How Bree Rosenblum Brought Her Book to Life with a Do The Thing Challenge

My name is Bri Rosenbloom. I'm a professor, an author, and a nonprofit director. And I wanted to take a minute to give a shout out to Stacy and her team at do the Thing and talk a little bit about what her framework and her collaboration has meant to me personally, and also what I think it has to offer to our world. So during this little testimonial, I'm just going to wear two different hats. First, I'm going to start with my author hat, and then I'm going to move into my big picture thinker hat. So with my author hat, I, as a professor and an author, I write for a living. I've published a lot of different things in a lot of different ways over the years. And my most recent book, which is more of a heartfelt offering that comes from me, not an academic offering that comes from my science, I decided that I wanted to publish independently. I was tired of working with big publishing houses and I was tired of not owning the rights to my own work. And so I wrote a new book series and I wrote it on my own and published it independently. It's called and the tiny word that can radically transform your life. And it has a companion journal. And the idea of this book series is really to help people with a universal method to move folks out of the feeling of constraint and compromise and conflict in their lives into a feeling of creativity and potential and possibility. And so I present a framework for doing that and lots of stories and exercises and prompts. Now, the interesting thing about being an independent author is that the hardest part, even if you already have an audience, is to get the book out into the world and to help it come alive. And so one of the things that Stacy and I did together this summer was to offer an and challenge. And so what we did is we took the book and we turned it into an interactive, explosive five day experience. And we invited people into that community. And as a community, we went through the process that I propose in my book. And we helped people work through, through every single step. We helped them connect it to their lives. And we also offered experiences and case studies from our own lives. And doing that experience with Stacy was phenomenal. It had this book come alive in a totally different way. Because now it wasn't just a book on a shelf. It was a living, breathing experience that people were engaged with, not just individually, but collectively. And the momentum and the insights that came from that community experience was absolutely phenomenal. And so not only do I appreciate that as an author, the experience that I had working with do the Thing on a book challenge. But it's also something that now I'm passionate about collaborating with Stacy, about to offer to other authors to use do the Thing as a platform for bringing books to life in people's lives. So that's a kind of case study of one way to use do the Thing challenges is as authors for book challenges. But I want to make it really clear that that is one of an enormous constellation of ways that I see do the Thing really contributing to a revolution in how we eng engage as community in this important period in our lives as individuals and as humans on this planet. So with my big picture thinking hat on, I am a professor of global change biology. I study what's happening on our planet, and I study what I think we as humans should do about it. One of the big things I think we as humans should do about it is come together in community in new ways. This is something that is fundamentally missing from a lot of our educational institutions and a lot of our social institutions around the country and around the world is that we don't have great ways to not just come together, but come together and move forward. And one of the things that do the Thing does so well, is it takes people who might not otherwise meet and brings them together around a shared purpose. And this element of the do the Thing philosophy, I know Stacy calls it a framework, but I also consider it a philosophy. Right. The philosophy that we need to come together and. And then we need to take shared action, is an amazing philosophy for this moment on our planet. And so one of the other things Stacy and I are currently collaborating on is bringing do the Thing into some of my classrooms at UC Berkeley to look at what happens not just when you bring students together around content in a class, but bring them together around a shared community experience. And how might that activate their feeling, not just as learners, but also as humans on this planet? It's a time where young people, and I don't think only young people, I think many people, are feeling kind of shaky about what our future looks like. And when we come together in community and then we plan actions that we can take, this is something that can have a radical impact in an enormous number of sectors in our society. And so I see the do the Thing philosophy as something that is going to be incredibly important for community groups, for schools, for people in their own lives to feel a sense of support and structure around their inspiration in this world and to really think about the connection between the personal and the collective in clearer ways. So I'm super excited to continue collaborating with Stacy. I'm really excited about the big work that do the Thing is growing into. One of the last things that I'll say is that for me, do the Thing connects three important things that matter to me right now on our planet, and that is people, a platform for engaging and a purpose for getting together. And when we put those three things together, I think amazing things can happen. And I personally think that Stacy is one of the folks that is doing the hard work of bringing those things together and helping light some bright lights for us. So thanks for listening and be well.