98. Summit 13 - Bunny Young - Live Your Life Powerfully & Unapologetically

Like my show? Because here's the thing. I just got my money and I've been waiting for years and I'm I'm so ready because Bunny Young already coached me up a couple times in this body. Has a way of coaching you up in a way that is this powerful, so clear. So to the point borders on backhanded compliment.

It's sugar coated, but kicking is what it's been affectionately deemed.

What kind of kicking?

Well, Sugar-coated, I didn't know if I would kick you, so I'm going to say Sugar-coated butt kicking.

That is awesome. So everybody, you know, we've been at this for a while. I'm sorry if you need a break, because you're you're about to be moved again. But he is awesome. The first time we talked and I did the preinterview interview in a podcast, I was impressed and we did the interview. She is just somebody that invites people and challenges people to be a better way, better version of themselves. And I thought, OK, that was awesome.

Then I realized from talking with her how much she has at the center of her life, what's important to her, how she manages her time, how she gets paid well, how she makes time for her family. She's a devoted wife. The air quotes, air quotes, air quotes devoted her husband. Love that. But you're ready for a really awesome treat with her sharing a little bit about how to make time for fame in abundance and just whatever else that she does.

That's awesome. So thank you so much for being here.

Thank you. I am one hundred percent here for you guys. And so when Wade and I talked about doing this, I said whatever is going to be helpful for the community. So with that being said, put your questions in the comments. Put what's alive for you in the comments. I'm going to share a little bit about my story. And then as Wade set up a little bit about how I got here, the one part of the introduction that we've put out there that last night I was reading and laughing is the fact that I can tell you how to do this for you.

The reality is I can tell you how I did it for me and I can tell you the thoughts that I had and that evolution. But really, the only person who could ever possibly tell you how to apply this to your life is listening to this right now in front of your computer, and that's you. So I am just here to support you and here to share with you my knowledge and it really to be able to kind of take you to the center of it.

I want to be able to give you just an imaginary scenario. So imagine that you're 14 years old, you're a super active athlete, and while you're at a softball tournament, you just collapse in the middle of the field, in the middle of the game, and you regain consciousness for just a little bit to see everybody panicking and huddled around you. And then you don't regain consciousness again until you're in the hospital and you see your parents having these hushed conversations in the corner of the room and in the hallway, you're not really sure what's going on.

And this happens on and off for the next three years of your life. And then you end up going to college and spending a lot of time, a lot of your life in a hospital, doing tests and being poked and prodded and not really getting any answers. And you watch how everybody around you starts to treat you a little bit differently, like you're fragile. And there's a lot of conversation about what you should or shouldn't be doing in your life right now.

And none of that really feels authentic. It just feels like you're being micromanaged and it at some point stopped being your life and started being somebody else's. And there's a point when you realize that you and your colleagues are on more medication than your grandmother when you're trying to assist your grandmother and putting her medication box together. And something clicks in that moment and you decide, you know, there is a difference between. Surviving. And thriving in life, and if this is your last day.

What would you want that legacy to be? And you start thinking in terms of tomorrow is not guaranteed and then you realize it doesn't matter that you have this diagnosis, that you have a disability, any of those things. Tomorrow wouldn't be guaranteed if you didn't have any of those things, and so being just sitting with that, I'm going to ask you, what would you do? What would you do if this was your life? You can put in the comments, you can take a note and just ask yourself, because this is a really powerful question in terms of what Wade asked me to do and to take you on this journey.

This is the starting line. What would you do if that was your story? It's mine. It's my story, and I can tell you that I became a professional stuntwoman, that I have two amazing, beautiful daughters, I have five companies. I am a growth coach, retired stunt woman, retired therapist and professional investor in other companies as well as in other lives. I like to think of it that way. And that didn't happen overnight. That happened through a series of questions of valuing my life.

And the value of living my life. And so when people ask me to be able to say like. Well, how did you do this? I'm laughing right now because the thought didn't occur to me that I had another choice. I could be in a hospital. I could be in bed with this heart condition that that was what ended up being the diagnosis is I do have two heart conditions at this point in my life, but there was no other reality for me.

It didn't occur to me. It's almost like the diagnosis finally gave me permission to live my life and not just assume that it was something that I would get done tomorrow. If right now, if this very moment I told you that tomorrow wasn't guaranteed, what would you do? And then why don't we give ourselves that freedom, that amount of freedom and that amount of latitude in our lives to be able to do what we're passionate about? Debbie just spent a ton of time sharing some amazing truth bombs with you guys about purpose.

And I have a theory, and this comes from the retired therapist brain. But I have a theory that if everybody on Earth was able to live their life and fulfill their purpose, we wouldn't actually need therapies anymore because anxiety and stress exists in the future and it exists in the past. It doesn't exist in the present. And this is why so many people do so much mindfulness work about being in the present. There's really two big arguments for living your life in the present.

One is that you don't have that stress and anxiety of being stuck in the future and wondering what will happen or perseverating on what did happen. The second is that you get to witness right now. How many times in the past? Month, have you noticed that people are having a conversation like this, not even looking up? Or pretty covid out at dinner, where you see couples that are out at a date night both on their phones. And so there's so much of this present that we're missing and I was missing, I was so worried about when the next heart episode was going to come, when I'd have to be hospitalized again, remembering how it impacted my parents every time I passed out that I couldn't be present and enjoy the moment.

And how that translated to work was I was distracted. I was preoccupied. I was tired because I wasn't sleeping. And my work suffered from that and my work wasn't fulfilling my purpose. So I'm hoping to be able to take Debbie's work and role that naturally into what I'm going to be sharing with you about being able to do work life alignment. Now, it's what our company, A Better Place Consulting focuses on the most is work life alignment. And as Wade said, as far as productivity, it's not so much about getting more done.

It's about getting the right things done. And so if you look at your to do list today and if you look at what's called an Eisenhauer matrix, there's important and urgent and you can do the quadrants around that. And I didn't make you a slide show because I wanted this to be a conversation. But it's basically a quadrant that you're able to see in real time when you take your to do list what's important and urgent and be able to do that, what's not important and urgent and question if you really need to get that done, because it's not important, what's not urgent and important and then you can schedule that for another time.

That's not right now. And then what's not important and not urgent, which we don't really need to think about. And so you can also delegate some of those things within your life and when you're able to take everything out of here. And put it down somewhere, just just set it down and take it out of your mind, it allows you to be present, you can relax, you can literally feel your shoulders come down and stop wearing your shoulders as earrings and.

Really sit in your true value and it's so important, it's so important for you to value yourself because that's where it starts. When you say the first question that I asked you, what would you do, what would you do if you had my story, the beginning of my story? There's a lot of different endings. There's a ton of different endings. And I would tell you that my story has a happy ending, but it hasn't ended yet.

I believe that it has a happy ending. And the second question that I meet at that starting line. Is do value you? And if so, how? When I started this journey of valuing my life, and I don't mean in an egotistical way of valuing me, right, my time is worth two thousand dollars an hour. No, that's that's not it. Valuing my life. Because when I answered that question of do I value my life?

And if so, how am I living my life in this gift of another day? I have a heart condition, every day's a gift, so if I'm given this gift, how then? Am I utilizing it? How then am I? Using that gift to make the world a better place and fulfilling my purpose, how am I not squandering this gift? Another gift of another day with my kids? I remember having four miscarriages before my first child and two miscarriages after my first after my second child.

Let me back up six miscarriages total, four before my first, two after my first before my second, being able to get receive those gifts, I value them so much more. I value my kids. Not all the time, but a lot because of the difficulty that I had in my life having children. And all of those nights in the hospital, all those tests, I value my life a lot more today than just the assumption that I'm going to have 80 years.

My assumption this morning was that I woke up in order to be here with you. I focused on the one thing I was going to do within my purpose to add value today. And that evolved into two things, because my daughter made on a roll, and so we must go get ice cream tonight because I want her to know that I value her. So the background color is my service animal. So if you hear him, that's just him snoring and getting comfortable sleeping.

So one of the things that I want to leave you with to to think about, I'm not going anywhere right now. But one of the things that I want you to take note of either mentally or journal down is if I don't value my life, who will? And this comes from relationships and employment. This comes from relationships with my spouse is when I don't value myself. It's very, very difficult for somebody else to value me. And even if they do value me, I don't necessarily believe it.

I don't necessarily. Hold that Wade could be like funny, you're awesome, and I'd be like, yeah, thanks. You see, I, I didn't cash that check. That check bounced and limiting my value because I'm not seeing it through that lens and allowing that check to make its deposit in my life. And so being able to add that value, it means so much. And you get to show up in a more confident space and by you going to work five days a week and saying, my value is.

This six hours of work that I actually do and the other two hours, I'm just sitting here twiddling my thumbs, why can't you get paid for 30 hours? Why can't you be in the office for 30 hours and get paid for results instead of time? This is the relationship that must be broken in order to have more value in your life, is the exchange of time for a finite amount of value. Every day that you wake up needs to be that infinite amount of value.

And that doesn't mean that you can't work a 40 hour work week. It just means that if everything in your life. Is fulfilling your work, your family, your self care, if you have that value for yourself, then that's what life looks like when you go to work. But if not, if you have my situation where you're like, I did the math, I know how many hours I have in a week, and to give 40 of those hours to a job that's not going to work.

And so is Wade talked about when this happened to me. There several evolutions in my life. And we're going to fast forward to the entrepreneurial journey. When I when I first started, I did strategic planning. I'm laughing at myself. I did strategic planning, executive coaching, all of this kind of stuff. And I set my market value at what other people were charging. That's not my value. That's somebody else's value. And strategic planning is what somebody else is doing.

Work life alignment, being a retired therapist and a third generation entrepreneur that is smack dab in the middle of my value. That's a combination of all of the skills, abilities, passions and purpose that I have in this amazing entrepreneurial cocktail that just is mind blowing. And when would win some kind of bartending award? Strategic partnership or strategic planning sessions are like four hours of my life. I'm never going to get back to make a six hundred page document that no one's ever going to look at, look at in the next three years.

And it's pretty much an expensive doorstop. And I would come out of those sessions feeling so drained and then I would go home with my family and I would not have any time or energy because I would just need to recover because I had to get on another plane and travel to Dallas, Texas, to do another strategic planning session. I don't get energy out of Dallas, Texas, this is not to knock anybody here from Dallas, but I'm a beach girl and so I need to be on the coast.

And I remember thinking, like, if this is my last day and I know it's morbid, but I kept asking myself, like, if this is my last day, can I go to bed at peace with what I did today? And it's like, no, because I was in a conference room all day long creating this piece of paper that no one's going to look like look at, and it's not going to add value to this world. So, no, this is not my value.

And so I came up with this hypothesis that if I just stuck with my value, I could make more of an impact and more money. And it was a hypothesis. If I am the Ruth's Chris of business coaches instead of the 7-Eleven that's doing everything that everybody else is doing and charging what everybody else is charging, I can charge Ruth's Chris prices and Ruth's Chris is only open like four hours a night. So maybe I can just work for hours and charge those prices and we'll see what happens.

Amazing. It makes total and complete sense when I go back it people and it makes so much sense because think about a professional athlete. I think about when I was a stuntwoman, I took that stage for four shows a day and they were like 40 minute shows. So if you think about that, that's maybe one hundred and sixty minutes. But actually, I was on stage for maybe 20 of those minutes because my character didn't come out at the beginning of the show.

And there's just transitions. It was a live action stunt show. So maybe I took the stage 20 minutes. So 20 minutes, four times a day. That's 80 minutes, 80 minutes a day. And I made an entire stunt woman salary. And now when I wasn't on stage, I was practicing my craft, I was practicing being a better me, not a better stunt woman, a better me, and that included working out, that included studying my lines.

That included being up to date on safety practices, but it also included taking care of myself. And so I earned an entire salary for 80 minutes of work. And a football player to show up and play one three hour game a week and make millions, so maybe it's not about time for money. Maybe it's about being able to find that thing that you are the very best at, that nobody can do like you and relentlessly pursue that. And be paid according to your value instead of according to the time.

Being paid for. What's produced? And how it's produced that strategic planning session, I was professional, that I wasn't passionate. And so I what I wasn't making as much money as I do now, when I show up with just four clients a year for clients is all I take a year and relentlessly show up with them on this journey of work life alignment. And it's not work life balance, right, there's no 50 50. It's work life alignment so that you show up confidently.

As you whether you're at home with your kiddos, whether you're working with a client. And in your head, I know we're going a tiny bit into marketing, but in your head, it's not about selling somebody on you, it's about serving them. And it's this knowledge that and permission that if you don't do this, no one else on the face of this planet can do it. You're here for a purpose. You're here for a reason. You have so much value in this world.

And so being able to lean into that and being able to own that and if you want to work three days a week, if you want to work one day a week, Wade and I were laughing because he was introducing the speakers and talking about these speakers are all actively pursuing this three day workweek. And then some of our speakers are pursuing a one day workweek. Last week it was like the only day that I came into the office was to talk to Wade.

And that's because I in the time that I'm not with you, I am exploring and refining and perfecting my craft. And that will be a lifelong journey and being able to share that experience. Here's the here's the thing. If I was in a hospital bed. I could not be here sharing that experience of my life that I chose to live, I believe that from a cellular level. That the fact that I decided to live my life, I actually made myself healthier in the process because I wasn't giving up, I wasn't surrendering, I wasn't restrained by other people's views of what my life should look like.

I gave myself permission to live my life. And I'll be honest with you, I didn't know what exactly that looked like, but I just kept showing up for it. I just kept sharing my value. And then I started to see the return on my investment and I started to see how other people who went to school to be a therapist and graduated with me and were just charging what Insurance would bear when I started doing private practice, because I wanted to be able to work more authentically with clients and not spend six hours every single day battling insurance claims.

I was like, I wonder what would happen if I just did more of what I'm good at and remove this whole Insurance barrier. And then other people were like, I didn't know we could do that. Why not? So what's one thing, put this in the chat, what's one thing today? They are going to commit to doing. To add more value in your life and what's one thing that you were going to do today that you're going to commit to not doing?

Because part of the homework that I want to give you and I'm going to break it down is when you say yes to something, I want you to identify what you're saying no to. When I'm saying yes to being a professional stunt woman, I'm saying no to a traditional career when I'm saying yes to taking my daughter out for ice cream. I'm saying no to probably getting to bed at an early, decent bedtime. When I'm saying yes to being here speaking to you, I'm saying no to my family because I'm here with you guys.

And so being able to just acknowledge that and having this life accounting system is one of the most amazing, precious gifts, rather than saying, Oh, I have the time. Yeah. But what are you taking that time from? Are you taking that time from your family? Are you taking that time from yourself? Are you taking that time from your future? Because it's we're not measuring time anymore, we're measuring value and being able to align that work and that life, and another piece of homework that I want to give you is to put an auto responder up.

And this homework is going to be in the I'm giving you the seven simple steps to running your company and not letting it run you. And that also applies to life. And I emailed it to Wade. So he's got it to share with you guys. But if you email me, you get an autoresponder and it sets expectations. It says everything that you need to know in order to have the appropriate expectations for our value filled interaction. It gives you information that I've repeated over and over and over again and then put into a autoresponder.

It gives you access to a bunch of resources. That is my brain captured and recorded so that you don't have to wait for me. So that's your second piece of armor. First is the yes or no exercise. Second is to put up an autoresponder. Third is to take out your calendar and find four hours next week for self care time and then find four hours next week for family time. And what I'm doing is I'm actively I'm not saying how could we get started on this.

I'm just getting started. Instead of listening to 30 minutes of funny talking and being like, oh, that was good. I took notes. I wonder how I'm going to take action on that. I'm going to make sure that with three minutes left, you take action on it. So take your calendar out and find four hours for self care time and four hours next week for family time. And you're already actively reducing the amount of hours that you're working.

And picking up your phone to check email and you're giving yourself a higher quality of life and adding more value to your life, whether it's that you wanted to listen to that masterclass or go surfing or go play beach volleyball, whatever it is, this is your time. And so at the end of next week, you're going to have eight more hours for your life than you had this week. Intentional hours, not with stress, not with anxiety, not wondering what you're missing because it's scheduled.

You're not missing anything. It's on your calendar. The last piece of homework that I have is going to download the Seven Simple Steps and let me know on social media, you're going to pick one of those steps, one of those simple steps to implement between now and the end of next week. And if you want accountability, you can let me know on social media, on Instagram, it's at Bunny Young has six legs. And on LinkedIn, you can just look up Bunny Young and I will I'm offering.

To be able to hold that accountability for you until the end of next week, as long as you let me know, I can't energetically just know I'm not that good. But as long as you let me know, I'm offering to hold that accountability. And I hope that you take action on at least one or two of these homeworks because you're worth it. Your life, your purpose, your value is here.

That was awesome, as I knew it would be, I didn't know exactly what it would be like, but I knew it was awesome.

Thank you. The secret. I didn't either.

That's good. That's good. Thank you so much. That's what. I knew you were going to do I didn't know what it was going to look like, but I know you're going to do that. Thank you for that. I got so much from that. There's so much some people you have this the ability to just cut right through it and I imagine some of it's restoring some of it to you, but you've chosen to do so. I imagine there's many people who have a similar story and that's, you know, this concept, the card, the excuse card they give every time they meet somebody.

Oh, see, this happened to me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the rest of it's a sob story. Yeah, it's interesting. In my case, my sob story is I have it so well, how dare I want more? And I'm sure I've been working on it literally for years. And your home and your life is just too damn short. I don't have time for people who are committed to mediocrity. We all do stupid things sometimes.

We all do mediocre things. Well, there's bad things, sometimes are horrible and sometimes great things. But to to be to have that be something that I'm OK with, it's just not OK. So thank you so much for that. Yeah. The the two really quick things is Wade when you ask yourself how much that thought is costing you. How much are you going to continue to let it cost you? And the second thing that I love to be able to put as a mantra is instead of why is this happening to me?

Why is this happening for me? Like, what if this is happening for me? And I think I'll share that with you before. But for those of you listening, when you have life happening, it's happening for you instead of to you. And that's a huge shift and a huge difference. It's been it's made such a difference in my life. So thank you for allowing me to be here with all of you beautiful souls. And if there's anything else I can do for you, I'm happy to do that.

I've already let Wade know that. So you guys have that carte blanche. And thanks for making the world a better place, and I'll see you soon.

Thank you so much. We have an awesome rest of the day by.