The Mission Driven Mom Podcast
Episode 168: Donna Zajonc on Victim, Creator, and Who You Want to Be
I'm a recovering rescuer. For me this shows up as me doing things for others that they should really be doing for themselves (often my kids). I also sometimes jump in and try to fix a problem that isn't mine, or do something I was never asked to do—like call the doctor or plan the party or give dating advice. Of course, I'd tell myself I just "wanted to help." But honestly, that probably wasn't my true motivation. I probably thought something was broken that I needed to fix. Resources from the Episode: Mothers of Creation - Provo, Utah - September 26th The Center for the Empowerment Dynamic - Donna's Friday newsletter and essays, published weekly for over twelve years Coaching with the Empowerment Dynamic - Donna's coaching program, the one Audrey went through Who Do You Want to Be on the Way to What You Want? by Donna Zajonc The Power of TED* by David Emerald, a core text in MDM Academy Level One Episode 164 with David Emerald AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 168: Donna Zajonc on Victim, Creator, and Who You Want to Be Introduction AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. Today I have a special guest, Donna Zajonc. Her credentials are master certified coach, author, and co-founder of the Center for the Empowerment Dynamic. If you saw our David Emerald interview, that is her association here. She helped co-found that organization with David. They worked intimately together for many years until he passed away. And I had the privilege of being one of Donna’s students years ago when I took her coaching program. It gave me lots of tools, some of which we’ll talk about today. Thank you again, Donna, for being here. I’m really looking forward to this. AUDREY: I want to give you a little bit of her credentials, because she’s done some really amazing things in her life and I want all of you to know how incredible she is. She is currently the director of coaching for the Power of TED, the Empowerment Dynamic organization. She is a very gifted teacher and coach, and her coaching program is so worth signing up for. She received the Washington State Excellence in Coaching Award in 2017. She served three terms in the Oregon legislature, and she also owned a multi-store food retail company in Oregon. Then in 2001 she really embraced her passion for coaching. Donna, you’ve been coaching pretty much full time since then? DONNA: Yeah, 25 years now. AUDREY: That’s amazing. And The Power of TED, one of the core books in our Mission Driven Mom Academy, level one, has sold over a quarter of a million copies. DONNA: I’m so glad to hear that. It’s so needed. AUDREY: And then her own book, which I own here and have all marked up, is Who Do You Want to Be on the Way to What You Want? Coaching with the Empowerment Dynamic. It was published a few years ago. I love it. Donna’s Path: Nursing, Public Service, and Coaching AUDREY: There are so many places we could start. I think we know a little bit about you professionally. I’d love to start out with a little bit more about you personally, so our audience can feel like they know you as a woman. Tell us a little bit about yourself. DONNA: Well, there are quite a few different segments to my life, as you alluded to. My early years of being drawn to public service through politics and being in the legislature. And being a mom. DONNA: I was in southern Missouri and went to the University of Missouri, joined VISTA, and married right out of college. We went to Oregon to work with the Klamath Indians, where I was the health coordinator. That was in the early to mid seventies. It was through that experience that I got really interested in public policy and health care policy, and I spent some time in the legislature. I stayed in Oregon, stayed in the Northwest, even though my home base, my brother and sister and family, were sixth generation in small towns in Missouri. But I’ve been a Northwesterner: Portland, Seattle. I live on Bainbridge Island, which is a gorgeous island right off of downtown Seattle. DONNA: That’s the résumé of person, place, and time. We can certainly get into when I met David in 2003, when we started immediately talking about the empowerment dynamic. We named that and had no idea it would become our life’s work and our business. AUDREY: You said professional coaching since 2001, so you were already doing that when you met David. DONNA: That’s correct. I was moving into coaching leaders, especially public leaders, because that had been a big part of many of the years earlier in my life, a real dedication to the nobility of public service. That is not how much of our public leadership is seen today, and I get really sad about that. But that’s exactly what I was doing in 2001 and 2002. We met in 2003 and were immediately drawn to our way of thinking and our desire to create a world that works for all: our desire to serve, to help people be their best, and to create systems where families, companies, and nations can really thrive. AUDREY: Absolutely. So what led you to coaching in the first place? Why were you already in that realm when you met David? DONNA: That’s a great question. My undergraduate degree is in nursing, and I went into public health nursing right out of college, working with the Klamath Indians and then in two different community mental health clinics in Oregon for many years. So I already had a very keen interest in human development and psychology. That’s when I heard about and discovered this idea of coaching, which in 2000 and 2001 was brand new. DONNA: There was a friend here on Bainbridge Island who really guided me into asking, is this a good fit for you? And it felt so good. My psychiatric mental health nursing was more about healing, about addressing wounds and issues. Coaching is all about forward looking, forward thinking. That forward thinking, being at our best, being emotionally sound and secure in our values, being able to take responsibility, all of that really attracted me. So I looked into the coaching school here in Seattle. It was a perfect fit, and I never looked back. AUDREY: They actually had a school established by then? DONNA: They did. There were a handful of really incredible coaching programs in the year 2000, and one of the founders of the International Coach Federation created a school here. I felt that was a bit of guidance, because it was so easy for me to be able to attend school right in Seattle. How the Empowerment Dynamic Was Born AUDREY: That’s wonderful. So tell us a little bit more about how this connection with David organically started to grow into shared work for the two of you. DONNA: What a beautiful question. We met in a business setting, but we very quickly realized that there was a strong love and affinity between us. Over those couple of years after meeting, he shared with me epiphanies he was having about a time in his life where he felt very much like a victim. He found out he couldn’t have children of his own, that he was biologically infertile. His dad, who he was very close to, died suddenly. And his first marriage disintegrated, for lots of reasons, but I think in part because he couldn’t have children and she very much wanted children. DONNA: So he started telling me about his epiphanies around this victim consciousness, and about some guidance he had had to ask, well, what’s the opposite of victim? Out of that meditative reflection, he had a sense. He says, I didn’t hear words, I didn’t hear a voice, but the opposite of being a victim and having life happen to us is to be a creator. So learn to create and take responsibility for our lives. AUDREY: And on first blush that seems like a really simple idea. It is so profound. DONNA: It comes with an extremely profound idea about how we meet the world, how we meet challenges, how we meet ourselves and our family, moving out of “life happens to me and I’m powerless,” which is a quick summary of victim consciousness. And we are all victims at times, to accidents, to health issues. People really do abuse us. What we’re talking about is not victimization. AUDREY: That’s right. Definitely. DONNA: We’re talking about victimhood as an identity, that we see ourselves as not having a choice, that life happens to us. That description alone can really stop people. AUDREY: Yes. There’s a big difference. DONNA: So that became our conversations. We both knew about the drama triangle, me from my days in mental health, and David knew about it through being in therapy regarding the loss of his marriage and not being able to have children. AUDREY: And that’s the main shift, isn’t it? Victim is the heart of that drama triangle. DONNA: Dr. Karpman said that when we’re feeling like a victim, there’s always a persecutor. There’s always a problem that’s caused us to feel like we’re a victim. And the third role Dr. Karpman said is that when those two roles enter, there’s always a third one, the hero, the rescuer. So that’s a very dynamic description of the three primary ways we human beings respond to things we don’t like and don’t want. DONNA: David’s epiphany, as you know, was, oh my gosh, there’s got to be a positive alternative to that. We firmly believe in the goodness of who we are as human beings. So what is the new triangle that rests upon that goodness, that ability to choose, that ability to create, that ability to be loved? That’s what he started sharing with me on walks. And I said, David, this is really original work. We need to write this down. DONNA: That’s what we did for about a year and a half. And we named the new triangle. I was writing a book about my time in coaching, and my editor heard about David’s new triangle and that we had just named it the empowerment dynamic. So now we’ve got the drama triangle on one hand and the empowerment dynamic on the other. She said, okay, David, now you have named it TED. The name of your book is going to be The Power of TED. And now you need to write a story. DONNA: David was shocked. He said, I don’t know how to write a story about some guy named Ted. But that’s what he did. We hired my editor to help him do that. And so there you go, Audrey. That’s how it was birthed. We just kept following our guidance and our epiphanies and our sense of how much value it had for us to stop and say, wait a minute, where am I on these two triangles? Being a victim, persecutor, rescuer, stuck and just going around and around. Or do I really believe in the divinity of my creator essence? Not the Creator, but a creator. Do I really believe in my ability to challenge and see the truth of who I am and to keep moving toward what I care about? And then how do I do that? How do I coach rather than be the rescuer pleaser that’s always fixing everybody else? How Audrey Came to This Work AUDREY: I was thinking while you were talking about my own experience with drama. I found out a long time ago that one thing I’m really good at is creating curriculum. Twenty years ago I was at a college, I saw the need for a course, I asked if I could create one, they said go ahead and try, and it turned out to be a popular course. That’s just how I think. Whenever I can see that there’s a problem in the world, my answer is usually, well, let me tell you what to read, let me build a course for you that will help you learn and change and grow. AUDREY: Years ago I had an interaction in a women’s class. A handful of roses were handed out at random, and the women were asked to come to the front, say something good about themselves, and put the rose in a vase. I knew many of the women in the audience, and I watched them one by one come to the front and say something self-deprecating. Nobody else in the world remembers this event but me, because it was just what I needed to see and recognize at that moment in my life. I carried it with me for weeks. I thought on it, I prayed on it, and I pondered: what is happening that these women either don’t know how incredible they are or don’t have the confidence to say it? What is wrong? AUDREY: So I decided I was going to do something about it. For about a year I went back through all the things that have helped me most and vetted them down with the help of a couple of women, and we launched level one of the Mission Driven Mom, which is all about loving God and yourself more fully. AUDREY: I can’t remember if I had found the drama triangle before that or if we found it through my husband’s marriage and family therapy degree. But I knew about this drama triangle, and we had had so many conversations about it. Just that aspect had been helpful in our marriage, helpful in our parenting, helpful in our lives. When it came time for me to try to understand it better, I wanted to teach it, because I felt like it would be helpful. And there’s just nothing out there. Karpman never wrote a book. He never elaborated on it hardly at all. There’s basically the original thesis. Other people have written some books, and I have maybe half a dozen. Some of them had helpful things to say in delineating the drama portion, and you could look at what it was and then think about the opposite, and that could be helpful. AUDREY: But it wasn’t until I found The Power of TED that I said, oh, this is the antidote. This is the solution. This is what I was looking for that’s going to help these women. There are three concepts we cover in the academy: self-care, self-leadership, and self-discovery, all to help them know themselves, accept themselves, and love themselves more fully. In the self-leadership section, this is what we talk about. I teach them all about drama. They buy their own copy of The Power of TED and go through it. There are other concepts around that, shame and blame and other elements that we found helpful to understanding the whole aspect of it. And I know some of the women who have come through the Mission Driven Mom have turned around and gone to your coaching program to dive deeper into it. AUDREY: What happened for me was that I learned it, I was teaching it, women were having incredible experiences with it. And then a few years ago I saw on your email list that there was a coaching program, and I thought, maybe this will help me teach it better, maybe I can understand it better. That was a very rich experience. Just the idea of reframing that you teach was insanely helpful, and I’ve added to and elaborated on that some in the way that we teach it. We have our event this fall and we’ll dig deeper into some of these things. One of our mentors, Lindsey, was very excited about victim types. There are a lot of people out there with victim types, but she decided to work on her own list, and she’s attached Disney characters to them. That’s been a fascinating journey. AUDREY: So that’s how I came to it. What I can attest to is over 600 women who have come through our program. There are a handful of core ideas from level one that they usually call out, and this is one of the ones they usually say is a huge paradigm shift for them, and just so helpful to their personal progress. It’s like one of my favorite quotes. I say it all the time. It’s very simple, and I’m sure you heard David say it all the time: you cannot not create. DONNA: Yes. We had a blog about that just a few weeks ago. AUDREY: When you really deeply know that, then you know it’s kind of like, yes, there is drama and the opposite of that is creator, and yes, there’s this empowerment dynamic. But it is also true that there’s a sense in which even in drama we’re creating, because we can’t not create. We’re just creating more of what we don’t want, more of what we don’t like. We’re so focused on those fears that they manifest more and more in our daily lives. Naming Our Reactive Patterns DONNA: Well, thank you for that history. You’re really mirroring much of what encouraged David to keep digging. Because the drama triangle work, people said, oh, it’s so helpful to name my reacting patterns. But then what do I do? And the response in therapy and in the few articles and writings was, well, just don’t do it. It’s very toxic. You’ll just get stuck racing around those archetypal roles. It was that awareness, just like you had, that he couldn’t find anything that pointed to the good part of us, the goodness of us, the self of who we are as human beings, as divine human beings. AUDREY: It sounds like you and David had such similar thinking and tracking. DONNA: We wanted to be teachers and healers of how to bring the work alive. There are so many nuances in the triangles and how they point to what we focus on. More and more, what I do with the coaching is this: okay, now I know some reactive patterns, and now I can see them. You name it. Naming is so helpful. And it can really be upsetting at first. Oh, I’m so stuck. AUDREY: It seems like it’s the malaise of the human experience, because our brains are threat-seeking mechanisms. Our brains help keep us safe by scanning the horizon, looking for problems, threats, danger. If we’re not careful, that can be our primary neurological and thinking pattern of how we go through life. Which is great, because our ancestors survived because they did worry about threats. DONNA: They worried about the tiger or the snake or whatever the physical threat was. But where we are in this world now is that our bodies were not made for the speed of life. The way threats come at us now at such a rapid pace, whether we want them or not, whether we’ve actually put the phone down, whether we’ve stopped watching the news, so much of what is now being talked about are social threats. The speed of life is forcing us, if we’re open to the stress, to look at ways we can create habits to transmute and transform and get out of this reacting pattern. It requires skills. It requires practices. DONNA: And that’s what we focus on at the Center for the Empowerment Dynamic, because the default way of going through life is to be problem focused, danger focused. That’s what keeps us alive. But that pattern of our brain does not support living in this fast-paced world where we want to be our best selves, our best moms, our best spouses. DONNA: I love that you have one right there: we cannot not create. One of your go-to slogans. So what does that do? That helps us realize, ah, now it’s my responsibility to choose what I’m going to broadcast out into the world. And that responsibility is the core behavior change from victim to creator. I start taking responsibility. Everyone Is Vying for the Victim Role AUDREY: I’ve read several books, so I can’t always remember exactly who taught me this particular aspect. But one of the things that has been very helpful in understanding the drama and the shift is that one of the other books I have on drama talks about the game of drama. They explain that even though there are three players, actually everybody wants the victim role. It’s a game where everyone is vying to prove that they’re the victim. And the reason they’re playing that game and trying to prove their victimhood, whether they’re doing it in a rescuing or persecuting way, is because the victim is the one who’s off the hook. When everybody is in agreement about who the victim is, then the victim has been acted upon. The victim doesn’t have responsibility for the conditions of their life or the conditions of their relationships or whatever the circumstance might be. And that is what we think we want. That’s what we are fighting for when we’re staying in drama. DONNA: But it’s a very disempowering way of being. AUDREY: I love that you use the empowerment dynamic in our academy. All of the self-leadership sections are titled “increasing my personal power by.” And you’re absolutely right. There are countless voices out there that explain to us that the root of change is responsibility. It’s just that simple. Until you own it, you can’t do anything about it. You are powerless. And there’s
