Evoke Greatness Podcast
Do you have an insatiable hunger for growth and knowledge?
Are you interested in hearing the stories of how successful people have navigated their journey towards greatness…all while stumbling through valuable lessons along the way?
My name is Sonnie and I am the host of Evoke Greatness, the weekly podcast driven by my curious nature and fascination with the champion mindset. I am a HUGE book nerd and a wee bit of a "control enthusiast" with an obsession for motivational coffee cups.
On this podcast, we share the ups and the downs, the highs and lows and all the lessons learned in between. It's my most sincere hope you hear something in one or maybe many of these episodes that resonates with you and reminds you that you’re not in this alone.
I believe that a rising tide raises all ships and I invite you along in this journey to Evoke Greatness!
Evoke Greatness Podcast
Rewilding Your Life and Leadership with Aubrey Morgan Yee (Part 1)
🎧 Episode 181: Rewilding Your Life and Leadership with Aubrey Morgan Yee (Part 1)
In Part 1 of this conversation, futurist, systems thinker, and storyteller Aubrey Morgan Yee shares her journey from reluctant entrepreneur to rewilding advocate and narrative-shaping leader.
Aubrey opens up about the breakdowns that became breakthroughs, what she discovered when she stopped numbing, and how ancestral wisdom and rewilding practices can transform the way we live and lead. Her insights invite us to slow down, reconnect, and remember what we’ve forgotten in a world that desperately needs more grounded leadership.
We explore:
- The pivotal “gut punch” moment that shifted her path forever
- Why breakdowns often hold the seeds of our biggest breakthroughs
- How numbing keeps us from both deep pain and deep joy
- What rewilding looks like in nature, relationships, and leadership
- The Hawaiian wisdom of pono and aloha as frameworks for self-awareness and alignment
- The role of story and ritual in transforming culture and leadership
🔑 Key takeaways:
- You can’t feel the big joy without facing the hard emotions
- Leadership starts with recalibrating yourself before guiding others
- Story isn’t just entertainment—it’s the blueprint for culture and change
- The future of leadership is deeply human, grounded, and interconnected
đź’ˇ Quotes to remember:
“Breakdowns are often the birthplace of breakthroughs.”
“If you can’t feel the hard stuff, you also can’t feel the big joy.”
“Leadership is an inside job—alignment has to start within.”
“We are always storying the world into being.”
đź“š Resources mentioned:
✨ Learn more about Aubrey’s work:
www.ourbelovedfutures.com
📲 Connect with Aubrey:
LinkedIn – Aubrey Morgan Yee
Instagram – @aubrey.morgan.yee
Beloved Futures Podcast
A rising tide raises all ships, and I invite you along on this journey to Evoke Greatness!
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We're actually just humans trying to make it in this kind of weird world that we've created that has some incredibly beautiful parts and some really kind of messed up parts, and we're all, in our own way, experiencing joy and experiencing suffering, and just it allowed us to see ourselves in our wholeness and that kind of rewilding of us as humans, not just workers or professionals or leaders. It was like we're human beings trying to make a beautiful life for ourselves and the people we love.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Evoke Greatness, the podcast for bold leaders and big dreamers who refuse to settle. I'm your host, sunny. I started in scrubs over 20 years ago doing the gritty, unseen work and climbed my way to CEO. Every rung of that ladder taught me something worth passing on Lessons in leadership, resilience and what it really takes to rise. You'll hear raw conversations, unfiltered truths and the kind of wisdom that ignites something deeper in you your courage, your conviction, your calling. This show will help you think bigger, lead better and show up bolder in every part of your life. This is your place to grow. Let's rise together. In part one of our conversation, you're going to hear Aubrey's powerful journey of walking away from a successful business, discovering futures, work and embracing rewilding as a way of life and leadership. She shares the pivotal breakdown moments that became breakthroughs, how she stopped numbing and started feeling both the hard stuff and the big joy, and why ancestral wisdom and ritual hold keys to leading more authentically in today's world. Okay, let's hop into it. Welcome back to another episode of About Greatness.
Speaker 2:Every so often, you come across someone who doesn't just talk about the future. Rather, they invite you to reimagine it with them. Aubrey Morgan Yee is one of those rare voices. She's a futurist systems thinker and storyteller who helps leaders reconnect the wisdom of the earth and their ancestors to shape a world that feels more human, more grounded and more alive. Her work through Beloved Futures weaves together, rewilding indigenous knowledge, story and ritual, not as relics of the past but as living, breathing practices that can transform how we lead, how we connect and how we create. In this conversation, we're going to trace the journey that led Aubrey to her unique calling, explore how leaders can slow down to hear the wisdom available to them and discover why the future we most want to build might actually begin by remembering what we've forgotten. And yes, we'll also get a sneak peek into her upcoming book, which promises to be a field guide for transformation at both the personal and cultural level. So let's dive on in, aubrey welcome.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, sunny, thank you. It's such a gift to hear yourself introduced, myself introduced, because I've struggled for a while now to kind of explain what I do, and what you just shared was so beautiful. I'm like, oh yeah, that's what I do. So thank you, that was really lovely. Yeah, I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:I love being able to put that into words to be able to have an introduction to someone. That's typically when people go. Oh, I want to hear more about that.
Speaker 1:Yes, totally. Thank you so much, it was really lovely.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Well, before we get into the work you do now, I always love to just kind of take people back a little bit. I'm curious about what experiences and moments of clarity, or even breakdowns sometimes it comes through a breakdown brought you to your current version of yourself the Aubrey who blends ancestral wisdom with visionary futures.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. Yeah, that's a really potent question. There's a couple of sort of, I guess, waypoints that I'll mention and a breakdown, so that's good. Yeah, you know, I started off as an entrepreneur, sort of like a reluctant entrepreneur. I think like my whole life I've been a lover of earth, like you know. Just I remember one of my first books, favorite books in like second grade, was 50 things you can do to save the earth in like the eighties, right. So always sort of had this eye towards like how can I make the earth better? I love the earth, I love nature, and then went on this kind of sidetrack into entrepreneurialism and, just because I love to travel, and started a business importing out of Indonesia and all this stuff. And looking back on it now I realized that that was an incredible lesson in understanding how capital works around the globe, like stuff like importing, exporting, you know, international trade, all this stuff from the inside out.
Speaker 1:But I was in that business for about 11 years and then I had this like really kind of like rough awakening moment in Indonesia we would always visit the factories that we were working with. I had read Paul Hawkins' book about how to grow a business because he, you know he's like came from that same perspective of loving the earth. And so I was like, okay, this is an entrepreneur I can align with. And so I tried to always approach from that perspective, like working with really good people and being, you know, having an eye towards being as like, environmentally conscious as possible. And I was in a factory one day and I saw this massive, beautiful tree on the chopping block and it was just like this gut punch and I was like, oh my God, like of course, that's what I'm doing, you know. And on some level I could justify like, oh, I'm bringing in antiques and I'm doing these other things. But there was like a consumption aspect to the work that I realized, wow, I'm participating in that. So it wasn't that exact moment that I shifted, but it started this like really deep seed within of sort of a mild discontent that I realized, okay, I'm learning from this experience. I learned so much about starting a business, about being an entrepreneur, about creativity, about, you know, having gumption, like trying stuff that was hard, taking risks, all the things learning from the ground up. I was an English major, like hadn't studied business, but that started me thinking like what is it I'm really here to do, what is I'm really here to share? And so I decided, if maybe it was about two years later, I had this like another moment. We had this big, beautiful showroom. We'd built this big business, all things. It was successful, it was working. And I just swiveled in my chair and I looked at my husband and I said we need to sell it all. And he's like what he's like, what he's like you're totally crazy, what are you talking about? I'm like I don't know, but something else is coming and I need to go back to school. And God bless him. He was like okay, I don't know what that means, but I'll support you. And so we kind of started the process, which took time, you know. We had partners, we had a showroom, we had a lease, we had all the like 3D world things that we had to untangle. But we did. We sold the business.
Speaker 1:I ended up getting pregnant with my first child and I went back to school and again, I didn't know exactly what I was going to study, but I knew that there was something that was calling me back to learning and to expanding my capacity to be of service to the world. So I just started taking classes and I was taking different classes that called to my sense of joy and excitement. And I found this class called Politics of the Future and I looked at the reading list and Paul Hawken was on there amongst a bunch of other authors that I loved and I wanted to read, and I was like, wow, this sounds really interesting. Like what is this thing, politics of the Future, that sounds so intriguing. So I went to join that class and even before the class started, I got this one pager from my mentor, who is this incredible futurist named Jim Dator.
Speaker 1:He's kind of like forefather of future studies. I was so lucky to study under him, so lucky he was in Hawaii, I mean, of all places where I grew up, didn't have to leave my home island and it was called To Be a Futurist. And it was just this very simple one pager that had like 20 lines of like the things it would take to be a good futurist. Things like being able to notice patterns, things like being, you know, really interested in lots of topics, not necessarily an expert in just one. Things like being creative and thinking out of the box. All these things about what it would take to be a good futurist, and it was like reading my like life purpose job description, so I thought okay here we are and I started down that pathway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, it was just like this full yes in my body. I remember exactly where I was on a train in Alaska reading this one pager. And I started down that pathway and I didn't think I'd go for a doctorate, I thought I'd just start taking classes and studying. But I fell so in love with the discipline and with the ability to take what I was learning in academia which can so many times be like an ivory tower but out into community. And so immediately with my mentor, jim, we were going into government offices, into communities, taking out futures work to the people and saying like okay, this is to empower you, to remember that you're a co-creator of the futures, that you don't just have to like, digest and take what's being fed to us, that we can actually remember that we co-create each day. You know that's like a very kind of spiritual perspective, but it's also really grounded in this academic research. So it just fit me really well and that kind of helped me to start on this pathway.
Speaker 1:And then I think, you know, the next kind of breakdown or breakthrough came during the pandemic, when I realized I wanted to, you know, quit my relationship with alcohol. So I became alcohol free and I just stopped numbing in general, like it was a sort of like sense of realizing that I had been numbing myself from the pain of the world because it was so overwhelming moment of that like global breakdown. I realized I can't be of service unless I'm fully grounded in my highest self and able to look at the pain and the suffering of the moment that we're in. So it was like the combination of that with this looking towards the futures, grounded in, you know, connections to indigenous ways of being and my love for earth that have led to this moment and everything that's happening now in this chapter. So there's lots in there, that's amazing.
Speaker 2:I'm curious off of your last comment around the like identification of numbing the pains of the world, because there are many and each person's is probably unique to their lens and their lived experience. What have been the biggest like takeaways for you or kind of aha moments since abstaining from alcohol that you, that you've kind of maybe leaned into some of those emotions?
Speaker 1:yeah, I think that's a really good question. You think about the parts of it because you know there's so many different ways that we numb. Yes, for me it was alcohol and social media, I think, were the two main ones. There's like food there's, you know, avoiding emotions. There's I. There's like food there's, you know, avoiding emotions. There's, I mean, there's exercise can be a numbing, you know anything, anything that we do to try to avoid the hard feelings, and I realized I hadn't really been raised in a family that knew how to face hard feelings and I think that's kind of a social, it's a common social issue in our culture and in Western culture that we kind of avoid you know the difficult emotions, and so what I've learned in facing them is that actually, once you get through those, it's like if you can't feel the really hard stuff, you also don't feel the really big joy, right Like it's like they go hand in hand, you know. So it's sort of you're living in this like kind of in-between zone where you're not really feeling either. But if you can feel the really hard stuff and let it just move through you rather than get stuck, that's where breathwork has actually been incredible for me.
Speaker 1:I found breathwork around that same time in 2020. And it was this profound technology where I remember my first breathwork class. We finished and I looked around and I was like we just breathed, right, we didn't do anything else, right, that's all we did was just breathe. It was holotropic breathing and it just like activated so much in my system and then, as I learned more about the science of it, I understood like, oh, all these old emotions we're storing in our bodies that actually are chemical reactions that get stored in our tissues are being released through the breathwork, and so it's become a huge healing modality for me. But, yeah, so I started to layer on those different practices that gave me the fortitude and the resilience to face the dolphins here on the North Shore.
Speaker 1:Just getting in the ocean, being in nature, you know, like feeling really just alive, like the level of life force that's able to course through my being is so much more enhanced by letting go of the numbing and facing. You know it's like it's just sort of like a facing truth. You know we can't really get to anywhere new until we face where we actually are. So that I mean, I think that's something I encourage all of us to start to look at, because we've reached a point where you know it's hard to look at what is happening in the world sometimes, but we have to acknowledge and face it with clear eyes. And that's really a lot of what my book is about is the courage together to grieve where we're at so that we can go to something else, to move through that to the next thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you talk about rewilding, and that's not just about nature, Although it makes sense when you live where you live. Right, you are so connected to nature. As you talk about swimming with dolphins, I mean, these are things that people like, wow, you could swim with dolphins. But you're clearly very connected and grounded by nature.
Speaker 2:It's not just about nature, right, it's also about people. How do you find rewilding in the context of leadership? Why do you feel like it's so necessary in today's like disconnected, hyper digital world? You talked about the couple of things that you used as numbing. Social media is such a big one. We're so hyper Totally. How do you feel like that actually weaves itself into leadership?
Speaker 1:The connection piece like how to reconnect and rewild. Yeah, I mean, I think rewilding is such a great metaphor because it can be you can think about it like from the physical level rewilding your gut, like making sure your microbiome is healthy and functioning, because that affects how you think. Rewilding in your relationships, I think, is really showing up authentically. The things I thought was like a really beautiful, unexpected sort of side effect of everyone suddenly being stuck in their homes and being on Zoom all the time was that I watched, you know, because I was still working in leadership at that time. So we were running all of our retreats and gatherings and all the things that we had planned for that year. We just moved them all to Zoom and I was seeing how people were showing up I mean sometimes literally from the inside of their closet, like in their closet, clothes around them, like cats walking across the keyboard, and it was like we got to see that we're all human, like. We're all human. We have kids. We didn't sleep well last night. We're feeling sad about something, our room is messy, like we didn't have to armor up, so typically, you know, we would get our clothes on for the day, put on our makeup, drive in our car to get to some building, to go up the elevator. The whole way along that we're armoring up, we're putting on our masks, we're shielding ourselves. So we were kind of just like ripped open raw. And it was only for a short time, because as soon as we started going back to the real world, the armor started coming back on.
Speaker 1:But people had experienced that and I think it changed a lot of us to see like we're actually just humans trying to make it. You know, in this kind of weird world that we've created that has some incredibly beautiful parts and some really kind of messed up parts and we're all you know, in our own way experiencing joy and experiencing suffering, and just. It allowed us to see ourselves in our wholeness and that kind of rewilding of us as humans, not just workers or professionals or leaders. It was like we're human beings trying to make a beautiful life for ourselves and the people we love, and so how do we see ourselves in that way and have that compassion and empathy and interconnectedness and I think, yeah. So that was one one thing that for me, was a positive of the pandemic I was like really grateful for yeah.
Speaker 2:It's funny how, you know, typically we've become such a virtual world afterwards. It kind of oh, and I think there's pros and cons to that right. I think there's something to being deeply and personally connected with someone you know in person. Yes, however, there was and you used the wording but it's like it humanized our interactions and allowed for when kids are running in the background and usually we're like, hmm, how do I, how do I cover all that? No, like exactly Guess what, like it's life human, like we're all living this experience together, and so I think there was like a sense of like grace that came with that. That was wholly heartening.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know, and systems change in leadership, which is, I think, the kind of leadership we really need right now. It's so important to be able to see the wholeness of us. You know that we have like multiple facets to our lives, that you know our work is just one facet of a whole human. So in terms of rewilding and leadership, it's helpful too, because we get to see like what is it, what is the world we're after, not just like the bottom line of this particular company or organization or nonprofit, but like what's the holistic picture that we're looking for in the world we're trying to create together?
Speaker 2:you know? Yeah, absolutely. You talk about the power of indigenous knowledge and shaping how we lead. What's one piece of ancestral wisdom that completely reframed your understanding of leadership?
Speaker 1:the you know reemergence of a lot of Native Hawaiian philosophy and leadership happening here since, you know, 1993 was kind of the 100th year of the overthrow and there's been just this like blossoming of incredible work happening. So I'll speak to aloha, because it's such a widely understood or widely known word that I think is very like little understood in its depth. So ha is basically the breath of life, so it's the way that Hawaiians would greet each other, was nose to nose, sharing ha and aloha. You know it's come to be this kind of like passing phrase that means everything, but it actually meant a state of being that you would show up in full alignment.
Speaker 1:There's another Hawaiian term called pono, and some people have heard of ho'oponopono as like a forgiveness, sort of reconciliation practice.
Speaker 1:That's also kind of misunderstood because it's about right alignment within.
Speaker 1:So it's this idea that you have three selves your higher self, your amakua, your sort of like center self, your uhane, and then your subconscious self, your unihipili, and those three selves need to be in right alignment with each other to be able to show up in pono in the right way. And you can only be in aloha, which is the state of being that you're always aiming for if you're in that right alignment so it's this idea that we're constantly recalibrating ourselves and sort of checking in like, am I in right alignment with those three parts of myself? Can I show up in this situation from that grounded place and can I share aloha? And if not, what do I need to do to right myself before I can come back and be in relationship with this other person? So you're not looking outside of yourself for somebody else to provide you stability, safety or you know the ability to lead. It's actually coming from within and it gives you like that calibration technology to think about how you can write yourself and show up in a more grounded place.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it makes me think of self-awareness, right, of how are we showing up Like? What is our way of being? Not just, yeah, showing up like exteriorly, but truly? How are we showing up, how is our presence showing up?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's self accountability, right. So it's it's not looking outside for either the blame or the cure. It's like no, it's all within me, it's an inside job. So I've got to work on myself and then I can show up. You know my one of my friends, chris Block, who's an amazing systems change thinker. He said you know, the quality of the intervention is directly related to the quality of the intervener. So it's you as the facilitator, as the coach, as the guide, as the teacher, you know, whatever it is the leader, how are you showing up will directly affect the quality of the intervention that you're trying to hold or launch or whatever it is, yeah, what a beautiful thing to share just in what you've gained out of it.
Speaker 2:But also, I think that brings awareness too, like that word is way deeper than we maybe passingly use it, that it serves as a hello or a goodbye when there's so much deeper meaning to it. I love that Describe story and ritual as some of the most powerful tools for transformation. Is there anything that stands out to you? The way using story allowed someone to shift, or even a whole community to shift how they saw themselves?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great question. I actually work right now in what we call narrative-led systems change. So it's almost like taking that idea of story as a powerful anchor of culture into systems change work and thinking about narrative. As you know again, story but also like the way that we create the world. So we create the world through story, we create the world through narratives, through the way we tell ourselves that. You know, for example, you have a bookshelf behind you. There's a narrative around books and learning and keeping books in your house and all these things that create a desire to have a bookshelf. You know, it's like it's a very deep sort of understanding that we're always storying the world into being. And then when we think about it in terms of systems change, so we work with we have a fellowship called the Rhizome and we work with mostly frontline social impact activists that are in, you know, social justice, climate action, environmental justice, economic reform type of thing, but on the front, sort of bleeding edges of those fields, to think about rewriting the stories that are holding the dominant culture in place. That's creating harm, right? So it's everything from like land back movement. So, for example, we worked with a bunch of land defenders and came to the new narrative was land back to right relations. So very simple, kind of catchy phrase, but tells a new story that it's not just about like land going back from peoples who have been erased or whose land has been taken, but that there has to be an aspect of right relation with the land that you know writes into that story that the land itself is animate and that we have a relationality with the land. And so that becomes the new story is what does it look like to build systems, politics, ways of being that take land back to right relations? So that's just one example, but there's lots of different ways to think about narrative and story and story as kind of cultural creation piece In the futures work I do.
Speaker 1:We do this exercise called the iceberg. We also do it in the narrative-led systems change. But it's helping you to go from what you see in the world like sort of the surface layer of things, diving deeper into the systems, the worldview, and then at the very bottom is always the myth and the metaphor. So it's like what is that deeply held myth about the world that tells us why we're seeing what we see in our daily experience and for me, like we're in this really incredible time, as systems kind of crumble or break down or don't work so well, we get to rewrite those myths. We get to think about okay, well, that myth worked for a time, it's not working anymore. What's the new myth, what's the new metaphor that we want to hold collectively that will bubble back up and create a whole new world and a way of being so. I think that's, you know. For me, that's really exciting about the moment of breakdown.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Okay. This is where we hit the pause button. Make sure to check back next week for part two, where Aubrey goes even deeper into the role of narrative-led systems, change how stories shape culture, policy and possibility. We talk about rewriting the myths that hold us back, the courage to grieve as a pathway to transformation, and why leaders must reclaim their humanity to create futures worth living in. If Part 1 cracked open your thinking, part 2 is going to challenge you to reimagine what's possible for yourself, your leadership and the world we're building together. If today's episode challenged you, moved you or lit a fire in your soul, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with somebody who's ready to rise. Could I ask you to take 30 seconds to leave a review? It's the best way to say thank you and help this show reach more bold leaders like you, because this isn't just a podcast, it's a movement. We're not here to play small, we're here to lead loud, one bold and unapologetic step at a time. Until next time, stay bold, stay grounded and make moves that make mediocre uncomfortable.
