Living with a 'Bucket List' Mindset: Christy High

By Carrie Vittitoe

Be Open: “Having a plan can be detrimental to your happiness.”
"Failure is never fun, but failure is not the worst thing that can happen to you,” Christy High says. “Even though things crashed and burned, I was able to start over. It didn’t kill me.” An acceptance of risk has led Christy to opportunities that she wouldn’t have had if she’d had a rigid plan and stuck to it.

During the day, Christy is a senior product management analyst at Neustar, but when she isn’t there, she works as a certified Hypnobabies Childbirth Hypnosis instructor. The path that led her to both of these occupations was a little off the beaten trail.

When Christy was in her 20s, she worked as Cleopatra when Horseshoe Casino in Southern Indiana was known as Caesars. It was there that she met Las Vegas hypnotist Anthony Cools. He hired her, and she traveled with him, learning about stage work and hypnosis. The knowledge she gained about hypnosis and how it can mitigate pain made her want to utilize it in the future when she had her own children.

As her pregnancy with her daughter, Rowan, progressed, Christy learned about Hypnobabies, a program that uses hypnosis techniques to manage childbirth. She was so enthusiastic about the program because of her past experience with hypnosis that nine months after her daughter’s birth, she traveled to to take Hypnobabies training. Because her family had witnessed the pain management that hypnosis brought to her drug-free delivery of Rowan, she served as a hypno-doula for both her niece and nephew.

An open mindset is critical to allowing success to happen. “Having a plan can be detrimental to your happiness,” Christy says. She says people sometimes pass up something they are good at because they are too focused on a rigid plan. “It’s OK to do things spontaneously,” she says.

Although a willingness to take “exits off the interstate” has led Christy to find amazing personal and professional opportunities, she sometimes has to directly refocus herself to stay healthy and happy. “You can’t serve from an empty cup,” she says. Periodically, she reassesses what she is doing and why. “I focus on the things that I’m enthusiastic about and love.”

Photo by Sunni Wigginton