Mapping What Matters Most Reboot Live | Part 1 | Episode #165

Aaron McHugh (00:00): Friends, welcome to Work Life Play. I'm your host, Aaron McHugh. I'm here to help you find work you love, learn to play live adventurously, become curious and live your life with joy and purpose. Ready, Set, go.

Rob Bell (00:30): Episode 99 of the Robcast, I interviewed a fantastic woman named Leith McHugh and she sat in this chair right in front of me here and she told about what it was like for her 11 year old daughter to die and what it's like as a mother to have given 11 years to caring for one that came from you and then to lose your daughter. And I know so many of you mentioned that episode, like it just did something to you. And what she talked about is how after that the pain was so great, she and her husband Aaron, realized we need to reboot our lives. So they put the word out in Facebook that they were getting rid of furniture and they sold their house and they literally got rid of their stuff and started over. And they sort of systematically went through their lives and said, let's just reboot the whole thing.

(01:27): And once you go down that road, you're like, Well, seriously, let's start over. Like everything, let's end it and let's start again. And so the interview was deeply moving, but it was also really, really interesting how they had just sort of systematically gone about this. And I was saying to her questions like, So what about somebody who's been through something horrific, traumatic, some, a breakup, a loss, a divorce failure? What do you say to them? And she's like, Oh yeah, you can for sure reboot your life and it will be better. I got an email from her recently. She and her husband Aaron, they did a Reboot Your Life event. They just put out the word that they'd be doing an event and you could register for it. And they were gonna take you through all sorts of interesting experiences to help you reboot your life.

(02:15): And she sent me all these pictures of people who came to their event and ate good food and talked about all these things and talked about how to unclutter your life and how to reclaim the importance of pleasure. And they like had a whole thing they just created and took people through. Can you do that? Can you do that? Like, you go through this pain and trauma and it does something to you and you learn some things and then you have this driving desire to share what you've learned with other people. Can you just like do that? Can you just put on an event? I don't know. I don't know. Can you? That's a decision for the committee. Wait, we are the committee. Are you with me on this? Can you just do it? Yes, yes, apparently you can.

Aaron (03:02): Friends, welcome to the Work Life Play podcast. There you were listening to our friend Rob Bell on his episode 170 of the Robcast, which he was riffing on this reboot live experience that Leith, my wife and I, put on two of last year in 2017. And this month marks one year ago that we had our second one. Life got busy and things a lot of has change has happened in our lives, so we haven't really had the margin to be able to put on another one. But as he was saying, we encountered these unforeseen really difficult challenges in our life. The passing of our daughter and lots of other challenges. And as a result of that, in rebooting our lives and starting over, we, as Rob was saying, we systematically went about our life and decided what are we gonna keep?

(04:10): What are we gonna get rid of and what are we gonna redo? So one year ago this month was our second reboot experience, and we had a total of I think 84 people in 2017 that went through these two reboot workshops. And we recorded the audio from the second one. So it's been sitting on a external hard drive and we decided to finally get it dusted off and produced, and it is ready for release. So what we're gonna release to you here in a few seconds is you'll be able to hear basically the morning of day one. And where we started was with this base premise and idea is when you look at big questions with your life about what do I do? What about my career? Where should we live? What kind of house should I have? What relationships should I be in or not be in?

(05:01): Or just generally like, what if my life is just not very satisfying and fulfilling and it's not headed in the direction I want it to be, or I feel stuck and I keep repeating the past? Whatever those big questions are, what we find is the best place to start is to really take more of a high level; I call it like a Google Earth view of your life. And we lead into this exercise about looking at the raw materials of your life as all being useful and that everything you've experienced in your life has value. Now, it may have mystery as associated with it. It may have, what do I do with this? But I can tell you that from my experience now, so for instance, in my new career that I'm spending time out on the front lines with corporations across the globe that I've been dragging around, for instance, these markers in my backpack for the last, I don't even know, three or four years.

(06:03): And I just kept bringing these markers along. Well, all of a sudden, you know, I'd pull 'em out in a business meeting a couple years ago with a bunch of software executives and I was kind of laughable. Like I looked like a, somebody made fun of me and said it was my cartoon bag of a grade schooler, my grade schooler art kit. But I just started doing me, I started leaning into what's this thing I do with markers and drawing and I don't even really consider myself an artist, but nonetheless I was leaning in. Well, fast forward. The work that I'm doing today in leading these transformational workshops and these personal insight workshops and top team alignment with corporate executives we do, it's a no PowerPoint zone, so there's no PowerPoint allowed. And we use Mr. Sketch brand markers and one of the practitioners facilitators that I work with carries around their own bag of markers.

(07:04): And so we pull out our bag of markers and 3M flip charts and off and running for a day or two or three, whatever the, the workshop length may be. So my point in saying that is that by way of intro is everything in your life is useful. Everything you've experienced, everything you've become, all the setbacks all of the experiences of relationship, all of the careers, it's useful for what's about to happen next. If we choose to use it that way, we can just choose to chalk it up as mystery and I don't know what to do with that. Or we can choose to hold it loosely with hope, believing that part of what's important for our future is already who we've become from our past. So that's the start. First exercise we lead through and then there's a series of other ones through the course of this next 30, 40 minutes. we'll have a couple more we'll release, but enjoy the reboot experience as if you were there live skipping school with us in the Ivy Wild Brewery, which used to be a former grade school that we rented out for the first day.

(08:15): All right, you can do this. Keep going.

(08:17): How many of you guys remember from science class the periodic table? Yeah. Okay, so I have the theory, here's my theory. I think the periodic table is super helpful as an illustration for our lives. And I wanna walk you through why I think so and give you some ideas on how it's true. Okay? So on the period table, one of the elements is carbon number six, right? Big C and then carbon by itself. So I ride road bikes and mountain bikes. So when you get a carbon bike, it's not carbon by itself, it's actually intertwined with other, another element. And in this case here, I just grabbed iron. So when you take carbon and then you take iron and combine it together, you can make some really hardened, stronger metals. So for those of you who your chimney sweep gig is to make cool stuff, big stuff, then when you combine these individual ingredients on the periodic table, the combination of them makes something more meaningful.

(09:44): Something you can build with something you could do it with. But some of the stuff on the just carbon by itself or iron by itself, like you're kinda like, I, I don't know what to do with that. So I think it's like her life. Months and months and months ago I sat down and, and I'll read this off to you and tell you about it so you don't have to strain your eyes because you're gonna get one here and you're gonna make one yourself in a minute. So this idea is what if everything in your life was a raw material?

(10:19): Everything that's happened, everywhere you've been, every place you've moved, every bad painful thing, every good joyful thing ends up as a raw material ingredient that equals you. And then out of that is the special sauce, the special combination, the carbon and iron combination that makes this badass thing you can make something with called your life. So can I just share with you some of mine, what it is and then I'll give you guys a chance to do it. All right. So my first kiss, Tasha Fair was her name. I don't know what to do with that, but she's in there. So I lived Bishop California in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, one of my favorite all time places when I was seven, eight, and nine. And everything was well in the world. You're gonna hear some more about this weekend. That is deep to my heart to me Leith, my wife, Averi, Holden, Hadley, my people, Colorado, California.

(11:21): And I just took this approach as more of just a brain dump. Not like this really long exercise. It took me forever. It was just like, what's me? Who's me? What am I about? So Baylor University, seven 13 Ridgeway. We lived on food stamps and my next door neighbor was a drug dealer. How he transported drugs from the door of his house out to the curb was through a vacuum cleaner that he stuffed drugs in the bag, in the zipper bag. So that's in there, that's part of my story. That's me, Wilderness Ranch, my brother, my sister, my mom, these fellows here, John Dale, Alex Morgan Rob Bell, Sexton Road. Unfortunately when I was 16 years old, I hit a five year old who ran out in front of my car and that's my story. It's in there for a long time. When I would look at the raw materials in my life, I just put things in buckets of here's the stuff I understand and I know what to do with, here's the stuff I can't believe happened to me and how come that keeps getting bigger. But what if they're not in buckets? What if instead they're just on the raw material, periodic lists and it's all raw material, it's all usable, it's all part of the story and it all can be part of making this thing called us in our life.

(13:02): I, this teacher that believed in me, Ms. Mc Closkey, when I was in a sophomore in high school and I almost failed high school and she said, there's more to you than this. And so I'm here today because somebody like that that said, there's more to you believe in you. She was an English teacher. I wrote down Work Life Play and Goonies trip that Holden and I took on the coast of Oregon and we retraced the movie the Goonies and reenacted scenes from the movie and took pictures and videotaped and it was awesome, and Star Wars. The first time I saw Star Wars was in Bishop California in 1981 in a double feature theater. And then I got to watch the space shuttle in 1980 land in wherever the Edwards Air Force base was. So all of it, it's just me. So what I wanna do is suggest to you, nothing is wasted, everything is useful for it's all in there.

(14:10): It all matters even if it doesn't make sense. And some of it just may be a filament to join with other stuff in your life that ends up being part of these ingredients that make these really wonderful parts of you. So what I wanna do is I'm gonna give you guys five minutes and what I wanna do is I'll just put on little tunes. One of the keys to this exercise is unedited. Nobody's gonna see it. It's only for you. And what we're just trying to get at the starting place is what's in there? Who are you? Where'd you live? What did it used to be like to be you? Okay, where did you live? Who was your pet? Who was your best friend? Who was that person that believed in you? Who was the person who didn't? How about that coach? How about that friend's parent that stepped in when your parents weren't? How about this crazy experience that you had Summer camp, you went to first boss? How about that embarrassing thing like in middle school and everybody laughed. How about that person you thought you'd be that job? You thought you'd have that marriage, you hoped for cool things you were gonna accomplish by such and such a age, these passport stamps you were gonna have or you did have?

(15:47): What was your favorite like TV show? What's the stuff that gets put into the mystery box of, I don't know, wtf? The voice that you hear that says why you can't, what does it say? Why can't you, what can't you? It's all useful, Nothing's wasted. What was that killer vacation you went on as a kid with your family? What about that quirky best friend of your mom? What about that ritual you guys do at your house on Saturday mornings with your kids? So what I would encourage you, you guys to do is I would take this raw materials of your life, this periodic table and definitely through the weekend I'd add to it now that we've like started some popcorn firing, like part of what we're trying to do today is just get some sparks

(16:59): To kind of fire up. And so I'd keep adding to it and I would gift yourself with the most amount of uncensored you can be. Just be that who cares? It fits or doesn't fit or it makes, just put it down. Just put it down, put it down, put it down. And so then what's cool is then this can become a, a tool that you revisit back in your real life. And then as you begin to think about and reframe how you think about your life, what if you started with believing it's all useful. I don't know where to put it. I don't know what to do with it. I didn't want this or holy cow, can you believe? But it all goes in there equals you. And I think a lot of what we can begin to do is to think through a reframing of how we think about what we think about.

(18:05): And to me this has been really instrumental in doing that because then I can look at it and say, look, yep, it's all true. It's all in there. It all happened. But look what I can build with this. I can build some really rad stuff. Like hey what if we on this run with Dave, I bet it was February and I was running down this trail, this snowy trail and I said, Dave, you know what I think I'm supposed to do? I think Leith and I are supposed to do this event together. I thought it was just Leith's supposed to do her event. I'm supposed to do my event. I think no, I think we're supposed to do this thing together. I think it should be on reboot. And what if all these things, we've done all of this. What if we just kind of did a live experiment for a couple days and invited people to come And at first it was like outlandish senator coming home and telling me, I was like, I talked to Dave.

(18:59): He's like, Dude, yeah dude, you should do it. Oh okay, well guess what? This is an alchemy mixture, concoction of all of you, all of us intersecting together and here we are. And it's all because all these raw materials are at play but we're building something, we're doing something right now. We're creating something. I wanna play you another little audio sound bite from this book titled Designing Your Life. So one of the things we have for you guys through the weekend as resources, we've got 'em all written down, but feel free to write 'em down as we go. This is one that is really helpful. These are two guys from Stanford that teach a class on designing your life. I've interviewed these guys a lot of what you're here through the course of the weekend or snippets from podcasts that I just pulled outta interviews I've done. I couldn't believe these guys quantifiably had like scientific proof for the stuff. Like I that's what I thought. So how to build a well lived, joyful life. Let me just play you a cut from this interview from these guys.

Gentleman from Stanford (20:12): How many lives are you? You know, if you had actually gotten to run in parallel universes and you could have concurrent consciousness across them, how many parallel lives would you be able to interestingly lead? And we actually ask people to answer that question. And on average, you know, kinda the numbers we get are somewhere between three and eight. You know, I mean well occasionally people say one, mostly people say, you know, three or more. Sometimes they'll say a thousand, you know, but it's clearly more than one. Well it's more than one. I can't plan the one perfect life. There's not a single best life that's a one of the great dysfunctional beliefs we try to get of dysfunctional beliefs are a big problem that we try to help people reframe. And, and have you found your single passion? Have you found the best you?

(20:55): We think those are the wrong questions because you, most people don't have a single passion or even don't know what they are. So that's not a good place to start. So this this fear, am I really doing exactly the right thing? We see a lot of people burdened by that unnecessarily cuz there is no exactly right thing. There's a bunch of right things and they're not even comparable. Yeah, well in design you never pick your first idea. You brainstorm a lots and lot of ideas. When we were doing the first laptops at, at Apple when day was working on the mouse team, you know, they built hundreds and hundreds of prototypes and there's lots of good ideas. You might end up selecting one or the other based on some specific characteristic or fact in your life, but never start, which is one idea or this no, the really debilitating notion, the boy, if I don't figure out the one perfect thing, I'm screwed or I'm too late,

Aaron (21:40): I'm screwed, or I'm too late. I felt like I was too late for sure a couple years ago we were at some friend's house and we were having dinner with him and I was telling him what I really wanna do is, man, I really would like to write and speak. I just, I don't know, it may. And the guy called me and he's like, You think it's too late, don't you? Like, yeah, I do. I feel like here I am at 40 something. However, these guys talk a lot about prototyping and talk a lot about life in a real free form way of just, let's just pretend, let's, let's unhinge a little bit and let's just dream about what would a well lived life look like to us. So what I wanna do real quick is we're gonna do an exercise, we're gonna create a baseline.

(22:32): What I'm looking for and what we're gonna look to do is mention earlier, but I really strongly encourage you, again, going back to this inner critic as much as you can just silence the inner critic for right now. And here's what I would recommend. The inner critic can sound like you know what it sounds like, but let me help you with how to respond back to it. First of all, I hear you okay, Yeah, I hear you. And right now I hear you and I'm going to go ahead with this. And what's kind of nice about it is then you can just say, Hey, you know what, I got you. You're, I know your drill. I, we've been down that I, yes. But right now I'm gonna give myself some permission to dream a little bit and I'm gonna start with some questions. I'm gonna explore a couple possibilities and where I need to start is starting exactly where I am. So let me play you another intro video to just get you thinking about this next exercise.

Intro Video (23:39): You will live a long time, have many friends, many experiences, you will lose all your money. Don't worry, you will get it all back again and you will come back to Bali and then I will teach you everything I know.

(24:02): When some guy who, yes, looks a little like Yoda hands you a prophecy, you have to respond. I get it. It's your life, Raf. Right now, just like a couple of years ago when you were completely consumed with being the perfect wife, mom, when did you accept the life you had? Oh my baby always searching for something.

(24:26): Your underwear. My Queen just folded my delicates. Oh my god, baby, you are in so much trouble.

(24:31): You know how people start resembling their dogs? They used to look like Stephen. Now you kinda look like David.

(24:38): I need to change since I was 15. I've either been with a guy or breaking up with a guy. I have not given myself two weeks of a breather just to deal with myself. You wanna go away for a year? I used to have this appetite for my life and it is just gone. I wanna go someplace where I can marvel at something, I'm going to Italy and then I'm going to India and I'm going to end the year in Bali. I'm having a relationship with my pizza. This is my no car left behind experiment. If you could clear out all that space in your mind, you'd have a door, whatever.

Aaron (25:38): So what I wanna start with is instead of us focusing on this question of, and I do this drawing of focusing on outcomes. So a lot of you show up here with these questions. What am I gonna do about my job? What am I do about my marriage? What am I gonna do about my health? What am I gonna do about my money? What am I do about my kids? Those are the awesome questions. However, the challenge is we usually start way out here and we're like Ah,

(26:06): I just wanna know and we're gonna start back here. Does that sound fair? Which is really inconvenient for really driven type a's like me and you, but it turns out we just, this isn't always very helpful. So we're gonna go back here and what we're gonna start with is, can you guys, well you can see it on tv, we have a drawing here too. So here's what we're gonna create. We're gonna create a life dashboard. This is really simple and it's a fifth grader could do it, which is why we're gonna do it cause it just dumbs it all down makes it simple. And so we're gonna look at our li our life as a dashboard of green, yellow, red. And let me just explain to you, green is really good, things are groovy and I wanna keep going. Things are yellow right now and it's just, you know, warning light.

(26:56): Like okay, caution, paying attention. It's not terrible but it's not bad. And then red, we all get like, how many more days can I do this? And I think it's really helpful to just get a big picture on me, you in these key areas. So it doesn't matter what are you doing man, it doesn't need to look like mine. I purposely spent a bunch of time on mine just to give you visualization. And you're gonna go through and take these categories and if you have other ones that you wanna add, great. But I think these are really key good starting places. Where are you at in your career and whatever that version is for you that�s your chimney sweep gig. And I also think that work and career could and should be expanded to stuff you're up to that may not produce income but it's just your jam.

(27:50): It's what you love, it's what you're doing. And so that's what you want to be about in the world. So you might separate those and say here's what I do to earn money and then here's what I do that brings me life. And those might end up with two different green yellow reds. Then we're gonna look at just your life. And when I think of your life I think of like how do you spend your time, what do you do? And I think all of you get that cause we're gonna subdivide into relationships also. So the reason I put play up there and adventure, that's one that I pay attention to a lot. And I would just say, let's just call it having fun. If it's hobbies, whatever your vernacular is for that. And a lot of times you might have, yeah work's going great, life's a little yellow and I'm in the red zone when it comes to actually having fun.

(28:43): I'm spending so much time soccer mommy driving, I'm in the car all the time. And so I'm not actually doing much for myself in relationships. Feel free to subdivide those. If you wanna say, hey, me and my significant other or me and my, you know, family of origin, those might end up with two different sets And we're, one of the things we're gonna do, I think it's later today, is we're actually gonna do a relationship map and look at the health of our relationships. But for right now we're just looking real big picture, 50,000 foot fly overview, physical health, money, finances and spiritual connection or yeah. So I'm curious if you're willing how many of you ended up with two reds, two red light on your dashboards? Yahoo. There you go. Celebrate that. So I think what's helpful, just broad flyover is if you're looking at three or more reds, that's not good because, and here's what I mean by that's not good, not good as in a grade card, but not good as in sustainable.

(30:04): So a lot of what we're gonna look at this weekend is sustainability. Can I keep this up? Do I wanna keep this up? Sometimes some of those things are red and it's not your doing, sometimes they're red, but that's gonna be for a stretch or a season, you know it's gonna be right. But what happens then for us when we end up with a whole string of red lights going off on our dashboard, it's just like your car after a while it's in the ditch. So what we're gonna try and take a look at this weekend is what can we do about some of those? And then which are the ones that they might be circumstantially read just full on a mess? But then what choices do we have in spite of that? And we'll tell some stories about that. But for right now we're just trying to get kind of a barometer to start with. I'm struck by how much I've learned to live in the yellow, is that right? Yep. How, how many can resonate with that? Wow, that's really good. Thanks Jim. Okay, cool. Alex gonna grab this handheld mic, so if it's cool with you guys, if we could pass it around that'll just help us capture this for the recording. All right, so anybody else? Other insights? Yeah, Lynn.

Lynn (31:28): I was struck with what Jim said. I had five yellows, but in the middle of the yellow I put a dot of where if I don't pay attention it's gonna go. And so I had four red dots in my yellow dot and one green. So, okay, so

Aaron (31:44): That was, So would you say, is it, would it be fair to say that they're yellow trending red? Right. Okay. Yeah.

(31:53): That's super helpful. So then the question of sustainability becomes really important, right? Right. And another thing that I would say when you think about this life dashboard, and again, everything that we're gonna talk through buddy of mine called it being a practitioner. So we're practitioners of this. I sat and did the same thing and went through and I realized like mine used mostly red or trending red.

(32:28): And I've been for a couple years working on specifically how can I get these to trend in different direction. You guys ever heard the term, the phrase attempting to boil the ocean? Have you ever heard of that? Okay, so the idea business people use this a lot and they're like, Oh, we can't try and boil the whole ocean. Let's just start with one little vial, one court and let's boil that because here's what can happen. Look at your yellow, I've learned to live mostly in the yellows, or I've got a bunch of reds and it can feel like basically, I gotta fix this. And then you're overwhelmed and then you're over here at anxious and you're over here anxious and you're stuck because then it's, it's all a mess. I can't last another day in any of it and if I don't fix it then, and then you go into the loops of the story I tell myself is true is it'll always be like this or I'll never get any better or this is just the way it is, or whatever those rehearsed stories lines are. So what I would encourage you to do is in grace, in kindness for yourself, is just attempt to just look at it. Just observation right now. Just, oh, that's, that's an insight. Okay, boy that's super helpful. I didn't know I'd learned to live with so many yellows. Oh, I didn't realize they're all red.

(34:25): Okay, but we don't have to go to that dotted line with the question mark of like, Oh well now what am I gonna do about it? Hold on, we're gonna, so we're gonna walk our way through. So the intention of the weekend is to start with awareness, get big picture orientation, surface up these little sparks of like, Oh well I could move to India and go eat food in Italy and I could so it, we could. And right now we're just gonna get oriented in a baseline on how's our dashboard look You with me? So I'm Grant, I too have tons of yellow. Okay. And just reflecting on it, I'm thinking the reds are either caused by like an external thing I can't control or I really don't want to admit they're red cuz then I feel like I have to do something about them. And thinking about dreaming this morning, it makes it really hard to put down green. And that's why we live in the yellow is cuz we've kind of quit dreaming and so we don't, we don't really think we gonna achieve green maybe. So how many can you relate to that? That just green at this point just feels like nirvana, like some utopia for somebody else's life. Yeah, and that's okay right now. Yeah. Pass the mic over to Stacy.

Stacy (35:52): What I was gonna say is when I broke down my relationships or broke down the money or broke down health, a lot of it was red or green, which makes it brown. So I have a lot of brown. Yeah, so I have green and I have reds. So that was green reds, a lot of them.

Aaron (36:11): So a good buddy of mine in the room leads an event like this for guys. And one of the things that comes up in that event is he talks about becoming good soil and good soil. We have a garden in our backyard and we'll show some pictures of it and talk about it. It actually does take a lot of manure to make good soil, which is really painful. But it turns out in volcanic ash and in piles of manure, you really do grow some beautiful things. And I'm not saying that as a trying to put a box and a bow on, I'm just saying it. And what's also true is for all of us, the ash from what's been burned and lost and the manure from the stuff at sideways, it's in there too on that periodic table in spite of many things being out of your control.

(37:18): And they may in fact be red or yellow that there's still remain the empowerment of choice in other areas that you could do something about. And it's hard to do. But I think that's a starting place of awareness to say let me just tell you a quick story that I think can illustrate that app. So when Hadley, our daughter was alive we woke up most mornings for about six or seven years, five or six years, a long time to her crying most days. And that I didn't set an alarm clock for that elapsed time.

(38:07): And I would wake up and I was usually up during that stretch and season at least that this story occurred up first and early. And let's say it's six o'clock-ish, whatever in the morning. And I'd walk outside or walk to the door threshold of her bedroom and I'd stand in the doorway listening to her cry down the hallway and to her room and a time with her seizures and her tube feedings. And she couldn't go to the bathroom herself or diapers. So there was just always something happening. And then it'd been overnight. Leith usually did the night shift. And so get up with her through the middle of the night and then I would get up early and I would stand in the door. So right at that moment in my life, every day started red.

(38:57): So every day was the baseline beginning was, this is sucks, how is this my life? And then compassion would enter in and I could think about her, but here's what I learned to do. And this was years. This is like, let's just say this is over a two year period of time maybe. I started realizing that in the doorway right then and there. What I was about was I wanted a cup of coffee, but she needed something. And so what I was about was that I was forced to wrestle with this internal battle about what's love look like, is love, go take care of her and step into her world or is love go take care of me so I can have something in my tank and then go enter in in love. So over time, as I wrestled through this, I realized I had this empowerment of choice. And what was most loving for me to do was to go get my cup of coffee, crying continues, it's still red.

(40:11): I'd go do that and spend five minutes and then I'd walk into her room with a cup of coffee and ready to offer love. And it changed the atmosphere of our house. It changed the atmosphere that I was offering, the capacity for love that I had to offer. And then it changed my story. So my story all of a sudden went from totally red to it's yellow and it got to yellow, trending green. So then I would go into a room and I was like, Yeah, she's crying. Is that I would too, if I was in a wheelchair and my spine was twisted sideways and I laid in the bed and I couldn't roll over, I'll be right in, I'll get a cup of coffee and then, then I would engage my daughter and we would connect and I would love on her and pray over her and get her ready for the day. And all of a sudden it was green. And that empowerment of choice, I was a victim in that story by the narrative I told myself was true until I discovered that I was empowered is a choice, bro. I'm like, but I just want it to be better.

(41:27): How come she just won't stop crying? That's what I wanted fixed. How come she isn't walking, talking, crawling, going to college? I don't know. But it's on the periodic table. It's not in the mystery bucket anymore. It's still in the mystery bucket. And I learned how for those things to shift towards the yellow. And like, that's the other thing I'd just end with this morning is this is all like what we're gonna collectively experience together and share together. This is like distilled next door. There's an ax oak whiskey place here. You can get some beer. So the irony is we're in a distillery. We're all this heap of stuff gets cooked and mashed down and settles and then comes out refined. So what we're gonna offer this weekend is our current place today, where we're at on these refined snippets. And then the other thing that's beautiful I think about here is this is a school back in the day in the 1950s, it was a middle school and today's a Friday and we're all playing hooky. We're skipping school, we punted on our real life, back at home, carved out some space and we're gonna play.

(42:58): You've been listening to Work, Life, Play. If you like what you've heard, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really does help. You can get more information about this and other episodes at aaronmchugh.com. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being part of this adventure, for being part of braving the pioneering work of discovering sustainable work life play rhythms, love your work, live your life, and play a whole lot more. I'm Aaron McHugh. Keep going.

*We’ve done our best for this transcription to accurately reflect the conversation. Errors are possible. Thank you for your patience and grace if you find errors that our team missed."