"It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy,
that makes happiness." Spurgeon
Self-actualizing individuals have more peak moments
(i.e., the most deeply rewarding experiences in life)
in a given year than most people do in their lifetime.
That means they have 80-100 times more of them.
The constant stream of Peak Moments in the lives of
self-actualizers tells us they must be doing some things
different
that draws so many magical experiences to them.
And that if we learn how to do that, we can have them too.
Newness and growth are what make peak experiences.
Contrast is the real elixir that makes a life feel magical.
New experiences and new learnings
tap our adrenaline
and make us happy to be alive.
The self-actualizing principle of Peak Experiences says that
peak moments create a self-actualizing spiral in our growth.
They rejuvenate us with increased energy and motivation.
The more rewarding, soul-satisfying moments we have,
the more desire we have to
continue to do the work
to increase our growth to have even more of them.
As a first step in clarifying what gives you greatest
pleasure,
Look at what have been the peak moments in your life,
the times you felt most rewarded
and grateful for being alive.
Make a list of all the peak experiences in your life.
After you've listed your Peak Experiences, then go back over it
and look for repetitions in the list. What do the patterns tell you
about what makes
you happy? What activities, environments,
people
and experiences feed your soul? Write them down.
These tell you what things have most deeply rewarded you
in the past, and thus are most likely to do so in the future.
Then compare what you learn from this
to the ways you have been living your life
to see if there are any changes
you'd like to make
in order to have more peak experiences in your life.
If you'd like to learn how to have more peak moments,
or
mystery trip adventures and mystery dates in your life,
you can find out how by clicking
here on
GOALS to see how
peak experiences lead to a self-actualizing life or by reading on.
"There is one thing which gives radiance to everything.
It is the idea of something coming around the corner." G. K.Chesterton
We can rejuvenate ourselves with peak experiences, for example
by going on Mystery Trip dates and adventures,
such as:
These Mystery Trip dates and adventures have been experienced by people who have learned to have
natural highs.
If you want to connect with the people who have done these and other mystery trips
and dates,
or if you would
like to learn how to have more peak experiences and adventures in your own life
and want help from people who have had these adventures themselves, email the SAGE GOALS Counselor.
A PERSONAL LIST OF PEAK EXPERIENCES
Because our memories are a measure of how much we've enjoyed our life,
here are some 50 of my favorite peak experiences.
To learn more about any of them or to share some of your own peak
experiences, please feel free to
post your questions or comments at
the WIN (Wisdom In Numbers) section of SAGEGOALSLifeCoaching ,or
you can click here to
email
me at
SAGE Coach.
Lee Wotherspoon
I’ve plane hopped (hitch-hiking rides) on private jets and cargo flights all around the country from coast to coast.
I’ve flown in ultra-lights and hot air balloons, hang-glided in the Rockies, parasailed at sunset off the coast at Key West.
I rode upside down with a pilot in a 2-seater stunt plane, doing “loop-the-loops, barrel rolls and hammerheads”.
I've hopped freight trains around the country, once with a dozen of us all waving out the boxcar door at crossings.
I hitch-hiked around New England and up to Montreal with my oldest daughter and taught her how to plane hop.
I love being with old friends and making new friends and savor spending time in good conversation. And so
I opened my home as a hostel in the woods, which is how I met, fell in love with and married the love of my life.
I took her for a walk at midnight on a full moon night to the top of a hill where I asked her to marry me. And
on a flight to Chicago the next morning she'd arranged for the pilot to propose to me for her over the speaker.
We got married on the beach in Antigua in the West Indies with our seven children present.
A friend and I hired a guitar player and serenaded our wives from outside an inn at midnight.
She loves fireworks, so I took her on a plane ride to see them from the sky on the 4th of July.
I’ve taken her on a mystery trip airplane ride to see New England’s fall foliage from up above.
I performed for years with a Murder Mystery troupe of actors – including shows on the QE-2.
I’ve gone horseback camping, riding on a beach and swimming on horseback in the Caribbean.
I danced to "All Night Long" in the streets of Cartagena on a New Year’s eve mystery trip a friendtook me on who said to meet him at Kennedy Airport in order to learn where we were going.
I’ve gambled at casinos in Europe, danced with Gypsies in Barcelona, and swapped tales in pubs in Ireland.
I’ve ridden hanging on the outside of a steam locomotive engine going 60mph through the mountains of Mexico.
and camped out in the mountains there with Indian cave dwellers. And I watched a volcano erupt in Hawaii.
I soloed at Outward Bound in the Florida Keys and brought back the skull of a 200 year old loggerhead turtle.
I sat in a high-stakes poker game with armed, tequila-drinking gamblers in Mexico as one guy was cheating.
I was a single parent to my youngest child for years and sometimes rode her to nursery school on horseback.
I hand-sewed a quilt for the birth of a friend's first child, and added to it each time she's grown to a larger bed.
I once went out for a loaf of bread and came home with a convertible; another time with a Volkswagen camper.
I traveled around the country in the camper doing newspaper and television interviews promoting my first book.
I’ve ridden through the Canadian Rockies on a train from Vancouver to Banff on a mystery trip
with a friend.
I slept in Queen Victoria’s bed in London, bathed in her tub, seen her knickers and sat on her most intimate “throne”.
I lived palatially in Argentina with live-in maids and a chauffeur but also 24-hour a day armed bodyguards.One of my guards in Buenos Aires was shot and killed when some people tried to kidnap me.
And so I took early retirement from business in my 30s in order to have more time for the business of life.
I've lived for three decades in a home I designed in a pine forest on a 200 year old dirt road in New Hampshire.
I try to visit my favorite cities (New York, Boston and London) several times a year to play and see clients and
also to visit my favorite smaller places (Mallorca, Carmel, Big Sur and Santa Barbara) nearly as frequently.
I love giving mystery parties, like at Halloween when I had horse-drawn hayrides take guests for rides to pick pumpkins, then we came back for a pumpkin-carving party, turning out the lights and placing sparklers in the jack-o-lanterns so that bright pink, green and orange sparks shoot out the pumpkins’ eyes, nose and mouths.
Or the "Harvest Moon Party" on my land where I had an ultralight airplane fly in front of the full moon like ET on a bicycle.
Or the “Wizard of Oz Party” where just as we left the ground in a hot air balloon, my 8-year old grabbed a mega-phone and shouted out to people on the ground “Goodbye, Everybody, Goodbye! We’re going back to Kansas!”
I gave a butlered dinner party and Murder Mystery at a mansion in London where Prince Charles has been entertained
(the butler did it).
At that party we played Hide & Shriek in the dark where if you were a seeker and got near a hider, they’d jump out of the dark and scream!
I've hosted numerous parties where we played ‘Moonball’ outside at night after dark where I inflated an 8-foot weather balloon lit up by a dozen different colored light sticks I put inside it so it glows in the dark. When hit,
it glides through the air very slowly like a giant glowing moon as the light sticks zoom up and down all around inside like bright colored comets or fluorescent shooting stars.
I gave my wife a birthday party where I asked everyone to make their presents be mystery trips of something they'd like to share with her that year (and said that if it involved traveling, I'd pay for her to get there). She got to go to a butterfly farm, to Cirque de Soleil, a fine craft fair in Coral Gables, a weekend in the Adirondacks, etc.
I took her to Buenos Aires on a mystery trip for a Tango Festival where we danced Tango on rooftops and in the streets and at Tango clubs that didn't open until midnight. And I showed her my old haunts from when I used to live there.
She took me on a mystery date Gondola ride on the Charles River in Boston, and dancing on the roof at the Ritz.
For a birthday she took me swimming in a bio-luminescent bay, where tiny flagellites make the water light up like diamonds as you dive in and swim through it at night.
I've been to bullfights with beauty queens, dined with matadors in Colombia and ridden polo ponies in Argentina.
I went to Hollywood producer Bob Evans’ wedding to fashion model Leslie-Ann Woodward on the beach in Mexico.
I was at the Waldorf for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction of Aerosmith, Steely Dan and Michael Jackson there.
I went to Richard Nixon’s Inaugural Ball, and the night before to the hippies “in-hog-uration” of a hog, ankle-deep in mud.
A year later I was named on the White House enemies IRS “hit list” in the articles of impeachment that led to Nixon’s resignation.
I’ve known billionaires and hobos, ex-cons and card sharks, a Pulitzer prize winning writer and a grave digger, celebrities and drug smugglers, a stripper, a prostitute and an Argentine tango dancer.
And I’ve been shot at, hand-cuffed, arrested and thrown in jail.
My earliest peak experiences
An important secret in increasing the magic in your life is to add adventure, i.e., exploring new paths
and directions that hold some promise of bringing you something that delights and rewards you for
having made an extra effort to expand your life and experience, and increase your quotient of HOPE
(High On Positive Expectation) in your life. The only way to have this is to take the risk to go exploring,
setting off without knowing where you'll end up, but filling your sails with a positive, hopeful attitude
to see what you may encounter and find along the way.
That brings us to Mystery Trips, the intentional setting off in new directions just to see what we encounter,
being open to whatever happens with an attitude of wide-eyed, child-like trust and expectation that we'll
stumble across something worthwhile on the adventure, the same way as a child going out to play.
I first experienced this feeling as a boy of 6 at an aunt and uncle's little 4-cottage resort near Canadathat my mother sent me to every summer to get me out of the dreary steel town and government
housing projects we lived in, to let me experience and see what life was like out in nature with its
deep woods and streams and lakes.
From the time I was six until I was twelve, my mother would put me on a train alone in Gary, Indiana,
where we lived with a note pinned on me and send me to spend the summers at an aunt and uncle's
little place up in the north woods of Wisconsin, some 400-500 miles away on the Canadian border.
She would give a train conductor a couple of dollars and ask him to help me change trains in Chicago.
The note was a backup with her phone number asking strangers to help me if I got lost. She did that
summer after summer (My wife, Barb, teases that it was because I kept coming back).
I spent those summers playing alone in the forest, building forts, paddling around their little lake in a rowboat, exploring the countryside, following streams and watching the deer come down to the water to drink at dawn. It was a magical time, and the first memories that cropped up when I first looked at my peak experiences. When I did that, one pattern I discovered in my peaks experiences was that they involved times in nature, and especially in the woods, and particularly in pine forests. So when I used those to identify what my ISLE (Ideal Style of Life Elements) would be if I could get free, I knew it would be to live in the woods,
and have more time to be outdoors in a similar setting to those of my summers as a child in the north woods.
The first house I ever bought was the last home on a cul-de-sac on a wooded hillside, surrounded by a forest
much like the woods where I played as a child during those summers in Wisconsin. One of the first things
I did for my kids after we moved in was to put up a fort and a teepee in the woods alongside our house and
a zip line, a cable strung up between trees with a pulley handle on it that the kids could ride down the hill on.
When I got free of working for a corporation and was able choose where I wanted to live my ideal style of life, I set off on a mystery trip one Saturday morning to find land in the woods where I could build a house to live in for the long haul, which is how I came to buy the land and build my home here in a pine forest on a dirt road in New Hampshire where I've lived for nearly 30 years now, and still find myself thinking, "I love living here".
MY first mystery trips with my kids
A friend recently wrote that his and his brothers' wives sent them a note that said: “Mark your calendars
for our first mystery double date. That’s all you get to know, so make sure you don’t plan anything else,
and get excited!” Later he wrote: “Gin took me out on our first mystery date that included an awesome
tapas restaurant and a murder mystery at our local theatre. So much fun. Now it is my turn to step it up : )”.
Starting with relatively easily accessible local things is a good way to get started. That's how I first reconnected with the magic of adventuring in life as a adult. My first mystery trips started out by going out on bicycles with my children on our Saturday morning bicycle adventures, where at each intersection or corner, we would “sniff” to see if any of us was drawn in any direction and if so that’s the way we would go (if we weren’t feeling tugged in a particular direction, I’d take my “magic coin” out of my pocket and we’d flip it to decide which way to head.)
Each time we kept having great adventures, like the time we discovered old underground caves hidden along the Ohio River near our home in Kentucky. Asking around, we learned that they were “runaway slave caves” dug during the Civil War to hide slaves in until they could be ferried across the river at night out of the South to Ohio and the safety of the North.
Those were my first experiences going off on mystery trips where “you don’t know where you’re going; you’re just out on an adventure.” And that’s where I began realizing that because we kept having such great adventures that we must be stumbling across some principles that led to that. As I began reflecting on our experiences, I started to learn ways we can facilitate finding magic in life and make ourselves open to having more peak experiences. And I’ve been doing it and teaching other people how ever since.
OUR LATEST MySTERY DATES
My wife Barbara and I discovered that one key to keeping romance and adventure alive in a marriage is to take each other on mystery dates, where we take our mate somewhere we think they'd like but where they don't know where we're going. We started with small things, like for a surprise picnic to a local riverside woodland park.
She recently took me on a mystery date to a concert by a favorite singer of mine, a girl from New Zealand
named Haley Westenra who has the most ethereal voice I’ve ever heard. When she sang “Amazing Grace”
I got tears in my eyes, and when she sang “Ave Maria” I felt myself floating away in what was my first ever
out-of-body sense while listening to music.
We’ve also discovered ways to add an occasional exotic major mystery trip or date to mark a special occasion. Like last month when I gave Barb a Valentines Day mystery trip date. First I gave her a gold charm bracelet with ceramic “dancing shoes” and a sparkling “shooting star” floating necklace and matching earrings as clues for where we were going.
I had arranged to take her to Hollywood to be in the audience of “Dancing with the Stars” TV show as a way to celebrate my “dancing star” partner, and to share in a special occasion as our friend Tom (Bergeron, the host of the show) was going to dance for the first time ever and on live television in front of 20 million people, doing “Charlie Chaplin does the quickstep.”
It was expensive to do for just a one-day trip, but for a once-in-a-life experience and a memory for a lifetime it was worth it. And it was a great thing to do with Tom who I taught how to go on mystery trips and who we’ve gone on mystery trips together with for decades. He had VIP passes for us to have seats at a table stage side and to join in the post-show party where we had great conversations with the dancers and judges. Barb initiated such a good conversation with one of the judges, Kerrie Ann, that she asked if she could hug both of us afterwards. We slept at Tom’s that night and flew back to New England the next day.
It brings up an important principle in finding magic in life: Some of the best things in life just won’t happen unless we put them at the top of our list and make them our priorities. The universe seems to be willing to let us live our lives on whatever level we show by our actions that we are willing to accept to live on. If we settle for low-grade rewards, that’s what we’ll get in our life. We have to stir ourselves and take some risks if we want to live life on higher levels. And we have to be willing to accept the prices of that. And the way to do that is to start small and keep learning and growing how to play on higher and higher levels as we go along.
CREATING A SETTING FOR OUR GRANDKIDS TO ADVENTURE
In recent years many of my peak experiences have involved creating a magical place for our grandchildren to come visit and play and explore outdoors all day long. We put up a great child-sized log cabin on the edge of the woods behind our barn. It's 8 x 12 x10 feet high with a front porch with a swing, and a loft to sleep in.
And one of our sons built a 30-foot long wooden train coming out of the woods at the edge of the field that has a boxcar, caboose, coal car and engine that the kids climb in and on (Barb had him build it to celebrate the end of my train-hopping days -- but that's another story). And we have a six-foot inner tube hanging on a rope from the rafters 30 feet up in the barn that the kids love to swing on and jump into the hay pile.
All this summer I had a peak experience building a tree fort in the woods on a hill behind our barn for our grandchildren. I built in on the same tree where 25 years ago I hooked up a cable ride for my youngest daughter. Now I have the delight of watching our grandchildren have the same fun that my kids did, climbing up into a tree fort and grabbing the pulley handle and launching themselves off on the zip line and riding 100 feet down the hill past the log cabin and out into the woods.
We love to give our grandkids unstructured, vine-ripened, adventuring days of exploring outdoors. We see one of our most valuable roles be to give them experiences that balance out and broaden their sense of the world and to have opportunities to make magical memories and peak experiences in their lives. And just watching them do that are peak experiences for me.
For more tales about having a self-actualizing life, you can go to GOALS to see the free online book, 'Getting Free' or phone us for information on SAGE Coaching at 877 SAGE ACT.