Join us on a journey of self-discovery, resilience, and transformation with our remarkable guest, Athena Johnson. Athena, a lifelong learner fascinated by cosmology, quantum physics, and consciousness, shares her inspiring story of growing up in Minnesota, braving the corporate world in the former Soviet Union, and the joys and challenges of being a transgender woman.
This episode dives into Athena's raw and profound reflections on her family history, the mining work of her grandfather, and her own internal explorations. You'll hear her discuss her experience of growing up in a dysfunctional household, the process of coming to terms with her transgender identity, and how she navigated trauma to find her true self. Athena's insights on the importance of emotional intelligence and vulnerability in leadership are thought-provoking and illuminating.
Athena also courageously touches on the societal challenges she faced when she came out as a transgender person in her workplace. She talks about her traumatic brain injury, the impact it had on her life, and her decision to live authentically. Athena's reflections on the interconnectedness of all beings, the courage required to transform suffering, and the power of being who you truly are, are deeply inspiring. This episode is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and a dose of wisdom, healing, and inspiration you won't want to miss.
https://bamboolab3.com/
Join us on a journey of self-discovery, resilience, and transformation with our remarkable guest, Athena Johnson. Athena, a lifelong learner fascinated by cosmology, quantum physics, and consciousness, shares her inspiring story of growing up in Minnesota, braving the corporate world in the former Soviet Union, and the joys and challenges of being a transgender woman.
This episode dives into Athena's raw and profound reflections on her family history, the mining work of her grandfather, and her own internal explorations. You'll hear her discuss her experience of growing up in a dysfunctional household, the process of coming to terms with her transgender identity, and how she navigated trauma to find her true self. Athena's insights on the importance of emotional intelligence and vulnerability in leadership are thought-provoking and illuminating.
Athena also courageously touches on the societal challenges she faced when she came out as a transgender person in her workplace. She talks about her traumatic brain injury, the impact it had on her life, and her decision to live authentically. Athena's reflections on the interconnectedness of all beings, the courage required to transform suffering, and the power of being who you truly are, are deeply inspiring. This episode is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and a dose of wisdom, healing, and inspiration you won't want to miss.
https://bamboolab3.com/
Hello and welcome to the Bamboo Lab podcast with your host, Peak Performance Coach, Brian Bosley. Are you stuck on the hamster wheel of life, spinning and spinning but not really moving forward? Are you ready to jump off and soar? Are you finally ready to sculpt your life? If so, you've landed in the right place. This podcast is created and broadcast just for you, All of you strivers, thrivers and survivors out there. If you'd like to learn more about Brian and the Bamboo Lab, feel free to reach out to explore your true peak level at wwwbamboolab3.com.
Speaker 2:All right, everyone, welcome to today's show. I appreciate each and every one of you for tuning in today. Today we have such an amazing guest. I had the opportunity to meet Athena via phone last week. We talked for a solid hour. This is the first time, folks, I've ever talked to somebody after an hour and said to this person I love you. I got off the phone and I thought why the hell did I say this to a person I've never met in person and only spent 60 minutes ever talking to? And it was because I think you'll pick up on this of why I said that today. Just an amazing human being.
Speaker 2:So today, folks, we have Athena Johnson on today, and Athena comes from Minnesota originally, was raised there in Minnesota, and I'm sorry I'm having a little bit of technical issue here, folks, there we go. She got her bachelor's degree in 1982 in Russian at Williams College. She wanted to fight the Cold War, so she worked in the former Soviet Union, principally in Georgia, armenia and Azerbaijan, for the State Department. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, she came back and got her NBA in 1998 from Cornell University. So she's a pretty smart, she's wicked smart, as they say. She worked for SC Johnson in Ukraine and Russia setting up sales and distribution systems. And now she is celebrating a 25-year career with one of my favorite companies, ameriprize Financial, the last 10 years as the senior director of operations for a key business line.
Speaker 2:She's a lifelong learner with a special passion for cosmology and quantum physics and the intersection with consciousness. So do you think, folks, that we're not going to get her back for a second episode of Talk About Just that Subject? We are. She's a martial artist. She's a mother of two amazingly beautiful daughters, ages 21 and 18. And over her career and her life, she's come full circle. Now she's back in the state of Minnesota, living in Cathedral Hill neighborhood out of St Paul, so I am so excited to have her on here. So, my new friend who, for the first time ever, after 60 minutes, I said I love you to someone, athena Johnson, welcome to the Bamboo Lab podcast.
Speaker 3:What an honor and thank you for that introduction. I felt very much the same way with you. It's the heart to heart connection that I felt we had in our hour time together.
Speaker 2:Well, I got to tell you I was very happy when you said I love you too, back, because a lot of people could take that the wrong way.
Speaker 3:Well, we are all humans here on this planet and I think our role and our job is supposed to be to lift each other up and walk each other home.
Speaker 2:Increase the sense of self worth of others. That's the God Absolutely right. So, by the way, bamboo Pack, I'll let you know we, both Athena and I, are both fighting off colds, so you might hear a lot of sniffling and clearing our throats, and maybe we talk a little bit nasally today, but we're powering through, so all right. So, athena, I got to really I felt like I got to know you pretty well in our conversation and then we got to spend several minutes before we started recording today. So, but can you please share with me more and also share with the Bamboo Pack a little bit about yourself, your childhood, where you're from, what or who inspired you growing up?
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure. So when Borne and I, my father was a graduate student at University of Iowa, but that was short lived and moved to Minnesota when I was like two or three years old so grew up in those like no Hopkins it's a little suburb of the Twin Cities off the West Side and grew up in a pretty dysfunctional household, which I will, I think, get to in a little bit, as it sort of forms. A lot of who I am and the work that I've done to be who I am now was a result of a pretty significant childhood trauma. I will go to the person that inspired me my most, most of my child, excuse me is my grandfather, who was just a dignificent human being, grew up during, actually went to the Minnesota School of Mining during the Great Depression, graduated from there Obviously didn't get a job in 1931, so went out last to pan for gold and I've got a very big picture of him panning for gold on my bedroom wall as an honor to him.
Speaker 3:And one of the things that I so admired about him was he grew up in a time when manhood was defined, you know, very specifically, and there was, you know, one of the definitions certainly is we're supposed to be impervious to emotion.
Speaker 3:We're not supposed to feel things. And what I found with him was he saw me more than anyone else saw me. I felt that, you know, he looked into my eyes and he could see my soul and I looked into his eyes and I could see his soul, whereas everyone else around me and my family system was so I don't always say involved in their own dysfunction that, you know, I was simply just, you know, sort of an afterthought or sometimes a nuisance, but with him it was just a presence of grace and I knew he felt the same with me. So you know, as I think about the error that he grew up in, but his ability to be kind and compassionate and loving and have that be a definition of manhood for him, I think it's what manhood should be defined as and anyway really admired his feeling, the sunshine, that within me, but also seeing that as an example of what is possible.
Speaker 2:No, when did he pass away?
Speaker 3:Sadly, when I needed him most he passed away. When I was 13 years old he had cancer that just really ate him up, and last time I saw him he weighed 70 pounds.
Speaker 2:What was his first name?
Speaker 3:His name was Marvin Marvin Johnson. Yeah well, it's interesting, brian. So you know, as I think about sort of my own work with my own personal psychology and dealing with the layers of trauma that I have from age, call it zero to 18. You know, it's like geological layers, right. So as I did my own therapy work, it was sort of going through layer by layer and seeing the trauma, naming the trauma, sort of reintegrating the splits within myself that resulted from the trauma. And it was a digging, it was a deepening exercise, right. It was looking for the gold, it was looking for the ore right within.
Speaker 3:And I feel like, say, he went into mining and this was the reason I have the panning for mold picture in my bedroom. Is I feel like that was a psychological act that was available to him as a man in that generation. Was I am looking for the gold amongst the dross right, the base ore. Because there was no psychological support for an inward exploration of that, he externalized it. So he became a general superintendent for Minnesota. So US Steel, minnesota Bintech plant, for those who might know it, virginia, minnesota. So he spent his entire life looking for ore amongst the earth. I feel that if he were born in my generation that he would have turned that exploration internally as opposed to externally. So anyway, I'm very, very indebted to him. I feel my survival and who I am as large measure to him.
Speaker 2:Let's dedicate this show to Marvin grandpa, your grandpa. That's awesome, what a great man and what a great man that you said at that timeframe go through the depression. I mean, yeah, manhood was described was definitely was predicated on certain premises back then that are not all true, maybe some of them are. I mean, I was thinking as you were talking about that yesterday I left my daughter's house at I don't know noon or so. I was up there for two days. My mother is visiting and my grand little two year old grandson, jack, is home from school, from daycare, because grandma's there.
Speaker 2:Here's, great grandma, and I pulled out of the driveway and I wasn't sure if I was gonna leave yesterday or early, early this morning and just be on the road at dark or before it gets a light out.
Speaker 2:So I have a full day today and I left at noon anyway and I pulled out and driving down their long drive when I looked back and here's my mom waving out the picture window and all I could see is about two thirds of my grandson's top of his head waving back at me and I just started bawling. I'm like and I'm gonna see him again tomorrow, I said. But I, you know, it's like I don't know man. I don't know if it's this, if it's when you get older you are more emotional, or if men are just becoming to the realization that we can cry. We have emotion and some of my best friends, who are very, very would, you would say, are stereotypically macho men, played football or rugby in college and, you know, like the hunting fish, but they the best ones I have during a conversation. We'll start crying on occasion and there's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, my goodness, there's nothing wrong with that. I think it's extraordinarily healthy. I feel saddened for, you know, many of the much of the cultural messaging is not supportive of that. But I have to say there is nothing more I don't say charming, sexy than somebody that's willing to be completely vulnerable with you and to show you their sacred soul. Right, and if they allow you to see that, you know, then that is that's true grace and I feel like that's what all of us should be doing. I just feel like society culturally allows women to do that more than than has been the cultural expectations for men. So I do think that that is all changing. I think my grandfather was a pioneer on this and I see that changing. But you know, ultimately, at the end of the day, I think you know, love, compassion and grace are the things that we should all be striving for, and dropping some of the persona and the invulnerability is probably necessary for all of us.
Speaker 2:Like we talked about before we started recording today. I mean, I think vulnerability is the greatest strength that men or women can carry. It really is because you can't lead effectively if you can't be vulnerable. Because I coach so many people around the world or around the country, I should say that I that I work with the president or the CEO of the companies or the you know their managers and they tell me you know the people I coach or the employees.
Speaker 2:When I'm not coaching the management teams, they'll tell me you know, I can't really get close to this person. They never, they don't share anything. You know, everything's always good or always trying to hold themselves together. I can't connect with this person and I hear that regardless of gender, regardless of age. I hear that from so many employees who want to be led but they can't be led because they're quote unquote boss, manager, executive will not really share much. And they won't. They won't show that vulnerability not going to work and crying, but I mean just being vulnerable, that you make mistakes, that you have fears, you have temptations, you have insecurities. That makes a person realize, hey, you're just like me, I can become like you and even better. But so many people are on, they feel like those person's untouchable because they don't show any side of their human nature. So I don't want to follow that person because I'm not that person, because deep down nobody is. We're all just a bunch of fucking raw nerves all the time. I mean.
Speaker 3:And we all come with our baggage right, and I do think those and I, you know as this one for a while myself is those that come from the most traumatic backgrounds have really built the most sophisticated defense mechanism right, and those are the ones that have built their.
Speaker 3:Their entire life are on not being vulnerable and they don't want to feel the pain, they don't want to feel the suffering, and there's a lot of shame often attached to it and the last thing a successful person wants anybody to see is their own shame, right. And so being being vulnerable sort of, oh, it takes the screen off, it takes the mask of the persona is withdrawn, it's you know, you're looking through the eyes of that person into their soul. So it is. It's a leap of faith. But I think it's a leap of faith. It is rewarding every single time. I mean it may feel like you're, you're holding onto the edge of that cliff, but if you just let go, you will see that being vulnerable, authentic, just going to deepen most of your relationships Any any good and damages are not. These people weren't meant for you to begin with. So I, it was less of a loss, of more of an alignment, right.
Speaker 2:I have a really funny story, athena. I have a really good friend of mine. In fact I would probably put him in my top three or four best friends in the world. I love him like a brother and he's probably the sweetest man I've ever met in my life and he I've known him for 30 years. When he's he, whenever he he takes he has testosterone cream he puts on his chest. On occasion I'm like well, when do you know when to take it? He says whenever I cry during a movie, I know it's time to take my testosterone and I know he's going to be listening to this podcast, or his wife will be, or his children will be, and I know they're going to know exactly who I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's really that's pretty funny. Okay, you go that route.
Speaker 3:Well, crying is perfectly acceptable, but you know, as a woman I have to say a man crying is, then I know that person is real and authentic. I like to say that those that don't aren't. I am just saying that that takes, takes down sort of some of the wall between us. Yes, all right, I'm, I'll be, I will be as open and transparent, as you know is just the way I am now. If you want a hard work, well, you don't have a lot of options.
Speaker 2:I mean you, your, your transparency is so. I mean your life is all about authenticity. It really is. I mean you, you wear that as a badge of honor and I think that's one of the most amazing things of really why. I think I connected well, so well with you last week on the phone. I'm like this person may be the most authentic person I've ever met in my life and I love what you said. Before we talked about you know, before we started recording today is about living authentic with authenticity. Sorry, my, my, my mouth. I'm breathing out. I'm breathing out of my mouth today and talking. My nose is plugged.
Speaker 2:I have a mouth. It's going to sound like you have a dog. I have a dog in the background.
Speaker 3:Breathing into the microphone. It's winter. These are the climates I told you. I'm looking out at snow, and so Carl's got my first cold.
Speaker 2:Well, it's, you know, like I told you my grandson is a Petri dish man and we touch that kid, You're going to get every little bit he has.
Speaker 3:He's got no running nose cough.
Speaker 2:He coughs like an old smoker.
Speaker 3:And the thing about the damn kids is that they are so resilient that you know 24 hours they're over it, but you're down for a week All right, and even while they're sick they're still running around.
Speaker 2:I'm like I just want a nap.
Speaker 3:Right, I got the energy metabolism. Yeah, bottle nap, I can hear a million.
Speaker 2:So let me ask you this question Over the past couple of years, what has been one of your major learnings in life that you can share with us?
Speaker 3:Oh my god, honey, oh my god. It's been a quite transformative few years. I think it'll probably make sense if I take us back to the childhood piece. So I guess there were two, I suppose the psychologists I guess you'd call it sort of risk factors, as you can Right. One is I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional household, so dysfunction was nearly pretty much the whole spectrum it was divorce, it was alcoholism, it was verbal abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and it was hard and very often felt like an existential threat.
Speaker 3:And so I spent much of my early life trying to overcome that Right, and you listed the colleges I went to and the work that I did. So when it became called the last five or six years working with one of the greatest therapists I could ever have hoped for. I've done a lot of work on that and it's the other thread that I'll describe here in a few minutes. So the childhood trauma took the years and years and years to build defenses against. So I had a good brain, I had a great, did well in school, got scholarship at Full Ride which got me out of my system of circumstances that I was in, put me in this elite East Coast environment and I thought, my god, I transcended the bullshit. I gave two middle fingers back towards the state of Mexico.
Speaker 2:Now you're living there again.
Speaker 3:No, right, I transcended that. So I'm not damaged and broken. I'm worn being ungood, because look what I've done on some paper and so proceeded to build a career and do graduate school, and much of that, as I realized now, was certainly just survival. It's good, I was leveraging a gift that I had to overcome the shit that I experienced, but it didn't mean the shit had gone away and I, for many years had just pretended that it had gone away. The other thread is that I'm transgender.
Speaker 3:So this I was born in the physical body of a boy and knew from my very earliest memories. You know I go back to the age of three is when my memory is really pretty clear and you know I knew from that moment, certainly from the moments before I had language as well, right, but as soon as I had language, I knew that people, I was a girl, people were treating me like I was not a girl, and I was very confused about why that was, and so I was talking to my mother about that. I was a three-year-old thing, you know. Basically WTF in the three-year-old language, right? So what's the deal here? Is it when I turn five? Is there a magic incantation or what's up?
Speaker 2:You gave me a special vitamin.
Speaker 3:Hi, what the hell. And you know I was very, you know, in case, it was 70s. You know, even now of course we're such a big mom, but in 70s it was just unheard of and you know it was, life works. That was just not a conversation anybody wanted to have. So I, you know it felt changed and I put it down, I buried it. So now we go back up to the East Coast, right. So when that Williams College, I said I'm working on these two things, right, I've got the family trauma that I'm, you know, trying to overcome through achievement, and then I've got the transgender piece that I'm trying to figure out. Okay, here I am in liberal East Coast College. Now, here's an environment where people might know something and then they might have some resources to help figure this out.
Speaker 3:It was again, it was the late 80s. I graduated in 92, it was hard to imagine. But these, before the internet, you know the library systems were we're just getting computer. I mean, it's just, it's hard to believe how much we've gone, sent in a lot more resources that are available. You know, if I were to do this now, it would be some different than then. However, you know, then there was, there was nothing. It was really literally nothing. What few things resources there were in the, you know, the East Coast library system was treated as a pathology. I got, I had an offer. There was a retired New York analyst. That was a Williams College.
Speaker 3:For those that don't know, it was in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts, really beautiful part of the country and a lot of people from New York and Boston and other places. Of course I went to the Berkshires in the summer and then some entire there. This guy, it was a New York therapist that had retired in the Berkshires and I sure think his wife learned a lot of the house that he was given therapy hours to, to William students. And so I said, hey, I need therapy hours and I can't pay for it. So he said, great, I learned that he was a Freudian sort of, and at that time of course I didn't know my young life from my Freudian, my admirers, you know. But I just thought therapy was a commodity product. But again, he, he had nothing for me. He was trying to dig into family, origin and it's not, it's his fundamental who I am and every soul, every fiber of my being. It's not, it's not that. And so you know, at that point, you know, graduating from college, I, I did this visualization of taking, you know, my, my gender identity and my orientation on female and putting that under six feet of concrete against the.
Speaker 3:I see it in my head with rebar and that the pledge that I'm going to die with this, no one needs to know. Oh, I'm going to cry, no one needs to know, and I will just go along and live a life that's like him in the role that was assigned to me. So did I did that and got married and two beautiful daughters. You know, no, I'm both adult, 18 and 21. So obviously don't regret, right, the two most exquisite, lovely young ladies that I'm so, so proud.
Speaker 3:What, what happens as I got older. So when I turned 40, it's right around that. So you know the, you know you sort of the union world 40 is a pretty important array of is, I began having these. I recall very big dreams. These are the tap. You know the, what you don't call the big dreams. Once it's happened to the collective unconscious, oh, my God, the world is bigger than just me. And and then began getting into therapy. Through that read everything young ever wrote, and then I got into therapy At the same time I was. I was, I was finding it harder and harder, I was consuming more of my mental and emotional energy. I'll put it this way just being taking the baseline right, suiting up every day in a gender I didn't recognize and and doing it, doing it.
Speaker 2:Can you hold on just a minute? There's somebody knocking up the door here. All right, we're back. I could have ignored that, but the dog won't stop barking. Somebody's right in the middle of your story bad timing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, don't, don't worry, I usually do not disturb.
Speaker 2:Sign on. But I forgot to put on.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So by the time I was 40, it I was, my energy, my, my I was no longer able to pull the energy from my ego I guess I would say right and it just took more and more of my energy to pretend who I wasn't and to try to still overcome the, the, the, the pull, the gravitational pull of significant childhood trauma that I was bypassing through, you know, being very busy, being focused on external environment, having a busy job, having raising kids, all those things that kept me so busy that I didn't actually have time to think and feel right. So that was the way I was trying to deal with it and was I could just, I could feel my life force ebbing, right, I could just feel it leaving my body. And so I engaged, found this a remarkable woman, this therapist, and began engaging with her. I at the time you know my pledge to the universe, and it was very specific I realized I need to do work.
Speaker 3:My bargaining with you, universe, is if I do my work, if I dig as deep into that childhood trauma as I possibly can and try to recover the you know the sport broken and split off pieces inside of me and that wounded child that is still there, suffering in a trauma that I try to transcend over right, and not deal with the suffering that was still there. If I do that, then will you allow me to die with the knowledge that I transgender right? Will you just allow me to die Right? I don't, I don't want to deal with it. That's not a thing that's going to work in my lifetime, it's. It's just something that we just want to die with, not to deal with. So my bargain to the universe was that, of course, I didn't hear a reply. Right, it was a one way, one way work and I don't think the universe liked that request.
Speaker 3:You said you think so, huh boy. Just wait, but you go to your work.
Speaker 2:We'll meet up again soon.
Speaker 3:We'll meet up again soon. And so did the work, dug in very deep and, oh my goodness, when was that? That was 2002. Well, I think it's when I really began that interest and did amazing work with an amazing woman and got down through you know the geological layers, right. So the trauma when I was 17, I must have fallen through it to shoot me.
Speaker 3:The trauma, you know, when I was 10 and he was trying to throw me out the front door. My trauma went, you know it's, it was layers right Through through that, you know, down to when I was five or six, being it's actually abused by my father. And going through all of those down to the bedrock right and, and so the therapy work was was big, different than it did. It's an ongoing process. It probably is a lifelong process, I must say. But I feel as though reconnected with my inner, with the inner child right, with what everything that I'd split from. I feel reintegrated with. And at the bottom of that, you know geological strata, the bedrock was oh, and your transgender Right and oh, fuck's sake, and sorry, I don't know if I can see that.
Speaker 2:You can say whatever you want on here.
Speaker 3:Okay, all right, well, fuck's sake, I'm just running years of this work and years where I am. No, no, the work was amazing and it was really important that I do it. So. So what happened then in 2017, which you know? This is a very long way around to your question, talking about the last few years.
Speaker 3:So so in 2017, what happened is I was it was January and it was, of course, minnesota and there's ice everywhere and I was walking our dog and I remember being barely moving I think the dog was sniffing something and it sort of incomprehensibly got slammed to the pavement, to the concrete sidewalk, and slammed my head. You know, the head, just you know slammed and picks up a very bad traumatic brain injury from them. What was, what was? What was so interesting about the way it happened was I I can't say I slipped on the ice, but it felt like it in the way I described it to the front, I said I was walking the dog and then the universe hit me in the head with the side. It was almost incomprehensible.
Speaker 3:The way the forest in which I hid was like I didn't body slam and and what I? It was, and, being somebody that's attentive to cosmology and quantum physics and the universe, and know that the universe, I come to learn. It was a speak through a lot of metaphors and they hit the head. It was a classic metaphor. Right for wake the fuck up.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:And take some action, or you know, you're gonna get hit in the head. So I thought, oh my God, okay, so the stakes are escalating. The universe is called my, you know, called me on my shit, but I can't make a bargain with them about you know, truth and, and it's pressing the case, right. So what did I do? I ignored it.
Speaker 2:Who wouldn't Go the easy route on that one?
Speaker 3:Do you think you know as as a husband and as a father and you know, as an executive of the company, these are all done in a male role. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was to, to, to tell people that I'm actually female, right, that that was the last thing, the single last thing that I wanted to do. I wanted to die with that. That was my, my place myself. That was a business with a concrete. The universe was an habit. So we had, it's like five weeks after the traumatic brain injury I'd already had tickets for our student Costa Rica. We often get out of Minnesota in February to dose up on somebody, to maybe. Oh, my girls love Costa Rica. So we, even before my, my fall, we had this trick planned. They were looking forward to it. It was on their screen break and I thought well, you know nothing else. It's a. It's a week where I can just sit in a hammock or lay down by poolside in the shade and hear them having fun while I, you know, do my concussion protocol and try to recover from this thing.
Speaker 3:What happened on the plane is so a consequence of this traumatic brain injury and was undiagnosed, was that I had a condition called hypotremia, which is sort of your, your, your systems inability to regulate blood sodium serum at at a, at a normal level, and it it, my blood sodium had plummeted and I didn't know that Is it the symptoms of you know, your blood, of your, of your blood sodium serum plummeting are the same symptoms as concussion rates, as confusion is the brain fog, fatigue. So I thought, all right, well, this is just the TBI, right? I didn't even think about it. It was just the TBI, but it was actually some. Probably that and the symptoms that they had when they treated me. But nevertheless, I was on this airplane I'm going to go to Serega with my daughters and my that level hit the critical level on the airplane on the way to coast America and I went into seizures.
Speaker 3:I was seizing and the airplane packed in clothes and it was very visible, thank God. And so you know, within seconds there's the flight attendant calling, you know, inter-call, asking for medical professionals. I learned all this later. Of course, I was completely gone and you know, there was an E&T right behind me, there was a flight nurse, of all things. A couple rows ahead there was a husband wife surgical team. You know, a spring break from time in Minnesota, so professionals were heading south, but anyway, so it turned out, there were five highly qualified medical personnel on the flight. So, and all they had, so the med kit in the plane had blood pressure monitor, stethoscope, and had a ceiling, a ceiling bag. Right, ceiling is what I needed, that was in the bag and it was in the bag. And because they had no idea what I needed, because they couldn't do any tests, they only had to work with the ceiling bag so they put it in. So I came to, I stopped seizing and I came to and I saw these, you know, I learned later these five medical personnel, sort of all around me, and they put the ID bag. You know, they'd hung it on the luggage thing overhead.
Speaker 3:So I was like hell, where am I? Who are you? What's happening? I had no, I had no notion what was happening. I will tell you that, while I was seizing, what was happening psychologically was a woman had you know, this is words for it they got guardian angels, angel, whatever language that might be for it, but it had grabbed my, it took me by the arm. I grabbed, but it took me by the arm, was holding me sort of tight as we were walking in through space together and I could see us going through space at just a normal speed. So that was happening to me as I was, as I was seizing, and then I came to and sort of pulled I think sort of pulled back from that journey I was taking to that moment and into this back and, you know, plop back into this existence, and I said who are you, where am I? I had no notion that, I really had no idea what was happening.
Speaker 3:The, the divey bag drained and then the flight birds who had the blood pressure on me I heard her say 70 over 30, and then I they started seizing again and they called up to the cockpit again later and asked you do what do we do? And you know the nearest airport was the one we were going to. He said well, you know, we're, we'll get, we'll get this person off the plane. And first we got an ambulance ready to go. But you know perfect that here's a med kit. There's another med kit at the cockpit, which I learned later and was not necessarily a protocol. We just happened to have one and it had another sanding bag. So they put that in and it got me to the ground.
Speaker 3:They got me to the ambulance, got me to the hospital and at the hospital because they did the blood work and then I was there for four days before I could fly home. But I brought back the blood work to my doctor here and he said this must be wrong. And I said what is this blood sodium? At level you'd be dead. And they said, yeah, that's right. And so when I realized you know the universe was, you know back to the, so I got hit in the head. I I chose to do nothing about that and then it said, okay, well, see how you like this. It took me right up to the edge of death. I pulled me back and said okay, now what are you going to do? And what I did was go home and tell my therapist that was transgendered to my wife and begin, begin that journey.
Speaker 2:You hadn't even told your therapist yet.
Speaker 3:I didn't know. I know I had told no one I was. I mean my, my bargain was trauma and I had so much trauma to work with I was very fertile field I didn't need to add this extra layer because I was hoping to avoid that layer altogether. So no, I hadn't told her.
Speaker 2:So kind of the timeline is right around 2012,. You made a kind of a pact or a bargain with university saying I'll work on this childhood trauma, I'll go through the layers, I'll do the work, just let me die with this, this secret I have of my transgenderism. And then, five years later, whatever it might be, you fall on the floor and university saying where you, the university grabs the floor and smat or the ground and smacks it in your head and says okay, wake up. You didn't really listen yet. So they said well, we're going to do it again on an airplane, but we're going to take care of you. We're going to have some five medical professionals on that plane with you, yeah, yeah, we're going to the right amount of saline with you.
Speaker 2:We're two packets of saline, so that was fine, like okay, now I get the message.
Speaker 3:Well, it was, you know, and thank you for saying it that way it was. I finally got the message because I was thinking, you know, why have all places this airplane right? Damning convenience. But you know, if I was reflecting, you know, had I been anywhere else, nobody would have noticed this immediately. And there went to the immediate health that you know, sitting right behind me, and the one thing they had to mention, the only thing they had to work with. So they used it right, so they would be at waste time with tests or what's gone on here. They just they'd work with what they had. You know, had I been at home, had I been in my car, had I been in the office, we'd have been in very different outcomes.
Speaker 3:So I was thinking, my God, the beauty in that. I mean, there's a certain exquisite beauty in the way that that circumstance was constructed for my education. And I did, I took note of it because I what, what are the choices? I have right. So you know when I, you know when I was 22,. And then I put it under six feet of concrete and said I'm going to die with this.
Speaker 3:What I had bargained on is I was going to die three to four decades earlier. That wasn't a bargain that I wanted. It's like I would find dying in 90 with this I mean I'm fine, dying in 50 with this. So all right, you, you put, you push the point. I see, I see the message and apparently this mind wall in this, in this global human family, to to do, to, to do this right. I and you know I need to go out and leap of faith because I was really pushed to extremity so I didn't feel like I was out of options. I did have to let go of that cliff, but it was not entirely exhausted. Every single other option.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, you know, I I work a lot with my clients on the ways we change and you know we can change in three ways Force. We can change by force, which is the way we, most of us, change. You have a heart attack, you change your diet, you know, and that's that's kind of what happened with you, but yet, at the same time, it's not a very proactive way to change, but it's the one that you needed at that moment because you probably, if that never happened, you would not be living authentically. I mean, what a fucking weird story. That's the weirdest. It's so cool that with that little could it be the truth. Because you think about this, you know. And well, first of all, I have a question for you. I want to know where you were going on that journey with that woman while you were out.
Speaker 3:Well, here's what I, here's what I think. I sort of I guess this is my, it's sort of an intuitive knowing, I think is I have spent most of my life interested in cosmology and I, as a kid, I you know, I had a telescope and I you know, used all that.
Speaker 2:A lot of people out there are going to think you said cosmetology, right.
Speaker 3:Today, I've been cosmologist.
Speaker 2:No, you didn't say cosmo, you said cosmology, did I just know?
Speaker 3:Yeah, oh, I see, no, yes, no, I didn't know, and it's a subscription to the sky telescope. And when I, when I as a kid, and I, you know, looking back on it now I'm still, I'm still my interest is still very much in that line. But I'm doing it now for a position of much more awareness of the interconnectedness of all being. But as a kid, I think what was interesting is my family version was so dysfunctional.
Speaker 3:You know, I was interested in my cosmological right. I felt like, you know, if we all are, we all are star dust. I mean, that is, you know, the atoms in your body were once in the center of stars. This is all true, but I did, I felt a resonance to that right. And so I say, and I've always had, and so you know, they, as a woman was taking me through the space. I mean, the universe is so vast, right, we're one galaxy out of potentially a trillion other galaxies within the just the visible universe alone. I mean the scales are just, they're incomprehensible. And so I feel like she was taking me back to my home. I feel like she was taking me home, and that journey got interrupted by the medical intervention.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm glad it did. I think a lot of people are pretty happy.
Speaker 3:I would have been an awful way to die. And so you know this, you know one of those you know Marcos are really. You know I've been to ancient history that Marcos really is probably the one Roman emperor that was. I do is why is he a lot of tremendous wisdom? Yeah, you know. You said, you know, consider yourself dead and now go live the rest of your life authentically. And I think, you know, I think that was sort of the notion, right, because I nearly was dead and I was like, okay, do you prefer to be a dead man or a lying woman? And that's not like. That was the choice that was offered to me and, of course, I chose life and I feel like it is.
Speaker 3:It's the opportunity now, whatever role that I have in this greater community of mankind, to in my second life here, to, I don't know I think what, I think what, when one sort of gets completely naked in front of others and said this is, this is who I am, it enables others, whatever those things are, right, childhood trauma, sexual orientation, whatever those things are. It just enables more, more people to become, to be vulnerable to themselves, right, and I think what? What the world needs right now and more than ever and I think it's rather urgent is greater level of consciousness. That requires people to go inwards and deal with their own shadows rather than projecting their shadow externally, which is the source of most of the human cause, suffering and all, all wars and most ecological trauma or flicking on the earth, is because the world outside is simply a reflection of the collective level of consciousness inside, right? So I think you know if I had a, a learning from this. You know, if I get back to your question, I think the learning is, I feel, such a tremendous deepening in my appreciation for the interconnectedness of all being and the importance that that all of us, with courage, do the work that we need to to transform whatever suffering there is, whatever trauma, whatever terror, whatever shame.
Speaker 3:You know from an earlier time, often early childhood, that many people don't even recognize themselves. But you can see it in the way, the interactive world, right, you can see it in the projections. You can see that is that the more people that do their authentic work and reconnect inwards, it's going to lead to a reconnection outwards, right? This realization of, oh, we are all one, we're all a drop in the same ocean. And this, this belief that we're, we're separate. You know this, all in surre ego, right In that I am this, I define myself as that, I drive a certain car, I live in a certain neighborhood, etc. It has really nothing to do with who you are.
Speaker 3:You know, show me, show me your ability to connect to somebody deeply and compassionately, have a heart to heart conversation with somebody, sit with somebody while they are in deep grief. That that is. That is what I think we need more of. We need less invulnerable personas. So, you know, there is, you know, a learning of the last few years and I, you know I do this with you. Know my community to my family, my team is, and I'm going to show you who I am. Right, it doesn't mean I'm not also really good professional, but I'm going to approach you as a human. We're also going to drive outstanding business results and we're going to, we're going to lead this fucking thing, but but I'm also going to do it with you, recognizing that you too have challenges, you too have had hardship, you too have had suffering. You too are a human, on this journey with me together. In addition to you are a fucking badass professional. I think we can have both of those things happening at the same time.
Speaker 2:I think that's so damn powerful. I mean, when you came, when you made the transition and you made the announcement. Can I ask you you don't have to go into detail, this is very personal what was there? What was that like for you to tell your therapist and your children and your family, I mean what? What goes through your head?
Speaker 3:It was terrifying.
Speaker 2:I can imagine it was terrifying.
Speaker 3:I mean, I had built. I built my entire life around not doing that thing. And um, I'll tell you this really interesting thing about it. So with my daughters, god bless our kids' generation. I know your son and my oldest daughter are the same.
Speaker 3:Yeah that's amazing Is it's all my older daughter, who might have been 16 at the time, and she looked at me and she said, oh, you do you right, it's like that's fine, you do you. My younger daughter. I took it harder, but we are now. We are so, so close and I think the greatest gift anybody can do for their kids is to do their own work. I know that if my parents had actually gone inward and done their work rather than projecting all this up outwards, it would have changed my life.
Speaker 3:So I know people had some judgment about well, what do you do with your kids, right? And my, I think, response is simply I am demonstrating what it means to live authentically and follow the lead. Take the risks but lead with love, and if that's a bad role model, you need to recheck yourself. So it was terrifying. I think one of the things that I'm seeing this professional, so financial services industry, which tends to of many industries. So there's a reputation of being more traditional, right, more definitely larger preponderance, typically of men in the organization, where we're making huge shifts, but historically it's been fairly male dominated, very traditional. So I know that I am the first transgender person. Nearly all of my colleagues have no right or access and that if you had asked them what described for me as transgender person right prior to me naming myself that many of them would have probably said and I haven't pulled them so I don't know, but I'm going to guess that they would have said something else, probably confused 20-year-old, probably living in San Francisco, maybe drug addiction.
Speaker 2:Let's throw it all on 20-year-old San Francisco drug addiction.
Speaker 3:But what's another head, ideally educated, executive of a fortune? That's not part of their description. And so when I was very, very nervous I'm saying a lot of fear about what that would mean for me professionally, and I was so pleasantly astonished I guess I would say, is that by naming myself that I was putting a person to a label? And they were saying, oh my god, actually I really not only do I really like you as a person, but I really respect you as a professional, but you transgender. And so when the announcement was made at the firm, I got so many texts and emails from people that I was thinking, oh my god, this person they'll never talk to me again or if they do, little speech. And I got flooded with oh my god, you are a single, big as brave, as badass. And it was like is that the respect for being vulnerable completely transcended any previous bias they may have had? So I'll say further on a year into the transition is for pride month.
Speaker 3:The firm is in and run some stories on our corporate intranet, so about 20,000 people that probably see those stories and my boss had suggested the corporate communications that they it would be if I was willing to share my story. The community has that. You know this. The value of me for sharing this story outweighs any I think about it, outweighs any fear that I have of people who I know the hell she thinks she is right or have the chunks and opinions about it. But within two days of having this story I've corporate comms told me it was the single most clipped story that they've had.
Speaker 3:And I received again hundreds of emails from people all over the country that I had never met before. It said something like oh my god, thank you. You have no idea how important that was for me to hear you say that here's what I'm dealing with. And then they got vulnerable with me, people I never met before. And so you know I think you never know who needs to hear the message, but you know, you trust and know that there are people that do need to hear the message and it doesn't serve anybody to keep it within the fear of judgment or ridicule or whatever it is. I'm over that Is that if it provides a hope to you know, even one person out there, it's worth sharing.
Speaker 2:Well, I think, if you pacify the people who are going to judge or ridicule you at the expense of somebody who really needs to hear this and it can be inspired by your message to live authentically, I mean, it's a really shitty tradeoff.
Speaker 3:I mean it really is what's appeased the people who I mean.
Speaker 2:That goes against what the universe wants?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I was pleasantly surprised at reception with my corporate family. I did have the reception with my nuclear family that I was expecting, which was abandoned, basically, and what is so interesting about that? One reason to do it, when you said in our pre-show, I love you, and I said I love you too, is it's true? Right? Those people that can, when words come from the heart, the inner heart, people that look at you through your eyes, they see you right? They don't see, they're not confused by the exterior presentation, like you, in fact, it's meaningless. So, brian, if I ask you tell, give me, think of somebody that you really admire and give me five or six attributes to that person.
Speaker 2:My mom strong, kind, intelligent, healthy and incredibly giving.
Speaker 3:Yeah, right, if you ask exactly, if you ask anyone that question, they're not going to say well, I don't like makeup, I don't like that, she's a she and not a he. I don't like that she's. I don't like skin color, I don't. It's none of those things. But those things are very confusing to a lot of people. So one of the things that I've become very clear about in the last couple of years is that people that look into your eyes and they see your soul, those are your people. The people that confused by the exterior presentation and they can't get past your makeup, these are not your people, right? And you know, opinion and judgment are the lowest form of knowledge. It doesn't take any curiosity, it doesn't take any you know any specific knowledge. It is. It is simply working off a bias, without any question about the validity of the bias, right? So I get it. I, in fact, I don't. I don't concern myself with it at all, because it's, you know, people that have judgment rather than defining me, than defining themselves Exactly.
Speaker 2:And the thing is, what I have found in my course of my life is that most people who judge are just avoiding judgment of themselves. You know, let's throw it out there so I don't have to go and do the deep work inside myself, and that goes back to vulnerability. Man, it goes back to vulnerability every time.
Speaker 3:Yeah it does, yeah, and you can see the person, you can see the level of work they've done by by how much they, they, they externalize their stuff right. So if there's judgment, that's an externalization of an internal drama, if they, and if they you know and you can see it, and that's work that they need to do to clean up, clear up inside so they can, they can pull those projections of judgment back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, it's interesting because you know, you and I have been friends on Facebook for you know, I wonder if we ever ran into each other in the course of you've been there. 25 years.
Speaker 2:Oh, I bet we can. We also. I think we must have. I mean, I've been. I was with the company from 91 to 90, I don't know, this is my 27th anniversary coming up in three weeks. Yeah, two weeks. Well, congratulations, thank you of consulting. So I then I was with the company five years before that. And then you know, I've been. You know I've always had a consulting agreement with somebody with a merit prize financial. So I know we must have run across. And then, but we were just friends on Facebook. I didn't even know who you were, I just knew you worked with. I saw you with Bill Williams several times on Facebook and on stages and things like that. I'm like, oh yeah. And then, when Fred, you had to talk with Athena, I'm like, oh yeah, I know her, she's on Facebook with me, she's a friend of mine. I'm like, yeah, I'd love to interview her. Then he told me that, oh, she, you know, she is transgender. She's gone through the, the transgender we call it process. I don't sorry, I'm probably gonna say the wrong word.
Speaker 3:Transition yeah, she's transition.
Speaker 2:Transition. Well, I already said earlier in the pre-book podcast, I said you've got balls. I've already offended you on Lady, lady, lady balls, but you know and I'm like, oh, better yet, you know she'll have a cool story. So you know, I think that's. I think that's where society is going. I think, you know, I think there's a lot of poor media I don't know coverage of transgenderism in certain situations and I think sometimes the transgender movement has not done itself any favors by some of the movements at the same time. But when you look at somebody like you and I have a cousin who's gone through the transition as well and probably five, six, seven, eight years ago and when you look at a person who, like who gives a, who gives a fuck, I mean I got maybe 85, 90, hopefully 105 years. Is my goal to live on this planet. Why do I give a shit? Why would anybody care? Well, it's fucking nice man.
Speaker 3:Well, this is right, and nobody, 100% nobody, nobody should care. I mean, again, they ask you, they give me some attributes from the person who you're most admired, talk to like your lovely mother, and that's right. Right, if somehow yet people have a tremendous amount of judgments, there's certainly many that do not, and I think it's the minority that do. Get that. Get all the noise. I just say it is the last time I looked this year alone. They were coming up to a presidential election cycle, so one of our political parties is gonna have trans gender view, anti-trans gender view, a platform.
Speaker 3:Is it this year alone? There were, you know, you're today through, I don't know, call it October 583 anti-trans pieces of legislation pushed through state houses in this country. Right, it's two and a people trying to limit my rights, my access to healthcare, my ability to exist as a co-equal within the society. And it is what I'm hopeful of is when people are able to see People that they might admire and respect say, I'll also line trans. You're right, the spokes piece would get a general, whatever the name is.
Speaker 3:It's just terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible spokesperson and I cringe every time I hear an interview or I see your face. It is not representative and I can see why that would be off today. So I think the people, the gay rights. One of the things that I found interesting is that I was in the late 80s on college campus. Gay rights movement was definitely had a huge head of steam and that was seen as there was a whole socialization around. This is a new normal.
Speaker 3:We, now society, had gone through the violent opposition to an acceptance of this is a status quo, which is, of course, wonderful, for whatever reason. There are no coattails. I'm happy to transgender movement, and so I think it's for all of us to do what those pioneers did, which is let's, let's, let's just engage the world with love and grace and compassion. But people, see, you know that the I mean see, I went from white, white male privilege right to transgender female with 583 pieces of legislation and now targeting my rights this year alone is nobody does that unless it is fundamental to who they are. And how dare anyone else have judgment about that Without, without knowledge or without curiosity, or go and ask me any questions about my life experience.
Speaker 2:You know, one of the things I've noticed and this is when I communicate with people is, as far as people who may be you would think are more right wing on the subject matter, but I think when you talk about someone who actually has made that, who is truly transgender, has gone through the transition yeah, I haven't really met anybody ever and I've talked to a lot of people at different levels of education or different part of the political parties or, you know, socio-economic status. I don't really hear anybody ever say that's wrong. Where I hear a lot of is it's the. It's the question of somebody waking up one day and say, okay, I'm going to identify as a female, or I'm going to identify as this person, or identify in and even that they say I don't care how you identify, just don't make me call you this or that or don't force something on me. How do you handle, how do you answer that one? Because that's one that I that I could be honest.
Speaker 2:That one is the one that I sometimes question in my head is 18 year old, 1413 year old kid. I wake up and says I'm, I'm, I'm a girl, I'm a boy or whatever it might be, and call me this from now on all the teachers call me this. And then the course and it gets down to the. Hey there kids, you know now the. The extremists will say both are also kids who identify as a cat. We have to put kids in the bathrooms and blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever that goes so extreme.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they take you down down a rabbit hole.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what it's not so is there a way in your, from your perspective and this is a line I didn't expect to go down, but you know, be, you know, having gone through the transition and being transgender, being a female now, and most people I think most people support that. They're like yeah, we get it. You know, people are sometimes born in the wrong body and that's been a case for years. But then you now, all of a sudden, we have a big, large group of people coming out and saying I'm a, I'm a girl or my boy or a woman or a man, and just treat me differently. I mean, is there a difference between the two of us?
Speaker 3:I guess what I'm asking it's a very it's a very interesting question. I so I will say In my experience I knew fundamentally every, every fiber I've been every day since I actually had words for it right, and so I this was just fundamentally who I am and I definitely knew it for the entirety of my life. Now, so I can't say what other people's experiences. If you're 14 obviously now we've got social media, now you know this I think there's something much less of a stigma about it, certainly in that generation. And is it? Is it exploration, right? So I think I think part of it is there is different temperature is just so high around it, I think. I think I think everyone you know teenagers, and that's their old job is to sort of explore who you are.
Speaker 2:You don't have a damn clue when you're a teenager. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And you're getting set to enter adult and you need to make, you need to figure out who you are and what kind of education, well, career, you want to be, friends you want to have and who you are fundamentally and I think I think it's absolutely fine to play around with that, just as is fine to play around with I'm interested in economics this week, next week, I think I think I can. I can, I can hear people's reaction to say it, but I think I think you, what is really important is to is to listen deeply to the person that is saying this, right, and if it's fundamental to their being, you, better people that are damn well respect. I think you know somebody says these are the pronouns I want to use and we should always respect that because it's it's their identities, their life. If we don't, if people don't respect that, I think again, we're defining themselves more than defining the person. That's respect.
Speaker 3:But I think I think you know I can only again speak to my experience. I do. I do think that you know, as I've seen a couple of people my daughter's generations play around with with gender expression, yeah, is that it's just seeking identity? It's just, like you know, trying to grow the not transibles, and I think we just make it so much more than that. Now it escalates if you take hormones or surgery, right, but if you're just trying to figure stuff out, I don't. I don't think that's an exceptional answer that was a very exceptional answer.
Speaker 2:I think that's you know you can't, you know your journey, you know your experience, but you really can't, you can't speak on others, and that's a good, and I think we could all kind of just take that advice I'm open to. I mean, I've marched in gay pride marches multiple times for support of gay rights back in the 90s maybe, yeah, probably 90s, and I support the transgender, transgender movement 100%. I. But I have been. I'll be very frank and authentic. I've been very confused by the influx of this and you know people screaming. You know, today I'm a female, tomorrow I might identify as non binary. Then that boggles my mind. I'll be honest, I don't get it. I'm not going to judge it because it's not my experience and I don't really care. I doesn't, it doesn't impact my if something comes to me and says here's my story.
Speaker 2:I'm going to say you're awesome, live your life, man.
Speaker 3:I think I think that's binary, and you're this or you're that, and people only have their own life experience to go on. I think what I think what you said is right, which is, if it's not within your life experience and you don't have the curiosity to dig further than you don't, you're not entitled to an opinion. If you have an opinion, have curiosity, talk to somebody, do some research.
Speaker 2:Have you have an opinion? Have curiosity, that's pretty good. Have you have an opinion? Have curiosity, do some damn research and then if you walk away with the same opinion, at least your opinion for you as valid. You feel like I've done the work right.
Speaker 2:I still agree with what I originally thought or whatever they thought, but I did the research and that's the problem today, don't you think? Athena is that we really don't know half the things that were were propagating for or propagating against, we really don't know. We just jump on a bandwagon anti this, pro this, support this, you know Right. Then you say, well, what is this? Well, yeah, that, no matter what, it is nobody. Really, when you really get down, most a lot of people who are very vocal really don't know the subject matter, their pro, their proposing or that they're. You know they're fighting against. They really don't know, yeah, they just know what they've heard and read and social media.
Speaker 3:Right, and so with all the information people take in during the day I mean just the firehooks, stuff coming at us, right, is it? People go reactively just because it's the quickest thing to buy is it's unconscious? I mean, some are fully conscious biases, of course, but some are unconscious. But it's, it's a shorty and way for the brain to dispatch with things right, so it's open. It went to put a label on it. You think you know it? So transgender? Oh yeah, I know that, which is again tonight.
Speaker 3:My description of this, you know, probably almost person is an apathos, carols or whatever. But I think when you say that you put a face to it. You say I am. It's something that you've known for 20 years and have a high regard for. I am that. So, as you were talking, one of the things that I read recently and I thought, my God, that is genius. I want to be great if we could do that in this country, in Denmark, in the library system, you can quote, unquote, check out a human. There are people from all walks of life trans people, gay lesbians, drug addicts, sexual workers, all sorts of people that will allow them. So Be in the library and somebody can quote, unquote, check out and you can sit with that person for a half hour and talk with them as a human. You get to know them as a human behind the label You're gay, you're not gay. It's a really very interesting person. That's really exquisite life story and I want you to be my friend.
Speaker 2:Who happens to be gay? Yeah, gay is not the label. Who happens to be gay? It's not the label.
Speaker 3:And so much of this labeling is a way for people to say, well, I know what that is, I don't need to deal with that, and they just write off an entire class of people that way.
Speaker 2:Well, I think a lot of it too is. It's a very primal thing for us. We are pack animals. Humans are. We can't survive alone. If you were ostracized from your tribe 10,000 years ago, you were going to die. No matter how great of a warrior or a hunter you were, you were going to die.
Speaker 2:And I think with now, with social media we have, we are overstimulated with information. Our brains were never designed for this level and influx and speed of information. So we have to jump on a pack. We hear something, we have to jump on a side because I don't want to jump on pro or against, for or against or or because otherwise, if I'm standing alone and I say wait a minute, I don't know enough, you have to do, I need to do some research.
Speaker 2:I have don't have a true opinion on this You're kind of alone on an island because everybody else is divided in their own packs and that's a very scary thing for us to be and I think that's why we are so divisive politically in our country. We have to have a pack, we have to have a sect to join, to be a part of, or we feel like we're alone on the island. It's terrifying for people. It takes courage to do that. I asked you I didn't have an ask you the question, that, but I think I already got the answer. I mean, if I were to ask you what's the most difficult thing you've ever gone through, I think you kind of answered that you kind of gone through a few.
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah, transition is quite hard. Well, I guess the childhood trauma that was the as an adult doing that it was, it was, it was really scary to your, to your point, right, there was, you know, the family system and my friend system and my corporate, my colleagues and my coworkers and my corporate family system, and you know there is the. You know it's a certain set of expectations of how you know that I, you know, as this male, father, husband, professional executive, we're, we're expected to show up and my, my therapist is as great analogy, you know, those mobiles with, like the seven or eight pieces that hang off.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know they sort of go in the wind, but it's very carefully balanced and she is her analogy is you know, when you, when you do something to a piece, like you say, snatch it off and you change it though mobile, it just goes crazy right. All the other pieces, it just goes wild, wild and crazy. And that's the experience right Now. It's now, it's level again in the new, in the new dynamic is all level. The mobile is very graceful, refloating all the Alice again, but it took a number of years to get there Right.
Speaker 3:So, through my daughters, I think my relationship with both of them is deeper than it's ever been. I'm no longer pretending to be who I wasn't and I'm more emotionally available to them and at work, you know, I think I was so, so surprised at the incredible positive feedback I had from so many people that I feel like it deepened many of my relationships and probably be more effective. And again, because I'm able to be more present to it, I'm not spending mostly emotional and mental energy again pretending they are trying to suit up and get through it, and I think that, oh, I don't know where I was going with that. What was the question you asked me?
Speaker 2:Well, I just well, I kind of alluded to the fact that we've kind of already answered the question what was the most difficult thing?
Speaker 1:you've gone through and it was your challenge and the transition.
Speaker 2:You know I got to do a shout out to a MeriPrize financial though what, what an amazing company the way they've just embraced you and said, okay, let's get back to work. I mean, I'm I'm simplifying the fact, we don't give a shit.
Speaker 2:Congrats, you know. Great man, we love you. Get back to work, you know. Let's, let's make this. You know, I just think that's so powerful I got to give a shout out to. You know who I'm going to give a shout out to now? Our bill Williams man. You've worked with Bill for so many years and he is one of the most incredible leaders and people I've ever had the chance to meet.
Speaker 3:You, really I will. I will tell you, as long as you did the shout out like so obviously it's part of my transition, as I had to tell Bill that I was transitioning and so I took, you know, I asked for time with him, got private time with him, told him the story and he leaned forward and he said you know, that is probably the single most courageous thing I've ever heard. You have our hundred 110% behind you. What do you need from us? And you're right, I know Usually I cry when I think about it. You know that that gave the air cover right. He set the tone for the organization and that it just and it just unfolded. I mean, that's it was. It was. It was really an exceptional experience, very surprising, all in very positive ways, how that happened.
Speaker 3:I was the first person my HR director and I I printed off a had a transitional in place manual by the transgender alliance organization. It's like 200 page HR manual for organizations that didn't have one of their own, and so I read through and I highlighted the things and it was the HR director who think of this was somebody had worked for years and was a very good friend, and so that conversation was pretty difficult. But I said here's what I'm going to do, here's what I'm doing, here's the support I need from you. And here are the pages, I think, that are relevant to the organization and how we can manage this. So it just it. You know, once I'll tell you.
Speaker 3:The thing is, once I stop fighting the current right and I just went with the flow, meaning stop trying to say no, I am not that, I am this, and I'm going to do that it felt like I was swimming upstream every single day. It was so exhausting. The second I just said, no, I'm not that, I'm actually I'm, I am a dealer. And it just like everything flow and the workflow unfolded exquisitely. And even I will tell you this, I find it so remarkable.
Speaker 3:Just knowing what was going to be unleashed by a family system was the, the after I decided to transition. I just felt such a calm right. I hadn't done anything, I hadn't taken my first home, I hadn't taken no action, I hadn't, you know, told anybody but my wife and my therapist. I felt such a piece, just on the precipice of all the unknown right. I had no idea what was going to happen, but I knew I was in alignment and I was. I chose myself for the first time, right, and the inner piece that I had was you figure you drove your car for 40 some years with your emergency brake on.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's a great analogy. You finally released it and like I released it and everything just flowed and flowed.
Speaker 3:This is what it's like to not fight the universe. It was like, oh, I fall.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's amazing. You know, we and what you said earlier really, really resonated with me is the impact like if your parents had done the work, the work that you have done on yourself, life would have been so different for you and you're making that life different for your daughters and the future generations, and I think I share this with you. When we talked last week, right Before you and I spoke, I had the privilege of being on the phone with Dr Fred Luskin at a Stanford University and he's an expert in forgiveness and he made a really good point when I was talking to him. You know, when you work on yourself and he was talking a lot about forgiveness and but that's a key point to working on yourself is forgiving others or yourself in the past. He said when you do that, you heal seven generations back and you heal seven generations forward. And I still can't grasp the seven generations back part. But maybe it's because we allow that forgiveness that happened over those generations. We forgive that, so we release it from ourselves and we don't carry it forward to our next seven generations. But that statement when he shared that with me on the phone, man, I really that hit me.
Speaker 2:I'm like wow, and in fact I'm going to tell his book Forgive for Good by Dr Fred Luskin, because I'm just starting to read it again now this week. I'll start it when I finish the book I'm on, but I went through it, most of it or part of it, and skimmed through the rest of it six, seven months ago, and it's amazing. But anyway, I have a question for you. So if I were to come to Minnesota today and I jumped, I brought my time machine with me and we jump in that thing. We fly back to, I don't know, maybe when you're right around 20, I don't care Somewhere in the younger version of Athena you sit down with your younger self and you have an intimate conversation. You give advice, words of wisdom, whatever it might be. What would you share with yourself? You have a lot to say.
Speaker 3:I wouldn't trade my daughters for anything. That's sort of on a life path. I think what I would say to my 20-year-old self is everything's going to be okay. I would say that you are unbelievably courageous almost miraculously so, and you've got a sense for justice and appreciation for grace. You desire love and compassion, but your life circumstances didn't nursery those right and they're making choices as a result of that and I think I would say you are loved, you are held. Do what you need to do to learn in this lifetime and to heal internally so that you can do for your daughters what your parents are just unable or are willing to do for you. Do that, you will make a mark and that you will come to healing.
Speaker 2:Okay, I want to recap. So, everybody out there right now I know you are going through something. You have gone through something recently or you're going to go through some challenges in the future. I want you to remember what Athena just said. I'm going to paraphrase I'm going to miss a few things, but everything is going to be okay. It's going to be okay.
Speaker 2:You always get through what you're going through and that was from a previous podcast guest that I had on a few weeks ago. You are courageous. You're amazingly and immaculately courageous. You really are and you can get through everything that this universe throws at you. God throws at you, other people throw at you, you throw at yourself. You're immaculately courageous and you're going to get through it. Have a sense of justice and grace. I mean grace on others and also grace on yourself. While you're going through this, give yourself some leniency, give yourself some forgiveness, give others and you are loved and you are held and you are.
Speaker 2:Do what you need to heal yourself. Do what you need to practice self-care and self-love, because I was taught by a friend a year ago this month actually when she had a friend of mine who I shared this story. I was going through a difficult time and she texted me on a Sunday morning and she said what are you going to do this week to practice self-care? And I started writing things down and I still do that to this day. I write the things I'm going to do each week to practice self-care, and it's little things. I'm going to work out five times, I'm going to take my vitamins every day, I'm going to drink X amount of water every day and it's little things. I'm going to read this much, I'm going to whatever, and all that stuff is all.
Speaker 2:What we're talking about here is, for many, it's much deeper than that. It's therapy. It's deep, deep, deep, deep digging and gold mining, for lack of a better term. Like Athena's grandfather, you got to get in there, man. You got to find the gold in there, but you got to go through some shit and some mud and some dirt to get to it. And you have the courage to do it and you're going to get through it. So, athena, what's next for you? What's next on your? I mean, you haven't done much in the last few years, so what's next?
Speaker 3:It's kind of boring. Well, good question. So my youngest is a senior high school, so still parenting. So really enjoying my martial arts journey and deepening with that? I would like to.
Speaker 3:I've begun to do some writing and I think this experience is a conversation that he was. It's helpful to me in thinking through that I do. I do feel like I've got a lot that I want to save for myself and you know, and for my daughters, right? So I feel like I'd like to explore further sort of you know our. You know not only our. You know this, this, this connectedness that we all have as humans, but also you know the greater connectedness to the just, the unbelievable majesty of. You know the cosmos and the source of creation, and I do some writing on that. I like to travel, I think I think so, from a from. You know what. What I want to do, you know Fred Schultz said on your, I think on the last show, is you know people.
Speaker 3:You know either financial planner. People talk about leaving a legacy right. That's a, it's a cornerstone of financial planning conversation. Um, that he was talking about living legacy right and um, being living as fully as you can into your to the exquisiteness of the full human potential. I think you know, if I had one goal in my life, it would be obviously to my daughters. Right, no-transcript? Are launched in the world and are doing things that excite your curiosity and connect your passions, that's for sure. That's number one. Number two is that I'm able to, at least in this lifetime, to show, to the extent that I possibly can, you know, my role as part of this human path in just in terms of being a source for connectedness, seeing other people's vulnerability, often just being, you know, conferring grace upon one another. I think those are the things that I think.
Speaker 2:I mean, I don't think there's anything better than what you're doing. We're gonna have you back on because we definitely want to talk to you about quantum physics with you and I have to read this and the intersection with consciousness. I had to read it back up. I told you, you know, before we talk, I'm so interested and fascinated by the field, but I and I have people on here who dabble a little bit and they pull back. I gotta get somebody on who can really have a deep conversation on that subject, because that's a really emerging conversation that people have, especially people who are looking every day to become better and more connected with the universe, connected with themselves, connected with other human beings.
Speaker 2:But really it can be challenging to read books on the subject as a late person like myself, but and I've read a few but to have to talk to somebody. So we're gonna get you back on. I guess, as short, that's a short version of what I was gonna say we're gonna get you back on. So last question, my friend, is there any question that I did not ask, that you wish I had, or any final message you want to leave with the bamboo pack audience?
Speaker 3:I think there are just a couple of messages, and this is from the trenches right, having fought, still working through my personal journey. But the first thing I think I would say around healing from trauma is we are obviously not responsible for the trauma we experience as children. However, it is my belief that as adults, we are 100% responsible for dealing with it, for not projecting our inward trauma, our shame, our fear outworns, onto the world. And because you know, as without so within, as above so below, what that means is the world outside of us is the collective expression of our individual, of our collective conscious level, consciousness. The more people that are able to pull back their projections, projections and judgments and say, oh, that's interesting, what am I? Why do I think that? What do I need? Right? So take an example of somebody cutting off in traffic, right? That's all the time Lots of people get very enraged, and so you ask them what they're thinking.
Speaker 3:Why am I thinking this person's an asshole? What are you needing? Well, I'm needing this person not to be a narcissistic dick and treat with respect. Oh, interesting, what does that go back to? And they think, if they close their eyes, they didn't. Oh, it's introspection. They say, oh, it goes back to when I was five and my grandfather blah, blah, blah. Right Is that the trigger in the environment isn't the thing. The trigger is a pointer to the interior work that you need to do. Right, the more people that cannot get violently opposed to the external trigger. The external trigger is merely a pointer to the work that they themselves need to do. So that's one thing.
Speaker 3:The other I would say in living authentically is if you are not free to be who you are, you are not free. And there will come a time when you choose yourself. And don't wait. If there is never, there will never be a right time. In fact, the conditions are. You will have a thousand reasons why the conditions are impossible, but you need to at some point choose authenticity or your life is going. You're going to be swimming upstream all your life.
Speaker 3:And you know, I guess I will my last quote Nelson Mandela. We can. I would love to talk with you about that Another time around forgiveness and the truth and reconciliation commission that Mandela and Tutu did to try to address all the trauma, the collective trauma, from the apartheid era. But you know, I spent I had the privilege of being in Mandela's to Robin Island and off Cape Town and standing in Mandela's cell. For 18 years he was in it. He was an 8x7 cell with a straw mat on a concrete floor. 18 years, a 27 years, total 18 years, and that 8x7, 56 square feet was his own, 18 years, and such such an example to all of us. I've run so many things, but you know what he said, among many things, is may your choices reflect your hopes and not your fears. And I think that's what I would do, that's what I think.
Speaker 2:So let's just compound that for a minute, compact that for a minute. Let your hopes say it again, let your fears, let your choices reflect your hopes and not your fears.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:My friend. I can't imagine a better way to end this. You are an amazing woman, you are an amazing human and I am so blessed that Fred connected us. I'm just getting to know you and I know we're going to have a friendship. So I'm a big texturist, so if I ever get too annoying on text, you can just say hey, calm down a little bit, brian, and I do owe you the book. I'm going to send you the book by Dr Luskin. Forgive for good, so I got to get your address and get that out to you. But I want to just end this now, real quickly here and just say I love you and I do, athena. I think you're an amazing human being and I don't say that to my friends and my family, but other than that, I don't say it to the bamboo pack audience Because I do. I love them, yeah.
Speaker 3:They're big spoilers. You know why? Because I see you and you see me. We see the humanity of one another.
Speaker 2:Well, we drop labels. Drop labels and see the soul 100%. So, anyway, I want to take this time to welcome you. Hey, welcome to the bamboo pack audience. Athena, you want to tell? That story again.
Speaker 2:Let's go for another hour and a half and tell that story again. Anyway, I just want to thank you, my friend, for being such an amazing, not just inspiring which I say that a lot at the end of the talk but for this one I say inspiring but also educational. Thank you for being so inspiring and educational today for all of us here, myself included, and all the listeners out there who will be tuning in here in a couple of days. I thank you for that.
Speaker 3:Oh honey, Thank you for the opportunity. It's such a pleasure.
Speaker 2:All right, let's talk for a couple of minutes after we're done, but in the meantime, bamboo pack audience, please listen to this episode. Listen to it again. Really, let yourself put down your guards. If you have guards against transgenders, there's my cold coming out. Or if you just want to hear the story of the human spirit, which is it? That's what this is a person who wants to live authentically. You all want to live authentically. I want to live authentically. This is a perfect example of how you can do that and the courage it takes to do it. But the benefit and the beauty behind the other side of that mountain is way, far, far better than any trauma you'll go through. You'll suffer going through that or you'll experience going through that.
Speaker 2:In the meantime, please, everybody, please, get out there and subscribe, hit that like button, smash the like button, rate, review us and please share this particular episode with five people, not three, which I usually ask. Share it with five. This is not about transgenderism just alone. This is about living your life authentically. It's about how do you overcome and deal with childhood trauma or trauma of any type. How do you come around that and climb those mountains and come out the other side, really, truly being true to yourself. This is the perfect example. Everyone out there in the meantime I'll talk to you in a few days Remember to strive, love and live. I appreciate each and every single one of you.