What Could Go Right?
Personal Growth | Family Connection | Parenting Adult Kids
with Erik Orton + Emily Orton
Episode: One Question That Can Immediately Improve Your Life
EMILY: Welcome to What Could Go Right? The Awesome Factory Vodcast.
ERIK: Vodcast.
EMILY: Vodcast is like…
ERIK: It's like a like podcast and video make baby
EMILY: Vodcast.
ERIK: So whether, if you're listening to this it's a podcast. If you're on YouTube it's a Vodcast.
EMILY: All right, so I am Emily Orton.
ERIK: I am Erik Orton.
EMILY: We are the co-founders of The Awesome Factory. And today we're asking - Why ask, What could go right?
ERIK: Okay, so if you are like me, and you and I are like most people, we usually will worry about all the things that could go wrong. We plan for the downside. We build contingencies. We do all kinds of things because we're worried that things are just going to go bad.
EMILY: We’re very responsible.
ERIK: Or are gonna go poorly.
EMILY: That's good.
ERIK: I think that's part of being a grown-up. To just be aware and be prepared for bad things to happen. Not knocking that at all. However, if you're like me and most people, we don't often ask the other side which is, What could go right?
And since this podcast/vodcast is called the What Could Go Right show. We want to explain that question. And the best way I can think of it is that it's yin and yang. When we ask, ‘What can go wrong?’ we're we're asking a good question. But we're only asking half of the whole picture. And when we ignore the other half we're missing out on a lot of the fun because, quite frankly, just preparing for the worst. Or preparing for the downside is reasonable but it's not that exciting
EMILY: Not that likely either.
ERIK: Or that fun.We're big believers in the whole picture. When you open your mind and your heart up to what can go right, man, it gets real good. And I would say real good kind of fast.
EMILY: The what could go wrong list is -as important as that is -most of those things never happen. Most of the things that we worry about never happen. So make your list. We make peace with it. But look at both sides.
ERIK: All right. Should I share that one example we were talking about earlier?
EMILY: Oh, yeah. Please.
ERIK: Okay, so when we were doing something that felt really out there and crazy for us. That was we wanted to go live on a sailboat for a year. and If you've been following us for a while you know this story really well so you can fast forward. But if you're kind of new just we'll give you this one little snippet which is we knew nothing about sailing. We knew nothing about boats. Our kids -we took sailing 101- and when we started to take them out, they would scream because they were so scared when the boat started to tip.
EMILY: I was screaming inside because I was scared of deep water. We really had no business being there.
ERIK: Yeah, we were in way over our heads as I say. Fast forward a few years we went from doing nothing to being semi-competent Sailors.
EMILY: And I got in the water.
ERIK: And Emily got in the water. We were looking at the possibility of buying a boat and it was pretty scary because we were going to send the down payment to an offshore account for a sailboat that we’d technically never seen. We believed it was there. We trusted it was all the things that they said it would be but we actually had to wire some money. We came face to face with this question of what could go wrong. So many things could go wrong on this trip. We could go broke. We could wreck the boat and sink it. We could get injured or die.
EMILY: I mean we would miss our friends. We didn't know what would happen to our apartment while we were gone. We didn't know how we were going to pay for it. We didn't really know if we could actually manage the boat we'd never really worked with diesel engines or the electronics or the plumbing systems…
ERIK: And I didn't know if coming back, if I would be able to find work again. Because who hires somebody who just takes off for a year?
EMILY: And our youngest has Down syndromewhich is such a benefit in so many ways. But we knew we were going to be missing out on her therapist. And she didn't know how to swim. And…there was a lot.
ERIK: So there was a lot that could go wrong but then we asked ourselves what could go right? and it was like a switch just flipped in our brains. All of a sudden we thought, man! It had never occurred to explore this before. We made this list of what could go right which included – we could make lifelong memories as a family. We could develop new skills and competencies so we could grow in confidence. We could see extraordinarily beautiful places.
EMILY: We could super-bond as a family.
ERIK: yeah
EMILY: Maybe try new foods. Learn about new cultures. Learn new languages.
ERIK: Make new friends. Yeah, so all that was just growing, growing, growing. And we said, if we do not do this trip we are for sure missing out on this. If we do this trip this short list of negative things might happen.
EMILY: Probably not.
ERIK: Probably not. Anyways We started the weigh what could go right -which was very likely - against what could go wrong - which was very unlikely. The scale is easily tipped in favor of going. So we're fond of saying that that question is what got us out on this adventure. And Continuing to ask it is what kept us out there, in addition to asking what was going right, right now.
EMILY: Yeah I think for me, the history of that question - it goes way back. It's rooted in some really solid principles about /that we have lots of choices. When we first got engaged in 1995. Starting to plan a new life together was stressing us out and we were like ‘Oh my gosh. How are we even gonna do this?’ We were very much rooted in what could go wrong. And Erik had this idea of let's just make a list of all the things that we will have control over no matter what our circumstances are. And one of those things was gratitude. So we decided at that tender age that in our life…
ERIK: Almost 22.
EMILY: In our life, when we felt discouraged, if we would get grateful and that didn't help then we would know we were in real trouble. But over the decades that always did help. We would always just look around and say, ‘What is good right now? What are we grateful for right now?’ And that gave us the stamina and opened our minds and kind of gave us the courage to keep moving forward. We started asking it to our kids this way, What's awesome about right now? What could go right? is just taking that one step further and putting it into the future. Instead of saying, ‘I'm grateful for all these things that happened in the past’ or ‘I'm grateful for everything that's happening’ - all of these things in the present. This is a future casting. What might be the things that are awesome - that I'll be grateful for in the future? That was a real turning point for us.
EMILY: Like you said, this is for us and it's been helping other people. We learned so much on our sailing trip we ended up writing a whole book about it and we shared a lot of what we
ERIK: You see it right there if you're watching on YouTube - Seven at Sea there it is. Sorry.
EMILY: Yeah, we learned so much on that journey. As we wrote it out we realized, ‘Oh my gosh! We have a pattern for facing disruption or for bringing about positive change. Or when a transition is happening how to handle it very deliberately. That's why we founded The Awesome Factory and we started teaching people the things that we've learned about living a meaningful life. Taking the reins and having a little more fun.
ERIK: All right so what else should we talk about on this first episode because this is just kind of like an intro so that we can break the ice and people can get in a sense of what..
EMILY: Well, hopefully the ice is broken. That's it. We broke the ice. What if you if stop now. And you just walked away with that question, ‘What could go right?’ That will take you so far. So, I would say, please, we invite you to ask that question.
ERIK: What do you? What do you do with like a YouTube channel? Is it Like, comment and subscribe? We're not really YouTube savvy.
EMILY: We're brand new here. We're using one of our principles - Scouting It Out. Trying it out, throwing our hat over the fence. Starting something that's gonna just keep getting better and better as we dive into it. But this is a place whereyou want to come for positive uplifting content. Where you know we believe in your potential and your power to make choices. We know it's not always easy. We'll talk about the obstacles the struggles and maybe some of the fears that come up. We talk about how we mitigate fears. We're going to talk about everything - all the aspects to living a meaningful life. I think because we're at the age where we have three adult children and two teens at home - you might be peeking around the corner to see what's ahead for you. Or you might have crossed that threshold and be in that phase where you're parenting adult kids. But you still have so much of your own life that you want to live. We'll be addressing all that kind of intentional, deliberate…mindful, cheerful.
ERIK: Mindful cheerful. You heard it here.
EMILY: Mindful cheerful. This doesn’t happen by accident.
ERIK: Mindful cheerful awesomeness.
EMILY: Yeah.
ERIK: Sorry.
EMILY: Yeah, absolutely. This is a place where you're going to hear the message that life is good and that we have choices.We're going to try to make the best choices we can with the highest quality information about who we are and what we're capable of.
ERIK: So in case you stumbled upon/across this podcast like totally out of the blue you can follow more of what we're talking about on theawesomefactory.nyc that's our website.
EMILY: It's like New York City.
ERIK: The Awesome Factory dot NYC as in New York City. Of course, we're on Instagram and Facebook and all that. And you can always subscribe to our email because we send notes out - emails out from time to time and and we want to just make your day We want to make your inbox that much brighter.
EMILY: Yeah, we alternate weeks so you'll hear from me you'll hear from Erik. Hear what we're learning.
ERIK: Yeah, so thanks for joining us for this first episode. We hope to keep in touch and go on a fun journey together. Anything else we should say before we sign off Miss Emily?
EMILY: We're only going to get more wonderful.
ERIK: If this is not your thing if this is a little bit too rough and tumble for you just know this is like day one - baby steps.
EMILY: What could go right?
ERIK: What could go right? We figured just what the heck? Let's just give it a go. So anyway thanks for listening. We look forward to talking with you on future episodes.
EMILY: Yeah, feel free to leave any comments. If there are questions - things you want us to talk about - we're happy to take a look at that. So many things are going to go right.
ERIK: What could go right? Thanks so much.
