Advance to GO

When his professional career imploded during the dot-com bubble, advertising guru Will Travis found a different calling. Annabel Heseltine charts a truly transformational career shift.

Minuscule insects dance in a luminous screen, slipping through gaps in the palms towering above us. Rushing water bubbles around my calves and swirls down the steep-sided gorge in strong, eddying currents. I cannot see the rocks below, but I trust the hand supporting me. Sim, a crypto visionary from India and founder of several companies, is one of my teammates who, like me, has been selected to spend four days here in Bali on Elevation Barn’s Retreat to Advance — to find clarity in our purpose as leaders.

We are of different nationalities, three men and three women — “only six so that every person’s story counts, bringing a different perspective and elevating each other,” explains Elevation Barn’s founder and our retreat leader, Will Travis, who, in another lifetime, founded and sold two major advertising agencies and was paid millions to define brands such as Toyota, Coca-Cola, and Netflix. Seven years ago, he turned his back on a dream role as a global leader of Saatchi & Saatchi to move to Bali and use his “superpower” — motivation — to inspire people to follow their ambitions.

“I’d had enough of selling things to people they didn’t need,” says the branding genius. “No matter how remarkable you are, you can’t build a barn without your tribe. I want to create a safe place to celebrate trust. When individuals trust themselves, they gain the confidence to extend that trust into their business world and communities.” It was a lesson learned through bitter experience.

At 32, Will’s life collapsed around him. He realised how alone he was. Caught up in his ego, he gambled on his business and lost. Everything blew up with the dot-com crash: his marriage, his health, and his confidence. He had no one to turn to for advice — no one he could trust. He felt like a fraud. “I was the doubting hero,” he reflects. “I was going to Davos but not leading a country or a corporation, to Burning Man without a six-pack, and to TED Talks but not on the main stage. The colleagues around me were on my payroll, so I couldn’t talk to them. I longed for an authentic network where I could go deeper — with trust — to solve those critical challenges, but I didn’t have that.”

“And neither did anyone else,” he adds, referencing reports that more than 85 percent of people are unhappy in their jobs, that leadership is the loneliest place, and that entrepreneurs face a higher risk of suicide. “We’re in a global confidence crisis. We don’t trust our leaders, our corporations, the data — or ourselves. We undermine each other all the time. Nobody feels good enough. I was in board meetings but didn’t know the people I was working with. In business, nobody cared. If something went wrong in my life, it was just an inconvenience.”

A friend encouraged him to host a retreat at his country home for six friends — all successful but at a crossroads. He called it Sort Your S**t Out. Then, looking in the proverbial mirror, he realised he needed to do the same for himself.

His “aha!” moment came at the Explorers Club Annual Gala in New York in 2017, which he attended with oceanographer Dr Sylvia Earle. “The energy in that room was magnetic. I realised that every single person there was uniting their ‘superpower’ of science to propel a purpose higher than themselves — to protect our planet. That triggered Elevation Barn. I thought, what if I could motivate people from all walks of life to trust themselves, elevating that belief in themselves, their families, and their businesses to support what this planet needs?”

Will and his team now lead retreats on five continents. Using his own branding techniques honed over 30 years — inspired by MIT and Harvard — along with simple tools such as a pack of cards, an iconic object, chalks and crayons, and meditation, he guided us through exercises that stripped away self-delusions and smashed through our limiting beliefs.

Personally, Will has guided over 700 “Barners” and trained 12 other guides. It may not sound like many, but they come from 48 countries and 178 professions — including CEOs, billionaires, Fortune 500 CMOs, marine biologists, inventors, writers, domestic dads, athletes, even a Montana bullfighter — many of them with significant influence. It isn’t cheap, but, says Will, “we subsidise those we think will benefit but can’t afford it.” His ambition is for Elevation Barn to one day win a Nobel Prize for its collective impact in elevating the world. “There’s a need for a community to come together. We are born dependent, grow interdependent as children, but spend our lives trying to be independent — playing the hero’s game. That doesn’t work.”

While Elevation Barn retreats focus on the individual, its consultancy, The Stable, helps organisations solve complex business challenges through its global network of experts. At first, Will resisted the idea. “Elevation Barn was really helping people ignite their confidence in who they could be,” he explains. But then a friend, Tom Gruber, inventor of Siri, asked him to help Sylvia Earle’s scientist-led charity, Mission Blue, tell the story of the oceans globally. Like most NGOs, it couldn’t afford the fees of top branding experts.

“Earle was compelling,” says Will, who has since brought in experts such as conservationist Steve Boyes, UN climate-branding activist Natalia Vega-Berry, Dr Zach Bush, and peace activist Candice Mama. Together, they help Earle and other purpose-driven organisations — including Africa’s Great Blue Wall, Bali’s Biosphere Foundation, and World Enabled — realise their potential. This year, Will heads to Bhutan to teach his tools to Bhutanese monks.

I attended my first Elevation Barn retreat fresh out of a challenging marriage — exhausted and unemployed, having resigned from my job as a magazine editor with no clear idea of where I was going. I had forgotten my conservation interests and the reasons I once pursued a master’s in wildlife management.

Those memories were rekindled in Bali, along with my self-esteem, when my overlooked skills were reflected back to me by my team: a tech start-up VP, the founder of an Indonesian online payment gateway, a Taiwanese TV journalist, and a UN sustainability advisor.

As inspired as I was by the alchemy of our group, I still wasn’t convinced I could achieve the ambitious goals I’d set for myself — a podcast, a book, and a database. So last year, Will invited me back for a viva at Broughton Sanctuary, a turbo-charged ashram in the Yorkshire Dales, to confront the difficult questions: how much did I want to do the work, and how much did I care about the person behind the persona?

From the moment I arrived at that second retreat — attended by, among others, the Quaker CEO of Vivobarefoot, a pilgrim, a digital nomad, and a behavioural scientist — I saw the difference in myself. I saw how far I’d come in 18 months. All doubt was gone. I had found my silver arrow.

“It’s very hard to wake someone pretending to be asleep,” explains Will. “But when we see cracks in our lives, the light starts to shine through, and we can rekindle the fire.”

“And trust ourselves too,” I remind him.

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Annabel Heseltine is the host of the Hope Springs podcast, sponsored by The Resurgence Trust.