Tuesday – Guanella Pass, Elevation 11,670′

Monday – Cathedral Spires, 8,580′

Welcome 1.0

This is about a renewed journey, beginning with the ending of one career, advertising & marketing, and the start of several others. nine years ago, we “jumped,” and moved from Texas to Colorado. We traded looking at our next door neighbor’s utility room window in Dallas for a view of the Rocky Mountains. Our new neighbors are a little on the wild side – deer, bears, foxes, mountain lions and other assorted four-legged creatures. Rocko, Jeffrey and Riot, the animal squad, share our tree house on the side of a mountain.

Now that you have the preamble on how we came to this place, I’ll get to the reason for this website. Tying yourself image to what you do for a living is an American standard. It’s how we measure our self-worth, our place in society, our social standing and our insatiable thirst for stuff.  Crazy as it sounds, that’s how it works.

But what if you let all that go? What if you stripped away the façade and got down to the basics? That’s what we did and it has been an enlightening experience, not to mention a journey of self-discovery.

Moving to Colorado has offered many new experiences: carpenter, landscaper, painter, snow thrower, mover, bartender, motorcycle restoration and most recently, a MFS RiderCoach instructing new motorcycle riders on the finer points of motorcycle safety and riding skill.

The mission for this website is to expose all the possibilities that surround us and maybe, just maybe, entice some of you to join in on our journey.

The Flow

For the last several months I’ve been trying to live in the Flow. In my opinion, the Flow represents both physical and spiritual energy that is always surrounding us. A natural progression of events and happenings, culminating in a life lived in harmony with our surroundings.

My thoughts about Flow have been shaped by events that have impacted my life. A few years ago, my wife and I relocated to Colorado. The move represented a jump into the unknown; a career opportunity for my wife and a reset for me. I’d been in the advertising business for four decades. As with all careers, there were ups and downs and I prided myself on being able to reinvent and reposition as needed to adjust to business cycles. However, the perfect storm of digital disruption, social mayhem (social media), private equity buyouts and the great recession proved to be too much for my small agency to overcome.

In my first few months upon arriving in Colorado, I brought the aspirations and vision of the agency business to our new location.  I concentrated on gaining business contacts and pitching new clients to fuel the reinvention of the agency. While I enjoyed a few successes, there was more rejection and disinterest than I anticipated. My problem, like a lot of successful business owners, was that I identified too much with my career. Without it, what would I do, who would I be, how would I pay the bills? In other words, I was not ready to let go, or at least not go down without a fight. This internal stubbornness is a yin-yang trait. You need it to succeed but if you’re out of the flow, it can lead to your downfall. Needless to say, it was only then that I came to realize the reinvention was probably not going to happen at the scale it needed to be.

That’s when I started to take more notice of the Flow that surrounded me. From the abundance of energy and optimism that burst through the watercolor hue of the morning dawn, to the contemplative evaluation of the day’s events reflected in the clouds at the evening dusk, there’s a natural flow, an order or progression, of the way the world around me went about its business. It became very obvious that when I was in the Flow, life worked much more seamlessly, success was obtained and failure was minimized. When I was outside of the Flow, nothing was easy, misery was my companion.

On an afternoon motorcycle ride in late August I found myself skirting the Platte river. Usually I ride on, but that day I decided to stop and take in the views. It had been a record breaking spring snow fall and a wet summer, and the river was flowing. It was at this moment of serenity that I recognized the Flow had something in mind for me. All I had to do was let go.

After nine months of prospecting for new business and achieving a dubious 0 for 50 rejection ratio, I contemplated going back to tending bar. It was not my first stent behind the bar, but there was an ego issue on returning to a profession that I considered “beneath” my skill set and experience level. This is where Flow comes into play. With a background in strategic marketing, I naturally started with a SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunity, threat) analysis. After this bit of nonsense due diligence, it really came down to one simple question. What have you got to lose?

The answer to my question was found in the flow of the river.  It was a metaphor for what I had to let go. My anxieties, my baggage, that I had carried to Colorado with me — pretense, ego, illusion of control, social status, anxiety and fear. All of the aforementioned are not conducive to being in the Flow.

The river washes these away, revealing a new way forward — sans baggage.