Courage and Leadership Lessons from Mount Everest
with Mountaineer Alison Levine
In the Season 4 premiere of How We Future, Lisa Kay Solomon talks with Alison Levine, polar explorer, mountaineer, leadership educator, and author of On the Edge, to explore what courage really looks like when the stakes are extreme.
From leading the first American women’s Everest expedition to skiing to both the North and South Poles as part of the Adventure Grand Slam, Alison operates at the edge of risk, resilience, and reinvention. This conversation is about how to lead, decide, and keep going in a world full of uncertainty.
Together, Lisa and Alison unpack what it means to:
Reframe fear as a tool for awareness
Redefine success when plans fall apart in high-stakes environments
Recognize that progress doesn’t always look like forward motion
Go “big and go home” instead of sacrificing everything for achievement
Alison shares powerful stories from Everest, including being just 300 feet from the summit when a sudden storm forced her team to turn back after two months on the mountain. What could have been framed as failure becomes, in her telling, one of the most formative leadership experiences of her life.
The episode also highlights Alison’s work beyond climbing, including her role as executive producer of Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest, a documentary honoring the first Nepali woman to summit Everest, and her ongoing commitment to expanding who gets seen in adventure and leadership spaces.
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Alison Levine: So many people I know have gone big in the mountains and have not gone home. This applies to everything in life. You're an entrepreneur, you have a startup, or you're in a new job or something, and you want to give it everything. You cannot give it everything. You have to save the best of you for the people that you love, for the people that you care about, and people who care about you. What good is it to achieve something really big if you're not able to come back and celebrate it with the people in your life who are important to you?
Lisa Kay Solomon: I'm Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
We've all experienced moments where the plan stops working, the environment shifts, and the right move isn't obvious. That's why I'm starting Season 4 of How We Future with Alison Levine. Team captain of the First American Women's Everest Expedition and leadership faculty at West Point, Alison is a record-breaking mountaineer and leadership expert who accomplished the Adventure Grand Slam, climbing the highest peaks on all seven continents and skiing the North and South Pole.
It's just incredible. In this episode, she shares what those experiences taught her about decision-making, risk, and leadership when total certainty just isn't available. We cover what you can learn from fear, how listening, humility, and situational awareness can save teams, and why knowing when to turn back can be one of the strongest leadership moves you can make. Our conversation will show you how the skills we practice in everyday life are often the same as the ones that matter most when things get hard. I'm so excited for Season 4 and for this conversation with Alison Levine.
Let's get started.
Alison, this season, we're focusing on big themes, and the big theme that comes to mind when I think about you and your work is courage. You are just not only courageous in what you've done, in all of your accomplishments as a history-making polar explorer, but courage in how you share your point of view in the world. You are one of the most authentic people that I know, and courage in how you lift up others. I'm just thrilled to talk to you about all of that today.
Alison Levine: Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here with you, and courage is one of my favorite topics. Perfect.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I'd love to even start with how you made the shift from growing up in Arizona and, as I know, reading a lot about adventure travel, but then actually engaging in adventure travel. Tell us a little bit about that shift for you.
Alison Levine: It was such an interesting shift because growing up in Phoenix, when I was a kid, I was just absolutely obsessed with the stories of the early Arctic and Antarctic explorers and the early mountaineers. I would read the books and watch the documentary films. I just loved these stories about really cold places because it felt like an escape from the extremely oppressive summer heat in Phoenix. I never thought I would go to those kinds of places because I had some health challenges. I was born with a hole in my heart that got bigger as I got older.
I always thought, "I'm just going to have to just read about these adventures or watch films about them." I had my first heart surgery when I turned 17. That one was not successful, but I had a second surgery, a successful one, when I turned 30. Then this crazy light bulb went on in my head. I was like, "Wait a minute, if I want to know what it's like to be these mountaineers going to these remote mountain ranges, then maybe I should try going to the mountains instead of just watching films about them or reading books about them, and if these other guys can do this stuff, why can't I do it too?"
We're talking about courage here for a second, but I did feel a lot of fear about doing these things. I felt like I had this new lease on life after my second heart surgery, and I didn't want to waste any more time. I just had to really embrace this mindset that you can be scared and brave at the same time. When I feel fear, I just have to accept it and let myself feel it. It doesn't help me at all when somebody looks at me and says, "Oh, don't be scared." I'm like, "Oh, okay, I'm all good now, thanks." I just had to realize it's okay, and fear is just a normal human emotion, and it's okay to feel it.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Not only that, fear is an important signal for us. I know when you talk about some of the most extreme moments in climbing Everest, how important fear is as a source of information to help you then act. I think so often our instinct is to run away from fear or to not really think about metabolizing it in a helpful way, but to have it as a paralyzing emotion because we're unpracticed at leaning into it. Yet, your real-life examples have just totally shifted, at least the way I'm thinking about it.
Alison Levine: I do think that if most people had to put the emotion of fear into a box, like let's say you have two boxes of emotions and one is positive emotions, and one is for negative emotions, I think most people would think that fear goes in the negative emotion box, but I really think it belongs in the positive emotion box because you just have to learn how to process it and how to think about it. For me, I use fear as a tool to keep me safe. Fear keeps me awake, alert, on my toes, aware of everything going on around me. Fear, for me, is a motivator, and I realize that fear can actually propel me forward because complacency is what puts you in danger when you're on these high-altitude mountaineering expeditions or on these polar expeditions.
Complacency is what is dangerous. Fear is just a feeling. A feeling isn't dangerous, but being complacent is. I've just learned to use fear to motivate me to keep going. It means I'm paying attention because when you're in an environment where there's avalanche danger, danger of extreme altitude sickness, crevasse danger, there's a lot of risk on Mount Everest. You should feel fear because I feel like that keeps you aware of your surroundings, which is very, very important, and paying attention to your surroundings.
Lisa Kay Solomon: My husband is a very accomplished tennis player. He used to say that he was nervous when he wasn't nervous before matches, maybe getting into that complacency zone-
Alison Levine: That makes sense.
Lisa Kay Solomon: -that he would channel his nerves into focus and awareness, and made him really acutely attuned to how to play his best. You speak so vividly about some of those just daunting moments on the mountain when you're in this crevasse, and things are shifting, and there is no single plan that's going to get you over it. It really is about taking in all of the information and making moves based on that.
Alison Levine: Exactly, because it's great to have a plan. You always want to go in with a plan, keeps you organized, keeps you on track, keeps people motivated, but when you're in these environments that are shifting and changing very rapidly, where there's just a lot of uncertainty, then you need to be able to stray from your plan because your plan's probably outdated as soon as it's finished. When you're in those types of very dynamic environments, you always want to focus on taking action based on what's going on at the time, rather than always being hell-bent on sticking to your plan no matter what.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I love how you've taken all the lessons of being an extreme and experienced adventurer in these high uncertainty and volatile conditions, and really channeled them to being an extraordinary leadership advisor and educator. I know you've been on faculty at West Point for a long time. You've been a senior fellow and on the board of Coach K's Leadership Institute, not to mention your bestselling book.
I just love how passionate you are about taking your experience and encouraging others to step into places of courage and getting more comfortable with the uncertainty around them. I know both you and I talk about the VUCA world around Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. I just think the world's not getting less VUCA. We got to change. We got to change.
Alison Levine: It's definitely not. We are really experiencing times of unprecedented volatility across business, technology, the geopolitical landscape, society in general. This is not going to change anytime soon. I like to remind people that if you wait around for perfect visibility, if you wait around for perfect clarity in your environment, you may be waiting around forever. The important thing is to have clarity in your intent. If you have clarity in your intent, you do not need perfect clarity in your environment because the days of having perfect clarity are gone. They're not coming back.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Over and over again, Alison, what I get in your stories is that clarity of values and clarity of intent versus over-indexing on the trophy or the seemingly trophy of, let's take, for example, getting to the top of Everest. I know you famously talk about your first expedition on Everest, being the captain of the first American all-female team, and the pressure to summit. Yet, that's not what the conditions teed up for you, and really reframing what success means in that moment.
Alison Levine: That experience of being the team captain for the First American Women's Everest Expedition was a climb where I learned more about leadership and achieving big things in times of uncertainty. I learned more about those things on that trip than I learned on any other trip that I'd been on. We were a very high-profile expedition because we were the
First American Women's Everest Expedition. The Ford Motor Company was sponsoring us. We had a ton of media coverage. We had media coverage from all over the world, not just national, but we had international media coverage.
Then we ended up missing the summit by less than a football field, by less than 300 feet. Imagine you're on this mountain for two months. That's how long an Everest expedition takes, two months. You're on there for two months. You've got all the media. We're doing media from the mountain, satellite radio interviews the whole time. Then it's finally summit day, and a freak storm came in that was not predicted, not in the weather reports. Go figure. The weather report got it wrong. A freak storm came in super early in the morning, and we had to abandon our summit attempt less than 300 feet from the top.
It was so gut-wrenching to have such a high-profile failure. We did this big media tour before the expedition, and then I had to do one after the expedition and explain what happened and explain why we didn't get to the top, and so many people looked at it as a failure, but you have to really know what your goal is. A lot of people think the goal is obvious when a team's working on something. Everybody knows what the goal is. Not necessarily. The goal of an Everest expedition, number one goal is to come back alive. Number two, come back with all your fingers and toes.
Number three, come back as friends with the people that you're with. A famous climber named Ed Viesturs has a great quote where he says, "Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory." Because if you make the right decisions up there, you can go back to the mountain another time. Granted, it's not easy. It's all the training and the fundraising and finding the sponsorship and all the stuff. It's big, but if you do the right thing, you'll have another shot at the top. If you make a bad decision up there, you may not have another opportunity to go back.
The interesting thing to note is that the majority of deaths that occur on Everest actually occur after people have reached the summit, when they're on their way down, because they forget that the summit is only the halfway point. You have to get yourself to the summit, 29,035 feet above sea level, and then get yourself back down for it to be a success. A lot of people use everything they've got in them to get themselves to the top, and they do not have enough energy reserves left to get themselves back down.
Lisa Kay Solomon: So many powerful lessons, not the least of which is perspective. It's having that longer view that the top is not the goal. Getting back down is the goal, and that the top, if you're lucky enough to get there, is halfway. That is so huge. It's a total shift.
Alison Levine: It really is. It took me eight years to get up the guts to go back to the mountain again and give it another try. When I reached the summit, on my second attempt, it really felt anticlimactic to me because I thought, "Standing up here 300 feet away from where I stood eight years earlier doesn't really feel like a big difference." It's a much bigger accomplishment because I was 300 feet further the second time around. I was like, "Okay, I guess this is it." It was really thinking about the lessons I learned along the way that was important to me about that climb. Learning about your pain threshold, learning about your risk tolerance, all of these things play into courage.
I am so glad I went back. The reason I'm glad I went back is because of all the things I learned along the way, and also just realizing how much I learned from that first attempt and how valuable that attempt was, even though we didn't reach the summit.
Lisa Kay Solomon: It's incredible. I often think life is short and life is long. Both are true. For you to be able to take that first experience and be able to make you stronger, wiser, more ready for the elements, that's extraordinary. When I hear you say that others on that first one talked about it as a failure, I just think, "Look at all the things you did." First of all, not a failure, of course, because it's about coming back, but organizing the team, raising the money, elevating awareness about what you were doing, getting those fab down jackets. Are you kidding me? A win-win-win in so many ways.
Alison Levine: There were so few women in the sport back then. We really wanted to just set an example for other women and pave the way for other women and show them that women do belong in this sport. Now there's way more women on the mountain than what you would have seen back in 2002. Sometimes when we do hard things and really push ourselves outside of our comfort zones, we don't always get the outcome that we desire at the time, but you have to think about how you are laying groundwork, how you're laying the stepping stones for other people to achieve big things, even if you didn't have the exact outcome that you wanted at the time.
Every time you try something really hard, even if you fail, you don't have the outcome you wanted, you are laying the groundwork for somebody else to achieve something really big. That's really, I think, how we should look at our failures.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I've heard you say a number of times, "We have to be able to see it to believe it," and the fact that you were a pioneer in helping others see something that they didn't see before, and we're going to talk about the incredible movie that you helped produce in a minute. My very humble reflection of learning to adapt when you had a goal that had to shift was a couple of years ago, for my 50th birthday, I decided to run the New York Marathon. I had run a marathon before, but it was 20 years before, so I was basically a newbie. I trained for six months.
I didn't want to get injured. I put myself in a fancy hotel. I was going to be all celebratory about it. This was 2022, and three weeks before the marathon, I got COVID for the first time. Perhaps you heard my scream in Colorado. I just could not believe the audacity of getting COVID. Of course, I spent the entire time in my isolation looking at how quickly I could get back to running and the whole bit. I took that slow bit. I was then testing negative, and then I rebounded. Literally five days before the marathon, I'm testing positive for COVID.
Luckily, my husband, ever the grit athlete, was like, "Don't give up. Don't give up," whatever. Long story short, the day I tested negative, I got on the plane. It was a Wednesday before the Sunday race. I was like, "I'll just pick up my number." Anyway, I ran the race. I was like, "You know what? I'm just going to run it whatever way I can run it," and because my perspective completely shifted, I was like, "I'm just going to run this for fun." I high-fived as many security people as I could. I danced with as many bands that they had on there.
I FaceTimed my girls going up First Avenue. While I was running, they're like, "You're running." I'm like, "I'm running." Anyway, the whole thing shifted. Now granted, this was not a life-or-death moment, but I think I really resonated with the "You have a plan, and then you have to adapt." You have to figure out how to deal with the information, what's available to you at that moment, and make the best of it.
Alison Levine: That is amazing. First of all, I also have to say that I think running a marathon is harder than climbing Everest. Here's why I think that, so you're climbing Everest, and you've trained for months. Maybe some people train for years. You've spent months and months trying to find a sponsor. You bring in the sponsorship money, blah, blah. You get a permit, all this stuff. When you're on the mountain, you feel a lot of pressure. You don't want to quit because it's so hard to get there. At least for me, it was so hard to get there in the first place.
When you're running a marathon, I feel like the urge to quit would be so loud, because you can do another one anytime. You could just be like, "You know what? I'm not feeling it. I'm going to go back to my car."
Lisa Kay Solomon: Oh my gosh. I think that those words have never been said, that "a marathon is harder than Everest." That is, by the way, classy of you to be so generous and expansive in your framing. One of the other things that I think along this line of reframing and understanding what progress really is, I've heard you talk a lot about the importance of backtracking, and this idea, when you're climbing Everest, it's not a straight shot. You don't get to base camp, and you're like, "Let's go." There's a whole methodology to help acclimatize your body that is really quite grueling, but in many ways is a phenomenal lesson in being patient and really honoring just what it will take for your body to get there.
Alison Levine: I think that this is probably the thing that surprises most people when they hear about how you climb Everest, because so many people say, "Wait, I had no idea that's what you had to do." You hike to base camp, it's a 10-day trek into base camp, and then you would think you just slowly move your way up the mountain to Camp 1, Camp 2, Camp 3, Camp 4. You just slowly go up until you are ready to go for the summit. That's actually not how it works. You hike to base camp again, 10 days, then you climb up to Camp 1, the first camp above base camp, and you spend the night there.
Then the next day, you actually come back down to base camp again. Then you spend more time at base camp.
Then you climb to Camp 1 again, the camp you just came down from. Then you climb up to Camp 2, a higher camp, about 21,500 feet above sea level. Then, after you spend the night up at Camp 2, you come all the way back down to base camp again. Then you do this rotation again, where you go to Camp 1, Camp 2, you climb up to Camp 3, 24,000 feet above sea level, and back to base camp again.
The reason you have to keep coming back down to base camp is it's part of this process called acclimatization, because you have to let your body get used to the altitude very slowly. Otherwise, you're going to suffer from extreme altitude sickness. You could get cerebral edema, which is where your brain swells, or pulmonary edema, where fluid builds up in your lungs. Either of these things can be fatal. You have to move up the mountain slowly to let your body get used to the altitude. As you're moving higher on the mountain to get used to the altitude, your muscles are starting to get weaker, and your muscles are deteriorating.
You keep coming back down so you can build strength. You're going up to get used to the altitude. You're coming down so you can build strength, and when you're down lower on the mountain, you have more of an appetite. You sleep better. You're just helping your body stay healthier. It's hard because to get to the summit, you need to go up the mountain, obviously, but you're spending a lot of time climbing in this downward direction, back to base camp, in between these rotations, where you're going to the higher camps. It's very physically exhausting to be going up and down and up and down.
It's also psychologically incredibly challenging because you feel like you're climbing in the wrong direction half the time. What I like to remind people of is that progress doesn't always look like progress. Progress doesn't always feel like progress, but it's still progress. When you are climbing down the mountain, back to base camp, you are helping your body acclimatize, so you are setting yourself up for success on that next rotation up the mountain. Progress does not always happen in the direction that you think it's going to happen. Sometimes you have to change direction and go backward in order to eventually get to where you want to be.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Talk about courage. This is one of my favorite lines of all time. I've heard you say, "Backing up is not the same thing as backing down."
Alison Levine: That's one of my favorite lines. "Backing up is not the same as backing down." Backing down feels like retreating or giving up. That's not it. You're just backing up so you can be stronger.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I also imagine that when you come down to base camp, you're learning. You're revisiting. "Okay, what happened? What can we learn?" Again, speaks to the leadership aspect of it. If you don't have a leader that is really helping you keep the perspective of why you went up and went down and how that's going to make you stronger on the next one, then I imagine all those demons come after you, like, "Why are we going down?"
Alison Levine: Right. "How did that rotation feel? Did you run out of snacks? Did you run out of water? What do you need to pay more attention to next time?" The other thing is that the first rotations that I would do up the mountain, I would get super psyched out because I would see people blowing past me on the trail, people who were faster. I'd see these big mountain guides who are 6'3", 6'4", super long legs, big lungs, and they were just always so much faster than I was. That would affect me psychologically because I was like, "Why am I so slow? Why can't I keep up with these guys?"
A few reasons. First of all, their legs are twice as long as mine. They're a foot taller than me. They're twice my weight, so they can carry a 30-pound pack. I have to exert myself a lot more to carry 30 pounds than somebody twice my weight. I had to realize like, "I'm just going to go at my own speed and I'm not going to worry what other people are doing." Then, just also realizing that you don't have to be the fastest, strongest climber out there on the trails every day. You just have to be the person who will put one foot in front of the other when it's really uncomfortable.
You have to be the person who will put one foot in front of the other when the conditions around you are far from perfect. It's not necessarily the fastest, strongest people that get to the top. You also have to remember that as you get closer to the summit, you're going to feel more and more uncomfortable. As you gain elevation, you feel the altitude a lot more. It becomes more difficult to breathe. You lose your appetite. You feel weaker. You might have an altitude headache. You might feel like vomiting. The closer you get to the top, the worse you feel, and you have to convince yourself that discomfort is not a reason to quit. Discomfort is not a reason to turn around.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Gosh, that is such a big lesson, and especially one that our younger people need to hear. I just feel like, for now, building on many years, we have the wrong instincts around our young people to protect them, to get them out of something that's difficult, versus encouraging them to do difficult things because it builds their character, it builds their tolerance. Listen, as a parent, I'm like, "Oh, why did I interfere all the time?" I think that is such an important part about, first of all, knowing it's going to be uncomfortable and then doing it anyway.
Alison Levine: You have to just be in that mindset of exactly what you said. It's incredibly uncomfortable, but I'm going to do it anyway, because oftentimes, the first instinct is to retreat at signs of discomfort because you think, "I'm uncomfortable. This means something's wrong. This means I'm not supposed to be here. This means I'm not supposed to be doing this. This means I'm not prepared or I'm not equipped because I'm feeling uncomfortable. The universe is trying to tell me something." The universe is trying to tell you, "You can keep going."
The universe wants you to push through that discomfort because once you've done it one time, really pushed through something very uncomfortable, you have that muscle memory for that discomfort, and the next time you're in an uncomfortable situation, you stop yourself. You say, "Wait a minute, hang on, because I felt like this before, and I kept going then, so I could keep going now."
Lisa Kay Solomon: It's incredible. As we said earlier, sometimes having the humility to say, "Even though I could go, sometimes the elements are bigger." What's interesting, I should say, even though I've never attempted to climb Mount Everest, sometimes when I'm coaching people when they're in a terrible culture, or they're part of a challenge that's just bigger than them, I'll reflect on the incredible-- My first exposure to Everest was, of course, the Jon Krakauer book. I was like, "You know what? Sometimes Everest is Everest." Sometimes, no matter how good you are, no matter how talented you are as a climber, and those poor, just expert beloved climbers died in the storm, Everest is just Everest.
Alison Levine: You nailed it. Sometimes, no matter how good you are and no matter how experienced you are, things can still go wrong. You're in these environments where there is a lot of inherent risk, where you cannot control the elements. Unfortunately, people die on that mountain every year. It really makes me think about that mantra, "Go big or go home." We hear that so often. "Go big or go home." I'm really on this one-woman mission to change that mantra from "Go big or go home" to "Go big and go home" because so many people I know have gone big in the mountains and have not gone home.
This applies to everything in life. You're an entrepreneur, you have a startup, or you're in a new job or something, and you want to give it everything. You cannot give it everything. You have to save the best of you for the people that you love, for the people that you care about, and people who care about you. What good is it to achieve something really big if you're not able to come back and celebrate it with the people in your life who are important to you? Whenever I hear that "Go big or go home," I think, "Go big and go home." Do the hard things. Chase the big dreams. Push yourself outside of your comfort zone. At the end of the day, there is nothing more important than coming back to your loved ones.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Oh my gosh, Alison. Amen. It also speaks to another component that you talk about a lot, particularly around leadership, which is the importance of team, that you are doing it, but you are doing it with others. As part of my fun research to prepare for our conversation, I reached out to a mutual friend of ours, Coach Eric Reveno. Rev, as we know.
Alison Levine: I love Coach Rev.
Lisa Kay Solomon: We both love Coach Rev. I said, "Rev, I'm talking to Alison. What question should I ask?" He had such a great one because he's really into helping his team learn to be a better teammate. He's all about, "We've got to teach what it means to be a better teammate." He wanted to know, can you tell if someone will be a good teammate before climbing? What about climbing crystallizes the understanding of the quality of a teammate that someone is?
Alison Levine: This is such an interesting question. I will tell you, since Coach Rev's a basketball guy, I'm going to bring in some more basketball stuff. I think the best advice I ever learned about choosing a team came from Coach K, Mike Krzyzewski. If there's any
listeners that don't know who he is, he's the former head men's basketball coach at Duke University, the winningest coach in the history of Division I men's college basketball. For Duke haters listening to this, you guys stick with me because Coach K was also the head men's basketball coach of the US national team, our US men's Olympic team.
They brought home several gold medals. He gave me some great advice about picking a team. At first, I was like, "What are you talking about? This doesn't make sense." When I was on the board of the Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics, we had this breakfast with him when the US team had just come back from winning a gold medal. He was talking about what he looks for when he's recruiting a team. I thought, "How do you figure that out? You've got this big talent pool to pull from. How do you know who you want to put on the court?" He said what he looks for is ego.
I thought, "Right, because you don't want that. You've got to get rid of those guys first." He said, "No, you want ego." I was like, "What are you talking about? This doesn't make any sense to me at all." He went on to explain it, and it made sense. He said when he's recruiting a team, there's two kinds of ego that he looks for. The first is what he calls "performance ego." He said, "I want people who are good and who know that they're good." He said, "I can't have LeBron James come out onto the court and be a wuss. I need him to be LeBron James with all the confidence that goes with him."
I thought, "Okay, I do want someone like that sense of performance ego. I want somebody who's good and who knows that they're good." That made sense to me. I thought, "I don't want to be climbing Everest with a bunch of people who are like, 'I don't really know. This mountain seems super high. I don't think I can do this. I'm not sure.'" You want people going like, "Yes, I can do this. I'm here. We're going to do this as a team. We're all going to help each other." The second kind of ego Coach K looks for is what he calls "team ego." He said, "I need people on my team who are going to be proud to be a part of something that collectively feels more important than the individuals alone."
That name on the front of the uniform, "Team USA," is going to be more important than the individual name on the back of the uniform. That made sense to me, too, because I always want to be climbing with people who are going to put the best interests of the team ahead of their own best interests. You want to be up there with people who have the skills to be successful, but who are also going to be really good team players, because it doesn't do you any good to be high up on Mount Everest or any mountain, for that matter, with someone who's an incredibly skilled climber if that person doesn't care about the team.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I love that so much. First of all, I really hope that there are a lot of young friends that are listening, younger folks, because I don't feel like they're told enough that it's okay to say, "I'm good at something" or "I strive to be good at something." There's a little bit of this, "No, that's boasting, that's bragging, I have to be hidden behind." I'm like, "No." That doesn't mean you're [crosstalk]
Alison Levine: It's okay to say, "I'm good at this." You want to take the shot at the buzzer?
Lisa Kay Solomon: Do it.
Alison Levine: You're like, "Give me the ball."
Lisa Kay Solomon: Particularly young women. "Yes, I'm good. I can do this." I love that you're sharing that and lessons from him because, of course, he has such a winning record and really has the evidence behind him.
Alison Levine: Somebody asked me the other day about who's a good person to follow on social media, and I was like, "Coach Rev." I gave the link to his LinkedIn profile because I think he is one of the best people on the platform when it comes to leadership and teamwork. His posts are so insightful.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Oh, it's so good. It's so good. We are doing something that I learned from another guest that we had on How We Future, Rabbi Shira Stutman. She says, "When you celebrate other people's success or greatness, it's called shepping nachas." Here we are, shepping nachas of Rev, which is great. It's how I think about you, of sharing greatness of your team around you. I want to use that as a pivot to talk about the documentary that you helped produce because I think it is so spectacular, Alison, that you took your platform and your passion for bringing women into climbing. You used that to start really a conversation by honoring someone that was mostly overlooked but foundational to the sport. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about it.
Alison Levine: Yes. I'd love to talk about that. I was the executive producer of a documentary called Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest. It was about the first female Sherpa and the first Nepali woman to summit Mount Everest. She grew up in Nepal, and back then, women were supposed to cook, clean, and take care of the family. They weren't climbing Everest. She saw all the men in her village climbing Mount Everest. She thought, "I want to climb this mountain too." Social norms were not accepting of that. She actually had to fight for the right to climb this mountain that was in her backyard.
Her rationale was, the Ministry of Tourism lets all these foreign women come climb this mountain that's in her backyard, yet she's not allowed to climb it. She was finally granted access to the mountain, tried three times unsuccessfully, finally summited on her fourth attempt in 1993, but she died on the way down, so she never got to tell her story. She left three young children behind. I just thought, "This is a woman that paved the way for other women in Nepal to climb this mountain, and her story needs to be told." The director, Nancy Svendsen, approached me about getting involved in the film, and I was happy to do that.
If you want another inspiring documentary about a female Sherpa climbing Everest, there's another documentary called Mountain Queen that's on Netflix right now, about a woman named Lhakpa Sherpa, who just summited Everest for the 11th time. She holds the record for the most summits of any woman. She was inspired by Pasang Lhamu Sherpa. She was just a child when Pasang died. She remembers Pasang's funeral, and she said she feels like Pasang's soul jumped into her. She was the first Nepali woman to summit and survive the descent.
Lisa Kay Solomon: That is incredible. Again, these are the stories we need to know. I'm so grateful to you for jumping on that project and putting your energy behind it to make sure that we know, because it's critical, and that inspires the next generation. I know you haven't just inspired climbers, you've also inspired craft brewery makers. I can't end this without talking about the beer. Can we just talk about the beer?
Alison Levine: This is so funny. I delivered a keynote for the Craft Brewers Association in DC several years ago. This team of women came up to me afterward. They're from Charlotte, North Carolina, from a brewery called Bold Missy Brewery, and they said, "We loved your story so much, we want to name a beer after you. What's your favorite kind of beer?" Of course, I responded, "Chocolate stout," because chocolate anything in life is my favorite. They made a beer called Conquer the Route Chocolate Stout, and my likeness is actually on the label of this beer.
They also have a beer for Diana Nyad, who swam from Cuba to Florida, Annie Oakley. They named all their beers after women. It was amazing, but unfortunately, they did not survive COVID. We're hoping that they'll come back at some point, but they used to sell the beer at Carolina Panthers games. It was cool. It was a woman-owned brewery. All their beers were named after women. It was fun.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Oh my gosh, that is so fun. Maybe folks listening to this will get inspired and will call up Carol and revive.
Alison Levine: Carol Waggener was the founder. She has such an entrepreneurial spirit and really was the heart and soul behind the brewery.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Oh, I just love that too, because again, Alison, you make magic happen, these seemingly disconnected things. I would just love to ask you about one more story that I found so inspiring, which is how you funded your first expedition, and just the creative connections that you made in order to make that happen. Can you just share that? Again, I think it's another kind of courage. I think it's another kind of courage to be like, "This idea may be wacky, but I'm just going to go for it."
Alison Levine: Yes. Courage also means facing rejection and being okay with rejection. That's part of the journey as well. For the First American Women's Everest Expedition, we needed to fund it. This is 2002, and there were going to be five of us. We needed to raise the money. The cost all in was about $20,000 per person. I was $70,000 in debt, thanks to all my student loans. No one else I knew as a climber had any money. We had to go find a sponsor. We ended up with Ford. I would send pitch letters and emails, and I wasn't hearing back from anybody.
I was pitching Patagonia, ESPN, Nike, and you name it, The North Face. I sent letters and emails to everybody. A lot of times, people didn't respond at all. That was getting very frustrating because I thought, "Are they not responding because they don't want to sponsor us? Are they not responding because my email went to their spam box, or maybe they didn't get the letter, or I don't know?" I needed to figure out a way to get people to respond. I took my hiking boot, and I put it in a box. You know what's so funny? I actually covered the box. In 2001, Duke won the championship.
I took a cover of Sports Illustrated, and I cut out all these pictures of Duke basketball stuff, and I put it around the box. The box was all Duke stuff, basketball stuff, when I was sending it to sporting goods companies. They'd get this box, and they would open it, and there would be a dirty hiking boot in it. I just wrote a letter, and I said, "My name is Alison Levine. I'm trying to put together the First American Women's Everest Expedition. We need sponsorship. I would love to talk to you about this and share more about what we have in mind. Whether or not you choose to get involved with our expedition, I need my hiking boot back because I need to train for this climb."
I included a prepaid FedEx label so it wouldn't cost them any money to send it back to them. It made them take action because they didn't want to feel like, "Wait, if this woman can't train, if I don't send this back." Obviously, I had another pair of hiking boots, but I wanted them to feel some sense of urgency and wanted them to feel like they had to respond. Then I'd get the box back. I was like, "Oh, someone sent it back." I'd be so excited. You open the box and rejection after rejection after rejection. Eventually, let me tell you something, Ford, who sponsored us, also initially rejected us.
This is just a lesson in when somebody says, "No," you do not have to walk away at that time when it happens, because sometimes, if you come back and ask a couple of questions, that "no" turns into a "yes." I got a "no" from Ford, and they said, "We're going to pass on this. It just doesn't feel like a fit for us." I ended up leaving a voicemail for the guy that said no to us. I left him a voicemail back, and I was like, "Curt, I just have to tell you, I got your message. I understand what you're saying, but I have to tell you, I believe you are making a massive, massive mistake, and here's why."
I was like, "This is the First American Women's Everest Expedition, and Ford has an opportunity to get behind this, your whole 'No Boundaries' mindset," because their theme for their SUVs, all their SUVs, was "No Boundaries." I made this plea, and I left this message. Then the next morning, I got a message back, and it was like, "Hey, Alison, Curt Jakeson here. I don't know whether you just caught me at a weak moment or if it's because my daughter's name is Alison, but we are going to revisit this." They ended up sponsoring us. It's just a lesson that when someone says, "No," it's not necessarily a rejection.
Sometimes it means, "I don't have enough information." Sometimes it means, "Not right now." When you get rejected, you have nothing to lose by going back and asking a few questions.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Oh my gosh, what a great story. I hope people take inspiration from that that there's lots of different ways to continue, as you say in your talk, "To take the next step." I know you've dedicated your life to helping leaders and even ordinary people do extraordinary things. Alison, you are extraordinary. Thank you so much for your time today. I have learned even more about you. I'm just such a fan.
Alison Levine: Mutual admiration society, because I'm a fan as well. Thank you for having me on your podcast.
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Lisa Kay Solomon: This conversation was such a good way to kick off Season 4. I think now more than ever, we need to remember that resilience isn't about pushing through at all costs. It's about paying attention, noticing early warning signs, and making decisions that serve the long game, not just the summit moment. Alison's note about "Go big and go home" really stuck with me. The next time you feel the urge to opt out of something just because it feels awkward, hard, or uncertain, pause long enough to ask, "Is this discomfort or is this really danger?" Then ask, "What would staying one more step look like?" Don't force yourself to push through everything. Just interrupt the reflex to quit at the first tough moment.
If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to follow, leave a rating, or share a comment wherever you're listening. It really helps others find the podcast, and it helps us keep shaping conversations that matter. If you want to go deeper between episodes, be sure to check out the How We Future Substack, where we share reflections, tools, and ideas to help you keep building your future readiness. I'm Lisa Kay Solomon. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next week.
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Links from the episode:
On the Edge by Alison Levine
Lessons from the Ledge – Alison’s TedTalk
Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest – documentary site (film Alison executive produced)
