What drives you can make you or break you.

We often look to our values, commitments, and operations as a map to how we do life and work.

But there are things that get in the way of honoring our commitments to ourselves and those we serve - no matter what we have professed as our values and mission.

The messages that tell us we are not enough. We have to do more or get more. We have to over-deliver and never disappoint.

These shame-based messages get in the way of our ability to make our aspired values consistently lived in action.

Shame is insidious, sneaky and can become a powerful driving force in our lives if we do not get clear on what is driving us and why we are making the choices we do day in and day out.

Until you look at your own unique experience of shame and what drives it, shame will continue to chip away at your capacity for courage and convince you to compromise your integrity.

Getting granular about what drives you - and why - can reveal some hard truths and important data that can help you lead yourself and others without dodging the messages of shame.

And that is exactly what my guest today chose to do. After a very public fall - he was forced to look at how he ended up where he did and what needed tending.

Ref Rodriguez, EdD is a social entrepreneur who has spent his career starting organizations and programs whose mission is to change the life trajectories of those most affected by educational, economic, and social injustice.

He has served as a classroom teacher, school principal, administrator, university professor, and elected school board member. At 27 he founded a charter middle school in his home community of northeast Los Angeles. He went on to co-found a network of high-performing charter schools serving low-income first-generation college-going students in Los Angeles. He is currently working on a program to significantly improve the educational and life outcomes of Black and Latino males attending California’s community colleges.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How running for office brought up Ref’s long-held feelings of loneliness, shame, and of not being enough
• How self-doubt and shame led Ref back to old patterns of guarding his authentic self and the impacts that had on his physical and mental health
• Why a major victory created conflicting feelings of joy and self-doubt
• How a mistake influenced by feelings of not being enough turned into a very public and agonizing fall, and the healing that has come after it

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