Epic Entrepreneurs

Building A Human-Centered Framework For Well-Being with Rachel Buckley

• Bill Gilliland

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What if your grind isn’t a discipline problem but a design mismatch? We sit down with Rachel Buckley of the Wellbeing Project to rethink success from the inside out, trading vague self-care for a practical framework that meets both body and being. Rachel’s story moves from New York sales floors and network marketing calls to single parenting in Asheville and hard-won spiritual clarity. Along the way, she discovered something that changed everything: she’s a wisdom teacher, not a traditional founder. That shift reframed “lack of follow-through” as misalignment—and opened the door to work that fits.

We unpack the seven core concepts of her Wellbeing Project, built to be universal and accessible with free online courses and weekly conversations. Think structure like AA but content for everyone: clear, human-centered language, no jargon, and a focus on what all people need to thrive. Rachel shows how “tending” replaces performative self-care. Instead of optimization, you get rhythms: consistent sleep, real food, movement, and the inner nutrients of connection, inspiration, and knowledge. She shares simple rituals that make life feel livable now—like a weekly, agenda-free gathering that keeps community strong without the performative networking.

We also get into common entrepreneurial myths. Ownership isn’t automatic freedom; freedom comes from fit. Rachel explains why keeping her business small on purpose protected her values and season of life, and how partnering let her stay in her genius as a teacher. Then we explore the Being Blueprint, a living personal manual that uses AI to synthesize insights from multiple modalities into practical, everyday guidance. It’s not about labels—it’s about decisions you can trust.

If you’re craving a humane path to growth, this conversation offers tools and language you can use today. Listen, share with someone who’s running on fumes, and tell us what part you’ll tend first. Subscribe for more conversations that put human thriving at the center of work and life.

Thanks for Listening. You may contact me or our team at https://billgilliland.biz/

All the best!
Bill

Thanks for listening. Please hit the subscribe button, leave us a 5 star review, and share this podcast. You can reach me at williamgilliland@actioncoach.com or at https://billgilliland.biz/

All the best!

Bill

SPEAKER_00:

All right, well, welcome to this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs. I am Cliff McCray, filling in for Bill Gillilan with your local business training and coaching firm, Action Coach, Business Growth Partners. I'm excited to have Rachel Buckley with the Wellbeing Project as the focus for our Epic Entrepreneurs podcast episode today. So, Rachel, please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself and your company. What primary products or services did you offer the community?

SPEAKER_01:

Um, well, thanks for having me, Cliff. It's uh a pleasure to chat with you this afternoon. Um, so I am based here in Asheville, and uh the Wellbeing Project is a um practical approach to physical and psychological well-being. And it is launching in January. So it will be available then, and we can chat about a little bit more about what that is um and how uh people can get involved. But um yeah, uh what what it is is um a framework um that's not specific to any kind of um background or demographic. It's it's human-specific, um, teaching what humans need to thrive, um, and then giving just a really practical approach to that. And there's really just nothing out there like it. So I'm pretty excited to be kind of introducing it to the world soon.

SPEAKER_00:

All right. And like you said, it has no bearing on background or where you come from or anything like that, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Correct.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. Okay, perfect. Now, if you had to start your your business from square one, you know, what would you do differently? Or would you do anything different at all?

SPEAKER_01:

Um, you know, it's a really interesting question. I have been around entrepreneurs for the last 20 years. Um, it started in New York City. I was a sales rep uh for a Fortune 500 company, and I was very young and had a friend call me up and say, Hey, I got this skincare that's amazing, and you should talk to my upline. And I had no idea what network marketing was or anything, but I got on this three-way call with a network marketing um recruiter, essentially, and um, and she said to me, Well, you're really successful making all this money for this big company. Why not do that for yourself? And I thought, well, heck yeah. So having really no idea what network marketing was, I I dove in. And uh, of course, it was like a trial by fire um learning. But what it did is it really introduced me into the world of entrepreneurship then. And I have since um always been in that world because I think I um think along those terms. And I I think because of the way I've always thought, um, I assumed I was an entrepreneur because I was always thinking about problems and how to solve them and creating solutions. Um, but one of the problems was that I really had a hard time executing or implementing them. Uh, and so um I didn't know if that was some kind of faultiness in my wiring or it was some kind of failing in my character that I didn't have the right focus or discipline. Um and yeah, and and a lot of life in between, um raising kids and and all the things that happened over the last 20 years. Um and so I know I sound like I'm I'm meandering, but I the project itself is not actually a business to me. Um, and that's been a really difficult thing to navigate because I've never really felt like I felt fit into one category. Um, I come from a fundamentalist Christian background. I was raised in a very, very strict religious home, and I had a preacher for a dad who was really fiery. Um, and so a lot of my development as a human has come from my spiritual journey. Um, I was also a missionary um around the world as a young person, and you know, I saw people in war zones uh killing one another over religion, and I saw in, you know, I was hosted in homes in Muslim countries where supposedly these are my enemies, or what I'm told, and they were not my enemies. Um, and so a lot of my travels to do um religious work ended up sort of helping to loosen and kind of um, you know, the word they they use is deconstruct, which I don't love that word, but um kind of evolve uh my spiritual path. But for me, that's always been about practicality. I've always been curious about like what do we have in common? What do all humans have in common? How can we help one another without trying to tell each other that you have to change your culture or your worldview or do it this different way? Like, surely as a species, we have enough in common um that we don't have to get to those nitty-gritty details. Um, and so the well-being project is on one hand, it's a powerful economic engine, um, as it's designed to be, but it is sort of more of a social enterprise uh than it is, you know, a classical capitalist startup. Um so yeah, I don't know if that's helpful, but I've always felt like I straddled multiple worlds. Um and uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, okay. No, I love it. So what have your what have the big been the biggest things you've learned uh being a business owner?

SPEAKER_01:

Um, you know, I so I actually have been I've owned in order to pay the bills. So this the well-being project has been in development, it's been a passion project. I have been self-employed as a training, I own my own training company and I teach for the American Red Cross and other organizations. So I'm a safety instructor. And what I have learned from that um form of entrepreneurship and that form of um self-employment is really how to get into your genius area and only do what you're good at. Um, that has made all the difference for me. And I have been very strategic in my business um and not grown it beyond what I needed to meet my needs because I did not want to be attached to something that wasn't fully my vision. Um, so it was it was aligned and compatible with my practical life in where I was in the stage of raising kids. Um and so it I didn't feel like I was selling out, uh, but I did feel that I was just functioning in a very practical way. So I guess the point is is that number one, I kept the business at a size that was just enough to meet the needs I outlined that I needed, um, even though I could have grown it larger. Um and I did that by staying completely in my my zone and only doing what I was good at, which is teaching. Um, and all the business aspect of things, I partnered with an agency so that I didn't have to do a lot of marketing or anything, and I could really just be excellent. Um and that's not a sort of lifetime trajectory, but I think it's important for entrepreneurs because we have all these seasons um in development and having a vision and being passionate and committed to it, and at the same time having to provide for a family can sometimes get really confusing. And so um, yeah, for me it's about having realistic goals and staying committed to the practical as well as the aspirational.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, okay. So, what are some common misconceptions about running a business?

SPEAKER_01:

Common misconceptions about running a business. Um gosh, I I I'm not the business guru. I will say I guess um from my corner of the world, I think some of the common misconceptions are um uh give me a second to formulate this.

SPEAKER_00:

No, you're fine, you're fine.

SPEAKER_01:

Um, well, I think I mean a pretty obvious one that's often debunked pretty quickly is you know that there's so much more freedom in owning your own business when you know that can be that very opposite. I think we all know if you're if you're an entrepreneur, you know that's pretty much the opposite. Um, because it it you can never really clock out. Um so um the freedom has to be tempered with the practical realities of it. I mean, if you're absolutely doing what you love, then you don't necessarily want to clock out. Um, but just maintaining that balance. Um and other misconceptions, um, you know, just I think sometimes just getting our priorities mixed up. You know, if we feel like we have taken a big risk and launch something, um, we might feel sort of committed to it um and unable to evolve if if it doesn't turn out the way we want it to go and keep grinding. Um, and that can be really difficult when you've kind of staked a lot on a venture. Uh and it might be hard to iterate when you're you're out there on your own.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. Okay. So how do you handle taking vacations running a business? I don't know what gets everybody away.

SPEAKER_01:

That's funny. Um, I'm a single mom and I have I I live in North Carolina, as we said, I don't have any family around. So I I'm I'm it's pretty unique um how I have really had to approach um free time and vacation and what that means. Um and yeah, so I try to number one have a life that I don't need to escape from, so that I I'm not pining for a vacation. Um, so building rhythms of rest and refreshment and joy into my life so that um while vacations are are good and important and um necessary, they're not all they're not uh they're not something I'm living for. Um and then yeah, just some real practical stuff with my kids. Uh last year we went down to St. Simon's Island um and spent some time down there and road trips to see family, and um we're pretty uh we're pretty modest around here.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, okay, nothing wrong with that. All right, and what have you attributed to your growth so far?

SPEAKER_01:

Uh a lot of suffering.

unknown:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

Um I have I have um always been a really passionate person. And as I mentioned, coming from sort of this this fiery practic uh fundamentalist background, um, I never actually lost any of that kind of um personal fire. I mean, I was uh I I really embraced everything I was taught as a kid on one level, um, and at the same time had another sort of observatory questioning perspective. And so uh that's often not super welcome in religious communities to question things like that, and especially not when you're a woman. Um, and so I found the process of um observing and questioning and reflecting on really what I believed, or really what was um important, or kind of being thoughtful about my values brought a lot of resistance and a lot of rejection. Um and so I think that growing as a person, um, suffering is usually um the main way that we do that because we wouldn't choose um to grow uh dramatically, I think otherwise. And so it's really just rising to the occasion uh when we encounter challenges. Um, and so yeah, my development as a person has come from um just a life of inquiry and um and questioning and um and trying to align who I am with how I behave and um having an integrated life. You know, I used to think of integrity as like this moral virtue, um, which I really don't think it is anymore. I think it's really just um integration and being mindful of who you are and allowing the different pieces of yourself all to have their place and to be accepted, and so that when you act, you act from a place of wholeness and consistency.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, okay. Now we kind of got into this a little bit earlier, but let's dive into it a little bit deeper. So, how do you balance your personal life with the demands of running your business?

SPEAKER_01:

Um, I in the well-being project, one of the things I teach the kind of the crux of that approach is what's called tending. So, you know, we when we talk about self-care or we talk about um, you know, mental health and you know, meeting our needs and that kind of thing, that's all very ambiguous. And so, you know, that could mean anything. That could mean like uh Netflix and Chardonnay on the weekend, you know, there's just really no kind of definition to what self-care really is. Um, and so I like to use the word tending because uh it really helps us to remember the core of what who we are. Number one, we are biological, right? We are we are nature, um, we're not machines. So all this optimization and all that kind of stuff is has really nothing, no place in the human um experience. Um we are nature and we are consciousness. And so when taking care of yourself, um, really tending is essentially the same thing as what we do for little children when they're they're babies and they're born and they're completely helpless. We do everything we meet their needs with consistency and um uh yeah, with boundaries and routines is what I say. So the point of saying that is somewhere along the way between little children who had their needs hopefully consistently met, some of us didn't, um, but ideally, and then transitioning into adulthood, we lose that I sense of like, hey, I need to have a regular bedtime. I need to have, you know, nutritious food. And I need not because I'm like trying to lose the weight, or but because these are the things that that fundamentally that um create a healthy life. And we understand to some extent, you know, tending a body, but we we get that, right? You need to be nourished, you need to have rest, you need to exercise, those things. But we get no instruction on on the immaterial part of us, the part of us that that stays whole when you lose a limb. Um you're still a whole person if you lose your legs in an accident. So whatever it is that stays whole, that's not material. And we never get any practical guidance on how to take care of that. And so I'm the I'm getting back to your point about um, you know, balancing my personal life and my professional life or my vocation. The point is that you have to understand yourself as a whole being, both the physical and the non-physical, the the being and the body. And when you meet those needs, that's automatically gonna require things like nourishing your being with connection, um, with inspiration, with knowledge. Those are the main three food groups that nourish. Well, connection is gonna come. Yeah, I might have connection in my professional life, but I have to be cultivating meaningful connection in my personal life, whether that's with a romantic partner or whether that's in close friendship, um, whatever my setup is. So that for me is not just like a, oh, you know, I try to have girls' night out, or it's a deliberate part of my rhythm to have meaningful connection. And that might look like wine and cheese uh weekly, which I host at my co-working space, right? That is a part of my yeah. Um it's a beautiful part of my uh social life. Um, and it there's no kind of networking officially to it. It's literally just food and beverage and connection. Um, but that is uh one of the ways that I deliberately build, you know, uh that kind of personal connection into the rhythms of my um life.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, okay. I love it. All right, so now so now we're gonna head into the quick fire round. So basically, what I'm going to do is I'm going to say one word and I want you to give me kind of the first thing that comes to your mind in in regards to running your business when you hear that word.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Education.

SPEAKER_01:

Mandatory.

SPEAKER_00:

Mandatory, okay. Now now what you say doesn't have to be one word. The answer doesn't have to be, it's just basically the first thing you think of. Okay. Um so education.

SPEAKER_01:

I just well, so if I'm going to expand on that, just meaning that, you know, like to consistently be in a in a place of learning and reflecting and sort of growing. Um, you know, I I used to love listening to Jim Rohn. And uh he I he would have he had this one bit where he would talk and he would say, um, how many times do you want your kid to go through the third grade? And most people say, Well, obviously just one time. And then he would kind of talk about how most people go through one year of their life 30 times in a row. Um, and how they're not sort of and and that's something that's always stuck with me is like we should always be in this, whether you call it education or reflection or whatever, but that's it's so important to be consistently learning and growing.

SPEAKER_00:

Planning.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh fun. I'm I'm a very optimistic forward thinker, and planning is uh like a um preoccupation of mine. So I love the idea of planning.

SPEAKER_00:

Inspiration.

SPEAKER_01:

Um absolutely fundamental nutrition for your being. Um and and I like to talk about inspiration in the in terms of um inspiration being anything that expands you, right? So it encompasses all those expansive experiences, whether it's love, beauty, joy, um, all of that. So it could be, you know, uh a quote on Instagram, um It could be uh uh you know, a weekend conference at Tony Robbins. It could be sort of anything. It could be just quiet couch moments with your children. But yeah, inspiration is I mean it's part of the juice that makes this whole thing run. Commitment commitment. Um gosh. That's the goal. I think um as someone who's been married twice um and never intended to not be married, uh, in either of those two marriages, so commitment always speaks to me in that on a very personal level. Um and finding that uh I I know that I can make commitment, but finding what that looks like in a collective, whether it's community or um roots, that's still like a very curious uh you know, um path of exploration. So commitment feels a little tender to me.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, that's powerful there. I like that. So what words of advice would you offer to other business owners who are looking to grow their business?

SPEAKER_01:

Um I think the words of advice I would give to anyone would be the same whether they're a business owner or not. Um and it always comes down to the human experience. Um deeply understanding yourself is I think the foundation for everything else in life. And it doesn't matter how much we achieve and how many goals we actually uh, you know, manage to accomplish, if we're doing it from a place that is in any part alienated from our deeper selves, it really doesn't matter. Um, and we can see that all around us. We can see people reach the top of any ladder uh that you can name, and we find them hanging in their closets or slumped over in their hot tub. And I think whether you're a business owner or anyone who's aspiring to anything, being really careful about the path that you're on, um, and knowing it comes from a place of alignment and integrity. And again, not in this moral sense, and but in this sense of that you have deeply taken the time to understand yourself um and to make choices that are aligned with who you are, so that when you do reach those you know, milestones, um they don't bring a sense of emptiness and uh shock that you got here and now what okay, okay.

SPEAKER_00:

All right. So now we're in a section here where you can highlight um kind of what we discussed earlier, you know, any of your projects and everything that you've got going on with your business.

SPEAKER_01:

Sure. Um, so two um things that I have going on right now are are they're not uh so I have mentioned the well-being project, and that'll be going live in January for the wider world. Um, and it as I said, it's a practical approach to physical and psychological well-being. So it's it you can kind of think of it in structure like um AA, Alcoholics Anonymous. Not the content, but just the structure. So there's seven concepts, and there's um the online courses are free. Um, and but it sort of teaches this framework and establishes kind of like what humans need to thrive physically and psychologically, and um, and then kind of lays out this framework of how you achieve that. So there's three courses that that people can take, and then um baked into that coursework is a weekly conversation format that you learn, and then you can then participate in. So you can find a weekly conversation with other people who have the same language. You don't need to have the same background, but we have common language for the human experience where it's accessible and affordable and really makes well-being something that can spread. Um, so that is uh something I'm just deeply passionate about. I actually I taught this when I first when I first developed the course years ago. I taught it for a year with violent offenders who were uh incarcerated. Um, and I I I did that because for me it was like a test of efficacy. Like I don't want to be involved in something that you know involves like uh farmers market produce and yoga classes. I if it's well-being, it has to apply to all humans. And if it doesn't apply when you're locked up, then I I'm not I'm not down. And so um it was really, really practical and really an incredible experience, you know, participating with these guys for a year. Um, but this is like content that applies whether you are in Silicon Valley or whether you are locked up or whether you are a student traveling, you know, on your gap year. It be it's very much a human framework. Um, so that's exciting. That is uh, like I said, about to launch. And then the other thing um that I'm kind of passionate about is um I mentioned earlier that I thought for a long time that I was an entrepreneur, and I had all these conflicting feelings about why I couldn't achieve the things I thought an entrepreneur, I as an entrepreneur should achieve. And what I really discovered, um, and honestly, much more recently than uh uh than is convenient, um, is that I'm not an entrepreneur. Um, I do have those similar qualities, but I'm a teacher, I'm a wisdom teacher, and I thrive on taking profound amounts of knowledge and making them accessible for other people. And so, really, what looked like entrepreneurship was always just me thinking about a wide array of problems and how to solve them, uh, and then creating frameworks for doing that. And whereas before, I used to think that um, you know, I just didn't have the follow-through or something, uh, that wasn't the point. The point was actually my design. I'm designed to create these frameworks and then kind of give them to the world. So um one tool that I actually initially created just for myself is called this the being blueprint. Um, so if you think about, you know, the first time you ever took like a personality test or you know, the Myers Briggs, or maybe the Enneagram, or one of these, you know, typing tools, and you get this report back, and you're just like, wow, this is me. You know, like it it describes you and you feel so seen. Um, and you know, it's pretty great for about five minutes. And then um, you know, before long, it's kind of in a drawer somewhere, or oh, I remember, yeah, those are that's a really cool thing. And so we learn these things about ourselves, but we don't really know how a way to integrate them and kind of keep them relevant. Um, and then you can maybe move through these different, hey, I get into my astrology and that seemed really helpful, or I got somebody told me about human design, and that felt really profound. But still, you can have these really profound experiences and still not have a way to integrate the knowledge. So for me, uh what I did was I created a just a document where I used AI to clean the data and put it all into one place, just kind of raw data on everything about me from all these different modalities. And then I developed these prompts so that I don't have to understand the systems or the modalities. I don't have to be, you know, an expert in astrology or human design or any of these things. But with the right prompts, it can take this document and translate it into the what I need to, the insight I need for my day-to-day life, for my practical life. So it's like this living document in essence, like a personal manual with all of these different sort of modalities that kind of show who me, who I am from various angles and viewpoints. Um, but it's synthesized so that I'm not just being told, oh, you need to do this because that, or but it's like looking for the structural commonalities and then using that as a as a guidebook for you know anything, honestly, like big and small. And it's shocking how um how profoundly helpful it is. And so I made them for friends, I've made them for my kids. Like I it helps me with parenting my own children. Um, I have used it for all kinds of things. And and the blueprint actually is the one thing that helped debunk this idea that I was an entrepreneur. It completely explained to me why I was struggling and said, here's what you're doing wrong, and here's what you're doing right. And you're just in a fish out of water. And when you stay in your lane, you're actually doing all the right things, and there's no kind of, you know, this is not a character flaw. Um, and so that was really, really profound. Um, and so I've just I've created a course that allows someone to build this document for themselves and then a way to use it on a regular basis. So none of this stuff gets tossed in a drawer somewhere, it's always available. Um, and there's no kind of like jargon to unpack because it's delivered to you in a way that makes sense. You don't have to understand the modalities. So that's what the being blueprint is, and uh I'm pretty excited about it.

SPEAKER_00:

So all right, perfect, perfect. And and lastly, what's the best way for someone to get in find you or get in contact with you if they're interested in any of your projects?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, um, rachelbokley.com is my personal website. Um, and everything else is attached to there. The wellbeing project is the wellbeingproject.info. Um, but if you go to rachelbokley.com, everything is always gonna be uh linked there.

SPEAKER_00:

Perfect, perfect. Any phone number you want to share or social media?

SPEAKER_01:

Um at Rachel Bolkley is my Instagram, and that's the main social media that I use.

SPEAKER_00:

All right, perfect, perfect. All right, well, fantastic. Thank you so much for being a part of the community and for all you're doing. We certainly wish you suc uh continued success in what you're doing with your projects there.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you, Cliff. Have a great afternoon.

SPEAKER_00:

Great talking. Thank you. All right.