Asking someone if they would like to go to lunch is really no big deal, right? Plus, its usually fun to get away from the office or home and converse with people that you enjoy talking too. Well, over the past six months I seem to have a ton of brilliant ideas. And let me add, I am the type of person that will actually follow through on these “bright” ideas that I get. As I result, I sometimes get myself into situations that I want to quickly back out of because I didn’t actually intend to get myself into the situation in the first place (not really, but you know what I mean).

Recently I decided that I’m going to look for people that I want to be more like or who intrigue me and ask them to go to lunch. First up? Our children’s music teacher.

Let me give you some background information before I tell you the rest. We initially signed up for music class to invite and encourage healthy and thoughtful development into our children’s lives. We’ve been attending this program for two years now. We happen to have the teacher who owns the program. Through bits and pieces of different conversations over the past two years, I’ve gathered that this woman was a teacher, a CEO, has her PHD (that she doesn’t mention anywhere), and is now clearly running a music program that she runs straight out of her heart and with passion. I’ve recently realized that because of this woman, I’m learning more in this class as a parent than my children are and they are the ones attending it.

I went a head and scheduled lunch with her. Mind you, this woman doesn’t know me well at all and I went ahead a sent a random e-mail to her asking her to lunch. I told her in the e-mail that I’ve noticed that she was passionate about what she does and I’d like to know more about how she found something that she loves to do so much.

Last Friday was our scheduled lunch date. We planned for 11:30. I showed up 10 minutes early just in case. Nervous, of course. What was I actually going to say during lunch? I kept waiting and waiting. It was 11:40. I had all these things going through my mind of why she wasn’t there. Things like she forgot, something else came up, I accidentally gave her the wrong restaurant name. You name it, I thought of it. Well, thankfully she showed up. It just took her longer than anticipated.

We sat down for lunch and I can’t even tell you how it all started, but she started all the way back from college until today telling me about her journey through life and the decisions she has made a long the way. She was telling me how she went from being a teacher to a CEO, and in the middle of that was in a terrible car accident that clearly didn’t slow her down much. Eventually she quit a really high paying job and started a children’s music program. I started questioning about how she really figured out what she wanted to do in life. As a result, she started giving me some valuable advice.

One piece of advice that she gave me was to start making a list each week of things that I get excited about. It could be anything from a conversation that I have with someone to the way that I tie my shoes. She said that over time I will start to see patterns which will show me and idea of what drives me. She said that it will lead me to some fresh perspective and ideas.

She also talked a lot about being present with myself in my daily life rather than trying to worry about an end result. This was a very good point as I often worry about what the end result should be.

The lunch lasted almost two hours. I was trying to soak in every piece of advice that she had. I couldn’t be happier about how lunch went. The lesson learned here is that its worth it to do something out of your comfort zone because it returns something much bigger in return.