On Trout, Contentment, and Other Things I Haven’t Figured Out

It was September 2023, and I was standing in the Elk River in British Columbia, my trusty Winston fly rod in hand, doing what I generally consider to be one of the better ways to spend a day.

My best friend and brother, Tod, and I have taken the same trip every Fall since 2010, I think. We may have started in 2009, my memory has been leaking oil for about 5 years. The scenery was spectacular, the water was cold, clear, and the Westslope Cutthroat were behaving like trout, which is to say they seemed perfectly happy to ignore whatever I was offering them. I don’t remember exactly what prompted it, but somewhere between changing flies and wondering whether having more than 20 fly rods was too much , a question popped into my head.

What does it mean to be content?

That was followed almost immediately by another.

And why am I having such a hard time finding contentment?

These are not particularly useful questions when you’re standing in a fast-moving river with slippery rocks that could quickly provide an unwanted cold plunge. They certainly weren't going to help me catch fish. But once they show up, they’re difficult to ignore. Which was annoying because I’d gone fishing to get away from thinking about such things.

By most reasonable measures, I had a pretty good life. A wonderful wife, four kids, a successful career, good friends, and enough fly rods to equip a small fishing expedition.

I’d spent decades traveling the world, speaking to audiences, writing books, and helping organizations understand why people do the things they do. And I genuinely enjoyed it.  So, what was the problem? I didn’t know.

This was especially irritating because understanding human behavior is what I do for a living. You’d think I’d have some insight into my own. Apparently, the brain doesn’t offer employee discounts.

I kept fishing, but the questions came home with me.

And they stayed.

For much of my professional life, I’ve encouraged people to slow down, pay attention, reflect, and make more intentional choices. I even came up with a framework called the Three Rs: Recognition, Reflection, and Response.

It’s a pretty good framework. I’d pat myself on the back if I could reach that far. I’ve seen it help a lot of people.

Eventually, it occurred to me that I might want to try it myself. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere, but I’m trying not to turn everything into a lesson these days.

Instead, I started slowing down. I took fewer speaking engagements, did less consulting, and spent considerably less time in airports, hotel rooms, and conference centers. I wasn’t retiring. I still liked my work. I just wanted to find out what life might look like if I stopped organizing so much of it around work.

As it turns out, there are plenty of things to do. I played more pickleball. A lot more. Even injured myself which I hear is a requirement. Pickleball is a curious game. It’s easy enough to learn in an afternoon and difficult enough lead you to spend the rest of your life buying the latest and greatest paddles as a substitute for practice and actual skills.

I also fished more. Fly fishing often has the advantage of taking place in beautiful surroundings, with very few people around – the way I like it. I’d rather be myself or with a few friends and catch little or no fish than to be shoulder-to-shoulder with others and catch a lot of fish. And if you don’t think the shoulder-to-shoulder stuff doesn’t happen, just go to the 6^th Street Dam in downtown Grand Rapids, MI during the Fall Salmon and Steelhead runs and you’ll see why fishing should be practiced in solitude. Oh, by the way, one can never have too many fly rods, just not enough space. Well, that’s what I think.  My wife, unsurprisingly, differs.

Speaking of my amazing wife, Donna and I traveled more. We took vacations. We especially like Viking River Cruises where, in our early 60’s, we are the young ones. I spent more time with family, and visited places without my having to give a presentation when we got there. It turns out you can go to a hotel, check in, and never once ask where the ballroom is.

I also got back into something I’d loved when I was younger: hi-fi equipment and vinyl records. Now it’s considered vintage gear. My reentry started innocently enough. I thought it would be nice to have a vintage stereo receiver, a turntable, and a few records. I now own enough receivers to make a reasonable person question my attraction to silver plated face plates and analog VU meters.  Donna is a reasonable person.

There’s something about older Marantz receivers, Polk Monitor speakers from the 70s and 80s, and Technics turntables that DJ’s often used.  Oh, and vinyl. The mechanical ritual of putting on a record by Dire Straits or Steely Dan and listening in a big easy chair transports me to one of my happy places. Of course, collecting fifty-year-old electronics means accepting that some of them occasionally need repair and restoration. I enjoy bringing back to life vintage stereo equipment. So does the technician I pay to do it.

Now here’s what I noticed. I was having a pretty good time. And I wasn’t accomplishing much of anything. At least not in the conventional sense. I wasn’t building a business, developing a program, or preparing for a keynote. I was catching the occasional fish, traveling with my wife, listening to music, and recovering from pickleball-related injuries.

And for once, that seemed like enough. Or at least closer to enough.

The question about contentment, however, turned out to be a little more complicated than simply working less and fishing more. I spent time with my therapist trying to understand it. Some of what emerged wasn’t particularly surprising, although understanding something and being comfortable with it are two different matters.

I grew up poor, in an environment and circumstances that were sometimes dangerous and rarely predictable. As a kid, it seemed I was always on DEFCON-1. My brain had become remarkably good at scanning for threats, real or imagined. I learned that things can go wrong quickly, and that it’s a good idea to be prepared.

Those habits can be useful when you’re young and trying to get through the day. They became less useful for me as I became older, when my circumstances changed. Still, I can’t completely convince my Ancient Brain to stand down and rest, just a little.

Then there was the guilt.

My sister Diane disappeared in 1985, never to be found. My mother died by suicide in 1991, at the start of graduate school and just months after I got married. For years, I’ve carried the feeling that I should have been there for them. That I should have done something. That somehow, I could have prevented what happened. Intellectually, I understand that I can’t go back and change any of it. But feelings don’t always pay much attention to what we understand intellectually.

In my work, I often talk the two brains, metaphorically speaking, that we have, the Ancient Brain and the Modern Brain. The Modern Brain is the part that can reason, reflect, consider evidence, and recognize that some things are beyond our control. The Ancient Brain is more concerned with keeping us safe. It’s fast, more emotionally driven, and not especially interested in lengthy explanations. My Modern Brain knows I can’t change the past. My Ancient Brain seems to think I ought to keep trying. And it can be remarkably persistent.

I’ve spent years studying and teaching this stuff, so you’d think I’d be better at managing it. But knowing how your brain works doesn’t necessarily mean it will cooperate. If it did, I’d probably have a much better pickleball game.

I’m still working through all of this. And I’ve come to appreciate that contentment may be difficult when some part of you believes there’s always something else you should be doing, fixing, or making up for.

That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped wanting to accomplish things. I still have plenty of ideas and interests. But I’m trying to get better at enjoying what’s in front of me without immediately thinking about what comes next.

Some days I’m better at it than others.

As I spent more time reflecting, trying to understand myself, I found myself thinking about how I got interested in understanding other people in the first place. When I first started out I was a professor and, for years, people knew me as the Diversity Guy. Then I became the Diversity & Inclusion Guy. Then came DEI, DEIB, and assorted variations that made me wonder whether acronyms are useful after a certain number of letters. The funny thing is, I’ve always considered myself a behavioral scientist.

And there’s a deeply personal reason for that. My interest and work in “diversity and inclusion” was a by-product of me trying to understand what led my mom to take her own life. There’s no question my sister’s disappearance as a major contributor. But even before that, she seemed lonely, not just a lone but lonely, there’s a difference.

In 1970, my mother left our family behind, taking me with her to escape the Vietnam War. She traveled literally halfway around the world to a different continent, a different country, and a place filled with people who didn’t always treat her particularly well. As I tried to make sense of her life, and eventually her death, I kept coming back to the idea of belonging. What happens to someone when they don’t feel like they belong? What does that do to a person? And then came other questions. Why do we form groups? Why do we sometimes treat people who are different from us, people outside our own groups, as threats? Why does identity matter so much?  And on and on.

Questions about belonging, identity, relationships, and the sometimes peculiar ways human beings treat one another. In other words, fundamental questions about human behavior. The “work,” if you will, was as much personal as professional, probably more.

As I reflected, it occurred to me I’d been talking about belonging long before inclusion became a popular workplace term. And I’d often argued that diversity without inclusion could make things worse. Put people with different backgrounds and perspectives together without paying attention to how they relate to one another, if they felt like they belonged and were included, and you’re likely to encounter some predictable problems.

I like to say, human kinds are a function of minds. And as our brain creates different “kinds” of humans, it easily jumps to creating an us and a them.  Getting beyond that takes work.

Of course, there’s no denying the conversation around DEI has become considerably more contentious in recent years. I’ve found that frustrating, especially when complex questions about human behavior get reduced to political arguments and slogans. But it also made me think about how my work had come to be defined.

To me, diversity and inclusion were never the whole story. They, and their accompanying letters, were part of a much larger interest in what and why people do what they do.mAnd I realized I wanted to spend more time exploring the rest of that story.

Why do smart people do dumb things?

Why do we get defensive so quickly?

Why is it so difficult to admit we’re wrong?

Why do we sometimes treat people we love worse than people we barely know?

And why, when we know perfectly well what we should do, do we so often do something else?

These are the questions that got me interested in behavioral science in the first place. They’re still interesting to me. Maybe more so now that I’ve had a little more time to notice how often I provide my own examples.

So, after a couple of years of slowing down, I’m getting back to doing more of the work I love. Not as much as before, and hopefully definitely not at the same pace.

There are still rivers I want to fish, the Skeena in northwestern British Columbia, the River Spey in Scotland, some river in Patagonia. There are more places Donna and I want to visit, more pickleball games to play, and more records to listen to.

But I also miss writing, teaching, speaking, and sharing the science of human behavior.

I still think about that day on the Elk River. I went there to spend time with my best friend and brother, to catch trout, and enjoy a wilderness setting (we had to purchase and carry bear spray with us). I wound up with a question that has occupied a surprising amount of my attention ever since.

I haven’t completely figured out what it means to be content. Maybe I never will. But I’m beginning to think it has something to do with recognizing that a good day doesn’t have to produce anything beyond being a good day. That you can enjoy what you have without giving up on what you still want to do. And that sometimes the most useful thing you can accomplish is to stop trying to accomplish something.

I’m not always very good at this. But I’m getting better. At least I think I am. And if I ever get it completely figured out, I’ll probably be standing in a river somewhere, not just fishing, but catching trout. Or watching my brother frantically chasing a can of bear spray down the river. Yes, that happened just last month.

It’s good to be back.