How Adventure Can Change the Way You Handle Work Stress

We live just 45 minutes away from “hypercoaster” Goliath. It goes 200 feet feet high and has 12 story drops. Dusty really wanted to go to Six Flags this summer. We saw our window of opportunity closing, so we decided to go! My roller coaster experience previous to this looks like: that slow one for kids at American Adventures, Space Mountain, and my classic 2006 panic attack at the front of the line at the Rockin’ Roller Coaster. (Yay me!)

I’d never been to Six Flags. The lady at the gate looked at me like I was nuts. I was terrified, but pretty excited too. I mean I just made it into the park, shattering preconceived notions right from the gate. We started on the Dahlonega Mine Train which was pretty fun and surprising. Next up we did the Looney Tunes one, faster, but definitely a confidence booster.

We headed over to Mind Bender. We’re standing in line. We get buckled in. And Dusty mentions the loops. LOOPS. We take off and I find myself in the fetal position, eyes closed pretty much the whole time. PSA: It physically hurts to ride a roller coaster like that. It hurts to resist all that force.

That sounded very Obi-Wan Kenobi, but I meant it in more of a physics sense.

After that experience, I was sure I was done with roller coasters. I’d failed Dusty’s only dream for me to become a coaster crusher. We decided to take a break on those (terrifying) swings that go around in a circle. I thought about a lot on those swings. Like, suddenly we are super high and I’m just in this little plastic seat with a bar across my lap. And man, that’s kind of a good metaphor for life. We're just here, where we are, doing all we can do. I thought about yoga and the idea that sometimes the best thing to do in moments of stress is to just observe and acknowledge everything that’s going on. I started collecting data like a scientist. What does it feel like when I look away from the swing in front of me? What about when I look down? What’s the sky look like? What are my feet doing? I breathed some really good yoga breaths, was incredibly thankful for my local yoga studio, and eventually relaxed enough to enjoy to ride.

Knowledge is powerful, and calming.

After the swings, I wanted to try the Mind Bender again and experience it instead of wishing it to be over. I sat straight up and blinked maybe twice the whole time. It was still scary, but because I wasn’t resisting all the forces, it didn’t hurt. I got to see a little bit of where I was going, and it was really cool. That second time became more of an experiment in curiosity.

It became an adventure.

I tend to face life and my work with the idea that things will only be good when the bad stuff is over. I miss so much in thinking that way - there’s so much to see and learn in every loop. Tough things are actually easiest to face with your eyes open and back straight.

If we could look at our work with a sense of adventure, I think we’d be a lot less stressed out when things don’t go exactly to plan. The next time things get terrifying, collect all the data you can.

Examine where you are, own it, and take the next step in your adventure.

We can choose to look at our career as a logically planned path to success in which we resist and hurt with every bump and detour. But. I think it would be better to look at our work as an adventure. Those detours will always be surprising, but expected and celebrated as learning opportunities.

So, I didn’t ride Goliath this time, but I rode a bunch of other scary coasters, and I think I crushed them. Here's to the adventure!

Mad & Dusty Restyle Their Brand

DUSTY: When we first started Mad & Dusty, it was our intention to showcase our work as a husband + wife team. But since I work full time at a screen print shop, I've been more of a shadowy figure in the background. The one Maddy talks about occasionally, but some may not believe is real. But with our impending rebrand, we decided that it's time for me to make my presence more apparent. Starting with my input on the whole restyling thing... 

First of all, we want Mad & Dusty to be more design focused. Our business has been many things since we've started. We did a little bit of this and a lotta bit of that. Designing, painting, printing, woodworking, etc. More or less taking any job that we could tackle, regardless of what it was. As time has gone on, we've gotten a better feel about how to run a business. Obviously we haven't nailed it, but we're getting there (fingers crossed!) We've refined who and what we are, so it felt like time for a refresh!

Right now, our business looks rather clean and safe. But that's not what we are. We're a little messy and we like to experiment and adventure! And we want that to be reflected in our business.

Maddy has a fun and youthful illustrative style that people love. And I've got a clean retro style focusing on design and type-layout. It may sound kind of boring, but it helps us balance each other out. Clients love the way our styles come together, so we want these things to be evident up-front. Which we'll hopefully be able to achieve as we walk ourselves through the same branding exercises we work through with our clients.

MADS: When we first started, we had trouble with our brand. We were trying to build a brand around something that wasn’t fully formed. Luckily we were getting married and a designer friend was able to gift us with a logo. (Thank you Joey!) That got us started and gave us the confidence to move forward. Now that we’ve grown and been working on this thing for a while, we noticed some things were off. The brand we were in person was not syncing up with what’s online.

Our site was (is) clean and structured, but our house is chaotic and eclectic. There’s no clean white space. Our home is full of video games and roommates and old things getting renovated by Dusty. It’s even in the suburbs. I can’t keep a plant alive, let alone Instagram it. I don’t like pineapples as a design element, even if you put them in gold foil. With all this working together, it seemed to me that we were doomed to failure. (When you think success is simply looking like everyone else.) I felt this discord around the beginning of February. Our brand started to feel like clothes that will never fit right, no matter how much you tug on them.

I felt lost. Like I wasn’t matching up with who I wanted to be and just couldn’t catch up. There’s the good aspirational “I want to be more…” and then the bad aspirational “I want to be more because what I am now isn’t good enough.” I was operating in that second space for a good while, and probably will always navigate back there from time to time.

I was juggling too much, not sleeping and we were saying yes to everything. I was looking for that job, that client, that goal achieved, that affirmation to say, “Yes, you’ve finally made it. You can sit with us.” But no matter how hard I worked, how much family time I sacrificed, I wasn’t hearing that.

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I think I finally realized it was because I didn’t need to hear that. God wasn’t holding his affirmation out of reach on purpose to show me who’s boss. (Really a thing I had believed for a while.) God had already given me affirmation. I was sitting at the right table, wearing the right clothes and just staring with envy at all the other tables. Yuck. Even writing that physically hurts my fingers as I type. Chasing that sort of affirmation through your work is not a healthy way to operate, no matter your profession, but especially as a creative. That sort of chase makes it incredibly hard to be authentic. You’re too busy trying on the brand that “works” and not exploring your own person.

I had been so busy jamming ourselves into “the right” persona online, that we were missing out on the chance to communicate a lot of what makes our brand unique. We weren’t telling anyone what makes us fun to work with or why we love to design and who we love to design for. So, yeah, basically what Dusty said with a side of all the feels. 

Since we are two people forming one brand, we both created separate mood boards. They look kinda Different Don't they? Sign up for next week's dispatch to see how we merged them!