Beyond the Crucible Warwick Fairfax

Our guest this week, Kim Cantin, discusses a tragedy of the deepest sorrow: the 2018 flash floods in Montecito, California, that obliterated her home and took her husband and son from her. Yet the rain and the mud and the devastation could not take her hope.
 
Cantin was herself injured seriously and her daughter, Lauren, trapped for six hours under the debris. While the body of her husband, Dave, was found quickly in the mudslide’s aftermath, the remains of her son, Jack, would not be discovered until three years later, after an exhaustive search.
 
In her conversation with Warwick, she explains how she had to muster the tenacity and perseverance to rediscover hope. She’s also documented that journey in her book, WHERE THE YELLOW FLOWERS BLOOM. Its title refers to the yellow flowers that grew in a place that they shouldn’t near her son’s remains … and how their presence helped her see the beauty where there should be none.
 
Indeed, as she says here, love found a way.
 
To explore Beyond the Crucible resources, including our free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment, visit beyondthecrucible.com.
 
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and be sure to tell your friends and family about us.
 
Have a question or comment? Drop us a line at info@beyondthecrucible.com

Winston Churchill was known for many things – always looking for ways to move onward after a trial or challenge chief among them. That’s the perspective we all should hope to have when life’s crucibles knock us for a loop. When setback and failure are all-too-common companions. When we’re wrestling with our own darkest hour.
 
This week, as part of what we’ve dubbed our series within the show – Stories from the Book Crucible Leadership – we have a deep-dive conversation about what a great role model of perseverance Churchill is for all of us hoping to turn our trials into triumphs.
 
Though he faced personal and professional crucibles all his life, Churchill rose above and moved through them by doing some critical things right: leaning into pursuits like writing to calm his soul; a happy marriage he worked hard at protecting; and  -- maybe most importantly – adopting a magnanimous and forgiving nature when family, friends and political opponents disrespected or outright attacked him.
 
“Success,” he once said (and then modeled throughout his life), “is to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”  
 
To explore Beyond the Crucible resources, including our free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment, visit beyondthecrucible.com.
 
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and be sure to tell your friends and family about us.
 
Have a question or comment? Drop us a line at info@beyondthecrucible.com

Bolstered and resilient. That’s how we all want to feel after we’ve been through a crucible. And this week’s guest, Vanessa Vershaw, is known as the CEO whisperer because she has an impressive track record of helping leaders arrive at that very destination.
 
In her conversation with Warwick, Vershaw speaks candidly about her own crucibles – some she’s never spoken publicly about before – which include being bullied in school and as a leader in the workplace, often by other women.
 
She’s emerged from those challenges to help organizations and those who run them reimagine their future, creating strategies and orchestrating experiences that ensure they thrive.
 
To do so, she explains, they have to commit to shifting mindsets from desperately holding onto past practices to being open to new approaches and possibilities. It’s ground she covers in her latest book, Unreasonable Ambition: Renegade Thinking for Leaders to Create Impossible Change.
 
The principles she shares in the book, and in this episode, she says, help her clients believe in magic and miracles.
 
To learn more about Vanessa Vershaw, visit reinventionconsulting.com.au
 
To explore Beyond the Crucible resources, including our free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment, visit beyondthecrucible.com.
 
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and be sure to tell your friends and family about us.
 
Have a question or comment? Drop us a line at info@beyondthecrucible.com

A team so connected, so authentic with each other and committed to the leader’s vision – sounds like a great place to work, doesn’t it? Listen to our discussion on this week’s episode that unpacks Warwick’s latest blog.
 
That blog, HOW TO BUILD A GREAT TEAM, extrapolates lessons learned during a recent team strategy meeting we had in Savannah, Georgia. From our sessions, Warwick discusses the essentials to top-notch team building – which include picking the right people on the team, the necessity of team members being authentic and vulnerable, the power of differences among team members and why it’s critical everyone on the team genuinely cares for each other and is committed to the mission of the organization.
 
The big headline of the conversation? Character and commitment matter … and not just to an organization’s bottom line.
 
To explore Beyond the Crucible assets, including the blog we discuss here and our free Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment, visit beyondthecrucible.com.
 
Enjoy the show? Leave a review on your favorite podcast app and be sure to tell your friends and family about us.
 
Have a question or comment? Drop us a line at info@beyondthecrucible.com

A little more hope. That was a lifeline our guest this week, Teri Wellbrock, desperately needed after a soul-crushing series of crucibles that began in childhood. She suffered through the traumas of sexual molestation, rape, bank robberies, the murder of a co-worker, emotional abandonment by an alcoholic parent, physical abuse, poverty and the resulting panic attacks that eventually would lead her to the depths of despair.
But as she explains in our conversation, she discovered breakthrough the form of EMDR therapy -- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing -- a psychotherapy technique that uses eye movements to help people heal from trauma.
Within the confines of that safe space, she explains, she was able to dump the contents of her compartmentalized traumas into a heap of unprocessed memories. Sifting through that pile, trauma by trauma, with the help of her therapist, she embarked on a life-altering healing journey.
Today, she shares her insights as host of The Healing Place podcast – exhorting her listeners with a simple charge: Choose Happy.
To learn more about Teri Wellbrock, visit www.teriwellbrock.com
To explore Beyond the Crucible assets, including our free Life of Significance assessment, visit www.beyondthecrucible.com
Enjoy the show? Be sure to tell your friends and family about us.
Have a question or comment? Drop us a line at info@beyondthecrucible.com

We hope our series exploring the methodology and the profiles of our Trials to Triumphs Self-Assessment has offered you an exciting opportunity to process the crucible you’ve been through and apply what you learn from reflecting on it toward your unique life of significance.
 
In this eighth and final episode of the series, we revisit the three big takeaways our discussions have unearthed: that knowledge is power, how one small step is all it takes to get the flywheel of significance turning and that there’s always hope – no matter where you find yourself on the roadmap from navigating your way from trials to triumphs.
 
What we ultimately discovered during the series, and what we hope you discover, too, is that there are six starting points on that map … but a million journeys, no one the same as another.
 
To take the Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment and discover your own "you are here" mark on your roadmap to a life of significance, visit www.beyondthecrucible.com