Q&A with Caleb Campbell

  

 

 

 

Caleb Campbell is the author of the new book Unstriving: 12 Lessons on Authentic Success from a Recovering Overachiever. He is a former Army officer and NFL athlete, and he lives in Nashville, Tennessee. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write Unstriving?

A: I think Unstriving came from a couple of places.

For the better part of the last decade, I’ve been in a season of deep personal transformation, and at some point I could feel that season beginning to shift. There was a sense of completion to it, like something I had been living and learning for years was finally ready to be shared.

There was also something creative happening that I didn’t want to ignore. The book felt like it was asking to be written, and I had reached a point where I was ready to trust that impulse and give language to what had changed my own life.

And secondly, as a keynote speaker, I travel the country speaking to a lot of high-achieving people, and I keep hearing a similar longing. People are tired of believing they have to endlessly push and strive in order to make their lives happen. A lot of people have built successful lives and are waking up with the kind of tired that more sleep doesn’t solve.

I wrote Unstriving because I believe we’re hungry for a new way forward, and I wanted to put words to what that way might look like.

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

A: The title came to me through a pretty random series of events.

I ended up having coffee with someone who didn’t really know me or my story, and I started telling him about the last decade of my life and the book I had been trying to write. At some point, I told him how frustrated I was because I still didn’t have a title.

He looked at me and said, “I know exactly what the title is.”

When he said the word Unstriving, I got goosebumps all over my body. I knew immediately that was it. In the most unstriving way possible, the title found me.

Over time, that word has come to represent something much bigger for me. So many of us learn how to survive our lives through striving. We learn to push harder and make things happen because, for a long time, it works. It helps us build careers and create lives we’re proud of.

Eventually, though, we can outgrow the identity that got us there and we see it manifest through soul exhaustion.

Unstriving is the process of untethering ourselves from who we had to become in order to survive our lives and allowing our identity to evolve. It’s through this inner evolution that a new way of being begins to emerge allowing us to become who need to become in order to fully live our lives in a way where ambition and wholeness can coexist.

 

Q: The author Jonathan Martin said of the book, “While Caleb Campbell writes with remarkable vulnerability about his own healing journey, this book is ultimately less about his story than it is an invitation into your own.” What do you think of that description?

A: I love that description because that was always my hope for the book. I knew I needed to tell the truth about my own life, and I wanted my story to become a doorway that helped people see their own lives more clearly.

My story is obviously woven throughout the book, but the deeper invitation is for you to begin asking your own questions. Who did you have to become in order to survive your life? What ways of living helped you get here but may no longer fit who you’re becoming? What might your life feel like if you stopped trying so hard to make it happen and learned to participate more fully in the life that is already here?

So when Jonathan described the book that way, I felt like he understood exactly what I hoped Unstriving would become. My story may be the vehicle, but the reader’s life is where the book is meant to lead.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

A: My biggest hope is that people finish Unstriving with a deeper sense of permission to live their own lives.

So much of our striving comes from the stories we’ve inherited about who we need to be, what success should look like, and what we need to accomplish in order to finally feel like we’re enough. Over time, those stories can become so familiar that we stop questioning if they’re actually ours.

I hope this book helps people become curious about the life underneath all of that. I hope it gives them permission to loosen their grip on who they think they’re supposed to be and begin listening to what their own life is asking of them now.

There’s no greater gift than waking up knowing you’re living the life you’re meant to live.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Between keynote speaking and raising a 4-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son with my beautiful wife, life is pretty full right now.

But something did  happen during the book launch party of Unstriving that I’m still sitting with.

I partnered with an artist to create an immersive experience around the themes of the book. We paired his artwork with a guided audio experience by me that invited people to move through different stages of unstriving and experience the ideas in the book in a way that went beyond simply reading about them.

I was really inspired and moved as I watched people have a deeply personal experience with the work, and it made me curious about what else might be possible.

I don’t fully know what that means yet, and I’m trying not to rush to figure it out. But, there's something about creating experiences where people can actually feel and experience Unstriving for themselves that is catching my heart’s attention. I have a sense that this could become a new expression of the work, so for now, I’m giving it some space to show me what it wants to become.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I believe that Unstriving is the journey that allows us to transform at an identity level. It essentially becomes the vehicle that takes us from where we are to where we want to be by helping us to become someone new.

And if Unstriving is the vehicle, then self-compassion is the fuel.

One of the hardest and most profound lessons I’ve learned in my own life is that you cannot hate yourself into a life that you love. Being gentle with ourselves is a non-negotiable on this journey.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb