Smash Notes
Matt Walker: I did whatever I wanted to do
On this episode, we welcome adventure entrepreneur and author Matthew Walker to the program. Matt is a behavioral scientist and adventure expedition leader who works with people to take the lessons learned from adventuring and apply them to the everyday challenges we face. Matt is the author of Adventure in Everything: How the Five Elements of Adventure…
People
Notes
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It’s what brings vitality and engagement in our lives. It’s important to have routines and some normalized behavior. Adventure is what brings out the best in us.
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Matthew Walker, the adventure guide and author of Adventure in Everything, tells Jan Black and Laura Owens that he is trying to take the word adventure back from National Geographic, Red Bull, and Outside. The classic trips are powerful storytelling, and they can catapult people. The moments that actually define a life are adventures too.
He splits adventure into five elements. High endeavor, uncertain outcome, total commitment, tolerance for adversity, and great companionship. High endeavor is the rare overlap of values and action, the engine of a given stretch of life. It might be a company, a child, or a relationship, and it changes.
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High endeavor, uncertain outcome, total commitment, tolerance for adversity, and great companionship. Addressing all five of these is when our values create max internal alignment.
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Matthew Walker, author of Adventure in Everything, tells Jan Black and Laura Owens on Nobody Told Me that traditional adventure works as a teacher because it pulls people out of their everyday patterns and drops them into a new environment. Learning happens there, and where habits become obvious.
He gives a coaching client on a rock-climbing trip. Whenever the man felt stuck, he shopped for holds, touching every hold on the wall again and again, looking for a perfect one when several were good enough. Walker recognized the same pattern from the man's business. He researched problems endlessly and did not act. The climb was a small copy of the larger stall.
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Walker suggests for someone to practice small local adventures. There are certain things you pass by that you have never experienced. It starts with having more curiosity to open us up to different ways to look at our communities.
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It’s easy for humans to go into a place of shame due to those emotional experiences. Hard resets are ways that we can start over with new practices with a clean slate. We give ourselves permission to continually keep trying.
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There’s a tool that's divided into four elements that Walker recommends for people to incorporate. He urges people to start small by doing one behavior per category each day for 30 days straight.
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He wants people to be super clean and clear by getting all of their verbiage and story out of the way. In doing so, people will be really clear about who they are and what they're doing in the world to help them see if they are aligning their values and life.
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Walker states how easy it is for us to be stuck in patterns. The plan is acknowledge, reflect, and plan. He does not recommend people to do all three in one sitting because it’s better done over time and to work with others so you are held accountable.
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On Nobody Told Me, with Jan Black and Laura Owens, adventure guide Matthew Walker says he has finished things that look impressive on paper and that he is not proud of, because of the style or the relationships that produced them. The way a person moves through the world matters more than the accomplishment.
You can write a book or build a business and collect the usual praise, and still have done it in a way that does not count. The moments he is proudest of are the ones where he was present. Helping his son through a fit, or through pain, and watching confidence come back, matters more to him than having written Adventure in Everything.
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Nobody told him that he could still do whatever he wanted to do. He grew up where he had to follow a direction in order to move through the world. The space of creation is limitless.