 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Hello, welcome to another episode of Out of the Comfort Zone on Think Tech on Spectrum OC 16. I'm your host, Arby Kelly, and today I'm very excited to introduce you to someone who is actually a personal coach of mine and a very dear friend. I'd like to introduce you to Debbie Burns, the head unicorn at Debbie Burns LLC. So all right, are you popping up Debbie? Are you there? I am so here. Yay! Hi there. It's good to see you. I'm so excited you're on the show today. Me too. You're one of my favorites to come talk to, so thanks for inviting me back. Well, thank you. I'm really happy you're here. And I'm wondering if you can explain to our viewers who haven't seen you on the show before, what exactly do you do? I'm an archeologist, and what that is is I help people to understand the deeper call inside of them and to believe in themselves and this mission that they have on this earth so strongly that the rest of the world can't help but believe in them too. And that's really powerful. I know, especially for our viewers, some of you may be thinking, wow, I'd love to believe in myself so strongly that the rest of the world couldn't help but believe it too. So I'm curious, Debbie, can you tell us a little more about this process for our viewers? Absolutely. I think it starts with having communities, like the first place that we need to go when we're starting to believe in ourselves is to surround ourselves with people who can hold that space for us as we grow and as we develop. And then the next step in that is courage. And because those two are so linked together, I thought it was super, super important that we had a deeper conversation about that, which is why I wrote the book, The Path to Courage, seven steps to following your soul song and living your happily epic after. Because stepping into who we are is actually quite terrifying. I think from the time that we're little, I mean, not that they mean to, but parents, culture, society, they tend to tell us to quiet down our light and don't be so loud and don't do it like that and why are you doing it like that? And it's very interesting that usually between the ages of 10 and 12, we've already shut off this part of us that is the spark that this world needs, right? And so the courage is so, so important in being able to dive deeper into that and to invite what we already are or who we already are from inside of us and let that shine on the outside of us. And then that continues on a path of expression and fulfillment, leadership and eventually a higher level of belonging. But we've got to come back to that beginning stage of just connecting with people who are willing to hold a space for us and having the courage to hold space for ourselves. And Debbie, that's so powerful. I know for me, you are one of those people who holds that space for me. And looking back, I can see absolutely how by the time I was 13, I had already decided that who I was wasn't OK. And I'd already built up those walls of defense that were hiding my true self from the world. Absolutely. And like I said, it's not that anyone does it on purpose, but we're taught. I feel like most of us, I won't speak for all of us, but I feel like most of us are raised in an environment that keeps us from taking risk. Why do they want us to be quiet so that we don't get in trouble or we don't get hurt or we don't rock the boat or we don't draw too much attention to ourselves? And it's just, it's sad because we're taught to live. And this is why I love your show so much. We're taught to live inside our comfort zone. We're taught to play small. I feel like humans are born with a greatness inside them. I feel like we're born to create and to expand and to add more to the earth, not take away from the earth or from each other. And yet this upbringing teaches us to just be small and silence our voices when I think real living happens outside of the comfort zone. And it is so uncomfortable to be there and to live there. And most of us spend our entire lives trying to avoid it. We get to the edge and then we're like, oh, let's come back. Let's play it safe. But there is not living as it doesn't happen in safety. Living happens in that space outside the comfort zone. It happens in being willing to grow as human beings, which is so natural to us, except until extraneous rules tell us, oh, this isn't OK anymore. Stop growing. Stop being different. Like just be this day. I think it's one of the reasons that society is where we are right now as we spent too long asking people to stay the same or tampering or dampening or dimming light. And it's time. It's time for more light to shine. It's time for people to step in to who they are. Because if we really want a different world, if we really want a place that's more inclusive, more whole, more kind, more humanity, and less division, then we've got to start with stepping into our own, what I call muchness, into our own essence, and then giving permission to others to do the same. Debbie, that is really powerful. And I love the word you used, muchness, like from Alice in Wonderland. And I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share with our audience your story of how you came to muchness. It's a typical, like, right? You grow up, you're taught to go to school, and get a job, and then get married, and have kids. And that was my trajectory. And I was doing a pretty dang good job at it. I graduated out at Torian from my high school of over 1,000. I got a full right scholarship to college. I kind of got lost a little bit in college because I didn't quite know what I was going to do. I found my major by kind of ruling everything out on the planet. Like, I think I was a different major every semester. And then I ended up in English literature and was like, OK, I don't hate it, so let's choose this one. Because my plan in the culture that I was raised, it was to grow up, have kids, get married, and have kids. So I just wanted to be a well-educated mother. So I got my degree, met my husband right before my last year of college. We got married. And I entered into corporate, because that's what you do. You enter into corporate. And I found out very quickly that that is my version of purgatory. If you believe in higher power, and higher power is going to send you somewhere because you were naughty, they would make me a secretary for eternity. And that's not to say that that job isn't important because it absolutely is. But for me living in cubicle land, it was pretty close to a death sentence. But I kept telling myself, it's OK. It's OK. This is what we do. This is what we do. And unfortunately for me and my husband, we weren't able to have kids. So that was my first kind of experience of not being able to check all the boxes, of not being able to keep up on everything everybody else wanted me to be. But I kept telling myself, it's OK. And I kept trying to figure out how to fit and how to live by somebody else's rules. I eventually quit my main corporate job. I was like, oh, I'm going to pull up my sales and see where the wind takes me. I was inspired by actually the head of the department. He had just been hired. He invited everyone in when he got hired to talk to them. And I was like, I thought I'd ask this brilliant question. Well, how did you end up as head of this great department kind of thing? And I was so surprised. I thought there would be a full plan in place, all the steps there. He was like, no, I just put up my sales and watch where the wind takes me. And so I was like, oh, I'm going to do that. So I quit my job. And I accidentally fell back into corporate again. But this time it was at a smaller place. It was a small mom-and-pop credit union where there was only two of us working there. So it was manager-assisted manager. And we were a teller, loan officer, all the in-betweens we handled everything. Again, I was unhappy. But I was trying to please other people. I was trying to play it safe. I was trying to make sure that their needs were met and their happiness was met, even though I was miserable. Until one day, someone came into the credit union and I stepped to the counter and he pulled a gun on me and asked me to give him, didn't ask. He told me to give him all the money in my tail. And it just changed everything for me. Because after that, he told me he was going to kill me. He put me on the floor. And as I lay there with my belly and my hands pressed against the rough Berber carpet of the credit union floor, I heard him closing the door. And we were in like a little office building. So he was like closing the door to our little office. And what I saw, because I couldn't see, but hearing what I saw was going to happen is he was going to close the door, walk back around the teller station and put a bullet in my head. And the last three things that kind of went through my mind before I just went completely numb was, was my life good enough? Does my husband know that I love him? And how the heck am I going to get my credit union manager out of here without her getting shot too? Because she was in the back. So it was just me in the front handling all of this. Well, come to find out, he hadn't stayed. He had closed the door behind him as he left. So not true in the surprise, but I survived. I lived seven weeks later, he came back and did it again because they didn't catch him. And everyone tells you it's like, you're more likely to get struck by lightning than to have, to get robbed twice, let alone to get robbed twice by the same individual. But hello, I got struck by lightning. So he came back, he did it again. And after that, I lost all grasp on the world. Like I didn't believe I was safe anymore. It went back and pulled into some childhood trauma. I ended up with post-medic stress disorder with accompanying friends of severe anxiety, acute depression, suicidality, all of those things. I kept trying, but still are we, I kept trying to work at this location, kept trying to prove myself to people until about five months later, I finally quit because I just couldn't keep going into work because every day when I drove into work, my husband driving me, I would get flashbacks of what happened with this guy and I got flashbacks of the things that happened when I was younger and it just was traumatizing me over and over and over again. And it was funny because I quit, funny, interesting, not funny, ha ha. I quit and then the very next month was my first interaction with trying to commit suicide. That was it. And that led into the dark downward spiral that eventually a little over a year later landed me in a hospital. We finally got to a place where I couldn't keep myself safe anymore. I couldn't promise my husband that I would stay on this planet. And so we decided to commit me and I ended up in a psychiatric institute for people with post-medic stress disorder, which was such a blessing. I didn't feel like it at the time because you're like, I'm committing myself. So the quote, unquote, uni van, what's wrong with me? I'm completely broken. There's nothing left for me. And so I went into this hospital but I'm so grateful for that experience because it was there. It was there that it was first brought up to me that my tension wasn't because someone put a gun to me and threatened to kill me. My tension was because I was still trying to live by other people's rules and was failing every single day. As long as I kept comparing myself to their checklist, I was failing. And if I was failing, what was the point in me? Why should I even be here? And so they helped me see that. And then they gave me the greatest gift I think I've ever been given or one of the greatest gifts. I don't want to say the greatest. A social worker in the hospital one day brought me into her office, had me turn the page after we discussed the rules I'd been living by. She goes, now it's your turn. At the top of the page, she had me write the rules that I will live by. And I was so moved and dumbfounded at the fact that I could pick my own rules. I remember looking at her and being like, wait, wait, wait, I get to pick my own rules? Like that's a thing? And she said yes. And I still have the paper over here in my bookcase. And it's at the top, number one, live by your own set of rules. And that is where I started going through all of the pieces. Cause what it felt like if someone had shattered the pane of glass that was me and that I thought was me and then it was up to me to go through each of those pieces and go, how do I feel about this? Do I like this? Do I want to keep this? Do I believe this? And I started separating into things that I wanted to and things that I didn't want anymore. And then that gray in the middle of like, I'm not sure what to do with you yet. So I'm just going to put you back in the pile and take a different piece. And that was my journey. I don't think that has to be everybody's journey. Mine's really, really extreme. But that was the moment that or that was the chain of events that led me to a place that said, I cannot live as anybody else anymore. I cannot live with their masks and their expectations and their to-do list. It has to be about me and about what I want to accomplish in this life. And then that was a whole journey out of that, like baby steps. I don't expect anyone to throw it all away and just like become a different person, right? That's what we're talking about. But it's taking these steps to go, what do I really want? What's in alignment with me? What do I really believe? What really resonates with me? And can I have the courage to choose that today? Just that one thing. Can I choose it today? Can I live it today and see how it feels, right? See if I like it. And if I do, I'm going to keep it and can I choose the next thing tomorrow? And that was my path. My path to understanding what courage looked like for me because it wasn't a life without fear. I get really, really tired of people who are like, oh, be fearless. And it's like, no fear, I'm not lying. So let's keep fear, because there's no really getting rid of it. We're human, it's part of our biological response system. But let's change the relationship with fear. Let's stop allowing fear to drive. Let's stop allowing fear to make the decisions. Let's stop allowing fear to like put our makeup on and get dressed in the morning, right? Let's put fear in the back seat and let's take control of the wheel because no matter what happens, when we take the power and it's our choice, the outcome, regardless of what it is, is more powerful and impactful because it was ours, not because it was somebody else's. That is incredible, Debbie. And I'm certain some of our audience is actually in tears right now. And when we get back in just a minute audience, we will be right back. We're going to be talking more with Debbie about some of the strategies that she can give you to help you find your own path to courage. And we'll see you in a minute. I'm Ethan Allen, host of Likeable Science on Think Tech Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., I hope you'll join me for Likeable Science where we'll dig into science, dig into the meat of science, dig into the joy and delight of science. We'll discover why science is indeed fun, why science is interesting, why people should care about science and care about the research that's being done out there. It's all great, it's all entertaining, it's all educational, so I hope you'll join me for Likeable Science. Hi, I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark and every Monday at one o'clock, I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Manoa. And at that program, we bring to you a whole range of new scientific results from the university, ranging from everything from exploring the solar system to looking at the earth from space, going underwater, talking about earthquakes and volcanoes and other things which have a direct relevance, not only to Hawaii, but also to our economy. So please try and join me one o'clock on a Monday afternoon to Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Manoa and see you then. Welcome back to Out of the Comfort Zone on Think Tech on Spectrum OC16. I hope you enjoyed that brief commercial break, but I am here with fabulous, inspirational head unicorn Debbie Burns, who has been telling us all about her story and her path to courage. And if you didn't go into tears over the commercial break, well, there's still hope for you yet. But Debbie, I was hoping you'd be able to share with us some of the steps that you help your clients take when they're finding their path to courage and maybe some of the stories. Absolutely. I think one of the major steps, I wanna cover a couple, if we can. The book outlines seven steps. We don't have the time to go to all of them today. But the first one I want you to look at is seeing through your fear. So, so important. Now, what do I mean by that? Fear shows up in our lives and it has a story to tell. And it usually reaches back into our path and it says, here's all the evidence of why what I'm telling you is true. But below that fear is usually a deeper concern or a deeper issue going on. We might be like, oh, I'm afraid of showing up as myself because people will make fun of me. If we look deeper than that, we're gonna find a pain or a hurt point that says actually what I'm afraid of is that people won't love me or that somehow I won't belong. And if we can see through the fear to the issues beneath it, then we can start feeling the fear from the inside out. Instead of fighting fear all the time, it's like, okay, thank you fear. Thanks for telling the story, I appreciate you. Now step to the side because what I really need to talk about or what I really need to look at for myself is the fact that I'm afraid that if I show up as me, people won't love me. Because then we can start going to our brain and asking for evidence that shows and proves that we can be ourselves and people will love us. But as long as I keep going after this, oh, people are gonna make fun of me, it won't heal the fear. It'll give us a quick band-aid, but then the next time it comes up, we're dealing with the same thing over and over and over again. So really, I'd encourage people to try and see through their fear, find one level deeper or five level deepers or if you're working with me, we're gonna level 100, no, just kidding. We go to where it's comfortable for you but we try to go deep fast because what I know is that if we can get to the root of the issue and heal it, not judge it, not hate it, not beat it up, but to heal it and to love it and to support that issue, then I know that fear becomes easier to manage out here in our life. And stepping into our muchness becomes easier because now it's not about whether or not people love us because the truth is the only one that needs to love us is here, is ourselves. And if we can heal this relationship between me, myself, and I, we are empowered to do so many great things, so, so many great things. Example, I had a client who was struggling to write her book, okay? So I work with a lot of writers in what I do, a lot of artists. She was really struggling to write her books. She wasn't showing up for herself, wasn't showing up for her work. And she thought, okay, my initial fear was that I'm not gonna get the words right. That's what she thought. But as she did some journaling with that and was like, okay, really, what am I afraid of? Really, what am I afraid of? You know, why, why, why? Keep asking yourself why. These parents would tell our kids to stop asking us why we gotta stop that theme. Why is such a powerful question? Let's let people ask it, okay? But as she got into that, what she thought was, if I don't hold true to whatever expectation I have, then I am not worthy. Suddenly I've lost worth instead of just not getting certain words on a page during a certain amount of time. And so as we could look at that and be like, okay, so where's the evidence that you are worth it? And you are worthy. And we feel that story. She was right on it with her writing. She was able to jump right back in and be like, okay, I got this, I got this, I'm moving forward. And it's so powerful. So that's one of the things that I'd encourage people to do is try to see through their fear. The other stuff that I want to call on, now if you're looking at the stuff in the book, I give you the first, I'm gonna give you the last. And then there's all these beautiful ones in between. But the last one really does come back to this idea of community. Once upon a time, I was at a camp for girls. I don't camp. I learned in my later years that I am, I thought I was such a camper when I was growing up, but I'm like, I would muster up, just give me a cabin on the edge of the wilderness and I will like walk into it and come back. But this I was willing to do. So I camp, I went out with these girls into the wilderness. And one, at one point in the middle of the night, I hear all this screaming from a cabin. Like, it's the cabin at the edge of the woods, like the one where people are supposed to die in a horror flick. It was that cabin that started screaming. And I'm like, oh my gosh, what's happening? And I have to be the adult, right? You can be scared when it's just you, but when there's like little ones there, you're like, okay, I'm the adult, all of a sudden I'm brave. And I went running down this cabin with my co-leader with me. And we were running down this cabin and we're like, what's going on? We're expecting mass murder or something. And they're like, there's something about me. I hate bugs. I absolutely, I hate them. But again, I have to be the great person. I'm like, it's okay. It's fine. Everybody calm down. It's gonna be fine. And started pulling apart blankets and pillows and sleeping bags to try and find the bug and move it out. Oh, I moved two blankets apart and RV. Oh my gosh, the ugliest spider looking bug you've ever seen on the planet is like in between these two blankets. And I don't like bugs, but I am terrified. Like Joe had to come save me once in the shower. He thought I was being murdered, but it was just a spider. And I was trying to hold it together. And then I moved towards it, because you think you're gonna do something like smash it? Like, this is so unfair right now, but you do not allow spiders to fly. But it flew up in my, later I found out it was a spider cricket. It's a cricket that looks like a spider. And that's what it jumped at me and got me to move out of my power and out of my space. I wanna tell you another story and then I'll wrap the two of them together. The second one is about fireflies. I grew up with fireflies in the Midwest. These are lightning bugs. They light up at night and they float around. And as a kid, I would never do it now, but I used to switch them around my finger because then you'd have a glowy ring on your finger or you could draw with them on the sidewalk. Don't do this at home, kids. But that's what I used to do. And then I moved to Utah and they don't have them here in the desert. And my husband's from the state and he'd never seen them. But we moved to Maryland quite a few years back just after all of the trauma and the robberies. And I remember one night we had been invited out to dinner at someone's house. We ate it outside the sun set and all of a sudden their backyard, all these lights started lighting up in the backyard and Joe's like, and I'm like, those are fireflies. Do they have any of these same fireflies? He's like, I've heard of them, but I've never really seen them. And my husband's so do-well, he gets up and he starts walking out into the grass and he's trying to catch them as they light up just like a little kid, right? Here's this 35-year-old man and he's trying to catch these fireflies. And as one lights up, he walks a little farther and then another lights up and he walks a little farther and as another lights up, he walks a little farther. Now here's the truth. As we're trying to follow our path to courage, we will have people in our lives who are spider cricket. They will say or do things that make us jump. They are not really harmful, but what they say hurts. That seeing through the fear exercise we talked about earlier, that's a version of a spider cricket, right? Fear is the spider cricket. The story that it's telling us is the spider cricket. It's trying to get us to move out of our power when it's really nothing to be afraid of at all. We also have in our lives people who are fireflies who light up the darkness, who walk us along the path, who help us to take one more step when there's nothing left that we think we have to give. Those are the people that believe in us, who surround us, who offer their support, their love, their faith, their faith in everything that they know and we know that we can accomplish if it works for the spider cricket to keep getting us to jump out of our way. And so community becomes incredibly important on our path to courage, that we align ourselves with fireflies and we remove ourselves from the spider cricket because if we really are to be who we are inside and to list and, oh, change this world the way that I know that we have the power to do that, then we've got to let go of the people and the fears and the stories that keep telling us to play small and keep pushing us back into roles that we're never ours to begin with. And when we walk with a firefly, what I know is that there is nothing that is too big for me to accomplish because I have the people around me who can light my way when I feel like all that has lasted the darkness. Wow, that was incredible, Debbie. And I want to thank you so much for sharing this with us and with our viewers. Now, viewers, there's a whole book for this and Debbie also does personal coaching and she's actually my coach. She's helping me with a lot of things but if you, I would really encourage you to go and read that book. The website is right here on the screen in front of you. It'll pop up in just a minute but go read that book. Go find out more about what Debbie does and see through your fears and get to the heart of how you can really help people.