Podcasts about audrey you

The 60-minute reggae mixtape show curated by Dubmatix showcases the finest Sticky Icky Reggae tunes from around the globe — spanning dub to dancehall, rocksteady to roots, and every rhythm in between. PLAYLIST Hugh Malcolm – Good Time Rock (1969) Leon Dinero – Version (2017) Sid Bucknor, The Slickers – You Can't Win (1969) Audrey – You'll Lose a Good Thing (1970) Stranger Cole, Gladdy Anderson – Just Like A River (1968) Dave Barker, The Upsetters – Shocks of Mighty (1970) The Pioneers – Long Shot (1967) The Kingstonians – Lion's Den (1969) Alton Ellis – Can I Change My Mind (1970) The Jamaicans – Love Uprising (1968) Joya Landis, Tommy McCook, The Supersonics – Moonlight Lover (1968) Count Machuki & The Destroyers – Movements [The Joe Gibbs Way] (1967) Dennis Alcapone – Wake Up Jamaica (1972) Ken Parker, Tommy McCook, The Supersonics – I Can't Hide (1967) The Uniques – A Yuh (Hey You) (1968) The Termites – Love up Kiss Up (1967) The Versatiles – Push It In (1968) Phyllis Dillon, Hopeton Lewis – Boys and Girls Reggae - Take 3 (1970) The Ebony Sisters, The Rhythm Rulers – Let Me Tell You Boy (1970) Delroy Wilson – Put Yourself in My Place (1968) The Ethiopians – Hong Kong Flu (1969) Keith & Tex – Don't Look Back (1967) Ken Parker – True, True, True (1967) Clancy Eccles – Fattie Fattie (1969) Carry the show on your station. Get in touch dubmatix@dubmatix.com https://www.mixcloud.com/dubmatix/

Audrey Darley Welch heads up the partner program for Darley Defense, W.S. Darley & Company's military distribution business and its largest division. Her team manages the company's partnerships with key suppliers of tactical and fire-fighting products and services. In this episode, Audrey shares lessons she learned from working in various industries and now at Darley. She tells how she adapts to working in a male-oriented field, how she applies sports metaphors to her team, and what she learned from bad assumptions.  https://bit.ly/TLP-327   Key Takeaways [2:09] Audrey originally had intended to become a high school math teacher and volleyball coach. But she didn't realize you had to be a calculus whiz to teach algebra! She decided to go into finance, instead. She is still passionate about sports and coaching. [3:01] Darley, a family-owned business of four generations, has a family employment policy that requires family members to work outside the business for a period before joining Darley. Audrey had not planned to work at Darley. She started a banking career after college. After three years, she considered joining Darley. For a year she went to board meetings and shareholder meetings and researched Darley. [3:53] When Audrey decided she wanted to join Darley, she wrote an application essay. The open position was a dealer development person for Darley's legacy pump division. She got the job and spent a year working in that area but it was not the ideal position for her background in finance and relationship management. [4:28] Audrey was interested in getting exposure to different areas of the business. She found a position in supplier relationship management in the Defense Division. It was a job she was weel-qualified for and she has been working in the supplier relationship function for the last seven years. [5:40] Working at a large bank before coming to Darley allowed Audrey to see how big companies do things, their policies, and their structure. She was able to see what her strengths were at work. The largest thing she learned was the discipline and accountability of being part of a professional organization. [7:03] Audrey feared before joining Darley that she would have to follow her father's leadership style. He is an extrovert and Audrey is introverted. Audrey's advice to the next generation would be to be natural. She also advises the next generation to find out what fresh ideas the business needs to set it up for success, respecting the secret sauce, the family. Darley has had 300% growth in the last five years. [10:01] Audrey doesn't have a problem with being an offspring, the fourth generation, or being a woman in a male-dominated field. She works well with her male cousins and men in the industry. She goes on pheasant hunts, fishing, and to the Wisconsin supper clubs with the men, so being a woman didn't make a difference to her career. Audrey describes a Wisconsin supper club, for those unfamiliar. [12:34] Audrey talks about one's personal responsibility to pursue professional development. Especially in the family business environment, it's all about initiative. She doesn't expect her generation to be nurtured in the business. Each person needs to pave their own way. Audrey recommends a career map with a “From-To” statement and figuring out what kind of experiences you need to get there. [15:26] Does Audrey want to be President? At Darley, there is no job description for President; currently, the CEO, President, and Chairman are all the same person. So Audrey went ahead and developed a job description for the President as she sees it and as she thinks she would do well in that role, and where they can split off CEO responsibilities. She finds those types of exercises to be very refreshing. [17:25] Soon, the fourth generation will get together to talk about all the positions and get clarity on succession planning. Everybody at Darley has worn a lot of different hats, and it's time to separate their roles, especially of the senior leadership team. [18:51] In a mid-level role like Audrey's, leadership is tough. She has five direct reports and will soon have six. The company is trying to scale, with top-level goals, and every team is checking that their goals align with the company goals, but managers may not realize they do not align with cross-functional team goals. Audrey shares a misstep she had made with goals that impacted the Sales Team's goals. [22:11] Audrey presented to senior management in a virtual meeting the initiative she had developed. When she heard “crickets,” she knew something was wrong. She started getting pushback from sales and business development. Her incorrect assumptions had damaged her trust level across departments. Sales reps started having friction with account managers. Get feedback! Silence is not compliance! [24:46] Audrey ties a lot of her leadership to sports and the volleyball she played in school. She was the setter in volleyball, setting her teammates up for success. The setter is usually named the captain of the team because they're running the plays. At work, she considers herself the captain of her team, and the coach. Audrey is concerned about perfecting the fundamentals. [25:46] Audrey's volleyball coach had her do 1,000 repetitions against the wall before coming out for a game to start setting people up in the warm-up. She uses repetition at Darley, focusing on strategies and core competencies. [27:30] Sports metaphors may not work for everybody. Audrey says something that applies to almost all sports is never to sacrifice form for speed. That's how you get injured. Slow down to speed up. [28:45] Government contract bids need to be submitted within 72 hours. Audrey says that cutting corners on supplier due diligence can cause problems. Darley's core value is integrity, and speed is not integrity. Never bypass your core values. [31:54] Audrey tells how she achieves work-life balance. She has her priorities straight. Even so, when she chooses personal over business or business over personal, sometimes there is some guilt felt. Her husband helps. Figure out work patterns with your partner or whoever is helping you with all this and get into a routine. [34:38] Audrey does not think remote work will go away. Audrey prefers hybrid to all-remote. About 60% of companies are offering remote work. It's not a fad. Audrey values in-person collaboration. She values in-person collaboration time in the office. That can be managed in two-to-three days. Remote doesn't work for every position. Audrey's quality of life has drastically improved through hybrid work. [37:08] Audrey comments on what veterans can do to have a successful transition to business life. Veterans at Darley are very aligned with and connected to the mission, which catapults their careers forward. The biggest challenge is understanding the business world. You need to be flexible and wear different hats. You may be uncomfortable. Getting an MBA before coming to Darley helps a lot. [40:21] Three points that will help anyone transitioning into the business world: 1. Be curious, 2. Be adaptable, and 3. Figure out ways to be confident without knowing everything about everything. [41:04] Audrey's closing thought for listeners: Build your sounding board early. Besides joining forums, having mentors, and tapping the knowledge of the board of directors, it is most important to participate in a peer group to help you get where you want to go. [42:37] Closing quote: Remember, “There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self.” —Aldous Huxley   Quotable Quotes “I found out that I'm very detail-oriented and I do like relationship management on the customer side.” — Audrey “Are we setting up the future of the business for success with the way that we have it? Right now, we've had 300% growth over the last five years.” — Audrey “When it comes to building trust and relationships, I'm out there doing the pheasant hunts, and the fishing, and the beer-drinking, and the supper clubs in Wisconsin up near our plant, and all that. So I don't think [being a woman] really did play a role.” — Audrey “I ran through, ‘This is what it means for the division, this is what it means for sales.' I was trying to highlight all the good things that would come from an initiative like this. … It was like ‘crickets.' … Sometimes not hearing anything at all can be a message.” — Audrey “[Sports] is where it all started. And I still do, I tie a lot of it back to sports, or even just fitness, in general. I was a setter in volleyball, very much the quarterback or the point guard equivalent. You're setting people up for success.” — Audrey “You won't hear me say I don't value that in-person collaboration time.” — Audrey “We're a distributor and we sell a lot of different types of products, we call on a lot of different types of customers. … They may not feel as comfortable. … Everybody's bought into the importance of the equipment we sell.” — Audrey   Resources Mentioned Theleadershippodcast.com Sponsored by: Darley.com Rafti Advisors. LLC Self-Reliant Leadership. LLC Audrey Darley Welch Pareto Principle  

Show Notes If you enjoy learning from Sara and me, consider bringing our Raise Thriving Kids live workshop to your community or participating in our online course. Join my PATREON squad for special perks, including bonus podcast episodes, exclusive posts, and resources.  Subscribe for resources and ideas for happier, more connected families.  This is an encore presentation of one of my favorite episodes. Enjoy! This episode is a live recording of my chat with Sara Kuljis about some of our favorite year-end reflection activities. Joining Sara and me for this episode is Kate Rader, one of the participants from our Raise Thriving Kids Workshop. Kate is a stay-at-home mom to 3 adventure-seeking and fun-loving kiddos, Lauren and Caroline, identical twins who are 13 and Jack, age 10, wife to her college sweetheart Jeff and curious lover of books, podcasts, and conversations about intentional parenting and living. Here's what Kate had to say about our workshop: "It was just so wonderful to be in a room with people who care enough to be intentional about the choices they're making for their families and what they want for their families because it's a work in progress--and we're all working together." Big Ideas In addition to parenting books, podcasts, and coaching, workshops are a great resource for parents. Just as most people need continual training and education in their careers, parents can also take the time to learn and connect with others in order to feel invigorated. It is helpful to share what is working and to discuss best practices for strengthening family bonds. We talk a lot about the importance of self-care and modeling a balanced life for our kids. Today we discuss the ideas I shared in my recent post, 5 Simple Year-End Reflections: Create a Reverse Bucket List. Look back over your life and make a list of the cool things you've already done. 100 Family Memories Brainstorm and make a list of what happened in your family this year. Pick a Quote of the Year Find a quote that resonates with you, or something motivational, looking back or looking ahead, a quote you want to live by. Select One Word that you want to guide you in the new year Be authentic and make it a word that is uniquely yours. Remember your Favorite Books or resources from the past year Take time to let the new things that you have learned (in books, podcasts, workshops) to percolate and apply the concepts or practices to your life. Pick one or two of these ideas that resonate with you. You can do an activity on your own or engage the whole family. Make the delivery of the idea fun and light. Allow people to be silly. Getting the family together over the holidays, expressing gratitude, and setting intentions together are my favorite ways to bring in the new year. Quotes Sara: "Sometimes parenting intentionally feels counter-cultural. When we're swimming upstream, to have fishies to swim with is so confidence building. It's reassuring, it's empowering. I've loved all the parents we have gotten to work with through this project because it has fueled me." Kate: "The regular accountability is equally as important to me as the one-day workshop. Whether it's via podcasts, recorded conversations, or live conversations, getting together at Starbucks, or whatever it might be, that's really beneficial in maintaining the kind of wonderful feelings that we got coming out of the workshop." Kate: "If we're going to develop a true family culture, we need to be intentional about spending time together as a family. And that time is harder and harder to come by." Kate: "Just being together, away, experiencing some new adventures has been a neat way for us to firm up our family culture and values and make memories together. That's been a key take away for me." Kate: "It's not about those grand gestures. It's about the thoughtful, meaningful moments where people take the time to appreciate their relationships." Audrey: "Even if you're not a person who gives affirmations, I really don't think there's a person in this world who wouldn't mind getting a nice note saying something that someone likes about them." Audrey: "Sometimes parents start thinking that their relationship with their child is supposed to be like a normal, reciprocal relationship. Expecting that you pour into this child and they're going to pour back to you, is not how parenting works. However, I'm seeing that once they're adults you may get more of the reciprocity than when they were kids. I get very filled up now by my adult children when they give me affirmations or send me a nice message--it's really great." Audrey: "You keep encouraging, even if you don't think it means something because I think it really is landing somewhere." Audrey: "Another activity could be taking a year's worth of fun texts, cards, and nice messages and putting them somewhere like in a scrapbook just as a great boost." Sara: "I love the idea of sitting down with the whole family and saying, 'let's look way back' because there is a chance that something that I didn't consider very bucket-y might have been really significant to my kids. I think it will remind us that it has been a rich life of experiences." Audrey: "I would challenge you to focus on yourself for your own reverse bucket list. Sometimes it's good to just think about for your own self-awareness and self-worth and knowing that you're enough just the way you are. I would suggest that the bucket list idea is more of a personal thing because it is recognizing the goals you've already achieved and the cool things that you've done, whereas the 100 Family Memories would be the things you're grateful for." Audrey: "The goal is to try to remember (as many as) 100 things so you get down to some of the minutiae and those are some of the funny, random, individual things that happened. It's been a really fun practice." Kate: "I think when you allow each family member to share their treasured memories from the year, it gives us insight into their personalities and their level of value and priorities, as well." Audrey: "I like spending time at the end of the year, really thinking through what my one word is, thinking about what was good this year and what is it that I want to take into the new year and feel more of, or do more of--I love the process." Audrey: "Determine the kind of person you want to be in the next year. Identify the characteristics of that best self. When you're being your best self, what does that look like? It has guided me a lot because once I pick a word, I then seek out resources and ideas to help me live that word better." Kate: "It's a neat way to put the focus on how you're going to spend your time, your energy, your reading, and research--all that good stuff. When it is meaningful, it really does carry you through the year and it gives purpose to how you're spending your time." Audrey: "It really hit me that my best contribution to my family, to the world, comes when I focus and take the time to do some research, reading, writing, thoughtful time, which is not a normal part of life anymore. You have to actually build in focus." Audrey: "There are so many new ideas and things you can do, but to really move the needle, all you need to do is just one. I am challenging myself this year to slow down on the consumption of new information and instead get out the books I've read, look at my highlights and just recap." Related Posts & Podcasts 5 Simple Year-End Reflection Activities Learning to Enjoy the Little Things 100 Family Memories #oneword My One Word for 2019: Focus 15 Books for a Happier, More Purposeful Life Stop & Celebrate Ep. 68 12 Parenting Tips for Happier, More Connected Families Ep. 105 Live Above the Noise with Rob Reiher Resources Present Over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living by Shauna Niequist How to Raise An Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success by Julie Lythcott-Haims One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp Finding Fred Podcast  

SHOW NOTES This week's conversation is with Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D., the trusted, down-to-earth parenting expert many of us have grown to trust over the years due to her pragmatic, research-based approach and advice. Tina has researched and written the reference book every new parent needs to combat the anxiety from competing advice from family and friends. In The Bottom Line for Baby, Tina boils down the actual scientific research in short, 2-4 page spreads. She covers many topics including vaccines, co-sleeping, germs, and circumcision. Sometimes the science is clear and sometimes it isn't, but this book arms you with the data you need to know whether your gut instinct about your own child is the direction you should go. She also arms you with the science to defend allowing your child to play in the dirt when you have well-meaning relatives who think you're letting your kid get too dirty. The Bottom Line for Baby is the book every new parent needs during this era of information overload for parents. It'll be my go-to new baby gift for many years to come. Big Ideas An exhausted parent can flip to that subject and within just a few minutes, have the latest science on that topic and then be given a bottom line about what to do. I'll just give you a sneak preview, it's really good for kids to be exposed to germs. So we should just love each other and understand that people have different webs for the decisions they make. I do want parents to say, "You know what, this isn't working for my family, but it's allowing me to be a better parent in another way." And to have that more positive self talk around, or that framework around the decisions we make. Quotes Audrey: This is just so necessary right now because I think like you said, especially when you're a new parent, you just want to do things right. And right now what's right is so confusing. So to be able to have this reference book, it is going to be my go-to baby gift from now on. I wish I had had it too. Audrey: You've summarized instead of us having to go out and find all the science, which is so, so great. Audrey: I heard you talk about it in another setting and you were saying about also just kind of going with your gut. Tina: Just how much we are so hard on ourselves and how we can be so hard on other people, especially around these super controversial topics like vaccination, sleep training, co-sleeping, breastfeeding, you know, those are all such hot button issues for people. Tina: I hope this is how it's experienced, is that parents will walk away with the idea that knowledge is power. 'I am now informed on the latest science on this topic and now Tina has just empowered me to trust my baby and to trust my instincts and to do what's right for our family, regardless of what everybody else says.' Tina: Every decision we make is not done in a vacuum. The decisions we make are part of a web. Tina: And there are many, many ways to be a great parent. And if that's not something that works for you and your baby and your family, you can let that go and ignore people who criticize you. Audrey: So just to be nicer to yourself and it's okay. Audrey: And you can also pivot. Do you know what I mean? If something isn't working, like if you're trying one way because your neighbor or somebody said, 'this is the way you have to do it', and then it doesn't work for you. There's no reason you can't say, 'well, you know what? I tried that, and it's not right for me.' Tina: I think you get perspective, as you have more kids, as you're around more kids that there really are very few, have too's. Tina: So giving in and changing your mind and holding the boundary are three different things. And the first one's not so good, the other two are perfectly acceptable. I want my kids to change their minds about things. I want them to be open when they have new information. So I want to model that too. Watch a Video of Audrey & Tina's Conversation Listen to Audrey & Tina's Previous Conversations Ep: 136: Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D. on Showing Up for our Kids During COVID-19 Ep. 121: The Power of Showing Up with Dr. Tina Payne Bryson Ep. 95: Raising a Yes Brain Child with Tina Payne Bryson More Resources about The Bottom Line for Baby Links Tina Payne Bryson, PH.D. The Bottom Line for Baby Tina's Instagram Publisher's Weekly Review Tina's short-run podcast series with Dr. Phil Boucher (pediatrician) Dr. Phil Boucher (pediatrician) Tina's video blogs, with content to support parents through the pandemic Gold Arrow Teacher Academy About the Author: Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D., is the Founder and Executive Director of The Center for Connection, a multidisciplinary clinical practice in Southern California. She is the co-author (with Daniel J. Siegel) of two New York Times best sellers, The Whole-Brain Child and No-Drama Discipline, as well as The Yes Brain and The Power of Showing Up. Dr. Bryson keynotes conferences and conducts workshops for parents, educators, and clinicians all over the world, and she frequently consults with schools, businesses, and other organizations. An LCSW, Dr. Bryson is a graduate of Baylor University with a Ph.D. from USC. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three children. One Simple Thing Consider doing a September Reset. Take some time to prioritize things you want to do differently. My Favorite This week I'm sharing a favorite that I've shared before. This pandemic has left many of us with a lot less time to listen to podcast. Laura Vanderkam's Before Breakfast Podcast is a quick daily podcast with helpful tips for productivity. Before Breakfast Podcast: Tips from Happy Campers Book! I'm a big fan of Laura Vanderkam's other books and advice, as well. You can listen to our chat about her excellent book, Off the Clock, here: Ep. 56: Off the Clock with Laura Vanderkam

Show Notes In Episode 150, I catch up with Karen Lock Kolp, M.Ed. of the We Turned Out Okay website and podcast. Karen is an early childhood development expert and parent coach. Karen helps worried and hovering parents by bringing reassuring, helpful advice and conversations. She offers simple strategies and guidance in her book, 10 Secrets Happy Parents Know: How to Stop the Chaos, Bring Out Your Child’s Good Behavior, and Truly Enjoy Family Time. Big Ideas • Making little tweaks in our parenting can have positive effects that make our lives easier and calmer. • Kids are very capable and can contribute a lot in the home. • It’s important to lower our expectations of ourselves and focus on some daily connection time with family rather than all of the things we feel like we “must do” right now. • Going through a tough time with at least one person is better than alone—find that person! Quotes Audrey: I think they really need to just relax their expectations of themselves. There's no way you're going to be engaged, connecting, entertaining your children for their entire waking hours. You need to balance it. Try to do something fun every day, maybe for a little bit of time, but also finding those things that can keep your kids busy is really important right now. Karen: As much as you can, make your home life structure so that there is a lot of connection, a lot of laughter, reading aloud to your child. Karen: If you can read aloud to them and make it infectious and fun, you will find them wanting to read aloud to you. And that's what we want. We want it to come from them. We want it to be motivated by them. Karen: It's a rare time for that. I mean, you talk about what is possible, which is an expression that Pat Flynn has used. He is an entrepreneurial podcaster. I really love him. He's got the smart, passive income podcast and he's just relentlessly positive. And he asked the question, “What does this make possible?” And it does make possible a whole bunch of scary things, but we can't live in that space. We have to live like this. Maybe this will make possible some positive things. Maybe our children will discover clay in the brook behind the house and learn how to take that clay and make it into actual, usable, moldable clay. Audrey: Even pretty young kids could help with some cooking, but I mean, if you have even an eight or nine year old, they can cook a meal for you and you can just teach them and then they can just do it on their own. And that would make them feel great and be an incredible life skill to take out of this time. Audrey: My mindset is: everyone's helping, no matter how young you are, we're all going to do something. Audrey: I think sometimes we just have to remember that our kids can do more. So if we're thinking, “Oh my gosh, the house is a mess and I have to do it.” And I think that we can enlist our kids and now more than ever, we can just say, “Hey, we really need you.” Karen: My goal is to change behavior so that you don't have to do as much negative disciplining. You can just be happy because things are much more smooth. Audrey: I think we just all need to take a deep breath and just realize that maybe there's just little tweaks that we can do—simple things that actually make life easier, not harder. Audrey: I also think that it's really important during this time for people to find community. Audrey: We're all okay. It's not looking great really anywhere. And that's okay right now. Audrey: I think it's just finding whatever it is that works for you to get you in the right mindset to be able to be flexible and know that none of us really knows what tomorrow's bringing and we have to just be okay with that because all we can do is try to make the most of today with whatever people we’re with. Audrey: You took something that was really a scary, bad thing and turned it into something amazing. Audrey: I hope that one of the outcomes from this is we all realize that we need each other and we can lean on each other and, we'll get through this better together than alone. Resources/Related Ep. 38: We Turned Out Okay with Karen Lock Kolp Ep. 69: 10 Secrets Happy Parents Know We Turned out Okay (Karen Lock Kolp’s Website) Download Karen’s “Calming the Weeknight Chaos” Helping Your Fearful Kid Try New Things I was also guest on Karen’s We Turned Out Okay Podcast! Our topic was Give Your Child the Magic of Summer Camp! Karen's Interview on Am Writing 32 Ways to Occupy Stuck-At-Home Kids Crucial Conversations Book Smart Passive Income Podcast with Pat Flynn Karen's Ninja Parenting Community Positive Discipline Ninja Tactics Book Positive Discipline Ninja Tactics Podcast Episode Karen's OkayCon 2020 Author: Mary Balogh One Simple Thing My one simple thing tip this week is to focus on strengths. When we've spent a lot of time with people, we can start to get fixated on their faults and the things they do that annoy us. Take a moment to list out the people you're sheltering with and one strength you appreciate about each of them. Focusing on strengths is a great strategy for improving family relationships! Creating a Strengths-Based Camp, American Camp Association Ep. 28: Focusing on our Kids’ Strengths Celebrating Strengths Focusing on Our Kids’ Strengths My Favorite My favorite this week is one of my favorite mood boosters: listening to music! Music, especially songs that have an uplifting beat or lyrics, are a great way to improve your mood. Here are two of my current favorite "feel good" listens. https://youtu.be/8YuWAZmD0aU   https://youtu.be/3osp2p_gLx4  

In this episode, I'm chatting with "Happy Science Mom" Sandi Schwartz about how we can use nature to help us - and our kids - feel happier during COVID-19 and beyond. At the time of our recording, Sandi was on Day 66 of her "Ecohappiness" Challenge, and she's shooting for 100 days of doing something nature-related to improve her well-being. We talk about some of the very doable, simple activities she's tried as well as the benefits of getting ourselves outside. Grab Sandi's FREE 30-Day Ecohappiness Challenge Calendar filled with fun and relaxing activities for your family to enjoy together without even leaving your own neighborhood. Sandi is the writer behind the blog Happy Science Mom. She has also published hundreds of articles in outlets such as Motherly, Scary Mommy, and more, and recently her blog was listed in Feedspot’s list of Top 100 Mom Blogs Every Mommy Must Read in 2020. Sandi researches and writes about nature and its positive effects on us and is currently working on a book on the topic. Sandi lives in Florida with her husband and two children, a daughter in elementary school and a son in middle school. Big Ideas • Being in nature is healing to us and to our kids. • Participating in something nature-related (even if you have to stay indoors) is positive for our mental health. • There are so many ways to bring nature into our lives. Quotes Sandi: You can really tap into nature in so many different ways. And when it comes to your kids, you don't have to necessarily force them to do something they don't enjoy. You could kind of spin it off from something they already love. So if they're into art, so have them go on a nature walk and then even nature photography have them, um, you know, paint a picture, draw a picture of something that they love. If there are athletes, get them outdoors more playing their sports. There's just so many options that we can, you know, weave in, in nature. Audrey: We each have our own unique combination of experiences that kind of lead to the things we need to learn. Audrey: If you want to raise a child who becomes a thriving adult, they need to see what that looks like. They need to see a parent who's showing them the way that when things get hard, how do you deal with it? What are your strategies for coping during difficult times? Sandi: The coolest part is that even the days that I'm kind of like tapped out and I'm like, am I going to come up with something unique today? Something appears. Sandi: You don't always have to work hard to seek out nature. It can find you as well. Audrey: You can see the silver linings and it sounds like  you've really found a silver lining in your, what you always knew: your knowledge that nature can heal and can help through challenging times. Sandi: I appreciate the well-roundedness of how we can reach out to nature, whether it's through your computer, your balcony, your backyard, or if you're going on a hike. Audrey: It's a very relaxing feeling to be fully in nature. Sandi: You don't necessarily have to be at the natural water body to experience it. A lot of it is even closing your eyes and imagining you are at the beach. Water is so powerful. Audrey: Sometimes we try to separate different parts of us, but really we are part of nature and the world and our bodies are also really connected with how we feel like drinking enough water and getting sun and getting that vitamin D. So there's so much that it's all interconnected. So being outside is obviously something that we all need. Sandi: Nature also gives us that positive ability to go back and be in awe even from our past experiences. Resources & Links Happy Science Mom Happy Science Mom on Facebook Happy Science Mom on Instagram Happy Science Mom on Twitter The Happiness Project by: Gretchen Rubin Blue Mind by: Wallace J. Nichols Related Posts & Podcast Episodes Advice & Encouragement During COVID-19: Bringing Camp Home with Ariella Rogge 7 Reasons to #optoutside One Simple Thing Do one thing outside as a family this week, even if it's just for 20 minutes. Ideas: picnic on a deck or in your backyard walk or bike around your neighborhood chalk art or basketball in the driveway golden hour photo shoot nature bingo What simple outdoor activities have you tried with your family? Comment or send me pictures!  My Favorite For all these reasons, spending time in nature with your children may be an ideal way to nurture family bonds, whether you’re dealing with a fussy infant or a recalcitrant teen. Nature doesn’t have ring tones or deadlines. You can reach it without spending a penny. And you can even get outdoors together with other families to increase the sociability and fun. As parents like Debra Scott have discovered, getting outdoors can help both you and your child feel better, while giving you common ground for discovery and play. -Sara St. Antoine , "Together in Nature: Pathways to Stronger, Closer Families" (Children & Nature Network Spurred by my conversation with Sandi, my favorite this week is the Children & Nature Network. Founded by Richard Louv (best-selling author of Last Child in the Woods and Nature Deficit Disorder), C&NN offers free resources and tools for families and organizations to help get kid out in nature. Free PDF Dowloads from Children & Nature Network Nature Clubs for Families Together in Nature: Pathways to Stronger, Closer Families

Show notes & links. I've spent the past weeks talking with youth development experts who are sharing their advice and encouragement for parents during this crazy time of social distancing, sheltering at home, or what I like to now call "Iso for the Rona" (the Australian term for "Isolation for the Coronavirus" that I learned from my email friend Vicki).  Over the next several episodes, I'll be sharing excerpts from those interviews, as well as links to the resources and ideas my guests shared. I'm kicking off this series with two chats with teachers - one current high school teacher and one former sixth grade teacher. Both of them have a lot of experience working with and teaching kids, and they have some great ideas for parents who are new to "teaching" and now have your kids at home full time. I hope our chats bring you some encouragement during this challenging time! Please continue to reach out to me with your feedback, questions, and ideas! Thank you for joining me in raising kids who become thriving adults. Gretchen Monke: High school English teacher at Live Oak High School (Morgan Hill, CA) who's now teaching remotely while stay home orders are in place for COVID-19. What do high school kids need from us during this time? That's the question I ask - and Gretchen answers - in our chat. Gretchen offers tips for parents and teachers about the connection kids need during this time. She also offers  her downloadable daily checklist to help kids have the autonomy they want. GRETCHEN'S DAILY ACTIVITIES CHECKLIST Step 1: Open this Google Doc file Step 2: Make a copy: Go into “File” and click on “Make a Copy.” Step 3: Add or delete categories and tasks & start using! Alternatively, you can download a PDF version (not changeable) below! QUOTES Gretchen: "Even the kids who maybe don't love the academic aspects of school knew, even before we went remote, that they were going to suffer this loss from not being able to socialize with their friends. What they value the most is time with their friends and being able to socialize. So taking that away from them is a huge loss." Gretchen: "The kids are just looking forward to checking in with each other at these zoom meetings. They've become more about connection than any kind of formative work." Audrey: "Even if you don't have some kind of setup yet, you can provide any way for your kids just to get together and check in with each other, sharing what's going on." Audrey: "I'm a big proponent of not really having a rigid schedule, but instead having daily checklists, activities that we want to make sure we do every day." Audrey: "It's helping me to stay in a routine because I think the tendency can be if you don't have anything that you need to get to or do, you really could do nothing and doing nothing, as we know, does not promote us feeling good." Audrey: "What I like about having these daily checklists, and maybe having it be a family thing, is that you're doing it together." Audrey: "If there's something that you want to do, you can make the time to do it. If you think about what we're not able to do right now, I think that doing a little bit more activity will make us all feel better." Audrey: "If you're not used to doing some kind of family daily sharing, this is a good time to start something on a very small scale." Gretchen: "I've really loved having family dinners again. There are some things to be thankful for during this time. It is fun to get to be with my family again for a little bit." Audrey: "Make a list if there are things you've been wanting to do, like random craft supplies that you have around the house that you can now actually utilize or bake some bread." Audrey: "I realize how critical it is to stick with my daily activities. I think for our kids, it's important to help encourage them to make sure they're doing all those things, too." Resources & Links Watch the video of our conversation. Before Breakfast podcast Ep. 56: Off the Clock with Laura Vanderkam 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think LEARN MORE   Daily Family Sharing Ideas Alison Moeschberger: Camp director and former 6th grade teacher who's now responsible for teaching her girls (ages 4 & 7) while stay home orders are in place for COVID-19. Camp director (Gold Arrow Camp) & former 6th grade teacher (The Classical Academy in Colorado Springs, CO), mother to two daughters ages 7 & 4 During her time at home with her family, Alison's been coming up with a lot of activities to help keep her girls engaged, interested, and interacting with each other while also giving her some time to get her own work done. QUOTES Alison: "I don't aim to be creating a Pinterest-worthy homeschool experience for my kids. I'm trying to come up with activities that will keep them engaged and interested and wanting to do things with each other, interacting and teaching each other things and giving me some space so I can get my work done, too." Audrey: "I think a lot of parents, especially parents who work outside the home and are used to having this very concentrated short time with their kids, have a little too high of expectations for the interaction with kids when you're together all day long." Alison: "For us, family dinner is a non-negotiable time. We want to get together and make sure we're having that time together." Alison: "My husband and I really want to spend some time with the kids so we both map out time to spend with each daughter independently. We want to make sure we have intentional, I'm-going-to-set-everything-aside-and-focus-on-you for this one activity today." Alison: "This is kind of a historic time that our kids are living through. And so I wanted to start a notebook where it's kind of a keepsake. I ask very specific questions about the Coronavirus. I'm asking things that I think would be fun to look back at in a lot of years." Alison: "I think it's all in finding the context and finding the fun. You can do a little science experiment together that takes care of a lot of learning. You've got your measurements, writing, and it's not standards-based. I know how to write lessons that will accomplish the goals for first grade but I'm not even interested in that right now. I just want some brains-on time." Alison: "I want my kids to be thinking. I want them to be talking with me, interacting with me, following directions. So you can accomplish all of these things, just differently." Audrey: "You do learn something better when you teach other people. So if you have something that your child is supposed to learn for school, you could have them teach you how to do whatever their activity is that they are assigned. Because it is more fun when you get to be on stage. A lot of kids like to do the demo, so maybe parents can be the students sometimes, too." Alison: "My kids actually just love the attention that they get to show off the work they've done." Alison: "What's important to me is that my kids don't emerge from this viewing our relationship any differently." Alison: "This is what we do on weekends, maybe not with such educational emphasis, but we still try to have fun. We still have adventures and we still program part of every day, even on the weekends. Now it's just the same thing. We are trying to keep an eye on what she's missing by not being at school and filling the gaps at home." Alison's Photos & Ideas This Week's Podcast Segments One Simple Thing: Kindness! The results indicate that performing kindness activities for seven days increases happiness. In addition, we report a positive correlation between the number of kind acts and increases in happiness. Neither effect differed across the experimental the groups, suggesting that kindness to strong ties, to weak ties, and to self, as well as observing acts of kindness, have equally positive effects on happiness. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29702043 Join me for 30 Days of Kindness! My Favorite: Graphic "Who do I want to be during COVID-19?" I originally saw this graphic on Tara Leigh Cobble's Instagram (but I'm not sure if she created it).   Listener Question: How are you staying positive? I've done a few recent interviews also answering this same question: Parenting & Staying Positive during the COVID-19 Crisis (Happier in Hollywood Podcast) Okay Con 2020 with Karen Lock Kolp

Show notes & links available here. In this episode, I'm chatting with Dr. Chris Thurber, a legendary trainer in the camp industry and a clinical psychologist who works at Phillips Exeter Academy, about how important it for parents to connect with their teens. Chris has developed online training programs for educators and youth leaders around the world and many of the best practices and concepts he teaches apply to parents. We also discuss how the skills kids learn at camp can help them to thrive in life. Big Ideas Even one summer working at a summer camp can be so valuable for the experience gained and training in relational, leadership, and communication skills. Much of the training camp counselors receive is helpful for teachers and parents. Thurber's Tic-Tac advice: Expend as little energy as possible, “no more energy than a Tic-Tac.” Take a break from lecturing or nagging and instead use the low-energy responses of a look, a point, or just saying the child’s name. In our society today, it is harder than ever to be an adolescent. One big reason is the competitiveness of education. Colleges are getting more applications from students around the world as high school graduation rates continue to climb. Parents and students should consider alternatives to college such as apprenticeships and vocational training. Parents need to have more conversations with their kids--girls and especially boys--about their emotions.  Expressing empathy helps to alleviate the pressure that kids are feeling these days. When parents minimize or downplay their feelings, kids do not feel connected. Quotes: Chris: "The reason I think Happy Campers is a brilliant book is you've taken the lessons that we get to practice in a very intense way as camp professionals for, you know, seven, eight, nine weeks with constant feedback about whether it works or not. And I don't mean that kids were filling our questionnaires. I mean, they're either listening or they're not, or they're being compliant or they're not...It's a wonderful laboratory and classroom for parenting." Chris: "We have an untapped resource in a sense at camp. Everyone who is lucky enough to be a staff member at a camp is going to be that much better as a parent. The rest of the world can benefit from what we've understood about child development and behavior management, leadership, supervision, physical and emotional safety." Chris: "Instead of having high school graduates who are excited about going to college or university, they're starting to feel the pressure, even in elementary school or early middle school, to set themselves apart from the crowd, to develop a unique talent, to begin preparing their resume for college." Chris: "It's creating a tremendous amount of pressure for adolescents and that's a problem. They're more anxious, more depressed. It's taking an emotional toll.  Also, we're not thinking creatively as adults about education broadly construed. You don't necessarily need a college degree." Chris: "Apprenticeship is the model we use at summer camp. We have younger leaders apprenticing with older leaders or younger counselors with older counselors so you're learning on the job. We should be applying that to more things." Chris: "It's awesome if you get a bachelor's degree in English literature or physics or computer science, but not everyone wants that, needs that or has that as a career path. And I think we have, as a society, fallen victim to the perceived prestige of a college or university degree and completely overlooked expanded opportunities for vocational training and apprenticeships." Audrey: "You know that what makes a thriving adult is not a test score or even a degree from us particular place. It's these character traits and these interpersonal skills and this emotional depth and all these things that actually can be counter to when we're so focused on these specific metrics." Audrey: "What do you want to be building and growing in yourself and in the kids you work with? You want people who are going to be great friends, who are going to stop and help someone who needs help. When you're so busy climbing your way up to something, you make decisions and sometimes you're not your best self." Chris: "I recommend camp because it's the ideal complement to a traditional or non-traditional classroom setting. You take kids from being mostly inside and bring them outside. You take kids from mostly sitting to mostly running around. You take kids from doing things that have a lot of numbers, quantitative marks associated with them and put them in less structured, less evaluative circumstances." Chris: "It's a way of stretching your brain and building resilience that will not only relieve stress and boost your mood, but also make you more resilient to future challenges. Camp is not the panacea, but it's a huge part of robust youth development." Chris: "Ask better questions. Students here, like students at a lot of schools, are really sick of parents asking, what were your grades? Or if we want to steer clear of performance markers, what'd you do today? How was school? Those are well-intentioned questions. They're benign but they're not nurturing a relationship." Chris: "There are many students here with wonderful relationships with their parents. And I think a big key to that is taking an interest in your child as a person and how are they unique and how are they evolving, developing rather than continuing to try to fit them into some mold." Chris: "Kids need, people need room to be creative and be themselves. I want parents to encourage, to say that it's okay, who knows what it will lead to, but it doesn't need to lead to anything if it feeds your soul. The most authentically happy people in the world are the ones who tap into one of their signature strengths in service to other people." Audrey: "I think there's a lot of value in adults and parents showing kids what it's like to tap into those things even if it's different. If they see you doing something you enjoy, they learn that adults do things they enjoy and they're having fun and they meet other friends that way. So that modeling is really important." Chris: "Model this kind of humility and show your kids, not tell them, how to live. Show them what it is to balance work and play and sleep and get a little exercise and model what it's like to bounce back from failure. If you say something that you realize didn't have the intended effect or was the wrong thing to say, don't move on and pretend like nobody heard it. Talk about it, fix it. If you're enraged, that's not the time to debrief it, but you can always circle back." Chris: "Talk with your kids about what your vulnerabilities are. It's such an important thing to be able to do. For well-intentioned parents who make missteps, you shouldn't view your kids as fragile. They can bounce back from something you said or didn't say or forgot. They need to see you trying hard. They need to see you learning from mistakes." Chris: "Provide empathy but when you get to the end of your empathic statements, full stop, let it sink in. Let your kid respond. Let them just process the fact that you acknowledged some of the dimensions of their emotional experience. We are all tempted to immediately follow our empathic statement with problem-solving. But when someone is in distress, whether it's they didn't like the news they heard from a college or the grade they got on a test or the fact that you know their significant other just broke up with him by text message, or whatever it might be, they don't want to hear the solution right now and they probably know what the solution is anyway."   About Dr. Chris Thurber Dr. Christopher Thurber enjoys creating and sharing original content for business leaders, independent educators, and youth development professionals. He is a board-certified clinical psychologist, educator, author, and father. Chris earned his BA from Harvard University in 1991 and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from UCLA in 1997. A dedicated teacher from a young age, Chris has more than 30 years of experience working with camps and independent schools. He has written numerous book chapters and scholarly articles on leadership, homesickness, and youth development. An award-winning contributor to Camping Magazine and Camp Business, Chris has also shared his opinions and expertise on national and international radio, television, print media, podcasts, and webinars, including The Today Show, Martha Stewart, and CNN. In 1999, after a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Washington School of Medicine, Chris accepted a position as psychologist and instructor at Phillips Exeter Academy, a coeducational, independent school in seacoast New Hampshire. Combining his love of research, teaching, and clinical work, Chris’s work at Exeter has grown to include publications and presentations for The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS) the British Boarding Schools Association (BSA) and the Australian Boarding Schools Association (ABSA). Chris has keynoted conferences for all three associations and has delivered guest lectures on the differences between Chinese and American public education, as well as the complementary nature of schools and camps at schools in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Wenzhou. In 2000, Chris and his lifelong friend, Dr. Jon Malinowski, co-authored the critically acclaimed Summer Camp Handbook, hailed by psychologist and parent, Dr. John Weisz, as “a remarkable accomplishment…the best in its field…required reading for every camper’s family…the most comprehensive and scientifically sound coverage of the camp experience available.” The Summer Camp Handbook has since sold tens of thousands of copies, won a Parenting Press Gold Award, and been translated into Chinese. As part of his lifelong effort to enhance the camp experience for young people, Chris has been a guest on The Today Show, Martha Stewart, CNN, Fox, CBS Morning News, and NPR. Chris is the Founder and CEO of CampSpirit, LLC,  which provides consultation and training to professional educators and youth leaders around the world. As he traveled across five continents to present in-person staff training workshops, Chris realized that no directors of summer youth programs had enough time with their employees to provide all the necessary training prior to opening day. The increased complexity of health regulations and accreditation standards, as well as heightened awareness of child abuse and risk management, made training demands higher than ever, especially for seasonal employees and volunteers. But with a fixed period of time during which to conduct on-site training, an innovative educational solution was imperative. Resources Mentioned Chris Thurber Prep4Camp.com Expert Online Training David Brook's Road to Character Bill Pollack's Real Boys Michael Thompson Related Posts/Podcasts Why Teens Need Summer Camp More Than Ever Ep. 89: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men with Michael Reichert, Ph.D. Ep. 92: Creating Strong Relationships with Teens Ep. 32: 10 Benefits of Summer Camp for Teens Ep. 27: Raising Teens who Thrive with Stephen Wallace 11 Ways to Help Kids Create REAL Connections

In this episode, Sara Kuljis and I discuss the importance of family rituals and traditions. It's one of the topics that we wanted to cover with parents in our Raise Thriving Kids Workshop that we had in September. Big Ideas Family Rituals and traditions are important because they: help build a sense of shared identity and deep belonging. help us organize and make sense of an ever-changing world. help teach and impact faith and family values. They may remind us of our cultural backgrounds. provide safe spaces and anchors in an ever-changing world. help us cope with trauma and loss. produce amazing memories, the silly and the sacred. Talk to your kids about what traditions are important to them and let them come up with their own. Quotes Sara: "It has been remarkable to watch how important, year after year, the daily rituals and traditions of summer camp are to our campers and to our staff. I dove in and did quite a bit of research on this and was struck by how profoundly shaping rituals and traditions are in our family cultures." Sara: "In our fast-paced world, where people travel for work, where families are going in different directions more often, where we don't necessarily live by extended family, many of the rituals and traditions are falling by the wayside. Kids have fewer of these anchor points than they used to back in the day." Sara: "There are things that stay the same when lots of other things are changing and it really does give us a sense of structure and stability and addresses our longing for simpler things and things you can count on. I think that's very important to kids, especially as they're growing, changing schools, maybe moving homes. Maybe family dynamics are changing, but I can count on tradition." Audrey: "People like that security of know that things are as they were. Kids need structure, they need to know when bedtime is, but they equally need the ritual of being tucked in and having someone say prayers with them or say goodnight to them or whatever the tradition is in your family." Sara: "Children want boundaries. They want a frame around the picture. As they are figuring out how to live life, they really crave discipline. So structure and traditions add to that and it creates a sense of safety and knowing what to expect." Audrey: "You almost don't realize some of the practices that you do or don't do that are traditions.  It is anything that you do that is part of your family's life. So many of our rituals are communicating our values." Sara: "There are a lot of life skills, really practical stuff, that are embedded in traditions that are helpful for our kids. Traditions provide us safe spaces and anchors in an ever-changing world. The more change, the more rituals and traditions we need." Audrey: "When things are tumultuous, you just want these touchstones of things that are still going to happen, that you can depend on still being there, regardless of what else has changed." Sara: "I urge you to look back and think about the rituals built into your family. What are the memories that came out of that? What glue to bond a family and help you get through some of the bumpy times." Audrey: "Sometimes when you're in it, you don't realize that those are traditions. If there's something that you do as a family that's really fun or memorable, why not repeat it each year?" Sara: "As you think of the traditions in your own family, sometimes it feels like a lot of pressure. The big things are awesome but sometimes it's just the daily flow of life things that provide even more anchoring." Audrey: "Returning to camp itself, or to the vacation places where your family likes to go, year after year, will help to bring calm back to the storm of life." Audrey: "Rituals and traditions are just something that can be going on all year, every day or every weekend or whatever, Friday night, movie night, a Saturday morning hike -- it could be anything." Resources Find out about our next Raise Thriving Kids Workshop 100 Family Memories 5 Simple Year-End Reflection Activities Related If you liked this podcast episode, listen to: Ep. 7: Family Pace and Space with Sara Kuljis Ep. 23: Peaceful Mornings with Sara Kuljis Ep. 63: Growing Gratitude with Sara Kuljis Ep. 70: Parent on Purpose with Amy Carney    

This episode is a live recording of my chat with Sara Kuljis about some of our favorite year-end reflection activities. Joining Sara and me for this episode is Kate Rader, one of the participants from our Raise Thriving Kids Workshop. Kate is a stay-at-home mom to 3 adventure-seeking and fun-loving kiddos, Lauren and Caroline, identical twins who are 13 and Jack, age 10, wife to her college sweetheart Jeff and curious lover of books, podcasts, and conversations about intentional parenting and living. [caption id="attachment_6803" align="alignnone" width="1024"]Kate Rader and family[/caption] Here's what Kate had to say about our workshop: "It was just so wonderful to be in a room with people who care enough to be intentional about the choices they're making for their families and what they want for their families because it's a work in progress--and we're all working together." Big Ideas In addition to parenting books, podcasts, and coaching, workshops are a great resource for parents. Just as most people need continual training and education in their careers, parents can also take the time to learn and connect with others in order to feel invigorated. It is helpful to share what is working and to discuss best practices for strengthening family bonds. We talk a lot about the importance of self-care and modeling a balanced life for our kids. Today we discuss the ideas I shared in my recent post, 5 Simple Year-End Reflections: Create a Reverse Bucket List. Look back over your life and make a list of the cool things you've already done. 100 Family Memories - brainstorm and make a list of what happened in your family this year. Pick a Quote-of-the-Year. Find a quote that resonates with you, or something motivational, looking back or looking ahead, a quote you want to live by. Select One Word that you want to guide you in the new year. Be authentic and make it a word that is uniquely yours. Remember your Favorite Books or resources from the past year. Take time to let the new things that you have learned (in books, podcasts, workshops) to percolate and apply the concepts or practices to your life. Pick one or two of these ideas that resonate with you. You can do an activity on your own or engage the whole family. Make the delivery of the idea fun and light. Allow people to be silly. Getting the family together over the holidays, expressing gratitude, and setting intentions together are my favorite ways to bring in the new year. Quotes Sara: "Sometimes parenting intentionally feels counter-cultural. When we're swimming upstream, to have fishies to swim with is so confidence building. It's reassuring, it's empowering. I've loved all the parents we have gotten to work with through this project because it has fueled me." Kate: "The regular accountability is equally as important to me as the one-day workshop. Whether it's via podcasts, recorded conversations, or live conversations, getting together at Starbucks, or whatever it might be, that's really beneficial in maintaining the kind of wonderful feelings that we got coming out of the workshop." Kate: "If we're going to develop a true family culture, we need to be intentional about spending time together as a family. And that time is harder and harder to come by." Kate: "Just being together, away, experiencing some new adventures has been a neat way for us to firm up our family culture and values and make memories together. That's been a key take away for me." Kate: "It's not about those grand gestures. It's about the thoughtful, meaningful moments where people take the time to appreciate their relationships." Audrey: "Even if you're not a person who gives affirmations, I really don't think there's a person in this world who wouldn't mind getting a nice note saying something that someone likes about them." Audrey: "Sometimes parents start thinking that their relationship with their child is supposed to be like a normal, reciprocal relationship. Expecting that you pour into this child and they're going to pour back to you, is not how parenting works. However, I'm seeing that once they're adults you may get more of the reciprocity than when they were kids. I get very filled up now by my adult children when they give me affirmations or send me a nice message--it's really great." Audrey: "You keep encouraging, even if you don't think it means something because I think it really is landing somewhere." Audrey: "Another activity could be taking a year's worth of fun texts, cards, and nice messages and putting them somewhere like in a scrapbook just as a great boost." Sara: "I love the idea of sitting down with the whole family and saying, 'let's look way back' because there is a chance that something that I didn't consider very bucket-y might have been really significant to my kids. I think it will remind us that it has been a rich life of experiences." Audrey: "I would challenge you to focus on yourself for your own reverse bucket list. Sometimes it's good to just think about for your own self-awareness and self-worth and knowing that you're enough just the way you are. I would suggest that the bucket list idea is more of a personal thing because it is recognizing the goals you've already achieved and the cool things that you've done, whereas the 100 Family Memories would be the things you're grateful for." Audrey: "The goal is to try to remember (as many as) 100 things so you get down to some of the minutiae and those are some of the funny, random, individual things that happened. It's been a really fun practice." Kate: "I think when you allow each family member to share their treasured memories from the year, it gives us insight into their personalities and their level of value and priorities, as well." Audrey: "I like spending time at the end of the year, really thinking through what my one word is, thinking about what was good this year and what is it that I want to take into the new year and feel more of, or do more of--I love the process." Audrey: "Determine the kind of person you want to be in the next year. Identify the characteristics of that best self. When you're being your best self, what does that look like? It has guided me a lot because once I pick a word, I then seek out resources and ideas to help me live that word better." Kate: "It's a neat way to put the focus on how you're going to spend your time, your energy, your reading, and research--all that good stuff. When it is meaningful, it really does carry you through the year and it gives purpose to how you're spending your time." Audrey: "It really hit me that my best contribution to my family, to the world, comes when I focus and take the time to do some research, reading, writing, thoughtful time, which is not a normal part of life anymore. You have to actually build in focus." Audrey: "There are so many new ideas and things you can do, but to really move the needle, all you need to do is just one. I am challenging myself this year to slow down on the consumption of new information and instead get out the books I've read, look at my highlights and just recap." Related Posts & Podcasts 5 Simple Year-End Reflection Activities Learning to Enjoy the Little Things 100 Family Memories #oneword My One Word for 2019: Focus Ep. 68 12 Parenting Tips for Happier, More Connected Families Ep. 105 Live Above the Noise with Rob Reiher Resources Present Over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living by Shauna Niequist How to Raise An Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success by Julie Lythcott-Haims One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp Finding Fred Podcast  

What comes before gratitude in our children? In this episode, Sara and I discuss how we can prepare our kids to become grateful people. Sara and I talked about gratitude last year in this episode about Growing Gratitude. Big Ideas As the Thanksgiving holiday nears, it is important to remember that we can cultivate a heart of gratitude all year long. Good manners are important but employing these "precursors" to gratitude can help instill our family values in a deeper and more meaningful way. Precursors to growing gratitude: Avoid over-giving, as it can lead to entitlement. When we earn what we have, we value it more. Cultivate empathy. When kids realize that there is a cost (money, time, energy or thought) associated with everything they have, they are more grateful. Model gratefulness. When kids hear their parents thanking each other, showing respect and demonstrating gratitude, they are more likely to adopt the same habit. Be exposed to seeing how most of the world lives or not always having daily comforts. A vacation from things like big meals and hot showers, such as in camping situations or while traveling, can help us to realize a greater appreciation for all we have. Quotes Audrey: "You can't just start saying thank you or start doing gratitude practices and suddenly become this grateful person. There are precursors to gratitude." Sara: "When our kids are little, one of the first things we teach them is to say please and thank you. As my kids grew, I wanted their thank yous to come from inside them, not from me reminding them." Sara: "It's my work to do as a parent to set these things up and to cultivate these habits in myself and in my home so that when it's time for our kids to build the muscle of gratitude, it fits in. It's kind of super-powered and more authentic." Audrey: "Practicing kindness and practicing gratitude is good because you build the muscle." Audrey: "The depth is what we're talking about. It's almost like a mindset, a way of thinking about things and remembering the impact of what we do." Sara: "As parents, we so long to meet (our kids') needs well, but we also feel compelled to meet all their wants. By 'needs' I mean shelter, love, food, medical care, sleep, all the things we need to thrive. But then we get on this hamster wheel of, 'well, they better have the newest iPhone, or best kind of tennis shoes, or the tutor everyone else is going to,' and we can over-give. We can over-meet their wants to a place where they develop an entitlement." Sara: "We've really got to guard our choices. We're developing grown-ups eventually who can work and earn something, who can long for something, who can have an appreciation because they had to wait or they had to grow into it." Audrey: "The expression 'delayed gratification' has 'grateful' in it." Audrey: "It's just kind of balancing. Are we giving in a good way? Are we overdoing it? It's the 'over-giving'. It's not to not-give to our kids, it's to give in a way that we're thinking through, is it the right amount?" Audrey: "You have to do things. You have to gain competence to earn confidence. You can't make someone confident. It has to take some time. It comes from learning that it's okay to make mistakes, you're not going to be good at everything the first, second, third, even 20th time." Sara: "When we help kids understand 'what did it cost that other human to provide this to me,' it naturally grows gratitude in them." Audrey: "Young kids are made to be self-focused. That's normal developmentally. Anything we can do to get them out of their head helps. I do think empathy is such a key thing." Sara: "I think sometimes our kids hear us being critical of things or dissatisfied with things more often than they hear us being grateful. Make thanking each other, thanking your spouse for something that he or she did, a really normal thing." Sara: "If our kids never see us being grateful, how will they suddenly become grateful people?" Audrey: "If you're only living in the bubble of your neighbor, which likely is safe, or you're own home, which likely has electricity and your kids have their own beds and running water, I think that we can get almost desensitized." Audrey: "We can just set our kids up, get that soil ready to really build their gratitude muscles." Sara: "Whenever we do something in the daily flow of life, it just becomes part of who we are as a family. Finding a habit or a ritual (not just around the Thanksgiving table--although that's awesome!) where we get to name something that we're grateful for, or practice thanking another person for something, done daily or weekly makes things stick." Audrey: "When we adults practice this ourselves it goes a long way in setting our kids up to be more grateful." Resources/Related Posts Three Good Things A Grateful Family is a Happy Family: 5 Gratitude Practices Ep. 63: Growing Gratitude with Sara Kuljis Gratitude Revisited 5 Ways to Create a Happy Thanksgiving

In this episode, I'm speaking with Suzanne Tucker of Generation Mindful, a website dedicated to helping kids learn how to regulate their emotions. Big Ideas While working as a physical therapist, Suzanne realized there was much more going on in people's wellbeing than just the physical body. The whole health approach to healing and wellness is what led her to start Generation Mindful. Parents and educators love the science of positive discipline but struggle to apply the science of connection practically in their everyday lives. Generation Mindful offers evidence-based tools and toys that make connection a habit in homes and schools. They nurture emotional intelligence via play and positive discipline. Generation Mindful helps people overcome perfectionism, feelings of inadequacy, and promote connection. Their mission is to raise an emotionally healthy world. Generation Mindful tools and toys can be found in 70 countries and their community is in nearly 100 countries around the world. Quotes Suzanne: "If you're looking to get on the superhighway of spiritual growth, just jump on it because you're going to find it in Parenthood." Suzanne: "Parenting makes life apparent." Suzanne: "It was that love of whole health and learning about ourselves and being on a spiritual journey myself that brought me into doing empowerment-based education with families." Suzanne: "We've got to make it easy. We've got to make it fun. We've got to get this evidence-based brain science into everyday life because people feel 'not enough' and it's not right." Audrey: "Instead of punishing someone for being dysregulated and needing to calm down, making it a thing that 'hey--we all have these moments. Let's find a way to just create a space where we can just feel good.'" Audrey: "Adults, we need this, too, the candle that smells good, the book we really like, that calms us down, and a cup of tea." Suzanne: "It's not just about education and support (because we need both of those.) What I found in my work is that children are concrete learners and so are adults. We are very much supported when we open a box--it's concrete." Suzanne: "It's really about embodying wisdom. It's about creating this community that inspires you and is there to hold your hand online. We've got all these online supports, the blog, a private community for anyone who goes through our six-week self-paced course." Suzanne: "It really starts from the inside out. And we're about supporting and inspiring you into what we think of as a mind shift into self-awareness first, 'connect before you correct' and just seeing misbehavior as an unmet need, without the guilt, and training ourselves out of shame as a motivator and guilt as a filter." Suzanne: "We are all about creating habits because habits lift us up. Habits just happen...We want to connect, but if it's not a habit, it's not happening." Suzanne: "It's really about the brain science of honoring emotions as sacred and integrating." Audrey: "Name it to tame it. We all talk about that." Suzanne: "Just by labeling the things that happened in the day and which mood group would I associate them with, is like the middle brain doing pushups. The hippocampus, that really important part of the brain that helps with emotional regulation, is going down, doing the pushups and it's training that part of the brain that wants to react. It's actually laying the neural synapsis so it can learn to respond." Suzanne: "Once we get over our fear we're empowered to show up powerfully with what is. Then we can source the tools and support to just be where we are and meet the child where they are." Audrey: "You see the kids' behavior is just like the tip of the iceberg and all those things going on underneath; it's like the behavior is just kind of a clue. Be curious. They aren't trying to ruin your day or be terrible. They're communicating something that they're having difficulty articulating." Suzanne: "Where is the source of emotional intelligence in relationships? It's in pausing to look in each other's eye, to listen, to share. It is so simple, yet how hard it is in everyday modern life to carve out a sweet little five minutes to talk about things that matter?" Resources Genmindful.com Time-In ToolKit Snuggle Buddies and My Feeling Calendar Dr. Dan Siegel Free Positive Parenting Class from Generation Mindful (ENTER PASSWORD: FreeAccessClassOne) Related Posts/Podcasts If you liked this episode of the podcast, listen to or read: Ep. 110: Keep Calm & Parent On 10 Ways to Teach Kids to Calm Down Ep. 103: How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t with Your Kids Ep. 97: Parenting the Challenging Child The Whole-Brain Child: Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture your Child’s Developing Mind, Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson Ep. 95: Raising a “Yes Brain” Child with Tina Payne Bryson

In this episode, I'm talking to Debbie Reber, creator of TiLT Parenting, the host of the TiLT Parenting Podcast, and the author of Differently Wired: Raising and Exceptional Child in a Conventional World. While this book was written mainly for parents that need extra support, I think it will resonate with all parents of all kids. Big Ideas Every child deserves to be understood and accepted for who they are. We are all wired differently. Some differences are more visible than others. Each kid needs different tools to thrive in life and we can help them figure out what they need for their individual journey. When parents and children communicate their needs and explain their differences to others, people are more understanding and accepting. 3 Key Take-Aways: Find a community and resources Find the right kind of support (parent coach, couples counselor, online communities) Embrace and accept kids' strengths; teach them to articulate their needs. Gifted kids also have special needs that can be addressed and supported in schools and at home. As a parent, set aside what you think your child's (social, academic, physical) life should look like, and respect your child's own timeline. Quotes Audrey: "Sometimes people are just kind of under the radar. Maybe they aren't diagnosed with something, but their parents just sort of know that they don't move through life the same way that other people do." Debbie: "Many of the kids in my community may not have a formal diagnosis but a lot of them are extra sensitive, have heightened anxiety and are more tuned in and the world is an intense place for them." Debbie: "I wanted to cast a wide net and include any sort of narrow atypicality because there are so many of us. But when we stay in our little buckets, we don't get to tap into the collective and recognize the power in our numbers and why things really do need to change." Audrey: "Sometimes our biggest challenges become our biggest gifts." Audrey: "You did this journey together with your son, learning how to help him navigate the world and then how to help you navigate the world as a parent. You figured out how to embrace your son and all of his strengths and his uniqueness and help him become his best self. And you helped him be able to articulate to the world who he is and what he needs." Audrey: "I've always loved delving into all the personality type inventories that just help us learn how the way we see the world or react to things is different from other people and being a little more empathetic and understanding of that as opposed to thinking it's wrong." Debbie: "We're really looking at this person as an individual human on their own incredible journey. I think it can be really hard when we're just kind of on this treadmill of life, doing what everybody else is doing. Take a conscious step back and say, 'wait a minute--who is this kid and what do they need to do to really thrive?'" Debbie: "It's not easy to take that pause and to really shift your focus." Audrey: "Even for people with different interests, the concept that there is one path is so flawed. Kids who aren't academically inclined or school isn't their thing are left feeling like they don't fit in. Often, it beats them down to the point where they don't have the opportunity to explore their interests." Audrey: "The impact of not letting kids be who they really are and exploring that is coming out in the rise of mental health disorders, substance abuse, and suicide among adolescents and young adults. All of these things can be traced back to the same idea that if you don't fit into some prescribed thing, the world is hard." Audrey: "We all have a lot of parental shame, insecurity, guilt, worry and often loneliness when we are kind of embarrassed by our kids' behavior or confused or just don't get it." Debbie: "There's a lot of judging in parenting. It's pervasive and it's really harmful. It hurts us and when people are judging it is triggering their own insecurities. I think it's so important to find safe spaces to connect and to share." Debbie: "It's important to get clear and remember what the core goal is and that is to support these kids in becoming who they are." Debbie: "One of the ways we can bolster our foundation is to surround ourselves with people who fully support our family. When we do this, we relax, our kids relax, and we all get to go about our business from a place of confidence. Community changes everything. It lifts us up. It deepens our well of resources. It fuels our bravery. It allows us to be our authentic selves. It reminds me that we and our children are not alone. It's time we ditched the doubters, skeptics, and those will never get it and instead surround ourselves with our people." (Differently Wired, pg. 217) Debbie: "Part of the process is for us to speak openly, without fear or shame or worry. That's part of the accepting process of knowing that there is no one way to be normal." Debbie: "I imagine we are going to create a more accepting society if we stop shaming certain behaviors, ostracizing people, or making them feel like they're aberrations when really it's just a different way of being." Debbie: "One of the biggest gifts we can give a kid is the opportunity to truly know themselves and understand how their brain works and what's going on and then how to advocate for themselves, how to speak up." Debbie: "When people understand, it changes everything. People are afraid of what they don't understand. In a society that puts so much weight on conforming and fitting in, when we don't understand something, we tend to make up stories about it or push it aside." Audrey: "For more typically-wired kids, it teaches them super important character traits like kindness, empathy, and compassion." Debbie: "As parents, we can really spin out and get concerned if what we're seeing in our own family isn't matching our idea of what this should look like. Every child is on their own timeline. Everyone is growing in strengths and may have some lagging skills but they even out eventually. If we can keep our eye on the goal to raise a responsible human being who knows themselves, who understands what they need and has the tools to reach their potential, that's what we're going for." Resources The Miracle Morning Learn more about Debbie Reber and TiLT Parenting: TiLT Parenting on Facebook TiLT Together Facebook Group TiLT Instagram http://www.twitter.com/tiltparenting Related Posts/Podcasts If you liked this episode, listen to Ep. 104: Know and Love Yourself AND Your Kids 4 Ways to Focus on our Kids' Strengths Ep. 71: Growing Your Child’s “Bushy Broccoli Brain” Ep. 30: How to Raise a Durable Human with JJ Madden 10 Friendship Skills Every Kid Needs

In this episode, I’m chatting with author Nefertiti Austin about her latest book, Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America. We talk about her journey to adoption as a single Black woman and some of the issues faced by mothers of color and adoptive mothers. When she couldn’t find any books on the topic while going through the adoption process, she decided to write her own.   Big Ideas Fostered and adopted kids need to be given age-appropriate information from caregivers about their situations. Good communication is critical to helping kids understand what is going on around them. It’s important to never talk badly about a child’s biological parents, no matter the situation. Allow kids to try new things and leave the door open for them to pursue their interests. The term ‘crack babies’ is a misnomer; there is no evidence to support the idea that children exposed to substances in utero can’t thrive in a healthy, stable home environment. People should not be afraid to adopt a child who might be born addicted. Single mothers need to find positive male role models for their children. They can find support from men in the community through sports, church, friendships, and extended family. The Anti-Bias Education that has emerged in recent years is hopefully moving the needle, but the best way to help communities overcome racial prejudices and discrimination is for more families to connect with people who are different from them. If you are adopting a child of a different race, do your homework, understand their culture, and make friends with people of their race. It’s important to respect cultural differences. Quotes Nefertiti: “I always wanted a family, wanted to be married and have children but as I got older, what was really important to me was helping a child in need.” Audrey: “it seems like because of your experience, you understand that adopted kids need a lot of talking to and explaining about their situation.” Nefertiti: “When I became a mom, I made a point to talk about adoption with my kids when they were very young. I started using the word ‘adoption’ and reading books to them so that it was really normalized.” Nefertiti: “I make a point to let them know that I’m so happy that they chose me, that I love them, and this is just the best place for all of us.” Nefertiti: “Your ‘parents’ are the people who provide a home for you, feed you, love you, help you with your homework, and help you kind of get on in the world.” Audrey: “One of the reasons people choose adoption is to give kids the opportunity to have the family that all children deserve.” Nefertiti: “I was looking for words, for information, for contexts to be able to share with people and it wasn’t there I had to create it for myself.” Nefertiti: “The child’s trajectory turned on the environment; that seemed to be the biggest thing that was going to either help a child thrive or not.” Nefertiti: “When you take a look at those families where drugs, violence, or neglect play a central role in a child’s life, if you remove those barriers and put them in a stable, loving household, then it is 180 degrees from what they first thought.” Audrey: “You really had a plan to have a community in place to support your family. You had role models--men, aunts and uncles, and miscellaneous people--creating a support network.” Nefertiti: “Any woman who is going to have a child of the opposite sex, whether you give birth or not, that child needs his community." Audrey: “I think reading to kids and having them develop a love of reading is just so important because it opens up the world to them, whatever they decide to be interested in, they can then go out and find it.” Audrey: “I really appreciate that you wrote this book because I think it’s not only going to be helpful for the people who are in your same circumstances, black mothers, adopting as single women, but also in the general adoption community.” Nefertiti: “If a child can go to a loving, stable home, a home where the parents have really thought about what that’s going to mean (being in a mixed family), then they should go there.” Nefertiti: “The best way to move the needle is through interpersonal relations. You can read anything, but you have an emotional distance from it. It doesn’t impact you and it’s hard to see your own bias. It’s hard to see your own privilege. It requires people sitting down with one another and listening to stories about each other.” Nefertiti: “My book isn’t specifically for black mothers. There really is something for everyone. It’s important that all mothers come together—period. There is a racial hierarchy in motherhood and that needs to go away.” Nefertiti: “I think moms have a lot of power and our voices collectively could make a huge difference. If we could come together and really support each other, our kids would feel a lot better about themselves, who they’re friends with and be less suspicious of the ‘other’.” Audrey: “You can’t ‘other’ people you are friends with.” Resources/Books Mentioned Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption Angie Thomas’ On The Come Upand The Hate U Give About Nefertiti [caption id="attachment_6387" align="alignright" width="438"]Nefertiti Austin[/caption] Author and memoirist, Nefertiti Austin writes about the erasure of diverse voices in motherhood. Her work around this topic has been short-listed for literary awards and appeared in the “Huffington Post”, MUTHA, “The Establishment”, matermea.com, Essence.com, “Adoptive Families” magazine, PBS SoCal’s “To Foster Change” and PBS Parents. She was the subject of an article on race and adoption in “The Atlantic” and appeared on “HuffPost Live” and “One Bad Mother”, where she shared her journey to adoption as a single Black woman. Nefertiti’s expertise stems from firsthand experience and degrees in U.S. History and African-American Studies. Nefertiti is a former Certified PS-MAPP Trainer, where she co-led classes for participants wanting to attain a license to foster and/or adopt children from the foster care system. An alumna of Breadloaf Writers’ Conference and VONA, her first two novels, Eternity and Abandon, helped usher in the Black Romance genre in the mid-1990s. Contact Nefertiti www.nefertitiaustin.com Instagram.com/iamnefertitiaustin Twitter.com/nefertitiaustin Facebook.com/nefertitiaustin If you enjoyed this podcast, listen to: Episode 55: Raising Kids who Love to Read with Anne Driscoll Episode 61: National Adoption Awareness Month Episode 93: Teaching Healthy Relationship Skills to Improve Lives Three Strategies for Raising Kids Who Become Thriving Adults

At its core, the Enneagram helps us to see ourselves at a deeper, more objective level and can be of invaluable assistance on our path to self-knowledge.- The Enneagram Institute Website In Episode 104, I'm chatting with my daughter Meredith who--like me--enjoys learning more about herself and other people. The tool we discuss most is the Enneagram, which Meredith discovered last year through her employer and introduced to me and the rest of our family. Big Ideas It is important for parents, and anyone who works with kids, to be self-aware. Understanding personality types can help us to create healthier relationships because it affects the way we view the behavior of others, as well as our own reactions in different situations. Empathy increases when we are more aware of other people's tendencies. Each relationship is unique based on personality types. It is the parent's responsibility to adjust and to figure out where the child is coming from. Noone can be defined by one personality test or type but learning about the different characteristics and identifying with types can be extremely informative. We can't accurately assess other people's types just by observing their behavior. Personality test results are personal and best used for self-reflection. Being self-aware helps us identify our weaknesses and strengths in relation to achieving our goals and in our relationships with others. The Nine Enneagram Types in their Family Roles Ones: family perfectionists Twos: family helpers Threes: family stars Fours: Shed light on family problems Fives: family experts Sixes: move between building family unity and rebelling against the family unit Sevens: family cheerleaders Eights: family protectors Nines: family peacemakers   Quotes Audrey: "The theme of this podcast is about the importance for parents and anyone who works with kids to know themselves because your own self-awareness has a huge impact on how you view the behavior of others." Audrey: " You can have more compassion when you understand where other people come from and it changes your view of why they do something that may annoy you or that kind of thing." Audrey: "As parents, we are different with each of our kids because our kids each have different personalities. It's our responsibility to adjust and not our kids." Meredith: "I do think that the Enneagram, and with most personality quizzes once you find out what you are, you sometimes don't want to be that. I think its easier to focus on the downsides of that personality type and look at the good sides of other personality types." Audrey: "Remember, 'Comparison is the thief of joy.'" Audrey: "The more I've read about my type, the more it has freed me from some of my frustrations with myself. It has given me a better understanding of why I've done some of the things I've done and why I am the way I am. It actually makes me feel a little better." Audrey: "I like the whole idea that there are some things that just make me kind of unique and just because I don't do something the same way or view things the same way, it's still okay." Audrey: "I just think that self-awareness is a really important part of social intelligence and a lot of us don't have it. I really don't think I did until a few years ago when I started doing more strengths testing, this Enneagram, and the four tendencies. It's like all this stuff kind of comes together like a puzzle of self-awareness." Meredith: "It's a tool for yourself and maybe for your close family members and friends so that they can understand you better. It's not something that you go around asking people, 'What's your Enneagram number?' because sharing your numbers, sharing how you think, your weaknesses, the different lies you believe about your self, is actually quite personal." Audrey: "You really have to read the book to understand for sure the one (type) you are because oftentimes depending on how healthy you are and what you're doing, you may look like a different number." Audrey: "You really can't tell about someone else because you don't know what's going on inside of them." Meredith: "Being aware of Enneagram numbers has helped me to empathize with the way other people were thinking and for them to understand me, as well. It has made me more aware of myself and for example, how I can come off to others, even when I don't think I'm coming off as critical." Meredith: "It is helpful to be aware of the way my brain is wired, that I need to actively work to give myself grace, to be aware of my thought patterns so that I can see when I'm starting to be in a state of stress or a state of health because I'm taking on those qualities." Audrey: "For me, I'm prone to not rest in my emotions long or deep enough and that came out in the last few years with problems in my body. Like in my shoulder, my knee, I would always have some huge pain and it was because I had internal pain that I wasn't dealing with." Meredith: "Read an introductory level book. It's most helpful to read the descriptions in-depth and identify with one. I think that's more helpful than just taking a quiz and having it spit out an answer for you." Meredith: "You move around on the Enneagram a lot, sometimes to lots of different ones depending on if you're in a state of stress or security. So it's not like your number is locked in. You move around to your wings and then to other numbers too. It's normal to identify with lots of different qualities, but I think it's when you really identify with one number, you found the right one." Audrey: "It's fun to take them because any little insight that you gain is just more self-awareness." Meredith: "You have to give yourself grace because it's not like you can know what Enneagram or personality types all your kids or family members have, especially when kids are changing and forming in different ways. I think it's good just to be aware, but don't be too hard on your self." Audrey: "There can be certain personalities that may bring out your not-great parts, like when your kid has a personality that's so different from yours or one that clashes with yours. That can be really hard as a parent." Audrey: "A lot of parents have pain when they don't feel their relationship is really strong with one of their kids. But there is always reparation, especially if you take the time to learn a little bit more about each other and figure it out."   Books We Discussed     Different Personality, Strengths, and Tendencies Assessments The Enneagram is one of many different assessments that can give you more self-awareness. Here are some other popular options: Myers-Briggs Read more about Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies or take her quiz to find out yours! Related Posts & Podcast Episodes Ep. 28: Focusing on our Kids' Strengths 4 Ways to Focus on our Kids' Strengths Celebrating Strengths Ep. 75: Begin with the (Parenting) End in Mind Ep. 59: 5 Ways to Help Kids Thrive during their School Years and Beyond Ep. 97: Parenting the Challenging Child #oneword My One Word for 2019: Focus Want More Sunshine? Subscribe to my email newsletter to keep up with my podcasts, events, book club & resources, including favorites like my Ready for Adulthood Checklist. “It is remarkable to witness what happens when kids think and talk about a strength, often for the first time identifying it in themselves, and then learn how they can use that strength in different settings. When given a name to a part of themselves they recognize and intuitively know, kids gain a vocabulary to talk about themselves more positively.” #happycampersbook

Audrey Eschright: @ameschright | The Recompiler Show Notes: 00:50 - Background in Publishing and Open Source 06:53 - The Contributor Pool 12:37 - Open Source Bridge 15:29 - Mistakes Open Source Contributors Make 17:21 - Tools for Maintaining an Open Source Project 19:09 - Roles 23:33 - Open Source Bridge (Cont'd) 27:47 - Governance and Decision-Making 36:20 - Making Open Source Accessible, Safe, and Welcoming Resources: Free Geek Calagator PDX Activist Dreamwidth Safety First PDX Open Source Bridge: Enter the coupon code PODCAST to get $50 off a ticket! The conference will be held June 20-23, 2017 at The Eliot Center in downtown Portland, Oregon. Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode #71. My name is Charles Lowell. I'm a developer here at The Frontside. With me also is Joe LaSala. JOE: Hello. CHARLES: Hey, Joe, another developer here at The Frontside. With us today is the publisher of The Recompiler Mag and a long-time open source contributor Audrey Eschright. Welcome Audrey. AUDREY: Hey! CHARLES: Thanks for being on the show. AUDREY: Oh, thank you. CHARLES: Today, we're going to be talking about open source and in particular, the labor that goes into open source and making that sustainable but before we get into that, I wanted to first talk about your background, both in terms of how you came to be publishing the magazine and also your background on open source, how we're arriving at the subject today. AUDREY: The magazine, in a lot of ways, I refer to it as a feminist hacker magazine. It holds together a lot of different things that I've worked on over the years so I'm going to jump all the way back to when I first encountered open source and then maybe that will fit together. When I was in high school, I first encountered the internet and the internet that was available to me at that time use things like Gopher. Gopher is a pretty web protocol and it was free software. I didn't really understand that it was free software at that point but I did understand that if I wanted to learn how to write code and the computer that I have access to were things like a bunch of really old PCs like 286's and an old Macintosh. Then there were commercial compilers for writing code and there were free compilers for writing code. There was a thing called GCC and I knew that it was on university computers and if I got access to those, then I could write code. Then I got to college and write about when open source really started to take off as this concept of how free software comes into business world. I've had that as a background of becoming a programmer and getting involved in things but after college I wasn't really sure that I want to work in technology so I took a break. When I came back, I needed a way to get myself up to date so I started volunteering with this local group called Free Geek that recycles computers. What they do is they take those computer parts and the ones that are usable, they build them into Linux boxes for people, like Linux desktop boxes. How I got back up and running was learning how to work and volunteering in an organization that was very open source based, like all of the tools that they used are just completely open source. CHARLES: Was that for budgetary reasons or they didn't want the people to burden the recipients of these computers with any licensing fees or obligations to third parties? AUDREY: It's budgetary but it's also ideological. The organization was started out of environmental interests. The original folks, they pointed to us this computer monitor that they [inaudible] as the reason that they do this, that the way computer waste is being handled was so unfriendly that you might as well just dump it in the river. They started from there but I think because those kinds of interests of creating something that was really accessible for people are really educational and accessible to lower income patrons has always been a really big part of it. I think that using Linux and using open source tools has been a big part of that. CHARLES: I think open source is so pervasive, a lot of people forget that in those days, there was a lot of radical thinking behind it, of radical accessibility like it's your basic right to be able to access every layer of your stack. It's a little bit unfortunate that you mentioned GCC that like the GNU, the Free Software Foundation isn't as much part of the conversation as they were back then. AUDREY: Yeah. I think that as more people come in to, we've shifted through these different generations basically in open source contribution and how it's formulated. The fact that I even default to open source is really interesting because a lot of the values that I referencing are those free software values. CHARLES: Fast forward to the present... AUDREY: Part of how I built my skills was by starting open source projects called Calagator. It's a community calendaring platform that makes it very easy to import things from other sources like Facebook. It's interesting, it wasn't our primary thing but it's so big now. We've been doing this for 10 years so a lot of recent change around us. We have a 10-year old [inaudible] app that is still up and running and is now in Rails engine. CHARLES: Wow. Is this an application that you can run yourself or when you say it's an engine, if I've got a Rails app, I can just drop it into any Rails app? AUDREY: Yeah, that was a direction we decided to go in a couple of years ago because my experience was that handing people in Rails app and saying, "Go fork it and then go sell it and use it in your community." That's a pretty big technical burden. At least, as an engine, it makes it a little bit more flexible for people to really come in and make some of those changes. We can bootstrap a little bit more for them. CHARLES: It's always funny to me know how some projects always run off the fork model, like there's a lot of HTML starters or editor starters where the thing is you fork it. I always hate that model because eventually, you ended up having to do this terrible dance with the upstream in order to jump around the changes that are coming through and stuff. AUDREY: Yeah and that was definitely one of the problems that we would run into. We would make changes to functionality and the frontend and the visual display of it. It was really difficult for people to pick and choose the parts that were useful for them. CHARLES: Yeah. Okay, so you've got a 10-year old Rails applications/engine, now you are actually running an instance of this engine yourself or just maintaining the open source? AUDREY: Yeah, there's actually two of them, that I'm in involved with right now. One of them is that Calagator.org. It's a Portland's techs events calendar. That was really our original site and the reason that we created this. The other one just as of a few months ago is PDXActivist.org and that is a way to get a lot of activism and political organizing off of Facebook, basically. That's really our primary target. It's just getting people an alternative to using Facebook for all of their events. CHARLES: I see. Now, having to maintain an open source project for 10 years, that's a really, really long time. AUDREY: Yeah. CHARLES: How big is the community now and how many different users have you seen as you developed this? AUDREY: Well, it's a little hard to tell. We deliberately don't do a lot of tracking, especially on PDX Activist side. I can tell you that there are a lot of events on both calendars. For the tech events, there are probably five things that you can do on any given day, maybe 10. During design week, they put all that on there too. This has been very consistent over the history of the project. I can also tell you that we've had dozens of contributors. CHARLES: Yeah, that's more what I meant when I said users. Not necessarily the consumers of the calendar but the consumers of the software that makes the calendar. AUDREY: It goes without saying that I think that those users are creating events, they are part of that because they help curate content. Like with the wiki, your user base isn't just the people who update MediaWiki. It's that people who really work on the content too. We've had dozens of people. There's a contributor's file that I didn't pull up but we can go and look at it. We made a point of crediting everybody who contributed at Code Sprint, whether or not they check in code. We have a really great documentation over the history of the project about how the different ways that people contributed and who they are. CHARLES: Yeah. I feel like that's something that often goes missing in projects, especially open source projects that you find on GitHub where there's so many people that are involved in creating software beyond just what you see in the commit history. It's kind of a poor showing of what it was all involved in the whole creative act. Sure, it's an accurate reflection if it's a one-person project who's hacking away on weekends but as your project scales, there's a lot of different stuff going on. AUDREY: Yeah, definitely. I think the other part that's really interesting for me about this is that I can point to that big contributor pool, people who have come to sprints so they've work on a project. They help define the shape of the project. Then I can tell you that we had a three-person core team for a very long time and then it was down to a two-person core team. Now, I'm not really sure which one of those is in charge. I don't look at GitHub often enough and a couple of the other computers. There isn't a lot of coaching happening anymore. We should have a wish list but there's nothing so urgent that we stop all other work and go back to making this our primary effort. CHARLES: Of the people on the core team, how many of them are developers? AUDREY: All of us. All three of us were. We come into with different cross skills. I've done a lot of documentation and mentorship. As of the others, I would say we have one person who were in design or one person who was more apps-oriented. We fill those different layers too. CHARLES: Of that group of the core contributors, outside that group of core contributors, you said you accumulate a list of all the people who contributed. What's the breakdown in the roles that those people are playing? AUDREY: You know, it has changed a lot over the course of the project. Early on, we had maybe half of the people were really doing development and the other half were helping. We took a very agile approach like index cards and users story. Maybe half of the people that show up at a given time, we just talk through the feature and do research. We were looking at a lot of integration so what needed to know what would be required to integrate it. We brainstorm a lot of things. We did in-person Code Sprints every two weeks from the year that we started, at late of January to the end of July. We had this whole set of in-person work that really shape in that. Also a lot of people who weren't necessarily contributing code that had disappeared. CHARLES: I see, so people who had a vested interest in a particular set of features could show up and voice that interest and be heard, as opposed to what you're having, it just be limited to the people who are writing the actual code. AUDREY: Yeah and we would ask people to spec it out. Just sit down with somebody and figure out how the feature could work and whether it fit with everything else to what we're doing. I do that research and investigation. Over the years, we've had this come and go in waves. Every so often, we need to go up a Rails version or make certain kinds of major updates so we get people together for that. We had some different pools of Codeschool students that have come in and really been interested in working on this to get a little bit more development experience, get some experience working with other people, have open source some resume to show off. I've been very enthusiastic about giving people that resume credit that if they need an open source of it so that they could say, "I know how to write with other people," then our projects is very happy to help them with that. CHARLES: What is the conference that you run? AUDREY: I am on the committee for Open Source Bridge. It's an annual conference for open source citizens, which is the same people who participate and benefit from open source. CHARLES: Which is pretty much the planet at this point. AUDREY: Yeah. It's funny because, I think it's just so interesting who does or doesn't identify themselves as part of that. Anybody using a computer these days is in some way benefiting from open source and could potentially contribute to it and be part of that. It's not just awareness, there are a lot of actual barriers so that, to everyone having a role in it. But the conference I co-founded it with Selena Deckelmann who's at Mozilla now. We do say over time to ask a lot of questions about how across technologies, open source comes together to build things? How projects work? What kinds of skills are involved? How we become better maintainers by being aware of our users, by communicating better, by being good moderators of online message boards and mailing lists and things like that? We've had a chance to really just look at broad swath of elements that come in. CHARLES: I think that literally every bullet point that you mentioned, I feel is something that we've come across and it has been a challenge for us, in our efforts to maintain our open source projects. Ours are mostly just libraries. There's very little by way of big, big frameworks or big, big applications. We've got it kind of easy, I would say and we still struggle with those things really understanding our users, understanding how your open source project should run and how it even fits into the bigger ecosystem. Is there a guide out there somewhere like how to how to open source? AUDREY: You know, I don't know that I've seen a single guide but there is really a lot of good writing and a lot of good conference talks on this topics. Like you said, it's just this broad set of skills and we focus so much on teaching people how to code and maybe teaching people how to code together, to be good contributors together but if you ever to maintain a project, there's leadership involved. There's communication involved. CHARLES: It seems to me that's the bulk of it, right? AUDREY: Yeah. I don't know, did you get training on that? [Laughter] AUDREY: I just decided to try things. I'm very lucky that I'm mostly made good guesses but there's some really bad ones too where later I look back at it and realized we could have done better. CHARLES: What are some of this mistakes that open source contributors often make, where they could save themselves a lot of trouble? AUDREY: I think a big one is thinking about it only in that technical framework. Even just by tools that we use, we tend to force people into contributing solely through GitHub, which means that you've got to understand somethings about the bug tracker and how tickets go and the workflow around that. CHARLES: Yeah. I've literally looking at a message in our Slack from yesterday where someone on our team who doesn't interact with GitHub said literally, "Someone is going to have to show me how because GitHub is the most confusing thing I have ever logged into." JOE: I thought about that message today too and yeah, I guess I'm wondering how do you attract those more non-technical skill sets to a project? AUDREY: It takes a lot of direct mentoring and coaching. You already has some people that are identifying themselves to you if you're having that conversation. I think I've really benefited from looking at who else is like them, who else do they know that might want to get involved and starting conversations that way. Because the biggest projects that I have worked on are these calendars, it does give us so many users that maybe are interested in having more technical involvement. If I can start looking at who's doing a lot of cleanup on there, who's paying a lot of attention to the content and the structure of the content and structuring information is also a technical skill. But people don't necessarily go from that to thinking, "I can write code," or, "I could submit a ticket and debug that thing and tell you what needs fixing now." But people can get there. We just have to be willing to talk to them about it and willing to look at it from their point of view. CHARLES: One thing that I dig out of there is that if you're running your open source project solely on GitHub, it's not going to be enough. You're going to be constrained in your growth just by the toolset and the implicit exclusivity of that toolset. What are some tools that you can bring in that are going to be more attractive? AUDREY: I think mailing list have turnout to be one of the most open-ended things that we've done. People who want to find out a little bit more, sometimes post there but also just having a good webpage, a good info pages or some sort, having your wiki actually talked about some of the less technical aspects of it. Even explaining what your project is for can be really good. You know, you start to make these assumptions like, "If they're going to go and install it, do they know?" Maybe not. I think just looking at it as a broader set of communications. CHARLES: Right. What seems self-evident to you and maybe someone who shares a lot of context to you is a mystery to someone else. It never hurts to state the obvious. It seems to me you have to be able to use tools that people are familiar with but also part of the leadership is giving people things to do, giving them a way to think about your project or giving them a way to act independently. How do you think about the different roles in an open source project so that you can then elucidate those roles so that someone coming, who is going to look at your website or who's going to be reading your e-mail list is going to be participating in your community in some way and particularly not in a code contribution way, how do you think about the different roles of your open source project so that you can kind of hand that to them? So that they can act independently like, "Here's this thing that you could do. Here's this thing that you could do. Here's this thing that you can do." What is that kind of core set of roles? CHARLES: We could think about it in terms of the actions that we take. If you go back to our lone weekend coder who put something on GitHub, you're already writing the code, making design decisions about the shape of the code, you are writing about it in some way, even if all you do is update the ReadMe to have two lines of something you're writing. You are managing any bug tickets that come in, any future request so you're doing some project management, some kind of general analysis of that. They don't necessarily have to be different roles. People implicitly take on the whole thought of that when they start a project. But they can also be split out. I hate to say like, "Give away your least favorite thing," because people sometimes do that, may dump it out there and it never gets handled well because they don't really understand what they're looking for. But it's okay to say, "I am really great at this one thing and I really struggle with this other thing." I bet there's somebody else who is just way better at organizing the stack communication and they can help me with that. If I can tell them what I need it for, maybe they can help with that. CHARLES: So you have to admit your weaknesses? AUDREY: Yeah. I think a lot of leadership is that kind of self-analysis: really seeing where you are helping the most, where you're strongest, what things absolutely have to be done with you. I don't know. I'd learned you to be really honest about that. Sometimes, the thing you enjoy doing is not the thing that you have to do because nobody else can. But often barred things that are really not fun for me, turned out to be the thing that nobody else can do. I just think that you have to spent some time thinking about that and thinking about what you can teach people too. You already have the knowledge of your project and what you're trying to do so I think what you can teach is what your mission is, what your goals are and maybe they can help you to communicate that too. CHARLES: Yeah, because it seems to me if you actually can very clearly communicate your target, then people can begin to walk towards it independently and that's almost more important than the actual taking the steps. Or the steps needed to be taken but that's something that you can provide. AUDREY: Yeah, you need that kind of definition regardless in order to make your decision and have your work actually function and the less conscious we are about, the more we tend to get a big pile of something and you go, "Now what? What do we do with that?" CHARLES: Right. I think it also flushes out if you have a clear target and you have a clear mission, by externalizing it, it makes you reflect on it more and hardens it, if that makes any sense. You have all these ideas bouncing around in your own head about the things that you might want to do or might like to do but once you actually try to express it to people and say, "You know what? We're going to do this." Then it takes on a reality of its own that is subject to more scrutiny but also subject to the constraints of the real world and that's a good thing. It means that whatever you're going to come up with is going to be more resilient. AUDREY: Yeah. I think we can be scared about putting that out there. They won't see what you see or they won't like it. Those who disagree with your goals there will go, "You really should have been building an eggplant slicer and not a tomato slicer." Yeah, I don't like tomatoes. But for more definition that we put out there, the clearer we are, the more that the people who want to [inaudible] they can find us. That's why it's so important to do it and not to dodge those kinds of questions. CHARLES: Yeah, absolutely. Now, I'm wondering so when is this conference that you're running? Is this the first one or is this the second, the third? AUDREY: Oh, no. We're on our ninth. CHARLES: You are on your ninth? Oh, my goodness. AUDREY: Yeah, it's actually just in a few weeks. It's in June, the week of the 20th, I want to say. Tickets are for sale. If you're in Portland, we had a great volunteer program where you put in eight hours over the course of the entire week. You can split out with everyone and you get a free ticket. CHARLES: Nice. This is the problem with the internet is I'm always finding out things that I wish I'd known 10 years ago. I wish I'd known about this before it actually tried to do any open source. This is the Open Source Bridge so what's a sample of what you guys are going to be talking about? AUDREY: The thing that we've added this year and it's really exciting is the activism track. We're having a lot more people to talk about what they do as code. In this other way, more of public facing way. We have Nicole Sanchez from GitHub. She's going to talk about diversity inclusion and some of the biggest [inaudible] there. We also had Emily Gorcenski doing another keynote and she talks a lot about data and ethics and has a lot of interesting things to say about how we collect and sort and process information and the impacts of that. We have a couple of workshops that are really great. One on technical interviewing and the personal skills that you need. There is a session on keyboard hacking. CHARLES: Keyboard hacking? This is in the activism track? AUDREY: No. This are across all the tracks. CHARLES: How many different tracks are there? AUDREY: There's five. CHARLES: This is a big conference. AUDREY: Yeah. It is such a great community for me to be a part of. Like I said, the different kinds of projects that people come from and bring into it and the different skills, we'll have people that are everywhere from kernel hackers to working in devops to people that kind of fit, I think what we think of it are more typical like web developer or mobile developer kind of skill set. People who run their projects, folks from Dreamwidth often come and participate and they have a lot of really great things to share because they have such an inclusive focus on how they do their project. CHARLES: Where was that? AUDREY: Dreamwidth. It's a LiveJournal spinoff. It's online community journaling website. It's in Perl, which is cool. There aren't as many outward facing things, hiring Perl programmer these days, I think. CHARLES: It's still a very active Perl project? AUDREY: Yeah. CHARLES: Wow. I did Perl a long, long time ago. AUDREY: I think it's really useful to remember that programming languages never actually die. There is always code. JOE: There's still plenty of COBOL positions out there. AUDREY: Yeah. Actually my uncle is a COBOL programmer. CHARLES: Yeah, I remember it was only some statistic where it was something like five years ago, Java, Eclipse, COBOL is the most popular programming language. The cycles are much larger than we tend to think. Surfing on the beach as we do, not realizing there's a whole ocean generating those waves. AUDREY: Yeah, I think if you're in a certain kind of technology startup plan, there's always this push to go for the nearest and shiniest on the number of JavaScript frameworks that we've gone through in the last five years. You kind of [inaudible] of all of these things that come before that are still in use. What I really loved about doing devops is that all of this pieces are still in play and there's something to learn from that. If they don't die, you don't get rid of them. You just try to build on them and keep them working usefully. CHARLES: Right. Man, that's exciting, so you have a very, very huge cross-section of the development community. It sounds like participating in here which is a quality in of itself. That must give you a pretty unique perspective being with that level of cross-discipline. Are there any insights that can only be gleaned by being able to perceive it from that high of a level? AUDREY: Well, a big one is that we all struggle with governance. We don't really talk outside of just a couple of forms for events that focus on open source maintainers. We don't talk about the governance of projects, like who was in charge and how decisions are made. But it turns out that that has just an enormous impact on what a project can actually do and how it survives. I think I might not have seen that as clearly without having people from so many different angles participating. CHARLES: I'm just trying to think of keeping it in the area of web frameworks because that's something that I'm familiar with. If we were to compare, say the governance model something like React, which is basically whatever Facebook wants, versus something in the middle like Angular, which is like an explicit governance model but also is heavily influenced by Google, versus something like... I don't know, well something like JavaScript itself, which has an open democratic model but heavily represented by major, major, major companies, versus something like Rust, which is I certainly get the feeling is a very explicit, very democratic model. All of those seem to have achieved a lot of success and this seemed like a very healthy projects but on the one hand of the spectrum like Rust, you have the super-transparent, super-democratic model and then on the React side, you've got this authoritarian model. That's opaque. How do you reconcile that those are both successful? AUDREY: I think a lot of what actually determines this stuff is who pays the developers. In both of those cases, meaning projects that present information and decision making differently but there are corporations that pay those developers and that's where the primary source of that code. Because of that, really who pays the developers determines what gets made, what code gets written. In a way, they're both doing some of the same things. They're just not giving you inside into that decision making, in some cases. CHARLES: The decision making apparatus is there, I guess the thing is this transparency to the user base matter. I would say that the user base of a thing like React dwarfs the actual corpus of decision makers. That doesn't seem to be that that decision making process is opaque. AUDREY: Well, I might be opening too much of a larger conversation by saying this but if you're familiar with the idea of algorithm transparency, decision making is encoded into things like algorithms and when we can't examine them, then we don't know how that decision was made so we don't know what biases are encoded into it. The same thing happens with code in general. You might say, "Let the outcome of this and this working really great," but there are still biases and preferences that are encoded into that that you don't have insight into. If they start to ship the project in a certain way, that include some users and excludes others. Even on just purely technical levels, you don't know what. You don't know how they got to that, you don't know if they're going to keep steering in that direction. If you're one of those people that is starting to be excluded, you don't know what you can do about it. I've seen these kinds of governance discussion even happen within Ruby in Rails. CHARLES: Yeah, it does seem like these political questions come up constantly. I remember an example that leaps to mind is a project that I was involved with was the Jenkins project, which originally was Hudson, which came out of Sun Microsystems. When Oracle bought Sun, they were basically trying to, I want to say there's always three sides to every story but from where I was sitting, they were essentially trying to subvert the project to their own needs and end up being in a fork of the project. Luckily, there was recourse there where because it was open source and because it was mostly maintained by the community and not by the company, they were able to fork it. They changed the name. They changed the logo and that was the end of the story. There was a question of which fork would survive but that was resolved within probably six months. But Jenkins lived and I think it's better off for it but I guess maybe then a question that you can one kind of stress test that you can put like, "Is it okay to put weight on this technology?" What would happen? Would my community be represented and would I be able to fork this, essentially? Maybe in that sense, React would pass that test. In the sense that it would be reasonable to fork it or something like that. I don't know. I'm just thinking of ways to try and validate if something safe to use. AUDREY: I think it's really interesting that you commented on the new change and the logo change because those kinds of trademarks are actually the most readily protected of all of the intellectual property in an open source projects. If things are going to go off and become a community project and it's being released under some open source model, often where the corporate control stays over those assets -- the name, the logo, the graphics -- maybe even some of the work [inaudible]. You have to ask if that code is still useful without that infrastructure that they provided. If you take the whole codebase and you walk off and you don't have the same developers and you don't have the same, even hosting resources or whatever, is that code still useful to you? What if you use a bug tracker? CHARLES: Right, now you own it. What's the cost now of maintaining? And are you going to get a return on that investment? AUDREY: Yeah. There's been some pretty big open source projects that have struggled with that, especially for end user facing software. Those turned out to be easy things for community to pick up. CHARLES: Can you provide any examples? AUDREY: I'm thinking of some of the stuff that happened with Open Office LibreOffice. CHARLES: Yeah, I remember that. AUDREY: There's still two different batches of people working on this and from what I understand, a whole lot of intellectual property complications. CHARLES: Yeah, it's funny how sometimes, it would be interesting to see a case study of all the major forks and the outcomes of what they were. Some I can think of, there was a fork of Ruby gems, for example I think back in 2009 that went off and was mainly, I think was a way of protest. I think some of those concerns were addressed in the main thing so that fork ended up dying, then you got the fork of io.js, which was ended up. There was a fork and then a rejoining with the Node community but I would say it was an effective tool so there was a fork but then it joined. It was a source code fork but it was a political fork. Then you have the Jenkins fork where the fork basically swallowed its ancestor and there's all these fascinating outcomes and then you've got this LibreOffice Open Office where the waters are very murky about what happened with that fork. AUDREY: I heard people say like, "If you don't like this decision, then just go fork the project." CHARLES: Because that's easy. AUDREY: And if one of your major developers does it, then maybe, like you said, they have some leverage and they can make the changes they want to see happen, [inaudible]. But in general, that's a really hard thing to pull off. You've got to be able to take your entire community with you. Part of this is have to be functional and I think people are very rarely actually make that happen. CHARLES: Right. I feel like that's a dishonest thing to say when people are like, "If you want to go fork it," because really forking the code is the easy part. It's forking the community. AUDREY: Well, if you do that, then you've got a lot of conflicts. You've got a lot of people's feelings to address. It's not a very simple thing to recover from. CHARLES: Yeah. Some people do it. We have some good examples of that happening but it doesn't always pan out for the best. How can we make open source more accessible and supportive of contributors? We've mentioned a lot of that stuff in terms of how you can support people who are contributing but there might be more to talk about that. AUDREY: Yeah, we haven't really talked about who gets to participate. We talked about what kinds of things you can do when you see that people are interested but we don't talk about how in order to be a week encoder, you've got to have those weekends free. Certainly, I am right now. CHARLES: Yeah, neither do I. AUDREY: You have to have access to a laptop if you want to go to Code Sprints or [inaudible]. Not everybody has that, even people who are programming or your own computer not owned by your employer. That can be really important. You have to have a knowledge of how open source works. I do see fairly often in conferences that focus on a lot in open source, there will be how to become an open source contributor kind of talk. That kind of cultural knowledge is really important because otherwise, you're going to GitHub and you look at it and you say, "What am I supposed to do here? What am I actually supposed to do with this?" It's just a wall of information. There's something about a project on GitHub that creates these entry points for somebody who doesn't know how open source projects work. CHARLES: Yeah and it's so hard to be able to perceive it from that person's perspective, especially if you're frog-boiled, so to speak in the community. You've been doing this for so long, these things seem self-evident that it takes a computer, it takes the time, it takes knowing where to establish a toehold. These are all non-problems for you but they're insurmountable for someone else. AUDREY: There's one other aspect of this that we haven't really talked about, which is the friendliness to the kinds of contributors that you have, the diversity of the project versus the homogeneity of the contributors, whether or not you have a code of conduct and you know how to do something with it so that people feel safe and welcome in your environment. There's a lot of people that stay away from open source projects because all they've ever seen is harassment and that behavior. You can have a counterexample but if you don't have some mechanism for showing that that won't happen in your projects, then there are folks that are never going to submit about. They're never going to make a commit. They're not going to put anything on the wiki. CHARLES: Why would voluntarily subject myself to, if the only thing on the other end of the phone is pain? AUDREY: There are plenty of people that decided just to opt out because of that. If open source projects want to see more contribution, you have to be very proactive in dealing with that. CHARLES: Yeah, I feel like it almost would be nice to have some sort of training. Even if you have a code of conduct on your open source project, I think as you grow it from something that's maybe just one or two people to where there's a larger community, the first time you have a bad actor who shows up and start slinging turds, it's shocking and you're taken aback. But just as the number of people grow in a community, that is going to happen. It's just an unfortunate fact of human nature so not having to react to it, but be prepared for it, I think is something that's extraordinarily valuable. I don't know if there's a guide for that on GitHub or guide for that on anywhere else but I think it would be very useful skill to have. AUDREY: It's just very funny that you say this because this is actually a training idea. CHARLES: Oh, really? I promise there was no payment under the table to ask that question. AUDREY: Yeah. There was some consulting around this and I started a program with a local non-profit called Safety First PDX and what we do is train user group leaders, conference organizers, open source project maintainers on exactly that: what to do with their code of conduct to enforce it and help people feel welcome in their community. I worked through a really specific examples with people about how you respond, how you have this conversations and what kinds of things you need to do to protect your contributors who are participants and be really firm about what is next in your space. CHARLES: Absolutely a critical skill for any open source project, for any open source community, for any large accumulation of people. AUDREY: And GitHub made it very easy to put a code of conduct on your project now but without these kinds of resources, I think what happens is that people get that first incident and they panic because it is scary to tell somebody that their behavior isn't okay. To tell them that they might have to step away from the project or stop doing that or even leave indefinitely, those are really hard things to get started doing. I really enjoy doing the training and getting to walkthrough that to people. CHARLES: Are you going to be offering that training anytime soon? AUDREY: We just had one here in Portland last week. We're doing it a quarterly thing but I'm also really open to bringing it elsewhere like a place to host and some sponsorship that they can throw at that and people that want to take this. CHARLES: That'll be awesome. Maybe we can have you in Austin. AUDREY: [inaudible]. CHARLES: Thank you, Joe. Thank you, Audrey for coming on the show. AUDREY: Thanks. CHARLES: It was really great to talk to you. It's great to talk about your history in open source and the things that you're doing in the community, especially the insights that you have around running sustainable open source projects. Also, thank you for talking to us about Open Source Bridge which is, I understand coming up right around the corner. If you want you can go to our podcast page and there will be a link to get $50 off if you enter in the discount code 'PODCAST.' That's $50 off of your open source bridge ticket. Be sure to go check it out. That's it for today, from The Frontside. If you're interested in hiring us, we do have availability starting in July so reach out to us. All right, everybody. Take care.

This week on TALK! with AUDREY: You’ve probably heard of hypertension or high blood pressure, but may not fully understand what it is or the risks it poses. To help us get to the heart of the matter, so to speak, DR. ANA STANKOVIC, a board certified nephrologist and medical director of nephrology at Parkland Medical Center in Derry, N.H. is my guest.

This week on TALK! with AUDREY: You’ve probably heard of hypertension or high blood pressure, but may not fully understand what it is or the risks it poses. To help us get to the heart of the matter, so to speak, DR. ANA STANKOVIC, a board certified nephrologist and medical director of nephrology at Parkland Medical Center in Derry, N.H. is my guest.

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Audrey MacLean Co-Founder & VP, Network Equipment Technologies; Co-founder & CEO, Adaptive Date: July 30, 2008 Audrey MacLean: Network Equipment Technologies Lucy Sanders: Hi. This is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, or NCWIT, and this is one of a series of interviews that we're doing with IT entrepreneurs, people who have fabulous advice about starting companies. With me, I have Larry Nelson from w3w3.com. Hi, Larry. Larry Nelson: Hi. I'm happy to be here, of course. Lucy: Why don't you tell us a bit about w3w3. Larry: We're an Internet based all business radio show. Our focus is high tech, which is why we are here. Lucy: Well, wonderful. Also, Lee Kennedy, an NCWIT director and a serial entrepreneur and also co founder of Tricalyx. Hi, Lee. Lee Kennedy: Hi. Thanks for having me today. Lucy: Welcome. Today, we're really fortunate to have Audrey MacLean as our interviewee and I can't say enough about her by way of introduction. Audrey, you have such a reputation for helping entrepreneurs for mentoring them. I know you're going to have a lot of great advice for our listeners today. But, you have such a great track record. You're a founder of the Network Equipment Technologies and also Adaptive. And, you're an independent investor and also a consulting associate professor at Stanford University where you deal with ethic entrepreneurship. So, there's a lot to say and I think we just want to jump right into the interview. So, welcome. Audrey MacLean: Thank you. Happy to be here. Lucy: We like to start our interview series with a question about technology and really pick your brain about the up and coming technologies. And somebody, such as yourself, you work with a lot of entrepreneurs so you see a lot. I'm very curious to know what you think are the emerging technologies and how they're going to shape the landscape. Audrey: Well, as you mentioned, in terms of my own personal background, I cut my teeth in the industry in the networking field; in ET, Adaptive and a lot of other companies that I've participated in the growth of. So, as a network bigot, if you will, I continue to believe that some of the most exciting innovation we're going to see across, at least the next decade or two, has everything to do with the Internet and mobile technologies. Having said that, I think there's going to be a lot happening on the clean tech and the med tech front as well that is going to change lives. Lucy: Well, and I happen to be a network bigot myself. Lee: Yes, you are. Lucy: So, we really like that answer. Say a bit about clean tech if you will. What are you seeing there? Audrey: I see a broad spectrum of applications emerging, literally, every quarter over at Stanford. There's the obvious big things with the big entrenched utilities and the search for alternative sources of energy. But, there's all kinds of little opportunities as well that I think you would find just as amazing. We've had companies that are building LED lanterns for applications in India. I think that the clean tech front is one of the most exciting places that I'm seeing my students have interesting new innovations in. Lucy: Wow. Larry: That really is a hot topic here, excuse the expression. Lee: Oh, stop. Larry: OK. I'd better stop. Lee: Well, Colorado is really into some of these things as well. Lucy: So Audrey, it's clear from looking at your background that you've been an entrepreneur and worked with entrepreneurs for years. What is it about entrepreneurship that you love? Audrey: Everything. I assume you wanted a more complete response to that. First of all, I tell my students all the time, it is an extreme sport. I've been on the faculty of Stanford engineering school now since '94 and I've made sure that my students understand that it is not for everyone. It is one of the most demanding feats that anyone can undertake. So, it's to be - proceed with caution. Let's put it that way. But, in terms of what attracts me to entrepreneurship, and I have to say to begin with, that I'm sort of an accidental entrepreneur. I didn't set out thinking, "oh, I want to be an entrepreneur." In fact, people didn't talk about it much when I began. It's just that I had been working for 10 years at a company called Time Net in the packet switching field and came upon an opportunity that was so compelling that I had to quit my job and go do it. I think that's at the heart of what makes me tick as an entrepreneur. It's that you want to solve problems that need to be solved and when you do, you want to turn them into reality. It's that process that's exciting and it's that process that got me excited as an entrepreneur. And it's that same process that keeps me excited about working with a new generation of entrepreneurs to help them realize their dreams. The fact is that to be an entrepreneur, you have to be able to see things the way they could be versus the way they are and you have to believe that if you can see it, you can make it happen and then you have to inspire others to want to do it with you because it always takes a team. So for me, personally, I'm always in search of how things can be improved and I love the process of creating something out of nothing. And truthfully, I'm happiest when I'm collaborating with others to materialize real results and I never give up. So for me, entrepreneurship is a natural habitat. But, I'm not sure that that's true for everyone. Larry: You just mentioned the word "inspired." Along the way, who might be somebody that had a major impact in your direction, maybe had been a mentor to you, a special adviser? Audrey: Again, you have to consider the time frame in which my career began. I didn't really have a specific mentor. I was certainly influenced by lots of entrepreneurs early on in Silicon Valley particularly those that cared as passionately about the corporate culture they were creating as they did about the product innovations that they were bringing to market. There were - I don't know; Bob Noyce, Ken Oshman, Jimmy Treybig - people like that that were inspirations to me. But, my primary source of encouragement and support was my husband, Mike. Lucy: Well, and we know that spouses play a large role in the success of an entrepreneur for sure. Larry: That's a fact. Lucy: And that's a fact. And that's a fact. So, you mentioned building corporate culture which I found very interesting along with the products or the services and that being an important byproduct of entrepreneurship. Often, good corporate cultures will help you weather the bad times, weather the hard decisions. Maybe you could share with our listeners what the toughest thing you've ever had to do in your career was. Audrey: On an umbrella level, by far the toughest thing that I've had to do in my career is keep my family life and my role as an entrepreneurial CEO in balance. I obviously was totally committed and completely professionally driven. But, when I look back on my career and I look at N.E.T., and Adaptive, and Peace, and Pure, and all the companies we've built and all the jobs we've created and all the market value achieved, the truth for me is that when I look back at my life, those things are in the top ten. But, the top three are still my husband, our kids and our family. So, I think that the overall balance is the most important thing. In terms of specifics, career things, I think the merger of Adaptive into N.E.T. was a very challenging transition in that Adaptive had built a very exciting corporate culture where the entire team was very bonded and the extended families of the employees themselves were very connected to the company. We had done that consciously in many ways and it was to support employees in a start up who have to put forward such enormous efforts. We wanted their families to be participants. For example, we gave New Baby stock to anybody whose spouse or themselves gave birth to a child while we were growing the company. Things like that and obvious activities at the company brought families in and engaged them directly. So when we were ultimately merging Adaptive into N.E.T., there was going to be a huge cultural change as Adaptive that had 150 people and had won back to back product of the year awards and everybody was totally on the same page in terms of goals and directions and culture. Suddenly they had to merge into a much larger entity and make that transition. I think that was probably one of the more challenging points in my personal career. But again, I think that the way you get through those things is by being completely clear on the objectives and completely direct and open with your employees. And ultimately, I think that reality drives a situation like that and you simply help people navigate it. Interviewer: Well you mentioned corporate culture as a way to help employees bring balance to their lives. This is something we don't often hear from the people we interview. We hear, you know, many wonderful things around hobbies or personal things that they do. I'd like to just follow up about a few other things that Adaptive may have done in this area in addition to the New Baby stock because this is such an important issue and we just keep seeing the same corporate cultures over and over again. Audrey: You know, it's taken a lot of different forms in a lot of different companies. But, I think first off you have to celebrate successes. That could be bringing in a vat of ice cream on a software build or it could be a massive party to celebrate a first customer shift. But, you need to celebrate successes. But on a daily basis, you need to do things as well. So for example, one of the things we did at Adaptive was if you were there in the evening, you had two corporate accounts from local restaurants that you could call up and order dinner. In practice, what ended up happening was someone would start walking around and seeing who was still working and say, oh, you like the garlic eggplant, and you like this, and order up a pile of food. People would end up in conference rooms all over the company eating dinner together and talking about what they were working on. Not surprisingly, they would end up solving different problems. "Oh, I didn't realize you were doing that. We've already done this piece." So, this bonding and this nurturing where you're saying, hey, if you're still working and it's time to eat a meal, we're going to make sure you get it as opposed to having to leave and drive somewhere and spend your time and money doing it. So, those sorts of things if you look at companies like Google today, they've taken it to the next step where they've got a cafeteria where employees at any point can go down and get a nutritious meal at breakfast, or at lunch, or at dinner. The idea simply is that if your employees are working that hard, you want to make sure that they're being nourished, as well as nurtured. So, I jokingly say feed them. Literally, feed them. So, those sorts of things are important. But then, it's also the little practical ways in which it infiltrates the culture. I remember one time my C.F.O. at Adaptive came into my office with a look of worry on his face and said, "I've got a problem." And, I said, "what's that?" He said, "Well, you and I have that 3:00 meeting in 20 minutes and I just got a call from the nanny saying her car broke down and she can't go pick up Tyler, his son, at preschool." And I said, "who else is in the meeting?" And he said, "just you and me". I said, "OK, so it's not a problem. We'll get in the car. I'll drive. You go over the material with me. We'll pick up Tyler, bring him to the nanny, and we'll be back in time for our next meeting. And, he looked at me and said, "I never would have thought of that." It's that type of thing. It's giving people the permission to think about what needs to be done that will make their life support the incredible task you're trying to undertake with a startup company. Lucy: I love it. It's the practical advise. So many companies will feed their employees if they're working late, but it's those little things like picking up the kid from school because the nanny's car broke down. Larry: Yeah. Audrey: Exactly. Lucy: So, Audrey it's clear you've had all kinds of successes, and I'm sure there's some failures along the way, but everything from building companies, merging companies, culture. If you were sitting here with a young person, what tidbits would you pull from your background to just give them the pearls of wisdom? Audrey: Well, it's interesting that you refer to it as "pearls of wisdom," because I obviously have been on the teaching faculty now since 1994. So, I frequently get asked for advice, and I frequently respond by saying, "I don't necessarily want to dole out advice, but I'm happy to share some used wisdom." Lucy: That's great. Audrey: I think that one of the pieces of used wisdom, apart from what we talked about earlier which is, "This is an extreme sport, and it's not for everyone." But if it is for you, and you really are going to go for it, one of the important things to realize is you can't do it alone. You need to create a team. One of the most important decisions you'll make are who to trust. It's extremely important that you choose your partners and your advisors wisely. So, I think that that's probably one of the most valuable pieces of used wisdom or advice that I can leave people with, which is that you need to put the team together. You need to be sure that the label of integrity and commitment is there across the board, and then you need to strap on the ski boots and get your knees forward in these boots. Larry: You've already achieved a great deal. You have lots of interests from clean tech, to just a variety of different topics that you're involved with. What do you see on the horizon next for you? Audrey: As you know, I got off the court and onto the coaching bench over a decade ago now, but I can tell you there are more exciting things happening right now that I'm involved with then at any other point in my career. The number of young entrepreneurs that I'm working with right now, and the potential for innovation that will help change the way we will live on this planet is greater today, then it was certainly at the beginning of the last century. I have tremendous faith in the future that this new generation of entrepreneurs can create. I will do exactly what I have done, which is to continue to work in support of the realization of their dreams. I don't give up, so I expect to be doing this for a long time to come. Larry: Well, they say, "Persistence is omnipotent." Audrey: Well, certainly tenacity is a fundamental tenant of any entrepreneurial endeavor. Lucy: Well, it's very heartening to know that you're out there coaching these young entrepreneurs. I can't imagine a better coach, a better person to pass along their wisdom. It's really inspirational. I know that Kristin McDonald was just, "Oh! One of my advisors is Audrey." I'm sure that she's one of many, who really depend on your experiences. So, I know that they would all be sitting here saying, "Thank you, Audrey." Audrey: Well, like I said it takes a team, so I'm happy to be on their team. Lucy: Well, thanks so much for sitting down with us for a few minutes and talking about entrepreneurship. We really do appreciate it. We want to remind listeners where they can find these interviews. They can find them at w3w3.com, and also at NCWIT.org. So, thank you Audrey. We really appreciate it. Larry: Thank you very much. Lucy: I want to say that I have now learned a new phrase that "Entrepreneurism is an extreme sport." Woman 1: Don't you love it? It's so appropriate. Lucy: I love it. So, thank you for that too. Audrey: You're welcome, and thank you for keeping and spreading the word. Transcription by CastingWords Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Audrey MacLeanInterview Summary: Audrey MacLean has a unique track record for entrepreneurial success as a founder, CEO, seed investor, and board member. Release Date: July 30, 2008Interview Subject: Audrey MacLeanInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 18:35