Ep #4: Hero’s Journey Series 1 of 11: The Call to Adventure

There are these certain times in your life where you’re going to have a choice (and they are going to be small as a whisper large as a shout), opportunities for you to pursue something else. 

What if you could write your own life story? How would you spend your time? What would your career or business look like? What kind of parent or partner would you be? Welcome to Storied Life Coaching, the only podcast that will show you how to stop living life by default, and teach you how to build a thriving business that fuels an amazing life on your terms. I’m Aaron J. Jacobs, and as a master coach and the CEO of OMH, creative and storied coaching, I’ve had the privilege and opportunity to learn what it takes firsthand to rewrite your own life story. It’s never too late for a rewrite.  

Hello, my friends! So I’ve decided to do something to take you all the way through how we look at, from a business perspective or a personal perspective, for coaching: the hero’s journey. I’m going to outlay every single phase of this journey for you so that you know exactly how to create it for yourself, whether you’re working with us and you’re one of our students or whether you want to do this work on your own. I’m going to show you, step by step, over the next 11 episodes, exactly how these phases work, what you should be thinking about and each phase, how to identify which phase that you are in, and I’m going to try my best to give you examples of how to apply it in your personal life and strengthen that as well as your business and entrepreneurial journey.  

So we’re going to start off with this first one with the beginning, because the hero’s journey always has to start with the first step, and the reason that we use this methodology is because you see it repeated everywhere. You are steeped in this. The human collective psyche is steeped in the hero’s journey. It doesn’t matter what culture you’re from, it doesn’t matter what religion you are, you have a hero’s journey story that happens where there’s the ordinary world, and then something happens, and then an adventure is gone on and by the end that person or that being or that deity has had to go through trials and tribulations through these different stages until they’ve come out and they are a changed person from the inside as well as the outside. 

So I’m going to show you exactly how to apply this to your personal life and to the journey and the adventure that you’re on: your entrepreneurial journey. So, this first episode is all about starting out the ordinary world. You are going about your business, and then there’s a call to adventure. This doesn’t have to be huge. This can be as quiet as a whisper or a conversation with a friend that shows you a different perspective. Maybe you’re having lunch with a friend and a friend says, “You know, I always thought that you would be a great teacher. You always said that you were going to want to teach or that that was something that you felt a pull towards when you were younger and I’m just kind of surprised that you ended up, you know, on the CEO track,” and maybe you leave that conversation and you were driving home in the car and you think, “Oh my gosh, that’s striking a chord, that whisper that I haven’t been paying attention to the un-satisfaction that I have in my current role, in my current job in the corporate world. I think maybe I need to become a teacher.”  

And so you start to think about how your ordinary world and all the things that feel safe and feel amazing and your brain is like, “Hey, no, no, we have things wired right now let’s just stay the way that we are.” Right? because our brains are hardwired in order to keep us safe, but maybe that tug is a little too powerful now and you’re going to listen to that call to adventure, or you just can’t stop thinking about it. So that’s an example in your personal life. 

For me, I remember it was, there was a time in my life: my parents had just gone through a very messy divorce, I was in first grade and every week in elementary school, we had choir class. And I wasn’t really good at anything at that point, and I didn’t feel like I was good at anything and I had a lot of anger. And I remember this class every week that we had: music class, this amazing teacher, Mrs. Carter, she was able to take these first to third graders and make them into amazing choral singers and you loved going to this class. And I remember she pulled me aside one day and said, “Aaron, I think that you’re actually, you have a lot of potential to become a really good singer. Would you like to audition?” And for– at the time was called the Indianapolis children’s choir, which was this huge big thing, and I never thought like I could do something like that. I’d have to audition and that would be scary and there’s all this stuff, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and that instance of having to go through that of having to be in the ordinary world and then be able to go on an adventure, even in a small way, has affected me and echoed through the years to where I am right now as a 45 year old man, that I know that there are things that can pull me out of my ordinary world that I can be good at and I can feel amazing about that I might not have thought that I could do. 

And so, you probably have similar experiences in your own personal life, where if you look at it from that perspective, you were on the ordinary world, a specific path, and then something pulls you to the left or the right and you decided to go on an adventure. In business, this can be something like if you’re on your entrepreneurial journey and you thought that your startup was going to be all about this one thing and then you had to get to that wonderful thing that we love talking about as entrepreneurs, which is the pivot: you thought your business model was going to be all about this. You had written it down. There were white-boarding sessions. And then you get to the point where you know what? People don’t seem to want to buy that, so we’re gonna have to pivot. 

I know this, because I’ve had to live through it as well, my friends. We’re going to, they actually want this, they’re telling us they want this. Okay, we can either choose to go on this call to adventure or we can choose to keep going on what we decided that’s not going to ultimately be effective. So there’s lots of different ways that you can apply this, this call to adventure and looking for the instances where your ordinary world could be disrupted by a call to adventure. Because it is a disruption isn’t it?! It’s not always convenient in fact. It’s hardly ever convenient when a call to adventure happens. In fact, many of us even try and refuse the call. We come up with all kinds of reasons and I’ll talk about that in the next episode, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. 

But I want you to think about those small tugs that can be large as well. They can be as small as a whisper or as loud as a gunshot, that take you from your ordinary world and show you that there might be something else that you want to go after and pursue. Maybe it’s a different relationship that you want to pursue. Maybe it is a different line of business you want to pursue. Maybe you’re just trying to grow your career and you really want to apply for a new position, but you having some impostor syndrome. You don’t think that you’re qualified for it and so you’re telling yourself you can’t do it. You’re trying to not listen to that call to adventure. 

It’s worth listening to it and if you can think about things in terms of this: that it isn’t just this messy soup, that, like, there are these certain times in your life where you’re going to have a choice. And there are going to be small as a whisper large as a shout opportunities for you to pursue something else and to go towards it. And you can either let fear stop you, or you can take that first step out the door and go towards it. And those are the things and those are the people that other people are attracted to: the ones that go after opportunities, the ones that go after adventures. 

And if you’re an entrepreneur, or business person, or a leader, this is a skill to start to hone, to listen and get curious about when you feel a tug or a pull towards something that could absolutely serve your customers better or grow your business.  

So here is how to go about this: think about what is happening in your ordinary world and when you feel that pull, start to examine exactly how that can help you or help your life or help your business to be able to grow. Maybe even write it down and list how “If I went on this adventure,” all the things that would be good, all the things that would be bad. The bad ones, like, our brains love to tell us all the reasons something isn’t going to work. So just know that that’s part of the process and you’re going to write that down and that that list, that side of the page, might be a lot longer, because your lizard brain really wants to keep you safe in ordinary world! It sees this as super safe, but it’s important to be able to identify these things, whether you’re trying to rewrite who you are and what you do or you just want to improve a small aspect of your life. Whether you just want to take guitar lessons, but you keep putting it off and you keep thinking about “Oh, that’d be super hard and I have to schedule it and then I already have so much stuff going on with the kids and all this other stuff,” but you keep feeling that pull towards it: that’s a call to adventure. It’s a small one, but it might be worth exploring.  

So, that’s what I want you to think about. I want you to think about a call to adventure and how you could go on this adventure. There are going to be stages in this where it’s hard and that’s okay, it’s supposed to be. Otherwise, you can’t slay those dragons, go through the transformation that needs to happen, overcome obstacles, and get the reward at the end, the hard-earned reward, whether that is a successful thriving business, or whether it’s that relationship that you’ve always wanted, or that career that you always wanted to pursue. If it wasn’t hard, if there weren’t some things in front of you that you’re going to have to overcome, it really wouldn’t be a true adventure, would it?  

So what I’d like you to do is: I’d like you to this next week. Just listen for those small voices. The small ones can be some of the most important ones. That small gut tug towards what you might want to do in your career towards that change you want to make as an entrepreneur, that business idea that you’ve had floating around, but you’re just kind of like, “Oh, that would be silly and I already have a pretty good income at the company I work for, I don’t want to rock the boat,” is that really the adventure that you want to tell people about on your deathbed?  

Sorry to be so dramatic, but in reality, is that what you want to do? Or do you feel like you were built for something more? 

I think that you are. 

So, I want you to think about that this next week. When I talk to you next time, I’m going to talk about the next part of this, which is actually the refusal of the call, because you’re going to have that list, right? You’re going to write those things down and there might be a lot of reasons that your brain is telling you why you can’t do something, and that’s actually a very important part of the process. So come back next time. I’m going to help you think through that as well.  

All right, my friends. Thank you so much for your time, and I will talk to you next week.  

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