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 her husband in 2017 -- two months before their 20th anniversary. From the ashes of those tragedies, she expla...
Jan 17, 2023•55 min
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 medical diagnosis derailed his plans: he had Parkinson’s. But he has refused to let Parkinson’s beat...
Jan 10, 2023•53 min
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 takeover of his family’s 150-year-old media business. As unique as this story is, the message is universal: life’s toughest challenges that c...
Jan 03, 2023•1 hr 11 min
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 while coping with crucibles and being grieved by losses that grow even more intense. He shares the best practic...
Dec 13, 2022•45 min
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 continue to grieve and live as a good ancestor to those who come after you. To explore Beyond the Crucible assets, includin...
Dec 06, 2022•1 hr 23 min
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 diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, then battled and succumbed to breast cancer when Marisa was just 25 year...
Nov 29, 2022•1 hr 1 min
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 him that the losses we experience in life can be the fuel for living more intentionally. He says that we can ...
Nov 22, 2022•43 min
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 you. She discusses with Warwick the moving and meaningful truths she’s packed into her book -- Rebuilding B...
Nov 15, 2022•1 hr 3 min
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 had happened to him – but never gave up the fight, or gave up hope that he’d win it. In this second...
Nov 08, 2022•56 min
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 officers via the nonprofit she founded not long after his killing: Project Never Broken. Her organization exte...
Nov 01, 2022•51 min
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 ration in miserly fashion when their greatest disaster struck: The ice that had trapped their ship now clo...
Oct 25, 2022•48 min
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. Her career aspirations drydocked, her sleep interrupted nightly at 1 or 2 a.m., she sought solace ...
Oct 18, 2022•43 min
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 by her harrowing experience of being stalked in high school by a man who eventually assaulted anothe...
Oct 11, 2022•57 min
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 path to move from asking themselves “Is this all there is?” to a life that is everything they've always...
Oct 04, 2022•54 min
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 build a mindset toolbox to conquer their crucibles. To learn more about Ryan Campbell, visit www.Ry...
Sep 27, 2022•1 hr
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 needed to learn how to move through the emotional upheaval of instantly becoming a widow and a single...
Sep 20, 2022•59 min
In this first episode of our best-of series, we talk to Tracy J. Edmonds. From the outside looking in, her life couldn't have been sweeter: A high-profile executive job with a Fortune 30 company at which she excelled. But on the inside, where she discovered it really counts, her career had come at a high cost because of a self-imposed crucible: not being her authentic self. So she decided to embrace both her figurative and literal wild hair -- trading her corner office for a cubicle and tackling...
Sep 13, 2022•57 min
This week we tie a bow on the package that has been our special summer series, LIGHTS, CAMERA, CRUCIBLES: What Our Favorite Movie Heroes Can Teach Us About Overcoming Setbacks and Failure. Host Warwick Fairfax and cohost Gary Schneeberger discuss five key learnings from the eight episodes that comprised the series – spotlighting such highlights as Captain America’s oft-repeated mantra of “I could do this all day” as he faces challenges to John McClane’s never losing his sense of humor as he enco...
Aug 30, 2022•1 hr 30 min
Our summer series LIGHTS, CAMERA, CRUCIBLES: What Our Favorite Movie Heroes Can Teach Us About Overcoming Setbacks and Failure continues with HOOSIERS … and it’s the perfect film to end the series before next week's wrap-up episode. Why? Because at its core the message of the film is what overcoming our crucibles is really all about: redemption. It's the story of Coach Norman Dale, who leads his team to an unlikely Indiana high school basketball championship in the 1950s. It’s unlikely because t...
Aug 23, 2022•1 hr 23 min
Few movie heroes undergo a success-to-significance arc fueled by their crucible more dramatically than Iron Man – and maybe even more so, his alter ego, Tony Stark. In his first movie appearance, Tony is a glib, hedonistic billionaire playboy who has a lot to live with, but not much to live for. That all changes when he’s attacked with some of the same missiles his company makes and is nearly killed. As he emerges from that crucible, given a second chance by one man’s surgical skill and self-sac...
Aug 16, 2022•1 hr 2 min
In the latest episode of our special summer series, we focus on four big take-aways from the movie that made Bruce Willis a superstar that can help you move beyond setbacks and failures. Even if you haven’t been trapped in a skyscraper seized by international terrorists, there is much to learn here about triumphing over whatever challenges you have faced. Just two of the points we’ll touch on: why it’s critical to lean into your sense of humor even when what’s happening to you isn’t funny … and ...
Aug 09, 2022•1 hr 12 min
With great power comes great responsibility. That’s what Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben tells him in the film we look at on this week’s episode of our summer series, LIGHTS, CAMERA, CRUCIBLES: What Our Favorite Movie Heroes Can Teach Us About Living a Life of Significance. That counsel and wisdom from Uncle Ben – and Aunt May – has been a key component of three different big-screen iterations of Spider-Man over the last 20 years. It’s a key Crucible Leadership lesson, too, one that Peter Parker learns...
Aug 02, 2022•1 hr 18 min
"Rise and Rise again, until lambs become lions." There’s a motto to live a life of significance by, to inspire not just perseverance in the face of crucibles, but noble triumph over them. It's the central truth explored in this episode of the summer series LIGHTS, CAMERA, CRUCIBLES: What Our Favorite Movie Heroes Can Teach Us About Overcoming Setbacks and Failure. Host Warwick Fairfax and cohost Gary Schneeberger discuss the many lessons to learned from ROBIN HOOD, particularly the Russell Crowe...
Jul 26, 2022•1 hr 19 min
The life we learn with … and the life we live with after that. Those words come from THE NATURAL, the film we discuss on this week's episode of our summer series LIGHTS, CAMERA, CRUCIBLES: What Our Favorite Movie Heroes Can Teach Us About Overcoming Setbacks and Failure. It’s hard to think of a better way to express the truths we try to share each week on this show: offering hope and practical action steps to learn the lessons of your crucibles in order to chart a course to a life of significanc...
Jul 19, 2022•1 hr 12 min
We say often on the show that crucibles don’t happen to us, they happen for us. And in this second episode of our special summer series, LIGHTS, CAMERA, CRUCIBLES: What Our Favorite Movie Heroes Can Teach Us About Overcoming Setbacks and Failure, we examine that truth as played out in the story of Batman. It's a powerful tale about how Bruce Wayne did not let the unimaginable trauma of seeing his parents murdered when he was a boy keep him from a life of significance. He found purpose in his pai...
Jul 12, 2022•1 hr 2 min
Our eight-week summer series, LIGHTS, CAMERA, CRUCIBLES, kicks off this week. We examine some of the most popular film heroes -- superheroes, sports heroes and action heroes -- to extract key learnings and practical action steps to help you move beyond your crucibles to a life of significance. We begin with Captain America, whose "I can do this all day" attitude offers inspiration for staying strong and standing tall when setbacks and failures come. What makes Captain America, aka Steve Rogers, ...
Jul 05, 2022•1 hr 17 min
Lying in a hospital bed, unable to do anything for her only son but watch him leave and wondering if it would be the last time she'd see him was the traumatic crucible Sarah Willoughby faced after she turned to in vitro fertilization (IVF) in a desperate attempt to have another child. Diagnosed with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) and secondary infertility after losing another baby, she was at the end of her physical and emotional rope. That’s when she decided to stop trying to force her dreams...
Jun 28, 2022•49 min
Ian Dibb knows firsthand that from the ashes of your crucibles are born the strength and wisdom to not only survive – but to live a life dedicated to serving others. Dibb’s most devastating moments were the deaths of his sister and his mom within months of each other – life-rattling tragedies that birthed his calling. He turned his pain into purpose after struggling to settle the estates left behind by his loved ones – an experience that led him to launch keylu, an online portal that helps users...
Jun 21, 2022•53 min
What do you think of when you hear the word "cuckoo"? Those cute clocks that chime with chirps at the top of every hour? There's nothing cute about real cuckoos -- predatory birds that camouflage themselves and their destructive intentions in visiting chaos upon other birds. Andrea Anderson Polk, a licensed professional counselor and author of the new book THE CUCKOO SYNDROME: THE SECRET TO BREAKING FREE FROM UNHEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS, TOXIC THINKING AND SELF-SABOTAGING BEHAVIOR, discusses the beh...
Jun 14, 2022•50 min
It's the essential, sometimes heart-wrenching, often-life-changing question pondered by those who move from one act of their lives to another: "Is this all there is?" In this wrap-up of the eight episodes of the series, SECOND-ACT SIGNIFICANCE, host Warwick Fairfax and cohost Gary Schneeberger extract from the stories shared by guests four key steps you can take to pivot from Act 1 to Act 2 in your own life. And they discuss what all of those guests have in common with a former Major League Base...
May 31, 2022•1 hr 24 min
