A boy setting out his classmates' books asks his teacher where his own book is. Azul Terronez nearly lies, then admits he's afraid, and the boy hands him back his own advice.

Sound Bites

• "Hiding from yourself is the game."
• "Well, you tell us, it's okay to be afraid to just do it anyways."
• "It had taken me 24 years and 30 days to write that book."
• "He was loving the identity he had created more than the person."
• "Great teachers are the ones who are listening to the young people."
• "Everybody likes to read about it, but nobody wants to go through it."

Azul Terronez spent his adult life playing the perfect straight man. Eagle Scout, husband, father of two, school principal. At 19 he had lost the man he loved to suicide, and he locked the whole thing away.

Nearly 40, he finally said three words to himself in the mirror. What followed rearranged his marriage, his family and his work. Today he coaches authors through Authors Who Lead, and says children taught him most of what he knows.

What We Explore

• Pretending to other people, pretending to yourself, and which one does the real damage
• What happens to grief, guilt and creativity when they sit locked in a box for 25 years
• A question from a boy, a book written in 30 days, and a life built without a plan

Mentioned in This Episode

• Art of Apprenticeship — Azul's first book, written in 30 days, about learning from a mentor by serving them
• Born to Write, Scared to Start — Azul's free audio series on his website, on finding the confidence to start

Connect with Azul

Website, and the free audio series Born to Write, Scared to Start: https://authorswholead.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azul-terronez/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authorswholead/

Authors Who Lead podcast

on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3Qm8I3UO8FEoSh6xaElOFR

on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/authors-who-lead-learn-to-write-a-book-from/id1303212874

A little about Hamish Niven

For 25 years, I lived a life that looked successful from the outside. Inside it was falling apart, and I was throwing fuel on the fire — addiction, alcohol. I was on a steep path to self-destruct.

November 2018. I chose life, and had to change everything.

I built The 13th Room because nothing like that existed when I needed it.

The Brave Man Project — this podcast. It is about men, but not just for men. Men who broke under the weight of their own performance. Men who rebuilt and climbed so much higher.

The 13th Room is a space for the successful man who needs to change and knows it. 13 sessions, you and me. No fixing. Pure witnessing. Starts with a free 20-minute conversation.

Podcast website: https://thebravemanproject.com

Hamish's website: https://hamishniven.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBraveManProject

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamishniven/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@hamish.niven

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hamishniven/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hamishniven

one of the students was helping me put all the books out and getting ready

for the classes to come visit.

And he said, Mr. Taronis, where's your book?

I want to put it out along the others.

And I paused and I thought about lying,

And I, I'm gonna go to the library and talk to the people in the library

but I was like, nope, I'm not doing that anymore.

I'm not pretending anymore. And I just said,

and not pretend to be. I just,

I don't have one. And he looks very curious to me and says,

don't know any of Very curious spaces.

well,

why not? And I thought I could lie again.

So I said, honestly, I'm just afraid that I won't know what to say

I'm afraid that I don't know what to say or what to say.

or have anything that people care about.

He said, well, you tell us, it's okay to be afraid to just do it anyways.

And then he walked

so shortly after that, I decided I'd write a book.

And I wrote that book and I published it.

And what was amazing about it was that I started to see myself differently.

Well, Azul all thank you very much for being on the podcast today.

~ I know you've got a wonderful story of overcoming

and really stepping into being brave and finding what's important to you.

So can you tell me a little bit about your background and why you are ending

up on my podcast today?

Well, it's so interesting that,

It's such a shame.

you know, most of us who have been through challenging things don't think that

our lives are very interesting to other people.

But, you know, perhaps we just start with what it's like when

you're living in a world where you don't know if you fit in.

And maybe a lot of people can relate to that.

And you do really, you do.

And you do really,

you do, you try to achieve to fit in.

you try to achieve to fit in. And so being an achiever or a people

And so, being a consumer.

pleaser or however you would describe it is probably the personality trait

Probably the personality trait.

as long as

I can remember it was something I would try to do.

If I could just prove myself worthy,

then maybe I would be. And a lot of that came from early childhood,

but.

being the first to go to college in my family,

being an Eagle Scout, which was a big thing at the time,

~ doing anything and everything to show the outside that I had everything I needed.

But on the inside, I was secretly hoping that I could figure out how do

I hide this thing that's inside of me being gay?

That, you know, in the 80s was not a popular thing.

You know, there are

Hmm.

people dying of AIDS and

a strong stigma. So even as a young man,

even though I had had relationships with men,

I just never was going to come out.

And the reason I talk about it so straightforward is that somebody that

I really cared about, that we agreed we'd keep these secrets together.

When I was 19, he killed himself.

And I just thought, I don't think I could share any of this.

I can't go through this.

loving somebody again and then having them leave and then hiding this terrible

secret. So I think a lot of my perfectionistic game came into play because

I was just going to play the perfect straight heterosexual man ~ and

do everything I was supposed to do.

Hmm.

with that came a lot of people gave you lot of acceptance actually.

~ So

lot of that turned and I think people said,

how did you, I fell in love, I would say,

with my friend at the time and we got married and we had two beautiful children.

But sitting behind me was this feeling of I'm not being myself.

~ But I was a very busy,

productive human with too many degrees behind

You

my name, but don't matter much.

~

and became a principal. And so it was extremely busy and workaholic sort

of tendencies was the way I masked sort of this feeling.

~

you

When I stopped being a principal,

those feelings came rushing in as if you were digging sand in the ocean,

near the ocean. And as you dug,

you

the water

just kept coming and that's how the feelings were coming.

I couldn't stop them no matter how fast I tried to dig anymore.

I wasn't busy enough.

like I was when I was working 80 hours a week.

Mm-hmm.

So I had to wrestle with myself.

So that's a little bit of my story why I'm perhaps I'm here is to give some people

a sense of what happens when you come out and you're almost 40 years

old and you've lived this whole other life.

you

you know, I was nearing the edge of feeling suicidal myself.

So I thought I can't

Thank

do that. I know how it feels. I can't do that to my family.

I think that that would be a much worse choice.

than to figure out how do I navigate this and coming out to both my children

and my wife, because by then my children were,

you know, 10, 8 and

Mm-hmm.

10 maybe.

So yeah, it was quite a harrowing journey to kind of come to

30 seconds.

the realisation of what do I do now

that I know this? How do I present this to the people I love?

it's a tough story, isn't it? I mean,

losing a friend, a lover, was he a lover,

the guy who committed suicide or?

Yes.

Yeah, so losing a lover to suicide.

And you said you had that pact,

you had an agreement, you would talk to each other and keep each other's secrets

safe and things like that. So that's

Carrying that burden must have been really,

really tough. mean, how did you?

How did you

Yeah.

move forwards with it? Obviously,

there's the grief. How did you reconcile holding that sacred secret

with another person, ~ but also living a lie,

I suppose.

think it was.

I felt sort of betrayed but couldn't talk about it or didn't want to talk about

it because there was no suicide note left.

And so people just speculated,

well, how could this happen?

Nothing seemed wrong. ~ I couldn't tell you the reason why because he never,

I knew that he was suicidal. That's the problem.

That was the challenge. It was even more challenging.

I had.

come home to him having a gun to his head.

And so there was not just, it wasn't just,

it was out of the blue. I had knowledge that he was in a bad spot,

but I kept trying to encourage him,

even though we weren't in a relationship anymore.

I still tried to encourage him to hang in there.

We agreed not to be in relationship,

but we weren't dating in any way.

He didn't ever want to be gay.

So it was nothing that about that.

It wasn't competing, but it was.

It was a shock to me, but not totally.

It struck to me, but not totally.

And the hardest part was, as people speculated,

the hardest part was, as people expected it,

I just needed to get away. So I never went back to the hometown where we were from.

I just needed to get away. So I never went back to the home town.

I never

talked to people. In fact, recently,

just recently, I moved there for a short time to stay for a long time.

I moved there for short time.

I stayed for long time and it almost 40 years.

It had been almost 40 years, you know.

~ So there was just sort of this container.

So there was sort of this container

And I think...

and I think

Grief, when it's unprocessed, can metastasize.

what is unprocessed

And grief can also then become usable.

and can also become usable.

And so I really used it to do things that I didn't think I could

And so I not really used it to do

do, like perform on a stage. I became an actor for a short time,

and the things I could do with the emotions I had were extraordinary.

if you met me on the street or talked to

you

my friends, you would think this person has a very...

even keeled, but I had so much intensity

Mm-hmm.

in me. think creativity was the way out that no one could hear me talking about it.

So I used creativity in many ways to release the pressure,

the guilt. So not only would I have grief,

but I had guilt, this extreme guilt that I could have done something,

Good night.

I should have done something. And so there's lots of that sort of to navigate.

Yeah, it must that must have been really hard that whole.

~ As you said, you knew something was wrong.

You couldn't do anything to help.

You tried. You couldn't. then that was the outcome.

then, you know, I've had conversation with other people where they've been

in that environment and they've been able to say or see that person,

I don't want help. I don't want help.

You know, that's that's that's their story.

I don't know what his story was.

~

How did you manage to let it all go?

think the hardest thing to release wasn't the guilt as much as,

because I came to terms with the fact that this person made a choice.

They were a grown person. It wasn't anything I could do.

They didn't want me to do anything.

~

But the part was hard for me was forgiving myself that that could

be possible and not holding the guilt and guilt of holding myself captive

by the story that that experience created and not living,

you know, just not pursuing more of the arts.

Cause as I kept

more clear.

being in, in productions and I could feel the sense of this.

angst in me growing because it was required to express yourself.

And I was afraid that it was too dark,

it was too heavy, it was too too much.

Thank you.

So I pivoted to education.

It was a safer route, but it wasn't really where it's supposed to be.

For 25 years I was in schools.

So, but it was a safe place because of that.

It was in a container in a box locked away.

Davy Jones locker sort of thing.

And

I knew if I opened it, I would have to deal with it.

And that's what I did eventually.

just decided I got to open this up and see what happens.

And that's when I realised, I've been hiding behind this story of grief and shame,

and I need to finally let go and see what happens.

See what happens to my life when I don't hold this back.

How brave is that? How terrifying is it to actually have to face those kinds

of things? It's, yeah, I mean,

it's the bravest thing you can do,

I think, isn't it? And ~ yeah,

well done, mean, how, what, what was the,

what was the outcome? mean, was it,

was that what two things, was there like a moment you suddenly realised I've

got to do it now. So that's, that's one question.

Then what was, what was the outcome of making that decision to really turn your life

around? Cause I think this is pretty quite,

quite an important point.

Well, to go even further,

it made much more sense for me to hide farther and farther away in my sexuality.

So I got involved in a very religious cult-like church,

Christian church, that really pushed it farther away.

So it was locked so deep that I couldn't access it.

The key

Mm-hmm.

was to go to the ocean. one of the things that I did was,

~

Just stay in the space of...

I'm going to when this when I deal with this,

either it's going to be on my deathbed or whenever ~ I know I'll be free.

And then the messages of this search was about freedom.

Like, this is not freedom. This is not this is not the thing that I'm here for.

I'm not living the truth anywhere.

I'm just I'm I was really good at acting.

So no wonder it was not a problem.

I was the part

you

I was extremely good.

But it was when I looked in the mirror and I said the words and to myself,

I am gay. I had never said that before to myself.

I think it freed me because I had never let myself say those words to myself.

And when I said that, it was like its whole weight lifted off because

I wasn't hiding from myself. Hiding from yourself is the game.

you're pretending to others, that's one thing,

but if you're pretending to yourself,

then that's where homophobia comes from.

That's where all these other things come from.

So once I said that, it was like I could breathe enough to say then,

so what do I want to do? And I knew I had to tell my wife,

I was like, have to, I can't, I love this human.

We are best friends and I have to.

And that decision is where everything shifted because I didn't know what would

happen. I didn't know what would.

what would I do? I didn't have any plan.

I didn't have a game plan. I'm like,

here's what I'm gonna do and this is gonna go like this.

~ So that was really the major point.

And the shift really happened when I had the courage enough.

We had just moved to a new city.

~ So there's lots of change going on already in our lives.

I said, I'm gonna tell her and I sat down to talk to my wife and I said,

I just need to tell you something.

And I just said, I'm gay.

And it was a shock and there were tears.

And we didn't know what to do.

She didn't know what to do. She didn't know what that meant and

I didn't know either. But as we worked through it together,

~ we decided we're gonna be honest now.

Let's be honest about this. ~ We started getting help with counselor

and then about a month later, she came to me and said,

I have to tell you something because you're so brave.

I said, what? She goes.

I think I'm gay too. And then I almost fell out of the chair.

So ~ I wasn't expecting that because

I wasn't paying attention to her being

Mm-hmm.

trying to masquerade the same way I was.

I had never crossed my mind. So I came out,

then she came out. here we are,

now we have tell our children,

what do we tell our children? We're both gay.

Now what does this mean? And so life became incredibly turbulent for a while.

But with that came this freedom of like,

well, so who are we gonna be now?

Who are we gonna be together? And so that was quite a turn of events for sure.

I I just want to come back to that.

you, both of you hadn't told each other your stories.

So you were both living a normal life and then you said,

darling, I'm gay. And then a short time later,

she said the same thing. I mean,

how, are you guys still friends?

yeah, we're the best of friends.

lovely, well that's all that matters then.

spend holidays together. ~ yeah,

we've spent holidays together.

We've traveled together. Yeah,

my husband and I hosted her and her wife ~ at our home for things.

yeah, we're still best of friends.

just, the

Mm-hmm.

decision to not be romantic partners changed and parenting partners,

we would stay forever. ~

Mm-hmm.

some switches happened because I started,

she wanted to go figure out. I had had sexual experiences and she had it,

so she's like, I don't know what this even means.

So I had the kids pretty much full time and so it was a switch of identity

for me being a single dad, I'm gay,

I don't even know how it means to be gay,

because I was hiding it. I'm not even sure

Yeah.

what happens next. I'm a middle-aged guy,

I have kids. I wasn't sure who would want.

anyone like me anyways, but at least I knew who I was.

And so that's the part that was sort of,

you know, that was the unknown.

That was gonna be the unknown,

Yeah.

even if it was gonna be forever.

But things shifted quickly after that.

You know, I'm just feeling there's so much,

there's so much love there. The fact that both of you were finally honest with each

other. You're still talking, you're still best friends.

You're both remarried. You both,

all four of you, I'm assuming are friends and I'm reading between the lines.

The kids still love you both and everything is.

But all that's come because you were actually brave enough to go,

this ain't working. Something I have to be honest with myself.

Um, I mean that, that,

that's really remarkable. That,

that really is so incredibly brave,

isn't it? Because you could have,

it could have destroyed everything.

It could have broken the children,

broken the marriage, broken the friendship,

broken everything. And you.

You chose to risk. Did you choose to risk that or did you just choose your

own sovereignty? Did you just choose to be honest with yourself?

I just chose to be honest with myself because I had never done that

and so I wasn't trying to do something for everyone else finally.

~ And I knew there would be some sort of consequence.

I just didn't know. I would deal with it.

Yep.

I figured I

would deal with it. And it wasn't like it was this lovely rainbow shot everywhere

out of everybody's hearts and minds,

but it did.

in some regard, start to change who I perceive myself as.

And so when I came out, I had to come out to my family or I chose to.

the challenging thing wasn't that the kids were young enough that I think that they

weren't as troubled about their parents being gay,

but that we were being, we were gonna be separated and eventually divorced.

That was really hard. They were losing their identity as a family.

Even though we spent most of our Christmases together,

even my mother-in-law,

she still would come home for Christmas with my husband.

Mm-hmm.

it just was this different thing.

And my wife,

at the time, she started going to the coming out group at the LGBT Centre Like,

I should figure out what this means for me.

And I was thinking,

Yeah, you should go. it was, I remember she went on Halloween.

It was the first time I was taking the children out to get treats on Halloween.

And where's mom? And she's out doing something.

then the next day,

November 1st, there was another meeting at the centre for men.

That was for women. And she goes,

you should go. said, well, how was it?

She says, it was awful. I was like,

you want me to go? She goes, yeah,

it was awful. You should go.

It's awful because you're facing yourself is what she was saying.

just think, I thought, well, why would I go if it's awful?

And so I went and that's,

that's where you sit in those chairs in their circle.

Like any other meeting you could imagine with adults,

those creaky chairs and the dark kind of room.

And, ~ I will parked very far away because I didn't want to,

I was not comfortable even walking to the centre with a rainbow flag.

Gotten there, you know, five minutes early.

I didn't want to be right on time or be late.

And right as the time ticked that it was going to start this incredibly handsome

young man walked across and sat next to me I didn't even want to look at him.

He was so gorgeous. And I thought this,

this is good. And this is bad because you know,

this is obviously I'm supposed to be here because I'm attracted to this man.

And my wife was here yesterday.

This is really absurd. And you go around the circle,

you know, from

You'd say who you are, why you're there,

et cetera, what your challenge is.

As it came to me, I was thinking,

you know what? I've been lying this whole time.

I don't have to say why I'm here.

I don't have to say I'm married and I'm a single dad now and I'm raising these kids.

because this cute guy just walked in and he's not gonna want me.

I'm an old, almost 40 year old guy with kids.

And I was like, that's ridiculous.

You've been hiding all of this time.

You are not doing that. You're gonna be honest and say the truth.

This is, told you, I'm here. I just came out.

My wife came out right after me and she said I should be here.

So here I am. I'm living with the kids now and I don't know what

I'm doing and that's why I'm here.

And the next person to go was this handsome young man.

He said, I thought my story was beat.

I've I've caught a few times I'm married and I'm coming out and I just didn't know

anybody would like top my story because there weren't a lot of married people

in that group. In fact, just he and I were the only

Mm-hmm.

one.

and he was just blown away that I had,

he thought his life was complicated because his wife was still there.

They were still living together,

trying to figure it out and he was there.

Yeah. So we met that day and we've been together almost 19 years.

Yeah, so we went that day,

we've been together almost 15 years.

~

lovely yeah ~ wow

yeah, it was a wild journey

and his wife and him were still getting in the early stages of figuring

it out and trying to support each other.

So.

his wife and my wife, ex-wife and the kid,

like, it was a wild Christmas,

let me tell you that year, but we stuck through and stuck in it.

And his wife has moved on and got married to another man and we've stayed in touch,

we've stayed at their house. Like,

so everything came crumbling down and then rebuilt itself in a different way.

But it took a lot of courage for everyone involved.

That was it. That's the sentence.

It took a lot of courage for everyone.

all, everyone, the moment you're honest with yourself.

who knows what's going to happen,

but yeah, there's consequences.

Yeah, the hardest parts were the parts you would expect,

letting go of identities and relationships.

Your parents, you have to tell them and they see you differently.

you know, ~ it doesn't all work out perfectly.

Though Steve's parents,

they've accepted me and his father before he passed away became my father.

And we just, I've written books about his life growing up ~ as part of

the work that we do together as novelists.

My mom and my siblings accepted me.

My dad didn't, my dad really stayed away.

I haven't seen my dad in probably 17 years.

But that doesn't surprise me because we weren't really close before,

but it just, you can't expect everyone to be a part of the story that they're

creating for themselves. He was using me as part of his story rather than loving

who I was. He was loving the identity he had created more than the person.

I love him and I give him lots of blessings and I still do my part to reach out,

but I'm not expecting ~ everyone.

And that's the acceptance part,

but I accept myself. And that part

Mm-hmm.

was the hardest part. so,

there are people in my life who decided this wasn't for them as friends.

I

realised that they weren't friends.

it was a benefit to me because I realised he was really there for me in

Yeah.

the long run for being

who I was. So and our children.

~

are quite remarkable, actually.

You know, because they're the ones who had to get,

they didn't have a choice. They had to change their identity,

too. I have two moms and two dads,

down.

you know, parent nights and sleepovers and things are just different.

Yep.

~

But I'll tell you, they have the most accepting,

wide perspective of humans because they understood what it

is to be ~ on the other side of,

they really want us to be who we are.

I you've nailed such an important thing there,

know, being yourself, but also that complete deconstruction of your identity.

My identity, I was a photographer,

I was married, I was this, I was that,

as I chose to be honest with myself.

I guess what I'm trying to ask is how was it to have to change that identity?

mean, that's kind of secondary to the story,

isn't it? You change and then you have to start changing who you are.

How has that changed you as a human being?

I think it's made me so much more authentic.

~

I no longer have to keep people at arms distance.

I don't have to measure how much they can read into my,

do they think I'm gay? I don't have to pretend and act on a stage

to express emotions that I'm afraid that if I don't,

they'll come out. ~ I don't have to protect someone's lie anymore.

The part that feels so truthful is those things are very painful.

All of the stuff that I'm sharing,

I share it with joy now because I'm in here

Okay.

in this moment. But as you know,

going through those things of admitting to yourself certain things that you've been

not being

Mm-hmm.

honest with yourself. When you're doing it just feels like the death,

like you're gonna die. This is it.

No one's gonna love me. It's over.

Yeah. ~

And once you really do have a sort of

death of sorts to let go of all of that and say,

let's hear now. And for me, I've been able to do something I wanted

to do for my whole life. I didn't write my first book until I was 46,

maybe.

after I came out, I started finding the energy to do something I

had always wanted to do. I wanted to travel the world.

I wanted to write books for a living.

I wanted to...

make stories, I want to write movies,

all these things I had dreams of when I was younger before all this hit me,

the death of my friend and things like that.

and doing it my friends and things like that.

~ once that happened, lid,

And once they're gone, so.

cosmic lid

shut and all the creativity got sealed away.

And though I had creative moments,

Sorry.

I didn't have access to them because if I opened it in that depths,

I wouldn't be able to put it away.

knew it.

But as I opened it up, it's like a boundless amount of energy and creativity

Yeah.

and joy and happiness and ~ forging new relationships,

new friendships, learning to let

you

go of friendships earlier that are out of convenience,

like really trusting my intuition,

trusting who I am. So the energy level has changed because it keeps growing.

I have friends that are my age talking about retiring.

I'm like, my goodness. I can't imagine that would be the

You

last thing I'd want to do.

I am just getting started in my life.

And it's because I think I let go of,

when I let go of my identity, I had to protect about being straight.

I also let go of my identity. had to be a principal.

I had to continue being a professor.

I had to do, I had to. I said,

no, I don't have to. I'm not holding on for my retirement.

I could, but I'm not going to,

I'm doing whatever I want to do now because life's too precious to waste

a single day. ~ So.

quitting my job and traveling the world and helping people write books

was a fantasy that I only dreamed about once upon a time.

And that's where the boundlessness comes from,

this energetic freedom to be who you are.

In some ways, I feel like I'm gaining back years that if I had done

it any differently, I couldn't have had because I didn't know this much energy would

be stored up inside of me. I thought maybe it would be all gone.

Like I have expelled it all.

Hmm.

in protecting it and yet in fact what I've noticed it's been reserved

in a special way as long as I'm true,

as long as I say authentic to myself and say true to myself.

You're just glowing with that,

you know, that, that peace that's come through from this conversation,

just like, yeah, I stopped worrying.

I stopped holding it all. I stopped pretending.

I stopped this and I'm writing books.

I'm traveling the world. I want you to tell me more about the books

and the traveling because, you know,

this is, this is how I found you through your podcast,

through your books, but tell me about the writing.

Let's start at beginning, know,

following your dream. I want to write books.

I want to travel. How did that happen?

I think what happened when I started to do this sort of work to let

go of my identity and I started to become more intuitive,

more, I started to trust myself,

my instincts more. And I started trusting children that I was teaching.

I was teaching.

It was ironic that I was a professor,

a principal, and a teacher. I would go back and forth because

I really was fascinated by the children.

I learned more from them than I learned at any time in college,

in the university. And I realised that they had been trying to tell

me something in their subtle way for years.

The same messages were coming through,

and I just wasn't listening. And so...

And so.

I had started to teach early on when Amazon first started allowing

keep grouping.

this print on demand, first allowed authors to do this sort of thing back in 2006,

I started helping young people,

13, 14-year-olds become published authors.

Because I thought, wouldn't it be lovely if by the time you got to high school,

Yeah.

you already had published a book or a piece of writing in a

book. How amazing that would be.

so I did, we started to publish to children.

He didn't know what being. So I did,

And one of the...

we threw a deposit together. And we were like,

One of the days we were having a book fair with the students work

the day's perfect, I'll pay her,

and other students were coming from other classes to see my students

I'll pay the students for her.

And was like, okay, I'll see you.

had published and they're like,

wow, their students are

writing books. And they would come and one of the students was helping

me put all the books out and getting ready for the classes to come visit.

And he said, Mr. Taronis, where's your book?

I want to put it out along the others.

And I paused and I thought about lying,

And I, I'm gonna go to the library and talk to the people in the library

but I was like, nope, I'm not doing that anymore.

I'm not pretending anymore. And I just said,

and not pretend to be. I just,

I don't have one. And he looks very curious to me and says,

don't know any of Very curious spaces.

well,

why not? And I thought I could lie again.

I could say it's about you, it's not about me,

it's about the kids. And I was like,

that's a lie again. Because it's a subtle,

and I have try again. Because it's so long.

I could make that true.

know,

could be

but I knew it wasn't true for me.

a I'm afraid that

So I said, honestly, I'm just afraid that I won't know what to say

I don't know what to say or what to say.

or have anything that people care about.

He said, well, you tell us, it's okay to be afraid to just do it anyways.

And then he walked off and I thought,

~ Out of the mouths of babes, hey?

you little turd.

And I paused for a moment and he went on and probably thought nothing of it,

I was, I was.

shook up because I could sense the truth in his words,

mirroring back the words I had given him.

I just had not been listening.

~ so shortly after that,

I decided I'd write a book. the reason I was struggling is I wanted to write

a book about starting over and doing something again and leaving education.

But I felt very afraid because this I'm an educator,

I'm a professor, I'm a teacher.

What am I doing here? And

I decided, once I decided who is this book for,

I said, this is for me. I need to make a leap out of this classroom and

I'm going to write a book about how,

how do I leap from here without going back to school?

I don't need another career. I needed to leap from here to there.

And I wrote the book, Art of Apprenticeship,

about how you can really learn from a mentor by service through serving them.

And I wrote that book in 30 days.

It had taken me 24 years and 30 days to write that book.

Those 24 years were too...

not facing the truth of I was just afraid that this could help me see.

And then once I was clear about the why,

why I was doing it for me, everything shifted.

And I wrote that book and I published it.

And what was amazing about it was that I started to see myself differently.

I started to see myself with a new identity again as an author,

not just a teacher. So that shift is how I started doing this.

And people came to me, you wrote a book.

How did you do that? Could you teach me how?

How did you do it in such a short time?

And I realised they were asking me the same questions I was asking myself,

but I realised

Mm-hmm.

they were just afraid of the same things I was.

And they're dancing around these questions.

It wasn't that they didn't know how,

it's they wanted to know how to get rid of this thing they felt inside.

And I was now able to help them because I could realise I was just deceiving myself

that I didn't know how to write a book.

A book is one word after the other and it has chapters and pages.

It's not, I didn't know how. I was helping children.

I couldn't even lie about that.

Cause look, I'm helping kids. It's I know how.

So the

you

things started happening for me as I was now connecting to the truth of who I was.

I was no longer hiding from those stories and those messages.

And as that happened, things started to shift for me.

And people started to seek me out as a sort of a book doula to help them birth

their book because they had been trying for so long,

they couldn't get through. And I said,

I think I can help. But you have to be willing to face some of these things.

have nothing to with writing.

That's one of the ways I built freedom.

I built freedom

to travel. took a job internationally to Shanghai with my husband

and our daughter went there. She graduated from a high school in Shanghai.

~ Things started just shifting in my world because I was trusting myself

and I was able to leave my career as an educator,

started coaching authors and that's,

I've been doing that for almost a decade now.

It's miraculous to me. I don't know how it all happens,

but the thing is I no longer have to know.

I don't have to know

Mm-hmm.

the answer.

Because before I had to know because if I don't know,

someone will figure me out. Now I was like,

I don't know what's happening tomorrow.

I'm hoping that today is just as perfect as it will always be.

Not because everything goes well,

but everything does go my way now because I only see it that way.

I don't, I'm no longer hiding from the things I've perceived as problems.

So I get this internal sense of if it doesn't go well this way,

I know another way will happen

Thank you.

because I've been through so many hard things.

I've lived through every hard thing that's come my way.

you

I

know I can live through whatever.

So why not try the thing I want to try?

So that's really how the journey kind of started.

was from a student, it was from a child,

it was from a young person. And that's why I gave a TED talk about what makes

a good teacher great because I realised great teachers aren't teachers because

that's what kids have told me.

Great teachers are the ones who are listening to the young people.

That's how you become great. You don't become great by just learning something.

You have to surrender yourself to the people you're trying to serve.

That last bit, you become great serving the people,

listening to the people you serve.

absolutely. Then you're not the guru.

Then you are listening, you are hearing,

you are... It's so simple, so beautiful.

And then that whole thing around,

I don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow,

but I have survived everything that's come my way.

I mean, you've survived all sorts of things.

It's like, yeah, next. Yeah. You do make it sound very simple though,

Azul. I know it's not quite as simple as that.

It has cost a lot, but.

Yes, so the travelling, mean, what were you doing when you were travelling?

Well, I was coaching authors. What had happened is I went because I

was writing this book about finding a mentor because I was an educator.

I was an academic. I didn't know anything about living online.

hear, you know, in the early two thousands,

I heard about people making money online,

living their life online. It was really a novel thing when people weren't doing

that. And I thought,

Hmm.

well, I'd like to learn to do that.

And I would research books and

websites and podcasts and I would listen and I found somebody I really trusted.

And that was Pat Flynn and I started listening to his work.

But what was happening is I learned better if I learned from the person,

like can I ask them questions?

Can I connect with them? So I wrote that book really to show can

I become this person's mentee?

How would I do it if I don't know him and he's semi-famous to me?

I don't know how to do this. So basically I

I'd taken the book that I had written and went to his event.

had an event for one day and I had written a book and I shared

my story about writing this book the same way I told you.

And one of things about it was that he...

~

He was more surprised by how did I write a book than,

it was a business sort of entrepreneur meeting.

And I didn't know anything about entrepreneurship,

but, ~

Hmm.

I knew I wanted to mentor. So what happened was that,

~ when I told him I wrote a book in 30 days,

all these entrepreneurs afterwards,

including the person I was trying to encourage to be my mentor without asking came

up to me and goes, well, how, did you do that?

You think you could help me? So people started just asking me.

~ yeah, I could help you and I would meet with them in person and I helped them

and coach them through cause I had helped children.

I didn't change anything about how I helped adults.

I had to help them see things differently.

But when I moved to China, the challenge was,

well, how do I do this? And so I started at the time we didn't have zoom

or Riverside or anything like this.

We had Skype. So I would just coaching people on

Yes,

Skype and eventually I,

people, I didn't have a website.

wasn't like I had a bis people just kept sending me.

Hey, I heard you do this. Oh, yeah.

Hey, I heard you do this. I got your email.

I your phone number. And eventually I got so many people.

was like, I can't I don't have time.

I'm still working a traditional job.

I said, I'm going to put you in a little group together.

Is that OK? Yeah. So I started coaching people in groups and it just kind

of grew and grew. And eventually it grew so big I had to hire other coaches

to help me. I was like, I can't I have too many people now who want me to help them.

And now it's sort of scaled back in a smaller way so I can help.

the individual authors, but yeah,

that's sort of how it started.

Just word of mouth. I really don't know.

I can't tell you. don't think I

Hmm.

did anything how you're supposed to do it.

I don't know how you're supposed to do it,

but I just took one more step the next day and then we'll the next day.

Maybe I should build a website.

It's been a couple of years. That might be good idea.

I didn't have a podcast and eight years ago I started one and I just been doing that

every week. I'll do another one,

guess.

I'll try another podcast. And I just kept going and well,

it's been eight and a half years I've been doing this podcast for.

So I just try things and I just see what happens.

And I really don't know what comes next.

And I hope that it stays that exciting for me because then it means I can't

do it wrong.

This is such an inspiration. I cannot wait to listen to this back and just go,

yeah, I like this because there's just so many gems that enthusiasm.

Yeah, we'll do that. Do that. Give it a go.

And it's working. mean, have there been any failures?

Have there been things that you started or done that have been really like,

knocked you for six or really made you worry wonder,

am I really just, is everything falling apart?

Or have you just stepped over it and brushed your feet off and stepped off again?

mean, yeah, things like that. What,

all the time, they go wrong all time.

Coming to this meeting, it was late because I rescheduled a meeting.

was like, well, things just don't go always the way you planned.

They go wrong all the time. But what I realised is I was still letting

go of what was happening. Here's the honest truth.

My identity of proving started to show up back in my business because during

the pandemic, my business actually exploded because everybody was home.

They all wanted to write a book.

They were sitting at home now.

So my business grew. think thinking I needed to build this big thing,

think one of my biggest, like I let it grew too fast.

I had too many people that I was now had 15 people and that I was hiring

and they were doing all these things.

I was now a manager again of people.

wasn't just being a coach. But I was trying to keep up with everybody else who's

like, you gotta grow, you gotta grow,

you gotta do these things to grow.

I was like, yeah, yeah.

I think that was a misstep because I wasn't looking to grow.

I was just having a good time,

if I'm honest. But I fell into the trap of following what other people were doing.

so that was a misstep.

Yep.

It was a great learning experience because I realised,

I never got here by doing what everyone else was doing.

Why did I start now? ~ And as I let go of that,

it felt like, again, a proving point.

It was familiar feeling. was like,

Yep. ~

ooh, this doesn't feel good.

This feels like I know this familiar feeling and I'm starting to,

I could sense the old patterns coming back,

you know? ~ But I was using them

Yeah.

to hide in a different way. I was hiding,

I don't know what I'm doing. And now I'm like,

I really don't know what I'm doing.

Don't come for my business advice.

Come to me for coaching advice.

But like, I could just tell you that you have to trust your gut,

trust yourself, trust this inner knowing.

I always tell my authors,

Yeah.

your blueprint of who you are is destroyed.

There's no one gonna come after you that's you.

So you have to trust what's in you more than you trust what your teachers told you,

your professors, what books you've read.

You can't trust those things. Those are things other people did.

Hmm.

You

have to trust this deeper thing.

that was, again, I had to listen to the people I was serving,

that I was telling them these things,

but I wasn't hearing them from me.

So I was like, oh, here again,

opportunity to listen.

So as I do that, as I just lean into this person that I really am,

~ people show up again. It's like this,

~ it's an energetic shift, right?

When you

them.

trust this energy, this human you are,

the higher self starts to show up.

Things that are inexplicable start to happen.

You see,

Yep.

no longer see challenges as problems,

you see them as opportunities.

everything that looks like a hindrance now,

say, that's a miracle waiting to happen.

I don't know how, but I know it is.

I'm not trying to fix it. Before I tried to fix that problem,

I gotta fix that problem because that's going wrong versus,

that's probably keeping me from doing something I shouldn't do.

Instead of throwing money at it or throwing ~ attention at it,

I say, well, that's an opportunity for a miracle.

know it.

because it's how it's been in my life.

All those problems, how will I do if I come out?

No one will love me. I can't be this or that anymore if I come out.

Then again, if I fail, I didn't mention this,

but another huge setback I had when I first came out,

before I came out actually, I had left being a principal because I didn't want

to do it. Remember I told you I was trying to get out of education,

trying to find my thing, but I picked ~ something that was probably

not my right path, which was I opened a physical.

gymnasium for working out with my wife at the time.

And I totally went, it was right before the 2008 crash and I lost everything.

I went totally bankrupt. I lost my house.

lost cars. had nothing. had nothing.

Zero. I had completely bankrupt.

And so I was like, wow,

these are all lessons. These are all information for learning.

So I just had to remind myself,

trust yourself. You can get through anything.

Don't worry what it is and trust this resilience that's inside of you because

on the other side of it, it's these miraculous things.

Because we hear when you read about people who you admire,

Hmm.

you read about how the hard times they went through and then they overcame.

Everybody likes to read about it,

but nobody wants to go through it.

But the only way to become that person is to live through the stuff that's already

before you. You don't have to worry about hard stuff.

It'll show up for you. It's going to.

That's just how it works. And you don't get to be an exception.

I think

it.

There's a book, The Road Less Traveled,

and I think the very first, I've not read the book,

but the very first part of it,

it's all I needed, which is, ~ once you realise life is difficult,

it's no longer difficult. And that's sort of where I'm sitting then,

Yeah.

like, challenges are gonna come,

failures are gonna happen, how business goes or doesn't go has nothing

to do with me, I'm just gonna keep showing up here.

And other people wanna tell me this is how you do it to be successful.

And I see very successful people being miserable.

I go, I had joy.

Yeah.

that just comes out of me now,

I don't have to worry about success bringing me joy.

I have, no matter what happens in life,

I will have joy. And so I think that's sort of how I'm trying to perceive

my world so that I can attempt anything.

I can do anything I want, whatever

Hmm.

I choose to do. ~ And that lesson,

again, this is all from young people.

I've learned all these things from children.

If I reflect back on all the wisdom they were freely giving me.

you

And

I wasn't listening. Now I just go back to those,

the annuals of my mind about the wisdom that they gave me.

I, I go, what would make me great?

What would they say? And I would just listen deeply and go,

Hmm.

Oh, this

is what I should be doing. Um,

so I, I'm, I'm on a different path than a lot of people and I can't tell

you it's easy. And I can't tell you there aren't lots of hard times,

but whether I have lots of money or have none,

it doesn't really, it's not going to change this feeling I have.

so much inspiration, so much gentleness.

I don't like the word hope, but there's just so wisdom there.

And I don't have kids, so I haven't got that framework.

I haven't worked with kids, but I know from my siblings,

their children teach them every single moment.

~

And I love all of that. Yeah, I really,

really do. How can people find you and connect with you and hear you?

Well, you can find me at authorswholead.com.

That's where people usually find me if they want to write a book.

And I have a podcast by the same name.

I have a pretty unique name, Azul Taranis,

so you easy to find me anywhere on socials.

But if you go to authorswholead.com,

I created something for people,

which is a, it's a free audio series.

It's called Born to Write, Scared to Start.

And it's about

getting that book from idea to out,

like getting the confidence to start,

because that was the thing I learned from kids.

there's a really small step that is about

a mile wide in between wanting to do something and doing it.

And most people are waiting for the confidence to come and then do it.

And I'm telling them your confidence comes from that really impossible step.

Sort of like the movie Indiana Jones

She did it.

where he takes that blind

step into nowhere. That's what people have to do when they're doing something

creative, whether it's your life that's the creative part or whether it's

.

writing a book. that's in a free audio series I can get from you there.

And feel free to send messages because I'm always curious and what inspires people

when they hear sort of podcasts like this

Brilliant. Well, we'll put all that in the show notes.

this has been, this has been really inspirational.

Thank you ever so much. Really,

really enjoyed this conversation.

Yeah, thank you so much for

the invitation.

Well, there we are guys. Another episode of the Brave Man Project.

Just dare. I think that's the outcome.

Dare. You have no idea what's going to happen.

And as Azul has said, it's worth it.

Yeah. Shit happens. Things get frightening.

You have to change your identity.

But I mean, look at that face.

Look at that smile. For those of you who can't see this,

system.

he's got this

smile. He's happy. He's peaceful.

It has been a lovely, lovely conversation.

So if you like what you've seen,

like what you heard, please follow,

please subscribe and keep sharing this on because this is

a really important conversation as of all these conversations.

So thank you ever so much.