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Majka Burhardt: Scaling Life's Challenges One Bold Step at a Time · 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 Micah Burhart.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: She is a professional climber, a conservation entrepreneur, an author and a filmmaker.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: She is the founder and executive director of Legato and the author of Vertical Ethiopia Climbing Toward Possibility in the Horn of Africa, as well as the book More Life on the Edge of Adventure and Motherhood.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: So excited to have you on the Bold Lounge.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so great to be here with you today, lee, thanks for having me.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: So what did I miss?
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: A climber, conservation entrepreneur, author, filmmaker anything we missed?
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: No, that sounds pretty good Mom.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: I have twins who are seven years old, which makes sense with my new book Having Just Come Out.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: I'm talking about my journey into motherhood, from pregnancy until they were four and a half.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Excellent and we're definitely going to jump into the book and talk about it and just the deepness of the book and the way the memoir is written.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: But we're going to start out with some boldness, so we'd love to learn your definition of bold For me bold is when you're trying hard emotionally, physically and mentally, all at the same time.
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: I think that's where true boldness comes in.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: It's not just a physical feat, it's actually like being vulnerable and giving it your best in all of those dimensions.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Love that.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: So physically, emotionally and mentally, you're in action and all at the same time.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: So it's not just I'm jumping, but I'm thinking and jumping, and I might be scared and I might also need to tell myself keep going.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, just just to kind of put that into place.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: So what was the first time you remember, based on your definition being bold, it's so interesting to come up with that answer because I think about all of the times in my life when I was young, when I wanted to try something, and usually it was something that was physically difficult.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: It was physically difficult whether it was the first time I went climbing, when I was seven years old, for example.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: That springs to mind, where there is this thing.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: I was at a camp and I was, you know, told if you want to go climbing, you can go, and I decided that what would almost be left to keep using the word bold, like the boldest thing would be not just get in line but volunteer to go first, volunteer to go first, not because I knew I was going to do great, not because I was thrilled.
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: It's because I had that unease that comes when you're on the precipice of doing something that is physically, emotionally and mentally challenging, and so actually going for it and doing it and then realizing that I liked it, and I really liked it when all those systems were firing for me and having me want more and that's how I really think that the adventure has been in my life is always choosing to be in that kind of triad of self expansion.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: Love that.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: I remember when I was during my master's program and we had to do a ropes course and we had to jump off the telephone pole onto another you've probably done it or something like it and I remember being like I don't really want to do this, but if I do it I'm going first because I don't want to stand in line and think about it the whole time.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: And I, you know, just that came to mind for me when you were talking through that.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: You know it is an activation and I think that's something that's almost and if you put together the other word you use adventure activation through these things, how you're thinking about something, what you're physically going to do about it, and then how you emotionally feel about it, right, and sometimes you're, you know, probably clicking on and off the override button of fear.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: You know, I think boldness is not fearlessness, but it's moving through it right and being active in what you're doing.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: So, when you think about how your career trajectory has gone, are you surprised where you are right now, or is this always the plan?
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: Well, I can look back on my career now.
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: I'm 46, and I can say, oh, it makes so much sense.
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: Right, because you can connect the dots and you can make the shape.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: But when you're in the middle and you're making the dots and the dots aren't following the exact right spacing, with the right altitude, it sure feels really confusing.
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: So no, this was not the goal.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: The goal was to.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: I don't think I actually had a goal when I was graduating from college.
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: I knew that I didn't wanna take the conventional track that was being offered to me, which would have been to go to law school, to go be an investment banker.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: I mean, I graduated from college in 1999, and everywhere there were flyers you wanna come to Lehman Brothers, you wanna go do this, you wanna be a consultant, slide right into it.
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: And for me it was saying that's not what I want.
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: I need to be outdoors.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: And I also need to be outdoors and do something beyond the outdoors.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: I don't know what that is, but I'm from Heller Highwater, I'm gonna go find it.
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: And then this is what's manifested as the career that I have today.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so when did you start climbing?
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: And you rock climb and you ice climb.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: Is there any other type of climbing?
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: I'm missing that.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: You do those are great.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean.
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: I'm an alpine climber, so climbing the mountains, the rock, ice, you name it.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: I started climbing, as I mentioned, when I was seven, but very, very little.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: I grew up in Minnesota.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: I went climbing when I was part of this wonderful camp that's still in existence called Camp Ajua, but I wasn't a climber then in the way we understand now, because there weren't climbing gyms accessible there.
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: I didn't, my parents weren't climbers, so it wasn't something that was just imbued into my life.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: My parents were all active and were adventurers, so that for me climbing made sense.
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: It was exciting, it was edgy, it also made me feel really whole and I strove to be outside in an adventure any way I could from a really young age.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: And then you know that expressed itself in going on big multi-week canoe expeditions when I was in my early teens and then eventually it really focused laser-like in on climbing when I was in college and having a pursuit of being a full-time climber and a professional climber became really important.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so when you think about climbing, there's certainly the physical, the emotional and the mental.
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: So walk us through like if you could think of your most difficult climb, that you had to really think it through, push yourself, get over some maybe mental things that were happening with regard to fear or just unknown.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: Does anything come to mind for you?
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: I think every time you go climbing it's a combination of those things.
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: So I mean, here's a great example I have.
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: I'm sort of recovering from a knee injury so I went climbing in a climbing gym even though I'd rather be outside in the middle of climbing in the summer and I was there with my kids and I was climbing and saying, okay, how's this gonna feel right now, how's my knee gonna behave?
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: And so on the one hand, I know what I'm doing, I know how to be safe and I have this expectation around the standard that I should be at.
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: And I also have a gentleness of saying, man, you're recovering from this injury, so don't get ahead of yourself.
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: And it's the vortex of all of those things slid up against the physical expression of actually climbing and feeling my body work like that.
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: But then in this case the emotional and the mental component for me in a controlled environment were about how I was responding and listening to my body post injury.
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: Versus climbing on Fitzroy in Patagonia and having a three day climb after a huge snowstorm and combining kind of every skill set I had in the mountains to get to the summit of that mountain and then down safely, in some ways can feel like a more logical explanation of it.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: You can say you know you're tired, you're hungry, you're going for it, you're making decisions, you're evaluating risks along the way.
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: But the reason that I'm sharing both is that like that's, I think, kind of to me, the beauty of climbing is that when you're there, in that moment, you're present and the expression of it.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there is no checking your cell phone, there is no checking your email, like you are in full concentration mode too, in the sense of being present.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: There is no other form that you can be in when you're climbing, like you were Not when you're actually climbing, but what's?
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: really fascinating and I think a great irony that we don't often talk about is that climbing like actually having let's just call it when all of your limbs are trying to move yourself up in some mechanism it's only part of what you're only doing, that part of the time.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: You spend a lot of time hiking to get to that place.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: You spend a lot of time not moving if you're climbing with a partner while the other person is moving, so you have downtime interspersed with these high focus moments, and during that downtime your brain can think of everything from a grocery list to whether or not you're like you called your mom back and how you can remember to do it.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: So it's a really interesting juxtaposition that sometimes we focus on.
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: Like, well, when you're climbing, you're in this hyper flow state and you are, but it's broken up.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: So I wanna talk about that a little bit more, because the analogy of also how we work outside let's say we're not climbers or we're leaders of an organization or we're running a big project or a team and these times of hyper focus and then times of like reverberation of life or whatever is happening or whatever is going through your head, and then hyper focus and then coming back Is there a hangover from that in the sense of the intensity of thought and cause in the real life, like in the sense of not being a climber and not knowing.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: I only know my experience of like what I just described as a leader or kind of leading a team or doing something big or exploring something.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: I think that's probably going somewhere high or walking on a canopy run or something like that, but you're kind of very focused for that period of time.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: So I think that's real important for people to realize too is when you're climbing it isn't like you're in flow state the entire time.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that for me.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: That's also changed over the years in terms of what else is happening in my life.
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: So when I was younger I could stay in that moment for longer.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: But now, being a mom running you know, being the founder and executive director of an organization, having a new book out, there's a lot in my brain.
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: So whenever my brain can be buzzing around all the things it chooses to, do that right and because I want climbing to still be a part of my life and kind of ping ponging back and forth more and accepting that right Like that's how I get to climb as much as I do right now is because I like, for example, there's a, you know, when it's rock climbing season, there's a really wonderful rock climbing area that I drive like an hour and 15 minutes to go to and I have meetings when I'm like heading on the way and my team knows that right, so I have calls with them you know where they are in Kenya or Mozambique on WhatsApp when I have service, and that's like it lets me sandwich the different parts of my life together which.
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: I find really important in my pursuit of this full life that I'm building and this full life that I want to show to my children as possible to have.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: So the title of my new book is more Life on the Edge of Adventure and Motherhood.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: But the more is the most important part to me, because I was really struck when I became pregnant and then found out in a really like very surprisingly, I was pregnant with twins and I thought, oh, wait, wait, wait, this is not the plan, like it's not the plan at all.
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: For, you know, I thought I'd have one kid and it would be sort of convenient and we would just go handle it, which I say that with all the humor because, having now been a parent, I realized that there is no such thing as doing that.
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: But you can have a myth in your head about you know how it's just gonna how we even plan.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, you're gonna have a plan, it's gonna work.
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: And they're like not gonna interrupt you at all.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: And then I had two, which was the universe saying let's talk about what it really means, right, and let's have this happen.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: And for me I said I don't wanna stop doing what I'm doing, so how do I do this, how do I do more?
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: And add motherhood to it, and add present motherhood to it.
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: And so for me it's not a question of endorsing multi-tasking or kind of this have it all concept.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: It's saying that we all are looking for a more in our lives, right, like we all are having, how we put the pieces together of a rich life, and opening up the conversation table to what that means and how to support each other in our pursuit and the how that's gonna change over our lives is really important.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: And so climbing to me when you say like, is the whiplash difficult?
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: That's part of my life right now, of trying to have this really complex tapestry be what my life is.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's kind of life, honestly.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah right.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you have a plan and then I say God laughs.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: And then you keep going, you figure it out every day.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: You're learning, you're succeeding and you're failing.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: That's how I feel.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: You know Absolutely, and whenever I fail I'm hoping I'm on learning.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: You know Like, well, do that again.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: Well, maybe I shouldn't do it that way or maybe I shouldn't do that at all.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: You know, whatever it may be.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: And then when I succeed, I think what I do, and why I try to help people to focus on a little bit more, is, when you do succeed, make sure you don't just like jump over that and kind of go to the next, Give it a moment, give it a.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: You know whatever it needs, because that's just something you know as I get older, that I wanna make sure I acknowledge those things, because sometimes, as I'll just say, as women, I think we move the goalpost of success or what we wanna do or what the next thing is.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: And analogy to climbing is you know there's always something higher, there's probably always more difficult, and then you conquer something or you kind of achieve something and it's like, okay, the what next?
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: Little bit of adrenaline and adventure in that too, which is not a bad thing.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: But I think sometimes we just don't like sit in the success sometimes.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think we also are outside of, depending on what a career is I mean, having had a very unconventional career what you do is you separate yourself from tried and true feedback markers, right, like, and I have had moments in my life where I think man feedback is outsized importance to me, like if I learned that I did, someone thinks I did a bad job, and almost is harder for me to hear it because I don't hear feedback in a regular way, because I'm not in, like, a business structure where I have, like all these people I'm reporting to and you have.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: So it's really interesting and I talked to young adults about this a lot.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: When they have this idea like I wanna have this very alternative career and I wanna do it, and I say, you know, it's not necessarily for everyone and connecting with yourself about how you, how you give yourself buoyancy in that life and how you know what success means and how you honor it and, as you're saying, not move the goalpost and create community around that alternative career becomes really important.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: Otherwise it can feel really isolating and when something can feel isolating, then any destabilization of that good or bad is a bigger destabilization, right, because there's not enough things that you're allowing to intersect it.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: Some people think you have to make a choice between your passion, your pursuit, and your purpose, which is right on your website, like they're like right under you, and this incredible shot of you climbing, yeah.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: What do you say to people who say you can't have that, you can't have more.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: You have to just be a good mom and stay at home or go to work and take care of your kids or whatever, however it's together at your puzzle pieces, which I think everyone has their own adventures and motherhood of how they figure out and their support system.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: But what do you say to folks feeling like you have to make a choice and they can't actually think, even think about more?
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: I think that the reality is that it's like the altitude, that we're understanding those concepts, that how you're driving towards your passion, for example, let's go back to the fact that I have a knee injury right now.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: I'm so irritated at how little I've actually climbed.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: It's two and a half months when I'm trying to get this thing better.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: I'm still a climber, right.
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: So if you think about the passion, purpose, pursuit we all have that and how we're creating ourselves inside of, that is actually the conversation about how to be human and how we do that in community, how we do that in our families, whatever our family needs it for our parents if we're not.
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: I think that's how we allow space for other people to be individuals and driving towards their goals, and it doesn't mean that they all can or have to be at 100%, because that's nothing.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: You don't get to do it that way in life, right, but you can have seedlings of those.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: There can be different moments over a year or in seasons where things are crescendoing or where they need to slow down a little bit so that they can make space for other pieces.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: I mean I've certainly had that adding having a new book in the mix since March.
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: I mean that's changed, what the amalgamation of my life is, and it's naive to think that we don't have to adjust.
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: But I think that we've gone too far and said, oh, therefore, you can't do these things, you have to pick one, you have to get really laser focused.
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: And I think that that divorces us from the reality, that, as humans, we're driven to be curious.
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: We're driven to say what more can I do with my life?
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: We're driven to say if I had a little bit of space, could I have more?
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: And I think by allowing us to have that conversation, it doesn't put a value on.
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: It has to be this much for it to count.
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: It's more like what should this look like for me in this moment and what could it look like for me in the future?
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, more can be incremental, it doesn't.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: It could just be planful, meaning like you're just planning for more or you're getting ready for more, or you're actually just giving yourself permission to think about more.
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: Or you acknowledge that you're already doing it.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: Right, yeah, there's also this moment of saying wait a second, Like I am working 80 hours a week on my career and I'm not moving the needle towards if I want to be a parent, but working the 80 hours on my career I am growing my individual skills, that I'm growing my leadership.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: I'm becoming more of an internet, Like whatever it is Right.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: So it's also taking this moment and saying hold on, where am I already doing that that I'm not giving myself credit for.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: Right, so let's jump into the book.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: So from the perspective of the title More Life on the Edge of Adventure and Motherhood.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: So tell me about what made you want to write this book.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: You had written a previous book which was really focused on climbing and your experience in Ethiopia.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: This one's very different from that.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: It's a memoir.
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: It's written almost diary style.
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: It kind of takes you through your life.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: So how did it come about?
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: the book itself yeah, I like to say at the very start that I wrote More by Accident, which is because I didn't set out to write a book.
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: What I did was, when I found out I was pregnant, I reached for the thing that I've done my whole life, which is writing to make sense of it For me.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: We're talking about my background as a kid, writing in a journal, right, as saying, oh no, this feels big and heavy and I have lots of emotions.
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: And how do I process those emotions?
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: Well, how I process those emotions is writing them down.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: And so I started writing a series of letters and recording a series of audio journals to my unborn at that point child, which then, very quickly, I found it was actually children.
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: When I found out I was pregnant with twins, when I was like seven weeks along and I was, basically I had been handed this hot ball of unknown.
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: And instead of just saying, well, I guess I'll just figure it out, I'm like how am I going to figure this out?
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: And what if, what if, what, if and what more is is real time emotional processing of that journey, right?
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: So it's not a retrospective, it's not going backwards in time and saying, oh yeah, when I was.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: Here's, like you know, light, sketch, high points and low points how pregnancy was for me.
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: It's not that at all it's like.
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: Here is what that emotional ping pong ball looks and feels like in your heart and in your head as you're wrestling yourself and the world into a new iteration of yourself and trying to make the world move into a new iteration as well.
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: Right and so that's.
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: I mean it's letters to my kids all along the way, from through my pregnancy until they were four and a half, as I was navigating how to have the career that I have, how to become a mother with them, how to reconcile things that had happened in my own childhood, like we all reconcile through adulthood, and especially if and when we become parents, and how to come out the other side as a like a hard driver that I am, but now with a lot of new ingredients in the name of two really great kids.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: Were you ever worried, as you went through it, that you're going to lose yourself to being a mom?
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: And I don't say that in a negative, judgmental way or anything like that.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: There's absolutely nothing wrong with being a full-time mom.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: But I mean in the sense of your climbing and the other things that you were doing with your business and the things that you had done so far, did you ever worry about what were your thoughts initially and as you kind of went through it, did it bubble up and go away or come back?
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: I think it was something I was always trying to understand, like what am I going for here and what am I trying to create?
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: And how do I manage the juxtaposition of drinking from the fire hose, of understanding what it means for me to be a mother of these particular two children at this stage in their life, when they are not sleeping, sleeping and sick, have a really weird cough that turns out to be asthma, that sort of dust created, but not like whatever it is and also loving my career, building this organization that I'm super committed to, wanting to have a healthy marriage, like it was this constant question of not necessarily like if I was going to quote unquote lose myself to motherhood, but how to be myself, believe myself through motherhood, as I was learning what motherhood was right, because that's, I feel like the nuance in there is that what motherhood is is different for every single person, and what it is for any of us is constantly evolving and changing.
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: So it's like you can never put a container around it because it's growing and moving and more things.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: So you're saying, okay, this is what it is now and these are these other things I want to have, and so I think that that was a huge struggle for me through those early years of motherhood and then eventually I realized that that was part of it, that it wasn't supposed to have an answer, that it was that struggle that gave me a kind of going back, that made me human and also that I really wanted to relate to in other people.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: Because here's the crazy thing about becoming a parent it's very common, right, like lots and lots of people do it, and yet when it happens to you, you're thinking, whoa, this is insane, right?
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: Like how is everybody doing it?
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: But yet it feels so unique to me and it also feels so hard and so great and so lonely and all of those things and like, what are we missing?
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: What are we missing in this conversation?
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: If it feels, it still feels like that, and to me what was missing was like this total transparency about that emotional processing that was happening along the way.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that how to be me and be a mom and continue on learning.
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: I think parenthood in general is just an ongoing adventure itself in learning not only about your child as they grow up, but also about yourself as you're also growing up in some form or fashion, I think, with them, and along the way too, like you kick off some scabs of maybe how you grew up.
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: You know in sense of like, oh, why did I do that, or why did I think that, or why did I wrap that way?
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: And it's like, okay, I've got some work to do.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Most likely there might be a shadow or two there, and so it is this thing that's very hard to describe.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: But there's commonality but at the same time, it is individual of how you experience it and there is no right or wrong way other than you should love and always care for and be kind to your children.
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: But I mean, there are moments of you know just like, am I doing it right?
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know like I don't want to mess up my kids and you know I just want to make sure I do this right and everyone is okay.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: So, and how that's defined is also individual, absolutely yeah.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: So when you went through the book.
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: What do you think your children are going to say when they read the book?
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, as I said, this book was really written for them, and it was written for them because when I you know, the opening letter in there is actually the last letter I wrote to them, which is saying that I put this together because there are so many stories of motherhood being wonderful and what I needed when I was going through it was how motherhood brought me to my knees and how to learn how to get up and how to learn how to do that, and what I wanted most of that time was connection to my mom and to my mom when she was becoming a mom, but it was impossible to have.
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: I can't go back in time with my mother, and so giving my kids this time capsule sorts to be like, if you want to know if anyone else felt like this here's me, here's like the person that might be most important for you to know felt like this, and that that was like that was the goal.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: Like when I actually sat down after you know, having all these scattered journal entries that were really just because I needed to put them somewhere, and saying I think this could be a book.
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: It wasn't a question for me about, you know, whether or not it would be helpful to my kids.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: It's like it's there if they are ready for it.
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: It's there, you know when they're ready for it, and my job is to make sure that they're ready for the honesty that comes with it and to make sure that I'm raising kids who already know that it's not all great, it's not all hard, it's a little bit of both, it's a lot of it all, and that's the conversation that we need to be having to make them resilient humans.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: What was the greatest learning you had about yourself by writing the book?
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: The thing that comes to mind is that there's such a depth of feeling that I have, like I, if I read the book now, it still makes me cry, right, and like so, which is sort of interesting, you think it would sort of be a nested ties.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: But I think that you know, having like worked on it, done this, like put it out in the world, you name it and I think so.
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: I think the, I think that you know the great, the greatest learning for me is that things that matter keep this journey that we're in to process how to live, and how to live in the way that is important for us.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: It's not like you go through it and you're done and you say, okay, moving on, like slap your hands together, wipe the slate clean, great, I accomplished that.
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: Right isn't ever going accomplishment, and that process is really poignant.
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: I think that you know that I've learned that about me, that it's the poignant journey, ongoing and evolving journey of being a human so deeply matters to me and so deeply moves me.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: So when you think about someone who's just starting to think about the more part of their life and you know whether they've been on the career side of it or their mother or they've been doing both, and they're thinking something's out of alignment or something could be different, and it doesn't mean that your life is bad, it just means could it be enhanced or could you have more of something or even less of something, because sometimes joy comes from just doing less of something you know.
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: So when you would give someone advice like what are the first steps for them to think through when they're just kind of getting to that point?
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think what we spoke about earlier looking already at your life and saying, like almost doing a map of what you're doing and how it's speaking to a more that you might not be giving it credit for you know doing some great work around visioning.
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: I was really opposed to that work.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: There's a great tool like your leadership is a is a really wonderful programming.
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: That program that, instead of taking you right to doing a vision that actually sets you up for success and what that's going to look like in your best self I think that you know, using some of those tools and and and taking the space and time to do that thinking is really is really pretty integral to doing it well and to doing it with your full self present.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: What does your more look like right now?
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: Right now it's, you know, having two seven year old kids and, you know, supporting them as they're bigger, more rounded humans in the world with different, with new emotional needs, and understanding how you know my life is helping them and where it's getting in the way of how they're expressing themselves.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: That's a big part of like, like our family journey.
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: You know it's running legato, as the organization that I founded in Mozambique is now working in Kenya and Peru with a ton of demand for partnerships from other indigenous communities and local people around the world.
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: And doing that well, also balancing that with being a mom and being the adventure that I've, you know, set myself up to be for my life.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: Tell us a little bit more about legato and what made you want to found that and the mission that it has.
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so today legato exists to really move the needle in what has been typical conservation and traditional international conservation and instead think about what climate justice really is and when I talk about climate justice.
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: We can throw that term around.
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: We're like well, what does that actually mean?
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: What are we talking about?
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: And to us, it means having indigenous people in local communities driving all of the things that they want to create in their lives, while protecting some of the world's most important areas for biodiversity.
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: So that's you know for legato.
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: We began in Mozambique working with the long way people surrounding mountain forest and other species, especially on protecting their incredible forest, but we realized that that wasn't going to happen unless we open the aperture of what our understanding was our role to be.
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: And that actually our role was to backstop those local communities across all the things that they needed alongside of protecting their forests, because us going in with a singular agenda, which is the way it's commonly done and especially has been done in the past, like several decades of traditional conservation development.
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: Actually, the people who steward that landscape should be the drivers of that agenda, and that agenda is complex.
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: So, just like the conversation we had about people and about how we're all doing them more, that's the same thing with people all around the world.
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: Right, like none of these things are in vacuums from each other, but yet we try to pretend that solutions should be constrained and should be very guarded.
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: And the reality is that when you start getting intersectional, that's when you can have transformative change, and that's ultimately what we believe in.
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: What we're seeing leads to long-term biodiversity protection and human thriving.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there's an incredible point in there that I just want to reiterate.
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: I think sometimes, in conservation explorations and wanting to help or support, some of the things that have happened have been very Well predetermined by someone who doesn't even live there.
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: You know, we're not even with the community itself.
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: And partnership, although it's a lovely idea or it's something that you know is helpful for a moment, it doesn't have sustainability, it doesn't have longevity and ultimately it's not interconnected to how the rest of the their world runs.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: And so I think, is you're talking through what you do, is you really come into help and support but allow the community to drive the agenda of what needs to be done in partnership with you, right the intersectionality of the solution.
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: And I think that's important for people to hear, because I think many of my listeners, I think, want to help, want to do things, but sometimes you know we, we think myopically and in like I have the best answer, or here's this or here's that.
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: So what is?
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: What is one way we can help?
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean you know we are right now we're growing our community of supporters now that we have, you know, like I said, our trifecta programs in Kenya, mozambique and Peru, and understanding that and saying we want to put communities in the driver's seat of these choices and support them with the tools and the partnerships to do that, and like join us, come on a trip with us.
• 31:50
  Speaker 2: We have, really.
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: I just got back from a trip to Peru with some of our donor community.
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: That was wonderful, where you actually get to go, be in the work of legacy building and be in the work of what this looks like, bringing your personal support to the community.
• 32:04
  Speaker 2: And if you're really fundamental, you can jump in our website and you can think about what it means.
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: To look at it means legacy in Portuguese and Spanish.
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: So if you're ready for your legacy to be beyond what your preordaining, for your legacy to be back, stopping other people and let's let's kind of tie this together in their pursuit of more and how that, more than, protects our planet there are great ways that you can get involved there as well.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I definitely think there's a tie in between more and legacy.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: Get in the sense of like how is what I'm doing today in my personal life and my professional life and my family life connected to a better world tomorrow, here or wherever we want to have an impact and the bigger the impact the better.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: But it starts with you know, in my mind, we're, you know it starts at home and then it kind of goes from there.
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: I just want everyone check out the episode notes.
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: You'll see all the information about legato, the book, both books that you have.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: But definitely pick up more and learn more about Micah and her exploration of motherhood and the big adventure she's been on.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for being on the Bold Lounge.
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: Thank you, lee, what a pleasure.
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the Bold Lounge podcast.
• 33:12
  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.
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: By highlighting these stories, we hope to inspire others and share the journey of those with a bold mindset.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: We hope you've enjoyed this podcast and look forward to sharing the next bold journey with you.