Shifting Perspectives and Releasing Judgments on the Journey of Being - Townsend Wardlaw

Speaker: 00:00:04

TUCP Intro/Outro: Thank you for tuning in to The Ultimate Coach podcast, a companion to the transformative book The Ultimate Coach written by Amy Hardison and Alan D Thompson, each conversation is designed to be a powerful wake up call, reminding us of what's possible for you and your life. So if you're on a journey to expand your state of being, this podcast is for you.

Meredith Bell: 00:00:37

Welcome to The Ultimate Coach podcast. I'm your host for this episode, Meredith Bell, and I am really delighted to welcome as a very special guest today. Townsend. Wardlaw, Townsend, welcome to the show.

Townsend Wardlaw: 00:00:52

Thank you. Great to be here.

Meredith Bell: 00:00:54

I am really looking forward to our conversation and what we're going to be exploring. I want to just tell our listeners a very small amount about your work, and then we'll jump into our conversation. Townsend serves as coach to a select group of founders and their leadership teams. He also serves as the trusted advisor to the world's top coaches. Now, for many years, he was a consultant to founders, and in 2018 he moved to coaching as his primary focus. So the first question I wanted to ask Townsend is, for you, what is the difference between consulting and coaching, and what was behind that shift that you made

Townsend Wardlaw: 00:01:38

Great, great question. I love that question to me, it's rather straightforward. In the practice of consulting, what I have is my expertise, my knowledge, my experience in a particular domain, an area, a function, a vertical, a technology, what have you. And I'm very useful when somebody wants somebody else to show them what they need to do, how they need to do it, in what order they need to do it to get what they want. And for a lot of years, I enjoyed being a consultant. And one of my primary domains of of specialty were, were sales, sales operation, particularly for for scale up stage startups. And I had the playbook for lack of a better term on what what they needed to do, and the systems they needed to put in place, and what have you coaching on the other hand, is an entirely different, I'll say, even world. And it begins with the premise that the coach is not the expert. It begins with the the truth that all the expertise is over there on the other side with with the client, and all the answers are inside of them, and it is the coach's very, I would say, very sacred responsibility to assist who they're working with and in seeing themselves and their world differently, everybody sees what They see from where they're looking, and they know exactly what to do from where they're looking, including if what to do is I don't know what to do, that's exactly what they know to do. They don't know what to do, but only from where they're looking. And a consultant can say, Yeah, but you're missing something, and this is what it is. It's not what you're thinking. And here's what you do. A coach says, let's, let's take a stroll. Let's take a stroll around life and and look at life from different vantage points, perspectives, angles. Let's, let's look at you from different vantage points and angles. And when people change what they see or what they see changes, they change their thoughts. That happens naturally. And as to the part of your question about, you know what, what, what happened and why? Well, the short answer is, I had some incredible experiences with coaching. I started working with rich Litvin in 2018 and it was working with rich that I declared, I want to be a coach, and I want to move from consulting to coaching. And it seemed like it'd be a really straightforward switch. We can get into that later. It turns out it wasn't. I had worked with a coach before that. In addition to Rich litvid, who I spent a year and a half with, I had the opportunity to spend two and a half years with Steve Hardison, coaching one on one, flying to Mesa, Arizona every two weeks. What was incredible. Also worked with Michael Neal for a little bit, and had just incredible, personal and profound experience of coaching for me and and I thought this, this is way more fun, and not just more fun. It created an opening to a whole different world. You see, the challenge with consulting is, the better the consultant you are, the more your life consists of waking up tomorrow and having the same conversation again and again and again, because what you need to seek out are folks that you know their world. Better than they do. So that's a very specialized world. It doesn't create a lot of value for environments where you don't have much experience, you don't know anything about it. I like doing different things. I don't like doing the same thing every time. And coaching just opened up a whole, a whole nother world of of possibilities.

Meredith Bell: 00:05:20

So what was the excitement for you when you got into the role of coaching, having been coached by a number of people, what was it you felt you uniquely brought to the coaching environment with a client?

Townsend Wardlaw: 00:05:36

Well, that's a great question. I don't know at the time, I believed I had anything truly unique, and to me that was sort of the the allure of coaching, because no coach is uniquely qualified to coach their prospect. Now, to the degree you have shared experiences and you've walked the path they've walked, well that that does uniquely qualify you, but again, that puts you more in the role of a consultant, you're going to advise, you're going to give them ideas, you're going to tell them what to look for, tell them what to see. So I think the simplest way I can answer the question, what was what was fun about it was all the unknown being being completely out of my depth in terms of what we were going to talk about, stated simply showing up to a conversation, completely unqualified to be there, except for the fact that I was there and chose to be there, and that's that was a whole different game to play. I don't want to sound well, I don't know, conceited. I don't want to sound ungrateful. But consulting had gotten really boring, and I was very successful. I had incredibly successful practice by myself. I was doing almost a million dollars a year, but I could do it my sleep, and that took a lot of the fun out of it. I've always liked trying new things. I've always liked going into new areas that I have no idea how it's going to work or even if I'll be successful, that's always been something that that I gravitate towards. So coaching definitely scratched that itch.

Meredith Bell: 00:07:07

Oh, as you were just describing, going into the unknown and going in fresh with no agenda, it reminds me of the in the book The Ultimate Coach, how Steve Hardison has that approach with his clients. He doesn't have anything in mind. What are some of the things, let's say you learn from him as a coachee, that have served you well as a coach in your own practice.

Townsend Wardlaw: 00:07:33

At the end of my time, when we when we concluded I worked together, I went through all of my my notes, I have, I have a note. Tap in my iPad. I'd bring my iPad. I don't take a lot of notes, but every time I, you know, write some notes, and I would, I would also capture concepts or distinctions or things, and I went through, I think it was 250 pages or something like that, and I took everything, and I put it over into, okay, I was just gonna name all these things. There were 120 I can't remember exactly, but 120 different discrete, specific, just, I would say, mind blowing ideas, that I could literally spend the rest of my life on any one of those ideas. And I use them every day. I mean, they are the basis of my coaching work. And as an example, this morning, I was on with the gentleman. I've been coaching him for about two and a half, almost three years. We spent two hours talking about freedom, just the word, what is it? What do we think it is? What does he think it is? What do we think you get to it? What does it feel? We talked about freedom for two hours, and Steve and I probably spent 10 or 15 hours talking about freedom over the over the course of two and a half years. I mean, it's just such a, such an infinite topic and such a, such a core desire for every human I've ever met,

Meredith Bell: 00:08:55

One of the key things I know that you are focused on in your work with clients is this whole area of consciousness. Hello, which is another way, I guess, of talking about who you are being in the world. I'd love to know, and I think our listeners would love to hear why that is like the focal point of your work, yeah.

Townsend Wardlaw: 00:09:18

Well, first of all, say for me, what consciousness is, is all that there is consciousness. Is all that there is anything you see, think, feel, experience, know about as consciousness, and there's so much you have never seen, felt, heard or know about, that's also consciousness. So it's everything. And for me, consciousness is is being, being is conscious. They're synonyms. Now there's my being, who I'm being, but fundamentally who I'm being, and my being is simply part of all being. So that's. How I think about it. At the end of the day, the people that I serve, the founders that I serve, they're they're playing a game called grow their business. They're playing a game called grow revenue and then get it to a certain point and get somebody else to pay them for it. That's the that's the game they're playing. And they play it different ways, and different people have different ideas about why they're playing that game, or will their life be any different? That's that's probably a whole nother conversation. But what I get paid to do is help people play and win that game. And for a lot of years, the way I help them play and win that game was to work with them, work with their people, on on the doing what they should do. How should they do it? Process, strategy, tools, technique, technology, even mindset. I put mindset in the world of the doing. It's stuff you do. You take a negative thought, make it a positive thought. Well, over over time is I'll just say I leaned into coaching, and as I as I worked more with Steve and learned more about being or at least what I thought being was, what I found was, and this will be sort of simple for anybody who's ever read the ultimate coach book, all doing follows being, all doing is created from our thinking. And even our thinking is produced from being. And one of the things that always frustrated me about consulting and working with these companies at the level of their doing and even their thinking was that I would come in and we would solve a problem or create a plan or take an action, and we would roll out an initiative, and that involved training and conversations and guides and books and processes and role playing and all sorts of things. I worked with sales organizations, so I got really good at teaching people the doing the how tos, and we would see the results improve, right? You get people to make more calls or go to more sales calls or be more effective closers or or better negotiators. You had the needle move, so to speak. The funny part was, as soon as I was gone, it was like a switch was flipped and and there was decay. There was a shift back to what was so you train people on a process, a way of doing something. You get it so it's perfect, and then walk away and come back in six months, and almost nobody's doing what they learn to do. They're doing what they were doing before. And it sounds almost trite at this point, but what occurred to me was it's really ridiculous. It's silly to work with people on the doing, if, if we're not going to work with that, which is doing the doing the being, you don't do something to shift somebody's being. They might learn the doing as like a dance they perform and the moves, but if they don't practice the dance every day, language is a fun metaphor. You learn a foreign language, and you can even get really good at it. Stop speaking it for a year, and you'll you'll regress back, right? Because you have your native language. Well, that that's a great way to think about being if you don't change where they're from, well, then you're doomed to always rehearsing and practicing and drilling and relearning the language. So I thought this sounds like it'd be a lot more fun. This sounds like it'd be a lot more persistent, a lot more sticky. It was. It also turns out, it was a lot faster.

Meredith Bell: 00:13:40

Curious, why do you think it's faster?

Townsend Wardlaw: 00:13:44

Well, lots of reasons inherent in working at the level of someone's being or consciousness is trusting that when they see the world differently, when they are creating life in themselves differently, they'll do different things automatically. You actually don't have to teach them anything new. You don't have to train people, and that means you don't have to train one person, you don't have to get 10 people in a room. You don't have to do three sessions a week for 20 weeks with two separate group, right? You can work with 200 people, just as easily as you work with two because it's not X amount of hours of learning multiplied by all the people and all the effort, it's literally the time it takes for people to see things differently. And I worked with very large groups around this, and all of a sudden everybody wakes up one day and the world looks different, and they literally start literally start behaving differently. I I had a client a couple years ago. I used to work with a lot of VCs who would call me in and have me help fix problems when their sales teams weren't selling. And I got a call from VC and they said, we have this founder. He's struggling. His team's not selling. I talked with the founder, and he introduced me to his two. Sales people, and it was true, they were, in fact, we're not generating any revenue. They'd been there a year and a half in the role and hadn't, hadn't sold the thing. And I said, Let me, let me, let me work with them for a little bit. I spent about two months with them. I didn't even check in with the CEO. I just hung out with the two gentlemen. Two months later, the CEO calls me. He said, What? What have you been doing? It's like they're different people. And I said, well, they they are. What's happening goes, yeah, they're selling like crazy. I said, Yeah, that makes sense. He said, What did you teach him? I said, I didn't teach him anything. Would you trained him on stuff? No, no, I didn't do any training. Well, you revamp the process. No, I literally haven't touched anything. I I don't even know how you guys sell. I've never even seen your product. And he was just completely non plussed. He said, What have you been doing? I said, we've been talking about life. You see, these two gentlemen lived in Bangalore, India, India. One had a college degree. One had a master's degree. They're very intelligent, very motivated, working hard. They they were working us hours from Bangalore, and we talked about how life occurred for them. We talked about power, we talked about authority, we talked about money, we talked about asking questions. We talked about social manners, right? You see somebody who was born in Bangalore as an idea about what's okay to ask and what's not okay to ask and who you can talk to and who you can't. So if I had taught them a process for selling that said, Well, here's who you talk to and here's what you say and here's what you do, well, that would have been a nice idea, but it would have never occurred for them to do it, because it doesn't show up to do there. Well, you don't speak to somebody who is of a higher authority. You'd never push them on something. It's, you know, it goes lit against cultural norms. But to me, culture is just one component of being so we talked about how life occurred for them. And two things happened. One, they got to see from where they were seeing so in the talking about it, they got to see that they had a point of view, they had a perspective which had never occurred to them, right? Life is just life to everybody. It's not life as it occurs. For me, it's life and doesn't everybody see life this way? The second thing that occurred that is that throughout our conversations, I would create invitations to metaphorically wander over to my side of the table and imagine life through the eyes of a, you know, a white male of a certain age who grew up, you know, in the United States and see what that would look like and what they would do if they were looking out from that place. Well, they found all sorts of training and courses and processes. They found sales work. They found all of my I have an extensive collection of sales training tools and videos that I've dealt they're all on YouTube and stuff. They found them all. I never, I never said, Go, watch this, right? Once they saw, Oh, life looks different, they had the idea, well, I need different tools for this life. And they went, found those tools. I'd have to do a thing. It was really extraordinary.

Meredith Bell: 00:18:13

I love that you shared that story, because I was going to ask you for an example to take this from the abstract of seeing things differently. You know, town said to me that is a huge takeaway, just from our conversation so far, it's this idea that we don't have to try to entice people to do certain things. I love your word invitation, inviting them to look at things from a different perspective, and in that seeing you're right, the the change can happen very quickly and last longer, because, to me, it's like putting on a pair of glasses where you haven't been able to see before, and now Everything is so clear. Yeah, you're not going to ever choose to go back to having blurred vision. It wouldn't make sense.

Townsend Wardlaw: 00:19:08

Yeah, and I love the metaphor the glasses. In my work with founders, one of the things I've found for the last 20 years is they they wear a pair of glasses that out those glasses, what they see is all the places they can have what they want if they're willing to work hard and struggle. It's not a crazy set of glasses. They're not defective glasses. Those were the glasses that you know, their mothers, fathers, teachers, preachers, handed to them and said, these are the ones you wear, and they've used those glasses to create great things in their life, businesses, money, wealth, relationships, but at some point the idea of, I can create whatever I want if I'm willing to work hard, struggle, stress, sacrifice. Well, it doesn't. It does. And scale, it also creates an incredible strain and drain on the system. Right? If I, if I need x units of struggle to generate 100,000 in revenue, will I need 10x to do a million and so on and so on, and it never occurs to them, how could it that there's another set of glasses called Life is effortless and fun, and when you put those on, what you see are easy buttons and slides everywhere. So literally the glasses they wear, it's not just about clear or fuzzy, it's literally what it will filter in and filter out, nothing. Nothing in life is objective. Nothing in life is as it is. Nothing in life is inherently anything. It is what we're looking for, what we're creating at the level of our being, which is producing our thinking about life. One of the one of the greatest things I learned from Steve was your thoughts about the world. Create the world, literally, whatever you see in the world, that ain't the world. That's your thinking about the world. And that's not coming from the world. It's coming from somewhere. I call that being and being produced in your thinking and then out in the world.

Meredith Bell: 00:21:16

Well, one of the things that was interesting to me in our first conversation is the fact that you said you work with just a handful of clients, and you've worked with some of them for many years. And I was curious, what is it you're doing with them? First of all, that keeps them saying, I want to continue working with Townsend in a way that they're not feeling dependent on you in the way you were describing earlier, when you would do a training and you would work for an extended period of time, and then after you left, I love the word you use, decay. You know, things deteriorated and returned back to how they were. It doesn't sound like that's a concern that you have with these clients. If you stopped working with them today, you wouldn't see that kind of regression. But what is it you're also doing in helping them to not feel dependent on you, so that if you aren't there, they would still continue to grow and expand?

Unknown: 00:22:21

Yeah, yeah, that's it's an interesting question, because, you know, in the world of consulting, very first thing the client starts to worry about is, okay, how are we going to get you out of here? How are we going to make sure we don't and even as a consultant, I always find that funny, because my idea was, well, if we're having fun and making money, why do you want to get rid of me? And there it says, well, we don't want to be dependent. Okay, I get it sort of, but again, if we're having fun, all right, dependency, the metaphor that comes to mind is, is imagine you get dropped into this new world, this new planet, or whatever, and upon arrival, somebody greets you and says, Hey, welcome. I could take you around and show you some things. And they take you all these beautiful sites, and they show you cool stuff. They don't, they don't talk a lot about it. They just kind of walk you someplace and you see like, now I've never seen that before. It's so cool. And then go someplace else. And after some time, the person says, Well, you know, what do you think you're good? And the person that came to the planet says, Well, is there more? And you say, Well, yeah, actually, there's lots more. There's, in fact, well, it's infinite. Well, yeah, let's keep going. And you show them some more stuff, and they see some more things. And what you don't know is they can even go back to the same place you went before, where you started. And they say, now we're gonna go back there. But I want you to look at it not from the guy that showed up, but from the guy that you know was here a year ago, like, or who's been on this whole adventure, like, look again and like, wow, I missed so much stuff. So it could be metaphorically infinite, or you could literally stay and look at the same place again. If that's dependency, well, okay, truth is, nobody needs a coach to do any of that. You really don't. I don't believe anybody needs a coach. I believe we all receive all the coaching that we need from life, right? Life puts in front of us exactly what we're supposed to see and work with. That's going to teach us the next lesson, the next idea, whatever, if we're paying attention. Now, a coach is useful in helping you get that idea and helping you play with that idea, and I would say, frankly, reminding you of that idea, because it's really easy to get stuck in this concept or this thought that you. Well, this isn't supposed to be here. What do I do with it? I got to deal with it. And it's nice to have somebody say, Oh, you're back to dealing with stuff again. What if this is for you? What if this is a lesson? What if this is a gift? I mean, I could, I could. I could literally get on the phone for the rest of my life with most of my clients and simply remind them that whatever happened in the last two weeks since we met was a gift, not a punishment. Just to remind them that and say, yeah, the wrapping paper wasn't so pretty. But what if this was a gift? I could literally coach the rest of my life with that one question.

Meredith Bell: 00:25:37

What do you think people lose sight of that? Because I think you're absolutely right. I'm just curious, from your experience working with folks, why do we stop seeing everything as a gift?

Townsend Wardlaw: 00:25:51

That's a wonderful question. Well, I think some of the answer to that has to do with how our being, as opposed to all of being, was really formed and created. We're not taught. We're not programmed to treat life as a gift. I didn't grow up in a in a house where, when we were short on money, my mom said, Oh, look at this. What a fun little puzzle we're going to solve here. This is a gift, right? What I heard was, No, this is scary. So there's a lot of that, that being, that beingness installed in us, fear, doubt, anxiety, non acceptance, right? Not just as things we do, but as ways of being. Non acceptance as a way of being. The way you create things in your life, young man, is to make whatever you're doing wrong and bad, and you got to get away from it. That's a way of being. That's just something you do. That's how life occurs. You can't possibly get what you want by loving what is. And, you know, I like to believe that over time, we're swapping and this is, this is what I think is possibly the most, most beautiful role the coaches plays is swapping those ideas out when I talk about up, leveling the consciousness of the planet, which is what I think coaches are here to do. That's what I mean, is is shifting the consciousness that was installed in me shared with me when I got here. My two sons have a very different level of consciousness that I did. I'm I'm amazed at how conscious they are, how much beingness they live their lives with. If that gets passed on, there'll be more of that. So it seems to me that overall, there's more and more awareness to that, but still a pretty convincing illusion that we got problems and this is bad and get stressed just talking about it.

Meredith Bell: 00:28:00

You know, I love your answer. And I was also reflecting on so much of this is related to our thoughts, and then the language that we use to express those thoughts, then impact not just our being, but our doing. Yeah, and I'm curious for yourself personally, because our thoughts have so much impact on us. What have you done personally as it relates to thoughts occurring to you that take you back to the old way of being? Do you embrace them? Do you how do you handle them? Because they come to all of us, and I'm just curious, your way of dealing with them?

Townsend Wardlaw: 00:28:48

Yeah, couple of things. And then you talk about language. The first thing that pops up is, I usually pounce on a client who who suggests that we have something to deal with. So even that itself, the idea of dealing with something creates everything that's going to come come after it. We have 30,000 to 50,000 discrete thoughts a day. Latest Sciences has figured that out. 30,000 to 50,000 thoughts a day, that's a lot. And we have thoughts about everything. We have thoughts about things that are, things that have been, things that might be we even have thoughts about things that have never occurred. We have insights that we don't know where they came from. There's a lot of thoughts. And then we have thoughts about thoughts, well, that's not the right thought. I shouldn't think that thought. You got to do better than that. How am I going to share that thought? I don't want to say that. How am I How am I sounding right now about the thought that I'm thinking, I mean, on and on and on and on and on. One answer that pops up to say, and I mean this in a very sincere way, one of my. My favorite techniques to use with my thinking is simply to ignore it. That's a fun one. The idea that we don't have to do anything with that thought is a powerful idea. We can just leave it alone. We don't have to deal with it. We don't have to make it go away. It'll be gone, and something else will come in. Last time I checked, there's always more. Now that's, you know, that's sort of at the highest level. And I would say that's a very sort of practiced or enlightened way of be, of being right? It's not like you can just say, Okay, go fine, I'll just ignore my thoughts. No, it doesn't work that way. What I have developed a practice around, and I started this working with Steve, is asking the question, what's creating that thought? Right? Again, all thoughts are perfect from the being that created them. Every bark is perfect for the dog that's doing the barking. Steve likes to talk about the tree and the seed and the fruit, right? You hold an apple. There's an apple tree there. You don't have to do a lot of guessing. So if one can see that thoughts are a product of being. They're produced from being, just like a bark is produced from a dog. You can ask the question, what being produced at what way of being. Now, for me, where it gets really interesting is when we have a thought we don't like, we often go on a crusade to find the way of being and eradicate it, like there's something wrong with that thought, or there's something wrong with that way of being. I believe that creates more challenges. I believe that actually creates persistence in ways of being that don't serve me. So another approach is, is to simply look for the way of being that's producing your thinking, not as like that's all you are, who you are, but that's what's producing that thought and ask the question, is that, how I want to be? Is that a way I want to create myself? If I'm having loving thoughts, well, I'm being loving we've heard Steve talk about that, if I'm having thoughts like they should be doing this shouldn't be that well, I'm not having loving thoughts. Now, if I make those thoughts wrong, oh, I shouldn't be thinking that. Well, now I'm creating more thoughts on top of that thought. I'm not actually doing anything about that thought and whatever way of being produced that is just going to keep creating more that I can keep, keep working with if I want to, but if I just ask is, is that how I want to be, who I want to be? Well, mostly the answer is no, for most people, right? Most people want to be loving. And that's just one simple example.

Meredith Bell: 00:32:52

That's a great, thought provoking answer. And one of the things I wanted to also explore with you, that I think is related to this is you mentioned that you did some work on yourself over the holidays, and that how you're showing up for your clients this year is like you're a different human for them. And I'm very curious to know more about that.

Townsend Wardlaw: 00:33:17

Yeah, beautiful, well, and I share this with my clients all the time. What I share with them, what I teach them, what I what I speak about with them, is not a concept. It's how I live my life, and it's a constant process of asking, what is my experience of life in this moment? Is that the experience I want to be having? What are the thoughts producing that experience and and what upstream of those thoughts is probably creating them. If I want to do something about now, if I'm having loving thoughts and kind thoughts and peaceful thoughts and thoughts that I'm free, not a lot of looking to do life is great. But wherever there is, I call it activation. And for me, activation is what most people refer to as anxiety or frustration or anger or shame or blame or anything that a lot of folks would call a negative emotion. I simply refer to that as activation, and I call it activation because they're just thoughts, but our desire to be rid of those thoughts produces an after effect, right? And the example I always use is I'll rub my hands together and I'll say, hey, my hand's getting really hot. What should I do? Maybe I'll run my hand under the sink and cool it off, or I'll go find some ice. Well, I can do all those things, but at the end of the day, I'm generating the heat from the friction. Heat is the byproduct of friction. If I wish my hands to stop feeling hot, I only need to stop rubbing them together. So all these things we think about as emotions that we process and work with and talk about and take back. Vacation for well, my idea is that's a lot of thinking that we're constantly trying to work with and deal with and get rid of. When, when you have a thought, I don't know how I pay my bills this month, or you have a thought, what if they don't like me? Or you have a thought, I'm not sure I'm healthy. What you have any of those kind of de energizing thoughts? Well, that requires removal. You don't want to sit there all day thinking that. So you're you're dealing with it, you're working with it, you're getting rid of it, you're processing it. Sometimes I say you're metabolizing it. Well, that produces the what we experience as as emotions. So I'm always on the lookout for, where am I feeling activation, where am I feeling something that is not the feeling I want to have? And then we, you know, work it upstream. So, so what happened over the holidays was really, was really quite extraordinary. My wife and I, Louisa Milano, she is also coach. Have an extraordinary relationship. Both of us are coaches. We're very conscious in our communication, in our thinking, we do a lot of this inner work, as people like to say, so our relationship is truly extraordinary. We don't fight, we don't bicker, we don't have an incredible relationship. And there's a tremendous amount of love and loving between us, with one exception, and that is for the past few years, in and around the area of her business or growing her coaching practice, I found myself continually, consistently experiencing what I call de energizing thinking and activation, frustration, blame, anger, judgment, and that's been a consistent theme. Now it always appears to be something she's doing or not doing. My thoughts are always I'm upset because she's doing this or not doing this, or it's something about her, but what I know is, if it's occurring in me as an experience, there's only one source of that, and that is in me. Nothing outside of me can create. Anything inside of me that is, that's physics, that's not even an opinion. So I decided I was, I was going to really go to the mat on this one with me anyway, and I looked very deeply at what are the thoughts that I'm producing. Because often we have emotions about other people, and we process those emotions, but if you don't get to the thinking behind it, well, the thinking will keep producing those emotions. It'll never stop. So I really had to kill you know, what am I thinking? And I asked the question, How am I? How am I judging her? Or what's my complaint? Now she's building a business. And last time I checked, building a business is tough. It's challenging. It it messes with your mind. Presents all sorts of opportunities for growth. It can feel stressful people. People experience growing a business in a lot of ways that aren't pleasant. It's not all you know, roses and champagne and puppy dogs, but my thinking, when I really looked at it sounded like she's got no right to be feeling that way. It was judging her for feeling down, for having down days, right? You grow a business, it's up and down, and whatever she would be down or low or kind of in a low mood state, well, my judgment would kick in. So I got clear on what's the thinking there. And ultimately, the thinking that produces judgment of others is always something we find unacceptable, right? You see somebody and their kids running around screaming in a nice restaurant, well, you have the thought that's unacceptable. Well, my mind had the thought, This is unacceptable. What she's doing, this is unacceptable that she's experiencing down now, I had a great story behind it, and my story was, it's not acceptable because she doesn't have to worry about paying the bills. She doesn't have to worry about making sure like she has, right? It was, it was a great, very solid court case that I had against her that she wasn't allowed to be doing this, and yet she was. So once I said, Well, whatever story I'm creating is nonsense. It's a cover, right? It's, it's covering what's really going on. Let's get back to the point. Well, the point is, what she's doing is unacceptable. It's unacceptable for her to have a down day. That was really the net of it. And then I did something, which is how I process these things. I said, Well, I wonder where that thought shows up in me. Do I have that thought about me? And I was probably halfway through even formulating the question in my mind, when all of a sudden, all of these thoughts started popping up about how that is unacceptable for me to have a down day, right? My Truth was it is unacceptable for. Them, I'm not allowed to have a down day. And there were literally stories in the moment of asking the question, stories and memories started to emerge of growing up. And you know what I was taught? What I learned? What I learned was when the going gets tough, the tough get going. What I learned was when you're tired. We work extra hard that day to kind of get it out of us, right? But my mom was a very driven woman. I learned how to work hard. I learned so many amazing things, great values from her. One of those values, one of those things I learned was you don't get tired. You don't have that luxury, not like once in a while, like never. And if, God forbid, once in a while you were down or sick, well, a had to be really bad. And, you know, you probably should be in a hospital or something. And B, you need to snap out of that quick. You don't sit around in there, you don't you don't let any grass grow. And that idea served me very well in life, right? Somebody who doesn't have down days, who's not allowed to have down days? Well, I create powerfully. I've built companies with that. I can outwork anybody. I never get sick, right? All these things, they become badges of honor. But it's more than just the stuff we do when it's a way of being, it's it's not just something you do in life. It's not like I work hard. It's at the level of being a rule, I must work hard. I'm not allowed to take a day off. I'm not allowed to be down. I'm not allowed to think thoughts about being down. But if a thought comes up about I gotta, I gotta produce a different thought and kill that thought. So all of this judgment that was projected onto her, all of this unacceptability that was projected onto her. Well, it was only here, and it wasn't like I was making myself wrong. Here's the fascinating part, I was making myself right for it being unacceptable.

Townsend Wardlaw: 00:41:57

Now imagine it's unacceptable to have a down day. I'm not allowed to have a down day. Is hanging out with somebody who has a down day? Well, they're breaking the rules. They are an affront. This is not okay. And you can't just say it's not okay to have a bad day, because that's absurd. So you judge them, and which can't say is, I've never let myself have a down day, so I think you shouldn't either. You don't say that. So you judge them, you make them wrong. You you make them a bad person. You tell a very convincing story that it's them, that they they're doing something bad. Well, once I saw that, it was pretty simple, right? My rule, my judgment of myself, my way of being was, I'm not allowed to have a down day. Well, shifting being is, is really simple. You choose a different one, and you acknowledge this is who I am being, who I have being, been, being, and you say, and I choose this now and in that very moment, like literally, one second to another from, I'm not allowed to have a down date to, I think what I created was I'm the hardest working person. I know I'm always up, but I'm allowed to have a down day. Once in a while, I didn't even need to blow up the rule. I just, I just added an exception in there. My new being is I can have a down day if I want to. The world won't end. And in that moment, all the judgment, which were just thoughts, she's wrong, she's bad, evaporated. I'm allowed to have a down day once in a while. Can't produce thoughts of judgment in a bad way for her. So it immediately shifted to loving thoughts she's having a down day. I wonder how I can be of assistance. What are the things I can do? Wonder if I can help her get back in gear today, or maybe she needs a day off. Whatever. We'll see and all the judgment falls away. Now, that moment didn't solve anything. It didn't make the old way of being go away. It's not like you say, I'm I'm going to be this. And now the old way is gone, that that legacy way of being, as I call it, that's been there for 50 something years, and it works. It has worked. So you're not just going to sweep it away and it'll be gone. What I can do is consciously create and recreate a new way of being in a declaration, in a document. That's when people think about that, but but also be aware to where the legacy being is continuing to create. And this, to me, is one of the most important things that that I wanted to share about being, and specifically when people talk about creating a document declaring new ways of being, I love that it's powerful. What I believe is often either overlooked or not given enough weight, is you already have a way of being. You already have a document. You see my document said very clearly, you're not allowed to have a down day. I just wasn't reading it out loud every day in front of a mirror. It was running all the time. So to simply create a new way of being, without acknowledging, identifying and acknowledging and always. Looking for, where's legacy being, trying to create, right? This was towards the end of last year. You know, it must have been three or four dozen times since then, I've caught legacy being, you're not allowed to have a down day trying to produce thinking and judgment. And then I've had to walk that back. So it's, it's an ongoing experience, it's a practice. It's not like, Okay, I'm done with that. It's no that's still part of me,

Meredith Bell: 00:45:27

Of that phrase, Legacy being I hadn't heard that before. And thank you so much for sharing that experience, that shift, because we can all identify with that. I'm sure we all have some area with our partner or spouse that we have those kinds of judgments kick in. May not be around having a down day, but it'll be around something where

Townsend Wardlaw: 00:45:54

Money, health, anything, right?

Meredith Bell: 00:45:57

They ought to be a particular way, or our kids or coworkers or business partners everywhere, and, you know, Townsend, one of the things I've learned, although I haven't done the kind of analysis you did, this has been really helpful, but I have noticed over the years and become aware of when I am least tolerant of someone else's behavior, I've learned to step back and recognize there's something going on with me that's impacting the way I'm seeing that person in that situation. So I I have shifted from the legacy way of being of blame and been wishing for them to change and instead, take time to look inward. And I think that's what you're inviting us to do, is look within, to see what what belief, what way of being have, I always thought was the quote right way, yeah, but that's a judgment,

Townsend Wardlaw: 00:47:00

Yeah. And I'd love to add a little thing to that. Part of the reason I don't talk about being right or wrong is that that also kind of lives in judgment. What I love is the idea of anything I cannot accept right. When I find something unacceptable, it is literally just that I'm not able to accept it as it is. Acceptance means you don't gotta do anything with it, outside of you or inside of you. So to me, it really is a simple practice. As soon as I feel something about a situation or somebody else or anything, or even myself, what I know is there's a rule, there's a judgment that is running that is making that unacceptable. And when something is unacceptable, I move from choice to obligation. I must act. I can't leave it alone. Well, if that's another person doing something, we don't have a lot of options. We can't stop them. Well, let's judge them. So all that's required is to see if you find something unacceptable and somebody else will. Where do I create unacceptability in myself, and can I shift that in me? I don't have to accept anybody. All I need to do is accept myself. Yeah, whenever I identify something is unacceptable, well, in that moment, I can't do anything with it, so I judge it, I make it wrong and tell a story. Well, that's one path. The other path is simply to ask, Where in me does that rule exist, where there's unacceptable, and how can I turn it to acceptance? How can I accept that about me? And that doesn't mean I don't change it. That's the beautiful thing. I often spend a lot of time talking to folks around the distinction between acceptance and allowance. I can accept something and then choose not to have it around. So having a down day, it wasn't a problem having a down day. It wasn't a problem not having a down day. The problem was I could not accept having a down day like it wasn't supposed to be here. But I can accept having a down day and then turn it around, or I can accept having a down day and have a down day.

Meredith Bell: 00:49:16

For you. What's the distinction between that acceptance and allowance?

Townsend Wardlaw: 00:49:21

Acceptance is it's there, it's okay. I don't have to do anything with it. It is what it is. Allowance is the degree to which I choose to keep it in my life or not. And that could be a person or a habit or anything. And what we've been trained is the only way to get things done is to make something wrong, to not allow it, and to not allow it, you must not accept it. You can't write. There's an idea. I can't remove something if I accept it, if I accept that, I'll be complacent. And my idea is that's a. True, I can accept anything and then choose to walk away. I can also not accept something and walk away. But in that situation, I make them wrong. One of the easiest things in the world to do is let somebody be right for what they're doing for them, and say, I'm not going to be around that. I don't want that in my life, a friend doesn't call you back, well, friend doesn't follow through in their agreements, you can make them wrong. That's unacceptable behavior. You can say, I accept that. That's your behavior, and we're all good. I won't be making plans with you anymore. So I can accept it, but but not allow it. Thank you. That's great.

Meredith Bell: 00:50:39

You know, Townsend, I could talk to you another hour. This has just been such a wonderful conversation. There are so many ideas that you've shared by sharing with us, your being, your own levels of consciousness that continue to unfold, and it's it's just beautiful. Thank you so much for the gift of you, the gift of this conversation. I really cherish it, and I know that people who invest time really listening and absorbing what you said will benefit deeply from your words.

Townsend Wardlaw: 00:51:17

Thank you for the kind acknowledgement. It's been a lot of fun.

Meredith Bell: 00:51:21

It's been great. Thank you again for being with me today. And to my audience, I can tell you, you're going to want to listen to this one more than once, because there's so much here to unpack and reflect on, in terms of our own being, our own levels of consciousness, and just like with your clients, where you help them reveal and see more and more of what's possible, I think that's the same thing that can happen as we reflect on what this conversation has meant today. So thank you again.

Meredith Bell: 00:51:59

TUCP Intro/Outro: Thank you for joining us today. If there's someone you know who could benefit from this conversation, please share this episode with them. Also check out our website, being movement.com you'll find valuable resources and links to connect to an engaging and wonderfully supportive community together, we can inspire and support each other on the path to a greater understanding of being until next time, take care and be kind to yourself. You.