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SUMMARY

Christy-Faith and Timber Cleghorn discuss how he survived on the show Alone (Season 11), the thrill of hunting, and the mental resilience required in isolation. She discusses the importance of community and family in humanitarian work, emphasizing the need for a growth mindset and the ability to process difficult emotions. The talk about core values in parenting, particularly in a homeschooling context. 

The discussion also delves into personal revelations from the show ‘Alone,’ where they reflect on self-worth and the significance of existence beyond accomplishments. Additionally, Timber shares insights from his memoir, ‘Memoir of a Wild Man,’ detailing his life experiences and the lessons learned throughout his journey.

TAKE-AWAYS

• The thrill of the hunt brings a unique adrenaline rush.
• Cultivating a growth mindset is a learned skill.
• Self-worth should not be tied to accomplishments or societal expectations.

ABOUT TODAY’S GUEST

Timber Cleghorn is a humanitarian aid worker, a father of three, and a contestant on Alone: Arctic Circle (Season 11). Raised off-grid and homeschooled, and with extensive experience in impoverished regions abroad, Timber has unique perspectives on modern life and holistic living. 

Find Timber here: 

• Website: https://timbercleghorn.com 
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1612309262833632
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timbercleghorn/?hl=en

SHOW SPONSORS

TRANSCRIPT

Timber Cleghorn: But when we don't have those mechanisms of any input, music, media, just something to distract thoughts, it's coming. The dam is gonna break. There's a freight train coming through. You can be a strong person. You can have all those bulwarks in place, but that what that means is that when they break, it's more catastrophic.

Christy-Faith: Welcome to the Christy Faith Show, where we share game changing ideas with intentional parents like you. I'm your host, Christy Faith, experienced educational adviser and home school enthusiast. Together, we'll explore ways to enrich and transform both your life and the lives of your children.

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Thank you for tuning in to part 2 of our captivating series with Timber Cleghorn. This interview was so intriguing, we couldn't bring ourselves to cut anything out. Hey, you get this moose. Now, what? What are you gonna do?

Like, I can't remember exactly if it's been freezing yet, where you could preserve it. But anyway, tell us about because that was like the highlight of the entire show.

Timber Cleghorn: Oh, thanks. It's really cool that we could be connected across these vastly different lives. It brings us here. We're talking about this is really cool. That moose kill though was it was electrifying.

Now me, I get electrified about any hunch. There's something in my DNA or I don't know if it's DNA or just my upbringing. But when I get into a hunt, I zone in so much. I will have a level of focus and dedication. And that's that's my favorite place to live.

I would just live on a hunt all my life if I could. So it's my favorite pursuit. So when when I see that moose out there in the distance, I think 2 things. I'm like, I'm grateful I've got another shot at this because missing it was pretty humbling. I missed this moose.

Most of the contestants would not have missed it because they're excellent shots with their bows. Me, I do spend most of my time overseas. I do other things. I'm not practicing with my bow all the time. Every time I'm in the States, I'm shooting and I'm hunting deer.

I kill a lot of deer with my bow. But for me, I stop close to the deer. I like to kill the deer at 10 feet away. These other contestants, they're excellent shots. And so when I miss that moose, I'm like, no one else would have done that.

It was humbling. So I see this moose the second time. It's far away. And I think I've got a second shot. But I also think I can't jinx this.

And I'm I'm not superstitious, but I just had this thing. If I bring the big camera with me and do a big production about filming this, I'll jinx this hunt. I'll miss it again. So I just barely filmed it. I just took a GoPro with me, and I pointed it at my face.

And I'm running to get to cut the cut off the pass where this moose is going to cross the river and get outside of my territory. And then I turn it the other way. But in the end, it ends up that I'm the only one who's gotten the kill on camera for big game. In each case, somehow they turn on the camera afterwards or something. And it's because it's hard to do when you're hunting.

But when I see this moose and I and I successfully draw it in, I'm just out of my mind, I'm like, I can't believe this is this is happening. But I I let the arrow go, and I can tell right away that it's gonna hit. But when I shoot, I it slows down time for me. And I can see the arrow spinning, And I I can see it moving through the air. And I can kinda trace its trajectory.

And I'm, like, oh, it's it's gonna hit. And then, it hits. And they played it real time. The moose really died that quickly. It it was real time how they played it.

They didn't cut out any any intermediate material with the moose suffering. It just it runs over to a bush and falls over dead. I was thankful because I like to be humane. When I saw the moose go down, it was an experience like I no other. I can hardly relate it.

But a successful hunt from the arrow shot that you've got the animal is it's a it's a level of adrenaline, happiness, need, hunter instinct. It all comes together there, and it's like the golden moments in life. If you look back over your life and there's whatever it is, there's golden moments stand out like jewels. It's definitely gonna be one of those for me forever. When that moose toppled, I was like, Thank God.

Wow.

Christy-Faith: How incredible. And what was it like? Is it called field dressing? Is that how they refer to that when you have to cut it up, Skin it? What what is that called?

Timber Cleghorn: Yeah. Yeah. Field dressing is basically the first part of the process where you go and you take the the guts out of the animal so that they don't heat up the animal and cause any spoilage in the meat. So I quickly get up there and I field dress the moose. And then it's down to the process of butchering, which is basically skinning, quartering up all the meat, hauling it to camp, stacking it.

And then the most incredible and difficult task that I faced the entire time of the load, preserving the meat.

Christy-Faith: Now what was that like? There were different techniques shown on the show with preserving. Some people would make little caves and hide their stuff in there and critters always seem to get that. What was the climate like and what did you choose to preserve it? I know you made a lot of jerky because when you were coming on the show, my daughter was so excited and she goes, I'm really worried about his teeth because if you recall in the latter episodes of the show, you were mentioning how your teeth were hurting from the jerky.

But just quickly explain what you did with that moose. And then for my daughter, let her know how let us know how your teeth are doing.

Timber Cleghorn: That is so sweet. She's she's concerned about folks. That's sweet. The weather was a big problem. Everybody thinks on the show if you kill a moose, that's the dream.

And then you just sit there and eat. That would have taken place if the weather had stayed cold and gotten colder like it was supposed to. I say supposed to because this is the arctic. It's supposed to be cold. Well, the day I killed that moose, it had heated up to about 60 degrees by evening, and then it stayed hot for the next week, and it just blew my mind.

So anyways, that transformed the thing from a situation where you're just made in the shade and you sit there gobbling meat for the next 2 months to the situation where it nearly took me out of the competition because I had to preserve all the meat from rotting. And it was insanely difficult. I had to work so hard that I I scarcely ate for a week. And then I preserved to preserve a whole moose is a lot. So basically, I had to do 2 steps.

The first step was to make a spot to store it where animals couldn't get it, and it would be kept cool while I created a smoker. And then the second step would be smoking all the meat because it was the only way. There's no salt. There's no way to preserve the meat. It had to all be smoked.

It's the only way to preserve it when you're facing weather that's warm like that. I did those 2 steps, and they both took a lot of energy. I barely ate. And at the end of that process, that's I look like a I look like a skeleton after the end of that process. After getting the most meat that's ever been gotten on the show, I look like a skeleton right after that.

And then my task is to try to regain my shape, to try to eat back up. And I just stayed skinny. But smoking the meat is basically I built my shelter and turned it into a smoker. Took a 3 or 4 days of work to get that done. And then I started hanging the meat in there on racks, slicing it all up.

This takes a long time for a whole moose because we're talking maybe as much as £800 of meat that I got back to my camp after killing this moose. And £800 of meat, that's a it's a big job. So stripping it all into strips, a foot to 18 inches long, about a half inch thick, making racks, small sticks, making them big racks where I could hang on my shelf and then keeping fires going with green wood to generate smoke. And that will preserve all the meat. When I got that done, it was day 21.

The moose was smoked, and I looked like a skeleton. And I said, wow, this did not this did not go how it's supposed to go. It's supposed to be cold, the moose. The meat stays cold and you just sit there eating it like a king.

Christy-Faith: The other thing, this is not on the questions I gave you ahead. Sorry, I'm gonna throw you a curveball. But I have to ask you, one thing that really stood out to us throughout the entire show was the difference in your mindset. Are you just a naturally positive person, or did you intentionally focus on a growth mindset when you were out there?

Timber Cleghorn: Thank you for asking that. I remember all my childhood being a naturally negative person. Like things are always gonna turn out bad. Things are always gonna go south. I will never make it.

That was my mindset growing up. And then, I kinda feel like as a survival mechanism, I had to embrace a growth mindset as a survival mechanism to be like, I won't be killed by this. I'm going to live and to make it through. And since then, I've decided like, I need to cultivate that as a skill. This is a skill.

And you can't think that growth mindset people just always have it naturally. I certainly am a case. I did not have it naturally. I was like a downer, pessimist. But I thought my life has taught me that the only way to really get through, and being in war zones has has really played into this.

You have to laugh. You have to find fun. And you have to do something to change your situation for tomorrow. Because we make tomorrow, today. If we don't do anything for tomorrow, we'll wake up tomorrow and our situation will be worse than today.

So that's to me where the growth mindset comes in. I I said, I have to cultivate this and I've tried to carry that through my life, especially on the show.

Christy-Faith: I was curious about that because it's something that in my homeschool, I homeschool for a lot of reasons. But one of them is to get out of comparison grades things like that and to foster more of a growth mindset where failure is expected and rather rather than agonizing over which decision do I make? I don't wanna make the wrong decision. It's more a question of let's make a decision and make it the right decision and if and grow from it. Right?

So Yeah. This really leads into my next question which is about the mental game on alone. Right? Everyone thinks, Timber got the moose, he's gonna win. And that is not always the case.

You write in your book, I've seen extreme stress, pressure and heartbreak expose my raw edges before but I've never experienced anything like I am going through right now. Now this is you referring to being on the show because in the book you go through a day by day which is really cool and really fun. And then quote, you say, But I've never experienced anything like I am going through right now. Out here in complete isolation, I find that I am facing all of the individual fibers that are strained and broken. I feel everything piece by piece and there's nothing to mask this effect.

There's no conversation. There's no media, no input of any type to help me skip over the tough parts. Tell us what that's like being out there in this mental game of alone.

Timber Cleghorn: Yeah. It's part of the journey that I didn't expect to be so hard. We people, I was about to say men but we just all do it. We build up survival mechanism, resiliency. We have difficult and terrible memories if we've lost somebody, if we've had trauma in our life.

We kind of can put those behind a dam as a survival mechanism. And so when I'm talking about this on alone that I'm experienced all of the fibers of my being that are strained or broken, I'm not talking about the difficulty of surviving in the Arctic because that really was I like that. That's that's me. That's I didn't have to think about parts of it. You just do it.

But what I'm thinking of is the isolation is opening up all of the things from my from previously in my life. And you've seen this happen with other contestants, I'm sure. And we contestants are just blindsided by it sometimes. Like, why am I struggling with this death that took place over here? And it's because in our fiber memory, I believe that in our fiber memory, if we don't fully process something, it stays there forever.

And then it'll want to be processed if ever given the opportunity. And so I get face to face with that because of the silence and isolation. I get face to face with my younger brother who passed away not that long before I got off the show. All the many, many deaths that had surrounded us as we had been doing humanitarian aid work in some of these war zones. A lot of that terrible, terrible memories and visions come to your mind.

And in a normal day, you would just turn on some music or talk with somebody, and you could keep that dam intact to hold all those things at bay. But when we don't have those mechanisms of of any input, music, media, just something to distract the thoughts, it's coming. The dam is gonna break. There's a freight train coming through. You can be a strong person.

You can have all those bulwarks in place, but that what that means is that when they break, it's more catastrophic.

Christy-Faith: We often can avoid dealing with the hard things in our life with distraction and good distractions. I gotta grocery shop. I gotta plan the meals for this week. I gotta do this, that, and the other. And it's easy to just continue distracting ourselves and not deal with and heal from the really hard stuff.

And so what I hear you saying is out there, it's you and the wilderness and you can distract yourself to an extent and then there's a point where you can't.

Timber Cleghorn: That's right. You can't distract yourself anymore. You have to get by with thoughts because I guess the last 2 months of the show after it snows and everything is silent, it got so silent. The tinnitus in my ears would almost drive me crazy. So silent, you could almost not even make a sound that you could hear.

When unless the wind is blowing and then there'd be something to experience. And then colorlessness too. So you've got nothing to go on. You're you're going on the things that are inside your head and that and that's why all these things come up. If you're gonna dwell on thoughts, you don't have enough strength, positive thoughts, and positive memories to keep all the negative ones in an isolated box.

They have to be fully processed. They'll come out and they'll be processed. And the strength comes from not if you could keep that dam intact and suppress those. The strength comes from if you can process them and survive it and be well.

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Yeah. That makes so much sense. And for television, they're showing us action all of the time. And even when there's montages of silence, it's still a montage of silence.

I don't think we have any idea how many hours and hours. And also in the Arctic, the darkness. Right?

Timber Cleghorn: Oh, my goodness. That was a big issue because we're closing in. At the end of the show, we're closing in on no sunlight at all. So at the end of the show, I think there's 21 hours of total darkness and then 3 hours of half light. Wow.

And that's that really changes things. So you've got a you've got a lot to go up against there. All that silence, all that darkness. Oh, my goodness. It's just it's it's a monster.

Christy-Faith: I have another question for you. It's about your humanitarian efforts because you have spent a lot of time overseas. You've worked in really tough conditions with your humanitarian efforts. How do you manage the balance between your personal life as a father and the emotional toll of that kind of work having your family in unsafe places? What insights do you take from communities and in thinking about raising your own kids?

Timber Cleghorn: This is a growth topic right now. I'm growing and I'm trying to approach these very decisions in a proactive way especially since the show because it revealed a lot of things to me about about I think how to approach this. Going into this humanitarian work, I didn't have a very good mentality. I've been steeped deeply in accomplish, accomplish a very a mentality all my life to where you accomplish or or you don't deserve to exist. Going back to my childhood, that's what it was really like there.

So I've brought that into my adulthood. I'm also just an active person naturally. And so heading into our humanitarian aid work at the beginning, I did make a lot of errors in like what place of priority that I would put the family. I remember my wife, we just moved to this specific country. We had a 6 month old baby and it was very difficult.

We hadn't found a place to live yet. We were, it was very difficult And I would be like, look, I've got to go do such and such, such. I said, it's going to take a week and I'll be back. And being an amazing woman like she is, she handled business. But then looking back at that in life, I would say, why did I do that when our family is in such a delicate and vulnerable state?

So we've been making different calls as time goes by. And what this brings me to is where we're at now. I've gleaned a lot of things from underdeveloped villages where they have a survival lifestyle, and they have to prioritize community just to get by. And so I've taken in some of that mentality. You've got to prioritize community.

Our core community is really small, close friends. You have to prioritize and lean on one another. You have to be okay with that. You have to prioritize your closest community, which is your very family. And then just more recently, the war zone work has showed me that we can't be okay and meet anybody else's needs unless we're strong inwardly in our family.

We can't do it. And so that's why we came home. And then I got on alone is that we had reached a point where I I'm like, I don't quite have the answers for how to approach this anymore. And then on alone, I just did so much thinking. I'm like, How do I do this?

How do I approach it? Because my wife doesn't want to get out of this kind of work, and neither do I. But she doesn't want to be left behind, neither. I don't want to do that either. So how do we go about this as a family?

Do things that we think are meaningful, and reach out in date situations that even could be dangerous, but have a good family life. I think that so much boils down to the husband wife relationship. What my wife and I have between us seems to be for us the core that sets the tone for how well our family is, how peaceful our children are going to be. And we've gotten into places where we couldn't sleep at night. We couldn't get by.

And then I'm like, what do I do? I want the peace of God. I've experienced it before, but I don't have it now. I want the peace of God in my family. So we always have to pull in, pull together, get together as a family, get our feet on the ground.

And a big part of that for us is spending time with our faith, spending time in prayer, and asking God, like, bring us peace, bring us to a point of peace in our souls. And then whatever home we're living in, let's start here and let's expand our circle of peace. Let's have our home filled with peace. And then we might have enough to go outside the home for somebody to help bring some peace. But we've got to pull right down to the core, to the nucleus.

So it's always me and my wife. We get together. When we go through hard times, we have to hear each other out completely. We have to try to understand each other's points of view completely. And then we have to say, what's the goal in this situation?

We'll rally around that. Don't be afraid to start fresh. In the growth mindset, I think we don't have to prove that we were right before by hanging on to something that wasn't working. We can start fresh and rally around a point and say, from this point we stand. We'll go out from here again.

Christy-Faith: Life is all about seasons, and it's all about change. And as families grow, and we age, and maybe our parents age and need more of our help and things like that, I think it just changes the decisions that that we need to make.

Timber Cleghorn: Yeah.

Christy-Faith: I wanna ask you about, this global I I'm just so curious because it's very easy in the United States to live a really sheltered life, especially as a Christian where we just understand our version of Christianity. We definitely pack a lot of extra things on the Bible regarding Christianity. I wanna ask you, what are some core values based on your more global exposure and your experience on Alone as well that can give us some insights on raising our kids with a little bit more of an empathetic perspective on the world?

Timber Cleghorn: Core values about that. Keep in mind that as I say these things, I understand that I'm not the person with the answers. Every family is so individual and the world is so vast. I don't understand it all. But I'll be happy to relate some things that we've found to work for us, those rally points and some things about this.

I think that what travel and being in different cultures means to us in this approaching family life and trying to make it through all of these decisions is I think it's important first to not be locked into a micro culture in our minds. And this is one thing I would say about homeschooling in general about how we approach it is that we gotta be aware that it can develop micro culture. And that's normal. It's okay. It's a human tendency.

Anything that we're doing brings a micro culture aspect to it. But culture is what sets our worldview and how we act and how we think we ought to approach the world. So me coming from a very tightly controlled and no outward exposure homeschooling environment, I had such a micro culture that I couldn't even understand the world when I went into it. Couldn't even understand it. Whatever the human said didn't make sense to me, and I could tell that whatever I said didn't make sense to them.

And so I had to basically study another culture and be like, can I operate in this other culture? Just like studying a culture in Tajikistan and being like, can I get by in this culture and and meet people and be an understandable human to them? It was just the same for me entering mainstream America, even as an American. So for our children, we try to expose them to a lot of ideas. I I'm I have strong faith myself, but I expose my children to all the religious ideas as well that are in whatever village that we happen to be working at the time.

I'm like, that's a part of this place. It's a part of this culture. It goes into who they are. I want you to understand it. And it would be nice if they believe like me, we would understand each other, but they don't have to make all my choices.

So I want them to have an open mindedness like that. That's very important to both me and my wife. I want my children to be exposed to other cultures. It's inevitable that we build somewhat of a micro culture around them, but I want them to be exposed to so much more so that their ideas won't be stuck in a rut or limited, so that their to so much more so that their ideas won't be stuck in a rut or limited. So their growth mindset will be stimulated.

We found that in the midst of all that exposure that we try to give them to, they also really hunger for grounding as well. There's a feeling of safety and groundedness that they need so much. It's just been kind of a journey to us to be like, what? In this particular line of work, it's so chaotic. What do our children need?

And they're they're getting that ground as my son is playing baseball with the other boys, and he's getting that groundedness to be like, I'm I'm part of something that I can be. I'm not just trapped between all the cultures.

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See you inside. Hi there, podcast family. If our episodes bring a smile to your face, challenge you, or spark your thoughts, tap that like and subscribe button to stay connected with us. Also, we'd truly love to hear your voice in the comments. Your insights and stories are what makes this community special.

And not only does it allow us to hear you, but your engagement helps us reach more people and spread our message. So go ahead and don't be shy. Like, subscribe, and comment. I love this because we don't always have the answers, but that doesn't mean that a conversation isn't worth having because just having that open mind. And also what came to mind as you were sharing on that is what an opportunity in homeschooling rather than, oh, I'm homeschooling because I I'm afraid my kid will turn into that or they won't be this or they won't end up this way or they need to end up this way.

How about homeschooling so that we are preparing our kids and teaching them how to live, how to live an abundant life? Yeah. And because we know already the studies are coming in, they're like crazy about its soft skills that are gonna predict their success. And regarding, you know, sheltering with faith, I think that can easily happen if we're choosing all Christian curriculum and this and that. And I am a Christian myself, but as a person who has had at least 2 pretty significant faith crises where I almost walked away.

Like, I actually remember a moment where I made the decision not to. And I tell my kids, like, this is I'm raising you in our faith, but I'm not gonna hide different cultures, different religions, all of these things. Because if our faith can't stand, it's not worth believing. It's it's just not. And so and as one who believes in absolute truth, we have nothing to be frightened of.

Because yeah, we don't want our kids abused and and traumatized and things like that, but that's why in my book, I talk about homeschooling as more of a greenhouse, where it gives us the opportunity to

Timber Cleghorn: nurture our little saplings. Our kids are like little trees, and we can nurture them and

Christy-Faith: feed them, trees and we can nurture them and feed them with the intent of it growing strong and being able to transplant them. Because we know that if we don't feed young plants well or we put them out too early, expose them to too much too early, they won't thrive and they might die. And so I really like that analogy of how homeschooling is a way that we can accomplish these things. And I think it's pretty cool that you have this you a theme in your book as I was reading was just about God's love. God's love transcending different societies and I think that's pretty incredible.

Okay. So before we wrap up though, there's a couple things. I want to ask you what your biggest revelation was when participating in the show.

Timber Cleghorn: Okay. The biggest revelation I experienced from this show is kind of a a private thing, but I don't mind sharing it at all because I've spoken about it on camera, on the show. People might be like, how can you be that vulnerable or open? Because this is a private thing. But I realized that it is okay for me to exist.

This goes back to that mentality that I've had all my life. Like, I have to accomplish something or else I'm not a deserving person. Being raised that way, we we worked awfully hard being a survival based living. And if you weren't working, you were in big trouble because you were directly hurting the effort of the family to live if you weren't working. And so that came into a point where when I went to college, when I left home, I didn't know how at all to regulate.

I didn't know how to not work. I just work all through the night and all through the next day, and I nearly killed myself a number of times. I nearly destroyed my health through those years from not knowing how to just breathe and just be. I thought it was sin still. I somehow in the back of my mind, even though hating that mentality that God would do us that way, something in the back of my mind, in my muscle memory, thought that it's sin to just exist.

To just be a human. So all alone, I'm I struggle with this all my life. I have a very man different mentality about God now than I did growing up. Very different viewpoint of His love. I'm very much a I see that he looks down in love.

That he he loves the creation that he made. But still, I've struggled all my life. Just like just work, work to generate, to accomplish. And I'm sitting there on alone. And I'm looking out.

I see this moose. And besides the moose, I hunted. I see other moose. I see other animals, creatures. And I just was so dumbfounded by the strength of of the notion that God looks down.

Like, how strong this notion was to me, surprised me that God was looking on that. Just admiring it, just loving it. And as he says, He looked on everything he made and behold, it was very good. And I said that out loud. And I was like, Hey, Bird, God looks at you and he thinks it's very good.

I'm sitting here talking to myself because alone is a descent to madness. And then I was struck. Like, what about me? I'm a creature. I'm a strange creature, a weird creature, but I'm I'm a creature that God made.

And and how could God how could I be different than that? How could humans and I know so many people in our society struggle with not being enough, with not being beautiful enough, or not being having enough accomplishments or capabilities. But here's the thing, it was pushed in on me that God would look down and see the things that he'd made and say, it is very good. And I'm I just I just look up at the sky, and I'm like, is that the truth? And it just felt like the truth.

That God would look at not only animals, but a weird creature like me. I don't fit in with people's society. Even since the show, people have been, like, sending me messages, cussing me out, different stuff like this. I understand that I'm weird. I don't fit in with society.

But I understand now that God looks down and says, I made you, and it's very good. And that would be my greatest revelation from the show. And the thing that I've been saying to people since then, I'm like, I understand how how you're feeling about yourself. And that isn't the truth. Because if there's a God, and if he made us, he looks down and he says, Behold, it's very good.

And I like that notion. Now that's just the beginning. That's not the end of the road to me for knowing God and understanding it, but that's a good beginning.

Christy-Faith: Absolutely beautiful. What a great revelation. I was moved when I read your reason for tapping out. You guys, when I tell you I was moved reading this book, I I'm telling you, you guys need to get his book. You write in your book, Broken Timber says, if I don't win this show, I am nothing.

The second voice is the person who has been called out from within me, renewed and whole. He is the voice of peace, freedom, and wellness. It is a man I have been so happy to become. The one who doesn't fear anyone's judgment because God has already judged him and found him enough. It is the voice of Timber the satisfied.

Will you share with us, Timber, who had an abundance of food on the show? You could have won. You could have gone on for a lot longer. Why did you choose to go home?

Timber Cleghorn: You're gonna bring me to emotional state here by reading those lines because this whole idea that there is a satisfied Timber means a lot to me. So I apologize, but you're gonna get me a little bit emotionally this. Alone is it can it's it's deep. It's not just it's not a game show. It's deep.

So I get to this point on Alone where I do have plenty of food. I could go on for a long time on the show. I could live there all winter, I'm sure. And so could William, probably. He's the winner of the show, and he deserves everything.

So I wanna say, I don't wanna take one thing away from William because he deserves this win and and seeing his family win is so beautiful. I love it. I don't look at the end of the show and think, oh, darn. Because William winning it is so beautiful. I don't wanna take anything away from him, but I definitely could have gone on for months.

But I come to this point where I've realized these things in my soul. I've realized a couple of things. What is gonna get my family through all the decisions ahead? Because there's round after round of decisions to go through. If we're gonna live a life where we go to some places and try to serve people, we have to make several rounds of decisions.

Where do we live? What do we do? How do we accomplish this? And it's not just once like you think. Well, we not have a home now.

The decision of where we live is done for life. That's not how it's gonna be for us. We go. We we're goers. So I'm like, the money, if I win the money, it can only solve one single round of that decision.

One round. And then we're right back where we were. But what can help us is if I'm well and I know who I am and how to approach our family life, we can face every round of the decisions. And I'm like, oh, that's good. But I'll try to win the money anyways.

But the more I said, I'll scratch on. I'll get more unhealthy towards that money. I felt like I was arguing with that satisfied timber, driving him away, and maybe I'd never see him again. This what kills me because I couldn't live that way. The way I had been living, I couldn't live that way.

I wanted that satisfied person, that satisfied timber. I didn't wanna drive that away and argue with it and and discredit it by being, like, I will also scratch on toward things that maybe I'm not meant to have. So I'm sorry. This is a it's a big day watching that transpire on TV because you're thinking all those thoughts that don't get included. But that's what brings me to go home is that I'm like, if if I can be this version of me that that god is calling me into, my wife will win the show.

And my wife did, I think, if I could say that. And she's smiling from over here, holding our new baby. Because what she needs is she doesn't need $250,000, which is what it is after taxes. She doesn't need that because that solves only one round of decisions. She needs a partner who understands who he is and is well that she can rely on for every round of decisions.

And I just didn't wanna ruin that and drive that person away by hanging on through just scratching how I saw it. Scratching towards that money that would be like, what kind of a prize is that? I don't even know what that would be. It hurts to give up the position of being the one man left. That's what hurts.

But it's a small price to pay. It's a small price.

Christy-Faith: Well, it sounds like you, and I know this is the case for many others on the show. 1, ultimately, what is more important. When you watch the last episode of when you tap out, it's cut the way they frame it is pretty sudden. Didn't you think? Yeah.

I was like, wait, what? What? And then we're like, no. Right? And but you just know there's so much more in the background.

And I thought that was so cool. But when we heard that beep, we were just like, what? And I agree with you that William was amazing. He was so fun to watch too. And man, his skills were incredible.

And so absolutely well deserved. But what an incredible journey of healing this experience was and just how you have embraced it to become a better man, a better husband, a better father, and just doing what you are called to do. Since the show, you have been busy writing a book that is absolutely incredible. Everyone listening right now, you need to go on Amazon and you need to buy this book and need to read it and you're not gonna be able to put it down. You sent me a sneak peek.

Thank you so much. It completely changed the questions. I don't know if you were shocked when you saw my questions based on how when I approached you before, you're like, wait a minute. Isn't this a homeschooling show? And it's like, this is way more than a homeschooling show.

This episode, because I just couldn't put it down. Tell us a little bit about your book. Just the, the nuts and bolts of it. What your approach was. And would you tell us where we can find it?

Timber Cleghorn: Yeah. Thank you. So this book is pretty much it's stories of my life painted across the context of alone. So I start the book starts just before I got onto alone with the situation coming out of Ukraine, out of the war there, with me looking out of this train window and seeing a meadow with some beer in it and thinking I need to be in the wilderness. I need that.

And then I come home, I apply for the show. So it picks up there. And then it goes through to day 84 where William wins, and I'm in the at the base camp with my wife being incredibly happy. So it goes through there. But all throughout that, I tell kinda who I am.

Everything that I can tell about what I've done, where I've been. Basically, it's my life story painted through those days. And I told it day by day exactly how I remember it happening. I wrote it as soon as I came home so it would be fresh in my mind. So that when when I come and I tell my life story on day 42 in the book, that's exactly when on day 41 or 42.

It can't it's hard to remember now. But that's exactly when out there on a loan that I sat there with the camera and I was like, I'm I'm struggling today with people thinking that I'm contestants thinking I'm from the CIA or for for doing this, doing that. I'm gonna tell you who Timber is. So that I do it in the book exactly how it happened on day 42. So it's all exactly chronological and, it gives a deep dive into alone, but also a deep dive into why my life is so weird.

Now I've got pictures in in the middle of the book that that prove these stories are true. I have a story about gold teeth that fell out of the head of a goat in Tajikistan in the village. I mean, like, that's stuff that weird. I've got pictures of that there so people know I'm not making this stuff up. But also, keep in mind as you read this book, and I hope that you guys get it, I've left out a lot of stuff that I thought could bring hurt on other people.

Even especially my childhood growing up, I want my parents to be proud and thrilled about all the wonderful things that they did. Okay. So I would I don't go into a deep dive in things that I think could bring hurt to anybody. And that just keep that in mind because I wanna take that I wanna take that road. But the book is is out there on Amazon worldwide.

It's called Memoir of a Wild Man and I really hope that you guys enjoy it and find something in it. I I hope that with all my might.

Christy-Faith: Oh, everyone who reads it absolutely will. Your perspective, your insight, your willingness to be vulnerable, which in turn makes you relatable. I think a lot of people suffer from the exact things in your life that you have as well. And so I just want to thank you for your bravery, your willingness to be vulnerable because what that does especially for public figures is it brings on it it opens the door for a lot of attack. But over here in our house, we are rooting for you.

You guys, don't forget to catch season 11 of Alone. You can find it on the History Channel. If this is a show that you haven't heard of before, it really is a fantastic masterclass in growth mindset, both good examples and bad examples. We pause the show. I wanna say at least, sometimes we annoy our kids, 4 to 6 times per episode and say, okay, What did she just say?

What do you think about that? Right? And I see growth mindset here or whatever or we would pause a lot and say, wait a minute. Is Timber a Christian? Do you think Timber's a Christian?

It's a really fantastic show to watch with your kiddos as part of homeschooling. We homeschooling does not have to be sitting at a table and opening a book and boring your kids to death. It can be so much more and it can be incredibly engaging. Timber, it has been an absolute delight to meet you. Thank you for coming on this random homeschooling show and sharing your story.

It is an honor to get to know you. Everybody go out right now. I'll put a link in the show notes, but just get on Amazon right now, click Prime, buy that puppy, and just read it because you will not be disappointed. And, Timber, I hope this is not the last time we hear from you in the homeschooling space. I hope it's not the last time that you come on the show.

It's certainly gonna not gonna be the last last time all of us hear from you because you, my friend, my brother, have something really special and god is using you for incredible things. And it's an honor to be just this small little part of your journey. Thanks for coming on today.

Timber Cleghorn: Thank you so much. This has meant a lot to me. I have never reached back and been a part of the homeschooling community. I realized that my experiences in homeschooling, they're very extreme. That's not a case study for everybody, but it does illustrate some points for us.

So it's it's neat to me to see what's happening these days. Christy, with your podcast here, it's wonderful to know that there are folks like you approaching growth mindset and engaging with their kids being so, I would call it, intentional. You said you paused the show. Kids, what do you think about this? I love that so much.

And but also, you're providing support for so many other people out there that may want to do this kind of lifestyle, but it can be very stressful without this community. And so I just want to say thank you for all of that, for what you do for folks there. I've just gotten to know you a little bit. I just like this so much. I like what you're doing.

And thank you for having me on the show today to talk about this stuff. I hope I've been a fun addition to your show, and I've just really enjoyed it.

Christy-Faith: It's been a pleasure.