Andy Gray: I’m talking today with Eric Plantenberg. Eric is the co-founder of Freedom Personal Development, the creator of a retreat called Abundant Living, and is now the Core Values Ambassador of Kombucha Mama, a thriving kombucha company here in our hometown of Bend, Oregon. Eric and I met for coffee the other day, and I got the feeling that we could have talked for hours – I’m really glad to be welcoming him to A Congruent Life. Eric, welcome!
Eric Plantenberg: Andy, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Andy: Eric, you’ve done so many things and involved in so many pieces of life; I don’t even where to start. Maybe at a top level, could you kind of describe for our listeners that haven’t heard of you a little bit about what you do in the world?
Eric: That’s a big question, Andy. [laughs]
Andy: I know. It’s a really big question.
Eric: What I do in the world is that I simply care deeply about people, and I care deeply about making an impact. The way that that normally shows up for me is in the various businesses that I’m involved in, in the various non-profits that I’m involved in.
I had a mentor when I was a raft guide back in the early 90s. His name was BR. I was really into kayaking, really into raft guiding. I just thought it was the coolest thing in the whole world. What BR said to me that just really made a tremendous shift in what ended up transpiring over the next 20-something years was just like, “Eric, you can really be focused on the things that make you happy. You can kayak all over the world, and you can spend your day on a river. Or, you can be focused on how you make an impact in other people’s lives.”
Here’s the thing about that. He said, “If you focused on you and your dreams and your goals, you’re going to be able to get a lot of fun, and you’re potentially going to be kind of—for lack of a better term—‘stuck’ doing the things that are in your space of what you know and experience.” At the time for me, that was rafting. He said, “If you really focus in reaching other people’s lives and using your skill set outwardly, instead of inwardly,” he said, “What will happen is truly going to be miraculous, because door after door after door will open in your life, and they will open through relationships and through connections with other people.”
I’m sure glad that somebody sat me down and shared that with me, because if I look back at all the things that I’ve experienced, it’s always been through some sort of a relationship that has lead me somewhere that I would never have thought to go all by myself.
Andy: So, the way that that has shown up for you, in much of your professional life anyway, has been through the personal development field. You created this company called “Freedom Personal Development”.
Eric: I did—yes—with my best friend from college. It was a couple of years after that that I have been done rafting—actually, I wasn’t done with that. I kayaked the next ten years all over the world, which was super fun, but I didn’t need to be a kayak instructor of a raft guide. I actually did dive in, and I started Freedom Personal Development; and that, like many great endeavors, really happened by accident.
I had a job. I was a sales manager for a startup company, and we were selling dog treats, of all things. [laughs] Here I am, living this glamorous raft guide, kayaker life; and then the next thing you know, I’m a dog treat salesman. [laughs]
Andy: [laughs] Who would have thought?
Eric: Who would have thought? But, that was all about a relationship. I met a guy that I really admired, and I thought, “This is somebody that I have a lot to learn from, and this is somebody that’s tremendously passionate about what he’s doing.” He and the founder of the company were just people—that I was just really inspired by their passion.
So, I had no desire, no intention, of being a dog treat salesman. But then, the next thing you know, I was; and I got pretty bored with that pretty quickly even though I love the people that I was working with. One day, I was doing a meeting for one of our distributors, and I just couldn’t talk about dog treats another day. I just couldn’t do it.
I wrote this little talk on how to really be passionate about your career, which I was at the time, even though I wasn’t super passionate about dog treats. How can you really be passionate about your career? [It’s] by setting goals that were really meaningful to you, and communicating authentically and directly with people, and then really paying attention and managing your time and what you do in the day. I did that program for about 25 or 30 minutes.
I was 24 years old at the time, and this really gentlemanly man, who owned the distributorship; he was probably 65 years old. He came up to me and just looked at me with that really funny look. I had no idea what he was going to say, and he just said, “Son, who told you to say all that stuff today?” [laughs] And I was like, “Oh, crap! If my boss can hear about this, what’s going to happen?” I gave it to him honestly and I said, “Well, Sir, it was me.” And, I was trying to shield my boss actually. I mean, it was me. It was just true, even though I didn’t want to fess up to it.
He looked at me, and he said, “You know, that was the finest staff meeting that I’ve seen in 30 years.” I was really humbled by that, and then I was really inspired by that, because I went, “Wow! Now this is something that I love. I mean, I just really love this.”
That was the birth of Freedom Personal Development, back in 1996.
Andy: That’s quite an auspicious start, [laughs] kind of a scary start, but it sounds pretty exciting. What of form did your work with Freedom Personal Development take over the last 16 years or so?
Eric: Yes, it’s definitely changed. On the plane ride home from that distributor meeting, I literally wrote out a couple of notes on a napkin, like the textbook business plan on a napkin. I called my best friend, Roger Seip. We had worked together in college and have been friends for a bunch of years, and I said, “Roger, we’re starting a company,” and he said, “Awesome! Let’s do it.” We both threw literally—I think it was $3,000 in a shoebox, literally; and we launched the company.
We had no idea what we’re doing. We had no real business plan. We had no credibility. We just were excited. We were just excited about being in business for ourselves, and we were really excited about personal development. We were reading books and listening to audio programs and going to seminars; and we had been doing so for years, so it wasn’t new to us.
When I was 18 years old, my first boss gave me a copy of Og Mandino’s book, and I read Dan Millman’s The Way of the Peaceful Warrior a couple years ago. These books have just really resonated with me, and I really believe that inside of everyone is tremendous capacity and tremendous potential to do good in the world.
And, when I was shown that if you follow your dreams, and if you do the things you’re most passionate about and do them with people that you can learn from and are connected to, then everything expands and grows.
So, that’s really how it started. We started talking about the importance of working on yourself and the importance of following your dreams and people loved it; referred us to other people, and 16 years later, we’re still having fun.
Andy: I’m always fascinated about stories like that. I mean, you’re a fairly young guy. You didn’t really have any real “credibility” or any real credentials to go do something as crazy as all this. It takes a bit of audacity and boldness, and a sense of self to be able to launch into something like that without a business plan and without a clear set of opportunities; and it’s like, “Well, how is this business going to survive?”
Eric: Yes, and I think a lot of people face that. A lot of people face that, “Can I do what I’m passionate about?” From the outset, we didn’t have any credibility, really. We didn’t have any—
Actually, the couple of notes that I put in a real makeshift business plan, I took to the director of entrepreneurship at the University of Wisconsin, where I was an alumni. I thought, “Hey, I’m going to start a business; I might as well go to my alma mater and talk to the entrepreneurship guy.” He just looked at me, and he was like, “I would give this business plan an F if it was submitted as a project, and I think the chances of it ever working are basically next to none. You’ve got a ton of talent. You should go out and get a job. You can get a great-paying job.” [laughs]
Andy: Awesome. [laughs] Love it.
Eric: And to be fair, he wasn’t just being a prick. I mean, he was a nice enough guy. The work that I had done to create the business plan probably was “D work”, but his lack of faith and lack of perspective about my passion was completely disregarded. It was completely overlooked, and I think that’s really, really common for people in themselves.
One of the businesses that I’m involved in right now is called “Kombucha Mama”. It’s here in Bend, Oregon. I was having lunch with a really, really dynamic influential woman in our community yesterday. She knows a bit about her business, and is on the Bend 2030 committee, and is really a leader in the community. She goes, “That thing about Kombucha Mama that I just love is that Jamie Danek—and my wife, who were the founders, but this woman, Jamie, especially —she’s has thrown all of her chips in. Here’s a woman that’s 40-something years old, had no business starting a Kombucha company and didn’t know what Kombucha was, had never been in the Natural Foods Market, had never sold to Natural grocers, had two kids that are heading to college—I mean, she’s risking financially all of her savings.
The reason that I mentioned this is that so many times, people look at my story and they’re like, “Yes, Eric, you know you could throw every dollar you had—all $3,000 of them in a shoebox when you were 25 years old, and you could risk going broke because you didn’t have kids; and you didn’t have a wife; and you didn’t have a mortgage. You’re just a kid. It’s kind of like playing.”
I get that. I get that at different stages in life, you’re more available to make those kinds of bold moves, but there’s never in my experience a good time to not follow your passions. Life is just too short. I admire Jamie so much for seeing something that she cares about so much, and even though she didn’t have a credibility, and didn’t have all the resources, and didn’t have the knowledge, she was just like, “I love this. I care about this. It’s in my heart. I’m going to do it.” And I mean, they’re seeing three-figure growth in their company. They’re over 100% growth the last three years; this year, they’re going to grow four fold.
I think that in most success stories, the common denominator is not the life situation somebody was in. The common denominator was an incredibly high level of passion and that feeling inside that, “In order for me to be true to myself, I have to do this.” And I think that when people don’t listen to that voice inside of them—I’m not going to say that bad things happen; I’ll just say maybe all of the good things that could happen don’t.
Andy: So, your F business plan aside and the life circumstances aside, where did that come from for you? Where was the source of that—both passion and confidence—that you and your friend could go and make this business work, as a 25-year old?
Eric: For both of us, we were already living it, so what I had personally experienced from personal development—the life changes that I experienced reading Dan Millman’s book—were really profound. The career growth that I’ve been able to have—I mean I basically went from a kid, who was 18 years and had no experience—nothing. My friends were going home to Green Bay, Wisconsin to get factory jobs in the summer; and because of the training that I received and because of the mentorship that I received—
I mean, by the time I was 18 years old, I was making $1,000 a week in the summer time. By the time I graduated from college, I was making $3,000 a week, and this was back in the early 90s when that was actually a whopping load of money.
I knew that people that were stuck in their career—that couldn’t really excel. It wasn’t because they weren’t smart. I’m not smarter than anybody. It wasn’t because they didn’t have opportunity; everybody has opportunity. It’s simply how they see themselves and what they were able to realize about their potential.
I had lived that for seven years prior to developing our company. I travelled to Africa. I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, went to the Middle East, travelled all over North America; I think I was in 30-something states by the time I was 23. I really had a rich experience for the last handful of years, and I just wanted to share it. I remember being in those distributor meetings and looking at people that we’re kind of zombie-like.
Here they are in their jobs—and I’m selling dog treats, so you can’t say that I had the most glamorous job in the world, but I loved it. I love the people I worked with. I love the growth we were seeing. We went from 200 stores to 2,000 stores in a year, and that was simply because we were turned on about with what we were doing; and I wanted to share that. I thought, “There are more people that would love this message,” and it turns out that I was right, that it wasn’t just me; hundreds of thousands of people later.
People really care about growth. They care about a balanced, fulfilled, harmonious life; and I just love what I do, so it’s all sorts of fun.
Andy: A lot of your work in Freedom Personal Development has—I don’t know I want to say—culminated, but it’s grown into this thing that you call the “Abundant Living Retreat”, which maybe—would you consider how to be like a flagship kind of program for freedom?
Eric: Yes, that’s really the thing that—yes, I can say that that’s the program I care the most about. It’s certainly the one that I’m most invested in right now. Abundant Living is something that we do once or twice a year. It’s a four-day retreat.
How this came about was actually pretty funny. In 2010, our daughter, Mae, was born in January of the year. Michelle looked at me and just said, “You know, when Mae is born, why don’t we just nest for a little bit? I’ll take a sabbatical from Kombucha Mama”—which I have to point this out, because so many people—I don’t know how many of the people listening to this are entrepreneurs or are starting their own businesses, but I love bragging about Michelle a little bit on this because here she is. She launched a company in the spring of 2009, right when she was getting pregnant.
She was pregnant for 9 of the first 12 months in our business. And then, immediately after the baby came, she said, “You know, Eric, let’s just walk away from our jobs, from our businesses for, like, 2 or 3 months, and let’s just—the three of us—nest. Let’s just go somewhere, where nobody can call us, and let’s just hang out as a family.”
So many entrepreneurs, Andy, just don’t give themselves permission to really live their life the way that they want to. They believe that they have to do X, Y, and Z, and in turn—I know this is cliché—they don’t own their business; their business owns them. And, a lot of people—they don’t have a job; they have a job that has them.
Michelle said, “You know, we’re going to leave. My family, in this time, is more important to me than the growth of our new company.” She had a great conversation with Jamie, her partner. We headed off to South America for three months to just kind of hol3 up and not do any work. But when I got there, this woman who was so sweet—she’s passed away since. Her name is Mary Titten. Mary and I had become friends with Michelle years earlier.
So, I get down there with the baby. We’re nesting; we’re hanging out at Mary’s house. She just looks at me, and she’s like, “Okay, mister goal-setting guy, life is going to change now that you have a baby. Now that you’re a father and now that all of this life change is going to happen, what would you do if you can do anything professionally? If you had no limitations and you had no constraints in time or money, what would you want to do?”
And, it’s so funny because I ask questions like this—of clients and in workshops—pretty frequently, but the way she phrased it was just a way that I had never quite considered before. She really put me on the spot. She was like, “No wiggle room on this one.” I tried to evade the question a little bit, but she just wasn’t having it.
I finally said, “Okay, fine, Mary. What I would do if I can do anything is I would do a fully intensive retreat. It would be four days long—long enough and longer than weekends—so the people can really immerse. It could be immersion, but not a week or two, because then, nobody would go because they couldn’t get off work. I would do it for four days long, and it would center around career, relationships, physical health, and financial freedom.
“It would just be completely intensive. The curriculum would be 24 hours a day. Of course, people would sleep, but they’d get exercise. They’d eat amazing food. They’d work on their jobs. They’d build relationships, and they would really get a transformational experience that would literally propel their whole lives forward.”
That’s what I said, and Mary just looks at me, and she’s like, “Alright, when are you going to do it?”
I was kind of in a pickle, because here I am, and I just mapped out that thing that really filled my heart. It just came out of my mouth. I never really thought about it that way. And then, she put my feet to the fire, so we did the first one about 10 months later or 9 months later, and we’ve been doing them ever since.
It’s a great experience. It’s definitely a piece of personal development that I think is the most unique and impactful in the entire Eric Plantenberg world.
Andy: Speaking of doing things that you’re passionate about—you’re cruising along; you built this great company; you set up sort of an ideal lifestyle, in many ways, with the work that you love; and then, you abruptly left. What was behind all of that?
Eric: I love it when you say I abruptly left, and my mind goes to, like, three of four times light bulb. [laughs]
Andy: Which time? [laughs] That’s actually a pretty good sign if you don’t know exactly what I mean.
Eric: Yes, you know, all my Buddhist friends, they really, really, stress the importance of non-attachment. Apparently I’m not very attached to my career.
Yes, this recently, is that I was the CEO and really the executive director of Freedom Personal Development for the last, call it, 16 years. I took a couple of years sabbatical, and there are three years where that wasn’t my job. I turned it over to some other people, but I was advising in. And now, I’m really just doing Abundant Living.
What happened was when Edge was born—our youngest—Michelle and I looked at each other, and we said, “We had so much fun taking some time when our daughter was born; let’s do the same thing again.” We went to Mexico this past January and basically unplugged again—very, very little phone activity, basically no internet. We sat on the beach, and we were just a family.
I woke up one day. The girls had been consistently talking about expanding their business, the Kombucha business, and I had no intention—I had actually told them a couple of times that I would love the CEO job of Kombucha Mama, but I’m not available.
Well, one day, I was sitting on the beach. Certainly, I’m not a victim, and I don’t want to say that I didn’t have a choice in the matter—but I’m just sitting there, and it was like the decision was made for me. I was sitting on the beach, and I just knew I had to resign from the CEO position. I had to just step away from what I was doing, and it just completely felt right for me to shift things up.
What I find pretty interesting about this experience for me is that the time, none of the logical pieces made any sense to me. I’m a pretty logical guy. I use my left brain, and I think somewhat linearly. But as I was sitting there, it had none of that. There was no reason or rationale. It was just, “I have to do this. I’m going to resign from running Freedom Personal Development, but I’ll still do the retreat, because I love that so much. But, for the most part, I’m just going to turn that over to the rest of the capable people in the company, and I’m going to run the Kombucha company.”
As I look back on it months later, now, it’s really easy for me to identify all of the logical reasons why that was the right decision. But when I was in it, man, that just didn’t make any sense at all. I just knew that I had to do it. So, I guess it’s kind of the short answer, Andy.
So, I’m curious to hear from you. I mean, you interview a lot of really, really interesting people, and your personal background in the tech business, and then setting into this personal development space yourself is really, from my experience, profound. I love listening to your vision of how that happened.
I’m curious to meet your take on this for anybody. When is it the right time for someone to make a big life shift? When do you go from doing what you’ve always been doing to doing something new?
Andy: That’s the question I want an answer to, really; [laughter] and I think what you were alluding to before was actually the right answer and that there’s never a right time. There’s something intuitive about this process, where all of a sudden, you just can’t not do it. There’s a certain amount of listening to your heart, to your intuition, to your soul—whatever—and actually honoring what that’s telling you.
I think there’s an internal wisdom that we tend to ignore. It’s very convenient to ignore that and to simply live life as we always do, instead of going through the motions and live the life that we’re “supposed to live”. And I think that it’s those times of separation, like your example—sitting on a beach in Mexico—where we create enough spaciousness in our lives that we can actually listen to what that wisdom is telling us.
Eric: Man, that’s awesome. I’m just listening to you and go on and, “Ah-huh, preach it.” [laughter] And I guess I think that—I guess the question that I have is, “Why don’t we collectively, as a society, listen to that intuition more, because I believe it’s in everyone?” I don’t believe it’s just in the wise, medicine-women type of people that are so famous and so iconic for listening to that sixth sense and listening to their feelings—but, man, I think that’s a big, big, big, big deal.
I don’t know why I’m reminded of this right now, but I’m thinking of Simon Sinek’s TED talk, where he draws out the circles, and he really says, “Start with Why”—which is a great book by the way; I’ve really enjoyed reading that book. And, I think that “why” a lot of times is if not irrational, at least illogical. It doesn’t necessarily connect dots linearly, and just having that feeling of, “Why I exist,” of, “Why am I here?” of, “Why is the solar system wrapped around itself like it does?” I think that when—at least when I tap into that “why” in that purpose, everything seems to work out in the long run.
Andy: Yes—absolutely. And I think you’re exactly right in that we all do have that wisdom within us, and I don’t know why we don’t pay more attention to that. It seems like we live our scripts. We live the lives that we’re supposed to live, and for whatever reason, we don’t call time out and take the time to tap into what that wisdom is telling us.
Eric: I’m psyched that it doesn’t have to be that way all the time.
Andy: It definitely doesn’t have to be that way all the time, which is exactly what this show is about—that having these conversations to really talk about authenticity and to share some of these stories of people that are defining authenticity in very different ways. There’s no real answer of, “This is what it means,” but people are having the wherewithal to do that exploration for them.
And sometimes, that’s forced upon them, right? Sometimes, there’s some sort of crisis or loss that forces a change. But sometimes, it’s really a matter of just stepping back, and you can say, “You know what? My life isn’t really working the way that I want it to right now, and so, something’s got to shift.” And then, being able to—it’s a courageous decision to say, “You know what? Let’s explore this. Let’s lean into it. Let’s do something differently than the way that it’s been up until now in my life.”
Eric: I really love that. One of the things I love about it is that so many people confuse positivity with authenticity. It takes a real open heart to look in the mirror and go, “Yes, my life isn’t the way that I want it. This relationship isn’t working for me. I don’t love my career the way that I really want to love my career.” I think that that’s such a big deal for people to be honest enough with themselves.
Not being a whiner or a complainer—big difference between being authentically like, “This doesn’t work for me,” and bitching and complaining a lot, but sometimes I know it’s hard for me. Michelle and I are, I think, wrapping up a very hard cycle in our marriage. It’s been really interesting watching us stay positive and stay true and real to ourselves, and then also find the places in our marriage that we’re like, “This just isn’t cool. This just doesn’t work. This just isn’t who we want to be.” That’s been a really hard, but a good experience; at least for me, it has. I think she would echo that. How I got in our marriage, I don’t know, Andy. [laughter] I just went there. [laughs]
Andy: No, it’s all part of authenticity, right? It’s about asking those questions of what is working and what is not working. In the flipside of that, that I’d like to ask you about, is what would you consider to be some of your notable failures, and what have they taught you? Just a light question for you…
Eric: Oh, yes, I know. There are so many of them. I feel like I’ve failed miserably in my marriage for most of the last eight years. [laughs] Why I say that is I remember, it was about six months; Michelle and I took a three-year sabbatical, where we travelled all over the world, and people hear about that. We went to 50 countries and left our jobs, and stuff like that, and people are like, “Oh, my god! You guys are amazing,” and, “Oh, that’s great.” My first thought is, “Wow, you should have been there because it was torture, for at least a part of it.”
To answer this question, I think that I fail pretty regularly in the extremist view that my personality brings out. It’s like when I do something, even with the things I’m passionate about, I don’t necessarily have much of a governor; and that’s something that I’ve just been praying, like I’m on my hands and knees praying to God, the universe—and anybody else who’ll listen—that as I continue to grow older, that that wisdom will somehow hit me because it’s slow in catching up.
When I look at our marriage, we dove into this thing with so much passion and so many big dreams. And then, we put ourselves in a crucible, where for three straight years, we were together, 24 hours a day, seven days a week; most of the time, in cultures that we didn’t speak the language and didn’t have any friends—so that just seemed like the most fun ever—coming into it. And then, when we got there, both of us look at each other, and we we’re like, “Wow, we’re way in over our heads.” I mean, I know that Michelle could have just used a girlfriend [laughs], like more than a couple of times, and I just needed some space.
The good news about that was that we definitely have subscribed into the, “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” and I really do think that our marriage is much stronger because of some of the wacko situations that we’ve put ourselves in.
And another one—I could just go on with these for a long time, Andy, so shut me up. I really took on a huge mountaineering project to climb a couple of the biggest mountains in the Himalaya. On one of them, Michelle was pregnant, and then on one of them, our daughter was a year old; and I was gone for 40 and 70 days. At really critical times in our family’s junction, in our family’s growth, so I would say that if I had to encapsulate it or put my thumb on where I fail, it’s simply by over-committing and by really allowing my optimism and my ability to have a lot of energy.
I mean, I have a lot of energy. I meditate. I do yoga. I don’t need to sleep as much as, I think, maybe I used to think that I did. I just take on a lot. And, as Michelle puts it, that comes with collateral damages.
Andy: I have three young sons, and they’ll kill me if I don’t ask about this. They’re in their young teenage years—14, 12, and 10—and are fascinated by Mount Everest. [laughs] So, can you talk a bit about your experience climbing Mount Everest, and what motivated that, and what it was like?
Eric: Yes—I have. I mean, it was the most fun ever. I wish—I’m going to call Michelle in here, so that she can get on [laughs] want to [laughs].
Andy: [laughs] We’ll do a separate conversation with her maybe.
Eric: Yes—she’s awesome. Climbing the mountain, I guess I’ll just talk about that, itself. It was a lifelong dream. It’s one of those things you hear about as a little kid, and then I read about it when I was a teenager, and then I saw it when I was in my late twenties trekking. It’s this thing that just inspires me and, I think, many other people to just really see what they’ve got under the hood.
What it wasn’t about is it wasn’t about conquering the highest peak on the planet, or any of that crap; that’s not really important to me. It definitely wasn’t about bragging rights or resume. It has had a much bigger impact to my speaking business than I thought it would. I actually didn’t think that any of my clients, or potential clients, would care; and to be totally honest, they do—the fact that I’ve climbed Mount Everest. They want to hear about it. They hire me because I have. That was completely unintentional.
And, for me—I love athletics. I love running, biking, swimming, and being out in nature. I think a big part of it was as it just stacks up, that’s the type of climbing that I’m really, really good at. We have this great rock climbing, sport climbing area, really close to my house called “Smith Rock”. There are recreational, very recreational climbers, that are out there climbing 5.8, 5.10, 5.12 routes that I would never come close to—like no interest or desire—and there’s probably tens of thousands of people in America that can climb routes like that; but high-altitude, really cold, really long expeditions just happen to fit what I love and what I’m good at.
To your kids, I would say that when following their passions about whatever sort of sports or activities, or whether it’s music or art—or whatever it is—it is to really align with the things that you naturally love and are good at. I have a daughter that’s super, super into music right now. She’s three years old. She’s singing all the time, and she plays the piano and guitar; I mean, not like super intuitive or anything like that. She just naturally gravitates into it and picks it up.
And again—intuitively—I think that’s the exact same thing that we were talking about earlier. It’s that there’s a voice inside of us that says, “This is where you need to go,” and mine was really clear. It said, “You have to go to Mount Everest,” and I loved it. I love the culture. I love the Sherpa and the Buddhist culture, and I just love that part of the world. It called me and I said “yes”, and I have a very, very, very—emphasize “very”—patient life.
Andy: So, Eric, you’re involved in all kinds of different things. I know that we could talk for hours about your stories, but what do you want your legacy or your spiritual footprint, if you will, to be on the world?
Eric: That’s such a big question, and I hope that I would be able to answer that on my deathbed. I was there with my grandfather when he said goodbye to the physical world, when he was 93 years old. I feel like he had a pretty good handle on it, but even at that point—and he was guru status in my life; just really, really impactful—I don’t know that he was even totally clear on that, even when he was passing.
Maybe this is a little bit corny, but I would hope that the people that spend time with me look at themselves in a better light. I would hope that somebody that I work with, or that I go on a climbing trip with, or one of the parents in our community where our kids are all running around together—I think that I just hope that if somebody spends enough time with me, they would look in the mirror, and they would like the picture that they saw in the picture better because of our interactions. That would be a grand slam homerun in my life.
Andy: That’s an inspiring answer, thanks. So, what’s next for you, Eric? What’s going on in your world that you’re excited about right now?
Eric: Like next-next, if I’m super present, I’m probably changing a diaper some time in the next 15 minutes. [laughter] Yes, that’s probably super high on my list. [laughs]
I’m running a 50K in the next couple of weeks. That looks like a lot of fun. I’m taking my daughter to school a couple of days a week. She’s three and is in school.
And then, we’re opening up this new Kombucha facility this month, so we’re going to take our production and increase it. We had four-fold increase last year, and we’re going to do another four to five-fold increase this year—so those are pretty good.
And then, there’s this non-profit that would love to plug because I love that. It’s called “KIDS in the Game”, and one of our core missions is to make sure that every child in America has the ability to play sports. If they come from families, where financially that’s not available—something like 3% of kids are dropping out of organized sports before they’re 14 years old, and a lot of that is for financial reasons. I think that that has a lot of negative implications when it comes to physical health, leadership, drug use, alcohol use, teen pregnancy. I’m doing a bunch of events for them. I’ve been recently put on the board of directors, so I’ll be really active with them for this next year, too.
So, yes, life is full.
Andy: It sounds like it’s busy, and full, and wonderful. That’s great. How can our listeners engage with you, Eric?
Eric: EricPlantenberg.com—Eric, E-R-I-C; Plantenberg, P-L-A-N-T-E-N-B-E-R-G; dot-com.
I do a video. I don’t know if you know about this, but I do a video every Monday morning called “Happy Monday”. People, most people at least, dread going to work on Monday morning. Studies have proven that the average person in America smiles around 11:15 on Monday morning. Come on, people! [laughs]
So, I throw out a video first thing in the morning, Monday morning, that is some combination of entertaining, inspirational, and thought-provoking—I put out different topics, so that’s it. That’s a great way to engage with me, Andy. I would love to see any of your listeners plugging into Happy Monday. They are like two or three minutes long. It’s just much fun to kick off to the week.
Andy: Fantastic.
Eric: Yes, and come to the Abundant Living Retreat. If people think that that sounds like fun—unplugging from their life and plugging into themselves and in their goals—our next retreat’s in February, and you could always get that information at EricPlantenberg.com, too.
Andy: Fantastic. We’ll be sure to link to all that stuff.
Eric: Thank you.
Andy: So, is there a final thought that you’d like to leave our listeners with about authenticity?
Eric: Yes—I guess I think they’re already doing it. My final thought would be that the time that anyone has spent in all these last—whether it’s been 20 or 30 minutes—listening to this conversation of authenticity is really time well spent. I personally—and this goes back to the beginnings, back to the late 80s and the early 90s—have found that to become your most authentic self, it doesn’t happen by accident. That tuning into podcasts like this one, reading books, being in mindful conversations with other people on this topic—it’s a pursuit that’s worthwhile.
It’s not a lot of heavy-lifting work, but it requires efforts and intentionality. And, I guess I would just congratulate everybody for listening to this program and for plugging into your work, Andy, because this is important, and it’s my experience at least that it makes an impact.
Andy: Awesome—thanks very much. Eric Plantenberg—thanks very much for spending this time with us. I’m really rateful for the connection, and thanks for sharing your stories with me.
Eric: Thank you, Andy. Have a great week.
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