Beyond the Crucible

This week, Warwick speaks to Dan Wolgemuth, whose burn the ships moment looks a little different on his resume than it does in his heart. After nearly three decades of working in the corporate world, he followed his faith into becoming president of a nonprofit Christian ministry. But he’d have never gotten there if the flames didn’t first get lit iwithin.   He had to stop pursuing a career sc...

In this episode of our special winter series BURN THE SHIPS, we talk to Donte Wilburn about how he wound up selling drugs in his teens and 20s – recognizing the danger but embracing the lifestyle that dealing allowed him to live. But that lifestyle, he explains, came perilously close to ending his life.   It was only after he leaned into his faith and avoided prison thanks to a judge who beli...

Go do it! That's the counsel, the hope, the legacy the mother of our guest this week, Joel Hungate, gave her son. He’d need those words more urgently than he ever could have imagined when she died by suicide, leaving him to question everything on which he had based his life.   In this episode of our special winter series, BURN THE SHIPS, Warwick talks with Hungate about how his Mom’s death le...

If you’ve been listening to our special winter series BURN THE SHIPS, you’ll know why we’ve turned the microphones on ourselves this week. It's because we’ve made our own pivot – changing our business name from Crucible Leadership to the name of this podcast, Beyond the Crucible.    While the change is more a remodeling of our ship than setting it ablaze, it does indeed signal an expande...

In this third episode of our winter series BURN THE SHIPS, Darwin Shaw describes how he set fire to a medical career, with the near-guarantees it offered, to pursue acting and the creative joys it offered. Maybe you know him as Daniel Craig’s first kill enroute to double O status in CASINO ROYALE; maybe as the Apostle Peter in the megahit miniseries THE BIBLE. Maybe from his role as a key creator...

What do you do when the normal tools you use to navigate life no longer work? When the ships that have taken you to a crossroads – or maybe a crosswaters – in your life are smoldering? According to our guest this week, Finnian Kelly, you set sail in a new craft to a new destination: intentionality. In this second episode of our winter series BURN THE SHIPS, Kelly discusses how all the success he c...

Eryn Eddy had found a way to make her passion for music pay off -- licensing her original compositions to VH1 and MTV and some of the most popular shows on television. But she longed to give giving people more than a song to listen to. She wanted to give them a truth to live by.   That makes her the ideal first guest for our new series BURN THE SHIPS, in which we’re talking with men and women...

The ultimate hope of every one of us is to live a life worthy of being remembered. If that’s something you’ve been thinking about during this season of New Year’s resolutions, you’ve come to the right podcast. This week, Beyond the Crucible founder Warwick Fairfax unpacks his timely new blog about ways you can commit in 2023 to live in a way that is true to who you are, anchored in a vision that i...

A critical component of Beyond the Crucible’s recipe for discovering your unique path to a life of significance is to develop a strong team of advisers to help you lean into your gifts and passions along the journey, especially in the aftermath of a crucible. This week, Warwick talks to two men serving in that role to men and women all along the-age and-stage spectrum.   Our guests Tom McGehe...

Karen Austin experienced both anguish and joy as she walked with her husband, Tracy, after a cancer diagnosis that took his life, but never his optimism and spirit.   In our conversation this week with Karen, she shares with intimacy, vulnerability and, yes, humor about what she describes as her “crucible life” – the early death of her mother, her brother’s suicide and the cancer that took he...

It’s quite common for those we interview to tell us their crucibles have improved their lives, made them richer than they would ever have been without the setbacks or failures. This week, Warwick talks with Bill Brown – his Harvard Business School classmate in the ‘80s -- who describes how he was approaching the pinnacle of his business career, as a finalist in Toro’s search for a new CEO, when a...

In our first episode of 2023, we’re joined by guest co-host Lexi Godlewski, who interviews the host of Beyond the Crucible, Warwick Fairfax. His face and voice you know, but the deeper parts of his story you may not! Warwick shares new insights, lessons and perspectives on how he moved beyond his crucible and created a life of significance after the failed takeov...

The holiday season, according to the songs that celebrate it, is supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year. It's when all is calm and all is bright and we join with friends and family to fa-la-la-la-la our way to the new year. But what if we just don’t feel that way?   In our final episode of 2022, we talk with author Gary Roe about how to get through these last days of the year whil...

We put a bow on the package of our special fall series by exploring the wisdom we heard from all five of our guests. The insights they offered form a roadmap for how to find gain out of even the most devastating losses:  be patient, work to change what you cannot accept, understand there is room for your pain on the other side of your loss, intentionally cultivate joy as you continu...

What does OK look like after you’ve been through a devastating loss? How does the new person you become in the aftermath of that loss go on living even as you go on grieving?   This week, we talk with Marisa Renee Lee, a former official in the Obama White House and a regular contributor to Glamour, Vogue and The Atlantic. She discusses at length the struggles she endured after her mother was...

Rabbi Steve Leder thought that after officiating more than 1,000 funerals, he understood death and the loss experienced by those it leaves behind. But it wasn’t until his own father passed away that he felt in his heart, rather than just knowing in his head, the depth and breadth of losing a loved one.   The lessons he’s learned and the applications he’s still living out have made clear to hi...

It is fair to ask what gain Kayla Stoecklein experienced from the loss of her husband, Andrew, to suicide in 2018. What good could possibly come from where she found herself after such a devastating tragedy? What beauty could be birthed from those terrible ashes?   In our conversation with Kayla this week, she answers all those questions in ways that will inspire you as much as they surprise...

Jason Schechterle was a rookie Phoenix police officer in 2001 when his stopped squad car was slammed from behind at more than 100 mph and burst into an inferno. The unimaginable burns he suffered left him in a coma for two and a half months. He woke up unable to see, his appearance dramatically altered by his injuries and the surgeries he underwent to treat them. He struggled emotionally with what...

We kick off our fall series GAINING FROM LOSS with Shelley Klingerman’s story of grit in the face of grief after her brother, Greg, a 30-year veteran law enforcement officer, was shot to death in an ambush while leaving a government building – a senseless and evil act.   From that tortuous crucible, Klingerman has dedicated herself to celebrating the essence of Greg and helping his fellow off...

Ernest Shackleton and the men he was leading on an expedition to cross Antarctica had piled up a breathtaking number of life-threatening crucibles by late 1915.  Stuck motionless in polar block ice for months, hundreds of miles off course with no way to communicate their location to anyone who could help, Shackleton and his men were running low on the supplies they had already been forced to...

Nancy Koehn was on track for an administrative leadership role at Harvard Business School, where she taught the history of leadership to the world’s best and brightest. But a series of personal crucibles — the death of her father, a divorce that came without warning and decimated her finances, a cancer diagnosis — caused the floorboards of her personal and professional lives to crumble beneath her...

Adversity, Dr. Taryn Marie Stejskal says in this latest edition of our best-of series, is a trip we take. Resilience paves the road we walk to move beyond it. As one of the foremost international experts on building and exercising resilience in business and in life, Stejskal has crafted the Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People through exhaustive research into the subject … and informed...

We’re launching Beyond the Crucible’s first-ever e-course – Discover Your Second-Act Significance -- in October. In this episode, host Warwick Fairfax and cohost Gary Schneeberger pull back the curtain of its creation, discussing -- among other things -- what each of them learned while filming the course. The hope is that by sharing what those who take the course can expect, they'll discover a pat...

At 19, Ryan Campbell became the youngest pilot to fly solo around the world. Two years later, a horrific plane crash threatened more than the dream he birthed at 6 to make a life and a living streaking through the skies. Left a paraplegic after the accident, he fought back physically and emotionally to walk — and hope — again. Today, he’s an in-demand motivational speaker who inspires audiences to...

In this second part of our best-of series, we talk with Sarah Nannen. With four children under 6 -- the youngest just a few months old -- Sarah's life was upended as both a mother and a wife when her husband, an Air Force fighter pilot, was killed in a training accident. A former naval officer herself, she understood how to navigate through the material and logistical details of the tragedy, but n...