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 Today’s podcast discussion --Inside the New Mission Driven Mom Academy!

This episode provides an in-depth update on the transformation and relaunch of the Mission Driven Mom Academy (MDM 2.0) and highlights the purpose, structure, and impact of the Academy’s three-level curriculum based on The Seven Laws of Life Mission. Audrey is joined by longtime collaborators Lindsay Wright and Tracie Hyde, who share why they returned to serve as mentors and leaders after several years away. Their stories emphasize the Academy’s ability to transform mothers' self-understanding, leadership capacity, spiritual grounding, and family culture.

They outline how the Academy helps mothers build foundational self-knowledge, articulate principles clearly, and understand worldviews and servant leadership in order to influence their families and communities for good. They describe new features—including a community platform, workshops, accountability partnerships, mentoring support, and a member directory—designed to provide deeper connection, structure, and real-world application for women seeking to grow.

Throughout the episode, the women share specific transformations they experienced personally: overcoming victim-thinking, discovering strengths, developing leadership, improving family relationships, and guiding their children more intentionally. They also share updates on the upcoming Mothers of Creation conference and new opportunities for both new and returning Academy members. The episode ultimately conveys a clear and passionate call for mothers to step into mission-driven living, deepen their education, and join a supportive, principle-centered community devoted to renewing culture through virtue and truth.

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Transcript (AI generated)

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, the founder of The Mission Driven Mom and author of The Mission Driven Life, and thank you for joining us. If this podcast is bringing enlightenment and aid to your life, please share it out and give us a review—that helps us grow our reach. Today I am really lucky to have Lindsay Wright and Tracy Hyde to talk to us for a few minutes about all things Academy.

Those of you that have been with us for a little while are going to be familiar with their faces. They’re incredible women who’ve been here from the very beginning. We were getting up at five in the morning and talking about the books that should be in the Academy. It was hard, but it was great fun—really rewarding.

And we launched together and did a bunch of events together, and they mentored for a long time in the Academy. They’re incredible mentors and guides. We are all products of everything that we teach. It's blessed our lives. It's changed the way we think. We want to keep giving it back out and guiding you through those seven laws of life mission.

And so the Academy is kind of new and improved. We spent a little bit of time moving it to a new platform. There was a period of time when mentoring wasn't available, but we know there are a lot of you out there who own lifetime access to the Academy, as well as, of course, many women we want to reach—women we'd love to bring into this beautiful environment to become friends with and to walk together on our mission journeys.

So we just want to update you on some of the things that are new and improved. And I want to start by talking to Lindsay and Tracy. There was a time when they weren't involved with MDM, and they've come back this year on our invitation. And so I want to just ask them first: what prompted them to come back?

Either of you can start—why you’re here and what you're hoping to give to moms.

So for me, the reason I came back is because I do believe in the message and the vision of The Mission Driven Mom. The vision has become so clear of what it is that we're trying to do—that we want to create a movement of mothers and of women that can influence the culture.

Yes, there's so many things—there are a lot of good things happening in the world today, but there's also a lot of things that I would like to change, and I would like to have some friends on the journey with me. And I just know—we’ve seen it so many times—that if you change a mom, you change a family, you change a community.

We just have so much influence as mothers. So I just believe in the message. I believe in the vision. I know that it's changed my life for the better. I am not the same person that I was. And in fact, I'm not the same person that I was even a few years ago. I have continued with my education, continued to try to live the laws of life mission, and it just feels good to be back and to be able to offer the skills and talents that I've developed over the last few years—to offer that to The Mission Driven Mom community.

Oh, that's awesome. Before we move on to Tracy, Lindsay, I have a follow-up question, just based on what you said.

So tell us a little bit about what you did for those couple of years when you weren't as involved with MDM. How did you continue to grow? What projects were you working on?

So the biggest project was teaching an online humanities class, and it's one of my favorite things to do. It's a four-year cycle. We go through ancient Greece, we read The Iliad and The Odyssey. We move through ancient Rome. This year we’re studying the Renaissance up through the American and French Revolutions—principles of government and natural rights, some of the things that we learned about in the Academy. And then next year we'll do modernism and postmodernism.

What's been fantastic is that I'm still in the classics.

So my education has increased just by reading these great books and being able to discuss these great ideas. I love mentoring, so it’s a class for high school students, and I have loved mentoring them. I can see the change that it makes in their lives.

This used to be the standard education that everybody would get, right? Reading the classics, discussing and asking questions—and it's not anymore. We've been robbed of a great education. So I watch these high school students, and they struggle with the readings, but they grow so much. These ideas, just like with the moms, are lighting a fire in their minds and their hearts. It's so fun to see the transformation even over a semester or over a year. Some of them have been with me two years now, and they've taken the class longer than that. They’re just outstanding students who are going to bring that into the things they do in the world.

So it's very rewarding in that way.

Oh, that's awesome. And you've done some stuff with moms too. What’s that other great books… something… what’s it called?

We did the Gateway Project.

Gateway—that’s what it’s called. That’s right.

So I took moms through… so behind me, I’ve got the Great Books of the Western World set by Mortimer Adler, and he wrote a ten-volume set called The Gateway to the Great Books, which was meant for high school students to prepare them to read the great books. The readings are a little bit shorter and a little bit easier—although they’re plenty hard enough for all of us. But it was a good mix for moms. We would read a selection and discuss it for an hour a week, and it was the same thing. It’s just so fun to see what this kind of education does for anyone.

And I know some of those, at least, were Academy students—Academy graduates who are also continuing their lifelong learning and continuing to dig deeper into principles. So great. So much to learn. It’s great.

All right. Tracy, how about you?

I want to echo a lot of what Lindsay said. I think she really summed up why I came back as well. I just believe in this cause and want to uplift women and give them the opportunity to have this education. And I knew that I could fill a place that Audrey needed filled because I come with a lot of experience—years of building the Academy with Audrey and Lindsay and Julie Greenman, which was a wonderful experience for me, and then several years of mentoring Level One and Level Two and working on Level Three with Audrey.

And we hope to have that out.

Yeah, that'll be out next year.

But I just felt like—it wasn't like it was a duty—but it felt like that was God’s call to me: to come back and insert myself into the things I had been doing already with MDM, knowing that I could make a difference with that. And what I’ve been doing in the meantime: actually, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Lindsay doing the humanities course. Julie Greenman started that class and then handed it off to Lindsay last year. So I’m a four-year graduate. This year I'm really sad that I'm not taking humanities because I finished. And we were doing the Gateway Project together and continuing our education together. I just love learning with women, and I wanted to keep doing that.

So I'm really excited to be back and excited to get this off the ground and to more women.

That's awesome. Well, anyone listening can appreciate that these women come with so much experience. They’ve been mentoring for a very long time. They know this material inside and out. And as Tracy said, she was running the Academy at one point previously and is our Academy Director again. Lindsay is a mentor with us but also helped with some of the restructuring of the Academy. Again, we've done this so much and so many times—we just keep getting to make it better, which is really a joy.

Tracy has been taking all of the… we used to have a workbook that we would mail to you, and now the program is in a course platform that actually comes on an app, and it’s attached to a community, and it’s the cleanest, simplest way to consume the Academy we've ever had. But then you still get a journal that we mail to you so that you can have that hard copy to take with you, and you can use that “All About Me” section as you go through the self-discovery—I'm getting ahead of myself there, but…

So that’s what Tracy’s doing for us—directing the Academy—and Lindsay’s mentoring for us, helping build and run workshops. And we’re really excited for the two projects coming up in the new year: we’ll finish building out a mentor training program, which first will be available internally for our students to take so they can turn around and mentor in the Academy. Then we hope at some point to offer it to other people who would like to learn how to mentor better. We all have a lot of experience with that, so we’re excited to offer that for women and mothers who would like to improve their skill set there.

And as Tracy mentioned, we'll be offering Level Three next year. We did two pilots of it, but it's never officially been done, and so it’ll be done officially for all of you who have been waiting for that.

All right, so let’s just talk logistically for a minute about some of the changes and improvements to—well, let's start with the basics. For those who aren’t really familiar with how the Academy works, let’s just give a basic overview. If somebody wants to walk us through the basic structure… Tracy, would you mind doing that for us?

Sure. Do you mean in Kajabi or the whole… just how it works?

Just like, if you're not familiar with the Academy—how does it work?

Okay. So the Academy is built off of Audrey's book, The Seven Laws of Life Mission.

And in her book she outlines the first law, which is love God and love self, and then love truth, and then love humanity. And the Academy is built to help moms get their education in the first four laws of life mission. So Level One is love God and yourself. Level Two is love truth, and Level Three is love humanity.

And so how it works is: you sign up and you start with Level One, and you go through the course material in Kajabi. We have a community that's attached to that where we hope to help you find an accountability partner or accountability group that you can discuss with regularly—keeping each other moving through the Academy so that you do get this rich education and finish.

We also have mentored workshops that are built into your journey through the Academy, through Level One, where you will prepare certain sections and then come to the workshop prepared. We want it to be a time where you discuss and get to articulate the things that you're learning, and we as mentors want to do as little talking as possible because we want this to be a time for you to really bring to the table what you've been learning and have that discussion opportunity. And so we hope it to be an experience like that—something you come prepared to.

But then we also have bonus workshops as well to help with sticking points, like study skills and writing a mission statement.

And then we also have bonus experiences where Audrey will come, and it will be a live meetup with Audrey where she'll introduce a topic of her choice and then take a question-and-answer session. And then as well, we are available as mentors to answer any of your questions in the community feed.

For Level Two it's just the same process, but it's with love truth. And so you'll learn to articulate principles—specifically thinking in an orderly way, thinking in first principles and applications—which will really give you flight in your ability to discern and to lead yourself, your community, and your family.

And then in Level Three, which we still need to build out, that's love humanity. So it's worldviews and also servant leadership. You'll learn details about the major religions and also other secular worldviews. And you'll also learn public speaking and how to help people but not hinder them—how to be a multiplier, not a diminisher—and just learn leadership principles. And so yeah, we're excited to offer that to you.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Tracy. Going back to the big picture, I guess with all of that in mind, a couple things I'll add. We always had—for those of you who are thinking about getting involved or have been involved—the curriculum, the concepts and principles that we learn, and the books that we run through have not really changed much. It still is all that same great stuff. Level One is a really heavy focus on loving God and loving yourself, and what does that mean, and why does that matter? And how are those core relationships the foundation for all your other relationships? And how getting those right is so vital to enabling you to correct and lift the other relationships in your life.

And loving yourself encompasses proper self-care and proper self-leadership and proper self-discovery. When you combine those three things—which I talk about in the book under the second law—you really start to have… in fact, there are so many testimonials. You can go to the website and see a lot of them. You can go to the YouTube channel and see a lot of testimonials.

But Lindsay and Tracy, just tell those who might be listening and curious: what are some of the outcomes that you've seen with Level One in particular, and then with just the Academy in general, for yourselves and for other women you've worked with?

So I really… I love all of it, but the self-discovery sections—learning about what my strengths are, focusing on strengths instead of focusing on weaknesses—has changed a lot of things. But realizing what are the things that I'm good at, and then developing those… I think it was through the self-discovery sections that I came to realize that I've always wanted to be a teacher. And so now I just take every opportunity I can to teach and to become better at teaching. It's something that gives my life so much meaning and purpose, and it's so satisfying.

And that was an insight that I had going through the self-discovery sections, and then to see how all of my other strengths and intelligences work in tandem with that. So that was really powerful. And then for me, the other concept was just that we have needs and we're responsible to meet them.

Just knowing that I have physical and spiritual and mental and emotional needs has centered me so that I can do the things that I want to do. I have the energy that I need to do the things that I want to do. So that was powerful too.

Yeah. Yeah. Any thoughts around some of the results you've seen for yourself or others, Tracy?

Yeah, for me, I think the victim mode that I didn't realize I was in was huge for me to learn about in Level One. And when I read about the victim cycle, or the victim triangle, I thought, “I'm not in that.” Like almost 90% of my thoughts… wow, that's like a personal tendency, I think.

Yeah.

And so that was really helpful for me, and I still have to continue to help myself—remind myself—to be in creator mode.

Yeah.

But I think the way the Academy is structured was so easy to bring my husband along. He didn't read all the readings, but we talked about a lot of the things. And then just my children over the dinner table…

One of my children did go through the whole Academy book by book and did everything. But with the rest, I tried to do it with my boys, and we were on our own—we didn't have a group. And so I just talked about it at dinner. And I talked about it in our meetings that we would have together—just the principles I was learning.

And I had a son who went abroad to serve a mission for our church, and he wanted a refresher on a lot of those things that we learned, because he knew to survive that he needed some of those principles. And so it's been incredible to see my children go into their adult life well-equipped to know how to handle themselves and how to handle relationships.

And also, like Lindsay was saying with self-discovery, I can help them find… it's been a wonderful skill to be able to help them find their sweet spots and to guide them—and to let go of some of my preconceived ideas of what I thought they should be doing, but to really look at what they love to do and to go off of that as a springboard.

So it's just helped me be a greater, more effective mom. And, as Lindsay was saying for her, it stabilized her, and it did that for me as well. But it also stabilized my family, I feel like, and I think it will reverberate through the generations, and I'm really excited about that. And so I'm just excited to infuse that into other families, and it will be a whole movement.

And I have to say, with Lindsay finding her sweet spot with teaching, she really is an excellent mentor. And I think the whole program’s worth it if you can just have Lindsay as your mentor—she really is amazing. You've really found a gem. And I'm really excited to have her mentoring with us.

Yeah.

Yeah. Thanks, Tracy, but it's… you know, it would be so fantastic if this was the kind of education everybody was getting. And we're just not. And so we needed this opportunity to learn these truths.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And when I first found classical liberal education, the transformation that I had for me, and then being turned on to principles… and it was so funny because, you know, I'm there and I'm reading the classics, and I'm in Locke, and he's talking about the natural law. I'm like, “What is this? This is so amazing.” And I was learning all these things. But as time went by, I remember going to… I spoke at a conference that was based on all of this—and it was classical liberal arts and all of that—and attending some of the speeches and talking to some of the presenters and things…

Even in that environment, I felt—even back then—concerned that there wasn't enough emphasis on principles, and that we were still thinking in terms of applications. And so just feeling like this drive—I don't know why I care so much about it, but just this… we've got to figure out how to make this accessible to more people.

You know, I would go and read Susan Wise Bauer, Mortimer Adler—and they're brilliant and they're geniuses—but they would talk about this type of education and they would say, “Okay, so what you need to do is read the book three times, and the first time through do this, and the second time through…” And every time I engaged with one of these brilliant people who understood the value of this type of education and wanted to promote it, I just was like, “Moms aren’t going to do that.” They're just not going to do that. They need it vetted down. They need the best stuff as quickly as they can get it. They need a shortcut. They need to be able to get to the best information and have the principles laid out for them, and they need community. Women need each other. They need safe, vulnerable spaces where they can talk honestly about what their roadblocks are. They need support and accountability. They need to lift each other.

And so that's what we've been working on creating.

Some cool inclusions now that didn't used to exist—we used to get on Zoom and that kind of thing. In the community, it's everything for us. So you go into the community and it's as robust as Facebook or any other platform. You can post videos or articles or images. You can share all the types of things that you would want to share on a social platform. And it's really robust and interactive. You can DM anybody in the community that you want to—and that's one of the things Tracy was talking about. You have access to the mentors anytime you need them for that kind of thing.

And then there are these workshops that happen regularly. You show up—it's right there inside the community—and you just follow the link, and it's just like a Zoom experience. And we go into breakout rooms, and we can share our screens, and we can get in and use all the different technologies that are available. And every time we post one, it automatically sends you an email. So you always know what's going on.

And then we've added an extra layer that actually isn't in the platform itself. We have layered this onto it, and it's our directory. So you can actually go into the members area and see where everybody lives on a big map, and you have access to the emails and the names of women in the Academy. Just to keep their locations safe, it only has their city, so you can't track them down—it's not dangerous—but you have to be in the Academy to get access to that directory.

And you can email somebody and get to know them, you can get on Zoom with them, and, like Tracy was saying, we work hard to help you find someone who can be your accountability person, who can be your friend, who can walk this journey with you in an even more intimate way.

But as mentors, we're there as often as you need us, as much as you need us. And you get some goodies when you sign up—a book bag, bookmarks, we send you The Mission Driven Life book, a journal, some fun things like that. But it's kind of… we keep calling it MDM 2.0 because it's just that much better, having taken everything that we learned before.

And we watched hundreds and hundreds of women's lives be transformed through this content. You know, marriages were healed, and women felt like they were settled into this deep level of self-acceptance, and that they had control over themselves, and their families, like Tracy was saying, were lifted.

And this self-discovery and understanding the culture and the ability to discern… we have a group chat of some women who are graduates, and just this week they were texting each other, “Well, what's the actionable principle for this, that, and the other?” And I was just blown away at their ability to take what we've provided and to build on it and use it out in the real world, and use it to improve themselves and their family ongoing for the rest of their lives and beyond. So that's really fun.

And, of course—and I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before—we have graduates that are doing lots and lots of amazing things out in the world, trying to make the world a better place. And we want to better support them. We want to be there for them. And there are lots of other exciting things that we could mention that are coming.

I have not announced this or sent any emails out about it, but the celebration is back next year. It's Mothers of Creation. And so if you want to join us, you can go to the website, to the conference page, and sign up to be there with us live, in person, in Provo, Utah. We will probably add another location as time moves on, but for now, that's where we are next fall.

But for those of you who have lifetime access—if there's an even funner offer, I guess—we would invite any and everyone who wants to hop on this train with us, who wants to be on a mission-driven journey with us. We welcome you. We would love to have you in the Academy.

For those of you who already have lifetime access to Levels One or Two, you may not know that you can hop back into the community and take advantage of the workshops that we're building out. They're quite robust, they're well thought through, and Tracy—bless her—has actually gone through the content and built out a structure where you know exactly what you need to do to prepare for those workshops.

And we can make you the promise that in 30 minutes a day you will be ready for those workshops, and you will get through the material in nine months. And if you didn't finish the level that you were in, or you had a good experience and you want to go through it again, or you want to move on, or whatever the case might be, you can have access to that community—the workshops, the mentoring, the directory, all of that good stuff—for just a small monthly fee.

So just go to The Mission Driven Mom login. Go to the end of the course that you have access to—at the end of Level One, for example, it'll say “Continue Your Journey.” And that's right—you can sign up for Level Two right there, but you can also sign up (cancel anytime). You can sign up to join us in the Academy on a monthly basis. Just pay monthly until you feel done, and then move on to the next level of the Academy. So that's also something that we want to offer those who miss being part of the Academy and want to rejoin us. Again, we'd love to see your beautiful faces back in the Academy with us.

Is there anything else that—Lindsay or Tracy—you'd like to add? What are you excited for in this coming year? I guess we can end on that question.

I'm excited for the workshops. Oh—go ahead, sorry, Tracy.

Oh, it's okay, I'll be short. Something that I'd like to add is: this really is the education I wanted when I talked with Audrey years ago. We were at a retreat and happened to meet each other. She asked if I wanted a degree. I said, “Not really. I just want to be able to think better and manage myself better.” And I couldn't be more pleased with what Audrey has created and what Lindsay and I and Julie Greenman have helped Audrey create.

It really is just the shot in the arm—what moms need—and in the minimal amount of time, because time is so precious for moms. But it really is the foundational education that will just propel you into years of enriched living.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Tracy.

So I totally agree with that. I'm just excited for these opportunities in the workshops and in the events to meet each other, to form those relationships. The workshops are not intended to take the place of your accountability partners or your accountability groups—they're meant to add an additional resource, an additional refinement to the things that you're learning so that we can truly become mission-driven moms and influence the culture for good. I think the workshops are a big part of being able to do that.

Yeah. A hundred percent.

If you have not read the book The Mission-Driven Life, you can also go to themissiondrivenmom.com and get three chapters for free, and you can grab a hard copy of the book if you're so inclined. We would love for you to learn more about who we are and what we're doing.

We really do—we're going to do everything we possibly can to educate as many women as we can, thousands of women, and help empower them to lift our culture, because it needs to be renewed with virtue. It needs to be reinfused with the principles that founded this nation. And we need mothers who can discern, who can live out and teach truth, and lift our culture with us, hand in hand.

If you're not on our email list, go get on it. There’s a lot of—I didn't want to tell you all the exciting things we have scheduled for this coming year, but lots of super exciting things scheduled. So we'll stay in touch. We'll let you know about all those things.

But in the meantime, this is a perfect time to come back as we re-infuse the Academy with these beautiful workshops that are being built out. We're ready for you. We would love to see you again in the Academy. Whether you're new or coming back, we are excited to spend time with you again and to lift each other and move forward in lifting the culture.

So thanks for joining us today, and we will see you next time.

Get Your FREE Chapters in Audio format from The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

Why did school feel boring or pointless? …because you were robbed of a true liberal arts education—learning that forms free people. We decode what “liberal” really means, chart how American education drifted into vocational training, and show how to revive the Great Books, the Socratic method, commonplacing, oral exams, and meaningful leisure. Drawing on Hayek and Mortimer Adler, it shows how this tradition was lost—and how reclaiming it can transform your thinking, purpose, and lifelong learning.

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Transcript (AI generated)

There is a reason why you were probably dissatisfied with your education—why you felt frustrated and unfulfilled, why you couldn’t find the meaning or purpose behind much of it. Why you felt bored, why you felt unfulfilled, why it felt brainless or pointless or full of frustration.

If you’re like me, when you were in school, you probably had some thoughts like: “This is really dumb,” or “This is really boring,” or “Why do we have to be at school so long?” or “What is it that we’re even doing? What’s the point of all this?”

I don’t know if you ever thought deeply about it, but I remember a consistent sense of dissatisfaction. It grew as I got older—especially in high school—until I finally thought, “Okay, well, high school education isn’t all that great.”

I mean, there were some classes, like my psychology class—it was so easy. Everything was straight out of the book. I think it was the gym teacher who taught us, and as long as I memorized some answers… that was back in the Scantron days, where we’d just fill in the bubbles and they’d run it through the machine.

I would get out early basically every time we had a test in psychology. Or there were times when you’d pour your heart into a paper or project and still get a bad grade because you didn’t check certain specific boxes with your formatting, or your teacher didn’t like how you phrased something, or whatever.

It was just not a great experience on a lot of levels. I was always waiting for it to get better and better.

And I’m here to tell you: there’s a reason why you were probably dissatisfied with your education—why you felt frustrated and unfulfilled, why you couldn’t find meaning and purpose behind a lot of it, why you felt bored or unchallenged, why it all felt brainless or pointless. It’s because you were not given a liberal arts education.

That’s the type of education that existed in Western civilization for over a thousand years. This was how education was done for a very long time.

 When I tell people that I have a liberal arts education, they usually have no idea what I’m talking about, because those terms have been hijacked. I’m going to explain that to you in a minute—what this really means, how education used to be, and how you were genuinely robbed by people who decided a hundred, hundred-twenty years ago that you weren’t smart enough to get the kind of education people had been receiving for hundreds of years.

They said all that information was just “unimportant dead white men” that you couldn’t learn anything from. That is so arrogant—because this is the very foundation we stand on.

 Anyway—obviously, I have feelings about this—but when I tell people I have a liberal arts education, they usually think it means something like being an artist, or doing something in the arts. They don’t even understand what these terms mean.

So, I’m going to break this down and give you a brief introduction to what this is—and what has been taken from you.

Because I’m passionate about learning, lifelong learning, and becoming better—about living the 7 Laws of Life Mission that I talk about in my book—we’re going to keep talking about this. I’ll keep putting out information about the history of American and Western education so you can understand how we got from there to here.

But for today, I just want to give you the basics of what this means.

 The word liberal—as in liberal arts—comes from the Latin root liber, which means “free.” It’s also the root of liberty and libro (which means “book” in Spanish). So, there’s this connection between being educated and being free. It was the educated classes who were free, and you received an education to be a free person. That’s what it was about.

Now, this might surprise you.

 In today’s culture, the word liberal is often associated with people on the political left—Democrats, progressives, whatever—and so in conservative circles, “liberal” has taken on a negative connotation. Liberals are seen as more open or generous or kind, and so on.

But liberalism is actually a Western cultural philosophy. Let me read a little about it:

“It’s a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual—liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, equality before the law, private property, market economics, individual rights, civil rights, and human rights.”

 We actually have liberalism to thank for our freedom and our ideas about human rights. It sought to establish a constitutional order—meaning that those in power (the king, aristocracy, or any tyranny) were subject to the law, and that there was a natural law above all mankind.

We derive those rights from God, not from government. And government must submit to its own laws. That’s a liberal idea.

 It prized individual freedoms such as freedom of speech, freedom of association, independent juries, public trials by jury, and the abolition of aristocratic privilege.

The fundamental elements of modern Western society all have liberal roots.

So what is this “liberal” that some people identify as—what does it really mean?

It’s actually social liberalism. In Europe and North America, “social liberalism,” often just called “liberalism,” became a key component in expanding the welfare state. That’s why the word was hijacked.

 Now, F.A. Hayek—an incredible thinker who wrote The Road to Serfdom and won the Nobel Prize—wrote about this back in 1944. He said the word liberal was already being hijacked in America even then. In the preface of his book, he wrote:

“Throughout this book, I use the term liberal in the original nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. Its current usage in America often means nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of the leftist movements in that country—helped by the muddle-headedness of many who really do believe in liberty—that liberal has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control.”

So this word was stolen—from a form of education that had, for centuries, enabled people to gather, organize, and learn from the great thinkers—mostly men, but some women—throughout Western history. That’s the foundation we stand on in the West, and especially in America.

This is a liberal country, built on the principles of liberty.

Hayek goes on:

“I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term, but even should have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium.”

So he’s saying that people started using it negatively—even though it defines the very civilization and nation we aspire to be.

 Mortimer Adler said, “The chief difference between ourselves and our ancestors is that they, for the most part, talked sense about liberal education, whereas we, for the most part, do not.”

That’s fascinating—that a word and an idea so foundational to our civilization could be so misunderstood today.

 If you read American Higher Education: A History by Christopher Lucas (which is really good), and look up “liberal learning” in the index, you’ll see row after row of citations. That’s how predominant liberal learning was in America—until recently.

 This is what you’ve been robbed of: liberal learning for the sake of learning itself—learning to be free—the education of a free people.

 That’s very different from vocational learning, which is learning for the sake of earning.

Those are the two kinds of learning.

 What we’ve done is take a liberal foundation and replace it with vocational learning—through apprenticeships, trade schools, and job training. But originally, everyone received a liberal education so they could be free.

 After the American Revolution, as the founders built the nation, they said, “Now we need an education system to match our form of government.” They knew people needed to understand what creates freedom in order to stay free—to preserve a free nation and a free people.

 That’s why they valued a liberal education: it teaches people how to be free.

Adler said,

“For anyone to become an educated person, it is necessary for his or her learning to continue throughout the lifetime that follows graduation from college or university. The most crucial contribution these institutions can make is in the field of the arts—the liberal arts—which are the arts of learning, and the arts which discipline our creative powers.”

He also said, “Education frees our minds by disciplining them.”

Our education is supposed to discipline our minds—to help us find, hold to, and adhere to truth.

 Mortimer Adler (I’ll talk about him more in another video on The Great Books and how we lost liberal learning in America) was one of the key figures who tried to preserve liberal education in the United States.

He often argued that the best education happens in adulthood—and he was right. Because it’s only as adults, with real-life experience, that our education takes on its deepest meaning.

 I could read Anna Karenina in college, but ten or fifteen years later—after I’d had a troubled marriage myself and been through much more life—Anna Karenina means a whole lot more to me. Right? So, we need the tools for lifelong learning, and that’s what liberal education was giving people.

There was a very specific way this was done, so let me explain it quickly so you understand what the “liberal” part is—and what the “arts” part means.

Liberal Arts are not Fine Arts, and they’re not Vocational Arts. They’re not arts for the sake of earning, and they’re not fine arts for the sake of beautifying. They’re the liberal arts—for the sake of being free, for disciplining the mind, for learning how to use our intellectual and rational powers to their fullest.

The fine arts are totally “useless,” and that is their glory—because the fine arts are meant to move the heart and to move the culture toward beauty and goodness.

 The liberal arts, on the other hand, are useful. They consist of the Trivium and the Quadrivium, which in their modern forms include reading, writing, speaking, listening, and all the mathematical and scientific disciplines.

 So, this hangover that we have in our schools—where those are still our focus—is a remnant of the liberal arts. We’re still trying to do the liberal arts, but we’re doing it without the same medium or methods used in the past. We’re doing it in a textbook model—which doesn’t work—and we’re doing it without the full toolset for liberal learning.

 We still teach that people need to write, read, and calculate, but we’re not bringing it home. The liberal arts are meant to help us live a robust life of truth—to be the search for truth itself.

That’s why Harvard’s motto was Veritas—“truth.” These colleges and universities were founded upon the liberal arts: the pursuit of truth, living the good life, and seeking real happiness in harmony with God’s natural laws.

 The fine arts were meant for those who would go on to create works that inspire humanity. The liberal arts were meant for everyone—so that they could perpetuate a free society. The vocational arts were training for earning a living in a particular trade or profession.

Today, we have remnants of what liberal education was meant to be. Sometimes we call it “the humanities” or “general education,” but at the college level it’s often turned into social indoctrination. It’s money-driven now, because these are no longer private schools making independent decisions—they depend on government funding. The government dictates what’s taught, and that independence is gone. The priority to help us be a free people has disappeared.

I could give you all kinds of examples from American and Western history that you’ve never heard—because they’re not taught in school anymore.

 Here’s how it used to be done—it was very simple. You would choose a text of broad and deep significance, what we call a great book. That’s where the Great Books of the Western World and the Harvard Classics came from. These are books that have stood the test of time—books that have spoken to people across generations, cultures, and circumstances.

 But in our modern, technological society, we’ve begun to think we can leave those behind. I’ll tell you—authors like Plato and Aristotle, whom I’ve studied, are completely relevant today. The things they discuss are the very things on my mind now. The way they reason and write—it’s often over my head. It’s hard for me to understand, even in modern English translations.

I’m limping along to really grasp it. But I love this quote by Mortimer Adler, one of my favorites:

“Whoever passes by what is over his head condemns his head to its present low altitude, for nothing can elevate a mind except what is over the head.”

They chose deep, rich works.

 I did another video on the five types of questions, and I talked about St. Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on the Passions. That’s the kind of reading we’re talking about. We all have passions, right? He explained that the passions follow a certain order, and he explored how they work.

That’s exactly what you and I think about today: What are my emotions? How do they work? How much should I listen to them? These are timeless questions. They’re relevant, important, lasting, and world-changing. We need to understand what these thinkers said—why their ideas had such impact and how they changed the world.

 So, they would choose a truly rich text—often in the original language. These men (and sometimes women) would learn Latin and Greek. Then they’d study those works in small sections, reading and writing in a commonplace book.

Books were rare and expensive, so you didn’t write in them. You’d copy long passages into your commonplace book—your favorite quotes, insights, questions, and reflections. That’s how you internalized what you read.

Then you’d meet in a small group, or “pod,” with a tutor or mentor. You’d discuss what you’d read. The tutor would question you deeply, guiding you with thoughtful questions. If you want a better picture of what this looks like, go watch that video on the five types of questions—I share an example from one of Mortimer Adler’s classes.

Those discussions were powerful. That’s why book groups were so popular in early America.

Benjamin Franklin, in his Autobiography, describes how he started the first public library and made book clubs fashionable. It elevated the educational level of that generation and those that followed.

 Eventually, when you were ready, you’d have an oral exam. That’s how they knew you’d truly absorbed what you studied—when it had become a part of who you were. You could articulate it clearly, discuss it thoughtfully, and apply it wisely.

You gained skills of discussion, negotiation, reasoning, and the search for truth—honed and refined over years of dialogue with your peers and tutors.

The last part of a liberal arts education was about the use of free time—what was called leisure. Mortimer Adler argued that you can tell the quality of a person’s education by how they choose to spend their leisure time.

Do they play instruments? Do they get involved in their community? Do they serve in government? Do they volunteer? Do they practice the fine arts? Do they build strong relationships? Do they read great books? Do they find ways to elevate themselves and those around them?

The quality of that leisure time is the mark of a truly educated person. Someone with a real liberal education will always use their free time for the most enriching things.

Adler said, “A good human life is one that is enriched by as much leisure as one can cram into it.”

So, you’re always finding ways to elevate yourself as a human being—and to elevate humanity—through what you do when you don’t have to work.

If you were dissatisfied like I was—if you felt frustrated with the kind of education you received, or sensed something was missing—you were right.

 You were robbed.

 Over the last century and a half, bits and pieces of this education were eroded away until now. You can expect low-quality textbooks, many steps removed from original sources. You can expect not to engage with great minds or great ideas. You can expect not to hear about the pivotal moments of Western history.

 You can expect to write papers for a professor instead of for yourself—to aim for “the right answers” instead of deep understanding. You can expect to stay stuck at the level of knowledge questions, instead of seeking meaning, truth, and personal application.

So I hope that clears up what you’ve been robbed of—and helps you understand that a liberal arts education is the education we all need to become the best human beings we can possibly be.

 I spent fifteen or sixteen years in structured, formal, traditional public education. Later on, I discovered liberal education—and it absolutely changed me as a person. It changed the way I live, the way I think, the way I use my leisure time, the way I teach, and the values I hold most dear.

It’s the great minds I’ve interacted with and the tools for lifelong learning that have completely transformed my life.

 If that’s something you want more of, we do learn these skills—we do engage with great minds and study the classics and great books—at The Mission Driven Mom, through the MDM Academy. Check that out, and tell me in the comments below about your experience with school—what you wish you’d had, and what you feel you missed out on.

If this message was helpful for you today, please pass it on. Go ahead and subscribe and leave a review—that really helps us grow and reach other moms who we might be able to serve.

Thank you so much for joining me today, and I’ll see you next time.

Get Your FREE Chapters in Audio format from The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

In this heartfelt episode, Audrey shares a powerful reflection on rediscovering purpose and reigniting passion as a mother and mission-driven woman. After hitting a personal “wall” while relaunching The Mission Driven Mom, she realized that clarity of purpose—knowing her why—was the missing ingredient.

Through honest journaling, prayer, and reflection, Audrey reconnected with her deeper motivations, finding renewed excitement for her work and calling. She invites listeners—especially mothers who feel unfulfilled or weary—to pause, reflect, and ask themselves: “Why am I a mom? Why did I choose this life? Where do I want to take my family?”

By rediscovering their “why,” moms can reclaim gratitude, purpose, and joy in their daily lives, and begin shaping the kind of family and legacy they truly desire.

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Transcript (AI generated)

 Welcome back to the podcast. I'm so excited that you have joined me.

When I was at the James Lindsay event—who I recently interviewed—there was an app we could use at the event to connect with other people attending. You filled it out and told a little about yourself, so I decided to do it.

I put some information in there, including a link to The Mission Driven Mom website. About halfway through the event, I got a message on the app from someone who was in attendance. He said, “Do not leave before I talk to you.”

Near the end, we finally connected, and he took me out into the hall. He said, “I have combed over your website, and you have perfectly described my wife. I’m a young attorney. I have a wife, and I can’t remember if he said two or three young children. We have arranged our lives so that my wife could be home with the children—that’s what we both wanted. And yet here we are, a few years in, and she is so unhappy. She’s struggling to get out of bed in the morning. She’s struggling to find joy in the day-to-day activities of mothering these small children, and I’m really, really worried about her.”

It reminded me of something one of our students said about her experience before she joined the Academy. She said, “I felt there was something missing. I kind of felt like I needed a little something more. I had a good marriage, cute kids, but I wasn’t feeling happy, and I didn’t know why. I knew I had every reason to be happy, but I felt there was something I needed to change—and I didn’t know what, or where to start, or what was wrong.”

So if you feel like these women did—if you are struggling to make it through your days with optimism, hope, and excitement; if you are feeling the drudgery that can sometimes come with lots of demands on your time and energy—and if you’ve been at this for a while and you’re starting to feel discouraged or lost, or if you feel like you have what you need to be happy and should be happy but you’re not—and you just can’t figure out why—

I want to tell you what happened to me recently and give you a tip—something that you can do that I think might turn things around for you.

Before I do that, I want to welcome you to the podcast and let you know that I’m the author of The Mission-Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World.

If you head over to themissiondrivenmom.com, you can grab the first three chapters of that book for free. I’d love to give those to you so you can learn all about the Seven Laws of Life Mission that we take moms through to help them overcome this drudgery and unhappiness—to rise above their circumstances, to ground their lives in truth, and to begin having influence in their communities.

It’s a beautiful process. So thank you for joining me today.

Also, if you’re brand new to the podcast, you may want to go back and start at the beginning and listen to some of those early episodes where I go in-depth about the Seven Laws of Life Mission. You’ll also hear lots of mission-driven stories about great men and women who lived those seven laws, and there are many other podcasts that may interest you.

Recently, I hit a wall with The Mission Driven Mom. I hit this wall a few years ago when we slowed things down and I stopped podcasting for a while—we kind of went quiet. But now we’re back, and we’re doing the things. It’s been really exciting as we’ve been relaunching the podcast and the Academy, and we’ve relaunched our yearly in-person event.

You can actually sign up for that on the website as well—just click on Conference. This year the theme is Mothers of Creation, so you can head over there and sign up before it fills up.

We’re relaunching, right? We’re in this phase, doing this—and I just hit this wall a few weeks ago. As I thought about it, I realized, “Oh, this looks very much like the wall I hit a couple years ago, which caused me to really go quiet and not know how to move forward.”

I was frustrated, overwhelmed. I didn’t feel up for the task. I didn’t really know how to proceed. So I paused. I moved everything to a new platform and thought, “Well, I’ll make this program available, and I’ll write books, and we’ll just see what happens,” because I didn’t know how to crack the code on letting more students in.

We had a bottleneck with mentors. Our business model wasn’t right. There were lots of problems.

So now, as we’re going through this 2.0 launch, everything’s going fine—but new opportunities keep coming, and I’m hesitating. My husband sat me down and said, “Why are you hesitating? We’re all in. We’re doing this. We’ve been putting all this energy in—we’re gaining momentum. Why are you hesitating?”

And you know, I felt frustrated. I felt worried. I felt overwhelmed. I felt all those feelings.

Then I did something that I’m going to recommend you do—something that has made such a huge difference. This isn’t the only time I’ve done this in my life, but it’s the most recent, and it’s made such a big difference that I really believe it will help you.

I decided to pause for a minute and dig deep—do some journaling, do some praying, a lot of pondering. Maybe go back to some of the things I’ve read, definitely spend time in scripture, and just ask myself the question: Why?

Why are we coming back to this? Why are we relaunching? Why do I want to do this? Why does it matter?

And the secondary question was: Where am I trying to get to? What is my why and what is my what? What is the goal? What is the objective? What does success look like? Where are we headed?

At first, it was really exciting to relaunch the Academy—to have women signing up again, coming into the community. We have this better platform, and it’s really exciting. And then we’re doing more things, and more is being asked of me—and more, and more. More responsibility is on my shoulders.

And I found that there are things about this new space that feel familiar—and worrisome.

So I took time—a couple of weeks. I still did all the things in life that needed doing, but instead of focusing on a bunch of MDM tasks, I just paused to be with myself and with God, and to really explore why this mattered.

Because for me, it’s not enough to just... I’m not in this to sell the Academy. If women do the Academy, that’s wonderful—and that’s why I put it on this new platform, so it would be available and anyone could sign up. But that alone doesn’t fill me with passion.

It doesn’t light me on fire.

One of the things I noticed is that I’ve been interviewed on quite a few podcasts recently. A few of them have been released, more are coming up. The conversations were beautiful and meaningful, and I meant everything I said—obviously, moms need to meet their real needs, love themselves better, discover their gifts, and recognize their God-given mission.

All of that is meaningful and beautiful—and the conversations were wonderful—but I recognized they weren’t full of passion.

In most instances, I wasn’t on fire. And that meant that the person interviewing me wasn’t on fire either.

And I’m just going to be straight with you: I don’t need to be doing this. My kids are about to finish leaving home. I have time and resources. I could do whatever I want for the rest of my life. And I knew that going back in—but I kept needing to evaluate: Why am I hesitating? Why am I not full of passion—excited to be doing this?

That doesn’t mean there can’t be stress or some down days and disappointments—it just means that overall, I had to ask: What’s wrong? Where am I trying to get to? What is my end game?

And I want to tell you—it was incredible.

I dug so deep that I discovered things about myself, about this organization, about where we’re headed, and about why I’m doing it—things I didn’t even know before. As I gained more clarity about what actually changed my life, what I’m truly trying to do for women, and how we as moms are really going to make a difference—

I can just feel the passion bubbling up again as I say this.

There are a lot of exciting things coming, and I am on fire about what we’re going to be releasing.

But with all that being said—what you can do right now, if you’re not feeling it as a mom—if you know you have every reason to be happy, if you live in comfortable circumstances, you’re not starving, you have resources, you can educate yourself, you have beautiful children… Maybe your marriage isn’t perfect, but your husband’s a good guy—and yet you just aren’t feeling excited to be alive each day. You’re not full of passion, and you don’t have clarity.

I would invite you to do what I’ve done—this time and many other times in my life—and really start journaling and asking yourself the question:

Why am I a mom?

Why did I want to become a mom? Why is this the life that I’ve chosen? And where am I trying to take us? What’s the destination I’m trying to reach with this family?

I really believe you’ll have some amazing breakthroughs if you just sit with that. Let your beautiful, marvelous mind percolate on it—however many days or weeks it needs. Keep asking God. Keep asking that question as you read scripture, as you go through your day. Maybe talk to your spouse, maybe talk to your friends—but most of all, be with yourself.

I was at a marriage retreat, and several good things happened there, but probably the most impactful was when they asked each of us to go off alone—with a pad of paper and a pen—and answer the question:

Why do I want to keep living?

One of the things we do in The Mission Driven Mom is learn how to get to fundamentals—to get to the first principles, the truths by which we can govern our lives. First principles tell us why—and when we know why, it’s much easier to find the energy, the motivation, and the passion to go discover the how.

That’s part of what I needed to do. I have found an even bigger why—something I’m even more excited and passionate about sharing with you—and concrete ways in which I can show my love for the women I serve. It’s so exciting. It’s so rewarding.

I’m ready to level up—to go learn principles that I haven’t yet known or haven’t been living in certain areas and facets of this movement.

And I can do that because I know why. Because I’ve outlined those first principles and meanings for myself.

So if you want more passion around your mothering, then go find out why.

Why did you want to become a mother? Go back to those moments when you made those choices—the excitement you felt to have these children—and ask yourself: Where am I trying to get to?

And journal, journal, journal—until some things become clear.

When we were at that marriage retreat and asked to journal about that question, it was incredible. As we reentered the room, there were these grown men—strong, tough guys—who had been weeping. Because when they thought about why do I want to keep on living, the beauty of the life they were already sitting in became really clear.

And you are sitting in the middle of a beautiful life. You are incredibly blessed. There are beautiful reasons why you chose to be a mother. If you can get back to some of those whys, it will start to clear the path for you.

If we can be a resource and a help—if this podcast or our Academy can help you on that journey to find the principles that will help you be the mom you want to be and get where you want to go—then I’m grateful.

But no matter what you do after you find your why, it’s vital that you dig deep and start asking yourself:

Why did I sign up for this? Why am I a mom? Where do I want to take my family?

It will reignite your passion. You’ll become far more clear. You’ll be much more grateful.

Just sit in it long enough—it will bubble up. God will answer you. Your marvelous mind will come up with clear answers, and you’ll find that you really are grateful to be where you are—grateful for the opportunities that surround you today.

And you may feel a little bit worried or overwhelmed about where you want to go—but there are answers when you have that why.

When we’re clear about first principles, it’s so much easier to go out, search for those principles, practice living them, and use them as the gateway to develop the kind of family and life we can be proud of.

So that’s my challenge to you:
Think about why you’re a mom and what success looks like for you.

Journal about it. And if you’re so inclined, share your thoughts below if you’re on YouTube, or send us a message. I would love to hear why you’re a mom and where you’re trying to get to.

I would love to know why this is the life you’ve chosen and what beautiful things you’ve discovered about it.

Because we’re in this together. We’re going to uplevel ourselves—and by doing so, uplevel our homes and our communities.

It’s a beautiful journey that we’re on together.

So thank you for joining me today. Please take the time to journal about those questions and share your answers with me. I would love to hear more about that.

And if this message was helpful for you today, please pass it on—go ahead and subscribe and leave a review. That really helps us grow and get the word out to other moms we may be able to serve.

Thank you so much for joining me today, and I will see you next time.

Get Your FREE Audiobook Chapters from The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/.

Want to get at the meat of what's wrong with the trans movement? In this episode Audrey outlines her 5 biggest takeaways from her extensive research into the trans movement and her study of the controversial book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier. 

If this craze has boggled, confused, or upset you, listen in for a synopsis of the biggest issues around this cultural trouble and how to look at it with more clarity. 

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT (AI Generated)

 Years ago, at my organization The Mission Driven Mom, I was running a leadership retreat and decided to do a presentation on the sexual revolution in the United States.

I had already done quite a bit of research, but I dug even deeper before the retreat. When I presented all this information to the women there, I was honestly shocked — almost everything I shared was completely new to them. Some of the things they had never heard before, and most of it they knew little to nothing about.

That experience really opened my eyes to a serious problem in our culture. We live in what’s called the information age — which would make you think we all have access to high-quality knowledge about all sorts of topics. But that’s actually not the case. There’s a tremendous amount of misinformation out there, and it’s difficult to sift through the noise and find reliable sources.

Because of that, I’ve spent years reading some of the best books and research available on issues that are affecting our culture — topics that seem to have gone completely off the rails. The transgender movement is one of those.

So I picked up Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. I wanted to understand why there’s been such a sudden surge — this flood of young girls seeking testosterone, top surgery, and beyond. We know the numbers are climbing at a shocking rate.

Historically, we actually have very good data — at least a hundred years’ worth — on gender dysphoria. For most of that time, over 90% of those who experienced it were male. It usually appeared in early childhood, and in the vast majority of cases, the feelings resolved naturally by early adulthood. Of those who continued to experience it, many became homosexual men, and a small percentage transitioned — what used to be called “transsexuals.”

But even among that older generation, they never believed they could literally become the opposite sex. When you talk to trans individuals from those earlier decades, they often describe simply feeling more comfortable presenting as the opposite gender. Some had surgeries to help them do that, but they didn’t claim that changing clothes or undergoing surgery actually made them women.

So for a century, this pattern held steady — until around 2006. That’s when things began to flip. There are reasons for that, rooted in the broader history of sexual identity movements in the West, but 2006 marks a turning point. The number of girls identifying as the opposite gender — and seeking hormones or surgeries — began to rise dramatically.

By 2016, Shrier reports that natal females made up 46% of all gender reassignment surgeries in the United States. Just one year later, that number jumped to 70%, and it has continued to climb since then.

Now, one reason we struggle to understand what’s happening — even in the so-called information age — is that we don’t always do our homework. On this channel, I try to share tools and strategies for how to research well and think critically about the sources we use.

Another reason is that many people simply don’t know where to look or who to trust. Lots of experts have impressive credentials or bios, and it’s easy to assume that means they’re reliable. But in reality, good information is often hidden, misrepresented, or outright suppressed.

In Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier shares an interesting example. In November 2020, after the book had been selling well for about four months, a Twitter user posted this message:

“@AskTarget, why are you selling a book notorious for its harmful rhetoric against us? Historically, harmful products have been pulled from your shelves — and this should be too.”

And that was all it took. Based on the complaints of just two Twitter users, the book was pulled from Target.com. It was banned and protested in other places as well. There are also numerous YouTube videos denouncing it as “transphobic.”

So, I thought today we could spend a few minutes on this topic, and I’d share my five big takeaways from the book.

I’ve got to say right from the outset — I didn’t see a lot of transphobia in it. In fact, one thing that made reading it especially interesting was that I went through it with a book club. One of the women in our group identifies as quite a bit more liberal and left-leaning than the rest of us. She’s very supportive of LGBTQ+ causes, and she was nervous about reading the book. Her circles had warned her that it was going to be transphobic and problematic.

And yes — there are moments when Shrier uses a bit of tongue-in-cheek or sarcastic humor that can come across as a little distasteful. But beyond that, even this woman in our group ended up really enjoying the book. She saw the value in what Shrier was saying, and it led to some great conversations about what we can do — both individually and as a society — in response to this transgender craze.

Shrier makes a striking point in the book:

“A remarkable thing about the continuous campaign against Irreversible Damage is that it came amid additional confirmation that the book’s claims were true.”

And that’s exactly what we’ve seen. The book is only two or three years old, but time has already proven many of her concerns to be valid. We’re now seeing several countries passing legislation to restrict certain practices or to slow them down. And while the transgender movement is still growing — and the majority of mainstream voices continue to promote it — evidence keeps emerging that supports what Shrier argued.

Her main claim is this: the sudden rush of girls seeking hormones and transgender surgeries — what’s being called “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” — is not actually gender dysphoria in the traditional sense. It’s a craze, a social contagion, and rushing these girls into medical transition is not in their best interest.

So, in light of all that, my first big takeaway from the book is this:

👉 We can only fight with truth.

Right now, we simply don’t know the full truth about the transgender craze. We don’t have enough solid, unbiased information — and it would really benefit us to read books like this one.

I have a couple of other books on the topic sitting on my shelf, and I’ve watched dozens of detransition videos and interviews with experts in this field. And I’ve got to say — if you’re only paying attention to surface-level information, the kind that shows up in your social media feed or the headlines — you’ll end up being pro-trans in ways that are actually harmful to young people, especially those under 18.

So takeaway number one: we don’t yet have the whole truth, and we can only stand for what’s right if we’re willing to seek it.

As I was watching all of these detransition videos, I started noticing some common themes — and I want to talk about a couple of them.

One thing that really stood out to me was this: sometimes, it’s easier to change what’s on the outside than it is to change what’s on the inside.

And that’s not unique to the transgender movement — that’s something all of us struggle with in different ways. It’s part of being human. But in these stories — mostly girls transitioning to boys — this theme came up over and over again.

Now, Abigail Shrier highlights the same thing in her book, and it matched exactly what I was seeing in these videos. In almost every case, there were preexisting mental health conditions — depression, anxiety, self-harm — and often social struggles as well. Many of these girls were on the autism spectrum or had traits associated with it.

So these girls were already struggling. They already felt like outsiders. They already felt broken or “different.” Shrier gives a few statistics about the number who were cutting, the number who were clinically anxious — and the pattern was striking.

Here’s what parents consistently reported: their daughter had social struggles and anxiety but no signs of gender dysphoria in childhood. Then she enters high school, makes a group of new friends — and several of those friends come out as transgender. Soon after, she makes the same announcement. And from that point on, her mental health actually worsens.

In other cases, it wasn’t the school friends but the online communities influencing them. These girls felt so lonely in real life that they turned to the internet, where they were quickly immersed in circles that reinforced the idea that they must be trans.

There are even online quizzes or “tests” where they’re asked questions like, “Have you ever felt uncomfortable in your body?” or “Have you ever struggled to fit in?” And of course, those are universal experiences! Every one of us could say yes to those. But for socially awkward, already hurting girls looking for answers, this becomes a new label that feels like relief — a new identity that promises to fix what’s wrong inside.

And again, it’s easier to change the outside than the inside.

So my second big takeaway from Shrier’s book is this:
👉 Virtually all of these girls have preexisting mental health challenges and social struggles — and that makes it tempting to focus on outward change instead of inward healing.

And in their defense, many of them don’t even know what’s wrong or how to fix it. They just know they’re unhappy, and transitioning looks like a solution. Add to that the fact that there’s a huge amount of social validation that comes with coming out as transgender — especially online.

Yes, there’s still bullying in schools. But overall, many of these girls suddenly receive an outpouring of support, encouragement, and praise. They’re told they’re brave and courageous. That kind of affirmation is incredibly powerful for someone who already feels invisible or broken.

Now, as I mentioned, I’ve watched a lot of these detransition stories — and everything I saw was echoed in Shrier’s research. It was like reading a well-documented version of what I’d already found on my own.

One thing they all talk about is how easy it was to get the medical interventions.

In most cases, on their very first visit to Planned Parenthood, they were prescribed testosterone. One girl said she even asked for the maximum dose — and they gave it to her right away.

It’s not just Planned Parenthood. Many psychologists and psychiatrists now approve medical interventions after a single visit. Parents of younger children are often told that if they don’t affirm their child’s new identity, the child will commit suicide. Puberty blockers are offered extremely early in the process.

This whole mindset is called affirmative care — the idea that if someone says they are something, you simply affirm it as truth. But if you stop to think about that for even a minute, it doesn’t line up with how we treat any other medical or psychological condition.

In every other area, there’s testing, diagnosis, and careful consideration before prescribing serious medication or recommending surgery.

I remember watching a Jordan Peterson interview where they were analyzing the case of Chloe Cole — a detransitioned young woman I actually met a few weeks ago at the Capitol in Austin. Peterson said, from a professional standpoint, that before such a life-altering decision, a person should have at least a year of weekly or biweekly therapy sessions to truly unpack what’s going on.

Of course, that didn’t happen for Chloe — and it doesn’t happen for most of these girls.

In any other situation — whether we’re talking about cancer or bipolar disorder — we would never give medication or perform major interventions without solid evidence and diagnosis. Yet, in this space, we’re skipping all those steps and making irreversible changes based solely on self-identification.

And that’s deeply concerning.

Building on everything we’ve talked about, it actually gets even worse — because not only is the affirmative care model being used, but in most cases, there’s also no real informed consent happening.

So many parents have shared that they didn’t understand even the most basic facts — like what puberty blockers actually do. They were told these medications were “safe” or “reversible,” but no one explained that they stop normal puberty and physical maturity, and that this can lead to long-term psychological and physical consequences.

Many of these kids end up developing osteoporosis — that’s something most parents never hear about beforehand. They’re also rarely told that puberty blockers can cause permanent sterilization, or that cross-sex hormones can significantly increase the risk of heart disease, cancers, and other serious medical issues.

I’ve personally met several of these young people and watched dozens of their stories online. Almost all of them said they never truly understood what they were signing up for. No one explained what these treatments would mean for their fertility, their long-term health, or their ability to experience sexual function later in life.

So my third big takeaway from all this research — and from Abigail Shrier’s documentation — is this:
👉 Affirmative care doesn’t work, and there is essentially no informed consent happening in the transgender movement.

Now, another thing that really hit home for me while reading Irreversible Damage was just how lonely this generation of teens is.

Across the board, people are lonelier than ever before — but Shrier goes into great detail showing how isolated and sheltered today’s teens have become.

In the past, teens were often seen as reckless — they’d push boundaries, do things like drink, smoke, sneak out, or drive too fast. And while those behaviors aren’t healthy, they at least represented real-world experiences. Kids were learning through trial and error, interacting face-to-face, and navigating relationships.

Today’s teens are missing that. They’re living largely online. They’re anxious about in-person interaction, and many of them are struggling with depression and social anxiety. Instead of developing healthy romantic relationships, many are turning to pornography — which completely distorts their sense of intimacy.

And if that’s what intimacy looks like to them — something degrading or violent — then it’s understandable that they would say, “I don’t want any part of that.” So when someone tells them, “Transitioning might sterilize you,” they shrug it off. They don’t care, because their concept of real love and real connection has already been damaged.

In fact, some of these girls explicitly say that their desire to transition came after watching disturbing pornography that left them afraid of men and unwilling to ever be intimate with one.

Shrier cites some powerful statistics:

So nearly half of our 17-year-olds have never had a real-world romantic relationship. They feel anxious about human interaction, spend up to nine hours a day online, and experience the highest rates of depression, anxiety, suicidality, and loneliness we’ve ever seen.

Now, one thing I really appreciated about Shrier’s approach is that she’s not saying these girls aren’t in pain. She’s saying the opposite — that they’re in deep pain. She simply believes — and I agree — that transitioning isn’t the right answer to that pain.

Most of these girls will end up regretting these irreversible decisions because they never addressed the real source of their suffering.

So my fourth big takeaway is this:
👉 Teens today are lonelier than ever, and because they lack deep, real-world relationships, they’re unequipped to make major life decisions like transitioning.

They’re already too young to fully grasp the consequences — but their emotional and social isolation makes them even more vulnerable. This loneliness and lack of connection is a huge source of pain for these girls, and it’s one of the driving forces behind this movement.

Finally, my fifth and last takeaway has to do with how all of this is being promoted and reinforced by powerful institutions — the medical establishment, the psychological establishment, the government, and the schools.

Shrier gives several examples from each, and I have to admit, I had a sense this was happening — but I didn’t realize the extent of it.

We’ve already talked about how the medical community is allowing these interventions without informed consent, and how therapists are labeling kids as trans after just one or two sessions. That’s the psychological establishment’s role — cooperating with, and in some cases outright promoting, the rush to medicalization.

Then there’s the government, which is increasingly cutting parents out of the process altogether. In Canada — and now, increasingly in the U.S. — there have been cases where parents have lost custody, been fined, or even jailed for refusing to go along with their child’s transition.

And the manipulation starts early. Parents are often told things like, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” — an emotionally manipulative statement that pushes them to comply. In some situations, they’re even legally forced to comply or threatened by professionals if they don’t.

And then there’s the school system — which I honestly didn’t realize was as involved as it is. I assumed this was mostly student-driven, maybe supported by a few activist teachers. But in many liberal states, it’s actually institutionally promoted — a very aggressive push.

Some universities now even include gender transition surgeries in their student health insurance, making it not only accessible but almost free. And, of course, there’s tremendous social and institutional support for those decisions at the college level.

All of this adds up to a perfect storm: emotional vulnerability, misinformation, social isolation, and institutional reinforcement.

Now, you’re an adult—you can make all your own decisions. But even in elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools, the schools are beginning to—especially in California and along the West Coast—put policies in place that intentionally create a break between the child and the parent.

In fact, the NEA has a policy stating that when a trans-identified student comes out at school, the parents don’t need to be informed—in fact, they usually should not be informed. There’s even a place where the child can check a box that says, “Do my parents know?” And if the parents don’t know, then the school’s policy is not to tell them.

So what happens is that schools create a separate set of documents with the child’s new name and gender on them, while holding onto the originals with the legal name. The parents only see the legal documents, so they have no idea their child is literally living a double life.

There are many stories about this happening—parents have come to the Capitol to testify about it. Schreyer gives several examples in her book, including interviews with parents who experienced this firsthand.

The NEA says, “Privacy and confidentiality are critically important for transgender students who do not have supportive families. In those situations, even inadvertent disclosures could put the student in a potentially dangerous situation at home. So it’s important to have a plan in place to help avoid any mistakes or slip-ups.”

It’s absolutely mind-blowing that these practices are becoming more and more commonplace.

So my last big takeaway is this:
👉 The profound loss of parental rights!

We are no longer seen as the ones ultimately responsible for our children. And I don’t mean “owning” them, but who does the child belong to? Is it the doctor’s child? The psychologist’s child? The school’s child? The government’s child?

It’s complicated, I get it—there are laws to protect children from abuse, and sometimes that gets gray and sticky. But this is different. These children are not capable of making such major life decisions, especially when parents genuinely believe it’s not right for them. Parents should have the right to stop that process.

Once a child turns 18 and is a legal adult, they can move forward however they choose. But parents shouldn’t have to go through the anguish and heartbreak of cooperating with something they know is deeply harmful for their child.

In one interview I watched, parents described the process as a kind of grief—they’re losing their child as that child transitions to another gender. And they’re often ostracized for it. Nobody’s on their side. Nobody sees their pain, because the focus is all about “celebrating” the child and condemning the parents if they hesitate or struggle emotionally.

I want to end with something C. Scott Miller said. He’s the Equality California liaison to the California Teachers Association—the one who gives recommendations and works on policy. Here’s what he said:

“Even parents that come in and say, ‘I don’t want my kid to be called that’—that’s nice. But their parental right ended when those kids were enrolled in public school.”

So parents, this is a call to you: rise up. Do whatever you can to educate yourselves. Read this book, read others, watch interviews, learn what laws are active in your state, and fight for your right to do what’s best for your child—whatever that looks like.

Because you are their parent, and you have the right to make those decisions. You shouldn’t be left in the dark while your children are working with Planned Parenthood, the government, or the schools without your knowledge.

Thank you for joining me for this overview of my five takeaways from Irreversible Damage. I’ll see you next time.

Get Your FREE Chapters in Audio format from The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

 “Your mission, should you choose to accept it…”

 These are words meant not just for Ethan Hunt but for YOU, right now! God divinely fashioned you to make a difference where you are. Your level of commitment to preparing for the calls God has for you will make all the difference for you, for your family, for your community, and beyond. 

 And all you have to do is say “YES!”

 Through the lens of the Mission Impossible movies, Audrey demonstrates just how mission driven living works. Then, taking those same ideas into the life of George Washington and her own personal experiences, she paints a picture of a beautiful life cadence from one call to the next—full of self-discovery, personal development, and blessings to those around us. 

 If you’re ready to say yes and begin the adventure of life mission in your own life, this podcast is for you!

________________

Transcript AI Generated:

 Hi, welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission-Driven Life, founder of The Mission-Driven Mom, creator of the MDM Academy, and I’m your host today to talk about this series of questions we’re answering—what is a mission-driven life, what is mission-driven living, how does it work, and how can we be more mission-driven individuals?

I want to thank you for joining me today. If you’re brand new, you can head back to the beginning of the podcast and listen to some of those first episodes. They’ll give you some backstory. We talk in detail about the Seven Laws of Life Mission. You can listen to some mission-driven stories, and in the meantime, you can also keep up with our most recent podcasts.

You can expect a variety of different types of podcasts here. We tell mission-driven stories about great men and women—or sometimes men and women living today—who are living according to these Seven Laws of Life Mission. We also talk about what mission-driven living and a mission-driven life look like, which we’re going to dive into today.

We also talk to some of our students and graduates about the amazing things they’re doing in the world today in their mission-driven lives. And I also interview individuals—authors, influencers, and others—who have important things to teach us about how we can be more mission-driven in our own lives right now.

So thank you for joining me. It’s a joy to be here. If you haven’t headed over to themissiondrivenmom.com to get your free audiobook chapters, I encourage you to do that. We’re giving you part of The Mission-Driven Life book so that you can hear the backstory and framework of the Seven Laws and get acquainted with them easily.

While you’re there, if you want a hard copy, you can grab a copy of the book as well.

So thank you for being here today. We’re going to answer the question: How does mission-driven living work? And if you stay until the end, you’ll hear a little about my own path along this mission-driven life that I’m attempting to lead, and some of the stories of how I got started and what it’s looked like for me.

But I want to start out by giving you a frame of reference for mission-driven living that we’re all probably familiar with—and that is the Mission: Impossible movies. You guessed it—Ethan Hunt enters stage left.

In fact, I was reviewing one of the movies recently so I could say this more intelligently to you. It’s just so funny how he’s always on a plane or a mountain or something, and then something gets dropped and it says, “This is your mission, should you choose to accept it.” And it’s always insanely difficult and basically impossible.

But in the one I was watching recently, he’s talking to his superior and says, “Well, that sounds really hard.” And his superior replies, “This is Mission: Impossible. ‘Hard’ should be a walk in the park.”

So, we aren’t going to do Mission: Impossible when we try to live a mission-driven life, but sometimes it can feel like “Mission: Pretty Hard.”

You’ve probably seen one or more Mission: Impossible movies. You know who Ethan Hunt is—you have some context. So, keeping that in mind, let’s think about how those movies always start: he’s given the opportunity to choose to do something. There’s a need in the world. The world is calling to him: “Will you come and save us?” in some specific way.

The one I watched recently was Mission: Impossible 2. In that story, there’s a deadly virus that kills within two days, and a corrupt company has been building both the virus and its antidote so they can create the problem and then sell the solution. The scientist working on it tries to get to the United States—probably to work with the U.S. government—but he’s killed along the way.

So the call that Ethan Hunt gets is: “Will you save the world? Will you find where this virus is? We have an agent who’s gone rogue—he has both the virus and the antidote—and we need to stop him before he starts a global epidemic.”

Now, the calls that you and I get aren’t going to be to save the world in such a literal way. But I want to break down what goes on with Ethan so that you can better understand how this applies to us.

If you’ve read my book—or even just parts of it—you’ve seen how, in everyday ways, we can hear and answer calls all the time. There are also larger, encompassing elements. In my last video in this series, I shared an analogy about a king who sees all the needs of his kingdom, and when you make yourself available, he sends you where you’re needed.

Today, I want to talk more about the tactical side—what it actually looks like and how it really works.

In Ethan Hunt’s case, there have been years and years of preparation. These are what we call the foundational laws: loving God, loving yourself, loving truth, and loving humanity. We’ll return to those laws all our lives. We can always get better at loving ourselves, loving God, loving truth, and loving humanity.

But until our home is in good enough order—until we’re out of victimhood, our relationships are more stable, and we’re living some solid financial and personal principles—it’s very hard, when things are messy and out of control, to go out and serve others.

That’s why, when we see ourselves as children of God and treat ourselves as such, we can first be of service to ourselves and our homes. That’s where it starts. We work on ourselves and our homes first, and then we can begin serving in our community.

Now, Ethan Hunt probably doesn’t believe in God, and I don’t know if he’s lived all these laws, but he’s definitely prepared. And those foundational laws encourage us to prepare as well. There are two ways we prepare for the calls God has for us:

We’re intentional about our preparation. We gain knowledge and skills, we work on ourselves and our homes first, and we recognize that preparation leads to calls—and calls lead to more preparation. As we execute calls, we develop new skills and gain more experience, which makes us more capable of answering larger and larger calls.

We don’t know much about Ethan Hunt’s backstory—maybe there’s a book series somewhere—but what we do know is that he shows up with massive preparation, education, and skill. He’s done a lot to become the person capable of answering a call that big—one to save the world.

Here are some practical skills he’s clearly developed:
He’s proficient with guns, explosives, and other equipment—an expert-level operator. He knows which weapons to use and when. He’s also incredibly good at hand-to-hand combat, with strength, agility, and endurance at the top of his physical game. In Mission: Impossible 2, he’s even free-climbing a rock wall at the beginning!

There are always car chases, too—and he can manage all kinds of vehicles: cars, motorcycles, helicopters, and more. He can operate them under high-stress, high-stakes conditions with incredible precision.

He also works with a team. He handpicks his people, depends on them, trusts them implicitly, listens to their advice, and surrounds himself with those who can help him accomplish his mission. He’s an excellent team leader—he sees what needs to be done and coordinates everyone effectively.

He’s also an expert in secrecy, stealth, and spy work.

Now, of course, not everyone could reach his level of proficiency—and honestly, his abilities are “impossible” because it’s Hollywood—but there are real people, like Navy SEALs or special agents, who train and develop high levels of these same kinds of skills.

He also has access to a vast network of resources. The heads of his organization are plugged into the world’s top leaders and intelligence networks. In the story I watched, they’d discovered the virus threat and were coordinating with top agencies globally. They trust Ethan completely—he’s earned that trust—and they give him everything he needs to succeed.

They provide him with other agents—in that movie, a woman whose trust he had to earn because of her relationship with the villain, which allowed her to infiltrate. He can also choose the rest of his team, and they’re all experts in their respective fields. They back him up with tech, surveillance, and intelligence.

He has access to all the equipment he needs—explosives, technology, flights, secret identities, passports, travel arrangements—whatever it takes. They also cover his living expenses and provide financial resources and global connections.

If you listened to my last podcast, this probably sounds familiar—it’s the same analogy I used before.

And finally, his personal character: we admire Ethan Hunt because he puts his life on the line for the good of others. He usually has little to gain and a lot to lose when he accepts these missions. Sometimes it’s his wife’s life at stake; other times, it’s the whole world. It’s definitely over-the-top praise for him—but it’s also inspiring.

But the fundamental issue is, he doesn’t have to be this guy. He doesn’t have to risk his life—and he does. And we know that. Sometimes his life might be at risk, but sometimes not. Sometimes it wouldn’t affect him much not to do the mission, but he’s the type of person who has been willing to do all the work to get himself in this position where he can do this kind of work. And he’s always willing to risk himself for the greater good.

He keeps himself in top condition. He accepts the mission. He has a passion for the work. He has the natural talents and abilities—in addition to the preparation. Obviously, he had interests in that direction, and he was willing to do the work to be that kind of person. In many ways, he doesn’t always have the same moral compass that I would have in different aspects of his life.

But he definitely knows some key, fundamental aspects of right and wrong. He really respects life. He tries not to kill people, even if they’re very evil, unless he absolutely has to. And it’s those traits that he has that cause us to like him, trust him, want to follow him in his adventures, and to cheer him on when he’s trying to make the world a better place.

And of course, all of us can choose to be Ethan Hunt. We can choose to live a mission-driven life, where we hear calls and we answer them. So I’m going to give you the example of George Washington, and we’re going to walk through and talk about what mission-driven living looked like for him.

And then I’m going to tell you a little bit about me. He, of course, was born in 1732 in Virginia to a slaveholding family, and they were pretty well off. I don’t know all the details—I didn’t go research everything about why he didn’t inherit and how that all went down—but when he was eleven years old, his father died.

And when this happened, basically his formal education ended. If you’ve read much about Washington or from Washington, you know that he was very self-conscious about this. He was surrounded by men who had the most elite education available, probably in the world at that time, but definitely in the United States.

And he felt inferior to them because he tried to be a lifelong learner. He tried to always keep reading and educating himself, but he hadn’t learned all of the other languages, and he hadn’t read all of the great classics that they had. And so he felt a little bit inferior, and it was because his dad died and he didn’t get to finish that formal education where he would’ve received that tutoring.

So time goes by, and he’s working, he’s learning, he’s doing the stuff. And when he’s seventeen years old, he’s appointed to be a county surveyor for a frontier county called Culpeper. It’s really interesting because this is where his interests, his natural propensities—his strengths—really started to show. He was a very tall man, a very strong man. He was more inclined to tactical things rather than abstract ones.

Someone like Thomas Jefferson was interested in tinkering with things and inventing, but definitely way more of an intellectual. George Washington loved to be outdoors. He loved the rough and tumble. He loved to do things with his hands. So when he was seventeen years old, he accepted this post to be a surveyor, and he did really well at it.

He really, really liked it—and it was rough work. I mean, he was out living in the middle of nowhere on his own, living off the land, and trying to survey this county by himself. It taught him a lot of lessons.

And the question I’m going to ask as I go through this example, and my own, is—was this his mission? Was the call to be a surveyor? Well, yeah, he felt like it was the right thing to do. It matched his interests, and like I mentioned before, it developed certain traits, certain gifts, certain skills that he used later. The more he did this kind of thing, the better he got at it, and the more everything he learned could be of use.

It’s this cumulative effect in our lives when we say yes. And he keeps saying yes—to the next call, to the next opportunity. He faces his fears. He steps out courageously. He does something he’s never done before. Sometimes with minimal mentorship, sometimes with minimal financial aid—he just does it. He takes on the adventure. He says yes to the call again and again.

A couple of years later, his brother becomes ill. So they travel together to Barbados—it’s the only time Washington travels outside North America. While he’s in Barbados, he contracts smallpox. Again, this becomes an opportunity to go do something adventurous, to see the world, and it’s also a call to take care of his brother. He travels with him so he doesn’t have to travel alone.

And guess what happens? He gets really, really sick. But by virtue of the fact that he got sick, he was able to care for his soldiers and remain in the war later when smallpox broke out. So again, every time we take an opportunity to serve—he’s serving his brother, he’s developing his own skills—it comes back to bless him and many other people in the future.

A year or so later, Governor Dinwiddie, the governor of Virginia, sends him on a mission to the Ohio Valley to deliver a message to the French. And when he goes on this journey, he keeps a journal and writes down everything that happens. When he’s done, it’s a successful mission, but again, it’s fraught with danger.

He’s traveling through Native American territory to deliver a message to the French. It’s very dangerous—he could have lost his life—but it was important for Virginia that this happen. He had proven himself in the militia and through his work as a surveyor, so he was given this task. In fact, I think he may have even volunteered for it.

He was just in his early twenties. By virtue of the fact that he ran a successful mission and wrote down his journal, which he later handed to Governor Dinwiddie, this journal was printed—and you can still find it online. It made him a local celebrity and earned him a lot of respect.

A year later, he’s still a soldier—now a major—and he travels again to the Ohio Valley to fight for Virginia’s claim on some land. During that campaign, he has a combative confrontation with French soldiers. His men end up retreating and surrendering. It’s really embarrassing to Washington. But again, he’s on the front lines. He’s learning a lot from these experiences.

He’s so embarrassed by this that he resigns his commission. That failed campaign ends up sparking the French and Indian War. He could’ve just decided he’d had enough—that he was too embarrassed, that it was over—but he didn’t. He didn’t slink away. He kept saying yes when new opportunities came.

He recognized that he loved being in the military—that was where he performed best—and that he really wanted to be involved. He loved his country, the colony of Virginia, and he wanted to fight for and defend it.

The next year, he returns to the Ohio frontier as a volunteer for General Braddock. He exhibits great courage and leadership, and because of this, he’s recognized for his conduct in battle and given command of the entire military force of Virginia. Still a very young man, just in his mid-twenties, he’s already recognized as someone with great courage and valor in the face of death.

Of course, countless people in America—and around the world—owe the freedom they enjoy, at least in part, to this man.

A few years later, he marries Martha Custis, the widow of a wealthy man and mother of two young children. George and Martha couldn’t have children together—it was probably George’s infertility, since Martha had already had children. He loved his stepchildren as his own.

For the next sixteen years, they lived at Mount Vernon. He was a gentleman farmer, and he loved it. From the beginning, he was born into a slaveholding culture—he couldn’t change that—but he did try to live it differently. He was generous with his slaves. He kept families together and wouldn’t sell them off, even though it became a financial burden. He gave them opportunities to innovate on the property and lived in relative harmony with them.

Obviously, they were still enslaved, so I’m not trying to sugarcoat it—but within the time and place he lived, he elevated his circumstances. He lived a higher level of truth at a time when he didn’t have to. That tells us a lot about his character.

Then, of course, in 1775, he’s appointed Commander of the Continental Army. For eight years he risks his life over and over again, taking care of his soldiers who often had nothing. If you study that war, you’ll see the struggle and the heartache—how they went without supplies, how the states didn’t always send soldiers or money. It was awful.

And when the war was over, he resigned his commission and gave his power back to the people. He was declared a hero around the world because that kind of humility and integrity were rare.

Finally, I said yes. Okay, I’ll try it. You’re gonna get what you’re gonna get—I just made sure they understood this was going to be whatever it was going to be. I wasn’t making any promises. But they wanted me to come, so I did.

I found out that I’m a pretty okay speaker naturally. Then I got asked to be on a panel, and then to speak more at conferences. So for over twenty years, I’ve been public speaking simply because I said yes when people asked me. They saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself, and I responded to that feedback.

So this book club grows and grows. By the end of that year, I’m homeschooling, and I realize we don’t have the kinds of things I want—we don’t have a science fair, we don’t have group outings, we don’t have family events. I really wanted an annual Shakespeare dinner for couples where we could read Shakespeare together and enjoy a traditional dinner. I wanted a family ball.

And I knew other people wanted these things too. I saw a need, and I answered the call. I gathered a few friends, we met over the summer, brainstormed how we could do it together. We booked a free room at the library, sent out invitations to people we knew, and asked them to invite others.

They came, they paid a small annual fee, they volunteered in the community, and we connected online. It grew and grew until we had over a hundred families in this community. We had an annual ball every year. Later I moved, but it outlived me—it kept going.

And all I did was say yes—like George Washington, like Ethan Hunt. Every time I said yes, I learned, I grew, I developed. I found more gifts. I made mistakes and learned from them. And over time, I was able to have more and more influence—really until now.

Today, I’m on this podcast. I’ve had the privilege of talking to people like James Lindsay and Susie Mighell, who will be on soon, and others I’ve been reaching out to. I’ve been able to work with Richard Paul Evans, a number one New York Times bestselling author, who helped design my cover and endorsed my book.

I’ve had the privilege of amazing experiences—meeting heroes, taking pictures with them, and hoping to meet more. When I was bumping around that college campus years ago, I never imagined I’d be doing what I’m doing today.

I’m not famous. Most people don’t know who I am. I’m not Ethan Hunt or George Washington. But in my own small way, in the circles I move in, I’m trying to serve. I’m trying to see a need and answer a call—to give people something that I believe will bless their lives.

And in many cases, it’s blessed mine too. In every case, I bring my family with me. I’ve taught them the things I’ve learned, read books aloud to them, and built a family culture of great literature. They saw the book club in our home. They saw me taking risks and facing fears. They’ve come to hear me speak, and when I was on the radio or speaking at big public rallies, they could be proud of a mom using her gifts in the world.

I’ve had the privilege of serving over six hundred women in the academy and watching their lives change through the curriculum I’ve built—which happens to be one of my gifts.

And you can do these same things. You are so much more gifted than you think you are. You can truly live a mission-driven life—where, over time, as you see a need and say yes, as you grow in your love of God, you love yourself better. You take the actions of love for yourself—self-care, self-leadership, self-discovery.

Then you love truth. You build a principle-centered life and a principle-centered home and family. Then you go out and learn about the people in your community. You understand the bridges you can build through shared principles. Then you see needs and start to answer them—as many of our graduates are doing right now.

And as you listen to their stories on this podcast, I hope they’ll inspire you too. This is you. This can be you. You are amazing. All you have to do is say yes.

Just say yes right now. Offer yourself to God. Tell Him that you’re willing to learn and grow—to face fears, to take personal inventory, to strive to overcome, and to grow as an individual. He will show you the first step.

If my book can help, I’m grateful. If our academy can help, I’m grateful. But most of all, what I really want you to know is that you are divinely fashioned—that you are irreplaceable, that your worth is infinite, and that you can make a difference right now, where you are. You’re already leading. People are already following you. They’re watching you level up, improve your game, improve your skills.

Go practice more. Be willing to fail faster. Be willing to take risks. Be willing to face your fears. You will be shocked at the person you become, the opportunities that open up to you, and the positive influence you get to have—right where you are, in your own world.

So please, become that servant leader God means for you to be—because the world misses out if you don’t become who you could be.

Thank you so much for joining me today. If this podcast has been a help or inspiration to you, please pass it along and leave us a review. Thank you for joining me, and I’ll see you next time.

Get Your FREE Chapters in Audio format from The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

This week we get to hear about the spiritual strength and resilience of Catherine Marshall. As a young girl, Catherine had three dreams:

Through her diligence in the 7 Laws of Life Mission, she was able to accomplish all three in amazing ways! As graduate of Agnes Scott College, married to the most famous pastor in America and eventually a New York Times bestselling author, Catherine set her course and never relented.

 But it was her relationship with God that made it all possible. And her incredible willingness to be honest with herself and course correct when she knew she wasn’t living as she should, was the real magic of her life.

 In this podcast, you’ll hear beautiful stories of personal triumph that have inspired Audrey and many others to put God first, love themselves, and strive to fulfill God’s missions for them. It will motivate you to step into your callings and fulfill them with integrity!

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Transcript AI Generated:

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, founder of The Mission-Driven Mom and author of The Mission-Driven Life. On this podcast, we talk about all thing’s life mission. We interview great men and women who are living mission-driven lives or have important concepts and principles to share with us.

We talk about what mission-driven living looks like and how moms can be more mission-centered. We focus on natural law and true principles—how we can build principle-centered homes and lives, how we can take care of ourselves, discover who we are, and lead ourselves and others. All those great concepts and more you will find on this podcast.

I'm super excited today to be sharing with you a mission-driven story about Catherine Marshall. This is where we highlight someone in history who really well exemplifies the seven laws of life mission as they lived them. They’ve left a very positive imprint on the world through aligning themselves with these seven laws of life mission and their accompanying principles.

So I'm really excited to share some of Catherine Marshall’s greatest insights—some of her greatest battles and victories—as a woman of faith and a truly mission-driven mom.

Before we do that, if you're new to this podcast, continue listening to these new episodes, but you might want to consider going back to the beginning and listening to some of those initial podcasts where I introduce myself and my history, explain how we got to be doing what we’re doing, and walk you through those seven laws in more detail.

Those podcasts are a great companion to The Mission-Driven Life book, and you’ll hear lots of other mission-driven stories besides Catherine Marshall’s. You’ll get a lot of really nourishing content that I hope will inspire and uplift you and help you on your life’s path.

Oh, one last thing—if you have not gone and gotten your free chapters of The Mission-Driven Life, head over to themissiondrivenmom.com right now and make sure to grab those audio chapters of the book. You can listen to them, get an overview, and gain an understanding of what we’re doing here. And then, if you want to grab a hard copy of the book, it’s available there as well.

I also want to mention that I’m continuing to work on my new book, How Truth Makes Us Free, and hope to do that launch in the spring of 2026. I’m working on chapter seven of about ten or eleven chapters, and then I’ll send it over to the editor. We’ll start looking at book covers and all that good stuff.

So I’m getting excited—it’s getting real! You can look forward to that book coming out. Hopefully, it’ll be something to help you as well.

So let’s dive into Catherine Marshall. She is quite an amazing woman. She was born in the early 1900s—1914—in Greenville, Tennessee. She moved several different places during her life, and she had a Presbyterian minister for a father.

She never had much money; they struggled pretty much all her life. But she has some beautiful tributes to her mother especially, who did some pretty amazing things. She says that her mother, Leonora, was born in 1891 and raised in North Carolina, and when she was 18, she volunteered to be a teacher for Dr. Edward O. Garren’s mission, which was located in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee.

That story, which I’ll mention in a little bit, was one Catherine heard about all through her childhood. She was really fascinated by this story, and eventually, one of her great dreams—she had three great dreams in her life—was to become a successful author. Well, she did do that, and Christy, I think, is the pinnacle of all her writing. It’s my very favorite book—one of my favorite books in the world—but definitely my favorite book by Catherine Marshall. It is the story of her mother and the work that she did among the Appalachian people in the Great Smoky Mountains.

She met her husband there, actually, when she was doing this service work. Her mother was very mission-driven—her parents very mission-driven—and so that was modeled for her. When Catherine was a young girl, about nine or ten years old, she gave her life to Jesus, and after that, she tried to be a good Christian girl, following the example of her mother.

She said she never thought of them as poor because her mother’s philosophy was to find good in every circumstance and to always emulate a very consistent, positive attitude. In the Academy, we call this optimistic realism, and her mother really portrayed that. She said her mother’s real secret was an utter, confident inner attitude. Always before her was the picture of a healthy, fulfilled family.

Catherine said of her mother: “No matter how little you have, you can always give some of it away. And when you do that, you can’t feel sorry for yourself, and you can scarcely consider yourself poor.”

That was one of many lessons I learned in studying the life of Catherine Marshall. It really made even more sense to me about the principle of the tithe and philanthropy. To be generous not only helps others—I always knew it helped the person we give to—but it also helps us in ways I had never thought about. It helps us feel more affluent, to feel like we have enough for ourselves and to share. It helps us stay out of self-pity and have an attitude of gratitude because we do have enough and can share. It’s a constant reminder of those who have less than us.

This is a really beautiful principle that her mother taught her. She also volunteered in the community. They moved to this place called Radical Hill, and she wanted to change the name of the vicinity from Radical Hill to Potomac Heights. She and her volunteers refurbished an old abandoned hotel and made it a meeting place for all kinds of activities, including a Bible study and childcare classes given by herself.

This was what she was giving to the community around her. Like I talk about in the book—and we talk about in the Academy a lot—this mindset begins when we first learn to love ourselves better and to love God better. Her mother Leonora, renamed Christy in the novel, really did this. She understood what her gifts were. She volunteered for service work at a young age. She learned a lot about herself during that mission work she did as a young woman, and eventually, she learned to love humanity.

She put her life on a foundation of true principles by loving truth—that’s Law Four—and then she learned to love humanity and became a servant leader. When she was 19 and volunteered to go up into the mountains to teach the backwoods people, she learned how to give herself to God.

If you read the book Christy (which I highly recommend—and we do in the Academy), you see her personal growth. You see how she gives herself to God, learns to understand what faith is, and learns to take care of herself properly, etc.

By the time she’s a mother of growing children, she not only has a home centered on principles and faith; she also knows how to give in meaningful ways to the community. She sees the problems around her and, like I say in the book, she offers principled solutions to real-world problems.

These were real-world problems—probably you and I would both rather live in a place called Potomac Heights than Radical Hill! She built this community center, and it became a hub. Eventually, the welfare board that had been helping her run this work had to tell her there weren’t enough funds to even pay her. She didn’t mind—she continued doing it for free. And through Leonora’s inspiration, the work continued and the community was renewed.

So beautiful.

By the time Catherine Marshall was 12, 13, 14, she had a pretty clear vision of her future—of the kind of woman she wanted to become and what she wanted her life to look like.

Her first and most cherished goal, like I said before, was to become an author. She wasn’t sure what she was going to write, but she knew she loved to write, and that felt like the right calling or vocation for her. She also really wanted to attend Agnes Scott College.

I relate to her for a lot of reasons, but also because I’m right in the throes of having children who are applying to college. Two of my youngest knew the colleges they wanted to attend, and it was just in their hearts so strongly. Neither of them has been accepted to those schools yet, but I know it’s possible for them if they still cherish that dream—just like Catherine did.

I’m going to tell you a story in a minute about how that happened for her. She genuinely wanted to attend Agnes Scott College. For whatever reason, that was just on her heart and really important to her. She also wanted to marry a wonderful man and have a family.

She had cherished these dreams, gone through high school, and done the work to get herself accepted to Agnes Scott College. But it was expensive—more expensive than her family could afford. As college drew close, she became more and more discouraged that she wouldn’t have the money to pay for it.

Of course, this was a time in history when there weren’t government grants being handed out. If you wanted a college education, you had to come up with the money. And I do think that helped build character for many people who were required to do that.

But she was hundreds of dollars short. One night, her mother came to her room and found her weeping because she was so discouraged that this dream was never going to come true—that she would never be able to attend this college.

Her mother said to her: “Catherine, I know it’s right for you to go to college. Every problem has a solution. Let’s ask God to tell us how to bring this dream to reality.”

What took place next was truly life-changing for Catherine.

Right then and there, her mother encouraged them both to kneel and pray. I don’t know if they said vocal prayers together first, but as the clock ticked, they remained on their knees, eventually saying individual quiet prayers. One of the ways Catherine described it was that her mother was admitting her to the “inner sanctum of her prayer closet.”

So they’re there praying, and Catherine’s really trying to have a spiritual experience and connect with God.

This is from her journal:

“As I prayed, as time went on, as we continued to pray for I don’t know how long, finally the truth struck me. For most of my life, I had been selfish. I had been working toward selfish purposes. I had given so little of myself to God. I had not really taken much part in Mother’s work to transform Radical Hill to Potomac Heights. With a sinking heart, I remembered all the times I had seen members of the church coming up the front walk, and I would flee up the back stairs to my room where I could be alone to read and not have to give myself to others in the sharing of their problems. Scene after scene flashed across my mind’s eye—the times I had resented my brother and sister, the many occasions when my parents had gone without something they needed so we children could have new clothing, piano lessons, books, or sports equipment. I felt more unworthy than ever, and my going to college would call for yet more sacrifices from my parents. I stole a look at my mother. She was praying intensely, but soundlessly, with her lips moving. Then, closing my eyes, I silently prayed the most honest prayer of my life to that point. “Lord, I have been selfish. I have taken everything from You, from Your Church, and from my parents—and given little of myself in return. Forgive me for this, Lord. Perhaps I don’t deserve to go to a college like Agnes Scott.”  A deep sob in my throat made me pause. I knew what I had to do.”

She goes on:

“And Lord, I turn this dream over to You. I give it up. It’s in Your hands. You decide.”

And something really beautiful happened after that, she said.

“I was learning the price of a relationship with God—and it’s dropping all of our masks and pretense. We must come to Him with stark honesty, as we are—or not at all. My honesty brought me relief. It washed away the guilt. It strengthened my faith.”

And I have to say, from a personal standpoint, I have had this experience many times—even recently—when I’ve wanted certain problems or personal issues I was experiencing to go away. When I wanted to feel differently about myself or other people, I’ve had to go through my own self-evaluation.

I’ve had to look honestly at what’s really driving me and to truly repent—to tell God I’m sorry—because so much of it is wrapped up in my ego and how I want to present myself to the world. My self-image, what people say and think about me—I want to be able to control that. And really, that’s not handing it over to Him.

Remembering and recognizing that nobody else’s perceptions matter besides the Lord’s—and that I’ve got to put my ego aside if I really want to be close to Him, if I really want the peace I’m seeking, if I truly want to engage in my relationships in healthier, better ways—it can’t be about any of that.

So I really, really related here. And there are a couple of other stories I’m going to tell you today where I deeply related to what Catherine was going through. I could see in my own life how necessary it was for me to again hand it over—to live that principle of willingness that I talk about in my book and in the Academy.

We have to hand it over to God and stop trying to control everything else. We can only control ourselves—and that’s it. When we really accept that truth and get serious about finding the tools, principles, and skills to manage and lead ourselves better, we find that everything goes better in our lives.

Living these principles is so beautiful—and of course, she had a beautiful result from this story.

Not long after this, their petition was answered. Leonora received a letter from the federal government offering her a salary to write the history of the county. The money was more than enough to pay Catherine’s tuition.

Catherine stood in awe of the God of her mother—the God who forgave her selfish attitude and graciously supplied what she needed to attend college.

So this was really her first major spiritual experience—where she saw the kinds of things God could do for her personally. It awakened her to how important her relationship with God was, how she could nurture it, and what it was going to require of her.

Throughout her life, she was always trying to dig deeper into this relationship—and it’s amazing. I’m not going to tell you all the stories, but I’m going to recommend a couple of books you can read if you want to know more about her.

What we find with Catherine Marshall—as with so many other mission-driven individuals—is that she’s backed up against a wall and realizes that she has more personal power than she thinks she does. And much of that power lies in giving herself up to God—giving herself up to principles and truths she’s been ignoring or denying.

I’ll tell you one of those stories in just a minute. But first, to fill in the blanks of her story: she went off to college, and not far from there was a man named Peter Marshall, who was the pastor of a church. He was from Scotland—I talked about this a little bit in a previous podcast—and he was incredible.

If you haven’t watched A Man Called Peter or read the book, it’s very worth your time. The movie is especially good—it covers this entire period of Catherine’s life. I’m going to touch briefly on what happens during her marriage to Peter Marshall, but you can have a beautiful experience watching that film and learning more about their story.

You’ll learn about his life, how he got to that point, and you’ll see their courtship and marriage. I’m going to spend more time on what happened before and after that time period so you can go watch the movie for their shared experiences.

Basically, he was the pastor, and she felt drawn to him. He was about ten or twelve years older than her. By the time she was a sophomore or junior, she was attending his church pretty regularly. She was noticing him; he was noticing her—but he was incredibly busy as a pastor, traveling and speaking, and having a lot of success.

He had been an immigrant from Scotland, like I said, and was called to the ministry. He’d even had his life miraculously saved—really incredible experiences. He kind of dated her a little bit, but then she wouldn’t hear from him for long periods, so she thought he wasn’t interested. She’d try to get over him and be mad at him, but eventually they connected, and after she graduated from college, they were married.

They had a very united, beautiful relationship. He was very good to her, and she was very good to him. He took her feelings and thoughts into account all the time. Even though she was younger, he respected her wishes and involved her in decisions. They felt very unified.

They were only able to have one child together—a son, named for his father. There was a really incredible experience that Catherine had after Peter Jr. was two or three years old. She became very ill with tuberculosis and languished for two or three years.

She tried everything. She had an incredible spiritual journey—confined to bed most of that time and not getting better. She went through these spiritual steps of drawing closer to God, really getting herself to that point—and this happens so often—where she was willing to let God’s will be done.

There were multiple times in her life when that theme rang so loudly. If you want to understand that principle better, again, read some of these books, listen to the mission-driven stories I share here, learn about it in my book—and if you really want to dive deep, you can join us in the Academy.

But she goes through this whole experience—beautifully portrayed in the movie—where she eventually gives it to God and says, “I will be an invalid all my life if that’s Your will.” And it’s at that point she turns a corner. She begins to heal, and within six months, she’s up and about.

It’s really a beautiful story.

A couple of years after that—maybe just two or three years later—Peter, her husband, began having heart issues. He eventually had a heart attack. Though he recovered and seemed to be doing better, he died quite suddenly in his mid-forties.

When Peter died, she was just 34 years old. She was a young widow, a single mother. She kept a lot of journals, so we have many of her words. She also spoke and wrote quite a bit.

In one of her writings, she talked about the divine comfort she was given after Peter’s death:

“Peter Marshall’s death from a heart attack at 46 was a devastating blow. ‘Why?’ I asked the Lord. ‘Why take a man who loves You so much, who is in the prime of his life, whose impact on people for You is so great?’ In the midst of grief, I had a million whys. One of them was answered. Instead, into my anguished emotions there crept one morning a strange, all-pervading peace. Through and around me flowed love as I had never before experienced it. It was as if Someone who loved me very much were wrapping me round and round with His infinite care and protection. I knelt there, marveling at what was happening. I had done nothing, said nothing to bring it about. I understood no more than before the reason for my young husband’s death. I only knew that, in some transcendent way, it was deeply and eternally all right.”

She had this beautiful experience after he died, which gave her great peace. But then she was left to raise their son on her own.

She began to struggle financially, and she began sharing more about Peter’s life. That eventually led to her writing A Man Called Peter. The book became an instant success—it was a New York Times bestseller—and was quickly made into the 1955 movie I mentioned earlier (which you can still stream online).

That brought in revenue and peace of mind. It was beautiful that she was finally doing the writing she had always wanted to do and finding success at it. That brought both financial stability and personal fulfillment.

She began having daily devotionals with God and spending quiet time with Him. During this period, Peter Jr. was really struggling. As a teenager and young adult, he became quite rebellious.

At 14, he started smoking. He was reading and watching bad things, getting into trouble with the law with his friends, and living a reckless college life. Having grown up with such a spiritually strong father, he didn’t deal well with the loss, and Catherine struggled to connect with him.

These were difficult years. During her daily devotionals, the Lord would counsel her—sometimes giving her very practical advice. She wrote in her journal that God said things like:

“Don’t be afraid for young Peter. No harm will come to him. You still have not completely released Peter to Me. Fear usually comes from guilt.”

And then more practical guidance, like:

“Here’s what to do with TV and movies. Here’s how to teach tidiness, responsibility for his own clothes, money and allowances.”

She felt God helping her. She was striving to live by principles—to establish her home and life on truth. She kept returning to those foundational laws so she could live the leadership laws better.

Here she was—called to be a single mom, called to be an author—trying to love herself, her son, and humanity. She was struggling, but she kept trying to learn how.

One of the things that crept in during these years was loneliness. That loneliness led to self-pity, and that self-pity led to a negative outlook on life. When she looked out at the world, she saw the bad.

For a long time, she didn’t even want to date again because she felt it would be a betrayal to Peter. Eventually, she felt more peace about it and began to date. She fell in love with a man named Howard, but he wasn’t a spiritual person at all—and that became a big barrier in their relationship.

Eventually, she had an experience where she came to see what she was doing wrong.

This was something that she wrote in her journal:

“I had a revelation today that there has to be someone else for me into whose life I can pour everything—since this is what my whole being cries out for. It is sure, as sure as the fulfillment of the tides of the ocean, that love will come again somewhere.

There is a man whose life needs this lavish giving, whose personality and career will bloom and blossom under it.”

So she realized she wanted to give herself to someone else. And one of the lessons she learned during this whole period of life—where she was single for a dozen or more years—was that God helps to sculpt and change us through family life.

It is one of the greatest schools of our time on Earth, and it’s through these family relationships that He helps us become who we can become. But she didn’t have someone to give herself to, and by the time Peter went off to school, she was even more lonely.

She was trying to figure out how to find someone, but when things didn’t work out with Howard, she became even lonelier and more discouraged. Eventually, she had an experience that helped her understand what she had been doing wrong.

She wrote this in her journal:

“For this past year, I have felt defeated and frustrated—and this certainly is not as God wishes it. Here are some of the ways I have allowed my loneliness to defeat me.”

She talked about how the savor had gone out of her life. “This is wrong,” she said. “The zest has gone out of everything.”

She just felt down and depressed, negative about most aspects of her life. She wrote:

“There has been a growing coldness in my heart toward other people. Visiting the sick has been a chore. There hasn’t been any joy in it. There’s been an increasing preoccupation with self.”

She sought more satisfaction in material things than spiritual things. She had been more irritable about the daily grind of life.

She wrote:

“I’ve known that God wanted me to wake up earlier and spend an hour with Him, but I haven’t been consistent in doing it.”

She hadn’t been engaged in self-mastery as she once had been. She had been giving in to little passions that were leading to bigger ones.

So this self-evaluation—like I mentioned earlier—was again really replenishing. And it actually is. I know I bring up Alcoholics Anonymous a lot, but it’s such a beautiful example of the spiritual journey we all have to be on.

For those alcoholics, it’s the daily inventory—staying out of self-pity, forgiving instead of resenting. And it’s recognizing that while self-evaluation might seem painful or difficult, it’s actually freeing.

As moms, we sometimes think that if we’re really honest with ourselves, we’ll feel even more depleted and worse than before. But actually, it’s so liberating—if we do it honestly, not in a self-pitying way like, “Oh, I’m so subhuman, I could never be different; life is awful; I can’t change.”

Rather, in a spirit of curiosity: What have I been doing that’s actually holding me back? What are my perceptions, my attitudes, my habits that are keeping me stuck?

And how can I gain new skills and tools for being different?

This is what Catherine beautifully demonstrates—over and over again—and it’s so renewing, so empowering.

This is why we’ve built the Academy the way we have. Because some of the hardest work we have to do is this work of self-leadership.

We need to engage in self-care—really taking care of ourselves by meeting our real needs, as I talk about in the book and in the Academy. Then we engage in self-leadership—this kind of self-evaluation, this personal inventory we take on an ongoing basis.

And then we move into self-discovery—that beautiful reminder that we are divinely fashioned, uniquely made, bringing unique gifts and talents into the world that we must develop and use.

Cycling through those stages in the Academy is very nourishing.

So I encourage you: follow up this personal inventory and the peace that comes from God by recognizing your gifts—and then go out and develop and use those gifts for good.

That’s how this beautiful rhythm works.

One more story I want to share with you before we finish up.

After all of this happened—and after she was honest about what loneliness was doing to her—she had already recognized her deep desire to pour her life into someone.

There was a man named Len, whose wife was an alcoholic who never recovered. They tried everything, stayed together for a long time, but eventually she had to be institutionalized.

When that happened, he wanted to move forward in his life. While he and his children still maintained some contact with her, he was left to raise three children alone.

He knew of Catherine Marshall because he worked in the publishing industry and she was a well-known author. They had met once and interacted a little.

At one point, after rebelling against God for a time—living carelessly for months or maybe a year, which was very detrimental to his family—Len finally came to himself. He realized, This isn’t who I want to be.

He went to God and said, “Okay, I want to do this, but I need help.” And Catherine Marshall’s name came to his mind in prayer.

He sought opportunities to see her. They didn’t live near each other, but he found excuses to travel where she was and spend time with her. Eventually, it became clear that he was trying to court her.

They did fall in love, but she was hesitant. His children were still at home, she was in her mid-forties, and taking on early motherhood again—with one child under ten and teenagers besides—felt daunting.

She didn’t want to do it. But again, she went back to God. She was willing to accept His will in her life, and it ended up being a huge blessing for her—and for them.

She learned many lessons, and they grew together. His children came to see her as their mother, and they loved her deeply. Beautiful things came from that union.

The last story I want to tell you as we finish up the mission-driven life of Catherine Marshall brings us full circle.

Her son Peter got married, and it turned out that he and his wife shared a genetic combination that gave their children a 50% chance of inheriting a rare, fatal disease.

Their first child was healthy, but their second was born with the disease and died within a few months. When they were expecting their third—a little girl—they knew the risk.

When she was born, she too had the disease.

Peter Jr., and especially Catherine, decided they would intervene—that somehow God would perform a miracle and save this baby’s life. They were determined.

Catherine did what she knew best: she turned to intercessory prayer. She had led many prayer groups before, so she gathered a dozen devoted friends and they prayed around the clock for a week.

They did everything medically possible and spiritually possible.

By this time, Peter Jr. had experienced a personal conversion, had come back to God and to Christianity, and was even serving as a pastor. He and his wife were happily married and devoted to faith.

But despite their prayers and efforts, the baby’s life was not spared. She died within a few months.

This loss sent Catherine into one of the deepest depressions of her life. Once again, something happened she couldn’t control—something she didn’t want—and she believed she had done everything right. She couldn’t understand why God hadn’t intervened.

For months she languished—depressed, sleepless, anxious, and withdrawn. Her husband Len couldn’t reach her.

Finally, after several months, two of her close friends came to see her. They came to lovingly confront her. She had been in seclusion, and they knew it was time.

Now, this isn’t how we often handle things today. In our modern world, we sometimes forget that peace can still come even when we don’t understand.

Catherine didn’t have a genetic disorder causing her depression—this was circumstantial grief, deep and understandable. Her friends had given her time to grieve, but after months of isolation, they felt led to intervene.

They asked her about her anger toward God. She insisted she wasn’t angry—because she knew it would do no good. But they told her that God wanted her to stop wallowing in self-pity, to confess the sin of rebellion, and to repent.

It was a powerful moment.

Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with seeking professional help or medication when needed. But sometimes, as Catherine demonstrated throughout her life, deep peace also requires honest self-examination and alignment with truth.

She explained to her friends that confession and repentance hadn’t helped. She said:

“I’ve already done this again and again. I honestly have. It’s the complete lack of response that confounds me. I’ve never lived in this kind of vacuum before.
I talk, I pray—nothing. For most of my life, I’ve felt God’s presence, heard His voice, received thoughts that I knew came from Him. No more. He’s gone out of my life.”

She told them she had been so caught up in the battle for her granddaughter Amy’s life that she could hardly think straight.

Through this experience, she eventually realized that she had been acting on her will—not necessarily God’s.

She wrote:

“I’ve always tried to be 100% in everything I do, and always before, God honored my efforts. Why not this time?”

And that realization was profound.

It helped her see what she had been missing: she had to accept life as it was, to stop fighting against it.

This is something we talk about often—in the book and in the Academy—that there are things we can control and things we cannot.

When we can’t control something, we have to truly let go.

I realized I had been hanging on to expectations—things I wanted to happen—and that was, in its own way, rebellion.

Catherine wrote something that finally made it clear:

“We must completely and profoundly accept the circumstances which God allows. If He can do anything, He can change circumstances—and if He chooses not to, then it is our job to accept them.”

That doesn’t mean accepting defeat. It means accepting reality so deeply that we are no longer in rebellion—and then we can bloom right where we are.

Her friend Virginia pinpointed it:

“Catherine, what lies at the root of your anguish is your insistence on understanding. You want answers. You want to know why.”

And that’s the key difference.

When her husband Peter died years before, she didn’t know why—but she accepted it and found peace.

She wrote:

“I am beginning to see it all now. The instant we are in a state of rebellion, we have not only lost our contentment and joy—we have also declared personal war on God. If God is truly God, then He is Lord and ruler of circumstances.
So if we are rebellious against the circumstances He has allowed, then we are, in practical fact, rebelling against Him.
No wonder God withdrew His presence from me. My spirit of rebellion shut the door in His face. It was saying, ‘I will do it my own way. I will be the boss of my own life.’”

From that point on, she began rising at six again, spending that hour with God in prayer and scripture each morning. She felt renewal.

Not long after, her health began to decline again. The damage from her earlier tuberculosis worsened, and she eventually passed away.

But the lessons she left us with are powerful.

Accepting the circumstances God allows doesn’t mean we stop growing. It means we stop using them as excuses not to grow.

We stop saying, “I can’t change because of my kids, my husband, my finances, my health, my past…”

We profoundly accept what we cannot control—so that God can show us how to grow within those circumstances.

And when we do that, peace and purpose return.

That’s what Catherine’s life showed me—and why her story has meant so much to me personally.

Her willingness to do this personal inventory all throughout her life—to accept the circumstances God allowed, and then seek truth and apply the principles of human growth and potential—led her to constantly move forward, forgive, develop, and give.

She answered calls to write, to pray, to serve, to lead, to love—and she did it all as a servant leader.

She truly inspires me.

I hope something in her story has lifted you today. I hope it’s reminded you of a principle you can begin to practice—and inspired you to live more intentionally by the seven laws of life mission.

May you find deeper meaning, chase your potential while bringing your family along with you, and have a positive impact in the world through your unique gifts.

You are divinely fashioned. God loves you dearly. He will use you if you are willing—and He will heal you if you will let His will be done in your life.

Thank you for joining me today. I’m so grateful we could spend this time together. I hope you have a wonderful week, and I’ll see you next time.

Get Your 3 FREE Audiobook Chapters of The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

In this brief interview, Carolyn shares how the principles of the MDM Academy transformed her life, her marriage, and her relationships. She discusses why the program appealed to her, the rich friendships she developed through the academy, and how principles are improving her life!

If you've ever wondered about whether or not this program is for you or your family, this interview will answer your questions and inspire you to let principles transform YOUR life!

Listen to the David Emerald interview for a deep dive into some of the concepts that have changed Carolyn's life! https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/podcasts/the-mission-driven-mom-podcast/episodes/2148868481

 ___________

Podcast Transcript (AI Generated)

 All right. Welcome back to the podcast! Thanks for joining me today. I’ve got Carolyn Marriott with me — a good friend and a member of the Mission Driven Mom Academy. We’re just going to talk for a few minutes today about her experience.

For those of you who might be considering it, have gone through part of it, or are wondering how to get through it — or even what it’s all about and why you should care — Carolyn’s going to share some of her experiences. I thought she would be a great person to answer some of your questions, concerns, and other things that have come up about what this whole thing is, why it matters, and how it can bless your life.

So Carolyn, let’s start by you just telling us a little bit about yourself — your family, your career path, education, whatever you’d like to share.

Carolyn:
Okay. Well, let’s go clear back. I was a straight-A student all through high school — pretty good in college.

Audrey:
Mm-hmm.

Carolyn:
Not quite as straight-A, but still good. But I always knew there was something missing.

Audrey:
I felt that way too.

Carolyn:
Yeah. That’s so crazy. Why is that? Ugh.

Audrey:
“This can’t be it.” Like, is this it?

Carolyn:
Exactly. I had this piece of paper in my hand, and I knew I’d never read Shakespeare yet! I mean, I knew enough to know that there were holes — that I didn’t know how to think. I knew that for a long time.

Maybe it was because my dad was such a good example — he was super smart, always reading difficult things. I wouldn’t necessarily say classics, but he was always reading and talking about ideas and stuff. He didn’t really teach us how to do it — maybe he modeled it — but we didn’t really have discussions.

Anyway, I don’t mean to criticize him, but maybe it was because of him that I knew I was inadequately educated.

And then as I started having kids and sending them to school, I was unhappy with the school system. We were not in a good district, and I began homeschooling. That’s when I say my education really started, because all of a sudden I had this fantastic interest in learning — what education was all about — and started asking questions.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
I started doing a book group, just knowing I wanted to stay intellectually active, because especially as a mother of a lot of children, you just feel like a beast of burden. It kept my mind busy and gave me things to think about.

Looking back though, they were kind of lame book discussions.

Audrey:
Right? You don’t know what you don’t know.

Carolyn:
Exactly! We’d be like, “I don’t know, why did Tess do that?” or “That was so weird.” We were trying to talk about ideas, but we didn’t really know how. So again, I was getting there — but I needed MDM a long time ago. Let’s just say that. I needed Mission Driven Teen!

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
But you know, I’m not dead yet, so—

Audrey:
There you go.

Carolyn:
There’s still time! Anyway, I was almost done with my kids-at-home stage of life, and I was in a homeschool group. I don’t know how they learned about Mission Driven Mom, but I would hear their comments. They would say such cool things, and I was like, “Wow, that was so profound! What is this? How are you guys learning this stuff?”

I think that’s how I first heard about it. I also was somehow on an email list.

Audrey:
Oh, oh!

Carolyn:
Yeah, it’s a little vague because it’s been a while, and it took me a while to get started after I first heard of it. Once I started, I don’t think it had been going very long.

Audrey:
What made you sign up in the first place?

Carolyn:
Well, I’ve always had this desire to learn more. I could see from my friends that they were discussing things and ideas I hadn’t even thought about. Because I had that desire for more, I wanted to know what they were getting that I wasn’t.

We actually had monthly book discussions with our group, and they seemed to be coming up with such good stuff. So I signed up!

It took me a while to get started. I had every intention of going through the book — because back in the day, we got a paper book.

Audrey:
Yeah — the hard copy workbook. It’s just a printable now.

Carolyn:
Right. I had my plans to go through it, and it was encouraged that we get an accountability partner. So I thought, “I should probably do that.”

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
We decided to email each other every week about what we’d done, but that didn’t go so great — for about six months actually. Then we met at one of the Celebrations — I think it was the first Celebration.

Meeting her in person, sitting next to each other, we made a new connection and decided we needed to do a Zoom meeting. So every week we started doing Zoom meetings together.

Audrey:
That’s great.

Carolyn:
And that’s when we really took off.

Audrey:
My daughter does it with a couple of women she’s met — they’re in different states and everything —

Carolyn:
Oh wow.

Audrey:
Yeah, they’re in different parts of the program.

Carolyn:
My first partner and I worked together, and that worked really well. We could discuss ideas with each other and talk about how we were applying things in our lives.

That’s something I would really encourage people to do — get together with others. I’ve never met anyone in this program that I didn’t just adore. I’ve met so many great women.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
They’re like-minded — they think being a mother is important, they believe they have a mission, they really want to learn, they’re seeking truth. That’s my kind of girl.

Audrey:
Yeah. Amen.

Carolyn:
Amen!

So Valerie, my first partner — she’s quite a bit younger; she could be my daughter — but that didn’t matter. We got along great. Then we heard of other women and ended up joining their group. Now we’re in a group of about eight of us who meet weekly.

I’ve since met even more women and now have the best friends in the world. What do we do together? We talk about ideas.

You know, years ago I heard someone say, “You should talk about ideas, not people” — as in, don’t gossip. And I remember thinking, What else is there?

Audrey:
Yeah!

Carolyn:
Like, what ideas would we even talk about?

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
Now I get it — there are so many!

Audrey:
Yeah, I didn’t get it either back then — but now, there are so many.

Carolyn:
Exactly.

Audrey:
So tell me what you remember — what were some of the things that stood out to you that you were learning in the program?

Carolyn:
The number one — probably my biggest takeaway — is just to be a creator.

When I opened my book, there was a little paper insert that said, “I am a creator.” I literally had tears spring to my eyes because I’d never heard that before — and I instantly knew it was true.

One of the recurring blessings in my life has been recognizing that I am not a victim. I can choose the life I want. I can create the life I want. Things will happen to me that I can’t control —

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
— but I can control how I respond to the circumstances I’m given. And in that way, I am like God. I create with what I’ve got.

That’s been life-changing. It’s made my marriage better, all my relationships better. It’s made me happier. I can recognize when I’m in victim mode — and I’ll say, “Okay, I’m in victim mode right now,” — but now I recognize it, and I come out of it.

Whereas before, I think I lived in victim mode for years — decades, maybe — blaming others, feeling helpless, hopeless.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
So that was huge.

Audrey:
That’s huge. So why do you feel like it’s made such a big difference in your relationships?

Carolyn:
Well, I’m not blaming my husband, for example. I’m not blaming him because he’s the way he is and wants to do things a certain way.

Audrey:
Okay.

Carolyn:
And I want to do it another way, but I’m more of a pleaser and he’s more opinionated.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
And then I’d get mad at him because he had that opinion and I had to do what he wanted, right? But no — he doesn’t want a doormat wife anyway. As much as he likes having his way and not having to give in — that’s not what he really wants.

Audrey:
So how are you showing up as a creator without being off-putting to people — or making them feel like now it’s your way or the highway, or something like that?

You know what I mean? That kind of nuance — how do you feel like you’re showing up in relationships in this “creator” way? Can you describe that?

Carolyn:
Well, maybe it looks like saying, “Let’s talk about this, because this is what I think, and this is how I think we should do it. What do you think about that?” And then, “Okay, I can see one of us might have to compromise here — and if it’s me, I’m not going to hold it over your head forever,” that kind of thing.

It doesn’t mean you have to have your way; it’s just not blaming the other person every time something goes wrong.

Audrey:
Yeah. And owning your own stuff.

Carolyn:
Owning your own stuff — yes, exactly. Maybe I’m not the easiest person to live with! And when I consider that, it helps me see more clearly.

Another huge thing that has really helped me in my relationships is when we worked to discover our top values.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
At first, I thought it was kind of dumb. I mean, of course all these values are fabulous — how can I possibly choose? Like, I’m not going to say honesty isn’t a top value for me, but it’s not the top. It took me a while to realize that doesn’t mean I go around lying — it’s just not one of my top three values.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
So that was a huge thing. It took me weeks, but I slowly discovered, “Oh my goodness — the way things look, aesthetics, are really important to me.” That’s one of my top three values.

Audrey:
Wow.

Carolyn:
And it doesn’t mean my life is perfectly aesthetically beautiful, but it’s something that deeply matters to me — and that’s okay. That was freeing, because I used to think, “I shouldn’t be so focused on that; it’s so worldly.”

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
But no — it’s one of my gifts to the world.

Audrey:
Yes.

Carolyn:
And then my husband — well, his top three values are different from mine.

Audrey:
Sure.

Carolyn:
So now I recognize that. Independence, for example, is probably his number one value.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
And for me, that’s like number ninety-nine on my list — pretty far down there!

Audrey:
Uh-huh.

Carolyn:
So now I value his independence instead of seeing it as annoying.

Audrey:
Wow.

Carolyn:
I hadn’t identified that before. I just knew he always wanted to do things his own way, own his own business — things that were really important to him, but not important to me. So I didn’t understand it.

Now I see — that’s one of his top values. Aesthetics isn’t one of his, so we can work together, compromise when needed. Maybe I need a little more security than his independence provides, or maybe I need the house a little cleaner than he cares about.

We recognize those differences — and they’re good. They’re both equally good. One isn’t better than the other.

Audrey:
That’s awesome.

Carolyn:
It really is. It also helped me respect myself more, because I used to think my gifts were kind of boring or dumb. And now I’m like, “Ooh — a little bit of perfectionism can be good!”

Like when it comes to the written word — I can go in, fix the misspellings, put commas where they belong.

Audrey:
Yeah, and you enjoy it — and you’re good at it.

Carolyn:
Exactly. That was a big deal for me.

Audrey:
That’s awesome.

So what about the concept of principles? That’s a pretty heavy focus in the program. Does that mean something different to you now than it did when you started? And if so, what’s the difference — and what difference has it made?

Carolyn:
When I read something now, I’m looking for the underlying principles. When I watch a movie, I ask, “What are the underlying principles? What are they saying? What’s their worldview?”

It’s totally helped me become a more principled, critical thinker — to dissect what people are saying, understand where their fallacies or flaws are. I can recognize, “That’s not based on truth. That’s not based on natural law.”

Audrey:
So you feel more discerning — more grounded in principles of truth.

Carolyn:
Yes. More discerning.

Audrey:
And what difference do those principles make in your life? You think differently, you discern better — but how is that helpful day-to-day?

Carolyn:
Because I’m able to align my life more closely with true principles instead of misbeliefs that make me less happy and less successful.

Audrey:
Can you think of an example of one of those?

Carolyn:
Hmm, not off the top of my head — but I’d go back to that idea that I didn’t recognize I saw myself as a victim.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
And that it was better to create than to blame or persecute.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
That shift was everything.

Audrey:
So why is it important to be principle-centered in your mind? If somebody were to ask you, “Why should I even bother learning principles? Who cares?” — what would you say?

Carolyn:
Because there is truth — and there are consequences to living according to truth or not. You can’t escape that. Giving lip service won’t change it.

If you say something that’s not true is true, it doesn’t matter that you say it — it’s still not true, and it won’t lead you to goodness or happiness.

Audrey:
Yeah. Oh, that’s a great way to say it.

What was one of your favorite books in the program?

Carolyn:
Alcoholics Anonymous.

Audrey:
Oh wow! Why? I mean, I love that book, but what did you love about it?

Carolyn:
I just didn’t expect it to be so applicable to me.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
Everyone should read it. It should be required reading.

Audrey:
Yes — for all people. I totally agree.

Carolyn:
I’ve never been truly addicted to a substance — no alcohol, drugs, anything like that. But I have reacted to fear. I have been selfish. I’ve had those same thought processes that could lead me down the path of addiction.

And I have my little “mini addictions” that could be cured by applying the truths in that book.

Audrey:
Yeah. Yeah, I love that one so much.

Okay — a couple last things. What about the concept of mission? You mentioned earlier that these women care about being mothers and about mission. What does that concept mean to you, and why does it matter in your life?

Carolyn:
Well, I love the idea that being a mother is a mission. I truly felt that. To me, being a mother was the pinnacle of my life. And now I’m a grandmother — so it continues, but it’s not the same.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
But the idea that I can make a difference in the world is super important to me — that my strengths matter. Because we also did StrengthsFinder in the program, and that was very helpful. I discovered I had strengths I didn’t realize not everyone had, for example.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
Sometimes things come so easily to you that you don’t even realize they’re hard for other people.

Audrey:
You think everyone’s like that.

Carolyn:
Exactly. So that was great for self-discovery.

Now I can’t remember what we were talking about!

Audrey:
Mission — and why it’s important.

Carolyn:
Oh right, yes! So just realizing that my strengths can be used for good purposes — that’s huge. I’ve been reaching out and doing more in my community.

I recently worked with a Senate candidate in our state.

Audrey:
Wow.

Carolyn:
Yeah. I just feel more secure in the gifts I have and that I can offer them when people need them. I’m doing more things.

As much as, honestly, I’d like to sit and watch Netflix all the time — I feel that pull, I’m not going to lie — but that’s not how I want to spend my life.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
I don’t want to look back at decades of Netflix. Like, yeah, I really want more than that out of life. So to feel like I have a mission—there are things, there are people I can reach, causes I can help.

One of my specific loves is just the love of our country and the love of our Constitution.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
And while I think a lot of Americans have that, I’ve always kind of had a strong bend that way. I tend to enter the political spectrum because I don’t think I would make a good candidate myself, but I can be a great support person.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
And I’ve been a teacher that teaches about the Constitution and things like that. I’m passionate about that. I don’t see myself ever being world-famous, but I think I’m making a difference.

Audrey:
Yeah, you’re in there.

Carolyn:
Yeah. And if we all do that, the world is a much better place.

Audrey:
I love how you said that. It sounds to me like one of the things you’re expressing is that you feel more—maybe confident? I’m not exactly sure if that’s the right word.

Carolyn:
Yeah, maybe that’s a good word.

Audrey:
More self-aware. More settled into yourself. More comfortable with yourself.

Carolyn:
Yes.

Audrey:
Yeah, it’s an interesting process that I’ve watched with a lot of moms. It’s like a kind of humble confidence. It’s, “I’m very aware of where I’m not strong, but it’s okay for me not to be strong there because I know where I am strong. I know what I can give, and I don’t need to be able to give everything.”

Carolyn:
Yes.

Audrey:
“I can just tell these few things.” And so you can be honest with yourself and other people about what your limits are, but because you know you genuinely have something of value to give, you can show up and do that with a little more—

Carolyn:
Yeah.

Audrey:
—enthusiasm.

Carolyn:
Totally, totally well said. Yep.

Audrey:
Yeah, that’s so awesome. And it all goes back to the story I always tell about being in that class with those women, my friends, and them going up to the front with those roses and not being able to say anything good about themselves. Just feeling like—how can we build something that a woman walks away from…

I mean, I would say that makes me feel so grateful and humbled that the program came together in a way that creates that outcome for so many women, because that’s ultimately what I want. I didn’t want them to feel like they were superwoman and could do it all and be it all.

And I feel like, with all our little “I can do anything, I can be anything, follow your dreams” kind of cultural…

Carolyn:
Cultural selfishness.

Audrey:
Yeah, little—I mean, I don’t know if I’d call them lies, but they’re definitely little beliefs we throw out there. People internalize those. And this whole thing—I mean, when I was younger, maybe it’s just because I wasn’t a grown woman yet, but I don’t remember so much of this talk about “I’m not enough” and “How can I be enough?”

I feel like that’s really grown, and I do think it’s attacking women—especially mothers. Which is why, I mean, lots of women do the program who aren’t necessarily mothers, but specifically for mothers—because I feel like they’re kind of beat up.

Like the culture doesn’t value what you’re saying. You’re proud of being a mom. That was the pinnacle of your life mission. I feel the exact same way. You know, there’s this picture my brother took—he’s a professional photographer—of me holding one of my little girls at a family wedding.

And I told Blaine, “That’s what I want on the front of my funeral program.” Because I want to be remembered as a mom.

Carolyn:
Mm-hmm.

Audrey:
And I know many incredible women who feel that way. But the world tells them that’s not noble enough, that’s not worthy enough of them or their lives. And those who have done it and tried to do it well know it called for the best that was in them. It sculpted their character more than anything else.

And so for them to not feel proud of that—to feel like they’ve got to lose their personality or can’t do anything good—that’s so sad. It’s just that tricky dance our culture struggles with now: how do I be a mom and find fulfillment, and be proud of that, but also not feel like that means I don’t exist as a separate entity too, and there’s nothing for me as an individual? Just finding that balance.

Carolyn:
Yeah, that is a tricky balance.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
Yeah. Mothers are just so critical to society.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
As are fathers. But it’s making me think—so many times I’ve said, “Well, I’m just a mom.”

Audrey:
No. No.

Carolyn:
Yep.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
You feel a little apologetic, like you’re just… yeah, you’re in the trenches. There’s no glory.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
Yeah.

Audrey:
Well, that’s exciting to know that your daughter’s doing the program too, and hopefully it’s beneficial to her and her family as well. What is one thing, as we finish up, that you would like to tell someone who’s thinking about doing the program—or maybe thinking about putting their teen in the teen program—or who’s stuck in the middle of it and struggling to finish out? Any words of wisdom or advice for them?

Carolyn:
Well, I mean, definitely do it. Definitely stick with it. To me, if someone’s stuck, that means they could use a discussion group or—yeah—they need to reach out to the community. I think that would do the trick.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
For anyone else, I guess I can just give my testimonial that it’s a well-curated program. I really appreciate that you found the best stuff. And with some books, it was nice that we didn’t read the whole thing—we just read selections. I really appreciated that you picked the best of everything.

I know there are a lot of resources out there, so it was really nice to have them selected. I think you did a very, very excellent job picking what would really help us learn and change.

The earlier in your life that you can be grounded on truth and principles—and correct any misbeliefs you’ve already picked up as a young person—the better.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
Getting on more firm grounding will change the trajectory of your life. And I don’t care what age you are. I’m 60. I’m old.

Audrey:
You’ve got a lot of life left!

Carolyn:
Yeah.

Audrey:
Well, thank you, Carolyn.

Carolyn:
Thank you for Mission Driven Mom Academy.

Audrey:
You’re welcome. I’m glad to know it’s had such a positive impact in your life and your family’s life. Hopefully, for those wondering whether this is for them, this has answered some of their questions and concerns.

I hope it encourages you to get in there—grab a friend, do it together, take your time, apply the principles as you go. I think you’ll find over time that—while there are some pretty dramatic testimonials—there are also a lot of women saying, “My life is richer. It’s fuller. I’m more confident. I’m more settled in myself. I feel better able to navigate life and care for myself and love myself properly.”

And I’m really, really grateful that’s been their experience.

Carolyn:
That did remind me of one more thing—and that is, just take it in bite-sized pieces. There’s no rush. You want enough of a challenge, but I just fit it into the cracks of my life. I’d think, “Oh, I have half an hour here, I’ll grab that book, I’ll take it to the doctor’s office,” whatever.

Rarely did I have a set time to sit down and do it. Probably like, I don’t know, 30 pages a week, I’d say. And there are lots of videos—you can just watch or listen to them. They’re in an app now, so they’re easy to consume while you’re driving.

Audrey:
Yeah.

Carolyn:
So just pace yourself—enough to be a challenge, but not too much to be overwhelming.

Audrey:
Yeah. All right, well thank you so much.

Of course, if this has been helpful, please pass it along, subscribe, like, review—all that good stuff. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.

Get Your 3 FREE Chapters from The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/.

For years, every time Audrey spoke somewhere, no matter the topic, people would approach her afterward and tell her that she had inspired them to read more, "But," they wanted to know, "what should I read?"

This podcast has the answer!

If you're someone who wants to be a lifelong learner and just isn't sure where to start. Or if you want to read more enriching books but don't know how to choose. Or you would love to read books to your children, but don't know how to pick the best ones. Or you wish you could discuss good books with your friends but have no idea what you should be looking for...Audrey is here to help!

With a few simple guidelines, you will be far more confident in choosing the right things to read, books which can enrich your life, and help you lift others. 

If you want to level up your reading, take a listen!

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT (AI Generated)

 Welcome to the Mission-Driven Mom podcast. This podcast is for moms just like you—moms who want to learn how to glorify God by finding and embracing true principles, discovering and developing your greatest gifts, and using them to serve your family and community.

Jordan Peterson once said something that really encapsulates the “why” behind what we’re going to talk about for a few minutes today:

“We’re always deciding, with every choice we make, whether we are going to do good or harm—by action or by inaction. Whether we should do good, or harm, or nothing at all. I think that depends, to some degree, on who we think we are and what we believe we’re capable of. It seems to me that the humanities, when they’re properly taught, are the study of who we could be as individuals. And we need to know that, because otherwise, we’ll be much less than we are—and could be. And that’s not a trivial problem.”

That really struck me. All throughout the day, every day, we’re called upon to make micro-decisions and macro-decisions. Those decisions affect us, they affect the people around us, and they reflect the kind of person we’ve become.

This is why the ancients—and really, all the way up until maybe the last hundred years or so—the greatest thinkers and leaders constantly talked about virtue. Virtue was considered the primary purpose of being human. That was the ultimate goal. That was the end game.

We are the only creatures we know of who have self-consciousness, self-awareness, and the capacity for self-improvement. Because we have that capacity, it’s incumbent upon us to develop it—to become the most virtuous humans we can be.

This reminds me of something John Quincy Adams wrote to his son while he was serving as an ambassador to Russia. His son was only about 10 or 11 years old at the time. In his letter, Adams wrote something like this:

“You boys brag a lot about how many books you’ve read. But those books are of no benefit to you if they don’t make you wiser and more virtuous. What’s the point of plowing through a stack of books if they haven’t changed you?”

That’s the essence of what I’m all about: truth that changes you. Truth that makes you free. And it connects beautifully with what Jordan Peterson was saying—that the humanities are really the study of being human and of striving to be the best humans we can be.

This is why I’m such an advocate for lifelong learning. When we seek truth and apply it, not only do we gain tools for solving the problems we face, but we also grow in virtue. Lifelong learning develops our character, shows us over and over again the kind of person we could become, and motivates us to keep striving.

I talked recently in another video podcast about Benjamin Franklin’s book club and the impact it had. It illustrates this same principle: we often don’t realize how much good can come simply from interacting with the truly great—the kind of “great” that is genuinely virtuous and has a profoundly positive influence on the world.

So today I want to focus on something that might seem a little trivial at first glance: how to choose books—whether for yourself, your children, or a book club.

I am a huge proponent of book clubs and group learning because discussion is so powerful. In future podcasts, I’ll share more about why discussion matters so much—how it changes the way we think, the way we live, and the way we apply truth. If you follow me at all, you know I teach the five types of questions, how to lead quality discussions, how to look for themes, how to mark your book, and most importantly, how to identify principles.

But here’s the thing: none of those skills matter if you choose the wrong books. The wrong readings will derail your efforts before you even begin.

Now, when it comes to book clubs, many follow a “democratic” method—everyone takes turns choosing a book and leading the discussion. The challenge is that members have widely varying backgrounds, skills, and levels of preparation. I’ve seen book clubs where members hadn’t even read the book they chose! That kind of inconsistency creates an environment where participants don’t know what to expect—whether the reading will be worthwhile, whether the discussion will be meaningful, or whether someone will simply hijack the conversation.

And when that happens, people lose motivation.

But book clubs—done right—are one of the best ways to continue lifelong learning. Having a deadline motivates you to actually read, and discussing the material with others deepens your understanding. In my own book club with my sister and some friends, we use these principles. We eat, we laugh, we learn—and the discussions are rich and life-giving.

So how do you choose books that will make that possible?

I want to give you three simple but important tools for discerning which books to read—whether you’re teaching a class, parenting your children, or running a book club. These three suggestions can make all the difference in your experience.

In fact, I once wrote about this, and I’d like to share a little story from that piece—an experience I had while attending a friend’s book club…

So I went to this book club—it consisted of neighbors who had been meeting regularly for many years. Out of the 12 women who attended, about half had finished the book for that month. Some had started it, and a couple had even refused to purchase or read it at all. As you can imagine, this made it difficult to have a meaningful discussion.

When they did talk about the book, the conversation felt flat—just sharing a favorite part, a quote, or a brief comment. But when they shifted to discussing their personal struggles with spouses, children, friends, or work, the conversation suddenly came alive.

And this is my point: pair the two. Let the things you’re reading inform your real-life experiences. My YouTube channel used to be called Education for Real Life because that’s exactly what true education is supposed to provide—skills for living. That’s what we want to resurrect.

Now, I personally didn’t say much during that discussion, but when I sensed they were winding down, I asked a few questions. Honestly, I wanted to evaluate this book club as a kind of test case for my theories about book clubs.

I asked, “How do you choose the books you’ll read?”
One woman replied, “Everyone gets a turn on a rotating schedule.”

That’s how most book clubs operate.

I followed up: “Had anyone here read this book before it was recommended?”
The answer: “No.”

“Then how did you come to choose it?” I asked.
“It was recommended to one of the members by a friend.”

Finally, I asked, “Will any of you ever read this book again?”

And here’s what shocked me: even the staunchest defenders of the book—the women who had purchased it, read the whole thing, and engaged in the discussion—all answered no. Not one woman there thought the book was worth reading again.

“Really?” I asked, genuinely surprised. “Why not?”

One woman’s answer explained the problem perfectly. She said, “There just aren’t very many books worth reading more than once. Maybe a couple hundred years ago that was different, but now we’re inundated with information. Honestly, if you look at how many books are published every year, very few are worth a second read.”

Now, while I know many people feel this way, her comment still surprised me—because I own many books that I believe are absolutely worth reading again and again. For me, her perspective felt a little tragic.

Another woman added, “Yeah, I’ve only read a couple of books twice in my whole life.”

Then something fascinating happened. A woman sitting next to me—one of the members who hadn’t purchased or read the book that month—spoke up. She said, “I read The Help three times this past year. We read it for group several months ago, and when I finished it, I went right home and read it again. Then I read it a third time.”

I asked her, “Why three times?”

She replied, “Because it made me want to be better.”

That’s the key. That’s the power of choosing the right books.

This is why I’m doing this series on book clubs—and why I’m releasing this one as a podcast. I want you to have these tools. Because what most people think they want in their book clubs are books that are simply entertaining. But the books that truly enrich the club—the ones that bless the lives of those who attend, and keep them motivated to come back—are the books that are enriching.

Now, enriching books can certainly be entertaining. But often, entertaining books are not enriching. Great books are both. That’s the goal.

Think of it like food. We think we want candy—but what we really need, what nourishes us, are vegetables. And just like vegetables, great books can both taste wonderful and nourish us at the same time. That’s the kind of reading we want.

Here’s the point: some things are “the best” by my standards, and some by your standards. But some things are truly the best by history’s standards. Certain books, music, and art outlast the popularity of their day. They endure not just their generation, but even centuries, because they speak universally to humankind.

Personally, I don’t have a lot of extra time to read for book club. If I’m going to invest my time, I want it to be worthwhile. That doesn’t mean I want to cozy up with Moby-Dick tonight, but it does mean there are so many incredible works we could be reading and discussing—works that could truly change how we think and live.

Unfortunately, most book clubs spend their time on easy-to-read, modern novels. And that’s a tragedy, because the same time could be spent on books that are far more meaningful.

Not only are better readings richer in content, they’re actually more fun to discuss.

So when I say “classics,” I don’t just mean old books. I mean any reading that:

And here’s the secret: one of the biggest problems in our culture today is the absence of this kind of reading. If our schools were filled with the right kinds of books, we would be producing a different kind of man and woman—and, ultimately, a different kind of culture.

The Founding generation understood this. After the Constitution was ratified, the leaders said, in essence: “We’ve established a free nation. Now we must educate the people to remain free.” Education wasn’t just about literacy—it was about forming character, cultivating virtue, and preparing citizens to perpetuate liberty.

So if you didn’t receive that kind of education in school—and I didn’t—get it for yourself. And then pass it on to your family.

That brings me to the first principle in choosing what to read for lifelong learning—whether it’s for your family, your children, or your book club:

Stick with the original.

Let me give you an example. Several years ago, I was doing research for one of my classes. I had to visit a local private school, where I listened to a lecture on Christopher Columbus. It was part of their American history studies.

At the time, there was a lot of buzz in the country about putting Columbus “on trial” in classrooms and finding him guilty of heinous crimes. That narrative is still circulating today—though it has only intensified…

I’ve written and spoken elsewhere about this, but I believe what we’ve done to Christopher Columbus is truly tragic.

When I was young—50 years ago—we admired Columbus. But in the 1990s and early 2000s, suddenly he was despised. I watched that shift happen in my own lifetime, and it felt bizarre. I couldn’t figure out why it had changed so drastically, and I thought about it a lot.

So when I was working on this research project and heard a speaker lecture about Columbus, my interest was piqued. He shared stories I’d never heard before, and I was fascinated. But what struck me most wasn’t so much what he said about Columbus—it was that he repeatedly referenced Columbus’s own journal.

By this point, I had already realized that the private university I had attended as a young adult had not given me nearly enough exposure to original sources. But that lecture, combined with what I was seeing in the news, helped me understand the importance of going directly to the source on a whole new level.

I went home, typed “Columbus’s journal” into Google, and there it was. In just a few pages, I could read for myself who Columbus was, what he did, and—most importantly—how he felt about his life and decisions.

I could learn about Columbus from Columbus.

It was incredibly liberating and exhilarating. No more relying on someone else’s opinion—I could find out for myself. I hadn’t done this earlier in my life simply because I didn’t realize I could or even should. Others don’t do it because they don’t know how, or they feel intimidated. Many people believe older writings are too difficult to understand.

But that simply isn’t true. Yes, Shakespeare can be challenging, and yes, you may need to read Plato’s Republic or Allegory of the Cave a few times to fully grasp it. But most older writings—letters, treatises, documents, even Shakespeare—have been translated into modern English. You can start there.

Columbus’s journal was not hard to read. Neither are many of the original sources I now recommend: the letters of John and Abigail Adams, Cicero’s speeches, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. They’re not as easy as a modern novel or a children’s classic, but they’re far more accessible than most people assume. Even Shakespeare, once you get familiar with the plot and take a little time, can not only be understood but thoroughly enjoyed.

So here’s the first principle when choosing what to read for yourself, your family, or your book club:

1. Go to the original.

Most of our public-school textbooks are three, four, or even five steps removed from the original. Someone read something, who read something else, who read something else, and then a committee of scholars compiled it. Along the way, they picked and chose based on their worldview, values, and judgments of what was “important.”

But that doesn’t necessarily make you a more virtuous person. It might not help you discover who you really are. It might not benefit your life.

So whenever you can, go straight to the source. Learn from Columbus, from Plato, from Abigail Adams—directly.

2. Mix it up.

Don’t read only novels. Don’t read only nonfiction. Don’t read only self-help. Expose yourself—and your book club—to all kinds of reading.

I’ve included a bullet list in the description to give you some ideas, but here’s just a sampling of the kinds of genres you can explore:

You see, most book clubs fall into monotony because they read almost exclusively modern novels. That’s largely because these are the books friends recommend, or because they feel easy and entertaining. People think that’s what they want—but in reality, those books don’t usually provide a deeply enriching experience.

Modern novels do have their place. But they should be just one resource among many. Leaders who haven’t been exposed to other types of readings simply don’t know what’s available. But if they did, their groups would have far more enjoyable reading experiences and much more stimulating discussions.

One way to start mixing it up is to choose a subject or theme and explore it across genres. For example, say you want to study Franklin D. Roosevelt, or France, or leadership. Search your library or the internet for speeches, essays, novels, and even scientific studies on that topic.

Another way is to use the internet to search for “10 best” lists in various genres. Spend a little time comparing lists, and you’ll quickly find consensus about the true greats in each field. Then dedicate a year to reading across those genres—perhaps speeches one month, letters the next, short stories after that, and so on.

And don’t stop with just the text! Look at maps and timelines while you read. Learn about the time period, see where events took place, and pull up photos of what those places look like today. Doing this will open up a whole new world of learning—and make reading not only more meaningful, but also more fun.

Super-duper fun—and your book club becomes a little classroom.

So, the first principle is: go to the original. Stick with the original.
The second one is: mix it up.
And the third is: start simple.

As you learn more about the kinds of questions and reading skills I teach (or learn from others as well), you’ll come to see that in preparing for a great discussion, it’s far more important how you read than how much you read.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is just a page long, and I’ve had so many discussions about it that have gone in a million different directions. That’s the power of rich material. It’s not about the volume—it’s about the depth. And that’s also why you can actually get everyone to do the reading and come prepared. Because if it’s just one or two poems, or a short selection, people can actually engage. And those conversations can be incredible.

Now, many book clubs feel like they have to read an entire book every month. I want to say something about that. You’ve probably had it drilled into you—like I did—that you have to finish everything you start. Finish the book. Finish the assignment. But here’s the truth: you do not have to finish. You can read, and then stop when it’s no longer enriching for you.

That said, as a book club leader—or even just for your own enrichment—you can choose shorter readings that people will finish, and then you can go back to them over and over again. Your group can read as much or as little as you’d like. Just as you can use all different types of readings, you can also help your group grow in their capacity to read more effectively by starting simple.

Maybe you spend a few months, or even a couple of years, reading easier books while practicing your reading and discussion skills. The best way to do this is by choosing readings that are relatively easy to understand but that still offer rich themes and principles to explore.

Classic children’s literature, selections from self-help books, poetry, excerpts from great books, or even fairytales are wonderful for this. They’re short and approachable, but still allow for thoughtful reflection.

When you’re starting simple, choose readings that are either short and a little challenging—like a few pages from a great book, a couple of poems, or a document you can read multiple times and ponder—or easy and accessible, like children’s literature, a magazine article, or a play you can finish in a month. This gives you time to go slowly, think deeply, and really understand what you’re reading.

This approach also helps keep things fresh by rotating through different types of readings, while allowing your group’s reading and comprehension skills to grow. Eventually, you’ll be ready and even excited to tackle a more difficult classic.

And while it may feel like that day will never come, I promise you—it will. I’ve seen it happen with hundreds, probably thousands, of students and groups. I’ve had seven or eight hundred people just in the Mission Academy alone, and every time, when they follow this path, their capacity grows. Their love for learning deepens. And soon, they find themselves reading Cicero, Blackstone, Plato—just little pieces at a time—and applying the principles they discover.

It’s exhilarating. It’s fulfilling. And I can’t express enough how passionate I am about this path.

So the big “why” behind all of this is simple: so you can know who you are. So you can experience the joy of self-discovery, develop your character, and become a more virtuous person.

By sticking with the original, mixing it up, and starting simple, you can do that.

And what’s so wonderful about these tools is that they’re just a small part of what we call the MDM Way. This is our unique educational approach. It takes you to original sources. It introduces you to many different genres. It focuses on Socratic discussion and on learning by expressing your ideas. It’s deeply principle-based. And all of these good educational practices are built into everything we do.

The MDM Way is a beautiful model for the kind of education we can be giving ourselves right now, in our own lives.

If you join us in the MDM Academy, you’ll gain access to these tools and many more. You’ll be mentored as you walk through the content with us, and we’ll provide the resources you need. But even outside the Academy, you can begin today. Pick up a quality reading from an original source. Study it carefully. Ask yourself great questions. Ask the author questions. Compare it to your scriptures. And then strive to live the truths you discover.

We’ve talked today about how this applies to book clubs, but it’s just as true for your family, for your personal enrichment, and for any area of life where you want to keep learning and growing.

So thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you’ll take these simple tools to heart—choosing a variety of readings, using good study skills, and engaging in the adventure of lifelong learning. It’s such a tremendous source of joy, and so many people miss out on it.

If this was valuable to you, please share it with a friend and leave us a review.

Thanks again for being here—and I’ll see you next time.

What a privilege to interview Dr. James Lindsay—bestselling author, guest on shows such as Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, professional advisor on multiple court cases, and so much more!

As an expert on Critical Race Theory and modern culture, James has so much to offer our world and our moms. In this conversation we get into James’ story, how he got to where he is today, the kind of work he does, and how he helps so many understand our crazy world. With specific discussions spanning cultural dynamics, critical race theory, postmodernism, communism, and the nature of reality and truth, this interview gets a bit heavy in a few places.

But stay with us to the end where James gives some beautiful advice to parents engaged in the struggle, validating the importance of the daily work we do, and encouraging us along the path.

Please share your questions and insights with us via email at: [email protected]

And share this with a friend who needs encouragement in their parenting!

Get your 3 FREE chapters of The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

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TRANSCRIPT (AI Generated)

Welcome back. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of the Mission Driven Life and founder of the Mission Driven Mom. Today is a really special treat talking to James Lindsay. He's unbelievably credentialed and popular and has done so much good to help us understand our culture. Before we get into that interview, I want you to know that if you're new to this podcast, I would recommend that you keep up with the current, episodes, but also head back to the beginning and listen to some of those first podcasts.

You'll get a deep dive into the 7 Laws of Life Mission, which is what everything we do here hovers around that framework and those laws and principles. And then you'll also hear a lot of mission-driven stories of great men and women who have lived those laws and had huge positive impact in the world.

I also wanna encourage you to go get your free copy of the audio book of the Mission-Driven Life. Discover and fulfill your unique contribution to the world over at the mission driven mom.com. You can grab that. It won't be available forever, so make sure that you head over there to get your free copy of that.

And if this podcast is of benefit to you, please leave a review and pass it on. That helps us share the word about truth and principles.

This interview with James Lindsay was incredible. We talked all about what critical race theory is, why it matters to us as parents. He gave some really good advice to parents and what they should be doing with their children right now. We talked about truth and reality and the natural law. We talked about his story and experience of becoming the man that he's become and why he does what he does.

So enjoy this interview with James Lindsay.

Alright, welcome back to the podcast. We have an incredible treat today. I don't know how it happened, but James Lindsay has graciously agreed to talk to me today and to share some of his incredible wisdom and scholarship that is so needed in the world. I'm gonna give you a little bit of his professional bio.

Some of my takes on who he is, why I listen to him, why I trust him, and then we'll get into some of his experiences with some questions. So first of all I know you American born Author, mathematician. You got your PhD from the University of Tennessee in mathematics. And that's incredible. So I don't even know the level of intelligence that's required to do that.

On his bio it says professional troublemaker, which is actually true. He's written six books spanning a range of subjects including religion, philosophy of science, postmodern theory. He's a leading expert on critical race theory, and I have learned a lot from him on that. And that leads him to reject it completely.

The founder of New Discourses, and we got to meet in person. When I went to his event just a few weeks ago here in Dallas, it was phenomenal. Encourage anyone and everyone to attend in in their future opportunities. And you've got a book going right now, Cynical Theories :How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity, and Why This Harms Everybody.

And that one's getting translated in 15 languages. Is that one already out, James? Yeah, that one came actually.

And that came out. That's actually, I don't know why it's worded that way. I know I just pointed you. So just mea culpa, I just told Go read the bio. That's a little bit dated on my website.

Yeah. 'Cause I'm very like weird about writing my own bios. Yeah. And as it turns out that the book came out in the summer of 2020 it was like, oh, okay. Kind of first major book about woke stuff and it is now in 30 languages and it's sold 500,000 copies. So it's it's the entry point, especially if I leave the country.

, If I leave the country, that is the book people know me for. Like I was in New Zealand. Yeah. And people were bringing it up to sign. I went to Belgium and people brought it to me and I haven't even seen most of the foreign language copies. They have different covers. They have completely different That's awesome.

And one people are bringing up copies of it that I've never seen, when foreign languages having me sign it and so it's all over the world. Yeah. It's exciting. But yeah's awesome. Yeah. Awesome. I think it like 30 languages now.

Awesome. That's awesome. I, that's the one I need to grab then.

I've been consuming all of that information from you via podcast and interviews and things like that. That would be great to grab. I just have the Marx notification of education is the one I've got. And then course you've been on all the podcasts. Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, all the people. I don't even know what the list is or all the people, but everybody knows you.

I've been like every podcast.

Yeah, I thi everyone so amazed and grateful for you to come today. What I can say from my own personal experience with Dr. Lindsay is that I don't even remember when I first stumbled across you. It's probably been two or three years., I don't know if it was from an interview that I saw or my sister sent it to me, but my sister and I have been exchanging another girlfriend.

Here's another Lindsay podcast, and we exchange 'em when we discuss 'em, which has been awesome. But one of the reasons why I was immediately like on board, I guess with what you talk about is because, I didn't even know about classical liberal education. I had no experience with ancient philosophy or any of that until I was married and had a couple kids. I found it inadvertently in a small liberal arts college that was nearby. And luckily I signed up and made it all the way through a master's degree. And so I have the very introductory rudiments of an okay. Decent education.

It's how I feel about it. I'm grateful for it. But what that meant was that when you used certain references and you talked about certain people, I knew what you were talking about and I feel like I feel really blessed. 'cause I feel like that gave me an edge that helped me know you knew what you were talking about because there's so many names that people could drop and if you had no frame of reference for when they lived, who they were, what their worldview was, any of that, it would be hard to know.

That's a real legitimate problem in the current culture. How do I even know who to listen to? Because I don't even know, but I especially had become very fascinated with communism and Marxism and had read and studied much about what went on in especially Russia, especially China.

And so I knew when you got in, especially the Marxist stuff, was, oh my gosh so good and really spoke to me. And I was like, and then you saw, help me see layers of it that I hadn't seen before. And so I know you do your homework. I know you know what you're talking about. Because my education luckily gave me enough information to be able to identify that.

So I'm really, really grateful for that. Grateful for all the things that you've taught me so far, what you've keyed me into, what I should be aware of,. How to understand the culture a little bit better. Postmodernism was just a nut I couldn't crack for so long. I would read books on it. I would try to, I would try to read the guys, try and, it's so hard.

So I'm so grateful for some handholding where stuff like that is concerned. I mentioned to you before we got on, we've got three levels in our academy. That third level is, a very high level introduction to just, there are these worldviews and these are some key things they teach, and postmodernism is in there. Anyway, so that's why I wanted to talk to you. That's why I wanted you on this podcast. That's why I think you're an important voice in the culture and hope that. All of the listeners to our show will get more involved in what you do. Read your books, watch your stuff.

Let's begin at the beginning, and talk about you before the storm began. I know you got this PhD. We were talking for a minute about some of the reasons that you didn't pursue all the way into academia and working there. But give us a little bit more about why did leave academia after that degree and why you were frustrated with what was going on in academia, and then segue into how you got started doing what you do now.

I know that there's article submissions. I've seen some, watched you talk about all of that stuff. And I bet a lot of our listeners don't know about that. So tell us that story.

This story can be very long. My, history doesn't make sense except when you've lived it and then it all makes sense.

It just was the natural thing to do. Yeah. Like you said, I got a PhD in math.

Yeah.

I finished that in 2010. I have a bachelor's degree in physics. My master's is in math in between. And so I introduced that. So I was in college effectively from fall of 1997 until spring of 2010. Mm-hmm. Which is a long time to be in college.

And all of it was either physics, which is a hard, pure science. Yeah. Or mathematics, which is like in some sense even more rarefied in some sense. And I bring that up because the timeframe ending in 20 10, 97 to 2010, and then the subject matter. I just want people to understand like I did not deal with woke in college.

Like I get that it was probably happening in the humanities departments. Sure. I know it was happening in the education departments and I was too busy looking down my nose at every other department regardless, because every physicist looks down at every other department, including mathematicians and every mathematician looks down at every other department, including physicists.

And the only people who look down on both math and physics are philosophers and possibly engineers who think nobody's practical. I had no exposure.. A lot of people go to college and so they know, you have to take all these classes, then you have your major, they don't know what grad school's like a lot of times, unless they've been, your entire school is your major.

There is no other class. Like, people talk to me all the time. Oh wow. When were you at ut? And I tell 'em the years and they're like, wow, did you know so and so in the history department? I'm like, that's not in the math building.

Yeah.

I literally only went to other buildings when for some reason there wasn't enough room in the math building to have the class.

Yeah.

That was a math class anyway.

Yeah.

That's the only reason I ever left the building. My entire University of Tennessee experience could really be summarized as being one building. So, I say that because it's all immersive. Woke wasn't a thing. So a lot of people think, wow, James, I get this.

I sometimes, I just don't try to correct people. It's just not worth it.

Yeah.

But people are like, James saw the woke coming early. No, I didn't. I just saw university bureaucracy is what I saw. Yeah. I saw the softening of standards to keep students in and paying tuition and I didn't wanna be a part of it.

I had the faculty meetings where they were instructing us in the classes below a certain level that are not, within a math major or a science major. Just pass people find ways, give 'em extra credit, make it easier. Do whatever you have to do. At one point they, they said that if you wanna fail more than one student, you need to be able to justify why.

Come bring evidence to the dean. And I was like,

that's no scoring little league.

Yeah, and I get it because it was like

everyone gets a trophy.

It was for the math class that only people who will do zero more math ever in anything they do. It's that class. Yeah. But it's so it doesn't, it's it's literally like the university just waving the white flag and saying, we know it's pointless to make you study math when you're not gonna do it.

But I objected to this kind of on a principled level. Like I had to learn US history, which I didn't have that much. I'm glad I learned it now, but at the time, 18, 19 years old, I'm like, I'm a physics major. Why the hell do I have to learn history? I don't wanna learn that. I had to suffer through that.

I had to do you can suck it up and pass math class kids. You're getting a college degree, right? Yeah. You can show some mathematical reasoning. You should be able to, it should need something, add fractions or something. Yeah. And so anyways, it was a bureaucracy and this. This tendency I didn't know the, what it was at the time, but it was before I started taking on the woke stuff that I realized it was that the guiding principle of the university had become student retention.

The goal was just to keep paying customers in the door, and I was. Sickened by this, and I didn't want to continue. As we were talking about before we started, my family was such that my step kids were about to start high school when I graduated, and it would've been like, Hey, kids who wants to get dragged all over the country, to go to a bunch of different high schools because I have to do postdocs.

Yeah. And nobody wants that. And that was a little bit more to tip me over the edge. So I left the university after I finished my PhD. I didn't look back. I, to this day, people sometimes ask me if I would consider being a teacher in a institution again. And I'm like, Nope. Absolutely not.

The bureaucracy's a disaster. The whole system is corrupt. I don't want, it's not corrupt in some like dirty political corruption way necessarily. It's just gross. I don't want any part of this. Yeah. Like this, if the university is not geared toward basically making like academic ninjas. Like I'm not interested like I want high level stuff here.

I think I have these controversial opinions that our society lied to our young people. Most people should not go to college. They should have done other things. It was not the guarantor of a good job. Yeah. We ended up with this. It sometimes, was it Peter Turchin? Is that his name? Who called it Elite Overproduction?

We have all these basically uppity people who got degrees who can't go work like a normal job now 'cause they're too good for that. But they're not actually skilled to fit anywhere in the economy either. The, they have a useless skill like gender studies or they have a, an oversaturated skill like veterinary medicine.

Which nothing wrong with veterinary medicine, especially if you wanna work on large animals, but currently, last I heard, vet schools are producing 11 times more vets than the economy can absorb.

Oh, wow. So

you can just imagine what the problem is there. Right. And there's all kinds of interesting conversations we could have about, should academic advising at university, should they be on the hook?

What are good ways to put them on the hook for mis advising students into bad sectors of the economy, basically. But that's a different discussion. I decided to get outta this. At any rate, yeah. So I leave the university and I had to figure out something to do. Yeah. And my wife was a massage therapist.

This is a weird story, James. You were a massage therapist from 2010 to 2020 of all things with a PhD in math. Yes. Yep. I was, and there are actually, it's like my story doesn't make any sense unless you lived it. I can say my wife was a massage therapist, which is true. And encouraged me to join the business with her and take some of her overflow and then build my own clientele and we'd have something going on and I could work, here with her in the studio or whatever.

Cool. That's a thing. But I had some lead over production there. I'm like, I have a PhD. Like what? Massage. Cool. Yeah. What?

Yeah.

But for the fact that I used to be a fighter I still can, but I used to like actually get in like rings and fight. Right? Oh, wow. I trained martial arts for a long time.

Uhhuh, I used to fight in like real competitions and things. And one day I was at, when I was in my early twenties, I was at, so, before the PhD? Yeah. I was at, the dojo or whatever training, and I hurt my back. Really bad. Like my back went all the way out as they say. Wow. And this sets up this cycle of like doomsday, you get it back, in alignment or whatever.

You start training again. Yep. You hurt it again three, four times a year.

Yeah.

Sometimes it gets in like a lot worse, whatever. So I had this long-term chronic back pain and kind of disability that actually was pulling, I was functionally able, I'm not claiming I was disabled or anything, but practicing martial arts at a high level, continuing to do competitive martial arts was out like that wasn't real anymore. And it's like I just had this stupid back pain. As it turns out, while I was doing my PhD, I happened to be out at the park, out on a walk and I ran into a guy, there's a stupid story, but he thought I was my brother.

They had gone to school together, blah, blah, blah. And he was a chiropractor Uhhuh. And he could tell by my posture that my back hurt. But he thought he was this, guy he was friends with in high school, even though it's mistaken identity by brother. We got talking. I'm like, no, I'm his brother. We hung out.

Anyway, a little bit, chatted for a bit. He's I can tell your back hurts. You want me to fix it? And he did a massage to me, not twist and crack my back. And I was like, weird. And he's you need to go buy this book. It's called the Trigger Point Therapy Workbook. By Claire and Amber Davies. It's in his third edition.

People ask me every time I tell the story, where's the book? Well, I told you the whole title. You can go look it up and it's on Amazon uhhuh and massage yourself according to where it says to poke. And you now know what it, you now know what it feels like, and I'll help you here and there if you have time, or we have time or whatever, and we'll straighten you out.

And a few months later, I'd figured it out and I'd worked out a technique and had fixed my own back. Wow. So I get outta this back pain that had been plaguing me for most of a decade. My life is vastly improved.

I have this skill, which I actually do, to family members and friends and things. No, no money involved.

'cause it is illegal. And so I already had this background in helping people and helping myself. And I had this technique that I knew was rare within the massage market because I'd been in massage therapist who couldn't do it. Yeah. And even after I learned it, there was like stuff, it's hard to reach and I'm like, can you do this?

And I'm like on the table telling the massage therapist how to massage me correctly to make the thing work. And I'm like, no, seriously, just put your elbow there and hold it no harder. And it's this is frustrating. Why don't I just take my wife's advice and do this? Mm-hmm. So I did that for 10 years.

Yeah.

And while I'm doing that, I'm academically bored. I have some free time. It is a busy job, but your fingers can only handle so much.

Mm-hmm.

So you're not like at the desk 60 hours a week or something.

Right, right.

So I start writing and getting involved in discussion forums and. Things online.

People were wrong on the internet. One thing leads to another. I learned that radical feminists are a particular branch of wrong on the internet. I start fighting with them, they're terrible. I start reading their academic literature to understand what in the heck they're talking about, because I had no idea how they can just be calling everybody a sexist and saying, misogyny is the enforcer of sexism.

What the hell does that mean?

Yeah, yeah.

And that's Kate Mann, if you wonder who that is. She's the, she wrote a book called Down Girl. No, like weird sexual undertones there about misogyny being the enforcer of systemic sexism. And I'm like, alright, so I'm reading all this and I'm finally kinda getting my head around it.

I'm friends with this guy Peter Boghossian. We've written a bunch of stuff together at this point, and some of it is literally about all this kind of woke stuff at that point, which was poisoning everything we were dealing with. Killing.

So you're publishing articles online, you mean?

Yeah, just like that's what's happening.

Time magazine, scientific Americans.

I see, Uhhuh

here and there. We had the big ambition to get into the Atlantic or the New York Times.

Oh, cool.

I think we eventually, actually he and I put out a book together later and we actually did get an essay in the New York Times as a result of it.

I forgot about that. So anyways we never got the Atlantic though, and now it's whack, so that's okay. But that. We were just doing that and everything was toxic as hell because of these feminists. And Pete worked at Portland State University, which is maybe not ground zero, but ground like 0.001 or something for woke.

It's like really close to as bad as it can get. They got rated on the top 10 worst schools for free speech. And so Pete went to the president of the university and said, did you know that we're on the top 10 list for worse schools? And the president's reply was who wrote the list? Because sometimes those are lists you want to be on.

Yeah.

Like totally politicized, Yeah, it was crazy. Yeah. And it's a civil rights group called Fire, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education that had made the list. It's pretty unbiased in that assessment. It's just straight civil liberties. Yeah. And so anyways we decided to take this on as you intimated.

What we decided to do was write a bunch of academic hoax articles. That's called the grievance studies affair. That was my big introduction into public life.

Mm-hmm.

We wrote 21, actually, if you count the trial balloon, we wrote 20 primarily articles, journal, academic, peer reviewed journal articles for

Were you just trying to go as far as were you just gonna keep going until you were found out, or did you have this number you were trying to get to?

No, we were going to write novel papers for one year. Oh, from when we started. Okay. And then we were going to see the papers that we wrote through and then that was that. Okay. And so as the, that was the original plan,

right

Which you formula formulated in August of 2017. And so the last novel paper we wrote was in June of 2018.

Mm-hmm.

Then we stopped in June because number one, we hit 20 number two, things were getting complicated, papers were getting published. It was in the news, like stuff's happening. We're trying to keep up with literally like 14 papers or 12 papers or something, or are active at this point. It's getting to be outta control.

So we decided 20 was the number, 10 months is enough, and we stopped.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

But the goal was one year to write from August to August, come up with new ideas.. And then see them through, which can take another year, but. We ended up getting caught all of that attention. Some of the papers got, one of the papers in particular, which is the infamous one about dog humping at dog parks being an indicator for rape culture.

They're all funny as it turns out. That paper was so absurd. Eventually the Wall Street Journal started digging into it and we were caught. Basically. Yeah, it was like we had to send in. Like driver's licenses to prove that we were the fake name, that we used to write the paper.

And so we weren't gonna do that.

And so we had to just figure out how to get outta this thing, as best as possible.

So they know that they're fake, but they aren't sure who you are yet?

No, no. They thought the paper was real and then the Wall Street Journal thought the paper was fake or something's wrong like that. The identity, like nobody could find the identity of the alleged author.

Right. Right, right.

And so the academic journal in this case, which was called Gender, place and Culture, which was the leading journal in feminist geography, contacted us and said basically these right-wing trolls won't leave us alone. Please just prove your identity so we can clear this up.

Because that's their demanding proof of your identity and I'm not who you think I am.

Yeah. This isn't what you think it is.

Helen Wilson. So actually it's funny, I talked to the lady from the Wall Street Journal, her name's Jillian k Melcher. And so I got on the phone with her. I think she still writes there.

I don't know. But um. I got on the phone with her and so she hears my voice and I was like, this is Helen Wilson. And she's are you trans? I was like, no, this is a lot more interesting than that.. And off we go, having our dialogue, that thing comes out in the midst of this. So I realized this woke stuff's not stupid and it's not funny that it's actually scary.

Like I was like, the wheels are coming off the bus of society with this.

Yeah. Yeah.

In fact, I concluded that woke in the universities represented and I got in so much trouble for this phrasing. I still get in trouble for this phrasing, but I'm still gonna say it again because I stand by it.

Woke in the universities represents the seed, and I say that with emphasis, the seed. Of a genocide. And I say it with emphasis because if you say the seed of a genocide, people hear genocide. I didn't say it is a genocide. I said it is the seed, which if it finds soil and it sprouts and it's nourished and it grows and it finally bears fruit is a genocide.

It is the seed of a genocide. And

but there's no question that woke is intentionally turning people against each other. I don't think that's a,

there was in 2018.

Yeah. I don't think it's ridiculous to say that. That's where it could go., Did we not all watch Rwanda for heaven's sake.

Like we know.

Nobody believed a word of it in 2018.

That's you're intentionally turning people against each other. You're intentionally not intentionally creating contention. You're intentionally creating hate. Like you're the belief you want people to not like each other. You want people to distance themselves from others.

Like it was.

That's what I saw.

Yeah, that's what,

but the belief in 2018 was not that, the belief was this is a bunch of college people being college people and the real world will straighten 'em out. Leave it alone.. And I was like, no, it's not. This is a big, big, big problem coming. So I bravely.

The reason it can't be that is because it's coming from the leadership.

It can't be college people doing college stuff if the, if they believe that the authorities are with them. That's the difference is when if the authorities are with us, then this is legit and they'll bring it into their adult life and expect people to mold themselves to it.

Which was called the long March for the institutions.

And that's what they were doing. Yeah. And not in 2018, nobody believed that. Peter and I were considered quite wild.. I finally have this conversation with a guy, a doctor in 2019. Peter was there too. And we're talking to this guy who's fascinated by what we've been doing, and he's the first person we ever heard say, it finally hit me one day that you know, the belief that they're gonna go out into the real world and the real world's gonna straighten them out.

And it suddenly hit me, no, they're gonna go out and change the real world.

Yeah.

And that's exactly what their goal was. It's, they say their goal is. So I asked my wife in January of 2018 if I could quit my job as a massage therapist. Eventually when it got to be too much and dedicate all of my effort and resources to fighting woke by figuring the role that I selected for myself.

I'm not like. I'm not showing up to a lot of policy fights. I have been to school board meetings, but I'm not like the guy that's, I'm not running like a protest or, community organizing.. I decided that I have a skill in reading this, understanding it, making sense of it, and communicating that to people.

So I decided that I was gonna step into this, the role of Rosetta Stone for woke, and that's what I can do. I can help other people decode this. so a lot of people think that my discussions at a high level, that the podcast is hard. What I mostly do is read primary sources to people and tell 'em what they mean.. But the fact is. I always saw myself as if I'm gonna be the Rosetta Stone, I've gotta put the cookies on the fourth shelf and I've gotta put not the very top shelf, but the one right below it, and I've gotta bring a ladder. And so that's what I try to do. So I, people are like, James dumb it down.

I'm like, Nope. Your job, I bring the ladder, the cookies are there. You get the cookies, you distribute them. That's the way that I've envisioned my role. That's what I've sought to do. I think I do it well. When I try to dumb it down, I have to ask Grok for help. I'm not very good at it.

Yeah. Yeah,

Grok actually does an okay job with it, but then I take the thing grok gives me and then I edit it and make it harder again, so it's correct.

And there's just something wrong with me. The math in me, I don't know. And at any rate,

I think that the obstacle a lot of the time isn't so much that you can't explain the concepts. I think a big part of the barrier for most people is just the language. Like math is a different language.

Yeah.

It's a different language.

This is a different language.

And there's a lot of concepts and a lot of definitions and a lot of words that people just,

thousands.

Yeah, they just,

thousands

don't. And so they're, it's real. It's really, it can feel like, or sound like speaking a different language and you have to get in there and acquaint yourself with that and be able to and again, like I said, I had a little bit of a leg up maybe on other people to a point, simply because I was lucky enough to submerse myself in some of that education.

But I think that's very,

I'll give you a taste of this. That's very helpful.

And you have to use that language. You can't, not you have to use it. You have. What are you gonna do? You know?

So like in postmodernism, which you mentioned, which is a very mysterious and complicated thing. they focus on this kind of a thing called discourses. By the way, that's part of the reason I named my company New Discourses.

I didn't make that connection.

At any rate, the discourses what are discourses? Well, in general, it's how things are talked about, how people talk about things and what they're talking about, but they mean something more specific.

And I had, I'm about to do something very dangerous. I'm about to try to use words to describe a complicated picture, which never goes well. And I do not have the picture to share with you because I don't remember where I saw it. But I had watched this YouTube video some years ago, and it was describing discourses.. And it basically looked like a big, complicated mathematical graph, like a spider web graph. Okay. Except in three dimensions and big and complicated, in every dot represents a word. And every line between the dots represents how that word relates to other words. And it was all just. You know?

And it wasn't a real map of language.. It was just a pictorial representation of what, of an idea they were trying to communicate. Dog would have a line that goes to cat under the idea of that they're animals or whatever, right? So that it was like thousands of dots.

It was very complicated, spectrally looking thing.

Yeah.

And what it showed was the exact, the dots with all the lines. Then it said that set of lines is the discourses, or the discourse. That's how things are talked about. And all the things you can talk about are the words and the connections between them are the discourse.

Then the video, they got rid of those lines and kept all the same dots. And you could tell that's what they did. And then they just put new lines and they're like, that's a different discourse. So the point that I wanna make is,. When you say it's a different language, it's actually a different discourse.

They're using a lot of specialist terminology, but they're also using a lot of your regular words.

Yes.

With different connections. Yes. Between the words.

Yes.

So that when you hear the words, you don't realize they fully mean something different.

Yes. Yes. And you think you know what they mean and you actually don't.

And then when their conclusions are so confusing to you, then you feel like you're just an idiot, because why doesn't it make sense to you?

And so what the difference is, and it took me a long time to figure this out, and I can actually say it succinctly now, but what I did first, what I did to understand that language was, believe it or not, I just started writing a dictionary of it.

It's. Partly done, there's like 200 entries that I finished and like 500 that I haven't done on new discourses. I call it translations from the Wokes. And I just created in Social Justice encyclopedia where I just went through their words and tried to explain to other people what they must mean by that word.

And what I boiled down from this, first of all, it's how I really got my head around how they think was by decoding as many other words as possible. And so like in our normal use of language, the discourses are actually defined by something, which is that the words are supposed to refer to things in reality.

So the idea is that the words correspond to real things. And the relations between the words are defined by real relationships between the words.

Yeah.

That is not how they order their discourses. It took me so long to figure this out. The North Star for us is reality.

Yeah.

The North Star for them.

Is political power. So all of their words have to be understood in how they create relations of power between. them, if you have two dots that are connected, that dot that's connected, or the line that's connected them defines a power relationship.

Yeah.

In some way or another. So every single word has to somehow have an explanation that boils down to their convoluted ideas of systemic power.

And until I figured that out, it was literally, it's like trying to learn Korean where you can't read their alphabet.

Wow.

And isn't that the same reason why you make so many connections, draw so many straight lines back to Marxism for the same reason that's the same because they've got the same ultimate goal in mind.

That's, that connection, that political power is what's driving it, is what makes them all similar and what draws a line to them back to Marxism.

Yeah. That in every single possible trail of citations. the other thing that I did was I started reading this stuff, I was trying to figure out feminism, then we were trying to write the grievance papers and then I was trying to make sense of this to communicate it.

And it's like peeling an onion in a sense.. And it's just instead of reading the history of this particular branch of philosophy from the beginning and moving forward, oh, here's John Jacque Russo, and here's what Kant did with him, and here's what Hegel did with that. Now we get to Marx through Feuerbach.

Instead of that, I started on the other end, I started at the end I started in, pop articles in Cosmopolitan,

Uhhuh.

And then it's who's the feminist they referenced, what did she say? Who did she cite?. Oh, we are, now we're back to Fuko. Here's all these postmodernists.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

But somehow there's this other piece that I can't find and the citation trail gets a little bit wacky, but they all talk about Marx here and there, but they seem to be against Marx. And then somehow, actually my friend Michael Fallon, I was with him and I'm talking about, I was just postmodernism and postmodernism at the time.

Yeah.

Back in 2019. We were in a hotel together in Orlando and he said you need to read Repressive Tolerance by Herbert Marusa. And I'm like, never heard of it. Not relevant. Is it postmodern? No. Not relevant. In fact, it's critical theory, which we had been convinced by a critical theorist that understood postmodernism, who was helping us understand it at the time that critical theory wasn't relevant, which is completely wrong.

, I don't know if it was a lie or just a complete distortion. I can work out arguments for both.

Yeah.

As to how he could have made this argument, honestly. Or not. But at any rate, Mike sends me a link to repressive tolerance. I end up going to my room and just sitting there a little early in the hotel, don't have anything to do, start reading It. takes about an hour and a half to read the thing all the way top to bottom for yourself. It's not easy.

Yeah.

And I'm reading it and I'm like, holy crap. This is like everything. But then we're busy for the rest of the trip, like two, three days.. And on the flight home, I read all of it. I actually get to the bottom.

And the bottom is where he is takes the mask off. It's this is gonna require censorship and prec censorship and violence is on the table and all. I'm like, holy moly, and I was like, we live in this guy's world. This is the world they created. And all of a sudden I knew that critical theory was relevant.

And the second I knew critical theory was relevant. That's neo Marxism. Yeah. Therefore marxisms on the table. And then I had this weird humiliating moment because up to that point I had been arguing against Jordan Peterson's. Characterization of it as being postmodern neo Marxism.

And I was like, that's a lot of words. And I was against the neo-Marxist element. Then I read Marcuse and I'm like, it's neo Marxism that's using postmodern tools. It's postmodern neo Marxism

crap. You know? And it's like Jordan was right.

Mm-hmm.

And, but he wasn't getting through to me, but he was right.

So at any rate, I was able to go back and listen to Jordan again with a new set of ears and a new set of eyes and started to piece it together. But once you find them, it's a straight line to Marx.. There's no avoiding it.. And then you can start to see the marx, the postmodernists hid it better, but you can see the marx all through how they think.

And these newer people, it's all kinds of, all over the place there.

Yeah.

But they do this citation game where they won't cite the like really bad guy. They don't want you to know they worked with. They use all of his ideas, they just attribute it to somebody else who also used their ideas. There's this weird citation game.

It's like they know they're hiding their tracks sometimes.. And it takes somebody like Paulo Frady, who I, dove into heavily for education.. For me to really open my eyes and be like, this guy's sighting, like Stalin

wow.

All the way out. What's going on?

Wow.

No, these guys are just commies and, they've just changed their shirts.

It's otherwise, they're literally just communists. And now what we saw on the news the other day, just to draw a metaphor, that Xi Jinping changed his shirt back. So he took off his business suit and put on the frog collar Mao military suit for his meeting that he had with Putin and Kim Jong-un the other day.

Oh, I did not know that.

Mm-hmm. The world noticed.

Okay. Just as a sideline, as a quick question, then we'll get back to the mainline questions. This is just my own bit of curiosity. So would you say that critical race theory has developed into what we might call its own worldview? Or would you say it's like a tool set that can get layered on other approaches?

Both. Is it. It's both.

Oh, okay. Okay.

It's both, but, I thought you were gonna ask me a different question. I was anticipating your question. I was like, is it that or is it Marxism? And I'm like, but it's just derivative to Marxism., It's literally Marxism. Just reconceptualized.. But it is its own worldview, right? So you have a massive social system. I'm think of white supremacy that pervades everything that was created by white people.. And the point was, in order to elevate themselves as a race and to subjugate other people as a race, which gets. Codified by a woman named Cheryl Harris, for example, in 93, she wrote a paper called Whiteness as Property, and she explains that whiteness was established by white people for the purposes of white supremacy, et cetera, as a form of private property that only white people have or can extend to others like Irish or Germans or Jews or whoever they wish.

Yeah.

Or even to model minorities like Asians or so whatever, but never to black people and never to the fully indigenous.. Right?. And but she conceives of it actually as a form of what Karl Marxs in the Communist manifesto calls bourgeois private property. She even says that it's a form of bourgeois private property, which the Communist manifesto is abundantly clear that the he says communism can be summarized in a single sentence, abolished private property,

all private property.

After he says that by private property, he means bourgeois private property.

Yep. Yep.

By which he means capital.

Yes.

So it means your own private property that you are able to and allowed to go invest. In other words, you can take your pile of money to go make a bigger pile of money and, that's what's gotta go away., I was like,

. I was like, wow. It's just the same worldview, but instead of the evil hand of capitalism and the bourgeois values that uphold it.. We now have the evil specter of white supremacy and the, the values of whiteness, which are just western hegemonic values.

They're just literally the regular

because it's telling you what to believe and what's right and wrong and what your values need to be and how

that's right.

Life

and who the,

it's a whole

who the angels and who the demons are.

It's yes.

It's a fully, in the psychological terminology,

what the purpose of life is

a fully split world of view.. It's, there's anti-racist and there's racist. That's it. So there the people who are dedicated to a communist revolution against the racist regime that exists today. And then there are a racial communist revolution. And then there are the people who wish to preserve the status quo, who are all racists.

And so there's no in between. They explicitly tell you there's no not racist.

Yeah.

And so

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

It's a total worldview.

Oh yeah.

But it's also a package of tools that you can pick up, which is called racial critique or racial consciousness raising that you can then use in specialized circumstances layered into other things.

And one of the things I loved that Jordan Peterson cleared up for me too, is that when you adopt one of these other worldviews too, what you're really doing is putting yourself in this position of moral superiority and you get to look down on everybody else because you have it all figured out. I loved how you laid that out in this education book in terms of, there's, the people that know and the people that don't know. It's that same kind of

Yeah, no of racist versus anti-racist,

knower versus

we're the enlightened, those not allowed to know, and you're the idiots and so we need to enlighten you and we're on top.

And postmodernism works the same way.

They're the people who assign themselves the power to define what the discourses look like, what meaning actually is. And then there are all the people who have different meanings who aren't recognized because, they're kept outside of the power structure.

It's just language games.

It's the same thing. Yeah, that's right. It's just the same pattern over and over again. It's dis just disappointingly not creative.

That's true actually.

How, this is a question for you. Yeah. How savvy with your audience can I use gnostic terminology and not lose people? Because some people might get this and some people might not.

But if it's just gonna lose everybody, there's not a lot of point in taking this little digression. It's very short though.

You could try it.

Okay, so very brief summary of gnosticism that will satisfy nobody. Gnosticism is a ancient heretical belief that the God of the creator of the world is actually a demon that's called the demi urge, which comes from the Greek degos, which means builder.

And so he's not the real God. There's a real high God behind that. So we're actually trapped in a prison in our own existence in the world that was created by a demonic force called the demi urge. And we can wake up to the truth that there's a real higher God beyond the God that everybody thinks is God, the God of this world.. Okay. So that's the idea. When you get into various schools of thought within the gnostic thinking structure, you have these kind of lesser demons, under the demi urge called Archons

Uhhuh.

Okay. So what's happened with the whole Marxist philosophy as we talked about at the Dallas workshop you came to

is that it's all socio agnostic rather than there being a spiritual realm that's split into this, high god, that's all good versus the demon that we all perceive that builds the world that we live in. It's not spiritual any longer now. It's social. So there are social high gods that we have that are beyond our access, but then there's a social demon God that's built out the systems of power that we all live within.

So each of those systems of power is like an Archon. And so systemic racism is an Archon, so critical race theory is addressing one of the Archons of the gnostic.

Mm-hmm.

That's one way to think about it.

Yeah. Could you say within that framework that it was something like

that the, the misogyny or the patriarchy. Would that be, within the framework that you're talking about? That's like an Archon that's something that's controlling us.. That's the devil. God,

that's exactly right.

Okay. So that's what you mean. So that's an establishment that we can't get outside of that's controlling us.

That's the devil.

Yeah. But the Archons are like, they're like,

and the patriarchy is controlling everything we get to do.. We have to fight it. And so CRTs our tool, so we're gonna fight this. And it's established as the reality. The patriarchy is a real thing. Like we can prove it.

Here's our proofs. Let's use this really, this really terrible, but, they say helpful tool of CRT or whatever it is mm-hmm. To fight against the Archons.

That's right. So it, yeah. It's like the demi urge overall is like. The evil builder, god of the systems of the world..

But the Archons. Are like his emissaries. Yeah. They work in specific domains. There's theon that might govern the wind and there's theon that might govern the waters or whatever else. Or that governs the human heart or whatever it happens to be. And so each of these systemic power dynamics, classism, racism, sexism, patriarchy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is like one of those like lesser.

Beings in this. Grand gnostic prison that we all live in.. But that's why they all act like we've been imprisoned in some world., We didn't want, we don't wanna live in, and they freak out, like their rights and freedoms are being taken away from them.

Yeah.

When the, all that's happening is literally they're not being expanded into places that are not even rights or freedoms.

It's mind blowing to listen to because when you listen for very long, not even very long you start to realize that, that, for people who are really entrenched in this. They really believe that like somebody somewhere had the skills, the ability, the resources the forward thinking enough to have intentionally built this whole thing like that.

People really did sit in their dark corners and figure out how to build this patriarchy and that it's intentionally attacking them. It's crazy. And then they, one of the things that we talk about our, Academy a lot is victim mentality., When I look at any one of these I don't know, whether you frame it as woke or critical race theory or whatever, what they're trying to do is draw everyone into that drama triangle. They wanna position the world as if it's all persecutor and victims and rescuers and they wanna position all of us as victims and be the rescuers and the whole model is broken because that whole drama doesn't work.

It, everybody wants to be the victim. Everybody's just piling on top to be the victim.. And that's why, you do that in your home, everybody's fighting. 'cause everybody wants to be the one that doesn't have to take responsibility and doesn't have to change things. And there's the big, bad whatever out there.

And to me it's like it at a very personal level, it's so dangerous because it causes people to evade personal responsibility. I feel like at its root, that's a lot of, how it deconstructs the human deconstructs the family is. When you really embrace it and you really become part of it.

You don't. You don't have to change as a person. You don't have to own your crap. You don't have to ask people, tell 'em you're sorry. You don't have to forgive 'em. You don't have to show up different, you don't have to do your job. You just get to complain.. And moan and gripe.

I'll just tell you, not to make it still weird, but this is the gnostic thing, right?

So the gnostic thing is that the idea is that we're actually perfectly spiritual beings. In fact, we're identical with God. We're not separated from this high God, but that we're all imprisoned in this material, crappy, fallen, fake world.. And so what actually enlightens you knowing your true spiritual nature as an imprisoned creature who's been flung into the world to use the Heger term for it?

Yeah.

What awakens you to that is suffering, you're suffering, that you're not expressing yourself as you truly should be, as a fully liberated being, which means a full, integrated part of God. Again, that suffering in the world, which makes you hate the world, becomes the currency. So this is why it's the same exact mentality.

Everything you just described just is exactly the results of that applied to social dynamics instead of to a high spiritual, cult. Literally a spiritual cult. Yeah. And this is why it's such a profound spiritual sickness that it causes in people is because they are enacting spiritual sickness through social means, not realizing that they're engaging in this fundamental spiritual disease. Where you've now inverted

Yeah.

The order of spirituality.. In your own

right is wrong

and glorious belief that you in fact are continuous with the most high.

That you have the answers and that you're gonna rescue the world. And

They don't get it. They have false consciousness, they think everything's real, not fallen in crappy, in an image and a,

yeah.

Mundane and not spiritual. They don't get it. You have to wake 'em up. They have to be woke.

Yeah. It's crazy. I did a YouTube channel and I used to do book reviews and one time I did a communist manifesto book review. And, my particular copy had a really nice introduction and then that introduction, he talked about what I believe to be the truth, that you can look at Marxism as a religion and that it has many of the tenets of a traditional religion.

It gives you a purpose in life. It tells you who you are. It tells you what you're supposed to devote your life to. It tells you what's right and wrong. And he says it also invokes the same kind of religious fervor, the kind of fervor and passion that has been traditionally evoked with, a God relationship.

And I got so much crap, so many people making comments. You're such an idiot. You don't have a clue what you're talking about. Why don't you study real Marxism? Why don't all this kind of stuff. I just still blown away by the fact that did, I guess some people maybe it took and it, they agreed, but I still can't believe how many people were just so averse to that, to looking at it that way.

'cause that made absolute sense to me.

Yeah. People flip out about it, but it's. The word religion has to be used with some caution here because do you consider heretical cults religions?. But they certainly get adhered to with religious fervor and under a judicial definition of religion for like establishment clause purposes.

It meets the definition, which is, by the way,

just read wild swans.. And you'll see exactly what it felt like, what the stupid meetings and the confessions and the, anyway,

that's right. So I don't think that's crazy, but I don't know where it goes. But I can't look at it other than not just as religious in its orientation, but specifically as a recreation of gnostic cults, which gets me in all kinds of trouble.

I was getting made fun on the internet for this today. I get made fun of almost every day for this.

But otherwise, why eradicate all other religions in the first place? Because you are trying to tap into the same emotions that religions are and you're competing with them, so you have to.

That's why, they're always, as soon as communism really takes hold. Anyway, that's a whole other We're getting off. Yeah.

It's a whole thing, but it's a hundred percent right.

Okay. Let me ask you a couple, that's just for my own curiosity.. Okay. So, here's a big question.

You now have been at this long enough that you have gotten a lot of grief. So my question is, why do you keep doing it?

Yeah, one does wonder that sometimes, no, actually I'm very blessed to get to hear somebody else give the answer that you knows the right answer.

So then you know what the answer is and you can just say this guy said this.. And you don't have to think of your own 'cause he said it.. And so I was at an event, I don't know if you've heard of the film that I helped produce a couple years ago called Beneath Sheep's Clothing.

I heard you mentioned it, but I've not seen it.

Yeah. It's pretty good. I'll say, it's a good film. Yeah. And I think it had a pretty good. It made a pretty good splash last year when we put it out. But this would've been about a year earlier and I was out in Utah at a fundraiser to try to raise some of the initial, production cost money for the film and which turned out to be a successful fundraiser is very good.

Nice.

But, one of the other guys who was helping, who helped organize this fundraiser and, put the event on and all this had just suffered a close family friend dying. And their funeral was that day, earlier in the same day as the event.

So we had this event planned and then somebody dies and then he has to go to a funeral in the afternoon. And then at 5:30 we have a barbecue and an event.., I mean, he is a great guy. He wasn't on his normal emotional level, is what I would phrase this as. He wasn't like wild or weird or broken down or anything.

But as you can imagine, he's got a different perspective he brings to the table.. So he stands up and he ends up having this kind of like emotional moment where he says what he wants to say about the film and why it's important. But you can tell he took what would've been like 15 minutes of remarks and shrunk it to three.

And then he was like, my friend just died and it had me thinking all day and basically, why should you support this film? The reason you should support this film is the same thing I was thinking about. And it was a little awkward, but what he said was, I was thinking, why do I do this?

Yeah.

And he is as soon as I asked myself, he's talking about how he's driving in the car back from the funeral. Why do I do this? Why am I in this fight? Why do I get up every day? And he gets his own grief, right? Why do I do this? And so he's immediately came to my mind, my kids.

Right. I do it for my kids. Yeah. 'cause they're the next generation.. And then he thought, no, it can't be that. It's too selfish. It's too small, actually.. And then he was like, I do it for everybody's kids for the whole next generation. And then he thought, no, I care about that, but I don't care enough about that.

You know?. It's it's too abstract in a way.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

And so then he is I do it for my family. And he had the same kind of roadblock. I do it for my myself. And that wasn't right. And he finally said that he, I don't remember. He had this whole progression of things.

It went on for a little bit, but then he finally says, it finally came to me. It struck me that I do this because I know in every bit of my heart that if I didn't do this. I wouldn't be able to look myself in the mirror in the morning when I wake up. Every bit of my soul tells me every single day I have to do this.

So I get asked this question a lot. Why do you put up with the trouble? Why do you put up with the fighting? Why do you put up with the doxing, the smearing, the slander, the harassment, the bullying, the every other thing, cancellations from every which way?

Yeah.

And then just keep going. And the dumb answer is, I don't know how not to, and I don't mean that in a stupid way.

Yeah.

I don't know how to live with myself if this isn't what I'm doing.

Yeah.

I could just go get like a normal job and just enjoy my life. I've got a great place to live. I, have a comfortable life. I have a great family. Like I could just move on.. And then it's no, I couldn't because every single day I am gonna think about this stuff.. Be still working out the ideas, I'm probably gonna end up doing the reading again, and then I'm gonna get pulled back into it. 'cause I gotta tell somebody about what I read holy crap. And so I do it because I have to like, and I don't know why I have to, I just have to, I couldn't live with myself if I wasn't.

And when you have that feeling, trouble coming your way doesn't matter that much. It's okay, so what? It's just part of the process, it's not fun or pleasant. Like I have better and worse moments, but at no point is there time to pack up and do something else.

Mm-hmm.

The only time that I have any doubt of that kind whatsoever is when I wonder if the work that I'm doing is effective. At which point it's not should I quit, it's. Should I completely retool and figure out how to be effective and just basically not put anything out until I figure that out. And like that's just a matter of pragmatics though. That's not a, it's not a fundamental deviation from actually doing the thing. And then I realized I've got a limited set of talents here and I've got a highly refined capacity to do what I'm doing, and I don't see it anywhere else, honestly, except in a very small places and a small number of people.

And so I better just kinda keep going and doing what I'm doing.. And, we'll see where the chips fall.

Yeah. And at this point, the more that you know the better. Resource you are, the more connections you can create for people and the more you can help them make sense of, and I know you contribute, when there's been lawsuits and other things like that.

It's not just your books and your writing and your events, but there's a lot of that. Yeah,

I've done a lot of stuff.

Yeah. Done a lot of stuff. Before we finish up, I wanna touch on something that head a little bit different direction for a minute, because. I got turned on through Locke 20 years ago.

He introduced me to the natural law. I felt cheated 'cause I never got it in school.

Mm-hmm.

And then I started making connections to, oh it's in our declaration and oh, it's been talked about forever. And so that's the lens through which I work with women, that there are things that are objectively true.

They are always true. They're true for everyone. There are things that are written on our heart. That's one way to talk about it. And the thing that you say a lot, that I quote a lot is that reality is what you bump up against when your beliefs are wrong or some variation on that theme.

And then when we were at this event, your ending presentation was a lot about what truth is and why it matters and how, we get back to that. Can you just talk just for a minute to whoever might. Be listening about why you believe that there's objective truth, and what you mean by this reality is what you bump up against when your belief is wrong.

And why? Why all of that matters. Why you, why that's part of what you champion.

It's just what the deepest philosophical question in the world. Okay, cool.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Yeah. No, why is reality, right? That's like the philosophical question.

But why do you even, we have just talked about worldviews that even reject reality.

I mean I'm saying I guess didn't used to be a choice to believe in it, but it is today. And so for you, why. Why do those things matter? Why do you talk about things in that way? What is truth to you? What is reality to you?

Sure. What I don't want to do is turn this into a long discussion about the philosophy of science, of why I think that realism is the correct philosophical position.

Realism being the belief that reality exists external to us and is objective to each of us.. A very simple explanation that doesn't satisfy everybody, but it satisfies a lot of people.. Is that, let's say that I set up a just a thought experiment. I set up a room and there's nothing in the room, but a chair and a table and something on the table.

What does something is, does not matter. Okay. And now a hundred people randomly selected from whatever walks of life you want, I don't care what walks of life.. You could even have a dog among the list to the degree that the dog is capable of doing things as a dog.

Sure.

And we put them one after another to go into the room.

And pretend they have a pad of paper and a pencil besides the object and it's write down what's on the table. And then they come out and the door's closed. Nobody can see inside. Nobody knows what was, we get the paper, we have all 100 people go, including we can even video how the dog interacts with the thing on the table.

If it doesn't, I can imagine it's set up so the dog might sniff it or whatever. Right, the thing is, every single one of them to within some range of error or tolerance would describe the same thing.

Yeah.

Right.. So they would therefore perceive the same thing?

Yeah.

And it wouldn't matter if we picked this random sample or that random sample, and it wouldn't matter if, we were using other tools like different kinds of, maybe we scan the room with light, which is photons.

Maybe we scan the room with electrons, maybe we scan the room with, protons or neutrons or any of these other kind of part. Doesn't matter how we do it, we're going to get a bunch of descriptions or whatever of the thing that all have consilience, they all line up in some way or another. And the simplest, in my opinion, explanation for how that's possible is that we actually live in a world where things are real and they're outside of our imaginations, they're outside of our heads.

We can get into complicated things like, no, we're a brain and a vat. But then you have to explain how you, your whole world is your brain and your vat. And somehow every other person who has as much will to do whatever it is that they want to or would still manages to perceive the thing the same way that you perceive it.

So it's just a lot easier to just cut the Bs as. Mr. T once said he gave, he made a series of funny videos back in the day. Him giving basic advice and one of them was Mr. T on public speaking and he's cut out the jibber jabber. Say what you got to say. That's all reality is real, is just cutting out the jibber jabber,.

It's saying what you got to say, that's all. So that does take a modicum of faith to believe that reality's real and that we're perceiving an external reality.. But because of the fact that every single external observer given a simple enough task to observe something will give conciliatory answers to one another. It's just way easier. To assume that reality's real.

Mm-hmm.

And you know this, again, without getting into a long description of the philosophy of science or even possibly why human beings have sense apparatuses and why they work the way that they do, why they have fidelity, blah, blah, blah.

All that's a fun and exciting exploration. We could go down those roads. I have things to say, but the point is, we would all basically agree on the features of reality pretty closely, which is pretty hard to explain unless it's just actually there.

Yeah.

And okay. So once we decide that reality's actually there truth becomes this.

Thing that somehow represents that which is in reality. In other words, I subscribe to what philosophers call the correspondence theory of truth. Those ideas that correspond faithfully to reality are true.

Yeah.

Does that mean that we know them accurately? No. Does it mean that our ideas are not ideas, but are actually real?

No, our ideas are still ideas, but when they accurately describe reality to a Fair enough, degree.. I talked about these things in the workshop.. I talked about the big four operational criteria by which we can judge a model of reality,. Does it have predictive power?

Does have explanatory power.

Yeah. I love that.

Is it parsimonious?. No extra assumptions, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah.

Whatever they are, because, I have to write those ones down. But. Because we can then, make a judgment about the reality and say that well, probably the thing is real.

And what is true about the thing is that, which corresponds to what, everybody, not most people, everybody would, if their sense faculties are working.. Within reasonable tolerance would conclude about it. Including even, you know, animals and other things. If I put a plant on the table and a snail in the room, you're never gonna see the snail, flying or something.

It's, if it's crawling on the plant, it's always gonna be on the plant. So it's even it's sense of touch is connected to the object really physically being there.

Yeah.

It's like, it's not just floating near it or something.. So that's just the best explanation.. So for me, truth then is what corresponds to reality.

Yeah.

With reality being something that's out there.. This also takes a drop of faith, but then it's what do you do with the fact? This is a deep philosophical question. Like I said, this is an important question in the philosophy of science.. And epistemology.. But what do you do with the fact that okay, you said the thing on the table is a plant.

Right. But you could call it a different name. You could specify what kind of plant it is. You could play this stupid game, like tree is tree in English and it's arable in Spanish. Sure. Like you could do, why does that. Word or the idea that word represents. How do you know that's what's real?

It's easier to deal with that with like fundamental particles. If you look, 'cause they're not a lot going on with them, but if you have a proton and you fire it at a thing, you can describe its behavior fantastically. You can tell exactly what it's, you can guess it's momentum. You can tell how fast it's going.

You can do all kinds of things about it, right?. You can see how it scatters and you can be very precise. You can do a lot of stuff.. Very accurately. How do you know it's actually a proton? You don't there's some object that we agree to call or phenomenon actually. Maybe physical phenomenon.

We agree to call a proton.. And it definitely exhibits these behaviors that can be explained by these properties. So that's called a model. So there's an entire school of thought. It was created by Stephen Hawking and his. A colleague, Leonard Mlodinow, and he wrote about it in a book called The Grand Design, if you wanna read it for yourself, called Model Dependent Realism.

Mm-hmm.

I had the good luck one time of running into Leonard Mlodinow himself. Ah. And the Caltech physicist, and I talked to him about model dependent realism.. And he was like why don't you explain to me what you think it is? And I explained to him what I think it is, and he is that's a better explanation than I would've given.

I think you understand it. I believe in this. This is a lot to say.. What I mean is I believe there's reality. I believe the best we can do is create models of reality. Those models have a degree of accuracy and correspondence.. And at that level, you can compare them one to the other, but it doesn't matter if the actual contents of the model are.

Literally true that a proton is literally a proton instead of some phenomenon that happens to exactly act the way the thing we describe in this model as a proton. That doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. And that's basically the idea. Okay? So once you get to that point, you can agree that reality exists.

That reality has certain principles that reality behaves in certain ways. So there's all of physical truth just falls out of that. The reality is out there, it's discernible.. It's not always easy. We can apply reason, logic, inference, deduction.. All these logical tools to try to figure out what the data are telling us.

When we do experiments, we can rule out certain explanations. We can posit other explanations out at the fringes. Like in cosmology there's 30 explanations 'cause nobody knows which one's. For sure. Yet. And they're competing with one another.

Yeah.

But what about things like moral truth level.

That's what I was gonna say. Yeah. How do you That was human experience. Yeah.

There are different ways to do this. One way is the natural law way, which is the direction I'm gonna take in away that you might not expect. The other way is the religious way, which in my opinion is fine, but also a shortcut.

Which is to say, that the law is written on every human heart.. And so in better language, honestly, what we have is general revelation to work things out in special revelation to help us do it.

Yeah.

And that's, in my opinion, a shortcut if we try to take that off the table to get the harder answer.. My answer usually starts with this very weird sentence that I end up saying to a lot of people who never seem to understand what I'm talking about. I even said it in the back of the room to a guy at the workshop in Dallas. Is that human beings are abounded set. How do I know that?

Because if we have our room that I was just describing and there's a person in the room

mm-hmm.

You're gonna know it's a person. If there's a chimpanzee in the room, instead, you wouldn't think it's a person.

Mm-hmm.

If there was a banana, you wouldn't think it's a person.. If it's a rock, you wouldn't think it's a person.

So there's only so many states in which matter, if we wanna be purely materialist about it can exist and that still be human. In other words, humanity is a bounded set.

Yeah.

Which. For whatever reasons be that evolution, be that creation, be that whatever the explanation for how we got here and how we are, whatever it is.

Yeah.

It's got ends. It only goes so far and then you're not that anymore.

There's something else. Okay. So we are some kind of a social species. We live not just in small bands, but in small bands that band together into larger bands.

Mm-hmm.

Into communities, into even nations. And beyond, we have this very complicated, in the technical word for it is ultra sociality.

We are for whatever reason, an ultra social animal that has all these different properties. We have, our own brands of, we have needs, food, water, sleep, shelter, so on.

Mm-hmm.

We have. For whatever set of reasons in our sociality, a sense of fairness. We have a desire to, do well in the world.. We have actually capacity for cooperation.. Because we have the capacity for cooperation. We have the capacity to get cheated, therefore, we develop high intelligence to make sure that we can work with each other without getting cheated by each other. There are lots of reasons to believe that if you buy the evolutionary hypothesis, that's why humans are primarily so smart.

Mm-hmm.

Was so that we can figure out how to work together and not get cheated by free riders. That would, that would basically be parasites on your tribe or your community.

Sure.

So you have to figure out what people's intentions are with what they're doing and why they're doing it, whatever that all, whatever the causes of all of that.. Maybe we're just created and that's the situation. Maybe we evolve this way, whatever the cause is.

Yeah.

That's defines a wide set of parameters.

Yeah.

By which we have to interact with each other and there are better and worse answers.. I'm not saying there are perfect answers. There are better and worse answers.. For how we're going to do that. We call that morality. Better answers are considered moral. And you can say moral in a local sense, like Islam has its set of values.

Mm-hmm.

And then Christianity has a set of values. And western liberalism. Regardless of religion has a set of values.. But at the same time, there's still the fact that human societies, you can measure how well are they flourishing.. How productive are they can, how much are they developing?

You have enough information to look back,

can they feed everybody? Do they have to kill people they don't know how to deal with?

There are some pretty basic things and then there's some pretty sophisticated and complicated things where you can measure and say. Which of these sets of values actually promotes flourishing better?

Yeah.

And I know that some people are gonna recognize that this is a spinoff of Sam Harris's argument in the moral landscape.

Mm-hmm.

Which people have accused of being kind of moral relativist. But what I think is that there might be multiple answers to what good morality is, but because humans are a bounded set, most of the right answers for most people, most of the time are going to overlap. Now, what does that mean for a culture that has completely different values and it's functioning, but maybe at a lower level?

Can you just say, take, some backwards tribe in Pakistan of, angry Muslims and transform them into liberal loving, western Christians. The answer is no, because it's really hard to change the way that people understand the world as a communist learned, you can't just change in one generation how people think about the world.

. How communities share and transmit knowledge, it has nothing to do with race, but has a ton to do with culture. Is that we share and transmit knowledge in different ways for different purposes. And tend to have very sticky cultural underpinnings that. It's like the weird conservative thing.

This is what we've done and it works and there might be something that works better, but by God, we're not messing up to find out. But the short answer is that there are moral truths because there are only so many. There might be more than one, but there are only so many good answers to these questions.

And it is very likely that there are actually optimal answers to these questions.. And I think the United States is one of these, this is what the point of my lecture was in some senses that the United States proves out that the principles of, voluntary exchange with safeguarded private property rights unlock abundance, prosperity, and wealth.

Period.. It doesn't matter who you're talking about, it doesn't matter where they're from.. This is a universal principle. So the, a value set that honors the ability to engage in voluntary exchange of secured private property. Is going to produce greater abundance, wealth and prosperity for the people who engage in it.

Mm-hmm.

And it's just a fundamental. Fact, like another fact of human nature is that at the end of the day, as communal and ultra social and whatever, highfalutin and stuff, we are, we're also self-interested.

Yes.

Like number one is still number one. And you can say I'm religious. God is number one.

We know what we, you don't have to play word games with me. We all know what, looking out for number one means.. And it means you're taking care of yourself first.. And we're all self-interested. So what this weird system we have of, voluntary exchange and secured private property.

What allows me to do is to have a self-interested motive to help a stranger. If you have, I use the example of hammers. So if you have a loose nail on your house and I don't have, I don't care. It's not my problem. You need something to drive in that nail.. If I happen to be good at buying hammers, I don't have to know you.

I don't have to care about you. I don't have to care about your wall. I don't have to care about what you're doing about, I don't care about your problem, but you'll give me $20 for a hammer and I care about $20.. So now I am investing my time and resources to create the object that you need so that you can solve your problem without even knowing you or your problem or caring about it.

So all of a sudden, self-interest becomes mutual interest.

Yes.

It solves that problem. And so this kind of a system fits with our if you're Christian, you'll say, fallen human nature, where we're looking out for number one instead of number one.

Mm-hmm.

Right? And so these are, again, I can, I did this in New Zealand, actually, this is very similar.

Talk to that portion of the presentation I gave in Dallas.

Mm-hmm.

And I had the wherewithal in New Zealand, which I did not have in Dallas. After six lectures and being exhausted, but in, New Zealand, I had the wherewithal in front of this crowd to say all these principles about basically what amounts to free enterprise.

And why they produce wealth and abundance. And at the end was like, and obviously they have this huge issue with the racial issue with the Maori and the Pacifica and all of the different peoples. And I was like, and notice that what I just said is true for every single person. I didn't have to mention that it's more true for white people or Maori people or any race.

It doesn't matter.. It doesn't matter. So the fact that there are universally true things that produce greater abundance, flourishing and so on means that there must be some. Objective moral truths. The problem is that some values are socially constructed.. Sometimes for legitimate reasons, derivative to real stuff, and sometimes for completely arbitrary reasons.

Which is why I also think a principle of free inquiry allows you to say does that tradition that we have here really work?

Or is it just something we do because we do it?. Does it really work? And that requires free inquiry. 'cause otherwise, the second you say, what about this tradition, somebody cuts your head off because now you're a threat to the tribe.

So the second you have free inquiry, what you can do is you have, one of the big four operational criteria was optimal flexibility. Was the ability to abandon a bad idea. In favor of a better idea.

Yeah.

And if you have free inquiry, you can then say I don't know about this tradition. Then you can have a debate about it with violence not on the table, and discuss what is this real?

Is this actually, is there something better we could do? Can we do an experiment and find out, kind of test both of them ab test this and see what happens? And you can start to find better solutions to ways that you deal with, building the complex problem of how do you build and run and manage a society.

Yeah.

And history in some sense is this weird collection of, uncontrolled, unregulated experiments.. And how this is done. You have countries that have all these principles and they decide they're gonna have, I don't know, a great society program instituted by President Johnson.

Everything gets worse and you say, that was a mistake. We shouldn't do that anymore.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's. So well said.

In other words, human nature exists that's the short version.

Yeah. Yeah. And we ignore it or go against it at our peril. That's really like

the hard part for it is that there are genuinely places for wiggle room within human nature.

Sure.

There are perfectly acceptable different ways to cut your hair. And style your hair.

Yes.

From one culture to another, and it literally doesn't matter.

Yeah. One of the things that I love to quote is from democracy in America. In the preface Tocqueville, it's like a letter to the French.

It's Hey I've written this book for you. Here's what I want you to think about., I can't give you the whole paragraph, but basically he says the idea is, what they're doing is working pretty well. And I really think we ought to follow the American model.

And he says, but we need to follow her principles, not the specifics of her laws, basically. And that kind of speaks to what you're saying here, that there are things, there are fundamental principles that made America work. And that's what Tocqueville recognized that France needed right at, mid 18 hundreds.

That's definitely what they needed. And if they were to embrace those, but do it the French way, 'cause you can do it the French Way and that's, that's what he understood. We can still be us.

Mm-hmm.

But those are objective, human, moral, societal, governmental truths, principles, however you wanna talk about them, that will just create flourishing if we'll just get behind them it, infuse them into our systems in whatever way we possibly can.

Yeah, it's that variation or variability on themes erected off of core universal and fundamental principles is actually at the basis for why I think things in the moral universe are true beyond obviously physical truths.. Which we had to waste time because we live in postmodernity now.

So somebody has to say that reality's not real. And how do you know? And what do you mean by real? What does is mean? How are we gonna rearrange our discourses so that I win The argument is what postmodernism is really about.

And that's for me where I feel like individual expression really comes in play.

Different cultures. We can have all of that individuality and we can have, culturally or individually or whatever as a society, we can be who we are, we can be the French, we can be the whatever. But we're not gonna thrive unless we accept that there are certain proper ways to bring about human flourishing and we've gotta get behind them.

Yeah. Human nature exists.

Yeah.

Also the physical world exists, or another way to say human.

And it's crazy that we have to defend that the hundred and fifty years ago. We wouldn't even have this conversation. It would've been what are you even talking about? Why are you even defending?

That's so common sense. Yeah. Okay, last question for you.

The reason is because academics didn't defend their turf properly and now we're all living in their I know their nightmare.

I know. There's this great, you know who Robert Hutchins and Mor Adler and all of them were University of Chicago, all that stuff.. There's this really great phrase in Robert Hutchins book he's looking back on the time when he was debating Dewey and all of that stuff was going on, and he says, at the time I really thought we were doing a good job. I really thought we were making headway. I really thought we were preserving the liberal tradition.

And I realize now that I was just a stopper in the bathtub. And it's a discouraging, it's sad actually, that, and it's hard not to feel that way sometimes. It's hard not to feel discouraged about where things are and to feel so small and to feel so insignificant, especially for all of us of us that aren't nearly as brilliant as you.

I would love to end by, and I don't know if maybe you need to think about this for a minute or whatever, but what could you say? What would you choose to say? To parents today, what is there 1, 2, 3 things that, this would be my recommendation for you. Whether it be something they could read, something they could watch, something they could do.

My answer is always educate yourself. Educate yourself. That's, we've got an academy. It's encourage our women to be lifelong learners. Try to point 'em to good resources. You've, you've been in this quite a lot, you have a very deep understanding of a lot of what's happening culturally.

So what advice would you give to the parents that are listening?

Without hesitation, the first thing to say is what you're doing matters. What you are doing actually matters. Especially as parents, you're raising the next generation.. So what you do for good matters and what you do for ill matters.

Where you decide to be lazy matters. Where you decide to be diligent matters, it makes a difference. There's this principle in the Moms for Liberty group of being joyful warriors. Not that they're the only people who ever thought of it, but obviously they've made it a big part of their brand.

And the one of the founders at the time who, she's moved on now is Tiffany Justice. And she said that she's a mother, right? She's I have four kids.

Yeah.

I don't wanna be angry all the time. I don't want them to lose their mother to my political advocacy. I need to be present for them. I need to be a smile on my face.

In a good mood, I can't be angry and miserable and frustrated all the time. So what you're doing matters. Your children are watching, your community is watching, your children are watching. So how you engage matters that you are, for you guys, lifelong learners matters. And in fact, that's related to that is, Zu and Art of War says, and I don't butcher it, but the gist is if you know your enemy and you know yourself, you don't need to fear any battle. If you only know yourself, but you don't know your enemy, for every battle you win, you'll also lose one. And then he says, if neither your enemy nor yourself. Then he basically says, you're gonna succumb in every battle.

You're gonna get your butt handed to you, right?. Lifelong learning, I think is actually key, but let's focus it. You need to know your enemy. And you need to know yourself. So what's your enemy? This the stuff that's coming in trying to disturb your way of life, and what is your self, it's your way of life.

So that means, who are we as a people that you know, politically, culturally, economically. You have to know those foundations. You have to, teach your children, those foundations. You have to increase in your understanding by teaching your children those foundations and engaging in them.

Who are we spiritually? If you're a person of faith, that's very important part of who you are and a very important part of who you're teaching your children to be.. The raising, educating, and discipling of children are the three kind of things that are usually brought up as the core functions of parents.

And so you need to be engaged in that, but that means you need to understand it. So, if you want to be on the. Avant garde of making a difference. You need to know who you are.. Politically, economically, socially. You need to understand the tenets of your country, the tenets of your faith.

The tenets of the long tradition in which of prosperity that we're all embedded. There's a lot to know about yourself that we've been able to take on cruise control for a lot of time. A lot of homeschool parents are not, but other parents, a lot of everybody is just taking it on cruise control.

Yeah. So there's a lot of fun stuff to do and know yourself and then knowing your enemy, like it depends on how you want to engage in the battle. Right. You have to prepare your kids for the road that they're going to walk one way or the other.. You can't go out and change the road.

Not much. You can change it a little, like your advocacy does matter. It can make a difference, but for the most part, you've gotta prepare your kids to walk the road. They're in this. Like we were just laughing about we live in this stupid postmodern world where these stupid arguments about what words mean, and if reality's real come up where everything's like race and gender all the time.

Yeah,

I know. You don't wanna engage with, that's not part of you want your kids to have a normal childhood. Sorry, that ship sailed. You have to engage them. We're very fortunate you could say, I just want my kid to have a normal childhood. Let's go back 400 years.

And I think there shouldn't be famines. No. You have to teach your kids to be ready for the famine when it comes. And it turns out right now what you have to teach your kids to be ready for is political warfare and brainwashing. Unfortunately.. But at least they're not as likely. Who knows what could happen if it goes bad to have to weather a famine, right?

So you have to prepare your kids for the road, which means you also have to learn. if All you wanna do is just tend to your own garden, your own children. You still have to learn some of the stuff.. But if you want to engage in advocacy, if you want to try to go be a part of a group that's making a difference, if you want to get involved at the local level in politics or just if you just want to have even like a Bible study that's culturally informed or a civics study,. It's, imagine the exact same thing as a Bible study, except you're doing like the Declaration of Independence.. PS by the way, a lot of people are surprised when they hear this. You can do that. It's allowed, right? It's like the idea of getting together and studying

called the book club goes all the way back to Benjamin Franklin.

Change the world with the book club..

All of that stuff. You have to enrich and understand if you wanna do that well, you have to be able to enrich and understand in comparison to the world that we actually live in.

Yeah. Which means unfortunately, you gotta learn some woke crap. So I, as you said educate. So you know, you matter. You need to get educated. A lot of kind of broad principles, like the goal of this thing is to make you despair, to make you want to quit. How do you not, you can't.

So how do you do? You can't quit for your kids, let 'em watch you quit. Yeah. That's great, mom.. So what do you do? Whether it's faith in your religious faith in God, whether it's faith in your country, whether it's faith in, just the principles that your family or the tradition.

Like you need that and you need to renew it, and you need to intentionally take measures to renew that. In other words, it's keep yourself healthy so that you can mentally, emotionally,. Physically, spiritually.. So that you can nourish others.. Is a really big thing.. There, there's lots more stuff, that could be said. I literally, I think I told you before we started, I am literally writing a book about this and there's 70 things. Oh, excited. And I don't wanna just start rattling them all off.

Mm-hmm.

And I could tell you the title, but I don't have one yet, so I don't know what the title of the book is.. I can't tease you with it enough. We haven't got that far.. We're just gonna write it first.. And there's principles in there love the truth, always do the right thing, even when there's consequences actually. Especially when there's consequences,

I also have very practical advice if you wanna be useful in the public policy or community. In that legalist way, learn to read legislation.

Yeah.

Learn to read woke, like we said, it's another language, another set of discourses.. You can't peel apart the document your kid's school sent home, unless you can read for keywords and buzzwords and decode what they mean.

So learn to read it and do the reading. But yeah, mostly my advice is just general and generic. Your kids are number one, you need to take care of them, and you need to remember that what you do matters. It doesn't matter how small you are.. Right. So I give this, talk.

Sometimes it's this really inspiring thing I say, people cry. It's exciting. So nobody is gonna crying. But one of my favorite scenes, and this is dorky, but one of my favorite scenes in Lord are the rings. Is when the tree people just went and, spoilers are coming. So the tree people just got really mad and went and destroyed the evil fortress of Orthanc.

. Right. And Isengard. So they couldn't destroy Orthanc actually, but they destroyed Isengard. So the tree people just did their thing. And then the wizard Gandalf is explaining what happened. And what happened was that these two hobbit characters, Merry and Pippin get captured by the bad orcs and dragged off and they escape into the forest in a dramatic scene.

And then they meet the tree people and they tell the tree people what's going on in the world. The tree people get pissed off and they go to destroy this thing. And so Gandalf's trying to relate this to other people and he says, I, in his very Gandalf way, I think the coming of Merry and Pippin to Fangorn Forest was like the loosening of two stones that fell in avalanche.

Wow.

And so I tell people, you don't have to be Gandalf. You can be just somebody who's kicked a small stone that hits another stone that the next thing you know, the side of the mountain's coming down. And I could probably sit here and different times, different talks. I come up with different people and I just start rattling off everyday normal people.

People whose names I don't even know in a lot of cases, who were the catalysts that triggered somebody to get involved, who became a really big deal, who made a gigantic difference. So even if you don't end up being the guy going to do the thing, or the mom going to, change the world, that conversation that you have at lunch might put an idea in somebody's head.

I give an example, I use a lot here is Billboard Chris. And everybody thinks, okay, so he was just a dad and now he does this thing in worldwide activism. He's made a huge dent in the gender ideology and transgender thing. Helped parents all over the world, but it's not billboard. Chris, who's the small stone billboard, Chris was at lunch with somebody who told him about puberty blockers, which he had never heard about before.. So somebody just had the courage or the gall or whatever to mention puberty blockers in Vancouver in front. I think in Vancouver, that's where he lives. In front of Chris. Chris is shocked by these two words next to each other, goes home, looks 'em up, finds out what they are, freaks out, starts his advocacy.

So the person, the unnamed person who happened to just be talking and mention that started an avalanche.

Yeah.

That's being a small stone. And I can't encourage you to realize how important that is. The bottom line there is that you, you need to be telling the truth as much as you can all the time.

. 'Cause when you tell the truth, you put truth into the world. And you don't know what that truth is gonna go do now that it's loose in the world.. And a truth, as I said in Dallas has the power to level any error. That it touches. That's the power of a truth. The example I gave is a very fun example where, imagine we have three really smart people in the room up on the stage, and we say, how wide is the room?

And they all give their guesses and they argue and one, different guesses and why they're Right. And their big important philosophers or whatever.. And all their argument doesn't get us any closer to the truth until the janitor walks in the back with a tape measure and then all of a sudden their reputations are on the line because they've all just made an ass of themselves defending their answer that's about to get showed out by the least of these pulling the tape measure and seeing how big the room really is.. Because the fact is it doesn't matter who they are. It doesn't matter what their state or stature is. It doesn't matter how much of an expert or how wholly or how politically important or how fantastic they are, how nice a guy they are, how good an arguer they are, how many people in the room they convinced by consensus that they're right.

It doesn't matter any of that. Once the actual measurement comes, once the truth shows up. Everybody who's right is vindicated and everybody who's wrong is shown to be an error.

And so when you put a truth out into the world about anything, you don't know where that truth's gonna go. It might not go far.

If you put 10,000 truths in the world, one of 'em might make it a pretty good distance.. And that truth will eventually through somebody else or through you or whatever, encounter an error that it levels and now you've cleaned up some error in the world.. So tell normal people and parents, especially a lot, to realize that it doesn't matter if you think you're just a regular mom or just small character and you're never gonna play a big role.

It's like you don't have to. And in fact, nobody's too small.

To make a difference.. Just. What do you do? You take care of your kids, you raise 'em. You tell the truth. You get involved where you can,. Just very basic stuff and it actually adds up. That's the idea of the American principle of self-governance.

If we're all taking care of our own stuff and taking care in a way where it ends up bleeding over through trade or exchange with our neighbors, then everything rises.

Yeah. That's beautiful.

It's the same principle.

Yeah. That's beautiful. So well said. There's something I was thinking about that came from you and a few other sources, and I started to understand over the last couple years that it really hit me that we are all responsible for our culture.

Our culture is creating the future, and what you're saying is that every single person that adds positively to that culture nurtures it. We're either nurturing a good culture or a bad culture. We're either paving the way for things to be better or for things to be worse. And, that's another reason why every single person matters, because they're part of the greater culture and they're responsible to it to try to nurture it, try to make it healthier.

And that's why it's so important that wherever you stand.

That's right. And

You just stand for whatever that is, even when it seems so tiny because you know what's right. And so you stand there and then there's enough of a standing and before you know it, the culture isn't quite as sick as. It was

That's right. And your kids are watching.

Yes. And what you do matters way more than what you say. So walk the walk.

Yeah. They'll notice a mismatch. Yep. They're smarter than they let on.

Yep. Yep. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. I've learned a lot again from you, learn from you every time I interact.

I'm so grateful for all the things that you shared with our audience that can go out and bless their lives. Hope everyone will pay attention to especially your newest book coming out that we don't know when it'll come out, but it'll be for us. And so we're excited. And anything else catch James at new discourses.

I think it's just new discourses.com, isn't it?

Yep.

And all kinds of resources. You're letting out podcasts, like just all the time and so many, the books and I don't know what other events you do, but. Check him out and we'll leave a bunch of links. Is there anything else? Is there other ways that I haven't mentioned that people can find you or engage with you or learn from you?

The people that wanna find me on social media it's a bit of a wild ride. I'm a wild creature on social media, but I got described as a talk one time as a knife fighter on social media...

Do you wanna watch the fight?

I try to be good, but. I'm

lose your patience sometimes?.

I have. No, not so much patience. I just, I have boundaries and, I will give as I get.. And I know that the biblical thing is, do not answer evil with evil, but bless. But man, there is nothing in there that says, do not answer a smart ass with something. Smart ass.. And so unfortunately it's a little wild.

It's not for everybody's taste, I hope it's for yours. But I am at Conceptual James, which is also a spelling test, by the way.. And I'm everywhere except Facebook. You can't find me on Facebook.. Facebook banned me for life and has not un banned me.. And I didn't like it anyway, so that was great.. I celebrated the day they kicked me off.

Okay. So at Conceptual James, we will link that as well. We'll link the website and the podcast and all the other resources. But it's been such a pleasure, such a treat. I just can't thank you enough. And thanks everyone for listening. We will see you next time.

Get Your 3 FREE Chapters of the Audiobook version of The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

The first in a series of upcoming podcasts answering questions “All About Life Mission,” this first installment begins at the beginning.

If you’ve ever wondered what life mission is, this podcast gives you a perspective you may have never considered. Once you understand life mission in this way, it will be so much easier to see why life mission is so transformational—for you, for your family, for your community and beyond!

Stay tuned for upcoming episodes answering more life mission questions such as:

    1.    How does mission driven living work?
    2.    Who are mission driven people?
    3.    How can life mission help me solve my persistent problems?
    4.    Does everyone have a life mission?
    5.    Is life mission the same as life purpose?
    6.    How can life mission help my family?

And many more…

_____________________

Podcast Transcript (AI generated)

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, the founder of the Mission Driven Mom and the author of The Mission Driven Life. If you haven’t yet, head over to themissiondrivenmom.com to get your free copy of the first three chapters of The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World.

Make sure to grab those chapters, which will introduce you to the Seven Laws of Life Mission. They provide the backstory of the book and guide you on how to live a more mission-driven life, fulfilling your unique contribution to the world. Thank you for joining me today. 😊

If you're new to the podcast, consider going back to the beginning. In addition to listening to recent episodes, explore our series on the seven laws and various mission-driven stories. This will give you a comprehensive understanding of what we discuss and how it relates to principles and those seven laws.

Today, we’ll talk a bit about what life mission is. I want to do a series of episodes addressing the various questions we receive at the Mission Driven Mom about Life Mission. We’ve noted down many of them, and you can look forward to these episodes in the weeks and months ahead, answering your questions about life mission—why it matters, how to discover it, what the seven laws are, and more.

Let's begin at the beginning and discuss what Life Mission is. The best way to describe this to you is to imagine you live in a kingdom with the best king you can imagine. He is attentive, knows and loves his people, does what’s right and just, and always seeks improvement for his kingdom.

You, living in this kingdom, feel like an average person with limited resources and unclear talents. Yet, you hold a desire to be useful. You love this king and wish to help him in any way possible. Despite feeling you have little to offer, you approach the king with a willing heart, ready to do whatever he asks because you trust him completely and know he loves the people.

What would this good king do if someone approached him with such willingness? He would accept their help, regardless of self-perceived limitations, finding a role for them. Whether it’s delivering messages, taking dictation, or something else, he would use their abilities.

Moreover, seeing this eagerness and willingness, the king would help them grow and develop to be even more useful. Starting with something small, he would match their abilities with the kingdom's needs, gradually increasing responsibilities as trust and capability grow.

This dynamic allows both the king and the subject to thrive. The king accomplishes tasks with willing participants, and the subjects develop through their missions, understanding the bigger picture that only the king sees.

When embarking on any task, even the smallest, the king ensures you are prepared and equipped with everything needed—be it keys, seals, or messages. You may not receive everything right away, but with trust, you will find what you need along the way. 🌟

As you perform tasks with dedication, you grow closer to the king, gaining more responsibilities and developing a deeper relationship rooted in mutual trust. You discover your potential and talents, which the king helps to nurture for greater challenges.

This partnership with the king, who knows the realm’s needs, enriches your life with meaning and purpose. You become more like him, surrounded by others who share your dedication to making the world better. Together, you avoid self-doubt and embrace growth, focusing on improving yourself, your family, and your community with God’s guidance.

Life Mission is about recognizing God as the ultimate authority, allowing him to guide you in his plan, and understanding that your willingness and trust are what truly matter. In this partnership, you rise to your potential, discovering more about yourself and achieving more than you ever could alone.

Sometimes, people struggle with the concept of Life Mission, thinking it might feel mundane or inconsequential. However, as C.S. Lewis noted, even after his conversion, his life looked much the same, but now he did everything to the glory of God, changing everything.

Now, with God’s guidance, you have a roadmap—the Seven Laws of Life Mission—to prepare yourself and partner with him. These laws, practiced by great men and women, show us how to live a mission-driven life, enriching our lives and those we serve.

In essence, Life Mission is an errand given by God to serve others, representing him and striving to act as he would. Through this service, we and those we serve grow, enriching our lives deeply.

It's important to know what Life Mission is not. It’s not self-serving or deceptive, but rather a true submission to God and truth. It’s not about accolades but about making a genuine contribution, trusting the king’s vision, and understanding that mission outcomes exceed expectations.

As Dr. Frankl explained, don’t aim at success. Instead, dedicate yourself to a cause greater than yourself, allowing success to ensue naturally.

The pursuit of success or happiness is not direct. Instead, these come as byproducts of dedicating oneself to a cause greater than oneself. The same principle applies to Life Mission. It's not something to be directly pursued, but something that naturally unfolds as you prepare and submit to the Seven Laws of Life Mission, aligning yourself with God's plan.

By embracing the Seven Laws—loving God, loving yourself, loving truth, and loving humanity—you create a foundation for a mission-driven life. You become attuned to the callings already present in your life, recognizing that roles such as a parent or a leader at work are parts of your Life Mission. The key is to approach these roles with the mindset of service, letting God guide your actions. 🙏

Life Mission isn't restricted to a particular type of work. It is defined by the spirit in which you perform your work and who it is done for. By allowing God to lead, you transform everyday tasks into meaningful contributions, enriching not only your life but also the lives of those around you.

Here's a brief summary of what Life Mission is not:

Ultimately, true Life Mission requires submission to God and a willingness to embrace his guidance, trusting that the tasks he gives—no matter how small—serve a greater purpose. Through this, you discover your potential and contribute meaningfully to the world.

At the Mission Driven Mom, we believe in this transformative process. We've witnessed over 600 women complete Level 1, with many continuing through the program to graduation. These women are now making a positive impact in the world, using their gifts and talents guided by a higher purpose.

Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope this insight into Life Mission inspires you to explore your unique contributions. I look forward to seeing you next time!