Everyone Has a Story – But Is Yours Serving You?

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability, explicit or implied shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. What's Working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential.

0:45 Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on Purpose. Now, here's your host, Doctor Relise Cortez. Welcome back to the Working on Purpose Program. Thanks you training again this week. Great to have you. This show has been brought to you with passion and pride since February of twenty fifteen, and I'm happy to share that this show has been ranked on the top ten most inspirational leadership podcasts on the web. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, and if we've not met, I am an organizational psychologist and MOBO therapist, speaker and author. My team and I at gusto Now help companies to enliven and fortify their operations by building a culture in leadership activated by meaning and purpose. Our mission is to help our clients create a destination workplace where people flock to join, are intrinsically motivated to perform at their best, can grow into their full potential, and are committed to stay. And we deliver on the company's mission always translates to higher profits for you. You can learn more about us now.

1:46 We can work together at gustodashnow dot com or my personal site at least Coortes dot com. Getting into today's program we have with us today. Karina Kilcoin a former trial lawyer who specialized in criminal defense, including complex, white collar and civil litigation in federal and state courts. Today, she passionately shares her own personal story of trauma and healing to teach others how to rise above their own stories and find true peace and emotional freedom. She's the author of Rise Above, the story Free Yourself from past Trauma and Create the life you want, which we're talking about today. She joins her today from Tampa, Florida, Karina. Welcome to Working on Purpose. Thank you, Elise. I'm so happy to be here. I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed reading every single word of this beautiful book that you created, and I'm really really impressed. What I want to start with is, you know, this is a It's both really beautifully written, but it's also incredibly transparent and personal. So the very first thing that I have to ask you, my friend, is how did you summon the courage the bravery to be that brave and bold? And what you shared it is true. I am very honest and transparent and raw in this book, and I would say that courage came in levels and layers and stages. So there was so much of my life that was stowed away, and I was so ashamed of so much of what I went through, that I was stuffed and suppressed so much of who I was and who I thought I was and where I came from. So I would say that after decades

3:20 of living like that, I understood when I started to go on my healing journey that I had to go back in there to those dark places of where I hid all those pieces of myself and bring them into the light. So through therapy and the different modalities of therapy I tried, they would come out piece by piece, little by little, and then I started to realize that there was no shame in what I had experienced, and I started to take a lot of pride and who I was at those different points in my life. And that was kind of the first level and the first layer and the first and peeling of it, if you really consider it like an onion almost. And then I would say I really got courageous about it when I realized at the end of it all that I really wanted to create this book that I wanted to write essentially a guidebook for people and how to heal from trauma.

4:15 And I knew that to do that, I had to do it authentically and to really share my journey, I had to share those stories, my past stories, my history. And I knew that if I could show people, if I could take people along through my own personal journey and show them through example of what it feels like and what it looks like to share yourself in that way, that the book would be so powerful and an authentic for people and would really encourage them to do the same. And that's really what healing takes, is to find that courage to go back into the past and pull forward those pieces of your self that you left behind beautifully rendered and kicking us off, Karina, So, since I have read the book, and I do know about the trauma that you were talking about, because you really detail in the book very well, but our listeners and viewers don't yet know.

5:13 So let's situate that next so they understand really what you were pulling from. So. I was born in a rusted out steel town on the Ohio Pennsylvania border. I came from a very dysfunctional, violent family. My mother and father fought and argued as long as I can remember, as far back as I can remember the number of incidents that I witnessed and was involved in and trying to protect my mother in domestic violent situations countless. My father went to My father started to have legal trouble. He was a very astute businessman, my father, and very much a hustler. And when he was in the picture, we had we had a good living, We had a good lifestyle. But when he was not in the picture, we didn't, and he got in trouble with the law. When I would say I was about eleven, I remember the FBI starting to surveil our home and such, and he went to prison, to the federal penitentiary. And when he left, my mother, who suffered from mental health issues, was unable to cope.

6:25 She was unable to cope with the stress with a financial aspect of him leaving us as a family. And at the time when he left, there was me, I was the oldest, and I had a younger brother and a younger sister. I was about twelve, and all of this was going on, and my mother, like I said, was just really unable to cope. So there were long period stretches of time where she would be in bed depressed. You know, this was you know, the eighties in Ohio, and people weren't going to psychologists in that group and in that era. So if I had to look back on it now, knowing what I know about mental health. I would speculate that my mother had severe depression, anxiety, and probably some kind of bipolar. There were massive, massive bouts of spending the money that my father left us on silly things, and then we were in extreme, extreme poverty. We would go without hot water, without electricity, countless countless times. I remember sharing a bathtub a type of water that I would make up and my brothers and sister and I would bathe one after the other. A few years later, my mother had my youngest brother, and I decided that I was going to get myself out of all of this.

7:42 And the only road I saw out of all this poverty and all of this chaos was too was through education. So I was a good student and I would always prioritize education, and I chose to go to law school. So I put myself through law school. There was a little bit more trauma than occurred during that time, and that was when I was in my early twenties. My mother was diagnosed with cancer, so even during law school, I was taking care of her while she was dying. When I was twenty four, my mother died and I adopted my nine year old brother. So there was this trauma of course situational trauma, family trauma. But there was this bigger problem, which was that I never had the space to process it.

8:30 I didn't have the tools, and none of us do at that age, and I wasn't with a parent who knew how to help me process it, and I never, as I got older, didn't even know the difference of what that meant. I didn't know how to do it, so I continued to suppress it, and then adopting my nine year old brother put me even deeper into fight or flight, into survival mode, because it wasn't just me anymore that I was trying to make sure that I survived. It was now my nine year old brother. So it was quite a long time of quite a many years of trauma. And then it was this idea and this this huge burden I carried of carrying all of this old, old emotional energy in me that continued to feel like trauma over and over and over again.

9:24 Such a such a burden, and too, and if I have, if I remember right, too, your mother also tried to give you away when you were first born. She told you that, yes, there was that little thing which is a really heavy, heavy, heavy thing to carry as a child to know that your mother tells you that she tried to give you away. So I wanted to make sure our listeners and viewers kind of were anchored in what kind of trauma we were talking about here and the length of it, so that they could understand just why you've been so motivated to write this book, to research this book and write this book. I am curious how, if at all, your experience as a trial attorney served you to the research, the writing, and in the healing journey. I can't imagine that it wasn't present. Yes, it absolutely was present. And so this whole even younger than even you know, when I was younger than going through college in law school, I loved to read. That was my that was my escape, that was my world. I got to live in other places besides the traumatized, violent world in which I was being raised. So reading and you know, books and storytelling was always a thing for me. But law school and the way they teach you to think in law school and and then as a as a trial lawyer, the main skills that I took that transposed so beautifully into this is the idea, especially in trial work, of taking really complicated matters and distilling them down into some simple form so that people like jurors can understand what you're saying. And so the law can be very

10:58 complex. And then you know, there were types of law I practice, So even when I got into more white collar criminal defense, and there are complicated financial aspects in addition to criminal law aspects that you had to explain to jurors. That is a skill that you learn in law school, and that is a skill that you develop as a lawyer. So in writing this book, I had to take really complicated ideas and this is all things that I went through on my own healing journey. I am such a researcher and such a reader and such a nerd about health and mental health and emotional health and physical health. So it was always something I was interested in. But when you really get into the ideas of trauma and what it does to you and how what it does to your brain or what your brain is doing in the presence of trauma, it's really complicated. And a lot of times I think that that is what makes people shy away from it. They don't really want to get into that aspect, and so they keep going to somebody to a therapist like, well, tell me, just tell me and tell me how to fix it. And that's not really how it works. You have to be very proactive in your healing. So what I really wanted to do was do exactly what I did as a trial, where is take this really complicated information about your brain and your brain and what it does in the presence of trauma, and simplify it for people in one chapter so that people could really understand it. And I will say that it is a lot of you know you and people out there who love to read a written books. It's like

12:30 it's a lot. It takes a long time to write a book. It takes a really long time to write a really good book. And really what you try to do is you put it all out there and you really try to simplify it for people. And that chapter I wrote on the brain science was the chapter that took me the most, not because of the information, but because I wanted to make it so simple. I wanted to keep, you know, making it simple, simple, simple, simple, so that as you asked, the qualities and the skill that I learned and I developed came in super handy. And writing this kind of a book. Indeed, well, kudos, I mean it is, you're right. I mean I've been hosting the show for nine and a half years, Karina and I generally bring on authors and I read their books or to cover, so I've got a really quite quite a deep experience in how to be able to read books and how looking at how they're organized and how well can I understand them, and the easier to understand, the better written it is. So here we go. So this let's situate here before we take our first break here of this idea. I mean, everybody's heard the idea. Everybody has a story.

13:37 Of course, we all have a story, but you have a particular way of describing just what stories are that I think it would be helpful to say at this point, what are stories? In your view? Stories are your brain's emotional interpretation of what happened to you. So the traumatic response is there's an objective quality to it. There's an objective nature to you experience something traumatic that goes without a doubt. But the story that we all have, because we all have one or one hundred we all have about ourselves. I'm unlovable, I'm not worthy, I'm always abandoned, I'm not worth being loved, like whatever your story is, and those three were always you know my story. But whatever your story is, it comes from your brain's subjective, emotional interpretation of what happened to you, and it creates that story for you to keep you quote unquote safe, beautifully rendered. And that is going to set us up here, ladies and gentlemen, for what we're going to cover after the break. So we're going to get We're going to get into the difference between the emotional and the thinking brain in terms of all this sort of thing that. Let us take our first break. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. We've been on the air with Karina Killcoin, who shares her own personal story of trauma and healing to teach others how to rise above their own stories and find true piece and emotional freedom. We've been talking a bit

15:11 about where this book came from, why it's important. After the rec're going to get into this more of the nitty greeting of the techniques that she covers. We'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose, an inspirational speaker, and author. She helps companies visioneer for a greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose.

16:04 This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise alisee at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, as I am dedicated to creating a world where people can realize the potential at work and are led by inspirational leaders, and they are part of the urization that does business that betters the world. I keep researching and writing my own books. So the last one came out in March of twenty twenty three. It's called The Great Revitalization. How activating meeting and purpose can radically enliven your business. And I wrote it for leaders to really understand that the lay of today's talent landscape, what do they want to stay motivated to stay with you? And then I offer twenty two best practices to help equip the organization with culture to be able to provide that. You can find my books at at leastquotest dot com or on Amazon if you are just joining the program. My guest today is Karin at Kilcoin. She's the author of Rise Above, the Story for Yourself from the past, trauma and Create the life you want, which is what we're talking about today. So now I appreciate you very much how you did distill as an organizational psychologist. Right, I've studied a lot about emotions in the brain, etc. And I like how you describe the brain as a master's storyteller and then you distinguish the emotional and thinking brains. Can you kind of expand on that a little bit for us?

17:33 Yes, So, as we were discussing earlier, the brain is so complicated and complex when it comes to trauma and what it does in the face of trauma. So I read a lot of books and one of the things that I learned in my healing journey was how important the role of your brain is and understanding and how your brain works when these traumatic things happened to us, your brain is doing And when I first learned these ideas, it's the thing that really broke me open the most. It seemed so seems so like just the light went on, like it was like, oh my gosh, So all this time, in all these years, I have been defaulting to this mindset, to these stories, to these limiting stories of who I thought I was because of how my brain works. So the way I describe it in my book again really simplified, but I want people to really be able to absorb this and understand it. So the way I describe it as there's two parts to your brain, the emotional brain, which is comprised of the reptilian part of your brain and the mammalion part of your brain. And those two parts of your brain register and control all the things you have no control over. You're breathing, your heart rate, all these things. So it also those two parts of your brain also control fight or flight. So something if something happens to you some kind of you're in danger, like the old stories about like the dinosaurs chasing your bear's chosing something's chasing you. Your body goes into this whole or system of staying and fighting or running away. There's

19:08 also the idea of freezing. But that emotional part of your brain, as I call it, is what controls all of the things that you don't even think about. And then there's your thinking brain, which is what I kind of group together as your cortex, your subral cortex, your frontal cortex. So all these areas of your brain, the upper part of your brain that are the more sophisticated parts of your brain that are free Will you know that all of these ideas about self awareness, self love, it's all of this and that all happens in this different part of your brain that I call the thinking brain in the book. So where it goes awry is when you experience trauma, and your emotional brain, in order to keep you safe, registers and ignites this fight flight response. And when it does that, it does all these things physically to your body, right, but it also creates a story that keeps you safe, as I said earlier, quote unquote safe because what your brain is doing, your emotional brain is doing, is it is trying to make sure that you don't get hurt. The brain is wired first and foremost for survival. So when you experience something traumatic, your emotional brain initiates fight or flight, and it creates a story in your head that keeps you living a smaller life, like, Oh, I don't know, don't

20:41 take that risk. I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't quit your job. I wouldn't fall that dream. What that doesn't pan out? What if you don't make the money then you're going to make I wouldn't fall for that person. I wouldn't do that. And what if they don't love you back? What if they leave you? Everybody leaves you. These are the kinds of negative self loops that play in our head, and they're all brought about by the emotional brain. How do we stop those? How do we stop the fear loop and negative self talk? How do we get out of it? We create self awareness and you do that in your thinking brain. So we all have these loops. In fact, I just saw this great reel on Instagram and it's a comedian. He had Jerry Seinfeld on and he said, Jerry Seinfeld, you have written, you know, arguably the best show ever on television. Do you still have that negative voice in your head when you're writing, and do you know Jerry Seinfeld said, yes, I do.

21:32 Every day in your voice tells me I am not a good writer, I am a comedian. I'm not this, I'm not that, and I'm thinking, see everybody's story. And so what you want to do is is you want to get into the self awareness where you know what the story is and you stop it. You find the awareness about it, you hear it, you hear the story, and you reset yourself and you say, that's not true. This trauma isn't happening anymore. I don't have to stay in this safe box anymore. That's not happening to me any more. So it's all about developing this self awareness and this pattern of self awareness. And that's ultimately once you start getting that going like an engine revving, like once you get enough of that self awareness going, the stories don't ever completely stop what they get lighter, and you know how to put them in their place, and you know how to say, I know you're trying to protect me emotional brain, but I don't need that right now. What I need right now is to take this risk. I need to make this jump. I need to tell this person I love them. Right. So that's where we get into the difference. Because your brain is a master storyteller, and if you default to your emotional brain and you let your emotional brain tell you what's happening, you are living a limited small life, no question, I think so much.

23:02 I've had so many amazing people on this program over the year's Koreina, and one of the things we've talked about is just if we could literally spring more people so that they're operating from much more of all of their talents and their capabilities, and they were then empowered to contribute those what kind of a world will will be living in it? It's amazing, right, It's just amazing. So the limitation is incredible. Now, what you were talking about, that three step process that you just mentioned to us, is that the same thing as removing the victim mindset? Or is that something else the victim mindset removing? That is definitely related and parallel, Okay, I would say that. I would say that to me, this was a huge part of my healing. I carried around for decades this idea that like I was the daughter of a felon, and you know, if people knew that about me, what would they think, Who am I? Because I'm the daughter of a felon, And so I had to really I had to let that go if I wanted to get to the next phase of healing. So to me, that came out to be that I had to know. I boiled it down to basically three steps that they put in the book of Realizations I had about victimhood. And the first one is is that the trauma, the bad thing that happened to you, to any of us, doesn't happen because we deserve it. We get into this mentality that, oh, somehow, when something bad happens to us, we caused it, or it's our fault, or we could have said no, or we should have did in this stuff

24:33 differently, and that's just human nature. That's again something the brain does. And what we need to realize is is that that's not the truth. That's not reality, that the bad thing didn't happen because we deserve it. The second thing we need to do is again know that this idea you're right, this parallel here, is that your story is a distortion. It is your brain, your emotional brain, creating this loop, is trying to keep you pushed down and safe within the little bubble it's creating for you. So your story about your abandonment or your worthlessness, your own loveability, or your that you fail and everything that that's a distortion. And the third thing about the victim mindset is that to get out of it, you have to understand that and accept and look for the bigger purpose and what happened. There is always one. It's hard to pinpoint sometimes because especially when it's something so terrible and so traumatic, and there's always something if you can find it, a silver lining, a bigger purpose, some benefit that came out of it for you.

25:45 And then all the times I talk about this in groups and I speak, and that's the one that gets people the most because you think, what good could have come out of that? But there is if you look. It might be that you moved, It might be it took another job, It might be that you met somebody different, It might be that you learned something new about yourself. There could always be a silver lining, and resetting your brain from negative to positive takes that kind of self awareness. It takes that kind of using the thinking brain to analyze the situation and to say there was something bigger and brighter for this that happened to me. I know. It's what I love about that Koreina and what I align with. I'm, among other things, I'm a meaning and work and an identity researcher. And when we look at what we've gone through, what things that we've had like crawl through the mud through to get to get to the other side, or what we've transcended, if we peel that back and say, if that hadn't happened to me, what would I would what would I would not have become as a result, So then we see how those things really layered into our sense of identity and our sense of strength and perspective and talents and skills.

26:57 I think that's a lot of what we can get in terms of that silver lane that you talk about and true And I would say this too, that I look back on my life and I think, would I ever want to go through all of that? Again? Absolutely not? But standing where I stand today, am I thankful for it all? Absolutely? I wouldn't be like you said, I wouldn't be who I am today had I not gone through all of that. So I love what you say. I think that's beautiful. Thank you. I am really As I was thinking about you coming on the program today, I was thinking, you know, I really am convinced that, you know, the people that have really done something in their lives and they've gone through this stuff, it's almost like a not quite a direct correlation, but there's something in it, like we humans, you know, almost need to be catalyzed. You know. It's the rom Dos would call it the sandpaper of life. Right, And so your story, you couldn't have written this book. You couldn't be doing the work that you're doing today in the world. Had you not had to go through and find a way through all of that trauma that you had in life, you wouldn't be equipped. Absolutely, that's so true. So you have a way, this idea of rising above the story. You have a method for that, a methodology for that. And I don't know if the steps you've already covered really speak to that, but I think everybody who's listening to at this point it's like, Okay, great, I know I've got a story. How do I rise above it? So I love this question because again to this point of I wanted to create a guide book for people. There are a lot

28:33 of beautiful books out there and actually really heady, intelligent books out there on trauma, and I actually read them and quote a lot of them in the book. And there's you know, seventy two end notes in my book. So there's a lot of these big ideas, and if you want to go back and research, you know, some other things are dive deeper. That's great. But what I wanted to do is really simplify the journey for people through reading the passages of my book. So I took my own healing journey and what worked for me, and I broke it down into three steps. And the three steps the three big steps, and there's lots of fun things under each step. But the three big steps are acknowledging your story number one. And that's sometimes the most powerful, most difficult work for people because so many times, like I said, we're walking around the earth with our head and the sand or a head and the clouds about Oh yeah, I guess this is just the life I have, because you know, they're defaulting their emotional brain. So acknowledging your story is this idea of what happened to me and really analyzing this objective and the subjective part of it, so you know, I give this example in the book of a Trial Experience, right, and I really like to explain it to people this way. So if you were testifying on the stand, Let's say you were robbed and you're testifying on the stand and you're supposed to be talking about what happened to you, and they're asking you very factual questions. You know, they want to know, where were you, what did the person look like, like, what did they say to you? What were they wearing? And instead of instead of giving them the who, what, where, when of what happened to you,

30:06 you you sit on the stand and you say, oh, my god, the whole thing was my fault. I shouldn't have been out after midnight. Why was I walking the street like that? I shouldn't have been on the left side, I should have been on the right side, and I should never have been wearing my good watch. So that would be objected to all over the place. That membered a lot, and you would be driven back to the objective facts of what happened. So similar in this acknowledging your story, understanding the objective part of what happened to you, laying that out, Yes, this happened to me. A B and C no doubt about it. But the next part is acknowledging the story that your brain wrote about it. My case, my story where my objective thing was my father went to prison. The story I wrote about it was that I was unworthy and unlovable because my father included left me when I was little. And so there's a story that we create. So acknowledging that story and that you're telling yourself a story and that you're living in a little bubble of your story is the number one part. The second part is releasing your story. Second big step.

31:11 This is all this idea of Okay, now you acknowledged it, we have to go back a little bit further and understand how you got so tangled up in it, all the times it repeated itself, how patterns happened, how it took over your life. And then you start doing some work on releasing the story. And that's a lot of work about you know, you're inner child, work forgiveness, it's all these types of things in there. Then the third step is rising above your story, and this is all about finding real self love and how you tap into that and how you finally, after all this time, know exactly who you are, and you love exactly who you are and you're not ashamed of it, and you put it out into the world because, as you said earlier, could you imagine a world?

32:02 Or we all did that? Or we have these gifts in us and we handle them, but we tend to like bury them and like because we got the emotional loop going, Yeah, you're not good at that, and I wouldn't do that. You'll fail at that. Don't do that? So can you imagine? So it's all about I teach you all the ways in which I do this on earthing, excavating the real you, and loving the real you. So that's the world that I want to live in, Koreina, That's where I want to live. Yes, let's brum our next break here. I'm your host, doctor Earles Cortez, who are on here with Karina Kilcoin, who shares her own personal story of trauma and healing to teach others to rise above their own stories and find true peace and emotional freedom.

32:42 We're getting more into the details of just how it is that we tell the stories, how we are a master storyteller. After the break, we're going to talk more about how to extract our true self to be very powerful. We'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com.

33:32 Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to a lease a l Se at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on purpose. Thankteresting with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, Doctor Lei's Cortes. I mentioned in the last break that my last book came out in March of twenty twenty three. It's called The Great Vitalization. What I did for you is I built you a three page assessment you can pull off my website to They've learned the extent to which your organization is actually operating at for today's talent discerning standards. You can find it at gustodashnow dot com if you are just now joining the program. My guess is Karina Kilcoin. She's the author of Rise Above, the Story for Yourself from past trauma and Create the life you want. So as we were on break there, I was thinking about this Koreina, and one thing that I want to say to our listeners and viewers is is that none of us are immune to trauma and pain.

34:40 We are all walking wounded human beings. And my work inside organizations to help develop leaders and cultures that are really destination in nature. Think about how there are so many people that have no idea how truly wounded they are. If they did this kind of work that Karina is putting forth, they wouldn't be the tyrants that you actually report to, or they maybe they would, you know, create a whole new company that would be something else. So I really am a huge fan of this work, Comrena. It's so so so important. One of the many reasons I wanted to have you on. So I just want you to know that for me, this the work that we're doing here in this program is integral to the kind of work that I try to do. Some companies as well. I agree with that that's so powerful because I've been thinking a lot about that myself. That we take all of this with us everywhere everywhere we go. That's right, not just our family and our friends. It goes to our work, to the workplace. And I think back on it now having been healed, and I think back with people that I have worked with, and I think, Wow, how different the company would have felt, or the environment would have felt had we had this kind of training or this kind of thinking available to sea level, especially right Who's kind of like it's all coming down the attitude of the leadership.

36:00 So well, it's so thank you. I mean, you know, a huge dobnorable one for leadership is self awareness, and most people just scratch the surface of that. So so getting to that then I where I wanted to go next is I just found it so powerful. You have these four steps to extracting our true self, say more, tell us about those the people that haven't read your book kit. So, as we talked about earlier, I had a really hard time even knowing who the real me was because I was I'd stuffed so much of what had happened to me, and then I spent so much time time trying to be anything but who I thought I was. And I think this is also something that we all fall into. So I chase success, thinking, oh, you know, if I'm this lawyer and I went all these cases and I have all these clients, like I'm going to be this person and I'm suddenly going to be healed and happy and not all the shame inside of me, And that's not really how it works.

36:58 And in fact, I felt I had a poster syndrome for you know, most of my career, I just never felt like I was good enough. So this part about extracting our true self and excavating our true self is so powerful and needed in this idea of healing and you know, really finding ultimate self love. So the four buckets of that, the four steps that I had to do a lot of work in and I think we all probably do, is Number one, rid ourselves of shame. So we get so caught up and bound up in our shame, and we keep these secrets about ourselves and we think, oh, you know, nobody can know this about me. They're not going to like me if they knew this about me, and it makes us feel less than and dirty and not worthy of things.

37:47 So the biggest thing in there is riading yourself of shame, and that is really about talking about what happened to you. And an easy way to start doing that is just you know, journaling things, writing it out yourself, and then taking it to somebody you trust. I am not espousing you know, putting this all o our social media or going to work and letting it all out on the on the conference table. I'm saying being responsible about how you are going to free yourself from this shame, any secrets you have that you're keeping. And this miraculous thing happens for me and I witnessed it with so many people, is that when you do this, suddenly nothing feels shameful or turty anymore. It's like you just felt like that because you were holding it in the second step. And this is soothing your inner child. So many of us have something that happened as a child in those formative years.

38:42 Like I mentioned earlier, we don't have the capacity yet, we don't have the brain capacity yet to process what happens to us. So so many times we carry around those wounds or our brain actually as it's forming, is impacted by these different traumatic events, and so we need to learn how to dial back down into that child that's so wounded, and learn how to parent that child, learn how to nurture that child, know how to love and soothe that child. And that that didn't take a fair amount of work, but it's absolutely worth it. The third step is forgiving others. Oh my gosh, this was This was huge for me. And this was like forgiving my parents. And it was interesting because I could more easily find forgiveness for my father than for my mother. I felt like my mother was supposed to have been my protector. So it took me a long time and releasing a lot of rage. And I mean I had rage for her. And that's something else. I think when we have these emotions, we get ashamed of them and we think, oh, we can't, can't say that against have rage against my mother. Yeah, you actually can, and you should express these emotions because emotions have energy, and if you keep suppressing them, they will cause disease in your body and very possibly disease. I mean that is like, that is scientific. I am not making that up, and the last four step is forgiving ourselves. We get so caught up in this idea of all the things we did wrong. And I know, for me it was

40:15 interesting because I really didn't get into this until, you know, my early forties, and I had to grieve this whole situation of well, gosh, I spent like you know, twenty years locked up in this half lifehere I could have been really being my real self and really being like who I'm in here to be, and really loving myself. But everything happens when it happens, and healing takes as long as it takes. So forgiving ourselves is crucial and important, and it requires a lot of compassion and a lot of patience. Indeed, indeed, well that brings me where I wanted to come next. I mean, I'm well aware, you know, at least concretely or that researching, writing, and sharing this book has had to profoundly change you.

41:06 So I'm interested in how would you describe that transformation? What was that for you? I had so many versions of this book. I worked on this book for a very long time, and I mean eight years. I had different versions of this book, and none of them seemed to really hit or to really feel right, or I would not quite get a deal I wanted, or I don't know, just something never felt right about it. And when I took it off the market and I reformatted it into this formula right and then really made it more, this journey of this mixture of a memoir and self help, it really felt like this is it, this has to be it. Like I mentioned in the beginning, I wanted people to feel like they wanted to They wanted to feel like we were friends and I was walking them through this journey they were on. So that whole process was so cathartic for me because I started out sobbing and crying in all these early journals and these early drafts, and somebody very wise told me, they said, Okay, these aren't the ones you're going to use, right, Like you have to like let all that out. So one big thing I want to say to people about that I could draw parallel to this and this whole journey of me writing this is that, And where I want people to get in their journey is all of these things I was able to write about them in this version of this book that people could buy and read. I don't have an emotional charge to them anymore, and now they almost feel like somebody

42:37 else's stories. And so I want people to get there. I want that sense of emotional freedom for people where they don't have an emotional charge to those things that happened to them anymore. And I would say that the beauty of what happens also to me at the end of this or where I am not in the end, but where I am right now in this journey, is that I run across people. I run into people and they tell me, oh my gosh, I just had I just met somebody the other day and they said, I read your book and it broke me wide open, and I was like in a good way, and yes, I actually took time off from work and I went deep into therapy and I took your book and I answered all the journal prompts and I took it to my therapist and I was like, this is what I want to work on. I had been hiding all this emotional, this childhood trauma. So it is this continual, beautiful journey for me where I am helping people get to this emotional freedom part where they don't have this charge about the negative things that they've that they've happened that have happened to them, and they've left those bags behind at the railway station where they should be. Yeah, well so then then the next logical place for me to go then, And I've been very interested, I mean the transformations in life. I mean, you don't practice law anymore, correct?

43:58 Is that right? You left it behind? So I know that you're out helping people with their stories and such, but how are what are you doing with your precious energies in your time? I am such a believer in this book, so I am out there speaking, So I'm doing you know, keynotes, So I'm speaking wherever I can. I am right now trying to get a ted talk lined up. I'm building a course around this book and this idea because I want to offer more information and I want to expand on it, and I want to offer some meditations and things and other assets that really helped me that I couldn't make part of the book just because of what it is in the format. It isn't So I'm continuing this. This my life's work of this. And I will say that growing up I told you I loved books, and I don't know, maybe five six years old.

44:50 I remember thinking that I wanted to be a writer, and I didn't really know what that meant. I knew like I wanted to put words together and things, and law school, like I said, was my way out. It was, you know, an escape for me in a way that I saw that I could survive and make money. But I would say that it was a beautiful choice because those skills have come so in handy and I would never change one day of that, And it makes me appreciate being a writer and having this freedom to be a writer so much more so. Two things. One, it's not lost on me that you know your father went to the penitentiary when you were age twelve and you became a trial lawyer. That's just a very interesting sort of piece of your story. Second thing I want to say, right, trial lawyer, Yeah, No, less right is I curated an anthology of women's stories of how they discovered their purpose and our serving from it. And one of the very known paths of purpose is in learning how what ails you in life? What has ailed you in life?

45:49 What have you learned about dealing with that that you can teach other people? And that seems to be to me to be your path. So I am wildly happy that you are pursuing this full time. I think the world desperately needs it and you are uniquely positioned to be able to give this the message and the teaching in a way that is so raw and accessible. Thank you. I appreciate that. I really do feel that it is my life's calling. And when I meet people like I shared that story with you, it it just makes me. It just I just got a chill. Whenever that happens, I know I'm doing something good or sing right. That is exactly right, Karina. No, I'm delighted, you know. I'm just very grateful that our pass acrossite. I think your work is very very powerful.

46:31 We're coming to a close here, and you may not know, but this show is listened to by people around the world, and they care about trying to either improve or better connect with their work in a more meaningful way that allows us to contribute. They want to grow into becoming more inspirational leaders. They wanted part organizations that are doing something that better is the world. What would you like to leave them with. I would like to leave them with the idea that no matter what has happened to you in the past. You are worthy of a big, beautiful right life and there is no reason to hide anymore in that negative self talk, the negative loop, the stories that we play in their heads. And I would also love to offer your audience you know that very important first step we talked about the acknowledging your story and how hard that can be. On my website, I do offer free acknowledgment guide, which is a beautiful way to get started in the journey, so they can find that on my website. Awesome, Krein and I will give that to them in just a second. I want to thank you for coming on the Working Purpose podcast. You have but a beautiful contribution. Happy to know you, and I can't wait to get this out into more people's hands. And I want to see you do that Ted talk. Let's get to it already. I have to do one too, by the way, so maybe we could do it. Yeah, let's do it, Okay, awesome, all right, thank you so much, Alis, So welcome, so welcome, listeners and viewers. You are going to want to continue connecting with Karina Killcoin the work she does, and definitely check out her book.

48:00 You can start by going to the website she mentioned, let me give it to you and then I'm going to spell it for you as well. It's Karina killcoin dot com. So that's k A r e n A k I l c O y n E Karina killcoin dot com. Last weekend also get their release with Rise Above the Story. That might be easier. That's Rise Above Thestory dot Com. That's even easier. Okay, if you missed the show last week, you can always catch it via recorded podcast. We were on air with David Pearl, the creator and founder of Street Wisdom, which provides walkshops of curious discovery around the world. He's also the author of Wonderful First First Wonder in the every day See you next week for you at another nourishing conversation to help you become more of an inspirational leader and build your destination workplace. Remember that work is one of the best adventures and means of realizing our potential and making the impact we crave. So let's work on Purpose.

48:54 We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose feature your host, doctor Elise Cortes, each week on W four cy Together We'll create a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion performance and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there. Let's work on purpose.