30 - This is B-RAD

B-RAD with Brad Toews

I turned forty the same week of launching this podcast, and in honour of that milestone birthday I set a goal of releasing forty episodes this year. I didn’t quite reach that goal. I am ending my first season of the B-RAD Podcast with thirty episodes.

This thirtieth and final episode of the first season feels like a good time to tell you what B-RAD means and what it means to B-RAD.

I’m a self-diagnosed self-development junkie. I seem addicted to the process of growth and development. I’ve read books, participated in programs, hired coaches, attended webinars and seminars; anything I can get my hands on.

But when I “signed up” for self-development I didn’t realize I was saying yes to the evolution of myself. I wasn’t just saying yes to growth and greater well-being, but to change. I was saying yes to some very difficult lessons.

The B-RAD Podcast is my contribution to the world of ideas in which I’ve been immersed. It comes out of what I’ve learned and am still learning, always a student. It stands on the shoulders of all these teachers who have influenced and changed my own life.

But what does it mean to B-RAD?

B-RAD is a play on my name Brad. Radical is from the Latin word radix, which means to “proceed from a root”.

Radical is about the base of all things, the origin, the root.

It’s the source.

To be radical is to be connected to the root, to proceed from that root.

Being radical is primarily the path of discovery, of going to the root.

The philosopher Ken Wilber says that we are given the incredible opportunity of a “radical transmutation and transformation at the deepest seat of consciousness itself.”

This dramatic change in form (transmutation and transformation), proceeding from the root (radical), is what it means to B-RAD.

It is a becoming from the ground up.

Join me in this final episode of season one as I recall my first big gains in the journey of self-development, tell stories from my youth (anyone else know what it’s like to dig an elevator shaft?), and trace the meaning of the B-RAD podcast to its latin roots. (And here you thought it was 90’s slang!)

Show notes, links, and other resources at Brad Toews.