DR. RANDY CRUTCHER
DR.KARIN LUBIN
The Passion Path to Health and Empowerment
Robyn:Hello everyone and welcome to month eight of the Self-Care Revolution, where our topic is empowerment.
My name is Robyn Benson. I’m a doctor of Oriental medicine and the Founder of Santa Fe Soul Health and HealingCenter. I have to say eight months later we are loving the Self-Care Revolution. We’ve had such an amazing experience so far with over 80 speakers. We had our live Bliss event in June and we’ve already planned Bliss for 2014, June 5-8. Mark your calendars now.
Kevin is our co-host extraordinaire who is with us in another state. This is my first time without him in the room with me. Kevin is what we call the desert Shaman here at Santa Fe Soul. He’s also a spiritual counselor and we’re grateful that you could spend this time with us.
We just had a fabulous talk with Sharry Edwards and every person that’s written in has been blown away by what they learned about the power of our voice, and not only the power but the frequency and how you can detect imbalances in your body, any disease category you can imagine, you can figure out what might be the root of it. Or often, a misdiagnosis just by hearing certain frequencies.
This is our first day of this month of empowerment and I’m so delighted to look at Randy Crutcher and Karin Lubin, welcome.
Randy:Thank you it’s great to be here.
Robyn:We’re so lucky that we are graced with so many amazing people in the community of Santa Fe. You all are globetrotting all over the place, you were just in Japan and you travel a lot and the fact that we could find a time that you are here locally to be here with us is fabulous. Thank you so much.
There’s so much to say about these two amazing people, but I’ll give you a little background just the same. Drs. Karin Lubin and Randy Crutcher are expert life coaches, team and organizational development consultants in their business Quantum Leap Coaching and also work on a global team with authors of the NY Times best-selling book, The Passion Test. They help people get clarity then take action to create their most passionate life and successful enterprises.
Karin Lubin, EdD and Randy Crutcher, EdD, are professional speakers, trainers, organizational development consultants and authors that help people get crystal clear and fully engaged with what's most important and meaningful in both their personal and work lives. Founded in 2006, their business is called Quantum Leap Coaching and Consulting.
While looking for the most powerful tools to build the foundation for their unique coaching process they quickly discovered the New York Times best-selling book, The Passion Test: The Effortless Path to Discovering Your Life Purpose. In this book, the authors Janet and Chris Attwood provide a tool that helps people get clear about their top five passions and learn the secret that guarantees a life of passion and purpose. Karin and Randy currently work with the Attwood’s and a global team of leaders that deliver Passion Test certified facilitator trainings and products to adults and young people.
Let me tell you just a bit more about Karin. For 25 years Dr. Karin Lubin served as an award-winning elementary school teacher, administrator and mentor for educational leaders. She has also been on the board of women’s shelters and sustainability education organizations. A constant creator of many high performance teams that deliver The Passion Test programs world-wide, Karin speaks to groups, businesses and organizations about the learning, love and joy that people experience when they grow into the highest level of team development, the "enlightened team." She assists others to discover and express the "brilliant leader" in themselves. Karin’s number one passion is "Inspiring and Uplifting Humanity with Love."
Dr. Randy Crutcher has been an active participant in the human potential movement for over 40 years. Joining his first men’s group at age 25, he realized the power of men opening up to and supporting each other through life passages. As a professional therapist and research psychologist he was part of ground-breaking work in developing effective group programs for men who batter after opening one of the nation’s first education and support centers for men’s health and well-being in the l980’s. He went on to develop father-son workshops and teen male counseling as an Education Director for Planned Parenthood while leading state-wide and nation-wide men’s organization’s hosting gatherings and conferences redefining masculinity.
I could just go on and on about the two of you, wowza! We love that word, that’s a big Self-Care Revolution word, because we’ve been wowed by so many amazing experts who have shared their pearls and words of wisdom to our expanding audience. We now have members all over the country and internationally and we welcome all our Self-Care Revolutionaries out there for being here to learn more about passion.
Kevin will continue our co-hosting but I’m going to start by asking you both. This is the month of empowerment and you certainly are living and breathing that word in your message.
Can you both speak to empowerment and what that means to you and why it’s so important in relationship to passion?
Karin:To me empowerment is all about tapping into your passion so that you can feel fully engaged and in your dharma, because to me dharma is, when you’re taking right action and when I say right I don’t mean good/bad or right/wrong, I mean right actions that feels so perfect, so incredibly aligned that you are trading maximum benefit for yourself, the world and for others in your community. So when you connect passion with empowerment you fulfill your dharma.
Robyn:I love yours. Your number one passion is inspiring and uplifting humanity with love.
Karin:That’s a big one for me.
Robyn:It is. I’ve been through the Passion Test with both of you one fine Sunday morning years ago. If you haven’t done the Passion Test, certainly read the book, but to work with one of the many facilitators out there we’re so fortunate to have you right here in Santa Fe, to go through that process, wow! And you took all of us, all the practitioners at Santa Fe Soul through the Passion Test. It was very cool, I love it. I’m still living my five passions.
This is a big one, your mission and vision.
Randy:So the connection between empowerment and passion, passion itself is both a feeling, a concept and can be an activity. To get really clear about passion, the deepest definition is it is your life force. It is the power within you. It’s the light within you and when you get clear about what it is that you’re to light up for yourself.
As Karin said you engage in it and know you’re doing your dharma, then you’re automatically powered. It’s not about going out there and finding your power, but getting clear about what brings you alive, as Howard Thurman says. We need more people in the world that are alive and when we help people get clear about their passions they come back to life, if they’ve hit the doldrums, a plateau or have been sunk for a while, or people who are just starting out in life and aren’t clear at all yet. That light in their eyes tells me they’ve gotten clarity and they are already empowered just by virtue of getting that clarity.
Robyn:We started the whole Self-Care Revolution series with thoughts and food as medicine and that’s a big piece. Then we talk about the importance of heart and breath matters, which was month two. We talked about the importance of trauma and releasing trauma, and we could have an entire month just about passion.
We’re calling it empowerment but this is the perfect month to really bring your message, because so many people can dramatically reverse any possible health issue by rediscovering their passion.
Karin:Absolutely.
Randy:Underlying so much of this is the philosophy, you change your thoughts you change your world. So when you have a powerful tool like the Passion Test which is deceptively simple and easy but powerful, you are already changing your thoughts because you’re focusing now on what you say is most deeply meaningful and important to you.
You get your top five passions, your whole attention shifts and focuses which means you now have a new mental habit of choosing to live those things you say are the most important things in your life. So you’re already changing the world, and as I said before you’re already empowered when you’re getting clear and when you’re using the tool in the process, which you’ve experienced Robyn, and we all continue.
We have to walk our talk and so we do it two/three times a year to keep that clarity and see if we’re in alignment, doing what we think is most important for us in the world. Then you develop those mental habits that begin to recreate the world you want to live in. It’s Gandhi too; it’s be the change you want to see in the world. So if you have clarity, you’re living your passions and people see and know that and want to be around you than you are changing the world.
Robyn:Exactly.
What’s your number one passion?
Randy:I just did the Passion Test again. They normally stay pretty much the same, but they shift around. It has been my spiritual connection as number one, so that’s right in the top five with my connection with nature. I just spent two weeks in the Idaho wilderness going down the middle and main fork of the Salmon River. That, for me, was a deep connection… in the water, on the water, looking at the water for two weeks and that really fed my passion for being one with nature, being in nature.
Robyn:That’s great.
Randy:That’s just one example, what we call a passion marker, a piece of evidence that you’re truly living your passion. My deciding to take action to go down the river and have that connection; I mean I can go in my backyard and have that connection too and I do, I love being in the yard. There’s something about committing to an even bigger experience like you have in your series this year that really launches you into your passion.
Robyn:In terms of nature, we devoted a whole month to earthing and reconnecting to the earth, electro-sanitizing and growing your own garden, and being connected to the pulse of the earth and how much that is the ultimate pulse that turns on our cellular beings.
So your passion work, it sounds like people of all ages and that you yourself work a lot with men.
Can you talk a little bit about your work?
I know you have a blog…
Randy:It’s a blog, EveryMansBlog.net. In that I’m addressing some issues that men and boys deal with in growing up as boys and becoming the men they’d like to be. A lot of that has to do with passion in the sense of, when you’re a boy and you’re in there playing and in that place of openness and carefree-ness with no sense of responsibility but just creating and building, and I remember I built forts with my friends and we were architects.
We built lots of things and we’d play, we were naturally in touch with our passions, but as a boy grows up and is expected to perform and compete and produce, some of that childhood wonder that’s buried very deep within some of us and on the surface for others, is messed with. In particular for men it’s about not so much that the man is the primary bread winner or expected to be these days because we’ve added dual earner income families for a while.
In many cases the woman makes more money than the man does and there has been an entire power shift around that.
Robyn:That’s happening more and more.
Randy:That’s been a real power shift, but they’re still conditioning that the measure of a man is what he produces and the money he makes, in this culture. So there’s a lot of pressure taking it further and further away from the childhood sense of wonder and playfulness and creativity and fulfillment.
That way, men could have with the right guidance and support to be able to achieve mastery and making money or mastery in being a good father or mastery in being a good husband and not lose that spark of life within them, but to do those things that fill them up so they have the energy to fulfill all those roles that have been expected of boys and men.
In the corporate world especially, you’ll hear a lot of stories like we do from the people that come to our four-day Passion Test facilitator courses. By the way, people come to those for a transformational experience as much as to learn how to help others find their passions.
Thought they might have started in the corporate structure with lots of benefits and opportunity, mastery and some ego identification, all good healthy stuff but after a while they realize they’re no longer fed by that and in fact they’re slowly dying. In fact, when a person is taken away from their passions and their neurochemistry starts to change than they’re more susceptible to disease.
I see a very strong connection between men who are getting depressed now in greater numbers, particularly in middle age and a loss of that sense of what lights them up, that is a variable in there. I’m not saying it’s everything, but passion and health are very connected where it comes to men’s health and I think Karin could speak to that around women as well.
What we’re doing, I’ve organized a team of men who are all over the world who have had the facilitator training and we’re giving other men in an hour, this tool to help them identify their five passions, how much they’re showing up in their lives right now and what evidence, markers or milestones they would need to see to convince them that they’re back on track or getting on track is really living those passions.
Robyn:And younger men as well, boys, you’re working with young adults in schools?
Randy:There’s a whole Passion Test for kids and teens. Karin has actually just done a training to train teachers and also master trainers that will help take the Passion Test for youth into schools, communities and families.
Robyn:That’s fantastic!
Randy:Into the classrooms to actually revolutionize the classrooms so everything is centered, the teachers and the students, around creating passions for the entire class for the year as well as getting clear about everyone’s individual passions.
Robyn:That’s an important revolution. The Passion Revolution in school systems, boy you can imagine what would be prevented.
Karin:And how learning would accelerate.
Robyn:Absolutely.
Karin:It’s interesting, I’ll be doing a family this weekend and they all want to do the Passion Test. These are kids 9-13 and their parents, so I’ll be doing a family Passion Test process with them. I’m actually really focusing on the kids. Can I focus for a moment on empowerment for women?
Robyn:Please.
Karin:What I see as really critical and it’s actually my own and many women’s story right now is that about nine years ago, when I think about self-care, I remember as an administrator I guess I noticed finally, after taking my head and lifting it up high enough to look around that the last three administrators had all either gotten extremely ill, had cancer and had to leave their jobs, and I realized that I was the next woman who was going to get cancer or have a serious health crisis.
As a woman I think the issue is that we have been conditioned to believe that we have to take on a very left-brained, climb the ladder of success just like men have had this conditioning. I’ve seen women and I’ve been one of them clearly, and I realized that I was at a breaking point with my health at stake. It was the recognition that if I didn’t do something, and I think many of us can relate to this, to the point that it’s so detrimental, it’s like suffocating who we really are, the great brilliance that we are then what happens is we start to die.
I’m talking holistically. It is physical, emotional, spiritual and all those things and that’s why I think the Self-Care Revolution is such a fabulous title and a great message for everyone.