The Entrepreneur Sessions: Michael O'Brien
Randy: Hello, this is Randy Kaufman from Aker Advisors. Welcome to the second episode of season two of “To Grit with Grace,” stories of perseverance to jumpstart your month.
This year, we’re hosting The Entrepreneur Sessions. Anyone who has been an entrepreneur knows that the road to success is long, winding, and lonely. Through this podcast, we hope to lend helping hands to anyone who is struggling.
My entrepreneur clients have often said that they learn much from me — how to diversify single stocks, how to create a complicated portfolio, estate and tax planning strategies — but boy, I’ve learned so much more from them about how to think, how to survive, how to thrive. Entrepreneurs, I’ve long believed, embody the 4 Gs — grit, grace, growth, and gratitude — more than any other group of people.
Today’s guest, Michael O’Brien, was living the American Dream. A 22+ year veteran in multiple pharmaceutical leadership and executive roles, his world came crashing down on July 11, 2001 in a horrific bicycle accident. The journey since, Michael says, has been filled with discovery and un-learning, joy and sorrow, tailwinds and headwinds. He would be defined by how he responded to the accident. He made the choice to recalibrate his approach to the rest of his life.
Michael now runs Peloton Executive Coaching, a coaching service for corporate leaders. He prevents bad moments from turning into bad days.
Chasing Happiness
Michael: It was July 11, 2001. I was out at a company offsite meeting in New Mexico, back in the days when we used to do those things. I’ve been an avid cyclist for my whole life, and I brought my bike out. I was training for a bike race.
On that morning, I was riding on this loop off the back part of the hotel, up the main drag. The sun was coming up, it was getting warm, the coolness of the desert air was starting to drift away into the heat of the day. The world was, like, right there, waiting for me to take it.
I had a really good job. I was the marketing director for my company’s flagship product. My daughter were three-and-a-half years old and seven months old at the time, and I had a pretty charmed life. Sort of the American Dream.
I came around a bend on the fourth lap, and a Ford Explorer was heading right towards me, going about 40 miles an hour. I didn’t have enough time to react. I remember the sound I made when I hit his front grille, the thud I made when I went into his windshield and broke a hole in it, I still can hear the screech of his brakes and the thud I made when I went to the asphalt.
And that of course knocked me unconscious. I later regained consciousness, and when I did, I was surrounded by EMTs, police, emergency, fire. In that moment, trying to cut the tension, I asked the question that only another cyclist can truly appreciate: “How’s my bike?”
They looked at me, and said, “Your bike’s fine, just try to breathe.” For the record, my bike was not fine. It was not in good shape. Neither was I.
Right femur, tibia, broke apart in multiple spots. The left femur shattered, and it created bone shards, and it lacerated the femoral artery of the left leg. So what made it a life and death situation was I was losing a lot of blood. I broke my shoulder, I had lacerations and bruisings and a concussion, and I just kept on playing in my head, This is not how it’s supposed to go. This is not the script.
When they put me on the Medevac, I made a promise to whoever was listening — Mother Earth, Universe, or God — and said, If I survive, I promise I will stop chasing happiness.
Last Bad Day
Cause up until that point, I was a chasing-happiness guy. I thought my happiness was in the next external merit badge I would grab. The car, the house, the money, all that stuff. And I didn’t know how to deal with my stress, so I did a lot of pouring my stress within me.
I had a lot of visitors, a lot of phone calls, from colleagues, friends, family. I knew enough about me to put on a happy face. We got this, we’re gonna do it, but only a handful of the close ones knew how much pain I was in. But when the hospital got dark, when visiting hours were over, and all I heard was the beeping of my machines, I went back to, This shoulda never happened. This is so unfair. I became angry, bitter, vengeful.
Then, a mentor called, and I unloaded the dump truck on him. It was safe, that’s how our relationship was. He said, “How you doing?” I said, “You really wanna know? Here’s how I’m doing.” He said, “You know what, everything in your life is neutral until you label it.”
I said, “Huh?” He repeated himself. “You’ve labeled yourself the victim,” he said. “I’m gonna offer up that maybe there’s a different label, maybe there’s a different meaning to all this.”
At fist, I was not in the mood. But I noodled it, I let it marinate, and after a while, I was like, “You know what, he’s right.” Coming from a school of cycling, there’s an old adage, “You go where your eyes go.” If you wanna get around a turn, you don’t look straight ahead at the tree, you look around the turn. That’s the fastest way around. So, if you see yourself as a victim, if you see that day as a horrific day — what I didn’t realize was that he was getting inspiration from Victor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, in the space between stimulus and response there’s freedom.
I realized that if I have my wife, my daughters, and some other friends in my life, each night when I hit the pillow, how can I call the whole day a bad one? That accident was a really bad moment, but I don’t have to make it a whole bad day.
And so I thought about it, I said, “Well, I’m gonna label that day, July 11, 2001 as my last bad day.”
I Want Out
When I went back to work, I decided to go back to work on my own terms. And get really clear on the values I wanted to honor. I made an agreement: Once those values could not be honored at that place of employment, I was out.
We went through another corporate alignment. My boss, the president of the company, got pushed out for political reasons, and I got a new boss. I knew this guy. He had promoted me several years earlier to VP, but I also did one tour of duty with him, and I knew a second wasn’t good. The only sequel worth watching is The Godfather. Every other sequel sucks.
The news happened on Tuesday, new boss, my boss leaving. My job changed a bit. The next day was an offsite about how we’re gonna reimagine things. For those in corporate America, you’ve seen this movie before. I sat, and I listened, and I realized, there’s just no way I can stay. There’s no way I can honor the values I wanted to honor staying at this company and working for this guy. I just didn’t have faith in the direction of the company.
That day, I said, “I want out,” and we worked on a way for me to leave with grace.
And then it became real.
Just to give context, I was there for eighteen years. I started as a rep, worked my way up to the executive suite, had a team of 1,000, had a P&L of $4 billion, had the salary, the bonus, the long-term stock, a nice car, great healthcare — you don’t have the same type of healthcare when you go out on your own. And I was like, “Oh wow. That money that comes every two weeks, and the really cool bonus, and the car, and healthcare…”
There was something that happened in the ICU that I don’t remember, but my wife took copious notes. I told her to find David. I said, “Find David, he will show us the way.”
When I came out of the ICU, she went through the notes of the babble I was doing, and she asked me, “Who’s David?”
David was a coach we’d hired to work with my team in a partnership we’d had with Pfizer six months prior. My wife said, “You kept on mentioning his name.” Of all the people I could mumble, it was this guy, this coach. I thought, That’s a seed worth watering.
I had a vision: Helping others step into their full potential. I wanted to do that as an entrepreneur, as a coach.
The first company I established was Peloton Executive Coaching. A lot of people say, “Oh, the Peloton spin bikes, are you the same company?” And I say, “No. Not the same company. They have venture capital money, I don’t, and they have more attractive models.”
A peloton is a group of bike racers, like the Tour de France. They’re on different teams, but they have to find a way to ride together. They need each other. Even though they’re competing in this one race, they need collaboration, communication. There’s a culture that exists in a peloton. When I was in the hospital, my team, about 15 doctors, interns, fellows, they were like my medical peloton. They’re all helping me get down the road as fast as possible.
And I thought, “Ah. That’s a great name for a company.”
So I took that seed that was planted in the ICU, plus this whole concept of peloton, and used it to start my own coaching business, to help leaders lead better. Help organize their own pelotons, work cultures. The thing I love to say is, “I'm gonna help you prevent a bad moment turning into a bad day.”
My wife and I said we’d give it eighteen months. We were going to put a lot in in those first eighteen months, and if it wasn’t going to work out, I always could go back into industry, that was always an option. But I wanted to give it a good try and see what hay we’d make. And within the first six months I knew it was gonna stick.
Pause, Breathe, Reflect
The second company I just started last year. As an athlete my whole life, I knew the important of my breath. Before every shot, before every pitch, what do we do? We breathe in, we breathe out, we slow things down.
I started doing this box breathing process that I labeled, “Pause, Breathe, Reflect.” It had an acronym of PBR, so I could tell people, “I just need a PBR break,” and everyone here in the States was like, “Oh, Pabst Blue Ribbon.” I’m like, “No no, different type.” Truth be told, I had an acronym/metric at work I was judged against called Profit Before Royalty. And I hated it. So, PBR, a different acronym for Profit Before Royalty, and it was sort of cute, because people get it confused with Pabst Blue Ribbon.
So, Pause, Breathe, Reflect was like my thing that I kept private. I never really talked to people about it until I became an executive coach, and then I would just share it every so often in a blog post or with clients. Then, when the pandemic hit, people were like, “God, I need like six PBRs today, it’s really stressful.” It had become a thing.
Now, it’s an apparel company with courses. I offer meditations on Insight Timer and the Clubhouse app. It’s sort of a third chapter, if you will, of my career, helping a lot of corporate executives tap into mindfulness as a way to sharpen their focus, meet their moments with more calm, and grow their awareness so they can have success at work.
Whispers & Screams
I have an acronym, whoever’s filling your MUG. MUG stands for Mother Earth, Universe, or God. I think whoever pours your mug sometimes whispers to you, and sometimes it screams.
I think it starts with whispers. And when we’re going as fast as we’re going — any cyclist can really appreciate this — the faster we ride, the harder it is to hear. Cause the wind’s going. It’s flapping in our ears. We can’t hear the same. I was going 1,000 miles an hour as I was chasing my happiness, so I didn’t hear the whispers. Whoever was filling my mug said, “We’re gonna give you something that you can’t ignore.”
And here’s the interesting thing: The right-size vehicle was sent that day. The universe sent a Ford Explorer. It could’ve sent a Ford Expedition, the bigger version of an SUV by Ford, and if it did, I probably don’t live. And it could’ve sent a Ford Fiat, a little subcompact car, and I probably walk away with maybe a mildly broken leg, and I might not get the message. The way I choose to look at this is it sent the vehicle that made an impact but didn’t debilitate me so much that I couldn’t respond to it and grow from it.
Change can happen. I don’t think you need a radical event. But I do think you need to be able to hear the whispers.
Breath
I think we can take our breath for granted. If you think about what’s happened under COVID, it attacks our respiratory system. The planet’s on fire, scorched earth sears our lungs. We go back to 2020, with George Floyd, he lost his breath, he lost his life. If you’re underemployed or unemployed, when you’d go to the ATM, you’d hold your breath, wondering if you had enough money to pay the rent.
There’s a lot of pain in the world. There’s a lot of healing we need to do. Our breath is one way to heal.
Randy: Thank you, Michael, for sharing your story. This summer, he will be embarking on a cross-country bicycle ride with his wife and two dogs. It’s called the Rise2Ripple challenge. You can follow and support Michael at michaelobrienshift.com/2022-bike-tour. Or, just Google “Michael O’Brien bicycle ride.” You’ll find him there. Text “RIPPLE” to 503-487-5957 to receive daily updates and inspirational text messages.
If you like what you hear and see, follow Michael on YouTube, Instagram, Clubhouse, and Facebook. I, for one, look forward to following your ride this summer. My hand will be on your back the whole way, and my thoughts will be with you.
Thank you to Dustin Lowman, my marketing manager, for producing and editing. Thank you to Aker Advisors and Heron Wealth for their financial support. And to all of you, our listeners: If you like what you hear on “To Grit, with Grace,” I encourage you to share with others. As Michael says, “We go further together.”
We’ll be back next month with another tale of entrepreneurial struggle and perseverance. Until then, with grit, with grace, with growth, and with so much gratitude.