Take Flight with Abby Falik

[Music] Welcome to the Breadwinners, the podcast where we talk about what it actually takes to lead and earn when the world keeps shifting under your foot. I'm Rafale Lowell. For nearly 20 years I've been coaching leaders at top tier institutions and Fortune 500s through massive cheap. But what's happening now is different, the pace, the pressure, the way it's hitting people's work and their lives. One thing I've learned, the people who build something new aren't following a different path. They've given themselves permission to stop following all together. Abby Faleck is one of the clearest thinkers I know on what it actually means to prepare for a life, not just a career. She took a year off during undergrad to travel Latin America alone, then convinced her university to give her credit for it. She went to business school not because she cared about business but because she wanted to learn how to work with power. This was the mindset that led her to founding Global Citizen Year, which encourages graduating high school students to take a gap year, and now the flight school, which takes that thinking one step further and provides fellowships to graduating students for a launch year. And for education that she says is higher than higher at. Abby's thinking about travel entrepreneurship, self-discovery and lifelong learning is fascinating and I loved this conversation. We talked about where self-permission comes from, why the most formative learning often happens outside the classroom, and why real change is always an inside job. Let's dive in. Abby, we are so thrilled to have you on the breadwinners. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. It's my delight. You are creating an education higher than a higher ed. I would not love that more. And as we'll see over the course of this episode, a bunch of what you've written and how you phrase what your purpose. It's just really remarkable. As I was reviewing your content, one question in a post from January stands out in my head. How does my inner work intersect with my work in the world? And I think this podcast is really about identifying that transformation, that metamorphosis, coming from what is it like to be in the world as a young person, which I know you spend a lot of time working on in the flight school, and how do you get to a point where you really feel the personal and professional or linked in a very powerful way? So we want to start first to hear a little bit about where did your ideas about working and earning and caregiving and all the breadwinning pieces? What did that look like for young Abby? Well, thank you for inviting me into this conversation. I would certainly start with my family, which I imagine many people do. It's hard not to be deeply influenced by the water we're born into. My dad has always been highly entrepreneurial, running various things out of our house. So it was the example I saw was of somebody who loved his work, where it didn't feel like a burden or obligation as much as it clearly brought him to life. And so he was what kind of businesses was in real estate. He's trained as a lawyer and then became a professor at UC Berkeley. So various things, but I just have memories of as a kid, we would have dinner as a family and he was always there. But then he would retreat into his home office and work until all hours. And he didn't need as much sleep as most humans do, but I saw that his work replenished him and I saw that he felt free in having charted his own course. And maybe relevant here is that he had finished law school and got a job at a big law firm and just felt something was off. It was 1978 he had just married my mom. They quit their jobs to call their savings and spent a year traveling around the world in 1978, which was a pretty wild thing to have done and very courageous. And that experience was so formative for them that it then became a real ground note for how they raised their three kids. Including the fact that my dad didn't go back to a big law firm, he had a glimpse of and taste of what it felt like to build a life where he could be free or to pursue what animated him. And I would say that that example absolutely indeld itself in my own sense of how to integrate my work with my life. Fascinating. Have you where did they travel to? I just got so curious. I feel like there are different cultures where that sense of freedom would be reinforced and others where it might not feel as synchronicistic there. What do you think they were all over? They were in African Southeast Asia. We only recently as adult children were allowed to read their journal from their experience. That must have been something but really really beautiful and it then inspired us to take our kids out of school a couple of years ago and we spent a year with them in rolling them in schools around the world and just having a real reset as a family. So yeah, deeply grateful for their courage to break away from the herd and to help us understand this beautiful Joseph Campbell quote that's on my computer all the time which is that if the path is clear, you're on someone else's. That's a crude Ted. Cards who've started a little tidbits things that we want to highlight permanent episode. I love that quote so much because I do think we've talked about this with other guests on the podcast this idea of like one guest even asked like where's the track. You know their parents had basically said as they were preparing to go into their career you got to be on a track. You know you got to be on somebody else's path or it's not going to work right financially or otherwise so what does that mean to you when you started to think about your career development. Where do you want it to go do you think that your parents experience was and the Joseph Campbell quote was on your mind or were you you know tell us when you the college and early career Abby. I so one of the things my parents decided in raising us was that travel was going to be a foundational component of our education and so my experience of leaving home and meeting kids like me in other parts of the world that I had no point of reference for or even within you know the Bay area context exposing us to other ways of living and being. It was that exposure that sense of once you can see the water you're in yeah you recognize you have freedom to choose where you're swimming to carry the metaphor further. I think there was a sense I had from a very early age that the the quote track that you describe was a mirage it was this collective delusion that we had decided somehow was how we were going to. Structure society. I remember. An early. Kind of belt sense that I had when the adults around me when I was a kid and adults would talk about so and so had been so successful this person has been so successful in their career. And successful was short hand for has made a lot of money. And I remember asking the questions at the time and just feeling deeply unsettled that it didn't add up to me that we would use the word success exclusively to define somebody who made money. So that's how I finished high school. I'd been a good student and I was very fortunate to just be wired in a way that was positively reinforced in traditional classroom context. But I got to the end of high school and I had gotten into Stanford which I had been told was the golden ring you know but I had this deep sense that something was off it was not satisfying or fulfilling in any of the ways that I'd been told it might be. And so I think those were the early signals of having an inner compass that was like leading me in a direction that was different from the norm and it was just keeping me alert and awake to my own intuition as a guide beyond. The expectations from my family and from society and so in many ways that has been the through line ever since is how do I use my life to follow the thread of what animates me outside of the context of our fear based achievement culture. And how do I then pass that on to the rising generation so that more of us can take the leap. So many pieces of this that I'm going to dive into a little bit here I also lived abroad or when I was 11 12 year old I lived abroad and I can really understand that experience of being uprooted for me. from what you know. And then realizing that's not all there, there's this whole, there's so many different people in the world who approach life so differently. And it does leave an indelible mark. And I have a friend, I was just in Paris with my friend who's had her kids in France for four years, learning French just because they could do it. Not because they have relatives, no particular reason. And I think what's interesting that I'm hearing is, you know, access to the inner compass wasn't something that I think came out of that experience for me because the reinforcing of entrepreneurship and travel and, and the sort of off the, off the mess wasn't something that was sort of lived and breathed in my household. It was more like the people who are successful or the people who make a lot of money who've done the track, right? Yeah. But it sounds like that combination for you, that environment, the models that you watch, plus this travel piece, what a powerful way to access, to build an awareness of your inner compass, which I think is really elusive for a lot of people. So I find that really fascinating. Not to keep us on this inner compass too long, but you said when you went to Stanford, something felt a little off. How did that show up? I'm wondering if listeners are curious. I think a lot of folks don't know how to trust their inner compass, even leave her in their career. And so wondering if, you know, if there's a way to describe what that inkling felt like for you. I don't think I could have described it clearly at the time, but I could sense a disconnect between, hmm, what felt authentic, whole, satisfying, energizing, and what I was being asked to perform. Yeah. There was a feeling of running somebody else's race. And again, the positive reinforcement of being quite good at it in many ways, created a whole mess of conditioning that I've spent the rest of my life understanding and working from. I took a year off during undergrad and was in Latin America on my own, not study abroad, not with other people. I was just having experiences that I felt would shake me out of any kind of trance I'd been in about my life and my identity in the world. And it was the most formative part of my education. And it had nothing to do with my formal education. And I came back to college and petitioned for that year to count for credit. And they came to me. And I share that because I think that was the next entrepreneurial policy that dropped for me was an insight around the things that we give credit for, the things that we credential, the teaching and learning that happens in a classroom context is so far from the kind of learning that is actually formative. Yeah. And what will it look like to create a completely new scorecard around what it looks and feels like to prepare a young human for flourishing? Yeah. I want to talk about that. That's where your focus is now through flight school. But I want to get us to that point. I mean, it sounds like we've talked a little bit about how you came to be happy with the ideas that you have about work and life and how you started to trust that inner compass in college and this. It's actually an amazing story to be able to travel. I also went abroad and had a very kind of independent experience. But it was still within the confines of a university that I was navigating and living in a city by myself. I'm wondering, not that it was broken, not that you saw a broken system so much as you were saying, this is also valuable. This contributes to my knowledge of the world and my ability to contribute to the society at large, global society. So I think that's really interesting. So how did you see as you were leaving college and you were thinking about the next steps in your career, how did you see kind of bringing those really strong instincts to bear professionally? Well, I'm struck in this conversation. I don't know that I've thought much about the link between travel, which I could call just sort of deep immersion outside of your comfort zone. It doesn't have to be international travel either, either. Even-- but the link between traveling entrepreneurship is quite interesting, because I think that there's a way in which to summon something that doesn't exist requires a kind of self-permission and a sense of one's own intuition and agency that our schools and workplaces are pretty hell-bent on squeezing out of us. But the experience of leaving our comfort zone and grappling with our identities, particularly when we're stripped of the traditional ways of identifying. And then getting a sense that there are so many ways to see and name the world, so many ways to be in the world and build a life. All of that gives us more degrees of freedom. And so I finished college, got a job in New York for five or six years and was already very entrepreneurial-y wired. In my DNA, it was both the example that was set, but also sort of how I'm structured as someone who just is always scanning for what's missing or needed or possible and finding ways to gather the resources and people to make something happen. So I was building a program in New York in the context of a broader NGO. And I had the experience of feeling frustrated and constrained by the way that the NGO nonprofit world was operating. And it was not inherent to the tax status, like being a 501(c)(3) does not need to dictate anything about how something operates. And I was working with a group of really talented people. And I became aware that there were things I wanted to learn about how to build and operate a high-impact business that I was not learning in the quote-non-profit world. And I say quote-non-profit because I hate the term. I think so much of the language we use defines our mentality around things. But to define a whole sector is what it's not, as opposed to what it's for, I think has been one of its constraints. Anyway, we could be in a school, not because I had any interest in business, and you nobody would be into business school. But I was very clear that's where I wanted to learn the next set of lessons about a, how to work with power, and b, who am I in the world? And could I immerse myself in this foreign context? And emerge bold and clearer about what I'm here to contribute? I think that's such a wise and powerful decision. And one thing that strikes me, Abby, as we're talking about your choices, you said travel is coming up in this conversation as a powerful motivator or catalyst for entrepreneurship for taking a different path. But what also struck me as I was thinking about it is the willingness to go off for a year on your own, the willingness to commune with oneself and learn that you can make these decisions as you navigate foreign spaces, whether that's an MBA program or Latin America, right? And you can say, even if it's just me, I don't have all of the resources and scaffolding. I can still do this. That feels like another really powerful place. And I agree, it doesn't have to be Latin America. I went to Las Vegas last year, and I had never felt so alien in my-- (laughs) But I think, you know, I think that's really, that's something that I think even if you can't travel, that building that skill of being alone must help into a shared as well. Yeah, yeah, being alone can we sit with ourselves and also the muscle memory of leaving our comfort zone. And so at the flight school, we've got this clear learning framework where we all have a comfort zone, a stretch zone and a panic zone. And we actually only learn when we're in one of them. And so the curriculum at the flight school is deliberately structured around, how do you leave what is comfortable and enter this stretch where you're forced to grapple with what you thought was true, with who you thought you were, with what you believed the world to be, and that it's in that disorientation that the most profound learning and transformation can happen. Yeah, I agree with that whole heartedly. I want to walk us back a little bit to how flight school came to be so that we can ground our listeners in this amazing initiative that you've launched. So I want people to be able to really appreciate the pieces that you're highlighting. Can you tell us a little bit about how flight school came to be? It feels like the integration and expression of everything. We've been talking about everything I've experienced, educationally, professionally, personally, at all. all comes together in this vision for a re-imagined higher education. And I've been anticipating this since I was in college and was trying to reboot it on my own terms. And what's a thrill is that we are living at a moment when increasingly we're all starting to reckon with the question of what the purpose of school really is. So the moment for me of recognizing that it now feels like old news, but that the computer in my pocket could pass all the entrance exams and all the exit exams in seconds. If we don't take that as a signal that we need to step back and radically re-imagine the purpose of school, shame on us. And specifically, kids are approaching college, somebody described it as on autocomplete. So there's a way that college has become a game of how well you use chat GBT. And there's a lot of offloading of learning and at the deep expense of the inner development, grappling, challenge, and. fortifying of skills that make us human. And so it feels to me like what has always been a bit of a made up game starts to look absurd when we look at it through the lens of how quickly and dramatically the world has changed. Yeah. One of the sub-stack posts that I referenced at the beginning of a conversation, it was this January post where you were talking about new year, new beginning, when you had some bullets that really stick out to me right now. And so, you know, when teachers are everywhere, right, so really getting people to appreciate you do really walk your walk, talk your talk, right, you live and breathe what you are doing in the world. And I think so many people I've seen it's not a given that you're going to really, really lead with your convictions. I don't think that's always a given for folks. But you also said suffering is what happens when we fight reality, right, which is a Buddhist concept. There's radical acceptance. I really like Tara Brock's way of putting it. But I think there is this sort of fighting with reality that people are doing now. Like the reality is showing us everything is different and changing. And people are like, no, no, no, no, but if I get my degree from Stanford and I follow the path of this, I'm going to be happy. You know, I remember like when I did my degree at Columbia, I was like, this is going to fix it. This is like, I'm not sure, but we have these ideas. And and it's really powerful to help people understand what radical acceptance and this idea, right, this to me that it's synonymous with that suffering is what happens when we fight reality. It sounds like part of what you're doing is this helping people with radically accepting what's happening in the world right now and how that impacts their lives because it's scary. And everything you've just said leads me to what for me is the key lever for any of the change, which is that it's all an inside job, happiness, contentment, satisfaction, success begins with our own knowing of ourselves and trusting ourselves and comfort with uncertainty and ability to sit with fear and uncomfortable emotions. Because here's another Buddhist frame, but there's a Zen cone that says the bad news is we're all falling and the good news is there is no ground. Things are always in flux and we are constantly looking for what is stable, certain concrete tangible material clear. And we have conflated things like titles, identity descriptors, credentials with certainty, yeah, the certainty that we're looking for and it's not ever going to be found there. And I think this moment invites us to really recognize that the things we'd hung our comfort, a hitched our sense of comfort and confidence to are also in flux. So got to turn it inward. You said it in the piece and I'd say this all the time with my clients, presence is power, right, presence yields power. I don't remember how you phrased it in the piece exactly, but I do think that we try to look outside ourselves of two models that really come up as we're talking about this one is the spheres of uncertainty. For that model where it's like three concentric circles and the one inside the middle one is what we can actually control what I referral can do to impact my reality and my actions are going to have a direct impact. Second one is the sphere of influence. So it's how do you influence folks you are not going to control that outcome, but you can convince you can use, you know, your best efforts to to get others on board and the outer circle is the sphere of concern. I feel like we live a lot in the sphere of concern and people think that the sphere of concern is where they have the control and they don't. But I think what's interesting about like when I think about your model, so I want to talk more about the flight school, the stretch, the comfort and the fear was that the other piece. I think what I wonder about is in the stretch, you know, what I'm seeing with clients and folks that I work with is so much kind of dysregulation that when they are asked to do a stretch or when they see an opportunity to stretch and push boundaries, they sometimes have in their presence in their ability to regulate their nervous system. I think I'm going to like almost talk about the window of tolerance, like it's a little bit of a different space, but either they're in the calms zone, not comfort, but calm where they can access and think clearly and connect with others or they're in hyper arousal where they're going to do everything and then like I have to figure it out. The type of arousal like quiet, quit Netflix and chill, I'm not really here, right? So I wonder when you're talking to folks about the stretch, does that come up that question of like it's scary to stretch, right? So how do you talk to folks, particularly people, you know, who the flight school is really targeting folks who are more early career, right? We work with students coming out of high school, so they begin with us when they're 18 and they've been on a treadmill, but they've got a hunch that there's something awry and so we catch them. And they just went through the pandemic, it's a lot of this was in their face, right? Just the pandemic's impact, seeing how it how it shifted. Thanks. So dramatically. So so do you see that? How do you talk to people about addressing that? Yeah, well, I think in some ways they're better equipped than we are because their entire lives have been shaped by this piece of external change. And there's much less expectation of getting back to quote normal. There's just an understanding and acceptance that the world is in flux. So I think that becomes a real strength of the rising generation. I do think they have been encouraged to continue playing by the same rules, the same scorecards, but it is now impossible to ignore that winning that game rarely leads to happiness or satisfaction. And that the cost of that game, call it capitalist hustle for dominance. The cost is everywhere and it's immeasurable and it is not what a lot of people want to keep feeding with their energy. So I think there's a moment where a whole generation is starting to question everything about the way things have been done. Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. Well, I'm going to switch us over. This is too fascinating conversation to move along, but I'm going to have to do it. But I want to carve a load a little bit. So I want to talk about some of the quickfire questions that we ask our guests and the one I want to start with with you, Abby, is this question of what will always be human about the way we work. And to frame the conversation, there was a post that you wrote over the summer. You asked a couple of questions that really suck out to me that I love to hear you tie in here. What if AI isn't diminishing our reality, but revealing it, which is fascinating to me. And also will this one, like kind of saying from the heavens with the light shining down, will we take the opportunity to get better at being human? When you think about what's always going to be human about work. Obviously, AIs, the big piece that we're referring to here inadvertently are kind of under the surface, the subtext. So tell us what's your take on it. - I am hopeful that being able to place a lot of the cognitive functions outside of ourselves, allows us to, which has never been really the highest use of our heads and hearts. (laughs) That it's part of a process of reconfiguring the currencies that count and how the economy functions. So, you know, we have built an information and knowledge economy, but quite suddenly, those are no longer the scarce resources or the things that you should be acquiring in order to be resilient to the world's changes. The human skills were anchored on at the flight school or asking and practicing how to restore our intuition. So it's a very human ability to gather all the inputs and process it through our body, through our experience, through our consciousness. We talk about awakening compassion. So, an AI can mimic or karaoke the experience of being empathetic and compassionate, but it's not actually felt the thing. So it's missing that layer of conscious experience as well. And then courage, which also feels to be taking risks when there's actual consequence is something that is uniquely human and something that as we've been talking about takes practice. It's not easy or innate to take risks when it's easier to stay safe, but it's essential. Yeah, what that? I think we have a sort of tendency, particularly in that learning and development HR world. So when I think about professional development in that context, it's usually where you tripped up and how can you improve, right? How do you build AI skills? How do you build your negotiation skills? How do you like, where are you broken? And how do you fix them? There's a lot of the approach that we see towards development. And I think part of what you're saying about intuition is really, and helping folks get this early. And this is tied into a lot of what I do too, but it's just recognizing, where am I strong? And how do I bring that? You're bringing so much to the workplace and you don't need to operate from here's where, where your skill building is needed, but where are you coming from? It's starting from where you're strong. I really like that. I'm wondering, you travel around the world so many different types of work events. And everyone should really check out Abby's sub-stack because she writes so beautifully about all of them, all of her different journeys. But I'm wondering if you think about work events recently, so anything recently, what stands out to you is like, this is what our human workplace should be. This is what work events should present for people. What comes to mind? Well, it's an immediate hit, and it's probably quite orthogonal to what you're anticipating, but it was a deeper treat in the Redwoods at a Buddhist monastery last month. I read it, I thought, maybe. Yeah. So not what we think of as-- when we think of work events, but it was the deepest work I could imagine with the most inspired and animated colleagues I'd ever want. And-- Am I correct that you were asked to give a speech, a little talk at the beginning of the retreat? Is that right? Yeah. So the night before-- and it was a group I didn't know. And I was invited at the very last minute. It was clear I was not on their initial list. But setting that aside, I was so giddy and honored to be included with a group of people I'd really looked up to. And I got an email the night before that said, will you give an opening talk on the first night? And I wrote back right away. It was obvious that I was going to say yes to anything. This was a retreat that was structured around what's known as the economy of the gift. So you're invited to participate because people have paid it forward for you. And there's nothing transactional. It's all just given freely. And so of course, I'm going to contribute to something that's being given to me. It creates this beautiful cycle of generosity and gratitude that just flows abundantly. So I said, yeah, of course I'll give the talk, but can you give me some tips on how to prepare? And the response that came back was the only way to prepare is not to. And it was a perfect prompt for my hyper-conditioned to practice and perform self. And I wanted to be a good student, as I always aspired to be, which here meant every time I kept thinking, OK, how do I prep for this talk? How do I prep for this talk? Every time that thought came up, I got to say, you know what? They are inviting me to share not what I know, but from who I am. And it was a very profound experience. Or just-- Every story you've woven into our conversation here, I kind of want to see the Abby Fowl like chapters, some cinematic moments in your life. I can just start up see how powerful they each would be, obviously, the redwoods and the retreat, certainly cinematic. And with one question, we'd like to ask folks, if you could find a breadwinner, any breadwinner with us or us that you would like to learn from for your moments, for what you're doing right. Who would it be? Mackenzie Scott. Oh, wow. I am so inspired by what she has done with her power and resources to seed power to others, to take the spotlight off of her. She's given $20 billion away, and she's just getting started. And she's done it with a quiet humility and grace and a way of inspiring everybody to see the role that they play in this web of care and repairing the world, that it's not just people who happen to have access to financial wealth, but that we can all tap different forms of capital to make really meaningful contributions. But I'm just so deeply, deeply moved by how she has chosen to use her life in the service of the world and mostly would want to thank her and to learn from her. It's wonderful. Yeah, that's a really wonderful choice. I want to close up our conversation first to say thank you so much for being here with us. And I'm wondering if I could put you in this spot one more time to share one word. You feel like as we navigate this external change in chaos, what's one word that we should keep in mind to get us anchored and tap into our intuition? I think when we are land bound and hustling with our heads down and chasing some elusive finish line, we're missing the bigger picture, and we're navigating by old maps. And the notion, the invitation to flight is an invitation to navigate changing conditions, to find ease in chaos and change. And to see a much broader perspective. Love it. Abby, thank you so much. Thank you. This has been the Breadwinners podcast. I'm your host, Rahal Loel. The show is produced by Rahal Loel and Rachel Sklar, technical production by Ron Passaro, music by Hannah Baki, with gratitude for support from Ruth and Arnesh. The Breadwinners was founded in 2019 by me and Jennifer Owens. The Breadwinners is a co-production between smart friends network and reworking leadership. Thanks for listening. This podcast is part of the Sound Advice FM Network. Sound Advice FM, Women's Voices Amplified.