The corporate world scares me. It scares me because so
many people’s dreams are tied up in the illusion of safety and security
of the so called “steady pay check.” If I do a good job, so
the story goes, the company will take care of me. I’ll save some
money, contribute to the company pension plan, and retire. And then, when
I’m old and no longer of any use to any one, I’ll finally
be able to live my dreams.
In my profession, such as it is, I hear that story a
lot. It’s like a reoccurring nightmare.
I’ve lived that same nightmare for the past 20
years, until one day, on the top of a tall mountain, in the middle of
a Malaysian jungle, I suddenly realised what those adverts had been trying
to tell me. Life is not a dress rehearsal. This is it. Once the light
goes out, the show is over. And if I don’t pursue my dreams now,
when will I?
The system will let you down, as I found out on a cool
autumn day. The day had started out like any other normal business day.
I was pleased to be on my way to work. It had only been a few short months
since I’d left the belly of manufacturing to go work for a well
known investment bank as a senior technology trainer. I turned up the
radio to an unacceptable level of loudness, put my foot down on the accelerator,
and heading for the open road. I hadn’t felt this good since my
days as a young infantry lieutenant fresh out of West Point.
We were scheduled to have a town hall meeting with the
CEO of the company. The stated agenda was meant to be the future of the
company. There had been some rumours of a possible restructuring, which
is a polite way of saying lay-offs, but we figured as the business innovation
team of training consultants we would be safe in the hands of progress.
We shuffled into the auditorium like lambs to the slaughter.
The CEO, dressed in his best suit and power tie walked onto the stage
with a measured gait, his stride brimming with confidence. What he said
left me in shock. The company, in order to protect shareholder profit,
needed to return to its core business and any department that didn’t
fit into those parameters had to go. And in my experience that meant if
you didn’t bring any money into the company, you were a prime contender
for being cut loose, let go, sent packing no matter how important your
job title sounded or how many years you had invested in the company.
This was my first experience with redundancy and it wouldn’t
be my last. The 11 years I’d spent in the army hadn’t prepared
me for this. I could hear the gods of big business saying, welcome to
the civilian world where profits mean more than people. I’d learned
a valuable lesson that day. No one is safe and sooner or later, the system
will let down. I needed to find a way to escape from the system.
When I first conceived of the idea of an outdoor adventure
coaching program, I was standing on the top of Mount Kinabalu, in Borneo,
watching the sun break the horizon. I had just finished a tiring 10 day
charity adventure race. We were there to raise money for Raleigh International’s
youth development program for young urban kids who, through getting tangled
up with the wrong crowd, had gone off the track, and were now working
hard to get back on the right track and stay on.
During the day, we raced, and in the evenings we’d
sit around the base camp and tell stories of our ordinary lives back home.
Most of the folks, being city types, had never been in the jungle. They
were experiencing nature first hand. And from the folks I’d spoke
to, the experience was very close, personal, and intense. This combined
with being in a developing country, where people still depended on the
jungle to provided nourishment and shelter, shifted their perspective.
Many began to question if their complicated lives really needed to be
so complicated and contrived. I’ve always been a nature-boy and
know the effects a stunning piece of scenery can be have on a person,
yet I wasn’t prepared for the impact this trip would have.
We returned to the UK, back to the corporate salt mines, and the daily
grind. Some of us had changed forever and our desks would never look the
same.
To fight against the constricting walls and ticking clocks,
we sent emails to each other to pass the time. Mostly we talked about
how Borneo had changed our lives and how we had to escape the quagmire
of office life. And more then few folks said that they couldn’t
continue to do work they found uninspired. The jungle had freed their
minds. They had to escape and a few did. One lady left her stressful advertising
job in London to go pursue her dream to be a teacher. Two others quit
their job and bought around the world tickets and set off to find themselves.
The final straw had been pitched for me as well. I was
more determined then ever to make my break from the soul destroying existence
I was living. Buzzing from my experience in Borneo, I had a thought, if
the jungle was capable of getting people to change without any coaching
intervention, how much more powerful would it be, if you added coaching
in an outdoor environment? Having a purposeful conversation using nature
as a backdrop for inspiration? It was in this spirit that Personal Growth
Adventures was born.
I hooked up with one of my teammates to see if he’d
be interested in doing something like that with me. I did some market
research and came up with a few coaches doing something similar, but not
quite in the same way that I had image. I put together a business plan
and tried to bring the idea alive. I wanted to create something magical;
something that would change people’s lives.
We didn’t get very far and the idea faded into
the recesses of my computer hard drive as I got swallowed back into the
daily grind. The idea went into incubation, and it would be another year
before the idea resurfaced.
A reoccurring theme in The Alchemist is that the universe
conspires to help those who are in pursuit of their destiny. Once a person
commits to truly following their dreams, the universe, I am told, will
do everything it can to help make the dream a reality. And so it was with
me. In Alchemy there is a principle that states every thing touches every
thing else. That if a butterfly flaps its wings in Texas; it causes an
earthquake in China. I’ve always found that these things take time.
You commit to your dreams, events are set in motion. But this motion has
a rhythm of its own and some times this rhythm isn’t in time with
what we have in mind. We want things to happen quickly. We want them to
happen now. I have found that the universe doesn’t operate in this
manner. Things take time. Forces and events have to be moved around the
chessboard in a certain sequence. Timing is everything. Isn’t it?
The company I was working for was a partnership between
two financial giants – one in investment banking, the other in personal
banking. The markets had turned south and one of the partners wanted out
of the market, leaving the one company holding bag. Inevitably when these
things happen, the fallen out is people lose their jobs. The corporate
parlance is restructuring. The guys at the top, the ones pulling the strings,
call it restructuring, the guys in the trenches turning the tools call
it redundancy.
I had settled back into corporate life and was getting
pretty comfortable. A promotion, a new role, more money, things were looking
good. My dream of setting up an adventure coaching company was a distant
memory – a dream that had fallen asleep.
My wake up call came in the form of a letter from HR.
I was facing a redundancy again. This was the fourth time in three years
that I found myself in this position. The balance of sums threatened to
render my lifestyle apart. The letter was a portent to the possibility
of no job and no means to care of all the usual trimmings of mortgage
and bills to pay and mouths to feed. But instead of feeling dreadful,
I felt oddly calm about the situation. And as I was updating my CV, I
came across the old business plan for Personal Growth Adventures. I shook
off the dust. Opened it up and had a read. And in an instant, the magic
returned. I knew what I had to do.
I volunteered for redundancy. Much to my surprise so
did a whole lot of other people. We were fighting to get out! A lot of
people wanted to take the money and run. It says something about the state
of a company when you have people fighting to get out, actually wanting
to be made redundant. So the irony of the situation was that people were
actually going to and did get upset when they were told they still had
a job. Imagine that!
I was one of the lucky ones. I lost my job. But as one
door closed, another opened. I teamed up with Peter Freeth and together
we created what has become known as the Ascent Experience. And with that,
I was finally free of the corporate salt mines.
Clay Lowe, September 2005
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