The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Getting Over the Fear of Speaking Your Truth with Lisa Fabrega

Growing up under the dictatorship of Noriega, Lisa Fabrega has overcome incredible odds in developing the courage to speak her truth. In this episode, we discuss the role of speaking your truth, and finding compassion in your ability to be a leader.

Growing up under the dictatorship of Noriega
When we ignore our artistic inclinations
Facing death and dealing with a terrible illness
The problem with doing work that doesn’t align with your values
Dealing with fears of speaking your truth
Removing the imprints of our past to mold a stronger future
Finding hope through creativity when life challenges you
Learning to forgive people after they have oppressed or hurt you
Transcending our tendency to build walls and be self protective
The importance of devotion, trust, and belief
Why massive growth experiences are rarely blissful
The role that self care plays in your ability to heal
Learning to separate rejection from your identity as a creator

Lisa Fabrega has devoted herself to helping others find their inner Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mother Theresa, so they can accomplish the big things they were destined to. By facilitating release of fear and transcension of circumstance, Lisa finds big ideas to make big impacts.

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Duration:: 1h 14m
Broadcast on:: 15 Jun 2014
Audio Format:: other

As you probably noticed this month, we're bringing you our "Life of Purpose" series and revisiting some of our most transformative episodes, tune in to explore expert insights and practical strategies on help, performance, and community well-being, all aimed at helping you achieve personal and professional fulfillment. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll not only get recaps of the key ideas in each interview, but at the end of the series, you'll receive our free "Life of Purpose" ebook. What you have to do is go to unmistakablecreative.com/lifepurpose, again, that's unmistakable I'm Srinney Rao, and this is the Unmistakable Creative Podcast, where I speak with creative entrepreneurs, artists, and other insanely interesting people to hear their stories, learn about their molding moments, tipping points, and spectacular takeoffs. But, uh, bada boom, sold. Just sold my car on Carvana, dropping it off and getting paid two days. Already? What, you still haven't sold yours? 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It's almost like a journey before the journey. So tell us a bit about your journey and your story and what has led you to where you are today. Yeah. So fasten your seatbelt. It's an interesting journey. I was born in Panama, the country, and I was growing up in Panama during a time where there was a lot of political unrest. And we had a dictator, it was the dictatorship of General Manuel Noriega. And so during that time growing up, I experienced a lot of unrest, a lot of things, situations like being tear gassed and being shot out by guards. And from the mind of a child, which is how I experienced it, because I think I was around six when it started, and it went until I was about 10 or 11 when the US invaded Panama. But I just remember what I most remember about that time is this feeling of not being able to speak what you really felt, because we actually had no freedom of speech. And if you did speak out, you got killed. And I saw that all around me. I had a lot of relatives who were vocal about opposing the dictatorship and opposing some of the really horrible things that he was doing. And those relatives were abducted, and I had one relative that was literally pulled out of her car with her child. And she disappeared for three days, and we had no idea where they were until we finally located them. But it just had all these experiences. I mean, I could just talk for hours and hours just about that, the things that happened. But I just remember just seeing this example of leadership gone wrong. And just the fact of which I think a lot of people are afraid of speaking their truth because they're afraid of being judged. But in this case, it was, if you spoke your truth, you got murdered, or something really bad would happen to your family. So, you know, after the invasion, things calmed down a little bit. And we actually moved to the US when I was 15 with my family. And then I kind of went on this personal journey of speaking my truth where I had always been very different than my family. My family is super conservative, super Catholic, and I am not. But I really wanted to please my parents. And so I did a lot of things to please my parents and to please my family. And I had a lot of artistic inclinations, which I ignored and ended up going to college and like picking a business major, which was not what I wanted to study at all. And it all kind of culminated in me getting really, really sick in college. I woke up blind in my left eye, and we didn't know what was going on at this culminate. This was like several years then of testing and trying to figure out what was wrong with me. They thought I had brain cancer. They thought I had all these terrible autoimmune disorders. And it kind of all peaked when I was sitting in the parking lot of a hospital waiting for the results of this test that would tell me if I was going to suffocate to death with this illness that kind of makes your lungs harden. And I just remember having this moment of thinking, why is this happening? I don't get it. You know, I'm young, I'm pretty healthy. There's no, I don't get it. There's no reason why this should be happening to me. And I really faced my death in that moment. I was terrified and I remember I was sitting in the car with my boyfriend at the time and I was just crying and saying, I really don't want to die. And in that moment as I'm asking, why me, why me, I hear this voice in my head say, well, you know, it makes sense because all these years you have been suppressing what you really want to say, what you really want to do, what you're really feeling called to do in the world. And so your body is just sort of like a form of self attack. So your body is now just attacking you in response to mimicking what your mind has been doing all these years. And luckily the tests came back negative. I didn't have that illness. But from that point on, it was a real earth shaker for me. And I started changing things little by little because, you know, it's scary. You can't just change everything at once and just totally flip your paradigm in one day. But I went back to college. I switched my major, my parents threatened to withdraw all funding and not help me at all. And I said, fine, I'll go get scholarships and I'll get college loans, which I ended up, I did do and my parents still helped me. They saw that I was serious about it. I switched my major, I started speaking out more. And this all kind of culminated in me when I got, I went to graduate school for acting. I would be, I was an actor in New York for many years and one time a friend of mine told me that she was making money as a coach and that she was able to not be in her nine to five. And I was still shedding these layers of stifling of what I really wanted to do and speaking and doing the things that I was meant to do here. And I remember hearing that and thinking, well, this would be really cool because I could just ditch this nine to five at a financial firm, which was totally killing my soul and go do this. And I started my business, but I did the same thing. I started a business that I thought would make me money. And I didn't check to see if the message was in alignment with who I was. I didn't check to see if that was actually something I wanted to do. So I ended up in a business and in the first two years, I was working so hard and killing myself and not seeing the returns that I thought I should see. So at the end of those two years, I had this massive breakdown and it was such a gift because I remember I was so sick that I could not get out of bed. I was having hallucinate. I couldn't even watch like reruns of how I met your mother. I couldn't do anything. All I could do was just look up at the ceiling and that forced me to really sit with where I was, who I was being, what I was ignoring. And I remember I just got so fed up. And I remember when I was well enough, I got up one day and I just started posting on Facebook to my community. All the things I had been wanting to say in my business to the people that I served but I had been suppressing because I thought, you know, wouldn't make me money or this wasn't the norm. This isn't the stuff you're supposed to be saying. And when I did that, first of all, I healed. And it was amazing. People just responded in this amazing uproar of support and people thanking me and getting loved letters. And I still get it. I still do it. So get these letters and my business exploded. And you know, to where I am now, which is a lot of the work that I do with people is just helping them really, if they're going to be leaders, if they're going to make an impact in the world, is helping them get really aligned with their truth and getting over the fears of speaking that truth, which now I see very clearly was impacted tremendously by the experience I had growing up. So that's just my story in a small nutshell. So a lot of stuff here. And as you heard me say a thousand times, I want to go back to actually the very beginning of this. Yeah. You know, it's interesting that you had been through an experience which was so informative in terms of speaking your truth, one in which people got killed for speaking their truth. And the thing is that I think that a lot of these early experiences tend to imprint us. And as a result, they shape our behavior as adults and we often can't escape those imprints. They just become our story. They become our identity. And I'm really curious how you navigate getting out of those imprints, especially if somebody can do it with something as difficult as what you've done with and get to the point of being able to speak up, how do we get back to that? I love that question because to me, that's like the eternal question that I'm always, you know, I don't know if I don't know who said this, but I've heard that we all had this one question that we're always meditating on and for each person, it's different. So for me, that question that you just asked me is the question that I'm always meditating on because I'm not sure if you ever read this, but I wrote a piece a while ago on this experience that I had growing up where my parents adopted two children from the ghetto. And it was, I'll just tell the story quickly, there is a, my mom used to drive back and forth to school. She taught on the army base in Panama because she was an American. And one day she was driving to, or driving back from school and she saw this little boy sitting on the corner and it was very common to see children begging on the streets for money. The third world country happens less now, but it still happens. And for some reason this day, she just really got to her heart and she kind of pulled over because he was crying and she said, "Why are you crying?" And he told her that, you know, his, they had sent him out to collect money to bring back to the family for food and that he hadn't made enough and that he was going to get beaten for it. So something happened and my mother went and bought, went and took pity on him and, and went to the grocery store and bought him all these groceries and she drove back to the ghetto with him in the car in her fancy car. Well, to them it was fancy, it wasn't really fancy to us, but, you know, considering poor people in Panama are, you know, people in the U.S. are rich compared to poor people in Panama. But it ended up that my mother and father kind of adopted them and we helped them with their education and as long as they stayed in school and, you know, stayed out of trouble, my parents would buy them food and pay for all their education, all their clothes, shoes, which were a big commodity in the ghetto, people would steal them from them all the time. And that really impacted me because what ended up happening with those two kids is that one of them died of AIDS because he ended up becoming a male prostitute. And the other one ended up in jail and my dad bailed him out a couple times, but he kept ending up in jail and that always kind of broke my heart because we gave them so much attention. I mean, they were at our house all the time, my mother would sit down and tutor them. We just gave them so much and it was like they couldn't overcome. So to answer your question, I think I've been asking that question my whole life since that incident. I ask it in the work that I do and I ask it of myself because I also had to overcome some pretty crazy obstacles growing up, including things like physical abuse and outer violence and the world that I was in. And I think it's a combination so far, the answer I've received, but I haven't fully gotten the answer is it's a combination of the encouragement that you have in your environment. So for me, even though there was all this, don't speak your truth, don't speak your truth, don't speak your truth, or you will be killed, my mother, who is an American, didn't understand the concept of don't speak your truth. So we actually almost got killed several times because of my mother, you know, shaking her fists of the guard. One time she gave an interview on TV to an American news channel and she totally bashed Noriega and like exposed all the truth about what was really happening and we actually had to go into hiding on the American base for a couple of months because of that interview that she did because we got noticed that there was like a hit on our family because of that. My dad almost killed her. But see, my mother sort of still kind of like do it even though she was putting her life at risk also clearly imprinted me. So I had the example around me of some people doing it, you know, that was really important. But I think the biggest thing that I've discovered just through the work that I've been doing with people is there's a lot of fear and limiting beliefs and patterns of thought that we have that keep us from really stepping out into what we're called to do on this planet. And I always think about those two boys that we adopted and I think if these mindset shifts, if these ways to be able to keep your mind and sort of creator mode versus feeling victimized by the environment around you, if we could have if we could teach this in schools or at a younger age, I wonder if it would have made a difference. So for me, I think it was environment. I also think that just I don't know for me, no matter what has happened to me in my life, I always have this inner fire that's like I'm going to get out of here, I'm going to get out of here. And I don't know if that was something that was instilled in me if I was born with it. I don't want to think that I was born with it because I want to think that we can actually instill this in people and help them overcome those obstacles themselves. But that's sort of my incomplete answer to your question because I haven't found the answer myself yet. I love the incomplete answer. I think there's a lot of depth to it and I love it because it's actually more of an inquiry and permission to inquire into all of this for anybody listening. I want to ask you another question around this. You mentioned that this sort of fire that you've had inside of you that I will get out. I think that when we face challenges in our lives and we reach difficult spots, one of the things we often do is we look into the future and we either see our past or we can't see anything or we feel hopeless. And I'm wondering given what you've been through, how you navigate that and how you see a future that looks better than the one you're experiencing today when you're going through so much trouble and so many challenges. Wow, that's such a good question. Well, I think honestly, I actually think it was, I was a huge bookworm when I was growing up and I read a lot. I mean, I read voraciously. My mother would bring home like five books from the library a week and I would read all of them. And I think creativity and being able to escape into other worlds and envision other things that maybe I wasn't seeing around me was, gave me vision, it trusts, it allowed me to tap into my vision, it allowed me to dream beyond what I would see. So, you know, it's funny, I've never actually thought about this and it's surprising to me that that's my answer but creativity was huge for me. Seeing other perspectives, you know, growing up in the environment I grew up in, there weren't many perspectives that could come in, especially not just with the dictatorship but also, you know, very conservative family and I'm actually quite liberal. My soul is quite liberal, but just being able to have little examples in the books that I was reading, I think really helped because sometimes I would read books that weren't totally sanctioned by my family or by what was around me and that allowed me to think there were other possibilities and other ways of doing things. So perhaps exposing yourself to things that you wouldn't normally expose yourself. You know, I love that you brought up creativity as one of the ways in dealing with this because I think that often some of the most amazing art that ever gets created is actually the byproduct of a lot of pain and grief and you all, you see this, I mean, I think even Michael Singer mentioned it in his book, The Untethered Soul, he said, "Great art often comes from the depth of one's being" and I think that one of the things that's interesting is that these kinds of experiences which, you know, we'll even talk about some of the other ones you had really allow us to access something that we couldn't otherwise access if we didn't go through them. Yes, I completely agree and I feel that to be honest with you, I feel that it has given me greater compassion to go through these experiences, especially having to forgive some of my perpetrators and see it from their point of view for sure, for sure. I'm actually very grateful for all my experiences so far. Let's talk briefly about this idea of forgiveness and seeing it from somebody else's point of view because I think that's really hard to do when you feel victimized or you feel that, you know, it's about you and I'm curious how you make that shift. Yes, okay, so this is actually huge for me and I really believe in this. I actually think that you cannot be a powerful leader that makes an impact in the world without compassion. I think compassion is one of the most crucial traits that we need to develop and it's because of this. So, for me, I was reading this, I think it was a speech that the Dalai Lama gave to some students and he was talking about how the world today, there's so much violence, there's so many bad things happening to people, there's so much separation, we see people as other separate from us so we then forget to see them as human beings, that there's so much of that in the world today that actually things that were called spiritual virtues like kindness and compassion are actually crucial to the survival of the human species. And when I read that, it really resonated with me because it's true. The only way to counter-attack some of the things that are happening in the world is to embody compassion and so for me, the way I did that is I think you have to go through a process. I think you go through the rage, so I had some experiences of being physically abused as a child and being hit very hard many times by some members in my family and I had to go through a process of just releasing all of the rage and the anger for that experience first. So, you always go through that experience first and you can't deny your feelings because if you try to push your feelings down first, this is one thing that really kind of annoys me a little bit about the whole positivity movement. It's like, let's just be happy, let's just think happy thoughts and it's like no, there's a shit ton of pain in there that needs to be processed and released and like you need to get angry, you need to feel your feelings and then you can start thinking about forgiving somebody. So I had a really good therapist and coach that I worked with with that and just really allowed all that anger to just bubble up and really fully feel it and you know it's really unpleasant to fully feel it because we think we're going to die if we fully feel our feelings and once that, once I really allowed myself to feel my feelings, it's amazing how quickly it evaporates when you let yourself just feel it. But we think we're feeling things but we're actually feeling them like 40% of the time and I think the reason feelings last for a long time is because you haven't let yourself fully feel it. So, that was the first part of the process and then, and this is the really hard part and this is like the spiritual work piece of it is you have to, like, because I do believe that the way I behave impacts the world and the way that I think impacts the world, then that means I have to look at myself all the time and see where I'm creating negative impact and for me to hold on to anger and be angry at the people in my family who did those things to me or to want to go kill Noriega for what he did to my country, to me that just destroyed me inside. It doesn't really feel good to hold on to those feelings and so the other alternative to that is to just see that person as a human being and have compassion for them. Because for me, when I have compassion, I am seeing the other person as myself and to me that creates real healing in the world because if you really think about it, think about why countries fight, think about, you know, why people disagree, why there's war is it's because everybody thinks that the other country or the other person is sort of like other and separate from them and there's this huge divide that happens and because of that we can justify all sorts of violence and horrible things to other people but if I'm forced to look at the other person as a part of me, that's really hard because I don't want to look at myself as an abuser, I don't want to look at myself as a dictator who would cause so much harm to an entire country but in being able to see the people who physically beat me or being able to see the dictator of my country as a piece of me and realizing that if I hadn't been fostered a certain way, if I hadn't had the twist of circumstances that I had, I could have become those things too. Suddenly, I'm seeing that person on the same playing field and what I actually saw, you know, obviously I can't stand in front of Noriega, right, because he's in jail right now, but you know, with the people who were my abusers, what really, what was amazing is it actually created a deep transformation in them for me being able to have compassion and my goal is to impact the world positively, that's just my goal, my personal goal is to no matter what I'm doing in every moment, with every person I interact with, is to impact that person or the world as a whole, positively and to unify the world and to help kind of heal some of these riffs with my leadership and the way I lead is within my family, within the moments with people that I share and one of those ways is seeing myself as that person, understanding that that's a part of me that I haven't integrated and then when I see that part of me, when I see the dictator in me, when I see, you know, the abuser in me, then I suddenly know what that person or what that dictator or whatever didn't get that I can give to myself and then give to them and to me that creates long-lasting transformation versus continuing in this pattern of your other, your disgusting, let me separate for myself from you and then that just creates negative, harmful thoughts and then I'm just then affecting the world subconsciously or consciously in a negative way. So if I'm really here to make a positive impact, then it's my absolute responsibility to delve deeply into compassion and see all of my haters and everything as me. I love that. And it's so hard. Yeah, yeah, it really can be, especially when you don't, would you feel, you know, victimized or you feel dejected or you feel rejected? That can be really hard, but I've never thought about it that way before. I've never actually heard anybody tell it to me that way before and I think it's interesting because I think this, you know, we're talking about it in a very extreme case, but I think about it in terms of our day-to-day relationships, how we deal with, you know, the people who love us, the people who are in our lives and just how we operate in the world on a day-to-day basis. So I think, wow, really, if I start to look at everybody who I interact with as a part of me, then any of this resentment that I have towards them, while it doesn't go away instantly, it makes you really start to think, okay, maybe, you know, that maybe what, if that's the case, everything I'm feeling is just going to be a mirror. Yes, exactly, exactly. And, you know, just to give you like a practical real world example of this beyond like dictatorship or whatever, I was talking to a guy at a party recently, who's like an executive at a business, and he was telling me he was having problems with his team, where nobody was being respectful of him and they weren't doing the work. And I asked him, you know, "Super businessy guy," and I go, "So what part of you are they?" And he was like, "What?" And I'm like, "What?" So you said, "This person's disrespectful and this person doesn't want to do the work." So I believe that everybody around us is like a manifestation of a piece of us, reflecting that back to us. So if you, this problem is recurring, where is that in you? And he was just blown away by that and he started thinking and he realized, "Yeah, I do this too when I don't want to hand this report in." And I was like, "So the way that you can really lead these people is by seeing that you are those people and then seeing it from their point of view." So if you can see the part of you that doesn't want to do the work, look at that part of you and think, "Okay, when I don't want to do the work, what is my unmet need?" And he's like, "Well, my unmet need is that I don't feel like my voice is being heard." And I'm like, "Great." So probably that guy who doesn't want to do the work feels like his voice is not being heard. And he was just totally blown away and then he texted me a week later and he said he wanted to work and he did that and it totally changed the dynamic of his team. So just even on a practical level, seeing people as you, I think has real-world practical applications too. So I have one other question based on this and then we'll kind of see here a little bit. One of the things I think that often happens, and I was also reading this and the untethered soul, is that when we go through these painful experiences, we build walls and we create defense mechanisms and we shut down, we really close ourselves off because we don't want to experience pain again. And I'm wondering in your life how you've transcended that tendency. Oh, wow. Well, I certainly had many walls because of that. And I certainly do have a tendency to be self-protective. You know, that's just a natural expression of some of those experiences or natural consequence. But honestly, it's been just to boldly expose the rawness of the wound and to just be radically honest. So you know, one thing I've really been practicing in the past two years is if I'm triggered by somebody and I'm not sure if it's my stuff, I will literally just say to them, I will say, you know, obviously with love, I'm not going to scream at them or I try to walk through the emotional trigger before I contact them, but I will literally just expose it. And it's very scary, but I will text them and say, "Hey, I'm super triggered by this thing that you said to me and I'm fully ready to own my experience of this, but I need you to help me work this out because I can't tell if this is me projecting onto you or if this is my own wall, this is my own issue where if we can have like an actual chance to have a conversation here and to be honest, almost always, it creates a transformational experience for me and the other person because an honest conversation can be had and I know that that's just my own bullshit or I know that maybe it was in my own bullshit." 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Let's refresh a little bit. You know, one of the things that you had talked about is our tendency to ignore these artistic inclinations or, you know, ignoring your own. God, I mean, I think that is one of the epidemics of the culture that we live in. I mean, we've ignored these artistic inclinations for so long. And I often find that it's one of those things that we have in our childhood, and we lose it as adults. And I've asked this question to a lot of people you know since you listened to the show. What are your thoughts on getting it back? And also, you know, not ignoring it in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. Well, not ignoring it in the first place. I don't know that I can go back in time and change the circumstances that caused me to start ignoring it. But again, I really think it comes back to working with fear because if you really think about it, most of the people who have been highly, highly creative, or at least the examples we have most, we have this like old, and I think it's dying. It's this old paradigm of like the starving artist, or the artist who went through hell because of what they did, or you know, Van Gogh cutting his ear off, Picasso, who I mean, he was, you know, somewhat commercially successful later on in his career, but the torture of the artist. So we have all these stories in our culture about what it means to be creative and be an artist, and also that it doesn't pay, that we're going to not be able to survive doing what we love. And so I think the most important thing to do is to start looking at paradigms where people are being successful, being creative. And to start talking to people that are having a good experience being creative, that's one of the things I love about your show is that everybody on the show is highly creative, and it's pretty successful, and I don't necessarily mean money-wise, it just means successful in their lives. And so I think that's just for me, any kind of transformation comes from finding a tribe of people that support the paradigm you're trying to enter. So if you're trying to be more creative, if you're trying to get your creativity back, then start hanging out around people who think that creativity is good. Start looking for examples of people who are doing well being creative, who are not starving, who are not tortured, that's one of the huge, huge things, I think. And in addition to seeking out other people, I think you have to do, you have to really look at what you're really afraid of, because very often, for me at least, I'll tell you this has been my journey, I'm highly creative. I have sculpted, painted, written music, been an actor, I mean my whole life, I've been an artist, and when I first started my business, I felt very stifled because it was all marketing and selling and the templates and the things you have to do, and I was like, "Where am I supposed to put my creativity into this?" I've slowly been doing that in the past two years, but the first two years of my business, there was no creativity, and it was hell, it was miserable. But I think what I've started to realize is I've had to work with these fears of sometimes I write poetry and I want to send it to my list, and I think the fear, and it's funny because everybody I work with says this to me, nobody wants to read this, who wants to read this? If I read this, 200 people will unsubscribe from my list, because they'll be like, "What is this crap? I didn't come here to read a poem." Well, first of all, then those are not your people, people who don't want to support your creativity and aren't excited to receive all of you, shouldn't be on your list anyway. And second of all, you have to just trust that, so your creativity for me is where your best ideas come from, so if you're being led somewhere with your creativity, follow it. And there's a lot of belief release work and a lot of working through your fear that has to be done in my opinion, which is what I end up doing with a lot of people that I work with. But honestly, if you walk away with nothing, what I would say, or one thing, what I would say is to really sit with a cost of what it feels like to not be creative, to be suppressing that part of you. So for me, it made me sick to the point where they thought I was going to die of a horrible disease that made me suffocate to death. That was the consequence and the cost of me suppressing my creativity. So a lot of people will just kind of dip their toes in the cost, but they won't actually sit in it and really feel the cost. So I would invite you, if you're listening now, to really feel the cost, really feel it. Because once you really feel how painful it is to not express yourself creatively, if you really tap deeply in the fullness of that pain, you really can't stand to be there any longer. Wow. I love that. It's interesting because I think we share a very parallel path of infusing creativity into our work, especially because you know, you've been a very, very sort of close witness to a lot of what has gone on with me in the last, probably even six months. I love a lot of these things. I mean, finding a tribe of people who share that common vision for transformation. I mean, in a lot of ways, I think that's why when you look at our group from the instigator experience, that's why you have the money that you do there. That's why something that powerful gets created. The idea of suppressing it, God, I mean, like, I think about it. When I listen to you say that, I think about all the self doubt and the moment in which I have questioned whether I'm on the right path and whether I should abandon this journey to go do something more practical. And when I imagine the end, that makes me sick. Yes. The end of that. Yes. When I imagine the alternative history, it literally makes me sick. I know. I know. But that's the thing that keeps you going because it's like the alternative is to, that's something I used to do at the beginning of my work coaching people is I would ask them, like, if you don't do this, what do you look like in six months? And the reaction was so like, oh, my God, no, I can't. I can't. Like, that's what you're talking about, sitting with that cost. And there's something else that comes up for me as you said, what you said about just going with your creativity. You know, for me, I feel that the whole like creative entrepreneur, creative journey, honestly, it's all about trust and surrender and devotion. Because you're right. There are moments where you have no idea where this is leading you. You have no idea if anybody's going to sign up, like you said, when you release instigator experience, you were like, I don't even know if anybody's going to sign up for this. Who knows, right? But you have to have this level of trust in that creative drive. And I feel it in my gut, like in my belly, it just pulls me. And that's when I know it's really from a good place and when it's all up in my head. And we don't know. You have to be devoted to it, you have to be devoted to going through the ups and the downs. You have to just trust that that drive is actually your purpose leading you somewhere. And even if nobody signs up, you also have to trust that that happened for a reason. Because for me, if I didn't have that trust and that level of devotion and surrender to it, I would never survive. I just couldn't do it. I would just go get a nine to five. Not that there's nothing wrong with a nine to five, but for me, a nine to five is not good. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I think there's a component of this that requires just successive leaps of faith and I think the trust and devotion. It's one of those things I'd love to figure out if there was some magic formula to get that. But I don't know that there is. I think that is just a consistent series of leaps of faith and I think we're all looking for a formula for how to develop that trust and devotion and commitment. And I'm not sure that it exists. I think it's just literally throwing yourself in the fire over and over again until you see the fire doesn't burn that bad. That's what I think is the formula. Well, speaking of which, let's let's talk a little bit about your time being sick because I think that illness, you know, and our brushes with death or just the contemplation of our own mortality has actually a very significant thing. And throughout the conversations I have with every single person on this show, there is sort of an experience that really just shakes them to the core. And it's part of what I call it, you know, part of any hero's journey, it seems like. And somehow that experience ends up being the catalyst, the one that really does transform them to go out and to live life in a way that very few people would. I mean, you and I are friends with my business partner, Greg Hartle, and you've kind of been witness to that firsthand. And there's a real sense of urgency in the way he lives his life and a real sense of intention as well. And I'm wondering and I'm very curious kind of, you know, what lessons you gleaned during that time, you know, one, you know, what lessons you have brought from that time as you came forward, how you sort of overcame that sort of victim mentality of why me, when you're going through it. And is it necessary to go through this? I mean, can we experience these kinds of changes without going through sort of the dark night of the soul, which I realize is like four questions in one. No, these are great questions. So I'll answer the last question first. I think that most of the time you can't, I've had experiences of blissful growth. They've been few and far between and they feel they feel very weird. You're kind of like, whoa, that's not reassuring. Yeah, it's like what I was actually one time talk. Yeah, I was having a blissful growth transformation and I texted my friend. I'm like, I don't know what's happening right now, but I'm like growing with bliss, not with like dark night of the soul. She's like, well, just be grateful for it. No, I don't think that growth can happen without a dark night of the soul. I just don't. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but you know, polarity in life is everything paradox. You know, all of life is a paradox. We hold paradox with so many things and in order, you know, in order to be able to see one thing, we need the contrasting thing, the contrasting experience. So I can't really appreciate the light if I haven't been in the dark. And I can't really, you know, appreciate the light, light until I go through with the dark moment and there is no light. So I don't, I think most growth does happen with some dark nights of the soul. To be honest, I go through dark nights of the soul like every three months and I actually think it's wonderful because for me, every breakdown leads to leads to a breakthrough. So what I remind myself of is when I'm going through a dark night of the soul and I, but I mean like, what I go through now, I call dark nights of the soul, but it's more like growth, you know, quick growth. But if you're going through those little growth spurts, I always remind myself when I'm down there, okay, the breakthrough is coming because it's a nature in the universe for things to contract before they expand. So in college, I was this huge cosmology nerd. So I took this class on the universe by the guy who just, one of the guys who was on the team that discovered dark matter, and I remember when we studied supernovas, he talked about how when a star becomes a supernova, basically all the hydrogen runs out and the star collapse upon itself, it's, it collapses upon itself, which is a huge contraction, everything like self implodes and then boom, it explodes everywhere all over the unit surrounding universe. And then little stars grow from those particles and that star dust. And when I learned that, I thought, wow, that's such a metaphor for growth and for life that all these new little stars come from this violent, massive explosion of the star. And so before every contraction, to me that like the fact that that's how stars get created and we are made of the same stuff of stars, then that shows that it's sort of like a rule of the universe of life that in order for an expansion to happen, there has to be a contraction. So I remind myself of that during those times, and that gets me through them, but I don't remember the other questions you asked me before that. Well, that's, I love that, they think you answered a good amount of, so another part of this was, you know, when you're in that mode of being sick, and when you're in that place where you're very sick, asking, why me one is, is how did you get over sort of that victim mentality, because it's easy to be in the victim mentality when you're going through something that painful, like you can, I mean, I've never come close to death, but I can tell you when I battled IBS, I felt the same way, I was like, what did I do to deserve this? Like, have I been a horrible person? And so there's that. And then of course, you know, what are the lessons that you've brought from that, and you know, how you carried that throughout your life moving forward? Yeah, well, it's another great question. What I would say to that is that one thing I've realized in the lowest moments of my life is this, it's like, well, I can't control this. I literally can't control if my body decides to have an illness where I'm going to suffocate to death. I have some modicum of control, but really, I mean, the results may be maybe influenced by some sort of action, but sometimes there are things that are beyond our control. And so after I kind of sat with the victim mentality of that, one thing that's always risen from these moments, including that moment where I thought I was going to die early. It was kind of like, well, what choice do I have, really? The only, and it's a phrase that I say to my loved ones all the time when they're going through stuff, it's like literally the only choices you have, there's two choices, deal or die, period. You will either deal with it, or you will die because your body and your heart can't handle it, and you will just die because you can't handle it. And so if you're still alive, it means you're dealing because you're not dead. So then that for me, the only choice that's left for me is to deal. And I certainly, if I haven't died yet because clearly my body can handle the level of pain and the stuff that I'm going through, then if I'm only going to deal, then I want to deal in a way that doesn't make me feel like crap every day, right? So what are the ways in which I can deal and make the best out of the situation that I've been given? So that, I mean, it all comes down to deal or die for me. Explaining football to the friend who's just there for the nachos, hard. Tailgating from home like a pro with snacks and drinks everyone will love, any easy win. And with Instacart helping deliver the snack time MVPs to your door, you're ready for the game in as fast as 30 minutes, so you never miss a play or lose your seat on the couch or have to go head to head for the last chicken wing. Shop Game Day faves on Instacart and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three gross reorders. Offer valid for limited time, other fees and terms apply. Jewelry isn't a gift you give just once. 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And then, of course, you know, the deal part I get completely because I think getting once you, the fact making a decision to get out of that is how you start dealing. But I'm very curious about your thoughts around that. How do we get out of that place of just death, soul death, basically? Yeah, exactly. Your soul dies. That's what happens. Yeah. It comes back to what I said earlier because I've seen this with people I've worked with where they just kind of, but it's amazing how there's still little sparks, right? So I worked with a woman recently who I worked with for three years and what I'm sharing is totally sanctioned for me to share. But when she came to me, she said to me, I feel like I want to die all the time. And you know, I'm clearly not a therapist, so I said, you know, I think you should get a therapist from me because I'm not a therapist, but it was because she had allowed her soul to die. But there was a little spark in her that told her to reach out to me to do whatever program I was offering at that time. And we did a lot of work of just having her sit with how truly crappy it felt to not be alive. And I kept bringing her back to that over and over again. And when I would give her action steps to take and then she'd come back and she hadn't taken them or she had gone back to the same patterns, I would remind her how crappy it felt to not to not really be doing or to not really be living. And it was through just again, just coming back to the cost, the true cost and being brave enough and willing enough to go there, I think is absolutely massive. Number one, and number two, a way I think you can kind of trick your brain into wanting it because I see what you're saying. I think some people, they don't even want to feel a cost. They just want to stay dead. And you just want to be like, come on, you know, let me help you get out of this. But I do feel there are some people I've experienced, some people like that, where they're just very defeated internally. But I think one way you can trick your brain into doing that is through self-care, which sounds good. Yeah. It doesn't sound funny at all to me because that was going to be my next question. Well, it's through self-care because there's something about, and this is what I did with that woman that I worked with, I gave her the only homework I had for weeks and weeks was self-care practice, which I think is crucial, you know, because my work now really does involve like leadership, crucial, crucial because there's something about self-care where when every day you're doing a little tiny thing for yourself, it starts to create a little crack and light starts to come in through that crack. And you're reaffirming to yourself subconsciously that you're worth that care. And then when you start believing that you're worth that care, you start thinking, well, why aren't I worth other things? Why aren't I worth dreaming? Why aren't I worth really doing what I want to do? So I just think even just little bits of self-care can help a lot. Yeah, it's funny you say that because I was going to ask, you know, what is the importance of self-love and self-care and all of this? And you pretty much answered my question, you know, it's like Kamal Gravikant says, you love yourself like your life depends on it. Yes, yes. And you know, do you know Pascal, the French philosopher? Mm-hmm. So there's this really cool story about Pascal that I just have always loved and I use it all the time when I work with people is that Pascal was an atheist before he was super, you know, believing in God. And he decided to try an experiment because he had certain beliefs about how habits get built. And he decided to try an experiment where he was going to pray every day and to see if he could get himself to feel like he believed in God. And so he started doing it every day and he just committed to the experiment. He was a disbeliever. He didn't think he was actually going to end up believing in something bigger than him. And so every day he prayed every single day diligently. And after, I think it was a couple of months, he was a full on believer in God. And so with self-care very often, even when we don't feel like we love ourselves, even when we don't feel like we're even worth it, to just commit to it, even from a rational point, if you can't access your feelings or your heart at all, just as like an experiment just to see what will happen, it, to me, it creates the same effect just mimicking and like doing the action starts to create a feeling. Yeah, I know it's interesting because, you know, I think back to so many of the conversations I've had here with people who've been through just incredibly trying and challenging experiences. Our friend Meg Warden, who I know you've met before, who always says, you know, taking care of your body is holding space for infinite potential, which really that's about self-love. I know when I haven't been in the water for multiple days, I always turn back to that. For me, that's the ultimate form of self-care is getting in the water and surfing. And it's interesting because, you know, I heard Jonathan Fields give a talk this weekend, and he said, you know, he separated our lives into sort of these three buckets, and one of them was the Vitality Bucket, and he said that often when you find that there's an issue of bankruptcy in one of the buckets, he said, if you go and fill, he said, if the buckets are out of balance, usually it's filling one of them that's not full, it somehow levels out the other one. So if your Vitality Bucket, the case of self-care, is lacking, somehow self-care tends to transform all the other things in our lives. Yes. Yes. Well, it's because to me, self-care is this unconscious affirmation that we are of value. Wow. I mean, that's what it is. And if you aren't, if you don't believe you're of value, then why would you ever believe that anything you create or put out in the world would have value to anybody else? And what is your motivation then? Not much. There's nothing. For me, I really believe the human soul is motivated by service. I do. I know some people would argue with me about that, but I really do. I think if we don't have that greater meaning, then nothing is sustainable. And so it starts by valuing yourself, because if you don't value yourself, then you're not going to put anything out there anyway. So a couple more questions, and we'll start wrapping things up here, because I know we've been going for about an hour. We haven't really talked about your acting career, and I want to spend a little bit of time on this just because I'm personally very curious about it. Talk to me about how that has shaped and influenced your life and how that has helped you bring things forward from it, and what impact that's had on things. It has had a huge impact, huge. And it's funny. I really believe that everything that's happened to in your life and everything, all the things that the choices you've made and everything all leads you is leading you to your purpose. And I can see so clearly how being an actor led me to where I am today. And probably more revelations will unfurl as I continue on the journey of my life. But as an actor, the things that I really learned from being an actor, lots of things. But number one is when you're an actor and you're auditioning a lot, you're getting rejected all the time. All the time. You're literally going out there and bearing your soul. And as an actor, your instrument is your body. And so it's very vulnerable. And you're going out in auditions and the chances of you getting things are very small. And it's literally everyday rejection, rejection, rejection. And what's really great about it is you start to learn to not give a crap about it anymore. And then your job, what I learned was my job was not to get the job. My job was to become the best auditioner that I could possibly be. So then my audition's actually improved and I started getting a lot of jobs out of that. I actually had some pretty nice little gigs that I got when I was an actor. The second piece that I learned about it is how powerful art is. How freaking powerful it is. And that's why I think it's so important to be creative as entrepreneurs and anything that we do. Creativity is such a huge piece because one of the things that I learned because I actually got an MFA in acting and I studied theater history and there's this man who was a brilliant theater director. His name was Joe Chacon. And he said this thing where he said the reason that theater and film is so powerful. It's such a transformational experience is because for two hours somebody in the audience is basically looking at their humanity reflected back to them and they're forced to deal with all the things they don't want to see about themselves and they're forced to love all the things they don't want to love about themselves. And so for me I loved being an actor because I could feel when I was on stage, especially when I was on stage because when you do a film you don't really get to feel the audience's reaction. But when I was on stage I could feel that the audience was like a living, breathing character in the play. And to be able to function as a mirror of transformation for people, seeing themselves in these characters on stage was mind blowing. And one thing that I really realized that came from that is how important it is to be of service with your soul versus your ego. Because... Go ahead. I love that. Oh my gosh. Well let me tell you like perfect example of this. When I would go on stage thinking about what I looked like or how I was saying my lines, oh my god, the audience felt dead. It was a horrible experience if I ever got in my head or if I was ever an ego, that audience was unforgiving. They weren't giving me one bit of energy. And that really screws up the play because the audience is a character in the play. We always say in theater like when you go on stage you rehearse and rehearse and rehearse but opening day is the real play because that character gets added. When I would go on stage completely focused on the person in front of me and living through the experience and embodying the experience of that character, what was created was it just gives me chills thinking about it. The audience was so engaged, it was so in it. The feedback I would get after the plays, half the time I wouldn't even remember what I had done because I was so in the moment and the feedback I would get was incredible because I wasn't in my head. So when you're really just in the moment and serving from your soul and you're not thinking about what you look like, that's when the transformation happens. So I really learned that from acting for sure, for sure. I would say those are the top things that I learned. It's funny as you're describing that, you're taking me back to my moments on stage in the instigator experience. Everything was about serving with your heart and it wasn't about ego. It was, I mean, don't get me wrong, it was cool as hell to be up there. It was like the greatest feeling in the world but I think it's because it came from the heart. I'm doing this to get my rocks offered to have this amazing accolade. It's like my heart is really in this. You mentioned one other thing and I want to talk about this and then start to wrap things up. You mentioned acting gave you this capacity for dealing with rejection and this is another one of those things that I think causes us to grow. But when we get rejected by people, when I get rejected by, when somebody gets rejected for being a guest on this show, when you get rejected by another person, something happens to us internally where the way we feel from that experience, it starts to get intertwined with our identity in a very messy, messy way and I'm very curious how we keep those two things separate so that it doesn't keep us from growing because I think rejection is another one of those places that really does cause you to close your heart. Yeah. So I think it comes back to what we just talked about as being of service versus serving your ego. And so when I think about all the times I got rejected, I wasn't doing, I wasn't acting to be famous and be a super movie star. Would that be nice? Yes. Hell yeah. Did I envision my Oscar speech many times? Yes, I did. But that's not why I was doing it. I was doing it because it was art and it created a transformational experience because it was art in people. That was my underlying reason for doing it. So the rejections then, if I'm focused on why I'm doing this, the rejection then doesn't become part of my identity because the rejection makes no impact on whether or not I'm going to be of service or not. You don't want me for this role, great, I'll just go audition for another one until I can be of service with the thing that I love to do. And I think that this very often keeps people from doing things and keeps them small is because they're thinking so much about themselves and what it says about them, if they don't get it or what it says about them, if nobody signs up for their thing they release or if nobody buys their book. And when we start focusing, if you just notice how you feel as I'm saying those things, if you put the focus on yourself, you literally can't produce anything because you get so terrified of being rejected that you don't do anything at all. But if you keep your mindset on who you're here to serve, then none of that stuff matters. So for me, the rejection didn't sting after a while because if it did sting I knew I was making it about myself and my ego and that's not why I was acting. Wow, I love that. And that applies to just about every area of our life. Exactly. Yeah, I do this with my business, like if you had said no, Lisa, you can't be on the interview with me, I would have been like, cool, well, maybe it's just not my tribe right now or and you know, I'm just going to go find somebody else who will interview me because I'm not here to be like, look, I'm on Trini's show. I'm here to be like, how can I serve you through this interview? Well, I definitely think you have. There's no question. There's no question in my mind that you have and this has been really, really cool and eye-opening and you've revealed a lot of very, very profound insights. So I want to close things up with a question that you've heard me ask a thousand people at this point, maybe not a thousand, but quite a few. We live in such a noisy world and we live in such a difficult time in terms of standing out and doing work that matters and I'm curious, based on the experiences you've had throughout your life and your experiences as a creator, as an entrepreneur and as somebody who clearly has a very, very perceptive view of the world, what makes something unmistakable? What makes something unmistakable is you. So you don't have to try to be unmistakable. You just have to focus on being the most full version of you and speaking your truth. That's what makes something unmistakable to me. But Lisa, as I said, this has been just absolutely fascinating mind-blowing, inspiring and I think our listeners are going to absolutely love you and I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share some of your insights with our listeners here at The Unmistakable Creative. Thank you, Shurnee. I have to say, I've had an experience of you creating a wonderful space for transformation for me just from asking me such great questions and allowing me to tell my story, so thank you for that. And for those of you guys listening, we'll wrap the show with that. 1-800-Flowers.com knows that a gift is never just a gift. A gift is an expression of everything you feel and helps to build more meaningful relationships. 1-800-Flowers takes the pressure off by helping you navigate life's important moments by making it simple to find the perfect gift from flowers and cookies to cake and chocolate. 1-800-Flowers helps guide you in finding the right gift to say how you feel. 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Well, what if you could turn that fear into creative fuel? We've just published an amazing new ebook called The Four Keys to Success in an AI world, and this is more than just a guide. It's a deep exploration into the human skills that AI can't touch. The skills that are essential for standing out and thriving, no matter how much technology evolved. Talking about real differentiators here like creativity, emotional intelligence, critical thinking and much more, inside you'll find actionable insights and strategies to develop these skills, whether you're a creative person, a business person or just simply someone who loves personal development. This isn't a story about tech taking over, it's a story of human creativity thriving alongside AI. Picture this AI as your creative co-pilot, not just as a tool, but a collaborator that enhances your unique human skills. The Four Keys ebook will show you exactly how to do that, and view AI in a new way that empowers you instead of overshadows you. Transform your creative potential today. Head over to unmistakablecreative.com/fourkeys. Use the number four K-E-Y-S that's unmistakablecreative.com/fourkeys and download your free copy. [BLANK_AUDIO]

Growing up under the dictatorship of Noriega
When we ignore our artistic inclinations
Facing death and dealing with a terrible illness
The problem with doing work that doesn’t align with your values
Dealing with fears of speaking your truth
Removing the imprints of our past to mold a stronger future
Finding hope through creativity when life challenges you
Learning to forgive people after they have oppressed or hurt you
Transcending our tendency to build walls and be self protective
The importance of devotion, trust, and belief
Why massive growth experiences are rarely blissful
The role that self care plays in your ability to heal
Learning to separate rejection from your identity as a creator

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