Given the Circumstances: Integrating interests and talents into your life

If humans are naturally drawn to learning, why doesn't everyone enjoy school? If everyone has unique gifts and talents, why do some people feel dumb, depressed and insignificant? If you want something different, you need to do something different. Welcome to the Element Is Everything podcast where we discuss real world experiences, research and strategies around finding your element, what it is, how to do it, and how to support others in developing it. Please welcome your host with over 30 years experience in public education and independent learning. Terry Novacek. Imagine a life a society in which its people are motivated to, and capable of doing great things for themselves as well as others, people full of positive energy and confidence with a desire to give rather than take. Today, we hear from Rick and Laura Sylvester, co founders of good dogs, service canines, and parents of Elliot Sylvester. When the two met, they were putting their talents of branding, graphic design and advertising to use in the marketing communications world. As they began to build a life together, they reflected on the noise in their heads telling them success was to be found in the corporate world. But it just really wasn't who they were, it didn't feel right. And so they decided to change perspective and follow their heart. With a dose of courage and a leap of faith, they went out on their own. They shifted gears again, after Elliott's diagnosis of nonverbal autism. And they use their talents and interests to create a place for themselves in a whole new industry. One that felt more like home, a place that spoke to them. Rick and Laura, thank you both for making time to share your story. Can you begin with your breakaway from the corporate world? How did that play out? Laura and I both had different careers up until the time that we met. And when we met, there was a lot of discussion about our work lives because she was working at an ad agency. And I was working in the graphics fields and printing graph at the time. And so there's a lot of discussion about our industry. That's kind of how we met. So we decided because we're more become more independent minded people, and being the type of people who like saw all the different ways that our work lives could be better. And the environments in which we worked could be better. We thought, Well, why don't why aren't we doing this for ourselves? Why aren't we taking all these great ideas and all these things? Do we have the capacity to escape the corporate world and do these things and take advantage of all these great ideas on our own, you know, and that takes a big risk, that's a leap for a lot of people to exit the comfort and safety of the nice corporate paychecks and the health insurance and all those things to do find that passion and flow and where you say, the talent and the opportunity meet so that you can take advantage of that sometimes it takes that leap of faith to do that it did take some courage. And both of us were able to provide that I think to each other. You know, I encouraged Laura, kind of to jump first because I was still in a in the corporate environment. And we weren't quite we weren't all the way together yet. And so I encouraged her to become a freelance graphic artist. And she did so with she started her own agency with one of her ex workmates. And that got her into the independent world of being her own entrepreneur. You know, and then later on, as it started to evolve, I was able to join her because we both had the same type of creative mentality only I had a bunch of skills that would contribute to the duo, she had other skills that would contribute to the do. So I was a writer and more of a right brained creative person, Laura was more of the administrative graphic designer. You know, ce o type. And so we that's how we, that's how we started our working lives together. And the greatest thing about that was we intentionally decided that we wanted to work together like so many other couples say, I don't know how you guys do it. But we decided that we were better together all the time than we were apart. So that was also You know, a very conscious decision that we had to make, do we want to do a? And can we work together? Can we be a couple, you know, and eventually, a married couple, working together and spending so much time both at work and at home. And we decided, yes, that's the best way for us to live the most meaningful way for us to live. And so that's the path that we intentionally took to be Where does that fall in the timeline of Elliot's birth, That journey to working for ourselves and away from the corporate world happened before Elliott was born. And I think that the reason that's important is to know that, like Rick said, we had made a lot of decisions, even prior to his birth, about what the way we wanted our life to be, and that we didn't, we wanted to work for ourselves. And we wanted to create the path ourselves. I think what happened for me and for both of us is that once Elliot was born, that decision gave us a lot of flexibility, which was great. But then more significantly, when he was diagnosed, all of a sudden, the work that we were doing felt unimportant To me, it felt on significant. It felt insignificant, it felt not worthy of our time anymore. So helping clients develop their brands and their advertising and their graphic design and their marketing communication plans. just didn't have the meaning for us that it had before Elliott was diagnosed. And so I think Elliot's diagnosis was a huge catalyst for us in starting to search for ways that we could do what we felt was more meaningful work. Tell us about good dog where it began and how it's morphed into what it is now, We had decided to get a service dog for Elliot. And that was a very, it was not as easy as we thought it would be. We thought getting a service dog for him would be easy. But we applied to the place where my friend had got an autism service dog for her son, and we were denied. And then we searched for other ways. So I had to do a lot of research before we ended up on the path to getting him a service dog. At that time, I was working at Hewlett Packard as a brand manager, consulting. And I knew that that job was going to end it was a temporary consulting job. And so my focus at that time was on getting Elliott, a service dog working at HP. But also my mind was on what's next, what's going to happen next, what do I want to do next. And as I mentioned, ever since Elliott's diagnosis, there's always been an a calling for us to help the autism community I had volunteered as a mentor for many different organizations. I was a parent liaison for a doctor that worked with autistic kids. I was always looking for something to do in that area. And it just serendipitously happened that we got a dog for Elliot, the trainers who gave him gave us the dog that we fundraised and purchased the dog from, we're interested in doing more I was already in the community of autism. And so almost immediately after getting the service dog for Elliot, we started looking at if we could do it for more people, the impact it was having on our life and on Elliott's life. And mostly when we would head out into the community. It was so impactful that we started exploring if we could help and do that do it for other families. You know off the top of your head, how many families you've served. We have 55 dogs placed with families. It's our 10 year anniversary this year. We're about to do four more so at the by Autism Awareness Month in April will be up to 59 families. Wow, that's great. In addition to that, we also have dogs that work at facilities. So indirectly we're serving all of the students that go or patients or clients have all these different facilities and and schools where our dogs are not specifically assigned to a family or a child and they're assigned to a facility where the dogs serve of the pupils, if you will they go to these different services or clients that go to all these different facilities. And so I guess you could say beyond the 55, we serve a lot of other families and kids out across the US at these different facilities. And can you tell me about your funding? How does that work? We are very small organization, we both were very many hats. Rick is the director of family education and support. I am the Executive Director, the Director of Operations and the Director of Development. Right now our funds come mostly from individual donors, and ones that have been with us a very long time. And we are so grateful. So our families, fundraise help fundraise for their dog, we fundraise half for every family, they fundraise the other half. It's a very healing process when the families fundraise and we get very tenacious families that we know that are going to put the hard work in once they get the dog because they've put the hard work in to get the dog. So a lot of our donors really like that they can match the donations that a family raises and knows that that's a very dedicated family that's going to do everything it takes to make this happen for their child. So we really rely on individual donors, that makes up 99%, maybe 1%, we get in grants, but most of it is individual donors, family funds and trusts. We're incredibly grateful for every donor that we get. But what limits us and how many dogs we can place every year is how much money we can raise. So we hope now that we're 10 years old, that our funding pool will increase so we can grow in the next 10 and help even more families. And if somebody wanted to learn more about the organization as well as how to contribute, what would they do, The website is Good Dog Service Canines.org. The org is important. So Good Dog Service Canines.org. We also have a free chat that we offer for any family that wants information about service dogs, not just our organization, but any organization, any thing they want to know, because we had such a hard time understanding the industry, when we set out to get a service dog for Elliot, that we just wanted to provide free information anybody whether they get the dog from us or someone else. So we do have a free chat. That's for any parent considering a service dog for their child with a disability. Alrighty. Well, thank you both so much for your time, any anything else you want to add? When Laura was talking about fundraising, it reminded me of all the ways that we get feedback and following our passion, and, and providing the service and working for good dog and serving the Sally's is that when you get this feedback, and we have from so many unexpected places, like fundraising, when we see these families that work so hard to take care of their children with autism, and, and it's it is a very, you know, isolating can be very isolating experience as a parent, because it's very unknown. And a lot of people from the outside don't know how to approach you. And so when, when we ask families to fundraise, we thought, oh, gosh, as autism parents, now we're putting another burden on top of these poor families. Now they got to go out and fundraise for their service dogs. And what we found early on was that when they started asking for help from their families and their communities, there was this outpouring of love and giving that just, it just warmed our hearts and we just surprising to them and us And ever since we have taken a different look at fundraising and, and how that can contribute to the you know, the the positive feedback that you get as someone who wants to serve and follow their passion, look for and appreciate those types of small things in your environment that are giving you that positive feedback, because Laura and I work get like, endless, endless hours, like we put so much time into good dog. And it's always surprising to us that wow, we still love it this much. We still get this much positive feedback from the work that we're doing by helping these families and seeing the reciprocal love by all these families becoming a part of the community a larger and larger community that we serve, and it's just this big love fest and we wouldn't have it any other way. It's just amazing. And we feel blessed to be able to do this work and serve in this way. Yeah, because if you choose a job that you love, you'll never work a day in your life. I've heard that once. It's just one Of my favorites. It's also easier for us as a family to work in the autism community then try to work in the neurotypical world and be surrounded by people who have neurotypical children and neurotypical lives, families who take vacations and go places and do things that most families take for granted. For us, it is much easier to be surrounded by families like ours, who and to be able to serve them. Because there are people that they get our life, we get their life, it's so much easier to spend our days helping families like ours, than being surrounded by people who don't really get us. So there are so many personal things, satisfaction, so much personal satisfaction that we get out of working with these families like ours. And I think if you can, if you can be or say that you're grateful for the work that you get to do, I think you've pretty much found your passion and your calling in life. And that's the way we feel when we working really hard and it feels even stressful. Sometimes you're like, Yeah, but how lucky we are to get to do what we do. Boy, yes, the work you do truly is amazing. And to think you do all that while homeschooling, Elliott makes it even more spectacular. Thank you both, again, so much for sharing your story with us. You know, I realized as I was listening to Rick and Laura, their story has a lot of similarities to Earl Adi, who we heard from last week, it wasn't enough for their interests and talents to be in sync. There was still something missing in the environment, and the people. The corporate world is not a bad world. It's just that it wasn't a good fit for them. In a smaller, more personal community, they found their element doing great things for themselves and others while bringing them loads more satisfaction. In the meantime, they found their tribe so to speak. And how did they get there? Well, Laura describes it as serendipitous. Personally, I call it self determined learning. They took the initiative to reflect to set goals, to be resourceful, and to drive their own learning to get what they wanted. They took personal responsibility to create their own path. We do good when we feel good. And oftentimes that begins with meeting our own needs first. Good dogs service canines began with Rick and Laura looking to meet their own needs a service dog for their son. But it just didn't stop there. Instead, they said, hey, let's make this happen. For others. It turned out to be a win win all the way around. They're in a business doing what they love and are good at families in need get service dogs, and Elliott gets parents who can work from home support his learning and give him access to his own tribe. This June, Elliot will be graduating with a high school diploma. Doing good helps us mentally, physically and emotionally. When we're doing good for somebody else. Our body releases endorphins creating what some refer to as a helpers high at the risk of sounding a little dramatic. Doing good for others is actually good for your blood pressure and has been shown to increase life expectancy. There is a link to an article on our website for more information and ideas on how to help you feel good by doing good. Give it a try. Who knows it just might be the next step to finding your element.