Work Life Play with Aaron McHugh

In this podcast series on Restoring Balance, I deconstructs the art of making adjustments in your approach, your thinking, your beliefs and habits. I share practical easy-to-start tools to restoring balance to your Work, Life, Play, Health and Relationships. Part 1-Changing Your Atmosphere starts with changing how we approach our circumstances by changing our internals.

Andrew Skurka is an accomplished adventure athlete, speaker, guide, and writer. The 34-year-old is most well known for his solo long-distance backpacking trips, notably the 4,700-mile 6-month Alaska-Yukon Expedition, the 6,875-mile 7-month Great Western Loop, and the 7,775-mile 11-month Sea-to-Sea Route.

Andrew spends most of his adventures off trail picking his way through the high mountains. I really enjoyed my time meeting Andrew. I found him to be very kind, humble, relatable and focused.

National Geographic, March 2011. Circling Alaska in 176 Days.

Outside, April 2011. Adventurers of the Year.

National Geographic Adventure, December 2007. Adventurer of the Year.

Backpacker, August 2005. Person of the Year.

Men's Journal, December 2005. Adventurer Hall of Fame.

Five years ago I started writing a couple articles on a wordpress site to profile my ideas as part of a career change.

Accidentally….Now two-hundred and forty field reports (blog posts) and 86 podcast episodes later on Work Life Play….I can confidently say I'm onto something. This podcast is a milestone marker to this five year journey and the lesson's I've learned.

Thanks for your friendship, your love, your encouragement, your comments, your shares and rooting me forward.

Here's my summary as best I can articulate it today.

Learn how to restore balance in your life. Create a life that matters to you. The narrative we tell ourselves frames our life. Work can't be about survival. Life can't be entirely about work. Rethink work. Live differently. Capitalize on the small margins of your life, they add up. Stay curious. Live adventurously. Learn to play. Love the people that you're with.

Create a life that matters to you. The narrative we tell ourselves frames our life. Work can't be about survival. Rethink work. Live differently. Capitalize on the small margins of your life, they add up. Stay curious. Live adventurously. Learn to play. Love the people that you're with.

Five years later, I know I'm onto something.

Meet Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, co-authors of the Stanford course turned book providing a methodology to Designing Your Life: How to build a well-lived, joyful life. Our conversation provided me a meaningful crescendo to my two hundred and forty field reports here on Work Life Play. This book is new quantifiable proof to my work.

• Everbody gets stuck, start where you are
• Learn how problem solving used in product design can be applied to designing your life
• The idea of Work-Life balance is totally wrong and approaches the problem with a win-lose outcome
• Understand why your life needs a dashboard in five categories: Work, Life, Play, and Health & Love
• Dysfunctional beliefs require Reframed Thinking in order to Design Your Life
• You're never too late to Design Your Life

Last week, I crashed a women only backyard dinner party. Thirty women were dressed and buttoned to celebrate their Season Finale of Super Soul Happy Hour/Share Classes. Party lights were strung between Ponderosa pines and simple picnic tables borrowed from the local high school. Each place setting held a Martha Stewart style full bouquet of food and wine. Elayne Prechtel envisioned this backyard soiree of Sharing our Life, Love & Food and created an enchanted Colorado summer evening for her friends.

Srini called in for our interview from a SoCal seaside coffee shop between tides. He ejected on his busy life to detox for a few days by practicing what he preaches. During our interview you'll hear trains pass by, seagulls cawing and Srini get fired up about why becoming UNMISTAKABLE eliminates any notion of competitors.

Over a quick beer in downtown Portland, I met Srini in 2013 at Chris Guillebeau's World Domination Summit. He just released his first book, UNMISTAKABLE: Why Only Is Better Than Best. You've probably listened to one of his near 700 episodes of his popular podcast The Unmistakable Creative. He interviews everyone from an FBI hostage negotiator to some of my favorites Bob Goff, Rob Bell, Tim Ferris and Seth Godin.

In this podcast he talks about his love for surfing and the metaphors for life he discovered between sets of waves. We chat about how UNMISTAKABLE uses the stages of surfing as the framework for his becoming Unmistakable.

Podcast Highlights:

• Srini's favorite surfing locations
• How to avoid the "Mimic Epidemic"
• How to approach hard to get to people
• Why blazing your own trail is your best chance at being UNMISTAKABLE