An interview with Fashion-Forward Funny Chick/Starter-Upper/App-Developer/ Entrepreneur/Photographer/Pop-culture Icon/Friend to Girls/ One of the best-dressed gals I know, Jennifer Puno. We will be breaking down the process of quitting a job you don’t like in favor of pursuing your dreams.

In this podcast episode I get to interview one of my besties, Jennifer Puno, or as she’s known to most, “Puno.” She, along with her husband Daniel, has created the curated photographic map of cool and beautiful places across the globe, “Made with Map,” on Instagram. Aside from MAP, Puno has a million other awesome projects – “just cuz,” including a Star Trek homage – with photos and gifs, shot on location in Iceland, with photographer friend, Ken Lin. 

The topic of this interview is “Path-Forging.” Basically, authoring your own life – fearlessly, but intelligently – including pragmatic steps to take if you’re in need of a total career-change. In my opinion, Puno took on this process in the best way possible: with data and spreadsheets to ensure she had the right back-up plan and savings mapped out while she figured out her next step. 

 

Read More

It’s pretty easy to “never deal” with anything heavy, or anything that makes you feel vulnerable in life. You can always find a way to distract yourself, or hide from the tough stuff. Maybe you’ve been coasting through your emotional adult life and perhaps medicating any and all issues and scary feelings that might come up – or numbing them with drinks, TV or just constant distraction. Maybe you’ve never allowed yourself to become vulnerable to another person – you’ve kept it very superficial, and just kind of “pass the time” in your life –never venturing past the top layer. It all feels fine until one day you suddenly “wake-up” and realize you don’t know what you want, who you are, or whether or not you even like yourself.

Maybe something in your life came to a head, like you finally met someone you want to be in love with and that makes you totally clingy because it feels so reliant on whether or not they like you, or maybe you’ve been through a break-up and you feel shattered – like you have nothing, to you, alone. This window of clarity might force you to realize you’ve got some work to do on yourself so that you can actually figure out who you are and what you want in this life. And with work, grow to like that person, and be proud of who that is. But before you can even fathom that part, if you’re just now realizing you’ve been asleep at the wheel of your life for years and are looking at the amount of work you have to do, it can feel totally overwhelming. It’s a lot to think about and where to start? So if this sounds like where you are right now– this is a blog for you.

Read More

When you suffer from habitual thinking that you don’t like and you have a hard time creating change, it’s because you’re trapped in a physically engrained system of thinking.  For example, feelings of low self-worth, depression, fear of change, or even something like getting stuck in a lifestyle rut – they all result from mental muscle-memory and need to be untrained with “exercise.”  If you’re feeling bad about yourself or professionally or personally stuck, your problem is likely you have been blinded and trapped in a habitual loop. You got stuck here not because you’re weak or untalented or “born this way.” There is no validity to the “causes” you might attribute to your suffering.  You can undo your cycle of negative feelings simply by consistently retraining your habits.  You are suffering at the hand of your subconscious muscle-grooves. You solution lies in three steps: awareness, commitment to your goal, deliberate “retraining” of the mal-formed muscles.  With this blog, I invite you to get you into some emotional physical therapy.  

Read More

Whatever you do, make it awesome.

And interview with the greatest at their craft, Mark Shostrom

This is for you creators, makers, and passionate thinkers out there: it’s a challenge to commit to your own bar of excellence and GO FOR IT. Decide to do whatever you do – awesomely, and foster your voice - because what you leave in your wake is a legacy: something you will be proud of, and others will learn from, for generations to come. Make a stamp on this world with who you are.

I get to interview one of my heroes – and someone thematically perfect for Halloween, special effects and creature effects artist and innovator, Mark Shostrom.  He’s influenced so much of what you see today in horror and zombie tv and film, because he’s an “artist” with a distinct voice and imagination, and he has built an incredible legacy of work.

Read More

This is for the times you hurt and you hurt for love.  You can't go over it, you can't go under it, you've gotta move through it.  The best thing you can do right now is be gentle on yourself and soothe.  This too shall pass.

First and foremost, (VIRTUAL HUG). Imagine I am walking up to you with open arms and giving you a long, back-rubby kind of hug and maybe a little bit of rocking side to side.  I am so sorry you are suffering, but I believe it's because you have a big heart and you know how to love.  So for what it's worth, you are blessed in this way.  There’s very little I can say to change how you feel and this part of life is just something you've gotta move through, so instead I am offering you a recipe for soothing. 

Read More

We often measure the success of our lives by whether or not we’re happy enough, taking the slightest lull in our lives as a sign that something is wrong. However, those long stretches of “middle” are often where we are en route to our greatest goals and along the way we are processing who we are and deciding exactly where we want to go in our future. If you’re feeling just okay about your life, or maybe you’re frustrated you haven’t reached the stage you want to be, consider the idea that you’re exactly where you should be, right now. 

Read More

When everything you planned in life seems to spontaneously fall apart. 

It’s a pretty universal experience: you plan out your whole life, everything’s on track to be what you’d imagined it’d be, and then seemingly out of nowhere your whole life begins to unravel and your “perfect picture” falls apart.  One moment you’re winning at the game of life: the career, the relationship, the paycheck, the “perfect future”… the next, you get fired, your partner dumps you, your bank account gets leveled – suddenly the path you saw before you evaporates and you feel like you have nothing at all. 

Read More

Are you in need of an emotional tune up? It might be time to balance your happiness chemical levels! I’m going to take your emotions to the mechanic – okay, enough of the puns… It’s important to medicate your physical body and not take every emotion at face value.  If you endure any kind of stress at work or at home, you’re likely managing that stress with a lot of emotional energy.  Overtime, if you don’t take time to rest and relax and shut your brain to the “OFF” position, your chemicals get a bit out of whack and basically don’t fire at the right time.  So, if you’ve been feeling a bit crummy lately, this is a blog for you. 

Read More

When you grow up unable to rely on people in your life, it’s something that helps you grow super powers as an adult: you’re self-reliant, independent, and often extremely resourceful.  The downside is it can be very hard to untrain this mistrust in others, because your life experience has taught you that it’s only going to hurt you and potentially put you in danger.  If this sounds like you, I am writing this for you. I hope to give you some clarity and also some simple marching orders so that you can start to build the awesome and trustworthy relationships you deserve to have in life. It’s going to take time, focus, and work, but as long as you want it, you’ll have it.  AND it gets easier and easier with time because once you feel the benefits of this work you gain a massive amount of momentum and you won’t want to stop. 

Read More

This is for anyone who’s in a place in their life where they feel separate from their body – or maybe they think of it like an enemy, they’re terrified of their body and or they’re in a vicious loop of dieting. Maybe your body is acting weird and you cannot tell what’s going on with it at all.

My friend Leila and I both went to the same amazing nutritionist – and that basic education was blow-my-mind amazing, I wanted to share it with you.  It’s also amazing how many misconceptions we had about food and the way your body relates to it. In short – this episode is about Nutrition and Metabolism 101 – cause of a lot of us don’t know about that stuff! I didn’t.

If there’s something you can do to promote speeding up your metabolism, it’s improving your gut health with something like a probiotic, drinking WAY more water, and making sure to eat breakfast.  We are going to go through a few major no-no’s that can slow your metabolism and also hurt your ability to stay healthy and happy longterm. 

Read More

Untangling the truth behind what you struggle with, and what you don’t like about yourself is all about ‘the why.’

That’s the missing link to truly healing. All the stuff you tell yourself about who you are and what’s wrong with you is false. It is a justification your brain makes to make sense of what is scary or difficult to understand in your world. To give it some order, or some relatable terms.  “Why am I like this? Why do I get stuck with this one thing and how come I feel powerless to change it?”  Everyone – when they go through a particular set of experiences — will do pretty much the same thing as a result of them. Think about that for a moment.

If you grow up with a specific set of tools – have a particular kind of childhood, school, parents, summer camp, every tiny experience that makes up your life, down to the tiniest detail to the grandest trauma – you will manifest a particular set of tools with which you will build your life. Everything you understand and abide is something you learned, and you are doing the best you can with the tools you have collected thus far. So sometimes we don’t get all the tools we need and that means we have to go outside our life experience to find them. Like, for example, in a book about someone else’s life – someone we trust or relate to our in our problems. If we are not able to find the answer to our problems, it’s most likely because we’re searching for the wrong answer based on what has caused our tangle.

Read More

Why don't they like me?

If you’ve recently gotten dumped or you can’t fit in with the crowd you want to hang out with, this is a blog for you.  Firstly, I am sorry you are here because it’s definitely painful and lonely – but know that this is not forever, it’s not because of anything being wrong with you, and it’s actually a gift in disguise.

“I got dumped but I still love them – why won’t they love me back?”

If this is your situation, first, I want to ask you to examine your reasons for wanting this relationship.  The one you don’t have at the moment.  Think about the person or people you’re pursuing or have recently lost.  Did you fall into a state of extreme “want” with this relationship?  How does it feel?  What yearns inside you for this?  Is it something about social status or is it the idea of a relationship with that person?

Read More

If you're stuck in a loop of bad behavior and find yourself set up again and again, maybe even to the point that a confrontation has come about, this is a blog for you.  Whether it's a friend, family member, or significant other, a solution is about setting yourself to zero. Not in a bad way, in a realistic and self-loving, healthy way.

Read More

Often we find ourselves stuck in relationships that hurt us on a continuous loop, forever making us feel sick inside with worry: when will this hurt come around again and why can’t I escape it?  No matter how hard you try to talk someone out of their misery and heal them with your kindness, it will never quench the void that lives inside.  And like a dance, you are actually continuing to complete this misery by accommodating its bottomless yearning – by giving something that it does not deserve. What I mean by deserve is not what a person deserves – I mean what that dysfunction deserves.  You are rewarding a negative behavior – a negative habit, and not truly benefitting a person when you fulfill the other end of a negative relationship. In short, the pain is there until that person decides to gut it for themselves, and until they do, you will forever be a casualty of it.  Trapped in a cycle –slowly getting pulled downward by its effects.

Read More