 I'm Rusty Komori, and this is Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Punahou Boys Varsity Tennis Team for 22 years, and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. My books Beyond the Lines and Beyond the Game are about leadership, character, and creating a superior culture of excellence, which is what this show is all about. My special guest today is a licensed professional counselor and author of the absolutely wonderful book Voices of Hawaii. She is Jane Goodsill, and today we are going beyond life stories. Hey Jane, welcome to the show. So great to see you again. Hi Rusty, so good to see you. Now, I know you've been busy doing a lot of book signings. I'm a fan of your book, Jane, and we're gonna talk a lot about that. And I wanna first know, Jane, if you can just share a bit about your background growing up. I was born on Oahu. My father was a lawyer in town, a corporate lawyer. I went to Punahou school. I played tennis. I learned Iolani from Mrs. Sunderland, and then I played on the Punahou team. So I'm an athlete as well, and tennis was my sport. Oh, I just assume everybody plays tennis, Jane. Now, Jane, I wanna ask you, what compelled you to write this book Voices of Hawaii? Rusty, I have been taking oral history interviews of people in the state that I live in, which is Texas, with my beloved husband, which is why I'm in Texas. I had been taking oral histories there for many years, and I would continue to come back to Hawaii to visit my parents and to visit friends. This is home. And so finally, I came home, and both my parents have died, and I thought, what am I doing? Why aren't I taking oral histories of people here in Hawaii? And so that's how it started. And I started because I wanted to know more about what my father did at work. And it's an interesting topic. I think all of us could learn more about what our fathers do at work. We might know he goes and works at X Corporation, or he goes and does X thing with his hands, because he's good with his hands. But what exactly is involved? What skills does he bring to the trade, and how did he learn those skills, and how did he contribute to our community? So as I began to learn those things, I became so proud of him and my mother, because she was the wind beneath his wings. Oh, for sure. And Jane, I know that your dad was a very successful corporate lawyer, but as you were doing these interviews, finding out some of these stories, what was the most surprising story that you learned about your dad? My father was, I always called him Clark Kent because he had a little haircut, kind of like mine. And he was a mild, mild man. You see him right there in the future. He was very mild man, but his brain was like Superman. And he could do so many amazing things in terms of problem solving and moving a case forward. And corporate law in those days, it was very difficult in Hawaii because you didn't have the consult of the experienced firms on the mainland to help because communication took so long that it was almost useless by the time he got the data. So he had to learn how to do tax law and social security and exchange law and public utility law and tax law. And so he had a wide variety of things that he specialized in, which was unusual. And it made me very proud to learn that. Now, Jane, in your book, you did 75 interviews and I wanna know what were some of the questions you would ask your interviewees to allow them to open up to you? Well, Rusty, I always start by saying when I take your interview, Rusty, I'm gonna give you a written transcript of it afterwards and you can review everything that's said. So if there's anything that's not quite right or anything that you misdated, you can correct it. Date, names, the spelling, everything. You get full editorial control. So that in the beginning makes people feel relaxed because my project is not a gadget project. And then the next thing I'd ask is Rusty, tell me how your family got to Hawaii. I want to know both sides of your family how they got to Hawaii. So what we do there is we invite ancestors into the interview and we ride on their shoulders. We couldn't have done this or be where we are without what they did and what the gifts they gave to us. So people generally feel quite relaxed because I'm talking about their predecessors instead of them. And then I say, okay, so you're born in the world and what happens in your life? And then they just begin to explain in their own way and then we take it from there. So how amazing was it for you to really meet so many of these people for the first time but to really hear how so many stories are interconnected with each other? Well, I'll go to your question about what it was like meeting all these people. A few people that I started out with were people I knew, maybe they were family friends and I tried to do the generation, my parents' generation because they wouldn't be here forever. And I was trying to capture those memories. And then people would say, I would say, who do you think I should interview? And they'd say so-and-so and I'd say, you know, so-and-so. Yes, would you make an introduction? Yes, next thing you know, I'm sitting at their table and interviewing them. And Rusty, the aloha, the opening of the arms to me, the welcome that I received, the trust these people put in me by telling their stories in an undiluted, open-hearted way was the gift. This was the gift of the book. And I say somewhere in my book, this is the gift I try and give back to my readers. This try and portray these stories in the very best and most accurate way with the same feeling that they were conveyed to me, with the love, with the anguish, with the aloha, with the laughter. Oh, that's so good to hear. And Jane, what do you feel are some of the keys to doing effective interviews? Well, first thing is put yourself aside and listen to what the person says and be fascinated. And I have a technique that is sort of the Larry King technique. I don't do any research on the people I'm going to interview. I don't do a little search. I don't try and find out everything I can about them. I just sit with them and know nothing. And I tell them, I know nothing. So if I ask a silly question, please forgive me. Because if it's a question in my mind, it will be in the mind of the listener. And so if I ask a silly question, just answer to the best of your ability. They do and they don't mind. They'll say something that may be common knowledge. And sometimes I do know it, but I'll say really, tell me more about that. And I will ask them about their ancestors. Do you remember your grandfather? What did he look like? How did he move? What kind of clothes did he wear? What was he good at? And so these people that they're painting the picture become more than names and dates. They become personalities. And then when the person begins to talk about themselves, it's really, and how on earth did you know how to do that? And did you know in school that you would be good at sales? Or did you just come to you later? Or did you know early on that you were a good athlete? And what led you into that direction in your life? And you just show true interest. I think that's the trick, don't you think? I totally agree with you. And I like how you said that you're just going there with the open slate. I mean, it's really important, I think, to do that. And then just to really build and see where the conversation takes you and what you're learning about them. And Jane, one of the people that you interviewed for your book was Oz Stender. And Oz was the Oha trustee, Kamehameha Schools trustee. Very interesting story about how he and his family, they would be hunting and fishing out in Ha'ula where they live. But I really admire Oz, his courage that he had to do the right thing when he was a trustee. But how impressed were you when you met him? Well, first of all, I was mightily impressed because he's a very pleasant, humble person to be around. He's got a sort of enchanting childlike sense of humor, but he obviously is very skilled in some of the things. For example, he worked for Grovener estate, worked for Campbell estate. He was a trustee for Bishop estate. He worked for Oha, all those things. He seems to have, you know, I'm a therapist and in my real life, before I retired, I'm a licensed professional counselor. So I'm always looking at how people do things. And he came from a humble beginnings. He said he learned about life from his grandfather who was a parkkeeper at Oha. And the father taught him how to hunt and how to fish. And they had three or four families. And each week it was that family's turn to make boy. And so they learned how to do all those things. They learned how to hike and be fun. And then he ends up as a grownup making really significant negotiations on land deals and business deals. And I said, oh, how did you learn that? And what would grandpa John have thought about that? And he said, oh, he would have been proud of me. Just touches your heart, touches your heart. And Oz came into my life in an interesting way. I was scared to approach him because he's big smoke. And I'm a little one. And then I, but I asked him, I reached out to him and I said, would you be willing? And he said, yes. And it happened two or three days later. He came to my apartment. If you show that picture, you'll see the background that I'm sitting in is the background that he's in in the picture. He sits at our big black table and we take the interview. And at the end of it, I say, and I didn't think he'd wanna talk about being a whistleblower for the Bishop of State. Who wants to talk about that? It was a very painful period in his life. He was ostracized by a lot of people and blamed for a lot of people and praised by a lot of people. But you know, the hurt of blame is much more painful than the praise. They're the reward of praise. And so it was painful time for him. And he talked about it very openly. And then I said to him, why would you even bother to come and talk to me? I'm so touched. And this is the story he told me. He said, when I was going through that awful time, I have a lawyer of my own. But every Tuesday, I would play golf with your father. And after we played golf, we'd go into the clubhouse and he would say, okay, and we thought about this. And I look at this citation and maybe this is something that would help you with your case. And maybe you could think about it this way and Papa evidently just gave him some support and you know, unofficial counsel. And Oz was so grateful for that. That he said, Jane, if you call and want to talk to me, I'm going to drop everything I'm doing and be there for you. Oh my, that's the kind of man he is. And that's the kind of praise that I received taking these interviews. He was just an example of the kind of thing that happened all the time. No, I love hearing that about him. And like I said earlier, I mean, I admire his courage to come out and really do the right thing. And Jane, so many, so much of Hawaii's history would be lost without books like yours. But what were some of the challenges you dealt with putting your book together? Oh, the biggest challenge Rusty is I took a life history of every single person. If you look, excuse me, I'm going to reach for my book. If you look on the back cover, you'll see all the names of all the people that I interviewed, they're all right there. And so I have 75 of them. And every story is magical because I start with how did your parents, grandparents, whoever get to Hawaii. And it almost always starts with the immigrants' journey. So they tell me the story. One story I loved was Mark Fukunaga's grandfather came over from Japan and he worked in the cane fields. And then a lot of the Japanese men were courageous in this way and knew how to work with their hands. And he became a dynamite blaster to blast looms in the lava rock to get the water from the mountains down to the field. And he was very successful at that, made enough money to put himself through Iolani school. And then he started about 10 or 12 different businesses. He was very entrepreneurial. And one of them was SIRFO, which is still in existence today. It's a marvelous story. And you asked a question and I was going somewhere but I forgot, remind me where we were. No, that was really good. Actually, I'm glad you brought up that Mark Fukunaga story because I remember reading that story. I mean, so many of your stories. What I really liked, Jane, was when I read the book, I went right through it. And then since then I'll just open it up to whatever page and read a page or two. And oh, it's just fascinating to see the stories. But the challenge of putting a book together, I mean, we both know how hard that is. But I really love the structure of your book and the chapters that you have. So was that hard for you to put that together? Well, that was really fun. Oh, I know the question you were asking me where I was going is I have 75 fantastic interviews, life stories that go from birth to the end. And I can't use all of them. And that was really hard. And my publisher said, you flop those all on a book. That's gonna be the most boring book ever. I thought, oh no, what am I gonna do? So then I used my creative mind, somehow I did this, I came up with chapter headings. And the chapters that I came up with were voices of my father's generation, voices of the old days, voices of World War II, voices in a racial melting pot, and so on, 16 different chapters. So then I went through my mind, hear my Rolodex in my mind. Bukunaga told me a story about the old days and Oz told me a story about the old days, I'll put those in that chapter. Someone else told me about Nature Conservancy and keeping hydro-elected off the rivers in Hawaii. So I'll put that in the conservation chapter. And it was really fun to segment out the best stories from each interview and put them in the most appropriate chapters. That was so much fun. Jane, I love talking with you and you and I met some months ago and I was, you know, we exchanged books. Did you end up liking my books? Oh my goodness, yes. You gave me both of your books and I read them, but I came straight home and I read your books. And what I liked is that I had been a tennis player and I liked the way that you talked about coaching. I liked the way that you talked about how it led to leadership. I particularly liked one young man who was misbehaving and flacking off. And you had to use some tough love on him and it turned him right around and I thought, yeah. And, you know, he really appreciated that kind of direction. And then I liked the way you turn your coaching experience into knowledge about being a leader in general and how you then apply it to leaders in our community. I've liked that on your show and I like that in your book. Oh, thank you, Jane. And Jane, you know, I wanted to ask you about this because as you know, I focused a lot about mindset with our teams to really have the right mindset, to have a healthy mindset. And you as a successful counselor, you had to do that a lot with your clients as well, right? Yes. It may be a little bit different than being a coach, an athletic coach. Generally, they're coming in with something that is very distressing for them. And my job is to, again, like when I'm doing interviews, put myself aside and see if I can hear their story. And then once I hear their story, then, and I've got the face of it, then I try and get the back of it. I wanna hear and understand the story all the way around and all the dynamic moving parts in their lives. And then slowly, we try and help them find a different way to think about this. My theory about therapy is if you can find a way to think about it, then you can probably live with whatever it is that you're going through. Because you ask people, would you trade your life for someone else? People think about that and they say, no. People that are in really serious circumstances, they say, wouldn't change for somebody else? No. Okay, so we got your life and we're choosing your life. How are you now going to choose to think about it in a way that's healthy and productive and gets you the results that you want? So, Jane, I love this. And when you reflect back on your many years as a counselor, why were you so successful as a counselor? I don't know the answer. I don't know, except I will tell you that I was at a social gathering many years later and a woman that I had canceled with was at this social event and she came up and it's always a little tricky because you don't wanna out the moment. She's one of my clients, but she came up to me and she says to her friends, Jane was my therapist back when, and I just want all of you to know that she saved my life. And tears came to my eyes. And I looked at her and I said, really? She said, you just don't know. I was on the edge and you helped me realize there was a reason for living, there was a reason for my being here. And that gave me the courage to go on. It has a lot to do rusty with what you do, connecting with people and making them feel like they're a valuable resource to the world and they have something to give. Flaws and all, right? Well, I think that's the most impactful is when you hear a story like that from somebody and they say how you saved their life. And so far, Jane, since I wrote my first book, five people have come up to me to share that they were contemplating suicide. And then after reading my books, it changed their mindset. It gave them inspiration and hope and it saved their life. And they're crying, telling me this and I'm crying, listening to it because I thought I was writing books about leadership and creating a culture of excellence. Little did I know that it would impact people to the point of saving their lives. But when I would ask them about, they said, you talking about choices, you talk about impact and purpose and making people contribute and making them feel like they matter. And those are all key things, right? And it's about creating an area of excellence within ourselves. Like what is going to be my area of competence and how can I work within that? And how can I work with what draws me away from that? Yeah. Yeah, what would you think, Jane, is one of your greatest accomplishments as a counselor, is there a story that you could share? Probably that story I showed you was shared with you but there were so many other people that you have no idea as a coach, as a counselor, you really have no idea on the impact you have on people. All I know is that I kind of love them through it. I was married to a man, my husband, my second, my husband who died from cancer was a very skilled psychoanalyst and his technique and mine were so totally different. And I kept thinking, oh, I need to try and do therapy more like John because he's really good. And I couldn't, it was a flunk every time. It was just a miserable failure. By the way, I said, I've just got to do it my way because I worked totally from the heart and he worked totally from the head and just different people have different techniques but he was brilliant with his clients. He worked with the sickest of the sick and was brilliant, I couldn't have done what he did. Oh, and Jane, you know, I'm fascinated. You're such a great communicator and when I met you the first time, I mean, we could just talk for hours and hours but I wanna ask you, what is it about, what are some keys to really having open and honest communication with someone you're meeting for the first time where they're able to share their insecurities and vulnerabilities with you? I think it starts with my being, let's see, how do I say this? It took me a long time to realize that my authentic self was adequate, that I didn't need to be my presenter self. Put on a show, act like I was bigger than I am, be somebody, I just show up and be me. And show true interest and inquisitiveness and wonder at everything they say. And when they're sad, I'm sad, I'm very good at echoing back people's emotions. And so then you might ask me what my favorite interviews were and my answer is I didn't have a favorite interview because there were so many that were fabulous. My favorite category of interviews was the men, the grown men, the leaders and successful people in our community who were brought to tears by talking about something that impassioned them, either a success or a failure or remembering their grandfather. And then I would sit and I would say, and they'd go, oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And they were gonna need to do this. And I'd go, no, no, I'm interested. Tell me what it is that touches you when you talk about your grandfather. Oh, and then they'd say, oh, the way he guided me and taught me things and set them all up for me. Just, oh, you know, it was so tender when grown men got in touch with their emotions. And it's interesting, I think sometimes as we age, people get more vulnerable and they care less about what people think. And so they're really willing to be fair authentic selves. That was the joy of this project. I felt like 75 people, I got to see their real selves. Oh, it's wonderful. Not the kind of person you see at a cocktail party, right? Somebody who's sitting quietly and connecting one on one with another human being. No, I like what you said about how the importance of being real. I mean, yeah, everyone has to find their own excellence, their own greatness within themselves. And people can really feel that. I mean, it's an energy that you feel, just being real. And Jane, people define success in so many ways. What is your definition of success? Well, it doesn't really have to do with sales of the book. So here I am holding up a book, you can buy it anyway. No, it doesn't have to do with that. It has to do with people giving me the gift of telling me precious stories and my being able to relay it back to my community. And for me, it's all floating on the wings of fate. I don't know who I'm gonna interview. Each interview is a marvel in and of itself. And the success comes from the connections. I mean, it's not about financial success at all. So that would be wonderful. It's about these other things that are so tender and moving. Yeah, I totally agree with you, Jane. And when you reflect back on your life so far, what do you feel is an important lesson you learned in life? I refer to the relationship with my husband where he and I have learned how to respect each other and give each other freedom. So we each have the right to do whatever we would like to do without feeling compelled. When I first got into a relationship, I thought we needed to think as one, what I liked he had to like and vice versa. Turns out he doesn't like cocktail parties. He doesn't like chatting with people he's never gonna see again. And I thought I gotta maneuver him and manipulate him into coming into the cocktail party. And now I've learned I'm happy to go to a cocktail party and I can do that without him. So he has freedom to do as he wishes and I love and respect him without needing him to be who I want him to be. He can just be who he is. So that's probably one of the main lessons because it has made my marital life so much more rewarding. I love hearing those insights and I remember talking with you about you and your husband when we had met for lunch with Karan Davis and I wanna know Jane, what gives you fulfillment? What gives me fulfillment is having a goal in my mind and then setting it out to the universe and have the wings of fate bring it along. You know, just this week all along I've been thinking maybe booktube but my publisher says, maybe and I've got to sell book one first. And I'm like, it's very difficult for me to get logged into the sales part. That's not what my motivation is. And just this week I thought, yes, I am now going to put together material for a second book. So I've got 21 interviews under my belt already. And they just happened miraculous. Today I'm gonna go and talk to Betty. And Betty made all the lei for the coral group, the trio, Pooamana. She made all the lei. She's gonna teach me about laymaking and how they stayed their way so that they could make them last a week. You know, stories nobody knows to just touch the heart. Jane, it was super great having you on the show today. I mean, I love hearing your insights about your book and you as a counselor. I mean, and to hear that there's gonna be a book too that's coming out, that's super exciting. And I really wanna thank you for taking time to be on the show today. My pleasure, Rusty. Thank you for having me. Aloha. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. For more information, please visit rusticamory.com and our books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I hope that Jane and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha.