Lori Adams-Brown on When Leaders Become Bullies: Lessons from the Oval Office Zelensky Ambush

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Welcome to the A World of Difference podcast. I'm Lori Adams Brown and this is a podcast for those who are different and want to make a difference. Does it feel like your whole world has just been turned upside down? Are you having trouble remembering to drink water or eat? Does it feel like you're walking in quicksand?

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You can't even concentrate on normal things. You may be walking through trauma. There may be a crisis in your life or in your government that is causing you to feel that you don't know how to put one foot in front of the other. I have walked through times like this and it really has helped me to walk with a professional therapist through these times. I highly encourage you to find a therapist and@betterhelp.com difference you can get 10% off your first month today.

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I myself have benefited from a therapist I've worked with there. You can message your therapist in between sessions, go to extra courses around grief or trauma, find support groups, and also also really have a person to help you walk through some of the most difficult parts of your life right now. You can get 10% off your first month today by going to www.betterhelp.com difference, you deserve to heal. Here we are at the beginning of season 11, and I had a completely different episode plan to launch this season with the new rebranding of A World of Difference podcast, where I am renewing with more resolve my commitment to show up as an authentic leader who speaks up, who uses my voice, who tries my very best to do the right thing at the right time and brings people on the show who are also doing the same. And I don't know if it's just becoming a woman of a certain age because of the times we find ourselves in geopolitically, because of all of the narratives that seem to be crashing down in ways we I didn't see coming at this point in my life and the way the world has gone.

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But here we are at the beginning of Women's History Month, and I can't say that it's gone the direction I expected in 2025 for us to be celebrating Women's History Month and seeing some of the narratives around all that we're seeing in the US and globally and how important it is to bring our different perspectives around the table, to make a difference with each other, to show up with our unique perspectives and let them be known. We absolutely need different perspectives right now in the boardrooms, in oval offices of the White House of the United States. All right, guys. I had not planned on doing this. But I'm here in Taipei and I have been watching the news.

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I don't speak Mandarin, but I've been seeing things on the news hearing. I've watched Singaporean news coverage of it. Channel News Asia, which was one of the favorite TV stations I used to watch there. My husband was on there one time. We were doing tsunami relief, and we lived in Indonesia at the time.

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We weren't even living in Singapore, but I was visiting Singapore and saw him on there when I was in the airport with our little baby at the time. A while ago, 20 years ago now. Anyway, watching the news here from different perspectives. There's British news channels, there's Taiwanese news channels, there's an American one. All the different coverage of what happened in the Oval Office the other day with the honorable President of the Ukraine, President Zelensky, and with the absolutely shameful and disgraceful way he was treated with bullying, mobbing, an ambush meeting, coercive control, intimidation, belittling, gaslighting Darvo.

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All that he experienced in that Oval Office by the leaders of our nation. And no, I didn't vote for them. But I'm a US Citizen, and I feel responsible in that way, in a democracy to. I know many of you are speaking up. It takes all of us to make a difference.

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So even though I had a different episode planned to start off season 11 with, well, wouldn't you know, it's coming out with a bang. Because as I watched that meeting, and it was not easy to do, but thank God for therapists, I've gone through EMDR therapy for my mobbing ambush meeting, which was full of a lot of the same tactics. You guys, the playbook is absolutely predictable and even cliche. My gosh, it's unoriginal. Trump, you were so unoriginal with your playbook and that just.

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You did all the things. Check, check, check, check. It's actually a case study and gaslighting, if you just want to watch that. Starting about halfway through that video. I can't remember if it starts around minute 30 or whatever, but it's clear this was a planned attack.

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Vance kind of kicks it off in his own little way, making Zelensky look like he's somehow the abuser. And yet he's a victim of an invasion by Russia into the land of his country. And they make him seem like this horrible human being for not being grateful. All these same tactics worked on me or were used against me. They didn't all work.

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But I'm here to unpack this today because. All right, you guys, listen up. Here's the question. Have you ever walked into a meeting and thinking it was going to be professional, maybe even productive, only to realize, oh no, you just stepped into an ambush where your character is under attack, your voice is shut down and your reality is twisted in real time? Well, that's exactly what happened to Volodymyr Zelensky.

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The honorable, the outstanding, the remarkable, the brave, the courageous, the people first leader of the Ukraine in the Oval Office recently coming in expecting to find a peace deal for his people. And he found an ambush. And that's exactly what happened to me at echo Church on December 20, 2020. Not the same power dynamics, obviously. I have no concept of what it would be like to sit in the Oval Office of the White House with the most powerful man in the world and his gang who mobbed him that day.

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I don't know that, but I know a fraction of that power. The religious power, the abuse, the spiritual abuse, the psychological abuse. So let's talk about it. Because this isn't just about politics or church leadership or workplace abuse, workplace bullies, toxic bosses. This is about power control and the tactics abusive leaders use to silence people.

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They are absolutely predictable, unfortunately. Let's get into it.

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So Zelensky walks into the Oval Office expecting to have a discussion about Ukraine's security. Instead he gets the full on psychological warfare treatment. Bullying, intimidation, coercion. This is your trigger warning because we're going to get into it. I have my cup of tea, my oolong tea here in Taipei this morning.

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It's about midday for me recording this. And I went to the hot springs yesterday in Beitou. It's a short cab ride or MRT ride. I did both. I took a cab there, got into the hot springs that I reserved.

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Oh my gosh, a little private hot spring moment for about 90 minutes. And it really helped me process all that's going on in the world right now. It's a lot for those of us who've had workplace bullying experiences of mobbing, of ambush meetings, of intimidation, belittling, gaslighting, darvo, all of the tactics we saw. If this has re triggered you in any way, which it may have, I just. It's fine to pause this and take it in chunks.

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Listen later. Take care of yourself. The somatic practices I've learned from therapy that have helped me to this day to make sure I'm doing okay, that's part of the self leadership. That's part of the self awareness. One of the most difficult aspects of my global leadership.

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Key leadership program that I have developed to which is why I'm here this week. It's the weekend here when I'm recording this, but I've been here last week and then a little bit into early next week where I'm working here with the Silicon Valley based company where I work and training global leaders in my company about psychological safety. I am doing the work within a global business to try to do the anti bullying, anti mobbing, anti intimidation and coercion and all the things that we saw happen in the Oval Office of the White House of the United States of America, a country where I'm a citizen and to see this at the highest seats of power, yeah, it deserves a conversation. But if that was true re triggering for you in any way, please feel free to pause and this is your trigger warning. Take care of yourself.

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I'm taking care of myself. Doing some walking around the city yesterday and today over the weekend, the EMDR therapy of bilateral movement, which either you can do tapping your butterfly tapping on your left and right shoulders or sometimes even just walking the left and right movement of that can be really helpful. All of this is helping me right now. So I hope you find some somatic practices that work for you, that help you even as we have this discussion. But I think it's important to have it.

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This podcast exists to make a difference for us, for each other. For it's made a world of difference for me to know my body keeps the score from that particular meeting I had in December 21, 2020 in a workplace environment. I've done so much healing. Thank God for emdr, thank God for therapists, thank God for tea and museums and all the right brain activities that have helped me heal. Even yesterday, visiting the Beitou Museum here and learning all about the Japanese tea ceremony, which feels complicated because of the colonization here and the way I've lived in other countries such as Singapore and Indonesia that dealt with Japanese colonization for a particular time.

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And it was a dark part of their history. And yet, like with anything, bosses, toxic bosses, bullies in the workplace are often nuanced too. Whether a person, an individual or a system such as colonization or an empire or a business or a faith based environment like a megachurch or a political party or government. People as individuals have personalities that are nuanced, interactions that are nuanced, and organizations and systems made up of people are also nuanced with both good and bad. So the Japanese tea ceremony is full of serenity and elegance and beauty, and this intimate moment of serving tea to someone with Such humility and care and minimalism and mindfulness at the same time, the colonization by Japanese was harsh in a lot of places in Asia.

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And so that's hard to unpack. It's hard to unpack and hold space for both of those things. So today, whether you have a cup of tea and you're leaning into the beauty and the elegance of a Japanese tea ceremony to help you be mindful and make your body feel safe and ready for this conversation or whatever tools you're using, just know that let's unpack the nuance because it matters. And even though Marvel superheroes are the good guys and the bad guys are just clearly bad guys in life, it's not usually like that. There's usually a lot more nuance.

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If it was all bad, we wouldn't fall for it, would we? We wouldn't take that job at that place that had all the red flags. We wouldn't go into that meeting where we were going to be ambushed. But we do because we have hope and we see the good. And that's why this is hard.

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And that's why I have a lot of compassion and empathy for Zelensky going into that meeting and absolutely do not blame him at all because was treated in such a horrific and horrendous way that we saw play out on the world stage and the whole world is talking about it on the news. Whatever news channel I go to, let's unpack it. Zelensky walks into that meeting thinking they're talking about Ukraine's security and instead he gets the full on psychological warfare treatment, bullying, intimidation, coercion. Trump, flanked by J.D. vance and him, doesn't engage in a discussion.

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He engages in a takedown, a breakdown of Zelensky. He wants Zelensky to feel small, powerless and completely alone. I know that feeling. I was made to feel that way. And it worked for a little bit on me in December 21, 2020, being flanked on both sides and gaslit.

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Because when I walked into that meeting with Andy Wood, pastor of Echo Church at the time current pastor of Saddleback Church in Southern California, and Felipe Santos, who was currently the executive pastor of Echo Church, now is the lead pastor of Echo Church since Andy left. And they've been both buddies since high school, I don't know how many people they've mobbed and intimidated and coerced and belittled and harassed and mobbed and ambushed and bullied in the way that I was done in that office. I've had so many stories come to me by those same Men in multiple churches, but also there are many NDAs that cover it up with hush money, etc. So when I walked into my meeting December 21, 2020, which you can hear all about in the Our Story series, starting with episode 100 where I talk about the early process of working there, and then in episode 102, it's a series of six episodes where I unpack the whole kind of experience. Episode 102, called the Gaslighting and the Flanking is where I talk about this mobbing and abusive meeting, which I can talk about now without being re triggered because I've done a lot of emdr.

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Thank God once again for this therapy and the somatic practices like dbt, a lot of mindfulness that have really helped me do the work on my neurological system, which, when you understand psychological warfare, it's the neurological system that is under attack. So I was met with an orchestrated attack by these two men. A calculated attempt to make me doubt myself, force me into submission and silence me. So let's break this down together. I've learned some patterns from my own story, from all the stories of these two men who've done this to many other people, most of which aren't public because of NDAs, but are happening even now at Saddleback, and then have happened previously at Echo Church and then in other churches and spaces ministries where these two men have worked.

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Let's break it down. What is an ambush? So Zelenskyy thought he was walking into a serious conversation. Why would he not? These are presidents of nations.

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They're supposed to be talking about peacemaking. Instead, he was walking into a. He didn't see it coming. I didn't see it coming. Trump and Vance had already decided they were going to corner him, pressure him, and make him feel like he had no way out.

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That's a power of play. Trump calls it the art of the deal. I call it the art of the con. It's not leadership, it's manipulation. These are master manipulators.

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They manipulate in ways we could never imagine. Please do a little bit of study on narcissistic abuse and you'll start to see the levels of master manipulation that the majority of us who don't, you know, struggle with narcissism would never consider manipulating people in such a way to be so transactional, so heartless, so cold, so cruel to use people, to run over them, to step on them, to get to the top and build an empire and have power for ourselves. Most of us would never fathom going to the depths that These individuals do. The same thing happened to me. I walked into what I thought was a conversation at Echo Church.

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Instead it was a pre planned ambush. These two men weren't there to listen, they were there to break me down. This is a tactic I believe get passed on in megachurch pastors. In that little world, probably between politicians. Narcissists attract narcissists, they say.

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Therefore, this is obviously what we see with Trump and Elon Musk, even Vladimir Putin, the bromance going on there, it's just, they just love each other. Even Andy Wood, the man who have psychologically and spiritually abused me, bullied me, mobbing me, all that. He came out and endorsed President Trump on a couple of occasions. They really admire this man because they see this admiration for the level of manipulation, I guess, that they're willing to do to get, to grow and get more numbers or get a bigger empire. Get, I don't know.

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Trump's so obsessed with numbers of his crowd sizes and even if you watch the video, he keeps bringing up his old political opponents. I was shocked that he was bringing up Hillary Clinton. It's like, good grief, leave it alone, right? And also Biden, even Biden's son, Hunter Biden, he brought up Obama. It's like he's still competing with them.

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It's like you're the president, I don't know, trying to, I don't know, somehow see himself as the victim, blame other people, not be willing to look inside. It's, it's really sad that they are not doing the inside work. It's actually, if I can separate it out, I have a lot of compassion for it. What went wrong, what happened to Trump and Elon Musk and Andy Wood and Felipe Santos that made them like this. It's sad, it's pathetic, but also sad to just not look inside and be able to be self aware and do that hard work instead, always looking elsewhere.

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The amount of work I've had to do on myself has been very hard. It's been vulnerable. It's hard to admit you were duped. Hard to admit you moved your family across the world for a job that was a toxic work environment that really made things very hard for our family. And also walking through Covid at the same time and being in another country and all that happened, that's a hard thing to admit, that you had betrayal blindness, that you didn't see it, that people in your workplace came and tried to tell you and you couldn't process it.

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The cognitive dissonance was too hard. And you were afraid I was. That I've had to process all of that. It's not fun, it's not easy. But there's been so much freedom and inner healing and the ability to look at this situation in the Oval Office with more congruence and understanding myself and the mistakes that I made by not seeing what was a very psychologically typical experience of betrayal, blindness by somebody that I thought was treating me well.

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And he was, until he wasn't. So that is not easy to unpack. And I've done so much work on myself to do that. And how sad that these men in this office, in the highest seats of power have not done the work on themselves and somehow see themselves as a victim of this man who's the president of Ukraine. His actual country is at war because an actual large superpower with a huge military invaded his country.

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And somehow the people like Trump see themselves as the victims. But we're going to talk about bullying and intimidation. This is the second part that's such a parallel lessons I learned in my experience and from listening to many stories of workplace abuse with the ones who also abused me and also various ones that are similar in similar situations. And doing a lot of research. Books by Dr.

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Chuck de Groat, When Narcissism Comes to Church. Also his latest book, Healing what's Within all of this to help us understand from a therapeutic and research based approach how all this happens in a system and an individual. And also Dr. Wade Mullin's work on his book Something's Not Right, where he's done incredible amount of also, you know, PhD research on this. Both of these two men have been on the show.

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Dr. Chuck de Groot has been on twice. And Dr. Wade Mullen, I got to meet him in person. These are just authentic leaders really trying to make a difference out there.

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And so I do recommend their work. You can check out their episodes previously on the podcast let's. Let's unpack the bullying and intimidation. Right? So Trump towers, pun intended.

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Trump towers over Zelensky, throwing out veiled threats, making him question his own standing, isolating him from allies. This isn't a conversation, it's dominance. That's clear and plain and simple. I get this because the same thing was done to me. Sitting across from me, this man, it's his office.

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He founded this mega church. He's the leader of this church. He demands loyalty. He rules with power by fear. He's sitting across from me, leaning in, aggressively, dismissing my words, making it clear I had no power in that room.

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That's why I ended up having an. A dissociative experience from the trauma. So if we understand fight and flight and freeze and fawn and fold and all these different, what I call f words that Dr. Choak Degro also unpacked in great detail on our most recent episode with him last year, which was one of our most downloaded episodes, where he unpacks more of the what's going on in the neurological system. And we have like, he goes into attachment theories and things like that.

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But we all can be. We have two people in the same situation. There could be a car accident right out here on the street right now. And they would want different witnesses, perspectives because people react differently to that trauma. Our neurological systems do different things in the same situation.

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And so it's normal for that to happen. As human beings, our neurological systems are unique to us, as unique as our fingerprint because of our own previous traumas. Our personal experiences of our bodies work walking in around this world. Even my twins, born six minutes apart, have very different filters. They had the same teacher in kindergarten, but different teachers from first grade onward.

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So there's that they have different personalities. One's more right brain, one's more left brain. All of this to say same mother tongue, same family, same countries, same home. Very different filters. So we all have very different filters.

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So let's just not judge each other on how we would have reacted based on our previous experience of what Zelenskyy did or didn't do. That's victim blaming. He is his own person. He was in an impossible situation. Clearly his neurological system was being attacked from the moment he got out of the car when Trump belittled him about his clothing.

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And for real, the President of the United States at his house in the biggest superpower in the world with the largest military, dares to say to a president of an allied nation or any nation or any human being as he gets out of the car that he belittles him because of his clothing while his country is at war. He's portraying that this isn't a time for suits, which, by the way, if you've not seen the photos, Winston Churchill did the very exact same thing. Those are circulating now. When the, you know, England was experiencing war from. And he was coming to the, to the White House to talk about our efforts to help out.

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And what to mention his clothing is just the most. What are we in, like seventh grade? I mean, seriously, the arrested development of Trump in this situation was horrifying. But if you've ever been in a Situation like that, where you've been belittled from the get go or even throughout a meeting like this, you know what it feels like, and it's awful. And your neurological system is scanning the room at all times to say, ask if this is safe.

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And if it's not safe, you're likely to have a trauma response of various types. It could be like mine, a dissociative experience where, you know, we have, like I said, all these different F words. Mine was more of a freeze at times. Sometimes I was fawning, sometimes I was. I didn't flight.

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I kind of wish I had. But victims, we often blame ourselves in that situation. I wish I had done this. I wish I had done that. But the reality is you're in trauma, and making decisions is not easy in that situation because your neurological system is under attack.

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And thank God our systems help us react because that's what it was designed to do. Belittling and harassment is no joke. And I don't care who you are, you can be a strong leader of a nation, a military expert, but this is not easy to walk through because we're humans and we are designed to have connection. And when that is broken in the worst possible way, when you're expecting it, it's very, very hard. So in the Oval Office, Zelenskyy was treated like a nuisance, like his concerns were an inconvenience to Trump's bigger agenda.

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Vance backed it up, reinforcing the harassment. Just like a little Scooby Doo and Scrappy, too. Just, you know, standing by his bully. And it's pathetic. That's what happened to me at Echo Church.

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I was talked over. My experience was minimized. My credibility was attacked. It was designed to make me feel like I was nothing. It was designed to make me feel like nothing.

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And so was this situation with Zelensky. All right, let's talk about gaslighting in Darvo. Makes you question your own reality. Makes you feel crazy. It's telling you what you think instead of letting you express what you think or believing what you think.

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It's telling you what you feel instead of letting you feel your feelings and express that you're feeling that. And isn't it just awful when Trump said, don't tell me how to feel? This is the Darvo moment. That's not at all what Zelensky was doing, but Trump was doing that. Trump was telling Zelensky what to think and how he framing him in a way that wasn't true about him.

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It's crazy. Making it's designed to make you feel crazy, just like the movie. That's where the word gaslighting comes from, where it says husband who's been telling his wife that this other thing is actually happening and it's not true and she thinks she's crazy. It was designed to make you think you're crazy. Darvo.

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It stands for deny attack and reverse victim Offender. Makes you feel like the abuser is actually the victim and they play this whole different role. So the problem gets flipped, they flip the script and suddenly the victim is the one being blamed. There's a moment where J.D. vance kind of just goes for it with Zelensky and that meeting.

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It's like, I don't know, 30 or so minutes in and he just starts attacking Zelensky, like, you're ungrateful and I can't, you know, the audacity of you coming in here. And it's like, wait, what? So they just blame him when he's actually the victim of Russia invading Ukraine. Do you know the difference of power dynamics of that? It's.

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It's unbelievable. Trump denies any wrongdoing he attacks is Zelensky's credibility, which is something they do, made it seem like Ukraine was the problem. I know this because these two men, Andy and Felipe, they did the same to me and to many others. They denied the toxic culture I was calling out. They attacked my integrity.

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They positioned themselves as the victims as if I was the one causing division, as if I was this tool of Satan and spiritual warfare and Jezebel against Andy Wood for Easter time. And this is part of the narrative they often use is that whoever is this, quote, unquote disgruntled employee that they've belittled and broken down and mobbed and ambushed in these closed door office meetings that when they come out and try to express what happened, they'll attack their character. For me, they went to the staff and told everybody that I had gained weight, which is just completely inappropriate. And the fact that they're just pointing that out about my body is so icky. And it made everybody, every woman, especially in the room, just think, oh, gosh, I mean, it was abusive to them for them to even have to hear that in a staff meeting.

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But also it was a way of veiled threat kind of to say, if you cross us, this is what we'll do. We'll do a smear campaign against you. Which they did. They called multiple pastors around the nation, people I don't even know. They called them up and said, hey, we had this woman pastor, and we had to let her go and, you know, made it look like it was Darvo in the conversation.

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I only know this because a few of these men actually came to me, and I didn't even know who some of them were. Some of them flew across the country to have coffee with me or wanted to share their story or just, you know, have lunch. Literally, a couple men I've actually met in person, they wanted to fly off over and talk to me and just say they believed me, even though they didn't know me. Because isn't it interesting when somebody starts a smear campaign, some people out there are smart enough to realize what's happening. And so they were trying to control the narrative with a false narrative about me and discredit me as a person and blackball me from other jobs and all kinds of crazy, wild stuff that happens with narcissistic abuse, if you've experienced it, you know, so you'll see this now on, you know, Trump doing, like, little interviews with the media.

00:27:13
He came straight out of that meeting at the White House, and he was about to fly off on his helicopter to Mar a Lago to go golfing while Vladimir Zelensky has to go back and deal with a war zone. My gosh, he talked to the press and made Zelensky out to be this ungrateful man who doesn't want peace. He's gaslighting us. He's controlling the narrative with a false narrative to try to discredit this whistleblower. It's not.

00:27:38
Okay. Coercive control and the payoff for silence. Let's unpack that. Trump dangled aid in front of Zelensky, making it clear that if he just played along, he'd be rewarded. That's coercion.

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That's abuse of power. Saying if you've been in an abusive home. Some people have expressed it this way with, like, a narcissistic parent, where they've been given help, maybe monetary help from their parent, and then their parent will come later and say, oh, I need you to pay that back. But that wasn't a part of the deal. Right?

00:28:06
And so that's abusive. That's inappropriate. And so Trump is going and saying, oh, we gave you all this help out of the goodwill of the American people. And now he's saying, you need to pay it back by letting us take your minerals from your land. The way he talked about the Ukrainian land gave me the ick.

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I'm sorry. It's transactional the way he talks about people, but Even the land, everything is to be exploited, to be taken, to be, you know, collected by him for his own personal gain. It's really disturbing. At the church where I worked and these two abusive, narcissistic leaders who abused me and others, they wanted my silence, my compliance, my willingness to look the other way in exchange for keeping my position, or not just position, but, like, reputation. My position was gone, but they allowed me, I guess, a version of the opportunity to keep my reputation by signing an NDA tied to severance with hush money.

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So they said, we won't talk bad about you if you don't talk bad about us. But I knew they would never abide that. Kind of like Zelenskyy was saying, this peace agreement that you're offering, which I know is not solid because you're not talking about security protections. He'd mentioned how many times that Putin had violated a ceasefire. And he knew that, like you trust the actions, not the words.

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The words mean nothing. So he was smart enough and experienced enough to know better. And I don't have near the experience he does, but I knew better in that situation, it was not worth the hush money because they weren't going to abide by it anyway. False attacks on character. Trump tried to make Zelensky look weak, untrustworthy, like he wasn't a leader worth respecting, that he was ungrateful, that he didn't want peace, that he was out for himself.

00:29:39
It's such a classic abuser move. Attack the credibility of the person standing in your way is abuser 101. This was done to me. These two pastors spread false narratives questioning my character, making it seem like I was the issue when all I was doing was standing up for what was right. These kind of narcissistic, abusive men like this, they can't handle somebody like Zelensky with such character, who's a people first leader.

00:30:03
They actually don't see it coming. There's so much projection going on, which is incredibly sad. They're great at master manipulation in ways that most of us could never fathom or would ever consider. But what they often don't see coming is a truly authentic leader who can't be bought, who cares enough about others to sacrifice themselves in a particular way. This is something they have no concept of, and they don't see it coming because there's so much projection.

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They just assume the person that they're using their narcissistic, abusive tactics on and bullying, that they're like them. And they also just want to build an empire and they also just want fame and power and adoration and narcissistic supply, but they can't fathom a person who's not like that. So that's part of the weakness behind it. And you saw that play out on the world stage where Zelensky just was. No, no, that's not how it is.

00:30:54
What a strong. What a strong leader with such character. So much respect for Zelensky. All right, Psychological abuse and mobbing, these aren't just words. These are tactics designed to instill fear, doubt, and helplessness.

00:31:06
Trump had Vance backing him up, reinforcing the bullying. Andy Wood had a whole church system that enabled him to push people out through mobbing by turning others against those who spoke up. And then once he became pastor a year later, after I was ousted and he went to Saddleback, and even though many of us spoke up during that time, they squashed our stories in this kind of fake investigation that they did. And so having a whole church system that wants to believe this man's good, that wants to believe they just hired the right guy that wants to believe our church would never make a bad choice in getting a new pastor, These are. The cognitive dissonance of that is difficult to admit.

00:31:42
We were duped by this man. This is a con man. Nobody wants to admit they just bought a lemon instead of a Mercedes or whatever. That would be a horrible reality to have to confront in yourself. And yet we must do that work if we want to see this for what it is.

00:31:58
I had to do that work, and it's not fun. But let me tell you something. Bullies don't win when we refuse to be silent abusers count on our secrecy, and you can count on me not being secret about this, not being silent about this. I've been told to sit down and shut up and know uncertain terms, to stop talking about that thing. And even though I absolutely don't talk about this all the time, there's many other things I talk about.

00:32:19
I'm here leading a global leadership summit. But psychological safety is a core part of not only Google's project Aristotle, identifying that as the key to successful teams, but what's good for business and organizations is also good for society and human beings. And I think that makes a world of difference. So I don't stop talking about that. And embedded in anti bullying and speak up campaigns in my workplace and being a global head of ethics for the organization as well, and having regional advisors that I've brought in and training and managers I'm training in my office that I Work in globally here and also the work I'm doing here on this podcast, you can count on me not stopping speaking up about workplace toxicity, workplace abuse, because it is a problem that has not gone away and it's at the highest levels of our government in the United States.

00:33:06
So, yeah, I haven't talked about it in this way in a while, but here we are at the beginning of season 11. I'm talking about it because if you saw my LinkedIn live or my Instagram Live where I talked about coming into season 11, there was something different about it. I realized not long ago that my favorite number is 11, and somehow I had completely missed it. But once again, as I mentioned in the one of the lives that my college roommate, I would tell her how my favorite time was 11:11. This is back in the day, Dana Milinsky, if you're listening.

00:33:39
For over 20 years, she has prayed for me every time she sees 1111, which is very, very sweet. And she'll check in with me every now and then by text and see how I'm doing. So I have twins who were born in the 11th month. Something that I always kind of wondered when I found out they were going to be born in the 11th month was, would they come at 11:11 on the 11th of the 11th month? That would just been wild because 11 is also two ones which always like twins to me.

00:34:05
So there's something about my life where the number of 11 has just been there kind of at special times and gotten my attention. And coming into this 11th season, I wanted to do something different. We have a rebrand of the podcast where I'm putting myself out front and center. I've been told to kind of stay in the shadows, be quiet, don't talk about that thing. And so I just realized we need leaders to stand up.

00:34:25
Zelensky was an incredible example of that. He's not going away. He's still fighting for what's right. He's doing the right thing at the right time. He's.

00:34:32
I hate that he went through that. I hate that as an American citizen, he had that experience of such trauma in our government with our leaders. I wish I could just give him a spa weekend and all the free therapy and peace for his country and all the things that he and the Ukrainian people really deserve after what they went through. But what I can do is work on the world right in front of me with the people I have, with the influence that I have. And this is a place I have influence.

00:34:57
So I'm putting my face on the Podcast logo. I'm putting myself out there, front and center. The world is so interconnected. We need authentic leaders to show up, to speak what's true. From your perspective, we will see it all a little bit differently, but that's how we change this.

00:35:13
Bullies don't win when we refuse to be silent. Abusers count on secrecy. They count on our fear. But when we tell the truth, when we step out in courage, courage is contagious. And we take their power away.

00:35:26
To control, to bully, to mob, to ambush, to silence, to intimidate, to belittle. Zelenskyy didn't cave. He didn't play their game. And neither did I. And I hope you don't either.

00:35:39
And if you've ever faced workplace bullying, mobbing, or abuse, I need you to hear this. You are not alone. Your story matters. Your voice matters. And together, we expose these power structures, and we demand better for our workplaces, for our world.

00:36:01
If this hits home, I invite you to listen to my story in full on episode 102 of A World of Difference, titled the Gaslighting and the Flanking. Keep speaking up, keep standing firm, and never, ever, ever let the bullies win. Before we go, I just want to take a moment to thank you. Yes, you. The fact that you're here, tuning in, leaning into these conversations, and doing the hard and beautiful work of making a difference in this world, it means everything to me in this episode.

00:36:32
If it spoke to you, if it brought you healing, hope, or even just a new perspective, I'd love for you to help us spread the word. Subscribe to the podcast, leave us a review, and share this episode with someone you think might need to hear it. Your support helps this community grow and also helps us to keep having these important conversations. You are such a vital part of this journey. And every time you listen, every time you share, you remind me of.

00:37:00
Of why we do this. Because you are out there making a difference in your own beautiful, messy, and imperfect way. And that. That matters more than you know. So thank you for being here, thank you for showing up, and thank you for making the world a little brighter, a little kinder, and a little more whole.

00:37:20
Until next time, take care of yourself and keep making a difference. You are loved.