Signing Up for Adventures, Large and Small

As is the case with any marriage, when Sian Wayt married Per Wingerup, she had no way of knowing everything she was signing up for. In her case, one of those things was becoming immersed in her husband's sense of adventure. Growing up as a boy in Sweden, Per's parents scrimped and saved to make sure that their children saw a good part of the world. When he wasn't in school or traveling with his family, Per spent a lot of time running in the woods creating “little adventures.”

When they became parents themselves, Sian and Per knew they wanted to pass that sense of adventure on to their children. When their daughters were 10 and 12 years old, they decided to take them out of school for a year to travel around the world. They had talked about it for three or four years and, then, one morning at breakfast looked at each other and said, “Do we want to sit here and have breakfast when we're 65 and the kids are out of the house and say, ‘Oh, missed opportunity. Why didn't we do it?’”

“We couldn't afford it, but that didn't matter,” Per told me. He resigned from a job that he loved not knowing what he would do for a living after the trip. He and Sian basically took a leap of faith so that, as Per told me, they could teach two important ideas to their kids by going around the world. Per said:

One, we refuse for them to be afraid of the world. There are so many people who are afraid of so many things. Most things never actually materialize. They're just afraid because they don't know anything about it or it's different. We didn't want the kids to be afraid and the second one was we just want them to know it's not right and it's not wrong. It's just different.

Thanks to Sian's strong talent for logistics and budgeting and her willingness to adopt Per's sense of adventure, the Wingerup family spent nine months visiting 24 countries on six continents. (You can watch a beautiful four-minute video summary of their trip on their blog, familywingerup.com.) As I write this, Per is back in the job he resigned from to take the trip. He didn't know when he left that job would be there for him when he got back.

When I asked him what he learned from this big adventure, Per talked about two things. One was about how much he learned about his preconceived notions from watching the unbiased way his daughters engaged with the world. The other was how important adventures are to him and his family. When I asked him what the last adventure was that he had taken with them, he replied:

It was yesterday. My youngest daughter had a dance competition in Lowell, which is a town about an hour away from where we live. We never go there. Sian and the youngest went over early and our oldest, Linnea, and I were going over later in the day. We knew where the dance competition was, but we hadn't planned out where we were going to eat or what we were going to see, so on purpose I parked about a mile away from the venue.

We turned off the GPS and I said to Linnea, “Let's just see if we can figure out how to get there. We'll ask locals for help and we'll just venture our way in from here.” On the way there we found a great little coffee house where she had the best chai tea latte. If we hadn't gotten lost on purpose on our way there we would've never found this little coffee place. It's just small, little, silly things like that. It doesn't have to be big. I think adventure is more a state of mind.

Actions and Results

The point in opening this chapter with Per's story is not that you should quit your job and travel around the world with your family. The point is to provide some food for thought about the bigger picture outcomes that matter most to you and to give you some space to consider the connection between your actions, the fruits of your actions, and the amount of control you have over both.

The fact is, because all of those extrinsic factors are not in your control, you don't have complete control over your outcomes. That's not to say, however, that you shouldn't consider the kinds of outcomes you hope for in the three big arenas of life: your life at home, your life at work, and your life in the community. You should consider them because having intention around your outcomes will inform and reinforce the actions you take each day. Life isn't a dress rehearsal; this is your one opportunity to create the outcomes that matter most to you at home, work, and in the community. Just don't hold on too tightly to your ideas of what the very specific results of those outcomes should be. Holding tightly to specific notions of how things should be now or will be in the future is the source of a lot of the stress that causes people to feel overworked and overwhelmed. It creates anxiety before you know the outcome and, if things don't go exactly as you planned, disappointment after the outcome. As my wise friend, Ward Mailliard, said to me:

If you want to be stressed in your life, if that's your goal, be attached to the outcome. . . .

Instead, do the action for its own sake, and don't worry about the results. That doesn't mean you don't care about the results, but you work without worrying about the results. You worry about the quality of what you're doing. You worry about intention.

What Mailliard is talking about is what Gandhi called renouncing the fruit of your actions. In his commentary on the spiritual classic the Bhagavad Gita, Gandhi explained it this way:

Renunciation of the fruit in no way means indifference to the result. In regard to every action one must know the result that is expected to follow, the means thereto, and the capacity for it. He, who, being thus equipped, is without desire for the result, and is yet wholly engrossed in the due fulfillment of the task before him, is said to have renounced the fruits of his action.

When a lot of the programming in the world is about the fruit and not the action, it can be hard to wrap your mind around the idea of renouncing the fruit. For me, a key phrase in that quote from Gandhi is that for “every action one must know the result that is expected to follow.” While we should expect outcomes (fruit) from our actions, we shouldn't obsess over them. As we hear so often, it's more about the journey than the destination. As the name of a planning process called the Life GPS implies, direction and a sense of what you're trying to do in the different arenas of your life matters a lot. The premise of the Life GPS is that mindful and high-quality actions (showing up at your best) will lead to mindful and high-quality outcomes. They may not be the exact outcomes you expected at the start, but the likelihood that they will be ones you feel good about is high. Let's spend the rest of this chapter completing your Life GPS by considering the outcomes that matter most to you in the three big arenas of life—home, work, and community—with thoughts sparked by the experience and perspective of some of the people I've talked with about the mindfulness alternative.

Where the Heart Is: Creating Mindful Outcomes at Home

The reason that home is positioned as the first of the three arenas of life is that it's the long-term foundation for everything else you do in life. You may spend a lot of time there or a little, but it's the place you return to at the end of the day. Whether you live on your own, with a friend, with a life partner, or as part of a family, home is your sanctuary. Ideally, it should be that safe place where you and the other people who may live or visit there grow, renew, live, laugh, and love.

When you think about the outcomes you want to create at home, you may think of the space itself. You may have particular ideas about the kind of setting that would nourish and inspire you, your friends, and family.

You may also view home not so much as a place but as a frame of mind that represents aspects of your life or the lives of other people who reside there. Your desired outcomes for home may have a lot to do with the quality of the relationships that the people who live or gather there have with each other. If you live at home with a life partner, you may, like author Susan Piver, think about home as the place where you learn and grow together. What she said when I asked her about her desired outcomes at home may resonate with you if you're in a long-term relationship:

What's specific for me at home is I'm married; I've been married for 15 years, and that is the best practice anyone ever designed. . . . It's designed to show everything that is ridiculous about you, everything that is wonderful about you, everything that is blind about you, and it's just packed in a nice little package.

So my desired outcome at home is a deepening intimacy with my partner because you can't always expect love and you can't always expect even friendship but you can expect to use everything that happens in your relationship—good, bad, and ugly—as a means to deepen intimacy. That is possible.

Of course, long-term relationships often lead to children, and if you're a parent, a lot of your desired outcomes at home probably focus on the kind of relationship you want with your kids and your hopes for their long-term health and well-being. As a dad of two young adult men myself, I have a lot of appreciation for what Power Yoga creator Bryan Kest observed to me about parenting: “Your children may not listen to you, but they will always become you.” Earlier in the book, we talked about how leaders control the weather. If you're a parent, the same holds true for you and your kids. The climate you establish at home will play a big part in whatever outcomes develop for your kids. It reminds me of the story we heard earlier from Godiva Chocolatier CEO Jeri Finard about the moment of truth she had when she was delayed at O'Hare Airport while trying to make it home for an important high school event for her daughter. She made it, but the fear of not getting there in time caused her to reevaluate how what she wanted for her family synced up with what she wanted from her work. It led her to Godiva, where she's been able to stay closer to home while still pursuing an energetic career. In the process, she believes that the outcomes in one arena have positively affected the other. As she told me:

I feel like I'm the luckiest person in the world because I was able to raise great kids. That has always been my most important project. I always vowed that I did not want to be one of those moms where the kids said, “She was there for work and she was there for everyone but us.” I wanted to make sure that I was there for them as well.

I love them, and I also love what I do. I love to work. . . . My husband has been super supportive. . . . The kids have picked up that this is something that I get energy from and that I like. I would frankly be quite surprised if my boys ended up with women who do not (pursue a career) because that's the only model they have known.

Of course, there are a lot of other factors besides your work that influence outcomes for your kids. One of the big ones on my radar screen is the influence of what my wife, Diane, and I call competitive parenting. If you aren't really clear about what you're trying to do for your kids and why you're trying to do that, it's easy to get sucked into a dynamic of “they have to do everything that all the other kids are doing or else they're going to fail at life.” When our boys were little, we used to love to read the Berenstain Bears books to them at bedtime. The one that made as big an impact on us as it did on them was the Berenstain Bears in Too Much Pressure. The story was that Brother Bear and Sister Bear got involved in so many extracurricular activities that the whole family became overworked and overwhelmed with car pools, juggling the schedule, missing meals, and the like. It was so bad that Mama and Papa Bear almost had nervous breakdowns, which made the kids worried and sad. (Even bears can suffer from chronic fight or flight apparently.) They regrouped, the kids agreed that they would each only do two after school activities at any given time, and they all lived happily ever after. We did our best to follow their example. Our principle as parents was quality, not quantity, when it came to what our boys were involved in. My personal opinion is that a lot of parents are stressed because they operate from a position of fear rather than love. They're so afraid that their kids are going to miss out on every possible opportunity that they make themselves and their kids crazy in the process. It's hard to get terrific outcomes when everyone is going nuts.

For most people, the arena of home doesn't just include the nuclear family but also the extended family. As you consider the outcomes you're aiming for at home, you may also consider your parents, siblings, and other relatives as they're all part of the tapestry of your life. It can be helpful to envision the kind of presence you want to exhibit with your family so you'll be prepared when the good and bad times inevitably unfold. For example, a beautiful story I heard in doing the interviews for this book came from John Rawlinson, who described the work that he and his father did together to strengthen their relationship in the last years of his life. Rawlinson's father served as a nuclear submarine commander in the British navy and was the classic, no-nonsense English gentleman. Rawlinson, at that time in his life, had a hectic and exciting career as an international model and actor. When I asked him what his dad's take on his career was, he shared this story with me:

He did a lot of listening. We worked hard, together the two of us, to try and come to a place of understanding between us. How do I put this? It was patience, I think. There was patience throughout it. I think in a sense, the great thing about being a British gentleman—there are numerous benefits in terms of stoicism and things but they are not great in terms of emotionalism, which is where I came from.

It really was probably not until—actually it was the day before he died. I came back from New York and his eyes lit up and he said, “Oh clever you, you made it.” It was nothing, but it just all came out in that one phrase. It was just seeing the look in his eyes and all that. In many ways, it was the summation of quietly working our way through it together in a truly British Remains of the Day kind of way.

One way to nurture the outcomes you're hoping for at home is to, as much as possible, share your life in a way that leaves no regrets. John Rawlinson and his father did the work that enabled them to feel that way.

What Does Success Really Look Like? Creating Mindful Outcomes at Work

In a speech she gave a few years back, Anne Bryant told the job interview story to end all job interview stories. In 1996, she was a finalist to be the executive director of the National School Boards Association. Prior to her onsite interview with the search committee, she did some searching online for stories about the association and mainly found articles about school board members taking “boondoggle” trips and engaging in other questionable behavior. She also found a lot of op-ed pieces from the incumbent executive director, who consistently defended school boards as “the center of democracy.”

As the search committee members ended their questioning of Bryant, the chair of the committee asked her if she had any questions for them. Bryant did actually; she related the rest of the story this way:

I asked, “Is this an organization whose mission is to defend school boards as the center of democracy, or is this an organization that wants to make school boards more effective?”

Silence. Nonverbal looks from one to the other and then to Roberta, the chair. She asked me to leave the room! Have you ever been in an interview and been asked to leave the room? I was a bit stunned, took my briefcase, and left. [While I was sitting] out in the hall, the search consultant came by. I said, “Eric, I think I have blown it. Sorry, but you have lots of other candidates right?” He looked very puzzled and mumbled, “You were not supposed to be out for another 20 minutes.” As he opened the door to go inside the meeting room, I said, “Oh, would you bring my purse out when you come?” He came back seconds later without my purse and said, “Don't worry, they're talking about your question.”

What seemed like 20 minutes was probably 10, and I was invited back in. Standing up to her full 5 foot and 1 inch height, the chair, Roberta, declared, “Anne, we have been discussing your question, and we have an answer. We have been an organization that defended school boards; we must become an organization that makes school boards more effective!” I was hooked and they never wavered in my 16-plus years with the organization.

With her question, Anne Bryant kicked off the transformation of that organization and its members. Her story frames an important question for you to consider as you think through the outcomes you're hoping for from your work: What does success really look like? One way to think about your answer to that question is to consider the range of possible outcomes on a continuum from transactional results to transformational results. There's no judgment here about one end of the spectrum being bad and the other being good. It is just a way to frame up what you're trying to do in your work, how you need to show up to make that likely, and why all of it is important to you in the first place.

By their very nature, outcomes on the far end of the transformational spectrum will require a greater investment of your energy, time, and attention. For example, when Danae Ringelmann cofounded the crowdfunding site Indiegogo, she did it because she wanted to bring personal connection back to finance. That transformative vision is what makes it worth the hours she invests in leading a high-profile start-up. As Pennsylvania's Secretary of Corrections, John Wetzel spends a lot of time on the road speaking because, as he says, “We are trying to not just improve the operation of the department but change legislation and really change how we do corrections. Our goal is to kind of set the example for the country. . . . The country needs it, so it might as well be us.” For Jim Campbell, the former CEO of GE Appliances, transformation depended on him showing up as a positive leader with a plan to lead the business through the financial crisis and recession that began in 2008. The energy and focus that Campbell and his team brought to the table led to thousands of GE Appliance jobs coming back to the United States.

Transformational outcomes can be large scale like in the previous examples, or they can be smaller scale results focused on individual people. Your vision may look like that of Rod Swanson, who found that in a decades-long career creating best-selling video games at Electronic Arts, the most meaningful thing he could do was develop other people: “[I found I loved] the idea of if you give them a voice and they feel like you are going to do what they think should be done and then they become responsible for it, you can really change things.”

The way you show up at work may be transformative for other people in ways that you may not learn about until much later, if ever. Harvard's Teresa Amabile had that experience. One evening she and her husband were at a Broadway show and were stretching their legs and talking during intermission. A young woman came up the aisle toward her asking, “Dr. Amabile? Dr. Amabile?” The young woman, whose name was Sarah, introduced herself as a student of Amabile's at Brandeis 12 years earlier.

The younger woman was excited to see Amabile again because she wanted to tell her exactly how Amabile changed the course of her life. Amabile was the leader of a weekly psychology lab at Brandeis that included other professors, graduate students, and undergrads. One week Sarah, who was a sophomore at the time, gathered her nerves to offer a suggestion in the meeting. She got a couple of sentences out before a professor cut her off and started talking about her own ideas. As Sarah remembered it, Amabile stepped in and said, “Hold on a minute there. Let's let Sarah finish. Let's hear the rest of her idea.” “That's all you did,” Sarah said to her. “But it was, to me, a validation that oh, maybe my ideas are actually worth something.

Maybe I can actually do something in this field. . . . The fact that I was a sophomore and you cut off a professor so that I could finish my idea just meant the world to me and I've never forgotten it. That's when I decided I was going to try to pursue psychology as a career.”

Amabile told me that as a result of Sarah's story she “was walking on air the rest of that evening and probably the rest of the next day as well.”

There are a lot of opportunities to do transformative work. Some require a lot of energy, time, and attention. Others just require being present and attentive in the work you do. Sure, there will always be work that is just transactional by its nature, but don't sell yourself short. As you consider the outcomes you hope to create at work, factor in opportunities for transformation.

Leave It Better Than You Found It: Creating Mindful Outcomes in Your Community

I used to coach an executive named Patrick, who, in addition to his job in a large financial services company, chairs an organization that supports the homeless in his city. Every year, Patrick's organization stages a day in which more than 700 homeless citizens each connect with a volunteer at the city's civic center. The goal is to provide as many essential services to the homeless as possible that day. Stations offering medical and mental health screenings, dental and vision services, barbers and hairdressers, housing assistance, food, and dozens of other services are set up in the civic center. The role of each volunteer is to host and assist a single homeless citizen through their most important stations over the course of the day. It's quite an amazing operation, and I was really impressed when Patrick told me about it. A lot of associates from Patrick's company participate in the program as hosts. When I asked him what people say to him about their experience spending the day helping and getting to know a homeless person, his answer was immediate: “The biggest thing I hear is ‘I realized that the person I helped is really not that different from me. They have families; they went to school; they've had jobs. I realize now that if I had made a left turn instead of a right turn somewhere along the way, that could have been me.’”

The most important aspect of Patrick's project is helping people who need help. You could make a strong case, though, that the volunteers get as much from the day as the homeless people they're assisting because it connects them with the life and community beyond their immediate everyday experience. All of us live and work in communities. Some communities are very tangible like the neighborhood, town, or city you live in. Others are based on a common interest like religious faith, profession, hobbies, or other interests. Still other communities are formed around shared challenges such as a medical condition or traumatic experience.

The question to ask when you think about the communities that you are or could be a part of is not only what are you giving to them but also what are you receiving from them? Communities create what Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam calls “social capital,” from which everyone involved benefits. As a matter of fact, research conducted by Putnam and his colleagues shows that joining and participating in just one group cuts in half your odds of dying within the next year.² My physician, Myles Spar, saw this play out directly when he spent a few years volunteering for Doctors Without Borders. Spar was focusing on stemming the spread of infectious diseases like tuberculosis and HIV in less developed countries. In those years he spent time in a region of the South Caucasus called Nagorno Karabakh as well as Uganda, Nigeria, and Guatemala. He was surprised to see that:

Patients were doing better than they should have been. Patients with terrible multidrug-resistant TB or HIV were not as sick as the patients with comparable pathology in the U.S. by a big margin. They didn't have access to the medications that we had in the West but they weren't as sick as they should have been . . . so I started to ask what do these patients have that we don't have in the West, why aren't they as sick? I realized a lot of it was about really good community support, really good family support. Most of them still lived close to their families and friends. They don't have a lot of resources; they don't have a lot of stuff. But they have a lot of everyone involved in their care.

So, if you're reading this book, chances are, in contrast to the problems Dr. Spar saw in Nagorno Karabakh, yours are literally first-world problems. That's not to say they're not legitimate or important or challenging. It is to say that, in the broader sense of the phrase, you, too, could benefit from having a lot of everyone involved in your care and they could benefit from your involvement in theirs. As you develop your mindfulness alternative and complete your Life GPS, consider the communities that you connect to the most and what sorts of outcomes you would like to help create in them.

If you don't know where to start, spend some time reflecting on people and issues for which you have an affinity and how you can bring your gifts and talents to bear for the common good. For instance, when Elaine Hall saw the difference that the arts made to the level of engagement that Neal, her son with autism, had with the world, she decided to share that experience with other families affected by autism. Soon, she had a bunch of kids with autism onstage performing a musical and loving it. That experience grew into a nonprofit called the Miracle Project and an Emmy-winning film called Autism: The Musical that ran on HBO, was introduced by Elaine and Neal at the United Nations, and has helped and inspired families around the world.

Troubled by the indignity that the poor endure when they have to stand in line for food at a distribution center, Ron Shaich and his team at Panera Bread have started a chain of donation-based restaurants called Panera Cares. If you have the means, you make a donation; if you don't, you eat for free in a nice environment just like any other customer. Panera Care supports its own profit and loss statement and serves more than one million customers a year.

Born in Bridgetown, Barbados, Kaye Foster Cheek came to the United States and created a vibrant career for herself and life for her family. Based on her own experiences, she views part of her mission in life as “giving voice to the voiceless.” She puts that into action in multiple ways. One way is through a homeless ministry at her church because she believes that “feeding the homeless is a way of enabling them to access their voice.” She also does a lot of work with young women and girls that are suffering from neglect; she is “training them to be agents of social change, so that in finding their own voice they can also help others.”

If you visit the website of author and consultant Peter Block and look at his biography, you'll see that the first line says, “Peter Block is an author, consultant and citizen of Cincinnati, Ohio.” For Block, Cincinnati is not mentioned in a throwaway line that comes at the end of the bio as in “he resides with his family in Cincinnati, Ohio.” No, he's a citizen of Cincinnati and that leads. He's done a lot in his community, including starting an urban arts center for at-risk youth and, as he told me, supporting agencies and efforts “in the city that align with the principles of focusing on gifts and focusing on the future.”

Block raises three points—citizenship, gifts, and the future—that I think are important ideas to keep in mind as you consider what you're in it for and the outcomes you hope are facilitated by your showing up at your mindful best. We're all citizens of somewhere and not just one somewhere but multiple somewheres. We all have gifts but none of us have all the gifts. It can be an inspiring exercise to consider how your gifts align with the gifts of others in creating positive outcomes at home, at work, and in the community. And although we can't control the future, focusing on the mindfulness alternative can raise the awareness and intention that can improve the odds.