Lucid Planet Radio with Dr. Kelly: Not For Sale: Finding Center in the Land of Crazy Horse with Author Kevin Hancock

This week, Kevin Hancock shares his incredible story that brought him to find himself at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

As the national housing market collapsed, and home sales in Maine plummeted by 66%, Kevin struggled to help his company adapt, adjust and survive. The future of one of America’s oldest family businesses, and its 450 employees hung in the balance.Then, things got worse. In April of 2008, Hancock lost his voice; his sentences became weak, broken and difficult to hear. Any effort to speak left the company’s once vocal leader feeling sore, dizzy, out of breath, and not wanting to say much. Hancock would soon learn that he had acquired spasmodic dysphonia, a rare neurological voice condition for which there is no known cause or cure.

As he struggled with the inability to consistently use his normal speaking voice, Hancock worked tirelessly to help guide the company back to strong financial footing as the economy sputtered into recovery. In 2012, compelled by an astrological reading and a lifelong interest in Native American History, he traveled to the impoverished Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He was moved by the people he met, and the struggles he witnessed there. The bonds he forged at Pine Ridge prompted him to re evaluate the trajectory of his own life – including the tribe that had shaped him, and the new future he might create as an individual. There, he learned how to listen to his own voice, and was inspired to develop a new approach to corporate leadership and to life.

In Not For Sale: Finding Center in the Land of Crazy Horse, Hancock recounts his journey to Pine Ridge, and shares the lessons he learned there that permanently altered the course of both his life and leadership style. Hancock describes how he learned to listen more, look inward for purpose, strengthen the voices of others and reconstruct his entire sense of identity – completely removed from the one that had hinged on being on stage in the spotlight all the time.

Hancock’s incredible journey has been featured in the New York Times and scores of other publications in Maine and beyond, h ailed by U.S. Senator Angus King, Jr. as “part spiritual journey, part moving portrait of some extraordinary people, and part leadership manual... [a] Fascinating book will touch you and teach you on many levels."