Rick Ouellette

Rick is a son, brother, husband, father, and one who is always striving to improve. He embraces Maya Angelou’s guidance of "when you know better, do better" and as such Rick is a focused lifelong learner. He has certifications and leadership experience in the fields of Finance, IT, Audit, Cybersecurity and Risk Management. In his leisure time, he enjoys fitness training and practicing mindfulness and tai chi.

For as long as he can recall, he remembers occasionally experiencing a significant lack of satisfaction with life. Of course, it wasn’t noticeable when he was at a party, immersed in a movie, working out or riding a dirt bike for example. However, the problem was and is that we can’t distract ourselves with parties and dirt bikes forever.

What he wasn’t prepared for, and didn’t see coming, was that this feeling came to visit more often and stayed longer and his trying to escape it was making him quite unhappy and threatening his closest relationships.

Being a lifelong learner, he considered his worsening situation as an important project that he had to tackle. He was determined to find and implement a better way to live and pass on this knowledge to his children and their children as a means of adding lasting value. He dove deep into research, read and listened to everything he could find and was lucky enough to attend conferences with presenters such as Clayton M. Christensen, Eckhart Tolle, Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra, and Arianna Huffington. He took notes, looked for trends, found common threads and started implementing changes. Excited, and wanting to test and share his gathered insights, he provided learning events to coworkers and received very positive reviews with the most significant being - “I think you may have saved me.”

Since making changes, he has been sustainably happier than he has ever been in his entire life and his key relationships – especially with his wife Marlene - are stronger than ever. At work, since taking this path, he has been called ‘chill’ and ‘the voice of reason.’ He sees fewer problems and more opportunities, and doesn’t see work as work anymore, but instead a situation that provides an opportunity to add value. Interestingly, even retirement doesn’t seem that important to him anymore.

Although a wise man told once him that he already received the value from researching and documenting the book, he is determined to share the insights as he believes the insights can help many others.