This is Women Road warriors with Shelly Johnson and Kathy Tucaro.

From the corporate office to the cab of a truck, they're here to inspire and empower women in all professions.

So gear down, sit back and enjoy.

Welcome.

We're an award winning show dinner dedicated to empowering women in every profession through inspiring stories and expert insights.

No topics off limits on our show.

We power women on the road to success with expert and celebrity interviews and information you need.

I'm Shelly.

And I'm Kathy.

Do you ever feel stuck not knowing what direction to take in life, a relationship or a career?

Too many times life sends us down a rabbit hole and a dead end.

According to Bonnie Wan.

You need to get clear, get creative, and get courageous.

Bonnie Wan is the creator of the Life Brief, a playbook for no regrets living that gives professionals a path for true joy and success.

She's devised effective steps to get unstuck.

Bonnie is a partner and head of brand strategy at Goodby Silverstein and Partners, one of Fast Company's 2021 Most Innovative Companies in the world.

The Life Brief is a USA Today bestseller.

It frees people of limiting beliefs, gives them crystal clarity and sets them on a path to make their dreams a reality.

Bodi's with us today to share her insight.

Welcome, Bonnie.

Thank you for being on the show with us.

Oh my gosh.

Thank you, Shelley and Kathy for having me.

This is awesome.

Your insight is terrific and you empower so many people.

How did all of this begin?

Well, I've been a strategist for three decades now.

But my fascination and maybe fixation with human behavior and motivation goes all the way back to childhood.

I've always been curious and fascinated with what drives people.

What drives some people to embrace and navigate adventure and challenge with aplomb while other people crumble in the face of the same hurdles.

And so being an immigrant as a kid, you know, immigrating here to the US at 6 years old from Taipei, Taiwan, I was an outsider.

So I got to really study people right from the start.

When you're on the periphery of things, you get to really watch and listen and observe.

And I think those became the traits that set me up to be a really good strategist as I entered advertising, which is the art of persuasion.

I know a lot of people look at advertising, they think, oh, used car salesman, you know, big, big hard sells.

But actually, you know, the kind of work we do at could be Silver Scene Partners is through humor and humanity and entertainment and working with truths, the truths that drive people in the Ways that they think and act.

And so the last 30 years, I've really been a student of human behavior in the effort to help companies really get to the essence of who they are and how they show up in the world in order to achieve their biggest ambitions.

Wow, that was beautifully said.

Oh, absolutely.

And, you know, advertising really is a study in behavior because human beings can be so unpredictable.

And as advertisers, you're trying to get into their heads, essentially.

Yes.

And that's the beauty of human beings.

They're irrational, they're hard to pin down.

You know, they're fascinating creatures.

It's interesting.

On a side note, now that we have technology and machine learning, right, machines are trying to predict human behavior in the same ways that I've been studying for 30 years.

But what's fascinating and what I love about human beings is they're absurd and ridiculous and sometimes deeply unpredictable.

They confuse AI.

Yes.

I hope they keep doing that.

Please keep doing that.

You know, I've played with ChatGPT and stuff like that before and gotten it, actually.

I think it was frustrating.

Well, I think it's still in its very early stages, even though we feel the threats.

And I also like to, you know, steepen the thrills of it.

There's lots of stuff that's possible.

I come from a business that is all about creativity and possibility and innovation, yet one of my big personal missions is to always retain our humanity.

That's so important.

And I think that's something that people are forgetting.

People feel like a number.

And as technology becomes more and more pervasive, you're wondering if you're even talking to a human being on the other end of the line, especially with AI and everything.

Humanity is something we can't lose.

Yeah, I'll just put in a little word here.

I.

Since they.

They are mine.

Autonomous trucks is all 81 autonomous trucks is driving around.

And I.

That is one thing that I miss the most is the human part.

Because, I mean, when you have drivers in the seat, they drive by, you're waving, you're making faces, you know, you're.

Sometimes you're throwing things at each other.

But now they have these robots driving around the mine.

I miss that.

I miss that human interaction of, you know, that simple, hey, how's it going?

Or, you know, hanging out the window doing stupid things just to make the other person laugh because it's a long day now.

These robots are.

It's horrible.

Yeah, I never thought of that.

Thank you for raising that.

I mean, it always comes back down to connection and community.

That's what we're talking about.

That brings joy to the most arduous tasks.

Absolutely.

And you know, Bonnie, it feels like I think people think we're more connected because of technology today, but I think in so many ways we are not.

We're actually disjointed.

We're isolated and we interact with faceless pictures and avatars and emoticons.

And I think we're losing some performative stories.

Right.

We're always projecting something that we want people to take away rather than real deep connection.

And that is what I have enjoyed in this journey with the Life Brief.

So kind of.

Because the Life Brief is all about giving you prompts to get you deeper, faster into your own truth, your own humanity, your own essence.

And it is the same tools that we use with companies and to study people as strategists, but now apply to the different relationships in our lives, whether that be the relationships with someone else that's really important to us, whether it's the relationship to our work or really importantly to ourselves.

And when we serve up penetrating questions and interesting prompts, we not only tap into our deepest values and beliefs and what matters most to us as individuals, but we get to connect with each other around those deeply meaningful subjects and topics.

And I find that really rich and meaningful and lasting.

I think people lose sight of who they are as they go through life.

There's so much confusion.

And what you're doing here with these prompts, as I was reading, it cuts through the limiting beliefs and false assumptions about what's possible.

Because I think as we go through life and we hear externally from other people, wherever we're getting our information, we get self doubt because let's face it, not everybody has our back.

And there are going to be people out there saying, you know, you can't do that, when in fact you're perfect for it.

Yes, you can.

And your dreams are not something that you need to let go of.

So true and so beautifully said.

And what I'm experiencing right now, even in my own life, is that, you know, we.

We're living in a moment of peak uncertainty, right?

And that makes us all wobbly.

That's why it's so important to be connected to our own essence, our own beliefs, our own values, if you will.

Values.

It's hard, you know, those are vague and hard to unpack.

But specifically, what do you believe?

What's your own story and what matters most to you that becomes your compass as the world gets more chaotic, as change speeds up and as we're all kind of stuffed into these technology containers that put everybody else's values and beliefs right into our faces and we're challenged with wait, wait, wait.

It's so easy to get swept up in the current of the status quo, right?

Yes.

And to fall into other people's stories.

That's what you're talking about, Shelley.

That's where the limiting beliefs, and we're collecting them all the time because the world is shouting at us from every corner of our lives.

And from the beginning, with good intention, our parents raised us with some of these limiting beliefs.

We've had them for our whole lives because they were trying to protect us.

Right.

Or they, they grew up in a different era with facing different challenges and it's out of love.

Our teachers, our friends, everyone is on the lookout for us.

Yet inside us we all have what I call a knowing.

And that gets way beyond the knowledge in our heads.

We're far too neck up in our living these days.

Right.

We're on zoom, we're on teams or talking to each other.

And we're only using the mind as a faculty.

Except for you, Kathy.

You are out there in the world with big, big ass machinery.

That's right, yeah.

The rest of us are sitting here at our dining tables right in front of computers and more and more challeng with thinking our way through our lives rather than tapping into the deeper wisdoms from our own experiences and using those to overcome our doubts.

As you said, Shelley, we're relying on technology.

We're tapping into the technology rather than back into ourselves.

And I almost feel like as human beings we're going to lose the ability to think logically, to have foresight to solve problems, because we're waiting for the technology to do it for us.

I think human beings inherently can be a bit lazy.

You know, we rely on GPS rather than can you read a map?

You know, I think that's one of the scariest things with the upcoming generation.

Give them an analog clock, give them a map, give them an old fashioned phone and write in cursive.

I was just gonna say right in cursor.

They don't even teach that anymore.

Like, what the heck, it would be a whole different world.

They would have no idea how to function.

If technology came to a grinding halt, what would humanity do?

And do people have the beliefs and confidence in themselves to survive?

I don't know.

That's the big question.

Right?

Yeah.

You know, I talked earlier about the threats and the thrills of technology and I am still A real optimist and believer.

While I'm very cautious too about the dangers of it, my hope is that we can use technology in a way that is equitable, in a way that frees us from busy work, unnecessary, hard, invisible labor, and opens us up to tap into our wisdoms and our creativity.

That would be nice.

It would be.

It's very idealistic, isn't it?

But, you know, that would be ideal if we could do that, if we could expand as human beings and really, really tap into our potential.

Because we don't have to be distracted with all of the survival stuff that previous people on this earth had to deal with.

I mean, barely over a hundred years ago, not that long ago, people in many parts of the world were living as pioneers.

Even in North America, you know, they didn't have power.

They didn't.

They had to make all their clothes, churn their butter.

They had spinning wheels, they had to make yarn.

It was tough just to survive every single day.

I think you've just pinpointed it.

We don't all need to churn our own butter today, but how are we avoiding the challenges and the opportunities that develop and strengthen that pioneering spirit, right?

That spirit that of, of self determination, self directedness, the courage to learn new things and to actually face our fears head on.

But what we're talking about is technology making everything so convenient that we relax those skills, whether they be critical thinking or perseverance, resilience, creativity, courage, right?

We're so easy in our, in our kind of armchairs or sofas or beds, you know, being served up all the content, all the entertainment, all the knowledge.

And what you're talking about is how do we develop and strengthen the muscles to forage into new spaces, to grow ourselves in new ways, to stretch ourselves?

Are we losing the muscles for resilience, for growth, for healthy tension and challenge?

I think we are.

What do you think, Kathy?

Do you think we are?

Absolutely, absolutely.

100%.

I, I see it just in my own environment with all these robots going around, how much it is influenced and changed, mining how it affects people's mental health.

Believe it or not, people are it it, for lack of a better word, that they're almost.

They get upset, you know, just because that you don't have it.

It's cold.

It's very cold.

I guess would be what I'm trying to, to say with this AI kind of operating the mine and you have to base everything around them and there's no more connections.

It's changed everything.

And I think about this often I'm thinking, okay, well, we're the first mine that is completely autonomous with all these trucks.

Well, now that's going to, we have people coming from all over Canada to come tour our mine to see how it works.

Because now they want to do the same.

Right.

So if you think about that globally in 20, 30, 40 years, well, where are the jobs?

Where are, where we have robo fuel stations now, like they call it a robo dog, where you don't even need people to attend the fuel thing.

Right.

Like it's just, it's cut out.

The hardest thing that it hit me was when, when they officially came in and they gradually had come in, but when they officially made it all autonomous, all the hard hats of all the people that were laid off that went into my, my recycling bin, all these people that I know personally with families and you know, you need that paycheck and there, there's their empty hard hats, meaning that they don't have a job anymore.

It was, it was very sad.

I was thinking earlier when you were talking about being out in the mine and the, the heavy equipment and you know, the, the lifting boxes that are stories high of a building and I thought, wow, Kathy, you are in a space that is still in that pioneering spirit, you know, or, or the muscles, but now hearing about the human cost of it and the humanity cost of it.

Yep.

I, I think we're just at the beginning of waves and waves of seeing that across so many different industries.

Oh, absolutely.

I was reading just several years ago, some of the major publications have opted to use AI to write stories.

And they've used the excuses.

This frees their reporters up to do more investigative stories.

And I step back and go, no, it doesn't.

This is eliminating jobs and people.

I mean, you don't know what you're reading today, whether it was a human being that wrote it or if it was a computer, essentially a computer program.

And that takes out the humanity.

Because one of the things that AI will never have is emotion and humanity.

We have something that it will never have.

And I think your life brief is so timely today because it really, I think, gets people to get back in touch with themselves, with their critical thinking and their creativity and maybe even a self actualization, if you will.

Yes, yes.

It is really about the practice of self directedness.

It's a practice of getting close and in touch and in tune with your own voice again and using that voice to be your navigation.

Not your AI navigation, but your human and heart centered navigation of all of this turbulence, all of the change.

And it takes not work but it takes engagement.

It doesn't take time or a lot of time, but it takes practice to drop in to yourself and the practice.

You know, in the book at least I serve up as many prompts as possible and not all questions and prompts are created equal.

So I've really selected the ones that drop you deep in fast because I work in advertising.

Right.

We don't have a lot of time to change minds or affect behavior.

That's right.

Not therapists or coaches.

You know, we don't have lifetimes.

We have to move fast.

And observing humans and what activates that tune in to self clarity and action.

How do we move through our messiness into clarity and into action quickly is the art that I've been practicing and studying and really getting a lot of insight and joy from for the last 30 years.

And so the life brief and I am my own lab as well as hundreds and thousands of other people.

But you know, watching it in my own life, helping me navigate the messiness has been illuminating and game changing.

Stay tuned for more of Women Road warriors coming up.

Dean Michael, the tax doctor here.

I have one question for you.

Do you want to stop worrying about the irs?

If the answer is yes, then look no further.

I've been around for years.

I've helped countless people across the country and my success rate speaks for itself.

So now you know where to find good, honest help with your tax problems.

What are you waiting for?

If you owe more than $10,000 to the IRS or haven't filed in years, call me now at 888-557-4020 or go to mytaxhelpmd.com for a free consultation and get your life back.

Industry Movement Trucking Moves America Forward is telling the story of the industry.

Our safety champions, the women of trucking, independent contractors, the next generation of truckers, and more help us promote the best of our industry.

Share your story and what you love about trucking.

Share images of a moment you're proud of and join us on social media.

Learn more@truckingmovesamerica.com welcome welcome back to Women Road warriors with Shelly Johnson and Kathy Tucaro.

If you're enjoying this informative episode of Women Road Warriors, I wanted to mention Kathy and I explore all kinds of topics that will power you on the road to success.

We feature a lot of expert interviews, plus we feature celebrities and women who've been trailblazers.

Please check out our podcast@womenroadwarriors.com and click on our Episodes page.

We're also available wherever you listen to podcasts on all the major podcast channels like Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon Music, Audible, you name it.

Check us out and bookmark our podcast.

Also, don't forget to follow us on social media.

We're on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other sites and tell others about us.

We want to help as many women as possible Bonnie Wan is a master at the art of persuasion.

After many years in advertising and studying people, she's bringing her expertise to the public to help people persuade themselves into gaining the courage they need to succeed.

Her creative commentary and tutorial, the Life A Playbook for no Regrets Living is a powerful tool on how people can live their lives at maximum capacity.

It gives professionals and everyone a path for true joy and success.

Bonnie's devised effective steps to get unstuck.

She'd know better than anyone else on how As a career brand strategist, Bonnie gives powerful advice.

She spent the last three decades helping brand titans get clear about who they are so they can grow and innovate from a place of clarity and purpose.

Her brand knowledge is invaluable to people who want to do the same.

Her book gives readers prompts to find their essence and know their brand to succeed.

It helps people cut through the limiting beliefs and false assumptions about what's possible.

Bonnie, your book is so helpful and it makes so much sense.

You have a section that talks about getting messy with the open ended writing prompts to cut through limiting beliefs and false assumptions about what's possible.

Then you have Get Clear, which guides the reader on crystal clear clarity to find out exactly what they really, really want.

And then the third phase, which is Get Active, which helps the reader get into the steps to make their desires real.

I would love to touch on each section if you wouldn't mind, because this really, I think will help people find out who they truly are and maybe sometimes they didn't realize who they were until they go through this process.

Yes, and you've talked about why we don't know who we are, right?

Because there's so many stories and voices in our own heads.

So getting messy is getting all of those voices out into the open, out onto the page.

Writing is a big part of this.

I have a writing teacher that I studied with, Roger Housdon.

He said writing rearranges the furniture of our minds.

Oh, I like that.

I like that.

That's great.

I mean, he's a poet who doesn't love a good Poet writing rearranges the furniture of our minds, because when we are.

Our heads are.

Our brains have actually limited capacity, and it.

They grip onto stories that repeat over and over.

But when we write, we let those stories out and we uncover deeper unconscious.

We.

We bring the unconscious out to the surface.

And then the writing creates some distance between us, our thoughts, our wisdoms, and our emotions, because it's our emotions that really trip us up, right?

We think one thing, we go into fear, we think another thing, we go into rage or anger or frustration or.

Or love or humor, and we get caught off guard.

But writing helps us collect, collect, collect.

So then we can take a look at everything out on the table, all the cards out there, and you get to start to see patterns.

Ooh, wait a second.

Or insights or ahas or themes.

And that becomes the next stepping stone to clarity.

Because then you start to see, oh, that's my mom's voice there talking.

That's not me, but I know when she shows up.

Or, oh, I have this pattern around time.

That was my first insight in my first life brief.

I thought my marriage was broken, but when I started writing and giving myself total permission to be nakedly honest, a whole different story came out onto the page, which was not about my husband.

It was about my relationship with time and my people pleasing patterns and me saying yes to all kinds of things that I should have been saying no to.

And once I saw that, it gave me a new problem to solve.

And instead of being fixated on, what do I do about my marriage, Do I need to end it?

I immediately went into, how do I change my relationship with time?

And that was really instantaneous.

As soon as I saw that insight, I moved into a different space and I started writing into clarity around time, and that propelled me into action.

So it actually works quite fast.

But we have to have the presence and engagement and give it the pause and spaciousness in order to uncover it.

So get messy is really about leading with curiosity, asking questions, giving yourself permission to be honest about your answers.

And it's a private practice, so you get to do it at your own pace, in your own space, but you get to drop in.

Those are the kind of fundamentals people really need to have.

And when you write it down, you can go back and really ponder what you've written.

You're tapping into, maybe even the subconscious.

It is interesting when you say you hear your mother's voice or, I've heard my mom's voice.

I've heard my mother's words come out of My mouth.

It's like, why did I just say that?

Yeah.

Something I heard as a kid.

It's like, is that still in the back of my head?

And is that true?

Right.

Because when you put it in writing, you get to now reflect on it and say, okay, that's been with me a very long time.

But is it true?

Do I have the evidence?

This is Byron, Katie's questions, right.

Is it true?

What evidence do I have in my own experiences that that is true?

And what if.

How would my life be different if it.

If.

If I let go of that story, that thought, that idea?

And that's just so fascinating.

You know, I taught a retreat in Costa Rica in January 2020, before the pandemic hit.

And the first day, you know, the starting question of the book, of the practice, of everything I teach, is the question, what do you want?

What do you really, really want that you haven't even allowed yourself to admit yet?

And I asked that question at the retreat, and a woman said, oh, no, no, no.

My parents taught me never to ask that question.

It will always lead to disappointment.

And there it was, her story, and it was gifted to her by her parents out of love.

But then we spent the next seven days unpacking that story, reframing it, replacing it with a new story, because I call this courageous, a practice of courageous living.

Because if we don't examine these stories and we don't ask ourselves, are they really true, then we're kind of living blindly in somebody else's truth, somebody else's playbook for life.

And at the end of that journey, I know what that stimulates.

Right.

Bronnie Ware talks about the five regrets of the dying.

She's a palliative nurse.

And the number one regret that she hears across the board is that I wish I would have lived a life of my own making, not someone else's.

Yeah.

And I think that women often do that.

We end up doing something somebody else has fashioned for us, and we go into maybe the.

The role that they've outlined.

Maybe we get married because it's expected.

We do this, we do that.

And unfortunately, that kind of regret can also impact how we raise kids, how we interact with others, because we end up being bitter, you know?

Yeah.

Women especially.

Right.

It goes back so many decades, if not centuries.

We've been raised to serve.

Raised to serve other people's needs and put them ahead of our own.

And we see that across cultures.

I feel fortunate to be in Western culture, where I think there is just such a collective fight to raise women's voices, women who lift each other as they rise.

But we still butt our heads up against very deep, sturdy, concrete, patriarchal walls.

And like you were saying before we started the interview, a lot of this is very, very discreet.

It's hidden now.

It's hard to prove because it's being talked about.

It's harder to pinpoint.

It is, you know, I study a lot of bad behaviors.

So in advertising I get to not only work on commercial, but also deep societal, you know, causes or predicaments, you know, south child sex trafficking, college campus rape, racial inequality.

And the thing you learn is, is as soon as something comes above ground and we get collective awareness around it, it forces it to go back underground and find new innovative ways for it to exist.

Right?

That's always the battle.

And I do find that sexism, you know, racism, things that, you know, we, we've come to bear and talk about now quite openly, has to find more insidious ways to exist.

Do you think any of those things are ever going to go away?

Or is that part of the human condition to inherently dislike another group they don't understand?

Oh, I'm not the expert on that particular piece.

I think it's always a fight.

If we remove the external fight with each other, it's also an internal fight.

Right.

And that's why this practice is so important.

Because we have to start from the inside out and we have to examine our own biases and they start with the stories that we have inherited and adopted and picked up along the way that somewhere deep inside us we know are not true, but we have not set aside the time to challenge them.

And that's why this practice is so important.

Because we can't really create external change until we reframe things internally inside each of us.

Isn't that the truth?

Yes, I agree with that.

Well, when you think about it, when somebody's stuck, if somebody inherently intrinsically does not like themselves, they're not going to like other people either.

They're going to, they're going to carry that resentment forward and externalize it.

And that's self defeating right there to everybody, you know, you know, here's something.

Really strange and odd, but I, it works for me.

Ever since I've been in my teenage years, I've been having dreams of when I in my outer life, that something is going on.

I have dreams where I'm stuck in the mud up to my neck or I'm in all the way up to my knees or I'm in snow Drift, and I can't move.

I can't lift my legs.

Or sometimes I'm in sand, like quicksand, but it'll turn into cement so my feet can't move.

Or I'll be surrounded by tornadoes, like eight or nine tornadoes that are coming my way.

And I've always seen that those dreams as a blessing because it's enabled me to say, okay, what's going on in my life?

That.

That is making me stuck, making me feel that I can't move ahead.

And it forces me to reevaluate where I'm at and how is my thinking and, like, what am I doing?

So that's not working.

And it's.

It's really worked wonders.

So now, today, now that I'm 55 years of doing this.

So when I have a dream like that, which they don't come very often, but I can actually turn and face the storm and figure out, okay, something's coming or I'm not doing something right, step back or.

Or what I like to do is pull myself above the situation like I'm an eagle and look down at my life and figure out, okay, what's my next move?

Right?

So get a.

Get a different perspective to help me change my train of thought or change something that I'm doing that's not working.

I love.

Yes, very.

I love that.

I love what you do with dreams, Kathy, and your dreams are powerful.

I'm not sure that my dreams have the kind of sense that yours do.

Oh, I think they.

They all do.

But I've been writing down my dreams since 1985 because they're so vivid, and it's so.

It's enabled me, believe it or not, to guide me into what I need to do the next.

You know, it shows me ways that, okay, this isn't working for you.

I love how visual and visceral your dreams are.

Yes.

It's such evidence that we have so many more tools at our disposal than just our rational minds.

Well, yeah, people think they're.

They're.

They're listening.

They think it's.

Oh, it's just a dream.

No, it's not.

They are very prophetic.

And if you can actually filter through the illusions and what.

What's the real meaning underlying it?

Like here.

Here's an obvious one.

The year I.

I was really struggling, and I had to.

I knew I had to change my life.

I'm walking around in the town of Whitehorse, Yukon, and I have baggage.

Like luggage tied to luggage tied to luggage.

I had backpacks.

I had Some.

A headband with.

With some luggage carrying on.

I had some around my waist.

And I'm carrying all this heavy excess baggage literally everywhere I go.

And no stores, no banks, no restaurants would let me in because I had too much baggage.

And so I see this, right?

So I see this woman, she's the size of a football player.

She's come along and I said, oh, she's big and strong.

She can carry this.

She.

And I ask her, and she backs up as if I had a gun pointed at her.

Her hands went up in the air.

She goes, oh, I'm not.

That's way too much for me.

I ain't taking that.

And she turned around and left.

And I woke up standing on the corner, unable to move anywhere.

And when I woke up, I knew that this is telling me I had to go look at my own internal baggage.

What am I carrying around that's so heavy that I am unable to advance spiritually, physically, mentally, emotionally, whatever it is.

And that was in 2007, and I hit treatment for the.

For my alcoholism the first time in 2008.

And then.

Yeah, so.

And it took me.

I had.

Here's that thing.

I had so much baggage that it literally took me two years off and on in treatment to unravel it all, you know, bit by bit by bit.

And.

Yeah.

And now I now have 12 years sober.

And it's been amazing, thanks to that dream that forced me to really look.

Hey, you're carrying something that is powerful.

That is so powerful.

Wow.

Yeah, I have hundreds of those.

Well, it reminds me of this.

This past July, I flew to Mexico.

I was taking my daughter, my eldest daughter, I have four kids, and she graduated high school.

So I took six kids and my husband, and we all went to Tulum, Mexico.

And we realized when we got there that Hurricane Beryl was going to make landfall in Tulum, where we were in about four days after we arrived.

And we thought, oh, it's going to downgrade to a Category 2, Category 1.

And it actually upgraded to a Category 3 hurricane while we were there.

And the eye of the storm was coming straight to where we were.

And it's so interesting because the last 18 months, I've been weathering the biggest storms of my career.

Identity shift, restructuring of the agency.

You know, long held relationships being challenged at their core.

And here comes this literal storm and how we navigated it.

All the fears that came to bear, watching the media, all the stories in our heads, and then the actual intensity of the storm and the recovery, it just became such an arc for how we weathered change in our lives.

It was much scarier the days before the storm than the actual storm itself, which was intense but so short lived.

Three hours.

And then the dawn that came afterwards was so beautiful.

The community, the shared recovery.

The sun came out, you know, but the scariest part was the anticipation and the stories in our minds before the storm hit.

We do make those things so much larger.

We want to do we do we set up roadblocks for ourselves?

Yes.

We enlarge.

We build things up.

So we starts with initial doubt.

Those are normal, human.

That grows to a fear.

And then we enlarge all those negative what ifs and we can really get consumed by them, eaten up by them.

But what's interesting is I watched eight of us navigate it very differently, each of us, and that was really interesting to see the people who just went into preparation, preparation and then also curiosity.

Ooh, what's this going to be like?

What, how do I learn?

You know, what do we do with the windows?

Isn't interesting that when you face it, when you turn and face the storm, it's not that bad?

It was not bad.

In fact, for some of us, it became quite adventurous.

Stay tuned for more of Women Road warriors coming up.

Dean Michael, the tax doctor here.

I have one question for you.

Do you want to stop worrying about the irs?

If the answer is yes, then look no further.

I've been around for years.

I've helped countless people across the country and my success rate speaks for itself.

So now you know where to find good, honest help with your tax problems.

What are you waiting for?

If you owe more than $10,000 to the IRS or haven't filed in years, call me now at 888-557-4020 or go to mytaxhelpmd.com for a free consultation and get your life back.

Industry movement Trucking moves America Forward is telling the story of the industry.

Our safety champions, the women of trucking, independent contractors, the next generation of truckers and more.

Help us promote the best of our industry.

Share your story and what you love about trucking.

Share images of a moment you're proud of and join us on social media.

Learn more@truckingmovesamerica.com welcome back to Women Road warriors with Shelly Johnson and Kathy Tucaro.

What do you believe and what's your story?

What matters most to you?

These questions and answers become your compass amid the chaos.

You can't default to other people's stories or what you've been told that creates Limiting beliefs about ourselves.

Achieving success requires clarity, according to Bonnie Wan.

It's a matter of tuning into ourselves and moving from our messiness into clarity and then into action quickly.

We need to navigate the messiness that so often consumes our lives.

Writing is a great tool for that.

It results in insights into patterns, perspectives, and aha moments.

That's one of the stepping stones to clarity.

Bodhi Wan guides professionals and others to reach their true and full potential with her book the Life A Playbook for no Regrets Living.

Bonnie's a living example of this.

She knows people and how they tick.

She's been a powerhouse in the advertising industry as an advertising executive.

She was celebrated as an Ad Age leading woman for 2023 and 2022's Chief Strategy Officer of the Year.

Her insight is phenomenal.

Bonnie's showing us how we can open up new perspectives about ourselves and discover our own playbook, not go by somebody else's.

We need to ditch the stories we've inherited and adopted and discover our own.

Your inspiration, Bonnie, and your insight is helping so many people.

You go to different corporations and you share the Life Brief with them.

This is super important.

It makes for much healthier workplaces and you help a lot of professionals really become who they should.

Not should.

That's a bad word.

Who they want to be.

There's so many places where the Life Brief can help.

You don't have to necessarily even be in the workplace.

It applies to everybody.

What would you say before we talk about where people can find the Life Brief?

Do you have maybe some golden nuggets to share with women on some fundamentals that they need to look at so that they can get unstuck and be who they should be to find the true joy and success in life?

Yes, I do.

Don't be afraid of the questions.

Start with questions, not answers.

We live in a culture that moves fast, wants us to have answers all the time.

But let's pause.

Drop into the questions that we tend to avoid.

I like to say the answers we seek lie behind the questions we avoid.

Don't be afraid of the questions.

Give yourself privacy and pause.

Spaciousness.

And I don't mean a whole lot.

You don't have to take a week away, 10 days, fly to France.

You don't have to do any of that.

I mean, a few minutes a day and let it all come out in.

In writing.

Just jot it down messy, as messy as you want it to be, and allow it to strengthen your own tuning fork and relationship with yourself and the power of Clarity.

The reason why I have dedicated my work at work and my work outside of work to helping people, leaders, everyday people, certainly women, juggling a lot of things in their lives get clear is that clarity has the power to unlock change fast.

I like to say clarity is your shortest path between who you are and where you want to go.

Clarity moves you through it quickly without all the U turns, without all the, you know, missteps.

It's not like throwing spaghetti against the wall.

Clarity unlocks the shortest path to the change that you want in any part of your life.

So don't be afraid of it.

It does take a little practice, and I use that word very intentionally.

Practice, because it gets easier the more you do it.

It's hardest to start because we are scared of what we're going to.

On the other side of that question, what do I really, really want?

But let me assure you, time and again, in not only my life, but the lives of others that I have witnessed is what is on the other side of that question is not to be feared.

It is hope, it is creativity, it is possibility, and it is a deep sense of satisfaction because you are living according to your own truth.

That's dynamic.

Wow, that was.

That was good.

I feel really good.

Now.

I'm like, oh, yeah, I want to run around the.

You're both living this.

I.

I just have to say, when I listen to your stories, I'm like, here are two women who are not only badass, they're living the life brief already.

Wow.

Thank you, Bonnie.

That's a wonderful compliment coming from.

Yes, it is.

Thank you.

Where do people find your life brief?

Can they reach out to you as well?

Absolutely.

So my website, thelifebrief.com is where you can find the life brief, the book, and anything else that's coming up and happening around the life brief, you can just email me@bonniebrief.com or on Instagram.

Bonnie One official.

Oh, I like that.

Bonnie Wan official.

And that's spelled W.

That's spelled W A N.

It is.

Bonnie Wanofficial.com.

excellent.

We could unpack so much more, Bonnie.

I mean, I love your insight.

I love how you've been able to dial all of this in.

Well, it's all in the book, and I'm happy to unpack it with anyone who wants to open their minds and hearts to it.

That's really key.

Opening our minds and hearts so that we can really, really tap into our.

True potential and our humanity.

Yes.

We need to stop forgetting we're human.

Yeah, human.

First.

Yes.

Because that's what's going to keep the world going.

And no man, no woman is an island.

We need to remember humanity and we all need to get along, but we also need to be supportive of each other so that we can all reach the potential that we're here to achieve.

Oh, my gosh.

Here, here.

Thank you for that reminder.

Well, thank you, Bonnie, for your insight.

This has been a pleasure.

Oh, my gosh.

Can I.

I could talk to you both forever.

I wish everyone was having this level of conversation every day.

Right.

Instead of the superficial BS that's.

Oh, talk about the weather for supper.

You know, let's talk about the real issues.

That's right.

Let's do it.

Let's do it.

Make.

Let's make it a practice.

We'd love to have you back to have some more conversations like this, Bonnie.

That'd be great.

It would be such a pleasure, a gift, an honor.

Every.

All the things.

It would be all the things.

Awesome.

You name the topic.

If there's a particular topic you'd like to talk about, we'll definitely have you back.

This has been just.

This was great.

Yeah.

Thank you for making.

Yes.

Thank you for making my month.

And ours too, Bonnie.

Thank you.

We hope you've enjoyed this latest episode.

And if you want to hear more episodes of Women Road warriors or learn more about our show, be sure to check out womenroadwarriors.com and please follow us on social media.

And don't forget to subscribe to our podcast on our website.

We also have a selection of podcasts just for women.

There are a series of podcasts from different podcasters, so if you're in the mood for women's podcasts, just click the Power network tab on womenroadwarriors.com youm'll have a variety of shows to listen to anytime you want to.

Podcasts Made for Women.

Women Road warriors is on all the major podcast channels like Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Audible, YouTube and others.

So check us out and please follow us wherever you listen to podcasts.

Thanks for listening.

You've been listening to Women Road warriors with Shelly Johnson and Kathy Tucaro.

If you want to be a guest on the show or have a topic or feedback, email us@sjohnsonomenroadwarriors.com.