An Ecstatic Freefall Into The Unknown With Singer-songwriter Peter Katz

22 Nov , 2024 podcasts

 

Celebrating every note of your life is about finding the music in everyday moments, savoring the harmonies of joy, the rhythms of challenge, and the melodies of love. In this episode, singer-songwriter Peter Katz shares with Katherine Twells his journey from childhood happiness to the upheaval of his parents’ separation. Peter reflects on how shifting from a path in engineering to music saved his spirit, sharing personal stories of surviving on his own at 16 and discovering his true passion for songwriting. This episode celebrates overcoming trauma, resilience, and the power of creative expression, reminding us to follow our hearts and celebrate every note along the way.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

An Ecstatic Freefall Into The Unknown With Singer-songwriter Peter Katz

Celebrating Every Note In The Music Of Our Lives

Peter’s Journey

My guest is the very soulful Peter Katz, a very special artist and human that I’ve had the great honor to get to know. Peter is an award-winning singer-songwriter and he has been hailed as a thunderbolt for the soul by many of his fans. The more you listen to his music, the more you understand why they say that. He’s cultivated a unique perspective on what it means to be truly connected to your passion. He’s served clients over his career, touring and speaking globally. He’s crafted stories and strategies as a singer and keynote that are rising above the noise and truly helping people create new opportunities for connection and elevation.

A four-Time tedx fellow, Peter has delivered highly customized keynote concerts to numerous companies and organizations across many industries, including an appearance in the Compassion Lab Speaker series. He’s inspired so many with his songs. His music has been streamed over 30 million times and his music videos have over 26 million views on YouTube, with his cover of Beyoncé’s Halo garnering over 20 million views alone. Beyond his professional journey, Peter is someone devoted to the work of the soul to serve and inspire others to know their power and potential. He’s doing such amazing work in the world, so please enjoy the conversation with the very talented Peter Katz.

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Peter, it is so lovely to see you again and you will be joining us in the Compassion Lab. I am so excited because we’ve never done a keynote concert before in the Lab and I think it’s going to be super cool to bring music into the conversation. I want to say thank you in advance. You are gracious enough to also give me the time to have this conversation in advance so that we can get more of the backdrop and the context about you. Thank you for that as well.

Absolutely. My pleasure.

Let’s dig right in. As I always start at the beginning because it tells so much about how we turn out to be who we are in our lives. Can you tell us a little bit about where it all began in your origin story? I know it’s impossible to tell so much about your journey in a short period of time, but maybe the highlight reel, so we can get started from there.

I definitely feel like there are these different blocks in the story, like these key moments, these key seasons. If we do go way back, the first season was pretty great. We lived in the suburbs. We had a house. I’m the baby of four. We lived on a crescent. We would play with the neighbors. It was pretty great. I was a super happy-go-lucky kid. Pretty much every report card that I had, the teachers would write, “Peter’s a very enthusiastic child. Sometimes, his enthusiasm is distracting to the other students.” There’s a little bit of a dig there. I was high energy, maybe a little too high energy, but a happy kid. I had close relationship with my siblings and with my parents. Things felt pretty good.

There was this sudden chasm this this moment where we were having dinner and my parents said we have to talk about something. They let us know that they were going to be separating and they were going to be selling the house. It was that sudden and shocking. My parents didn’t fight. I had no clue. It was this very sudden removal from Eden and everything changed. I was 12 going on 13 at that time, and by the time I was 16, I had lived on my own in an apartment. Yeah, it was a very dramatic shift. Those years in the apartment were a completely different part of me that needed to be developed, which was this strong survival instinct, this sense of, “I’m going to figure this out.”

In many ways, I got a lot of pats on the head for that. People were very impressed with how I was able to adapt so suddenly and how I was able to figure things out. I remember when I first moved out, I wasn’t old enough even to have a driver’s license. I would take my scooter and go get groceries and manage the household. I had a job as a waiter. Not that I was fully supporting myself. My parents were still assisting in that time. It was a very different period in my life.

There were also some positive things that happened at that time, in the sense that I thought my life was going to be on a very specific trajectory. My grandfather was an engineer. I was good at math and science, so I’m going to be an engineer, too. Of course, in that first semester in that apartment, as much as I was on the outside seemingly doing great, I was also dealing with a lot of anxiety. I would come home from class and I would be scared. I’d have to check under the bed, in the closet and in the shower and because I was still a kid in that environment. I also was free. I was sixteen and I had nobody looking over my shoulder. I was in these physics and math classes and I was not feeling it in my soul. There was something that was shifting in me and I was trying to drink and kill those feelings.

There was this moment where I went to go see this school play and I was like, “Whoa.” I hung out with some of the actors afterwards. They were they were creative, self-expressed and fun. I was like, “Maybe there’s this other path for me.” I felt so lit up. I didn’t have anybody to tell me no so I walked into the registrar’s office. I said, “I want out of math and science. I want in on creative arts and theater.”

From that moment on, I always say I haven’t been bored. Since I was in love with what I was studying, I was less interested in drinking anymore and more of taking care of myself and pursuing this passion. That led me to move to Toronto to go to theater school. Of course, there are some plot twists in the sense that halfway through theater school, I realized that actually what I wanted to do is music. We can get into that. Do you want me to keep going or should we pause there for a second?

No, let’s pause because we’re going to get into some of those other juicy stories, but there are a few things I don’t want to forget that I’m picking up from what you said that I want to go deeper on. First of all, Peter, I want to honor the journey that you had. I think that the comment that you had, removed from Eden, is such a visual, at least to me, that you were in this idyllic place, and it’s a place of innocence.

Coping Mechanisms

In that moment, you lost your innocence. I struggle with that with my own kids as I see them taking on adult problems, adult anxiety, all the things that you’re like, “No. Just stay being excited about the great pumpkin.” That’s where you want them to be. You had to go abruptly into the stage of adulthood. You talked a little bit about the pats on the head and the coping mechanisms. How do you think that served you now and how is it not serving you now?

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last few years, especially since my own divorce, which we can talk about, unpacking that and trying to understand. I was the baby of four, so I had this natural precociousness where I could do the things that the older kids could do. I was driven in that way. One of the things that I’ve been studying a lot over the years is the idea of how we adapt. In many ways, the ways that we adapt when we’re kids, when we’re faced with these challenges and these traumas at the time, is brilliant. We develop ways that help us survive.

When we're kids, the ways we adapt to challenges and traumas are brilliant at the time, but those adaptive behaviors can eventually become maladaptive. Share on X

This workaholic, driven, “I’m going to figure this out,” person that emerged when I was sixteen helped me at that time. I became incredibly driven. I became incredibly adept at surviving. My resilience was at an all-time high and people were so impressed by that. The problem is that those things that are adaptive at the time can eventually become maladaptive, whereas workaholism later in life is not so great. Putting on a front of success no matter what and swallowing your anxieties is not so great a little later on in life.

It helped me in the sense that I was driven. Even though I lived on my own, I didn’t have parents to remind me to do my homework or anything, but I didn’t need it because I was there to outwork everybody else. I was top of the academic dean’s list. I was driven, which obviously serves you. The way that our education system is set up is outwork and you will be rewarded but it doesn’t necessarily take into account your physical health, your mental health, your anxieties, any of these other things that probably should be tended to alongside.

I sometimes feel like we spend the first part of our lives learning and then we have to move into unlearning because we are wired for survival, but it’s not at that primal level. We’re also being fed a lot of stories about the way it is, the way we should be, and other people’s ideas of where we should fit in. All of a sudden, I think there comes a day when you’re like, “This is not working for me anymore.” The coping skills that did serve and they do serve us, people reading might be like, “I didn’t have anything that dramatic,” but there are even nuances in family systems where in order for someone to find attention or to feel love, they had to act a certain way. That becomes so ingrained in their identity.

All of a sudden, you find yourself 55-year-old and they’re like, “Why am I still feeling this need to perform?” or whatever it might be. I think so much of this voyage of becoming more aware as we age is learning what do we need to let go of and how do we need to change into a different person, which is I think what you’ve been doing for years.

Moment In The Theater

The other piece of your story I want to go deeper into is that moment in the theater. Here you were, going for the engineering and you’re sitting there and something stirred your soul, like, “This is it.” I think it’s so magical when we have those moments in our life where our essence, something is tapped, something is turned on inside that light that we resonate with. Talk more about what that was like. You touched on it, but talk more about that.

I do this mentoring work in the summertime and something we always tell the teenagers is about is the paradigm. There’s a classic Stephen Covey story about the paradigm shift of this man riding on the subway. There’s another man there whose two kids are running around and being noisy and disruptive. This man’s watching this and is like, “What is wrong with this guy, this terrible father?” He calls out at him and says, “Get control of your kids here, buddy.” The guy looks up and is so apologetic. He said, “I’m so sorry. We have just come from their mother’s funeral. I didn’t know what to do.”

There’s this paradigm shift that happens where you saw things one way and then you suddenly see things another way. I feel like I’ve had a few of these key paradigm shifts in my life, and I had this bias in my brain about creative expression and pursuing the arts. I don’t mean to be offensive as I say this, but I literally thought that you were going to be dealing with homelessness or something if you pursued a life in the arts.

 

People say that. “How are you going to make a living doing that?” It’s the pursuit of what makes you the most money. That’s the voice.

It wasn’t a possibility in my brain. Even though from a very, very young age, I played music. I played violin starting at four. I played piano. I loved music. I started playing guitar when I was 11, 12. It wasn’t something that was ever going to live in the realm of something that I might actually pursue. In that moment, like I said, I was unattached. I was unhinged in a way and anything was possible. I was sitting there watching this, and it just so happened that two of the actors in the play lived in the same apartment building as I did. They were in the basement. They always had people over, and they were like hippies.

I was intrigued by them. There they were in this play and they were it up. They had this spark in them. It was clear that they loved that they were doing and it was clear that they didn’t think they were going to be living on the streets as a result of pursuing what they were pursuing. There was this undeniable energy there and I felt it in my body. I felt this resonance. It was one of those moments where I was like, “Why not? Why would I not do this? Clearly, it’s speaking to me.” I think because I didn’t have anybody to challenge me, I did it.

That was such a moment of this rush of freedom and this rush of stepping towards myself maybe for the first time. Maybe that was one of my first real adult moves, like, “Who am I, and what do I want?” Honestly, I never looked back. I loved going to class. I loved everything I was doing suddenly, whereas that first semester, I was miserable. I was depressed. I remember sitting in calculus or whatever it was and, on repeat in my brain, I was like, “I don’t care about this.” That’s all I could think. Big shift.

You probably saw the movie The Dead Poet’s Society. There’s so much in that movie, but you know how the one young man, all he wanted to do was act and he came alive and he was free and loved it. Of course, his parents didn’t approve, and we know the tragedy that happened in that movie, but seeing that character is amazing. Honestly, you know what else I was thinking about as you were talking? Now that I know you and I know your music.

I’ve told you before we hit record, “I have Peter Katz on in my house all the time,” because your music speaks to me and I think, “You almost didn’t do this?” That would be a real loss to the world because it is a gift. Probably, when you were learning all these instruments when you were a kid, you thought that was normal, but your gift was already showing at that point. I hope anyone reading this conversation will listen to their voice and what makes them come alive. Not what’s the highest paying or what Uncle Ed thinks you should do, but what you feel touches your essence. I love that story, and the fruits of that moment happened, which was awesome.

I could talk a lot about this and whenever I give keynotes for teenagers, I’ll often talk about this, too. That moment where my heart came alive, it was like, “I want to be in this play.” It put me on this whole other path. It doesn’t mean that path is linear. It’s not going to be linear or easy. Ultimately, I didn’t pursue being an actor but that is what then led me to pursuing songwriting. I had another paradigm shift moment when I decided to play music for the rest of my life, which we could talk about.

That led me to songwriting, which led me to touring all over the world as an artist, which then led me to keynote speaking and all these other things. Now, this facilitation work that I do. It’s not that it’s this linear thing that’s going to be exactly the image that you thought it was going to be, but you’re on this alternate path of following these things that light you up. As long as you’re following them with that passion and from that place, then I feel like you can’t go wrong. I could talk a little more about that.

The path to following the things that light you up will not be linear, but as long as you're doing that with passion, you can’t go wrong. Share on X

Here’s what’s so interesting to me. I do believe that life is unfolding, but you’ve probably heard Stephen Covey say, “Begin with the end in mind.” Even when we do development plans within the company, it’s like, “What do you want to be?” You’ve got to work your way backwards. “If you want to be this, you need this skill, you need that skill.” Now, the logic of that is clear, but what you said doesn’t take into account because we’re always changing and shifting. I feel like it’s a little bit more like the breadcrumbs, like there’s a breadcrumb here and you follow that.

In your case, it wasn’t the acting part, it was the music part that came alive. I think this is what is fascinating to me. I think we all want to know where we’re going, but we actually have to be super present now to get there. Does what I just said make sense? I’m freethinking. I don’t know. There’s something here. Help me here, Peter.

As you know, I do a lot of facilitation work within corporations and all that stuff. To me, the idea of strategic planning years out in this current world is laughable. Imagine the strategic planning that was happening in 2019 or something but that is the kind of world that we’re in. A lot of the philosophies that I try to bring within organizations is it’s more about learning how to create the container for great questions. It’s more about learning how to work with each other. It’s more how do we develop the skills in our humanness in order to be able to meet those changes. I’m not suggesting that you have no strategic plan at all, but if you think that your strategic plan is locked in, then I think you have another thing coming. I resonate with what you said.

 

All the touché clichés come in all that, like, “Yeah, it’s funny that you were going to do this. I’m going to make you go this way.” The frame is fine. I think about it. Even as I sometimes think about my future, I think, “How do I want to feel in that future?” I don’t define exactly what I’m doing, but I want to feel adventure. I want to feel free. I want to feel connection.

As I go down and I pick up those breadcrumbs, I’m like, “Does this help me feel more free or more connected or further away from that?” It’s actually magical because you can go on this journey of trust that the right things are going to happen. I firmly believe when you were sitting there, you were being tapped on the shoulder by a higher, wiser part of you that said, “Come on, Peter. Come back to where you belong.” You listened to that, which is pretty cool.

Music And Compassion

Tell me this, Peter, because I love music. I don’t play an instrument. It’s still on my list. It’s never too old to learn. It’s on my list to learn. I do love music. I always have, ever since I was a little kid. It would speak to me in a different way. How do you think, as an artist, music brings forth maybe our heart, our compassion, like a different part of ourselves? What happens to us when we’re listening to music?

It’s funny, even you asking that question, I’m tearing up because I have such a love and gratitude for music. As I’ve been blessed to have it, it infuses every part of my personal and professional life. I’ve come to learn a lot about it. I think of a couple of things as you ask the question. I think of music itself, but I also think about songwriting, so I’ll start with music.

I happen to have a podcast and be dear friends with a brilliant researcher and scientist who’s studied these things. She shared with me some of the physiological things that happen when we’re listening to music. By the way, that’s my dear friend, Dr. Robyne Hanley-Dafoe. She’s amazing. She talks about how in the same way that we’re wired to drink water or eat food and process nutrients, we’re actually wired to intake music. The place that we process our feelings and our amygdala is the same place that we process music.

We all know this intuitively. You hear a piece of music and within seconds, you are transported somewhere, or your breath eases or like there, or there’s a memory that come. There are all these things that happen with music. I use music in my facilitation work, in my speaking work, obviously in my concerts as well to actually put people in a different physiological state. We bring people together and we want to have meetings and we want them to come up with great ideas and we want to feel connected with each other.

However, if people are in fight or flight the whole time, that’s not going to happen. All of a sudden, you introduce music at the beginning of a session, a little bit of starting with heart and the ideas are flowing. Somebody maybe feels comfortable taking a risk and putting an idea out there that may or may not work, but they felt comfortable putting it out there.

I love the learning about the neuroscience of music. I even have been partnering a little bit with the Ivy School of Business and they’ve been studying the correlation between music and leadership qualities and all kinds of amazing research on that. Very fascinating. I have to talk about the songwriting piece, because for me, that is why I’ve dedicated my life to music. I wouldn’t have done what I’ve done. I wouldn’t have driven through snowstorms and slept on floors and dealt with no money and all the challenges if it was just about standing out.

You were temporarily homeless, right?

That’s true. It actually happened.

Sorry, I don’t mean to be laughing at you being homeless but keep going.

I wouldn’t have done all that if it was about singing a song or playing guitar. The reason that I have dedicated my life to it is because I’m singing songs that I wrote. To me, that is one of the most special experiences to basically take the invisible and make it visible, to have this feeling, this sense, this impulse, this unknown force and then go through the process, which is, most of the time, grueling. Every now and then, you have like this magical experience where it downloads, but most of the time that’s not the case. Either way, to go through that, to be in this liminal space where you’re creating this thing and you don’t know what it is, you don’t know if it’s good, you don’t know if it’s complete, like you just don’t know.

It’s not just about singing a song or playing the guitar. It’s about taking the invisible and making it visible. Share on X

However, you keep in that uncomfortable space and you allow this thing to finally emerge. At some point you’re like, “I did it. Here’s this song,” and then you get to play it. It reveals to you things that you didn’t even know. I feel like songs have this prescient power to them where I’ll write something and then six months later, I’ll catch up to it. At the time, I wouldn’t have known that I felt that way. In some ways, the song went first. It guided me. It knew something that I didn’t know because it was in that unconscious space. Even with this new album that I’m finishing up right now, there was this moment where I was like, “I’ve got an album. I did it.”

I just stood there and I picked up the guitar and I played all ten songs. I wrote more than ten songs to the album. I played the ten that made it onto the album. It was this glorious, beautiful experience where I’m like, “All these songs exist now. All these songs I’m going to put out in the world. All these songs are here forever.” It’s such a special feeling. When we’re talking about music, I feel like that’s such a big part of it.

I think what keeps me in it, too, is it is forever, in a way, this mystery too. Even though I’ve written hundreds of songs, there’s this part of me that feels like I have no idea how to write a song, but I know how to show up for it and trust that there’s value in that, whether it works or not, whether it’s good or not, whether anybody else likes it or not. I’ve developed the muscle to show up for it. Sure enough, new things come, for which I feel very grateful.

Peter, I think that when you are living out of this essence that we’ve talked about, like your true self, you can’t go wrong because it’s like being in alignment. You’re in alignment with what you came here to do. The cool thing is you can never know the impact. As an artist, you create this and put it into the world and you don’t know how someone’s going to be in their house driving their car, and something you sing touches them so deeply that it changes them. How amazing is that?

I would make it more broad to say we are all artists and whether you are a painter, a musician or a business person, I think we’re made to create as humans. We always need to be creating. It might be a beautiful meal, a beautiful party, even a different way of engaging with the customer. I think that’s the beauty of the human experience. AI is coming up hard and fast and everyone has got a lot of questions about it, but the beauty of the creation of the human spirit is something completely unique to us.

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve said this many times. I’ve never liked this line in the sand of, “I’m an artist. I’m not an artist.” The story I always think of was my mom, in her career, she began as a nurse then she became a marital and family therapist. In the third phase of her life, she was a manager for this visiting nurses association. They do PSWs like personal support and going into people’s homes who needed care. One of the projects that she did in the final years was this adult day center where seniors could come and have community and connect.

My mom asked if I wanted a tour of it and I was like, “Absolutely.” This was right before it was about to open. I went and she gave me this tour of this adult day center. We were walking through and she’s like, “I picked this color over here and we wanted to have windows as soon as they walked in. We made the kitchen the center of everything because people love to gather in the kitchen. We made it in a way that they could gather comfortably in the kitchen.” She took me to this back room and she said, “This is for the people that are dealing with dementia and so we’ve created these blankets that have the buttons and different stimuli on it. We thought about the lighting here so that they’re comfortable.”3

I’m following my mom on this tour and I was like, “My mom is an artist. There’s so much thoughtfulness and creativity that’s gone into this and nobody would label her that and yet it’s so obvious.” I see it all the time like in the way someone teaches their class. There are so many different things that people do that should get labeled as works of art and beautiful moments of expression because I feel like that is what we’re here to do. It’s to create and I love it when in the less conventional places you see that happening.

 

Seeing Our Own Greatness

I do too. We are talking to each other, Peter, but we’re also talking to our virtual audience, the people who will be reading this at whatever time in the future. One of the biggest things that comes up in so many of our conversations in the Compassion Lab is people not seeing their own greatness, beauty, gifts, or comparing those gifts to somebody else like, “Their gift is so much better than mine.” I would love for your words to echo this in whatever way you see fit. I would tell everyone that is reading to see the beauty that they are, see the artist that they are and see how important they are in the tapestry of all that we’re doing together. Is there anything you would add to that?

Yeah. I have two thoughts on that. Number one, we were talking earlier about me getting pats on the head for being a workaholic and just pushing. I think we also get these pats on the head for being humble, minimizing ourselves and not standing out. There’s a beautiful Maryanne Williamson quote in her book, A Return to Love. I often share this quote with the teenagers that I work with in the summer. This is my paraphrasing, but the essence is that she says our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we’re powerful beyond measure, that we could actually be all the things that we could be, shine, and be brilliant.

She says, “Who are you not to be brilliant? You playing small doesn’t give the world what it’s meant to receive.” I feel like we have to work against this idea of like, “Yeah, just be quiet and we’ll like you and you can fit in,” versus allowing that brilliance to be expressed. It needs to be said that it’s fumbling in the dark. When I’m trying to create something, I’ve already talked about this, that you don’t know. You are going to make bad things.

They’re almost like a kid who’s learning that they have a voice, then they’re screaming and it’s bouncing off the walls. There is this messiness in self-expression because there’s no roadmap. You’re figuring it out. I love that Marianne Williamson quote, which reminds me and I try to share it with other others as much as possible, that your job is to shine, to have those things be expressed. That’s your gift to the world, not to disappear and play small. Those are my thoughts.

There is this messiness in self-expression because there's no road map. It's figuring it out. Share on X

Thank you. That’s beautifully reinforced. It is messy. I think the other thing is we think it’s going to get aligned on something, and we’re like, “It’s going to flow. It’s going to be easy.” Yeah, there should be some degree of flow. You shouldn’t feel like you’re totally swimming upstream all the time, but it’s okay. I think we need to allow the mess. We need to allow the things that don’t go the way we want them to go.

With that, I want to bridge all the way back to something you said in your origin story as well. You mentioned going through your own divorce. If you don’t mind sharing a little bit more about that, because I have to imagine with your childhood and that crucible moment when you were twelve and what you had to do, getting divorced was probably the last thing you ever wanted to do. Can you talk about that part of your life and how that shaped who you are now?

It’s such a classic story that you don’t realize you’re in where you go through this trauma. My number one goal in life was don’t get divorced, don’t lose your house, because that was my core wound trauma. Just like my parents, I thought I had like the best marriage and we were the couple that everybody referenced as having it figured out.

Funny is not the right word, but very similarly, one day, my now ex-wife had been doing her Masters abroad in Europe and came back and essentially in said, “I’m in love with somebody else. I don’t want to have a family.” It unraveled instantly. I tried to not have it unravel. I was like, “I forgive you. It’s okay. Let’s go to therapy. Let’s work this out,” but I had lost her. There’s this moment that’s seared in my mind from that time. We had a house together that her parents owned. I was walking away empty handed.

You were homeless again.

I had nowhere to live for a month. I had signed a lease to move into a basement apartment with a roommate in a month, but I had a month’s period where I had nowhere to live. I moved a bunch of my stuff in storage and I had the essentials in the back of my car and I was sitting in the driveway. This was the moment that I was going to back out of the driveway, never to return.

I remember I paused and I’m sitting in the car and it’s the deepest pain. I feel like I failed. In this fundamental core foundational way, I have failed. I remember this voice, this presence, this feeling where I made this commitment in that moment. Even talking about it now, I feel it again. I was like, “This hurts so much, but I am going to take this pain and I am going to turn it into love. I’m going to turn it into opening my eyes. Obviously, I missed something, so I’m going to learn. What will you have me do? I am here for it. I’m here to learn. I’m here to grow.” I feel like that was the moment that I came alive and awake for the first time where I just wasn’t trying to not recreate my parents’ story, but I was like, “I am going to create my own. I am here for it.”

 

I backed out of the driveway. I went and bought a copy of Brené Brown’s Rising Strong which I furiously consumed. That was the beginning of me of the unlearning and the unfolding. Even connected to what we were talking about, I think it was me applying the creative process to my life of not being this reaction against, but this open space of possibility, which of course includes the unknown. We try to protect ourselves. We try to put all the things in place so we’re not so vulnerable. I was like, “That didn’t work.” I had all the things in place and ultimately, I was as vulnerable as ever. That’s not the goal anymore.

The goal is not to batten down the hatches and be protected from anything that might happen. It’s more like, “Okay, here I am.” I started therapy and mindfulness. I’ve been working with my mindfulness coach for years. At the core of what we’re working on and the first word she ever had me use as a mantra was this word trust. I would say the word trust. That was my gateway into doing all of the work that I’ve done since. Ultimately, the goal is to trust that I am okay. No matter what, I am okay. That was the furthest thing from how I felt when I was trying to shape everything on what I didn’t want to happen versus trusting that I’m okay, which means that whatever happens, I can find my way through it.

First of all, thank you for sharing that because I know that’s a very tender memory that brings up a lot of feeling, but it’s a powerful story because you did choose to turn it into something good. We’ve talked a lot in this conversation about this messiness, the unknown twists and turns. We want to have a linear path. We don’t have a linear path.

Do we want to control things? I do. My closets get very clean when I feel out of control, because all I can do is organize that. I think the fact that the only thing we can control is how we respond. We’re confronted with that moment. I’ve had that moment. I’m sure many people reading have had that moment. What do you choose to do in that very moment of crucible and how does it change you?

When I think about the worst times in my life, illness, emotional challenges, I don’t want to go relive them, but I would not erase them because they have shaped who I am so differently in my ability to empathize and not just sympathize with people about how they’re feeling. I’m sure all of this has also created not only your way of being, but infused into your music as well.

There are so many things that I would never wish on anybody else and yet I’m like, “That has given me so much learning and depth.” I’m an open book. I don’t mind sharing about my life. I don’t even mind when something makes me cry because that reminds me that I’m a human. What you said there about sympathize versus empathize, my partner and I have been on what people label as a fertility journey. What it is this rain cloud over your head. It’s truly awful. It has also caused incredible depth, connection and shared experience with my partner and I where we’ve had to go to therapy to work through this.

We’ve had to hold each other through moments that are like a pain I’ve never experienced. I think about what that has opened up in me. My sister dealt with a miscarriage. I remember at the time, I was sad for her. I was like, “That must suck.” In my brain, I was like, “I guess try again.” There was this part of me that didn’t understand. Now, when anybody shares about what they’re going through in that department and, to be honest, in other departments as well, I’m there with them and my heart is locked in.

I was at an event and this guy on stage shared about his fertility struggles with his partner. I met him afterwards and we just hugged and cried so much together. I just met this guy, but we felt each other’s hearts because we had that depth from our experiences. I think that is our journey as humans as well. It is our mission as well to feel. Part of it is to be brilliant and to shine and it’s also to feel.

As humans, it is also our mission to feel. Share on X

Brené Brown talks about you can’t mute your pain and expect to feel joy. If you’re going to mute your feelings, you’re going to mute everything. There’s only one button and it goes up or down. If we want to feel joy, if we want to feel the essence of aliveness, we have to take it all. We have to feel it all. I don’t wish these things on anybody, but I’m telling you, when my partner and I are holding that baby someday, the joy is going to be off the charts because of the challenge and that will be the gift of it.

It will be the gift of it, Peter, and I’m seeing that for you right now. I’m visualizing it in my mind and putting it out into the field for you. When that kid is sixteen and rolling his or her eyes at you and telling you that you don’t know anything, you’re going to be like, “Do you know what we went through for you?” It’s so crazy true.

What we’re talking about right now is the power of the heart because we talk a lot in this world and certainly in business about the head and the strategy and the what we know and our knowledge, but what we’re talking about is our wisdom. It is our connection through our lived experiences, because we all have them. Let me tell you, if I were rewriting the way things go, would I love to gain wisdom and growth through bliss, joy and fun all the time? Yeah. That would be a lovely way to do it but it’s not the way it happens.

I think about it all the time with my own kids wanting to protect them and make their life perfect. I go crazy when I see them going through it, but I know they have to or they won’t develop this heart that can give so beautifully to other people. That’s the whole point. Peter, I want everyone reading to hear you sing because hopefully, they’re all going to immediately go to their best music platform and look you up if they don’t already know you. We’re talking about a lot of heart and all about life. Would you share a song with us that you think maybe is fitting for this conversation?

Song Selection

I would be happy to. I’ve got guitars all around me here. I’ve even got a piano at arm’s reach there. Yeah, this is actually a brand-new song and it doesn’t exist other than me singing it right now. It’s been recorded, but it’s not out in the world. I think it is super fitting for what we’ve been talking about. It’s called Celebrate. It’s about celebrating the moments that we don’t necessarily think to celebrate but recognizing that those are the moments that give us the wisdom, that give us the strengths, that give us the lessons, that give us that sense of who we are. That ultimately teach us about that fundamental okayness that I work a lot on in my life. Here you go. This is called Celebrate.

“Throughout the biggest moments in the every day, happy and the sad and the hard to say, for everything that comes and goes a long way, I’m going to celebrate. I still remember that place in time, just shy of twenty when I realized that someday I was going to die and it could be soon. I was lying in that hospital room with all the tests that they were putting me through. When I got out, everything seemed new. I felt so alive.”

“So for all the biggest moments in the every day, happy and the sad and the hard to say, for everything that comes and goes a long way, I’m going to celebrate. I had a love that I was promised to, then she became someone I hardly knew. All the paths that she was winding through didn’t wind my way. Sometimes your plans, you got to let them go. Get into growing like you’ve never grown. Hands on the handles of the great unknown and cut the lines away.”

“For all the biggest moments and day, happy and sad and hard to say, for everything that comes and goes along the way, I’m going to celebrate. Oh yeah. For every indecision when I lost my way, every moment wishing for the words to say, all of them may made me who I’m today, and so I celebrate. For all the biggest moments in the every day, the happy and the sad and the hard to say, forever I’m holding as I’m fading away, I’m going to celebrate. I’m going to celebrate. I’m going to celebrate.”

Studio audience of one clapping. That’s so beautiful. Thank you for sharing that, Peter. It actually perfectly summed up everything that we’ve been talking about in this conversation. We get to choose to celebrate the whole enchilada. I have to read this little excerpt. I don’t know if you wrote it or someone else did on your website, but I thought it’s so beautiful and it even speaks to this. It says, “Not to suggest that everyone needs to fall off a cliff to discover a renewed direction in life and art, but as it turns out, it did work for Peter Katz. The accidental drop was his twisted and not a little bit painful road to make his startling new album, City of Our Lives.”

This is the piece I love, Peter. “Rhythmically inclined, streaked with gossamer sense and sensitivity, attuned to the most progressive and emotive reaches of 21st-century pop, the album has a definite feel on the whole of an ecstatic free fall into the unknown and that’s the point.” I think this is going to be the title of this episode, In A Static Free Fall Into The Unknown, because that’s what we’re talking about, which is so cool.

Serving And Giving Back

In the time we have left, I’m watching our time because there is no time when I talk to you. It’s like it’s the eternal present moment, but I want to talk about how you serve and give back, because part of this sympathy, empathy conversation is also realizing we’re a part of this greater whole. Part of our lives is not to live fully into who we are, but to serve other people and you’ve done that.

You briefly mentioned FACES, which I know is an incredible mentoring program for teens, but you also are very involved in the business sector. I’m so happy that our paths have intertwined with this, but you are part of a trifecta of leaders working on the conscious leadership quest. I’ll share that vision that you envision a world where business transcends their conventional roles, evolving into instruments of healing and wholeness that align with the world’s deepest needs, which is amazing. Can you talk a little bit more about how you serve?

I’ll see if I can touch on both of those. The work I do with teenagers every summer, there’s a much longer story that probably don’t have time to tell the whole thing, although I will talk about it when I’m with you at the Compassion Lab. Essentially, this youth mentoring program called FACES is like an outdoor program for teenagers. It takes some hiking and rock climbing and all those things, but the truth is they don’t care if the kids get good at rock climbing or any of those activities. They care that they learn how to develop their courage and empathy, that they realize that they can do things that they didn’t think they could do, that they could support each other and be connected to other human beings in ways that perhaps they didn’t realize. All of the activities that we’re doing are catalysts for conversation and for growth.

Anyways, that program had been using my music as part of their curriculum, totally unbeknownst to me. I played this show in Southern Alberta back in 2013. It was at a time when I basically thought I was failing at music and that nobody was paying attention. There’s this sold-out theater with hundreds of rabid fans that loved my music. They had organized this concert because they had wanted me to work for them. They’d been coming to my shows in a town nearby and felt like I would be a perfect youth mentor. They’d reached out to my management, and my management had shut it down. They said, “No. Peter’s not a camp counselor.”

They organized this show so they could show me directly what they were doing. Of course, I fell in love with the whole thing. I went out there and did my first session. Now, years later, I’ve been out every single summer except 2020 for obvious reasons. I’m now one of the directors of that program every summer. It’s this incredibly powerful part of my life and one of my absolute greatest teachers. I don’t think I could have survived my divorce or all these other things without FACES because what FACES taught me more than anything else is if you want to be a mentor, a teacher, a guide, a coach or anything like that, your number one job is to live what it is you seek to teach and inspire.

FACES ultimately hangs its hat on integrity. Integrity is a very personal thing. It’s not something that anybody on the outside ultimately is able to assess. It’s an inner connection that we feel. It’s the head on the pillow at night, checking in with ourselves. FACES has nurtured that sense of integrity to me. I always check in with myself. If I want to be deserving of being in this position of being a mentor, I need to make sure that I’m living it myself every single day. That space is an incredibly important part of my life. That’s also where I had the fall that you referenced in that quote where we were doing some rock climbing and I had an unfortunate accident. It’s not something I’d wish on anybody, but also something that changed my life in many positive ways.

 

Isn’t it so cool to think about that moment watching the play where you got in touch with what you wanted to do, all the things that happened, the fact that you create this thing that goes out into the world, you don’t know what’s going to happen and here’s this organization that took it in and made it a part of who they are and it affects all these kids’ lives. You step into that. When you look at all of this, how it all comes together and you would’ve never written that story, from the beginning you had to live that story. That’s so cool. I love it.

I think it’s a worthy tieback to what we talked about earlier, too, of putting myself on that path of listening to my heart and switching from engineering into the arts. None of what’s materialized could I have known like how it was going to go. Even at the moment when I decided to play music for the rest of my life, I thought, “I’m going to play arenas, and that will be what success looks like.” I never thought I was going to be on a mountaintop with a bunch of teenagers because I’d put songs out into the world. Yet, the depth and meaning of that experience eclipses anything I could have ever imagined at the time.

If you’re a parent and your child is wanting to follow their heart, I would encourage them to do so. It’s about following your heart with that wholeheartedness. It’s not just like, “That looks fun,” but it’s like, “This is speaking to me and I’m going to dedicate myself to it.” That’s when you put yourself on the path of all of these unknown possibilities.

Also, trusting that everything is coming together for the greatest of good. All right. Part two of that.

The Conscious Leaders Quest. As I’ve mentioned, I’m deep and very passionate about facilitation. I love creating the container for connection to occur. I think it feels like the 3.0 version of me. Not that this needs to be the case, but in a certain sense, as the singer, songwriter, rock star on the stage, or the speaker in the room with the thousands of people and the big bio and all these things, there’s this certain sense of you’re the sage on the stage.

It’s like you want people to walk away thinking, “You are amazing.” For me, in this part of my life, I actually want people to walk away thinking they’re amazing and using the skillsets that I’ve developed to enhance them and their experience and use my expertise so that they feel their own experience versus mine necessarily.

I’ve become passionate about studying facilitation, how to create that. I’ve met a lot of wonderful people as part of that community of learning. Two of those people Ron and Michael. We decided to take all of our learnings and this interesting intersection of experiences where, of course, I’m bringing the art and the heart and those parts of things and creating the conditions for people to feel connected and all that stuff. Michael, in his previous life, was a therapist and has deep understanding of human psychology, but then also has worked for more than a decade as a consultant. He was helping organizations with organizational change and strategic planning and everything under the sun.

Ron is our avatar of our ideal customer in a way. He was a CEO of a company and managing a lot of people. A lot of people are looking to him. He realized that he needed to do the work and go through the eye of the needle. He wasn’t going to see the change that he wished to seek unless he lived it himself, much like I was talking about. The three of us bring these different perspectives, and we partner with some amazing somatic workers. We have an amazing woman who leads us in breath work and cacao ceremonies and all these things. It’s been this beautiful opportunity to bring what I believe the world needs.

I think there’s this bias that we have. I certainly had this bias before I started doing this work. The meaningful change is only going to come from the not-for-profit sector or that kind of thing. I’m obviously deeply grateful for the not-for-profit sector and all the work that we do. We always have a scholarship at the Conscious Leaders Quest for two not-for-profit leaders to join and be part of it because they bring a tremendous amount of wisdom into the room. Realizing that our world, in so many ways, runs on business. Business does move the needle in so many ways. We need to bring humanity into that space because there’s a lot of important decisions that are happening.

There’s a lot of time that people are spending within business there. I read a study that you will spend more of your waking hours with the people you work with than your own family. If we want to have a more human, heart-centered, connected world, we can’t just pretend that that’s not necessary from 9:00 to 5:00 Monday to Friday. Ultimately, if we want organizations and companies to be making decisions from a place of thoughtfulness versus reactivity, if we want people to be thinking about the whole person, all of these different criteria that needs to start with the leaders. They’re the ones that need to go through the eye of the needle. They’re the ones that need to model how we’re going to be here.

It’s not about the iron fist or whatever that might be. It’s about how do you bring the best out of people? Leadership is influence. My dear late friend, Dr. Danny Friedland, wrote a great book, Leading Well From Within. He said, “We can’t help but have influence, so the question is how do we influence our influence?” That’s what we seek to do at the Conscious Leaders Quest. Obviously, we run these retreats, but we’re also creating a community of practice around that as well.

I’m having a conversation with Ron, too. Check it out. You might see me on the next one because I can’t stay away from things like this. You said so many important things. Clearly, my chosen path has been to work in a Fortune 50 setting to run a P&L and do this work. If anything, I think in Buddhism, I’m not sure if I’m giving the right credit. They talk about householders because there are the people who go to the cave and the monks; all they do is do that inner work.

There are people who work a job, raise a family, clean the house, and do everything that you need to do in normal life. You need these tools. So much about what we’re doing in the lab is teaching how to show up, again, our themes of this episode, in alignment, in trust with tools, remembering to breathe, remembering to let go of old survival mechanisms and come into a place of joyful presence in whatever work you’re doing, but it is a process and a path. I applaud all that you’re doing to give back and that ripple effect keeps growing, which is amazing. I do have a close some closing comments, but before I do that, do you have any other thoughts on anything we’ve talked about that you want to share with our readers before I close this out?

I do, actually. I think one of the themes that, that’s been emerging in the latter half of this episode is this idea that I shared. If we want to inspire these things in others, we need to live them ourselves. I wanted to share with the readers an experience that happened because of you that I feel is worthy of sharing. I was struggling with my health when you and I were booked for me to do my keynote. I’m still struggling with it a bit. I had mono and that’s a long-haul thing. October and September is always the busiest time of the year. It events 3, 4, 5, 6 days a week constantly in events, which is not conducive to healing.

The event that I had with you was right in the middle of four events and I was going to have to take a red eye in order to get there and have a sleepless night, which felt, in my mind, impossible. I also never, in a million years, would have asked to reschedule. There was no part of me that had that on my radar. When you and I got online for the soundcheck and you found out what was going on with me, you basically insisted that we reschedule.

Insisted is the right word because I wouldn’t have accepted. It was a gift in the moment in my ability to do what I had to do and with the other engagements that were not movable. Not that yours was movable easily. I know that there were things that you had to do in order to pull that off, but I feel like you modeled compassion. You modeled putting the human being first. You dealt with whatever you had to deal with in order to reschedule, modify, and deal with the inconvenience so that my little human body could heal. I feel like you embody what it is that you seek to share in others. I think it’s worthy for people to know that.

Peter, you sharing that story makes my heart very happy. No one can see the flushing or the awkwardness when people speak your value. Thank you for that. I’m very grateful. I know in some of our text conversations after that, we both realized, as practitioners of the inner work and being on the journey, of how hard we both found like receiving grace was, then again, you take a look at that, like, “Why do I work so hard? It’s because I don’t want to let everyone else down,” but we need to receive the grace because if we want to help everyone, everyone includes ourselves and sometimes we leave that out.

Thank you. I’ll close with more gratitude. I am blessed in what I do to get to meet people who change the world by showing up who they are, their full essence of what we talked about. Thank you for the artistry that you put into the world. Thank you for, in the short time we’ve known each other, being a teacher to me. Thank you for your service to others, for your vulnerability and leading for your heart. Everything that you are, I want to say I see you and I appreciate it.

Thank you, Katherine. Received. Deeply appreciated. I get to work with all kinds of wonderful clients and be on a lot of client calls. There are some moments where you feel more seen than others. I certainly immediately felt seen by you. The layers of the onion keep revealing themselves as more and more special. I’m very grateful to have been in conversation with you.

There will be much more to come from here. I get to see you in the Lab and our associates get to experience the amazing Peter Katz. Where can people find you other than on their favorite musical platforms if they want to learn more about you?

This epicenter these days is PeterKatzSpeaks.com. PeterKatz.com is still there. That’s my music website, but it needs a little bit of an update and some love. I think Peter Katz speaks is representative of the work I’m doing right now. I’m on all the socials, although I have a complicated relationship with social media. Sometimes, I try to avoid it. It’s @PeterKatzMusic.

Fantastic. Thank you again, Peter.

My pleasure. Thank you.

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I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Peter. Take good care, everyone.

 

Important Links

• Peter Katz
• A Return to Love
• Rising Strong
• Leading Well From Within
• Peter Katz Music
• @PeterKatzMusic – Instagram
• Twitter – Peter Katz

 

About Peter Katz

Peter Katz is a JUNO Award & Canadian Screen Award-nominated singer-songwriter, keynote speaker, and facilitator with a global career spanning almost two decades. Described by many of his fans and speaking clients as “a thunderbolt for the soul,” Peter has delivered hundreds of Keynote Concerts and facilitations in both English and French to an international list of Fortune 500 companies and major organizations.

With more than 50 million combined streams on Spotify and YouTube and numerous features on film and television (including CBC Television’s coverage of the 2016 Olympics and Paralympic Games), Peter leverages his unique skillset to help his clients harness a renewed energy around the importance of their work and deeply reconnect to their internal sense of service.

As one of Canada’s most in-demand fluently bilingual speakers and facilitators, he’s had the opportunity to be of service to countless companies and organizations, including Bell, Johnson & Johnson, Xerox, Royal Lepage, American Express, Sick Kids Hospital, Purolator, Mars, Trillium Health, Royal Bank and The House of Commons of Canada.

Beyond his music, storytelling and actionable takeaways, Peter stands apart for his deep care for who you are, who your people are, and what specifically will make each shared moment meaningful.

 

celebration, harmony in life, music, music inspiration, musical journey, songwriting

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