When you rewrite your, life story, you can start living on purpose.  You can then transcend the negative stuff from your story all the things that makes you uncomfortable. When you do this as a leader, you can then show up in your organization as your best self and that contributes to, organizational wellness.

My guest today is Sam Morris, Managing Director and chief Culture Officer at Five to Flow LLC, a global collective that builds integrative, organizational wellness, solutions designed to achieve and sustain, peak performance.

Listen to the full interview Here:

Coach Myrna Life Story

I want to start off by sharing my, life story.

I decided to think about my, life story, I realized that as a youth I didn’t identify with my, life story.

My, life story, is that I was born in a very poor Third World Country, Guyana. My mother and father didn’t have much. Both my grandmother and my mom were domestic servants. During that time, I was also, sexually abused.

I never identified with that, story, because somehow God put in my heart and spirit all of the things that I was good at an early age.  I was good in school, I had a great personality, teachers liked me etc. Now that I’m a, life coach, in the personal development space, trying to motivate and inspire others;  the, story, that I tell myself now is that I was born for greater things.

The, life story, of my birth to me is just basically like Jesus, we were both born in poverty and lack in order to transform you into a spiritual teacher.

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Helping Men Rewrite their Life Story

Myrna – Sam you mentioned that you help men overcome their, life stories, traumas, and blocks to be the men the world need them to be.  I’m assuming that you have a, life story, that somehow parallels this, because we have to go through something before you can help other people do the same.

What is your, life story?

Sam – My, life story, is that I was born with my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, so I couldn’t breathe. From birth to almost 30 years of my life, I was extremely sick.  I had severe food allergies, actually a long list of food allergies. People say that I was allergic to basically everything except water and air; but then a therapist affectionately pointed out to me that actually I was allergic to air, because I also had asthma!

There was a period in my mother’s womb when she thought she had cancer, she didn’t know she was pregnant.  So my energies and my soul and my spirit were immediately put into fighting to survive mode.

As a child and adult, self-love, was not a part of my vocabulary or thought process. I had this idea that I needed to fight for breath and also fight for love.

Overcoming Your Life Story

My, life story, became that in order to be loved, someone had to save me. People were constantly having to save me from my asthma attacks and choking, and this saving mentality got imprinted on my heart as this is what love looks like.

If I am in a relationship with a woman, friend, parents or family member, I believed that for anyone to show me that they loved me they have to somehow save me.

Later in life, I battled addiction from my early 20s into my late 30s.  Really hardcore destructive addiction.

So my, life story, of being needing to be saved was very detrimental and destructive to me and that is why I coach men on how to rewrite their, life story.

Your Life Story and Organizational Wellness

Myrna – How does rewriting your, life story, help with organizational, wellness, and, peak performance?

Sam – Your story, is important in, organizational culture. The, culture, is where I focus all my all my energies on.  Five to Flow focuses on the, organizational culture, because a culture of, inclusivity, allows an organization to thrive.  By, inclusivity, I mean the whole, diversity and inclusion, conversation. The, inclusion, I’m talking about here is the, culture, of feeling safe, allowing your employees to be creative, to be innovative, to show up for work as their best self!

When you rewrite your, life story, around I’m living my purpose, I’m transcending the negative stuff.  I’m transcending my negative story, I’m transcending that, lifestory, that keeps me uncomfortable. I am transcending the, lifestory, that’s familiar, but not productive or growth oriented. I choose to transcend that, lifestory, and show up in my organization as my best self, that mindset contributes to organizational, wellness.

Rewrite your Lifestory by Going Back to Your Childhood Home

Myrna – I was listening an interview on Oprah Super Soul Conversations and the author talked about going back to your childhood home and looking through the window. What were your thoughts back then as a child when you looked through the window? Did you envy your friends because they had better clothes than you? Did you want to be white and have long straight hair? Looking through your childhood window allows you to understand your mindset and rewrite your, life story.

A lot of times you have to go back to the trauma and look at it from those eyes and maybe you will see something different. Looking back you could see something someone said to you that had traumatized you for years and now you see it was nothing.  The, story, that you been telling yourself for 30 or 40 years did not happen as you saw it.

How men can be vulnerable as Leaders

Vulnerability, for a guy is like being open to show your feelings even though you have told that real men don’t do this or that.  The things that society doesn’t let you talk about because you’ll look weak. Vulnerability, is like a beach ball in the ocean. Imagine you have a beach ball and it’s fully inflated and you’re trying to push it under water, it’s gonna to always pop back up. That’s like your trauma popping back up and you keep trying to push it back down.

That leads to self-sabotage and repeated destructive patterns.  The beach ball represents, vulnerability. If you open the tab and let some of the air out of the beach ball you will be able to keep it under water.  As a leader you have to become vulnerable to prevent self-sabotage.

Myrna – I remember Tyler Perry talking about this particular subject.  He was taught that men don’t cry and that he’s gone to funerals and people have told him don’t cry, you’re a man. But in an office nobody’s crying, what’s an example of, vulnerability, in a leader that showcases organizational, wellness?

Sam – In organizational, wellness, it is the action that you take to avoid the insecurity of fear. One of those insecurities could be something about like the President implemented a strategy that proved ineffective and someone else presented a better policy.  The President could fear loosing his job and being replaced.

 

Organizational Wellness and Your Life Story

Myrna – Tell us about your organization Five to Flow, I understand your mandate is to help foster, organizational wellness.  You identified that, health and wellness, is important to organizational success.

Sam – What we do at Five to Flow is we look at five areas of, organizational wellness:

• On our website www.fivetoflow.com we have a, wellness, wave which is a diagnostic tool that anybody take and it will spit you back a score. There’s two versions, a short version and a long form version that any anybody in the organization can take. You get a score from one to five back on how all their employees answered questions in these five areas:
• process,
• people,
• culture
• analytics and
• technology.

Each one of these areas has 25 questions for the long form and five questions for the short one about they’re employee or the leadership team or the CEO c-level, c-suite team about their experience of those five areas of the business.

 

Conclusion

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Additional Resources

Are You Trapped By Your Past?

How to Find Beauty in Your Now!