The Mission Driven Mom Podcast

I'm a recovering rescuer.

For me this shows up as me doing things for others that they should really be doing for themselves (often my kids).   I also sometimes jump in and try to fix a problem that isn't mine, or do something I was never asked to do—like call the doctor or plan the party or give dating advice. Of course, I'd tell myself I just "wanted to help."  But honestly, that probably wasn't my true motivation. I probably thought something was broken that I needed to fix.

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AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

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

AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. Today I have a special guest, Donna Zajonc. Her credentials are master certified coach, author, and co-founder of the Center for the Empowerment Dynamic. If you saw our David Emerald interview, that is her association here. She helped co-found that organization with David. They worked intimately together for many years until he passed away. And I had the privilege of being one of Donna’s students years ago when I took her coaching program. It gave me lots of tools, some of which we’ll talk about today. Thank you again, Donna, for being here. I’m really looking forward to this.

AUDREY: I want to give you a little bit of her credentials, because she’s done some really amazing things in her life and I want all of you to know how incredible she is. She is currently the director of coaching for the Power of TED, the Empowerment Dynamic organization. She is a very gifted teacher and coach, and her coaching program is so worth signing up for. She received the Washington State Excellence in Coaching Award in 2017. She served three terms in the Oregon legislature, and she also owned a multi-store food retail company in Oregon. Then in 2001 she really embraced her passion for coaching. Donna, you’ve been coaching pretty much full time since then?

DONNA: Yeah, 25 years now.

AUDREY: That’s amazing. And The Power of TED, one of the core books in our Mission Driven Mom Academy, level one, has sold over a quarter of a million copies.

DONNA: I’m so glad to hear that. It’s so needed.

AUDREY: And then her own book, which I own here and have all marked up, is Who Do You Want to Be on the Way to What You Want? Coaching with the Empowerment Dynamic. It was published a few years ago. I love it.

AUDREY: There are so many places we could start. I think we know a little bit about you professionally. I’d love to start out with a little bit more about you personally, so our audience can feel like they know you as a woman. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

DONNA: Well, there are quite a few different segments to my life, as you alluded to. My early years of being drawn to public service through politics and being in the legislature. And being a mom.

DONNA: I was in southern Missouri and went to the University of Missouri, joined VISTA, and married right out of college. We went to Oregon to work with the Klamath Indians, where I was the health coordinator. That was in the early to mid seventies. It was through that experience that I got really interested in public policy and health care policy, and I spent some time in the legislature. I stayed in Oregon, stayed in the Northwest, even though my home base, my brother and sister and family, were sixth generation in small towns in Missouri. But I’ve been a Northwesterner: Portland, Seattle. I live on Bainbridge Island, which is a gorgeous island right off of downtown Seattle.

DONNA: That’s the résumé of person, place, and time. We can certainly get into when I met David in 2003, when we started immediately talking about the empowerment dynamic. We named that and had no idea it would become our life’s work and our business.

AUDREY: You said professional coaching since 2001, so you were already doing that when you met David.

DONNA: That’s correct. I was moving into coaching leaders, especially public leaders, because that had been a big part of many of the years earlier in my life, a real dedication to the nobility of public service. That is not how much of our public leadership is seen today, and I get really sad about that. But that’s exactly what I was doing in 2001 and 2002. We met in 2003 and were immediately drawn to our way of thinking and our desire to create a world that works for all: our desire to serve, to help people be their best, and to create systems where families, companies, and nations can really thrive.

AUDREY: Absolutely. So what led you to coaching in the first place? Why were you already in that realm when you met David?

DONNA: That’s a great question. My undergraduate degree is in nursing, and I went into public health nursing right out of college, working with the Klamath Indians and then in two different community mental health clinics in Oregon for many years. So I already had a very keen interest in human development and psychology. That’s when I heard about and discovered this idea of coaching, which in 2000 and 2001 was brand new.

DONNA: There was a friend here on Bainbridge Island who really guided me into asking, is this a good fit for you? And it felt so good. My psychiatric mental health nursing was more about healing, about addressing wounds and issues. Coaching is all about forward looking, forward thinking. That forward thinking, being at our best, being emotionally sound and secure in our values, being able to take responsibility, all of that really attracted me. So I looked into the coaching school here in Seattle. It was a perfect fit, and I never looked back.

AUDREY: They actually had a school established by then?

DONNA: They did. There were a handful of really incredible coaching programs in the year 2000, and one of the founders of the International Coach Federation created a school here. I felt that was a bit of guidance, because it was so easy for me to be able to attend school right in Seattle.

AUDREY: That’s wonderful. So tell us a little bit more about how this connection with David organically started to grow into shared work for the two of you.

DONNA: What a beautiful question. We met in a business setting, but we very quickly realized that there was a strong love and affinity between us. Over those couple of years after meeting, he shared with me epiphanies he was having about a time in his life where he felt very much like a victim. He found out he couldn’t have children of his own, that he was biologically infertile. His dad, who he was very close to, died suddenly. And his first marriage disintegrated, for lots of reasons, but I think in part because he couldn’t have children and she very much wanted children.

DONNA: So he started telling me about his epiphanies around this victim consciousness, and about some guidance he had had to ask, well, what’s the opposite of victim? Out of that meditative reflection, he had a sense. He says, I didn’t hear words, I didn’t hear a voice, but the opposite of being a victim and having life happen to us is to be a creator. So learn to create and take responsibility for our lives.

AUDREY: And on first blush that seems like a really simple idea. It is so profound.

DONNA: It comes with an extremely profound idea about how we meet the world, how we meet challenges, how we meet ourselves and our family, moving out of “life happens to me and I’m powerless,” which is a quick summary of victim consciousness. And we are all victims at times, to accidents, to health issues. People really do abuse us. What we’re talking about is not victimization.

AUDREY: That’s right. Definitely.

DONNA: We’re talking about victimhood as an identity, that we see ourselves as not having a choice, that life happens to us. That description alone can really stop people.

AUDREY: Yes. There’s a big difference.

DONNA: So that became our conversations. We both knew about the drama triangle, me from my days in mental health, and David knew about it through being in therapy regarding the loss of his marriage and not being able to have children.

AUDREY: And that’s the main shift, isn’t it? Victim is the heart of that drama triangle.

DONNA: Dr. Karpman said that when we’re feeling like a victim, there’s always a persecutor. There’s always a problem that’s caused us to feel like we’re a victim. And the third role Dr. Karpman said is that when those two roles enter, there’s always a third one, the hero, the rescuer. So that’s a very dynamic description of the three primary ways we human beings respond to things we don’t like and don’t want.

DONNA: David’s epiphany, as you know, was, oh my gosh, there’s got to be a positive alternative to that. We firmly believe in the goodness of who we are as human beings. So what is the new triangle that rests upon that goodness, that ability to choose, that ability to create, that ability to be loved? That’s what he started sharing with me on walks. And I said, David, this is really original work. We need to write this down.

DONNA: That’s what we did for about a year and a half. And we named the new triangle. I was writing a book about my time in coaching, and my editor heard about David’s new triangle and that we had just named it the empowerment dynamic. So now we’ve got the drama triangle on one hand and the empowerment dynamic on the other. She said, okay, David, now you have named it TED. The name of your book is going to be The Power of TED. And now you need to write a story.

DONNA: David was shocked. He said, I don’t know how to write a story about some guy named Ted. But that’s what he did. We hired my editor to help him do that. And so there you go, Audrey. That’s how it was birthed. We just kept following our guidance and our epiphanies and our sense of how much value it had for us to stop and say, wait a minute, where am I on these two triangles? Being a victim, persecutor, rescuer, stuck and just going around and around. Or do I really believe in the divinity of my creator essence? Not the Creator, but a creator. Do I really believe in my ability to challenge and see the truth of who I am and to keep moving toward what I care about? And then how do I do that? How do I coach rather than be the rescuer pleaser that’s always fixing everybody else?

AUDREY: I was thinking while you were talking about my own experience with drama. I found out a long time ago that one thing I’m really good at is creating curriculum. Twenty years ago I was at a college, I saw the need for a course, I asked if I could create one, they said go ahead and try, and it turned out to be a popular course. That’s just how I think. Whenever I can see that there’s a problem in the world, my answer is usually, well, let me tell you what to read, let me build a course for you that will help you learn and change and grow.

AUDREY: Years ago I had an interaction in a women’s class. A handful of roses were handed out at random, and the women were asked to come to the front, say something good about themselves, and put the rose in a vase. I knew many of the women in the audience, and I watched them one by one come to the front and say something self-deprecating. Nobody else in the world remembers this event but me, because it was just what I needed to see and recognize at that moment in my life. I carried it with me for weeks. I thought on it, I prayed on it, and I pondered: what is happening that these women either don’t know how incredible they are or don’t have the confidence to say it? What is wrong?

AUDREY: So I decided I was going to do something about it. For about a year I went back through all the things that have helped me most and vetted them down with the help of a couple of women, and we launched level one of the Mission Driven Mom, which is all about loving God and yourself more fully.

AUDREY: I can’t remember if I had found the drama triangle before that or if we found it through my husband’s marriage and family therapy degree. But I knew about this drama triangle, and we had had so many conversations about it. Just that aspect had been helpful in our marriage, helpful in our parenting, helpful in our lives. When it came time for me to try to understand it better, I wanted to teach it, because I felt like it would be helpful. And there’s just nothing out there. Karpman never wrote a book. He never elaborated on it hardly at all. There’s basically the original thesis. Other people have written some books, and I have maybe half a dozen. Some of them had helpful things to say in delineating the drama portion, and you could look at what it was and then think about the opposite, and that could be helpful.

AUDREY: But it wasn’t until I found The Power of TED that I said, oh, this is the antidote. This is the solution. This is what I was looking for that’s going to help these women. There are three concepts we cover in the academy: self-care, self-leadership, and self-discovery, all to help them know themselves, accept themselves, and love themselves more fully. In the self-leadership section, this is what we talk about. I teach them all about drama. They buy their own copy of The Power of TED and go through it. There are other concepts around that, shame and blame and other elements that we found helpful to understanding the whole aspect of it. And I know some of the women who have come through the Mission Driven Mom have turned around and gone to your coaching program to dive deeper into it.

AUDREY: What happened for me was that I learned it, I was teaching it, women were having incredible experiences with it. And then a few years ago I saw on your email list that there was a coaching program, and I thought, maybe this will help me teach it better, maybe I can understand it better. That was a very rich experience. Just the idea of reframing that you teach was insanely helpful, and I’ve added to and elaborated on that some in the way that we teach it. We have our event this fall and we’ll dig deeper into some of these things. One of our mentors, Lindsey, was very excited about victim types. There are a lot of people out there with victim types, but she decided to work on her own list, and she’s attached Disney characters to them. That’s been a fascinating journey.

AUDREY: So that’s how I came to it. What I can attest to is over 600 women who have come through our program. There are a handful of core ideas from level one that they usually call out, and this is one of the ones they usually say is a huge paradigm shift for them, and just so helpful to their personal progress. It’s like one of my favorite quotes. I say it all the time. It’s very simple, and I’m sure you heard David say it all the time: you cannot not create.

DONNA: Yes. We had a blog about that just a few weeks ago.

AUDREY: When you really deeply know that, then you know it’s kind of like, yes, there is drama and the opposite of that is creator, and yes, there’s this empowerment dynamic. But it is also true that there’s a sense in which even in drama we’re creating, because we can’t not create. We’re just creating more of what we don’t want, more of what we don’t like. We’re so focused on those fears that they manifest more and more in our daily lives.

DONNA: Well, thank you for that history. You’re really mirroring much of what encouraged David to keep digging. Because the drama triangle work, people said, oh, it’s so helpful to name my reacting patterns. But then what do I do? And the response in therapy and in the few articles and writings was, well, just don’t do it. It’s very toxic. You’ll just get stuck racing around those archetypal roles. It was that awareness, just like you had, that he couldn’t find anything that pointed to the good part of us, the goodness of us, the self of who we are as human beings, as divine human beings.

AUDREY: It sounds like you and David had such similar thinking and tracking.

DONNA: We wanted to be teachers and healers of how to bring the work alive. There are so many nuances in the triangles and how they point to what we focus on. More and more, what I do with the coaching is this: okay, now I know some reactive patterns, and now I can see them. You name it. Naming is so helpful. And it can really be upsetting at first. Oh, I’m so stuck.

AUDREY: It seems like it’s the malaise of the human experience, because our brains are threat-seeking mechanisms. Our brains help keep us safe by scanning the horizon, looking for problems, threats, danger. If we’re not careful, that can be our primary neurological and thinking pattern of how we go through life. Which is great, because our ancestors survived because they did worry about threats.

DONNA: They worried about the tiger or the snake or whatever the physical threat was. But where we are in this world now is that our bodies were not made for the speed of life. The way threats come at us now at such a rapid pace, whether we want them or not, whether we’ve actually put the phone down, whether we’ve stopped watching the news, so much of what is now being talked about are social threats. The speed of life is forcing us, if we’re open to the stress, to look at ways we can create habits to transmute and transform and get out of this reacting pattern. It requires skills. It requires practices.

DONNA: And that’s what we focus on at the Center for the Empowerment Dynamic, because the default way of going through life is to be problem focused, danger focused. That’s what keeps us alive. But that pattern of our brain does not support living in this fast-paced world where we want to be our best selves, our best moms, our best spouses.

DONNA: I love that you have one right there: we cannot not create. One of your go-to slogans. So what does that do? That helps us realize, ah, now it’s my responsibility to choose what I’m going to broadcast out into the world. And that responsibility is the core behavior change from victim to creator. I start taking responsibility.

AUDREY: I’ve read several books, so I can’t always remember exactly who taught me this particular aspect. But one of the things that has been very helpful in understanding the drama and the shift is that one of the other books I have on drama talks about the game of drama. They explain that even though there are three players, actually everybody wants the victim role. It’s a game where everyone is vying to prove that they’re the victim. And the reason they’re playing that game and trying to prove their victimhood, whether they’re doing it in a rescuing or persecuting way, is because the victim is the one who’s off the hook. When everybody is in agreement about who the victim is, then the victim has been acted upon. The victim doesn’t have responsibility for the conditions of their life or the conditions of their relationships or whatever the circumstance might be. And that is what we think we want. That’s what we are fighting for when we’re staying in drama.

DONNA: But it’s a very disempowering way of being.

AUDREY: I love that you use the empowerment dynamic in our academy. All of the self-leadership sections are titled “increasing my personal power by.” And you’re absolutely right. There are countless voices out there that explain to us that the root of change is responsibility. It’s just that simple. Until you own it, you can’t do anything about it. You are powerless. And there’s a difference between being powerless and powerful.

DONNA: You’re so right. And you’re making it sound so simple, because I get that energy from you. This has really dawned on you, and you have really taken this work, and it’s a mission for you.

DONNA: So we say the victim, and I really want to emphasize here, that’s not who we are. These are roles that we play. These are characters, faces, personas, types, as Jung spoke so much about. So for our listeners, let’s remember that we’re not speaking about the victimization that does occur to us. We’re talking about our choice and our sense of identity in how we respond to life’s challenges.

DONNA: I try very hard to say, when I’m in the victim role, kind of acting like a victim, when I’m in the victim mindset. Underneath all three of the roles is a victim mindset: I don’t like what’s happening right now in life. It’s not what I want. I’m anxious or upset about it. And how we respond to that anxiety, to those heavy emotions, comes out in three different patterns. We can say, okay, it’s not mine to do, and take on that victim role. I don’t have any responsibility here. The persecutor says, well, I don’t want to be the victim, so I’m going to lean in and really take charge and control. There are many faces and characters in how we do that. And then the rescuer says, oh, let me help. I’m uncomfortable with seeing you two in conflict, so let me help, let me please.

DONNA: There’s a real cost to all three of these roles. They’re different in our strategy and in the way we behave and respond to our anxiety about something. But they’re all built on focusing on what we don’t want, what we don’t like, our anxiety about it, and then our reacting behavior. We do something to keep the drama going.

AUDREY: I love that point, that they’re all racing to the bottom because they’re all based on a victim mindset. For me, I can tell that I’m probably in this problem orientation when I reflect on something that’s going on in my life and I can feel myself shut down, get negative, focus on the things I don’t like, feel really stuck and powerless, like I don’t know how to move forward. Those are all indications.

AUDREY: And what’s interesting, Donna, and I love how you said this at the beginning, is that it’s not like life is never going to be hard again, or bad things aren’t going to happen. It’s just tools in a toolbox. It’s recognizing that this habit is probably going to come back up, but I’m going to know how to snap out of it a little bit quicker, just because I can name things, I can recognize things, and I have tools.

AUDREY: Maybe one of the most powerful things you taught me when I was in the coaching program was that the reason I’m disappointed or upset or frustrated or stuck about something is actually for a good reason. It’s because there’s something I truly value that’s rooted deeply inside this circumstance I’m in. For me, that turned it around. Instead of being down on myself, instead of being frustrated about what I was doing, instead of staying in that negative place, all of a sudden I was like, oh, wait a minute. It’s because I’m a good person with good values, and I just need to remember what I value. That’s one of the tools you teach for reframing that was so helpful. It helped me let go of a bunch of things I couldn’t control, and to reframe things and create a new plan. I don’t know how you and David came up with it, or if it was your idea.

DONNA: I would say my nursing background, my coaching background. David wasn’t a coach. David was a facilitator and trainer, just brilliant at making complex ideas simple. I think that’s how his mind created this positive triangle.

DONNA: So the name of my book was going to be Love Your Drama. When I first wrote my book it was 2020, and we all remember that. Like so many, we got off the road and I had some time to write. I finished the script, and I had five people who were my readers. All five of them said, Donna, I don’t like your title. Nobody’s going to get that.

DONNA: When you hear about the drama triangle, the number one question is, well, how do I stop that? How do I get out of it? And it’s the opposite. There’s something going on in our life that we’re really reacting to, and we can observe our victim behavior or our judgment. When we’re stuck in a drama triangle, it means there’s something we care about. I call it the commitment behind your complaint. You might remember that phrase. There’s a commitment that you have that’s behind your complaining. Otherwise you would just go on to the next thing on your list or the next issue in your life.

DONNA: Now, I’m not talking about chronic complaining, which is a behavior of its own, a concern one would really work with if there’s a chronic tendency to complain. I’m speaking of going through life and all of a sudden something happens in the middle of your day and you get triggered. You get upset. Wow, there’s something going on here that I care about. And that’s exactly what we do, because that’s a coaching moment. Learn to be with your clients, be with your family members and friends, and sit in the ick. I call it sitting in the ick. What’s going on here that something matters to me? To me, that’s the door to the next level of awareness and epiphany and greatness in your own life. It’s the opposite of the way most people teach it, which is just stop doing that. We also offer questions and exercises and tips to help facilitate the shift out of the drama triangle into TED. But one of the main ideas is: notice your reactivity. What’s my commitment that’s got me complaining?

AUDREY: I love that. Someone else who taught me about commitment is Ben Hardy, who talked about it as an essential component of identity, that one of the things that makes us who we are is our commitments. That perfectly aligns with understanding that something is butting up against how we see ourselves.

AUDREY: There’s a bit of identity in all of this. As we were preparing our content for this event this fall, one of the things that kept coming up for us in our problem stories was ego, in a negative sense. We realized that so often the problem story, staying in victimhood or problem orientation, was all about how we were looking to ourselves and how we were looking to other people. Which is why you teach, look at the intention. Because our intentions often weren’t right. When we find ourselves in drama, it really often goes back to: I just have the wrong intentions. I’m trying to control things I shouldn’t be trying to control, and I’m not living within the things I can control, keeping the commitments that matter to me so that I can create a life I love.

DONNA: Usually aligned with values. What is it that I really value, and do I behave and keep my commitments to be aligned with those values? Those are very powerful connections, and it goes back to the victim to creator shift. What is mine to do?

DONNA: What do I want? As you know, we often don’t know what we want when we get triggered. We just know what we don’t want. But to me, that’s also the doorway. It’s similar to the complaining we just talked about. Okay, I hear what you don’t want. What is it that you do want? I don’t know, I just want this. It’s okay to sit with that. Something you care about has got you really riled up. Maybe you feel invisible because of the way somebody treated you in the grocery line.

DONNA: That’s again why I love it as a coaching process. It doesn’t have to be coaching as a professional coach, but as a friend, as a family member, to help the other see what is going on in their mind and heart, where they’ve bumped up against something that isn’t aligned, somewhere they’re not fulfilling the integrity of who they say they are. So I love the “what’s my intention” question. Other than what do I want right here, what don’t I want, what’s on the other side, what’s the reframe? What if this problem were solved? What would it allow me to have or do or be?

DONNA: The second question that I love is, what’s my intention? Is my intention to look good? To be right? To get out of doing something hard? Or is my intention to listen deeply? Is my intention to build up? Is my intention to learn something? It’s a continuum, a polarity of two totally different intentions.

DONNA: And what really gets my attention, Audrey, is when I catch myself and ask myself that question and I go, yeah, I really want to be right in this moment. Now I am faced with taking responsibility. Am I going to add to the fire of this friction and drama that’s going on right now between whoever is in the room? And am I upset because this situation is forcing me to look at myself and the world in a different way? It’s forcing me to be different. It’s forcing me to go out and do things I’ve been avoiding doing.

AUDREY: It’s one of the reasons that I sometimes ruminate and stay, because it’s painful, but sometimes it can feel more comfortable to just stay there complaining about it than to actually do something about it.

AUDREY: I was thinking while you were talking: what are the reasons these principles and tools hit home so much with our audience at the Mission Driven Mom? I think it’s a couple of reasons. The most important one is that so many women, and I don’t know if this was your experience, but it was definitely mine, we want to be moms, and that sounds fun. Our initial impressions of motherhood are the loving, the nurturing, the playing, all the beautiful things that are going to happen when this baby comes into our lives. Often those first few years can feel a lot like that, albeit with two-year-old tantrums and whatnot.

AUDREY: And then they get a little older. We have quite a few moms come into our program whose kids are just getting a little bit older, maybe starting to enter the teenage phase. Now they realize that they aren’t sure what they want as a mom anymore. They weren’t equipped with the tools and the questions and the principles to build a family culture that they love and want. They did go into motherhood with intention, but now they’re at this new phase that requires a new level of attention and intention and creation, to decide: this is who we are, this is what we’re going to be, this is how our relationships look, this is how we work together with each other.

AUDREY: They also can have a bit of their identity being lost in that. They feel this friction, this ongoing struggle between what they need and want and what their family needs and wants. They tend to be conscientious, good women who set their own desires aside, but then that feels yucky, and then putting themselves first feels yucky too. They don’t know how to find the balance.

AUDREY: And we’ve also had women, to your point, where some of our moms have been homeschoolers, and many homeschooling families are driven by what they don’t want. They exit the school systems because they don’t want that, and they don’t know what they want instead. So then it becomes turmoil and friction in their homes. When they start to become acquainted with these principles and tools, a really big transformation happens in the way that they think and show up for themselves and their families in their homes.

AUDREY: We’ve talked quite a bit about the drama and the players and the roles in drama. Give us an overview of the empowerment dynamic. What is the inverse of that? We’ve said the word creator, but talk us through that inverse triangle.

DONNA: Perfect. We’ve spent a lot of time on Dr. Karpman, and David and I went down to see Dr. Karpman.

AUDREY: I saw a video on YouTube of you with him, actually. It was on his back porch.

DONNA: He’s still alive. He’s in his early nineties, I believe. At lunch we asked him, what have you found most successful to help people move out of the drama triangle? And he said, oh, you all have done a lot more than we ever have. I just described it. David and I both remembered that. So the first thing is naming.

DONNA: We human beings live on an earth plane of polarities: up, down, hard, soft, in and out, future and past. And so it’s the same thing with these two triangles, this continuum. We have a reactive pattern that arises out of us. The reason I think it’s so familiar, as you said, that people get it so fast, is because Dr. Karpman named universal reactive patterns. The victim: woe is me. The persecutor: I better take control, nobody else will. And the rescuer: oh, let me help.

DONNA: So the positive side on that continuum, on that polarity, is the victim to creator shift, which we’ve talked most about. As the victim leans out, and again, the victim role is not who we are, the creator leans in and says, what’s my responsibility? What do I care about? What do I want to do?

DONNA: So now, what’s the opposite of the persecutor? The persecutor at its heart is controlling, sometimes not overtly but very behind the scenes, manipulative. It has a fiery energy to it, that persecutor energy. So what is the opposite of that? David named it the challenger. We can challenge ourselves to step up, to grow, to expand. And we can be a challenger to others.

AUDREY: I call that the truth teller.

DONNA: Oh, I love that. The challenger has the capacity, and we all have had challengers in our life. It may have been a grandmother. It may have been a college professor. My hunch is you’re a challenger to a lot of women in your network. When we’re in the challenger, we have the ability to speak the truth, to be courageous, to be authentic. Maybe no one else in the room has that, but you speak to it. And you do it without blame or put-down.

AUDREY: That’s why I love this truth teller description.

DONNA: So that’s the opposite of persecutor. And the last one is the rescuer. The rescuer steps in and says, oh, let me do it for you, unknowingly disempowering others by doing for them what is theirs to do. So the opposite is the coach, not necessarily the professional coach at all, but the coach in us that is the good friend who takes a walk and asks inquiring, open-ended questions that help the other clarify what it is they do want. Oh, I hear that you don’t want this, but what do you want? The rescuer is a supportive role. Cares a lot, thank goodness we care. But the coach leaves the power with the other, to make decisions for themselves.

DONNA: That is a really tough one when we’re helpers and we want to fix and make things better. To leave the power with others is a huge part of what that coach role is, and it distinguishes the rescuer from the coach. So those are the three roles that we call the empowerment dynamic. And we have a TED tools kit to help get out of that drama and into the empowerment. It’s a continuum, as we said. We’ll always get triggered. We want to move our center of gravity more out of living in the reactive world and into living more and more into the empowerment dynamic world, updating our operating system. So there you have it. That’s the brief.

AUDREY: Thank you. So simple, and it’s really not easy, is it?

AUDREY: I’ll give you two takeaways for me that have really helped me with this framework. Seeing the challenger, like you’re saying, we can show up for someone else as a truth teller and a challenger. We can push back on them when they’re complaining and all of that kind of stuff. But for me, a huge shift happened when I realized that I could also decide, at any moment in my own life, with the things that I’m facing and the problem stories I tend to fall into, that I could choose to see them as challengers.

AUDREY: That reframed it for me. Whenever I remember that, then I’m asking a lot better questions. I’m asking myself, what is the truth about this? What does this circumstance have to teach me? What is life asking of me? Why am I bumping up against reality in such a painful way? When I frame the difficulty and the problem as a challenger, I can even keep myself from going down a rabbit hole. Because otherwise I probably will.

DONNA: The relationship between how these roles get so interfaced is that when you can stop and pause and breathe. There’s a reason the adage “count to ten” has been with us since who knows when, but a long time, because it really does allow our neurology, our heart and our prefrontal cortex, to come back online so we can be smarter. You go, wow, what just happened? How am I being asked to learn? What is the gift here?

DONNA: If we’re really hijacked and triggered, it’s very challenging to ask those questions. It may take a couple of hours. It may take a couple of days to be able to look back and deconstruct what happened. But keep asking, Audrey. I love that. Keep asking, what has shown up here in my life to teach me right now? And that’s how we see other things that we would previously have labeled as persecutors. We now can see them as challengers.

AUDREY: And that takes a very emotionally grounded person to be able to ask those questions and to sit in the ick.

DONNA: I recently have been facing the decision, after 25 years, of whether or not to sell the family home. I’ve been in a six or eight week process making that, and boy, sitting in the ick of all the variables of a big decision. In my twenties and thirties I wanted to buy a house. We wanted a big family home. That’s not what I want anymore. The reason I’m saying that is that our lives go through so many stages, and we need a capacity to update how we’re making sense of the new information. The moms you referred to who now have teenagers, it requires them to get clear about values, get clear about a whole different situation. That ability to keep asking the same questions: what is there here for me to learn now? What do I care most about? What are my values? They change over life.

AUDREY: I love the challenger part of the empowerment dynamic, to ask us to step up, take responsibility. Just like we can play all three roles in our own heads in drama, we can be the persecutor and the victim and the rescuer, we can also, I’ve learned, play those three roles for ourselves when we want to move out of drama. We can coach ourselves and challenge ourselves and keep striving to create. Obviously lean on a friend, teach people around you, bring them on the journey with you. But also, in those moments, we can do that for ourselves.

AUDREY: My other takeaway is about the coach. I tell people often that I’m a recovering rescuer. That’s definitely my go-to role, especially in parenting and friendships. I want to rescue, which usually shows up as doing something for you that you should be doing for yourself, or doing something for you that you didn’t ask me to do, but I see that you need it. And learning and realizing that that actually makes you feel broken, because I’m assuming you can’t do it for yourself.

AUDREY: So the coaching piece I’ve had to drill really deep into, because I’ve had to use coaching skills to change the way I parent, especially in parenting my adult children, because that has not come as naturally or as easily for me as it did to parent younger children. I remember one time I just got out a piece of paper and imagined a soccer coach, and I wrote down all the traits of that soccer coach. I was trying to identify for myself what a coach can do and what a coach can’t do, to help me reframe the difference between the coach and the rescuer.

AUDREY: The coach is not allowed to step onto the field and take the ball and run the play. There are so many boundaries there that you might want to cross over as a mother, but you wouldn’t even be able to in a true coaching circumstance. What can you do? You can teach them how to play, but you can’t practice for them. You can’t force them to get better. You can’t force them to come to practice. You can’t force them to give their all. There are so many parameters. Once I had that list in front of me, it helped me say, okay, well then what power do I actually have in coaching anyone? In a real life circumstance, what are the boundaries around that? What are the limitations I need to honor, to honor myself and to honor them, to be a coach and not slip into the other thing?

DONNA: There are real costs. It hurts the relationship a lot. It can really hurt, and it exhausts you.

DONNA: May I offer another question to put on your list? How do I see the other? Do I see them as a victim that’s not capable of handling this themselves? Or do I see them as a creator? Do I see them as learning, and as having the capacity, as a divine being, to take charge of their own life?

DONNA: How we answer that question can be a remarkable insight into what you do next, because it’s broken my heart more than once when I get honest and I go, wow, with my adult daughters, I am judging them as not capable. Is that the way I want to relate to my adult daughters? It’s sometimes shocking, just like when I ask, what’s my intention? Well, I want to look good and I want to be right. Okay. I think I’ve been. How do I see the other? Do I really see them as not capable? That’s not how I want to relate to others.

DONNA: The reason we rescue, we think, is because we want to help. And it’s not. I’m talking about serial rescuing. You and I know what I mean, that our only go-to way of working with life’s challenges is just to step in and fix and help. The cost is very high to do that. It’s disempowering to others. And you likely will never know, but it’s likely that others are going to see you as a persecutor.

AUDREY: And that’s the last thing we rescuers want. We’re just trying to help, and we’re seen as a persecutor.

DONNA: Are you resonating with that?

AUDREY: One hundred percent. Because I would only step in if I didn’t think they could do it. I mean, what other conclusion can they draw?

DONNA: Well, part of it is because we want to be seen as kind, wonderful, loving people. It’s an identity issue for many of us. That’s how we’ve gone through life, that we’ll get accolades and love if we help and fix other people. That’s usually learned behavior in the family, learned behavior in some cultures and religions. There are different ways we pick up those ingrained patterns.

AUDREY: One of the reasons I realized that I do it is because I don’t want the people around me to fail, because it will be painful for all of us. It’s a pain avoidance mechanism. If I step in and rescue and help you get there and make up the difference between where you are and where you want to be, if I can just fill in that gap, then we won’t have to suffer that you failed, because I’ll suffer with you. I’m your mom and you’re part of me and we’re intimately linked, and that’s going to be painful and I don’t want to go through that pain. So let’s just make this thing happen.

DONNA: Okay, so there’s a justification going on here.

AUDREY: Exactly. So that’s what I’ve had to remind myself. No, failure is a tool. The law of the harvest is God’s way. They must butt up against life themselves, or they’ll be crippled, they’ll be weaker. That’s where I coach myself and remind myself of those good laws and principles. That’s not what any of us want. My intention really truly is for them to thrive on their own, for them to be proud of who they are, and for us to have a thriving relationship. That’s what I actually really want. And so I have to behave that way.

DONNA: You want them to learn and grow. There’s another part of us that is the controlling part, that we rescuers often don’t like to admit, which is that we just want to get it done. Come on. Can’t you all see how quickly this could be if we just did this and this? So the rescuer has a huge controlling element. So what is it we’re trying to control? Well, the situation, fixing it. But what we’re really trying to manage is our anxiety about a situation we don’t think should be that way.

DONNA: One of the first things I encourage when I coach people who have a fault of rescuing mode is to learn to pause and learn to hold silence. Bite your tongue if you have to.

AUDREY: And I’ve said that. I’m not going to say anything. I’m not going to say anything. And I’ve got to leave the room so that I don’t say anything, because it’s just going to hurt for me to say something.

AUDREY: I was taught a really good lesson by a mentor years ago. She told me the story of one time when she and her husband decided they were going to have a family garden. They got the seeds or the plants or whatever it was, and they went out one Saturday morning to do this gardening with their children. The children were young and they didn’t really know what they were doing. So the husband kept taking it out of their hands and doing it for them, getting frustrated with them, pushing things along so that the garden could be planted.

AUDREY: When it was all over, she and her husband had this debrief, and she said, well, how did you feel about that? And he said, oh, it was so frustrating, the kids just didn’t know what they were doing, they were going so slow, we weren’t getting anything done. And she said, oh, you thought this was about us actually having a garden.

AUDREY: It’s actually not what this is about. It’s actually about us enriching our relationships and teaching our children. If we get plants out of it, great, but that’s not actually why we’re here. I think about that often.

DONNA: It’s a great story. And it’s what I speak about in the coaching program about being outcome oriented, the difference between an outcome and a goal. Goals are usually, I mean, we need goals to get things done in our life, sure. But as a coach, I work less with goals and more with outcomes. So the goal in that case might be, hey, let’s plant the garden. And how would we know if we accomplished that? Well, the seeds got planted, we watered it, the plants start coming up.

DONNA: But what is it we really want? This is the power of it. I want connection in this case. I want an experience of being with the children. We are a family that experiences life together with fun and creativity. That could be the outcome statement. If that husband and wife could have clarified that out loud, I think it would have allowed that father to say, oh, here’s the outcome. It’s not about the goal. And to enjoy the experience. Then they would have accomplished that outcome. It’s a much different way of going through life. What do I want? Clarify outcomes first and then goals second.

AUDREY: Thank you, Donna. I think that’s like the first chapter in my book. Really, really clear about what’s my focus here, what’s the outcome I want.

AUDREY: This is on page 118 of your book. You say: “Tara asked me to accept and nourish all the different parts of myself. If I resist doing that, she says, the fearful parts will grow stronger and gain even more power and authority over me than they have now. Awakening my inner observer, facing those fearful parts and listening to their voices, will get me out of the grip of the DDT and into self empowerment.” Then you paused and looked over what she had written and added, “honoring my ongoing struggles inside and out is the doorway to freedom and choice.”

AUDREY: So as we finish up, you can share anything else that’s on your heart and mind. But the last question I would ask you is this. In the front of my book I wrote, if you embrace your fears, you’ll have a whole new relationship with them. What would your advice be to mothers around this idea, that if you face your fears you’ll have a new relationship with them, in terms of everything we’ve talked about today?

DONNA: What a brilliant question. Let me answer that by first starting with how I took the feedback from my readers before the book was published, the ones who said, oh, we don’t like your title of Love Your Drama. It was my daughter who sent back the binder with the printed book, and she had circled with a big red circle where I had said, right at the end of the book, that TED said to Sophia, you know, this is really about who do you want to be on the way to what you want. My daughter circled that phrase. She said, mom, this is pure gold. This is your title. So that’s how my title came from my daughter giving me the feedback. She’s a psychotherapist, a brilliant, highly conscious mom.

DONNA: So what advice would I offer in facing my fears? First of all, what does facing it even mean? I would say the first thing is just noticing the speed of life. Sometimes we’re going so fast that we’re not allowing our body to tell us, to guide us, that there’s something we’re scared about, something we don’t like, some heavy emotion. Fear is kind of a catch-all phrase for those heavy emotions. So slow down, so that you can recognize when your body is like a tuning fork and is saying, hey, pay attention here.

DONNA: And then have a practice where you’re learning to be with whatever is rising that you’re naming. But name it lightly. Here’s what I mean by this. When we name something like, oh, I feel really scared about my mother-in-law because she does this and that, that’s the event, and we can actually name it and explode it like it’s a feature film. Instead, lightly notice it and describe it, and pay more attention to the feelings that you have about the situation than to the story about the situation.

DONNA: In the book, I call it the phase of three stories, because you really don’t know often what’s going on. You can make up three stories, and that broadens your perspective. Maybe you really don’t know what’s going on, so have fun with all those stories that could be going on. That alone will help you soften the worry that you have created about a situation.

DONNA: And then have a practice. Journaling for me is very helpful, and journaling might be three or four paragraphs to help me move the angst that I’m feeling out of my system onto a piece of paper. I write a fair amount, so that’s a practice for me. For others it’s a walk, or some breathing. Have your practice that you actually really practice.

DONNA: So first, allow yourself to notice. That’s the first step. Name it lightly, just notice it and describe it, rather than get into an extensive story, because that actually can dig the fear deeper into your neurology. You want to be able to have a relationship with it rather than be that fear. And then a practice to help you allow it to flow and let go of it.

DONNA: And then finally, your beautiful question about what is it I’m ready to learn now. What has this showed up for me as a gift so I can learn?

AUDREY: That’s beautiful. It’s such a big question. And that’s who we are as human beings. We are learning machines. We love to grow and become, but any type of growth involves pain. That’s the structure of reality. So if we can emotionally accept that. M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, the first sentence is, life is difficult. That was a really big paradigm shift for me when I first internalized it. He says this is a great truth, maybe one of the greatest truths, because once we accept it, we can transcend it.

DONNA: You brought that up. Or the Buddhist idea, you know, life is full of suffering. I had such an easy life for much of my mid years, and part of it is a bit of positive toxicity, because I was such an optimist. I didn’t see any of it. And yet now I look back and I go, life is challenging, and not in a way to say, oh, woe is me, I’m a victim to life. It is through living with challenges, through me, as me, for me, that I’m able to see the challenges as blessings. Because if life wasn’t difficult, it would lose its meaning. If everyone could get to the summit, the summit wouldn’t mean anything.

AUDREY: And so the fact that we have to put our shoulder to the rock and push and become stronger through the process, to accept that yin and yang, that we are creators but the creation will have difficult aspects to it. That makes it even more worth doing, because of the accomplishment and the gratification and the development on the other side of it. The joy.

DONNA: Yes. Well, you are certainly a learner and a leader and a visionary. It’s not easy to have a vision of seeing a problem, women putting the rose in and mostly complaining and being self-critical. You took that problem and saw the opportunity of how to be of service. And you took action and followed through. That’s not always what we do, especially as a busy mom.

AUDREY: Well, thank you. And thank you for your work.

AUDREY: Is there anything else, any other advice you would give to our audience, or anything else you’d like to share before we close this out?

DONNA: Not so much advice, I guess, but to say I’ve written a blog every Friday for over 12 years. Writing is definitely a big way for me, and it helps me to think through these distinctions and the nuances. You can go follow that. Go to empowermentdynamic.com. You’ll see a very robust website. If you want to get that free Friday newsletter, you can sign up for that. Most Fridays we have the essay, and then we have different programs and activities and classes that people could take to learn more.

AUDREY: And books. I don’t know if I own all of them, but I own several of yours and David’s, all worth buying. Of course, we encourage our moms to buy them and utilize them. And I’ve encouraged women to go and do your coaching program, which I can’t speak highly enough about. We’ll put the links below this conversation for them, so they can consume all the beautiful truths that you teach and all the support that you offer.

AUDREY: I feel so indebted to you and David for the work that you’ve done. It has transformed my life. It has made me feel so much more capable of living closer to the kind of person I’d like to be. I just feel like I owe you a great debt of gratitude in that regard. And the joy of watching your work bless so many lives is also beautiful. And the privilege of speaking about some of it this fall at our event is also going to be incredible. For those listening who want to come, the link will be below for that as well. But again, please go follow Donna. Those blog posts are really enlightening. They come into my inbox and I read them often. Thank you again for being here.

DONNA: Oh, you’re welcome. I was just going to say, I know that you met David and were very close to him in one way and in the work, and he died very suddenly, a year ago in April. So I have now, as the sole remaining co-founder of the work, taken on new partners, and we’re in a whole new generation of work, very dedicated to expanding the framework with more tools and more great things coming. So I’m very excited about the future of expanding what David always said he wanted to live on for seven generations.

AUDREY: It’s incredible. I think it will. I pray it will. Thank you. Thank you for being here, Donna.

Years ago I read a book by Robert Fritz that taught me something that has changed my life: that often we think we know what we want, but when we actually ask more questions and get down to our true motivations and intentions, we are really just reacting, not creating! 

Resources from the Episode: 

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Episode 167: Robert Fritz on What Creation Actually Is

AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. I am so excited for us to spend a few minutes today with Robert Fritz, who I greatly admire and am very honored to have with us. Thanks for being here, Robert.

ROBERT: My pleasure, thank you.

AUDREY: Let me tell the listeners a little about him. His bio is technically three pages long and thick with worldwide influence. Here is a summary of some of the highlights of his life’s work. He is an acclaimed composer, filmmaker, author, and management consultant, best known for developing the theory of structural dynamics, which explains how underlying structures shape human and organizational behavior. Educated at the Boston Conservatory of Music and in Germany, Robert has spent decades helping corporations, government agencies, educators, and nonprofit organizations create lasting change through his principles of structural thinking and the creative process. His work has influenced leaders such as Peter Senge and has been applied by organizations including IBM, Blue Shield of California, the US Department of Defense, and educational systems worldwide. He is also an award-winning composer and filmmaker whose films have earned more than 250 international awards, and the author of several influential books, including The Path of Least Resistance and The Managerial Moment of Truth.

AUDREY: Today we are going to focus most of our attention around my favorite book. This one right here, and this is probably an old copy. Creating. The subtitle is A Practical Guide to the Creative Process and How to Use It to Create Anything, a Work of Art, a Relationship, a Career, or a Better Life. Robert, thank you for being here with us today.

ROBERT: Thank you. I am delighted to talk to you.

AUDREY: This book has shaped some of my thinking. It has corresponded with other things I have studied and experienced in life and proven itself over and over again. Many of the principles and concepts you teach in it have borne out in the real world and proven to me to be very, very important. So I am just curious personally how this book came to be.

ROBERT: I had a two-book contract with Ballantine Books. The first was The Path of Least Resistance, and then there was time for a second book as part of the contract. I thought the major focus should be on creating. Because creating, or the creative process, is the most successful process for accomplishment in history. It created all of the arts, science, commerce. And yet mostly we do not learn how to create.

ROBERT: We learn in school how to react or respond to circumstances. The major difference between the creative process and what we learn is that what we learn is to think about the circumstances first, and then what do we do about that. If you are rebellious as a kid, you react. If you are cooperative, you respond. But it is still the circumstances that are the driving force. The creative process is really different. It is your choices. And one of the major choices the creative process always begins with is, what do you create?

ROBERT: My background, as you said, is the arts, and particularly composition. I have a bachelor’s and master’s in composition from the Boston Conservatory. What we learn in music in particular is that it is the underlying structure of music that determines how music goes. We have things in music called form and analysis. If you are in a conservatory, you go to these classes and you analyze Beethoven or Chopin, a number of different types of pieces. And it is not a matter of how does it feel and what do you think of when you hear the piece. It is, how did the composer get you to feel that? What are the elements in play that give rise to predictable patterns of behavior?

ROBERT: When I was teaching composition at New England Conservatory, I began to wonder if that same principle could apply to everyone, not just composers, but everyone in creating their own lives. And that led me to developing the principles that are in the book you really like.

ROBERT: What do you like about it, by the way?

AUDREY: If you are out looking for answers, as I was, there are a few different camps. There is the camp that focuses entirely on the self, on self-esteem. What do you want to create in relationship to this ego? What will service you? It is all about you.

ROBERT: I wrote a book with Dr. Wayne Andersen called Identity, and the subtitle of the book is that it does not matter what you think about yourself, which is ironic. It seems like the self-esteem people have never read a biography of successful people. They would see none of them had high self-esteem. But the difference was they were not focused on themselves. They were focused on what they were up to, what they were doing, what mattered to them, what they were creating.

ROBERT: It is always on how am I doing, and how does it make me look, and do I like myself. Totally irrelevant in the creative process.

AUDREY: It is interesting, because we are building an event this fall called Mothers of Creation, and it is all about the creative process and how mothers can engage in it. We start the day by having everyone write out a problem story. What in your life are you feeling upset about or stuck in? In preparation for that, our team was writing out problem stories and picking them apart, trying to figure out why this is a problem for me. There were a few different reasons, but we were trying to find what was in common. Ironically, one of the core components for all of us was that our intentions were wrong and our ego was right in the center of it. That is why we were bumping up against life in that way, unhappy about something happening to us because of what it was going to cost, what pain it was going to cause us, how it was going to make us look, or what other people were going to think. That was so enlightening and clarifying.

AUDREY: It is such a great insight to understand the shift of focus from how am I doing and how do I look, to what is this outcome I am trying to create, how close am I to it, and what do I need to do to create it. And is it worth my precious life energy? Because there are a million paths we could choose, and it needs to be worthy of the few minutes we have here.

ROBERT: That is a principle called hierarchy. What is more important, what is less important. A lot of people spend their lives on things that are less important to them, because they have not really sorted out that value system of hierarchy.

AUDREY: I read The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy a little while ago, and that is the theme of that novella. He spent his life on what was not important, taking direction from everyone around him, being a subject of his environment, thinking that was what he wanted, thinking he was arriving. Ego was so deeply entrenched in everything that was going on, because it was all reflective of that. Is this now servicing the identity I want to have of myself?

AUDREY: So to answer your question, I would say there is one camp saying get what you want, but the underlying message is to service the ego. And there are other camps I lean more toward that say, no, actually take responsibility, have discipline, show up, fulfill your duty. The conscientious aspects of life. I think there are some powerful, good, solid principles in that camp.

ROBERT: I am sure, because what you are describing is obligation. But really, we are not obligated to do any of that. Often what happens is people turn what they want into an obligation. For example, let us say you are caring for an adult, your parents. And you say, well, I really have to do it. Well, no, you actually do not have to do it. You are making a choice that is really quite altruistic, and you do not even have the benefits of knowing the altruism of it, because you are manipulating yourself into obligation rather than seeing, I could do this or not do this.

ROBERT: Obligation means you have no choice. You have to do it. Choice means you can do it or not.

AUDREY: That is what I was getting at. What you are talking about is the best parts of both of those camps. It is the middle ground that says it should not be all about me, even if for no other reason than that as soon as it is all about you, it will not even service you best anyway. And you choose it fully. But then you commit yourself to it. There is this component of responsibility, but it is responsibility you have chosen. It is a commitment you have made.

AUDREY: That dovetails into something you say at the start of the book. I cannot remember the exact phrase, but basically that creating is an act of love. I wanted you to speak to that love component of creation, how you would define creation and creating or being creative, and what the connection with love is.

ROBERT: Before I do that, I want to be with you a little bit on the commitment. If you think about choice, you can do it or not do it. When you do a so-called commitment, what you are doing is turning the choice into an obligation. The reason you are doing it now is because you were committed. Which puts you out of touch with the actual motivation, which is your true aspiration to accomplish whatever it is.

AUDREY: So would you say that is where the component of vision comes in, rather than commitment? You would say vision instead?

ROBERT: It is more a matter of being in touch with the reality that you still want it. Personally, I do not like to exercise. I have a primary choice of being healthy. A primary choice generates a series of secondary choices. Secondary choices are choices you may not really, in and of themselves, want to do, like exercise. But you do them because they are motivated by a hierarchically higher choice that they are serving. A vision or an outcome that you want.

ROBERT: Now what happens if you lose touch with your primary choice? You lose motivation. You do things like commitment, because then you are forcing yourself into doing something you have lost touch with the actual desire for. But if you stay in touch with the outcome, you are never needing to be committed, because you are always making the strategic secondary choice in support of the outcome that you want.

ROBERT: In terms of love, by the way, Robert Frost said all of the great things are done for their own sake. Why do we do what we do? Sometimes we actually do it for return on investment. Especially since you deal with mothers. A lot of times mothers do this thing about turning what they want into an obligation, because it is really tough to be a mother. I remember when I became a father, and sometimes my wife would go off to work and I was the house husband for a while. How much work it was. This is not nothing.

ROBERT: But we love our kids. So we do a lot of things for our kids that otherwise we would not do. And we do them really for an altruistic purpose. All the great things are done for their own sake. But a lot of times it is so frustrating and so hard that people begin to manipulate themselves into their secondary choices, losing touch with the primary choice.

ROBERT: It looks like you are doing something you do not want to do. But in fact, you are doing something you want to do. Not that you like the secondary choices. Sometimes we hate them. But the motivation is not that, it is what it creates. So I think it is important that people understand their underlying motivation. Why are you doing this thing?

AUDREY: You say here, in the creative process, love is generative rather than simply responsive. Can you explain what you mean by that?

ROBERT: This is the difference between professional creators, let’s say filmmakers and composers and actors, and the rest. We usually think of love in the romantic version of it. You meet and you fall in love. So the situation first, the love second. Now, in the creative process, in terms of it being generative love, you love the creation before it exists, which is your motivation to create it. So the filmmaker loves the film before the film exists. The novelist loves the novel before it exists. It is generative love, a different kind of love, because you are doing it before it even exists.

AUDREY: When you are loving your child before it exists, before it shows up, you are already thinking about it and caring for it and buying things and making plans and having a vision for how this family will look and who you will all be and how they will grow up. It casts a lot of vision when you are planning parenthood.

AUDREY: So this generative love, one of the ways you put it is that you love the creation into being, or you love it enough to create it.

ROBERT: No, you do not love it into being. You actually do a little work. But the love is the motivation, meaning the love is what is driving you to create it. For example, when I am doing a film, I know the film I am making before I make it. I do not know every aspect of it, because you get to the set and it is raining that day, and you have to do different things to make it work. But there is a way that you have this relationship with the film you are making before it even exists. Or writing music, or writing a song, or writing a show, or writing a book. That is a different kind of experience.

ROBERT: It is an interesting thing, because often in the real creative process in the profession, particularly in the arts, there is a love-hate-love relationship. It goes a little like this. You love the thing as you are creating it and making it. Then it is done. And then there is a period where it did not quite live up to exactly what you imagined, and you kind of hate it for a while. And then you rediscover it, because you become audience for it rather than creator of it. You start to see it in its own terms and have a love for it again. That is a very common experience creators have.

AUDREY: I like how you point that out in the book. So often whatever we are creating falls short of the vision we had for it and what we thought it could be. And accepting that the path was still worth it, that the process was regenerative, that the process was an important part of becoming, that you still do it anyway. You do it even though you know it might not live up to the standards you have for it.

ROBERT: And if you did not like it enough, you would stop. You would destroy it. You really do not destroy it, because you like it enough. And then later you rediscover it and go, oh, that is pretty good.

AUDREY: It is funny, because I was recently doing a little class with some youth. We decided to do a Bob Ross painting night just for fun. We all had our little canvases and we turned on the video. I am not a painter. Mine turned out awful, but it is still sitting there on my nightstand. I passed it this morning. I know it is awful, but I did it. I painted it. So I cannot bring myself to throw it away, because even though it is far below what I would like to be able to create, I created it, so it is hard to let it go.

ROBERT: What happens, though, is if you really wanted to become a painter, you would practice. Of course, some people have more talent than other people. But it is just a starting point. Think about Van Gogh. He turned out to be one of the greatest painters of all time, but he was not naturally talented. It was not easy for him to draw, to really see perspective and so on. But independent of that, he understood how to learn.

ROBERT: I always hated that Kirk Douglas film, Lust for Life, where he is playing Van Gogh and talking about, I have got a feeling. You read Van Gogh’s letters to his brother. He is sharp as a tack. He is incredibly structural. He understands perspective. He discusses things from a completely artistic point of view, in terms of mixing colors and so on. He really knew what he was doing. He was not just feeling some kind of explosion of emotion. He was very calculating.

AUDREY: That reminds me of what I read about Isaac Asimov once. The number of books that man cranked out. People say, oh, he is such a genius, but it was just a schedule. It was just his lifestyle. He was at his desk at eight or nine every morning, and he sat there and wrote until five. I am sure there were bursts of inspiration now and again, but he just was a creator, and he chose to create, and he showed up for that creation every single day.

ROBERT: Yes. The difference between a professional and an amateur is that a professional can do it no matter what the circumstances. An amateur can only do it when they are inspired, when they feel like it. But a great actor, a great director, a great playwright, a great writer, they can do it at the drop of a hat.

AUDREY: One of the things I talk to moms about that has been super helpful for me is to remember, when we think about creation, and in the case of moms creating a family culture, creating balance between their needs and wants and those of their children, there are many things they long to create and to have that are very good, beautiful, worthy things that will bless many people. But the process to get there, like you said, has not been taught to them, and it can be a huge stumbling block. One of the things I remind them of is that love is not just a feeling. It is also an action. You are welcome to hate being on the treadmill this morning, but recognizing that getting on the treadmill is actually an act of love toward yourself, through the desire to have something bigger than being on this treadmill, an outcome that is bigger than that.

ROBERT: In all of my books I write about structural tension. Structural tension is a structure. Whenever you have tension, it strives for resolution. So that is a force in play. Structural tension is the essence of the creative process, where you have a desired outcome, and you are aware of what you want and where you are in relationship to that, and there will be a difference. That contrast, that difference, creates tension. Not, by the way, anxiety or stress, but structural tension, like a rubber band. A rubber band has a tendency to want to resolve. And that motivates actions that help you move from where you are to where you want to be. So there are two data points. One is what do I want, and where am I now in relation to it.

ROBERT: Now, let us think about generally what people want. Usually they want good health. They want quality of life. They want meaningful things to do. They want good relationships. These are worthy things to want. Plus, I want them anyway, whether they are worthy or not. The question is, how do you create those things? If you think circumstantially, you end up problem solving, which is not creating.

AUDREY: Pause right there before you go on. What do you mean, if you are thinking circumstantially, you get stuck there?

ROBERT: The circumstances are driving the action. You are reacting or responding to circumstances.

AUDREY: Like other people’s expectations, or things that come up in your life, or just situations. Situational, scheduling, time. Okay, go ahead.

ROBERT: But if I start with, here is what I want, here is where I am, already I have got a structure that wants to move in the direction of the outcome. Because we want that tension to resolve. And then, what actions do I need to take? Now these actions are motivated by this structural tension. So the tendency is not only to take the actions, but to take them in the context of the focal point being the outcome we want to create.

ROBERT: That is very different in life than problem solving. A lot of times people think of their lives as a problem to solve, and the idea is that if you solved all your problems, everything would be okay. But here is the actual truth of the matter. You can solve all of your problems and still not have what you want. Creating is different than problem solving.

ROBERT: So the question is not how do I solve the problem. The question is what outcome am I trying to achieve. Where am I now, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And what actions can I take to move from where I am to where I want to be, to accomplish the outcomes that I want. And this is a cumulative skill. The more you create, the more you can create.

AUDREY: One of the things you talk about that is so profound, but also such a huge stumbling block, is that in order to create appropriate structural tension, in order to actually move well toward this new outcome, you must be able to properly assess reality. You talk about this a lot in the book, the huge problem people have with that. Why do you think that is such a big problem, and what tools or advice would you give people who are striving to do it?

ROBERT: Understand that the reason they have trouble seeing reality is because they have various concepts that they impose on reality. I have this example in that book and in other books I have written. It is from a book by Arthur Stern called Color: How to See and Paint It. It is about teaching artists how to see color and paint it. You have got to see it before you can paint it.

ROBERT: So he takes a group of his art students to the shores of the Hudson River, and he points across the river and says, what colors do you see? The students said, well, the Brook building is red, and the tower is white, and the other building is yellow. And then he handed out what he calls spot screens, which is basically like an index card with a hole in it. He had the students hold the card up to the background. And he said, okay, now what colors do you see? They all got very quiet, until somebody finally said blue. Everything over there is blue.

ROBERT: Now, Stern said, first of all, the reason it was blue is that on hazy days you do not actually see the color of the objects. You see the atmosphere between you and the objects. The color of the water and the color of the sky created a blue atmosphere, and those were the colors they were actually seeing. But then he went on to say, why did they think they were seeing red and yellow and white and all these other colors? Because they were imposing a concept of reality on reality. They were painting what they expected. They were seeing what they expected to see, versus what was really there.

ROBERT: So to be able to really see reality, you have got to be objective and truthful. And that means a lot of times your fixed ideas are wrong. It is hard for some people to see reality because of the beliefs they have, the ideas they have come to conclusions about, the concepts they hold up in front of reality instead of looking at it objectively.

AUDREY: There is a short section early in the book with three quick examples that I think are so helpful. You basically deconstruct it. You ask, what do you want to create? Then they say it, and then you ask, why do you want to create that? And then you highlight for the reader, you see, they are trying to solve a problem. They are not actually thinking about what they want instead. They are responding.

AUDREY: So discovering that this is something you actually really want to create, and choosing it freely, is harder than you would think. And then assessing where you currently are, so you can see reality and build appropriate tension, can also be a challenge.

ROBERT: Well, it is an orientation. You can get better at it. It is not hard for me, by the way. It would be easy for everybody in a different orientation than a responsive one. In a more creative one, your general modus operandi is just to think in terms of, what is the outcome I want? Even in difficult situations, what is the outcome I want? What is the best thing that can happen here? What do I want to see happen? And where am I now in relationship to that? And then that generates ideas about how to get there.

AUDREY: It is funny, because so often I work to use these tools and principles as a mom, and so often I am upset or frustrated or worried about something situational. But then I go back to, what do I want? And it is almost always simply relational. And that is something I can actually do something about. That is actually what I want most, for us to just be close and talk and love each other and give and take.

ROBERT: Can I tell you what we did when we were raising our kids? We had something called the deal. Now, here is the deal. Our job is to take care of you until you can take care of yourself. And our job is to teach you how to take care of yourself, so that you can start to make more and more of your own decisions. When we think that you know how to choose in a particular area, you can do it. But until then, we get to choose. And it is a fair deal. It is not a manipulative deal. It is a fair deal.

ROBERT: So our daughter, for example. There was a certain point where the main thing about dressing for school was that she was dressed warmly enough. She did not know how to do that at first, so my wife would choose. And then when she knew how to do that, she got to choose what she wore. Sometimes she chose the silliest things, but they were warm enough, which was the criteria. Good enough.

ROBERT: The thing about it is that what we were allowing her to do was learn how to make choices. And the more choices she made, she could see when consequences worked out well. This was for my son as well, the same kind of thing.

ROBERT: I wrote a children’s story once called The Baby’s Job. In this story there is a young child, and the mother brings home a baby. At one point the baby starts to cry, and the child says, what is the baby doing? And the mother says, he is telling us it is time to take care of him. What do you mean? Well, the baby’s job is to be taken care of. And then our job is to teach the baby how, when they get older and older, to take care of themselves. That is what we do. Parents teach our children how to take care of themselves over a period of time. So in a cumulative way, the more choices they are able to make, really able to make responsibly, the better it is, because then they get to see the consequences of their choices in relationship to taking care of themselves.

AUDREY: That vision, that this is actually at the heart of what we are trying to do as parents, is really centering. It really helps us get rid of a lot of nonsense that we otherwise tend to focus on.

ROBERT: One thing most parents do, and I even caught myself doing it from time to time, is inadvertently giving your child an impression that their actions have to do with their identity. You are a good kid, good grades. You are a bad kid if you do not. You are a good kid if you keep your room clean, and not a good kid if you do not. What that does is teach them that their identity is tied to their actions, versus their identity is not tied to their actions.

AUDREY: You have a really great chapter on that as well. You were talking about how human instincts can be ignored when identity is made to seem a matter of survival. You talk all about this first-person orientation and how unhelpful and unhealthy it is, off the back of talking about Nazism and Stalin and those kinds of ideas. Here it is. There is no relationship between your opinion of yourself and your ability to create what you want. And you also said your thought is not your mind. So in a lot of different ways you are parsing out what is you and what is not you. Your actions are not your identity. Your thoughts are not your identity.

ROBERT: Let me add one dimension to that. Who cares? I think I told in that book the story of having dinner one night with somebody who had written a lot of books on identity. And he said, the most important question you can ever ask yourself is, who are you? And I said, that is really an easy question to answer the way you answer it. Who wants to know?

ROBERT: It is not a very important question at all, because it does not matter. First of all, how do you even know how to define yourself? We say, well, I am a this, I am a that. In fact, you cannot be what you have. The you that is having the thing.

AUDREY: But it makes the focus inward versus outward. How am I doing? What does it make me look like?

ROBERT: This thing happens a lot to creators. While they are creating, they seem to disappear.

AUDREY: I was reading a lot more about Michelangelo lately, and his submersion into his projects, like nothing else in the world existed when he was in the middle of something massive.

ROBERT: Exactly. That is the theme. Particularly professional creators, you can go on for hours.

AUDREY: In this moment in my life, this season of my life, I am so caught up in creating this program for moms and building this business and the people I get to work with and the team we have built. It is so rewarding, but I do not know its potential. I just have a vision for where we can get first, and then I hope that as I approach it, that vision expands and gets bigger for what we can do after that. There are so many days or moments where I am just head down, so caught up in thinking about it, and people in my life will say, why are you not more attentive to this thing? Well, first of all, you are an adult. But also, I am in the middle of head-down creating something I really care about, that I really feel is important, that I want to exist in the world, that I want to outlive me.

ROBERT: In a way it is a bit hard to describe that experience. But one of the ways of experiencing it is the way time passes. It passes in at least two dimensions. One is, you are right in the moment. And the second is, time does not exist.

AUDREY: It is the experience of working on something that felt like a few minutes, and many hours have passed, and you look up at the clock and are shocked.

ROBERT: That is absolutely the experience when you are really creating. These dimensions of time happen simultaneously, and that is quite common in the creative process.

AUDREY: Do you find that there is a sense of intensifying, like a sense of, I will do whatever it takes, the more you are in it? I know you do not love the word commitment, but to me there is something like, I am committed to what I want.

ROBERT: Can I give you a better word? Involvement.

AUDREY: Oh, that is right. You do talk about involvement. So my question is, as creators, when people start to get it and become involved in a project, what is it about the creative process that separates the people who say they want it, assess reality, and start moving in that direction, from the ones who do not? Because the tension wants release. That rubber band can go both ways. You can diminish the vision to alleviate the discomfort, or you can move toward it. So what is the difference between the people who stay involved, who seem to speed up, who seem to accelerate?

ROBERT: I think I get your question. Let me begin by this answer. It is not attitudinal. It is about your skill. If you have created a lot, you do not have any kind of weird stuff going on. It is like another creation. It is another meal. So you make another creation. But if you have not done a lot of creating in this particular area, it is different.

ROBERT: For example, funnily enough, even though I am a composer and have written a lot of music, I had never written songs. So about ten years ago I started to collaborate with Dennis Smith, who is the head of a band called Party on the Moon. I did a documentary on them, by the way. You can get that if you look up Party on the Moon, the film. That is one of the films I have made. His band plays for presidential inaugurations and celebrity weddings and things like that. He and I started to work together, and eventually we wrote a show together, a Christmas show. So I started writing songs with him.

ROBERT: It was completely a new genre for me. I had never done it before. It is a very different way of working than writing film music. I did not know how to do it at first, but I know how to create. All of the years of my experience of creating let me learn how to do this new thing. It was not a big deal in a way, but it was an exciting learning experience, a new territory I had not really worked in before. If you are a really masterful musician, you may not have played certain music before, but you will know how to do it.

AUDREY: That reminds me of something I love. You talk about the two kinds of people, and the other kind of person is a learner. Learners develop an ability to grow. The lesson is that you can learn. You are talking about Van Gogh here. He knew how to learn. It reminded me of my husband, who has been in sales for a long time and is picking up the sales in our little business to help it grow. He has been immersed in Brian Tracy recently and cannot stop talking about this one key theme from Brian’s life, that everything shifted for him when he realized he could learn everything. That was his life mantra from that point on. I can learn anything. And because he could learn anything, in the framework we are talking about today, that shifted him to being a creator all the time.

ROBERT: See, that is the attitude. No. Now, I cannot learn everything, because I tried to learn Japanese and I could not. There are a lot of things I can learn. But I realize some things are beyond my learning at this point.

AUDREY: For Brian Tracy, maybe it meant, I can learn everything that is important for my vision. That is a different statement.

ROBERT: In that chapter there are a couple of things I talk about. One is that often when you are learning, you look terrible. So if your identity is involved, it is hard for people who have their focus on themselves to learn, because they do not want to look bad. The other thing I go into in that chapter is how traditional education is not about learning but about performing.

AUDREY: I wanted to ask you about that. How do you feel our idea of creation and being creative has become so distorted to mean this little niche group? The kids in school who are talented. They are creative, I am not, and they make pictures.

ROBERT: It is really quite interesting that the reward system, if you have not learned a thing but you get all the answers right, you get an A. If you have learned a lot but you do not get all the answers right, you get less than an A. So the reward system is not rewarding learning. We are rewarding performance and parroting. From that you get the wrong idea, that life is about performance.

AUDREY: You say here, your vision and desire for the creation can far outshine your current level of ability to create what you want. I have had that experience over and over and over.

ROBERT: When this is the case, you have a choice. You can either learn or you can quit.

AUDREY: I think that principle is harder to grasp, largely because we have been a little indoctrinated about what creativity is. It can be harder when it does not seem like it is creative. Sure, I could take an art class. Sure, I could get a Japanese tutor. But how am I going to create this relationship with my child? How am I going to create a home that is more peaceful? What can I learn, instead of quitting, that can get me there? So I think that can be a stumbling block even for mothers who start to get it, who have a sense of the structural tension, who understand why it is important to create instead of react, and are starting to get a sense of what they would rather have or experience or create. What things have worked in that scenario?

ROBERT: One time our daughter, when she was young, had a friend who was very manipulative to her mom. So she came home, and her mom asked her to do something she did not want to do. Her name is Eve. Eve said, I hate you, Mom.

ROBERT: Now, normally in the other household, that would be a point of manipulation, from the mom’s point of view, to say, oh no, you should love me. Rosalind said, well, it is up to you how you feel. I love you. You can feel whatever you want. In other words, you still need to do this thing. And that is the last time she tried that out.

ROBERT: Because think about it. Rosalind was not trying to prove that she was a good mom. And she actually did think, it was not a manipulation on her part, she really did think Eve could think whatever she wanted. It was up to her what she thought, what her opinions were. She was not trying to control her opinions. Of course, she knew it was just a ploy anyway, but that is not even the point. The point is, the greater principle was, it is up to you what you think. We are not trying to control your thinking. We have suggestions, or recommendations, or ideas about what is more important and what is less important. But it is up to you whether you agree with it or not.

AUDREY: So how do the great creators we have pointed to a few times hold that tension? How do they maintain the vision? Is it as simple as being learners?

ROBERT: No, it is none of that, because what motivates the learner is the creative process. It is not trying to be a learner. You end up having to be a learner because there is stuff you need to know to create stuff. One of the action steps is to learn. I want to do this. Current reality is, I do not know how to do this action step. So, learn how to do it.

AUDREY: So how do they do it? Because they just want it badly enough?

ROBERT: Look, it could be the simplest thing. I just really want that. The intensity of wanting it is irrelevant. It is a simple choice.

AUDREY: But how do you stay there? Is that not difficult? How do you keep it going?

ROBERT: Well, did you change your mind about wanting it?

AUDREY: People do, right? All the time. They say they want things and then they do not go create them. I think it is mostly because they do not know how.

ROBERT: But if you ask them the question, do you still want it, and it turns out they still want it, the fact is they still want it. They may not know how to create it, so they have given up. But their desire, their aspirations, went underground.

AUDREY: What can they do to resist the temptation to give up?

ROBERT: Learn how to create. And the way I am going to describe this is, start by creating little things. Just build up practice. My son has a company called Creator Tools, and there is a three-month course that I created that they offer on creating your life. It is like music lessons, really, about creating your life. You do a lesson every day, and then you practice that lesson during the day.

ROBERT: At a certain point in the course, you make five-minute to fifteen-minute creations. This is not improvising. These are things. It is practicing structural tension. You have the idea, you have current reality, and you create the thing within five minutes, or ten minutes, or fifteen minutes. By doing that every day, you are building up stamina for the creative process, because you have gone through the entire cycle from beginning to end in that short period of time. So the more you do that, the more you internalize the creative process. They also work on two-week goals, then one-year goals, and then five-year goals. It is a cumulative process in terms of creating your life. But what you are doing is practicing creating, exactly the same way we would practice learning an instrument.

AUDREY: I think I am starting to get it. So you gain the skill of creating. You become adept at this way of approaching life. And because you are good at it, it can apply in many areas of your life.

ROBERT: It is an orientation. It is a way of approaching life. It is a different universe you are living in. It is not just a different process of approaching life. In that universe, in this creative orientation, you think about, what do I want to create? And when I talk about involvement, it is not about satisfaction. It is about involvement. So sometimes you are dissatisfied. Sometimes you are satisfied. Sometimes things work out, sometimes they do not. All of it becomes a learning experience. When it works out, and when it does not work out, you learn. Over time you begin to master your own creative process, and your life itself becomes the subject matter of the creative process.

AUDREY: The way you put it is really starting to click. Because the different way is reactive. And you can spend your life being reactive, because you can react to your parents, react to your school assignments, react to your career choices. You can let the stimuli around you drive it. It is not that you are not making decisions, or that you are not an actor in your own life, because you are. You are doing things. You do have a life. And maybe you are surrounded by many things you end up liking, because you made some of those decisions in a way that was successful or according to what you would enjoy.

AUDREY: It reminds me of a woman I am acquainted with who was abused as a child. Well into her thirties and beyond, having married and having several children, this was still the most prominent part of her identity. She wore it around. She talked of it often. It was her identity. And it was difficult for the people around her to work with her in any productive way on an ongoing basis. She was constantly butting up against people who really wanted to create things with her, to be in a quality relationship with her. She was really in that reactive, problem-focused place.

ROBERT: It is an underlying structure in which she could not resolve the experience she had. And so she was constantly trying to resolve it. Here is the thing. One very different way of understanding this situation is that, in reality, the past is over. And in reality, she will never resolve it. The resolution is, it is not resolvable. You are not going to catch the plane you missed. It is over. So trying to resolve it spills over into her current life. Understanding that it is not resolvable, and it is over, can help her regain being present in life, versus being trapped in the past.

AUDREY: What we want to do is move all the way from, those are the creative kids at school, to, I am a creator. It is part of my makeup. It is moving from, I can create more of this life, to this complete other thing. I am putting that framework behind me. I am accepting the fact that I do have the power to create my life. But what you help people do is move even beyond, I am the person doing the creating, to thinking in terms of creation. It is my orientation in the world, that I am not reacting.

ROBERT: I know what you are saying, and I kind of know why you are saying it. The way it actually exists in my life is not that way at all. I just think about things I want to create.

AUDREY: Exactly, but what I am saying is, moving someone to where you are, I think they might go through a process of, oh, I could create things. That would be the first epiphany. And the next one would be the life you are living, where it is second nature.

ROBERT: It is the other way around. You start by, there is something you want to create. What is it? Is it a house, is it a room, is it a poem, is it a kitchen, is it a meal, is it a party? What do you want to create? And the cumulative experience over time of creating many things automatically puts you in the orientation of being a creator. It is not that I start by trying to convince myself I am a creator. I create a lot of things.

AUDREY: It is actually just saying, I am going to learn how, I am going to create something, and over time that orientation just becomes part of how you approach the world.

ROBERT: Exactly. For example, my original writing looked like translations from German. I did not know how to write.

AUDREY: You mean when writing your books? They were just clumsy, is what you are saying?

ROBERT: I did not know how to write. If I wrote a letter or anything, it was a translation from German. And for example, I have talent for music. I never had to know. I always knew how music worked. There are a lot of technical things you have to learn in the world of music, but it came easily. Writing did not. So what I did was I practiced writing. I studied writers I liked. I analyzed, how did they do that? How did they get so much meaning out of a single little sentence? Looking at how they imply things.

ROBERT: Sometimes before I would write something, I would read articles in The New Yorker, because the writing is so good. Get that in my world. So I worked at it. And finally I became pretty good as a writer. But it is because I did not have talent. I actually have a lot of skill.

AUDREY: That is interesting, because going all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, it sounds like you were doing with your writing the same kind of thing you were doing in the conservatory. Analyzing, breaking it down, looking at its components, getting to the root of it, and orienting yourself to good writing, immersing yourself in it so that it could start to come out in the mix.

ROBERT: One time I heard an author talk about Hemingway. And he said, Hemingway knew every trick in the book. And I said, what book? I want to see that book.

ROBERT: Right now I have got two book projects going. There was a play I wrote that premiered in Japan in December and then had a run in April. They just sent me the video of the play, which I am going to add the subtitles to, because it was in Japanese, of course. They are all written in English. There are so many different projects. I am doing a lot of songwriting these days. In less than a year we have written over thirty songs. And I do not think about it like, oh, I am a creator. More like, what is next? I do that even because I am the cook in the family. So I think about that when I make a meal. Do I know how to do it, or do I not? It is all the secondary choices to the primary choice.

AUDREY: This has been a tremendous conversation. I have learned a lot. Two things before we finish up. One, what advice would you give to mothers who will be listening to this? And then, how can people follow you and engage with the projects you are working on?

ROBERT: I do not know if I have any real advice for mothers, since I am not a mother.

AUDREY: What would you want them to know about how a creator orientation can help them?

ROBERT: Well, this is the thing. It really is a secondary choice to the primary choice. Realizing that a lot of times the frustration and so on are the secondary choices to a very altruistic motivation, which is that you love your kids and you really want to support them. And this thing we did with the idea of the deal. Our job is to teach you how to take care of yourself, and then we take care of you. So we get to choose when you do not know how. And more and more, you get to choose.

AUDREY: I love that. It is a pretty good system.

ROBERT: It is a good deal. It is a fair deal.

AUDREY: So where can people find you? How can they engage with your work?

ROBERT: There are many books. One book I like better than the one you have is called Creating Your Life. And then there is Identity, which I told you about. And www.robertfritz.com is our website.

AUDREY: We will link that below. I also saw the plays and the songwriting, and conferences coming up on your site. There is a lot going on in your world.

ROBERT: I have a YouTube channel called the Robert Fritz Creating Channel, where I have my films and songs and some other things. And then there is another channel called the Robert Fritz Structural Consulting Channel. In that channel I am doing consultations with clients. It is an entirely different way of understanding human motivation and change.

AUDREY: They are fascinating. I have watched some of those. It is good stuff. Well, thank you again. I am so grateful that I got to meet you. This has been logged away in the back of my mind for a few years now, that I would love to talk with you and meet you and learn from you. Thank you for all you do, for what you have put out to bless other people like me and others. I am really, really grateful.

ROBERT: Thank you.

ROBERT: One of the best developmental things you can do is teach kids music. There is a program called Music Together. When kids learn music, it affects their language skills, their math skills, and it also helps their social skills. What happens is they understand how to put things together relationally, in a certain sort of way. It is probably one of the best childhood developmental approaches. Maybe what you should do on your podcast is have one of the people from Music Together as a guest. They were the first and best program. There are some other programs now that do that too. They did it understanding very technical things, like certain modalities that are developmental and socially supportive. Modalities meaning scales, certain scale-type things, and certain rhythmic kinds of things. These are very musically technical things. But they understood exactly how to put them together, and they accelerate childhood development enormously.

AUDREY: It is important to note that the parent or caretaker goes with the child to the class.

ROBERT: Yes. The kid goes to a class.

AUDREY: I do not know if you have ever read anything by Shinichi Suzuki or know anything about his work. One of the things that fascinated me the most, and he is such an incredible man in so many ways, is that he would not take on a child as a student until the mother had had lessons for at least six months. The mother had to take lessons, and she had to go home and practice in front of the child while the child listened and watched. He would only take on that student when the student asked, because they had been inspired by the mother’s example, and because it was something the mother had basic skills and understanding in, and something they could do together.

ROBERT: Suzuki, of course, is Japanese. But he was in France learning music. He was amazing. You probably know this, but his basic question was, how do French children learn French?

AUDREY: Yes. The huge breakthrough. How do children all over the world learn their native tongue? They absorb it in the ether. He was amazing. And those concerts he used to tour with, with all the little kids playing with him. He had such a generous heart. He was just a beautiful person.

AUDREY: Thank you. That is a great resource that I will look into. All the things you have mentioned we will pull out of the podcast and link below. Many of our moms might want to do your creating class. I am going to go grab your other book, which I did not know about. Thank you so much. It has been a joy.

ROBERT: Thank you so much.

You do hard things every day. You run a home, you carry other people's needs, you handle complicated things most people never see. You have so much more power than you realize.

So why can one small, ordinary thing still fill you with dread? Having people over for dinner. A phone call. A visit you keep putting off. Something that should be simple, and somehow just is not.

What's fascinating is that the dread is almost never about the thing itself. It is about the story you are telling yourself. Which means you do not have to keep dreading it. Once you can see the story clearly, you can change it, and show up as the you you want to be.

Resources from the Episode: 

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Episode 166: Creator Orientation, A Panel Discussion

AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I am Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. Today I am joined in another wonderful discussion with Tracie Hyde, Lindsey Wright, and Cadie Hatch. We are preparing for our upcoming Mothers of Creation celebration, and it has been such a joy to meet, to discuss, and to read more resources together as we look at the kinds of things we will cover that day. We are also preparing the women who will attend in our online community, which is really wonderful. If you are interested in joining us, the link is in the description below.

We have been returning to a few themes leading up to this event, and today the theme is creator and creation. We have talked about victim types and victimhood and why understanding them is helpful. But what is the reverse of that? The opposite of being a victim is to be a creator. So let us start simply. Will one of you give us a high level overview of Karpman’s Drama Triangle, who the players are, and what a problem orientation looks and feels like?

LINDSEY: I can do that. The victim orientation has three components. First the victim, who needs a persecutor, someone to blame the problem on, someone they believe is causing the problem. And then they need a rescuer, the knight in shining armor who comes to save the princess. Those three components collude together and feed on each other. Often we switch places within it. We start out as the victim and then become the persecutor. It is a fluid circumstance, this drama.

On the other side, we have the opposite. The opposite of victim is creator. The opposite of persecutor is challenger. The creator sees the problem not as something to blame, not as the source of the bad feelings they are having, but as a challenge, something that can be overcome and that has something to teach them. And the opposite of the rescuer is the coach. The rescuer just takes away the consequences and smooths out the problem, but the victim does not get to learn anything. The coach does not solve the problem for you. They help the creator solve it themselves. They ask questions, they provide support and resources, but what they want is for the creator to have the experience of solving the problem and reaching the outcome they want.

AUDREY: Thank you, Lindsey. That is so helpful. So we have two orientations, two ways of being. We will get into a lot of detail at the event and help you understand the nuances and why they matter. But fundamentally, to talk about being a creator, we have to juxtapose it with who a victim is and who a creator is, and the players in their life.

AUDREY: Most of the time, in most of the circumstances we find ourselves in, we have a choice. But most of the time we organically show up as one or the other. Let me give you a good example. My husband has incredible health. Optimal health. And it is not just good genes and a good constitution, though I am sure he has that too. He has a way of being in the world about his physical body that is creator all the time. If he gets sick, his first thought is, I will probably be better tomorrow, or this is not a very big deal. He is not looking for who got him sick, or why this always happens to him. Even when he gets something small like a blemish, he sees it as a challenger. He tells himself, that is probably going to go away, I am going to figure out how to get rid of that. And then he always does. He is always looking to coaches to understand how to eat better, build stronger muscle, and live longer. He is currently reading three different books on how to be as healthy as he can be. When it comes to his health, he is in a creator orientation almost all the time.

I think all of us have at least one area of life where being a creator comes so naturally it is like the air we breathe. Some people are like this with money. It may be hard for a lot of us to believe, but they have always had a positive reference point toward it. They expect it to come, they are comfortable with it, they spend it wisely and grow it, and there is always more than enough. But most of us also have a weak point, an area where we show up as a victim a lot, maybe in several areas. We talked about that in our last group discussion, about victims and victim types, and how we can show up as different types in different areas of our lives.

When something happens to us, we determine the orientation we choose. Two different people have cancer. Two different people declare bankruptcy. Two different people get divorced. Two different people lose a child. And we will see radically different responses to the exact same circumstance. Often, when we are uncomfortable with something, we think that surely anybody in our situation would respond the same way. And the answer is almost always no. There is probably at least one person who would choose a creator response, who would look at themselves and their situation differently.

So I would love to hear from each of you. Where in your life are you tempted to show up as a victim, and where do you show up as a creator? What are the thoughts and emotions around those two experiences? To go back to my husband, the other end of his spectrum was his pornography addiction. For years he was the victim of it. He could never figure it out and believed he would never overcome it. And then, with the right principles, tools, and orientation, he found sobriety. So we know that with the right tools we can conquer even the hardest circumstances of our lives. Give our listeners some reference points from your own lives.

TRACIE: This is one I can share. It is not a deep problem in my life, but it is something I have observed, where I can be in drama or choose to be a creator. It is having people over for dinner. It seems like that would be easy to do, but for many years it has been something I dreaded.

We have a lot of people over, especially on Sundays. Family, extended family, friends. We can have up to seventeen or twenty people for dinner. My drama side looks at everything as a problem. The meat is not going to be done exactly right. The people coming may not really want to be there. What if someone feels left out, or no one talks to them. All these things that are out of my control, I worry about and see as problems. I dread Sunday as it comes around. And while people are there, I feel anxiety, so I am not able to minister to them or think deeply about what they need. That is the drama side.

It has been so helpful to recognize that I have been in drama in this situation. Because if I can flip it into creator mode, then I can ask, why am I having all these people over? It is to create an experience we can have together. My drama type here is the perfectionist, where nothing can reach the goal, because it is just a nebulous idea I have never thought through clearly. It is never enough, and that is why I dread it. But in creator mode, I can have a vision of what I am actually creating. Maybe the food is not perfect. Maybe someone is dreading coming. How people interact is out of my control. But I can feel satisfied that I invited them and provided an experience where they can feel connection, where we can have time together as family and friends. When I focus on what I am creating, it becomes less about me and how I am being perceived. That anxiety leaves, and it becomes fulfilling instead of something I dread. I still lapse into the old pattern every so often, and I have to work through it and exercise that muscle to be a creator. But I can tell I am coming out of this dreaded rut I have been in, and I am finding a lot more joy in it.

AUDREY: That is wonderful, Tracie. Those details help us see it. At the event we are going to give women a lot of specific tools to parse this out, and vision is a key component, which we will talk about on another podcast soon. One of the things you said several times was the focus off of yourself and onto others, and instead of reacting, taking ownership of your thinking. In our discussion about victims, one of the key words was responsibility. One of the biggest responsibilities we can take on is responsibility for the way we are thinking, and choosing to think differently can change everything. You are being intentional to recognize a pattern and to use the tools and principles you have been given, and it is turning what could be a bad experience into a really beautiful one.

Can anyone else give an example of how this creator orientation is blessing your life and pulling you out of difficult circumstances?

CADIE: I loved how you said your husband just has areas where creator orientation comes naturally. I do not know that I had ever thought about it that way before. I certainly know where my victim orientation comes naturally, but where does my creator come naturally? For me, one area is education. I do not tend to feel overwhelmed by it. I have educated my children at home all their lives and have helped with a charter school here locally. Education does not intimidate me to take on, even though for other people it can feel really intimidating and scary. It is neat to realize that is just a natural orientation toward creator that I have in that area.

But my victim orientation almost goes hand in hand with it. It is difficult for me to make visits to people, to go and talk to them, because I get so caught up in what if I say something wrong, what if I hurt their feelings. It becomes a focus on my own inadequacies instead of on the positive outcome I want. In education I think, there are so many wonderful things we could do, let me tell you all of them. But with a visit I think, what if I say something wrong. In most of those circumstances I would say I am acting like the dummy who cannot quite figure out what to do or how to make it work. It is nice to recognize what that is, because there is an antidote for it, and I can move forward and have positive experiences.

AUDREY: You can choose to be the creator of a new vision. And it is interesting, because I had not thought about it quite this way until you said it, Cadie. Recognizing your strengths, which is something we really focus on in the Academy, can give you the confidence to become a creator. I have to go make this visit, but I am an effective teacher and communicator, I have strength in this area, so how can I lean into that strength here and create a different outcome for myself and for others?

LINDSEY: What creators are really doing, in so many ways, is re-blazing a trail. We get into these habits of victim. A circumstance arises, and my automatic response is all the victim trails I have worn into my brain, all the reasons this is not going to work. So when I move into creator, I have to make a new trail in my mind for how this is going to go. And it is so empowering to realize that it can change.

Thinking of the areas where being a creator comes naturally for me, I feel like I can learn anything, and I am not afraid of leadership positions. But those are not only natural strengths. I have also practiced. I have put myself in those situations and gotten the practice. So in the areas where I am more likely to show up as a victim, I can know that if I practice, this too can become a strength.

AUDREY: Yes. We can rewire those neural pathways. We can use principles to change the way we fundamentally show up, and eventually notice that we are showing up differently, more naturally, more of the time. That is empowering to see in ourselves.

AUDREY: As we finish up, one last question. In a few words, what is the difference in how you feel as a victim versus as a creator? What does it feel like inside when you are in a creator orientation?

TRACIE: I will tell you what the flip feels like, because I have been noticing it over the last few weeks. When you recognize you are in a victim orientation and then you make the switch, to me it feels like an exhale. I see what is happening. I can choose to let it go, choose a different action, choose a different response. The pressure has been released, and I am free to move forward in so many positive ways. I am free to create what I want to create. I can breathe now.

AUDREY: I love that.

LINDSEY: I would totally agree. Mine is slightly different but very similar. I feel like chains have just dropped off and now I can move again. I had felt very stuck, very entrenched in negativity, and now it is gone. I can move, and it feels fantastic. It is very liberating.

AUDREY: I love that.

CADIE: For me it is a closed heart versus an open heart. I feel like my heart opens up when I move into creator mode.

AUDREY: I love that. I see all of those emotions in myself and others, a sense of new opportunity and new hope. I feel a lot of new hope. The focus comes off of myself, and I can focus on what actually matters instead of on me.

AUDREY: For those and many other reasons, it is so worth it to do the work to understand this. It is one of those things that does not feel urgent. If you are familiar with Covey’s quadrants in The 7 Habits, it is in the important but not urgent category. It is very important, but unless we are in a state of emergency, we feel like we can put it off. But making it a priority can have far more impact than you would ever imagine.

When our speaking team first started working on our own problem stories, it was so interesting. Several of us said, this is my problem story, and I do not really see a way out right now. I do not know if I could get out of this. That is so often how it feels when we are in confusion, overwhelm, and frustration in an area of our life. And this is an incredible tool to get out of that and to be liberated.

Thank you all so much for joining me today. It was a joy to talk about creator orientation and why it is so empowering. If you feel so inclined, keep listening to these podcasts around these themes and share them with a friend. And we would love to meet you in person at our fall event in the beautiful mountains of Utah. There is information about that below in the description. Thanks for joining us, and we will see you next time.

In Auschwitz, a man told Viktor Frankl about a dream.

A voice had said he could ask one question, so he asked the only one that mattered: when would the war be over for him. Not for everyone. For him. The voice gave him a date.

He believed it completely.

I have not been able to stop thinking about what happened to him on that date. It changed how I understand what we are really doing when we call ourselves creators.

Episode 165: Viktor Frankl

AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. Thank you for joining me today. I'm excited to talk to you about Viktor Frankl, a personal hero of mine. Just imagine that you're a Jew in Vienna during World War II. You've fallen in love with the woman of your dreams and you want to be married, but the law has just changed, and you are the very last Jewish couple in Vienna awarded the privilege of marrying. Not long after, your beautiful wife becomes pregnant, but no Jews are allowed to have children. And so she is forced to abort it.

AUDREY: These were some of the things Viktor Frankl went through. I'm not going to go through every detail of his life, but he's worth looking up and learning all about. Today I want to do something really special with him and his experiences.

AUDREY: We can see components of the Mission Driven Life in these stories and events and excerpts from his life. He had that love of God. He lived according to principle. He loved truth and talked about it often. He took good care of himself, loved others, loved humanity, made a huge impact in the world, heard the call, adopted meaning in his life, and shared logotherapy with the world. So definitely a mission driven life worth celebrating, and an incredible man who I greatly admire.

AUDREY: But for today, I want to focus our conversation a little more narrowly. I'm going to tell you a bit about his life leading up to World War II, and then I'm going to take you into his most famous book, Man's Search for Meaning. If you have not read this book, you really, really need to. The first half is recollections and excerpts from his experiences in the concentration camp. Nothing vulgar or offensive, but very thought provoking. He's trying to look at it from a psychological point of view, through the experiences of the prisoner. The second half is about his logotherapy, which is a fascinating read.

AUDREY: The reason we're going into that book is to do something very unique. This fall, as I've mentioned on the podcast before, we're going to gather in the beautiful mountains of Utah and spend a day at our MDM celebration working through our theme for this year, Mothers of Creation. We're going to talk about how we show up as victims in the world, in our own drama, how we sometimes create it for ourselves or react to circumstances outside our control. We build these problem stories. We're going to break those apart. We're going to learn how to disengage. We're going to talk about what creation means and what it means to be a creator. And then we're going to teach you how to reframe it, how to turn it into new purpose and vision for your life, and how to create a creator statement.

AUDREY: There's a community in the MDM Academy specifically for this event that women are welcome into as soon as they sign up, and that's been going well. Our brilliant Lindsey Wright has been running trainings in there. We did the first one together, and they're recorded. It's been a beautiful experience to watch women start to learn these ideas and prepare for this day-long event. So with all of that in mind, I want to show you three core concepts we're talking about on the podcast right now, and how they come to life in Viktor Frankl's book. Drama and victimhood and victim roles. Creation and creators. And vision, and why vision matters so much and how it's incorporated into these other aspects of our lives.

AUDREY: He was born in 1905 in Vienna, the middle child in a Jewish family. When he was little, World War I hit, and it hit his family hard, like it did so many others. They were in abject poverty. They struggled to survive. And what's fascinating about Viktor is that by the age of three, he knew he wanted to be a doctor. Isn't that something? He went along that vein, thinking and learning in terms of what it means to make people whole, what it means to heal them. By the time he got into high school, he was actively studying psychology and philosophy, some in school and some out of it. So it might not surprise you that at age sixteen, he gave a speech in school entitled On the Meaning of Life. These ideas were already part of his message, his mission to the world. He felt it at a very early age, and that idea of meaning and purpose never left him. It was a central theme in his life.

AUDREY: As a teenager, he also wrote to Freud. I don't know that they exchanged many letters, but Freud remembered him and remembered the correspondence when they met a few years later. He later disagreed with Freud and left off following him, but always deeply respected him. He then went on to medical school. During that time, he started to notice a disturbing trend. As exams approached, there was always a percentage of high school students every year who would end up taking their own lives, either leading up to the exams or after they received their scores, because these were so vital. They would literally determine the trajectory of that student's life. And they were young, and didn't always have the foresight to understand that things can change, that life could be different and better. So they became very fatalistic. He noticed this. He was disturbed by it. He decided to do something about it. He started treating these students with therapies and other modalities, and the first year he did this, there were no suicides. It was the first time in a long time that had been the case, and that was very rewarding for him.

AUDREY: So he continued on. He finished school, and by the age of twenty-eight or twenty-nine, in 1933, he was already the head of the Vienna Psychiatric Hospital for female suicide prevention. He had seen the need, he had reached out, and as he did that, he really started to make a difference in this area. He learned a lot in the process. He went on and took other top positions. And by the time World War II was approaching, it hit Vienna earlier than it did the United States. Even as it approached, he could see that as a Jew he was in a lot of trouble. There were already more laws and discriminations put in place. So he applied for a visa to the United States. It was done by lottery, so he just had to wait it out. His number came up, and he was actually awarded a visa to go to the United States.

AUDREY: But he knew his family didn't qualify. He would be the only one going, leaving his family behind. He didn't know what he should do. So he decided to leave the decision up to a power higher than himself. He prayed and waited for some kind of sign. One day he was at home and found a little stone on the floor. When he lifted it up, he realized it was a piece of a Ten Commandments tablet that had been shattered when a synagogue was bombed, and his father had brought it home. It was a section of the honor your father and mother commandment. He saw that as divine intervention, and that he needed to stay with his family. So he decided to do that, which is why he was still there when the war reached him.

AUDREY: He met his wife, Tilly. They fell in love. She was an incredible woman of compassion and intelligence, and they connected very deeply. As I said earlier, they were the last couple awarded the opportunity to marry, in 1941. In 1942 she became pregnant, and it was a forced abortion, because if a Jewish couple was known to be pregnant, they would be sent immediately to the concentration camps.

AUDREY: So she had that forced abortion. Not long after, in 1942 or maybe 1943, the family was transferred to a milder concentration camp. At the beginning they were together. Frankl's father was old and very sick. Frankl was able to smuggle some morphine into the camp and give it to his father just before he passed away, and he was very grateful he could do that. Through a series of complications, he wound up in Auschwitz. His wife was going to follow him there. She ended up at Bergen-Belsen, where she was, I believe, almost immediately killed. He didn't know that at the time. And so he served out his time in Auschwitz until the war ended.

AUDREY: That brings us to this book. After the war, he dictated it in just nine days. He first published it anonymously, because he didn't feel he should take credit for it. He didn't know it would do any good or make any difference. He just felt it needed to be said. And it had a huge impact. It became his most famous work and has sold more than twelve million copies in print worldwide. So a very, very important work.

AUDREY: I'm going to take you on a journey, from victim to creator to having vision, through some different excerpts. He says here:

"The camp inmate was frightened of making decisions and of taking any sort of initiative whatsoever. This was the result of a strong feeling that fate was one's master, and that one must not try to influence it in any way, but instead let it take its own course. The prisoner would have preferred to let fate make the choice for him. This escape from commitment was most apparent when a prisoner had to make the decision for or against an escape attempt."

AUDREY: That phrase, escape from commitment, is so fascinating. Of course, we know these are true victims. They really are victims. They are in a concentration camp being tortured, not having anything to eat, doing hard labor every day. They are, in the truest sense of the word, complete victims. And yet there is this space Frankl creates for us, where he helps us understand that even when you are genuinely a victim, victimhood is a mindset. It's a choice. It's a choice we can choose out of. That's what we're talking about this summer and this fall. We all have hard things happening to us. We all feel like victims to someone else's choices, to life circumstances, to illnesses or disabilities we can't change, to financial circumstances. We all could act the victim. We all could fall into victimhood. We all could run away from responsibility and commitment, just like the prisoners in the camps wanted to. He says:

"That which was ultimately responsible for the state of the prisoner's inner self was not so much the enumerated psychological causes as it was the result of a free decision."

AUDREY: Let me help you understand that again. The ultimate responsibility for the state of the prisoner's inner self. He couldn't control the circumstances around him at all. One hundred percent, other people were in control. But he makes this distinction: we may be a victim externally, but we don't have to be a victim internally. We don't have to choose it. That inner state is a choice. Like he says here:

"Psychological observations of the prisoners have shown that only the men who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp's degenerating influences. The question now arises, what could or should have constituted this inner hold?"

AUDREY: So how do they go about taking hold of their inner selves, being true victims but not being in drama, not being in victimhood, choosing their inner state? He also talks about a man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal, and found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. That's our first hint into how we choose not to think or act like a victim.

AUDREY: He shares something else here, probably the most famous quote from the book, if not the most famous. He says:

"We can answer these questions from experience as well as on principle. The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress."

AUDREY: What's amazing about this is that only someone like Frankl could say it definitively, because he was there, because he experienced it, because he saw it firsthand. He has the power and the ability to tell all of us: no one has an excuse. If you will learn to recognize when you are thinking like a victim, feeling like a victim, acting like a victim in your life, when you are responding to life without choice, without responsibility, then you can make a change. You can make a shift. He goes on:

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

AUDREY: So he's saying yes, we sometimes are victims. Sometimes genuinely victims, sometimes just making up the drama in our own minds. I have done that millions of times. But even when we're genuinely victims, we can choose our own way. We can choose our attitude and our response to life. We can choose to hold on to the inner freedom, which is our God-given gift.

AUDREY: I want to tell you this story, because I felt it was fascinating, one of the most interesting stories to me in this entire book. As we move from being victims, let's talk about some stories of being creators in our own lives. The opposite of victim is creator. So we want to think and act like creators. How do we do that? What does that mean? David Emerald said, we cannot not create. So we are always creating. We are actually creators, even when we're thinking and talking and behaving like victims. We're creating the thing we don't want, because we are creators. And the last thing we'll talk about is vision. Vision anchors us to something we want. Because if we don't know what we want, and we're thinking like victims, we will create the wrong thing. Here's a really powerful example of that.

"I once had a dramatic demonstration of the close link between the loss of faith in the future and this dangerous giving up. F, my senior block warden, a fairly well-known composer and librettist, confided in me one day. He said, 'I would like to tell you something, doctor. I have had a strange dream. A voice told me that I could wish for something, that I should only say what I wanted to know, and all my questions would be answered. What do you think I asked? That I should like to know when the war would be over for me. You know what I mean, doctor. For me. I wanted to know when we, when our camp, would be liberated and our sufferings come to an end.'"

"'And when did you have this dream?' I asked. 'In February 1945,' he answered. It was then the beginning of March. 'What did your dream voice answer?' Furtively he whispered to me, 'March 30th.'"

AUDREY: For those of you who know the timeline of World War II, that will be very insightful.

"When F told me about his dream, he was still full of hope and convinced that the voice of his dream would be right. But as the promised day drew nearer, the war news which reached our camp made it appear very unlikely that we would be free on the promised date. On March 29th, F suddenly became ill and ran a high temperature. On March 30th, the day his prophecy had told him that the war and suffering would be over for him, he became delirious and lost consciousness. On March 31st, he was dead. To all outward appearances, he had died of typhus."

AUDREY: He was a creator who could not not create. And he created his own death by believing so furtively in what this dream voice had told him. It's so amazing to me, the power of our minds to create. So we are creators, and we are responsible for our inner state. He says:

"In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain, but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy makeup often seemed to survive camp life better than those of a robust nature."

AUDREY: This leads us from the creator piece, where we know we are responsible for our responses to life, that we can choose the inner state regardless of external circumstances, that we are responsible for who we are inside, how we feel, and the spiritual and intellectual life we develop, which is protective in nature. This is so profound: that a rich spiritual and intellectual life was physically protective as well. And then he moves into vision. That's the third piece that's so vital to getting out of victimhood, to getting over the problem stories we tell ourselves, and to learning how to truly solve the significant problems of our lives with these key principles. He shares this experience:

"Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise. A thought transfixed me. For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire."

AUDREY: He goes on to talk about the intensification of the inner life by holding on to a vision. He sculpted his mind, he trained his mind to think about what he wanted to think, not in a reactionary way to his external circumstances. He says:

"My mind still clung to the image of my wife. I did not know whether she was alive or dead, but there was no need for me to know. Nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved. Had I known that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying."

AUDREY: So he imagines his wife. He spends time with her. He talks with her in his mind. They have these beautiful conversations, and it's an emotional, spiritual, mental, and intellectual lifeline for him. It keeps him alive, very literally, and it keeps him from falling into victimhood, from being degraded by camp circumstances the way so many prisoners were. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn talks about this same transformation: that some prisoners, if they chose the higher road, if they used their minds to concentrate and focus on new purpose and a new vision for their life, it not only saved them in the moment, it literally kept them alive and helped them move on in their lives.

AUDREY: He says he would keep talking to his wife. And one day he was in the cold, and his thoughts had become degraded again. He was thinking about how hungry he was, imagining the meal he was going to eat. And then he says:

"I became disgusted with the state of affairs which compelled me daily and hourly to think of only such trivial things. I forced my thoughts to turn to another subject. Suddenly I saw myself standing on the platform of a well-lit, warm, and pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on comfortable, upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp. All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past. Both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psychological study undertaken by myself."

AUDREY: That vision, communing with his wife and loving her every day, and then envisioning a future goal for himself. He had been writing a book that was confiscated when he was put in the camp. Arriving home and writing that book, lecturing about it, teaching people the things about life purpose he had discovered and the importance of meaning in life, became the meaning of his life and the purpose of staying alive in the camp.

AUDREY: So these concepts, these fundamental principles of building up our reserves, of being true creators in our own lives, of seeing where we're falling victim, of identifying those victim types we've talked about and recognizing where we're doing that, of seeing that we're in drama and deciding to be creators instead, and of latching on to a vision bigger than ourselves, letting that meaning and purpose drive us into the future and out of drama into a creator mindset. That is really the key. And Viktor Frankl's book and his experiences in the concentration camp perfectly encapsulate that.

AUDREY: I am so grateful you've joined me today to talk about these things. If you're interested in these topics and want to learn more, keep listening to the podcast, and consider joining us this fall. As soon as you sign up, you'll be given access to the MDM Academy pod that's working on all of these concepts leading up to the event. We've got trainings coming up that you can be part of, where you can engage with Lindsey. And then we'll meet you that great day at the end of September and spend the day together. The links are in the description, and we would love to have you join us.

AUDREY: In the meantime, I hope this information has been helpful and inspiring to you. I hope you will see, in greater and greater clarity, how principles can rescue you from the difficult problems you are in. They can liberate you and make you free, and help you get back on the path to where you truly want to go. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I will see you next time.

Thirty years ago, a man sat down for his morning quiet time in the middle of the hardest season of his life. His father had died far too young. He and his wife had been trying to start a family, and he had just learned he was infertile. His marriage was ending. And in that prayerful space, he said, "Okay, God, I'm ready to surrender my victim stance in the world. But I need to know: what's the opposite of victim?"

The word came immediately. Creator.

That man was David Emerald, author of The Power of TED. If you've been through the academy, you know this book. It's one of the core texts we study together, and I've heard story after story from women whose lives changed because of it.

Resources from the Episode: 

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Episode 164: David Emerald & The Power of TED

Introduction

AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher. If this podcast is helpful for you, please share it, like it, pass it along, and leave a review, so we can share the message of mission and principles with everyone who needs it. I feel privileged and honored to have David Emerald with us today. This is a long awaited conversation. I’ve talked to people for years about how someday I was going to have a conversation with David Emerald about The Power of TED. This is that day, so I am ecstatic. For those of you who have engaged with the work or been in any of the academies, you know that The Power of TED is a core book that we spend a lot of time in to learn better self-management and self-leadership skills. I’ve heard story after story about its impact. If you listened to Carolyn’s interview that came out recently, one of the most important things that happened to her in the program was learning this book and practicing its principles. Today, David is going to tell us more of the backstory, so I’m excited for that.

AUDREY: A little bit about him. His full name, which I didn’t know until recently, is David Emerald Womeldorff. He’s the creator in chief of the Center for the Empowerment Dynamic and founder of the Bainbridge Leadership Center in Washington. His passion and work is in supporting individuals, teams, and organizations in leading and working from an outcome-focused and passion-powered orientation. His principles and frameworks are based on his decades of study, observation, and application in collaboration with a wide range of individuals and organizations. His pen name is David Emerald, and with a last name like Rindlisbacher, I can understand why he did that. He’s the author of the best-selling The Power of TED (The Empowerment Dynamic), a teaching story about self-leadership, and 3 Vital Questions: Transforming Workplace Drama, which is also phenomenal, by the way. I’ve studied that one quite a bit. It’s an organizationally focused teaching story that draws on his more than 30 years of experience in leadership development, change leadership, and employee management. David’s books are sold worldwide. David, where should I send people to find your work?

DAVID: If you go to powerofted.com, where you’ll end up is at theempowermentdynamic.com.

AUDREY: Perfect. That’s where you’ll find all of his work. And I’ll talk more later about some of the other ways I’ve engaged with David and his wife, Donna. They have some other incredible programs. But to get the conversation started, David, can you give us some of your backstory? What were you doing professionally before all this authorship came up, and what did you learn there?

The Backstory

DAVID: The backstory is that prior to the epiphany that eventually led to The Power of TED, and I’ll certainly share that whole story, I was living in Dayton, Ohio, working in corporate America, focused on management and organization development. I had a communication background. I was introduced to Robert Fritz’s work and was engaged in a course being run at a hospital based on his creating technologies, and I became friends with a gentleman named Bob Anderson, who’s the founder of The Leadership Circle. A number of things just came together in my life. At the time, my wife and I were trying to start a family, and that wasn’t working. And I’m pausing on that, because a big part of the backstory is that the things the character David faces in the story are autobiographical.

DAVID: In about an 18 month period, three things happened in my life that were quite formative. One was that my dad, who I had a very healthy relationship with, passed away at much too young an age. He was in his early 60s. My wife at the time and I were trying to start a family, and I was declared medically infertile. She was quite introverted, and for whatever reasons, she chose not to have us explore any other options. So that marriage failed. As the marriage was coming apart, we were engaged in some couples therapy and doing quite a bit of work, and as things continued she decided to withdraw from that. It was during that period of time that I learned about the Karpman drama triangle and its roles of victim, persecutor, and rescuer.

The Epiphany: What Is the Opposite of Victim?

DAVID: I had been working on my own with this therapist for about three months. One morning I was sitting at my desk engaged in what I call my morning quiet time, which has always been some combination of prayer, meditation, and journaling. I was in that contemplative, prayerful space. I remember having my eyes closed, and I just remember saying to the God of my understanding, “Okay, God, I’m ready to surrender my victim stance in the world, but I need to know: what’s the opposite of victim?” And I’ve got to tell you, Audrey, immediately the word creator came. It was so stark that my eyes flew open, and I thought, I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect that. I can’t say that I heard a voice, but the experience was such that I could understand someone saying they had an experience like that and heard a voice. I wish I could say, like Paul on the road to Damascus, that my life was forever changed. That was not the case. It was a personal epiphany. And I’m now talking about a good 30 years ago, around 1990 or 1991.

AUDREY: Just as an aside, when was the book first published?

DAVID: In 2005, actually 2006.

AUDREY: So about a 15 year period. Wow.

DAVID: There was about a 10 year period where I would think about it from time to time, and then it would fade into the background and life would go on. I continued in the corporate world in executive and leadership development and was involved in The Leadership Circle that I mentioned earlier, a very powerful feedback process, doing a lot of work with The Leadership Circle at the University of Notre Dame in their executive programs.

AUDREY: What kind of work did The Leadership Circle do?

DAVID: It’s what’s called a 360 degree feedback tool. If you think about an organization chart, it’s 360 degree in the sense of getting feedback from one’s boss, one’s peers, one’s direct reports, perhaps clients, around the perceptions they have of one’s leadership.

AUDREY: And you’re facilitating that feedback loop.

DAVID: Exactly. It’s a coaching conversation. The Leadership Circle at the time also had a couple of leadership workshops that I facilitated and co-facilitated. And the ways of thinking that are captured in The Power of TED and in 3 Vital Questions, I owe a lot to Bob Anderson and the framing of what I call the victim and creator orientations, or the problem and outcome orientations. So you asked earlier what prepared me for this work. All of those elements were in there, and they came together in the personal epiphany I just shared.

AUDREY: Would you say that insight, or revelation, or epiphany changed your behavior at all? Made you see the world differently? Was it having any kind of personal impact before you built a model for others?

DAVID: Yes and no. The yes is that because of the other work I was doing, in The Leadership Circle we would talk about a reactive orientation versus a creative orientation. That creative orientation, which evolved in my work into a creator orientation, certainly impacted me. And I have long been mission driven in my own work. From that work I crafted my own mission statement, which has not changed much since the early nineties. I can call it up on my screen.

AUDREY: I would love to hear it. And why did you call it a mission statement?

DAVID: Because it’s what I’m called to do. It’s certainly purposeful, but it felt more like a mission statement than a purpose statement. Here it is: I am called to support and facilitate individuals, teams, and organizations in consciously shifting to a co-creative, vision focused, and passion motivated orientation for their lives and livelihoods. This is my lifelong ministry of service to humankind. I am a partner in creation with God. As spirit works in and through me, I serve as a channel of God’s abundance, love, wisdom, and power to touch, heal, and transform my own and others’ lives and ways of being in the world.

AUDREY: Wow. That is beautiful.

DAVID: That’s been on my wall through multiple moves. It really has been my North Star in terms of all the work. And that existed before I had a name for TED, before I had alternatives to the persecutor and the rescuer.

Meeting Donna and the Conversation at Notre Dame

DAVID: Fast forward about 10 years. I was doing a lot of work with The Leadership Circle and some international work with another consulting company. I was on my own, so I could live anywhere. In 2003, I was attending a workshop as a participant at a place called the Whidbey Institute and met Donna Zajonc. We really connected around a shared interest in leadership. She was coming out of public leadership; she had been an elected official in the Oregon legislature. In 2004, because I could live anywhere, I ended up moving to the Pacific Northwest as Donna and I were starting to date and our relationship was growing. I initially moved to Whidbey; we live on Bainbridge Island now. The reason the move is germane to the story is that as I was unpacking, I came across one of the journals where I’d played around with an alternative triangle to the drama triangle and its dynamics between victim, persecutor, and rescuer. So I had that fresh in mind.

DAVID: I was at Notre Dame getting ready to do a debrief around a Leadership Circle profile. A gentleman came in: six foot five, blond hair, blue eyed, not an ounce of fat on his body. The reason I share that is that within minutes I knew he was third generation military, had led a platoon in the first Gulf War, and had been in the private sector for about three years. We get into our conversation. The night before, they had done some work with an art therapist, and he had his journal with him. Another very important part of his persona: he was very traditional and fundamental in his Christian belief. The reason that’s relevant is that he opens his journal, and he’s got little stick figure pictures: two military oriented pictures, then a Bible, and in the middle he had VS, for versus. It was the military versus his faith. I said, “Tell me about the versus.” He said, “I’m really struggling as a leader in the private sector around how to deal with conflict.” I said, “When you were leading a platoon, how did you deal with conflict?” He said, “In the military, it’s pretty simple. You contain, control, and move off to the side.” I said, “That probably doesn’t work too well in organizational life.” He said, “No. And people come into my office and they’re just such victims.” I said, “That triggered something for you.” Because the orientations come out of The Leadership Circle work, I could do a really quick review of that with him. Then I said, “Let me share something related to this,” and I shared the drama triangle, which for him at that point, as it was for me when I first learned it, was what I call in the book a blinding flash of the obvious. He said, “That’s it. That’s what I experience.” And I said, “As you shift your focus to more of a creative orientation, or what I call in this work a creator orientation, it makes possible a different set of relationship roles and dynamics.” At the time, creator had always been the antidote or the opposite of victim. The label I had at the time for what became challenger was teacher: what has this come into my life to cause me to learn and develop? And what became coach, the antidote to the role of rescuer, was servant.

DAVID: We got into this deep conversation, just got into a flow state, and we came toward the end of our 90 minutes together. I just remember sitting there, Audrey. I looked at him, and I looked at the whiteboard, and I looked back at him, and given his faith, I said, “Creator, teacher, servant. Can you think of three words to better describe the life of Christ?” And he said, “Oh. I got it.”

AUDREY: Wow. That’s so beautiful.

DAVID: The next morning I was at the little South Bend, Indiana airport, and I called Donna. Donna is a longtime master certified professional coach, and she said, “How did your coaching sessions go?” I said, “Well, I had one that was pretty remarkable last night,” and I told her the story. And I got silence. This is back in the Verizon advertising days of “Can you hear me now?” I looked at the full bars and said, “Are you still there?” She said, “Yes. Is that original?” I said, “No, the drama triangle has been around since the 1960s.” She said, “No, the other triangle.” I said, “Well, yes, I guess it’s just something I’ve thought about off and on for years.” And she said, “You have got to write that down. That could be so useful to other people.”

TED Gets a Name and Becomes a Story

DAVID: So I came back, and we were out for a walk one evening asking, what am I going to call this alternative triangle? In the course of that conversation we hit upon the empowerment dynamic. The next morning, we were sitting doing our quiet time, and my monkey mind was going, empowerment dynamic, empowerment dynamic, T-E-D. And I went, huh. It’s got a name. It came out of the quiet time, and I told Donna.

DAVID: The day after TED showed up, I walked into Donna’s house. Donna was working on a book out of her public leadership experience and was on the phone with a publishing consultant she had been working with named Cece. Donna said, “Oh, Cece, David’s model has a name.” Cece said, “What is it?” “It’s TED, the empowerment dynamic.” And Cece said, “Hand David the phone.” So Donna handed me the phone, and Cece, who has this wonderful Texas accent, said, “Okay, dear, let me tell you what you’ve done.” I said, “What have I done?” She said, “You have anthropomorphized the concept. Now I want you to write a story.” And I was like, “You want me to what?”

DAVID: That teed up playing around with how I could approach this as a story, because I knew there had to be the models and the visuals. The apartment I was renting overlooked a beach down a bluff, and one morning Donna came out of quiet time and said, “What if the conversation takes place on the beach, and Ted etches the models in the sand?” And I was like, where did that come from? All the inspiration coming.

DAVID: I know one of the other questions you’re curious about is how the other characters evolved. I had the idea of a conversation taking place on the beach, and I knew what the models would be: the orientations, the triangles, dynamic tension, creating outcomes. So I put together a few friendly focus groups, three of them in total, and just shared the ideas on flip charts. A couple of things happened. In the first little focus group, one of the participants said, “There’s no female here.” And I said, “You’re right. There needs to be a female presence.” And Sophia, the wise woman, was born out of that. The other thing that was a bit of a surprise to me is that there was some pushback on both teacher and servant. For some people it was, “I’ve been blessed to have some really great teachers, and I’ve had some really terrible teachers.” And the word servant, even though it was well intended, carried that whole sense of servitude, so it was challenged. What emerged out of that was challenger as the antidote to persecutor, and coach as the antidote to the rescuer.

DAVID: Then there were some magical moments in the writing of the book itself, which went pretty quickly, about six months, because I was still doing quite a bit of organizational work. I truly feel I was guided. I’ll give you one instance that has always stuck in my mind. There’s a scene where Sophia comes into the story on the second day of David and Ted’s conversations. She comes running up the beach, and she has a headband on her wrist. She wasn’t wearing the headband, and I wondered, why does she have a headband on her wrist? I just let it be there as the story was emerging, and of course I was being edited by Cece as I went along. Then, when I got to the chapter on dynamic tension, which Robert Fritz calls structural or creative tension, and I always use a rubber band to illustrate the tension, she takes the headband off her wrist to illustrate the concept of dynamic tension. There were just magical moments along the way.

AUDREY: That is incredible. You know, we talk a lot about the word servant, especially in the Mission Driven Mom program: that we are becoming servant leaders. In my book, The Mission Driven Life, there are seven laws of life mission, the first four preparatory, where you work on yourself, and then you go lead in your communities. Those preparatory laws are loving God, loving yourself, loving truth, and loving humanity, and learning to love humanity is becoming a servant leader. That’s the subtitle of that chapter. So we’ve talked a lot about servant leadership, and I have several books on it. There’s a book, you’ve probably heard of it, I can’t remember the author’s name, called The Servant. He taught servant leadership all over the world, and he talked about the same kind of thing: that he would get pushback on the word servant. He tells the story of a man in a life crisis who goes into a monastery for a week and learns valuable things about what it means to be a true servant leader and what leadership should really look like. There’s a lot of crossover. He talks about the marriage of the head and the heart, and you do too. It’s fascinating to see you both arriving at some of those common principles and ideas.

DAVID: Very much aligned. I have no issue with the term servant. And one of the things you’ve said a couple of times that I want to explicitly call out in a positive sense is that The Power of TED is written as a fable on self-leadership, and that was done purposefully. I’ve got to tell you, Audrey, I wrote the book because I needed to write the book, and I felt called to write the book. It was consistent with the mission statement I shared with you. And it was almost a hobby, because I was doing so much travel and so much work in organizational leadership. It’s a self-published book, and it grew a baby step at a time. I remember Donna and I were traveling to Vietnam to visit her oldest daughter, who was trekking around Southeast Asia, and we were changing planes in Seoul, South Korea. I checked on Amazon and said, “Donna, somebody bought the book.”

AUDREY: As a self-published author, I totally get that moment.

From Self-Published Book to Worldwide Community

DAVID: Then there were several meetings and conversations along the way, and what started to happen is that organizations found out about the book. A group in Dallas, Texas called the Stagen Leadership Academy started to adopt it. Everybody who goes through their leadership programs gets a copy of the book, kind of like what you’re doing. It just really took off, and 20 years later it’s still selling very well on Amazon and other places. I feel eternally blessed to be doing this work, and it’s been my full-time work for a good 10 years now. I used to do quite a few workshops pre-pandemic. Now my primary focus is on building what we call our community of practice, and with the bringing online in 2019 of 3 Vital Questions, which is an organizationally based fable, we have about 125 certified trainers in nine countries now, all virtual. That’s really my focus.

DAVID: Where we are now is that we have a couple of outcome statements related to the Center for the Empowerment Dynamic. Our really big, audacious one is that the Center for the Empowerment Dynamic has the infrastructure, the people, and the financial resources to abundantly serve the next seven generations. The notion of seven generations comes out of indigenous thought. A number of tribes, as their councils would meet, would use that as one of their frames: if we make this decision, how is that going to impact seven generations down the road? So that’s the grand outcome statement. The current outcome statement is really around what the next generation of this work will be. Because I need to say, this work is not about me. This work is not about Donna. As woo-woo as that may sound to some people, I am eternally grateful that this work came through me, but it’s not about me. The importance of the community of practice is that it’s a big part of the next generation. We haven’t figured out how to hand off the baton yet, but we’re working in that direction.

The Impact in Mission Driven Mom

AUDREY: That is so incredible. I’m grateful for you, I’m grateful for the work, and I’m grateful for the inspiration. I have seen so many powerful transformations. We’ve probably had 1,200 people do the program at this point, and a huge number of them talk specifically about this transition in their frame of reference. I had a woman whose marriage had been on the brink for a long time, and this is just one of many stories I could tell. She finally submitted to going through the program, and when it was all done, people who knew her asked how her marriage was, and she said, “It’s great.” They said, “What in the world changed?” She said, “Well, I did that Mission Driven Mom program.” They said, “What difference did that make?” And she said, “It taught me to take responsibility for myself, that I have to meet my own needs and be the creator of my own life, and that I’ve been expecting my husband to do that for me.”

DAVID: She reclaimed her agency.

AUDREY: Yes. The program cycles four times through self-care, self-leadership, and self-discovery, and The Power of TED is in that first self-leadership section. Every subheading for that section is “increasing my personal power by,” and in the section your book is in, it’s “increasing my personal power by becoming a creator.” We designed little mini posters that people can print off and hang up on their mirror, in their home, in their room, and the first one says, “I am a creator.” I interviewed one of our students recently, and she said that when she read the book, went through that section, and pulled up her card to hang on her wall, tears came to her eyes and she thought, “That’s right. I am a creator.” I asked her what the impact of that has been, and she said, “All my relationships are significantly better. I stopped blaming everybody.” There’s another poster called No Blame Zone, so I encourage them to watch their words and stop blaming. That’s how it rolls out for them.

AUDREY: I want to tell you how I found this book. My husband was getting a marriage and family therapy degree. We had had a troubled marriage for a long time. We had worked through a lot of key things. He had a pornography addiction for a long, long time, and we found answers for that. There are lots of other stories around that, but through all of those experiences, at some point we were introduced to the drama triangle. I found it somewhere doing research, and for me, like it was for you, it was just clearly true. It made sense of so many things and brought human interaction down to such a simple construction that it made everything easier and cleaner to navigate. But what’s ironic, and I don’t know if this was your experience, is that I went to try to find books on it, and there were very few. Some of them were not all that great, and there was not a whole lot of alternative offered. I just researched and researched until I found your book, and I thought, well, he’s telling me he’s got it all, because it says “an effective escape from the drama triangle,” and I knew exactly what the drama triangle was and who Stephen Karpman was. I got online and watched an interview between you and him on YouTube, and I think on that interview he even said your model is the very best solution to the drama triangle. I got the book, read it, was just blown away, and I’ve used it in my programs ever since. It’s so helpful, but people are so unaware. It’s just not commonly taught or understood.

The Death of a Dream

AUDREY: It helps in so many little micro ways too. Today I was going back through the book again, with all my notes and questions and highlights, and every time I go back, there’s something new that I needed to hear or that I see again. For me today, it was the reminder that the reason victims are positioning themselves as victims, or struggling in their victimhood, is because of, how do you say it, the death of a dream. And I’m right in the middle of that. I’m right in the middle of a moment in my life where it feels like a lifelong dream is dying, and it’s been incredibly painful. It was so vital for me to hear that today and to remember that I cannot have dreams built on other people’s choices, that past paradigms weren’t helpful, and that I have to move through those to be a creator again, to get back on track with what I know my call to be. I remember years ago I had a dear friend who was in crisis and grieving so many things, and she complained to me incessantly about her husband. I just kept saying to her, you’ve got to find what’s yours. And that was brought back to my mind going through the book again. I also want to tell you and everyone listening that when I went through your coaching program, which was phenomenal, there’s an exercise where you deconstruct what the problem is, and you look at a situation and see if you can come up with seven things you’re learning out of it. So helpful, even though the situation is unwanted and unwelcome.

Victimization vs. Victimhood

DAVID: If I can, Audrey, there’s so much in what you’ve just said that I’d like to add to and build on. One thing, given your current situation: a distinction that has emerged since The Power of TED was written, and this distinction is in 3 Vital Questions, is the distinction between victimization and victimhood. Victimization is something that we all experience as human beings. It’s situational. I use the proverbial scale of one to ten: one being the slow line at the grocery store again, and ten, you just have to turn on the news to see people experiencing the severe end of victimization. That is distinct from victimhood, which is a way of being. An identity. This work really stands as a challenger to victimhood while acknowledging the reality of victimization. And when there is a dream or desire that’s being denied or thwarted, whether by someone else or just by circumstances, I think there are times when it’s important to acknowledge our sense of victimization. To grieve. And not to deny or minimize. Part of the power of this work, and you just gave voice to it, is knowing that you’ll move beyond that. You’ll get back into that creator groove.

Stephen Karpman’s Endorsement

DAVID: And I appreciate you mentioning Stephen Karpman. That little video was shot in his garden; Donna and I had the opportunity to visit with him. When I first reached out to him, as we were coming toward the finishing of the book, Cece asked, “Who would you like to have endorse the book?” I said, “Well, I’d love it if Dr. Karpman would, and I don’t even know if he’s still alive or where he is.” We found him in the San Francisco area, where he’s been for a long time, reached out, and sent him a copy of just the empowerment dynamic chapter. Then I got a phone call. Donna and I were over at my apartment cleaning. The phone rang, Donna answered it, and I heard her say, “Oh, Steve, David will be glad to know that you called.” She handed me the phone and said, “Steve Karpman.” He said, “I read your chapter. I want to thank you for it. I think this is the best escape I’ve ever seen from the drama triangle.” I said, “Thank you. Can I use that as an endorsement?” He said, “No, I’m sorry. I’ve had a long policy of not endorsing anybody’s work, because I’ve been ripped off, and people have taken the triangle and named it themselves.” I said, “Okay. Thank you, I really appreciate it.” About three weeks later, I got an email from him saying, “I’ve thought more about it, and if I can refer to the empowerment dynamic as the empowerment triangle, you can have my endorsement.” And you were right about the books that were out there. As I was doing my own research, there were a number of things that had been written on the drama triangle, some that were okay, but basically what I found, and my guess is what you found as well, was: now that you know about it, just don’t do it anymore.

AUDREY: Yeah, just stop it. Not super helpful.

DAVID: Moderately helpful, but ultimately we need more. What do I do with this energy? What do I do with this focus? What do I do with these emotions? That’s what I feel blessed to have had come out of that epiphany.

AUDREY: At the end of that coaching, or somewhere along the line, we were encouraged to make a statement, and you had a template for us that was phenomenal. Mine is two and a half pages long at this point, and it’s been a working document. It’s my daily creator statement. Every day that I take it out and take the time to read through it, it recenters me. It is so, so helpful. Probably the most helpful phrase in it is that I see myself and others as creators, resourceful and capable, able to navigate life successfully.

DAVID: Wonderful. Well said.

AUDREY: It reframes the interactions I’m going to have that day, how I’m going to talk to myself and see myself, and how I’m going to see the people in my life. I have six children, and many of them are in adulthood at this point. Those adult parent relationships are tricky to renegotiate. It’s been tough. They’ve had some really hard times that we’ve had to walk through with them. This came at a time in my life when it was so needed, and it has been helpful more times than I can tell you.

DAVID: I am so grateful to hear that.

Pity vs. Compassion

AUDREY: I want to spend a few minutes before we finish talking about a few of the concepts in the book. You mentioned victimization and victimhood, and I’m so glad you brought that up. Of course, I’m just going to tell everybody to go read the book for themselves. It’s going to take them a couple of hours, they’re going to refer to it for the rest of their lives, and they’re going to need it. If they want to do my program, great. If they want to do your programs, great. I don’t really care. I just want them to have this tool. So, near the beginning of the book, you bring up pity. You talk about how Ted comes in and he doesn’t judge, but he doesn’t pity. And later on, David makes a comment about not pitying himself. Why did you call attention to the concept of pity? Why was it important that Ted didn’t judge or pity David? Why is that part of this orientation?

DAVID: A couple of things. One is that in framing both the Ted character and the Sophia character in my own mind as I wrote, Ted, even though he does ask some coaching questions, really embodies a challenger, whereas Sophia embodies a coach. The reason I bring that up is that someone who is stuck in victimhood, distinct from victimization, often pities themselves, and in that sense can be pitiful. A conscious, constructive challenger, as Ted is in the book and in 3 Vital Questions as well, has compassion for the fact that change and growth are not always easy. But they don’t stand in judgment, and they see the person they are challenging as a creator in their own right, whether they act like it or not, and whether they know it or not. So they would not reinforce the sense of “oh, poor me,” which is the pity statement. It’s really coming from a place of compassion for whatever the struggle is, for whatever is calling forth the learning and growth.

AUDREY: So what is the difference between the pity and the compassion? How would that show up if you were wanting to be a challenger instead of a rescuer or a persecutor? How could you tell the difference for yourself?

DAVID: That’s a great question, Audrey. What comes to mind is that if one is feeling pity for themselves or someone else, the word that comes up for me is stuck. It’s like having your feet in tar, stuck in the pity. As a challenger, rather than saying, “Gee, Audrey, you’re sounding like you’re having a pity party,” I would not say that. What I would do, if I was noticing that, and I’m going to use a convention that has come up out of this work over the last 20 years, is feed back to you and say, “Well, Audrey, I really get that you’re feeling stuck, that you’ve got a lot of feelings in this. And I’m just curious: what’s one step you could take, whether it’s a conversation or some journaling, what’s one step you could take to begin to become unstuck?” And notice that I’m now going into the coach role.

DAVID: That convention comes from a friend of mine who has been a longtime Buddhist practitioner. Quick background on this: he has had the opportunity to have two private conversations, ten minutes long each, with the Dalai Lama. He asked the Dalai Lama at one point what he should be teaching, because he had a teaching background. The Dalai Lama said, “I don’t know how to tell you what to teach, but I can tell you what I know every human being needs. Every human being needs to be heard, seen, and loved.” My friend Mark calls that HSL. So by acknowledging and saying to you, “I really get the feelings you’re having,” you’re being heard, you’re being seen and not judged, and you’re being loved and respected. If that space is created, it opens up the real possibility that you could take a baby step to start to get unstuck. Because you’ve been heard, seen, and respected.

Letting Go and Believing in Others

AUDREY: Wow, that’s beautiful. You made me think of something very simple. When I’m faced with someone who looks like they’re in self-pity or looks stuck, even myself, there’s this simple reminder that they can do it. You can do it. You can overcome this. It can be done. I know you don’t see the way yet. And it has to start with an inner conviction. I have to really believe that. I have to remind myself of why they can do it, of what resources they have available to them, and of how I can get behind the changes that need to be made: not by giving them the answers, and not by pushing or forcing, but just by believing in them. And I don’t win every time, because I slip back. I tell people all the time that I’m a recovering rescuer. I’m a mom. I want to have the answers, I want to put the band-aid on, I want everyone to feel better as fast as possible. And I want the dreams that I’ve carried for 30 years in bearing and raising all these children to be manifest right now. Getting into that tension is painful, and I want it to end. But the times when it’s successful: I’ve had two different experiences with my children where I basically reminded myself of all the reasons why they were capable and literally told God, I’m handing them off. They’re yours. And on two different occasions, I have had children come to me and say, “You are different.” It was immediately after, and I didn’t try to be different, but I was different. Because of the FISBE, the focus, inner state, behavior, I didn’t even always notice the nuanced ways my behavior toward them had changed. But my focus changed, so my inner state changed, because I was focused on how they could do it, why they could do it, why it wasn’t my role to babysit them, why it was their journey to have, why I couldn’t dictate the terms. Every time I stay in that space and let them walk with God and do it on their own, our relationship gets better. They feel closer to me. They feel like I’m not trying to control anymore. But I have to be super intentional about walking myself through that whole thing, especially when I’m really stuck. And sometimes it takes a while.

DAVID: Sure. And I just want to reinforce that what I hear in those descriptions is that a very powerful baby step can be the act of letting go. I’m not saying that’s easy. What you inherently did is that you made the focus shift from your child being a problem to solve to seeing them as a creator: capable, resourceful, and whole, with resources, seen and unseen, that they can draw on. Your shift of focus leads to what can be subtle behavioral changes. And then they recognize, somehow intuitively, that your frame of reference toward them is different. You’ve not said anything to them, but it’s palpable somehow. They’re able to recognize in your countenance, in your energy, that there’s been a shift in you, and that is liberating them in some way. Because you’re treating them as a creator rather than reacting to them as a victim, either you feeling victimized or seeing them as a victim. It changes the whole energy.

Ego and Control in the Drama Triangle

AUDREY: Yes. And wanting to fix it, and wanting to control it, and wanting to have a different outcome that I’ve prescribed, and not liking the outcome that is happening, and it’s painful, and all of that. The other thing that was super helpful in the book today: at one point, and maybe Ted says it, there’s the idea that the drama triangle is just fraught with ego. You wouldn’t think of a victim as being really egotistical, but I see that in myself, because it’s me imposing my will. I’m wanting it to look a certain way because I want to look a certain way. And that whole concept of feeling embarrassed or ashamed: I don’t want to tell people this is how things are turning out, because it doesn’t look the way I wanted it to look, and it doesn’t make me look good. You become a parent, and you put your life on the line. All of it, and that includes your ego. You don’t always get to look like the star parent based on current outcomes, and it’s painful.

DAVID: Well, and the other thing, Audrey, is that all three of the drama roles, victim, persecutor, and rescuer, are all trying to control the situation. Ultimately, it is I oriented. Whereas all three of the empowerment dynamic roles, creator or co-creator, challenger, and coach, are we oriented. They’re focused on the other person.

Do Not Weaponize This Work

DAVID: One thing I want to add before we go. There are two things I think are really important to say to your listeners. One is: please do not weaponize this way of being and thinking. What I mean by that is that one of the least empowering things you can do is to say something like, “Audrey, here’s this book. You really need to read this.”

AUDREY: You’re broken.

DAVID: Yes. And what goes along with that is this: I have one surefire way of being reacted to as a persecutor, and that is simply to tell the other person that they’re being a victim.

AUDREY: You mention that in the book too. I ran across it again today. You tell somebody, “Hey, you don’t need to be a victim,” and immediately you’ve built a wall between the two of you. They’re just not going to listen anymore.

DAVID: Exactly. There are other ways of opening the doors to a more empowered way of being.

AUDREY: And to give people, well, it’s not even mine to give. Their freedom, their liberty, their right to choose, their right to have their own life. That’s not even mine to give. But when I’m trying to control things, I feel like I’ve got to give them that. It’s just a form of letting go, to recognize that. That’s why we use that metaphor of giving birth. Maybe another way you would talk about your book is that you gave birth to it. I gave birth to my children; I didn’t create them. I’m not responsible for their life. Their life came through me. I was talking to my daughter recently, having a better moment than some, and I just said to her, “I gave you life so you could live it. I didn’t give you life to control it. It’s your life, not mine.” That’s the place I try to stay in. I don’t always do a great job, but I try.

DAVID: Wonderful. You know, the drama roles, and you said “recovering rescuer,” I want to really emphasize that those are roles that we play, roles that we can draw on. The genesis of those roles happens very early in life for all of us, in the reactive strategies we form in reaction to what’s going on around us. Our true essence is that creator essence. That’s who we really are. Because we are creators. And that is not a role to play. That is a way of being to embrace.

AUDREY: That is so great to remember. I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it that way: in drama, you’re taking on a persona, but as a creator, you’re just being you. You’re being your best you.

DAVID: Your best self, yes.

Problems vs. Outcomes

AUDREY: There’s one other thing I’d love to talk about, and then as we finish up, anything else you feel you want to share. There’s a distinction I want to try to get clear about. Later on in the book, there’s the FISBE, the focus, inner state, behavior. One way of talking about the drama triangle would be that it’s kind of problem centered, and I want to say that the empowerment dynamic is the opposite of that, that it’s solution focused. But you chose not to use the word solution. You chose to use the word outcome. So I wrote down: how can we tell the difference between when we’re reacting to a problem, or reacting to our anxiety, and shift it? Why is it outcome instead of solution? Because what I’ve seen in some of my students is a concern that comes up: “But if I don’t focus on the problem, I won’t solve it. If I don’t sit with it and try to brainstorm solutions...” I can see the wisdom in not using the word solution in some respects, but could you give more clarity around how someone can navigate that for themselves? Because it’s really easy to tell yourself, “I am being a creator,” but still be problem focused, and to think you’re doing it right because you’re trying to solve the problem.

DAVID: Let me give that a shot. I didn’t use the term solution because we talk about problem solving, and one of the things I want to emphasize is that the victim orientation, or let’s call it the problem orientation, is not a problem solving orientation. It is merely a problem reacting orientation. We tell ourselves we’re reacting to the problem, but in reality, we’re reacting to the anxiety that we feel. And if we take steps that help the problem, what tends to happen is that our anxiety diminishes, and when our anxiety diminishes, we lose energy for action. So that’s one thing. The other thing is that problems absolutely exist. The empowerment dynamic is not Pollyannaish. It is not in any way diminishing the reality of the problems we face in our lives. When we face a problem, here’s the work to be done: to frankly ask the question, why do I care about this problem? What is it about this problem that I care about? There’s a phrase I came across a number of years ago from two Harvard professors, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. They make the observation that behind every complaint lies a commitment. Behind every complaint lies a commitment.

AUDREY: Wow. Writing that down.

DAVID: The reason that’s an important phrase, and the add-on question, is this: do we complain about things we don’t care about? Of course the answer is no. So when we’re complaining, or facing a problem, the work is to be able to ask and answer, and we may need the support of someone in the coach role: what is it about this problem that I care about? Why do I care about this? Unpacking what it is that I care about gives me an opening for focusing on the outcome I want to create. The other thing I want to say, Audrey, is that we solve problems in service to outcomes. In the use of dynamic tension and going after outcomes, we identify the obstacles, the problems that we need to resolve, in service to the outcome that we care about, that we’re passionate about. I hope that helps.

AUDREY: Yes, that’s super helpful. So if I take the time to unpack it: I’m not liking the way that I’m feeling. That’s an important insight, right? Something’s off. There is a problem, because I’m not liking the way I’m feeling in this relationship or in this circumstance. And then asking myself: if I’m complaining about this, if this is making me uncomfortable or angry or anxious or resentful, why? What is the center of that problem, and why do I care about it? We did a little bit of this in the coaching, and it was super helpful. And then you take that and you start looking at values, which is actually something we do in the self-discovery element of my program, which I built before I even did your coaching a couple of years ago. The woman I interviewed recently about the program said that what she got out of it was The Power of TED, and another major one for her was values: recognizing that she doesn’t have all the same values as her husband, and that’s okay. She can honor his values and honor her values, and she cares about things because she values them.

DAVID: Well, I’m so glad that the coaching course impacted you and has been of value to you. I will tell you that Donna has further evolved the coaching curriculum. She came out with a book two years ago: Who Do You Want to Be on the Way to What You Want? Coaching with the Empowerment Dynamic. It’s also a fable, also a story. She is doing wonderful work with coaches who want to coach with the empowerment dynamic, taking it to an even deeper level.

AUDREY: Right, I got that book. And I’ve had a couple of my students go on from my program to do the coaching program with her, because they want to be coaches and they understand how helpful this construction is.

DAVID: So whereas I’m focused these days on building the community of practice, she’s really focused on the coaching curriculum and working with coaches.

Holding the Tension

AUDREY: It’s phenomenal. That’s really, really great stuff. When you were talking before about how to know if you’re problem focused or focused on the outcome, it reminded me that one helpful way to tell the difference is how you’re feeling. Looking again at the FISBE: what’s your focus, and what’s your inner state? And then in the Robert Fritz book on creating that I grabbed, he has this section on tension. Have you ever heard the water glasses story that he tells?

DAVID: Tell me.

AUDREY: He introduces the idea of tension at an event. He puts seven glasses up at the front near the podium, and he has a pitcher of water there. All he does, before or between or during or after presentations, is pour water into a glass and leave it. He doesn’t say anything about it. He just lets it be at the front of the room all day long and into the evening. People start asking him, “Why are the water glasses there?” And all he would say was, “That’s a good question.” “Well, are you going to tell us?” “That’s a good question.” He just let the tension sit there. Everyone began to speculate, and then people started messing with the glasses. Different people took drinks out of them or poured out part of the water. Someone put a flower in one of them. Then he has everybody write down what they thought the glasses meant, and they read out all the answers, and he deconstructs with some of the people who messed with the glasses why they did it. The whole section is so helpful, and it plays beautifully into The Power of TED, because some of the people were playing with the glasses because they so desperately needed to control the situation, and that need to control was coming out of being in the drama triangle in some regard. They couldn’t handle the tension. He says that when we feel tension, we can deflate our goals, and a lot of times we do. We deflate the importance of our values or commitments. We deflate what we really care about, just to alleviate the tension. I think people do that when they walk away from their faith. Sometimes the tension is so uncomfortable that they minimize how they felt about that faith at one time or another. And there are a myriad of ways: they walk away from relationships, or from jobs, or from opportunities. It’s wrapped up a lot in that tension issue. And if everyone can take your advice and ask themselves what they’re committed to, that lends itself to being able to continue to care without feeling like they have to control. Because that’s what the tension is, right? You have to care but not control.

DAVID: And as creators, it is a discipline to be able to hold the tension and not to react against it. You’re so right. This is a phrase from my friend and colleague Bob Anderson: one of the easiest ways to reduce the tension is to compromise the outcome. And what he says that is so powerful is that we can’t invest our souls in a compromise. There’s a part of us that knows that we’re compromising. But we can’t hold the tension because of the anxiety that we feel in it. And another thing I would like to say is that, again, this work is not Pollyannaish. It seems simple, but it’s not easy.

AUDREY: I reread the preface again this morning, and you mention that several times: how nuanced it is, how difficult it is to actually live it out day by day. It is a practice. We talk in my academies a lot about practicing principles. Principles are universal truths that we can apply to our lives in a myriad of beautiful ways. Everyone is going to live those principles differently, but we have to practice them to imbue them in our lives. And what you said about compromising on the outcome, on the dream, on the goal, on the vision, on the mission, goes back to what you teach us about taking baby steps. You can alleviate the tension by decreasing the goal, or you can alleviate the tension by taking the baby step and letting that be enough. One of the things I wrote in my creator statement is: I know that the thoughts I choose to entertain and the words I choose to speak are critical parts of what I’m creating, because they’re the seeds and soil from which my creations grow. And: I am grateful for the incremental baby steps that help me manifest these outcomes, because it is the small steps that I can recognize and act on today that keep me engaged in the creative process.

DAVID: That helps me remember what I was going to say, which is that creating outcomes is not anxiety free. There are times when we’re going to feel that anxiety, and the question is, can we have the anxiety without the anxiety having us? If the anxiety has us, that’s when we compromise, and that’s when we take less effective action. But if we can say, “Okay, I’m feeling anxious, and I’m going to take this baby step anyway,” that’s part of the process of creating outcomes. And I want to close by saying: don’t for a moment think that David Emerald is always in the creator orientation. I’m a human being just like all of us, and I certainly have times when I go reactive. But I think the measure of this work is that I’d like to think I catch myself more quickly, and I take baby step actions more quickly and more consciously. Reacting and feeling that anxiety is part of the human experience. Experiencing victimization is part of the human experience. So we need to have compassion for ourselves around that as well.

Closing Thoughts

AUDREY: Yes. What’s so liberating for me is to feel like I don’t have to stay stuck, that I have tools, and that there’s something I can turn to. Obviously, I’ve always been a person who turned to God and turned to scripture, and those things are helpful, but I find these principles reflected there too. I find that God brings me back to them because they’re truths. And when you were talking about anxiety, it reminded me of one of the times I read the book, maybe when I was teaching it, when I remember having this really clear epiphany: well, you’re going to feel uncomfortable either way. For me, that was a huge thing. I’m going to feel anxious either way, so I would rather be moving toward something than always reacting to something, if I’m going to feel anxious either way.

DAVID: There you go. There you go.

AUDREY: Well, thank you. This has been so great. Such a privilege, and such an honor. I really can’t thank you enough for the mission you’re engaged in, how you’ve given your life to it, and what you’ve given to so many people that I interact with. What a blessing it’s been in my personal life. I’ve taught it to my children, and it’s blessing their lives. One of my kids said recently, “Well, I just need to be a creator,” and I thought, yay. So it’s working.

DAVID: This has been an inspiring conversation for me, Audrey, and I really appreciate the invitation very much.

AUDREY: It’s been wonderful. Thank you so much, David. Bless you for all the work that you do. Everybody, please head over to theempowermentdynamic.com and check out all the programs. There’s a lot to engage in there. There are three books between David and Donna that I’ve read. I love them all and highly recommend them all. At the very least, grab The Power of TED. Do your best to engage with it and to live it out, because I can promise you, even the attempt will radically change and bless your life. Thanks for joining me today. We’ll see you next time.

I want to tell you something Abraham Maslow figured out while studying the highest levels of human consciousness.

He had assumed, like most of us, that creativity belonged to a certain kind of person. The artists. The composers. The poets. The rest of us just didn't have that natural creative genius.

Then he started studying people who were truly thriving and one of them stopped him. She was a housewife.

Uneducated, not wealthy, no artistic training.

And yet everything she touched was original and inventive and alive.

What he wrote about her is something I think every mother needs to hear. Come listen and I will share with you exactly what he said and why it changes everything about how you see yourself.

Resources from the Episode: 

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

AUDREY: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” That is one of the most important and well-known sentences in the history of the world. It tells us who God is: He’s a creator. And it tells us who you and I are, as children of God — we are also creators. We cannot not create. So what are you creating? That’s what we’re going to talk about for the next few minutes. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, founder of The Mission Driven Mom, and today I want to spend some time on a topic we’ve been discussing a lot on this podcast and will be diving deep into this fall at our Mothers of Creation event: creation, and being creators. What does that really mean? Why does it really matter?

Are There “Creative Types”?

AUDREY: For those of you who went through a lot of public school in the West, you were probably just like me. In school there were art classes and music classes, and those students were “the creative types” — the ones who could draw and paint, the artists and the musicians. The rest of us weren’t creative. And then, on the other hand, today the world tells us like crazy: just create what you want. Create the life you want. Create a life you’ll love. You hear that kind of thing all the time. So which is it? Are there creative types, or can we all create literally anything we want? I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.

AUDREY: I want to read you something today from Abraham Maslow — a very famous psychologist, in case you’ve never heard of him. He said that Freud figured out the unhealthy part of psychology, and he wanted to figure out the healthy side. He came up with his hierarchy of needs and the concept of self-actualization. This is from his writing on creativity, and he started with the same assumption I did. He says: “I soon discovered that I had, like most people, been thinking of creativeness in terms of products, and, secondly, I had unconsciously confined creativeness to certain conventional areas only of human endeavor — unconsciously assuming that any painter, any poet, any composer was leading a creative life. Theorists, artists, scientists, inventors, writers could be creative. Nobody else could. I didn’t even think of scientists, as scientists, as being creative. Unconsciously I had assumed that creativeness was the prerogative solely of certain professionals. But these expectations were broken up by various of my subjects.”

AUDREY: So he was studying people intensively to better understand the highest levels of human consciousness and living — what it looks like when people are really at their peak, this self-actualization we strive for. He goes on: “For instance, one woman, uneducated, poor, a full-time housewife and mother, did none of these conventionally creative things and yet was a marvelous cook, mother, wife, and homemaker. With little money, her home was somehow always beautiful. She was a perfect host. Her meals were banquets. Her taste in linens, silver, glass, crockery, and furniture was impeccable. She was, in all these things, original, novel, ingenious, unexpected, inventive. I just had to call her creative. I learned from her and others like her that a first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting, and that, generally, cooking or parenthood or making a home could be creative while poetry need not be — it could be uncreative.”

AUDREY: That was a huge insight for him, and it’s important for us to keep in mind. Just because certain people are labeled “creatives” doesn’t mean anything. We are all creators; we can’t not create.

What Creation Really Means

AUDREY: You are creating, every day, the life that you live. Your choices, your thoughts, your beliefs, your patterns, your habits, your actions — they build up the circumstances all around you, and you experience the fruits of them. What happens to us is that we have areas of our life we don’t like, so they become problems. We build out these problem stories, telling ourselves everything that’s wrong with the situation and all the ways we can’t make it any different, and we struggle and fight, focusing on the problem instead of on what we want instead. To have a creator orientation is the gateway to a new life — and that’s what we’re working to flesh out for you on this podcast all through the summer and into the fall.

AUDREY: I looked up the root of the word create. It comes from a very old root, “ker,” and here’s what’s fascinating: that root means to grow. Sometimes when we think of creation — of God as a creator, of ex nihilo, “out of nothing,” and all those biblical or Christian ideas — we picture it as coming up with something from nothing, molding and making material. But really it’s just to grow: to bring something worthwhile into existence, to love it enough to create it. This is how Robert Fritz talks about it — we’re going to have him on the podcast later, and I’m excited to talk with him about his ideas. He describes how we create because we love. We love the creation enough to bring it into existence. We love the unborn child enough to prepare for it; we love it before it exists in our material world. That’s the spiritual creation we bring about when we imagine things that could be and love them into existence.

AUDREY: Now, this state of being is the opposite of being a victim. Creator is the opposite of victim. A victim is caught up in obsessive mental patterns that keep them stuck on a problem — focused on what they don’t like, what they don’t want, what’s not working out, unmet needs, unmet expectations, things they feel they can’t control, ways they feel stuck. And this can be a small thing, like hating running carpool, or a huge one, like going through a divorce or losing someone close to you.

Creator Is the Opposite of Victim

AUDREY: Any issue, small or major, that’s causing that pit in the stomach and those negative emotions — that’s where you’re probably showing up as a victim. I’d encourage you to go review the victim-type discussions I had with Lindsey Wright, and start asking: do I maybe have more power than I think I have? That’s the message our mothers and the women in our programs continually discover. They keep seeing new ways to identify truths, to see principles, to peel back the layers of how they’ve been thinking and believing about themselves and about life. And they feel so liberated as these misbeliefs and lies they’ve been telling themselves fall away. When we’re doing that, we’re acting like victims — and awareness is the key to change. We can’t know how to become a creator until we can admit we’ve been a victim; identifying the type of victim, and the antidotes that get us out, is enormously helpful. Once we recognize we’re being a victim, we can start to create something different, because now we know what’s been going on with us.

What Meditation Teaches Us

AUDREY: One thing I thought about while preparing this was from level three of our academy, where we go through worldviews. One of my favorite authors on worldviews is Huston Smith — he’s brilliant — and in this section he’s talking about Buddhism. Buddhism and the Eastern religions have gained a lot of traction in the West over the last fifty to eighty years; a lot of people love those worldviews now, or adhere to them. And even when they don’t, meditation has taken off in the West in a huge way. Here, Huston Smith is talking about why we meditate — basically what it can do for us — and I found it fascinating, because one of its primary functions is to move someone from a victim space to being a creator. Listen to how he describes it. Through the practice of meditation, one arrives at a number of insights.

AUDREY: Number one: every emotion, thought, or image is accompanied by a body sensation, and vice versa. So as you become more aware that you’re acting like a victim, it’s an awakening — you become aware that you’re having these emotions and thoughts, and that they’re accompanied by feelings; that there’s a connection between your thoughts and your feelings, and that they’re inextricably linked. That’s why you can better control your thoughts by changing your words, your actions, and your thoughts. We talk about this in the academy — how they’re all interconnected. So those feelings of anxiety, dread, frustration, and confusion are a cue that you may be thinking like a victim in this area of your life, and you can key into that.

AUDREY: Number two: one discerns obsessive patterns in what arises in the mind, and how these patterns constitute our misery. I mentioned this a minute ago — these obsessive patterns, where we feel so stuck. He says: for some it’s a nursing of old grievances; others find themselves preoccupied with longings and self-pity; and still others simply feel at sea. With continuing practice, the obsessive grip of these patterns loosens. So as you get better at understanding your thoughts and feelings and putting your finger on the obsessive patterns, you can begin to identify them. It’s different language, but it’s the same process.

AUDREY: Number three: every mental and physical state is in flux; none is solid and enduring. Even physical pain is a series of discrete sensations that can suddenly change. You recognize that life is fluid, that you can make changes, and that all these sensations in your body take different shapes.

AUDREY: Number four: the meditator realizes how little control we normally have over our minds and over our reactions. I found that so helpful and insightful to sit with — that even meditation, that every worldview and world religion, is attempting to help us get out of these terrible patterns and become creators, and to choose the tools that help us become a creator and stay a creator. Vision is the anchor; it’s the main tool we use. There are a lot of tools and principles around how to reframe your problem story into a creator orientation and build out a new vision for the world, and we’ll go over the details of those at our Mothers of Creation event. I’m so excited, and I hope you decide to join us to gain them. This is really important, because to be creators simply means we choose growth. When you feel stuck, you can be pretty sure you’re in drama — and creators grow. They change. They become better.

As a Man Thinketh

AUDREY: As we finish up, I want to read you a couple of things from James Allen — from As a Man Thinketh — that I think really apply. He says man is “a growth by law, and not a creation by artifice.” In other words, you aren’t just something that shows up fully formed; you are a growth. And “cause and effect is as absolute and undeviating in the hidden realm of thought as in the world of visible and material things.” Your thoughts are real. They’re things, and they create results. This law of cause and effect is happening to you all the time, and these obsessive ways of thinking are keeping you from being the creator you were born to be. That is your true orientation, your true way of being — but you have to choose it, and you have to know how.

AUDREY: He goes on: “A noble and godlike character is not a thing of favor or chance, but is the natural result of continued effort in right thinking, the effect of long-cherished association with godlike thoughts.” In terms of what we do here at The Mission Driven Mom — teaching you to be principled — how better to be in constant association with godlike thoughts than to strive to be in association with His principles, to learn how to uncover and practice them, so you can lift yourself out of the persistent problems keeping you stuck? Those godlike thoughts can be principled thoughts. That’s what we want to do: change our orientation so we think in terms of principles.

AUDREY: He continues: an individual “is continually frustrating the accomplishment of their goals by encouraging thoughts and desires which cannot possibly harmonize with that end. Such cases could be multiplied and varied almost indefinitely, but this is not necessary, as the reader can, if he resolves, trace the action of the laws of thought in his own mind and life; and until this is done, mere external facts cannot serve as a ground of reasoning.” In other words, you can trace your life back to your core beliefs and thoughts. What you think about all the time is what’s manifesting in your life. And you can change from a victim orientation, from drama, to a creator orientation by reorienting the things you think about persistently — untangling that knot. That’s why it’s so helpful to label it and to make the choice to change the way you’re thinking, to stay in a creator orientation. We’ll talk more in a future podcast about what vision is and how it’s the anchor for staying there.

Choosing to Be a Creator

AUDREY: One of the things we talked about in our discussions is the shift that happens when you recognize — because you can’t change anything you can’t see — that you’re being a victim. Just that begins to loosen the chains; it begins to help you change. And then you choose to be a creator, and now you’re in a new place. You look around and think, “Wait a minute — if I’ve been seeing it wrongly, then maybe there’s a new way to see it. I can reorient myself, I can see myself and others more clearly, and maybe there’s hope for me.” That’s stepping into creator orientation. Just in the act of questioning your way of being and your way of thinking, you’re beginning to think like a creator.

AUDREY: James Allen says it’s “pleasing to human vanity to believe that one suffers because of one’s virtue.” Sometimes we think, “I was just being such a loyal friend, and that’s why it all fell apart — I didn’t have any part in it.” Even when it’s absolutely true that something happens to us that we had no part in, it’s also true that we’re in control of our response, and that we can choose a more empowered one — a response in which we’re at the center of what we can control, choosing to be a creator, choosing to grow, choosing to see the problem as a challenger, and choosing to go out and be coached through it.

AUDREY: That coaching is invaluable. Creators need coaches. You need the tools, the guidance, the feedback. My daughter was a gymnast for twelve years, and that coach stood there for every single skill saying, “Change this, change this, change this” — and the nuances of all those changes led to incredible growth and great success in her gymnastics. We need the challenge, because that’s where growth happens: when we see our problems as challengers we can conquer, mountains we want to reach the top of, and we do the work to find the coach who can take us through it and help us become the creator we want to be. The anchor for all of it is vision — we hang on to that vision, and it keeps us wanting to see ourselves in this new orientation and stay the creator in our lives.

AUDREY: So what Allen is saying is that it’s pleasing to our vanity — it makes us feel good — to think, “This problem only happened because other people are messed up, not me; I had no part in it.” And then we have no power to change it. That’s the trap. But if we can see that even our reaction can be made different, that’s a whole new place to be. He goes on: “Not until a man has extirpated every sickly, bitter, and impure thought from his mind, and washed every sinful stain from his soul, can he be in a position to know and declare that his sufferings are the result of his good, and not of his bad, qualities. And on the way to that supreme perfection, he will have found working in his mind and life the Great Law” — and he capitalizes “Great Law,” which I think is really telling — “which is absolutely just, which cannot therefore give good for evil or evil for good. Possessed of such knowledge, he will then know, looking back upon his past ignorance and blindness, that his life is, and always was, justly ordered, and that his past experiences, good and bad, were the equitable working out of his evolving, yet unevolved, self.”

AUDREY: In other words, when we get honest about the fact that we show up in our lives as victims — when we accept that this is something we’ve been doing but don’t want anymore — then we have the power to decide to make it different: to decide to be creators, to engage in our own growth by admitting we’ve been in drama, even if we didn’t cause the problem. Admitting that our reaction was one of anxiety, frustration, confusion, and overwhelm — that we were reacting instead of acting according to a new vision or outcome. Taking the time to do that is where we really sit with ourselves, work it through, and determine to see things differently and think differently from now on, so we can stay in that creator orientation.

Why Affirmations Aren’t Enough

AUDREY: This is one of the reasons flat affirmations don’t really help. Affirmations aren’t enough of an anchor for us to truly change the way we’re thinking. In life, truth is the great anchor, and principles can do that for us. When we use principles to create a new vision for ourselves in a circumstance we maybe didn’t like or didn’t anticipate, we grow through all the challenges that come into our lives. We grow, and grow, and grow — because we show up as a creator every single time.

Closing Thoughts and Invitation

AUDREY: So I hope that’s some food for thought as we head into a few more podcasts on this theme. We’ve got some great discussions coming up — Donna from The Power of TED, Robert Fritz, and some other people we’re excited to talk to — to flesh out what this creator orientation means, why vision matters so much, how we hold the tension to stay in that place, and how to make our lives more of what we’d have them be. But most importantly, to remember that our own development is the great adventure of our lives, because we are the only person we can control. When we take that seriously, really own it, and decide we’re going to show up as the creators of our own lives, things can really start to shift. When you use the principles of creation, and principles in other areas of your life, to lift yourself out of whatever is currently holding you stuck, everything can be different for you from now on. I’ve experienced that personally, and I’ve watched it happen with hundreds of women in our programs. I really want it for you.

AUDREY: So if this material has been helpful, keep listening to the podcast and pass it along to a friend. And we’d love to meet you in person at the Mothers of Creation celebration — our MDM celebration this fall. Oh, I love the mountains, and we’d love to have you there. The information is down in the description; come meet up with us, and bring a friend. In the meantime, more great information on these concepts and principles is coming on the podcast. Thank you for joining me today, and I’ll see you next time.

Resources from the Episode: 

You know the feeling. Something happens. Maybe your husband sleeps in, maybe the house is a mess again, maybe a conversation goes sideways. And before you have said a word, there it is. A tightening in your stomach. A low hum of frustration you carry around for the rest of the morning.

That feeling is drama. And it is not the situation causing it. It is the story you are telling yourself about the situation.

This week I sat down with Cadie Hatch, Tracie Hyde, and Lindsey Wright for a panel conversation on victimhood: what it actually is, how it shows up in real life, and what it feels like from the inside. All four of us got honest about our own patterns. And I think you are going to hear yourself in this one.

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Episode 162: Drama & Victimhood — A Panel Discussion

Introduction

AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. Today I have with me CADIE Hatch, Tracie Hyde, and Lindsey Wright, and we’re going to talk for a few minutes about drama and victimhood. We’ve been preparing content for our upcoming Mothers of Creation celebration, focusing on these themes — drama and victimhood, creation and vision — because those are the things we’re going to spend all day on at the event. We’ve been having discussions in the background, preparing our presentations, working on our own problem stories, and having our own experiences with the content. So today we just want to talk a little about drama and victimhood. And I want to start with a very simple question: how would you describe a victim? What do we mean when we say “victim” here? How does each of you understand that?

What Do We Mean by “Victim”?

CADIE: I would say victims are kind of all around us. All of us can have this tendency to fall into the victim mindset. But regardless of the circumstances they’re in, victims see things in the negative. They want to focus on the problem — on the thing that’s annoying them — and they’ll stay stuck in the emotions and negativity around that problem for as long as they choose to.

AUDREY: Great description, CADIE. To reiterate what you’re saying: there are victims in the world who are genuinely victimized — we’re not questioning that. But what we’re talking about is the drama triangle, and specifically the victim role within it, recognizing that we all show up in our lives as victims at times. That means we have areas of our life we don’t like, that are uncomfortable, where we feel frustrated and stuck and negative. It doesn’t mean everything in our world is falling apart, or that we can’t get out of bed in the morning. But it does mean there may well be an area of your life where, when you think about it or talk about it, your thoughts and feelings and words are predominantly negative — and you just don’t like it, and you don’t like thinking or talking about it, because it’s such an uncomfortable area. Any other thoughts on how you’d describe a victim, or on victimhood and the victim mentality?

Responsibility and Powerlessness

Tracie: I think an important word is responsibility. Victims don’t take responsibility, because that would mean they’d have to act or create. Instead they feel acted upon, powerless, and they push responsibility off. For example, I do this a lot in my marriage. My husband is really great at taking responsibility, and I’ve had to learn through the years, through his example, that I need to take responsibility for what’s mine — instead of saying, “No, that’s something you did,” or casting blame on someone else for why this happened. I need to own it and say, “Yes, that was my responsibility, and now I need to act and make a difference.”

AUDREY: I love that. And even just taking responsibility for our response, for our attitude about what’s happening — parsing out what we can and can’t control has been so vital for me. I like that word you used, Tracie: powerless. A victim orientation feels powerless, like things are out of our control, like we’re being acted upon.

LINDSEY: They weren’t supposed to be like this, and we’re so mad about it. The world is the way it is, and I’m the way I am, and nothing’s going to change no matter what I do.

Tracie: And how I feel in victim mode is a pit in my stomach. I feel anxious, unhappy, unsatisfied, stuck — it’s not a great place to live.

CADIE: I feel the exact same way, which is so interesting to me. When I’m in drama, I feel it in my stomach — that tightening — and it’s something I’m adding to the situation. Here’s a general example: my husband loves to sleep in, and he’ll sleep in and feel no guilt about it — “This is great, I got to sleep in.” And I’ll be thinking, “Oh, I just missed two hours of things I should have done.” I’m the one adding the drama to the situation.

AUDREY: Or the expectation.

Are We Adding the Drama?

AUDREY: It’s interesting, Tracie, because of what you said about not taking responsibility. What’s fascinating is that it’s so easy to tell yourself you’re not in drama, that you’re not acting like a victim, that you’re not focused on yourself — because you’re doing stuff. But why are you doing this stuff? How are you doing it? And is doing it actually alleviating the negative emotions you’re trying to be rid of? If those actions don’t really make you feel better, then that’s not actually taking responsibility for what you can take responsibility for. A good example: I’m still a recovering rescuer. I want to have all the answers for everybody and tell them how things ought to be, so I’m often doing something — but I’m still stuck right in the middle of the drama. And when people don’t respond to my rescuing the way I want them to, I have an excuse to go back and play the victim and lick my wounds: “They didn’t even take my good advice.” Because ultimately I’m not taking responsibility for what’s mine; I’m just reacting to a situation that’s uncomfortable.

Not About Positive Thinking

LINDSEY: I like that. Can I share something? I came across this the other day — it’s a book we use in the MDM Academy called 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do. I think what we’re describing, this victim orientation, is really that we’re mentally and emotionally weak in some areas. Becoming a creator is a strength we have to develop. And I know we’re going to do another whole podcast on this, but it’s not about positive thinking. We keep saying victim is negative and creator is positive, so it’s easy to hear that as “I just have to think positively all the time” — and there’s a nuance to clarify there. The author, Amy Morin, says mental strength is about thinking realistically and rationally. A victim isn’t thinking realistically or rationally; they’re blowing things out of proportion, holding themselves and others to impossible, unrealistic standards. They’re not seeing themselves clearly or telling themselves the truth. So it’s not just “make every thought positive.” It’s becoming intentional: we notice a thought, we notice the guilt we’ve attached to something, and we get curious about it instead of judging it — not “I’m a bad person for feeling guilty about sleeping in,” but “That’s interesting. What is that teaching me, and how am I responding?” Then we become intentional about showing up differently — and the pit in the stomach starts to loosen, and we get out of the drama.

AUDREY: Great stuff, Lindsey. If you’re interested in what exactly those victim types are, Lindsey and I did some podcasts on them recently, so you can go back and review those.

Which Victim Do You Show Up As?

AUDREY: With that in mind, I’d love to hear from each of you. How do you identify with this framework? What kind of victim do you show up as? And more importantly, how has having this language — being able to recognize it — been helpful for you?

CADIE: I’ve really learned that I show up as different types of victims in different circumstances. My typical go-to — my “home victim” — is the perfectionist. Lindsey has done an incredible job identifying these different types, and among the four of us we feel we’ve identified another one to add to the list: the perfectionist. That’s my home victim. But I’ve noticed I show up as different types depending on what I’m doing. Recently I learned that when I go to clean my house, I very quickly become the martyr: “I’ve taught you all better than this. I’ve taught you to put your clothes away, to put your shoes away, and you don’t do it. Why don’t you appreciate me?” I get so frustrated with my family. But the reality is people are coming in and out of the house all day, we’re all busy, and things get left because it’s real life. When you’re living, you make a mess, and it has to be cleaned up eventually. It doesn’t mean they’re completely irresponsible human beings because they didn’t put their shoes in the rack like I asked. So I need to slow down and recognize that we’re still good people.

AUDREY: That’s awesome, CADIE. So how has having that language helped you? Because it could just become one more way to feel bad about yourself, right? One more thing that’s wrong with you: “Now look at another victim type — here I am being a martyr.” Is it actually helpful, or is it just one more way to beat ourselves up?

CADIE: It depends on how you want to look at it. If you want to stay in victim and use it as a battering ram to beat yourself up, you can. But if you want to recognize — as I’ve learned, because Lindsey has done so much amazing work with this — that there’s an antidote, then I can choose to use it and get out, or choose not to and stay stuck. Knowing all the different victim types helps me, because I think, “I know there’s an antidote to this one, so let me use it, get myself out, and start feeling better a lot faster.”

AUDREY: I love that, Cadie — and I love that you used the word choice. We keep coming back to that word. Another concern women might have is, “Come on, I can’t be perfect all the time. I shouldn’t be upset when I’m vacuuming, or when I host a party.” But we’re not saying that. We’re saying we want to give you choices — the opportunity to recognize what you’re doing. If you don’t like how you’re feeling, if this is an area of your life where you get a pit in your stomach and feel negative and worried and upset and you just don’t want to feel that way, we’re giving you an option to recognize it. And the reason that matters so fundamentally is that you can’t change what you don’t see. So we’re just trying to help you have eyes to see this pattern — in yourself, and in all of us, because we’re all human — and to see that it’s a way of being we can choose out of, if we want the truth to make us free and we want to know how to make a different choice: to choose an antidote that kicks us back out of it.

How It Helps: Compassion, Ownership, and Peace

AUDREY: As we finish up, I’d love to hear one example from each of you. How has understanding drama, victimhood, and victim types made your life a little bit better — in your mothering, your marriage, your other relationships? We’ll talk more about being creators and having vision in future podcasts, so I want to speak specifically to the ability to recognize this, to see it in yourself, and to have words for it. How is that helping you?

LINDSEY: For me, it’s empowering. The words help make something abstract more concrete, so I’m not as confused. I don’t wonder, “What’s going on with me?” I can see what’s happening — and if I can see it, I can change it. Becoming more aware has allowed me to flip it, because I don’t want to be that. But it’s also helped me be more compassionate toward myself and toward others. Just like Cadie said, we get to decide whether we use these tools to beat ourselves up or to empower ourselves. We could use this information to beat other people up — “You’re being a victim” — or to recognize what’s happening with ourselves and others and say, “Oh, I think I understand what’s going on, and I know what role I need to play, because I can see where we are in this dreaded drama triangle.” So it just helps me have a little more compassion for myself and others.

AUDREY: I love that, Lindsey. Other thoughts?

Tracie: It’s helped me realize that I’m the problem. I think I’ve gone through life assuming I’m not the problem — that things just weren’t working out in relationships, for some strange reason. But now that I can see a lot of it starts with me, then, like Lindsey said, I can see how to get myself out. The other thing is helping others get out of drama. You can’t necessarily tell someone they’re in drama — that’s something we each have to recognize for ourselves — but there’s a way to ask questions and lead them out. That’s been huge for my family, because we all have this lesson to learn, including our children. If we can help them take those steps out of the darkness into the light, our family relationships are so much better. They’re able to engage with the world in a positive way, enjoy more happiness, and avoid that pit in their stomachs — and the same for us. It leads us all to a happier, more light-filled life.

AUDREY: I love that, Tracie.

CADIE: I love what you said, Lindsey, about feeling more compassion. As I was thinking about this, I’ve felt the same way — compassion has really increased for myself and for the people around me. My husband and I have a lot going on in our neighborhood and community; we like to be out and part of the projects happening in our town. And I’ve noticed that when you’re working on a project, it’s easy for drama to arise. Understanding the drama triangle and being a creator helps us make a lot of peace in the circles of influence we’re part of. So it’s not just about helping yourself feel better — though it does that, and that’s hugely valuable — you can create a lot of peace. The more people I talk to, especially the older people I speak with, the more I hear, “I don’t remember there ever being so much hostility in society as there is now.” And I’ve found that if I can approach a situation recognizing that this person might be in a victim orientation right now — I’m not going to tell them, “You’re being a victim,” because that doesn’t create peace — but if I can recognize that they might be in drama, and that I might be playing a role in it, then I can ask, “How can I help them get out? How do we help this calm down?” It creates much more peace and much more civil conversation. Ultimately, that’s what we’re shooting for: an improved cultural experience for all of us.

AUDREY: When you say it like that, it makes me think that understanding this victim orientation is just a tool to love better — to love ourselves and love others better.

CADIE: Loving your neighbor is huge, right? The golden rule — treat others the way you’d want to be treated. When I’m upset about something, I don’t need someone coming and yelling at me about it. Talk to me, listen to me for a minute, let me talk to you, let’s go back and forth and have a conversation. Let’s not just assume the worst in the other person. Victims, because they put so much blame on others, always assume “they’re the problem, they’re the problem.” If we can get out of that, we can have a much better influence.

Closing Thoughts and Invitation

AUDREY: I love that. That’s a beautiful way to end this discussion. Thank you, ladies, so much — that was really insightful. It’s inspiring to be reminded that we have so much more power than we think we have. We can change so many more things, and have so much more influence on ourselves and others, than we think we can. But we need to educate ourselves, gain recognition and understanding, and work toward the principled thinking that truly liberates us. That’s what we’re hoping to provide.

AUDREY: We’re super excited for this event coming this fall in the beautiful mountains of Utah at the end of September — Mothers of Creation. We hope you’ll plan to join us. If you haven’t signed up, there’s a link below to learn more and register, and you’ll get instant access to Lindsey and to the community of mothers who are coming, learning more, and asking questions as they prepare for an incredible event. Otherwise, we hope these podcasts and this information are of great value to you. If so, please pass them along to a friend — it helps us grow and reach more women who want to be empowered with principles. And if this content interests you, keep listening; these are themes we’ll continue to revisit in the months leading up to the event. We’re so grateful you’re here with us, and we’ll see you next time.

Resources from the Episode: 

I want to tell you about a man named Jacques Lusseyran.

He was eight years old when a classmate bumped into him in the middle of a crowded classroom and sent him crashing into the corner of a teacher's desk. His glasses didn't break. The arm of the frames went into the tissue of his right eye. By the time he woke up the next day, he was completely blind.

And yet by the end of his life, he would say that every single day he thanked heaven for making him blind.

This week's episode is his story. Jacques went on to become a leader of the French Resistance during World War II, eventually leading a movement of more than 600 young men and women. He was arrested, interrogated, and sent to Buchenwald. He was one of 30 survivors from a transport of 2,000 prisoners.

What makes his story so extraordinary is not just what he survived. It's what he discovered.

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Episode 161: Jacques Lusseyran — Choosing to Be a Creator

Introduction

AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. Today I have the honor of telling you the story of Jacques Lusseyran. He was a French Resistance fighter during World War II, but his story is so much more than that, as I’m sure you’re going to find out. Years ago I did a longer, more thorough podcast on his life, showing how he lived the seven laws of life mission — you can go listen to that one too if you’d like. But today I want to share some of the key highlights of his life with a very specific lens in mind. I’m going to focus on a few principles that we’ll be diving deep into this fall at our Mission Driven Mom celebration for our Mothers of Creation. Through Jacques’s experiences, I want to help you see how powerful it is when we choose not to be a victim but to be a creator instead — regardless of what life throws at us. And I want you to see what vision really is, and how it empowers us to navigate the most difficult moments of our lives.

AUDREY: I’m going to begin by telling you his story, and while I do, I want you to keep some principles in mind — the ones we’ll focus on at the celebration this year. Number one: when we respond to life as a victim of circumstances, we get frustrated, stuck, and lose our way. Two: a victim mindset robs our vision and makes us blind. Three: we can choose to be a creator regardless of circumstances. Four: responding to life as a creator causes us to feel liberated, clear, and even joyful. And five: our choice to live in a creator orientation blesses not just us, but those around us — and sometimes our whole community and beyond. When I finish Jacques’s story, I’ll remind us of those principles again and encourage you to take some time this week to ponder them in your own life.

Losing His Sight

AUDREY: So here we go. On a beautiful May morning in 1932, little Jacques was at school as usual. At ten o’clock the children jumped up, all of them excited to get outside, running all over the classroom. As Jacques moved toward the front of the room, a student darted past and hit him, causing him to fall into the corner of the teacher’s desk. His new glasses were made of shatterproof glass, so they didn’t break — instead, the arm of the spectacles drove into the tissue of his right eye, and he lost consciousness for the next twenty-four hours. During that time, doctors discovered that his right eye was completely destroyed and would have to be removed, and that his left retina had been so badly torn that by the time he woke up the next day, his whole life had changed. At the tender age of eight years old, he would be blind for life.

AUDREY: Physically he recovered quickly. Within a month he was walking again; the next month he was learning Braille; and by the third month he was running and playing on the playground with the other children. But overcoming his blindness was a different challenge. He said this: “It was a great surprise to me to find myself blind, and being blind was not at all as I had imagined it. Nor was it as the people around me seemed to think. They told me that to be blind meant not to see, and for a time I still wanted to use my eyes. I looked in the direction where I was in the habit of seeing before the accident, and there was anguish, a lack, something like a void, which filled me with what grown-ups call despair.

AUDREY: “Finally, one day I realized I was looking the wrong way. I could still see — in myself. I could still picture myself in the Champ de Mars. I knew the garden well: its ponds, its railings, its iron chairs. Naturally, I wanted to see them again, but I couldn’t. At this point some instinct — I was almost about to say a hand laid on me — made me change course. I began to look more closely, not at the things outside but at a world closer to myself, from an inner place, from further inside. Instead of clinging to the movement of sight toward the world outside, the substance of the universe drew together, redefined itself, and formed itself anew. I was aware of a radiance emanating from a place I knew nothing about. I felt an indescribable relief, and a happiness so great it almost made me laugh. Confidence and gratitude came like a prayer that had been answered. I found light and joy at the very same moment.”

AUDREY: This experience relieved him of his initial despair. It enabled him to overcome the fear of blindness and gave him a way forward. Yet learning to navigate the other aspects of his blindness took time. One important tool he slowly discovered was that his thoughts and emotional choices had a profound impact on his ability to “see” and to function well as a blind person.

Fear, Not Blindness

AUDREY: As Jacques made his way through this new world, he eventually learned that it was actually fear — not the loss of sight — that made him truly blind. This is what he said about it: “Fear made me blind. Anger and impatience had the same effect, throwing everything into confusion. The minute before, I knew just where everything in the room was; but if I got angry, things got angrier than I was. When I was playing with my small companions, if I suddenly grew anxious to win, to be first at all costs, then all at once I could see nothing. I could no longer afford to be jealous or unfriendly, because the moment I was, a bandage came down over my eyes. But when I was happy and serene, when I approached people with confidence and thought well of them, I was rewarded with light.”

AUDREY: In this way, Jacques gained a mastery over himself rarely achieved, especially in a child. He discovered that he had to rein in his natural tendencies toward anger, pettiness, unkindness, and jealousy. The temptation to give in to self-pity and victimhood was strong, but Jacques began to realize that when he chose to live according to true principles and governed his heart and mind instead, his ability to function well and happily in the world was restored. This insight was revolutionary for him.

AUDREY: This process helped him grow into a man he could not otherwise have been. Through daily practice, he developed a high level of command over himself, along with an enhanced ability to love others more fully. This generated inner peace and self-confidence and endeared him to everyone who knew him. The character he built by living these principles spilled over into other areas of his life, and his education became a great success story. Through his persistence in learning Braille and studying hard, he was able to remain in the classroom alongside sighted students — can you imagine? — eventually winning first place in his class.

The Coming of War

AUDREY: Although Jacques had already faced and overcome extremely difficult challenges, another great crisis came into his life during his high school years: the outbreak of World War II. Fortunately, he had developed immense emotional, mental, and spiritual maturity in his younger years, and now it served him well. Already a very conscientious man, the war awakened in him a strong desire to know, to understand, to make sense of what was happening. For Jacques and his friends, the war was a call to action. They dug deeper into their studies and read the greatest thinkers, searching for answers.

AUDREY: This is what he said about that time: “We wanted to learn how to live, and that was a much more serious matter. And we wanted to learn fast, because we felt that the next day it would surely be too late. There were signs of death on land and in the air, from the Spanish War to the frontiers of Russia — not just signs, but battles to the death. The feeling rumbled inside us, pressing to come out into the open: unless we were up to making a better world than our elders had made, the orgy of stupidity and killing would go on until the end of the world. I sat up late at night. I had thrown myself furiously into the study of philosophy. I wanted to understand it all, and I felt it was urgent. I don’t know exactly why, but it seemed to me that such a chance would not come again — that I was going to be snatched away to more worldly responsibilities. All the ideas of men who had dedicated themselves to thought found their way into my head for the first time, from Pythagoras to Bergson, from Plato to Freud. I examined them as closely as I could.”

AUDREY: By the following spring, France had been occupied by the Germans. Of this time, Jacques wrote, “In me was a pack of fears and desires, intentions and irritations, which had had me clenched in a tight fist for weeks.” Then he learned that one of his closest friends had been arrested. Three days later, he contracted measles. He felt the illness was as much a moral lesson as a physical one. Of the change that took place in him as a result of the sickness, he said: “This was no microbe or virus making its way in me. It was a resolve. It took me over from head to foot like a conquered land. I could not resist it, for it had taken the wheel. It was driving me to definite destinations I had not thought about before it came. This resolve gave me orders, telling me first of all that I must say nothing to my family. I must have a meeting with two of my comrades — I already knew who they were. Later I would have to get in touch with about ten more. The list was already made up. My only haste was to get my body well again, to risk it all in the great adventure. On the first day of convalescence, I said to myself aloud in my room: ‘The occupation is my sickness.’”

Forming the Resistance

AUDREY: As soon as Jacques was well, he called his friends together and formed a resistance movement, later named the Volunteers of Liberty, which eventually involved more than six hundred young men and women. About their resolve to do whatever was necessary to fight for truth, he had this to say: “Let people be silent if they were able to go on living without speaking out. We were incapable of it. For our part, we knew that Nazism threatened the whole of humanity, that it was an absolute evil, and we were going to publish its evil all around us.”

AUDREY: To lead this incredible group of young people, he leaned not only on the strength of character he had forged through his education and hard work, but heavily on God to guide him. At their very first meeting, he quickly learned how desperately he needed help and guidance. He said this: “At the beginning of May I had adopted an ascetic way of life. Every day, including Sunday, I got up at half past four. The first thing I did was to kneel down and pray: ‘My God, give me the strength to keep my promises. Since I made them in a good cause, they are yours to keep as well as mine. Now twenty young men — tomorrow there may be a hundred — are waiting for my orders. Tell me what orders to give them. By myself I know how to do almost nothing, but if you will it, I am capable of almost everything. Most of all, give me prudence.’”

AUDREY: Amazingly, even in the midst of great danger, Jacques felt an immense amount of personal meaning and joy. Of this he said, “I was surprised when I awoke in the morning, feeling a sense of purpose strong and entirely new to me. I was madly happy to be doing this work.”

AUDREY: Early on, it was decided that Jacques would be the sole screener for potential recruits. Here again, his blindness came to his aid. Because of the loss of sight, his other senses were heightened, and through years of practice he had learned to listen carefully to body language, to choice of words, and to intonation of speech. More importantly, he had a profound intuition about people. He said, “The consciences of my companions seemed to be wide open before me, and all I needed to do was read them.” His accuracy was nearly perfect. Although he interviewed over a thousand individuals for the six hundred members of his resistance group, only one ever betrayed them.

Betrayal and Buchenwald

AUDREY: When that betrayal came, several of them were arrested. After a long and difficult interrogation — accompanied by many miracles that kept Jacques alive — he spent several months in prison. Finally, he and a few of his friends were transported to Buchenwald concentration camp. In the beginning he was able to take comfort in having a few friends close to him. But when they were all shipped to other camps and he was left completely alone, fear took over. He said, “Fear is the real name of despair.”

AUDREY: He also said: “In March I had lost all my friends. They had all gone away. A small child was reborn in me, looking everywhere for his mother and not finding her. I was very much afraid of the others, and even of myself, since I no longer knew how to defend myself. One day out of two, people were stealing my bread and my soup. I grew so weak that when I touched cold water, my fingers burned as if they were on fire.

AUDREY: “For those unfit for labor like me, they had another system: the Invalid Block. It was a barracks like the others. The only difference was that they had crowded in fifteen hundred men instead of the three hundred that was average for the other blocks, and they had cut the food rations in half. As a result, people were dying there at a pace that made it impossible to keep any count. It was a greater surprise to fall over the living than the dead. For days and nights I didn’t walk around — I crawled. I made an opening for myself in the mass of flesh. My hands traveled from a stumbled leg to a dead body, from a body to a wound. I could no longer hear anything for the groaning all around me.”

AUDREY: These vile conditions, compounded by the fear and despair Jacques felt, soon took their toll, and he became very ill. Pleurisy led to dysentery, then to an infection in both ears that left him deaf for two weeks, then to erysipelas, then to complications from blood poisoning. Through it all, Jacques drew closer to God and nurtured his soul.

Light in the Darkness

AUDREY: When he finally left the camp hospital, skin and bones, he said: “I was so happy to be alive, and free to help the others. I could try to show other people how to go about holding on to life. I could turn toward them the flow of light and joy that had grown so abundant in me. Hundreds of people confided in me. The remarkable thing was that listening to the fears of others had ended by freeing me almost completely from anxiety. I had become cheerful, and was cheerful almost all the time. That helped me, naturally, but it also helped the others. They had made such a habit of watching for the coming of the little blind Frenchman — with my happy face and my reassuring words, delivered in a loud voice, and with the news I gave out — that on days when there was no news, they had me visit them just the same.”

AUDREY: By the time he was released, he was one of only thirty survivors out of his original transport group of two thousand prisoners. After the war, he moved to the United States and became a husband, a father, and a university professor. Surprisingly, he always attributed his ability to accomplish these amazing feats to his blindness. That is why, through all the challenges and joys of his life, he could honestly say that “every day I have to thank heaven for making me blind.”

Closing Thoughts and Challenge

AUDREY: His story is absolutely incredible — it often brings me to tears. He is definitely one of my heroes. I know he wasn’t a perfect man; no one is. But could you see those principles of creation at play in his life? Let me remind us all what they are. Number one: when we respond to life as a victim of circumstances, we get frustrated, stuck, and lose our way — like Jacques did when he first gave in to his blindness. Two: a victim mindset robs our vision and makes us blind, just as it did to him. Three: we can choose to be a creator regardless of circumstances, just like he did. Four: responding to life as a creator causes us to feel liberated, clear, and even joyful. And five: our choice to live in a creator orientation blesses not just us, but those around us — and sometimes our whole community and beyond.

AUDREY: So with Jacques’s story in mind and these principles in front of us, I want to challenge all of us one more time to consider them — not just in his life, but in our own. I’d love for you to return to this video and put your insights in the comments below. Where do you sometimes struggle with being a victim to your problems and circumstances? When was a time you overcame the victim mindset and turned things around with your own creative abilities? And what can you do to be more of a creator, rather than a victim, in your own life?

AUDREY: When things get hard, think of Jacques and all he came through. Consider how different his life could have been if he had chosen to give up and be the victim — how unhappy he would have been, and all the lives he would never have blessed. But he chose to be a creator, and he set a beautiful example for us. Showing up in life as a creator blesses you and everyone around you. It can be a harder path, but it’s definitely a better one.

AUDREY: If you’re ready to better understand the difference between victims and creators — how you might be showing up as a victim without even realizing it — and if you want to gain tools and learn principles that can get you out of the problems and challenges keeping you stuck, and onto a road toward a life more full of meaning, joy, and vision, I want you to consider joining us this fall in Utah for an all-day training on these concepts. There’s a link in the description, and you can learn more about the conference at themissiondrivenmom.com. I hope to see you there. Thanks for joining me today, and I’ll see you next time.

Resources from the Episode: 

Here is something I need you to know before you watch Frozen again.

The moment everyone cheers. Elsa in her ice castle, belting "Let It Go," finally free, finally herself. That moment is not the triumph we think it is. That moment is Elsa playing the victim.

Lindsey Wright is back on the podcast this week, and she has done something I think is truly brilliant. She took the six victim types we've been studying and matched each one to a Disney character. The result is one of the most clarifying conversations we've ever recorded.

AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. So grateful to have you with us today. I want to ask you a question. If every Disney movie only exists because there’s a problem, what if those beloved stories are actually teaching us how to be victims? We’re going to talk about that today.

AUDREY: This is Lindsey Wright who’s with me today. We recently did a podcast where we talked about victim types — all six of them. We broke them down, gave you some detail on a couple so you could really begin to understand how they work and what they are. We talked about how when we can see ourselves in these victim types, it helps us identify the fact that we’re acting like a victim, and then we can start to work on a way out. Lindsey mentioned this a couple of different times: naming things can be so incredibly helpful. It helps us better understand what it is that we’re doing and why we’re doing it. For me, that’s been a catalyst for change, because I don’t want to be the dummy or the avoider or the quitter — but how do I be different? Lindsey has built out a beautiful framework for that which she teaches inside our Mothers of Creation community. If you haven’t listened to our previous episode, we encourage you to go back and listen, but you can also start here and go back afterward. Today we’re going to dive deeper into the victim types by talking about Disney movies — some core stories that we’re probably all very familiar with.

AUDREY: Before we do that, Lindsey, as you were building this out, why did you head toward these Disney stories? What tipped you off to the idea that these characters could help illustrate the victim types?

LINDSEY: First of all, I think because Disney is so much a part of the culture. I grew up with Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast — we had never seen movies like that before. It was just part of my growing up. And Disney has long been associated with family. I felt like it was something we could all understand quickly, something that would help make these abstract ideas a little more concrete.

LINDSEY: Everything we watch, everything we listen to, everything we read is trying to teach us something or convince us of something. Are we aware of the lessons we’re receiving? I thought if I could give people an image — something familiar — that would be really helpful as we teach these different victim types. And once I started going, I realized a movie is not a movie unless it has some drama. That’s why we watch it. There’s a problem, characters react to it, and we would not enjoy the movie if the characters always stayed in the drama. What we want to see is transformation. So it’s a rich resource — you see not only the victim types, but how each character gets out of them. I’ve really tried to stay away from the villains because I want us to see that these victim types are all of us. We embody all of them, some more than others. But that also means that all of us have the tools to get out of them.

AUDREY: Let’s start with the avoider. Who did you choose for this one?

LINDSEY: I’m not trying to destroy Disney movies, but the character I chose for the avoider is Elsa. If you watch just a clip of ‘Let It Go,’ you can see all of the things we’ve connected to this victim type. She’s afraid. She doesn’t want to lose control. She fears the emotional discomfort of reaching out to people, so she avoids it all. She builds her ice castle in the mountains, decides she’s going to be by herself. She doesn’t trust herself. She doesn’t think anything is going to change or get better. She can’t face it. She’s overwhelmed. She’s stuck.

LINDSEY: And in the theater, that moment — that ‘Let It Go’ song — is meant to be a girl-power high point. You go, Elsa. You show them. The singing is beautiful, she’s being herself. And yet — actually, she’s being a victim. We know this because her reaction causes problems. What we see at the end of the movie is that she has to learn something about herself. She has to learn that love is more powerful than fear. That relationships are more valuable than anything she could do by herself. There’s something she has to learn about who she is — and that is a pattern I’ve noticed over and over as I’ve connected these victim types to Disney characters.

AUDREY: What’s so interesting is that Elsa is the hero. She’s the one with superpowers. Her sister Anna is the one who’s ‘normal’ — and yet Anna is the one problem-solving, taking risks, facing fears, doing hard things. Elsa just sits in her castle and avoids and blames, while Anna is actively fixing things. Elsa technically has more power than her sister, who is the one making things happen. Which tells us a lot about what we’re doing when we play the victim. We’re snuffing out our own power.

AUDREY: Why do you see Elsa as the avoider rather than the quitter?

LINDSEY: She’s an avoider because she doesn’t even engage at all. The quitter engages and then it gets too hard, and so they quit. Elsa is just ‘no, I’m not going to have anything to do with it.’ She’s been avoiding all the way along — from the very beginning, putting the gloves on her hands — and then she does the ultimate act of avoidance. Her parents were teaching her some of those behaviors, and she just plays them out as she gets older and the consequences get bigger.

AUDREY: One other thought: we mentioned last time that this is built around the drama triangle that Stephen Karpman taught — the simple triangle where, when we’re in problem stories, there’s always a victim, a rescuer, and a persecutor. What we didn’t mention is that the whole reason the drama triangle exists is because everyone wants the victim role. They’re all vying to be seen as the victim. Even persecutors don’t just show up wanting to be persecutors — they want to be seen as victims too. And one of the most important things to understand about this is that when we play the victim, we actually show up to others as a persecutor.

LINDSEY: Exactly. Elsa feels like a persecutor to the people around her. She’s playing the victim, but when others try to empower and encourage her to take action, she lashes out like a persecutor. And it shows how subtle some of these victim orientations can be. She feels like she’s doing the right thing. The avoider feels like they’re doing something — but they’re reacting, making their own little plans in their own little world, convinced they’ll figure it all out alone.

AUDREY: So how does Elsa’s story become untangled? Because the most powerful movies and stories speak to us because of the transformation of a character — and that’s who we all are, characters in our own story wanting transformation.

LINDSEY: What we’re waiting for is when is she going to wake up and realize how powerful she is, that she’s a creator, that she can do it. And as soon as the character sees it, it sparks something in us and makes us come to life because we identify with them. Maybe I’m a creator. Maybe I’m powerful. Maybe I can do things I didn’t think I could do.

LINDSEY: The truth the avoider needs to understand is that right now is what I can control. Elsa learns that fear is hard to control — but love? You can control that. We’re in control when we’re acting in love toward ourselves and toward other people. That’s the shift she makes. What I want right now is this relationship with my sister. What I want right now is to have love guiding me instead of fear. That’s what she needed, and that’s what the people around her needed.

AUDREY: Let’s move on to the quitter. Who did you choose?

LINDSEY: The character I chose for the quitter is Simba from The Lion King. The quitter starts going, but then it gets really hard and they stop. We see Simba’s dad showing him the kingdom — he’s so excited, ‘I just can’t wait to be king.’ And then his dad is murdered. His uncle tells him to run, that everyone will hate him, that he has to get out. And so he quits. Hakuna Matata. Goes off and lives this carefree life.

LINDSEY: But it’s not as his real self. His power and potential are snuffed out. It’s a mistaken, distorted identity. He’s avoiding the pain of who he’s actually supposed to become by abandoning the path.

AUDREY: And then — Rafiki. That moment in the movie.

LINDSEY: Yes. We’re right back to identity. Simba has to remember who he is. He is the son of a king. He is the rightful king. He has to take responsibility — and he hasn’t been, wandering around doing Hakuna Matata. He has to remember that identity and go back to claim his spot. That’s why we love the ending. He becomes who he was meant to be, reaches his potential.

LINDSEY: The tool for the quitter is that they can practice the principles, rely on the truth they know, and patiently wait. Because principles work. Baby steps. Principles always work. I know that if I take responsibility, remember who I am, work my way back, renegotiate the relationships that were damaged — those baby steps will get me back to where I need to be. And Simba does that. It’s so powerful to watch.

AUDREY: Give us just a little context on the Disney characters you chose for the rest of the victim types.

LINDSEY: For the martyr, this was a tricky one I’m still working on. We have Mother Gothel from Tangled. I was hesitant to use her because she’s the villain — and I want us to see that victim types aren’t villains, they’re just our natural tendencies. But she’s very much ‘look at all the things I do for you, Rapunzel, and you’re not grateful, I’ve suffered and sacrificed everything for you.’ I’m still working on some other ideas for that one.

LINDSEY: For the doormat, I chose Cinderella. She’s loving and kindhearted, but she’s afraid of conflict. She waits to be rescued. She doesn’t want to stand up for herself. But by the end of the movie, she learns her worth — that she’s worthy and valuable, that she can be assertive and have boundaries. That’s why we love the ending. She starts out as a doormat. People walk all over her and she allows it.

LINDSEY: The dummy is a work in progress — I’ve been talking to my kids about it all day. The dummy claims they cannot solve their problems. They want somebody to rescue them or just make it go away. The character we landed on is Kuzco from The Emperor’s New Groove — the emperor who turns into a llama. He doesn’t want to accept responsibility and claims he doesn’t know how to solve things. And as he’s doing that, he’s creating more and more problems. He has to learn something fascinating: that people don’t actually like him. He has to have an identity shift in how he sees himself in relationship to others. He sees himself as superior — it’s all ego. But other people are resources. We have to be willing to ask for help and learn how to rely on people in the right way.

LINDSEY: The last one is the chameleon, and I chose the Genie from Aladdin. He’s just whatever you need him to be — he’s forgotten who he really is. And Aladdin is almost the same — he shows up as someone completely different so that Jasmine will like him, afraid to expose his real identity. But that’s not what Jasmine liked. And in the end, it’s not what saves him either. It’s understanding who he actually is, and how his real strengths are exactly what’s needed to solve the problem.

AUDREY: Of course, we watch these stories because we’re waiting for the transformation — and that’s what Lindsey and I are passionate about in this work. This framework has changed everything for us. The ability to self-identify when we’re playing a victim role means we might still do it for a bit, but we can often catch ourselves. We have common language in our homes. Our families can help catch us. Every bit of information we glean around this empowers us to be different, to work our way out of the drama cycle and be creators instead.

AUDREY: This is what we’re doing all year inside our Mothers of Creation community. We have our in-person event in the fall — September 26th in Provo, Utah. We’re going to spend the whole day talking about problem stories and victim types, reframing those stories, moving out of victimhood into a creator orientation, building creator declarations, and so much more. And the community is open now — as soon as you sign up for the event, you get instant access to Lindsey’s trainings and everything we’ve been building together.

AUDREY: Our challenge to you today: as you watch Disney movies or any movie, look for a victim type. Watch how the character plays into it, what problems it causes, and how they come across as a persecutor to the people around them. Then watch how the transformation happens — when their identity shifts, when they come to see that they truly are a creator, when they learn the truth about who they are and what they’re capable of, and become powerful once again.

AUDREY: Thanks for joining us today. If this is of interest to you and you want to know more, we would love to see you in the community. And we would love to meet you in person this fall. Visit themissiondrivenmom.com and sign up for the Mothers of Creation Conference. Thank you so much for being here. We hope this is helpful, valuable, and motivating for you — and we will see you next time.

Resources from the Episode: 

Most of us would never describe ourselves as victims.

And yet — if someone asked you where you feel resentful, or stuck, or like things just keep happening to you no matter what you do — you'd probably have an answer pretty quickly.

That's what this week's episode is about.

Lindsay Wright is back, and she's walking us through something called the victim types — six different ways that we show up in a victim orientation without ever realizing that's what we're doing. Not because we're weak or broken, but because these patterns were useful once. They helped us manage fear, avoid pain, survive hard seasons.

The problem is they also keep us stuck.

AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of the Mission Driven Mom. I’m so excited for you to join me today as I have a great conversation with Lindsey Wright. Now, most of us don’t think of ourselves as victims, except that we do often show up as one of six or seven victim types in our real lives without realizing that we’re doing that. And that’s what we’re going to deep dive into today. So Lindsey, thanks for being here.

Super excited to talk to you. Just as a little bit of background, let me explain the context of what we’re going to talk about today. The drama triangle is something that not a lot of people know about, but it’s an insanely helpful framework for seeing how you’re getting stuck in your life. There’s a persecutor, a victim, and a rescuer in this drama triangle that we all kind of fall into. And yet in the end, when we’re in drama, we often feel stuck because we are actually being a victim without realizing that we’re being a victim. We call this problem orientation and we call it our problem story.

Now you and I — if you think about it for a minute — you’ll realize that you know plenty of people in your world who complain and struggle with things that just aren’t a problem for you, that that would just not be an issue for you in your life. Well, that’s what we call a problem story because it’s not a problem for everybody. It’s a problem for you, or it’s a problem for them, because of who they are, because of how they think, because of what’s showing up in their life.

And there are certain reasons why that’s a problem story, which we can talk about another time. But this is the framework for what we’re going to talk about today: that we get stuck in our lives in problem stories. Maybe it’s a rebellious child. Maybe it’s the loss of a job. Maybe it’s a spouse that asks for a divorce. Or maybe it’s something simpler, like you just can’t seem to get the weight off and you’ve been trying for years and you are sick and tired of it. You just incessantly complain about how you can’t lose the weight because you’re a victim to your weight. And so these problem stories keep us frustrated and irritated and angry, or whatever the case might be.

And we want to talk to you about how you might be showing up in this problem story as a certain type of victim. Lindsey’s going to help us understand why knowing a little bit more about what victimhood is and the different types of victims can be insanely helpful as a catalyst to help us see what we’re doing to ourselves a little more clearly, and be the first step toward getting out of this problem story and getting the car back on the road and moving again.

So as a little bit of background, if you’ve been around very long, you probably recognize Lindsey’s face. She’s been with the Mission Driven Mom from the beginning. She’s phenomenal. She’s brilliant. She helped vet content for the Academy, helped get it built, has mentored hundreds and hundreds of women for us, has spoken on our stages, and I just can’t even begin to say how much I love her and how incredible she is. She has taken on the job of mentoring women who are going to be attending our Mothers of Creation event this fall. Bless her for that.

We have an online community and we talk about these victim types in detail. Women are mentored in them in preparation for coming to this event. So she’s going to share with all of you today a little bit of what’s been going on in that community and why it makes such a huge difference. So the first question I want to ask you today, Lindsey, is: why do the victim types matter? Why do they matter, do you think, in general? And specifically, why do they matter to you?

Lindsey: The victim types matter because they just help to bring awareness to something we might not realize that we’re doing, or patterns of thought and behavior that we don’t realize that we’re perpetuating. And so there are these victim types. I think if I were just to ask you, “Where are you being a victim in your life today?” your automatic response would be, “Well, I’m not,” because we don’t want to believe that about ourselves. But if I were to ask you, “Is there anywhere in your life that you feel resentful?” that might give you some clues, something that you could think about. And then if I were to say, “Well, there’s a way of being a victim that the feeling you get is this resentment,” and tie that back to the specific victim type, I think that’s a little bit more helpful in helping us to see these things, these things that we’re doing in our lives.

AUDREY: Why does it matter to you personally, then? Have you had that experience?

Lindsey: Yes. It’s so fascinating to me. The more that I learn about the victim orientation and the creator orientation, and I look for that in my life and I find it. But then — because I don’t just stay there, and that’s part of what we’re doing in the fall. We don’t want to just stay in the victim orientation. We want to learn how to get out of it. But awareness is that first step. And so when we become aware and I can start to see those things in my life, what’s happened is that I’ve been able to make changes in my life. I’m not stuck in some of the places that I was stuck in before.

I feel more empowered. My relationships are better. Like, everything is better. My thinking is more clear when I can notice these things about myself and then also know what to do when I see them.

AUDREY: Agreed. And we’ll get into this here in just a second. But just for me, knowing the title of what I’m doing — of how I’m being a victim — helps me see why I should just do the opposite of that. And there’s so much rich context that you’ve helped build around all of these victim types, and you can explain that to us. But just the title for me is so helpful because then it gives context around my attitudes, my behaviors, the way I’m approaching things. And it’s hugely motivating because I don’t want to be a doormat or I don’t want to be a chameleon. I don’t want to be that thing. And so it stimulates me to want to get out of that victim mindset and be different.

Lindsey: Yes. And when you can name something, then you can start to create order. That is part of the process of creation — you have to name it.

AUDREY: That’s a great point. Identify it, and then you can move on to the next steps. Yes, super helpful. All right. So let’s head into this. Can you give us a little more context around how you would answer the question: what is a victim type?

Lindsey: So all victims have a few things in common. All victims have something that they’re afraid of. All victims don’t want to take responsibility for something. All victims blame. There are certain characteristics of just this victim orientation in general. But these types of victims are helpful because they help us to see some of the nuances. They help us to see that there are a few different flavors of being a victim. And they’re a little bit different in the thoughts. So one of the things I’ve done is I’ve tried to connect a thought and a feeling to each of these victim types to help us understand it a little bit better. And so the thought and the feeling, there’s nuance there. And then the tool and the truth that they need to get out of it is also a little bit different. So when we can isolate this certain particular flavor of victim that we are participating in, then it’s helpful because then we know the next step. We know how to get out of it.

AUDREY: Yeah. So with that in mind, let’s just walk through each of these and you can kind of give us some context and framework with some of the things that you feel like are most vital to understand about each one.

Lindsey: So one of the first victims that we talked about in our Mothers of Creation community is the avoider. And I know from conversations that you and I have had, we both really struggle with the avoider.

AUDREY: Yep.

Lindsey: And I want to say that it’s not — we’re not bad people because we have this tendency. It’s just something that we do. It’s something that maybe we picked up — just the way we handle pain and struggle. It worked for us then, but now we know better, and so we’re going to do better.

AUDREY: So when you were just talking, Lindsey, it made me think that maybe for our listeners one of the things that might be helpful to think about is that one aspect of the victim type is the way that you respond to fear. So something is happening that you don’t want to have happen, that you don’t like, that you’re afraid of. So what do you do about it? How do you respond to it? And like you said, for me, one of the common ways that I respond to fear is to avoid. But then the problem is that later on I look back and regret that I didn’t do something. And maybe doing something would still have been doing nothing, but at least it would have been a conscious choice instead of a reaction. Because I feel like the victim types are reactionary. Maybe that’s a reaction to those feelings of fear, maybe it’s a reaction to other things too, but anyway — so go ahead and give us some examples so that we can have some context.

Lindsey: So the avoider — there are four possible reactions. You just reminded me when we were talking about reactions. And we’re all, I think, familiar with these: you can fight, you can flee, you can freeze, and there’s a fourth one that I learned about from David Emerald, and that is to appease. So you’re going to appease the people in the situation so that that conflict can go away. And so — take the avoider, the victim type of the avoider, and their reaction is to freeze. That’s the reaction. And they’re reacting to an anxiety that they have. They’re not necessarily reacting to the problem itself, they’re reacting to the way they feel about it. And they think, “I can’t do this. I can’t face this. This is too hard,” and so they freeze. Like you said, they don’t address the problem. And well, what happens when you don’t address problems? They get bigger. Then the anxiety gets bigger.

AUDREY: Yeah. If you don’t face that anxiety it will just continue to get bigger and bigger.

Lindsey: Yes. And so that’s where we get the avoider. They’re just avoiding those hard things that make them feel uncomfortable or overwhelmed. So what other aspects of the avoider can you share? The avoider feels stuck. And a lot of victims will feel stuck, but the avoider really feels stuck because they froze, right? They’re not moving forward. And they’re really afraid — say you have a relationship where there’s a hard conversation that needs to happen. The avoider is afraid that if they have this hard conversation, first of all that it’s going to be really uncomfortable — which is true, it is going to be really uncomfortable — that they’re going to lose control, that they’re going to lose the security, and maybe they’ll lose that relationship. So they’re reacting to that fear, to that anxiety, instead of making a proactive choice to deal with something.

And isn’t there a truth that each one of the victim types needs to know? So what is it for avoiders?

So the avoider needs to know that right now is what I can control. Sometimes an avoider will do something that seems like action, that seems like they’re addressing the problem, but actually isn’t. So they start to get into the future, they start to make plans. Say the problem is that your house is always a mess. What does the avoider do? Well, instead of addressing the actual problem, “Oh, I’m going to plan. I’m going to make job charts. I’m going to set up incentive systems.” They spend hours and hours doing all this and it feels like action.

AUDREY: Oh, that’s so me. Yes.

Lindsey: But I’m not actually — it’s not going to change anything. And how do we know? Because a week into this new job system, it’s not working anyway. Not that no one should ever plan, but if you’re feeling reactionary and freezing as an avoider victim to a hard situation that you feel anxious about, if you remember the truth that right now is what you can control, then you will just get busy cleaning the house. Just clean the house. In the five hours it took you to create that new job system, what could you have done?

AUDREY: Yeah. And then some of the anxiety starts to be alleviated as you take action and you remember that you have more control than you think you do. And you can be planning in your mind while you’re cleaning, I suppose.

Lindsey: Sure, yeah. The difference is — because planning is good, we all need to begin with the end in mind — it’s when you’re using the planning to avoid the doing, that’s when it’s a problem.

AUDREY: I can see that in myself, that as I avoided, I liked to make plans, but actually nothing was happening right now. Yes.

Lindsey: Yes. And one of the tools that we teach is radical acceptance of your current circumstances. Maybe my house is a little messier than I would like it to be because I’m a very busy mom. Maybe I have young children, or maybe I’ve just had a health crisis, or whatever. And so accepting where I am now, the season that I’m in now, and then controlling what I can control right now, here in the present. That’s how we can make that shift.

AUDREY: I love it. Okay, let’s contrast that one with another one and go through each of those, and then maybe we can finish out by just touching on all of them so people just have some frame of reference for each of the types.

Lindsey: Okay. I want to do the quitter next because just like the avoider, the quitter’s reaction is to flee. They want to get away from it. They don’t even want to try. They just want to get as far away from it as possible. So what might that look like? It could look like not getting out of bed in the morning to take care of your family. Or think of a young child — I have a young daughter who struggles with some things, so she just doesn’t want to do them. “It’s too hard.” She just doesn’t do it. So the avoider is kind of pretending like they’re doing something about it because they’re making all these plans, but the quitter just says, “I’m done.” They’re just out. They just quit the thing — quit the sport, quit the lessons, quit the conversations, quit the relationship. Just walk away instead of engaging. Yeah.

AUDREY: Okay, I think I see that. And what are the other aspects of the quitter as compared to the avoider?

Lindsey: They’re not necessarily thinking, “I can’t face this,” but more like, “Why do these things always happen to me?” or “This is too hard.” So a little more self-pity. We’ve got another victim type that I think really embodies the self-pity, though I think all victims to a certain extent feel badly about themselves. But the quitter will start and then decide it’s too hard. The avoider won’t engage at all. The quitter starts and then stops. And it comes from some misbeliefs: that I’m not capable, that the world is too hard, that the world is fixed, that there’s nothing that I can control.

AUDREY: I loved your example about the music lessons, because most of us have maybe experienced that, or our children have, and we can see the pattern: we do this thing and then it gets hard and we quit. That actually is super helpful, because I was just thinking about two different kids of mine and different experiences that happened in their past when they were in lessons. One kept saying, “I want to stay in, I love it, I’m going to do better next week,” but then didn’t practice. So the avoider: making plans for the future, saying that they want this, but just not digging in and taking control of today. And then in other circumstances a child would sign up and go like mad for a couple of weeks or a couple of months, but it would be unsustainable, or it was just so much harder than they thought it was going to be, and so they would just quit. So I can see the differences. In both cases they’re not showing up for themselves in something that they said they wanted, and not taking responsibility for what they can control and moving forward with something methodical happening. But they did manage an uncomfortable situation differently.

Lindsey: The quitter’s deep fear or anxiety is that they’re going to make a mistake. And they’re so afraid of making a mistake that they’re just going to stop now and then they don’t have to deal with that. So it kind of sounds a little bit like the avoider, and they are similar — they’re all victims. We’re just teasing out some of the little different nuances. But what the quitter needs to know is that they can practice the principles, that they can do the things that they know will work, and wait for the results. They can patiently keep moving forward to the best of their abilities and trust that as they do — as you practice the piano every day — it’s going to get better. It’s going to get easier. Principles will always deliver if you’re persistent.

And the tool for the quitter is that they can practice those baby steps. Sometimes you or your child had this idea that they are going to be the best pianist in the whole world. And they want to be perfect now. And that’s why they get frustrated — because they imagined in their mind that it’s going to be great, that they’re just going to achieve it and it’s going to be easy. They don’t realize the work.

AUDREY: And the child I was thinking of as a quitter — that is so fascinating because that exactly corresponds. They have an idea, they get excited, and it’s too big, it’s too much too soon. They’re not realistic about the process that it’s going to require and the daily choices that have to be made. And then because they’re here and the goal is so far out of reach after a few attempts, it just feels too impossible to get there. So they’re done. They just quit.

Lindsey: Yes. But if we would just remember baby steps. Nobody is going to be the best at anything the first time they try it. Just baby steps. Just putting one foot in front of the other. That’s how we get there. We just have to remember those baby steps.

AUDREY: Oh my goodness, I can totally see that. So we’re getting a little bit low on time. Let’s just run through the rest — give us the titles and just a little bit of context around the rest of these victim types.

Lindsey: Sure. So we talked about the avoider and the quitter. We have the martyr, and I think moms especially relate to this one. The martyr uses suffering as proof of their love or their value. If they’re suffering, then you know that they are a really good person. And I don’t think they’re making it up — I think they actually feel like they’re suffering. But isn’t it kind of like wearing that suffering on your sleeve to garner attention or empathy?

AUDREY: Yeah. Or carrying this chip on her shoulder. “Why am I the only one that cares this much about this thing?” “No one says thank you. No one helps with the dishes.” Which is a way of avoiding responsibility — right? Because to train and educate and organize so that people will participate takes real work.

Lindsey: So the martyr just stews in resentment and self-pity. That’s really one where we see the self-pity come through. And then we have the doormat, which is what it sounds like. The doormat’s fear is conflict. They don’t want it, so they’re an appeaser. We talked about those four reaction types. The doormat is an appeaser. They don’t want the conflict, so they’re just going to appease, which means that they are going to abandon their own boundaries in order to avoid conflict. We just go along to get along. And then they just get walked all over and they start to feel exhausted and hopeless.

AUDREY: And it can make the situation — I guess any of these make the situation — it’s all drama. And like you’ve talked about avoiding responsibility, but I feel like a big part of what all of these victim types are avoiding is the work of thinking and taking responsibility for actual, true problem solving. “I’m going to just not think about it and avoid it.” “I’m just going to give up because it’s too hard.” “I’m just going to lay down on the floor and let everyone take care of me.” “I’m just going to do whatever you think.” These are all ways of avoiding deep pondering and the work of finding truths that could liberate you — of telling yourself the truth.

Lindsey: Victims do not tell themselves the truth. That’s for sure.

AUDREY: Great point. Okay, a couple more.

Lindsey: I may add a few more before our celebration event because I’ve been thinking about these things. But a few more today. We have the dummy. The dummy either fights or freezes, and they’re the ones who don’t feel like they can solve their problem. So they’re inviting a rescuer — somebody come solve this problem for me because I’m not capable of solving it. Or they just want you to stop talking about it. “I don’t know what to do.” End of story. End of conversation.

AUDREY: That actually reminds me of someone. A lot of times when I’ve tried to have problem-solving or root-getting conversations, it’s: “I don’t know” — silence. “I don’t know” — silence. “I don’t know” — silence. That’s a good way of avoiding responsibility. And maybe part of that is — I mean, I think they all have their issues with self-image — but in this particular case, they just don’t see themselves as capable problem solvers.

Lindsey: Yes. And then there was one more, and that is the chameleon. This is an interesting one. The doormat abandons their boundaries to avoid conflict. The chameleon abandons their identity to gain belonging. This is the people-pleasing person. Whatever group they’re in, they assume a different identity to fit in with the group. And the problem with that? They don’t know who they are, and nobody else knows who they are either. How can we interact with each other if nobody knows who you are?

AUDREY: Wow, that’s profound, Lindsey.

AUDREY: While you were talking about this, I just realized that the inverse of this can also be super helpful. Just in those titles alone, women will recognize themselves. But then the next thing they can say is: “And when I do that, I’m being a victim.” And that is so helpful because you recognize that it’s not a helpful or healthy way of being, it’s not where you want to stay. And as you understand these different aspects — the feelings that accompany each type, the truth that goes along with it, and the tools that they need — then if they can identify that behavior and recognize that as a victim way of being, they can walk themselves back out of some of that with those tools.

So as we finish up, what’s the first step? What is something that you recommend that women do when they’re just becoming oriented to these victim types?

Lindsey: Well, I’m going to quote David Emerald. He says — and this is from his book, Three Vital Questions — “This transformation begins by recognizing one’s own drama.” So that is the first step: just to become aware. To know first of all that there’s a victim orientation and a creator orientation, and to name it. Have those things to name it, and then start seeing it. That’s what’s been really fun as I’ve kind of done a deep dive into this material — as I’m in it and I’m thinking about these names, I can see them. I can see them in movies, in books, in relationships, and especially in myself. So that’s what we’re doing in the community right now: trying to develop this awareness so that we can see it more quickly. And then the more quickly you can see it, the faster you can change it.

AUDREY: Wow. That’s powerful. That is awesome.

AUDREY: Well, if you can see — I think anyone listening can see that Lindsey knows her stuff, and she continues to flesh this out. There’s an in-depth training that we did a few months ago that lives in the community. There’s ongoing mentoring in that community. Lindsey, I think you have another training coming up here pretty soon, and all of those are recorded in that community.

But the best part is — if this has been interesting and stimulating to you, if you want to understand it better — we would invite you to sign up for our Mothers of Creation MDM Celebration that will happen September 26th in Provo, Utah, in a beautiful big ballroom hall in a library. We will spend a whole day together talking about all these things in great depth. And leading up to that, the moment that you sign up you will have instant access to that community and to Lindsey. She will answer all your questions. You can watch these past recordings, you can attend this upcoming training, and you can begin to orient yourself around this whole chart — which is available in there. She’s adding to and fleshing it out and improving it all the time. And you can begin to understand and name for yourself how you are showing up in your life as a victim, why you don’t want to do that, and how you can work your way out of it.

Just understanding these victim types is a huge, mega tool set for that. But then at our event in September, we will walk you through the entire framework for going from problem orientation and problem story to being the creator in your own life through disconnecting and reframing that problem story. So we hope that you will join us for all of those things, and we can meet you in September. But again, thank you for joining us. Hopefully understanding a little bit about these victim types has been helpful for all of you, and we will see you next time.