Antarctica? Conference? Hell YEAH! I’m going. Absolutely. Hell YEAH!
Why Hell Yeah though? To answer that, let me take you back to a trip I made in April 2018 to Baja Mexico, where I had the privilege of meeting Chip Conley and be part of the beta of the Modern Elder Academy.
(Modern Elder academy is now fully open for applications, I highly encourage you to consider this if it fits for you). For more on Modern Elder, visit the link above and search on Chip Conley on this site, I’ve written often about Chip and Modern Elder. For one article, though, Chip has captured and distilled what this is all about beautifully in an article written in mid July 2018 after the beta (150 people in about 15 weeks) was completed.
An absolutely critical element of being a Modern Elder is to consciously adopt a growth mindset. In “Do you have a Growth Mindset“, and in there is a quiz on whether we have a fixed or growth mindset.
Chip, master of concise distillation, would say something along the lines of :
Fixed Mindset = To Prove
Growth Mindset = To Improve
Lisa Taylor of Challenge Factory, who has been working in the space of the future of work for many years, told me that she feels that shifts in identity is the single most vital component for people of (roughly) 45-65 looking at rethinking the conventional pattern of three stages of life to shift to what Chip calls a “Modern Elder”.
The more we have a fixed mindset, the more difficult it will be for us to shift, as we will keep proving (to ourselves and others) that existing paradigms and conventional wisdom limit us.
For me, then, I have adopted several key tools to maximise the growth side of my mindset, and one of them is “Hell YEAH!”
My version of this is that, unless I have a good reason why not, if I listen to my intuition and an experience feels right (and more the better if it feels more than a little challenging, taking me out of my comfort zone!), I will say Hell YEAH !
So, when my past client, the amazing Heather Wilde, posted on Twitter about a conference in the Antarctic, I was intrigued. When I looked at the conference site and expressed interest and it asked “attendee or speaker?”, I went for the “Hell YEAH!” approach, and said “attendee AND speaker”, as by then I will have published my first book on #OpenLeadership. Hell YEAH!
I hope I’ve inspired you to do one or more of :
- Take the Growth Mindset quiz
- Apply for the Modern Elder Academy
- Go to Antarctica
If you are saying “no I can’t” to any of those, what would you say if you were a “Hell YEAH!” person ?