 The movie said, Susan Bond, you got to have her speak. She's totally awesome. And I said, I went and looked at her stuff and traded some emails. And I said, yes, you're right. She's totally awesome. She should speak. This is one of the many helicopters I'll fly today. Susan Bond. The women will probably be able to understand this, and the men most probably won't. But I was watching the Miss Universe pageant with my mom and my sister. Maybe you guys watched it too. I don't know. Probably little girls, right? You watched the Miss Universe pageant. And my mom said to us, you know, if you could be which one, which one would you be? Because if we could change our race or something. My sister was like, I want to be Miss Thailand. And I said, I want to be the translator. Right? It's a guy. It's the 70s, right? It's a dude. And my mom looks at me and she just goes, OK, which one do you want? It's a clue that I was living an unconventional life. And I was going to have to figure out a life that worked for me. Right? That reaction from her was, wow, they are not in Kansas anymore. This girl doesn't look at the world like, you know, the rest of us. I grew up in Detroit. My dad's an engineer. My family is full of engineers, teachers, and lawyers. Translator, other world, because she asked me why. And I said, well, because I wanted to talk to the whole world. And when everyone did communicate and get along, I just thought that was really nice, but, you know, kind of strange. So that became a whole life-long Odyssey for me to talk about and to think about how do we create a live that really works for us? Right? How do we, instead of what I call self-sourcing, how do you create a life that works for you versus crowdsourcing your life doing what you think you should do or, you know, looking at Zuckerberg and thinking about, you know, next group hot or the next Facebook or the next whatever. And so it's something that I started to think a lot about and spent most of my life thinking about. About how do we, I need to stand. Okay, sir. How do we create a life that really works for us and how do we make sense of that life and then create it? Right? Because I think it's easy for us to fall into things where we just go along without the crowd. Instead of we have experience in this, right? Everybody kind of gets what I'm talking about, right? Did any, anyone have an experience in their life, right? Where you thought, wow, I really should go the safe path. But that's not really the path I want, right? It's not nods, right? So that led me in an Odyssey of my own life. I've spent many years. I have a bunch of different degrees in my human stuff. And I've spent human stuff, right? I would swear, except that this is on camera. My mom, I'd watch it one day. Which is what I'm making up for. I have a whole bunch of degrees in human stuff and I spent 11 years doing executive coaching, working with CEOs and tech companies. The most ridiculous thing they said, do something really silly or ridiculous or really something stable. I think I got like police officer. I was like, are you kidding me? Have you met me? I hate rules. I wanted to be a singer. My mom said, be a music teacher. She was like, that sucks. And I went, I want to be a writer. I want to be an English teacher. So I kept getting these messages, right? I mean, other people, I think, understand this, right? Go back to like, something safe or normal or, you know. And I kept getting these messages and finally enough of them came along. So I decided to go into the corporate world and just become a corporate person rather than listening to who I really was. And I kept trying to fit in, you know, like I bought the right clothes, right? I spent a lot of money on clothes. I mean, thousands of dollars on clothes. And I cut my hair a certain way and I took certain jobs. And I spent a lot of time doing that. And I, one day, I was really unhappy with myself and my sister, who I'd been complaining about, said, I don't know what I'm going to do with my life. I'm unhappy. I think I should do this. But I don't know about this drama. And she looked at me and she said, you know there's no rule book, right? There's no one rule book with one answer. And I thought, no, you're joking with me. There is a rule book. Just give it to me. That's what I said to her. Give me the rule book because I want to follow it. So things kind of started to fall apart for me because there was no rule book and I wanted to, you know, go along with the crowd. I got laid off four times in 11 years in North America. Every single time, my job secured. My job was eliminated. Susan Bond's job. Sometimes there was a couple other people. Most of the time it was my job. It got eliminated. It was in San Francisco. I'm looking for the gap and I got really, really sick. And this is one of the biggest awakenings for me. So I've been sick for six weeks. For three weeks I had a fever of 102 degrees. It's like crying slowly. And I worked for the gap and I was managing one of their stores. And I was so insistent on doing a good job and proving that I could do it that I didn't take a day off, ever, during that whole time. And then I ended up on a Sunday morning with pains. Radiating down my shoulders. Like, oh, you know, I could talk about heart attacks. And I was 27 years old. So, but my boss was coming in. Essentially, Mickey Drexler, who was the president, his wife was coming in. So, to teach his story, right? I know their wife of the big guy is coming in to my store. So I go in and buy a suit. What do I do? I'm going to go try to fit in and buy a suit. That night I had 105 degrees fever after taking the title. And I finally, my roommate, drags me to the hospital. Long story short, they discover I had a pint of fluid building up around my heart and my caracardium. Caracardium is like the sac that's around your heart. That night, they called my parents and said, essentially, you need to come here now because your daughter's going to die. They didn't think I'd make it through the night. They got there that night. I was so sick that they let my parents come in for a long time that night. And the cardiac ICU was 27. And the next morning, all of a sudden, I throw up and I, everything starts going haywire and people are freaking out. And I'm vaguely aware of this. And I'm essentially blind blind. So everything was going out. And I was really peaceful. It's like, huh. Well, that little shit about trying to fit in, trying to do it right, the right clothes, doesn't really matter right now. Like, if they don't get here in five minutes, I'm dead. I'm gone. It's really the most peaceful place I've ever had in my entire life. And so they got there in time, obviously, from here. And I said, OK, give me the will to fight or just take me now. It's fine. I woke up and I slapped a doctor. I guess I lived. To my defense, he was putting a ventilator down my throat. It really, really hurt. So I slapped another doctor because he blew a vein. No one knows what that is for the people, so they'd go up. Yeah. Like, if anyone's I know together, it's super painful. You don't want it to happen. You know, so obviously I survived that. But I looked back and the reason I survived it was because I was in the emergency room. And I was dying. And I didn't know. I mean, you kind of know when you're dying, at least I knew when I was dying. And the doctor said, I can't figure what's wrong with you other than a really bad fever. And I said, I don't know what's wrong with you but you have to admit it now. You have to admit it to the hospital right now. And that is the only thing that saved my life because two days later I would have collapsed and I wouldn't know what's wrong with you. And that was sort of this awakening for me of, you know, around my intuition. And I really needed to just listen to myself. And I just really needed to stop listening to anybody else. And that was when I was 27. The 30s were a rough decade. A little rough. Back and forth, you know. You know you're trying to learn something new, right? That whole failure piece that you talked about, right? I had a lot of failures. I'm also, you know, be brilliant and excellent. That's the history for me. It's a nice story. So back and forth, you know, got laid off a bunch of times, had my own business that, you know, started the middle of the downturn, you know. Gave up on the 401k for it. So it was a lot of back and forth and back and forth. And what I started to do was help other people. So I wrote a book about intuition and I worked with folks. And I saw how people couldn't, it's a really hard thing to live a life of a living. Especially if it's a little more. I guess what I learned was there's a couple different things to it. And I actually want to leave a lot of time for you guys to kind of just talk about some of these concepts and ask me any questions. Sure, your own stories. Because I think we've all, right, I mean who hasn't had a time where they didn't know what they wanted to do. They didn't know how to get where they wanted to go, right? We've all kind of struggled with how do I be me? How do I be uniquely me? And how do I make my impact, whether it's personal or whether it's business? We've all had that. So there's a couple of things, you know. It's one, you really got to understand who am I? What is my unique, truly unique value proposition and impact in this world? I'm sorry I used that word, value proposition. It's still in there. Damn. What's my unique thing in this world? I can use it that way. But for me, mine's being a translator. I'm really great at translating things, taking these serial subjects and translating them back and making them real. You know, translating between organizations and between people. That's where I've spent my entire career. Then it also goes down to, you know, what do I dread and just stop doing that anyway? Like just, if you don't like it, stop doing it now. I mean now, you don't have to do it. You don't have to do it. It's like we have this belief that we have to do something hard and hard work and effort. But it isn't. You can stop doing what you don't have to do. If you dread it, stop doing it. Right? Have you had something you've stopped doing? I can't think of an example, but I know the feeling. You get it, right? You're like, he's really figuring out a way, a life that works for you. Because not having had that moment of like, I dread it, I hate it, don't do it. Right? It's hard. It's hard as we think there's only shoulds. You know, we should ourselves to that. We should ourselves to that. So that's the thing, to stop doing that and really figure out what works for you and create that life that works for you or that business or whatever it looks like. I spent a lot of my career working. I'm going to tell you a couple of stories about the people I worked with. I spent 11 years as an executive coach and I worked with a bunch of folks. I worked with a guy who was a PhD in candidate in philosophy and he didn't like it anywhere. I didn't want him to do that. You know, I worked with folks who want to be fashion designers and I helped to figure out something to move up here and be a fashion designer. We're just all sorts of folks who created a life that works for them. We all think it has to look like this and it's like this little linear path. You know, I don't think that way. I think in circles, in spirals and stars, I don't think linear. You know, and I think we don't have to live a linear life. So for me, I'm now 42 and I finally figured out later on, like 39, it all went to crap. I got laid off twice in one year. I had financial nuclear meltdowns. It was 2008, 2009. Everything fell to crap. I found out I couldn't have children which was bad, but in a way, you know, because it changes who you are as a woman. Women as a woman, I cannot have children and men can understand it. I think women can understand it. Even if you don't want them, it gets taken away. You're like, wait, who am I? I walked out. This is a true story. It's embarrassing, but I think it, you know, I walked around that night when I found out a little tipsy saying, I'm a Hishi. I'm a Hishi. Yeah. That bad. Thinking about, like, where am I as a person? What is my life to be about? So it all melted down. I went to crap and I took my dog and threw it in a car and we moved to Boulder. So we moved to Boulder a couple of years ago. I had my own successful business and now I work for someone else and I will for a little while translating, helping take their vision and translate it and make it marketable and I'm going to move on again. And I said, screw it. I don't care what anyone else thinks if I need to work a job for 10 years and get some stupid golden watch. My dad worked at GM for 35 years. He was like, you know, he has patents and he's got their, in case they were silver dollars for his patents, that's what he got. For two inventions. One of those inventions, 10 other inventions were created because of my dad's invention. Don't ask me what they are. It's like, can you take me in a fold for cars? I don't know anything about that. So I guess I just leave you with, you know, how do you self source your life? Where are you at in that whole process, right? You know, there's the hero's journey where you start out and you're going to slay the dragon and then you're like, oh crap, this is really hard. I'm just going to go back and not slay the dragon, but I need to slay the dragon. Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap. Okay, I'm slaying the dragon, right? And now I'm moving forward. You can think about that in terms of a self source life. I'm curious about where people are at and hopefully you resonate with my story. Then think about where you have been creating more self sourcing. So you may not be willing to share us deeply as I have and you might not have a story about Hishi running around cut your sad about your fertility. True story. Anyone have any questions? I'll take anything. Yeah, oh yeah, back there. Thank you. Just along the same lines as you, when you're in a career path and you, like when I was in film and I wanted to click the break, it wasn't something that was like, oh, now I have to like go into the career and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, I line with you in that I don't believe in straight lines. You just, you want to do something to do it and don't think about trying to do it. Right. It's hard too for people who brought it to be brilliant, right? That whole failure piece that really resonates with what you said, right? There's like a piece of self source life. Thank you TJ, it's so great. It's about failure and screwing up and not knowing and you know you have to consent to leave the shore and not know where you're going to go and not know if you're going to find a shore again, but you will. It's just that you feel like you won't. Thanks TJ. Not to go anything too specific, but as far as the concept of security and that whole decision, there is definitely a point of realization where being securely miserable doesn't really give much dividends at the end of the day. If you can be a cage is the safest place you can be. Nothing's going to happen to you in a cage. You're totally safe, also totally cut off. So yeah, I definitely resonate with the concept of there really isn't a safe route. Plus, if you look at the world of entrepreneurship, all the big things that have happened have happened when people have broken out and really gone after something. And the only way to really be successful is to find where your key value is and really apply that. That's where the real path to success lies. Finding and exploiting your own value to the level that's quite potential. I'm so glad because I forgot a couple of my points. I didn't want to bring up a piece of paper. I love that. That's so perfectly said. I don't know your name. Nice name. It's really awesome. I don't know why you call it, but it's really cool. I know there's like full moment link to it. It's really true. I kept trying to go to the corporate world because I kept thinking this is security and this is stability and this is the way I'm supposed to go. I got laid off four times in 11 years, twice in one year, February 27th and March 4th, right? I mean, it says something to you, right? And so I decided that for me, stability because I'm a translator and you don't need translators for a long stretch of time necessarily, right? So I go into an organization. I'm there two or three years to be translated to your new culture or right now I'm in marketing and sales and I'm helping to create this whole thing but I found stability through instability and I found it through a way that works and it took a tremendous amount of effort. My dad worked at GM for 35 years. My mom was a housewife and a teacher before that. I mean, literally I'm the lack shape of my family but I love what you're saying. It is. It's like that is a cage that you get stuck in, right? I got stuck in that cage with a lot of really nice expensive suits that made me feel like I wanted to age. Right? And left me with no money, less than any money. So I love your point. Thank you. It's such a good point. One of the themes we talked about was basically not doing not following the path that's laid out for you but following your own path because taking charge of your medical treatment that sounded like people didn't want to admit you because they were wrong with you and people just wanted to sort of do stuff and talk a little bit more about how you took some charge of getting help from people who didn't really know what was wrong with you. Yeah, it's good. I'm glad you brought that up because you guys are reminding me of concepts that I have concepts. I get so excited about the stories. I don't know if I said this in the beginning but like this whole concept of living inside out life is really important. We live our lives outside in and that means I look at like, okay, here's my guidance to come and start what I'm saying, here's what I'm supposed to do. Here's what the doctor says and here's what I'm supposed to do. Rather than saying, here's me, Susan, and applying it to the outside world how does that work for me? I've always been intuitive as a kid and I've been sick. I spent the first two years of my life off and on in incubators for asthma. It was an oxygen tense and all of that. And so over the years I actually, my father, even though he's an engineer you wouldn't think he was like, listen to your body. What is it telling you? What is your body telling you? So he helped me really listen and when you're on death's door it really becomes a matter of saying you fight so hard to become like an animal. I mean literally I slapped people. I didn't care. My ass was hanging out. I didn't care. So it really becomes a matter of how I did it was. I just knew in my heart this was what I needed to do. Finding, absolutely the finding moment. But I actually wish I had everything. You know, I wish I remembered it. Yeah, I'm so blessed. I'm saying that's a horrible experience. I'm like, no, what's the best experience I've ever had? Because now I know. I'm never going to go back. And when I do go back I just remind myself. So it was just my clear insistence with people and my clear knowing that there was something seriously wrong with me. I've now discovered that a true favor for me is 90 miles. I don't know how I even have brain cells left. I mean, I was literally burning up on the inside. Did I answer that enough? How I did it was just really a clear at that point I had started to think about who I was and it always was there. The thing is that that inner compass is always inside of us. It just came out to me. I'm pretty sure that I'm the oldest dog in the backyard here. The path that you've gone down has seen it from my opinion so differently because of the fact that I was down the path with the house and living in the neighborhood with a bunch of people that you get to know and you stay with for a long time. And now all of my friends are freaking out because my wife and I are too old outside and we've changed up the way we live and we've gotten rid of everything that we could get rid of so that we can go out and have more fun and enjoy life more. Again, I'm the oldest dog here and I think you really have to look at that while you're the ages that you are and break a little bit loose and enjoy yourselves more. Thank you, I really appreciate that. It really is so important. It can sound like a foo-foo topic but I really ask you guys to look in your hearts and figure out how you can create that life even more because I think we get stuck into that and that's incredible by the way. Congratulations on that. Oh, you have one more? Yeah, I've made some pretty disruptive changes. At times I was raising a really religious conservative family and was pushed into getting married and I did at 21 and then a couple years later my wife and I moved a thousand miles away to get away from the family and just kind of made a huge life change and then I found myself two or three years later 25, I felt like I was going on 45 I had a mortgage, a house an hour each way, a commute and I was completely invisible started working on a startup with other people who were my age and doing things that I probably should have been doing at that age so I said screw this I'm moving on, so I disrupted it and then worked again and felt like I was stuck and this last year basically drew a very comfortable life at the beach, running a successful company making good money out the window, start over and there's one fear that plagues me and I wonder if other people have that same fear and hopefully we can talk about it later which is you sit down, you think about it, you go am I always going to be this way am I always going to get comfortable and then throw it out and start over is that any way to live am I asking myself that because that's what society wants for me is to be stable or am I asking that because I truly have a concern that I'm just never going to be happy that's such a good, I love we're going to leave you right on that because I think that is such an amazing question and we could place the mic thanks everybody