294: Case Study: Discovering the Power of Purpose with Richard Leider and Yvette Francino

Casey Weade: Richard, welcome back to the podcast.

Richard Leider: Oh, I was looking forward to this. Thanks, Casey.

Casey Weade: I’m excited to have you here. This is a unique opportunity, something we’ve never done here on the show. This is a follow-up episode, which we’ve done many follow-up episodes in the past. However, we’ve never done one quite like this, where we’ve had one of our Weekend Reading subscribers join us live on Facebook right now. Yvette, welcome.

Yvette Francino: Thank you. I am so excited to be here.

Casey Weade: I’m excited to have you here, Yvette. For our Weekend Reading subscribers, you have the opportunity to get involved in all kinds of neat things that we do here, not just on the podcast, but at Howard Bailey Financial. And after our interview with Richard, he said, “Hey, what would be a great idea is to have one of your listeners come on, do a live episode where I’ll run them through a Napkin Test.” He calls it a Napkin Test to help them clarify their purpose in life, where they can find more fulfillment in life. I said, “Boy, to have a master counselor like you come on the show and offer this kind of service to one of our subscribers would be absolutely amazing.”

We sent an email out to all of our Weekend Reading subscribers, said, “Hey, here’s the interview. This is what we want to do.” We had all kinds of applicants and we just kind of let one come here. We did randomly pick one. We got Yvette that’s joining us here to go through this. So, before we get started here, Richard, I want to ask Yvette, why did you want to pursue this? Why were you interested in doing this test with us?

Yvette Francino: It’s exactly up my alley. I am always looking for books and resources and podcasts and things that both of you provide about living life fully and trying to discover our purpose. And how can I really? That’s what carpe diem is all about, seize the day. And that’s what my website and my writing is all about. So, again, it was just the perfect opportunity for me to be coached by the master here.

Casey Weade: Well, I’m curious, your website, I want to know a little bit more, Carpe Diem Day. Why did you start the site? What’s that mean to you?

Yvette Francino: Well, it’s actually started about 12 years ago. I had a friend named Craig Dunham, same initials CD as Carpe Diem, who had ALS, and he was extremely inspirational to me. And just in the way, he did live fully, despite losing all his ability to move and talk in the end. And I think of him often, if ever I have a challenge, I think he could do so much and inspire people without any of those functions. So, certainly, with whatever challenges we have in life, we can adapt and still be resilient. And so, he reminds me of that.

And so, I started this whole sort of carpe diem movement. I did walks, trails in his honor. And so, on my 60th birthday, and I was always very interested in these special days, like national whatever day, National Margarita Day, they have tons of days on every day of the year. And so, my kids and friends went together and purchased. You can purchase the special day. You have to have a write-up and get approved and everything, but they purchased Carpe Diem Day and presented it to me on my 60th birthday. And it was such a tribute for me. It’s such an honor because it showed me that they recognized how important this was to me. And so, I said, “Well, I’ve got to live up to that.”

So, I created the website Carpe Diem Day, and I started blogging about living life fully on the site and getting into social media that way and getting on all the lists of people that had the special days. And it’s Chase’s Calendar of Events and other National Day sites. So, I’m really excited about that. And when Carpe Diem Day comes around, I Google and I see that people are having events. They use those special days a lot to kind of market whatever they’re doing and they’re like today is Carpe Diem Day, it’s the day to seize the day and do such and such. So, it’s really exciting for me.

Casey Weade: Well, that’s definitely going on our calendar here at Howard Bailey on short notice, so I’m really excited about that. That’s so neat. What do you hope the impact is of this day in other people’s lives? What do you hope the legacy of this is?

Yvette Francino: Well, that’s kind of that the write-up and that is the message I do try to spread is really, again, since it was inspired by my friend who despite challenges, lived fully. That’s what I’d like people to remember. I know it’s very easy to say I can’t do something because I don’t have the resources or I don’t have the health or it’s too late or whatever. And to recognize that we can always make progress, we can always do something.

And again, I also view it as a time to kind of honor. I mean, we have Memorial Day and different days where we think about the people we’ve lost. But since it originated from me out of a tribute to someone I lost, I also, in my write-up, say I do think Carpe Diem Day is honoring the people we’ve learned from that are gone and honoring their legacies and spreading that forward. So, those are the kinds of things I would like Carpe Diem Day to mean to people, or it could just mean getting out there and doing something fun that you don’t normally do. But again, hopefully, we do that every day, but a reminder that we need to value this precious life we have.

Casey Weade: Well, that’s beautiful. And it seems like you’re someone that shows up with already a high sense of purpose and mission and meaning in life. It seems like you’ve kind of got this. You study this, you enjoy this. You’re in some ways immersed in this. I think you were just recently in one of Richard’s events here. And so, this isn’t anything new to you. I know you’ve been following us for some time. So, discovering your purpose today, what would you hope at the end of today after going through this with Richard, through his Napkin Test? What would this mean to you? What kind of impact do you hope this makes in your life?

Yvette Francino: Well, even though like anything, we study, there’s always more to learn. I’m always interested in different perspectives and I have challenges with this. I mean, despite, trying to live fully every day, I have my challenges, I know Richard’s talked about and you’ll probably both view this idea of little p and big P and I have trouble with the big P in different ways. I still struggle because my purpose for so many years had been as a mother and an employee.

And now, in this state of life, I do go through phases of feeling like, does anybody really care what I’m doing? And am I just repeating what’s already out there? There are already these messages that are out there. And how do I get past, I guess, the ego and feeling like I want to have more hits on my website or that kind of thing? So, I do still have struggles with taming the beast of ego, I guess, and really wanting to make sure I’m doing something that matters or feel– and I also, again, want to, as you both do, have other people through having this interview. Hopefully, other people will listen to it and have their own questions and be exposed to Richard and you, and that helps spread the word, too. So, for all of those reasons, I really am so excited about being here.

Casey Weade: Well, Richard, as the pope of purpose, affectionately known as, I think this is really important. I don’t want to leave this alone. I want to make sure we really talk about this because I know for myself, I mean, this is a huge part of my life. Purpose is something that I’m thinking about almost every day. And I still at times, will feel a lack of. I’ll get in a rut. And I think purpose is like marriage. It’s not something that we just set it and forget it. We have to work on it. We have to continue to put effort into this. It’s not something that we just inherently have and we’re blessed for the rest of our lives. I actually think it’s something that we have to work on. And I would presume even for someone like you, this is something that you have to continue to work on.

Richard Leider: Totally. And I was taking notes while we got us talking because she’s the guest and I’m the translator at this point. But let me say a few things first is that I actually use Dead Poets Society, seize the day, carpe diem, in video clips in some of the programs I do. So, I love the carpe diem concept. And the question is, what does that really mean? What does that mean in practice? Because it can be just a fleeting positive thing that goes away.

And so, what we’re doing here is a checkup. I call it the Got-A-Minute School of Coaching because people today, with all that’s going on, not just with the pandemic, this was even pre-pandemic, will say to me because they know, or those that know what I do, say, “Richard, got a minute? Can you tell me what I should do with the rest of my life?” And I’ll go, “Well, here, let’s start with a napkin. Write this down, and if you only got a minute.” And so, we got more than a minute here, but not a whole lot of minutes. And so, I want to dig quickly into that.

The other thing, though, is that what Yvette said was really very critical about ALS and her relationship with that. One of the key stories in that new book you held up, Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Old? which is my newest book is a story about an ALS, Ed Rapp, who was about to be the CEO of Caterpillar Worldwide. And at age 57, he was diagnosed with ALS. I had worked with him coaching and teaching with him and working with Cat, and all of a sudden he goes back to Raleigh, North Carolina, and he is now six and a half years into his ALS diagnosis.

And his big P is helping to fund research for ALS, and he’s raised so far $16 million through his organization for ALS. His little p, every single morning, he gets up, I think it’s 8 o’clock Eastern Time and he coaches somebody on the phone or Zoom who just was diagnosed with ALS and is terrified. Now, this is a guy who’s doesn’t have to do this, obviously, but he gets more joy and more aliveness and more, I wouldn’t say healing because ALS, he’s not going to get healed, he knows in his lifetime, but maybe in the future, others will, but he gets so much joy and aliveness out of coaching somebody who he doesn’t know, who just was diagnosed with ALS. And he shows his protocols, what he does, his faith journey, his health journey, all those kinds of things.

And so, I think what we’re talking about here, Casey, just to draw the bottom line is the process works if you work the process. The purpose process works if you work the process. But purpose is a verb, it’s not having a purpose, and you put it on the wall and that was your legacy. It’s living purposely on a day-to-day basis, making choices in spite of the adversity, whether it’s ALS or other things, and living fully as a result of that. So, that’s what I want to dig into.

So, I just was taking notes from Yvette. Thank you, I think in many ways, you’re asking the right questions for yourself because you don’t just get the answer, and then boom, got a minute, here it is, Richard, this famous coach. It’s like, no, this is a process, and it takes work, it takes practice. Purpose is a verb. Action precedes clarity. That’s a big idea. It seems like a throwaway idea. It is not. You don’t learn to ride a bike by reading a manual. You ride the bike.

And same with purpose. You do purposeful things and you get a felt sense of that, and it evolves over time. But then you get to certain points that said words, emptiness perhaps or age-related or illness-related or something where you push the pause button and you sit back and you have to look at a larger frame here, which I call the Napkin Test. And so, I want to dig into that, but I want to pause here and just say Yvette or Casey, any comments on what I just commented on?

Casey Weade: Well, there’s a couple for me that comes to the surface, one, that we can’t let fleet away would be action precedes clarity. I think there’s so much time spent by all of us, but it seems to me to be an ever-growing issue that we have to have our entire lives planned out. We need to know exactly what we’re going to do in this next phase, whether that’s retirement or the next one in college, whether that’s getting a job, whether that’s getting married. And sometimes, we just need to take action. Otherwise, we’re going to have procrastination. Just do that paralysis by analysis. We’re going to be just paralyzed...

Richard Leider: And continue but don’t go it alone. The action precedes clarity, but it’s not just individual action. It’s with Yvette who is, and I’ll get into this in a minute, but isolation is fatal in spite of the situation. Going it alone is not a good idea for anybody, and the science of this is so clear. I’ll clarify it in a minute. So, go ahead.

Casey Weade: Well, my last comment there would just be an ask of you, Richard, and that would be for the audience. How should someone listening to this listen along? How should they be consuming what they’re hearing? How should they be following along? What are your thoughts to that person that’s on the outside looking in here?

Richard Leider: Well, think about a purpose partner, and a purpose partner is a committed listener, somebody you can really get down to what gets you and that doesn’t try to fix you. It’s care versus cure, so to speak, interested versus I was trying to be interesting. Oh, well, if I were you, I would do this. That’s not what we need. What we need is somebody who can be present and a witness to our story and let us figure it out in certain ways. I call that a sounding board or a purpose partner or a committed listener.

Casey Weade: So, let’s find somebody that we can do this with. So, you’re laying out the exercise. The listeners should find someone that they can do this exercise with. And one of the things, I’m going to ask this group that we always talk about this, I mean, this is a core tenet of the group that I’m in. And when we get together, we’re not there to deliver advice. We’re there to ask good questions and let ourselves really create those answers for ourselves. And we always want to seek to go three questions deep. Don’t stop at the surface, but find someone that can take you from question one, ask another question, ask another question that really exemplifies caring.

Richard Leider: Exactly. That’s a beautiful way to put it.

Casey Weade: Well, Richard, the floor is yours.

Richard Leider: Okay, well, let’s start with the big picture, Yvette. And I have studied and written about something called The Good Life. And The Good Life has been around since Aristotle and Plato and maybe even before that, in certain ways. So, the starting point is the bigger picture before we dive into the Napkin Test, which is kind of a focused decision tool.

But The Good Life has four characteristics. This is a question to you, but I’m going to put it out as a narrative. The question is, are you living the good life from your perspective, not from mine or the society’s perspective? And the good life has four characteristics to it – place, people, right work, which is the Napkin Test, and purpose. So, let’s just start with The Good Life, and I will send, if I haven’t already, to Casey for readers to download The Good Life inventory and for you to look at and...

Casey Weade: Absolutely, Richard, we’ll have that in the show notes so you can go directly to RetirewithPurpose.com and get the show notes right there.

Richard Leider: So, prior to the Napkin Test, are you living in a place you love?

Yvette Francino: Are you asking me, seriously?

Richard Leider: Yeah, I am asking. Place is important to people for a whole variety of reasons. It’s not just the weather. It has to do with a lot of layers, including weather. So, just a quick footnote on that, are you living in a place you love?

Yvette Francino: Funny you asked, I just bought a snowbird, which was one of my big life goals, a snowbird condo in Bradenton, Florida. For that reason, I love the sun, I live in Colorado, and every winter, I’m so cold. And so, yeah, I mean, I think I have now that snowbird condo and my home in Colorado, so I would say yes.

Richard Leider: So, to be determined, you don’t know yet because you haven’t done it, but you’ve done the first step and that is getting it, and so...

Yvette Francino: Well, I actually was there this winter, so I did get that experience in a little bit.

Richard Leider: People who retire and move because of the sun and the weather often move back, 80% of them will move back within a year because of the second thing. So, place is important. Second thing is people. You can be in the most beautiful place on earth and feel isolated and alone or feel like not connected in ways that you would hope for. And so, people have to do with a lot of layers to that.

So, Dr. Vivek Murthy who is the attorney general under Obama and also under Biden has written a book called Together, and he says, “What we need is that people, so to speak, together is more important than many other facets of aging.” And he goes into the science of that and he says, “You need three levels of people.” You need, first of all, what we talked about with Casey a minute ago, committed listener, which he calls it intimate, but intimate is not physically intimate. It is emotionally intimate, somebody who gets us.

Secondly, we need friends. We need people who have shared common interests or passions and things like that who we feel like we want to get together with. And third is collective or community. And he said all three are essential to vital aging. And he said, if you don’t have those, it’s almost like worse than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. He goes into all the science type of stuff. So, my question back to you is, people, are you feeling like you’ve got those three covered?

Yvette Francino: You are talking so much by language. I am really interested in connection and I’m really struggling now because my three grandchildren who all were in Colorado, fairly close to me now are, one moved to D.C., the other in the family is moving to Raleigh, North Carolina, and one is staying here in Colorado. So, I am really kind of going through a lot of turmoil about what to do because my family’s going to be dispersed. So, I mean, I do have a life here in Colorado and a lot of people, but my family is really important, the most important to me.

Richard Leider: So, for our listeners, I mean, they need to answer the question of people, and it’s not just yes or no. Just like you said, there’s a lot of nuance in all of this. This is not just what’s the answer here? Third is, so are you living in a place you love? We’ve talked about that with the people you love. And how will that work in Bradenton, Florida? You don’t know yet. And then the third thing is right work, doing right work. And right work is really important to make some distinctions here because there’s a difference between jobs that pay the bills and vocation that gives us meaning.

And as Parker Palmer in my books said, I can’t imagine living without a vocation, but vocation is how we stay relevant in the world, how we stay relevant to our families, to our communities, and it’s how we bring our Napkin Test, our gifts, passions, and values regardless of our age and regardless of our career, our job in the past. So many people who retire from a job or a career also don’t get that location is important. It comes from the vocare, to be called. Another way to look at it is calling so we could do a whole nother session on this, Casey, about calling, which is the deeper dive into what is it that we’re called to do, which is the Napkin Test in a variety of ways.

So, I want to look at what are you called to do, but before we do that, I want to just say the fourth component. So, place, people, right work, which is what we’re talking about here on purpose. So, what’s your why, Yvette? Why do you get up in the morning? Why do you do what you do? Maybe that’s the question you’re struggling with, but if you had to answer it right now with an actual answer, why? Why do you get up in the morning? What fuels or ignites your energy?

Yvette Francino: I think relationships is the number one thing. And so, I like my calendar to have at least one social thing every day on it, something that I’m going to look forward to. That’s part of my process is to make sure I always have something to look forward to each day. And then that will excite me about getting up.

Richard Leider: And is it about you or about others or both?

Yvette Francino: Both.

Richard Leider: Okay. Because purpose is always beyond the self, purpose is a verb. As we said, action precedes clarity, but it’s action for the sake of others. You don’t have to be Mother Teresa, you don’t have to volunteer, but there’s some part of purpose, it’s always about making a contribution to life, in other people’s lives in some way. And it could be another 14,140 purpose moments in a day. So, it could be just that moment where you pick up the phone or do an email or give someone a hug or a kind word or something like that.

I learned about that from Viktor Frankl back in 1968 when he said in the concentration camp, he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning. His whole family was exterminated. He was in several concentration camps liberated from Auschwitz. And he said the last of the human freedoms is choice. It’s to choose to live, a will to live, and the will to live beyond yourself, to give somebody else a kind word across the bread, a hug. And he said that didn’t guarantee your survival, but it helped. And those that had that beyond themselves tended to do a bit better. So, that was my question to you. Is it for you beyond yourself? Yeah.

Yvette Francino: Well, I will tell you that I have little four things that I try to do every day – exercise, learn something new, socialize, and give in some way. And the give in some way has been a little bit difficult. And I’m sure we’ll get into this when we’re talking more. But I think a lot of it was because I thought it had to be something big. And I was once talking to a friend, I was doing my socialize. I think I was saying I worried about this. And I’m like, I don’t feel like I’m contributing much anymore. And he said, “You’re contributing just when you’re talking here, every time you smile at someone else, it’s a contribution because you’re lifting someone’s spirit.” So, that really helps me be able to be a little easier on myself on that give one that I was trying to do every day.

Richard Leider: Well, let’s dig into this. But the universal purpose is to grow and give. It sounds like in many ways that you’re living in the question yourself, which I totally respect and think is fantastic. And that’s why you’re on here. And also, it’s like, is there more? And sometimes we’re pushed by pain, sometimes we’re pulled by possibility. I think in this case here, what I’m hearing is you’re pulled by possibility. True?

Yvette Francino: Yes.

Richard Leider: Okay. Alright. So, let’s look at the Napkin Test. The Napkin Test is based on a pattern or a formula that has been researched by me and many others. Becca Levy who at Yale just came out with a book. It says that when you have a reason to live beyond yourself, you tend to live 7.5 years longer. She calls it the Longevity Code, etc. So, back to the Good Life, living in a place you love with the people you love. Now, what do you do all day, every day? Or what do you do is part of what I call right work?

The Buddhists call it right work, the Christians call it stewardship. There are many other names for this, but it’s vocation. Its location is from cradle to grave. It’s not just your job and your career. So, that’s what we’re looking at here. And so, the Napkin Test code, G plus P, passions, plus values equals bottom-line purpose or calling. And calling and purpose to me are interchangeable.

So, let’s just look at gifts here for a minute. Gifts are we’re born with, and we developed along the way. When I developed a tool called Calling Cards, I use it every day, and it’s used all over the world, and you can get it on Amazon, it’s called Calling Cards. It helps you discern what’s true and what’s false about your gifts and it’s intuitive. When I developed this, I went back and interviewed parents, teachers, siblings, and so. Yvette, do you have siblings?

Yvette Francino: Yes.

Richard Leider: And are your sibling’s gifts the same as yours when you think about their natural talents, what they love to do?

Yvette Francino: No, we’re different.

Richard Leider: Okay. And when did you see that at first?

Yvette Francino: I mean, I think that when we were in school, when we were young, we had different interests.

Richard Leider: So, I think what we can probably find from your other listeners, Casey, is that people know that their gifts are different, whether they’re siblings or whether they have kids or grandkids, they’re different. And so, finding out and bringing those forward later in life is what the Napkin Test is about. So, the gifts have four characteristics. So, question to you, Yvette...

Casey Weade: And Richard, if I may, I just want to clarify something. So, we have place, people. So, when you’re working with Yvette, you went through place, people, then you went to purpose, now we’re back to right work. And with right work, in order to find that, we’re going into the Napkin Test. It looks like the Napkin Test equals purpose. So, is the Napkin test helping purpose or right work?

Richard Leider: Yeah. It ends up enhancing purpose, but it is the way forward to the action precedes clarity. What’s the action that leads to this felt sense? Purpose, Casey, is a felt sense. And when you have a purpose, that’s one thing, but living purposefully brings a felt sense or just sense of fulfillment, a sense of aliveness, a sense of joy that comes from actually being or doing that as opposed to just having that. So, my word, the Napkin Test is about naming it and putting it into practice.

Casey Weade: So, we’re naming it. So, should we then think of it as place, people, purpose, then right work?

Richard Leider: No. Right work leads to purpose.

Casey Weade: Okay.

Richard Leider: Let’s go forward with it.

Casey Weade: Let’s see what happens.

Richard Leider: Okay, so gifts, what are your gifts? My gift has more of it, let’s say for the sake of us today, for care in regard to men in school coaching four characteristics, first of all, is something you love to do. Your hand turns to it naturally. You’ve done it for years. You do it and you don’t even know you’re doing it because it’s just so natural to you. Secondly, others observe you doing it effortlessly and superbly, and often, they observe you doing it because they don’t have it and they value it.

There is the whole no pain, no gain society that if you didn’t have to, and I don’t know, I’ve just always been doing this and yeah, Yvette, you do it so well. And I observe it, and they may even come to you for help with it because they don’t have it. So, that’s the second characteristic. The third is this. You can’t remember learning it. I don’t know, I don’t have a degree in it. That’s not my major. That’s not what my career was or maybe a piece of that.

And the fourth is you’ll love learning more about it and studying. So, one of my gifts as a personal example is awakening spirit in others. Well, what does that mean? Well, it means a lot to me, but what it means is that I love digging into people’s stories and find out why they do what they do and why they don’t do other things and what they’re willing. And so, there’s a hole. And then I write, I design, I do other things that are gifts. So, what about you? When we do the Calling Cards exercise with people, they go through 52 gifts and they come up with their top five, and their number one is usually their purpose or informs their purpose. So, what about you when you think about that? And I will give you several reasons, how can I be sure these are my top five? But just to give our listeners a glimpse at what are your top gifts?

Yvette Francino: Well, I think one is that I love to learn. So, I’m really curious and I am always wanting to learn as much as possible. I think the second is I’m really a goal-oriented person and I’m really good at having the drive and the grit to achieve the goals that I put forth so their goal-driven, self-motivated. And then the third one is I’m very logical, which I was very good with math. I became a software developer. And so, as a result, I’m really good at technology. My career was in technology. So, that is one where people ask for my help with the technology and I love technology.

Richard Leider: But that’s kind of organizing things or some other word for that. It’s not the technology, it’s the way you put it all together.

Yvette Francino: I think a lot of it is I just have always been fascinated by computers, and from the time I was 10 and there wasn’t even a personal computer yet, but I wanted to go into computer technology. So, I am a project manager kind of person too, but I don’t know if that’s the same. I just do love...

Richard Leider: Yeah, that’s a role. That’s not you.

Yvette Francino: Yeah. So, I would say if you narrow it down, it would probably be logical. And really, I like logic.

Casey Weade: But it seems to me it’s kind of like composing things and seeing the big picture and putting things together for people and something like that.

Yvette Francino: I like that too. I’d be curious to see what the 52– did you say there’s 52 up there? I don’t know if any of these three would be on that list.

Richard Leider: Well, there may be different words for it.

Casey Weade: Learning about technology is overcoming a problem, right? You’re learning about something new. That is technology. It’s constantly something new. You like to learn it and teach it to others.

Yvette Francino: Yeah.

Richard Leider: So, let’s just stick for now because we don’t have a lot of time with learning and curiosity. So, let’s just say that in the next phase of life, the future belongs to the learners, not the knowers. And you’re a learner and you love learning. And so, with that Napkin Test, gifts are what you want to serve, what you want to do. Passions are about curiosity, whether you’re passionate about something. Oh, I’m not passionate about, but it’s who would you like to help learn? Who would you like or what would you like to learn? That kind of thing. So, let’s look very quickly at the P in the formula G plus P, passions. What triggers your curiosity these days?

Yvette Francino: I’m really interested in brain health a lot these days and how we build neuroplasticity, and that relates to learning, so...

Richard Leider: Yeah. Okay, good. Fantastic. Let’s just stop there. Then values, the V, is how you want to go about it. In other words, there’s how do you want to serve? Who do you want to serve? And where do you want to serve? What energizes you? And what drains you? So many people who retire say, “Oh, I actually love what I did and I love the content of what I was doing, but the place sucked. I’m done with that. I don’t want to work in organizations anymore, I don’t want to do whatever.” But the question is what seems to be the kind of thing out there, the role you could play or the place you could play that energizes you versus drains you?

Yvette Francino: I love social media and I’ve been a blogger for 15 years. I really like writing. I did write a humor book. So, I think writing and social media. And I tried my hand at podcasting too. And so, just reaching the community, and I really like discussion too. So, that’s, I think...

Richard Leider: And I have a sense here as it relates to purpose, as it relates to the bottom line that we’re coming into right now is that you really want to remain relevant.

Yvette Francino: Yes, that’s true.

Richard Leider: And one of the things is that how do I stay relevant? And so, if you’re using your learning gifts on brain health and plasticity in ways that really reach out and help others, does that make sense?

Yvette Francino: Yeah, absolutely.

Richard Leider: Okay. And so, if you went to the bottom of the Napkin Test and said, okay, in 35 minutes here, we looked at this, why do I get up in the morning? What’s my purpose? It’s to _____, how would you say that?

Yvette Francino: To help continuing to have a healthy mind and help others, build their own, or be aware of what things they can do to have a healthy mind.

Richard Leider: Yep, bingo. When you said that if I am watching you, but if others are watching you, there is a certain sense of, oh, aliveness, certain sense of I won’t call it joy yet, but a certain sense of vitality that’s there, and you don’t have to do it full time. It can be part of a portfolio of other things you do, but this needs to be explored. You mean?

Yvette Francino: Yeah, like...

Richard Leider: Yeah. When you go through a process like the Napkin Test, there are six steps versus reflect, which we’re just doing. Second is to connect, to talk to somebody else. Do you have a purpose partner, somebody you can talk to about this, what we just talked about?

Yvette Francino: Yes.

Richard Leider: Okay. Third is explore is to get out there and rather than say, well, I’m not the world’s expert in this, or it’s like, forget that, just open doors and look at who else is doing this? Who else is out there doing this that I could actually, maybe I don’t have to maybe invent this myself or maybe I do, but I want to find out who else is in this category because I know personally, other people in this category would love to talk to you? So, if you start to explore and then choose, say, all of the options that I’ve explored, I’m going to do a deep dive into this.

And then the fifth thing, so you follow me in the cycle here is reflect, connect, explore, choose, and then repack. And repack means, oh, Richard, I don’t have time or I don’t have money or I don’t have– well, as you said in the beginning, time is precious. It’s your most precious currency. What do you need to unpack and let go of in terms of either time or money to spend some time on this? If it’s action precedes clarity, if you’re not willing to act, forget it. It’s not going to happen. It’s going to be another pipe dream. And you can just keep cycling over and over and over again.

And then the final point is act. What do I need to do? What’s the first step I need to do to make this happen? And it’s a small step, but that usually leads to other steps. So, the process of reflect, connect, explore, choose, repack, act is a way forward with the Napkin Test. I know our time is up here, but in case you want to just say, well, how can I be sure these are my top gifts? We can talk about that. But let me pause here, Casey, and say, where are we time-wise? Where are we, Yvette, with what we are intending to do here?

Casey Weade: Well, Richard, I want to make sure you go to that. So, why don’t you hit on that real quick and then we can bring things to a wrap? I know this has been really helpful for me as we’ve gone a long way here.

Richard Leider: So, if you look at your gifts, for example, and you look at, first of all, peak experiences in your life, so you named your gifts and you’ve named this learning and this other couple of gifts. And you go back and you look at the peak experiences. When I coach someone in a longer time period rather than the got a minute, I dissect seven other peak experiences to see if that learning thing was there, and they say, “Oh, there it is there, there it is again.” And all of a sudden, they go back and they say, “Wow, I didn’t realize that. I get so much energy out of this.”

Secondly, as you unpack your jobs, what’s your worst job or your best job? And you say, the best job was when I was learning and doing those things. And the worst job was when I wasn’t doing those. And you sort of take the formula. It gives passions and values, and you unpack your best and worst jobs.

Third thing is you get feedback from your sounding board. You take five cards. If you have the Calling Cards exercise, you can do that with others and say, “Can you do this on me and give me some feedback?” If you don’t buy the Calling Cards, you can just take five index cards, give them to five close people, and just say, “What is my gift?” And then see what the thread is in those.

And finally, is just I call it the Somatic Insight, and that is catching yourself in the act of being yourself on a day-to-day basis. In the course of a day when I developed the Calling Cards, Casey, I had people where– remember beepers? And I would beep them during the course of the day and say, “What are you doing right now? Are you getting great joy? Is it draining you or energizing you?” And people said, “Oh, my God, I didn’t realize how drained I am doing this.” So, there are those things you don’t love to do, which we didn’t talk about. Well, that’s a whole nother piece of this.

And what I was doing right now is what I love to do. I wish I could do this for, so they got insight from just being beeped at the time, and I got insight into Calling Cards. So, somatic means just observing yourself and catching yourself in the act of being yourself. Today, I feel really alive when I’m doing this and I don’t feel alive when I’m not doing this.

Casey Weade: That’s fantastic, Richard. Well, thanks for this. Yvette, thanks for joining us here today. It’s been a lot of fun. I know I went through this myself. And as I was going through it myself, I just gained further clarity around my purpose. And for me, I really love the ability to just deliver that in a one-sentence form, know exactly what that purpose is. That creates so much more clarity for me on a daily basis than what I’m supposed to be doing when I get up and throughout the day, when I go to sleep, where I’m going to be, and how I’m going to generate fulfillment in my life. I hope this has created more of that for you and many of you out there as well.

If you want to dive in deeper into Richard’s content, check out the show notes, or you can get a free copy of Richard’s book, Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Old? This is the most recent book that Richard has put out, it’s a fantastic book. He believes it’s his best book of all time and he’s had some really good books over the years. If you’d like to get a free copy, all you have to do is this, you can just write an honest rating and review of the podcast over on iTunes and then shoot us an email at [email protected], and we will send you the book for free. I hope you found this as enjoyable as me.

Richard, thank you for joining us. Yvette, thank you for joining us, and I’m sure we’ll see you again. And I know, Richard, we’re going to do this again. So, thanks again.

Richard Leider: Okay, thank you. Thank you, Yvette.

Yvette Francino: Thank you so much.