Summary: “Whenever I start to feel sorry for myself or start to wonder why is this happening to me, I take a moment and a breather and I think, the universe is creating a space for me right now. What’s about to come in? And then I start to get really excited! The Bucket List Life Podcast #18 - Drive to Change Founder, Heather Falenski Life is full of amazing and tragic circumstance and the universe has it’s own way of guiding us through the path to realizing our own dreams. It’s when we struggle and resist that path, that we suffer the most. Today’s in studio guest has mastered the art of going with the flow of life and allowing change to guide her. On episode #18 of The Bucket List Life Podcast, Kenyon chats with his dear friend and climbing partner Heather Falenski. As an adventurous, world traveller, photographer, Founder of Drive to Change and CEO of One World Media, Heather is an eloquent communicator and effective storyteller. She has some incredible insight and advice to share about allowing life to change us and believing in the universal plan. Highlights of their podcast conversation: 3:00 Heather tells us about how her love and passion for photography developed at a very early age. Some of her favorite pictures are of facial expressions of the people she’s had a chance to really connect with in her travels around the world. 8:30 As a female pilot, Heather talks about how she became interested in aviation and her thrilling and powerful first ever flying lesson. Also, how this taught her a metaphor for life when she learned, “No matter how bad it gets, you are taking that plane and you are landing it!” 15:30 Heather talks about her curiosity of society and what inspired her to travel around the world, live in other countries, lose her own culture and take in all the different fascinating lifestyles. 20:00 Talking about all the different languages that Heather has known and learned, she tells us how she came to learn Swahili while working with United Students for Fair Trade in Kenya, Africa. 21:00 With a positive attitude and going with the flow of life, after a job fell through in Japan, Heather decided to go ahead with a trip to San Francisco, where she ended up accepting a dream job as a photographer in refugee camps in Zambia for 15 months. “Whenever I start to feel sorry for myself or start to wonder why is this happening to me, I take a moment and a breather and I think, the universe is creating a space for me right now. What’s about to come in. And then I start to get really excited!” “Anytime that something major has come crashing down in my life, something amazing has risen out of it.” 26:30 Heather tells us about her health struggles in the past year and how she has started to bear fruit from her experience in the past couple of months. “Sickness comes because your body is trying to signal that something needs to change…. Sometimes change is inevitable, we are all riding this wave together, no one is frozen in time and we are all forced to evolve.” 33:15 Heather explains why it was so hard for her to come back to America and assimilate back into the first world culture. With all of our technological advances what we lack most is a real sense of community, which breeds underlying disconnect and loneliness. “We are more connected, but less connected than ever.” 37:45 Heather talks about her film project, Drive to Change, (http://www.drive2change.com) and how it has come to fruition. She’s passionate about this movement and driven to change the way the media portrays female adventure sport athletes, both in the amount and type of coverage that they receive. 49:00 Heather describes the magic of a photographing and capturing a moment with one of her Drive for Change Athletes, Highliner - Sonya Iverson, while she sent a high line at sunset in the Moab Desert. 58:00 What is something on Heather’s Bucket List? It’s always been her dream to solo fly her paraglider across the desert for a week.
