STORY TIME WITH ADAM KREEK. Adam is an executive coach, speaker, consultant, and the author of The Responsibility Ethic. Before all of that, however, he was winning Olympic gold medals and rowing across the Atlantic Ocean! This episode is heavy on adventure, and sets up a conversation with Tyler about emotional intelligence in the next episode. Learn more about Adam and his book: https://www.kreekspeak.com/ Watch the video, “Dateline:Capsized” on NBC: https://www.nbcnews.com/video/capsized-part-1-226589251691
STORY TIME WITH ADAM KREEK. Adam is an executive coach, speaker, consultant, and the author of The Responsibility Ethic. Before all of that, however, he was winning Olympic gold medals and rowing across the Atlantic Ocean! This episode is heavy on adventure, and sets up a conversation with Tyler about emotional intelligence in the next episode.
Learn more about Adam and his book: https://www.kreekspeak.com/
Watch the video, “Dateline:Capsized” on NBC: https://www.nbcnews.com/video/capsized-part-1-226589251691
Tyler Small: Hey guys, this is Tyler Small on Hacking Emotional Intelligence. And today I have with me a special treat: Adam Kreek, who is an executive business coach. And in his past life was an Olympic gold medalist in the sport of rowing. And he also rowed a rowboat across the Atlantic ocean, almost dying in the Bermuda Triangle.
How are you doing today, Adam?
Adam Kreek: Well, I'm not as bad as the day that I capsized in the Bermuda triangle, that's for sure!
Tyler Small: Are you dry?
Adam Kreek: Yes, yes I am. I'm dry.
Tyler Small: Oh my goodness.
Adam Kreek: In my office studio, as we speak, ns a very comfortable working positioning.
Tyler Small: So, uh, first off, I want to hear your story and, um, you know, the big, the big picture story of Adam Creek. Um, and, and I hope you'll include something about that, that incident, that capsize incident in your, in your story.
Adam Kreek: Yes. Well, okay. Big, big picture. You know, so I'm currently an executive business coach. I work one-on-one with, uh, with, uh, leaders in organizations to help them find more clarity, uh, in, uh, in their career and within their teams. And, uh, within the business goals, I help reduce negative stress in their life and help them manage people more effectively. Yeah, that's what I do right now.
So what brought me here? I grew up in a pretty average town in London, Ontario. I, uh, had, uh, you know, two older sister's, older brother, dad sold life insurance. Mom was a nurse. Uh, grew up riding my bike to school, dreaming that I'd be an accountant that rode my bike to work when I grew up.
All that changed, I suppose, when I was around 16, uh, local parents started a rowing program at my high school. Uh, I played a lot of different sports when I was a kid, as well as being in the band and trying to be a good student, as good as I could be anyways. And, uh, uh, after rowing for about a year or two, my coach took my dad aside, said "Adam Creek's an Olympian. He just. He just doesn't know it yet."
Tyler Small: That's quite the prediction!
Adam Kreek: It was quite the prediction. He saw it and he was, he was actually a really good coach. Um, you know, I had two coaches: Walt Benco and Peter Carson. The coach that said this was Walt Benco. And, uh, he had seen all sorts of rowers and, uh, I guess he just knew from my personality and who I was, uh, um, like, you know, physicality, that, you know, I had this potential and that potential drove me through high school sport. And thankfully he was, uh, a balanced type of coach, uh, um, told me to not obsess too much about sport at a young age. And he encouraged me to stay a multi-sport athlete and, uh, and specialize later. He say he saw too many young kids, young athletes, uh, burn out too quickly at a the younger age.
So after high school, I went on a different path. I suppose I moved to Northern Alberta. I worked on an oil rig for a year and a half, uh, up in the dead cold of Northern Alberta...
Tyler Small: Oh my goodness!
Adam Kreek: ...in Canada. So outside minus 50, lots of ice cold, lots of hard work. But the voice of my coach, you know, kept coming back to me, Hey, you can do this Olympic thing! And, uh, that pushed me further West to, uh, Victoria, British Columbia, where, uh, the Canada national rowing team trained. So I went to university for two years, then I dropped out and joined the Canadian national rowing team. We, um, and then we. Uh...
Tyler Small: Wait! Wait!
Adam Kreek: ...won a couple of world championships...
Tyler Small: Wait, wait a minute! So you, you skipped a part there. How did you get, I mean, I realize that you, you were able to, to get on this, this college team and we're probably doing really well, but, and also that the, the national team just happened to be there, but how did you do that swap-a-rooney there?
Adam Kreek: The swap-a-rooney? Well, consciously I knew that the national team was training in Victoria and I'm a big believer in, you know, that old Covey-ism, right? "Successful people surround themselves with successful people." So the, my, my thought was if I wanted to go to the Olympics and see what my potential was in the sport, I should... be baptized by fire, jump in with the best and see, um, see how I could hold my own. So there was the college rowing for two years. There were some guys who were coming in and out of the national team who were also training on our college team and, uh... I was able to sort of come in around the edges with the, with the senior national team.
I went through the under 23s, uh, which was, uh, uh, under 23 national teams. So we had international competition; went to Lucerne. We had some early success there too, and I was lucky to have great athletes, great coaches, you know, early on in my path. Uh, we, we won the Canadian university rowing championships a couple of times, um, won the, the under 23 national championships in Austria.
Tyler Small: Wow.
Adam Kreek: And then, um, after we had that success, because I live in Victoria by the training center, the... A lot of the senior team guys, they kept on bugging us: come out, come train with us, come train with us. And when I first went out, obviously you're slow and you're getting beaten up and you being left in the wake. Uh, but, uh, you know, I kept on improving, had great teammates, good coaches who taught me a lot. And, uh, I kept progressing. That's the story , I suppose.
Tyler Small: Wow. I mean, that just sounds amazing. I'm trying to imagine what that's like on a, like, if you are running, it would be like, Oh, that guy is way in the back, like he's, he's he, like, we don't even see him anymore. But on a row boat you're just, you're sitting right there together. How, how can they tell how good of a job you're doing?
Adam Kreek: Well when we would train and rowing boats who actually trained in singles and pairs. So one person and two person boats. Although we competed in these eight man boats, uh, uh, internationally, in the training center our coach's philosophy was to create competition every day during the workouts so we could measure ourselves against each other. So we'd constantly go up and down the lake. Yeah and, rowing's kinda, rowing is a unique sport, similar to running, but if you could picture being, you know, having eight people, their hips, their legs, their arms, their heads are all linked together, running together. That's what rowing would feel like, if you've never been in a rowing boat.
So the, the magic of rowing in a crew boat is that there, there's a lot of, uh, you know, physical momentum, but also I'd say, you know, psychological and spiritual, um, momentum that the crew gives each other. For example, the other seven guys decide to keep going and you're feeling weak, or you feel like you're having a slow day, they lift you up and they carry you to another level, um, you know, of fitness and help you - give you, give you grit. So you, um, you developed a lot of trust, you know, working with, uh, with and alongside a lot of these athletes.
Getting back to this idea that successful people surround them with successful people, you know, I learned so much from, you know, rowing and especially in small boats, two person boats with some of these great athletes. I remember when I first came, I wasn't very good, as you can imagine. I had low skill. I had potential, but I didn't have the, you know, the fitness or the physicality.
And one of the biggest breakthroughs that occurred, you know, on my Olympic career, was when I sat in this two person boat with Kevin. He's still a close friend to this day, but he, he coached me through the rowing stroke and simply by sitting with him and him showing me how to do it and me feeling how he did it in the boat with him... I learned more from him in a one hour row than I did in the previous four years from all the coaches telling me, this is how you should do it. This is how you should do it. This is how you should do it. And it's, uh, it was incredibly powerful to be shown alongside, versus just being told. There's great method in that.
If we continue on the, you know, the timeline: we won a couple of world championships. We won actually the first world championship ever for Canada in the men's 8. So we, you know, we created, uh, created some history there. And then we went to the Athens Olympics and in the Athens Olympics, we were expected to win or podium - but we finished 5th.
Uh, the Americans actually had an excellent race that year and, uh, um, I'm still good friends with a number of those athletes, you know, from the American team, too. Um, and they had a really great race. We had a horrible race. I was quite despondent, uh, well we felt quite despondent afterwards. And I thought I was actually done with my career after that.
So after the, after the Athens Olympics, I moved down to California and went to Stanford University for three years and I was down there as a bit of a player coach, I was studying, um, geology, earth sciences, uh, geo physics thought I would be in the resource extraction industry as a career.
Tyler Small: Yeah.
Adam Kreek: But athletically, was able to teach a lot of these younger guys, how to row, you know, I paid forward the gifts, I suppose, that Kevin gave to me and sat in the boat with them and said, no, no, this is how you do it... this is how you do it. And we were able to achieve some really great success the few years we were there and, uh Six of the guys that I rode alongside ended up competing for America at the Olympics in 2016.
Tyler Small: Holy cow!
Adam Kreek: Yeah, it was really neat. And, uh, and then in 2007, I came back to the Canadian national team. Um, we, we trained and then we won the, um, the Munich World Championships. Then we went to Beijing and we won the Olympics. That was wonderful.
Tyler Small: Wow.
Adam Kreek: And after the Olympics, I was looking to see what, [wait] would happen next...
Tyler Small: I have to pause you for a second again. Like, and then we won the Olympics. And then I did the next thing, like, but, but tell me, like, what was that moment like? I mean, Uh, like you, you, you stood on the podium, like you had this, this gold medal around your neck. Like what, um, what did that, what did that feel like? What was that moment like for you?
Adam Kreek: Well, it was connecting, uh, connective ... I felt really connected to my teammates. I felt connected to the world, to the universe. Uh, self-connected with the journey.
It was a calm sense of accomplishment. I know when the, you know, the rowing race itself rowing is a very, uh, it's a power endurance sport. So you have to maximize both your aerobic, which is, uh, power with oxygen, and your anaerobic, which is power with glycogen, uh, without oxygen. So you have to maximize both to your aerobic and, um, your anaerobic capacity and you experienced a lot of physical pain and lactic acid burns, uh, pretty deeply, uh, throughout the rowing race.
And even one step back, a lot of nerves, they deal with a lot of nerves before the race. Um, as you're leading up, you sit on the start line, uh, the buzzer goes off, you go off the line, you burn off all your glycogen. You get into the aerobics pain. You start, you know, pushing through a lot of pain, go through some darkness and some doubt, and then hope returns. You finish the race. You collapse in exhaustion. And then when the energy returns you celebrate with your friends and you realize, wow, we did it. We did it! We won the Olympics!
And I remember standing on the podium or wasn't the podium, the docks, because that's where we get the metals for the rowing. And we were standing on the docks and I just had our arms around one another. And the flag was being raised. And I remember looking at the flag, and thinking, I'm either going to cry or I'm going to sing. And so I started singing "Oh, Canada" really loudly, my teammates, too. And, um, it was, uh, it was a pretty special moment.
And then afterwards - I had a tradition, after every, every major rowing race, because there was such a buildup of nerves so much physicality, uh, afterwards I would go down to the water's edge and just sit there alone and meditate by the water, soak up the experience. That was, that was a pretty special time too, because I, I looked out there and I appreciated the experience for what it was, what it had had given me and my teammates, um, to, you know, my co-patriots and even all the international competitors. I was just grateful for everything that it had given all of us and then came to the conclusion that I didn't want to race like that anymore.
It was a wonderful journey, but it wasn't for me to continue, uh, you know, good to go for another one, two Olympic cycles. There were a number of things that were coming into that decision. One being that I was married in 2005 and wanted to have children. And so I noticed that no, athletes who had children either were absent fathers, um, to perform at that level and the type of sports that we were in, or they weren't able to perform as athletes.
So it was a bit of a, you know, it's kind of a work-life balance choice that was made.
Tyler Small: Wow.
Adam Kreek: So this is looking to move more into family life and partially it was, you know, there were other things that I wanted to do. Life is rich with so many different experiences that you can have. So I felt I was, you know, I knew, well, I knew the grind and what it took to win an Olympic gold medal. So I wanted to take that grind and push it towards something else.
Tyler Small: Wow. So in that moment, you're sitting by the water's edge. And having this, this wind down time, this reflection feeling really connected. You decided that this was, this was a good time to pull out.
Obviously you can't make it any - you’d already achieved the top and, and what a great time to pull out for the sake of a family opportunity.
Adam Kreek: Yeah. That was a year and a half later that, um, Rebecca got pregnant with her first child and, you know, afterwards there was a, you know, I put my, I guess I had some entrepreneurial drivers, so I, um, I partnered up with a, when I was at Stanford, I built this bio-diesel reactor, uh, to turn waste, cooking oil, uh, into fuel, started off a small company collecting, cooking oil, making biofuel, uh, but it was, it wasn't generating enough income at that moment just to live a family life. And I was in the world of conference speaking. You know, after you win the Olympics, you have this glow for about eight months, where everyone wants you to come to their conference and speak and tell about your experience.
I was doing that and it was - the money was, you know, relatively good. And it also afforded freedom to pursue other, uh, other initiatives as well. So I, uh, I enjoyed the practice and I enjoy the delivery of the, uh, these presentations. And I kept doing that and it turned out that the conference speaking kept on having a positive feedback loop and I kept doing it. I was exposed to other people who had made this their career, you know, they had spent 20, 30, 40 years as a speaker at conferences. And I, I saw that this was something that you could, that you could do actually over the long term.
And, uh, You know, obviously it takes grit work, but I was no stranger to that, you know, after the Olympic experience.
Tyler Small: Yeah.
Adam Kreek: So I, um, I leaned into that a little bit more, um, got a bunch of training, uh, in, you know, in communication and, uh, presentation and you know, all this sort of stuff. Took improv classes and got an acting coach and, um, worked with a speech coach and then started to figure out what sort of ideas and thoughts I actually wanted to teach.
Because the conference speaking place, it's, you know, there are so many interesting stories that are out there, but what is most useful is when you can deliver the story of the point that resonates with working age adults and it helps them harden onto the path, gives them a lift, uh, helps them, uh, helps the audience and gain a little bit of perspective on, you know, on their life where they're at. It helps them feel a little bit, you know, happier and at peace with their path. And so I went along on that, on that journey.
And as I was going along in that journey, I got involved with a boatmaker here in Victoria, British Columbia. They make incredible row boats. If they're a... they're Dory style boats, they're not a racing shell like I, I raced in. But I, I loved the boats because I could go, I could load it up with crab traps and go crab fishing in the ocean, off the shore.
And, uh, got involved with them and, uh, doing some endorsement. And they were a small business, uh, struggling through the ups and downs of small business, but really connected with the, with the owner. And, um, he ended up connecting me with a guy by the name of Jordan Hanson who lived in Seattle. And Jordan had rowed across the oceans a few years prior,
Tyler Small: You're going to tell the Atlantic story now?
Adam Kreek: Yes, we're going to go, we're moving into the Atlantic story...
Tyler Small: Okay. I'm on the edge of my seat. I'm, I'm super stoked for this part.
Adam Kreek: Well, and so from a rowing perspective, was really great to get involved with Jordan because he was an adventurer and I have an adventurous spirit at heart. He had had some experience on the ocean and we met each other in San Francisco, doing this race called the Diablo race underneath the Golden Gate Bridge and back. I think we were in Sausalito. That was where we launched from. And after that race, Jordan and I connected, and we decided that we're going to row across the ocean together.
And so we started planning. We met with each other once a week over Google Hangouts and started building spreadsheets and figuring out what we needed to do. And, uh, we, you know, we ended up getting a few more teammates on board. We rebuilt the boat that he had already taken across the ocean once before...
Tyler Small: Wait - he had done this before?
Adam Kreek: Yeah. Yeah. He wrote from New York to England...
Tyler Small: By himself?
Adam Kreek: No with three other guys. So he went to the university of Puget Sound and right after they graduated, they spent a year, all lived in the same house and, um, put together this, uh, this project, rowed across the North Atlantic. And that's... the funny part of that story: they didn't pack enough food when they did that. So I didn't know, it was funny at the time, but they, they all lost, like 15 to 30 pounds a person going across the ocean. They weren't overweight by any means...
Tyler Small: I'm just so amazed. I didn't, I didn't know that was possible. This is all by, by human power. There was no sail. There's, there's no, obviously no motor. Did you have like a support vessel or...
Adam Kreek: No.
Tyler Small: Holy cow. How long did it take to go across when you guys did it?
Adam Kreek: Well, Jordan, it took him 71 days and we were 73 days at sea.
When we capsized in the Bermuda triangle... It probably would have taken us close to 90 days to get to Miami, which was where we were originally trying to get to.
Tyler Small: So you had a much longer journey that you were doing.
Adam Kreek: Yeah, it was a bit longer. And we had, uh, we weren't quite going with the weather patterns. We were going on a bit of an angle...
Tyler Small: Oh!
Adam Kreek: ... against again, the, I guess the prevailing trade winds as it were. We left, we left from Dakar, Senegal. And so it was, and I'll say it took us about, uh, four years from the time that Jordan and I, uh, committed to going across the ocean to the time that we actually launched. So we had to, we did some training in the Puget Sound up and down the coast of Washington.
We circumnavigated, Vancouver Island; that took us about a month to do that.
Tyler Small: Oh my goodness.
Adam Kreek: And so we had, you know, we built up, you know, our skills and our experience, and then we partnered with eight different universities to do some research projects. And we had 30,000 school kids who were following along, uh, when we were going across, uh, to, and we were just sharing with them what it was like to be in the ocean, you know, to expand their minds as to what, what's possible and what's out there.
Tyler Small: Oh my goodness.
Adam Kreek: We had a pretty neat program, um, that we were proud of; appreciated the opportunity to give back, you know, through the adventure and the, and then when we finally pushed off, it was January 2013. That's when we pushed off from the dock in Dakar and And we were heading, heading to Miami. And what a crazy feeling to slowly watch land, you know, the continent of Africa, over a couple of days, fade outta a site and realize we're doing this - we're rowing across the ocean!
Tyler Small: Yeah! Oh my goodness. So, so a couple of months and some change later, what, what happened there in the Bermuda triangle?
Adam Kreek: Well, there we were, and we had seen amazing things when we were out there, you know: sunrises, sunsets, hard rain downpours, uh, you know, flying fish, whales, turtles, sharks, fish. Um, there was a lot of those; a lot to really be said about the, the magical nature of the wild and just being able to connect with nature. Uh, yeah. Real raw and authentic way. And it was day 73...
Tyler Small: Wait, wait - before you get to there, I wanted to ask: so, like, up to this point, how did you sleep?
Adam Kreek: How did we sleep? Very quickly.
Tyler Small: Can you just like, okay, everybody's going to go to sleep now and we're just going to let the wind blow us around. Or how did, how did that work?
Adam Kreek: There were four of us on the boat, so we had a, um, we had something called a modified Swedish watch system. There were two people rowing at any given time, always two people on deck. Oh, when it was time to sleep, we would crawl into a little cabin that had a hatch door that shut. [Wow.] And, uh, we would, we would sleep. We'd have one, four-hour sleeping cycle every 24 hours. And then we had a few, two-hour sleeping cycles and a few, one-hour - call them rest cycles, where we weren't necessarily sleeping. You could sleep if you wanted, but there were other things to do during the rest cycle, like brush your teeth or make food, or, you know, read the weather or do some science . Or like talk to the students, the students who are, uh, listening to us and you're communicating with, so we had a bunch of these other responsibilities, too, on the boat.
Tyler Small: Wow. It just, I mean, being in, just, just up to this point where we're about to go into the, into the Bermuda Triangle situation, I mean - 73 days... That's a lot longer than most astronauts are, are in space, right? They, and they, it seems like they have a lot more support with them. They have a lot more convenience and technology and, like, food. So like that.
Adam Kreek: Yeah. It's uh, it was funny because we were actually, when we were in the middle of the ocean, we were trying to get in touch with, uh, with the astronauts in the space station. We were sending video back to a news broadcaster in Canada, and this guy, Commander Hatfield, was up in the space station. And it was a, it was actually kind of funny because we were closer to the astronauts in the space station than we were to anyone on land. You know, definitely astronauts have, you know, they've got a whole institution behind them and we had a small not-for-profit; we had a 501(c)3 that was supporting us. We had a mission control, which was one guy, Greg, and, uh, we had a few volunteers we had like a... David Birch who was a, a navigator and a weather guy. And then we had, uh, some people from the University of Washington who where, you know, giving us some weather support as well.
Tyler Small: Okay. So I just wanted to understand a little bit more about that. So I can, I can now visualize: you've got this tiny little sleeping pod and you have to have people rowing around the clock and you have some minimal communication with, with people. You're closer to the astronauts than practically anyone else.
And then you're in the Bermuda Triangle - this mysterious, spooky place. And, and then what happened?
Adam Kreek: Well, we were going through a shift change, uh, where the, the sleeping cabin door was open and Jordan and Marcus get on deck. I crawl in the sleeping cabin, when a funky wave comes, floods the cabin. I push Pat out, but I can't get out because the water is rushing and in the face of a waterfall, essentially.
Yeah. And I'm trapped, you know, obviously no air, small space. The boat overturns. I pop my head up. There's still some air in the cabin. Take a breath, dive under, get up onto the other side and look around. Is everybody OK? Yes, everybody's OK. Um, we pushed the emergency distress beacon.
Five hours later a coast guard plane shows up. We're too far out for a helicopter rescue, so they divert a number of ships. We end up getting picked up by the M.V. "Higen", and, uh, the "Higen" picks us up.
Tyler Small: What's that? What's a "Higen"?
Adam Kreek: Well, it's a M.V. - that's the name of the boat. So M.V. stands for "motor vehicle", uh, and the, the "Higen" was just the boat name? Uh, they, they were delivering cars from Newark, New Jersey to San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Wow. So they, um, they came up next to us. They had a giant rope ladder over the side of this massive tanker and we climbed up the rope and, uh, got on, got on deck.
Tyler Small: Wait, wait, wait. So I have two, I have two questions about this. One of them is, uh, when you woke up to basically being some somewhat drowned in the water, like you're, you're underwater, you've got all those, like, did that cause a lot of trauma for you? Like, what was that like?
Adam Kreek: Well, there's, I, I feel at sometimes I'll have some mild PTSD after that experience, if I'm, if I'm ever in a small space, um, sometimes my nerves can get out of control and I get claustrophobia. Sometimes when I'm, like, I'm in an airplane, I'll take - you know, my current work where I, I fly back and forth from Vancouver Island to Vancouver or Seattle to do some of the, my training work or the executive coaching work, I'll be in this little float plane and we'll hit some turbulence and then I'm instantly just looking all around. Saying: Okay. If you land on the water, where are we gonna to go. And, uh, where is all these emergency gear and I'm like hyper, extra vigilant.
Yeah, I pay extra attention to all the, you know, the emergency, uh, you know, the emergency conversation you have at the start of these flights. Or, and there was another time I was, I was getting some as doing some recovery from some back injury and I was going in these hyperbaric chambers and I just felt like, um, it couldn't do it because it was just too... The space was too small and I just felt like everything was closing in around me. I was thinking back to, you know, thinking back to the ocean of being, being trapped like that. So there's sometimes there is, you know, there are these remnant, uh, memory fragments that don't necessarily serve you.
Tyler Small: So was it like a storm? Was it like, I mean...
Adam Kreek: It was was kind of like a storm, but we weren't in that big of a water. We had, we'd hit bigger water when we were in the ocean. What was interesting about it was the, um, were the waves and the currents. The wind and the currents. So the wind was going perpendicular - the wind was blowing, uh, perpendicular to the current. And when the current is going in one direction and then a 90 degree or 80 degree angle, the wind is hitting it, it would create these square waves - uh, waves with four sides. And, uh, the waves just picked up the boat and slammed it around. Um, yeah, it was just bad luck.
Cause if it didn't hit us five minutes earlier, fine later, the hatch door would have been closed and it would have been just been another wave that hit us. But it hit the boat at the wrong angle, flooded the cabin.
Tyler Small: Okay. Wow.
Adam Kreek: Bad vigilance during shift change.
Tyler Small: Oh my goodness. So, so then you're, where I paused you, you're, you're getting, you're climbing up this huge rope ladder onto a, an enormous-sized tanker. And then what happened to your boat? Like did they haul it up there?
Adam Kreek: Well, it's funny afterwards, the captain's like, "Oh, I would've loved to have rescued your boat. That would've been fun. You should have let me know." But we, we didn't ask him to do that. Um, so we ended up afterwards, we ended up renting a plane and going back into the Bermuda triangle and spotting the boat, putting down a beacon and knowing that we'd found the boat. And then we went back out with a tug boat and, uh, picked up the vessel.
Tyler Small: Oh, my goodness.
Adam Kreek: On the vessel we were able to recover - we had a lot of scientific monitoring equipment, as well as, um, you know, like the video and content we took when we went across the ocean. Uh, the, a little of it was destroyed unfortunately. But there was enough saved that, uh, that - who was it - NBC Dateline, uh, with, "with Keith Morrison." "NBC Dateline." They came and, uh, they interviewed us and they made a, a great little documentary about our adventure. [Wow.] And, uh...
Tyler Small: I'll have to check that out.
Adam Kreek: If anyone listening wants to actually see it, just go look up Capsized, NBC Dateline. And you can see the story of the adventure and you can see the perspective of my wife because as well, when I went across the ocean, we, I had a two and a half year old son and my wife was pregnant with my second, with my daughter.
Tyler Small: Oh, wow. I'm going to put a link to that. I'm going to find it and put a link to that in the description. Wow. Okay. So you're on the you're on the boat. You got the tug boat. That must've cost a fortune.
Adam Kreek: It did. It was, yeah, it was an extra $150,000 to rent, the plane and to rent the tug boat. So that wasn't cheap! But our sponsor stepped up for that, actually. They were quite happy to pay, uh, pay for that, help recover the boat and, uh, keep a happy ending - a happier ending to the adventure.
Tyler Small: Oh my goodness. Well, I'm glad you all survived.
Adam Kreek: Mmm-hmm. We are too.
Tyler Small: Okay. So, so exciting. Oh my goodness. What a trip! So, so then, uh, fast forward: Today, you are a, an executive business coach - you've continued your coaching to this day. And you've written this wonderful book. Tell us about your book.
Adam Kreek: Yeah. Well, it's book, The Responsibility Ethic. You know, and writing a book in and of itself is its own journey, its own experience. If anyone out there listening thinks about writing a book. The, you know, I think what was difficult about this book too, is that it's semi autobiographical in that I was telling, I'm telling my own personal story. So after the, after the Olympics and I had moved into the conference speaking, I sat down and decided I was going to write a book about my whole Olympic experience and wrote everything down. But then when I would pick it up and look at it and read it, it just wasn't, it wasn't resonant. It didn't feel like it would be valuable to the reader. And, you know, I've heard it said before this idea certainly, um, rings true with me: the idea that when you're writing a book, the first copy of the book, you write this for yourself and you're writing to clarify your thoughts as well as, you know, expunge, some of the, um, muddy thought that you might have, uh, around a given subject. So I'd, I'd written that. And then I put it to rest.
Then after our ocean voyage and the capsize, I realized: I should get back on this book writing journey. And so I sat down and started writing again. I ended up finding a great, a great editor and worked with him for a couple of years, two years, you know, writing and rewriting the book and, uh, structuring it and putting it together in a way that I wanted it to be put together.
Then we ended up getting it close to the finish line. I got another, um, another great guy who was a sports writer, sent it to him. So he helped, um, dial in some more of the stories and gave it another pass. And then I worked with the publisher and we started doing some line editing and copy editing and rewriting it. Until, finally it's where it's at right now. We recorded the audio book, which was wonderful. The audio book is out, or will be out very soon, uh, on, on Audible and we've taken a lot of the, you know, the teachings and the learnings from the book and turned them into YouTube videos on our YouTube channel.
The book itself: there's 12 chapters, and each chapter talks about a different ethic or a different idea that each of us can use to gain more traction in our personal life, in our professional life. So I talk about failure, goals, sharing leadership, managing our stress more effectively, being more professional, managing our recovery more effectively. I talk about coaching and mentoring, teamwork, safety, communication, being more resilient, and enacting Providence.
So, and then wrapped in each, you know, each chapter talks a little bit about a story. So we'll talk about the ocean capsize, winning the Olympics, uh, training for the Olympics... A bunch of different stories that are in the book with a lot of take-home lessons. So it's geared for people who would like some adventure stories, but are also, you know, professionally motivated or, or have a personal development bias and want to continue getting a little better in their personal life and their professional life.
Tyler Small: Well, cool. And you said it's a quick read as well.
Adam Kreek: Yeah, it's a pretty quick read - couple hours. I tried to make it really simple. And I think that I made it in a way that, if you just want the stories, you can read the stories and skip over the personal development stuff. If you just want the personal development stuff you can skip over the stories. If you just want to pick through and pick out one or two things that would help you in your current journey, then pick through and do that. So it's, um, you know, it's designed for the business reader; and for people who want to get out of the book whatever they want to get out of it.
Tyler Small: Very cool. Well, I'll put a link to that as well, in the, in the description. I'm excited to read that.
Wonderful. Adam Kreek, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm Tyler Small, and this is Hacking Emotional Intelligence.