How A Walk In The Woods Shaped A Life Of Freedom

Hi, this is Dan Sullivan and I'd like to welcome you to the multiplier mindset podcast.

One of the things I find very, very different about the way that a lot of children are raised

here in the 21st century is comparing it or contrasting it to the way that I was raised

in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

I grew up on a farm. It was about an 80 acre farm and it had somewhere between 15 and 20 acres

of woodland behind it. The woods were always fascinating to me as a child and up until the age I

was six, I couldn't go into the woods alone. I could wander the field alone as long as I didn't

go outside the fence line and I didn't cross the street and the road in front of our house.

I could pretty well wander from the time I was four or five years old. I could wander the field

but I wasn't allowed to go into the woods alone. But on my six birthday I was given permission to go

into the woods alone and I'm one of seven kids and I'm the fifth child and I just happen to have

birth order. I'm both sides of me where I've got a lot of years to the next oldest and I have a

lot of years to the next youngest and so I was home with my parents and we always had dogs and

the dog at the time was a collie dog, very very nice family pet and wherever I went on the farm the

dog always went with me. So I remember my first time in the woods. I had been there with my brothers

but I had not been my own and I got to really wander in the woods and you know when you're six

years old the woods looked bigger than when you're in your seventies so it would seem a very small

woods to me today but it was a very big woods. It was a bit like the Amazon going and there were

vines and there was overgrowth and everything else and I just found it an amazing experience you

know and I would climb the trees and they had a lot of vines hanging down from the trees and I

would secure them and then I would swing down the vines and I would climb up to the first branches

and hanged by my knees so the first time I did it I came running back to the house it was quite a

waste it was I would say easily three quarters of a mile from the woods to our farmhouse and I came

and I said mom mom guess what I did down in the woods and she stopped me and she said I don't want

to know what you're doing down in the woods I don't want to think about what you're doing down in

the woods the dog goes with you if anything happens to you the dog will come back and bark and

will find you I do not want to think about what you're doing down in the woods I want to tell you

I probably didn't realize it at the time but very quickly as I got older I realized that my mom

probably did worry about what was happening down in the woods but she wanted me to have my freedom

and I think that being given permission to actually go into a place that might be a little bit

riskier dangerous really develop that I have to be responsible so I don't want the dog rushing

back to the farmhouse and barking and then them having to come and search for me I say I do not

want that to happen so I think I developed a sense of really watching out for myself and it

really struck me that that's kind of the essence of freedom when you have responsibility for someone

like my mother did but you also want that person to grow and I'm so struck today by all the stories

of parents being desperately scared of anything that's going to happen to their children and therefore

the children are always protected and all their activities are organized and supervised and I think

it has a very negative effect on their sense of personal freedom and their sense of exploration

the sense of being really creative because I made up wonderful games when I was down in the woods

I was always a big Robin Hood fan because I got my first Robin Hood book when I was six years old

and the woods at the back of our farm automatically and permanently became Sherwood Forest so all the

characters in Robin Hood I would see them because I make them up and I knew all the stories and so

I would act out one story on each day and I came back and it was just tremendous for my

imagination and this was just a wonderland for me and that 80 acres of farm also had a lot of

interesting things so I don't think life is any more dangerous than it was in the 1940s and 1950s but

I think that there are so many bad stories on television and in the movies about children being on

their own that the fear that the parents have is interfering with the development of children's

sense of freedom and sense of exploration so I'm not going to necessarily do anything about it

or anything else but I just really am appreciating enormously the last 65 years since those experiences

happened that I was given an amazing gift by my mother and my father my father was in agreement with

this and they just trusted that the risk of something bad happened to me was worth it to ensure that

I developed a really independent and confident mind so you know I said here having created this

strategic coach over the last 40 years with Babs and all the thousands of entrepreneurs and I think

the sense of freedom that I have in developing the program and continually growing the organization

is directly tied back to that type of early experience that I just described my freedom in the woods

that's six years old