Episode 1495: Interview with Ray Martin About His Discovery to Finding Real Success and Happiness Through Mindfulness

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining us on episode 1, 495 of the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

[00:00:07] Ray Martin: I'm Ray Martin. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent, and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to find your own true path is key, and one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Mader.

[00:00:37] Feeling of kindness and kindredship where people genuinely, genuinely, not in a forced way, really feel that they want to create a sort of shared prosperity for their, for their entire community.[00:01:00]

[00:01:01] Scott Maderer: Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent, and your treasures for your true calling. In the Inspired Stewardship Podcast, you will learn to invest in yourself Invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

[00:01:33] In today's podcast episode, I interview Ray Martin. I asked Ray about how he discovered he was living someone else's life despite what looked like having great success. I also asked Ray about how mindfulness helped him find a connection to the bigger universe. Ray also shares with you how his outlook has changed as he dived deep into mindfulness.

[00:01:55] I have a great book that's been out for a while now called Inspired Living. Assemble [00:02:00] the puzzle of your calling by mastering your time, your talent, and your treasures. You can find out more about that book over at inspiredlivingbook. com It'll take you to a page where there's information and you can sign up to get some mailings about it as well as purchase a copy there.

[00:02:18] I'd love to see you. Get a copy and share with me how it impacted your world. Ray Martin, also known as the Daily Explorer, is an entrepreneur and award winning business leader. As a coach, mentor, facilitator, speaker, writer, and mindfulness teacher, he is a torchbearer for greater human consciousness. Ray is also a marathon runner and fundraiser.

[00:02:42] He's on a mission to empower people to live authentically and to bring more joy and happiness into the world. He's also written a book, Life Without a Tie. Welcome to the show, Ray.

[00:02:55] Ray Martin: Great to be here, Scott. A pleasure to see you again.

[00:02:58] Scott Maderer: Absolutely. So for those of [00:03:00] you that can't tell from the accent, Ray is not here in the States.

[00:03:03] So he, he's over in the UK. So we were talking before we started recording about the beauty of the time zone thing. It's we're recording it's early in the day here for me, it's midday for him. And it's always fun to, to talk to people all over the world at all different sorts of. times. So I shared a little bit in the intro, Ray, with some of the things you've done, your tag or the, your name, the Daily Explorer, what you've done to get there.

[00:03:31] But I always talk about intros, no matter how long they are, even if it's a 12 page bio, it's like our Instagram photos. We show the highlights of the good stuff. We don't necessarily get into all the nitty gritty details. So talk a little bit about your journey And what has got you to being the point now where you're focusing on, fundraising through running marathons, which is odd enough in itself and doing the mission that you're doing to look for folks to help [00:04:00] them spread more joy and happiness in the world.

[00:04:03] Ray Martin: Yeah, gosh, let's see if I can summarize that a bit for your listeners. And if you can ask me, maybe some parts you want to explore a bit more. When I was a younger man, I'm 64 now, but when I was a younger man, my, my ambition growing up was to be a successful and respected businessman.

[00:04:20] I had been taught that by my parents and my society around me. And that was always the road I was walking down. And I think I didn't question it. I just largely followed that path and eventually set my own company up at age 34. And my business partner was the woman who eventually became my wife. And we were a husband and wife team and grew a very successful consulting business in the UK, which resulted in 2002, me being the business leader of the year from the Daily Telegraph, which is a very prestigious newspaper here.

[00:04:54] Now, that all sounds great. But in the last few years of that part of my life, [00:05:00] I noticed often that I wasn't feeling deeply happy or content in the life I was in. I actually felt like it was like living someone else's life in a weird sort of way. And I could never really make sense of that.

[00:05:13] It just bothered me all the time. And I always thought it might pass, but it never really entirely did. Eventually, one day, my wife came back from a business meeting and said, quite suddenly and abruptly, I'm leaving you and I'm leaving the company. And it shocked me to my core, Scott, to be honest, it just really floored me.

[00:05:32] And at the same time, my father got very ill and passed away, and the life that I knew and had been in just was completely gone. And so that created a, just a crack in my reality enough to say, this is a moment where if I chose to, I could really reflect on what that feeling was in those years and see if there's a new path for me to take from this moment on.

[00:05:57] Because I'd never had the chance to [00:06:00] look at it while I was in it. Now it'd gone. It literally had lost everything more or less, still had the company, but I decided for various reasons to actually sell the company, get on, get, move out of it. And that led to me making the decision to take a six month sabbatical after all of that had happened, I got divorced and my dad had passed away.

[00:06:21] And six months was the time I gave myself to go into a new world and reflect on all of those things and get, extract some meaning, but I had no idea that it was going to take me longer and I actually ended up on that journey of reinvention to discover. A new path for myself. It took me 14 years living out the backpack, globally around the world.

[00:06:42] And in that journey, I did many things, including learning about meditation, mindfulness, developing a mindfulness practice, starting a fundraising foundation, running marathons, all those things that you've mentioned. and I ended up being someone with a kind of a unique [00:07:00] insight into life because I'd been for 25 years successfully in the corporate world and an award winning CEO.

[00:07:07] And then I left that life totally and become a meditator, mindfulness practitioner, traveler, fundraiser, philanthropist. And now I had experience of almost two different lives. And the combination of those enabled me to be able to support the journey of. business leaders. And I started 15 years ago, coaching business leaders based on what I'd learned from those two parts of my own life, which I, my learning still goes on.

[00:07:36] I'm constantly in a learning mode. I'm still in workshops and being mentored by teachers. I respect all the time. So I'm still in that journey, but that's what I do currently. I would say it's a long answer. No,

[00:07:49] Scott Maderer: no, it's perfect. So I want to follow up on a couple of things you mentioned at the beginning, that you at that point.

[00:07:56] And the way you said it was success, but [00:08:00] talk a little bit more about, why did you look at that as success? What was it that made that quote something you would call success? And yet at the same time, obviously you were not, it wasn't authentically feeling like success. Talk about that kind of mismatch.

[00:08:18] Ray Martin: I love that question. I'm really glad you asked me because I only realize in hindsight that the way I define success as a much younger man would be what I would now call material success. Because as a kid, my parents always used to say you'll be really happy if you've got a good job, a good house, a good income, and all these material things.

[00:08:39] There was no dimension in the way, They encouraged me to think about success that had any spiritual element or sort of personal fulfillment element. It was more about setting your life up physically so you were in a good place. And so that was my blueprint. and of course I did that, I got a good income, I got a house and all those things, but [00:09:00] I actually didn't feel happy on the inside.

[00:09:02] And it just suddenly dawned on me, wow, I didn't define success really very clearly or well, and then as I was stuck in the realisation that I hadn't defined it well, and I was mourning the loss of my marriage, I came across this book, you might have heard of it, called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, it's written by a lady called Bronnie Ware, who's a hospice nurse in Australia, And so her job is talking to people in the last days of their lives.

[00:09:28] And she's spoken to thousands of people in that place. She says in her book, she asked them all the same question, what do you most regret about your life? And they all said the same five things when she asked them. She said, it doesn't matter if they're a millionaire or a janitor, or didn't matter what they did.

[00:09:43] They all said the same five things. And the number one thing that they said was, I wished I'd lived my life true to myself and not the life that others expected of me. And this, when I heard this, it just hit me between the eyes like a punch. Because that was one of the pieces I was [00:10:00] trying to figure out for myself.

[00:10:02] I'm not, what does living life true to myself actually look and feel like for me? And I didn't know because it wasn't being a CEO. It wasn't living in London and having that life. And so I needed to get an answer to that question. So it became my quest. I went on a quest, as Tony Robbins, the coach, he says.

[00:10:20] Your life is determined by the questions you're asking of yourself because the word breaks down to what quest am I on? What quest am I on? What's the question I'm asking? And and so it became my quest to discover the answer to that question. And now I feel like the life I have today is much truer to who I am as an individual and what fulfills me, what gives me deep satisfaction, and that gives me inner peace.

[00:10:47] I have a lot, lots of comparisons I can make to the old life, but that's really what it's about.

[00:10:53] Scott Maderer: So another thing that you said early on that I wanted to probe, you said while you were in the midst of [00:11:00] all of that, having all of this success, had a successful business, winning awards, married, all of these things that you see as trappings of success, the exact thing you said was, I never had a chance to examine it.

[00:11:15] Is that true? Is it really a, I never had a chance to examine it or is it that you just didn't examine it? Looking back on it now, where you are today, because I know at the moment it's a different thing but where you are today.

[00:11:27] Ray Martin: Yeah, probably more the second I didn't examine it.

[00:11:30] Scott Maderer: What do you think kept you from doing that?

[00:11:32] Ray Martin: Yeah, what a great question. I think probably just fear. that by having to stare, confront it head on and make a realization, this isn't the life that I want, that I would face a lot of loss, a lot of pain, a lot of sense of where I'm avoid of no direction or just having to confront that feeling, which inevitably had to do anyway.

[00:11:56] Scott Maderer: I

[00:11:58] Ray Martin: don't think I was willing or [00:12:00] courageous enough at the time to really confront that feeling. I had a very good material life and it was enabling me to sustain my dysfunction for as long as I wanted to because of plenty of destruction, distractions that I could afford to spend on, good holidays, lots of nice food to eat, going out and doing lots of lavish events and those kinds of things just kept distracting me from answering, facing that question.

[00:12:23] Yeah. So I think it was a combination of fear and distraction, both. Fear and distraction.

[00:12:30] Scott Maderer: Yeah. Talk a little bit of, I know You mentioned having that kind of trappings of physical success, but no real deeper feeling of happiness or success or connection. And talk a little bit about your spiritual journey, your faith journey, how did mindfulness and these other things, how did they help you tap in or feel that connection to.

[00:12:53] whatever name we want to give that bigger, that bigger connection to the universe that we have.

[00:12:58] Ray Martin: Yeah, it was a [00:13:00] gradual unfolding is how I'd describe it because after I'd been in Thailand where I first went to in Asia for five or six months, I, on the surface I looked fine because I was in a lovely paradise setting and I was wearing shorts and my flip flops and all relaxed with no targets or goals to have to achieve.

[00:13:19] But on the inside, I was very agitated. I was not in peace. I was. feeling a lot of guilt and shame about not being a great husband and having wrecked my marriage and, just really hard on myself to be honest about how I'd screwed up things in some ways. And I remember talking to a traveler who'd had a meditation practice and when I was telling him this he'd said, had I ever considered going to do a Vipassana meditation retreat?

[00:13:46] And I didn't even know what that was, I'd never heard of it. He said, and I said, what's that? He said, you go into Buddhist monastery for 10 days and you sit in silence with the monks. and you meditate and they teach you about the Dharma and Buddhist teachings. And [00:14:00] it can be very enlightening and eye opening and could create some peace for you, and what I was learning in this first few months of that journey was to, I was learning to trust my feeling rather than my thinking. And I really relied heavily on my thinking as a businessman and never trusted my feeling. And this is what I was learning. I wasn't being told that by anyone. I just was noticing as a traveler that when someone spoke about something, and I felt excited, or I felt good, or I felt what they were saying, I went, I feel good hearing this.

[00:14:34] I need to go and do that. I overrode my own intellect in a way, and trusted the feeling, and I was very unwilling to do that at first, but I started to do it, and I, and that confidence to trust that feeling, what I now call the voice of my inner wisdom, just grew and grew. And I did the Vipassana retreat, and it massively changed my mindset.

[00:14:55] I calmed down a lot. I had much less mental noise. I felt [00:15:00] much more calm and optimistic about the future. And then I wanted to have a mindfulness practice, so I joined a community of meditators in Chiang Mai, where I lived, and started meditating every week with my community, and evolved the practice. It became like a foundation of stability inside me that I'd never had before in my life.

[00:15:20] And it was a sort of place I could go, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen Buddhist monk who died about two years ago, is a lovely man, he was 95. He calls that place going home to yourself, going inside yourself is like going home to your safe place. And I always have that now inside me, I never had that before.

[00:15:39] So it's changed my life in a lot of different ways that's a couple,

[00:15:42] Scott Maderer: For a lot of folks when they start thinking about doing mindfulness or meditation or these sorts of exercises and what you just said, coming, going inside yourself as a safe space, coming home, but for a lot of folks, especially, I think early on, that doesn't feel like a safe space when you [00:16:00] start getting inside your own head and thinking about yourself.

[00:16:03] Talk a little bit about that. How did that become a place that felt like coming home?

[00:16:08] Ray Martin: Yeah. How I've come to understand it in the teachings I've received is that because we're basically, we're either driven by our ego or we're driven by our wisdom. And I don't think there's any in between, which depends on which sort of system you let navigate your life.

[00:16:24] Now I'd become very used to being driven by my ego and navigating in that way, and so here I was in a place where I was being invited for the first time to let go of that system and try stepping into something as a different way of doing things. Living and navigating. . And that's quite scary because the ego wants to get everything right, wants to do it correctly.

[00:16:45] And so when I was meditating, I go, I don't think I'm doing this right. I'm not getting the kind of insights other people are saying they're getting. It's not happening for me. And my mind isn't quiet. I've got loads of noise going on. Even when I'm sitting meditating, I can't stop thinking and should I stopped thinking, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.[00:17:00]

[00:17:00] I

[00:17:01] Scott Maderer: must be doing it wrong. Yeah, I must be

[00:17:02] Ray Martin: doing it wrong. And I took me a while to the penny drop, but I realized that's what the ego is and that's what it does. And that's what the mind does. When it's untrained, the mind runs amok and we're mostly being run by our minds, our wild untamed minds.

[00:17:17] Most of the time, you can call that respectfully, you can call it your autopilot. Your autopilot's running your decision making. We're not in that place of equanimity and calmness where we can look at what we really want and need. and make a wise choice based on those real needs. Even if it feels uncomfortable or it maybe goes against the grain of our self image, it's still the wisest and best choice for our soul.

[00:17:43] then we can make those choices when we've got that place of calmness, but you can't when you're in autopilot. And I look back at my life and I thought, wow, I've been in autopilot my whole life pretty much.

[00:17:54] Scott Maderer: So there's a struggle sometimes, I think, for folks with, talking about the [00:18:00] future, the past and the present, right?

[00:18:01] Yes. Where, we want to prepare for the future. We want to plan for the future. We want to be smart about looking forward, right? You don't want to make. decisions today that hurt you in the long term. Yeah. And you want to learn from the past. You want to know what's coming, but a lot of times when you look at the past, instead of learning, we feel other emotions like regret.

[00:18:22] Yeah. But obviously the only time we're actually able to be alive and act is the present, that kind of three way tension. How do you balance now versus, where you used to be when you were all in your head and in that ego driven? What's the difference in how you look at the present?

[00:18:38] those components of your life, the past, the present and the future, now versus then.

[00:18:44] Ray Martin: Let me think about how to respond to that because this is a great question. There's so much to say. I think for me, it's taken me many years to integrate quite a few different, from a few different teachers and learnings from mindfulness, Buddhism, the three principles [00:19:00] is another wisdom base that I've dropped into.

[00:19:05] What I'm doing these days is really as much as I can use my gift of thought to be observing what I'm thinking rather than being lost in the thinking. I call it in my six rules for happiness, I call it becoming your own observer. It's rule number three in my six rules. And that's taken me quite a few years to get comfortable with doing because I think the human being is the only species on earth that has this ability to stand in the third person and be aware of.

[00:19:35] What we're thinking like, like right now I can just be thinking about what I'm saying to you, or I can be noticing that I am in a conversation with you, Scott, and I'm talking about this subject and I'm observing that. And I can be in both places simultaneously, almost. And I think that becoming your own observer for me has been.

[00:19:57] giving me the greatest freedom above [00:20:00] anything else I've ever discovered to step outside of my conditioned thinking and outside of my automatic reactions and go, that's not the wisest choice I can make in this moment to behave in that way. There's a better choice for me here in this moment. And I'm having to sit in the moment, not going to the future or go back to the past, but actually in this moment, what's my best and wisest choice right now?

[00:20:26] And the Generally points me in a slightly different direction to what my conditioned autopilot is telling me. . Yeah. So that's how I coped with it.

[00:20:34] Scott Maderer: And before, when you were in that period of your life, were you driven by success or. external measures of success. Did you look at it the same way or was it

[00:20:44] Ray Martin: totally different?

[00:20:46] Because in that paradigm, which is ego driven, the goal or the target is the God. So you go, I've set this goal, this financial goal, this target for the company, my life, my earnings, or whatever it is. [00:21:00] I don't care what the consequences to my wellbeing are. I'm getting that goal. I will push relationships to the side.

[00:21:06] I'll miss people's birthdays or anniversaries. I'll do everything I need to do to have that goal achieved and you're driving and you're successful in that narrowest of dimensions of achieving that goal. But you're missing the rest of your life and pushing it to the sides. And to me, I now define my life.

[00:21:24] Success in my life is not, is defined completely down to things like, can I go to sleep every night and feel like I lived that day in my heart fully to the best of my ability and showed up well for every person in my life. That is a feeling of success for me that I go to sleep with. It's a completely different measure, if you will.

[00:21:45] Scott Maderer: So when you think about this is back to that idea of finding mindfulness. Of times. when you're thinking about I'll ask it this way. Let me ask this a different way. In the moment today, when [00:22:00] you look back at those years that you spent chasing the external success and looking at it as that's what you were supposed to do, that, that's the measure of success, do you look back at that now with regret and if yes, why?

[00:22:16] And if not, why not?

[00:22:19] Ray Martin: Yeah, no, I don't is the answer because. I think of life as a series of chapters and, in our twenties and thirties, that's the time of our lives where we're skill building, where we're building our base of capital and, stuff where we're doing all of that stuff.

[00:22:32] We have to put it, you've got to construct your life at some phase of it. So all of that hard work and focused effort to achieve goals and targets. set up, set me up for the rest of my life so that I could then direct my attention in a slightly different way, but not have the fear of being insecure financially and things like that.

[00:22:54] So I really don't regret any of it. I just think the moment arrived for a change in [00:23:00] awareness and attention and how I focused that was needed. And I had made the contribution I wanted to make up to that point and created a company and jobs for people. And now I wanted to do something slightly different with the boy.

[00:23:11] with the wisdom I'd gathered. Yeah. And I think that's a great thing about our lives, isn't it? That we can have so many different chapters. We don't, like when I was a kid, my parents and their parents generation, it was us. You just got one job in the local business and you stayed in that company for your whole life and got your pension with that company.

[00:23:30] And then you died three or four years after you retired. And that was the model that I saw when I was a young kid. And it never made sense to me because when I was 11 or 12 years old, I remember talking to my friends in the playground at school saying, that seems really stupid to me that people work their whole life in one place.

[00:23:46] They never do anything. They go and then they wait till they're retired and then they only have two or three years and then they die. So then I thought, so my friends laughed at me a bit and said what are you going to do instead then? I said, I don't know. I said, I'm just going to work twice as [00:24:00] hard for the first half of my life.

[00:24:02] Keep accumulate whatever I need for my whole life and then spend the second half spending what I've accumulated so I can play for half of my life. And that's what I used to say. I had no idea how I do that. What it really meant I was talking nonsense in a way But I remember feeling that was how I wished it would be And that kind of must have set a kind of an inner vision for me, which I wasn't aware of until much, much later.

[00:24:27] Scott Maderer: I think a lot of times that those sorts of things that we either say to ourselves or sometimes other people say to us, as kids, I've worked with a lot of folks where, after, you know, After they do some deep work, and that may be through professional counseling, that may be through coaching, that may be through mindfulness, that may be through, there's lots of different routes that I've seen people take.

[00:24:49] But one of the realizations that they'll have at some point is, wait a minute, the reason I've been doing this for the last 25 years is because, my dad said this to me whenever I was eight. [00:25:00] That kind of thing. I think a lot of our formation and programming happens in that, 8 to 15 kind of time frame and we don't even realize it.

[00:25:08] We're unaware. And we

[00:25:09] Ray Martin: forget, don't we? Because I, it never came back to my memory until the divorce, I was in now in my early 40s and I was sitting down to work out with my ex wife now how we'd split up the monies from our house and the company and stuff like that. And we were doing that in a very friendly way.

[00:25:25] But through the process of looking at all the numbers and everything we'd created, I suddenly went, Oh my God, I can't believe this. I think I've created enough to sustain the second half of my life here. And I never even occurred to me that I had, it just happened accidentally in the background.

[00:25:45] And I'd forgot. And then I went, gosh, I remember 30 years ago, talking about this as a kid, and I totally forgotten. I'd even had those thoughts.

[00:25:54] Scott Maderer: So I've got a few questions that I like to ask all of my guests, but before I, I ask you those, is there [00:26:00] anything else about this journey that you've been on or the mindfulness work you do that you think is really important to share with the listener?

[00:26:08] Ray Martin: Yeah. And following on from what I was just saying, the one thing that I would say to anyone these days is living life intentionally, is what I call it, setting intentions. And when you set an intention, like I did when I was 10 or 11, saying I want to work half my life twice as much hard and create twice as much money, I had no idea how that was going to happen or what that would look like.

[00:26:31] But that's the whole thing about setting an intention. You don't need to worry about the details. The thing is, you've got to set the intention and energetically align your life as much as you can to it. And that involves sometimes knowing the details. what your values are, what your vision is, what your purpose is, things like that.

[00:26:48] And that's all work you can do by deepening your own reflections into your way you're seeing things. But setting an intention is critically important in having a meaning, [00:27:00] a life of meaning and fulfillment. And I include setting intentional relationships with your colleagues at work, rather than just drifting in and out of those relationships, having a colleague.

[00:27:10] sit down and saying, look, we've just been put on the same team, you and me, we're going to work together for two or three years. How do you want us to work together in a way that maximizes each other's growth and development? How can we support each other to realize our dreams? How can we give each other feedback that's really going to help each other grow?

[00:27:28] This is an intentional relationship that's got to really have some impact on our life if we set it up well.

[00:27:38] Scott Maderer: So I read things through stewardship. My brand is inspired stewardship. That's a word that means a lot to me. And yet over the years, I've also discovered that's a word that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. They hear different things when they hear that word.

[00:27:53] So for you, what is stewardship and what does that word meant to you?

[00:27:59] Ray Martin: I think I [00:28:00] can most easily apply an answer to that question in the context of being a leader, because for me, stewardship is about taking care of others. That's the essence of it. It's knowing that your role is to make sure that every individual has everything they need to fulfill their potential, to live their best life, to realize the dreams they have through what you're doing as a shared endeavor together.

[00:28:26] So it's very selfless in a way, and I actually, this is supported by, I read this lovely book a couple of years ago called The Mind of the Leader. by Rasmus Hugard, and they'd done a survey of about 30, 000 executives through Harvard Business School, so they had access to all these chief executives and other, and they asked them what are the three qualities that make a great leader, and they were mindfulness, selflessness, and compassion.

[00:28:52] And for me, stewardship reflects the selflessness part the most and so that's, I don't know if that's a good answer, but that's how I [00:29:00] would, see

[00:29:00] Scott Maderer: it very much. That's the beauty of it. I asked what your opinion is. So there is no good or bad answer. I'm now wondering your answer,

[00:29:08] Ray Martin: but my ego wants to know, how does that compare to what other people say?

[00:29:11] Scott Maderer: So Ray, this is my favorite question that I get to ask every guest. Imagine for a moment that I invented this magic machine. And with this machine, I was able to pluck you from where you are today and transport you into the future, maybe 150, maybe 250 years. And through the power of this machine, you were able to look back and see your entire life, see all of the ripples, all of the connections, all of the impacts you've left.

[00:29:37] What impact do you hope you've left in the world?

[00:29:40] Ray Martin: The first answer that comes to the surface is just that there would be a feeling of kindness and kindredship. People genuinely, not in a forced way, really feel that they want to create a sort of shared prosperity for their entire community. And [00:30:00] there you see a complete absence of this individuation, which I think is destroying our society.

[00:30:06] And you just see this ripple effect of much more love, understanding, compassion, togetherness, and everyone making sure that everyone's got everything they need. There's no one left out. Feeling of complete inclusion would be in my vision of that. Because we've definitely got enough intelligence, resources, food, energy in the world to make that possible.

[00:30:29] There's nothing physical that would stop it. What stops it is the thinking and the belief systems that individuals have about how things should be distributed or who should control things or whatever, or who should make money. This is all the problems we face are in our thinking as a society. So I think that's what we would see is a shift away from thinking to the feeling of togetherness, total.

[00:30:53] Scott Maderer: So what's on the roadmap? What's coming next as you continue on this journey?

[00:30:57] Ray Martin: Immediately, actually, I'm going back [00:31:00] to Asia for a couple of months to spend the winter there. And it's the first time I'll return since I finished my journey in 2019. So I'm really excited about going back to see some of the places where a lot of changes happened for me and my thinking.

[00:31:15] And then after that, 2025 I think I've got an idea for another book that I want to write and I've got some creative ideas I'm developing. I still will be obviously coaching people in leadership roles. I love that work. And anyone who has read the story in the book and, wants some guidance and support, I'm going to be working with to support on their own journeys.

[00:31:37] So watch this space. And you can find out more about Ray Martin, and he mentioned his book Life Without a Tie. That's over at his website, which is lifewithoutatie. com. All one word with no spaces. Of course, I'll have a link to that as well over in the show notes. Ray, is there anything else you'd like to share with the [00:32:00] listener?

[00:32:00] Life's so short, Scott. I think the way in which we can make the best contribution in the world that we're capable of is by finding and walking on what I call our own true path. And so I, my encouragement to anyone listening would be to, not settle for anything other than that.

[00:32:19] And just be, persevere until you find your center line, it's worth the struggle I found. And it is a struggle sometimes. It's worth it.

[00:32:34] Scott Maderer: Thanks so much for listening to the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. As a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you enjoyed this episode please do us a favor. Go over to inspiredstewardship.

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