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Bonnie Wan: Purposefully Bold- Intentional Steps for a Full Life · The Bold Lounge

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bold Lounge Podcast.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: My name is Lee Burgess and I will be your host.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: If you're anything like me, you love hearing inspiring stories of people who have gone on bold journeys and made a positive impact in the world.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: This podcast is all about those kinds of stories.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Every week, we'll hear from someone who has taken a leap or embarked on an extraordinary journey.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: In addition to hearing their stories, we'll also learn about their bold growth mindset that they use to make things happen.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: Whether they face challenges or douse along the way, they persisted and ultimately achieved their goals.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: These impactful stories will leave you feeling motivated and inspired to pursue your own bold journey.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: I believe everyone has a bold story waiting to be freed.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Tune in and get ready to be inspired.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bold Lounge.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Today I have Bonnie Wan.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: She is the author and speaker, as well as a partner and head of brand strategy at the world-renowned advertising agency Goodby Silverstein and Partners.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: As creator of the Life Brief, bonnie helps people live with greater clarity, creativity and courage by teaching them how to write creative briefs for their lives.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: The Life Brief has evolved from an agency talk into a workbook, workshops and speaking appearances places such as Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop, jane Goodall's Activating Hope Summit, the 3% conference South by Southwest, and has worked with companies such as Accenture, apple, google, changeorg and more.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bold Lounge.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me, Lee.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: I'm so excited.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: We had an incredible pre-talk and I'm excited to jump into different areas of the Life Brief and how it can be applied, especially to those listeners who are on their bold journey, beginning their bold journey or thinking about the next one and just getting that gut check of, like, what is next for me.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: And so excited to jump in, too, to your definition of being bold, because it is definitely part of your Life Brief for sure.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: So what does bold mean to you, bonnie?
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: Bold means taking a leap into a new space, or a first, from the center of your being and your truth.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: So starting with the clarity of who you are and the essence of what you believe, and putting yourself out into a whole new experience that activates your sense of desire.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: I love that.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: I love that verb activates, so it's putting yourself into a new space or new situation, new environment.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: That activates the what's next, the how to the what if?
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: In my mind that's what I saw as you were talking about that.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: Yes, I love how we're building on each other already.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: So when is the first time you remember leaping into that unknown space, that activated action for you?
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: Eighth grade.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: Okay, I immigrated from Taipei, taiwan, to California when I was six years old and I was the shy, bucktooth brown girl in a sea of blonde, brunette, white girls and I didn't know English, so I was for a long time relegated to the sidelines.
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: I was kind of the outsider looking in and really shy, introverted.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: And I grew up in the 70s so casual racism was just part of the fabric of the day.
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: No one questioned it, it was just kids being kids, you know.
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: And I remember in eighth grade I was looking at high school coming up the next year and my longing for belonging was so, so thirsty, so deep that I just made a decision that I was not going to experience high school as the girl on the sidelines or the shy one in the corner, that I was going to do something radically different.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: And my bold move was I spent a lot of time after school across the street at the public library and there was this carousel and I discovered all kinds of books I shouldn't have been reading.
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: I discovered Charles Manson oh, some scary ones.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: But I found a book of jokes, foul, inappropriate, raunchy, all kinds of things I might.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: My eighth grade brain shouldn't have been wrapping around your mom never would have approved.
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: I memorized so many jokes from that book and one day I decided to start telling the jokes on the playground and I found more and more kids coming around me and I saw them laughing and giggling and having a great time and I noticed who is this in my body?
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: What's happened?
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: It was the moment I realized I had agency to be a different person, try on a different persona, and that I could be in the center, not on the outside.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: So you were kind of the person then that was entertaining others, that was bringing the laughs, that was making people smile, and did it continue through high school.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: Did that moment kind of actually create more community for you, or connection or feeling of acceptance and belonging?
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: I don't know that I ever felt acceptance and belonging, but it certainly created a new persona within me, a new way of showing up in the world, and that became what I now call a practiced extrovert.
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: Okay, and by the end of high school my resume if I had one was so long.
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: I was varsity athlete, student body president, homecoming princess, class president.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: You know, I just I had put myself into the arena.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: Now did I feel like me?
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: Not necessarily.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: I think what I was doing, and I only can recognize it now, is a assimilated.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: I shed the parts of me that I felt weren't acceptable and took on parts and became parts of me that put me into the center.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: But I now, in reflection, can see all the costs and I felt by assimilation.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I bet there's a lot of people, including myself, who can relate in some form of fashion to that statement of dropping the things that aren't accepted by others and becoming something that is and there's a continuum of degree of that as well that we could take, and even you and I, in a pre discussion, talked a little about that.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: Mine was more so in the corporate world where I felt 70, 30 me and the 30% that wasn't accepted I had dropped.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: And then in my later 40s I'm like where did I go?
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I woke up in one of these days and I was just like this is not me, you know, and I know that there's some situations in your life where you got this is not acceptable, this is not me, this is not how I want to keep going forward in life.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: So we kind of had that moment.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: What made you activate?
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: Because sometimes that's the hardest thing for people to do.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: You did this in eighth grade and you've done it again with the life brief and multiple life brief that you've done throughout your life.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: But it's that activation time where you said I'm going to, I'm going to change something and this is how I'm going to do it right.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: And you did it in eighth grade, with becoming, you know, someone who could tell good jokes and bring laughs and assimilation, which you know has its cost.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: But what made you activate it?
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: So that's enough.
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: Well, I think there's always a call or a grip or something that it has an urgency to it, so really something, some driver, that's potent, emotional, but then it matches or meets up with a certain clarity of idea.
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: That's so at the heart of the life, brief, and it was exactly what happened.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: In eighth grade.
• 8:33
  Speaker 2: I had the idea and the declaration within myself that I was not going to spend high school on the sidelines.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: The great belonging was the belonging right, yeah.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: And when two things came together, it was a propeller, a momentum builder.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so between that eighth grade moment and the first life brief that you wrote for yourself, what were the moments of clarity for you, or that cross section of clarity activation?
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: Clarity activation I always view it as an upward trend.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: You know, up and down, up and down, up and down, like the kind of how life is right, you know it's not all ups, it's not all downs, it's what we do.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: Do you have memorable moments of kind of like going and having bold moments along the way?
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: Because I think creating your original, the life brief that you talk about and start within your book, is a bold, bold moment.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: Right, but I know you probably had things along your bold continuum.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: Some of that were really quiet, most likely.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: They don't have to all be loud or things that people see either.
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: That's a great point, and I'll get to the series.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: There were definitely a series of bold actions because at first that eighth grade moment taught me that, oh my gosh, I can transform my situation.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: Did it take a whole lot?
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: Yes, it took a lot of internal grinding, I guess, to get to that moment, but externally the transformation was pretty fast.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: I started playing the jokes and everyone started laughing and they started seeing and experiencing me differently.
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: So suddenly girls that never talked to me were inviting me to places after school, and so I think I understood I might not have been able to explain it that when I push myself out in that bold way into that new space, into that new way of showing up, interesting things happen.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: And I think that became a little bit of a addiction, if you will, a test.
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: Let's see what happens now.
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: And that's certainly happened through high school, but you said something earlier that was really great that bold doesn't have to be big and loud.
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: And I find now, at this stage of my life, often bold for people around me, people I've been workshopping with.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: We live in such a fast hustle culture that sometimes boldness looks like taking a pause, slowing down, getting off the treadmill.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: Disappearing.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, that's bold when people do that, like I'm taking three months away, or I'm not going to be on any social media and I'm just all of that, or I'm going to just have auto-post or those types of things, but just engaging with the noise, I guess, is the best way for me to put it.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: But you did.
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an example of bold not being loud.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: Go big or go home.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it certainly can be, but I think it's definitely a myth too that I think along the way that you're always highest courage, highest confidence, and I think sometimes you do doubt yourself, sometimes you're like I'm not sure that's the right move, but it's kind of the courage to continue to move through and into it that I think is important about being bold and claiming the life you're to live and getting aligned, which I think is much different than being balanced, and so I think that's an interesting kind of thing that's happened along the way too.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: So when you get to this point where you're creating the life brief which actually came out of the creative brief from your professional world that you live in and a day in just to help the listeners understand what is a creative brief and how does it pull into what a life brief is- so for people who don't understand what I do as a brand strategist, I'm going to just take a step back.
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: Try this the same thing, bob, as a brand strategist, is to work with companies to get really clear about who they are, get to the essence of who they are so that they can innovate and create from that place of clarity and distinction.
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: So I help companies like BMW really understand what makes them unique and different from Mercedes or a Tesla or any other mode of transportation or desired identity.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: We all badge with different brands that we associate with, and so my job as a brand strategist is to help BMW understand what their essence is in the world and then create all kinds of products, cars, et cetera, experiences from that place and at the center.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: The tool that I use as a strategist is called a creative brief, because my job is to make meaning out of messiness.
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: So companies are in high stakes, super competitive businesses and categories.
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of fear around becoming obsolete or disrupted or beat by the competition, and so my job is to identify hey, within all the data, the research, all the products and innovation, what do you really stand for in the world in a timeless way?
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: And so I sum that up, I distill it down in a single-minded strategy on a single page called a creative brief, and brief is in the name because it's meant to be concise.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: Which we may not all be good at.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: I know if you give me less than 800 words, that's more difficult than me than 15 pages or more, and so I love that it's concise, which I think makes or forces you to be clear and get to that clarity point over and over and over, like what does that give you?
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: What does that give you?
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: What do you really, really, really want from your book, which I think is really important for people to understand.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: And that getting to that clarity is, as you said, not everyone's good at that.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: So I had to break it down in the book and help people do that in really small steps.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: And getting messy is the first part of the book.
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: You have to get messy in order to get clear.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: And get messy is about generating Generating all the ingredients so that you can sort and sift through your own mess and arrive at that clarity.
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: But you don't have to get it from the air.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: The book walks you through every step in tiny, inexcusable, irresistible ways.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: But to back up, a life brief is a creative brief for your life.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: It doesn't look like the creative briefs that I use in my professional life, but it is the same in that it's a distilled essence of what you want in a part of your life that matters most.
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: So it could be well.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: Everything in our lives is a relationship.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: So whether it be a relationship, the classic relationship, a relationship with someone else, doesn't have to be a lover or a spouse.
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: It could be your parent, it could be your child, it could be your dog.
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: Then there's the relationship we have with work, a vocation, your side, hustle your joy, hustle your career and, very importantly, the relationship we have with ourselves, which many women neglect and put laugh.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: And then there's relationships we have with money, with community, with causes that we care about.
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: So you can aim the life brief at any relationship and in essence it's five or up to five declarative statements about what you want in that relationship, and not just what you want, but what you're choosing right now, what you're ready to activate right now.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: And then you sum it up with a name or a handle or a short sticky line that tattoos that brief in your mind and on your heart so you don't have to call it up every time oh, what was it again?
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: What was it again?
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: You know my first life brief.
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: The name of it was Take Our Time.
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: Because what I realized?
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: I was in a really dark moment with my marriage.
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: We had three kids under the age of five and my husband and I were arguing all the time, negotiating, comparing, critiquing anything but getting along.
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: I felt I was doing the unfair share of the work.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: I was sole breadwinner, he was trying to start a business, I was the housekeeper, the cook, the playdate planner, doing all the things and in my head, my husband was the problem.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: That was the story I was telling myself.
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: But when I got really nakedly honest and started writing and allowing myself to answer the question what do I really really want here?
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: What came out on the page was a different story.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: It was that no, my husband isn't the one.
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: That's the problem.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: It's my relationship with time.
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: And what's funny is when you put things in writing and you put your mess outside of your body, get it dumped out onto a page, you get to suddenly have some perspective with it.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: You start to be able to look at it with some curiosity and see things that maybe you couldn't see when it was all jumbled inside you, inside your body, all tangled and enmeshed with your feelings and your fears.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: But when it's out on the page, suddenly you get some emotional distance.
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: Does it make it safer from your inner critic or the judgment that you could have about yourself?
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: Because just even saying that your marriage, you felt like your marriage wasn't what it needed to be and where it was supposed to be, or potentially it might not last Like.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: I don't know if those things like came into your head, do you ever, like at any moment, think, well, is it me?
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: No, it's not me, because I'm doing these things.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: But when you actually get it out and you put it in writing and you see it and you know with all its messiness, you have greater clarity right, and it's not something that can be judged or thought about and kind of recycled.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: It's right there, looking at you.
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: That's a good question, I find, and you know I'm going to have this question stir inside me the next time I do a brain dump, which is probably tomorrow.
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: But I feel that my inner critic is always activated when the thoughts are inside me.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I mean.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: Like it diffuses.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: It doesn't mean it probably goes away.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: I mean that's.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: I'm going to continue to work on it.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: Because for me, like, the best way that I can just make it clear is to write it down.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: Because when I write it down and I read it, I'm like you know, that's the silliest thing I've ever seen.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: Like if I'm journaling or trying to get some recycling negative thing that's happening.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: Or if I'm like, wow, no, am I really trying?
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: I'm not working hard enough.
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: Like there are moments where I feel like I'm not achieving some things, where I'm like did I really try?
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: Like that was my mantra the other day.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: I was like, did I really try?
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: I was like I'm going to put it on paper.
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: Well, I have to say and it's in the book that writing rearranges the furniture of our minds.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: The loop in my head at that time was my marriage is broken.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: I can't do this anymore.
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: My husband is the problem.
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: He's not doing enough.
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: Blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: And then, when I got it on the page, it's exactly what you just described.
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: I could then look at it and say is this true?
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: Remember that this is true.
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: And then all this other stuff came up with those stories, and I could see the other stuff and that other stuff all had to do with time, a craving for a different way of spending time.
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: And then, because I'm in relationship now and asking questions of what's on the page, I'm realizing oh, why say yes to a lot of things I should be saying no to in terms of where I'm putting my time, or I'm spreading my time really thin.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: It's no wonder I have no energy and I'm bitchy when I get home.
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: So suddenly a series of ahas start to percolate and I'm able to automatically shift my attention towards the thing that's calling or ringing to me, which is now not my husband.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: But it's about time.
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: And then it's less about blaming him and it's more seeing and taking accountability and responsibility for the ways that I was bleeding my time spending instead of investing in the time with people I love.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: Is there a way to get messy and not be vulnerable?
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: I think I know the answer, but I have to ask it because I think that's one thing people potentially could run into as a barrier, honestly, like they don't want to be vulnerable to know, or they don't even think they're messy, but they're going to read this book and they're going to like, wow, there is something there.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: Do you think it's possible to be messy and not be vulnerable, with yourself or with others?
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: Well, I call it self-awareness, honesty.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: So, if honesty and self-awareness is how people define vulnerability, then no, I don't think you could do this work if you don't want self-awareness, if you don't want to practice.
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: I call it a practice because it's hard for a lot of people.
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: We're out of practice with listening to ourselves, with creating space to hear ourselves.
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it does require wanting to be in relationship with yourself, and if that's the definition of vulnerability, then yes, it does require that.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, as you go through, obviously get messy, get clear, get active, right.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: So those are the kind of the phases or the way that you're going to work through your life.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: Brief, how do you know you're ready to get out of messy and get clear?
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: Are there markers along the way?
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: Is there an off ramp, like how do I know I have enough out that I can move into clarity, which then moves me into action?
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: I don't think it takes a long time.
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: It does take active engagement.
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: So there is one of the foundational exercises in the book is early on.
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: It's the second exercise, which is a daily brain dump.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: So just minutes of writing, permissive free writing, every day, and if you don't have 10 minutes, five minutes.
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: You don't have five minutes, try three minutes.
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: So my invitation is to break it all the way down until you don't have the excuse.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: You can do a brain dump for two weeks and take a look at it and see what is it reading back to you, what is it telling you?
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: And when you read what you've written, often things will jump out that you didn't realize before.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: You can't see the ha ha's or insights or lightning rod type of thoughts.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: You start to see patterns, or you start to see what's a distraction and what's drama versus what's sacred and non-negotiable.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: And now you have things to push around, to sort and sift and bucket, and this is how you start to get clear.
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: The beautiful thing is you will also have other questions come up.
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: As you're sorting, lifting, reviewing, writing your insights, more questions will come up naturally for yourself.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: Huh, I wonder, why time is this thread?
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: What's going on really?
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: And then that's the rabbit hole that gets you deeper and deeper and it forces out more ingredients on the table.
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: And you know when you start sorting.
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: I advise people to sort into three buckets the stuff that has come out in writing the meaningless versus the meaningful.
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: And then the third bucket is just neutral, miscellaneous, and it might have come up one day because you were really stressed and it's nowhere else to be found.
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: But once you sort the meaningful from the meaningless, now you can zoom in, zero in on the meaningful.
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: That's the clay for your clarity.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: So one of the things that can happen, I think, as we're going through this and you could do the life brief once you could, I mean, but it's not a one and done type of moment, right?
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: So these are things that you can use again as you're looking at your relationship with what it is that you choose, right?
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: One of the things you're talking about particularly is your relationship with time, which was the issue.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: I have heard so many people, you know, throughout the last several years and throughout my career of like saying they are not in charge of their time, they can't make the decision because of their boss, or they were supposed to be off with their family but the meeting's been scheduled, or you know they might lose their job, which again financial stability and all those things like it kicks in.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: It's real and you can't.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: You know, I always would say I never could decline a meeting from my supervisor or my boss in the organization that was in.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: It just wasn't the thing you should do.
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: So how do we start from your experience of your life brief, where I'm assuming there was a bit of claiming back or and I don't know if it's the word boundary, or like placing a boundary that slipped or putting a space or something that wasn't getting its due time?
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: Are there things that you did particularly for time, as a strategy to start claiming it back and getting it into more of the order that you had preferred?
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: Yes, the magical quality of clarity, the declarative statements, means you push those statements to a place where it just gives you this fired up goosebump type of feeling.
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: So, take our time.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: Was this declaration for my husband and I?
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: It's your hashtag, right?
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: We wrote it as a hashtag and it had several layers of meaning.
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: It meant take control.
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: Take control back of our time.
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: It also meant slow down our time, and the hour was oh, you are was very key, because this was about our shared time as well as our actual time, and action is a byproduct of clarity.
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: What that means is as soon as we got yes, this is it, and this is not a bucket list to do list.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: This is now.
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: It's urgent and fundamental.
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: And when we agreed and aligned on that the next day, we automatically shifted in tiny slivers of ways, so wasn't like I quit my job and took a new job that had less hours.
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: I was stayed in the job.
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: He was still doing all the things he needed to do.
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: We were still caretaking our three kids and cooking all the meals.
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: That's the housekeeping, that's the neutral stuff, how to show up, but the spaces of time when I might have been nursing the baby and instead of doom scrolling the news, I started just thinking about hmm, what other communities could we be living in where we weren't shoving kids into cars all the time and getting them off to school and, you know, having this where I was commuting?
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: three hours.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: How do you change the routine around time?
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: Exactly, I just started loving myself, spend that doom scrolling time a little differently.
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: I was asking questions, I was playing with what, if I was researching different places we could live.
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: You know, it just started in small slivers and my husband was doing those little slivers of his own time, choosing different ways to spend it.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: And what's interesting is, as soon as you make a small shift in how you show up, things start to unfold, because you're aiming your attention in new places and action follows attention.
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: And then the series of actions become momentum.
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: And I started researching schools because we were starting to walk down a path of private schools for three kids and that was gonna add up very quickly.
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: I didn't even need to do the math.
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: I started looking up and down the West Coast for what are standout public schools that shared values with what we declared, and my husband was looking at a whole set of different things and very quickly I had a short list of communities that were built around schools for young families so that they didn't have to drive all over, commute long commutes.
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: I was just looking for ease ease of lifestyle, Not easy, but ease because time was about taking our time meant slowing down, getting rid of the friction that maybe didn't need to be there and within four months a combination showed up.
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: We had a vacation in Portland Oregon a couple years before and my husband wanted to do a documentary around this one neighborhood.
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: It was rough around the edges down and out and they beautified it.
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: The community came together and painted this giant sunflower on the intersection and beautified it to attract young families.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: And I was at work one day and my husband sent me an email and said hey, do you remember that neighborhood in Portland Oregon?
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: I said, of course.
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: I said but tell me what the school situation is?
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: And he said the house on the corner, this big, bright, red, Victorian house, was available for rent.
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: He saw it on Craigslist and I had been looking at schools and there was a school in Portland Oregon that stood for all the things that we appreciated and wanted for our kids.
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: Four hours later he called back and he said there is a school at the end of the block and it's called Sunnyside Environmental School.
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: And that was Bingo, the school that I had covered and had been discovering over and researching online House and the school on the same block.
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: And I thought, okay, let's go check that out.
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: And we weren't checking it out live, we were checking it out online and we applied for the house on gut instinct, because it felt like maybe our brief was showing up right there.
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: And we were the fourth application.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: We sent a box with our life brief, with our marriage vows, with photos of our family.
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: We got the house.
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: We sent in the first and last month's rent Site.
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: Unseen this is bold, Bonnie, Super bold.
• 31:46
  Speaker 2: And we said, oh gosh, we got a fly up to Portland.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: Oregon Go check it out.
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: So we just did and we got up there and it was better.
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: I said to my husband I think we won the lottery, the universal lottery, because at the other end of the block was the grocery store and in the middle of the block was the pizza parlor.
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: At the end of the block was the coffee shop.
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: Everything we needed was, within a two block radius, no young kids getting into car seats and commuting long hours.
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: It was just.
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: We couldn't believe it.
• 32:24
  Speaker 2: The house was gorgeous, it was half the price of our California home and four months later we were in Portland, oregon.
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: You were clear and active right.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: So one of the things I think is interesting about the book is sometimes people wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: I'm not ready, it's not clear enough, I'm not sure if it's the right, but there's like we gotta go.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: It's not, I haven't even seen it in person, but it seems to be matching up.
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: It keeps to be showing up right, but sometimes people keep pushing that down.
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: So when people keep pushing it down, when things are clear but they're like, nope, not yet, I'm not ready, is there something that you would advise someone?
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: When it's kind of that point where it's time for action and time to get active, is there a just do it formula that Bonnie has that she can share?
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: Just reminds me of this beautiful Hugh Laurie quote.
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: He says ready what is ready.
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: You know, life is a series of leaps of faith.
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: I'm not religious, but I'm deeply faithful.
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: There is a bit of intuition.
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: I like to say, as a strategist, the future is gonna be built on intuition and math, the two things coming together.
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: So it's the intangibles and the tangibles and some combination and your gut's gonna know.
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: But yes, we often bat away our gut feeling.
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: I call it our knowing.
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: So the knowledge it's usually in our head facts, data, things we can point to evidence.
• 33:59
  Speaker 2: And then there's knowing which is deeper down in our bodies, in our heart center or in our gut, whatever you might call that.
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: And I think those two things need to match up in some kind of synchronicity, and you know.
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: So the math worked on this combination, but our intuitions were also screaming.
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: How did the school and the house within one block radius?
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: That just gave us a signal and it was great, because I invite in the book that you don't do this alone.
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, I had this with my husband, but you can have people in your life who are really good at reading the signs with you.
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: I call it cast your dream team.
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: Find that person who is really honest with you and calls you on your stuff.
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: Find the person who believes in you when you stop believing in yourself.
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: Find the person and know who to go to when you need either a nudge or a shove how?
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: Or a shake yeah, or a shake.
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: So don't have to be your own every person, but surround yourself with people and share enough of your brief where you can give them that job of saying, okay, lee, here it is.
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: We both know that this might be it.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: I'm going to kick your booty and shove you out the door.
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: Yep, time to fly right.
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: We sometimes see those people that help us do that or see that there is a way to go, and I think it's important for people to understand that if you don't have to go it alone and I think you can't, honestly, the life brief's not set up that way.
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: Being bold isn't set up that way either.
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: So you will need to take action.
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: Your left right is your left right, but you do not have to do it alone.
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: So I love that we're ending on that, knowing that as you go through the stages of getting messy, getting clear and getting active, that momentum as you take those left rights, it gets stronger and stronger.
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: The heart beats are louder and louder too as you're taking those steps.
• 36:00
  Speaker 2: That's beautifully said.
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: You sum it up so beautifully.
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: Well, thank you, I'm so excited.
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: Our time went super fast.
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: All the information about the life brief is below.
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: Please grab your coffee, learn more about Bonnie and her work, and thank you so much for being on the Bold Lounge.
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, thank you for having me.
• 36:16
  Speaker 2: This was so much fun.
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: I feel like we could talk for hours, for sure.
• 36:20
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the Bold Lounge podcast.
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: Through the continuum of bold stories vulnerability to taking a leap you will meet more extraordinary people making a positive impact for others Through their unique and important story.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: By highlighting these stories, we hope to inspire others and share the journey of those with a bold mindset.
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: We hope you've enjoyed this podcast and look forward to sharing the next bold journey with you.