S3E11 The Life Lessons from Motorcycle Gangs Edition with Susan Armstrong

James Nathan 0:54 Hello and welcome to The Only One Business Show with me your host James Nathan and I’ve got a fabulous guest for you today. All the way way from Toronto, Canada where she is waiting potentially for a flight home maybe not depends on what happens with the with the virus at the moment. This person has been working with and changing people’s lives for over 20 years, starting with her own 20 years of living on the streets, homelessness, addiction and abuse at the hands of a notorious motorcycle gang and not at all where you would expect to find behind a successful business transformation specialist. But they are the circumstances that taught her the many ways in which we are responsible for creating our own personality and our own personal and business reality.Specialising in transforming businesses through their people. She works with organisations to affect transformational change through creating emotionally intelligent leaders and individual contributors that reengage and motivate workplace performance. Please welcome Susan Armstrong, Susan. How are you?

 

Susan Armstrong 1:58 I’m very well James. How are you?

 

James Nathan 2:01 I’m great thank you. I said before I’m absolutely fantastic. I’ve got a cough and every time I cough in the street now people stare at me like I’m some kind of villain. But it’s been with me for about three months. So it’s it was one of those days but I’m so delighted we can get you on the line. How are things in Canada?

 

Susan Armstrong 2:22 Probably likely the same as they are in the UK. So streets are empty. All services are closed except essential services but like you said, it’s very funny. You go to the grocery store, you don’t hear a cough or a sneeze or a sniffle anywhere. It’s like people are terrified to have a sniffle in public. It’s quite funny. I think everybody’s holding it until they get out of the shop.

 

James Nathan 2:47 Well, you know, this is where we are at the moment but it will pass. It might take a bit more pain but it will certainly pass. You’ve got a fabulous background to start in. If you don’t don’t mind just going back in time a little bit and tell us sort of where you started and where you are now.

 

Susan Armstrong 3:05 Well, yeah, you know, it’s a it is a very interesting background. I don’t know I would say fabulous to live through it. However, on the other side of it, I learned a lot. So, I don’t know how much time do we have? But basically what happened is that when I was young, I grew up for various reasons, feeling that I wasn’t good enough. You know, I, in my opinion, in my mind, I didn’t fit in, you know, I wasn’t the same and fair enough in fact, I was always different. I had a different accent. I was really smart. So you know, that made me different from the other kids in school. It just…. I was very creative. So that made me different. So when in fact, there were a lot of things that made me different, but in my mind, I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t fit in, you know, I didn’t deserve to be on the planet and that’s very painful for child under 10 to carry and so when I was about 11, it was 10 or 11. And I remember this very clearly, I thought to myself, see, I was raised to believe that in order for people to like you, you have to be perfect. Well, there’s no such thing is perfect. So when I was a child, I was trying to be all things to all people all the time. And of course, that doesn’t work. So the stress that I was carrying, caused physical problems, health problems, and caused enormous problems. And I remember being 11 years old thinking, okay, you know, I’ve tried everything I possibly can. I’ve tried, and it doesn’t matter what I do, I am never going to be good enough. So I decided that I was just not going to play anymore. And I found alcohol to numb the pain. And of course, you know, when you’re 11 years old, and you want alcohol, there’s only my parents really didn’t drink. They grew up they were raised in pubs and so they just didn’t drink. So I had to get it out on the street. And that’s where it started. So I started hanging out with street gangs and then eventually graduated to motorcycle gangs. And of course, alcohol often leads to drugs. And I think, I think I was probably an alcoholic by the time I was 14, and so I spent 20 years living on the street, many of them as property of a motorcycle gang. So not the nice kind, the kind on the FBI most wanted list. So, I’ve been shot and stabbed and beaten and left on the side of the road for dead. And then it was 20 years, so I escaped the gang. And my father sent me an airline ticket and I managed to escape the gang. And what I didn’t realise is that it didn’t matter where I went, I took me with me. So even though I was no longer with the gang, and I no longer had them abusing me. I was now abusing myself because every time I looked in the mirror, all I could see was all the horrible things that happened in the past. And as a way to numb tha I would use drugs and alcohol to numb that. And then of course, I would do stupid things. And I would wake up in the morning, and I would have all kinds of regrets. And I could only ever see all the horrible things. I couldn’t see any kind of a future and it was just a vicious cycle. So I escaped the gang. And then I spent two years actively trying to kill myself. Obviously, I was a failure at that too.

 

James Nathan 6:31 Well, how can I? How can you get away from a gang? I mean, I don’t….. I have a concept of of what it must be like to be in a gang and kind of being controlled by them. But how do you actually get away?

 

Susan Armstrong 6:45 Wow, yeah, well, there’s a lot of television shows, movies, there’s been tonnes of books written about the particular time that I was there. So that’s a bit freaky, to pick up a book in an airport, you know, store to pick up a book. And start reading about your childhood. That’s it gets kind of weird. I engineered an escape. So I went to work at the bar that I worked at, I had my father courier, an airline ticket to the bar, to the manager. He locked it in the safe. On the day before the flight, I went to work as normal. I arranged with a regular customer that I was going to spend the night at their house and they were going to drive me to the bus station the next day. I was to take the bus to a different city and get on my flight. And all worked well until I got off the bus where I was, in the city where the airport was, and they were they were waiting for me, my abusive ex and one of the officers and I thought, okay, that’s it, they’re going to kill me. And I was okay with it. You know, they were going to kill me. And they drove me around for a while and then they drove me into the bowels of the airport and I thought okay, this is you know, this is where its gonna happen, but instead they just took my money, my phone numbers, they took anything that they could and they left me with my passport and my clothes and I flew away. It should have happened, it shouldn’t have happened. Nobody could quite understand how they let me go. Because they probably, you know, they’re historically they don’t, but they did.

 

James Nathan 8:25 And so you flew back and then what?

 

Susan Armstrong 8:31 Well, then I quickly realised how different I truly was because you have to imagine that being in a gang, being property of a gang like that is like being in a cult. So I was, you know, brainwashed, indoctrinated into this kind of mentality. And I realised very quickly how different I was from normal people. Now you can’t, your audience can’t see me but I’m using air quotes. Because that’s the term that I used to use was normal people, real people. And so it became very quickly apparent that I couldn’t open my mouth to speak because I had nothing in common with these people. And that led me then to you know, the decision that it just wasn’t worth living and it would put everybody’s mind at ease if I just, you know, were found dead somewhere. So I did stupid things. You know, I would walk home from the bar at three o’clock in the morning through a dangerous neighbourhood. I was actually hoping somebody would mug me and kill me, you know. I thought… I would try and overdose on drugs. It never worked. So I spent two years, just trying to kill myself.

 

James Nathan 9:48 And thankfully, you were you were, as you said, you weren’t very good at it. And you know, I’ve never heard anybody talk about attempted suicide like that, but I I cannot tell you how grateful I am that you were, you a bad at that. And you, you now work with businesses in a totally different way, which is a million miles from where you started? What took you from that? You know that two years of self abuse to working with with people?

 

Susan Armstrong 10:18 Yes, it looks like it’s a million miles away and when I tell this story and people see me, they can’t quite make the link to what I’m telling them and the person they know today. But if you think about it, it’s not really a million miles away. So I at one point, I…. one point I call it I quit drinking, now I didn’t but the point was I only had about four hangovers in a year. So for me that was quitting drinking. And then I had stopped working in bars because you know, my boyfriend and I had decided that probably wasn’t the best thing for me. And I was working in a lady’s clothing shop making minimum wage, and things were going pretty well, you know, and then one morning and I’ll never forget it. It was May, it was beautiful. I wasn’t doing to work until 12 o’clock, and I thought I’ll have a beer. Well, you know, I don’t need to finish that story…. all I remember that day is four o’clock in the afternoon accepting another case of 24 beers from the taxi driver. That’s about all I remember. I do know that I called the district manager for the shop that I worked at. It was a chain of shops, I called the district manager. I told her that I quit, that I was a horrible employee that I had been drinking on the job, that they deserve somebody better than me, and that this was my resignation. So I quit my job. I remember that. And the next morning, I woke up, and I reached beside my bed and I opened up a warm bottle of beer. And I took two sips. And I had this thought that if I continue the way I am, I’m going to die. But if I try and change my life, I’m probably going to die because nobody’s going to accept me because remember what I said in my mind, I was worthless, and certainly everything I had been through from the last two, you know, 20 years or so. really felt like I had a giant L for loser tattooed on my forehead. And that anytime somebody looked at me, they saw what I saw, I believed this, that they could see, you know, all the horrible things that were horrible life that I had lived. I believe that they could see that. And I was sure that if I tried to change my life that I would not be accepted. So I figured I’m gonna die either way. I can just roll over and die in a gutter somewhere and nobody would be surprised, or I can fight and I can die fighting. I’m a fighter, what can I say? I always have been. And so I chose to fight. And some interesting things happen. So we could change this show into a show about miracles. But interesting things happened. And through a series of what can only be described as miracles. I ended up in a recovery hospital in Marin County, California, which is just north of San Francisco, and I spent six weeks there. And for the first two weeks, I was convinced I, you know, I just it wasn’t gonna work, right? They were bank managers, they were lawyers that were dentists in there. They were all men. And then there was me. So again, I couldn’t even open my mouth, because the minute I did, you know, then I wouldn’t be accepted, even here. And they asked, you know, they insisted that you had to have a higher power, and I didn’t understand the concept. So after two weeks, I decided this wasn’t going to work. And I decided that I was going to escape. I was going to hitchhike back across the contrary to the gang, I knew they would kill me and I was okay with that. You know, I figured it was a fitting end. And then again, a series of small miracles happened, and I didn’t manage to escape but I did go to a meeting the night that I tried to escape, the day try to escape. I went to a meeting that night with all my other you know, I call them inmates. It’s not a patient. Yeah, I call it inmates but with the other patients, I went to a meeting and I sat in the very back crying, knowing that this wasn’t going to work, and I was going to escape. And at least I was going to try. And these meetings, they always had a draw, you know, you always got a ticket when you went in and they had a draw at the end. And all I remember sitting in the back crying, and this nice man who was a bank manager in the recovery hospital, he had kind of taken me under his wing and I remember him nudging me saying to Sue, you won, you won. Well, I’ve never won anything, James, anything in my life. And all I remember is, I was not crying. I was sobbing, heaving, sobbing, I could barely breathe. And I ran up to the front and I grabbed this book that I want, and I ran back across the road to my room, and of course, being the only woman I had my own room in rehab. And I just remember standing in this room, clutching my book, this book that I’d want to my chest that there’s actually a video of this. I’m I had a video about it on my website, clutching this book to my chest and I looked at the ceiling, I used to talk to the ceiling. When I was at my worst, I used to talk to the ceiling. And I used to say, Why won’t you let me die? Because, you know, I would try and overdose on pills and it didn’t work. And I would say to the ceiling, why won’t you let me die? You know, please just let me die. And I stood in this room clutching this book, and I looked at the ceiling. And I said, You’re not going to let me go, even if I want to, are you? And I heard a voice. And it said, no, Sue, we’re not. And you know, they say when you die, your life flashes in front of your eyes. I didn’t die. I didn’t die, but in a fraction of a second. I saw all of the times in my life or getting goosebumps telling this it happens every time I tell this. I saw all the times that I should have been dead. And I wasn’t. And in that instant, I knew that I wasn’t supposed to die, that I’d been given this life for a reason, and I think I slept that night, for the very first time in my entire life. I know I went to bed and I woke up in exactly the same position that I went to bed in. I woke up and I knew that I had a purpose. I knew I was being given a second chance. I didn’t know what that was. But I knew that I had to pay this back. And from that day forward, I understood the concept of a higher power. And I started to understand a lot more. And, again, you know, we could turn this into a show about miracles. About a week after that. Nobody knew where I was. My parents didn’t want me to go to rehab, they thought it was a scam. So I hadn’t told anybody where I was, I quit my job. I left nobody knew where I was. I got a letter from the district manager that I had called to quit my job. I got a letter about a week after this had happened. And it said, if this is the kind of employee you are when you’re having problems, then we do not accept your resignation. We’ve put you on sick leave, you’re being paid while you’re off, take as much time as you need. And when you’re ready, your job is you’re waiting for you

 

James Nathan 17:07 How fantastic.

 

Susan Armstrong 17:09 But you see what I mean about a series of these little miracles all pulling me along. And so, you know, we could speak a whole hour on this, but I saw one of these days, one of the days where, you know, I had made this shift, right, I had this realisation that I was never going to die. So now I had to figure out how to live the best life I couldn’t pay this back. And one day I was walking through the common room, and I saw this man on television now, I always say this man saved my life. And his name was John Bradshaw. We lost him a few years ago. I’m lucky enough that in the latter of part of his life, he and I became friends. But his name was John Bradshaw, and I saw him on television. And back in the 90s in North America, he was all over TV on what’s called PBS, you know, Public Broadcasting System and he was talking about breaking the family cycle. And that made me pay attention, that made me pay attention. And I thought that’s it, you know, that’s what I need to do. So I made a list of all of the things that I thought were wrong with me. Now, I also knew from this, that real people had something called self esteem. Now, I didn’t know what that was, but I knew I needed to get some of this. So I made a list of all of the things that I knew were wrong with me, you know, that I was learning through rehab. And through watching this PBS special, and when I left rehab, the very first thing I did was go and buy his book, it was $11 and 99 cents. And I went and bought his book because I, you know, I had this little bit of money now that my company had paid me and I bought this book, and it actually started my journey on what I call rewiring my brain. So, yeah, so you know, it looks like what I do today is completely different from where I came from, but it’s actually not. Because what started what I started to understand the first thing I understood was that we actually learn what we live. And then we live what we learned. So I was able to recognise through John’s book, all of the things that were passed along to me as I was growing up that were in fact wrong. So I realised that my belief system, about the world and about myself my belief system was actually wrong.

 

James Nathan 19:30 So that’s what psychologists would call is a thinking error then is it?

 

Susan Armstrong 19:33 Oh, yeah, absolutely. It my thinking was completely way off base. Everything I believed everything I thought I knew was completely wrong. So that started me on a journey. At first I went on free workshops with the WYCA. And that, you know, I had a little bit of money so I enrolled in evening classes in college. I didn’t enrol in university, because I was still convinced that they would turn me down. Yeah, because I was a lowlife. But eventually I enrolled In University and I said about what I call learning to be a real person. So this was a range of workshops from psychology, deviant behaviour, communication, group skills, you name it, right, anything I could to learn how to rewire my brain. But what made me different than everybody else was that while they were going to get a degree, I was going to change my life. So I would learn this, and then I would practice this every single day. You know, and I could tell you stories about I really this whole perfectionist thing I always say I’m a recovering people pleasing perfectionist, right? Yeah. So this perfectionist thing, I was terrified to make a mistake. Because, you know, I was quite sure that if I made a mistake, everybody would know I didn’t deserve to be on the planet, and I don’t know what I thought would happen, but something catastrophic was gonna happen. So, I and I, when I started to realise that this was wrong thinking I actually started to watch what happens when people make mistakes. And to my surprise, nothing happened. So what I made a mistake and I thought, okay, I’m going to go and tell somebody and see what happened. Nothing happened. This was amazing to me. So I did this, you know, when I learned new things, I actually put them in practice. It took about three years for me to realise that I was actually lucky. You see, I was gonna die. I didn’t have a choice but to implement this stuff in my life and change my life. I was gonna die if I didn’t. But there were all kinds of real people that I was encountering, who were suffering the same as I was, except they weren’t a drug addict or an alcoholic. They just really thought that this was all there was in life. And that’s when I made my decision that I needed to help these people I needed to share with them what I was learning, so they could help themselves so they could have a better life so they could see themselves in a different way and see the world in a different way. And see that there was more possible for them than what they even imagined. And so I was not quite five years sober. And, you know, there’s three people who’ve had a huge impact on my life. And my father was one, John Bradshaw was one. My father was another one, my abuser was the third. My father, who, you know, was my hero and rescued me. And I knew that as long as my father was alive, I would be okay. My father died. And it was eight days from diagnosis to death. And I almost took my own life. Yeah, I remember driving home from law school when he died, and I thought, well, then it doesn’t matter anymore. I might as well kill myself as well. And then the next thought in my head was no, that’s not how you do this. And I realised in that moment, the power of conditioning, I realised all of the conditioning, the beliefs, the thoughts I had got from my father. I realised how wrong they were. And in a strange sense, through my father’s death, I found a new freedom. Now, I don’t know if that makes any sense. But it was like I was free. Because you see, I grew up in a house where when you get a job, you retire from that job, when you get married, you stay married, whether you like the person or not. And so I stayed in abusive relationships, because that’s the way I was raised. That’s what I was raised to do. So with my father dying, there was this strange sort of freedom. And I took six weeks off work. I was working in a different job, I progressed through the ladder very quickly. And I was at this point director in a financial organisation and I had 225 people underneath me. But I took six weeks off because I knew if I didn’t grieve correctly, that it would, it had the power to ruin my life, to govern the rest of my life. So I took six weeks off, so I could grieve correctly, and part of that was recognising how every thing I did in my life was to make my father proud. And I actually didn’t want to work in a financial organisation that was so not who I was, you know, none of what I had done was who I was. So I made a list of all of my, I call them God given talents or the talents that I came to this planet with. I made a list of all of the things that I needed in a job to be happy, and I set about trying to find something, that mirror, that match, those two things together. And I ended up at human resources. I knew I had to specialise. I’d always done training as part of my job anyway, and I liked it and people seem to like me doing it. I’ve been speaking for four years by then two groups and people seem to enjoy it and I enjoyed it. And so I decided that I was going to do… I was going to make training my full time job, but if I was going to do that, the perfectionist was still running rampant. If I was going to do that I was going to be the best at that that I possibly could. So I took a little bit of the inheritance that my father left me and I went to university, adult education and instructional design, which meant that I learned how to design training programmes that changed people’s lives. And so I have spent all the years since then doing exactly that. But in businesses, so I started out with customer service and call centre.

 

James Nathan 25:28 Fantastic. That’s brings us beautifully full circle to, to my world, I guess. What what are you seeing in businesses? Now you go into companies and you you go into help. So they’re bringing you for the reason that they’ve decided to bring you in? What are you seeing what are the the kind of constant problems you’re seeing, or the most kind of normal thing you’re seeing in each of the businesses? Where’s the, where’s the common link?

 

Susan Armstrong 25:54 Well, how deep Do you want to get here, James?

 

James Nathan 25:57 Well let’s start at the start. We’ll see where we go.

 

Susan Armstrong 26:01 All right, because we can get very deep with this question. So here’s what I see. And I’ve seen for a long time, fear, right? So we still have, to some extent, a 1950s, 1960s mentality. Where we join a job, and we expect to be employed by that employer for the entire rest of our lives. So in my view, is only my opinion. But it’s the way for the last almost 30 years I’ve conducted my life. I have never wanted to hand my future, to hand my existence, to hand my safety and security over to somebody else. I want to be in control of that. And that’s why I have my own business. But we still have this 1950s, 1960s mentality where we expect that we’re going to be employed, and we’re going to continue to get a pay cheque. And it’s like, we’re handing our life over to this employer and that creates great fear these days. Because unlike the 50s, and 60s, nobody’s job is secure. You see back in the day, I’m not young. Back in the day if you got a job with a government or a union got a job for life, not anymore. These things are outsourced, you know, so organisations can’t promise a job six weeks from now, let alone six months, six years or 16 years. And that creates fear within employees.

 

James Nathan 27:19 But you say we’ve got that mentality that 50s and 60s mentality but surely that’s changing? I mean, generations are obviously all different. But with the with the younger generation? I don’t think there is that expectation is there?

 

Susan Armstrong 27:34 Well, there there isn’t with if you look at Millennials and Gen X, there is not that expectation or sorry, millennials and Gen Y, there is not that expectation. But if you look at the newest generation who’s coming into the workforce now, the gen Z’s surprisingly, the research on Gen Z’s says they are looking for lifetime employment, so it’s almost back to traditionalist, value system with a Gen Z. So it’s a very interesting thing. They are looking for a company that they can go and work for, and have that safety and security. So it’s quite interesting. The generations, but organisations haven’t, the bigger organisations, the older ones haven’t necessarily made the transition in their policies that would accommodate the younger employees who are looking for flexibility, who are looking for contract work, were working for flex hours and work from home. So it creates this fear. So that’s one thing I see. And that fear and this is a big issue. And again, I’m not talking necessarily you know, your small companies, but in the bigger the medium to large companies, you see this a lot. This fear creates what I call a manager centric organisation, not a customer centric one. So instead of doing what’s good for the customer, they do what their manager tells them to do, but their manager often is not in touch with the customer base. You see the problem?

 

James Nathan 29:03 Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.

 

Susan Armstrong 29:06 And the second big problem that I see is it’s a lack of emotional intelligence. So it’s a lack of self awareness. We seem to have a culture these days where it’s, you know, me, me, me. Yeah, it’s, you know, I want this. I, you know, I want that, I’m going to do this. There’s very little and my language, psychologists call it all kinds of things. They call it view of the world. They call it mental model. I’m a psychologist friend who calls it scaffolding. I call it central universe, where we really truly believe the world revolves around us. And the biggest problem is this lack of self awareness, this lack of understanding that because we could, we’re completely unaware of our behaviour and how our behaviour affects other people. So if you want to get really strange we can bring the Coronavirus into this.

 

James Nathan 29:58 Sorry, what I was going It was you mentioned that kind of businesses with that lack of flexibility that lack of, you know, not being able to adapt to what people want. Well, guess what, they have to now because there’s no choice, it’s interesting to watch isn’t it?

 

Susan Armstrong 30:17 Yeah, and you can bring that in and another way we can bring in this Coronavirus thing in another way, not only our businesses having to go, oh dear, and they’re having to make these accommodations now. But think about what’s happening in society. That me, me, me with the social isolation that me, me, me, is somewhat going away. Self isolation is forcing us to recognise the impact of our behaviour on other people. It’s forcing us to recognise through all the graphics that we’re seeing on the news, how you know, we might think that we’re okay and we just have a cold, not knowing if we have Coronavirus or not, but we go to the to the shop, we sneeze or cough. We infect three other people. They go out, they sneeze or cough, they each infect three other people. So it’s causing us to recognise the impact of our own behaviour on others. And it’s causing us to start to think about our neighbours and our grandparents and our parents. And so we’re not the centre of the universe anymore. Our universe has now widened to consider our family, our colleagues, the strangers that we meet in the store and staying six feet away. So the Coronavirus is it’s actually it’s, it’s almost like a, it’s a way overcorrection. Okay, so if you think that we swung really far to the right hand side, it’s a way overcorrection to the left, but somehow we’ll find our way back into the middle.

 

James Nathan 31:45 Well, I really, really hope and that’s going to be the outcome. I’m unfortunately am quite cynical about people, particularly when it comes to business. Although I’m seeing a lot of meeting a lot of fabulous businesses who work in a much more human way. But I do, you know, I think we were talking about this before we went on air, the community that’s coming out of this the helping of each other I think is absolutely amazing. And I don’t think, you know, you hear all the time people saying isn’t it nice how we’re all talking to each other again, isn’t it nice how we’re all working together again. It’ll be really interesting to to play this podcast back in 12 months time and see where we are. Because I hope we’re in the middle too I hope we don’t go back to where we were. I hope we learn from the from the the you know, what’s going on around us and that some of that fear disappears and some of that centric human, personal centric stuff the narcissistic kind of style, it won’t go away but if it reduces that will be superb.

 

Susan Armstrong 32:46 Yeah, no, I agree.

 

James Nathan 32:48 I could chat to you all day about this stuff. Susan, and I probably would have let myself as I say this thing all the time, but could you leave us with your big idea, your one big thing, the thing that people could do today to make their businesses and their lives benefits today and better for the years to come. What would that be?

 

Susan Armstrong 33:07 I can. To take exactly what we were just talking about, about, you know, we’re all talking to each other. We’re thinking about other people’s needs. We’re paying attention to what we’re doing and the impact that has on other people. That’s what we need to take into our businesses. Because that James always has been the essence of good service. So whether you like it or not, every single person in an organisation is in service. They might never ever see an external customer, but they are serving someone who served someone who served someone who does. So if we can take the exact mentality that we have now of starting to be aware of our surroundings, aware of other people aware of the wants and the needs of other people. That’s truly the essence of service. That’s what we need to carry back into our organisation. and not let that go.

 

James Nathan 34:03 Susan, that is absolutely fantastic. Thank you so, so much been lovely chatting with you.

 

Susan Armstrong 34:08 Thank you for having me.