Building A Human-Centered Framework For Well-Being with Rachel Buckley

0:02Hi, and welcome to this week's episode of the Epic Entrepreneurs podcast where we are all about helping business owners just like you achieve success. So we don't do fancy smancy. We don't do flashing lights. We don't do a lot of things that a lot of podcasts will do. These are just real stories about real people and their entrepreneurial and business experiences. We go into their wins, their challenges, and their learnings. So we hope you enjoy it.

0:37all right well welcome to this week's episode of epic entrepreneurs i am cliff mccray filling in for bill gilliland with your local business training and coaching firm action coach business growth partners i'm excited to have rachel buckley with the well-being project as the focus for our epic entrepreneurs podcast episode today so rachel please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself and your company what primary products or services you offer the community um well thanks for having me cliff it's a pleasure to chat with you this afternoon um so i am based here in asheville and uh the well-being project is a um practical approach to physical and psychological well-being and it is launching in january so it will be available then and we can chat about a little bit more about what that is um and how uh people can get involved.

1:29But yeah, what it is, is a framework that's not specific to any kind of background or demographic. It's human specific, teaching what humans need to thrive, and then giving just a really practical approach to that. And there's really just nothing out there like it. So I'm pretty excited to be kind of introducing it to the world soon. All right. And like you said, it has no bearing on background or where you come from or anything like that, right? Correct. Okay. Okay, perfect. Now, if you had to start your business from square one, you know, what would you do differently? Or would you do anything different at all?

2:15You know, it's a really interesting question. I have been around entrepreneurs for the last 20 years. It started in New York City. I was a sales rep for a Fortune 500 company, and I was very young and had a friend call me up and say, hey, I got this skincare that's amazing, and you should talk to my upline. And I had no idea what network marketing was or anything, but I got on this three-way call with a network marketing recruiter, essentially. And she said to me, well, you're really successful making all this money for this big company. why not do that for yourself? And I thought, well, heck yeah.

2:58So having really no idea what network marketing was, I dove in. And of course, it was like a trial by fire learning. But what it did is it really introduced me into the world of entrepreneurship then. And I have since always been in that world because I think I think along those terms and I think because of the way I've always thought I assumed I was an entrepreneur because I was always thinking about problems and how to solve them and creating solutions but one of the problems was that I really had a hard time executing or implementing them. And so I didn't know if that was some kind of faultiness in my wiring or it was some kind of failing in my character that I didn't have the right focus or

3:57discipline. And yeah, and a lot of life in between raising kids and all the things that happened over the last 20 years. And so I know I sound like I'm meandering, but the project itself is not actually a business to me. And that's been a really difficult thing to navigate because I've never really felt like I felt fit into one category. I come from a fundamentalist Christian background. I was raised in a very, very strict religious home. And I had a preacher for a dad who was really fiery. And so a lot of my development as a human has come from my spiritual journey. I was also a missionary around the world as a young person.

4:47And, you know, I saw people in war zones killing one another over religion. And I saw, you know, I was hosted in homes in Muslim countries where supposedly these are my enemies or what I'm told, and they were not my enemies. And so a lot of my travels to do religious work ended up sort of helping to loosen and kind of, you know, the word they use is deconstruct, which I don't love that word, but kind of evolve my spiritual path. But for me, that's always been about practicality. I've always been curious about like what what do we have in common what do all humans have in common how can we help one another without trying to tell each other that you have to change your culture or your worldview or do it this different way like surely as a species we have enough in common that we don't have to get to those nitty-gritty details and so the well-being project is on one hand, it's a powerful economic engine, um, as it's designed to be, but it is sort of more of a, a social enterprise, uh, than it is, you know, a classical capitalist startup.

6:11Um, so yeah, I don't know if that's helpful, but I've always felt like I straddled multiple worlds. Um, and, And, uh, yeah. Okay. Okay. No, I love it. So what have your, what have the big, been the biggest things you've learned, uh, being a business owner? Um, you know, so I actually have been, I've owned in order to pay the bills. So this, the wellbeing project has been in development. It's been a passion project. I have been self-employed as a training. I own my own training company and I teach for the American Red Cross and other organizations. So I'm a safety instructor. And what I have learned from that form of entrepreneurship and that form of self-employment is really how to get into your genius area and only do what you're good at.

7:05That has made all the difference for me. And I have been very strategic in my business and not grown it beyond what I needed to meet my needs because I did not want to be attached to something that wasn't fully my vision. so it was aligned and compatible with my practical life in the stage of raising kids. And so I didn't feel like I was selling out, but I did feel that I was just functioning in a very practical way. So I guess the point is that, number one, I kept the business at a size that was just enough to meet the needs I outlined that I needed, even though I could have grown it larger. And I did that by staying completely in my zone and only doing what I was good at, which is teaching.

8:00And all the business aspect of things, I partnered with an agency so that I didn't have to do a lot of marketing or anything and I could really just be excellent. And that's not a sort of lifetime trajectory, But I think it's important for entrepreneurs because we have all these seasons in development and having a vision and being passionate and committed to it. And at the same time, having to provide for a family can sometimes get really confusing. And so, yeah, for me, it's about having realistic goals and staying committed to the practical as well as the aspirational. Okay. Okay. So what are some common misconceptions about running a business?

8:51Common misconceptions about running a business.

8:57Gosh, I'm not the business guru. I will say, I guess, from my corner of the world, I think some of the common misconceptions are, give me a second to formulate this. No, you're fine. You're fine.

9:22Well, I think, I mean, a pretty obvious one that's often debunked pretty quickly is, you know, that there's so much more freedom in owning your own business. When, you know, that can be that very opposite. I think we all know if you're an entrepreneur, you know, that's pretty much the opposite. Because you can never really clock out. So the freedom has to be tempered with the practical realities of it. I mean, if you're absolutely doing what you love, then you don't necessarily want to clock out. But just maintaining that balance. And other misconceptions. You know, just I think sometimes just getting our priorities mixed up.

10:05You know, if we feel like we have taken a big risk and launched something, we might feel sort of committed to it and unable to evolve if it doesn't turn out the way we want it to go and keep grinding. And that can be really difficult when you've kind of staked a lot on a venture. And it might be hard to iterate when you're out there on your own. Okay. So how do you handle taking vacations running a business? I don't always get to everybody. That's funny. I'm a single mom and I have, I, I live in North Carolina, as we said, I don't have any family around. So I, I'm, I'm, it's pretty unique. how I have really had to approach free time and vacation and what that means.

11:01And yeah, so I try to, number one, have a life that I don't need to escape from so that I am not pining for a vacation. So building rhythms of rest and refreshment and joy into my life so that while vacations are good and important and necessary, they're not something I'm living for. And then, yeah, just some real practical stuff with my kids. Last year we went down to St. Simon's Island and spent some time down there and road trips to see family. And we're pretty modest around here. Okay. Okay. Nothing wrong with that. All right. And what have you attributed to your growth so far? A lot of suffering.

11:59Okay. I have always been a really passionate person. And as I mentioned, coming from sort of this fiery fundamentalist background, I never actually lost any of that kind of personal fire. I mean, I really embraced everything I was taught as a kid on one level and at the same time had another sort of observatory questioning perspective. And so that's often not super welcome in religious communities to question things like that, and especially not when you're a woman. And so I found the process of observing and questioning and reflecting on really what I believed or really what was important or kind of being thoughtful about my values brought a lot of resistance and a lot of rejection.

13:04um and so i think that growing as a person um suffering is usually um the main way that we do that because we wouldn't choose um to grow uh dramatically i think otherwise and so it's really just rising to the occasion uh when we encounter challenges um and so yeah my development as a person has come from just a life of inquiry and questioning and trying to align who I am with how I behave and having an integrated life. You know, I used to think of integrity as like this moral virtue, which I really don't think it is anymore. I think it's really just integration and being mindful of who you are and allowing the different pieces of yourself all to have their place and to be accepted.

14:05And so that when you act, you act from a place of wholeness and consistency. Okay. Okay. Now we kind of got into this a little bit earlier, but let's dive into it a little bit deeper. So how do you balance your personal life with the demands of running your business? Um, so I, in the wellbeing project, one of the things I teach the kind of the crux of that approach is what's called tending. So, you know, when we talk about self-care or we talk about, um, you know, mental health and, you know, meeting our needs and that kind of thing, that's all very ambiguous. And so, you know, that could mean anything that could mean like, Netflix and Chardonnay on the weekend.

14:52You know, there's just really no kind of definition to what self-care really is. And so I like to use the word tending because it really helps us to remember the core of who we are. Number one, we are biological, right? We are nature. We're not machines. So all this optimization and all that kind of stuff is, has really nothing, no place in the human, uh, experience. Um, we are nature and we are consciousness. And so when taking care of yourself, um, really tending is essentially the same thing as what we do for little children when they're, they're babies and they're born and they're completely helpless.

15:34We do everything. we meet their needs with consistency and yeah, with boundaries and routines is what I say. So the point of saying that is somewhere along the way between little children who had their needs hopefully consistently met, some of us didn't, but ideally, and then transitioning into adulthood, we lose that sense of like, hey, I need to have a regular bedtime. I need to have, you know, nutritious food. And I need not because I'm like trying to lose the weight or but because these are the things that that fundamentally that create a healthy life. And we understand to some extent, you know, tending a body.

16:24We get that right. You need to be nourished. You need to have rest. You need to exercise those things. But we get no instruction on the immaterial part of us, the part of us that stays whole when you lose a limb. You're still a whole person if you lose your legs in an accident. So whatever it is that stays whole, that's not material. And we never get any practical guidance on how to take care of that. And so I'm getting back to your point about, you know, balancing my personal life and my professional life or my vocation. The point is, is that you have to understand yourself as a whole being, both the physical and the non-physical, the being and the body.

17:11And when you meet those needs, that's automatically going to require things like nourishing your being with connection, with inspiration, with knowledge. Those are the main three food groups that nourish. Well, connection is going to come. Yeah, I might have connection in my professional life, but I have to be cultivating meaningful connection in my personal life, whether that's with a romantic partner or whether that's in close friendship, whatever my setup is. So that for me is not just like, oh, you know, I try to have girls night out or it's a deliberate part of my rhythm to have meaningful connection.

17:53And that might look like wine and cheese weekly, which I host at my co-working space. Right. That is a part of my. Yeah. It's a beautiful part of my social life. and there's no kind of networking officially to it. It's literally just food and beverage and connection. But that is one of the ways that I deliberately build, you know, that kind of personal connection into the rhythms of my life. Okay. I love it. All right. So now we're going to head into the quickfire round. So basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to say one word and I want you to give me kind of the first thing that comes to your mind in regards to running your business when you hear that word.

18:41Okay. Education. Mandatory. Mandatory. Okay. Now, what you say doesn't have to be one word. The answer doesn't have to be, it's just basically the first thing you think of. Okay. So education. Well, so if I'm going to expand on that, just meaning that, you know, like to consistently be in a, in a place of learning and reflecting and sort of growing. You know, I used to love listening to Jim Rohn. And he had this one bit where he would talk and he would say, how many times do you want your kid to go through the third grade? And most people say, well, obviously just one time. And then he would kind of talk about how most people go through one year of their life 30 times in a row.

19:30And how they're not sort of, and that's something that's always stuck with me is like we should always be in this, whether you call it education or reflection or whatever, but it's so important to be consistently learning and growing. Planning.

19:48Fun. I'm a very optimistic forward thinker and planning is like a preoccupation of mine. So I love the idea of planning.

20:04inspiration um absolutely fundamental nutrition for your being um and and i like to talk about inspiration in the in terms of um inspiration being anything that expands you right so it encompasses all those expansive experiences whether it's love beauty joy um all of that so it could be you know a quote on instagram um it could be uh you know a weekend conference at tony robbins it could be sort of anything it could be just quiet couch moments with your children but yeah inspiration is i mean it's part of the juice that makes this whole thing run commitment commitment um gosh

21:01uh that's the goal i think um as someone who's been married twice um and never intended to not be married uh in either of those two marriages so commitment always speaks to me on a very personal level um and finding that uh i i know that i can make commitment but finding what that looks like in a collective whether it's community or um roots that's still like a very curious uh you know, path of exploration. So commitment feels a little tender to me. Okay. That's powerful there. I like that. So what words of advice would you offer to other business owners who are looking to grow their business?

21:58I think the words of advice I would give to anyone would be the same, whether they're a business owner or not um and it always comes down to the human experience um deeply understanding yourself is i think the foundation for everything else in life and it doesn't matter how much we achieve and how many goals we actually uh you know managed to accomplish, if we're doing it from a place that is in any part alienated from our deeper selves, it really doesn't matter. And we can see that all around us. We can see people reach the top of any ladder that you can name and we find them hanging in their closets or slumped over in their hot tub.

22:49And I think whether you're a business owner or anyone who's aspiring to anything, being really careful about the path that you're on and knowing it comes from a place of alignment in integrity. And again, not in this moral sense, but in the sense of that you have deeply taken the time to understand yourself and to make choices that are aligned with who you are so that when you do reach those, you know, milestones, um, they don't bring a sense of emptiness and shock that you got here and now what? Okay. Okay. All right. So now we're in a section here where you can highlight, um, kind of what we discussed earlier, you know, any of your projects and everything that you've got going on with your business.

23:42Sure. So two things that I have going on right now are they're not. So I have mentioned the well-being project and that'll be going live in January for the wider world. And as I said, it's a practical approach to physical and psychological well-being. So it's, you can kind of think of it in structure, like AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, not the content, but just the structure. So there's seven concepts, and there's, the online courses are free. and but it sort of teaches this framework and establishes kind of like what humans need to thrive physically and psychologically and and then kind of lays out this framework of how you achieve that so there's three courses that that people can take and then baked into that coursework is a weekly conversation format that you learn and then you can then participate in so you can find a weekly conversation with other people who have the same language.

24:47You don't need to have the same background, but we have common language for the human experience where it's accessible and affordable and really makes well-being something that can spread. So that is something I'm just deeply passionate about. Actually, I taught this when I first developed the course years ago. I I taught it for a year with violent offenders who were incarcerated. And I did that because for me, it was like a test of efficacy. Like, I don't want to be involved in something that, you know, involves like farmers market produce and yoga classes. If it's well-being, it has to apply to all humans.

25:30And if it doesn't apply when you're locked up, then I'm not I'm not down. And so it was really, really practical and really an incredible experience, you know, participating with these guys for a year. But this is like content that applies whether you are in Silicon Valley or whether you are locked up or whether you are a student traveling, you know, on your gap year. It's very much a human framework. So that's exciting. that is, like I said, about to launch. And then the other thing that I'm kind of passionate about is I mentioned earlier that I thought for a long time that I was an entrepreneur and I had all these conflicting feelings about why I couldn't achieve the things I thought an entrepreneur, I as an entrepreneur should achieve.

26:23And what I really discovered, and honestly, much more recently than is convenient, is that I'm not an entrepreneur. I do have those similar qualities, but I'm a teacher. I'm a wisdom teacher. And I thrive on taking profound amounts of knowledge and making them accessible for other people. And so really what looked like entrepreneurship was always just me thinking about a wide array of problems and how to solve them and then creating frameworks for doing that. And whereas before I used to think that, you know, I just didn't have the follow through or something. That wasn't the point. The point was actually my design.

27:13I'm designed to create these frameworks and then kind of give them to the world. so um one tool that I actually initially created just for myself is called this the bean blueprint um so if you think about you know the first time you ever took like a personality test or you know the Myers-Briggs or maybe the Enneagram or one of these you know typing tools and you get this report back and you're just like wow this is me you know like it describes you and you feel so seen. And, you know, it's pretty great for about five minutes. And then, you know, before long, it's kind of in a drawer somewhere or, oh, I remember.

27:58Yeah, that's a really cool thing. And so we learn these things about ourselves, but we don't really know how to integrate them and kind of keep them relevant. And then you can maybe move through these different, hey, I get into my astrology and that seemed really helpful. Or I got somebody told me about human design and that felt really profound, but still you can have these really profound experiences and still not have a way to integrate the knowledge. So for me, what I did was I created just a document where I used AI to clean the data and put it all into one place, just kind of raw data on everything about me from all these different modalities.

28:43And then I developed these prompts so that I don't have to understand the systems or the modalities. I don't have to be, you know, an expert in astrology or human design or any of these things. But with the right prompts, it can take this document and translate it into the insight I need for my day-to-day life, for my practical life. So it's like this living document in essence, like a personal manual with all of these different sort of modalities that kind of show me who I am from various angles and viewpoints. But it's synthesized so that I'm not just being told, oh, you need to do this because that, but it's like looking for the structural commonalities and then using that as a as a guidebook for you know anything honestly like big and small and it's shocking how um how profoundly helpful it is and so I made them for friends I made them for my kids like it helps me with parenting my own children um I have used it for all kinds of things and and the blueprint actually is is the one thing that helped debunk this idea that I was an entrepreneur.

30:00It completely explained to me why I was struggling and said, here's what you're doing wrong. And here's what you're doing right. And you're just a fish out of water. And when you stay in your lane, you're actually doing all the right things. And there's no kind of, you know, this is not a character flaw. And so that was really, really profound. And so I've just, I've created a course that allows someone to build this document for themselves and then a way to use it on a regular basis. So none of this stuff gets tossed in a drawer somewhere. It's always available. And there's no kind of like jargon to unpack because it's delivered to you in a way that makes sense.

30:42You don't have to understand the modalities. So that's what the being blueprint is. And I'm pretty excited about it. So. All right. Perfect. Perfect. And lastly, what's the best way for someone to find you or get in contact with you if they're interested in any of your projects. Yeah. RachelBulkley.com is my personal website. And everything else is attached to there. The Wellbeing Project is thewellbeingproject.info. But if you go to RachelBulkley.com, everything is always going to be linked there. Perfect. Perfect. Any phone number you want to share or social media? Yeah. At Rachel Boakley is my Instagram and that's the main social media that I use.

31:28Right. Perfect. Perfect. All right. Well, fantastic. Thank you so much for being a part of the community and for all you're doing. We certainly wish you continued success in what you're doing with your projects there. Thank you, Cliff. Have a great afternoon. Thank you. All right. Hey, thanks for listening to the Epic Entrepreneurs podcast. podcasts, here's three things that you can do. Number one, remember to subscribe to the podcast. It takes very little effort on your part. It's going to help you and your fellow entrepreneurs. Plus, you guys know how it works. The more subscribers we get, the more cool things we can offer to you.