Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Maurício Kakuei Tanaka
Nine years ago, I was asked a very simple question,
"Do you believe your best days lie ahead of you or behind you?"
At that time, our company that created the market for mobile phone hard cases
was one of the fastest-growing private companies in the US.
We had an amazing CEO and executive team running it.
I was single, thriving living in San Francisco,
and things were looking up and to the right.
So I'm trying to answer the question, and quickly I was ready to say,
"Clearly, they're ahead of me."
But when I hesitated and gave it a moment and an honest consideration,
this upwelling in my gut, crescendo, it rose up through my body
and left me unexpectedly and uncontrollably sobbing in tears.
I suddenly came into contact with the truth in myself
that, somewhere along the way,
I subscribed to a story that life follows an arch
and at some point we're over the hill and on the backside of life,
and that maybe I was there.
This left me in such a crisis.
Despite so much going right for me in my life, something was wrong.
The path that led to here wasn't working for me anymore,
and I was looking for a new path ahead.
Maybe some of you have been here before yourselves.
So I spent the next several years
trying to figure out how to turn that curve upward,
and I'm here today to share with you what I found.
The first thing I did was shift my relationship to goals.
Achieving goals had this hollow victory feel to them,
and I noticed I had this résumé-culture mindset to my life
where I was a bulleted list of achievements
and somehow I was the summation of all that put together.
But clearly, we're so much more than that.
Who we are is how we develop on the path towards those goals.
That's what shapes us, that's who we become.
So to start to turn that curve upwards,
what I did is I realized
the power in the goal wasn't actually in achieving it.
The real power was using the goal to propel a transformational journey,
to hold me in my practices, to keep me on my path,
and I shifted my focus from getting to the goal
to enriching the path itself and widening it.
You see, up until this point,
my path was pretty narrowly focused on the world of actions
and getting things done.
Daily, weekly, monthly,
quarterly rhythms would roll up into annual goals and tenure BHAGs.
In the name of focus, my actions would drive me to a goal
and I would leave big parts of myself behind and ignored.
When I started to include some of those parts on the path,
the path itself became more meaningful and sometimes transformational.
When we walk with our whole self along a path,
that's walking an integral path, and that's what I started to do.
And to name the parts that were missing, I go to Integral Theory,
and Integral Theory is not something you missed in high school Calculus.
It's actually a developmental model,
created by the modern philosopher Ken Wilber,
that organizes all human experience into four distinct quadrants or domains,
and actions is just one of them.
When we expand our awareness in all four domains,
when we experiment with practices in all of them together,
that's walking an integral path
and that's what keeps the curve rising and rising.
But nine years ago, I knew nothing about Integral Theory.
And so I had to get started somewhere to start unfolding the pieces.
And so that night,
inspired, supported and prodded by a few of my friends
and maybe a little bit of alcohol,
I committed to completing an Ironman in six months' time,
and I didn't want this to be yet another box
checked on my bucket list of life.
I wanted the training path itself to be something meaningful,
something that would shape me.
And so I expanded the areas of development into the areas of my thoughts and mind,
the second human domain.
After swimming, biking or running,
the mental aspect of triathlon was the fourth discipline I was training.
My long training sessions were a form of moving meditation,
and despite being in motion,
I was learning to be still with myself and free from distraction.
And in that calmness,
my self-limiting talk had the space to rear its ugly head -
boy, did it.
Thoughts would rise up like,
"You aren't an Ironman."
"You don't belong."
"You aren't even an athlete!
That's for them."
And a particularly insidious, persisting one for me was:
I was never doing enough.
And in training, there was nowhere to put these thoughts aside
and move on to something else.
I chose to face what was coming up
and I started the practice of asking a question,
"Does this thought serve me in moving forward,
or does it keep me where I am today?"
In my growing awareness in this distinction,
I started to notice my patterns and I could understand them,
and to begin to shift them.
Six months later, at the finish line of that first Ironman,
to the announcer's call, "Tony Lillios, you are an Ironman!,"
and in lingering self-doubt, I just cracked and fell away.
And I was left there with this question,
"What else are you convincing yourself you can't be?"
I wasn't one and done.
The person I was shifting into was looking for the next goal
to pull me further down on my path.
And all the training for this first Ironman I did alone,
and I was looking for a group to work with.
And I thought I had some work to do in the human domain of relationships.
And there might be some people here who'd vouch for my need in that domain.
(Laughter)
So I joined a 150-year-old open-water swimming club in San Francisco,
called the South End Rowing Club.
This eclectic group swims every day, all-year long, without wetsuits,
in the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay,
with Alcatraz looming in the background.
I literally dove into the deep end with these guys.
Inspired by other club members pursuing their own big swims,
I identified my next stretch goal for myself
to be the first person to swim across and back
the deepest lake in North America, Crater Lake, in Oregon.
And in training for this over the next two years,
I deepened my mindfulness practices,
swimming in the sublime waters of the San Francisco Bay,
at dawn, with the sun rising up.
In the domain of relationships,
I found myself intertwined in this quirky, loving, passionate ball of humans
where we shared so much more than just swimming.
My fiercely independent self
was loving melting into being part of this interdependent community.
I joined the club looking for a training group
and what I found was a family in adventure.
The fourth human domain
is a domain of places,
and that's the environment we spend our time in,
like our homes or our time out in nature.
And up until this point,
my time outdoors was limited to a handful of backcountry camping trips,
and with that little bit of a taste,
I was craving a grand adventure in the wild,
something I could bring my whole self to,
something that would stretch me in all four domains.
And that came to me in spades,
when I was invited to be part of a historic 42-day unprecedented expedition
to cross the Himalayan country of Bhutan
to explore their policy of Gross National Happiness,
and the experience was transformative.
I came back so alive and so clear.
I had this new way of being in the world that was effortless and natural.
There was an unfolding and a deepening of who I was.
Tony, the business venture guy,
had expanded into "Tony-life-is-a-grand-adventure guy!"
And this is how I came back from Bhutan,
walking an integral path and seeing the four domains that way.
And the domains are organized into our individual domains
and our collective domains;
our internal, unobservable domains
and our external, observable domains.
And we are operating out of all four domains all the time,
but most often, we're completely unaware of at least three of them.
Each of us have a domain we have a bias towards, or we like to work out of,
and for me, that's the domain of actions.
When we find ourself in a place of struggle, with limited options,
we can feel collapsed.
Can you sense into how this feels for you?
Thoughts that rise up.
A relationship you might feel like you're in a rut.
A situation where you don't know what to do next.
Or a place that you feel trapped or constricted by.
We go to the domain we're comfortable with,
and that's where we try to do something about it.
And if we don't do anything in the other domains,
they hold us where we're at.
And so we have to continue to apply effort to create any sort of change,
and eventually that gets tiring, and often we give up.
When we develop in all four domains concurrently,
there's an unfolding that happens, a sustainable shift that happens.
From this place, there's more clarity, more expansiveness, more choice.
We have more access to the wisdom of our whole person there.
This is what walking the integral path can yield,
and this is how I came back from Bhutan.
And in my storytelling of this,
I've explained how this happened for me in the athletic world,
but by no means is this limited to that.
And the goals I set out were quite lofty,
and by no means do they need to be this lofty at all.
For example, I came back from Bhutan with a deepening of appreciation for space
and I wanted to cultivate more space in my life, in all four domains:
more space in my thoughts,
to make clearer decisions;
space in my environment,
to feel wonder and to dream;
space in my calendar,
to be able to go to dinner the next night;
and space in my heart,
to let something unexpected in.
As a single gay man in my 40s, who always wanted to have family -
but that was never going to happen -
I made a choice to move to Lake Tahoe
into a house with a couple of extra bedrooms,
where I could invite friends to stay, especially those with kids.
I wanted to step into the role of "uncle Tony"
in sharing this amazing natural playground we have in our backyards,
and pretty quickly, my front door became a revolving door
with friends coming and going.
And as "uncle Tony," I came alive!
And in all this,
my stories and beliefs around not being able to have a family started to crack,
and a new story started to emerge,
a story of unexpected possibility.
Unexplainably, piece by piece by piece fell into place
to bring forth an unimaginable future for myself.
Four years ago, my path brought me the incredible gift of my daughter,
and two years later, the gift of my son.
And if you asked me that question from nine years ago,
I can tell you my best days clearly lied ahead.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)