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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Fleet Maull. Fleet Maull is an author, consultant, trainer, and executive coach who facilitates deep transformation for individuals and organizations through a philosophy and a training program he’s developed called Radical Responsibility. From 1985 to 1999, Fleet was imprisoned on charges of drug trafficking, and he’s spent the last 20 years since his release articulating a philosophy that actually began and evolved while he was in prison, the philosophy of Radical Responsibility. And since his release, he has served tirelessly, working for positive social transformation as a meditation teacher, social entrepreneur, peacemaker, and end-of-life care educator.
With Sounds True, Fleet has published a new book called Radical Responsibility, and an audio training series called Living with Radical Responsibility. If you’re someone who, like me, has a tendency in certain situations to blame, justify, to want to be right, or to hold on to resentment or grievances, I hope you’ll join me for this incredibly empowering conversation on Radical Responsibility with Fleet Maull.
Fleet, you and I had a previous conversation on Insights at the Edge, and we talked in quite some depth about the 14 years that you spent in prison, from 1985 to 1999, on charges of drug trafficking, and all the great work, actually, that you were, I’m going to say, miraculously able to accomplish while you were in prison, including setting up two non-profits, The Prison Dharma Network and the Prison Hospice Association. And in that previous conversation, you shared the work that you did in training prisoners in mindfulness, and your vision of prison reform. And also, I heard a whisper at that time a few years ago about a book you were working on called Radical Responsibility. And now, a few years later, Radical Responsibility exists and is being published, and we get to have this follow-up conversation about that body of work that you’ve created that’s really an outpouring of, I’m going to say it, your genius and the crucible of your life. So let’s begin. Talk a little bit about how the roots of this philosophy, this way of living, was born in you while you were in prison, or maybe even before.
Fleet Maull: Yes, certainly, you referenced some of the things that I was able to accomplish in prison. Really, everything I was able to accomplish for myself, in terms of turning my own life around, in terms of the path of personal transformation and evolution, that I was able to do during those 14 years, make good use of my time, as well as what I was able to create for that community that I was in there, that prison community and for the larger world, really was all grounded in this approach that I call Radical Responsibility.
I’d say in terms of pre-prison and the roots of it, or certainly in my dharma training with my teacher Trungpa Rinpoche, and just my overall dharma training . . . that brings up, how did I end up in prison after all of that extensive dharma training? We covered that the last time around, but suffice it to say I was pretty thickheaded and one of those people that came out of the 60s with a dual major, and so I earned myself a 14-year federal sabbatical, and I became incredibly motivated to use that time well. But really, I think it was the influence of my previous training. I actually had a Master’s degree in Contemplative Psychotherapy from Naropa University, so I had a lot of education and a lot of training. So fortunately when I did land in that situation, I was really awoken by the fact that my son, who was nine years old at the time, was now going to grow up without his dad. And that was devastating, I’m sure for him, as well.
I found myself, in that situation, really motivated to do something with my life, and I found myself in an environment that was just pervaded by anger and bitterness, and really, everyone’s victim story. And of course, most of these are people who society feels have been perpetrators of one kind or another. And yet, they universally feel victimized by the system, by their lives, by the court process, by their fall partners that turned on them, by their lawyers, what have you. And all you had to do was start up a conversation with a fellow prisoner and this ritual would ensue when they would tell their victim story, then you were supposed to tell yours, and I very quickly realized I didn’t want to live in that place, I didn’t want to come out of prison that way, I didn’t even want to live that way in prison. And it became crystal clear to me that the only way out and through, for me, was to embrace 100% or even 200% ownership for the fact that I got myself into the situation.
And I had lots of people I could have been angry at if I wanted to. I was doing time for a lot of people. A lot of people didn’t have to do time so I could do time. And my lawyers, and the way the prosecution . . . I had all those stories in my head, but I realized that I just needed to make a boundary with all that and focus on how I got myself into that situation, and what I could do to get myself out of it. And how I could do something positive with that time that I was going to spend in prison, for myself, create a legacy for my son better than just his dad went to prison, and try to add value to that community.
So right from the very beginning it was grounded in this idea of voluntarily embracing 100% responsibility or ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, both the ones we can see we had a part in creating, as well as the ones that just seemed to land on our head. Not out of any sense of self-blame, this is really getting out of the blame paradigm all together, but rather in the only place we have any real power, which is with ourselves. So shifting our focus to that place is, you can equally call it radical self-empowerment.
TS: Now when you talk about getting out of the victim story, I think that’s a very, very, very powerful idea, and I notice sometimes I hesitate to use that kind of language, because I might be talking to someone and they’ll say something like, “Yeah, easy for you to say. You have no idea what happened to me, and I have every right to feel victimized by the abuse, or the betrayal, or the person who ripped me off.” And when you say that, people can take it not in an empowering way, but in an “I’m going to kill you” way. So I’m curious just to speak to that person who says, “Oh my God, one more person who’s telling me to transform my victim story when I have every right to uphold how I was trespassed.”
FM: Yes, and that’s a great question, a really important question, one that I address quite clearly in the book. If I was in the right environment, like some of the trainings I deliver, and somebody said that, I might say, “Well, how’s that working for you?” But that would have to be the right environment in the right context. So, no, clearly, terrible things happen to people. And they have every right, as you were saying, to feel victimized, and they may need a lot of support, a lot of healing, and the Radical Responsibility model is not really about other people. Now of course, by putting it out there as a book, I’m suggesting it for other people beyond myself, but it’s really the consideration, I think, importantly needs to be about ourselves. This isn’t something we go around telling other people, “You should be radically responsible.”
But for ourselves, to me, it’s really the doorway into personal freedom and self-empowerment, and realizing that, like it or not, we are living a choice, and our choices have impact. So, if I’ve been seriously, significantly victimized in some way—and I had my childhood issues, I grew up in an alcoholic family, and I’m sure that contributed to my involvement in drugs and all the rest of it. There was a very famous study come out, the adverse child experience study, and it showed that children who have adverse childhood experiences are several thousand percent more likely to end up as addicts, or end up going to jail, or end up in all kinds of problems.
So, it’s completely reasonable that someone may feel victimized, or unjustly victimized, criminally victimized by something that happens to them. And at some point, though, they are going to be making choices. And those choices are really what’s going to determine their future. Now, those choices might be to seek validation, or the fact that they were victimized, to seek support, to build a circle of support around them, or to seek justice. And those choices could be made in a self-empowering way, as a way to move forward in one’s life, or they could be made from a sense of unprocessed or unresolved anger and bitterness. I think we all realize that, for some of the terrible things that happen to people, for someone to be able to start making choices to step out of the victim mindset at some point in their life can be incredibly heroic. But if they’re not able to, if they stay trapped in that sense of victimization, it’s going to, at the very least, be very self-limiting for their life.
We all know of people who have had terrible things happen to them, who have found some way to move forward in their life, and often have gotten involved in trying to prevent similar things from happening to other people. There are all kind of examples, in life, of people who’ve been in the worst imaginable situations, and have found some way to turn that around, so this is not to place a burden on people who’ve been victimized. We should all feel tremendous empathy and compassion for anyone who’s suffered in that way. Of course, I think we all want to be committed to trying to prevent such harm in any way we can.
Nonetheless, at the individual level, at some point, a person’s destiny and future is really going to be determined by the choices they start making. That’s really the perspective here. Of course, we all get into what I was calling the victim mindset—and I realize that can be a loaded word in our society—about all kinds of fairly ordinary, garden-variety occurrences that happen day in and day out, and those throw us right into that kind of victim mindset thinking. The problem with that is—apart from the fact that it’s not so helpful and not the best state of mind to be in—in essence, we give away our power, continually. Because, if I’m unhappy and I’m really convinced that the causation of my internal state is someone or something outside myself, then I don’t get to be happy again until that person or that situation changes.
So I really put someone or something else, or a whole group of people, whatever the situation is, in charge of my internal state—of course, we do it all the time, but it really doesn’t make sense—it completely disempowers us. You could even say it in terms of positive experiences. If I’m convinced I’m really happy because of something that’s happening outside myself, in the same way, I’m giving my power away. Because, if that situation changes, now I’m unhappy, which is kind of the roller coaster ride of our life.
Again, this model comes from a deep sense of empathy for the suffering that we all experience as human beings, and in particular, the terrible traumas and victimizations that happen to children and adults. By the way, this is a conversation about adults, not about children. Children deserve to be protected. And adults also need kindness, and validation. At the same time, for each one us individually, the question is, “How can I most empower myself to move forward in my life?”
At some point, the question becomes, regardless of what happened to me, even if I have a situation or circumstance that everyone would agree is completely unjust, and everyone would agree that I had nothing to do with creating it, or even if I could tie some thread of my behavior to it, it’s still totally unjust and criminal, nonetheless, at some point, the most salient question I can ask myself is, “What can I do? What can I do to shift this? What can I do to move forward in my life?” Which is not self-blame, this model. The difficulty in understanding this model is that we’ve been so inculturated into shame and blame, that it’s hard for us to think there could be a situation where it’s not that “If I don’t get to blame someone else, I’m going to have to blame myself.” This is stepping out of that paradigm altogether.
TS: You mention in Radical Responsibility, you write, “The magical empowerment question is, ‘what can I do?’” What’s remarkable to me, Fleet, is that this whole model started forming in you while you were in prison. I mean, most people wouldn’t think to ask a question like, “What can I do?” while they’re in prison. You didn’t have that many options, and yet you accomplished so much.
FM: Well, it wasn’t the question most of my fellow prisoners were asking. But that was a very unique situation, because I was at a maximum security federal prison. It was a federal prison hospital, medical and psychiatric, and I was part of the general population there to help run the place. So it wasn’t as serious of a maximum security prison as Leavenworth, or Lewisburg, or one of the federal penitentiaries, but most of the patients were from those federal penitentiaries. In fact, all the patients were. I was at a maximum security institution, and so sociologists call that a total institution, which is basically a totalitarian state, where the authorities have absolute control and absolute power.
In that facility, if you really tried to directly buck the system, you would be back in a psych ward, in four-point restraints, on a concrete bunk, being pumped full of Haldol or Thorazine, and hosed down at night, literally, so resistance was futile. How do you get something done in that environment? Also, almost any time you would ask a staff person, an administrator, anyone from the prison staff, “Could we try this?” or, “Could we start this program?” or, “Have you thought about that?” The answer would always be no, and if you were audacious enough to ask why—which could even get you in trouble, just asking why—but if you did, they always had a story, and they’d answer, “Well, we used to do that, but some inmate abused it, and so that’s not happening,” or they would have some story like that. How do you get anything done in an environment like that?
I was continually falling back on my dharma practice and experience, about coming from a place of kindness and compassion, as well as being respectful, and having integrity, and being consistent, and I was just continually living in that question, “What can I do? How might I approach this person?” Not in any kind of manipulative way, but how can I genuinely get in relationship with this place, with a certain person, and find a way where there’s a win-win? Where somebody might see, “Yes, maybe it is worth trying that.” That approach led to two national movements. It led to countless programs in that particular prison over those 14 years, and it really was the birth of this book.
TS: Now, the book Radical Responsibility offers a model, as you said. It offers a framework for how we move to this place of choice and empowerment, no matter what’s happening in our life. It’s not that easy a framework to introduce people to, Fleet. There’s a lot of nuance and depth to it, but I wonder, here, in this conversation, if you can make a go of it, and introduce what you call moving from a Drama Zone in our life, into an Empowerment Zone.
FM: Yes, I’ll do my best. Actually, I’d like to back up for just a minute, and in terms of the roots of this, to mention, one of the roots of this is a program called The Event. During my time in prison, I connected with a man named Purna Steinitz and he was leading a secular personal evolution, personal transformation seminar, out in the community, called The Event [Training], and got interested in some of my writings. I’d been publishing things from inside prison, in various journals, about being a Buddhist prisoner, and my journey of the work I was doing, the hospice work, and so forth. He wanted to use some of those writings in his post-Event curriculum that he had for participants in his trainings, and so we got in relationship.
I got very interested in the work he was doing, felt a strong affinity to it, and it turned out he was going to offer an Event in the town where this prison was located. I convinced two of the prison psychologists, who I had a relationship—one, who was a sponsor for the hospice program, and one who was involved with the 12-step work—I convinced them to go out and do it.
They liked it and got it into the prison, which was pretty magical, because it’s a very hardcore training, with intense rage work, and very physical grief work, rage work. I think if the prison officials had known what it was, they would’ve never let it in, but it did get in, and we did four of them before I left prison. I’m still leading it. I just led one about three weeks ago.
Actually, that training began in a federal prison. It was started by a psychiatrist and an inmate in Marion Federal Prison, which was built to replace Alcatraz. It was the federal Supermax before the one that was built in Florence, Colorado, and it’s still basically a Supermax, a very dangerous place, and mostly gang members, and everybody on lockdown. Back in the 70s, a psychiatrist named Martin Groder started a therapeutic community there, and this inmate got involved with them, and they developed this model. Eventually, the inmate, who was never supposed to get out of prison, got paroled.
It’s a great story, because they came to him and said, “We’re going to parole you,” and he said, “I’m not ready to go yet. I haven’t finished my training yet.” Amazed, they said, “Well, let us know when you’re ready,” and 18 months later, he left. Eventually, my friend Purna met him, and he got trained in his model, and then was empowered to start his own training. This core distinction between what I call the Drama Zone and the Empowerment Zone, that’s where this came from. That’s why I wanted to mention it.
TS: Very good. Lay out the model for us.
FM: The first thing we really need to do is get very familiar with the Drama Zone. One key aspect of that is understanding Karpman’s drama triangle. That IDM model was developed by Stephen Karpman, a transactional analyst. He’s still alive, and I have permission to adapt his work. People can check him out online. The drama triangle represents the basic triangulation that drives all human conflict. Just like in the movies, you’ve got a good guy, bad guy, and they constellate around some kind of victim position. He’d call it the Persecutor, the Rescuer, and the Victim, and these are not labels for people, very important to understand we’re not labeling ourselves or others. These are mind states or psychological positions that we all get into, and they’re really all attempts to gain power.
They all really come from the victim mindset or a sense of helplessness or powerlessness. I can try to gain power from the victim mindset, from that position; or I can move and start persecuting; or I can be a rescuer, in the sense that I’m that savior, fixer, kind of martyr-like rescuer that needs to be rescuing other people to feel good about myself. These are all attempts to gain a sense of control or power out of a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, and they really drive all human conflict.
It’s the heart of every great play, every great movie, the great American novel, and it’s wonderful to read about it, and be entertained about it, and it’s part of the human tragedy, the human condition, human pathos, but it’s not so fun to be in the middle of it. It actually destroys families, leads to divorces, damages children’s lives, and plays out on the global stage as continual warfare, and genocide, and refugee crises, and so forth. This is Karpman’s drama triangle.
In these trainings that I lead, I lead experiential trainings around this, and I really set the book up to be like an experiential training, to get people through it, step by step, with lots of exercises, and I encourage people to have a journal close at hand, and to do the work while they’re going through the book. Once people get this idea of the drama, they just see this everywhere, and it’s incredibly liberating, because once you see it, you start to have choices about how much drama you want to keep engaging in, in your life, at home, or at work.
Also, I have a concept I put out there, called the “drama hook,” and we live in a sea of floating drama hooks, and some have got my name on them, some have got your name, other people’s names. If one of yours goes by, I don’t even notice it, but when one of mine comes by, my palms start sweating. I’m salivating. It looks so juicy and wonderful, I just want to swallow it. The discipline is learning to recognize them, and holding our seat for five, 10 seconds, and not swallowing that hook or not biting the hook. Pema Chodron says, and I think it might be a Sounds True tape, Don’t Bite the Hook [Shambhala, 2007], same idea, she calls that shenpa, where we get triggered, we bite the hook, and we take things personally, and then we’re hooked into another drama.
We learn that model, and we learn steps to get off the drama triangle. When we have gotten hooked, how do we get the hook out of our mouth? We learn how to stop and resource ourselves, the classic count to 10 or count to 100 before you say anything, deep breathing, some kind of state shifting, to where we regain access to the executive function in our neocortex instead of being totally under the control of fight-or-flight response, and where we can make better decisions. We start, then, owning our feelings, instead of projecting out with blame. It’s like, “Oh, I’m really angry. I’m really afraid. I’m frustrated. I’m sad. I’m having all these feelings.”
The reptilian brain can’t do that, so that’s moving from projective blaming language to reflective ownership language. And that begins bringing us back into full access of our brain and all our capacities, and then we can look where these feelings arise from. And this is a really important distinction, here, because, even if we’ve read otherwise, we’re fairly convinced that our feelings are caused by things outside of ourselves. Somebody does something, and I’m upset. Somebody does something, I’m angry. Somebody does something, I’m afraid. Seems very compelling, but actually our feelings arise around the perception of our needs getting met or not.
We all have the need for connection, and autonomy, and creative expression, and safety, validation, respect, all these kinds of things, normal human needs, food, water, and shelter. When we feel like our needs are getting met, we feel good. We have all the warm and fuzzy emotions when we perceive that our needs are getting met, but if I perceive that my needs are threatened or not being met, then I start having all the challenging emotions of fear, anxiety, anger, jealousy, greed, envy, hatred, all the rest of it. A very human experience, grounded in the experience that I’m perceiving that my needs are threatened or not being met in some way. Of course, are my perceptions always accurate? No, we all realize our perceptions are, at the very best, a limited read of a limited set of available data, and sometimes we completely misperceive situations.
Once we’re down to the level of our needs . . . No wonder I’m angry, my need for inclusion is not being met, my need for respect, my need for autonomy, my need for connection, my need for financial stability… Maybe it’s something happening at work. Then I can start, “Is that really true?” I can start going in and seeing, “Are my perceptions accurate?” I may find out they’re not that accurate, but I still may come down to some needs that I feel these needs, actually, in this situation, are not being met, but is this the only way I can meet these needs?
This takes us into a further, further reflective place, away from projection and blame, and into deep reflection and self-understanding. And eventually we can get to a place where maybe we can come back to a situation, in an interpersonal conflict, and without any charge, actually let someone know what we had been feeling, but what we understand now, and what our needs are, and probably have a positive conversation. Because everybody has the same needs, and if we can get to that conversation without blaming someone else so that they have to be on the defensive, then you can possibly resolve things. But at the very least, we resolve it ourselves so we’re not continuing to pour gas on the fire of the drama.
And then sometimes we just have to make a boundary. Sometimes we just have to say, “If you’re going to use that language, we’d better just leave this alone,” or, “This doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Let’s revisit this next week,” or, “If you touch me again, I’m going to call the police,” or, “If you talk to me that way again, I’m going to report you to Human Resources,” or whatever it is. Sometimes we just have to make a boundary to get off the drama triangle. That’s that whole thing about Karpman’s drama triangle. That’s one piece of the Below the Line landscape. The other way to look at it is, what are some of the classic Drama Zone behaviors?
There are many, but the four that we named, that are kind of in the upper part of the Top 10 List, are blame, when we’re blame-shifting, instead of taking ownership, we’re blaming others; justification, we’re justifying our own behaviors to ourselves or others; resentment, we’re holding on to old feelings and storing them up like ammunition, chewing away on them, developing grievances and holding onto grievances, which just creates more suffering for ourselves; and then being right, and that’s a really powerful one. We all love to be right. We’d rather be right than be in relationship. We’ll get divorced over being right. We’ll lose our kids over being right. We’ll go to war over being right.
These are some of the classic Below the Line behaviors. The whole thing is about recognizing this Drama Zone landscape, and not demonizing it. It’s a human condition. We all do it, we’re going to find ourselves there. But when we see it, we can recognize it and make the shift. We make that shift by recognizing, “Here, I have all these storylines going in my head. I’m having all these feelings. What can I do? What can I do? What can I do to shift it?” Then we can start talking about the Empowerment Zone landscape, but first of all, I don’t know if you have any questions. That’s kind of the Drama Zone landscape, which is all based on fear. It’s a total focus on problems and limitations, and it really disempowers us. It’s compelling. It can be juicy. We get our adrenaline going, and we get little emotional payoffs for blaming and justifying, but I would call it kind of the junk food world of our emotional life—quick payoff, lasting suffering.
TS: One of the things that surprised me, Fleet, about your book, was the amount of attention you gave to brain science and understanding, physiologically, what’s happening to us when we get into the Drama Zone, when we bite the hook. Why is that so important, do you think, for people to understand the brain science of being triggered?
FM: I think it’s really important in a number of ways. One, it kind of depersonalizes the situation. In other words, it’s like, “Oh, I’m such a terrible person, and I’m getting hooked all the time.” No, that’s how my physiology works. It’s a natural response. We all have a biology that’s set up to survive. Job one, for any species, is survival, so quite naturally our neurobiology is set up, at the most basic level, for survival. When the amygdala and the midbrain get triggered with any sense of unfamiliarity or danger or discomfort, the fight-or-flight response starts to take over, and so this is a very automatic process, and one that we don’t need to feel bad about or blame ourselves for at all. That depersonalizes it.
Also, having an understanding of how it works empowers us to begin doing things that will help us override that when it’s not serving us. Many times, those alarm bells get triggered, and we’re off to the races, down the rabbit hole with a fight-or-flight response, when it’s really not appropriate to the situation. Or maybe the situation has passed, but we’re still there, we’re still hooked. How do we get ourselves unhooked? Understanding our neurobiology and our physiology, we can simply do something like belly breathing, or counting to 10, counting to 100, or the straw breathing technique that I offer in the book. These are state-shifting techniques that release the grip of the reptilian brain on our consciousness and allow us to regain access to the whole brain. I think it really empowers us.
Actually, I’ve run this by several people, like Dan Siegel, and Richie Davidson, and others, and they kind of look at me with a raised eyebrow, they’re not so sure. But I have this theory that, eventually, kind of like the phenomena of biofeedback, it’s pretty simple. If someone hooks you up to a heart monitor that you can see, you can learn to adjust your own heart rate pretty quickly, just with your mind, because you get this feedback loop of the visual input from seeing your heartbeat on a monitor. My theory is that, as people are introduced to these mindfulness skills and mindfulness-based self-regulation skills, earlier and earlier in life, at some point, we’re going to be able to actually sort of direct our own neurophysiological, neurobiological processes, because we actually understand it and we feel it.
Anyway, that would be the further reaches of it, but just in simple terms, right now, it kind of depersonalizes it, so we realize it’s just the way we’re wired. Second, it gives us the insights and the tools to take responsibility for it and get in the driver seat of our own life instead of being victimized by our circumstances all the time.
TS: Now, Fleet, you mentioned that the book, Radical Responsibility, is like taking an intensive workshop. It is. I mean, you have so many exercises and statements for people to reflect on. During this section, when you’re talking about the brain science of being triggered, you offer people the opportunity to take a vow that says, “I will not act when triggered.” This is a vow I should take. At the same time, I remembered certain circumstances when I was like, “You know, I’m triggered, and I have every right to say what I’m feeling right now. I want to be heard. Of course, I’m going to act, because I’m going to express myself.” I’m wondering if you can talk to that situation, where we just feel justified in sharing our view. We know we’re triggered, but “I want to talk about what’s going on for me.”
FM: Yes. Sure, so you’re describing a possible spectrum of situations. There could be one where “I’m really triggered and I feel justified, so I’m just going to start spouting off, and then to hell with what happens, to hell with the impact,” or there could be other situations, where, in the context of a trusted relationship, “I’m just going to say what I’m feeling,” or, in the realm of leadership training, there are some people that feel leaders need to be transparent, sometimes, about their emotions, and in a controlled way, and in an appropriate way, but be willing to communicate that they’re upset about something. That can be important to a human quality of leadership. The thing there is appropriate and controlled, regulated. If we can express our emotions, while at the same time self-regulating ourselves that can actually be quite useful.
Again, that comes back to these self-regulation techniques, like having an abiding quality of what we call interoceptive awareness, which means I’m deeply embodied. I’m really anchored, and feeling my body from the inside out, down to the marrow of my bones. I’m working with my breath. I’m using breath regulation techniques to stay in a resilient, regulated place. And from there, I can speak the truth of what I’m experiencing in the moment in an effective way. Now, that’s kind of a high level of mastery in some ways.
Regardless, once we say something—even if we feel justified, and we may express it however skillfully or unskillfully, depending on how self-regulated we are and how much access we have to the executive function in our neocortex at that moment—regardless, once we say it, there’s an impact. There is an impact, and possibly a consequence for us. As long as we’re willing to take ownership for that, and then do the work that comes next, because we may have to clean something up, if we didn’t do it so skillfully.
TS: Yes. I think you’ve done a pretty good job of describing the Drama Zone, where often we find ourselves, when something happens that’s upsetting, and we feel victimized, or trespassed, or betrayed, or whatever it might be. How do we move out of it?
FM: Absolutely, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. We might find ourselves not just feeling victimized, but we might find ourselves in the judgmental, critical persecutor role, which has the victim position underlying it, or we might find ourselves hooked into those rescuing behaviors that we can get engaged in. When we recognize that we’re in the Drama Zone, in one way or another, we’re participating in drama, creating drama, enabling drama, what have you, within ourselves, because we all walk around with a drama triangle between our ears. We beat ourselves up, then we rescue ourselves, we feel victimized by ourselves. Of course, when you have a lot of human beings with that between their ears, what do they create together? Drama, of course.
Once we recognize we’re there, how do we get out of there? Well, first of all, self-empathy, self-compassion. This isn’t about blaming ourselves, and it’s not about feeling bad that we find ourselves there. It’s just the human condition. The storylines going on in our head and the emotions we’re feeling, it’s all valid. It’s just a question of, “Is it serving us?” Some of it may be on a spectrum of validity, because a lot of it might be based on complete misperceptions, but nonetheless, it’s a human experience. The question is, “Is that where we want to stay? What’s that going to create for us, if we keep operating from that place?” It’s not about demonizing that. And it’s not about blaming ourselves for it. It’s a simple, fairly objective decision. “Is this serving me? Is this serving others?”
Once we recognize it and we decide to make the shift, this is where the Radical Responsibility model comes in, because the way we make the shift, to begin with, is through what we call self-responsibility or Radical Responsibility. That’s this idea of voluntarily embracing 100% ownership or responsibility for each and every circumstance we face in life. Now, we all know that, with some level of honesty, even radical honesty, we can see that, a lot of circumstances that we find ourselves in, we had some part to play in it.
We may have actually created it altogether, or at least we contributed to it, or we may have set ourselves for it in some way, because we all have these internalized scripts that we made up when we were kids, and that we keep trying to prove are right, until they’re not. So we may be setting ourselves up for this, in some unconscious way. Or maybe we just allowed it by being unaware, by not doing our due diligence, by being lazy communicators, by not having good boundaries, not speaking up for ourselves. We might find all kinds of ways to recognize that we have a part in something.
Again, that inquiry is not for the purpose of self-blame. It’s simply for the purpose of self-understanding and insight, because, when I see my role in creating, allowing, enabling, anything like that, then I say, “Oh, I see how that works. Well, I don’t have to do that anymore. I’m not going to do that anymore.” That’s what that leads to. So it’s not for the purpose of self-blame but for self-understanding and more choices, more options. Then there may be situations that I mentioned before, that we just can’t see we had any part in at all. Again, it comes back to, “Well, here I am. I don’t like it. This is terrible. Well, what can I do? What can I do?” Taking that ownership, that question shifts me from the helpless, powerless, or victim mindset, immediately to the realm of possibility.
Well, there’s always a million things we can do. There’s a million different ways we can approach anything. Even if we have a boss who’s a tyrant, there’s limitless different ways we can approach that person. That question just catapults us back into the realm of possibility, so that’s the first step, self-responsibility or Radical Responsibility.
The next step is accountability. What we mean by that is keeping our agreements, making clear agreements and keeping them. We create a lot of drama and conflict in our lives, by getting into agreements, relationships, partnerships, marriages, business deals, that we have no business being in. And we got into them because we weren’t willing to do the due diligence, because we wanted to operate from wishful thinking or conflict avoidance, so we didn’t really do the due diligence.
We get in there, and we go walking down the road, hand in hand, whistling in the dark. “I hope it’ll work. I hope it’ll work,” and then it blows up, and we don’t even have a contract to work with. Doing our due diligence, making clear agreements, and then keeping our agreements, so that we have integrity and people can trust us. Sometimes the world shifts on its axis, and we can’t keep an agreement. Well, in that case, instead of avoiding the situation or avoiding the person, renegotiate the agreement, and then keep it. If you find you’re constantly renegotiating agreements, then that’s something to look at as well. At any rate, that’s the second step, accountability.
The third step, we often call it vulnerability. In some places, I don’t use that term, because people will interpret that as meaning weakness. What we really mean by vulnerability is being open-hearted, being genuine, being real. If you and I have a personal or professional relationship, and I don’t blame my stuff on you, I don’t project myself onto you, I take ownership for my own stuff, if I keep my agreements with you, and if I’m willing to be open, real, genuine, with you, what does that create between us?
TS: Connection.
FM: Connection. What else? It begins with a T, is the word I’m looking for.
TS: Oh, you’re helping me out here. A truthful relationship.
FM: Yes, I’m helping you out here.
TS: I don’t know. Tell me, Fleet.
FM: Truthful relationship. Well, trust, it creates trust. If I’m willing to own my own stuff, and not project it on you, if I have integrity, I keep my agreements with you and am willing to be open and real and genuine with you, that creates trust. We say that trust is the ground of authentic relationship. So this Empowerment Zone world is a pathway into what we call authentic relationship, which is really the blue sky of human life. I think, I hope we all want to have powerful, juicy, interesting, value-added lives, right? Purposeful lives, meaningful lives. If we want that, then we have to have relationships of those kinds. We have to have meaningful, juicy, powerful relationships—and those are created in this way. That’s how we create authentic relationship.
Now, down there in the Drama Zone, we can have plenty of buddies and playmates down there, as we all know. But that’s not what we call authentic relationship. So this is like a stairway, a step-by-step process of self-responsibility, accountability, and being real, being genuine creates trust and creates authentic relationship. That’s sometimes what we call that Empowerment Zone sphere. We call it the world of authentic relationship.
TS: OK. Now I need to go back to step one. Bear with me, because I’m working on some stuff as we’re talking, and I can imagine that our listeners are in the same place. Thinking about instances in their life, where they’re still trapped in a drama triangle to one degree or another. They still have a grievance or still blaming someone for something or other. “OK, so 100% ownership. I’m willing to own like 49% of it, just to be truthful. Anyway, I’m willing to own part of it, but I’m not getting up to 100%.”
FM: Yeah. OK, great question. So Tami, let’s say you and I, we have some kind of a business agreement, something going on. It falls into a conflict of some kind and I’m thoroughly convinced it’s all your fault. You probably have a different version of it. So we can’t resolve it. We go meet with a mediator, and the mediator listens to both of us separately and then comes back to us together and says, “You know, I don’t know what to do. You’re both really compelling salespeople and storytellers and you’re both very convincing. And it’s a ‘he said, she said’ thing, and I don’t know what to do with this, except we do have the videotape. So I think what I’m going to do is I’m going to take the videotape and I’m going to go find 10 people, create a focus group, sort of a jury, and find 10 intelligent people that don’t know either one of you, couldn’t care less about either one of you and see what they have to say.” So we say, “OK.”
So the mediator goes and does that and then comes back and turns to me and says, “Fleet, I have to say, they did agree that it was more Tami’s responsibility, more Tami’s fault.” I go, “Wow, I’m glad you found such an intelligent group of people and they realize it’s all Tami’s fault.” And I feel very vindicated. To me, he said, “No, Fleet, actually, no, they felt like, yes, Tami bears the bulk of the responsibility, but they figure, maybe you probably need to own about 40% of the responsibility here.” I say, “Well, OK.” Secretly, I don’t believe it, but as long as they agree it was more her fault, I feel vindicated.
Maybe the mediator keeps challenging. Then, I go, “OK. All right. Let me breathe, take this in. OK. All right. I’ll admit I had some role to play, but it was really mostly Tami’s fault and I feel been vindicated by this situation. I feel good that the world agreed with me. That it’s your fault.” So, does that make sense? Well, it seems like it would. It seems compelling to most of us.
But if I’m really convinced, and I’m very unhappy with the situation, and if I’m convinced that it’s 60% or 70% or 80% or even 51% your fault, how much of my power am I giving away? Well, you could say I’m giving away 60, 70 or whatever it is. Then we could say, I’m giving it all away because I am unhappy. And if I really think it’s your fault and you’re causing it, I don’t get to be happy again until you change your behavior. And I can’t control you.
We cannot control other people. And if people get nothing else from my book, I hope they get that, because they’ll lead happier lives. We cannot control other people, and how do we know that? Well, we’ve all tried a lot and probably have failed at it miserably. But we even know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, more compellingly, that we cannot control people because we know that we ourselves are uncontrollable. No matter how much somebody tries to control us or intimidate us, we will find our way to get our needs met.
You can lock human beings up in maximum security prisons, they still find ways to pass notes and make mirrors and bribe guards and what have you, to get their needs met. We are endlessly creative. So we cannot control other people. So, if I’m attributing the causation of my internal states to something outside of myself, I’m giving away my power. It just doesn’t make any sense.
So the choice to embrace self-responsibility or Radical Responsibility 100% is not taking on a burden. It’s not about letting the other person off the hook and it’s not about blaming myself. It’s just a choice to put my energy where it’s going to do some good. Now it may be very human to kvetch for a while, and have those feelings, and complain, and get mad. But at some point, at least my way of thinking and what this book is based on, I’m going to make the shift and focus my energy where it can do some good.
That’s not sitting around, blaming Tami Simon for something. It’s focusing on, “What can I do to move my life forward, to move this situation forward?” Even in my own enlightened self-interest, which means my long-term interest. It might be my short-term interest to yell at somebody or hit somebody. But that’s not going to be in my long-term interests. I might go to jail. But my long-term interest, my enlightened self-interest, generally works out to be in alignment with other people’s interests, too, because we’re social beings, we’re all interconnected. So it’s a choice to focus our energy here as a radical act of self-empowerment. It has nothing to do with self-blame. It’s not about letting other people off the hook. It’s simply a radical act of self-empowerment and choosing to focus my energy where it can do the most good, which is with myself.
TS: How would you apply this model of Radical Responsibility to situations in the world where people feel that they don’t have an impact? There’s nothing I can do about it. How can I take 100% ownership and become empowered about things I see happening? Maybe it’s related to environmental destruction or things that are really upsetting to me. How do I take ownership of that?
FM: By focusing on what we can do, right? So the key thing and one of the reasons that we keep. . . I’m not talking about you, but all of us struggle with this idea, is that we tend to equate responsibility and ownership and blame, we tend to lump all that into one thing. So when I think about taking ownership, it just feels like you mean self-blame, but it’s not what I mean. It’s simply going back to that, “What can I do?” So in terms of climate change, which we’re all—most of us, many of us, I’m hoping more and more of us—are extremely concerned about. All the environmental degradation issues. It’s, “What can I do?”
So my partner Sophie, she ran into a resource that takes you through a whole personal . . . What would the word be? Anyways, it’s for a family with a household to take themselves through a whole thing of the way they’re living, and their household and everything is set up. How they could do a better job of having a lighter imprint on the climate, right? So she was really inspired to do that. She just told me about that a couple of days ago, so we’re going to do that together. So that’s something we can do. Now there may be other things we can do, in terms of advocacy and what have you. So it’s focusing on what we can do.
Now that doesn’t mean that, if there are heavy polluters and someone wants to make it their focus to go out and bear witness to that, or speak truth to power, and get into advocacy or protest work, that’s also something people can do. So there’s lots of things we can do and there’s no . . . I don’t think there’s any right or wrong because we’re all different. We have different lives, we have different capacities. But choosing, “What can I do to affect this thing?”
Another example I’ll give you is, as I’m obviously still very involved in prison work, and I go in the prisons all the time. Interestingly, for the last 10 years, a lot of my work has been working with correctional officers, probation officers, police, public defenders and so forth. But I still go in the prisons and work with prisoners very often. And this comes up, I can talk about it with both those different populations.
But when I go into prisons and I’m leading a class with some of my fellow prisoners, I want them to get two things. I want them to get . . . And I don’t necessarily have to spell it out, but they’ll get it by just how I’m showing up. Or I may bring it into the conversation in some ways. But I want them to understand that I, first of all, I have tremendous empathy for their situation. That I get that most of them were almost programmed to go there, by their lives and all the adverse circumstances with their childhoods, and in often cases, abuse and trauma of all kinds.
That many of them have been victimized by racism and extreme poverty and injustice of all kinds. That our criminal justice system, either by design or default, is incredibly racist and unjust and that many people are over-prosecuted and so forth and so forth. I want them to get that I get all that. At the same time, I want them to get, in any way I can skillfully introduce them to this possibility, that what they’re going to be able to do with their lives now that they’re in this situation is going to be 100% determined by the choices they start making today, and tomorrow, and the next day.
If they want to become an advocate and go out and change, well then, use your time in here to educate yourself, and stay out of trouble, and get yourself out of prison, and get out there and become an activist, and get out there and change the world. Or whatever you want to do with your life. But, no matter what the injustices are involved in how they landed in that prison cell, whatever future they can have for themselves in the prison, how they’re going to live there, and then, whatever future they could create for themselves beyond prison is going to be 100% determined by the choices I’m making today, tomorrow, and the next day.
Oftentimes, I’ll say to them, just so people get it, I said, “You all know that there’s guys in here, if it’s a male prison, there’s guys in here that do hard time. And some of them do hard time, get depressed, suffer on their own, and some of them make it miserable for everybody else. And then, some people learn to do their time in a better way. We all respect ourselves and others when they know how to do their time, right? So what’s the difference there? Well, they’re making choices, right? They’re making choices. So there, you’re making choices that impact the quality of your time while you’re in here. In the same way, whatever you’re going to be creating for yourself in your life is going to be based on that.”
So it’s that combination of introducing people to the notion of choice, which is not a new idea. Marcus Aurelius, one of the Stoic philosophers way back in the Greco-Roman times, talked about, mostly I’m paraphrasing here, but most people feel their destiny’s determined by their circumstances. But in fact, our destiny is determined by our response to those circumstances.
TS: Which brings me to something I wanted to ask you Fleet. First of all, I just want to say, I want to meet you in the Empowerment Zone! And I think, probably our listeners do, too. And it’s a journey. It’s not easy, and this was one of the exercises you offered that I thought was particularly challenging. It’s in the fourth section of the book where we’re really stepping into the path of Radical Responsibility and you write that the exercise is to see circumstances as neutral. And I was like, “Wow, that’s really interesting. Could I actually see circumstances, things that are occurring, as neutral?” So explain to our listeners what you mean by that.
FM: Yeah, that’s a really interesting one, and when I deliver Radical Responsibility trainings, “circumstances are neutral” is one of the key distinctions in this book and it can be a tough one to get. So when I deliver Radical Responsibility trainings in person and I really try to create the same experience with the book, I lead people through a process, where they go into some story they have in their adult life, where they feel like they were victimized in some way. Even in a garden-variety kind of way, they got a bum deal, they got the wrong end of the stick, somebody took advantage of them in some way. And I have them go full-blown into it.
I have them, either with a partner actually, just start telling that whole story full-blown. Like it just happened to them, to try to convince their partner that they were truly victimized and get that person to be their rescuer and so forth. And I just have them go full-blown into this.
Then we identify all the themes that come out of those stories: injustice, betrayal, abuse of power, being taken advantage of, all these kinds of things. Then what were the feelings they were experiencing when that happened to them? Anger, hurt, disappointment, overwhelmed, shocked, disbelief, frozen, vengeful, sometimes even shame or guilt or sadness, all these kinds of feelings.
So we get to this whole landscape up there, and I put it up on an easel pad and down in the area, what I call the Drama Zone. So we got all that up there and then, I asked them to make a shift. And I say, “OK, let’s revisit those same circumstances. I’m not asking you to make anything up here. But back to that actual situation that happened to you in the past and we’re going to revisit that and tell the story from a different perspective. We’re going to tell from the perspective of ownership.”
I give them a little rubric called CPA to help him with that. CPA, like Certified Public Accountant. But in this case, it means . . . The C stands for, looking if there’s any way I can see that I caused it or contributed to it, any way at all. Or the P is, is there any way that I’m promoting this or setting myself up for it? We all know people, not ourselves of course, but those other people that get the same dead end job, or the same conflict, or the same bad relationship again and again, and you have to wonder if there isn’t some internal script going on there. And we all have versions of that. So is there some way I’m promoting it or setting myself up, or the last one is A, allowed it. Is there any way I just allowed it by not paying attention, not being aware, being naïve, or not doing my due diligence, or not having good boundaries, not speaking up for myself?
So go back to the story, begin with the pronoun “I” and start retelling the story from that perspective and just find anything you can own and then, just let it go from there. So people do that, and then after we finish, we get the whole group to put all the new storylines they have up there, which are the things they recognize. “OK. I was people-pleasing. I was enabling. I didn’t do my due diligence. I was conflict avoidant, and I was a lazy communicator. That small voice in the back of my head said, ‘This isn’t a good idea,’ and I went ahead anyway.” All the things they’re recognizing and then, what kinds of feelings? Well, people have different feelings and it’s not always a rose garden. People may experience embarrassment or regret, or even it may feel very challenging or disorienting, but sometimes people feel it’s like a relief or they feel less helpless. They feel more empowered, more clarity, they feel more mature, more adult, or they’re learning something, or they may experience empathy for the other person or for themselves.
So we get all that up there, and we see there’s the two landscapes, one down in the Drama Zone, one up in the Empowerment Zone. And on the line between them, I write the word “circumstances” and then, I go into an inquiry. OK, if vis-à-vis this one set of circumstances, like it had already happened. Let’s say we had the videotape. You can experience it in these two very different ways. That seems to imply that there’s choice involved. And people genuinely agree with that. Then often, “Well, does it feel like choice in the moment?” No. When we find ourselves with all the storylines and feelings going on in the Drama Zone, and it doesn’t feel like we chose that. But if we’ve been choosing that chronically, we’re more likely to be there. But certainly those things would throw any of us down there. But is it a choice, whether we stay there or whether in some way, somehow we found some way to make the shift? And most people would agree, “Yes, that’s true. There’s choice involved at some point.”
Well then, what does that say about the nature of circumstances? I usually pull it from the audience and someone finally says, “Circumstances are neutral.” Then I usually, sometimes I have them stew on that overnight. But eventually, I usually lead a discussion around that, and I really encourage people that really dialogue about it and chew into it and argue about it. People will get it for themselves. “But what about those terrible things that happen to other people?” So we get into a big dialogue about it, because I really want people to chew on it, because it’s a tough one. But what it really comes down to is, “circumstances are neutral” is not a value statement about the circumstances. Some circumstances obviously, feel a lot less neutral than others. Some circumstances are criminal, negligent, terrible, right? But what it’s pointing to again is choice. That where’s our choice in something, right? Once a circumstance is there, it’s pointing to the choice.
And I invite people to just think about your life. If you walk through life feeling like if X happens, you have to feel this way. If X happens, you have to go down the rabbit hole. Or, if you go through life looking for the neutrality and it’s like, “What is my choice? Where is the neutrality here? What can I do? Where’s my choice? What are my options?” It’s a very different kind of way to live, and most people eventually see that it’s incredibly empowering.
Sometimes, I’ll use stories, like Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, where in Auschwitz, the most infamous death camp of the Nazi Holocaust, he discovered that, stripped of any ounce of human dignity, starving to death, naked, emaciated, with a gun pointed at your head, you still have choices. And what he says, “We always have choice over the attitude that we bring to a situation.” Now that choice can be harder, because if we’ve been bringing anger and bitterness and fear to something our whole lives, it may be hard to make a new choice when push comes to shove, but people have. So it’s better start learning with the small circumstances rather than waiting for that big one.
TS: You know, Fleet, I just have two final questions for you. One is that, as I mentioned, moving from the Drama Zone to the Empowerment Zone, I haven’t found wholly, completely, in every part of my life, is an easy thing to do. Reading your book, Radical Responsibility, one of the things that impressed me was how much inner work is actually involved. This is like inner weightlifting or something. There’s inner work required here, and I wonder if you have a comment about that?
FM: Yes, I believe it is deep inner work and the training, The Event, that these, at least some of these distinctions came out of, is a really deep process training. But taking this path and the book represents deep inner work. But the results are incredibly profound and towards the end, one of the last chapters, there’s a chapter on the Heart-Mind. This is this idea that through contemplative practices of meditation, there’s contemplative spiritual practices, mindfulness, meditation—in whatever tradition—they use these inner practices.
Combined with this perspective of Radical Responsibility, where we choose to focus our energy on seeing my role in creating things and seeing my role in creating different things, if I want something different than what I’m getting right now. And also, having this basic understanding, I liked the expression that I think Tony Robbins used, that in his trainings, he’s to help people become practical psychologists. Like you don’t have to be a PhD, but to have enough insight in to how our psychology works—I also think, how our physiology and neurobiology work—that we can actually navigate life more skillfully.
So that psychological knowledge and insights, the physiological and neurobiological insights and knowledge, all these things combine to giving us access to what I call the Heart-Mind. Which I think is this really profoundly relational place from which to lead our lives. I think it’s what all the great spiritual traditions are pointing towards. And it’s where we can experience both the oneness and the diversity of life and really actualize the most profound possibilities of relationship in our lives. Both within ourselves, so having a really positive, nurturing and empowering relationship with ourselves, and also having really powerful nurturing, empowering relationships with others, and with the planet and entering into a really different sphere altogether.
For me, the doorway is stepping through this radical self-empowerment and then, doing the work to develop more, deeper and deeper levels of self-awareness and self-understanding. The ground to which has to be self-empathy. So Radical Responsibility can sound like a tough model and maybe one of these mental toughness models and some of those distinctions hearken way back to the Stoics, so it may have, a bit. But it’s important to realize, this is completely grounded in profound levels of self-empathy and self-compassion and that’s absolutely critical to the model.
TS: Which brings me to my final question, which is one of the themes that laces through the book Radical Responsibility, is your full 100% trust in our basic goodness as human beings. You write about how you even found basic goodness in the prison guards when you were in prison, and in your fellow prisoners. Why is it important to respect and honor basic goodness as an aspect of living with Radical Responsibility?
FM: I think it’s really the key to our human lives and human possibilities. On a physical and neurobiological level, as I mentioned before, we’re hardwired for survival. And we all start off life in very fragile circumstances. Most of us got a mixed bag of how nurtured we were. But once we have to begin individuating and separating from the mother, we have to start forming some self-structure, because the alternative is just groundlessness and the black hole of emptiness, which we’re not at all prepared to handle at six months old or a year old. So we paste together some kind of self-structure, for better or worse. If we had a very stable, loving upbringing, we ended up with a pretty functional self-structure. And the alternative, we can end up with gaps in that, which can create problems for us.
But the whole thing, no matter how high-functioning we are, is essentially fear-based and it’s grounded in survival. At the same time, as human beings we have the capacity to rise above that. We all had some hit of shame in our childhood. It’s inescapable. I think it’s this thing we get inoculated with in the human journey. Which in some ways, as tragic as it may seem—and one of my biggest goals in life is to remove as much of the shame from life as possible—nonetheless, I think it is something that triggers the hero’s journey, that we all go through. Part of that is learning to rise above our human animal physiology, because human beings have the capacity to override that survival instinct, and access higher states of consciousness from which we can live at a level of trust and relationship.
That’s really grounded in experiencing that part of our being where we are unquestionably good. That’s again, the importance of the contemplative disciplines where we can drop below all the noise, and the noise is within our nervous system and physiology and neurobiology, the noise in the environment. We can drop into states of being where we just realize, things are profoundly OK. It’s unquestionably workable, that we’re whole, we’re not missing anything, we’re not broken. It’s an experience. It’s undeniable when we have that experience.
And to the extent that we keep getting glimpses of that, we start trusting it more and more. And we start operating our lives less in fear and more from openness and vulnerability. We’re really structured, even neurobiology. Our brain structures operate either from openness and vulnerability, or operate from fear. And to be able to operate more relationally and from vulnerability, vulnerability in a positive sense, open-heartedness. Vulnerability in the way that Brene Brown uses it. Our ability to do that is really grounded in our recognition of our own innate goodness, the innate goodness of others, and allows us to reach the higher states of what’s humanly possible and not just live fear- and survival-based lives.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Fleet Maull. He’s written a new book. It’s from 20 years after he left prison and has been working and offering trainings to all kinds of people, organizations, businesses. Fleet, you work in so many different environments.
FM: Yeah. Actually, right now, just a few weeks ago, I was up in Canada. I’m going back there in another two weeks, working with correctional officers and probation and parole officers. Introducing mindfulness, introducing the Drama Zone/Empowerment Zone distinction, introducing Radical Responsibility as a way that they can take ownership for creating more wellness and resiliency for themselves. The data shows that correctional officers have a life expectancy two decades less than the rest of us, because of their exposure to chronic stress and trauma, primary and secondary trauma.
So actually, even before that, I’m going to be leading an intensive mindfulness retreat, a weekend retreat, for correctional managers and correctional officers up in Oregon. So it’s really interesting to be able to bring this work to that population, as well as into the corporate sphere and into the prisons and into health care and people working with people experiencing homelessness. So I think we’re all thirsting for, yes, especially with what’s going on in the world right now and what’s going on in our world politically, we’re all thirsting for and longing for something that offers a different way of being, and a more hopeful view of life.
TS: Check out the new book, Radical Responsibility: How to Move Beyond Blame, Fearlessly Live Your Highest Purpose, and Become an Unstoppable Force for Good. With Sounds True, Fleet Maull has also created the audio series, Living with Radical Responsibility.
Fleet, thank you. Thank you for being so inspiring and presenting the Empowerment Zone, “What can I do?” to the Sounds True audience. Thank you so much.
FM: Thank you, Tami. Thank you very much for having me on.
TS: Thanks for listening to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. At Sounds True, we are dedicated to creating a wiser and kinder world by making transformational education widely accessible. The new Sounds True Foundation exists to remove financial barriers and make sure that people in communities of need have access to transformational tools and teachings. You can find out more at SoundsTrueFoundation.org.
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