Getting Unstuck (with author Bonnie Wan)

0:02Don't hold anything too tightly. Just wish for it, want it, let it come from the intention of real truth for you, and then let it go. For me, our soul is like, it's unbound. It's limitless. But we will use words to limit ourselves. When people stop believing that somebody's got your back or Superman's coming, we turn to ourselves. And that's where you become empowered. Courageous participation attracts positive things.

1:00I deeply admire her and the way she keeps her heart open to the world. Together, we believe that engaging in open-minded, honest, and sometimes difficult conversations has the power to change our lives. All right, over to Cleo. My guest today is Bonnie Wan. Bonnie is the author and creator of The Life Brief. Today, we sat down and talked about how her background as a brand strategist in advertising was the force behind The Life Brief. which is a process that Bonnie created to help people reimagine their lives and get clear on what they really want. We talked about her own journey to creating the life brief and then we got into how to apply the process to different areas of our lives including marriage, parenting, work, and more.

1:48The first step says Bonnie is getting messy and dumping out your uncensored thoughts in order to unearth your deepest truths. The things we're afraid to say or what we've pushed so far down that we've forgotten. As I mentioned at the end of our conversation today, if you're looking for a group of people to do the life brief with, email me, cleo at cleoway.com. I would love to help connect you to each other. All right, let's get to my conversation with Bonnie Wong.

2:21Bonnie, when did you speak at Goop? Oh, wow. It was the San Francisco Summit. so whatever year that was it 2019 I believe because it was just before the pandemic wow well this book is so cool but I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed it because I love the format because I feel that there's something for someone no matter what the current pace of their life is. So whether you only have a minute of the day to kind of stay or find yourself in the present moment to have a space to dream or set goals or remind yourself the value of living your life and all the things that you want, whether you have a minute for like a single mantra from this book, or you have an hour to really go into the prompts and, and, and really do the workbook aspect of this.

3:21It's something you really get to live with. And I just loved it. So I loved that so much because I felt that it's actually helpful for the modern person because our days look so different. Thank you for spotlighting that. That was very intentional because I work in my business. It's always running at the speed of culture, the speed of business. and I wanted to make this not only accessible and inviting, but irresistible and inexcusable. Hmm. That is so beautiful. Okay. So tell me about, since you've just mentioned it, for anyone who does not know what you do when you say that in your business, can you tell our goop, peeps, what are you up to all day?

4:07Well, my job for the last three decades has been finding meaning in messiness. So I'm a brand strategist in advertising. So anyone who's not in that space, my job is to help companies get really clear about what their essence is so that they can innovate and create from that place of distinction and clarity. and the tool that we use as strategists is what's called a creative brief and right there in that name is its essence it's meant to be brief we say sharp and sticky because we're distilling a brand often into one word three words one single strategy and how we express it is as important as getting clear about what it means.

5:05I think one of the coolest things about whether it's podcasting or social media is that, you know, I grew up going to a library to find out anything that someone did for a job. So there could be someone out there who's just never even heard the last five sentences that you said or heard of it in that way. And so if this is someone's first time today, can you tell me a little bit about your journey in creating this process called the life brief and how it has kind of helped you to personally find your way. I know that it's something that you kind of, you were your own Guinea pig in a way. And by the way, that's why the book is good because usually I always say that about any, everything I write, I write for myself.

5:48I'm not someone who hypothetically solves a problem for someone. I heard the problem in the living room with my friends. I heard myself have the problem. It's advice I would give my mom. It's advice I would give my best friend and myself. And so can you kind of take me through the process of not only writing this, but you know, how you, how it's helped you personally and maybe your close friends. Yeah. The whole idea came about because I was in a moment of dark despair about my own life. And And it was a glee time. I call it the dark chapter of my marriage. You know, we had three kids under the age of five.

6:29We now have four. Oh, my God. Yeah, it was nuts. I was the sole breadwinner. I was the 24-hour restaurant. I was the playdate planner, the grocery shopper, the meal, the housekeeper, the cook, all of it. and it felt insane. And I was commuting a lot for work and I felt I was doing the unfair share of the household. And now to be really empathetic to my husband, he just didn't know how to satisfy me. I was critical. We were comparing, we were debating, negotiating, arguing. It just felt really bleak to me. And at the lowest point in that time, I guess my rock bottom, it was either we were going to separate in my mind or I was going to do something else.

7:30And the alternative was I turned to my reflexes as a strategist, which is, okay, I'm going to write this out. Because as strategists, we collect data, we collect research, and the data was going come from me this time. And I allowed myself to just dump in writing in notebooks and write freely from a place of naked honesty around the question, what do I want? Not what does my husband expect? What do my parents want? What do my children need? It was purely from the center of my own essence of what do I want in this moment really? And as I dumped it out, it was interesting because the story that was playing in my head was not the story that was coming out through the pen in the notebook.

8:24So what was the story? Well, the story in my head was that my husband was the problem. I was with the wrong person. He was not the right partner for holding this big life we had created. But on the page, what I noticed was everything I was writing had to do with time. And that was my first aha in looking at and rereading and reviewing all of my scrappy notes was that I had a bad relationship with time. I was spreading myself thin. I was saying yes to too many things that didn't matter. And that left me with no energy or time for the things that did for the people that did, including him. And so that first realization and epiphany automatically shifted where I turned my attention.

9:18And that's the beauty of what I've learned in this practice is when you get insight and as strategists, you get insight and suddenly you aim your attention differently into a different path of possibility. And that's exactly what happened there. And I started writing more to get to that again, the answer, what do I want? And everything shifted and became about how I wanted to change my time and attention and what I wanted to say yes to and what I want to say no to. And that created an opening that turned that really dark moment of despair into a moment of hope. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday.

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10:45Just go to Indeed.com slash listen right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash listen. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. And so if you're going between yeses and no's, how do you then organize your yeses? You know, it's interesting as Gloria Steinem was once asked, you know, there's so many problems in the world. How do you prioritize? And she's like, you don't. you just go towards what you know you can do and you do it. And I, and while I'm not saying as I have two kids, two small kids, and I don't think that that is possible in that way, but I often wonder about how we harmonize these yeses rather than trying to balance these yeses.

11:30Cause there's, I think there's a lot of time lost in shame and beating up on or feeling bad about or complaining or this and that. So if we put even all of that waste of time in our nose, then what is the org of our yeses? What does that look like? Well, that judgment, first of all, is so draining. It just takes it all out of you. So yes, I have three buckets of time. There's the sacred time, the thing that's most essential to the thing I want. So if I'm looking at that first life brief that we created, it was all about time and the name of that brief because a life brief has five or less, whatever you, you know, no hard rules, but five declarative statements where you end with an exclamation.

12:22You have a feeling that this is what I want. It's sacred. It's non-negotiable. It gives you this sense of goosebumps or fire in the belly. It's activating. When you read these sentences back to yourself, you think, yes, yes, that is what I want. So when you get to that place, then you name it. And for us, that first brief was take our time. And so on one level, it meant slow it down. On another level, take our time meant take control of it again. And then that just became an automatic filter for my day. So the bucket one is sacred, non-negotiable, fits right into that filter or brief of taking our time.

13:10And then there's what I call housekeeping time, stuff that I just got to show up for. It's just the responsibility of life. I got to do the groceries. I got to quit the meal. We got to change the diapers. This is not time or responsibilities to have feelings about. We just go do it. And then we had the bucket of distractions, drama, all the things that get in the way. They're the nuisance. They're the, you know, we think they might matter if we don't have a clear brief. If we don't have clarity, those things might deceivingly seem important. When you have clarity, you automatically say, oh, yeah, that doesn't fit.

13:53It's neither housekeeping or secret. Hmm. It's I'm sure like so many of the listeners right now, we're going through our own buckets and being like, hmm, that's not sacred. Or, yeah, I have a I call it those things, low stakes productivity. Love that. cleaning out the garage and because there is something that I think helps keep your flow going when you, if you're somebody who, you know, I, I'm a recovering kind of type, a doer of everything. Me too. I'm a retired perfectionist. Yes. And so in that, I, I do find flow in feeling like I've, you know, clear what I would say, clearing the runway for, because I have always been the person who I can't write if I know there's dishes in my sink.

14:48Like, you know, there are just certain things you have where you just know that you need to feel that you could set the space to be able to drop into whatever your zone is. And so I love that kind of, whether it's the groceries or whether it's making the list, the packing list for the kids or whatever, because it's that like kind of low stakes flow mode, which I think staying in it helps you to create the space to drop into the bigger kind of. Exactly. I call them conditions, but I love low stakes flow because you already feel that sense of ease. And I call it just making sure that you understand yourself and what you need to be productive, effective, creative, alive.

15:34And those dishes in the sink go against that. So let's get rid of them. What do you recommend for the people who are trying to figure out what are those things that make you feel productive and alive? Are there questions you feel that, or were there any prompts for you that day on the page? I mean, your book, it has so many prompts and I'm sure that your answer to my question is just that they should read your book and do your prompts. But were there prompts you found yourself answer, you know, kind of subconsciously giving yourself and answering on the page that day? When time came out as the clear theme and the idea, I started just filtering through my mind very quickly.

16:16When do I feel rich in time? And when do I feel depleted in time? So part of the practice of doing this is a practice of curiosity. So one insight leads to more questions. And those questions unpack more insights. And then that layered effect is like peeling back an onion till you get to the core. And so the book acts as a trainer and a toolbox of curiosity to help come at your life and how you examine your life in really fun, irresistible, low stakes ways that hopefully unlock new answers and new perspectives. Was there a light bulb moment you had when you realized, I think this will work for someone besides me?

17:14Yes. You know, my journey to the book is maybe unique. I meet a lot of authors now who had the idea, they wrote the book, and now they teach it. But this one started in my life, and then I was asked to teach it. And then over 14 years, I taught it to lots of different people and I applied it to lots of different parts of my life. So now I have a life brief for leadership at my agency. I have a life brief for parenting. I have a wealth brief. I have obviously a marriage brief. I have a self brief. And I engage in it. I call it a practice because it applies to so many different things. And so when I started teaching it and having taught it over 14 years, I've just naturally been gifted so many different examples and different ways it's worked for other people.

18:06So I call it not only time tested, it's life tested. And that allowed me when the invitation came to write the book, I just had a lot to work with. what are some of the biggest questions people have asked you or the most common questions people have asked you in i'd say maybe for our listeners like you're in the work brief and in the marriage brief in the work well work and marriage have a shared connection people always think they only have two choices when it comes to work or their relationship. Do I stay or do I leave? Is it a yes or a no? It's always kind of this limited binary sense. And for me, I've had two longstanding relationships in my life.

19:02I've been married for 23 years and I've been at my company, my agency for 25 years. So when I look at those two relationships, I don't see one long continuum. I see lots of different chapters. And I could probably go through and name all those chapters. And I could have written probably a brief for each one of those chapters. And so the common question is always, where do I start? How do I start to figure out what I want? And how do I get beyond the stay or go set of choices? What is kind of sticking out to me is you being a retired perfectionist, writing a book about the mess. Because I didn't count how many times you see the word mess in this book, but I'd say that if somebody counted the word mess in your book, it'd be comparable to the amount of times they see the word love in one of my books.

20:05And so to be this kind of leader in the mess. And when I first opened the book, I remember thinking, oh, wow, this reminds me of, and I've done this ever. My mom actually reminded me that I've done it since I was a little girl, but I still do it to this day, which is I, again, my low stakes productivity. I love cleaning out my closet and I have to take everything out and put it on the floor. And I have to then go one by one and put everything back in its place. Everything has to come out of the drawers and there has to be a pile where everything is for an entirely new way for me to organize and understand what's going on.

20:41And when I first started your book and I, you know, could just kind of read the back first, and then I was kind of going through it. And then before I dove in, I was like, this lady is asking us to take everything out. I love hearing one, your experience of the book. Thank you for sharing that. But I was like that as a kid too. I had this little drawer on my desk that I was obsessed with in my little white, I don't know, shiny patent desk. And it was full of Sanrio products, the Hello Kitty, My Melody, Tiny. And I would do exactly what you said. Take them all out, rearrange them every day. Every day was so gratifying.

21:26But yes, this is what getting messy is all about. So there's two, three parts of the book, getting messy so that you can get clear and then you get active. And the best part is getting active becomes automatic once you get clear. But I meet so many women in particular who are afraid of getting messy. Where do you feel like you're, you made your first big mess? Was it that day on the page? because it was just, you just were kind of emptying your own inner junk drawer onto the page? Yeah. And then you kind of took it and made it in and created an org system for everything you let out? I'm a reluctant writer.

22:05So that day, that night, allowing everything to come out nakedly, messily. And it was, it was scribbly. It was wet because I was crying. I didn't, I am a Virgo too. Me too. September 13th. Oh, September 22nd. So I like things neat and organized and it feeds that perfectionist tendency. But this time it was raw. It was messy. It had scribbles. I hate scribbles. I like highlights. I like to be super neat in my journal, but that day it was rough and I allowed it to be. And it felt freeing. It feels like when I go out in the rain with my kids and it's muddy and I just let go. It doesn't happen a lot, but I'll just let them get dirty and let the dog get in there and try to hold back from thinking about the paw prints on the kitchen floor and the shower and blah, blah, blah.

23:06And that's the act of getting messy. And you have to let it all out. And I invited in writing. If you want to draw, people have sent me their visual briefs and that's great too. But when we get it out parked somewhere on a page, we suddenly create the distance, the emotional distance for us to look at it, examine it and bring curiosity into it. But when it's swirling in our heads, it creates its own patterns and loops and it takes up the space. And so that looping thought that my husband is the problem, my husband is the problem, it didn't create any space for other possibilities. And I couldn't look at it without it being attached to the emotions it triggered.

23:51But once I got it on the page, suddenly I could go, oh, wait, what? What's this here? Or, oh, that's not really important. But this is interesting. Now let's dig deeper in it. In the book, I quote a poet, writer, someone who used to be my neighbor, Roger Hausden, and he says, writing rearranges the furniture of our minds. And it does. It's so beautifully said. When we put it out there, suddenly you're seeing things in new orchestration, new arrangements. And it becomes clay for you to play with and work with. Well, what's really interesting is I'm always asked, you know, how do I, you know, get through a hard time or, you know, if someone's struggling and I always say, whether you think of yourself as a writer or not, right, so that you can see the stories you're telling yourself and create the distinction between what is real and what is true.

24:53Yes. Yes. And, and usually if you, if you kind of can read your story rather than have it kind of cover you, you get to go from this place of my friend, Dr. Ellen said this to me one day, she was talking about one of her most profound moments was the shift between, will we get through this to how do we get through this? Because in your head, it's always, will we, and that's what you were saying about, do I stay, do I leave? We're only in these binaries and we're not in this kind of the more abstract question. And it's interesting because I was talking to Simon, my partner, the other day about something else completely unrelated to this, but he's saying, well, you know, I see both sides of something.

25:41And I was like, we have to stop saying both sides, all sides, because everything has 30 different, probably a million different ways to see, understand and feel in these kind of giant ideas. And that is, I think, kind of questioning something, you know, because I think we can question from judgment and we can question from curiosity. And I think sometimes we don't know when we're doing the one, we think it's curiosity and it's actually judgment and one yields nothing but a multitude of solutions. And one actually only has someone being bad and someone being good and some or someone being there and someone being left?

26:16Yeah, judgment really has limitations, right? You always want an enemy or someone, the bad or the good. Curiosity, I think, can be expansive in one realm or it can be deepening and peeling, peeling back those layers in the onion again. So it really depends on where you aim it. And what I love about writing is you can write in different ways. There's exploratory writing, which is what we're talking about, right? Let the pen lead, dump it out, be completely free. And then there's committed writing where you're being very choiceful about the words and structuring those sentences. And that's part two in Get Clear.

27:07Now we're distilling, sorting, eliminating, and then expressing with evocative language, juicy language, bolder language. And that's where we get to play with the act of expression, moving writing into feeling, and then being committed, committing to words. And that's really giving ourselves process too, which is, What I felt very grateful for and how this book is written, because I think a lot of us move through the world of that process. You know, whenever I'm working with anyone on a project or hiring in any way, something I feel that I'm always the most clear on is what is your process? What is what needs to be the shared process?

27:56And what is my process? You know, what type of listener are you? Are you listening to feel that you're completely understanding the goal or are you listening to feel your place in the goal? Because that's two different processes. And a lot of the time, I think especially in today's culture, because we think that things move so quickly without process because we see, you know, finish lines are ultimately these celebratory moments. So they're more on the highlights and what we see and or we see the day that something has started. But there's not really, to me, as much talk and process. And I think if there is, sometimes it is in a workspace of being like, okay, step one, step two, da-da-da.

28:39But this idea that you holistically put a processing kind of mechanism on your life, I found, to be something I don't think people are expressing in the way that you are talking about it in quite such a clear way. Well, I love what your observation is. And it's so true in a culture, we always just skip to the outcome, the win. Yeah. And then we rewrite the story of how it got there to be overly simplified. Yeah. And it feels so easy. But how did the rest of us do it? And I was trying to occupy that middle space. I have this brilliant editor. Thank you, Leah Miller, who kept saying to me, you do your strategy work so intuitively, but your job in writing the book is to walk the blind horse down the mountain to get to water with just your words.

29:32So you have to unpack every nuance of how you move through this. And I put over that, the filter of it has to be inexcusable. It has to be in such small doses that anyone suffering from the busy trap or cultural ADD or, you know, just the resistance can come in and dip their toes into it and still get something rich and meaningful. How do you think the everyday person like myself is supposed to get to our rich time with our phones and our hands all the time? Well, first of all, I don't think you're every day at all. Because that's what I mean. I'm like, oh, everyone in my life, I just am like, we got to, like, how do we, you know, what is the balance?

30:30I think it gets so restrictive. And it is such a block. I mean, the cultural ADD is fed by this idea that there is, you know, this constant flow of stimulus in the palm of our hands that is also designed to addict us. You know, I mean, it's designed by people who design lottery and slot machines in Vegas. So what the heck? I hear you. I mean, I work in advertising, right? I invite practice. I call it a practice for a reason because it gets easier the more you do it. So it's really about cultivating habits in small slivers of time. And it is how I was able to write a book in a pandemic with four kids and leading an agency.

31:21It was in the smallest slivers of time. Now, some people write books in six months. It took me three and a half years. and luckily I had a team that allowed me to do it in those small slivers of time, but the tiniest yet consistent and continuous actions can breed tremendous outcomes. So again, I try to break it down for the reader to make it inexcusable and hopefully irresistible. So I say, if you don't have 10 minutes to do a brain dump, which is a daily rewriting exercise, then make it five. You don't have five minutes? Then make it three. And what I find is most people, they'll give themselves three minutes or five minutes and 10 minutes and they'll end up doing a half an hour because something flows.

32:07And some days it doesn't flow. I have a great story in the book, which I love. It is a writer who was daunted by the idea of writing her novel. And so the lowest stakes commitment she made to herself on the daily was to just open her her manuscript. She made it that easy. And some days when she opened it, she wrote a sentence. Some days she didn't write at all. And then some days she wrote a thousand words. And within a month, just by opening it each day, she got further. She was shocked by how far she got. So again, I'm trying to make it so tiny, so small that it's inexcusable. Someone said to me one day that they were like, I can't, I want to do yoga every day and I just can't do it.