PJ Madam – Self Responsibility, Letting Go of the Story, and Living Without Limits

Sridhar Krishnamurti: Hi everybody. Welcome to The Mind Shift. This is a podcast where we discuss how to live a life without limits. My name is Sridhar. I'm a mindset and strategy specialist, and my very special guest today—if you're in Australia, you'll most likely recognise my guest today—she'll have been all over your TV as a reporter, as a news anchor, and internationally as well. If you are into Netflix, she's done shows like Extreme Engagement. PJ, I could go on and on. There'll be so many to list, but you may very well recognise my guest today. It's the amazing PJ Madam. So PJ, welcome. I'm so glad to have you here. Thanks for being on the podcast.

PJ Madam: Thanks for inviting me on, Sridhar. That was a very lovely, humbling introduction. I think we need to do more work together, because I was like, no, no, there's too much. That's too much.‍

Sridhar Krishnamurti: Well, I think the great thing about you is because you get on and do things, and it's not about the accolades and about who you are, yet you've just gone on and done so many different things. I didn't even cover all of it, if we're being honest. I didn't even cover the writing part, the producing part, the co-directing part. So you've done some incredible things, but I love that you feel that way, because it just shows who you really are. This work is all about authenticity—not showing everybody who we are, but it's also about living a really great life. I can't wait to get into it with you, because of the things that you've achieved and just who you are and what you've done with your life. So, I'll just throw you in the deep end here. We were just having a chat before, and I was thinking, how long have PJ and I known each other? I think it is more than 10—yeah, 11 years.

PJ Madam: Yes, I think our relationship spans at least almost 12—possibly 13.

Sridhar Krishnamurti: I think you're right, somewhere in that vicinity. It's been a while. I work with you and your partner as well, and we've just had some amazing conversations. You've done incredible things. To throw you in the deep end a little bit, this podcast is really about sharing with people. The listeners of this podcast are going to be people that go, "I want to live a life without limits. What can I do?". Considering that's basically everything we speak about, what's an insight that you can share from your work or your experience that you would want to share with the listeners or watchers of the podcast about how they could do that?.

PJ Madam: Thank you so much for starting with the most difficult question first. I'm getting a taste of my own medicine here. That's such a broad and big question, because I feel like it encapsulates the purpose driving your podcast. For me, it's an endless work in progress to have limitless thoughts. Every day I wake up and it's a battle against the mind—and not so much a battle. It could be an acceptance, it could be a surrender, but just being still with what the thoughts are that are running through my head. I can have 1,000,001 thoughts running through my head a day; which ones I choose to believe will determine what kind of a day I have, and that practice is daily. I don't think I will ever get rid of that practice until the day I die.

We're not taught that in schools. I certainly wasn't taught that in my family. I had a wonderful upbringing, and despite my parents being pretty spiritual and even a little religious, I've never been taught that until the work that we've done. It was actually you that I've got to thank. I've got to credit where credit's due; I've got to thank you for opening my eyes to that, because I think we can miss it. We can also do a lot of self-help, and we live in a world now where we really want to get better in ourselves and in the ways that we think. We're articulating so many more emotional issues way more accurately than what we would have when I was a teenager, or even in my mom's or dad's era. But I think that work, when you get really laser-focussed to it, it never ends. That's probably the best way I can describe my mindset journey.

Sridhar Krishnamurti: When I was preparing for this, I thought, be prepared for PJ to come up with a bang, because that's how PJ is. Straight from the start, you've said a lot in those opening sentences. There was so much in it, because we have challenges in life, and part of the work is that those challenges open us up to a possibility of something. Oftentimes, when people come to do the work, they've got something going on. You and Tim had a few challenges going on, and we started to work through those, but then that's the thing that opens the door to you: "Hey, what have I not been asking?". I just love what you said about having so many thoughts in a day and now choosing which ones you believe. If I'm out there and I've never done any of this work, I'm going, "What does that mean? Aren't all my thoughts really true?".

PJ Madam: One of the things that you said to me a long time ago—and it really stuck with me—was that two of the most dangerous words in the history of our language are "to me". If you say—let's just say you're having a conversation with someone about a marriage breakdown or a relationship conflict or something at work that you're feeling disgruntled about—and you say, "Oh, they did that to me," suddenly you're put in this position of both victim and potentially martyr. You're also projecting. I mentioned before that we live in a world where we're so much more acutely aware of how to articulate what people are doing to us. It's really amazing that we're grasping onto a language that we can all jump on board with, but at the same time, I think, "Wow, what a slippery slope". We're not really doing it justice when we're still trapping ourselves into a way of thinking and a way of believing that really doesn't set us free at all.

When I'm talking about those thoughts, I think when we believe the wrong thoughts, we can just get totally stuck. Or, as my five-year-old son says, we get caught in a "sticky web". From the work that we've done together, the sense of self-responsibility in terms of our own thoughts has been the game-changer. It’s like saying, "Look, I can have any problem in the world." If I take one with Tim, for example, if I had to substitute Tim with anyone else, would I probably still feel this way? Yes. That's really interesting. So maybe I should start with me and not projecting onto him, making it about him doing something "to me".

Sridhar Krishnamurti: What I'm hearing you say is, if your partner wasn't Tim but just happened to be somebody else, you wouldn't feel any different. It's not what that person is doing; it's that whatever is being done, something is happening within you and you're reacting similarly whoever it is. Therefore, it must be you.

PJ Madam: 100%. I'm in a situation at the moment where I have very strong feelings towards someone that they are representing for me. I've got this professional issue, and someone that I'm locking heads with is representing, for me, someone perhaps in my past. What that person is representing to me is manifesting in my mind as a lot of stress and anxiety. I am, weirdly, both aggressor and victim. This has probably happened in my life again and again. This person is representing someone probably from my four- or five-year-old self. At the moment, it's causing me a huge amount of angst and stress.

Now, look, I've got a choice. You sometimes have to beat me around the head to stop me going on the story. There's safety in the story. If I talk with my colleagues or friends, they sympathise and empathise. We have a good old bitch session about it; I feel momentarily good, and then, bang—the anxiety is back. Nothing gets solved. I find that when I do the work—and it's like taking medicine, you don't always want to do it—it has the most long-lasting impact. It starts with me having a deep dive into why I'm thinking the way I am, which is creating a whole heap of emotional reactions. I have to prosecute those thoughts to see if they're really true. I don't always get it right. I resist; I don't want to let go. I get stuck on the narrative, thinking it's serving me. We have this back and forth until I can't handle it anymore. I've reached my limit; it's clearly not serving me, or it's affecting my relationship or the kids. Then I have that "come to Jesus" moment and things get better.

Sridhar Krishnamurti: We get a lot out of the stories, don't we?. You're saying something extremely important here. Even when you know this stuff, sometimes you don't want to look at it. You want to keep your story. But then at some point you go, "My story, what I'm projecting onto this situation or this person, isn't serving me". Looking within may be the hardest thing that we ever do in our life, yet it's the most freeing thing. It appears to be hard, but I've also found that it was so much more difficult carrying all the weight of the stories that I had, rather than just looking within myself and saying, "How am I creating them?". So in the end, it's not hard, but it does take a tremendous amount of courage to take self-responsibility.

PJ Madam: Insert negative emotion here: mainly stressed and anxious. I think catastrophising in my head about what the next step is going to be—that alone causes stress because it's all speculative. You're projecting fears and running away. I could spin a great story where it looks exactly like it's that person's fault and you'd be hard-pressed to doubt that. Other people would be like, "Yes, this is exactly the scenario. You're in that and it's not your fault".

The reason I know that person isn't causing it is because if you swapped that person out for somebody else, or if I really had to prosecute this feeling, I've been in these moments before. If the answer is yes, I feel like that's a lesson in my past that is still recurring in order for me to address my old patterns of thinking and clutching onto an old narrative. It's like Whack-a-Mole. It might be dressed up differently, but actually it's probably just a different variation of something I experienced when I was a young child. And doing the inquiry is hard; you've seen me before, I'm always in tears. It's like the "ugly cry" going on.

I don't want to meditate over this; I don't want to do the work, because the story at the time can be really attractive. There's a bit of a dopamine hit in thinking you are justified, or feeling like the victim or martyr. You think you're owed something. To realise that no one owes you anything except only you to yourself—then it feels like I have to roll up my sleeves and do some hard work. Nothing is changing the way I feel, and when that is the outcome, I can't argue with that. I end up thinking, "Well, what is left for me to do, other than to be on a self-destructive path playing that victim?".

Sridhar Krishnamurti: To live a life without any limits, we have to get past these blockages. If the behaviour of other people is going to stop us and have us live in frustration and limitation, there's no way to create a life without limits. I've found that I can't really change other people. No matter what I think they should be doing, they just keep right on doing what they're doing. So it becomes extremely important to find a way to feel better in yourself, and then you can get on with your life.

PJ Madam: Being free—that's how you have a limitless life. Knowing how to not be controlled by your thoughts is a skill set we don't have. I'm really grateful that today we have our eyes wide open a little bit more, but I also think part of that is the tendency to blame very quickly—to make it like almost outsourcing the responsibility of your emotions to somebody else. Really, you're only in a relationship with yourself, and you can only control what you do and what you think. As soon as I can feel that tension there, I know I have to do some work on this person, because there's an entanglement. I've got something going on with this person which has got nothing to do with them; it's got everything to do with me. And that's hard to let go of. I like being the victim sometimes.

Sridhar Krishnamurti: I think you said it earlier—we have a society that really promotes victimhood. The "identity mind" has a very strong vested interest in being right. We're victimising ourselves because we want to be right. I've had some incredible teachers, and one of them asked a very important question: "Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? You can't do both". It feels justified, but it's suffering at the end of the day.

PJ Madam: You can live a lie for so long, until then you realise it seeps out. You can't run from yourself. We've just done this work recently where it's not just victim and martyr, but it's also that you can be the aggressor at the same time—the bully or the boss. I'm actually quite shocked when I look back at my actions and thoughts. I'm always blown over to see myself as being both the victim and yet the aggressor. I'm in the world of television and media; I can't even write a script to reflect a character like that, and yet, here I am. Humans are complex.

Sridhar Krishnamurti: If the world could get what you just said, we would have such a different world to live in. When people have been victimised by things, they will get very defensive when I suggest that what they are perceiving is causing their suffering. Whatever it is that you're feeling suffering about possibly happened a long time ago, but you're still carrying the suffering. Victims are holding stuff in, so they become aggressors. They become what it is that they feel victimised against in an attempt to try to protect themselves.

PJ Madam: It’s like lifting the lid under a bonnet of a car; you've been looking for the root cause of the problem, then you see the engine and you can't erase that picture. Admitting that it's not serving you is half the problem, and then doing the work to dismantle it takes time.

Sridhar Krishnamurti: I worked with someone once whose husband and she were breaking up. They just really resented each other; they hated each other, essentially. She said, "I want to get past these things that I feel about my husband". I asked what it was about him she didn't like, and she said, "He's totally dominating". I said, "We all dominate when we feel threatened. How do you dominate him?". She was angry and said, "I don't think you've heard me. 100 friends will tell you who's dominating who". I said to her, "Maybe I'm not the guy for you, because I think you just want somebody to say that you're right".

She was courageous and said she was willing to look. I asked, "In an argument, do you ever just stay silent?". She was very pious about it: "Yes, I do, I just stay silent". I asked, "Have you ever walked away and slammed a door?". She admitted she had. I said, "There's your domination". Society would say he's the aggressor for yelling, but consider the person who says nothing and shuts you down. The quietness isn't the pious thing that we think it is; it's another strategy to dominate the situation. She got it and said, "Oh my goodness, I never saw what I was doing".

PJ Madam: You can definitely still dominate by giving the silent treatment. We dance around that person because the perceived power is in their hands, but they're actually quite aggressive. I've been that, 100%.

Sridhar Krishnamurti: That one is so misunderstood, because those people are seen as the victim and the others are seen as the aggressors, when really what you've got is two people just employing two different strategies to dominate. One looks better, but one is deemed wrong and one is not.

PJ Madam: Being trained in commercial media, we live in a society where you always have a "goodie" and a "baddie". In current affairs, someone is the aggressor and someone is the one who's been hard done by, and you will feel sorry for the victim. But of course, the amount of times where the cameras have stopped rolling and you turn them off, the stuff that happens—you're like, "Gosh, okay, well, that just flies in the face of what I thought a victim would do".

Sridhar Krishnamurti: What have you achieved as you've been willing to get to that point of self-responsibility?.

PJ Madam: Dropping the story. When I first came to you, I was off the back of a really big relationship breakdown and I was going through a divorce. I had an excellent, tried-and-true narrative running through my head that I told everyone, and it fit the story I wanted to believe. Yet I was still miserable; there was anger, frustration, and sadness. In our very first session, I was bawling my eyes out and you asked, "What do you want out of this?". I said I just wanted to be happy. We did an almighty turnaround where I realised that I was just as much to blame.

The most incredible thing happened: we hung up, and my ex actually called within three minutes. He asked, "Is there a way that we can move on and be friends?" and for the first time, I just said, "Yes". The entanglement was broken. It was like the work that I'd done had told the universe we're ready to move on. This is the only way that I can live my life, to just keep trying. You can never stop working on yourself. Why would you want to infect everyone else with your thoughts when they're faulty?. The best investment you can make in a relationship is to never stop working on yourself.

Sridhar Krishnamurti: Why would we want to spend this precious time we have in this one life being unhappy and miserable?. You're very clearly demonstrating that the only thing keeping us from that is our own stories about situations.

PJ Madam: As a journalist, you're trying to portray a very binary world—black and white, victim and aggressor, right and wrong. I think deep down I always knew that something wasn't right. There were a couple of stories where I was like, "This is not the baddie," and the victim was actually the biggest aggressor who attracted the situation to themselves. I could never report it like that, but something was just uneasy. Realising actually I don't want to live my life like that, because it's not real.

Why do we have to know what's happening every single day in every single country?. That's not the way our ancestors used to live. News stories are often snippets of harmful or destructive stuff. We don't hear about all the great stuff that's happening. We form this version of the world that it's a horrible place, but they're just taking snippets that are the most sensational. News institutions want eyeballs on screens. That competitiveness is skewing for the audience what they think is really happening. I think it's important to be aware that the world is grey. I've seen a lot of people come together and forgive. We concentrate only on things that are binary, and life is just not that.

Sridhar Krishnamurti: Right and wrong are two of the most fundamental black and white constructs we have, but it causes a lot of suffering and it's very isolating. If we're into right and wrong, that's a very low, dense way to live your life. On the other end of the spectrum is understanding.

I was at the airport the other day, and this guy comes up and rams my car behind and says, "What, you're blocking the way, get it right!". He was really angry. In the past, I would have let him have it and probably started a fight. But through the practice of it, I just went, "This isn't about me at all". I can have my day be ruined, or I can just realise this is not about me. If I think about that guy now, I just feel for him. What kind of stress was he under to have to behave that way?.

PJ Madam: 99.9% of the population would have gone, "Look what he did to me". My partner, Tim, is way better than me at this. His first reaction is actually care, because I'm a hothead. I like to get on the high horse.

I'm a mom of two boys, and I'm seeing this play out with my children. The most interesting lesson I'm handing down to them is the practice of continually prosecuting my thoughts. There’s a difference between disciplining to teach and disciplining to get angry because I can't deal with it. Being overwhelmed or overstimulated is very common in the motherhood space today, 2026. I'm completely dysregulated when I'm overwhelmed. What we've been trying to do is stop and practice that awareness. We sit with my eldest son, Alby, and talk about what I was thinking and what we could have done better. If I've screamed, I'm ashamed to say it, but I can't avoid that that's the truth of it. We try to be very honest about where our heads are at, because we're trying to demonstrate the practice of identifying faulty thoughts.

One of the most amazing things was my five-year-old picked up this way of describing it as being "stuck in a sticky web". If you're stuck in a thought, you're in a spider's web and you want to get out. A couple of times he said, "Mummy, mummy, you're stuck in the web. Take some deep breaths". He's only five, but it's to relax and start to meditate on working this out. Nothing has given me more joy than seeing my two boys become awake.

Sridhar Krishnamurti: Kids are a mirror of you. You're getting mirrored back an awakened child who understands that thoughts are creating suffering.

PJ Madam: He told me off the other day and said, "You and daddy are working too much, and it's making you stressed and unhappy". I said, "Yes, it is". And he said, "Well, you should have thought of that before you had children". I couldn't even argue with that. Everything drills back to me not being seen, not being heard, not being valued. What I'm concentrating on are the tools to deal with it. Do you think we do need voids in order to be a better self?.

Sridhar Krishnamurti: We're not going to escape them. It’s when we frame it as a challenge or a void that it becomes like a trap. If we believe, "My challenge is I'm not good enough, and I'm going to strive to prove myself," we drive really hard but it's never enough. If you examine it, you were never not good enough. If we're going to have challenges, we might as well utilise them, but we don't need them to grow.

People think you have to work hard to be successful, but you just have to be inspired. Dedicate yourself to it, enjoy it, and you'll be more successful than the person who's struggling. The greatest achievement for me always is authenticity. When I hear what you've done in your life and the mother you're dedicated to being, that in itself is the greatest achievement.

PJ Madam: The moment I let go, it all happened. If you want to break past your limits, I would say: watch your thoughts. We are what we think we are. Which thoughts are you going to choose to believe today?. That choice is the moment you can find real, meaningful, authentic change in your life.

Sridhar Krishnamurti: Choose what you believe today. That's just absolute gold. There’s about another three or five episodes to do with you, but I'm definitely going to get you and Tim on a podcast together. Thank you very much for giving us your time and your authenticity.

PJ Madam: We'll see you soon. Thanks. Bye.