Ep272: From Setback to Comeback: Finding Strength in the Hardest Moments | with Bevin Farrand

Zack Arnold

I'm here today with Bevin Farrand. Bevin, you are a keynote speaker. You are an author. You have been featured in NBC, Yahoo News, TEDx, Business Insider. You have a lot of different frameworks, all of which have the word damn in them, which we're going to talk a lot more about. But most importantly, just to give full context, you're also my business therapist, so I'm very excited to finally get today's conversation on the record for a multitude of reasons, because you have an absolutely amazing, inspiring, tragic story all rolled into one. And I just I think that given present circumstances in the world, present circumstances with my global creative community, you bring a tremendous amount of value in multiple different facets. So it's, it's, it's already been too long since we got this on the record, but I'm glad we can finally record and we can chat today. So thanks for coming on.

Bevin Farrand

Thank you for having me. It's, it's an honor to be here. I'm so excited.

Zack Arnold

And I'm also very excited about the fact that you told me you know, off the record before, and you're like, I'm actually, I'm nervous about being on this podcast, because you have your own podcast. You've done plenty of interviews, you've you've done this on large stages, and like little old me, I made you nervous today, so.

Bevin Farrand

You did, and I told you, part of it's like, we're flipping roles here, like, this is, this is exciting for me to see you truly behind the scenes in your elements. I'm really excited.

Zack Arnold

Yes. And now, one thing that you may not have noticed, and I bring this up because I think it's valuable to especially for my audience, of people that are largely very introverted creatives and kind of live in their own caves, I'm very deliberate about the space that I create, or even like the posture that I use. Like one of the things you may have noticed when you and I drew our calls, I'm always sitting, but if I'm going to be doing this call and I want to, like, flip that alter ego switch and forget, oh, I'm like, Mr. Introverted, creative and just doing my own thing, like, I make sure that when I had these conversations, I stand so, I mean, in a very different, just kind of physical and emotional position. So if you're feeling like the roles are switched, that's not, that's not by accident.

Bevin Farrand

Well, and Zack, not that anyone would see our other calls. But normally I'm in an entirely different space. I'm in a I'm actually in my office, not my writing corner. So I am, I am ready for you today.

Zack Arnold

All right, good. So this is going to be fun. So where I want to start with this is very much on the personal end, not the professional end, when it comes to understanding branding, marketing, positioning, how to kind of build your own world and do work that you love, like those are all areas where you excel. But really what brought us here today is your really interesting and unique personal story and everything that you've been through, and the simplest version to frame it for people, and I'll let you fill in all the details. If this is us, we're non fiction. It is your life kinda so like, let's start filling in all the details about just all of the reasons that you've come to where you are now and what you've been through, just to help people better understand just what what it is that all of us are up against, whether it's our fires just or our houses just burned down because of fires we're dealing with, you know, grief and loss, like me losing my father, other people, losing people, especially in the the sandwich generation, or this loss of identity with, you know, our careers and everything imploding for creatives. There's so many avenues we can go down. But I just want to start with, let's talk about the origin story of Bevin. Oh, it's everything

Bevin Farrand

you just listed. What it's so funny is I've had all of those things happen to me, and as I'm working on my next book, and I've been thinking like, what is the origin story? I've had to ask this question a lot, because if anybody has ever heard me talk, seen me speak, a lot of the story that I tell started in 2019 which is when my husband Mark surprised me with a trip to France for my 40th birthday. He gave me the tickets on Mother's Day, and two weeks later, I lost my job for the third time in under 10 years, and we had a two year old and a four month old at home. We were not expecting this at all, and at that point, I decided I did not want to put the hands the financial health of my family into the hands of any one person, and I started my business, which is now why you and I work together too. Totally terrified, not sure what to do. Was afraid I was going to fail, because I'd been an entrepreneur in the past, and I made a whole 4,000 dollars the first year that I did it, and then 11,000 the second year. So this was many years later, and I decided I was going to start my business. We gave it some benchmarks. I hit them. I made my first 5,000 dollars I was the business was growing, and we decided to still go on this trip that Mark had planned for us for my birthday, and we flew to France. We were there for 39 hours. We were in the plane, the same amount of time we were on the ground. And had this beautiful, amazing trip rediscovering who we were, as Mark and Bevin, not Mark and Bevin the parents, Mark and Bevin the he was an engineer, and I was, you know. Had my new business. I was a brand director for a while, like just who we were as a couple, and we flew home, and it was Thanksgiving week, so we got a lot of stuff done around the house. And the day after Thanksgiving, Mark didn't wake up, and he passed away in the middle of the night, completely unexpectedly, from undiagnosed heart disease. That's really the story that a lot of people know, because that then turned into what I call the take the damn chance movement. About a month after Mark passed away, I made a post on social media talking about losing mark and the trip we had taken and just our relationship, and I ended it by saying, whenever you're faced with a choice, just take the damn trip. And that then kind of spiraled into this, take the damn trip. I changed it, take the damn chance, so people no longer thought I was a travel agent. I created what I call the do the damn thing method. So yes, everything is based around the word damn which does stand for something. It stands for, decide and declare, attend your own party, moments, not minutes, and now is the time. But what a lot of people don't hear is the story that led me to that, and that's like I said, I'm working on my next book, and I had to think about, well, what is the actual story? And it's all the things that make us who we are, right? So in 2010 I lost my home in a house fire. And I came home, I was watching football with some friends, and I got a text that my building was on fire. And I came home and it was a six alarm fire. There were 100 firefighters outside battling these this blaze that basically destroyed our unit, our building of six units, and that then dominoed me down to move back to Ohio, which is where I met Mark. Mark had gone through chemotherapy when he was younger, so we knew we were going to have to do assisted reproductive technology, IVF. Years of IVF treatments, a miscarriage. So it was all of these things that came together that I've been through. You know, you were talking about losing your dad. I lost my dad to cancer, like I said, I had a miscarriage, all these fertility treatments, and that was everything. I looked back when Mark died, I looked back at everything I'd been through, and I said, What is it that allows me to navigate these things with some grace and creativity, and that was where I finally came up with the do the damn thing method, and how I make decisions and how I stay present, and how I'm able to achieve the most incredible things of my life.

Zack Arnold

First of all, it's a good thing that we are going to put the explicit lyrics label on this one. Otherwise the entire conversation would have been, do the beep chance do the beep. So that would have been a challenge. So note to my editor, make sure we don't bleep any of this out. But you already kind of alluded to where I wanted to go next, but I want to go deeper into this. You and I, we both love us some frameworks. We're all about the frameworks, but I don't think today is going to be so much about the frameworks. I really want to dig into the more personal, emotional story. And here's the part that I want to start with. When I said, let's talk about your origin story, you said, All right, let me go back to my 40th birthday, and in my mind, and in my mind, I'm thinking, wow, like, that's the origin story. And here's why I think that's so important, and why I think it's so relevant for the people that are listening. Now, when you say, if I were to ask, tell me about your origin stories, like, well, you know, I was born and raised in Ohio and did this like, that's what people generally think. But who we are as people and our stories are very cyclical, and the things that we thought we wanted, the goals that we want to achieve, the life we were creating. Those things change over time, as we get older and we go through these different cycles and phases of life. So in your mind, the current version of Bevin, my origin story. Let me take you back to my 40th birthday, right? And here's why I think it's so important, because I think there are a lot of people that are listening right now that maybe got laid off. I mean, anybody that works for the government, they don't have a job anymore, right? You work for tech companies, you don't have a job. But I recently had a conversation with a grief counselor and grief specialist, talking about, specifically the loss of the people that lost their homes and the fires in LA, but also how, figuratively, basically, the entertainment industry in Hollywood has been burning down for two years, and so many people are stuck in this place of I'm grieving the loss of all of these things, but they're not quite at that mindset shift of, oh, maybe this is the beginning of a new origin story. So I want to go even deeper to really understand why. Right now you're saying, Oh, my origin story. I'm going to go back to 40. Versus, let me go back to when I graduated school and I did this, or when I started the first business. There's a very specific reason. You said that's where my origin story begins,

Bevin Farrand

yeah. So I know we're not going to talk frameworks. So one thing I'm going to say is that my life and my framework are so intertwined that I may end up talking some frameworks, just because it's it is how I view the worlds. Now, it's not how. Was born, but it's how I view the world now, looking back of like, oh, the fire made this. Um, that's such a good question. I don't know that I have an answer. I think that part of it is and this is why it's so interesting. As I looked back at this for years, my 40th birthday was five years ago, so I keep talking like I'm 80. Like, oh, so many. So for for years, right? Like Mark passed away a little over five years ago, and for the first couple of years, when I started talking about do the damn thing, I told the story of losing mark, and then I told the story of having my daughter, because that was, like the most amazing thing that I created out of it, which we can talk about or not. But I had to then say, let me go further back, because actually losing Mark was not my origin story. And I had to think of, well, if I'm the through line of my life, right? I think a lot of times, kind of what you're alluding to is like, we put the, I think we put, like the not the responsibility a little bit, but the empowerment of creating our lives on other people. And so if I was like, Oh, my story is how I lost my husband, I overcame this tragedy, I made really beautiful things out of it, but having my house fire was hugely shaping of my life. I lost my dad to cancer when I was 24 like and I was so lucky that I actually got to say goodbye to him in a way that I knew that he knew how much I loved him. Those are all parts of my origin story. So I don't have an answer for you of why I went back to 40, except I think that's just the story I'm continually telling right now, which is kind of what all of us are doing, right we think, Well, this has to be my story, because it's the story I've been telling for five years. Yep,

Zack Arnold

and that's exactly what I wanted to point out, is that so many people right now are stuck in but, but this is my story, and this is the story that I need to continue, and I need to wait it out, because this is supposed to be the story, or whatever it is, right? And they're just so stuck in this is the story, not realizing, Oh, well, I have the keyboard in front of me. I'm writing the story. What? What if I were to write a different chapter, and I don't say that flippantly, right? Like I'm not setting that this is tremendously scary and hard, and there's so much uncertainty and fear right now, but at the end of the day, what we can control is the gap between stimulus and response. All of these things are happening that are outside of our control. Industries are imploding, government is imploding. Like there, there's almost nothing right now that we can count on right where hopefully we can count on the fact that there's going to be oxygen in our atmosphere. Other than that, there's not a whole lot of things like, Oh, we know that this is what the world is going to be like when we wake up tomorrow. Yeah. But I always look at the fact that we have the ability to, even in the smallest way, write the story or rewrite the story. And that's what I found so interesting, is that I feel like when you're you're shaping your story, and one of the reasons I wanted to dig into this is because I know you're trying to find these through lines and these threads. I think a core part of your story, like an inciting incident, if we're going to really look at like story beats in a script, is, of course, losing your husband, you go to France, you come back, boom, like your husband has passed. But to me, there are so many other story threads that lead to that. And here's why I say that there's a lot of things that must have happened to you in your journey that led up to that point where you reacted to that loss the way that you did. Yes,

Bevin Farrand

yeah, that's what I was just gonna say, is that when we talk about what we can control, and I was just talking about this last night with a client, and I was saying, I can't control how things end up. I can always control 100% how I show up. I call it radically loving responsibility. So it's I can take 100% radically loving responsibility for my role in the experience of my life. And I saw that it was like a little petri dish, because there were six units that were all destroyed in my fire. And I was the one who sold the unit fastest, who moved to Ohio, who navigated that with less suffering. And you know, you and I were talking when you first asked me to come on the podcast, and I was saying, Man, I can't even imagine what you guys are going through right now. And you were like, but, but you lost your home in a house fire. And I was like, Yeah, but I wasn't sitting like, watching fire come towards me and not knowing and that anxiety of like, is it, am I going to leave with this bag and not come back. Like, you know, I was out having beer Saturday morning in Chicago, and I got the text and like, I just went home and was surprised, and then had to deal with it from there going forward. And that's where I just have seen over and over again that when Mark died, the reason I. I responded the way I did was because of everything that had happened to me up until that point. But what I want to be super, super, super clear about is that I was devastated. I did not pop up the next day with a rosy outlook on life and say, Oh, let me, like, make a movement out of this. And what can I learn? And this must have happened for me, because I that makes me so angry when people are like, Oh, everything is happening for you. And I'm like, That is such shenanigans that, like, you can't convince me that my husband died for a good reason, like there's no lesson I needed to learn that I couldn't have learned another way. So I call that attention to that, because I think however anybody is reacting or responding to what's going on in their life is 1,000% valid. And I think what we have to remember, though too, is that our responses can shift. And I think sometimes our suffering comes when we glom onto a response and we make that part of our identity, and we say, I have to be sad because my dad died. No, I'm sad. I'm grieving. And we hold on to that, even though, at my dad's funeral, my sisters and I were laughing at a joke, and we were like, Is this even okay? Are we allowed to have this response? It's funny because

Zack Arnold

I had a very similar conversation. And again, the recording that I did with the grief counselor, where it was actually a part two, where I talked with her a little bit less than a year ago, and I was in it like dealing with the worst of the worst with both of my parents, especially my dad, for anybody that's following along, he has since passed. And I know that you've kind of, you've been a part of that journey with me as well, but I had shared with her that there was this moment that I really couldn't reconcile that to this day I'm still trying to reconcile so much fear, so much anxiety, so much loss, so much grief while he was alive. The moment I got the call that he passed, it was like losing 50 pounds, and I felt peace. And it's like, yeah, but shouldn't I be sobbing uncontrollably and feel horrible right now? But it was just like this weight was lifted because I knew that he passed in peace. He passed in his sleep, my wife or my wife, my mom, was by his side. And it was just this immense sense of peace. And like you said, there's this sense of I'm supposed to feel this way, and an identity associated with grief or loss or otherwise, and I think we get so lost in those identities, in the way that we're supposed to feel, or the flip side, which is what you're talking about, this world of toxic positivity. It's one of the main reasons that I'm literally allergic to Instagram, and I refuse to be a part of it, because it's just a cesspool of toxic positivity. It's also a cesspool of toxic negativity, depending on who you follow, but there's no in between. And this, I, like, you said, Oh, everything's happening for you for a reason, and sometimes shit just fucking happens. Yeah, I, like,

Bevin Farrand

just last night, I was on a panel with some other coaches, and they were talking about, oh, well, this is happening for you. And I was like, I fly in the face of that. Like, I totally disagree. Because, man, if you the reason we talk about politics positivity, toxic positivity is if you're waiting for your thoughts to be positive all the time, you'll never get into action. And it's just this way of beating ourselves up by thinking, well, I should be able to have these positive thoughts. I should be able to see this in a way, like even when people tell me, Oh, I'm glad you made something so beautiful out of losing your husband, and I'm like, no, like, I could have done without that. I think things happen, and then I think we choose how we respond, and we can choose a different response at any moment. I think that's part of the power is seeing I could choose 100 different things. And the fact, the fact that I can choose is where my personal power comes from. Because then on the days when I want to choose to be mad, I think about something a certain way. Want to want to be like at peace, I think about it a different way, but I the only thing, the only thing I can control is just how I'm showing up that day, for my kids, for myself, for my clients. That's the only thing I can control.

Zack Arnold

And that's it's again, it's that gap between stimulus and response. And one of the do not intend to go dark here, but to again, like you and I, we're not in the world of toxic positivity or toxic positivity. I'm going to trademark and hashtag that, because that's great. We're going to have a movement of, you know, toxic positivity and, like, What the hell is that? But what one of my favorite books, and I don't mean Favorite, Like, most entertaining. It's a happy go lucky story, but one of my favorite books, as far as the impression that it made on me, is Viktor Frankl, search for meaning. And for those that don't know, like he was in a concentration camp and saw the worst of the worst of the worst of humanity. And again, it was for him. It was choosing, how do I want to respond to this? And as long as he was associating the work that he was doing in the concentration camp having purpose and meaning for other. Is that's literally what kept him alive through it. So you think, Well, you know, all that's well and great to, you know, choose the response, but I literally just lost my house, or, you know, I just lost my job, or my industry is going to shit. It's like, I don't want to take anything away from that. But it could be so much worse, and there's still that room to have some form of a response to it, but also realizing it's okay to be angry, to be sad, to be depressed, whatever it is. And I've just, I feel like in the the world that we that has now been conditioned around both toxic positivity and social media and everything else, like you're you're not supposed to express these things out loud. And I would, I would guess that for you, like you said the your husband passes away, you didn't wake up the next day and say, I'm gonna create the take the damn manifesto. Yes. Let's turn this into a framework, right? I

Bevin Farrand

also didn't say at least how, at least we had eight years together. Like, people always be like, Oh, at least this or and I'm like, you know, there's a lot of things that are just make people feel worse about the situation that they're in, and one of those is, like, at least you had this, or, you know, you're not going to be given anything you can't handle things are happening for you. Like all those things are not made to feel make they're not made to make me feel better. They're made to make the person who's saying them feel better because they don't know what to say, Yeah. And

Zack Arnold

that's one of the hardest things for those that are on the other side of it, myself included, is, as you know, because you were involved with all of this, the flames got close enough I could see him outside our window, and was like, Yeah, we should probably evacuate. But at the end of the day, nothing ended up happening. But went through that whole process of all right? Well, I'm, if I'm never coming back, what am I going to be upset about losing? And it really kind of gives you a sense of perspective, of like, oh, that whole, you know, bookshelf of movies and books. Like, yeah, I just don't give a shit, right? Photos of my family. First thing that went like, all these collages were gone because you and I were on calls. You're like, Wow, your walls are really bare, right? So it kind of gives you that focus and that perspective. But then when it's over and you're thinking, all right, I know multiple people, multiple students, that have lost their homes, and I'm here, I've got my house. I was able to move back in. I still have my stuff. I don't know how to talk to the people that have lost their homes, so I think that that's I want to look at that from both perspectives. So there's a lot of other areas we can zoom in, zoom out, but at least for the sake of this portion of the conversation, you are somebody that has literally been through losing their home, and I want to see from the perspective of you've just lost it. How do you process this? How do you move on? But then how do people talk to you that are like, I'm so sorry you went through this. Bev, and I have no idea what to say to you right now.

Bevin Farrand

Oh, this is good, because I had this exact conversation with my friend Sarah the week after I lost my home because I was staying with her, and I came out, and she was in a really bad mood. She had a her daughter, Cece, I think was maybe six months old. She was really little. And I said, What's wrong, Sarah? And she's like, it's nothing compared to your problems. I was like, Okay, but what is it? And she said, I just didn't sleep last night. My husband was snoring. I was up all night. I just and I said, That's okay. Like, you don't need to compare your hard to my hard. Like, yes, when somebody compares losing their bird to losing my husband, I'm kind of like, maybe we have a little bit of a maybe we have a little perspective shift that's needed. But the truth of the matter is that, like, whatever we're going through, like our heart is the hardest thing because, because it is the thing that we're going through. Like, you sit here and you say, Oh, I'm so lucky. I didn't lose my home, but Zack, I know the shit you've gone through in the past couple of years. Like, I think people would say that back to you, like, Man, I don't how are you doing it? And I think that one of the things my neighbor told me, that's a really lovely thing to say, there's two things. One is, if you're talking to somebody who has gone through loss, don't say to them, is there anything I can do? Or let me know if there's anything I can do, because that puts the pressure back on the person who just went through the really hard thing, like when Mark died, I couldn't even think of what I possibly needed. But if you give them choices, hey, I'm bringing you food. Would you like pizza or Chinese food? Do you want me to bring you lunch or breakfast? Right? You just give them, like, small choices they can make. But the thing that my neighbor told me that she says, and it's so true, because the other thing you'll hear people say is like, oh my gosh, I can't even imagine, like, when I said to you, I can't even imagine that, it was like, that's the first time I've said that in how many years. Because what I will always say is, I can only imagine what you're going through, because we can imagine Nora McInerney talks she has a TEDx talk about losing her husband. When she said, people would say, Oh, I can't imagine she's like, I think you can, and I think you should, because you're all going to go through it right. Like, I can only imagine what it was like in LA when all those fires were happening. I know what it was like for. Me sitting in the back alley watching one building burn. I can only imagine. And I think sometimes when we say I can't imagine, it's because we don't want to. We don't want to put ourselves in the possibility that could happen to us like it makes me want to cry thinking about that, like I don't when I think about when I hear stories about somebody losing a child, and if I say I can't imagine, it's because I don't want to. It's too real and too raw to put myself into that situation. So I just say, I can't do it, but I think we can, and I think we should imagine what other people are going through, because I think we'll have a hell of a lot more empathy for people. And

Zack Arnold

I would say that the if there's something that is lacking in severe supply right now, it would be empathy on a global scale. And you know, I do my best to not turn this into a political conversation, so we're not going to go and, you know, either direction, left nor right. But in general, I think that empathy has almost become, it's seen as something that is weakness, right? Like, I think that the the idea that there's compassion, that there's empathy, oh, well, those, those are only going to get in your way. And at least the way that I was wired and designed and brought up and like, programmed and conditioned, is I'm a machine. I'm just I'm gonna find a way through this, no matter what, and when all the crises happen, like you were there squarely in the middle when it was my dad passed away, lost my job because my dad passed away, lost my house because there are rats infested everywhere. Oh, great. I've moved in for two months now. I might lose it to a fire, right? So in those moments, I just there's a there's a switch that I just know how to flip. It's like, All right, we're getting through this like there's no connection with emotion. But then all of a sudden there's that space, and you're like, Whoa, what's all this stuff that's going on? Right? And the reason that I bring this up is that very clearly disclaimers all over the place. You are not a licensed therapist, counselor, psychologist or otherwise, but part of what you're really good at is, I think it's one of the reasons that we understand each other, because I'm really good at it too. I wasn't really joking when I said you were my business therapist. Business Coach, business therapist are largely the same thing. And to just to manage the fear and the uncertainty of I had this thing that I've been building for years, I was just like, there the Malcolm Gladwell calls it the tipping point. Like my finger was on the tipping point, and then boom, like the rug is yanked out underneath everything. And it's like dropping all the way to the bottom of the mountain and starting over. And you've been really good at helping me navigate the difference between like, the fear is there, the anxiety is real. I get that, but let's focus on how can we start taking little actions just to move us forwards. And that's really the hardest part when you're trapped in this anxiety and this fear. And had talked about this idea that if we were comparing trying to, especially as creatives, trying to overcome all this uncertainty with artificial intelligence, the industry shifting, several people have said to me in different ways, what's the point of climbing the mountain, if by the time I get there, the mountain disappears, right? And that, and that's where I think that the the experiences that you've been through can be tremendously beneficial, because you've you've been in this position where all of a sudden, this is my world, this is my life, and I'm working towards this thing. It literally doesn't exist anymore. Like, what's what in the world do I do now that the mountain that I was climbing has completely disappeared?

Bevin Farrand

Yeah, so to command you don't ask small questions that started her. Yeah. I mean, people would ask me how I got through the first couple of weeks after losing mark, and I will always say I distilled it down to the three things I needed, and that was to keep my kids safe and healthy, to keep my job, or no, I'm sorry, to keep my kids safe and healthy, to keep myself safe and healthy, and to keep our house, because Mark and I built this house, and in order to do that, I needed to keep my business running and so but it was like I wasn't trying to solve world problems. I wasn't trying to write my book at that time, I was just like, Okay, what do I need to do? I need to keep the kids safe and healthy. At that time, I had two kids under the age of three, and it was me now as a solo, sole parent, sole financial provider. So like, support. I mean, yes, we have other people, but above all, like, I am the parent for my kids, even when I went to the doctor and I was like, Man, my kids are like, Mama. Kids like, Mama, Mama girls, Mama boy. And they're like, Yeah, you're their only parent. I don't get a break, right? So it's like, what can I got to keep those things happening? And I think that when we are in this, like, period of crisis and period of upheaval, it is just what's the one thing I call you deciding on your top priority, right? What is the one thing where you have to say yes to that you say no to everything else, and that's okay, whatever it is, it's going to shift, right? It's not No, it's not yes forever. It's YES for now. But the other thing that you brought up about the fear and anxiety, and I think people use those two words interchangeably, but they're not. It, there's fear, which is a very useful emotion, because there's action to be taken, and then there's anxiety, and so we'll talk about buyers here for a second. The fear that I felt when my house was on fire is different than anxiety last summer of 2020, after Mark passed away, we had Mark was like the grill master, right? There's, there's certain things that like Mark just did around the house. And one of the things was he was the grill person. And so we had, my sister and I were out back, we were gonna grill, and there were two tubes leading into the grill, and we turned on both spigots and let it go. And then when we went to light the grill, one of the tubes was laying inside the cabinet, filling the cabinet with gas, and so when we lit the grill, a fireball shot out of the grill. And my sister and I were like, Oh my God. What do we do? Like we called my knees. She brought out salt or baking pot, whatever you throw on fire, whatever we threw on that fire, she was able to get the spigot turned off, the gas turned off, we got the fire taken care of. That was fear. There was action to be taken. There was a fire that needed to be put out. About 20 minutes later, the anxiety hit in and the anxiety was, Oh, my God. What if my three year old daughter had been standing in front of the grill instead of off to the side. What if the house had caught on fire? What if I was trying to get these kids off the deck by myself, where there is no stairs like that was the anxiety that is me up in the What If. Like, what if? What if? What if? And instead, so, again, we're not talking frameworks, but we are. But like, what I teach is called the pad method, and that is a really great way to get out of anxiety and overwhelm and into the present moment. Because your body is only ever in the present moment. Your thoughts are what can be anywhere. And so you pause and get present. You get back in your body. You name all of the things. The a is acknowledged, you just name all of your feelings. Because I think that's the other part that people part that people are skipping over, is they're either not naming their feelings, or they feel like they have to identify with a feeling as their identity. So I'm angry, and therefore I am. I'm just anger, right? I'm scared, I'm all of these things. Instead, we're just naming our feelings without trying to judge them or change them. And so it's like, I'm scared, I'm overwhelmed, I'm excited, I'm nervous, I'm, you know, curious, all of these things, and then you do something, and the D of that the do something is a really good indicator of whether you're in fear or anxiety. Because if you're in fear, there is actually action to be taken, there is a fire to put out, but if you're in anxiety, there's really no action to be taken towards that situation. So what I did then standing out on the back deck is I spent $400 on Amazon buying fire extinguishers, escape ladders, all of these things to put around my house, not because that's going to prevent a fire, but because that helped me alleviate some of that anxiety that if a fire were to happen, I know where to grab something. It's the preparedness does not mean I'm going to live in this anxiety of, well, I can't have a candle burning, but that made me feel better, so I did it. It's best dollars I've ever

Zack Arnold

spent. I was gonna say, if I were to show you, you know, the last month of purchases on Amazon, you would say it looks like somebody's doing some prepping. And might think that maybe there's gonna be another fire in your neighborhood sometime soon, and you need to be ready to flee quickly, like, because that's the part that I'm like, You know what I can control this? Yeah, I was so fortunate to be in the position where we had time, like multiple people that I know that lost their houses, like I talked to somebody in the the community town hall that I did where he was so inland, like he was two miles away, where his house was, like two miles of houses in the city, before you get to the hill where it started, he gets a notification, oh, do an evacuate. All right, I guess I'll do the evacuation. This is a pain in the ass. I got work to do. No idea in a million years he was going to lose his house. He just grabs a couple of things, but didn't take it seriously, which was not his fault at all. Right, nobody where he lived did, because they thought never in a million years would this happen, right? But I had the luxury of being far enough away that I said, I know this could be coming and it could be coming fast, but by fast, we're talking multiple hours. So I had the chance to look around. I grabbed this. Do I need to pack this? I need to rearrange this bin here so I can fit more in here, put it in the back of the car. But then I also had the luxury of I would leave overnight, and I'm like, shit. I really should have grabbed this, or I really should have prepped that. And I was so fortunate that I could drive back, even though we were, you know, technically evacuated, I could still drive back. It wasn't in the mandatory zone where, like, they had the police and the National Guard and everything. It was the Evacuation warning zone where the line was literally our backyard. So our backyard, not in the backyard, was in the zone. Front yard wasn't. And, like, the. This stupid Why would I sit around and wait? Yeah. So the point is, I had the ability to go back and forth and three days in a row. Oh, I totally forgot to get this, or I should have bought this. Those were the things that I could control. So then as soon as everything was settled, I'm like, All right, this shit is never happening again. Like, if we're ever in this position, I'm gonna have everything I need ready, packed in the perfect spot in 30 minutes or less, because that's the part that I can control, right?

Bevin Farrand

And had you not been able to come back, right, that's where this anxiety sometimes can be, like, more damaging, because had you not been able to come back and forth, and had you lost things, you would have just dealt with it. Sometimes we're in this well, what would I do? Like, what if this happened? What? And it's like, well, you would just figure it out. Like, I was, we say this, right? I was fortunate in my house fire that my unit was actually under the fire, so the majority of damage was smoke and water. For me, I did lose a lot of stuff, but I didn't, I didn't lose everything. And my third floor neighbor did, like, she lost so much as, like, not just her computer, but the hard drive that was sitting on top of her computer, like her backup of backup of backup, also was lost. And you know what? She just dealt with it. And yes, we can prepare for the next thing. We can put things online instead of just in there. And, you know, we can think about, well, if I only had 30 minutes to evacuate, what would I grab? Like? We can think about that, and we can be prepared, but just knowing that the truth of the matter is that when, when shit hits the fan, you just you have the resilience and you have the creativity to make something happen, to create something new. You know, I kind of alluded to it earlier, but like even so, my kids were IVF babies. Are IVF babies. They not were, but they are IVF babies. And when Mark passed away, we were 60 days away from starting our next round of IVF and so when Mark died, I decided I did not also want to lose my dream of being a mom of three. And so I chose a few months Well, I I don't remember exactly when I chose, but by the time july 2021, rolled around, I was having marks in my third child and so, and it's marks in my genetically, the embryo we had used in previous IVF attempts, where we had from a previous IVF attempt, and that was my decision, right? I was like, This is what's happened. This is where I am. I want Mark back, and I can't have him back because that's impossible. And I have this dream of being a mom of three, and I have the ability to do it, so I'm going to, and that, to me, is always like, well, what's the thing? What is the thing that, if you were on your when you're 85 years old, or 75 or whatever it is, when you look back, like, what's the thing you'll regret? That's where I like, that's the like goal that people are like, I don't know what to do. I'm like, Well, what's that thing that if you look back on your life, you're like, Man, I just wish I'd done that one thing. Start working towards that. Like, if we're all stuck in these stories, even if you're like, my my dream was to become a Hollywood editor, and now the industry is decimated, and that was my dream. It's like, okay, well, is it still your dream? Because if it is, if it is, let's keep working towards that. What's the what of it? Not the how,

Zack Arnold

or even deeper, I would say, what's the why in it, right?

Bevin Farrand

Yeah, well, yeah, that's I always tell people, I'm like, figure out your what and figure out you're fully fleshed out. Like, cause six dimensional? Why not just, like, one why that? Because then it's like, oh, I want to do it because I want to make my living doing this. It's like, well, yeah, then if you're not making money, it's really easy to give up on it. But if you're like, emotionally, it's going to make me feel this way and mentally and financially. But yeah, what is it? People jump too fast to the how. It's like, what do you want and why do you want it? And if you know those two things, that's what I call your damn manifesto. If you know those two things, then when it gets hard, it carries you through it like I know that what, like my damn manifesto for my work, is to share the damn framework with as many people as as possible, in as many ways as possible. It's why I do podcast interviews. That's why I wrote my book. It's why I do a keynote. And I do it in order to create a sustainable and thriving business to support my family and inspire them. And when things get hard, when I don't have enough clients, or I have a book to speaking gig, or even just my kids are up like late and I'm exhausted, I go back to that. What is it that I want? I want to share this, this message, and why is to support and inspire. And so that's what I go back to. So if you're struggling right now, and I know a lot of people are in a lot of different areas, like, what is it that you want and why?

Zack Arnold

So now we're going to start to dig in even deeper.

Bevin Farrand

Oh, almost done. No, not

Zack Arnold

even close. What I talk about this with my students all the time, where, when we talk about making massive career pivots and transitions, I went. Through this existential crisis about 10 years ago when I realized I don't just want to edit for a living. There's something else for me, and I want to find it. And I was in this mentality of I Am, quote, unquote, starting over, and I share this story because I think so many people feel that way right now, but when I realized that what I'm doing right now is what I've done my entire career, the difference is I'm using Zoom instead of Adobe Premiere or Avid Media Composer or Final Cut Pro. It's the exact same thing with all these transferable skills. I'm trying to find what's the most compelling story thread to this character, right? And I think I'm starting to find it. So we're going to start to pull a little bit deeper. So there's there's one detail that has been implied but hasn't been explicitly explained, and I want to shine a spotlight on this. Then we're going to rewind. Okay, when we look at the timing of what happened with your husband, and now you have these two kids, and now you're having three, you keep saying the year, but I want to put the pieces together. Did anything else happen in 2020, that we haven't talked about that might have affected this, this journey and this experience,

Bevin Farrand

oh, I don't know, maybe like a global pandemic.

Zack Arnold

It's

Bevin Farrand

I was just writing about this today, about how I was, I was outlining in the structure, and I was just doing quick like this, this, this, this, these are the sequence of events. And then I said, Oh, and, you know, let's see. Five months after Mark passed away, the world shut down. And so I am a very like social person, and I had to do a lot of my grieving without my network. Now my sister and my niece moved in with me because I needed help as a solo parent of young kids, and one of them was always awake at all the time. So but you know what I needed to like, feel better was hugs from people in a time and space where we weren't allowed to hug people. And so, yeah, there was, there were a few other things happening. My none of our lives are happening in a vacuum, like the hard stuff. That's like, we can't expect everyone around us to drop everything, because they have their own hard stuff going on too. You know you're talking about your friends who lost their homes. They weren't there. Wasn't the only person who lost a home. My even when I lost my house in a house fire, it didn't mean that other people hadn't just lost their jobs or hadn't. I can't expect everyone to have dropped everything to come take care of me for long stretches of time. A lot of people dropped a lot of stuff when Mark died, to come help, but they also still had to go back to their lives. I had to go back to my life. So

Zack Arnold

here's, here's the thread that I'm starting to see. Okay, if we look at you and the the period in which you lost your husband, obviously, there's grief, there's you know what the happened? But you're, you're finding the opportunity in crisis. You're saying, You know what? I'm gonna figure it out. There's this space where I can respond to this and I can choose my response, but that's not your origin story. So you said, Well, my origin story is really like, if let's go back to the fire. But here's what I find interesting. Your response to the fire was the same. You said I was the first one to pick up and do this and do that like you were all about being action oriented, whereas most people would say, Look at what just happened to me. I'm a victim of this, and now I have an excuse to not go to work or not pay my bills or whatever it is, right, using your circumstances as an excuse. So the fire itself was not the origin story for the way that you reacted with your husband. There's something that led to Bevin being the kind of person that when her house burns down, she's like, well, that sucks, but let's figure this out. There's something else that's the origin story to being the kind of person that reacts that way and has the mindset I believe in my ability to figure things out. There's something deeper in here.

Bevin Farrand

Well, too bad we're out of time. Zack, tell

Zack Arnold

us where we can find you. What is your URL? What are your socials? No, I don't, yes, we've got plenty of times

Bevin Farrand

days to talk about this. Yeah, it's so I don't have a pat answer for you on this, of like, well, what is it? I think, like I said, I looked back at I mean, yeah, this is something I don't talk about on I don't know that I've ever publicly talked about it, but I'll do it so I have. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was 20, and that was a really, maybe this is it. Maybe we're figuring this out here. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was 20, and obviously had been there for, like, suffering from a lot of situations because of it, a lot of symptoms and difficulties. And so it wasn't just like, oh, I went to the doctor on a Tuesday, right? It was like they were trying to figure it out for a long time. And when I was diagnosed, I was then put through this long. Feels like was for it feels like it was ages of experiments of what kind of medication I needed. And like, I remember going to the doctor I was 20, so I like. And I was an actress at the time. I don't know that you knew that I was an

Zack Arnold

actress. I did not know that I'm learning new things about you every minute. It's actually part

Bevin Farrand

of why I love doing keynotes. We were talking about, like, I'm gonna come back to this, but like, when we were talking about, like you're doing what you have always loved to do with telling stories. Like part of why I love doing keynotes is because I get to be on stage, and I love to entertain, and I love to tell the stories, and it just gets to be that I'm telling mine instead of somebody else's at that point. So I was 20 years old. I'd been on this been diagnosed, and meant that I was not allowed to drink alcohol anymore. And I'm 20 turning 21 so I can't, like, go to Margarita night with my girlfriends. Gained 40 pounds from the medicine that I was on. And here I'm an actress and a dancer, and I'm like, just losing so much of, like, my identity and myself, and so frustrated, I looked at the doctors, and I'm like, could you just figure this out? Like, could you stop using me as an experiment and just tell me what medicine to be on? And they just, they couldn't Right. Like, it's, it's such a medicine is an art, not a science. And so they were tweaking and figuring it out. And I think maybe, I don't think this is like the true origin, origin, origin story, but maybe this is a bigger key than I'm ever willing to admit, is that getting through that, and all of the depression and the ups and downs and like, then getting out on the other side of that was kind of like, well, if I can figure that out and figure whatever else is coming out, because it was hard, it was probably one of the hardest things I've been through. Now

Zack Arnold

we're creating all these little threads and these story beats, and something tells me that maybe that'll end up in a chapter or a section of the book, and, you know, might not have been there or might have been told in a different way. So my two favorite things when I'm doing podcast interviews, just to kind of, you know, take the curtain back, are when people either respond with that's a really great question, because what they really mean is, holy shit, I don't know the answer to that, because I've never talked about this before and I don't have a canned response, so that's my first one, right? But the ultimate win is, I've never talked about this before. Oh, my goodness, right. So we're digging in now. So here's the reason that I wanted to bring this up. I really think we've gotten there might even be a little bit more there, but I really, oh, there's more there, but that's okay, but I think we found a really important kernel here. And here's the reason why I want to bring it up, because whether somebody's dealing with mental health issues, being bipolar or depressed, whatever it might be, whether they're losing a job, whether they've lost their home in a fire, one of the things that I've talked about in the the year long mastermind group that I have, shameless self promotion, that you helped me build, and is really the only reason I'm still in business, and you were amazing. But one of the things that I talk about with them is when they have these fears or these anxieties, and I love how you separate the two. But they say, Oh, I'm I'm never going to be able to, you know, find a job in this economy, or I can't deal with this challenge, or whatever it is. And I always ask them, What evidence do you have to support that claim? Right? And what you've created is mountains of evidence that when the world tries to take a shit all over me, I'm going to find my way through it. And my feeling is that whomever is going through whatever they're going through right now, they have evidence to support that they're probably going to get through this

Bevin Farrand

too. Yeah, yeah. We just look for evident, like we we can find there's, there's a reason. There's two sides to every case in front of a court of law, right? It's because you can find evidence to support whatever you want. There is actually no agreed upon truth. That's why we things happen, and then we we have our thoughts that create our experience of it. That's why I say we can only control my role in the experience of my life. I can, can only impact my thinking around something. And so we just have to decide what we want evidence for. And this is not to say that I'm not still terrified of things. Somebody asked me I had some big, heavy conversations yesterday, so somebody asked me yesterday, like, what was the thing that if I was honest about, would kind of blow my life open? And I said, it's that I'm scared about relationships. Like I'm scared that maybe I'll never meet somebody again. I'm scared that I want to. I'm scared. What does that mean? Like, all of these things, like, can I find the right type of person? It's like, that's the thing. And to I think that if I, like, looked at it and I took a step back, like, God, of all the things in life to be worried about, that's it. And it's like, well, that was what they that was what was present for me at that time, and I think that that we have to, like I said, we have to be okay with acknowledging and letting people have their heart, have their truth of what's going on, but and look for the evidence that you want to support. So it's good for me to remember that no matter what comes up, I have evidence that I can get through it. And I think this is the other part of it. We can all get through it, right? And some of it is but how do you want to experience the getting through it? Do you want to experience the getting through it of being like angry and scared and snarky and bitchy and all those things every step of the way, like I have people in my life who are such. Victims. It's like, Oh, of course this is happening to me. And I'm like, well, there are worse things happening to a lot of people, but Okay, if that's where we're gonna go, they're getting through life, but they're getting through it in a really, like a suffering way or and I'm not like, a Susie sunshine kind of person, so I'm not sitting here being like, Oh, well, yay. I'm so glad that I had a bunch of money stolen for me last year. Isaiah

Zack Arnold

Lord, another story, but I had $40,000

Bevin Farrand

stolen for me in 2024 No, 2023 and it was like, and that was like, the hardest thing I'd been through in a long time. I say a long time. I mean, you know, like a lot of what we're talking about has happened in five years. You've had quite a decade I've had quite the this is my, this is my messed up shit era. Yeah, no kidding, but like that happened, and I wasn't sitting here being like, Oh, thank God. Another like thing. I can overcome another, another situation where I can look for evidence. Like I was devastated when it happened. I still am. I'm still dealing with the financial repercussions of that. And I can either, like, when I want to be upset, then I get really pissed off about it, and I get really I can go into victim mentality, of like, how could this happen to me? And when I want to have a more peaceful experience, I just say, I can get through this.

Zack Arnold

I don't think and again, that's a lot of that. Much of it, I would say almost all of it, is really that you're again, it comes back to this core theme. You choosing how to respond to it,

Bevin Farrand

yeah, and that you can choose like, that's the part I just want to hammer home for people is, there's so many, there's so many times in our life where we feel like we don't have a choice in how we respond, right? We feel like. So I was talking to somebody recently, and they were talking about how they were, they were a caregiver for somebody, and they're like, but I feel guilty that I'm pissed about it. Like, you shouldn't feel guilty. That's that's a completely, I mean, you can't, you should or shouldn't. Doesn't matter, right? The truth of the matter is, you're pissed about it, or you're guilty, or you're this, or you're happy, or you're feeling relieved, or this, like all of those are valid choices, because they are choices. And when we realize that, literally, there's, there's truly nothing, we can't change our choice about change our mind about how we experience something like there, if I really wanted to be like, I could choose to say at least Mark and I had eight years together, at least we met. And there are days that I say that, and then there's other days where I'm like, we should have had 50. And it just depends on the experience I'm having that day, I

Zack Arnold

think that one area where you and I, again are really, really similar, and the RE this is not so much you're coming in as the expert this is just be kind of trying to workshop this, to help other people understand it. But I think what you and I are both doing, and it's hard to articulate, is that whenever something comes along, unexpected, there's this moment, whether the moment is for five seconds a day a week, where you're like, You got to be shitting me, like, really, this is happening. But then all of a sudden it's all right. So here's the new reality that I've been presented. Right? There's nothing that I can do to change this reality. I'm not going to sit here and dwell on. It shouldn't be this way. I don't deserve this etc, etc, etc. It's the ability to say, here's, this is the new game that I'm playing. What are the new rules? And how do I how do I proceed forwards in this game? That's at least the way that I look at it, right? So that, whether it's the you know, the situation happens with the dad, with the caregiving, with, you know, the the rat infestation, with the fires coming. Ultimately, when I think about all this, the question I ask myself is, what brought me to the place where I can say, All right, so this is the game I'm playing now. How do I proceed? I want to be able to help people get to that, because I know it doesn't make the situation any better, but it gives you some modicum of controls like, All right, so the industry is burning down. My neighborhood is literally burning down. Can I change this? Nope. Am I upset? Sure I'm upset. Am I scared? Sure I am. But this is now the new reality with which I'm presented. These are the pieces on the chessboard. Let's play this new game, right? And that that's really what gets me through. But if somebody were to say, How can I do that for myself? I'm not sure, and I don't know if you have the answer to that either. But I just want a workshop, because I want people to have that sense of, Well, I lost my job, or I've lost my entire career. This has happened, but now I accept this as reality. Now it's time to move forwards and take action, because so many are stuck in that space between responding to it and taking action to get through it.

Bevin Farrand

Yeah. So first of all, that first part that you talked about is the reaction, not the response. So there's a difference. So reaction is often emotional. It's often forceful, because it's that equal and opposite reaction. So if you've had a big dramatic thing happen, then your reaction is going to be equally as dramatic and forceful. Like my house burned down. I was like, I was I was sobbing. And I was devastated. And then after some time and some space, I could respond, and I could say, Okay, what am I going to do next? And that is like I said, that's where we get to make the choice. We get to say, how do I want to experience this like the situation is happening, the suffering is optional. So do you want to make this more painful? And I think some of that comes from fighting reality so I can cause more suffering when I fight reality. So can you to say, oh, like we could say, I want to, I wish the industry weren't like this, but the truth is that it is like this. So are you going to fight reality? Am I going to fight reality that Mark died? No. Now when my daughter, my daughter's turning eight this weekend, and she'll often say, when is Daddy coming back? Because she was two and a half when he died, and so she was there, literally, she was he was he died sleeping next to her. And she'll say, Oh, I remember the day. I remember when you were screaming, and I remember this, and it breaks my heart. And she'll say, when is Daddy coming back? And now that my youngest is three, who obviously never met her dad, whenever I'll say, well, daddy died, and daddy is not coming back. And when Guinevere is upset, and she fights that, and she says, I just want daddy to come back, and I see me too, and I can't fight her on it either. I can't be like, but I guess it's like, the the the resistance that I would have to that and say, well, he's not, and we fight that that also extends the the suffering. But instead, if I can say to her, yeah, me too. I wish he could come back to there's no reaction there, because there's no force. It's like, I wish he could come back. He can't. What are we going to do?

Zack Arnold

The first thing that came to mind randomly just popped up, like random access memory, was a quote, and I remember writing about this. I think it was, it might have been at the beginning of the pandemic. I can't remember what it was that was the instigator of it, but it's a very popular quote. Most people have heard it before. It's Dr Seuss, don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened. And my immediate reaction to that is always what? Why can't it be both? Like, let let us cry because it's over, right? We lost somebody, where you lost your job, or you're concerned about where the career is going. Like, don't tell me. I can't cry because it's over, but I can also smile because it happened. I can have both of them. And like you said, if you're just, if you're not letting yourself experience that, you're just getting deeper into it rather than working through it, which, then again, totally uh random. Again, another quote that I just thought of, that I share with my students all the time is, when you're going through hell. Keep going, keep going. Very, you know, very popular Winston Churchill quote, right? And that's, that's kind of the, again, this idea of, all right, so this thing's happened. My reaction is, this is bullshit. Like, what the hell is going on? How am I here again? How did this horrible tragedy happen? Or whatever it is. But it's like, all right, and I like the fact that you differentiated the reaction versus the response. So the response is not, well, I'm just going to sit here and wallow in it. The response is, this is going to suck, but I'm going to figure out how to get through it.

Bevin Farrand

And if you want to wallow, that's fine, just decide how long you want to do it, like you can choose, right? Like I said, I have people my life who are victims, not because anything harder, easier is happening to them, but they have just a victim mentality about it. And so, oh, sorry, go ahead. No, that's That's it period.

Zack Arnold

One of the things that I tell my students all the time when they're kind of stuck in this kind of place, and I do for myself, is the exact same thing is that I give myself a time limit. The example that I use of there are many examples, but the one that I kind of highlight is that for those that have followed my journey for several years that are not new to the podcast, they know that for a long period of time, the goal was I'm going to be an American Ninja Warrior, and I worked my ass off for it. First time I got on the not on the show, isn't on TV, but on the show itself, like on the stage, on the course, my brain literally completely froze. I remember the the anxiety and the adrenaline took over so badly that I looked down and I said, I don't know which foot is my right foot, because my trainer said, lead with your right foot. That was the end. Even before I started, it was over because my brain froze. I wasn't about a physical issue. It was about a mental issue. But I remember thinking to myself, I'll never forget the bus ride back like I was so upset. I put years into this. This was my shot. I had all these visions, all these dreams, and it didn't work out. And I said, All right, you got a week. You got a week to go home and be. And be upset, and you're going to be pouty, and you're going to eat all the Girl Scout cookies in the house. You got one week. Day eight, you wake up, you figure this shit out, and you move forwards, right? And I've used that multiple times. I even use that. I remember thinking the same thing when my dad passed. The problem was that when I got off the plane, I said, I'm going to give myself a week to process this, and instead, I have about seven minutes. And then I opened my door and realized, realize, oh, great, I have to move my family. So actually, I wasn't able to have that window, but that's exactly the same thing that I do, is I give myself a time limit, otherwise you try to repress it, and it just makes it so much harder. It's like you're carrying that weight vest rather than let me just deal with this. Get it off now I can move forwards. One

Bevin Farrand

of the things I was, I'm not actually a huge Swifty, but I am. I have a tremendous amount of respect for her, and where it came from was watching the documentary Miss Americana. Miss Americana, however you say it, and she gets the call that her that she didn't get nominated for a Grammy, and she's real quiet, and her agent or her manager is like, yeah, you know. But this was a really good album. Good album. And she goes, I'm gonna go make a better I'm gonna Okay, I gotta go make a better album. And her agent was like, No, this was such a good album. She goes, I'm gonna go make a better one. And that's like, we get to choose, and she could be disappointed, but we get to choose. And I think that anyone listening, if you're listening and you're this, is really rubbing you the wrong way. Come back and listen to this again tomorrow and see if you're in a different space. I think

Zack Arnold

that's really, really good advice. So now what I want to do this is going to be a little bit of a pivot, which is ironic, because we're going to be talking about pivots, so it's not a completely different conversation. It's certainly the kind of one that we could turn into an entire part two if we wanted to. But what I don't want to do is lose sight of the other tremendous value that you can bring to this conversation. The first value that you've already brought is really understanding how to process deep levels of tragedy and trauma and how to get through the other side. But you also have a lot of strategic and tactical information that you can share about how to actually do that for somebody that's thinking, what, what do I do with the skills that I have, or like, how do I rewrite my story, and where do I find value that's something that you're incredibly good at. You've done it for yourself. You've helped others reinvent themselves. So now we can get a little bit more strategic and tactical, so we can take all the emotional stuff that's done, right? So we'll give ourselves, let's give ourselves at least a good 15 plus minutes to just basically, this is what I tell my students to never do. I'm gonna pick your brain for a while. Okay, which is I'm now in this place where I'm dealing with all these issues, all these tragedies, with the industry, with my career and whatever, right? How do I figure out what to actually do with this? How do I capitalize from it, whether it's starting my own business or otherwise, like, you understand how to navigate this world at a very, very deep level.

Bevin Farrand

Yeah. So, 15 minutes. Okay, cool. You know, we talked a little bit about it earlier, which is, like, I think people jump to the how, too soon. And instead we have to look at what, like, what is it that we want? So I mean, everything that I do with the do the damn thing method is like, applicable to all the different areas of our life. But if we want to just talk about business here, it's like, what is it that you want? Not how do you want to do it, but what is it that you want? You want to tell stories? Well, like you said, there's dozens, hundreds of different ways that you could tell stories. You could be in front of the camera. You could be behind it. You could be writing them. You could be editing them, you're doing them on podcasts. But what is it and why is it that you want it? And then I think what stops most of us is once we have that clear picture of what it is that we want, we keep staring at it. And the problem is that's like staring at the top of a mountain when you're at the bottom of it and and, and, you know, it's that law of physics, or whatever, of inertia, an object at rest tends to stay at rest, and an object in motion tends to stay in motion. And so when you're either on a path that you've been on for a long time, even if you're not happy about it, you're going to stay in that motion, unless some kind of force, internally or externally, makes a shift. When I lost when I lost my job the third time in 2019 I was on path to be a C level executive. I was very excited. I loved where I worked, and then I got laid off. I got fired, actually, let's be honest. And that was the external force that I needed to then say, I'm not going to do this again. I'm going to start my own business. And but an object at rest tends to stay at rest too. So like, we've got to get our eyes off of the top of the mountain and onto the next tree. We talk about this all the time, right? Like, just got to get to the next tree. And we use micro actions because we think there's the other thing. We think that inspiration gets us into action, but it's actually the action sparks inspiration. Do you remember we're I think we're close in age. I don't remember, but we're almost exactly the same age. Okay, so you remember those death trap merry go rounds that were on playgrounds and we were kids that were like. That you just hold on and you'd swing around and listen, oh, sure, yeah. And they were, like, installed rusty, like, you've never seen one that isn't like, like, waiting for tetanus, right? And so if you think about those that this is my favorite analogy for when we're starting a project, when we're trying to change paths, whatever is those are heavy, and when you just get up onto them and you lean it feels impossible, and so you kind of lean into it, and you take that first tiny little step, and you take the next step and the next step and the next step, and then you're running, and then you jump on and you spin and spin and spin. And if you want to keep it going, it never has to get to that level of hard again, unless you stop, get off and start from stands, from standing still again, you just put your little foot out and hope you don't break an ankle and keep it going. But what, when I tell that story, what I realized is that what we all forget is that we didn't wait for it to be fun to get started. We got started with the faith that the fun would come and so if we know the direction we want to be moving into. So we've got that clarity on the what, we've got the clarity on the why, and we're taking micro actions towards it, which is the smallest possible action that you'll actually take. Sometimes we don't chop them up small enough when you just take micro actions in the direction of your damn manifesto with the faith that it will happen. That's when you can do really amazing things. I think people either get stuck on staring at the top of the mountain, or they're waiting for data. They're waiting for proof before they start. I think, I think it was Amy Porterfield who said this. I I've heard it a couple times, but we confidence comes from results. So when you're first starting out, you don't need confidence. You need courage. You don't have results yet. You just need to know the direction you want to move in and have courage. I

Zack Arnold

love all that, and I'm going to add on top of it as well, and this is going to come from a very different place, or kind of a different area, different industry, different perspective, but it relates to this perfectly. This is another area that, as you know, is very near and dear to my heart, which is neuro divergence, and one of the most formative influential things that I had ever heard about better understanding yourself or understanding others with ADHD. But really more about understanding yourself is from Dr John Ratey. He's written multiple books. I had him on the podcast years ago talking about he had a book called spark that was understanding how movement could ignite creativity, and how walking exercise, you know, increases norepinephrine, endorphins, brain drive, neurotrophic factor, all kinds of stuff, right? So I had a conversation with him years ago. Didn't even know that he also had ADHD. I just thought he was a brilliant doctor. And now he's come out with a series of books about ADHD, all that to set the stage for he says that what you're looking for is the right kind of difficult. Because somebody with ADHD, myself included, I have a raging case of it. You're either thinking, There's way too much here, it is too overwhelming. I'm scatterbrained. I could be doing 100 different things. Therefore, what am I going to do? Nothing. I'm going to watch TV and I'm going to eat garbage all day long, because that's what I can do, because it's too overwhelming, right? But then, if something is too easy, it's boring, and you don't want to do it. So the key is finding the right kind of difficult. And for me, everything that I'm putting on a calendar, all of our to do lists, all of our project planning, it's a combination of two things. I got to get to the next tree, and the distance between here and the next tree has to be the right kind of difficult. Yes, and I think so many people like you said they get stuck in the inertia of it's too much. It's too heavy to handle. There's no reason to even start. Or they make things so easy and so small that it makes no difference whatsoever. So I'm always asking, Is this the right kind of difficult, and if it's like my hand, like, all right, I really don't want to do this this afternoon. I know I can do it. I know it's not going to be that hard, but it's going to be a little bit challenging. I'm gonna have to push All right, great, so I'll just do it, and I have to trick myself to always find that right kind of difficult. And what you're talking from a completely different perspective, saying the exact same thing

Bevin Farrand

well, and sometimes we have to not put the 30 pound weights on our ankles when we're starting to train for a marathon. And so if you I trained. I did a I've done a half marathon and a triathlon, and I am not an athlete, and a lot of it was just getting started and when I so when I was training for the triathlon, I had never even run a mile in my life, and I did the couch to 5k program because it was like, let's not jump from I've never worked out to I'm going to be an Iron Man triathlete. And so when I talk about micro actions being the smallest possible action that you will actually take, because what you're talking about, oh, they make it so easy, it doesn't make a difference. Sometimes, that's what people will say to me, like, oh, well, that's such a small action, it's not going to make a difference. Well, it's just the first one. And then, as you as things. Things happen as you go along. Things get easier. They come faster. You can take bigger actions, but it's all still just a series of micro actions. How old? How old are your kids? Is one of them learning to drive?

Zack Arnold

I don't want to talk about almost he's 15, and going on 13. So it's this is the year that we're going to be digging into this. Yes.

Bevin Farrand

Okay, so here's the thing, when you're teaching your kid how to drive, or when you're learning how to drive, there are you. You teach them tiny, micro actions. You teach them open the door, sit down, check your mirrors. Buckle in. Check your mirrors again. Put the key in the ignition. We don't keys anymore, but like, push the button, put your look over your shoulder, look back. Put your foot on the gas. Little bit, you know it's those are micro actions. When I drive my car, I still do all those same things. I still get in the car, buckle my seat belt, check my mirrors, put the gas. I just, I just, in my mind, start driving. So it's all still a series of micro actions done one thing after another. So if you're if you're start, if you if you feel stuck and you feel stagnant and you feel paralyzed, just break it into smaller, micro actions and give yourself the grace to know that they will get easier and they will get bigger and and you will move further with each action over time.

Zack Arnold

Obviously, I agree with all of the above. And I second all of

Bevin Farrand

the above, we are saying the exact same thing. We're always we're saying

Zack Arnold

the same thing in, you know, different frameworks with, you know, same idea, same results. I want to look at one more thing very, very quickly, which is almost, it's like the opposite end, but directly connected to this idea, right? So you have these very, very small, micro actions. But I want to dig a little bit deeper into this idea of a manifesto. As you said, you know, the damn manifesto. But this is where a lot of people also get stuck, and I'm hearing this a lot right now. Before it was I know exactly what the dream, what the vision, is, but it's a really scary goal, and I don't know how to break it into steps so I can get started. The other problem right now is because things are changing so much, people are saying, I don't know what to do next, because I have no vision for the future whatsoever. So talk to me, at least. You know, on the basic level, when you're talking about this manifesto, what does it include?

Bevin Farrand

Okay, so this is, this is my first book, your damn manifesto. So it really is the the what and the why, and so it's not the how, the how is. So if I look at my my framework as four steps, you craft your damn manifesto, attend your own damn party, find your damn people, and get your damn results. The how is the Get your damn results. That's kind of the end of it. But the damn manifesto, and you can have them be big and small, and like I said, you can have them for fitness, you can have them for relationships, you can have them for parenting, business, health, all of these different things. And it is like I said, starting with what like, okay, I get that. You can't. We can't decide what's going to happen. We don't know what's going to happen in five years. We don't know what's going to happen in five months right now. So what is it that you want in your life? What do you want your life to be about? What area are you most thinking about? Right? Like, if it's your business, what do you want your your business life to be about? What is that? What and then why? And so the when you know it's like something you're really passionate about, it's going to impact you in most of these six areas, which is financial, emotional, mental, physical, social and vision, and when you are saying, Okay, I don't know what anything's going to be like tomorrow, but I know what I want my life to be about is this, and here's all the reasons why I want that, emotionally, financially, that becomes your day on manifesto. That's the touchstone for when things get hard. And things are hard right now, things always get hard. They're just different levels of hard. And so I don't know if that actually answers your question, but to me, that's like when I when I have a fitness goal, the most important why, for me, is not physical, it's mental, because physically, it's not going to change right away, first of all, but also to me, it's not a physical thing. It's Can I set something? Can I do what I set my mind to? So when I set, like a fight, a physical goal, like a like a health goal, it's got to have a mental why to it? Because otherwise it's just really easy to give up. Same with if you're if you're changing careers, do not have your only, why be a financial why? Because you're not going to see that result right away. When I was starting my business, if my only, why, people will be like, Oh, your WHY SHOULD be like your legacy do for your kids? Yeah, that's great, except when my kids are the ones keeping me awake until three in the morning. I'm not trying to build a business and a legacy for them. I just want to put them in daycare and go do something else away from them for 12 hours. So I can't just have it be one. Why? So starting my business, it couldn't just be financial, it couldn't just be social, couldn't just be about my kids, but it could be emotional, that it made me proud and made me happy. And it could be mentally, it gave me a challenge to to overcome. And it could be. Vision. This is what I was put on this earth to do, and so that's the day of manifesto. Is your what? In order to why I

Zack Arnold

love that this could very easily be a part two. I could dig in and talk about this framework alone for hours, because, again, this is where I think you and I came together. It was through a mutual connection, but you and I both knew, without really knowing anything about each other. Like, there's something here. I don't know what it is, but my intuition says there's something. And the more that we dig in, the more I'm like, those are all the things that I teach. I use slightly different words with different letters in a different order, but like you and I see it in such a similar fashion. So again, this, these are the things that I dig into with my students all day, every day, just as you do with yours. But I want to kind of transition to the closing and this will be, you know, maybe a combination of the things that you've learned on the logical level, the things you've learned on the emotional level. I don't do this at the end of every show, but I do it at the end of appropriate shows. So what we're going to do is we're going to step into a time machine, and I want you, I want you to pick a time and place that's most relevant to you, and I would assume it's one of the ones that we've already talked about, but where, if anything, you thought to yourself, like, how the hell am I going to get through this? Is it losing your husband? Is it losing the condo on the fire? Is it diagnosis of bipolar? Is it other where's that moment where you're thinking, what the hell like you got to be kidding me, I just have no idea what I'm going to do.

Bevin Farrand

I think losing mark. All right, so you're going

Zack Arnold

to, you're going to, you're going to time travel back to whatever that moment it is. And it's not just a day on the calendar. It's an image in your mind. It's, I remember sitting on the couch that one morning, or I remember I was, you know, taking the trash out. Do you know what that moment is

Bevin Farrand

of when I thought I wasn't going to get through it?

Zack Arnold

Just whatever, whatever the first thought is that comes to your mind, where we're creating a scene right now. So that moment where it's like, whether it's all hope is lost, or I can't believe, like, whatever it is where you just you kind of feel lost, rudderless.

Bevin Farrand

Do you have any cry? I do. You're gonna make me cry. Okay, yes, I have that. Okay.

Zack Arnold

So I want you to time travel back, and I want you to talk to Bevin. Well, what are you gonna share with her in this moment?

Bevin Farrand

Okay, so the moment that I'm thinking, of is literally the moment that I that I found mark, and that I was performing CPR, and I literally, and I do talk about this on on my keynote and such, but that I literally said to him, like, I can't do this alone. And I think, I think what I would say, I think there's a couple things. One is that you don't have to, right? You don't, you're not going to have to do it alone, and and you're not going to be alone, even though, like, I'm not sugar coating it, it's going to be hard, it's going to suck, and there's going to be lots of things that you wish were done differently, but you absolutely can do it and and I think also I would say you have the permission to to navigate this however you want, and that if that means, like, being more scared, less strong, whatever that is, like, you can do all of those things. There's there's no way to do this. I don't know that feels very ineloquent, but I think that's what I would say. I'm

Zack Arnold

not looking for eloquence. I'm looking for authenticity. And look, I think I would just give myself

Bevin Farrand

a big hug. I know that that sounds so okay. I have also, I have never said this on a podcast before, and, yeah, I'm gonna say this, and I don't know where it's gonna go. I don't even know if it's answering your question. But a few years ago, the Sex and the City reboot came out, and I have not watched it. I watched the first episode where big dies and whatever, and there was this huge backlash of people saying, Oh, my God, if she had not just like, sat on the shower floor and she'd actually tried to perform CPR, then she could have saved him, right? If I had known that Mark wasn't going to wake up, I would have just crawled up next to him and been there until the EMT came. I would not have tried to perform CPR for 15 minutes, because there he had. He had passed away at like four in the morning, something like, hours before I found him. It wasn't like he had a heart attack in front of me. And I think that's one of the hard things, is like, I can't go back and do that. But I think, honestly, if I, if I had known like that, this is it. This is the last time I'm actually going to, like. Be with my husband, I probably would have just laid down next to him and been there.

Zack Arnold

I appreciate you being very open and honest and sharing that, and have learned so many things about you and your story. And I knew we had a lot to lot to talk about, but we got so many things that I didn't even expect to come out of this today. So now that we've kind of taken that lens of your time traveling back to yourself and sharing this, this is probably going to be more summarization of everything we've already talked about. But now, rather than time traveling, you're just you're sitting next to somebody that's going through all the things that we're talking about now, what's the quickest, simplest advice you're going to give them right now.

Bevin Farrand

Oh, advice. I don't, I don't. I'm not big on advice. I mean, like, I know that I've just spent an hour and a half like talking, but I think if I was sitting next to somebody who was going through all of this, I think I literally would just say to them, I can only imagine what you're going through. And I think sometimes, rather than advice, we need to be seen and we want to be heard and we want to be seen. And so, you know, I get to be on podcasts like this, and I get people get to hear me, and they and I get to be heard a lot. I get to be seen a lot. And I think that if I'm talking to somebody, I think I would say I can only imagine what you're going through, and it is okay for you to ask for the things that you need right now. And I don't mean just money or clothes or food or whatever you physically need, but also it is okay, as long as you are not damaging or hurting someone else in space. It is okay for you to ask for what you need, and if that is time, if that is space, if that is hugs, if that is help, it's okay for you to have wants and needs, and it's okay for you to express those wants and needs in a way of expressing them, not demanding them. I think that's the other thing we get confused about, is we think, Oh, I could never ask for that. Well, you can. You can't demand it, but if you, if you ask for something with the attitude, my kids recently have been asking me questions or it's okay if you say no. I'm like, Well, of course I know that it's okay that I say no, you're asking me a question, not a demand. But they say that all time, Mommy, I'm gonna ask you something. It's okay if you say no, and that's where we have to come in to ask things. Is, I'm making a request and I need this. It doesn't have to come from you, but I would like it to and if and if that, if not that, then is there something else you can do to support me? And so I think if you can, that's, that's, I guess, what I would say to somebody, if you're going through something, it's okay to have wants and needs, and it's okay to ask for them.

Zack Arnold

It's almost as if you were literally on the Zoom call where I was having this conversation with the grief counselor, because we're walking away with almost exactly the same takeaways. These are going to be really good pair of putting these together. But having said that, I'm just immensely grateful that you both showed up in my life, and are getting me through what's a very challenging time right now, and, you know, putting yourself out there in a very open and vulnerable space to talk about all these things, two of which, by the way, you've never talked about before. So I know when I'll take that, right? I gotta, that's a really good question, and I got, I've never talked about this before twice, so I'll win. Yeah, so I love it, but yeah, this, this has been an absolute pleasure. Looking forward to continue working together, and for anybody else that is ready to take the damn chance and create the damn manifesto and go to the damn dinner and go see their damn friends and live their damn life. Where are people gonna find you?

Bevin Farrand

Do you know I actually own that damn girl.com and it just points right to bevinfarrand.com, which is

Zack Arnold

landing baby. I love it,

Bevin Farrand

but no, that's what that's you can find me on like all the socials at Bevin Farrand. I also, for anyone listening, you can go get that man, that meditation of the pad method that I talked about at just one damn minute.com and it's you could once you do it, once you listen to it, once you can do it anywhere. And it literally takes a minute, but it will just get you out of that feeling of overwhelm, feeling of anxiety, that heightened level of emotion, and back to a place where you might make the exact same decision, but it'll feel different. And so I would just say that is a great place to then go get that and then, yeah, find me on all the places. Bevin Farrand. That's the beautiful thing about having a unique name. It's Bevin Farrand, isn't it, exactly.

Zack Arnold

So anybody listening, we'll make sure to put all this damn information and the damn show notes you can find all the damn information you need for today's damn podcast episode. Right, so damn, this was a good interview. Bevin.

Bevin Farrand

Damn, that's my barometer. I say, did I get a full body damn out of this? And I did a couple of times.

Zack Arnold

Well, I very much appreciate everything you brought to this and look forward to continuing our journey together.

Bevin Farrand

Thanks. Zack.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai