Erik Radle shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Erik, a huge thanks to you for investing the time to share your wisdom with those who are seeking it. We think it’s so important for us to share stories with our neighbors, friends and community because knowledge multiples when we share with each other. Let’s jump in: What are you being called to do now, that you may have been afraid of before?
I don’t know how these two callings are connected, except that they both came to me in the same way: through my daily meditative practice. Every evening I spend time in silence and darkness, speaking to God about what I am grateful for, what I need to let go of, and the abundance I desire in my life.
Once I get quiet and open the conversation on my end, the dialogue can begin in earnest. And the two recurring themes or ‘callings’ that are active now are to make my body a weapon and to give all of my worries to God. Odd bedfellows these two callings.
I am called to make my body a weapon, to be able to protect myself, my family and employees if a bad actor enters the scene. The meditation didn’t give a why, but it painted a picture of pain and suffering that would occur if I ignored this edict. While currently healing up from reconstructive surgery on my ankle, I’ve been looking for the right discipline to attack in Q4. My fear of entering a physical combat arena is real, having been an athlete but never involved in a combat sport. At 53, I’m quite fit but worried about the impact to my body when asking it to strike and absorb the strikes of others.
What to do with that worry or any worry? I am called to give them to God. I have not hesitated to answer this calling, and it creates a peace and tranquility in me that has been missing for decades. My commitment is to do all that I can, while still trusting that I am enough when giving my worries to God. Historically, I have shared the stress of my worries with others- and it hasn’t been productive. They have their own worries- where mine are my own and belong to God.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
After 25 years in the advertising game, I guess I’m rather institutionalized. While it feels like all that I know at this point, the innovation and disruption in the space is keeping me young and fresh.
Both personally and professionally, the last 5 years have been about purposeful reinvention. On the business side, our history has been anchored by a business model predicated on media sales. We’d make money when our clients are spending money on digital ads, TV, Radio, etc. plus creating the commercials and the ads. We’re finding that, more and more, the needs of the clients are straying well outside the need for simple media acquisition and more towards what we’d call ‘services’. Increasingly, clients do not have a competent internal resource attached to marketing, and we’re filling that role more and more. This can take many shapes, but think website maintenance and updates, database hygiene and 1st party data communications, systems integrations, events and activations, and anything requiring hands-on acceleration. We’re doing the blocking and tackling for our clients.
On the personal side, my reinvention has been around diet, health and wellness. Summoning the discipline to keep my target weight (170), my target body fat (15%) and target blood chemistry becomes less of a challenge each day, as the habits take firm hold. My next rung on the ladder to a strong, healthy body is going to be learning a combat sport, making my body into a weapon.
In life and in business, it helps to be prepared for the challenge ahead, especially when the challenge takes a shape and size you have never seen before.
Amazing, so let’s take a moment to go back in time. What was your earliest memory of feeling powerful?
When you conquer something, it feels awesome. When you’re the first to conquer something, you’re the most powerful person on the planet and everybody can see it. As a 14 year old, I was into skateboarding and lamented the coming of winter in New York as it meant the end of skating and the beginning of shoveling snow. It was about this time that snowboarding was making a debut on the scene, a way for skaters and surfers to experience the snow like a wave or a half pipe.
My friends and I made our own boards out of wood planks and rubber foot straps, and attacked the local hills in our suburban neighborhood with zeal. It wasn’t long before we all ventured to Manchester, Vermont and purchased some of the first boards sold in America by Mr. Jake Burton Carpenter himself. At the time, ski resorts didn’t allow boards, so we honed our skills in the back country. We got unimaginably good, at a sport nobody had really seen yet, We took our skills to a few local mountains and were successful in impressing one of the mountains to take on snowboarding as an activity, with me and my friends taking on the role of instructors and certification agents for the mountain.
What a thrill to be atop a new sport, doing WILD aerials and tricks, teaching a crop of 5 to 75 year-olds how to carve up a snowy hill. We were legends on that little mountain.
What did suffering teach you that success never could?
Suck times drive me to gratitude infinitely harder than good times do. And not the kind of gratitude for possessions, but the kind that comes from getting grounded in what will remain if and when all possessions are wiped away.
A friend of mine, David Chapelle, has an expression that I really love in reference to the kind of problems you can expect to have in a big business: “Tall grass, big monsters.” When faced with a struggle of magnitude, I get grateful for the kinds of problems I face.
When things get bad, when either I am suffering or the business is suffering, I am pulled back to a kind of foundational gratitude that transcends space and time. It’s a stripping down, where I accept the loss of clients, of possessions, and of the notion that business will be easy. What’s left?
I have parents who love me, a spouse that is my best friend and lover of 24 years, 3 adult children and two happy Rhodesian Ridgebacks. If they all get washed away, I have my relationship with my Creator and the gift this world has been to me for 53 years. I have my goodness, my heart for others and a curiosity like no other. I have the warmth of the sun, the sound of the wind in the trees and the smell of fresh cut grass. This kind of deep gratitude comes to me when I am suffering, not succeeding.
Sure, so let’s go deeper into your values and how you think. Is the public version of you the real you?
Increasingly, I’m the same person publicy as I am privately but that has not always been the case.
My default setting? I’m an introvert, a sapiosexual and book worm. But right out of college, I took a job in sales that would last 7 years and force me to become actor on a stage. My success was predicated on being vibrant, enthused and knowledgeable.
Fast forward to my stint in corporate America when I spent more time on stages, in front of crowds of 50 to 5000, where success was defined as ‘moving the room’ to a state of action, driven by emotion. Quite the tall order for a guy that would much prefer the company of one or two individuals, or a book.
Agency life required more acting skills- same stages, but now with a team of outstanding folks that needed a front man, a lead singer, a chimera to be the face of the shop. For my first 10 years at the agency, that role came naturally based on my history but not naturally based on how I’m wired. Just in the last 5 years, I have let more of my inner-introvert shine, taking others with parts or all of presentations and speeches. That’s been good for my people to grow into a more client-facing roles, and good for me to be more my authentic self at the office.
Showing my true colors has brought my team closer to me- they know that they too can perform a task that requires extroversion without being an extrovert. They know I’m a normal human, with normal worries and not just a wind up doll for the stage.
Okay, so let’s keep going with one more question that means a lot to us: How do you know when you’re out of your depth?
Nobody knows anything. From the media we consume on TV to the opinions we hear proffered ad nauseum about any topic, most people are infinitely more confident than they are informed. So I always assume that I’m out of my depth.
I find this about myself, the older I get, having been trained in the business by our founder that is supremely confident if not always correct. It’s easy to catch yourself speaking confidently around knowledge you picked up over the years, only to find out that the sands have shifted, that the facts are changed.
In the last few years, I’ve started conversations and explorations with the assumption that I’m out of my depth. Even when I’m not fully out of my depth, I allow myself to ask neophyte questions along the way, focused on why we do things as opposed to assuming the why and moving on to the tactics. This Socratic approach has opened up meaningful conversations around branding and tone (example) that would have never happened if we were operating from a platform of confidence over curiosity.
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