#77 | Validation Addict (with Will Greenblatt)

This is Into the Story, the podcast where you learn English with true stories from all over the world. Stories that connect us and inspire you to get where you want to go. Hello and welcome. I'm your host, Brie. If you're back for another episode, thank you so much for being here. And if this is your first time, I'm so happy that you found the podcast. Have you ever done something just to feel liked? Of course you have. We all have. Maybe you said yes when you really wanted to say no.

Or you stayed quiet when you really wanted to say something. Just to feel accepted. Just to feel like you mattered. Just to feel like you were enough. We all want to be seen but when that desire takes over, when being liked becomes everything, it can lead us somewhere we never meant to go. Today, we are going into the story of Will Greenblatt, a former child actor who was always looking for validation through friendship, through performance, and partying.

But then he has a dangerous experience while he was on a road trip in Spain. I'm in a rental car with a bag of cocaine in the glove compartment. and my friend is jamming his knee against it to keep it closed because there's a police car slowly coming towards us. By the end of this story, you're going to see what happens when you stop trying to be what everyone else wants and finally listen to yourself.

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Now it's time to look at five words and expressions that Will uses in his story today. The first one is to jam your knee into something. or to jam something somewhere. So this means to hit or push something into a tight space. It can be by accident or it can be done forcefully and even painfully. For example, she jammed her knee against the door so that the kids couldn't open it.

Or he jammed his phone into his tight jeans pocket. To jam your knee into something or to jam something somewhere. Then we have to... Pay your dues. D-U-E-S. So to pay your dues is to work hard over time before you succeed. For example, he played in small clubs to pay his dues. Or she had to pay her dues before becoming famous. To pay your dues. Next we have a very common expression.

To be dead. To be dead refers figuratively to something that has no energy, no power, or no people. For example, my phone is dead. I need a charger. Or the party was dead by 11 p.m. There were no people. To be dead. Then we have get out of jail free card. This is an expression that refers to something that lets you avoid punishment. It refers to the card in the game Monopoly.

For example, he thought being rich was a get out of jail free card or her apology was not a get out of jail free card. Get out of jail free card. And finally, we have to get away with it. So when you get away with something, you do something wrong and you don't get caught. For example, he cheated and got away with it. Or you can't lie and get away with it. To get away with something. And just before we get into the story, I want to let you know...

that this episode is a little spicier than usual. Will uses some strong language. which means that he uses swear words. And he also talks about using drugs and alcohol. So if that's something that you just don't want to listen to, you might want to skip this episode.

As always, if you would like to get the free learning pack for this episode, visit intothestorypodcast.com. All right, let's get into the story. I'm 23 years old. And I'm in a rental car with a bag of cocaine in the glove compartment. And my friend is jamming his knee against it to keep it closed because there's a police car slowly coming towards us. We're parked in an empty parking lot in Valdepenas, which is about an hour north of Andalusia, where we've just come from this crazy road trip.

And the car's full of beer cans. We're all drunk and high out of our minds, me and two of my best friends. And this police car is just slowly coming. And we go, are they coming towards us? Are they coming to see us? Are they coming to our car? Fuck. Shit, sorry, I'm cursing already, but that's what we were thinking. And they come all the way through the parking lot and they park right in front of us and two police officers get out of the car and start walking towards us. And I just thought,

I'm going to jail for the rest of my life in Spain. So to back up, I meet these two guys who are my best friends in about grade nine in high school. I'm kind of a weird kid, I'll say, in a way, because I was a child actor growing up. So I go on movie sets every few months and TV sets to work as an actor.

in film and TV shows. And then I go back to school for a couple months. And kids are like, who's that kid? Is he a foreign exchange student? Does he go to this school? And so I kind of have a hard time making friends. Will meets two guys who become his best friends. They do everything together. Sleepovers, sports, parties. For the first time, Will feels like he belongs.

Being with them makes him feel cool, noticed, accepted. And for a teenager trying to fit in, that feeling is powerful, almost addictive. I get a little bit older, you know, go through my high school. And then when I'm 17 years old, I'm on a canoe trip in Northwest Territories. After, I think, 44 days of being away from civilization, a plane flies over our group and lands on the river ahead of us. In the middle of the wilderness.

Will sees his father walking towards him, and his heart stops. He knows right away that someone has died. At first, he thinks it's his mother. But then he learns... that it was his little brother and in that moment will's world completely shatters i went from being the middle child to the baby of the family Everybody just took care of me. My older sister, my mom. And so I had a lot of shame about that. And so I was like, I just, I don't feel good about myself.

And I just need to get somewhere else. And through this time, Will got really close to these two best friends. They partied, drank.

And he just tried to forget about everything. At university, the chaos got worse. But through it all, Will kept thinking. If he could just get to theater school. to the National Theatre School of Canada, one of the most prestigious in the country, maybe he would finally feel okay again. So I go to theatre school in Montreal. Theatre school's insane.

I actually hate it. I'm miserable there. But I'm like, well, I guess this is what it takes to become an actor. You got to be miserable to pay your dues. And that's what they all tell us. And so I'm living with my friends and we're partying way too much. And I'm going to theater school hungover and, you know, not doing great there, but there's no grades or exams. So I'm not failing, but they kind of...

tell me that I'm failing. They're threatening to kick me out every semester if I don't get my act together. I don't even know what that means. But I'm just I'm really not doing well. And then I just graduate. And I'm like, Okay, now I guess I'm a working actor, and so I do a play, and I do a couple TV shows, and I'm just miserable. And so I realized I have to get out of here. I have to go traveling. And...

Me and my friends have always talked about doing a boy's trip in Europe. And inside, I'm kind of like, oh, I kind of want to go by myself, but these are my best friends. They've always been there for me. Like, I got to go. I can't abandon them. I got to go with them.

So we go to Spain and we buy a one-way ticket to Barcelona at first. And then quickly we're like, oh, nobody's given us any job interviews here. We didn't set anything up beforehand. We just bought tickets. We got our... English teaching certification, the like, you know, 60 hours, like no qualification course. So one guy.

A Scottish guy in Madrid says, I'll give you an interview, but you got to move to Madrid. So we're like, OK, we get our stuff, we get on the bus and we just move our lives to Madrid. So we're in Madrid and we get jobs. And it's just, I'm miserable still. I'm like, I wanted to be traveling, but I feel like I'm stuck with these guys.

We don't want to do the same things. They want to go to different places. All three of us, we're kind of falling apart as friends. We're just kind of like getting drunk and doing drugs and then like yelling at each other and having these kind of... shitty nights where we're sort of fighting and it's it's pretty dark and I'm like okay this is not like this is kind of what I came to get away from and I'm just doing it here what am I doing here

And I really wanted to learn Spanish. And I was just hanging out with these guys from Canada speaking English all day. And I was like, this is not what I wanted. But I didn't know how to say any of this. I don't know how to say any of this. I'm just like, I'm scared to tell them any of this stuff. So, we got to Spain in January, we get to Spain in January, and then April, it's Semana Santa. And we go, Semana Santa, Easter week, it must be like spring break back home.

And if you don't know what spring break is, it is DJs and parties and girls taking their tops off and dudes, you know, shotgunning beer. And this is the stereotypes of American spring break. We go. Well, this is a break in spring and we're in Spain, the party capital. So it's going to be crazy. And we like get a rental car and we drive south from Madrid and we're going past the.

olive fields with the trees coming out of the ground that look like zombies. And it's just like, this is crazy. This is so cool. It's so exotic and foreign. And we get down to Seville, Seville, the first stop. And we're like, And we just come out of the car in Seville and it's just dead. It's just empty and quiet. And we're like, there's all these bars, but they're all empty. What's happening?

We're just so stupid. We don't have Google. We don't have smartphones at this time. It's 2012. We didn't realize that Samana Santa means Holy Week. And it's a religious, solemn occasion. And it's not crazy party Mardi Gras carnival. We're furious at Spain for being Spain and Spanish culture for not being what we wanted it to be. We're like, hey, we're Canadians. We're here to party. You guys are partying. So we're assholes. We go to these bars.

We try to find the party. It's nowhere to be found. That first night we wander out and there's the march, you know, the carrying Jesus on the big palanquin. and people crying, watching the procession, but just dead silent through the whole city. I was like, oh, we don't belong here. This is this is very wrong. We're not supposed to be here, especially not with this energy that we brought up. Like, where's the party?

So we get to Cadiz next. Same thing. Dead. Empty. Nobody there. It's a bunch of families with toddlers on the beach. And we're furious. So basically we all decide, okay, we're getting as many drugs as we can. We're just going to get fucked up by ourselves. Their trip quickly falls into a pattern. Drinking, getting high, and sleeping in their car to save money for more drugs. Before heading back to Madrid, they make one last stop in Granada.

They arrive just as the sun sets over the hills, and they see the Alhambra, a centuries-old Moorish palace, just sitting above the city. It should have been a moment to slow down and take it all in. But instead, their focus stays the same. Find more drugs and keep the party going. So we literally drive up the hill. Alhambra's over there.

And then we find a drug dealer's apartment because he had asked around in the base of the city. And we go to this drug dealer's apartment and knock on the door and this little sliding thing. And he goes, see, and then they go, cocaina, see, money exchanges hands. And then we basically have to bring the car back to the rental place in Madrid in like...

12 hours. So we're like, we're just going to drive there and drink the rest of our beer and do the rest of our cocaine on the drive. Horrible decision. This is where we're at in our lives. It's all so fun when it's dark. And then we start driving home and then the sun starts coming up. And if you've ever done cocaine and the sun starts coming up, you know how horrible of a feeling that is. You're just like, oh, this is not.

nice this is wrong i'm not supposed to be doing this and we're driving and i'm like i think we should stop doing cocaine i think we should throw the cocaine out the window my friends go no no we've got so much left and i'm like i think you know I think we're good. They go, no, no, no, no. We've got to find somewhere to do this, the rest of this cocaine, and finish, and then we'll drive home. We look at the map. We have a paper map in those days.

And there's a town called Val de Pinas, about an hour, I think, north of the border of Andalusia on the way back to Madrid. So we go, oh, it's wine country. Why don't we go there and then we'll finish the bag of cocaine.

And then we'll go on a wine tasting and we'll get some lunch in wine country. And so we go into Val de Peñas. And there's again, it's empty. It's dead. Nobody's there. So we come to a vineyard. And the vineyard's closed, but there's a massive parking lot. It looks like a Walmart parking lot or something. And it's empty. Nobody's around. So we drive to like the far corner from the road.

into the parking lot and we're listening to music and we're chatting and we're smoking cigarettes and we're drinking beer and we're doing the rest of the cocaine. Then we see a cop car enter the parking lot from the road, like 200 meters back.

from this massive probably more massive parking lot we just see it we're like oh fuck is that a cop car and there was like a kind of winding road to get into the parking lot with like different roads coming off so we're like maybe they're not coming over here and then it just kept missing the turnoff roads and then it came around the corner and then just slowly started and we all just go oh my god so the cop car pulls up right in front of us we're facing them they're facing up

Two officers with sunglasses get out. They walk up to the cop car. And one of my friends just jams the drugs in the glove compartment and just jams his knee against it and goes, I'm not getting out of the car. I'm just going to stay here. And I... remember thinking, this is it. This is all these bad decisions that I've been making for the past five years that I knew were wrong.

I'm about to get my karma. And I didn't listen to myself. And I kept doing these things that I knew were wrong and I knew were dangerous and were going to get me in trouble. And now, their moment of reckoning comes. So please knock on the window. I'm in the back seat on the right.

There was about 30 empty beer cans. We had a blanket. I just threw it over all the beer cans to hide them. They knock on the window. And my Spanish is pretty good at this point. But I just go, I'm going to pretend I barely speak Spanish. So they ask us to get out of the car. My friend just stays in there. They finally make him come out too. So the drugs are just right in that glove compartment. The cops start searching the car. They look in the cup holders. They find...

you know, like one beer can. They don't seem to care. And we kept just going. They asked us for everything. We showed them our passports. They asked us everything. We just kept saying, donde es Madrid? And we just played the stupid foreigner. And finally they were like, Madrid is por allí, you know, this is the highway. And they started pointing. We're like, oh, gracias, you know, doing our worst Spanish accent.

And then they get in the car, but they follow us out of the road. But then at one point, they just honk, and then they get off the highway. And we're just like, we're free. Eventually, we make it home.

And at this point I knew that I had to get away from this dynamic I was in with these guys. Otherwise I was going to end up dead or in jail. It was like a get out of jail free card, literally. And right before we got into that parking lot, I had a conversation when we were doing these drugs. And it was one of those moments where the drugs were actually helpful because I was like, I need to tell them.

what I've been feeling. And I said to them, I love you guys. You've been there for me since my brother died and mean so much to me, but I need to go off on my own. I need to just figure out who I am and I can't do that with you guys. And they were good about it. They said, we understand. And so after that, after we got out of that situation.

I moved to a town in the north of Spain, in Leon, and I took this job from another Canadian friend of mine who was leaving, and I took over her job, and I lived by myself for the first time ever. And that was the beginning of a change for me where I started to realize it's not the most important thing is not to just be cool and be validated and have people like you, but it's to really try to get at who you are.

and to figure your shit out and to go through tough times alone and feel independent and have your own thoughts and your own opinions and your own ideas and let that be where your confidence stems from. And it was a long time coming to get there. But I needed to be alone in order to figure that out. And I just can't. imagine how my life would be different if they had looked in the glove compartment. But by some crazy, crazy karmic intervention that I do not deserve and did not deserve, you know.

we got away with it. And since that time, I've come to realize that I am a validation addict. Growing up as an actor, I wanted to be validated. That's why I wanted to be an actor. I wanted people to love me and think I was cool. I wanted people to say, you are enough. You are good enough. You are good looking enough. Whatever the enough.

is that I didn't feel I was. And then I quit acting and I became a speaking coach and a public speaker. And I get to have conversations like this, which to me are much more interesting than pretending to be. someone else, and look for connection over validation. Validation is a drug, but connection is medicine. And I try to use that to fuel all this.

work that i do now even as i put myself out there on social media or go on stages it can't be to make people like me it has to be to create connection and healing with other human beings Today, Will Greenblatt is one of my favorite people on LinkedIn, not just because he wants to be liked, as he tells us in his story, but it's because he's actually impossible not to like.

He's thoughtful and funny and incredibly easy to connect with. Will is the co-founder of Outloud Speakers School, where he helps entrepreneurs and business leaders. improve their public speaking so that they can pitch, teach and share ideas. You can follow Will's work on LinkedIn. Just search Will Greenblatt. I promise you will not regret it. And I will also leave you a link in the description of this episode. That is it for today's story. And this is the final story episode of the season.

But don't go anywhere just yet. Next week, I've got a special bonus episode for you. A conversation with Will where we go deeper into what it really means to be seen instead of just liked. and how that shift changed the way he communicates and connects. I will be taking some time off the podcast this summer to rest and to prepare for the fall opening of Speak With Impact, my course for professionals who want to speak with clarity, confidence, and connection, especially in high pressures.

situations. If you want updates about the course, you can sign up for my free newsletter at into the story podcast.com. And of course, follow the podcast so that you don't miss a thing. That's all for today. Until the next time, I hope that you you have a good time or at least a good story to tell.