The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – How The Tin Man Found His Brain: One Attorney’s Path for Perceptual Development by Danute Debney Shaw

Episode Date: June 8, 2025

How The Tin Man Found His Brain: One Attorney’s Path for Perceptual Development by Danute Debney Shaw Amazon.com Celaphontus.com ""Will I ever be normal again?" That was the question. The First Light had occurred. It had happened... Some years ago, a gentleman was referred to me for consultation. It was unclear what kind of strategy this man was looking to develop, or why he was referred to me. He seemed vague and perhaps a bit confused. I should say, that some of the work I was engaged in at that time was "decision strategy innovation": an approach to professional and personal problem solving which incorporates multiple functions of conscious resources. Simply put, it involves the intuitive/inspired, rational and creative forms of thinking being utilized in concert, using subjectively and emotional intelligence." As Mr. Humphries points out via Alice Hoffman, "Once you know some things, you can't unknow them." In other words, learning creates inner change. Within these pages you will find what has been described as many "nuggets that require further digestion," as Ms. Debney Shaw takes you on a personal journey toward enhancing your decision strategies , using methods designed to bring out innovation.About the author Danute Debney Shaw is Managing Director, International Speaker and Consultant for CelaPhontus, LLC. Ms. Debney Shaw has been a consulting facilitator and writer in the areas of professional, personal, group, and individual, innovative strategies of thought and process development. Her background includes over 25 years in management, organization and law, spanning such varied contexts as work for the broadcast industry, corporate, governmental, aviation and not for profit organizations and agencies. Having a diverse cultural history, and a complex platform of integrated skill sets, Ms. Debney Shaw has provided information and training for both individuals and groups, across the United States and in England. Utilizing her combined experience, she is known for her vision, insight and creative strategies in decision-making, and has achieved dynamic results with groups as well as individuals.

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Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi folks, it's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome home. Ladies and gentlemen, there are only things that makes official welcome to the show. As always, the Christmas show is the family that loves you and wants you to be better than you already are because you're already amazing for listening to the show for 16 years, 24 episodes.

But we just constantly every day have two to three episodes of some of the most amazing minds on the planet. None of our mind, I'm the idiot with the mic. And we just had these amazing guests on the show and they come on to share with their journeys of life, their stories, their lessons. And that makes it so you can skip maybe some things that came into their lives, some errors, some mistakes, or maybe just life being not nice to people. And they learn how to overcome it, survive it, and give you the data so they can't, you can't too, so that everyone can.

Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Foss show. Some guests to the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. We have an amazing young lady on the show with us today. Her book that was out March 13th, 2020 is called, How the Tin Man Found His Brain. is called how the tin man found his brain, one attorney's path for perceptual development.

Danute Debney Shaw joins us on the show. We're going to be talking to her about her book, her insights and all of the great stuff that goes into it and all of that. And so she's done a lot with her life. She's a manager, director and consultant for her company and the decision strategy innovation company, which provides services, including with her life. She's a manager, director and consultant for her company and the Decision Strategy Innovation Company, which provides services including speaking at events, providing workshops related to decision strategy, as well as private counseling for business and individuals. Welcome, Michelle. Young lady, how are you? Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here.

We're delighted to have you as well. So give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? Dr. this sort of persona of a website. It's c-e-l-a-p-h-o-n-t-u-s dot com. I can also be found on Facebook under my own name, Danuke Devne Shaw. I'm on Instagram under Ciela Fontes, and I'm also on LinkedIn under Danuke Devne Shaw. Pete So, give us a 30,000, oh, look, give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside your book? Dr. C. Wiggins What's inside my book? It's a collection of essays and commentaries. And it's a journey. Some of that journey is introduced by our character, the Tin

Man, but it really takes off for a life of its own. It's a, the chapters are short, they're very accessible, and they're filled with all sorts of adventures and situations. Some of them are short, they're very accessible, and they're filled with all sorts of adventures and situations. Some of them are mine, some of them I've captured and gathered from other people's experiences who I've known and also from certain public events that have all affected my life and helped me to evolve an approach which I now implement with decision strategy innovation, and that approach is working from the inside out. Now, it's not so much that people have never thought of working from the inside out, but my approach is that we do that first, then we do the rational, then we do the intuitive,

then we do the creative, and if there needs to be some kind of emotional intelligence kicking in, then we do that as well. But that's the process. Pete So, who is the Tin Man in your story? I mean, I imagine that we're referring to, of course, from The Wizard of Oz, but how to find your brain? Are these people running around with their brains? What's going on? I didn't know. I thought there was only the guy in the movie, but maybe there's more. Dr. Julie Bollingham You know, we have to bear in mind that the

Tin Man actually had a very substantial brain. He didn't think he had a heart until they gave him a little clock to tick away. The characters of the Wizard of Oz as created by Frank Braun all already had all the tools and skills that they needed. They had it all. They just didn't realize it. And so indeed, this is the first of a trilogy. The second book will be about the cowardly lion, which will be risk-taking. The third one will be about the scarecrow, and that'll be about validation and how we all seek validation a great deal in life, and whether that's good, bad, does it stand in the way. But that's really where all of this But that's really where all of this has sort of germinated, and it has connected very strongly with my own personal experiences, my own life, and the work that I've done throughout.

Pete And so, you help people figure all this stuff out and all that good stuff. What prompted you to write the book? Julie Well, I've been thinking about it for about 20 years, and then I sat down and wrote it in two months. I have to tell you a little bit about my background so that it kind of makes more sense. I have two tracks that brought me to this place of writing this book. One has to do with my personal experiences. I grew up in a family that went through a great deal of tragedies in their lives. My mother and grandmother were in a Siberian labor camp.

My dad was in a German labor camp. My brother and I would lay children for them. But by the time we came into the world, they'd lived most of their life, or at least most of this kind of dramatic dynamic experience of trying to work their way through a variety of different challenges, obstacles, pain, loss, and built the resilience to make it through all of that. So that's on one hand. On the other hand, I've had the opportunity to have 30 years of management organization

and law. I've worked with and for some tremendously powerful people, and I don't just mean, you know, people with lots of money, but people who really are subjectively powerful. I've worked in a variety of different contexts. I was a law clerk for the federal bankruptcy court in the central district of California in Los Angeles. I saw people's lives fall apart and determine whether they get back together or not. Businesses fall apart and see how they get put back together or not.

I worked for Homeless Health and Human Services Organization when I was going to law school. I was a unit manager for Network News at a broadcasting organization in New York. And the list goes on. So I often wondered why life was taking me from one door opening and another closing, and then another opening and then another closing. I was thinking, what on earth is this?

And I now realize that the culmination of all of these experiences have brought me to a place where I can talk about just about any profession. And I now still am a federal practice counsel and have been for a number of years working out of Washington, DC. So, the experiences continue. Pete You know, it's interesting when you go through life, like a lot of my young things, I was like, I never ever thought, well, this might make a great book story someday. You

know, you're just trying to survive and in the myriad of turns that you go through in life and the things you experience end up building, you know, this, what we call in the show, this, the fabric, the stories or the fabric of your life. And in this tapestry that you build and weave, you know, one day you wake up and you go, man, I've, I'm kind of like a griot. I've collected a lot of really cool, amazing stories. I've created, you know, there's probably lots of things that I failed at, but I learned from them and developed myself greatly. And, you know, some of this information I have can maybe help some other people.

Danielle Absolutely. And that's the biggest part of what I've come to at this point in my life, because there's all of these experiences, my own and others, that I've been able to learn so much from and be able to bring forward at this point in time. And I want to say something else that you triggered in your comment, and that's that people don't realize that some of the things that they've been to, they think, oh, well, that has nothing to do

with what I'm going through now. I've changed jobs, I've changed careers, that was then, this is now. You'd be surprised what you've learned previously that you can bring forward into other experiences in your life and build upon. I really don't believe that anything is lost in terms of the kind of knowledge you can gain through the hardships, through the good stuff, through all of it. Yeah. I mean, I wish I'd started writing books or writing my stories down sooner. There's like so many, I mean, from the employees I had and all the stories they gave me,

I could have had like four books of just employee stories and weird shit that got happened to my office. You know, and a lot of that got lost. No matter how much I've jogged my memory, it will come back. Maybe there's a reason I don't want it back, but, uh, I've been enjoying, enjoying not having lots of employees for a long time, but, uh, you know, it's, uh, you know, some of the stories that I have wrote about and stuff that happened in my life, you know, they were the ones that really stuck out and, um, yeah, it's just, it's just so amazing what you can learn from your life and have that insight. I wish I kept better journals and all that stuff. I wish that was another thing. Now, this is a trilogy, you say. What are

the other two books? Can you tease out maybe their content? Are you going to go through the Wizard of Oz actor base? Maybe you're going to do the strongman? Julie No, no, no. I'm really dealing more from the books that have been written, although of course, obviously, there's, you know, great similarity. But it's the notion of that kind of journey that we do all take. You know, the stories, I have lots of different stories that I tell in this book. This book, the first one that I've written, How the Tin Man Found His Brain, is really the overview. It talks about a lot of people's professional challenges, personal challenges, triumphs. There are some silly stories.

There are some very, very serious stories. And all of them kind of approach the issue of what we have within ourselves as resources. Self-trust is critical to building the kind of resilience we all need to overcome, whether it's the things that go on in our own lives and our families, it doesn't all have to be drama. In my family, I grew up with a good deal of drama because of what my parents had been through. By the time I'd come along, life was pretty normal and standard,

but they'd been through so much. In fact, the next book that I'm writing is not part of this trilogy, it's my grandmother's story. It's going to be the five lives of Agnieszka. She went through a Downton Abbey beginning where she wasn't nobility but she was landed gentry in Eastern Europe. She got through the Russian Revolution, the First World War, the Second World War, that Siberian labor camp, a Middle East holding camp and then ended up in the United States. And there were all sorts of adventures along the way. The question is, did she find her happy ending? But you'll have to read the book to find out. Pete That would be an interesting thing to do. I mean, a lot of people don't survive

those Siberian camps, you know, you go there and that's usually the last place anybody sees you. You know, Navalny found that out recently in Russia. But if you don't mind me pulling a joke, I don't mean to dissuade from the seriousness of the nature of the joke, but honestly, if your parents go through a labor camp, you know, it kind of prepares them for teenagers. Well, you know, it's very funny. We were pretty grounded teenagers growing up, I got to tell you. Of course, we had parents who were already pretty, you know, older and grounded and very stable. See, it's different.

It's different if you're a parent at 20 or you're a parent at 30 or at 35 or whenever. And particularly if you've been through some situations that have given you an opportunity for maturity and growth. So yeah, we were pretty good kids. We didn't, but what was interesting is, you know, you grow up and you, you know, every child has some kind of vision. Oh, I want to get married, have a couple kids, this and that. I never planned to move 18 times, change, you know, have five careers all totaled, you know, move across the country I lived in. Originally I'm

from Wisconsin. I ended up getting that job at the network in New York, lived in Manhattan for a number of years. Then I was in New Mexico for a little while. Then I was in LA, then San Francisco, then Washington, D.C. Now I kind of write my books in New Mexico still and spend a lot of time in Washington and New York. In fact, I'm going to be out there next week. I'm going to be attending an event for the International Association of Top Professionals. They're doing a summer soiree.

I've been honored this year in receiving an acknowledgment as empowered woman of the year by them. So I will thank you. I'll be speaking very briefly at that event. And then they have a gala occurring in December. The book itself is now on track to be Book of the Year under the International Impact Book Awards organization. It's been nominated and is a finalist. We will find out in October. I'll be in LA and what they'll be doing there is having a wonderful gala for that event. It'll be structured as an Academy Awards kind of event. So, we'll find out who the winners are in all the different

book categories. So, that's quite exciting. Pete We'll be rooting for you. Mary Ann Thank you. Pete That should be exciting as well. So, tell us more about your history. What got you into law, becoming an attorney and stuff like that? What was the proponents behind that? Dr. broadcast network. And at that point in time, my personal life moved me out of the city and into a new direction across country. I ended up in Los Angeles and I felt I needed to get myself rooted in something more, I don't know, kind of core fundamental. I was

thinking either of going into psychology, rather than continuing in the broadcast industry, I was thinking of going into psychology or possibly law because I felt that that would be very foundational in a very logical way because as of course, you have to use a lot of logic with law. And I thought it would be an interesting piece in my personal development. Little did I know that I would get a prestigious externship with a federal judge, the Central District of California. And it was a quite intense externship that I participated in. And it just set me on a track that eventually then took me to San Francisco, and it took me to working for an airline there. I was doing some negotiations work for them. I'd originally been hired because I did have the

bankruptcy experience that I mentioned previously. Once I finished that externship, I ended up working for the Federal Bankruptcy Court. And from there, I ended up working in California, Northern California for the airline, because they were they were going through some challenges that involved bankruptcy. And they thought that my background would be very useful for the purpose of negotiating their contracts for a maintenance service organization that they an operation that they were running at the time.

And indeed, I would be able to explain to potential customers what the ins and outs and challenges would be of going to contract with a company that may be involved in a bankruptcy. And so this has sort of got me into that track. And when I got involved there, after a couple of years, they were going to be going through a merger, and we all knew that our division was going to close, and there was no place really for most of us to land after that closure. I ended up going out to Washington, D. DC, being invited by one of our outside council, and then ended up placed in the contract world.

I worked for a law firm directly for a couple of years as a staff attorney, but I sort of landed in that contract area, which gave me such a rich, rich education in a variety of different contexts. I ended up working strictly federal practice, and so I ended up learning a lot about large litigations, investigation, government investigations, mergers and acquisitions, a number of different areas. So, the richness of experience and growth continued, and my life just kept moving in

that track. Pete Yeah, that is awesome. It's interesting, you know, one of the things I talk about in the show is I'm sick of hearing about me because I'm 57 now and I like other people's stories because I know my stories. And so, it's interesting to me, I think of life kind of as this walk through a forest with multiple paths. There's a great thing. I can't remember who the reference is, but it's called the wilderness of mirrors. Anyway, but a giant forest and there's these multiple paths and the fork, different ways, and you can choose to go this way or that way. And then there's forks all down the road. And

you can go just about anywhere you want. But forks all down the road and you know you can go just about anywhere you want and but what you know once you start down those roads you usually can't go back or I suppose maybe sometimes you could circle around or go back if you really wanted to but you know it's interesting how these compound or these you know they you go down one path and then you you know you keep turning left all the down the pass and you end up someplace different than you would otherwise. You know, sometimes you'll see that in video games. They have these video games where, depending upon the choices and responses you make to

characters, depends on your end result and your experience. And so, you know, it's kind of how life works. And so it's interesting. You've been on a lot of different forks in the road and things. And building and learning from all of those things have given you the estimation of this quality. And I think some people get upset with stuff. They go, they go, damn it, I'm not where I'm supposed to be right now. But maybe the more important question is, what can you learn from where you're at right now? What can you learn from?

Dr. Patrick Patello Exactly. And what possibilities and opportunities can carry you forward. And then there are these bumps that occur. For example, I went through breast cancer, which I don't speak about a lot in my current book. It's referenced briefly, but I will talk a little bit more about that in the risk-taking book, the Cowardly Lion's book, because we all have ideas on what courage is or isn't. But it is a test, after all, when you have something that enters your life that threatens your potential very existence, right? Potentially your very existence.

It really brings you to a place of, well, different places, I'm sure, for different people, but you realize your mortality and you realize the possibility of not being able to be here much longer. And it allows you to reflect, it allows you to learn and grow in that experience. So yes, it's funny where life, that's not something you would anticipate or plan for, you can't plan for anything like that. It's just something that you have to bring all of your own resources and resilience to in order to go through and beyond.

Pete Yeah. It's, you know, nothing focuses the mind and like when your existence is at threat. And, you know, you can be having the greatest time of your life or whatever you're doing in life and then one day, you know, you get presented with some of these challenges and, you know, the focus of the mind. But, you know, what's it all the advantage that which does not kill you makes you stronger? That's what I like to say when people are throwing spears at me. Debra Haldon

Well, you learn, you learn, and learning gives you strength. And again, back to what I talk about in the book, it's that self-trust, it's that growth. I mean, I learned tremendous things from my grandmother, who got through all of these things. And it wasn't all miserable and horrible in life, but it was just a huge amount of mountains to climb and to get over. And, you know, and it doesn't have to, when people read that book, it's not going to be about, oh, I can't relate to it because I didn't go through a war. But people go through these major challenges, whether it's health, whether it's work, whether it's relationships, whether it's very personal and subjective what you're going through,

or circumstances that you are faced with. People go through a lot of things and you can't really, you know, it's not a question of, well, this was really much worse than that was. When you're going through it subjectively yourself, it's your mountain and you're the one climbing it. It could be drug addiction. It could be many things that that one has to find a way through and beyond. And the only real way to do it is from within. It is from within. It's from using your inner resources and then getting the information that you need. Getting the in... See, we're taught so much to rely on the outside in, what we learn from teachers, what we learn

from books, and that's fantastic, and we need those resources. But what gets left behind often, and what I speak to in the book, is the fact that we also have inner knowing and inner perspective and perception that can work with it, that can help to augment it. And I quote a few people in there who are pretty prominent individuals who have said, spoken to that concept. Because that's how they work. That's what their success is about.

They don't run around saying, I'm using intuitive awareness, I'm using subjectivity, I'm using creativity. They don't run around saying all that'm using intuitive awareness, I'm using subjectivity, I'm using creativity. They don't run around saying all that. They're just naturally using it. And what I encourage with my work and with my speaking, with my books, is to do it consciously, to make you your own best friend and not just the critic or the one getting sort of trashed, if you will, for those people who have had the unfortunate beginnings in life when they've always been criticized

and belittled and made less of. You know, this is not what you're gonna carry into your life that will let you go forward. It's a major piece that needs to be worked with, worked through, but it's not the truth. It's not the truth. It's not who we are. We individually, all of us have tremendous things to offer, tremendous things to give. I don't care what your work is professionally. We as humans all have a gift. We all have a piece to offer. We all have

a way and a, you know, direction to take for our own journey. And we can discover that from who we are within ourselves and what we can learn, grow through and develop from outside of ourselves. I mean, wonderful story there. Now, in the book, How the Tin Man Found His Brain, you lead off with this thing, will I ever be normal again? That was the question. Yes. Can you give us the tease out on that? Yes, I talk about it in the introduction. It's actually the lead into the introduction

of the book. I ask people to read the forward and the preface and the introduction, because that really sets up not just the tone, but sort of the context and perspective of where these stories all go. This has to do with the client that was referred to me. I spoke with the gentleman briefly. He had a has a business. He's out there somewhere. It's I don't think the business has gone public, but it is a large company that he has. And he came to me because he he ended up in a tremendous internal conflict for himself. As the fearless leader of this company, he was to attend an event in in Phoenix. It was a team

building event for many of his management people in this organization. I think I believe a lot of them were sales sales management folk and they were all going on this team building event to Arizona to Phoenix and of course he was involved in approving this this four-day weekend or whatever it was and they had a variety of different speakers as he's explaining this to me. He explains all of this to me by way of background. And he said in the middle of all of this, there was a Qigong master. And I'm not going to use his language, but basically who is this darn Qigong master?

And what the heck is he doing in the middle of my team building weekend? Because essentially it was all about maximizing profits and realizing greater success and etc., etc., etc. And here's this Qigong Master. What could he possibly contribute? But because he paid for this, he attended the event. And something amazing happened. Now I wish I'd have been able to talk to him more and have further, a couple more sessions

to discuss all of this, but he just laid all of this on and he said he came back from that experience, like the proverbial lightning strike of, you know, Paul on his way to Damascus, right, where he falls off the horse, he's been struck by lightning, and now he's a whole changed man. This is essentially what happened to him. It's like somebody tore the veil off of his face. He came home and he couldn't look at anything the same way again. He couldn't look at the way he was running the company, the way he was treating people.

He said even his family, who he was married to, she was a lovely lady but very superficial. He was just realizing that suddenly his kids were very materialistic. All they really seemed to want from dad was money. And he's sitting here looking like, who are these people? And what am I doing with my life? And what is this? It's like he woke up in some kind of scenario he'd had no conscious awareness of. He'd been this tough, and you could tell talking to him, tough businessman, smart man, intelligent guy, very strong, aggressive. And then he was talking to me almost in a voice like this when he got to this point like, I don't know what I'm

going to do now. Where am I going to go with this? He said, will I ever be this point like, I don't know what I'm going to do now, where am I going to go with this? He said, will I ever be normal again? And I said, well, I'm not sure what you mean by normal. I said, first of all, I'm not a psychologist, and that's something I disclaim. In my work for Cilophantus, I don't do any legal practice within that context and I'm certainly not a psychologist. It is decision strategy. You have an idea of where you want to go, what you want to develop, and we work on that framework and develop it. If you need a program mold out, if you need something in your personal life that needs to be structured and rolled out, these are the kinds of things that we work

on. But here is this guy, and he's now sitting here almost like he's a little boy now kind of crunched in on himself, wondering if he's ever going to be normal again. So I said to him, I don't think you can unknow something you've now become aware of. I don't think you can unknow it. It's not like you can pretend you haven't had the insight, the awareness, the development of yourself, which this was a development. This was like a personal aha moment, but outrageously dramatic and startling and sudden. And so I gave him a variety of different books that I thought might be useful.

These were books written by people who were sort of thinkers outside the box, who maybe were grounded in science and grounded in the rational, but we're now exploring areas beyond all of that. I mentioned a few of those to him, but I could tell that I didn't really satisfy him in the sense that he was hoping he could become the man he was before he ever went on this retreat. Whatever that Qigong master said, I never heard what was it, what was that one thing? It didn't seem to be that one thing. It was something about the whole direction of thought and process that this man explained that suddenly, you know, completely hit him to the core. And there was no backing away from that. You can't unknow that. You can't be normal again. He's going to have to be who he is in his new normal

and create his own life and go in his own new direction. But it appeared to me that it was going to require a lot of shifts and adjustments because now not only will he need to adjust how he behaves, what choices he makes, what direction he takes, potentially, potentially he needs to adjust that. But also he has to bear in mind what his circumstances are, what circumstances he's created in his personal and his professional life. And is that satisfying now? Is that workable? Is that how he wants to go forward? Is he respecting himself? And is he being truly satisfied by that direction that he has taken? How is he going to change that and where he's going to go?

So, that's where the book opens. Pete What an amazing story in launch to the book. Was this kind of a proponent for the book? Did you, was this kind of the story that was always jumping around your head and some of the things you'd thought about from it? Dr. Ann Cunningham No, not in that respect. I had an experience, when I say it took me 20 years to think about all of this and then write it, I had an experience, when I say it took me 20 years to think about all of this and then write it, I had an experience and that's also in the book. And it had to do with something that happened one night. I got very sick. I was just feeling sicker than, in a strange way, it was like

I was feeling weak, I was feeling heady, I was feeling dizzy. It was not clear what was really going on. And so, I was taken to emergency. I've not spent, thankfully, much time in emergency centers, but it was about two o'clock in the morning. I was taken to this emergency center and it was very, very surreal. There was nobody there. I'd never heard of going to an emergency hospital and having nobody be there. The lights were just these little drop lights that were around. It was basically dark. This one woman steps up to the counter. I step up to the counter and she said, the doctor will be with you shortly. I'm like, okay. So they put me in her room, the doctor comes in

and he's of course evaluating me, etc., etc. While he's evaluating me, I'm evaluating him. And he's telling, you know, he's obviously paying attention to see kind of what my stress level is, you know, am I having some kind of, am I flushed, am I pale, am I, you know, you can tell he's taking everything in. And we're chatting. And I asked him about himself being a doctor, a trauma surgeon, because he did not seem like a trauma surgeon. He seemed like a regular guy dressed in jeans. He had this yellow shirt on. He comes in casually to talk to me

and he's talking very slowly, kind of almost with a little bit of a Southwest draw. And he does not, for the life of any image that I could have had and what most people would have, seem like he's a trauma surgeon, right? There's no urgency. And he explained to me, being a trauma surgeon is like being an airline pilot. You have hours of boredom and then sometimes mere minutes of panic. And he explained how he handled all of this. He said that when he gets a patient that comes in and that patient seems to be crashing, he knows nothing

about the patient. The patient's gonna die if something's not done and all he can do is take in all of the you know the respiration, the heart, the this, the function. He's got the patient wired up to whatever he needs to have him wired up to and then he's got his staff around him. He says sometimes he'll just walk around the bed and he'll be going tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick in his mind. And then when it's ding, when something kind of clicks, then he asks the some, you know, one of the nurses or whatever to do this or test this. And then it'll go click click click click click click click ding. There's

something else. He'll test that. He cannot afford to miss anything, anything. And so he must keep himself very centered and he must keep control of his subjective time. That's one of the things I talk about and we don't have any time here to get into it. But subjective time is a real interesting element in terms of the power that we all can have in our decision making. But this is where I got a hint of that. I thought, wow, subjective time. He said, yes, he has to do everything he can to save this patient. And he said, if he can't save the patient, then he'll stay with the patient until the patient passes. Because he feels that while death is something we all want to avoid, because we want

to live as long as we can, there are worse things in life than dying. And I thought, oh my goodness, maybe he was somebody Zen from a mountain somewhere. Who was this doctor? And so he brought up points that stimulated my thinking. For years I'd been acquiring this information, this knowledge, these experiences that I have, you know, kind of filed away in my brain and kept and honored in terms of their value, their power, their representation of what all these people have gone through in order to achieve their success or their resolution or their acceptance of what must be. And so this doctor somehow brought it

into a kind of culmination. And that just sort of stayed with me. And then as I went through the next decades, I thought, I'm at a point now where I've accumulated, I've acquired, and I want to share it, because I'm essentially a service person in everything that I do. And even in the other work that I did outside of Seal of Fontys that were essentially employment, they were jobs, they were hired to work with other people in whatever team effort. I was always doing what I do now anyway, and providing that support and insight wherever I could anyway, and learned from others who were doing it

also in their own way, and therefore we all contributed to the success of the department, of the company, of whatever the organization was that we were working with. And so, the same thing that I'm talking about in terms of personal life applies, for example, if I were to be brought in to help an organization roll out a new platform. You know what the platform structure is, you know what the guidelines are, but the discernment has to be there. The why, when are you going to do this, how are you going to do this, why are you going to do this? It's all in there, but you have to make those discernments. And I don't like to use the word judgment, but use those discernments, because that's where, you know, the richness of potential success will be. I'll give you a very

quick example. A woman came to me and she said, I need help, I need help, I'm in a finance group. My people around me are such concrete thinkers, I don't know what to do with them because they're driving me nuts. I can think out of the box, they can't. So if it doesn't fall right into the square pegs of their, what they've been trained, what the protocol says, they can't make a judgment outside of that. They can't discern amongst that. Now because her company wasn't willing to, for example, set up six sessions every couple

of weeks or so where we could really work on helping this team be more comfortable, more elastic in how they undertook their engagement, their effort, their assessment, the valuations they had to make. We couldn't do that. So what I did instead is I devised a plan for her to expand the box. Because you see, with every box, I often do this when I do a workshop, is I show a frame, you know, here's the picture, this is the picture. Is there nothing outside of this picture? Nothing exists over here? No, there's a whole world behind here that sometimes we're not taking into account, but maybe need to, in order to successfully be able to make the decisions, take the direction, go forward. And even, for example, working with attorneys, often their management skills are not so good.

They're used to their syllogistic reasoning, their schedule of when they're going to file this, when they're going to do that, when they're going to... And even that, they're looking at sometimes very narrowly, which they need to, yes, that's the logic of where they're going. But occasionally you have to take into consideration elements that are an implication of something else. And if you're not prepared to be able to capture that, to be able to use that, to be able to assess that, to know whether that's damaging to your case or not, certainly somebody on the other side may.

So you see, in a lot of different contexts, it's very helpful to be able to look beyond that structure. So with this woman, she just took my ideas of where to go with this, of expanding that box for them. It was still going to be a box. It wasn't going to, it wasn't an ultimate solution. But it certainly was an interim approach to keep her from, she said, from coming in and just murdering them all one day. Of course, she wasn't going to do that. But she was just terribly frustrated. And she knew that she was wearing them out too, because they felt they were doing their job. But they were doing their job in such a strict fashion in a context where you really needed a little bit more elasticity of thinking, of assessment, of analysis, and of solution.

So as we go out, final thoughts, and then of course, anything more we need to promote of what you're doing on your website, how can potential clients reach out to you, engage you and see if you guys can work together? Well, absolutely, they can. They can reach me through the social media. They can reach me through my email. They can either contact me at info at celophantus.com. They can also reach me under my initials, dds at celophantus.com. And I will spell celophantus again. It's C as in cat, E, L, A, P, H, O, N, T, U, S. And I can, what I usually do is I spend about 15 minutes or so being able to discuss what kind of challenges or issues there are. Are you wanting to work with a group such as this

woman was wanting to, you know, to work on behalf of a group within her organization? Is this an individual consultation? And also, speaking engagements. I would love to continue to develop the work that I've already started to do with speaking. And I'm going to show you my book. This is my book, my little tin man book. Oh, are you getting a light there? Here we go. This is the better side. That's my book. And this is actually the International Impact Book Award I won last year and now the book is up for book of the year in self-help. So we will see what happens. I'm just delighted to have been honored with the, you know, voted in as a finalist and so we will see where it goes from there. But

wherever it goes, it's a fantastic journey. I'm honored, I'm blessed, I'm thankful, very thankful for everybody who has been helped, who has helped me along the way and continues to support me moving forward. And my work continues. Pete What a great story of gratitude and learning. And you know, sometimes, you know, one of the things that I was thinking of when you were talking about that was, you know, I met people that they go through life kind of with blinders on. And I think sometimes there's some developmental things or, you know, there's, you know, people

that have different ways they process data. But I remember I going through life early on that I would see everything and I pay attention. I'm really like, why does that do that? Why does that do that? Yes. I remember when I was driving down the road one day in the car with my business partner and best friend, I said to him, I said, did you notice that person on the bike do that? You know, just we just passed and there was something in the park to the left of us that

I'd seen as well. And he goes, no, there was a guy in the bike. I'm like, yeah, we just drove the car almost right past him. You know, there you had to see him not to run him over. And then I was like, hey, you know, look at that. Did you see the, the, the other thing in the park over there? And he goes, uh, I don't know. And he was like that for most of his life. And you know, he didn't, it was like, there wasn't anything learning going on. He was just going through life. I don't know, on autopilot. And, and

you know, so I've seen people like that through life, they autopilot through life. And, you know, maybe it's an IQ development thing. I don't know. There's, I think close to 50% of people don't have an internal monologue, which I find is interesting. Sometimes it's not a monologue, per se, they process pictures or video. But I was shocked to find that people don't have an inner model. Yeah. And also along that thought, a lot of people are just reacting as they go rather than responding. That's one of the things I talk about in my book as well. Response is critical and response is something that it doesn't have to be an hours and hours of evaluation.

Sometimes it can be just a flash that goes through, but you've kind of processed it. I mean, obviously, if you have a train coming at you or a car coming at you, you have to react. But you'll notice companies as well as countries, when they say, the country quickly reacted to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then shortly thereafter, you hear about the correction they needed to make, because that's what very often has to happen. Sometimes you do need to react, but there are implications to a reaction. And also there's this blindness around that reaction. There isn't the awareness that you're

speaking of. In fact, somebody who reviewed my book said, you know, I never thought about how I make my decisions. You've never thought about how he admitted it. It's right in the review. He says, you know, I review. It made him think. See, this is what I love when people say, you know, and different people will pick different things from the book that have struck them, but they'll say, it made me think. And I'm like, oh, that's honey over my heart. Because yes, that's what we want. We want people to think for themselves, not about telling them who to be or what to think, because people don't have to agree with what I'm saying. It's not even that they have to agree with me. It's the fact that it's taken them on their journey,

whether it's a short journey or our continuing journey in life, that type of exploration. And now more than ever, we're in a place now with so much transition, so much turmoil. There's so much more that we need to draw upon from within ourselves, because we're being bombarded by all sorts of information, pseudo information, accurate, inaccurate. It's very hard to make those discernments with the fullest of thinking processes. And then if you don't have that, then you're relying on somebody, somebody to tell you what to think, what you're supposed to think. No, no.

And it's understandable. We start out in life early on and we're taught to think, you know, people from the outside are telling us stuff, our parents, our teachers, our peers. We're learning everything from the outside and I discuss that in the book as well. It's not a bad thing because they need to help us get on the track in life. But sometimes we lose the richness of our own perception, our own creativity, our own awareness. If you've spent any time with little kids, and you may have, you know, it's amazing what they know, what they can see, even what they

understand. We think they don't. They get an awful lot because that mind is still so open. It hasn't been shut down into these little boxes, sit up straight, pay attention to your teacher, do your homework, you're going to get a good job, you're going to do this. That's all important in certain ways, but we don't want to lose the rest of it because then we spend the rest of our lives afterwards trying to reacquire that, try to reawaken that, trying to reintegrate that. And like I say now, more than ever, more than ever, we need to be those people who have the discernment and the perspective and the consciousness and the resilience. Pete Well, you're a great motivator as well and I'm sure a great speaker. So, thank you very much

for coming on. Give us your dot coms as we go also get me at, it's at D. Debne Shaw, and that's on Facebook. Silafontus is what is on Instagram. It's Silafontus LLC on Instagram. And on LinkedIn, it is just denouche-debne-shaw. It's very easy to find me in any of those places. And I look forward to connecting. Pete Well, Ms. Shaw, thank you for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Ms. Shaw Thank you so much for having me. Very much enjoyed it.

Pete Thank you. And thanks, Your Honor, for tuning in. Order per book wherever fine books are sold. Watch for future ones. How the Tin Man Found His Brain, One Attorney's Path for Perceptual Development. Everybody needs to start using their brain. It's 2025. We got too many people running around without them. So get the book and slap them upside the head and don't do this laughing. That's just metaphoric people.

Metaphoric, yeah. That's assault. She's an attorney. She knows that. Yeah. She's directing me. No smacking. No smacking. Don't encourage assault, Chris. I have been tempered by my attorney. Anyway, thanks so much for tuning in.

Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss. Chris Foss won the Tik Tok. And Ian, oh boy, all those crazy places on the internet. Anyway, be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time and keep learning. I think I'm out.