Episode #48: The Life Brief with Bonnie Wan
In this episode, Bonnie Wan shares her journey as an advertising brand strategist and author of the book The Life Brief: A Playbook for No-Regrets Living. Modeled after the ad agency creative brief, the life brief is a playbook that will help readers unlock clarity in a part of life that matters most. You will learn Bonnie’s three-step practice with specific exercises to make your life brief a reality.
Episode Recap
In the fast-paced world of advertising, where creative briefs drive innovation and strategy, Bonnie Wan has taken a familiar concept and transformed it into a powerful tool for personal growth. Known for her work as a brand strategist, Bonnie introduces the concept of The Life Brief as a way to bring the clarity and focus of a creative brief into one’s personal life. Modeled after the concise, action-driving documents used in advertising, The Life Brief helps individuals distill their deepest aspirations into clear, actionable steps. Whether you’re navigating career changes, balancing family life, or simply seeking more intentional living, Bonnie’s three-step practice offers a structured yet flexible approach to achieving your goals.
The Three-Step Practice
1. Get Messy
The first step, “Get Messy,” is all about exploration. Bonnie encourages us to dive deep into our thoughts and emotions, capturing everything that comes to mind without judgment. This chaotic phase is essential for gathering raw data—much like the initial research phase in advertising. Bonnie emphasizes the importance of asking ourselves, “What do I really, really want?” to unearth our true desires, free from external expectations.
2. Get Clear
Next, in the “Get Clear” phase, we sift through the gathered information to identify what truly matters. This step is about discerning the meaningful from the meaningless, honing in on our non-negotiables and the things that resonate deeply. It’s akin to refining a creative brief to its essence, ensuring that the final document is sharp, sticky, and action-driving.
3. Get Active
Finally, “Get Active” involves turning insights into action. With clarity comes the ability to make intentional choices that align with our true goals. Bonnie likens this to the execution phase in advertising, where a well-crafted brief leads to impactful campaigns. By understanding what we want and why we want it, we can take confident steps toward realizing our ambitions.
Benefits of The Life Brief
Clarity and Focus
Just as a creative brief provides direction for a marketing campaign, The Life Brief brings clarity and focus to personal goals. By distilling what matters most, individuals can avoid the distractions and detours that often arise in daily life.
Intentional Living
The Life Brief encourages intentional living, where every decision is made with purpose. This method helps individuals allocate their time and energy toward activities that align with their core values, leading to a more fulfilling life.
Empowerment
By taking control of their narrative, individuals feel empowered to make changes that reflect their true desires. This shift in mindset can lead to greater self-awareness and personal growth.
Episode Transcript
Kelly Callahan
Welcome to the Two Marketing Moms Podcast. I’m Kelly Callahan-Poe and today’s episode is called The Life Brief with Bonnie Wan. Bonnie is the best-selling author of The Life Brief and a celebrated brand strategist turned life strategist. She has been named chief strategist of the year, as well as an advertising Icon. Bonnie’s Life Brief talks and workshops have been featured in Apple, Airbnb, Google, South by Southwest and many more. She’s a married breadwinning mom of four kids and loves sleeping under the stars. Welcome, Bonnie.
Bonnie Wan
Oh, my gosh, Kelly, thanks for having me.
Kelly
I have to tell you, as soon as the book came out, what month did it come out?
Bonnie
January 16.
Kelly
So as soon as I saw it, I hit my hand on the table. And I was like, why did I not think of that? Because, you know, after having been in advertising and marketing for 30 years and doing what you/we do in terms of writing creative briefs, it never occurred to me to take the idea of a creative brief and translate it to a personal life brief. And so, I have so many questions. So, let’s first talk about what is a life brief in broad strokes?
Bonnie
Yes. So, for industry insiders, the easiest way to explain it is it’s writing a creative brief for your life. And for those who are not in the marketing world, creative briefs help us distill the essence of our ambitions about who we are. It’s single-minded, written often on a single page distilling a company’s DNA, who are they, and what did, what they want, as their ambition in terms of where they’re going. And it’s all distilled and crystallized into a sharp, sticky strategy that drives action. And that’s really the key to creative briefs, right? That they propel you into seeing a wider expanse of possibility. Creative briefs are designed to generate ideas for innovation, for creativity, for expression. But they anchor you in what matters most so that we don’t get off brief, as we call it in the industry in which you write. And the life brief has the same effect. It gets you to the essence in a sharp and sticky way of what do you want in any part of your life? You can aim it at any part of your life. But what matters most here? And what do you want? And how do you express it in a way that is sharp, sticky, and action driving? And what I mean by sharp means it’s so clear. What I mean by sticky is that it’s tattooed into your heart and onto your mind. So, you never forget it, almost like a tagline. And it’s action driving because that’s the most important part. When it comes to creating change, it shifts how you show up even in the smallest ways, in the most important parts of your life.
Kelly
I love that. So, in the industry, a creative brief for us is always about finding that one insight about the target audiences, that’s going to make them take some sort of desired action. And frequently it is close to impossible sometimes to get it in a one-pager. And a lot of times we’re talking recently about can we get it in one sentence, but really, that’s the brief that we use to give to the creative team so they can manifest the creative ideas to make that key message come to life. So, that’s why I love what we what we do. That’s to me the most fun part of problem-solving in the advertising world. So, what was your motivation to take the creative brief concept from advertising and turn it into a life brief?
Bonnie
Well, it was a moment of despair, really. I had already been a strategist for 20 plus years of my life and I hit a giant speed bump in my marriage. It was 2010. And I had three kids. I have four now, as you said, but I had three kids under the age of five. And I was the single breadwinner, though my husband was trying to start a business. So it wasn’t that he was at that time, the stay-at-home or lead parent, as we call it now. And I was exhausted, you know, young kids, no sleep. And we were negotiating schedules, we were picking each other apart, who’s doing more who’s doing what? Where can we get better? We were just, you know, raw, and I felt bitter. I felt like I was holding an unfair share of the load. And I wanted help. And I did. You know, in hindsight, now, I see all the ways that I was overly critical, and exhausted. But in that moment, it was just a fury of frustration. And at my lowest point, I could see the path leading to separation, divorce all the things we know, as a society. And as a reflex and an act of desperation. I went to my strategist mind. And I said, okay, let’s break this out. And strategists use questions to penetrate and stir up new answers or new data points. And so, I applied that to myself with the question, what do I really, really want here? Not what do my parents want for me or my best friends, not what does my husband expect, or even what my children need, I had to drop into a deeper place more raw and nakedly honest place about myself and I started there. And very quickly, a bunch of stuff vomited out onto the page. I was just thinking, because as a strategist, I’d collect data through writing. And what appeared, was a new story. And here’s what I’ve learned in teaching the practice and writing the book is that we all walk around with stories in our heads, maybe in our hearts, about how the world works. And oftentimes, those stories are full of limitations. They hold us back. They make us play small, they force us to hide, or they’ve been handed to us from people, we love to protect us. But they keep us in this safe little bubble. And for me, the story that was on loop in my head at that time was my marriage is broken, I married the wrong person. My husband is to blame for all my troubles. feel silly now, in hindsight, but the story that came out on the page was no, no, no. What’s broken is my relationship with time. I was spending and spilling my time, in ways that didn’t matter to me. Some of it was sleepwalking out of habit, a lot of it was people-pleasing. I was saying yes to all kinds of things that I should have been saying no to. And as soon as I had that insight, my brain immediately shifted instantly to how do I solve that problem? How do I reimagine my relationship with time? And so, I wrote to get clear about if I could re-imagine restructure mighty time, what would that look like? Where would I invest it, instead of spilling it? And out came my first life brief, which was called take our time, which meant, be more intentional with it. Take it back, take back control over it, and to slow the heck down.
Kelly
And that’s a that’s a good lesson there. Well, I’d love to give some of my own input as well. But before we kind of go back and forth on that, you divided the book into three different parts and three different in essence strategies. Can you go through those strategies, and I think you call this it’s a book full of exercises, and some may work for some people and some may not work for others. And so, people kind of need to pick and choose I loved it here broadly, the way you’ve structured the book, and the different categories and then kind of dig into some of the specific tactics that you suggest.
Bonnie
So, the arc that the practice overall is exactly inspired and modeled after what we do as strategists in marketing. It’s three simple parts, get messy so that you can get clear and then you can get active but a lot of times in our culture, especially business culture, we have a bias for action. So, we skip over messy and clear, to just drive action. And that is through another definition of insanity. Because we need to slow down to speed up. We say this all the time in business, and we say this to our clients you need, let’s slow down, let’s examine all the ingredients. That’s what get messy is let’s collect all the data, let’s do the research. Let’s drop in and peel back the onion. So that we can get really clear and get to the essence of what we really want and what matters most. And once you do that action is a byproduct of that clarity, action becomes organic, you start to see new ideas, new possibilities. But if you drive straight to action, oftentimes, you’ll just be chasing your tail. So, get messy. And in the book, the hardest part about writing, it was giving people lots of different ways to get messy, because not everyone is the same. So, you had made the observation, wow, it’s a long process. And it’s not so long in that it’s not expecting everyone to do every exercise. But I wanted to create a toolbox, because as a strategist, I have a pretty wide tool set. And every time I’m faced with a new client or new category, I’m pulling different things from that toolkit. And so, in the book, get messy part one is filling it with a toolbox, some will resonate with some people, and others will resonate with others. And that’s what it’s meant to be. But getting clear, is really about taking all the ingredients you’ve generated. And looking at them with curiosity, and then meeting them with that naked honesty, and setting aside what is meaningless or meaning light or neutral. And zeroing in on the stuff that is sacred non-negotiable gives you goosebumps. And that’s the pile of stuff. That’s the juicy stuff, where you start to write your clarity brief.
Kelly
I love that. Can we break that down a little bit? And first a little bit about getting messy because that’s kind of where I, I I’m still in the getting messy phase. And your core question is, is what do you really, really want? And I think most of us don’t sit down and ask that question. And you know, for me, one of the things that you asked is talk about that also in, in, in relationship to your own personal fears. So you can state what you want, but what is holding you back. So I can say I really, really want XYZ, but maybe I don’t have the money to do it. For example.
Bonnie
Yes. So what do you want? It was the simplest question because as a strategist, we’re using all sorts of questions to penetrate, right? And not all questions are created equal. Some are so big and vast. What’s your purpose? That is just one that stumps everyone. But what do you want is deceiving. Simple, because it’s familiar. You get asked that you know when it’s your birthday, when it’s the holidays, when you want to go on vacation. But what I do is I take something that’s really familiar to people, and then I start dropping in layers that take them deeper. It’s not just what do you want in terms of what do you feel like it? What do you really want, Kelly? And in your heart of hearts, when you look at this part of your life, whatever it is gripping you could be a relationship. It could be your career, it could be a cause. It could be yourself, which a lot of us women ignore. In your heart of hearts, what do you really want that maybe you haven’t allowed yourself to admit yet?
Kelly
That’s the part that really got me is there are definitely things that you have in your head that you don’t think about all the time that you weren’t ready to admit or to surface yet. And I think getting that down on paper is a huge part of the process. So in that gap getting messy stage, can you just give a couple of the exercises or tactics that that might help do that best?
Bonnie
Yes, I’m going to talk about the first two chapters because each chapter and they’re so short, right, I tried to make them as bite-size as possible because I know we’re living in these busy traps, you know that we’re on 24/7. So how do I make this so digestible? We’ll easy accessible and hopefully irresistible in some in some chapters. But the first chapter, the exercise that comes after at the end of it isn’t an exercise at all, because it’s less, it’s not at all about doing. It’s more about being, which is one of the hardest things in our culture today. It’s about creating pause, and dropping into yourself, creating quiet. That’s what it’s really about. How do you sit in the quiet? And I’m telling you about increments of time of five minutes to hen. And that’s, that’s the starting practice. And I call it a practice because it gets easier, the more you do it, but I am inviting frequency, not quantity of time, but frequency, so that you’re really starting to drop out of your head and into something deeper. The second chapter is about creating a practice of a daily dump, which is a timed writing exercise, five minutes, 10 minutes. If you can’t do five minutes to three minutes, my invitation is always to break it down into the easiest increments. And that is the practice of giving yourself that naked permission to allow whatever is coming up from deep within you to come out of and onto the page, without editing without judgment, without withholding. That, in itself, is a cathartic experience. It can also be challenging if we’re afraid of our thoughts if we’re afraid of our feelings, and that simple daily practice. And I invite people to try it for a week, two weeks, I’m not talking about years or months. Because as an advertising strategist, my job is to get further faster, right? It isn’t coaching, it isn’t therapy, it’s about how do we uncover the truths quickly. And so. the daily brain dump gets us into the practice of being in relationship with ourselves, not editing ourselves not having our inner judge or inner critic rule. And so, it’s messy, because this is part one, get messy, because just allowing all this stuff to come out.
Kelly
Are you writing sentences? Are you writing words? Are you writing feelings? Are you writing thoughts? Is it all the things that you just want to get out of your head before you go to sleep? And there’s no guardrails?
Bonnie
There’s no rules, no guardrails. And that’s part of the practice. You’re practicing being your own compass and allowing yourself to examine, are you asking, am I doing this right? Is this what Barney intended? And the invitation is off road from that need to know whether it’s right or wrong? You know? Or what grade would you get? If you showed this to someone this was about a practice of self-directedness. You create the rules. What you feel, and what you need, honoring your needs in that given moment, which were out of practice. And in I think, you know, everyone I know is out of practice with that.
Kelly
I think that’s absolutely true, especially in just giving yourself the time, right, because we’re so scheduled every day is so scheduled and we don’t schedule enough time for ourselves.
Bonnie
Yes, I’m working on a kid’s brand right now, you know, from prodigy agency lens. And I’m looking at the data around how stressed kids are, how overscheduled they are, how pressured they feel to grow up at a younger age. So if they’re feeling it, we’re definitely feeling it. And we’re probably the source of it without even being conscious of it.
Kelly
There were two tactics that I thought interesting that I haven’t touched yet one is pen your eulogy and the other one is know your magic. And I think I think we know that in an intuitive level. But you suggested another way of going about it in terms of asking your friends, your people that don’t know each other and you start to see themes coming out of that. Could you talk a little bit about those two tactics?
Bonnie
Yes, penning your eulogy is an exercise of writing your own eulogy, imagining it’s a bit more a bit about imagining at the end of your life, what your friends, families, colleagues are going to say about you. And it’s an exercise that we use when it comes to branding, you know, we ask people in focus groups, what if this brand went away and died? What would you write for its eulogy? And it’s a way to uncover. What role did this brand play in people’s lives? What made it special? And in this case for the life brief, it’s what do you want to be remembered for? Would you like your legacy to be, and a palliative nurse wrote, it kind of went viral across the Internet many years ago about the Five Regrets of people who dying. And the number one regret, I hope, I don’t butcher it is about I wish I’d lived a life of my own making, and not one that others had prescribed for me. And that exercise really is helping you begin at the end, meaning at the end of your life, let’s look at what you want your legacy to be. And then let’s wind back to how are you living up to that today? Does that mean you have to live every minute? You know, in service of your legacy? No. But if we look at the broad brushstrokes of your life, what are you doing in service of that legacy? Where could you shift some of your choices? On the flip side? What is your magic? What makes you you? Sometimes we need somebody else’s outer perspective, to help us get clear because we’re jumbled and confused, and we’re in the trenches of our own lives. But when we ask people who are invested in our growth, who really care for us some simple questions like what makes me me? Who am I? What do you experience of me when I’m at peak me — meaning the best of me when I’m, you know, high on who I am? What do you notice? And what kind of situations activate that? And on the other side, what drains me? When do you see me, you know, kind of depleted deflated at my worst? What’s happening there? And when we collect that data, we’re looking for patterns. As you said, what do people say that shared things from different parts of our lives? And that just gives us perspective?
Kelly
Well, let’s move on to getting clear. So this is, to me the essence of what of the whole thing in terms of declaring what you want? And the five declarations? Can you explain how you know how you get to that point? And then how do you make it sticky? And keep going and keep just like you iterate a brief, you’re working on that key message? How do you continue to make it stronger, make it stronger?
Bonnie
So if in getting messy, you’ve collected your ingredients through writing, writing is really key. Because when we write, we create distance between our emotions and the content. And so you can step away from the writing, knowing that it’s parked, and come back to it with curiosity, instead of with fear. And so the writing means it’s there, you can give it space, you can come back to it. And when you’ve collected some ingredients over the course of a couple of weeks, you start to see your own patterns, or you start to see some aha, because like I did in that very first brief, no, it’s not about my husband being the problem. But when I spill and spend my time, I’m left empty, I have nothing left to give. And then I’m raging blank, you know. And that isn’t great for our relationship. And that turned me to notice where I’m accountable for what was happening in our marriage at that time. So the writing allowed me that distance, I could look at it from a different view, instead of the repeating story in my head. Here’s the problem. Here’s the problem. Our marriage is broken. Oh, no, oh, no. Instead, I looked at the page, and I could see, no, I got to shift how we’re spending our time how I’m working, how we’re living. And four months later, we had really transformed our life after writing that first brief and getting clear. Start with looking at those ingredients from a distance with curiosity. And like I said earlier, sorting them. Oh, seeing what’s drama, distractions, noise of the moment, moods of the moment, and separating that from the stuff that fires you up, lights you up, gives you goosebumps or butterflies because it’s tapping something that you really, really want. And you can’t imagine at the end of your life, not Getting it, right, and two different buckets of things. And then there’s homework and housekeeping things that you have to show up for, right? And those are just neutral, let’s stop giving those things energy just show up and do it. The zero in on the juicy stuff, the stuff that makes you nervous yet excited at the same time, right, this idea of taking back control of my time and creating spaciousness, where I could invest in the relationships that matter most my children, my husband, the people in our community. Now let that starts to become the material ingredients for us to write. And what I invite people do is write five up to five, it can be three, it can be to declarative statements about what you want. In this part of your life. It’s not more than five because remedy is key. The more you write, the less clear you are. And the less action-driving you are. But when you can get to that brevity, make it really concise, crisp, declarative, meaning you feel it in your veins, you would put an exclamation mark on it, I call it f*ck yes, clarity. And that’s what we’re looking for. In the business world, right? When everyone is feeling that f*ck yes. Clarity about this is what we want the brand to be. Yeah, suddenly everyone sees all the ways they can contribute to it. And in your life brief. It’s the same thing when you get to f*ck yes, clarity, let’s take our time, take back our time. Now, when you wake up, and you need a lens from which to look at your day, and how are you going to spend your time you’re reminded of what is really important. And then that makes decisions easier when you’re at a crossroads easier. It kind of propels you into a new state of showing up.
Kelly
So when you’re writing your four declarative statements, do you suggest that you look at four different aspects of your life, your work, your personal, your community? Or does it matter?
Bonnie
There are no rules, but I find the sharper, the better. And so, it’s not one life brief. So my first life brief was really around our family, and how do we spend our time. But since then, in the last 15 years, I’ve written briefs for my career for my leadership, how I show up as a leader, I’ve written a parenting brief. I have a wealth brief. So my relationship with money. And what do we want to be wealthy in? And that brief is about being rich in a relationship. If there could be one thing that we have true wealth in it would be in the depth of connections and the relationships we have. So it’s about aiming, writing a brief for whatever is gripping you in your life. Right now, I have a self-brief to write. So this is not one brief and done. It’s where do you want to write a brief? Where do you need more clarity in your life? And how do you want to go through this practice?
Kelly
And then you talk about pushing it three times.
Bonnie
Because the first time is just to get it in the zone just to write in a messy way your first draft, right. And once you have your draft, that’s your clay, you get to push it now. Now I want you to make it more honest. Where are you holding back? Where are you not allowing yourself to come fully forward about what you want? Yeah, the second push is how do you make it sharper, meaning more exacting, get more vivid with it, evocative right, describe it really. And then the third push is to make it bolder, make yourself nervous because it shouldn’t feel easy. It should be declarative and push you to a new space. My marriage brief is to fall madly in love with my husband again, after I wrote that after 17 years, four kids, three moves, the boldness in it was that I the boldness and the sharpness was that I called it Mad Love.
Kelly
So you branded it. You branded each statement has its own branding. So, make it sticky. Is that what you mean?
Bonnie
Yes, it has to be tattooed.
Kelly
It’s little stickies that you have on your computer.
Bonnie
And Mad Love was a phrase that I couldn’t forget. It was also terrifying for me at that time because it was the second time that we were probably inching towards that Cliff’s edge of separation. And I didn’t believe that Mad Love was possible. Between us. That’s what made a bold, I could have said, Oh, I want to get along, or oh, I want to co-parent, you know, with ease and grace, those would have been safer briefs. But in my heart of hearts, I wanted Mad Love. I was too young to not ever feel that fire of desire again. But it was really bold to write that down at a juncture in our relationship where I didn’t feel that that was possible to rekindle that kind of feeling. But when I wrote it down, that was a declaration of God dammit, I want that. I do I want it. And the courage was in admitting that to myself, even with the possibility that I might not ever get it. And this is the exhilarating, yet terrifying thing about writing the brief. And the spoiler alert is, when I declared it, I started making tiny new choices in how I showed up, showing him appreciation in the smallest, most tender and sometimes passionate of ways that even surprised myself. And quite quickly, about maybe just six weeks later, we decided to go away for the weekend and have someone babysit my mom babysit all our four kids, which is a tall ask for anyone. And we went away for three days. And by the third morning, I would I wake up before him and I was thinking and feeling these feelings stir inside me and I thought, what is happening with me? Could this be mad love? And yeah, it was. So it was just interesting. It’s interesting because declaration is an act of commitment. When you write, that’s your first action. And when you write a declaration, that is a real seal of yes, I want it. And when you’ve committed to yourself in that privacy, you start sparks start happening, you start to see oh, oh, hi. Thank you very much for that beautifully crafted cup of coffee that I usually just grabbed from your hands and walk out the door without acknowledging you at all. I’m just going to stop looking in the eyes and lean in for a kiss and say thank you, before I walk out the door, get in the car, take the kids drop them off head to work. And those tiny acts just gave him permission to show up differently too. And that’s what I find in all parts of our lives. When we choose and commit to showing up differently in the smallest of ways. It’s an invitation for everyone else in our lives, to show up differently in response.
Kelly
So these are all the things that we learn in advertising, working in behavior change, right? We probably don’t think about it and our own lives necessarily, we know how to do it for our clients. Again, back to the brief, but intuitively, we read all the books about behavior change, and we know what we need to do to make it happen. And by making those changes within that leads to your Get Active chapter, are there any other Get Active strategies that you recommend to solidify this other than the ones that you recommend — those are the small little changes of acknowledging where you are.
Bonnie
Well, we can’t do it alone. So enlist people around you and surround yourself with people who are going to keep you on the path because doubt will reemerge those stories that we talked about at the beginning. The stories that were given to us handed to us to protect us they will reemerge and tell you this is crazy. Mad Love — No way you’re crazy for thinking that you can revive this calcified, you know, marriage or whatever it is right. You can’t change the company. Because the company doesn’t want the change. We have all these stories about why we can’t and our clients have them too. And so our job in the client world is to give them the confidence and the bravery to make bigger bets. And in our lives, it’s how do we surround ourselves with people All who will encourage us when we’re down when the doubts creep in, to also help us commit to those bets in our own relationships.
Kelly
I love that. Any other thoughts about getting active?
Bonnie
Ah, gosh, there’s so many things, you don’t have to make big leaps. Just know that life is a dance. And you can, you can really change things in big ways. In the tiniest slivers of action, you don’t need wholesale change in a knee, you don’t need to put everything up in your life in a garage sale. All you need to do is really get clear about how you can show up differently in five-minute increments. But do it daily, and be consistent.
Kelly
One of the things that you talked about that became part of your life brief was how important Equity and Diversity and Inclusion is as part of you as a professional. And you had a wonderful story in the book that talked about how this came to fruition in work. And would you mind telling that story and how it impacted you and how you were actually able to take part of your life brief that you had written down and manifest it in a real way at work?
Bonnie
Yes, and this brief is a lifelong one. Because this is a big, big topic, and you know, the world. I don’t know that there’s a finish line for this. But this was this came about in 2020, after the killing of George Floyd. And also the months later, the women in Atlanta, the Asian women in Atlanta, and it really forced me to look at my own identity. And the stories I had been telling myself and to cut to the chase. It was a reckoning of all the ways I had assimilated. Yeah, since I was eight, no, since I was in eighth grade, because I immigrated from Taiwan, I was a really shy, buck tooth, brown girl in a sea of blonde and white, you know, girls in Southern California, and I realized in 2020, how much of my life and my identity I had shed or suppressed, in order to fit in. So as a kid, it was because I had this longing to just belong and not be the outsider. And then as a teenager, that really increased and then as an adult, that was a path to success and achievement. And in 2020, I had to confront all the ways that I was supporting, excusing, and defending a system that was not designed for me as a woman, or as an immigrant woman. And I dug really deep about, well, now that I am a leader, I am at the top of my game, what is the thing that I want to bring to it. And that really circled around Equity and Diversity. And the brief was about relations, not just solutions, because I’m in a business of innovation, right? We’re trying to come up with innovative ideas to solve big, complex problems for companies. But I realized that that also created an excuse for me not to get deeper into the relationships around me at work, and in other parts of our lives. Because I got to check the box and say, Oh, look at that amazing campaign I did for gender inequality, or that call us campus college campus rape campaign we did that was so effective. It kind of made me say, Yes, I’m doing it in the world, right, I could badge all the ways I was helping change the world. But that kept me at an arm’s length, from the relationships and the power as a leader were inside the company, on the teams or in the industry, to change things that really needed to change. And so I had to examine how I show up as a leader in the smallest of ways in the conversations down to the meetings, even in writing the book and sharing some of these really vulnerable stories about work admitting that I too have impostor syndrome. I to question and I have cried at work as you know, that’s a big taboo as a woman leader. You’re right. Those are really scary acts. But I felt that the only way we could change is to talk about these things openly. Name them, so that we can shift them.
Kelly
I think that’s absolutely essential for what we’re doing. So thank you for sharing that with us. How has the life brief changed for you professionally? I mean, I understand how it has personally, but has it changed what you do professionally? Do you feel like the practice personally has honed what you’re doing on the professional side? Is it easier for you to get to a key message now that you’ve kind of created these tools for yourself? Or is, you know, what do you feel?
Bonnie
Well, the hard news is, that every project problem brand or life situation is tricky. And so it’s always daunting. At the beginning. I always thought, oh, gosh, it’s going to be so easy. 30 years in, but every problem has its own complexity and its own nuances. So it’s its own puzzle. I don’t know that that gets easier. But it is juicy. And I think how this work has expanded for me is at the agency, I still love getting deep into the essence of a company, right? And that clarity is more important than ever, for companies right now. Because we are experiencing peak complexity, their industries and categories are being disrupted all the time. Their audiences are fickle. They’re not loyal, how do we get a breakthrough, right? With our magic, and so I still run an accelerator at the agency called Brand Camp. And I love it. It’s six weeks of intense getting to the essence uncovering the story and working with leaders to author that story for themselves. Because when they author it, they own it, and they act on it. If I hand it to them, you know, it’s a different dynamic. So, I really work with leaders to uncover it for their organizations. And it’s really fun, and it’s sharp, it’s, it’s exciting. And I have stepped to expand and lean into life strategy. And this actually, they fit together really well. Because when I work with leaders on their leadership briefs, it’s how do you want to show up as a leader, just like I had to examine and reexamine. Yeah. And are you clear about where you want your leadership to impact and influence the influence and impact you want to have in the next 12 to 18 months, right? And when you put those two things together, when leaders are clear about how they lead, and they’re clear about what their brands stand for, and how their brands need to show up in the world, it’s a really potent, interesting intersection.
Kelly
Oh, that’s wonderful. I want to learn more about the Brand Camp I think that sounds fantastic. And also, you know, a lot of leaders are looking for that personal branding. How can you help me do personal branding? So that’s an essential thing for offering that to your clients. I think that’s really exciting. So if people want to learn more about you, obviously, they can order the book The Life brief on Amazon or any other platforms, but where can people go to learn more about you and connect with you?
Bonnie
You can go to https://thelifebrief.com and on social media
https://www.facebook.com/people/livingthelifebrief/100069158868626
https://www.instagram.com/bonniewanofficial
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bonniewan
or just email me Bonnie Wan <bonnie@thelifebrief.com>
Kelly
Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I had a wonderful time picking your brain and learning more about The Life Brief and I’m excited to finish my own.
Bonnie
Well, thank you for having me, Kelly. It’s so juicy to be in conversation with you. I appreciate it.
