Every week Brazen will shine a spotlight on someone by asking them a set of questions.

Those questions are

1) What are 3 things people don’t know about you?

2) How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

3) If you had to start your adult life over again, what would you change?

4) What’s the single best thing that has ever happened to you?

5) What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

This week our Brazen spotlight is on Chloe Gunn.

1) What are 3 things people don’t know about you?

I think about getting a dog every single day (and its been that way for two years). I’m coming for you HUHA.

I have a dark sense of humour and have laughed myself out of some pretty dark situations (I once got mugged and they took my purse, so the next day I go to my bank with my passport and request some money out – my passport had expired the day I was attacked so it was an ‘invalid’ form of ID – I mean it was so ridiculously not ok – I had to laugh.)

I love to do people’s illustrations (see @Chloeslivingillustrations on Instagram.

2) How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

This is tricky. With work I have low-key anxiety (because that’s how I am wired not because of where I work) so if it’s on my list – it has to get done. I don’t struggle with motivation there at all.

I struggle to motivate myself to exercise, as someone who spent their first 21 years overweight and had their mum happily write fake ‘Chloe can’t do P.E class today she hurt her leg’ letters to my teachers, I’ve never got into sport or built any sort of muscle. But when I got myself together in university and lost the weight and worked out consistently the motivation was pretty strong because I wanted change.

But now my motivation is mental health.

Before Covid-19 I did F45 six days a week, but now I’ve been enjoying a break, mixing up some home workouts and also slow jogging (because no matter how hard I try my speed settings seems to be ‘slow’ to ‘moderately slow’). Recently I’ve made my peace with never looking like I want too or like the girls on Instagram – and that’s fine. What motivates me now is mental health, everytime I dread working out I make myself remember how I always feel better mentally afterward. So that’s my main motivator now. Shout out to Sydney Cummings’ videos on Youtube.

3) If you had to start your adult life over again, what would you change?

I would move to New Zealand as soon as I finished my masters, I took a year out to work and save in the UK but I was wilting and depressed- the UK did nothing for me.

If I can go back further I would study UX at university then run for the hills (New Zealand’s literal hills). My psychology qualifications are redundant here as I can’t register with the registered psychologist board (what a giant waste of money and years of dedication – but we laugh now…ha.)

I found myself in an IT company where I have discovered a secret passion for UX. I love UX as it’s a mix of IT and psychology, I just wish I had more experience with site-building, designing and, well, some sort of actual computer science degree.

4) What’s the single best thing that has ever happened to you?

Jacinda Ardern and New Zealand.

Also managing to lose a large amount of weight and free myself from being so lazy, depressed and self-concious. But that didn’t happen to me, I made that happen for me and it was hard so I’m not giving anyone else credit for that. But, it did change my life for the better.

5) What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

I’m lucky because I think I am over simplistic when I want to do something – I just find out how and carry out the steps until I hit a barrier.

This once ended up in me running my own vegan doughnut business when I first arrived in New Zealand (it was my way of coping with the heartbreak that I would never be a psychologist if I wanted to stay here). The worst part is it got too popular for me to juggle with a paying job and the doughnuts actually made close to zero profit when everything was accounted for – common sense and fear of running myself to the ground should have told me not to bother before I threw so much money, time and investment into it.

So I do most things that scare me realistically. Emotional things are where the real fear is at, am I right?