Latest / Real STRength with Sarah Draper / The Future Walk That Changes Leaders | #1
Transcript
- Sarah Draper: Best leaders aren't exhausted because of how hard they work. They're exhausted because they never check in with how they're doing or where they're heading. You work and work and at first momentum carries you, but eventually you're drifting. The writing this by hand immediately after the walk cements your insight before the noise floods back in. Welcome to the Future Walk Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Draper. Each week on the podcast. I explore tools to help you lead your best now and into the future, and I talk with top leaders to see how they stay focused when life gets cluttered. It's time to stop reacting to your life and start leading it. Welcome to Future Watch. Welcome to the Future Walk podcast. I'm Sarah Draper and I'm so glad you're here. For more than three decades, I served in high stakes environments of the army and the FBI, deploying overseas, managing national security programs, leading high stakes operations, and working with some of the most talented leaders I've ever met. People who work extraordinarily hard in trying circumstances. No fail environments. It's no surprise that some, including me, struggled to maintain that high level of performance for an entire career, as well as long-term harmony with their life outside of work. Here's what I learned during that time. The best leaders aren't exhausted because of how hard they work. They're exhausted because they never create the time or space to step out of the noise and check in with how they're doing and where they're heading. There was never a shortage of discipline or grit. Those weren't the issue. Reaction, survival mode, and drift were. That's why I created the Future Walk. It's the ultimate antidote to the things that derail leaders the most. Each week on this podcast, I'll share practical tools and frameworks to help you redesign how you lead and live with intention. Some weeks I'll walk you through the Future Walk framework and specific practices, while other weeks I'll interview leaders about how they've stayed on track or found their way back when they were pulled off. Today, by the end of this episode, you'll understand what a Future Walk is, why it works, and how to take one yourself. And more importantly, you'll see how this simple practice can reshape your leadership and your life. Because beyond walking, This is about you taking back control of your life, your choices and your leadership. It's about being intentional with how you spend your days and your years. The future walk is how you start to see that and find your way there. So what is a future walk? It's how you stop reacting to your life and start leading it. And it's very simple. You walk solo or with one other person. outside if possible, leaving your phone behind or putting it on do not disturb, and you walk at a calm and steady pace, thinking forward about the future you're building. That's it. But the impact is profound. And there's a lot of science behind it. Some of that is that walking increases your creative output by around 60%. Stanford research found that 81 % of participants were more creative while walking than sitting. Another study found that just 10 minutes outdoors improves attention and executive function. Nature walks decrease anxiety and rumination while increasing your working memory. Time in nature lowers your stress hormones and shifts you out of fight or flight into clearer thinking. And this can happen in just five to 20 minutes and walking by side by side with someone enhances your conversation, quality and cooperation. The truth is that you're exhausted. Not because of how hard you work, not just because of that, but because you to never step out of the noise long enough to check in and reset. You work and work and at first momentum carries you, but eventually You're drifting, you're running on fumes, reacting to whatever comes at you. Daily fires begin to consume your vision until you forget what you're even building towards. That's where the future walk comes in. And you don't take it to escape your reality. You take it to design and refocus it. And when you build a future walk into your rhythm, everything sharpens. your presence, your thinking, your conversations, and your ability to lead yourself and your people towards a future that you've intentionally created. Now for me, the Future Walk was born from survival mode. It transformed my life and is now the tool that gets me to my best self no matter what I'm doing. I did not start as an entrepreneur or a leadership coach or a speaker. I started as a driven kid with a heart for service who always chose the hardest path. And I married a man who was wired the exact same way. About nine years ago, we were deep in the chaos of life. We were both in high stress FBI careers. I was leading national security programs for a state while we were raising two kids with no family support for two days in any direction. We made it work through spreadsheets and what we called tag team parenting. I was leading much the same way I was living, jumping from crisis to crisis, never stopping long enough to think, much less lead with presence. Some weeks felt like pure survival. Our only consistent connection was an evening walk when we were both home. My husband and I these walks to kind of download the previous day and plan the next. But one night, for some reason, we started talking about the future. And this wasn't like the next 24 hours, the next day, it was the next decade. And we started to ask ourselves, where do we wanna be? What's this all for? Who do we wanna be when our youngest leaves for college? That night became what we called our 11-year plan. And it was our first future walk. Every major decision since then, has been based on what that conversation led to. Me going to grad school, job changes, moving across the country twice, how we spend our money, how we take care of our health, how, where we live, what we do with our time, all of it. That future walk shaped our entire trajectory. And I brought this idea into my leadership, walking and talking with people I led instead of sitting across a desk. I use it for my own clarity. from mentoring and coaching, 10 minutes outside created space, widened the frame and brought me back to what mattered. I'm sharing this now because it reshaped how I lead and think and find clarity. It brings me buoyancy and storms and now anchors the work I bring to others. The leaders I work with today use it to get out of survival mode, to widen their perspective. protect their energy and sharpen their decisions. The Future Walk changed my life and my leadership. And I'm here to give that same clarity to you. So you can create that future that you look forward to and are proud to live. Now at a high level for a framework of what a Future Walk is, it's not one size fits all. There are three main types, each designed to address a specific challenge that can cause leaders to go off course. Think of these as like antidotes to three primary derailers. The first one is your daily future walk. And this is an antidote to reaction. The daily fires, the urgency, the back to back meetings, messages, and crises, real and not real, that end up consuming you and your energy. The time focus on a daily walk is the rest of whatever day you're in. It's 10 to 15 minutes and it gives you the space to step back and choose your priority instead of reacting to whatever screams the loudest at you. The second is the strategic feature walk. This is an antidote to survival mode and burnout. It's focused on the next month or quarter and it's 20 to 30 minutes in length. This forces you to identify where you're ignoring your boundaries just to get through and helps you see where you can get back in control. And the third is a visioning future walk. This is an antidote to drift, which is losing sight of your long-term why and your purpose. Your time focus on this is three to five years or even longer. It's about 30 to 50 minutes and it recalibrates your long-term heading and connects you to your vision. So together, you've got your daily future walk that keeps you from reacting. The strategic walk keeps you from burning out or staying in survival mode. And the visioning future walk keeps you from drifting. And together, these three will create a rhythm of intentional leadership that starts with how you lead your own life. So let's dig into each of them and I'm share my real world experiences with The first, the daily future walk. This is again, 10 to 15 minutes. Normally this is a solo walk and you are focused on the rest of the day. This is the antidote to reaction in daily urgency. It's intended to help you step back from the noise and choose your priority instead of letting that urgency dictate your day. You can use it when you like want to set your priorities first thing in the morning. Maybe to reset midday between meetings or mid-afternoon when your to-do list has grown and you need to identify the number one thing that needs to get done during the rest of that day. You can use it before a tough conversation to lock in how you want to show up in your most important message. It's very tactical, focused on what's next. How you do it is you leave your phone behind or if you wanna take it for safety, put it on do not disturb, but please resist the urge to check the time or take a photo of something you see. You don't wanna get pulled back into whatever's coming at you from that phone. And you walk outside if you can get outside at an easy pace, a parking lot will do. And you're just walking and asking yourself, what is the one thing I need to. prioritized to lead at my absolute best for the remainder of the day. Focus in on one question. And if you're not focused on leadership for the rest of your day, it could be something like, what does winning look like for me today? Or what energy do I want to bring to the rest of my day? Just one thing at the rest for the rest of your day. You walk for 10 to 15 minutes, or even five if that's all you have. And when you finish, Immediately write down one action or priority on paper before you look at your phone or re-enter your workspace. Put that note somewhere visible for your rest of the day. Writing this by hand immediately after the walk cements your insight before the noise floods back in. And one action, you're just focusing on one thing. It keeps it executable. You are not trying to solve everything. just identifying what matters the most for today. I just did one this afternoon before I record it. And I've had a really busy day with my mom's house going on the market tomorrow and all the messages and emails from the realtor and all the various people that are doing work on the house and getting things ready. And then I've got on top of that all my normal daily work and distractions. I will be honest, I've been procrastinating a bit because Launching a podcast feels like a really big deal, right? And I'm a recovering perfectionist, I say. So I needed to lock in today to make sure I did this. And the question I asked myself on the future walk I just finished was, how do I want to be for this? My answer, two things, clear and true. Clear meaning focused and attentive in my delivery. And true is, true to who I am and true to you. My whole purpose in doing this podcast is because I've discovered this tool that can help anyone. So I want everyone to learn about it and use it. I need to be true to that. My 15 minute walk today gave me exactly what I needed to show up for you right now. The next future walk is the strategic future walk. And again, this one is 20 to 30 minutes. It can be solo or with a key partner, like a collaborator or a colleague, a coach, a mentor, someone you lead, a significant other, but one other person that you are invested in their success or they are invested in you. Focus on the next month or quarter. This is the antidote to survival mode and burnout. Survival mode is when you're just trying to keep your head above water. You're taking the path of least resistance just to get through. And this can work for a short period of time, but if it continues day after day, week after week, you start to lose some of yourself. You start to violate your own boundaries, maybe ethical or moral or purpose or your work life harmony. You do what you do just to keep the peace. Every little boundary violation you have creates this like little bit of a release of cortisol, the stress hormone. And days as these days of this happening become weeks, which become months and years, this long-term impact can lead to burnout or worse. So the goal of a strategic future walk is to identify where you're in survival mode and make corrections before you burn out. And again, how to do this one is you leave your phone behind or place it on do not disturb for all the same reasons and walk at an easy pace. If you're by yourself, you can ask yourself a question like this. Where have I noticed survival mode taking over lately? And what's the one specific correction I will make to stay strategic? Or if you're with someone else, you can walk side by side and ask, where are we surviving as a team or as a couple? And what's one correction we need to make together to stay aligned and intentional? Some other questions you could ask on the strategic future walk would be, what's one strategic priority I or we need to protect over the next 90 days? Where am I or we saying yes, where we should be saying no? And you walk for 20 to 30 minutes. And when you finish this one, you're going to write down two bullet points. One is the insight. where you've been in survival mode. And the second is the correction, where you're committed to change. This works because 20 to 30 minutes is optimal for collaborative creativity and strategic alignment. Two bullet points at the end keep it focused and actionable. You're not trying to overhaul everything. You're just identifying one correction that matters. When I used this one recently was in January. I was in Michigan getting my mom's house emptied to prepare it to sell, which again is happening tomorrow. It'd been a pretty challenging year. I'll just say that she'd had a fall, had to move into assisted living. And then we later moved her out of state to be closer to family. I took the lead of managing everything with clearing and selling the house. The nine days I spent there were all honestly like most physically demanding days I'd had since I was in the army. It was bitterly cold and a lot of the work happening was outdoors. I was so focused as I was sorting the house and figuring out what to do with things. I was so focused on each and every item. I had to, and if you've been through this, you're just saying you have to look at it, assess it, review it. Do I save it for family? Do I sell it, gift it, donate it, discard it? Everything that she and my dad had from their lives, as well as many things from their family's lives, were in that house. Antique furniture, photos of people I'd never even heard of before, things from my childhood and my siblings. And it was a lot doing all of this while coordinating all the various people to come in to sell, gift, donate, et cetera, load the dumpster with. The last thing, the... Very last thing I felt I had time for was a future walk to think about myself, but I knew I needed to do it. So I did it. I focused during that walk on what is going to be my priority the first few months of the year. What do I want to accomplish in my business? So came out of that was starting this podcast, scheduling some workshops, finishing a breathwork facilitation training I'm doing and beginning a regular column or newsletter. also had to decide to make these things happen. I had to decide what I was going to let go of to make time and energy for all of that. So I focused on myself, just a short walk, and I came back re-energized about the task at hand with the house and inspired about what lay ahead for me once that was done. So even in the middle of one of the most demanding periods of my recent life, the strategic future walked kept me from losing myself completely to survival mode. And the third is the visioning future walk. Again, this is 30 to 50 minutes solo or with a spouse, partner, mentor, or other family member or close friend. You're focused on three to five years from now or maybe something farther away, like when a child, if you have children, leave the house or retirement or something like that. The antidote to drift and losing sight of your long-term why is this visioning future work. You drift when survival mode causes you to lose sight of what you're working for. You might have some unformed idea of how you want things to be when you retire, but you've never really put words to it. So you don't really have any framework to build shorter term goals from. Or you might find yourself either shifting from thing to thing over the long term or going years on with the path of going on years and years with the path of least resistance. And then one day you look back, you're like, how did I get here? Couple examples of drift that show up in your life in pretty understandable ways or with your health and your career. So with the health, you know, you want to be healthy for your future, right? but you've not specified what you want to be able to do. So you bounce from health trend to health trend without making any real progress. Or you keep doing what you did when you were younger without accounting for the change work and life demands. Maybe you skip your exercises because other demands shout louder because it's not tied to a vision. Or maybe in your career you move from role to role trying to find the perfect fit. or you stay in an unchallenging job for security or perceived lack of options, or you just follow the corporate advancement process. Now, any of these are fine if they're done with intention, but without intention, you look back in the end of your career or mid-career and you're like, how did I get here? So the vision in FutureWalk's goal is to identify where you're going. So you live your life and you lead with intention. Again, this works the same way. You leave your phone behind, it or place it on do not disturb. You walk outside at an easy pace. And if you're with someone else, like a coach or mentor, you can ask this question and then think out loud. Who is the leader and person I want to be three to five years from now or at this future point? And what am I building that will be most, I'll be most If you're with a spouse or partner or a family member, where and how do we want to be at that three to five year mark? And what are we building together that we are most proud of? Other things you can think about are how or what do I want our life to look like in three to five years? What am I doing now that doesn't serve the leader and person I want to become? Can you walk for 30 to 50 minutes and when you finish, spend 10 or 15 minutes writing some things down. This is your vision and this is gonna serve as like your long term purpose and why. So you wanna spend some solid time writing down your thoughts or your vision. You could sketch actually a rough visual. like a mind map or even an image of what that vision is, who you are, what you've built, how you feel. You could write your dream day description of a day in the future, five years from now in present tense, like your ideal day, very vivid language, what you're doing, how you're feeling, what you've let go of who you're with. And if you've done this walk with someone else who's a partner of yours, each of you should write for you know, a few minutes and then share aloud and identify where you have shared alignment and share commitments and where you don't. So you can work through those now so you're not headed down the road on different paths. This one works because 30 to 50 minutes at timeframe supports deep attention restoration and your visionary thinking. Writing or sketching when you get back forces you to move from this like abstract dreaming to concrete design. And the pen to paper debrief prevents the vision from evaporating once you return to your daily life. That's why it's so important to capture this. So I did this one with my husband around the time I retired from the FBI. Now I'd been working for the government my entire adult life. So I was now faced with the prospect of becoming a solopreneur. without the guardrails and directions of the system I'd come from, I knew I would risk chasing shiny objects if I wasn't intentional. So we laid it out. How did we want our life to be when our youngest was settled into college, which at that point would be about five years from then. And we'd finally have this freedom and flexibility to begin to do the things we dreamed of when we had that first future walk years ago. That's a really energizing thing. But we needed to get a little bit more concrete on what specific we want to do and accomplish and have. Where do we want to travel? What activities do we want to do? How would we want our health to be? The parts that we can control. Where would we buy a house? These more solid things were grounding for this like feel good vision of where we wanted to go. And the specif- This city of dreams and visions in our five-year plan currently helps me stay on track now every day to reach those goals. And because it's partnered, we hold each other accountable as these are shared goals. We're not there yet. We've got a little bit more time and we're still working forward and are excited about it. So that visioning future walk gave us a shared destination. And every decision since gets measured against that vision. So there you have it. Three types of future walks, three anecdotes to what derails leaders the most, three ways to stop reacting, stop survival mode, and stop drifting. Each week on this podcast, I'll share practical tools and frameworks to help you redesign how you work and live with intention. Some episodes will go deeper into one type of future walk. Others will feature leaders who've gotten off track in how they found their way back. You'll hear their stories, their struggles, and the specific practices that really helped them regain clarity. So your action this week, now that you've listened to this, is to experience it. Pick one of the three future walks that resonates with you. And this week, head outside. Leave your phone or put it on do not disturb and take that walk. Notice what becomes clear. Come back, write it down. That's your first future walk. Future walk changed my life and my leadership. And I'm here to help you do the same. It's created a future you look forward to and are proud of. We'll do this together. Thanks for joining me on the Future Walk podcast. I'm Sarah Draper. I'll see you next week. And until then. Enjoy your work.