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Does striving for work-life balance feel like an elusive goal that you can never quite reach? That’s because designing a fulfilling life isn’t about balance, it’s about creating a rhythm that integrates all the key ingredients of a meaningful existence. And one key ingredient that we often overlook is the importance of play. On this episode, Deloitte chief well-being officer Jen Fisher discusses creating a work, life, play rhythm with Aaron McHugh author, speaker, podcaster, and adventurer.
The WorkWell Podcast™ is back and I am so excited about the inspiring guests we have lined up. Wellbeing at work is the issue of our time. This podcast is your lens into what the experts are seeing, thinking, and doing.
Hi, I am Jen Fisher, host, bestselling author and influential speaker in the corporate wellbeing movement and the first-ever Chief Wellbeing Officer in the professional services industry. On this show, I sit down with inspiring individuals for wide-ranging conversations on all things wellbeing at work. Wellbeing is the future of work. This podcast will help you as an individual, but also support you in being part of the movement for change in your own organizations and communities. Wellbeing can be the outcome of work well designed. And we all have a role to play in this critical transformation!
This podcast provides general information and discussions about health and wellness. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast. The podcast owner, producer and any sponsors are not liable for any health-related claims or decisions made based on the information presented or discussed.
Work, Life, and Play
Jen Fisher (Jen): One of the biggest work-life myths is that you have to overhaul everything in your life and move to the beach to pursue your passion. It's a product of the either-or mentality of work life balance. You can either have a successful career or a meaningful life. By believing in work-life integration, I believe that we can find meaning right here, right now, without making drastic changes to your work or your life. Intertwining purpose and play into our day gives us the strength to reengage from a place of meaning and hope.
This is the WorkWell podcast series. Hi, I'm Jen Fisher, Chief Well-being Officer for Deloitte. And I'm so pleased to be here with you today to talk about all things well-being.
Aaron Mchugh (Aaron): Do you know what I really want to do at the end of the of the zoom call? I'm going to read a Dr. Seuss book. Like that's really what my eight-year-old self wants to do. I'm going to do it. And I thought, “Oh my gosh,” when it came time to actually do it. And am I really going to be brave enough? And I was like, “yeah, I am”. I'm going to read Dr. Seuss!
Jen: I'm here with Aaron McHugh, a writer, podcaster, adventurer, and author of the bestselling book, Fire your boss, a manifesto to rethink how you think about work, In 2015, Aaron and his wife sold their house and all of their belongings to reboot their lives, rather than trying to strike the impossible balance between work and life. He believes in creating sustainable rhythms of play and adventure. His family creates their own adventures like road trips and their 1974 VW bus, known as the joy bus. Today, we're going to learn more about this. Why play, tell me, talk to me about play.
Aaron: Oh, it makes me so happy you asked that. You know, what I learned was years ago is that, you know, there's work life balance was such like a common nomenclature of our culture these days. And what I found was missing is, I just felt like there was some idea of perfect Zen, like remember like a Teeter totter as a kid. And like, you'd have like a friend on the other side. And it was like this idea of could you actually balance it out and get to the same level place? And I just found that impossible, like this work life balance, because something was always out of rhythm. And then the other thing I think was the assumption was that work life balance assumes that it's like kick out my work in like some, I don't know homeostasis, you know, and then I have my family life and then it's all balanced out.
But what I found was often missing was like, well, what about play? What about adventure? But not just hobbies, not just like you're on a softball team on Tuesday nights. Like, and then maybe that's enough, but like as an actual way of becoming a part of a rhythm of our life. And so what I discovered was that really work life balance, I find is a myth and work life play, sustainable rhythms, where we learn to integrate in the wholeness of those things as ongoing practices of our life versus just compartmentalize to vacations. I found to be much more life-giving.
Jen: Hmm. So are there parts of your own, and I'm, I'm totally leading the witness here, cause I know the answer to this, but are there parts of your own personal experience that inspired you to seek more meaning and to seek this adventure in your life?
Aaron: I'll just shoot straight with you from the beginning, I've had a lot of really challenging unforeseen events in my life. One of them was 2011, which would be nine and a half years ago. Our middle daughter had passed away and she was severely disabled her whole life and in a wheelchair and had cerebral palsy, and tube fed, and had seizure disorders, the whole thing. And so, our life was already super-intense and when she passed away unexpectedly, then that really caused me to stop down and start asking some big questions. But I was pretty banged up and I was living… this idea of work, life, play was in my hemisphere. And I was attempting to like ask big questions. Like what if, how could I, and then I found myself in, I guess it would be five years ago now in a personal burnout.
And my resting pulse was 92 beats per minute.
I was on sleep meds, depression, meds, anxiety meds. My career was in full tilt, but my experience of my life, which is really challenging. And I just found, I just started to lose the Gusto, my mojo. And I actually even had a guy I worked with and he asked me, “what happened to your mojo?” Wow, what a great question. I'm, I've lost it. And I'm losing like the through line and the thread and the plot of the story that I want to be living because I'm just despairing over how hard this is and I'm just not experiencing the life I really want.
Jen: Was that question from your colleague kind of the tipping point for you because you know, my own personal story and you know, for me there, there were lots of signs and there were a handful of people that were asking questions and pointing it out. But for me, admitting it was admitting failure. Because I believed at the time, you know, if I couldn't be everything to everyone, then there must be something wrong with me. Now I know that that is a ridiculous expectation of anyone and everyone. But just, I get the question all the time about burnout. Were there signs, were there signals? What am I supposed to look for? So, what did that look like for you?
Aaron: Similar with your story. You know, I started having warning lights on the dashboard of my life and work starting to go off. So, like one of them was my wife. I was traveling a lot in the consulting work that I was doing. And my wife said not in an unkind way, just in a matter of fact way, it's easier when you're not here. And that was one, you know, it was a bell ringer of like, Whoa, hold on. We've been married now 27 years. So, the time, you know, 22 and some change or something, and that really was like, Whoa, what are you really saying? And I had things at work where my experience of it was, I just wasn't proud of who I was. I wasn't proud of who I was in the moment. I wasn't proud of my intensity.
There were just so many things like that.
And so I think what was happening for me was I just had enough evidence and then physiologically, I was experiencing so much pain, not like a physical pain, but like just emotional, you know, anxiety and depression and things. And really what it came down to
is, if you know that sculpture of the Atlas man, he was trying to hold up the globe. Yep. That was me, that was really how I was attempting to navigate life. I really viewed like you, you know, I didn't feel like I could have permission to have a bad day and that I just, my experience of my life was not what I knew. Like I didn't set out for it to look like this. And so, I just really, I guess I had the, in some ways the painful luxury of being forced on the sidelines of life and I couldn't, so I really lost a lot of the ability to care.
I didn't have any energy to care what people thought for awhile. And so those warning signs, whether it was career or at home and these other places are just my personal experience. My friends, I remember one of my friends said, you know, I feel like you write checks that your friends can't afford the cash that you're, that you're making promises and yeses all the time. And then when I come back and say, “hey, listen, you wrote me this check, I'd love to cash that in.” You're bankrupt, you got nothing. So, they're just really like sobering, humble moments of what if they're right now, the challenge was, I didn't know how else to live. I didn't have a plan B. I didn't have an alternative blueprint to live from.
So, it really forced me to ask the deeper questions about why do I do what I do and why do I always do what I do in the way I do it? And then other life-giving questions like in what do I really want? What would I want my life, and my work, and my play to look like, if I were life designing on a blank sheet of paper? Yeah.
Jen: Thank you for sharing, that’s really powerful because it resonates with me and probably so many others, because I know from my own experience, I did not step back to design that life. I just kind of, you know, kept succeeding into the next thing and the next thing, and the next thing not ever asking the question of, is this what I want or how I want it to go? And the, the concept of life design, it was a foreign concept to me until I was forced to design my life. You know, and I think that's why we both probably do the work that we do now is to help others design that life. So, you know, they don't get where we got, you know, where we were, where we were forced to do it.
Aaron: Yes. Agreed. I think so much what happens to us in our careers and in our life is we just end up with a lot of momentum. So you find yourself whether it's five years in or 35 years in, and you end up on a trajectory and you end up in a space in your career in a position, in a town, in a house, in a relationship, whatever it might be. And we, and we just made decisions, lots of decisions along the way, but oftentimes they come with these byproducts, these unintended consequences. And what happens is that we just lose this.
What I found, I lost a lot. Relinquished, I guess, is a better word. A lot of the agency, the choice, the empowerment, the ownership of my life. And I really found myself like playing a victim. And that was mind boggling to me.
Like, I'm not a victim. How am I, how is it that I'm actually living out like a victim mentality and a victim mindset? And what that looked like was, well, they said, I have to, or, well, I've come too far. Or if I wanted to start over, I can't afford to, because I own all these belongings. I have this zip code I live in, I have these cars, I drive, I have these memberships, I have this level of prestige. I was in a senior executive role in a software company. And we had just run the London day opening day trading belt, London, stock exchange. And so, I had like this story in my head that I felt like I had to keep up, but I just started saying like, you know what, time out. I'm, you know, I'm 48 now. And I just thought, you know, is that really what I want to do?
I just want to white knuckle this thing all the way to the end or what if, what if I have a lot more agency and choice than I thought? And I think what happens for a lot of folks is this life design idea that go from like what the, where I am today. X marks the spot on the map
and where I'd like to be is in some other place. And sometimes I don't even know where I want to be, but I think what's really helpful is to begin to think about what if I just made two degree tilts, just, I may not directionally know exactly where I want this to go in the end as a destination, but I can start making adjustments directionally. I spent a lot of time in wilderness. And so, I think in terms of like compasses, well two degrees on a compass, a friend of mine is a FedEx pilot. And he says, when you fly from Los Angeles to Hawaii, the difference of two degrees is whether or not you make it to Hawaii or you're 80 miles off course. So, two degrees is really doable. It's super manageable on a daily basis. I know you talk a lot about micro habits, like micro choices. So, I really began to live into like, okay, what's the micro adjustment I can make right now? And then over time, those begin to have these, you know, I call it, and talk a lot about experiments. What are the small micro adjustments, choices, and experiments? Things I can try that then over time ended up yielding and building momentum in a different direction. So often i find this lifestyle design piece. If we start with these dreams and they can oftentimes feel a little like eight-year-old ish, you know, are young, but it's actually the best part of us.
It's the young zeal, sparkly eyes. Part of us that actually can dream big dreams. That actually was in the beginning of our career, in our families and our lives. That was, who was fueling us a lot of what we had passion around. And I find that a lot of executives, adults, people in the business world, somehow we suppress that over time because responsibilities and duties actually take the captain of my soul position. And I've just learned to slowly reclaim that and become, again, you know, more in the position of agency and choice.
Jen: Yeah. As, as I listened to you. And, you know, I think about, you know, what's going on in the world today with the global pandemic and racial injustice. Some have talked about this as kind of the, the great pause, right? Like, you know, refocusing on kind of what matters and who matters in our life. What advice do you have for people right now?
Aaron: Yeah, one of my hard truths that I was faced with was when so many unwanted things had happened in my life, undesirable things, misfortunes and mishaps. One of the things I found was a really helpful question, is if some of the worst things I could have imagined in my life have already happened, or are happening and I'm surviving it, that's actually really encouraging. Like, Oh, I didn't die. Like I did get out of bed. I did find a reason to keep going and I found it really helpful of like, well, gosh, if some of the most impossible things I could have imagined had already occurred, well, well then what's the big deal about taking a little risk, you know, what's the worst that could happen there? And so I actually started making a list of what's the worst that could happen. I'm like, okay, well we could move home and live in my mom's basement.
I could be, you know, lose, have tons of shame, you know, for my neighbors to think I'm a loser. I don't know, you know, it was like, whatever I could come up with. And I just made the list and said, okay, could I live with this? If all this bad stuff actually comes to be and happens, could I live with it? Every dollar we've ever saved? You know, in my following the 401k plans, like what if we had to use it all, what would be the worst? And it was actually really refreshing and disarming because then I could get clear on saying, would I be willing to, you know, have one car, would we be willing to live in a different house? Would we be willing to, you know, what was our list? And it was actually really liberating because then all of a sudden it was like, oh, well, what's now what's the likelihood of all of this bad stuff happening.
And so, to me, I think the sum of what I'm explaining here is I spent a lot of time attempting to manage my life versus experiencing it. And I wasn't a great life designer. I
was more of a risk mitigator and I didn't realize that about myself. And so what I began to do is to say, well, if I've spent so much time mitigating risk and trying to preventing things to happen, what if I actually expended my energy, my attention, my focus, my desires, my hearts, my passions towards directions thatt I actually want things to go? What might happen now? It's still risky. If I leave this job or attempt and try something new, but as a designer, as an explorer, as a pioneer, like those are things I really identified with as an adventure. Well then what if I began to integrate those as ingredients in my life, as ingredients in my work? I'd spent years in startups and software companies. And we were always trying new things. Well, most of the time it actually went great. And sometimes it didn't, but even when it didn't go great, we still learned something and found a way to use that as part of our learning and trial and error to apply to the next thing. So, I just began to say, gosh, I'm in this really hard place.
Now, the other thing I would add to that is I didn't do it alone. And I have friends, I have a community, I have people that love me. I have a deep spiritual life. Like I have, I have access points, you know, for help and support. That helped me believe it was possible. So, this is, I don't want to make it sound like it was like a one man effort, you know, and it wasn't at all. And those people were alongside saying, yeah, give it a whirl. Let's see, let's see how it goes. And let's see where it goes. And I'll just name like, two and a half years ago, my wife and I bet the farm. Five years ago, we sold everything. We owned down to our wedding China and our forks and moved our stuff in storage and went and volunteered at a summer camp with our youngest daughter. You know, two and a half years ago, we were down to 1500 bucks in our checking account. So, we have bet a lot of resources on these life design things. And I can happily say today, you know, we, you know, we have a lovely life that we have actually intentionally designed.
Jen: Yeah, it's really inspiring. Can you go deep on, on why play is so important?
Aaron: You know, I've found that in my work with executives, as an executive, worked with executives today and business people that, especially in our Western world, we're so focused on conquests. We're so focused on achievement and her great phrase recently about the treadmill of more. And because of that, what I found is there's an old adage of what does it all play? All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. And I just started asking like, what if that's true? Who do I know in my adult world that is really great at play? And what happened was, I’ll take you through a specific story. I was in Kona, Hawaii with a friend and he was developing real estate there on the coastal lava rock. And he had customers with last names like Schwab and Dell. And he asked me when we were running on the beach, when do you leave your watch behind and just play?
And at the time I was really into triathlon and I always wore my watch and always measured everything. And so, I was really perplexed by this question of like, what are you talking about? Play like, that's what boys do. That's what young men do. I got stuff to do. I'm a big deal now. I didn't say that, but that was my posture. Right. Have you seen my to do list? Do you know how big my inbox is? You know, do you know what the revenue numbers I'm responsible for delivering? Those would have been my responses if I was untethered. And so, as a result though, here's a guy, he was like uber successful on all of those kinds of metrics, but he was asking different questions. And so, I walked away and was like, hold on a second. What is he talking about?
So, I went back to the main land and I really started chewing on of like, he wears flip-flops, he goes slow, he's home on time. There's people, now, he had had a long career of like sorting it out himself too. And he lives in the land of Aloha. And so, I kind of tried to dismiss
it a little bit, but instead I started asking like, okay, so I, yes, I run, I do triathlon. And I come home bloody and muddy at times, but is that play? So, I actually started doing some research on what is actually play and what's the value of play in our life. And I started researching about how animals play and the importance of play for the brain, for the creative process. And I just really was messed up like undone by this question. And so, I started being curious about what would it look like?
Could I live in a more light and easy creative state if play was something I reclaimed in my life and what is play? And there's this great quote, this Dutch researcher in the 1950s, I want to say. And he basically said play is when no one's keeping score. And I thought, Whoa, that is totally disruptive because that's like all of a sudden, most of what I do, I'm somehow keeping score. So, as an endurance athlete, you know, Strava is a big thing you check in or if your fitness tracker, or if you're a, you know, on a bowling team, basketball, baseball, whatever I'm always keeping score. What is it that I do just for the delight, the joy and the ease, and I'm not keeping score. And so I started finding myself like walking down the sidewalk and there'd be like hopscotch, like kids, you know, drawn chalk hopscotch.
And like, I'm going to do it now. Like I'm in my dress clothes, but I'm going to hopscotch now. And then I'm like, in this hotel in the middle of Phoenix. And they had these bikes you could rent, but the only ones that were left were like pink and it was like six o'clock in the morning. And I'm like, I'd love to get in a workout, but I think I'm going to skip the workout and leave the watch behind. And I'm going to go hop on this pink bike and ride around old town Scottsdale. And I just found, it was like Oh, you mean like, feel like you're an eight year old, like you, you, all of a sudden, like the tight grip I was holding on my life and the outcomes I was driving for started to loosen. And I started having different ideas and different thoughts and possibilities and what ifs.
So fast forward today, like how that actually shows up in my life is I was recently doing a live book tour event through zoom. And I had this idea of like, you know, what I really want to do at the end of the zoom call is I'm going to read a Dr. Seuss book. Like, that's really what my eight year old self wants to do. I'm going to do it. And I thought, Oh my gosh, when it came time to actually do it. And am I really going to be brave enough? And I was like, yeah, I am. I'm going to read Dr. Seuss. And it was super fun. And so, to me, that's like the spirit of play injected in my everyday life. And so how I talk about it often with adults is just about reclaiming that like eight year old part of you. And what did that eight year old part of you love to do? And when, when he, or she was not keeping score, what did, how did you approach friends and life and lunchtime? And so, I've lots of practices in micro habits that I've attached to that to make sure that it's part of my ongoing days, but that's like an opener riff for you.
Jen: Well, I think that was great and kind of leads to my next question. You talk about sustainable rhythms of play. So how do you suggest we integrate play into our day?
Aaron: What I find is when we wake up in the morning, the story we tell ourselves before we're even out of bed or through our first cup of tea, or coffee is I'm a big deal and I got a bunch to do. And it's, here's how long my list is. I find that it's just not, it's not the whole story. Part of the story also is we have this amazing life that we have an opportunity to live, and then we're actually here to make a difference. And what I love about your work is that you help call people into an, up, into a way to experience life in a more life giving way and play can become this like antidote to stress and play can be like, like silly things. Like I was back when we were traveling, you know, I would find myself with a 15 minute break at a conference that was at, and I thought, you know, I don't want to do, I really would love to
get some exercising and some movement, but I think I'm instead I'm in this hotel and it's only 15 minutes.
And instead of like getting a coffee and eating more, I'm going to go into the stairwell in the middle of the hotel. And I'm going to pretend it's like Mount Everest and the Khumbu Icefall that like meanders its way up the, from base camp. And I'm gonna pretend I'm like climbing the Khumbu Icefall for 15 minutes. I was like, they're just silly. Like, but I came back light. Easy, with like a 15 minute micro rest break. That was the antidote for the stress. And I came back in and I just find it's like, okay, I can do this because it was intense. The meeting we were in was intense, you know, we're behind in revenue numbers. And we were talking about what we're going to do next quarter. That's different than the quarter we just finished. That's stuff that’s not going to change, but the way in which I engage, it can change.
And so, I just find this, like, what are the things? So, one of the things that I help in coaching people with is I have this thing in the back of my car, it's called a joy bucket and it's just a bucket from Home Depot and it's got a bunch of stickers on it. And I put all these like staged impromptu artifacts, pieces of equipment. So, I have a pair of running shoes, some socks, I have a stove and I started like brewing up cups of coffee for my coworkers on my, on my tailgate, you know, during the workday, like as a smoke break. I'm not a smoker, but I was like, I'm going to start taking smoke breaks and invite my mates down to, Hey, you want a cup of coffee? They're like, they think it's Starbucks. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Like down on my tailgate, I'll brew you up a Starbucks. And so, I just found was like, I desperately need ways in which I can feel like my life is light and easy and play is a way we can integrate that in. So, all of those things, I just find are the ways that we can then begin to seed play. And instead of it having to be isolated to just vacation or weekends and those kinds of things play can actually become an everyday part of our rhythm so that we can keep it going.
Jen: What does play look like now? I mean, everything feels so heavy. You know, we're in the middle of the global crisis. How do we infuse play into our day? You know, so that, I mean, we get the benefits of it, but that it, you know, it feels okay. Right. I mean, in some regards, you know, finding play and joy and happiness right now for some people could feel strange, you know, cause there there's a lot to not feel happy about. And we have to honor those feelings too, but so, so how do we find play right now?
Aaron: Yeah, that's a great question. And I guess what I would just start with is just starting with honoring the reality of our life right now in the world that we're living in, the environment and the stress, the worry, the anxiety, the death, the conflict, the all these things that they're true and they're real. So, I don't believe that play is it's not sticking our head in the sand, right. What it's doing is also integrating in beauty into our life because beauty is actually still true as well. Flowers are still blossoming. Birds are singing, waterfalls are still falling. And I find that our, our body, mind, soul needs reminders also of what's still good in the world and beauty can provide us hope. And so, for me, I have a, just a mantra of outside every day and what play can provide us is it's an escape hatch it's in. So sometimes maybe that's buying a set of bochi balls that you go to the park with a friend and just say, let's go do something goofy. And let's go. I had a guy send me a video, he was a, he wanted to learn how to lasso like cowboy lasso, like a rodeo. And so, he was lassoing trash cans on his block just for fun because all this stuff is so serious.
After the death of our daughter, I had to really look at like, where can I find some joy? Where can I find a reason that this is going to be okay? Like I need some proof and
evidence that this is going to be okay, that I'm going to be okay. And so I realized that it was like this idea of, we can look for the things for proof and then we'll believe them because we then see enough proof or we can begin to believe them and then live into them in a way that we can then create them for ourselves. And I just found, I was like, boy, there's not enough joy coming to me daily. So, I'm going to have to make some of it. I'm going to have to make some reasons why I feel eight years old again and riding girls bikes, you know, in downtown Scottsdale.
So, I think for each of us it’s very particular. And what I find is starting with the question of what brings you joy? Cause sometimes for play, people might say, Hey, I'm not an athlete or I don't do this. No, no, no, no. Let's start with joy. What brings you joy? Like would checkers in the sun bring your joy? Would a walk bring you joy? Like what would, but I'm actually talking about like the practice of the art of living and joy and play and lightness and ease. And you feel like we can reclaim that. I know 82 year old people that are amazingly youthful, playful and joyful, but that is a practice that you have to cultivate and choose.
Jen: Fascinating. I never thought about joy as a practice that you have to cultivate.
Aaron: Yeah. Well, what, what for you, Jen? Like what brings you joy?
Jen: What brings me joy? My puppy Fiona brings me joy. So, you know, I, you know, when I go walk her and we have to walk her several times a day, it's, you know, she has no idea what's going on in the world. She is seven and a half months old and she is just living her life, being bad, being mischievous, you know, wants to play all the time and you know, barks at you and bites you when you don't play with her.
Aaron: Yeah. That's a perfect example. So like play can be like getting down on the rug with her to play and that's yours and that's again, that's a muscle, it's a muscle of choosing to activate that joy muscle. The challenge is, is that when the circumstances of our life, the environment of our life, the culture of our life, politics of our life, the environment with our workplace, their relationships, when they govern our full experience of our life and our work, then we lose twice. And so, for me, I just found, I was like, man, I am, there's no way I'm going to be a joyful person. If I don't, I'll find a way to build in some practices of joy. Right.
Jen: Love it. So how does play impact the people around us?
Aaron: Oh, that's such a great question. You know, one of the things that I'm going to read you, a quote that I have in my book here, it's by Brene Brown, it says we have to let go of exhaustion busy-ness and productivity as status symbols and measures of self-worth we're impressing no one. And one of the things that I've found is that in our culture today, we have these what I would call, remember, like Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, remember how this is the little patches they would have on their sashes or their shirts. So, one of the things that I've, I've just envisioned is like, I think our culture today specializes in patches. Like busy-ness, hurry, stress, anxiety. And we kind of wear those like, like, Oh look, I've got, yeah, I have my people will say, are you so busy? Oh yeah.
I'm so busy. Like, Oh, that's a, that's a badge. We're wearing a badge that says I'm so proud. I'm so busy. But because of that, I realized, I was like, man, I got to find a way to not just survive my life. And so, I'll just close by saying that because we don't come with an owner's manual. We have to write those manuals ourselves. We have to become students and architects of our life. So, I just found that over time as I built that out, I'm like, Oh
wow. I know how I work best. I know how to get the optimal, you know, return from this investment of my life. Now I'm still, I'm a student now, so that will continue. And there's not a finish line for this, but I found it way more hopeful adaptable and responsive to our engagement.
Jen: Yeah. I love it. So powerful. So, I have one final question for you and you, and you just said the word. And I'm a, I'm a big believer and a student of hope. So, what makes you hopeful?
Aaron: It makes me hopeful. You remember when COVID first started and people in Italy at 8:00 PM or out on their balconies singing together, that made me hopeful. Made me hopeful, seeing our culture today. I was really moved to see the, the people in protests the last few months. How w how it, wasn't just all black, there's lots of people of all colors and ages and yeah. Socio economic status. Like people are collectively saying it's time for a change. Yeah. I'm hopeful of I'm watching people like on the road be kinder, not everybody, but lots of people like let you in when you need to turn left. You know, like I just think the end is like this conversation about pause. I'm super hopeful. Maybe we've got more agency than we thought. Maybe we can actually steer this thing in a different direction that will actually yield more. Yeah. More life.
Jen: Yeah. I completely agree. And I can't think of a better way to end this episode. Thank you very much, Aaron. That was a fabulous conversation. I learned a lot and I feel like I have some work I need to go do – not “work” work – on myself.
I'm so grateful Aaron could be with us today to share the importance of play and how to reengage with purpose in our lives. Thank you to our producers and our listeners. You can find the WorkWell podcast series on deloitte.com or you can visit various podcatchers using the keyword WorkWell, all one word, to hear more. And if you like the show, don't forget to subscribe so you get all of our future episodes. If you have a topic you'd like to hear on the WorkWell podcast series or maybe a story you would like to share, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. My profile is under the name Jen Fisher or on Twitter @Jenfish23. We're always open to your recommendations and feedback, and of course, if you like what you hear, please share, post, and like this podcast. Thank you and be well.