I’m thrilled to interview a powerhouse in the world of personal development, a bestselling author, and an expert in courage and leadership. Margie Warrell‘s passion lies in empowering individuals to lead more purposeful and courageous lives by challenging them to step outside their comfort zones and embrace life’s challenges. As Margie told me, “Courage is uncomfortable. Courage is also learnable, but courage is also contagious.“
Listen or watch our interview on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or your favorite podcast platform
Transcript of our interview is below:
Lisa Niver:
Good morning. I am so excited to be here with Dr. Margie.
Good morning. Good to see you too, Lisa.
Lisa Niver:
One of the things that I’m so excited to share with everyone who’s listening to us is I have a new book. My book is Brave-ish: One Breakup, Six Continents, and Feeling Fearless After Fifty. And the first of your books that I found was called Brave, and it talks about 50 acts of courage. I know that you have seven books now, but I appreciate in all of your books how you’re really talking about the importance of courageous conversation and courageous acts. How did this get started? You are from Australia, you’ve lived around the world, you’ve raised children, you’ve done so many impressive things, but what made you focus on bravery and courage?
Dr. Margie Warrell:
Well, Lisa, I grew up on a dairy farm in the Aussie bush. I had very limited horizons. My parents both left school at 16 and most people actually where I grew up still live where I grew up or many do. I just knew I wanted to expand my own horizon and that required an act of courage in its own way, overcoming all my own doubts and fears of have I got what it takes and am I good enough. I set off and moved four hours away to go to university. I feel like I have been living outside my comfort zone for much of the time since, which was quite a few decades ago. I also traveled around the world, as you said. One of the things that struck me the most as I’ve met people across so many different countries and cultures and lived in some of them for a period of time myself, is that as humans, we’re so often held back by our fear of failure of not having what it takes, of not being good enough, of being exposed as inadequate or unworthy or unlovable in some way.
Courage to me, it is not the absence of self-doubt or misgivings or being afraid of being found out. It is just deciding that something more important lays at stake in being willing –to quote Susan Jeffers “feel our fear and move forward anyway.” Even writing my first book many years ago, I had four kids who were age seven and under at the time, which was an act of courage. I never studied writing, I didn’t know where all the apostrophes go, et cetera, but I feel really called to do this. If I look back on my whole life story, so much of it has been me practicing walking the path of courage over fear in so many different ways.
Lisa Niver:
I know for myself, when I was leaving my marriage, people kept saying to me that I was brave. I kept looking the word up in the dictionary because I did not feel brave. I felt anything but brave. I actually really appreciated in your book talking about the doing things anyway and trying to figure out the life that you want to have. In you book, you have 50 courageous acts. How did that come about? What inspired those 50 courageous acts?
Dr. Margie Warrell:
In my book, Brave, which was my third book, the reason that book came about, I’d written two books at that point, Find Your Courage and Stop Playing Safe. People said, fantastic, very helpful, but how do I actually do some of these things? How do I say no to someone because I hate letting people down. I’m a bonafide people pleaser. How do I give someone feedback? How do I set a vision? How do I deal with rejection? How do I pick myself up when I’ve had a fall? 50 Brave everyday acts of Courage came about because sometimes we want to be brave, but we just don’t know how to be brave. That book was very much inspired by that. 50 is the number of different ways that I could readily categorize different ways we can be brave.
Lisa Niver:
I love that because in my book I did 50 things before I turned 50. In your book, You’ve Got This, you talked about for your husband’s 50th birthday, your whole family went climbing together and that was very courageous and full of challenges. Can you talk about how did that happen that you’d made this family choice to do something courageous together?
Dr. Margie Warrell:
Yes, well, <laugh>, there’s a long story, the short version of it and the medium size. Ironically enough on his 49th birthday, I knew it was the next day. I remember the day before I knew it was his birthday the next day, but on the actual day, life was busy. I was working away. He was off at his work. We often speak to each other throughout the day for a quick call. We spoke four or five times, I just forgot it was his birthday. Finally, my daughter arrives home from high school and she walks in the door at four o’clock and said, “Hey mom, what’s for dad’s birthday dinner?”
Lisa Niver:
<Laugh>
Dr. Margie Warrell:
He started laughing and he said, “I was wondering how long it would take you.” So, I said,
What do you want to do for your 50th birthday?” And he said, I would really love to go on a safari in Africa and he shared that with the kids. One of my sons, Ben, who was 13 at the time said, “Africa is really cool, but wouldn’t it be even more cool to climb to the rooftop of Africa?” He did this whole PowerPoint presentation complete with all the details of Mount Kilimanjaro, which is at the rooftop of Africa and it sits at 19,000 feet and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, he got us all really excited and I thought, wouldn’t this be a cool thing to do for my husband’s 50th birthday?
I set about the job of all the logistics and managing it all, but it really was Ben’s idea. We decided as a family that it would be a really cool thing to do as a family to mark and honor my husband’s 50th birthday. Let me just say Lisa, that it was actually way harder than we had imagined it would be. It is. I had done some altitude climbing with Andrew but the kids hadn’t done it. I don’t think any of them could have known what it is like to be hiking at altitude when you do not get the full quota of oxygen into your lungs. My youngest at the time, Matt was 13. The younger you are the harder it can be for your body to adapt to the thinner air.
So it was a grueling climb on Summit Day. The whole trip was a week of hiking, but Summit Day was nine hours to get from base camp at about 18,000 feet up to the top. We did it very slowly with a lot of breaks, some vomiting. I had a wretched headache, I felt nauseous. There’s something about when you have other people around you who are all working toward a goal. None of us wanted to be the one that gave up. I thought about it multiple times, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with the kids saying– mom gave up. She said it was too hard. We all just lifted each other up, literally sometimes physically, but also just emotionally <laugh>. You can do it -one more step and we’ll have another break, another three steps and we’ll have a break. I think it speaks to the nature of courage.
Courage is uncomfortable. Courage is also learnable, but courage is also contagious. And when we dare to do something that’s bigger than we’ve done before, when we dare to risk falling short and failing, it inspires other people around us. It makes it safer for them to raise their sights and to do bigger things and scarier things. And I don’t think we should ever underestimate the impact we have on others when we decide to be brave with our lives.
Lisa Niver:
It’s really beautiful that your family has also been a part of this. You are one of seven children and raising four children and you lived in Singapore, you’ve done so many incredible things. I love the comment you made about the airplane that in order for the airplane to take off, it takes 25% of the fuel to get in the air. Because I know for a lot of people trying to be courageous, the beginning is so hard and I really appreciate the 50 steps you give people. Another thing that’s problematic, and maybe you can speak to this, if it’s universal or worse in the United States, is we don’t have a great definition of failure. In your book, you talk about what failure really is. Can you help people redefine failure as part of the process and not the end.
Dr. Margie Warrell:
Yes, it is part of the process. Let me just say this, the greatest reward we get from acting with courage and being brave in any of the many ways we can be brave is not what we achieve from it. It’s not that we had the incredible trip around the world or we climbed to the top of the mountain because we might not have got to the top of that mountain. There was a strong chance. You don’t always get to choose how badly altitude impacts you and it can impact very fit people. But it’s not about what you achieve. It’s not about whether you fall short and fail when you are trying to do something. It’s who you become in the process. And so failing at something shows that you actually have got the guts to try. Don’t over personalize it, make it mean something.
Failure is an event. It is not a person. You are not a failure. You just tried something and didn’t succeed at it. You put effort towards something and didn’t land the desired outcome. Sometimes we get an even better outcome though. It’s not what we think we wanted at the time. But looking back, we can say, I’m really glad that happened because I wouldn’t be who I am now and where I am now. Had it not been for that failure, that relationship breakup, that job that didn’t work out, that business that didn’t take off because I ended up doing something else and I learned something else. We have to be careful in the stories that we tell ourselves that we are not spinning ourselves a yarn that we are a failure. No, you tried something, you got result B and you wanted result A, learn the lessons, mind them for the gold that they hold.
Examine it, do an autopsy on it. What happened, what did I miss? What did I not do? Maybe it was totally out of your control. Maybe something that was seismic in the world was happening- I think of 2020 –people who were opening a restaurant in March, 2020 or something, right? Maybe it failed, because it was just what was going on. You are not a failure. But even if you launched it and it didn’t take off, you just didn’t know things. You didn’t know all the things you needed to know. And now you know more so take the lessons. Maybe you needed to secure more financing. Maybe you needed to get more stakeholders on board. And you thought that just because you had the best idea that was enough.
No, you needed to get a coalition of other people supporting you. Maybe you needed to manage people differently. Maybe you didn’t handle an issue and it got out of control. Maybe you didn’t repair trust when it was damaged. And that had a ripple effect. Do not tell yourself a story that you are a failure. Look at the failure for what you can learn from it. Failure is just another word for iteration when we’re in a business environment. The word mistake comes from the Latin misstep. It’s a misstep in a direction where you took a step in a direction that didn’t get you what I wanted. Move your step in another direction. Don’t keep stepping in the same direction if it’s not working. Don’t fall for what’s called sunk cost bias where we keep doing more of what’s not working. We don’t want to acknowledge that I’m on a failed course here and sometimes we can get caught in that. Yes. We’ve have to be so careful in our relationship to failure, how we interpret it, what we make it mean, and how we sometimes wrongly internalize it to be about who we are.
Lisa Niver:
That was really beautiful and helpful and I love that. I’ve never heard that about mistake and misstep. That’s amazing. I like that. Learn the lesson and trust your wings, not the branch. Sometimes we learn to fly on the way down. We’re filming in October, it’s breast cancer awareness month. And you mentioned Covid. One of the things in your books is your write about who there’s been a lot of challenges in your family. You wrote about when you were in Papua New Guinea and got held up and had a miscarriage, your loss of your brother and your own personal challenges with food. If someone’s feeling very bereft, your stories can help them feel less alone. When I was getting divorced, people said to me you’re so brave.
I looked that word up in the dictionary because I did not feel brave at all. I’d love if you could speak about -don’t put yourself in a mental wheelchair. I guess it’s part of how we view failure, but for people that already feel very, very stuck. What are some of the maybe helpful steps that they could reach out for? I know you talk about asking for help and dealing with your brother. What can we share with people at this time? How can they do more self-care?
Dr. Margie Warrell:
The phrase that I like to use is self-fullness. It’s not selfishness and it’s not selflessness, which are both two sides of the same coin. They’re both dysfunctional and they don’t serve us and they do not serve others. Self-fullness- that is filling up your own cup because others can’t drink from an empty cup. You can’t give what you don’t have. I’ve had to work at that. I still have to work at that. I had to work at it a lot more when I had young children at home. You have to prioritize your children’s needs. They need to be fed, nappies, diapers need to be changed. You’ve got to put your kids first in the morning when they get up versus you going off for an hour and a half to do a yoga class because you have children.
So I get that there may be people listening to this who think, Hey, I’ve got a whole lot of responsibilities. I can’t just go off to a spa when I want it. I can’t even afford it. But, there’s always something you can do that helps to top up your cup and in doing so, it expands your bandwidth to do everything else better. The heavier the load that we are carrying, the more crucial it is for us to prioritize what empowers us and what helps us bring our best selves to whatever problems and pressures that we are dealing with. When I was a kid my dad used to take us out in his old rusty tin boat and sometimes it would spring a leak and he always said, “boats don’t sink because of the water around them, they sink because of the water that gets in them.”
Boats don't sink bc of the water AROUND them but from water that gets IN them. Given the storms raging right now, don't let them pull you down or off course. Rather CHOOSE to model the values & mindset you want to see in others. That's #leadership & it's needed more than ever. pic.twitter.com/TB2qJVrRPG
— Dr Margie Warrell (@margiewarrell) November 1, 2023
When you are dealing with a lot of churn and a lot of stormy waves and a lot’s going on around you, it’s easy to feel like you are going under. It is just so much going on and you can feel down on yourself, down on life, down on your luck, down on everybody else treating the people who love you the most, the worst. And that’s where we have to just take whatever amount of time you can take, even if you can only do 10 minutes in a day, take 10 minutes and go for a walk around the block and listen to some music, and sit under a tree. I can read something that speaks to my spirit. In my book, You’ve Got This, I wrote about the importance of having daily rituals and practices. When I say rituals, I’m not talking about going to mass every day. I’m talking about the small little things that you do that just help to fill you up physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I feel very passionately about prioritizing those things and how I start my day because how I start my day sets me up for the day.
Lisa Niver:
You spoke about how challenging it can be for people with young children. We also see challenges with the sandwich generation, people caring for young children and caring for their elderly parents. It can be very challenging to ask for help. One of the other things that is really important is forgiveness. We talked about redefining failure. One of the hardest things for people, myself included, when I left my marriage is thinking about how –you make a comment about don’t carry the past weight into the future and that we can have a life as big as we dare. And at the end of life, people regret the things they didn’t do. There is a misunderstanding about what does it mean to forgive that it’s not letting someone who harmed you off the hook, but it’s about carrying that weight yourself. One of the things that really is challenging for people, when they’re trying to be brave and move forward is— I read once you cannot drive your car, if you only look in the rear-view mirror, you can’t go forward. Can you help us think about how to redefine forgiveness?
Dr. Margie Warrell:
Yes, absolutely. I’ve written about forgiveness a lot because I see it causing so much suffering for us. As we’ve heard, it’s like drinking a bottle of poison and waiting for the other person to die. We have to make a distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation. They’re two different things. We might never reconcile with someone. But that doesn’t mean we don’t let go of the anger that we’re holding onto. They’ve got their life to forge, they’ve got their conscience to deal with, that’s their stuff. But I’m not going to hold onto this in myself because it’s eating me from the inside. Forgiveness does begin with forgiving ourselves, forgiving that part of us that may have trusted someone.
Maybe we stayed in a situation longer than in hindsight, we should have. Not paying attention to signs, not listening to our gut continually making excuses for something, turning a blind eye, et cetera. For our own failings. None of us are perfect. Jesus said in the Bible, Let he, who among you who hasn’t sinned, throw the first stone. We love to throw stones, but none of us get it right all the time. For myself, sometimes some people are harder to forgive. We can hold onto those vindictive thoughts and just be sitting there kind of wishing something bad would happen to someone and it would serve them right. We have to forgive ourselves for being human too.
We’re all human. None of us are perfect. We’re not all loving all the time. The more we can extend grace to ourselves and extend grace to others the more it frees our energy to move on and make the most of our lives to be a person that lifts ourselves and lifts others and isn’t bogged down in blame and resentment and bitterness and vindictiveness. That’s how life works. I look at this as our deep work of being a human. The deep human work to continually shed that which keeps us from showing up as the highest holiest, bravest, best version of who it is we can be. We are many selves and we have many aspects of who we can be. Continually peeling off those layers to quote Ann Lamar of what keeps us a stranger to the best of who we are.
Lisa Niver:
That was very beautiful. I do think those are incredible goals for ourselves. You write in your books about setting goals, and in my book, I talk about being brave. I’ve been asking people on my podcast before we finish, and you’ve shared so many brave challenges, obviously living on multiple continents and climbing the highest mountains. But is there any brave challenge that you want to share with us? Maybe something you’ve already done or something that you’re planning to do next? What’s something that’s on your list? What challenge are you looking forward to?
Dr. Margie Warrell:
Oh, thank you. I’m currently writing my next book, which is in itself a challenge because I want this book to impact people in a way beyond any of my previous books. So that is a challenge. I’m also looking at what the next season of life holds in terms of where am I being called to step up in bigger ways in the world beyond what I already have done now that the season of the day in, day out raising of children is past. I have a strong ethos around using our gifts for good in the world. I’m not sure what that is actually Lisa, but I’m just sitting with it. It takes a level of courage sometimes and I’m not as good at this to just sit in the questions and in the not-knowing and to be patient and wait for the path forward to reveal itself versus going out and trying to figure out what that path is. Sometimes I need to trust that I’m going to get clarity over time versus being in the doing and sitting in a place of being versus in the doing. That’s a muscle that I have to flex myself and strengthen is just to be versus to always be doing.
Lisa Niver:
I think that is a good lesson for everyone to think about being more of a human being than a human doing. If people want more from you, obviously they can find your books. You have books everywhere, Amazon, and on your website. I know you have the Train the Brave Challenge, but tell people where can they find you and what would you recommend if someone is new to your work, what book should they start with and, and how can they get more of you?
Dr. Margie Warrell:
Thank you. I would invite you to just go over to my website margiewarrell.com and I have my own Live Brave podcast that you can check out wherever you listen to podcasts. And jump on Amazon and check out my books. I would recommend my book, Brave, but if you’re feeling really stuck and you just want to reset or a new vision for your life, I’d recommend starting with Make Your Mark, a guidebook for living a brave hearted life.
Lisa Niver:
You are such an inspiration, Margie. I really appreciate you spending this time with me and my listeners. I’ve been working hard on what does it mean to be brave, and your books were really helpful to me, so thank you.
Dr. Margie Warrell:
Oh, my pleasure, Lisa. Thank you for inviting me onto your podcast.
LISTEN on APPLE PODCAST: MAKE YOUR OWN MAP
Learn more about Margie and her climbing adventure in Kilmanjaro with her family: Click here
“Growth and comfort can’t coexist. Just because something is hard and uncomfortable doesn’t mean its bad. Embrace the discomfort; look for the growth.“
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