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Jordan Bower
jordan@jordanbower.com
linkedin.com/in/jordan-bower-storyteller/
instagram.com/jobo.momentum
Hi, I'm Jordan Bower:
a facilitator, consultant, coach, artist, and storyteller.
For going on 20 years now, I have been doing weird, creative work in the world. (Like the one time I walked across America by myself—now, that was a story!)
Like the rest of us, I am constantly trying to navigate the complexity of being human. Finding the balance between feeding myself, feeding my soul, and trying to be a good person to others. (As you probably know, it’s harder than you’d think.)
I hope that what I make can touch you in some way. If it inspires you, all the better.
If my earnestness strikes you as foolish, well, join the club.
I live in Vancouver, Canada, with my wife, Maux. (A fabulously talented and compassionate end-of-life doula.)
You can contact me at jordan@jordanbower.com.
The Small Print (Being updated right now…)
I’ve got the instinct to insert a professional bio here. (Even as a storyteller, I can’t help but feel the urge.) So let me share a few high-level details before diving into the more personal stuff. I’m one of those people who becomes deeply interested in other people, so my intention here is to write for someone like me who, by good fortune, has stumbled onto my site. I’ll get there in a sec.
Here’s the official bio:
A renowned expert in Transformational Storytelling, Jordan Bower has advised leaders at more than 100 organizations, including large enterprises like Volvo and Canadian Tire; tech companies like Autodesk and Mozilla; and many SMBs and startups around the world. Jordan is based in Vancouver, BC.
OK, let’s get into the details:
Education
First, education. I grew up in Canada and graduated with an HBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business, which was an impressive-sounding thing back in that time. (To date myself, I was in my second week of classes when we were suddenly interrupted by the news that a “small airplane” had crashed into the World Trade Center.) I’ve appended a variety of non-traditional educational experiences onto that degree, but, formally, that’s it: no Masters’, no Ph.D, no official credentials to call myself a professional storyteller. Everything I’ve done, I’ve just kind of made up myself.
Early Work
My first job out of college was for a luxury travel company called Butterfield & Robinson. Back then, in the early Internet, Before Times, the world was still a mysterious nebula only accessible through these archaic devices called “books”; a huge impediment to planning adventurous vacations. B&R was one of the originators of luxury adventure travel, combining high-end, five star hotels and Michelin-starred eats with the humble act of traveling by bicycle. (Picture a bunch of loud Americans wrapped in spandex stomping through the lobby of a French chateau. That was a vibe.)
I was hired to plan logistics, meaning I often sent envelopes packed full of Vietnamese dong (not a joke) to tour guides and travel experiences way out in the field. Quickly, I graduated to a more “business-y” role, focusing my attention on projects and systems. I became that guy who would float around the office and chit-chat with people on different teams, unearthing how a bunch of symptomatic problems were all stitched together. I didn’t yet have the terminology “system thinker”, but it certainly applied. It was something I came to very naturally.
To this day, I remain exceptionally fascinated by the relationships between things. I’ve never been very good at sticking to just a single lane. That quality has been the bane of my existence—and, interestingly enough, the birth of my creativity.
Quarter-Life Crisis
Looking back, I can see clearly that I was destined for another path. But at 25, I fought against the realization hard. Many of my friends from business school were successfully establishing themselves in their careers. In the mid-2000s boom times, their whole lives seemed to be laid out in front of them. Naively, I believed that a lifetime of success and stability would be constricting.
I can remember a solid year when it felt like the whole world was ending. People recommended conventional moves: find another job, find another girlfriend. But, again, with adolescent naivety, I decided that the smart move would be to blow everything up.
My Promised Land was travel. I had been taking solo trips abroad since I was 17; in the summers between college, I had traveled widely: Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos; my work at B&R had taken me all over Europe; I had spent semesters studying in Switzerland and Hong Kong. I felt competent, out there in the world. Moreover, my fluency in moving between cultures, at “surviving” on the road, felt like one of my few remarkable qualities. (My background certainly helped me here; forgive me, it was a much different time.) I quit my job, and I bought a plane ticket to India, where I spent the next seven months basically wandering. I wouldn’t have termed myself a “seeker”—that term was way too New Age. “Running away” was probably closer, but not quite on the nose.
For seven months, I drifted. The experience was liberating. In retrospect, it was essential.
India
From the moment I landed in India, I felt as if I had fallen in love. The culture brought out parts of me that I felt ashamed to express at home: a certain confidence, curiosity and level of social engagement. I spent my days basically chatting to people. I hopped trains, I rode scooters, I interacted with strangers. I got swept up in the billion-person tide, and most of the time, I loved it.
Back then, there was a well-established backpacker route that carried long-term travelers back and forth between Goa and the Himalayas. In the mid-2000s, India felt much closer to the 1960s than to the digital age; that would all change within half a decade. But at the time, you could get a cheap hotel room for a couple bucks; you could live on $500 a month, easily.
I would spend a couple days or a couple weeks hanging out with the other drifters—there were other mid-career wanderers like me, and there were the dreadlocked hippies who were always the source for the best Himalayan hashish. Then, I would leave these Western bubbles and head off into the hinterland that wasn’t covered in my Lonely Planet guidebook. These trips felt daring; a day or two “out there”, and I would race back to “safety”.
Gradually, I built confidence in my new identity as an explorer.
To bide the time (when I wasn’t stoned), I carried a cutting-edge digital SLR camera. It had been a huge expense, and I had debated carrying it with me. (Back then, most people had little digital point-and-shoots. There were no such thing as phone cameras; there was no such thing as smartphones.) My camera became my lens onto the world, and a major impetus to my exploration. Now, when I received concerned emails from friends and family back home, wondering how long I was going to keep running, I would look to my photographs and see, hidden in there, a message from my future. What was I going to become? Naturally, an artist! I hardly understood what that meant. But now, when I look back on those images, I can still see the glimmer of the something that had first made me inspired.
Separation
Seven months away felt like the most I could justify. When I came home, people commented on my “once-in-a-lifetime experience”. The language burned. Was that it? I was 27, was the best part of my life behind me? Quickly, I fell into dehabilitating depression; the last thing I wanted was to get to a job, to get back into the rat race, and “make something” of my life.
I thought about becoming a photographer, but it was a bad time in that industry: all around the world, photojournalists were being axed. It was the dawn of the user-generated content revolution, it was also the cusp of the Financial Crisis. Instagram was not yet a thing. I didn’t have the foresight about how I could turn my content “into” something. In fact, the whole idea of being an influencer would have sickened me. I didn’t want to profit, really, on my experiences; instead, I styled myself as something like an educator. It was my responsibility, I thought, to help other discover the beauty and the shared humanity of the world.
Back at home, I tried to champion that message—but it, and I, was tone-deaf. My depression deepened.
I went to therapy, I tried different drugs. I tried dating and sleeping with strangers. There seemed just one solution that would make me happy again; I began searching for a justification to go back to India. I knew that I could afford it, but I couldn’t figure out how to explain to family and friends why I was going for a second once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Then, a miraculous-seeming google search led me to a development organization in India that was using ultimate frisbee, my favorite game, as an empowerment and peace-making tool in slums in the western city of Ahmedabad. I fired off an impassioned email, and within days, I had my excuse. I was en route to India a second time.
Liberation
From the very start, I could see that this second trip would be much different than my first time drifting across the subcontinent. Landing in Ahmedabad, I took a rickshaw to the office of the development organization, where I discovered a half-dozen cheerful and idealistic people working beneath banners bearing inspiring messages about how to change the world. This organization, led by a brother-sister pair of Americans of Indian descent, seemed the literal embodiment of Obama’s recent rise to the White House. The world was changing for the better, it seemed, and people like this were at the forefront.
After a few minutes of shaking hands and cheerful introductions, I asked for directions to the toilet. I popped out, a beat later, to inquire where I could find some toilet paper; I was instructed that there was a bucket of water on the ground; make sure that I used some soap. It was a stunning shift of perspective, and a good introduction to the immersive experience awaiting me.
This organization, called Indicorps, had the mandate of bringing young people of Indian descent back to their motherland to contribute to India’s development. I met a couple dozen Americans, Brits, Canadians and South Africans who had come back to India for a year at a time—living in rural villages, working hand-in-hand with grassroots organizations on thorny issues like farmer’s rights and women’s health and empowerment, and, like, me learning how to wipe their own ass with their hands.
Indicorps billed itself as a non-partisan, non-religious, non-profit organization, but the truth was that it was Gandhian; Gandhi’s famed Sabermati Ashram was a couple kilometers down the road, and I spent a lot of time thinking about what it would mean to make my life my message, like the Mahatma had—what it would mean to live with purpose, with intensity, service and soul. I had never used language like that before, I was a business student and terminology like soul seemed laughable. But in Ahmedabad, at Indicorps, I found a vibrant and engaged community, and I felt lit up. More importantly, I felt accepted and supported, even though I was the lone white guy in the room. I taught ultimate, as intended; I found a sense of self-confidence I never could have expected. The hot summer I spent in Ahmedabad, I started to learn how to be a leader.
Then, the monsoon came, and I was wandering again. I traveled north to the Himalayas, and once again, followed my lens. I began to dream up a future for myself: creative, impactful, and hopefully also well paying. My cousin was getting married, back home in Canada, and I knew I needed to go; I had already decided that I would return to India that fall. Maybe a could work a short term job back home, stay in my mom’s basement and make a couple thousand dollars that would sustain me in India for a few months, or maybe a lifetime. When I got home, no one knew what to do with me. Suddenly, I was spouting off Gandhian rhetoric; suddenly, I was a vegetarian, and I needed to tell everyone about it. I suppose I was insufferable; I also believed in myself, perhaps for the first time.
I began to believe, profoundly, that I was approaching my destiny.
A Fateful Intervention
Then, late that fall of 2008, I was back in India again, when… I can’t help but tell the story.
Back home, I had secured a contract with a Canadian travel agency that gave me another “excuse” to go back to India. Basically, the job was to visit a handful of luxury hotels in India, and write pithy reviews that the agency could include as a value-add to their clients. The contract wasn’t exactly highly paid. (I think I was making a hundred bucks a day.) But they covered my expenses and my flight, and it gave me an opportunity to see India from a much different angle.
A few months earlier, I had been living in a slum and wiping with my left hand; suddenly, I was glad-handing hotel managers in the lobbies of former maharaja’s palaces. (Right hand.) The depression had dissipated, and I felt like good times were on the horizon.
Then, one night, I was walking by a streetside cigarette shop when I saw BREAKING NEWS on a black-and-white television. Immediately, I recognized the image on the screen: it was the Taj Mahal Palace, a regal hotel in downtown Bombay—one of the famed Asian showpieces of the British Empire. Smoke was billowing from the roof. As it turned out, ten Islamist terrorists had traveled from Pakistan by boat, under the cover of night, and laid siege to India’s most cosmopolitan city. Scores of people were killed in attacks on a train station, a hospital, a popular tourist bar… The pinnacle of the 60-hour siege was at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, where the surviving terrorists were holding hostages in the ballroom, until they were rescued in a dramatic intervention by the Indian National Security Guard that was televised to the world.
Globally, the newsmedia was referring to the attack as India’s 9/11. Personally, on a much smaller scale, the attacks hit close to home… because I had been scheduled to visit the Taj Mahal Palace just 48 hours later.
I altered my plans and flew to the very south of India, many hundreds of miles from still smouldering Mumbai. The country was in turmoil; for me, it seemed, there had been little impact besides the tiniest brush with terror. But, looking back, this moment was a significant inflection point—a fateful intervention—because it turned out to be the catalyst for all that came next…
A Transformational Love Affair
What happened next is, basically, I fell in love. Wild, crazy head-over-heels love with a young woman from England, who loved adventure and India as much as I did. We met, in the South of India, just a few days after the terrorist attack. (At a restaurant called, of all things, the Cafe Rendez Vous!)
For the rest of our relationship, I never lost track of how one thing led to the other: the terrorist attack -> meeting her -> feeling like I found “the one”. Like momentum.
We ended up spending the next five months galavanting around India. I won’t bore you with the scale of our adventures, except to say that they were tremendous; they were a series of remarkable experiences, each one more “once-in-a-lifetime” than the next. By the end of our journey, I was convinced that I had stumbled onto something: a career path, a profession, a love affair, a calling, all at once.
Had it been just a few years later, I would have happily called myself an influencer. I might have accrued tens of thousands of followers on Instagram; I might have figured out a way to get paid for traveling, forever. Had it been just a few years later, I might still be living in a van—which, needless to say, I’m not. But that business model was coming, I could smell it on the horizon, and I was doing what I could to perpetuate our peripatetic journey. Basically, I wanted to feel that intense, desperate love forever.
Leaving India, we ended up moving to Vancouver, Canada. The Olympics were coming; we rented a room in a shared house crammed full of ten other drifters. The plan was to make a little cash, hang out for the winter, hit the road again the following year. Then, out of the blue, we had a bizarre idea: we were going to walk together from Canada to Mexico.
Actually, I should say that it was my ex-girlfriend’s idea. I bought into whole hog. Then, when the relationship disintegrated, I held onto it. In a silly, desperate and, perhaps, inspired attempt to convince her to come back, I posted a project on Kickstarter called Walking to Mexico.
The plan: to walk the West Coast of America, taking photographs and making art. The purpose: to inspire a Gandhian ideal of human connection, to show others that deep down, we are all alike.
I know. Forgive me for being naive.
Remarkably, the fundraising campaign worked. At least, the money side of it worked. My ex decided she was out, and with money in hand, I decided I had no other option but to set off on the damned thing myself.
So, in summary, terrorist attack -> meeting her -> finding the one -> losing the one -> walking to Mexico. Funny, ain’t it: momentum.
I started walking on September 1st, 2010, alone.
(Here’s the video from my Kickstarter project:)
Walking to Mexico
So I went and I did it. I trudged my way down the American West Coast, through forests, along beaches, and, for many miles, on the shoulder of Highways 101 and 1—almost always facing into to traffic, because it felt safer to see what was coming than to hear the roaring engine noise rising from behind my back. I walked southwest across Washington State, and down the whole coast of Oregon. In California, I walked through redwood trees to get to the Golden Gate, then wound down through lovely Big Sur before finally crossing into the deserts of Southern California—Los Angeles—Orange County.
I touched the Mexican border fence on July 13, 2011. The whole thing took me 316 days. It felt like lifetimes.
There is so much to say about a journey like this. Every week felt like its own transformation; I felt as if I died and came back to life dozens of times. Then, resurrected, I inevitably convinced myself that the change was finally done; I had finally achieved my finished form. I was desperately hungry to achieve some kind of transcendence.
Emotionally, I moved through so many different stages along the journey. In the early days, I was completely consumed with the heartbreak and regret associated with my breakup. When the heartbreak waned, I began to see myself on a noble, Heroic Journey from boyhood to < finally > becoming a man.
It turned out that journey was fraught for all kinds of reasons I hadn’t anticipated. I wrestled with toxic masculinity, with relationships and sex, and with how I would establish myself differently in the world, even as I still craved the same patriarchal forms of success, recognition and power.
Shit got deep. And beyond the content of what I thought about, in retrospect, I think that the solitude was my greatest teacher. Though I had traveled alone before, I had never had such a visceral encounter with nature; I had never spent so much time alone in a tent; I had never had felt so desperate for the company and support of others. It was my great fortune that I met many hundreds of people who supported me, offering me conversations, a warm place to sleep, and an understanding, open heart.
In the years since, I have looked back and memorialized the journey in so many different ways. At the time, it meant so much that it was almost inconceivable that it could ever be over; once it was over, I struggled—and continue to struggle—to put it all away.
Starting from just a few weeks after I touched the border fence, I set out to write a book about the trip. Fifteen years later, and the damned thing is still incomplete. I have the hunch it will remain that way. A pity. Sometimes, when I’m on a plane, I wish that the person beside me would lean over and ask if I have any stories; there’s so much about this trip that I’m dying to tell. But it never worked (yet). The world doesn’t seem to want to hear about it (yet).
If you do, hopefully we end up next to one another on the same flight.
Momentum
All through the walk, I very rarely considered the reality of actually completing it. When I did actually get to the border fence, I was elated… for about five seconds, before that final day turned into a bizarre kind of disaster. (I’ll tell that story another time.)
Afterwards, though, I was left with a profound sense of accomplishment that was unlike anything I’d ever felt in my life. It would linger for years.
As I said, I set out to write a book about my trip—and, for whatever reason, I decided from the beginning that the book would be a best seller. It was 2012; Eat, Pray, Love was still at the top of the charts. Cheryl Strayed’s book, Wild, would soon follow. It seemed like there was a huge consumer appetite for soul-searching (navel-gazing) books about intense spiritual accomplishments, an I began to write in that direction. I wanted to write a tell-all—but instead of telling all about others, I wanted to share everything there was to share about myself. No detail was going to be left unturned: sex, drugs, screw-ups, you name it. I wanted the book to be a redemptive experience that would culminate in a sense of forgiveness, as much for the reader as for myself.
This seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. I was convinced that I was going to be a trillionaire on the back of my capital-s Story.
Of course, what I missed was that there were about a billion other people who were all trying to profit on their Story on the Internet. Many of those people, as it turned out, had Stories that were more dramatic or better written than mine; many of those people were also better looking, more primed to attract social media followers, and/or not setting out to write a book about the very divisive topic of toxic masculinity.
Privately, many friends cheered on the heroism of my ambition. Publicly, I couldn’t find a single literary agent who gave a shit. I tried and I failed, I wrote and I wrote, and every time I’d finish another draft, I’d realize that something was missing… so I’d start the whole thing all over again.
I did that, more or less, for more than a decade. By now, I’ve written the whole trip start to finish at least 35 times; yes, that’s right: I have 35 drafts of a book saved somewhere on my computer, each one written freshly from scratch, and none of them, in my opinion, any good.
Even if they were good, #metoo chilled the market for memoirs about white men on journeys of self-empowerment. The pandemic and Black Lives Matter put a sword through the heart. Compassionately, I could understand completely why it was time to center other Stories that had been historically marginalized. Personally, I could never—and have never—figured out what to do with mine. So I wrote and I rewrote and I wrote and I rewrote, I pounded my heart and soul into a keyboard… thousands and thousands of hours of a new kind of solitude. I found transcendent realizations, I came to terms with my past. Eventually—and relatively recently—I decided that it was finally time to step away from it.
Sometimes, I wonder how many other Stories there are like mine: important, transcendent personal stories that can’t get any attention on Instagram between all the girls in bikinis. It was a humbling realization; it still is. Strangely, the journey of writing about my walk was even more transformational than the walk itself. I no longer think I’m going to be a trillionaire from writing a memoir. I don’t really know what is going to happen with it. So there’s that.
Transformational Storytelling
The very good—and very practical—thing that came out of all that writing was that I taught myself how to be a storyteller. Honestly, this was a journey I had begun years before; when I first started traveling, I used to write “travel blogs”—long missives that I would send home from some cyber cafe on the edge of the world.
With practice and some excellent mentorship, particularly from a storytelling coach called Tom Schlesinger, I learned how to formalize my ideas; I learned storytelling principles; I learned how to follow rules and how to break them. I became, in Tom’s terms, a “mediocre” storyteller—which, as it turned out, made me a lot better than I was before.
Hungry for cash, I saw an opportunity in the explosion of social media during 2013 and 2014. I started offering “business storytelling” seminars to small business owners in Victoria, British Columbia—the town where I had ended up after my walk. I ran a couple workshops, and then I was invited to give a keynote speech at a small conference. Soon, I was being discovered on Google, and by 2016 and 2017, I was traveling widely, facilitating workshops all over North America and, increasingly, abroad, and refining “business storytelling” into something tangible.
It shocked me that my career had come full circle. I never thought that I would work in business again; if I was honest, I didn’t want to. I dreamed of hitting the road again; online, I had begun following inspiring digital storytellers who had found ways to build an audience on the backs of their art. Shilling my wares for corporate clients, I felt like a bit of a hack. I often felt limited by their expectations, by things like “learning objectives”; by the idea that storytelling was something a CEO could learn in a few hours, when for the rest of us it actually takes something closer to a lifetime.
Between these corporate gigs, in the evening, I’d be pounding away on my memoir. I often felt like I was raising twins—a corporate training business, on one hand; an artistic career on the other. My heart was in the art, there was no doubt. But there was a lot of money in corporate training, and I struggled to figure out just which one of the two I was: a business person? An artist? It felt laughable or even impossible to be both. And though my heart pined for the road, the “trouble” was that I had fallen in love again, with someone so special that, pretty soon, we would be married. All that time spent looking back at the “freedoms” and dalliances of my youth felt increasingly self-serving. Where was I? There? Or here?
For many years, this was the primary challenge in my marriage. Did I want the future? Did I want the past? Was I wise enough to tell the difference?
The clock was ticking towards the end of the decade… 2020 awaited.
