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“It was just such a redemptive, wonderful experience. I am so grateful to The VBAC Link for seeing me through it, for giving me the information, and just the inspiration to even take this on because if I had never found you, I don't know for sure if I ever would have gone through with it. So, thank you so much for that.”Amanda's episode will warm your heart, give you chills, and bring tears to your eyes. Her birth stories include a rough induction at 36 weeks due to preeclampsia with an 11-day NICU stay and not getting to hold her baby for 32 hours. When she found The VBAC Link, Amanda was given hope that she could have another baby and that her experience could be very different. Equipped with information and drive, she was able to do just that. Amanda's VBAC birth was spiritual and powerful!Needed WebsiteHow to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for ParentsFull Transcript under Episode Details Episode Topics:Review of the WeekAmanda's storiesMonitoring for preeclampsiaCervadil, Magnesium, and CytotecConsenting to a CesareanThrowing up during the C-sectionWaiting 32 hours to hold her babyFinding The VBAC LinkPraying for a babyScared or scarredSigns of wavering provider supportPhysical and mental preparationContractions beginAdvocating during laborThe night nurse“It is done.” Importance of lactation supportMeagan: Hello, everybody. How are you doing? I hope you are doing great. Right now, I can just tell you that my face is already hurting from smiling just from talking to our guest for 5 seconds. We have our friend, Amanda. Hello, Amanda. Amanda: Hello. Meagan: Oh my goodness. She has just been the sweetest thing just pouring on the sugar and sweetening me up. I mean really, she is saying just the nicest things about The VBAC Link and it has just been so fun to hear how The VBAC Link was part of her life. You guys, I love this so much. Thank you for supporting this podcast. Thank you for supporting us on Instagram and Facebook and all of the places. I truly from the bottom of my heart love you. I know I haven't always met you but I love you and I love this community and I love what we are doing here. I am so grateful for the opportunity. I just wanted to say that it really wouldn't happen without all of you so really from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Review of the WeekMeagan: We do have a Review of the Week so I want to jump into that and then we are going to get into Amanda's stories and maybe even some other things. We will see what this episode transpires to. Okay, so this is from Liz Judd and it doesn't say where it was from, but it says, “Empowering”. It says, “I found this podcast around week 30 of my second pregnancy by searching for ‘VBAC'. I had a traumatic C-section in 2019 and I knew I did not want to go through that again. It was helpful for me to learn the evidence on VBAC, how to advocate for myself, and healing to listen to other's stories. I just had my second child by VBAC and I thank you for the role you played in that.” Seriously, it warms my heart and you just said the same thing. You carried me through my whole pregnancy, and then this was back when Julie and I took a big 10-month break and you were like, “Oh no, they're gone!” But here we are. We are back and I hope that we are carrying someone else or many other people through their pregnancy journeys as well. Amanda: I'm sure that you are and that review could not have related more to my story so I can't wait to get started for you. Amanda's storiesMeagan: Okay, well without further ado, let's do it. Let's get started.Amanda: Here we go. My husband I met in 2004 which yes, was 20 years ago. We got married in 2009 and we were just living our best lives. We were traveling, doing all of the things. I had lost 129 pounds and I said, “I want to run a marathon and have a baby.” Meagan: Dang, yeah. Amanda: I was even a group exercise instructor at the time. Life was good. I ran the Marine Corps Marathon in 2015 in October and in 2015 December, I got pregnant. What was really special about that was we got engaged on Christmas Eve so on the 10th anniversary of our engagement, I got to share the news with my husband that we were expecting. Meagan: Yay! That's so awesome. Amanda: It was really special but other than that, I really had no knowledge at all about pregnancy and birth. I just knew that I wanted an unmedicated birth. Where I came up with that, I'm not sure, but I just was going to trust my doctor. That's where my brain was at. I went to my normal OB who I had always gone to and it was a very small practice. There were three doctors and a nurse practitioner and up until this point, I had always seen the nurse practitioner. She confirmed my pregnancy and she advised that I limit my exercise from what I was currently doing and to only maybe just walk and do some light cycling. Meagan: Oh my gosh. My OB said the same thing. I was wanting to run a half marathon and he was like, “Oh no, you're having too much round ligament pain. Just go for a walk.” I was like, “What? Okay,” so I stopped working out. Amanda: Right. That's exactly what happened to me. Now I know that was the first red flag of this practice, but I didn't know at the time. I was just like, Okay. Listen to what the doctor says. So I just kept going to my appointments and I generally felt okay but at my appointment check-ins, my blood pressure started to be high. They would put me into the room and I would lay down on my left side and they would have me do the whole appointment that way and then they would check my blood pressure at the end and it would be okay so they would have me come back in a couple of days for a re-check and it would be okay. We just continued on that way until I circled through all of the doctors and back to the nurse practitioner. She was really the only one who seemed a little more concerned than everybody else about what was going on. Monitoring for preeclampsiaAmanda: I got back to her and she sent me to the hospital for a blood pressure monitor. It wasn't super high so they sent me home, but they told me to do a 24-hour urine collection. I did that and my protein in that came back at 299 and she said, “Well, 300 is preeclampsia so we are just going to keep monitoring it.” Meagan: Mhmm, okay. Amanda: Okay. That's exactly what I said. Meanwhile, I'm not exercising. I'm just taking my prenatal and going to these appointments. I didn't have any preeclampsia symptoms either. I had no headaches, no spots, no swelling. I just felt yucky. I just chalked it up to pregnancy. I thought, Okay, I'm pregnant. This is what I should feel like. Meanwhile, people around me are pregnant and they are like, “I feel fabulous. I love this.” I was like, I don't love this. This is not great. I'm excited to have a baby but I don't love it. I also got carpal tunnel. Meagan: That is a thing by the way during pregnancy that people don't talk about. Amanda: They don't and I didn't know about it. My doctors were just like, “It'll go away when the baby is born. It will go away when the baby is born.” I'm like, “But I'm really in pain. My poor husband has to cut my food. I can't function here.” Finally, one of the doctors said, “Well, if it hurts that badly then you can go to a hand and wrist doctor.” Okay, so I did and I ended up getting a cortisone shot because it was unmanageable. I had the braces. I was doing night braces and day braces so that did help a lot. A high blood pressure and getting admitted to the hospitalAmanda: In the meantime though, we moved from an apartment to a house. I was the matron of honor in a wedding and then we moved into our house on July 17th. I had a surprise baby shower on August 6th and August 8th which was my 36th week, I had a non-stress test at the hospital. I went into the hospital for the non-stress test. They took my blood pressure. The nurse didn't say anything. She was like, “I'm just going to take it when it's over,” which is something I had heard the entire time. I do the non-stress test. She takes my blood pressure again. She says, “You know, the doctor wants to talk to you.” I was like, “Okay. That's fine.” I go into this little room and the doctor starts saying things like, “Not going home” and “Going into triage” and “Keep you pregnant as long as possible”, so I was like, What? I just couldn't even process those things. Meagan: And there wasn't any extra talk of, this is why. Amanda: No. Meagan: Yeah, okay. Amanda: No. I called my husband. I was like, “Listen, you might want to come be with me because I'm not sure what's going on.” So I go over to triage which was right around the corner and I'm waiting in that waiting room for over an hour. I'm still not thinking there is any type of emergency. They take me into triage and they take my blood pressure which was 214/111. Meagan: Okay. Amanda: Yeah. Meagan: Okay, well that's high. Amanda: Yeah, so then everyone starts going a little bit crazy. They start giving me medicine. They have me only lay down. I'm not allowed to get out of the bed and they start talking. I start hearing words like, “Possible seizure” and I'm like, “What is happening here?” A nurse finally comes over and says, “We are going to admit you. We just don't know yet if it's to labor and delivery or high-risk OB.” I looked at my husband. I was like, “Are we having a baby right now? Are we having a baby?” Then at that point though, that's when all of the things started happening to me and I was not a part of any of these decisions. Cervadil, Magnesium, and CytotecAmanda: I realize that that was a very high blood pressure and I didn't really check it after that, but they do take me up to labor and delivery where the doctor starts with Cervadil. This is on a Monday night. She inserts the Cervadil but I had zero dilation. They also put me on magnesium and when they did the magnesium, they also wanted to give me a catheter because they didn't want me to move. I said, “I don't really want that.” At this point, I still felt fine and nobody was really explaining to me–Meagan: The severity of things and what was really happening, yeah. Amanda: Right, right, right. So then they were giving me the saline. It was just so much fluid so I had to use the bathroom a lot. They were just letting me use the bedpan and teh nurses were so irritated by me. They would just stand there and watch me. I just felt horrible. It just was a very uncomfortable experience. Then there was the magnesium which–Meagan: Bleh. Thumbs down. Amanda: Yes. It was awful. I just felt terrible. They also gave me a shot for lung development because I was only 36 weeks. Yeah. My water broke on its own but that is the only part of labor that I experienced at all with him. After my water broke, they gave me a dose of Cytotec, and literally nothing happened. Not one thing. My blood pressure was still unstable. The magnesium made me feel awful and then I felt decreased movements. I just kept telling the nurses, “I can't feel the baby moving. I can't feel the baby moving.” I was scared. At one point, we knew nothing was happening. My husband and I actually called the doctor and said, “Should we have a C-section? Is this what is going to be happening?” They said, “No. Let's just see how this plays out.”Looking back, I'm shocked that that was the answer they gave me because of everything else that was going on. They just kept doing cervical checks and they were very uncomfortable because I had zero dilation and I didn't know I could say no. In fact, one doctor came in. This was actually the doctor who ended up delivering him. She said, “Do you want an epidural?” I said, “No. I don't even have any pain.” She said, “Well then, you need to let me check you.” Meagan: Wait, because you didn't want an epidural then you had to let her– what? Amanda: Right. I think she was saying this because I was acting like it was uncomfortable. I mean, it was uncomfortable. I wasn't acting. Then they gave me another dose of Cytotec. Nothing is happening. Now this is late Tuesday night. My blood pressure is all over the place. They keep giving me different doses of medication. I was on fire from the magnesium. I just kept saying, “This room is so hot.” They said, “But it's the coldest room in the wing.” “I don't care. I'm burning up.” Meagan: You're like, “My skin feels like it's on fire.” Amanda: So they gave me a fan. That was their accommodation for that. Consenting to a CesareanAmanda: It was around 12:45 so now this is Wednesday morning at 12:45 AM. The doctor comes in and she is just sitting on the end of my bed. I was in and out of awareness. I remember having her be there, but the magnesium is terrible. They just kept taking my blood pressure and she just kept giving me medication. All of a sudden, she stands up and she says, “We need to do a C-section right now.” I still don't know to this day if it was a decel. I don't know if it was his heart. I don't know if it was my blood pressure. I don't know what happened that made her stand up, but I just remember watching that happen and the look on her face. They were laying me down. They were giving my husband scrubs. I'm signing all kinds of consent forms laying down and then they gave me this awful drink for nausea and wheeled me into the OR. Because I had the magnesium, they were lifting me. I wasn't allowed to do anything by myself and I forgot to mention that since I wasn't exercising or doing anything, I gained 90 pounds during this pregnancy which was terrible but I didn't know. I wasn't small and they were moving me around. I get a spinal. As soon as I got the spinal, I said, “Oh my goodness. I'm going to be sick.” I just felt so nauseous and I remember the anesthesiologist behind me saying, “It's okay. We're ready,” and other people saying, “Lay her down. Lay her down.” They immediately lay me down and then I vomit into the bucket. Meagan: Oh yeah, that's the most miserable feeling. Amanda: It was terrible. He was ready. He did have a bucket. He wasn't lying, but then they squirted something on my stomach and I just remember saying, “I can feel that. I can feel that.” The doctor says, “Yeah, but is it cold?” I said, “No.” She says, “Starting incision.” She just is going. Throwing up during the C-sectionAmanda: Literally every time they pushed on my stomach, I was throwing up. Every single push and shove they did, it was awful. It was awful. But at 1:38 AM, our first son was born and there was one squeaky little cry and then he stopped and the NICU team got to work on him. They were about to take him up to the NICU and God bless my husband. He stops in front of the door and says, “Can she at least give him a kiss first?” They brought him over really quickly. I got a kiss and then they took him away. All was quiet. I was still nauseous and I just remember the anesthesiologist saying, “They're just putting you back together. Why don't you try to take a nap?” I was like, “Um–”Meagan: Okay. Amanda: Right. Needless to say, the bedside manner all the way through was not great. Meagan: Not great, no.Amanda: But once I got into recovery, I was just holding onto the fact that they said I could see my baby in 24 hours. I was like, Okay. I just have to make it 24 hours and they will take me to see him. I set an alarm on my phone. I am pumping. They gave me the pump. I am pumping. Any colostrum I am getting, I am sending up to the NICU. My blood pressure is still not settling down. Waiting 32 hours to hold her babyAmanda: 24 hours goes by. I call the nurse. I'm like, “It's 24 hours. Take me up to see my baby. Please take me up to see my baby.” She's like, “Well first, we have to take your blood pressure.” It was not good. She was like, “Wait 2 more hours and then we will check.” I was like, “I just waited 24 hours and now I have to wait 2 more.” They take my blood pressure again and it was fine. I was like, “Yes. I'm going to go see my baby.” They were like, “Well actually, you have to walk and go sit in this chair first and then we can take you up. We have to take your blood pressure from this chair.” I sit in the chair. My blood pressure is not good. “Oh, you have to get back in bed. We can't take you up.” At that point, I just lost it. I was like, “I can't.” I told my husband, I was like, “You have to tell people to stop texting and stop calling. I cannot do this. I just don't understand what's going on here.” I did not know it at the time, but after they got me back in bed, my husband went back into the hallway. He told the nurses. He was like, “You have to take her up there. You have to take her up. She has to see that baby.” Sorry. Finally, the nurse came in and she checked my blood pressure and it wasn't great but she thankfully had I guess fewer patients so she came up to the NICU with me. She did take me up there and after 32 hours, I finally got to meet him and hold him but as soon as we were together, both of our health's dramatically improved. My husband knew that that's what we needed. I'm so grateful that he did that. Meagan: Absolutely. Amanda: I ended up staying admitted for 5 days because they just couldn't get my blood pressure situated and then our son Jeffery David came home after 11 days. Physically, my healing was okay because I had 11 days of sitting. Meagan: Hanging out in the hospital not doing much. Amanda: Yeah, and you know, God bless my family and friends who drove me to the hospital every day to go see him. Some of them sat with me for hours and hours and hours just because I was by myself but my mental healing was not great. Because of everything that happened, I had just closed the chapter on kids. We were apparently one and done. I told my husband, “I am not doing that again.” I mean, I was on blood pressure medicine for 2 years after that. Meagan: Wow. Amanda: Yeah. It was bad. I just said that I always wanted more kids, but I'm not going to do that again. That was terrible. Finding The VBAC LinkAmanda: So my son was about 2 and I was listening to a different podcast. They were interviewing these two doulas who had VBACs and I was like, Who are these women? Then obviously, it was you guys. Meagan: That's awesome. Amanda: I went over and I found The VBAC Link. I was like, Oh my gosh. I didn't even know a VBAC existed up until this point. I was listening to your podcast and I listened to all of the episodes and then I finally said to my husband, “Listen, I found this information. It's really inspiring and really informative and if we ever had another baby, this is what I want to do.” He is the most supportive person that exists. He is my biggest fan and biggest cheerleader. He was like, “Okay. That's fine.” With a list of questions from your website, I went and found a new OB who I interviewed and I decided that they were supportive because aside from answering all of those things positively, she could also tell me the nearest provider who delivered VBAC twins and the nearest provider who did VBAC breech births. Meagan: Wow, that's awesome. Amanda: She said, “It's not here, but these are the two places that you could go.” I was like, Okay, I feel like this practice will work. It was also much, much bigger. They had two midwives on staff which I was very interested in because I'm definitely more of a midwifery mindset. In the meantime, I also went to pelvic floor therapy and while she fixed a lot of internal things, she also did a scar release which was very intense but very, very needed. I didn't know that until I had it and then I was like, Oh my gosh. I didn't realize how uncomfortable I was just living my life all of the time. It was amazing. Meagan: How game-changing it really is. Yeah. Not even just for birth, but for life like you said. Amanda: Yes. I couldn't even sit criss-cross applesauce just because I had so much tension in my hips and everything. It fixed so much. Praying for a babyAmanda: Then my son is approaching 4 years old and then one night we were saying our prayers just he and I at night and he says, “I pray for a baby in mommy's belly.” Meagan: Aww. Amanda: I was like, “What?” Meagan: “What did you just say?”Amanda: Yeah. There was no one pregnant around us at the time. I didn't even know at that time that he knew that babies in bellies were a thing. That continued for weeks. I never once reminded him. Every single night, he would pray for a baby in Mama's belly. I talked to my husband. I was like, “We need to address this one way or another. We either need to tell him that that is not happening or we need to have a serious discussion.” So since I'm here, you know what we decided on. Meagan: Spoiler alert. Amanda: We were blessed with a second pregnancy. Now, the day I took that pregnancy test, I went on The VBAC Link website. I looked up your doulas and I found doulas in my area. I just kept scrolling back to this one profile that just kept speaking to me. Her name was Mallory. I sent an email to her which was “Seeking doula, have questions”. She wrote back to me and that is actually who I ended up having as my doula. She was literally with me from day one. But I started this pregnancy at advanced maternal age because I was 35 at the time. I was plus-sized so while I wasn't 90 pounds heavier, I had lost some weight, but I still had a higher BMI. I also consistently worked out 4-5 times a week and I was loaded with information. I had a new OB and I instantly became their worst nightmare. I know it because–Meagan: Because you had all of the information. Let me just tell you. Providers, I think it catches them off guard when people come in and have information and they are like, “Oh, wow. This lady knows what she is talking about.” That's how it should be. We should know what we are talking about. Amanda: I agree. I always say that I wish there was a second-time mom the first time because I just went in armed with so much information that I never would have gotten if I didn't have such an awful experience the first time. I started taking a baby aspirin every day just because of the blood pressure issues before. Scared or scarredAmanda: This is a much larger practice. Like I said, they had two midwives and as I rotated through those doctors, I realized that some were supportive, some were tolerant, and some were scared. Meagan: Oh yeah. I like that you say that. Scared. Because I think that's the case with a lot of the “unsupportive providers”. I think they are scared or scarred. Amanda: That's a good point. Yeah. That's a good point. Meagan: They just haven't had a great experience. Amanda: Right. So along with all of this medical information, I also am very strong in my faith and I was having a hard time. I was having an internal struggle because I had all of this information and I wanted this so badly but I was struggling with the fact of what if this wasn't God's plan? I was fighting for all of this stuff and what if it wasn't His plan? I shared that with my doula, Mallory, and she actually said to pray then if this is not Your wish, then take the desire away. Meagan: That just gave me the chills. Amanda: Yeah. I wanted to share that because it changed me so much. I prayed it every single day of my pregnancy and the desire never went away. I felt like it was okay. Because I was able to pray that and the desire was never going okay, I just felt so strongly and continued going along in this happy, healthy fast pregnancy. There were no physical issues. I had no carpal tunnel. I gained a total of 16 pounds. Total. I mean, I worked out up until 39 weeks. At my 39-weeks, I was doing body pump. I lifted the weights over my head. The instructor was like, “How long are you going to do this for?” I was like, “Actually, I'm all done today.” Meagan: Today is the last day. Amanda: If I knew though that I was going to go to 41 weeks, I probably would have kept going but I just wanted to some time to be done with the gym and just get in the right mental space. Signs of wavering provider supportAmanda: At 30 weeks though is when the support started to waver a little bit. There were more questions about heart decels and reminding me of the continuous monitoring. At 32 weeks, I was having a scan to make sure baby was head down and I had been going to the chiropractor this whole time. This baby liked to hang out transverse. Before my 32-week appointment, the night before, I went to the chiropractor and I was like, “Listen. I know you have been doing Webster the whole time. I have an appointment tomorrow. They are checking to see if he's head down. What can you do?” He's like, “I got you.” So I don't know what he did, but I was driving home from the chiropractor and it felt like I was on a rollercoaster. You know how your belly does that flip? It was so intense at one point that I actually pulled over and chilled for a minute. It was just so much movement happening. The next morning, I went to my 32-week appointment and he was head down. Meagan: Awesome. Amanda: That was pretty cool. Then at 36 weeks, they started to pull the big baby card. Meagan: Oh yeah. Amanda: They gave me an ultrasound and they said that the baby was measuring 11 pounds. Meagan: Whoa. Amanda: I said, “That is impossible.” First of all, I gained 16. There's no way 11 of that is him. Then they were like, “Well, you do have a high BMI.” I was like, “That does not mean that he is going to be a big baby.” I had the article that I brought with me about all of the evidence and I declined a re-scan. That blew the receptionist's mind. I said, “No. I'm not.” She said, “Well, the doctor said you have to.” I said, “I don't have to though so I'll make my next appointment, but it's not going to be for an ultrasound.” That night, I actually got a phone call from a doctor who was like, “Why did you decline the scan?” I said, “My baby is not 11 pounds. He's not.” We had a big conversation and we agreed on a different type of scan. Now, I can't actually remember. I apologize. I can't remember what kind it was. They took different measurements but at that one, he measured 6 pounds. Meagan: What? That's a dramatic difference. Amanda: I know. Where I thought, that's where I thought he was going to be in my head so then I was given the green light to proceed with the way I wanted to. This whole time, I just had such amazing support from my husband but also from my doula. She would check in before every appointment. She just was amazing. I would be in the parking lot and the text would appear, “How are you feeling about this?” Then when I would come out, she would check in with me. In fact, even before recording this podcast, I got a text from her, “How are you feeling about this?” I was like, She is a gem. But I got the green light. Meagan: We should have had her on. Amanda: I know. I did think about that. I feel so bad. Meagan: That's okay. That's okay. Amanda: She's got a new newborn of her own. I know, it's wonderful. At 36 weeks, I also started to get the on-call schedule of all the doctors. I would say, “Who is working this week?” I would keep it in my phone so I knew who would be working because there was one doctor who at an appointment told me directly that she is terrified of VBACs. I knew that I should avoid her at all costs because I just knew that if I had her, she would find some reason to deem it C-section worthy. Physical and mental preparationAmanda: Throughout this pregnancy, I'm doing chiropractic care. I'm drinking raspberry leaf tea. I'm eating the dates when I was supposed to eat the dates. I also went back to pelvic floor therapy and told them that I want to have a VBAC. Help me prepare for that. That was wonderful. I became so passionate about this whole thing. Everybody knew. My poor coworkers had to listen but if there was anybody around me who was getting a C-section, I had to tell myself, “They didn't ask you. They didn't ask you. They don't want a VBAC.” Meagan: I know. Amanda: I also got acupuncture because I was just trying all of the things. Also, in The VBAC Link Facebook group. I found someone was Catholic affirmations that they had made. She shared that file with me so I had them all printed out. I was ready to go and then my due date comes and my due date goes. Meagan: Hello, goodbye. Amanda: Yes. I had never been pregnant past 36 weeks before so I was like, Well, this is pretty awesome, but I felt incredible. I still was coming to work. I came to work on my due date and my principal was like, “I did not expect you to be here today.” I thought, Don't underestimate me just like those doctors. I'm here. Contractions beginSo on a Monday, I was 40+3 and I had an appointment. I saw a midwife at the practice who was actually a VBAC mama herself. She and I just had this vibe and I was like, Yes. I love her. I knew at that appointment at 40+3 that I was going to ask for a membrane sweep. So I did and she tried but I wasn't dilated at all. She was really giving it her best shot, but she couldn't do it. I felt fine. I was fine with it, but I was also a little disheartened because I knew that pressure was going to start coming from the providers. This is where my BMI came in handy because I could qualify for an early induction because of that because like I said, I had the work schedule and that doctor who was terrified of VBACs was working on Friday. Meagan: So just a couple of days later. Amanda: Yes. Yeah. This was Monday at this point, so I scheduled an induction for Wednesday. I was like, Okay. Let me give myself a couple of days to see what I can do, but I also knew I didn't really want to go too far past 41 weeks because I know at 42, the risks go up and I knew time was of the essence. After that appointment, I go back to school and I'm standing on the playground with my partner. There are all kindergarteners running around and running around. I felt this intense squeeze in my belly. I looked at my partner who has had three babies and I was like, “Oh my god, what does a contraction feel like?” I was like, “I think I just had my first contraction.” We were just cheering out there and they continued every 10-12 minutes all the way through Tuesday. I come to work on Tuesday. I was still having contractions but they weren't increasing in intensity so it was okay. Meagan: Yeah, just happening. Amanda: Yeah, but Tuesday, I did decide to leave work early. I just checked in with my principal and I said, “I think I'm going to go home. I think being in a better headspace knowing I'm home and relaxed might help.” As I was leaving, one of my coworkers who had a C-section several years ago came up to me and she said, “There are a lot of women who would love to be in your shoes so good luck.” I thought that was really special. Meagan: Mhmm. Amanda: I appreciated that. I knew. I was like, Yes, I'm doing this for me and for a lot of people. So anyway, sorry. I was in constant contact with my doula. I go home. My contractions are increasing to 7-10 minutes apart. They are more intense at night. Now they are 5-10 minutes apart but I still decided to go to the hospital on Wednesday morning for the induction because I know my body. With my first baby needing the NICU, I knew that as much as I would dream of a home birth, I know that I was afraid in case intervention was needed and I knew that my body would just relax when I knew I was in the place where the interventions could be if I needed them. Advocating during laborAmanda: I send my son to preschool and I go into the hospital with my birth plan and all of the things. I tell the doctor I want Foley but no Pitocin. He was like, “Uh,” and then he watched me have a contraction and then he said, “Are you having contractions?” I said, “I am.” He said, “Okay, we can do it then.”I got the Foley and he also when I was talking with him about my birth plan said, “Listen. We all read it and we want this for you.” I just thought that was a cool thing for him to say. Meagan: Validating. Amanda: Yes. So I'm in New Jersey and here, VBAC after two C-sections is not a thing. I knew that this was really my chance and I also knew that really, two was enough for me. I knew I wanted two children to make our family complete and that was it. One of the things for a VBAC here in the hospital and with the practice is continuous monitoring. Trust me, I tried to not have them do that. Meagan: It's a real fight if you decide to try to fight it and that's really common everywhere. Continuous fetal monitoring is usually pushed really hard and it's one of those things where it's like, is it worth fighting for to you? You have to weigh it out because you really do have to put up a fight. Amanda: I tried, but like you said, I wanted the VBAC more so I was like, Okay, fine. We can do this. They did thankfully have a portable monitor because I really wanted to labor in the shower. They had a portable monitor. It could go in there. I was like, “Good. We're golden.” But then my baby did not want to be on the monitor so he kept falling off but there was no decel. There was never a concern. Meagan: Just loss of heart rate because baby moved away. Amanda: Because the monitors fell off. Yeah, so at one point, one of the midwives– not the VBAC midwife, the other midwife– comes in and says, “We're just going to put an internal monitor in.” I remember my doula looked at me and she said, “Do you know how they do that?” I said, “No,” so then she explained that to me and I declined. Meagan: Yeah because they do have to break your water to do that. Amanda: Oh, I'm sorry. My water did break. Meagan: Oh, your water did break. Amanda: I apologize. I missed that. Gosh darn it. Meagan: I might have missed that. Amanda: No, I missed it. I missed it. But I didn't want the internal monitor. I just didn't feel like that was right for me. I was like, “I'll just keep struggling with this. He is safe and happy and comfortable. I'll be fine.” The night nurseAmanda: Everything was going fine. My body was doing it. I didn't need Pitocin and I was loving labor. Everything that I had practiced and done and just my head space was good and I had listened to some fear-release meditation prior to this and it was just wonderful. I was living in labor land. It was wonderful. Then shift change happened and the night nurse came. The night nurse was very, very intense. My day nurse would let that monitor ride a little bit without being on. This night nurse was not having it. Continuous monitoring meant continuous monitoring and she felt that she needed to do that 3 inches from my face with her hands just pressing and touching me and I really was feeling very overwhelmed by her. Meagan: Yeah. Amanda: I was trying to ignore her and they brought in the bar and I was laboring on the bar. It was wonderful but I still remember that I could smell her breath through her mask. It was too much. She was too much. I said, “Please can I labor in the shower and then we can get together?” She was like, “Okay, as long as baby stays on the monitor." I was like, Please baby, stay on the monitor. So I get in the shower and I was like, Okay. We're fine. Life is good. This is wonderful. I feel great. I'm rocking. It's great. Then I hear the bathroom open and I turn around and she is standing there in a full raincoat. She's got a head cover. Meagan: A raincoat? Amanda: She's got a plastic gown on, plastic shoes, and she comes in the shower with me and is trying to adjust this monitor. Meagan: Oh dear. Amanda: I lost my mind. I don't remember what I said but all I remember is screaming at her and her leaving but telling me I had to come out of the shower. So she leaves and I walk out and my husband and my doula are just snickering because I just kicked her out. But I was like, “Why is she in the shower with me?” I get dried. I get redressed. I'm back in the bed and she's back. Then my blood pressure starts spiking and I start hearing, “High blood pressure, high blood pressure.” I'm like, Oh my god, it's happening. Meagan: It's her. It's her. Amanda: Right, but I got scared because of what happened before. Meagan: Of course. Amanda: I was like, “I can't have this.” I remember Mallory looked at me and she said, “Do you want an epidural?” I didn't initially want one because I wanted to feel this. I wanted to feel all of this. She said, “It would just be a tool to reach your ultimate goal.” Now, I knew two things at that time. It was one, an epidural would help keep me still which was going to help keep this monitor one and two, it's known for bringing blood pressure down. So I agreed. I was kind of sad about it, but I knew ultimately that I was going for the VBAC. That's what I wanted so I had to keep that in my sights. In my head, I didn't say this out loud, but I said, “Okay. If I am a 6 or less, I will get an epidural.” I had a doctor come in and check and I was a 6. I get the epidural and obviously, it doesn't work so I get a second epidural. Meagan: Oh my gosh. Amanda: It was lovely, but that one did work. That brought my blood pressure back to normal and I was still, but then man. Between my husband was helping my doula and she had the peanut ball and she was still moving me. She was holding that monitor on. She was watching that monitor for me. It was just amazing but the problem was that the epidural stopped my contractions. Meagan: That is a downfall that can happen.Amanda: Yeah, so then I did consent to Pitocin at that point because everything stopped. “It is done.” Amanda: I had the epidural. I had the Pitocin. Things were progressing. I was dilating. We were moving me as much as you can with the epidural and then around 4:00 PM, my epidural wore off and I felt it wear off. I was like, Oh my gosh. At 4:45, the midwife came in and she checked me. She said, “Oh, you are 9 centimeters. This is wonderful. I'll be back in a few hours.” I'm thinking, A few hours, I don't feel like I have a few hours here. I felt my body start pushing all by itself. I was like, Oh my gosh. This is amazing, but I was like, “You have to get her back here. I know she said I was just 9, but you have to get her back here.” She came back and she said, “Oh, you're 10 already. Let's do a practice push.” I was like, “Wait. I need the mirror. Where's the mirror? I want to get the mirror.” There was a full-length mirror that they brought in and I thought there was going to be a little hand mirror situation so I was really happy with the full-length mirror that came in. She said, “Let's do a practice push,” and she was like, “Oh, you are an excellent pusher. You've got this.” I'm watching in the mirror and I hear from the hallway, “Don't let her push until I get in here!” And it was the doctor that I originally interviewed. She came in. She said, “I want to see this through.”Now, meanwhile, I had not seen her throughout my entire pregnancy as one of my providers but I thought that was so cool that she remembered that and came in for this. It was the midwife, not the VBAC midwife but another midwife and her were there with me and as I started to push him and his head came out, the midwife said, “Oh, do you want to feel his head?” Before I could even answer yes, the doctor said, “Oh, she does,” and takes my hand and I feel him. I'm pushing. I'm watching. My doula is taking pictures and all of a sudden, the midwife is blocking the mirror. I'm like, looking at her and I'm like, “I can't see.” I'm hearing her say, “Amanda, Amanda, Amanda.” Finally, I look over and she's blocking the mirror because she is holding my baby in front of me. Meagan: Oh my gosh! No way. Amanda: I was like, “Oh my gosh!” Then I'm looking at him and then there is a bright light behind him and I feel this moment of peace and I feel in my heart and I hear, “It is done.” I just know that God was there with me the entire time and I'm so grateful for that. My husband got to cut the cord and I got to hold him immediately– well, we didn't cut the cord until it stopped pulsing. he was so cute. He was like, “She told me to wait until it's white. Is it white? Is it white? Is it white?” It was just wonderful and he cut the cord. I got immediate skin to skin and I got to do his first latch right then and there which was so different. It was so different than my son. It was just such a redemptive, wonderful experience. I just am so grateful to The VBAC Link for seeing me through it and for giving me the information and just the inspiration to even take this on because if I had never found you, I don't know for sure if I ever would have gone through with it. So, thank you so much for that. Meagan: Oh my gosh. You are so welcome and thank you for sharing this beautiful story. I'm looking at your photo right now and oh my heck. I don't know who took it–Amanda: My doula, she took it. Meagan: Mallory?Amanda: Mallory. Meagan: Mallory killed it with this photo. I mean, seriously it is beautiful. Amanda: Thank you. Thank you. Meagan: I highly suggest if you are listening right now, head over to Instagram or Facebook and check out this absolutely empowering photo. The emotion, oh. Congratulations. I'm so stinking happy for you. Amanda: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It was quite a journey. Importance of lactation supportAmanda: I just wanted to add one more thing if I could. Meagan: Yes. Amanda: I got to nurse Jeffrey David eventually, my first baby once he left the NICU but it was a rough time and then with Charlie, my second, I got to latch him right away and I am still nursing him now. He'll be 3 in June. I just want to say just like you get doula support for your birth, get yourself some lactation support if breastfeeding is the way you want to feed your baby. Meagan: 100%. 100%. Amanda: Yeah, so I used my friend, Lauren. She is from Cozy Latch Counseling and she has seen me through this entire process. I went back to work. I was able to pump and provide milk and now like I said, he's almost 3 and I'm still able to do that. If I hadn't had that lactation support from the very beginning, I don't know if that journey would have been as successful as it was. Meagan: Yeah. I mean, I full-on believe having lactation support even before the baby is here to talk about it. Talk about your plan. Discuss what you are wanting, your desires, your needs, and then getting that help right away even if it's your second, third, fourth, or fifth baby. Everyone is so different and I love that you brought that up because definitely, we are passionate about that for sure as you know or if you have been listening. We love The Lactation Network. We absolutely 100% would agree with you on that. Oh my gosh, well my face is just so happy. Can you just see my face right now? Amanda: I can. Meagan: I'm just smiling so big. My cheeks are throbbing a little bit, but that's a good thing. I'm just so grateful for you. This is such an amazing episode and congratulations again.  ClosingWould you like to be a guest on the podcast? Tell us about your experience at thevbaclink.com/share. For more information on all things VBAC including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Meagan's bio, head over to thevbaclink.com. Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-vbac-link/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

On today's episode of the G Word, our guests will be discussing the CanGene-CanVar programme. Funded by Cancer Research UK, the 5-year programme aims to create an interface between NHS clinical care and research that will expand genetic testing access for those with inherited cancers. Our host Amanda Pichini, Clinical Lead for Genetic Counselling at Genomics England, is joined by Dr Helen Hanson, Consultant in cancer genetics at the Peninsular Regional Genetic Service, Kelly Kohut, Lead Genetic Counsellor at the South West Thames Centre for Genomics, and Rochelle Gold, Patient Representative on the CanGene-Canvar research programme and co-founder of BRCA Journey.   "There is also the possibility of finding out genetic information that's familial or inherited, which could mean that the information is not only important for the person who is being treated for cancer at the current time but also as a next step informing relatives that they might have a higher chance of getting cancers in the future due to a genetic variant..."     You can read the transcript below or download it here: How-are-genetic-tests-transforming-cancer-prevention.docx   Amanda: Hello and welcome to The G Word.  My name is Amanda Pichini and I'm the Clinical Lead for Genetic Counselling at Genomics England.  We know that cancer is a very common disease.  About one in two people will develop cancer at some point in their lifetime.  Cancer is a disease of the genome involving many changes to a person's genome over time as well as other factors.  Only a small proportion of all cancers are inherited, but this can have a significant impact for those families who have a much higher risk of cancer and options to reduce their risk.    Today I'm delighted to be joined by Dr Helen Hanson, Consultant Clinical Geneticist; Kelly Kohut, Consultant Genetic Counsellor; and Rochelle Gold, Patient Representative and co-founder of BRCA Journey.  We'll be discussing the CanGene-CanVar programme which aims to link NHS clinical care and research to expand access to genetic testing and care for people with inherited cancers.  Welcome, Rochelle, Helen and Kelly to The G Word.  Thank you for joining me today.  Let's start with some introductions.  Rochelle, over to you?  Rochelle: Hi, everyone.  I'm Rochelle and I'm one of the Patient Reps on the CanGene-CanVar research programme.  I also co-founded an organisation called BRCA Journey that helps to raise awareness of the BRCA genetic mutation amongst both clinicians and the community, and also supports people who might be at risk of the mutation or who are thinking about testing, all the way through to maybe having preventative treatment or preventative surgery.  We support those with that decisions.  We're not genetic counsellors but we do basically talk to people about our experience and knowledge that we have of what it's like as a patient to be someone living with the mutation.    Amanda: Thank you.  Could you briefly tell us what BRCA is and how you came to be a patient?  Rochelle: BRCA is a genetic mutation that puts people at greater risk of breast and ovarian cancer.  My mum had the mutation, in fact she had two of the mutations which is apparently quite rare.  She passed away from breast cancer and just before she passed away I found out that I had the genetic mutation as well.  I personally have had preventative surgery and reconstruction to prevent myself from getting breast and ovarian cancer.  I got involved in being a patient rep so that I can advocate for people who may have the mutation, but also make sure that as many people as possible can be tested and be aware that they have the mutation and have that power to have the knowledge to be able to do something about it should they so wish.  Amanda: Thank you so much for sharing that with us.  Kelly, over to you?  Kelly: Hello, everyone.  I'm Kelly Kohut, I'm the Lead Consultant Genetic Counsellor at the South West Thames Centre for Genomics, which is based at St George's Hospital in London.  For many years I've been working in clinical practice in genetic counselling, seeing patients and their families regarding personal or family history of cancer, offering genetic testing where that's available, and then giving the results and helping to refer people on for surveillance programmes and to discuss risk reducing options, and also help a lot with communication within families, sharing the information from the genetic test results.    For the past few years, I've also been doing my own research as part of the CanGene-CanVar programme, funded by the charity Cancer Research UK.  This has involved partnering directly with patients and other expert stakeholders to co-design a patient website to support decision-making around the genetic chances of getting cancer in families.     Amanda: Thank you.  And Helen?  Helen: Hi, everyone.  I'm Helen Hanson, I'm a Consultant in Cancer Genetics.  I'm based at the Peninsular Regional Genetic Service which is in Exeter.  In my clinical practice I see patients who either have a cancer diagnosis to consider whether they may have an inherited susceptibility or people who maybe have a family history of cancer to try and determine if they are at risk due to their family history.  Like Kelly and Rochelle I've also been involved in the CanGene-CanVar programme for the last four years.  I've been involved in work package three of the programme which is developing clinical guidelines with the patients who have an inherited predisposition to cancer.  I was also fortunate enough to be given some funding to carry on with this work beyond the programme in the new NIHR Exeter Biomedical Research Centre.    Also, I'm currently chair of the UK Cancer Genetics Group, who has an aim of improving the management of patients who have an inherited predisposition to cancer.  It's been really great to work on all these different things and try and bring things together to try and improve care for patients who do have rare inherited genetic conditions predisposing to cancer.   Amanda: Fantastic.  Thanks, everyone.  Kelly, I wondered if you could start us off by just explaining a little bit more about how genetics and genomics is relevant to cancer.  Especially inherited cancers, why is this an important thing to talk about?  Kelly: The availability of genetic testing has been increasing steadily over the years.  Currently from pretty much anyone who's been diagnosed with cancer there should be some awareness around the possible benefit of knowing the genetics behind the development of that cancer and whether any genetic or genomic testing might help to choose more personalised treatments or surgical options for that cancer that's been diagnosed.  There is also the possibility of finding out genetic information that's familial or inherited, which could mean that the information is not only important for the person who is being treated for cancer at the current time but also as a next step informing relatives that they might have a higher chance of getting cancers in the future due to a genetic variant and that they could ask their GP for referral to genetics to be offered genetic testing and to find out about their chances of getting cancer and the choices for how to manage that.    Amanda: Thank you.  There are clearly some important things that someone would do differently when they know they have an inherited cancer.  Helen, how can we make sure that clinicians and patients and families know what do to in these situations?  Helen: Following on from Kelly explaining the amount of genetic testing we can offer has really increased over the last five to ten years and we're not in a position to offer many more patients genetic testing, it's important that we also consider what to do with that information when we discover somebody does have a pathogenic variant or a mutation in a cancer predisposition gene.  There are over 100 different cancer predisposition genes described and actually having a variant in one these genes is rare.  It's difficult and like other conditions in medicine due to their rarity to really understand how best to manage these patients.  But what's very important is that we try to understand how best we can help patients manage their cancer risk based on the lifetime risk of cancer and the particular cancers that they can develop and ensure that patients across the country are all being given the same advice, the same information about their cancer risks.    Through the CanGene-CanVar programme we've had a whole work package which is devoted to clinical guideline development where we've looked at a number of these genes and looked at the evidence that is available in terms of cancer risks, the utility of surveillance or early detection of cancers in that condition, and also whether risk-reducing surgery could be offered.  Really try to bring together groups of experts to discuss the evidence because for some genes it really is quite limited due to the rarity of the condition.  The overarching aim is really to develop guidance that is relevant and can be offered in our current clinical practice and is consistent to all patients who have a variant in one of these genes.  Amanda: You mentioned that many of these inherited cancer conditions are very rare. Is there a need to look internationally or collaborate internationally?  How do you pull some of these things together when there's so little information?    Helen: We definitely have found it really helpful to have international collaborations.  Some of these conditions there may be very few patients in the UK who have this condition, so each individual clinician who works in cancer genetics may have only seen one or two patients with the condition than themselves and, therefore, collaborating with international colleagues has been very helpful and we have recently published some guidance for a condition BAP1 tumour predisposition syndrome which increases an individual's lifetime risk of developing mesothelioma, which is a type of lung cancer, renal cancer and melanomas of the skin and eye.  This is a rare condition, but we worked with European colleagues to develop a set of guidelines advising what surveillance the patient should have, so looking to melanomas, looking for early detection of kidney cancers, so having that international collaboration has been really very helpful because in the UK there are so few cases per centre of individuals who have that condition.     Amanda: That sounds really helpful.  Rochelle, we know that shared decision-making is so important in healthcare.  How can we make sure that the voices of patients are reflected within these guidelines that were developing and that it's clear to them what needs to happen for their healthcare?     Rochelle: I think it's really important that patients are involved in the development of the guidelines, first of all, and actually within those guidelines there is stuff that talks about that, being about shared decision-making.  A lot of these guidelines are in a language that are quite a clinical language that is not necessarily accessible to patients themselves.  It's really important that they're part of the creation of them but also that there are things out there that enable people to understand what are these guidelines about, what do these guidelines actually mean in practice.  When you find out that you have a particular genetic mutation, of course, the first place you probably go is Google.  You find a hell of a lot of information and you find all sorts from different countries and different people and different organisations.  You're like which is the thing I need to look at, which is the thing that actually tells me what's going on, which is the thing that really helps me to understand what this actually means for me and what should happen to me?  What is the pathway for me, etc.    I think we also need to recognise that people have different levels of health literacy as well.  I am someone who can probably navigate my way around a very complex system, which is the NHS, maybe better than other people.  But there are plenty of people out there who this is new people, this is a completely new thing that's happened to them, a completely new thing to understand.  If you're not used to being part of health systems and navigating your way around it, it can be quite scary.  What does mutation mean?  What does it mean for me?  What does it mean to my future?  What does it mean for my family?  All this information.  There needs to be something somewhere that talks about this, some sort of lay way and helps people to understand what this means for them and helps them to engage with it.  To some extent, that's where my organisation was born from, that thing about having somebody who can just talk about it in normal words, in normal terms and normal views of what these guidelines actually do mean.  The fact is they are just guidelines, they don't tell you this is what you do.  You're this person, you're in this circumstance, you do this, it doesn't.  There's some ambiguity there that needs to be navigated by the patient and they need support in order to do that.  Amanda: That's a great point.  Having previously worked as a genetic counsellor, also seeing patients with inherited cancer conditions, it really strikes you how individual each person's journey and decisions are.  They're thinking about all kinds of factors in their life or in their family's life.  Navigating through that and understanding do I have surgery or do I have screening and how do I make decisions about this is based on my previous experiences and so many other factors.  Having access to different sources of support to help people navigate through that feels incredibly important.    We've been talking a bit about inherited cancers in general, but you're all here because you're involved in the CanGene-CanVar programme.  Kelly, could you tell us a bit more about what that is and what he programme is aiming to achieve?  Kelly: The CanGene-CanVar programme is a five year grant funded by Cancer Research UK.  It involves six different work packages, so lots of experts all around the UK have been allowed to have some dedicated time to work on specific areas where there hasn't been enough resource put in in the past which has resulted in a real gap between the research and the current findings and actually using that information to benefit patients by bridging the gap and putting those research findings into clinical care.    My programme is in work package four which is co-designing patient resources which are decision support interventions.  Basically, it's a website and it can be printed as a booklet and it's interactive and it's up to date and it's personalised to help convey the complicated information about genetic cancer conditions in a way that's meaningful and patients can understand, and it helps them with their personalised shared decision-making.  The CanGene-CanVar programme is underpinned by the patient reference panel and they've been involved, including Rochelle and others, from the conception of the idea of the programme and all the way through with various different activities helping to look at documents as they're developed, before their finalised, and giving input in focus groups and one-on-one and email conversations.  They're called upon frequently to share their lived experience and say what's important to them when they make decisions and that's really helped to drive the direction of the research and inform the results before they're published.     Amanda: That sounds like a really helpful approach to developing something in a way that's really working very closely with patients and participants.  Rochelle, it sounded like you were involved in that.  Can you tell us a bit about what that was like from your perspective?  Rochelle: It's really rewarding, it's really motivating to be actually one of the patient reps in relation to this.  I don't want to make my colleagues from the team blush, but it's just such an inclusive environment where as a patient is really welcomed, really heard, it's very much a partnership and that's been really, really important and it makes you feel valued as a patient and actually the importance of the lived experience the patient view has really been prominent in this.  I would say that's why it's helped develop such a useful tool, the fact as a patient people are really valuing and taking into account our lived experience, our views, our understanding.  It's been quite fun in some of the sessions.  There have been some good debates between us and some of the clinicians and it's been really good and really useful.  I think some of the people who maybe haven't encountered a patient panel before and engaged with patient's lived experience have probably learn a lot from it because we are pretty empowered to use our voice in this.  It's been a really great experience.   Amanda: I'd love to dig into those debates a bit more.  Kelly, were there things that you changed in the decision aid as a result of some of those discussions or as a result of that input that maybe surprised you?   Kelly: We have made changes based directly on what we've learned from the patients presenting their lived experiences.  They've been very open and honest with us.  Like Rochelle, I felt so privileged to be part of this real partnership with the patients.  As a genetic counsellor who had many years of experience in clinical practice before moving into this research role, I've been really surprised but also gratified by how much I've been able to learn from the patients in a different way because I am sort of taking a step back, I'm there as a researcher and not directly as a clinician looking after someone one-on-one in clinic and just thinking about their specific needs at that time.  But because I'm hearing from people from all different situations, different parts of the UK and other countries and maybe it's 10/20 years since they had their genetic diagnosis are actually getting a bigger picture of their care needs that we might not have heard about as the clinicians on the ground because they might not be coming back to tell us.  If we haven't opened the door to that conversation about their personal situation or who's influencing them or what's important to them when they make decisions, we just might not have learned about the thing they're grappling with and they've gone off and maybe Googled, they've found a patient support group or something else to support them.    In my research and in my interviews and the focus groups, all of the activities I've been learning about the gaps in care, what might be needed to address that.  The decision aid has not been yet ruled into clinical practice but we're very keen to get it out there and everyone wants it and wants to use it.  We want to make sure that we've developed it in a robust patient-centred way as much as we can for us before we put it out.  It will always be updated and go through refinements, but hopefully in the New Year we will be able to let people start using it in the real world situation.  Amanda: That's great, I'm sure you're looking forward to that.  Helen: I was just going to add to that in terms of the guideline development we've had a number of consensus meetings where we've made decisions about guidelines, for example, genes that can be predisposed to ovarian cancer and we've included patients from the patient reference panel and from other patient groups in those consensus meetings.  Again, as Kelly said, that's been so helpful because it's really brought something to those discussions and it is a different perspective than when we see patients in clinic because often we're seeing them at the point of genetic testing or maybe for their results, but actually that doesn't give us that overview of the whole patient journey and the whole patient experience.  I think that has been really one of the benefits of this programme and Kelly has been really pioneering the co-design of patient information leaflets, decision aids with patients.  Rather than clinicians designing things for patients that we think that they will understand, it's actually working with patients from the start to get things right the first time.  It's been a really great part of this programme.  Amanda: Rochelle, did you want to add something further here?   Rochelle: Yes.  I think one of the sessions that we had as a patient and clinician and researcher session that really stood out for me was when we started looking at how do people make decisions. We had academics and researchers who've looked at how do people make decisions, talk about the knowledge base and the research base that we have about it.  As a larger group of patients we got together to discuss about how have we made decisions.  It was really interesting because I don't think I've ever reflected on how I made the decision and what came from that in terms of what I did about having my mutation.  Hearing about how other people did as well, that session really does stick in my mind and actually I learnt a lot as a person about decision-making theory but also about myself and reflecting on how I make decisions.  So as a patient involved in this, it's not always about what I bring to this but actually as a patient rep you get a lot from it, too.  I've learnt a lot from the colleagues that I've worked with.  Amanda: That's fantastic.  It's really great to hear the careful thought that's gone into this, a real excellent example that hopefully others can look to.  I think, Kelly, hasn't your work won an award recently as well?  Kelly: We as a whole team won an award from the academic health science network and the NHS Confederation, it's called the Innovate Awards 2023.  This was for excellence in patient and public involvement in transformation and innovation.  Yes, it was a chance to showcase the really positive experience that we've had.  I think on all sides we've learnt a lot from each other and just to hope to inspire other researchers and clinicians to take this co-design approach with patients because we all benefit from it so much.  We think that the resources, the guidelines, everything that we develop will be better from the start if we work together throughout the project.    We're really hoping to encourage others to consider from the beginning of their idea about a research programme or clinical development to bring the patients in right at the start, because they can really help to guide where things go next and then throughout.  Even through to publications being on, committees, being co-chairs, presenting together at conferences, that can all help to really share the experience and the benefits that we get from the partnership.  Amanda: That's great, congratulations.  Coming back now to some of the aims of CanGene-CanVar and trying to bridge that gap, as you said, between research and clinical care, I guess that means there are some needs that still aren't being met that are falling through that gap at the moment.  Helen, from your perspective what are some of those unmet needs that we currently have or areas that are still needing improvement?    Helen: I think there's still lots that we have to learn, particularly about individual risks for patients.  We might have patients who all have a pathogenic variant in a certain gene but their risks might be slightly different due to factors that can modify their risk.  Trying to understand some of those risks better so that we can really have much better informed discussions with patients about their lifetime cancer risks I think would be really helpful.  Work package one of the programme is really focussing on that and looking at some of the information we have through national registries and trying to understand risks for specific genes better, which will help our discussions with patients, and then we still need to understand, which is more outside the programme, more how surveillance, so early cancer detection through screenings such as mammograms or ultrasounds for different cancers can help detect cancers early. There's still lots of information that we need to learn.    I think Kelly's decision aid which has been focussed on Lynch Syndrome, I think that can be translated across lots of other genetic conditions, because for each gene there is a different set of decisions.  For some of the genes that we developed clinical guidelines for we might be recommending slightly different management or for some of the genes we've recommended maybe a minimum and an extended level of surveillance, particularly for a gene called DICER1 where we've offered different options in childhood.  Decision aids would potentially help in some of those other genes building on the work that's already been developed as part of the programme.  Although the programme is coming to an end in the next year, I think there's still lots of work to be done in this area.   Amanda: It really sounds like you've all been collectively improving how much this work is worthwhile, so that's great to hear.  Rochelle, how about for you, are there areas that you would see as unmet needs or areas where we or research can improve to help patients and families with inherited cancers.  Rochelle: Similar to some of the stuff that Helen was saying, knowing more about what happens when people have different types of treatment, different types of surveillance and monitoring and stuff like that, I think there are things that are evolving all the time.  I think in the end when you think about gaps, there's nothing that's going to be written down on paper that says if you have this, do this.  In the end, every single patient is an individual with individual circumstances.  I think until we actually know that if you do this, this happens and this happens, this is going to be your chances of survival if you go through this route.  Even then when you've got the chance of survival, that's literally just a probability, it's not a binary this will happen or that will happen.  There's always going to be a need for discussion, there's always going to be a need for these brilliant genetic counsellors that we have to talk us through some of those complex decisions that we have to make.  I think, yes, we'll get more information, we'll get more evidence, we'll get more understanding of treatments that work best for different people, and we'll get it out there and we absolutely do need to do that.    Even when you have all the information you need, even if you made a solid decision, I mean, when I found out I had the mutation immediately I was like, right, that's it, I'll have preventative surgery after what happened to my mum.  It was an absolute no-brainer for me.  For other people it might not have been if they were at a different life stage.  I'd had my kids, I didn't need my ovaries, I didn't need my womb, it was pretty clear cut.  Even then when I was thinking about the different treatment and when to have that surgery, I got most of my information from bumping into somebody in the ladies' toilets who has been through it before.  I think there's always going to be a need in terms of being able to have those conversations to take in all the information you do that and make some sort of informed decision.  What came out of that decision-making workshop and all the other things that we did about probabilities, it's all just a model.  It's a model of what might happen.  The thing is, all of these models, they're all wrong, they just help you maybe make a discussion or a decision that might be right.  You just never know.  I still don't know if the decisions I made were the right decisions either.  There needs to be that space for people to consider their options, you're never going to get the definitive answer.    Amanda: An important message there.  We talk a lot about using digital tools to be able to do things better at scale, better ways to give information, but I think what you're saying is we can't replace certain elements of human connection, we can't underestimate the value of that.  You made a really good point earlier as well about how so many of these decisions have uncertainty and it can be really difficult to navigate the complexities of a health system.  Perhaps even more challenging if you have struggles with health literacy or if you are an underserved group in some way or another.     Kelly, I think you mentioned that some of your research has also touched on developing information for underserved groups.  Can you tell us a bit more about that?  Kelly: We recognised that there are many underserved groups that are not represented in research, in literature, and applied for additional funding to do some specific targeted projects in the community.  There were a couple of examples I can mention.  One was inspired by colleagues at the Royal Marsden who made some videos about prostate screening and the had black men and their family members talking about this in a relaxed barber's shop setting.  Through reaching out into the community I was connected with Lee Townsend from Macmillan who's been making these barbershop videos around London for the last seven years.  He's focussed on a number of topics like mental health, vaccination and cancer.  We connected and it was really about making that connection in the community, him as a trusted leader, and having formed partnerships with some of the barbers who opened up their barbershops for filming these sessions and went way beyond that.    One of them has actually trained as a counsellor himself because he said men are coming for a haircut and actually they have a bald head, they don't need the haircut, they're coming actually for the chat.  Because it's benefitting their mental health and they felt able to open up about topics that they wouldn't talk about even at home with their family members or with their friends, such as symptoms of cancer, going for cancer screening or presenting for treatment if they were symptomatic.  It's really powerful.  We've actually filmed six videos with black and minority ethnicity patients, talking about their cancer experience and they've really both helped others by setting an example that it's okay to talk about these things.  Also, through the process an added benefit was helping themselves, so it was peer support.  When they came to the barbershop to film their stories, they didn't need to stay for the whole time but they did stay for the three hours.  They said afterwards how helpful it was just to hear others in a similar situation sharing their stories.  One of them told me he's got up on stage and shared his cancer journey and he's been going to these patient groups and talking when he didn't feel able to do that in the past.  It's been a great project and we're going to be adding the videos to the CanGene-CanVar patient decision aid website soon.  Another thing that we've done in the diet and lifestyle section of the website where it talks about things that people might do to lower their chances of getting cancer have partnered with Professor Ranjit Manchanda who had some colleagues in India and made some infographics that specifically depict patients of a South Asian heritage and the types of foods that they might be choosing to give examples of how they might for example try to get more fibre in their diet to lower the chances of getting bowel cancer or trying to eat more fruits and vegetables or drink less alcohol.  It shows images of Indian patients.  What people have told me in my research, my interviews, focus groups, is they tend to go and try to search for something that means something to them, so they're looking for someone like me.  One of the patients I filmed she said that she had breast cancer as a young black woman and she was only middle-aged women on the websites.  She thought why is this, do black women not get breast cancer or young women like me?  For her to share her story was very brave but also has the potential to help a lot of other people in the community.   Amanda: That's really powerful, so understanding those nuances in different cultures or communities or groups is just so crucial to really being able to also develop information or messages or provide care that's going to really reach those people where they are, I guess.  This has been a really fantastic conversation.  If we could end with a final question, it would be great to hear from your perspective just one thing that you'd like to see in the next five to ten years when it comes to care for inherited cancer susceptibility conditions.  Helen, let's start with you?  Helen: I think that in developing the guidelines one of the things that we've had to struggle or grapple with is a lack of evidence and the lack of the data that's available for some of these conditions.  I'm really hoping that over the next five to ten years that we will see much more data on cancer risks and outcomes of surveillance progress for people who have an inherited predisposition.  Then we can utilise that information to be able to share with patients to enable them to make best decisions about their care.  There's a number of initiatives that are currently underway thinking about how we might better collect data on patients with inherited cancer predisposition in the UK, through registries, so I am really hoping that we manage to get some useful data that we can then use in our discussions with patients going forward.  Amanda: Thank you.  Kelly?  Kelly: I think that over the next five to ten years as awareness and availability of genetic testing continues to increase, we know that there will be more and more families identified who have a higher genetic risk of getting certain cancers.  We can't replace that personalised counselling that takes place, face-to-face or sometimes telephone and video appointments with a healthcare profession.  So there are more resources needed for the NHS to deliver this.  To compliment that, the patient website decision aid that we have co-designed is one way to help.  What patients tell us they would like, access to a central trusted source of information that's up to date.  Importantly in genetics it's very fastmoving, there's a lot of research, guidelines are changing, and it's very crucial to have information that's correct and relevant for people, and also meaningful.  We can only do that by partnering together with patients and co-designing things rather than designing them and asking them afterwards if they're useful.  It's a partnership all the way through that we all benefit from.    As I said earlier, it's not a one-size-fits-all, decision-making is so personal and shared decision-making is recommended but we don't always have enough time in clinic to really address all of the issues that the patient might not have even thought about themselves.  Having something like a patient-facing resource website booklet that they can look at in their own time, prepare for their questions that they really want to focus on in clinic, it might help give them the confidence to bring something up that they might not have otherwise.  It's about a number of different ways of helping to support people.  We've identified that there are gaps in care that we could try to help address if we have more resource in future.  Those are my aspirations.  Thank you, Amanda.   Amanda: Thank you.  And Rochelle, to you?  Rochelle: I think for me I would like to have as many people as possible to understand or know about their genetic mutation status.  We know people don't even know about the fact that they may have a genetic mutation that may make them more susceptible to cancers, and we know that even then if you do can you get access to testing to know whether you've got it or not.  That is the most important thing.  My mum, if she'd known that some of this was related, if she'd had that awareness that breast and ovarian cancer in your family was related to potential genetic risk, maybe she would have pushed harder to get testing and maybe she wouldn't have been tested when it's too late.  In the end, all this knowledge and empowering people with knowledge, whether that be about empowering people with the knowledge that they may have a genetic mutation, there's a possibility of the genetic mutation, that these things are related and empowering people through the knowledge of knowing their genetic mutation status, all that is something that saves lives.  From my view, it undoubtedly probably has saved my life and so my hope for the future is that we can empower more people like me and we can save more lives.   Amanda: Thank you for our guests today Dr Helen Hansen, Rochelle Gold and Kelly Kohut.  If you enjoyed today's episode, we'd love your support.  Please subscribe to The G Word on your favourite podcast app and like, share and rate us wherever you listen.  I've been your host, Amanda Pichini.  This podcast was edited by Mark Kendrick at Ventoux Digital and produced by Naimah Callachand.  Thanks for listening.     

Riding Shotgun With Charlie #180 The DCP Gals & GOAL    On August 27, Gun Owners Action League hosted an event called The 2A Freedom Celebration. They pulled in some names you've seen on RSWC. Amanda Suffecool (#009), Holly Sullivan (#036), Jared Yanis (#051). And some locals like Toby Leary, (#143) Kerrie Ann Auclair (#139). We were able to film a show with a few of the local DCP gals, Moe Palmer & Bonnie Marshall. Mike Harris, Director of Public Policy, also joined us. Yeah… it was a car full of teal shirts!   There were several folks that sent some love GOAL's way. Todd Eccles from Patriot Defense Podcast, Nikki Goeser, Michael Sodini, David Coy, Klint Macro, John Petrolino, and the closing video was Cam Edwards. Of course Jim Wallace spoke, Jon Green (#030 & #034), Mike & Angi gave away a couple rifles. And Garet & Jeff from the GOAL Podcast (#177) were there as well. It was really a great time. Lots of fun catching up with everyone. I've said for a long time, these kinds of events are family get-togethers.    We gave everyone the hot shotgun seat for today's show. Starting with Kerrie Ann, she doesn't get into Boston often so she was excited to see so much. We talked about the Gun Law Listening Tour and how it turned into HD.4420. But she talked about going to one of the stops and speaking with a woman who said she knew she would be dead if she tried to use a gun against her domestic abuser. Kerrie Ann helped her re-think if she had a gun and some training, the gun could have been an equalizer.    Mike Harris talked about his time working in the State House in Boston and learning the ropes there. But he also acted as a tour guide. He does know a bit of Boston history and how to get around BeanTown.    Holly Sullivan took the next spotlight. She brought up that the GOAL event is the kind of event where the states need to get together and have a conversation about what is working and what isn't. This is one of the things she really wants to work on and connect state groups so we can be just as organized as the antis.    Bonnie Marshall has only been shooting for a few years. She's become a Range Safety Officer and started helping Kerrie Ann with her other group, The Well Armed Woman. It was great to have Bonnie break out of her shell and join us for the fun adventure.    Moe Palmer is also a local Quincy MA gal. She's also an RSO working with some local instructors to run the shooting line at live fire courses. Moe reached out to me a few years ago.  We took a road trip to SIG Academy in 2022 when they opened. She's also a regular on the Patriot Defense Podcast with Todd Eccles.    And our closer is Amanda Suffecool. DC Project Advisor. NRA BOD member. Host of Eye On The Target Radio. Instructor. And my conscience. Amanda was great at the event. She talked about how GOAL is winning even though it feels like we may not be all the time. She had a busy week. She was in Nashville on Monday with the DCP. She met with Shelley Hill from The Complete Combatant in Georgia. Then she headed to Boston for the weekend. The following week, she headed to Dallas for NRA BOD meetings.    We stopped for selfies, got sidetracked, and saw some sights in Boston. Like Cheers, The Granary Burial Ground, The Old State House & where the Boston Massacre started. Kenmore Square and drove next to Fenway Park, followed by going down Boylston Street, where the Marathon bombings happened and finally up Newbury Street.    Yeah…it was an undertaking editing this beast with 6 cameras all together. Some of the batteries ran out, but we did the best we could. This is a long show, the longest I've done. But I wanted everyone to get some time Riding Shotgun.    Favorite quotes:  Kerrie Ann: “If you had a gun it creates an equalizer for someone that's 5'1”.” Mike: “The unintended consequences of that (covid) a lot of people were more activated so it's easier to get people focused on this bill (HD.4420)” Holly: “In such tiny states in New England, non-resident permits make life accessible.”  Bonnie: “It's a bunch of like minded people, really fun.” Moe: “I didn't know there was a community out there. I didn't realize it was a passion.” Amanda: “It's great when your life comes together and you have a mission that will make a difference and leave a legacy.”   The DC Project https://www.dcproject.info/   Gun Owners Action League https://goal.org/   Connecticut Citizens Defense League https://www.ccdl.us/   Eye On The Target Radio https://eyeonthetargetradio.com/   Sisters In Arms- A Firearms Story https://www.youtube.com/@SIA-AFirearmStory   Armed Women of America https://armedwomen.org/ Second Amendment Foundation https://secure.anedot.com/saf/donate?sc=RidingShotgun   Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms https://www.ccrkba.org/     Please support the Riding Shotgun With Charlie sponsors and supporters.    Buy RSWC & GunGram shirts & hoodies, stickers & patches, and mugs at the store! http://ridingshotgunwithcharlie.com/rswc-shop/   Dennis McCurdy Author, Speaker, Firewalker http://www.find-away.com/   Self Defense Radio Network http://sdrn.us/   Buy a Powertac Flashlight, use RSWC as the discount code and save 15% www.powertac.com/RSWC  

Key takeaways: • Control what you can and let go of what you cannot control. • After adversity strikes, take time to recover. Seek out resources to determine what happened and why it happened and get back out there. • Don't compare yourself to other athletes, because your success may look different from their success.   The road to success is rarely a straight line. In today's world, people are used to seeking out instant gratification, but becoming a successful athlete does not happen overnight. Instead, success comes from consistency and continuing to show up even in the face of adversity. In today's episode, Amanda Marek, triathlete and triathlon coach, speaks with Dr. Andrew Fix about how to keep pushing forward after a setback.   When Amanda was 7 years old, she was diagnosed with a seizure disorder. Doctors told her mother that she should be pulled from all sports, but her mother had other ideas. She refused to give up on her daughter and instilled that same tenacity in Amanda. After falling in love with triathlons in her senior year of college, Amanda pushed herself to train hard and entered her first full IronMan in 2015. Even though she was in love with endurance sports, success did not come easily. She continued to have issues with the running portion, culminating in a huge blow out in 2018 where she had a seizure 400 meters from the finish line. Where many people may have given up after such an adverse event, Amanda pivoted, seeking out the resources she needed to recover properly and making a new plan for how to best prepare Amanda's body for a successful run.    The road to success is full of ups and downs. It's all about staying consistent and getting back up after each mistake or setback. If you are interested in trying a triathlon, you absolutely can make it happen with dedication and a lot of hard work.   Quotes • “All too often I think people see really everything from sport to your professional life to social, everybody sees it as a straight line. But it's a lot of ups and downs. It's a lot of mistakes and getting back up and getting to the top of that straight line.” (8:45-9:11 | Amanda) • “There's no shortage of options on how you can do this and how you can be successful. I'm a big advocate for anyone getting involved in the sport.” (25:24-25:37 | Amanda)  • “Consistency is the most important thing.” (25:50-25:53 | Amanda) • “We live in a society where there's kind of this need for instant gratification…you have to make that decision to show up and put the work in.” (26:54-27:38 | Amanda)  • “I had a seizure 400 meters from the finish line. And, being the stubborn person I am and knowing what happened and knowing my body, whether it was right or wrong, I crawled to the finish line.” (43:08-43:22 | Amanda) • “It's really important to not compare yourself to every other athlete because what they do is going to be a lot different than what you do, and your success may not look like their success.” (59:44-59:59 | Amanda)   Links   Flux Footwear https://snwbl.io/flux-footwear/andrewfix 10% off   Xero Shoes: 10% off https://xeroshoes.com/go/drandrewfix   drinklmnt.com/physioroom - free variety pack with purchase.   RAD Roller - $5 off http://radroller.refr.cc/drandrewfix   Revogreen https://revogreen.co/drandrewfix   Connect with Amanda Marek: Tri 4 Schools: https://tri4schools.org/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/powerinthegrannygear/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ammarek/   Connect with Physio Room:  Website | ​​https://physioroomco.com/  Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/physioroomco/ Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/physioroomco Andrew's Personal Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/dr.andrewfix/  Andrew's Personal Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/andrew.fix.9/   Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Prepare for a laugh-out-loud journey through motherhood with Mom Cave's Jen and Amanda Rodriguez, the brilliant mind behind "50 Things to Do in Baby's First Year." In their discussion, they'll share Amanda's personal experiences of raising her three children (now 21, 18, and 15 years old) and the ups and downs of parenthood. Their must-read book is brimming with hilarious stories, clever illustrations, and practical advice on how to maintain your sanity during your baby's first year. Discover how to balance your relationships, keep the spark alive, and hold onto your humanity amidst the chaos. This survival guide is a must-have for new moms who want to keep it real and find humor in the madness of motherhood!Get the book here: https://amzn.to/3Lo0T3q (affiliate link)

Joël is joined by Amanda Beiner, a Senior Software Engineer at GitHub, who is known for her legendary well-organized notes. They talk about various types of notes: debugging, todos, mental stack, Zetelkasten/evergreen notes, notetaking apps and systems, and visual note-taking and diagramming too! @amandabeiner (https://twitter.com/amandabeiner) Mermaid.live (https://mermaid.live) Monodraw (https://monodraw.helftone.com/) Zettlekasten (https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/) Evergreen Notes (https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes) Notion (https://www.notion.so/) Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. And today, I'm joined by Amanda Beiner, a Senior Software Engineer at GitHub. AMANDA: Hey, Joël. Great to see you. JOËL: And together, we're here to share a little bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Amanda, what is new in your world? AMANDA: Well, one thing I'm really excited about is that my team at GitHub is experimenting with how we're going to incorporate learning and sharing what we've learned with each other in new ways, and I'm really excited to see where people take that. So, one of the things that we're thinking of is that we all get really busy, and we all have exciting projects that we're working on in the day-to-day, and sometimes it can be really hard to pull yourself away from them to do some learning that would be something that will probably help you in the long run. But every time we do do projects like that, people are really excited about it, and people like to collaborate. So we're just trying to figure out how we can make that a more regular thing because it's great for our whole team. JOËL: I love that. Do you have a project or something that you've been getting into recently to learn? AMANDA: Yeah. One of the things that I have been working on is that this is the first backend-focused role that I've had in my entire career. So I feel like I just kind of keep pulling back layers on how different forms of magic work. And I'm just trying to get closer to the metal of what is powering our databases. And that's something that I've been really excited to learn some more about. JOËL: So it's digging into a lot of, like, Postgres and just general database theory. AMANDA: Yeah. So for me, I've spent a lot of time at the Active Record layer as I have been settling into my role and figuring out what our domain models are that we care about. And I'm trying to get a little bit more into the questions of why did these tables end up looking the way that they do? Why are they normalized or denormalized where they are? And trying to get a better idea of the theory behind those decisions. JOËL: And this is a new team that you've joined. AMANDA: This is an existing team that I've joined a year ago now. JOËL: So it sounds like you're dealing with a somewhat unfamiliar codebase. You're looking at a bunch of existing models and database tables. That can be a lot to process and understand when you first join a team. Do you have an approach that you like to use when you're looking at unknown code for the first time? AMANDA: Yeah. I usually like to dive right in as much as I can, even if it's with a very small bug fix or something like that, something that allows me to just get my hands dirty from the beginning and poke around what models I'm dealing with, and maybe some of the adjacent ones that I don't need to know about now but might want to come back to later. JOËL: One thing that I find is really helpful for me are diagramming and note-taking. So if it's something like a database table or ActiveRecord models that I'm not familiar with, if it's more than maybe two or three, which is probably the most I can keep in my head, I have to start drawing some kind of like an entity-relationship diagram or maybe even just a bulleted list somewhere where it's like here are the things and how they connect to each other. Otherwise, I'm like, I don't know, I don't have enough RAM in my brain for that. AMANDA: That sounds like a really helpful approach. How do you approach creating these diagrams? JOËL: Occasionally, I will just draw it out by hand with pen and paper. But more recently, I've been using tools like Mermaid.js and specifically the website mermaid.live that allows you to just put in some names and arrows, and it will build out a diagram for you. And that's been really helpful to explore and understand what is going on with different entities that relate to each other. AMANDA: I've used Mermaid.js recently, and I really enjoyed it as well. I found that writing something that lets me write words or something somewhat like words and takes care of the drawing for me is probably best for everyone involved. JOËL: Yeah, that's a good point. It's kind of like Markdown, the ability to just write a little bit of text and move on and not worry about the size of boxes or the shape of the arrows or whatever. It helps you to really stay in that flow and keep moving. AMANDA: I definitely agree. I feel like I can't have been the only person that somehow ended up very deep into the Figma documentation because I didn't quite know how to do what I was supposed to do, and I forgot what I was trying to draw in the first place. JOËL: Right. It's really easy to put your designer hat on and want to make something like a beautiful diagram when this is really more of a capturing your state of mind. It's a rough note, not something you're necessarily going to publish. So, in addition to visuals, do you find yourself taking a lot of notes when you're exploring code or debugging code? AMANDA: Yeah. I feel like I tend to jot a lot of things down, maybe class names, maybe some links to PRs or issues, or anywhere that might have context about what I'm looking at and how it got in that way. At this point in the process, it feels my notes usually feel like a bit of a bullet point list that doesn't quite make sense to me yet but maybe will get some shaping later. JOËL: What kind of things do you tend to record in those notes? AMANDA: I think one of the things that I'm usually trying to get out of those notes is just a snapshot of what I'm trying to accomplish at the time that I'm creating them. What's the bug that I'm trying to solve, and how did I get into this rabbit hole? So that if it ends up being the wrong one, I can follow my breadcrumbs back out and start a different way. JOËL: Oh, that is really powerful. I love the imagery you used there of following breadcrumbs. And I feel like that's sometimes something I wish I had when I'm either exploring a particular code path or trying to find a bug. And at some point, I've gone a pretty long path, and I need to back up. And I don't remember exactly where I was or how I got to this point, especially if I've gone down a path, backtracked a little bit, gone down a different path, backtracked, gone further down a third path. And so having breadcrumbs, I think, is a really valuable thing that I wish I did more when I was debugging. AMANDA: Yeah. And one of the most helpful breadcrumbs that I found is just a list of questions. What was the question that I was trying to answer when I opened this file or looked at this method, and did it help me solve that question or answer that question? And if the answer is no, then I can refer back to what the question was and try to think about what else might help me solve that question. JOËL: I also love that. It's really easy to get sidetracked by other questions or other ideas when exploring or debugging. And sometimes I find that half hour later, I haven't answered the original question I came here to answer, and I kind of haven't even tried. And so, maybe writing down my questions before I go down a path would help me stay more focused during a debugging session rather than just trying to keep it all in my head. AMANDA: I very much relate to getting nerd sniped by something that looks interesting but ultimately doesn't solve the original problem that you were trying to. JOËL: This even happens to me when I'm pair programming. And so we'll say out loud the question we're trying to answer is this; let's open this file. And then you go into it, and you're like, oh, now that is an unusual line of code right there. AMANDA: [laughs] JOËL: I wonder why they're doing that. Let me check the git blame on this line. Oh, it's from 2015? AMANDA: [laughs] JOËL: I wonder what was happening there. Was that part of a Rails upgrade? And then, at some point, the other person has to interject and be like, "That's all fascinating, but I think the question we're actually trying to answer is..." and we get back on track. AMANDA: I feel like that's a really good opportunity, maybe for a different kind of note of just interesting curiosities in a given codebase. I find that one of the skills that I'm trying to get better at is, rather than building a repository of information or answers to questions, just building a mental map of where the information I'm trying to find lives so that when someone asks me a question or when I have to solve something I don't necessarily know the answer, but I just know the resource to find that will point me in the direction of that answer. And I feel like those kinds of explorations are really helpful for building out that mental model, even if it may be at the time seems like an unrelated rabbit hole. JOËL: So this kind of note is a bit more permanent than a bread crumb style note would be. AMANDA: Yeah, maybe. And I guess maybe it's less of a note, and it feels kind of like an index. JOËL: Hmmm. AMANDA: Like something that's connecting other pieces of information. JOËL: That's really interesting. It's got me thinking about the fact that note-taking can be very different in different situations and for different purposes. So we've talked a little bit about debugging. I think we've mixed debugging and exploration. Maybe those two are not the same, and you treat notes differently. Actually, do you treat those two as different, or do you have different approaches to note-taking when you're exploring a new codebase versus debugging a particular problem? AMANDA: I think that those kinds of notes could probably be a little bit different because I think when I'm onboarding onto a new codebase, I'm trying to cast a pretty wide net and give some overall information about what these things do that by the time I'm very deep in debugging, it might be information that I already know very well. So I feel like maybe debugging notes are a little bit more procedural. They are a little bit more I did X, and I did Y, and I did Z, and these were the questions. And the introductory notes to a new codebase might be more along the lines of this is what this model does, and stuff that will eventually become second nature and might be useful to pass off to someone else who's onboarding but which I might myself not refer back to after a certain amount of time. JOËL: I see. That's an interesting point because not only might the type of notes you take be different in different scenarios, but even their lifespan could be different. The value of a debugging note, that sort of breadcrumbs, might really only be that useful for a few hours or a couple of days. I can imagine notes you're taking while you're exploring a codebase those might be helpful for a much longer period and, as you said, maybe in passing them on to someone else when they're joining a team. AMANDA: So that makes me think of whether the debugging notes should be as short-lived as I'm making them sound because I feel like there are times where you know you've debugged something previously, but you didn't keep the notes. Maybe they were just on a scrap of paper, and now they're gone. And I feel like I'd like to do a better job of digesting those notes a little bit better and eventually turning them into something that can be a little bit longer-lived. JOËL: That's fair. I find that, especially for debugging, I like to capture a lot of what was in my notes in the eventual commit message for the fix. Of course, my random breadcrumbs probably don't make sense in the commit message, but a lot of what I have learned along the way often is helpful. AMANDA: That's a really good point. I hadn't thought of commit messages as notes, but you're right; they totally are. JOËL: One thing I've done is I've sort of taken this idea to the extreme. I was debugging some weird database table ActiveRecord model interactions, and the modeling was just a little bit unusual. There were multiple sources of truth in the relationships. And there were enough models that I struggled to really understand what was going on. And so I drew an entity-relationship diagram. And I felt that that was important to understand for people reviewing the code but also anybody looking back at the commit later on. So I used a tool called Monodraw, which allows you to draw simple diagrams as ASCII art. And so, I have a little ASCII art ERD in my commit message. AMANDA: That's incredible. I feel like if I were a developer git logging and I saw that commit message, I would be both thrilled and terrified of what exactly I was diving into in the git blame. [laughs] JOËL: Definitely both, definitely both. But I have referred back maybe a few months later. Like you said, I had to refer back to that commit because a similar bug had cropped up somewhere else. And I knew that that commit had information that I had gathered that would make the debugging experience easier. AMANDA: I guess the commit message is a really good example of having a note that's very closely tied to its context. Like, it's in the context of like a commit, which is a set of changes at a point in time, and it's really well situated in there. What do you think about the trade-offs of having that as part of a commit message versus something like some other sort of documentation where something like that could live? JOËL: I guess it depends on how you think you're going to use it in the future. Again, for debugging things, it feels like you don't often need to refer back to them, so I don't think you would want to just dump that on a wiki somewhere. It probably makes sense to have that either in just a collection of debugging notes that you have or that you could then dig into if you needed or in a commit message, something like that. But maybe some of the things that you learned along the way could be pulled out and turned into something that lives somewhere else that's maybe less of a note at that point and more of a publication. AMANDA: That sounds like a fine line between note and publication. JOËL: Perhaps it's an artificial line that I'm making. AMANDA: [laughs] JOËL: But yeah, I guess the idea is that sometimes I will look at my own debugging notes and try to turn them into something like either a wiki page for a particular codebase or potentially even a blog post on the thoughtbot blog, something that I've been able to synthesize out of the notes there. But now you've kind of gone a few steps beyond the underlying raw notes. AMANDA: I'm interested in your thoughts on that synthesis of notes into how does something go from a commit message into a blog? What does that process look like for you? JOËL: I have a personal note-taking system that's loosely inspired by a system called Zettelkasten and also another similar system called evergreen notes. The idea is that when you learn things, you capture small atomic notes, so they are an idea in your note-taking application, and then you connect them. You create links between notes. And the idea is that there's a lot of value in making connections between notes that's almost as much part of the knowledge-creating experience as capturing single notes on their own. And as you capture a bunch of these little, tiny notes over time and they become very interconnected, then you can start seeing, oh, this note from this one experience, this note from this conference talk, and this note from this book all connect together. And they maybe even make connections I hadn't seen, or I hadn't thought of individually in those moments. But now I see that they all kind of come together with a theme. And I might then combine those together to make a blog post or to use as the foundation for a conference talk. AMANDA: That's really interesting. I like the concept of being able to capture bits of information at the time that they felt relevant without having to have an entire thesis in this note. Or that idea doesn't have to be fully fleshed out; it can become fleshed out later when you connect the dots. JOËL: That's a really powerful concept. One of the big ideas that I picked up through this was that there are always byproducts of knowledge creation. So if I'm writing a blog post, there are always some things that I cut that didn't make it into the blog post because I'm trying to keep it focused. But those are still things that I learned, things that are valuable, that could be used for something else. And so anytime I'm writing a blog post, preparing for a conference talk, learning some things in a debugging session by reading a book, there are always some things that I don't use necessarily immediately. But I can capture those little chunks, and eventually, I have enough of them that I can combine them together to make some kind of other work. AMANDA: I'm really curious about your process of creating those notes. If you're reading a blog post, say, to learn a new topic and you're taking notes on that, how do you go from this concept that you're learning in the blog post to these really focused notes that can be combined in other ways? JOËL: So the Zettelkasten approach suggests that you have two forms of notes, one it calls literature notes which are just sort of ideas you jot down as you are reading some work. You're reading a book or a blog post or watching a talk, and then, later on, you go and turn those into those atomic-separated, linked notes together, what Zettelkasten calls permanent notes. And so I'll often do that is just focus on the work itself and jot down some notes and then convert those later on into these smaller atomic chunks. AMANDA: That concept of taking a larger theme and then actually spending the energy to distill that into a different kind of artifact that might be helpful later on is really interesting. And I don't do Zettelkasten note-taking, but I've also found that to be useful in other contexts as well. JOËL: One thing that I sort of hold myself to is when I am writing those atomic notes is, I don't write them as bullet points. They're always written in prose and complete sentences. The title is usually a sort of thesis statement, a thing that I think is true or at least a thing that posits that could be true, and then a short paragraph expanding on that idea which I think helps cement a lot of information in my mind but also helps to give me little chunks of things that I can more or less copy-paste into an article and already have almost a rough draft of something I want to say. Do you find that when you synthesize ideas into notes that you do something similar, or do you stick mostly to bullet points? AMANDA: I think I might do a mixture of the two. I think procedurally, I use bullet points a lot, but I think those bullet points tend to be full sentences or several sentences together. I've definitely run up against some of the drawbacks of terseness, where they're less helpful when you refer back to it later. But I do like the visual cues that come with things like bullet points, or numbered lists, or even emoji and note-taking to be a visual cue of what I was thinking of or where I can find this later on. JOËL: I love emoji; emoji is great. AMANDA: I guess actually I've started using emoji as bullet points. That's something that I've found even to be helpful just with remembering or with grouping things thematically in my mind. And when I'm going back through my notes, I find it easier to find the information that I was looking for because it had a list, or an emoji, or an image, or something like that. JOËL: Yeah, that makes it really easy to scan and pick out the things that you're looking for. It's almost like adding metadata to your notes. AMANDA: Totally. JOËL: That's a great tip. I should do that. AMANDA: You can definitely run into the Figma problem of you then spend so much time finding the right emoji to be the bullet point that you forgot what you were doing, [laughs] but that's a problem for a different day. JOËL: So this sort of Zettelkasten evergreen notes approach is a system that I use specifically to help me capture long-term thoughts about software that could eventually turn into content. So this is very much not a debugging note. It's not an exploratory note. It has a very particular purpose, which is why I write it in this particular way. I'm curious; I know you have a lot of different systems that you use for your notes, Amanda. Is there one that you'd like to share with the audience? Maybe tell us a little bit about what the system is and why it's a good fit for the type of scenario that you'd like to use it in. AMANDA: Sure. One situation that I found myself in recently is I have started taking classes on things that I'm interested in, development-related and non-development-related. And that's a formal structure that requires some note-taking that I haven't really done since I was in school. And the tools were very different back then as to what we had available to us for note-taking. It was basically Microsoft Word or bust. So I have found myself having to develop a new note system for that kind of content delivery method, basically of watching a video and taking notes and having something that then makes sense outside of the context of sitting down and watching a video. So that has been a little bit of a process journey that I've been on the last couple of months. JOËL: And what does your note-taking system look like? AMANDA: So it's been a mix of things, actually. I started out just kind of brain-dumping as I went along with the instructor talking trying to type and keep up. And I found that very not scannable to look back on. I was looking for some more visual cues, and I didn't really have time to insert those visual cues as I was trying to keep up with a lecture essentially. I then transitioned back to old school pen and paper, like, got myself a notebook and started writing in it. And obviously, that has some benefits of the free-formness, like, I'm not constrained by the offerings of any specific tool. But the trade-off for that is always that you have different notebooks for everything. And it's like, where's my X class notebook? And so I've been trying to bring those two methods together into something that makes a little bit more sense for me and also bring in some of that synthesis process that you were talking about with your note-taking method of doing the full literature notes and then synthesizing them down into something a little bit more well-scoped for the particular piece of information. JOËL: So you have like a two-step process then. AMANDA: It did end up being a two-step process because one of the things that I found was the grouping of ideas that make sense when you're first learning a concept and the grouping of ideas that make sense when I'm revisiting that concept, later on, aren't necessarily the same. And so, keeping it in the original context doesn't necessarily help me recall the information when I'm referring back to my notes. JOËL: That's really interesting. When you're writing it, it's going to be different than when you're reading it. So we've been talking a lot about the purpose of different notes along the way, and you mentioned the word recall here. Do you use these notes mostly as a way to recall things that you would look back at them and try to remember, or are they more of a way to digest the material as you're going through it? AMANDA: I think at the time that I'm writing them, they definitely served the purpose of helping me digest the information. But at some point, I probably want to be able to look back at them and remember the things that I learned and see if maybe they have new salience now that I have sat on them for a little bit. JOËL: Hmmm, that's good. So it's valuable for both in different contexts. AMANDA: Yeah, definitely. And one of the more surprising things that I've learned through that process has been that when I'm learning something, I really like a chronological kind of step-by-step through that process and building blocks of complexity that basically go one on top of the other. But then, once I've kind of made it to the end when I look back on it, I look back on those notes, and they're usually pretty thorough. They probably have a lot of details that aren't going to be top-level priority at the end. But I didn't really have that concept of priority when I was first learning it. I was kind of grasping onto each bit of information, saying, "I'm going to scroll this away in case I need it later." And then when you get a better understanding of the full picture, you realize, okay, I'm glad that I know that, but it's not necessarily something that I'd want to look back on. So I really like having systems that then allow me to regroup that information once I have built out a fuller picture of what it is I'm trying to learn. JOËL: Interesting. So the sort of digesting step that happens afterwards or the synthesis step, a lot of the value that you're adding there is by putting structure on a lot of the information you captured. AMANDA: Yeah, I think putting structure and changing the structure, and not being afraid to change that structure to fit my new understanding in how I see this concept now instead of just how this concept was explained to me. JOËL: So you mentioned that you'd initially used notebooks and paper and that that felt a little bit constraining in terms of organization. Is there any kind of software or apps that you like to use to organize your notes, and how do they fit in with your approach to note-taking? AMANDA: I've been using Notion for the last few years. I found that that application works well with my visual preferences for note-taking. I think there's a lot of opportunity for visual cues that help me recall things, such as emoji and bullet points. And I like that I can do all of that by writing Markdown without then also having to read Markdown. JOËL: Yeah, I definitely agree that a little visual change there where you can actually see the rendered Markdown is a nice quality-of-life improvement. AMANDA: Absolutely. And I also think that the way that it turns Markdown into blocks that then you can rearrange has served me really well for that synthesis process of maybe this bullet point makes sense, and I want to keep it as is. But I want to rearrange it into these new themes that I'm seeing as I'm reviewing these things that I've learned. JOËL: That's fascinating. So it has some really good tools for evolving your notes and reorganizing them, it sounds like. AMANDA: I like that I can group my notes by concept, and notes can be subsets or sub-notes of other notes. And you can kind of move the individual notes in between those blocks pretty easily, which helps me rearrange things when I see different themes evolving. JOËL: I've heard really good things about Notion, but I've not tried it myself. My app of choice so far has been Obsidian, which I really appreciate its focus on linking between notes. It doesn't have this concept of blocks where you can embed parts of notes as notes into other notes and things like that. But that has been okay for me because I keep my notes very small and atomic. But the focus on hyperlinking between notes has been really useful for me because, in my approach, it's all about the connections. AMANDA: So, what does that process look like when you are referring back to all of these notes that are hyperlinked together? JOËL: That's actually really important because the recall aspect is a big part of how you would use a note-taking system. For me, it's sort of like walking the graph. So I'll use search, or maybe I know a note that's in the general theme of what I care about, and then I'll just follow the links to other related articles or notes that talk about things that are related to it. And I might walk that graph three, four steps out in a few different directions. It's kind of like surfing Wikipedia. You find some entry point, and then you just follow the links until you have the material that you're interested in. AMANDA: It sounds like creating a Wikipedia wormhole of your own. JOËL: It kind of is. I guess, in a way, it's kind of like a little mini personal wiki where the articles are very, very condensed because I have that limitation that everything must be atomic. Wow. So this has been a really fascinating conversation. I feel like one of the big takeaways that I have is that types of notes matter. Note-taking can take very different forms in different contexts. And the way you organize them would be vastly different; how long you care about them is also going to be different. So going into a particular situation, knowing what sort of situation is this that I'm using notes and what is their purpose is going to be really helpful to think in terms of how I want to do my note-keeping. Whereas I think previously, I probably was just like, yeah, notes. You open a document, and you put in some bullet points. AMANDA: I am definitely guilty of doing that as well. And I like the idea of having a purpose for your notes. You mentioned your purpose was ultimately to build a map that would produce content. And I really like how you have found a system that works really well for that purpose. And I'm going to keep thinking about how to be more intentional in what is the purpose of the notes that I'm taking in the future. JOËL: Well, thank you so much for joining the conversation today. Where can people find you on the web? AMANDA: Thanks so much for having me, Joël. You can find me @amandabeiner on Twitter. JOËL: And we'll link to that in the show notes. And with that, let's wrap up. The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. If you have any feedback, you can reach us at @_bikeshed, or reach me at @joelquen on Twitter, or at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. Thank you so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!! 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Amanda Parker, President and Owner, Collective Alternative (Indianapolis, IN)   Amanda Parker is President and Owner at Collective Alternative, a full-service agency that focuses on growing small, mostly local businesses. She started her agency 14 years ago to bring together her background in strategy and development, experience as the Vice President of Marketing for a homebuilder, and passion for Mom-and-Pops, new home construction, and small, home-service businesses. Typical agency clients might include a local plumber trying to compete with bigger plumbing competition. In this interview, Amanda explains there are a number of differences for successfully working with small businesses as opposed to mega-brand clients. Marketers typically work fast. With small businesses, she has found that it is important to slow down, communicate with the client, and let them know what the agency is trying to accomplish, the end goal/objective, and the benefit of the end goal. They require a lot more “hand-holding” through the process, she explains, and they can't “afford to waste a single dollar.” Amanda feels it is also critical to “protect” these smaller clients, to watch both the market and the economy. She also believes an “it's just business” approach does not work. Larger companies have the resources and resilience to “experiment” with marketing strategies. With smaller companies, errors bleed through to the bottom line and can affect an organization's survival. With smaller companies,  It is so personal. It doesn't get any more personal for a small business owner. They have sunk everything into it. They're working 12-16 hour days. All they want to do is provide for their family, send their daughter to dance class, send their kid to college, whatever it is. It's personal. Amanda says she is quite cognizant of her personal weaknesses. In building her agency, she focuses on hiring people who can bring complementary strengths, identifies potential areas of growth, supports continuing education efforts, and brings in experts to help her team “accelerate” their careers. Some of the agency's local clients go national. One client they are currently working with provides rehabilitative and mental health care for first responders (fire and police). The client will soon launch a national first responder mental health platform called Shield, which excites Amanda because it facilitates open discussions of mental health. Amanda can be reached on her agency's website at: collectivealternative.com or thecaway.com, or by email at: amanda@thecaway.com. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Amanda Parker, President and Owner at Collective Alternative based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast, Amanda. AMANDA: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Very excited to be here. ROB: Absolutely. Great to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Collective Alternative, and what distinguishes the firm? What is your superpower? AMANDA: Oh, our superpower. Our firm is unique in we focus on small business. My background with agencies and things like that, I was on the larger accounts, but I really fell in love with the mom n' pops, the small businesses of the country, and wanted to give them an opportunity to compete and gain some market share. So, we really focus on those mom n' pop businesses. I love home services. When I did work on the client-side, I was the Vice President of Marketing for a homebuilder, and I fell in love with it. It got in my blood. So, we love home services and new home construction and all of that. But I just love my small business clients and to see their growth. It's just amazing. ROB: That's excellent. Those businesses, you say small; are they largely local? Are some of them national in scope? Is it heavy into services? Are you helping the local plumber go up against the big guys, or what are the industry specialties? AMANDA: The majority of our clients are local. We are definitely helping that local plumber go up against the big guys. Even the bigger guy in the area, right? Which I just love. But we do have some clients that are national, or they've started local and they've grown nationally. We have one client that started here in Indiana, and they provide rehabilitative care, mental health care, all of that kind of thing for first responders – for fire and police. And they are growing on a national scale, especially with a new product they're taking to market this month. So, it's really cool to see that growth and be a part of it. ROB: That's really exciting to be able to help with that. What is it that you think changed as the firm grows that makes it maybe a different firm specialty? How do you define small as in small business, and what is it that really makes the scope of what they need a great fit for you? AMANDA: My background is strategy and development, so I really focused on when you're a small business, you cannot afford to waste a single dollar. I really focus on the strategy behind everything that we do. We don't throw things at the wall to see what sticks. We are very focused, hone in on – we may do some A/B testing, but for the most part it's planned out. We know what the payoff is going to be. We know we're going to deliver the right ROI for our clients, and we really focus in on that strategy to make sure that every dollar they give to us is working for them and paying off. ROB: There's definitely a certain pressure. They don't have a lot of extra dollars for experimental budgets when you're talking about a small business. And I can imagine there's probably a range of services you can engage in. How far across the range are you going? You can do anything from SEO, you can do SEM, you can do paid organic social, you can do media, TV, billboards, out-of-home. How far does the rabbit hole go with these clients? AMANDA: We're actually a full-service firm, so we do everything that they need. One issue that I always heard from my small business clients was they felt like they had to repeat their initiatives over and over again to a number of different marketing partners. At one point they're talking to a PR person; then they're talking to a digital firm; then they're talking to an SEO firm. It was just all over the place, and they never felt like they had the unity, so they couldn't tell if their dollars were really working for them or not. I brought all of those different expertises in-house with different people leading those different areas, and now everything is under one roof and we all collaborate and talk together. So, they don't have to repeat and they can really see the benefit of it. ROB: Some services, it's pretty straightforward; you can show somebody “You're a plumber, we ran this ad, we tracked the phone numbers, here's your calls.” Maybe if they're really detailed, they can see what they got from that. How do you look at something that can be a little bit of a longer term investment? Let's say you're looking at – whether it's an awareness campaign on a digital billboard, whether it's maybe something where the outcome – sometimes it's not 100% certain how well you can do in SEO and what keywords you can optimize for. How do you think about helping them through that process of investing over time? The outcome is a little bit unknown, but directionally, you know because it rhymes with plenty of other clients that you've seen. AMANDA: I think it's more a matter of educating them and almost holding their hand through the process so they understand what it is that we're trying to accomplish, they know what the end goal or objective is, and they know what the benefit of that end goal is. A lot of times as marketers, I feel like we go so fast – and we know it, and we know the acronyms and everything else, so we just keep going and going and going, and we don't slow down enough to communicate to the client and let them know, “Okay, here's what this means for you, and here's why I'm doing it, and here's what I'm hoping to see out of it or I expect to see out of it, and here's what that means.” So just really overcommunicating that. ROB: Got it. I can certainly see that. And then there's I think also a challenge, then, of equipping more and more of your team to walk clients on that journey. How do you help give your team the playbook that is needed so that – you can't hold everybody's hand anymore, right? AMANDA: I can't. But I want to. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] All these nice little small businesses. They need somebody to hang out with them and help them and hug them, yes. AMANDA: Yes. I so want to, but I can't. So, it's really making sure that my team understands our culture, understands our mission. And if they do and they believe in it and they buy into it, then I know that they will continue to communicate that and advocate for the client. And that's what I've seen. It really comes down to educating the team on what our mission is and then making sure that they believe it in their soul and then get out there and do it. ROB: Excellent. You mentioned a little bit of your past life and some of the work you'd done for clients before, but that's still a long distance from actually starting your own agency. So, what was it that pushed you across that boundary and led you to start your own firm? AMANDA: I constantly heard that I was too vested in my clients and that “it's not personal, it's just business.” That kept me up at night. I struggled with that so much because, for a small business, you'd better believe it's personal. It is so personal. It doesn't get any more personal for a small business owner. They have sunk everything into it. They're working 12-16 hour days. All they want to do is provide for their family, send their daughter to dance class, send their kid to college, whatever it is. It's personal. I could not get that to settle with my soul, so I remember coming home one day and I told my husband, “Yeah, I'm done. I'm going to do this on my own and I'm going to make it personal.” And our tagline is “Making business personal.” He was like, “Okay, girl, go for it.” And that was 14 years ago. ROB: Wow, so 14 years. What have been some of the step functions, the inflection points on the journey? Whether it's key hires, whether it's service areas, whether it's a certain degree of scale or things that you don't do anymore that you used to, what have been some of those key points in the business? AMANDA: I feel like I have had this rollercoaster journey as a business owner. I'm sure a lot of business owners feel that way, but I have made some doozy mistakes where you hire the wrong person and they don't buy into the mission, but you just liked them so much, or you felt they had such potential but they don't want to realize it. I don't know. So, some bad hires along the way. But I've had some really great hires. I created a leadership team around me of some magnificent, magnificently talented people, and they are just incredible. I am so blessed to have them. As you know, this industry changes on a dime. Today it's one thing, tomorrow it's another. You have to stay up on that. So, making sure that we hire people who want to change with that and want to realize what's new – I mean, five years ago what was TikTok? Come on. It's just really making sure that we're staying on top of things, that we know what's coming, that we're watching the market, we're watching the economy. We have to protect our clients in ways that other firms don't. ROB: Have you found some local business clients for whom TikTok makes good sense and resonates well? What have you seen there? AMANDA: It's funny; because they're home services – and I will say, in Indiana compared to maybe where you are or California, we seem to be a little bit behind some of the coasts. Several of my clients, their big thing this year was getting on Instagram. It is what it is. And now I'm trying to talk to them about influencers and “let's get in with an influencer, let's do an influencer campaign.” It's harder for them to understand what that is or see the benefit of that, but they're coming around. We're doing some cool experimental things for them to see what that looks like. I know it's their trust in me that's pushing that, which I appreciate beyond words. But they're getting there. [laughs] That's all I can say. ROB: Sure. And I wonder also, not so much even for anything to reflect on you or your clients, but also as I think about the intersection of the businesses that you work with, simply put, the TikTok feed is not really optimized for local. That's not an axis that it tends to revolve around, so I could see it being a tricky investment just from that part alone. The dynamic isn't getting followed. The dynamic is showing up in the algorithmic feed and blowing up there. And TikTok would rather have somebody telling a joke or doing a dance or falling on their face or cute animals than “Here's how you prepare for freezing your pipes in the winter, and here's my dance for doing that.” It's a different thing. AMANDA: [laughs] Yep, exactly. ROB: You mentioned, and I'll pull on it a little bit – we don't always get a chance to talk through the thinking that goes into exec team, who's on that boat, what roles, what structure. How have you evolved and emerged and thought about this executive team around you and who's on it? AMANDA: I think pretty uniquely in the fact that I have tried to be very self-aware of my weaknesses. My skillset does not include design. It does not include website creation or even brand management, for that matter. So, I knew early on I need very strong people with me on that side that can see the strategy in that and really support me there. So having a creative director, a VP of Creative, was really important. She was my first hire, and she is still with me today. I have a designer that has been with me for 12 years. It's treating them like family, but filling in where I know that I am weak and I need to surround myself with strong talent. I think that has been so beneficial for me because then we've grown together. We can collaborate together, and together we do some really amazing things. ROB: It's interesting when you have someone involved who excels in an area that you need them. You need them to be stronger there. How do you think about continuing to develop those team members in areas where you're not more of an expert? There are places where you have your expertise and it's your job to equip and cast vision, and then there's stuff that you don't know how to do, and that's why people are there. How do you help your team grow with the firm? AMANDA: They still want to grow. They want to accelerate their career, they want to learn other things. We do a lot of training. We do a lot of bringing experts in. If they want to go to a conference or something like that, all of that is on the table. We do a lot of sharing newsletters, articles, videos. We do a lot of that back and forth so we all have that knowledge base, but they're still learning. And then it's constantly giving them a challenge. “Here's an area of growth that I see,” and getting them to realize that, see that, and then jump in and participate in it. ROB: It's always an interesting challenge, especially when you get outside of your wheelhouse a little bit, so I do appreciate that thinking. As you reflect on the journey of the firm, Amanda, what are some things you think about? What have you learned along the way? What would you go back and tell yourself “Don't do that, do it this way” if you could? Reflect on those things you might've done differently if you were starting from zero. AMANDA: Oh, my goodness, that list is lengthy. There have been a couple times that we were primed to grow, we knew we needed help – this is where I learned this lesson – and instead of hiring for culture or fit that way, we hired doers that could just support the work and do the work. It just didn't work out. It was a huge influx of people all of a sudden that we weren't ready for. We didn't train them appropriately. We did not set them up for success. That was a big lesson for me to learn, that I had hired the wrong way. I always try to leave people better than I found them, and I know those people I did not set up for success, and that was really tough for me. It was tough for me to get over that and move on to, “Okay, I had perhaps a negative impact on their life. I still need to take care of my clients and continue to build, so I need to reset. What does that look like so I don't do that again?” That's tough. It's tough as a business owner to know that you have that kind of impact. ROB: Yeah. But it's personal. You said it from the start. That part of the business is personal for you as well, so it's consistent. It pulls through. Even the wrong decisions aren't just like, “Oh, forget that person, they should've known better.” You see that in business, and some people operate that way, and that's personal. That gets taken very differently, personally. It's a different lane. AMANDA: It really does. It's kept me up at night. And then there's those things that if I could go back and tell this person “I'm sorry, I didn't know what I should have known” or “I hadn't learned that lesson” – you want to, and then at the same time, you're the boss, so you're always going to be the bad guy. [laughs] I mean, where's the line, right? ROB: Yep. We're in an interesting spot, an interesting turning point. We're coming into the summer of 2022. Everybody's done their different versions of office and no office, “how is my team structured, where is my team?” How are you thinking about the location and gathering of your team in-person as we're going through 2022? AMANDA: That's funny. When COVID came – and that was another lesson in and of itself – but when COVID came on, I was watching the news. I sent all my team home early. Before the mandate even rolled out, I had sent them to work from home. In the middle of May, my leadership team called me and said, “We're going back to the office with or without you.” And that was May of 2020. I was like, “Um, there's still a mandate.” I'm trying to talk through it, and they're like, “No. We need to collaborate. This is what we do for our clients. We're going back to the office June 1. You do whatever you need to do to make sure that happens, but we're going back to the office.” It just so happened to roll with the timeline; they had lifted some restrictions at that point, so we could. And we've been in the office since June 1st of 2020. We've been very fortunate with – we try to stay healthy. If somebody's sick, stay home, that kind of thing. But yeah, they want to be here. They want to collaborate. So that's where we are. ROB: It sounds like you didn't have to pull them into it. Did you have anybody who tried to move somewhere or tried to go remote first? Or that just wasn't your lane? AMANDA: We did lose two people. One person had to move to Texas to take care of her family, and then another person was just not comfortable coming into the office and she actually quit. That was unfortunate, because we liked both of them, but this is where we do our best work, and we have to perform for those clients. ROB: I'm sure you've had to, whether it was those folks and you had to backfill them or new roles you've had to hire – have you found that there are people who are ready to be in an office? That's a lane you've chosen and they're like, “These are my people, I want to be in an office too”? How are you seeing this from a recruiting advantage perspective? AMANDA: That's funny; I was just on an interview yesterday and she said she's worked from home since 2018, and she wants back in an office so bad that she's changed her career path and is moving over to marketing so she can go back in an office. It's out there. People want to be back to work. They want to be back in an office. I think you have a mix. There are still some people that are enjoying the work remote. But for the most part, I've seen, and we've heard in our interviews, people are ready. They are ready to come back in. ROB: I think a lot of people really want clarity, too. They want to know what the plan is instead of being in permanent limbo. You see some of the tech companies are back and forth, and people don't quite know. There's people who moved to Idaho from Silicon Valley. They're building a house there. They're not going back. AMANDA: Yeah, exactly. ROB: But where you're in limbo or it's like now you're going back – infamously, this past week, a VP of I think machine learning at Apple just said, “No, I'm not coming back to the office. I don't want to do that. I will take a job somewhere else.” Now, them announcing that loudly is probably a good way to get some recruiting calls as well. But I think people want to know, and when it shifts, I think that's when the moment of truth happens. We have hired all over the place, so we can't put the genie back in the bottle. We did most of our growth during COVID. We've found ourselves in making a different choice. But our choice is still that we're going to get together several times a year in a different place, and we're still going to get on planes and spend time with sufficiently large clients. I think people still kind of know that. They want to be in a lane where they value getting together sometimes, but they want to be at home. I think the clarity of letting people know, as well as the proof – people can see the proof. They can see the proof on your LinkedIn. Where are your people? If all of your people are in one place, they're going to take that message. If people are all over the place, they're going to feel safe being somewhere else. We just hired somebody in Canada, which is a whole other interesting thing. We'll enjoy getting to know her. AMANDA: I love the fact that remote opens up so much opportunity for people, and they can change to a different company or they can change to a different career path or whatever. I think that is perfect. But my team loves being together, loves to collaborate together. It's the culture we've built, so we're all here in Indiana and going to stay put. ROB: I'm glad it's working for you. As you're looking forward to the future of marketing, the future of services you provide, the future of your clients, what's coming up for Collective Alternative that you're excited about, for clients, for the overall trends in marketing in general? AMANDA: That's a great question. We have right now – and I mentioned it a little bit earlier – one client that is launching a new platform. It's called Shield, and it is a mental health platform for first responders, police and fire. I love the fact that we get to be very real and talk about how challenging their job is and how they do have those same needs that other people do. We get to talk about mental health openly. It's so taboo, especially in that field, so if we can start to penetrate that and really start to show that even anonymously, they can take these assessments and see where they're at, gauge what is going on, and they can self-assess – then maybe that helps them, or maybe that tells them, “Oh, I do drink a little bit too much. Maybe I should reach out and get some help with that.” Or “Maybe I should cut that.” Whatever it is so that they can be healthier, be better, and be better representatives of the community. So, it still has that community tie, but it's on a national scale. I'm really excited about that. As far as trends, like I mentioned, the influencer thing. We've got a couple influencer campaigns going on, one with a remodeling client of ours. He's all for it, so we're talking about lifestyle and remodeling trends, and it's been a lot of fun. Just doing some of those things to really set our clients apart and speak more to who they are and showcase that – I love it. I love it every day. ROB: That's exciting. There's a lot of good things coming up. I think it's a really opportune time to engage people in some change that they're seeking in their lives. I think people have realized – kind of like where they choose to work. They're in whatever rut they've been in, but there's some energy to do something different as other parts of their lives change. That's very exciting and very timely. Amanda, when people want to find and connect with you, with Collective Alternative, where should they go to track you down? AMANDA: They can visit our website, collectivealternative.com, or thecaway.com, or they can reach out by email, amanda@thecaway.com. Give me a call, you name it. There's a number of ways; you can find me all over the web. ROB: There it is. Excellent. And you can find you in your office as well. AMANDA: Right. ROB: [laughs] Thank you so much, Amanda. It's been good to learn about you, to learn about Collective Alternative. Thank you for sharing your story and your journey with the audience. Really appreciate it. AMANDA: Thank you for having me. It was so fun. ROB: Thank you. Take care. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

SUMMARY: Today we have Amanda White, an amazing therapist who treats anxiety, eating disorders and substance use. Amanda is coming onto the podcast today to talk about her book, Not Drinking Tonight and how we can all have a healthy relationship with alcohol. Amanda White talks about ways you can address your relationship with alcohol, in addition to drugs, social media and other vices. Amanda White also shares her own experience with alcohol use and abuse and her lived-experience with sobriety. In This Episode: Do you have a healthy relationship with alcohol Why we use alcohol and substances to manage anxiety and other strong emotions How to build a healthy relationship with alcohol. How to manage substance abuse, anxiety and substance use in recovery. Tools and tips to manage alcohol use and abuse Links To Things I Talk About: Easiest place to get Amanda's book with all links amandaewhite.com/book Instagram @therapyforwomen My therapy practice therapyforwomencenter.com ERP School: https://www.cbtschool.com/erp-school-lp Episode Sponsor: This episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit is brought to you by CBTschool.com. CBTschool.com is a psychoeducation platform that provides courses and other online resources for people with anxiety, OCD, and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors. Go to cbtschool.com to learn more. Spread the love! Everyone needs tools for anxiety... If you like Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast, visit YOUR ANXIETY TOOLKIT PODCAST to subscribe free and you'll never miss an episode. And if you really like Your Anxiety Toolkit, I'd appreciate you telling a friend (maybe even two). Episode Transcription This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 219. Welcome back, everybody. I am thrilled to have you here with me today. You may notice that the podcast looks a little different. That is on purpose. We have decided to update the cover of the podcast. It now has my face on it. There were a lot of people who had reached out and said that the old podcast cover art looked like a gardening podcast. And I thought it was probably time I updated it. So, that was something that I had created years and years and years ago. And I'm so thrilled to have now a very beautiful new cover art. Okay. This episode is so, so important. I cannot stress to you how overjoyed I was to have the amazing Amanda White on the podcast. She's a psychotherapist. She's on Instagram, under the handle Therapy For Women. She's so empowering. And she talks a lot about your relationship with substance use, particularly alcohol. But in this episode, we talk about many substances. And this is a conversation I feel we need to have more of because there are a lot of people who are trying to manage their anxiety and they end up using alcohol to cope. Now, this is a complete shame-free episode. In fact, one of the things I love about Amanda is she really does not subscribe to having to do a 100% sobriety method. She really talks about how you can create a relationship with alcohol based on whatever you think is right. And she has a new book out, which I am so excited that she's going to share with you all about. Before we get into the episode, I'd first like to do the review of the week. Here we go. We have this one from Epic 5000 Cloud 9, and they said: “This podcast has absolutely changed my life and made my recovery journey feel possible. After completing ERP, I felt lost and confused as to why I did not feel ‘better'. Kimberley has given me so many tools to build my self-compassion, grow my mindfulness skills, manage OCD, and do all the hard things.” So amazing. I'm so grateful to have you in our community. Epic 5000 Cloud 9. So happy to have you be a part of our little wonderful group of badass human beings. I love it. Let's go right over to the show and so you can learn all about Amanda and this beautiful, beautiful conversation. Have a wonderful day, everybody. Kimberley: Okay. Well, thank you, Amanda, for being here. I'm actually so grateful for you because you've actually brought to my attention a topic I've never talked about. And so, I'm so happy to have you here. Welcome. Amanda: Thank you so much for having me, Kimberley. I'm excited to chat with you. Kimberley: Okay. So, tell me a little bit about you first. Like, who are you? What do you do? What's your mission? Amanda: Yeah. So, my name is Amanda White. I am a licensed therapist. You might know me on Instagram from Therapy For Women as my handle. I'm also sober and I'm really on a mission to destigmatize sobriety and destigmatize the idea that you can question your relationship with alcohol. And it's really why my Instagram page and everything I do isn't sober only focused because I want it to be something where people who maybe aren't necessarily sober or haven't thought about it can, in a safe unstigmatized, unpressured way, also explore their relationship with alcohol. And that is what led me to write a book. And my book is called Not Drink Tonight. Kimberley: So good. So, I already have so many questions. Why wouldn't one question their relationship with alcohol? Because what I will bring here is a little culture. I'm Australian. Amanda: Yeah. I was going to say. Kimberley: I live in America. The culture around drinking is much different. I have some great friends in England, the culture there is much different. So, do you want to share a little bit about why one wouldn't maybe question their relationship with drinking? Amanda: Absolutely. I think I can only speak for America specifically, but I know enough people in England and Australia, too, that there is a culture of drinking is good, drinking is normal. We watch our parents or adults drink when we're young. We think that's what makes us an adult. If you look at the media, you look at movies, TV shows, it's what everyone does when they're stressed. Women pour themselves a glass of wine. Men pour themselves a bourbon. So, I think that we're just raised in the society that doesn't ever question their drinking, because alcohol use is so black and white, where you either are normal and you should drink alcohol and it's what's expected, or you're an alcoholic and you should never drink alcohol. And there isn't a lot of space in between. So, if someone questions their alcohol use, people assume that they're an alcoholic. Kimberley: And so, now let me ask, why would we question our relationship? What was that process like for you? Why would we want to do that? Some people haven't, I think, even considered it. So, can you share a little bit about why we might want to? Amanda: Absolutely. I think it isn't talked about enough of how much alcohol really negatively impacts your mental health. For a while, I know doctors used to talk about there are some heart-healthy benefits of alcohol, which new studies say is not true. There really aren't any benefits to drinking alcohol in terms of our health. But really, I think especially anxiety and alcohol are so intertwined and people don't talk about it and don't think about it. And what I want people to know is when you drink alcohol, it's a depressant and your brain produces chemicals because your brain always wants to be in homeostasis. So, your brain produces anxiety chemicals, like cortisol and stuff like that, to try to rebalance into homeostasis. And after alcohol leaves your body, those anxiety hormones are still in there and it creates the phenomenon where you end up being more anxious after you drink. There's other mental health effects too. But I feel like, especially on this podcast, it's so important that people realize how intertwined alcohol and anxiety is. Kimberley: Right. You know what's interesting is I do a pretty good amount of assessment with my patients. But really often, I will have seen them for many months before-- and even though I thought I've assessed them for substance use and not even abuse, they will then say and realize like, “I think I'm actually using alcohol more than I thought to manage my anxiety.” And I'm always really shocked because I'm like, “I swore I assessed you for this.” But I think it takes some people time during recovery to start to say like, “Wow, I think there is an unhealthy relationship going here.” Is that the case from what you see or is that more my population? Amanda: No. Absolutely. Because I think it's easy to lie to yourself. Maybe not even lie, just like not look at it because again, it's so normalized because we have an idea in our head of what someone with a problem with alcohol looks like. We don't consider ourselves to have that problem. But just because we aren't drinking every day or we're not blacking out or something like that doesn't mean that we might not be using it to numb, to cope with anxiety, to deal with stress. Kimberley: Right. You know what's funny is I-- this could be my personal or maybe it is a cultural thing because I always want to catch whether it's an Australian thing or a Kimberley thing, is I remember-- I think hearing, but maybe I misinterpreted as a young child that you're only an alcoholic if you get aggressive when you drink, and that if you're a happy drunk, you're not a drunk. You know what I mean? And that it's not a bad thing. If it makes you happy and it takes the stress away, that's actually a good coping. So, I remember learning as a teen of like, oh, you get to question what is an alcoholic and what's substance abuse and what's not. So, how would you define substance use versus substance abuse? Or do you even use that language? Amanda: I mean, yes and no. I use it in terms of it exists, and it is part of the DSM. So, it is in terms of, I do diagnose when needed and things like that. A lot of times though, I think the current narrative and I think people spend so much time trying to figure out if it's use or misuse, that they miss out on the most important question, which to me is, is alcohol making my life better. Kimberley: Yeah. Amanda: And if it's not, if it's right-- I have exercises in my book and I talk a lot about like, what are the costs of your drinking, and what are the payoffs? And if it's costing you a lot or it's costing you more than it's bringing to your life, I think that is where you should question it. And I think your life can change. You can go through different things in your life and maybe that's when you can ebb and flow with your questioning of it, especially people get so obsessed with the idea of whether they're an alcoholic or not. And the term ‘alcoholic' is completely outdated. It's not even a diagnosis anymore. It's now a spectrum. So, to me, that word is just so outdated and unhelpful to think about really. Kimberley: Right. And even the word ‘abuse' has a stigma to it too, doesn't it? Amanda: Right. In the DSM, it's alcohol use disorder and it's mild, moderate and severe. But it's wild thinking back. I mean, I was in grad school. Oh my gosh, I'm going to date. I don't even know how long ago, 10 years ago. Kimberley: Don't tell them. Amanda: A certain amount of time ago, I just remember being in ‘addictions class' as it was called and we were talking about what is the difference between use and abuse and what makes someone an alcoholic. And I think people also get very attached to being dependent. It means it's abuse. And it takes a lot to become dependent on alcohol physically. So, we're just missing out on so many people. I say often, we can question so many things in our life. I'm sure you do too with your clients. I question how their sleep habits interact with their mental health. We talk about how getting outside impacts their mental health, all these different factors. But for some reason with alcohol, which is a drug, we don't question it or we are not allowed to. Kimberley: Right. Yes. I will address this for the listeners, is I think with my clients, one of the most profound road, like if we come to the edge of the road and we have to decide which direction, the thing that really gets in the way is if I put a name to it, then I have to stop. And that can be, a lot of times, they won't even want to bring it up – be in fear of saying, well, like you were saying before, is that meaning now-- as soon as I admit to having a problem, does that mean I'm in AA? Is it black and white? I think that there's so much fear around what it means once we really define whether it's helpful or problematic. That can be a scary step. What are your thoughts? Amanda: Yeah, I completely agree. And that's why I really believe in looking at it as a spectrum, especially I think about disordered eating, right? It's like, we know that based on studies, if someone engages in disordered eating, they're more likely to develop an eating disorder. So, in my book, I coined this term ‘disorder drinking' and how I really think we need that term where people can-- it makes the barrier to question your relationship with alcohol much lower, where I find in my practice because I work with a lot of people with eating disorders. People are very open about saying, “Yeah, I'm maybe engaging in some unhealthy, disordered eating. I don't know.” But there's a whole step there before maybe you recognize that you have an eating disorder, where I really think that that is what we need with alcohol. We need to be able to talk about how, like, yeah, most of us in college engage in disordered drinking. It's not super healthy, the way that we drink. Or we may go through a period of time in our life because we're super stressed or something's going on, where we engage in that. And that doesn't mean that you have, for sure, a substance use disorder or you're addicted or you have to never drink again. But I think it's important to recognize when we start to fall into that so we can change that pattern. Kimberley: Right. Particularly with COVID. I mean, alcohol consumption is, I think, doubled or something like that in some country. And I think too, I mean, when we're struggling with COVID that we have less access to good tools and less access to social. So, people are relying on substances and so forth. Yeah. So, what is this solution? There you go. Tell me all your answers. What is their options? How might somebody move into this conversation with themselves or with their partner or with their therapist? What are the steps from here, do you think? Amanda: Yeah. So, I think that the first step is to try to take a break. I think 30 days is a good starting point. A lot of times, if people just start off by cutting back, they don't really get any of the positive feel-good benefits of taking a break, which is why I recommend starting with taking a break first. Obviously, I believe in harm reduction. And if you are in a place where you can't take a break, moderation is definitely a good tool and better than nothing. Kimberley: Can you tell what harm reduction, for those who don't know what that means? Amanda: Yeah. So, harm reduction is the idea that rather than focusing on completely eliminating a behavior or especially completely eliminating a substance is we think about cutting back on that. And I think about specifically, if someone is in an abusive situation, if someone has a lot of trauma going on and alcohol is the one thing that's keeping them afloat, that to me is like, of course, I'm not going to say you must quit cold turkey or something like that. And even if you're talking about, alcohol is very dangerous to physically detox from if you are drinking every day, which a lot of people don't know. In those cases, yeah, it's really important to get support and detox in a safe environment. Kimberley: Right. Okay. So, sorry I cut you off. Take a break-- Amanda: No, it's okay. Yeah. So, that's what harm reduction is. But yeah, in general, I recommend starting with taking a 30-day break, seeing how that goes, see how your health improves, see how your anxiety might be reduced and improved. And really to me, the goal is to learn how to live your life without being dependent on alcohol. Because if we can't process our emotions, set boundaries, socialize, go on dates, whatever, without the help of alcohol, we never really have freedom of choice over drinking or not drinking because we need it on some level. So, my whole goal is for people to learn how to do some of those skills so that they don't have to rely on alcohol, and then they can use alcohol in a healthier way for celebrating or in a way that positively impacts their life and they don't use it as a crutch. Kimberley: So, that's so helpful. I'm pretty well-versed in this, but I wouldn't say I'm a specialist. So, I'm really curious. So, if somebody is using alcohol or any other substance to manage their anxiety, would you teach them skills before they take the break so that they have the skills for the break or would you just start to take the break and then pick up what gets lost there? What might be some steps and what skills may you teach them? Amanda: I think it's a bit of both. I think if you only teach skills before, someone might never take the break, which is fine. But I think if you are only teaching the skills, a lot of times, the skills, I think that's really good to start before you take the breaks. You can learn how to start dealing with your emotions maybe without drinking, for example. But some of the other stuff like going to a party, without drinking is something where if you don't actually take that step, it's probably unlikely that you're ever going to do it until you've pushed yourself to take that break. But in general, yeah. I mean, I think one of the most important ones is learning how to cope with your emotions. People use alcohol all the time, especially alcohol becomes a way to deal with loneliness, to deal with stress, to deal with sadness. And I think-- Kimberley: Social anxiety is a big one. Amanda: Social anxiety. Absolutely. And I think a lot of us literally don't know how to process an emotion, say no, set that boundary, take care of themselves on a basic level without drinking. So, those are some of the skills I think are really important to learn. Kimberley: I mean, yeah. And for a lot of the folks that I see because their anxiety is so high, would you say they're using it to top off that anxiety to try and reduce it? In the case where if you're not drinking, you're having high states of anxiety. Is there any shifts that you would have them go through besides general anxiety management? Amanda: I think the example I'm thinking of is maybe social anxiety. If there's a specific instance, right? I know you talk about this a lot on Instagram, like exposures can really, really help with reducing anxiety. And I think there are steps that you can take that are small if you have a lot of social anxiety about going to a party and not drinking, for example, and you're relying on alcohol to deal with going to a party. I mean, some of the things off the top of my head I can think about are like driving to the place where the party is before it happens, talking to someone who is going to be at the party – taking these small steps to desensitize yourself to it so you can build up your tolerance before you go. Or maybe you go, if this is the first year and you only stay for a short period of time, rather than going from nothing to expecting yourself to go and have fun and stay at the whole party the whole time. Kimberley: Right. What was your experience, if you don't mind sharing? What were those 30 days like, or can you share it, put us in your shoes for a little bit? Amanda: Yeah, absolutely. So, I struggled a lot with an eating disorder and I kept relapsing in my eating disorder when I would drink. And I had said to my therapist at the time, “I think that I might have a problem with alcohol. I don't know.” And she recommended me do those 30 days. And it was really hard for me. I didn't actually make it to the first 30 days when I originally tried because I was so afraid of the pushback of friends, of people asking me why, of not being able to be fun. A huge part of my identity at that time was all wrapped up in what people thought of me and going out and being the fun, crazy one. Kimberley: Yeah. And it's interesting how the different experience, because I too had an eating disorder. But my eating disorder wouldn't let me drink. Amanda: Yeah. Kimberley: That would be letting go of control, and what if I binge, and what if I ingest too many calories? So, it's funny how different disorders play out in different ways. It was actually an exposure for me to drink. What we quote, I think I'd heard so many times “empty calories” or something. So, that was a different exposure for me of that. But I can totally see how other people, of course again, it does-- I mean, I think that this is interesting in your book, you talk about the pros and the cons. It does make it easier to be in public. It does “work” in some settings until it doesn't. Amanda: Exactly. And I think that's so important to normalize and it's part of why I wrote my book because there aren't many books that are, you'll get this as a therapist. I can think of many different situations where, like you said, I wouldn't tell a client, “You should absolutely stop drinking,” because everything is unique. So, I really wanted to write a book that took into account different things and really led the reader through their own journey where they get to discover it for themselves because while there's amazing books out that I love, there aren't a ton that talk about this gray area, drinking, this middle lane, this truth that a lot of times you can feel lonely when you don't drink because you're left out of certain things. And that can cause more anxiety. So, we have to navigate all of that. Kimberley: Yeah. It's interesting too, and I don't know if I'm getting this research correct. And maybe I'm not, but I'll just talk from an experiential point. It's similar with cigarettes, I think. There is something calming about holding the wine glass. Even if it's got lemonade in it, for me, there's something celebratory about that. And so, the reason I bring that up is, is that a part of the options for people? Is to explore the areas? It's funny, I remember my husband many years ago that we talk about cigarettes, because he works in the film industry, and he would say, “The people who smoke cigarettes are the ones who actually get a break because they have to leave set and they get to go outside and sit on something and breathe and have a moment to themselves. If you don't smoke, you're lazy if you take a break.” And so, is that a part of it for you in terms of identifying the benefits and bringing that into your life? Like, I still now drink sparkling cider or something, an alcoholic in old champagne glass. My kids are always joking about it. Is that a part of the process? Amanda: Absolutely. And that's something that I completely agree with you. I think sometimes we don't even want an alcoholic beverage. We want a moment. We want a break. We want a feeling different or celebratory, which is why we take out the wine glass that isn't a regular glass, something like that. And that is why I really believe, I mean, it depends on the person. And sometimes if someone has more severe drinking a non-alcoholic beverage initially could be something that's triggering for them. But I am a big believer too. And yeah, put it in a fancy glass. If you enjoy a mocktail, drink something different than water, you can explore different options. And I think some people are really surprised at how much it's not actually about the drink sometimes, it's the ritual of making a drink or the ritual of using that special glass, or the ritual of drinking something that isn't water. Kimberley: Right. Yes. Or even just the ritual of the day ending. I always remember, my parents would be five o'clock, right? And at five o'clock they would have the-- this is a big family tradition, is at five o'clock, you'd bring out the cheese and the crackers and the grapes and the wine. And it was the end of the day. And so, I could imagine, if someone said, “We're going to take that away,” you'd be like, “No, that's how I know the day is over. That's how I move from one thing to the other.” And sometimes we do think black and white. It means you have to take the whole cheese platter away as well, right? Amanda: Absolutely. We can get almost in our heads of maybe we think we're more dependent on that cheese platter or the wine or whatever, without realizing that what we really like about it is the ritual. Kimberley: Yeah. So, you can share it or not, how does your life look now? And for your clients, give me maybe some context of what do people arrive at once they've been through this process and how might it be different for different people. Amanda: Totally. So, I'm completely sober. I don't drink alcohol. I've been sober for seven years. And in terms of how the process looks for me, I drink mocktails. I drink out of wine glasses sometimes. I love going to a bar and seeing sometimes if there's an alcohol-free option on a menu, I think that's really fun. And for me initially, when I was thinking about this and working on it, like I said, it was very tied to my eating disorder. But the biggest thing for me is I used to think, well, I can't totally stop drinking because that's black and white, and that's not freedom. Freedom is being able to decide. And I think what is different and unique compared to an eating disorder, for example, is that alcohol is addictive, right? Unlike food, it is an addictive substance that we can live without. And for me, I used to, or for me, I don't have to think about it if I don't drink. When I was trying to moderate, it was a lot of decision fatigue. It's like, “What am I going to drink? How much am I going to drink? When will I stop? Am I going to drink too much?” It was all of these decisions. And freedom for me now actually is just not drinking and not thinking about if I'm going to drink or not. So what my life looks like now is I'm sober, I've been sober for seven years. I enjoy going out to restaurants and getting alcohol-free drinks and things like that. And I used to be really worried that that was too reductive, that I was too black and white if I just said I wanted to be sober. But the truth is unlike food, alcohol is an addictive substance. When you have one alcoholic beverage, it does create a thirst for itself for most of us. So, for me, the freedom is actually not worrying about whether I'm going to drink or not. It's so exhausting for some people, myself included, to be constantly thinking about how much you're going to drink, if you're going to drink, when you're going to drink, what you're going to drink. And now, the real freedom for me is I don't drink. I don't think about it. And that's the freedom because-- sorry, I just got caught up in what I was saying. Kimberley: No, I think that that is so beautiful. As you were saying it, I was thinking about me in a Fitbit. I will never be able to wear a Fitbit. Because as soon as I know, I could wear it for day-ish. And day two, I'm all obsessive and compulsive. I just know that about myself. And some people can wear it and be fine, and I can never wear a Fitbit. I just can't. My brain goes very, like you said, on how many? More or less, what's happening? And so, I love that you're saying that, is really knowing your limits and whether it's-- the Fitbit, it's not actually the problem, but the Fitbit is what starts a lot of problematic behaviors that I know is just not helpful for me. Amanda: Yes. And I think it's important to recognize there are factors that make us more likely to be able to moderate successfully or not, right? The amount of alcohol you've drank throughout your life, your past drinking habits, whether you have a history of addiction in your family or substance use, whether you have trauma, whether you have anxiety, all of these things might make it more difficult for you to moderate compared to someone else. Kimberley: Right. I don't know if this is helpful for our listeners, but I went sober. My husband and I did for the first year of COVID. What was interesting is then I got put on a medicine where I wasn't allowed to drink and I felt offended by this medicine because I was like, “But you're taking my choices away.” And so, I had to go back. Even though I'd made the choice already, I'd had to go back and really address this conversation of like, “Okay, why does that feel threatening to you” and to look at it because a part of me wanted to be like, “No, I'm going to start drinking now just because they told me I'm not allowed.” So, it's so funny how our brain gets caught up on things around drinking and the rules and so forth. So, I didn't think of it that way until you'd mentioned it. Amanda: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that can be why people rebel against “I'm not an alcoholic” mindset instead of it being a choice, instead of it being “My life is better without drinking.” I often say, my drinking was like Russian roulette. A lot of times it was fine when I drank, but the times where it wasn't fine, I was not willing to put up with it anymore. And I don't know whether I could drink successfully or not, but it's not a risk that I'm willing to take. And it's not worth it compared to all the benefits that I have from sobriety. And because of that, it really feels like an empowering choice. Kimberley: Yeah. My last question to you before we hear more about you is, what would you say to the people who are listening, who aren't ready to have the conversation with themselves about whether it's helpful or not? I think I learn in a master's grade the stages of change. You're in a pre-contemplation stage where you're like, “I'm not even ready to contemplate this yet.” Do you have any thoughts for people who are so scared to even look at this? Amanda: Yeah. For people who maybe are in that pre-contemplation, not sure if they want to do the deeper work to question their relationship with alcohol, what I would recommend to them is start by just trying to reduce some of their alcohol intake. They don't have to stop drinking. They don't have to even think about whether it's serving them or not, but there are so many amazing alcohol-free beverages that exist now. I mean there's alcohol-free beers and wines and all kinds of things. And you could just try swapping one of your alcoholic beverages with that when you go out or at home and just see how that makes you feel. Kimberley: Yeah. It's a great response in terms of like, it is. It could be. Would you say that's more of the harm reduction model? Amanda: Yeah, absolutely. Or someone who's not ready or really interested in the big conversation. That's one of the reasons I really support and like the alcohol-free beverages and stuff like that because it gives people, I think, an easier way to step into it. And sometimes even realizing too, like alcohol-free beverages can taste really good compared to the beverage that has alcohol in it. So, you're not drinking this for the taste. Kimberley: Exactly. Sometimes when I have drunk alcohol, I'm like, why am I even drinking this? It's not delicious. Amanda: It's true. Kimberley: It's not delicious. I love that you say that about-- I think one of the wins of the world is they are creating more, even just the bottles and the look of them are much nicer than the general or dual looking kind of bottles, which I think is really cool. I love this conversation, and thank you so much for bringing it to me because I do really believe, particularly in the anxiety field, we are not talking about it enough. So, I'm so grateful for you. Amanda: Absolutely. I'm so glad that I got to chat about it because, yeah, the anxiety connection is huge. Kimberley: Yeah. Tell me about your book and all about you. Where can people find you? Amanda: Yeah. So, my book comes out on January 4th. It's called Not Drinking Tonight. And 2022, because this is out. Kimberley: Yeah. Amanda: Sorry if I messed up. Kimberley: No, no it's good. So, for people who are listening on replay, it will be out as of 2022. Amanda: Yeah. It's called Not Drinking Tonight: A Guide to Creating a Sober Life You Love. It is broken up into three different sections so that you can learn in the first section why you drink, and I go into evolutionary psychology and trauma and shame. In the second part, it's about reparenting yourself or the tools that you need to stay stopped. So, I talk about boundaries and self-care and all of the things, emotional health, how we take care of our emotions. And then in the last section, I talk about moderation, relapsing, the overlap of alcohol use and other substances or ways we numb. So, really though my book is structured around alcohol. I talk a lot about eating disorders, perfectionism, workaholism, other drugs, because I think a lot of it is the same in that sense. Kimberley: 100%. Amanda: So yeah. And you can find me on Instagram at Therapy For Women, or my website is amandaewhite.com. Kimberley: Amazing. Thank you so much. It's so great to actually have a conversation with you face to face. Well, as face to face as we can be. So, thank you so much. Amanda: Thank you. This was so great. ----- Okay. And before we get going, I'm sure you got so much out of that episode. Before we get going onto your week, I wanted to share the “I did a hard thing.” This one is for on Paula, and she said: “I started ERP School earlier this year. While looking into my OC cycle, I was surprised to find out that I had some overt compulsions. I thought they were mostly mental. And that's when I figured out I had a BFRB. My loved ones had commented on my hair pulling in the past, but I didn't realize how compulsive it could be. I watched Kimberley's webinar on BFRBs, and I got inspiration to be creative. I tried to use hand lotion, so it would make my hands sticky and demotivate hair pulling. I also got a fidget toy to keep my hands occupied whenever I felt like pulling. But what worked best was you using a transparent elastic band to tie up the two strands I used to pull. It's perfect because it creates a physical barrier to pulling, but also a sensory reminder. If my fingers feel the band, I can say to myself, “Oh, the band, that feels different.” And because I'm trying to make a change, way to go me. Thank you, Kimberley, for all the amazing work you do.” So guys, this is amazing. If you didn't know, if you go to CBT School, we have a free training for people with BFRBs. If you have OCD, we have a free training for people with OCD. So, head on over to CBT School, and you can get all of the cool resources there. Have a wonderful day, everybody. And thank you so much for the “I did a hard thing.” That was so cool. I was not expecting that, Paula. Congratulations! You are doing definite hard things. Have a wonderful day, everybody.

How important are wedding flowers? We're pretty sure you'd agree they're a huge part of your decor, right? Yet is it really, totally, and absolutely necessary to use live flowers? “Say whaat? Fake flowers? No way!” But wait, we're not talking about the kind of faux flowers you'd find at your local craft store. On today's show Christy and Michelle are talking to a Megan and Amanda Rapacz, sisters and co-founders of Silk Stem collective , a silk flower rental company that offers a menu of options for you to choose from. Their model of rent, use, and return isn't only sustainable it's quite savvy don't you think? You'll also hear from Maria, a wedding planner from Kara Mia Events as the ladies chat it up and discuss manufactured wood flowers. The discussion leads to fresh vs fake flowers, sustainability in the wedding industry, and how to make the right choice for your big day. Ready? Set. Learn. Big Takeaways * There are ways to sustainably source and dispose of real cut flowers. * Look for locally grown, in- season flowers. * Use them without flower foam. * Arrange to have them donated or composted at the end of the day. However, sometimes there isn't a viable option with travel, guests having allergies to flowers, not having a proper way to dispose of them, etc. * And if you want to keep the flowers having the sola wood option means you can keep them forever or even use them again. * There is definitely a craftsmanship with florists. This isn't to say you can't DIY, but when you really want something perfect, the extra cost of a florist can absolutely be worth it. * With Silk Stem, they do make the arrangements for you. They have multiple collections you can choose from. This can really help you match colors and see exactly what you're getting when you order. * Another benefit of these flowers is that they will still look good a day later. If dates are changing, or you have two day photoshoots, you know for sure these flowers will still look fresh and new. * Basically - as Maria said - there is no one size fits all. And if you're thinking of alternatives to fresh flowers for your wedding - both fabric and sola wood are options you can consider. * What do you like the look of? * Order samples? * What can you afford? * What do you want to do with it afterwards? * And remember - aiming for a green wedding is not an all or nothing endeavor. * You don't need to feel overwhelmed by the prospects and options - there are ways to zero in on one element and make that a more sustainable option for your wedding. * There is a lot of fear around faux flowers. If you are on the fence, order a sample! Links We Referenced greenweddingguild.com (https://www.greenweddingguild.com) karamiaevents.com (https://www.karamiaevents.com) instagram.com/greenweddingguild (https://www.instagram.com/greenweddingguild/) facebook.com/greenweddingguild (https://www.facebook.com/greenweddingguild) silkstemcollective.com (https://silkstemcollective.com) (Use Code: PODCAST20 for 20% of $200+ and free shipping) instagram.com/silkstemcollective (https://www.instagram.com/silkstemcollective/) Quotes “There is no one size fits all option. Everyone is going to have a different take on what they prefer. This one happened to work for me, and I liked it. I am sure there are others that will feel the same way.” - Maria “There isn't an easy way for a florist to show you exactly what you are going to get on your wedding day. Flower availability changes. Flowers are in and out of season. They can make great recommendations, and you can give them a great inspiration board. But at the end of the day, you don't know what you are going to get until the actual day of your wedding, right?” - Amanda “It worked so well for us, and for our wedding. That easily transitioned into a business, because I felt so passionately that other people would love this too. Other people also don't want to spend $2000 on flowers. Other people also want really beautiful floral options that don't look plasticy, and look like real flowers.” - Megan Plan your wedding using The Big Wedding Planning Master Class (https://www.thebigweddingplanningmasterclass.com/). A self-paced digital course created with love for you by Christy & Michelle. The Big Wedding Planning Podcast is... * Hosted and produced by Christy Matthews and Michelle Martinez. * Edited by Veronica Gruba. * Music by Steph Altman of Mophonics (https://www.mophonics.com/). * On Instagram @thebigweddingplanningpodcast and be sure to use #planthatwedding when posting, so you can get our attention! * Inviting you to become part of our Facebook Group! Join us and our amazing members. Just search for The Big Wedding Planning Podcast Community on Facebook. * Easy to get in touch with. Email us at thebigweddingplanningpodcast@gmail.com or Call and leave a message at 415-723-1625 and you might hear your voice on an episode * On Patreon. Become a member (https://www.patreon.com/thebigweddingplanningpodcast) and with as little as $5 per month, you get bonus episodes, special newsletters and Zoom Cocktail Hours with Christy & Michelle! Our Partners (https://www.thebigweddingplanningpodcast.com/partners) Special Deals for Listeners - TBWPP Enthusiastically Approved! Wedfuly (https://wedfuly.com/bigwedding/) SuitShop (https://suitshop.com/?utm_campaign=EngagedLeads&utm_content=BWPPPartnership&utm_medium=BWPP&utm_source=ReferralLink) The Flashdance (https://www.theflashdance.com/virtual-party-the-big-wedding-planning-podcast) Cactus Collective (https://www.cactus-collective.com/the-big-wedding-planning-podcast/) Unboring Wedding Academy (https://www.unboringweddingacademy.com/bigwedding/)

This weeks guest is the wonderful Amanda Garcia! Heres a little more about Amanda: "It's never too late to go back to school. On our first date, my now partner, Jose, shared some of the struggles he faced when trying to go to college straight out of high school. Fast forward a few months later...plus knowledge of how to navigate the system, he was able to go back to school and take advantage of campus resources. As we discussed his journey and some of the barriers he faced, we had an "ah ha" moment. We thought about the community we live in and how we come into contact with people who didn't have the proper support to go to college. We thought about the people we've spoken to who have said, "I wish I could have gone, I wish I knew someone I could talk to, I wish I knew how to get started." I want to reach people who have always wondered but never had a resource to reach out to. As a Community College counselor, I have worked with students who are: first-generation, undocumented, re-entry (25+ years old), students who have disabilities, students who are parents, and so many more. My goal is to serve as a resource and to show people, it is possible!" Follow Amanda on the Gram! @agarcia9323 -------------------------------------------------------------- Love this episode? Leave us some love in the review section and share with your friends! Don't forget to follow us @talentlessexecution on instagram! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

In this bonus episode, Zach chats with Amanda Edwards, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, about her journey in electoral politics and the importance of voting ahead of Super Tuesday.Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and check out her website by clicking here.Visit our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? Look, it's Zach with Living Corporate, and yes, I know. It's a Monday. You're like, "Whoa, why are you dropping content on a Monday? The world is shifting! Why is reality as I know it splitting in half?!" No, you're probably not doing any of that. You're probably just like, "Yo, okay. Another podcast, okay." And that's what it is. It's, like, a bonus pod. Look, y'all. Remember when we had Royce West a couple--you know, it was, like, a week or two ago? A little bit ago. The point is, we had Senator Royce West on, Texas State Senator Royce West--what's up, respect to the man--to talk a little bit about voting and the importance of voting. Today is the day before Super Tuesday, right? Like, Tuesday, that's the day you vote for the person that you want to continue forward in the respective race, whether it be presidential or senatorial, and we have Amanda Edwards on. Amanda Edwards is someone who is running for U.S. Senate. She is a native Texan and former Houston City Council member who represented 2.3 million constituents, and she actually left that position to run for U.S. Senate. A pretty crowded race. We're talking a little bit about just her background and the importance of voting as well as really why we should vote. And you'll hear me say it in the podcast, y'all. Like, Living Corporate is about amplifying and centering black and brown experiences at work. I believe a way--not the only way, but a way to do that for yourself civically is by voting. And I recognize there are different positions, like going full dissident. We had Howard Bryant on the show, and he talked about the idea of Colin Kaepernick not voting, because he's like, "Look, if I believe that the system is inherently broken and I can't vote my way out of oppression, then why should I vote?" But, you know, there are different points of opinion on that. I do believe we have the right to vote. People are actively looking to take away our ability to vote, questioning our very right to be here. I believe a great way to just say that we matter is by voting. So make sure y'all check out this episode. Nothing changes for the rest of the week. We've got more content for your head top starting tomorrow and then Thursday and then Saturday, and then the marathon continues. 'Til next time, y'all. Peace.Zach: Amanda Edwards, welcome to the show. How are you doing?Amanda: I'm great. Thank you so much for having me on this morning.Zach: It's not a problem. Now, look, just to start, many people are saying that, you know, Texas is really truly the battleground state. So goes Texas, so goes the nation regarding tilting red or blue. So there have been, you know, accelerated attempts to speed that up. We've had Beto and Wendy's campaigns being notable in that regard. So with that let me ask you, do you think Texas is ready? And if so, what makes you the right choice to get us there?Amanda: Absolutely I believe Texas is in fact ready in 2020, and the question remains is will the Democrats put up the right candidate who will be able to unseat John Cornyn. It is not a far-gone conclusion that it will inevitably happen. It will happen if we put forward the correct candidate, and that is someone who can build upon the strengths of Beto's election. So when we looked at Beto's 2018 run, in a time where nobody thought it would be possible to flip the state of Texas, Beto came within 215,000 votes of doing so, and he did so in large part based on the strength of getting persuadable voters out to vote for him. In other words, people who were independent voters or people who were in suburbs or people who were in non-traditional markets, like smaller markets that typically don't vote heavily Democratically, those are areas and spaces and places in which he had tremendous success in terms of getting the vote out. Where there were still some opportunities left on the table happened to be--when you look closely at the numbers, you saw that communities of color, they registered in high numbers, but they didn't turn back out and vote in high numbers. There were less than 50% of the registered numbers. People under the age of 35 likewise had high levels of registration but did not turn out to vote in those same high levels. They were under 50% of their registered numbers. So what if you had a candidate who could, by virtue of her politics, allow her to galvanize those persuadable voters yet again, but in addition to that be able to build upon Beto's run and actually also bring in those communities of color that had registered but did not actually vote, bring them into the fold as well as those under the age of 35 who had this similar situation arise with registration versus actual turnout. If you can build all three of those coalitions, you will actually the votes necessary in order not just to come close but to actually beat John Cornyn and to make history in Texas, and that is what we're planning to do after getting out of this Democratic primary, which is in fact a very crowded field, but I think a very important testament to the significance of the time that we're living in. 'Cause it used to be the case where you couldn't get anybody to run in these primary elections because of how difficult the feat was considered to be. Now of course, people have internalized that Texas is in fact winnable now, and in fact, that's why a number of us are running in this race. I for one left my city council at-large state--I was representing about 2.3 million Texans--to pursue this because I know how significant and important it is that we not just come close but that we actually can win, and the only way to do that is by galvanizing those coalitions that I mentioned to you.Zach: So what have been some of the greatest, you know, advantages and biggest challenges in not only being young and being black and being a woman, but being a young black woman in this race?Amanada: Well, the first thing you always have to do is your homework, right? And we know that this is a change election, meaning there's gonna be a lot of non-traditional voters turning out to vote, and so you can as a result--I mean, just to [?] small statistic, since 2016 for example--and there's been well over 2.6 newly registered voters in Texas. Of that number, over 1.6 million of them are people of color and/or under the age of 25 years old. And so if you look at that or you think about that statistic, the electorate is changing. So someone who's younger, someone who is a person of color, is actually consistent with the wave of change that we're seeing in Texas as we speak. So these are not, you know, things that many people from the outside looking in might view to be challenges that I face or obstacles I see as strengths. And so we have a huge opportunity in our hands, putting in a candidate that looks and sounds and is about change. Also a candidate who has a track record for such. I think it's important when you have someone--when you talk to some of these communities that stayed at home last election cycle. Let's take some of the communities of color, for example. Back in '17 when Harvey struck my community, there was 51 inches of rainfall that fell across our community. Billions of dollars in damage, loss of life, loss of property, you name it. Devastation across a broad spectrum, and I got a phone call to go check on some of my low-income seniors. I said, "No problem," and I went, and I just went to their houses impromptu, and I learned they weren't removing the walls from their homes. And of course they had been soiled by the flood water, and that will result in mold setting in if you don't remove those walls. So I mobilized hundreds of volunteers. We went out and started going door to door. Well, the first question I was asked by many homes was "Oh, are you up for re-election?" And they asked it very innocently, but the question is an illustration of a much broader systemic problem in which people are only accustomed to seeing their elected officials when it's time for us to get a vote, and we've got to make it more than just about electoral politics and voting. We've got to make it about depositing in people's lives, and I think that's how you bridge that disconnect with a lot of these communities of color who are used to being exploited around election time only to see that the promises are never delivered, and we've got to have a messenger, which would be me, who can demonstrate when they ask "Well, why should I believe you that it will be different? Because I've heard this before," I can say it's been different for the communities that I've represented, and that's gonna be huge in bridging the disconnect. So again, another strength out of what some could perceive to be a disadvantage. I see it as a strength.Zach: I love it. So, you know, it's easy I think--and let's talk a little bit about, like, the presidential race as well, because it's Monday, the day before Super Tuesday, y'all. Y'all get out there and let's get to voting. Let's go. Let's move. But it's easy, right, for black and brown folks, I think, to look at the current slate of candidates and see that the Democratic Party does not really prioritize the voice and representation, like, of us, and with that in mind, I'm curious, why do you think it's important for that same group to vote in 2020 if the alternative could be just another candidate that will ultimately ignore them?Amanda: I think that's what my campaign is all about, not just electing--well, first I need you to elect me. [laughs] But that's just one step. The second is something that I've embarked upon as a local elected official, which has been about empowering people and to also hold their leadership accountable for the things that come out of [our?] mouth. So it's not good enough to see me in the campaign cycle and let me go away and not come back until the next campaign cycle, because how do you get what you deserve in your community unless you hold me accountable? We have to have an open line of communication. This open line can be state-wide. It relates to not just being responsive to constituent requests but being present in communities, hosting a town hall. When I come to you, you should be having the report card out. "Well, where are you with this? We talked about this. What's the timing on this?" Or not even a report card. I should just proactively share with you where we are with that. That's being effective as a leader in delivering results. Before I got into politics, I will tell you, I was a [?] lawyer. I was a municipal finance lawyer. You don't get paid [?] 'til the deal gets closed. So in my mind I'm hard-wired to think in terms of deliverables, right? And so you have to close the deal before you get paid for it. In the world of politics, people just give speeches all the time and not see progress. In some kind of way that's doing your job, and I just don't think that the bar is high enough. I think doing your job is bringing home the things, the change you discussed on the campaign trail and not pointing fingers. What if the premium was [?]? And this also turns to the electorate, okay? Constituents have to raise the bar for themselves. It cannot be that you say "I want to send a boxer to go perform surgery." If you're asking somebody to bring home deliverables like policy changes, it's not about me beating somebody else in the public arena, in public. It's not about me getting some cable news, you know, applause for some Tweet I made. It's about going and getting those bills passed, and that's what we have to begin to focus our attention on. So often it's the case that we focus on the fight versus focus on the result, and I think there's a role to be played by the electorate to understand that. You've got to be focused on who do we think is a mover in that place and get something done there. That's what we should be rewarding, not so much who can be mean like Donald Trump or who can, you know, fight him. I mean, that's part of the equation, but that's not the exclusive element that we should be focused on. You know, and I think that gets lost, and that's a huge detail. I mean, part of the dysfunction we have in Washington, the polarization, is because we elect people to go in and be polarizing.Zach: So, you know, you mentioned Donald Trump, and it's interesting because the next thing I was gonna ask you was about millennials and Gen Z black and brown voters in this cycle keep getting told that we have to make compromises in order to beat Trump, which often means accepting candidates that have troubling racial records, right? And I don't even know why I'm saying troubling racial records. People got records out here that's showing that they're mad racist and/or--this is my show, I'ma stop trying to use all this little political language. I ain't playing with y'all. You know what I'm saying, they got some crazy stuff happening in their past, but we're challenged to vote for them anyway. So, like, should we make that trade-off? And if so, why?Amanda: I think you vote for what you want to see. I mean, some people try to--because ultimately that's what change is about. So if you see a candidate that espouses the change you want to see and enough people see it, I mean, whether you are in agreement with Bernie Sanders or not, you know, he was seemingly a long-shot early on, right? And now of course you see him gaining momentum, and it's not because people say "Oh, he's gonna be the easy one to win early on." They got behind him. They wanted to see what he was talking about. Same thing with a litany of other candidates that we've seen. Obama, you know? Obama was not the likely candidate to emerge.Zach: I remember that in high school, yeah.Amanda: He was the unlikely candidate, and people just wanted to see that change that he described so they got behind him. And we've done it for good and for bad. I mean, Donald Trump is another example. You know, my good example is Barack Obama, President Obama. My bad example is Donald Trump. But people wanted to see somebody mess up the system, you know? They wanted to see the establishment just turned on its head, and I don't know if they're all pleased with the way it was turned on its head or not, but he's had a critical mass of supporters stick with him, and you just--you know, in both Obama's example and Trump's example, neither of those were considered the likeliest candidate. So it's about seeing what you want to see. So you support who you believe can deliver the change you're looking for, and if the candidate that you see--you know, the candidate that you're being told to vote for isn't that person, then don't vote for him, 'cause you're the one who's gonna be holding the bag with the policies they promote. Zach: That's a fact though. No, that's true, and I think the reality is--I saw this somewhere on Twitter, 'cause you know, Twitter has all the quotables, but it said something like "The person who's electable is the person you vote for." Right? Like, just vote for 'em.Amanda: That's right. I love that.Zach: Okay. So in this country and in this state, public or private, the quality of your education has more to do with the value of your home and your zip code than your work ethic. So when you're in the Senate and you're asked to confirm the next secretary of education, what would you ask them to change?Amanda: Well, #1 I need a secretary of education that actually believes in public education. Can we just start there?Zach: Man. Yo, what is up with her, man?Amanda: I hate to start--Zach: Nah, let's let these shots off. No, let's go. Come on. [ratatata sfx]Amanda: It's such a fundamental [?]. If you don't believe that public education should even be there, that's probably not the person to have over the department of ed, #1. #2, I would make sure that we have strategies in place for our students to be successful no matter where they're in school. One of the things that is just--you know, you've heard about the phrase "The silent bigotry of low to no expectations," right? And for us to not have those expectations of our students and put systems in place for success, pathways for success, and not just success today. I'm talking about leading the next generation of jobs. You know, why--I do a lot of work on tech and innovation, and people always--you know, and I do a lot of work in minority communities as well, and they don't see those things as being harmonious, and I'm saying this should be something that's in all of our classrooms. We should be introducing our young people to the concept of entrepreneurship and, you know, just all of the things. We should be making those introductions. We shouldn't just be teaching for tests, okay? Because kids, that's not preparing them for life. I'm not saying you can't have a test, but we've gone crazy with it. We cannot just be there for tests and that's the measure for success. We have to do better, and we have to have a well-rounded education where people have multiple pathways for success, including vocational, but also including four-year institutions no matter where you live and how much money you make. In Texas we have seen the course challenged time and time and time and time again, our full financing structure, and that requires us to say education is a right, which we have not gone as far to say. So you're not going to see the reforms that you truly need to see, which is--you know, the connection between where you live and the quality of your education doesn't make any sense. Education is our great equalizer, yet we're perpetuating how unequal it actually is by virtue of tying it to your income--I mean, of tying it to your property tax value. This is not something that makes any sense, but we continue to perpetuate the systems because, you know, we have people in office who don't believe that public education has value. I am a product of public high school, and I will tell you, you know, it is so important that we are investing more than what we have in the past, because there's so many other challenges and conflating variables our students face. So I'm a proponent of making sure that all of our students, no matter where they go to school, can be successful. They need to see that. I like to go back to my alma mater and, you know, model the behavior. You should have expectations of going to school, and they've got to see it. They're not necessarily going to see that at home all the time, so we've got to supplement that with the support they're getting in school, but truthfully speaking, a lot of the support that I recall being in school when I was a student are no longer there 'cause they got cut. We balance our state budgets on the backs of our students all of the time, and consequently our students have fewer resources to succeed, like wrap around services, and just--I could go on and on and on and on about what needs to happen with our education system, but I think first and foremost we need somebody innovative coming to the table, bring some new ideas to the table, and I would be highly eager to see, once we get our new president in office, that we bring somebody in who can be serious about educating our youth so we'll have a prepared workforce for tomorrow.Zach: So that sets me up well for my last question before we let you go. So irrespective of who wins the election in November, the Democratic primary race has shown that there is a more progressive, ethnically diverse voting population that is [?], so what do you believe the Democratic Party at large can do to ensure that they capitalize on this ever-growing reality?Amanda: In terms of electoral politics?Zach: Yes.Amanda: I think we've got to make sure that we're putting up candidates that are receptive to the issues that these communities face, and too often I'm asked, "Oh, [?]?" And I say, "Well, I think it's additive to be honest with you." I think, you know, the black community cares about health care access and education just like anybody else would, but they also have other issues in addition that they care about. But what [?] me is when people try to reduce it down to one issue, and that's the only issue that we face. The truth is we have additional issues that we have to contend with, and we have to have a broad spectrum of answers that are responsive to the broad spectrum of media. And so we've got to have to figure out how to do that. I'd like for us to be serious about elections, more serious about how we treat our elections in general with a national holiday for Election Day. I mean, I just think it's crazy that we don't have that in our country. Obviously we know why that is not the case, but it should be, and just--you know, we have holidays for all kinds of things that don't make a lot of sense, but we don't do that for Election Day? And that's the primary part of how our democracy works? I think that's problematic. So yeah, I think we've got to really start to not view the diverse candidates that do come forward as being candidates that have challenges because they're diverse. I think they're candidates that are stronger because of being diverse candidates, 'cause that's the direction the country is headed, and we should support our candidates and support diversity within that representation, but also provide for more ways to provide clear sources of information that are truthful, you know? Like, some people pick up the League of Women Voters guide and things like that, but a lot of people don't even know where to start with this stuff.Zach: Right, you're absolutely right.Amanda: You know, and it's very overwhelming as someone who's been in government and in electoral politics. It's overwhelming for people the kind of questions I get. "How do I register? When do I register?" Why isn't there one clear depository for all the information for these things where you could just information for candidates, information for--you know, just things like that. There should be some kind of clarity provided for people to make it easier to participate.Zach: From an accessibility perspective, right?Amanda: Yeah. You're kind of on your own out there, and I just think that's not the way to make it accessible to the masses.Zach: Amanda, this has been a great interview, a great conversation. Thank you so much for having us. Y'all, it's Monday, the day before Super Tuesday. Making sure we bring y'all the stuff to make sure that y'all continue to have your voice amplified and centered, and you can't do that if--well, look, for the sake of this podcast and this conversation, I'ma say you voting is a critical way to amplify and center your voice. Let's make sure you get out there and you vote, and we'll catch y'all next time. Peace, y'all.

One of the privileges we have as the owners of QLB is that we have a panel of experienced entrepreneurs that act as advisers and also happen to be our brokers. On today's episode, we are hosting our first Podcast Panel, these in-house experts are here to answer key questions regarding buying and selling. Jason, Bryan, Amanda, and David have a combined 40 years of experience in brokering e-commerce businesses and are here to share some great insights into their first-hand transaction experience. The discussion today focuses on the sell side and how human behavior can influence a transaction, balancing being a good seller without being a pushover, and finally on valuation and managing expectations from the seller side. Episode Highlights: Can a seller increase their sales amount just by being a good seller? How to handle challenging sellers and tips for approaching the negotiations with them. Thoughts on where seller behavior fits into the entire valuation process. Some of the principals of a good seller and behaviors they should avoid. Where the line is between two being too private and being proactive as a seller. Ways certain SaaS elements can be revealed in due diligence without giving away too much before the handover. Specific contingencies that sellers can hold onto until the signing. The importance of the buyer/seller face to face meeting. Things sellers tend to put too much emphasis on during a transaction. Staying on for extra consult periods as a way to earn buyer trust and confidence. How to temper unreasonable valuations or unreasonable expectations for what market can bear on the part of the seller.   Transcription: Joe: So Mark one of the privileges that you and I have as owners of Quiet Light Brokerage is that we have an unofficial board of directors and highly successful entrepreneurs that are our advisors slash brokers. And we joke often that most of them are more experienced and smarter and more successful than we are. And I think with the panel that you put together in this upcoming episode it's absolutely true. We've got Jason, Brad, Amanda, and David all sharing their experience as advisors, brokers about how to be a good seller and beyond that with the entire transaction. How did the overall panel go? Did everybody behave and give nuggets of wisdom throughout the whole podcast? Mark: Well, naturally I started this all first well it was a pretty interesting idea. I was talking to Amanda about going to a conference down in Austin where she lives and she was invited onto a panel and she said that she'd be really interested in doing stuff like that. So I thought well why don't we do a panel here at Quiet Light and bring forward some of the advisors that have been working on deals. I mean I think the combined number of years on that panel alone was something like 40 some odd years of experience combined. Joe: As buyers or entrepreneurs? Mark: I didn't even get into the; I have no idea how to calculate that. That'd be a much bigger number. My math abilities stop after about 40, 45. Joe: So everything is 40 years of experience for you. Mark: Well I become 42 so yeah everything is; that's going to be the limit. Every year I add one number to my math abilities. The panel was pretty fun. I didn't know how it was going to go. I didn't know if it was going to be too many people on the panel. I was hoping for some discussion between them and we did get into that. We got some great discussion between people who have been doing this for a really, really long time. I wanted to keep the topic pretty simple and just kind of dig into their actual experience in doing deals. I wanted to find out what are they seeing on the sell-side specifically and working with people; humans that can really influence a transaction by their behavior. How much are they seeing that actually come into influencing the price? Jason right out the gate is like look we can sometimes influence the price but the bigger worry here is having a primary effect. If you're a crappy seller you might make this an unsellable business. And that kind of launched off this conversation of what is it; how can you be a good seller? How do you balance this idea of being a good seller who is open and proactive? David talked about being proactive as a seller. How do you balance this proactivity and openness versus being a pushover? What elements should sellers also not necessarily open up on their business right away? And where should they stick their foot down and say we shouldn't be sharing this? A pretty interesting conversation on that front to see what other people's experience was in these different questions that came up. I didn't lay it out right away. Joe just to let you know I asked them to pick out a URI moving forward for the company and I won't tell you what the result was of that. Joe: So I have to listen to this to get the answer. What was the question again specifically and what wiseass comment did Jason make because I'm sure that's exactly where it came from? Mark: You're going to have to listen. Joe: Alright. What was the question though? Mark: The question was choose Joe or Mark. Joe: To do what? And you're like hosting the podcast so you could totally edit it out and tell them no, no, no, no, choose me so it's…for the audience, I want to know Mark has full editing control of the podcast so whatever negative things said about him were completely edited out. Mark: Well, that's actually not true. I don't touch it, in fact, there's a point in there and I'm hoping the editors… Joe: See he's fabricating he's making this up. It's totally true. Chris and Podcast Motor; they do what he tells them to do. Mark: They're the only people in my life that do what I tell them to do. Joe: You man have seven children, that's the way it is. Mark: Yeah, I guarantee nobody in my household does what I tell them to do. Joe: There is teenagers. Mark: There is a point in there; I hope the editors catch this where Amanda cuts out and I awkwardly interject so we'll see if the editors catch that part. If they don't just bear with it because she's actually giving some really good advice during that point in the podcast. Joe: So you and I always joke about or I always joke about the fifth pillar. You always correct me and tell me it doesn't exist. And for those that don't know the pillars, it's growth, risk, gross transferability, and documentation and I always say there's a fifth. It's an invisible fifth and it's the person behind the business. Who you are and how you behave and what you post on Facebook and what's your LinkedIn profile says and it's silly pictures and things of that nature. It has an impact on the overall value of your business. People are going to stroke a check for enough money that is going to make a difference in their life savings and the risk they're going to invest in their future. They need to like you number one, they need to trust you number one; both a number one. That is so so valuable so I love this topic. I absolutely have to listen to see how quickly they all said your name instead of mine. And then I'm going to have to have another panel on with the other four advisors and see what they say. Mark: Sounds great. Mark: Okay, welcome everybody. We're having our very first podcast panel or panel podcast. I don't know what we want to call this but basically, we have a bunch of people on this podcast here. We have Amanda, Jason, David, and Bryan all joined me for a conversation. We've never done this before so we're going to see how this actually works out. The format is going to be pretty simple, I'm just going to ask questions and pick out different people and see what sort of conversation comes from those questions. So, guys, I'm just going to start off with a very simple question. You've got to pick one personally Joe or me; me or Joe? No, don't answer that. I'm just joking. Don't answer that because I already know what the answer would be. You guys would want Joe. Alright so let's; I want to focus this panel on more seller questions because we obviously work with buyers. I know a lot of buyers listen to the podcast but we work with a lot of sellers as well. And so I want to focus a lot on that. What is it like to sell a business? What are some of your experiences? You guys have a ton of experience working with sellers, preparing their businesses for sale, helping them go through that really difficult emotional complex process of exiting their companies so I wanted to try and tap into your collective wisdom here, get some good information and insights into sellers and that process of actually selling a business. And I want to start out by looking at how much influence a seller can have on the value of their business just by how they act with their business. Let's start with you Jason because you are the longest-tenured member of QLB here so I'm going to start with you. I'm going to ask you just a pretty basic question here and that is do you think that you can increase the amount of money; can the seller increase the amount of money they get out of the exit of their business by being a quote-unquote good seller? Jason: Absolutely 100% but it may not be in the way that you're thinking about it. I don't know that your value goes from a million dollars to a million one because you're a good seller. I think it's more binary. I think it's either a million dollars or zero. Meaning if you're not a good seller I think it's likely to spook a buyer to the point where they simply don't want to complete a deal. So I think it's incumbent to be a good seller, to be ethical, to be honest, and very very important to be transparent. So like any little thing about the business that in the back of your mind you think gee I really don't want to talk about that, that's exactly the thing that the seller should talk about with the buyer. Get it out there. Mark: Yeah. Amanda, I know over the years you've also been with QLB for a really long time, we've worked with all sorts of different people. Some people are really easy and a joy to work with and while not dumping on any previous clients, some people are a little bit more challenging. And I want to take a step back and just say something real quick. When we talk about challenging clients, difficult people to work with, the one thing that's always important for us to keep in mind is I get why some people are somewhat challenging. They've built a business, they have a valuable asset, they want to make sure the deal goes through well. So they have a right to a certain extent to be a little bit more challenging. But what has been your experience, Amanda, when you've dealt with a client that might be a little bit more difficult to work with and maybe a little more abrasive in the negotiations? Have you seen that impact the deal that they're able to get? Amanda: Absolutely. I think it's important to actually take those clients and take them aside and say it's really important to look at the feedback that we're getting from buyers and to be reasonable with their expectations. Otherwise, we're not going to deliver for with the deal successfully because the buyer's feedback is super valuable. If you get a lot of feedback that's consistent and a seller is not willing to hear it, it makes it very difficult to take those items there that could be actionable, make them happen, and then get a deal done. I think that also working with abrasive sellers can rub buyers the wrong way because obviously after a deal is done they have to work with the buyers. The buyers work with the seller for extended period time for training and support and it certainly is concerning if a seller is not easy to work with and has a difficult time getting along with the buyer for that matter. So yes it definitely can impact the deal. Mark: Yeah. And I think Jason your point about it being somewhat binary I think is interesting. At the end of the day obviously, we're valuing the business not necessarily the business owner and so Bryan what are your thoughts on what Jason is saying as far as it being somewhat binary? Do you agree with that or do you think that the seller is just one other element of the entire business mix? Obviously, we're valuing the business on its own to a certain extent where does the buyer fit in; I'm sorry, where does the seller fit into that entire valuation process? Bryan: Yes. So I think Jason makes a really, really good point and I'd like to touch on his point about honesty first [inaudible 00:11:30.1]. I think that's probably the most important quality that a good seller can have. But in terms of sort of being a good seller, being more binary than affecting the valuation I think it can be like this and if the seller is really difficult to deal with then disconcerting there is something that's not happening. But I think that being a really good seller can actually also increase the ultimate value that the seller gets out of the transaction simply because being likable and getting along well with buyers is in my opinion likely to induce better offers, induce better conversations that lead to better offers, and thereby can lead to a better and more profitable deals for the seller itself. Mark: Yeah, I think the only issue that I would just if I'm going to comment on this here would be that the buyer is going to look at a business and look at the element of risk. There's always a perceived unknown of what am I actually getting into here. And if you have a seller who is shifty, if you have a seller who is maybe withholding information or is being just kind of; I think Jason to what you're saying, if they're being really abrasive or just mean or whatever yeah that becomes a very binary sort of situation where if I'm a buyer I don't want to get into that because who knows what's going to happen after the sale. Jason: I find in the real world though it's not necessarily that that a seller is abrasive it's more the word you used is good shifty. A buyer just gets the sense there's something that the seller is not telling me. Are they planning to start a competing business the day after they sell? Do they know that this industry is about to hit a brick wall? Are there issues with the supplier? It's that shifty element more than the abrasive element is what I find in the real world. Mark: I would agree with that. I mean the thing that I think people on the sell-side need to understand is that from a buyer's standpoint risk plays into a valuation perceived or real. It doesn't matter if the risk is real or if it's perceived it's still there. And so if you are giving off a sense of risk to a buyer that's going to play in the valuation that you get. So I guess we can put this out there as a plea to be a good seller; to behave correctly. But what does that actually mean to be a good seller? David I'm going to throw it over to you because I haven't got you in on this yet. And sorry, I didn't get to turn in you in the first question here but I want to ask you what are some ways that you've seen from sellers that make them good to work with and things that maybe sellers can do to maybe reduce that element of risk; that perceived risk that they might give out otherwise? David: Yeah, it's a great question. For me, it comes down to three core principles and the guys have touched upon perhaps the most important one right away which is honesty. And then after that, I think it's diligence and knowledge of your own business to the extent that they understand their own numbers in great depth. They understand the reasons, the trends, the way things happen, the problems that they've had; like fully understanding then business. When you have that and have someone with that level of knowledge come on the call with the buyers it's incredibly reassuring that they have this gross knowledge about their own business. And then to a company both that depth of honesty with expertise in their own business. And you know that's not taken for granted because sometimes many entrepreneurs are running multiple businesses and they haven't had the time to focus a lot on one specific thing. So when you have that knowledge it's really helpful. And then the third piece, of course, is productivity. I think that it's easy to come into a selling process perhaps when you are quite emotionally spent even being in the business for a while and to underestimate that a lot of clients will ask some questions and they will want to go back into past historic information and having like a positive mindset about putting that information and realizing that it's also the benefit of the ultimate end goal of the transaction which is to get the best deal terms. Going at that formula very proactive and positive perspective really just creates that like perfect cluster I think of the best seller like proactivity, positivity, honesty, and diligence. Mark: Yeah, that can be a really difficult line to draw because from a seller's standpoint you hear some of these questions and you think I don't want to share this. But at the same time, you don't want to appear shifty. I mean where do you guys think that line is for a seller when they're going through; especially like initially, right? We put up the listing out to the market. I think Brad who is not on this call recently put a listing on the market and had like 300 inquiries on it. We had to shut things down and that client is going through multiple calls one after another after another. And some of these buyers get on and they start asking some pretty pointed questions pretty quickly. What do you think the line is? Amanda I'm going to throw it to you, what do you think that line is where between being a shifty yet still open and honest and proactive as David says? Because I agree with you 100% David that being proactive makes a big difference. So where would you put that line, Amanda? Amanda: I think it has to do with creating expectations for when you're going to open up certain information and letting them know upfront what you're comfortable with. So there are certain things obviously that you want to keep pretty close to you like your suppliers or certain proprietary information that you just don't want to open up to everybody. And so possibly you say okay I'm going to give you all this information; my financials, this is how I do this, this, and this but creating a timeline of when they'll have access to that information based on certain steps being in place and finalizing the deal. And keeping some of that information towards the end I believe has worked really well for most sellers and buyers because if you have that trust level that you built between the two along the way and then you're just basically following the course of actions that have been set out ahead of time then I think that creates a nice flow. And obviously, that's what we want. We want sellers and buyers to both be comfortable through the entire process so that we can get to that finish line. And so I think it is obviously definitely a fine line. But also when a seller and a buyer are working together and they're meeting in person I think that makes a huge impact in what information is shared because you can just feel whether a person is trustworthy or not and what they're going to do with that information. It often comes across just in energy and so oftentimes the seller will let their guard down just when they get to know the buyer a little bit more. But upfront I think obviously you don't want to give 300 people everything you have for obvious reasons. Mark: Yeah and I think for… Amanda: It's about creating expectations. Mark: I would agree 100%. For the buyers that are listening to this, I think the insights that you can take away from this as well is understanding that. Amanda your suggestion is something that we use quite a bit here at Quiet Light during the due diligence process of ordering your requests and understanding some items are going to be more sensitive than others is a really good tip there. It does a great job of helping that seller get put at ease and from the sell-side is a great way for you to protect your more sensitive data by promising this saying I'm more than happy to share this with you but let's first go through these other items first just in case that torpedoes the deal. Bryan, I'm interested to know what your thoughts are where you think the most sensitive sort of data is that sellers might want to consider maybe safeguarding a little bit more than others. Obviously, different sellers are at different levels of comfort. Some don't want to share a single thing about their business and other people are like I don't care. You can't replicate what I did because I got the magic sauce. What sort of information do you think sellers is kind of the main stuff you would probably want to hang onto until the end? Bryan: Yeah, that's a great question. I think it depends a lot on like I said an individual seller. It also depends a lot on the type of the business and the business model, to begin with. So I think with that with an e-commerce business the most closely guarded secrets so to speak might be like Amanda mentioned the vendors with any any business that depends entirely or for the most part on a single or a couple of traffic sources the seller might hold the details of those traffic sources confidential such as for instance in indication of PPC traffic they might not feel comfortable disclosing their full keyword lists and that copies and so forth in the early stages. So it really depends on the business model. It also depends on the business itself and how defensible the business is. Like you said there are some business sellers who are happy to open up absolutely everything because they are fully sourcing that nobody can replicate the business no matter what they sold on but businesses are different and so does comfort level is different. Mark: David and Jason I'd be interested to know from you are there any elements that you have ever run across that have been off-limits in a due diligence process and if so how have you handled getting around that? For example vendor names, customer names, talking to employees; if you're able to share any details on that please do. And I didn't prep before this so if you're not we'll just move on to the next question. Jason: No, that's fine. Well, one thing if I may I just want to add onto what Bryan said. He mentioned about whether a business is replicable. One thing sellers hopefully are aware of, any buyer that's going to see the information has signed I think it's about a five-page non-disclosure agreement which specifically says they're not allowed to scan for ideas to steal. So if a buyer did that they would be blatantly violating their NDA. And a seller would potentially have legal recourse. So hopefully that will give sellers a little more comfort. In regards to what information is truly off-limits, the thing I found is by the time of closing it all has to come out. But some of it does come out essentially at the closing table. So one of the big areas of sensitivity I found is if a business has employees a lot of times the seller doesn't want to mention the sale to the employees literally till the last minute. The reasoning is it could really make them panic and look for other jobs if the deal doesn't go through. The buyer who might be inheriting these employees will have some obvious consternation. They're going to want to know who's about to work for them; are those people planning on sticking around? That can be a really sensitive area. And I've had situations where it feels like we're a lock on that or some other small issue and it always seems to get resolved at the closing table at the 11th hour when finally everyone feels confident that the deal is actually going to happen. David: Yeah and I think to add to Jason's point it's something that comes to mind a lot. Me over the years that's owing a lot of SaaS deals you can imagine the code base is just a really cool secret sauce component of SaaS business and the buyer very naturally wants to see that annotate to see what kind of code quality is annotations and see what kind of architecture is and that creates a lot of shrikes naturally in the owner right away. And it was an interesting bridge trying to think about how we could do that in a very safe way to get to that point that Jason is talking about which is the eventual reveal at closing. And what we did that's worked very effectively over the years and what we do at Quiet Light is show a snapshot of that code base and just provide enough insight and then a high-level like architectural look so that they can see how this sort of modules are put together. And then just a small snapshot so they can analyze the code based on a very discrete basis. Or also consider using a third party due diligence advisor to come in and review the code base and that way the owner is never really hands-on with it. It's being reviewed by a third-party specialist and there's a non-disclosure agreement in place and so you really can actually go into something that looks like quite a difficult issue and something to verify with a lot of credibility and integrity. So that's one of the ways that we've done most to do that with SaaS. Mark: Yeah I think one of the things I've learned over now 13 years of helping people through this is that during the due diligence process oftentimes a buyer comes in and says I need to understand X. And rather than saying in the due diligence process that I need to understand X they say okay I need to understand X and the way to do that is Y. And so what they say is let's do Y. And the seller says I can't do Y. And then the buyer says well what are you trying to hide, right? And so one of the tricks for you guys that I know you guys have done so well over the years is figuring out what is that X; what is the person actually trying to achieve through this request? What are they trying to learn through this request? And David to your point I'm glad you brought up [inaudible 00:25:11.7] because I was going to bring that up. That's one thing that I would consider to be kind of a non-negotiable. If I had a SaaS business and a buyer came in and said I need to get the codebase I would say no. I don't think that that's reasonable mainly because we can satisfy the same information that you're seeking in a way that does not involve handing over the entire code base through a third party due diligence requests or otherwise. I think there are other elements that could be non-negotiable such as if you have a business that has only five clients. And if the buyer wants to speak to those clients there might be a reasonable request there. But it can also be pretty dicing so how do you overcome that sort of friction in a due diligence process. Jason, it looks like you have something that you want to add onto that. Jason: Yeah I mean just touching on that. One thing we were talking about earlier was being a good seller and the corollary is being a good buyer. But one thing I've encountered on occasion is somebody will have experience with having done other deals in the past; either business acquisitions or dispositions or real estate or something. And a person might have an attitude of I've done a lot of deals; this is the way it's always done. And one message I would try to get out to people is just because you've done a deal in a certain way that's not the way it's always done. This panel has done literally hundreds of deals and probably in dozens and dozens of different ways. So I think Mark what you're saying is try to figure out the core of wants and then get creative about how to supply it is probably the most appropriate answer rather than being rigid and saying this is how it has to be. Amanda: I also think to David's point about bringing a third party to do due diligence and possibly a financial audit or an audit of some technology or code it brings a lot of value because it gives the buyer some time to focus on actually what they wanted to do at a business point or it takes the nuances of the financial load because it's so tedious when you're going through financial due diligence or looking at code. And to have somebody else do that who's professional and experienced with that while the buyer can focus on future opportunities and getting prepped and ready for your transitioning into the business then I think there's a ton of value in doing that. And oftentimes it helps the seller feel more comfortable sharing that information with a third party as well. Mark: I'd be curious to see what experience each of you has had with conditional purchase agreements. I've used them sparingly and just I'm going to take a step back, whenever we do the podcast I introduce something that is a little bit outside the normal. Oftentimes I hear from you guys they're saying why are you saying that now everyone is going to want a conditional purchase agreement. So I'm not necessarily encouraging this but I've used it on occasion when somebody really doesn't want to disclose vendor names or really doesn't want to disclose something else. So we say alright let's put together a conditional purchase agreement where basically this thing is binding conditioned on a very specific term. Have any of you others worked with those? Jason: I mean I think like I said I've had some deals where it really seems like it's either going to close or fall apart at the closing table and they've always closed. It's always whatever is that one condition has been revealed right at the very end. Mark: Yeah, and I think I'm going to wrap this up. Amanda, I think one point that you made that I kind of went right on over is meet in person. If I could give one bit of advice to anyone doing an acquisition on the buy-side or sell-side, get together and meet in person. It solves so many problems. If you can spend a couple of days with that person in the same room going over some of the due diligence materials I think it solves a ton of problems or it creates a massive problem that deals shouldn't happen anyways. And that's an outcome that might be okay if the deal is going to be bad anyway. And so a meeting in person is a great suggestion. It's something that I would definitely recommend. Alright, I'm going to ask and move on to another topic here. Bryan I'm going to move this over to you here and that is talking about what's important in the negotiation. When somebody is looking to sell their business oftentimes what we do is we think well I want to get money out of this. I want to get X out of it. I want to get as much as I can possibly get out of it and forget that there's a lot of elements that you have to negotiate. You have a non compete agreement, you have an employment or consulting agreement on top of that. And there's literally probably about a half dozen different things that get negotiated through the process of selling an online business. What are some areas that you've seen maybe a wrong emphasis from sellers in the past where they might put too much weight on one element of a transaction? Bryan: Yeah there is definitely a lot going on in terms of what makes an offer than just total price of the offer. There are things you mentioned and there are seller notes, equity rules, you mentioned an offer can be structured in so many ways. In terms of wrong emphasis, I think sellers are often a little bit perhaps too much against carrying a seller note especially if it's a small seller note. I've seen this sentiment changing over the recent years though and it used to be the case years ago that most sellers would basically only want to want to deal with good cash offers. It's now getting more and more common for sellers to be okay with a 5, 10, or 20% seller note. And the reason why I believe a seller should be more okay with carrying small notes is because that's what I often explain to sellers themselves is that oftentimes those offers that they get that are structured this way are actually going to have bought them more money at the end than a full cash offer route to the extent that they can even easy to consider the seller note to be sort of a bonus on top of what they get anyway. So they can keep pushing for an all-cash offer but it's likely that this all-cash offer would actually go to turn out to be lower than the cash part of the offer that might go to small notes. Mark: Yeah to that we have a podcast I think it probably would have aired a couple of weeks before this episode here with Shannon Stewart who's a tax advisor on the sell-side. And she has an example of a business that sold for 11 million dollars and that she was able to; the net proceeds increased by 43% largely through deferring some of the payments that came in. And when you're talking about an 11 million dollar deal a 43% increase in net proceeds is not a small amount of money. So I would agree, seller notes and knowing how to structure those the right way is is something. Jason what would you say; is there any element that you think sellers tend to overemphasize when they're negotiating? Jason: Yeah I mean I think like Bryan said headline price gets a lot of focus when in reality it's more about how much are you going to get overtime after-tax that you get to keep. And then I think another thing that gets way too much emphasis is multiple. I think a lot of people get hung up on multiple both buyers and sellers and it kind of boils down more to bragging rights than to a discernible business reasoning meaning ohI sold my business for 4X or whatever so I can tell my friends. The reality is okay let's say you pushed the multiple for your particular industry; let's say you're selling an e-commerce business and they normally sell around three times earnings and you managed to push it to four times like you're taking a lot more risk to get to four times you had to accept an earn-out and it's depending on performance and this and that and the other. Even if you collect it all you're earning what you would make in four years anyway. You wouldn't be selling the business if the sole reason was the money that you're getting paid. There are clearly other reasons otherwise you're better to keep the business. So the big advice I give to sellers is the market will determine the value of your business better than anyone on this panel, better than you the seller, better than any individual buyer. We have thousands and thousands of buyers and for most businesses, we get multiple offers. That's the market. If you're not willing to accept what the market will bear you're better to keep the business than to sell it or to try to push the market beyond what it will bear because it very likely could backfire. Mark: Well Jason you're begging me to go into a question that is also on the list. I'm not going to go there yet because I want to stay on this one here and then we're going to get over to that question to wrap things up here. David, I'll be interested in your thoughts on this as well here. Are there elements; I mean you've got a ton of experience in working with sellers just like everybody here, what are some things that you see people often negotiate maybe more heavily than they should and what advice would you give to them on that? David: Well I think certainly on the emphasis question I would say to sellers when they're reviewing any offer that 50% of the decision; only 50% of the decision should come down to purchase price and terms and the other 50% should be based on the execution certainty of the buyer that's actually presenting the offset. Because there's an ocean of difference between coming out with an LOI for your business and actually closing it. And I think it's part of the; well a huge component of hiring a broker and an advisor to help you take that bridge from there to there and I think it's for me sellers that have been really receptive to guidance and advice at that point whether they should take the focus off the headline price off the headline multiple that Jason is talking about and consider the wider context that is this still going to close because the buyer has experience, for example, they have a readily available source of funding their due diligence requests are miles and miles long they're not reliant on any kind of outside financing [inaudible 00:35:22.8] all of these things introduce risk into the deal and ultimately that's risk needs to be looked at properly in the context of the whole deal so I think that's really important. Negotiating terms, one thing that I always recommend for sellers to be open to is the prospect of keeping the window open for like the minority kind of consulting arrangements after the sale. Honestly, we had enough every business through a standard transition period and depending on the size and complexity that can vary. But I think one thing that's actually really good for sellers to think about is maybe staying on to do like an hour or two a month to just say six months longer with the sale and that goes a huge way with buyers knowing that they just have a slightly longer line which the owner has to ask a half an hour-long question in four months time. And to that point about getting the trust and getting the deal over the way, that's a huge point that I think sellers are sometimes like they're spent and they never really want to spend more time on the business. But just that tiny little time investment for just a few moments goes a huge way towards getting a deal on the way and a great value. Mark: Yeah I would agree to that 100%. I remember when I sold my business now a long time ago they asked me to stay on for six months afterwards and they paid me for it; so a regular monthly consulting fee and at first I was like man this is going to be a pain but what I found pretty quickly is it wasn't. It was really easy. It was very easy money that I was bringing in as a result of that. And it really helped with their transition as well. Alright, we're at 35 or about 30 minutes here on this so we're going to round it out with one last question and this is one that is pretty important to me because I think it's what we all do here. We all earn a living in some capacity through helping people exit their businesses and from our standpoint it can be really easy to treat people's businesses as inventory that we're simply moving. And obviously, we don't ever want to go there because we're all business owners ourselves. We've all been through that. We know what work it takes to build these and then how difficult it can be and how stressful it can be to sell them. So one of my pet peeves that have grown over the years is just hearing people say oh man is this seller I was approaching them I wanted to buy their business they weren't selling it but I was doing outreach and I asked them how much they'd sell it for and man his expectations were crazy. It's a pet peeve of mine so I'm kind of implanting here the answer that I want to hear. Amanda; we're going to go left and right on my screen, Amanda, you're first here. Do you think that there is such thing as an unreasonable valuation or is it only really unreasonable expectations of what the market can bear? Amanda: Well I think both actually I think unreasonable expectations for where the market can bear; I mean when we're seeing that right now. Certainly, we're seeing a lot of growth in multiples over the last two years and there's been a push to constantly drive that multiple. And I think we've done a really good job of doing that. But sellers, of course, have their own expectations on what they think that multiple should be because they hear things from other sellers or they possibly got an offer four years ago from a strategic and they decide to pass that. And that has dried up and gone away and is no longer a viable option. And so I think the market evolves really quickly. And I'm actually one of those people who may have unreasonable expectation professional with expertise and proper data to bring somewhere like that back to reality. And I think that that's; actually, the core of it is having realistic expectations with what the market is; the ability of the market at this time because obviously, that may change in six months for better or for worse. I think that whether the expectations are reasonable is less important than the seller being able to be open to the feedback and coming back down to reality. And I think that makes a lot of difference because we see that quite often where sellers will come in and they think their business is for X multiple but then they're open to hearing what we're experiencing, what we're seeing because we do a lot of volumes and then having those realistic expectations is super important. Mark: Yeah and I think one thing I've been trying to remind people as well especially in the sell-side when we get up into the high seven and eight-figure territory; you brought up Amanda that the seller might have gotten an offer from a strategic years ago but obviously never went through or they heard about so-and-so who got a 6X on their business what they never really hear when they hear these big prices is what was the composition of that offer. How much was there actually cash? How much was equity that can be the phantom value? Jason, I know you have a lot of stories about phantom values in equity, right? And so that's something that we don't hear about. It's like the sports contract of oh my gosh they got o120 dollars but it's only 10 million dollars guaranteed and like it's so much in incentives. Jason, what are your thoughts on this aspect of unreasonable expectations on the part of sellers? Jason: I think part of it depends on how you define unreasonable because I look at myself as an example. Most people say I've got very unreasonable expectations of the value of an hour of my time and I will concede absolutely positively. What I expect to earn is way more than what my job will provide and all that means is I need to adjust how I use my time in order to achieve it. So if you're a person who believes your business is worth a lot more than the market will bear, that's perfectly fine. I just think don't be a seller because the market won't provide it. It's important to understand the people on the other end of the transaction are buyers. They're seeking a certain rate of return. You're comparing your business not only to save alternatives like or I mean to a spectrum of alternatives and various safety like bonds, stocks, municipals, real estate. They're also comparing it to other businesses for sale that earn roughly the same amount. You might have roughly the same growth plans. And it can be really frustrating if anyone is banging their head saying no, no, no, no, my business is special and deserves more when the market simply won't bear it out. I think most of us on the panel have kind of learned that there's a range. There's a spectrum where a valuation could be within a certain range depending on certain factors. Sometimes it's worth it to test the market to put out something at a bit higher valuation just that so you see the seller understands that the odds are going to go down the harder you push. And then one other kind of important point I want to bring up, we talked about this on an internal email the other day. A lot of times a seller will call multiple brokerages; they'll call Quiet Light and then two or three of our competitors and that's perfectly fine. We want you to talk to whoever you want to talk to. But one common thing I'll hear is a seller will say to me how much is the business worth and I'll quote a price. I'll say I think it's worth about a million dollars for the sake of argument and they'll say well wait I just talked to Brokerage X and they quoted me a million two, can you get me a million two? My answer is I don't know and neither do they. It's not the broker that's buying your business. It's a buyer that we've not yet identified and all that all of us are doing is giving an opinion. And in some cases, it can be really detrimental to the seller to try to play brokers off each other because the broker's tendency might be well gee if these three other people told you it's worth more maybe I'm wrong and the price gets bid up in the sellers head. And then when you get to market the buyers; the people that are actually writing the check for the business are like what are you talking about you're way out of bounds? So it's really important to remember who's the decision-maker. In my mind the decision-maker is always the person that's writing the check for your business; sometimes that's the buyer, sometimes that's the banker who's funding the buyer, but you always have to cater to that ultimate decision-maker to figure out what's the true value. Mark: Absolutely. So in regards to the value of your time Jason I appreciate you putting it on a payment plan for this little podcast panel because it is pretty crazy. Alright, David, over to you I want to get your opinions on this. David: I think Jason said absolutely the best. I think the market ultimately informs everyone to pick up on what Amanda said it's all about receptivity to that. I mean you can continue on as a business owner with a maybe like a grand ass perspective of the value of your business for a long enough period of time and as Jason said potentially go with the broker that's gone for a particularly inflated valuation. The problem is as Jason and we all know here is that if you come out way too high you will flop in the market and it will be a long long period of time before you then eventually have to come off the exclusivity pulling down the listing and then return back to market at a later point in time often with another advisor and how many times do we see that at Quiet Light with people coming to us from a very correct or whatever having spent an awful lot of wasted time and to cut in to Jason's point all of our time is valuable and we love the perception of it. If you're a business owner with a great business that you want to exit your time is especially valuable. So that decision right out the gate in terms of your receptivity and so what the market will bear is arguably the most important decision when it comes to respecting your own time and getting a process done and completed and money in the bag. Mark: Yeah, I remember probably about a year ago I was recording a potential client and then he came back and said another broker quoted me and said that they could get me this much and it was substantially higher than what I was going to; what I was quoting him at. He said and he's going to reduce his commission to this. I looked at it and I called him and said yeah you should sign with them. How do you counteract that, right? You couldn't really counteract that too much other than say if you really think they can get that and are being less commissioned then you should sign with them. He ended up signing with me later and we ended up getting a really good deal for him. But I think you guys point about valuations being a predictive exercise is on point. Alright, Bryan, I saved the best for last. What are your thoughts as far as these unreasonable expectations or is it just unreasonable expectations for the market? Bryan: I think Chris and David both absolutely nailed it. And I'm glad that they took the conversation the way they did. I think the market is always going to be brutally honest and any valuation mistakes that are being made, any unreasonable expectations are going to be corrected by the market. But I think the one most important thing on this is it is going to be the market who will buy the business it's not going to be the broker. There's no point negotiating the valuation of your business with the broker because it's not in the broker's power to value your business it's the market that values your business ultimately. Mark: Absolutely I'm going around this out and close it up by saying one thing and that is Jason, you said this in what you brought up, if the value of your business in your head is 10 million dollars but the valuation of the market is 1 million dollars just don't become a seller. That's kind of the result. As far as Quiet Light Brokerage, look I know where the value of Quiet Light is. If somebody came up the street and offered me the value; the market value of Quiet Light I would say no. If they are offering me two times the market value of Quiet Light I would say no. If they offered me three times I would still say no because the value of my head for what this business is worth to me right now is way more than what the market value is. I'm not a seller; not going to be a seller for a long long time. And that's totally fine because I love this business. I love working with you guys. Thank you so much for coming on this podcast panel. Guys give us feedback on this. Let us know what you think. If there's something that you want us to do a panel on as far as topics let me know. If you want it to be specific in industries such as e-commerce or SaaS or content sites we can do that as well. We've got a wealth of experience here with the advisors and we're about to be able to tap into them more with these podcasts. So again, thanks everyone for joining this. Let's do it again hopefully sometime soon. Bryan: Thanks, everyone. Amanda: Thank you. David: Thanks, Mark.

Hello friends, get ready to meet Nicholas and Amanda Bayerle! They are the CEO and COO respectively of the 7- figure lifestyle brand for businessmen, Billion Dollar Body and the community the Billion Dollar Brotherhood. Where men can achieve their highest potential in both their business and their health.  Both have been featured in media like Forbes, Oxygen, Huffington Post, and featured in top podcasts. Nicholas is also the host of their own Billion Dollar Body podcast which has over 300,000 downloads, as well as an international speaker and author of the new book Modern Day Businessman: Success Without Sacrifice.  They are passionate not only about people having healthy bodies, but healthy relationships and truly achieving their dreams in life. And welcoming their first child in January 2020. They believe anyone’s network is what determines their net-worth!    In this episode you will learn: There is no need to sacrifice your own personal goals within your relationship. And it’s even by focusing on striving to be the best person you can be, that will be your invitation to your partner to strive to be the best they can be.  You will hear 2 activities and conversations that you can have with your partner today, so that you can feel the most collaborative and supportive of each other (and your relationship goals) that you have ever been. This will put you on the path of achieving the most you ever have together.    Questions asked in this interview How do you balance both holding your partner accountable to their goals (both individually and business), but also being their caring spouses and confidant? Is there a certain way you have to approach conversations to not trigger the other, when you want to invite them up (in either their performance or mindset)? Do you hear from men in your group that they don’t really know how to gain their spouses support? What’s your advice for how to communicate their goal to their spouse? Do you think men today are at all intimidated by a powerful female partner? What do you wish you knew about healthy relationships growing up?   Quotes: "Always focus on what is good about them, you do not need to try to change them, you wouldn't even want an exact version of yourself" -Amanda "It may sound like a scary question to ask, but ask how you can be a better partner. The answer will surprise you (in a good way)" -Nicholas   Other resources: Follow us on Instagram Book your Relationship Breakthrough Session here that was mentioned in the episode PS. Because of demand there is a $97 placeholder to book your breakthrough session.  Connect More With The Guests: Get a copy of the book Modern Day Businessman: Success Without Sacrifice.   

 Amanda Louder is a Certified Life Coach who helps women from conservative Christian backgrounds love their sex life. She helps women embrace their sexuality to help them strengthen their relationship with themselves, their spouse, and their Heavenly Parents. As a first step to helping women embrace their sexuality, she has provided a FREE guide to help women understand how they personally experience pleasure. You can get this guide by going to www.amandalouder.com/improvingintimacyIn addition to being a coach, Amanda is also a wife, mom to 3 and step-mom to 2.  In her spare time, she enjoys reading, watching her kids play sports, fishing, and camping.To hear more from Amanda, you can find her on Instagram @AmandaLouderCoaching or her podcast "Live From Love" where she talks about all things sex and marriage.[music]00:02 Voice Over: Welcome to Improving Intimacy, a podcast to help single and married Latter Day Saints strengthen their family connections and marriages. Daniel A. Burgess is the host of Improving Intimacy. Daniel's a marriage and family therapist, father, husband, and author. Here's Daniel on this episode of Improving Intimacy.00:20 Daniel: Welcome to another episode of Improving Intimacy. Today, we have life coach Amanda Louder with us, and I'm excited to explore her journey. I've been through her podcast and her website, and she's a member of the Intimacy Group. And I really enjoy her comments a lot, so I'm excited, and hopefully you are excited, to explore her journey to healthy sexuality here. So, let's jump right into it. Welcome. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Amanda.00:47 Amanda: Thanks so much, Daniel, I'm excited to be here. My name is Amanda Louder. I am a certified life coach. I coach women, primarily from conservative Christian backgrounds, help them embrace their sexuality, learn to love their sex life. I'm married. I'm currently on my second marriage, don't plan to have any more. [chuckle]01:08 DANIEL: Oh, wow.01:09 AMANDA: And together we have five kids, ranging from 11 to almost 20.01:14 DANIEL: That's exciting. So, what took you on this journey? I'm assuming that you weren't always a life coach.01:18 AMANDA: No. [chuckle]01:20 DANIEL: So, what brought you here?01:22 AMANDA: So, when I went through my divorce about eight years ago, it was really a time of discovery for me and discovering myself. And I actually have a great relationship with my ex-husband now, and we co-parent really well. And I'm remarried. I actually got remarried fairly quickly. I met my husband just six weeks after my divorce was final, and we married about nine months later, and we've been very happily married for seven years now. And so, people started reaching out to me for divorce advice, because they could see that, I guess as far as divorce goes, it was pretty successful. [chuckle] And so, I was getting calls like three or four times a month from people either asking for themselves or for a close friend or family member. And I really started thinking about going back to school to become a therapist so that I could help more women who had been in my situation. And I looked into it, and it would have taken me a lot of years and a lot of time that I wasn't willing to sacrifice with my family. I had five children at that point, and I'm very busy with them. And so, it wasn't something that I was willing to pursue. But then I found coaching a few years ago, and immediately, it felt like the right choice. It felt like what I was meant to do.02:44 AMANDA: So, I started coaching, and then I went through a certification program. I started originally just coaching women who were struggling in their marriage and contemplating divorce, helping them come to that decision for themselves with confidence and peace. And as I coached more and more, I found more and more women were struggling with healthy sexuality within their marriage and within themselves. And I was actually just on a trip this summer with a bunch of other girlfriends who are also coaches, and we're sitting around our condo, as girls do, and sex comes up. And so, I started imparting of my knowledge of the subject. And by the end of our trip, all of my friends were like, "Amanda, you have to do this. You have to change your niche. This is what you were truly meant to do. We have learned more from you in a weekend than we have in 15 years of marriage." And I was very hesitant at first. Sex can be a very scary topic for some people. I come from a background... A very private background. My parents are very private people.03:48 DANIEL: Very.03:49 AMANDA: I've never been that way. I'm always been an open book. But respecting where I came from and stuff, I understand that it can be a very scary subject for a lot of people to talk about. But it is something that I am very comfortable talking about. I feel very comfortable in that space and really want to help women love their sex life and embrace that so that they can not only enjoy their marriage more, but truly embrace who they are as a person. And I think it helps them come closer to themselves, to their spouse, and to their heavenly parents.04:20 DANIEL: I think it's impressive as I listen to your podcast. It's one thing to be a coach or even a therapist and work with people with sexual health issues, another have this ability to talk about the very sensitive, private, taboo topics in a way that's very comfortable. And that's one thing I immediately appreciate listening to your podcast. You could say things like vagina, clitoris, masturbation. The one episode I was listening to, I think it was orgasms. And the way you presented the information, you even talked about how using masturbation is a healthy part of discovering yourself. The way you presented it was very impressive. It's very difficult within our culture to even use the word masturbation. You pointed out it's a dirty word, and it triggers a lot of people.05:04 AMANDA: Well, I have to attribute a lot of that to you, Daniel. I listened to a podcast you were on, I think it was maybe the Mormon Marriages podcast, and mainly...05:11 DANIEL: Oh, with Nate Bagley and his wife?05:13 AMANDA: Yes. And it really opened up my eyes to a different way of looking at things. And then, I really started doing a lot of my own research and thoughts and prayer about it to be a lot more open-minded about it.05:26 DANIEL: Thank you. It's been quite a journey, but today's podcast is not about me. I relate to you a lot, just I didn't realize you had this background with your divorce. It sounds almost parallel to my experience. I'm assuming you probably already know. But it sounds like we were even divorced at probably about the same time. And I met my wife shortly before my divorce, and we knew we were gonna get married within months after my divorce was finalized. And so, in my journey, I made the stupid decision of jumping back into school and getting into therapy, and that was... It's difficult. And I knew it was gonna be hard, but I value and appreciate the weight of that journey, and I've been very open and vocal about life coaching and the concerns I have around it. You have something that most coaches don't have, is an actual certificate. You're a certified professional life coach. And I think that's important because one of the things of working with people, especially with this type of subject, is you really gotta understand your boundaries, professionally, ethically, and what the client's responsibility is and your responsibility is. And I think that adds an additional level of safety in the relationship.06:37 DANIEL: And so, very good for you. I admire you for doing that, because you're right. I can't tell you how many people I've seen in our position, try to go back into, or at least pursue therapy as a career, and they have to stop after four or five years because it's gotten too expensive, and the barrier to entry is just ridiculous. And that's why I don't say life coaching is not an option. I think it is definitely an option. In fact, I hire life coaches, and I worked as a life coach for a while. But back to what you do, I love this. So, you're presenting a message of safety to these women and you're giving an example that they haven't seen before. When you say you did a divorce right, I totally understand what you mean by that. No divorce is easy, by any means. But they were pursuing you. What did you notice? What was maybe a common theme or pattern that you saw in the people who were seeking your advice? Kind of a big question there, but what would you sum it up, or did you see any patterns, or was it kind of all over the place?07:33 AMANDA: It's really all over the place. Everybody comes to the table with different issues. Their spouse comes to the table with different issues. And it's just really helping them see how they're interpreting the situation, the story that they're telling themselves, and how that's giving them the results that they're getting in their marriage. I worked with women who were really struggling with their sexuality, I worked with women whose husbands had issues with pornography, I was working with women who have had issues with infidelity in their marriage. And some, they were just unhappy because their husbands weren't living up to what they thought husbands should be, what they thought their spouse was supposed to be, the needs that their spouse was supposed to be meeting in them, and just teaching them how to meet those needs for themselves and just letting their partner be them and choosing to love them anyway.08:22 DANIEL: That's a big one, and one that I don't think even a lot of therapists embrace. Maybe that's not a fair statement. Maybe don't value or understand a lot. We get couples into the therapy room, and we focus on better communication. And those things are important. But I like what you're saying here. And I wanna inquire a little bit more about that, and focusing on the individual and their needs. And I've heard that in a few of your podcasts, the need to turn to yourself and understand what your needs are. Tell me a little bit more about your journey there and how you came to that conclusion.08:54 AMANDA: Well, we all have issues, we all come to the table with baggage. And really, being able to look at yourself and see what you're bringing to the table and how you're contributing to your relationship. Are you being needy? Are you being demanding? Are you being... And they stem from all sorts of issues from your background, but you're showing up in a way that's creating the relationship that you don't want. And so, really taking a look at how your thinking is creating that result for you, creating that relationship for you, and what you can do differently even if your spouse never changes. And sometimes that means making hard decisions. Sometimes, that means setting boundaries, walking away, whatever that is for you. But looking at yourself first, not, "How do I change him?" It's, "How do I change me? How do I get comfortable with myself in this situation, no matter how my partner shows up?"09:54 DANIEL: That's a huge concept. [chuckle]09:56 AMANDA: Yeah, it is.09:56 DANIEL: Big. And I'm curious if you get any push back on that?10:00 AMANDA: For sure.10:00 DANIEL: How do you deal with that? Let's get a little bit more specific here. I think there's this danger, and you pointed out in one of your podcasts is, "Are you blaming me for my spouse's behaviors then?" And that's usually how that phrase is taken. It's like, "Focus on yourself. See what you're doing to contribute to the problem or the issue." How do you navigate that?10:19 AMANDA: Well, it's individual. It really just depends on how they're thinking about it. What I say to all of my clients is, every problem is a thought problem. It's just how you're choosing to think about it. Or, you're believing what your brain is offering to you without questioning it. If you wanna believe something, believe it with intention, not just because that's what's offered to you. One I hear a lot is, like, "My spouse plays way too many video games. I'm sick and tired of him neglecting me, neglecting the house, neglecting the kids, because he's busy playing video games." And this could be a variety of things. It could be watching sports or looking at pornography, or whatever it is. It's his behavior. Well, how are you choosing to think about it? How are you contributing to that situation? One, you can choose to think that it's not a problem. That's totally up to you. But you can also choose to think it is a problem, and then what are the results of that? And are you okay with that? Is that serving you? If it's serving you, go ahead and keep thinking about it. But if it's not, then you can look at what you want to purposely think instead that might change that dynamic.11:25 AMANDA: Try to look at it from his point of view. Maybe he's had a long day at work, and this is how he knows how to unwind. Maybe he's doing that too much and you just need to have a conversation about it. But are you having that conversation in a blaming way, like, "You shouldn't do this," or you're saying, "This is what I see, and this is how it's affecting me. This is how I feel"? And be confident enough in yourself to be able to say those things.11:49 DANIEL: I really appreciate that. I use this example and I appreciate it as an example because we focus on the wrong problem a lot. And when I work with clients and they say, let's go with this example of, "He's gaming all the time. And he won't listen to me, he won't get off. He's absorbed with it." And what the discussion starts to evolve around is, how much he's gaming. But that's not really what we want. We want his attention. And so, I will often say, "Tell you what, let's try this experiment. Why don't you stop talking about the... Don't ever bring up the gaming anymore. And you walk into the house after getting the kids or coming home from work, and you see him gaming with his headphones on or whatever he's doing, and tell you what, why don't you do something a little bit different and go up to him, hug him in a way that's not distracting him but letting him know that you're there, and say, 'I would really love to spend a few minutes with you. I miss you'? And watch how that changes." Now, often, people will... They'll come back and they'll say, "He didn't listen to me."12:55 AMANDA: Keep doing it.12:56 DANIEL: No, keep doing it, day after day. Create a new sense of predictability. I think a lot of couples, depending... Especially if they've been in this rut for so long, it's like, "I'm not trusting that behavior. Where is that coming from?" It becomes a little bit suspicious. "You're actually focusing on me and not the games. Are you just trying to manipulate me?" But we give the gaming, or whatever that problem is or that distraction, all the attention. And it no longer becomes about each other. It's about ending this. As though taking that behavior away will then create a healthy behavior.13:28 AMANDA: Well, so I talk a lot about, like, "Who do you want to be in this situation? Do you wanna be the nagging, controlling wife? Or do you want to be the wife who's loving and compassionate and trying to create that connection with your spouse?" Because really, that's what's happening. You're not getting that connection that you want. He's getting the connection through gaming, or whatever. He's getting what he thinks he needs, but he probably rather get it from you, if you're offering it in the right way.13:55 DANIEL: It's interesting, as I listen to you speak, you're definitely using language, I think you have an advantage as a woman working with female clients. I don't know if I could ever get away with saying, "nagging." "Stop nagging your husband."14:05 AMANDA: [chuckle] Yeah. Women nag, I can say that. We nag. Yeah.14:09 DANIEL: [chuckle] Yeah, that's very good, that's very difficult to do, and be able to focus on the positive behavior. I always call it, "What's the desired outcome?" And they'll say, "Stop the game." No, that's not the desired outcome. The desired outcome is, "I wanna feel closer. I wanna feel connected." Then, let's make that...14:29 AMANDA: Let's make that the goal.14:30 DANIEL: Not the ending. 'Cause really, if your husband... And let's exaggerate a little here, for example's sake. If he's gaming 12 hours a day, but he's providing a living and you feel totally connected to him, is the gaming really a problem? "No, I feel totally connected to him." So, it's not really the gaming. I realize it's an exaggerated example, but usually, is the case. So, excellent, I love that approach. So, tell me a little bit more about how you work with the sexual topic. I know when I first did this, it was... And I appreciate the compliment that you got it from me, but when I first did this, and I've shared this story before. My first blog post was a couple, maybe three years ago, about masturbation, my infamous, seven series blog posts. I remember when I clicked post, I was shaking. I was afraid of how people would perceive me and just the whole cultural phenomenon around that. And so, it took me quite a few years to get to that point where it was even comfortable to say out loud, even with clients. Masturbation. I'm constantly managing that sensitivity around that issue. How do you feel like you've taken that journey and getting comfortable with engaging in those topics with people?15:48 AMANDA: It's just kind of who I am. I'm...15:51 DANIEL: Oh, really?15:51 AMANDA: I think it's become more and more comfortable, but it's never been something that I've really had a problem talking about, body parts and saying vulva and vagina and clitoris and penis. That's never been an issue for me. But that's not how I was raised, so...16:10 DANIEL: Yeah, you were saying you were raised in a very private home.16:13 AMANDA: Yes, very. Very private. So, it's just something that I feel like... I almost feel like it's a gift that I've been given. And that's part of the reason... When I started coaching a year-and-a-half ago, I don't know that I would have been ready at that point to discuss these sexual topics in the nature that I do now and become a sex coach. [chuckle] But now, I'm stepping into my own, that is who I am, and I can see that very, very clearly. And I feel very prompted. I bring prayer and the Spirit very much into every podcast that I do and all of my coaching sessions. I pray about what I'm supposed to be podcasting about that week, and I feel very prompted onto what those topics are supposed to be. And so many times, when I listen to those promptings, the words just flow. And so, I just learned to recognize that this is who I am, this is who I was made to be, and I'm just really stepping into that, and as I do so, my Heavenly Father is blessing me more and more.17:26 DANIEL: I appreciate hearing that. I think one of the collateral damage of work in my type of profession is being hyper-sensitive to people's concerns and not wanting to offend or come across as unempathetic. And I think sometimes that's a detrimental in the sense that I forget my personality in that because I'm so focused. And it's interesting because it's almost like a marriage in a sense, because if I lose myself in that work and that other person, I forget the gifts that I bring. So, that's a really good reminder to me, I appreciate hearing that. And being myself, I think, I've talked about this, written about this, is, I'm gonna say dumb things and I'm gonna say things that are incorrect.18:12 AMANDA: Totally.18:13 DANIEL: I'm dyslexic in my communication, as you probably already can tell, but if I focus more on a fear on not being truthful to myself and offending somebody else, I lose that power in that message. And so, that's a great reminder.18:28 AMANDA: We can't control what other people are thinking, so no matter what we say, people could be offended. [chuckle] So, I would rather just be true to myself and true to who I know I'm supposed to be, and let them worry about them.18:40 DANIEL: We call that differentiation in therapy, and that's a powerful concept and very difficult for a lot of people to embrace. I've discovered, as I've tried to bring that to the table, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this is, as you teach clients how to differentiate and to be an individual, is that scary for them? What's their experience like?19:01 AMANDA: Yeah, I always tell clients it's gonna get worse before it gets better.19:05 DANIEL: What do you mean by that? I think I know what you mean.19:07 AMANDA: Yeah, so when we start showing up differently, the dance changes. We've been doing this dance with our partner, with ourselves, even, for a very long time, and when we start showing up differently, the people around us, and not just our spouse, but our parents, our children, our friends, are like, "Woah, what's happening here? This is not normal." And they're like, "I don't know how to do this dance, I don't know how to respond." But eventually, most the time, they get the hang of it. If we just...19:35 AMANDA: You create a new normal...19:36 AMANDA: You create a new normal. So, I have a client who... She was definitely... Well, she says, "Being controlled," by her spouse. Really, she was letting herself be controlled. We know that it's not... They're not controlling, you're letting yourself be controlled. So, once she learned to step into her own, her spouse was like, "No, this is not happening. I run... This is what I do." And she was like, "Sorry, this isn't the way it's happening." And now, they've figured out this new dance and things are so good, so good. They've learned to give and take more, and she's willing to really say what she's thinking and not be afraid of his response. And he wasn't abusive or mean, or anything, it was just like, "I'm the man. This is the way it's gonna be". And she...20:26 DANIEL: It was his role.20:28 AMANDA: It was his role. And she's like, "Sorry, that's just not gonna work anymore". And it was really rough for a long time, but then he's like, "Okay, this is the new normal. Okay, I can see how this is actually beneficial for both of us. Okay, this is working. Yeah, okay, let's keep doing this, let's do it, let's do this dance now." And it's so much better.20:48 DANIEL: That is so wonderful to hear from you because I think there's a concern when we... When we look at these relationships, we have a difficult time in general. I'm not just talking about life coaches or therapists, is someone has to be bad and somebody has to be good. And so, when we look at these situations I think we have to be very, very careful. And you demonstrated that right now, is where we have... Let's go with this example of the wife coming in, saying, "I'm being controlled." And then, you reframe it to, "You're allowing yourself to be controlled," which is a big concept and a little scary, as you see. But then, the husband's response in this is, "No, this isn't gonna happen." We tend to stereotypically identify that as a manipulative person. But you had this insight is, "Well maybe this is just his training." He's not trying to be a bad person, as you clarify. He wasn't abusive, but his behavior, the way he was raised as an individual, this is his communication style and he doesn't know how to get out of it, so we need to help him out of it. It's not because he's a bad person. But he just doesn't know how to do it.22:00 AMANDA: But he didn't come to coaching, he didn't go to therapy. It was only her. But by her changing the dynamic and changing the way that she was showing up in the relationship, changed the relationship.22:12 DANIEL: Yes, and that's huge. Good clarification there. And you were able to create that change through her.22:18 AMANDA: And it wasn't me creating the change through her, it was her creating the change through her.22:22 DANIEL: But even in that situation... In fact, it could be even more risky, because we could look at this, we don't know the husband, we don't know his behavior, it could become an easy out and say, "He is abusive. You need to get away from him."22:33 AMANDA: Well, you can, but we talk about that and we talk about healthy boundaries, what those look like. When he starts exhibiting more control, maybe using some language that violates one of those boundaries, then you say, "Hey, that's not okay with me. If you wanna keep using that language, that's totally fine, but I'm gonna go, I'm gonna leave the room. I'm gonna leave the house for a couple of hours. I'll come back when you're ready to talk about it again in a better manner," I guess.23:00 DANIEL: I notice on your website, and it sounds like you work exclusively with women, but do you ever work as a couple?23:06 AMANDA: Yeah, I've worked with couples, I've worked with just men.23:08 DANIEL: Okay, so it's not just women.23:10 AMANDA: No.23:11 DANIEL: But that's your primary audience.23:13 AMANDA: Yes.23:13 DANIEL: So, along this line of thinking, you extend this idea of, "You need to take responsibility in your relationship for your own behavior and how you perceive things and create a new healthy or a new normal." You push this idea into intimacy. And I think it was that same podcast I was listening to is, "When sex is requested, say yes."23:36 AMANDA: It's the Nike approach. Just do it.23:38 DANIEL: Just do it.23:38 AMANDA: Say yes to the sex. That's what I say.23:40 DANIEL: And you addressed the concerns around that in the podcast, but tell me a little bit more because there is a risk there. How do you create healthy boundaries in an environment where you're saying yes to sex whenever requested?23:52 AMANDA: Yeah, so of course there's gonna be abuses taken, but what I'm talking about is more just in a good healthy relationship, where a lot of women are just not in the mood, so they're not... They don't wanna do it whenever their husband wants. And I'm really encouraging them to cultivate that connection and that desire within themselves, so that when their husband approaches them, they're ready, they want it too. And the more that they cultivate that within themselves, the more they start to crave it themselves.24:28 DANIEL: Is there ever a time to say no?24:29 AMANDA: Yeah, I've had women who, like, "Well, what if my husband is wanting sex as I go out the door and I need to be somewhere?" I'm like, "Okay, that's not gonna work. But you don't say, 'No, we're not having sex right now,' you say, 'Hold that thought. Let's do it later. I gotta run here.'" So, you're not saying no, you're saying yes, but let's do it later, when it's a little bit more convenient.24:51 DANIEL: You're focusing on the desired outcome. I love it.24:54 AMANDA: Yeah. Another one was like... And this is... Sorry, maybe too much for you, but women are like, "Well, can I say no when I'm on my period?" I'm like, "Well, that's a boundary... "25:03 DANIEL: Not too much here at all.25:05 AMANDA: "That's the boundary you can set for yourself." "Yes, I will say yes to you when I'm not on my period." But I will push you a little bit further and say, "It is totally fine for you to have sex while you're on your period, you just have to make some adjustments. Get a towel. It might be a little messier. Use a menstrual disk so that you can... " There are options. It's just, what are you willing to do for that?25:28 DANIEL: As I said at the beginning, we're gonna meander here. I love having just casual conversation. Let's explore that a little bit more there. I've actually, and maybe it's just being a man, I'm seeing a different perspective here, but I'm curious what you're seeing. Usually, I hear the man doesn't wanna have sex while the wife is on her period. Are you seeing it the other way around, where usually it's the women or is it...25:50 AMANDA: I see both. In my, "say yes to the sex challenge", if the man is saying, "I wanna have sex and I know you're on your period," then what is your hold up? What barriers are you putting into play? Just like, "Oh, I can't do it because I'm on my period," or like, "Is there really a problem?"26:09 DANIEL: Excellent, excellent insight there. I love it. So fascinating. So, what is the maybe biggest obstacles to intimacy that you're seeing for women?26:22 AMANDA: Guilt. Shame. Not knowing their body.26:25 DANIEL: Guilt and shame around what?26:28 AMANDA: I think the cultural dialogues that they've had in their youth, that their sexuality is something that needs to be repressed and is evil and is going to take them to hell, and then all of the sudden expecting that to be different when they're married. And not understanding that we should not be repressing sexuality as teenagers. We should be learning to manage it. And so, now that you're an adult, you've gotta figure out how to manage it as an adult. And that means not continuing to suppress it, and that means doesn't going crazy but learning how to manage it as an adult manages things.27:06 DANIEL: Wow. How does one go about eliminating that guilt? That's...27:11 AMANDA: Figuring out where it comes from, what the thoughts are, and just retraining the brain on... A lot of what I get is women saying, "I feel dirty. I feel un-virtuous. I feel like Heavenly Father is going to be mad at me."27:28 DANIEL: Wait, wait, wait. Are you talking about about when they're having sex with their spouse?27:30 AMANDA: Yes, when they're having sex with their spouse, that it creates all of this guilt and shame that somehow their Heavenly Father is looking down on them for not using sex only for procreation. For a lot of them, it's okay to procreate, but for fun and enjoyment and being closer to their spouse, not okay.27:48 DANIEL: This is actually something that I've discovered more and more. I think I knew it before, but I didn't realize how deep it ran. I knew it did with me, but for maybe other reasons. But this concept, if you noticed in the group and maybe you saw are common, with the new interview, temple-recommended interview questions came out. And the questions around the law of chastity where you're striving to have morally clean thoughts. And some... And this is not to point out anybody or criticize or shame in any way, but a few people were actually saying, "How do I answer that question when I'm desiring sex with my husband?" Or something to that effect. And so, they equated this idea that sex, even with your eternal companion, is dirty and can't be experienced emotionally or mentally.28:35 AMANDA: Or having thoughts about having sex with your spouse is dirty. And yeah, I just... I'm like, "No." And I tried to tell this as much as I can and try to help women understand, like, "This is what's supposed to be happening. This is what your Heavenly Father wants for you. He gave you an entire organ just for your pleasure. It's not... He wants you to be having fun. He created your brain to need novelty and newness and dare we say dirty thoughts to get aroused with your spouse." Now, sometimes minds wander, and that's fine too. But if you're not turning away from your spouse to do that, if you're turning towards your spouse, even if your mind is going a different direction, good on you. That's what's supposed to be happening. This is how your brain was created. This is what your Heavenly Father wants for you. Just changing that dialogue, I think, is so needed, and that's what one of my main messages is. It's like, let's just change this dialogue a little bit. All of these things that you've heard or you heard as youth or you're reinforcing to yourself now, you're interpreting, there's a different way to think about things, and I just want you to open up your mind to that possibility.29:47 DANIEL: Yeah. What a wonderful idea there. That concept of guilt runs so deep and we start to bring so many different perspectives into the bedroom. And...29:58 AMANDA: Oh, for sure.29:58 DANIEL: We gotta get the Bishop out of the bedroom, we've gotta get our culture out of the bedroom. And how do we do that? 'Cause it crushes sex. Do you see... When a client of yours is able to embrace that idea and start to re-map their brain in how they think about this, what do you see happen to their sexual arousal or desire?30:19 AMANDA: It goes way up.[chuckle]30:22 DANIEL: It seems like I led right into that...30:23 AMANDA: Way up, yeah. This has happened with quite a few clients, but I usually see them creating, cultivating that more within themselves. And it just... It makes everything better. I have a little theory here that the anxiety that so many women have is really just that they're sexually frustrated. And I would love to do some sort of study on this. I gotta try and figure it out. But I really think that they don't understand their body well enough to know that they're actually craving it, and they need it. And if they would just let their body do what it was made to do, quit putting on the brakes all the time and just let it run, it would be so much better for every aspect of their life. They would be a better wife, they would be a better mother, they would be a better friend, they would be a better worker. Every single aspect of their life would be better. And I have seen that for myself. I've seen it in my clients. It happens almost every time. Unless there's some sort of sexual trauma, abuse or something that needs to be worked through, and that's not something I do. I turn that over to the professionals. I can work with a therapist when it comes to that, but that's not something that I personally work on, that's out of my scope. But unless there's that there, it's just women putting on the brakes when they don't need to put on the brakes.31:50 DANIEL: Yeah. Have you ever seen... And I appreciate the clarification around the trauma, and I think that's very important to... And thankful that you refer out for that stuff. And I think that it's important to understand too, it's not for everyone to approach it this way. I'm curious if you've ever seen where somebody is working on their guilt and they start to experience their desires in a way that they've never done before. Have you noticed any of them actually get scared of that desire?32:17 AMANDA: Yeah.32:18 DANIEL: Tell me a little bit about that.32:19 AMANDA: Their brain is doing this, like, "I want it, but I can't." And they're just fighting it constantly, and so, it's causing all this friction that they don't understand.32:28 DANIEL: They can't what? They can't have it or... Oh, because it's bad.32:31 AMANDA: It's bad. They shouldn't. But helping them retrain their thinking so that, like, "No, this is a good thing. This is what I was created for. If I can embrace this, my Heavenly Father can give me even more of His Spirit and His blessings. He can bless my relationship, my marriage, even more when I can open myself up to everything that I was created to be."33:00 DANIEL: I've even heard female clients say... I wanna represent it correctly. I think it was, "I don't... " As they're starting to feel this arousal and this orgasm come on, I've heard a handful of them say, "I don't deserve this." It's very self-shaming language. I'm not exactly sure what they're experiencing as a female, and that... 'Cause I know for a lot of men is like, "Yes, we're creating that experience." So, what is this dynamic they're feeling?33:32 AMANDA: I talked about it a little bit in my last podcast, that we...33:37 DANIEL: Was that 77 or... Which podcast was that?33:39 AMANDA: 78, I think. We're told in the proclamation of the family that we're nurturers. We are responsible to nurture our husbands and our children, and we've turned that into, "We need to be self-sacrificing."33:52 DANIEL: That's the language they use. "It feels selfish to have an orgasm." [33:55] ____, yes.33:57 AMANDA: Yes. Yes. And so, they don't feel like they can have that for themselves, because if they do, then they aren't fulfilling their eternal role as a nurturer. And what I say is, "You need to nurture yourself first." Sex isn't about the culmination of a man having an orgasm. That is not what sex is about. And when it comes to sex, yes, you want to take care and nurture your spouse, but you need to make sure that you are taken care of and nurtured for yourself as well. You and your arousal and your feelings and your primary responsibility. It is not your spouse's responsibility to give you an orgasm, it is your responsibility to get yourself in a place where that can happen.34:40 DANIEL: Wonderfully said. And I'm gonna link the listeners to the specific podcast that I'm referencing, we're referencing, in this podcast. But tell me a little bit more about that. I think it was in the orgasm podcast, again, that learning yourself, even through masturbation, it's not just about stimulating your clitoris. Tell me, do you recall what I'm talking about? Tell the audience more about self-exploration, what's involved with that?35:06 AMANDA: Yeah. So many people think that orgasm is the end goal. And really, it's about connection, but it's also about pleasure. So really, understanding how you personally experience pleasure, that can probably get you to orgasm, but understanding your body... We have erogenous zones all over our body. I love that Friends episode. [chuckle] I don't know if you remember that, but I'm sure some of your listeners probably do. The seven erogenous zones. We have so many places on our body that can experience pleasure. And so, if we tune into our body and really understand how we personally experience pleasure, then we are much more able to have that experience and cultivate that within ourselves. Whether that's, we are understanding how we can touch ourselves, or how we can guide a partner to touch us. It doesn't have to be masturbation. You don't have to pleasure yourself to the point of orgasm. It's just understanding what feels good to you, and then, being able to replicate that, either with a partner or on your own.36:17 DANIEL: We refer to this as sensate focus therapy. Touching and even dragging your fingers across your skin, and just becoming present with yourself. And I really valued how you approached this topic in that podcast, and that you're even sharing with the audience. Consider things you haven't considered before, like anal stimulation. And that may seem dirty, but even that concept of it feeling dirty or not even considering is self-shaming and not really considering what your body can or should do or would like to do. You're silencing your body and not actually paying attention to it. And so, in this senate experience, touching yourself all over, your nipples, your anus, your vagina, your arms, everything.37:04 AMANDA: Everything.37:05 DANIEL: Discover what you like and how it resonates with your sexual self.37:10 AMANDA: Yeah, and so, I actually... And I couldn't offer this, and I'll give you a link to put in your show notes. I offer a free worksheet, a download, where it guides a woman through different body parts and how those body parts like to be touched. And it's just... I call it the roadmap to personal pleasure. Really figuring out what pleasure feels like for you. It can be done alone, it can be done with a partner, both, either. You can do whatever you want with it. It's just a guide to get you thinking and get you started.37:47 DANIEL: Amanda, I gotta have you back on, 'cause I would love to continue to poke and prod your knowledge, and I could go on for hours like this. Anything that you would like to... I think you shared a lot here, but anything you'd like to leave the audience with, before we wrap up?38:03 AMANDA: I would love for you guys to follow me on Instagram @amandaloudercoaching. My podcast is called Live From Love. That's what I believe this life should be, that if we live from a place of love, we're not only honoring ourself, but we're honoring everybody else around us, and that's the best place to be.38:20 DANIEL: Amanda, thank you, thank you so much for your time.38:23 AMANDA: You're so welcome, Daniel, thanks for having me.

Episode 04 Summary    0:00 - Intro  0:35 - Defining Timbre Timbre refers to color for sound Imagine you have a 128 pack of crayons, Instead of different shades of red, blue, and orange, imagine that you have “sound crayons” Each one is a different timbre One could be the sound of a violin bowing One could be a trumpet fanfare One could be muted trumpet Each of these are different crayons, and each of them are different timbres Some of the “colors” can be similar, but they’re still distinct timbres. Garrett points out that cerulean and cyan are different shades of blue. Amanda draws a similar comparison with the sounds of string instruments Garrett points out that different instruments can play the same written pitch, but they’ll still have a different tone Amanda agrees and points out that timbre is what allows you to tell different instruments and voices apart, even if they’re singing the exact same pitch Garrett does a terrible Amanda impression to illustrate that their voices are distinct Garrett does a better Mickey and Kermit Timbre is a musical term, but you can use it for any distinct sounds 6:21 - The Spelling and Pronunciation of Timbre It rhymes with amber It’s a French word Garrett casually alienates French listeners Most musicians will pronounce it the way Garrett and Amanda are in this episode. We apologize to the French for bastardizing this pronunciation. 8:10 - Human Ears The human ear is probably more attuned to voice for most people Garrett points out that it’s what we listen to the most Garrett gives examples of how dogs and cats like squeaky sounds because they sound like prey Humans have lived in communities for so long that we’re now extremely attuned to human voices It’s probably pretty easy to tell most men’s voices apart from most women’s Garrett points out the power of Mom Ears for their own babies Garrett and Amanda can even tell their cats’ meows apart The same thing that makes it easy of you to tell voices apart, that’s the human ear’s ability to tell apart different timbres. This is very helpful for music. With practice, listeners can learn to differentiate between different instruments, though some will be trickier than others. While it may be easier to differentiate vocalists, chances are you can tell your favorite musicians/bands apart from other similar bands if you’re experienced with the genre Garrett points out that many people’s preferences for or against certain genres have to do with timbral considerations Example: the twang of country music 12:08 Singing Voices We’re pretty picky with vocal styles Examples: Opera Country Music Vibrato The hours we spend talking and communicating probably greatly outweigh the hours we spend listening to music, so it’s not surprising that people get really picky with voice type 13:03 Telling Instruments Apart It takes a more trained ear to hear a difference in instruments than in voices Garrett gives the example of 1980s rock bands and how he can now pick out Brain May’s guitar playing (Queen) The more you listen to certain bands and genres, the easier it will get to tell apart different instrumentalists and vocalists Amanda gives the examples of Freddie Mercury and Louis Armstrong, and how identifiable their voices are for most people Amanda shares a story about successfully identifying an individual trumpet player (Freddie Hubbard) Garrett does his Louis Armstrong impression 15:05 Musical Timbres We Love Garrett likes: A good French horn Garrett calls this instrument “An ugly girl with a pretty voice” (and acknowledges how problematic that description is) French horn is difficult to play, but it’s a very in demand sound Amanda adds that she loves horn “rips” Garrett describes how this sound is made Example: Music at the end of Star Wars Episode I Amanda likes: Brian May’s guitar The guitar’s unique construction and Brian May’s use of a coin instead of a pick helped make his unique timbre Amanda calls this a wailing sound and attributes that common descriptor to guitarists like Brian May 18:54 Musical Timbres We Hate Garrett points out that many people pick on woodwinds Garrett dislikes the high register of the violin Amanda hates the harpsichord Amanda argues that it’s okay to have different ears from your neighbor and prefer different timbres Amanda can still appreciate good harpsichord playing even if she doesn’t like the sound of the instrument Amanda points out that the difference in sound between a harpsichord and a piano  has to do with how the sound is produced (plucking internal strings vs. striking internal strings) Amanda and Garrett lightly make fun of Bassoonists for the second time in this episode (though they do enjoy the bassoon's timbre) 23:04 Recap Timbre is the sound equivalent of color Just like there are many different shades of the colors we all know, there are many different shades that can be achieved by each instrument and by the human voice Thanks to technology, new timbres are created all the time Garrett asks if being tone-deaf is like being colorblind Amanda says yes, and a very small fraction of people are truly tone-deaf (comparable to how many people claim to have OCD tendencies) Timbre is the different sounds that different instruments and voices make and what lets you differentiate between them, even when they are playing/singing the exact same pitch    24:20 - Listening Recommendations 24:26 Amanda’s 1st rec: (Movement I from) “Symphonic Dances” by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1940) Specific timbre(s) to listen for: orchestral alto sax! (3:35 into the track) 26:53 Garrett’s 1st rec: IV. "Hoe Down" from “Rodeo” by Aaron Copland (1942) Specific timbre(s) to listen for: violin, xylophone, trumpet 29:06 Amanda’s 2nd rec: “Black and Tan Fantasy” by Duke Ellington (both 1927 and 1945 versions on Spotify) Specific timbre(s) to listen for: Bubber Miley’s trumpet solo and Tricky Sam Nanton’s trombone solo (gutbucket style, mutes, growling/flutter-tongue) 32:08 Garrett’s 2nd rec: Victor Wooten’s performance of "Amazing Grace" (1999 on) Youtube Link Specific timbre(s) to listen for: melodic electric bass 34:08 Amanda’s 3rd rec: Movement I (“Turning”) from “Roda” by Elliot Cole, performed by Projeto Arcomusical (2019) Specific timbre(s) to listen for: Berimbau! YouTube Link 36:27 Garrett’s 3rd rec: “Sheep Go To Heaven” by Cake (1998) Specific timbre(s) to listen for: chunky guitar, muted trumpet, distinct vocals 38:29 Amanda’s 4th rec: Louis Armstrong’s Performance of “You Rascal You” (1950) Specific timbre(s) to listen for: Louis’s voice and his lead trumpet playing Youtube Link 41:27 Garrett’s 4th rec: “Human” by Rag’n’bone Man (2017) Specific timbre(s) to listen for: Rag’n’bone man’s voice   43:42 Answering Listener Questions! 44:03 Danni G wants to know: If someone was looking to dip their toes back into the music world, what would be some of your tips?  A place to find local concerts or music groups to join? 44:12 Amanda: Visit Your Local Music Store When local musicians want to promote a concert or group, they’ll do it at the music store Garrett points out that they may need their instrument repaired or maintained, so they’ll visit there Amanda says it’s a good place to stay in touch with the musical community and the employees usually know all the groups and teachers in town Consider grabbing a lesson just to refresh your skills and find out more about what’s available for you Try to find a shop that stocks your instruments if you’re looking for info on musical groups you can join.  Guitar Center might not be the best pick. Garrett points out that lessons don’t have to be a huge commitment, so don’t be afraid to take just one lesson. 46:22 Garrett: Colleges and the Elderly Hit up the local college because colleges promote music, and they often have ensembles that community members can join The senior sampler (or whatever your equivalent is) is a good resource too, since retirees often have the time and means to support/pursue the arts Community bands and orchestras will be listed in the senior sampler 47:30 Amanda: Considerations We took this as more of a band/orchestra question. If you’re trying to get into the rock scene, that might require different resources The music store is still a helpful place to start!  Grab a lesson! Also, college faculty often direct these community groups, so stopping by the university is a good first step (or e-mail if you don’t have a connection yet/you’re shy) 48:26 Amanda: It’s Never Too Late! It’s never too late to get back into your instrument or pick up a new one! Amanda mentions retirees who rock out It’s not about how good you are… music is fulfilling and fun! It’s probably more fun now that your parents aren’t forcing you to do it 49:37 Sign Off Thanks for listening and thanks for your feedback!  We appreciate you! New episodes will be released on the 1st and 15th of every month! Spotify Playlist Special thanks to OpenMusicRevolution.com for our intro and outro music and to the guys at Better Podcasting for being such great guides to us.  Special thanks to you, our listeners, too! Visit our Website! Follow us on social media! Instagram: @uptoyourearspodcast  Twitter @uptoyourears  Email us! uptoyourearspodcast@gmail.com

Edgar was busy, so we decided another guest would be cool. And who else, but the infamous Amanda? It's ladies night tonight ya'll. See Holly and Amanda geek out with each other as always. You'll soon hate to love us both. A friendship made in heaven, or maybe Taco Bell... Follow us on Twitter: @chongatronchongatronpodcast@gmail.comcashapp: hp4420 

When you're on a big life-changing journey like becoming debt free, community can play a huge role in your success. Although there can be negatives to being involved in an online community, like dealing with other people's opinions, the pros definitely out-weigh the cons. Having people who understand, support, and encourage you can often be the thing that keeps you going when times get hard. This week, I'm joined by Amanda from Debt Free in Sunny CA to talk about how and why she started The Debt-Free Community, how it's grown over the years, and a little bit about her own personal journey to financial freedom. In this episode, Sami + Amanda talk about: Amanda's debt free journey story How moving from CA to TX aligns with her FI/RE (Financially Independent/Retire Early) goals The story behind the beginning of #debtfreecommunity, how + why it got started Why community is so important to the success of your journey The pros and cons to sharing about your journey How the Debt Free Community is growing through sharing monthly numbers + in-person meetups Memorable Quotes: “You tend to get motivated about something and then you need to find something to keep you motivated, so seeing people and talking with people who are in the same situation is helpful.” -Amanda “It's so nice to have people to have to ask questions, bounce ideas off of, and to just go along the journey with you.” -Sami “That's why community is so important because all the people in your real life are doing the normal thing of going into debt, buying all these things, and you're trying to step back and get your life in order...and that's why it's so important to reach out to people who are doing the same thing.” -Amanda Resources Mentioned: Podcast Home Page #debtfreecommunity on Instagram [Debt Free In Sunny CA Blog] Why We're Leaving California Playing With Fire Documentary Amanda + Josh's Debt Free Scream on The Dave Ramsey Show Debt Free Community Payoff + Savings Numbers Debt Free Community Meet Ups Living That Budget Life Email Newsletter [Mentioned Debt Free Community Friends] @elliemondelli @frugalkittens @savemycents Who is our guest? Amanda Williams is owner and founder of Debt Free In Sunny CA. Josh and Amanda paid off $133,763 of debt in 3.7 years. She has built a dedicated, engaged, and loyal audience of over 65,000 people from the ground up. The #debtfreecommunity hashtag was created under Amanda's direction and has generated an online movement, bringing thousands together on a daily basis. Website: debtfreeinsunnyca.com Instagram | YouTube | Facebook | Twitter I'd love to hear from you... Reviews are everything on iTunes! Would you take a minute and click here to leave a review? If you have a question or comment about this episode connect with me over on Facebook or Instagram.  HEY I'M SAMI WOMACK I'm the wife to my high school sweetheart, Daniel, + homeschooling momma to our 3 girls. I'm the Budgeting Coach + Motivational Speaker behind  A Sunny Side Up Life. My family used to be in $490k of debt + living paycheck-to-paycheck, but after we hit rock bottom everything changed for us! Now that my family has become debt free + gained financial freedom, I want to help your family do the same! My passion is inspiring women to live abundant lives through budgeting, intentional living, and positive thinking. I offer a jump start into budgeting with my free 8-day Declutter Your Budget Challenge + full budgeting experience with my course, Your Sunny Money Method.

Guests: Amanda Hickman: @amandabee | GitHub Amberley Romo: @amberleyjohanna | GitHub | Blog In this episode, Amanda Hickman and Amberley Romo talk about how they paired up to get the safety pin, spool of thread, and the knitting yarn and needles emojis approved by the Unicode Committee so that now they are available for use worldwide. They also talk about how their two path crossed, how you can pitch and get involved in making your own emojis, and detail their quest to get a regular sewing needle approved as well. Resources: Unicode Technical Committee Draft Emoji Candidates The Unicode Consortium Members Sewing-Emoji Repo Proposal for Sewing NEEDLE AND THREAD Emoji This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Transcript: ROBERT: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 112 of The Frontside Podcast. I'm Robert DeLuca, a software developer here at the Frontside and I'll be your episode host. With me as co-host is Charles Lowell. Hey, Charles. CHARLES: Hello, Robert. Good morning. ROBERT: Good morning. This is an exciting podcast. Today, we're going to be discussing writing a proposal to the Unicode Committee, getting it accepted and rejected. This is basically making emojis which I think is really awesome. We have two guests today who have an amazing story, Amanda Hickman and Amberley Romo. Thank you both for joining us. You two have an amazing story that I would really love to dive into and we're going to do that today. It's about basically creating your own emoji and getting that accepted so everybody can use that and I think that's super, super cool, something that I've always kind of wanted to do as a joke and it seems like that's kind of where your stories began, so you two want to jump in and start telling? I think Amanda has a great beginning to this. AMANDA: Sure. I mean, hi and thanks for having me. I don't know where to begin and really for me, this starts with learning to sew my own clothes which is an incredibly exasperating and frustrating process that involves a lot of ripping stitches back out and starting over and Instagram was a really big part of me finding patterns and finding other people who are sewing their own clothes and learning from the process. I wanted to be able to post stuff on Instagram and it started to drive me absolutely crazy, that there's emojis for wrenches and nuts and hammers and there are no textile emoji. The best I could find was scissors which is great because cutting patterns is a place where I spend a lot of time procrastinating but that was it. I knew a woman, Jennifer 8 Lee or Jenny who had led a campaign to get the dumpling emoji into the Unicode character set. I knew she'd succeeded in that but I didn't really know much more about how that had worked. I started thinking I'm going write a sewing emoji. I can do this. I can lead this campaign. I started researching it and actually reached out to Jenny and I discovered that she has created an entire organization called... What was that called? She's created an entire organization called Emojination, where she supports people who want to develop emoji proposals. CHARLES: Before you actually found the support system, you actually made the decision that you were going to do this and you found it. You know, from my perspective, I kind of see emoji is this thing that is static, it's there, it's something that we use but the idea that I, as an individual, could actually contribute to that. I probably, having come to that fork in the road would have said, "Nah, it's just it is what it is and I can't change it." What was the process in your mind to actually say, "You know what? I'm actually going to see if I can have some effect over this process?" AMANDA: It definitely started with a lot of anger and being just consistently frustrated but I knew that someone else had already done this. It was sort of on my radar that it was actually possible to change the emoji character set. I think that if I didn't know Jenny's story and it turned out I didn't know Jenny story at all but I thought I knew Jenny story but if I didn't know that basic thing that that somebody I knew who was a mere mortal like me had gone to the Emoji Subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium and petition them to add a dumpling emoji, I am sure that I wouldn't bother. But I knew from talking to her that there was basically a process and that there were a format that they want proposal in and it's possible to write them a proposal. I knew that much just because I knew Jenny. I think at that point, when I started thinking about this, the Emoji 9 -- I should be more of an expert on that actually, on emoji releases but a new release of emoji had come out. There were a bunch of things in that release and it got a little bit of traction on Twitter. I knew that the Unicode Consortium had just announced a whole new slate of emoji, so I also was generally aware that there was some kind of process by which emoji were getting released and expanded and updated. ROBERT: That's interesting. Do you know when that started? Because it seems like Apple started to add more emojis around like iOS 7 or something but it was pretty static for a while right? Or am I wrong? AMANDA: I actually am tempted to look this up but the other piece that is not irrelevant here is that at the time, I was working at a news organization called BuzzFeed that you may have heard of -- ROBERT: Maybe, I don't know. It sounds kind of familiar. AMANDA: I do feel like people kind of know who they are. I was surrounded by emoji all the time: in BuzzFeed, in internet native of the highest order and we had to use emoji all the time and I had to figure out how to get emoji into blog post which I didn't really know how to do before that. I can put them on my phone but that was it. I was immersed in emoji already. I knew that there was a project called Emojipedia, that was a whole kind of encyclopedia of emoji. One of my colleagues at BuzzFeed, a woman named Nicole Nguyen had written a really great article about the variation in the dance emoji. If you look at the dance emoji, one of the icons that some devices use is this kind of woman with her skirt flipping out behind her that looks like she's probably dancing a tango and then one of the icons that other character sets use and other devices use is a sort of round, yellow lumping figure with a rose in its mouth that you sort of want to hug but it's definitely not to impress you with its tango skill. She had written this whole article about how funny it was that you might send someone this very cute dumpling man with [inaudible] and what they would see was sexy tango woman. I think there was some discussion, it was around that time also that Apple replaced the gun emoji with a water gun. There was some discussion of the direction that the various emoji's face. One of the things that I learned around that time was that every device manufacturer produces their own character set that's native to their devices and they look very different. That means that there's a really big difference between putting a kind of like frustrated face with a gun pointing at it, which I don't really think of it as very funny but that sort of like, "I'm going to shoot myself" is very different from pointing the gun the other way which is very much like, "I'm shooting someone else," so these distinctions, what it means that the gun emoji can point two different ways when it gets used was also a conversation that was happening. None of that answers your question, though which is when did the kind of rapid expanse of emoji start to happen. ROBERT: I feel like the story is setting in the place there, though because it seems like there's a little bit of tension there that we're all kind of diverging here a little bit and it's sort of driving back towards maybe standardization. AMANDA: There's actually, as far as I know, no real move toward standardization but the Unicode Consortium has this committee that actually has representatives from definitely Apple and Microsoft and Google and I forget who else on the consortium. Jenny 8 Lee is now on the consortium and she's on the Emoji Subcommittee but they actually do get together and debate the merits of adding additional emoji, whether they're going to be representative. One of the criteria is longevity and I tend to think of this as the pager problem. There is indeed a pager emoji and I think that the Unicode Consortium wants to avoid approving a pager emoji because that was definitely a short-lived device. CHARLES: Right. I'm surprised that it actually made it. Emoji must be older than most people realize. AMANDA: My understanding is that very early Japanese computers had lots emoji. There's a lot of different Japanese holidays that are represented in emoji, a lot of Japanese food as well are represented in emoji, so if you look through the foods, there's a handful of things that haven't added recently but a lot of the original emoji definitely covered Japanese cuisine very well. ROBERT: I definitely remember when I got my first iPhone that could install iPhone OS 2, you would install an app from the App Store that then would allow you to go toggle on the emoji keyboard but you had to install an app to do it and that's kind of where the revolution started, for me at least. I remember everybody starting to sending these things around. AMANDA: But if you look at Emojipedia, which has a nice kind of rundown of historical versions of the Unicodes, back in 1999, they added what I think of as the interrobang, which is the exclamation/question mark together and a couple of different Syriac crosses. Over the years, the committee has added a whole series of wording icons and flags that all make sense but then, it is around, I would say 2014, 2015 that you start to get the zipper mouth and rolling your eyes and nerd face and all of the things that are used in conversation now -- the unicorn face. ROBERT: My regular emojis. AMANDA: Exactly. CHARLES: It certainly seems like the push to put more textile emoji ought to clear the hurdle for longevity, seeing there's kind of like, what? Several millennia of history there? And just kind of how tightly woven -- pun intended -- those things are into the human experience, right? AMANDA: Definitely. Although technically, there's still no weaving emojis. CHARLES: There's no loom? AMANDA: There's no loom and I think that a loom would be pretty hard to represent in a little 8-bit graphic but -- CHARLES: What are the constraints around? Because ultimately, we've already kind of touched on that the emoji themselves, their abstract representations and there are a couple of examples like the dancing one where the representation can vary quite widely. How do they put constraints around the representation versus the abstract concept? AMANDA: You don't have to provide a graphic but it definitely kind of smooths the path if you do and it has to be something that's representable in that little bitty square that you get. It has to be something representable in a letter-size square. If it's not something that you can clearly see at that size, it's not going to be approved. If it's not something you can clearly illustrate at that size in a way that's clearly distinct from any other emoji and also that's clearly distinct from anything else of that image could be, it's not going to be approved. Being able to actually represented in that little bitty size and I don't know... One of sort of sad fact of having ultimately worked with Emojination on the approval process is that we were assigned an illustrator and she did some illustrations for us and I never had to look at what the constraints were for the illustration because it wasn't my problem. ROBERT: Sometimes, that's really nice. AMANDA: Yes, it's very nice. I ended up doing a lot of research. What made me really sad and I don't want to jump too far ahead but one of things that made me really sad is we proposed the slate and the one thing that didn't get approved was the sewing needle and it also didn't get rejected, so it's in the sort of strange nether space. That's kind of stuck in purgatory right now. I did all this research and learned that the oldest known sewing needle is a Neanderthal needle so it predates Homo sapiens and it's 50,000 years old. CHARLES: Yeah. Not having a sewing needle just seem absurd. AMANDA: Yeah. We have been sewing with needles since before we were actually human being. ROBERT: That's a strong case. AMANDA: Yes, that's what I thought. If I sort go back to my narrative arc, I wanted to do a sewing needle and started researching it a little bit -- CHARLES: Sorry to keep you interrupting but that's literally the one that started this whole journey. AMANDA: Yes, I wanted a sewing needle and I really wanted a sewing needle. I did a little research and then I reach out to Jenny and to ask her if she had any advice. She said, "You should join my Slack," and I was like, "Oh, okay. That's the kind of advice." She and I talked about it and she said that she thought that it made more sense to propose a kind of bundle of textile emoji and I decided to do that. She and I talked it through and I think the original was probably something closer to knitting than yarn but we said knitting, a safety pin, thread and needle were the ones that kind of made the most sense. I set about writing these four proposals and one of the things that they asked for was frequently requested. One other thing that I will say about the proposal format is that they have this outline structure that is grammatically very wonky. They ask you to assert the images distinctiveness and they also ask you to demonstrate that it is frequently requested. I found a couple of really interesting resources. One, Emojipedia which is this sort of encyclopedia of emoji images and history maintains a list of the top emoji requests. I actually don't know how they generate that list or who's requesting that and where but I think it's things that they get emailed about and things people request in other contexts and sewing and knitting, I've done on that list and I started compiling it in 2016. ROBERT: To be a part of the proposal process, to show that it is requested, without that resource, you just start scouring Facebook and Twitter and history and shouting to people like, "I really want this emoji. Why it didn't exist?" That seems pretty hard. AMANDA: Actually our proposals all have Twitter screen shots of people grousing about the absence of knitting emoji and yarn emoji and sewing emoji. I know that Emojipedia, they do a bunch of research so they go out and look at based what people are grousing about on Twitter. They look at places where people are publicly saying like, "It's crazy that there's no X emoji," and that's part of their process for deciding what kinds of emojis people are asking for. Their research was one resource but we took screenshots of people saying that they needed a safety pin emoji and that was part of making the case. One of the things that I found as I was doing that research was that, I guess at this point it was almost two years ago, when the character set that included the dumpling emoji came out, there was a bunch of grousing from people saying, "Why is there not a yarn emoji?" There was a writing campaign that I think Lion Brand had adopted. Lion Brand yarn had put in this tweet saying like, "Everyone should complain. We needed a yarn emoji," but it doesn't matter how much you yell on Twitter. If you don't actually write a proposal, you're not going to get anywhere. I had been told that the Emoji Subcommittee, they're really disinclined to accept proposals that had a corporate sponsor, so they weren't going to create a yarn emoji because Lion Brand yarns wanted them to create a yarn emoji. ROBERT: Right, so it was like counter-peer proposal. AMANDA: Right. But as I was digging around the other thing I found was this woman in... I actually don't know if you're in Dallas or Austin but I found Amberley, who also put a post on Twitter and had started a petition, asking people to sign her petition for a yarn emoji proposal or a knitting emoji. I don't remember if it was a yarn emoji or a knitting emoji but I found her petition and reached out to her to ask if she was interested in co-authoring the proposal with me because she had clearly done the work. She actually had figured out how the system worked at that point. I think she knew who she was petitioning, at least. I reached out to Amberley and we worked together to refine our proposal and figure out what exactly we wanted to request. I think there were a bunch of things that were on the original list like knitting needles, yarn and needles. I think crocheting would have been on the original list. We were sort of trying to figure out what was the right set of requests that actually made sense. ROBERT: So then, this is where Amberley stories comes in and it is interesting too because she has entirely different angle for this. Maybe not entirely different but different than outright. This kind of ties back to the word software podcast mostly. It kind of ties back to the software aspect, right? AMBERLEY: Yeah. I think, really they're kind of separate stories on parallel tracks. My motivation was also two-fold like Amanda's was, where I started knitting in 2013 and I had a really good group of nerd friends with a little yarn shop up in DC, like a stitch and ditch group -- ROBERT: I love it. AMBERLEY: It was a constant sort of like, where's the insert emoji here, like where's the yarn emoji? Where's the knitting emoji? And we would sort of sarcastically use the spaghetti emoji because it was the most visually similar but that was something that was in the back of my mind but it teaches you a lot about yourself too because I was like, "Oh, this is like fiber art, not really an emoji. It's kind of technical, like on a tech space," and I didn't really connect that it was relevant or that I might have any power to change it. It just didn't occur to me at the time. ROBERT: Interesting. I feel like a lot of people are in that similar situation or maybe not situation, even though you can make change on this. AMBERLEY: Right, so my brain didn't even make it like, "Why isn't this a thing? let me look at how to make the thing." When that happened for me, Amanda mentioned using emoji and everything in the BuzzFeed space. I love how you explained BuzzFeed a while ago, it's my favorite description of BuzzFeed I ever heard. Something similar that happened for me was I was a software developer and in 2016, the Yarn package manager was released and that kind of turned something on in my head. That was like I'm seeing all these software engineers now be like, "Where's the yarn emoji?" and I'm like, "Welcome to the club." ROBERT: "Do you want to join our Slack? We can complain together." AMBERLEY: Right. It has been like a pretty decent amount of time, I'm semi-seriously ranting and complaining to my coworkers who were primarily male software engineers. I remember I went to [inaudible] in the Frost Bank Tower after work and was just like, "I'm going to figure out how this happens," and I spent a couple hours at the coffee shop. I found the Unicode site and I found their proposal process and their structure for the proposal and everything and I just started doing the research and drafting up a proposal specifically for yarn. Maybe it was a bit naive of me but to me it was like, "Okay, here's the process. I follow the process. Cool." I mean, you have to make a case and it has to be compelling and has to be well-written and it has to be supported and all that and that to me it was like, "Okay, there's a process. At the same time, I did read about the dumpling emoji but I didn't connect it to Emojination and they had started the Kickstarter. We should talk about this later but I think the sort of idea the issue of representation on the committee and who gets to define language is really interesting but I saw that they had done the Kickstarter and there was a campaign aspect to it, so I ended up just building up this simple site so that if anyone Google, they would find yarn emoji. It's still up at YarnEmoji.com and that was how Amanda found me. I got this random email, I sort of like had this burst of energy and I did all the research and I wrote the draft, sort of piecemeal, filling out the different sections of the way they have it outlined on the Unicode site and then I feel like a month or two went by and I had kind of not looked at it for a bit and then, I get this random email from this website that I almost forgot about. It was like, "Hey, I'm working on this series of proposals. If you're working on knitting or yarn or whatever, maybe we could work together," and I was like, "Well, that's sweet." Then she opened up this whole world to me. There's this whole Emojination organization, sort of 100% devoted to democratizing the process of language formation through creating emojis and so then, I got really into that. My primary motivator was yarn. CHARLES: So what's the status of the yarn spool, those emoji right now? AMBERLEY: The yarn, the spool of thread and the safety pin, they're all approved emoji for the 2018 released. Amanda and I are actually at the end. Amanda, a couple of months ago when I saw someone used the spool thread emoji for a Twitter thread -- you know how people will be like all caps thread and have a thread of tweets -- I saw someone do that just out of the blue. I was like, "Oh, my God. Is it out?" and the thing about these individual vendors, it sort of gets released piecemeal, so at the time Twitter have I think released their versions of this series of new emoji but others hadn't. CHARLES: How does that work? Because you think the Twitter would be kind of device depending on what browser you're using, like if you're on a Windows or a Mac or a Linux Box, right? ROBERT: -- Emoji set, right? I know Facebook does this too. AMBERLEY: I'm painfully aware that Facebook does it because I can't use the crossed finger emoji on Facebook because it actually gives me nightmares. ROBERT: I have to go look at this now. AMBERLEY: Because it's so creepy-looking. CHARLES: Okay. Also like Slack, for example is another. It's like a software-provided emoji set. AMANDA: Right. AMBERLEY: I'm not totally sure that Slack actually adheres to the standard Unicode set. I think it's kind of its own thing but I might be wrong about that. AMANDA: Sorry, Slack definitely supports the full Unicode set. They also have a bunch of emoji that they've added that aren't part of the set. AMBERLEY: Slack emojis? AMANDA: Yes. CHARLES: Yeah and then every Slack also has its kind of local Slack emoji. AMBERLEY: Right. CHARLES: But how does that work with --? ROBERT: Okay, this crossed-finger Facebook emoji is... yes, I agree with you, Amberley. AMBERLEY: Thank you. I had yet to find someone who disagrees with me about that. AMANDA: I have never seen it before and I'm now like, "What is going on?" CHARLES: Yeah, so how does it work if a vendor like Twitter is using a different emoji set? How does that work with cut and paste, like if I want to copy the content of one tweet into something else? Are they using an image there? AMANDA: They're using an image. I think it's doesn't happen as much anymore but for a long time, I would often get texts from people and the text message would have that little box with a little code point in it and you were like -- AMBERLEY: More like an alien thing? AMANDA: Yeah. Definitely, if you don't have the emoji character set that includes the glyph that you're looking at, you're going to get that little box that has a description of the code point and I think what's happening is that Twitter is using JavaScript or generally programming. There were air quotes but you can't see. Twitter is using their software to sub in their emoji glyph whenever someone enters that code point. Even if you don't have the most up to date Unicode on your computer, you can still see those in Twitter. If I copy and paste it into a text editor on my computer, what I'm going to see is my little box that says '01F9F5' in it but if I get it into Twitter, it shows up. I can see them on Twitter but I can't see them anywhere else. AMBERLEY: Damn, you really have the code point memorized? AMANDA: No, I -- CHARLES: Oh, man. I was really hoping -- AMBERLEY: Oh, man. ROBERT: You live and breathe it. AMANDA: No, I'm not that compulsive. AMBERLEY: We definitely have our emojis on our Twitter bios, though. AMANDA: Absolutely. ROBERT: If you see Amanda's bio, it's pretty great. AMANDA: They started showing up on Twitter and I think that somebody in Emojination probably told me they were out and that was when I first started using them. Amberley might have actually seen it. It sounds like you just saw it in the wild, which is kind of amazing. AMBERLEY: I saw it in the wild with this tweet thread and yeah, it's just [inaudible]. I was like, "Amanda, is it out?" CHARLES: Yeah, I feel like I saw that same usage too, although I obviously did not connect any dots. AMANDA: This last week, October 2nd -- I'm also looking things up. I'm just going to come to the fact that I am on a computer looking things up so I can fact check myself -- after they actually released their emoji glyph set, so by now any updated iOS device should have the full 2018 emoji, which in addition to a kind of amazing chunky yarn and safety pin, there's also a bunch of stuff. There's a broom and a laundry basket. There's a bunch of really basic, kind of household stuff that certainly belongs in the character set alongside wrenches and hammers. AMBERLEY: I think one of the big ones too for this year was the hijab? AMANDA: No, the hijab actually came out with a dumpling. Hijab has been available -- AMBERLEY: It's been up, okay. ROBERT: So did it come with iOS 12 or 12.1? I don't know for sure. I just know -- AMANDA: I'm looking at it and it's 12.1. I really feel that I should be ashamed that I have used the internet and search for this. AMBERLEY: I would say, I have no idea what their release numbers are. AMANDA: [inaudible] as it appeared for the first time in iOS for 2018 with today's release of the iOS 12.1, Beta 2 for developers. ROBERT: That is amazing. Do you get some kind of satisfaction -- like you have to, right? -- from people using the emoji and it's starting to make its way out there? AMANDA: So much. Oh, my God, yeah. AMBERLEY: I didn't really expect it, like saying that random tweet using this spool of thread for a tweet thread. I just thought and I just got so psyched. For me, I'm a knitter. I have knitter friends and it started with yarn and then really, Amanda and through Amanda, Jenny really sort of broadened my idea of what it all really meant. To think someone using it in the wild for a totally different application than I had ever thought of was like, "That's legit." AMANDA: I definitely have a sewing emoji search in my tweet deck and sometimes, when I'm feeling I need a little self-validation, I'll go look over there and find people who are saying things like, "Why is there no sewing emoji?" and I'll just reply with all the sewing emoji, like it is part of my work in this life to make sure that not only do they exist but people know about them. ROBERT: That is awesome. I would do the same thing, though to be honest. You'll be proud of that. AMANDA: Totally. ROBERT: Were there any hitches in the proposal process? I know we're kind of alluded to it but the thing that you started off one thing, Amanda didn't make it. Right? AMANDA: I know. ROBERT: So how did that process happen from you two meet each other and then going through the actual committee and the review process and then being accepted. What would that mean? AMANDA: The process is actually incredibly opaque. We wrote this whole proposal, a bunch of people edited it, which is one of the other nice things about collaborating with Emojination. There was a bunch of people who are just really excited about emoji and the kind of language making that Amberley was talking about. There's a whole bunch of people who just jumped in and gave us copy edits and feedback, which was super helpful and then, there was a deadline and we submitted it to the committee and it actually shows up in the Unicode register which is also a very official kind of document register. I was a little excited about that too but then they have their meeting. They first have a meeting and there's like a rough pass and the Emoji Subcommittee makes formal recommendations to the Unicode Consortium and then the consortium votes to accept or reject the Emoji Subcommittee's recommendations. It's a very long process but unless you're going and checking the document file and meeting minutes from the Unicode Consortium meetings, you'll never going to know that it happen. AMBERLEY: -- You know someone connected through there because one of the things in our first pass, it wasn't that it was rejected. It was that we needed to modify something. We do have art for knitting needles with yarn because at one point, I think we weren't totally sure that a ball of yarn would be visually distinct enough in this emoji size to look like yarn and so, we had put it with sort of knit piece on knitting needles. AMANDA: Oh, that's right. There was a tease of a little bit of knitted fabric. AMBERLEY: Right and I think that, probably through Jenny or the people actually in the room, the feedback I remember is that there is a crocheter in the room who was like, "Yeah, why isn't there a yarn emoji but knitting needle?" so there was a little bit of like that was how I think we ended up from knitting needles with a fiber piece to ball of yarn, maybe. AMANDA: I think that sounds right. I'm actually sure of that. It's just all coincide with my recollection. There were some things that they had questions about and that happened really fast because I feel like we had a couple of days and they have stuck to our guns and said, "No, we're only interested in knitted bit of fabric." Also, we worked with an illustrator and went back and forth with her because the initial piece that she had illustrated, I feel like the knitting needles were crossing in a way. That was not how knitting works and so, there was a little bit of back and forth around that as well. But then once they decided that the they like the thread, yarn and safety pin, we're going to move to the next stage. I actually had to go back and look at the minutes to find out that the two reasons that they didn't move the sewing needle on to the next stage is when they thought it was adequately represented by the thread, which I wholeheartedly disagree with and they thought it wasn't visually distinctive. That's so much harder because a sewing needle, which is really just a very fine piece of metal with an eye at the end, you get down to a really small size and it is maybe a little hard to know what you're looking at. But I think there's such a big difference between the static object which is the spool or the thread which represents a lot of things and is important and the needle, which is the active tool that you use to do the making, to do the mending, to do the cobbling. CHARLES: Yeah. I'm surprised that it almost isn't reversed when certainly in my mind, which I think is more culturally important in terms of the number of places which it appears, it's definitely the needle as being kind of... Yeah. AMANDA: Yeah and I think that the thread and yarn, they're important and I think that the decision to have a ball of yarn rather than a bit of knitting makes sense because there's a lot of things that you can use a ball of yarn that aren't just knitting and they think that -- AMBERLEY: And it's the first step too that doesn't exclude anyone in the fiber art community. AMANDA: But there's so many things like in sutures and closing wounds, you're not using a little spool of cotton thread for that or polyester thread and stuff like embroidery and beadwork, you might be using thread or fiber of some sort that started on a spool but you might not. Embroidery floss was not sold in a spool and there's all these places where we use needles and all kinds of different size and you don't always use thread. Sometimes, you're using yarn. Sometimes, you're using leather cord. Sometimes, you're using new bits of, I would say Yucca. You're using plant fibers to do baskets and in all of these different practices, that process of hooking it through the eye and sewing it is how it's actually made. It still sort of mystifies me why they haven't accepted it but they also didn't reject it, which is really interesting. I don't know how many other emoji are sort of sitting in this weird nether space because sometimes they just reject them outright. I think there was a proposal for a coin that they just said no. ROBERT: They were a like, "A coin?" That would be [inaudible]. AMANDA: Oh, God. ROBERT: They have to add one for every -- AMANDA: [inaudible]. CHARLES: Literally, the pager of 2017. AMANDA: Exactly. CHARLES: So what recourse is now available to you all and to us, by extension, to get the sewing needle? AMANDA: I'm actually working on a revised proposal and I've been trying to figure out what are all the arguments that I'm missing for why sewing and the needle are not adequately represented by the thread and yarn. A bunch of things that a friend of my named, Mari who's half-Japanese, half-American but lives in Guatemala and does all this kind of arts in textile work, pointed out that there's a whole holiday in Japan devoted to bringing your broken needles and thanking them for their service. I thought that was really cool. I've been trying to formulate what are all of the arguments for the necessity of both a needle and a spool. If anybody has interesting ways to phrase that, I would love for arguments. CHARLES: Yeah but it's hard to imagine the arguments is just anything being more compelling than the arguments the you just laid out that you named about seven context: shoemaking, medicine, different fibers where the needle operates completely and totally independent of the thread. It's looming so large in kind of our collective conscious like holidays, being dedicated to them, except I think the Cro-Magnon pager, which is made out of stone, I believe, the being the artifact that pre-dates... AMANDA: There's the idiom landscape as well. Things like finding a needle in a haystack, that has a very specific meaning -- ROBERT: And for puns. I've been resisting saying a pun this whole time. AMANDA: Oh, share your pun with us. AMBERLEY: Yeah, you have to say it. ROBERT: Well, you could say that trying to get this through the committee is like threading a needle. Butchered but -- AMANDA: There's a biblical quote about getting into heaven -- a camel through the eye of a needle. I forget actually how it... CHARLES: To thread a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. AMANDA: Exactly and there's this sort of do-re-mi, saw, a needle pulling thread. There are all these places where it's about the needle and somebody had -- CHARLES: It's primarily ancient. AMANDA: I know. CHARLES: It is the prime actor. Maybe, this is a good segue into kind of talking about the makeup of the committee and the decision making process and these kind of what seem like very clear arguments might not be received as such. AMANDA: I certainly don't want to say anything bad about anybody on the committee. CHARLES: No, no, I don't think that there's anything bad. I think that being receptive to things which are familiar to us versus with things that aren't is a very natural human thing and it can be interesting to see that at work and at play. AMANDA: The Unicode Consortium is also evaluating all of these requests for whole language glyphs sets. Lots of languages and lots of character sets that are kind of obvious, like there has to be a sort of like character set like there has to be an Arabic character set but there are a lot of languages that have been left out of that because they're very small minority languages or they are historical languages, where the actual writing is no longer written the same way but there's historical reasons to be able to represent those characters. One of the reasons why the Emoji Subcommittee cares about what gets into the formal character set is that everybody has to accommodate it and there's already been, I think some grousing. People start to moan and groan about how there's too many emoji, then it's too hard to find things. CHARLES: And there's no take backs. AMANDA: There's no take backs. You can't undo it. The committee is made up of representatives from a lot of tech companies primarily, although there's a couple of other kind of odd additional folks on there. I do try to find the committee list and I can find it right now. AMBERLEY: I have it from Emojination. I don't know if it's up to date but Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Google, Facebook, Shopify and Netflix. The other voting members -- ROBERT: Shopify? AMBERLEY: Yeah, right? The others being the German software company, SAP and the Chinese telecom company, Huawei and the Government of Oman. AMANDA: Yeah, the Government of Oman is a fascinating one. I don't think they're the ones that are biting us on this. Especially for those tech companies, every time the emoji character set adds 10 or 12 emoji, they don't have to accommodate it on their devices. They have to put illustrators on it, they have to deal with everyone saying that the crossed fingers emoji in Facebook looks like I-don't-even-know-what. AMBERLEY: Hey, Amanda. AMANDA: It's all your fault. There's a whole process and there's non-trivial work associated with every single new emoji, so wanting to put the brakes on a little bit and be intentional about where and when they apply that work, it doesn't seem crazy to me. I just want them to approve the thing that I want. AMBERLEY: I like the way that Emojination captures it. I looked at their website earlier and actually, they take it down but their goal quote "Emojination wants to make emoji approval an inclusive representative process." There has to be a process. There's overhead involved but looking at the makeup of the decision makers are not a trivial question. CHARLES: Right. This is a great example like [inaudible] metaphor but these little artifacts, these emojis are literally being woven to the fabric of a global culture and certainly, everybody uses them and they become part of the collective subconscious. It does seem like very important to be democratic in some way. It sounds like there is a process but making sure that everyone has a stake. AMBERLEY: Yeah. ROBERT: What was the reason that they gave for not accepting the needle and thread? Was it like a soft no? You said it's like just hanging out, not really rejected but not accepted. We're going to drop a link in the show notes for the proposal and your GitHub and everything. I'm looking at the PDF that was put together and it seems like it was all a package deal like we talked about. How do they just draw or they just take like a lawyer would, just like draw or cross it out like, "Well, no but we'll take the other ones." AMANDA: Yes, basically. What they did is they need to discuss and I don't know how long they've been meeting but they need to discuss all of the proposals that have been supplied by a particular deadline and -- ROBERT: That sounds painful. AMANDA: Yeah, I mean, it's -- ROBERT: Just imagine the power of thinking about emojis. AMANDA: One of the things that they rejected, I think because there's the smiling poo face. Somebody wanted a frowning poo face and they rejected that. There's a bunch of things that actually do get rejected. I don't know if they've been really care about a smiling poo face versus a frowning poo face. ROBERT: What about an angry one? AMANDA: We got all the feelings of poo. ROBERT: We got important work to do here. AMANDA: But they go through when they're trying to figure out. I think to some degree, you want to get them when they're not tired but I think the status that it's listed right now is committee pushback, so they've set it aside until we have some concerns. We're not going to reject it outright but we're not really sure why this isn't adequately represented. Then their most recent meeting, they just kind of passed on reconsidering it, which is fine because I think I was traveling and my proposal is not done. I really want to make sure that I have consolidated every imaginable argument in one place so -- ROBERT: And make it strong as possible. AMANDA: Yeah. If people want to help the other thing that would be amazing is any and all idioms that you can think of, especially ones that are not in English or European languages, idioms in Central European languages, idioms in Asian languages that refer to needles, either translations of the kind of classic, 'finding a needle in a haystack,' but also any idioms that are kind of unusual and specific to a culture outside of what I have experience with would be amazing for making the case, so this is an international need. ROBERT: Do they need any specific or actionable feedback or do they just say, "We're going to push back on this. We're just not quite sure?" AMANDA: The two things that we're in the minutes -- there are minutes and they publish the minutes to Unicode.org -- were it was not visually distinct, which is not totally crazy. We actually worked with an illustrator to get a different image. The first image was almost at 90 degrees. It was kind of straight up and down and it is a little hard to see and the second is -- ROBERT: Especially, because it's thin. AMANDA: The second image is actually a kind of stylized needle because it's fairly a little fatter and the eye is bigger but it's much more distinctively a needle. I'm hoping that that will also convince them but you have to be able to tell at a very small size that it's a needle. The other thing that they said was that sewing was already represented by the thread, that we didn't need thread and needle but it was literally one line in the minutes that referenced that and then it sort of like, "Did you have somebody in the room or not?" and so, if there is somebody on the committee who is willing to tell you really what their concerns were, then you have some sense of what they're looking for and why they're pushing back. When you can very much see in the earliest emoji character sets that I have a hammer and I have a wrench and I use them but there's these very conventionally male tools. We have all of the kind of office supplies but all of homemaking and housekeeping and textile production, none of them were there until very, very recently. I think it does reflect the gender of the people who've been making these tools, that sewing and knitting weren't important enough as human practices to be included in this glyph set. AMBERLEY: I guess, that's non-trivial to mention because that wasn't an argument that I made in my original yarn draft and Amanda and Jenny sort of pushing to open it up to this whole slate of craft emoji. I didn't realize until they brought that up. I took a stroll through pretty much the whole slate of emoji and you can count on almost one hand the number that represented the creative endeavors or sort of more traditionally known as creative things like camera or painting palette and stuff like that. It was extremely limited. AMANDA: I think they have stuff like that. I think there's a few different variations on the camera and then there's painting palette and that's it. AMBERLEY: Oh, there's the theater mask. AMANDA: Oh, that's right. There is the theater, the happy and sad -- AMBERLEY: And I don't know it exactly and I haven't read the minutes like Amanda has but I think and I hope that that was a particularly compelling piece of that argument. AMANDA: I think they definitely heard it. AMBERLEY: Yeah. CHARLES: Opening it up then, what else is coming in the way of craft? It sounds like this is historical but these pieces are being filled in not only with the work that you all are doing but by other emoji which you're appearing. AMANDA: Yes. CHARLES: And are you in contact with other people who are kind of associated with maybe craft and textiles and other kind of what you're labeling historically creative spaces? AMANDA: I don't think there are anymore with a possible exception. Someone's working on a vinyl record proposal which I think is great. CHARLES: Yeah, that's awesome. ROBERT: Antiquated, though. AMANDA: Maybe not, I don't know. AMBERLEY: Take a stroll through the Emojination Slack and people discussed that. AMANDA: Yeah. If you click at Emojination.org, the whole Airtable database is on there. There's not a lot of other creative ones. A friend of mine got really bent out of shape about the lack of alliums and wrote a whole slate proposal for leeks and scallions and garlic and onions. ROBERT: Oh, there is a garlic one, right? AMANDA: No. I mean, there is -- AMBERLEY: Actually, I'm looking at the Unicode page for current emoji candidates. They first get listed as... I forget the exact order. They become draft candidates and then provisional candidates or vice versa but I don't see any pending further creative ones but garlic and onion are on there. AMANDA: Yes. ROBERT: That makes my Italian a little happy. AMANDA: I think there's some prosthesis, the mechanical leg and the mechanical arm, a guide dog -- AMBERLEY: Ear with hearing aid, service dog. AMANDA: Yeah, there's a good chunk of interesting things that have been left out. I guess they've been approved by the subcommittee but are still waiting on final approval by the Unicode Consortium. ROBERT: Okay. What are the next steps that we can do to help push the thread and needle proposal through it. You mentioned a couple things like coming up with idioms that are in different languages and whatnot but how can we contact you and push this effort and help? AMANDA: That's such a good question. I don't even know. I mean, I am Amanda@velociraptor.info and you're totally welcome to email me if you want to help with this and I will -- ROBERT: That's a great domain, by the way. AMANDA: Unfortunately, there's no information about velociraptors anywhere on that site. ROBERT: That's the way it should be. AMANDA: But also, if you're excited about working on emoji proposals, Emojination is an incredibly great resource and folks there, including me actually will help you identify things that are on other people's wish lists that you could work on if you just want to work on something and we'll help you refine your proposal if you know what you want and we'll help you figure out whether it's worth putting the time in or not and how to make it compelling. You can definitely check out Emojination.org. I think there's a path to get on to the Slack from there. AMBERLEY: Oh, yeah. The Slack and the Airtable. AMANDA: Yeah. ROBERT: It sounds like there's a whole community that was born out of this, where everybody is trying to help each other and collaborate and get their shared ideas across. AMANDA: Definitely and there's a woman, Melissa Thermidor who is fantastic, who actually is a social media coordinator. It's her actual title but she works for the National Health Service in the UK and was tasked with getting a whole series of health-related emoji passed. There's a bunch of things that she's -- AMBERLEY: Is she's the one doing blood. AMANDA: She's doing blood. AMBERLEY: That's a good one. AMANDA: Because there's a lot of really important health reasons why you need to be able to talk about blood and getting blood and blood borne illnesses and -- AMBERLEY: That one was listed on the emoji candidate page or blood donation medicine administration. AMANDA: Yeah. ROBERT: That's really interesting, so she works for the government, right? and that was part of her job to do that? AMANDA: Yes. ROBERT: That's awesome, actually. I love that. AMANDA: Yeah, I think the drop of blood, the bandage and the stethoscope are the three that are in the current iteration, which is interesting because the existing medical emoji were the pill and that gruesome syringe with a little drops of fluid flying off of it, which do not do a lot to encourage people to go to the doctor. ROBERT: No, not at all. AMANDA: So a few more, we're welcoming medical emoji. ROBERT: You have a GitHub. Is that where you're still doing for the follow up and the prep work for the sewing emoji? AMANDA: Yeah, that's probably the best place. I do have a Google Docs somewhere but that's probably a better place to connect even than my ridiculous Velociraptor email. The GitHub -- ROBERT: But it's still awesome. AMANDA: It is awesome. I won't lie. I'm very proud of it. I am AmandaBee -- like the Bumble Bee -- on GitHub and the sewing emoji, the original proposals are there and I will make sure that there is information about how to plug into the revised needle proposal there as well. You guys are a tech podcast, so if people want to just submit suggestions as issues on that repository, that's awesome. We'll totally take suggestions that way. ROBERT: That would be pretty rad. Well, I appreciate you two being on the podcast. I love hearing your stories and how it ended up converging in parallel tracks but it end up achieving the same goal. Still unfinished, right? Let's see if we can help push this over the finish line and get it done because I would really like to see a needle. I could definitely use that in many of my conversations already now, making all kinds of puns. Thank you, Amanda for coming on and sharing your story. AMANDA: Thanks for having me. ROBERT: And thank you, Amberley for also coming on and sharing your story. This was super awesome. AMBERLEY: Yeah and thank you for connecting us to finally have a voice conversation. AMANDA: I know. It's great to actually talk to you, Amberley. CHARLES: Oh, wow, this is the first time that you actually talked in audio? AMANDA & AMBERLEY: Yeah. ROBERT: We're making things happen here. The next thing we have to do is get this proposal through and accepted. AMANDA: Yes. CHARLES: You've converted two new faithful sewing and needle partisans here and I'm in. AMANDA: Awesome. ROBERT: I know you've already gotten, what? Three through accepted? AMANDA: Yeah. ROBERT: We talked about that, it's got to be really awesome. I think I want to try and jump in and get that same satisfaction because a lot of people use emojis. AMANDA: Exactly. CHARLES: It definitely makes me think like you look at every single emoji and there's definitely a story. Especially for the ones that have been added more recently, there's a lot of work that goes into every single pixel. That represents a lot of human time, which I'm sure you all know, so thank you. AMANDA: Thanks for having us on. AMBERLEY: Yeah, thank you guys. ROBERT: Cool. That is the podcast. We are Frontside. We build UI that you can stick your future on. I really love this podcast because it wasn't necessarily technical but had a lot of interesting conversation about how to work with a proposal and probably make a bigger impact than any of us with software, just because the sheer reach that emojis have are insane and the fact that you can influence this process is new to me and really cool, so I hope a lot of other people learn from that too. If you have any feedback that you would like to give us on the podcast, we're always open to receive feedback. We have our doors and ears open, so if you like to send an email at Contact@Frontside.io or shoot us a tweet or DM us at @TheFrontside on Twitter. We'd love to hear it. Thank you, Mandy for producing the podcast. She always does an amazing job with it. You can follow her on Twitter at @TheRubyRep. Thanks and have a good one.

Bamboo Detroit Update with Amanda Lewan Romy catches up with co-founder, Amanda Lewan to hear about the most recent expansion of one of Detroit’s hottest hippest co-working spaces. Listen in to some of the secrets of the success including the special nature of the diversity in members and programming.   http://bonfiresofsocialenterprise.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Bamboo-Detroit-instagram.jpg () Full Transcript Read Full Transcript Romy: Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Bonfires of Social Enterprise! This is Romy and I want to thank you for your loyalty and following. It keeps us all going around here! This time, we follow up with Amanda Lewan of Bamboo Detroit. Bamboo is a co-working space that has some very special characteristics… it is very diversified and full of energy. Not to mention that it is one of the ‘hippest' places in town. Is that even a word? ‘Hippest?' Oh well, you know what I mean. People want to be there! We did an interview with Amanda back in Season 1. She is one of the owners and visionaries of this space. We will catch up with her in just a moment because we are going to hear from Hudson Robertson of Traverse City, Michigan on the fun fuel… Hudson: My name is Hudson Robertson and I am bringing the Fun Fuel for this episode. This information comes from an article published in the online magazine PhatRice.com on September 18th of 2014. The article is called “7 Crazy-Interesting Facts about Bamboo” 1. Bamboo is anti-bacterial - bamboo has natural pest-fighting powers, thanks to the plant's unique resistance to bacteria and fungi. 2. Panda's Did not always eat it like you see in pictures. - At some point, pandas came to love the taste of bamboo and hate hunting, giving us the peaceful and herbivorous, bamboo-munching creatures we know today. Here are a few more…. Bamboo tastes delicious, it grows on every continent, and Bamboo is stronger than steel - In compression tests, bamboo comes out stronger than brick, wood, concrete or steel, meaning it can hold more force than any of those materials. Some scientists even theorize that a length of bamboo 10 centimeters across could hold a 11,000-pound elephant -- though that particular experiment has yet to be attempted. I hope you enjoyed this Fun Fuel. This is Hudson Robertson. Enjoy the show! Romy: Thanks so much Hudson. I might have to go find some Bamboo to try in a salad. I hadn't thought about that before! Ha ha Okay, let's turn our attention to Amanda Lewan from Bamboo Detroit… Amanda: Yes, we just opened up at our new location, 1420 Washington Boulevard on floor three. The building is called the Julian C. Madison Building, so we're super pumped about it. It's a beautiful building right downtown. It's locally owned by a wonderful family. The building's named after our landlord, Sharon Madison's father, Julian C. Madison. He was a history-making entrepreneur himself. Romy: Oh, he was? Amanda: It's very inspiring to live that sort of similar path with our inclusive entrepreneurial hub here. Romy: Yeah, can we hear a little bit about that story? Amanda: Yeah, so Sharon's father and grandfather were trailblazers. They were the first and third African American engineers in the state of Ohio, and I think his grandfather was one of the very first engineers, African American engineers hired by the federal government. When they bought this building, they named it after her father. One of the things they always described it as he always had a spirit of ... A belief that one should take their life into their own hands, and create with it. I guess he [inaudible 00:02:33] always give back and help raise up the younger generation for their own businesses. It was a really good fit for us seeing a great shared workspace for entrepreneurs and creatives, and fostering and sharing those values of inclusion and diversity. We're super pumped. I think it's really good to partner with people who share your...

Return movie, return guest – Chris Platek. Why is Biff there? Top secret flubber. Chris complains about the terrible puns. Top secret meeting is code for playing golf. If it’s off the charts, change your scale. Terrible flubber products. Noun association survey and Stitch Fix rankings. Useless infomercial people. BodyForm Fitness Stick. Banana Slicer Amazon reviews. Cousin Christmas Secret Santa. Happy belated birthday to William. Amanda – “the government is a scam”. Calculating the paperboy’s earnings. Bad science. Annoying return characters. Game – original uses for inventions. Amanda likes the word guff. Going to a party just for the food. Ninja turtle newspaper caper, milk jug skeleton bones, Ash Ketchum. Shady business venture. “If you weren’t deductible, I’d disown you”. Amanda needs an explanation of football. Pawnee vs Eagleton. Unnecessary sequel. Air Bud movie success. Amanda – “It’s okay to cheat”. Next episode - Miracle of the White Stallions

Chris is a sculptor and a painter of all manner of critter, and has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the world.  His work has been published in numerous books and periodicals in the US as well as in Europe and Singapore.  Chris is also a toy designer and sculptor of numerous instantly sold-out editions of designer art toys and figures. Amanda’s mixed-media work combines the textures and colors of antique domestic objects, the natural world, and an obsessive attention to detail.  Her fabric creatures evoke ideas of cast-off children’s toys and ill-conceived taxidermy experiments with crooked human teeth.  Her work is highly sought-after by collectors around the globe, and she has exhibited her work in galleries, boutiques, and conventions across the United States, as well as Europe and Japan. Full shownotes: http://yourcreativepush.com/158 Listen to Part 1 here! In this episode, Chris & Amanda discuss: -The “F it moment,” where you have no more time to finish a project and you have to put your perfectionism aside in order to submit your work. -The idea of getting many different projects started all at once and how to handle all of that on a daily basis. -Will you be happy or sad with how you spent your time when you are on your death bed? -Coming to terms with the fact that you have a lot to say about the world and finding the way to say that through your creative endeavor. -What their creatures bring to their lives and what their lives would be like without them. -What their online followings do for their creative process. Chris & Amanda's Final Push will inspire you to put your head down and keep putting the work in and finding a way to let the creativity in! Quotes from Amanda: “It’s kind of this narcissistic fear of failure and it really keeps me from doing a lot of stuff.” “The way that I try to combat the futility of time is that I try to break everything down into small chunks.  Eventually all those bricks will eventually form a wall and then you’ll have a body of work. “In terms of creativity, for me it’s drawing first and everything else after.” “It gives me a reason to share my crazy obsessions with other like-minded people who also appreciate crazy obsessions.” “You have to be a little crazy and a little silly and be willing to be a little frivolous.  I think that’s really really important.” “Do whatever you can to demystify the creative process.” Quotes from Chris: “The thing that holds me back the most is that there is not enough time to do all the things that I want to do.” “I don’t want to be yet another contributor to the endless bucket full of commentary.  What I want to do is give people a break for a second.  To look at something that might make them smile in an otherwise dismal day.  Or just a normal day.” “Wishing got nobody anywhere.  Except for Pinocchio.” “On Friday night, where are you at?  Are you out drinking with your friends?  Or are you in your studio working on your passion, working on what’s important to you?” “Really put your head down and put the work in.  That’s the only way you’ll get results.” “The goal is not to end up in a place in your life.  The goal is to get better and progress until you can no longer create art.” Links mentioned: Bindlewood Connect with Chris: Website / Facebook / Instagram / Tumblr / Twitter Connect with Amanda: Website / Facebook / Instagram / Tumblr / Twitter

Amanda Shofner satisfies her need for adventure through the written word. She’s a self-published author who has written urban fantasy, non-fiction and romantic suspense. She’s a voracious reader, TV-watcher and Minneapolis native. We chatted with Amanda about her writing process, alpha readers, beta readers, pantsing, plotting and a little bit of everything in between. Here’s where to find Amanda Shofner: Website/blog: http://amandashofner.com/ My blog posts at Mill City Press/where my non-personal writing content is: https://www.millcitypress.net/blog/authors/amanda-shofner Published: http://published.com/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/amshofner Instagram: http://instagram.com/amshofner Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amshofnerauthor/ Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/amshofner/ Writing Sprint Hashtags: #NaNoWriMo #AmWriting Mill City Press self-publishing services: https://www.millcitypress.net Here’s where to find Ashley: Website: www.BrooksEditorial.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/brookseditorial Instagram: http://instagram.com/brookseditorial Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/brookseditorial Here’s where to find Abbigail: Website: www.InkwellsandImages.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/abbigailekriebs Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/abbigailekriebs/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inkwellsandimages/ Mini Book Club: The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi The Lunar Chronicle Series by Marissa Meyer Shadow & Bone by Leigh Bardugo Quotes: “Everything I have done in life has led me to where I am now.” -- Amanda “Writing is a priority and I had to figure out how to fit it in my life.” -- Amanda “I started writing 30 minutes every morning. A morning is not a morning without writing.” -- Amanda “Your self control stumbles over into other areas of your life when you choose to be really diligent about something.” -- Abbigail “You don’t need a lot of time to write.” -- Amanda “A lot of the things that I told myself about writing were wrong. Writing is what you make it.” - Amanda “If you commit to writing and if it is something you really want to do, you will be surprised in where you can find the time.” -- Amanda “[Netflix] is kind of an easy pit to fall into.” -- Ashley “It’s tough to find a balance: sometimes you do need those days where you don’t do anything.” -- Ashley “Sometimes just doing the work in your daily life takes a fair amount of creativity.” -- Ashley “The first draft can be terrible. I can hit delete later on in revision. But I need to write terrible now to get to the next point.” -- Amanda “Given the choice between something that I am really excited about and something that I want to never look at again, it was an easy choice.” -- Amanda “You need to be excited about the project that you are working on.” -- Ashley “You still run into problems, but writing can be enjoyable.” -- Amanda “Times are changing in self-publishing: it’s no longer a last resort.” -- Amanda “It’s probably smarter to focus on one thing at a time.” -- Ashley “That’s why I have a full-time job: I can write as much as I want and not have to worry about what is paying my bills.” -- Amanda “Having a full time job allows you to take a little more risk and fail a little more often.” -- Abbigail “The ability to fail is huge. You have to be able to fail in order to succeed. Failing means you are trying things.” -- Amanda “Creativity is more like a muscle: you have to train it to do what you want it to do.” -- Amanda “Writers struggle at finding other people to connect with. It is a very isolating experience.” -- Amanda “Writing sprints are how I am able to do as much as I do.” - Amanda