CHAPTER SEVEN

Where Are You Now?

AS WE SAW in the last chapter, some obstacles to finding your Element may be more imagined than real. Of course, everyone’s situation is different, and some obstacles may be all too real. In this chapter we look at the external constraints and opportunities that you may be facing. I suggest some ways of taking stock of where you are now, of the resources you have already and of those you may need. It’s important to recognize first that we all have different starting points. Whatever yours is may influence the initial direction you take, but it doesn’t in itself determine your destination. We’ll come to your own situation in a moment. Before we do, let me illustrate the point with some dogleg turns in my own story.

The Leaving of Liverpool

When I was in elementary school in the 1950s, the thought wouldn’t have occurred to anyone, least of all me, that I would eventually live in California doing what I do now. As a teenager, I used to go to a folk music club in Liverpool and join in throaty choruses of sea shanties, the general drift of which was that I was done with roving, whiskey and wild, wild women. I’d hardly roved at all at that point and hadn’t actually met a wild woman, so far as I knew. That didn’t stop me vowing to give them all up. One of the staples of the repertoire was a song called “The Leaving of Liverpool,” which began like this.

Farewell to Princes landing stage,

River Mersey fare thee well.

I am bound for California,

A place I know right well.

So fare thee well, my own true love,

When I return united we will be.

It’s not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me

But my darling when I think of thee.

At the time, I didn’t know California right well, and I had no idea I was bound for it. Nothing seemed less likely, but here I am. Like all journeys, mine began with the first few steps and evolved through various different phases. Sometimes one grew naturally from another. Sometimes there were conflicting crossroads and a decision to go one way or the other would have led me to a completely different life.

In the summer of 1972, I sat at such a crossroads. Actually, I was sitting in a bar in a public house in Wakefield, England. I was having a pint of beer and contemplating my future. I was twenty-two, unreasonably attractive and had just graduated from college. I had a degree in English, Drama, and Education and a teaching qualification. I had no responsibilities and no attachments. I had been in an intense two-year relationship with a girl in college, but that was over. (Unbelievably, she broke up with me. I know it’s hard to imagine, but there it is.) I was under no pressure from my parents to move in any particular direction. As long as I was happy in what I did, they were, too. So what was it to be?

I was musing on two quite different options: to take a teaching job in Sweden or to study for a higher degree in London. I enjoyed teaching and was good at it. I wanted to travel and had applied for a job teaching English to young adults in Sweden. I was attracted by the idea of spending time in Stockholm, by the salary (since I’d never had one), and by the awful plight of so many young Swedish women being unable to speak my mother tongue.

I had also applied for a studentship to study for a PhD at the University of London Institute of Education. I had no long-term aim in studying for a doctorate. The idea just appealed to me. It sounded challenging, like climbing Annapurna. Plus, if you succeeded, you got to call yourself Dr. and I liked the sound of that. The college I went to, Bretton Hall in Yorkshire, had an inspirational principal, Dr. Alyn Davis. He was the first doctor I’d encountered who couldn’t write prescriptions. I was impressed. He encouraged me to go down this route and advised me how and where to apply.

As I sat in the pub, I was waiting to hear back from Stockholm and from London. I wasn’t sure which option I preferred until the day I had to choose. I received a firm offer from Sweden and they needed a reply within the week. As the week wore on, I still hadn’t heard about the studentship. I realized then what I really wanted to do and let the Swedish option go. It was several weeks before I was called for an interview in London and some months before I was offered the studentship I wanted. I moved to London and set off down the path that has led me, among many other things, to write this book and to my current life in California, which I now know right well.

Getting Out More

When I was twenty-two, I was unencumbered and free to make decisions just for myself. That may be your situation now, in which case you should celebrate it and take full advantage of it. Equally, you may be committed in every direction and feel that your options are much more limited. Even so, dramatic changes of direction are always possible. Many people move countries to change their prospects. I live in the United States now and this land is filled with people from other countries who came here purposefully, often up against terrible hardships, to change their circumstances and to enhance their lives. Not everyone fulfilled their dreams: but they were all prepared to take the chance.

It was our intention with The Element to move people. As it turns out, we managed to do that—sometimes even physically. In 2008, Lisa and Peter Labon and their four children were living in San Francisco—a place Lisa calls “our favorite city in the world”—when they saw my first TED talk and picked up a copy of The Element. They’d been slowly realizing that they needed to do something very different with their lives, and the book provided further impetus. “It was life-saving nectar from a deeply hidden well,” Lisa told me. “Not only did we not want schools to kill our children’s creativity, we recognized our own abandoned dreams and withered passions in the dustbin of modern achievement.

“Peter was working long, difficult hours. After fifteen years in money management, he was seriously burning out. I was wrangling four precious children, attempting to manage their development, our household, and family social obligations like a three-ring circus. We were exhausted and isolated in a city full of people juggling the same crazy schedules.

“One of the big moments for me was going to a lecture at the Sacred Heart school. The speaker asked the audience what they wanted for their children. People said things like, ‘We want our children to be happy,’ ‘We want our children to be healthy,’ ‘We want them to have good relationships.’ Then she told us that children say that their parents want them to have a big house, an expensive car, and the right high-paying job. There’s a real disconnect between what we’re imparting, wishing, and modeling, and the message that’s really being sent. We were at a point where we wanted integrity in every part of our life, and we realized that we needed to change everything. We were so enamored with the school our kids were at, but we started to see that it was healthy for children to be challenged in different ways and to stretch outside of the comfortable little bubble we created. It was a liberating moment for us as a family.”

What followed was the kind of thing so many people talk about doing, but rarely have the fortitude to do—the Labons dropped everything and reignited their lives. “Our entire family had a simultaneous awakening,” Lisa said. “I asked the children if they were happy in their triple-A-rated educational institution and they shrugged. I asked if they would like to travel, and their faces lit up like bonfires. So, full of inspiration, we left our home of fifteen years for the great unknown. We sold our house just as the markets were collapsing, packed up everything, and hit the road.”

Lisa loved surfing, so the family went to Sayulita, Mexico, because friends told them the surfing was great. Peter wanted to live in a skiing town, so they rented a house in Aspen for the ski season. Other places followed while Lisa home-schooled the kids. “We had to home-school because we weren’t going to be anyplace long enough to get into a school. That was a little scary, but also exciting. My oldest daughter, who was in fourth grade at the time, introduced me to e-schooling. It was a whole new world. I would do it again in a heartbeat, but it was a lot of work.

“Initially we thought we would travel for a few years. There were so many places to visit, things to see and do, experiences to share. The joy of travel quickly waned as the pressure of keeping everyone safe and healthy in new places, not to mention all the packing and unpacking, grew into its own stressor. We traveled for one year, but during that time I asked Peter to think about where ‘home’ was eventually going to be.”

As they journeyed across North America, they continued to consider that question. Lisa identified a handful of qualities required of any future home: a small, healthy community, excellent educational options and an abundance of the nature, sun and outdoor activities the entire family loved. They drew from their experience, they polled friends, they pored over websites like city-data.com, and they did regular gut checks. What they ultimately decided was that their ideal living environment was about eight hundred miles northeast of San Francisco in Park City, Utah.

“One thing that stood out to me was the commitment and devotion of the people who choose to live in mountain towns. They are very clear about what they value in their lives and often make sacrifices to live there. Not simply the colder climate, but also financially. Many artists, intellectuals, and cultural creatives scrape out a living in tourist industries in order to share the mountain trails and fresh air with other locals. The passion for life is palpable in these consciously created communities.”

The Labons love their new home, and they’ve made friends with “extraordinary people.” When they were hunkered down in San Francisco, they couldn’t have imagined that the place where they were meant to live was in the mountains, away from the ocean and away from the world of finance. By taking a good look at where they were and where they wanted to be (both emotionally and physically), they made the most important move of their lives.

Figuring Out Where You Are

The Labons discovered that you’re never as “dug in” as you think you might be. Peter had a responsible position. Lisa had deeply established roots in the Bay Area. The kids had school, friends and lifestyles to which they’d grown accustomed in a city that has a tremendous amount to offer. When they realized that they weren’t living the lives they were meant to be living, they could have easily settled for the belief—as so many people do—that their commitments were too great and that their paths were already laid out for them. Instead, they chose to do something exponentially more dramatic, exponentially more challenging and exponentially more fulfilling.

They had every excuse to stay in San Francisco; life was, in many ways, very good for them there. But their Element was somewhere else.

They also learned that starting points can be arbitrary. That they started in San Francisco was nothing more than circumstance. They could have launched their journey from New York, Mali, Liverpool or anywhere else. Similarly, they could have started when the kids were very young, when one of them had gone off to college or when a few of them had yet to be born. What is instructive about their story is not where or when it happened, but that a realization inspired them to head off on their quest. This speaks to all people trying to find their Element: while it’s important to look at the obstacles in front of you and while it is essential to take stock of your situation, you can move toward the life you feel you should be living from virtually anywhere. An essential first step here is to take stock of where you are right now.

What’s Your Situation?

One commonly used way of taking stock of your current situation is through a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The SWOT framework was developed in the sixties by Albert Humphrey, an American business consultant. Although it was originally designed for business, it’s widely used by coaches and mentors to help individuals assess their own circumstances and to develop their own plans for personal or professional development. A SWOT analysis helps you assess the internal and external factors that may be helping or hindering you in finding your Element.

Exercise Twelve: Where Are You Now?

To do your own analysis, draw a large square on a piece of paper and divide it into four equal boxes. Name the top left box “strengths,” the top right box “weaknesses,” the bottom left “opportunities” and the bottom right “threats.” Broadly speaking, the two top boxes—strengths and weaknesses—are about your own personal qualities and characteristics; they deal with internal factors. The bottom two are about your practical circumstances; they deal with external factors. These aren’t exclusive categories. You may well see strengths in your circumstances, for example, and threats in your attitudes. But it’s useful to keep this general emphasis in mind as you work through this exercise.

Look first at the two upper boxes. Drawing on all the exercises you’ve done so far, list in these boxes your relative strengths and weaknesses as you see them. Start with your aptitudes. Then in a different color list the strengths and weaknesses in your passions. In a third color, add your strengths and weaknesses in terms of your attitudes. Now look at the bottom two boxes and make a list of the opportunities and of the threats and difficulties you face in your current circumstances. Below are some questions that may prompt you as you complete the boxes.

Consider your basic situation:

The next step moves beyond the basics into more nuanced questions:

Next, consider the biggest obstacles in your way:

Give these questions some serious thought. Sometimes our obstacles are truly substantial—sick family members depending on your time and financial assistance, the need to stay in a particular location because loved ones wouldn’t be able to make the move with you—but often making a significant change has fewer consequences than you might think. Would your partner leave you if you gave up your current job to do something completely different, perhaps for less money? If so, that’s a considerable consequence.

Examining the true consequences of overcoming your obstacles is a tremendously important exercise. What would really happen if you decided to follow your dreams? The answer is often less daunting that it first seems.

Now think about your available resources:

The next step is to consider each of the items in your list in more detail and to ask yourself how you can develop and make the best of your strengths:

One Door Closes and Another Opens

Taking stock of where you are is essential to getting a new perspective on where you want to be. That was the experience of Mariellen Ward. After a series of losses and traumas in her life, she found a new direction only after an extensive process of soul-searching. “I spent a huge part of my adult life, instead of working at a job and building a savings account, deciding what I was put on this Earth to do,” she told me. “I made that my mission in my life. I think it’s important to throw yourself into this process fully. Other than my health, I’ve put everything else aside to go into it. Moneymaking was a sideline for me. I had a degree in journalism and I’ve worked in the communications field. I always toyed with being a writer. When I look back now, I realize I always wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t have the confidence. So I went into jobs that skirted on the edge of what I wanted to do.”

Mariellen had two considerable obstacles to overcome. One was that she’d been shuttled through the educational system far too quickly. Because she was academically bright, she skipped two full grades. While she was up to this challenge intellectually, she was not up to it emotionally, as she was surrounded by people who were at different levels of maturity than she was. “My whole education was just botched,” she said. “It’s taken my whole adult life to recover from my education.”

The other huge issue was that, as an adult, she faced a string of traumatic losses that threw her entire life out of whack. “My father went bankrupt and we lost our family cottage. A few months later, my mom died suddenly, and I discovered her body. It was a horrible shock. Not long after that, my fiancé left me. Then my dad died of cancer. I’d be starting to get up off the floor and then I’d be flattened again.”

When she was finally able to move forward enough to think about healing, she sought comfort in yoga. “I would go to class and all of my feelings of grief would overcome me and my teacher would allow me to experience it. She offered three classes a week, and I went to each, no matter what. I started breathing, and I started moving. It took a couple of years, but I started coming out of my depression. I knew organically that it was time to go after my dreams.”

Finally, after decades of doing things other than what she felt she was meant to be doing, Mariellen started reaching out for opportunities. And when she focused on what she should do, she came away with an overwhelming compulsion to go to India. “It was the strongest inner voice I ever heard in my life. When you hear a voice that strong, you have to follow it. You almost have no choice because your whole being aligns to that. It took a year of planning, saving, putting my things in storage, giving up my apartment.”

At the end of that year, Mariellen headed east, unsure of what would be waiting for her. She’d heard plenty of stories about how difficult it was to travel in India, and while the voice inside of her had been emphatic, it hadn’t been particularly clear. She knew she had to go to India, but she wasn’t sure what was waiting for her there. She’d even begun to wonder if she were going there to die.

“I had this idea that the whole thing would be a long, protracted dark night of the soul. What happened, though, was the exact opposite. I had this absolutely amazing time. I felt that the entire trip I was blessed and protected, and I had one wonderful experience after another. I was throwing myself off a cliff to see if the net would appear. The net not only appeared, but it turned into a magic carpet.”

While in India, Mariellen rediscovered her passion for writing. As it turned out, though she was Canadian and of British descent, what she was really meant to do was write about this land.

“All the dots started to connect. I remembered that, from childhood, I was fascinated with the mysterious East. All these dreams of childhood had been obscured, but they hadn’t disappeared. For the first time in my life, I just started to write. I realized that this was what I loved to do and what I wanted to do, and I’ve gotten incredible feedback from people confirming that I’m good at it. When I write about India, I’m connecting to something that’s so much bigger than me. It’s been worth devoting my entire adult life to discovering this.”

Mariellen now writes constantly. “I can’t even imagine what writer’s block is like.” She’s created the blog BreatheDreamGo, subtitled “tales of travel and transformation,” and the blog is generating both traffic and acclaim, recently receiving nominations for three Canadian Weblog Awards. The next frontier for Mariellen is extending her writing to book form. She’s still trying to find a way to make a steady living from her work, but she has no doubts about what she should be doing and no regrets about taking the leap necessary to pursue her opportunities.

To get a better sense of her outward journey, Mariellen had to travel inward first. Her time practicing yoga helped her to assimilate the traumas and grief of the previous years and to emerge from the depression that was shrouding her hopes for the future. Those experiences could have immobilized her. Instead they eventually gave her a greater sense of resilience.

As Joseph Campbell says, if you move in the direction of your passions, opportunities tend to appear that you couldn’t have imagined and that weren’t otherwise there. Let me add a caveat. Some people do need the special support that can come through personal counseling and therapy. Shortly after The Element was published, I was in Seattle to give a public talk and book signing. There were several hundred people in the audience and during the question-and-answer session a young man stood up and asked nervously how he could find his Element. He was clearly agitated and I asked him to tell us a little about his situation. He said that he’d just been discharged from the U.S. military and was angry that there had been no real support or mentoring to help people like him find his true calling back in civilian life. He felt that he and his fellow soldiers had been “pretty much hung out to dry.” Recognizing that he really needed to talk, I suggested that we meet for a few minutes at the end of the session. We did and he told me he’d been in Iraq and that he had been trained as an interrogator.

He was twenty-two years old. He’d joined the Army at eighteen when his mother died and he’d been left on his own. He had been devastated to lose his mother and turned to the military for a sense of security. I could only imagine the experiences he had had as an interrogator; what he had seen and been required to do. He was clearly in a very tense, emotional state and said he had been deeply affected by the arguments I put forward in The Element and felt that I had offered him a positive way ahead. I hope that proved to be true for him. I also felt that he needed sustained support to deal with experiences that were so traumatic. The exercises and tools in this book can complement such programs, but they are not meant to be a substitute for them. It’s for you to understand and decide what you most need in your own unique situation.

Where Do You Want to Go?

It’s likely that the quest for your Element won’t take you to India. It’s entirely possible that it won’t even take you out of your house. For my collaborator, Lou Aronica, for instance, his quest involved no longer spending three hours a day commuting to work and instead walking into his home office where he could pursue his career as a writer. Regardless of the distance, though, once you understand where you are and where you want to go, it’s essential that you figure out a way to get there.

Some of this comes down to mindset. What do you need to do to prepare yourself for this emotionally? Many people spend a great deal of time imagining themselves following a particular pursuit without ever imagining how that pursuit will make them feel on a day-to-day basis. For example, if your dream has always been to teach, are you prepared for the plethora of mood changes any single day will bring—from the joy of breaking through with one student to the frustration of being unable to get across to another to the frenzy of an overactive classroom? If your new project requires you to operate in a completely different environment, have you prepared yourself for such a dramatic change? Having a hundred colleagues obviously involves a very different dynamic from working by yourself. Similarly, if you’re accustomed to spending a great deal of time in your car, are you ready for an endeavor that involves staying in one place for six or seven hours at a time?

Don’t underestimate the need for this preparedness. I regularly talk to people who have started to do the thing they believe they should be doing, but are worried that they might have made a mistake because they hadn’t prepared themselves emotionally as they should have. Any new situation requires some time for adjustment, but you’ll be far better off if you understand beforehand how much of an adjustment you need to make.

Another key step along the way is to identify what kind of experience you need before you can truly pursue your passion. It’s often assumed, for example, that to be successful, you have to go to college. Well, you don’t. Very many people who have had highly successful and fulfilling lives did not go to college. Others did go and then dropped out before completing the program. I’m not recommending that you shouldn’t go to college or that you should drop out if you do. Plenty of people benefit from a college education and for some careers it is essential. On balance, college graduates also tend to earn more money over the course of their lives, but not always.

What I am saying is that you shouldn’t assume that going to college will guarantee your future or that not going will undermine it. I know many students who drifted from high school to college without any real understanding of why they were going or what they hoped to get from the experience. They and their parents and teachers simply took it for granted that this was the next required step. Many college students ramble through the experience and graduate with no clearer understanding of what they want to do with their lives than when they enrolled.

The facts, I think, are these. Some paths through life do not depend at all on having a conventional college education. Some people prefer to get into the world of work right away after high school. Second, many people get much more from college if they do something else before they go. I used to teach in a university in England, and I often found that the so-called mature students—those who were taking programs after other work experience—applied themselves with more energy to their studies than younger students who’d gone straight from school. This was because they knew why they were taking the program and were determined to get as much as possible from it. If you’re in high school now and you’re thinking of going to college but you’re not sure what you want to do there, you might consider taking time out of formal education for a year or two to broaden your experiences and give yourself time to breathe.

Ben Strickland is an astrophysics senior at the University of Oklahoma. He agrees:

Those who go directly into college from high school can lose time otherwise spent developing a plan and getting to know themselves better. . . . I am a strong advocate for breaks in education. That’s not to say it’s best for everyone, but it’s certainly not best for everyone to just plow through from kindergarten to a bachelor’s degree and beyond. . . .

Many people fear the idea of taking a year off between high school and college—it’s practically pounded into our heads that people who do so are not likely to ever attend a university. Those who don’t have a “college attending” mention after their names at senior graduation are often viewed as inadequate or lesser. Turning eighteen is supposed to signify the entrance into adulthood, but this isn’t the case for everyone. . . .

I wasn’t ready after high school. Every sign pointed to yes. I had great grades, great AP test scores, great SAT/ACT scores and I was eighteen years old—seems like a short list to judge a college entrant by, doesn’t it? I came, I tried to look busy while having close to no clue what I was doing and I managed to hang around for three years. It was entirely too long if you ask me. . . .

After taking around three years off and working with my hands in a very satisfying blue-collar job, I’m back. This time, I have a purpose and understand the concepts of hard work and responsibility to my fellow humans. There are many like me who, in their first attempt, floundered, but went out into the world, grew and returned to kick some real ass. . . .

One of the most genuine and compassionate people I’m lucky enough to know took a one-year break because he had the awareness and maturity to realize he wasn’t really working towards a purpose. “I was just walking down a path with no real drive or reason,” he told me. “It took my leaving college to recognize my desire to be a therapist. Knowing that goal, I have seen the path I need to follow to get there.” Now in the school of social work, he says he’s “realized his love for helping people.” . . .

Another friend took a year off between high school and college to take a tour of the south in a van with a bunch of “skateboarding hooligans.” After returning and working in a metal shop for several months and building a financial foundation, he purports, “Then I remembered: Oh yeah! I should go to college.” Now you can find him lurking around the physics and math quadrant, hair ablaze as he teases apart mathematical proofs and the inner workings of the universe. . .

The truth is this: there is much to be gained by spending time other ways than rigorously studying. College is hardly the only source of education in life. And while you’re truly lucky to have this opportunity, if you take a break and see the world, college will still be here when you get back—and who knows, you might just find a purpose.

My third point is that there are many more options in higher education than conventional academic programs. So-called vocational colleges—in design, performing arts, trades and industries, for example—have a huge amount to offer students of all ages. The culture of academicism has tended to demean work of this sort, even though our economies depend on them and many people find their true calling in them.

Sometimes the requirements of being in your element are very subtle. When Lou embarked on his writing career, he assumed he had all the prerequisites. After all, as a publisher, he’d been working with writers for two decades and he’d been writing constantly. However, his first couple of efforts at prose fell flat. It took him a bit of time to realize that this was because everything he wrote read like an interoffice memo. He’d become so steeped in that form of communication that it had infiltrated everything he put on the page. He needed to retrain himself to write like a writer rather than a corporate employee.

Another thing to consider is how you’re going to make this move. Are you going to dive in, or are you going to put a toe in the water? Can you start your journey while maintaining your old job, as Yasmin Helal did when she started Educate-Me, or does it require making a complete break, as the Labons did when they headed off on their travels? Much of this will depend on a variety of factors you’ll probably have considered by the time you get to this point: your sense of comfort with change, your financial safety net, the support of friends and family, and how desperate you are to be fully engaged on your journey.

Finally, it’s important for you to have a plan for dealing with the predictable challenges (as opposed to the challenges you can’t predict, which everyone faces). How are you going to address detractors? How are you going to navigate through financial difficulties? What will you do the first time your lack of experience throws up a wall in front of you?

As you can see, there are many moving parts here. They all confirm a point that’s made in every story in this book: there is no single route to finding your Element. Life is not linear. It is organic.

Here are some final questions to consider as you look around and take stock of where you are now and where you might like to move next: