– Welcome everybody to today’s Building My Legacy Podcast. I have with me today Zander Sprague. Zander is a licensed professional clinical counselor and interesting in terms of his practice because he works with loss. He had a sibling that he lost and so he works with sibling losses and other kinds of losses and he also works with building teams and I think in a way they both go hand in hand in many ways, because in teams, if we’re gonna build them up, sometimes we have to let go of things in order to build into that next chapter, don’t we?

– Absolutely.

– So to get started, Zander, tell us a little bit, how did you get started in this? What took you down the road in these two seemingly very divergent pathways that you’ve managed to bring them together?

– Absolutely. You know, first of all, thank you for inviting me on, Lois. It’s great to be here. You know, it’s sort of, the short story is coming up on 25 years ago I lost my older sister. There weren’t a lot of resources available for siblings so I wrote a book called “Making Lemonade: Choosing a Positive Pathway after Losing Your Sibling,” and that’s been well-received. I’ve spent time helping other siblings, but I went to graduate school because I wanted to expand what I was doing. I got a master’s in mental health counseling. As you said, I’m a licensed mental health professional. And funny thing happened. I finished my intern hours from my licensing in February of 2020. A month later we were in the pandemic. So all of these plans that I had made to go out and help the world came to a screeching halt. And as I was sitting in my apartment trying to figure out what I was going to do, and frankly eating my way through the pandemic like a lot of other people because there wasn’t much to do, I had this epiphany that epic begins with one step forward. There are so many things in my life that I’ve been able to achieve and all of those started with just one step. And as I was thinking about expanding what I was doing, going to a wider audience, I thought, “How many other people have epic dreams, big things that they want to do, but they never, they seem stuck at the start line?” They don’t know how to start. They don’t know how to make a plan for that. And I was like, “I know that, I can help people do that.” So I sat down and wrote a book called “Epic Begins with One Step Forward.” And really, you know, that’s where it’s coming. Now, you’re right, there is this divergence of the sibling work and helping teams and helping people be epic, but here’s where it kind of merges in, which is, there are similarities. When we lose someone, we begin this unexpected journey of trying to work our way through it. And sometimes we, some days we do better and some days we don’t. In team-building and building your own epic dream, there are going to be detours, roadblocks along the way and so that’s where they’re similar is that we’re on these journeys and oftentimes we’re on many journeys at the same time.

– It’s so true, isn’t it? Many journeys at the same time. I feel like that’s the way life is more often than not. Zander, you talk about the two words, magic words that impact you dramatically. What are those two words?

– Not yet. So powerful because I think if someone says, for example, “Has your book come out?” “No.” That’s an end. It makes it sound like it’s never gonna come out. But if I say “not yet,” that leaves the possibility. If you want to, whatever your epic dream is, and I want to be clear that for me, your epic dream can be enormous. It could be going to earn a degree. It could be running a marathon. It could be saving up to go on your dream trip. It could be also changing the way you eat or deciding to change your career. So again, your epic, Lois, is yours, mine is mine, but not yet leaves that possibility. So if you dreamed of always traveling to Australia, have you been there yet, Lois?

– I have not.

– Not yet.

– Not yet.

– And there’s such a power of optimism that not yet leaves that possibility that you haven’t achieved it yet. Now there are the, certainly there are the not yets in our life that may never happen, but there’s still, you’re leaving that door open that it is possible that you may be able to achieve that.

– I like that and so tell me, you also have the 97/3 rule? Is that tangential to the not yet?

– It is in a way. So the 97/3 rule is this. I believe that 97% of our day is good and up to 3% might not be as good, but people tend to focus on the things that aren’t going right in their day and they somehow are completely ignoring all of the good things that are happening in their day. And I kind of wonder about that. Like I know when I was in school, I wasn’t particularly good in math so if I got a 97 on a math test, I would have been elated. I would not have been complaining about the three points I didn’t get. I think about if you went on a picnic and it’s a beautiful day, absolutely spectacular, but it rained for two minutes. The rest of the day, absolutely spectacular, have a great time and I asked you, “Lois, how was a picnic?” Oh, it rained. You somehow forgot on either side all that beauty, all that sunshine, all that fun that you had. You’re just concentrating on that 3% and I think we need to acknowledge, you know, what is going right in our day because there is so many things that are going right. And if you think about it this way, do you know baseball at all, Lois?

– Oh, I know a little bit.

– A little bit. So people who make it into the Hall of Fame usually have a batting average of over 300. That’s considered a lifetime batting average of over 300’s great. That’s 1/3 of the time that they get to bat, they get ahead. I imagine if we thought our life was good, if we got it right 33% of the time or 33% of the time it was going well. The fact of the matter is our lives are going a heck of a lot better than 33% most days.

– That is true, isn’t it?

– And I just want people to really pay attention to all the good that is happening in your day. Look, you and I both got up this morning. That’s a good thing, right? It’s a good start.

– It is.

– And, you know, here we are getting to talk. That’s a good thing. Certainly a highlight of my day is to be able to say, “I got to talk to Lois” and it’s, you know, I get to share my information with your audience. I got to learn from you. That’s awesome. I should focus on that stuff. Sure, today there’s gonna be stuff that doesn’t go absolutely the way I want and I can acknowledge it, but I can also say there’s so much other stuff statistically that’s going well.

– Okay, so I wanna talk a little bit about that because you’ve been on a journey where life has, as you say, giving you some lemons, right? You’ve learned how to create some lemonade out of it. But there’s a lot of what happens that’s out of our control and we try hard to create that dream, the epic world dream that we want to live in, whether it’s at work or at home, and, you know, you’re really fortunate if you put the two together and you have an epic dream that combines the two. So how do you approach that so you can have 97% be positive?

– You know, I think like anything, if we have a plan and create, and frankly, if we create structure around our epic dream, it’s a lot easier to achieve. I’ve been fortunate to, you know, and I don’t do it right now, but I’ve run some marathons. And when I first, that was always like a bucket list. I wanted to go run a marathon. And I mean, I grew up in Boston. I grew up watching the Boston Marathon and I thought, “Someday I’d like to do that.” But 26.2 miles is a long way, Lois. Wow, it’s a long way. And when I started thinking about that, I thought there’s no way that I can do that. And what I did is I joined Team in Training so they gave me a schedule and taught me how to run, but when I got that schedule, it made it so much easier because I had structure. I just had to look and say, “Today is Friday, I need to go run for 30 minutes.” And that’s what I did. I didn’t have to worry about all the rest of it because it was all mapped out for me. And I found that that was so much easier. I think people have, people don’t think about it, but we enjoy structure because there’s, mentally there’s safety, there’s knowing, there’s, “Here’s what I have to do.” And if you think about some big task that you have to do, if you break it down into steps, it is infinitely easier for you to do. That’s what I called the pizza analogy. Do you like pizza?

– I do.

– I like pizza. Now, when you get a pizza, do you just shove the whole thing into your mouth all at once, Lois?

– You eat it a piece at a time.

– A piece at a time and you don’t worry as you’re eating the first piece about the third piece because you’re like the third piece will come or the second piece will come. You just eat it one bite at a time, one slice at a time. And I think creating that structure is how you get to making your epic dreams come true because you just have to take that one step and then you take the next step and then the other, and it follows along and it becomes a lot more manageable. So let’s take a travel example. So you say, “All right, I want to go to, and I’ll pick on Australia, you want to go to Australia.” All right, well, how much does it cost to get to Australia? Here’s relatively what airfare is. Here’s what hotels and you know, what is the overall cost? Now you say, “All right, now I understand how much costs to go, how am I going to get there?” All right, well, I can fly. All right, that’s good. Now I need to start to make a plan for how I will have the money to go on the trip. I need to plan when I’m going to go on the trip so that I have a mark to get to. So all of this I think is essential and it works for businesses. It works for building your legacy. If you want to build your legacy, you gotta have a plan because a legacy doesn’t just happen. It happens because people think about it and say, “I would like to do this and here’s how I think I will get to,” whatever your legacy is.

– So, part of what I’m hearing you say, Zander, is you start with a plan, but sometimes to have that plan, you need somebody to help you build it. Like when you were doing the marathon, you had a coach or somebody who helped you with that and had the vision of the steps that got you to the finish line, right?

– Yeah, absolutely. And I think you absolutely need to have, you need to ask for help because we don’t know everything. And I’m a firm believer that in my own business, they’re the things that I’m really good at and they’re the things that I’m not as good at and that is where I should go look for help, outsource the things that I’m not as good at because someone else is really good at. So for example, let’s take social media, which, you know, seems to rule all of our lives and pretty adept at it, but I’m not an expert at it, but there’s someone who really loves that and really knows how to get everything hopping and stuff like that. Why wouldn’t I work with that person to do that so that I can focus my time on the stuff that I’m much better at? And I think in businesses, you know, they have different departments that do different things. Why? Well, because the marketing department does marketing really well. I used to work in high tech firms. So the marketing department was not doing, you know, CAD designs of the product or, you know, doing engineering on it. Why? Because that wasn’t their expertise. So absolutely you need to have a team. You need to share what you’re doing with people. Don’t keep it a secret. I found that when I decided to run the marathon, I told people and all of a sudden I kind of had to do this because I told people I was gonna do it. And there’s a little of that accountability, you know, funny thing, when you tell people you’re gonna do something they’re gonna ask and it’s okay to say, “Not yet, I’m working on that. I ran into this challenge.” Certainly I ran into the challenge of the pandemic, you know, but that didn’t stop me from what I wanted to do. It just changed the way in which I had to do it.

– There was a shift wasn’t there.

– Absolutely.

– I think, Zander, that’s such an important point because I think when we see challenges, sometimes we’re stopped, aren’t we?

– Absolutely.

– And teams get to be that way, so suggestions, thoughts, how did you, you were resourceful internally to come with this idea. I’m gonna write a book and you had the discipline to do it, so where do people start? When you have your challenge, you’ve come to this wall and you know you’re going to have to figure out something. You gotta go up, above, around, under, something. Well, where’s that first step come from?

– Well, I think first of all, I think for a lot of us, we say there’s that roadblock. But I think a lot of times the roadblocks that we say are there are actually a mirage.

– Oh, okay.

– They don’t actually, we say I can’t do it for this reason. Sometimes there is a really good reason. I can’t do this ’cause I right now don’t have the money to pay the social media expert. Okay, fair enough. But I think a lot of times we are actually our own worst enemy. I say in my book “Epic Begins with One Step Forward” that we are likely the meanest person in your own launch. And the things that we say to ourselves in our head, if your best friend said just 1/1000th of that to you, you would be devastated and yet every day we’re saying, “You’re not good enough. You can’t do this. You’re, you know, whatever.” And so I think those roadblocks, as I said, they’re a mirage. They’re not actually preventing you. It’s yourself saying, “I can’t do it because this is there.” You know, this is here. Now, let’s take the pandemic, certainly a impediment on the path that I was on ’cause I wanted to go out and talk, you know, I wanted to get licensed. I couldn’t do that because, well, couldn’t go take the exam. I couldn’t go talk to companies because companies were all working virtually. I couldn’t hold a conference because conference centers were closed and we weren’t allowed to get together, right, so certainly I’m not gonna go, “Oh, it was all sunshine and daisies.” No, it wasn’t. But I said, “Okay, what can I do?” So I stopped, I assessed and I planned and I said, “All right, here’s how I’m going to achieve this.” And I think if people, we come up against something and say, as you said, how do I get around, under, over this this roadblock? And I think it’s all in how we think about it. I’m originally from Boston. I lived in San Francisco for many years. I moved back to Boston, but I was really knew my heart was in Boston and I said, “I can’t move back because I have a job. I don’t want to drive my car across the country.” And then in July of 1996, I got laid off from my job and my car got totaled and my then fiance broke up with me, all that seven day period, that was a bad week. But all of a sudden, all these roadblocks that I thought were in front of me were gone so I had no reason that I couldn’t move back to San Francisco, which I did. And I now, lived here now for over 20 years and I love it. I’m exactly where I want to be. And so I think we need to look carefully and say, “What is this roadblock? Is it really a roadblock or is it me just saying to myself, ‘I can’t do this.'”

– That’s so often true with so many things, isn’t it? We create our own impossible roadblock and sometimes all we have to do is pick it up and move it.

– Absolutely, and we argue for our limitations versus for what is possible and even if we think I’ve no idea how I’m gonna do that, you should still take those first steps because it’s amazing. Once you do the first step, it’s like, well, okay, that wasn’t too bad, so I can go on and do the next step. And then I can take the next step. And then pretty soon you’re on your way. And you look back and think, “Why did I think that was so hard? That first step wasn’t really as hard as I thought. I did that. I don’t know how I did the second one.” And again, goes back to that 97/3 rule. Pay attention to all the success you’ve had on your journey.

– That’s what Gallup talks about, look at your strengths, not your weakness.

– Absolutely, and I love the StrengthsFinder. I think it’s a fabulous tool to allow people to figure out where their strengths are. And, you know, I’ve done the StrengthsFinder. I love it. One of my top things is woo, I’m a woo.

– Good for you.

– When I first took it, I had no idea, but I found out that that seemed to be a highly desirable thing and when I look at my life, I’m like, “Yeah, I’m able to understand people and get people to do the things that I need to do to work with them and it’s mutually beneficial, but I’m getting what it is that I need to be able to be successful.”

– To function. Zander, our time is almost up, what have we missed? What have we left out that should be talked about?

– It’s really simple. Epic choices lead to an epic life. And we all, we honestly, we have choices in our life and I will absolutely own ’cause I’ve lived this multiple times. Sometimes the choices we have are two choices that are not particularly palatable, but there is so much strength in saying, “I am choosing, I am not helpless, I can choose this.” If you’re in a career that just isn’t serving you, you’re not happy, just because you’ve done it for 20 years doesn’t mean that you can’t make a shift. I went to graduate school at 45. I was constantly reminded by my classmates that I was older than some of their parents, but that was okay. I mean, that was possible. Anything I think is possible, you just have to be resourceful and you have to be determined to say, “I am going to cross the finish line however I have to do it.” And I realized that there are absolutely, there are social and economic barriers that prevent some of that, but I also believe that all of us are innately survivors. Look, we’ve all made it this many years to be where we are. That didn’t happen just because we’re like, “Oh, well, I can’t do anything.” I think we have to just believe in ourselves unfailingly and again, you make epic choices, you get your epic life.

– I love that, believe in yourself, unfailingly and you make epic choices. You have an epic life. Wonderful.

– Thank you so much for having me here.

– You are so welcome. Thank you for being with us and our audience today.

– Have a fabulous day.

– Thanks, Zander, and for those of you who are listening to Building My Legacy Podcast today, thank you for being with us and please remember to visit our website as well at www.Build2morrow with the number two, .com. Thanks much.