As Simone puts it, she "leads an ordinary life filled with extraordinary moments." She is an author ("The Extraordinary UnOrdinary You"), mother of 6 (with 3 adopted children), entrepreneur, and speaker; with a goal to help others realize that the small choices matter and we all have the power to inspire others, just by being who we are. The whole idea of being an "ordinary person" who does special things was really interesting to me. There are so many of us who see people who have climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro (which Simone did) and think "that is a different type of person, I could never do that." That fascinates me, because maybe it is true, or maybe it isn't. So I wanted to talk to Simone get her perspective and try to find out.

Interestingly, Simone started with kindness as her value. She believes that we don't have enough kindness in the world and to get more, each of us needs to figure out what makes us special, what makes us come alive, and what makes us happy. It is only once we do that, that we have the ability to make the (sometimes hard) choice to be kind to others. We spoke a lot about the journey she took to build confidence in herself so that she can live in accordance with her value of kindness. Simone spoke about challenges with her weight, lots of internal self doubt, and how ultimately having kids went a long way to helping her become the person she is today.

Towards the end of the conversation we got into some really interesting philosophical territory. We talked about the importance of having someone who believes in you, so that you can start to overcome your own self-doubt; and how very often for people that someone is "God." We also asked the question: if being kind makes you happy, is that OK? By that I mean, if we are really just being kind because it makes us feel good are there any risks or negative implications to that? Simone had some really interesting thoughts/insights on all of it, so big thanks to her for being on the show and sharing her perspective.