Wild Ideas Worth Living: How Nature Teaches Us Resilience And How Changing Your Attitude Makes All The Difference With Shelby Stanger

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Markel and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change-proof. Hey there, everybody.

Welcome back to the Change Proof Podcast, and it's Adam Markel. I'm so happy to spend a little time with you today. I've got an incredible guest, Shelby Stanger. She's a neighbor of mine. I didn't really even know this till recently, but she's in the next town over. She's at Cardiff-by-the-Sea, this beautiful little town, Southern California, North County, San Diego area. If you don't know Cardiff-by-the-Sea, it's definitely a place you're going to want to visit. But for now, Shelby Stanger is the host and creator of the hit podcast Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production. Over the years, her work has appeared everywhere from Outside Magazine to ESPN. She's spoken to organizations like the Girl Scouts of America, NPR, and Creative Mornings. She's always chasing adventure herself. Shelby has surfed from Canada to Costa Rica, sandboarded down desolate dunes in Cape Town, paddled down a remote portion of the Amazon River, Got so many bug bites, by the way, and interviewed countless CEOs, athletes, activists, and thought leaders. She regularly consults with highly motivated individuals and brands to tell better stories and even launch their own podcasts and wild ideas. She is amazing. So buckle up, have fun right now with me and Shelby Stanger. 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 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 term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. All right, Shelby, I'm already just salivating at the idea of where we're going to take our conversation today. And just at the outset, What's one thing that's not part of the introduction that you hear quite frequently that I just read out loud? What's one thing that you would love for people to know about you that's not a part of your standard bio or intro?

That I love people and I have a lot of energy, but I will talk to everybody. Some people like dogs. I love dogs, but I really like people. So that's probably something you should know.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's a good thing to know because I don't think everybody does love people. I mean, I don't have any statistics to prove that or back that up, and I'm not a cynic or anything, but I mean, there's some people out there that, as evidenced by their behavior, their attitude or whatever, you just go, they don't really dig people. And then I've also known people, as you probably have too, that you thought kind of liked you, but in the end they were not so much.

I just think that everybody has a really unique story and They should tell it, or I wanna hear it. I just love how people go through life and I love finding out what they're passionate about. So, I don't know.

So why do you love people? I mean, I thank you for sharing that. And I guess what I'm really getting at is, was there a time in your life when you didn't love people so much? And now this is how you live a better life by loving. No.

Lucky. I grew up really lucky. I had a mom who just talked to everybody at the grocery store, at the gym. I mean, the guys who bagged our groceries, there was a Vons in Solana Beach where CVS is now. And they came to my birthday parties growing up. And I think I just learned at a very young age that like everybody's really unique and has a cool story and someone doesn't have a place to go for Thanksgiving, we should invite them. So my mom was a professor at San Diego State and often our Thanksgiving dinners growing up had a very motley crew of personalities from her students to the people at the gym, to the guys at Seaside Market or Vons or wherever, someone she met on the beach. And I think what's great about that, and I didn't realize that until probably like this year or a couple years ago, is that it made me really good at interviewing people and just good at my job. So I love people and I don't know, I'm able to kind of talk to all sorts of people and figure out what makes them tick. And I think that's, you know, people always ask me, what's your superhero power? And I'm just a very average surfer, maybe an average writer. average podcaster, but I think I'm really good at connecting to all types of people and finding goodness in them.

Yeah. You're genuinely curious about them.

Super curious.

And their lives and yeah. Wow. You know what? Just thinking how important it is that we're gonna talk today about a lot of things, but change and resilience and the Darwin quote comes to mind. A lot of people, when I ask about resilience and how they think about it, and I'm almost always in In a context of a keynote presentation to a more corporate audience when I'm asking that kind of thing, or in a, like a workshop or something. And I'll say that and they'll go, well, it's the survival of the fittest thing. That's what we know about Darwin, or one of the things, you know, we remember. And I go, well, it's interesting that that's the case because that's not really what his quote is all about. That's not what he said. He said it's not the survival of the fittest or the smartest even. It's the survival of the most adaptable. It's the people who adapt to their changing environment. that are the ones that will be around the longest. And I feel like to be able to fit in or find yourself curious enough to want to fit in even around people that are so different or just having a different experience, that is a superpower. And you're making me think about why it is that if I travel to Alabama for an event or something like that, I literally fall in love with Birmingham. I'll be there for 3, 4 days and I'll love everything. I'll just— So like literally vibe with everybody I meet and just enjoy the whole thing and be sad when I leave. And then you know what, a week later I might be in Springfield, Missouri, and it's like totally different, but I still love it. So are you that way? Do you love to just wherever you are, are you like a chameleon, or how do you relate and connect to people that are so different than you?

I don't know. I had different— my sisters and I are really different, and so I had to live with people that are really different than me. I don't know, but I can tell you that I do like going to different places and trying to find goodness in them, but I tend to like places with beaches or mountains or trees. I don't always like cities, so maybe I'm a little bit more biased when it comes to places than people, but I think writing a book was really lonely for me and hard. And what was hard about it, someone asked me about that yesterday, was that there weren't enough people around when I was writing. It's such a solo activity. And when I grew up, I played soccer really competitively, Olympic development onto college. I ended up playing at the only Division III school I applied to. I was going to go D1, but I wanted to also be a journalist and have a life and party and maybe join a sorority and volunteer. So I ended up going to Emory University. What I learned is that I like being the goalie. I was a goalkeeper, so I'm used to being like the hero or the villain, and I'm okay with that amount of responsibility. It sucked, but I don't ever want to play goalie again, but I like having a team in front of me. And writing a book for me was a little tricky because it was just me. And I have a podcast too. I have a podcast all about adventure, but I have a team. So yes, I'm just the host, but I have all these really great people at REI and at our production company that I work with to tell stories. So I don't know. I just like having other people around.

Yeah. I love having a team that is a part of the whole thing that we're doing too. It's just remarkable how Not just how important that team is, like literally how much more enjoyable the whole process is. Like podcasts, for people that don't know, there's a lot of moving parts to a podcast. I mean, you and I are just vibing. We're gonna have a conversation here, but there's so much that went into getting this thing set up. The post-production on this is gonna be its own like universe of stuff. Then there's the how we'll get it out to the world and what that looks like, and that's its own thing. I mean, there's so many things that are part of it. Yeah. Including it getting transcribed and turned into show notes and turned into blog fodder that gets on the website for SEO and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? There's a lot of moving parts to this simple conversation that we're having. And if I was to do that alone, I'd be burned out. I'd be pissed off. I know me, I would just be like, I would never do it.

I'm the same. Our podcast, the one I host for REI, which is REI's podcast, they own it now. I sold it to them. It's called Wild Ideas Worth Living. We also script it now, which is really cool. So we'll do like an hour and a half, 2-hour-long interview, and then it'll become a 30-minute show.

Ooh, yeah. Ooh, that's nice. And REI, what a great collaborator. What a great company to be aligned with. I imagine that's why you did it, because it very much a values alignment for you. Yeah.

Yeah. When I was a kid, I wrote down on a piece of paper, encourage other people to kind of go for it. I was 15. I wrote that as like my own little mission statement. And I was always a mainstream sports athlete. I played soccer, I ran cross-country and track, but I found the most joy through outdoor sports and nature. Surfing to me was really the first outdoor sport I'd ever done. My parents weren't outdoorsy. They're from New York and Pittsburgh. They didn't camp. They were like, camping? You want to go camping? I didn't camp till I went to camp when I was a teenager and I fell in love with it. And REI, when I started my podcast, I, I I had a long career as a journalist and then as a marketer. I worked for Vans. I did international sales and marketing. I did women's marketing early on when I was very young, quit to be a journalist, was freelance writing, also moved to Costa Rica to teach surf lessons, which my mom thought I was absolutely crazy for doing. Then I went back to consulting, worked with brands like Nike and Prana to tell better stories and Body Glove. And in 2016, I'd been freelance journalist. And magazines were getting smaller and smaller. And I loved Tim Ferriss's podcast. I just had like a big crush on Tim Ferriss's podcast, but I wish he'd interview more people who were adventurers. Yeah. Because that's just the lens in which I saw the world and which I connected to. And I wished he had interviewed more women. So that's why I started a podcast called Wild Ideas Worth Living. And I wanted to interview people who had this wild idea. and made it a reality. And ever since I was a little kid, I've been fascinated by people who took the road less traveled and who are kind of outliers who did their own thing, didn't have a direct path, go to college, get a job, get married, have kids. I was always interested in people who did it a little differently. I grew up in the south part of San Diego. And do you know who Slow Mo is?

No, I don't.

Slow Mo is this guy who is a doctor, but he like rollerblades in slow motion. down the boardwalk. And I was fascinated by people like him who were just these caricatures of themselves. He was like this mainstream doctor and he rollerblades down the boardwalk in slow motion and PB on the Mission Bay Boardwalk. Yep. When I was 19 years old, I was a journalism student at Emory University.

And by the way, just going to parenthetically say, for people who don't know that area, you got to go, you got to check it. It's worth the trip to San Diego for, among other things, that environment. It's kind of like a bit of a—

It's kind of like Venice, but not really. I was just going to

say it's like a cleaner Venice, but it's not that clean either.

But it's so funny because as a kid I'd run down the boardwalk and at Thanksgiving there's this other guy who would be like mostly naked and he'd have like a turkey like coming out of his Speedo or like something ridiculous for every holiday. And I just thought it was awesome as a kid. I don't know where I'm going with this, but I've always been fascinated by people who took a different path. There'd been a lot of times in my life where I felt Stuck or scared and afraid to take a path that made zero sense on paper. And for me, I always got my best answers, not from writing a pro-con list because those gave me anxiety and stress and made my stomach go in knots, but by going outside in nature. In nature, I mean, science proves that in nature, our blood pressure relaxes, our nervous system chills out. There's a study in 2019 in Frontiers in Psychology that proved that just 20 minutes a day in nature can reduce the stress hormone cortisol. I don't think I realized that as a kid, but for me, nature has always been really cathartic and a really good place for me, like basically a Petri dish for me to harbor wild ideas of my own. I got the best ideas when I was out in the water. Sometimes I got the best ideas when I was swimming in the middle of the ocean in La Jolla Cove, which is so inconvenient because who carries a pen and paper when they're swimming? So I'd have to like memorize this idea that would come to me or these words. Yeah, I just, I find that nature is really healing and it's where our best ideas come from. And all of us are coming off this pandemic, which sucked. And a lot of us are really struggling still with mental health, but most of us are starting to travel more. We're starting to do stuff. We're starting to gather more, which to me is like joyous because I love people, which is why I'm loving doing these podcast interviews. For me, I wrote this last book because I just wanted to encourage people. To go do a wild idea, especially one in nature, because I think it'll improve your life and maybe even change it.

Yeah. What I'm tracking there are so many things. I wrote a book some years ago called Pivot, which was about my movement out of a conventional profession. I was a lawyer for 18 years and to doing something pretty rad, pretty different. And that people have often thought was nuts, especially other lawyers are like, oh, what do you, I mean, A, How did you do it? Tell me. And B, I don't know, how could you give up that golden whatever? And that kind of thing. So the pro-con list, I couldn't agree more. Like, bullshit on that. Ball it up. I mean, I mean, maybe it works for some people, but for me, I ball it up, throw it in the circular file because that's not the process for figuring out whether you're going to make a pivot. And that pivot, by the way, too, doesn't have to be a giant leap. So I'm going to not push back, but I want to offer another perspective on this wild side thing, right? Yes. Because for me, getting in nature mind or having ocean mind, which is my nature more than it is the woods. I love to walk in the woods and I live in a treehouse in Martha's Vineyard on one coast and on the beach on the other coast, one town away from you, cuz we're neighbors, funny enough. But the way my mind responds to nature and where it certainly responds to the water is that it just creates all this space. It quiets it, the classic sort of meditative thing. But it also creates all this space and then space becomes creative itself. So yes, the greatest ideas, the inspirations for books and everything, all these things, they come from that time when you get into nature and have a nature mind or an ocean mind or whatever. So I so agree and invite people to, yes, explore what that wild adventure might be. And it might just be, like you said, that you carve out 20 minutes a day, like legitimately 20 is all you need. Again, the research clear on that. Yeah. to just go walk in a grove of trees, or if you've got a bit more time, you can toggle your day so that the morning or some part of the morning or some part of the afternoon, you get to be near the water or in the mountains or in the forest. Wow. What that will do for your mental health and for your creative juices and so many things. So yeah.

I agree. I mean, I think that's what's so great about nature is it forces us to be quiet and it forces us sometimes also to surrender. Like there's no ego in nature. Nature doesn't care what you look like, how much money you have in your bank account, what you do for a living. Like it doesn't give an F.

You're so tiny.

You're forced to give an F about yourself because nature doesn't care, but it also is really good at holding space for you in the water. It's so big and it's so vast. You talk a lot about resiliency, but a lot of people are trying a lot of things right now to improve their life. But here's what some of these other things like taking a substance or just going to therapy doesn't give you that nature does. And an adventure does. I think nature gives you an adventure. Nature gives you the perspective. Like think about just watching. So one of the things I suggest people to do, you don't have to go hike the Pacific Crest Trail or bike from Alaska to Patagonia. I'm not going to do that. I'm never going to climb Mount Everest. Just watch the sunrise or the sunset. For a week or a couple times a week. And that in itself is pretty powerful. And we know that just looking out into the horizon from a mountain vista, or just looking at the ocean at the horizon increases our perspective physically. And I think that helps us increase our perspective mentally as well. You get this space, like you talked about, that you don't get inside 4 walls of a house or a cube or an office. When you're outside.

Or a computer screen. Yeah. Or a cell phone.

Exactly. Exactly. That was also why writing a book was so hard because I was writing it on a computer and I was like, ah, how can I make this computer waterproof in the middle of the ocean and write on my surfboard? I couldn't figure that out. I didn't wanna figure it out. I mean, it would've been cool, but yeah, I don't know.

That was challenging. Solitary experience. Just like you said. And yet even in that, having written a few books and one last year that came, actually had 3 books come out last year, which is insane. It just all the way the pandemic worked. It's how it's done. You're a machine. No, hardly. But it was a team. So that's what I was getting at. I didn't do it. I wrote alone a lot of times, and then I also wrote in collaboration. The editing was a beast, and there were a lot of people involved with, from the publishing house to family and friends and stuff. Like it was just such a community, like a, what does it say? It takes a village. Like it takes 3 villages to write a book. Yeah. And yet it's still crazy that this book, I will get people to say there's a typo on this page. Like, there's still, after 15 edits of the thing, there's 1 or 2 typos that are in this book. And so it is humbling. I mean, the whole experience is just like you are in nature. As you said, you're so small in the midst of this vastness that for me, and I think you feel the same exact way, it takes what is your ego, which is a part of us. It's a necessary part of our survival. It's vital to our success. The worst of it It's oversized for what we're doing in the world. And by that I mean we need a perspective on our own egos, and nature affords that. You know what else affords perspective on your ego is falling down, is fucking up, is getting slammed in the water, right? As a surfer, you and I both know what it's like to get slammed and have how many tons of water over your head and pounding and stuff. And yes, it's a great experience and it's somewhat optional too, don't you think? You can go out in nature and get your ego in check. That's a lot easier on your body and your mind, your heart, your soul, than to allow the forces of nature to slam you because you're a little outta control. Your ego's a little outta control. What do you think of that? Have you known anybody like that? Does that resonate with you at all?

I mean, I think there's, you know, ways to have a relationship with nature and you can go to her in different ways when you need it. So if you just need healing, Lying in water is really healing. Watching the sunset, going for a quiet hike is great, but I think nature offers a lot of chances to be a great teacher. And that can include going surfing or going rock climbing or doing an adventure where you're going to fail and you have to get really comfortable with it. You're going to fall off your surfboard, you're going to fall rock climbing, and usually the consequences aren't that bad if you're locked in with rope. If you're not, you're high consequence. But I think that's the point of nature. When you talk about being slammed by water, there was a time where I was teaching surf lessons in Costa Rica and I would just paddle out every day, whether it was raining.

Tamarindo? Where were you?

I was in Nosara.

Okay.

Oh, I lived in Nosara and I taught surfing before it was crowded and filled with really rich tech executives that have changed the town. But it's okay. It's still a great place. And every day I would surf, whether it was big, whether it was small, and mostly it was big because it was summer and it was south swell and the waves used to scare me. And then it's sandy bottom there. The consequences are small. The risk is really not that big in the scheme of life. You can get hurt if you don't know what you're doing, but not like going to Indonesia or Hawaii or somewhere like that. And so I just treated each wave like finally it was just giving me a massage and I was like enjoying the beating. Of being held underwater. I just changed my relationship with things that were going to be heavy and tumultuous. And I think that's how life is. Like, if you can just relax during tumultuous situations, like going through the rinse cycle after a wave breaks on your head and you're rinsed underwater and you're going upside down, if you can relax through it, you'll come up for air and you'll get a chance to break, take a breath. If you panic while you're getting rinsed through the rinse cycle of the ocean, You're gonna lose your breath and it's gonna be high consequence. So it's a good metaphor to then take to your everyday life. And I think this is why I felt so called to write this book is that nature's been the best teacher. And ever since I was a little kid, I teach surf lessons to women and women would come for like a weekend clinic. I taught at Surf Diva, the first all-girls surf school. Women would come for a weekend clinic at La Jolla Shores. This was before there weren't many surf schools. Now there's a lot. Or they'd go for a week-long clinic in Costa Rica. And I'd get a call from one or two of them every single time, a few weeks or a few months later. And they'd say something like, hey Shelby, I quit my job. I ended my dysfunctional relationship finally for good, or I'm moving across the country to a place with a better beach, often by me. And their life would never be the same again. And their changes they would make keep going for the positive and the positive and the positive. And what I learned is that even a little time in nature doing something wild, whether it's wild to you is what matters, can really propel someone to massive positive change. You talk about resiliency, which is like my mom's favorite word. My mom happens to be an interventionist on drug addicts and people with mental health substance abuse. She's one of the top interventionists in the country. And we've had a lot of trauma growing up. My dad died when I was young. I'm the 4th child of 3. There was a son. That she had that died of sudden infant death syndrome at 8 months. And so they really protected me as a little kid. They were always afraid I was going to die, which she's like, maybe that's why you do such crazy stuff because you're raised in so much fear that you have to keep breaking out of it. And I'm like, maybe, I don't know, whatever. I'm going to let it go. And I think that being in nature teaches you resiliency as well. Trees are really resilient. And what's so cool about some trees is that even in fire, there's certain trees that will only seed during a wildfire and then only sprout new seeds and new trees if they're burned. So, I don't know. I just love that you talk a lot about resiliency because like nature is the ultimate teacher at building courage, gaining perspective, and gaining resiliency.

To me, metaphors are super helpful. So, what you said earlier about being put through the rinse cycle in surfing and stuff like that reminds me of a conversation I had with Dave Kalama. Who's a big wave surfer out on—

I've been with him on a paddleboard in Fiji. He's really cool.

He is. He's a good, good guy. In fact, I remember we did that podcast. He ended up in the book. He ended up in Change Proof because the book starts out with this metaphor of the ocean, in particular of a rip current, what we used to, as lifeguards back in the day, called sucks. And so the beginning of the book is about a suck and how people respond to it. It is very similar to what you just said, which is that when we don't relax in the face of that Threat of the change, the threat of the change being, I'm not on my surfboard anymore. I'm underwater. I could die here. All this is dark and scary and unknown. And we're living in that world right now. We're living in a very time that for a lot of people is just filled with darkness and unknowns and uncertainty. And so again, if you can relax, as you pointed out, what ends up happening is the wave will release you. The conversation with Dave was interesting because he was surfing at the site Jaws, which Maui's famous for this 60-foot wave over there, and that Laird Hamilton has made famous among others. And he said he got, it was a day when Laird wasn't there, wasn't around for whatever reason. He was out doing some other crazy thing. And so he was the favorite to win this competition, which was just, would've kind of changed his career a bit. And he got in his ego, what we were talking about earlier, was such that he just sort of expected, which is a good thing. I'm expecting I'm gonna win. I'm visualizing myself. With the celebration, all that. He was there and he finds himself on whatever 50, 60-foot thing and he's on the face and the next thing you know, and he's already sort of passed it, he's already finished the wave and he's celebrating. And next thing you know, he's literally sliding on his back at God knows what speed. You're just sort of almost like a rock that's skipping across the water. He's just like skipping down face of this massive, whatever, 6-story building of water. And then it breaks and puts him under and he got a breath and he was good. And then there was a second wave that he got in the wash and they couldn't get him with the jet ski. And so a second wave got him and now he's under 2 waves and he's literally, if he does not, he comes up and if he's, the jet ski's there, his partner's there to get him. And he realizes, look, if I don't hold on, if I don't get outta here with this jet ski now, I'm dead. I don't have any more. air left to survive another wave that's going to put me 40 feet under the surface. And he talked about just this relaxing his body when he was under, following the bubbles because it's so dark and he's so deep that you don't even know which way is down versus up. But it was the bubbles that were going to the surface that he knew how he could swim to get there. And it's just so reminiscent of what you're saying, which is that when we fight it, when we're tense in the midst of what is scary, We're actually defeating our energy. We're limiting the creative opportunity that exists in that space. And that was the same thing with the rip current. If you just relax and lie on your back, the rip current will spit you out. Yeah, you may have some swimming to do from where it spits you out. That's true. But you will not have exhausted yourself to the point where your lactic acid and everything is seizing your muscles and you're ready to drown if somebody doesn't come get you. So I think right now in the time we're living in, People have to relax. We all probably have to get a dose of relaxation. Nature does that too. It gives us that moment to relax. I want to just go back to something you said earlier too, which was you talked about these companies that you've been associated with and aligned with, et cetera, including REI. But my question is, what's the best culture? If you could answer this question for me, of all the companies you've worked with, including Nike, et cetera, were you able to get a front row seat for what the culture at those organizations was like? And can you tell us which was the best culture you've ever been a part of?

I mean, I've really only spent the most time at Vans and at REI, and at REI, I'm just a contractor, but they just won basically an award by Forbes that they're the most social conscious and eco-conscious brand out there. And it's cool. Their culture is amazing and friendly and bright. And I don't get emails at like a certain hour. Nobody emails me really on the weekend. They really value also going outside. My coworkers on my team do crazy adventures and we talk about it. Vans was awesome. I mean, I was there early and I actually had this really unique opportunity right after college. I was the first female journalist for this thing called the Vans Warped Tour, which is a 60-day punk rock concert series that goes to 60 cities in 60 days with 108 bands, personalities, skateboarders, motocross riders, and a motley crew of people at every single stop. And it's just traveling. punk rock circus with massive chaos. And I was this young, one of the only females on the tour journalist. And I was 22 years old, which what a summer for a 22-year-old. Awesome. It was like almost famous. And the founder of Vans is a guy named Paul Van Dorn and his son Steve was really like the face of the company. He and I shared a bunk bed on the tour bus and he's this jolly guy. He's never had a drink in his life. He would get dessert before dinner. He was just He would be out there selling t-shirts, talking to people all day. I just had to write 2 stories a day and take 108 photos, which was hard because meant I needed to find a phone line at the end of the day to send the photos because there was no wifi in 2002. Warped Tours are held at dirt parking lots at fairgrounds. So there was no phone line except for ones occupied by tour staff. You didn't wanna mess with them. They were dealing with tickets. They were scary. They had mohawks and tattoos that were intimidating. They ended up being the nicest people, but they were scary to a 22-year-old girl. But Steve was out there all day, like selling t-shirts, selling shoes, helping people, getting excited. And then we would pull into like a truck stop or McDonald's in some random town. Some kid would recognize him, do an ollie, show Steve, and he'd be like, what's your number? What's your address? And the next day that kid would have a fresh pair of Vans on his sidewalk and he'd make time for everybody. And I just learned from Vans, like to show up and be kind and that kindness Is such a game changer. I mean, I learned a lot at Vans. It was awesome. I was there up until 2009, and the culture there is really strong. I don't work in-house at REI, but I can tell it's a wonderful company and they make gear that gets people outside in nature. I don't know what's really better than that. I didn't really have a ton of insight into Nike. I was pretty young. I got to work at Body Glove for a while. It's a family-owned company. They would crack open a bottle of wine at 5 and go sailing and scuba diving and surfing at lunch. And that was probably like one of the most fun companies I've ever worked at. And they're really cool. The whole family still works there.

Oh my God. That's awesome.

And the maestros, their grandpas were the people that founded Body Glove. They were like some of the first scuba divers. They had this like amazing collection of shells. So I think in surf companies and outdoor companies, What's really cool is a lot of these outdoor companies are really trying to expand who belongs in the outdoors, because I think for a while it was pretty insular. At the time, I was probably one of the few girls at a lot of these companies, and now I think you're seeing a lot more diversity, which is really cool, but they're all founded by this passion, this passion to do the thing that they sell so that you can do, whether it's going outside and sleeping in a tent under the stars or climbing a mountain, Or going surfing or riding a skateboard or like Body Glove. They create wetsuits so that you don't freeze when you're surfing. So I've always been lucky that I've worked with really kind, cool companies. And then I consult with a lot of companies. So I don't know, those are probably the top 3 that I've worked with that are the most interesting.

I mean, I love the word kindness doesn't get enough credit. I don't think kindness is really big, right? In

corporate, I think you gotta be fun because if your company is fun, Then your culture will be fun and customers will associate you with fun. And everybody wants to have more fun. We all take ourselves too seriously. And I don't know, I also really appreciate companies with a sense of humor. And I think that's really important. I think that humor is actually really important in nature and the will to wild, because there are gonna be so many times when you're scared and you don't know what you're doing. Yeah.

And I think

humor Can be a

great pause and just literally laugh at yourself. I mean, here's a call to action for everybody today listening to this. Like, find a moment today or seize a moment. How about that? Where it's possible to laugh at yourself for a second. Like, just have a chuckle at yourself.

I mean, I was young when I worked at VAMS, so I would be in these executive meetings and I was probably one of the youngest ones and they would be like, we're gonna penetrate the market. And I would just giggle like at the word penetrate. I was very immature, but sometimes there's some words that just make you laugh. You just talked about Jaws. I was actually at Jaws. I got invited to cover Bethany Hamilton, the surfer who would be one of the first to surf Jaws. It was quite remarkable to watch waves at Jaws. She was towed in on a jet ski and it was just incredible to watch her. And I was on the boat with her. She turned to me right before going out into the water and was like, can you put my hair up in a ponytail? And at that moment I was like, oh my gosh, she's doing this and she has one arm. You never realize that about Bethany because She's one of the top surfers in the world regardless of the fact that she only has one arm. And she surfed these 3 waves. It was incredible. We went back to the boat, she grabbed her son and started nursing him because she was a new mom. And it just drove home the fact that she's a badass no matter what. The next day she decided to paddle surf Jaws.

Yeah.

Without a jet ski. And she wanted to feel what a beating at Jaws felt like. And so she did it. She surfed on her own, then got one on the head and she came up laughing. She came up laughing after one of those beatdowns that Kalama had. And I think that's the point is like, if you can laugh, I mean, look, some things in life are gonna absolutely suck and they're sad and they're horrible and there's things going on in the world that absolutely suck. But if you could try to at least laugh at yourself when you suck, that's a game changer.

Oh yeah. Oh, let's replay that one. I mean, holy smokes. Yeah. I don't know if there was a poster for what badass is. She's on it in my book, people. Bethany Hamilton, if you wanna just check her story out, Google her. And I don't even know if I'm gonna say it here. If you don't know, you need to go find out. I'm not gonna be the source of info here. She has got one of the most utterly insane stories of resilience, of being change-proof. She's just, yeah, just an epic human and athlete. And as you said, mom, you just name it. This is a person with, if I was saying, oh, so what's the through line for somebody like that? To me, it would be this attitude word, like the word you probably heard when you were a kid. My dad would be saying to me sometimes, he'd say, change your attitude. I'm like, I don't know what that means. Like, what is my attitude? You're just like being a little whatever, sorry for yourself. And I didn't know how to change my attitude. And it's a funny refrain because it's been a long time since my dad told me to change my attitude, but We've gotta be able to change our attitude. And when you have the life experience that she had, it would be fine to have an attitude of this sucks and that's it. Just this sucks. So don't expect any more from me. I don't have to expect much because who even survives something like that, right? Let alone picks up their life and is stronger. So to me, that's resiliency is not about bouncing back. We often will say this when we're doing our work in the world, we talk about it as bouncing forward because it's bouncing back stronger. It's not a going back to the status quo. When life changes things in a radical way, it's because what existed was no longer tenable, and it's our job to adapt to that new environment and surf it, if you will. Yeah.

I mean, my mom also— part of why I wrote a book is I watched my mom write this book during the pandemic so fast. It's like, how did you just do that? A publishing company contacted her to write a book called Addiction in the Family, but her book before that was called Falling Up. And she has this saying that you have to fall up. You're going to fall down a lot in life, but you have to learn to fall up. There was a lot of hardships that she went through besides my dad, like her own life. And life is going to throw things at us, but we have to fall up. And that is part of resiliency, perspective. And I think nature also teaches that. very well, very fast. When you surf a wave, you're going to fall a lot. When you rock climb, you're going to fall a lot. And I think what's so cool is that you fall and fail enough times, you try more and you try more, and then the failing becomes less and the trying gets easier, and then the success becomes more present and more commonplace. So,

Yeah.

I always recommend people who are afraid of failure to try bouldering or go to the climbing gym. Because you have to fail.

It's part of it.

Like golf. Yeah, that's painful.

It's for the massacre.

I don't recommend that. Yeah, golf is cool, but I don't feel like there's enough nature in golf. It feels a little manufactured. My parents like golf. I just— I like golf.

I mean, you're walking out in the woods for, uh, 3 hours. What do you mean?

I mean, kind of, but you've got manicured grass. Well, it is pretty nice. You could have like a drink. I like that you can have a cocktail or a snack. I'm really a big fan of snacks. It's part of the book. You need to bring your own trail candy on the trail, whatever that looks like for you. It doesn't always have to be a suffer fest, like bring, if you enjoy kombucha or watermelon, which is totally inconvenient to bring in your pack, I say, bring it as long as it's safe and you're not in bear country and you do the things that you're supposed to do. You got to pack your own trail candy.

Oh man. Last question today, and, and then I would love to pick this up again another day too, cuz I feel like we're just getting rolling here. You've worked with young women a lot in your life, and I would like to just get your thoughts on how girls are doing today. I'm a daddy of 4 and have 3 of those as young women today. 22 is our youngest, 30 is our oldest, and then we have a son as well. But Just having spent so many years in watching young girls grow up and develop into these amazing women, and my wife being just the most amazing role model for them, I want to get your thoughts on how girls are doing today. Because even our girls, while the youngest is 22, she's certainly— they've all been involved in social media. They've all had a smartphone since whenever. But it feels like anxiety, depression, suicide, among teens, not just girls, of course, but high incidence of these things in that teenage demographic of young girls that is disturbing. It's confronting. It's something I think we need to be alert to. And I'm just curious what your thoughts are on what's going on. And for people listening to this right now who have either young girls in their home, they have daughters, or they have friends or family that they're looking at and maybe are concerned about how they're doing. Any thoughts that you could share on that? I know it's a really broad question. I apologize for that.

No, I wish I had better answers. I feel the same about you and I have a lot of empathy for young women growing up today. And I think that's kind of going to be my next move is to go back to working with young women. It feels like it's needed right now. And I don't know if I'm the one to do it, but everybody who has a mom that's a teen somehow puts them on me. So I think I just, have this maturity level of a teenager. And so I tend to relate to teens really well. I think we just have to be kind as adults and show kindness and compassion. I think we need more humor. We've lost that. Kids used to be more funny. I think the pandemic was hard on a lot of children. Social media. Yeah. I mean, it's not going anywhere. So the only thing we can do is teach kids another way. And I always believe that like nature is such a good thing to take kids into. Not every kid loves nature, but most kids really like time in nature. You just have to do it in the way that they want to experience it. Bring yummy snacks, make it fun. Maybe they don't like walking in the woods, but most kids like taking a zipline through a bunch of trees. And there are ziplines in California. Go on cool hikes, take them kayaking, enter them into surf lessons if they want to. I think that's One of the cool things about outdoor sports is they really build courage and confidence. And I have a friend whose kid surfs and she's like really well adjusted. Other kids at school are vaping and sneaking out. And this kid's like, whatever, I'm a surf nerd. She calls herself a surf nerd. She likes to study and she likes to surf. She has her head on glued pretty tight. But I also think parents have to give themselves breaks because I see a lot of parent friends beat themselves up and like, look, it's just hard. We're in a really different time than when we grew up and all we can do is be nice to ourselves. And I think that's the biggest thing. We need to show kindness to ourselves to model that for other kids.

Yeah.

I actually, the, probably the most interesting woman I've ever interviewed is Edith Eger. She's the oldest person I've ever interviewed. She's a Holocaust survivor. And she says self-love is not selfish. It's self-care. It's not narcissistic. And all of us have to be better models. A lot of us adults have anxiety and stress and we show it to our kids and all we can do is our best self-love, self-care. We have to say nice things about ourselves as women. It's tricky. Like I'm getting older, I'm getting wrinkles. All my friends are talking about them and I'm just like, I'm going to have a lot of wrinkles. I spent 30 to 40 sitting in waist-deep water, pushing girls into waves, staring at the sun, squinting, like It's just part of my life and I have to embrace it. And I think trees don't judge themselves for being wrinkly. And I'm not saying we all have to be like trees, but I think that we have to be better role models as adults to kids and be nice to ourselves, say nice things to ourselves. As women, we gotta support each other. I also think we need to be nice to young men. I think it's really hard to also be a young man today. I was a product of Title IX, so doors just opened for me. As a woman, I got away with murder because I was one of the only women who could kind of ride a skateboard. I pushed Mongo, which is like not cool. And I got the job at Vans. Like, yes, I had a great journalism degree and I was smart and had a little bit of charm that probably got me the job and some skills. But being a woman actually has kind of helped me in my career. So I think we just have to help everybody. There's a spectrum of people right now and it's really cool. We're entering an age where There's all sorts of different people. They identify with different things. I'm like torn on labeling anything. I just think that we're all people. We're all pretty close to the DNA. If you look up at stars, which is why I recommend going outside so often, you see that we are just a small dot in this wide universe and we're much more similar than we think we are, whether we have different beliefs about politics or whatever, we're all just this small dot. In this giant universe. And so, I don't know, go outside. It teaches you to have more love and to surrender.

Yeah. I mean, growing up, we just didn't have a lot of things that were interesting inside the house, I guess. I don't know. I grew up in an apartment, small little apartment, shared a room, tiny room with my brother. And, and we had TV. I didn't grow up like in the ice age or something like that, but we were outside a lot and we were outside without a tether. We didn't have a phone. And so our parents didn't know where we were and we didn't know where they were, although they were at work, so we knew that much or whatever. But, and we had to be home for dinner, and if we didn't get home for dinner, it could be dicey if they had to come out looking for you. But it was a different world, and I'm not doing, oh, the world was better back then thing. I'm not going there. There are things from the past that we would love to have back today, and there are things that from the past which sucked and which sucked for a lot of people that we don't want to revisit. So. It's a mixed bag, as you said. But it's interesting looking at other people parenting their kids now, and my wife and I being a little further removed from that, having just paid my last tuition bill.

Congrats. That's incredible.

UCSD. We have a UCLA. We managed to get into a bunch of UC schools. It was fun. So in that perspective, I see that filling up the kids' schedules endlessly with things, thing after thing after thing after thing. Not having space, like we said earlier, to close that loop. Space is creative. It can be. And when you create space, it becomes a creative thing. Kids maybe don't have a lot of space and they don't have a lot of time when they're not being observed, the helicopter parents out there. And they maybe also don't know what it's like to fail, to go back to something else you said, because they're constantly being made to feel successful and Regardless of whatever outcome they get. I think these are things that we have to, as parents, if you're listening out there, you could take a pause, take a beat for a minute, even a second, and just think, do I need to hover? Do I need to plan? Can my kid have some unscheduled, unsupervised, whatever time? And if that means inside in front of a screen, I would say no. It's like the only rule is get out, get outta the house. I don't know. That could be completely tone deaf to the world we're living in today because I don't know.

I mean, my friend and I have like this joke podcast that's parenting advice by people who aren't parents because we're not parents. And so I give my sisters who are parents all sorts of advice and they just roll their eyes because they're like, you're not a parent. So I have to say, if you're a parent, just give yourself a hug. If you're not that powerful enough to totally screw up your child, that's the other thing. Like, don't give yourself that much credit. Just be nicer to yourself. You're not going to fuck up your child. All you can do is model kindness.

All right. So you said it about your sister, so I'm going to call out my own family on this one. I say this to my brother, I go, dude, your kids are amazing. And my nieces and nephews, they're just the most amazing beings, but you're so hard on them. I'm like, so let me just understand something. Where did our parents who screwed up plenty and are not perfect people, and none of us are. So I'm like, clearly they screwed up really bad because you are doing so poorly. That you would have to be such a different parent than they were with you. And it's like, he's a super successful guy with 4 amazing, healthy kids and a great marriage. So where did they fuck up so badly that you need to, like, ride your kids so hard? Like,

oh, no,

they didn't ride you a tenth as hard as that. So I don't know. It's a funny thing, right?

I don't know. My sisters, I'm lucky. They're really good parents. I watch them. I have friends who are really good parents. I live in this community. I don't know if you heard kids chirping outside, but A lot of people had babies during COVID So Johnny and I, my partner, we are like aunties and uncles to a lot of kids. And I don't know if we're going to have kids of our own. Like I'm at that age where I probably need to make that decision, but I definitely want kids in my life. And if you don't have kids of your own, being that auntie uncle to other kids, I think is important because it does take a village and we have to support our parent friends. So good on you for raising 4 kids. Like that's a lot, Adam, and I'm impressed.

Well, this is why I look the way I do, and my wife and I were exhausted. We're exhausted.

You look great. You look great. Well, thank you so much for having me on your show. I really appreciate it.

A pleasure. And quick note to the audience out there, if there's some things in this show that would really not just resonate with you, but might help friend, family member, colleague to listen to, please, as always, share the episode. And that, what that does is it helps us get this to a larger community, of course. And I don't know how the algorithm works. We just know the algorithm's in charge. So sharing it is great. Reviewing it, leaving a 5-star or some other star review makes sense to you, please do that. You can leave a comment or a question for Shelby or myself by going to adamarkel.com/podcast. Leave that comment or question and it'll be us that answers. No bots, no robots, no AI. It's just real humans doing it. So we'd love that. And with that, I wanna just say again, Shelby, thanks so much for being on the show today. And wherever you are listening to this right now, think about some of the things that Shelby said, she shared. Maybe just make a moment, just a moment today in nature. Take a pause and feel, feel stillness or something. It's gonna be really beneficial to you. And again, thank you all for being here. As always, I'll say ciao for now. Holy smokes. I, so I love that conversation with Shelby. She is somebody clearly just has had an epic life leading by example. Loves, loves, loves nature and what nature does for us, how it opens us up. We talked today about the creative opportunities that come from creating space for opportunity, space for creativity. We talked about How it is that we create great cultures, business cultures. She shared a little bit about her experience working for Vans and with other profound brands along the way. We talked about how it is that our attitudes are such a big impact on the experience that we have and how we can sort of change, or at least we brought up the question of how do you change your attitude? That was something I shared from my personal life and my dad that would sometimes say to me when I was a kid, Hey, change your attitude. It's like, I didn't know what the heck that meant. Like, how do I change my attitude? And yet what I realize now is how important it is that we are the ones who are in charge of our attitudes, that we get to choose our attitude, choose it in the moment, and even choose it for the day. That's a life-changing ability. The capability to do that, it's transformational as a leader, as somebody who's wanting to live a great life, you've gotta be able to be in charge of your own attitude. If you can be in charge of your own attitude, my view is you can be in charge of your own destiny. We talked about Wild Ideas Worth Living, which happens to be the name of her podcast. We talked about the pro-con list and whether that thing actually works for us. We talked about nature mind, developing a nature mind. And for both of us, she's a surfer and I'm a surfer and we love the water. And in particular, the ocean. We talked a little bit about developing an ocean mind as well. She's got an epic book that's out that I think everybody's going to want to get their hands on, and it's Will to Wild. And you can find more information about her book, Shelby's book, as well as the work she does in the world and has done in the world in our show notes. So please go to the show notes to click on links and find out more about Shelby. And her experience. And yes, please go and buy that book. I would say right now more than ever before, I think we've really gotta challenge some of the conventional wisdom that's around us, maybe even within us, and be willing to get out there and do something wild. We chatted a little bit about how big a leap are we talking about here? Does it have to be a massive life-threatening leap or one that brings up fear, tremendous fear, like the proverbial jumping out of an airplane or climbing Mount Everest? And see whether that resonates with you. I, my personal belief is that it doesn't have to be, and it's the little changes that we make and the little changes aggregated over time that produces this exponential transformational change that is possible in any business. It's possible in any relationship, the relationship we have with other people, the relationship we have with ourselves. It's possible in our bodies. So that's the long game that I'm playing. That's the resilience training work that we do in the world, that our company Workwell does in the world, helping organizations and leaders create that longevity within their teams so that we are creating cultures that are work cultures of resilience and work cultures of wellness as opposed to cultures of burnout. And there's so many work cultures of depletion and exhaustion and burnout that I couldn't even begin to name a list if I was even inclined to do so, because it's more the rule than it is the exception. And that's old paradigm thinking. That's 20th century thinking. And we're in already well into the first quarter here of the 21st century, and that paradigm has to shift and has to be different. And that is why I love and I'm so committed to the Workwell way. So if you want to check for yourself just how exhausted or resilient you're feeling even now in this moment, all you have to do is go to resiliencerank.com. .com, resiliencerank.com. 3 minutes and you will get your own personalized score in 4 specific zones of resilience: mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual. And it's yours for the asking. It's entirely our gift to you. It's free, as well as the resources that you'll get as a follow-up to that. So, uh, take advantage of that. Let us know what you think of the podcast. We'd love to get your 5-star review. We'd love to get your comments. For Shelby, myself, you can go to adammarkel.com. .com/comment. Leave a comment there. And again, as promised, it will not be any AI. There'll be no bot. There'll only be a human responding, and that'll be myself and/or Shelby. So we'd love to hear from you. For now, just enjoy. And of course, if you love this episode, as always, my only request is that you share it with a friend, a family member, a business or work colleague. Okay? Take care, and thank you so much as always.

Thanks for listening. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights. insights to build resilience and become change-proof. Remember to leave a review on Apple Podcasts and you may be featured in an upcoming episode. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com. To get your own free resilience assessment, go to rankmyresilience.com.