Work Life Play With Aaron Mchugh

In this podcast series on Restoring Balance, I deconstructs the art of making adjustments in your approach, your thinking, your beliefs and habits. I share practical easy-to-start tools to restoring balance to your Work, Life, Play, Health and Relationships. Part 1-Changing Your Atmosphere starts with changing how we approach our circumstances by changing our internals.  

Andrew Skurka is an accomplished adventure athlete, speaker, guide, and writer. The 34-year-old is most well known for his solo long-distance backpacking trips, notably the 4,700-mile 6-month Alaska-Yukon Expedition, the 6,875-mile 7-month Great Western Loop, and the 7,775-mile 11-month Sea-to-Sea Route. Andrew spends most of his adventures off trail picking his way through the high mountains. I really enjoyed my time meeting Andrew. I found him to be very kind, humble, relatable and focused.   What's Andrew's #1 piece of advice? "GO" Andrew's Media Highlights & Accolades National Geographic, March 2011. Circling Alaska in 176 Days. Outside, April 2011. Adventurers of the Year. National Geographic Adventure, December 2007. Adventurer of the Year. Backpacker, August 2005. Person of the Year. Men’s Journal, December 2005. Adventurer Hall of Fame.

Five years ago I started writing a couple articles on a wordpress site to profile my ideas as part of a career change. Accidentally….Now two-hundred and forty field reports (blog posts) and 86 podcast episodes later on Work Life Play….I can confidently say I’m onto something. This podcast is a milestone marker to this five year journey and the lesson's I've learned. Thanks for your friendship, your love, your encouragement, your comments, your shares and rooting me forward. Here’s my summary as best I can articulate it today. Learn how to restore balance in your life. Create a life that matters to you. The narrative we tell ourselves frames our life. Work can’t be about survival. Life can’t be entirely about work. Rethink work. Live differently. Capitalize on the small margins of your life, they add up. Stay curious. Live adventurously. Learn to play. Love the people that you’re with.  

Create a life that matters to you. The narrative we tell ourselves frames our life. Work can’t be about survival. Rethink work. Live differently. Capitalize on the small margins of your life, they add up. Stay curious. Live adventurously. Learn to play. Love the people that you’re with. Five years later, I know I’m onto something. Quantifiable Proof Meet Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, co-authors of the Stanford course turned book providing a methodology to Designing Your Life: How to build a well-lived, joyful life. Our conversation provided me a meaningful crescendo to my two hundred and forty field reports here on Work Life Play. This book is new quantifiable proof to my work.   Everbody gets stuck, start where you are Learn how problem solving used in product design can be applied to designing your life The idea of Work-Life balance is totally wrong and approaches the problem with a win-lose outcome Understand why your life needs a dashboard in five categories: Work, Life, Play, and Health & Love Dysfun

Last week, I crashed a women only backyard dinner party. Thirty women were dressed and buttoned to celebrate their Season Finale of Super Soul Happy Hour/Share Classes. Party lights were strung between Ponderosa pines and simple picnic tables borrowed from the local high school. Each place setting held a Martha Stewart style full bouquet of food and wine. Elayne Prechtel envisioned this backyard soiree of Sharing our Life, Love & Food and created an enchanted Colorado summer evening for her friends. 

Srini called in for our interview from a SoCal seaside coffee shop between tides. He ejected on his busy life to detox for a few days by practicing what he preaches. During our interview you'll hear trains pass by, seagulls cawing and Srini get fired up about why becoming UNMISTAKABLE eliminates any notion of competitors. Over a quick beer in downtown Portland, I met Srini in 2013 at Chris Guillebeau's World Domination Summit. He just released his first book, UNMISTAKABLE: Why Only Is Better Than Best. You've probably listened to one of his near 700 episodes of his popular podcast The Unmistakable Creative. He interviews everyone from an FBI hostage negotiator to some of my favorites Bob Goff, Rob Bell, Tim Ferris and Seth Godin. In this podcast he talks about his love for surfing and the metaphors for life he discovered between sets of waves. We chat about how UNMISTAKABLE uses the stages of surfing as the framework for his becoming Unmistakable. Podcast Highlights: Srini's favorite surfing locations How to

In this podcast interview with Joanne Miller, she helps us understand the importance of having a peaceful and healthy home environment. In Joanne's new book, Creating a Haven of Peace (available on Amazon) she stresses the importance of intentional environmental design within your home. Bottom line: Peaceful home = Peaceful life.  

In this podcast, my adventure buddy, Ray Cameron and I retell our experience of turning around on our attempt to climb Crestone Peak. Crestone Peak is Colorado's 7th' highest mountain rising to 14,294 feet above sea level. Colorado's has over fifty-eight summits above 14,000 feet and I've been on a quest to summit all 58 of them. Locals call these peaks "14'ers".  

How to Scale Influence with Carl Richards | Episode #79 I met Carl last year in gravel grey parking lot in Western Colorado. We had $5K cash, ready to do the deal. Carl Richards was selling his BMW Adventure bike to my friend Jon Dale.   We discovered that we know some of the same people of influence namely Seth Godin. Listen to my 2015 interview with Carl Episode #29 on the One Page Financial Plan.  

Rob Bell says in his new book, How to Be Here, "We all have a blinking line, a cursor. Your blinking line is whatever sits in front of you waiting to be brought into existence". The narrative I tell myself everyday frames my Work Life Play. Every morning the tapes in my head begin to play. I used to think somebody else was responsible for those audio files. My High School principal told me once, "You'll never amount to anything". To be fair, I had just dumped dish soap in the biology lab fish tanks and suds overflowed to the top with dead fish. It was TV camera worthy.

Podcast bullet: If you don’t like the work you’re doing everyday. We can still choose to do it well. It is honorable just doing the hard work of staying alive. There is a lot of pressure in our modern world for our lives to be epic and big. Big and epic aren’t helpful when you find yourself in a season of work you don’t love. We see with our eyes what we believe we will see. Seeing is believing. How we operate in difficult seasons, says a lot about our core beliefs.

  You are more powerful than you believe. You are more influential than you think. Invest a dollar, an hour, an ounce of emotional energy in yourself. You will never loose. Markets are volatile.  You are steady. Money is fleeting.  You are constant. Risk equals reward and sometimes just a good story.

I had this nutty idea of asking Kristen Howerton if she would be willing to do a podcast interview while riding in a Surrey with the Fringe on Top (picture a four-wheeled carriage with each person peddling) on the Newport Beach, CA boardwalk. She said, That sounds fun. Boom. Game On.  In this episode, we got real...I mean really real. We covered a big range of topics as we bounced through conversations about... the pressure of perfectionism, the pretty veneer of social media, social justice, realistic expectations about life and parenting, vulnerability, the political election, LGBT community and religion, white priveledge, Multi-racial families, adoption and being a big-deal blogger.  

It is a fine line between choosing humility or humiliation.  I use this phrase "Eating Humble Pie" when I feel the tension of choice between humility and humiliation. I use this phrase when I find myself walking the fine line between experiencing shame and feeling humbled. I recorded this podcast after walking out of Crossfit class with my tail narrowly tucked between my legs. I got worked. Everyone in the class was ahead of me. I expect the Crossfit fenatics to beat me. I even expect some of the hundred pound women to kick my xxx. Unexpectedly, even the new skinny guy left me in the dust.

  Tribes of Belonging Your tribe of belonging is where you are at home. You know where you fit. You’re part of the tribe and everyone in the tribe knows you belong. You’re comfortable, safe and you can predict what will happen next within the tribe. You’re even apart of defining the rules and system of your tribe of belonging. An easy example is your family. Your hometown, your fraternity or serority, your school, your place of worship and likely your Tribes of Visitation Tribes Translator Required

Everyone should be part Mercenaries and equal parts Missionaries. I learned this idea from Mike Rowe the TV show host of Dirty Jobs. He riffed on this idea on a Fast Company video post and shared why he believes that everyone should be both. I unpack this idea of contrast between these two profiles. 

I have a confession to make. I get hung up with self-induced pressure of perfection. I have a vision of what things can become. As a result, I can easily get stuck in the muddy mire of perfect. I make things harder than they need to be. My wife reminds me of how I make things an “event” that don’t need to be. For as many cool things I create and author, there are twice as many projects that I get stuck on. I get hung up adhering to imagined rules that I’ve made impossibly more difficult than things need to be.

I discovered Kevin Butler's art in a Herschel Supply Co. magazine in a surf shop in Laguna Beach, CA. The Journal Issue 2, was intoxicatingly stacked from cover to cover with images of surf, land, sea, play, beauty and art. Kevin's RAD Cars with RAD Surfboards drawings were featured as Herschel's new beach line. I've been dragging around this journal for two years. I caught up with Kevin here on Work Life Play and got the download on how his art has so much soul.

It seems like there are only two choices, Option 1 (the way I've always done it) re Option 2 (the way I don't want to do it). However, I've discovered another option I never knew existed. We've learned to call this unforeseen possibility option "The Third Way". 

Podcast Highlights: The high’s and low’s of working side-by-side with Steve Jobs for twelve years. Discover the power of defeating complexity with simplicity. Watch the 1998 TV ads for the iMac with Jeff Goldblum. Why is simplicity so difficult to get right? Hear the story about the creation of the first Apple Store and naming the Genius Bar. Watch Steve Job’s commencement speech at Stanford “You cannot connect the dots going forward”.