Sunni VonMutius – Show Notes

Personal definition of resilience – calls it anti-survival mode.  Proactively intentionally designing your world and that comes from a desire to not bounce from one thing to another. 

Movie – The Waking Life

Home schooled.  Started school early and finished early.  Leap frogged her way through a corporate career. She made good financial choices and was able to retire at 32 but soon became bored and began other projects as well as travelling and living as a nomad.

There is always an adventure with Sunni.

Home schooling was wonderful for Sunni – her Mum was born for it.  Learned through play a lot.  She taught them to be ever curious.  She put us in classroom environments where they had social circles.  Played with other home-schooled kids. 

Being retired means her long-term future is taken care of.  She still has to take care of the life she wants today.  She had worked for a long time, she had a good amount of savings and she thought she was going to go to the beach every day, binge watch things she'd never been able to watch before.  Three weeks in she was climbing up the walls.

The first thing she did was to start a strategy business.   Apply the skills she had learned with small businesses.  She had a lot of contacts in business all over the world and she decided she wanted to meet those people and rekindle those connections.  She didn't go home much at all so started living a nomadic lifestyle.  Put all of her belongings in storage and made it official.  It helped her grow her business through networking.  When she travels she really looks to connect with locals.  A quest for humanity.

She believes everybody deserves to have a support system around them when they transition into adulthood.  She has been mentoring children as they transition out of foster care.  She just has to show up and listen and that can make a big difference in their lives.  Now she wants to go even deeper by fostering.

The more freedom we have to not take care of ourselves the more we feel like we have a choice to become an adult and some people just choose not to.  There comes a time when that is not satisfying.  There are things that come with adulthood that are really juicy that they are missing out on.  A marker for that is somebody who is taking responsibility for their existence on this planet.

A huge part of her resilience has become from not wanting to become a statistic. 

One thing that has been supportive for her is that we don't need to jump from being the victim to the victor. 

Talks about having bi-polar disorder.  Having a supportive system and communicating in an effective way when she is in a balanced place has been really helpful.  She was diagnosed when she was quite young but in the US once you get diagnosed it is very difficult to shake it.  She hasn't had extreme manic episodes.  She does have the cloud that will come and that will take her down into the deep pit.  It is like the resilient part of her has been locked up in a cave. 

When she feels the cloud on the fringes she makes sure she spends time with her more positive friends. 

Personal tools – maintaining a healthy body.  Starts the day by being in her body – meditation, stretching, exercising.  It keeps her present to taking care of herself.  Being honest and communicating effectively with the people who she chooses as her family and her support structure – both when things are going good and when they are going bad.  Continually being curious about herself and how she operates and how the world is operating.