Unlocking Your Authentic Life With Todd Kane Replay

Todd Kane has spent over 30 years developing the gifts and talents of creative people around the world. Seeing the transformative power of truth, he is now on a mission on guiding other unlock their truly authentic life just like how he did. In this conversation with Adam Markel, he shares how he went against the conformities and expectations of the world that push him to life in fraud and finally become truthful about who he really is. Todd explains how to get rid of fear associated with being yourself by being consciously aware of the world around you and starting to live in integrity. He also talks about the immense power of allowing yourself to pursue the things that actually mean something to you and the contents of his book, Hide & Seek.

Show Notes:

00:00 – Introduction
05:16 – The study of fear
07:30 – Becoming authentic
09:39 – Todd’s history
11:57 – Standard for normality
15:03 – Writing the book
24:33 – Importance of resilience
30:14 – Hide & Seek
37:47 – Trusting oneself
40:29 – Closing Words

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Unlocking Your Authentic Life With Todd Kane Replay

How do you find your true self and celebrate your authenticity in a culture where we are constantly bombarded with what we should be? What about in a culture that could be described as one of fear? We bring these questions to the forefront with my 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 on 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 the hidden places to discover the truth and expose fear for the fraud that it is.

In my conversation with Todd, we talked about how to find your true self, how to celebrate your authenticity in a culture where we are constantly bombarded with what we should be, and even a culture that could be described as one of fear. Todd shares his morning routines and his rituals for starting the day, how he dealt with the feeling of being different and afraid growing up, and even into his adult years, and how we hide our true selves in the world by playing the game. Sit back and enjoy my conversation in this episode with Todd Kane.

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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 this is an element of the dream state that’s still with me. I had an incredible guest on my show and I have 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 in 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 have been doing is over.” It’s so simple, but it’s also so profound and true that we have seasons, and some of those seasons are longer and some are shorter, and 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?” I woke up and it was a new ritual for me. It was a new way to begin. I will share this later, but I start the day with a certain mantra, but this morning, I started with a question and that question was, “What miracles are coming?” It very well could be that the miracle that was coming is the miracle of this show right now to be here and to be in a conversation with someone that I haven’t met before.

This is our first meeting, but I have a sense of this person as someone who 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 have been on the show, which happens fairly often. There are so many people in the world and there are so 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 have known for years, your family, and your friends. It’s a lot. Social media, in some ways, only makes it more difficult to feel like you have got to connect with so many people at such a deep level.

I will read a little bit about this gentleman, and then we are going to get right into it, and as you guys are sitting maybe on the edge of your seat wondering what this episode is going to be about. I’m in the same place of curiosity and anticipation, and again, expecting nothing short of a miracle. The gentleman’s name is Todd Kane, and Todd Kane has spent over 30 years developing the gifts and talents of creative people around the world.

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 have become so accustomed to using for protection have 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 to 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 so happy to have you on the show. 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 so many places that you have been to in the world. Physically been to in the world and otherwise been to in the world. I thought this was a perfect guest and the perfect person to talk about some things on this show, and I welcome you. Thank you so much for being with us.

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

Let’s talk about fear for a second. If we could get into the deep end of the pool, to begin with, what is it about fear that you have learned? It’s a big broad question but you study fear on some level, don’t you?

I do and I have 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 goes into the watering hole. There’s a crocodile there. You fear that, but every watering hole you go to doesn’t mean there’s a crocodile there. I wasn’t born afraid. I learned to be afraid and that was a big a-ha for me. To know that fear is a liar. Whatever and usually what we put into that, what we manifest in that are things that haven’t happened yet, things that we are uncertain of, and things that we don’t know. Life is full of those things.

Is that the fraud?

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

We are talking about we are in a greater community of the world always and now we have got, as we see all the time, these communities are becoming more and more siloed at times. It’s an interesting thing politically. There are these silos that have become much more prominent and obvious to see I suppose.

They have always been there. They have always been these types of separations. 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 have written this book. You want to share a message. I want to get to that message so that people can learn it from you. Is it becoming more difficult 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 we don’t want something. We buy something so we don’t feel safe. We buy something so we stay warm. We buy a big house because we don’t want to be looked at as someone in the lack and not successful. Our whole mindset is about how we are perceived and how others perceive us. We live in a society and a culture that feeds that all the time. We are 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. Most time it’s not. Showing up authentically takes courage and it takes practice to leave your fears behind, think of things in a positive way, and make choices based on faith versus fear. You mentioned something earlier when you started. You said about waking up and being in that little dream state. I got goosebumps all over it because I love that too. It reminds me that I have lived most of my life in fear. I have lived most of my life in that dream state until one day I woke up. I realized that doesn’t have to be. I don’t have to think that way and I don’t have to be that person. I’m enough.

Fitting in isn’t always the most authentic way to be. Showing up authentically takes courage. Practice to leave your fears behind. Share on X

Let’s dive into your history a little bit. I’d say pick a place where you started to observe yourself. Maybe that fear was running you or was keeping you 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, I write more and I reflect more. It was the military.

What branch?

Army tanker, armor. I was a tanker.

That’s fitting, isn’t it, when you think about it? Little irony in that. Surrounded by metal.

Beautiful camouflage too. We looked alike, we walked alike, and we talked alike. We did all those types of things and I ran to that. I was drawn to the idea of being a part 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 said, “You are my special gift. You are all these things,” but I hear these things and see people do things. I hear you laugh and say these things are in my family and my community. It doesn’t make me feel special. It makes me feel different. It makes me feel afraid.

You learn that this thing, this authenticity, or this uniqueness about you that’s supposed to make you integral. Not just being truthful and honest, but also being whole is not seen as a good thing by other people. When you are 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 hide. You hide from your family and your faith. You don’t participate.

You are speaking about yourself now in particular.

I’m speaking about myself up until several years ago. You 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 purpose. “By the way, if you do these ten things, this happens. You get promoted.” I could step in and be guided through normality.

Authentic Life: Joining the military is like being guided through normality. You all have the same direction and the same purpose.

I want to let that one sit for a second. Step into and guide to normality. What a great question that is to ask anybody. What is normality? Have you ever felt in your life like you were normal? We have had very different experiences. Everybody’s had very different experiences, and yet, I would say that what’s universal is that probably if people are being honest, many times in their life they didn’t feel like they were that there wasn’t this, “What’s the standard for normality anyway other than eating, breathing, and growing?”

A sense of peace. However, 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 belong. I want to feel a part of it. If I compromise my integrity and truth is what gives you peace. You have this conflict with these incongruencies throughout your life to 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 and I didn’t feel so guarded, and then one day, don’t ask, don’t tell came into play. The military said, “We won’t ask if you are gay. You don’t say that you are gay. As long as nothing is said or done, then there’s no gay.” We were all good. It’s all good.

Here I’m leading and married and children. I chose in the early ’80s when AIDS came on and all those kinds of 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, and we are still friends and we have two beautiful children.

However, there was a piece or part of me that had this desire to also love men or to also have that type of connection with men. It didn’t bother me for the longest time because I was living this and I felt integral, and I was doing the work and I was being rewarded for it. I saw that everybody was acting up like, “I’m not gay. You are not gay.” It wasn’t even about the homosexuals being afraid, although there was fear. It was about the heterosexuals acting up to make sure they weren’t seen as or they weren’t questioned.

The whole thing went head over heels. It turned upside down. I was confused. Suddenly, I felt here I was an officer commanding men and women. I was leading and I felt like a liar. I felt for the first time that I did not honor what I was doing, and this armor and camouflage that I had started to break or fracture. I couldn’t embrace what everybody saw me to be if I wasn’t truthful, and eventually, I got out. I made major but I didn’t take it. I went to run my father’s company, and that took off in a whole different story or a whole different thing. Once I left that framework, nature started taking its course.

When did you get inspired to write this book? 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.

My second marriage 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 so many things, so many incongruencies in the way I thought, the way I acted, what I believed, what I perceived, and what I wanted that were not in line with the relationship they were having.

When he chose to leave the marriage, I couldn’t grasp it. I couldn’t handle the failure that 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. I have never liked that person. I don’t think I have ever loved myself. I don’t think I have ever embraced my truth.

To have that moment was hard because I had been so successful at the charade, facade, and even times being an imposter. Yet all the beautiful things that I accomplished in my life, and I thought, “What if I had 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’d have put that energy into making myself the best version of myself?” I got home 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.

Authentic Life: Put your energy into making the best version of yourself. Show yourself the love and grace you have shown everybody else.

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 will say it. I do it. I have done it at various points in my life. The idea of not being entirely truthful. As you said, 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 was the essence of waking up every morning for me in my former profession and feeling like a complete fraud. I knew the only reason I was doing the work was because it was paying.

It was providing for my wants and 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, but I was good at playing that little game of hide and seek because, if somebody walked into the office to hire me, I was as enthusiastic about their case or about helping them as 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 and 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 that idea that we don’t fully trust ourselves. You talk about fear. What’s the antidote to fear? You could say it’s love for sure. I always can’t argue that one, but it’s trust as well. When you trust, you use the word faith. I’m saying trust not because I love faith. I don’t want to ascribe any religious connotation to it, but isn’t it all about self-trust? Doesn’t it all come back to that?

It is and I have 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 isn’t a higher belief or a higher connectivity or the unity of all of us when we are one another. 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, and trusting yourself is part of that. You said a very important thing. People walk into the office and you go on and you’d say, “Yes.” You get in the habit of playing that game and then guess what?

That happens at the board meeting, at the dinner, and then 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 then that’s not what I wanted. Someone comes in and says, “Let’s have dinner,” and you are like and you go, “I don’t particularly like to be around this person.” You go and have dinner with a person, and then that lessens the value of that relationship, and that adds more damage to it. It’s exhausting. Having this conversation is exhausting, but I lived my life that way, and it was like, “I can’t anymore.” Truth gives you peace.

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There’s a mic drop moment. Truth does give you peace, but at the same time, it’s something you have to work for. I don’t want to say fight for it, but it’s not easy. We are hardwired for survival and so 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 as you said. 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?

That should be a T-shirt. Hardwired for the required. That is a perfect statement. Fear is necessary. It’s the physiological response to danger, but we are very cognitive beings. We have an intellect that is far greater than anything else on the planet perhaps. We are assuming. We make a lot of assumptions. We start getting in our head and we start thinking, “It’s so easy to sit here and experience the world in our mind through our phone, and not feel, taste, and smell it. That imagination starts to become our reality, and you can go through an entire experience with someone, never see them, and think that you have been with them for twenty years.

We pen pals or whatever, and that’s also part of our ability to build these facades. This alternate reality or this other person can take our shame and take our guilt. At the end of the day, when you go to bed at night and you lay there and all that stuff goes away, and you connect with yourself and you realize, “I didn’t exercise not too long ago.” How many times in a day was I not integral? “Thank you for this.” “It doesn’t matter.” “You are okay. I’m okay. You cut me off.” “Sure. I will have dinner with you.” “I’m great to see you.”

When you say not integral, you mean just 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. 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 of.

There’s a difference between being polite and being foolish. If you are living a life on a regular basis being foolish 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. Again, it dilutes our ability to trust ourselves.

That’s a great point.

It’s certain.

We know people that are foolish. We know them. They walk in and we go, “Let me take a deep breath. Here we go. I get to these 5 or 10 minutes with this guy or this person.” They leave that on you almost feel like, “Ugh.” You have to ground 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.

I want to change the topic slightly just to talk about something I think because I want to ask you the question. How important has resilience been to you in your life? How important do you think is it within the community that you represent or within the community of people at large who are exhausted from having to keep up the facade in so many different arenas?

It’s incredibly important. It’s for survival. It’s so easy to give up. It’s so easy to choose the easier wrong than it’s the harder right. Why stay in the fight? Why stay in the game? That takes resiliency. 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 it 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 to get the belt. Why can’t I be smart? One hit and I’m out. Why can’t 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 beatdowns, and all that make success much richer. There are a lot of people in this world who look at themselves and go, “Why am I doing well? I never made these mistakes. Maybe I should fail.” No. Keep doing what you are doing. You are taking the time, you are making good choices, and you have a little grace. Don’t apologize for that.

Figure it out. Understand it and teach it. Help us not to feel that underdog and beatdown and whatever. I don’t necessarily have to have a low to have a high. For me, it’s gratitude. I started it was to get out of bed. “God, thank You for my hands, my feet, my eyes, and that I could talk, that I have clients, and I can pay my rent, and I still have friends and 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 my staying power. Thank You for my courage.”

When you start to change those things, you start to change your words and your life. It started with gratitude, and then there’s the physical. Getting up and moving. Doing the word to test your body and push your body because we are a physical being and a spiritual experience, and 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. Ironically, when we choose the physical and we wear it on our body, that time gets shorter. When we stay in the spiritual and we stay in 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, rituals, conscious practices, or habits that you have engaged in to build resilience within yourself? As you said, the beatdown and the life can produce its challenges. In many ways, we create them ourselves. There’s a lot of self-sabotage that goes on. Whether it’s something that you are producing on the inside or it’s something that’s coming at you from the outside that’s a bit out of your control even, what do you do to build that resilience on a ritual basis or a regular daily moment to moment? You shared the first one, which is gratitude. It’s so important. Are there other things that you do on a regular basis?

There is. I start my daily gratitude every day. I have a routine in the morning. I get up. I talk to myself. I drink a lot of water. I do affirmations. “What’s this day going to be like? What good can I do? What can I give? How can I show up in service?” Instead of, “What do I get? What can I do?” I changed that whole thing. I take the responsibility off of me and 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 the work that will come.” Don’t worry about the happiness. Do the joy. Be positive. Be a good influence on other people and you will 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, and in 45 minutes, I’m out the door and I’m set for the day.

A good start is important. A good start to your day is important because it’s how you start. It doesn’t necessarily de determine how you finish, but it does help. You get up every morning. It takes 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 have tried to do meditation before and I struggle with it. I want to be better at it. I’m working on it.

A good start of your day is important. It doesn’t necessarily determine how you finish, but it does help. Share on X

I’m going to a guided meditation for that, but I quiet my mind. I connect with myself and I set an intention every night before I go to bed. It’s been about what I’m writing. I want to address this thing. I want to have the words. Bring me the words and allow me to reflect. Let me dream about it, connect with me, talk with me, and share with me. I would wake up at 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning, grab my phone, and speak into it.

I hit the little voice thing and I spoke into it. Sometimes it was all garble in the morning when I looked at it. I will turn the light on. Shine my glasses and do it. That’s being 50. I can’t see anything. I’m doing this, and guess what? I would receive it. Another thing about in the morning is that you are not even in your head yet. It’s not 9:00. I have an appointment at 9:30. I have this 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 nice thing. 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 right 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 have never had a guest yet who was at the place where they were in the book, but we are 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 and they are in the process. You are in the mix of it. How’s it going? Is it in the flow?

I will tell you what is. It’s an interesting thing that happened. I went to a writer’s retreat. I was going to show up. My friend said, “Come. You will 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. I’m like, “What?” 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 start. I go, “This is an amazing thing. This is a divine thing.” At Christmas, a couple of months later, my brother struggled with addiction most of his life. He 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 in the family and I didn’t remember any of it. I disassociated from it. It was traumatic for me.

As he was telling me, it trickled in and I was sitting right here. 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 in has been one of the most difficult things. I’m learning it as I write it and I’m sharing it as I write. 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 couple of months, I have gone in and I have changed, adapted, and modified. I have 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.

It feels like, “I don’t know that I have 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 that truth is a black-and-white thing. There’s truth and there’s something that’s not true. As a lawyer, I was trained to be able to find these degrees, these very gray areas, and these slight distinctions between something so that we could make our case or what have you. Inside myself, I thought, “This is true and false and that thing, but there are a lot of perspectives and perceptions that we are unaware of.”

There’s a lot that is even within our consciousness, or let’s say within ourselves because again 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 are tuning into it, if we are not consciously aware of something, what do we do with it? How does that integrate into our understanding of the world and how we operate in the world if we are 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 are having an entire life experience making heads and tails of things. Creating your conclusions and making your mistakes, correcting, and continuing, and then 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 in that moment. The book is altered at that moment as well.

It is. It’s full of integrity.

It’s a big book.

Particularly being gay, bisexual, lesbian, transgender, or being different in any way. Being abused, being an alcoholic, or 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 then to start to share what you did 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 being a baby.

You came out at 33?

32 or 33, yeah. You are doing all these things and you are trying to make sense of it. You are feeling this, “I got this truth.” You go, “I didn’t have the truth. Now what does this mean?” It feels like, “This is exactly what it means.” We don’t always know the truth. We don’t always know what someone is going through, and we don’t always ask. Do you know what else we don’t do? 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? This an opportunity. Yay or no. If you don’t stand for anything, you are going to fall for everything. It goes back to those basic things. What are you? Who are you? The two most powerful words and the English language I think are, “I am.” Not I kind of, I want to be, or I should be. It’s the I can’t, I won’t, I don’t, I’m not. I will, I can, I do, and I am.

Authentic Life: 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.

To hear you say that you affirm who you are says something to me. It should mean that means something to all of us. They respect you and acknowledge you for that. Even to acknowledge. Maybe respect is too far or maybe they tolerate the wrong word. Acknowledge and then make the next best choice on what you believe. That’s integrity.

I have enjoyed this conversation.

I didn’t know we were good to go. I sweat a little bit but it’s good.

You never know where any of these things are going to go. It’s great. I love it when we can live a life. If I can live my life trusting in myself, in my instincts, and in God, I will use that word. It could be the universe. It could be trusting in yourself, but I feel like you can live a life trusting and not having to control or try to control everything. Which again, is that fear that drives us to want to figure it all out ahead of time so that it will work out perfectly or how we think we want it to work out. We are so much more free, and in this moment to be able to have a conversation and not necessarily even know where it would go.

It was freedom. I feel free in the moment. I feel blessed at the moment. I feel lucky. I know our community will also feel the same way because we are 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. We have to be truthful with ourselves, and if there’s a 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. I was thinking about what am I going to say and I just relaxed. The word that came to mind to me was allow. I went to bed and I woke up and it was allow again. I allowed myself. What I realize having this conversation with you is what we all should do. As you allow, you create a space that allows me to be integral.

I make the choice, yes. It’s ultimately my choice, but we can also choose to allow other people to be who they are. To allow them to have integrity. Not to scare and persuade them. To sit there in your truth and you have allowed me to share in a way that I’m still getting used to. I thank you for that. I think of what you do, all these ways of communicating, and all these situations where I have been able to sit and talk to you. I appreciate it and I hope that other people will follow. 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 who are a part of this community, how important it is that we wake up like Todd. As you said, this is a biggie. I will ask you this question. I love asking. Did you wake up?

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

You woke up and you showed up. I am still in the process of waking up, physically, mentally, and everything. I truly do believe that that’s our greatest responsibility, or at least I will leave it to myself. My greatest responsibility is to wake up a little bit more every day, and I believe if we all do that, that’s what we are engaged in doing.

Waking up a little bit more every day with that awareness and that heightened sense of sensitivity, even to the fact that we don’t live on an island. We are not alone anyway on this island floating in spaces that we all share. 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 acceptance. Words are important. They have meaning and are 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.

As you said, showing up is so key in our own lives. I woke up and tomorrow is my prayer, my hope, and my expectation that we all get to wake up again tomorrow and a little bit more. In that waking moment, we have an opportunity to follow Todd’s advice. 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 going to the bathroom. I woke up and it stopped throbbing. It doesn’t hurt. My little toe works. My feet work. What a blessing it is to have family, people around you that you love and want to love, and the anticipation of love and success. The anticipation of every good thing that we want for ourselves and we want for others is something to be grateful for ahead of time. The words that I say and then I will ask if you want to repeat these too are important for me as a way to remind myself how much I mean to myself and in the world, and those words are, “I love my life.”

I hope everybody who’s been reading has appreciated this conversation. I would love to say that Hide & Seek is available in stores at the moment, but it’s not. You can go on Amazon. We know that for sure, and you can find out more about Todd Kane and his life and this incredible book. I appreciate you being on the show. This has been a real pleasure and thank you.

Thank you. It was a gift.

If you enjoyed the show, please leave a comment at AdamMarkel.com/podcast. You can leave a review on iTunes, and you can join our Facebook community at StartMyPivot.com. We will see you very soon and lots to love everybody. Ciao for now.