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White Collar Support Group Blog: Prison taught me the beauty, power, and complexity of freedom. by Craig Stanland

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Craig Stanland is a Member of our White Collar Support Group that meets online on Zoom on Monday evenings.

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There are seemingly countless ways to experience freedom. There are nuances and layers, and I’m fascinated by all of them.

That’s because freedom is one of my core values. A couple of years ago, that core value and my commitment to it was challenged.

I was fortunate to land a job after prison. That’s not an easy thing to do.

I worked the front desk at a gym, making $12 an hour. There were plenty of nights I’d skip dinner because I didn’t have enough money to take the subway to work and eat.

A far cry from my six-figure salary, plus commission, expense account, and car allowance.

Over time I became friends with many of the members, and we spoke in great detail about life and work, and of course, working out.

One of my friends learned about my corporate background; they knew what I was capable of in a corporate sales setting. I generated 21M in sales in my best year. I was consistently in the top 3 in the country.

And I hated it. There was no fulfillment; there was no joy. When asked if I liked my job, I replied the same every time,

“I don’t like my job, but I like what it affords me.”

The facade it provided, the cars, the watches, the extravagant dinners, multiple homes.

I was always chasing, and I was never satisfied. Deep down, I wanted to innovate, create my own company, write a book, and deliver a TED talk.

But I was too damn afraid to give up everything and create the life I wanted to create.

The gym didn’t pay a lot, but it provided the freedom to create the life I wanted.

That’s when I faced one of my most significant tests:

My new friend offered me a job back in the corporate world that would generate 350K/year.

I looked at my non-existent bank account, my skinny frame, and my rumbling stomach.

I thought about the watches I could buy and the new BMW I would lease. A new apartment in a cool neighborhood in NYC.

I spent my paycheck before I even got the offer letter.

What the hell was I doing? What was I thinking? Hadn’t I learned? What do I genuinely want to do?

Write. Speak. Utilize my experience in service to others. To have the freedom to create, innovate and carve my own path.

I turned the job down.

Because I was done chasing, I was done living in scarcity. I was done doing things that didn’t make me feel good.

I knew my definition of freedom, and I made my decision from the center of that definition.

It was singlehandedly one of the most empowering moments of my life.

When we live in alignment with our core values, we generate an energy that will not be denied. It flows from our very being and ripples out to every aspect of our lives.

We seize agency by the horns, and we, nobody else, are responsible for our lives.

All the distractions, all the BS, all the noise falls by the wayside when we know what we value and operate from the center of that.

Our decisions, and in turn our lives, become crystal clear.

That, to me, is freedom.


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My new book, “Blank Canvas, How I Reinvented My Life After Prison” is now available on Amazon.


I wrote this book from my heart, and I gave it everything I had.


My dream, my goal for this book is that it helps one person—the one person who feels right now how I once felt. 


I’d be honored if you checked it out.


After hitting rock bottom, Craig Stanland was forced to make a choice: give up or rebuild. He thought he had “it all” until he lost sight of what’s truly important and made the worst decision of his life, losing everything along the way, including his own self-worth. Through the painful, terrifying process of starting over, Craig ultimately discovered that when you have nothing, anything is possible.


Today, Craig is an author, speaker, and Reinvention Architect. He specializes in working with people whose lives have fallen apart, helping them reinvent themselves by showing them how to rebuild their self-worth and create the extraordinary lives they’ve always wanted.  


www.craigstanland.com


TEDx: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrkG9VQzqIo


LinkedIn:  www.linkedin.com/in/craigstanland


IG: Craig_Stanland


Order “Blank Canvas” on Amazon.com here.



 


 

 

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White Collar Support Group Blog: When is the Right Time? by Bill Livolsi

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Bill Livolsi is a Member of our White Collar Support Group that meets online on Zoom on Monday evenings.

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When Is The ‘Right’ Time?

Anyone who has been involved with the criminal justice system asks these questions:

What’s the right time to tell my family?
What is the right time to tell my employer?
What’s the right time to tell my friends and colleagues? What’s the right time in a social setting?
Is there ever a right time? How do I tell anyone?

I have come to believe that these conversations need to happen, sooner rather than later. The topic needs to be broached, otherwise it’s a sack of bricks we silently carry everywhere we go. And it gets heavier and heavier with the passage of time.

Keeping secrets is corrosive, but these are hard conversations to have.

We are reluctant to have the difficult conversations surrounding our criminal justice issues. We’re afraid of rejection, we’re afraid of judgment and we’re afraid of being ostracized. All pretty normal fears.

Anyone who knows me knows that I believe in disclosing our situation to our employer, or prospective employer, sooner rather than later. I feel that keeping it a secret is in the long run counter-productive to our employment prospects. When they find out, and they will find out, having kept it hidden only reinforces the notion that we are, among other things, untrustworthy.

What about the numerous other situations we’ll encounter in our lives? Let me share a story from this past week at work.

I was paired for a day-long task with another one of my coworkers. We had never worked together before. The task at hand gave us ample opportunity to have a conversation while we were working.

As we were comparing our relative experience with our employer they told me how grateful they were to have this job because it was so difficult to find work as they were on federal probation.

BOOM, there it was!

Here I was thinking of ways I was going to broach the topic with them (at some yet to be determined ‘right time’) and they got there first. I felt good that they were comfortable sharing this part of their life with me. Then I felt a sense of relief as I shared my situation. As we continued our conversation throughout the afternoon we found that we had so much in common irrespective of the differences in our convictions. It was a really good day.

I’ve been thinking about this experience and here are some thoughts I’ve come away with.

Prior to that moment did I have any inkling they had a felony conviction? No! And the same is true for them about me, they had no idea. Did we have large F’s stamped on our foreheads? Obviously not. Yet we both were silently keeping the same secret, until we weren’t.

It felt very good to be able to talk openly about our experience free of judgment and not having to hide something so impactful in our lives.

Too often I forget that there are hundreds of thousands of men and women in our society carrying around the same guilt, shame and fear of judgement that I am. They are the checkout person at the grocery store, they cut my hair, they’re my plumber, they’re my electrician, they are the men and women I work with.

I am very mindful of the fact that not every experience that I will have, or you will have, is going to be pleasant. I have had plenty of unpleasant ones in the past. Sometimes my worst fears will be realized; I will be judged, or rejected.

So, is there ever a right time? And with whom do I share? I don’t really know for sure, but I do know this much – the more I hold it inside, the more energy I expend keeping my secret, my sense of isolation will never truly end.

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Bill Livolsi is a Life Coach supporting the white collar justice community and a volunteer with Progressive Prison Ministries. He helps men and women facing prosecution for white collar and non-violent crimes navigate their journey – including rebuilding their lives after prison. He was prosecuted for a white collar crime and spent 13 months in Federal prison. Bill can be reached at whitecollarcoaching.com.

White Collar Support Group Blog: Small Things. Strange Place. by Bill Livolsi

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Bill Livolsi is a Member of our White Collar Support Group that meets online on Zoom on Monday evenings.

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Spending an extended period of time alone can be a good thing. In my case, the forced solitude of federal prison provided me an opportunity to confront the many personal issues I had neglected for years.

FCI El Reno was to be my ‘home’ for 20 months. I self-surrendered in late March 2019. Not surprisingly, I didn’t want to be there, but there was nothing to be done about that. I was at the Camp. It was not a physically threatening environment but I didn’t press my luck. That said, prison was an extremely difficult experience. For me, and for many of the men I served time with, the worst aspect of our prison sentence was the isolation from children, family and close friends (those who remained).

I think about my time at El Reno almost daily. I’m very grateful it’s behind me. Yet strangely, there are things I miss, namely the unspoken bond that forms between those who share a common hardship. I was in the company of other men struggling with issues similar to my own. We shared these burdens with each other within our small group.

My first month at ‘The El Reno Resort and Spa’ (it was none of those things) flew by. There was so much to get accustomed to and to learn. It was as if I was dropped into a strange world where the language, customs and culture I knew no longer applied. Every day brought something new.

By the time summer came, I was pretty well acclimated and I found myself in the middle of a very real identity crisis. I was at one of the lowest points I had ever been. I felt trapped in my own head, and was trapped behind bars. My days were consumed with existential questions: How did I get here? Why did I get here? Who am I, really? Do I have any redeeming value to my children, my family, to anyone?

An unspoken fear of many who are incarcerated is that ‘people and events’ will conspire and you will never be allowed to leave. The prison rumor mill (inmate.com) was full of these tales. Such fears are silly and irrational to those looking in from the outside, but when you’re inside they feel very real. When I finally understood the truth, that my incarceration was not indefinite, and it would come to an end by December 2020, I began working though the issues and choices that brought me to that place. Slowly I began rebuilding my self-esteem, my self-worth, who I was, and who I will be.

Wayne Dyer said “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” As my rebuilding process unfolded I began to pay close attention to the good in my life and in the small things that previously went unnoticed. I found gratitude, a sense of normalcy and a little peace of mind.

Across highway 66 from the prison there is a huge wind farm. For a time I barely gave it a second look but it became an unending source of fascination for me. There are hundreds of turbines as far as the eye can see. The blades on all the turbines move in unison. Hundreds of blades moving together like gigantic swiss watches, keeping perfect time. When I focused on it, as I often did, I was mesmerized. I also realized that the direction of the turbines depends upon which way the wind is blowing (common sense, I know). Their directional movements were a mystery to me. One minute they were facing north, 10 minutes later they were facing west. So cool. And each structure is built in near perfect alignment with each other, one behind the next, and the next and the next, like a giant chess board. And depending on the time of day and the weather conditions, the visual effects could be stunning. When a storm would move in from the west or the north, which they often did, I would watch the structures slowly disappear, one by one by one, into the heavy cloud cover. It seemed like each day brought me a new revelation.

El Reno also has its own municipal airport, which isn’t unusual for Oklahoma. All sorts of planes would fly in and out. Small, single prop planes were the most frequent. They are a useful tool oil companies use for visual inspections of pipelines and drilling sites. These planes, and others, are easy to identify by sight but what I found fun was listening to the different engine sounds. High pitch or low, high revs/low revs, prop or jet. Sometimes I would sit on one of the outside benches, or lay on the warm cement of the abandoned tennis court, eyes closed, as the sound of the engine would soothe whatever was on my mind. Occasionally a certain engine sound would remind me of the many times I was on the beach in Sea Isle City, New Jersey and I would visualize a bi-plane flying by with it’s banner tow. All that was missing was the sound of the sea gulls and the waves, which my imagination gladly supplied.

Some mornings, if the breeze was just right, I knew they were cooking bacon behind the fence at the medium security facility. I love bacon. It wasn’t served to us lowly Campers. It made me think of home.

I learned to identify certain people’s footfalls on the walking track, sight unseen.

I enjoyed watching the feral cats hunting in the nearby field.

The smell of diesel fumes would let me know the back-up generators were running.

I knew it was noon when the town would test it’s tornado sirens.

I could tell by smell if there was a nearby brush fire (and the Camp fire crew would soon be called out).

And at all times of the day I would catch a whiff of burning tobacco coming from behind the out-buildings near the walking track.

I became strangely attached to these small things. They were all part of my ‘new normal’ existence.

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Lately I have been thinking about the things that bring joy and gratitude to my life right now. There is the most obvious – being home. Now I am able to be truly present for my children, grandchildren, and family. There is more: helping fellow travelers during their CJ journey, a job that helps to support our household, receiving a phone call, cooking, food shopping, fabric softener (if you’ve been to prison you’ll understand), or watching my garden grow.

In the years I was dealing with my prosecution and the run up to prison I often lost sight, perhaps understandably, of what I should be grateful for. My prison journey gave me the chance to find peace and gratitude in small things, in a very strange place. Perhaps I could have learned this lesson without going to prison, but I’ll never know for sure. Regardless, I have a deep sense of gratitude that I am able to recognize them and enjoy them now.

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Bill Livolsi is a Life Coach supporting the white collar justice community and a volunteer with Progressive Prison Ministries. He helps men and women facing prosecution for white collar and non-violent crimes navigate their journey – including rebuilding their lives after prison. He was prosecuted for a white collar crime and spent 13 months in Federal prison. Bill can be reached at whitecollarcoaching.com.