to Paris and study there. I am not exactly sure how old she was, but she was offered this scholarship. In the meantime, though, she met and fell in love with a man named Robert Butchart. AUDREY: They had fallen in love, and she wanted to marry him and have a family so badly that she actually turned down the Paris scholarship. In 1884 they were married. Cement, Limestone, and a Growing Garden AUDREY: The Butcharts were well off, so there was some money in the family, and they were able to take a trip to England. While they were there, Robert began looking around because he wanted to be in the cement business. I don't know if his family had already been in the cement business, but this was Robert's interest at the time. Incredibly, he was able to obtain a recipe for cement while he was in England that would allow him to be the first person to produce Portland cement in Canada, which was a much higher quality cement than what was available at the time. So when the couple returned to Canada, he set his sights on a plant. He wanted to open his own plant and produce cement. They were in Victoria, on the western side of Canada, and there was a limestone quarry that he needed for cement production. So they bought some land, some acres for themselves, and a quarry so that he could produce this cement. I don't know how much land there was in total, but he began to mine the quarry. He had some success in the business, and he was able to send bags of cement for the first time down to San Francisco and other places in the US and Canada. For a time it was a thriving business, and the Butcharts were having quite a bit of success with it. AUDREY: In the meantime, Jennie was starting her family. Remember how she was really artistic? Now that they lived out in this beautiful area, she decided she wanted to start gardening. She would express her artistic abilities in gardening. She started out planting flowers and shrubbery just around the house, learning about her plants, following her interests, and developing her artistic gifts and expressing them through gardening. She got better and better and better at it. As her abilities and knowledge grew, so did the garden. It got bigger and bigger over the next few years, as did her family. She worked hard to balance her mothering and wife roles with this artistic passion for gardening. It was wonderful not only to have this outlet, but to also garden with her children and teach them along the way. The Pit in the Backyard AUDREY: Well, within a few years, the limestone ran out. And when that happened, Jennie found herself with a huge three acre pit for a backyard. It was tall sheer walls of rock and this big ugly pit with debris all in it from all the tools that were used to pull out the limestone. It was really an eyesore, and Jennie hated it. AUDREY: Then she had an idea. She was going to try to hide it. So she planted Lombardy poplars, Persian plums, and white poplars to grow tall behind the house, on the back part of her yard, to try to hide this huge monstrosity. AUDREY: In the meantime, the garden right around her house was really beautiful. In fact, sometimes her husband would send workers over to move things around for her and help with her gardening, because it had become such a massive passion project. She had gotten better and better at it. By this point they had lived in their home, I think it was five or six years, before the limestone ran out. So she has had this garden going for several years and, like I said, she has gotten really good at it. And she looks out at this big pit in her backyard, at the temporary fix she tried to plant, and she thinks it is not cutting it. The Sunken Garden AUDREY: And so then she thinks, I will create a sunken garden. I will make it beautiful. I will use all the knowledge and expertise and extra money that we have now to find beautiful plants and make this into a gorgeous sunken garden. Now, I don't know that she actually thought much beyond the task at hand. Maybe she had in the back of her mind that someday people would come and see the sunken garden. I don't know for sure. But just know that this dawned on her and became an incredibly fun project where she could really express her talents and could beautify her home and her yard. AUDREY: So she took massive amounts of topsoil and brought it in by horse drawn cart. She had the rubble on the floor of the pit pushed up against the walls of the pit. She put these tall mounds on each side, and then she used those mounds of rubble to plant terraced flower beds. She wanted to beautify the walls of this pit, so she used a bosun's chair. She hung from this bosun's chair on the side of these cliffs, and then she would plant in every crack and crevice that she found. She would plant ivy and other beautiful things to cover the ugliness of the sheer walls around the sides of the pit. AUDREY: Once they had the rubble out of the way, and she had made some of the flower beds and brought in topsoil, it was a matter of deciding where to begin. She decided to start with a Japanese garden. She was able to work with an expert on Japanese landscaping for a little bit of time, who helped her get the details right. This was more than just an opportunity to develop her gifts. It was an exciting passion project. AUDREY: As the gardens grew, more and more people wanted to see them. Not only did she welcome them to the garden, she always offered them a cup of tea. In fact, she often welcomed them to see the gardens and showed them around herself. Sometimes they didn't even recognize her or know that she was the gardener. They thought she was just a worker. She loved serving her community through her gifts in this way. So when they came, she would hand them this cup of tea and show them around. AUDREY: Now, I don't know how many people she hired to come in and help over the years, but eventually there was an Italian garden and other themed gardens. The garden grew, the interest grew, and in the year 1915 alone it was reported that more than 18,000 visitors came. She and her husband named the estate Benvenuto, which in Italian means welcome. Over time, she and her husband traveled and brought back plants and fountains and sculptures from all over the world. She worked tirelessly for twelve years, and she finally pronounced the sunken garden done. A Legacy That Outlived Her AUDREY: The visitors increased and increased and increased. By 1930 she was named Victoria's best citizen for her work in her sunken garden, and its tremendous beauty, and also because there were visitors coming from all over now who brought interest and revenue into the town. AUDREY: When World War II hit, there was a loss of manpower, and it was hard to keep the gardens going and to keep them as beautiful as they once were. In the meantime, Jennie's health declined, and her daughter started trying to keep up with the garden. When they couldn't do it anymore, they gave it to their children, and their grandson brought it back to its original state and then started to beautify it and grow it even more. It has since grown immeasurably from that first garden and Japanese garden to five themed gardens and fifty-five acres, and now it is 122 years old and famous around the world. It is still in the family. A grandson, a great-granddaughter, something like that. They manage it now. I can't remember all the details of how the succession went, but they keep adding to it. They have added other themed areas. There is a children's garden and other gardens. There is a stage where they do performances. They have a lot more walking paths, and they do fireworks shows. So they have really made this an incredible experience for the people who come. AUDREY: It has also been named a National Historic Site in Canada. They employ at least

  6. Aug 25

    EP 169 The dreams you're carrying are the most noble part of you

    Years ago, when I was just beginning my classical education, I sat in a seminar where the presenters kept telling us to use our scholar skills. So I finally raised my hand and asked where I could find these scholar skills. The presenters, including the founder of my college, gave me a blank stare. Nobody had an answer for me. I could have just brushed this problem aside. But I cared about being the best student I could be! I was making a lot of sacrifices in time, effort, and money to be in those classes, and I had a vision of what this education would do for my family. So I went and found the answers myself. Resources from the Episode: Mothers of Creation - Provo, Utah - Saturday, September 26th The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness by Stephen R. Covey. The source of the four parts model and every Covey quote in this episode The Mission Driven Life by Audrey Rindlisbacher AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 169: Vision Mothers of Creation Invitation AUDREY: Mom, this fall I'm going to be back in the gorgeous library ballroom in Provo, Utah, spending one transformative day with women just like you, connecting, growing, and learning how to be the creators God divinely designed us to be. If you want an opportunity to spend one powerful day with some of the most incredible women around who will inspire and uplift you, and if you want to be guided through a process that will give you the tools and principles to turn your persistent problems into new vision and forward momentum, then I invite you to join us Saturday, September 26th in Utah. Me and my team of mentors have literally been preparing for an entire year, and I want you there. And I can promise you that your life will never be the same. You will walk out of that room, just as hundreds of other women have, with new hope not only for yourself and your family, but for the future of our culture and nation. Because there really are moms out there just like you who want to overcome their challenges and make a positive difference. Tickets are selling fast. Check out the link around this video or go to themissiondrivenmom.com to grab your seat while there are still some available. And I will see you there. Introduction AUDREY: The dreams you carry and nourish in your heart are the most noble part of you. When you don't have a vision, those dreams cannot be a reality. So what is vision? How can we develop it? And how is our perspective here at The Mission Driven Mom different than what you might hear at other places? That's what I'm going to talk to you about for a few minutes today. What Vision Is AUDREY: Beyond just the ability to see with our eyes, vision means the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination, wisdom, and intelligence. In The 8th Habit, Stephen Covey warned: "Vision is seeing with the mind's eye what is possible in people, in projects, in causes, and in enterprises. When people have no vision, when they neglect the development of the mind's capacity to create, they fall prey to the human tendency toward victimism." AUDREY: We've talked a lot about victimism, or our victim mindset, or acting like a victim, on this podcast over the last couple of months. We've explored how this pulls us into drama and steals our power and keeps us stuck. We've even spent a bit of time talking about the victim types and which ones we show up as, and we've gone on and on about how we need to be creators instead. Well, just like many others who have taught about creativity and vision, Covey also affirms that vision is the antidote to drama and the victim mindset. AUDREY: And of course, at our Mothers of Creation event this fall, we'll be spending one transformational day going through all the steps necessary to move from victimism and drama to creation and vision. I hope you plan to be there. But for today, I want to spend a few minutes diving a little deeper into the vision component of this journey. AUDREY: I want to start with a model Covey shares in his book The 8th Habit about how the four key areas of our lives work together and help us to create and cast vision, striving toward what matters most and becoming more than we were. Here's how this model works. There are four aspects to our whole being: the body, the mind, the heart, and the spirit. And each area has a need, an attribute, and what Covey calls a voice, or the expression of this part of us in the world. I'll explain them one by one. The Body: The Need to Live AUDREY: First, the physical body. Our physical body has a need to live. The voice or expression of this need to live is to take action, and it is through our body that we do the things that need to be done. The attribute that enables the body to thrive and to do the things it needs to do is discipline. With little discipline, we accomplish little, and sometimes even put our own health or lives at risk. With great discipline, we can accomplish great things. Covey said about discipline: "Discipline is willpower embodied. Only the disciplined are truly free. The undisciplined are slaves to moods, appetites, and passions." AUDREY: Horace Mann once said: "In vain do they talk of happiness who never subdued an impulse in obedience to a principle." The Heart: The Need to Love AUDREY: The second aspect is your heart. Your heart has a need to love. The expression of that need to love, when properly understood, is taking actions of love toward ourselves and others by meeting real needs. I don't have time to get into this today. We talk about it a lot in the MDM Academy. If you want to understand it a little better, you can go to our website and sign up for my on-demand training. AUDREY: That being said, in order for our hearts to love, it needs the attribute of passion. Covey said about passion: "Passion comes from the heart and is manifested as optimism, excitement, emotional connection, and determination. It fires unrelenting drive." AUDREY: Courage is the essence of passion. So taking action and doing what needs to be done to love properly, regardless of fears, obstacles, objections, or risks. The Spirit: The Need to Leave a Legacy AUDREY: Three, your spirit, which has the need to leave a legacy, and the expression of this need is conscience, working to guide the spirit in the right direction. The attribute that makes this possible is what Covey calls educating the conscience. Again, we don't have time to get into it today, but we all have what he calls a social and a divine conscience. It is the divine conscience within that must be nurtured by truth and goodness so that it can guide us to goals worthy of us. Immanuel Kant said: "I am constantly amazed by two things: the starry heavens above and the moral law within." AUDREY: If you've spent much time around us at The Mission Driven Mom, you know we work to champion the natural moral law and its governing principles. We strive to inspire women to listen to that still, small voice that wants to guide our actions toward what is good, true, and beautiful. The Mind: The Need to Learn AUDREY: Number four, our minds. Our minds have the need to learn. The voice or expression of all we learn and know and are is our talents. And vision is the attribute of the mind that takes the action of the physical body, the passions of the heart, and the conscience of the spirit, and brings them together in an aspiration bigger than all of those parts, bigger than we are, and puts all the parts of us to work toward a future worth creating. Aristotle taught: "When talents and needs of the world cross, therein lies your vocation." How the Four Work Together AUDREY: So to recap what Stephen Covey just taught us: vision is the spiritual creation. This is where it all begins. And discipline is the physical creation, making the decisions and doing the tasks to realize the vision. Passion is the fuel. A constant [image of the] vision generates passion to keep going. And conscience is the guide along the way as we're making decisions. You listen closely as your conscience guides you to an end that blesses everyone, a true win-win. Covey said: "When conscience governs vision, discipline, and passion, leadership endures and changes the world for good." AUDREY: In other words, moral authority makes formal authority work. [As moms,] we need to be the leaders and visionaries of our lives and our families. By virtue of being mom, we have some formal authority, but Covey teaches that formal authority doesn't work without the moral authority underneath it. And that moral authority comes from working intentionally with all four parts of your nature and submitting them all to a vision worthy of you and your family. Where We Differ From Other Voices AUDREY: This is where we at The Mission Driven Mom deviate from other voices you might have heard discussing vision. We don't say follow your heart and live your truth. We don't believe that you can do anything you want to do or be anything you might want to be. Those ways of thinking and believing are unhelpful and unhealthy. We do believe you can become the very best version of yourself. We do believe you are different than others for important reasons. We do believe that you are uniquely designed and called to a work that will bless you and others. And we do believe that recognition and adherence to truth makes all of this possible. Imagination and the Vision of Great Leaders AUDREY: Now, going back to vision: it is the spiritual creation. This is why, as Einstein said, imagination is more important than knowledge. Great ideas, great beauty, great art, nature, sacrifice, service, great deeds, courage, and virtue. All of these fuel the imagination. Great leaders have vision. They hold an image of the future they are creating in their minds, and they share it with others. "I have a dream" [cemented] a nation in turmoil. Your mind needs vision, and vision is fueled by ideas and imagination. That's why ongoing lifelong learning from the great

  7. Aug 18

    Episode 168: Donna Zajonc on Victim, Creator, and Who You Want to Be

    I'm a recovering rescuer. For me this shows up as me doing things for others that they should really be doing for themselves (often my kids).   I also sometimes jump in and try to fix a problem that isn't mine, or do something I was never asked to do—like call the doctor or plan the party or give dating advice. Of course, I'd tell myself I just "wanted to help."  But honestly, that probably wasn't my true motivation. I probably thought something was broken that I needed to fix. Resources from the Episode: Mothers of Creation - Provo, Utah - September 26th The Center for the Empowerment Dynamic - Donna's Friday newsletter and essays, published weekly for over twelve years Coaching with the Empowerment Dynamic - Donna's coaching program, the one Audrey went through Who Do You Want to Be on the Way to What You Want? by Donna Zajonc The Power of TED* by David Emerald, a core text in MDM Academy Level One Episode 164 with David Emerald AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 168: Donna Zajonc on Victim, Creator, and Who You Want to Be Introduction AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. Today I have a special guest, Donna Zajonc. Her credentials are master certified coach, author, and co-founder of the Center for the Empowerment Dynamic. If you saw our David Emerald interview, that is her association here. She helped co-found that organization with David. They worked intimately together for many years until he passed away. And I had the privilege of being one of Donna’s students years ago when I took her coaching program. It gave me lots of tools, some of which we’ll talk about today. Thank you again, Donna, for being here. I’m really looking forward to this. AUDREY: I want to give you a little bit of her credentials, because she’s done some really amazing things in her life and I want all of you to know how incredible she is. She is currently the director of coaching for the Power of TED, the Empowerment Dynamic organization. She is a very gifted teacher and coach, and her coaching program is so worth signing up for. She received the Washington State Excellence in Coaching Award in 2017. She served three terms in the Oregon legislature, and she also owned a multi-store food retail company in Oregon. Then in 2001 she really embraced her passion for coaching. Donna, you’ve been coaching pretty much full time since then? DONNA: Yeah, 25 years now. AUDREY: That’s amazing. And The Power of TED, one of the core books in our Mission Driven Mom Academy, level one, has sold over a quarter of a million copies. DONNA: I’m so glad to hear that. It’s so needed. AUDREY: And then her own book, which I own here and have all marked up, is Who Do You Want to Be on the Way to What You Want? Coaching with the Empowerment Dynamic. It was published a few years ago. I love it. Donna’s Path: Nursing, Public Service, and Coaching AUDREY: There are so many places we could start. I think we know a little bit about you professionally. I’d love to start out with a little bit more about you personally, so our audience can feel like they know you as a woman. Tell us a little bit about yourself. DONNA: Well, there are quite a few different segments to my life, as you alluded to. My early years of being drawn to public service through politics and being in the legislature. And being a mom. DONNA: I was in southern Missouri and went to the University of Missouri, joined VISTA, and married right out of college. We went to Oregon to work with the Klamath Indians, where I was the health coordinator. That was in the early to mid seventies. It was through that experience that I got really interested in public policy and health care policy, and I spent some time in the legislature. I stayed in Oregon, stayed in the Northwest, even though my home base, my brother and sister and family, were sixth generation in small towns in Missouri. But I’ve been a Northwesterner: Portland, Seattle. I live on Bainbridge Island, which is a gorgeous island right off of downtown Seattle. DONNA: That’s the résumé of person, place, and time. We can certainly get into when I met David in 2003, when we started immediately talking about the empowerment dynamic. We named that and had no idea it would become our life’s work and our business. AUDREY: You said professional coaching since 2001, so you were already doing that when you met David. DONNA: That’s correct. I was moving into coaching leaders, especially public leaders, because that had been a big part of many of the years earlier in my life, a real dedication to the nobility of public service. That is not how much of our public leadership is seen today, and I get really sad about that. But that’s exactly what I was doing in 2001 and 2002. We met in 2003 and were immediately drawn to our way of thinking and our desire to create a world that works for all: our desire to serve, to help people be their best, and to create systems where families, companies, and nations can really thrive. AUDREY: Absolutely. So what led you to coaching in the first place? Why were you already in that realm when you met David? DONNA: That’s a great question. My undergraduate degree is in nursing, and I went into public health nursing right out of college, working with the Klamath Indians and then in two different community mental health clinics in Oregon for many years. So I already had a very keen interest in human development and psychology. That’s when I heard about and discovered this idea of coaching, which in 2000 and 2001 was brand new. DONNA: There was a friend here on Bainbridge Island who really guided me into asking, is this a good fit for you? And it felt so good. My psychiatric mental health nursing was more about healing, about addressing wounds and issues. Coaching is all about forward looking, forward thinking. That forward thinking, being at our best, being emotionally sound and secure in our values, being able to take responsibility, all of that really attracted me. So I looked into the coaching school here in Seattle. It was a perfect fit, and I never looked back. AUDREY: They actually had a school established by then? DONNA: They did. There were a handful of really incredible coaching programs in the year 2000, and one of the founders of the International Coach Federation created a school here. I felt that was a bit of guidance, because it was so easy for me to be able to attend school right in Seattle. How the Empowerment Dynamic Was Born AUDREY: That’s wonderful. So tell us a little bit more about how this connection with David organically started to grow into shared work for the two of you. DONNA: What a beautiful question. We met in a business setting, but we very quickly realized that there was a strong love and affinity between us. Over those couple of years after meeting, he shared with me epiphanies he was having about a time in his life where he felt very much like a victim. He found out he couldn’t have children of his own, that he was biologically infertile. His dad, who he was very close to, died suddenly. And his first marriage disintegrated, for lots of reasons, but I think in part because he couldn’t have children and she very much wanted children. DONNA: So he started telling me about his epiphanies around this victim consciousness, and about some guidance he had had to ask, well, what’s the opposite of victim? Out of that meditative reflection, he had a sense. He says, I didn’t hear words, I didn’t hear a voice, but the opposite of being a victim and having life happen to us is to be a creator. So learn to create and take responsibility for our lives. AUDREY: And on first blush that seems like a really simple idea. It is so profound. DONNA: It comes with an extremely profound idea about how we meet the world, how we meet challenges, how we meet ourselves and our family, moving out of “life happens to me and I’m powerless,” which is a quick summary of victim consciousness. And we are all victims at times, to accidents, to health issues. People really do abuse us. What we’re talking about is not victimization. AUDREY: That’s right. Definitely. DONNA: We’re talking about victimhood as an identity, that we see ourselves as not having a choice, that life happens to us. That description alone can really stop people. AUDREY: Yes. There’s a big difference. DONNA: So that became our conversations. We both knew about the drama triangle, me from my days in mental health, and David knew about it through being in therapy regarding the loss of his marriage and not being able to have children. AUDREY: And that’s the main shift, isn’t it? Victim is the heart of that drama triangle. DONNA: Dr. Karpman said that when we’re feeling like a victim, there’s always a persecutor. There’s always a problem that’s caused us to feel like we’re a victim. And the third role Dr. Karpman said is that when those two roles enter, there’s always a third one, the hero, the rescuer. So that’s a very dynamic description of the three primary ways we human beings respond to things we don’t like and don’t want. DONNA: David’s epiphany, as you know, was, oh my gosh, there’s got to be a positive alternative to that. We firmly believe in the goodness of who we are as human beings. So what is the new triangle that rests upon that goodness, that ability to choose, that ability to create, that ability to be loved? That’s what he started sharing with me on walks. And I said, David, this is really original work. We need to write this down. DONNA: That’s what we did for about a year and a half. And we named the new triangle. I was writing a book about my time in coaching, and my editor heard about David’s new triangle and that we had just named it the empowerment dynamic. So now we’ve got the drama triangle on one hand and the empo

  8. Aug 11

    EP 167 You loved your child before they were born

    Years ago I read a book by Robert Fritz that taught me something that has changed my life: that often we think we know what we want, but when we actually ask more questions and get down to our true motivations and intentions, we are really just reacting, not creating!  Resources from the Episode:  Robert Fritz Inc. - Robert's website, books, articles, and program schedule Creating Your Life: the three-month course Robert built, offered through Creator Tools Robert Fritz Creating Channel - Robert's films, songs, and writing on the creative process The Robert Fritz Structural Consulting Channel - full consultations, filmed Books by Robert Fritz: The Path of Least Resistance, Creating, Your Life as Art, The Managerial Moment of Truth, and Identity, co-written with Dr. Wayne Andersen Mothers of Creation ** - Provo, Utah - September 26th** Episode 163: What It Means to Be a Creator AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 167: Robert Fritz on What Creation Actually Is Introduction AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. I am so excited for us to spend a few minutes today with Robert Fritz, who I greatly admire and am very honored to have with us. Thanks for being here, Robert. ROBERT: My pleasure, thank you. AUDREY: Let me tell the listeners a little about him. His bio is technically three pages long and thick with worldwide influence. Here is a summary of some of the highlights of his life’s work. He is an acclaimed composer, filmmaker, author, and management consultant, best known for developing the theory of structural dynamics, which explains how underlying structures shape human and organizational behavior. Educated at the Boston Conservatory of Music and in Germany, Robert has spent decades helping corporations, government agencies, educators, and nonprofit organizations create lasting change through his principles of structural thinking and the creative process. His work has influenced leaders such as Peter Senge and has been applied by organizations including IBM, Blue Shield of California, the US Department of Defense, and educational systems worldwide. He is also an award-winning composer and filmmaker whose films have earned more than 250 international awards, and the author of several influential books, including The Path of Least Resistance and The Managerial Moment of Truth. AUDREY: Today we are going to focus most of our attention around my favorite book. This one right here, and this is probably an old copy. Creating. The subtitle is A Practical Guide to the Creative Process and How to Use It to Create Anything, a Work of Art, a Relationship, a Career, or a Better Life. Robert, thank you for being here with us today. ROBERT: Thank you. I am delighted to talk to you. How the Book Came to Be AUDREY: This book has shaped some of my thinking. It has corresponded with other things I have studied and experienced in life and proven itself over and over again. Many of the principles and concepts you teach in it have borne out in the real world and proven to me to be very, very important. So I am just curious personally how this book came to be. ROBERT: I had a two-book contract with Ballantine Books. The first was The Path of Least Resistance, and then there was time for a second book as part of the contract. I thought the major focus should be on creating. Because creating, or the creative process, is the most successful process for accomplishment in history. It created all of the arts, science, commerce. And yet mostly we do not learn how to create. ROBERT: We learn in school how to react or respond to circumstances. The major difference between the creative process and what we learn is that what we learn is to think about the circumstances first, and then what do we do about that. If you are rebellious as a kid, you react. If you are cooperative, you respond. But it is still the circumstances that are the driving force. The creative process is really different. It is your choices. And one of the major choices the creative process always begins with is, what do you create? ROBERT: My background, as you said, is the arts, and particularly composition. I have a bachelor’s and master’s in composition from the Boston Conservatory. What we learn in music in particular is that it is the underlying structure of music that determines how music goes. We have things in music called form and analysis. If you are in a conservatory, you go to these classes and you analyze Beethoven or Chopin, a number of different types of pieces. And it is not a matter of how does it feel and what do you think of when you hear the piece. It is, how did the composer get you to feel that? What are the elements in play that give rise to predictable patterns of behavior? ROBERT: When I was teaching composition at New England Conservatory, I began to wonder if that same principle could apply to everyone, not just composers, but everyone in creating their own lives. And that led me to developing the principles that are in the book you really like. Self-Esteem, Ego, and the Focus of the Creative Process ROBERT: What do you like about it, by the way? AUDREY: If you are out looking for answers, as I was, there are a few different camps. There is the camp that focuses entirely on the self, on self-esteem. What do you want to create in relationship to this ego? What will service you? It is all about you. ROBERT: I wrote a book with Dr. Wayne Andersen called Identity, and the subtitle of the book is that it does not matter what you think about yourself, which is ironic. It seems like the self-esteem people have never read a biography of successful people. They would see none of them had high self-esteem. But the difference was they were not focused on themselves. They were focused on what they were up to, what they were doing, what mattered to them, what they were creating. ROBERT: It is always on how am I doing, and how does it make me look, and do I like myself. Totally irrelevant in the creative process. AUDREY: It is interesting, because we are building an event this fall called Mothers of Creation, and it is all about the creative process and how mothers can engage in it. We start the day by having everyone write out a problem story. What in your life are you feeling upset about or stuck in? In preparation for that, our team was writing out problem stories and picking them apart, trying to figure out why this is a problem for me. There were a few different reasons, but we were trying to find what was in common. Ironically, one of the core components for all of us was that our intentions were wrong and our ego was right in the center of it. That is why we were bumping up against life in that way, unhappy about something happening to us because of what it was going to cost, what pain it was going to cause us, how it was going to make us look, or what other people were going to think. That was so enlightening and clarifying. AUDREY: It is such a great insight to understand the shift of focus from how am I doing and how do I look, to what is this outcome I am trying to create, how close am I to it, and what do I need to do to create it. And is it worth my precious life energy? Because there are a million paths we could choose, and it needs to be worthy of the few minutes we have here. ROBERT: That is a principle called hierarchy. What is more important, what is less important. A lot of people spend their lives on things that are less important to them, because they have not really sorted out that value system of hierarchy. AUDREY: I read The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy a little while ago, and that is the theme of that novella. He spent his life on what was not important, taking direction from everyone around him, being a subject of his environment, thinking that was what he wanted, thinking he was arriving. Ego was so deeply entrenched in everything that was going on, because it was all reflective of that. Is this now servicing the identity I want to have of myself? Obligation and Choice AUDREY: So to answer your question, I would say there is one camp saying get what you want, but the underlying message is to service the ego. And there are other camps I lean more toward that say, no, actually take responsibility, have discipline, show up, fulfill your duty. The conscientious aspects of life. I think there are some powerful, good, solid principles in that camp. ROBERT: I am sure, because what you are describing is obligation. But really, we are not obligated to do any of that. Often what happens is people turn what they want into an obligation. For example, let us say you are caring for an adult, your parents. And you say, well, I really have to do it. Well, no, you actually do not have to do it. You are making a choice that is really quite altruistic, and you do not even have the benefits of knowing the altruism of it, because you are manipulating yourself into obligation rather than seeing, I could do this or not do this. ROBERT: Obligation means you have no choice. You have to do it. Choice means you can do it or not. AUDREY: That is what I was getting at. What you are talking about is the best parts of both of those camps. It is the middle ground that says it should not be all about me, even if for no other reason than that as soon as it is all about you, it will not even service you best anyway. And you choose it fully. But then you commit yourself to it. There is this component of responsibility, but it is responsibility you have chosen. It is a commitment you have made. Why Commitment Works Against You AUDREY: That dovetails into something you say at the start of the book. I cannot remember the exact phrase, but basically that creating is an act of love. I wanted you to speak to that love component of creation, how you would define creation and creating or being creative, and what the connection with love

See All (174)

5
out of 5
60 Ratings

About

For moms and women who want to increase their confidence, and discover and develop their unique gifts, while strengthening themselves and their families. *Over 50 5-Star Reviews*

Information

  • Creator
    Audrey Rindlisbacher
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    174
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Copyright 2025 The Mission Driven Mom Podcast
  • Show Website
    The Mission Driven Mom Podcast

You Might Also Like