Gary Schneeberger
October 26, 2022
When you work hard at something over an extended period of time that you’re passionate about, one of your highest hopes is that what you’ve created will be appreciated by others and will be beneficial to them.
But it’s always a nice surprise to experience just how beneficial it is for you too.
That’s been the experience of the entire Beyond the Crucible team as we’ve readied our first-ever e-course, Discover Your Second-Act Significance, which is hosted by our founder, Warwick Fairfax, and cohosted by me.
The course leads you on a journey of self-discovery from feeling stuck to awakening your passion, helps you craft a vision rooted in your talents, and guides you into unleashing a more fulfilling life that leaves a legacy you’ll be proud of. Plus, it’s all presented in a way that allows you to go through it at your own pace.
While there are a lot of things we can tell you about the course – like it’s three one-hour long video modules, over a dozen downloadable worksheets, and insightful clips from our nine-part podcast series on Second-Act Significance that ran all of April and May – frankly, this blog is more than an advertisement.
Even as the guides of this course, Warwick and I learned a lot…
For me, the “a ha” moment was coming to understand the nature of the journey we were guiding people on. After we finished the Second-Act Significance podcast series, I wrote a blog that recounted some of the key learnings guests have shared from their experiences. You may remember the star of that blog – which you can read here – was a friend of mine in the late ’90s, Albie Pearson, baseball’s 1958 American League Rookie of the Year.
I won’t get into all the details of Albie’s story again, but the key point was that despite his success as a pro ballplayer, he faced a moment in which he was forced to ponder, “Is this all there is?” Was the life he was living his destiny, his calling? Was he following a vision he was off-the-charts passionate about and living on purpose, dedicated to serving others – what we call a life of significance?
We don’t mention Albie by name – strangely enough – in the e-course. But we do talk about that feeling of “Is this all there is?” that so many people experience when their first acts aren’t as fulfilling as they’d hoped.
And I realized, smack in the middle of recording the e-course, that the journey we were guiding people on when it comes to second-act significance is not so much “from setback to significance,” which Warwick and I have said hundreds (maybe even thousands) of times in describing the path from moving beyond a failure or setback.
I realized that the journey when you feel stuck – perhaps even successfully stuck – and unfulfilled is a little different. And out of my mouth popped the phrase “From ‘Is this all there is?’ to ‘This is all I want.’ That was a powerful moment for me. Moving from dissatisfaction to satisfaction. It’s different than moving from setback to significance, but definitely an emotional and circumstantial cousin.
Another eye-opening aspect of directing people through this course was the depth that gets added to the learning when you move beyond storytelling as a learning tool and add in the soul work of the worksheets we’ve included. Warwick found the one called “The Younger You” particularly moving and meaningful.
It asks questions about your earlier days like “What was most fun for me?” “What was decidedly not fun?” and “What inspired me when I believed that everything was possible?” That third one really resonated with Warwick, who said he had to think back to what he really wanted to be when he was young. He’d never thought about it at all.
He thought, as the fifth-generation heir to his family’s 150-year-old media dynasty, that he needed to be the next Fairfax to take the reins of that business. But the worksheet got him thinking deeply about the things that inspired him when he was younger. One of the first thoughts to leap to mind was his love of science fiction dating back to the late ’60s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was fascinated, captivated by the vision of the future it painted, with then-unthinkable technology like a talking computer and video conferencing – a commonplace reality today.
As an adult, he was drawn to Star Trek: Next Generation, perhaps because Capt. Jean Luc Picard was a philosophical thinker who reminded him of his dad. Those influences, and his love of history, a passion he inherited from his father, made Warwick realize he’d always been a bit of a dreamer, a reflective person. He connected the dots to realize that much of what he loves about leading Crucible Leadership – drawing stories out of podcast guests, encouraging vision, passion and vulnerability in our audience — could be traced to those “younger days.”
What we’re most excited about, though, is the journey this e-course can take you on. It really is designed to help make the learning actionable and more concrete. Yes, we always hope that our podcasts and blogs make an impact, but the e-course takes it to another level through concrete tools we haven’t offered before.
So, if that sounds like something you think may benefit you, or maybe even a friend or family member, please visit www.secondactsignificance.com to learn more. You can also listen to our recent podcast episode on which Warwick and I discuss the origins of the course and why it may be the first one we offer, but it certainly won’t be our last. You can listen here.
We look forward to guiding you on your journey to achieving second-act significance!
Reflection
- Do you feel stuck? Dissatisfied with the direction your life is headed? Jot down a few reasons why … they’ll come in handy if you take the e-course.
- Do you believe it’s possible to change those feelings? Why or why not? And how? Jot those thoughts down and hang on to them, too.
- What are you willing to do to grab hold of a second act of significance?
