How Nature Makes Us More Human With Cara Parrish
“Nature is constantly evolving and solving problems”
YOUR KEY INSIGHTS FROM CARA
On Breaking Out of Her Environment
“I would definitely say it's about making a conscious decision to experience things that are the farthest from your experiences. To look over and say, This is way out there. This is so far from what I've ever experienced. This place is so different from where I've been... This culture is so different from where I've been, or this type of work environment is so different.. because that's really where we learn the most. I know that that's scary to throw yourself into the frying pan, so to speak, but that's also when you grow the most. Growth is uncomfortable and it doesn't feel great at first, and it's scary and you're alone and you don't understand, but going through that is how you start to understand and how you can start to learn and how you can start to be better as a human too. I'm really passionate, really motivated by having really different experiences and surrounding myself with people that have had really different experiences with me.
Even in my three years in living in the air stream, one of the things I love the most is always trying not to take the same route. We've spent three years going East Coast to West Coast annually, and then we did North, then south through that, and we tried really never to hit the same town twice. We're always trying to go a different way and see something different and experience something different, and every time that we got to an area that just looked vastly different from anywhere we had been so far, that was where we stopped and we hung out for a while. It makes you kind of think twice about what you consider that far out there, everything gets a little closer to you, and then your view of what you could experience gets a lot broader.”
Disconnecting to grow
“It is baked into the way that we operate as a company. I don't believe in text messages, I don't believe in phone calls - we operate in Slack within set hours that the team sets for themselves. We do that so that they can keep their life separate, so they can have moments that are all to themselves, that they can be off the grid, that they can travel, that they can experience nature. And I think that's fundamental, because when you're working online, it can be very easy to have a 24-hour day job, especially when you're involved in social media because it doesn't sleep. If you're running an international company and doing social media, then it really never ends unless you decide, Hey, I'm a human being, this is what it takes to operate as a human being, and that is to have sunlight, to have air, to experience a connection to the outdoors, because that is innately a part of being a human.
But second of all, you have to find something that grounds you. Honestly, what is more grounding than going for a hike, what is more grounding than disconnecting all of this and reminding yourself what you are... And one of the things I love the most about life off the grid is there's also that survivalist thing that you have to know how to do it. You have to know how to make shelter, you have to know how to start a fire, you need to know how to make food, and all of these basic things that we kind of disconnect with when everything is at our fingertips. The more that we disconnect from that it feels like we're losing some really poor traits of being good people, but especially being good leaders. We lose things like patience and we lose things like when you're talking about being compassionate to a baby bird, that sort of compassion... It's not the same necessarily as what we extend online, it's not like seeing an injured creature or an injured person even and going to take care of that. It's not like that. And so we lose these great traits that make us good people, but also make us great leaders.”
on situational awareness
“I would also say it helps with focus in terms of situational awareness. When we work online, everything is constant notification, everything is binging and going off, and it's all push notifications. We live in a world where we have to condition ourselves to not pay attention. Frankly, we have to condition ourselves to ignore our surroundings if we intend to focus, whereas in nature, it's the exact opposite. If you condition yourself to ignore what's around you, you are no longer safe and you're not safe, and you're not experiencing what you came here to experience. You have to rebuild that situational awareness, which I think is important in terms of cooperation and communication online, in order to start looking around and saying like, Okay, I'm not just having this conversation, but what else is happening over here? What else is gonna happen from this conversation, and a lot of marketing is looking at pipelines, where are these things coming from, where are they going, what is our intended path that we're gonna take a customer down? So there has to be a lot of foresight and awareness in that space, if you're gonna do it effectively. If you've conditioned yourself to ignore the greater situation around you, then I think it would be really difficult to be a really effective marketer.
Because what you've done is you've conditioned yourself to hyper-focus on one piece of something and not necessarily be constantly looking back out at that bigger picture view. If you don't have that big picture to start with, then all you're doing is kind of making a really great broken wheel, polishing it a lot… But there's no traction, there's no engine that it's attached to... It's just a broken wheel and you're like, Why is this not working? So I think it definitely affects being a marketer in terms of having that situational awareness, being able to come up with creative solutions and looking at something all of the way through.
I also think that nature is always really inspirational in terms of innovation. Nature is constantly evolving and solving problems. It’s clever, coming up with solutions and innovating, and it makes it hard to sit down as a human and look at a problem and be like, Oh, I can't solve that.”
SIMPLE PRACTICES
“I try to take a different path around town that I do day over day instead of doing the exact same. That way we're seeing things that are different, and even when I run out of routes, I just go back to the one that’s been the longest since I took it, and to see what's there now. But I do it with full awareness. Don't do it with your ear buds, don't do it with texting on your phone, do it with the intention of, that is what you are doing right now, and let that be your focus. That is how you're going to grow that situational awareness muscle and that creativity, and you're gonna let your brain do its thing, it's almost a form of meditation.
You're just letting your brain think whatever it thinks while you're going along, and you're letting it be inspired by whatever you're seeing around you in your neighborhood or in your community. There's this precious little girl who lives three blocks down that writes like an inspiring message every day for the community. It's one of the sweetest things I've ever seen. But also, as we've been going through all these terrifying things lately, seeing her little messages is so inspirational that this little girl wants to do is just comfort her town. I get that hit of that compassion and that energy and this optimism from this little tiny thing, so even if you can just start to do that and spend more time outside, fully focused on just being outside and experiencing your neighborhood... That's a wonderful place to start.”
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