Life-Changing Adventures Await

Speaker 1: all of us are capable of doing big things with our lives being stuck sometimes is normal one of the best things to do to get unstuck go out into nature and do an adventure I call it the ultimate pattern interrupt hi I'm Melanie bar welcome to the she builted experience with Melanie join me as I talk to women who have successfully built it a career and business that they love we dive into the topic of how they built it and talk about everything from Having the courage to make career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech Innovation magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so let's dive in thank you for joining us Shelby you wrote a book will to Wild tell us about it and what gave you the idea to write

Speaker 2: your book will to Wild Adventures Great and Small to change your life I'm holding the book in my hand it's my first book and it's a guide book for anyone who's curious about using adventure to get unstuck and maybe try something else in their life and it's a book that I wish I had so many times when I was scared or stuck when I was afraid to quit my job in 2009 I was working at Vans and at the hide of the recession I wanted to be a journalist it's the book I wish I had when I decided to move to New Zealand with a the guy I'd met and only known for two months I met in Costa Rica while teaching surf lessons to women it's the book I wish I had when I decided to paddle a portion of the Amazon River in Peru it's the book I wish I had when I decided to start a podcast with zero clue how to use a microphone and a zoom recorder and had zero social media following so there's a lot of books about Adventure but there wasn't one that I'd ever found that talked about the psychology and mindset of pursuing Adventure and Why adventure can be such a big Catalyst to changing so many other things in your life as a little kid I taught surfing lessons at this surf school called surf Diva down the street in La Hoya California and women would come and they would learn to ride a few waves over a weekend clinic or a week-long clinic and then a couple weeks after I'd get a call from several women and they either quit their jobs ended relationship that was no longer serving them or they'd call me and they'd be like Shelby I'm going to move by you to San Diego to a place with a better Beach and this phenomenon really intrigued me I was only 16 when this happened but I tasted the power of Adventure at a really young age but I studied it inadvertently full-time so I became a journalist I studied journalism in college and I started an adventure column in my local San Diego newspapers when I was 19 years old during the summer I worked as a newspaper journalist in South Africa I interned at CNN I tried to let them get me to report about Adventure and they didn't really have it but I covered it as best as I

Speaker 1: could anyway and then I eventually worked in the action and adventure sports industry at Vans and then I worked for body glove and some other companies I quit my job to be a full-time Adventure journalist then I started a podcast all about Adventure that I ended up selling to REI Co-op and still host and now I guess I'm an author of an adventure book so this topic of how Adventure can change your life has always fasinated me and intrigued me and I've seen it change other people's lives and there's a lot of things you can try right now to change your life you can go see someone you could try a ceremony there's something really powerful about the healing effects of Nature and the side effects can be profound it's interesting how doing these things and pushing yourself is eye opening and it shows us that we can do hard things exactly adventured allows us to build a big courage deposit there was one wave I caught later after I quit my job at vans in Indonesia that kind of catapulted me it was just a wave that had scared me so much but it was so thrilling and so magical that it gave me enough courage and confidence to do wild things for about a decade later and I don't think you get Courage the way you do with Adventure and with anything else that's the biggest effect and then nature can give us so many great metaphors in life like personally I'm struggling with an autoimmune condition that turns my pigment on my skin white and it's hard as a woman I like to pretend like I'm not vain but I am this condition has shown me that I care about beauty a little bit and when you go out in nature the trees are depigmented they have wrinkles they look funny and they're absolutely beautiful and nature doesn't really care how much money you have in your bank account doesn't matter what you do but it gives you courage and in business there's a guy in my book who at age 9 had a really wild idea now I have examples of people with grand adventures and small Adventures because I wanted this book to appeal to a wide range of people showing that anyone can go out and do Adventure but at 19 he's like I don't know what I'm going to do after college but I want to do a grand Adventure so he biked having no clue how to ride a bike with cliping pedals and really no clue how to camp but he biked from Alaska all the way down to Patagonia took him seven months which is really fast but on that trip at the very end of his ride he had no idea what he was going to do for money and he was suffering he was in Patagonia there was wild flamingos and guanacos and wild horses and he just imagined what he would want to do to bring him joy and he imagined this rock climbing gym that he went to as a kid and he's like wouldn't it be cool if I could open a rock climbing gym but make it 24hour and have an honor code versus having someone at the front desk Grill you for your card you would just come and go with a key code and there would be bar barue and a slack line and people would hang out and he ended up getting home and immediately getting funders for that idea and it's funny because his Adventure actually helped him get investors right away because here was a guy who said he could do something really hard ride his bike from Alaska to Patagonia and he did it and so people were willing to take a chance on him and now he has eight climbing gyms around the country nature and a wild adventure can really catapult us to other things and as consumed as we are by computer and media our best ideas come when we're quiet and I don't think we get quiet really until we're in nature yeah there's something that nature does that's really cool I've studied a lot with this writer she a science writer who actually just won the pen award for a book called heartbreak but her name is Florence Williams and I highly recommend her book The Nature fix and her second book heartbreak they're great but she talks about the science of Nature and why it's so great for fostering ideas and helping us make better decisions one thing that nature does is we know that in nature our blood pressure tends to relax our nervous system calms down we can make better decisions and there's something called hard and soft Fascination so hard Fascination is when you see a stoplight and you physically have to stop and that's just a reaction then there's something called Soft Fascination which there's a lot of it nature looking at a butterfly and like wandering your eyes around or seeing a bird in the sky and watching it fly or looking at a trail and in those states of soft Fascination our minds can wander and form these ideas better it's so true because there were moments in the past where we weren't so consumed by all the media and our computers and I think about that with everyone growing up you know I have nine-year-old Twins and I think about making sure that they have the balance and it's not just screen time we're all consumed by it Elliot loves the ocean Not Afraid at all I had to hire someone to teach him how to surf because he goes so far out in the waves just goes it's

Speaker 2: awesome you have a getting unstuck checklist in your book tell us about it and walk us through how you suggest we

Speaker 1: get unstuck a lot of us can feel stuck at different times in our lives and for me feeling stuck can often feel like

Speaker 1: want to do something else with our Liv or we're just bored but all of us are capable of doing big things with our Liv being stuck sometimes is normal one of the best things to do to get unstuck go out into nature and do an adventure I call it the ultimate pattern interrupt just this weekend I drove to Joshua Tree I wanted to go camping my partner he didn't want to go camping so we compromised and we settled on this place that was like a glamp site it was like a little castle structure there was a guy on a bike who brought s'mores via room service it was really cool there was a campfire we could see stars and I think just looking up at the night sky and seeing millions of stars was such a powerful interrupt because all the problems that were bugging us instantly went away if you look up you realize how small we are and what little specks of dust we are in this giant world and it puts it all into perspective so being annoyed about your job or your partner being annoying all that tends to go away when you look up and you see stars and I think Nature has a lot of opportunity for us to feel this feeling of awe which can really take us out of our heads make us feel more connected to other people and more connected to ourselves if you're out in the ocean you like the ocean and you see a whale or a dolphin leap it's a really cool feeling so much of our lives are predictable right especially with our phones but in nature there's all these moments that are completely unpredictable that really take us out of

Speaker 2: our heads so true we took the the cruise to Alaska and Canada I didn't know if I would like it and I loved it because it forced me to shut down I couldn't plan anything on my phone they say you'll have Wi-Fi but of course you really don't have Wi-Fi and I told my team I said if I don't respond it's because I do not have the ability to respond but for 7 days I was just looking out at Alaska from this cruise ship I said to anyone who has trouble shutting down this was the best because there's really no way to connect and to your point exactly I needed that time for my mind to rest and I didn't know that I needed it until I took those seven days it's really hard to carve out time for yourself I started thinking about the things I invest my time and money in and I started doubling down this year on the things that bring me the most joy and that's time and nature and often doing something completely different that's out of our normal day really shifts our

Speaker 1: mindset what was your favorite thing about writing your book and the writing and the publishing process and was there anything that you learned that you'd

Speaker 2: want to share I think the biggest thing I learned is I worked as a newspaper journalist and then a magazine journalist and even a web journalist and then a podcaster the turnaround time for a podcast a newspaper article even a magazine article it's pretty fast books are slow and that was really hard for me there's no way around it unless you self-publish a book and you can do that really fast but if you go the traditional publishing route I sold my book to Simon and Schuster that publishing process is really slow I think my most favorite part about the book is g to come and that's going to be connecting with people in real life who've read the book so far right now my favorite part is like connecting with people like you who has an early copy of the book and have gotten a chance to read at least the galley copy not even

Speaker 1: the final copy it's just fun seeing what they thought and hearing how it affected them but probably my favorite part is I ended up getting this artist and Residency program and for those who are writers or artists listening to this podcast I didn't even know these things existed but there's a lot of them and there's a lot of places around the world that will house you for free free or at a discount feed you while you work on your project and I got one of these Artisan residencies in my favorite town in Costa Rica in the jungle in a town called nosara where I've spent a lot of time where a lot of this book actually takes place and I went back there during the rainy season to write this book and one of the chapters I was writing about was when everything goes haywire and if you know anything about Adventure something will probably go wrong and that's part of what an adventure is something will go wrong and that's what makes it so great but while I was in Costa Rica it rained and it rained and it was so beautiful it was so enjoyable to listen to the sound of the rain while I wrote and had this space for myself but one day I got totally stuck in a flood and I literally couldn't get 400 yards from the place I was working to my hotel it was flooding it was lightning it was thundering couldn't walk outside I had a dry bag but it was like also lightning it was lightning and thundering so close together that I was afraid I was going to get hit so I just had to wait until the rain passed it was wild roads flooded Bridges flooded and it was fun and eventually the rain went away it's so fun that you got to actually live the writing of your book I got to absolutely live it there was a monkey overhead that woke me up every morning at 5:00 a.m. so I had no choice but to get up and write my book and then of course the waves were magical and the water was warm so that was really fun I really enjoyed that part and then the other thing I've really enjoyed is I enjoy public speaking and I did a talk about wild ideas in this Jungle Town And if you're in Costa Rica you're already living out your wild idea so it was really fun to talk to a lot of people who deeply related to the topic I was talking about and in the book I have a really wide range of Adventures I have a woman who was relearning to surf at age 885 another woman who had a full career as a physical therapist as a mom lived in Suburbia and at age 55 she's I want to become an ice climbing guide and she did it and she said she's in the best shape of her life and that she keeps getting stronger every year after age 55 which is really cool and I didn't think that as a woman you could get stronger after age 55 but she's proof that you can I interviewed the world's first outdoor drag queen a plus-size body positive Runner a group of grandmas who started a boogie boarding Club in my hometown so there's just so many fun different people who have used adventure and it's a big part of their life and it's made them happier healthier more connected and brought them joy and a lot of people have used nature and Adventure

Speaker 2: as a way to heal and I'm all for that

Speaker 1: you are the host of the podcast wild ideas worth living and you sold the podcast to REI what did you learn as a podcast host and did you start out thinking about wanting to sell your podcast how did that happen for you yeah

Speaker 2: I got really lucky but also when I started the podcast I started it as a business with the idea to maybe even sell it at the end I'd always wanted to start a podcast but I was scared I just didn't know how to use the equipment I was afraid I was afraid of a lot of things I was not super early but I started it had the idea for it around 2015 2016 and I was surfing of course when a friend I was telling a friend about this idea to start my own podcast the truth is I loved Tim Ferris is show thought he was such a great host I love the topics he covered but I wished he'd always interviewed more women and more people who adventured tech people are fine but my love language is Adventure and I just wanted to hear stories especially about female adventurers and someone was like you should just start your own so Johnny my partner really encouraged me to start this podcast and when I was surfing one day a friend was like Shelby there's an entrepreneur accelerator program down the street the woman who teaches it ran the entrepreneurship program at UCSD she's great you should take this class as soon as I got out of the water I called this woman and class was starting that day she let me in I showed up with soaking wet hair she gifted me her lunch I didn't even have lunch on me and I basically just stopped taking any more PR clients any more writing assignments and I dove in and on the very first day of class we had to write our business plan and we had to have an exit strategy and I was like okay I'll just sell my podcast so I started the podcast from day one as a business and that was really helpful prior to that I'd been a business journalist but I was a business journalist in the outdoor and action sports industry so I mostly interviewed Brands like Quicksilver Patagonia and I didn't want to start another t-shirt company or outdoor clothing gear company or shoe company the only thing I really knew was media and I knew it really well I figured my podcast could be my business and maybe I could sell that and everyone was like you should definitely pitch REI they have this new campaign it's called force of nature they're marketing to women and I was like oh yeah that's so easy I'm a woman I've been covering women in the outdoors since I was age 19 of course they'll pick me and subsidize my podcast and fund it so I pitched REI as soon as I had my business plan ready I'd recorded a couple of shows found the right person to pick they're really kind and they were like Shelby that's great we think your idea is fantastic we are not in the podcast business best of luck and I stayed in touch and I got other brands to sponsor it I produced the best show I could I was a journalist I'd interviewed so many amazing people who had such incredible

Speaker 1: stories so I got other brands to sponsor it long story short six months later went back to Ari and they're like actually Shelby we're getting back in the podcast game funny you should call let's talk so they licensed the show for a couple of years and then in 2020 they offered to acquire the podcast and it was on my original business plan to sell

Speaker 2: it to them so it worked out that is such a great story because from day one you set that in motion and I love that you

Speaker 1: didn't give up on REI I didn't give up yeah it's been great someone told me a long time ago that you shouldn't care how your idea gets into the world you should only care that your idea gets into the world and so there was actually a period where I wasn't sure wanted to sell it this was my baby it was really hard to let go but there's really no better Catalyst and brand to partner with to get the idea of going outside using nature as a catalyst to change your own life than REI am I happy that I sold it to them yeah they've been a great partner and as part of that deal I told them I was probably going to be writing my own book that I would publish on my own and they were totally cool with it so they've been really supportive of will to Wild it'll be at all REI stores or we going to try a couple of events with REI stores starting in La this June where it's like a hike and book signing yeah so it

Speaker 2: should be a grand Adventure so I'm ready for it to come out into the World Magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy we've talked a lot about Joy today how do you make sure to find and

Speaker 1: live your joy each day I have to get outside whether I'm surfing running hiking or just making a commitment to watch the sunset I have a broken toe right now and it's brutal it's so lame just a broken toe but the universe was telling me to slow down I was running out the door and I didn't do it doing anything cool it wasn't skateboarding it wasn't jumping out of a plane it wasn't surfing it was literally just like running out the door too fast to much on my to-do list it's been a good reminder that a little Adventure nature can go a long way so just watching the sunset makes me happy and gives me joy and I think the other part about writing a book that was hard is it's a pretty solo activity you can have a writing group you can have writing Partners I went and hired an outside editor just because I felt so lonely and she was amazing she's from outside magazine her name is Elizabeth hi Tower Allen highly recommend anybody writing a book about Adventure anything else to contact her she was a book therapist an editor a structural editor a copy editor there's some people in this world that you'll learn when writing a book that only do a structure edit only do a different kind of edit it's crazy but I wanted someone who could do it all and she was great so community that also brings me joy being with other people writing was too lonely for me I'm an extroverted person and I just like people some people like dogs I love dogs but like I love people if I

Speaker 2: could have a pet person I that person I love that when growing up my mom would talk to everybody she would talk to the guys at the grocery store who bagged our groceries and invited them to my birthday party so the guys at Vons were literally at all my six and seveny birthday parties and I'm the same way I just love people and I think everybody has a really cool story to tell so connecting with people that brings me

Speaker 1: joy everyone should read your book wil to Wild can you share with us how and where we can find you and your book you

Speaker 2: can find me on Instagram at Shelby Stanger or Shelby ster.com you can find the book all over my website and

Speaker 1: Instagram but you're so inspiring with all the Adventure this book really is you and you live it every day so someone that wants to gain more Adventure in their life this is the book or who just wants a hall pass that it's okay to go Adventure take some time for yourself so

Speaker 2: the book and I've started reading a lot more lately because by the end of the

Speaker 1: day I am tired of looking at a screen good for you that's good to hear I don't

Speaker 2: know if a lot of people read books now I know and I have a Kindle in the whole thing but it's like I don't want to look at a screen anymore because I look at it

Speaker 1: all day long I need that break I do too

Speaker 2: I like books and it's been cool connecting with other authors they all have really different Journeys I think most people want to write a book in their life so it's a big bucket list to have checked off feels really good that I'm done with that I somehow booked a tedex talk the same week that my book comes out into the universe so it feels like there's a lot on my plate right now but the topic is Will to Wild so it's the same topic I just want everybody to go outside into nature and have a relationship with nature whatever that looks like for them it can look like a lot of things but everyone I've met who's developed a relationship with nature has said it's changed their life for the

Speaker 1: better thank you for joining us today I'd love to hear from you reach out to me at hello Sheil it.com on our Sheil it website or at she built it on social thank you to my editor Rich draino who always makes us sound good until next time let nothing stop you from experiencing the life and business that you crave