A lot of people are unhappy with what they do to earn for a living. Speaker, author, and entrepreneur Adam Markel says he money and success aren’t enough and don’t provide fulfillment, and success without fulfillment feels like failure. Adam’s latest book is the bestselling PIVOT: The Art and Science of ReinventingYour Career and Life. He also hosts The Conscious PIVOT podcast, where he shares his insights on pivoting in today’s fast paced market and interviews experts, innovators and influencers to share their stories and wisdom in the areas of business and life. For Adam, to pivot means to evolve. It means growth and the small changes we make that creates some larger change over time, even transformation, because in the end, life isn’t happening to you, but you are actually creating life as you go.
—
Watch the episode here:
Listen to the podcast here:
Pivot: Reinventing Your Life with Adam Markel
I have a guest with me and I’m truly excited about this. I’ve been knowing him for quite some time. I am in love with him. I’m excited about the work that he’s doing in the world. I’m excited that he has taken his time to be here with us and share his knowledge, share the things that he’s learned and his work that he’s doing in the world. Adam Markel is here. He is a speaker, author and entrepreneur. He loves inspiring, empowering and guiding people to achieve massive success, personal growth and this guy truly has a heart for people and truly has a heart for allowing people to become who they want to become in the world. He’s here with us and we’re going to get into some of the work that he’s doing. He’s written a book. We’re going to talk about that. It’s the bestselling book called Pivot and I don’t want to steal the thunder from him. I want him to share with you what that book is all about.
—
Get ready to learn and to hear from someone who’s making waves in the world, who’s making it happen. He has a heart for people and heart to teach people how to become their best selves. I’m in gratitude for you for being here and I know that there are people in the audience that wants success in their lives and I’m excited about your book that you’ve written because it can help people accomplish that success and for you to be here and share with us is a pleasure. It’s an honor.
Let’s get into your book that you’ve written. I love the title of your book. When I met you, I found out you had this book called Pivot. I’m thinking what a wonderful title because I want success in my life. I wasn’t thinking about it’s actually a pivot and that title brings things into perspective about you want a certain place in your life and you want to move to another place, you want to experience something else, you want to have something else. What do we have to do? We have to pivot and the consciousness of that title of pivoting, that’s something that resonates with me. I want to talk to you about consciously pivoting because I know that’s what you’re about. That’s something that you thrive. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
PIVOT: The Art and Science of Reinventing Your Career and Life
Rodney, the title itself is an interesting story because the book that I wrote was Pivot: The Art and Science of Reinventing Your Career and Life. I began writing that book when my life was not so much in shambles, but I was in trouble. I had my midlife crisis is what you’d call it, but I avoided it becoming a crisis. I ended up getting a midlife calling. It started out with the feeling very little energy for the things I was doing at work. That’s where it began. I looked back and tracked back to where it began. I wasn’t enthusiastic about starting the day. I wasn’t enthusiastic about getting up and going to work. I wasn’t enthusiastic about working with people about anything except maybe getting paid. That was the only thing I put a smile on my face in connection with my work.
That wasn’t enough at a certain point. We laugh about it because we all know we’ve got to get paid. That’s the purpose on some level of working but it’s not enough. It’s not a big enough purpose because it was making money and I made a lot of money. I was a lawyer for eighteen years. Sometimes I say to people, “I’m a recovering lawyer.” I’ve gotten to speak all over the world and sometimes thousands of people at the time hundreds or dozens of people and I always have somebody come up to me or several people even come up and say, “I’m a lawyer. I want to see myself doing something else. How do I get on that road to recovery?” That tongue in cheek comment about it.
Underneath that, that comment is also a reality that there are a lot of my brothers and sisters in that profession because I’m still a lawyer, I just don’t practice anymore, who are unhappy with what they do for living. They’re earning a living. What I’ve come to realize is that I prefer to earn a loving. I would prefer to earn something more than the living. Money wasn’t enough. It didn’t provide me with fulfillment. Even though I had all the things that people would say would define success, and by that I mean I had a successful career. I had plenty of money. I had lots of clients and at the same time also I have all the possessions of the accouterments of success, financial success, but I didn’t have any enthusiasm for what I did.
I had success but I didn’t have fulfillment. Success without fulfillment feels like failure. I felt like a failure even though by other people’s definitions, maybe I was a success. I also at the same time had a lot to be grateful for. I married a woman after college who is still my wife to this day who I love and you know this woman. Randi is a special lady. Being married to somebody that I adore and that I felt was there as a genuine support for me to be exploring this midlife situation and also have four kids that were healthy and thank God our kids didn’t have any health issues. They were doing well. I had a lot to be grateful for. At the same time, I wasn’t able to put my feet on the floor in the morning and settle for the status quo anymore.
Long story short was I changed some things. I didn’t make big giant changes. I made small little changes like what books I was reading, people I was talking to, people I wanted to be around. I started to follow some things that I was interested in and I got jazzed up about being a teacher, believe it or not. I was a teacher before I went to law school. I spent two years as a middle school teacher. I knew one thing for certain, I did not want to go back to being that teacher. I’ll leave it to other people and other parents to take care of their kids.
Thank God in this moment that there are teachers who will spend six hours a day with my kids and with your kids and with other people’s kids. It wasn’t going to be me anymore. I wanted to teach nonetheless. I wanted to teach other people who were interested in making changes in their life the way I was making changes and those were the people who were open-minded and open-hearted. That was the group of people I wanted to hang around. I started to do that and I was doing it on a regular basis. I was running a group mentoring program. I was involved in masterminds. I was attending seminars.
All of a sudden, I was asked to speak. I was asked to get up on a stage, put on a microphone, and speak to a group of people. Then that grew into of a bigger group in a bigger group, then about eighteen months later I’m standing on a stage in front of 5,000 people in Asia, people most of whom didn’t speak English and here I am sharing things that are on my heart. Things that were truly important to me, not things I was doing to earn a buck. I’ll tell you, I’ve got addicted to that. I think we’re all addicts anyway to a variety of things not necessarily drugs or alcohol or anything.
We’re addicted to things and often I see that for myself. I’m addicted to things that make me smile. I’m addicted to things that make my heart feel good. I’m addicted to things that help me sleep well at night. I got addicted to that way of doing things and being around those people of sharing that information. I ended up writing a book about it, Pivot. That’s the book and ended up coming out of it. I started to write that book for our kids so that our kids would know what their dad had been going through, that someday they were going to hit that crossroads or that brick wall because that’s where I was headed. I didn’t want them to be without the tools.
They didn’t have to be the tools that are certainly not good tools, but they helped me and then I started to write that book. Maybe I was about a year into the manuscript writing and all that, it’s a torturous process. It can be a difficult process to write a book. One day, I’m doing some writing and our oldest daughter, Chelsea, walks in and she started to talk to me about this book as we were exploring a title and actually it was title-less at that moment. She said to me, “Dad, this book is not for us.” Because I was thinking it’s going to be a guidebook for the kids, a little book out a privately published thing, whatever self-published. She says, “No dad, this is a book for all the people out there like you. This is great that we’re going to have this book, but it’s about a lot of other people.” Then we started to brainstorm about the titles and whatnot and it started out as, Too Old to Hire, Too Young to Retire.
One day I woke up in the middle of the night, got up and this title, Pivot, hit me in the head and landed in my mind. In basketball, for us to remain in in the offense mode, we can’t allow the defense to collapse around us. We can play on defense only and to be able to pivot is actually a move. It’s an assertive move to be able to see the court, to be able to see 360 degrees on the court even because you can pivot on one foot and turn all the way around and see. You could pass the ball, you could shoot the ball, you can do a bunch of things because you can see more clearly what’s the environment around you. That became the genesis for the book. That was a long answer to your question, hopefully I’ve answered your question.
Yes, you did. There are a lot of things in there that I want to go back and touch on because I know we’re going to get into the conscious pivot a little bit later, and what that all means. It sounds like, and correct me if I’m wrong, you wanted a change. You were conscious that you wanted to change but you fell in love with the process here. It sounds like that was self-development. There were some things that you started to do that increased your quality of life, increased or learning.
That to me is important because I think it shouldn’t take something to happen in our lives for us to get to that place where we want to seek more, want to have more, we have to get dissatisfied with where we are because I believe lifelong learning. I believe that because we have such beautiful minds and we have the ability to learn and apply what we learn to be better and create, that’s actually something that we should pursue consciously in my opinion. What are your thoughts about that?
Pivot: Everything is a process of either growing or dying.
First of all, the things we do habitually, that’s the nature of how we’re built as beings. We do things in a habitual way and there’s nothing wrong with that. We breathe habitually. We walk, we talk so much of what we do, we do unconsciously. In other words, by habit. To me as part of what will help us to be more of what we truly can be. Tap into that 95% in the reservoir that’s in the reservoir. They talk about scientists. They talk about us tapping into areas that we have not yet been able to explore. All of that is about consciousness.
Consciousness is a word for evolution for me. It’s a word for how it is that we awaken as human beings, as a species, as a global community, as a universe, the universe waking up. Everything is in a process of waking. Everything is a process of growing, it’s either growing or it’s dying. Being conscious about the things we do, the choices we make, the thought we entertain, the thoughts, we dwell upon, the work that we do in the world. All of those things are either conscious or unconscious in my view, how we pivot. Pivoting is this term that means evolution, it means innovation, it means growth, it means small changes that we make that creates some larger change over time, even transformation. It’s all about consciousness.
I completely agree with that. What I’ve experienced in life is a lot of times it takes something in life to happen in order for you to wake up. You know my story about being paralyzed and suffering an accident that seemed to destroy my life. It seemed to make me feel like there was no point in continuing on, but there was an awakening that happened. Something happened during that process that caused me to want more, caused me to seek more, caused me to become conscious of what I had inside of a new person, a new opportunity in life. It was towards expressing myself more and it wasn’t about the material things and the money. All of that is a benefit or a side effect of being successful.
It was more so figuring out what I could accomplish, figuring out how far I could go and figuring out in experiencing creativity in myself, creativity in my life. Not drifting along and settling for whatever came about, but actually creating a life that I loved, creating a life that I was happy about, creating a like that I can say that I created and I was satisfied with that. It requires some level of personal development. It required some discipline. It required me actually going out and doing some things in order to accomplish what I wanted to create and accomplish, but it was from that moment of being in that place where I realized there was more for me that I could accomplish.
Making that conscious decision to go after it, to go get it, to go in and do it and be that person, it required a lot. What would you say to someone who may be going through that type of situation in their life right now and they want to be successful? They want to accomplish more, they want to have more. What would you say to that person? What does it take to be successful?
I want to unpack that a little bit. That’s a big question. First of all, it takes consciousness. I love the way where the conversation is going because there’s a lot of tried and true advice out there on success. It’s not that I don’t buy it because it’s tried and true for a reason. You’ve got to focus, you’ve got to be tenacious. I think there are things that people don’t talk about that contribute to the feeling that you are on purpose, the feeling that you were living your true identity, the feeling that you’re experiencing life as a conscious creator of it.
[Tweet “You don’t always have to do it alone. There are people who will support you.”]
Life isn’t happening to you but you are actually creating life as you go. Those are the things that feel like success for me. You can 10x your business and 10x your sales and 10x your house, you can 10x your stress, you can 10x a lot of things. I’m all in favor of abundance so I’m not arguing against that. Where I’m at in my now I want to work with people and I do get to work with people who want to have a greater influence in their own lives and in other people’s lives. That means not looking at things through the prism that is more common.
There are two types of pivots that are happening almost all the time. One is a pivot that’s happening without us consciously being aware of it. The other kind of a pivot is a pivot where we are consciously creating the road ahead of us. One is by design and one is by default. The book I wrote, Pivot: The Art and Science of Reinventing Your Career and Life, is very much a design build book. For the people who like to be architects of things, it’s an architectural process. I use the word process. That’s what the book is about. It’s divided up into three sections. It’s about creating clarity, which is all about identifying the reasons you’re not clear at the moment in how it is you get clear? You clear the windshield of the car that you’re driving down the road of life.
That has a lot to do with our belief systems. The second part of the book is about momentum. How is it that we actually create something and get it into momentum so that we can see some results from it? That’s very much about behaviors. We talk about or have heard in the personal development space that we sometimes have limiting beliefs. We have limiting beliefs for sure, but we also have limiting behaviors. Getting into moment of starting something, baby stepping your way into success to use that word is a process and it’s not an overnight process.
Patience is required in that process. I know it’s the same for you as it is for me, you want to create something bigger and better. I’ll tell you, it was eighteen months from the moment when I decided I want to do this particular type of teaching that is from a stage that’s in front of people who are wanting to learn about business or as we do quite a bit now people who want to learn more about how to become speakers. They want to do a TED Talk. They want to stand on a stage. They want to get paid to be on a stage. They want to train other people to be able to facilitate process and exercise and do that in a corporate arena or in a personal development arena. All these things that people want to take a certain amount of time, certain amount of patients. I know I had to deal with myself.
At eighteen months, I had to deal with myself and I had some low moments. I had a moment where the owner of the company who was primarily what the path I had taken or chosen to take was in working for a particular company that was doing these workshops all over the United States and Canada. At a certain point, the owner of this company said to me, “I don’t know if you’re cut out for this.” I’m telling you from personal experience that wherever you are, meaning where you are, where I am, the audience, wherever you are, you’ve got to be able to be patient with yourself.
You’ve got to be able to know that there’s a process that will support you. You don’t have to do it alone, there are people who will support you. There are coaches, there are mentors, there are people out there who will support you in creating what it is that you want in life. That was a big awakening for me as well, because I think I’m like everybody else in this regard. We’re trained from the time we’re very young that it’s important to stand on your own two feet. It’s important to do things for yourself.
Pivot: We can be the conscious creators of our own life experience.
You don’t want to lean on other people and that self-reliance is both a blessing and a curse. You and I were talking about this, that everything is fine until it’s a problem. Everything is okay until it’s not okay. It’s okay to be to learn how to stand on your own two feet. It’s okay to learn how to take your take care of yourself. It’s fine to do that until it’s not fine, until it becomes a problem in other words. Where it becomes a problem is when it excludes or it makes you blind to the fact that the world, that the universe that other people, your brothers and sisters, everywhere around you are here, that they can support you like you can support them.
Clarity, momentum, and then when we’re done with that process, you can plan something. People move into the planning stage too quickly, they move right into that. Go find the shiny chase after that shiny object because they want to feel safe and secure. A plan will make you feel safe and secure until you realize the plan’s not working, until you realize that somehow the plan isn’t a plan for your life at somebody else’s plan for your life. We’ve all been there, we all know what that feels like. We can be the conscious creators of our own life experience and that’s what pivoting means to me.
I too love where the conversation is going out on. You hit something home there when you talk about the process, when you talk about getting clear, gaining momentum, starting with the baby steps and then start planning. We don’t do that. A lot of times we want what we want and we want to go hard, let’s go hard, beast mode, but we don’t take that step back and get clear about what it is that we want and what it’s going to take to get there. I believe that when you’re trying to go from point A to point B, a lot of people look at point B is the most important step in the process, the destination. That’s what they want they’re trying to get there. I believe the juice and all the goodness is in between steps A and B because that’s where all of the magic happens. That’s where the actual pivot happens. When you get to your destination and you get to point b, you’re totally different person. You have reinvented yourself, if you will.
How does a person stay in that process though? A lot of times people, they start, they experience failure, and then they want to quit. I would imagine going through this process trying to create your life, it requires a certain level of resilience. You have to hang in there, things don’t always go your way, and as you know there’s an incubation period, a process. While you’re in there, sometimes people struggle with that process how do we remain resilient? How have you remained resilient in your process of life?
Resilience is everything. It’s the whole enchilada. There’s no question about it. I want to track back for a second about that destination that you’re mentioning. Destination is a consciousness, “I want to get to a certain place. I’m focused on that place.” That’s destination consciousness. Journey consciousness is different. Journey consciousness is that old James Taylor song that I remember singing to the girls when they were younger, our older girls, which is that the secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.
The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time. That’s journey consciousness. That’s understanding that this moment is important. I don’t give up this moment, I don’t sacrifice this moment because the moment to come is going to be better. I think a lot of people live that way. They live for the moment to come because they believe the moment to come is going to be better. Meaning when my mortgage is paid off, life will be better. When I have the money I want, my life is going to be great. Everything that people want, they say they want, they put the resolutions together for the end of the year. All that stuff gives up the present moment in some respects for a better moment to come. To me, the art and the science of it in the book that we’re incubating, I love the word incubator as you know, because we’re like little chicks. Either we’re nurturing ourselves to grow and we put ourselves in an environment. As Yogananda said, “Environment is stronger than will.”
[Tweet “Embrace the fact that change is a constant.”]
To be in the right environment, to be incubated in the right environment for your growth is what we’re talking about because that’s what contributes to creating resilience. I’ll just say we’re in the process of incubating a new book, a next step in the pivot process for people who have gone down that road already. It’s about three things. It’s about being able to embrace the fact that change is a constant. Embrace the fact that change is not going to go away and change doesn’t mean threat. It doesn’t mean what we feel it means often, that change means something unknown. I’m about to experience the unknown. I’m going to live in the unknown and the unknown could kill me.
As opposed to looking at it from through that lens, we look at change differently. We look at change as our best friend, like Rob Dawson, make friends with change. It’s so beautiful to embrace change and then to embody it, to literally embody what change is all about. An embodiment of change is the putting it into practice, not just lip service to it. You look at companies like Starbucks that have had some challenge recently in PR and systemic endemic challenge inside of the company’s operations. You look at Facebook, same thing, systemic challenge inside of the company, PR problem is a result of it all. These are companies that are faced with change, that there’s a disruption in the macro level. They’ve got to deal with it and not just deal with it but embody a change for it to enable them to be stronger than they were before.
They embrace it. Starbucks didn’t deny that there was racism in their company. They didn’t come out with a statement and say, “No, we’re not racist company. That’s a crock.” The CEO of the company comes out and says, “We’ve got this issue, unconscious racism, unconscious bias,” inside in the woodpile inside. He didn’t, “It will blow over, we’re bigger than this. We’ll withstand all the protest, we’ll pay these people off or make settlements.” No, they went about doing something to embody the fact that things were changing.
Even though the change was unknown, what would happen you can’t necessarily say for certain, that company embraced it and then they embodied by creating some new process for addressing, for speaking. Same thing with Facebook. They went ahead and changed their algorithms. You can say, “They had no choice. The market forced them, there are all these pressure,” say whatever you want. The point was they had a choice to make whether they would resist or embrace, whether they would create some lip service to the challenge or they would embody and do something different about it.
Both of those instances, the embrace that they embodied and then they executed as in they got about doing things differently. They actually started to change things around. I think there’s no question at this moment to be able to do all that, to embrace the change, to make change our best friend, to be able to incorporate new things into our way of being, to the things we do, not just the things we say and to be able to go forward so they have that new plan to execute on that new way of being in the world, that takes strength, that takes a certain strength that I will call resilience.
It is the ability to bounce back even stronger than you were before the disruption happened. Resilience is key. The thing fascinates me is how you look at in sports, because I know you’re an avid sports fan as well as an athlete. You know as well as I do about the recovery. If you’re in the gym and you’re lifting weights, the difference between somebody who can achieve a certain body and get a result from their body and somebody who can often has to do with how quickly their body recovers from the sets, from the stressors. How quickly can they recover is the difference.
Pivot: One thing that CEOs and successful business owners have in common is their ability to recover quickly from setbacks.
The Harvard Business Review actually researches the highest performing athletes in the world and compared them with business owners, executives. They found that there was one thing the ones who succeeded continually that created sustainable. One thing that those CEOs and successful business owners and operators have in common just like athletes was their ability to recover quickly from setbacks. Then they actually looked at why it is or how it is that they could recover so much more quickly than others. It was the rituals that they had created for recovery rituals for resilience. In other words, that’s the differentiator.
Let’s get into that, Adam. This is good. I love this because we’re talking about bouncing back, we’re talking about being resilient and you know as well that life sometimes can be harsh. It can hit you and you have a change in your life. You have a disruption in your life and here you and I are saying, “You’ve got to bounce back from the set back. You have to be resilient. You have to set some rituals in place.” Let’s get clear on what we mean by that because there’s somebody somewhere who just got beaten. Somebody somewhere lost a child. Somebody somewhere just was told that they’re not going to live much longer because of some disease. Somebody somewhere found out that they have a terminal illness or they’re not going to be able to walk again. They’ve got laid off.
I know these companies have problems and issues and these are multi-billion-dollar issues that some of these companies face. Let’s talk about the individual who has experienced something like this and they too want to live a life that they love. They want to wake up every morning and say they love their life. How can they incorporate some of the tools and the strategies that we’re talking about? Someone who’s faced or is facing that type of change. How do they embody and embrace that type of change?
First of all, there are two things I’ll promise. One is that I’ll share a resilience ritual. I’ll share this one ritual that has sustained me for almost ten years now. I’ve had plenty of time then practice with it and it has worked again and again. I’ll share that ritual and I have a gift for everybody as well that might also be a bit of a catalyst both to find out are you facing a change. Change is everywhere. Are you facing a change at the moment? Are the seas pretty calm? Is a storm on its way or you’re just coming out of a storm? There are people everywhere who had some pretty devastating changes happened, things that have happened in their life recently. I think it’s important that we be resourced, that people understand the level to which they are resourced in life.
Every one of us need support and that support is all around us. It’s a question of what are the resources that are available to you. For me, I don’t mind saying I’m not religious but I’m very spiritual. I know one of my main resource I go to is God. I pray and I meditate. I’m in gratitude a lot of the time. Not as much as I want to be. I’m a working progress there to be reminded again and again and again how important it is to be grateful because gratitude is a prayer. Gratitude is a meditation. Gratitude is going to source. For me, that’s a source of strength and it’s a source of guidance.
I remember being in Japan and I was doing an event with Tony Robbins. We were doing an Asian tour together. I spoke to a big group of people, probably 6,000 or 7,000 folks. When my talk was done, one of the promoters, they brought over an incredible man for me to meet this amazing man who is a billionaire Japanese business owner. Through translation what I found was that this gentleman has a practice, he has a ritual. We talk about rituals for resilience. How to apply them, how they’re applicable to everybody in daily life. Here’s a great example of that. This gentleman’s ritual was to say, and is to this day I believe, thank you a thousand times a day, which in Japanese is, “Arigato.” A thousand times a day, he says thank you. I grew up in New York. I was a lawyer for a lot of years. That cynical part of me could have said, “Of course he says thank you thousand times a day. He’s a billionaire.”
[Tweet “Gratitude is a source of strength and a source of guidance.”]
Then the question came up for me, “Is he saying thank you a thousand times a day because he’s a billionaire or is he a billionaire because he says thank you a thousand times a day?” We can scratch your chin on that one. To me it’s about gratitude and that’s where his success comes from. That’s where his fulfillment, that’s where his love of living and love of his life comes from that place of gratitude. I had a conversation. I was running a company, a very large personal development business training company, and I was the CEO of that company for five or six years at that point. I have a conversation with my business partners one day out of the blue. Where they say to me, “This what we’re doing here is not working. We have to make a change.”
That conversation in its end became us deciding how it would be that I would exit the company. That came out of the blue and yet for six months before that conversation, my wife and I and other my closest advisers and friends were saying, “This isn’t working. The model that we are dealing with and that whole host of things internally were not working in this company.” We knew the pivot was on its way. We knew it. Just like you everybody appreciate a stability I’m not necessarily looking for change or it wasn’t at the time looking to make changes where maybe changes don’t need to be made. What was I doing at that time, in all candor and honesty, I writing a bestselling book and international bestselling, highly regarded book on the topic of pivoting of how do you utilize change, how you innovate consciously and yet I was ignoring the change that was right in front of me.
I was ignoring the writing that was on the wall. That was clear as day. I was ignoring it until I couldn’t ignore it anymore because the universe said, “You’re not allowed to do that. You’re not allowed to be in congruent with the message that I’m allowing.” The universe is allowing me to cascade this message across so many countries, so many people that it wouldn’t be right for me to be a hypocrite in that instance. We’re all hypocrites on some level. I’m a hypocrite in ways. We all fail, we all are in some ways, but that was my core message. How it is you handle it and work with change and how it is that you don’t dig in and argue for and protect the status quo because it leads to mediocrity? I was doing the very same thing and then all of a sudden, my partner shows up and we go, “It’s time to make a change.”
Four months later, I am no longer the CEO of that company but I exit the company entirely. I have to create a brand-new business out of thin air. You talked about there are people who have lost a job, lost their business, lost a child, yes to all those things. I’m saying so everybody hears me clear that it’s no different for me than it is for anybody. The road of life is it’s this moment, this is the moment we can see and the next moment is unclear. It’s unknown. What is it that you do in those moments where your future is unknown as it’s supposed to be and you have the stark realization that that is true? That despite all your plans and all your things being nicely and neatly ordered in front of you so you think that you haven’t told this story at the moment. All of a sudden, you get knocked down, your legs get knocked out from under you and maybe those legs don’t work after that.
[Tweet “You’re pivoting your whole life.”]
You know better than me and better than a lot of people what that’s like. I can say from my experience, yes, you’re pivoting your whole life. To learn how to do that elegantly, to learn how to do that from a place of being guided. For me my transition from that job that I had made my identity into something new became a choice to either continue to try to guard myself, guard my life, guard my heart or to be unguarded and to surrender and to be guided. To move from the garden mentality to use your word, the guarded mentality to the guided mentality, that has been one of the most joyous experiences and one of the most unexpected experiences. I feel so blessed that that’s the next chapter that I get to share with people.
That resonates with me so much. I too believe it is what you do in that moment. One of the things I believe in is harvesting the good. No matter how bad it may seem and no matter how disruptive the change that comes is, it is harvesting the good. There’s no way to harvest the good better than to be in gratitude, to be in gratitude for the moment, to be in gratitude for what’s taking place and what’s yet to come. It’s been a pleasure to meet with you and share this time with you.
I want to thank you again for being here with us. A bestselling author of Pivot. It’s so nice that you’re here with this, Adam, and to share your wisdom, to share your work with us. I’m so happy. Ladies and gentlemen, Adam Markel, a bestselling author of Pivot: The Art and Science of Reinventing Your Career and Life. Adam, where can people find you if they wanted to buy your book, learn more about you attend one of your talks or classes?
They can go to AdamMarkel.com. I want to give your folks that gift as well, and how you deal with the pivot gets started in the pivot process is important. We created six questions that help people to establish where they’re at and help get kick start it into that designing their future. They can go to StartMyPivot.com and get this free kick start guide, these six questions. It’s a beautiful place to also find out more about our Facebook community. I don’t think there’s anything more important right now that folks start with a ritual for their own resilience.
The final thing I’ll share is my hope and my prayer for all of us is that we get to wake up because that’s a gift and it’s definitely not guaranteed. Gratitude is the key. We all get to wake up and that is step one. Two, that we’re grateful for that fact. Even if there’s challenge, even if waking up means dealing with stuff, dealing with whatever, there are a lot of things to deal with. To be grateful for that breath and that consciousness in that waking process, that’s step two. Step three, if they’re willing and if all of us are willing to do this either from the bed or when our feet hit the floor, as soon as we think about it, to say the words, “I love my life,” out loud. That’s the legacy I want to leave behind. Certainly, it’s been a great ritual for me. Thank you for having me on the show.
Thank you as well, Adam.
Important Links:
- Adam Markel
- Pivot: The Art and Science of Reinventing Your Career and Life
- AdamMarkel.com
- StartMyPivot.com
- Facebook community
About Adam Markel
Adam Markel is a speaker, author and entrepreneur, who inspires, empowers and guides people to achieve massive and lasting personal and professional growth. A recognized expert in the integration of business and personal development, Adam speaks and mentors around the globe in the areas of business, entrepreneurship, leadership, and transformation. His latest book is the best selling PIVOT: The Art and Science of Reinventing Your Career and Life . Adam also hosts The Conscious PIVOT podcast, where he shares his insights on pivoting in today’s fast paced market and interviews experts, innovators and influencers to share their stories and wisdom in the areas of business and life. Adam is CEO of More Love Media, a company dedicated to empowering individuals and businesses to re-imagine, refocus, and capitalize on change in order to thrive in a world where constant disruption is the “new normal”. He has diverse and extensive experience in business, leadership, law, mentoring, and facilitation, including being the CEO of North America ‘s largest human potential company . As a result, Adam knows what it takes to thrive as an entrepreneur, business owner, and corporate leader. For more on Adam, visit www.AdamMarkel.com .