What if the person you became to survive is no longer the person you want to be?

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with speaker and leadership consultant Jon Symes to explore the unconscious stories we build around identity, masculinity, success, leadership, and survival.

Jon calls this work Narrative Liberation: recognizing the roles and beliefs we adopted to navigate life, then deciding which ones still belong to us.

They talk about the cost of being “the strong one,” the provider, the good guy, the high performer, or the person who always has it together. Jon also shares how early survival adaptations can begin, including changing the way he walked as a boy to avoid social judgment and carrying that performance for nearly twenty years.

Together, Lisa and Jon explore midlife reinvention, masculinity, people-pleasing, leadership, family roles, authenticity, and what happens when the identity that once protected you starts costing you pieces of yourself.

In this episode:

• Survival performance and identity

• Narrative Liberation

• Masculinity and provider pressure

• Midlife reinvention

• The “good guy” mask

• People-pleasing and self-abandonment

• Leadership and authenticity

• Family roles and inherited stories

• Reclaiming the parts of yourself you learned to hide

Connect with Jon Symes:

https://www.wholeandfree.me

Connect with Lisa Lacy:

https://www.lisalacy.com

What did you perform in order to survive?

Welcome to the Edge.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What happens when a pastor trades the pulpit for a 24-year career inside the FBI?

Eric Robinson spent 12 years in Christian ministry before becoming an FBI Special Agent, eventually serving 15 years as a SWAT operator and working investigations involving counterterrorism, crimes against children, gangs, drugs, financial crime, civil rights violations, political corruption, and national security.

But this conversation isn’t really about badges, guns, or cases.

It’s about what happens to your understanding of human beings when you’ve spent decades sitting across from victims, informants, criminals, survivors, and people living through some of the darkest circumstances imaginable.

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy and Eric Robinson talk about:

• Going from the pulpit to the FBI

• 24 years inside federal law enforcement

• What ministry taught Eric about interviewing, trust, and human behavior

• Witnessing trauma without losing your humanity

• Why context matters when we judge another person’s choices

• The relationship between trauma, circumstance, crime, and survival

• Why mentorship and nonjudgmental support matter

• The psychological weight of believing you have to be perfect

• Dropping the mask Eric wore as a pastor

• Fear, competence, repetition, and learning to trust yourself

• Why making the “wrong” decision doesn’t have to destroy your life

• Humanizing people without excusing harmful behavior

• Choosing curiosity over judgment

• Why Eric believes we need more kindness in difficult conversations

• His upcoming book chronicling the unlikely journey from preacher to FBI Special Agent

Eric’s story is a reminder that people are almost always more complicated than the headline, the crime, the job title, the mistake, or the label we’ve been given.

Sometimes understanding another human being starts with getting curious enough to ask what happened before we decide who they are.

Connect with Eric Robinson:

https://preachertobreacher.com

Connect with Lisa Lacy:

https://www.lisalacy.com

What did you perform in order to survive?

Welcome to the Edge.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What if the behavior we’re trying to stop is actually trying to tell us something?

Bryan Post is a child behavior expert and creator of the Fear to Love Method whose work challenges parents to see difficult behavior not as defiance, but as communication from a nervous system experiencing stress, fear or unmet needs.

In this conversation, Bryan and Lisa explore what changes when adults stop trying to control behavior and start looking underneath it. They unpack why a stressed parent cannot regulate a stressed child, how consistency creates safety, and why the feelings we learned to suppress in childhood can continue driving our reactions decades later. Bryan also shares his “Reflect, Relate and Regulate” approach and a powerful story illustrating what can happen when a parent gets curious about the fear beneath a child’s behavior instead of immediately trying to correct it.

In this episode:

• Childhood trauma and nervous system regulation
• Trauma-informed parenting and difficult behavior
• Adoption, attachment and emotional safety
• Why punishment and control can intensify stress
• Parent self-regulation and co-regulation
• How childhood survival patterns follow us into adulthood
• Grief, emotional healing and unresolved trauma
• Reflect, Relate and Regulate
• Moving from fear-based reactions toward connection
• Why behavior can be an opportunity rather than a problem

Connect with Bryan:

www.feartolove.com

Connect with Lisa:

www.lisalacy.com

What did you perform in order to survive?

Welcome to the Edge.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.