This episode examines how mental health, trauma, and deeply held beliefs shape career success, arguing that workforce development must move beyond skills alone to an inside-out approach that builds resilience and addresses root causes to create lasting impact.
Podcast Transcript
INTRO
What could happen if we take our workforce to new heights? Workforce on the Mic, presented by NAWDP, brings you inspirational stories, innovative solutions, and expert insights that are shaping the future of the workforce. Tune in for dynamic conversations that motivate and transform the workforce development community. And now, on to the episode.
00:00:28 Alexis Franks
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, all you workforce warriors across the country. My name is Alexis Franks, and I am your Director of Membership with the National Association of Workforce Development Professionals. And welcome to another episode of Workforce on the Mic.
Today’s episode takes us into a topic that’s really becoming impossible to ignore, the connection between mental health, trauma, and the way people navigate their careers. For so many individuals, long-term stress and unresolved experiences can not just affect well-being, but they can influence confidence, decision-making, and what feels possible in the workplace.
So we’re joined today by Lyon Goodman, CEO of the Clear Beliefs Institute, an organization known for its work at the intersection of mental health, coaching, and workforce development. So Lyon, welcome to you.
00:01:30 Lion Goodman
Thank you, Alexis. Great to be here. Very happy to be your guest today.
00:01:35 Alexis Franks
Great. So we will do what we call passing the mic. So Lion, I’ll pass the mic to you. And if you can just start out with sharing where you are in the country and a little bit about your journey and workforce development and for the Clear Beliefs Institute.
00:01:50 Lion Goodman
Sure. I’m in Petaluma, California.
So we call it the left coast. And I was always concerned with poverty in the US. And the only thing I could do in my profession of teaching was to offer scholarships to people who wanted to learn my methodology. And many of those people took the training and what we do into their communities, which I was very happy with. The invitation came to participate in an innovation grant. The funding had already been secured. They were looking for someone with my background to support the initiative that was focused on trauma-informed coaching. And this came through another organization which was applying for two grants, one of which fit their capabilities, the other fit mine. So we came in as a sub-vendor to fill that grant.
And when I had a chance to meet with the executive director of WorkFirst New Jersey, Tammy Molinelli, we were very aligned. She understood that the outside-in resources that they provided for people weren’t enough because the impact of poverty and trauma in that community kept people locked into the poverty cycle.
TANF was a helping hand, certainly, but the issues that people on TANF faced were much deeper. They were psychological and cultural, there were mental health issues, as well as social and economic issues. And we had the solution she was looking for. We work with people who have traumas from the past, traumas from the present, difficulties in their life, and we go to the source
of that trauma or psychological difficulty, and we help people clear it from the inside out. So TANF is resources from the outside in, and we were able to come in and provide services to help people from the inside out, which included things like resilience, the ability to keep going, the ability to take advantage of the resources that were there.
So we’ve essentially made workforce development more effective in their mission to get people out of poverty permanently.
00:03:56 Alexis Franks
Wow, I love that you brought that up, Lion, really, because workforce programs can’t do it all. There are some services that we’re either not equipped in training or just don’t have the funding to support, but they’re just as important for an individual to be successful, that they have access to all of these resources and really, as you said, build from the inside out to be successful. So if you can dig a little bit deeper into really the role that Clear Beliefs Institute plays, how do you all view what long-term stress and trauma and how those things might shape the career decision-making process for an individual?
00:04:43 Lion Goodman
Well, I think we all recognize that poverty is traumatic.
One of the consultants I talked to said it’s PTSD without the P. There’s no post-traumatic because it’s constant traumatic. You can’t feed your kids or you’re worried about feeding your kids and you’re working two jobs at minimum wage and you can’t get ahead and you don’t have childcare and you can’t pay your rent. We know these issues in workforce development, right? That these are the things that people face in poverty. One thing breaks down and you fix it and two more things break down.
You asked about how trauma shapes career decision making, but you can only think about a career if you’re out of a traumatic situation. When you’re in trauma, the brain focuses on core survival needs. It doesn’t have the energy or the attention for future planning or long-term goals. You have to stay focused on today of getting the kids to school or getting them fed. But even the kids who are living in poverty, they’re involved in their parents’ trauma.
And so they can’t focus in school because they didn’t eat breakfast or they’re worried about their mom, right? And if they have any career aspirations at all, they look around their community and they see very limited options for them. I could be a cop or I could be a welfare worker. I could be a teacher or a drug dealer. What other options do they have? What do they see in their environment? Most people who are living in poverty don’t have a middle-class person that they talk to regularly or can ask for help from. This is where Donna Beagle’s program came in on the other side, the other innovative grant. She helps people who are in poverty get connected to people who are in middle class volunteers in the community so they can get help when they need it.
There’s so many agencies doing really good work in this field, but they’re not all coordinated. And the people that work there get stressed and they get fed up and they, burn out.
So the social workers are stressed, and then people come in and they are facing stress or facing judgment. So this is a system-wide problem. I hope someone’s working on a solution that’s certainly beyond my pay grade, but people aren’t getting the holistic help that they need. So chronic stress and negative
self-beliefs lock people into the cycle that makes escaping poverty difficult, TANF clients scored 48% higher in negative self-beliefs than the general population. And in our work, we increased self-confidence by 23% to 30%
in the people we worked with, and we decreased negative beliefs 35% and decreased strong negative feelings by 32%. So we had a real impact on the people, again, from the inside out.
00:07:33 Alexis Franks
I think that really phrases how we’re offering our services and workforce programs in general.
We typically come in and if someone is in our offices or if there’s a new customer that we’re seeking to serve, we ask a lot of questions in that initial conversation. Do you have access to a home? Do you have a phone number? Do you have a resume? How many children do you have? Do they have secure daycare? Are they in school? We ask all of these questions in their, what we term a needs assessment, but you bring up a really good point that we can’t begin to provide services if we don’t have a complete understanding of all of those holistic pieces that have brought them into our office on that particular day. So I think it’s really important for all of our listeners, especially today for workforce professionals, that we’re truly considering the full picture of the person that we’re looking to serve.
And the piece that you mentioned about just making that career decision can’t even happen until these things are addressed on the front end. And it affects everyone. It affects children. It affects parents, those that are caretakers. So this is a really good point to bring up for all of our workforce programs. These are services that are critical to the success of how we provide our customers with a clear path forward. So I love that you mentioned and you are called the Clear Beliefs Institute because that’s managing impact and success way past any program participation. And so I think that’s definitely something our listeners want to know more about and really begin to provide services or resources around.
So, Lion, as we continue to talk, can you share some examples of how the coaching and the the programs that you all are providing, how it leads to different outcomes for those that you’re serving.
00:09:44 Lion Goodman
Absolutely.
One of the people assigned to me, who I’ll call Alice, was a very bright, single mom. She was caught up in the morass of the system. Her attempts to break out of poverty kept failing, and so she considered herself a failure. This is where the external environment becomes the identity. A bad relationship with her ex had torn down her self-esteem, so she basically felt she was worthless and was just trying to survive.
When I talked to her about her future, she told me she wanted to be a preschool teacher because her daughter loved being in preschool. I began with her low opinion of herself, showed her that her circumstances were the issue, the problem wasn’t her. There’s nothing wrong with her. In fact, she was very bright and capable. She applied to a preschool and got the job as an assistant. Then she moved into a much more modern and healthy school as an assistant teacher with a higher salary, and they waived tuition for her daughter, which gave her more money and
in her pocket every month. And she found out that she could apply for a scholarship to a preschool training program. She got in and she’s completed that now. And her work actually with me piqued her interest in coaching and she applied for a scholarship to a coaching school and she’ll be soon training to be a coach. She’s very happy and healthy on her way to self-sufficiency. I just checked in with her today and she said her whole life has changed because of the coaching that we did.
So that’s one example.
00:11:12 Alexis Franks
That is truly amazing. And I think you got to the root of, like you mentioned before, really seeing what the cause is. Is it a circumstance? And more oftentimes than not, it is the circumstance and not the person necessarily. And it’s a mindset shift to help an individual to see that they really are capable of doing all the things they want to do.
That’s a wonderful example of just how coaching different a coaching session or series of sessions can make that outcome for that person.
And so I know we’ve kept you for a little while today, and I just have a couple more questions for you. So for any workforce professional that might be listening in today that hears this and says, yes, I need to build this into my programs. What does it look like? How can I do this? What advice would you give those leaders to begin to embed this approach into their programs or their culture in general?
00:12:19 Lion Goodman
Well, first I want to show them and talk about our results. 52% of the people that we worked with showed significant gains in movement towards self-sufficiency, either through education or a better job or starting their own entrepreneurial business, 52%. Most people who leave TANF are ending up working in low paying jobs and don’t actually get out of poverty. So for me, this is the perfect marriage between the outside in resources and the inside out clearing of those beliefs, the negative self beliefs that people take on naturally. We all do this. This is not just about poverty. Children take on the beliefs of their parents. If their parents tell them that they’re bad, they believe they’re bad and they see themselves as bad. So this is a human problem. It’s not just a problem in poverty. What I would say is call me, talk to me.
I would love to bring this further out into the field and to multiply it. I have a proposal brewing that would turn this into a nationwide program instead of just a local program. And I would love to work with people who want to do that. One part of our program was that we trained the social workers and the case managers in our technology.
It provided a lot of difficulty. It was not easy because they were at work. So it was almost impossible to train them, but we gave them some basic understanding so that they could actually help their clients with this part of the issue as well as just give them things that they could do or get from the government. So I am a wide open and I would love to talk to people who are interested in this process, interested in expanding what we do. I’m a teacher. I’ve trained over 700 coaches around the world in this methodology. And I can teach anyone the methodology if they have the time and the attention. So call me up. Let’s talk. I’d love to share this and spread it more and help more people get out of poverty permanently.
00:14:27 Alexis Franks
Absolutely. Well, that’s a great way. I think, Lion, really, we want to build environments for individuals to connect and provide the most innovative services possible to the communities that they serve. So we appreciate you being willing to connect with others and share your thoughts and experiences and training to help others to be successful. And really what we have on Workforce on the Mic is what we call mic drop moments.
And you gave us a few of our mic drop moments today. And really to take away from our conversation, to think holistically about the person before they even get into a career path or career exploration activities, to make sure we’re addressing the needs for that individual, either by providing our own services or resources to similar services that might be needed.
That’s an extremely good takeaway. And if we’re not thinking about how we’re doing it now, now’s the time to embed it into our programs to make sure we have successful outcomes for successful people. So Lion, again, we thank you so much for joining us today. And if individuals are interested in connecting and learning more about Clear Beliefs Institute, what’s the best way to connect with you?
00:15:48 Lion Goodman
The best way is through liongoodman.com, L-I-O-N, goodman.com. That has a link to my resources and also my contact information.
00:16:00 Alexis Franks
Awesome. Well, thank you so much again. We appreciate you participating in the podcast today, and we look forward to continuing our connection with you and seeing you soon.
00:16:12 Lion Goodman
Thank you, Alexis. It’s a pleasure to be here with you, and I wish you the best.
00:16:17 Alexis Franks
Thank you. Enjoy what you heard. Join us in person at the NAWDUP annual conference happening May 18th through 20th in Phoenix, Arizona. Connect with workforce professionals from across the country for three days of learning, collaboration, and inspiration as we rise to the challenge together. Visit NAWDP.org to learn more and register today.
CONCLUSION
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