#114: Curating A Life Of Experiences with Dr. James Kelley

Oh, Adam, thank you. And I just got to say, if it wasn't for your voice, I'm not sure your audience would know who is who in this conversation because we look so similar, actually. We are like a couple of fried eggs, man. Yeah, yeah. The glare off our foreheads is brutal. I can't really see you very well, Adam.

I'm going to move my head around just to kind of get in—

Oh my God, it's blinding.

In your eyes a little bit here. Oh my goodness. What is not written in that bio that you would love for people Oh,

geez. I'm a passionate person. I'm someone who, as the book probably entails or states in the title, authentic. It's a word that's bantered around quite a lot nowadays, but for me, what's really important is being a good person, being a good version of myself. I have a saying that, and I'm going to paraphrase this saying, I don't know how clean your podcast is. If I lost my arms and legs, No offense, Adam, you won't be wiping my ass. My wife and family will be. So they're always first at the center of the choices that I make. And often, if that's with business or speaking, whatever, my thought process first goes to how does it impact them? And then I kind of work out from there in terms of what I do next. So I'm a very passionate, family-oriented individual. Just a good guy that's just out to have a good time and don't take life too seriously at the end of the day.

Yeah. And you live near Dubai. You and I were having a little chuckle about this before we turned on the record button because I said to you, that's not the norm. for people to live near. You know, if I introduce somebody, they live, you know, they're in Chicago or they're in Canada. Sometimes you get some Australians here, you know, things that people can sort of envision for themselves. Oh, I'd love to live in Sydney someday. You know, it's like most people couldn't pick out where Dubai is on the map.

Most people think Dubai is the country of United Arab Emirates and it's just a city. Yeah, no, it's funny you're talking about rain. I was thinking we just had our 2 days of rain that we'll get for the whole entire year this week. So we had rain this week, very grateful for that, and now it won't rain again for another 354 days. So that's about it. Imagine,

2 days of rain for the entire year.

Yeah, that's about it.

It's so funny because certain things just keep coming up. You know how that is. I think they call it the reticular activating system or something like that, where you start to notice that you might want to buy a Volkswagen and the next thing you see Volkswagens everywhere. You didn't notice them before, but all of a sudden everybody's driving that Volkswagen that you're so interested in, kind of thing. So Dubai has come up. A buddy of mine, Steve Farber, who's also an author, got a new book coming out, which I love the title of this. It's Love Is Just Damn Good Business. That's the title. I don't know what the subtitle is, but in any event, he just came back from Dubai, had a speaking gig there, and now we're in line to do the same keynote for this banking organization next year. So I haven't been to Dubai personally, but I have a feeling it's in my future, buddy. Yeah.

So

now I got another bald friend with 4 kids. Living near Dubai. I'll be sure not to come on one of the 2 days that it rains. That's what I will schedule myself.

It's chaos here. No one knows what to do. It's like if it snowed in Carlsbad, everyone would just lose their shit.

Oh my God. I remember when Randy and I were in college, we trekked through Europe for a little bit, like that classic thing. And we were coming home and flying out of Heathrow, which is one of the 2 big airports, the major airport outside of London. And they had like a dusting of snow. I mean, I'm from New York originally, right? Randy grew up in New Jersey. You know what snow is. It doesn't count if it's not a foot. I mean, basically, if it didn't close the schools, if you weren't getting to stay home from school, it did not snow. Because basically, if you— if it didn't count for, you know, like a sledding day, like, what's the— what was the point? By the afternoon, it was gonna be like brown from the dirt that the cars are kicking up or the dogs, you know, doing their business or whatever. So a dusting, a half an inch of snow, and the whole airport closed down. We slept in the airport. It was

like— Yeah. Like the Brits did not know what to do.

With a half inch of snow. Let's dig into how it is that you came to live. I want to start, if we could, with this journey from Portland, Oregon to living near Dubai. I mean, that's a vast landscape, both physically, I'm sure on the emotional scale and in every which way. That's a lot of miles. Where do you want to start to navigate that for us?

My life has been so circuitous that I wouldn't even know where to begin because there's—

I love that word, by the way, because that's like an SAT word. So I'm not so smart, but I remember studying the SAT and the word circuitous came up. So listen, you wise guy, I got it. Circuitous. For those of you that are not or don't recall your SAT studying, circuitous is winding.

I only have a smart wife. That's the only reason why I know that. I got to be honest with you.

All right.

Yeah.

Yeah. I want you, every time you use a word that your wife has somehow introduced you to, I want you to stop and tell us Because otherwise, remember, there's a little punishment. When James and I were getting ready to do this, I had asked him if he'd been listening to any of the Conscious Pivot episodes to kind of get prepped and stuff. And he said to me, you know what, I really pride myself on being so prepared for these interviews, and I do the research, and I watch and listen to stuff. And he says, but in this case, I gotta own it. It just came up on me. I didn't do it. I said, well, you don't know what's ahead. You do not know what this show could be like for you. And at a certain point, I said, we might have you standing on your head, to which James said, Hey, listen, I'm living in Dubai. We could do hot yoga here. Like, all I have to do is like open up the windows and the doors and we got a hot yoga

studio. So watch yourself,

buddy.

Yeah, I'll be careful. I'll walk on a fine line here. So, you know, my journey is probably the same as many as your listeners in terms of I grew up in a lower middle class house in Portland. Both parents worked. I was the latchkey kid in third grade. I was the youngest by 5 years. So I was really in my own head a lot. My parents did not have a lot of desire to entertain their child. So Carlsbad's pretty well known for swimming and water polo. So if you're a swimming family, you know what that means. And my family was a swimming family. And so at the end of the day, my brothers were gone from sunup to sunset. And so I was by myself a lot until I started this stupid sport as well. And then I was out the door at sunrise and back at sunset. So when you have parents who don't want to entertain you, both working, both unhealthy, not a lot of money, you're kind of left to your own devices to sort yourself out mentally. That would have been great if I had a really confident, focused mom and dad. That was not the case. You know, my mom was very pessimistic, very deficit approach. My dad was kind of just there. So the building blocks of success weren't really there. So I barely got into college. I went to University of Dayton, and I got in only because I played water polo. That was it. And I was in probation. I take rudimentary classes. Left after a year. I'm going to reference your show. I was selling new and used cars at 19 years old in Portland. I moved back to Portland at that time. My parents had left Portland to live in Chicago, and I remember a vivid day in March. There was a used car shack, and I walked in, and two guys were. bent over a table with a dollar bill rolled up, and they looked at me, and there was white powder on the ground, and they said, hey, do you want to try some? And that was a huge pivot moment for me because, you know, those movies that you see where they fast forward and all of a sudden it's jail? And I just saw living in a dumpster, you know, in a van down by the river, not to quote Chris Farley, but like, I just saw my life going the wrong way. And so I literally walked out of that shack Straight to the phone and called my mom, said I want to go back to college next year. And she was like whatever she could do to do it, she'd get it done. She had to mortgage the house; she was going to do it so I could go back to university. So that was a conscious choice for me at that moment to say this is not a path I want to go on. I need an education. I don't know what that meant because I wasn't good at school, but I knew that I needed that whatever that would give me. So I'm at University of Dayton. I finish up there. Still don't know what I want to do. So I moved to Chicago. And I started a grad program there. Halfway through, I left that and I opened up an office in Portland, Oregon for an advertising agency. So I'm 24, no business opening an office. It's a national chain, no business. I had to find the place, hire the staff. I had to get the furniture. I had no business. I had zero business being in that job whatsoever. But the whole fake it till you make it. And so I did, and I did okay at it. Eventually, about a year and a half, I left and moved to San Jose, and that's where I got another conscious pivot where I got fired from my job. So I took a job over another office there. There was a whole bunch of issues. And so this is in 2000. Do you remember in 2000, internet was still fairly new, viruses were quite common, and sometimes you would get these emails that would just pique your interest, and you know you shouldn't click on the link, but you know, it really— your curiosity. And so I did. And about 25 minutes later, I knocked out 20 of the 22 offices in the network based on the link. So yeah, that was great. 2 weeks later, I was fired. So it didn't really last long. That was about 6 months in. That was 2000, 2001. I went to New York. So I was living in New York next. And in New York, I got my MBA at a small liberal arts college called Wagner College. And I thought that I wanted to coach water polo for a living. That's what I grew up, that's what I did, that's what I knew.

There's a great water polo team that plays in New York City called— at the NYAC, which is this private club.

NYAC. Yeah, yeah, they're— NYAC's unbelievable. But I mean, they cherry-pick—

By the way, I don't even know if you know this about us, because it's funny because we have this similar haircut, right? So yeah, we got the—

You're gonna tell me you played water polo for NYAC?

Turn to your left, turn to your right. I just want to check and see. No divots. Yeah, so you got a good noggin, like it's a round noggin. No forceps marks, no, none of that, no damage. Looks like nobody dropped you on your head. You're pretty good there.

Yeah.

Played water polo, so did I. I got into it a little bit later. Look, I ended up in swimming in sort of my junior year in high school, and a lot of the kids that were there were already burned out. So I know when you, when you were saying earlier about a swimming family, that up at 6, we used to go out. So it was— you grew up in a place that was kind of chilly in the winter, just like me. I'd get outside to either walk to the high school or take the bus. And by the time we got there, back in the day when we had hair, they were icicles.

Yeah.

Like, go to practice in the morning, get in the water by 6:30 or 7:00. For me, it was a New York City school, by the way, which meant that on the weekends they didn't heat the school to save money. So this is like a school built in like 1934, like an FDR, you know, like one of these New Deal buildings. Yeah, like 7 AM on a Monday morning and the water was, I don't even know, it had to be 60 degrees. It was utterly ridiculous to jump in the pool. But some of these kids were in there, they had been YMCA swimmers, they had been AAU and all these other things that you put kids into swimming when they're 5 years old and you have them swim back and forth and back and forth and back and forth ad nauseam for hours and hours and hours so they can someday become an Olympian.

Yeah.

Or at a minimum, like on the low end of that is You get a college scholarship.

Correct.

For swimming, right? So all that was going on and I wasn't at that talent level anyway, certainly not starting when I was starting. But one thing I really discovered when I was in college that I didn't know about and I fell in love with, it was water polo. I absolutely love this sport. It is one of the most brutal games. It's like rugby in the water.

I mean, it's totally

right. It is a beastly, beastly sport.

Where did you play at?

I played at UMass Amherst and we were a club team at the time. That wasn't even varsity, didn't even have any funding, and we went to Easterns, which was a big deal. We were good enough to go to Easterns, play at Annapolis, play against, you know, uh—

Those guys were beasts, man.

Johns Hopkins and Brown and— oh yeah, no, serious teams. Not— I would say Brown and Navy were like one cut below the teams that you probably were playing against, which were the West Coast teams. So whether it was the— No,

not really. I played the East Coast. No, I played the East Coast. So really, when I was at my college, we would travel 10 hours on the weekend. We drive from Dayton to New York to West Point to Annapolis to Brown. Like, yeah, we played the West East Coast and we just got our asses handed to us.

That natatorium at West Point's pretty sick, right?

Yeah, I just remember the Annapolis one being unbelievable too. Like, those two were just phenomenal.

Ridiculous. Yeah, this is so funny. Anyway, we won't digress into this because people will be bored.

They'll be like, what?

Like, what the hell are these guys talking about? You know, and some people are probably going, man, Polo, water polo. You know, the most difficult thing that people don't know about water polo, but I'll just sort of reveal this now and that way it'll make the podcast episode worth the while, is the toughest part about water polo is getting the horses in the water. Like, yes, right? That is not an easy—

I always thought actually beating the horses to move up and down was the hardest part because the whip kept getting in the way of the water and you just wouldn't have the same impact.

Well, the mallets, they slow down as soon as you Strike the water with the mallet, it just slows down. You gotta have this incredible, like a golfer, you've got to get club speed.

Yes. To get to the deep end, you have the snorkel issue, which you have to be blowing that water off the top of the snorkel.

Very tough.

So hard.

Yeah. All right. So back on point here, you end up in a series of jobs. And to me, I don't know what the number is right now. It's at least 7 Changes of career. And I think that number has radically gone up because millennials today are leaving a J-O-B on average every 18 months.

Yeah.

And 53%, I think, is the Harris Poll statistics. 53% of people who are in a job, working a job, which is totally cool if you work at a job, are looking for another job. So they know what they're doing isn't their direction. It's not their purpose.

If you look at the Gallup organization, it's actually in the US, Only 32% of the people are actually engaged in their job. So obviously the flip side of that is a huge amount of people, was that 68% are not engaged in their job whatsoever. So that means they're not productive, there's lower ROI, they're probably looking, the other 58%, looking for another job. It's a huge toxicity epidemic. Yeah, huge epidemic.

So give us the version of the story where you finally get on path. Like show us, because you've been able to do some things that are remarkable, which is along the way say no. To things that aren't going to work or you can envision in the future, sort of future casting going, I don't want to end up living in a dumpster or near a dumpster or whatever it is. You go, I don't want that.

Yeah, that's fair. I don't think that's always the case. I'm also the guy who wants the experiences. So I've lived in Australia. I've lived in Japan. I live in the Middle East now. I've lived in Philadelphia for 7 years prior to here. So I'm also the guy who wants experiences. My dad died when I was 20 at university. And so my dad was 49. At 20, I was like, that's really far away. At 44 now, I'm like, holy crap, that's around the corner, right? And so for me, there's always been this clock in my mind of the countdown to 49. And so one of the things that I've always said to myself is I want no regrets, because I could die tomorrow, and if my bank account is full and I've done no experiences, what's the point? So I'm not saying I'm frivolous with money. What I'm saying is that I want to have experiences that I can take with me that broaden my horizon, that give me a depth of knowledge and experience that makes me wiser. I'm not trying to sound like an arrogant, pompous guy, but I think that experiences give you perspective that you can't get if you don't go get them, if you don't seek them out.

Who would want to get to the end of their days and count among the things that they wish they had done Living in places, meeting people, eating foods, those kinds of things. I mean, those are sensations of life that you only get from a visceral experience of it, from actually getting involved in doing it. So has it been a major part of your philosophy?

Yeah, I think so. And I don't know if it's based out of fear of death, if I'm being frank. Like, I could die tomorrow, so I don't want to miss out, and I don't want my kids to miss out on opportunities as well. You know, I look at my mom and she's not had that many experiences. She hasn't done that much. She hasn't gone that many places, and she's a bit lonely and sad, and I don't want that for myself. But, you know, your question about how I got on a path, right? Like, that's a hard question for me because I went and got a PhD in Australia. That definitely was not on the cards for me whatsoever. If you were to ask anybody, I mean literally anybody that knew me in college, that was not what I'd be doing.

Right.

You ask anybody in college, I would not have written a book. So I've made conscious choices throughout my life either to prove someone wrong, to have an experience, to prove myself right. These are all conscious choices I make. It doesn't mean I want to do it forever. It means I want to get that experience. Right now I teach university and I'm an author, but I just started a startup that's in a tech industry. So here's a new pivot.

Yes.

And I'm out meeting people. New experience. Yeah, and selling things and getting this out to the world because you know what? I don't want to teach anymore. I want to go do something different that I can create from the ground up. So that's a new experience for me and it's a new set of challenges and it's a new thing for me to say, listen, I can do this. Because for many years, and we all go through this in our head, most of us at least, we have the imposter syndrome. Do I actually belong in this world? Do I belong in this job, in this career with this group of people? You know, I'm envious of people who have That depth of confidence, or at least the perception of confidence, that they belong in every conversation. I find that amazing. And maybe it's an act, maybe it's their front, maybe some people believe it.

What do you think the, the essence of that is? This is— fascinated with what you just said.

Meaning feeling like I belong in the imposter syndrome?

This idea about belonging in every conversation. I'm just curious there, what is it about belonging In every conversation, do you think?

I don't go on Facebook often anymore, but I fell for a Facebook survey and it was, what is your career blockers?

Did you crash a dozen computers?

No, there was no porn that showed up anywhere. I was totally—

Excellent. You know, it's so funny. I stopped myself earlier from asking whether it was a porn thing.

It wasn't. It wasn't actually. It wasn't. I don't remember what it was, but I knew not to do that at work.

Good man. I'm glad I'm glad I.

So I took this little survey, and at the end it basically said that you just always wanted your parents' approval to belong, like that you were part of their life. And you know, in retrospect, I mean most of our problems and issues we have do come from our childhood anyways because we create our own structure and meaning, which isn't always correct, but it's how we created at five, seven, ten, whatever. And so I remember thinking all the time, I want their attention, I want their approval. And I think it just manifested itself as I grew older, believing that I didn't belong in conversation. So, you know, I have 2 master's and a PhD. For me to say that sounds ridiculous because this is— I'm overqualified to do anything at the end of the day, right? So, uh,

I'm overqualified to do anything, so I do nothing.

Yeah, I mean, that's the way I feel sometimes. And so like the only reason why I did that is to make myself feel like I belonged in the conversation, but it didn't help me close that gap. It just allowed me to say, well, what else do I need to do to prove that? And I think that for many people, they struggle with that. They struggle with this idea of, do I belong? Am I good enough? And I think these are, you know, I don't know. Did you, I mean, have you ever experienced these things? I mean, you seem like this super well-informed and evolved human being, Adam. I don't know.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

If you only knew me.

Yeah. That's why I'm asking.

Very unevolved. Yeah, I mean, here, I think that's why I'm asking about it, is that this idea of belonging. We were at a friend's house the other night, this dear friend of ours who listens to the podcast. So I'm gonna just shout out to this beautiful soul, a lovely lady by the name of Shifra. And we were celebrating her birthday and had a bunch of her friends around, and everybody was sharing something about her that we all love. It's a wonderful sort of a ritual, I suppose, that our daughter Chelsea introduced us to, that at birthdays At a certain point, we asked this question, you know, go around the circle and ask and say one thing that you love about this person.

That's awesome.

You know, appreciate. Yeah, it's just magical how deep it goes, how emotional it gets. So I looked at her and I said, I'm just so in awe of how comfortable you are in your skin as a— just as a human being. You say what's on your mind, you make no apologies, but you're not insensitive. She's not without compassion. She's not a brutal person. Like a barbarian in any way. She's the opposite. But yet you really know where you stand because she's so comfortable standing in her own shoes. And I think that's what— when you said that to me, I do believe that is what a lot of people are either consciously or unconsciously seeking. It's just to feel comfortable inside their own skin.

That's so true. So true.

Yeah. And I think when looking at your life of seeking out and finding experiences, curating a life of And obviously, you're introducing your kids to these things. You've got 4 kids and they're having this magnificent life of living in places like Australia, now Dubai. That is in many ways, I think, part of how it is that we get more comfortable with ourselves is by knowing things through experiencing them. I want this to be about you, so I'll just say this one thing and then I'm going to come back to where this led you. We use an exercise and I don't even remember where I was introduced to this, but I love looking at a list of things that we don't want. So kind of a T-chart where on the left-hand side, it's the things we don't want in life. And it's the thing, it's like the first page in the personal development handbook is don't focus on what you don't want, right? It's always focus on what you want, focus on what you want. It's like all that drummed into your head when you start doing any kind of human potential work. And I thought to myself, gosh, there's so much juice in looking at the things that we don't want, because when you do, it gives you such clarity at times about what you do want. So when you know what you don't want, you know what you do want. When you know what you don't want, you know what you do want.

You know what's super interesting about that? Again, it's very serendipitous, is that I don't listen to it very often, Tony Robbins podcast that he has, and he has Shaun White on, and he literally used that phrase of, I have my clients write down all the things they don't want to happen To give clarity of what they want to happen.

Now he's a snowboarder. Is that the guy?

Sean White is. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

Tony Robbins was saying like this is what he has his clients do. I listened to that probably 17 times in a row to get my head around what that really means when you write down what you don't want. And I just think that's a really impactful tool because if yeah, to your point, I don't want to be a bad father. I don't want to be a bad business person. I don't want to be da da da da. Inversely, that consequently means that then I need to strive to be a better father, to be a better business person, to be a better human being, whatever that is you want the opposite of that. But that's the premise of it. And I think that, wow, I mean, in some ways that just kind of blew my mind. I felt like a vein pop or something, but I just kind of felt like that makes a lot of sense to getting you to be clear about where you need to go and work on yourself at.

Wow, the pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, You know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different, something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken, and all you have to do to get your own free Resilient Leader Assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Yes. Like, you don't want to be out of breath when you're climbing the stairs. It's such a clear indication of greed. What do I do about that?

Yeah.

I might want to actually do some exercise to, uh, yeah, you know, so that— well, so I think your experiences, the diversity of experiences that you've had, have given you such great clarity about the things that you do want. So when it comes to that path question, that difficult— and I'm so glad you said that because, you know, maybe there That is not an easy question to begin with, and it's an evolving thing. It's a moving target of sorts because it's not like we're on— there's one path. I mean, when we look backward from the end of days to the beginning, it's like looking from the top of a staircase backward. You might not have been able to see all the stairs. This is, by the way, Dr. King talked about this. You know, you just can't see the stair more than the stair in front of you sometimes. It's dark. Yeah. But when you get to the top and you look backwards, you can see the perfect ordering, the perfect sequence of all those stairs. So, it really is one of those things that when we look backwards, you can see how everything was just perfect. Like, all those experiences were perfect because they led you to where they absolutely had to lead you. But in the moment, to feel comfortable in your own skin, to feel like you belong in the moment without the ability to fast forward the 40 years ahead, which nobody wants to do. Like my mother-in-law used to say, don't wish your life away. You know, you don't want to do that. And yet you still want to feel safe, secure, comfortable, confident in the moment, right?

I think, you know what I've come to in my mind, at least for me where I'm at in my personal journey, and I think everyone's on their own journey, their own path, their own stones, their own steps, is that I literally do believe everything does happen for a reason. I'm not particularly a religious guy. I don't even know if I'm spiritual, but I do think that like inside your brain, the way it works is that you create the meaning and desires that you want. both negative and positive, but they all are additive to the bigger picture as you go. And so for every failure you have, it's an opportunity to learn. For every roadblock that comes up, it puts you in a different path to go a different direction. I'm a big believer that life will give you nudges and will keep pushing you in the direction that you were meant to be in. And if you don't listen, it's going to knock you that way eventually, no matter what, you know? And I'm going through that right now with nudges about being an entrepreneur where I've been trying to be one for 10 years, but not committed to doing it for various reasons. But I decided that I can't ignore my drive to do these things because I'm less happy if I don't. We as human beings, we all go through this. You know, my mom had a comment the other day that really is a manifestation of why she's miserable as an adult. Maybe miserable is a bit tough, but like not happy, is that she said sometimes you have to sacrifice yourself for the greater good. And so my mom and my house I grew up in, this again goes to my psyche, every day for 15 years complained about her job, how much she didn't like it, How annoying it was, how hard it was. And when you're a child and that's all you hear about working, why the hell would I want to have a real job working nine to five when all I hear is how bad it is? And so, in her mind, she was doing the greater good for the family by taking a job she didn't like so she could put food on the table. She was the breadwinner. She made more than my dad did growing up. But in my mind, why would I want to be unhappy and impact my family? So. My search is to figure out how I can be my happiest person, my happiest version, and that just trickles down to everybody. My wife will tell you, if I'm having a bad week at work, unfortunately, I'm a bit of an asshole at home. I'm shorter. I'm not as nice. I recognize it and I own it to my kids. I apologize all the time. Dad's having a bad week. I shouldn't take it out on you. It's my fault. I'll work harder to be a better person to treat you with more respect. Like, I'm really transparent with my children about these things. I think often as parents we have this like perception we need to act a certain way all the time so our kids don't think we're weak or we can't own our anger. We displace it on the children. And so anyhow, not to get all high and mighty, I just think that as a parent it's really important your kids see that you're a human first, right? And they can respect that process. So yeah, I don't know where I'm going with this, but jump on in, Adam.

Yeah, I love where you're going with it, buddy, because it's— well, you started to talk about authenticity earlier and how that word has gotten a little watered down. And to me, what you were just modeling there is what I would call transparency. And that level of self-honesty and transparency is how I would define what is authentic. And that's very powerful in leadership. And I know that's one of the things that you've been involved in is giving leaders these strategies, but more, I suppose, helping them to own themselves, own their authenticity, own the truth of themselves really. Including how it is that they work with their challenges. So is that the work that you're really called to still, or is the entrepreneurial nudge into it— well, you said it's going into tech, so it could be that you're leaving this chapter behind, that we're catching you at the close of a chapter. Does it feel like that, or—

No, no, not at all. I think that it's funny, my wife had the same comment as you just had, and she's like, you put all this work into it, why are you— I'm like, I'm not giving it up, it's actually all merging.

Hmm.

Everything's merging onto a highway for me. And so I can now have conversations with leaders about what it looks like to be more authentic and be in the room with leader as a leader. That's important. That gives you value. I mean, and I don't want to dismiss the work they do because there's some, you know, I had some pretty amazing people endorse my book. But there are people who have never actually led an organization, but they're telling you how to be a leader,

right?

So I was listening to a podcast and it was on a podcast, How I Built This. how I built that. It's the NPR one. It's really— if you haven't listened to it, it's freaking unbelievable. It's taking these entrepreneurs, and he had an entrepreneur who I think they built SoulCycle, him and her and her partner. Long story short, she goes, I got tired of listening to the armchair critics about how I should act and be as a leader when they've never actually been in the ring. Hmm. And so she's like, I just stopped listening to them. And I thought, man, that's really powerful because there are a lot of armchair coaches in this world that have actually never been in the ring to understand the constraints. Complexities of a situation. And so I'm pretty adamant about jumping in the ring. So if I want to be seen as a serious actor in this space,

yes,

I better do some serious acting.

You want to advise entrepreneurs?

Be an entrepreneur.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I'm not trying to dismiss my book or belittle it and say, oh, I wasn't— it's not a good book. I think it's a great book. It's written like how we talk. I think it adds value when people see, oh, he's led this organization or that organization. So I thought to myself, I should probably put it in practice, right? This is the theory in my mind. This is the learnings that I got from interviewing 140+ CEOs around the world. This is what I got. But at the end of the day, I don't know, for me, it's like, you know, I don't know if you grew up skateboarding at all.

Oh my gosh, you and I, it feels like we have a parallel, some parallel universe going on here. Yeah, skateboarding was a thing, man.

So I feel like a poser. I feel like a poser if I'm like out there saying these things, right?

And you can't do a 360. You can't do that. I don't even know what the tricks are today.

Yeah, yeah, you don't. I'd break my leg is what I know at this point.

I was bruising every part of my body back then. Just, yeah, with a skid pad or whatever it was called.

My friend and I, we made like a quarter pipe out of our house. We used to go just barreling down the street jumping off this quarter pipe on our skateboard.

You were doing the Jackass thing before Jackass was a thing.

Yeah, I wasn't stapling my testicles or anything. There's none of that.

Excellent. That's good, man. You look smarter than that. Marginally, right, Doctor?

Yeah, let's not set the bar too high, Adam. Not too high.

No, no, absolutely. Well, this is terrific stuff. I've just so enjoyed this conversation. Really glad we've gotten to meet, and I feel like our audience, our community feels— will probably experience the fact that we're meeting for the first time, which I think is really cool because this is one of the joys of having a show like this and being able to meet amazing people from all over the world, including near Dubai.

Yeah, you really like saying that, don't you?

I do, man. It's like I'm already manifesting my trip to Dubai. I'm gonna be someday— I'm gonna be speaking near Dubai.

Just only come here through October and February, October to February. After that, you're going to be like, how the hell do you live in this environment? Because in the summer, it's like 120, 125. Yeah. Yeah.

You lose weight. You walk outside, walk to the car, you've lost 5 pounds, right?

Yeah. Yeah. In Dubai, it's a humid oven.

So part 2 of this show, we're going to have it, definitely going to do hot yoga from near someplace near Dubai. Share if you could, You interviewed a lot of CEOs. I think, would you say 140 or something like that?

More than that, but in the book was about 140.

Yeah. And this is a tough question, but I'm going to put you on the spot for this. And if there's an answer, great. And if there's not, don't make one up. Is that fair?

Okay.

So is there one thing that's sort of a thread that you would say with every one of these CEOs, as crazy as they've been to do what they're doing? Because like, having been there and worn that, I don't know what kind of crown that is because it's a lonely crown. It's a bloody crown at times, and it's also a wonderful, a wonderful honor to be in that role and have that responsibility. So I could show you the scars to prove it. If there's one thread, one thing that ties them all together as leaders, what is that?

Let me give you a qualifying statement to that, is that the leaders that I think were most authentic had a string that went through their life. And not all 140 fell into this category. You know, that's part of the idea of research, is not everyone's gonna give you validity of what you're trying to prove. But what I found is that the leaders that really got what leading was about were leaders that really embraced their adversity moments. And they went from a point of saying, it happened to me, to it happened for me. And when you think about life and your own life and the pivots that you make, and most of your conscious pivots actually happen in your life When you start asking a different question, often when people play the victim mentality, why did that happen to me? Some of those people get stuck in that for thirty years, and I feel sorry for those people. My compassion does run dry at some point when you say to them, you've got to stop asking that question of why it happened to me and change that preposition and ask why it happened for me. And what I found, and this is a reflection of my life and probably your life as well, Adam, is that when you start saying, where's the learning in this? Where is the opportunity in this to be a better human being, to learn what I'm doing better, to add value where I wasn't adding value? Because then that actually led to the second biggest finding, is that these leaders all had growth mindsets. They all wanted to become a better version of themselves, not only for themselves but for the people around them. They wanted to lead more consciously and have a bigger impact and legacy about being a good human being. One of the things I have people go through is write their own tombstone or their own obituary. And I used to ask that question on my podcast. What do you want people to say about you at your funeral? What do you want your tombstone to say? And I always found it fascinating when people would say, he was a good business person, he excelled at being a CEO. And I thought to myself, you're really missing what life is about. Because when you're at your funeral, if people are talking about that, not that you were a good human being and a great father or a great mother, A great husband, a great dad. Like you're missing what life is really about because those manifestations of yourself will bleed into work because you treat people with respect and kindness and compassion. And that's the other part of these leaders that I found—they're really much more compassionate to those around them. And I want to be careful this word compassion, by the way. Sorry, I'm kind of going on a tangent here. If people think compassion sometimes is weakness, compassion is also saying the hard thing to somebody. Compassion is. Listen, I care about you enough to say you're not doing right. You got to do better because you care about them. There's also compassion where you can say you've lost someone in your family. Take some time. I feel for you. And I think the two types and leaders can have both of those of the hard compassion and the soft compassion. There was just a string that I kept finding that had these similarities of these leaders. Some were stronger in certain areas than others. I think we're human, but I think at the end of the day, there was this

Beautiful. I'm a big believer in the power of the habits that we have, but I call them a different word. I use this word rituals as in without a religious context around it, but more along the lines of things that we do consciously versus things that we do just habitually. We drive home the same route and we will pick up the fork with the same hand. I mean, it's things that we do without thinking about it. Rituals are more what we choose to do for a purpose. I know I have lots of rituals about so many different things these days. Yeah. I'd love to know, and I'm sure I'm 100% certain that our community would love to know, at least one ritual that you have consistently used or adopting or have adopted recently to keep you in that optimal state. Because as you said, when people are looking backward at what people might say about them after they've passed. You're right. I mean, would a lot of people want to be thought of as having been successful, having been at the top of their career or whatever it is? Yeah, I think people would want to be acknowledged for the work that they put in. But bottom line, if that's all there is, it still feels like an empty cup. Whereas for people to say, despite this person's great success or despite the fact that they worked 90 hours a week, they found time to blank.

Yeah.

Right? Does that make sense?

It's a both/and. It's a both/and.

Yeah.

Right? It's not an either/or. I may have phrased it like it was either/or and I didn't mean to. It's a both/and. You can be both successful and a good human being. I think that was the bridge I was trying to make.

Yeah. I feel like to get to that point, we've got to be working the same way as you said. You have your moments when you're with your kids and during the week and you're not at your best and you own it. You're just there being real about it. The rituals I think that we create for ourselves help us To be better at something. I mean, sometimes a ritual is for health, right? We have a green drink every day. We go walk, you know, take a 20-minute walk. We take a 15-minute, 20-minute nap, whatever it is. Those are things specifically designed for health. What are some of the rituals that you've got, or one in particular that you're really attached to?

Usually when I get asked this question in my past, I'd always go to like, oh, I meditate, or I do this, or I do that, like some sort of tactical thing. This is still a tactic, But I was really thinking about this as you asked the question. I think the thing I've always done, it's always been a ritual for me, which I think has allowed me to evolve as a human being and still evolve as I go on my journey, is to take time and space to be self-reflective, be intentional about being self-aware of my strengths and weaknesses. And in some ways, in fact, I'm really grateful my parents left me alone when I was 4 because like it taught me to get into my own head and And to really listen to what my body's doing, what my mind's doing. And as I've gotten older, I'm getting better at turning off the negative vibes and flipping those conversations to be more positive. But I don't think I could do that as easily if I wasn't comfortable going inside, turning inwards, and becoming more self-aware. And I think for me, that is the number one thing that I do that leads to whatever else habits or patterns that I have in my life. But it starts with that.

Yeah, self-reflection. You know, no one's ever answered that. So we're, we're nearing, I think, 100 episodes at this point, and I've heard a lot of rituals. You're right, there's some overlap in that. People say some of the same things. And I suppose somebody might be thinking, well, that's really what he's talking about is mindfulness or meditation. But it's not that, because in many ways is a scary place for a lot of people to go, to turn inward for self-reflection, like you said, because it can feel like a bottomless That's good.

Yeah,

bottom

line, being honest with yourself is the hardest thing to do.

Yeah,

right. That means you have to admit that you're fallible and be okay with those being fallible to then move forward. I think as human beings, some environments we're raised in, it's all about being perfect or flawless or not having self-love or whatever it is. In my world, which is raised— that was the norm, is not being— having self-love or being respectful to yourself. And that's a poisonous place to be for a really long time. But what comes healthfully out of that is that when you start to dissect those 2 things and say they're not together, and you allow yourself to say, okay, what is it about myself that puts me in that space that I can flip and change to be better at? And to be honest with some of your weaknesses, like, I am not a detailed person. If you watch half of my mailers that I send out, There's a typo in it every time. My wife always catches me. It's usually an apostrophe S. I eff them up every time. And she's like, when are you going to learn? And I say, probably never, but that's why I married you because you're awesome at it.

Yeah. Oh my goodness. Well, listen, self-awareness is a perfect place for us to wrap up this conversation. And I think there's a wonderful follow-up to this. I'd love to chat with you again about this idea of how it is that people embrace what it's like, as you said, to embrace the adversity, embrace the changes in life, and what's there, the wisdom that's there to be mined for, that there's this extraction process that if you're willing to go inside and examine, as you said, to be more self— not just self-aware, but self-honest, there's this virtual gold mine that's like nothing else. It really is remarkable. So it's like a lot of things in life, moving into something that's scary, moving into something that even triggers or brings up fear often pays a great dividend. And to me, one of the great dividends of being self-honest is that you end up with self-trust. And this is again maybe a second show, but it's really important because I don't think that anything that we truly want out of life comes to us without us having that sense of trust, trust in ourselves and trust in the universe. I so thank you for opening up the space of that conversation today, James. Thank you for being on the show. This was wonderful. I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com/book. And not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today.

Adam, thank you for your time, energy, and willingness to have me on The Conscious Pivot.

Beautiful. I love how we conclude these shows and even resist the term conclude because it's never an ending, at least not to me. This is just all beginnings. It's all openings. I do, in fact, believe in eternity. So it doesn't mean you have to all believe in that, but certainly not. It just feels right to me. I don't know. It's a story I want to tell, which is that there's no need to hurry. There's no need to worry. And in a world where we're eternal beings, I mean, think about that for just a second. If there is an eternity, what's the hurry? You know, what's the worry? What's the need to condemn or to resent anything?

Yeah.

You know, we take this so seriously, but I'll leave that for another day. And my prayer, if you will, my hope certainly, is that we get to do the same thing tomorrow that we did today. And folks that have heard this before, they know what I'm about to say maybe, which is that we got to wake up today, right? This was a gift. James, you woke up today, right, brother? Yes.

Yes?

No, was there a guarantee yesterday that you're going to wake up today?

No.

No guarantee, right?

Never.

But then all of a sudden, you realize in the morning there's a new day. You've been given this great gift and not everybody gets that gift. There's a fact that we can all acknowledge tomorrow when we wake up again and realize in that waking breath, in that waking moment, there are people taking their last breath at that very exact moment. So that's special. It's sacred, holy even. It's something we can certainly be grateful for regardless of the significance that you give to it. We can be grateful for another day, grateful for our assignment for that day, whatever that might be, whether we know it or don't know it, grateful for the opportunity to wake up a little bit more, be a little more conscious tomorrow than we are even today. And lastly, if you can take 10 seconds when you wake up tomorrow morning, James, do you have to— you think you got 10 seconds for something? A rich morning? Yeah, you got 10 seconds?

Awesome. Of course

I do. Yeah.

How can I say no to that? It's like a setup. I can't say no.

It is totally a setup. Exactly. I don't think there's anybody— the busiest people on the planet have 10 seconds.

Yeah.

And this is my—

Whatever I said no and meant no. What if I was like, no, I don't? I don't.

Who are these people?

Go ahead.

For a new waking ritual, it's the simplest 4 simple words: I love my life. I love my life. Do you love your life, James?

I love my life, man. It's the best.

Beautiful. All right, everybody. Ciao for now. We'd love to see you again. Love to hear from you, really. adamarkel.com/podcast to leave a comment about today's show. We'd love to get your thoughts on it. Also, there's full show notes so you can find out more about Dr. James Kelly and his book and the work that he's doing. So please, please, please check out the show notes. Also, visit us on Facebook, the Start My Pivot community on Facebook. You can get there by going to startmypivot.com and get to the front door, join the community. And if you're going to join, Participate because otherwise it's just not as much fun. So we'll see you soon and sending out lots of love, everybody. Ciao for now.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcasts. For more tips, strategies, and support as you consciously pivot into Into a new business and lifestyle you love? Join our Pivot community on Facebook at pivotfb.com.