Alyson Stoner: Author and Founder/CEO of Movement Genius

26:01Alyson Stoner:And I think subtly my hope was that I had the actual chops to prove myself both in family entertainment spaces, but to also be able to go in and meet with casting thereafter and say, hey, you can still put me in this serious role. I had no idea how hard that actually was going to be, which still blows my mind. I'm like, y 'all, we're actors. We literally can do or were trained to be able to pull off anything. The only reason I'm acting this way on Disney is because I'm serving Disney's mission. So with Mike Superchort Show, it was kind of like maybe a happy medium because I wasn't going to be on a set every day like my peers on Suite Life or That's So Raven.

26:47Alyson Stoner:I was able to film these interstitials, these 60 to 90 second commercial advertisements on a weekend. And so I could maintain, allegedly, some semblance of normalcy. That's a joke. But that was what we were thinking at the time. But I think what really happened is it was my first introduction to the nine to five, to being on the wheel, to taking on adult responsibilities. and as one of the leads of the show, the entire production revolved around us delivering. So there were these implicit pressures, even if it was also fun in many ways. And I think that's where I just became more serious as a kid.

27:29Alyson Stoner:Being on set, time was money and it wasn't about being playful and full of wonder. It was a job. And I remember socially that created more of a schism Whenever I would see quote unquote normal kids outside of the industry, I was like, I have no idea how to talk to you anymore. I don't know what your life is like because I'm working every day and like talking to people who are on their smoke break between shots. I was not smoking for the record. Yeah, I could see how that would create like real dissonance with your peers because your life is totally different. At the same time, I also feel like we talk about etiquette a lot on this podcast, office etiquette, set etiquette, the soft skills of how people interact in any industry, the learning curve it takes to get them.

28:19And so I'm wondering what sort of soft skills you were learning at that time. And then did you feel prepared for your first big feature role in Cheaper by the Dozen because you were working with all of these industry pros like legends, Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, Hilary Duff. I'm curious about what that transition then was like from the Disney world into sort of like the larger feature film world. I definitely learned what to do and what not to do, what it means to understand the terminology of being on set.

28:56Alyson Stoner:If someone says, stand on the apple box, do you know what they're saying? If someone says, banana out as you come into frame, do you know what they mean? If someone says 10-1, do you know that they're taking a bathroom break but trying not to disrupt the rest of set? And then things like staying out of an actor's eyeline so that even though we're riveted by their performance on set, they have to be able to focus and not feel an audience watching them if they're playing a character who's just supposed to be in his office. and I would say being on set with Cheaper by the Dozen, I also began to feel the hierarchies involved, understanding power dynamics.

29:36Alyson Stoner:Now, you know, the big five, I call them, and it was Steve and Bonnie and Hilary Duff and Piper Parabo and Tom Welling. They were all really, really kind and very, very hardworking. So it wasn't that their power came with some kind of ego or bravado. It was more so that I still recognized no one else on set talks to them unless they're spoken to first. Their trailers are significantly larger than everyone else's. I think being there as the newbie, you sort of absorb the message that if you keep working hard, maybe one day you'll make it. You'll have the large trailer. And I wasn't ever really chasing that.

30:14Alyson Stoner:It was more so, oh, that must mean then I've done the right thing. I've fulfilled the mission. People believe that I'm important enough to hire me. And so, yeah, the hierarchies, I think, are interesting as a child. These are things that, of course, when you enter the corporate spaces, you feel implicitly and explicitly. But when we look at them through a child's experience, I think it allows us to question the fundamental nature of a lot of these systems and dynamics that we're navigating. I mean, obviously, capitalism is the big C word in this scenario. So I found it fitting that throughout your mental health journey in your book that you created a cast of characters that served as parts of your inner monologue, like your inner publicist or your inner whistleblower.

31:05your inner publicist made its first appearance after the success of Cheaper by the Dozen. Can you explain a little bit about that character to our audience and how it helped you navigate Hollywood?

31:20Alyson Stoner:Sure. For anyone listening who's familiar with internal family systems, it's one of many therapeutic frameworks, but it does help people identify these parts or sub-personalities within ourselves. I'm loosely pulling from IFS as I assign these parts of myself names and personalities in the manuscript. For the inner publicist, it is an expression of the chess game that has to be played in the industry. It's an expression of the hypervigilance that you have to have when you're in the public eye, an expression of the self-protection when you're in media interviews and dealing with fan encounters and later things like stalkers and kidnapping plots.

32:04Alyson Stoner:This is the voice telling me, hey, you need to be on all the time, even when you're alone, just in case someone around the corner is watching or filming. This is the voice that says, don't be a diva. This is the voice that really is fueled by a form of anxiety where you're trying to predict every possible outcome. sometimes catastrophic, but sometimes actually legitimately possible in the industry and anticipating all the different ways that you can cushion yourself from something going wrong, cushion yourself from criticism, and maintain a pristine image. So the inner publicist really was trying to help and does continue to try to help.

32:51Alyson Stoner:It is the part of me that made sure I looked at the themes that we would be covering today. And I took a moment to reflect on the stories that I would want to share. God, it's so fascinating because it's like dealing with being perceived at such a young age and all of the pieces that go along with that. And like, these are all methods of protection, right? These are all ways of your brain trying to keep you safe. And again, like that is a lot to process as an adult, let alone, you were like 12 when this is going on. I was a baby. It's just so immense and so overwhelming to consider. I want to talk about the evolution into music when you were 13, and being able to widen your scope in this way.

33:45How much of the music piece of things was actual love of music? How much of it was about adding another skill to your resume? How did you feel about music as a young teenager?

33:58Alyson Stoner:There are a lot of both and responses coming to mind. From a personal love for writing and music standpoint, I actually had been writing poetry and lyrics since age seven as a form of expression and lots of poems that my mom put into a folder. And one day as the opportunity presented itself to actually pursue music professionally, I was able to go, oh, actually this isn't a new interest and it's not wholly manufactured. This is authentic. Where it gets muddy, of course, is that in commercial spaces, people were familiar with my dance work and dance background. And so the automatic assignment for me was to become the next pop star who dances on stage like a new school Janet Jackson.

34:48Alyson Stoner:And I was open to that. That sounds interesting. In reality, the kinds of music I actually wrote were softer ballads, mid-tempo, never up-tempo, and they were often pretty melancholic. It was my outlet for all of the difficult feelings I was having as a young person. Thankfully, I had a beautiful vocal coach, Nick Cooper, who saw the both and of it all. He knew that I had booked a job where I needed to know how to sing. In fact, he ended up kicking me out of the first rehearsal because I was so nervous to sing in front of people. And he was like, this is not the time after you booked the job to freak out.

35:29Alyson Stoner:So I'm going to need you to go take a moment. When you're ready, come back in and you're singing a song for everyone. And I'm so grateful. That was like the first adult who had actually set what really was like a healthy boundary and wasn't just like a yes person. And from that, he immediately earned my respect. and I humbled myself, started working with him very diligently on developing my vocal skills. And in our lessons, that's where I think he was able to perceive, oh, this young person is going through a lot more than just pursuing a music career. They're actually dealing with stuff that maybe they don't have an outlet for.

36:08Alyson Stoner:So what I felt like he was doing was creating a safe place for me to be messy, to be a human in progress, to have a safe haven and a trusted adult who wasn't just trying to make money off of me. Although his pricing was, you know, it wasn't the lowest, but I recognized that most Disney actors were expected to be some form of a triple threat. I did want to make sure that I wasn't falling behind. Again, put a lot of things in quotes because now I wouldn't describe it that way. But if I did it all over again and I wasn't in a commercialized space, I would love to see what kind of music I created, whether or not anyone ever got to hear it at that age.

36:49Alyson Stoner:I still have a lot of lyrics that I go back and look at every couple of years. I'm amazed actually of how young minds can be so potent. And I don't know, maybe they'll see the light of day at some point, But at that time, it was a lot of both and. And unfortunately, I think what won out was the industrialized version of a music pursuit. Sigh. But I promise things get better. We just got to keep moving through these experiences. And then there is another side to this. I promise. So I want to talk a little bit about Camp Rock, which was your first Disney Channel original movie that you actually helped ideate the concept for and were positioned to be the lead.

37:36Talk to me a little bit about that experience.

37:39Alyson Stoner:The experience was accompanied by a lot of confusion, trying to figure out who I can trust with my creative ideas and all of the almosts with Disney. It just created more challenge in being able to trust anyone about anything. I think I maybe became a bit hardened by it. You would never know externally. I still showed up and was ultra professional and grateful, genuinely grateful to be working in any capacity. But that one was particularly tough because I was reaching a point in my teenhood where I only had a few years left to break through to a mass audience before I reached what some of us call child star expiration dates.

38:23Alyson Stoner:Had I been able to break through and establish myself, I might not have had to do other things that young actors do, like these super intense rebrands. And on the flip side, maybe I actually would have had to do even more of that had I quote unquote made it. So I remember feeling quite hurt, of course. And my experience of it was so different from what was actually happening. Adults were just running a business. But for us, it felt like they were adults saying, hey, we believe in you. We believe in you so much. We'd love for you to shine in this way. And then, oh, actually, no, we didn't actually mean that.

39:00Alyson Stoner:We're going to take this one back. Actually, it's someone else's turn. So not helpful for building trust, but very helpful for building the thickest of skin. Gosh, all of this is just so intense. It was so intense to read about. It's so intense to hear about. And then it also makes sense that at 17, after a decade of nonstop work and chasing after these breakthrough roles and being whoever you needed to be to close the next thing, you hit a breaking point. Can you talk about how you got to a place mentally where you were able to ask for help, especially at such a still formative age? Right. I know every time it's like, well, we got to remember that I'm still only 15, 16, 17.

39:48Alyson Stoner:You know, I think culturally, we often view challenges as a test of willpower and moral strength. We want to see people overcome individually. And so with my struggles with eating and fitness and obsessive coping behaviors, I would have loved to have been able to address them myself, to have overcome them. I would have loved to not have had to tell anyone else about them. But in reality, addictions and or some of these more extreme coping mechanisms are so deeply entwined with identity and lifestyle, and they're often a response to something. And so they require a specific kind of structure and support that I couldn't find just by going on in the way that I was going.

40:44Alyson Stoner:So I explored every possible option. Maybe I can work with a dietician. Okay, maybe I can work with a trainer where instead of being obsessive about it, I can outsource their expertise and they can say, hey, all you need to do is this and this is enough. Maybe I can get myself to stop counting these calories so meticulously. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. And it just was never enough to actually truly heal. Because how are you going to do that while you're going 100 miles an hour? Good luck. So in many ways, I think asking for help, it was in response to the magnitude of the issue. There was a desperation and there was a plea for wanting to be an environment where someone would say, we believe that this is as big of an issue as it is.

41:28Alyson Stoner:We're not going to try to dismiss it. We're not going to try to have you take it on on your own. We're actually going to be here with you in it and we're going to give you some skills. And man, I know there's a lot of stigma around going to professional treatment and what a gift, what a life-saving gift, at least in my case, to be surrounded by people who are there to say, hey, not only do we want you to recover while you're here, but we actually want you to feel empowered to be able to manage life from here on out. Not perfectly, but where you can stay afloat. What I didn't realize though is that being in rehab would be far more helpful than just improving my health and well-being.

42:11Alyson Stoner:It was actually going to be the first time that I had paused my workload and had to really sit with, who am I? What am I becoming? Do I really want this? What role does the industry play in my life from here on out? And that's where I think some threads were pulled that really started to unravel a lot of things for me in ultimately the best way possible. So talk to me a little bit about deciding to embark on this new post-Hollywood life and eventually to pursue a career outside of what you had spent the first part of your life doing. I think being in rehab, it provided a manual that I wish we all were given while growing up.

42:57Alyson Stoner:And maybe some of our families taught skills around emotion regulation and communication. No one even had those words when I was growing up. I feel like this is still a new concept. Right. So I received a manual for how the mind and body work. And then I received personalized care to be able to apply these concepts to my daily life. Things like understanding and recognizing cognitive distortions, when I slip into black and white thinking or catastrophic thinking. Things like body image, realizing, oh, what I think I'm perceiving may not actually match what's really going on for a variety of reasons.

43:36Alyson Stoner:Things like communication skills when you need to ask for help, but you're not used to ever, ever, ever letting anyone know that you might need the smallest bit of assistance with anything. So leaving rehab, what a transition. You feel like you were in the haven where you could thrive and you're like, uh-oh, it's time for reality. My mentality toward the industry didn't really change right away. I was expecting to get better in treatment so that I could go back and make the machine run again. But my body told a different story. I was reconnected to the impact that this lifestyle had on my body and my body started resisting.

44:19Alyson Stoner:It resisted this lack of autonomy when auditions came in. And I was like, well, actually, I don't want to play a character who does that. That's not the story I even want in the public sphere. It resisted being a chameleon. Wait, why can't I just wear my own clothes today? How come I have to be another person? It resisted adhering to beauty standards. Like, okay, I just spent so much time unraveling these unhelpful thoughts around diet and fitness. And now you want me to take them up again just so I can book work? It resisted the workaholism. Well, a little less. It loved the workaholism still.

44:54Alyson Stoner:I'm still sorting that one out. But it would be a really long road to integrating what I learned in treatment and how to actually apply it and shift things. But what I will say is that love for psychoeducation and understanding the mind-body connection, that was a through line. So any chance I got to dig deeper into that topic or to learn more, I did. And that eventually would lead to becoming a somatic practitioner and a mental health coordinator and all of these things that, oh, feels so nice to say out loud and register in my body as, ah, yes, being an expression of who I authentically am far more than when I tell people like, yeah, I was a kid actor.

45:38Alyson Stoner:My body goes, huh, really? You? Did you choose that? Hmm. I say I'm a somatic practitioner and my body's like, ah, yes, home. So that's been really beautiful. Because you didn't choose it. You can't choose it when you're a kid, right? Yes, you're nailing it. Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about that education piece of it, because I know that you thought about going back to school, but the onset education piece of it made that complicated. How did you find these other courses and certifications to educate yourself? Well, it was really hard for me to stomach that I didn't have any degrees, any evidence, sheets of paper proving that I was educated on anything.

46:22Alyson Stoner:And yet I was actively studying and training. And I thought, okay, I need to, for the sake of pursuing a new professional path, I'm going to need some structure around this education. And so I tried a lot of things, a lot of trial and error, but eventually came across specific programs, came across, I actively researched for a long time, specific programs that covered a lot of different topics that felt like it would allow me to create this composite of skills. And at the time, I wasn't even necessarily thinking about being a practitioner. I just knew that these concepts were valuable to know.

46:58Alyson Stoner:And I already had been instructing and facilitating workshops, let's say like dance workshops or movement workshops for years. And I thought this will actually just help me be more trauma-informed, accessibility-minded, equity-centered in all of my endeavors, including teaching. So I started with trauma-informed somatic movement facilitation, which, you know, identifies how we store stress and emotion in the body and different techniques that can help heal and repair the mind-body connection that can help you learn how to ground, process, express, release, stress, and a variety of other things.

47:34Alyson Stoner:And then I dig in a lot to things related to trauma. So racialized trauma, intergenerational trauma, took several courses on those topics. And then I realized this specific, I guess, emerging field, you could maybe call it interpersonal neurobiology, felt like what Dr. Dan Siegel calls a consilient framework. This framework I could use to learn, going all the way back to the beginning of the interview, a little bit about a lot of things so that I could have a more cross-disciplinary lens when approaching whatever work I got into, that was really helpful in kind of being like an umbrella for me.

48:16Alyson Stoner:And then now, mental health coordination, that's specifically geared toward productions. So I'm able to combine my previous work with my longtime love for the mind-body connection and creating healthier environments for people to thrive. It's so neat what you can do as a mental health coordinator to support a set as well as the audience at home watching. Things like content notes, hello, so that we don't have the horrible spike in people experiencing mental health challenges after watching this program because I didn't know what they were getting into and so many other facets. Definitely recommend looking up associationmhc.com to see what mental health coordinators do.

49:00I mean, it's really remarkable too, just the way that you have developed a toolkit for children in entertainment. Talk to me a little bit more about that work and what that entails.

49:13Alyson Stoner:Yes, Art as Wellbeing Essentials is a digital toolkit designed by a number of mental health experts, child development experts, industry folks, performance artists. And it provides this comprehensive resource where you can watch guided tools and go through guided activities specific to performance-related experiences, like pre - and post-audition rituals for you to get into character but also out of character. Imagine. And things like managing rejection, stage fright, self-comparison when you're in a room full of people who look exactly like you going for the same part, as well as things like developing a public persona and managing brand recognition and how that can be confusing for a young person who's forming their own authentic identity.

50:04Alyson Stoner:So it's got lots of modules with lots of tools and activities. And it also comes with a journal section, and that's designed to help families personalize their game plan for how to approach performing arts activities. Because we want to look at it from a 360 point of view, right? If we're supporting our young one and they adore performing and we want them to be able to do that, we also still have to make sure they are getting an education somewhere, that they've got time to socialize, that they've got these other domains of life being tended to. So it's the resource that we all needed growing up but didn't have.

50:43Alyson Stoner:And frankly, I would have loved if someone else would have built it. But sometimes you got to just do it yourself. And so this team is extraordinary. And thankfully, I had already had several years as a founder of Movement Genius, the mental health company. That model worked for the toolkit. Talk to me about that. So at the height of the pandemic, of course, all of us were inside having to face ourselves and manage what was going on in our minds and bodies without our typical coping strategies and schedules and relationships. And so I did 14 days of live Instagram videos, and I taught different somatic mind-body techniques.

51:23Alyson Stoner:And over 100 ,000 people showed up, which was a signal that, wow, the mental health crisis is real, and we absolutely need to address it. And this is so the time for me to say I'm ready to pivot away from entertainment and follow this path. So we assembled this extraordinary group of therapists and experts across tons of modalities. We designed over 300 guided videos and we shared them on our website and app, which is essentially like Headspace or Calm, but for mental health tools and wellbeing tools. So it's not just meditation. It's also like, okay, how do I shake off the stress? Okay, what can I do at my desk in 10 minutes after that horrible meeting with my boss?

52:08Alyson Stoner:So fast forward after doing the content library plus weekly classes, we recognize, of course, hopefully the world is going to open up again soon. Will this translate to in-person workshops and programming? And now we're five years in and we're in hospitals supporting healthcare workers. We're in universities supporting students. we're working with all kinds of organizations because everyone who has a mind and a body can benefit from these tools and they're very tailored to whatever you're experiencing that's the point like it's not a one-size-fits-all it's what works for you in this moment in this context of your life so that has been a beautiful template and from there i was like okay what if we did this that we made a specific version for the artist experience.

52:59Alyson Stoner:Boom. Artist Wellbeing Essentials Toolkit now available. And when I say boom, it was not that easy. I worked on it for three years, but it is worth every cent and it's what we needed. And I can't wait for more people to have this be just like a commonplace resource. Like, did you get your toolkit? Yeah. You got yours? Yeah. That's the vision. So talk to me about your memoir, which I have right here, semi-well adjusted despite literally everything. I have had a chance to read it. It is incredible, but talk to me a little bit about why you wanted to write it, what the process was like, and what your hopes are for it.

53:39Alyson Stoner:Yes. So I have observed that every couple years, there's a new memoir or documentary or news tabloid about another child star who has followed what I call the toddler to train wreck pipeline. And they're dealing with some kind of really difficult life experiences, health challenges, maybe incarceration, maybe financial exploitation. And y 'all, as someone who lived it on the inside and is now a mental health practitioner, what we haven't done is write the book where you get to really see in vivid detail how the pipeline unfolds and why no one has intervened and prevented this from happening. And so in the memoir, you get very up close and personal with my experiences on all of the sets that we've talked about in our conversation.

54:33Alyson Stoner:And you also hopefully start to clue into these individual, communal, systemic variables that create this industry ecosystem that not only affects the kid on set, but also ends up affecting audiences and society. And so through sharing my story, I hopefully create an environment for us to unpack a lot of the cultural myths that shape all of us, one of them being in the title, what does it mean to be well-adjusted if the society itself is dysfunctional? So it's something where you can show up for the childhood chaos, but stay for the cultural critique. And if you can get to the end, because once you get through the mess, there is a vision on the other side.

55:25Alyson Stoner:I'm living into it right now. And I'm able to speak about, some of the policy work that I'm doing, but also conversations that we can all have together about how we're all navigating things like digital media and social media, dealing with issues of privacy versus visibility versus data tracking, things that once upon a time might have only been related to public figures or entertainers. And now it's actually like a common experience for anyone with a Wi-Fi connection. So there's a lot in there. Take your time with it. Skip over anything if it's too intense or just is not in service of where you're at in your life, but give it a shot and let me know your thoughts.

56:05Alyson Stoner:I really, really, really want to hear everyone's feedback. I think it's such an important conversation and you have done such an amazing job in the way that you've written it. I mean, it is heavy and it's light and it's thoughtful and it's meaty and there's so much to it. What was the process like for writing? How How long did it take you? What was your experience of it? Woo-wee. So I actually started gathering research in 2018. So it's been seven plus years in the making. Actually writing the manuscript was a little over 12 months. And I brought in, thankfully, a writing supervisor. I don't know what I would have done without her guidance and just having her support to persevere through some of those extra tough chapters.

56:52Alyson Stoner:the wild thing about writing a story about your life is that eventually there are lawyers who come in and have to do a legal review and say can you prove that this happened because if not you can't put it in writing and during the initial legal review i ended up having to go look through documents from my childhood and i realized there was a whole folder i had never seen before with information that I never knew about my childhood. That shifted everything because I then didn't know what story I actually was writing. Did I need to go back and rework everything I thought about my life? And so you'll actually see in the book, there's a time when I have this deep revelation about information.

57:37Alyson Stoner:I will say writing a memoir is not for the faint of heart. I don't wish the process on anyone, but I do wish the outcome for everyone. I do feel a bit more liberated in being able to say, look, I was honest. This is how it happened in my words. Moving forward, there's nothing about my life that I haven't explored at this point. It's emboldening for sure. But I also know truth has consequences. So I'm curious to see what the ripple effect of this book will be, not only for me personally, but also societally. I'm hoping that people read it and we actually graduate beyond some of the typical conversations we have about Hollywood.

58:17Alyson Stoner:I think we're ready to reckon with systems. We're ready to talk about things plainly, call things out for what they are. And I think we can have a much more interesting media landscape, more fulfilling media landscape for audiences at home and the performers and all the creatives involved. But we have to be willing to not be so easily pleased by the next sensational headline. Like y 'all, when you read the book, hopefully the parts that you think are going to be dramatic are not even the most interesting aspects of the book. I'm ready to graduate and I'm ready for society to graduate as well. It does feel like there is to a degree an evolution of the way that we talk about women and how we talk about people and how we talk about performers and how we talk about public figures and, you know, just seeing like what the discourse has been on everyone from Monica Lewinsky to Britney Spears as someone who has watched the way that we dissect people in the public eye over the last 40 plus years.

59:25I have seen it start to shift. It's not happening as quickly as we would like. But I think that for every honest conversation, an honest piece of work like that you have put out, it just keeps pushing the dial in the right direction. I think that is ultimately so valuable and helpful. Because you're right, this is no longer just folks who've gone through the Disney machine in this world of social media. It's just a whole new ballgame. And now hopefully we will judge folks a little bit less.

1:00:02Alyson Stoner:You summarized it so beautifully that in some ways, as we all get a taste of that medicine, we realize, oh, we don't like being talked about in this way in the comments. We don't like to have direct messages from strangers or bots. We don't love the editing apps and filters that we feel forced to use. We don't like trying to start a small business and having to use trending audio just to get visibility online, as it hits home, I think it is often easier for someone to then begin empathizing and sympathizing. So I do hope that it does spark personal reflection and that we don't lose sight of the fact that children are caught in the crosshairs of the public eye and profit-driven tech companies, for example, and power.

1:00:56Alyson Stoner:And in it, they often don't have any agency or very few legal rights and protections in digital spaces. So exercise caution, not only for your own wellbeing, but also for the young ones in your lives. And it's not a judgment, it's more so a deep invitation. In writing this book, I got to learn so much about platforms and attention fracking and digital privacy and AI. And I'm still learning and it has fundamentally shifted how I approach my interactions online. I would highly recommend that y 'all do not post anything unnecessarily online that can be forever tracked and used against you for advertising and profiling and all of these other things.

1:01:43Alyson Stoner:It's such a time. It's a confusing thing to navigate. And none of us were given the digital literacy manual, just like the kids on camera weren't given theirs. So we can together educate each other and have these important conversations. So one of the things that we like to talk about on this podcast is mistakes because we all make them and we don't always talk about them. And I think it's important to show folks that you can go through something really rough and still come out the other side of it and you can learn something from it and that we shouldn't be afraid of mistakes. So with that in mind, can you tell me about a mistake that you've made at any point in your career and what you've learned from it?

1:02:29Alyson Stoner:In the spirit of transparency, as a first-time founder of a company, I made the mistake of using the entertainment blueprint that I had inherited as a business model for the company. Doing a lot of unpaid labor as a creative is the norm in the industry. And I often don't get paid or I even have to pay money out of my own pocket. I literally pay people money so that I can work more. It's silly. And with my company, I was so nervous about not having enough money coming in or will we get the investors and what's our burn rate and all of the different details of operationalizing something. And so I chose not to pay myself.

1:03:16Alyson Stoner:My thought at the time was, well, I've got a lot of other jobs that I can lean on even doing that. And then I had less time to actually invest in the business because I had to keep up a bunch of other jobs. But my heart was in the impact-driven place of being able to say, okay, we can immediately invest all of the funds into these programs that are in service of people's well-being. Well, yes, I now know that never paying myself is not the answer because eventually my lights will be shut off and I won't be able to pay my rent. So if I could do it all over again, I would make sure, even if it was a modest rate, that I didn't overlook my own basic needs to show up as founder and CEO of a company.

1:04:06I understand. I bootstrapped my company for a long time. It was extremely tough. And I know we didn't pay ourselves for a long time. I think that young people in particular, especially when you're starting something new, don't always feel like they have, or at least I didn't feel like I had the authority or the gravitas to say like, no one else is working for free. I think sweat equity is important. You do certain things, you make sacrifices to get things off the ground. But ultimately, like you still have to take care of yourself. And you only have to learn that lesson once, I think, generally speaking.

1:04:48Right. So a lot of the folks who listen to this podcast are in their first lives. They are interested in making some sort of career pivot or switch, whether that's in the same industry or in a totally different industry, but they're scared. As someone who has made an incredible pivot, and I realize this is a harder question because you didn't make the choice in the first place for that first career. But what advice would you give someone who's thinking about doing something new, but is nervous about making that leap?

1:05:26Alyson Stoner:One of the hardest things up front was just to believe that anything else was actually possible for me. I knew that other people pulled it off somehow, but I didn't see how to get from A to B. So being willing to open your mind, to be willing to know that it is possible. And this is all within the context of the real lived experiences, circumstances, barriers, challenges that do exist. So this is not the Pollyanna version. This is the let's look at real factors in your life and figure out how can we create wiggle room a little bit here, a little bit there to try something new, to make a decision just a little differently.

1:06:08Alyson Stoner:to start this chain reaction of being able to be in a different position than you are if you just stay exactly in the pattern of what you're doing currently. So I think it's easy in the span of a conversation to be like, wow, Allison went from this career and then just woke up and had a company. Listen, this has been an eight to 10 year journey of a lot of small steps, not even steps that I really, I didn't even know where some of them were leading. Some of it was kind of following a prompting, knowing that it seemed in alignment with my values and that was enough. Some of it was now I actually need a job somewhere.

1:06:52Alyson Stoner:So I just got to make ends meet. It's a mix of practical, the vision that you have and the skills that you currently have, the skills that you need to build. It's all of it, and it happens in lots of, at least in my case, little steps, daily decisions. And so I would invite you to reflect on what that little step or that next step might be. And I'll add to that, my friend Joan P. Ball has a book called Stop, Ask, Explore. I love the vision that she paints on the topic of purpose. She says, oftentimes in the West, we're presented with this idea of a North Star. And so you're supposed to pick where you want to go and then reverse engineer it and know what your next step is.

1:07:39Alyson Stoner:For a lot of us, including myself, purpose looks a lot more like a constellation of possibilities and things that require you to dip your toes into something over here, dip your toes into something over there. and letting takeaways emerge from those experiences that help guide the decision-making process to whatever you do next. And so in my case, it wasn't a direct line to now being in meetings with digital policymakers. I didn't even know how policy was made. And yet some of the experiences leading up to this were taking the mental health certification courses, learning how to produce content on my own so that I could release a podcast to talk about topics, understanding analytics and marketing for my business, being a founder in an accelerator program where everyone else already knew what the heck it meant to run a business.

1:08:35Alyson Stoner:And I literally was Googling every term and every meeting like, I don't know. So I was bouncing around for a while, but just trying to do my best with what I knew at the time and to make a decision that at least is a step in a direction. Inertia can be a really interesting force when you've kind of just been feeling stuck or trapped or you're not sure where to go. Sometimes it's just like no matter how small that step is, take a step, bounce around a few stars, let it start painting the constellation of that sense of purpose for your future. So my last question is also my favorite one, which is if you could go back in time and And speak with your younger self and give your younger self some advice.

1:09:23What would you say?

1:09:25Alyson Stoner:Oh, young Allison doesn't need advice. Young Allison needs an emotionally attuned adult who is there to listen. Young Allison needs someone who's there to protect them from harm. Allison needs time on the playground. Allison doesn't need advice. so I would just be there be present and attuned and cheering little Allison on in whatever direction they chose to go I love that well Allison thank you so much this has been such a pleasure congratulations on the book and thank you so much for taking the time to walk us through your story and to share it thank you thanks for having me

1:10:15That was entertainer, author, and the founder and CEO of Movement Genius, Alison Stoner. For more inspiring interviews with people like Alison, head on over to secondlifepod.com, where we have so many more for you to peruse. If you like today's show, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review us. we love seeing you spread the word on social and now you can tag us in your posts we are at second life pod on instagram twitter and facebook we always want to know who you're interested in hearing from on the show so send in your requests to hello at second life pod.com or you can dm us on instagram i'm at hillary kerr the show is at second life pod our dms are always Open.

1:11:04I'm Hilary Kerr, and you've been listening to Second Life. This episode was produced by Hilary Kerr, Summer Hammeris, and Natalie Thurman. Our production assistant is Raven Yamamoto. Our editor is Natalia Perez. Our audio engineers are at Treehouse Recording in Los Angeles, California, and our music is by Jonathan Leahy.

1:11:34Thank you.