In this episode of the Origination Point Podcast, Bill de la Cruz speaks on his hiatus from his podcast series and the big changes that have been happening in his life.

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Origination Point Podcast

I’m back after an extended hiatus due to a large personal life change that I’ve been going through over the past few months. I’ve lived in the Colorado area for decades. I have created rituals, routines, work, friends, and all the things that you do to create a life and family. My life partner and best friend was on a journey to find her dream work. She found a job that she wanted outside of Portland, Oregon. We talked a lot about, “Do we want to move? What does it entail? How will we make this happen?” We decided to make the move. We took all of the things in our life, packed them up in a truck, packed up our lives, and moved out to the Portland, Oregon area in June 2019. It was a bigger transition than both of us even thought. I know in my last show, I was talking a lot about transition and how we move through change.

It’s interesting how, as a facilitator of this type of work with other people, it was easier to go out and facilitate other people through change than it was to facilitate myself through change. I had to feel and experience all of the things that came up by basically letting go of everything that I knew. All of the comfort of my routine, all of the ability to see my friends, my job, my colleagues, our kids, and grandkids. All of that, we had to let go of. I had been at a job with Denver Public Schools for almost ten years. I’m going there every day, 8 to 10 hours a day, 5 days a week. I chose to disrupt it all to support my life partner. The decision was challenging because we talked about all of the things that we were letting go of.

Yet, when we were in the thick of it and when the truck pulled away with all of our belongings and our cars, we had a couple of suitcases and we were on our way to the airport, it all got real. When we came out here, it was pretty challenging because we had no community, no friends, no routines, no doctor, no dentist, and no massage therapists. We had to start over fresh. I spent the first three months remodeling the house that we purchased. It is a nice house, but it just wasn’t us. I spent this time in a reclusive state basically working on the house, going to the hardware store, and going to talk to people about doing work in our house.

I literally spent three months by myself. While my wife was at work, running the school district, and creating a community out there, I was working inside. It was an interesting time because I had all types of feelings that I never expected. I felt a lack of confidence. I felt alone and sad. I had to go through all of these things pretty much on my own. I decided that I was going to do a lot of the work on our home myself. I had to think about what that meant because right after high school, I had a 25-year career in the construction trade. I had this logical mindset that I knew I could repair, build, and fix almost anything. When I worked for Denver Public Schools for almost ten years, that whole mindset shifted more into doing what I was asked to do.

Even though the routines that I had in Denver were getting boring and redundant, they were still comforting. It was a big challenge because had I stayed there, I was ready for a change. Choosing to leave, it was as though, “Now you’ve got to mix it all up and start all over again.” That’s what we did, and that’s what I’ve been doing in a few months and not doing this show. Even doing this show has been a challenge as well in that whole confidence level to say, “Stop procrastinating. Sit down and talk.” There are a lot of things that we need to talk about in terms of what’s happening in our community and in our countries with each other. The experiences that I’ve had in the last months are continuing to drive the work that I do.

Building Self-Awareness And Tapping Back To The Creative Mindset

Having personally gone through the things that I teach other people to do makes me realize how important this work is and how important it is to own my own process because that’s what I ask other people to do. I’m going to share a few things that I’ve gone through, and then connect them to this idea of building our self-awareness and building more of a growth mindset. I was with a friend of mine and we were talking about self-awareness. He had told me that he heard some research that said self-awareness was innate. We’re born with a level of self-awareness or without it, and it can never grow. I think that’s also been true of how people looked at intelligence that it was innate and could not be grown.

My own personal experience is that for many years in my life, I had a lack of self-awareness, and now I have a more attuned self-awareness, so I believe that it’s grown. Has my self-awareness always been there and it was masked by all of the routines in my daily life? Has it grown into something that I’m able to access more readily now about self-awareness because that’s been a big part of my journey the last few months?

When I worked for Denver Public Schools, I started there in about 2009 as a consultant, and then in 2012, I got a full-time job directing the diversity, equity, and inclusion work. I was excited about the position and I was very creative. I pushed the envelope. I created programs. I worked with people. I introduced ideas that for a lot of folks were new. I supported people. It was very exciting for a number of years.

In the last few years, a lot of that changed because there wasn’t a lot of movement at the upper levels of leadership from a systemic perspective. What I realized after I left there is my brain had basically gotten into a more compliance mindset where I wasn’t creative anymore. I didn’t have a lot of confidence. Some of that was because when I would push my ideas up to upper levels of leadership, I either would not hear anything back or what would come back was that’s not what we wanted.

I was being told how to do the work that I was hired to do. It wasn’t effective because much of it was based on doing things the way they’ve always been done. I didn’t realize what a detriment that was until I left that job. I had to think on my own and think through not just my own process of how I create this new life, I also have to shift my brain into this logical perspective around remodeling. How I look at a wall that I want to cut down and logically work through the steps to do that and then create something new.

At first, I was pretty lost. I had to push myself to step out of, “I don’t know how to do this anymore,” to “What do I have to do in shifting my thinking to be able to step back into this logical mindset and to be more creative?” When I look at the work that I did in our home, it was very creative. Looking at the tile and putting it down in a way that reflected the patterns that we wanted. Picking paint colors, cutting down walls, choosing countertops, and all of the things that go along with remodeling a house.

Losing that creativity in a job where I became systematized meant that I had to rebuild that part of my brain. It was a daily challenge because a lot of the things that I was doing were things that I hadn’t done in quite a while. I’ve been using my intellect around building programs and processes, and facilitating conversations about the behavioral and emotional impacts of race, class, and bias. All of a sudden, I’m in this mode of, “We have this house and it doesn’t look like or feel like us. I want to rip things apart and start all over again.” In some ways, it was exactly what was happening in my personal life where I was stripping wallpaper. I could look at that as stripping away the things in my own mind about how I saw myself over the last ten years in having to wipe off the glue on the walls.

 

What you have to know is that stripping wallpaper and my connection to my life go hand in hand because it was challenging work. You can’t just take the wallpaper off. You have to take the wallpaper off, and then you have to clean every little bit of glue off of there. If you don’t, when you paint it, it makes this weird pattern in the wall and it doesn’t look good. You have to go over every square inch of it. For those of you who have stripped wallpaper, you know what I’m talking about. It’s very tedious work and it will test your patience. If you don’t do it correctly, when you go to put the paint on, it looks terrible.

Lack Of Confidence

As I looked at my own life and where I was, in some ways, it was stripping away all this old stuff that I’d been doing for a long time and wiping it clean to start fresh. At that time, I can’t say that I was that enlightened about stripping wallpaper. I just saw it as a mess and a lot of hard work. Yet, I saw it as something that I needed to get done if I was going to create the beauty that I wanted in my house. As I worked myself through all of these projects, I had a lot of time to think about, “Who am I? What do I want to do? How do I tap back into this creative mindset? How did I get so stuck in being fixed in a lot of ways around my work, and even the ways that I saw myself?” I think it correlates to a lot of the work that I do with people.

For the last few years, I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to work with people all over this country, talking about issues of stereotypes, judgments, and biases. How they affect our lives, how they originate, how they’re created, and then how to deconstruct them. I’ve grown a lot through that process because as I work with people through their own stuff, I have to be cognizant of how I’m showing up at those times. I know there were times when I wasn’t fully engaged because of the things that were going on in my life. Fortunately, I didn’t have a whole lot of that type of work through this process of remodeling my house. In doing that though, I had to go pretty deep into this idea of total lack of confidence in what I was doing.

Not just the lack of confidence, but a feeling that I didn’t have it together, I wasn’t doing the right work, or how will I ever get through this? Those were hard feelings because, in certain spaces, I was very confident. Yet, in this space of change, I was not feeling like I had what it would take to pull this through. It takes tons of my energy to get up, do the work, keep doing it, mess something up, go back to the hardware store, get a new part, come back, and try it again until I finally got it right. That was one piece. This whole piece of confidence that I had lost because when I got into a compliance state at work, I just did what I was told. I didn’t do extra from that perspective. What I did extra was when people asked me to come and work with them, I would go and do it.

It wasn’t connected to the larger goals and systemic change. It was a way for me to continue to add value. Through this change process, I had to rebuild my own confidence and realize that I do have what it takes to be able to be successful and follow through on a project. As tedious as all those projects were, I finished them all and I got to a point where our house is pretty much done. It’s such a great feeling to start a project, finish it, and be able to sit back and look at what you’ve created. That helped me to at least feel better about having a home that reflected us and that was comfortable.

It's such a great feeling to start a project, finish it, and be able to sit back and look at what you've created. Share on X

Wanting Connection And To Create Impact

The other piece around being sad about everything that I was letting go of was more challenging because, during the months that I had my house to work on, I was distracted. I didn’t think about the fact that I didn’t have a regular job that I was going to or I couldn’t call one of my friends and go have lunch. I didn’t think about the fact that I wasn’t able to go see our kids or our grandkids to drive over and take them out, hang out with them, or pick them up for the weekend. That was sad, especially once I got done with my house projects because that created a big distraction.

I didn’t think about my family, my kids, and my grandkids as much as I did after I completed my projects in my house. It was especially bad on the weekends when I didn’t have a lot going on because the weekend was the time when my wife would be doing her projects and running around. I would take off and go hang out with my daughter’s family and our grandkids, play with them, then come back home. I missed that more than anything that I couldn’t reach out to our family and have that time with them. I’ve learned to appreciate FaceTime, although it’s not the same as being there and interacting with them. This sadness ran over into everything else that I was doing. My demeanor wasn’t joyful, outgoing, and uplifting because I didn’t feel that way.

The reason why I’m explaining all of this in such detail is that when about the origination point of these feelings, its genesis is in wanting to be more connected and have more of an impact in my life and in the things that I do. Also, realizing that family is important to me. I came from a family that wasn’t very connected and didn’t have strong relationships. In fact, the family life that I had was very dysfunctional. Out of our five kids, the most important thing for everybody was to turn eighteen and leave the house. That’s what everybody did. It was more around survival than it was around thriving. The origination point of this whole time of sadness and lack of confidence went all the way back to when I was young.

I had the narrative from my dad that I would never be successful and from my mom that we shouldn’t be proud of who we are. I don’t say those things to demean them. I say those things because that was real. I know that my parents did the best that they could. They were teaching and modeling to us what they knew and that was all that they could do. Yet I wanted more. I wanted to do different than what my parents did for me. When I felt sad, confused, and depressed in the last 4 or 5 months of this transition, I went back to some of those feelings of my youth and thought about that narrative of I wouldn’t be successful.

The other thing that I’m doing is I’m creating my own business. I don’t have as much work as I want right now. I have to fight that narrative, “I won’t be successful” and replace it with, “Everything comes in time. I need to be patient and allow whatever is going to be to happen.” The origination point of all of those feelings was between 9, 13, 15, and 20 years old. As these things came up, it surprised me that I went all the way back there and I started thinking about the interactions that I had with my dad, mom, brother, and sisters. It was crazy-making because I thought I had worked through most of those things. What I realized is that the work of growing and self-awareness never ends because there are always deeper places that we get to and new things that come up.

The work of growing and the work of self-awareness never really ends because there's always deeper places that we get to and new things that come up. Share on X

I had to come to terms with all those things. I had to do it in a place where my best friend was the person I am with and live with. Neither one of us have a friends group yet. It’s being created through interacting with people. It took us a long time to create that in Colorado. Again, it’s a matter of being patient and realizing that we are around a lot of well-meaning people. Over time, people who become our friends will start to show up.

There’s a huge amount of patience that goes along with this because I want my business to be successful right away. I wanted my house to be done in a month. My wife wanted things to be done quickly. We both had to sit back, talk to each other, and realize that we were in this together. We can either get frustrated with each other, which we did. We could figure out how to talk it through, which we did so that we could both work on it together because it was a shared level of frustration.

As I think more about what I’m doing, even this show was a piece of that procrastination that I’ve put off and thought about for weeks. I was like, “It’s time to sit down and do this.” I keep wondering, “Why do I keep putting it off?” Some of it goes back to, “Do I have a valuable message? How do I want to share this message?” Now I finally got to the point where I had to sit down, start to put my thoughts out, and connect them to something bigger than myself.

My ultimate goal in this work and my life on this planet is to make the world a more humane place. Connecting that to where I’ve been is important to me because I want to disrupt all of those false narratives. I don’t have what it takes to be successful. I’m not smart enough to do this work. I don’t have the drive or the creativity. I realized that I have everything that it takes to do this work, and I need to stop procrastinating and just get to it. I’m going to follow up some more about how this is connected to where we are as a country and a community, and some of the insights that I’ve gained in traveling across the country and talking to people.

 

We’re going to take a break and we have a sponsor that you will hear from. I want to remind you that this is a subscriber-driven show. If you resonate with this message, please share it with your friends and share it out into the world. Ask people to subscribe because we want to grow this community. There is a real opportunity here to build a community of people who are more self-aware, who are ready to take on all of the negativity and division that’s going on in our country and in our communities, and change it. The only way we can fight hate and divisiveness is through love and inclusiveness. We’re going to take a break and we’ll be back to share a little bit more about how this is connected to what we’re seeing in our country and communities.

Tell The People You Love And Care About You Love Them

While we were on the break, I was having some conversations. I thought of another origination point that I’ve experienced. I thought of it over the last few months with this big change, the loss, and some of my deficit thinking that came into my head. That was when I was thirteen years old. I had a sister who was my rock, protected me, shielded me, and supported me as a child. Especially when I was in trouble, she would help me.

When I was thirteen, she was over at our house. We were standing outside in the driveway talking about getting together, having lunch, and getting to know each other, and we said goodbye. The next morning, the phone rang at 6:00 in the morning, which is unusual. I got up and I could hear my mom screaming into the phone, “Call the police. Call the ambulance.” I heard her boyfriend screaming into the phone so loud that I could hear it. He said, “I think it’s too late. She’s cold.”

My sister died when I was 13 years old, just a couple of weeks shy of her 21st birthday. It made me think of two things the past few months when I was thinking about loss, change, and transition. One is that she was also subjected to a false narrative about who she was, how valuable she was, and what she had to offer. I believe that self-care wasn’t a part of her life because she died of acute bronchial pneumonia. Something that if you go to the doctor early enough, you get a prescription for and move on. She never did that. That never happened.

Another thing that I experienced at 13 years old that I didn’t learn until I was probably in my 30s is that if you love somebody and care about them, you should tell them while they’re still breathing. I don’t know if I ever told my sister that I loved her because “I love you” wasn’t a part of what our family said to each other. That haunted me for a long time in my life, realizing that not only do I not know if I ever said it to her. I don’t even know if I had it in me to say to her or anyone else that I love them.

If you love somebody and care about them, you should tell them while they're still breathing. Share on X

As I went through this transition, being away from my family, my kids, my friends, and my grandkids, it made me go all the way back to that origination point of the biggest loss that I’ve had in my life. I processed through that again and thought about it. I even made the connection of what does it have for me now that I’m going through this? What is the extended lesson, the bigger lesson, or the new thing that I need to think about?

Again, it reminded me that the people that I love and care about, I need to make sure that they know it. I need to make sure when they’re still breathing and can hear me, I tell them, “I love you. I care about you. I’ve learned so much from you. You’ve brought so much to my life. I appreciate you.” If you have friends, family, or relatives, and something is getting in the way of some of those words, I would ask you to consider the work that you need to do.

What I’ve learned through all of this in connection to where we are now as a country and as a community is that we live in the most divisive time that we’ve ever experienced as human beings. We have leaders on every side of the spectrum that say things with very little accountability. My belief is that leadership sets a standard. The divisiveness that we see is perpetuated by people who I know who have been hurt because hurt people hurt other people.

I think the connection of all of this that I’m sharing with you around the origination point, stereotyping, judgments, biases, and self-awareness is that I filled much of my young life with so much shame and blame for who I was. I had very little space to look at myself from a growth perspective. I had so many deficit-based narratives that I couldn’t get past even long enough to see any beauty and worth in myself. What I would say is that, if you look in the mirror and you feel shame or blame, do your best to find compassion and to be empathetic. As you think about what you’re feeling, reflect back to your life when you were a child, a teenager, and a young adult. Try your best to connect the feelings that you’re having now to something that occurred to you when you were younger.

 

The chances of what you’re feeling being connected to some other origination point are very high. I’ve not only experienced that in myself. I’ve experienced that in others who have shared stories with me about how when they made a connection in this work to their own origination point, they could start to do some healing for themselves. I truly believe that self-awareness is not innate. It might be stifled, buried, or covered up by pain and deficit narratives that we’re not able to see it. I also believe that for myself, self-awareness is something that I’ve uncovered, I’ve grown, and it’s an everyday process to be able to maintain. I know I’m never going to be there because I’ll always be a work in progress.

As we dive deeper into this show, I would love to hear from some of you about one of your origination point stories. Where have you had breakthroughs in realizing that what you’re feeling as an adult is connected to something that you experienced as a child? Asset-based narratives, whether you believe them or not, to begin with, are ways that can support growth, self-awareness, and breaking down the divisiveness that we see in our country, communities, schools, and churches. They begin to reconnect us as human beings. While there are many things that create differences, I know from my work with thousands of people over the years across this country that there are many more people who want to do.