Lifestyle Design: Vanessa Pan

Mar 1

I was introduced to Vanessa by her brother, who I met on a trip to Taiwan last year, and am continuously inspired by her fearless approach to life, her awareness of her self within the world around her, and her independence from the many systems that surround us. She shared with me some of the aspects of how she has designed her life to be in alignment with her values. -Alyssa Jasmine Chiang

The number one resource we need is to filter the noise and be with ourselves a bit more and create that sense of belonging and how we want to exist in the world. There is a guiding principle I have, which is to contextualize everything. There are voices that form our belief systems: your voice, your parents’ voice, society’s voice, etc. Just because it exists in our head doesn’t mean that it’s important or not important. I think the thing for us is to ask, “How important?” Let’s take something like social status. When you do something, it’s okay that social status goes with it. But is it the lead driver or just a side factor? We need to take and contextualize it and even say, here’s the space for the unknown - now, how do you want to navigate?

Meta Sessions

Meta Sessions is a coaching and consulting company that really focuses on meeting clients where they’re at and something that I really wanted to see exist in the world. I feel like I’ve co-created my life with whatever’s given to me, and I really want to help enable my clients to feel that empowerment as well. When I was younger, I had a good amount of - let’s just say: family drama - so I experienced a lot of therapy, which I really enjoyed. At 23, I met a life coach and after he gave me a free session, I found that it had everything I loved about therapy. It was a safe and secure space to process things, but I loved how it was more present-future oriented and less present-past oriented. From then on, I was hooked into coaching but there’s certain things I wanted to see in the industry that I hadn’t seen or experienced:

A visual keepsake at the end of processing everything that includes what you learned, action items, how you are feeling, etc.
A non-super-capitalistic coaching organization that meets clients where they’re at
A coaching-consulting model that leads with coaching and helping clients figure out their truth and what they want, and sharing and providing different methodologies if they ever do feel stuck.

Because Meta Sessions is my own organization, my plan is to do it until I die or until I’m tired. The purpose was to create something that I felt needed to be created and it’s great that there’s revenue associated with it. For now, it’s something I really enjoy that’s organically growing.

Consulting

Historically, I’ve just done business development for different companies. My most recent one prior to my current offering, I was the Director of Business Development for a small startup, and anyone who’s grown a small startup tell you that you actually wear tons of hats, and what your job is is to basically build a job, develop a job, and then give that job away to someone else to run with. And I’m happy to say, I’ve gone from consulting to now being onboarded as the Vice President of Business Development for a tech company called Cloudi-fi. It’s an international company that has a really wonderful team, and simply put, it does Wi-Fi security. I would say it’s the leveling up of a lot of things that I’ve done before.

Passion Projects

YouTube
Out of all the technological pieces ever, YouTube is the one that I just adore, because it helps me out my emotional funks, it educates me in so many ways…When you go to the Internet, you’re peering into this God-like consciousness of the world, and I just love YouTube because the parameters are amazing. I’m just doing one video a week for a whole year, and the sole purpose is to just be open, curious, and diligent about it. It’s very much an activity-based goal–there’s no need to monetize it or get a certain number of likes or subscribers. It’s just the act of doing it. I decided to do it outdoors, because I love being outside. I think it's beautiful. So if I’m filming it outside, I’m going to be a little bit happier and more grounded and anyone watching it is going to be a little happier and more grounded.

Podcast: Deep Shit
I see the podcast to be more time-committal. I see Youtube as “breadth” while podcasts are a little deeper, so my max for Youtube becomes my min for podcasts. My friend said he always wanted to do a podcast so he looked at me and said, “You should be my co-host!” I responded, “Okay, let’s do it!” It’s going to be called Deep Shit. Once a month, we’re going to meet up and give ourselves 20min to an hour on each topic and then have two posts later on that month. I absorb so much content that it is kind of nice to feel like I’m in more of a closed loop system by contributing to the greater consciousness of the orb of what is the Internet. I actually consume much more than I produce. But I think that’s the way it should be, right?

Eco-Village
I discovered co-housing when I was 19. In my early 20s, I went to 3 different co-housing units. I loved how it was a group of random people that would have shared meals every now and again and have their own private space and shared spaces. I did more research - why couldn’t we live that way? What I would love to create in the world is a nice little place - 5-20 acres of land where people can live, share space together, have their own private space, and every once in a while get together but still have independent lives. Now that’s the dream. I’m looking to build it in Mexico. It’s really wonderful just talking to people about it and realizing that even though for me right now it’s a dream, there is a very small percentage of the population where that’s just their day-to-day reality. I’m just making one other eco-village reality. Just like I have found with Meta Sessions, there’s tons of eco-villages and the reason I want to create mine is I have some ideas of what I would love to see exist that I haven’t seen exist in other eco-villages.

Approach to Life

I think the big thing I really focus on is that it’s really important to know why you’re doing something and how you want to do it and how you want it to feel, because the what will evolve. So as long as you’re pretty steady on your why, your how, and your core values, the what can change. We always want to be taking note of what actually is serving us and how we live in alignment. It might not be what we originally thought we wanted. I think at the end of the day we will care more about living in alignment than actually achieving the things that we think we want.

Resilience in tough times

A lot of the most beautiful and meaningful character building that has happened to us is through hardship so I think it's good to not underplay those days of sadness, or those days of lack of motivation, because there's normally a lot of gems in that. There’s so many ways in which we can contextualize our experience. Even with any kind of intellectual problem, the part that hurts isn’t the intellectual part. It's the emotional pain from what it means to us. Give space for what’s coming up for you, whose voice it is, what it’s saying, how it endangers you. You acknowledge it and then it’s really about contextualizing it so you can create this kind of intellectual understanding. Try to connect it to a lot of different things. What really helps is to connect it to other people and other areas in your life and use it as an opportunity to really understand how you are.