Go Backwards
On the difference between having an experience and being changed by one.
I recently had a conversation with Kat Kibben on The Courage Effect, and a few things they shared have repeatedly resurfaced in my brain. Kat sold their house, bought a van, and spent three years running their business from the road. It sounds like a freedom story – but underneath, it’s a story about pressure.
One line I keep turning over: “It was the ultimate pressure test of every rule I ever made about working.” Most of us never seek that test out. We wait for the bad thing instead, the layoff, the diagnosis, the tree through the roof, to force the change we already knew we needed.
Kat doesn’t wait. When they wanted to get healthier at 30, they didn’t hire a trainer; Kat signed up for a Tough Mudder. The kind where you sign a death waiver. “I light the fire under me,” they said. The van was the same instinct, scaled up: a way to make seeking a way of living instead of a thing they were always waiting to do.
And here’s the thing: the leap isn’t the point – the landing is.
It got me thinking about how we absorb a new experience; or more honestly, how we don’t. We tend to treat new experiences like trophies. We have the trip, the role, the breakthrough, and then we file it away and go back to who we were. Kat’s whole argument is that the integration is the work. And it usually requires going backwards.
This is captured in a story Kat and I talked about (which is also included in their book The Bounce Back Factor). A few months into van life, a friend talked them down a narrow road in rural Idaho to record a podcast. The road got tighter, and the trees got lower. Eventually they hit a bridge too narrow to cross, and it was impossible to turn the van around. An hour of cutting down branches and thousand-point turns later, a man on an ATV pulled up, laughed, and said: “go backwards.”
So they drove a mile in reverse.
“Sometimes backwards is good enough,” they said, “but we are never told to go anywhere besides forward.”
We struggle with integrating new experiences because we’ve been conditioned to believe the only honest direction is ahead. Reverse feels like failure. Retreat feels like weakness. So we white-knuckle forward into a bridge we can’t cross.
Real integration asks for something subtler – urging us to notice the rule the experience just broke, and then to let that rule go. Kat calls this the emotional rewiring. The hard part of change isn’t observing that something doesn’t work. It’s the willingness to say I don’t like this and I’m willing to change. That’s the tipping point. Not the insight – the willingness.
I think this is where most of us stall. We collect the lesson without metabolizing it. We come back from the thing and slot it neatly beside all our old assumptions, which remain fully intact. Nothing rewires. As Kat put it: if nothing changes about you, nothing changes about your work.
So how do we do it differently?
Kat offers one approach: practice quitting. Not the job. The little quits. The half-read book on your nightstand you keep force-reading. The run you hate. “We need to practice little quits so we’re ready for big quits,” they said, “because big quits make room.” That word, room, is the one I’d underline. Integration isn’t only about what you take in. It’s about what you clear out. You can’t hold a new way of working in a life that’s still packed with the old one.
And then there was Kat’s reframe that quietly rearranged some mental furniture in my head. They’d seen a social post that asked: If you knew you were thirty failures away from your best idea, how quickly would you fail? “I’d fail the hell out of today,” Kat said. They’ve been trying to live with that energy, not because failing is fun, but because treating each attempt as a door to open – rather than a verdict to fear – is what lets an experience actually teach you something.
That’s the shift. We don’t integrate new experiences by extracting a tidy takeaway. We integrate them by letting them change the rules we live by, even when that means reversing down a road we were sure only went one way.
So here’s what I’m sitting with, and what I’ll offer you:
What’s the new experience you’ve been treating as a trophy instead of a teacher? And what old rule is it quietly asking you to quit?
I’d love to hear. Drop it in the comments.
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Stay courageous,
