Beyond the Crucible

Living as your best self. Pursuing your vision. Fulfilled by your life of significance. If so, we’ve got good news for you. Just keep listening. Does that sound like a place in which you’d like to stand?    This week, in the second episode of our spring series exploring our Trials-to-Triumphs self-assessment, we begin examining the assessment’s unique profiles by starting with the end in...

Could we really prove it? The stages and the process we go through – each of us individually – after we’ve been through a crucible … and then chart our way beyond it? The answer? Absolutely. As you’re about to discover in our spring series that begins this week on how we built and how you can benefit from our Trials-to-Triumphs Self-Assessment.   In this first episode of our eight part series...

Someone you admire. Someone who knows more than you about your job or about the lifestyle you want to live. Someone who shares your values. People like that are the ones you should be on the lookout for in selecting a mentor.   On this week’s episode, we discuss Warwick's latest blog at BeyondTheCrucible.com, titled “How To Find the Right Mentor.” Among the seven tips he offers to assist us i...

Lion Goodman recounts his harrowing experience of being shot twice (two other bullets narrowly missed him) by a man whose car broke down in the middle of the Mojave Desert to whom he was being a good Samaritan – and the hours of discussion that he engaged in with his attacker, finally, miraculously convincing the gunman to let him go.   The incident, he tells Warwick, set him on the path to b...

The horrors our guest this week, Amanda Blackwood, endured almost from birth are hard to hear. Decades of physical, emotional and sexual abuse … but heartache was not the end of her story. Healing was.   Our interview with Blackwood, by necessity, covers the traumas she experienced being sex-trafficked on more than one occasion. But make no mistake about it: Amanda Blackwood may have been vic...

Character. Discipline. Overcoming a natural weakness like impatience. These are critical characteristics for leaders, and for bouncing back from a crucible, and we explore this week how George Washington modeled them. It’s our focus on this fifth episode of our series within the show, STORIES FROM THE BOOK CRUCIBLE LEADERSHIP.   Warwick discusses his appreciation of and respect for Washington...

This week, we commemorate our 200th episode by revisiting three moments from past shows that moved Warwick and have shaped the kind of podcast we have now. You’ll discover how crucibles can often be vastly different in details but so similar to be almost identical in emotion; the power of being able to find gratitude in your traumas and tragedies; and how mindset and perseverance can be your super...

This week, we discuss Warwick's latest blog, “Seven Ways to Live By Your Passions, Not Others’ Expectations.” In the piece, and on this episode, he unpacks key building blocks to develop and deploy a vision for a life of significance that you, not your friends or family, are uniquely off-the-charts passionate about.   What's a stake if we pursue what pleases others, not what ignites our spiri...

Brad Jeffery was visiting a Kenyan slum on a business trip focused on finding ways to financially help those who lived there when he found himself asking questions about what it would really take to help the impoverished, endangered women he talked with. Just giving them money, he determined, would not solve their dire situation.   So he founded Made Free, an apparel accessories brand that co...

Trusting ourselves and our vision, especially when naysayers offer all sorts of reasons designed to dissuade us from pursuing it, is a necessity in our journey to a life of significance.   This week, in the latest episode of our series within the show, Stories from the Book Crucible Leadership, we discuss how Walt Disney did just that, not letting the doubts of others or the crucibles he enco...

Turning tragedy into triumph. You’ve heard us use those words scores of times, because we know, from experience, that it’s not only possible to turn what’s broken into breakthrough – but that brokenness is often a key ingredient of the breakthrough.   This week's guest, Tyler Sexton, has cerebral palsy, a condition that has forced him to endure 18 surgeries and decades of insults and being re...

Original air date: June 20, 2023 Janine Shepherd was on track to represent her home nation of Australia in the Olympics as a cross-country skier – but then her dream, quite literally, crashed when she was hit by a utility truck while on a bicycle training exercise with her teammates. She came out the other side of that horrific accident and the 6 months of arduous recovery that followed to discove...

Original air date: May 9, 2023 Lauren Sisler was a freshman at Rutgers University when learned she had lost her father just hours after she had lost her mother. Having come home to grieve one parent, she was blindsided by the news that the other had died, too. And she had no idea how any of it had happened We speak with Sisler about that 2003 tragedy, when she was not only hit with the unfathomabl...

The way of others before self. The path lined with humility, authenticity and selflessness. That's the road we discuss this week in our latest episode of the Series Within the Show, Stories from the Book Crucible Leadership.   The historical figure we discuss here is Jesus – specifically His example of servant leadership and His exhortation for us to do as He did. Our conversation is designed...

Misaligned, misguided identity is one of the greatest tripwires to our crucible experiences. Placing our worth in other people’s perceptions of us – based not on our true inner selves – is a recipe for struggle and setback.   This week, we talk with former NFL quarterback Jeff Kemp, author of the new book, Receive: The Way of Jesus for Men. He stresses the necessity for men to build deep and...

A parent’s worst nightmare. That’s what Gerard Long and his wife, Jeannie, endured in 2005 when their son, Alex, committed suicide. And, inconceivably, it wouldn’t be their last nightmare. Their daughter, Rebecca, was killed in an accident in 2014.   How did the Longs bounce back from their pair of life-shattering crucibles? Not quickly. And not easily. The trauma of the events nearly ripped...

Conflicting. Confounding. Confusing. Did you feel any of those emotions when gathering with family and friends over Thanksgiving? If so, we’ve got the antidote for turning those difficult feelings into warm memories.   This week, Warwick discussed his latest blog at Beyond the Crucible.com, “Not Feeling Thankful? These Seven Tips Can Get You in the Holiday Spirit.” We recorded this episode be...

Doug Fleener, had been living without serenity, joy or purpose since the vise grip of addiction started closing around him when he was just 12 years old. The lowest point came decades later, when he woke up hung over in an airplane that had just landed, unsure how he got there – or how the large sum of cash in his pocket got there.   Fleener shares not only how he got clean from drugs and alc...

It can be a difficult, even scary journey when we set out to accomplish a challenging and noble goal. But that did not stop William Wilberforce, the British politician in the late 1700s and 1800s who fought for years to end the slave trade in his nation.   Wilberforce is the subject of our latest episode of the series within the show STORIES FROM THE BOOK CRUCIBLE LEADERSHIP, Warwic...

Image. Identity. Success. Failure. Topics you’ve heard us discuss often on the show. And topics that this week’s guest, Dr. Glenn Williams, covers in discussing his new book, WHEN LEADERS ARE LOST.   Williams talks in detail about what he’s learned about feeling lost from his professional setbacks and the personal tragedy of losing his son, as well as insights he's gleaned as an executive coa...

This week, we discuss Warwick's latest blog at BeyondTheCrucible.com. That piece, and the discussion we have here about it, is designed to show you that if you think your vision is too small, you’re not giving yourself, or that vision, enough credit.   We explore seven truths that can change that perspective: from realizing you’re not in a vision competition with anyone else to focusing on wh...

"I'm guilty" is not something you hear from the mouths of those who work in politics very often. But Tim Goeglein mustered the courage and character to say them … and that rare immediate honesty taught him valuable lessons to move beyond his self-inflicted crucible.   In his interview with Warwick, Goeglein confesses how he on several occasions plagiarized the work of others for a column he w...

This week we kick off what we’re calling a series within the show, which we’ve named Stories from the Book Crucible Leadership. That’s Warwick’s Wall Street Journal bestseller, filled with examples of how historical figures and his family members weathered their crucibles to lead lives of significance – and the character traits that led them to do it.   Our first discussion is on John Fairfax...

Losing millions of dollars -- twice -- was not the hardest crucible Ken Eslick has had to face. The most challenging thing about moving beyond those setbacks was decoupling his identity from the number of zeroes on his balance sheet. Describing himself as someone who was good at making money but not at keeping it, he needed to change the story he had told himself about himself since he was a teena...

We have a confession to make: When we sit down to interview a guest about how he or she has moved beyond a crucible, we assume – subconsciously we’ve come to realize – that you’re listening because you’ve struggled through a crucible too … or maybe find yourself smack in the middle of one.    But our own research tells us that that might not be the case.  Our study found that 72 per...