013 - An Ad Agency Executive With A Strategic Plan for Living

Get Curious, Get Clear - Writing a Life Brief with Bonnie Wan. Today host Chauncey Zalkin sits down with the author of "The Life Brief ".

Her guest, Bonnie Wan, has been the head of brand strategy at famed agency Goodby, Silverstein and Partners for over 13 years - and she took that talent for zeroing in on making meaning for major brands and parlayed it into writing briefs for people's lives starting with her own. 

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Written, directed, and executive produced by Chauncey Zalkin. Intro/Outro sound engineered by Eric Aaron. Photography by Alonza Mitchell with Design Consulting by Paper + Screen.

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Transcript

 For the past 13 years, Bonnie Wan has been the head of brand strategy at the iconic San Francisco based ad agency. Good beat Silverstein and Partners which is most ubiquitously known for bringing us the Got Milk? Campaign but you also probably saw their work in this year's Super Bowl ads for Doritos, for BMW, for Mountain Dew...

If you're not of the ad world, you might not know that brand strategists or account planners, as they're often called, are the people at agencies that make sure the creative work is aligned with real consumer and cultural insights. Brand strategists, and I did this role in three agencies, are there to inspire creatives with a clear and galvanizing big idea, so who better, arguably, to create clarity in individuals lives? 

I always felt that brand strategy was a deeply undervalued component of the advertising process. . In fact, I thought it should be woven throughout an entire business's operations at every stage of that business. So I was so interested when I learned that there was someone who was at the top of their field,  who had parlayed that gift for human insight and clarity that she was applying to these big brand briefs into helping, you guessed it, actual people. 

 She did it for herself almost by accident and it transformed her marriage. She started  helping other people and then she ended up writing a book called The Life Brief  based on her experience  and her ability to write a mean brief for the biggest brands out there.  
Welcome to Actual People. A podcast hosted by me, Chauncey Zalkin, dedicated to meaningful conversations about the evolving landscape of our lives and the power of our own creativity and imagination to make magic.  

 We're both brand strategists. Every brand strategist or account planner is very different from one another. 

Yes, because it's much of an art as it is a practice. It's why I call it a practice instead of a process. Because there is a level of intuition to it. It's not all science. As much data as we can measure and have, it's still evidence that informs the intuition.

But at the end of the day, strategy can be different coming from you than from me.

Absolutely. 
I had a book. Boss, that was all data. If the data doesn't back it up. No, 

My friend Natalie puts it really well. It requires rigor and wonder.  It's an intersection of that rigor...

I want to know what you're doing with these workshops with these different sets of people, the general idea of. what are they asking? And then what are you going in and solving for?  

I'm writing life briefs for them. It's 'what's my work brief'. 'What's my relationship with money brief.'  'What's my marriage brief' or 'my partner brief'.  'What's my leadership brief,' 'selling my company brief', 'being a better CEO brief',  'getting in the best shape of my life' brief.

Clarity gives you is courage. It helps them navigate change. And we're always changing. We're always evolving changes. It's a natural part of life, but it helps them navigate change. It's where they want to aim it  in their life. What part of their life are they  at a crossroads with.  

And how does this differ from coaching? 

Well, I call it life strategy because I'm not a coach or therapist. I'm not sitting there with them over months or years.  My job as a strategist is to drop in and get sharp, fast. That's what we are trained to do in the creative world. We're not spending hour long sessions week by week, month after month, you know, peeling all the onion.

What my job is, is to find the most penetrating questions that get us boom  down into the good stuff.  And then use our ability to look at patterns, connect the dots, read between the lines to start surfacing, Ooh, where's the tension, where are the contradictions?  And we're poking and prodding and provoking  to get somewhere fast, to get to clarity.

When you're doing a brand strategy for a company, it turns into a campaign. There's something at the end of it. These are your marching orders. How do you make these things actionable? The center of the brief should be action driving. So I say  great briefs.  are sticky. They tattoo into your mind or your heart, even better. 

They're sharp. They're specific. They aren't vague. You can't drive a truck through it. You can't over rationalize it. And they're action driving. So at Goodby Silverstein Partners, we talk about brands are verbs, especially modern brands, because we have to talk to companies inside companies, as well as outside about behaviors and action.

That's how modern brands and businesses operate. It's no longer just about messaging. And for me, it's no longer just about advertising or marketing.  It's about how do you come up with strategies that are sharp, sticky, action driving for the whole business. I know your early brief with your husband was about time.

Mm hmm. Take our time. Yeah. Yeah. So.  That was a moment in our lives, I call it the dark chapter. That brief took us to our golden chapter. And it was fast. That's the effectiveness of life strategy versus coaching therapy, you know, that can go on for many, many years.  As soon as I started writing, and you talked about writing as a strategist, right, we're collecting our evidence.

That's our form of collecting emotional data. It's not hard, big data in terms of numbers, but it is extracting  from us, what's really going on? What do we want? That's the driving question. What do I want? And can I extract it in writing?  Utter nonsense. naked honesty. And that was what was happening intuitively out of despair that first time I did it.

Because my head was telling me a story  that was looping again and again. This is what happens as we are humans. We have stories lodged into our minds and often they're not our own stories or they're our own story that gets us stuck. We only see a couple choices coming out of that story and they're not always good.

They're terrifying. So the story in my head in that moment in my life was that. My marriage was broken. My husband was the problem. I needed to maybe break this up in a different scenario. And that was terrifying because we had three kids under the age of five.  But when I started writing, Because as a reflex, that's what I do as a strategist is collect the data, collect the evidence.

And I gave myself that permission to be utterly nakedly honest. What came out on the page was different than the story in my head. And what came out on the page was that what was broken was not my marriage, but my relationship with time.  I was just saying yes to so many things out of habit, out of reflex.

They weren't the stuff that mattered. And it left me depleted the end of the day to invest in what really did matter. So I was spending and spilling my time instead of investing my time.  What helps me to be a good strategist when I'm working with another client is that I have personal distance from whatever the problem is.

And I can look at all these things from afar and I can sort them out. But with my own stuff, it's really hard to get out of your own way. Perspective, right? Agencies can bring perspective because you're not in the trenches of the stakes, the pressure. How do you get out of your own way in the life brief to be able to have that kind of clarity you can have for a client?

It's writing. You said it.  Writing creates that emotional distance. And Roger Housden, I quote him all the time. He's a poet. He's a writer. He's an author. He says, writing rearranges the furniture of our minds. What he's saying in such a beautiful way is that when we write,  We create emotional distance so that we can look back at it with curiosity,  see patterns, connect the dots.

Even though it is our own stuff, it's not directly connected to the feelings. Wired. When you're thinking it,  It, it's hard for it not to trigger another emotion or a series of emotions. But when you write it, park it, come back to it later,  you start to see it with a new set of eyes. Like it's a different person.

Yeah.  I write every single morning and I free write for 20 minutes based on, I'm sure you know the artist's way. The artist's way. Yeah. That, and I've done it for, you know, there's been gaps, but I've done it for, you know, 30 years. Good for you. And that stuff, and sometimes it ends up being like a to do list.

I mean, sometimes it's really banal. No rules. It's never, but then sometimes I might go off on something and be like, Oh my God, I didn't even know I thought that or felt that. I have this beautiful treasure trove to reflect on and to, to review, reread. You get to look for patterns. Then I invite two types of writing.

In the book and in the practice, the first type is exploratory. It's discovery. It's unlocking your subconscious. And that's what you're doing with the morning pages. You're kind of free and loose. I call it letting the pen lead and it's ideal to write it by hand. But if you must do it on technology, fine.

It's better than not writing at all. Yes. Yes. I think when you free write  stuff comes up and out of you that surprises you.  That's  part of part one, which is getting messy, right? Lots of different questions, prompts, exercises to just stimulate and get it all out of you. Cause once it's out of you on the page, it becomes  something that you can look at with curiosity.

It becomes the ingredients or your Part two, which is get clear. It also creates spaciousness. Now you've parked it somewhere. So now inside you, there is space for new ideas, new thoughts, new insight.  And that's the beauty of being a strategist because I have to park it so I can grow or create capacity.

For new ideas, new hunches, new assumptions, new questions. And then in getting clear is the second form of writing, which is writing to distill,  writing to sharpen,  writing to express and get to that brevity, that conciseness, because Brand strategy is getting to the essence, the truth of a matter, whether it's the truth and essence of a company and what they stand for, or it's the truth and essence of what you want in your relationships, whether it's your relationship to someone else, your relationship to work, your relationship to yourself, to money, you know, blah, blah, blah, all the things. 

Yeah. I like that part of distilling. I go back and I highlight. I number things. That's how I ended up rebranding my website and starting the podcast. I'm like, what do I really want? I just want to do a podcast. I'm a writer. I don't want to do marketing, marketing anymore. But how am I going to make money?

Money is the tether. And part of this whole podcast is exploring that, that sort of tether. How do we do what we want to do with these external constraints?  We often carry stories about what we don't want to do.  And I've had to confront, well, what are the stories about what I want to let go of? Do I really want to let go of some of these things? 

We tend to be a culture that restricts us to two answers or two options, two choices at all times. I call it binary living. Either it's a yes or a no, this or that, stay or go. Like these are  the choices that we are conditioned to believe, but creative living is that. There's so many more options.  You might not love all of marketing.

You might not love the client service part of it, or you might really love the facilitation part of strategy, or you might really love the creative writing. You know, once you have business and I like working with  people one on one  and I like writing and the storytelling and that's what I like. I don't like the performance marketing or the analytics.

You know, things that make you feel like your eyes are drooping and you just want to take a nap. I, you know, I've realized you should take your own temperature of what's giving you, this is very poachy. break it down, when you break it down, there's actually a much wider set of answers than No, I don't want to do marketing anymore. 

That's such an easy and broad answer. It's too easy. It's oversimplified. It's, I don't like the data analytics. I appreciate what it tells you. I'd love someone else to do it, but I really love the one on one, the digging in, the hearing the emotional data, to pull that out.  And mix it in with the big data that I'm not going to, you know, search for, design for,  look at the research for.

I am going to meld those two because I do love that. That's a puzzle I like to solve, you know, and get to clarity.  The danger in our lives is for our stories to be oversimplified.  Yeah, that's true. We only have so much time for things. I was thinking about the precision. If we just say, oh, this and this and this and this, then you're depleted.

My afternoons, what I'm doing is I'm working, working, working, working, working. I get my kids and I'm just, Racing towards the end of the day, I was getting tired and I'm getting worn out. I came up that I'm going to actually stop at three o'clock. I have an hour before I pick up my kids. They get out of school at four at their age, and I'm going to meditate for 20 minutes and I'm going to do 20 minutes of light housework.

The latter part of my day was a runaway train after dinner. I just want to watch some dumb TV show with them for a few minutes. I don't have the energy anymore, but if you take a break. It takes a long time sometimes to see these simple things like that.  Exactly. And that's what the original life brief we had, take our time, really was moving us towards taking our time and take back control of our time in terms of we can't control it.

Absolutely. But it meant be more intentional with our time and it also meant slow down  and create space for transitions, space for ourselves. It doesn't have to be huge. Well, I like that you said something about do we have to live in this very expensive neighborhood?  And live this way that's kind of putting a lot of pressure on us.

Can we not have these things and still be happy or maybe even happier? I work with people at the C suite. I work with venture capitalists. I work with  everyday people  and they all have the same struggles when it comes to money and financial stories. and wealth briefs. And I've had CEOs say to me, well, if you asked me five years ago to look at what I make today, I'd say, my gosh, I never even imagined myself at this level of income.

And now I'm already thinking about how do I make three times this? And  so there's a story and a pattern there that never enough.  Or it's the more we make, the more we spend, right?  Well, yeah, because then your money's tied up in all these other more expensive things that  And I have money come up often between couples.

One feels as time goes on, I need less and less to be happy. Whereas the other one wants more and more to be part of their social life. Life because they are hanging out with people who make more than them. It's in the conversation Can they get to an aligned place about money and really when people life brief money their relationship with money?

There's lots of other stories going on The money is the door that opens up the real things to brief, you know How do I get over? the story that's telling me that I'm not enough, that I can't ever stop, that if I stop, this will happen. You know, I think it's very easy to say, Oh, people are greedy.  And I've had those conversations myself, or it's excess, you know, but there are people who have been  raised.

That that is their identity. It's really money. What does money mean to you? What is your money story? What is money a proxy for? And so for some people, it's about safety.  Other people, it's about identity. For other people, it's about connection, self worth, that I won't have the relationships I have if I don't The beauty of the life brief is we drop in and we examine those things.

First, we identify them, we examine them, and then we reframe them.  And then how do you make that actionable so that it's like, tomorrow you need to X, Y, Z. That's the campaign part of it.  Yeah, here's the thing. Why creative briefs work in the agency world or with creative companies is clarity drives action.

Action is a byproduct of clarity because when you get super sharp, clear, you're like excited to solve the problem. You're excited. You're exploding with ideas already. It's the same with the life brief. Once you get clear, now you start to wake up in the morning and you're like, okay, take our time.  Okay, look at my schedule. 

Give me another example. Another example would be, I guess, um, look, look, give me a real life brief. Can you, I mean, it could be yours or someone else's or make it up. I just want to kind of visualize.  Do you want the action part? Cause you asked me about the action part. So. I have a writer, a novelist that I, I worked with and  she wanted to write her novel.

I invite people coming off of their briefs to find the tiniest daily actions that they can take and to make it irresistible. Because when you make it irresistible,  it becomes effortless. Like what? And so hers, it well, hers was less irresistible and more inexcusable. Her tiny daily was to open up her document on her laptop of her book.

Just open it. It wasn't write for 15 minutes, write for two hours, write a hundred words. It was open the document. Because it was so small, so duh, she couldn't ignore it. So she did that. That was her daily commitment. Low barrier to entry.  So low. I'm talking about so low. That's like going to the gym. They say go to the gym, even if you're not going to work out.

Yeah, just show up. Go there and go home. Put your sneakers on or once you're there, you're like, what am I? Yeah.  But don't tell yourself you have to go and then you can just go home and allow yourself to go home. That's exactly it. Okay. So she opened up her document. Sometimes she wrote one sentence,  but other times that she wrote a thousand words.

That is really a hard place to get to having that laser sharp understanding. So let's go back into a little bit about how to make this. actionable. Once you realize, Oh my God, I want to be a pilot, or I want to go back to school, or I really want to quit my job. There's some epiphany somewhere. It takes getting messy to get to  a certain clarity that you called it laser sharp.

And that's exactly it. That propels you into action. But things like, I want to be a pilot, or I want to quit my job.  That might be what you want,  but often that it's misdirected. There's a lot more underneath those statements. That's why in Getting Messy, and this is why strategists  use these tools, like the five whys. 

Why do you want to be a pilot?  Okay. And then you get the first level answer. And why do you want that? And why do you want that? And by the time you get to the fifth why, you get to the heart of the matter. And it's not just that very narrow focus, must be pilot or bust.  It becomes, oh, I want to be closer to my father who was a pilot and he's deceased and I gives me that sense of freedom and connection to my I'm totally making this up.

This is that's exactly it. You start to uncover and then you see, oh, there's lots of things in addition to pilot that satisfies. That real desire and need.  So my husband and I wanted to  let me, let me pick them. Hold on. Let me pick a real good example that can illustrate all this. So the second time the life brief saved my marriage,  it was prompted by a question from my husband.

Are you still madly in love with me?  And right away,  my whole body was like, no, but it didn't come out of my mouth.  But at that time we were arguing all the time. We had just moved, we're most vulnerable, we're in transition and we argued and nothing came out. I deflected, I defended, I danced, you know, I didn't have to answer the question. 

And then I took a business trip and on the plane after the new business pitch was over, no deadlines, no more work, I, my mind just went to that question and I had to get messy with it, with it. And just ask myself, do I really want this? Mad love.  I had to separate it from him first and that was immediate visceral, hell yes, I want mad love.

Who am I? You know, dead? No, I can't imagine the rest of my life not feeling those amazing feelings of desire or being desired,  but do I want it with him?  And then it unpacked so many things like, is it even possible with someone you've been with for so long, you know, where the dirty socks are and the habits and.

The money issues and frustrations for kids, bunch of moves, like, is this even possible? And in my head was no, it's not possible. But yes, I want it. If it was available, would I want it with him?  Yes, but I don't believe it's possible. And then I had to unpack kind of what does that mean? What does that mean?

But the name of that brief was  mad love. I am ready to fall madly in love with my husband again.  And as soon as I declared that  to myself, but I felt it in my bones. It was my first act of,  um, clarity. And when I wrote it out, That was my first act of commitment. So you see writing is an action itself because you're committing to those words all together in that declarative  statement or declaration.

I am ready to fall madly in love with my husband again.  And something happens when you  punctuate something with that clarity.  So I showed up differently, you know,  the next trip we took, which was only a week after I wrote that brief and we went to family camp, which is our annual family vacation. And I thought this is a great time and place for mad love,  but guess what?

There was a lot standing in between me and him and mad love. There was all this calcified stuff that we hadn't talked about, that we hadn't  found, found time to connect over to be honest about.  And before I could even get to a place where mad love could happen,  I had to take a sledgehammer to that, the walls between us.

And that's what happened at family camp. It wasn't mad love,  but it was addressing some of the issues that we weren't being honest about. And that looked, it showed up in a raging fight.  I mean, raging fight that then exhausted us and got us to loving honesty  by way of a hug. you know, a truce.  We were so exhausted after, after the fight.

And my husband said, okay, let's just hug it out. And tomorrow we can talk about whether we separate or what we tell the kids, you know, we really went far because  there was so much emotion pent up suppressed. And then when we leaned in for the hug, our bodies remember. You have so many defenses. We have so many.

That's such a beautiful way to say it. Yes, we have so many defenses and that melted the defenses.  And then we had to, you know, go back to our lives and we didn't tell the kids anything, but we, we, it softened our stances.  And then with mad love in my mind,  the next morning. On my way to work, on my way out of the house, he handed me the usual cup of coffee that he brews and crafts himself. 

I always just grab it without even acknowledging him. I'm usually on the phone, grabbing my bag, out the door, rush to work. And I just stopped in my tracks. I turned to him and I leaned in.  I said, thank you. And I gave him a kiss.  And his face was, what just happened? I don't show appreciation. I certainly don't lean in.

I don't say thank you. It was just so tiny, innocuous.  Why wasn't I doing it? I got in the car and I had a great feeling. I was like,  what? Why am I not doing that more?  So I did it every day that week for five days. And then he started showing up differently too, just in small ways, grabbing my hand. I think it is the little stuff.

Remember that book that was so popular, Don't Sweat the Small Stuff? I think it is all the small stuff. Do sweat the small stuff. Yeah. Big outcomes come from small, continuous, consistent stuff.  Yeah. Oh, I, I really love that story. My dad, who I talk a lot about on the podcast, came to New York and we were talking about my marriage, which was not going well.

I had two tiny twins. He asked me, is your marriage over? And I said, yes. And that's when I knew my marriage was over. We were trying and fighting, and it was bad. It was toxic. And he asked me the question. And then when he asked me the question, because it was him who asked me, it became very clear to me, this is over.

It was clarity. I've had people in that situation, you know, who  wrote their first brief. And this is what happens often. We, we write the brief we think we should write. Cause we're still living out a should story.  And so I have a woman who wrote a brief. She wanted to be her husband's number one fan.  They were not going through a good time.

And her commitment was to double down on the marriage,  but everything in our body.  Was telling her, she wanted to make this happen, right?  Um,  but it was a toxic relationship. It wasn't healthy. And the questions I think I now ask everyone who is life briefing their relationship is,  are you growing in this relationship? 

Are you frustrated because you are growing and that's uncomfortable?  Or.  Is it an unhealthy kind of discomfort? Are you shrinking? Yeah, are you shrinking? Are you safe? That should be the first question, always. Are you safe? Are you being hurt? Are you being diminished? You know, and then if you're in a healthy space, are you growing?

And are you, you know, are you growing together?  But she wrote a new life brief, marriage brief, Maybe a year later, and she had the epiphany  that she was under this limiting story that divorce is failure. She recognized that she had a story so ingrained in her that divorce and separation is a failure and she didn't want her identity to be tied up in a failure. 

But when she tried to flip and reframe that story. She got to a place where she saw, oh, divorce isn't a failure. It could be a new beginning for both of us.  And that excited her. And when she got to that place and wrote a brief around that, suddenly she went from embarrassment or guilt or humiliation to excitement.

And wow, what could my life be without this marriage? And how could I unwind it in a way that benefits both of us? That spurred her into a new form of action and a new form of seeing the situation that made her more creative, made her more empathetic, made her more honest.  Did her marriage end?  Yeah,  we're all living out some stories that hold us back  the story that she cannot get divorced because it equals failure.

We all have them. I have a CEO who walked in wanting to do her next chapter work brief.  But what we uncovered is that she really needs to write a personal agency brief that everything she does in her life is under obligation because she's been raised to be dutiful. Her drive at work is because her parents instilled in her must work hard, must be best.

And she doesn't feel any personal agency or freedom or choice. Yet. in the small ways that she has exercised personal agency or choice in her life. She feels aliveness. She feels engaged. She feels excited.  And when it came to her next business that she wanted to start.  It wasn't about what type of business she wanted to start, what role she played.

Those were the tactical practical things. It was more about how does she enter that business with a sense of personal agency and start to practice letting go of doing things out of obligation, doing out of things out of some sort of, you know, Suffering, yes, we all have homework that we have to do that isn't necessarily the fun stuff, but she just wanted to be able to let go and choose and to be honest about the role she wanted to play.

There's always these deeper stories. I like to ask people,  whose story are you living?  Is it yours or someone else's?  What would your life be like if you let go of that story, or changed it, or reframed it?  That's amazing. I was gonna ask you, and this is a good time to ask you, how much you believe in manifesting. 

That's a good question.  I 100 percent believe in manifesting. I think there are many different definitions of manifesting.  I do believe we bring energy to every conversation, every situation, every circumstance, and clarity informs our energy.  So, like the divorce example, when she was humiliated, guilty.

There was an energy around the idea of ending a relationship.  But when she got excited that this could be mutually beneficial, it could be an adventure. It could be the start of a new chapter for not just her, but someone else, her, her partner,  suddenly the energy changed. And when you change your energy, possibility show up, creativity shows up, courage  and excitement show up and you do propel yourself into action, but action with joy rather than fear. 

The stuff that weighs it all down. We all create ripples in our lives. Every time we show up, when we show up differently, that becomes an invitation for the other people in our lives to show up differently. When I show up scared. or I show up intense, impatient, it affects my outcome. But when I show up with the energy of possibility, the energy of excitement and joy, let's do this.

I can rally everybody around me and that is manifesting to me. Manifestation needs action to Make it so. When you're writing a brief, you're giving structure to creativity. How do you get to those steps? The hardest part is, well, what do I do now?  But what we're not talking about enough is that a great creative brief is inspiration as much as it is clarity.

Of course. Right. And, and words matter when it comes to writing great creative strategies. The difference between one word or another can be the difference between inspiration or meh, action, motivation, or. Stillness static. That's why sharp, sticky action driving is so important because it's as much a springboard for you to Get inspiration and then move into action or set and forget it a great brief Cheetos Let's take a really easy example because everyone knows Cheetos the snack, you know What we learned in our research is that people who eat Cheetos tend to be more  prankster, jokester, you know, they like to have fun in life.

They play practical jokes on people. They're more likely to ditch school  because I mean, look at it. It's a snack that turns your fingers orange. If you're a neat freak, you're a perfectionist. You can't take yourself too seriously while you're eating Cheetos. Never. The brief is deliberate, playful mischief. 

And that's so much more inspiring and fun for creative people. They immediately want to do right, create off of that brief versus super crunchy snack, more filling. When you give a juicy evocative word like mischief, suddenly you're like, Ooh, how do we create more mischief in the world? How do we incite people to play more pranks on each other?

to get away from being too serious. Give them a relief. You need to be able to do that for yourself with a life brief. I'm really interested in trying this out for myself. I was thinking of it more as this prescriptive  how to get it done. And we'll take it. Take mad love for it. instance, right? I could have written a very safe brief.

I want to get along with my husband. Yeah. I want to revive our marriage. But I used some really nerve wracking words that really pushed the brief. It's scary. It's like, oh my god, I'm asking too much of it.  Yes, and I don't think that that's possible.  There are times where I feel dead inside when I, you know, when we're interacting. 

Sometimes I want to kill him or whatever, you know. Right. How am I going to get to mad love, but when I write mad love? It forces me  into a different space than getting along, reviving our marriage. It's more the truth about what you care about. And it's very vulnerable.  It's like, Oh, I might never get that.

It's on the edge of  dangerously disappointing. Yes.  Right. The most courageous thing we can do is to admit,  if not declare, what we want to ourselves,  without a guarantee of getting it.  That's what courage is.  Yeah,  I think it's kind of a good place to end. I have so much to think about here. Actually, I did have a question I wanted to ask you about the cultural moment that we're in, because I think it's very ripe for things like a life brief.

A lot of women I know, though, in this age, between 40 In  55, we're going through a huge change. We're living longer and we are making new decisions about what we're going to do for this next chapter of our lives. But everyone's in this big shift right now because of AI. There's been mass amounts of layoffs.

It seems to be never ending. Media landscape is changing. Um,  housing is not affordable. There's just so many things that are really on the cusp right now. There's a real. like precipice. That's how I see it. And I'd love to hear your take on it and why this might be the moment, why you wrote this book now.

Maybe there's a reason why now this came out of you and what you think about the moment that we're in and what it means and where we can find some hope in it.  I have two answers to that.  One is  we're at a moment of peak uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity,  and how to navigate that. I firmly believe is to be deeply connected to your essence and your truth.

You are your own best compass for navigating the curve balls, the unexpected, and you just named all the forces that are happening. They're going to get accelerated. They might get more heightened, but being connected. To what you want, what you believe, who you are, your voice versus other people's voices, your story, not other people's story will help you pivot, navigate, you know, flex, adapt with more ease than if.

You're just faced with confusion, that fog you talked about, that digital, I don't know, uh, dementia. Digital dementia. Digital dementia. Right? Quick side note, digital dementia is a topic that is discussed on episode 10 in a conversation I have with a woman named Jessica Elefante, who's an author and a former digital marketer who found herself with a kind of brain fog that was diagnosed as digital dementia.

And we discussed this earlier in the episode, but it is edited out because it's us going a little bit off the rails on the topic. So for the sake of a nice tight episode, I took it out, but that is what we're talking about. I encourage you to go back to that episode and listen to it. The title of it is tech free in NYC, how one super successful digital marketer and city mom gave it all up and went for broke.

Put it in the queue for when you're done with this episode. Now back to our regular programming.  I mean, we're not going to be able to handle this stuff if we have digital dementia and the life brief is the antidote to that kind of state of mind because the life brief ultimately at its essence is a practice of being in relationship with yourself in deep connection with your own voice and your truth. 

At a higher level, at a deeper, maybe even darker level.  The practice of the life brief is to unlock the power within you, the power to have personal agency and choice in a world that is really getting chaotic and unpredictable  and obsessed with power over. And the more.  The powers that be,  whether it's in the corporate world and the politics and government or in places around the globe, the control comes when the population, all of us, don't know what we want.

When we're lost, it's easier to control people who don't know what they want. It's easier to control people who don't believe they have agency. I've been watching II stuff. It's that feeling of uncertainty and grasping onto anything at all. It's easy to control people who are divided. And it's easy to control people who feel lost. 

What do you think made you decide that I'm going to write this book right now, instead of go along on the career track that you were on?  I've always been fascinated with human behavior, human motivation. How do you connect people to purpose? In order to unlock possibility and agency. So that's just been a fascination of mine since I was a child. 

I didn't make the decision to write the book. I got the invitation. And my operating rule is that when invited, when a doorway or gateway shows up, my job is to show up and walk through it. Say yes.  And that's what happened. It was the newest expression of my career.  It was how brand strategy evolved into life strategy.

And I get the gift of doing both now.  When you're interested in people and culture, everything we do is a kind of evolution of that fundamental curiosity. You can never take that away from people like us who have pursued a career in why, why, why must know, explore, explore. Curiosity is the antidote  to anxiety,  to frustration, to connection, curiosity, fear, yes.

And it is the, at the heart of creativity.  Absolutely. Okay. Well, thank you so much. This has been so great. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. I am so happy to have met you. It's mutual.

You've been listening to Actual People. This show is written, directed, and executive produced by me, your host, Chauncey Zalkin. Show sound designed by Eric Aaron. Click on the link below to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode. And don't forget to leave a review. I'll be sharing my favorites.  You can find our socials and all links to deeper dives into these topics at chaunceyzalkin.

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