327 - Discovering Your Purpose: Navigating the Levels of Fulfillment with Extraordinary People's Robert White

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational.

Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life.

Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Robert White, welcome to Listening with Leaders.

You are—

these days you're a leadership coach with extraordinary people. Your website's extraordinarypeople.com, but you have been a CEO and a founder and have basically done it all in your lifetime. So welcome to the show.

Doug, I'm old enough so that the story gets involved.

I, yes, I understand. Let's get into the story. What's your backstory? You've done a lot of amazing things in your life. Why don't you give us the Reader's Digest version?

I grew up in, in poverty and abuse.. And I made a decision back then that I wasn't aware of, but I, it's clear that I made the decision and it fueled me for much of my life, which was that I'll never be poor again. So I've been a serial entrepreneur with the exception of 4 years where I worked for a training company, one of the pioneers in the human potential movement. I had a lot of entrepreneurial freedom there, but I was president of that company for 4 years. And learned the training business, but also learned a lot of how you can profoundly move people, change their perspective, change their mindset, get them to be more effective. So that, that's what I've done. I, I guess a big part of my life is that I've spent 23 years living abroad. I sold a company that I had founded for nothing down and forever to pay. Have you ever heard of that wonderful arrangement?

Oh yes.

I hope it worked out okay. And the completion of that joke is they took longer than forever to pay.

There you go.

Eventually they did, but I found my, I had put every cent that I had into that business. And what I did was when I was spending that 4 years working for someone else, I expanded that company into 7 foreign countries. And I only said no to one country and that was Japan. And then for Over 3 years, once a month at least, they reached out to me and asked for me to come to Japan and set up a program there. Doug, is this noise bothering you?

I don't hear a thing.

Okay. Then my noise canceling is working. We've got the leaf blower people working.

Yeah, that's okay. I got my wife on the tractor outside too.

Outside. Anyway, the, the people in Japan pursued me and finally there I am, I'm broke. I'm, I've got a family, I've got a mortgage. I've got, I'm unemployable in some ways. And they reached out with a final offer, which was come to Japan for 90 days and we'll pay you for 1 year. Wow. So you can set up a program and leave, and then we'll keep paying you. And years later when we were doing 3,000 or 4,000 new students a month in Asia, Somebody said, did you have a vision? Is that what brought you to Japan? And the honest answer was no. Or perhaps I did at a deeper level as an expression of my purpose, my values. But the real deal sealer was 3 months of pay and then for being in Japan and 9 months for coming back home. It was, I needed a job. I've lived abroad a lot, in and out. Of Japan and Taiwan and the Philippines and Korea and Australia and of course China. So that's a lot of my background. In the 3 companies that I have founded and led in that field, there are 1,300,000 graduates of these high-impact experiential learning events. So I can also tell you the story of, I'm very good at getting married, very bad at staying married. I, oh no, I'm a very undisciplined person in a lot of ways. I'm the classic entrepreneurial model. I love working with other entrepreneurs. I see myself in them. They see themselves in me, I think sometimes. And I love working with executive teams and getting them to be focused, aligned, and committed.

So tell me a little bit about the curriculums that you've developed over the years. I'm really curious about that.

Experiential learning is a challenging thing to explain because it is, in fact, an experience. There's a book that I don't recommend. It's not a very good book, but the title is great. And the title is You Don't Learn to Ride a Bicycle from a Book. And we all know if you've ever ridden a bicycle, you could go 20 years without riding it and still get on it and ride. You might be a little shaky at first, but that experience, that muscle memory is there. Coming out of the experience of World War II, actually, and then developed by a bunch of really brilliant people, primarily on the West Coast of the US. They brought some of that experiential learning, what we learned in World War II about rapid, accelerated, and effective learning, and brought it into the classroom, brought it into a variety of different experiences. So we had a series of programs where people play learning games, they do simulations, they do guided conversations, they do guided closed-eye processes, meditations, and all of these things are designed to get people out of a kind of waking sleep to get them to see what's possible for them as a human being, particularly to look at any beliefs that they have. That's a crucial part of the, all of our makeup is these, it's like an operating system.

Exactly.

Example. But generally what the experts tell us is that we are unconscious about the majority of our beliefs. In fact, as many as 90% of them are buried and that we get most of them before we're 8 years old.

That's true too.

And then we build on them over the years. In our training, one of the great one-liners— I say that because so many people comment on it— is that whatever your belief is, conscious or unconscious, What you do is go looking for proof that you're right about it.

Confirmation bias, right?

Yep. And that stops you from noticing what's really going on around you and what's going on within you. So the trainings are designed to have that kind of an impact on you that you question yourself in a healthy, productive way and take a look at, okay, that habit, that pattern, that behavior, that belief. Is working for me, I'm going to amplify it. I'm going to really double down on it. That, on the other hand, that other belief that I have about men, about women, about money, about business, about politics, about anything, is actually not serving me. It's dysfunctional, but I'm operating from it. So I have a choice. I can double down on that. I can become even less broad, more narrow, or I can drop it or ameliorate in some way so that it's not running me. And I have a lot of examples of that, but that's what's happened for 1,300,000 people and, um, is fueling the sales of my book and a lot of other things.

That's cool. I remember learning about experiential learning when I was in college. I went to Dartmouth. And for one semester, actually for a whole year, I was involved with the Dartmouth Outward Bound Center and we were teaching people through the Outward Bound principles, that kind of stuff.

Yes.

Only using outdoor, fairly strenuous outdoor activities such as rock climbing, canoeing, snowshoeing through the Pemigewasset Wilderness up in New Hampshire, in the middle of a dead New Hampshire winter, teaching people exactly what you're talking about. And that was way back in the late '60s and early '70s. So I understand it exactly. And beliefs are really interesting. I teach a graduate course in decision-making at the Strauss Institute of Dispute Resolution at the Kruse School of Law at Pepperdine University in Malibu. And I spend a lot of time on beliefs and they're basically heuristic shortcuts that allow us to make decisions without having to think about them. And to your point, many beliefs are formed early in life and some are good and some aren't so good. I think we should have a rule that when you turn 12 years old, your parents take you aside and you say, all that stuff we taught you when you were 2 years old, we need to go back and rethink some of that.

It's not very practical, Doug, but it's a good idea.

I know.

Outdoor, we've used the outdoor experiences actually with my staff over the years. And there's some of that are on sailboats and some are in the wilderness. My daughter Megan attended a kind of special school called the Colorado Rocky Mountain School. And they start every school year with 2 weeks above treeline. Wow.

And if you've done any climbing at all, I was a rock climber for many years.

It's rough up there. Yep. And they have a remarkably low number of incidents that plague many private schools because these kids have learned to survive together.

That's right.

I have a belief that our work is more efficient even though it's done in a training room. And, but I think the outdoor experiences are wonderful. My son, late son, Rob, did a 28-day program in Oregon where the food that they ate on day 28 was packed in on day 1. It was tough.

Wow.

I remember asking him, like a father would ask, right? And I said, what? What did you get? What was your benefit? What did you learn? And I'll never forget his answer. He said, I learned you can't count on everyone.

That's right. You can count on yourself.

Right. And, but then I said, if you got all of this value, you seem to have loved it. He said, I did. I said, how about go, you wanna go next year? He's, no. The wisdom of, he was, I think, 14 or 15 at that time.

So you're still coaching today. What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to go to work?

I'll share a story with you. I guess I do a lot of things through stories. When I was about 30 years old, I was in California. I was president of this company, Mind Dynamics. That's the 4 years I worked for someone else. And the guy that had been offered that job refused it, and therefore they extended the offer to me. The guy named Werner Erhard.

I know who he is.

You know, who founded EST and now—

Ah, it's nice to know.

Landmark Education, amazing man. And then there was Stuart Emery who wrote a bestselling book on awareness, on consciousness. There was Tom Wilhide who was a big vice president of our company and a big producer, later founded Cyworld, another big training company. And so it was a typical 10-top at a restaurant that's still there, the Spinnaker in Sausalito. It looks out over the bay and at the city. It's this incredible setting. And there was a substantial amount of good California wine consumed at that meeting. And there were these funny little cigarettes that got passed around.

Oh yeah.

I didn't partake of that, but I, I did have a few glasses of wine. And our conclusion at the end of this meeting was interesting. It's still interesting to me. And that was that within 20 years. Of that date that all of us needed to have a new job. Because by that time, the government, the schools, the companies, all of these institutions were going to be teaching what we were teaching about personal responsibility, about being clear about what you want, about being present instead of hanging out in the past. All of those things that we were teaching, we thought they are so valuable and they're obvious. How valuable they are, that within 20 years it's just going to be everywhere in, in conventional education, conventional organizational trainings, and that we better find a new job. And I look at that today, Doug, and I go, that's the naivete of being 30, right?

Yeah, exactly.

And being excited. So I think that today, frankly, we've built a victim culture Yeah. A lot of finger pointing, a lot of blame, shame, and resulting regret. And our trainings are more valuable than ever.

And I'm curious, why do you— you're— I could have been at that table thinking about what I'm teaching about how to listen, which is so obvious and so basic, and yet nobody knows how to do it. Why do you think— what do you think the barrier that I— and I know so many questions, what has prevented our culture and people from taking these skills that are so valuable and so important and not incorporating them into basic education?

A lot of answers to that, and it's an excellent question, frankly. I think part of it is that we don't handle change very well. Whatever we're doing in terms of our attitudes, our habits, and our behaviors are familiar to us and therefore safe. They're safe on purpose. An essential purpose for human beings is to be safe. And there's some other things like being approved of and being part of and things like that. But people fear change. And when you talk about changing the very, your very ground of being, and I know that's—

No, I understand.

Yeah, I get it.

I totally get it. No, I understand exactly what you're saying.

When you talk to somebody that they're gonna shift how they see the world, that's very frightening to people. And quite often that fear is not even conscious, but it's, it will drive a decision to stay the same. And if you say, well, how's the same working for you? And people just like, they freeze, their eyes get more open and they're unable to talk when you ask that simple question. All right, you're making yourself right about this, but how's it working for you with your family, with your company, with your key people, with your neighbors? How's it working? And quite often the answer to that is it's not working. And then it's energetically a spiral down, right? Where they retreat from the conversation. On the other hand, there are an increasing number of people that are saying, oh, what I'm doing right now is not working. I'm, I'm gonna try something new. I'm gonna take some risks and take some chances. Fortunately, those are the people that we, that I work with, we work with, are people that are sick and tired of being sick and tired. It's an old line.

I think it, I think people have to get to a point where the pain is so great they have to change because I know for what just came to my mind is I'm a lawyer professionally, but I don't practice law anymore. I haven't practiced in since 2000. I left the practice in 2000, but I remember back, and I didn't practice criminal law, but I knew a lot of judges and people in the criminal justice system. They all said, and will still say today, that the system is completely broken. And we know what the solution is. And yet they want it— the inertia prevents them from changing. Same thing with homelessness. Here in California, we have a huge homeless population. We know what the solution is.. It's not difficult and actually it's not that costly once you implement it. But there's an inertia of belief that we were talking about before that just prevents people from taking action even when they know what to do and that if they do it, things will change for the better. It's really frustrating.

You know that our business over the years as a co— I think it's an interesting dynamic to it in we attract psychologists and psychiatrists, and they come for their personal growth. They're in the business of personal growth, so that makes sense. And then we have a huge program for volunteers, and they will volunteer, and then they find out they have a reason to hang around because most of them are not very good at getting business, getting new patients, new clients. And, uh, by volunteering and running small groups for us, They get clients. It's not healthy, actually. It's codependency to the max. We try to filter those people out, but I've learned a lot about psychologists and psychiatrists over the years. In addition to that, Doug, something I don't think you know about me is I have two adopted special needs kids. They're not kids anymore. They're in their thirties, but one of them, Levi, is a huge success story. He had what's called attachment disorder, the failure to bond.

Highly abused childhood, probably.

He, the HBO movie about that subject is titled Child of Rage. And that was Levi and he was headed for prison. When he came into our home at 4 years old, he already had 6 cigarette burns on his back in a pattern. Wow. Had been anally raped, had been abandoned multiple times. He was angry for good reason, and that anger was being taken out on people that now that loved him and wanted to care for him and my— me and my family. So lots of treatment, lots of adventures, lots of failures. And from what I had learned in working with a number of psychologists and psychiatrists is I had an opinion. I had a new belief. And it's not a, it's not a very positive one. It's that 19 out of 20 of those therapists are in their profession to get their own product wholesale.

Yes.

They, they're originally struggling with their own mental health. And I don't know about that number. I made it up.

That's been my experience too, just so you know.

However, that leaves space for that 1 out of 20. So the man that was the 1 out of 20 for Levi, after going through a lot of different programs and a lot of different people, is named Jim Jonell, Dr. Jim Jonell, now retired. He lives in Estes Park, Colorado, the gateway town to the Rocky Mountain National Park. It's a stunningly beautiful place to live and has a beautiful home there that he says I paid for. And it's probably true. However, I would've paid for 3 more homes for the work that he did with Levi. He saved his life.

Wow.

And Levi's really fortunate.

Yes.

I, I worked in prisons for 10 years in maximum security prisons, training lifers how to stop prison violence. And I met a lot of Levis in that group of students that I taught.

That's where they're headed absent some really deep work.

That's right.

And so I obviously, I'm very grateful to Jim Jonell. I would do anything for him. He saved my son's life. And so during COVID there weren't many positive things, all of the lockdown days, but one of them that was positive for me is I secured a day-long appointment with Jim Jonell and I drove up to Estes Park and spent the day with him and I sat at the feet of a master. Wow. And one of my questions was, what's the distinction between you and the 19 that are a little bit shaky, if, or a lot shaky in terms of effectiveness? His answer was a lot longer than I'm about to give, but I think it's an answer to your question. And it's just one word: readiness. Whether that is losing a family member, going to prison, hitting rock bottom, if you're an alcoholic or an addict of any kind, something. And a friend of mine who is now a 35-year sober drunk, an alcoholic who hasn't had a drink for 35 years, his statement was he had to get desperate. He had to get to desperation, hit rock bottom. And, but if I'm working with an executive, the problems are usually not that dramatic. When you're driving home as a company owner or executive in a company, a growth-oriented company, and there's a lot of good things happening, and yet you can't get away from the thought that this is not where you really should be, or you're not really being effective, or that you're sick of the personal drama being brought into the workplace. And, and maybe you're drinking a little more wine each evening, or maybe you're yelling at your wife and kids when you No, it's inappropriate. All kinds of little signals that things are not going the way that you want them to. Frankly, those are the people that quite often are my clients. Okay. That's one group, maybe about half of them. The other half are people that simply have a really strong sense of what's possible for them and their company and their family. And, uh, they have a sense. That something really positive is ahead of them, but some things around them need to be fixed. Sometimes it's their team. Sometimes it's, they actually have a self-awareness. I have patterns that are stopping us from getting where I want to go. And I can't tell you how exciting it is actually doing what you do.

I do know.

When that person—

some of the most satisfying work in the world.

If somebody says, I've got a ton of problems, will you help? I'm in.

Yeah.

If they say, uh, things are going really great, but we, I think we are inadequate to a potential future that's really fantastic, but we're struggling here to break out of something that's already successful, but it's somewhat stuck. Either of those situations, let's rock and roll.

I'm ready.

I agree with you. In my work teaching people deep listening, how to validate emotions, ignore the words, they have to have a growth mindset. If, if you've got a fixed mindset, it's gonna be really hard to get these skills because you have to do some mindset shifts, including abandoning the idea that there's anything close to rationality. Human beings are not rational beings. We're emotional beings. And that's hard for a lot of people to grasp. But yeah, I totally get it. It sounds you've been doing this for what, 40, 50 years? I rarely meet people that are so satisfied with their lives as you seem to be with yours, despite all the obvious challenges you've had that you've alluded to, some difficult times. If you were to talk to my audience who are composed of leaders and executives mostly, and they're, they really want happiness and they, and maybe they're very wealthy, maybe they've been very successful, maybe they're on their way climbing up the corporate ladder thinking that bigger status, more money will make them happy. Based on your experience, Robert, what would you say to them?

You've obviously have a lot of thought into this and also direct experience. And it's something that I've been learning about all of my life, both personally for me and in terms of any kind of change process that I've wanted to be in. But also in terms of observing my family, my friends, and of course my clients.

What do you think? What is, what would you say to somebody who says, I'm, what do I do? My life doesn't have any real meaning.

Sorry, Doug. Did you ask that again?

Absolutely. So let's suppose that you've got I've got somebody in the audience and they're an up-and-coming executive, they're climbing the corporate ladder, or maybe they're an entrepreneur, but they don't feel fulfilled in their lives. Like they're missing something. What would you tell them?

I deeply apologize. I've got the leaf blowers back in my yard and walking away just right now.

And I'm used to— let me try it. Let me try it again so you can hear me over the leaf blowers. So, Let's assume I've got somebody in the audience here, they're listening to our conversation and they're an executive, they're, or an entrepreneur, and they ask themselves, what does this all mean? How do I find meaning in my life? How do, what is real happiness? Because I'm not finding it right now. I thought making money would be, make me happy. I thought having a title would make me happy. I thought having a successful company would make me happy. But I'm not. What am I missing?

Wow. More good questions.

What do you say to them?

Look, so I don't wanna sound flippant here, right? But I have a pretty strong belief that the answer to that question is always within us and that our patterning, our culture, the conversation that we're in life stops us from seeing what's true for us. We do a lot of work around purpose, vision, and values. And I've come to believe, and you, in the last 20 years, there's been a real wave of talk about vision. People like Simon Sinek and some others are now coming around to what we've been teaching for 30 years, which is that having a sense of your purpose, your reason for existing, and it's a very wah-wah, woo-woo, new agey kind of conversation around this, but it is immensely practical. So our recommendation, my recommendation personally is do the work on your personal purpose and your organizational purpose first. Why do you exist? There are approaching 8 billion people on the planet, and yet the classic line, there's 8 billion different fingerprints.

That's right.

And my friend Arjun Sen, who's a really brilliant consultant, marketing consultant. He says we are one of one, and the challenge is to discover who that one is. Who are we? Not what our parents programmed us about, or what early childhood schooling programmed us for, what the culture says we should be and do, but rather, why are we here? Our little simple structure is that there's 4 levels of purpose. The first one is the most obvious, and that's survival. You know, the food, clothing, shelter, that kind of stuff. The second level is maintenance, and that's figuring out some way to handle food, clothing, and shelter such that it's not dominant in your life. There are a lot of people in the world that where just food, clothing, and shelter is all they can handle. They never get to the maintenance level. Most of the people in the West and in the developed East I've gotten to this maintenance level where we have a job or we have a little business, or maybe we have some income from our family. Something happens that takes care of food, clothing, and shelter. And so we're at maintenance. The third level is the one that's, I think, confusing to people because it's leisure. It's bringing play into every area of your life. That if you are digging ditches or blowing leaves or a college professor, that somehow it's joyful. My book, Living an Extraordinary Life, the more important part of that title actually is subtitle, which is about bringing joy and fulfillment into your life along with success, because we learn the most when we're having fun, right? We accomplish the most when we're having fun. We find that perfect person to go through life with when we're having fun. Most people, when they hear leisure, they think of the beach and the Joe Biden lawn chair kind of experience. But if you talk with really successful people, one of the things you find out is they're having fun. And that, so that's a level of purpose that I'm gonna have fun. And that, by the way, that was a breakthrough for me to find out that I was living in a 14,500 square foot home and Aspen with a jet with 7 personal staff and the woman of my dreams and the children of my— that I've always wanted to raise. Everything was perfect. And I started waking up most mornings thinking there's something missing for me. And what it came out to, it was joy and fulfillment, right? I mean, when you have a purpose like I did totally based in survival, that I'll never be poor again. That's inadequate to creating joy and satisfaction and fulfillment. Absolutely. Fun. And then the highest level of purpose and the one that I'm working every day to live through and from is contribution.

Service, Doug.

What is it that God or life or parents or something prepared me for? You know, somehow you got into one of the finest universities in the world. I don't know if you lied or if you—

I hope not.

I don't know how you got in there in terms of, I don't know about today, but when you were at Dartmouth and that school was about the classic liberal arts.

That's right.

Where you learned about the world.

That's right.

And your interaction with the world.

That's right.

And there was, I don't know if it was spoken, there was certainly unspoken that you were here to make a difference.

That's right.

It was very made very clear to all of us.

Oh, my one semester at the University of Wisconsin was not like that, but we all have different beginnings. And the reality is we can choose the endings. And my personal approach, the approach of hundreds of thousands of people that we've interacted with, is that, that having that choice be the best one for you, the people around you, for your family, for your company, for your community, is to discover why are you here?

Yeah.

What's your purpose? What's the meaning of your life? That's right. And, uh, my experience is that you, that changes over time as your awareness changes, as your life experience changes. I started out, I'll never be poor again. And that made me a ton of money and fame and all of those things. But then I went through this, not quite a dark night of the soul, but in that direction. And that became— I suddenly realized that I had migrated from I'll never be poor again to I'm just a rich guy in Aspen. And that led me to some incredible friendships, some incredible, actually, contributions in the nonprofit area. A lot of great things happened, uh, if with that, I'm just a rich guy in Aspen because it handled this insecurity that I had that I'm not enough, that I know I don't have, I don't have enough education. I'm undisciplined and I'm a lousy husband. And, but then that opened up the space for me to get that I am okay, that I am enough and that it's time for me to contribute.

Good for you. We've come to the end of our conversation. I could talk to you for hours, Robert. You're an amazing man, and I'm really glad that you took the time out of your busy day to join us. And thank you so much.

It's my great pleasure. Maybe we should do it again. We'll talk about some more specifics around leadership and management.

We'll make sure that happens.

Wonderful. Thanks, Doug.

You're welcome, Robert. Doug Noll here.

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