Sunday Story: The Adventure Mindset - Part 3
Lean into Discomfort
This week we’re back with our third part of our Adventure Mindset series - and you are probably going to need some version of this mindset. If you’d like to learn why that is, check out Part 1 of the white paper we just published on the disruptive force of artificial intelligence and what it means for your leadership.
We’ve all been in situations where we didn’t know what to do. That’s a human experience. It can be an emergency or even a mundane decision like what to make for dinner, but it happens to all of us. Let’s use the dinner example to illustrate how this one plays out first, and we’ll follow it up with a true story from the same Alaska trip we talked about last week.
So: You are hungry, because it’s dinner time. Your budget doesn’t allow you to "Skip the Dishes", and at best you’ve got a bunch of ingredients in the fridge. You don’t know what to do, but you know you’ve got to eat. What are your options?
You can eat the ingredients. I’m sure raw carrots would fill your belly, but they probably won’t be the most satisfying option for you. Still, this is an easy, accessible opportunity to solve the problem, right?
You can go into debt and pay someone else to solve the problem for you - order in. But this is really making a bigger problem for yourself, isn’t it? And while it does solve your problem - maybe really well if you order the charcuterie board from Rebel Food and Drink in Edmonton Alberta (We are shamelessly plugging them because this menu item is mouth wateringly good and arrives in a a pizza box…we do miss it!) - it doesn’t really set you up to solve the problem the next time. You’re ability to tap your phone in the right sequence to get UberEats to show up is not really a growth experience.
Or you could cook something, only you’ve never been much of a cook.
Which option do you choose?
We recommend you lean into discomfort. And we don’t mean the discomfort of having raw carrots for dinner - we mean learn to cook. The reasons for this are obvious. It’s where the growth happens. Not only do you learn a new skill while honing existing ones, but you feed yourself now AND prepare to feed yourself in the future too. You’ve grown as a human, and you are more capable the next time.
THAT is the core of this stage of the adventure mindset. It’s not just about solving the problem today, it’s about leaning into discomfort so growth happens and prepares you to solve similar problems later on in your adventure. Over time, this has a cumulative and cyclical effect - skills build upon skills, and the more skills you have, the more adventures become accessible to you. The more adventures you can access, the more chance there is to lean into discomfort and learn new skills, which then leads to more adventures, which then…you get the idea.
But we use the word “lean” in purpose - not leap. If in this cooking analogy, you have not got a lot of cooking experience, and if you then decide that from the ingredients available you are going to roll the dice on an incredibly complex soufflé, you’re likely going to end up with an inedible, deflated, and discouraging waste of ingredients instead of dinner. While it’s still educational and you’ll learn something for the next soufflé, it doesn’t solve your immediate problem so at the end of the day you are still hungry. That’s no good - you want to be fed AND grow, ideally. Not just growing and hungry. So instead of the soufflé, maybe try an basic omelette or a quiche - far easier to prepare, and even if you make mistakes along the way the end result is usually pretty edible.
And ideally, you’ve prepared well enough that you’ve got LOTS of ingredients, so that if your first omelette is a burned mess, you can crack a few fresh eggs and try again. If you’ve followed our advice from last week - prepare for what goes wrong - then you should have lots of extra ingredients to try again.
Now, let’s look at a real-world story where this came to life. As mentioned last week, the trip up the Dalton was a scary one. We didn’t know exactly how dangerous the road was, but we weren’t naive - we knew that it was dangerous and it had a high likelihood of an accident, and an accident for me on the motorcycle would have been particularly challenging given the distance to help. And as we shared last week, many motorcycles have gone on to whatever comes next because their trip up the Dalton went wrong.
We had picked up my brother Sean and his partner in Anchorage as they were going to be joining Teryn in the Jeep on the way up the Dalton. After a couple of days of low-risk camping as we navigated our way north, we ended up just outside Fairbanks. The following day we would be embarking on the run up the Dalton, and so we dedicated some time to practicing for emergencies - we were looking at the ingredients in the fridge, and practicing making meals, knowing that if we needed any additional ingredients, it was a lot easier to get them in Fairbanks than where we were going next.
I took the responsibility of facilitating a bit of a training session for my expedition partners on basic first aid, as they did not have that certification already but Teryn and I did. This wasn’t about getting our two new teammates certified. This was about making sure everyone had the basics to stabilize life if necessary, but more importantly it was about not making things worse, while we waited for professional help. Teryn adopted the role of casualty, and put on my motorcycle gear while I gave coaching and instruction to Sean and his partner on what to do should I make an error and have a bad fall. They were mostly doing great, but then we practiced removing a helmet from an unconscious rider.
I remember watching the team attempt to stabilize the casualty’s head while the helmet was removed to assess the A and B part of the ABCs (Airway, Breathing, and Circulation). The way you do that is have one person stabilize the head while the other gently removes the casualties helmet. Neck injuries are incredibly common and one wrong move can result in paralysis or death, so this was the most delicate part of the operation. I watched as Sean did an exceptional job stabilizing and his partner attempted to remove the helmet; his partner didn’t have a lot of experience with this kind of thing, so her first attempt was a bit rough. They decided to switch and allow his partner to stabilize while Sean removed the helmet. Sean gently advised that he needed his partner to stabilize differently, because her hands were blocking the removal of the helmet; there was some back and forth and miscommunication, and I remember thinking “I think I’m gonna die if something goes wrong”.
I was uncomfortable. To me, this was a critical skill, and the team was showing that we had a lot of work to do to learn it. Just like the kitchen analogy, I had options. I could go the “raw carrot” route - which in this case would be to forget the best practices and hope for the best. In this context, that was super high risk. I could go for the “Door Dash” route - but hundreds of miles into the Alaskan wilderness meant that my “dasher” (an ambulance) would be a long way away. So that meant we had option three - learn to cook.
The thing was, the whole team was uncomfortable, not just me. This was my brother, my wife, and my then-sister-in-Law, practicing a skill that would likely only ever be used to stop me from permanent injury or death, and there was an awareness that if we didn’t get this right, it was going to be super awkward at Thanksgiving the following year, to put it mildly. We all had some growing to do in this space. And candidly, the first time they tried to “cook”, the omelette got really burned and was inedible.
But - remember last weeks lesson - we had extra eggs, and in this metaphor what I mean is we gave ourselves a whole afternoon to practice these skills. So we did - again and again and again. We made omelette after omelette after omelette. Soon, the shared discomfort gave way to confidence - now we were making metaphorical American Omelettes and French Omelettes, in the way that the communication streamlined and collaboration improved.
The next morning, we set off back on the road. I wouldn’t describe myself as confident - this was a scary trip after all - but our collective ability to lean into the discomfort meant that we had grown as individuals and as a team. We were as prepared as we were going to be, and all that remained was the most dangerous piece of road in North America.
This part of the Adventure Mindset meant that instead of sticking to pavement and seeing the Alaska that everyone else sees, we were prepared to go where few get the opportunity. That trip changed my life for many reasons - it changed all of us. You cannot travel through a place like that and not be changed in some ways. And it all started because we were willing to lean into discomfort and embrace our growth.
Like we said in the introduction, we’ve all got some growing ahead of us as our society and economy come to terms with the disruptive forces that are rearing their head in 2024. Check out our White Paper for more - but we truly believe that if we all lean (not leap!) Into this discomfort together, we can grow and have our own life-changing adventure over the next few years.
Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next Sunday.
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