Blossoming In Every Season: Achieving The Work-Life Bloom With Dan Pontefract

Bloom where you're planted – the secret to thriving in both work and life lies in embracing change and nurturing your growth. Join us as we sit down with Dan Pontefract, a renowned speaker, culture change expert, leadership strategist, and best-selling author of five award-winning books. Today, he dives deep into the lessons and insights from his latest book, "Work-Life Bloom." Sharing his life journey, Dan unravels the power of curiosity, impact of empathy, and the definition of “blooming”. He discusses  why traditional concepts like "work-life balance" and "employee engagement" may not serve us as well as we think, and how a new paradigm of "work-life integration" and "blooming" can empower individuals and teams to flourish. Tune in now to transform the way you think about leadership, curiosity, and the pursuit of a fulfilling life.

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Blossoming In Every Season: Achieving The Work-Life Bloom With Dan Pontefract

In this episode, it is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Dan Pontefract. He is a renowned leadership strategist, award-winning author, and keynote speaker with decades of experience helping organizations and leaders improve performance, productivity, and overall engagement. He has presented at four TED events and earned multiple industry awards including Thinkers50 Radar, HR Weekly's 100 Most Influential People In HR, peopleHum's Top 200 Thought Leaders To Follow, and Inc. Magazine's Top 100 Leadership Speakers. Amazing. Dan has written five bestselling books and has also written for Forbes and Harvard Business Review. He lives in Victoria, BC with 3 goats, 2 dogs, 2 cats, and his wife. It is truly amazing to welcome you to the show.

Tony, it's great to be here. I'm sitting around. I've got marshmallows. I have my s'mores ready to go and good Canadian chocolate. Thanks for the invite.

I'm a huge fan because I love the work you put out there. I'm excited about your book called Work-Life Bloom.

I'm taking a sledgehammer to employee engagement and work-life balance. We can talk about that later. Let's get into some personal matters first.

That's what we're going to do. As we do on the show, we talk about people's journeys to getting to where they are making a huge impact, which you are, through what's called flashpoint. These are points in your journey that have ignited your gifts into the world. What I'd like you to do is to share what you're called to share and along the way, we will stop and see what themes are showing up. Take it away.

I have parents who immigrated with me from England because it was free to immigrate to Canada and 10 pounds to immigrate to Australia when England was trying to populate the Commonwealth. The frugality of my father was how I ended up in Canada, outside of Toronto. I grew up in a town called Hamilton, which for any American viewer is a lot like Pittsburgh. It's a steel town, blue collar, and some good people but some tough people as well like rugged. I was a bit like a fish out of water. I'm a more metrosexual individual, one who likes fashion and design and is in touch with my humanity. I was often running with the bulls.

It dawned on me that probably it’s not where I wanted to live my whole life and nothing against Hamilton. I still have a brother and sister who lived there and lots of friends but it wasn't for me. I made it my point to get out of Hamilton to do my undergrad. Being English, I could go to England and do undergrad, or maybe there is a Europe in North America where I could do my undergrad.

That's either in the bayou in the French Quarter in New Orleans or Montreal. Those are the only two European cities that I can think of in North America. I went to Montreal and McGill where I met a French babe. We got married right away. My beloved Denise and I graduated in what's called the BEd Program. We were educators. When we got married, we looked at each other and said, “Let's not do snow.”

We immigrated as far as we could in Canada to the West Coast of Vancouver. I was a high school teacher for two years and then realized that was probably not the right venue. I love kids but I needed to spread my wings I suppose. I did a couple of retooling activities in terms of my education and then ended up a director of what's called DCIT. It's like MIT for Canada to a degree, the British Columbia Institute of Technology.

I pitched the Dean of Computing and Academic Studies there to hire me as a 25-year-old to run their new spanking nude downtown campus. For some reason, Dr. Ken Takagaki took this chance on this punk from the East and more or less said, “Let's go for it.” I spent 5 or 6 years learning about entrepreneurialism, business, leadership, teams, academia, and so on. Eventually, high-tech companies started asking me, “Do you want to come to work for us in San Jose, Vancouver, or Toronto?”

I made the leap in 2002 to a company called Crystal Decisions. They called me the Global Head of Learning and Development. That eventually became SAP after eleven acquisitions. I had this 6 or 7-year run in high tech as a learning culture leadership professional, running leadership culture and training technology. AT&T of Canada phone called TELUS in 2008 said, “We have a culture issue. Why don't you come over here?” I did.

I jumped over to TELUS and became the Chief Learning Officer there. I had a great time helping tons of people and people helping the organization shift its culture. By 2014, I pitched the CEO, this idea of what I call TTO, TELUS Transformation Office. I plucked a couple of troubadours from inside the organization and said, “Let's go help our customers with culture change.” I did that for another 4 or 5 years. Eventually, I decided, “I should go on my own and put my big boy pants on.” On January 1, 2019, I started up, A Company of One, known as Pontefract Group. There's only one of us. It’s a bit of irony. The group is me and I'm a group of one.

There's something about what you've shared starting from the beginning that has me thinking, “If you don't like your environment, change it.” You've done that from day one. Oftentimes, people try to accept their environment and adapt to it. Instead, you looked at the environments that you are in and said, “This isn't working for me. I'm going to do my thing and create my way of showing up.” That's brilliant. When you look at all the ways that have manifested throughout the years, it's truly powerful. Even asking to create a transformation group within TELUS is pretty powerful. A little side note, I also used to use Crystal Reports. I'm quite familiar to a painful extent.

I would've been the guy behind a lot of that training material that a lot of customers, partners, and suppliers would get, including training the workforce on how to use Crystal Reports and so on. I am very familiar with various versions of CR.

Would you agree that you're someone who is one for not accepting your environment and is it important for the work you're doing?

One of the ways in which to describe me is I am perpetually dissatisfied with the status quo. I used to read the dictionary as a kid. The reason I wanted to read the dictionary as a kid was because I wanted to improve my vernacular, which is a fancy word to say lexicon, which is a fancier way to say words and your dialogue. That's always been that.

It's the autodidact in me, another fancy way to say self-learner. That was me rhyming off a bunch of words. I probably learned as an 8 or 12-year-old reading the dictionary that has carried me through my life. I'll give you an example. It happens in work and life. Thank you for picking up on that. It's not that I am transient or addicted to being a very pathetic individual, like always moving. It's just that I'm curious. I need to learn more.

My life example, I always wanted to build a house. I didn't know anything about architecture but I like design. I went and forced myself to learn architecture by taking a bunch of courses and programs. I would shadow an architect so that I could build my home with Denise. We did that. It took about two years in total, finding the right property and learning enough to design the house with the 3D modeling, handing that over to a builder, and saying, “Could you build this with a couple of modifications because I'm not a licensed architect?” We did it and it was great.

Two years from the day of the property purchase, taking the courses, learning, designing, building, and setting foot in the house, it was fantastic. That day was July 1, 2019. We're recording this in the summer of 2023. Denise and I have said, “We should do that again and learn more.” Our friends are like, “You're crazy. What do you mean you're going to go build another house? You just did one.” We're like, “There's more to learn. Why not do it again and see if we can improve upon it and learn more about what it is like to architect and design a house?” Our friends think we're nuts but we think it's like, “No, this is the right thing to do. Let's do this.”

I knew there was a reason why I liked you a lot. I'm an architecture buff and I love design. If I didn't follow the path into pre-med and then finance, I would've been an architect. My family and I have built over eight houses. When you describe this, there's something that comes to mind when your curiosity gets you in trouble. What’s a situation where it's like, “I think I overstepped?”

Lots of times. That's the beauty of pushing yourself and your curiosity. It's in those mistakes that when you've pushed yourself too far, you're like, “I did go too far on that one. Next time when I come to that moment, I'm going to pull myself back, hold the reins a bit, and not let the bulls ride again.” Let's talk about TTO or the TELUS Transformation Office. There was this a period there where I felt that we should be pushing this new-ish technology to clients saying, “This is something that you should use because look at what we're doing here at TELUS.”

It's going gangbusters. Everyone loves this thing because I had brought it in as a Chief Learning Officer. I realized in hindsight after 18 months of trying to push this to clients that they were 5 and 10 years behind the thinking of where we were at TELUS. I was getting frustrated in my head, “What's wrong with these people? We did it. Why can't you do it?” This was probably 2015 or 2016. I learned the lesson that not everyone is going to be at the same stage when you're trying to invoke change.

Just because you did it once and did it successfully doesn't mean that everyone's going to all of a sudden tell, “Let's follow Dan and his crazy ideas.” That's one. It’s that curiosity of me saying, “What worked here? I'm curious enough to continue to push you, the client, on why you should be doing this.” They’re saying, “You are nuts. No.” I had to learn to eat that and be much more patient.

I'm sure that has created a sense of slowing down for you and listening more intuitively to, “Where are they? How can I meet them where they are and bring them to where I want to take them, or at least where I think they want to go but it has to start with that sense of slowing down and listening?” I know a lot of us are impatient.

To be honest, it taught me enough to write a book about it. My third book was called Open To Think: Slow Down, Think Creatively, and Make Better Decisions. The whole purpose of saying the title Open To Think is you have to be open to thinking. It's not just about curiosity. Thinking also includes decisions and actions. You have to be open to all three. Why did I put Slow Down in the subtitle? It is to remind me that to think properly and help people, you have to slow things down. Back to the tortoise and the hare metaphor, it's not always the hare that is going to win because the tortoise is slowing down the thinking before the doing.

I am so glad you mentioned that book because that’s one of my favorite books by you, until your next book comes out, which I'm sure will be brilliant. It's great because it elicits that sense of we have to have that sense of how can we ensure that we're not just being close-minded and accepting what is but continuing to keep the aperture open a little longer. Also, knowing that we have to ensure that we're taking action when we have those ideas that come into mind. I love that book.

It's all about us being humble enough to your point about when curiosity got you in trouble. What I learned as well, the humility, I'm alluding here and being humble was the two prong or twin sisters of empathy and listening. It comes with wisdom and age. Aging creates wisdom. Turn 50, you can look back a little bit to say, “What am I doing differently than in my 20s or 30s?”

Empathy and listening are the two twins that have helped me. I reminded an audience of sales professionals and executives that listen is an anagram for silent. I need to continue to remind myself or I should put a tattoo on my left arm or left hand that listen equals silent. When you're silent, you're listening for those cues and that helps your curiosity. You're paying more attention to the do's and don'ts, the pros and the cons, and the needs and the wants of whomever you are liaising with. That was number two.

On the empathy side, I've learned a lot about the head, heart, and hand and how social psychologists and the like have honed in on empathy as being compassionate and emotional. Cognitive is how we think people are thinking about situations. Emotional is how people feel about certain situations. Sympathetic or compassionate is the doing part, “Can we do something about it?” I've learned a lot about the breakdown of empathy. What I call head, heart, and hand, using your head to get in people's heads, using your heart to get in people's hearts, and using your hands to do something about it, helped me as well with my curiosity. I hope to be a different type of person and leader.

I love what you shared because it's right on point with how we should be thinking about empathy and listening. One of the things that came to mind around this is you talked about age as a great way to advance your learning and see how this all comes together. When we first start doing things in the world, we have a lot of ego involved. We want to be right and prove ourselves but then you realize that it's not about proving ourselves. It's about opening up to everyone else's ideas. Listening to others in the end shows value for you because it shows them you care.

One of the things I often advocate, which I didn't in my 20s but learned about in my early 30s from a wise gentleman about 8 or 10 years older than me, Chuck Hamilton of IBM, was reverse mentors. When you're a Gen X like me and you're in your 20s, you're not thinking about Gen Y/Millennials because they're 10 years old but when you turn to your 30s, all of a sudden, millennials are coming into the organization or life, let's say, as adults. Chuck taught me how having a reverse mentor, someone 12 or 15 years younger than you, can listen. They teach you what's going on in their heads, lives, work, and what have you.

I've carried that forward. I have usually several reverse mentors, people who are not just younger than me but at times, much younger than me so that I'm listening in on what's going on with Gen-Zs, let's say, and their world of complete alliance on Snapchat, WhatsApp, TikTok, and everything that's collaborative sharing. I’m like, “You guys are like a posse of decision-makers together. That's what you're thinking.” I would not learn a lot of that if I was just reading articles. I need to have reverse mentors. That's back to your point of shutting up listening and being open to your infallibilities.

That's exactly where we're at. It's thinking more instead of individualistically, it's more collectively. What is it that we as a whole are moving towards, not just me? Instead of the me, it's the we. I want to get back into your story a bit and find out how you got into this world of writing books. You've written quite a few amazing books but tell me about the journey to writing. Was it a simple thing for you? You're like, “It's made obvious sense,” or was it a challenge at first?

All the above but let me break it down. Even as mentioned when I was growing up in Hamilton, Ontario, outside of Toronto, I would write songs as a kid. That sounds weird but my dad showed up with an organ one day, one of those church organs, two levels with a foot pedal. I learned how to play music by ear on a keyboard on this organ that showed up in my house when I was about 7 or 8. I thought, “Now that I know C, G, and D and I can put some chords together, I'll start writing music.” I couldn't write music without writing words. The songs were together the whole time. Some artists will write the music, then the lyrics or the lyrics, then the music. To me, it was together.

I started then and I was pretty creative writing about girls, boys, Hamilton soccer, and all the things that I love but then I got branched out in creative about metaphors and poems essentially. They became poems. Fast forward, I got to high school. I'm starting to take creative writing and high school courses. Mr. Masotti took me aside one day and he is an English teacher. He said, “With a little bit of honing, you could be a pretty good writer one day. You're all over the map but you see things that others don't.” I'll never forget Mr. Masotti. Dennis is an incredible Italian-Canadian who pulled me aside and said that. That gives you back to the point where teachers can have such an indelible and impactful mark on kids.

Mr. Masotti said those lines. He took me outside to the room there and hung with me. When I was fledgling in my career, my emails were always pretty good. My business writing was pretty good. When I joined TELUS after leaving SAP in 2008, I made a conscious choice. I said, “It's 2008. Dan, you're 36. It's time for you to start writing publicly about vicariously what this journey might be like for you.”

I started a blog. I called it TrainingMag.com. I started jamming. That was the middle of 2008. Eventually, three years later, I'm giving a keynote in an audience with a Wiley editor in the audience. We're in 2011. Don pulled me aside at the end of the keynote and said, “I've been wondering about you. I've been reading your blog for the last eighteen months or so and here you are in my town. I showed up at this keynote. Why aren't you writing a book? You're a great writer.”

I thought, “Thank you, Don. Let's get on that.” It goes back to you never know who might be listening, reading in an audience, in a meeting, or on a Zoom call, observing you. Back to the point of curiosity, when we started chatting, it was my curiosity. I was allowing myself to learn about writing in the public domain and hone that craft in a public way for three years until serendipitously, an editor from Wiley was in the audience of a keynote, which led to my first book and contract Flat Army. That was published in 2013.

There is something that you triggered in me. Curiosity is an inside game in a sense. It starts with an inside journey of understanding, “What do I want to look into now?” You have to have the courage to express that externally. That might mean, “I'm going to start writing in a public setting and see what happens. It's going to be crap at first and then it's going to get better.” People are going to start noticing.

You might not even know that they're noticing but then what happens is people are watching and eventually that leads to something that could be even bigger. What you demonstrated is this beautiful cadence that takes place when you start doing stuff and following your curiosity. Don't give up on following that path. What an amazing outcome to have that person in the audience reaching out, believing in you, and seeing this path forward.

There’s a bit of an example as well, the old proverbial, “When you get to a floor, even if it's the top floor, send the elevator back down.” I've learned a lot from my contemporaries. I'll give you two other examples. Stephen Denning is a legend in my mind. He’s a management writer. When that book Flat Army came out, he asked for a copy, which first of all, I was wowed, and then reviewed it on Forbes. He spoke to the editor of Forbes and said, “You need to sign Dan up to be a columnist with Forbes.”

He pinched this Canadian weirdo kid from Hamilton who ran with the bulls and escaped McGill to meet a French babe, move to Vancouver, and work in these high-tech companies thinking he was an educator but with adults. Stephen Denning is reviewing your first book and recommending that you write for Forbes to the editor of Forbes. That's sending the elevator back down. Steven is twenty-plus years older than me.

I’ll give you a second example of sending the elevator back down. I'm writing my second book called The Purpose Effect. I'm having a grand old time. I think I'm the king of the hill. Flat Army was a critical success and bestseller in Canada in the management space, which is not a lot of copies but it is what it is. I'm like, “I'm going to crush this book, be a gazillionaire, and sell gazillions of copies.” I sent the draft, the alpha that is on its way to being printed effectively with the publisher.

I send the book to a gentleman by the name of Roger Martin, the former Dean of Rotman School of Business and legendary management thinker in and of himself. For those who aren't aware, Google Roger L. Martin. You will be delivered a litany of strategy, design thinking, and integrative thinking. Roger is the pioneer of both of those. Roger read the book and phoned me up the next morning. He's in Florida. I'm in Vancouver.

He says, “I hate to say this but please tell your publisher to stop the press.” I'm in tears, “Roger Martin is hating my book. What's happening?” He's like, “Come meet me in San Francisco and we will put this book back together. Tell your publisher you need another 6 to 12 months.” I go to San Francisco. I met Roger. We sit in Tim Brown's audio office for the day. We whiteboard this thing about what's in it, what's missing, what are the key points, and what research I still need to do. I couldn't be more grateful for that act of love to help somebody out who is 15 or 20 years younger than them.

There's an image that comes to mind of if he didn't care, he'd be like, “Let's watch Dan fail and see what happens.” People who care reach out. They say, “Let's move the mountains to make this better.” What we need is people looking out and believing in us. One of the things that I've come to see is that we have to have people who believe in us first before we can believe in ourselves. Ultimately, what is powerful about some of these examples is that this door opened up and it changed the game for you.

I'm not just grateful. It's emboldened me to do the same. I'm not Denning or Martin. I'm just Dan but I do believe that I can help raise the boats of others in the harbor by doing what little I could, can, and will do for other contemporaries.

I can't thank you enough. This is brilliant. I want to get into your book and know more about the ideas that you're most jazzed about in this book. It's very timely for where we are. Please share some ideas from Work-Life Bloom.

It's the fifth book. I suppose each book builds on itself. I'm not writing in different genres. They're all about the human condition in work and life. What I realized is that I've been a hypocrite for several years, even in Flat Army, The Purpose Effect, Open To Think, and Lead. Care. Win. It would espouse terms like employee engagement and work-life balance and even bring your best self to work and your most authentic self.

I was ruminating to the point where in bike rides, it was annoying me because I do a lot of cycling and this was my thinking time, “What am I doing? What are these terms?” I started asking people and doing focus groups or global research about work-life balance or employee engagement. It dawned on me that they start as zero-sum games. With Gallup, BlessingWhite, and Aon, Great Place To Work, it seems as though employee engagement scores don't change. Whether it's in America, North America, Europe, globally, or Asia, they seem to be the same.

They've been the same for many years and no one's questioning that. It's like, “That's how it is. Roughly 30% of people are engaged, 20% are chronically disengaged, and 50% are not engaged more or less.” I'm like, “Why do we keep spending all this money on these firms to do these employee engagement scores first of all? Secondly, why do we spend all this money in the organization to ‘fix’ employee engagement? Maybe we're looking at this wrong. Maybe the model's wrong.”

There's no such thing as employee engagement. I approached 50 and then I'm past 50. I'm thinking back, “Was I engaged when I was 30? What did that even mean? Maybe I was.” When I started having three kids, my network started to implode, and my boss was a narcissist, I was like, “Was I engaged? Probably not. Were there other people engaged?”

If I'm doing this up-and-down cycle of engaged, not engaged, chronically disengaged, and others are doing the same but maybe in reverse, no wonder the data hasn't changed because we all fluctuate. Like the seasons, we cycle. There are four seasons. Maybe we have four personas. Dependent upon certain factors in work and life, which is the root pun intended of the book, there are certain factors in work and life that create a persona for us, not in work or life but in both, in work-life.

We all fluctuate. We all are like the seasons. We cycle.

If we are imbalanced, because that's the beginning game, you can't balance work and life, you have to integrate work and life. There’s no such thing as work-life balance or employee engagement. Bringing your best self to work is only a matter of whether or not your leader in your organization is prepared to discuss and set up the conditions to allow you in both work and life to prosper. That's what became a proverbial 2x2 matrix, work on the Y axis, life on the X, and four personas. On the top right of work-life is blooming. Does work feel good? Does life feel clear? Great.

There are times when I'm not going to be blooming. Let's be real. I've felt it. You felt it. Your readers will have felt it and that's okay. The other three personas quickly are budding, stunted, or in renewal. If you're stunted, life is great, work is not. If you're budding, work is great, life is not. If you're in need of renewal, both the work and life factors are in need of renewal and that's it. I have felt it. I plotted myself working at high schools, high-tech companies like Crystal, BusinessObjects, SAP, and TELUS, and on my own, Pontefract Group, A Company of One.

I assure you, even in the same companies, I have felt different personas based on what's going on with certain work and life conditions or factors. That's why I don't believe anymore in employee engagement. I certainly don't believe in work-life balance. If we are to espouse employees/human beings to bring their best selves to work, leaders, you better have a wake-up call and understand that you can't espouse that statement unless you're prepared to have work and life discussions. People can bring their best selves to work. There's the smackdown there.

I'm blown away because first of all, this is brilliant. It's a great take on things. I often say how we need to throw employee engagement out the window and start thinking about employee enrichment. It's a different take but yours is much better. Enrichment is a sense of leading people better than we found them and thinking about how to make them feel as though they're coming to work to thrive and bloom. I love what you're working with but there's something else that's coming to mind.

You're an amazing wordsmith. You used to read the dictionary and words matter. Oftentimes, when people are using these words in the workplace, they're holding people back from truly understanding their condition. When people say, “Are you engaged?” What does that mean? You have to understand what exactly engagement means. Oftentimes, we don't even question ourselves about, “How do I feel about my condition?”

Let's extrapolate on that. Gallup is saying that 20% of employees, and I don't say human beings are team members because they use the word employee, which I loathe but let's leave that for a second, are “chronically” disengaged. You take their little Q12 survey and you are told by Gallup or your boss that you are chronically disengaged. How do you feel about work and life?

Not great.

You want to set fire to the building next time you enter, your team's license, or whatever it is that you're using from your work-from-home office. There's the point. Words matter, thank you for saying that. Blooming is the panacea. Work and life are not just balanced because that's not a thing. They're integrated and there's this harmony between the two. We're flourishing in work and life.

Blooming is the panacea. Work and life are now not just balanced because that's not a thing. They're integrated and there's this harmony between them.

If I'm the opposite of that, that doesn't mean I'm chronically disengaged. That means I'm in need of renewal. Renewal is a positive term. It's okay to be in renewal which is why back to your point when we started chatting, you made a very good astute observation that I was peripatetic and I would move from one gig or opportunity to another. That's because I figured that's part of my renewal phase and that's okay

We start judging ourselves. When I talk to people oftentimes, they're like, “I feel like I had to move to all these different roles and companies. It's got to be me.” Oftentimes, it's not you. You've come to this place where you need a renewal. You need a change to thrive.

The subtitle of the book is How To Build Teams That Flourish Ultimately. That's the point. Thrive and flourish. That's what we want but we have to be realists. You know this far better than most. A) We can't thrive and flourish first of all the time. B) If our organization, leader, and team are set up in a way that admonishes the flourishing, we need to renew. That means as human beings, we need to take matters into our hands.

If that's like, “Dan is leaving a K-12 school because he realizes he's never going to flourish and thrive to go into a higher education institution like BCIT,” so be it. The principal is not in charge of me and my renewal if I don't believe that I fit. That's not the principal's job. That's Dan's job. The principal, Chuck Luttrell, is doing the right thing by helping me see that maybe this wasn't the best fit. He's helping me fly the nest.

A great mindset for us to be thinking is helping people to get what they can out of every opportunity, help them grow but then let them go and do what they need to do to be able to bloom in whatever environment they're in. I can talk to you all day, Dan. This is fantastic but I have to come to our final question, which I ask every guest. What are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you and why?

We'll go two but off the grid, I'm thinking back to me being a teenager because they're so impactful for me, my thinking, upbringing, and the way in which I'm both creative and logical. On the creativity side, it’s Carl Sagan’s Contact. It got me thinking about other worlds and empathy ultimately. It threw me into what could be childhood. I've used that a lot. The movie is okay but the books were far better.

There's a legendary Canadian economist and his name is David Chilton. The book that was handed to me by my dad when I was fourteen was called The Wealthy Barber. Chilton plays part of the barber but the barber is talking to the customers that come in and out of the barbershop about how to be financially stable over the course of your life. It's so well-written.

There are ten lessons that are espoused in that particular book that stayed with me like, “Save 10% or 15% depending on where you are in your level of income every paycheck.” You're 14 years old and you're told to save 10% of your paycheck. I did. It's helped me build houses. Denise and I have a lovely life. Thank you, David Chilton and The Wealthy Barber because those lessons have helped me become this man later in life.

Although I know what Contact is, I never read the book. I want to go find these books and read them. That's why I love asking this question because it's the breadcrumbs. Your stories and insights are truly amazing and brilliant. I am blown away. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

It's a campfire. Sitting here and having a chat around a fire is a very good Canadian thing. I love camping. Thank you for what you do. You're asking people for their stories and doing what you do to help others, hear, see, and feel them. When I work with some First Nations groups here in Canada, there's this wonderful little metaphor called The Path Of The Waterfall. It is our lives. Getting to the waterfall is the afterlife but it's this meandering path. We're all on it. We need people like you to help elicit and solicit stories and the learnings of those waterfall paths.

The path of the waterfall is really our lives and then getting to the waterfall is the afterlife, but it's this meandering path. We're all on it.

I want to save that in a little file for myself so I can remind myself. Thank you so much for that. Before I let you go, I want to make sure people know where to find you. What's the best place for people to reach out if they want to learn more about your work?

First of all, if you've ever been to Victoria, British Columbia, come to the pub at the penny-farthing. I spent a lot of time at the pub. I'll buy you a pint of Fat Tug, a local IPA here. Otherwise, it’s DanPontefract.com or WorkLifeBloom.com. It will get you to the same spot.

I might take up on that offer. I'll be coming up to visit someday.

I love it.

Thank you, readers, for coming on the journey with us. Go grab Dan's books. They're all brilliant. Go look up Dan. I know you're leaving with so many great insights. That's a wrap.

Important Links

• Dan Pontefract
• Work-Life Bloom
• Open To Think: Slow Down, Think Creatively, and Make Better Decisions
• TrainingMag.com
• Flat Army
• The Purpose Effect
• Lead. Care. Win.
• Contact
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