CHAPTER 12
Awakening
Sometimes the most important lessons in life are painfully slow to sink in. That’s been the case for me, at least, especially when it comes to merging a journey mindset with destination leadership. Thankfully, with the help of friends, family, and God’s grace, life continues to provide opportunities for us to “get it.”
When Raye and I moved to Arkansas in 1995, I began to understand a little bit about the importance of enjoying the ride. Life presented a detour, so I scrapped the map and kept going. But in all transparency, I didn’t take the lesson fully to heart. Instead, I simply rerouted with the same hard-core focus on my new destinations.
I’ve had other aha moments through the years, but the real wake-up call came nearly a decade later. Even then it took more than two years to fully pull me out of my slumber, and ironically, it all started because I couldn’t sleep.
As Raye would tell you, I seldom struggle to fall asleep. My head hits the pillow, and I’m out. In 2006, however, I found myself caught in a disturbing trend. Each morning I would wake up around 2:30 or 3 A.M. This wasn’t just roll-over-and-go-back-to-sleep awake, it was wide-eyed-can’t-stay-still awake. I would fight it, of course, but inevitably I would get up, work on the computer, and watch for the sun to rise before it was time to get the kids ready for school.
I love to soak in a beautiful sunrise as much as anyone, but even that gets old after a few weeks, especially when it means you have to start each day with only a few hours of sleep. So finally I went to see my good friend and internist, Dr. John Furlow. Surely, I thought, I had some physical ailment he could write me a prescription for or wave a magic wand to fix. He listened patiently for a few minutes as I described my issue, and then he offered this advice.
“Elise, you’re healthy as a horse,” he said. “I know you are a driven person and you usually are going and blowing all the time. But something is keeping you awake at night, and you need to get to the bottom of it, or you’re not going to get a good night’s sleep for a long time to come.”
Well, the problem was, I didn’t want to get to the bottom of it. I knew what was bothering me, but I didn’t want to face it. What was waking me up at night, and keeping me up at night, was a simple question burning in my brain that would never go away: “Is this all there is?”
The question unnerved me for two reasons. One, I was afraid of what I might discover if I actually answered it. Two, I felt ashamed to be asking this question in the first place. I had so many blessings—a great family, a successful career and company, great friends. Life was good. How could I possibly want for anything else?
It was a chilling time, because for one of the first times in my life I began to doubt who I was and the value of my destinations. As those doubts gained a foothold, I began to second-guess some of my decisions. For instance, not long before I began enduring my sleepless nights, I had been offered two extraordinary job opportunities. These were high-level leadership roles with exciting organizations, but I ended up turning both down to stay with my own business. It was the right decision in both cases, but in the months that followed, my mind began to torture me with second-guessing. The devil on my shoulder kept whispering in my ear: “Good work. You didn’t just pass up one dream job—you passed up two.”
It hit me that I might always be doing exactly what I was already doing, and for some unknown reason, what I was doing suddenly didn’t feel like it was enough. So I woke up in the middle of the night asking myself over and over, “Is this all there is?”
“I Can’t Run Any Faster . . .”
Chariots of Fire debuted in 1981 and quickly became one of my favorite movies. It won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay, for the artful way it captured the real stories of two very different British athletes who competed and won Gold Medals in the 1924 Olympics.
One of them, Harold Abrahams, was an intense runner, a man on a mission and with a passion to win at all costs. He was driven, disciplined, and determined, and in the end, he won an Olympic gold medal in the 100-meter dash. As the movie unfolds, however, you get a picture of a man who finds no joy in his training or in the competition itself. He appears so driven by his pursuit of the goal that all he cared about was winning.
There is a defining moment in the movie when Abrahams loses a race to Eric Liddell, his arch rival and the other athlete featured in the movie. Abrahams’ girlfriend, Sybil, attempts to console him in his moment of defeat. Her message is essentially this: “You’ll get him next time.” But she doesn’t realize something much deeper has paralyzed Abrahams, and it comes out in desperation as he confesses to her: “I don’t think I can run any faster.” In other words, he admits in that moment that he is afraid he may never be any more than he already is. Think about the fear those words can cause in the heart of a leader. Not a good feeling.
I believe all leaders, and especially all destination-focused leaders, face crucial questions at some point, if not multiple points, during their careers: Is this all there is? Is this all I’ll ever be? What if I can’t get any better? What’s the point of my work? What’s the purpose of my life?
It was particularly paralyzing for me because I got up every day driven to get one step closer to a goal. Achievement defined my value. It had become my identity. It had become who I was. Confronting my deepest fear—that this is all there is and I can’t run any faster—was more than I could bear, even when my doctor prescribed it as the cure for my sleepless nights.
Instead of getting better, my problem only grew worse until one day I showed up for a client presentation without my shoes. I had left the house in a rush, as usual, and I was certain my shoes were in the car. Of course, I didn’t take the time to check, and so off I went to my meeting—in bare feet. This was my life, unfortunately: nonstop, frantic, and sometimes shoeless.
When my friends heard this story, they could have laughed it off as just another crazy day in the fast-paced life of their fast-moving friend. Instead, they saw it for the warning sign that it was, and they recommended I take some time off. They knew these types of moments were starting to define my life; they weren’t just exceptions to an otherwise normal existence. So on the heels of my shoeless meeting, Raye and I took off on our motorcycling trip to Europe.
I fell in love with riding while on that trip, and I took it up when we returned, but it still took time for me to actually slow down and change my mindset. A little less than two years later, in fact, I went to lunch with two leaders in my company and spent most of our time verbally lashing out in frustration over the performance of our team. Frankly, we weren’t hitting the marks of excellence I expected, and I feared it might cost us one of our largest and most influential clients. I ranted about our team’s inability to do the level of work I wanted to see from them, and it didn’t make for a pleasant lunch, at least not for my colleagues.
Unfortunately, this was not an uncommon scene. I found myself constantly frustrated with others: no one seemed to be getting it right, no one was giving it their all like they should (or like I would). In truth, no matter how hard those around me worked and the level of excellence they delivered, it was never enough for me. I had fallen into a black hole of unrealistic expectations and adopted a demanding demeanor that only made others feel they could never hope to keep up.
When I got home that night, Raye asked me to sit with him at our kitchen table and talk. He said someone from work had called out of concern for me. In fact, he and the kids were concerned, as well. Everyone—everyone but me—saw the pattern. They all loved me, but they didn’t like what they saw in the person I had become. Raye lovingly told me in no uncertain terms that something had to change. I had to get help.
And I finally did.
Getting off the Speedway
Every fall, teams of professional drivers converge on Le Mans, France, for a motorcycle race. That’s not unusual, of course. Le Mans is well-known for its races—automobiles, motorcycles, and just about anything else that moves. And motorcyclists regularly race on all sorts of tracks all over the world. But for this race, the Bol d’Or, teams of three drivers each circle the track continuously for 24 consecutive hours in an event that tests the endurance of both the riders and their equipment. It’s fast, furious, and . . . monotonous.
It might seem insane, or at least boring, to spend so much time driving around the same track, even during racing conditions. But that was my life in 2006. I was spending day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year driving around the same track in pursuit of a finish line and a trophy. I had become all about the destination.
With the help of people like Raye, Dr. Furlow, my closest friends, and my colleagues at work, I began making a number of changes, some of which I believe can provide help for any leader who faces, or wants to avoid, life on a never-ending Bol d’Or.
It was during some intense soul-searching after Raye’s kitchen-table intervention that I finally answered the question that haunted me. First, I admitted that destination leadership had so consumed me that my purpose in life had become defined by my achievements. Then I came to realize that my problem wasn’t that I was pursuing unworthy destinations; the problem was that I had missed the journey along the way. In my relentless pursuit of the destination, the journey no longer mattered.
I decided that if I could make the journey matter more, then perhaps I could find meaning and purpose for the path I was on—and satisfaction and contentment from my work and in my life. So how do you give more meaning and purpose to the journey?
In management and consulting circles, you sometimes hear the phrase “start, stop, continue” as a tool for evaluating personal or team challenges. So that’s what I did. I identified the things I needed to start doing, the things I needed to stop doing, and the things I needed to continue doing (but typically needed to make a higher priority). Here are a few lessons I learned.
1. Sometimes You Must Release the Destination
I’ve always considered myself a lifelong learner, but it was usually with a purpose of reaching a destination. I wanted to learn more so I could achieve more. I’ve come to realize I’ll always be on a journey, always learning, and always figuring it out, and that there are times when there’s no destination required for us to reap the joys life can offer. I realized that you can’t work all the time and that you have to learn to experience the joys of rest.
Rest is an interesting concept for a hyperactive person like myself. It can involve stopping and not moving—and I’ve always struggled to do that—but there also are active forms of rest.
If you’d asked me a few years ago what my hobbies were, I would have told you that I didn’t have any, because I didn’t have any free time. I knew that needed to change, if for no other reason than because I wanted to be an attractive, engaging person for my husband. He didn’t want to be married to someone who was defined by only her work.
So I found hobbies that relate to a journey mindset. I learned to ride a motorcycle and began riding alongside Raye. I took up running, one of the joys of my youth, and completed my first half marathon in 2009. I’ll never forget telling Raye after I crossed the finish line, almost screaming, “I’ve never felt so alive!” I also learned to fly-fish, a sport that requires skill, patience, and perspective. I fell in love with it on my first outing. I didn’t catch a single fish, but I learned that “catching fish is incidental to the experience,” and you can say with great confidence to anyone who asks: “The fishing was good; it was the catching that wasn’t so great.”
These things are meant to be experienced, not accomplished. You might ride toward a destination or run toward a finish line or cast for trout, but it’s the experience, not the results, that bring the real joy. Life and work can be that way, too. J. J. van der Leeuw, a Dutch author who spent much of his life exploring philosophical and theological ideas, got it right when he said, “The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved; it is a reality to be experienced.”
2. Find Your Dashboard Moments
It sounds a bit cliché to say we should “enjoy the moment,” but like many clichés, it’s rooted in truth. The reality is, many of us find this cliché easier to dismiss than to live.
I found one of the ways leaders can enjoy the journey the most is to look first at our families. There was a time when Raye and I both spent so much time at work that we found ourselves spending brief periods of “quality time” with our kids. Then we realized it was more important to spend lots of “sloppy quantity time” with them. Ironically, the more time we spent with them, the more we found quality in our time together.
For seven years my daughter was on both school and competitive cheerleading teams, and we frequently traveled around the country for competitions. I drove her to most of these events, and in the beginning I would take my laptop and phone and work whenever I could. But the more I started putting it away, the more I noticed that she began to open up with me. On late-night trips home with just the glow of the dashboard light around us, she began to talk to me about life, love, salvation, self-esteem, you name it. Anything worth talking about, we began to talk about it. I had similar moments with our son, Jackson, when traveling for baseball and basketball tournaments. I call these dashboard conversations. Had I not been paying close enough attention, I easily would have missed the small voice from the backseat that said, “Mom, can I ask you a question . . .”
For many leaders, it’s not always easy to “be there” and listen to our family when they call out to us, because work never stops throwing challenging issues at us that we need to think through and solve. But if we don’t learn to be present in the moment with our family, we’ll look up one day and find that we lost step with them long ago.
3. Work to Live
I’ve heard it said that most people in the world “live to work,” but people in Colorado “work to live.” For most of my first 25 years in the workforce, I thought that philosophy to be worthless. Now I find it essential.
Henry David Thoreau faced this dilemma and left his home to find out what life was all about by living on a pond in rural Massachusetts. You may recognize this quote from Thoreau: “I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life . . . to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” There is pure joy in truly savoring life itself, regardless of whether we’re at work or at play.
We find joy at work by loving what we do and doing it to the best of our ability. There is satisfaction from a hard day of work, even if the end goal was not accomplished. I once thought that if I could not cross everything off my to-do list and accomplish what I had set out to get done, then I had wasted the day. Then I learned to find joy in whatever came my way. Even if it prevented me from a timely arrival at some pre-established destination, I realized that I had:
• Solved an unexpected problem
• Addressed a client’s immediate and unplanned need
I realized I had found joy in my work. I had worked to live.
We see this lesson vividly brought to life by the other runner in Chariots of Fire. Eric Liddell is portrayed as the exact opposite of Harold Abrahams. Liddell loved to run and he experienced every moment as if it was a gift from God, which, of course, it was. Liddell was one of the favorites to win the 100-meter dash, but he had dropped out of that event because one of the heats was on a Sunday. For Liddell, Sunday was the Sabbath, a day of rest, and therefore he wouldn’t compete. To the dismay of many of his countrymen, including several high-ranking politicians and royalty, he instead ran as a huge underdog in the longer 200- and 400-meter events. In the scene that shows the 400-meter finals, Liddell has an expression of pure joy on his face as he presses his way to Olympic gold.1
Chariots of Fire shows us two different runners who both win the prize, but by using two very different approaches to how they ran their races. I can tell you with all assurance that while I used to be Harold Abrahams, with every day that passes, I am trying much more to run my race like Eric Liddell.
That doesn’t mean destinations aren’t important. It means I have a better understanding of what matters most to me and of the importance of investing in other parts of life and taking care of myself. It means I realized that a leader can succeed as a mother and wife, while still succeeding as a CEO. I discovered a leader can have it all, just not all at the same time. And that’s more than enough.
The Last Crop in Fallsville
By the fall of 2009, I could confidently say I had made the turn toward a journey mindset that brought balance to my destination style of leadership. I wasn’t there—I’m still not there—but I was on a better course. So when Labor Day weekend rolled around that September, I had no problem rolling away from my work and enjoying a ride on my bike.
Raye and I met his father, a good friend, and another couple just as the sun came up for a beat-the-heat ride through the Ozark Mountains of Northwest Arkansas. Our self-appointed navigator was born and raised in these hills, so we fell in line behind his Harley as we started out from Fayetteville. The general plan—after a pit stop for biscuits and gravy in Huntsville—was a ride through Newton County, a sparsely populated county with winding highways that are quite popular among cyclists.
The first hour or two of our ride took us through small towns, some beautiful rural areas with tree-covered hillsides, sprawling farms, and tiny churches with inspiring signs like, “We use duct tape to fix everything. God used nails.”
By midmorning, we decided to stop at a bend in the road called Fallsville. The small gravel lot had a lone white building with a single glass door, and three old-timey gas pumps. No credit card swiping here. You’re gonna have to go in, which was our intention anyway. We needed a stretch.
We discovered the only available restroom didn’t require a key—outhouses apparently don’t need that much protection. As we laughed about this, I noticed not far from us an old pickup sitting under a tree. An overall-clad gentleman was perched on the edge of the passenger’s seat with the door standing open. Sprawling around the truck were piles of plump green-striped watermelons. I didn’t need a cutting to know they’d been picked at the height of their juicy glory. I decided to wander over for a visit, and Gentleman Gene, as I think of him now, broke into a smile at the prospect of a buyer approaching.
“How’s business,” I asked, curious if he had, or if he really expected, to sell any melons that day.
“Picking up,” he said. “They’re beauties, and better than anything you’ve ever tasted.”
Certainly a convincing argument, especially on a hot summer day.
“You raise pretty melons,” I agreed as I looked them over.
He got out of his seat and leaned on the side of the truck. The entire bed was filled with dozens more melons.
“I’m just trying to get whatever I can for them today,” he went on. “They’re not mine. They’re my neighbor’s.”
Gene, as it turned out, was a proud farmer who just couldn’t stand the thought of letting perfectly good watermelons rot in the field. So he had driven to his neighbor’s house that morning and convinced him to let him load up his truck and come to the gas station to try to find a home for as many as possible.
“Why wouldn’t your neighbor bring them himself,” I asked. Seemed like a nice but strange thing to do, hauling off your neighbor’s bounty. Was his neighbor lazy, tired of eating melons, tired of giving them away?
His answer caught me off guard. “He’s just not up to it this year. He’s got cancer pretty bad. He’ll never make another harvest. This is his last crop.”
A new appreciation for the melons flooded over me, and their natural beauty just shone. Gorgeous shades of green, smooth round skin, plump centers. Just the way they were at rest on top of each other looked as if someone had carefully placed each one in a certain spot to catch the morning’s light through the trees. I began taking pictures of them.
Gentleman Gene went on to tell me how his neighbor had lived off the land his whole life, reaping what he sowed and scraping together enough along the way to feed and clothe 14 children. An experienced chef after a fashion, he had taught all the women in the area to make homemade sorghum molasses. Gene grinned, “I think the most he ever made in a year was $1,200. Some of it from his melons.” No doubt.
Our conversation was interrupted by the sound of motorcycle engines. I looked past him to our group. They were putting helmets on and folding maps. Time to get going again. I thanked Gene for his story and apologized for not being able to take some melons with me.
“They don’t make saddle bags big enough for melons,” I said. “But I want you to do something for me.” He leaned forward. “Please tell your neighbor you met someone today who thought these were the most beautiful melons she had ever seen. That she took pictures of them and promised to share their beauty with others.”
He laughed. “That will make him smile, and I haven’t seen him smile in a long time.”
As we rode away, I thought about fall, but not with the welcome anticipation I’d felt that morning. Harvest is a time of plenty but it’s also a time of endings. I never used to think about things winding down in life; I was always too wound up. But of course there is a time of harvest that comes for us all. The real question is what are we harvesting?
Gentleman Gene had done his neighbor a favor, but he’d done one for me, too. It may have been a last crop, but it won’t be one that’s forgotten.
So that haunting question, how do I answer it now? I have realized that this isn’t all there is; there’s a lot more out there for me to experience. I believe that’s true for any leader who wants to achieve great things while connecting to a purpose that doesn’t define them by their achievements.
For the first time, I knew I didn’t have to know how it all ends. I became content to leave the destination unknown and determined to enjoy the journey along the way.