Welcome back!
Or, sign in with your email
Don’t have an account? Subscribe now
Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 522, an interview with the author of The Courage Gap: 5 Steps to Braver Action, Dr. Margie Warrell.
In this episode, Margie shared her journey from a rural Australian dairy farm to a global career, and how she faced significant personal challenges including family illness and losing her first child. Instead of letting these experiences define her, Margie built a successful career while raising four children. She discusses how to overcome self-doubt, embrace uncomfortable situations, and build courage through daily practice. Margie discussed her book, “The Courage Gap,” which outlines steps to close the gap between desired and current selves, including embodying presence, challenging limiting beliefs, and consistently choosing to move towards one’s goals. She encouraged listeners to take small, brave actions daily to build a fulfilling life.
I hope you will enjoy this episode.
Kris Safarova
Dr. Margie Warrell is a Senior Partner at Korn Ferry and Advisory Board member for the Forbes School of Business & Technology. She’s also a member of APCO’s International Advisory Council, a bestselling author, leadership advisor and international authority on human potential.
Get Dr. Margie’s new book here:
The Courage Gap: 5 Steps to Braver Action
Here are some free gifts for you:
Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies
Enjoying this episode?
Get access to sample advanced training episodes
Episode Transcript:
Kris Safarova 00:45
Welcome to the Strategy Skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris Safarova. Our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com and we have two gifts for you today. The first gift is a book on how to be an effective leader. It is co-authored with some of our clients, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/gift. It is F-I-R-M-S consulting.com forward slash gift. And the second gift is McKinsey and BCG-Winning Resume. It’s a free download. It’s a resume that got offers from both firms. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf. And today we have with us Margie Warrell, a senior partner at Korn Ferry and advisory board member for the Forbes School of Business and Technology. Margie, welcome.
Dr. Margie Warrell 01:33
Oh, I’m so happy to be here with you. Kris, thank you so much for inviting me.
Kris Safarova 01:38
So to begin with, I wanted to ask you a question, what experience from your past has most contributed to who you are today?
Dr. Margie Warrell 01:46
Ah, it’s hard to to narrow that down to one experience I’ve had so many as you can probably tell from my accent. I didn’t grow up in the United States. I grew up in rural Australia, and I should just mention now the pronunciation of my name is an Australian pronunciation. It’s actually Margie with a hard G. And so I grew up on a dairy farm, and I have to say, just my childhood living on a farm, I’m the big sister of seven children. That, in itself, was a pretty formative experience. I didn’t have a very worldly childhood. It was very simple, but we did have to build a lot of resilience. My father milked cows. There was a lot of droughts, there was financial hardships. I had to step up in big ways as the big sister of seven children, so that was pretty that was very formative for me. But then moving to university, to the big city, that was a big deal. And then I spent a couple years backpacking around the world at 21 and 22 and 23 and then lived in Papua New Guinea in my later 20s. And have spent, you know, over 2025, years living around the world, in Singapore, in the United Kingdom, and obviously I’m based here now in the United States, living just outside Washington, DC. So those, those global moves shaped me, and then numerous personal experiences. A family member with schizophrenia, brother took his life. Another brother became a paraplegic from a terrible accident. I had an eating disorder through my teens, you know, raising four children while moving around the world, being in an armed robbery in my 20s, and losing my first child a few weeks later, all of those experiences have shaped me, personally and also professionally, as well as obviously the career path I’ve had. So I know it that was a lot that I just added to you. Then you asked me for one thing, but all of those different things have really shaped who I am.
Kris Safarova 03:56
And they know of some of them from your book, and you had so many challenges, and they did not know about your child. I’m so sorry to hear that. That is incredible loss.
Dr. Margie Warrell 04:05
Thank you. Thank you. It was, it was a profound loss. I was 29 years old, but I remember so clearly, so clearly in the aftermath of that a lot. Obviously, I had a lot of compassion and empathy come my way. People felt very sorry for me, and I appreciated that. But I also remember, I remember being so clear that I didn’t want people to think of me and relate to me as a victim. And of course, I was a victim. I was a victim of an armed robbery. I had a gun at my head being kind of thrust into my head, and then 10 days later, exactly finding out that this, this baby, was an my unborn child, at 20 weeks pregnant, had died. But I. Remember so clearly as I processed, as I worked through all of that, and I wrote in my journal and and kind of, you know, wrestled with God and like, hey, how could this happen to me? This isn’t fair. This shouldn’t happen to me. I didn’t think this would happen to me. And but coming out the other side of that wrestling match with a clarity of of of of who I wanted to be as a person. I did not want to be defined as a victim. I did not ever want to be defined by what happened to me in life. I wanted be to be defined by how I responded to it, and I didn’t want to give my circumstances or my fear the power to limit my future and and I think, you know, yes, I was like my late 20s, but I look back on that time, and while, of course, I wouldn’t wish that on anybody, I have a certain gratitude for the experience because of how I grew from it and who I became from it, and I I think that’s shaped a lot of the work that I’ve done now over the last sort of late 20s, you know, 25 years, helping people to to work through their own challenges and to rewrite their own narrative that sometimes hems them in and limits their future and leaves them being really stuck as a hostage to their to their circumstances and to past experiences.
Kris Safarova 06:33
I actually also am the oldest sister, and I also had an experience of robbery. It was just really, really scary experience. And happened in early 20s. I was coming home, it was still light out summer, and it happened right next to my house. And it stays with you. It changes you. It’s a very tough experience.
Dr. Margie Warrell 06:53
Yeah, yeah, no, it’s not, and I don’t want to be tried about it, saying, Oh yes, I grew from it. It’s great. It was and it was really traumatic. It was a traumatic experience. It really rocked my world as I knew it. And until that point, I really was living, you know, in psychology, we talk about the term an assumptive world, the world that’s that’s made up of the assumptions about how the world works. And my assumptive world came crashing down on me, because in my world, as I had assumed it to be, stuff like that did not happen to me. I knew people got held up in robberies. I knew people lost babies. I’d heard about miscarriages and and I just never thought it would happen to me, and so it was working through that, and in the world of the study of post traumatic growth, we have to be able to incorporate unwanted circumstances and experiences in ways that actually Help us to have a richer and more meaningful experience of life, to not feel bitter and resentful or to go through life anxious, but but to be able to incorporate that in a way that we actually grow and we thrive and we flourish. And I think that was a really big one for me when my youngest brother developed schizophrenia a few years after that, that was another really big one for me, because I just I just never thought that would happen to me or to our family. I knew this happened to people, but I didn’t think it would happen in my family, that I would have a sibling who would develop a really, actually horrendous case of schizophrenia, a torturous journey that he ended up going on where he ultimately decided that he did not want to live his life, and he took his life after a decade battling with this, these demons, and that was a brutal experience to try and support him and my parents and to make sense of life with that experience. And so yeah, thank you for asking, because I wasn’t necessarily assuming we would, I would share about these experiences, but that’s where the conversations taken us and and it’s definitely shaped me and my experience of life, and my appreciation for life, but also my courage to live life.
Kris Safarova 09:34
Could you give us a little bit of a sense of how you were able to build a very successful career and have four children, raise a family in the process, especially given all the hardships you also had to go through.
Dr. Margie Warrell 09:48
Yes, well, I think that growing up on a farm where there wasn’t any support, there was like it was difficult, like there wasn’t help coming in. There was no takeout pizza on it any night of the week. There was never zero takeout for the food or going to restaurants. My parents couldn’t afford that, and so I had to become really capable. And I, you know, as the Big Sister, I think they often say, you know, however shaped by our role in our in the family, and our position in a family. And I was very much the big the older sibling. I had an older brother, but it was a pretty gendered family, so as the big sister I was putting on we had cloth diapers, putting the nappies on and off the line, helping make dinner, helping change my little siblings nappies, calling them diapers in the US, making bottles for them, feeding them, getting that, you know, helping clean up the kitchen and and I had to do a lot of things young, like at seven and eight, nine, I was doing things that most people probably would have, wouldn’t want to, wouldn’t expect anyone under 16 to be doing. But I think that also set me up as a mom, as a mother, I came into motherhood with a confidence in my ability to nurture a child and then a second child, my daughter, 15 months after my my first, my son, and then I had four children in five years. But I think the way I did parenting, I didn’t do it with perfectionist standards. It was like, Done is better than perfect. Whether it’s, you know, cooking a meal or getting them ready for school or I was just sort of able to do it in a way that you would if you had seven kids on a farm, you know, just like, Okay, let’s get this done. And so I wasn’t hampered with perfectionism. And I think a lot of women have the bar for how they should parent set so incredibly high, far higher than the standards that most of us were raised with in terms of all the activities our kids should be doing and the clothes our kids should be wearing and the perfect house that we should be keeping. And of course, we should be having this brilliant career at the same time, and our bodies should be back to a six pack three weeks after we’ve given birth. So I think we have this bar set so high for ourselves that makes it really tough. I remember when my kids were little, taking them to school one day, and there was a woman there who had two little boys, and she always dressed her two boys who were two years apart in matching clothes, and they always looked impeccable, and she always looked impeccable. And she said to me one day, we were friendly. And she said, How do you do four kids? I’m just like, totally stressed out doing two. And she had just finished telling me how one of her children had spilt something on themselves in the car, and she had to take them back inside the house to change both their outfits before they she could take them to school. And I said to her, Well, you know, Jody, I didn’t do parenting the way you do parenting. And I said, that’s not a criticism. It’s just, I just, I have a much lower bar. Look at my kids. They’re in the same Batman t shirt three days in a row because they don’t want to change it. And I’m like, Okay, fine, wear what you want to wear. So that that’s one thing was the how I you know, where I set the bar. Secondly, I have a wonderful husband. We’ve been married now 31 years we were married, I think five, when we had our first child, who is now 26 but my husband championed me to go out and do what called on me and to pursue what gave me energy, and I felt inspired to do, and still does. And so throughout our marriage, he has just always been my biggest champion. When I have been filled with doubt, when I’ve been like, well, how can I go away on this training course? We’ve got four kids, you know, at school, and they’re doing soccer practice and basketball practice, and how do we manage this? He would be, I’ll figure it out. Let’s just figure out how to do give you air cover so you can go away for a couple days. And, you know, there would be, and he was the primary breadwinner for for many years. And I think there’s a lot of men who wouldn’t be so supportive, because it actually puts more on them, like he was the one that would then be baiting for kids at night and getting them off to bed and everything so that I could go out and do something. And in the beginning, I wasn’t earning a lot of money, because I changed career journey. Actually started my coaching business when my fourth child was six months old. So I had been working in corporate marketing, and I went back and started my own coaching business. We’re living in a suburb of Dallas, Texas. I didn’t know anyone we’d moved to the US two years prior, actually less than two years prior. So I didn’t have a network. I couldn’t tap into my alumni or my any any any groups that networks of people, so I had to, like, work a lot harder than a lot of people do just to get it off the ground. But he was always hugely supportive, and I would say the third thing, so one, where I set the bar. Two. I had a supportive husband that really helped. But three I would say I was I was brave and I was bold, and I just stuck at it, and I didn’t always know what I was doing, but my passion and sense of purpose around what I was doing and the my desire to truly help people get out of their own way and grow into their potential. Just helped me just keep putting myself out. There was 1000 steps outside my comfort zone, often falling short, failing, not always landing the things I wanted to land, but over time, I learned and I grew and I built relationships, and then sometimes from completely out of left field, a door would open, an opportunity that I hadn’t even been pursuing, but all of the other things I had been pursuing led to that door opening. So so i There were many things, but I would just say, often the biggest barrier is our own thinking about how we have to do things and the shoulds that we have in the back of our own head.
Kris Safarova 16:05
That is very true, that programming that is running our life, and we are on autopilot most of the time, and I’m so glad you are speaking about it, and I speak about it all the time with my clients, because that is so instrumental. And then if I was not reprogramming myself. From the time I was a teenager, I would not be speaking to you today. It’s so powerful. It’s the most important thing. I just another day this week, had a coaching call with one of my longtime clients, and we were talking about reprogramming, and he was saying, okay, something along the lines that okay, I can add it to the list of the things to do on this critical path we are working through. And I said, this is the most important thing. This is not just the afterthought. This is the most important thing.
Dr. Margie Warrell 16:45
Yeah, I say that our beliefs, what we’re telling ourselves, is like the operating system of behavior. And Daniel Carnahan, the behavioral economist and Nobel laureate, he said, Nothing is more important than what you’re telling yourself is true in the moment you’re telling yourself that. And so if we’re telling ourselves, Well, of course, I can’t have four kids and and pursue a career, or, Oh, I’m just not that smart, or I need to have a really good plan before I start out. Or, you know, for you, obviously you moved to this country from somewhere, English wasn’t your first language. For me, I didn’t have any network whatsoever. If I told myself, well, I can’t do it because of ABCD like and looked for all the reasons why not, I would never have done anything so I had, like you, I’ve had to continually doubt my own doubts, defy my own doubts, and do the very things that the little fearful voice on my shoulder is telling me not to do.
Kris Safarova 17:52
And the big part of all of it is figuring out the vision of your future life and who you want to be, and then closing that gap every day. So how can we close the gap between who we are and who we can be? And maybe, before we go there, let’s talk about, how can someone even define who they want to be if they’re struggling with it?
Dr. Margie Warrell 18:13
Yes, yeah, I think that’s a great question. You know, I the comedian Lily Tomlin once said I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific. And I think deciding who it is we want to be is probably the most important decision of our life. Like, who do we want to be? What are the values that we want to define our lives by? And and often, if we don’t know who we want to be, then we’re going to get pulled along by the crowds. Our fears are going to define us, our our the low angels of our nature. And often, we won’t do the very things that would help us grow into who it is we can be. And so I’ve done this a lot with my own clients. It’s just helping them get clear about what kind of person do you want to be like when, if you pull away the title of your job and the money you’d like to earn and your accomplishments and the house you want to live in and all of that stuff, what, what kind of human Do you want to be? And one day when you’re looking back on your whole life and you’re at your final breaths, how do you want to feel about how you showed up for life? And it’s a big question. It’s a profound question, and it takes some digging to figure that out and and often at a superficial level, we want to be successful and we want to be attractive, and we want to be fun and we want to be we might say it out loud, popular and liked and admired and all of those things great. Sure go. It me too, who doesn’t? But at the deepest level, who is it that you want to be that isn’t defined by what other people say about you or think of you or any material accomplishment, but at the core level of your being and our deepest self, I think if we’re quiet enough, if we give ourselves space, there’s a little voice within us that knows who it is we want to be and who it is we can be. And of course, there’s always going to be a gap. There’s always going to be a gap between who it is we most want to be and who we’re being. I want to be a loving person. I am not always loving. I want to be a really generous person. Sometimes I have ungenerous thoughts and I don’t act generously. I want to be a disciplined person. I’m not always disciplined. I want to be brave. I’m not always brave. Sometimes my inner wimp gets the better of me, but by having that clarity of who it is I want to be and having my sight set on, you know, what is the highest good for my life and the highest good for who I want to be, it acts like a compass, and it helps me discern. I need to invest time in self care, because that’s crucial to me being who I want to be, is to prioritizing my own, to be list ahead of my own, to do list and what it takes for me to show up the way I want, which for me, is eating well and exercising and having some quiet time with God and just little rituals and practices that I have, but then it’s like, okay, who is it I want to be out in the world, and not just with the people that I like and who like me and make me feel good about myself. But what about the people that I don’t resonate with? What about those people that I don’t feel as much affinity with? How do I want to show up sometimes, you know, when I might not feel like being kind and generous with those people.
Kris Safarova 22:04
And for clients who tell you, I just don’t know what makes me happy. I don’t know they have certain barriers in their mind that keeps them stuck. They’re not able to try to figure out what they want, even when you try to explain to them the struggle, and especially if they do not consider themselves a spiritual person, so all those practices and tools that could be used to get to the truth, you cannot use them. What is your approach in those situations?
Dr. Margie Warrell 22:28
Well, obviously it varies person by person, but I would say this, tell me if I was going to go through the different parts of your life, your family, your relationships, your health and well being, your relationship with money, your work, your career. You know, if I could wave a magic wand, let’s just play a little game here. Let’s just pretend for a moment that I can wave a magic wand and give you what is your heart’s biggest desire. Because often we don’t even give ourselves permission to connect to what we most want, because as soon as we do, we create a gap between where we are and that and that, that future potential state. And that’s terrifying. It’s like, that’s fright. It’s really frightening. Or, I don’t want to tell you that I would love to just find the perfect soul mate, or that I could just live in a beautiful home by the water, or that I, you know, would have a job that I would be well paid for and love what I do, because that’s not my reality, and I don’t know how to make that happen. So I think playing, I call it the magic wand exercise. I want you just to play. Let’s just do this as a just a thought experiment. So that’s one way I do it, and other way is asking them, well, tell me what it is you don’t want. What is it about your life right now that you that doesn’t light you up that makes you feel heavy or pessimistic or sad or afraid or alone, and okay and like, get them to talk about, well, I don’t like, and why is that? Wow, because obviously now all the negative focus is on the negative, but I want to keep, I don’t want to keep people in that state. It’s like, okay, got it so what you don’t want? And you see, our brains are wired to focus on the deficits, but what we focus on expands. So I’m like, okay, that’s what you don’t want. How do you feel about having shared that with me? I feel miserable, I feel down, I feel flat, I feel like life like, what’s the point? I feel depressed, I feel resigned, I feel hopeless. I’m like, Okay, now let’s shift notice how you’re feeling, because what you focus on expands, and our energy goes where our attention goes, so let’s flip that what? What is it that you want? Let’s focus on what you want and just get them to notice how it shifts, how they even feel. Of talking about it, because, as I’ve written about in in the courage gap, if we aren’t clear about what we want, about the highest intentions for ourselves, our lives, our our brain, our attention, is just going to default to what we don’t want, and we get end up living in the land of deficits.
Kris Safarova 25:21
That is very true. How often do you think someone should revisit what they want?
Dr. Margie Warrell 25:27
Well, I think that we can make an exercise of doing that on a on a regular basis. Do I sit down every day and go, What do I really want? No, not for my whole life. That’s something I definitely at the start of a new year. The new year to me as a catalyst, it’s a time to sit down and go, What do I want for my year ahead, but to take time to also go, what do I want for the rest of my life is such a valuable exercise. Most of us spend more time planning out our annual vacation than we do how we want to spend the rest of our life when we’re not on vacation. I also think there’s a value in having a daily or weekly, just a regular practice of going, you know, what is it I want for myself over the next 24 hours, over the next week? What is, how do I want to measure success and putting some KPIs on that, like, Okay, well, at the end of this week, I’m gonna, I’m gonna feel really good about myself if I have, you know, for me right now, as I have a book coming out, it’s like, if I’ve written this article for Forbes, or if I’ve done this podcast, if I have had four really great coaching sessions with these clients and given this really great keynote at this conference that I’m speaking at. So I’ll kind of bring it down into more granular kind of activities, but also how I show up. You know, what’s this? What’s the emotions that I’m spreading on to other people? And so at the start of every day, I have a journal exercise. It’s like, I ask myself, you know, what is it I need to do today? What is it I need to say today? What conversations do I need to have, and who is it that I need to be today? And I just have that as a little exercise every morning in my journal, maybe not every morning, but many mornings, most mornings. And it just helps me set my intention for the day ahead.
Kris Safarova 27:23
So now let’s talk about closing the gap. So once there’s some clarity on who someone wants to be, how do they go about closing that gap?
Dr. Margie Warrell 27:32
Yeah, this is obviously, that’s the focus of my new book, The Courage gap number one is getting that clarity of what is it that you most want for your life, in your situation right now, who you want to be? Secondly, being able to just ask yourself, what is it that I need to believe to make that a reality and editing the narrative that you’ve been telling yourself that actually is working against you. Moving forward toward it, we are story making machines. We all live in stories about who we are and how the world works. We were creating stories from our days in caves, when we etched stories on the walls of of caves. And so we are wired for narrative. Our brains are wired for making sense of the world and creating a narrative about it, but what we’re often not very good at is being able to identify how the narrative that we’re telling ourselves is actually keeping us from taking the very actions that would move us forward. And so, you know, I one of my key ex you know, I think one of my key responsibilities with with clients is is being a story buster. And as they’re talking about their situation and what they want, and what’s in the way of them getting what they want, I’m listening What’s the story that they’re living in that’s actually hemming them in like a straight jacket. It’s hemming them in and keeping them taking the very actions that they are entirely capable of taking, but their belief system is keeping them from taking. We create our stories, but then our stories create us. So the second thing we have to do after we’ve focused on what we want is to rewrite the stories that are keeping us stuck and stressed and scared or maybe keeping us selling ourselves short and living a way smaller life than we’re capable of living. Then actually we’re called to be living then. Then will help us to thrive and where we’re living too safely. And I know a lot of people who live lives of Immaculate mediocrity, living very safely within the confines of their comfort zone, and they tell them a story they can’t themselves, a story that they can’t do things because, you know what? It gives them an excuse not to try because it’s uncomfortable. And it’s scary, but I think you know, rewriting that that script is so is such a crucial step to closing that courage gap.
Kris Safarova 30:10
So let’s talk about identifying which studies we are telling ourselves that are keeping us from moving forward.
Dr. Margie Warrell 30:18
I have a 3p litmus test. My litmus test is this, if what you’re telling yourself about your circumstance and your ability to improve your circumstance or about yourself isn’t making you feel more positive, more powerful or more purposeful, then your story is working against you. And so sometimes I’ll talk to people and I’m like, well, they know they need to exercise more, and they’re like, I just don’t have time. I’m like, what we all have the same amount of time. It’s how you prioritize your time. Could you get up in the morning. Oh no, I’m not a morning person, and I have to get out, you know, basically say a big BS, sure. Some people naturally wake up early, and that’s where they start strong in their day. Other people, not so much. But all of us can get out of bed if we set the alarm. If there’s something important enough, it’s just that we’re not prioritizing it. And so again, I would say you’ve got to challenge the narrative that you’re telling yourself, but also ask yourself, is it making you feel more positive, more purposeful, more powerful? If it’s not expanding your avenues for action, if it’s not helping you move toward the future desired state, then it’s actually working against you. And I think that is an exercise that all of us can do all the time. And then ask yourself, What’s another story I could tell myself here that would make me feel more at peace, maybe with a situation that I can’t change, or more empowered to change a situation that I can.
Kris Safarova 32:01
When you get to that point with clients and they start rewriting their story, where do they usually get stuck?
Dr. Margie Warrell 32:10
Well, the easiest person there is to deceive is ourselves. We often fall into the trap of telling ourselves what’s called Vital lies. They’re the soothing myths, truths that we tell ourselves, that make us feel better about ourselves, that help us to avoid confronting difficult and inconvenient truths. And so I think we have to be very, very mindful of how we can become a victim of our own stories as well as an accomplice to the circumstances that we complain about. And so just asking yourself, how might this not be true? Like, how could I be wrong here? Oh, I don’t have time. Well, actually, how might I actually have time? If so, think of someone you really admire, if they were in my situation right now, what would they be telling themselves about this? So even sometimes, stepping into the shoes of somebody else who seems to be very empowered in their life, ask just, just imagine themselves in your circumstance, even that can help you to kind of reframe and see things through a larger lens.
Kris Safarova 33:24
That makes a lot of sense. So once you get to that point, where do you take clients next?
Dr. Margie Warrell 33:31
Well, in my in my book, The Courage gap, I’ve talked about five steps to close the no do gap between what we know we should be doing and what we’re doing, but also between who we are, who we are being right now, and who we can be. And the third step is about really embodying the full power of our of our presence, connecting to our own power, but also connecting to the power and the energy of people around us as well. And so that often requires resetting and regulating our own anxious nervous system. And we have a nervous system, and our nervous system is wired for being on alert for what could go wrong. And so we have to off. We have to be really mindful to be fully embodied in our whole bodies. A lot of people live from the neck up. They’re intellectualizing everything, and they’re not really feeling their emotions all the way through. So we have to own where we where we feel fear. We have to embrace that. We have to breathe in courage and breathe out fear, and we also need to connect to the people around us. And when we are fully embodied in our own presence and power and agency, we can tap into reserves of courage that we might never be able to do otherwise. And so an exercise I often do with people. Is to help them. Just think about, how do you need to show up physically? What does courage look like for you right now, and how you’re holding yourself? And sure, sometimes that can mean like I’m going into warrior mode. But sometimes embodying courage can be loosening up not being in Warrior mode, pulling down the armor that we erect around ourselves, allowing ourselves to be more available to other people, to connecting on a more emotionally intimate and vulnerable level.
Kris Safarova 35:36
For someone listening to us right now and thinking, You know what my fears are so strong. I have been feeling them for such a long time. I don’t know if I ever will be able to get rid of it. What would you say to them?
Dr. Margie Warrell 35:48
I would say, I see you, I hear you, I feel you, and you are not alone. There are millions and millions of people walking through their life every day, who feel like there’s just a they’re a big bundle of anxious nerves because our bodies, our bodies program and fear lives in our bodies, and when we’ve had experiences, particularly when we’re younger, that where we have felt as though our lives were, it was life and death, even if it wasn’t life and death, but where we’ve internalized it that way fear can set up permanent residents in our bodies. And so there, there are. There are people who are trained in embodied cognition. There are so many people who can help you work through how do you disentangle all of that anxiety from your whole nervous system that’s been wired up for so long that it doesn’t know how to be another way? And so I would just say you’re not alone, but you’re also able, over time, to to reprogram that fearful state in your body. And there’s many people who whose lives are entire, that’s what their focus of is doing just that. I share exercises in the body about how we can start doing that in in the courage gap, and one of them is just a simple mindfulness exercise, tuning in to what’s going on in our bodies, just noticing what feels constricted and tight or maybe just numb and just the more we can tune into that, the more we feel those feelings in our body then we have our feelings. Our feelings don’t have us, and over time, we can disentangle ourselves from that fearful state.
Kris Safarova 37:59
What advice do you have for choosing what we want more than what we fear?
Dr. Margie Warrell 38:04
Well, we have to choose it again and again. We just have to continually choose to move toward what we want. Step Four in my book, The Courage gap, is called step into discomfort, and that is a deliberate act to move toward what we want versus just continually being reactive and moving away from what we fear, and we’re not wired to do that. It is innately uncomfortable. Many years ago, I was on a high wire. I did a day at Circus School, and we had to go up and stand on a platform and reach out to grab the trapeze bar. And I intellectually knew that I could not fall to my death because I had a harness on and there was a safety net, and I knew I couldn’t die. It’s more dangerous crossing the road, but my body reacted as though I was going to die if I leant forward, and so I leant forward after a while. It took a while. I I breathed encouraged. I breathed out fear. I leaned in, I let out a scream, and I reached for that bar, and I swung through the air, and then eventually I dropped to the safety net. Well, we may not always be on a bar, a platform 25 feet above the ground. But every single day, throughout our day, there are moments when we can choose to move toward what we want, or are we moving away and protecting ourselves from what we fear? And sometimes they’re small things. It’s like, do I ask, Do I ask someone to give me a hand? Do I reach out to someone and say, Would you like to catch up? Do I speak up in a meeting? Do I make a call to someone that I’d like to get to know better, or be my client? Do I post something on my LinkedIn account when I risk the judgment of people thinking it’s not a smart or particularly interesting comment? Like there’s often these little micro decisions throughout our day. And so I would just encourage everyone to embrace discomfort as the ticket price for you to have the life that you want to live. And it’s not a one off choice, it’s a choice we have to make again and again and again, and we never actually get to a point where we don’t have to make that choice, because as we move up in our jobs or careers another level, another devil, we will have to practice stepping into our courage gap in new ways, in different ways. I work with extremely successful entrepreneurs and incredibly successful leaders in business, and I work with political leaders, and they have a lot of power and they have a lot of money, and they’ve accomplished extraordinary things, but courage is no less relevant for them than it is for someone who’s starting out in their job or has been out of work for 12 months or Five years. Courage is relevant for all of us right throughout our lives. It just takes different forms.
Kris Safarova 41:06
I will now ask you my favorite question. Over the last few years, what were aha moments, realizations that changed the way you look at life or the way you look at business?
Dr. Margie Warrell 41:17
Well, they’re two they’re two different questions. Let me just start with the second one. What’s happened in the last few years? It’s changed how I look at business. I think business is the engine house for a thriving world that the trade we do, the commercial, the commerce that we do with others, whether we are a solopreneur or we’re working in a large, multinational, publicly listed company. So what has been really interesting for me over the last three, four years working at Korn Ferry as a senior partner in their board and CEO succession practice, is that I’ve worked with some incredibly gifted, smart, capable, talented, driven, high achieving people. And yet what I have found is that as willing as they are to make bold, strategic bets, that often they’re driven by a deep, unfaced insecurity of not being good enough and not having what it takes and a need to prove themselves and their own value and worth and significance. And my experience is that whenever we have not really faced and worked through what makes us feel vulnerable, our decisions will be guided by avoiding those vulnerabilities, and we ultimately make the teams and organizations that we run more vulnerable over time. And so that’s been something that I hadn’t been as fully present to prior to the opportunity I had to kind of work with extremely senior leaders in some of the world’s biggest organizations, but what my recent experience over the last five years, and actually it was a catalyst for writing my book The Courage gap in 2020 I was living in Singapore. I had three of my four children living in the United States as students. My husband was working for a company that had us based in Singapore. And as we know, the wheels fell off the world. COVID happened, and his company, who he’d worked for for a really long time, said, we’re not moving you to the US, where your kids are. In fact, you can move back to Australia because you’re not traveling anyway. And Australia, at the time, had closed borders. In fact, even their own citizens couldn’t get in. There was long wait lists for citizens to get back to Australia. But you certainly couldn’t leave the country once you were back there without, like, getting a really difficult to obtain exception. So we had three children in the US, two of which found themselves, kind of homeless. We were in Singapore, which closed its borders. Our children couldn’t come into Singapore because we were not citizens there. We weren’t permanent residents. We were short term employment contracts, and we couldn’t go back to Australia, because then we couldn’t get out. And so we found ourselves in a really difficult situation, we felt literally between a rock and a hard place. It was really upsetting that my husband’s employer wasn’t really showing any humanity to us as a family in terms of just trying to have us on the same continent as our kids. And we’d moved our kids to the US because they had said we’d be moving to America, so we’d sent them ahead, and I remember my assumptive world came crashing down again because I was like, how did this happen? How could we end up with this family dispersed across the world? This is not how it’s supposed to be. This is not how I wanted to do parenting. This. Is not our family unit. And a lot of families talked about how their kids all came home and how what a bonding time it was with their kids. Well, our kids didn’t have a home to come back to, and it was really difficult. It was I felt anxious, I felt upset, I felt confused. I felt many, many different emotions and what I had to do to get myself through that time was just to really double down on my faith. And for those who may not have faith in in God, you know, I think of Rumi, who says, Live every day as their life, as though the universe is conspiring in your favor. And to go, I’ve just got to trust that there is some gift in here and that out the other side of this, things will work out, and things have worked out, and they did work out. I prayed a lot, and I think that experience, though, made me realize that none of us have certainty. Even when we think we have certainty, we don’t have certainty. At any moment, our lives can turn upside down, and we can find ourselves in situations we would never have expected much less of planned for, but that from the very situations where our world can be most rocked, we can discover a deep sense of self certainty from within ourselves that we’re going to get through it, that every day is a day for us to just choose and choose again, how we want to show up, and that when we do that consistently, we actually and ground ourselves in in the security of ourselves, not in the world lining up the way we want the world to line up. It is an immense source of security for ourselves and for me, leaning on my faith that God had a plan for me, even though I couldn’t figure out what the heck it was, and that things would be okay and that my kids would be okay as upsetting and traumatic as it was for them at the time too, that actually all of these things could be, could be used for good, and the good would come from them and and they eventually did.
Kris Safarova 47:12
Thank you so much for everything you shared today. Any final words, and specifically, also, where can our listeners learn more about you by your books, anything you want to share.
Dr. Margie Warrell 47:21
Well, thank you. Thank you. Well, my book, The Courage gap, it’s wherever good books are sold. It’s on Amazon, but you can also get on my website. There’s more information there. Margiewarrell.com I’m sure you’ll share a link with that or go to the courage gap.com that should forward you to the book page. And I also just invite people to connect with me on social media, on LinkedIn and Instagram, Facebook. And finally, I would just say to you, if you’re listening to this now and you’re thinking, Oh, it’s all fine for her, you know, she’s in a good spot. I don’t have XYZ. I would just say to you today, ask yourself, what would I do today, if I was being brave, what is one small thing that I would do that would cast a vote for the person that I am on the way to becoming, and do that thing, however scared you feel, however nervous you feel, however small that thing may seem, just do that thing, and then tomorrow, ask yourself that same question and act on the answer, and I’ll guarantee you, one year from now, you will be so glad you did.
Kris Safarova 48:30
Very powerful final words. Thank you so much, Margie. I really appreciate you being here. Our guest today, again has been Dr. Margie Warrell check out your book. It’s called The Courage Gap. And our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com if you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. And you can also get McKinsey and BCG-Winning Resume. It is also a free download. It is a resume that got offers from both firms, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf. Thank you everyone for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.