Why Midlife Demands a Renegotiation: Executive Coach Bryn Pane'e Burkhart

Bryn Panee Burkhart (0:00)

There's a lot of lives that are looking really good, and this is why we kind of have this mental health crisis with kids right now, is they're looking online, and everybody's posting the happy, happy, happy, joy, joy. And really, there are women that are struggling.

Hailey (0:15)

Hi, everyone, my name is Hailey.

Laura (0:17)

And this is Laura.

Hailey (0:18)

And welcome to The Body Pod. Anything juicy?

Not like there's going to be these ultra juicy. Maybe, maybe they're coming.

Bryn Panee Burkhart (0:31)

Who knows?

Laura (0:32)

I never know.

Hailey (0:33)

But yeah, so let's just get started, and let's just see where, I mean, I'm like so excited for this conversation. So Bryn, Bryn, welcome to The Body Pod.

Bryn Panee Burkhart (0:47)

Thank you. I am so looking forward to this conversation.

Hailey (0:51)

Can you give a little, like, I want it, I want everyone listening to hear it from you of kind of how we met.

Bryn Panee Burkhart (0:59)

Okay.

Hailey (0:59)

And the start of your story, I guess, with Hailey Happens Fitness, and then how, you know, how we've morphed into bringing you on the podcast.

Bryn Panee Burkhart (1:10)

Strength journey. I will say, I do want to preface that I lived in Boston for 20 years before we moved. And when I turned 45, I gained 12 pounds in a year with doing nothing different. And I've been active my whole life. So for some context, I was raised, I danced, I was trained dancer from three until college. I was in a company, have always been active. Movement is medicine for me. Exercise has always been a very integral part of my life. It's never been hard. You know, that's the great thing. And so I was active, but when I was 45, my kids were like 10 and seven.

We were doing all the things, living the hamster wheel life on the East Coast with work, kids, sports, blah, blah, blah. And I gained this 12 pounds doing nothing different. Now it was perimenopause. I didn't know it back then.

That, you know, the depletion of estrogen leads to more visceral fat, and you can just gain more weight because your body can't fight it off. And so I found a straight, I got into straight training. I hired a trainer. He was awesome. For the first time in my life, because, you know, I was raised Gen X, we're like cardio bunnies, right? We've been like step class and Taebo and all the things.

He introduced me to straight training. It was awesome because I was like, oh, I don't have to smash myself in a 60 minute cardio. I can like do a set of heavy weights and take a rest. Like it was like revelatory. I was like, I love this. And I lost all the weight within nine months. And I learned really good foundational principles and movement principles, which was easy for me because I was already kind of in my body as a dancer. And so I think that gave me a nice foundation for six years later. Fast forward, we're living in Hawaii. It was a dream to move to Hawaii. You know, I'm a trained coach. I help people figure out, where do you want to go in your life? What do you want it to look like? What's possible? And so the pandemic afforded my husband and me the opportunity to really think about what we wanted our family to look like. And I'm from Hawaii. My parents were born and raised here. And we visited every year for three weeks every summer. It was a dream come true. We were always like, when can we move to Hawaii? While the pandemic made it possible because of remote work.

Hailey (3:29)

Everyone is jealous of you because we all want to just uproot and move to Hawaii for sure. Yeah.

Bryn Panee Burkhart (3:38)

Well, I mean, it was a bold move. I mean, we had a great life in the East Coast.

We loved our jobs, we had a great house, we had a wonderful community, our kids were thriving. But I just felt this little pull like, could we leave a really great life and have a fabulous life? I would get to most importantly, I wanted my kids to understand that they were Native Hawaiian, and I wanted them to learn how to hula, I wanted them to surf, I wanted them to live this life only to know their family. So anyway, we brought my dad back with us. He moved back with us to Hawaii after 50 years off-island, so that was big, but now he's living with us. And what happened is we moved, okay, so now here's where my story starts, that was a lot of context. We moved and I quickly became the lead parent. So when we were living back in Boston, we lived in a town where my kids could bike to school and I just never had to worry, like they were walkable or bikeable.