Rebuilding yourself after life falls apart is a challenging, yet necessary, journey, especially when navigating grief during the holiday season and facing self-doubt. Arthur J. Rutledge, a servant leader, speaker, and author of 11 Pillars of Confidence: Build & Lead an Empowered YOU, shares his profound personal experiences with loss—from his pet to close family—and offers constructive steps to consciously move toward the light. He discusses the power of “stringing” good memories to work through the darkness, the importance of forgiving the unspoken, and how overcoming “low-frequency ideas” like shame and blame is crucial to becoming the ‘Victor versus the victim’ in your own life story. Arthur emphasizes that strengthening the trifecta of self-esteem, self-worth, and self-value is key to seeing grief not as a tombstone, but as a stepping stone to a renewed life.

I am sharing my experience of loving the same man for 32 years, a mother to two adult children, a retired military officer, a breast cancer survivor, and my connections with others. 

Anyone experiencing suicidal thoughts should reach out to a suicide hotline or local emergency number in their country: Psychology Today Suicide Hotlines and Prevention Resources Around the World.

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Grief As A Stepping Stone: How To Start Rebuilding Yourself After Life Falls Apart With Arthur J. Rutledge

Voices Of Widowhood Healing Through The Holidays

Has grief impacted your confidence? Has grief taken away your self-worth, your self-value, your self-esteem? If so, this conversation with Arthur is just for you. Let’s get into this conversation now.

Arthur, welcome to the Widowhood.

I’m happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

 I always ask people like, “Welcome to the Widowhood. Thank you for having me,” is that the ticker tape? If we were to see the invisible ticker tape in your mind, what would that look like?

I’m an avid servant leader. The first thing I learned as I’m going through my life is to always edify the person before you edify yourself. I always want to give it back, and I’ve made that the precursor to all the things that I’ve added up to the successes that I’ve obtained in my life so far. Just that little piece, just letting that person know that they’re seen and they’re valued in my eyes. That appreciation always gets received. At least I believe it gets received well, and it just opens the vulnerability, the trust up between the two that’s, or a room of people who are looking for what that can be for them. That’s the long of it.

Servant Leader In Action: How To Live With Integrity And Kindness

Actually, I want to dive in and be a little bit more specific. The servant leader, the giving back. How do those show up in actions? A lot of times, we use these words to become buzzwords, but how does that show up in your everyday?

I always say leadership is just a big word for us leading ourselves. The hardest thing that any leader will ever tell you are the ones who are being truly honest is that process. It is very easy to give instructions or tell somebody how to go about, how they should live, where they should go, how they can be or should be. It’s always best shown by emulating what that looks like by the actions.

If I’m being a good person to myself, if I’m being kind to myself, if I’m being a person of integrity with myself, if I’m following through on the things that I see for myself and I want for myself, and I’m living that every day. If I’m telling someone one thing, and then the next day I’m waking up to a smile on my face, which I’m always telling people to get that going, and their chemical imbalance that might be there to start their day or hugging themselves or taking deep, long breaths to step into who they are, and what they’re becoming, then that’s going to, like I said, trickle forward.

It’s going to echo in a way that’s what’s being expected of me. If I can give what I’m expecting out of myself, then the other person can receive that on their side and say, “This is the formula to have that smile, to have that good frequency, to have that good energy.” I’m a God-fearing person. At the end of the day, God says, “Put this in your space.”

A person who is good at following and serving leader means that for me you can’t be a good leader if you’re not a good follower first. Jesus, and my Lord and Savior and God, and or whatever that looks like for people who are stepping into, I emulate in a good way, in a good, healthy, kind, generous, respectful, loyal noble type of way.

We are all kings and queens, so that’s the same thing that I think people can expect from themselves at the end of the day. I don’t think it’s one without the other. I always tell people the first learning prowess, the first way we step into learning is imitation. Now we don’t have to follow people the same way we did from a young age, but to get good at that is the foundation for critical and creative thinking, standing on our own two feet and being able to give that back. Paying forward what we’re able to give lets us understand that we are interdependent in a world that maybe doesn’t make us feel like we are such at, at different points in our lives.

Navigating Grief & The Holidays: Finding Your Way Through Loss

Speaking of those different points of being in our lives, this conversation around widowhood, grieving holidays, once I was that person. I was this man who showed up in life that way. Now I feel that grief has taken that from me, and I’m approaching the holiday season and I’m trying to understand how do I grapple with this time? What thoughts come to mind to you from your own experience and then other leaders that you supported during difficult times?

I am one of those individuals, and people will relate to this because it is happened a lot. In the last few years, we’ve just gone through a lot, not just starting from 2020. Even that big recession that should have been called the Depression. The operative word, depression, that we’re talking about idea of grieving, the loss of, and we go through these types of different versions of grieving, even if we haven’t lost someone.

My first grieving was the loss of my pet Fletcher, that I had for six years of my life. Fast forward over the last few years, having to bury my grandmother, my auntie, my mother, a couple of nephews, a couple of cousins, and my father in April 2022. Every time I found myself facing what those were, I got to experience it in my own time.

They say time heals all wounds. I would make a small side note to what the axiom might look like. I think that we should consciously always want to look towards the light, what things are possible in the living. I always remember Helen Keller, the young lady, which a lot of people maybe don’t know, that was blind. She had instruction because somebody saw something beautiful in her because they put that into her as she was going along, I call it God’s grace.

If we live in that, or even God’s mercies, if we live in those mercies, and we know that we can take that and reconstruct our hearts, that means the effort of doing it, the effort of taking the needle and the yarn and go through it as slow or as fast as we need to, but still keep a constructive attitude about us in the now.

That’s the power of being present to what we’re at. What does that breakdown towards, or what does that mean? I have the holidays coming up right now. I know that I have people that’s not my life, that was in my life a majority or a good amount of time with me that’s not there. I can also decide to change that thinking and say, “I had someone wonderful for the time that I had them in my life.”

I get to find the realistic side of what I’m able to empower myself to be and not just feel like I only can be in a place that is where I cannot recover. Being human, that’s all we’ve ever done. I get to sit back and breathe. I get to understand that even though I might not have been a death that I felt in the past, I felt lost, but I’m still here and reminding what that looks like to myself, writing that down every day.

I’m still here, I’m still relevant. Whether that person is next to me on this plane or next to me on the other plane, we don’t know. I think we start to assume certain things about our power, the lack of when we stay in low-frequency ideas that we call grief, that we call dismay. Especially during the holidays, I think that it’s about not feeling like we need to be in a place of solitude.

Solitude is good for a minute, but hiding away doesn’t bring us out of our grief. I’ve mentioned before that someone has spoken to me, has talked into me at times where I felt at a lack. I’ve taken that caring, that empathy, that compassion that we all have that. We’re willing to do it for somebody else, but why aren’t we willing to do it for ourselves?

We see somebody in pain, we want to relieve that pain, and we go and we make high efforts for that. Maybe it’s a new time to step into a new renewal of our thinking, to be that cheerleader for ourselves and find any and every way to get out of the confines that can enrapture us at any given time in our lives, and again, spend that, make it something where it is something that is a lesson that we did have love. There are so many people out there that have not experienced some of the love that we’ve had experienced. That’s probably why some griefs are a little bit more enduring than others.

Reframing Your Mind: Participating In Life After Loss

Can you make a comparison of the idea of the timeline of one’s grief journey? There are different methodologies about tracing the different experiences that you’ve had in grief and how they have impact you differently, and how they may become more profound. Oftentimes, the first loss is a cherished pet. As different relationships evolve, those separations could be from relocation, but they could also be from someone passing.

The other thing that I heard you saying in a different way is reframing the season or reframing your mind around what you are focused on. Your spouse passing and the holidays coming up, how is one to reframe their mind? Reframe being gentler with themselves, ways to participate. My spouse, who I spent 30 years with, is no longer in this world. Thanksgiving, they’re not cutting the turkey. We may not be going to the in-laws’ house because I just can’t get out of bed. How is reframing placed in those types of situations?

There are so many ways. I think we can always, first of all, to put really good thoughts in our heads. We have to equate those. I call it stringing. Put a string and connect to the things that we’ve put bows on in our lives, in our past. Good memories don’t always have to end in tears. Even when a person is around, we’re in tears. Tears are a conduit to help us to get from one side of that string to another.

Being in better feeling, thinking and working our way through the darkness of the tunnel, to see the light on what that looks like on that side. I mentioned before about Helen Keller and the time she was blind, and I was going to say a quote that says keep your face to the sun and you can’t see the shadow if you are willing participant, and wanting to get out of that grief.

Also, forgiving ourselves. A lot of times, we hold on to unnecessary grief, because we feel that we didn’t say the last thing we want to say to somebody. We didn’t feel like maybe we had that closure. We have that in relationships too. Whether we break up with somebody or divorce, some things maybe we didn’t get out the way that we would’ve wanted or shouldn’t have, but we did it. The act of doing is always in place so we can start being in the moment and gaining momentum to what that looks like for ourselves. Going back to the things, the walk. Go to the park even if it brings tears. I say you can’t cry enough if you’re going through grief. There’s no such thing.

Eventually, the tears do stop. Maybe it is this hole that you feel that will never close. It does close. Maybe it will never seal. That’s a realistic talk that understands that the person is still with you. When you get to a place when you can forgive the things that you didn’t say, to forgive the things that you feel like you didn’t, or the person you didn’t show up at that time when that person was around, the forgiving is the letting go.

Grief, by definition, is the thing that we’re holding onto. If you let go of the reason behind the reason, which is a lot more than not, you’re able to see clearly and know that you can move forward. This is not the end of your life. I’ll use my grandmother as an example. She was an awesome person. She gave me a lot of her great Pine Bluff, Arkansas, moved to Detroit. Three times was the charm for the love of her life. Wisdom.

The first person she cared about didn’t work out. He gave her three children. He gave her three children that she never had to be alone. It wasn’t up to her. She moved up with the second husband. He wasn’t the best husband. She had to leave him by like other ways, divorced. He wasn’t the person for her. Even during that, he was still a solid father type. Even though they didn’t get along together, he was a solid father type to her children at a time that they needed a friendly face. Maybe the marriage didn’t work for them but the bow is that at that time in her life, it was somebody that seemed to feel like was solid that her children got along with.

The smiles on their face, diving into what that is, these are all the bows, the strings that we can connect. When we do the strings in enough places, because we have hundreds of those stories, even if we are not willing. The best thing to do is write those down. If we cannot remember, sit down with ourselves, be silent with ourselves through the tears. Do put the pillow to your face. Shout, punch the pillow. The pillow is our best friend, I think, you know and not the mirror.

Don’t punch the mirror. Your reflection is in that. Plus, you don’t want bloody knuckles or hand, but we go through what that looks like in our own different ways. These are just constructive ways to help us to see the Christmas tree or the turkey that we’re about to cut and not be a mess, but feeling like we are a mess like we failed on some level.

Grief just taps into these lower frequency sides of things. Dismissal and hate and shame and blame. When I talk about frequency and how that breaks down, the scientist, David R. Hawkins, the Law of the Consciousness. He gave the highest level of what that could be for an individual as they are, again, making efforts, making strides to really work past just isolating themselves, but finding that true potential, that metahuman, that person that God sees and knows that we can get through whatever is put before us. He told us, for those who are Bible thumpers like I am in that respect, or the universe, when you see squirrels or animals every animal on the planet has loss. Yeah, we can always say, because we’re human. We’re just made to overthink.

Too much analysis does lead to paralysis. We don’t want to get into a place where we’re just making our life about holding onto the pastor, forgiving ourselves, and then gratitude. That ties to bow. As I said, if you do this enough over time, the strings make a network of strings with bows on it. You are thinking more about living your best life from right now. That’s what our spouses would’ve wanted. That’s what our parents would’ve wanted. That’s what our children would’ve wanted.

Just a short story because I know you have another question, but my first cousin, very close to me, actually wrote into the anthology that I put together because I wanted people to start seeing more belief into themselves and stepping into themselves. His son had a tragic death where he had a situation where his body would just collapse and he was behind a car after work and his foot hit the gas and into a tree.

It was his firstborn. He is cousins and uncles and things like that but it was the closest that I came to that. I know that it’s something that he’s still working through but we talk about it. We don’t just keep it bottled up because our body’s not made to be a can that’s sealed. We’re not made to be a jar of what that is. We’re not preserved. We’re not pickles. We get to pop that top and let things out and be seen and heard and find the people. Finally, community. If it’s something that we just don’t think we can see past for ourselves, find a genuine servant leader type of community as no way that our faith in whatever that is, whether we think we have a great faith in ourselves or the master of the universe would ever leave us to be alone.

These are just a few different installations that can impart the right things so we can get through not just the holidays. I find, even in my grief, when I think about my mother and the significance and being an only child and very close that it turned into not something that I was going through a grief with, but it would be a moment or moments throughout the year, maybe 2 or 3 times where somebody introduced themselves and I said, “I’m Arthur.”

The person says, “My name is Eva,” and that’s my mother’s name. What I started doing was I started thinking those as thinking of those, refocusing, reshaping what that is. I started saying to myself, “That’s my mother saying hello to me. That’s letting me know that it’s okay. I know you thinking of me and I’m thinking of you, and our energies are different right now. You can’t see me, but I see you.” They want that for us. Knowing that should just start to help us to also fixate on the light at the end of the tunnel at any time that we feel that might come over us or consistently dealing with that type of trauma or turmoil that, like I said, we get to reshape.

Rebuilding After Complicated Grief: Finding Hope In Low Vibration

So much you said right there. I want our readers to sit with that, but I also want, in the spirit of reframing, ask a different question. For people that had relationships with their spouses, parents, the vibration was low. There wasn’t a hope for them to have something better. They are struggling to reframe their life in a positive way because the marriage was bad. They were on the brink of getting a divorce. Unfortunately, the spouse’s death saved them from that drama. There was a bad relationship with the child or the parent. How does one find the ability to reframe their situation in the absence of now hoping for something better for themselves? They hear that low vibration voice nagging in the back and wondering are they enough and how can they do that?

We go through all types of grief that tap into that not all the time, but usually it taps into something that we’re traumatized from prior to that. In NLP coaching, Neuro Linguistic Programming or practice is of quite frequent sayings. How we do one thing is usually how we do everything. We have this routine and there’s a cognitive dissonance that happens, and that’s just two words. It says that our subconscious space has gaps. We block it out. We don’t relate to it. We don’t want to connect to what that is at any given time. These are routines and I talk about this, and it’s not just in grief, but just even the side of just forgiving ourselves or shame and blame, like I said, other sides of lower frequency of this side. We have to make the effort to change it.

It doesn’t happen overnight. This is a process that we get to write what we’re feeling, journaling, releasing, taking the pressure off of that kettle before it overflows. It’s whistling. I even think of the term grief while you were talking. I was thinking Charlie Brown, the Peanuts gang. He was a perpetual walking grief. I used to always hear, I don’t know if he used to say it, but other people around him because he brought that grief into everybody else’s life so much, “Good grief, Charlie Brown.”

It made me also think of the donkey from Winnie the Pooh also.

Charlie Brown is the one that you always rooted for because he still was going through his everyday life even though he was always in a state of woe, but he stayed in his story and all of his stories that he was the one on the losing it. That’s what we do. We have gotten good at being the victim versus the victor and the story that identifies who we are to ourselves.

When you say story, you mean the story of my life, how do I see myself?

Defining Your Story: Stepping From Victim To Victor

Both because of the separation, like in season. Whatever we got traumatized or whatever turmoil that we may have faced or whatever that we didn’t quite get through or didn’t face at the right time, or organize what that is. Also, the side of it where we put certain narratives in place that we don’t want to move through because if we let those narratives go, then who am I?

These are the two things that humans are always talking into or wanting to know. One, who am I? That’s one of the biggest questions any human will ever ask themselves and how they go about figuring that out as they go through their lives and or grow through their lives, hopefully, but a lot of people haven’t stepped into that type of awareness.

Thus, you have this great show that helps people to maybe have a new awareness, to have a new spark, to see what that looks like. Also, decide of where people find their purpose. The next question is, what’s my significance? What am I here for? That is the biggest question that people usually ask themselves. If you don’t think you have a purpose, and if you don’t think you’re significant, then you’re diving into what I talk about in my book, 11 Pillars of Confidence.

I’m talking about a lack of the good confidence. That’s made up of a trifecta of these three words, self-esteem, self-worth, and self-value. If you don’t have all three of these, then you’re going to find a lapse in how you’re going to see yourself and how you’re going to identify with yourself. You’re not going to feel connected to yourself as much as the wholeness of what we all get to feel about ourselves.

I get to know that I’m imperfectly perfect and perfectly imperfect at every juncture of my life. If I’m not going to discover or be in curiosity with myself, about who I am, then I won’t care about who I’m becoming. You start to just throw things to the side. If you holding on, because we can hold onto those things so much, it just leaves a lapse. This gap.

You don’t even know if it’s a gap from the grief of a person that’s not in your life anymore, whether they have passed, transitioned, or even if you divorced from them, they’re not around, they just walked out of your life. Maybe even an absentee mother or father or whatever for your children. These holes, but you don’t know because it adds to that space that has not been discovered or the willingness to really work through what that type of trauma might be for you.

That’s on the inside. Things around you that’s triggering you all the time are going to be more pronounced. You’re going to internalize the thing that you didn’t face internally as is coming at you from the inside and the outside. You might have forgotten about it, but it doesn’t forget about you. That’s God’s way, I believe, and us working on ourselves. In a few of the passage says, “Study to show thyself approved.” That’s me showing myself that I’m worthy as I’m stepping into that good confidence, I’m worthy. I am of value and making it a healthy existence past the grief. Grief comes to all of us in many forms. The thing that when we step out of our integrity with ourselves over and over again, new year’s resolutions.

That builds up, that goes into those spaces, those cracks that we haven’t defined, that we haven’t faced as well. They add up to the big things, and we just start telling ourselves, we just have this unkind conversation with ourselves that, “I’m not strong enough. I’m not smart enough. I dropped out of college, I dropped out of high school. I can’t get along with my children.” Even when I had my spouse with me, they always used to say that this was the thing that they didn’t like about who I was. If I was maybe a better husband, a better wife, a better partner, that would’ve been something that could have been more conclusive in how I am as a person.

Everything, when it comes down to it, is never really about the other person. It’s about the undefined things that we have not put into our space and taken on. It just builds until we come back to a wholeness, which I think is partially about unknowing that we are possible. We are here for a reason. That is a reason that we are not by ourselves. That we do have people around. Even people who feel like they don’t, they could.

That isolation, instead of being in a place of solitude, of being quiet, calming our spirits, that seems to be in ecstatic, crazy, overwhelming emotional flows of energy. Whatever that looks like, we get to always step back into. The writing does help, the journey does help or finding a psychiatrist. It’s not hard to reprogram ourselves. A little around 3 weeks to 30 days, if we do something every day, even if it’s just affirmations.

People say affirmations don’t work, they didn’t do it long enough. They didn’t say the right things to themselves. It just a lot of times, the lack of awareness is not just about being ignorant, it’s about the lack of practice of belief in ourselves. That means we get to sharpen the questions that we even ask about our situations so we can have a lot more clarity and we can be cohesive.

How we sharpen what that is, if I write down a list of things that I notice bothering me today, tomorrow, my list might be totally different, but I wrote it down anyway a second day. What comes up for me the third day? Write that down a third day. Sit with myself and be okay with sitting with myself. As I said, a lot of people said, “I don’t want to deal with tears. I don’t want to keep hitting the pillow.” Maybe we need a more aggressive approach.

If you feel like you need to go to a boxing rink or take up karate or Taekwondo, or if you just need more hugs, ask. Don’t isolate. People in things of grief, we’re very quick to say, “I’m okay,” and we’re not and that’s okay too. You are not broken because you decide. You are going through this and you don’t have an answer. Not all things can be answered, but they can be decided. I think it was Harry Truman who maybe said that or our old presidents or Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to, but it’s something very real about the choice to move forward. Not to always think that your life is tied to the dead. That decision, if it is made over and over again, as I heard I think Les Brown say before, we’re already in a place where at 25 years old, we died, but we just don’t get buried until we’re 75.

I don’t think anybody that’s reading this wants to be in a state of disillusioned or disillusionment or disappointment. It can be chemical imbalances in that. Psychiatry is a great way at least to get the talking going so you’re not just hearing, like you said, the thoughts in the back of our head that want to creep up at unseen hours of the night or day, the midnight hour. That midnight train that can attack us at any time. It takes so much bravery to ask for the help, even that side of what that looks like. It can interrupt us feeling like we’re significant in anything else that we want to put ourselves into. That makes the grief, the disappointment in ourselves, a shovel that we have dug a deeper hole.

All these things are everything, meaning that it’s not one solution to what that is for anybody that’s reading this. I always tell people, when you’re in a place of good confidence, when you’re wanting to really do something, no matter who you are as a person, it is nothing when we put our mind to it that we cannot do. We’ve done it before. If we want something bad enough as a human being, we get it. We get it done. All we have to do is just hold on to that same type of elegy with how we are addressing grief. It goes into every aspect of our lives if we are just putting those things in motion, everything.

If that doesn’t work, fine. You are doing several other things that put into your space. If you’re not, then find somebody to maybe help you through what that looks like. Not everything that we get to have in our lives, we can do by ourselves. I would say we are in a 50/50 balance in a human race about the things that we can do for ourselves, but then the other 50% is what others can do for us. You’ve heard that saying before, we’re not an island of ourselves. We are an island.

Even though we feel like we’re away from the mainland, we are all connected on the grand scheme of everything. There are still going to be birds there. It is not going to just be you. There are still going to be lizards and frogs and fish that are in the waters, or are you going to see a whatever, or you are going to see a whale out in the distance. It is all these things that remind us that life is still moving and we get to too.

Life Is Still Moving: The Opportunity To Change Life Patterns

The idea of coming to terms with life is still moving is probably one of the most difficult, but yet motivating parts of dealing with grief and the idea that others have traveled this way and we’re not alone or the first one. You did an amazing job of covering everything that we discussed that we wanted to cover in this conversation. Thank you so much. I wanted to have this discuss with you because sometimes it’s hard to find your confidence. Sometimes it’s hard to find your why. Sometimes it’s hard to remove those low vibrations because you are already at a depleted state.

Something else you mentioned about, and for people to consider the way that we’re showing up now, showing now how is that similar to other experiences that we’ve had. This type of grief may exacerbate so it’s more profound but the habit and the pattern may relate the same. This may be an opportunity to change life patterns because we want something different. This immense experience requires us to do something different because what we’ve done before will not sustain us in this situation. Thank you so much for being part of this conversation for people walking through the holidays. Do you have any questions of me? I try to give people an opportunity to flip the script of who’s the interviewer and if you have any questions of me.

None at all. I think you’re doing profound work. To step into anything that you want to make your life better is already an obstacle, but to dive into grief, people talking about shame and blame and anger, which washes. It’s a fire of his own. You go through the anger of this, too. Most of the anger is, “Why me? Why is this happening to me?” Who else should it have happened to? It’s going to happen to everybody. Our card is up on what that is. The continuation of how we get to show up for ourselves, and a lot more times than not, we don’t even realize that when we give up on ourselves, people take that to heart too.

I mentioned imitation. It’s a double-edged sword. There are a lot of people that look to us before those situations and wanted encouragement. We were their encourager. When we decided to give up on ourselves, other people didn’t step into their lives, which a lot of grace and mercy in their own sensibilities for themselves. We are not an island of ourselves and there is always somebody watching.

My faith-centered understanding of God, I know that God created this situation in the context of how we are going to have loss. The best thing we can do is lean towards him more. That’s what he says. These things are not things that we cannot live through. He didn’t create anything, or he doesn’t let anything that happens to us hold us down. He believes in us. He’s God. He’s the master of the universe.

What makes me think that I have the right to not to be as strong as what he sees in me, what he’s made and put on here? Out of sight, out of mind. There are so many things we take for granted in our lives that just get to be addressed. Grief is a place that we can either make our skipping stone or our tombstone. You skip a stone over water, over anything like that, it splashes, it moves forward, it’s skipping. It has all these things because we get to see what that can be for ourselves.

It breaks us down to the base. Sometimes, our ego is so high, these things happen to us also so we can bring ourselves down to a humbler state of being so we can restart anew with something. I know people that’s lost everything. Most people who’s done anything amazing in their life, they’ve lost family, friends, houses, cars, started from scratch.

Job was one of the biggest stories that we remember what that was. Even though we are not living in that state of being, but knowing that if we are willing and we stay in faith in God and lean more to God, that he’ll give it all back to us by way of what he brought us to, because it shows us faithful. He only is there for the people. Paul said it too. He says, “We rejoice in our problems.” We get to rejoice and our problems because it produces character. By character, hope, faith, love but these things, persistence in ourselves, we have to keep coming back to it. If we didn’t, we would take it for granted even more than we already do. Five senses, six senses, whatever.

I had a conversation with somebody. I take my sight for granted, like a lot of people do, until you see somebody who’s blind. A person that comes to mind events sometimes that I organize. This guy is a consistent staple in New York City, and he’s deaf and mute, but he’s still living. I’m sure at one point he wanted to isolate himself, but he finds so much support from the people that know that he’s been coming out for years to different functions and parties and different things of that nature. He’s the ideal source of respect and nobility. He just steps into it. He says, “This is what I have. I can’t get rid of it for the rest of my life.”

We don’t have that problem. We’re not losing our sight or hearing or our voice, which is so powerful what we are creating right now. People see that and that’s why they pat them on the back. I give him a hug every time I see him. I don’t have to say thank you. I’m showing my thankfulness because, like I said, he stands as a torch in my life. We need those torches. You are with this program, one of those. I was just so happy that you even asked me, and I thank you so much.

Connecting With Arthur: Books, Retreats, And Resources

I am thankful that you said yes to this conversation, your work that you do with people and their confidence. I know that’s something that people struggle with in this community. I would like to say a few words to people that have joined us on this conversation, and if you would share your book, where they can find it, how they can reach you, and what work you’re available to do with people, I would love that as you wrap up after me.

You can find Arthur J. Rutledge on both LinkedIn and on Facebook. My page on Instagram, you can find me @Arthurs_Mindset. I’m on X as well, @BornKing1. I have a speaker author series in New York and coming to cities over the next five years as I expand that out called Thirsty to Thrive. I want to empower authors to share their voice from wherever what that looks like from their space and get in front of people with how they’re sharing their voice in a powerful, encouraging way. We have a couple of retreats coming up for 2026 in Costa Rica. Definitely DM.

Go to my website because you can put your email in there and I can reach out to you from there as well by way of www.VerticalMindsetGroup.com. Of course, my book is out right now available on every online outlet from Walmart to Barnes and Noble and Amazon, Apple Book, etc., on that side that you can find 11 Pillars of Confidence: Build and Lead an Empowered YOU.

My next book anthology that I’m doing with 23 beautiful souls from all over the world will be out in November 2026 called The Pillars of BELIEF, talking into Bravery, Encouragement, Love, Leadership, Integrity, Encouragement, and Faith, which makes up the acronym that I put on the book cover as BELIEF, to empower dismayed souls to find new light from wherever they’re at by the way of the stories that are being told by the beautiful souls that I put together for it.

Thank you so very much, Arthur.

Thank you for having me.

Important Links

• Arthur J. Rutledge
• 11 Pillars of Confidence
• Arthur J. Rutledge on LinkedIn
• Arthur J. Rutledge on Facebook
• Arthur J. Rutledge on Instagram
• Arthur J. Rutledge on X

About Arthur J. Rutledge

Arthur J. Rutledge is an author, coach, and speaker dedicated to helping people build unshakable confidence and lead empowered lives. His best-selling book, 11 Pillars of Confidence: Build and Lead an Empowered You, has been recognized by the Los Angeles Tribune for its practical, transformational approach to personal growth. Through the principles he teaches, Arthur guides individuals toward a “vertical mindset” — a daily discipline of self-belief, clarity, and action.

A gifted motivator, Arthur helps readers and audiences unlock the potential within themselves by challenging limiting beliefs and strengthening their inner foundation. His work emphasizes compassionate interdependence, enlightenment, and empowerment, encouraging people not only to transform their own lives but to elevate the world around them.

With a warm, relatable style and a passion for helping people rise, Arthur inspires others to take ownership of their journey, practice consistency, and embrace the life they were created to lead.