#158: Fortune Favors The Brave: Resilience, Bravery and Survival

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and I am thrilled this morning to have a great guest. I'm very lucky actually, because from my standpoint, all of our guests are really quite amazing. And it's so interesting. I won't get into the sort of the backstory of how I get introduced to people, because not everybody that's a guest on the show is somebody that I've known for years and years. Sometimes that's the case, and that's always a joy, but often it's It's just this sort of serendipitous leading of connection to somebody through someone else. And it's sort of looking at the breadcrumb trail backwards. It's always fun. I happen to know my book agent is the person who connected me and Kiri, who I'm about to introduce you to. And so at this time, I think it's just wonderful to acknowledge how so many wonderful things are happening in a way that we can't predict or plan. And yet when we look and when I look careful to be conscious of it, I can See all these just wonderful serendipities. And, and I think at this time, especially now with so many things going on in our world and people in many ways, I think, struggling with, with the unknown, having— maintaining faith and not veering off into fear. I think it's a great reminder for me and for all of us to just be able to see how many everyday miracles or everyday things that you might not call a miracle, but just— these wonderful serendipities, I'll just refer to them that way, are happening and with great ease and great grace and don't require a whole lot of heavy lifting. And this is one of those cases that I got introduced to Keri Westby by my book agent. I'm going to read a little bit of her bio and then I'm going to get right into it with her, which is really exciting because I think this is going to be a great conversation. So Keri is a lifelong human rights activist and a writer whose unique blogs have been featured on HuffPost and Good Morning America and translated into multiple languages as well. Kyrie was raised in a small Buddhist community in Colorado, where she began formal training in meditation and dharmic arts at the age of 8. She started working professionally in human rights advocacy at age 22, transporting money and information across borders for a global feminist network. At age 29, Kyrie was arrested, making international headlines for reminding the world in front of the Olympic cameras of ongoing human rights abuses in Tibet. Kyrie currently lives with her husband Phil and their 2 young children in a small fishing village in Mexico. After 10 years of writing for the international media, Fortune Favors the Brave is her first book, and we're going to get to talk about that today as well. Kiri, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I'm so excited to be with you.

Yeah,

my first podcast ever, and I'm just thrilled.

Oh my goodness. I feel really honored that we get to like your first podcast.

I know.

It'll be fun. I promise you'll, you'll be released unharmed. Relatively, relatively unscathed. So you have a beautiful bio and lots going on there. I know we're going to dig into a bunch of those things, but before we do, what's one thing that's not included in your introduction there that you'd love for people to know about you?

I think something that's not included in that is that while I'm a really extroverted person, I haven't spent a lot of time online, and this is sort of— this book represents a bit of kind of a coming out of an anonymous identity online to claiming my own identity and my own story.

Well, that's— there's a lot of mystery in that, which is good because we're gonna dive into that. Kiri, just before we turn the record button on, you and I were talking a little bit about an alias that you've got, and I don't mind just diving right into that story. So for everybody, I asked Kiri right before we started, I said, What's the story with Donna Snowbunny? And can I make reference to that name? And, you know, is that going to lead us? I don't know where. I actually asked you that. So let's, let's just go after it. Who is Donna?

Yeah. So as a sort of underground or anonymous human rights activist, I've spent a lot of time in my career formulating aliases or other identities that allow me to do my work more easily. And this is my book here. I brought a copy. So this is my book, Fortune Favors the Brave. And it's my first book. And I tell the story of becoming a global activist through the lens of the most sort of the bravest I've ever been, the scariest experience of my life. And that was a nonviolent protest at Mount Everest Base Camp in 2007, just as China had been awarded the Olympics and were kind of coming out on the international stage. And we, 5 of us, 5 American activists gathered there at Base Camp. the evening before the big announcement, and we staged a small nonviolent protest with a banner and our own sort of ceremony. And in that protest, my alias was Donna Snowbunny. And my story was I traveled separately to Everest Base Camp with a Tibetan American. And my story was that I was kind of a ditzy American who didn't have much knowledge about the political situation in Tibet or China, happened to find myself there on a vacation. There was another group of Americans holding up a sign and they needed some help. So we joined in, and that was a specific strategy to provide as much protection as possible around the Tibetan American who was amongst us, while others in the protest took different aliases. And some of the others in the protest, I never knew their real name, and they didn't really know mine until after the experience. And so in those circles, I'm still referred to as Donna a lot.

Donna, forgive, forgive if this is a really neophyte question about that form of activism. I've never really looked into it greatly, and maybe there are people listening now that, that same thing, just have never really thought too much about how that works. Were you able to maintain— because you were arrested, was that the time when you did get arrested? Was it that particular protest? Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken, and all you have to do to get your own free Resilience Leader Assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

Yeah, it was. Yeah, that is the first time I had been arrested after that point, 7 years of human rights work in war zones and different areas of armed conflict. And yeah, so it's interesting, we had an alias that very important in the lead-up to the arrest. But then once we went into the Chinese sort of system, they had our passports and they had a lot of information. Right. And our security strategy was that we smuggled in our own satellite and we'd live broadcast the protest to a computer in New York City. And that prevented China from denying what had happened. And for days they denied that they had us. And for days the video of us being arrested repeated over and over again on news. around the world. And so that was sort of part of the plan, so to speak, was to get arrested and to sort of show the lengths that China will go to cover up the truth and the lengths they were going to do that in Tibet, but to pit them against the United States government who was, was looking out for our whereabouts. Although there were days in which we were missing and our families, no one knew where we were.

Right.

Well, you were saying you don't know that much about that underground kind of world of activism. And there is a huge underground world of activism that trains people in nonviolent direct action and who does work anonymously or through sort of quiet means. And often the goal is to get in and get out unnoted.

Right.

In this case, the goal was to get in and get as noticed as possible and use that to sort of steal the Olympic spotlight that was shining on Beijing so that instead of every headline reading the next day, Beijing unveiled its torch route relay route, which was to go to the top of Mount Everest.

Right.

It read, Beijing reveals its torch route. 5 Americans have been arrested, detained, and are missing for days and days. So we added our story to that story as a way of kind of peeling back the truth from that propaganda. Yeah.

How long were you— were you held and were you kept together?

We were

held

for 55 hours once the Chinese secret police, as they're known as, showed up. So originally held at base camp in a cement sort of jailhouse by the local military. Most of whom are ethnically Tibetan, partially because Tibetans can stay and survive and thrive longer in higher altitudes genetically and have been for generations lived at high altitudes, whereas a lot of Han Chinese get sick when they spend too much time at altitude.

Right.

So a lot of the original people who held us were military. They were armed, but they were pretty friendly in sort of that general sense of not being too intimidating. And then about 14 hours later, the Chinese secret police showed up and then everything changed. And that's when we were searched for the first time. We were separated. We were each told different stories, lied to, and we each had a really different experience for that. So there is— this is just my experience. All I could tell was really my story here.

But right in base camp, is it about 14— is it 14,000 feet?

Just under 18,000 where we were.

Just under 18,000?

Yeah, it's hard to even walk across the tent.

That's remarkable.

Yeah.

I mean, we were in Lake Tahoe about a year ago, and it was maybe we're at an altitude of 6,000 or so, you know, and there's— so you're, you're above a mile high, you're, you know.

Yeah.

And you feel the altitude, and you feel the sort of the dryness, etc. This was 3 times as high, and that was just base camp, right?

And you're staring at a 10,000-foot peak above you, which is Everest at 29,000.

Yes.

So another 10,000 or 11,000 feet up. And, you know, I had been there before. So I was married in Lhasa, Tibet, and I went to Everest Base Camp on my honeymoon, which is the entire reason I was recruited for this action. So 2 years earlier, I had, as just a tourist, done this same route and learned the sort of permitting process and how one gets to Everest Base Camp. That was the original recruitment. But I wasn't— the others on the team were from Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace and the Ruckus Society. They had been arrested dozens of times, and I was sort of the most novel, most sort of novice and naive of the group, I would say.

Yeah. Had these folks— had you ever been arrested before then?

I had never been arrested, no.

These other folks had been, clearly. Yeah.

Oh yeah, yeah. I don't think Tendor— so Tendor is the Tibetan American who we kind of helped get him entry in. If he himself had just tried to go in, no Tibetan from exile has ever gone back in successfully and launched a protest before Tendor. And so part of our role and why we were recruited was to kind of provide cover for him and to help with our American white privilege, help smuggle him and the equipment and everything along the route through storytelling, through fake storytelling. Right. And then to surprise them at that moment. And it was an incredibly successful action. And in the year following that, an uprising sparked across Tibet. And a lot of those activists had heard or seen these vibrant stories of this Tibetan American, Tendor, who had done this brave act. And the stories were all kind of embellished. He had climbed Everest barefoot and left the Tibetan flag at the top and all that. But nonetheless, he really became a national hero and a symbol of resistance. That year, which was incredible.

Yes.

So I tell the story from within Chinese Interrogation in my book about how I got there. And I go all the way back to my unique upbringing in a Tibetan Buddhist community in Boulder, Colorado, the first Buddhist community, I think, in the West. Right.

So that's so interesting. You think about the connection to your upbringing, as you said, and then being— it's not the birthplace of Buddhism, is it?

Well, the Buddhism that I was raised in, for sure, it's the birthplace of Tibetan Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism. I started attending Buddhist schools as soon as I could walk or talk, and Buddhist summer camps, and we had a certain Tibetan angle to our training. I was led by a Tibetan meditation master who had fled during the occupation of Tibet and had led 400 people across those same Himalayan mountain ranges that I was later walking along.

Mm-hmm.

And I point that out in my book. It doesn't really occur to me until those moments before the protests, that I'm chanting a mantra from my youth.

From your youth.

And that mantra was brought to me by a Tibetan man who had walked these same mountains seeking freedom. And here I was making a choice to bring that wisdom and that knowledge back into yet another kind of action in the ongoing cries for freedom that are coming out. So yeah, it's an interesting cyclical pattern that arises in the book as you learn who I am and how I got there and how it was When

the Chinese arrived, when their Secret Service showed up,

did they

remove you from that location, bring you somewhere else? They separated you?

They did. Yeah, they did. They searched us for the first time. I had a hidden telephone up to that point, and I had actually done an interview with the Associated Press from the toilet that the military hadn't known about. They searched us, they removed everything, all our equipment. They went to the tents we had stayed in and gathered all of our belongings. They put us in 5 separate vehicles and they just started driving and they wouldn't tell us where we were going. And it's desolate, right? So from Everest Base Camp, you're looking at like 6 hours to 7 hours down to the main highway that goes sort of in and out of Tibet. That whole original section, that first 6 or 7 hours, I was with a Secret Service agent who was just constantly threatening me in my ear. Leaning in very close and talking about how I was never going to see my family again, how much she enjoyed watching me suffer, how nobody in the world cared or knows about what we've done, and stuff like that. And I kind of held my own, I think.

Another woman?

Another female, yeah. I was with 2 female Secret Service agents most of the time.

Right.

Speaking flawless English.

Flawless English.

Yeah, and then we get down about seven hours later. We get down to that main crossroads, and I had up until that point, I think because I studied diplomacy and world affairs in college, and I knew a lot about the politics, I am betting in my mind that the Chinese government was going to want to get us out of the country and bury the story as fast as possible. And it was only a few more hours to the border of Nepal down off the Tibetan Plateau from there. And I think everything in my heart and mind was seeing myself in Nepal, a place I know very well. I lived in the Kathmandu Valley. I was talking in detention about, oh, by tonight I'm going to have you guys at my favorite pizza restaurant, just holding on to all these visions of what was going to happen. And then we hit that main highway and we turned right back into the interior of Tibet. And like, my world shattered. I had this earth-shattering moment of realizing and starting to realize everything I thought was going to happen was wrong. And I had no idea what was going to happen. And I— so the book goes through those, but not till the end of the book, actually.

Interesting.

To give you lots of time to kind of get to know me and to see why it is that someone— I walked into my first active war zone at 18, traveled away from my parents across the world and walked into Cambodia against all advice because I had this sort of drive, maybe born out of my Buddhist upbringing, to help people. And I couldn't find satisfaction in Western sort of materialism way of living and striving.

Yeah. And you live in Mexico now?

And now I live in Mexico. Yeah. Which is wonderful. I actually spent a lot of time here as a child and I learned to speak Spanish at a young age. I live here in this gorgeous little mainly Mexican neighborhood and my parents live 2 blocks away for 6 months out of the year.

Is that right?

They split their time between here and Colorado where my other home is, Boulder.

Yeah. How long did it take you to write the book? This is your first podcast, but this is your first book as well, right?

It's my first book.

I know folks are listening. You know, we have it on YouTube as well, but it's a gorgeous cover. I mean, it's just a really, really striking galley, as we call it, cover of the book. And it's a hardcover book, yeah?

It's a hardcover book. Hard to even see these these days. And,

um,

my husband Phil, who you meet through the book and you hear our love story of falling in love, he designed the COVID actually. As I was reading him early pages, he was doing sketches.

You need to tell Phil we— lots of compliments and kudos for the book cover.

Thank you, I will. A little bit of like a modern feminist angle on like A Clockwork Orange is what I see. Yeah. Same face.

Or even Phantom of the Opera came up.

Or Phantom of the Opera, yes.

Yeah.

And I am— I refer a lot in the book to Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego, which was a video game I was a bit obsessed with as a child, and this idea of outsmarting people and flying around the world to assume different identities and all that. So It sort of captures all of that.

I want to dive in. Obviously, we gather very quickly how brave you are. I mean, incredibly brave. Not incredibly, totally credibly, credibly brave. What's the fortune piece of this? So fortune favors the brave.

Yeah. So I tell that story in the book a little bit about— it has to do with meeting my husband and he was a tattoo artist and I went in to get a memorial tattoo. I'd lost my grandmother. And when I lost her, I was deep in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And I was 5 days from an airport and I wasn't able to get home for any of the memorials. So I get home and my best friend convinces me to get a tattoo as a way of kind of memorializing her role in my life. And I go to get the tattoo and I end up kind of strangely falling for the tattoo artist. But I still think it's just gonna be a momentary overnight thing. I'm leaving in a couple months for a whole year in Kenya, a year's contract. I'm not attached to anyone at this point. I can barely keep a houseplant alive.

So you really are living the Buddhist principle of impermanence.

Yeah, impermanence. I always had like a bag packed. I could be in Africa with a few days' notice and I felt very like free. I would go anywhere I wanted at a moment's notice without accountability to anyone other than the mission that I was on. But in the months that I'm dating him before I leave for my contract in Kenya, I see this tattoo on the wall from like an old sailor flash and it says, fortune favors the brave. He starts talking about what an old saying that is in the tattoo world and that sailors used to get it while they were going off to literally seek fortune and didn't know whether the world was flat or round or what they were going to find and they would get this tattoo on them. And it's an old Latin saying from what I understand. And so it became kind of a motto between him and I every time I would leave and I would go on a mission. I'd have to say goodbye, like for real goodbye, like I'm going and I'm hoping to come back but I might not. And that's A different type of goodbye than you normally say to somebody. We started saying to each other, fortune favors the brave, because in Buddhism there's this concept that good fortune, or like good karma, comes from fearlessness. And fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It's not— when you say I'm brave, it's not that I don't feel fear and haven't felt fear a lot in my life. It's more of like having been trained with how to work with that fear so that it doesn't cause inaction. So how to move through fear, how to walk with fear. Fear is a really important lesson, a really important teacher that's always with me. Fear and death. So those are a huge part of my upbringing, and those are what I think caused me to do acts that others would see as incredibly brave. And it's because of my deep relationship to working with fear and my own death.

Well, let's— I'd love for us to be really present in this moment, not just with each other, but present in what's going on in the world right now. And I'm curious what your, your thoughts are on bravery today, on the kind of bravery that might be really impactful and not something everybody is sort of equipped— you know, when we think of bravery, we think of— I think we easily think of what you did as being brave. Certainly anytime where we are doing something for a purpose that's greater than ourselves, I think that's That's a brave act for sure. And there is a tremendous amount of fear that's— that I think is in the world at this moment, given this pandemic situation that we're in and a lot of the knowns and even, I think more so, the unknowns. I'd love to just get your take on bravery in the world we're living in right now.

Yeah. I mean, talk about like a conscious pivot for 7.5 billion people at the same exact time.

No kidding.

Yeah, we're living through really interesting times. Even when we booked this podcast a few weeks ago, no one could have imagined we'd be in this situation talking today. And that's some of that sort of serendipity you talked about and pulling out the voices that we need at the times we need them. I think that when you've worked in war and you've looked at war and you've looked at suffering as much as I have, you can no longer just look away and live in a place of kind of ignorance or apathy or really a ton of self-involvement. Right? It's sort of like every time you take a glass of water, you think about how far people walked for water. Every time you come into a home, you think about people who are homeless. Every time you pass a border with a passport, you think about people who are stateless and identityless. So it's like you never don't think of those things again. But part of my challenge is that I was one of the people who would be in war zones every other month and then be back in Boulder, Colorado, which sort of the height of having everything you need. And in that space of having everything you need, there's an incredible ability to not to look away, right? To not see what interconnectedness we have, to not see the suffering that went into our comfort and to look away from it. And I often would try to bring it up and was told over and over again to stop killing the buzz at the party or stop talking about war. We're all here together. And it was like hard to balance those two worlds. Yeah. For much of my life. And, but it is that view into war and suffering that has led me to so much gratitude for my life on a daily basis. And in that space of gratitude, I don't need as much as other people think they need. I don't— that kind of padding myself with stuff to feel a sense of happiness goes away because you see, like, what would I take if I had 20 minutes to decide? And you would take the people. And I think probably right now there's people who have a lot of things and not a lot of people. And right now people need people. I think that war is never something many people choose. It comes to them unasked. And this virus is coming into our life uninvited. It's not a choice that we've made. And yet we're being forced to look at, acknowledge, and understand our interconnectedness, even down to how much my breath may affect your breath. My space may affect your space in a whole new way than anybody's been wanting to look at it. And we don't have a choice. And that's because death and suffering is coming with it, unfortunately, for so many, and it's random. But I guess 2 things I think are really important. One is in a war zone, the first thing that happens that I've seen is that people forget expecting some kind of government or outside body to come in and take care of themselves, and they start community organizing. and they start building systems that work. They adopt children that are orphans, they start making food for everybody, not just themselves, they share what they have. And I'm seeing so much of that in activist circles online just in the last week, creating community care databases that take account of all the elderly and all of the immunocompromised in their own communities and start to build systems. Yes. Part of that is because they're looking at the government, they're not seeing the kind of savior model they thought was coming, and there's sort of a waking up To our own ability. And I think in war, what you see is rising to the occasion. You don't look at someone who's in war and you say, yeah, you're very brave. And they say, what choice did I have? It

was

bravery or freeze. And I froze for a while and then I got moving. And I almost felt like that this week. Like, I had so much I wanted to accomplish this weekend and I kind of sat frozen and I had to acknowledge that I was in kind of a fight-or-flight space around this pandemic.

Yes.

And I woke up this morning and I felt the The action is in me. I felt the, like, the rising to the occasion and the reaching out in any way that I could with what I have to my direct community here.

Yes.

A lot of that is just in Spanish, speaking to people about the pandemic, explaining to people who don't have access to international news what's coming and how to keep their families safe. And here it's not hand sanitizer, it's like soap and running water that is in short supply. And so bars of soap are 30 cents a bar and I'm buying soap and handing those out to communities that otherwise wouldn't think to go because soap is so necessary right now. Soap. And so I think it's going to be— I think by all predictions it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better in terms of the level of suffering we're going to see globally. At the same time, if we could count the number of infected that we have on these screens and we could balance it with the number of people who are doing something they've never done before, And rising to the occasion to meet the needs of their families or their communities, I think we would also see there's like that opposite reaction. And people will paradigmatically shift and wake up as they are called to, as this virus comes into their communities. And it's not a choice. You know, a lot of Americans in the news programs saying, I'm not going to let coronavirus ruin my day or into my time or ruin my— and it's like, This isn't a choice. Like, coronavirus isn't asking. And the interesting message I'm feeling is if you act in self-interest and individualistically, you harm yourself and you put other people at risk. And the community is starting to call people out just locally for doing that in a way that's different. Mm-hmm. And if you act community-minded and empathetically and you see us as one human species, You may be spared from this. So there's a— there's even a sort of bigger message to this virus, which is that we all are going to be called to our greatest, our bravest selves, and to rise to occasions we never thought possible. And we won't come out of that the same. There's no way that we come out of that still thinking in the same way we were thinking. So—

Wow, the pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the And all you have to do to get your own free Resilient Leader Assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. No, it is a— no, please continue. I was just going to bring us back to that paradigm shift, but yeah, please continue. I was

just going to say it is a major shift of consciousness and we're all being asked to decide how we're going to respond.

Indeed. Self-responsibility, I think, is a big component of all this, that we will have and do have a choice how we put our own self-interests in the mix in thinking about how We impact so many other people without even— maybe not even knowing it, because there are, as you say, a lot of— there will be a lot of suffering. There already has been. And the bulk, the masses, will come through this. And it just may well be that along the way, based on your actions, you've either harmed someone or helped them. And I think making that conscious choice, even in this moment— my goal is to help, not to harm— is a simple enough sort of mantra or question to ask before you choose to take a certain action. What I'm blown away by is the level of creativity. I was— we were talking to our kids about this, and with businesses being changed and disrupted in ways that we could have predicted, I suppose, but just— I don't think it was on anybody's radar, not really. What's something globally, you know, how things could shut down globally? And yet, the creative response to all this from so many different corners of the communities, online at least anyway I see, are remarkable. Just the amount of giving that's going on and the ways in which people are literally reinventing their models on a dime, like in the moment, just reinventing things, which is— I think it's a DNA thing. It's genetically a part of who we are as a species. to adapt. That's how we've existed. That's how we've managed to continue with all the god-awful mistakes that the human race has made over time and then one serious massive blunder after another. And yet we're still around. We're still here. And as a credit to that, I think we are resilient, resilient by nature. And I'd love to get your take on resilience, on the term. What does it mean to you? How do you define it? Would that be a word that you would use in connection with of how we move through this. As you say, there'll be this fear, there is this prevalence of fear, and it's a question of how do we move through this? What's your take on resilience?

Yeah, I think that I just wanted to say about the creativity, of course we're seeing that in our world as well, really beautifully out of— even in history, out of the Dark Ages came the Renaissance. And I think humanity who have been resisting figuring out a way to adapt to how many of us are on this planet and say, I could never telecommute, I could never work from home, I could never figure that out. Entire industries are figuring that out. And maybe we're realizing we don't have to drive in our cars singly to a location and that that model doesn't work for 7.5 billion of us. Like, there's so much of that coming out of it. And that people have been reading my book. I was lucky I had my book launch on International Women's Day in Oakland on Sunday, March 8th, and it was the last day that public events were allowed in the Bay Area. And about 40 people bought my book that day, and then I flew back home. They were handing out hand sanitizer with every book sold, and people are reading it and they're saying, wow, this is like a whole— I haven't had time to read. Like, I used to commute for 2 or 3 hours a day in my car, and I haven't picked up a book in the longest time. And so the space for creativity, the space for outlets with literature and art are being opened in our lives because we're not moving. So much, and our minds are expanding into that. And it's just so beautiful to see the creativity blooming at the same time out of this major interruption into every single human's life. And we needed a major interruption, the Earth, I believe.

And so quickly.

And so quickly, yes, in a matter of weeks. And fear that made it happen. So it's interesting that we look at fear sometimes as an enemy, and we think everyone's so afraid. And there is a moment with fear that you pause. Right? And then there's a time when you find your resiliency and you get to moving. And it's the fear that's causing us all to stay home. It's causing all kinds of beautiful renewing to the planet to happen and to animals to have a break from our relentless interruption into the world.

Yes.

And I think that in that fear, if you can stop resisting it and you can sort of befriend it and realize, okay, fear is causing me to make major changes in my life. To the way I work, to the way I relate to people, to how I live. And now it's time to stop being afraid and to start moving into action and to creation, which is what the human condition— we have this ability to ingeniously adapt and to create better ways for ourselves to exist. And a lot of that has come out of pandemics or plagues or world wars that come to us in a way that we're not ready for and we didn't want, and they disrupt our lives. And it's not pretty. But out of it blooms something brand new. And so I think about that a lot. And I think, I think a lot about this metaphor that we use sometimes in the activist world, which is that if one person just starts screaming out, they can only yell for so long.

Right.

But if you— if we yell as a chorus, if we create a chorus, then I can yell for a while while you rest. And then you can, let's say, sing for a while while I rest. And someone else can come in with another tune. And that note can be carried out forever, for as long as there are people to continue to spell each other and come into it. And so we tend in the West, in America, to see ourselves as saviors and how am I going to save this situation? And the thing is, it's not I, it's we. And the only way forward has always been we. And we can look to women, not just women, we can look to activists on the ground who've survived war and have done so by community organizing. And by stepping back from that sort of savior position and creating a we, and that's how we move forward. That's where I find my resilience. It's in the we, the kind of working with an entire plethora of talents and skills and moving everyone forward.

Something you said that really hit home for me in talking about what— how we capture our resiliency, or what does it even mean, is this idea of spelling each other because My belief and my experience is that resilience is in many ways about how we charge, you know, like how we, how we charge forward in things in life, and then how we recharge. Because without the recharging, in the example that you gave of a chorus and of a person screaming as long as they could possibly scream, at some point they run out of everything. They run out of energy, out of breath, out of voice. It all just At some point, they become exhausted. I really feel that our world has been exhausted for a long time. We're exhausting resources, but we're exhausting ourselves first and foremost. And that's— that is a pandemic of its own. Yeah. And this other pandemic is actually causing us to reset. It's causing us to have the needed space and even time to recharge ourselves. Similar to the way you described in that chorus, that one person spells the other, gives them that time to rest and recover so that their voice can then be strong again when it's their turn to pick it up. And that's just its own— it's— there's a beauty in all of that as well, that we are relearning something that we've probably forgotten anyway. And I'm not certain it's everywhere in the world because clearly people from Europe that are listening to this They're not— they weren't living as exhausted an existence as people from North America, in particular people in the United States. But I was in Japan in December, and it's the— between Japan and Singapore, the 2 most sleep-deprived countries in the world. So I think this idea of go, go, go and constantly producing and constantly working has been its own disease long enough. Yeah. Long before we were talking about corona, but I know for me personally, to maintain my own resilience, I've got to do things consciously. I've got to set it out. It's going to be a part of my plan on a daily basis to want to actually take care of myself. I think that's going to be another one of the things that comes out of this is that people are not only spending time at home with their families and have time maybe to read and time to think or sit still or what have you, but— New rituals will be born out of this forced reset that I think will change people's lives because they'll once again have some appreciation for how, how different life can be when you do slow down or when you do have the ability to rest, assuming they're not just being driven each day by fear. They can actually, as you say, sort of embrace this opportunity. I think it's a big part of being resilient is being able to see creative opportunities in situations that, that might otherwise just have you in that fight or flight mode. So I would love to know, Keri, what's— what are the kind of rituals that you— I know you've got a spiritual practice from the time of childhood. So is that the most significant ritual that you have at this point to help you to reset or to recharge yourself? Or are there some other things that you might share with our audience that you do on a regular basis, whether that's daily or otherwise, to— I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, But getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy. Thank you, Adam.

Yeah, I do a lot of things pretty consciously. I have some of my own non sort of very spiritual traditions that maybe are born out of my spirituality. And one of those is that when I lay myself down at night and I put my head on the pillow, I just do a quick assessment of my day. And I look at my whole day and how much of it I was present and how much of it I was just on autopilot. And then I kind of— I try to do something generous that requires my giving every day. And oftentimes I do it with my children or with my partner, but I also try to do something just like one simple act outside of myself or my own sort of self-benefit and not necessarily benefiting my family or my home, but something that benefits somebody else. And I don't always succeed, but every night I remind myself that— But for me, generosity is like the seed to feeling better and the seed to a sense of accomplishment or goodness or happiness even. I think that out of a sense of self-preservation, we've been taught to hoard. But as soon as you hoard, you feel terrible about the fact that you've taken it from somebody else. And then you have to sit in that space of greed versus self-preservation. And so the simple antidote to that, kryptonite to that, is to be generous. And so, and it can be small. Lately, I've been— anybody that posts on their Facebook that they're really freaked out right now because they're a hairdresser or a therapist or someone who sees people face to face and they are struggling with how they're going to feed their families. I also have a family restaurant, it's struggling. I've just been ordering them, hey, we're ordering you guys takeout tonight from our family restaurant. It's sort of not asked for. And that's been my practice all week and just being like, I don't have enough to give to everybody. The suffering is immense and I can take care of my community, but I can also just like do one small thing that I didn't need to do. Because once I do it, the feeling afterwards of having done it is the feeling I've been sort of searching for all day. This feeling of being useful to somebody, of being needed, of being in that chorus. So that is my note. Maybe today my tiny note that I can do for humanity is ordering food for somebody or sharing food. But if I'm not having any note, I end up feeling like I'm not useful to the choir. And so it's like you don't have to scream or bang your head against the wall all day long. But if you could do one note every day that added to the choir of humanity, then you're singing. And there's actually a physical feeling that happens when you do that. And it's nice to lay down at night and And note it and just say, oh, I did that one thing, and it actually becomes unconscious. Or sometimes I lay down at night and I say, wow, I was really unpresent today and I was super selfish and I did a lot of things that were not correct, and tomorrow I have the opportunity to double down a little bit. Yeah. And it's selfish in a sense that it brings me happiness, that it is actually the cause and the root of my feeling good about myself and all that I have. I mean, in the US context, I may be like middle to lower class. I'm a writer, my husband's an artist, but in the global context, I am 0.10% of people who can count on hot water coming out of their faucet and food in my— having a refrigerator. 60% of Mexico doesn't have refrigerators. So how are people here going to prepare for weeks of social isolation if they can't refrigerate food? And so there's just like those things I'm sort of uber aware of and the antidote To the fear or anxiety is generosity. Small acts of generosity, whatever it is. You help someone across the street, you buy 2 oranges and leave one at your neighbor's door. It doesn't have to be major. It doesn't have to be— but if you do it every day, I guarantee you'll feel better. You'll feel like you're part of humanity, and that will alleviate the depression and the cutoffness and the isolation that people are feeling.

I love the spectrum. That we've been able to cover in this conversation, because there are people that would look at you and think, what a great model and somebody they completely respect and maybe even have some envy of the fact that you've taken chunks of your life and devoted them in the way you have, in the way that we respect when we see it and honor. And yet that doesn't mean people are going to get on a plane and go perform, you know, an act of activism and end up in a situation that you talk about in the book. And And I want people to go out and get that book so they can find out how it all— I mean, obviously they know here. That's the good news, you're around. But I know there are a lot of probably very, very captivating details that we've left out and that people want to read about that. But I think there's a tendency sometimes we see someone like yourself and they go, well, they're just cut from a little bit of a different cloth than I am. I mean, I just put on her and I support people like that every day, but I haven't lived that kind of courageous life. And then we put ourselves in that other bucket somehow, that it's, it's an all or nothing. And generosity is not an all or nothing. Gratitude is not an all or nothing. The drop in the bucket is just as significant as possibly some bigger, bigger act or some bigger pour, if you will. That drop is significant. Absolutely. And I think, stick with that analogy you gave us of the chorus and that, that one note that adds to the entire thing. So as a ritual, and no one on this show in 170 episodes or something has ever struck that particular chord, has sung that note the way you just did in terms of a ritual to build us up, to build our resilience.

Yeah, and just to speak to what you just said too, I think that I try to say— I started out my book launch speech saying that this is not a hero's story, even though it's It's kind of packaged in the way we are used to seeing a hero story packaged. In many ways, it's kind of, it's like a slaying of the internal hero that I set out as at 18 years old with a lot of bravado and ignorance and well-meaning, wanting to help mistakes that I made. Kitty. And in the story, I talk a lot about the mistakes I made. and the activists who folded me in even despite my ignorance and my mistakes and said, we understand that you came here to save the world and you think you're helping us, but let us help you understand the role you have to play in this movement of millions. And through my story, I'm actually trying to tell the story of so many women on the front lines who have been fighting for their entire lives for scrap of the freedom that I was born into and how through my ignorance and making mistakes and the gentle patience of these activists, I became more aware of what it was I had to offer the chorus and how to offer it in a way that was helpful and non-disruptive. And I hope that in reading my story, other people can see that, but also see themselves and see that I am you. I am an average American who knew nothing when I started out with nothing but a big heart and through a lot of missteps, I became the activist that I am today. But reading my story, I hope that it brings people a sense of courage, that people feel braver afterwards and rise to this occasion we all find ourselves in together.

Yes, what a perfect place for us to conclude, Kiri. That's just beautiful. Donna Snow Bunny. Well, thanks for having

me.

Such a wonderful conversation. And I'll remind myself and all of us that it's— we get this opportunity, if we're lucky, every day, we get the opportunity to reset ourselves, reset and begin from zero hours, so to speak. And there's no guarantee of that. So for me, my waking ritual is always the same every morning. I'm lucky enough to wake up. I'm so lucky. spend a moment just appreciating that, that this is something worth appreciating. And that whole process takes 10 or 15 seconds. It doesn't have to take a whole lot of time. And, and then I declare out loud these 4 simple words: I love my life. So I get to ask you now, Carrie, do you love your life?

Yeah, I do. I love my life. And I would say add to those words, how can I help? Those would be my next 4 words. If you're resourced enough to love your life, keep doing what you do, Adam. Keep putting the message out there. Keep tiny acts of generosity in your mind. And it's time for us to take that knowledge and just keep expanding it outwards. The world really needs us right now.

Yes. One voice, one note at a time.

Yeah.

But together.

One chorus.

That's beautiful. Keri, thank you again.

Thank you so much for having me. This was great.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcasts. For more tips, strategies, and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love, join our Pivot Community on Facebook at pivotfb.com.