Adam Drake is the founder of Balanced Choice, which works with movement, theater, and sharing stories to encourage positive behavioral change. Adam regularly uses foresight tools to develop his business and employees, and to drive positive behaviour change in the individuals his work supports.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
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Transcript
Peter Hayward: Some people seem lucky in life. They seem to catch the breaks. I think I am one of those people. And yet we also meet people to whom life seems unfair. The cards of life don't seem fairly dealt out. What of those people? Can the idea of the future being different be useful?
Adam Drake: I think, we all want to feel like we've got a clean canvas and maybe I didn't have to go to those places I went to and some of those really dark spots I went to in my life, but what it gave me was a sense that how dare I judge anybody else? Because it would have been very easy for me to end up in those places too. And so once I got that deep understanding that every person deserves a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, the seventh and eighth chance, cause life's a bit too hard to get right the first time.
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on FuturePod, Adam Drake. The founder of Balanced Choice, which works with movement, theater, and sharing stories to encourage positive behavioral change. Welcome to FuturePod, Adam.
Adam Drake: Thanks Pete. Great to be here.
Peter Hayward: Yes, This is a conversation I think both of us have been looking forward to.
So, the Adam Drake story. How do you want to tell the Adam Drake story and the Balanced Choice story?
Adam Drake: I think the only way I know how and that's from my heart. The story is an interesting one going back many years. I always think it's important to talk about the time growing up in Lilydale, Victoria. Down in Melbourne and going to Mount Evelyn Christian School. And at that school, when I was in year 10, they actually taught us Warlpiri and took us to Yuendumu. I was given a skin name, Japanangka. Which I still get called in many communities that I go visit these days. But then my parents moved me up to the Gold Coast and I spent some time up there. I fell across theater and acting at Griffith University and studied that. I remember Mike Foster, my lecturer, taking me up first year university to Numinbah Correctional Centre and running a theatre workshop and getting me to run a couple of games and seeing the power of theatre in prisons. I thought, wow, this is interesting stuff.
And having an uncle like you, who is a futurist, who used to blow my mind every time I'd talk to you and just make my brain bigger, that's the way I talk about it. And then finding that fitness got my body feeling good. So there's a few things that I really latched onto, but to be honest, Peter, I was pretty lost in my 18, 19, 20s. When I'd found theatre, I, started touring comedy shows and then school shows with Queensland Arts Council and Australian Theatre for Young People. Then they thought it was a good idea to start sending me out to communities like Aurukun, Palm island. Went out to Tennant Creek and I remember just being so blown away by the fact that the places like Tennant and Aurukun were a part of Australia and I'd never seen that part of Australia before. And I found it so confronting and I just went, what do you do when you're confronted? Do you walk away or do you lean in? And I lent in and I moved out to Tennant Creek with my fiancé at the time and I went out to make a difference. Thought I'd make this wonderful difference.
But I collapsed. Like I was already struggling with my own alcohol in my uni days. I would say I was self medicating to some degree because I had a lot of anxiety and fear as a kid growing up. And I went to Tennant Creek thinking moving was going to fix me and I was going to fix people. I never fixed anyone. I'm only still working on myself. And so I got out to Tennant Creek and I tell the story that Mum and Dad moved out with me, and then my fiance moved out and we had my second daughter, Martina, out there. But mom and dad moved back and then my fiance and I broke up and she left to go up to Cairns with my daughter. And I still tell the story about how my dog ran away, took off under the fence and just left me. And I'm just like, can this get any worse? Like I just, I thought it was rock bottom, but it wasn't.
My Dad came and pulled me off a couch in Tennant Creek and said, come on, you need to come up to Darwin. Come and sit on Larrakia country and just heal. So I sat on a few beaches up there and kept drinking, thinking that was going to help. And got involved with Corrugated Iron Youth Arts, doing some theater stuff and still just getting by and my alcohol still being an issue to the point Mum and Dad went over to America to see my other uncle. And I think you were over there at the time and I literally collapsed. I reckon I'm lucky to get through that time. That was a tough time. And my sister Kelsey pulled me off the couch, put me into a rehab. I did a 10 day detox in that rehab. And I remember going, I don't want the story to end like this.
And I remember being under a tree and kicked out of my parents home for drinking because I'd stolen their grog. That it was rock bottom, but that's only just over a decade ago now and under that tree, I'd like to think that's where I started the idea of Balanced Choice. But what I used to do is I'd drive past Dondale when I was working with Corrugated Iron Youth Arts and a little voice in my head would say, you need to do something in there. You need to do something in there. Every time. And so I went and did something in there. I went to government and I said, look, I've got these things and made, I was still struggling like with my grog and everything. And I've got this stuff about fitness, theater, and Hope Theory, because, you taught me about Hope Theory.
And I've gone, this stuff's ingenious, this is brilliant. And I want to run some sessions in Dondale and they said, look, you can have three hours a week. We'll give you a shot. And to be honest, if I'd looked at me at round that table, the way I would have looked, the way I would have spoken, wow, I can't believe they took a risk on me. It would have been a massive risk. And here we are. What 10 years later and pretty much all around Australia, been over to America with Homeboy Industries in so many prisons and doing corporate workshops. And who would have thought that under that tree, we got to this point, and so that's kind of part of the Adam Drake and Balanced Choice story.
Peter Hayward: It is interesting, Adam, as I reflect on, you're on a journey and everybody who loves you went with you on the same journey. And everybody had hope for you. You had this group of invisible supporters that backed Adam Drake to do something, whatever it was going to say. And yet, the fascinating question for me, and I'm sure for people listening, is how does that person who's been through that, how does that become the fuel and inspiration for what Balanced choice becomes?
Adam Drake: Yeah Balanced Choice really started to get going when I started to believe the kids who were locked up. And that's probably quite ironic. Every time I would come in to Dondale the kids would be like, Adam, you're here! You're here! And they'd get so excited about seeing me, and I was like, these kids really love me. They genuinely love me. And then I went, what, if these kids love me this much and my own daughters love me and you love me and my family loved me, but those kids who had every reason to probably doubt the person that I was walking in to do stuff with them pointed me towards the fact that I deserve to start loving myself. And I still say to this day that's the key that those kids handed me was they just pointed me to self love. Which returned me to myself. And then I started to heal and then I started to gather amazing staff like Yianni and Jason and Breanna and Yvonne and all of a sudden Ollie, they all started turning up all these wonderful people and they loved me.
And then I realized a lot of the kids that I was working with didn't have many adults in their lives who had done the right thing by them, or it's even to the point of like just being consistent for. And I went yeah, these kids deserve this. They deserve me to be a better adult. And so I started doing things like going on Ninja Warrior and falling in the water straight away. But, what's that quote? It the definition of success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. So then I went to push ups to try to break world records for push ups. And I did it in Dondale and I remember I was doing the push ups and the kids were taped off around me because we were filming it for the Guinness Book of Records. But there was one kid and he yells out, Adam, we need a champion come on. I'll never forget that. That's stayed with me to this day and I just want to be the best adult I can be because these kids deserve it. And then I realized that the adults in the corporate world and the people in government, they deserve it too.
Like you just got to keep turning up as your best self.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, I think the word that comes up for me is redemption, but I don't mean someone regarding you as redeemed. You yourself feel redeemed and how much stepping out of you and your personal redemption, if I want to call it that. How does this happen with the work that Balanced Choice does? In the prisons and in the communities and in the corporate organizations. How much do people want to feel redeemed? In their own eyes?
Adam Drake: Yeah, I think, we all want to feel like we've got a clean canvas and I uh, yeah, I had to go to maybe I didn't have to go to those places I went to and some of those really dark spots I went to in my life, but what it gave me was a sense that how dare I judge anybody else? Because it would have been very easy for me to end up in those places too. And so once I got that deep understanding that every person deserves a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, the seventh and eighth chance, cause life's a bit too hard to get right the first time. And then it's the encouraging people along the way that actually helps them believe that they can get there and that builds the agency and yeah, those kids, they pointed me towards my healing. They pointed me towards my redemptive story. And so then I went I want to keep doing that. And now I want to gather a whole bunch of people who, when they look at these kids that are locked up, or they look at these people going through these hard times, believe that they can turn it around and change.
And that leads me to a value and we've started to do some work around values with our Anchor Program that we do. But the one thing that I think is crucial in all of this is Forgiveness. And so I'll say a lot of the time, if you've been carrying around stuff for a bit too long, it might be time to put it down. And that's actually forgiving of self. How do you forgive yourself for where you've been, some of the things you've done? How do you turn that around? Because when you can start to forgive yourself and believe that you deserve a better life than the one you're giving yourself, then you start on that right track.
Peter Hayward: And that's what the future offers everybody.
Question two
Peter Hayward: I'm going to move here to a couple of what, you might call your tools or your tricks from the Balanced Choice bag. And I'm going to give you three processes, activities that I think somehow both explain you and explain Balanced Choice. And hopefully when you explain them to the listeners, you'll both tell them how you use them, , or how they form part of this Balanced Choice experience. The three things I want you to talk to, one you've already mentioned, which is the Push Up cause it's more than just a form of physical activity. It's something that you have returned to time and time and time again. The second one is the theater game. I would call it the Two High where people stand on your shoulders. Another one of the striking experiences for participants. And the last one I want you to talk to is I think the first thing I formally taught the Balanced Choice team as they were Sohail Inayatullah's Futures Triangle which, again, giving you a futures frame to talk about time and past, present, future, and that has, I think, had a life of its own. And I'd love you to talk about that with the listeners.
Adam Drake: Yeah let's start with the Push Up then. As soon as I've been there and I talked a bit about how important that is um, For me, the push up is, I realized after a while of going into detention centers and doing a lot of push ups alongside people that creating that rhythm next to each other that ability to look next to you and see that young person's trying so hard to do that push up with you. To the point where we've now designed a workout called 50 different types of push ups because, we don't have weights or whatnot running around in prisons because, they can be used as weapons.
So we had to get creative. And so the push up became really important. And then we started trying to break world records with push ups and, weight on our backs for some of those push ups. But I tell a story that goes back to when I was around 17, I was on the Gold Coast, I got picked up by the learner driver car Palm Beach I was at school on the Gold Coast and they came and picked me up. And I remember going for a drive, and I was, the learner driver instructor was, yeah, obviously had dual controls and we were driving out the back of Burleigh Heads, got to West Burleigh shops and this truck pulled out in front of the learner driver car and I went smash straight into the side of it. And the instructor next to me head hit the dashboard and started grabbing at her chest and truck started to try to take off and I got out in my school uniform running around trying to get this truck to stop and pull over and then the school bus went past. My school bus, and all my mates are hanging out.
Ah, Drakey smashed the driver's car. And I just felt so small. I just, I was devastated. I remember going home and, I went to bed that night. I don't even know if I had dinner. I just went to bed. I was just devastated about what I'd done. And the next morning, I had my head under the covers and my dad came in and he's gone Ad, get up. I said, nah, dad, no, I don't want to get up. Ad, just get up, mate. Dad, I'm not getting up. He goes, Ad, get up, you're driving me to school. I said, I'm not driving you to school, mate. Don't you know what happened yesterday? He goes, get up. Otherwise, there's a good chance you might never drive a car again. So get up and get ready for school.
And I tell the story because what he told me to do was, get back up. I went down, get back up. And what's a pushup? You get knocked down, you get back up. Then all of a sudden you got a weight on your back. You go down, you get [Sound] It gets heavier, you get back up. And I tell it like that to the kids because, there's some kids over the years that we've lost cause they didn't get back up.
And I'm sick and tired of losing good kids. And so I just want them to keep pushing back up. And so it's a physical way to tell that story. And I think it's an important one too. So that's the pushup.
The Two High is actually a circus or an acrobat type move that was taught to me by Gavin Robbins, who's the movement coach at NIDA these days. And Gav does online sessions like you do Pete just to upskill our theater stuff for Balanced Choice. And even before I started Balanced Choice, I used to tour with Queensland Arts Council and Queensland Theatre Company and Australian Theatre for Young People. And we'd go to schools and I'd put kids on my shoulders. They would do a Two High.. They would start by surfing on my back, put their feet to a V position on the lower part of my back. I'd push up into what you would call Dog Pose in yoga. From there, I would then go to a half high where the kid's standing on the lower part of my back. And then they would go up to the top, grab my hands, step onto my shoulders, I'll grab their calf muscles and they will stand and shine like a star. And first few times I started to do it, I couldn't get over the joy for me and for the kid. And if you watch some of the videos on our sites on the Facebook page or your LinkedIn or whatever, you will see that when the kid is up there, there is complete joy.
And then they've achieved something and they grab your hands and they come down and they're buzzing with so much energy, then they're just still moving because they can't get rid of the energy. And I love it because it allows me to then talk about the fact of, what did we have to do together there? And we talk about trust and we talk about communication and we talk about safety, but what also we talk about. Is it allows us to then go in your life, who's that person who's been able to be there for you consistently balanced, communicated well with you, kept you safe. so you could go higher in life? And it's funny, Pete, because a lot of the time when we go around the circle and talk about that after we've done the lift. I would say 95 percent of the responses are females um, and that I find really incredible. It's Auntie or it's Nana or it's Mum, and it's rarely men. And so I also think it allows for great discussion about how do we become that for our young people again? How do we become consistent, balanced, strong? Good communicators, so we can keep you safe. And so that's why I love that lift. So many other reasons why it's important. The joy is probably the bit I love the most.
And then the Triangle. You taught me the triangle and it's funny actually, because whenever I bring the Triangle to a session, I always think, Oh, I hope I'm doing this justice because the futures community is a wonderful one. And Lynette Wintergast has been amazing supporter of ours on LinkedIn and, yourself, Peter and others who I've met along the way, who have just really encouraged us. I think, Oh, am doing a good job of this? But what we do. With our anchor is I go, okay. Let's look at our value for the day and the guys in the prison or the girls in the prison will pick the value that they want to look at. So seeing as though at the start of this, I spoke a lot about self love. Let's put self love through our little futures triangle. So we go, all right, in the past, let's go down to that bottom how much did you love you back there? Is there a time you want to tell us about where you felt like there was some self love? And then I, share a bit about my story about how I felt like back in those days, I had very little self love. I wanted to love everybody else. I wanted to fix everybody else. I wanted to, but I actually didn't have much self love for myself. And so we all gather around that bottom corner of the room and we just talk about self love in the most beautiful way.
And I say, oh, the cool bit is that's the past. Let's go over to this part of the room. And we go to the bottom left of the room and we go, okay, what about now? What's different between here and there? What did we learn? How much self love have you got now? And then we start to tell that story. I talk about how, I got led to love myself because others loved me. And then we have great discussion there. And then we head to the top part of the room, middle top. We say, okay, if this is the future and we look back there and, we could have our chair still sitting there from before. And we go, and that's the past, and there's the present, but we've walked into the future. What's something you can commit to today for your self love? So that you love yourself a little bit more when you return to that seat in the present, and then when you walk out of here back to your cell? And that's it. And then they write it down. They they put it in their journals or they stick it on a post it note and they make commitments. And we do that for 26 values. And we then mark that change with an Anchor bracelet. We just hope that we stay closer to our values than we were before we started doing the program with Balanced Choice. That's how we use it these days, mate.
Peter Hayward: You've had someone painted the triangle for you, didn't they?
Adam Drake: Yeah that's, it's really moving actually Pete, because what happened was, there's a guy in Tennant Creek um, his name's Steve Sutton. Jabaljarri, he's an artist and he was, I was doing some work out in the community and I had to do a talk for the Chamber of Commerce NT. He was just doing a little keynote and after I got off the stage, he grabbed me and he said, I really want do some artwork for you. I just, I wanna do a design or a painting for Balanced Choice. And I was like, ah, great. Just, go for it. Whatever, whatever you feel is right. And then I didn't see him for a while. It's probably about a week later. I was standing at the front of the Youth Center and he pulls up alongside me and he yells out, Hey Japanangka, he goes, I've got that design for you. But the other thing that was amazing about this was the man sitting in the seat next to him, there's an elder for that community who just passed away and he was really great friends with my dad and he was suffering with dementia. And I just put my hand on his shoulder and I just said, Hey, I just want to say thank you for opening your heart for our family out in this community. And he started to cry a bit and I started to cry and he passed just after that. And so that interaction happens. And then Steve pulls out this piece of paper and on the piece of paper, he's drawn the future's triangle, but with his Aboriginal art. And I'm like, mate, And there's the anchor in the middle of it, and it's just this beautiful design. And then around the outside, he's got these
circles, which are the people, he said, these are the communities that you travel to. This is where Balanced Choice travels to, and these are the messages that Balanced Choices is putting out. But on the inside, this is the triangle and you're constantly moving between those places on that triangle. And I said, do you even know about the futures triangle? He says no, talk to me about that. And I'm like, what? And so I started to explain to him about the futures triangle. And the funny thing is the footprints on it. If you actually look, walk back to the past regularly, and it actually works around going from present to past to future. And I go, Oh wow, look at that. And yeah he just blows away. And so that's now going to be on our new design. I got a shirt coming down for you for Christmas and yeah. I'll show you the painting. It's in the back of my truck at the moment, and yeah, I'm looking forward to sharing it with you.
question Three
Peter Hayward: Awesome. Thanks, Ad. Australia is an interesting place regarding uh, its relationship with Indigenous communities. I'm sure a lot of our listeners know that Australia had a referendum to recognize Indigenous Australians, and in a majority of states, in all states actually, I think Australia said No we're not going to recognise Indigenous Australians. So it's an interesting place for me to ask you, what are you paying attention to? What's happening around Adam Drake and Balanced Choice that's got your attention? Either for reasons of joy, excitement, or for aspects of fear and concern?
Adam Drake: Yeah, mate, that was a really tough one, the Referendum. It was tough for a lot of reasons. I work obviously in many communities like we were counting the other day. And at the moment we reach out to 33 different communities in the Northern Territory doing the work and uh, Oh, there's just so much hurt that I felt from people who I really respect and love and I've walked alongside for a period of time. And that was difficult. But the one thing that I've seen that's given me hope since is a bit like a story when I was working with Balanced Choice and I just started and I was doing three hours a week and I asked for four hours a week because we weren't doing the girls block and I said we should really be doing the girls block and I have an extra hour and they said there's not the extra hour at this point Adam, you actually won't get it any more than three hours a week was what was said to me at the time. And I went, I walked out that door with a determination and a grit because the rejection there was enough for me to go, I'm going to go get that.
The reason I tell that story is I see that the rejection of the referendum and the way it was delivered, the way it was packaged, we could talk about it all day. It is a moment to go and get it, to build that strength inside you, because the no means that we actually now need to really stand up, unite, and be heard, and do this properly. And so I'm seeing that in some communities. I was out at Kalkarinji a while ago, right near the Wave Hill walk off which was such a iconic place for, Whitlam and Lingiari with the sand through the hand and land rights. And there's a young man out there, Mathan and Eldris and Rob Roy. And they were saying to me, Adam we've got to stand up as men. We want to get a Men's Shed here, a place where we can get strong again. And I see that people are really starting to stand up in community now and take control of their communities again.
And I go that's important. If you go out to places like Nhulunbuy up East Arnhem land, Pete, and go out on the homelands and sit out there. There are answers out there for Australia that we've never gone to look into or lean into. With the bushfires and all the stuff that, that happened recently, the way that they deal with nature and the countryside and the burn offs and things like that, like there is so much wisdom, so many wonderful libraries in these communities. When I was living in bur heads on the Gold Coast, I was so far away from it. And yeah, I needed to go and immerse myself in it. Yeah, what I'm seeing, Pete, is there's still a determination, a resilience, a brilliance, but I also know that it is another kick in the guts. And so how do we overcome this? We've got to start uniting and it's actually the job of every Australian person to go and lean in. And learn more, because without doing that, you don't have a right to speak about it.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, we've had a conversation that's been going on for quite a while where I try to lean into you to work the systems better. Yes, it's important. The person in front of you is the most important person. No question. But the other thing that is necessary, I think, is for people to step back, not to reject, not to leave behind, but to also spend some time working the system, because the system itself needs to be lent on in a different way. And I know you've also started to work at the level of the system. On top of working with people, do you want to just talk some about those things?
Adam Drake: Yeah,
it's you've run a few amazing sessions with us, Pete. And one that stuck with me was when you taught me about Spiral Dynamics uh, and the way the colors sit with each other and the way to be, and you also played a game called the Polak game. And I remember when you did that with me I might've even said to you, I don't see the point in that game. And it's become probably one of the most useful tools, but I remember I ended up in the upper right. Which I was so optimistic about the way we were going to do this, and the way we're going to see change. And I remember doing it a while ago with a group down in Melbourne, actually it was St. Martin's Youth Theatre and I was with their staff and I found myself almost standing in the middle and I went, what happened? What happened here? And then I realized I was learning a lot more closer to the system because the system itself, it's only evolving. And so if you go into systems rather than protest against them, and there's a place for both, but you go into system and then you start to try to understand the system. And then you try to adjust the way that you think things might be a little different than that's. Where I've seen the most change for Balanced Choice.
And I'll give you a living day example of that is. We started the work in Dondale and we went through a Royal Commission. We went through some pretty harrowing stuff. Balanced Choice continues 10 years later to be in the same space. And then other detention centers like Ashley down in Tasmania, Karnataka down in South Australia and then Cherry Creek which is the new detention center down in Victoria reached out. And in Cherry Creek we're actually working with the staff and we're running sessions of old school Balanced Choice, new school Balanced Choice, the Anchor. Handing on activities and all of a sudden we're working with the youth justice officers so that they're working with the kids in a Balanced Choice way, which I always say is through the lens of PERMA and a very smart man who's interviewing me now taught me about PERMA and that when we walk into a room as Balanced Choice, you have Positive emotion, you Engage, you build Relationship, you build Meaning and you Achieve or accomplish something together and here I am now.
We've Balanced Choice and the amazing people who, the team is so much smarter than I am. Like I look at him, I did in their early twenties, a lot of them, and they are just so dynamic, doing beautiful work, working in systems. And we're seeing systems start to adjust. One of my staff, Ollie used to be a prison guard. He now goes into the same center that he was actually an officer in running Balanced Choice. And I go, Oh, that's fascinating. How cool is that? Let's do some more stuff like that with the system together and work out if we can make these places, more interesting, doing more interesting work and growing.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. And systems are only people, but people that can sometimes be, feel constrained by the rules and ways that people have worked previously.
Adam Drake: Yeah, that's, it's so true. The more I do the work and you meet with the people at the top of the systems, the executives, the ministers, you start to realize, like you said, just people, and they're just people trying to do their best. And then there's, policy that's being written to try and guide um, no one's I don't know, but I don't believe anybody's going out of their way to make this thing fall over and be an absolute basket case. I haven't met that person yet.
question four
Peter Hayward: So let's talk about how you talk about Balanced Choice. How you communicate what Balanced Choice is. Yeah. Communication is interesting, isn't it? Because often we have this big system called media communication that, yeah. Interesting to work with. Yeah.
Adam Drake: Very much yeah. And that's been a real journey Pete. From the early days when, people would say what is Balanced Choice? Oh, Theatre, fitness and Hope Theory. And people would be like what's Hope Theory? Oh yeah. Let's sit down. We'll have a talk about, Schnyder and the work that Schnyder did. And we just start to chat about it like that. And I was feeling my way through it at the time. I was making it with the young people. They were making the program that they wanted like really. But then as things grew and back a few years ago, I think it's probably four years ago, we got nominated for an Australia Day award in the NT and that in itself is fascinating with all the surroundings of, Australia Day and working obviously in a lot of communities and how that sat. And then you're getting microphones put in your face and people asking you after an incident at Dondale played out. They're asking you, Oh, can you tell us a little bit about what you think is happening in Dondale? Tell us about the staff, how are the staff working with, and it's that sort of talk.
And you're like, know, I started to try to watch the way that I spoke because I'm representing Balanced Choice, and a staff group, then I'm representing some amazing youth justice officers who are doing really important work and a system that I don't necessarily agree with locking kids up, but I want to work out what's going to work. And then I've got a media a microphone put in front of me by a person that I don't necessarily know, asking some questions about that place. I've got a contract in place and mate, it is like, how do you do this? And so I started getting good at my interviews, not being played. And I don't know if that's because I'm bad at interviews or if I was just maybe not giving what was needed to get the story. Because there's a place for media. We need it. It certainly raises things we need to discuss and talk about, I'll just go back to the Royal Commission. I remember just after the Four Corners report came out for Dondale I was sitting in a room with Naja, which is the legal service up there in the Northern Territory. And Terry Burns was leading a meeting with a bunch of people. There's about 40 of us in a room and they were going around the circle saying what are you worried about? What are you concerned about? And I remember saying, I'm really concerned about the staff. And everyone looked at me funny because I'm the guy that comes in and does the stuff with the kids. And it's I said, the staff, how they feel has a direct impact on how the kids feel. And if they're getting death threats and they're not able to wear their uniforms down the street, then we need to work out how they're okay too, because none of us are okay until all of us are okay. And that's something I learned from Father Greg Boyle over in Homeboy Industries when we got asked to go over to America and do some stuff over there and hang out with those guys and such a wise person. He also says there is no them and us, there is only us. Oh, I like that. Yes, we might all be a certain shade of color in regards to spiral dynamics, but I like it when those colors merge, and we start to see bridges between those colors, and we start to see, yeah, different versions of that, and second tiers, and things like that.
Peter Hayward: Thanks, Ad.
question five
Peter Hayward: The last question, last open question. There's two things, I want to talk about. What you hope Balanced Choice might be doing in a 10 years or so, but before then I'll ask you a specific question. I wanted to talk about, unclehood and auntie hood. Cause if I tell my story, like obviously I'm Uncle Pete, that's all I've always been Uncle Pete and the people in Balanced Choice that know me as Uncle Pete. And then when I've gone to the prisons and worked in some of the prisons, I make them call me Uncle Pete as well. and I suddenly realized that this is actually, seems a kind of important point that you talk about the wisdom, the gift that modern Australia could learn from indigenous communities and Unclehood and Auntiehood are interesting and useful futures ideas. What do you want to add to that?
Adam Drake: I really want to interview you one day and actually explore that with you.
But for me you are, you're my uncle. You're my uncle by blood. Yes. But you've also earned Unclehood to my team and you've earned Unclehood to the prisons, and anybody that hears about you. And so there's communities out in the Northern territory who know Uncle Pete. And I say you've earned that because yeah, all of us can be called dad or mom or uncle, but when do we actually earn that? So that, when you've got I know there's many times mate, there's Lilly, my daughter and Martina, they've got people in their life who they call uncle who aren't blood uncles, but it's because that person became really important to them and built a beautiful connection with them.
I consider you my uncle, but I also consider you my elder and why that's an important part to the uncle story is the respect. And I believe that respect has disappeared from a lot of places that I go to younger for older. And so how do we find a way to bring some of that stuff back? That's interesting.
Yeah. And I think we're only scraping the surface of actually what that means, but the wisdom you've imparted with me, I've then imparted down to my team, they are, they're imparting it out to the places that they reach. And I go, Oh, this is a really interesting uncle relationship. This one.
One of my futurist colleagues, Riel Miller, on his podcast, he's had a number of podcasts, but he talked about being a better ancestor. The notion that each of us think of ourselves as someone's ancestor, probably a person who's never going to know you, but how do you be the best ancestor you can be? Now, I think that notion of respect, care, love. And gifts, too, when there doesn't necessarily need to be any reciprocation. And I wonder whether uncle and auntiehood, that, again, it'd be an interesting process, futures process, to design into how do we build. Uncle and Aunty Hood into our futures.
You got me thinking Pete, but the idea of the ancestor and the uncle and the aunty, it does remind me of something I listened to a while ago and it was about in a relay race you hand on a baton and the runner grabs the baton off you and you have a change and they take the baton and they run and they hand it to the next person.
And I like to think, what are you handing on? What's the baton that you currently running with? Who did you receive it off? And of that baton, how much of it do you want to pass to that next person? And you've handed on the most beautiful baton with your study, your own journey. Watching you transition from, I call it a business type, corporate type life, to one of just a philosopher who has, you have a funny way of putting it to me, I think you say sometimes, Oh Ad, I don't believe half the things I say, it's got a gold pan, I'm just swishing around, you seem to find a good way of getting the gold out, and I go no, you actually are just sitting on a gold mine, and you've Yeah, you've handed on a beautiful gold baton and we're just doing our best to run with it while we've got it to give it to the next ones.
Peter Hayward: Thanks Ad. So what is Balanced Choice in 10 years time? Let's do a quick and dirty preferred future Balance Choice and Adam Drake. Yeah.
Adam Drake: Yeah, I don't know whether to go to the farcicle because I had this really weird idea a while ago, and it's only because of the caliber of a couple of the staff, oh no, all of the staff what am I talking about? But we got a young guy down in Victoria, Jason, and sometimes when he talks, I just see a politician and I go, imagine if the 14 Balanced Choice staff set up a party. That'd be interesting. But it's it's not, I certainly, I exclude myself of that because I don't ever want to end up in politics,
I just thought the other day that it'd be an interesting one because I love the way they think and I love the way they talk. Like today mate. We wrapped up a year. We do an online meeting every Monday and once a month we bring in you or Gavin the movement director people who pass on knowledge to the team. And I said, let's finish this this year up this week. And I really want you to think about someone in the group that's inspired you with something they've done this year. And so for an hour, I just sat back and listened to them, talk to each other in the most beautiful way. How proud they are of each other and hardly any of them mentioned me and I went, Oh, that's so bloody good because it used to be about me. But you challenged me years ago and said, I don't believe it's a program. Balanced Choice program. I don't believe it's a program. It's not a program till you're not needed. And today I had a deep sense that I'm not that needed and that's just fine. Because it allows me to go and do the really interesting work that is ahead of us as a group for a period of time. But then the team's going to do that and then I'll just be the founder who sort of sits around and hangs out and they can come and chat to me every now and again, but a future with me completely doing myself out of a job.
Or you become an uncle.
I like that mate. As I listened to them through the meetings over the years, there is just a deep sense that they're going higher than me in the Two High. And so they're reaching higher and it's now time for them. Jason actually does do it. He puts people on his shoulders, but it's not physically, they all do it. And yeah, I'm interested in the future without me at Balanced Choice. And I'll always still be an uncle to them and love them and guide them. However, I don't know when that's actually going to happen. Other things I'm really interested in is how we become a bridge between groups that mightn't hang out too often.
I did a workshop this year, which was really interesting. It was the Northern Territory Youth Round Table and the seniors, the senior Northern Territorians. And I remember in that workshop, we played a bunch of connection theater games and brought them all together. Some really interesting stuff happening and doing some futures triangle and at the end I said, you know Just share something with someone in the group that you saw today that you loved or whatever and one lady who at the start You know that really probably struggled a bit with the young people. She was an older person one of the seniors She goes I was really scared of you I was scared of you all. And then one of the girls go, Oh, I was scared of you too. So I want people who are scared of each other to start hanging out with each other because they just got to learn some stuff. I think that might that might be a future I'm interested in.
Peter Hayward: Cool. Well, Ad it's been overdue and it's been fun to have a chat. Thank you for your work at Balanced Choice. Thanks to all the Balanced Choice people in continuing to inspire and do you out of a job.
Adam Drake: Thanks for being a wonderful uncle and for walking away from the corporate world and opening that box and handing on your tools to all of us so generously, mate. I love you and I'm just super thankful to have you in my life.
Peter Hayward: Thanks, mate.
I hope you enjoyed Adam's story and you find a bit of inspiration in it to be the best Uncle or Auntie you can be for the future. FuturePod is a not for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod then please follow the Patreon link on our website. This is Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me, and see you next time.