The Power of Yes
Enhance your life and grow by using the Power of Yes! Anytime you are presented with an opportunity to do something that excites you or intrigues you even a little bit, learn to say ‘YES’! On today’s podcast, we learn how saying ‘yes’ to the right opportunities help you to grow and to lead a much more interesting and fulfilling life. Also learn when you should say ‘no’ by using Derek Siver’s, “If it’s not a ‘Hell Yes’, then it’s a ‘NO’!”
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30 Lessons For Living by Karl A. Pillemer
Adventure Travel Show podcast : Learn the skills needed for adventure travel
One of my most unusual ‘Yes’es:Â Moving four thousand sheep fifty miles on rural Idaho roads!
Show Transcript
 Angie asked us, “Want to move sheep?” Now, what I know about livestock fills the head of a pin with space leftover, but when the opportunity to walk thousands of sheep a hundred miles to the shearing camp, an occasion that I doubt would ever come my way again, I said, Sure, there are plenty of reasons to say no.
I just returned from four months in South America and I was backlogged on work for this podcast, plus I missed my regular routine. Plane fairs had skyrocketed now that Covid was over and people clammed just to go somewhere, anywhere. Idaho in March would be really cold, possibly super cold, snowy, and wet, and I would be outside walking sheep every day regardless of the.
And while I would no doubt learn a lot about sheep, where on earth would I ever use this newfound knowledge? Would my time and effort be better spent elsewhere? However, my eyes and ears perked up right away. When Angie mentioned it, I mean, how cool is that? How unusual and how far from my regular life and routine would this be?
I decided right then to make it happen. The simple exercise of saying yes to new opportunities that pop up here and there has led to profound improvements in my life and is often by these random yeses that have brought me the coolest, usually positive life altering changes in my life. That yes to Angie led to one of the coolest experiences of my life.
I will be telling you more about my sheet movie experience as we explore the power of saying yes and why you should add more yeses to your calendar in order to lead a richer and more fulfilling life. I’m looking forward to sharing this perspective on the power of Yes. So let’s get started.
Welcome to the Active Travel Adventures podcast. I’m your host Kit Parks. Before we begin talking about yeses, I wanna first talk about nos and also to define what kind of yeses we’re talking about. Derek Sivers, entrepreneur, philanthropist and philosopher, has an excellent essay, which I’ll link to in the show notes titled, if it’s Not a Hell Yes, then it’s a No.
Too often our lives are crammed with minutia, taking care of all the endless yeses we make to requests from other people that makes their lives. Most of these yeses fill up our time, but do not enhance our lives or further our life goals and priorities. I pose it that before you say yes or no, that you first look at any request, do the filter of will saying yes, enhance the quality of your life or the lives of your loved ones, and does it work towards one of your life goals?
Is there someone else who could do it and would it be more appropriate if they did do it? Unless you can hardly agree that the yes moves your life forward in the direction you want to. Then use all of your powers to say no. Doing so will free up time in your life so you can say yes to the potentially positive opportunities that come your way.
If saying no is hard for you, try using one of my all-time favorite saying, um, I’m sorry, that just doesn’t work for me. And then just shut up. You don’t have to explain. There’s no reason they have to know why it doesn’t work for you. I’ve used that in countless instances and truly it is a great expression That just doesn’t work for me.
Try it sometime. Let me know how it works for. In contrast, the kinds of yeses I would like to see you take more advantage of are the intriguing events that don’t come by every day, like moving she, for example. Why would saying yes to these odd opportunities be empowering? Usually when someone asks you to do something you’ve never done before, there’s an element of risk.
I’m not talking about risk of life or limb, but risk of failure are looking. I believe we all have a superpower too, and one of mine happens to be that I’m not afraid to fail. It’s not that I like it, but I sure don’t beat myself up when I do fail, as generally speaking, something good comes out of it that I wouldn’t have experienced if had I not gone this, whatever it was that I failed at.
Well, I don’t think that the experience of moving sheep would offer much downside on the failure end. Things could go awry. Would I be a bad sheep predator? Could I walk a hundred miles in the cold Idaho pre. I’d be living with somebody I only knew from the Costa Rica Camino hike and had never met her husband.
How would that go? Mom always told me that like fish guests begin to stink after two days and I’d be there for two weeks living in their house. Would Angie and her husband be chomping at the bit to get rid of me and have their house back to themselves? It’s gotta be a pretty stressful time of year, especially for the husband.
And here they have a house guest, but I was pretty confident that things would work out and that my body could handle the.
One thing I like is challenging myself by putting myself in foreign situations, not knowing at all what to expect. I do make an effort to get comfortable being uncomfortable, and I find it’s a really worthwhile skill to work on. That’s because you don’t grow when you do the same things over and over again.
You grow by stretching your boundaries and your horizons. Sometimes you can do this in baby steps like I’ve been doing with my travels. We’re inch by inch. I’m gaining confidence in my ability to travel the world’s solo. And it’s in these baby steps that I’m taking on some of the coolest experience the planet has to offer.
Sometimes, like when you’re moving sheep, there are no baby steps. You just leap. Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Air and Explorer Extra Air says If someone offers you an amazing opportunity to do something and you’re not sure you can do it, say yes, then learn how to do it. Branson’s willingness to say yes.
Not only has the staff calling him Doctor, yes, but it has given him a life I covet as he has tried some truly interesting adventures from Kite serving the English channel to ballooning across the Atlantic Ocean. He’s even gone on the suborbital space flight on his Virgin Galactic space Enterprise.
Saying yes can add definite spice to your life, as well as helping you to build your self confide. saying Yes, keeps life interesting by allowing you to remain curious about life and the world. What else is new and exciting around the corner?
On the first morning that we moved the sheep, we set up for the ranch where the band, which I soon learned was what you call a herda. Sheep had spent the night, we’d be moving two bands of around 2200 sheep each in legs totalling about 50 miles. So Angie and I, along with our sheep herders, would be walking a hundred miles.
The sheep were used, or adult females and all were four months pregnant due to give birth in about a month. The first day we set out at four 40 in the morning to drive to the ranch so we could start moving the sheep at dawn before they scattered degrees, my friend Angie and I would work the back. And plus there’s several professional Peruvian sheep herders that were on a three year contract that were upfront with Angie’s Rancher husband.
We also had some sheep dogs to help keep the sheep in lime. They were Australian shepherds that would race back and forth, and NPA used wool just to get her to move if she was going a bit rogue. We had a few guard dogs. They were great pieing, these dogs, beautiful dogs. And these dogs would move with the bands to keep them safe.
Their job is to keep the wolves and coyotes from attacking the sheep at night. And while they were work dogs, they were friendly and not opposed to a pat on the head. There’s also a sheep dog pup in training with each. Now, Angie had invited the entire Costa Rica commun hiking group to come move the sheep if they wanted.
Obviously, we’re all walkers as we’re walking 175 miles across Costa Rica together, and you can hear our story in episodes 1 21 and 1 22. I’ll put links in the show notes so Angie didn’t have to worry if we’d be able to keep up, and I’m sure for some of the folks on the trip, they just didn’t share my curiosity about this whole.
but for many she heard. That’s cool. I’d love to do that someday. Someday is the killer of opportunity because there’s never gonna be a perfect time or even a good time to do something. Most of the times you need to make the time to do the cool things or the minutia of life are gonna suck up your days.
And what sucks up your days sucks up your years. What sucks up your years, sucks up your life. How do you wanna live your.
Ask anyone in their deathbed and you’ll hear that the great regret is of things not done. Then the things that they did is what they’re regretting. Sure, some things are gonna blow up in your face, but for the most part, tackling an interesting experience enhances your life and shoot, even when things do blow up, you still get a fun story out of it.
So when someone offers you the chance to do something, whether it’s moving sheep or joining them on a trip to Bangkok, if your eyes and your ears perk up with interest, and that little bird in your head says, Hmm, that sounds interesting. I encourage you to figure out a way to say yes. Saying yes to intriguing experiences can truly be life changing, or at least set you out in a path that can enhance your life for the better.
Let’s look at my story as an example. I decided in 2011 that I wanted to section hike the Appalachian Trail. Even though at the time I didn’t hike or know anything about the woods. I was a suburban kid. Woods were dark and scary places best seen from the comfort of a car, but I signed up for a week long Appalachian Trail School that was supposed to teach me the ins and outs of backpacking The.
It was here that I met John with whom I became friends. John is a serious hiker who once a year would tackle a major international hiking challenge. I never considered that this might be something that somebody like me could do. Fast forward to 20 16, 5 years later in my annual, just checking in with John in my Christmas email, I said, Hey, where you going?
What cool place you gonna be climbing next year? And he answered back that he’d be climbing volcanoes in Nicaragua. But then he added, why don’t you? Me. Is he kidding? This is Kip. I don’t, I’ve never done anything like that. I mean, I did do my little backpacking trip, but still very safe. Us everything. I was comfortable with Nicaragua.
That’s scary. I wrote him back. I said, do you think I’m fit enough to do something like that? And he said, yeah, I think you can do it. So let’s look at this situation and what was going through my mind? First of all, a Nicaragua wasn’t even on my radar. And what about those San Anis? And the answer to that, by the way, is that, yes, there were sanas, but that was 30 years ago.
B, I don’t know any of these people. In fact, I barely really knew John C, but, and this is the most important part, I was intrigued and my face kind of perked up with interest. I wasn’t sure I could do it or should I do it, or even if it would be fun or what, but because that little bit of. I decided to sign up and I said yes,
and it was on that Nicaragua trip that my life took a complete pivot, a complete change. I had never heard of adventure travel before. I didn’t know that people like me could do things like that. We talk about on this podcast. In fact, this podcast wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for that trip to Nicar.
and let’s look at what I call the slinky chain of events. The intertwining of the people that I met by, by the continual saying of yes. So I go on this Nicaragua trip and there I meet a gentleman by the name of Jamie. He was a 39 year old gentleman from Scotland and he invited all of us to his 40th hiking birthday party, four months.
And again, note similar to the Angie thing, who invited all the people to come do the sheep? Jamie invited all of us to go to Scotland and hang out with he and his buddies on a big hiking adventure. Again, Scotland, not even on my radar, but my ears and my eyes kind of perked up with interest and I was thinking, how often do you get invited to hang out with a bunch of Scuts?
and as with the sheep invite on the Costa Rica, Camina around a dozen of us were invited, but I was the only one who took that leap and said yes, and what an experience that was. I couldn’t justify going to Scotland for the weekend, so I wondered what else I could do while I was over there. And that’s when I discovered a trail called the West Highland Way, and walking that trail introduced me to long distance walking holiday.
Something I’d never heard of before. A great and inexpensive way to see the world, and it became another positive life-changing development. And while walking the West Highland way in Scotland, I meet a gentleman by the name of Simon from the UK and he and I became Facebook friends.
The next year having fallen in love with walking holidays, I signed up to walk the Cotswold Way in England and my new friend Simon, picked me up from the airport. I spent the night at his place the first night, then at his girlfriend’s, the second since she lived near the starting place of the Cotswold Way.
And then since Simon’s parents lived along the cots wild route, midway on my walk, I had lunch with them. I mean, having all these cool local connections and interactions unbelievably enhanced my whole adventure. But none of this would’ve happened without that first yes, in Nicaragua. Something I’d never planned on doing, but just sounded a bit intriguing.
So please, whenever you’re presented with an interesting opportunity and you have an immediate positive vibe, or you think, Hmm, that sounds interesting, figure out how to say yes. Instead of mentally listing all the reasons to say.
sheep or herd animals, which means they prefer sticking together. Sometimes the sheep would smoosh and shoulder at each other and fit together so tightly together that you’d chuckle. But if the ones in the back slowed down a bit and the band got strung out a half a mile or so, we would encourage the sheep by calling out.
Let’s go girls. Come on ladies. Tighten up. Tighten up. Usha Usha. Usha being a made up Peruvian word that the Herder CMAR used and we picked. sometimes for unknown reasons, the sheep would run, so we would have to jog to keep up. Surprisingly, we averaged three miles an hour, which I think was because we were walking maybe like two and a half miles an hour.
But we were running often enough that we brought up that average the first day because there wasn’t a suitable place to bed the sheep for the night. We had to walk 18 miles a long day for both the sheep and us. And since we were trailing, and that’s the name for moving the sheep, so we were trailing two bands of sheep.
That meant that Angie and I, along with the crew, had to walk 18 miles two days in a row. I figured I could do it since I’d walked 20 miles twice before, once, actually be in the Costa Rica, Camino the year before. But I knew it would be tough, particularly since I hadn’t conditioned my feet ahead of time, but I knew somehow I would make myself do it.
However, I made one stupid amateur. , the temps were around freezing, and I hit the cold. It snowed the day before. So I put these thermal inserts that I’d used in Antarctica in my hiking boots to keep my feet warmer. Now I know better than to experiment with new gear while you’re out hiking or doing whatever it is that you’re doing, whether it’s biking, whatever.
I didn’t test ’em back home in these hiking boots. I’d used them in muck, boots in a, in Antarctica, and in this instant, just putting that simple shoe insert was a stupid, painful. , yes. It kept my feet warmer, but also filled up the shoebox. So later in the day, about 16 miles in, now my feet are swollen. It started hurting on the top where the big toe meets the foot, but I was like, eh, we only have four more miles to go.
It’s just a little more than an hour. Stopping, I should tell you on while you’re trailing, means that you’re gonna have to do a hard run, a quarter mile to catch up with the band, cuz they never stopped. So I just ignored the pain. But boy did I pay the price for those bruises for the remainder of the.
Every morning my feet would just scream when I put on the boots, but fortunately, maybe after half an hour they gave up yelling. It was a stupid amateur error. I remember thinking at the time, since it technically wasn’t a hotspot, I could feel it felt like somebody was just taking their thumb and just pressing down.
So it was different than like the form of a blister. So I figured I could just safely ignore the pressure and the pain that first day. But boy was I wrong. So don’t do what I do. Listen to your body and in your feet in particular, and stop and address the issue right away, even if it means you’re gonna have to run at a fast pace to chase down some sheep.
Fortunately, since Costa r. I’ve been trying to walk about five miles a day to keep my feet conditioned to longer mileage, so I didn’t really have any trouble with the daily miles one day. In fact, we only walked eight miles and exclaimed that. It was such a nice short day. I can’t believe that Angie and I thought that eight miles was a breeze.
There’s a time that eight miles would’ve crippled me.
when you say yes to unusual experiences, you by the very nature of saying yes, now open yourself up to meeting and interacting with a completely different sphere of people and you can make new friends with people who lead an entirely different life from you. I love meeting people from different walks of life for the stimulating conversation.
Plus it feeds my naturally curious. . Whenever you expose yourself to different ways of life, different ways of thinking, different ways of doing things, whenever you tackle new challenges, you have a larger arsenal of potential solutions and you are more able to think outside the box. For example, when I had a wholesale plant nursery, I mostly hung around fellow nursery men and garden center folks.
I learned how to set the nursery from the community college and was taught by fellow nursery men. So I did things the nursery. . But then when I went into home rentals and I learned to be handy fixing up homes, I was able to look at the nursery and inject some new ways of managing the operations, utilizing some of the tricks I learned in my rental business.
So instead of doing things the way most nurseries tend to do things, I could improve my management by injecting some fresh ideas from a completely different field. In the same way when you expose yourself to alternative ways of life, or sceneries occupations or simply experiences in general, and go into them with an open mind to learn, how do they do things?
You can come away with some cool insights as how to better run your own life or business. Angie and I walked the sheep on mostly rural roads with little traffic we could pass, stopped oncoming cars in about 10 or 15. The vehicles that were behind us, however, they’re pretty much stopped until we turned a corner.
Most people were thrilled by having a couple thousand sheeps around their cars like water, although I’m sure we made a few late for work. One guy smiled and said that he had timestamped a video to show his boss when he was late, and he chuckled that he was already late. Now he had a good excuse. One day we had to take the sheep through the town of Caldwell, including over the in.
I’ll bet Angie and I ran a couple extra miles that day as we went back and forth along the back, and then up and down along the sides as we kept trying to corral these sheep and keep ’em on course and away from uncommon cars and trucks, some of whom didn’t see us until they got right up to us. Sheep tend to stick together, but if one goes rogue, others are often gonna follow, and then you’re gonna have to run up and encourage them to rejoin the band.
driveways with fenced yards could be a pain as sometimes a sheep would be walking with the van, but just on the wrong side of the fence. They’d get in where the driveway was. That was really difficult to get them to turn around and head back the way they came around the entrance as that meant that they had to go in the opposite direction of the van.
Something they don’t like to do. One went down a ditch to get water and got stuck in the mud and it got its heavy wool coat drenched. Made it super heavy. It took two herders with all their might to drag that 150 pound sheep, plus the weight of that wet fur up out of the mud. And if any sheep started limping, a herder would grab hin leg.
By the way, that’s what they use sheep hooks for, is to grab the back leg if they have to, to capture a sheep. But the Peruvians just use their hands. And they would hold onto that back leg, and then a couple of guys would load the sheep in what I called the paddy wagon. And these used would then get a free ride up to the shearing station and wouldn’t have to walk anymore until they healed.
When we eventually made it to wherever the Knight’s pasture was, the guys would spread hay across the field to supplement the dried grass for food and then lay out troughs of water so the sheep could drink their. The days were tiring, but I found it quite satisfying and fun. We’d eat a very hardy dinner very early.
There was no time to do anything but snack while walking the sheep because like I said, the sheep don’t stop, so we snacked on nuts, cheese, or protein bars just to get through the walk. Teased Angie that she should charge for this and call it a fat farm, as I definitely toned up and lost some weight.
After dinner, we would crash and we were usually asleep by 8:00 PM. And then be up and ready to go, usually by five 30 in the morning. The Shears a group mostly from New Zealand and Australia, where sheep ranching is a huge industry. Were going to be delayed. So Harry Angie’s husband gave all of us, including the sheep a couple of days off so that the sheep could pasture in the BLM land where there’s more feed than the ranch, saving quite a bit of hay.
So for our day off, what does Angie do? She takes me to CrossFit Nice of. Seriously, I enjoyed it and I was surprised that the gym wasn’t full of barbell gym rats. That was my image of CrossFit and apparently I definitely had the wrong idea of what it was all about. Most people look like me, but just a lot stronger and fitter.
Angie is a CrossFit trainer and she modified read that as wissy down the day’s class so that I’d be able to move the next. , Angie said that she had asked visitors in the past to come try CrossFit after all her sister owns the gym. But they all said no as they were afraid or intimidated. She laughingly teased me that, did people think she was gonna kill them with the weights in the squats or something?
Of course, she would modify things for people according to their abilities. So this CrossFit is another example of saying yes, even if no one modified the class for me, I would certainly just modify it for. , I’m definitely glad that I went, not just because I had a good workout. I’m closing in on 63 now, and I’m starting to see, frankly, year by year, shall we say.
Uh uh, some differences in my strength and what I’m able to do, and I’m also more aware of body parts like hips and knees these days. Never used to pay attention to that in the past. Two things struck me from that first CrossFit. And we ended up taking three classes. While I was there, I learned I’m really losing my upper body strength and I don’t know how to jump.
I’m used to having pretty strong arms and when not traveling, I would do pushups and core work on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays. But when I travel, I mainly just walk and I don’t worry too much about my regular exercise routine. I noticed after I got back from four months in South America that I had to get back on my knees to do my pushups after I’d finally gotten up to doing real pushups.
but they did this one pushup at CrossFit. I think they called it like an inchworm pushup or something like that. And it was so difficult for me. You’re, I can’t even explain how to do it, but it’s, you’re on a chair, you’re leaning down, so you’re putting total body weight on these arms, and I realized that I’m no longer at that age where I can let things go.
I, I can’t wait till I get home anymore to pick things back up. I’m gonna have to keep maintaining my fitness while I’m on these travel. . So regaining my upper arm strength is gonna be a, a big priority for me from now on. So making myself at least do the pushups whenever I travel. That was a huge wake up call for me.
And now let’s get to the jumping. I’m not sure whenever I ever need to jump, but I had to admit I was really embarrassed at how little I could get my body and both my feet up and off the ground and we’re talking less than a foot here. I’m sad to say some. And some of the CrossFit folks in that class had worked up to jumping what looked like a 30 inch box and most were jumping onto a 24 inch box.
Now, I’m sure once upon a time they jumped just as sadly as I was doing that day, but they had progressed to an impressive. and I have no aspirations to jump as high as they did, but I don’t think it would kill me to work up to at least a foot and a half. Who knows, one day am I come in handy. CrossFit may not have been as exciting as moving the sheep, but by saying yes to Angie that day, I got a much needed wake up call regarding my own fitness and health.
I might be joining Angie Vietnam next fall, and I told her when she next saw me to ask me to do 30 pushups to see how I do.
We’ve talked about the power of, yes, expanding your creativity and problem solving skills of how it satisfies your curiosity and offers new experiences and opportunities. But one of the most important reasons to say yes is often it’s just simply a lot of fun and who doesn’t need more fun in their lives.
I got tons of from climbing volcanoes in Nicaragua, from celebrating with a bunch of SCOs and from walking 4,000 sheep. The back roads of. , what opportunities can you say yes to?
From the differing odd yeses I’ve experienced, I now have friends from all over the world. Each yes, expands my circle, and each of these expanded circles means more opportunities to say yes. The year before I said yes to Nicaragua, I was exploring Southern France. One Sunday while checking into a hotel, I started chatting with the gal behind me who was also checking in.
Vent and I then went to dinner later spending a total of about two hours together, but we became Facebook friends the next summer. She said she was going camping in Glacier National Park for three weeks and would I care to join her? I said yes, figuring if it didn’t work out, Mr. MasterCard could solve the problem and I could rent a car and do my own thing on the way to Glacier.
We stopped by our friend L’s home for a couple of days, thus adding L’S to my. The following spring, one of the guys who I went to Nicaragua with was organizing a trip to Bhutan. I immediately said yes, and I invited Ls and Venti and L said yes. We jumped at this opportunity and not only had an amazing time, but we further widened our circle.
Like I said, I liken this to like a tangled slinky where each connection, new friends and acquaintance winds around this never ending circle of opportunities, excitement, fun, and new friendships.
I had a dramatic mindset change around the time of my fifties prior. I led what we would consider a pretty normal, predictable life, but in the last.