Ep#5 - Donna Berry - Interplay

Episode Summary

On this episode of The Australian Business Show, Donna Berry joins Nick Stehr to talk about the birth of Interplay International, the impact of unmet needs, how Interplay is helping change people’s thinking, the missing unconditional love, and the future of Interplay International.

Donna Berry is an award-winning entrepreneur, creator, author, and healer. She has empowered more than 1 million people across the globe through her workshops, programs, events, and live seminars. For more than three decades, thousands of people have enjoyed the warmth, love, and transformational power of healing. Recently, Donna’s business growth was acknowledged at the David Goggins event, showing the explosion of Interplay International across the globe.

Timestamp Segments

·       [01:22] Donna’s turning point.

·       [02:08] Interplay in the making.

·       [03:59] Where Interplay started.

·       [08:55] What creates pain?

·       [11:16] Changing people’s mindsets.

·       [18:51] Why some people still excel in life.

·       [20:48] Evidence-based care.

·       [22:21] Unconditional love.

·       [26:19] What’s next?

·       [28:19] Creating a village.

·       [29:17] Donna’s upcoming books.

Notable Quotes

·       “Nothing’s ever created from your comfort zone.”

·       “It’s easier to do nothing or to go with the status quo.”

·       “If you’ve not been loved, you can’t love.”

·       “Don’t try to change people’s behaviour. Meet their unmet need.”

Relevant Links

www.donnaberry.com.au

www.interplayinternational.com

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Transcript

[00:01] Nick Stehr: One thing I've learned about business and life is that relationships are everything. Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll have heard the saying, “your network is your net worth,” and whilst I believe that to be true, so often, we think of our network as a contact list, but your network is also your family, loved ones, and those closest to you. What if there was a reason you have the number or level of relationships you know you need or want, and there was a reason for that. Our next guest is an award-winning entrepreneur, creator, author, and healer. Donna Berry empowered more than a million people across the globe through her workshops, programs, events, and live seminars. Her business, Interplay, was recently acknowledged at David Goggins’ event showing the explosion of Interplay International across the globe.

[00:45] Welcome to the Australian Business Show. In today's swiftly evolving commercial landscape, opportunity and challenge abound. It's imperative to stay on the cutting edge, emulating the strategies of the most influential business leaders and entrepreneurs. Join our exclusive network as we unite with the world's elite. Together, we'll uncover their success stories, gain fresh perspectives on market trends, and learn the innovative tactics they employ to propel their companies to the forefront of success. Now, here's your host, Nick Stehr.

[01:18] Nick: Donna Berry, welcome to the show.

[01:20] Donna Berry: Thank you for having me.

[01:21] Nick: We met for the first time at the AusMumpreneur Awards, I think, didn't we?

[01:25] Donna: We did. Forever ago, hey. Not even a year ago.

[01:30] Nick: No, it's not a year. So, I know, obviously, Melissa was there at the same one and got some awards there, as well, but boy, you were cleaning up. Every other award was Donna Berry.

[01:42] Donna: I was shocked. Oh, my god. That was a turning point, though, Nick, I think, for me, was working out, in that moment, that all of that hard work, and all of the dedication, and everything that I had put into creating Interplay, and obviously, we'll talk more about what that is, but creating Interplay, launching Interplay, making sure that families had access to services, it was a turning point for me to realize that we had achieved it. I didn't expect it.

[02:08] Nick: This was 20-plus years in the making.

[02:10] Donna: Absolutely, and it's taken courage and strength, and it's taken bravery to create it. It's funny because I was just having a conversation before yours with somebody else about this. Nothing's ever created from your comfort zone. It took me to lose people in my life, to step outside of my comfort zone, to go against the grain, to go against things that have been identified as traditional models of therapy, and so it took that to get to that awards night, and “thank God, I did it” is all I keep reminding myself. It would have been way easier for me, in life, Nick, to fit in with what already was.

[02:48] Nick: That's the point, isn't it? I think, for those of us that want to do something more, it's actually the hard road. It's easier to do nothing or to go with the status quo. 

[02:58] Donna: Yeah, it's way easier to fit in. Standing out brings a lot of pressure with it, and I think for me, it brought a lot of haters with it, and I know that we speak about this in business events and business circles, but I mean, you don't expect to lose people in my life who once believed in what I did, to then be like, “I think you're doing it wrong,” and then to stay strong in that, because there's so many friggin’ hurdles, or so many moments that I could have stopped, to keep jumping, and to realize that the gap gets even shorter. So, I was like, “these hurdles are getting closer. They're not getting further apart,” which is what I probably had hoped for. I hoped I wasn't going to have to be convincing people. That was the word that I used to use, to try to really convince people that what I had was worth listening to, and it took hitting brick walls and changing direction, and pivoting, and all of the things that comes with challenge, to get to where we are now, but thank bloody God, I did it.

[03:57] Nick: You did it. So, let's go back a step and talk about that journey, I guess, and where it all started. So, 20-odd years, 25-odd years in the making now, I think, Interplay International, and then you seem to have a lot of, I don't know if spin-offs, but you've got a horizontal integration there with a number of others there as well. Interplay Nest, Interplay Circle, Tiny Town, Toy Store, Inside Stories. So, you've taken this journey, both from, I think, clearly, from an obligation point of view, but then you've also taken your entrepreneurial drive, and you've been able to meld those two things together, and as they say, do what you love to do, and you'll never work another day in your life. Well, I don't know if it's 100% true, but because it’s still tough. There's obviously a passion that's driven you from the beginning. So, can you talk, in the very beginning, about where did this start for you? When you and I spoke, when we first met that evening, I know we spoke about what is this thing, and I kept remembering it as intergenerational and multi-generational trauma, one of the things that stuck with me, and to be fair, I probably thought, well, what is this?

[05:08] Donna: We live in a world that doesn't want to hear about it, to be truly fair. Not only are we ignorant to it, which is actually probably quite nice on some level, but we also don't realize that we've lost the core foundation of being a human being, to be fair. So, I think, you're not the only one to say that. Some people are just like, “so what do you do?” And I'm like, “relationship,” and they're just like, “Yeah, but what else?” Do you know how friggin’ hard that is? To be truly fair, it's the hardest job in the bloody world. That's where it all began. It all began back when I was really small. So, there's a really big story to it, but I'll move you forward as quick as I can to give you what you need. I was lucky enough, born into a world where I had parents who were able to connect, to created safety, fantastic parents, but they also had an obligation, and what they decided to do was, they were fostering children, and through a fostering process of having children come and live with us, I was only small, what I realized was, not everybody is as fortunate, and I was really little at the time, Nick, and then mum and dad decided to adopt one of the children who were fostered.

So, then I had a sister. I already had sisters, and then she’s above me, and I've got another two older ones, and from that moment, what I realized was, and this is what struck me right from being tiny, I remember it, that she had the same mum and dad as I did. So, bearing in mind, this is through a child's eyes.

[06:37] Nick: How old were you at this stage, roughly?

[06:39] Donna: I reckon, I was probably about three and a half, four, and I used to think to myself, “she has the same Mum and Dad. She lives in the same family, with the same experiences as me, and what's her issue?” I was only small, but she used to have major meltdowns, major tantrums, always wanting the extra cuddle of mum and dad, pushing us off mum’s knee, all of the things that, as a child, there was probably a part of me that was like, “can we just give her back?” I was like, “Do I share you forever?” and then I think, as I got older, I was aware that her trajectory of life and my trajectory of life were just on absolute opposites, and I was super curious about what that was about, and I remember moments where she'd be having contact with her birth family, and we're traveling there, and I'd be in the back of the car with her, and all I'd feel is this intense pain. I remember it so clearly. I'd always take two dolls with me, one for me and one for her, because I knew she needed something, and my whole childhood, I was always curious, watching her, looking at her, feeling her, being with her, and as we got older, it became really clear that it doesn't matter whether you had the same mom and dad as me growing up or not. You had a life worth of intergenerational experiences that no one had considered.

She came from a family who had tremendous pain, who had had lots of generations worth of tremendous pain, and she was the only child out of, I think it was, I would need to double check, but about seven kids that were given up. As I got older, I was like, “hold on a minute. There's something in this.” The world’s not talking about it. Fostering services doesn't mention it. Adoption services don't mention it. My mum and dad didn't mention it. She doesn't understand it. So, if anyone's going to understand it, then maybe my mission in life, because I've been faced with it, is to make sense of it, and that's where then I got really curious, and I thought “you know what? There's something that's not said here. There's something unspoken in all of this that I'm experiencing,” and then I kept seeing it come up in my life, how things come up for you, kept seeing it, kept feeling it, and then I got curious enough that I was like, “I'm going to study child development, because this is about kids.”

Then I worked out, it wasn't, and then I was like, “what's it about? Then I'm going to study human behavior,” and did some psychology, and then I was like, “that's not what it is either.” Then I did social work and thought I’m to change the friggin’ world. Realized that quite quickly into that, that wasn't the case, but all of those experiences led me to realize that we’re disconnected, and the disconnection is what was creating the pain, no matter who was involved, ongoingly, through her life. The most crucial period, which is pregnancy, through to the first 1000 days or three years of life, that shapes and forms who we become, and for her, that wasn't with my mum and dad. That was another story in her experience.

[09:22] Nick: How old was she when she came to your life?

[09:25] Donna: She was about 18 to 24 months, she came on. Before she came into our life, she had had a number of different foster placements. So, she had never had one person who unconditionally loved her, and the world wasn't talking about it, and I was like, “You know what? Maybe that's the bit that creates the pain. Maybe the experience, in utero, when our brain’s developing, there's something that happens there that shapes and forms who we become that then translates into other relationships, and that's why she's on a different trajectory of life than I am,” and it can't be undone just by somebody taking care of you, because that's what foster carers do and adoptive parents do. There was more that was needed for her to be able to live an optimal life, and that's where it all began, and then I was in social work, and I’d seen the most hideous stuff happen. Children being removed from parents, and parents not knowing how to parent, and one of the things that kept coming up for me was, if you've not been loved, you can't love.

It's damn hard to give someone something you haven't had, but the world assumes that parenting is natural. The world's like, “you just have a baby, and you just fall in love, and you become a really cool caregiver, you meet the baby's needs, and the baby grows up to be a really functioning adult.” That's not the friggin’ case. If you've not been loved, and your body and your brain are wired for survival, and you're not wired for connection, it doesn't stop you falling pregnant, but it stops you from being able to be the optimal caregiver.

[11:05] Nick: You don't have to get a license to have a child, and rightly or wrongly, there's people out there that, until they deal with some of their own issues, probably shouldn't be having a kid.

[11:15] Donna: And you know what people thought, though, and this is what I think Interplay has done, has changed people's thinking, and what the world thought was, then what we do is we tell them how we want them to be. This was the thought process. I'll give you an example. Child Protection goes into a family’s home and identifies a parent that are not able to care, and they’re not able to protect, and then they say to them, “you've got six months to change, and this is what I want you to do. You do these few courses.” They want them to learn. I'll come back to that. “We want you to learn to parent,” and these parents do these courses, and then they come back and say, “Hey, you clearly didn't listen, because it didn't work, and we're going to remove the kids anyway,” rather than realizing that these parents are parenting based upon how they were parented, and if we want someone to change, we give them what they haven't had. It's fucking simple. Sorry for swearing, but it’s simple. So simple. It's so simple that no one thought about it.

So, if we want someone to change, and a parent hasn't felt safe before, because they come from a family of domestic violence growing up, or they came from a family of alcoholism or disconnection, rather than trying to teach them something when the body feels unsafe, create safety for them in relationship, because that's what's going to help them to be able to go on to love and protect, but nobody offered that as a service, and then I got curious. I was like, “how am I seeing this and nobody else is seeing it?”

[12:34] Nick: Why? I mean, that's interesting.

[12:36] Donna: I don't know the answer to it, Nick. Still working out the answer. Fear is the biggest thing, on a few levels. Fear of making suggestions to a government organization, or to the world, that what they've done for many years is wrong. Fear of that, because what happens when you step out? You're going to have haters. You're going to have people who don't like what you're saying, and then are you strong enough and brave enough to step up? The next bit of that was, it's okay to identify, but do we even know how to be in relationship? We live in a disconnected world, disconnected from each other, heavily addicted to mobile phones and all sorts of crap, and then when we identify we need to do something, who's going to do the work? People say to me, “what do you do?” And I say “relationship.” They’re like, “I know, but the job? What else?” And I'm like, freaking hard.

[13:25] Nick: Well, there's a reason that divorce rates are as high as they are and are not getting smaller.

[13:32] Donna: It was easy for me to see, and it was easy for me to step up in it, because there was part of me that thought, “You know what? It wasn't congruent.” I was doing what other people were doing, and I got to the point, Nick, where my body was aching. I was in sessions with kids doing whatever someone told me to do, or my uni degree, “You do it like this,” and I was like, “Well, no. You might do it like that, but who is to say you are right?” because someone once created what I'm doing. Someone once created solution-focused therapy. Someone once created family systems work, and there was part of me that thought to myself, “I can either keep doing what everyone's doing, and I can keep fitting in with the models of care that are out there, or I can actually be brave enough to step up and try to create a change in it, and create my own model,” but the risk was in it, because it could have been that people were like, “Who do you think you are?” And “we don't agree with what you've got.”

Four years, it took, to work on myself enough that I was brave enough to be like, “I'm going to do this, whether you like it or not.” Four years’ worth of pretending I was doing other stuff. This is the world we live in. A world of non-acceptance, a world of judgment, a world of control, and I was like, “what happens if no one gets to tell me anymore?” I thought it was a race. Years ago, I had a really thriving business doing what somebody else told me to do. I was really good at it because I'm really good at following instructions. So damn good. It was a no-brainer that I just kept doing it because it was easy. I got paid for it, and one day, well, it was four years, really, but I got to a point where I was like, “I'm not going to do it anymore,” and I knew the world, as soon as I was going to say, the world was going to be like, “What are you doing? You fool.” I knew it, and then I thought to myself, “but that's professionals. What if the world who I'm really obligated to, which is children and families, and humans, what if they believe in what it is that I'm going to say? That's all I need,” and I launched it overnight.

Literally, I hadn't told anyone about it and launched it overnight, and I had to create my website, and said, “well, tomorrow, when they wake up, they're not going to see the old stuff. It's not going to be available anymore. They're going to see the new stuff,” and I did a really short launch, and overnight, my website crashed, and it wasn't professionals on my website. It was children and families going, “Holy shit. Why did no one tell us this till now? How have we been robbed of knowing this stuff? Because maybe I would still have my children. Maybe I'd still be married. Maybe before my mum and dad died, I would’ve repaired relationship,” and can you imagine our Aboriginal communities and our indigenous people who contacted me to say, “You don't know that this is music to our ears, that you've put words to something that people are terrified of.”

[16:15] Nick: How did that many people find it in that short of a time?

[16:19] Donna: I think that probably they knew that it was coming. I tried to hide it. People laugh at me when I say it took four years and it just like “we seen it, man. We used to call it The Gap. We used to call it all stuff. We knew something was there, that you were going to do something with, where there’s a gap. We know that needs to be filled,” and I think that they were ready for it. I launched at the right time. I launched it at a time where we stopped believing in Medicare. Our mental health care plans are like “let's do 10 sessions and you’re fixed.” People got to the point where they were like, “Let's really focus on the hard work. What is needed?” I used to say to people, “don't try and change someone's behavior. Meet their unmet needs.” I used to say it, ongoingly, Nick. So behavior focused, tell someone to change a thought pattern. If it's that friggin’ easy, then we wouldn't live in a world of addiction, but what happens if we just bypass behavior and realize that all behavior is communication of an unmet need? As simple as it is, we just meet the need, and there's no behavior. It's simple, but complex.

[17:19] Nick: Yeah, that's right. Easy to say, and I can imagine, when you start talking about multigenerational trauma, there's a lot of unpacking to do, and the older you are, probably, the more unpacking there is to do.

[17:32] Donna: Absolutely, and we don't talk about it, hey. We don't talk about attachment. We live in a world where we know, scientifically, that attachment relationship is the most important relationship in our life, and all future relationships depend on it. We don't even talk about it. This is as controversial as it gets, but look at our maternity leave system. Moms aren't even supported. Dads aren't supported to be at home with their baby, yet we know it's the most crucial time of life. So, it's not spoken about. I talk about trauma. I don't use the word trauma as much as I used to, but we talk about trauma, and people are like, “I'm not traumatized,” because there's this thought about what trauma is.

Trauma comes from feeling unsafe. It's not the big things. It's not the car accidents and someone’s parent dying at a young age. They’re traumatic, too, but there's so many things that can happen that lead us to feel unsafe, and when we feel unsafe, we often disconnect.

[18:29] Nick: Form of self-protection, isn't it?

[18:31] Donna: Thank God, we’re developed for it. Thank God, we're built for it, because imagine we weren't. Imagine what would be happening in the world now, and our brains get wired around the experiences we have. So, our brains are actually wired around our experience in relationships, but no one focuses on the experience in relationships.

[18:50] Nick: Why do some people seem to excel in life in spite of, and maybe this is a fairly simple answer, because everybody's different, and yeah, I get it, but this is just to play devil's advocate for a moment, if this is such a critical thing for us, as human beings, the attachment relationships, some people thrive in spite of, and other people are a mess.

[19:13] Donna: The level of resilience in it. So, it also comes from different factors. It comes from intergenerational factors, epigenetics, future relationships, as in someone in your life you can identify as being a really positive person who's created what you haven't had, getting their unmet need met, and working on sense of self. So, how we regulate. Often, they're part of meditation groups, yoga, all of the things that are more sensory. So, there's multiple ways we can reconnect to who we were born to be, but there's a lot of people in the world who will never ever have an opportunity, because they don't even know what was missing. Some people are on this earth to be like, “I'm going to excel from the experience I've had. I'm going to really learn about myself from it,” but there's so many people who have pain, who are disconnected, and they will find connection in addiction. It's why we live in a world full of addiction. So, it depends on your level of resilience, the level of relationships you've had, intergenerational trauma, epigenetics. There's multiple factors. Again, it's not spoken about.

I get so many referrals from adults who say to me, “Donna, I’m desperate.” 50-year-olds. Desperate. “I don't even know what it feels like to be loved. I don’t know what it feels like to be seen. I don't know what feels like to be heard,” and they're coming to me with addiction, and the referral might be for the addiction, to change the behavior, and I'm like, “if we're still stuck in the world today, thinking that we can change someone's addictive behavior without meeting the unmet need, we've got some serious friggin’ work to do, Nick.”

[20:48] Nick: I've always been a little bit on the fence when it comes to science and modern medicine, and I guess, what I mean by that, just to explain, is that what frustrates me about science is that it doesn't make allowance for what it doesn't know. People when they discovered something, they go, “well, that's it. That's now the answer,” until they figure out actually there's a little bit more to the equation, or there's a little bit more to the story like, “oh, no. It wasn't quite right. Now, it's this,” and I think science is great, and it's done amazing things. I just think, sometimes, they need to be a little bit slower to say that “this is the definitive answer,” and say, “this is what we know up to now.” You can't sell that, can you? That's not marketable.

[21:27] Donna: I actually think it is. I'm a big believer, like you are, where I think, if we start to call this as evidence-based, and this is scientific, and this is all that's out there, then we get really limited. We're never going to know everything that we need to know, and that's what people say to me. People say to me, “so where's the evidence behind the modality?” and I say to them, “look at the world.” If I was to be like, “This is the only way,” because I don't say that. What I say to people is, “every bit of research that's been done that's out there, I’ve brought into Interplay.” So, I look at attachment theory, interpersonal neurobiology, neuroscience, pre- and Perinatal psychology, systems theory, all of that is incorporated into what I created, because not one of it has all the answers. Not one bit can we look at and go, “that's what I'm going to create it from,” and the key is that we have some core fundamentals as being a human being, and you know what? I keep saying this, and I'm not talking about an evidence base here, but one of the things that I see all of the time, Nick, in every relationship I have, I work across the lifespan, so I work with pregnant mums and dads, all the way through to end-of-life care, I don't stop just because it's attachment work I do. Attachments are basically your whole life. So, I don't stop, and every person I see who's in pain, and I don't see people who aren't, because why would they come to me? They don’t need a relationship. Everyone I see is missing one thing, which is unconditional love. Every person I see that comes to see me, who's in pain, is missing one thing.

[22:52] Nick: Can that just be an individual in their life that gives them unconditional love?

[22:57] Donna: They’re just missing it.

[22:59] Nick: It just doesn’t exist in their life or has never existed?

[23:01] Donna: Probably a bit of both. I mean, sometimes we can have it and lost it, and that's where the pain is, and sometimes we've just never had it. We talk about two basic needs that we have, and one is for connection and attachment, and one is for authenticity and acceptance, and attachment and connection supersedes everything, because otherwise, when you're a tiny baby, you don't survive the world. If you're not connected and attached, screwed. So, we lose sight of who we were born to be, to fit in, which means that we can't be loved unconditionally, because “I'm going to alter who I am to be loved.” People live their whole life like that. “I'm going to love you when, I'm going to love you if.” All of that stuff, and addiction. How do we love through addiction? How to we love through behavior? It’s massive. I think the most important part of it is, we know that there was an unmet need. I put that into words, and that's what I launched with Interplay, and the world agrees with me. That's the key.

[23:57] Nick: Even so much as being recognized on stage with David Goggins.

[24:01] Donna: I know. Absolutely. So cool. You would have thought, and it's not easy. There's some days that I'm just like, “have I done my bit?” I do think that. Is my obligation fulfilled? and then I have a stark reminder, it's probably not.

[24:15] Nick: Because it is a hell of a lot of work to do. I mean, again, you hear through conversation, through media, through other channels, about the younger generation today is, we criticize them a lot, and it prompts me to think, I wonder how much of what you're talking about is a critical factor to what's going on in so many people's lives. Even families that might, on the outside, seem to have it all together, but if they don't have that initial attachment, mom and dad had to work their guts out just to survive. Look at affordability in real estate today. So, baby gets put into daycare from a very young age.

[24:54] Donna: It's all it takes. Everyone’s looking for the big thing that happened or the big event. It doesn't take that, and then we know that, unfortunately, they've got access to mobile phones, which disconnected, even further. Our brains weren’t created for it. We don't need to connect anymore. Our brains need right brain to right brain attunement, which you can only get in-person. What does it look like? That's what worries me is, if we don't start changing what we do, it's only ever going to get worse. It's not going to get better. Results out there, the statistics out there, aren't on decreasing. This is what I say, that we need more people to be doing Interplay, and I've just released my intellectual property license for that reason, because I don't have any more time to create more services so people can have access to them, but what I can do is, I can help people to create the service that I offer, so people can have access, and that's what I've done, and, up till now, we've got another 25 clinics opening worldwide, offering relationship. When people say to me, “it's bloody hard work,” and I'm like, “That’s why people don't want to do it. It's why we're just happy to do solution focused, saying to people, ‘change your mindset. Change your way of thinking.’”

[25:58] Nick: Yeah. Easy said. Bit harder to do.

[26:02] Donna: Look, there's very little change. If you've got something that's stored in your body from a trauma experience, changing your mindset is not going to heal it, and that's why we have people go all the way through to death with the same pain that they were born with.

[26:18] Nick: There's a massive job to be done, clearly, and you releasing the IP, as you've mentioned, and launching, globally, these offices, is a great start. So, what's next? If people want to find out more, get in touch, what do you recommend?

[26:33] Donna: This isn't about me training everyone up. I'm not bothered whether I train someone. I'm not bothered when someone launches the service. What I want to do is, really, for people to start questioning it, for people to start querying what we've always done, and why we have a greater level, now, with trauma in the world than we did. If it's working, we wouldn't have. It's not rocket science. For me, this is what I need. I need to do some really large-scale presentations, and planting the seed, and making people question the systems that are in place, because the only way we're going to have more systemic shift is that people start to realize that, don't take everything that people say, like our government, for one, and our healthcare services, and education. If we just keep accepting it, it'll never shift. If you just keep turning up and saying, “let's get a mental health care plan for 10 sessions, even though we'd know it's not going to be effective.”

Do you know how many professionals just say, “Yeah, because it's money?” What about if we say, “no.” What about just, actually, you know what? Ditch it, because it's crap. Total crap. Give us a service that's going to be effective. Don't build another frickin’ prison. Let’s stop people getting there. That's the mindset here, and I think that's what I've got to do, and it's the only way that I'm going to create the change that I need, but I've got to step up again, and there's sometimes that I want to be having a cocktail on a beach somewhere, Nick. You get me. I think the IP license is something that's going to keep growing. We need it worldwide, and it's funny, isn't it? Because when I say these are human needs, every country has the same issue. So, that's why we're global. It's not rocket science for that, either. It's not just because we live in Australia that we have challenges. Every single human has the same need. So, we can roll this out globally, because it doesn't shift and change.

[28:19] Nick: We're more disconnected now than we've ever been, aren’t we?

[28:22] Donna: We’ve got no village anymore. No village. That's why I created The Nest. Only thing I can do is create a village for someone and a soft place to land, then I've done my job.

[28:32] Nick: It's funny, you use the word village, because my eldest son and his wife moved to Queensland for a little while. They’re back in Melbourne now, because they said, “Yeah, we love the lifestyle up here, but we've got no village. We want to be around our family.” So, that's critical.

[28:46] Donna: Super, super critical. So, I think we've got a shitload of work to do, and I think it's going to be done. I think we're going to do it, and I think it takes more than me. This is way greater than I am, but I think if I can plant the seed, then people will question it, and there's going to be some loud people out there that are louder than I am, more able to create traction than I can. I'm not holding this, saying “this is mine.” I'm saying, “hey, take it wherever it needs to be, and let's change the world. Let's do what I set off to do, which was create change.”

[29:16] Nick: Yeah. So, they can find you, obviously, by searching Interplay, I'd imagine, or Donna Berry. Have you got a book? Are you working on a book, coming out at all? Are you working on that?

[29:25] Donna: I am, yeah. Interplay International is where they'd find me, but I've got two books. I'm not going to do it by half. I'm not going to just do one, but we've got part of an impact book, and that's a number of people in the world that are creating impact and change. That's due to be launched in September, and then I've got my own book that is really telling the story behind how I decided what Interplay was and how it was birthed, really, and all of the relationships in between that have been so impactful, that there's no way that it can be questioned, because for me, it was really important that people realize where this came from. It wasn't a decision overnight. It's been my whole life.

[30:01] Nick: Just keep stepping forward.

[30:02] Donna: Stepping out, being brave. It takes to be brave.

[30:05] Nick: Yeah, exactly. Listen, Donna, it’s been great to chat to you. I love what you’re doing. I think it’s critically important, and thank you for what you’re doing, and also, from myself personally, it gets me thinking about even my own life and my own relationships, and my own connections. So, I love that, and I really appreciate your time.

[30:24] Donna: Gorgeous. Thank you for having me.

[30:26] Nick: It’s been good.

[30:27] Donna: Absolutely.

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