Melissa Reaves wasn’t sure how her life was ever going to be OK again after she was fired from a job in an advertising career that had served her bank balance well even if it had stopped bringing her heart alive. But the assurance of her inner voice that all would yet be well gave her the courage and inspiration to embark on a new career that has become a calling – helping professionals use the power of story to write happy endings for their businesses. She coaches clients in how to make what she calls mind movies that add depth and meaning to their communications.

To learn more about Melissa Reaves, visit www.storyfruition.com

Highlights

Transcript

Warwick F:

Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership.

Melissa R:

My light was dim. I was not honoring the joy in myself, but I didn't know what that joy was. I couldn't get an answer other than I needed complete change. So it's January 2nd, 2019, and I'm on the phone and I am angry.

Melissa R:

In fact, I am hanging up and I am crying because I have just been fired from that job. And I don't like that job, but I need that job. That job pays the bills. I had money to pay for my divorce, and this isn't good.

Melissa R:

At that moment in my panic and what am I going to do, that voice said, "Don't worry about it. We couldn't watch you anymore. You were miserable. So we got you a pink slip. Yay." I'm like, "No, yay." It's like, "No, you do. You trust us, it's going to be okay."

Gary S:

It's going to be okay. The words we all want to hear, need to hear after a crucible, what we long to hear when we're moving on to a new chapter in our lives. Hi, I'm Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show.

Gary S:

Melissa Reaves, our guest on this week's episode of our series, Second Act Significance, wasn't sure how it was going to be okay after she was fired from a job in an advertising career that had served her bank balance well even if it had stopped bringing her heart alive.

Gary S:

But the assurance of her inner voice that all would yet be well gave her the courage and inspiration to embark on a new career that has become a calling, helping professionals use the power of story to write happy endings for their business.

Gary S:

She coaches clients in how to make what she calls mind movies that add depth and meaning to their communications. Melissa Reeves has found second act significance and you can too.

Warwick F:

Well, Melissa firstly, just thank you so much for being here and really looking forward to getting into Story Fruition and Melanin Live, Melanin Stories Matter. So yeah. Thank you so much for being here.

Melissa R:

Well, thank you gentlemen. I'm thrilled to be here.

Warwick F:

So, before we get into Story Fruition and what you do, you tell stories. And so I'm always curious bit like a movie sort of the origin story behind Melissa Reaves. You had a very successful career before you pivoted, but what are some of the strands in your life growing up that you feel are sort of woven into who you are now?

Warwick F:

And there tends to be an origin story of who we are and what makes us, us, if you will.

Melissa R:

Yeah, I actually call it ... So, I call the origin story, your Story Fruition.

Warwick F:

Okay.

Melissa R:

That's where and how you got to who you are. And that's why I named my company that, yeah. Well I was about seven years old and my father was in sales and marketing his whole career. He was a Harvard MBA, just like you.

Warwick F:

Okay.

Melissa R:

And one day I was asking him for something and he said, "Honey, you need to go into sales." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because you just don't hear no." And then when I went into middle school, remember how a lot of kids will go around and they'll sell wrapping paper or candy, well, I had to sell magazine subscriptions.

Melissa R:

And I knocked on this door. It's about five o'clock in the neighborhood. This guy answers. He's tired. You can tell he's just gotten home from work. And I am telling him, "I'm here to sell you magazine subscriptions." I am the last thing he wants to see. He just wants to sit down and relax.

Melissa R:

So he says, "No, no, no, that's okay." And he shuts the door on me. And as I'm walking down the hill, I'm like, "That did not go well, that did not go well." And then I started thinking about, he seems a little tired. He needs to relax.

Melissa R:

So, I go back up to the door, I knock. He's like, "You're back?" I'm like, "You know what, sir? I know you've had a really long day and you just want to put your feet up and probably watch some TV tonight. Right?" He's like, "That is exactly what I want to do." I go, "Then you need a subscription to TV Guide." And I point it to him and he buys because he was like, "That's tenacity."

Melissa R:

So yeah. So, my father was right and I ended up heading towards sales and marketing in my career. However, there was this other element that we had to deal with. I was an actor. I started acting at nine years old. I was the lead in every show all the way through high school, and I ended up having to get to Michigan because my parents were like, "Just get there."

Melissa R:

And I was like, "But I don't really have the grades. Did you see my ACT scores?" They're like, "Yeah, we're going to ignore that. Just get into Michigan."

Warwick F:

At University of Michigan, obviously.

Melissa R:

University of Michigan.

Warwick F:

Yeah.

Melissa R:

And literally I had no ACT scores. That was like walking into a nightmare. I had not taken chemistry or any of the math courses that the ACT score would have. So, I take this test, it doesn't go well, but the universe started working with me, I think.

Melissa R:

And the University of Michigan started to launch their musical theater department. I was a musical theater girl. So, I went in and I auditioned for musical theater and I got in and I was able to show my parents, "Okay, I'm going to Michigan." But my dad's like, "But that's a hobby. That's a hobby. That's not a real degree. You're going to have to get in and go to business school." And I'm thinking, "Great. All right."

Melissa R:

So, I get into Michigan and I actually realized I'm not that good in musical theater. I had about eight great notes. And once you went past those, I was a little messed up, but I was always a good actor. I ended up leaving that program and floating my way through. And my degree ended up being whatever my instinct was telling me to take.

Melissa R:

I really have been someone who floats through life, trusting that it's going to work out if I listen. So, I ended up doing psychology and marketing and journalism and acting. I kept the theater, and all of those things are true today in what I do every day with my clients.

Warwick F:

So, they're all these things, there's acting, there's business psychology, and so you went down the sales and marketing route. Do you think if your dad hadn't have said, "Oh, acting is not a real job," would you have pursued acting or not necessarily?

Melissa R:

Absolutely. So, what I did was I did a hack. I was like, "All right, I'll get your sales and marketing in." And I realized I liked eating. So, actually that wasn't a bad thing. And so I'm in Southern California, and what I was doing was I was selling advertising space for multiple publications, newspapers, four-color magazines, slick ones.

Melissa R:

I did that during the day, but at night I was in the theater all the time. And then finally, I meet my future husband and we're ... He was ... He played my brother in a play and that was great. And we decided we're going to go to LA and we're going to go for it.

Melissa R:

And we get to LA and it is not anything like I thought it was going to be. I was suddenly this little fish in a big ocean of actors, and I didn't care for it to be honest. I wanted to be in sitcoms. I didn't really care about movies. And it just wasn't for me. It wasn't for me.

Melissa R:

But my career in sales was taking off. I was a superstar at LA Weekly. And then they called me in one day and they said, "We're going to start Orange County's newspaper. It's going to be OC Weekly. And we think that you should be the advertising director."

Melissa R:

Now I'm almost 30 years old and I'm thinking, "Oh, that's amazing." And she says, "But you're going to have to move to Orange County." And I said, "Oh really? You mean leave earthquakes, floods, fires, riots, and slow speed chases from OJ Simpson and give up my crappy auditions? I'm in."

Gary S:

And you're closer to Disneyland up there as well.

Melissa R:

I actually lived almost behind it. So, when they would have a home run at the baseball field, they'd shoot off all the fireworks. That was my backyard.

Gary S:

Awesome.

Melissa R:

Yeah. So, yeah. So, I went to Orange County and I started the Advertising Director position for OC Weekly, which ran, it just closed. A lot of publications went down after COVID and digital and whatnot. But yeah, so my dad was right. He's like, "I knew you'd be good at that."

Melissa R:

But I started to miss my acting. I kind of put it all on hold. I couldn't even go to the theater. Couldn't even go because it just hurt because I should be on that stage. Right? I should be on that stage, but oh, I'm making so much more money not being on that stage.

Gary S:

Right.

Melissa R:

So, I gave into it, had a family, became the breadwinner of the family, had a marriage for quite a long time. And then things started to change.

Warwick F:

I love the way you talk about the universe and I'm a person of faith, whether it's however you view it, the universe, some divine creator, it seems like whoever it is up there, if there is anyone up there, they we're using all these strands in your story for later.

Warwick F:

At the time it probably felt like, "Why isn't this working? I guess it's not, "Oh, well I got to eat." I do kind of enjoy ad sales. So, does that kind of make sense? It probably was frustrating at the time. You didn't realize where your story was going to head later on.

Melissa R:

Right. Right. No, I definitely.

Warwick F:

But at the time it probably pretty frustrating. Right?

Melissa R:

Well at first ... Well, I've learned early that there is divine guidance that I've had and you can call it whatever you want. I don't think it's outside of me. I know for a fact it's inside of me and I believe it's inside everybody. And it's constantly giving me signs and it's sometimes I hear it.

Melissa R:

It's constantly talking, just sometimes I've heard it. During COVID though, I became a lot more self-reflective and I really got into building my storytelling repertoire. And my inner voice oftentimes comes up in my stories if you watch any of them and you can see them on my website.

Melissa R:

I've personified that character. It comes in and it will whisper to me. And it provides a variety, it provides a colorful element, I think in my stories because people are like, "You know what? I think I have those same kind of conversations with myself."

Melissa R:

And so I'm trying to capture that so that people can also realize we're all figuring it out. We're all swimming in this ocean, and you just got to surrender to it. Not being passive. I'm not saying being passive, but actually being active, being really vibrantly alive is when you really are connected to yourself, I think.

Warwick F:

So, life was going along. You're in ad sales and you're doing well, but then you ran into a bit of a challenge, as what you say crucible. So, talk a bit about that challenge, almost that wall that you hit in which life maybe it was ... I don't know if it was Disneyland, but it wasn't that bad, but then it turned out to be challenging. So, what happened?

Melissa R:

Yeah. So, my life was going well. I was floating around, I was successful in ad sales and then that turned into advertising technology. So, I went into the internet sales and digital technology because I was fascinated by it.

Melissa R:

I was like, "You mean I can click this thing and go to a website and I can buy something or not? And if I don't buy it, you guys know that, and then you follow me around with an ad? That is so cool." And I was in early, early stages of advertising technology.

Gary S:

It's not cool when it happens to you though, and you're not the one doing it because I'm getting chased by shoe ads all the time now because I bought some new shoes last week.

Melissa R:

Yes, but if you don't buy them, they may send you a coupon to inspire you because they know you've converted or not. Now once you've converted, they should stop talking to you and put you in a different bucket.

Gary S:

That's perfect.

Melissa R:

Anyways, that's data sales. So, I learned how to do that. I learned how to do that. And I did that in the early 2000s all the way through about 20, well, I'm going to tell you when I got there and it was exciting. But after a while, and I rose all the way to the level of Oracle, I had climbed to the top of ad technology.

Melissa R:

But it started getting more crowded. It started getting less fun. It was no longer the shiny penny. It was a penny that everyone was fighting for the scraps based on who clicked on that ad and who converted and you were up against the Googles, the Yahoos, there was a whole bunch going on.

Melissa R:

It became, I don't know, boring for me after a while because I had done it. I had done it for 15 years. And then when you start to lose your joy, you start to dim in your light. Right? Getting up now was becoming not joyous. I wasn't springing out of bed. I was getting out of bed. I didn't want to do something. I had to do something.

Melissa R:

And I started to just dim. And I think a lot of people go through that. Now I'm also starting to approach 50 and you start to look at your life. Like what have I done? What have I accomplished, and what haven't I accomplished?

Melissa R:

And I'd accomplished two beautiful children. I'd had a career. I'd built a home. I had been the financial breadwinner. I'm woman, hear me roar, I can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan. I'm the Angeli girl.

Melissa R:

And my marriage started to kind of wane and things started to unravel there. I ended up divorcing after almost 24 years together and it wasn't a friendly divorce. It was a fiery, crashing divorce.

Melissa R:

And then I went into my apartment and then I managed to get a job that was a little bit different. It wasn't ad tech, it was marketing technology, but it was the job that kind of ... If someone tripped over their technology cord and it unplugged they'd call us. I'm like, "Oh, okay."

Gary S:

Okay.

Melissa R:

And it was different. And it was very left brain, which is good for me to do, but I just didn't really like it. And it wasn't a fit because my light was dim. I was not honoring the joy in myself, but I didn't know what that joy was. I couldn't get an answer other than I needed complete change.

Melissa R:

So, it's January 2nd, 2019. And I'm on the phone and I am angry. In fact, I am hanging up and I am crying because I have just been fired from that job. And I don't like that job, but I need that job. That job pays the bills. I have money to pay for my divorce and this isn't good.

Melissa R:

And at that moment in my panic and what am I going to do, that voice said, "Don't worry about it. We couldn't watch you anymore. You were miserable. So we got you a pink slip. Yay." I'm like, "No, yay." It's like, "No, you did. You trust us, it's going to be okay."

Melissa R:

Well, meanwhile, my youngest child, my baby is bedridden. She can't get out of bed because she's so stressed out and has OCD, which my DNA had passed to her. I actually have told stories about OCD, which is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. And it's not something that people should joke about.

Melissa R:

So she's down, she can't get out of bed and I have to get a new job. And I am having a really hard time because not only is my light dimmed, it's portrayed in the job interviews, and everyone that I'm interviewing with is a 32 year old guy named Ryan Brian or Eric. It didn't matter, same guy, different body.

Melissa R:

And he'd just look at me and be like, "I do not see her at the bar speaking sports with me at the end of the day." And I'm like, "Yeah, you're right, man. I'm old enough to be your mom." And I don't care about who clicked that ad. And I can't get a job that I do like because it's going to require a lot of travel. And my girl needs me.

Melissa R:

We've got to be at this program four days a week, three hours a day, and then two hours of homework for exposure therapy to get her through this crushing OCD. I was terrified and I had $50,000 in credit card debt. Terrified. What am I going to do? The plane has crashed and I have got to walk out of the smoldering fire.

Gary S:

This is the pivot point of your story in the series called Second Act Significance. Right? That's kind of you talked about your first act, very successful. Now we're kind of at intermission, you've had a crisis, the curtain comes down, we got a little bit of an intermission and you're going to move into your second act.

Gary S:

And your second act, as you've hinted at talked about deals with storytelling. And I just want to make an observation about your storytelling before you and Warwick talk about it more. And that is we have a form that we ask guests to fill out for every show.

Gary S:

And the idea behind that form is so that we can ask informed questions of you so that we're not just kind of flying blind. We don't ask what 10 things do you want us to ask you? We don't want it to be too programmatic. We want this to be a conversation, but we want to know your story.

Gary S:

And I have to tell you, Melissa, I've been co-host of this show for 110 episodes, which is more than 80 guests. And your prep sheet is by far the best we've ever received. Your prep sheet is academy award winning worthy in terms of prep sheet writing, because what's on display here is exactly the thing that you have talked about, that you're going to talk about your passion, your fire, your joy.

Gary S:

You don't answer questions in this sheet, you tell stories, and that's a fantastic thing. So I'm going to shut up now, let Warwick ask you questions, and let you tell some more stories.

Warwick F:

Well, that is so well said, Gary.

Melissa R:

Thanks Gary.

Warwick F:

How come you didn't take that path of just anger and bitterness about what life had dolled out to you. You took a different path. What led you to take a path that ultimately led to Story Fruition? Where did you find that hope from, because not every ... It's fascinating that you chose hope rather than to dwell on anger and bitterness.

Melissa R:

Great question. And I wish I could say, "Oh, I didn't do that at all." I did get angry. I did. I retreated to my room because mother nature put us all in our room called quarantine. "Think about what you did, Missy." And I did.

Melissa R:

And I licked my ... My friend loves it when I do the ... I just licked my wounds and I was sad and I was angry and I was frustrated, but I also know that life is a journey. And so I started to read a lot. I read, Think and Grow Rich.

Melissa R:

I was like, "Let's read that." And that actually is a great book that then led me to reading things on Law of Attraction. And I started to learn that the power you were saying, it's like the two voices, it's like little you, y-o-u and then big you, Y-O-U, that's how I see it now.

Melissa R:

And so it's with me all the time. I just have to tune into it and I can do that by the way I feel. So, I started to learn how to feel my way towards what I desired. I now knew what I didn't want. I didn't want any of this. I didn't want to have financial crash. I didn't want to feel bad. I didn't want to have a child that didn't have a remedy. I didn't want to have a job I hated. I didn't want that.

Melissa R:

So, what do I want? Immediately, the opposite. So, I started to concentrate now on that. Where can I get her help? Okay. We've got that started slipping in pretty fast. Thank you universe. But the job thing was important. So, during this time I'm thinking, "Well, what am I good at? What am I good at?"

Melissa R:

And I started to make a list, I'm good at sales, I'm good at marketing, I usually always ... I know enterprise sales. That's cool. I know how to manage people. That's great. I know how to tell stories. I'm a really good actor. Okay. What am I going to do with that? That's been haunting me my whole life. That's my dad saying, "I don't know what you're going to do with that." I'm going to figure it out.

Melissa R:

I'm standing in the hall of Seattle University's Business Plan Competition, and I'm there to watch these students fight it out for $10,000 prize money. It's a very prestigious competition here in Seattle. It's been going on for a very long time. The biggest swankiest angel investors are all there. They want to see the next big idea that they might be able to get in on.

Melissa R:

And as I'm watching, I'm seeing these students one after another, get up on stage with a two minute pitch, and all they are doing is problem, and then saying a bunch of stats, solution and a pie chart.

Melissa R:

And I'm just watching, and I'm just thinking, it was almost as if a light from the universe came flooding down on me as I watched these students and I grabbed the arm of the executive director who was just a budding new friend and he went, "Amelia, I can help them. I know what to do. This is sales and marketing. Is it not?"

Melissa R:

She's like, "Oh, totally." I'm like, "And it needs acting. They're not acting. They need, they need story. They need to tell the story. The problem could be a character having the problem, and then they're the hero. I can do this." And I started just rambling. She ends up calling me during this downtime and says, "Do you want to really try this? Do you want to volunteer this year, and be one of the pitch coaches?"

Melissa R:

I'm like, "Yes, yes, yes, yes." I walk in to this room and there's three teams and I ask them, "So, what do you do?" And they start to tell me the exact same thing, the stats come out, the graphs come out, nothing's coming out. And then the last guy, Daniel, he's like, "Well, I want to unite artisan wood makers to people who appreciate art in their furniture."

Melissa R:

I'm like, "Well, that's cool. And what is an artisan? Are you an artisan wood maker?" He goes like, "I am. I am." I'm like, "Great." So, I started talking to him. I go, "So, who's going to be your target audience?" And he said, "Women 25 to 54 making 75K." I'm like, "No. No."

Melissa R:

And then all of a sudden this epiphany was, "Oh my God. Remember when you, Missy were in your late 20s and you started making money and you looked around your own apartment and said, I do not want to have a milk crate hold my television up. Things are going to change.""

Melissa R:

And I walked into this beautiful, I'm soul traveling as this guy's talking to me, I walk into this furniture store on Melrose when I was working for LA Weekly, and it's this artisan furniture maker. He couldn't speak hardly any English, but it was the most beautiful pine furniture back in the day when Pottery Barn was flashing it all.

Melissa R:

I bought an armoire, I bought tables, chairs, desk, bed. I transformed my apartment. I turned it into my castle. And then all of a sudden, as I'm talking to Daniel at the Seattle Business Plan Competition, I said, "That's your character. That's your target market. Make her come alive in your story."

Melissa R:

And all of a sudden, everything started to change. And the competition, all of the pitches now were coming in with a story that tells the problem. And then the solution would be the entrepreneur's solution. And I started to realize, "Huh, I wonder if people ..." Clearly there's a need for this. Would people pay me to do this? And the universe said, "Yep. And we got a great name for your company. Try this, Story Fruition."

Melissa R:

I'm like, "Ooh, I like that." I register. I find it. GoDaddy's like, "Yeah, that's a good one." And I started my company and next thing you know, because when you start to follow and you start to feel good, the universe wants more of that feel good, and all of a sudden clients started just popping in. They just started popping in.

Melissa R:

And I got a CEO who said, and he knew I was an actor and he'd seen my acting and he goes, "You're going to what?" I go, "I am going to pitch coach. I'm going to coach storytelling into executives so that they're more compelling." He goes, "I need that."

Melissa R:

Really? You're a millionaire. He's like, I know but I know I could be better. I'm like, "Okay." And he hires me and he says, "Okay, we're going in for a pitch. He's already sold a company before. This guy he's open and closed many companies now."

Melissa R:

He says, "I have all the numbers, you know that. But I need heart. There's no heart in this presentation. We're going into Andreessen Horowitz. What can we do?" And I said, "Well, come on Tom, you have all those amazing case studies. I now call them case stories. Let's bring those forward and weave them into your presentation to show them that your technology and your team are going to deliver on the goods."

Melissa R:

He's like, "That's awesome." He does that. He walks out with a verbal that day for $35 million series A and he granted, it's not just because Melissa gave him some stories. I know it was a collaboration, but he said we needed that, and that's when I started to realize, yeah, left brain data needs right brain stories.

Melissa R:

It needs it. It has to balance it, because as I said earlier, they're going to remember the story that you tell about the problem that you're solving far longer than any pie chart that you put in front of them. They will not remember that.

Melissa R:

And so now I have executives from all over the world that I'm coaching and I'm teaching how to be a storyteller for your keynote, how to infuse stories into your pitch, how to make sure your graphs or that your slides are also backing up your story and not usurping you because you put the whole kitchen sink on the slide.

Melissa R:

You're actually being cognizant to what you're doing to the listener. And that's where my book is called the Storyteller's Mind Movie. So it keeps ... So, the momentum of what I'm doing is continuing to roll forward, and I know that with joy in my heart, I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. So, this is absolutely chapter two.

Warwick F:

I think it's fascinating as you're telling your story, Melissa, our lives are often more easily understood as we look backwards. Our stories make sense as we look back. They don't always make sense at the time. But as you look back, you have to say to yourself, I would imagine, I get now I have these strands in my DNA and my personality of storytelling, but also sales. And you enjoy both.

Warwick F:

And here you've got a perfect marriage of the two. Your storytelling is helping salespeople, executives, venture capitalists, what have you, understand how to sell better through stories? And obviously as you would realize, people talk a lot in our culture about ancient wisdom, the way culture is passed on through pretty much every culture that's ever existed on the planet is through stories. You know?

Warwick F:

My dad was big into Greek stories and mythology and what have you. And so I sort of grew up and partly on the stories of the Iliad, which is the story of the Greeks trying to besiege Troy. And then the Odyssey with Odysseus taking 10 years for a variety of reasons. The gods apparently were against him and took him 10 years to get back to his home.

Warwick F:

But originally when those stories were told, there was no written word at the time. So, these stories were told by the elders or the community to younger folks, over hundreds and hundreds of years. And that's part of the Greek culture, part of their story of what it means to be part of the Greek culture mythology. And that's true of probably every culture on the planet.

Warwick F:

So, this whole storytelling, it's how we tell the story of who we are, who our culture is, what makes us, us. So, what you're doing is channeling something that's existed ever since there were human beings many thousands of years ago, does that kind of makes sense? This is it's like we've forgotten we're a collection of stories. That's what makes us who we are, if that makes sense.

Melissa R:

We're machines for it. We live them. We want to hear them. We want to tell them. And then when I realized that we all have these stories and there's no reason why our personal stories, our personal moments cannot be infused into our workday, but people kind of move into, "I'm in work mode. We don't tell stories."

Melissa R:

And those are the ones that I think you're falling short, where you're not giving credit to the stories and your wisdom that you have been picking up decade after decade, right? You have family stories, marriage stories, first birth stories, college stories, failure stories.

Melissa R:

There are so many stories that reflect your resilience, your out of the box thinking, your I'm down and out story and now I'm a hero, so many of those stories. So, when I'm working with people, here's the trick is that first I notice that people aren't valuing their stories. They don't think especially a lot of women. "No one wants to hear my story." Yes they do. More than you realize.

Melissa R:

But the trick is that we're not taught in school, believe it or not. We're taught how to write a story and read a story, but how to tell a story, like what you're seeing me do. I'm creating characters. I'm using voices. I've got pausing. I'm using senses. There's things that I'm doing deliberately to be an entertaining storyteller.

Melissa R:

But I am ... All my stories that I've told today have to do with my work world. But they're very personal.

Warwick F:

It seems like in the business world, we've gone so analytical we have forgotten our heritage, which is told in stories. We just sort of abandon that. If that makes sense.

Melissa R:

Yeah. I had ... I'll give a success story. I'm the pitch coach for Founders Live, which is a global pitch competition every month, different markets, about 60 markets and five presenters come up and they give a 99 second pitch. And I coached them in Seattle and in 99 seconds we have a story. We have a solution. We have traction. We have accolades, and we have team and an ask. It all happens in 99 seconds.

Melissa R:

And there was one gentleman who his name is Juan. And I just loved Juan. And he has this app called Lalo and Lalo was the name of his father. And essentially it's an app that would be to memorialize someone. So, let's say Aunt Frieda's on her final days, you might want to make sure that you have some of Aunt Frieda's stories and you can put them in this app and share them intimately with your family.

Melissa R:

It's not something that's going to get exposed out onto the net or anything like that. It's an intimate family experience and you can have photos and chats and all this. And I asked them, I'm like, "This is a really good idea. How did you come up with it?" I wanted his Story Fruition. And he said, "Well, I lost my dad when I was 24, about 18 years ago."

Melissa R:

And I said, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry." He's like, "Yeah, I was standing at his graveside and my wife asked me, she's like, "Hey Juan, tell me a story about Lalo." I had nothing. I had nothing. And I just sat there and thought this is terrible. I can't tell stories. Because when my dad passed, I lost his empanada recipes. I had a bunch of pictures in a box, but that's not going to serve anyone.

Melissa R:

And now he's got grandkids he's never going to meet, but I want them to know who he is. And that's when the light of his universe said, "Start Lalo." So I said, "Why is that story not in your presentation, because everything you've shown me today has been all left brain?" Seriously, it was all left brains and charts and the algorithm and how it's going to work and the flow charts.

Melissa R:

And it was just like, "Oh." And I said, "Juan, your story is beautiful. It needs to be in there." He's like, "No one would wants to hear that." I said, "Yeah, I think they would." So, for his pitch, we started with him saying, "I'm standing at the graveside of my father when my wife asks me, "Tell me a story about Lalo."" And he does that.

Melissa R:

And right away that image in the mind movie of anyone standing at a graveside does what? You can see it, but you can feel it, right? No one's standing at a graveside going, "Woohoo, how you doing buddy?" It's poignant, right? And he had him with the first sentence.

Melissa R:

This guy was going from $0 being raised and lots of "thanks, it's just a little too early stage for us." He took his founder's live video that we did, and he had all the other stuff. He had the traction he had. We had the science of the business in there. It was all there, made it a video.

Melissa R:

We put a little music underneath it. He plays guitar. And he put it out on Twitter. In less than 10 days, he had $210,000 in funding. And it was people saying, "It was your story. How can I help you? I just lost my dad. I want to be a part of this."

Warwick F:

Wow. So, as I think about it, there's been some good stories that have been told for many thousand of years and I'm sure there's a lot into it, but just at a high level, what are some of the key elements that make for a good story both in composition and in telling.

Warwick F:

What are some of the key things? Again, you don't need to get into every detail. That would be part of what you do, but just a high level.

Melissa R:

There's a lot there.

Gary S:

That would be that three-hour podcast I threatened. If she's too interesting it'll be three hours.

Melissa R:

I do, do workshops that take that long. Yes.

Warwick F:

Just to give people a taste of what's these elements of the secret sauce enough that I might want to learn more?

Melissa R:

Yeah.

Warwick F:

What are some of those key components, but the composing a good story and then telling it?

Melissa R:

Yeah, well first it's the composing it, making ... So first, we all have an aha moment. All stories are centered around that, right? It's like the moment that something hit you and you have to change or you did just change something happens. Right?

Melissa R:

So for me, my aha was I don't like my life right now. I want something different. I know I don't want this and now I want that. And then all of a sudden the aha started going on and I started my journey.

Melissa R:

I formulaically completely buy into the Hero's Journey story arc from Joseph Campbell, if it's good enough for Pixar and Disney, it's good enough for me. And so when I'm working with my clients, we are always going to be looking for transformation. So the character, the main characters in your story need to be relatable. We need to be able to see them, hear them.

Melissa R:

We need to know if you, as the storyteller like them or not. So, your relationship to those characters are important and what are the stakes? And then we are going to just plot it out like this mind movie, scene by scene, moving towards the triumph and the transformation. And I plug that in.

Melissa R:

And so formulaically, when we start to master that, which is where I think where a storyteller goes from being a storyteller to being a masterful mind movie maker. And those are the people I'm seeking, who wants to be a mind movie maker, because if you do, then let's talk, right?

Melissa R:

Do you want people leaning in? Then let's talk, and that takes practice. So, stories, a really well written story is something that advances enough, expands enough and it entertains and it educates and it inspires. That's the whole essence of what we're going for. And then we break it down scene by scene, character by character.

Gary S:

This is a good time for me to ask you this question. I'm entertaining myself with the thought that I'm going to throw a question at you that's going to knock you off balance. I know it's not going to happen, because I'm going to ask you to do something and you'll do it like that, because you're very good at what you do.

Gary S:

But our series that we're talking about, that this episode of this podcast is part of is called Second Act Significance. The idea being that there was a first act of your life for all the guests that we've had on the show. And it didn't work out either because something, some setback happened, some dissatisfaction happened, whatever that was, that first act then led to a crucible of some making.

Gary S:

And then here comes the second act and it's called Second Act Significance. So, I'm going to ask you to tell our listeners a story about why and how your second act is more significant and more satisfying than your first act was.

Melissa R:

I deep down always thought I would be an entrepreneur. When I was 25 years old I thought, "I have taken Toastmasters. I am an excellent speaker. I am going to teach people Toastmasters." And that's what I'm going to do. And I started my little company and I had cards that said speakeasy. That's what I was going to call. I didn't really realize that it would probably have a sexual connotation and that wasn't the best brand.

Melissa R:

But I was only 25 and I was going to do this. And I then went, "I am too young and dumb to do this. No, I'm not ready for it." But she, that entrepreneurial Melissa was born inside me. So, when I was stepping out of the smoldering flames and I started to listen to my higher self, all of a sudden, my second half now is on my terms. It's my life.

Melissa R:

And if I need to be a little bit selfish to find my joy, then that's what I'm going to do, because I want to be the best mom I can be. I don't want to deal with Ryans, Brians, and Erics again, that are going to make me feel like I'm not smart, because I am smart and I am going to attract the clients that I want and I'm going to be bringing them something that they didn't even know that they needed, but now that they do, they are so excited about the work we're doing.

Melissa R:

And I'd walk through most of the day with goosebumps. When I tap a story in one of my clients and we go, "Oh, there it is." It is so much joy. And even though with being an entrepreneur, you're kind of on a boat ride or a roller coaster.

Melissa R:

It's going to go up, it's going to down. It's going to swirl. You're going to have good months. You're going to have thin months, but it doesn't matter because if you're still believing in what you're doing ...

Melissa R:

Or I'll just talk for myself. When I started believing in what I was doing with joy and with value, how could this not be the best time in my life? I'm 56 years old. I am just starting. I am just launching. I got a book that's coming out. I'm doing storytelling on lots of podcasts and having a wonderful time teaching something that not everyone's talking about. And I like that.

Warwick F:

You know, I feel like there are some really, really important lessons, Melissa, for folks, irrespective of their journey and where they're from that I think it's important for them to listen to. When you connect to your inner passion, your inner truth, your inner voice and you connect that to folks.

Warwick F:

Well, I want to say they connect that to folks who have that. I'd say that inner voice, that inner passion is going to attract the people that you're meant to attract. The universe is going to see to that. It certainly has for you.

Warwick F:

You didn't start out with this old business plan saying, "Okay, I'm going to tell stories because it combines my acting ability and it combines my sales ability and people raising series A financing will be perfect, because they need to tell better stories."

Warwick F:

In hindsight that makes sense. But when you were trying to get out of the smoldering ashes of the previous job and life, it wasn't like, "Okay, I got it all figured out. It's series A financing. This is the one." Right? It evolved. You had a thought.

Warwick F:

I think life is often like an impressionist painting. You had a thought, okay, it's something to do with acting and sales and telling people stories. And you had that epiphany at the University of Seattle, but then it evolved from there.

Warwick F:

But I think the key, whatever people's situation is, if they're trying to shift to their second act, it's just really understanding what is something that they're passionate about. I said a lot of years ago, because I am an idealist at heart and still am, is if you're not having trouble going to sleep at night, because you're so excited about whatever it is, then maybe it's not it.

Warwick F:

Now that's you don't necessarily have to suffer from insomnia to prove that you're actually there, but it should be something that you're really excited about.

Warwick F:

And the other aspect I reflect on is passion breeds persistence. You're very persistent at what you do because you are passionate about this. This is going to help people. I love it and it's going to help people. And so you're good at sales, but this probably takes your selling ability to a whole nother level beyond what it was before, and that was probably already pretty good, if that makes sense.

Warwick F:

So does that make sense? Just passion will attract the people that you want to attract. It'll help drive you forward and will give you persistence. Does that kind of make sense?

Melissa R:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And that to me is going back to the just trust us, just trust us. That inner dialogue that I was having way back at the beginning of it. I'm like, "What do you mean trust you? I don't even know. Who am I talking to?" And it was like just trust it.

Melissa R:

And when you think about it, when you become aware of something and you start to see signs of it, like for instance, you want to buy a new car, let's say you're like, "I really like Lexus." I want a Lexus car. And then all of a sudden every radio station, every magazine, and every newspaper has a Lexus ad suddenly there.

Melissa R:

That's the universe in a way letting you know your awareness, your ask for it is now heightened and it's now coming forward and you're open to hearing and seeing it. Right? And you kind of get a giggle like, "Oh that's so funny. That's so funny. I was just thinking about, oh right, okay cool."

Melissa R:

Or you can look at the clock and it says 2:22 or 3:33. Some people love that. They're like, "Woo numerology. I'm being listened to." I find this fun. Some people you can just sign it off. That's fine. I personally find that when I'm living really consciously and I'm deliberately trying to create, you have to listen to all that stuff so that it can show up.

Melissa R:

And then when you see it, bless it. And know, I actually say that life is like a waiter. It gives you what you ordered. And if you don't like what you ordered, send it back to the kitchen. But if you like what you got, tip.

Warwick F:

So, I feel like this is another example. Nobody would want to go through what you went through. I'm sure you wouldn't want to do it again, having gone through that. But somehow I feel like the universe brought that onto you. Maybe without the challenge, maybe you never would be doing what you're doing.

Warwick F:

Maybe sometimes it takes a smack on the head with a two by four to say, "Okay Melissa, we want you to go in this other direction, but you're not listening. Okay. We're going to make you listen." Does that? I don't know if that makes sense at all.

Warwick F:

But do you feel the bit of that for some people to shift to their second act sometimes requires a bit of pain to be able to shift?

Melissa R:

Absolutely. I think pain is what we launch from. So, that's contrast. It's like when we hit contrast, it used to be contrast was bad. Now I start to see the contrast, which is something I don't want, sifting through all these things all day long.

Melissa R:

And when I hit contrast now and I feel it like, "Ooh, that doesn't feel good." I actually instead of going, "I feel bad and I'm going to lick my wounds again." I actually pay attention to it because it's talking to me. It's letting me know you're not really aligned here. Pay attention right now. And that's been the work with all the reading that I did over this past time.

Melissa R:

Also, there was this when I was in my 20s and I was going to go for my acting career in LA, I said to myself, "I don't want to look back and wonder if." I don't want to be on my deathbed and wonder what if I had gone to LA, what if I had given it a go?

Melissa R:

So, I did go to LA and I didn't make it as an actor really, but I did make it in sales and I didn't expect that. And a part of me had been calling out, I'm good in sales, I'm good in sales, I'm good in sales. And so the universe took me on that journey and you sometimes just have to ride your boat. Right now my big mantra is oars in, get your oars in and allow that boat to be steered because everything I want is downstream for me, everything, if I can just not try to paddle upstream.

Melissa R:

And that's when I start pinching it off, I start going, "No, I don't like it. Or it wasn't ... He didn't show up the day that I wanted him to show up or that money needs be in my account now." That's pinching it off and it doesn't serve me. It actually kind of spoils the joy of what I see life being now. I think life is a constant story being written before my eyes. And I actually have the pen.

Gary S:

This is the time in the show when I normally say that sounds you heard was the captain turning on the fasten seatbelt sign indicating our time to descend has begun. But come on, we're talking to a storytelling expert, so I'm going to say we've reached the denouement of the story where we're about to end, but we're not quite there yet.

Gary S:

Before we get there though and Warwick asks you a couple more questions, Melissa, I would be remiss in my duties as co-host, if I did not ask you how can listeners find out more about Story Fruition and about the services you offer?

Melissa R:

Thank you. Yeah. So my site is probably the best place. I've got a lot of information at storyfruition.com and I teach workshops to corporations now because people are realizing that there are stories that companies all tell, but not everyone tells them well. And new people are aching to know more stories.

Melissa R:

So, I'm helping companies now build story libraries and I train their teams on how to be very vivid mind movie makers, even in a case story because that's what's going to differentiate. So, I always say, I'm like it's like they're going to create an army of storytellers throughout your organization.

Melissa R:

And the culture will be infused into your organization across divisions so those are some of the services I do. And then you can like me, Story Fruition is on Facebook, it's on LinkedIn, it's LinkedIn to me, that would be great, Melissa Reaves, R-E-A-V-E-S. And you have to be careful, because there is a Melissa Reaves is a pop star.

Gary S:

Yeah.

Melissa R:

But that's not me. It's a Melissa Reaves storyteller cause it sometimes helps.

Gary S:

And can the pop star sing more than eight notes? Do you know?

Melissa R:

Yeah.

Gary S:

Darn it.

Melissa R:

Yeah. She plays music. She's really good. Yeah. I like her. I'm like, "Hey, there's room for joy everywhere. Let's go."

Gary S:

Absolutely.

Warwick F:

That's great. So, just as we sum up, what you talked about oars in I really want the listeners to hear that because unless you have the oars in and are just moving in some direction, the universe or however you term it can't steer you. If you're moving nowhere, you're going to ... nobody can steer you, whatever you think it's a higher path.

Melissa R:

You're never not moving.

Warwick F:

Right. So, I feel like by just going to LA and trying that, in hindsight, that acting was combined with selling to form Story Fruition. But if you hadn't done that, if you hadn't put your oars in, you wouldn't be where you were.

Warwick F:

So, just put your oars in and try something and then the universe, however you frame it, will guide you. I think that's such, such key advice. As we sum up, I love what you do in Story Fruition, but you have another thing you do at Melanin Stories Matter, which I'd love for you to just chat a bit about that.

Warwick F:

Because, it would be a whole nother podcast. But from my perspective, when you hear people's stories, it humanizes people. It's hard to dislike somebody whose stories you know, whose heart you understand. It helps people be seen who maybe people don't see, if you will. So, just talk a bit about what's the heart behind Melanin Stories.

Melissa R:

So, it was May 25th, 2020, and I'm in front of the television, learning the name George Floyd, along with everyone else. And then it wasn't very long after I'm learning the name Breonna Taylor, and that too long after that I'm learning Ahmaud Arbery, and I just couldn't handle it.

Melissa R:

I'm like, "Why are we so mean? Why can't we just be nicer to each other? Why? Why?" And then my higher self said, "Well Melissa, you were raised to be racist." "I was?" "Oh I was. Yeah, I was. Unfortunately I was." I have a rich Southern history of family lineage and I did not grow up learning kind terms, but it never felt right.

Melissa R:

Me and my sisters would always just cringe whenever a word that was derogatory towards any person of color would be used. And it was just in the family culture. Not that my family was bad, it was just that side. It was not the shining side.

Melissa R:

So, I started to reflect on that and I thought, "You know what? Just because that's how the family was, does not mean that's how the family can be." And so I realized that going out to protest was really dangerous. People were getting tear gassed, let alone COVID exposures. But I'm a storyteller, and I know how to produce shows.

Melissa R:

So we said, "Let's make a protest from our living room and let's have only black, indigenou,s and people of color sharing stories of moments that they had to face just because of their melanin being a little bit darker than mine." And the floodgates opened. And I have made so many amazing friends.

Melissa R:

I had to actually look at my own network and go, "God, it's so white. It's so homogenized and shame on me for that." And we started this show and it took off. We did seven different shows and we had your vote matters. So, as a person of color, what's important to you about voting. And I had a variety of people.

Melissa R:

I've learned that racism runs within their own cultures. We're all racist a little bit. And it's like, okay we're ... I'm not going to solve racism, but can we start to move towards celebration of our diversity?

Melissa R:

So, Melanin Stories Matter. If you go to YouTube and look that up, you'll see about at least 60 pieces of content from amazing storytellers, some I coached, some I didn't. They're already players in the space and they shared vulnerable moments so that we could do exactly what you said, Warwick, so that we could humanize those that have been dehumanized because it's just not right.

Melissa R:

Every human being has a right to be happy and safe and feel included. And so Melanin Stories Matter was this journey that I went on with a group of incredible people. And we would even talk about the fact that as a host, I was the white elephant in the room, "Let's talk about this."

Melissa R:

Because it was the white elephant that needed to hear these stories because you can't hear a story of this kind human being who's being surrounded by a bunch of white supremacists in a 7/11, and dehumanized, without going, "Uh-uh, uh-uh." That's taking now storytelling and using it for social advocacy.

Warwick F:

When you break it all down, we all want to care for people, protect our families, help our kids, help our wife, partner, husbands. We have dreams, hopes. There's a lot more that unites us about being human than divides us.

Warwick F:

And by sharing stories, that's a way of saying, "You know what? I can identify. Even though I may be so different, I can identify with what that person's saying." At least an element of it.

Warwick F:

Does that make sense? So, I think by telling stories, you help bring people together. It's not going to solve everything, but to me, even helping a little bit, it's a start. It's a start. Right?

Warwick F:

And so thank you for what you're doing. That's really an important mission. And thank you for everything you're doing in Story Fruition.

Melissa R:

Thank you.

Warwick F:

Left brain is all good, but we want to share people's stories and don't forget what Melissa's advocating. For those obviously with families, parents, try and get your parents and loved ones to share their stories. Don't lose that. That's part of what makes us, us. So, write them down.

Melissa R:

Yeah.

Warwick F:

But, anyway thank you for being an advocate for stories because that's part of what us human, part of what binds every culture is stories. You don't have ... We don't tell stories. We don't know who we are. We lose that. And so thank you. That's, I think really important work. So, thank you for what you do.

Melissa R:

Well, thank you. Thank you universe. I'm definitely doing the work I'm supposed to be doing. I know that hands down. So, it took a little journey to get there.

Gary S:

That sounds like an excellent place to wrap up an episode of the podcast that's about Second Act Significance. Listener, we have been talking about the importance of story in the context of pursuing second act significance.

Gary S:

And in addition to our guest, Melissa Reaves, our host, Warwick Fairfax has a little experience in that realm as well. And if you've enjoyed what you've heard on the podcast listener, a couple things that you can do to find out more about the stories that Warwick has lived.

Gary S:

One, his book Crucible Leadership: Embrace Your Trials to Lead a Life of Significance is filled with stories, not just of his own crucible experiences. And speaking of stories, Warwick tells his story and has been doing so on a speaking tour that has been sort of intermissioned right now, but he's about to go back out and do some more speaking.

Gary S:

If you would like to find out more about how you can get Warwick to come speak to your group. You can find that at our website, crucibleleadership.com. There's a speaking tab you can click on. You'll see actually a very nice little video of Warwick speaking or some highlights of Warwick speaking.

Gary S:

And you will also be able to reach our speaking agent at Crucible Leadership, Carrie Childers. Also at crucibleleadership.com. The book I mentioned earlier, Warwick's book, it's available there as well. I think I've done all of the marketing homework here. Melissa, as an expert, you can tell me if I did.

Melissa R:

You did it.

Gary S:

I think I covered it all. So, I will leave it. Listeners, I will leave you with this. We understand, we know you've heard it here on this show from Melissa and from Warwick. We know that crucible experiences are difficult. We know that starting a second act can be difficult, but we also know that starting the second act can be enormously rewarding.

Gary S:

It can lead to enormous significance because if you learn the lessons of your crucible, if you press into that, which brings your heart alive, if you press into that, which you were created for, if you press into that, that takes your skills and talents, and you can leverage what you've learned in your crucible, recognizing that what happened didn't happen to you. It happened for you.

Gary S:

You can chart a course to a new story, since we're talking about stories. And the great thing about that story that you can get on the journey toward is that it ends in a life of significance.

We’re in the midst of our most ambitious series yet on the podcast I host, Beyond the Crucible. It’s called “Second-Act Significance” and features interviews with nine men and women who recast their visions after a first act that was either undone by a crucible experience or proved to be an unfulfilling pursuit — even if it was a successful one.

The impressive, inspiring cross-section of people we’re interviewing – the series runs through the end of May – have stories that vary widely in detail. But those stories have, as we’ve found since we launched the show in 2019, many overlapping emotional beats. At the heart of the guests’ decisions to pursue a fresh second act is that they all harnessed the power of vision. Coincidentally, that’s the precise title of Chapter 10 in my book, Crucible Leadership: Embrace Your Trials to Lead a Life of Significance.

This seemed a perfect opportunity to use this space to revisit the beginning of that chapter – which includes details of my own pursuit of second-act significance after my failed $2.25 billion takeover of my family’s media company. More importantly, though, it offers what I hope is practical wisdom that augments what the podcast series highlights: how to recast a vision that will lead to a life of real significance.

The following is an excerpt from my book, Crucible Leadership:

The experiences and travails during my days at John Fairfax Ltd. have affected me in many ways. They have affected my view of myself, my view of vision, and my understanding of what it takes to make vision a reality. They have also affected how I help others.

At a personal level, my “failure”—which I consider my life’s greatest crucible experience—hurt me deeply and has humbled me, but ultimately, I believe it has made me wiser and put me on a better path. What was searing was the repeated thought that I had this great vision, this God-given vision as I believed it was, and I let God down.

John Fairfax Ltd. could have been so great, and I blew it. How did I blow it? Count the ways. Either I blew it by not being the take-charge leader the job needed, or I blew it by being too impatient for change and not really giving other family members involved in the family business a chance to embrace the vision I was trying to make a reality. Perhaps I would have found some commonality between my vision and their visions. I did not ask, so I do not know. Either way, I failed in my mission to bring the vision to reality.

Lessons Learned

But what was worse, in some ways, was what I learned about myself. That was not fun. I learned that perhaps I had a hero complex, the desire to be the crusading avenger who saves the day.

I had also made assumptions about the rest of my family, who they were and what they were about, based on others’ perceptions. I had not tested these assumptions by talking to my relatives myself and listening to them. There was resoluteness there, but there was also the other side of that, which was stubbornness. These reflections about who I was, my character and my motives, were not fun or easy. But part of living life well is learning from your failures and living life in light of these lessons.

So what are some of the lessons learned? You have to be humble. You cannot have this ego complex that you are going to be the savior of the world. That is dangerous and does not often work out well. You can hurt a lot of people while you are trying to save the world. There is another saying, “The path to hell is paved with good intentions.” I may have been trying to do the right thing. But a lot of bad things seemed to happen: to me, to others, and to the company. Having a “save the world” ego complex can be dangerous. And it is all-too-often the fuel of a devastating crucible.

You cannot inherit a vision. Just like you cannot inherit your parents’ faith, you cannot inherit your parents’ vision. I tried it and failed. If it is not your vision, no matter how noble it is, do not try to make it your vision. If you do, you risk facing a life-changing crucible of your own creation, causing pain in your own life and the lives of others.

For this reason, it’s important to have an accurate assessment of yourself, a healthy self-awareness. As a leader, as a human being, it is not enough to have a great and worthwhile vision. You have to ask yourself, in all humility, Am I the right person to make that vision happen? Do I have the skills and the gifts, let alone the requisite experience, to bring that vision to reality? How has this experience with vision shaped me and molded me?

Funnily enough, I am still attracted to vision. These days, though, I am more cautious regarding my own role in a worthy vision. I no longer see myself as always central to the picture. I am happy to help others with their visions. I am older and hopefully wiser. I have a few battle scars. I am more realistic, both about the challenges of making a vision a reality and about who I am and who I am not. But I have not given up on vision.

As I have said, I hate cynicism and defeatism—the sense that it is hopeless, nobody cares, why bother. Fortunately, through God’s grace, I have not become world-weary. I am still idealistic. I still have hope. I still believe the impossible is possible. I am committed to the truth that crucible experiences can be overcome if we learn the lessons of them, craft a vision to move beyond them that is rooted in our gifts and passions, and dedicate ourselves to making that vision a reality as we pursue a life of significance.

What It Takes to Find Your Own Vision

In my capacity as a coach and consultant, when people ask me for advice on job transition, or if people who have sold businesses come to me looking for a new direction, I have a paradigm I use. I ask them about their gifts and abilities. I ask them about their passions (that is, what activities or causes they are excited about). If they are Christians, I ask them how their planned new job or activity would advance God’s Kingdom. (If they are not believers, I might ask them how that job or activity would fulfil a higher purpose.) So, if that new job or activity is in the center of their gift set, in an arena they are off-the-charts passionate about, and they believe it advances God’s Kingdom or fulfils a higher purpose, my belief is that they will feel fulfilled and, I would say, “called” to that position.

In my life, too, I try to live by that model. I believe I am at my best when I am advising, facilitating, and writing. I am passionate about my faith. I want everything I do to advance God’s Kingdom. When I advise, my desire is to help people follow a calling that fits them, that draws on their greatest passions and talents. Helping people fulfil their visions gives me as much pleasure and joy as anything else in life.

Sometimes to be the best version of yourself you have to go through some trials and tribulations you do not want to experience—crucibles. Research done by Crucible Leadership has found that 49 percent of business leaders have had crucible experiences, events so painful that they have fundamentally changed their lives. I am certainly among that 49 percent. I have experienced much pain, and much self-reflection and soul-searching. The benefit of coming out on the other side of the failed takeover is that I now have a vision I am truly excited about, one that is truly my vision.

Where does vision come from? Is it internal or external? It would seem vision is often inspired by external events or comes from sources outside ourselves. Consider John Fairfax’s vision of the great newspaper he wanted to build one day. That vision was nurtured while working for a London newspaper and during the trials of working in newspapers in Leamington. His vision was cemented by the crucible of failure and then flourished under the promise of the young colony of New South Wales.

There was much external encouragement, such as that from John’s wife, Sarah. Yet that is not to say there was no internal component to John’s vision. Perhaps the greatest internal influence was his character, coupled with his aptitudes. John’s character made him want to build a newspaper that was fair, would fight for just causes, and help build a young colony. The facets of John’s character—fairness, justice, and compassion—were inextricably woven into his vision.

Reflection

Order Crucible Leadership here

Robert Miller wanted to make music his career from the first time he picked up an instrument in high school – but he did not get to fulfill that desire until after he retired. His dreams were deferred by the usual beats of life – a successful career that took him in another direction, family joys and responsibilities, and a crucible in his 40s when he broke his neck in an accident.

But in his 60s, he grabbed his guitar and launched his band Project Grand Slam — and finally felt the rush of playing original songs at festivals and concerts around the word. His success in pursuing his lifelong passion also led him to create his top-rated podcast, Follow Your Dream.

To learn more about Robert Miller and Project Grand Slam, visit www.projectgrandslam.com

Highlights

Transcript

Warwick F:

Welcome to Beyond The Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership.

Robert M:

I believe that everybody starts out life with a dream. And usually when we're younger, the dreams are pretty big, okay? Very few people start out life when they're 10 years old saying "My dream is to become an accountant," okay? Their dream is to become an astronaut, a baseball player, a rockstar, things like that. And I had this dream from an early age that I wanted to become a rockstar. I wanted to play music with all the guys that I grew up, and they were my heroes. So I did have this burning desire and it was always there that I wasn't doing exactly what I wanted to do. And the question became, was there ever a time and a place and a method where I could start to gravitate towards that? And it took me a long time.

Gary S:

By a long time, this week's guest, Robert Miller, is talking about 40 years or so. He wanted to make music his career from the first time he picked up an instrument in high school. But he did not get to fulfill that dream until after he retired. Hi, I'm Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show.

Gary S:

In this third episode of our series Second Act Significance, Miller tells us how his dreams were deferred by the usual beats of life, a successful career that took him in another direction, family joys and responsibilities, and a crucible in his 40s when he broke his neck in an accident. His dream may have been delayed a few times, but it was never defeated. In his 60s, he grabbed his guitar and launched his band Project Grand Slam, and finally felt the rush of playing original songs at festivals and concerts around the world. The group has released 11 albums, including a Billboard number one and has had more than 5 million video views and 1 million streams of its unique brand of rock, Latin, jazz fusion. Robert Miller has achieved Second Act Significance, and you can too.

Warwick F:

Robert, I'm just fascinated by just your whole story and following your dream after 60, which as somebody who's hit that benchmark myself, I think it gives a lot of us hope. So thank you. Life isn't over at 60. It's not time to plan your funeral. It's just not quite yet. There is more to life. Love the band Project Grand Slam, and again, and your podcast, Follow Your Dream. Tell us a bit about the origin story of Robert Miller. I guess you must have had this love of music and your family I'm guessing. So where did that come from, this love of music?

Robert M:

Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the podcast. I appreciate it. Yes, I was born into, I guess you would say a musical family. My father played the trumpet, although he didn't do it full time. He had a day job and he played trumpet on the weekends, weddings, bar mitzvahs, private parties, things like that. But right from the get go, my parents decided that I was going to learn music. So when I was about five years old, they started me on piano because that's kind of the mothership. And I was taking lessons. But when you're five years old, who wants to practice, right? So about a year later, I said to my parents, "That's it. I don't want to play anymore." And they said, "Okay, that's fine, but you got to pick another instrument." So I chose the trumpet because that was my father's instrument.

Robert M:

I continued to play the trumpet throughout junior high school and high school. But then there was an event that took place in the midst of all of that. This little band from Liverpool came around, and suddenly it wasn't very cool to play the trumpet anymore. So I taught myself the guitar and then I taught myself the bass and I had my high school rock and roll band and all of that stuff. And I was going to be the next rock star because that's just what I wanted to do with my life. Around the age of 19 or so, I did have that experience of studying for a brief amount of time with John Coltrane's bass player, Jimmy Garrison, and he introduced me to jazz.

Robert M:

At that time I went back to school. I had taken some time off from college. I went back this school in Boston and I completed my degree. I had a degree in broadcasting and film, which at the time meant absolutely nothing because it didn't give me entree to any kind of meaningful job. But I did get a job finally in the mail room of the public television station in Boston. And I had an ideal life. I was doing the mail room during the day and I was playing music at night. I loved it. There was only one problem. I wasn't making enough to sustain a human life, okay? I mean, I was making maybe $100 a week. It was terrible. I was so depressed about it.

Robert M:

And in a moment of severe weakness, a friend of mine said to me, "Well, why don't you go to law school?" And I said, "Law school? Why would I ever want to do that?" And he said, "Well, you're playing in a band with a guy who's a medical doctor," which is true. He had come over from South Africa and he was playing music. He was doing medicine during the day. He was playing music at night. We had a great band. We played all over the Boston area. And he said, "You could be just like him." And I said, "Well..." I thought about it for about a nanosecond, okay? I was a 20 year old idiot and I said, "Okay, that sounds great."

Robert M:

So I went, I applied to law school. Unfortunately I got into law school. Once you go to law school, people that haven't been there don't understand, it's all encompassing. I mean, it was 23 hours a day. I didn't have any time to even think about music while I was there. And then unfortunately, I did well enough in law school that I got a job afterwards as a lawyer. And that became my 16 year or so hiatus, because my dream was to do law during the day and play music at night. I mean, that's what I wanted. That was my dream, and I was going to do it successfully. But there's that expression, the law is a jealous mistress, which means that I was working in the law for 23 hours a day. I was trying to sleep for about one hour a night. I, then, I was married. I had a child, I had a mortgage, I had obligations. And my dream just flew out the window. And I was miserable. I really was.

Robert M:

I mean, this whole period when I wasn't playing, I kept saying, "When am I going to get it back? What happened to you? This wasn't what I was planning for." And finally, when I was in my 40s, I took the first steps towards realizing that dream.

Warwick F:

I mean, that's an incredible, incredible story. Unfortunately, yeah, somebody recommends law. I mean, that's not like a 40-hour a week job. I mean, it's like it's-

Robert M:

It's 40 hours a day.

Warwick F:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And unfortunately, as you put it, you were too successful. So the fact that you were successful was unfortunate in that sense.

Robert M:

Yeah. Right.

Warwick F:

It's like, "Please fire me. Somebody fire me. Put me out of my misery." But I'm fascinated as you, in a sense, your first love was playing the trumpet. Do you ever think if you grew up in the late 30s or 40s in the era of Glen Miller and Artie Shaw and whoever it was, you could have been a big band leader playing the trumpet in another life?

Robert M:

Sure.

Warwick F:

Because then it would've cool to play the trumpet then, right?

Robert M:

Absolutely. That's exactly the music that my father loved. He was into big bands. And of course I listened to all of that because they were being played in the house all the time. My father and I used to play duets on the trumpet. In fact, when I met the woman that became my wife on our first date, I brought her home and my father and I played duets on the trumpet for her. And she didn't leave.

Gary S:

She married you anyway? Yeah, I was going to say she married you anyway? Wow, that's awesome.

Warwick F:

I mean, how did it feel day in, day out, you were probably making decent money, paying the mortgage, being the responsible father, which is, I guess, is what we're meant to be, right? Responsible fathers. Responsible. That's sort of the mantra, if you will. So you were doing that. As the decades wore on, I mean, you are unfortunately, as you put it, being successful, but how did that feel within you?

Robert M:

Well, as I said, I was very frustrated, very conflicted, because on the one hand I had a life that was working for my family, but it wasn't satisfying the urge, the dream that I always had inside of me. And what started me down the path that finally got me where I wanted to go, I discovered by accident. I was living in New York City and there was a place there at the time I call it a musician's dating service, okay? It wasn't actually a dating service, but you went down to this place and you told them, "This is the kind of music I want to play." So if you said led Zeppelin album 2, side 1, they would find three other idiots that wanted to play that music with you. And that's what I did.

Robert M:

For about six months, that's how I started to get back into playing again. Every week I would go down there and it caused me to start practicing again. I was rusty as could be of course, but that got me back into music. And then I discovered another point of luck, that a childhood friend of mine had a recording studio in New York City. And I rang him up. And the next thing I knew, he was saying, "Well, why don't we do an album?" And I was scared to death because I hadn't done anything like that before. But he assembled a group of very professional musicians to work on material that I finally had put together. The first album that I ever did came out of that. So that started me down the path. And then I took some of those guys and I formed a band and we started to play festivals and clubs within New York City.

Robert M:

But it was still more like an avocation, more like a hobby because I was still working as a lawyer and I had that one life but I had this other life that was coming into play more and more. So I was headed down the right path, but it wasn't really what I had always dreamed I would be doing.

Warwick F:

I just wanted to get the timeline here. How old were you at the moment when this was happening, this sort of dual life?

Robert M:

I was probably around 40, okay?

Warwick F:

Got it. Got it.

Gary S:

I've wanted to ask guests, ever since we started this series, it's called Second Act Significance, and implicit in that title is that perhaps the first act maybe felt insignificant. I know it didn't feel like your dream, but did you feel at some point, was there any level of... I mean, you're working as a lawyer, you're raising a family, you have a "good life," but did you feel a lack of significance in what you were doing? Was that an emotion you had?

Robert M:

It was more like schizophrenia, okay? Because on the one hand I had this life, as you said, that was working on certain levels. I could pay my bills. I had a family. So all of that was very nice. But I believe that everybody starts out life with a dream.

Robert M:

Usually when we're younger, the dreams are pretty big, okay? Very few people start out life when they're 10 years old saying "my dream is to become an accountant", okay? Their dream is to become an astronaut, a baseball player, a rockstar, things like that. And I had this dream from an early age that I wanted to become a rock star. I wanted to play music with all the guys that I grew up and they were my heroes. And so I did have this burning desire and it was always there that I wasn't doing exactly what I wanted to do. And the question became, was there ever a time and a place and a method where I could start to gravitate towards that. And it took me a long time. I mean, I talked about coming back into music at age 40. I didn't get to the point where I was doing music full time until I passed 60. That was 20 years later.

Warwick F:

I mean, that's amazing. I may be misquoting it, but I guess I'd quote by Thoreau talking about smoldering discontent. Was there a sense that life was fine, but maybe it wasn't a forest fire, but there was sort of, I don't know, something smoldering at some level, just this in this bifurcated dual life? It was working-

Robert M:

The mass of men lead lives quiet of desperation.

Warwick F:

There you go. Exactly. That's the one. That is exactly the one

Robert M:

That is Thoreau's quote. And you know what?

Warwick F:

Yeah.

Robert M:

100% I agree with that. What happens I think in life, and it certainly happened to me, you have a dream, you have a path, you have a burning desire, life gets in the way. We don't plan for it. It just happens. And it happens to most of us. Most people don't wind up doing exactly what they dreamt they would be doing when they were younger. Either it wasn't practical or it wasn't in the cards or their uncle offered them a job, and they went into this, that, or the other thing. Stuff happens. That's the usual case. It's the unusual case if somebody that knows at an early age, "This is what I want to do" and they actually do it.

Robert M:

So the question then becomes, all right, do you let that dream go? Was it just a youthful, fancy of some sort? Or do you pursue it? And frankly, when I decided to jump into the deep end of the pool, I had just passed my 60th birthday. And I said to myself, "If I don't it now, when the heck am I going to do it?" As you said before, you're not quite dead when you're 60, but you also know that when it comes to age, you're kind of on the far side of the mountain, okay? You're not going to be getting any younger. Not to get morbid about the whole thing. You start to have your life pass before your eyes and you kind of say, "All right. If I'm going to do something, if there's really something left that I want to do, when am I going to do it if I don't do it now."

Robert M:

And I think the pandemic accentuated that feeling. It did for me and it did for other people. Because all of a sudden, we all had to stop and we weren't doing the kinds of things that we were doing before. And it made people kind of examine their lives and say, "Am I doing what I want to do?" It put older people certainly in touch with their mortality because they said, "Okay there's a finite amount of time that we're all on this planet. What do I want to achieve? What do I want to pursue?" So it was all of these feelings together that led me to do what I did.

Warwick F:

There's one other story before we get to that, in a sense, one of the things you've talked about is you had a crucible I think in your 40s, a bad accident. And somehow I think that also wove into the story of mortality. Maybe it didn't trigger the change right then, but it seemed like that's part of your journey with the pivots. Now talk about the role that accident had in changing your perspective.

Robert M:

Well, you're right. It was part of my journey and actually it stopped my journey because I couldn't journey much after that. When I was in my later 40s, I used to be a big bicycle rider in New York City. That's where I was living at the time. I would go out for these long bike rides on the weekends and the like. And it was on a cold, cold day in December of 2000. It was a Saturday. I went out for a bicycle ride. I went over the 59th street bridge which was immortalized by Simon & Garfunkel, okay? And at that time at least, once you got over the bridge, you had to do a U-turn onto a service road in order to then come back around and go forward, because I was going out straight at head from the bridge.

Robert M:

Well, I went onto that service road, the U-turn, and unbeknownst to me there was a van that came up from behind, hit my bicycle. And although I don't know and remember any of this, apparently my bicycle flew backwards several times over the van. I landed on the street and I was knocked unconscious of course. The only good thing about it was that the guy that caused the accident stopped and called 911. But here's the moment that I remember. I was lying on my back and I was coming to, and I hear these two EMS guys hovering over me saying to each other, "Boy, is this guy lucky? We usually find people like him dead or paralyzed." And I was neither. And they ambulanced me over to a hospital. I found out the difference between an emergency room and a trauma center, okay?

Robert M:

At least in New York city, every borough has one trauma center where they deal with people, gunshot wounds, and things like that. Anyway, long story short, it turns out that I had broken my neck. The only reason that I didn't wind up dead or paralyzed ala Christopher Reeve is because I was phenomenally lucky. My neck exploded and none of the shrapnel hit my cord, my spinal cord. So you have an experience... And I came back from that. I had eight hours of surgery. I got more metal in my neck than Doans has pills as we used to say for any of the older people in the audience.

Robert M:

But you know what? Since that time, that gave me a tremendous kick in the rear. Because I said to myself, not to get too philosophical or religious about it, but I kind of felt like, "Okay, I was given an extension on my life and I needed to do something to make use of that time." And so that was a big, big push towards the dream of going into music. But again, that took place in my later 40s. And it wasn't until another decade that I finally was able to get to the point that I wanted to get to.

Warwick F:

So you hit 60 or thereabouts, and maybe there was a dream, a bit like a little plant that was growing and growing and beginning to push the other life, the law life aside. Sometimes it takes a while for dreams to bloom and blossom, but finally it perked its head through and got big enough. And I think you've talked about it, but was there a point at which you said, "Okay, this is it. Law is fine, but I'm going to go full on for music." Was there a point at which you feel like " I'm doing it. I'm not going to do this bifurcated life anymore. I'm going to do it"?

Robert M:

Yeah. Well, there was a point. I mean, again, I can't measure it to the day, but it just got to a point. I had been playing music even since that time I mentioned in the 40s, I got back into it. And so music was in my life, but it wasn't in my life at the level and the extent to which I wanted it to be. There came a point, as I said, where I decided this is what I want to go for. And I gave everything else up. I dove into the deep end of the pool, so to speak.

Robert M:

So the first thing that I did, I sat down and I said, "What do I need to do?" And I'm a great believer in baby steps, okay? Because if I said, from a standing start, I want to be playing Madison Square Garden next year, that's ridiculous. That's not going to happen. But I was able to write down the first five or so steps on a napkin that I needed to do. I knew I needed to form a band. I needed to write music again. I needed to start rehearsing with the band. I needed to get gigs with the band, things like that.

Robert M:

This is a true story. I went and I took out an ad on Craigslist to have like a mass audition to find the members of my band. And lo and behold, about 30 people showed up for this audition. It was in a rehearsal studio in New York city. And from that, I was able to choose the initial people for the band, which I named Project Grand Slam. And that's how it began. And from there, it was one baby step forward, one back, two sideways, that kind of a thing. But slowly but surely I started to make progress and I saw that this was possible, okay? Because not every dream of course is going to be possible.

Robert M:

I actually came up with this, this acronym called DREAM, D-R-E-A-M, to explain my theory. Would you like to hear that? Would that be worthwhile?

Warwick F:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, that'd be great.

Robert M:

Okay. D of DREAM obviously stands for the idea that everybody has to have a dream. And I believe that everybody does have a dream, even if you've been kind of suppressing it for years. The R of DREAM theory is the dream has to be at least somewhat realistic. Now I think people could say, "Well, Miller, you were 60 years old. You're not going to be a rock star at 60. Come on. That wasn't realistic." And you know what? They were probably right. But I thought it was possible, so I said, "I'm going to take a shot," okay? If Mick Jagger can still do it at 75, I can at least take my shot at my age. The E of DREAM theory for me is what I was just speaking about, execution. And I believe that the way you do that is through an action plan. The action plan needs to be a series of baby steps, because otherwise it's just too daunting. It's just too big.

Robert M:

The A of the theory is to adjust that plan where necessary, because there's never a plan that goes directly from square one to your conclusion without some kind of obstacle or hurdle. I like to quote the former heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson, he was asked, "When you go in the ring, did you have an action plan?" He said, "Yes. Every fighter has an action plan until they get hit in the face," okay? Then you got to adjust it. And the M stands for me for measurement. How do I measure my success? Because not every dream is going to succeed. In fact, I didn't go into this with the idea that it was either going to be a rock star or everything was a failure. I said to myself, "This is what I need to do. This is what I want to do. And as long as I see movement that's kind of moving in the right direction, I'm going to stick with it. But if it ever gets to the point where that's not working, okay, not every dream is going to work out."

Robert M:

So that's been my philosophy. And frankly, look, when we started out as a band, there were too many nights when we were basically giving private concerts for the bartender and the waitress because it's very hard to establish a following of course, but we just kept at it. The most important thing is never give up.

Gary S:

The thing I want to make sure listeners hear, and you've heard it throughout this series and I just want to call it out now, because you've used the phrase a couple of times early on Robert when you talked about life sort of just happened to you. And in the first act, I think it's true that sometimes things can just happen to us. We get on a road, and the road, it's almost like one of those automatic walkways, you're just kind of on it and it keeps tugging you ahead and you're on the road and you're fine. So you can get into the first act that can be somewhat unfulfilling or not exactly right, and they can kind of just happen to you. But what you've just described is to get to that second act, to get to that significance, to get to what brings your heart alive. That doesn't just tend to happen to you. You have to act to make that happen. Is that fair?

Robert M:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we tend to be in a point of stasis where we just continue on with whatever it is that we're doing. It's very hard to kind of motivate yourself to do something else. I recognize that. There's a lot of people that want to do things, but they just can't move themselves in the right direction. But you really have to. You have to say to yourself, "The only way I'm going to change whatever it is that I want to change about my life." Whether it's my job, my marriage, my hobbies, my situation, you need to take steps, you need to do something. And that's why I said start with baby steps, okay? Because that's the way you can take a huge task and break it down into small steps and actually accomplish something.

Warwick F:

Yeah. I mean, I think what you're saying, Robert, is so profound and I want listeners to hear that, is sometimes you think, "Well, gosh," to pick your example, "I'm never going to be Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney. That's not going to happen to me. I'm never going to play Madison Square Garden." So they think of the big dream and they stop. It's all too much. It's all too hard. "I'm 60. My finger's maybe aren't as nimble as they were in their 20s." It's the whole list of reasons of why not. You could probably list 100 things of why Robert Miller should not even bother trying. Maybe you went through that list. But what I find interesting is your whole DREAM methodology, baby steps, dream, realistic, execute, adjust, measurement. I mean, you had a plan. Maybe it would change, but you had a plan of "I'm going do Craigslist. I'm going to interview a bunch of people. I'm going to take baby steps. I'm not expecting Madison Square Garden. I'm going to be okay if the first few times it's just bartenders and waitresses."

Warwick F:

And as you rightly said, so long as I see a little bit of progress, I'm going to keep moving forward. To me, you had a plan. Almost more importantly than the plan, you had a philosophy of how to start something new that increased your chance of success. So does that make sense? Because I feel like this is more than just your story. There are key lessons for anybody who wants to start a second act with your methodology.

Robert M:

Well, there's either lessons where there's a lot of stupidity in what I did. But all I can say is that's the way I have to go if I needed to go forward, okay? I kind of do this with everything in my life. I decide if there's something I want to do, I come up with a plan of sorts and I figure out a pathway. And not everything works out. I hasten to add that all the time. Because people think, "Well, if you go after something, if you go after that brass ring and you don't get the brass ring, you've been a failure." And that's a terrible way to look at things. For me, the question was always, I would feel terrible, I would feel regret, which I never wanted to feel if I didn't take my shot. And I think that's the most important thing for people in life. Whatever it is that drives you, you want to be able to look back and say, "I took my best shot. If it works, fabulous. If it didn't work, you gave it your best try. No regrets."

Warwick F:

Absolutely. We've had other people on the podcast say something very similar, that failure is not succeeding. Failure is not taking the shot. Failure is not trying. We have heard multiple people who've achieved amazing things who've said "So long as I tried and gave it my best, that was my definition of success, whether it succeeded or not."

Robert M:

Almost everybody that succeeds has failed before they succeed.

Warwick F:

Right.

Robert M:

I had the guy on my podcast that is the president of WD-40, the miracle product that cleans up any squeaks and any problems you have with anything.

Warwick F:

Yeah. Yeah.

Robert M:

Well, they named it WD-40 because it failed 39 times before they got to the 40th iteration. Keep that in mind. You know that 17 record labels passed on the Beatles?

Gary S:

Yep.

Robert M:

Okay?

Gary S:

Yep.

Robert M:

How smart were those guys?

Gary S:

Not very smart and not very rich when the time was done.

Robert M:

That's right. There's always going to be failures. There's always going to be hurdles. There's always going to be people saying "This won't work. This can't work. You're too old. You're too stupid. You're too this. You're too that." The heck with them, okay? Take your best shot.

Gary S:

And you are quoting of that, take your best shot, earlier you quoted a famous boxer, Mike Tyson. There's another famous boxer who took his best shot and that's Rocky Balboa.

Robert M:

Yep.

Gary S:

And he certainly didn't succeed the first time, but he succeeded after that.

Robert M:

There you go.

Warwick F:

Yeah. I mean, that is really inspiring. Just the mentality of not everything you're going to do is going to succeed, but you've got to try, because too many people that have this burning desire. To me, if you have this burning path, which you did over decades, that's not just some childhood whim. A childhood whim doesn't last 60 years. It fades. You might have wanted to be an astronaut when you were 12. Typically, at 60 you're not still thinking, "Gosh, I wish I'd be an astronaut, but-"

Robert M:

Well, if you're Richard Branson, maybe you are.

Warwick F:

There you go. There's always an exception. Well said. But for you, that dream was there and you went for it. Some people, we're both over 60, they kind of have this attitude, "Gosh," you know, this sense of regret, "if only I'd..." You know? "Yeah. I'm moderately successful now." And you're more than moderately successful. You're really incredibly successful. But let's say you achieved some moderate level of success. "I could have done this at 25 or 35. Why didn't I? Was just too scared, gutless, whatever." What do you say to people that just have this sense of regret? "I missed 40 years of my life. Gosh. What could I have been? What could I have done?" that kind of mentality.

Robert M:

I can't tell you that I don't have those thoughts or didn't have those thoughts. Along the way, it took me a long, long time before I finally got to the place that I wanted to get to. And feelings of regret are some of the worst feelings that you can have, okay? There's very few people I think get through life and say, "I didn't make any mistake. I have no regrets whatsoever." We all have different regrets that we didn't do something. But again, there's a difference between something that we were precluded from doing or that we had no possibility of doing, versus those personal regrets for things that we could have done, but we just didn't do it. And I got to a point in my life where I said, "I don't want to feel whenever my life is over that I could have done something that I wanted to do, but I just didn't."

Robert M:

Why didn't I do it? Was I afraid of failure? That's usually the reason. Oh, I don't want people to laugh at me. I don't want people to think I was a failure. "Oh, you took your shot. That was stupid. You shouldn't have done it. Why'd you do it?" There's a million reasons why people look down upon others for their success or for their efforts. Who cares? You don't want to be guided in life by those kind of naysayers. I think you just have to follow that north star that's in you. That's the key. Figuring out what is it that turns you on, that makes you tick, that motivates you. That there's going to be something in there. It probably was in there when you were younger, maybe you suppressed it. But even if it wasn't there then, you got something now. Something you always wanted to do. It was a hobby. It was a...

Robert M:

I just read, for example, this is kind of silly but it points out. John Travolta just announced that he just got a pilot's license for another huge airliner, okay? This is what the guy has decided that he wanted to do. He was a successful movie star and singer and all of that. He wanted to become a pilot. And now he's apparently approved for 767s and 737s. And for all I know, the space shuttle he'll be flying next. But that's great, okay? That's what it's all about.

Warwick F:

I think you might have said that maybe you weren't ready for it when you're in your 20s. You obviously know who you are far more now, and it's impossible to answer these questions. But I know some people have said, and I sometimes think like with my own book, Crucible Leadership, that came out late last year of 2021. And it's like, "Gosh, it would've been nice if I'd been able to write that 20 years earlier." But I wasn't ready for a variety of reasons that listeners have heard on other podcasts. You feel like in a sense sometimes whether that you believe in God or the universe, that there's some divine hand that kind of knows when you're ready. And yeah, that's one of those philosophical conundrums that philosophers have been discussing for centuries. What's the role of divine hand versus free will? And to me, it's both/and. How's that possible? I have no idea. But do you feel in some sense that there was this divine hand, maybe you weren't ready, and you are ready now, and life happened for a reason even if we don't understand it kind of deal?

Robert M:

I completely subscribe to that. I don't know what the force is that causes it. But if I look back and I'm really honest, I would say, "Okay, why didn't I do something when I was 20? I wasn't ready for whatever reason, okay?" And when I look back now at what I have achieved since I went into this whole thing full time, it's been meaningful what has been achieved. I've got 11 albums out, I've got a 5 million video views and million streams, I've played festivals and concerts around the world, I've got a Billboard number 1 album. These are things that if I was really ready for all of that when I was 20, I think I would've done it then. And I didn't do it for a reason. And I can say to myself now, "Well, it was because life took me in a different direction." But I think that we all kind of push ourselves or orient ourselves towards certain directions. So somewhere along the line, I must have pushed myself in a different direction.

Warwick F:

I want to just talk a bit about, I guess, your twin passions. But in this case, those twin passions are working together. Project Grand Slam and Follow Your Dream podcast. It's not this bifurcated life. You love both. So just out of curiosity, why did you call your band Project Grand Slam.

Robert M:

Okay. Here's the story. When I was naming the band, my first group was called the Robert Miller Group. That was big surprise, right? And I said when I was naming this band, "I got to do something more creative than that." And I was thinking about what the name could be. I just kind of thought about the James Bond movies which I was a big fan of when I was a kid. One of those great movies was Goldfinger, okay? 1964 or so, '65. There was the plot to steal the gold out of Fort Knox.

Robert M:

I remembered that the plot to steal the gold was called Project Grand Slam. And I said to myself, "What a fabulous name for a band?" So I named the band Project Grand Slam. Six months later, I actually watched the movie again. And to my horror in the midst of the movie, Sean Connery as James Bond, talks about Operation Grand Slam, okay? So I've remembered it wrong. And I said, "Oh my God, what am I going to do now?" So I went and I Googled Operation Grand Slam. And I found out that there was a nickname for some kind of genocidal program in Africa called Operation Grand Slam. So I said, "Well, I don't think it would be very cool to name a band after a genocidal program, so I want to stick with Project Grand Slam. So that's how I got the name.

Warwick F:

Sounds very fortuitous. And so how would you describe your music again, just for listeners?

Robert M:

My music is, it's a fusion of rock and jazz with a twist of Latin thrown in, and as I like to say, a New York City groove.

Warwick F:

That's great.

Robert M:

All of my musicians, almost all of them come from other countries. They have come to New York City because it's a melting pot for musicians. So right now in the band, my singer is from Mexico. My keyboard player's from Venezuela, my guitar player's from Canada, my drummer is from Puerto Rico. They bring not only their youth, their incredible talent, but their enthusiasm and their culture to the music. So although I was raised in New York City and my father was a big fan of Spanish music, we used to listen to it all the time on the radio, when I had folks in the band with a Latin background said to me I had to work some Latin music into the sound. So that's how the Latin got into that.

Robert M:

So it's kind of a fusion, it's a melting pot. It's completely against the grain of what happens in music now. Right now you're supposed to do one type of music. That's it. You play the same song over and over and over again. You just give it a different name. That's what artists do. And I was completely from a different school. I love variety. I love the idea that you could have different sounds and different influences and have them all reflect in the music. And that's one of the things I said to myself, "This is what I'm going to do to be true to myself."

Warwick F:

You know, what I love about what you're saying is, be true to yourself. Don't listen to the market mavens in music saying, "This is what you've got to do to be successful. Have one song and just change a couple chords." And you just over and over and over again, it sounds always very similar and it'll be familiar. "Oh, it's a Robert Miller song."

Robert M:

That's true.

Warwick F:

"I recognize that." And that's probably makes sense, but the other thing I love is you have such diverse people and themes in your music. And sort of out of diversity, you have a beautiful, to use your word, fusion into a new sound. I think that's maybe a metaphor for a wider discussion perhaps of diversity of experience can fuse together to form something greater, something new. So I think there's also a subtext to what you're doing that's important for society too. Don't you think?

Robert M:

I think that... There's the old expression, variety is the spice of life. And I believe that works in music as well. I love taking chances, doing things that are different, kind of always pushing the boundaries. It's just what I like to do.

Warwick F:

So talk about your podcast, because I get Project Grand Slam and yes, because when you said that, I thought, "Oh, that's right. That's from James Bond," but I didn't really figure out myself that, gosh, it was operation. But yes, so fortunate that you misremembered. Now that makes sense. But it doesn't sound like you had a lifelong dream to do a podcast, because obviously they didn't exist until I don't know what? 10, 15 years ago. What made you decide to do that? Because that does feel different. Why a podcast called Follow Your Dream?

Robert M:

Yeah, well it wasn't 10, 15 years ago that I was even thinking about podcasts. I didn't even know what a podcast was honestly about a year ago. We were in the middle of the pandemic. We had just put out an album in January of 2020 called East Side Sessions. I thought it was a terrific album. We were ready to go out and play by behind it. And then of course the world locked down and we couldn't play any longer. So the first thing that I did was I said, "Okay, we're stumped at this moment. Let's take four of the songs from the album and let's do some videos, because that we could do." The first two videos with kind of Zoom video with everybody in their own little box, like the Hollywood squares, and we're all lip syncing to the songs.

Robert M:

And then the third video, we did an animated video of a Beatles song, this totally obscure Beatle song called I Want to be Your Man that Ringo sang in a Hard Days Night.

Gary S:

Excellent. An excellent song.

Robert M:

But we changed it to, I Want to be Your Girl because we have a female singer. And then the fourth song that we did the video of, it's a song called The Partners. It's my cowboy jazz song, okay? Talk about it on an unusual combination. I did a song that literally kind of had horses hooves and whips and six gun shooting combined with a jazz kind of a thing. It's all around the storyline where you had two partners in the old west that went out and robbed people. And one partner robbed the other partner and the other partner was getting back at the first partner.

Robert M:

And I said to my video guy, "How are we going to do a video of this song?" He said, "Let me look around." He somehow found a 1960 Spaghetti Western where the plot of the movie kind of fit the storyline of this song. So we put out a video that was taking the Spaghetti Western and putting it to this music and it actually did very well. This is all leading up to, I needed to do something to keep my creative juices going. I was writing music. We couldn't practice. We couldn't play anywhere. And somebody suggested to me, "Why don't you think about doing a podcast?"

Robert M:

And I was very, very dissatisfied with social media as a musician because you put your music up on YouTube or you put it on Facebook and it takes absolutely no commitment, no engagement for somebody to hit a like button. So you get all these likes and you get all these comments, and at the end of the day, it doesn't mean anything because there's no real attachment. And somebody said, "Well, you should look into podcasts because in a podcast you have a longer form of communication. You can establish a much deeper connection with your audience." And the more I looked into it, the more I said, "Gee, I think you're right."

Robert M:

And because of my back round, you know, what I did, I followed my dream. I thought to myself that there were others out there, many, many others that would love to follow and perhaps succeed at their dream, so why don't I start a podcast with two goals? One is to inspire and motivate people to follow their dream, whatever that dream might be. And secondly, it was another way for me to introduce my music to a brand new, bigger audience than I had before.

Robert M:

So in each episode, I bring into play one of my songs as the featured song, and I try to make it relevant somehow. And I started to interview people that were among the more well-known musicians, but also others that had accomplished their dream. And what's remarkable about the podcast is that it has just spread out in a way that I never anticipated. As we speak today, I have listeners in 191 countries. I mean, that blows me away. There's only 193 countries in the whole world.

Warwick F:

Wow.

Robert M:

Somehow or other people have found me in places that I didn't even know were countries. So that goal has been accomplished as well. The podcast is doing very nicely. I've got great guests, I get my music out there, and I've got listeners around the whole world.

Warwick F:

I mean, that is remarkable. I mean, I love sort of the tagline you have for the podcast. Remember you're never too old. It's never too late to follow your dream. I'm sure in our society, as you say, especially after COVID, people have been shut in, people realizing their mortality. There's a lot of folks that think, "Gosh maybe I could do what Robert did. Maybe I'm a musician. Maybe I'm not a musician." But just telling people stories of it's not being too late to pursue your dream. I'm not a massive believer in so-called traditional retirement. Studies show that if you just sit on the beach or play golf without any purpose, not knocking it, you'll probably die younger. If you have purpose in life, whatever that means to you, you'll live longer and you'll probably be happier. So you're preaching life isn't over at 60, that it's never too late. A lot of people think it is too late, but that's an important mission. So I think it's ironic that out of COVID, in your case, something good happened, a dream was birthed that may not have been birthed without it.

Warwick F:

I mean, you're somebody that listens to your inner soul, listens to your passion and you don't snuff it out. Maybe you chat to some close friends and come up with a plan along your sort of dream, realistic, execute, adjust, measurement deal. So, you didn't just do one dream. You did more than one. You did a couple.

Robert M:

Well, I actually did a third as well.

Warwick F:

Wow.

Robert M:

Because along the way after I started the podcast, somebody said to me, "why don't you write a book? Your podcast is great, but why don't you do a book?" And I said, "Yeah, what am I going to do? War and Peace or something like that? I'm not an author." So they said, "Well, why don't you just kind of do it as a memoir?" And I said to myself, "Okay. What can I do that is within my scope?" So I put together what I call the Follow Your Dream handbook. I think I named it handbook after, remember there was a book a long time ago called the Preppy Handbook, right?

Warwick F:

I do.

Robert M:

I always liked that. I think of a handbook, that's pretty cool. And what it said to me was that I could make it kind of part memoir so I could tell my story, but the rest of it would be a how-to. So to try and tell people "This is how I did it. Maybe it would work for you as well. Here are my steps. I put that dream theory into it." So in my spare time, I wrote this little book, it's about 100 some odd, 120 pages, something like that. I put in a lot of pictures and stuff like that to prove to people that I actually was doing what I claimed to be doing. It went out last August. And lo and behold, it became like an Amazon Best Seller on day one. It's sitting out there, it's just doing its thing. So that worked as well.

Gary S:

This is the time in the show when I normally say the captain has turned on the fasten seatbelt sign, indicating we've begun our descent. It's time to land the plane. But because we're talking to a maker of music, I'm going to change that up and say, we're at a live show. The band has just fake ended it. It's left the stage for that moment where we all clap, knowing that an encore is coming. Speaking of the Beatles, Ringo Star just stops doing that. He just says, "Okay, I'm going to sit here for a few seconds. You know I'm not leaving. I'm going to come back and play encores." Before we get to the encore though, I would remiss Robert if I did not give you the chance to tell listeners how they can find out more about Project Grand Slam, more about your podcast, more about your book. Where can they find you on social media to find out all this stuff?

Robert M:

Easiest way is I have two sites that are worth mentioning. One is for the podcast, it's just followyourdreampodcast.com. And the other is for the band and it's also simple, it's projectgrandslam.com. And if anybody wants to send me an email, just send it to robert@followyourdreampodcast.com. I'd be happy to answer.

Warwick F:

So Robert, I just find what you do is inspiring. I mean, it's just not just you've launched a band in your 60s, but it's your philosophy of daring to dream and you have a plan and a methodology of how to do that. And you're not afraid. You could have said, "Project Grand Slam, number 1 billboard. It's pretty successful. I'm good. I'm done. I'm living the dream. This is awesome." And that would be great. That would be stupendous, but when other dreams come along, you just said, "Okay, no, no, no. I've got my dream. No more. I only need one." No, you're willing to say, "Okay, so let's try this whole podcast thing. Maybe I can help others follow their dreams later in life." Then it's like, "Oh, maybe there's a book that I can do." So it's being willing to listen to that inner voice that you now do. You don't ignore it. You flesh it out. Come up with a plan you're trying. If it doesn't work, that's fine.

Warwick F:

I feel like you have a whole philosophy of nurturing dreams and being willing to see if they're going to happen, being willing to fail that I think people need to learn from. So there might be listeners who they're in this second act, maybe they're over 40 or over 60, and they're listening. What would be a message of hope that you would give them as they're listening today?

Robert M:

First of all, thank you both for having me on. I really do appreciate it. I think we've said it together. You've said it just now. My mantra has been that you're never too old and it's never too late to follow your dream. And I am living proof of that. I think there are many other people that are in that category. Give it your best shot, okay? We only go around once in life. You don't want to have regrets. It's not about success or failure. As the saying goes, it's about the journey, not the destination, okay? Keep smiling.

Gary S:

I have been in the communications business long enough to know when the last words been spoken on a subject. I've also been a music fan long enough to know when Elvis has left the building. Both of those just occurred with the last statement from our guest.

Gary S:

Listeners, thank you so much for spending time with us, not just on Beyond The Crucible, but also on our series, Second Act Significance. We're not done yet. There are more episodes to come. If you've heard something in this series that really has touched you, that really has motivated you, if you've begun your own second act yourself because of what you've heard, we'd love to hear from you. Go to crucibleleadership.com. You can click on a link there and you can send us an email. And we'd love, love, love to hear from you. Until next time then listener that we are together for another episode of Second Act Significance here on Beyond The Crucible, do remember that your crucible experiences, we understand, Robert understands, Warwick understands. Your crucible experiences are painful. They're difficult. They can make you feel like some bad things have just happened to you, that you're just kind of stuck in the situation that is not fulfilling, that does not feel like it's bringing you satisfaction. But it's not the end of your story. As we talked about here, it can be the beginning of a new story once you learn the lessons of it, once you take some baby steps, as Robert talks about and Warwick says, take one small step at a time. As you do those things, as you advance forward beyond your crucible, beyond that first act, beyond the intermission from the first act and grab hold of your second act, you can end up at a place that's the most fulfilling of all, because that is a life of significance.

We take to the high seas this week with Erik and Emily Orton — which is where they headed in 2014, after Erik’s dream job as a playwright and theatrical producer came to a crashing halt when his off-Broadway show was closed after only a few performances. The failure left him fearful and rudderless – until his curiosity about sailing became his family’s passion for it and they steered their boat’s rudder on a 5,000 mile journey from New York to the Caribbean.

What Erik and Emily learned on the journey, with their five kids sharing the adventure with them, was how to turn worry into wonder and the importance of building confidence, credibility and calm. Those are truths they now teach others through their speaking, writing and coaching.

To learn more about Erik and Emily Orton’s family adventures and their coaching services, visit www.theawesomefactgory.nyc

Highlights

Transcript

Warwick F:

Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership.

Eric O:

I'd go down to this high rise in the financial districts every afternoon and I'd work 3 till midnight. So I would take a dinner break right around sunset, and I would walk along the Hudson River. I would see these sailboats that just carve their way up and down, silhouetted against the sky.

Eric O:

During my dinner break, that's when Emily and I would get on the phone and we would talk as we try to figure out how to dig ourselves out of this hole that we found ourselves in. I would describe this to her, and she was happy that I would see these boats and that they gave me a sense of peace. As I described it often enough, I realized that there was a sailing school right downstairs from where I worked, and that's where these boats were coming from. She said, "You should go check it out. Maybe you'd want to learn how to sail."

Gary S:

Eric Orton ended up taking his wife's advice, and it changed their family's livelihood and life. Hi, I'm Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show. On this episode of our series, Second Act Significance, we take to the high seas with Eric and his wife, Emily. The high seas is where they went in 2014 after Eric's dream job as a playwright and theatrical producer came to a crashing halt when his off-Broadway show was closed after only a few performances. The failure left him fearful and rudderless, until his curiosity about sailing became his family's passion for it, and they steered their boat's rudder on a 5,000 mile journey from New York to the Caribbean.

Gary S:

What Eric and Emily learned on the journey with their five kids sharing the adventure with them was how to turn worry into wonder and the importance of building confidence, credibility, and calm. Those are truths they now teach others through their speaking, writing, and coaching. Eric and Emily Orton have found second act significance and you can, too.

Warwick F:

Well, Eric and Emily, thank you so much for being here. I mean, it's so exciting what you're doing with the Seven at Sea book and The Awesome Factory. Just your journey on the sailboat for a year, I mean, that's just magical that people only dream about but you do advocate for turning dreams into reality.

Warwick F:

Before we get into what the challenges that set up that year on the sailboat, talk a bit about maybe, as they say in the movies, the origin story of Eric and Emily, and maybe not every beat growing up, but just what some of the backstory of who the Ortons are before we get to the rocks, so to speak, with some of the challenges.

Emily O:

Okay. I love this question. So we both grew up with dads in the military. So we moved around a bit and our paths intersected first just outside of DC when we were still in elementary school grades, but we did not meet there. We met later in college. We were in the same school and that's where we actually met each other, and right away, we didn't-

Gary S:

Oh, this is going to be good. I can tell they're laughing before they say what happened.

Emily O:

I'm like, "I don't want to drift here. I want to navigate."

Eric O:

Navigate carefully, right?

Emily O:

We didn't hit it off first thing, but before long, it became apparent to me that Eric was just a genuine good guy, and that really resonated with me, and I was very interested in him, and he's so forthright. He told me right away as soon as he heard, "Nothing will ever happen between us, but we'll stay friends." I can say we've been married for 26 years now and we are still friends. So we were both right.

Warwick F:

Yeah, but it sounds like there is something between you now, right? You're more than just friends. Would that be a fair assumption?

Eric O:

Sure, yeah. With five kids, I would say we've moved beyond the friend stage, for sure. So far so good.

Emily O:

I think we were recently each sharing what was a moment from our childhood where we felt proud. As we were sharing those stories, I feel like that really ties into the core being of who we really are. For mine, it was just that my mom and my grandma had taken me to some boring conference, and I had to wear a dress, and I was nine, and I didn't care about any of that stuff, but at this restaurant we went to afterwards, I was presented with my first slice of cheesecake. I'd never heard of it. Can you imagine hearing of it for the first time? What a weird concept, cake made out of cheese?

Emily O:

So I was trepidatious, but after I had it I was like, "Wow! That was very small," that slice of cheesecake and I wanted more. My mom said, "Well, if you can pay for it, you can get a second slice."

Emily O:

As a nine year old, I'm not carrying my wallet with me. She was basically just saying no, and I just sat there thinking about cheesecake, and I excused myself ostensibly to go to the restroom, but what I had remembered is that there was a wishing well out front of the restaurant. So I walked out of the restaurant. I stepped into the wishing wall and I filled my skirt with coins, and I brought back a pile of wet money.

Emily O:

My mom was aghast that I had done this in front of everyone. She said, "Those are other people's wishes," and my grandma came to bat for me and she said, "I bet they wished for a little girl to have a piece of cheesecake." I got a second piece of cheesecake, but mostly what I think makes me proud of that moment is that I had nothing and I wanted something, and I just figured out what was in my environment to find a way to make it happen. So I guess as far as background on us, for me, that would be illustrative.

Eric O:

I guess the experience for my part that Emily was talking about, because we were running a retreat this past week and the opening question that we asked everyone was, "What's a moment from your childhood that you're proud of?" I was stumped until afterwards I was telling Emily, I was like, "Actually, I played a version of baseball as a kid called coach pitch." I don't know if it's still a thing, but it's between T-ball and regular baseball where-

Warwick F:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. My boys did coach pitch, so I'm familiar with it. Yeah.

Eric O:

Okay. So coach pitch is where the coach actually throws the ball and some kid stands next to him to field anything that gets hit. So my position was actually right field, where the ball never goes. They put me there because I was no good. The kid that was playing pitcher got injured or couldn't make it. Anyway, so where could they afford to bring somebody in from? They brought me in from right field and I stood next to the coach who's pitching it.

Eric O:

Then big Dan on the other team comes to the plate. He's this big. We're all eight years old and he looks like a 13 or 15-year-old. He's just huge. The coach pitches the ball and all the outfielders backed up to get ready for his line drive for the fence. He hits this ball and it's going straight over my head and I'm like, "Okay." I just put my hand up and I jumped, and I feel it bounced off the tip of my glove and I come down and I turned around and I looked behind me to see how far, "is it a home run or is it inside the park?" I don't see the ball.

Eric O:

Of course, I look in my glove and it's there, and I was stunned. Everyone else was stunned. The place erupts. It's one of those eight-year-old boys' dreams. I'm just so glad that I went for it, not even thinking I had a chance, but I went for it. It was fun because they did a little write up in the baseball team newsletter and I became the permanent guy standing next to the pitcher, but really, just sometimes you don't know if you even stand a chance, but if you go for it, you just might.

Gary S:

As a baseball fan, I have to interject. Just one, one little comment. Guess who played most of his games in right field? That would be Mr. Babe Ruth.

Eric O:

What?

Gary S:

So when people say right field is where the balls never hit and the "not good players" go there, Babe Ruth played right field. Just tell them that.

Eric O:

Wow. I'm making a note of that. Thank you, Gary. I had no idea.

Warwick F:

That is so great. Those are wonderful stories. I got to imagine, Eric, for weeks or more after people were saying, "Eric Orton, that's the guy who got big Dan out."

Warwick F:

"No, Big Dan? Are you kidding me?"

Warwick F:

Right? I'm sure you're a legend. That's cool.

Eric O:

Pretty much, yeah, as much as you can be as an eight-year-old.

Emily O:

Our family visited Germany before borders closed for the pandemic, and he-

Eric O:

This is where, I was living in Germany at the time.

Emily O:

He was living in Germany and he took us to this baseball field on the military base to show all the kids where it happened. So yeah.

Warwick F:

Wow. It also reminds me of the other movie, Field of Dreams. That was your field of dreams.

Eric O:

With Kevin Costner, yup. Me, Kevin Costner, and Babe Ruth, basically.

Gary S:

Hey, there's a play in that. There could be a play in that.

Eric O:

Totally. Baseball through the ages.

Gary S:

Yes.

Warwick F:

There you go. So I want to move ahead of it, but what I love about that story is they're both maybe, I don't know, origin stories but maybe a vignette of what was to come about two people that just went for it, that went for their dreams. So I want to fast forward here, and unfortunately with the pandemic, it's been harder to go see shows, but I grew up going to plays, and we live in Annapolis, Maryland. So we actually have seen Wicked on Broadway a number of years ago and like everybody, it's unbelievable. So the fact that you were involved in there and helping to produce it is just unbelievable.

Warwick F:

That's a lead up to your challenge, but talk about ... You obviously love music and producing and the theater. So talk about some of that background and Wicked, and then you went on to get an Emmy award for Berlin. So talk a bit about that period in your life because you love music and the theater. So I mean, that feels a bit making your dreams come true. I mean, it sounds pretty exciting.

Eric O:

It was pretty exciting. Yeah. I studied music growing up and got into musical theater by accident. My friends signed me up for an audition in high school and I went. Anyway, I started doing theater and studied music and was writing in musicals and just started producing them when I was in college, mostly my own stuff.

Eric O:

Then right out of college, I got a job as a junior manager a Broadway show, and we moved to New York basically straight out of college. We got married while we were at school and we already had our oldest daughter was born while we were students, but we moved there with two kids. Our second daughter was born right before we moved there.

Eric O:

Fast fast forward, I don't know, eight, 10 years, I was managing the national tours of Wicked. It was a pretty dream job. I love the show. Steven Schwartz, who wrote it, was a hero of mine, so getting to work with him. Before I'd accepted this job on Wicked, I agreed to produce this little show called The Arc, which is about Noah and the arc, but it has a modern take on it.

Eric O:

I felt a deep loyalty to this little project of mine, and so I left this really secure and high profile job on Wicked because a secure job in the theater is a contradiction in terms, but I had that yet I walked away with Emily's support. It was a pretty exciting time because I'd raised the money, I'd hired the director and the designers, and I booked the deal with the theater, and it was extra exciting because Emily was due to give birth to our fourth child, now our first son, the day that this show was scheduled to open.

Eric O:

The show came and opened up and it was a great time. The audiences loved it and we had a big party afterwards. Then Emily, right on schedule, went into labor and gave birth to our beautiful boy. I said to my producing partner, "Hey, I'm going to take a day, 24 hours. I'm just going to go be with my girls and our new son."

Eric O:

So I went off radar, and while I was in the hospital, the reviews came out and they weren't amazing. They weren't terrible, but my producing partner, who is a generation older than me, was doing her best. Without consulting me, though, she made the decision to post a closing notice for the show, which for her meant one thing because she was an established producer and had all kinds of other revenue streams, and for us as a young dad and as a young family, I don't think she realized that it was everything.

Eric O:

Basically, when I came out of the hospital and found out that the show was closing, I was broke, I was unemployed, and quite frankly, I felt humiliated at this professional failure, and I ended up as the poster boy for failure because there was a picture of me on this roundup article that they had in Crain's Business New York. I don't know how many people read that magazine, but it's a big broadsheet that they print in New York City, and my face was front and center of why the off-Broadway business model was broken.

Eric O:

So that failure put me in a pretty dark place. I was confused. I was scared. Yet, I still had Emily and our kids and I felt the responsibility of providing for them. So I just went and I got a job, any job, which ended up being temping at a bank in the financial district doing graphics at night. That's our low point. That was where we got into the crucible that I think was a real pivot point for us.

Warwick F:

So Emily, as this is going on, you probably have a mix of emotions. You have a baby boy that's just sheer delight and gratitude, and you've got a husband that was at the pinnacle of success and now is being branded as a failure by Crain's Business Journal, which I'm familiar with. It's a big deal. So what was going through your mind as all this was happening and you're trying to focus on a new little life there? That must have been a sea of different emotions, I'm guessing.

Emily O:

Well, I always say I will always bet on Eric Orton. I know I married him for a reason. I really believe in him, but he needed this space to feel the grief of being disoriented. I actually think it was a huge blessing that around that same time we were able to have this little baby and we have these three sweet little girls, and Eric would just hold him and look at his eyes and be like, "Oh." It's just very centering. As much as it inspires you to feel like, "Oh, I need to take care of my family," your family being there also is a source of comfort and strength.

Emily O:

I've heard Eric say to young men considering marriage to say, "Nothing lights a fire under your butt like having a wife and kids. It makes you pretty ambitious," but no. He was devastated and it was very challenging. I'm just so grateful that we're able to just talk and communicate. He actually had this unexpected paternity leave where we spent a couple of weeks just saying, "Oh, my gosh! Let me stop reeling and make a pivot."

Gary S:

As we're about to pivot into the next bit of your story, you said something to me, Eric, when we talked offline when I explained the nature of our series, Second Act Significance. You actually indicated, and it's not surprising at all given your theatrical background, you indicated that you called the period after your show closed and you guys were looking for what that next act was going to be, you called it what?

Eric O:

Intermission.

Gary S:

Right. Right. What follows intermission if it's the first act that has been intermissioned is what?

Eric O:

The second act, yeah.

Gary S:

Right. Yeah.

Eric O:

So yeah, we're more than happy to talk some more about that, but yeah, we definitely feel like our life is divided into two parts. There was before the sailboat and before everything that led up to the sailboat and everything after it. So for sure, there's a two act structure going on here.

Warwick F:

So here you were in this, for what I understand, you're in this hired office building doing a temp job, and I think, what, during a dinner break, you were looking out the window and it seemed like that look out the window changed your life. So just talk about what happened as you were there in that temp job.

Eric O:

So yeah, I'd go down to this high rise in the financial district every afternoon and I'd work 3 till midnight. So I would take a dinner break right around sunset and I would walk along the Hudson river, and I would see these sailboats that just carved their way up and down silhouetted against the sky. During my dinner break, that's when Emily and I would get on the phone and we would talk as we tried to figure out how to dig ourselves out of this hole that we found ourselves in.

Eric O:

I would describe this to her. She was happy that I would see the boats and that they gave me a sense of peace. As I described it often enough, I realized that there was a sailing school right downstairs from where I worked, and that's where these boats were coming from. She said, "You should go check it out. Maybe you'd want to learn how to sail."

Eric O:

I told her that it wasn't going to happen because here's what I knew about sailing is that you had to be rich to sail, you had to be well-connected or you needed to grow up around sailboats and have a pedigree. None of which were true from me. Yet, she persisted because we talked every night and-

Emily O:

I just want to say we had this whole system where he would call me on his cellphone, tell me the number of the payphone, then I would call him back on the payphone so that we wouldn't use up our minutes during his dinner break. I don't even know if there are pay phones anymore in Manhattan, but-

Eric O:

That was the very beginning-

Emily O:

That's how we made it work.

Eric O:

Yeah, because we had one cellphone between us and it only had a few hundred minutes and we were just so poor, but then yeah, eventually, we got a phone and so I was able to do these for river walks. It was realizing that there was this school down there and that I could learn about this. That was really the beginning of sailing as a family because we knew nothing. We started from zero, I would say.

Warwick F:

So it wasn't like, "Oh, I see the sailboat. Let's go to the Caribbean," and the vision just happened. It was like a Mount Olympus kind of deal. Yeah. It's funny because we just did a podcast recently that talks about how visions don't always happen overnight. There can be little steps. So why sailing? I mean, there's a lot of things you could do. I mean, why even go to a sailing school? Why even play around with sailboats?

Eric O:

Well, I think, for me, it symbolized the peacefulness, and I guess I've always ... I used to deliver newspapers as a kid. I don't know if people remember newspapers, but I used to throw them on people's doorsteps before the sun came up. So I got to look at the stars a lot. It was this cosmic philosophical time, not every day, but every now and then I would just contemplate my place in the universe, and I always thought about people over the centuries that navigated by the stars. I had this romanticized view of it.

Eric O:

So that plus seeing these boats on the river I just thought, "I need to get to a bigger place where I see things in a bigger perspective and so that my problems will seem smaller." I think that's where the idea of sailing...that's what drew me in emotionally.

Eric O:

I think another important piece was a friend of ours was starting up a life coaching business and we agreed to be her guinea pigs. She sent us these questions that we call blue sky questions. We actually share these questions now when we take people sailing or we do retreats and things like that. Some of them are, "What would you do if you weren't afraid? What would you if money were no object? What would you do if you knew you would succeed?" and there's a few others, but I took some time to answer all these questions.

Eric O:

The point of them is to really just to pause fear and to mute it because so often, those feelings work that we have after these failures, they can crush us and they can take out any hope or ability to dream. So we have to just set those aside momentarily when we have no idea how we're going to pull things off, we don't have the money, we don't know if we'll succeed, and just say, "Set that aside. What would I like to do? What calls to me?"

Eric O:

So when I answered these questions, I wrote down a hundred things, over a hundred. One of them was to sail for a year as a family in, I think, it was in the Mediterranean was where I...spend a year on a boat in the Mediterranean. We won't get into that right now, but basically, that was the first time I spoke it into the universe by writing it down. Then yeah, it grew gradually from there.

Emily O:

Well, he didn't tell me that he wrote that in his journal, and I didn't know he was thinking about it in those terms. I just thought he's been so devastated and he needs something that's just fun, some new skill to learn or something like that. So that's why I was really pushing for it, but he went in and he asked, "So what does it take?" The people were really nice, "Yeah, no problem. We can set you up with the class," but because of the hours he worked, they didn't have classes at that time. So he was going to have to bring the class with him, basically.

Emily O:

So he started asking all his friends and coworkers and who else, whoever, if they wanted to ... He only needed to find three people, right? There's eight million people in New York City. So he's asking around for a couple of weeks and he's not finding anybody. Then he comes out with this great idea. He goes, "Why don't you and our two oldest kids take this class with me?" The kids are nine and 11. They're very excited. They think this is the greatest thing they've ever heard, but I don't really see how this works budgetwise because then now the class is four times the expense and we still have three kids that need a babysitter.

Emily O:

So I tried to play that card first and like, "Well, I don't really know how we'll afford it."

Emily O:

He was like, "I will get a second job."

Emily O:

Then I finally had to admit to my own fears that I am really scared of deep water. It hasn't really come to a head up to now. Even though we live on Manhattan island, it just hasn't been an issue, and I was pretty scared about it. He said, "Look," he twisted it around and sent it back to me like this, he goes, "You know what? That's perfect. That's exactly why you should learn how to sail because then you never have to go in the water."

Emily O:

I feel like I've been had, but no. The kids were excited. At that point, we had started homeschooling our kids, which is a whole different journey, but I cared very much about them having hands-on experiences and concrete experiences. So we went for it. He got the second job. We all went down and we took this class and we learned how to tack and jive and do all that stuff on this tiny little sailboat.

Emily O:

The main thing we learned is that we all get seasick. So that was an obstacle throughout our journey. Then after that class, Eric said, "I thought we're good," and he's like, "Well, we don't really know if we can do it until we go with no instructor." So we go with no instructor, but we don't just say like, "Let's the four of us go with no instructor." We bring the whole family. So now we're adding a six-year-old, a two-year-old and a baby who can't sit up on her own, and we decide we're going to try this for the first time in Tom's River, New Jersey.

Emily O:

As you might expect, we were a spectacle, and other boaters were pointing at us and laughing. Every time we tipped a little, the kids would cry or scream. I'm trying to nurse a baby through two life jackets. The best part of the day is when we were back on land throwing rocks in the water. That was the part we're like, "Oh, my gosh! We're never going to do this again. That was rough," but Eric continued sailing for a couple of seasons with just gathering up friends, whoever wants to chip in we'll do this.

Emily O:

After a couple seasons, he was a little more confident anticipating what might need to be done and being able to give instructions and just be a really present captain. He said, "You know what? Let's try it again." We joined a little sailing club in New Rochelle and we started going out as a family. It was this really beautiful season where every kid had a turn at the tiller, and it's very different when a kid gets to put their hand on the tiller, the experience that they have. We didn't get any cell service. So we're just looking at each other's eyes and when we'd sing together, we'd talk, we'd just lay around in the sun or read a lot of books.

Emily O:

We did this two, three times a month. I thought we were at the perfect amount of adventure. I never had to get in the water. It was close to home. All that was working out great for me.

Emily O:

Then one day, Eric put his arm around me in our little apartment and he said, "I think the seven of us on a sailboat would be enough universe for me."

Emily O:

I was like, "Really?" because he has so many interests. He said he wrote down over a hundred things. He's like, "Yeah. That's all I want, just the seven of us on a sailboat." I had all these questions going off in my head about like, "Well, that requires a much bigger boat, a much higher skill level. There's engines and electricity and water. What if we would get injured or hurt or get in a storm or what about leaving our communities, our school communities or our friend communities?" All of that stuff just it made a traffic jam in my head, but at that time, I didn't say any of that stuff. I just said, "When would you want to go?" He had an answer he knew because he said, "Emily, we have this really short window of time with our kids and it's closing, and I would want to do something like this as a whole family before our oldest one leaves for college." I think she was around 14 at the time.

Emily O:

Maybe living on a sailboat wasn't the biggest dream of my heart. I was actually pretty scared about it, but what I did feel good about what I heard him saying was our children will have me around 24/7. They'll have that influence and they'll get to be with their dad all the time, and I couldn't think of a greater gift, and then that just dovetails in with, yes, hands-on experience, try new things together, create memories.

Emily O:

I really have this belief that memories are the best investment that we can make because they always increase in value. So we just proceeded from there. For me to just real quickly to face that fear about deep water, we were taking a class in the Caribbean to help us know how to sail these larger boats, and I knew we needed this for just basic safety and survival. In my mind this was not a vacation at all even though it was in the beautiful, British Virgin islands.

Emily O:

The instructor every day would invite the students to go snorkeling at night or in the morning. So when I am sitting there in the cockpit and everyone has gone off and they flippered away to the reef and I'm just there thinking, "Do I really think I can live on a sailboat for a year without getting in the water? What example am I really setting for my kids? I'm telling them one thing about how they can overcome their fears and then I'm sitting here in the cockpit. Who do I really want to be in this world?"

Emily O:

So I just put on a mask and flippers and my heart was racing like crazy, but I jumped in and I just started kicking as fast as I could. I saw this large shape just came across from my right periphery to my left periphery before I could even register what it was.

Eric O:

Jaws was her deepest fear.

Emily O:

Yeah. I know. Sharks. So anyway, I saw it. First, I just saw a shape and a color and then I was like, "Wait. That is a sea turtle. That's fine," and then immediately the next thought right behind it was like, "What eats sea turtles?" It turns out I actually could swim faster than I thought originally, and I made it all the way to the reef. It was incredible like Finding Nemo. It was so much different than watching it on TV and being fully immersed in that experience and in that world was such a surprise to me. I was so fascinated that I forgot to be afraid.

Emily O:

So the two takeaways for me were that this was going to be a lot more fun than I thought, that, yeah, we could maybe really do this thing and that I could live in the water like this. The second one was that it changed the relationship that I felt like I had with fear because I thought that was a very sturdy fear. I'd been living that way for three decades, and I just thought it was real. When I kicked the tires like that, it just disintegrated.

Emily O:

So I had to reevaluate all the other fears that I already had. Every time a new fear comes up, I have to say really what other favorites are hiding behind those fears. So for me, that was a real turning point.

Warwick F:

That's huge. I mean, if you can conquer one of your deepest fears, the fear of deep water, it's like, "Okay. I conquered my deepest fear. I'm ready for the next one. What could be worse than that?" You had to, I'm sure, face fear economically. It's like, "Well, how do we afford the boat? In a year, how are we going to get income?" I'm sure you solved all those problems, came up with a plan, and off you went.

Warwick F:

I mean, people listening to this are like, "That's incredible. I mean, they knew nothing about sailing. They learned about sailing. They learned about how to sail in the Caribbean and take a year off sailing in the Caribbean." Most people dream about those things, but they never do it. They're sitting on their deathbed thinking, "Wouldn't it be fun if ..."

Warwick F:

I think of that quote that I'm sure you probably heard of by Thoreau, "They live lives of quiet desperation." That encompasses most of humanity. They have dreams and they never do it, but you did. So talk about, because that leads into what you do now, how did that year with your family change your life because that intermission, it fundamentally changed the direction of your life in ways you probably never could have imagined.

Eric O:

For sure. I often get asked what the hardest part of the journey was. I think the hardest part was actually when I was taking those walks along the Hudson and Emily said, "You should go check this out." The moment I stepped across the threshold into the sailing school and said, "Hey, I'm interested in learning how to sail. How does this work?" That was the hardest part. Yes, there would be storms and there would be logistics and there would be all kinds of other problems down the road that we would have to solve, but I think the hardest part of these things is seeing ourselves differently because you're talking about living lives of quiet desperation.

Eric O:

It's because I think we often get trapped in our own stories, our narrative of how we think our life is going to play out, and the ability to crack that open and allow other possibilities to come in, and to awaken ourselves to our divine potential, to who we really are in the bigger scheme of things, that's the hardest part.

Eric O:

For all the day-to-day stuff about what happened on this trip, read the book, we won't get into all that now, but when we came back, first of all, we'd lived to tell the tale. The thing that got us out there was we had this list of worries that Emily had mentioned initially. They're logical. They're reasonable, money, health, safety, community, all that sort of stuff, and walking away from that at least temporarily.

Emily O:

Even our two youngest kids didn't know how to swim and our youngest daughter has down syndrome and she had all this therapy we were leaving behind, I mean, they were legitimate responsibilities we were taking into consideration.

Eric O:

Yeah. I'm not trying to minimize them.

Emily O:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Eric O:

Yet when we looked at all the things that could go right, there's the what could go wrong category, and we looked at all the things that could go right, and we thought, "We could see beautiful places. We could gain new skills. We could make amazing new friends," and that list just went on and on and on. The finite unlikely list of what could go wrong balanced against the ever-expanding and likely list of what could go right. At a certain point, it made it an easy decision because we knew that none of this stuff would actually go right unless we did it.

Eric O:

So we gave up our fear of what could go wrong and were able to step into what could go right. Then to come back from the trip, I was worried about financial ruin, but I had a job waiting for me before we got back because I thought my fear was, "Oh, when you leave and you have a gap in your resume, you don't ever get hired again." So I'm going to be lucky to get whatever work I have. My old job wanted me right back. People were actually calling me saying, "Hey, are you looking for work now that you're back?"

Eric O:

So none of those fears came to pass and it opened my mind to all kinds of stuff in a new way. I actually tripled my income after I came home just because I thought about I moved through the world in a different way. I was less afraid. Really, that mindset shift has led to that period of coming home. Then basically, we worked for a few years to get some money back in the coffers and we were able to find inventive ways, not expensive ways, but very inventive ways and travel the world with our kids for the next five years and basically until COVID stopped all that. So I attribute that change to the mindset shift that happened when we went on this trip, and I'm forever grateful for it.

Eric O:

So to Gary's point, that's why the boat was intermission and it just took us into a whole new act where we've lived in a new way since, and I'm so grateful for that, that failure, that crucible moment, to use your language, that crucible moment that helped us transform into something that we didn't think was possible for us.

Gary S:

You've talked a lot about worry in what you just said. We have guests fill out a form so that we have the ability to ask smart questions when we interview you. One of the questions that we ask every guest is, "What is a critical action you believe people can take to find hope and healing after a setback?" Your answer to that question hinges a bit on worry. You said turn worry into what?

Eric O:

Wonder.

Emily O:

Wonder.

Gary S:

Right. Why is that so important, in general, for anybody who's gone through a crucible?

Eric O:

So going back to what we were saying about this what could go wrong question, that's the worry question, and we all go there. It's being prepared. It's preparing for contingencies. It's the responsible thing that we do as adults and parents and business owners or whatever role we might be in as we prepare for what could go wrong. Yet that's only half the equation.

Eric O:

If we never ask the question, "What can go right?" I feel like there's a little bit of intellectual dishonesty there to only ask one of those questions. Both of them are valid. When we ask the what can go right question, we then start to take that same imagination, that same mindset that can spin off into a deeper and deeper dark hole of worry and we say, "Well, what could go right?" and that's the same process of imagining and vision casting, whatever you want to call it, where you start to contemplate all the positive outcomes, and it's the same skillset that your mind does where you're imagining a future and you can use it in a negative direction or you can imagine it in a positive direction.

Eric O:

When we can take that mental ability to worry and we flip it towards the positive, then we're really able to create in our minds and in our spirits the things that we want to bring into being. I think that was really the shift that happened for us. I don't know if I'm saying it the way that or if you have anything you want to add.

Emily O:

Well, it's a more complete picture when you balance that. I think as we were nearing home on this trip, we asked our kids, when we left, they were six through 16, and as we approached home, the older two had turned 15 and 17, they're wise, and we always counsel with them and we like to see how things are going and get their feedback. So we asked them, "How has this changed you or what are you taking away from this trip?"

Emily O:

Our 17-year-old said, "It hasn't changed me. It's made me more myself." I think that's what we talk about in the crucible experience. It burns off everything. When you have an intense experience, it burns everything that isn't really you, that doesn't really matter, and it shows your true colors more vibrantly.

Emily O:

Then the 15-year-old said to us, "This trip has made me comfortable being uncomfortable."

Emily O:

Just piggybacking off what our children had said, I said, "You know what, Eric? I think what we're really taking away from this experience, the real treasure here is three kinds of confidence." It organically grows out of competence. When you learn a new skill, you're like, "Wow! I did a new thing," and then it expands what you think you're capable of doing, and we did this thing and we learned a whole bunch of new skills and that grew our confidence.

Emily O:

Then the second is credibility. When we do what we say we'll do, even if we only tell ourself we're going to do it, it grows our trust and we have learned that there's a ratio relationship there between the credibility that we have with ourself and how big our dreams are. So we came to trust ourselves more. Our kids believed us that we would do what we said we would do. Other people believed us. I think that's why Eric was getting those calls like, "Hey, do you want to come work for us? This is a guy who gets things done."

Emily O:

Then calm, for me, was the most transformative because I come from a line of professional warriors and always trying to put in all the possible contingencies, and what about this variable, and what would we do in that case. This helped me see. As we literally move from island to island to island to island all the way up this chain from St. Martin to Manhattan, 2,500 miles, we did this process over and over again where we'd never been there before, we didn't know exactly what it was going to be like, and as we got closer and closer, palm trees would emerge. We'd see where we were going to anchor the boat. We'd find the grocery store, see if we needed to change money, all those, the details would fill in as we got closer.

Emily O:

So that gave me this sense of calm like I don't have to know all the answers before I take off. I don't even have to know all the questions, but as I move in the direction I want to go, the details will fill in, the path or the answers will emerge, and it's going to be okay. So we've done this so many times now that I believe going forward we will figure it out. So that is really everything under that umbrella of turning worry into wonder is like, "Let's just get curious about this for a minute," and I think, grateful.

Warwick F:

Yeah. I want listeners to listen to what Emily and Eric are saying. I mean, this concept of turning worry into wonder, not just looking at the column that says what could go wrong, what could go right, and as you start taking steps of faith, however you want to express it in your inner self or the divine, whatever paradigm you want to look at, but as you trust yourself and you make those steps, it increases your belief. It increases your ability to take a bigger step and another step.

Warwick F:

So one of the things you said, Emily, I believe, I love, and this is all part of the wonder muscle, I think, is I think you said something like this. You develop a friendly disregard for others' opinions. When you live a life you love, everyone wins. I mean, getting other people's input is good, but you kind of know when to switch it off and it's not serving you. So talk about how all of those experiences, all of that wonder muscle exercise led to, obviously, you wrote a book, Seven at Sea, but The Awesome Factory. Talk about how all that dovetailed into your second act.

Emily O:

So as we wrote this book, we came home and everyone was like, "When are you going to write the book? When are you going to write the book?" I'm like, "That wasn't our intent. We weren't doing some kind of gimmick trick that we could then write a book about," but we do know we're both life long journalers. Obviously, Eric's written plays, and when I was teaching in public schools, I was an English teacher and we both feel deeply about the power of writing and the power of story.

Emily O:

So we thought, "We're not really going to have completed this trip until we've written about it and processed it and gleaned our takeaways." So we hoped that we could solidify that, have something to pass on to our children, and if anyone else wanted to read it and it could encourage them to live more deliberately, live a little more boldly, then we were all about that.

Emily O:

So what we didn't expect as we wrote it was that we were going to reverse engineer this process, which we now call the navigator framework for facing disruption, whether you're causing it or it's coming to you. We used all sailing metaphors. That was our experience and that's what the book is about. So we pulled out those of choosing your own island, having your destination, and there are clues and exploratory time prior to the choosing, chart your course, cast off, navigate out of the harbor, set your autopilot, trust your compass, and then drop anchor, and there are some important parts in dropping anchor as well to rest, reflect, and celebrate on what just happened before you start the cycle all over again, but we recognized it and now we had this map.

Emily O:

So as new opportunities would arise, we would identify them. We'd know where we were. We know where the fear was going to come in, and we'd have our strategies of we need more information so we have a bigger vision, so we're able to release what we're clinging to or things like that. We just used it as our own secret sauce to do all these things.

Emily O:

Gary was mentioning at the top of the show traveling around the world. Eric climbed El Cap. We got scuba-certified. We lived in New Zealand for a hundred days just farmsitting and traveling around by RV. We were just so curious. We wanted to take this idea of, "I want to see for myself. I want to go there. I want to touch it. I want to taste it. I want to smell it," have these experiences with our kids.

Emily O:

Then when COVID hit, we realized this is uncertainty on a massive scale. People aren't used to facing disruption. We've become accustomed to this dance, and we have developed a lot of strategies, and we just didn't feel like we could just keep these to ourselves and only pass them to our children anymore. We thought we want to start sharing and helping, and just what you said at the beginning, to go from drifting to navigating, just taking this, I think everyone's having this big shift of saying, "Wait a minute. Am I really where I want to be, and where am I actually going?"

Emily O:

I was like, "This is the perfect moment to just step in and talk about these strategies for being at the helm in your own life, being the navigator in your own life," and that doesn't mean you always all the circumstances, but it means you're always deliberate about the choices that you're making and which direction you're trying to head.

Gary S:

You used the phrase drop anchor a little while ago, a few minutes back. We've reached the time in the show where I normally say, "The captain's turned on the fasten seatbelt sign. We're going to have to land the plane soon," but come on, we're talking to people who sail the boat 3,000 miles and a guy who produced plays. So we're going to either drop the anchor in a bit or we're going to drop the curtain in a bit. We're going to do one of those two things, but before we do, I would be remiss in my duties as a co-host if I did not give you, Emily and Eric, the opportunity to let folks know how they can find out more about out the book and more about The Awesome Factory online. How can they reach you guys, find out what you do, and maybe engage with you?

Eric O:

Sure. The book is Seven at Sea. You can buy it anywhere that good books are sold. Theawesomefactory.nyc is our website and there's information about us, the book, and social media, and all that there. So theawesomefactory.nyc is the best place to connect with us.

Gary S:

That's awesome. I would say, Warwick, Warwick, you have the last question or two.

Warwick F:

So Eric and Emily, I mean, I just find this fascinating, your story, and your journey, and a couple thoughts in my mind. One is that quote of Thoreau. So many people live lives of quiet desperation. I'm wondering, if you had to re-engineer that quote as people that love English and theater, what would that be? I don't know if that's the right approach. I mean, that's certainly one tack and another would be what's the message of hope and encouragement you can give to people that are maybe living life in the gray, maybe they're in that cubicle, maybe they've had that financial failure or physical failure or however you want to answer that. What's a message of hope or a life that's not a life of quiet desperation, but what's your hope and dream for people that maybe they're not fulfilling life, they're sad, depressed, feel like life is just not the way they thought it was going to be?

Eric O:

I think that's a very beautiful and compassionate question, Warwick, and I'll try to do it justice. I've been that guy in the gray cubicle as you know, and I've been that guy who's felt just crushed and not feeling like anything that I want in life is happening. I would say this. As Emily and I are fond of saying, "When you live a life you love, everybody wins." That's nice if you can get there. How do you get there? I think it starts with what Emily was talking about earlier, which is how do we build these three kinds of confidence in ourselves? It starts with little things.

Eric O:

If I say, "I'm going to go for a walk every day," and then I get it up and I put my shoes on and I go for a walk every day, I'm going to feel better about myself, and when I start to feel better about myself, I'm going to start to make better decisions. I'm going to start to see the world differently, and it can be as some something as simple as I'm going to go for a walk every day or I'm going to eat an apple instead of a candy bar, whatever it may be, but if you do it, your confidence grows and your light starts to brighten.

Eric O:

I think what I was saying earlier, which is the hardest part of this journey for me was seeing myself differently, if we can invite light in in all these different ways and illuminate our view of ourselves, and the world, and God, whatever that means to you, if we can invite that light in and have that fresh perspective, that's what ultimately leads to living a life that we love, and when we do that, everybody wins. We win, our spouse wins, our colleagues win, our kids, everybody. So it starts with seeing ourselves differently.

Emily O:

I would just add to that making space, like Eric said, for the light. He was talking to a coworker once when he was in the gray cubicle place, and this other guy, he was in a similar place in his own life. This was for him also a holding pattern after a fail. He was telling about all the things he'd done in his past and Eric said, "What are you doing here?" That really woke him up to his capacities, and he just realized, "I've been in sleeper mode here, and I have stopped taking responsibility, and I've stopped even listening to my own thoughts."

Emily O:

So the single change that he made is that he stopped listening to music while he has a default mode to just put something in his ears to distract his brain, and he started giving himself some quiet so he could listen to his own thoughts. Lo and behold, he started having all kinds of ideas.

Emily O:

We would be remiss if we didn't actually say that for us, when you're in that place where you just feel stuck, we've found gratitude to be transformational, and when we first got engaged, Eric mentioned we were pretty young, but the first thing we did is we got a piece of paper and we wrote a list of all the things that we would always have control of no matter what our external circumstances were.

Emily O:

One of the things that we put on that list is that we could always be grateful. We decided early on that if we tried gratitude and that didn't help, then we would know we were in real trouble. We've been married for 26 years now and so far, gratitude has always helped us get a little inch up and get a better perspective on what's going on and helped us see, "Yeah, we have more to play with here than we originally thought we did."

Gary S:

I have been in the communications business long enough to know when the last word on a subject has been spoken. So the anchor is down, the curtain's down. You can get off the boat or you can leave the theater, however that works for you, listener.

Gary S:

Before we go, I have to tell you, Eric and Emily, I love reading the things that you wrote in the form that we had you fill out. I love looking at The Awesome Factory website. I love talking to you beforehand and here because I've written a bunch of notes down. Listening to you guys speak about what you've been through is like following around and grabbing paper and stuffing it in your pockets because you have so many good perspectives and the way that you phrase them can be so compelling and so beautiful.

Gary S:

There's one thing that you said that I want to leave our listeners with, not just listeners to Beyond the Crucible, but for this series on Second Act Significance because you said this, which I think could be my background in entertainment comes from the movie business. So the log line for this series could be this. How can you live deliberately doing what you care about most with the people you care about most? That's something that you said. I'll say it again, listener, and as you look to move beyond your intermission to your second act, have this question in your mind, "How can you live deliberately doing what you care about most with the people you care about most?" because that is a recipe for second act significance.

Gary S:

Until we're together the next time on Beyond the Crucible, listener, thank you for spending this time with us, and please remember that while your crucible experiences are difficult and painful, we know that, the Ortons certainly know that, Warwick certainly knows that, those crucible experiences are not the end of your story. In fact, if you learn the lessons of them, if you recognize they're not things that happen to you but things that for you, you can begin a journey. Doesn't have to be on a sailboat, but it can be. You can begin a journey that leads to a better end to your story, a better place for your compass to point you because where that takes you is to a life of significance.

In the opening episode of our nine-apart series Second-Act Significance, Kari Schwear recounts how at age 7 she vividly remembers thinking, “Is this all there to life?” – before embarking on a journey of soul-crushing crucibles even as she found success in each of her multiple career stops.

But when she grew concerned enough about her “gray-area drinking,” her research into the subject and passion for helping others overcome it launched a second act she is pursuing with absolute gusto – as a life coach who helps her clients overcome the gray areas in all aspects of their lives, from relationships to careers to how they think and talk about themselves.

To learn more about Kara Schwear, visit www.graytonic.com

Highlights

Transcript

Warwick Fairfax:

Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership.




Kari Schwear:

Right around this time, I heard the term gray area drinking via a guest that was on a podcast. And when I was walking my dog and I heard this podcast interview, I literally stopped in the middle of the street. It was a warm summer morning, like 7:30 in the morning, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, that's what I was. I never identified as an alcoholic. I was a gray area drinker." So I came home. It was like the fire was just burning inside me. I came home and I researched everything I could on gray area drinking. And there wasn't a lot out there. And I thought if I could share what gray area drinking is with more people, I'll get them to raise their hand before they get into a deeper addiction.




Gary Schneeberger:

Did you hear the enthusiasm in the voice of this week's guest, Kari Schwear? You'll be hearing a lot of the same excitement and joy, the same sense of fulfillment and significance, over the next several weeks from the guests we've lined up for our new series, Second Act Significance. Hi, I'm Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show. Kari kicks off our series recounting how, at age seven, she vividly remembers thinking, "Is this all there is to life?" Before embarking on a journey that had its share of soul crushing crucibles, even as she found success in each of her multiple career stops. But when she grew concerned enough about her gray area drinking, her research into the subject and passion for helping others overcome it launched a second act she is pursuing with absolute gusto, as a life coach who helps her clients overcome the gray area in all aspects of their lives, from relationships to careers, to how they think and talk about themselves. Kari Schwear has found second act significance and you can too.




Warwick Fairfax:

Well Kari, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. And it'll be so fun to just hear more about GrayTonic and Question the Drink. But I'd like to go back to a bit of the backstory behind what you do. A bit like movies, there's always an origin story. There's always a reason that fuels our passion, that fuels our calling, if you will. And so, from what I understand, you live in the Richmond, Virginia area, I believe, that part of the world. So just talk a bit about your growing up and your family, and you had some challenges growing up. But what was life like in your family growing up?




Kari Schwear:

Well, first, thanks for having me. I really am very honored to be here today with you guys. This is going to be so much fun. My childhood was very interesting. I was like most kids, had parents married so forth. We lived in a suburbial house and everything from the outside world looked to be fairly normal. And unfortunately my parents started to disconnect from one another, probably around that age of six or seven. And at age seven was a pivotal point in my life and one of those memories that will stay with me forever. And that memory was being on my driveway of my parents' driveway in a hot summer afternoon in St. Louis, Missouri, which is very hot and humid in the Midwest, playing jacks. Do you remember that game, jacks? I don't know if we're all old enough to remember jacks.




Gary Schneeberger:

Yeah, I do. I do.




Kari Schwear:

So I'm playing jacks and I'm looking up and down the street thinking there's no one to play with. If this is all there is to life, then I really don't want to be here. I just don't see the point of living when there's not really any exciting things happening. And then my thought was, I'm seven, I should probably not be having these weird thoughts, like who thinks like that? I knew right away that it was a very peculiar question to be asking of someone so young. And that really was the start of what I call my gray area living life really started at that point. And just for fun, that was also of the same year that I declared to my mom that I would become a cigarette smoker. And so I became one. I took a cigarette from her best friend Gladys's house when she was hanging out with Gladys, having some coffee. Gladys smoked cool cigarettes. Hey, I wanted to be cool. So I thought I'd take one.




Kari Schwear:

And then moving on through the teenage years were really, really difficult. They were the years that now my parents are divorced, I'm moving around quite a bit. I went to 12 different schools before I hit my second ninth grade. I was physically and sexually abused by older boys than me. It was a very difficult time in my life. Just always trying to fit in, always being the new kid, always just trying to make friends with people. I was beaten so badly in eighth grade my parents didn't even recognize me. It was a rough several years. And then fast forward, I meet my husband when I'm in college and he was the nicest guy I've ever met in my life, and I wanted to break up with him for that reason.




Kari Schwear:

I thought he is just too nice. What is wrong with him? I was used to being with the wrong crowd, so to speak. And I called up his house, this is before cell phones, of course. This is 1980 something. And I called up his house and his mom said, "Oh, he is not here. But I'm going to tell him that you called. And by the way, Kari, I want to let you know that my son loves you so much. I hope you never break his heart." And I thought, well, dang, there goes that. I was literally calling to break up with the guy.




Kari Schwear:

And I'm like, great, she just took that away from me. But I credit her because here we are, 33 years later, still together and very happy. But this is all part of the gray area of living is what I'm talking about is you aren't expecting anything wonderful to happen. It's always this doom and gloom living in this fake world of pretend and being fine. And that was what I was trying to do. I was trying so hard to fit in and just go with the flow and say, my life was fine, and it really wasn't. That was a big piece of it. And God flows in and out of this whole story, but we can get to it.




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah. Wow. Well thank you. You obviously had a very tough upbringing. Most folks need an anchor. I think some of us, you and I and Gary, it's our faith, our faith in Christ. You need an anchor in something. But sounds like growing up, you had parents that just drifted apart. You went to 12 different schools. I'm assuming you were living with your mom through most of your childhood. Was it pretty much visiting him, living with your mom, visiting your dad on every other weekend or whatever the deal is, something like that.




Kari Schwear:

Yeah. One year was all with my father. My eighth grade year, my mom had moved back to her home state of Massachusetts. This is all in Missouri, St. Louis, Missouri. And when she left, that was a difficult time too. I mean what's funny, I look at the situation now with such different eyes through a different lens. I see my parents as human beings, not my actual parents. I see them as John and Nancy. I don't see them as Kari's mom and dad, which is extremely helpful by the way. Because if I didn't see them that way, I harbored a lot of resentment during that time. And now I look at them like, wow, they went through a lot and they did their best and they didn't realize how much pain I was in.




Kari Schwear:

And I think this is a message, this is one of my bigger messages that I like to talk about is that we don't realize how much of our psyche and our belief system is formed at such an early age, before the age of seven. Neurologically, we absorb so much information into our minds. And we can take that information, we can take an incident as simple and as innocent as listening to your parents argue about money and internalizing that as money causes problems in relationships, and is a disruptor with relationships. And then later on in life, you have problems with a partner regarding money. This is how our brain works. And so I didn't know any of this. My parents didn't know. I think most people don't understand how our brains work, especially as we're children and we absorb all this information.




Kari Schwear:

So I think that was part of it. And part of my healing process now looking back, and God was never part of our everyday life. And at seven, going back to that magical age, I remember, very clearly, having a conversation with my sister who is six years older than me. And she, at that time, was pretty much an atheist. And I said to her, "What do you mean? How could you not believe in God?" And she was like, "Nope, don't believe in it." And I thought, well, that's weird. But I always had this innate ability, I guess, or this innate sense, would be a better description, that there was something bigger than me. But I didn't know what it was. And ironically, it is because of my sister that I am a Christian today. She went off to college, again, six years older than me. And when she came back, she was a born again Christian.




Kari Schwear:

Now this is a girl who dealt with a lot of stuff as well. She was older than me, but she was going through the same thing I was, parents getting divorced, so forth. She was involved with someone that wasn't a very good person and also had a lot of drug use, which at that point, I was using drugs also at an early age, seventh and eighth grade. And she came back this born again Christian and I thought, who are you? What does that mean to be a born again Christian? I had no idea what that meant. And she said, "I really want you to go to church with me." And I said, "Okay." So we went to a church and I ended up just soaking in. I didn't realize at the time how much I needed it, how much I needed something outside of myself, something bigger.




Kari Schwear:

And her particular church did an altar call at the end of the service. And she looked at me and I'm sobbing, just sobbing tears. This was eighth grade, by the way. This was the same year that I was beaten so badly that my parents didn't know me. I lived with my father this year. And we went up to the altar and I accepted Christ as my savior. And I am just bawling, bawling, bawling. And I realize at that moment, this is what I had been seeking my whole little 12 year old self or 13 year old self at this point. And I accepted Him into my life. But like most kids that age, it was in the back pocket and I didn't live a quote unquote, Christian life. But it's okay because the seed was planted. So I think it's that deeper connection of that faith that has carried me through this whole time.




Kari Schwear:

And I believe 100% Warwick and Gary, 100% that I was meant to go through all the things I went through, and there's so much more that I haven't said yet. So much more that I believe I was meant to go through all of that for me to be in this place today. Otherwise, I wouldn't have such a passion for my life and a calling on my life. And I truly believe God has called me to do this work today. But it all had to be part of the plan. It had to be the setup. It's like the greatest setup you can ever imagine in history, right? Is your own life looking back. As opposed to it happened to me, it happened for me.




Warwick Fairfax:

So you carry on with life and you're obviously somebody that's intelligent, successful. You end up being, I think a dealer in a Porsche dealership. You're earning six figures. Life is going well from the outside. You're married and family imagine, and life is awesome. But yet, there was this other side that you were drinking. Characterize it, because you view it a little differently than some because some people think it's all black and white, it's all, "Hey, everything's hunky-dory," or you're quote unquote, an alcoholic. But yet hence GrayTonic, your perspective's a bit different. But from the outside, you have a wonderful husband, life seems like it's been redeemed. In theory, life's pretty good. But yet, I'm guessing, obviously drinking probably went back a lot of years too, like some of the other things I'm guessing. Talk a bit about that. There's a flip side beneath the surface that people maybe aren't quite realizing about Kari.




Kari Schwear:

Oh yes. Well, the drinking actually started in my 30s. I'm now 55 to give some context of how long this was going on. So in my 30s, I was a food and beverage manager at a country club. I was in the restaurant business for a lot of years. Anybody who works in the restaurant business knows that you drink after work, that's just what you do. Well now, I'm the manager, so can't drink at work anymore. But I was the wine buyer for the restaurant. So I became very well educated on high end wines and became very much of a wine connoisseur, wine snob, whatever you want to say. And Rob was starting to notice that I'm now drinking a glass or two in the evenings at home when I wasn't working.




Kari Schwear:

And he raised an eyebrow to that, and he said, "I'm noticing that you're now drinking at home. What's up with that?" And I'm like, "What's the big deal? Everyone does it. They do it in Europe. Everyone drinks every night in Europe, so what's the problem?" Trying to make light of it. And he was hyper super focused on it because his mom was an alcoholic and unfortunately abused some pain medication as well. And so he was very well versed on what addiction looks like. So he was aware that "Uh oh, my wife is now having a couple drinks and it's becoming habitual." Well, right around that same time, we moved to Richmond, Virginia from Pennsylvania. And that move was very stressful, as you can imagine, finding a new job, which wasn't a problem at that point. Fast forward, I'm in the medical field now at this point.




Kari Schwear:

And I knew getting a job down here in Richmond would not be a problem. Matter of fact, I had quite a few selections to choose from 10 years ago, 11 years ago. But it was very stressful. I moved my kids out of school. The whole new community, trying to make new friends, trying to build a house, the whole nine yards, that the drinking became even more so. So instead of that one or two glasses, now we're talking a consistent two to three, mostly every night. Not all the time, but a lot. And then I would play the game with myself of like, oh, I'm going to take a month or two off of drinking and would do it successfully. And then I would barter with myself, like I'm only going to drink on the weekends, not during the week.




Kari Schwear:

And then the weekends turned in to be Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, instead of just Friday and Saturday. There was always these games I was playing with myself. And I started to question my relationship with alcohol, like, why am I drinking? So those internal voices started happening probably in 2014, still in the medical field. I really was in what we call the contemplation stage of knowing that I should probably do something about it, probably take this a little bit more seriously than what I am, but wasn't quite ready to make that shift. So a lot of people that are questioning anything, it doesn't have to be drinking, anything in their life, will stay in this contemplation stage until they almost feel like they're forced to make a change. Because if there's no rock bottom or there's no repercussions that's happening, or there's nothing that is forcing them to quit or make a change, well then why should they, right? It's like accepting what is, accepting well nothing's happened, so I'll just keep doing it. And this was a little bit of my attitude.




Warwick Fairfax:

I want to just dwell on this a bit because we all come from different paradigms. I personally don't drink, but not because of religious reasons. I just don't like the taste and it dulls my senses, and I don't agree with it. But my wife does, just at dinner. In fact, my kids are all adults. So having a glass of wine at dinner is what we do other than me, and that's all good. I grew up with parents that would drink wine. My dad especially was exceptionally moderate in his habits. He would drink a glass and a half of wine at dinner and a glass and a half at lunch, never anymore, like a metronome. And that was it. He would never drink spirits or gin, vodka, anything.




Warwick Fairfax:

So for a lot of folks that say, "Well, there's nothing wrong with having a glass or two of wine at dinner." In Europe, in Australia probably has, I think it has the highest wine consumption per capita of almost any country in the world. And so there are people that drink wine and enjoy it just as the whole wine pairing thing, and whites with whatever it is and reds. But yet, it sounds like you weren't this massively heavy drinker, downing, I don't know, glasses or bottles of vodka. To the outside observer, it sounds well, what's so wrong with what Kari's doing? I mean, couple glasses of wine, I realize your husband's sensitivity given his family background. But yet, I'm sensing there's nothing wrong with drinking wine per se.




Warwick Fairfax:

But I think what you're getting to, which I think listeners really need to understand, it's the why. So for those who drink wine, because they feel like it makes the food taste nicer, great. And everything's hunky-dory in life, but it sounds like with you, there was a reason you were drinking. And the reason from your perspective wasn't good. Is that the thrust of it, if you will? Because to most observers, are saying, "I don't get what the problem is. A couple glasses of wine at dinner. What's wrong with that?"




Kari Schwear:

Yeah, yeah. And that's a very good perspective by the way. And you are correct. So a lot of this is about the why. We have to look at the why. And for me, it wasn't a celebratory type experience. It was more like, man, I had a really crappy day at work. I'm coming home and I need to do something about this. It really became habitualized to my day. In other words, you get up in the morning, you brush your teeth, you go to the bathroom, you drink some water, whatever. It was like, I come home from work, I pour a glass of wine, I make dinner, I have another glass with dinner and then sometimes I'd have another glass. And sometimes I'd be like, well, what the heck? There's only a half a glass left in the bottom, I might as well just drink that too.




Kari Schwear:

So when I started realizing that I wasn't just using wine because I enjoyed the taste of it and wanted a glass with dinner, that it became a crutch for me, it became a way for me to cope with a job that I strongly disliked. It was a way for me to cope more importantly, this is really what it comes down to, the crux of my drinking was that I didn't like myself. I couldn't look at myself in the mirror. I had zero self confidence. I, yes had a very strong faith, still have a strong faith, but it wasn't enough. I couldn't see what God sees. All I saw was this broken person. And because I carried, this is a really big piece of the puzzle here is that for so many years since seven, all the things that happened to me as a child was exactly that in my head, it happened to me. I was a victim.




Kari Schwear:

I wore that victim badge so proudly, like you don't know what I went through. And people that have gone through trauma will use that as a way to justify a lot of the self-sabotaging behaviors. Not consciously, by the way. All this is done unconsciously. Our brain is so powerful and has the ability to really, really find ways to remind us, unfortunately. It's PTSD, to be honest with you. A lot of it's PTSD and trauma, that's so deeply rooted. So every time we have an experience that pops back up, unless it's healed, unless it's an area that we've healed, we're going to keep experiencing this. Well, I didn't have any knowledge of self development at this point in my life, just six years ago, I'm talking about. If I had a bad day and somebody didn't say something the way I wanted, I took that as this is why this happens to me, it happensall the time to me.




Kari Schwear:

And I'm just a rebel, I'm a rebel, I'm a bad kid. I had all the labels. I had all the self negative talk. I'm the troublemaker. I'm the one who always is expected to be in trouble. I'm the one who never quite makes the Dean's list. I'm always the short end of the stick, but I always seem to skate by somehow. That was my mentality on everything, even in my professional life. Even when I was successful in my jobs and my careers. This is my seventh career. I was successful in all of them. But it was more or less like, I can't believe I made it this far, like lucky me.




Kari Schwear:

And that's really what I saw of it. So I had all this internalization going on in my head, this back and forth inner chatter that was running a lot of my decision making, which neurologically is how it works. Our feelings really are coming from our thoughts and because we feel the feelings, we don't think about our thinking. We feel the feelings and those feelings drive us into an action or inaction that produce a result that reinforces the original belief that the thoughts are stemming from. So this is the circular thinking loop that we do in our minds.




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely. I want to shift to GrayTonic. But before we do, I want listeners to really hear what Kari is saying. I'm reminded the image of baptism, which is an outward manifestation of an inner transformation. That's what you always hear. And I elder at a nondenominational church in Annapolis, Maryland. So we do baptism. And so I'm familiar with all that. But it sounds it's similar in that this was an outward manifestation of inward hurt, of inward trauma, of inward unresolved. You never completely 100% heal from trauma. Certainly, there are scars and echoes.




Warwick Fairfax:

But it's one thing for it to be a scar and echo, this more felt like ghosts or whatever analogy you want to use that was unresolved and was still affecting you and your decisions and how you viewed yourself. Does that make sense? It just felt like that's what was going on. And I guess if that's true, the question is you made a big pivot, a roundabout that time. I think you're working at a Porsche dealer and life felt a bit blah, or as you put it, meh, which I guess is meh, not quite sure how you spell that. But something like that.




Kari Schwear:

Yes. Yeah.




Warwick Fairfax:

But it felt like there was a pivot and there was a shift from Kari is being governed by the ghosts and all the trauma and the damage that was done to you and other things that went on. But somehow, there was a pivot that shifted things, but below the surface that were no longer going to govern and drive. Somehow, you got out of that prison that you were in of being a victim, the bad girl, I always screw up, all of those negative self-talk. Somehow you got out of that. So tell us about how you got out of that prison and how those negative thoughts beneath the surface, which was driving the drinking from your perspective, how did you make that shift? Because many don't.




Kari Schwear:

Oh, yeah. Such a good question. Well, after I decided that alcohol needs to exit my life, I went the traditional route of figuring that out through Alcoholics Anonymous. Great program. I learned a lot. It was really an awesome place to go. However, because I did not identify as being an alcoholic and I didn't feel like it was the right fit for me, I left the program after about four months and I did all the things, the big book, the 12 steps, the sponsor, all those. And it did provide me some insight, which was good. It wasthe seed I needed to keep me going. But I realized it wasn't my long term game. And again, I had a problem with saying, "Hi, I'm Kari and I'm an alcoholic." It really was a label that I was not willing to accept, nor did I feel like I was.




Kari Schwear:

So I left the program and I worked with a coach that I used to work with, he's a physician, that we worked together in a medical practice. And I really trusted him. I was the only female that he had worked with at that point. He only coached men and he said, "Kari, I don't work with women." I'm like, "No, you need to work with me. I need to have you as my coach." And during those three months that I worked with him, they were not enjoyable, to be honest with you. It was hard work. He was tough on me and it was exactly what I needed.




Kari Schwear:

And this is where the big pivotal point comes in. He said to me on one conversation, "Kari, I think one day you're going to start your own business. I think you have everything it takes to be an amazing coach. And I think you're going to share your story with the world." And then I busted out laughing and said, "You are smoking something serious over there, dude, because that's never going to happen." And I was serious. First of all, I'm not leaving my job because I love my job at Porsche. By this point, I'm at the Porsche dealership. And I was making great money and I thought, well, coaching, okay, I might be able to think about that as a possibility, because I was already coaching some people that left AA when I did, and were coming to me for advice and solace and so forth.




Kari Schwear:

And then to share my story with the world, oh, that's where I drew the line. I'm like, there's no way. I was so private. I had everyone fooled that my life was so perfect. There was no way I was about to go be vulnerable and have anybody see the real Kari. So that was not going to happen. Well, God had other plans. And as I like to say, God's plan is the plan and my plan is just a plan. And I believe that this coach was given the ability, through God, to plant these seeds for me. It was about a year later, so I'm in church, and they're talking about starting a small group. And I said to my husband, "I'm going to start a small group." And he goes, "Okay, great. What are you going to start it on?" I said, "Well, I'm going to do something around drinking."




Kari Schwear:

Now, right around this time, I heard the term gray area drinking via a guest that was on a podcast. And when I was walking my dog and I heard this podcast interview, I literally stopped in the middle of the street. It was a warm summer morning, like 7:30 in the morning. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, that's what I was. I never identified as an alcoholic. I was a gray area drinker." So I came home. It was like the fire was just burning inside me. I came home and I researched everything I could on gray area drinking and there wasn't a lot out there.




Kari Schwear:

And I thought if I can share what gray area drinking is with more people, I'll get them to raise their hand before they get into a deeper addiction. And then this could be my contribution and then, okay, sure, then I can share my story. Because by this point I had a couple years, I was two years alcohol free at this point. And I thought, okay, well at this point, I don't care who knows I drank too much at one point, like whatever. And right around that same time, I said about the church, the church poo-pooed the idea.




Kari Schwear:

They actually had a recovery group at the church and they didn't want to have a competing small group. It's a small group, right? I'm like, "Are we not here to spread the love of Christ?" I'm confused. So I was really upset over it and I left the church over it. My girlfriend called me later that day and she said, "What's going on?" I told her. She said, "Kari, why are you allowing the church to dictate what you're going to do? You already have so many people that are following you, that you're helping. Girl, you need to start something on your own." And I said, "Yeah, I'll show that church I don't need them." And that was exactly how this business got started. I was on fire. I was on fire so much that I could sleep for a week straight. There were so many ideas flowing through my head.




Kari Schwear:

You know, when you first become an entrepreneur, you're like, "Oh my God, I'm going to conquer the whole entire world." I'm thinking all this crazy stuff. I bought 14 domain names within a week, and I just went crazy. But I settled on GrayTonic because I love the word tonic. By definition, it means medicinal drink of course. But it also means invigorate, strengthener, boost, pick me, up all these beautiful words. And I thought, yeah, I could be the tonic to someone who's in the gray. And that's literally how the name GrayTonic came to be, and that was three and a half years ago and here we are. I credit my coach.




Kari Schwear:

I credit God for the church saying no to me. By the way, I'm back at that same church. I'm glad that happened. I'm glad it happened exactly the way it needed to. And then I just really delved deeply, even more so into the self development world, became a certified life coach, or almost certified in NLP, I'm almost done with that, trauma training, motivational interviewing, all this certification. And every possible chance I get, I'm learning something constantly. So it's just been my world that I live in right now, yes.




Gary Schneeberger:

One of the things I love about your story Kari, is that from this idea of gray area drinking, you've expanded it to gray area living. And your assistance that you offer, your insight that you offer, your hope that you offer to clients and people is not just in the area of drinking, but maybe you're handcuffed to a job that is not rewarding, maybe you're in a relationship that is not mutually satisfying. That gray area concept and the idea of tonic coming to make it better, to soothe it, to propel you forward, that applies not just to drinking, but to other things. I imagine, and especially for a series that we're calling Second Act Significance, this new act in your life. There's enormous significance to you, I imagine, in not just focusing on drinking, while that is where it started and that's important to you, but these other very fulsome areas of life. There's got to be great satisfaction for you in that.




Kari Schwear:

Oh, absolutely. And I'm glad you brought that up because a lot of my clients, when they come to me, it is not because of drinking. That might be one of the things that they're doing to deal with their stress and their unhappiness and their deep rooted trauma that they might have in their life. But they might be saying, "Hey, Kari, I really need help with all the stress I'm under at work or my wife and I aren't getting along or my spouse, or I'm really having a hard time in my relationships," whatever it is. We have gray areas in so many places, like you said. It could be that, like you said, handcuffed to a job or just being in an unhappy marriage. And honestly, that's part of my story too is three years ago, I found myself, after 30 years of marriage, telling my husband, I don't know if I want to remain married.




Kari Schwear:

I was really falling out of love with him. And there was a lot of things that were happening with me during my process of self development that brought me to that place of, I don't know if I want to strap in for another 30 years. And so we worked really hard through that time. And I, again, believe that I was meant to go through that period with Rob, because to be where I'm at now, which is I can help couples with their gray areas.




Kari Schwear:

Now, I coach the individual, but we bring the partner in for a couple sessions and I have a process to do that, that really makes a significant difference in the life because now they can see each other in a way that they've not seen before. That's a beautiful thing about a coach. A coach is able to look into the future and see the blind spots and see things that the client could not see exactly what my first coach did for me. He saw the potential in me. He saw things that would fulfill me and that would make me feel like there was a purpose and a passion for my life that I have never felt, starting at age seven. Why am I here? Because if this is all there is to life, I don't see the purpose. I can honestly say now that this is the reason why I'm here, is to do this work, 110%.




Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah. What you said is so profound and yeah, thanks Kari, for just reminding us that there is a broader picture. Sometimes life can feel very gray, like it's overcast, all the buildings are gray, life is gray. It's almost like the Wizard of Oz before they turn the color on. It's just life is just boring. It's black and white, it's not all the colors of the rainbow. And for many people, they're stuck in this dead end job. If anybodywants to think of what is gray living really like, there's a film with Tom Hanks that didn't really go anywhere, but it's called Joe Versus the Volcano. And that opening scene where he goes through the mud into the bowels of this dark building, he has this it bitty little colorful lamp. And the whole thing is just boring, gray, awful.




Warwick Fairfax:

It's like you're going to prison every day. It's the most vivid illustration I've ever seen of what a gray life is, in a sense. And so for many people, it may not be drinking, but they might be unhappy in their marriage, they might hate their job, hate their life, hate themselves, all of the above. And so how do you get out of that gray living to where you love your spouse, you love who they are, you love yourself in the best God honoring sense of that word? You love what you do. If you're a person of faith, you feel honestly that this is a God given calling, or if you're not, a universe calling. So it sounds like you're trying to be who your coach was. You're an advocate for people to find their calling, to get out of the gray into just a colorful life where they love themselves and love others. Is that a reasonable summary of what you do?




Kari Schwear:

That's a great summary. That is a phenomenal summary. And you know what? I have to say, there is a client that would be an awesome guest for your show because he is the epitome of just that, and how he's touching millions of lives at this point with the work that he does. And it's just incredible to see what God can do in someone's life. And when you think about who was actually called for greatness in the Bible, it wasn't the most honoring upstanding citizens that were called. It was the lowly, undeservable or recognizable people that God was calling up to the stand to say, "You know what? You're the chosen one." Just look at the story of Saul, now Paul. You can't make this up, right? God purposely picks people that you would not expect. Even Jesus, the way that he came into the world, it's an incredible story. We don't always think it's going to look like that, but that's exactly how it is. And I'm actually very honored to do what I do. I have to pinch myself like, wow.




Warwick Fairfax:

Absolutely. I think God uses the broken for his own purposes, absolutely. So talk a bit about GrayTonic, and I know there's Question the Drink. People come to you and they say, "Kari, maybe I drink a bit too much. But it's not massive. But yeah, I don't do it for the right reasons. I hate my job, hate my life, hate my marriage, hate myself." As their coach, what are some of the things you do to try and turn the Titanic away from hitting the iceberg kind of deal? Because it's either they're on the iceberg or about to hit it. There's always, there's better, but there's often worse. If you keep going the direction you're going. What are the things you do as their advocate to help turn the ship around so it's not going to crash in the iceberg and go down?




Kari Schwear:

Oh, yeah. Well, it depends if I'm working with a one-on-one or in a group, because a group is set up a little bit differently and that's really surrounded towards drinking and some behaviorals. But with the group and with my one-on-ones, the first thing is let's hold up the mirror and let's really start to dive deep as to why you're doing this. There has to be more than just an interest. It has to be knowing what that why is because your why is your anchor. Your why is the fuel that's going to keep you going. But it also has to be of deep value. It just has to be your grounding force. It has to be that shining North Star that is just keeping you moving forward. And without a strong foundational why on how and why you want to change your life and the differences, it's not going to be very successful.




Kari Schwear:

And the next part of that is really understanding that there's a difference between goals and intentions. And I focus a lot on intentions. I don't actually like goals. I think goals are great to check a box and they're future based and yippee, yay, we can cross the box off and feel like we've accomplished something. But intentions are the daily fuel and the motivation that we need and those little micro wins provide the daily effort that is needed. And part of my program's called Everyday Effort Equals Expansion because what we're trying to do is to expand into the next best version of ourselves. And one of the guys that I follow that I just love, love, love, his name is Ed Mylett, on one of interviews, he stated that the day he dies and he's standing with God, he wants to be looking at a reflection of what he says would be his twin brother, the man that he had the potential to live up to.




Kari Schwear:

And he wants to have that reflection back, that he has lived up to his God-given potential and that he was used in every possible way, that he was every year rising to a new level and the best that he could be, both self development wise, but also spiritually. What more can we do for God's kingdom? What more can we provide? And I just love that. And for me, that's what I live by. And with my clients, yes, I am a Christian. Yes, I very much coach on Godly principles. But I'm not the one who's beating them down to say, "Hey, you need to believe in God." Instead, what I do is come at it through the back door, just like gray area drinking is a back door way in to say or gray area anything is to say, "I might want to explore this a little bit further." It's an invitation.




Kari Schwear:

So a lot of it, my job as a coach is to show the insights and the possibilities. And I like to describe I myself as the bumpers in a bowling alley. Like if you go to bowl, I'm those bumpers that are just bumping you back into the middle of the lane. So you can hit the targets and fully expand, and hit all of those pins where you can fully expand into the best version of yourself, which sounds so cliche. But it's true because if you would've told me just six years ago that I would be in this position right here right now, I would've told you, you're absolutely crazy. But yet here we are. So God's plan is really the plan. And I think if we can relax and rest into that and surrender to that, is when we allow things to happen. So a lot of it is a self-reflection, and of course I do that through some other modalities a whole lot more, but that's the high level version.




Gary Schneeberger:

That sound you heard, listener, is the sound of the captain turning on the fasten seatbelt sign indicating that we have begun, but it's going to be a slow descent to landing because we have some more ground to cover in this fascinating conversation with Kari.




Gary Schneeberger:

There's something about what you've been saying, Kari, that I can't get out of my head. You talk about... This gives me the opportunity to say something Warwick says pretty much every episode, when he says listeners will be familiar with, and then he tells a bit of his story. Listeners be familiar with a bit of my story in that I have an alcoholic background myself and I did go to AA for a longer period of time than you. But I sort of came to the place where while I loved the program, that didn't really do it for me, didn't work entirely for me. But the idea of why I drank to change the way I felt, the way that you talked about it to change the way you felt, I can see in what you're doing with clients now, you're dealing with, you're helping them change how they feel, but in much more constructive ways. Is that a fair assessment?




Kari Schwear:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm the pattern disrupter. But while we're making the patterns into new patterns, we can literally change the way that we think by creating new neural pathways and disrupting all that. But it's also building the confidence that they need. My whole job is to build that self love and purpose and passion inside of those clients. And when I can do that and I know I've become successful, doing that is when I know my work has been well received. And that's really the goal of what I do is to help them see what's possible for them.




Gary Schneeberger:

And that leads to this last question, I promise I'm going to throw it back to you Warwick after this last question, and something I'm going to have Kari do. The last question then becomes the series is all about, it's called Second Act Significance. And it's all about how, what we were doing before might have been great in its own way. Maybe it wasn't, but what we are doing now brings us much more satisfaction and significance. Is that true for you? How would you describe what you were doing before with the jobs you had, the Porsche dealership most recently before this, are you living a more significant life, a more satisfactory life now? And why is that?




Kari Schwear:

100%. More satisfactory because I'm not numb to what's going on around me. I'm no longer hiding behind a mask. I'm no longer living in this guilt and shame of something that I did that was wrong or that I didn't measure up. Those voices of I'm not enough, they're diminished. Are they gone completely? No. That is something that I think all of us as humans will occasionally have to look at and question and say, what is the truth here? And so for me, when I have those voices come into my head, I have to ask, is that what I really believe? Do I know that that is really the truth or is there something else that could be true? And when I realized that we have internal stories in our mind that create these feelings for us, that's what gets us into trouble.




Kari Schwear:

So for me, it's always circling back to what is most important, understanding my why, understanding the reason why I was chosen for this. And this is not about me. This is truly to bring hope and joy and peace to others that I'm doing God's work, that He has meant for me to do. And so when I take myself out of the equation and I make it about the person, then I know my direction is correct. And then when I take my eyes off of myself, that allows me to show up more vulnerably. And I think that has been a gift too. Like I said, there was no way I'd share my story publicly. And yet, now there's pretty much nothing I won't share.




Gary Schneeberger:

I would be remiss at this point, if I did not give you the chance Kari, to tell listeners how they can find you online and read your blog and learn more about your services. How can they do that?




Kari Schwear:

Thank you for asking. The best way is through my website, GrayTonic. And by the way, gray in the US is spelled G-R-A-Y. I think we're the only country that spells gray with an A, but it is A-Y, GrayTonic. And then if anybody is interested and wondering, "Am I a gray area drinker?", there is a quiz on my main website, GrayTonic. But I have another website dedicated to gray area drinking, and that is grayareadrinking.com. Again, G-R-A-Y. So either website, grayareadrinking.com or GrayTonic is a great way to learn more about me, my services and the things that I offer and more about the group program if that's something that is of interest, because it's an awesome group.




Gary Schneeberger:

All right, Warwick, I'm done. Take us in.




Warwick Fairfax:

All good. All good. I love what you're saying, Kari. One of the things you said to us in advance was the hardest lessons in life are in the storm. You say sometimes, basically the key is to know you have to go through and not around, that there's almost an unopened gift. There's a blessing in the storm. And I love what you say in that because I can relate. I don't know if it's true for everybody. It might be. But sometimes one of the keys to being able to deal with the dark in the past, the damage that has been done to us, the mistakes that we've made, and this is not an original thought, is to use our pain for a purpose.




Warwick Fairfax:

When you're using your pain in service of others, when you're sharing your story and others are saying, "Kari, you're speaking to my soul. That was me. I feel a little bit better today. Maybe everything isn't solved, but I have hope. I honestly believe the first time in my life I'll get out of the gray, I'll see some color of my life. I have hope for my marriage. I have hope for my life." It feels like at that point, boy, what I went through was awful, but I can see God's plan. I can see God's hand. And certainly, in my life, it's very different but similar in the way that I talk a lot about what I went through on my own podcast, but other people's podcasts, the losing 150 year family business, disappointing myself. I felt like I let God down because it was founded by a believer. I go into all this detail and it does get easier.




Warwick Fairfax:

I talk about it a lot, as you talk about it a lot. So just talk about for listeners there sometimes can be beauty, amidst the pain. And by sharing it, that's also a path back to the healing. And that leads to maybe that one last question you said, what would you ask us? And that question you say is with all that you've gone through, would you change anything if given the chance? I have a feeling those two thoughts are connected, if you will. There was some purpose by what you went through and it's able to provide you some healing, I'm sure. So talk about that and the would you change things if you could?




Kari Schwear:

Yeah. I feel sorry for that little girl, what she had to go through. I really do. I almost look at my younger self as a separated person from me. I'm not that person. I look at it through a different lens now. And because I'm able to do that, would I choose to go through it again? And the answer is only knowing what I know now and the impact that I get to provide is yes, I would. I almost think of anytime anybody goes through something really hard, if it's for the greater good of God's kingdom, then how could you possibly say no that you wouldn't experience it again, as painful as it was. So I think it's taking the mess.




Kari Schwear:

And listen, I think every listener could attest to this, that we all have something in our life. We all have some sort of, whether it's little T trauma or big T trauma, we have some sort of trauma or experience that has helped shape us. And instead of looking back on it saying, wow, that happened to me, that happened for me because now you can see that gift, the blessing. And there's really four types of blessings of failures, as I call them. And it's a learning, a set up, a redirection. And when we can look at that, we can find the purpose behind it, then it makes sense. And then we're like, "Oh yeah. Okay. I get it now." So yes, the answer is yes.




Gary Schneeberger:

So I have been in the communications business long enough and co-host of this podcast long enough to know when the last word's been spoken on a subject and Kari just spoke it. There's something, listener, I want to present to you. If you enjoy the show, if you enjoy the content, if you enjoy the things that we talk about here, these are all things that came out of Warwick's experiences. And there are more ways to experience Warwick's experiences. Couple of things come to mind. One, you can purchase his book, Crucible Leadership: Embrace Your Trials to Lead a Life of Significance. Go to our website, crucibleleadership.com. That Wall Street Journal bestseller book is available there. You also can book Warwick to speak at an event that you're holding or having. You can also find how to book Warwick as a speaker for your event on our website, crucibleleadership.com.




Gary Schneeberger:

So until the next time we're together listeners, remember that your crucible experiences, we know, we've talked about it here, we all know how hard those things are. Kari did a meaningful and moving job in talking about her own crucibles and how painful they were. But she also talked in great depth with great hope about the other truth, and that is if we learn the lessons of them, if we apply them to our lives moving forward, they can be truly blessings. They can be truly things that lead to a life of significance. And in the context of this series, which we've just kicked off, when we pivot away from those things that maybe cause us crucibles and we move into something new, we move into something fresh. We explore what we're calling Second Act Significance. That's where the depth and breadth and height of our lives of significance can truly be found.