Learn to Dance With Fear, With Kirk Wayman -

The things we fear the most are the things we want the most. Do you agree? In life, fear is inevitable. Therefore, it’s something we should not eliminate, but something we should accept and dance with. In today’s episode, Kirk Wayman joins us to talk about how to conquer your fears, navigate them, and dance with them!

Kirk Wayman is the founder and principal coach of Ikon Coaching, where he creates environments that allow leaders to become the version of themselves that delivers extraordinary value.

Here are some power takeaways from today’s conversation:

The dragon story and how it represents fear
The boundary between confidence and courage
How to conquer your fears
What dancing with fear looks like
What it means to be simple
Kirk’s story of how he danced with his fears
The value of being in a community
How we are all on this hero’s journey

Episode Highlights:

[08:38] The Boundary Between Confidence and Courage

There’s a boundary between confidence and courage – it’s the line of fear. When we cross from our known world into our unknown world, we feel fear. We all feel that sense of foreboding or nervousness and worry. But fear is there to remind us that we are no longer in the land of the known and we’ve entered the unknown. We haven’t done it before. But that’s okay. It scares us, and so, we will make that switch or possibly decide if a switch is worth making. A dragon is a mythological creature that represents fear. Fear is not fatal. It has a pu. It’s to remind us it’s time to switch to courage.

[11:30] The Known vs. The Unknown

There’s a desperate linkage that we can’t undo between the things that scare us the most and the things we want the most. The things we want the most are scary. It’s a measure of meaning and purpose in life. And we want meaning and purpose more than anything else. So the goal is to switch from confidence in the known to the courage that it takes to be out in the “sort of” known by learning how to dance with our fears.

[17:21] Dancing With Your Fears

To dance with fear is to get to a spot where we’re no longer seeking to be fearless. We’re not trying to kill fear, eliminate fear, or use fear as a metric for whether we’re doing the right or wrong thing. Instead, expect fear and each experience is a compass we can use to navigate fear.

Resources Mentioned:

kirk@ikoncoaching.com

www.ikoncoaching.com

www.youtube.com/@ikoncoaching

Transcript

there’s a desperate linkage that we can’t undo between the things that scare us the most and things we want the most
in fact I would suggest to you the things we want the most are by their very definition scary
and what I mean by scary is that’s how much they mean it’s a measure of meaning and purpose in life and we want meaning
and purpose more than anything else I think wow so the goal is to switch from
confidence in the known to the courage that it takes to be out in the sort of known and go after our Gold by learning how to
dance with our dragons hello everyone and welcome to the flow
over fear podcast where it is our mission to help you to rise above fear and realize your ultimate potential in
leadership and life I’m your host Adam Hill and it is my goal to share with you
the human side of high performance my guests share their experience with fear
anxiety struggle Challenge and most importantly despite all of it how they
Rose above it to achieve incredible results so if you’re ready to rise up
let’s get started but welcome to flow over fear everyone thanks for joining us I have a great guest today it’s a guest
that I talk to every two weeks or so because this is my this is my business coach this is the my my coach more so
than business you know he he digs in a lot more than just that this is you know how to live life and run a business and
and I’m really grateful to have him on his name is Kirk Wayman and he runs icon coaching and I’m going to read the very
first sentence that he sent me in his bio because it’s just so so great in how it explains it I’m just going to read it
verbatim he raised in the idyllic forests of Northern California where the stoic redwoods Tower silently over the
Pacific Ocean I found this Lost Coast forged much of my identity I learned the
value of pursuing a simple meaningful and deep existence and that just you
know that’s why he’s my coach Kirk Wayman is the founder and principal coach of Icon coaching where he creates
environments where leaders can become the version of themselves that delivers extraordinary value with more than a
decade of experience in a bevy of past clients with meaningful results he opens
the space to to allow you to find your highest good for the benefit of those that you serve before coaching he was a
business leader an entrepreneur working in business building materials easy for me to say construct production and Land
Development and spent many formative years as a non-profit executive co-founding of family co-founding a
family of businesses using social entrepreneurial model he has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration
with an emphasis in management and an M.A in leadership from Quaker Seminary when not in the office he loves to spend
time Outdoors fly fishing practicing photography and golfing and
it says it cleanses his brain and allows him more time to be the best coach possible for his clients so thanks for
joining us Kirk what a wonderful intro that was thanks for having me Adam that is a testament to the value of hiring a
copywriter so true so true but uh um well I I’m very grateful you’re here
because I’ve I’ve truly gotten a lot of value from you over the last couple years that we’ve worked together and I’m
really grateful that you’re able to share some value today and like any good talk or like any good conversation a
good conversations start with a story and one of the stories that you’ve been known for and one of the stories you’ve
introduced to me is is that is the Dragon Story can you kind of share some of that and give us some context into
what we’re going to talk about today yeah I’d be happy to um
I like to remind people that this story is not true but I think it could be
um a long time ago in what we often call the Middle Ages that time period in northern Europe
where things weren’t going particularly well um do things for sure
first they knew that there was a Known World and an unknown world
and they could map their Known World pretty effectively they could get around they they knew where the edges of it was
and then they’d have to do a little bit of guessing it get a little fuzzy and then there was something beyond that they didn’t know what it was
and so their cartographers would build these maps and they would they were actually brilliant works of art they’re beautiful
and they get all of Northern Europe right in Italy and down in the South and and then they get over the Mediterranean
and then it they didn’t know it was beyond that they knew that there was a Known World and there was an unknown
world the second thing that they knew for sure is that Dragons Were Real
nobody questioned that but what was weird is nobody had ever actually seen one either
and it’s important to know where your dragons are that’s not a thing you want to miss and so the map makers had a
problem like where do we put the dragons and so they would just put them out in the unknown world
so you can actually find some of these old maps that show all the known world and then out in the far reaches where
it’s just blank or empty or they were just guessing they would draw dragons and on the oceans they’d put sea monsters
well over time they kept sending explorers out and they would explore more and more of the unknown world
they’d come back and tell the map makers what they found and so they could draw bigger and bigger worlds and they would
do this over and over but every time they came back they would never talk about dragons they
never ran into them so they learned a third thing there’s a known and unknown world
dragons are real and they live in the unknown world
and so the map makers would just keep moving them they just kept moving them further and further out well eventually
they discovered and we discovered the whole world they’d gone everywhere and they never ran into a dragon
and so we don’t believe in dragons anymore now we believe in aliens which is
probably the same concept but some of the psychologists in the last century began to play with this idea and they
began to describe it as we’ve internalized our dragons we’ve taken them in internal to us
because we have a similar idea in our own minds in our minds we have a mental map or
mind map and it’s mapped to describe our Known World and our unknown world and we all have one
we all have places that we can navigate well relationships cultures business practice
accomplishments failures all these things that we can navigate around and there’s a map in our mind and then of
course there’s places we’ve never been before they are beyond our imagination even we can’t even guess at what they
are and we have internalized our dragons and they live in the unknown world
now let me pause for a minute and just describe what is this Dragon thing
we think dragons represent five things that humans are terrified of
four apex predators and then one natural disaster dragons tend to have
four legs and claws that run in a particular way and those are the the Lions the big cats
they have long necks and long tails the snakes
they have scales and big toothy Jaws that’s the crocodiles and the alligators
and they have huge Wings which is the birds of prey and they breathe fire
and we’re terrified of fire when it gets out of control so we think dragons are nothing more
than a mythological creation of our fear we don’t believe in dragons in fact
anymore we believe in them in myth and those are the kinds of places that
we store deepest truths the difference between confidence and
courage is simply the map in our Known World we get to be
confident we’ve done it before we know if we do this this happens at
least that’s a high probability it will happen we’re confident it’s a nice feeling
but when we navigate beyond our world when we walk off the map
that is a different experience we can’t be confident out there because the dragons start to Roar it’s where they
live now the thing is that line between the known
and the unknown world there’s a boundary there and it’s the boundary between confidence and courage
and it’s the line of fear when we cross from our known world into our unknown world we feel fear we all do
we all feel that sense of foreboding or nervousness and worry and the question is what is that fear for
and what the fear is for is to remind us that we are no longer in the land of the known that we’ve entered the unknown and
that we cannot be confident out here we haven’t done it before but that’s okay
so what the dragon is there to do is to remind us of that it Roars it scares us
so that we will make that switch or possibly decide if it’s a switch worth making not everything
there are many things we are scared of that we are supposed to be square scared of we’re not supposed to go out there or
at least not yet so the dragon roars it’s this mythological creature that
represents fear and the fear is not fatal it’s for something it’s to remind us it’s time to switch to
courage but what we’re actually doing is entering this murky land between the known and the unknown that’s what we
might call the sort of known and the goal of of high performance the
goal of development the goal of leadership the goal of the entrepreneur is to actually cross that line and make
the sort of known known for the benefit of others and then the dragons move because
dragons always live in the unknown once the world becomes known the dragon moves because it’s not needed anymore and then
we do it again and again and again and again and over time we grow our map and
our Dragon just keeps moving hmm now there’s one more piece to the Met to
the myth that I think is the most fascinating and it kind of it’s kind of revealing that
we don’t even notice it many of us just watched the movie a number of years ago um The Hobbit and in The Hobbit It’s a
classic Dragon Story there’s smog the dragon and he’s all the scary things oh yeah
but what’s interesting is smog and most dragons hoard gold
but why in the world does a dragon need gold for
we don’t ask that question when we go watch these stories it doesn’t even dawn us it is self-evident to us at least
subconsciously why dragons hoard gold and it’s because the thing that scares us the most in the world is always
guarding the thing we want the most those two ideas are generally connected
when we’re going after something that we haven’t done before something we say we really really want
it’s always got a dragon sitting on top of it because we can’t go get it without
courage and the dragon’s There To Remind us this journey is probably going to be hard
but worth it so dragons hold gold because there’s a
desperate linkage that we can’t undo between the things that scare us the most and things we want the most in fact
I would suggest to you the things we want the most are by their very definition scary
um and what I mean by scary is that’s how much they mean it’s a measure of meaning and purpose in life and we want
meaning and purpose more than anything else I think wow so the goal is to switch from
confidence in the known to the courage that it takes to be out in the sort of known and go after our Gold by learning how to
dance with our dragons and they will move and in time I think we learn how to lead
that dance and I think that might be a way of describing how I have experienced the
word flow it’s that the dance is now I know these steps to this
and there’s a way in which I think you might even be able to achieve a confidence in our ability to make the
Unknown Known even though we can never have confidence in the unknown itself
so lady and I love how you say leading the dance there and that’s that’s why I want to introduce it with the dragon
story because it’s such a perfect description of our fears and how how they’re represented it it it outlines
and and you know the the drag and you point out that the dragon moves yeah but
you never say that the dragon leaves that’s right right so you I don’t think we conquer dragons I don’t think we slay
dragons I don’t think we um I don’t think we eliminate them I
think we move them and I think if you can identify Your Dragon you’ll discover that that Dragon shows
up over and over and over I don’t think we Face new dragons I think we just moved them in fact I think it’s
important to build a relationship with that dragon he’s there for something
it often has something very important to teach us yeah that’s um yeah no it’s it’s it’s a
powerful story and and how did you so where did you hear this story or is this
a story that you’ve kind of come up with or or is it something that you’ve heard somewhere or where’s it from it’s an
amalgamation of a variety of pieces that I’ve heard different places um it starts in a book it’s a little
comment in a book uh by a guy named Brian Mclaren years and years ago and he just uses the phrase there be dragons
and it turns out that phrase was initially engraved in Latin on some of the first globes that were ever made
because it was the transition from the map makers into globemakers and they were copper Globes you had to engrave
and it’s just too hard to engrave a full Dragon so they just put in Latin therapy dragons yeah that line has emerged and
there’s movies and books that have used that line before inside of jungian psychology you’ll get
the idea of the monsters that have moved inside of us um Jordan Peterson has done work around
dragons he has a bit that he does about it um and there’s there’s actually some books that have
been written about the mythology of dragons throughout the globe because you find dragons in most cultures they’re not always precisely the same mythology
but they they have the same characteristics and so in culture after culture after culture there’s dragons
and it’s largely thought or at least supposed that it’s around this idea of
the mythology of fear and it’s very necessary for societies for cultures to
understand how fear works and how to dance with it and what it’s for and where it lives and so we build we build
mythological truths to store our our highest and our highest truths are held
in our mythologies yeah and it’s it’s fascinating to me how how a lot of these ideas I mean in even talking about
dragons they’re not new I mean dragons no have existed in in folklore from the
you know from ancient China to you know well that’s as far back as I can
remember but that’s that is a long way back it’s a long way back yeah but you know a lot of these things that we’re
talking about like Rising above or or going Beyond or dancing with our fears they’re not new Concepts but they’re
things that we’ve we’ve wrestled with are in in through generations and so I
love how you put it that we we eventually we learn you know as we’re as the dragons continue to move we learn to
dance with them so can you kind of expand on what dancing with fear might look like yeah
I think a lot of um I think it’s first held in this and and what it’s not like
and that is the brand Fearless or the notion that you could become Fearless right there’s um Taylor Swift
has a song called fearless and and if you listen to it it’s just darling wouldn’t that be nice if she was
right about that um there’s and there’s a variety of other kinds of Brands and books and things that’ll capture this idea of
fearlessness because I think we desperately want to be Fearless and there’s a season of our life when maybe
we even feel a bit invincible and so it resonates and that’s fine over time though I think it’s incredibly valuable
to get past that um that is is largely the hope that we
can live a life um free of failure I would say and failures are many deaths
and death is the ultimate fear I think I think that’s a driving fear the Death Drive ideas
um and so we’re trying to deal with that so in time I think we come to a spot where we have to come to terms with fear
um and I think for some people it creates the the um the slowing down or possibly the end
of growth we have grown enough we have faced enough fear and we get to this place where we’re like this is good and
the truth is this often is good it’s fine um to dance with fear I think of that as
being to lead that dance is to get to a spot where we’re no longer seeking to be Fearless we’re not trying to kill fear
we’re not trying to eliminate fear we’re not using fear as a metric for uh if I’m doing the right thing or the wrong thing
it’s that we expect it it becomes a norm an experience that we
have of um that might even be like a compass even I
think you can actually navigate by fear uh the question to turn fear into a compass
I think you have to ask another question is this thing I’m moving towards actually scary
um and I think it takes some wisdom to figure that out so I think to build the practice of being able to dance with
fear effectively it just takes time because you have to learn is this thing actually scary because if it’s not
actually scary and I’m feeling fear I think you can use that and that’s
often the invitation to move towards it um if it is actually scary
and wisdom is telling you that I think you can take action and it’s run away and I think there are things where you
you learn get away from that that’s really really dangerous sure um or at least dangerous for now
so to dance with fear I think is to be able to use fear as a tool to understand what it’s for and it actually can
motivate or help us navigate and and teach us what to do next
um yeah so yeah I think and I like that
idea of using it as a tool because we are often times I mean I mean a lot of
times we’re very either or on this that you know you have to either avoid fear altogether you know just stop being stop
being afraid we’ve heard that in our vernacular over the course of the last few years or you know or you know rise
above it but there’s never this in between that fear is always can always be useful it can either be telling us
well we need to avoid that bear over there that’s probably not a good idea to go face that fear right now or we could
or we could you know rise above it or or look at it as a signal to where we’re pushing against our comfort zone and
actually move the dragon so to speak so I I I I I get a lot from that I resonate
a lot with that that using fear is a tool um I I would love to kind of take a step
back and kind of dig in a little bit to your story here too and find out what a what brought you into this world
of of coaching and this world of wanting to help people in business and and that sort of thing because just to to
articulate that first sentence you know where where you’re learning uh to live the uh to and value the the meaning of a
simple meaningful uh and deep existence first of all what does that mean to you
um simple is a overly used word I think
it’s a very difficult thing to accomplish and many people who are living very simply are not living without intent or
passion or purpose um but they have de-complicated their lives
um they’re living with great intent and they’re often highly productive and um
so simple doesn’t mean um I I don’t know a better a better more
descriptive word without going on for hours but it’s it’s it’s more like focused
um meaningful is the I think meaning is probably the thing most people are
looking for in life meaning and purpose that kind of a thing um I think there are things deeper than meaning I think we have we are invited
into the production of meaning itself um and I’ve been on that Journey for for
my whole adult life as many of us have and then as I began to play with those ideas finding a mechanism through which
I could share them right that was a large Drive um the depth idea is
if you think about the idea of originality the goal to be original often means
doing something at The Fringe or boundary of The Human Experience doing something new that’s where the dragons
live right exactly and I think there’s a a way in which that is what’s going on
and people are doing things that you could say well that’s original but what’s interesting is in the word
original is the word origin we use that word to mean the exact opposite in other contexts which means
to do something that is from the origin of all things fundamental foundational
and so there’s a way in which to go out and play on the boundaries and to play out in that place of new uh I think it’s
best done if you’re doing it if your Center holds um and I think the center is doing
things that are deep and what I mean by deep is they are the things that humans have always done
can we find the place of origin thought
um can we find the things that have resonated throughout the Human Experience over all time and then find new and interesting ways to deploy that
and so there’s a depth that I think is super necessary super interesting that I’m fascinated by that then allows us to
use the word safe or uh to live on the edges in meaningful ways
and so I’m trying to do both simultaneously I don’t know that that’s the goal
um but that’s where the depth comes from and I find that when we’re able to do that we end up focusing which I think is
a more simple life I think we end up being building more meaning structures
in our life that are more long-term more valuable over time so it requires this idea of playing on
the edges Innovation creativity but from a place of depth I see so it starts with
it’s it’s it starts with depth like we have to go deep first before well I think it’s kind of a both and I think in
many other many of the reasons that I’m attempting to find depth is because playing on the edge without it wasn’t safe but if you’re only finding depth
without ever testing it on the edges maybe that’s boring right you know yeah
well so where at this time in your in your journey are you finding that depth what are you finding that depth in
um I’m actually in a in a liminal space between two things for the last
uh probably decade or so um I was finding it in a lot of our
coaching work a lot of our framework is built on three different um fields of study we spent a lot of
time in Psychology philosophy and then theology
um and we kind of mixed those three things together and so the pursuit of depth for me was reading and working in
those fields and or exploring those things so I went to grad school to do that that was part of that journey I did
a lot of the Theology and philosophy work there and then have been exploring psychology and reading what people way
smarter than me have said about all these things and then looking for themes throughout time where people keep saying
the same thing over and over and over and then seeing if I can integrate that um
the so I’ve consumed a lot of content over the last decade um reading books videos just anybody I
get my hands on um at the moment that isn’t feeding me the same way and I’ve been exploring
what the new version of that will be how to continue to to work out the depth and
what I think I’m doing right now is exercising those muscles so I think I’m
in more of a building doing phase um than I have been in the past last 10
years I’ve been just sort of I’ve been by myself as a working in a freelance model and just trying to get as deep as
I can and there’s a limit to how deep I can go um I think that’s a self-declaration of limits huh
right yeah limiting belief right yeah right there um but right now what I’m trying to what
we’re doing and have been working on the last couple years is we’re building out a team and we’re looking at ways of of going more broad
um and so I’m spinning it’s interesting as we’re talking about this I’m realizing I’m actually spending
less time in the depth and more time at the edges of what I’ve done so far so
I see yeah and and I see a lot of of content that you put out too because you’ve got a very active YouTube channel
yeah uh which I I uh I have here I can promote it’s uh YouTube uh at Icon
coaching on YouTube and uh that’s with a K by the way um and yeah a lot of great content a lot
of great shorts if you if you want to look at some great content that’s that’s the place to go is that kind of where
you’re operating on the fringes right now and getting a little more deeper there yeah a little bit we’re learning
how to take our framework and deliver it in uh content kind of trying to become
content creators I’ve spent zero time over the last couple decades building platform and all that stuff um it wasn’t
I just wasn’t concerned with that yeah so that’s a that’s more of a long-term
play over over ideas I have for the next three to five years of work
um right now what we’re doing is we’re I’ve got a team of this team of three of us coaches and one consultant and we’re
working on expanding that in the in the process of doing that what I’m what I’m trying to do is build a team
that can think with me because there’s the idea of you can only go so far alone and if you want to go a long ways like I
could I could move fast before but now I’m trying to move far and I’m I feel as
though I’ve come to the end of what I can actually accomplish well by myself and so we’re we’re playing together as a
team and it’s been great it’s in this last year it has solidified
um and we’re able to now we’re actually building products and new deliverables and Consulting packages and and things
like that that’s great yeah and it’s it’s it’s definitely showing in the years that I’ve been with you you could
see the Evolution for sure and and especially with the content and you know I’m interested in you know kind of where
you know that that that element of fear it’s it’s a big uh you know it’s a big part of your message and what you share
is because I mean you know entrepreneurs business people they operate on those fringes where the dragons are that’s
right and and so fear is a big part of that and you’ve had that own your own experiences with you know having to deal
with the fear and and kind of learning about that learning how to dance with that through your own experiences I know
you know you had some early near grief experiences and and Trauma can you kind
of share a little bit about that yeah yeah um I did grow up in a in a pretty idyllic
place in the world and nothing really bad had ever happened to me not really
um it was pretty great I end up getting married um married married a girl I met in
seventh and eighth grade and it was it was just wonderful and then
about six years into marriage we decided to start a family we had our first son um and I had a earth-shattering like
meaning structure shattering experience where he was born and we all have
the image of what that’s supposed to look like and it did not look like that at all and he was uh
he was born and pretty quickly got was born little tiny hospital they couldn’t
handle what happened and so they called up UCSF out of San Francisco flew up in airplanes and took him away so six hours
into his life he’s gone and we don’t know what’s wrong and uh it begins and
he ended up having open heart surgery at three days old um and
you know that by itself was just this um like I still feel those feelings of
the uncertainty of it all that we were shoved I did not choose to walk across the fear line in that experience I had
no mental map for how to navigate this I had a social worker sit with me the
night he was born and just looked me in the eye and say I need you to know this isn’t normal
because I didn’t know where I was I’d lost context
um so we didn’t get to hold him for the first 20 something days we finally bring
him home he’s he’s a cardiac kid now we’re in the constant care of a cardiac unit out of San Francisco and at six
months old he had another surgery at about four months old and then at six months old he had his second open heart surgery because they discovered he had a
lung disease too and it’s a disease that is used to be correlated with his heart condition and they’ve pretty much
stopped it they’ve figured it out so it was kind of a big bloat even the doctors that he had this lung problem as
well and it turns out the lung problem is terminal and so we had to sit with our doctors
and have the conversation of your son is going to die from this disease we don’t know how to fix it when it we don’t know
what to do well not that they didn’t know what to do but they just it’s Progressive it just keeps getting worse
about the best we can do is slow it down and so at that point we’re going home with a son that’s gonna die in the next
10 or 20 years um and we lived with that lots of hospital visits
um for for about 10 years and about 10 years into that Journey we
had a very surprise event which would take too long to describe the whole thing right now but
um they called us in after doing a heart catheterization which is where they test
everything um and they call us in and they’re all
his whole team is there the nurse practitioners about four doctors these people we’ve been journeying with for
years and they wanted to be together to deliver good news because they they said we never get to deliver good news
and they told us it’s better he didn’t get worse this time he’s better
and so then another six months later they ran the same test again and he was still better at that point they told us
he’s not terminal anymore this isn’t what’s going to kill him um which I always make the comment that
when you go from being terminal all you’ve done is up the upgrade is to mortal like you’re still gonna die we just
don’t know what you’re gonna die from anymore yeah so and it turns out that’s a sizable upgrade yeah right um so then
we had to make that we had to make this transition out of that and the healing process being able to to sit with the
pain of that whole 10-year experience get to the other side of it um it had wreaked um it had been like a
wrecking that’s too strong of a metaphor it had been it had hurt our marriage our marriage my wife and my marriage had
been impacted that’s a better word for it sure buy that whole experience we had some rebuilding to do we our our sense
of how the world works and what matters and where meaning comes from and what are we safe and I mean we had had this
brush with death and we’d lived with a perpetual
um it was like having death in your house all the time and but not actually experiencing it
um so he’s 22 now and uh doing great he still has the lung condition but it’s
managed it’s under control it’s if you met him today you’d never know any of this that ever happened
but that became an experience of prolonged trauma deep
fear and it it was a shattering experience it was the worst thing that has ever
happened to me and I think that’s a special category that’s a special place
and until it’s happened there’s nothing there right right
um it’s what we call suffering and my wife and I together suffered that
Journey and suffering is something that either suffering is something that either makes
you or breaks you and it takes time quite a bit of time to figure out which
um but I learned in that process I wouldn’t say I learned I began to ask
different kinds of questions and I began to have to deal with fear primarily the fear of death
I began to Ponder those kinds of questions and did my current understanding of how the world worked
where where the good was could it could it sustain me through
that experience um did it work and in some ways it
didn’t and I had to adjust I had to to go deeper and of myself and begin to think
about these ideas and it turns out my brain and who I am loves to think about these ideas so right I went on the
journey and so is that was that Journey alone or did you go on it with your wife or was
it was it something that you had to go through together how did that yeah we we did it differently but we did it
together we stayed connected through the whole through the experience um her journey is it is different in
meaningful ways from mine but we also did it in community we have
people around us that were part of that um
it’s not something I would want to do alone sure at all we had a
um we had some anchor points that I think really served us well as we walked
through that but what I learned was it was interesting as as I started to have this experience and I started to have
something in this sort of room in my mind called the worst thing that’s ever happened to me I began to hear other
people’s stories other people started to share their worst thing that’s ever happened to them
and these are people I might have known for a while but they had never shared that story with me
and I began to ponder the idea that oh they weren’t I wouldn’t have understood it but now
that I’ve joined this group of suffering right there’s a solidarity amongst those who have suffered and suffered well and
we share stories together and I was like oh I’m being invited into this experience and then strangers sometimes
we for a while we had a baby that was on oxygen and if you have a baby on oxygen everybody knows something terrible has
happened yeah and so people would come up and they would they would share their story with me they wouldn’t lead with
people say some of the dumbest things sometimes in the face of suffering yeah and that didn’t happen What would happen
is they would share their story and I found that incredibly meaningful and I
began to understand that everybody eventually has something in
that room and while they well they’re not all objectively the same you can actually
rank trauma or suffering there are some things that are objectively worse than
other things but once it crossed some kind of threshold into the worst thing that’s ever happened to me they’re subjectively somehow all the
same yeah and we collectively have these experiences where say the universe
punches Us in the face or we come to grips with the dread of existence as the
existentialists say and we have to figure out what to do with that and I think great entrepreneurs great
leaders the Elders of our community people of wisdom I think they’ve learned what to do with
that and then they can become guides to help guide others through that process
I I just think people that are faster at moving into the unknown and making it
known have a tendency to have significant impact influence in our lives they change the
world yeah but it’s the crossing of that fear boundary that’s actually involved
the learning to dance with our fear of death with our mortality with allowing our meaning structures to
somewhat crumble in front of us and keep going so it’s it’s a I am thank you for
sharing that with with us in the audience because I think there’s a lot of people that can struggle with that and one of the common themes that comes
up in all of these conversations I have and all of the interviews that I’ve had with people who have achieved great
things or overcome things uh difficult things has been the sense of community of finding that tribe of people or or
that Mentor or that group that can you know help them through that way and
that’s you know what you’re saying sounds almost counterintuitive that that other people sharing their versions of
their suffering with you while you’re suffering it sounds like you know at least if I were to approach somebody
who’s suffering I would feel uh odd about uh saying you know something about
my story but um but there’s power in that sharing of that story it sounds like you’re you’re
saying so um yeah and and if you don’t mind me asking how um how was your son’s reaction to
all this did did he know he was terminal how did how is he working through this
yeah it um his story is very different than ours um we uh the the you know his birth is
the beginning of it for us he came or became aware of it over time and uh we
had a conversation one time where he gets this all these tests and all this stuff and and
um he started to ask me very uh different kinds of questions one time we’re down at the hospital together my
wife and our other son were at home and and he just looks at me and goes Dad what’s what’s my number
and he I interpreted that as he was asking about lifespan for the first time and we didn’t have a
number for that he didn’t we didn’t have a specific answer so I didn’t have to tell him a specific thing but I watched
him start to wrestle at that point with this whole concept kind of for the first time and it’s a it’s a age-appropriate
time in his life to do that but it was an awful experience of having to hand him this super ugly thing
this difficult thing you just have to hand it to him and let him start to carry the weight of his of this reality
for him or what seemed to be the reality and it was just about that time that we got the news that they were taking
terminal off the table and so we were starting to get the best news of his life so far but he was just starting to
wrestle with the worst news of his life so far and he had to walk through that whole process took a couple years
um maybe longer for him to actually go through the whole valley of the experience before he was able to start
to rise back into but I’m not terminal anymore so it it hit him I would say very
differently um but we had oh
it’s a great advice from our our doctors there’s pediatric cardiologists that’s this is what they do they walk through this kind of stuff with families sure
um they were great they encouraged us to begin to process this with a much younger than I would have wanted to
um because you want to protect them right right you don’t want to have to carry this big bowl of ugly yeah that’s
a difficult thing to have to you know really you know work through with with your kids I couldn’t even imagine having
to to work through that but uh if if you had a piece of advice for somebody
that’s just starting to go through that process or go through that kind of grief or that longer term fear that they
didn’t ask for what would you what would you say to him
um it’s interesting that when we were leaving the hospital for the first time we’d been down there for about three
weeks um as we were it was a center where they do this particular surgery and so they fly people in from all over the place
and so as we were leaving there was another family just arriving it was uncanny we didn’t say anything we
didn’t talk to him but we knew who they were and we walked by them and I saw
what I had looked like three weeks ago and it was just Ashen face just yeah
completely decentered and undone and confused and lost and sad and
and I didn’t feel that way anymore um I still felt bad but I didn’t feel
that bad I had mapped it a bit and I think that’s
one of the things that draws us through this is first of all there is no around these experiences
um you just have to go through it and you just keep moving
you’re not going to move fast necessarily but if you just keep moving and sometimes it doesn’t feel like you’re even moving
but that’s part of the experience um secondly is it’s very very difficult
to do these things alone yeah um and you don’t know when they’re gonna happen
but they’re going to happen um I would say that the only thing for
certain that you can guarantee everybody will experience in life is suffering
everybody will have a moment of some kind where the worst thing that
ever happened to you will happen and you don’t want to be alone
um and because you can’t plan it you have to be oh there’s a way in which you
always have to be prepared for it so being in community building relationships that matter
um is probably the second thing is that you’ll just it it’s necessary probably
The Human Experience entirely but certainly for the moments of suffering sure um the third is
to do the work consistently which I don’t mean every day but be in the constant process of
evaluating and upgrading upgrading your meaning structures
your world view the your belief systems from which you operate because all the
little things that break along the way all the little hardships that we have that are they’re very important and they
teach us but one of the things that we want to do with them is learn what in our belief system is reliable valuable
works and what can be upgraded um but sometimes what we do is we we
develop a point of view or a way of navigating the world um maybe somewhat early in our life and
it might work for a time but then we think we have it figured out and we don’t do the work to consistently
upgrade it we just camp on that we just stay there and it actually won’t carry us through
some of these harder things but if you’re constantly doing the work
to find the most meaningful things to believe the the things that have worked
for humans over well the whole of The Human Experience if you can find them
constantly be upgrading those finding new mindsets new ways of being in the world new things new core belief systems
then when you get punched in the face by the universe you’ll have a better chance of having it be an experience you can
get through wow so just yeah kind of like the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset kind
of attitude Etc that’s that’s uh that’s powerful um and and
you know how would if if you’d say now now given you know there’s been 20 years
since this experience you’re now you know thriving as a coach You’re Building A Team you’re doing all these great
things what are what are you know what is one what are one or two of the best experiences you’ve had since that moment
like the greatest experience you’ve had ah
probably huh there’s so many directions I could take that
um that’s why I asked them yeah I know that’s always you know you’ve asked a great question when someone goes that’s
a good question um one of them would probably be the transition into my 40s where I
um I felt it actually happened right I was in the construction world and I
lived through the 2008 crash which decimated the construction world I mean everything we were doing just fell apart
it was awful wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to me it was bad and anybody in
that in that field at that time experienced much the same thing oh yeah I was in that field as well yeah no well
yeah it was just everything fell apart yeah just yeah um and I had to figure out what to do
next and and that began a journey of me deciding
it was time to actually make a a very intentional choice about career Direction until that point I’d kind of
been following my nose a bit I’d been following what I was good at what would people pay me for what could I figure
out that kind of thing but I’d figured out a bunch of stuff and it was a refining process allowed me to begin to
dialogue about what is it the thing well I I would ask the question or I was asked it what’s the hill you’re willing
to die on right what’s that because I wasn’t quite on it yet
um and what I learned is that statement is not a statement of willing it’s actually what hill are you going to die
on um and I I engaged that about that time and
I went back to grad school which is something I’d wanted to do for quite a while I tried a couple times but it just
either didn’t work or the timing wasn’t right but I did that and that experience um doing a I did a master’s in
leadership at a Quaker Seminary up in Portland Oregon it was just transformational it was
fabulous it was well timed in my life um and I got to I got to sit with myself
for about four years and just really go as deep as I could and I would call that a very
transformational experience um I used that time to actually develop the
framework from which I coach now and that’s when I launched the coaching business um
so I found that as a very significant high point that has
surprisingly it surprised me how meaningful that was it felt like a huge risk at the time in retrospect it now
seems obvious yeah that’s one another one is
um my childhood was organized around a particular River in a particular place in the world
um my my dad mom would take us up there and it became one of those
Origins stories to my existence and those those years are so impactful so
meaningful to me that I actually had to not go there for about 15 years to
to somewhat separate myself from it I didn’t know I was doing that
but I just couldn’t be there I didn’t know who I was without it right something like that and I needed to in
some way transcend it I guess and one day it’s on the coast of Northern California and one day my family and I
were driving down the coast and I happened to pull into this road that has an Overlook of it I say hey let’s go
check it out and so we drove up there first time in maybe 15 years and I stared at it for a minute and I was
shocked it was still there like it wasn’t there in my heart anymore
but it had been there the whole time I could have come back at any time but I wouldn’t
and uh that year I started to come back and now we make I make multiple trips over there a year and I’m back at this
favorite place um again so both the having a a childhood
experience there walking away from it and then being able to come back it’s a return home but I’m a very different
person um but in some way when I’m standing on that beach I’m the same person I always
was there’s an interplay there that I’ve just found incredible in the last five years as I’ve been returning to this
place that’s incredible yeah so yeah it’s it’s just a realization of your transformation like in this when you
bring yourself back to that environment of childhood um that’s a that’s a powerful uh way and
maybe that’s something that the listeners can take from that is if if you have a place where you can bring
your new self to your old self right just show your old self what you become there may be some power in that
it is uh it’s my little mini version of another mythological story called the
hero’s journey and we all probably know about that but it’s the it’s the
Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey tells that’s one of the classic stories that is this archetype and Odysseus has to
leave home and go face all the challenges of the world go face all the monsters in the Cyclops and the sirens
and all that stuff but eventually returns home and that’s how the hero’s journey works is there’s a way and
there’s a way in which we are all on that hero’s journey that’s why it resonates so well with us and that’s why
so many stories all the movies we go see there it’s just a hero’s journey being told over and over and over and it resonates with us because we’re
all on that journey and that was my version of it and I didn’t even know I was doing it but this this idyllic
origin story in my mind um I had to leave it and I went out and
had to face building a career and the hardships and Trauma Trials of getting married and working out of marriage and
then this whole story with my son and and then one day I was able to return home
but until then I couldn’t I wasn’t ready and suddenly I was it was weird and when
I come back people don’t know me there I’m not recognized um
but it’s it’s home yeah and in the midst of that it’s it’s uh
yeah and in the midst of that you’re building successful businesses and all those trails and all those kinds of things you’re just doing all of these
great things and yeah and and now the value that you’re adding to the world is
in you know one leader at a time you know you’re offering this you’re
coaching people to bring out that you know go deep and and uh and and bring
that life to them as well and you’ve done that with me and I’m very grateful for that because we’ve walked through a
lot of of these kinds of trials in my business and and my career and and all
of these kinds of things so uh so with icon coaching what are you uh what’s
you’ve talked about what you’re working through next you know you’re kind of building some more platforms and things like that uh how can people get in touch
with you how can you how can people start to work with icon yeah that’s great
um there’s a couple ways to do it you can go to iconcoaching.com it’s ikoncoaching.com although I will tell
you that website’s under construction and so while it’s still functional it’s it’s uh in Decline
um you can check us out at YouTube um just search icon coaching um or you can email me my email is Kirk
iconcoaching.com um and we’ll get you connected to our framework and our system
um so that’s how you get a hold of us the um the work we do is
it’s I’ve spent 10 or 12 years um not well leadership development success
literature the coaching Frameworks are um they’re not that complicated they’re
um I don’t think they’re that complicated they we’ve kind of worked out how this process works and and all
the different coaching systems in the world are basically structured around similar questions
um the the problem though is while it’s not complicated to understand it’s really
difficult to implement it’s really difficult to do it and so a lot of what coaching is a lot of what we do is just
walk with people through the process of doing it so we have a framework that we’re operating from and and a
a position or a point of view on the coaching work itself what I’m super proud of is the depth at
which we’re able to navigate these complex systems that people create in
their lives and help them navigate through those in a way where they can really bring meaning and purpose back to
work so that’s largely and and the ability to
now do that um through a team is actually exciting to me I’ve been at capacity for years and so for the for
the first time in a number of years we actually have capacity again yeah and actually we’re actually taking new clients and uh so we’re excited about
that that’s great well that that’s some good news for the listeners here is that you have some capacity to take on some
new clients because I speak from experience it’s been a great experience you’ve walked through me through some significant trials and transformations
in and uh challenges in my business that you know about very well yeah and um and
I’m grateful for it and uh so uh so we’ll put the email the website all that
good stuff in the show notes Kirk I’m very grateful that you joined us today um thank you for sharing your wisdom
your story and uh and some of uh some of the things that uh our listeners can get
value from and I look forward to seeing you soon and everybody out there thanks for joining us and we’ll catch you next
time thanks hey everyone Thanks for tuning in to the flow over fear podcast if you’d like to
learn more about getting into flow and learn the foundations of flow I have a free video series on my website at
www.adamcliffordill.com called the foundations of flow feel free to go
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thank you