About Lane
 |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|
 |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |
 |
Lane Wallace has spent the past 25 years writing, speaking, and working with individuals and groups on navigating, and learning from, all kinds of life adventure, whether that adventure is physical, professional, or personal in nature. Sometimes, adventure is something we choose, for the fun, joy, and learning of it. Other times, it’s something life throws at us, unplanned and uninvited. In every case, however, it’s uncharted territory that challenges us to find our own way through. If we learn how to do that, we gain the ability to craft better solutions, create more fulfilling and meaningful lives and careers, and build more resilience for handling the next adventure that comes along.
Lane was born with a gift for writing, an insatiably curious mind that wanted to explore and understand as much about the world as possible, and an unwillingness to settle for conventional answers if the possibility of a better solution existed. Those traits have led her to live most of her life in uncharted territory. She left Brown University after her sophomore year to live on her own in New Zealand, with only a working visa and $500 in her pocket. Six months later, a near-fatal car accident there turned her life again. She returned to Brown but with a different focus and set of priorities – if life could be taken away that easily, she was determined to pack as much meaningful work and vibrant living into whatever time she had.
At the age of 24, she learned to fly. Five years later, she made the decision to leave a lucrative corporate job in healthcare management to pursue a more uncertain, but more meaningful, career as a self-employed writer. Over the next two and a half decades, her work took her across six continents and from 120 feet below sea level to 70,000 feet above the Earth. She’s flown an Air Force U-2 spy plane and was part of the first crew to ferry a blimp successfully through the Alps. She’s gone wreck diving in the South Pacific, landed on glaciers, flown relief supplies into conflict zones in Africa and the Amazon, explored the Australian Outback, piloted a submarine, and climbed mountains in Nepal and the French Alps. She’s also flown her own airplane all around the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
In 1999, Lane became an editor and the first woman columnist ever hired at Flying magazine—an internationally acclaimed publication with over 300,000 readers, 96% of whom were men. She’s also authored six books for NASA, two books on adventure (Surviving Uncertainty and Unforgettable), published over 150 articles and essays for The Atlantic, and has written features for national and international publications including The New York Times, Outside magazine, The Dallas Morning News, and ForbesLife, as well as AOPA Pilot, Britain’s Flight International and the UAE’s The Investigator. In addition, she’s worked as a writer and producer on a number of television and video projects, including the Telly-Award-winning documentary Breaking the Chain. In 2009, she also founded No Map. No Guide. No Limits—a website offering thought-provoking content and support for anyone trying to find or create a more meaningful career path.
Working Across Differences
Throughout her time at Flying, Lane was frequently asked how she’d managed to succeed and be happy in such a male-dominated industry. So when she retired her column in 2015, Lane turned her attention to answering that question. She started by reverse-engineering her own experience, interviewing colleagues and readers to discover what the most critical elements of her success had been. She then spent three years doing research and interviewing educators, therapists, and professional women around the country to broaden her understanding of the issues and challenges beyond her own experience.
That research, in addition to her own experiences and insights, forms the basis of her writing and speaking about Working Across Differences, as well as her career coaching for women. She writes a regular magazine column called “Core Strength” for Women in Aviation, International, offering insights on how to create a meaningful and fulfilling career and successfully navigate the challenges of working in a male-dominated industry. She has also spoken to a wide range of audiences, from women’s groups and non-profits to professional groups and companies, including many in the traditionally male-dominated fields of aerospace and high-tech. And because of the unique perspective and cross-cultural understanding she developed in her own career, she’s extremely effective at bridging the gender gap between men and women in an audience, inspiring men to want to listen and offering women new ways of viewing their challenges and colleagues.
Health Care Advocacy
Not all adventures are planned, or welcomed. Caring for family members who are aging, or who experience a health care crisis, is one of the hardest adventures life can throw at us—especially because our health care system is so flawed, and getting the best care for a loved one is so difficult. But it can be done, by applying relentless determination and knowledge about the challenges we need to navigate in those uncharted waters. And Lane knows that to be true from first-hand experience.
In the five years she worked in health care management, Lane became an expert on how the health care system worked, from insurance coverage, to hospital procedures and protocols, to patients’ rights. She also saw the many ways the system was broken or let patients down, and how important it was for patients to advocate for better care in order to receive it. So for the past 30 years, she has stepped in to help friends and family navigate the world of health care crises, hospitalizations, post-hospital rehab, extended home health care and end of life care. She also became a subject-matter expert in eldercare and successfully managing long-term home care after father sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and her parents aged and declined, including the daunting challenge of working through state agencies to obtain home health care once her parents’ financial resources ran out. She tells people the real challenge is that the reality doesn’t match the paper description of what any of the services or systems say they do, or how they’re supposed to operate. So, armed with that knowledge, you have to figure out how to work with them, or simply work around them, to get better outcomes and the care your loved ones really need.
In the end, Lane managed to keep her parents at home, together, and professionally cared for 24 hours a day for the last 10 years of their lives, with a high quality of life and care. At the end of her mother’s life, after she discovered first-hand how broken the home hospice industry had become, Lane then pieced together independent, professional, affordable home hospice care for her mom that one of her mom’s caregivers characterized as the best end of life care she’d ever seen.
Lane recognizes how essential and helpful that knowledge could be for anyone having to navigate those same systems to care for elderly parents, or plan ahead for their own care. As a result, she is now working to share that information with other families. More information on specific projects will follow. For more information, contact Lane at editor@nomapnoguidenolimits.com.
Lane has been interviewed on NPR, BBC, and other TV and radio outlets. Listen to Lane's interview on Minnesota Public Radio here.