The Art of Flourishing: Becoming the Author of Your Life Narratives with Brad McLain

Transformative experiences always come from within. They're generated by us, even if we're not fully aware of that. And this is one of those activation points. When we realize this is happening, not only can we intentionally design and prepare for these kinds of experiences, we start to have more of them. We realize their possibility inside us and all around us is right there.

Hey there friends. Welcome to Health. This is the podcast dedicated to helping you unlock your full potential by mastering the art and science of happiness. We bring on the best leading experts on these topics to help you unlock your true potential and live with more joy, health, love and meaning in your life. Your host is no other than the star combo of Ashish Kothari and Anil Ramjiani, who are both on a mission to provide you with an unfair advantage to be the masters of your experience and leaders in your industry. Get ready to be moved, challenged and enlightened on this podcast. It may change your life. Thanks for being here and joining the squad.

Hey Happiness Squad. It's great to have you with Ashish.

And I as we continue to discuss with our guests who are industry leaders helping individuals and organizations unlock their inner happiness and flourishing. Would you like to be the architect of your own happiness and live a wholehearted life? All experiences are learning experiences, especially those that stem from tragedies and dark places. Our next guest shares his own story and how his insights will unlock that possibility for you. Meet Dr. Brad McLean, founder of Designing Transformative Experiences. With over 20 years of experience, Brad is a renowned social scientist and specializing in identity development, learning and leadership. He works closely with companies like Apple, Google and Morgan Stanley, advising them on inclusive culture and change leadership. As a faculty member at the University of Colorado, he's involved with the national center for Women in Information Technology. He also serves on the Board of Directors for Jane Goodall Institute. He recently launched his book Designing Transformative Experiences and I highly recommend that you check it out. We had a beautiful conversation that flowed incredibly naturally as we picked up on a few topics including internal and external conversations as well as insights that we can gain from transformative experiences as well as an appearance by Elvis, a brilliant model created by Brad comprised of seven elements that mirror those of the nine.

Hardwired for happiness practices.

Stay tuned till the end to hear about Roots and Shoots and a youth empowering initiative founded by the Jane Goodall Institute that sets the stage for tips that Brad shares and I promise you if you apply today, it can unlock your own flourishing. Please join Ashish and I as we welcome Brad to the Happiness Squad. And rewire for happiness together.

Hey, Brad. It's a pleasure to have you with Asha. Shanai. I hope you're doing well, my friend. You know, one of our favorite questions that we love to ask our guests because it's at the root of everything we're talking about is happiness. What does happiness mean to you and how has it changed from your younger years until now?

See, a good researcher recognizes a question that you pose to probably all your guests. Right. And you collect the answer.

That's right.

Indeed. Data. I recognize it and I love it. You know, I'm going to be biased from my lens, and I study transformative experiences. So I. I'm going to have to say that in my view, with that hat on, that happiness is a chameleon experience. You know, what might be happy causing to me might not be happy causing to you. But I would say, you know, at its core, it's an experience that we are having more than a state of being, perhaps, you know, and experiences are bounded by time. We might be happy for a while and less happy later or completely unhappy later, and then enter into a new experience of happiness. But I think it's that state of bliss, that state of wholeheartedness. If I had to say it, that would be my best answer.

Yeah, I love that notion of wholeheartedness. Wholeheartedness, right. And I. Brad, in all the work that we're doing, we get lots of different questions, a lot of different answers to this. You know, in Hardwired for Happiness, one of the things that we focus heavily on is this notion that we can build habits to have more of those experiences, be a part of our life versus the other experiences. So be an architect of your own experience. Be an architect of your own happiness, if you will.

Absolutely. I love that notion and the idea that you have to, in my framework, be an author of your own life narratives, your own lived experiences, which enables us to be authors of our own identity narratives. And these are the special narratives in the special room at the back of the library where we have the volume of stories we are writing always that tell us who we are and who we're not and how to live not only in relation to the world, but also to ourselves. And so this self actualization, being in touch with yourself as a first step, but taking up the writer's pen and becoming the active, intentional author of it, I think is the one of the keys. And if I had to say, you know, to happiness, I don't think you could have that without that.

You can't have that Without. Right. And also equally with that, Brad, is this notion that not only are you authoring your story, your experience. Right. But truly, I mean, you know, we hold as facts how we are experiencing the world when all they are is a reflection through our own lenses of what's actually happening. Right. That is not the world, that is not truly what's happening. And so there's truly this notion of that awareness which I know is at the heart of all of your work. And we're going to get into that in this podcast a bit. Also, the identities, which is what you and I bonded on right away as we started collaborating on Roots and shoots around. How do we give young kids whole new identities through which they experience the world and get agency? But before we go there, Brad, take us back to Brad as a young child. To Brad, where you are now. Right. It's a long path. You didn't wake up. You weren't born as kind of somebody who really passionate and has developed an approach around transformative experiences. So I'm interested in what were some of the transformative experiences in your own life, your origin story, that have gotten you into where you are and that have shaped your worldview.

Wow. And that's a huge arc. So to summarize. Yeah. And sometimes one or two.

One or two most meaningful kind of, you know, shifts, you know, in consciousness.

Those pivot points. Yeah, those plot shifts. Yeah, you bet. Those what I would call threshold experiences. And by the way, sometimes I wake up in the morning and I. And I. And I feel like no time has passed since 10 year old Brad. You know, who am I going to go play with today? You know, who might be? And then I go look in the mirror and I realize, oh yeah, I'm 53. And I was like, okay, you're still.

Halfway in your journey, Brad. You're still halfway in your journey.

We weren't going to name ages here, but you've done it now, so everyone knows how long that arc has been been made.

Go on. Yeah, yeah. The only, the only worst in getting older every year is not getting older every. So I'm very happy and blessed with that. I actually revisit some of my threshold experiences on a regular basis. And this may include people in my life who are long gone. And one of the most threshold experiences happened to me when I was 10 years old. I'm blessed with having one of those unique teachers who could, as I say in my book, challenge and provoke and touch our hearts and inspire us to stretch beyond ourselves. Well, she did this for me. In fourth grade. Her name was Mrs. Rave Marie Rave in a small town in Nebraska where I grew up. And I'll never forget her because I also had contact with her again in fifth and sixth grade. I began writing letters to her when I was a young professional making my way in the world and revisiting her classroom in these letters and explaining how she might have thought she was done teaching me in 1980. But the lessons are still reverberating. I'm still learning from her as a 10 year old trapped in a, in a 30 or 40 year old man and how valuable it was to me. And so she, she had that ineffable quality. I don't think she could articulate it herself, how she was able to do it. And I'm not unique. Almost all of her students felt this way about her and occasionally we are blessed to have those kinds of teachers. But she ignited something in me and it was a fire that only grew over time. It never went out. And I love to go back to her classroom on a day like this. A Beautiful Friday, Boulder, Colorado. Feeling, oh, Mrs. Rave's classroom. Looking out the window there. I can be right back there and feel that inspiration again. I carry it with me. It's one of my most valuable identity narratives that is activated a lot.

You know, Brad, I'm going to take a moment to just invite our listeners to think for a moment back into their lives. We've all had such teachers, you know, through our kind of, whether it was in college, whether it was in our school years, we've all had been blessed with at least one teacher who made, who really helped form, made a really big dent into who we are, right and shaped us, supported us, inspired us, nurtured us, taught us. Take a moment, dear friends, right now, and if you are in touch with them, you have their phone, you have their email, send them an email and let them know how much they made a difference for you. Gratitude is one of the core practices in, in Hardwired for Happiness. It's what has made a big difference for me. In fact, even better, write a letter, write a gratitude letter. You can learn more about it on our happiness program, which is, you know, which, which we offer. But even Google happened. Google gratitude letter and write a letter to them. It'll be transformational for you and for them to hear from you how big of a difference they made. You know, teachers and professors get into this work because it has meaning and they really connect with shaping the future generations. And in our society, it's not something that we give so much recognition for either monetarily or otherwise and we forget because we get so busy and I know it'll mean the world to them and I think it'll mean the world to you. So an invitation to take an inspiration from Brad's story. I already started when Brad said, thinking about three teachers I want to reach out to and just thank them both from my MBA days but way back from my school years.

One of the things that makes me, when you were talking just now, she makes me realize what she did for me because I can imagine someone saying, well, what was it that made her so inspirational? One of the things was she gave me the power of choice. It's 10 year olds, we don't have a lot of power. Again, many times as adults we don't feel we have a lot of power in our ruts that we've assigned ourselves to as people in society, our jobs, our family roles, whatever they may be. But the sense of agency is what she gave to me and many hundreds of kids this idea that we are in a position of choice and we get to decide how we are going to respond to the things that happen to us. One of the things I say in my book is that almost always people describe their most transformational experiences as something that happened to them from the outside. Asking just a few questions, probing into it. It's quickly revealed that's not the case. Transformative experiences always come from within. They're generated by us, even if we're not fully aware of that. And this is one of those activation points when we realize this is happening, not only can we intentionally design and prepare for these kinds of experiences, we start to have more of them. We realize their possibility inside us and all around us is right there. Right there. It's not something I have to go to a faraway land to experience or prepare for a major experience, you know, I can have it right here in my.

I love that and it so resonates with me, Brad, because we always say, you know, we don't choose what happens to us, but we choose the meaning we make out of it and what we end up creating again, going back to kind of self authoring the narrative, our story of where we go. So this notion of transformative experiences, right, that do not happen to us, they are created by us whether we realize it or not. Can you describe a transformative experience you created for yourself and the impact it had on you?

I will and I appreciate the question. The wonderful warm and fuzzy story of Mrs. Ray when I was 10 years old is certainly transformative. But it often is the case that our transformative experiences, our pathways to happiness, come from tragedies. They come from struggle, they come from dark places. And one of mine in the recent past, about four years ago, four or five years ago, was getting diagnosed with cancer. And I'm good now. I am in remission, and I have a good, clean bill of health, thankfully. But as every cancer patient knows, that moment of diagnosis is the assignment of a new identity. Whoever you were before, you are suddenly now a cancer patient. And it's the beginning. It's a transformative experience, but it's the beginning of a whole cascade of additional transformative experiences that you have to take in order to treat and deal with that cancer, not only for you, but also for your loved ones. And as I say, echoing what you just mentioned about meaning making, we don't get to control the curveballs, as anil would say, that life throws at us, but we do get to decide how we will RSVP to these invitations. And they are invitations. Answers was an invitation. I couldn't quite see the inviting part of it when it happened to me. But as I started to make meaning out of it, as I started to assume agency and say, I can decide how I'm going to respond and make meaning out of this, no matter the outcome, suddenly it became an invitation. It became an invitation to analyze my life. My career wasn't going the direction I wanted it to go in. My marriage at the time was something I needed to get out of. And a cascade of events beginning with cancer got me to a happier place outside of it. My role as a father and the pressures I felt, as many parents do, to have all the answers became something where they saw their father in a vulnerable position. And I had to say, I don't have all the answers, but I'm here to ask life's scary and important questions alongside you, and let's do that together. And it became a partnership of a parent, parenting role. All these transformations cascaded from the moment I was diagnosed with cancer. And then realizing it was a life invitation that I could make meaning from happiness wasn't there right away. Yeah, but it came. It came.

Do you know, I think, Brad, what you brought up there is something that kind of strikes a tone, right? You talk about your family, your kids, and if you don't mind, could you maybe just go a little bit further in that? I mean, like you said, you're having that conversation, that vulnerable moment, those scary conversations, those questions you have to answer to your kids. To your partner.

Can you share with our listeners what.

Was that conversation like? Because I can only imagine, like you said, happiness is not top of mind. How did you guys feel?

Let me get back to wholeheartedness. Many times I think, well, there's two conversations. What was that conversation like? The first conversation is with yourself. My favorite poet, David White, who's still alive, which is one of the reasons he's a great poet, he has a great perspective on these kinds of life changes, is that life is always asking us to enter into a new conversation with ourselves and our lives, to reconfigure ourselves in a constantly growing way if we are available for that conversation. So that first conversation is inside yourself realizing that I wasn't living a wholehearted life and facing up to it with the possibility that it's going to be a lot shorter of a life than I thought with this cancer diet. So this conversation of how can I become more wholehearted in the time I have left? It became an immediate conversation because I didn't know how long I had left. But why not ask that question? No matter if we know we're going to have a long life or we just don't know what's going to happen, let's ask ourselves, am I living that wholehearted life? As I always ask my corporate clients at the beginning of every workshop, what are we doing? How and why are we doing it? And most critically, who are we becoming while we do it? And that's the question I had to face in that conversation with myself. Who am I becoming while I. While I do the job I'm doing, while I'm in, the marriage I'm in, while I'm being the parent I am. And that invited me to make changes. The second conversation was external to me with all the people in my life to say, I need to make changes. Here's where I'm starting from. And I just got this. This news about a cancer diagnosis. I want to make some changes. And some of the people in my life were the initiators of the change, too. Recognizing that I wasn't wholehearted and saying, listen, you. You have a chance here to reauthor your story and to generate a life worth living, no matter how long it is. I think that's the invitation we have to recognize it's available to us whenever we turn our head to see and hear it. I think it's calling to us. Ever since I have tried to answer that call some days a little better than others.

I love those three questions, and it's so important which is what? The why and who. Right, who. Like if you can think about. And it's the iceberg, right? Almost you're actually going down. Oftentimes there is not enough effort put by leaders when they're driving transformational change on the why and the who. Because only through a shift in identity and connection with that North Star purpose does the bridge get completed to the what. Otherwise we don't have the will. We can lose the energy to complete the journey. Those two are important elements that can help us. Right? And I would almost say also you mentioned it, Brad, but in addition to the who, there is also, in a cultural context, with whom am I actually doing the journey? Because it might be teachers, but it might be. There are certain connections, there are certain things that we need to exit and there are new ones that we want to invite in because we are social beings and no journey is complete. You know, even a hero's journey, right, which is a very individual journey, needs others, needs others to guide us. And it needs to be in the context of others that we are actually bringing the gifts back to.

I love this. You know, when I had to face the question of how to design transformative experiences, I gave a TEDx talk many years ago about my general research and framework. And I got all these questions afterwards that I could not answer from people in the lobby after the talks were over and all the speakers were mingling with the audience and they said, we love your framework. How can I use it to inspire and motivate my employees or inspire my students or design a better museum exhibit or write a better script or be a better coach? And I was like, I can talk to you about the theory, but I didn't have any answers practically for how to do do it. And so I went back to the drawing board and three years later through research came up with a practical guideline, the heart and soul of the book. It's called Elvis. I'm a creature of NASA and academia where acronyms are running crazy and I hate acronyms.

It's a cool acronym though.

This is a cool acronym. Yeah, I figured if you're going to have one, let's make it memorable, right?

I'm about to beat it to my favorite Elvis tune here.

Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis is about to end.

Enter the cast the building. Yes, it's. Yes, exactly. It stands for Experiential Learning Variables and Indicators system. And why is that? It's because all transformative experiences are learning experiences that have an identity impact, which as she were just talking about the why the how and the why, but the, the who, you know, it's all. It invites us to a backwards design opportunity to say, who are we becoming while we do what we do? Who do we want that person to be? That's maybe the result, the end to begin with. And then we reverse engineer the things, the why and the how and the what that we're going to do that. So it aligns with the who we are becoming while we do it. And that may be for us, it may be for all the people we work with or the people in, in our lives. I'll give you a quick example. I used to, in my research, believe, well, transformative experiences. We need to have extraordinary experiences. And I was leading groups to Africa at the time. We would go for a month to work in schools, aids, orphanages, see the wild places of the Serengeti. And one of the challenges was an invitation to climb Kilimanjaro, which is a 20,000 foot volcano. You know, it's not a technical climb, but you know, it'll kick your ass pretty good. It's a high altitude and not everybody makes it. It's a hardship, especially for non climbers, non athletic people. I be often taking corporate professionals and teachers. One year I took a beautiful gentleman named Boone with me and he was a wonderful addition to the group of 20 or 30 people. Always good for a laugh and jovial. None of us knew the inner journey that he was actually taking. The inner conversation, as we said before, that he was having. He was on the rocks with his, with his marriage at the time. And his wife had become addicted to a number of substances and it was pulling their family apart and their young daughter in the mix. When he summited Kilimanjaro and told himself, if I can do this, I can do anything, you know, it seemed like that was a cathartic experience, but it wasn't. It was just another pathway because when he got home, he took that experience from Africa and applied it to meaning making in his life. He staged an intervention with all of his wife's family and friends and confronted her with an honest external conversation to say, we are not wholehearted. We need to make a change. It inspired him, his experiences in Africa. But the actual transformation was that moment where he became a different kind of husband, a different kind of father, a different kind of boon for himself, a different person. And it saved his marriage at that time and improved all of their lives. The transformation was appearing to be external, but it wasn't. It came from inside of him. It started with an internal conversation. But it expanded to a meaning making outside and with the people he lives with. Who are we becoming while we do the things we do? He found a pathway to happiness and he, more importantly I think, found his agency to navigate through any hardships that came and many more came in his life after that in order to navigate to an experience of greater happiness. Because he understood how it worked for him.

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I mean when you, when you hear about someone like I mean I, I again I know we were talking in the starting point around like I do triathlons and I try to like bring that into my life afterwards and go, you know, the training, the event and beyond. How you're able to have those internal, external conversations, whether it be with yourself or with others and how it can actually shift or change, you know those, that question, I just, I want you to know, Brad, the question like am I living that wholehearted life? You know, it just, it really resonates. I do want to ask you though because imagining our listeners when they heard Elvis, they thought the music would cue and you pop in. But you know, the, the way you described it, experiential learning I feel is clear and especially after the example you just gave, what I would love to understand and maybe our listeners a little.

Further is when you say variables and indicator system.

Break that down for us.

What?

How can I apply that to my own, let's say learning. Go ahead please.

Yeah, yeah. And in my book I exactly do this. Breaking it down not only For a person to do for themselves, but leaders to design the potential for transformations in others. And Elvis, that acronym, that system involves seven elements, you know, it reminds me a lot of the Happiness Squad Sunflower. That's a different framework. But there are these elements to attend to, to be aware of, to learn about that seem to be involved in all transformative experiences. And I've interviewed thousands of people of different ages and different cultures all over the world. What do all of their experiences that have changed them, that is to say, they change their identity, change who they think they are or who they want to become when that happens. It's what I call, from a research point of view, a transformative experience. That's why it has an identity impact, Whether it's triumphant or tragic or anything in between. It seems they all have these seven elements in common. And so Elvis to unpack it is half the book, you know, goes through these seven elements. But I'll give you an example of a couple of them at the top of the list. We've already kind of touched on one, and it is risk. It is risk or the entry into discomfort zone, which might seem like the opposite of happiness on the surface. Yeah. But it gets back to that idea that we can only grow when we put our identities on the edge of discovery. We put ourselves on the line, and it may not seem like happiness can be found there. It may seem intuitively that we have to be in our warm, cozy comfort zones. That's where we're happiest. But really, to be wholehearted is to be growing and discovering. And I think that discomfort goes with it. So what does risk look like? How do we recognize it and really, how do we design for it in our own lives or in the people who work for us and with us? How do we make a risk invitation possible? A risk invitation that requires someone, maybe myself, to make a risk decision, to have a risk experience and have a risk outcome? Yeah. So let's start getting good at risk. As I always say my workshops, risk is a skill. And in our culture in the United States, we don't do it very well.

We talk about it, but we don't really. I'd love you to take risk, but please don't fail. Right. I'd really like you to kind of be on the edge, but just make sure you're on this side of the edge so you don't fail. That's like not risk taking.

Right? That's it. To take a risk, you are risking failure, but you're also risking success or something. In between. It's usually something in between. Also, let's get smart about it because there's a lot of information about risk. There's an entire industry, usually in fintech firms and insurance companies, about risk management mitigation. But let's use that psychology. There's physical risk, which we're all familiar with. Could I get hurt doing this? There's emotional risk, there's intellectual risk, there's social risk. Now, they usually hit us all mixed up and mashed up together. They're not nicely sorted into researchable categories like that. But it's valuable to look at them and say, all right, what risk invitation am I asking myself offering myself right now in my life? What risk invitation am I offering the people who work for me in my life right now? And what kind is it? Is it a mashup? Is it mostly a social or emotional risk? If I give someone a stretch assignment at work, is that an intellectual risk only? Or should I also be recognizing that it's an emotional risk or a social risk where they are risking the ties they have with others because of the work I've asked them to do? If I'm going to be a transformative leader, an experienced design leader, as I call it in the book, I need to know about this and recast myself from a leader of processes and projects and teams and deadlines and budgets. I need to recast myself as a designer of experiences for the people who work with and for me and for myself when I do this. And I see, oh, I'm an experienced designer, my team isn't just a group of people. It's an experience that we're co creating together. Suddenly I get a whole new psychological toolbox that changes the way I think of myself as a leader and all the tools I might apply. And that's where transformative experience kicks into high gear.

I love that. I love that, Brad, because it changes this view, that unfortunately, this wrong view of leaders as leaders who are needing to have all the answers and the leaders who are providing the answers and controlling the outcomes and driving teams to achieve results, versus leaders who are merely the creators of experiences, leading with purpose, putting the North Star where we want to go, but collectively working with a group of individuals united on our why. Right, united on our why to shape the journey of how we can become something else to achieve the results. And with that comes play. You know, the other part about experience is that it can become play. You know, when we do work, which is just all about work and we need to get it done, it can get tiring, it can get exhausting. But when we have.

It feels like work.

It feels like work, right? It doesn't feel like we're a play anymore. It doesn't feel like life. And that's the beauty of what you just shared, too. As experienced designers, we are fundamentally integrating fun. We are integrating play because through play, we take calculated risks, but risks without which we will not become something else. We will stay within. There's this beautiful saying, I forget who say it, but if we are afraid to lose sight of the shore, you're never going to discover new lands. You're never going to discover new lands, right? So you have. You have to get lost. You have to get lost. And in finding your way through that lost wilderness is where you find the treasures, Right?

Beautifully said. And it's also that play element and that pathway to the person and the team and the group that you want to be is a wholeheartedness experience. And I would say where happiness lives, whatever that means to you, it's where wholeheartedness happens. And you lead beautifully. Sheesh. Into the second component of Elvis, which is control. Most leaders still adhere to a command and control style of leadership. Like you said, I'm not only going to dictate where we're going, but how we're going there. And I want you to fall into your job role and perform as productive and efficient on this team in control. As a. As an experienced designer, as a leader who designs experiences, we recognize that the transfer of control from the leader to the experiencer has to happen. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but it has to happen. So I might start out from a position of controlling or setting up the opportunity, the experience, the project, the task, whatever it may be. But I need to transfer, let go of the control I have and give it away to the experiencers so that they can author their own narratives and their own identity journeys. You say in Happiness Squad all the time that meaning making is such a critical component and that we can hardwire ourselves for happiness. In my model, very parallel, we are hardwired to translate all of our experiences into narratives, even experiences like our podcast today, we'll have three different narratives because we're three different people with different identities. But if I have an experience whose narrative that I create is powerful enough to inform my identity narratives, then I get into the realm of transformation. So how can I, as a leader, harness this psychology of narration, of narrative, translation of experience? How can I use that to design better experiences? How can I structure meaning making and narrative into the work that we Do. How can I help and not do it for them? Of course. Right. You have to give it away, but you have to also enable and empower and inspire people to do this. They're going to do it anyway by default. What happens if I design instead?

Exactly. And that's where I think we had so much synchronicity, Brad, in our conversations that we had. And dear friends, it's easy to say give it away. It is incredibly hard to do. And at the heart of being able to do it is a word that is often used in leadership, which is vertical development. It comes out of the work at Harvard around adult development theory, around how we can continue to take charge of our own own development and meaning making. How we shift from what's called socialized, we live outside in to self authored, we live inside out. Instead of trying to control the outside world that is becoming more volatile, uncertain and complex, that we have zero chance, let me make it very clear, zero chance of controlling. We can turn inwards and start to master our inner worlds which we have hundred percent agency and control over. Over. Because as Brad said, we are constantly writing our narratives. You can choose what narrative to write because at every moment it's what you pay attention to and the meaning you choose to make from an external event that is going to drive your happiness, your success. And in the end, right is the only thing that you can control is your meaning making and your growth. And for all of our listeners who want to definitely check out real practical tips, obviously in the book Hardwired for Happiness, hopefully you've got a copy of it. But also through the program that we have designed around the happiness program that you can find on our website, it is a journey, it is not an event. It actually needs real focus and attention and that's what you can actually lean into and build if you so choose to.

Yeah, and I would echo that wholeheartedly. As we've been saying, these are skills that we can get better at. From taking risks to narrating our experiences, to helping others do that as well. And all the other components of the happiness sunflower, but also the Elvis model, they're all represented as elements to these kinds of.

Exactly.

Yeah. They're like if we work them, we can develop them and get better at them, not without failures and setbacks, but that's the stuff of growth. And so when we start on this journey, this path, we can become skilled at the art of these kinds of experience designs. And it's not part of the typical leadership toolbox or even the toolbox for how to live our own lives. It's not part of the I was.

Going to say it's not part of our life toolbox.

Brad exactly right. But that's again, part of that authoring. It can be. There's no reason it can't be. And you don't have to be a scholar or an expert to do it. In fact, we often see children able to do this much more effectively because they have not yet been socialized, caged into the roles that society has prepared for them, and yet they are in a powerless position. Many times children don't have a lot of power, but they live in this self agency world of freedom that we all remember and long for. In fact, I talked to a lot of leaders who remark, and I talk about this in the book as well, that being a middle aged person is almost like a second childhood as you're shackled to the responsibilities of mortgage and car payments, relationships, job duties that the power you enjoyed as a young adult, that new sense of freedom is diminished as you are locked into the deep ruts of societal roles. How do you free or liberate yourself from the middle aged entanglements that we often find ourselves in? And I think the pathway is this identity growth journey, you know, this inward journey that brings you to the frontiers of your of your life while also inviting in changes to your external circumstances. No one is going to do it for you. It's something you have to grab hold of and fumble your way through until you develop those skills. But one thing we know is if you don't embark on that journey of self actualization, it'll never happen. It has to be. The step has to be taken by you and you alone in order to do it. There will be allies and helpers and kindred spirits like all of us on this podcast who recognize each other on the way and we feel momentum and validation and we get excited about the knowledge sharing and expertise sharing. But that first, those first few steps are the scary ones. How am I going to make these changes? Where's my wholeheartedness and how do I get there? Those are the important internal conversations to have.

You know, there's an invitation on the back of this. We had a conversation with Veronica Love when we first started the podcast and I think what Ashish and Brad have talked about, another Colorado resident, I want to invite the group who are listening to take a listen to it because it's all about self awareness. It's the heart of the practices. And I think what Ashish and Brad have mentioned require us before maybe we're even able to write our narrative or rewrite it to understand how we are as an observer. And there's a beautiful model that she shares, two of them, in fact. So that's an invitation to take a look at that podcast. But you know what? As we come to an end, Brad.

This has been beautiful.

The one question continues to circulate in my mind, you know, am I living a wholehearted life? And I invite again our listeners to contemplate that. But are there any tips, two to three, that you'd like to share with us that we can start from today to unlock our own flourishing, our own transformational experience, our own risk taking?

Elvis Yes, I love it. And I would also take this opportunity to frame it up in a project that Ashish and I are working on with a number of others. It's Jane Goodall's Roots and Shoots program. Jane Goodall, of course, a legendary anthropologist, animal rights activist, and conservationist would UN Peace ambassador, arguably the most recognized scientist in the world, still cranking away at nearly 90 years old, traveling the world 300 days out of the year. And we work with her on Roots and Shoots, her legacy education program that was designed to inspire kids. It was designed by kids in Tanzania to empower them to make a difference in the lives of their communities, to improve the lives of people, animals, and the environment. And her message was, you might not be an adult, you might not be a graduate of whatever, you might be 10 years old, but that doesn't mean you can't make a difference right now. It used to be that kids would make their own programs, projects in the community. And the success of the program was measured by how effective their projects were. Maybe it was cleaning up trash, maybe it was building a playground, maybe it was helping a local hospital or an animal shelter. And if it didn't work, the kids felt a little bad about it. But we quickly recognized in this program the real value of trying to make a difference was that it created identities for these kids as powerful change agents to say they can do something like that. And the success was redefined. Roots and Shoots is now defined as a program that creates change agents, change leaders in the young people who participate in Roots and Shoots. And that's really the goal. And Ashish and I are using our models of the Happiness Squad and Elvis and designing transformative experiences to embark on a Roots and Shoots initiative in Colorado. That's a nice twist on it. It combines it with learning experiences, science learning experiences. And if it's successful, we'll be exporting it nationwide. What are the things we can learn from this and the three tips, as you ask Anil? One is to invite risk and willingly enter discomfort zones, inviting ourselves and others into these discomfort zones where growth can occur. Even if it seems like it may not immediately be the path to happiness, it might actually be the most direct path. So recasting ourselves as experience designers for ourselves and others and recognizing that a key ingredient of that experience is risk, and we have to get good at risk. That also implies, as we alluded to earlier, we have to get good at failing forward because we're going to fail if we take risks, especially if we take a lot of them. And I think that's essential. The second thing is we need to get good at translating our experiences, our discomfort zone experiences, especially into narratives that make meaning. We also can develop this skill, but we need to make a habit of consciously and purposefully narrating our lives and our experiences in healthy ways, positive ways, empowering ways for ourselves and others. And the third thing is to look for those opportunities where those narratives inform who we think we are, who we want to become. That is to say, those narratives of our experiences impact our identity narratives and we can structure and get good at the skills for doing that as well. But again, it requires a conscious attention, a purposeful attention to do it. It's going to happen anyway, unconsciously, but we have more agency there, we have more authorship than we realize if we seize hold of it. I think all of us can realize this potential for ourselves and others as leaders, as parents, teachers, coaches, trainers, any leader of any stripe, wherever a mentor, protege, relationship exists. This helps others become self authoring, identity change agents. And that's a pretty powerful pathway to happiness if you ask me.

Brad, this was such an amazing conversation. I mean there is so much coherence. I invite our listeners to check out the latest book that Brad published. Brad, when does it launch? Is it already launched or it's just coming out?

It came out two weeks ago. Designing Transformative Experiences. You find it wherever books are sold. Also on our website, designing transformative experiences.com where you can find out all the different things we do in addition to more information about the book.

Please look into that. In the end, as leaders, we can really be the architects of our team's experiences and help collectively achieve our full potential. Brad, this has been such a joy. Thank you my dear friend, also for the amazing collaboration together with you on the nested Roots and Shoots program that will help fundamentally create new identities at scale for children around the world and enlist them in fighting one of the biggest challenges of our times, climate change. So thank you for the friendship and the collaboration there as well.

I am honored by you, your attention, your bright light and this opportunity to speak with your audience about the things we have in common. And having you as a friend in my life. Such a blessing and anil. Another bright light. And I hope to do many more things together in the future with you as well. Thank you both.

Amen. Thank you very much Brad. Appreciate you. And I just want you to know I'm going to say it again. I am going to ask myself daily as I write my narrative, am I living that wholehearted life? So thank you for sharing that with all of us. Big hugs and lots of love guys. Take care.

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