Journey To Authenticity with Todd Kane

 

How do you find your true self and celebrate your authenticity in a culture where we are constantly bombarded with what we “should be”? And what about in a culture that could be described as one of fear? We bring these questions to the forefront with guest, Todd Kane. This father, veteran, entrepreneur, philanthropist and author hid his past experiences, including his sexuality for reasons he couldn’t fully explain until now. Todd shares the conflict that began his journey to authenticity and reveals tips to understanding the layers of truth, writing from a whole different reality and living with gratitude. In his new book, Hide & Seek, Todd takes us into hidden places to discover the truth and expose fear for the fraud it is.

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Journey To Authenticity with Todd Kane

I am sitting here feeling incredibly blessed. I can hear it in my voice. I still haven’t fully woken up yet, which is wonderful. I love that space of coming out of sleep and not yet into the full wakingness of the day. I love it because there’s an element of the dream state that’s still with me. I had an incredible guest on my podcast who I’ve been reading her work for many years. She’s delivered these incredible affirmation emails for many years. One of the things that she said as she was concluding and deciding she no longer wanted to continue that work. It wasn’t so much she didn’t want to continue. She felt complete. She woke up one morning and said, “I’m complete. This is it. The season for what I’ve been doing is over.” It’s so simple, but it’s also profound and true that we have seasons. Some of those seasons are longer and some are shorter. Hers came to an end after 25 years of delivering these affirmations on a weekly basis to people through email.

One of those things that she said that she wakes up and thinks about in the morning now and has for some time is a question. The question is what miracles are coming at this time? I woke up this morning and it was a new ritual for me. It was a new way to begin. I normally start the day with a certain mantra, but I started the morning with a question. That question was what miracles are coming now? It very well could be that the miracle that was coming is the miracle of this show right now to be here, to be in a conversation with someone that I haven’t met before this. This is the first meeting for us, but I have a sense of this person and someone that is doing and has done amazing things in the world. I’m looking forward to the conversation ahead. I love it when I haven’t had a full-length conversation with somebody before they’ve been on this show, which happens fairly often. There are many people in the world and there are many great experiences.

It’s very difficult to try to connect with everybody. It’s already an exhausting enough experience to connect and stay connected with the people that you’ve known for years, your family and friends. It’s a lot. Social media in some ways only makes it more difficult to feel like you’ve got to connect with many people at such a deep level. I will read a little bit about this gentleman. We’re going to get right into it. As you guys are sitting maybe on the edge of your seat wondering what this show is going to be about, I’m in the same place of curiosity and anticipation and expecting nothing short of a miracle.

The gentleman’s name is Todd Kane. He has spent over 30 years developing the gifts and talents of creative people around the world. He is a proven leader of individuals and teams in both the military and the private sector. Todd has seen the transformative power of truth. For Todd and many others in the LGBTQ community and allies, the adaptive skills they’ve become so accustomed to using for protection has done them harm, compromising their integrity, silencing their voices and eroding their truth. Todd believes now is the best time to be self-focused, to find honor and celebrate your authenticity and live your truth. In Todd’s book, Hide & Seek, he takes his readers into the hidden places to discover the truth and expose fear for the fraud that it is.

Todd, I’m happy to have you on the show. When my wife, Randi, told me that we had set this interview up and that your work these days was about truth-telling and how the fear associated with being yourself or being in truth or living in truth is so much a part of many places that you’ve been physically been to in the world and otherwise been to in the world. I thought, “This is the perfect guest, the perfect person to talk about some things on this show.” I welcome you. Thank you so much for being with us.

Thanks for having me. I’m excited to hear you read that. It gave me goosebumps. It is a new chapter in my life, but it’s from all those old stories. Stories that you mentioned to let go and then you start to live your life now and to do so with integrity.

 

Let’s talk about fear if we could get into the deep end of the pool, to begin with. What is it about fear that you’ve learned? It’s a big, broad question. You study fear on some level, don’t you?

I do. I’ve lived it and we all do. There’s nothing wrong with fear. Fear is real. You can feel fear and it’s necessary. The antelope go into the watering hole. There’s a crocodile there. You would fear that. Every watering hole you go to, it doesn’t mean there’s a croc down there. I wasn’t born afraid. I learned to be afraid. That was a big a-ha for me. To know that fear is a liar. It’s whatever we put into it. Usually what we put into that will manifest things that haven’t happened yet. Things that we are uncertain of. Things that we don’t know. Life is full of those things.

Is that the fraud?

It is a fraud. There is some fraud in us too to put that out there, to feed it and create this thing that can be responsible for the actions that can make us do something. We are manifesting them.

We’re talking about we’re in a greater community of the world always. As we see all the time, these communities are becoming more and more siloed at times. It’s an interesting thing politically. There are certainly these silos that have become much more prominent and obvious to see. They’ve always been there. They’ve always been these separations and we know that, yet there seem to be these walls that are getting put up. Do you think it’s becoming easier or more difficult for people to be authentic? You’ve written this book, you want to share a message and I want to get to that message so that people can hear it out of your mouth. Is it becoming more difficult now do you think for people to be themselves and be open with who they are?

Yes, it is. We fluctuate, up and down where we feel safe and we feel afraid. We are in a culture of fear anyway. You think about why we buy things. We buy them because we want something or do we buy them because we don’t want anything. We buy some things that we don’t feel safe. We buy some things that we stay warm. We buy a big house because we don’t want to be looked at as someone in lack and not successful. Our whole mindset is about how we’re perceived and how others perceive us. We live in a society and a culture that feeds that all the time. We’re constantly being bombarded with what we should be so that we will buy something, do something, be something or fit somewhere for something.

Fitting in isn’t always the most authentic way to be. In fact, most of the time, it’s not. Showing up authentically takes courage and it takes practice to leave your fears behind and to think of things in a positive way and make choices based on faith versus fear. That’s empowering. You mentioned something when you started, you said about waking up and being in that little dream state. I got goosebumps all over because I love that too. It reminds me that I’ve lived most of my life in fear. I’ve lived most of my life in that dream state until one day I woke up and I realized that doesn’t have to be. I don’t have to think that way. I don’t have to be that person. I am enough.

It's so easy to choose the easier wrong than it is the harder right. Staying in the fight takes resilience. Share on X

Let’s dive into your history a little bit. If we can pick a place where you started to observe in yourself that fear was running you or not just keeping you safe, but keeping you from being who you wanted to be or who you felt called to be. Where was that? Did it take place early on in your life? Was it something that happened later on? When did you first have a conscious awareness of that?

As I look back now and I write more and I reflect on it, it was in the military.

What branch?

I was in the Army. I was a tanker.

Isn’t that fitting when you think about it? That’s a little irony in that, surrounded by metal.

It’s a beautiful camouflage too. We looked alike. We walked alike. We talked alike. We did all those types of things. I ran to that. I was drawn to the idea of being a part of that because I felt different forever. For as long as I can remember, I felt different. Different didn’t always feel special to me. My mom always says, “You’re my special gift. You’re all these things.” I hear these things and see people do things. I hear you laugh and say these things in my family and in my community, but that doesn’t make me feel special. It makes me feel different. It makes me feel afraid. You learn that this thing, this authenticity, this uniqueness about you, it’s supposed to make you integral. Not just being truthful and honest, but also being whole. It’s not seen as a good thing by the people. When you’re young, you don’t have the wherewithal. You don’t have the emotional maturity. You don’t have the cognitive ability to decide, “This is me. I’m okay with it.” You start to adjust and you start to hide. You hide from your family. You hide from your faith. You don’t participate.

 

Are you speaking about yourself now in particular?

I’m speaking about myself all the way up until about a year ago. You would adapt and become a chameleon because I want to be accepted. What a beautiful thing to join the military when you all look alike. You all have the same direction and same purpose. By the way, if you do these ten things, these happen, you get promoted. I literally could step into and be guided through normality.

What a great question that is to ask anybody, what is normality? Have you ever felt in your life like you are normal? We’ve had very different experiences. Everybody had very different experiences. I would say what’s universal is that probably if people are being honest, many times in their life, they didn’t feel like they were “normal.” What’s the standard for normality anyway, other than eating, breathing or growing?

It’s a sense of peace. However, the truth gives you peace. There’s a conflict right there. I want to feel at peace. I want to feel not threatened. I don’t want to feel afraid. I want to feel belonged. I want to feel a part of. If I compromise my integrity and truth is what gives you peace. You have this conflict. These incongruences throughout your life start to build. Back to the military thing, I was successful. I was good at it. I loved doing what I was doing. I could achieve. I didn’t feel so guarded. One day, “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” came into play.

The military said, “We won’t ask if you’re gay. You don’t say that you’re gay. As long as nothing is said or done, there’s no gay. It’s all good.” Here I am leading. I am married and have children. I chose in the early ’80s when AIDS came on and all that stuff. It came on the scene and it started to devastate the world that I couldn’t live that way. I was fortunate to be able to love a woman and to be able to have that relationship. I committed that and chose that. We’re still friends and we have two beautiful children. However, there was a piece of me, there was part of me that had this desire to also love men, to also have that type of connection with men.

It didn’t bother me for the longest time because I was living this. I felt integral and I was doing the work. I was being rewarded for it. I was seeing that everybody was acting up like, “I’m not gay. You’re not gay.” It wasn’t even about the homosexual being afraid although there was fear. It was about the heterosexual acting up to make sure that they weren’t seen as or they weren’t questioned. The whole thing went head over heels and turned upside down. I was confused. I suddenly felt here I was, an officer, commanding men and women, leading and I felt like a liar. I felt for the first time that I did not honor what I was doing. This armor that I had, this camouflage that I had started to break, started to fracture. I couldn’t embrace what everybody saw me be if I wasn’t truthful. Eventually, I got out. I was made a Major, but I didn’t take it. I went to run my father’s company and that took off on a whole different story, a whole different thing. Once I left that structure, once I left that framework, nature started taking its course.

When did you get inspired to write this book and tell us a little bit about what’s the essence of the book as well? I love the origin story. If you wouldn’t mind, start there.

Our physical form is our price for free will. We're given all the choices we want for a finite amount of time. Share on X

My second marriage, this one to a man ended. It wasn’t healthy for either one of us. I had put a lot into it and so did he, but it wasn’t working. I felt that this marriage encapsulated all the things I wanted my life to be and yet it failed. There were many things and incongruences with the way I thought, the way I acted, what I believe in, what I perceived and what I wanted that were not in line with the relationship we were having. When he chose to leave the marriage, I couldn’t grasp. I couldn’t handle the failure. I had put so much into it and I had created this fear. The next thing you know, I look in the mirror and I see someone that I don’t like. I realize I haven’t liked him for a long time. In fact, I’ve never liked that person. I don’t think I’ve ever loved myself. I don’t think I’ve ever embraced my truth and to have that moment.

To this day, it’s hard because I had been so successful at the charade, so successful at the facades, so successful even times being an impostor, yet all the beautiful things that I accomplished in my life, I thought, “What if I would have been in love with myself?” What if I could have shown myself the love and the grace that I showed everybody else? What if I had to put that energy into making myself the best version of myself? I got to hope because I thought if I went through all that and did all these things, can you imagine what my life is going to be when I take accountability and responsibility for it? You can’t do that without integrity.

You call it living a game of hide and seek. That’s an exhausting game. A lot of people can identify with that because hiding from the truth or hiding the truth is something that a lot of people put a lot of energy into. I’ve done it at various points in my life, the idea of not being entirely truthful. The first place that we lie and the most devastating lie we may ever even tell are the lies we tell ourselves. Not being truthful about who we are or what we feel. That was the essence of waking up every morning for me as in my former profession and feeling like a complete fraud.

I knew the only reason I was doing the work was that it was paying. It was providing for my wants and for my family, but otherwise, I didn’t love it. I wasn’t inspired by it. It didn’t feel like a lie, it was a lie. I was good at playing that little game of hide and seek because if somebody walked in the office to hire me, I was as enthusiastic about their case or enthusiastic about helping them as though I had gotten out of law school a week earlier. I knew how to play that game. Every time I would see myself play that game, it would erode a certain amount of trust that I had in myself. When you talk about integrity, that wholeness, that completeness, what is at the root of so much misery and a lot of pain that all of us suffer at different times in our lives is the idea that we don’t fully trust ourselves. What’s the antidote to fear? You could say it’s love for sure. You can’t argue that one but it’s trust as well. When you trust, you use the words faith. I love faith and I don’t ascribe any religious connotation to it, but isn’t it all about self-trust? Isn’t that all comes back to that type?

I’ve had this conversation several times and weave it in as I write. Is it trust or is it faith? Even when you go to the dictionary. It says, “I have faith in someone because experience has taught me.” That’s not faith. Faith is the unknown. That is in a higher belief of higher connectivity or the unity of all of us, whatever you believe, as long as you have, whatever gets you up in the morning and whatever gets you through the times when you don’t have trust. Trusting yourself is part of that. You said a very important thing. People walk in the office and you’d go on. You’d say, “Yes,” and you get in the habit of pleasing. You get the habit of playing that game.

That happens at the board meeting and at the dinner. That happens at the dining room table. Before you know it, little pieces of you are gone. You become that person and maybe it’s compounding as that lack of trust in yourself grows, you continue to act this way. Before you know it, you wake up and go, “That’s not what I wanted.” Someone comes in and says, “Let’s have dinner.” You’re like, “Yeah,” and you go, “I don’t particularly like to be around this person.” You go and have dinner with a person. That lessens the value of that relationship and that adds more damage to it. Having this conversation is exhausting. I live my life that way. It was like, “I can’t anymore.” Truth gives you peace.

Truth does give you peace. At the same time, it’s something you have to work for. It’s not easy. We are hardwired for survival. There’s a part of us that realizes at times that we are willing to do. I’m hardwired to do what’s required to be adaptable, to make the changes that are needed at the moment, to pivot even at the moment for survival purposes and to be willing to own that and look at it and be skeptical. What are you going to say, Todd?

That should be a t-shirt, “Hardwired for the required.” That is the perfect statement. Fear is necessary. It’s the physiological response to danger. We are very cognitive beings. We have an intellect that is far greater than anything else on the planet. We’re assuming, we make a lot of assumptions. We start getting in our head and you start thinking. It’s so easy to sit here and experience the world in our mind, through our phone, and not feel it, not taste it and not smell it. That imagination starts to become our reality. You can literally go through an entire experience with someone, you’ve never seen them and think that you’ve been with them for twenty years. You paint polish or whatever. That’s also part of our ability to build these facades, this alternate reality or this other person that can take our shame and take our guilt. At the end of the day, when you go to bed at night, you lay there and all that stuff goes away. You connect with yourself and you realize, “I did an exercise not too long ago. How many times in a day was I not integral?”

When you say not integral, do you mean not being truthful about how you’d respond to somebody? If you were being truthful, you’d say something different than you said. Is that what you mean?

Yes, and we have societal norms. We are a culture. We are creatures that like to be a part of. There are things that we can let go.

There’s the difference between being polite and being full of crap. If you’re living a life on a regular basis being full of crap because it’s either getting you from point A to point B in some way, whether it’s financially or otherwise. It erodes something inside of us. What it does is it dilutes our ability to trust ourselves.

We know people that are full of crap. They walk in and we go, “Let me take a deep breath.” Here we go. I can get through these five or ten minutes with this guy or this person. They leave that on you. You’ve got to drown yourself and bring yourself back to it. I hope that I wasn’t one of those people. I hope that I didn’t take that energy from someone, that I didn’t make someone go, “He’s here.” That makes me sad if I was that guy.

How important is resilience? How important has it been to you in your life and how important do you think it is within the community that you represent, within the community of people at large that are exhausted from having to keep up the facade in many different arenas?

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It’s incredibly important for survival. It’s so easy to give up. It’s so easy to choose the easier wrong than it is the harder right. Why stay in the fight? Why stay in the game? That takes resilience. Why put the energy into being resilient and what do I have to do every day to get up and join the fight? Does it even have to be a fight? Why can’t I just engage in my life and make those experiences more positive? When you say resilience, a lot of people think of Rocky. I don’t particularly want to get beat up and barely make it get the belt. Why can’t I be smart? One hit, I’m out. Why can’t I do a George Foreman? Why do I have to be Rocky?

We tend to think that we need to have this suffering because that suffering, that pain, those beat downs and all of that makes the success much richer. There are a lot of people in this world that look at themselves, “Why am I doing well? I never made those mistakes. Maybe I should fail.” No, keep doing what you’re doing. You’re taking the time. You’re making good choices. You have a little grace. Don’t apologize for that. Figure it out and understand it. Teach it, help us not to feel that underdog and beat down and whatever. I don’t necessarily have to have low to have high. For me, it’s gratitude.

I literally started, it was to get out of bed, “God, thank you for my hands, my feet and my eyes, that I could talk. I have clients and I can pay my rent. I still have friends. I’m becoming more aware.” All of a sudden, it was like, “Thank you for my creativity. Thank you for my passion. Thank you for staying power. Thank you for my courage.” When you start to change those things, you start to change your words and change your life. Start with gratitude and there’s the physical. Getting up and moving, doing the work to test your body and push your body because we are a physical being in a spiritual experience. This is what we have. To me, this physical form is our price for free will. I’m going to give you all the choices you want for a finite amount of time. How ironically when we choose the physical and we were on our body, that time gets shorter and shorter. When we stay in this spiritual and the good and we stay in that type of thought and that experience, we get to experience it longer.

Is there a series of things, call them rituals, conscious practices, habits that you’ve engaged in to build resilience within yourself? Life can produce its own challenges. In many ways, we create them ourselves. There is a lot of self-sabotage that goes on. Whether it’s something that you’re producing on the inside or it’s something that’s coming at you from outside that’s a bit out of your control even. What do you do to build that resilience on a ritual basis, on a regular daily moment to moment? You shared the first one, which is gratitude. It’s so important. Are there other things you do on a regular basis?

I start my day with gratitude every day. I have a routine in the morning. I get up, I talk to myself and I drink a lot of water. I do affirmations, what this day is going to be like. What good can I do? What can I give? How can I show up in service? Instead of looking at, “What do I get?” it’s like, “What can I do?” I changed the whole thing. I take the responsibility off of me. I put myself into this life experience as a positive thing for everybody. If you do the work, my father used to say, “Don’t worry about the money. Do work. That will come.” Don’t worry about happiness. Do the work, do the joy, be positive, be a good influence on other people and you’ll get that back.

I go to the gym. Half the time, I don’t even know what I do because when I’m there I can organize my mind. It takes me out of the space. It allows me to connect with myself physically. In 45 minutes, I’m out the door and I’m set for the day and I think a good start of your day is important because it’s how you start. It doesn’t necessarily determine how you finish, but it does help. It does help that you get up every morning and take some deep breaths. You say, “I’m blessed to be here,” and it changes the way you think. The final thing that I do, I believe it’s meditation. I’ve tried to do meditation before and I struggle with it. I want to be better at it and I’m working at it.

I’m going through a guided meditation for that, but I quiet my mind. I connect with myself. I set an intention every night before I go to bed. Lately, it’s been about what I’m writing. I want to address this thing. I want to have the words. Bring me the words, allow me to reflect, let me dream about it, connect with me, talk with me, share with me. I would wake up at 2:30, 3:00 in the morning, grab my phone and speak into it. I hit the little voice and I speak into it. Sometimes it was all garble in the morning. I’ll turn the light on, find my glasses and do it. That’s being 50. I can’t see anything. I’m doing this and I would receive it. Another thing about in the morning is that you’re not even in your head yet. I have an appointment at 9:30, I have a visit at 4:15. I know as long as I can keep from connecting with that part of my day, I’m being filled with all these wonderful things.

 

There’s something about not being in your head. It’s a rest. It’s a break. I’m so glad I’m not in my head right now. I’m not in my right mind at the moment. The book is called Hide & Seek. Is it complete? Are you finished with it?

No, I’m not finished with it. I’m quite at the end of it.

I know people are going to want to go out and get it in any event. Where are you in the phase of it? This is great because I’ve never had a guest yet who was at the place where they were in the book. We’re talking about the book, but it’s not done yet. There are a lot of people out there working on a book or working on something of that magnitude. They’re in the process. You’re in the mix of it. How is it going?

There is an interesting thing that happened. I went to a writer’s retreat back in November. I just was going to show up. My friend said, “You’ll like this.” I’m like, “Fine.” I throw some clothes in a bag and I go. We do some meditation. I’m looking at these people. He says, “Let’s tap into your fear.” I wrote this thing in two days, most of it. I started to clean it up and I was like, “This is an amazing thing. This is a divine thing.” A couple of months later, at Christmas, my brother who struggled with addiction most of his life, decided to share something with me. Something that happened to me that he came in on and took action on. It was a big thing. I didn’t remember any of it. I disassociated from it. It was traumatic for me. As he was telling me, it trickled in.

It was on December 27th. It changed everything. I had written all of this from a perspective of that never happening in my life. As it came in, it made me question everything. To go back and fold that it has been one of the most difficult things. I’m learning it as I write it. I’m sharing it as a write it. It’s easy to write with emotion, but it’s difficult to write an emotion, especially when that triggered me to go back and hide. For the last few months, I’ve gone in and changed. I’ve adapted and modified. I’ve left the core in there, but to weave in the fact that I was speaking to you from a whole different place, a whole different reality, from another perspective, it’s been difficult, but it’s also been beautiful.

I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of it this way. I want to say thank you for this insight about truth, about the fact that there are layers of truth. I always thought the truth is a black and white thing. There is truth and there is something that’s not true. As a lawyer, I was trained to be able to find these degrees, these gray areas, the slight distinctions between something so that we could make our case or what have you. Inside myself, I thought, “There’s true and false.” There’s a lot of perspective and perception that we’re unaware of. There’s a lot that is even within our own consciousness or let’s say within ourselves. I don’t know whether consciousness emanates from within us or whether it’s outside of us. There’s a good debate going on about that.

Regardless of whether it’s within us or whether we’re tuning into it, if we’re not consciously aware of something, what do we do with it? How is that integrated into our understanding of the world and how we operate in the world if we’re not aware of things? That’s why awareness is so key that we continue to experience more of that, but it changes everything at the same time. Here you’re having an entire life experience making heads and tails of things, creating your conclusions, making your mistakes, correcting and continuing. This information has given you a perception you didn’t have that you didn’t recall. That whole picture has changed. The truth of things is altered at that moment. The book is altered at that moment as well.

We don't always know the truth. We don't always know what someone's going through because we don't always ask. Share on X

It’s full of intent. Particularly being gay, bisexual, lesbian, transgender or being different in any way, being abused, being an alcoholic, being whatever those things that we have these secrets. To fit in and to make choices, to keep yourself safe, to provide a safe space and to have a life that’s fulfilling, that’s a lot. To create that and to start to share what you did and the choices you made to share with other people, how to make their life better, realizing that all those choices you made can come back to that. A lot of the mistakes that I made in my marriage with my ex-husband, the mistakes I made or the lessons I learned with my ex-wife, the choices I made throughout coming out and experiencing a new culture at 33 but really being a baby.

Was that when you came out, at 33?

Yeah. You’re doing all these things and you trying to make sense of it. You’re feeling you got this truth and you go, “I didn’t have the truth. What does this mean?” It was like, “This is exactly what it means.” We don’t always know the truth. We don’t always know what someone’s going through. We don’t always ask. Do you know what else we don’t do, Adam? We don’t articulate our truth. What do I believe? If I do that and someone says, “I don’t agree with that,” you can get accosted at a coffee shop. You can get kicked out of a meeting. You can be separated from a project. You talk about that culture of fear. What do we do? That’s an option.

If you don’t stand for anything, you’re going to fall for everything. It goes back to those basic things. What are you? Who are you? The two most powerful words in the English language are “I am.” It’s not I’m kind of or I want to be or I should be. The I can’t, I won’t, I don’t, I’m not, I will, I can, I do. I am, talk to me. To hear you say that you affirm who you are says something to me. That means something to all of us. To respect you and acknowledge you for that, even to acknowledge. Maybe respect is too far. Maybe to tolerate is the wrong word. Acknowledge and make the next best choice on what you believe. That’s integrity.

I’ve enjoyed this conversation. You never know where any of these things are going to go. If I can live my life trusting in myself, trusting in my instincts, trusting in God and I’ll use that word, but it could be the universe. It could be trusting in yourself. I can live a life trusting and not having to control or try to control everything, which is that fear that drives us to want to figure it all out ahead of time so that it will work out perfectly or work out how we think we want it to work out. We’re so much freer and at this moment to be able to have a conversation and not necessarily even know where it would go was freedom. I feel free at the moment. I feel blessed at the moment. I feel lucky.

I know our community will also feel the same way because we’re all hiding. Everybody is hiding. People have trauma and have experienced things in their lives that they don’t necessarily choose to speak about and have moved past. Ultimately, we have to be truthful with ourselves. If there’s hiding in the mirror thing, it doesn’t help us get to that place of greater truth. I love the opportunity to bring this up because it’s something that doesn’t get talked about a lot. It’s perpetuating a certain fraud on ourselves.

I went to bed and I was thinking about what I’m going to say and I just relaxed. The word that came to my mind was “allow.” I went to bed and I woke up and it was “allow” again. It was allowing myself. What I realize now having this conversation with you is what we all should do is you allow, you create a space that allows me to be integral. I make a choice. It’s ultimately my choice, but we can also choose to allow other people to be who they are. Allow them to have integrity, not to scare them, not to persuade them, whatever. To sit there in your own truth, you’ve allowed me to share in a way that I am still getting used to. I thank you for that. What you do, what all these ways of communicating and all these situations where I’ve been able to sit and talk to you, I appreciate it. I hope that other people will follow and we will all start to allow each other a lot of things to be ourselves. Thank you.

 

Thank you. I want to remind myself at this moment and all the incredible people that are part of this community, how important it is that we wake up like Todd, as you said, this is a biggie. I’ll ask you this question that I love asking. Todd, did you wake up this day?

I did wake up. I showed up and you allowed me to do that. I appreciate that.

I am still in the process of waking up physically, mentally and everything. I truly do believe that’s our greatest responsibility or at least I’ll leave it on myself. My greatest responsibility is to wake up a little bit more every day. I believe if we all do that, if that’s what we’re engaged in doing, waking up a little bit more every day. That awareness and that heightened sense of sensitivity, even to the fact that we don’t live on an island. We’re not alone anyway on whatever this island floating in spaces that we all share, that we are here together. The ability to allow is one of those heightened levels of sensitivity.

It’s a heightened level of awareness that we can allow. I agree with you. The words are used and thrown around a lot. Whether it’s tolerance or it’s acceptance. Words are important. They have meaning and they’re important. Allowing is a great one. Allowing is an important word that we allow ourselves and each other the space to be real, to be truthful and to show up. Showing up is so key in our own lives. I woke up and it is my prayer, my hope, my expectation that we all get to wake up again tomorrow a little bit more so even. In that waking moment, we have an opportunity to follow Todd’s advice when we talked about resilience and that is to wake up and even take a short ten-second moment to feel gratitude for something, for anything at all.

I stubbed my toe in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and I woke up and it stopped throbbing. It doesn’t hurt. My little toe works. My feet work. What a blessing that is to have a family, to have people around you, to have people that you love, to have people that you want to love, to have the anticipation of love, to have the anticipation of success, the anticipation of every good thing that we want for ourselves and we want for others. It’s something to be grateful for ahead of time. The words that I say and I’ll ask if you want to repeat these too, Todd, are important for me as a way to remind myself how much I mean to myself and what I mean in the world. Those words are, “I love my life, I love my life.” What are the words, Todd?

I love my life.

I hope everybody appreciated this conversation. I would love to say that Hide & Seek will be here around the corner. You can go on Amazon, we know that for sure, but we’ll have some other URLs as well. You can find out more about Todd Kane and his life and this incredible book. Todd, I appreciate you being on the show. This has been a real pleasure and thank you.

Thank you. It was a gift.

If you enjoy the show, please leave a comment AdamMarkel.com/podcasts. You can leave a comment there or you can leave us a review on iTunes. You can join our Facebook community at StartMyPivot.com. We will see you very soon. Lots of love, everybody. Ciao for now. Thanks again, Todd.

 

Important Links

• Todd Kane
• Hide & Seek
• iTunes – The Conscious PIVOT Podcast
• StartMyPivot.com
• IAmToddKane.com

 

About Todd Kane