Growth

It was the mid-1980s, somewhere in the middle of Canada—you know, the tall part of America! Now there was actually a very, very fatal illness sweeping the nation, and little children were getting very sick. If they were cheated, they had disabilities. It was called spinal meningitis. It's orally contracted. And what happens is it goes into the spinal column, and it affects the nervous system. And, in effect, actually, the fever affects the brain so much that it can shut a small child down. Now the 1980s. Tape decks, VCRs, station wagons, come on. Great decade! Budweiser was king, and Donald Trump was just a mere mortal wearing boxy suits and buying real estate. But I really wanna tell you about a little girl's journey, her brush with death, her glimpse at the other side. And that little girl is me. I was sitting eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the stairs. I loved to sit there because I could watch all the foot traffic move around the house, but I was really hot, like really hot. And Oh, I love this sandwich. I'm not hungry anymore. What's happening to me? Oh, I'm gonna go to the kitchen and talk to the adults cos they always know what to do. So I go to the kitchen, and I pull on Auntie Gina's shirt, and I'm like, "Auntie Gina, can you feel my forehead?" And she leans down, and she puts her hand on my forehead, and she says, "Oh dear, this child is really hot. I'm really concerned about her." Well, I scurry away because I'm like, Oh no, I've done something wrong now. Oh no, why am I so hot? And I put my little head through the banisters on the stairs, and I look out, and I listen to the adults as they make a commotion and talk about the hospital. Oh no, not the hospital. I really, really don't wanna go the hospital. That's where people go when they get really sick. Sure enough, they're throwing things into a bag. They're acting a little funny, and it's just a circus, and we're running out the door. And the hospital—clean, clinical, bright white lights, beeping sounds—doctors, nurses being called to all different floors. Surely a doctor comes and stands right in front of me, and he assesses me immediately. And he says, "This child is very sick. We think she has spinal meningitis. If we test her, we might lose her. Let's get her immediately to intensive care." I'm isolated in a room. I'm dressed in white. I'm sitting straight up in my bed. I now have intravenous being put into my arms—medicine running through my body. I don't know what's happening. My mother comes and sits on the corner of my bed, and she says to me, "Sweetheart, do you know what you have?" "No, I don't." "It's spinal meningitis, sweetheart." "Spider man ingitis? Oh, that sounds really scary." "Yes. We're very concerned for you. You see, we need you to make it through the night." "Okay." And with that, she got up, and she exited the room and went into the hall. It had grown quiet now, and night was falling. I sat in my bed, medicine running through my body. Exhausted. And I fell asleep. Sure enough, I woke up to something coming down next to me. A spider. Oh, okay. I'm gonna close my eyes. I'm gonna get myself really nice and tight like a board. And hopefully, this will go away. I open my eyes. I turn to the right. What-what is going on over here? Three unidentifiable shadowy men standing next to my bed. So I now have a spider and three men over here. Oh boy. This is what she was telling me about. If I close my eyes really tight, I think, Yeah, this is gonna go away, right? Yeah. And it does. That was a close one. Okay. But now what's going on now? Oh my God. I'm in a hospital, and I can hear dogs barking. There are three, four, five dogs in the room with me. They're barking so loud. They're snarling. They are drooling, and they are attacking my bed. They know I'm vulnerable, and they're coming for me. They're gonna take me down to Hades and present me to Persephone. What is going on? They oh, they can't get in. Oh, thank goodness. They can't get in. They keep attacking it, but they can't get in. There's a bubble around my bed that's protecting me—some kind of a force field. Thank goodness. Okay. I'm just gonna wait this out. This is just gonna go away. Yeah. Daylight is breaking. I can see it now. And like a good vampire movie, I know those dogs are going away, and they just get off of me, and they slither away through the cracks of the room. And the room is bathed in this warm white light. And I'm like, Oh, thank goodness. I've made it through the night. But now what's happening? I thought this was all over. No, it's not. It's not over. Oh my gosh. I'm getting up outta my body. I think they call this astral traveling, and I am looking back at myself. Phenomenal! Wow. And I can feel something beautiful and warm coming from behind me. Oh my goodness, what is that? Wow, that feels so good. And I can hear string instruments. Oh, it's beautiful. "Beloved. You are at a checkpoint." "Oh, a-a checkpoint?" "Yes, beloved. You see, you are now at a place where you can make a choice. How do you want to choose? Do you want to go back into that life, or do you want to come back behind the veil? We must warn you that if you come back here, you will have to work two times as hard. You see, beloved, the life that you have chosen, the contract that you have chosen is for your soul's evolutionary process. And the souls that you come into contact with will also evolve. It's a very multi-layered process, you see, my beloved?" "Yeah. I-I understand. Okay. Uh, so if I go there, how long will it take exactly?" "You see, beloved, for us it's a very quick timeline. Blink of an eye, really. But for you, once you will be embodied, time will move quite slow." "Oh, okay. I-I, okay. And what's . . . what's gonna happen? Can you tell me a little bit about that?" "Well, beloved, you see, there will be great global catastrophes. You will witness genocide. You will see abuse of human life and source life on the planet. There will be technological wars, famine, and you will feel it all." "Oh, okay. Sad." "Yes, beloved. And you will have a heart—an empathetic heart. And you see, there will be hardship, heartache, and your heart will break." "I understand. What else?" "Well, beloved, there will be beauty beyond belief. There will be human connection, joy—pure joy—humor, surprise, and elements that you can only experience if you choose to contract this life as a human." "I see. Well, I-I suppose I accept that, and I understand. Yes, I agree. I agree to this." And with that, I felt my body, my spirit slip back into my body, and I was looking back at my family, connected again. I could feel their collective hearts beat, their prayers answered. Their little girl had made it through the night. She wouldn't be taken from them too soon in this life. I felt cells regenerating and blood pulsing through my body. I was going to heal. I was going to make it. You see, there's actually many of us that have an experience like this. In fact, one in ten people that's admitted to the hospital has what is called a near-death experience, but because of fear or shame, embarrassment, we conceal this immaculate experience. We don't share it. And yet it's so beautiful to know that there's something beyond this. To know that it's pain-free. To know that we have to live without regrets here. That this is our training ground. That this is our playground. Our learning, our schoolhouse. I hope this message is something you can take with you tonight. Death is really very simple, you see. It's just a transformational doorway. A transformational doorway for the mystical energy that is spirit and spirit never ends. Thank you so much. Thank you so so much for being my audience for that story—that's the first time. Thank you so much.

I'm sitting in a restaurant in Rio de Janeiro. Across the table is Sarah. We've been traveling around South America for the last six weeks. It's meant to be one of the most amazing romantic journeys. I mean the most romantic city in the world, but I feel nothing. I thought I'd be falling madly in love, but we are falling and drifting apart. The next day I wake up in a hotel room in Rio, and I know it's over. I feel this knot of dread. I know I've gotta break up with her. I don't how to tell her. I'm just baffled, and I'm confused. My mind has been hijacked. All I can do is frantically panic. And I can only think All I've gotta do is just get outta this hotel room. I freeze and I start packing up my bags and I start packing up my suitcase. And all of a sudden, Sarah wakes up, and she's like, "What are you doing, Chris? What's going on?" And all I can say in my panicked state is, "I-I'm sorry. It's not meant to be. This isn't gonna work. I need to break up with you. I'm sorry." Twenty-four hours later, she's booked a flight back to Australia. We don't even hug goodbye. And like that, the girl that I thought I was gonna spend the rest of my life with . . . it's over. Two months later, I'm back in Australia, and I'm taking a look at my life. And on the outside, my life looks amazing. Looks really successful. But on the inside, I'm empty. I've been in an engineering career for the last ten years that I'm bored with. I'm now single. I'm lonely. I'm thirty years old. What am I doing? I think Did I even want to break up with Sarah? Maybe I made a mistake. I sent her a message, and I say, "Sarah, I'm so sorry. I think I messed up. I wanna get back with you." I don't know if she's ever gonna respond back to me. She doesn't respond. So I book a flight to Tasmania to spend some time with my family over Christmas. And as the plane hits the tarmac, I check my phone, and there it is. There's a message from Sarah. She wants to speak with me. And now I'm like the guy outta that romcom, that guy that messed it up. And I've got this one chance to make amends, to win back the girl. What do I do? I book a flight straight back to see her. And this time, when we're sitting across from each other, she's the one that feels nothing. I'm gutted. She says she could never ever trust me again after what I did to her. I'm devastated. I send her one last message to let her know I'm so sorry for the pain that I caused—I had no idea. And she replies. She says that sorry isn't good enough. And she proceeds to tell me every last little flaw about my character. She tells me I'm passive-aggressive. I don't even know what that is. I've gotta Google it. She says that I'm judgmental. I'm egotistical—I gotta Google that too. She says that I'm disconnected to my feelings. Like, wow, this is intense. This is the most criticism I've ever got from anyone. And then I reflected back to that day in Rio. I didn't even know myself. And I thought maybe, maybe she's right. What if I don't even know myself? What if I'm blind to this? The next morning I wake up, and I've got a very specific recommendation from my sister for a very specific book from a very specific guy, Tony Robbins—the self-help guru. Right now, I'm thinking I can do with some help. Anyway, I go straight to the bookstore, and I grab the book, and it's called Awaken the Giant Within. I take. I read it. Holy moly! I'm hanging off every word—every page. This guy's deconstructed my whole entire reality. Oh, this all makes sense now. I get it. I really get it. I am the giant. It's me. I'm the giant. I get it. It transforms my life. Everything changes. I go from being oblivious to being obsessed. I got the source code to my reality now. I learn more in the next thirty days than I have in the last thirty years. Wow. This is big. This changes me. I start showing up so much differently. I'm telling my mates that I really care about them. And instead of shaking their hand, I'm hugging them. I'm looking people in the eye when I'm chatting to them. I feel connected to people. I even ring my dad, and I tell my dad that I love him for the first time in my life. I'm changing at a rapid pace. I don't know what's going on, but this is good. This is so good. I really feel alive. And that's just the beginning. I realize I'm changing from a boy into a man. And I've just activated beast mode. All of that criticism became my fuel. It activated this hunger, this deep yearning inside of me to know who I really am. And I go on the next six-month journey of awakening. I truly awaken this new man inside of me. I get back into my life, and I'm going to seminars on weekends. I'm going to all these workshops—learning about myself. My friends think I've joined a cult. My dad's confused cos he thinks I'm into all this weird fluffy duck hippy stuff. But it's okay. He knows I love him. And I'm even sitting at my desk during the day in my engineering job, pretending to work on spreadsheets while I'm listening to podcasts and TEDx talks and audiobooks, feverously just documenting and writing and capturing all this wisdom. It all shifts. One day I'm scrolling through my Facebook feed, and an ad pops up. "Ever thought about becoming a life coach?" I don't even know what life coaching is, but there's something about it that resonates with me. I click it. And before you know it, I'm on the phone to some guy, and I've signed up to a year-long life coaching training course. But on the first three-day training of that course, holy moly, this is what I've been looking for my whole entire life. I found it. I knew there was more. I knew there was more. And I found it. And I didn't even know what coaching was, but I knew that was something for me to explore, something to expand into. So the next six months, the beast mode goes up a notch. I put everything I got into this coaching stuff and I'm actually pretty good at it. I helped one guy get off crystal meth. I helped a girl pretty much recover from the same crap that I went through. And it's not even the most important part. The most important part is I feel alive. I know why I'm here. I got a reason for being here, and it's incredible, but I have no idea how this is gonna work out. I don't know anything about business. I don't know anything about coaching, really, but I realize I need to make a decision. I've spent ten years climbing the ladder of success, leaning against the wrong wall. And I can see a path in front of me. I don't even know what it is, but it feels right. On that day on the drive home, I asked myself, Why? Why am I still in this job? And in that moment, I decide to take my decade-long engineering career, and I walk away, and it's liberating. It's also the most scary, crazy thing I've ever done in my life. What's my dad gonna say? But it feels right. And what I've realized to be true is that life is the ultimate contact sport, and I'm not here to play a safe game. And life—she's a tough teacher. She gives you the test first and then the lesson afterward. But bless it because all the adversity, all the chaos, all the suffering, all the confusion—it all exists. And it's there because it contains the seed of wisdom for the awakening and for the expansion of who you are meant to be. And I realize this whole time through the chaos, through the confusion, through the suffering, through the joy, through the love, through the adventure, through the whole lot, life has been conspiring in my favor, even when I didn't know it. Thank you.

I didn't write one speech for today. I didn't write two speeches. I didn't write three. I wrote four speeches. The last speech was thrown out this afternoon. This speech that I'm speaking to you has been written in the last hour or two. Basically, this piece is an accumulation of me and where I am at now. It's me. It's me being in the soup. The soup is about one meter, sixty-two high, and it's thirty-six and a half years old. It's been simmering for thirty-six and a half years. It's the story of me not being ready. It's the story of how are we ever really ready in life. And it's the story of how we came to be here. It's a story of who I am. Who I am. I'm Australian—far out! I've been told I have to say that at least. I arrived here right before COVID-19 hit. I was here for five weeks, and I left for two weeks, and I came back, and COVID hit. It's been a pretty insane journey since and a journey that I haven't been ready for. I come from a working-class family. I come from a family with two kids, two adults, a house that my dad built. I'm a Libra. I'm a vada/petar. There's a lot of air going on in here. I dance. I am a social worker by background. I'm an A+ blood type. I'm here, and I'm figuring out every single day. I come from a lineage of women who have experienced quite significant mental health issues. My mom was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was fifteen years old. And at the time, we had lots of social workers coming to visit our family. I watched what they were doing. They would come, and they would sit in with our family, and they would drink cups of tea. I looked at them, and I thought, Wouldn't that actually be really fun to just drive around all day, visit people, drink cups of tea, and help them feel better. So fast forward a few years. I'm twenty-two, and I'm knocking on the door of a family's home. I don't know what I'm walking into. A man opens the door—a man I've been working with for a little while. He's yelling and screaming at me, holding a cup of coffee that he's shaking like this. And the coffee's almost splattering everywhere. His child, the ten-year-old, is screaming in the hallway. And I walk in with my pile of paperwork. With the paperwork that's already filled out saying that I'm removing that child. I sit down in the living room with the dad beside me and the paperwork between us. I say to him, "This is what's going on." And he bursts out into tears. He says to me, "I'm trying the best that I can, and I don't know what to do anymore." And I say to him, "Is there a way that we can work together?" I wasn't ready for that conversation. And I wasn't ready for any of the conversations that happened like that, that continued on from that time. My mom, for over twenty years, my whole adult life, has been in and out of mental health facilities. We have spent Christmases and Mother's Days visiting her in mental health facilities. And I haven't been ready for any of that or any of the conversations that have come with that. Fifteen years fast forward. My cousin is now graduated as a social worker. And she says to me, "I don't know if I'm cut out for this." I say to her, "You know what? None of us are. Basically, all we can do is look at what's in front of us and take the humanity from it and find a way to turn it into some kind of magic and to create something better with it. We can't be ready for this." Fast forward another couple of years. And I'm at work. I'm sitting at my desk. A young person calls, and his debutante partner for that day has pulled out as a deb. She's not doing it. He's like, "That's it. I don't care. I'm not doing it." This is something that matters to this young person more than anything else. He has spoken to the children's commissioner and said, "This needs to happen for young people like us." My boss gets off the phone, and she says, "What are we gonna do?" I put a post on Facebook. And I say, "Who do I know who has a white dress in this size and can get it to me within three hours." A girl contacts me straightaway and says, "I not only have a dress, I have a tiara, and I have jewelry. I'll have it to you." Within three hours, I'm at a venue surrounded by all these teenage girls with white fluffy things everywhere. And I'm getting my hair and makeup done, watching a video on my phone of how to learn these dances. I wasn't ready to be a debutante at thirty-three years of age. And I wasn't ready to be a debutante that day. A couple of years later, I'm with a group of young people, and we're preparing for a massive event. I've got young people, a row full of young people, who are preparing to share their personal stories. The people in the audience are ministers. They're commissioners. They're politicians. One of my young people, she runs out of the room. I run after her. I stand in front of a toilet cubicle, and she's behind the door. I hear sobbing. I ask her if she's okay. She says to me, "There is no way that I'm going out there. There is no way that I'm sharing my story. There is no way that those people in that audience are gonna listen. And this matters to me more than anything. And I can't deal with the fact that they might not hear what I've got to say." I take this in, and I go, "Hmm. They're not gonna hear you from behind a toilet door." I hear the click of the lock, and the door opens. She stands there in front of me. And she's like, "How's my makeup? Are my eyes okay?" I hand her a tissue, and I'm like, "We can sort this out." She's like, "I have no idea what I'm gonna say. Like, what do I do?" I'm like, "We can sort that out. Fix your makeup. We'll be right." And she comes out. I ask her what she's most passionate about, and straightaway, I know that she's ready because the fire in her heart is what's going to deliver the message that she needs delivered. Anything else is a bonus on that. When we started this, Colleen asked us, "What is the story that you are most afraid to tell?" The story in this that I'm the most afraid to tell is the story of what comes next. It's the unwritten story. It's the story that I'm not prepared for and the story that I'm not ready for. It's the story that I don't have the answers for. And I can only prepare myself for that so much. And I don't know if all of these experiences and all of this life journey has prepared me enough for that. And there's nothing that I can do about that but just keep taking another step, knowing that I'm not ready for that. The story that I'm not ready for is the one that I will one day tell when this woman sweeps herself off her own feet and carries herself away in a way that she could not even imagine. And that all starts by being here. Thank you.

In 1969 I was a little girl in South Sumatra in Palembang, and my father was CEO of a big company. But at the time, parents would spend time to have lunch with the children. So my dad would go home at twelve and have lunch with us, all the children. And then he would go back to the office. And in my surrounding neighborhood, there were still forests, there were still rivers, and there was still a lot of poor people. There was a beggar who would come from house to house, bringing ragged white sacks, and each house would give him a cup of rice. Not money, only a cup of rice, so maybe he would not be starving. Of course, he would come to our house too. And my mom would prepare a special plate, with a special glass, and special food for my father. That's how we respected our father—special food for him. I saw the tukang minta-minta—the beggar—come and the cook would go with a cup of rice. But then I saw the food on the table, and I thought, Oh, he might be hungry. Why don't I just give it to him? So I put it in a big tin can. I put my father's food there with the rice, with the fish, with everything for him, and gave it to him. And I can still remember his eyes like disbelief and sparkling. That old man, now I still can imagine his face. So he ate there, but when my mom found out, she was confused and furious because there was no food for my father. There was no restaurant. There was no café. She had to cook and said, "You don't do that again because we can give a cup of rice, but not your father's food." I did the same thing the second day. And I did the same thing the third day. On the fourth day, maybe my mom thought this little girl cannot be told. So she told the cook to hide all the food on top of the kitchen cabinet. I was so small. I couldn't reach it, so that food was safe. I had my own lunch. What did I do with that? I gave it to him. And my mom said, "Maybe you don't understand Bahasa Indonesia. Which part is it that you don't understand? Do not give food because we give rice." And I was not sad. I was not angry. I was just feeling like I felt him, and my mom said, "No lunch. It's okay. You can give yours, but no lunch for you." I was not crying. I just walked to the neighbor and, you know, went into the kitchen talking. I had a very, very, a very loving neighbor, Basri. And they fed me. "Have you had your lunch? Come, come, come eat with us." So I had lunch at my neighbor's, and the big sister was a dancing teacher. So after lunch, I got a free lesson in dancing, and I danced. I danced and danced. My mom didn't know about it because she's like, "Oh, she finished her lunch." And that I had then gone to my neighbor. And I still remember that feeling. And I'm happy that I could keep that feeling because then I became an activist. I was the chairwoman of the Legal Aid Foundation for Women and Children. And I also established Kapika, the independent commission against corruption—like the Indonesia Corruption Watch. With the feeling of that little girl, I knew that in my heart, I'm an activist and I had a long career. I was in investment banking. I was in the biggest advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson. I was in first class on planes, in hotels and everything. But I knew deep in my heart I've never stopped wanting to become an activist. That was my story in 1969. And 1999. This is what I want to share with you. I went to Durban, South Africa, for the OECD conference on anti-corruption, so delegates from all over the world were there. I went with Professor Emil Salim, the former Minister of Environment. He became an activist after retirement. And I helped him to prepare the presentation. 1999. We did the presentation with slides so he could do it with his handwriting. And I was the one who suggested him to use slides with his handwriting. And he would talk in the plenary session. The plenary session was the biggest session. There were like 2,500 delegates there. There was James Wolfensohn, at that time the director of IMF. And the president of Transparency International. There was also the CEO of OECD and, of course, Nelson Mandela because it was in South Africa. And Prof. Emil said, "There will be the plenary session. And after that, there will be questions and answers." I said, "Oh, I really wanna ask a question. How do I do that?" "Sit next to me," he said. There would be hundreds of hands. So after the plenary session finished, there would be questions and answers. And "Okay. Who wants to ask a question?" I raised my hand like hundreds of hands also, but Prof. Emil was right. And somebody said, "That girl." "Me from Indonesia?" I was so happy but also shocked. Oh, I better have a good question because maybe they chose me because first I'm a woman. Second I'm from Asia, from Indonesia—very famous at that time because we were the champions of corruption. That was 1999, just one year after Suharto stepped down. I think, Well, this is my chance. So I raised my hand, and they asked, "Okay, who do you want to question?" I said, of course, "Nelson Mandela." I said, "Mr. Mandela, would you share with us what were the biggest obstacles when you became president? What do you think was the most difficult thing?" Because we know he won awards for housing when he put all the people from the slums into housing—he won so many awards. He then said, "That's a good question, Miss Irma Hutabarat." I was so happy. My name was mentioned! And he answered, "I have built schools. I have built housing. I have built infrastructure, but the most difficult thing, and the most important thing to me, is to heal my people. They have a lot of wounds, anger, insults, disappointment, you name it, from apartheid. And it's not easy to overcome that. I can't build this nation if they are not healed because they're not ready. So that's what I did. I sent a psychiatrist, a psychologist, public figures, and the people in each and every village would pay special attention to the wounded person that was allowed at that time." And I realized that he's not only a big name, but he has a big heart. And the evening after that, there was the closing party, the farewell party. And everybody was there. I was there too. And somebody came to me and said, "Miss Irma, what about you? You were the one who asked the question. Would you like to dance with Nelson Mandela?" "Do you want me to answer? Is the Pope a Catholic? Of course I want to dance with Nelson Mandela," and he escorted me and I was dancing. I was dancing. If you asked me how I felt, I saw a very compassionate person—peaceful and very gentle. And I was dancing with him. I felt honored. And I remembered my childhood. I remembered my mom before she died. She told me, "Now I understand you. I shouldn't have punished you because you were a kid. You've got a golden heart. We had lots of food on the table. Why would I punish you?" And that was the nicest thing that I heard from my mom. "And yet you learned how to dance?" She didn't know about it. And I told her that the punishment was like a blessing in disguise. So when I was dancing with Nelson Mandela, it felt like I was dancing with life. And this is the message that I want to give to you all—keep dancing, keep dancing with life.