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How did Morning Brew go from zero to 1.8 million email subscribers in just two years? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Morning Brew Senior Product Lead Tyler Denk shares the story of how he and and the small founding team at Morning Brew grew the scrappy email startup into the darling of the email newsletter world. Tyler shares details on Morning Brew's referral program, which was responsible for the bulk of the newsletter's early growth, as well as his thoughts on why quality content is the single most important factor driving the company's success. Learn what worked for Morning Brew in the past, what they're doing now, and what they plan to focus on in the future as they launch new newsletter products and continue to grow their flagship brand. Highlights from my conversation with Tyler include: Morning Brew launched two years ago as a daily business newsletter that had the goal of making business news engaging and enjoyable to read. Since then the business has expanded to include additional newsletters such as Emerging Tech Brew, Retail Brew and The Turnout, as well as the Business Casual podcast. The company is currently undergoing the transition from a single daily business newsletter to a media company. None of the company's founders came from a journalism or business background, so they intuitively took a very unconventional approach to the newsletter business. Morning Brew is 100% ad funded, but all ads are in the form of native content that is created by the Morning Brew team, not the advertisers. Morning Brew is very picky about the writers it hires. They look for people who understand business and finance but also have a strong sense of humor. When it comes to design, Morning Brew's goal is to have a newsletter that is aesthetically pleasing but that doesn't have design that takes away from the content. Like every email newsletter, Morning Brew relies upon tracking pixels to see if readers are opening the email newsletter, but because so many people have images turned off by default in their email clients, they need to incentivize them to turn images on in order to get those analytics. They do this by optimizing the image ALT text. One of the biggest things that has driven Morning Brew's growth is its referral program. Every Morning Brew newsletter has a sharing section at the bottom that tells the reader how many referrals they need to get before they qualify to receive an award, and provides the reader with a unique referral link. Readers are incentivized to share in a variety of ways, from SWAG to winning free trips, laptops and more. Morning Brew uses double opt ins to ensure that the new email addresses for subscribers are valid before awarding referral points to readers. Recently, they've supplemented the referral program with paid advertising and the team tracks their cost per acquisition closely. Resources from this episode: Visit the Morning Brew website to subscribe Email Tyler at tyler[at]morningbrew[dot]com Follow Tyler on Twitter Check out Tyler's Medium article on How Morning Brew’s referral program built an audience of 1.5 million subscribers Listen to the podcast to learn how the team at Morning Brew grew the subscriber base for their email newsletter to 1.8 million -- and what you can do to get more email subscribers, too. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Tyler Denk, who is the Senior Product Lead at Morning Brew. Welcome, Tyler. Tyler Denk (Guest): Hey, thanks for having me. Tyler and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I am really excited to have you because I have spent quite a bit of time in the last couple of years studying what makes a great email newsletter, and a lot of that time was spent looking really closely at Morning Brew, which we can talk about in a minute. But before we jump into our topic for today, can you tell my audience a little bit about yourself, about Morning Brew and how you wound up doing what you do today? About Tyler Denk and Morning Brew Tyler: Yeah, sure. I don't know where to start when we... I might need to start with myself. Kathleen: Yes, that would be great. Tyler: Throughout being in Baltimore, Maryland, I was friendly with one of the co-founders of Morning Brew, so that alludes to how I got involved with Morning Brew. Eventually, I'll fast forward, went to the university of Maryland, did mechanical engineering. I taught myself how to code while in college and me and a few buddies came up with a concept for some web application startup company that we did in college. Essentially it was to help entrepreneurs and startups connect to other software developers. The problem we had was we couldn't code ourselves, ran into the problem getting to build the website. We needed to learn how to code. So that's what forced us into teaching ourselves how to code. We built that website, and running that company while in college was a tremendous experience and that's what got me involved in like the entrepreneurship startup software world. Fast forward a little bit from there, that we ended up eventually shutting down, but Alston, who is one of the co-founders from Morning Brew -- at the time there was just three people, they just graduated college -- were going full time with Morning Brew and they needed some tech help. They asked if I could freelance on the side before I started a full time job. Pretty much all summer spent building the website and working on Morning Brew and eventually that led to a full time offer. So I've been in Morning Brew pretty much from the beginning since when they went full time with it, two and a half, three years ago, and initially joined as a growth engineer and the first like, tech product growth hire essentially in that kind of world. Kathleen: I love so much about this story, but before I ask all these questions that I have in my head, I did not realize that we had the Maryland connection. Because I am in Annapolis right now, went to college in Baltimore. So we'll have a whole separate conversation about that after I turn off the recording so that we don't force everyone to listen to the Maryland conversation. And that's awesome. I love that you guys were basically a bunch of young guys who hadn't worked for years in the corporate world. The Morning Brew story Kathleen: Tell the audience a little bit about what Morning Brew is and what makes it different than other newsletters? Because I think that's important to this. Tyler: Yeah. So what Morning Brew started off as is a daily business newsletter that makes business news engaging and enjoyable to read. What the co-founders found at the time, they were both University of Michigan students in the business school there, that typically the resources that the students were using were The Wall Street Journal and a bunch of incumbent traditional media companies. They created a lot of content, but as far as our demographic goes, like a younger 18 to 34-year-old millennial, new in the workforce, it wasn't the most engaging content. So they started off by creating this daily email newsletter. Since then it has expanded beyond just a single daily newsletter. We have a few other verticals. We have Emerging Tech Brew, which is all of the emerging tech. Retail Brew covers the retail industry obviously, and then The Turnout, which is a politics and business intersection newsletter. And then from there we've also launched a podcast Business Casual, which is a weekly, interview-focused podcast of like CEOs, founders, et cetera. So we're currently undergoing the transition from single daily business newsletter to a media company, and that's been exciting to be a part of. Kathleen: I love that story so much because I think what's so fascinating to me is that email newsletters have been around for a really long time. And I think a lot of marketers when they think email newsletter, they think boring. And I've always believed that one of the reasons email newsletters became so boring is because they became a little bit too easy to do "well" from like a formatting standpoint. There's tools like MailChimp and Constant Contact and MyEmma that have given the average person templates and things that that made it really simple to send out a nicely formatted newsletter, but unfortunately what that resulted in was a lot of sameness and a lot of people just spitting out these newsletters that were, "Here's the latest four blogs we wrote." Really, really, really boring, check the box kind of stuff. And so I think when I hear you talk about you guys coming right out of school and creating this, in some ways it makes all the sense in the world to me because I think it almost takes a group of people who haven't been steeped in the way it's always been done to recognize that the way it's always been done sucks. Tyler: Yeah. Well, there's a few things there. I think email actually is very hard, in a lot of senses, especially aesthetically. So you mentioned how terrible email newsletters traditionally look. There's a lot of limitations to like what you can do in email. Like you can't have video, you can't make it look... I think Morning Brew does a good job of making it as good looking as an email can, but it is very difficult to play with and there are a lot of limitations there. So when people got used to digesting and consuming content online, the flexibility on the web is so much beyond what you can do in email. So I think that's one reason why at least aesthetically email doesn't live up to living content online. But then the other thing you hit on I think is really important, but a lot of these media companies monetize online through banner advertisements, and people display ads, and so their email newsletters were really just a drip of links to drive you back to their website, which if you are in your inbox and trying to consume content, that's not an ideal experience. That's an angle we took. We are very unconventional. I think you hit it pretty much on the head where when we started off there were two founders who did not have a media background. Our first writer was not a journalist by trade and so we never really did things how they were traditionally done. We were challenging the status quo from the get go. We didn't monetize. We still don't have internet on our website. Our website's not monetized at all. Right now, even though we are 100% ad-based, which we're looking to change, all of our advertisements are natively created in-house and put right within the newsletter. So that just flips the traditional media model on its head and we're just email first and have been hyper-focused on that. And I think that's just led to like a pretty interesting product. Morning Brew's growth Kathleen: Yeah, I have like a thousand questions I want to ask, but I want to make sure that we do some table setting for people listening, especially if they're not familiar with Morning Brew. So tell me when exactly did they start the newsletter? Tyler: So they started as two undergrad students at University of Michigan in 2015. One, Alex Lieberman, the CEO, he's a few years older than Austin, so he graduated and worked a full time job at a trading desk for two years while Austin was still at school. And then when Austin graduated, Alex quit, Austin moved to New York and they went full time with it, I would say March, 2017. Kathleen: Wow. So that was like what, two and a half years ago, not that long ago. And how many subscribers does Morning Brew have today? Tyler: Right now on our daily newsletter, we have 1.8 million subscribers. What makes Morning Brew special Kathleen: That's insane. So if you're listening and you have a newsletter, think about how many subscribers you've added in the last two and a half years. And I'm betting it's nowhere near almost 2 million. Like I said, I've been following you guys for a long time. You've published some really good content on how you grew Morning Brew, and the thing that I love about what you've said, and it's something I strongly believe, is that all of this growth, you can have the best growth hacks in the world, you can be an awesome marketer, but... and this applies really to marketing anything. If the product stinks, it's not going to work. Right? And so I'd love to just start out by talking about the product itself and what makes the Morning Brew email special and so appealing to the people who read it. Tyler: Yeah. I think it really starts and ends and all the credit goes to the content team. The writers that we have on staff here are incredible. They have a certain sense of like wit and humor where they can combine that aspect of writing and creativity with also like a deep understanding of what's important in the world, what is this news is actually relevant to our demographic and generation and so be able to fully understand the business landscape, take the top five, six, seven stories any given day and then throw some creative like whoever, what do you spin on the story to make it interesting and engaging for people to read? I think it's like the total package, and I know that's something that we focus on, so that's not my thing, my domain on the content side of things, but it has been a struggle to hire for, just given that there are a lot of very funny, clever people that don't have any sense of the business world and like economics, finance and everything in that realm. And then there's obviously the inverse of that of people who are super well-versed in finance and business but don't have the creativity to take these different stories and news topics and turn them into something extremely funny and engaging. So I think we've done a great job recruiting and hiring people who are extremely talented and smart. And the product itself shows when you read it. The importance of great content Kathleen: Yeah, it really does. There's a very distinct tone of voice and it's very consistent. And you touched on that earlier and I found this out because I actually reached out months back about advertising. And one of the things that I talked with, I don't remember who I spoke with, but whoever that was, we talked about how when you work with advertisers, you establish what the objective is. Is it brand awareness, is it lead gen, what have you. And then the advertiser supplies information, content, et cetera. But really your team in-house creates whatever is going in the newsletter. You're not like, copying and pasting stuff that an advertiser is giving you. And it seems like that allows you to really create native ads that are going to appeal to your audience. Because if they're subscribing, they already like that tone. So can you talk a little bit about that? Tyler: Yeah, for sure. So right now our ad and copywriting team is growing like wildfire. We have two in-house creative copywriters right now, hiring two more that are joining in the next few weeks. Essentially, that is one of our value props to advertisers and partners, that you give all of the key messaging points and initiatives that you want to be promoted and our internal creative team that works separately from the content team, so we do have a separation between content and the advertising and copywriting, but they're trained in the same manner to have that same type of wit and creativity on the copy with the advertisement. And so that's something even when I first started reading several years ago, that it was hard to differentiate just because it's written with the same tone, like the difference between a story and an advertisement, the wit and the creative thoughts put into the pieces are very similar. Obviously there are disclaimers. That one is an advertisement and the rest are stories, but outside of that if you were to read them blind, they do blend into each other pretty well, which is great for advertisements as they get incredible performance and engagement with all the ads that we create. And it also doesn't seem out of place in the newsletter itself, where we have this pretty consistent on invoice and then advertisement that's either like a disgusting banner ad or something that just seems very out of place. So it's all kind of one cohesive product. Kathleen: It really makes all the sense in the world just intuitively because you guys know your audience better than any advertiser ever could. So to think as an advertiser that you could do a better job of really resonating with that audiences is a pretty audacious thing. So it's pretty logical, but it's interesting to me how few companies do that, that really create the content for their advertisers. That seems like an interesting differentiator. Morning Brew's email newsletter design Kathleen: The other thing I wanted to ask you about before we get into like all the growth strategies, is just the aesthetics and you mentioned this also about how when you're creating content on the web you have a lot more in terms of options for how you aesthetically design something. But with email there are a lot of limitations. This something that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, again, because I think that there is a ton of sameness, especially with emails, where due to the proliferation of templates, a lot of them are like picture to the left top, each of the right link or something along those lines or picture, copy, link, picture, copy, link. And what I found is that a lot of email newsletters gratuitously include visuals that don't add any value like stock photography and things like that because either they think they have to or they somehow think that people want to see a more highly designed product. And what I've noticed, at least in my own case, is that when I open my email client and I use Outlook and Gmail, one personally, one for work, all of my email clients are set by default to not show images. So you open it up and all of those things people are adding in thinking this is going to make the experience better, they're not showing anyway. You have created a very minimalist experience that still has design elements but they seem to be more intentional. So what is the strategy behind that? Tyler: Yeah, I guess it starts with the template itself. So we don't use like the drag and drop that you see in most email service providers. We have like, a custom HTML template that we've like... You'd be surprised at how long it took to get to any final decision with the design of that. It went through like months of iteration of testing different colors, different themes, the different shadows which we have now. If you've been reading Morning Brew for several years, you've probably seen our newsletter template change significantly, like three different times. The most recent update that we did, I would say in the fall of 2019, so not too long ago, we went with like 3d card within the shadow type aesthetic. This is obviously all pending on what like email client you're using. Outlook is the laggard of the email world and so it's fairly ruminating. As limiting as email is, Outlook is like a decade behind every other email client, so that's very frustrating. Like we used gifs to give it in our emails as well and Outlook does not provide the functionality to play gifs, just as one example. But yeah, initially, we designed our website last summer and we had that card 3d aesthetic with the website and to build that consistency with email product as well, we mimic that in the newsletter. What's interesting actually about a template is email isn't really supposed to have those shadows. So that wasn't really, not to get too technical, but a very hacky way to achieve that, which I think is pretty unique in newsletters and not many other newsletters I follow have a style similar to that. Yeah. Ultimately what we want to do is provide various aesthetically pleasing experiences but not something that would take away from the content. So that's just a constant battle. We have two in-house designers that are tremendous and then we obviously have a content team and the design likes to flex their muscles and build the coolest looking email product or any product that we release. The design or the content team knows what's most important at the end of the day is being able to cohesively read the content and not let the design distract from what's actually being written. So it's a lot of just like finding the right balance there. But I am very confident in our current design. I'm a huge fan of it. It's really just making sure it looks good, and now looking at every other email client. Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. That is a tough balancing act, trying to get something that's going to work across email clients. Optimizing email images Kathleen: Although I have noticed a little hack that I think you guys have used and a few other newsletters I follow have used, which is the alt text for the images or the gifs that you're putting in the emails. You can be really strategic about what you put in those and instead of like describing the image, it could be like, "Turn your images on or click if you want to see this." It's almost like you can make your image alt text a call to action to get somebody to look at it. Tyler: Yeah. There's a few reasons we do that too. The way that I'm sure we'll get into this with the growth and everything, but the main metrics that email looks at because its fairly limiting, is how many unique opens you get from your reader base. And so the way that opens are calculated is like there's like a small, like one by one image pixel placed in every email, which isn't unique to us. This is like what every single email, whether it's an email newsletter or eCommerce like Amazon or jet.com or whatever, everyone just, they place these small pixels into an email and once that image loads it like fires essentially the pixel, which is how you can calculate whether or not someone opened their or never opened the email. So people who have their images disabled like you make it impossible for us to tell if you actually open the newsletter unless you click on a link. So that initially was like a growth hacking type way. We used to have the alt texts over and just say, "Please turn on your images." One, because we think it enhances the experience because our images are actually designed to enhance the experience and go along with the content that we're creating. But it also means if you turn on your images, we can track that you're opening the newsletter and thus to tell that you're engaged. We did get some negative feedback from I guess visually impaired readers who found it offensive to say, "Please turn on your images." So I think we've moved away from that, but that was the thought process, start finish with having that as the alt texts. Kathleen: Yeah, that's definitely a trade off because the visually impaired person doesn't get any value out of, "Please turn on your images." Tyler: Right. It's still a learning experience. Morning Brew's email subscriber growth Kathleen: Yeah. All right. So switching gears over to the growth, it's been unbelievable. So when you first came on there was like 100,000 subscribers, I think. Tyler: Yeah. Yes. Around that- Kathleen: And now it's almost 2 million. Tyler: Yeah, it's been fun. Kathleen: In under two years? It's pretty unbelievable. Can you maybe like... Let's start with big picture. What were some of the key leavers that drove growth for you in that time period? Tyler: Yeah. And I'll start off by saying since about a year ago we hired new people in the growth team and I've actually moved towards the product in tech. So I don't want to say that I have done everything for growth but when you specifically reached out in the referral program is something that we are pretty well known for, which is what the article is about. That is something that I built in the early days. I just wanted to make sure we gave the proper shout out to the growth team is doing an incredible job right now. Kathleen: Absolutely. Tyler: Yeah. When I first joined, we didn't turn on paid acquisition until early 2018, so the first six to eight months when I was on the team, it was all about taking our current audience of 100,000 subscribers and seeing how we can incentivize them to share with other people. We gave away lots of awards, which have gotten better over time, but initially it was really just, "We have this subset of 100,000 readers, what can we possibly do to encourage them to share it with other people?" We were partnering with like clubs on campuses, and what we'll get to as we created this like "share with friends" section within the newsletter and on the website, that has been unbelievably effective and it really just came out of necessity. That's one big thing that I think our founders did an incredible job with, didn't raise any large venture funding. So rather than saying, "Let's raise $5 million and put it all into acquisition and just burn through money to grow," what that forced us to do is we wanted to make the product as good as possible so people would only share the newsletter if it was inherently good. And so the content team did a tremendous job of making sure that our readers were engaged and then also, instead of focusing on just burning money on Facebook and Instagram and any other growth acquisition channel, it forced us to grow organically and focus on this referral program, understanding our readers, what incentivizes them and what are the different levers and triggers we can pull to have them go from a casual reader to someone who works with their entire network. Building a subscriber referral program Kathleen: Yeah. It's a great point about having to get creative if you're not taking venture capital. I've seen a lot of newsletters that have had referral programs. I think yours has stood out because of the comprehensiveness with which you promote it, how easy you make it to use. You've written an article on Medium about this that has a lot of detail that I thought was really interesting because I think the concept of creating a referral program for your newsletter is, it's appealing, but the actual execution can be pretty daunting. So can you talk about how you set that up? Tyler: Yeah, I'll skip over the technical details because those aren't too exciting to talk about. But at a very high level, every user has a unique referral. They are incentivized both in the newsletter and on the website. So we created two different hubs. The sharing and referral process is built into the product itself. So in every single day's newsletter, towards the bottom there's a Sharing section which has, and it's like customly created, depending on how many referrals you have to say you have point referrals, you are only X referrals away from the next reward, as sort of like a character and stick or whatnot to kind of incentivize you to continue to share. It then gives you a referral link which you can tap and share with your network or there's a button that says, "Click to share." And so that's really the action we want you to take. If you click on that button it takes you out of email and onto our website to your own like referral hub, is what we call it. And obviously, as we've discussed, the flexibility on web is a lot more advanced than within email. So once you get to that hub on our website, you have all of the rewards and their programs like listed out for you, and that's the incentive part. We have several levers in terms of you can share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, SMS, whatever, and buttons to do all of that. And then it even has an invite people via email feature. So you can import your contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and then send emails just by tapping on your contacts, which we already have a pre-written blurb. You can customize that if you'd like. And all of those different levers include your referral link. And so really it's a combination of educating readers that the referral program exists, incentivizing them with the different rewards that we have, and then providing all the tools that people have asked for, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or email, and making it as streamlined and easy as possible to get their referral code out into the world. Kathleen: Yeah, I feel like there's like two halves of this. One half is if somebody decided to refer, making it super, super easy. And I love that you guys have so many options for like hitting a button and sharing it or importing your contacts or... You've basically given every possible option somebody could want, you have a solution for it. But the other half of that equation is getting somebody to want to do a referral in the first place, because most people with most newsletters you see a lot which is like forward to a friend or share with a friend but no one ever clicks those. The thing I've noticed about Morning Brew is really two-fold. One is you have done a great job of having that module at the end of the newsletter and that makes it really visual. You always can see like what are the things I'm going to get if I hit this button, which is very effective. And then you mentioned those periodic give-aways. True confession, that is totally what got me to refer for the first time. I think you had one, it was a while back. I think it was when you were doing the giveaway of a trip to Singapore and I was like, "What the hell? You never know." Tyler: We were still working that way with the guy who won that. They are going on a honeymoon I think in a few weeks. Kathleen: Oh that's amazing. Yeah. I never won anything but I was like, "I'm going to post this link to Facebook and have three people sign up. I'll get entered and can't hurt." Right? So I'm somebody who never ever does those things and it got me to do it. So it was definitely that. Tyler: There's a few things there. One, it starts to end with the product itself because we are content and we're written in a certain voice and tone, we are supposed to be your best friend in email. So something about what the content team does really well is making you feel as if we are like, we kind of know each and that brand affinity that we've created is probably our biggest asset. If you can have all these different types of rewards, but if you don't really align with the brand itself, I'm not incentivized to wear a shirt or have a coffee mug of a company I really don't care for. So it really starts with the content and just creating something that people can align with. So that is definitely first and foremost. Beyond that... Yeah, the goal is to get people to their first referral because 90% of people don't ever share. And I think that's just like the nature of most people aren't trying to be that annoying brand advocate that is posting in every group chat and on LinkedIn about this different service or product or whatever. And so I think it's hard to get someone to make that commitment to initially share the newsletter. So that is ultimately the hardest thing we do, is taking someone from zero to one. Once you get someone to a single referral, it confirms a lot of different things. It shows that they know that it verifies that they know it exists. So they are fully aware that you have a referral program, which before they ever shared, you don't know if they ever make it to the bottom of the newsletter or they're skipping over the different sections when you do reference that referral program. So the only way we are 100% positive you know it exists is after you have shared. It shows that they know how to share. So they have either copy and pasted it or posted on Facebook or shared on Twitter, but they have chosen their preferred action of how to share the newsletter and it confirms what they know how to, it shows that they are incentivized by the rewards because if they weren't incentivized, very few people do it out of the goodness of their heart unless they really think it would benefit a friend or family member. And then they've already received some sort of gratification. So after you share the newsletter, you receive an email saying like, "Thank you so much for sharing whatever, whatever," and acknowledging that they have taken that action. So because it confirms and verifies all of those things, the way that we can approach readers that have already shared a newsletter is entirely different than to people who have never shared. So that again is like the hardest thing that we do is just getting that very first referral and from there it becomes a lot easier to go downhill. Email nurturing for new subscribers Kathleen: Now, speaking of that first referral, I thought it was really interesting that you recognize that somebody is most likely to refer at the end of their first week of being a subscriber because that's when it's still new to them, they're excited, they're starting to see the value. So you guys introduced an email, I think it was like around day seven or eight, is that right? Tyler: Day seven. And I think we can do a better job of testing that. That was a hypothesis we'd had a while ago that two or three days seems too soon, after the novelty wears off, like two or three weeks, it seems like you may have missed the bright spot of where they're most likely to share the new newsletter. We've set upon seven days, we've done some tests around that and previously it has confirmed that seven worked best for us. But I think we can always go back and reevaluate that. We can also get a little bit more creative with it and rather than being set days on your first seven days, you may only open one newsletter, you may open all six newsletters, maybe we do it based on how many emails were opened rather than a set period of time. But yeah, we've been testing that one day email and there's just so many things you can do there. Where that is initially, we have a small section at the bottom of the newsletter that introduces the share off section and tries to encourage people to share. This email is the only, I guess, it's put spam email that we really send kind of unsolicited, but the value is clearly there because a lot of people do acknowledge it, take the action, start to share the newsletter. So the ROI of the email is 100% worth the 1% of people who get annoyed that it's a bit spammy, but it also is just a full email dedicated to our referral program, what they can get out of it and the different rewards, incentives and everything else. Kathleen: Now, one of the dangers of having a referral program, especially when you're trying to get new email addresses, is people can give you a lot of garbage. 123@abc.com, don't email me@stop.com. I've seen like every iteration of clever fake email, so how do you guys deal with that? Tyler: Yeah. Up until two years ago we didn't really do much with that. We just trusted that people were genuine, nice people, which is not always. Kathleen: Sadly the world is full of people who cheat. How Morning Brew approaches email list hygiene Tyler: Yeah. Once we started to put more investment into our rewards and they were actually like higher quality shirts and nice pull necks, et cetera, we put into place like a double opt-in type thing, which is pretty common. A lot of emails, whether you are signing up like an eCommerce platform or a newsletter, a lot of them require you to double authentic from your email. So basically if I were to share my referral with you, you sign up, you actually aren't on the email list and I don't receive credit until you check your email and confirm that that email does exist. Once you do that, then you're added to our normal daily lists where you'll receive the email regularly. I'll receive credit and that's how that process looks. There are still people who use like temporary emails or disposable emails. They'll play with the period with their email. There's a bunch of different tricks you can do, but me personally, I get email alerts every time someone hits a milestone and it lists out every email that they've referred. And so it's very easy to identify patterns of people trying to play with the system and we have a list of 700 fake emails that we check against before you put it in. And that list grows every day by every person who tries to hit the system. So our like defense mechanisms I guess are constantly getting better and no one gets through the system now, which is good. You might- Kathleen: That sounds good. Tyler: ... [crosstalk 00:32:37] momentarily but we'll catch you, bump your referral count back down to zero and we will add those fake emails to the list of forbidden emails. Kathleen: Yeah. I imagine that the double opt-in process results in some real people deciding not to follow through and so it probably like has lowered your conversion a little bit. But did that hit you took... was that made up for by the improvement in the quality of the subscribers you got? Tyler: Yeah. It was definitely a trade off. I think when I first joined we were just growing at all costs, especially when we started using paid acquisition and any bit of friction to joining the list was 100% against what we wanted to do at the time. So it was a trade off adding a double opt-in. What we've seen is the conversion rate is like over 85% I believe the last time I checked. So it is very high. And then one thing I actually wanted to bring up earlier in terms of consumers and subscribers or whatnot is the focus that we've placed on quality over just the vanity metric of total subscribers. We actually have over 4 million emails, but we've turned over 2 million, just because there's a lot of either competitors or companies that would boast about their top line subscriber number, which sounds great for a newsletter article or something online, but in actuality, if someone hasn't opened in six months, there's absolutely no value for them to be on your list and without completely nerding out on email, it actually makes your email harder to be delivered to the inbox because believe it or not, Gmail is very smart. And so when they know that you have a 50% open rate, they're going to send more of your mail directly to the primary inbox because it's something that people clearly want. If they see your open rate is 5%, they're going to send more of your mail to spam because obviously not many people want it. So it's like a virtuous cycle and it works against you if you have people on your list that aren't opening. So we have very strict turning practices. So that's a very long winded way of answering your question of, yes, it has lowered the absolute conversion rate but it does ensure higher quality and at the end of the day that's what we're looking for. Kathleen: Well, and I would imagine as a business that's really... the revenue model is from advertising. It's almost more important to have engaged subscribers than it is to have like a larger number of subscribers because as somebody who looks at advertising, I'm not just looking at how many subscribers you have, I'm looking at like what's your track record of clicks through to get a sense for what I can expect from a traffic perspective. So I could see where that would be really critical. What is your rule of thumb for how long you let somebody stay on the list inactive before you clean that up? Tyler: Yeah. We actually have like two different filters. One is on the... we call it like the filter, which is when you first joined the list, if you don't open in about three weeks, we send you a, "Hey, you signed up for this three weeks ago, you haven't opened any newsletters. Are you still interested?" And if you don't respond that you're interested, we will remove you within three or four days after those three weeks. And that's a little bit more uncommon I think. But we do have a fairly large paid acquisition budget, so that gets any garbage emails out really quickly if they don't start engaging from the get go. And then on the back end is what most companies, traditionally it was just like a reengagement campaign. And for us it's two months. So after 60 days, if you have not opened a newsletter or clicked anything in 60 days, we'll send an email checking-in on you. And if you don't engage with that checking-in email, then we will remove you. So we're getting rid of subscribers on the front end and in the backend. How referrals drove Morning Brew's growth Kathleen: Got it. All right. Well, I feel like we could talk about this like all day long, but I want to zero in now on what was the impact of that referral program? So you've grown considerably. You mentioned that you started including paid acquisition in the mix. What portion or percentage of your total subscriber growth can you attribute to referrals? Tyler: Yeah, a lot. I think to date we've had over 250,000 people refer at least one person, and so that is individual people. Many of those people have dozens if not hundreds of referrals. So it's definitely a good chunk of our growth and it comes at a very competitive price. So for paid acquisition, it varies channel by channel, but like a new email lead should be anywhere from like $3 to $6 or potentially more. Our referral program, like let's say stickers is the reward, you get five referrals. We pay for those five referrals less than 25 cents per acquisition. So if you were to compare the cost of the acquired users through a referral program versus any of our paid acquisition channels, it's a fraction of what we pay. Also, as I'm sure you would imagine, referred users are typically pretty highly engaged because they have been double opted-in because they came from someone, whether it's a friend or coworker or family member recommending the product. And so there's just a lot of alignment in terms ending up being a highly engaged reader and people who are referred are also more likely to refer other people. So it really is this virtuous cycle of higher quality, more likely to refer. The ROI is incredible and because people are sharing on social networks, even if it doesn't lead to a direct conversion, that exposure that we're getting in like your Twitter feed or Facebook or whatever else does add impressions to people who will hopefully eventually join us. Lessons learned from Morning Brew's experience Kathleen: So two follow-on questions. First is, knowing what you know now, is there anything you would've done differently in the referral program if you could rewind the clock? Tyler: Yeah, a few things. Two stand out. One is the rewards that we came up with. We came up with on our own initially, I think, and that was before we knew the success that would be, and obviously we can and have changed the different rewards, but I would recommend with starting by talking to your users and readers or whoever and really identifying what their pain points are, what their interests are and what would really incentivize them to share the newsletter. I think just people have a hard time talking directly to their users. It almost seems like too intuitive and too easy to do, but especially in email, you're always a reply away. So responding to a few different readers and just seeing what incentivizes them, I think it really boosts the effectiveness of a referral program. The second thing is while some of the rewards are like additional content, so at three referrals you have Light Roast, which is like our exclusive Sunday newsletter, which comes at no additional cost to us, which is great in regards to ROI. The management of the swag. So we also have a lot of physical swag and so that's something we didn't really plan for. And so at one point our office was half desk, half boxes of swag, and we got a bunch of interns from NYU to come in and help out with that. We actually outsource that now, but that was a huge headache and something that as we grew pretty quickly and the referral program grew in effectiveness, we didn't really have a plan to actually store, ship, manage and be on top of this entire swag operation, which became the biggest headache that wasn't initially a part of my job. So that's something to think about in advance. The future for Morning Brew Kathleen: Yeah, those are good pieces of advice. Second question is, looking to the future, and I know you've shifted in your roles, but I'm curious if you have any sense of, given where things stand now, what does the future look like in terms of the referral program and other acquisition channels? Again, you mentioned that you guys are doing some paid acquisition. Is the referral program going to still be a part of the plan and how is it going to evolve? Tyler: Yeah, I don't foresee the referral program going anywhere anytime soon. It's been so quarter growth and it really just assists with everything else. It's a huge boost in the business in general. It's pretty mixed. We have a fairly large paid acquisition budget, which consists of everything that you'd expect from Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, buying ads on Google, Gmail and other newsletters even. But the referral program has been a huge success and I think from there, it's really just focusing on how can we continue to optimize it. So for better or worse, it is a little hands off or it can be so we can go months without touching it and it really just operates on its own. Everything is set up with automated emails. It's built into the newsletter template itself. It really does run by itself, but there's so many different triggers and parts of the funnel that you can optimize. So that one week email that we check-in on that first week that you can change the subject line. You can change the days until you receive that email. The copy itself, you can incentivize Light Roasts or stickers or you can incentivize all of the rewards and just test the different copy there. You could also throw in like a second email somewhere down the journey and then at each milestone, like when you receive stickers, we send an email asking one, for your information so we can send the stickers to you, but then also incentivizing you to hit that next milestone, which is the bottle opener at 10. So it collects information but then hopefully shuts you down the funnel. We can test each one of those milestone emails at different ways in terms of what we're incentivizing you with, what's the language we're using, what's the subject line? So there's like an infinite amount of levers we can pull with that. It really just becomes an opportunity cost of just 1% here and 1% there add up to hundreds or thousands of new subscribers per day or per week or is it fairly maxed out under other levers that we can spend our time pulling? Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. All right, well we're going to shift gears now because if we don't, we're going to run out of time. So there's two questions that I always ask all my guests and I would love to get your answers to these. The first is really this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound? Tyler: Yeah, to be honest, I struggled with this question. Kathleen: Oh wait, why did you struggle? Because you don't think that anybody's doing it well or- Tyler: Not that, but I feel like it's such an integral strategy for so many different companies and the thing is like the better you are at it, the harder it is to tell that it's a part of like this larger ecosystem strategy, and so everything kind of blends together in terms of like a content strategy, but really it's a top of funnel inbound approach to have you go down funnel and make a purchase or join whatever it is. And I think most modern companies focus so much on doing both that it just becomes really hard to tell where you are in the funnel and what their actual true incentive is. Although usually it's always just to get into your wallet and have you pack your things. What helped me actually on our podcast, Business Casual, we just recently interviewed Gary Vaynerchuk or Gary Vee, how a lot of people refer to him. I personally am not a huge fan of the content, but in listening to the episode, I actually did think he made a lot of very creative, also in terms of he produces so much different content natively on all these different social platforms and explicitly does not plug his products or anything down funnel on purpose because his goal is to build an audience that trusts him and really engages with his content, knowing at some point you will make the leap if you really are aligned with what he's saying and his messaging, find the products down funnel, but he wants you to eventually get it to him. But I did think it was interesting when he was talking about how a lot of his friends and competitors in the space think that he's an idiot for not explicitly calling out his products and really using these channels that are getting millions of video views to promote products. Rather he refuses to promote his products. And it's kind of playing the long game and his inbound marketing strategy of just creating good content very consistently. So regardless of whether or not, I'm a fan of the content, I thought that his approach to that was pretty clever and pretty interesting and he seems to be doing very well. So I would find that to be pretty successful. And then another one that I just... I love Airbnb as a company and always have, but Instagram is great for a lot of brands. Airbnb is unique because everyone loves vacation, everyone loves getting away and the way that they create and post mostly on Instagram of all of these also houses and these destinations around the world. But really it incentivizes you to go onto Airbnb, look at those and then hopefully book them. I just thought that was an interesting inbound strategy. Kathleen: It's so funny that you call that out because I have totally gotten sucked in to going to the Airbnb website because I see like a picture of a tree house or something and I'm like, "Where is that tree house? That's so amazing. I want to stay there." But then I feel like I get to the site and I can never find those cool houses. It's like- Tyler: Yeah, so if you follow them on Instagram, I'm pretty sure that they tag the place or at least makes it a little easier to find. But yeah. Kathleen: Yeah, they have some awesome properties. Now, the Gary V example is great because you're right, like you don't have to be a fan of the content to appreciate the approach. And that's the thing. You talked about how Morning Brew's really becoming a media company and at some point there was a place I used to work that was making that transition to a media company. And we really looked at it as with media companies, you're building the audience first and then if you build a great audience you can worry about the product later. And there are so many examples of that done well. That's the whole business model that Gwyneth Paltrow built Goop on. It was just really a blog in the beginning and now she has a ton of products that she can charge an ungodly sum of money for and people are just eating them up because that trust is there. And so to me, that's one of the big differences between like traditional business marketing and media company marketing. Business marketing, you have the product first and then you try to build the audience. Media companies build the audience and then they introduce the product and that's like a really subtle but important difference. Tyler: Yeah. That's really great. Kathleen: Well, this has been so much fun. One last question for you. The biggest complaint I hear from digital marketers is that staying up with all the changes in the world of digital marketing is like drinking from a fire hose. So how do you stay up to date and educated for yourself? Tyler: Yeah. To be really transparent, I struggled with both these questions. I'm obviously in the newsletter space and I get a lot of information from different newsletters. Shameless plug, I think we are releasing a marketing group newsletter sometime in 2020 so that should be everyone's go-to resource when that launches. And- Kathleen: You've heard it here first. Tyler: I think I broke news here. But I'm pretty up-to-date on whether it's like different podcasts or different newsletters and there's not really just one that I stick to, my inbox gets 25, 30 different newsletters a day. Podcasts I'm way too ADHD where I just jump from anything that's recommended but a lot of them are from like the business startup culture and like founder story type podcast. And so through that I think it's just like I find like pure marketing material to be a little repetitive, where if you actually take a step back and see like some of these founders stories of how they grew their company to be very successful, a lot of the success comes from creativity and just being aware of the business environment and your surroundings. And so what I've seen, there was somewhere... Like in a random example, someone advertised in a fortune cookie at a restaurant that I was in and just something like that that I would never think about, but understanding that anything could be an advertisement. I really just think the more exposure you have very broadly to life, but like the different experiences and what different companies have done, I think you can almost turn anything into a way to share your message or to get your voice or brand in front of a select group of people. You just have to be aware of the different surroundings and what has worked for other people. So I'm not a huge fan of Facebook changed their algorithm and now marketers should shift X dollars to do this type of campaign. I'm more interested in what other companies have done in town, very successful, and something that actually makes you think to share your message. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a great point because I do think some of the marketing, educational content out there really contributes to group think. And if you're doing the same thing everybody else is doing, you might grow but you're not going to have exponential growth the way that you guys have. Tyler: [crosstalk 00:50:16] one thing that we have always been good at at Morning Brew is jumping on new platforms or new ad units when they become available. So specifically digital advertising. Anytime that a company like Facebook or LinkedIn or like for example TikTok would be the new example. Before that becomes absolutely flooded with every competitor trying ad placements there, you get a lot cheaper CPMs when you jump to it first. So rather than waiting for everyone and their mother to tell you that this has worked really well, if you hear that there's a new ad placement product or medium, being one of the first to test, it has its ups and downs, but if you're creative I think there's a lot of success to be had there. How to connect to Tyler and Morning Brew Kathleen: Love it. That's a great tip. All right. Well, we're at the top of our hour. So if somebody wants to learn more... First of all, how can somebody subscribe to Morning Brew? Because that's the most important thing. Tyler: That is the most important. So morningbrew.com, our landing page's optimized for conversion. You can't do anything but sign up. So go to morningbrew.com and sign up. Kathleen: And then refer your friends of course, because you can get really cool swag and maybe even win a trip to Singapore someday. And then if somebody has questions or wants to learn more, I will put the link to your Medium article where you go into a lot more detail on what we talked about today. I'll put that in the show notes. But if someone wants to reach out to you, is there a great way for them to connect with you online? Tyler: Yeah. So I'm also shamelessly trying to grow my Twitter audience. So I am @denk_tweets. It is my Twitter handle. So I respond to tweets. My email is easy to find. It's just tyler@morningbrew for your responses to the inbox as well. So either one of those, whichever you prefer, I'll be answering. Kathleen: And definitely head to the show notes for those links because if you try to Google Tyler, you might accidentally reach out and connect with Tyler Denk who was a model on The Amazing Race, which I found out when I first tried to Google you. Tyler: Yeah. I'm trying to beat him in SEO, so my name appears first, but I also talked to him funny enough from the SEO. Kathleen: Yeah, and so maybe you can connect with both, but if you want the Tyler Denk who's at Morning Brew, head to the show notes for the podcast and I'll have all those links in there. Follow him on Twitter, subscribe to the Morning Brew. You know what to do next... Kathleen: And if you liked what you heard or learned something new today on the podcast, please also head to Apple Podcasts and leave a five star review for the Inbound Success Podcast because that's how we get in front of new listeners. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Tyler. This was a lot of fun. Tyler: Yeah, this was great. Thanks for having me.
BE SURE TO SEE THE SHOWNOTES AND LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE. Eve Picker: [00:00:03] Hi there! Thanks so much for joining me today for the latest episode of Impact Real Estate Investing. My guest today is Janine Firpo. Janine is a writer, values-aligned investor and entrepreneur. Janine's background is fascinating. She left a career in the tech world many years ago to pursue a more meaningful work experience. This led her into the world of microfinance and philanthropy. She has consulted and lived all over the world. And now for almost 10 years, she has been on a personal mission to invest all of her assets so they create a positive impact. It's a bold move and she is all in. Be sure to go to EvePicker.com to find out more about Janine on the show notes page for this episode. And be sure to sign up for my newsletter so you can access information about impact real estate investing and get the latest news about the exciting projects on my crowdfunding platform, Small Change. Eve: [00:01:21] Hello Janine, thanks so much for joining me today. Janine Firpo: [00:01:24] It's my pleasure, Eve. Thank you so much for asking me and for being interested in what I'm doing. Eve: [00:01:30] Yeah, well, you've had a really fascinating career, starting with technology companies when they were startups, and are household names now. And you left that path to follow a very different one. But I wanted to ask you how you started your career? Janine: [00:01:45] I'd be happy to tell you. So, I actually started my career very early in 1981. It's a long time ago for many people. And I sort of fell into the computer industry, first in Louisiana, and then when I really got into it, I moved back to the Silicon Valley where I was originally from and I'm still here. And I worked in high tech for about 15 years, worked at Apple Computer in the 80s, and then also did some startup work. And then in 1995 I left a job and I did a solo backpacking trip through sub-Saharan Africa. And what was really interesting about that is when I left on my trip, I was in something called the CD-ROM and multimedia industry. And when I came back, everyone I knew was in the Internet industry. So the internet literally turned on in the four months that I was away. Eve: [00:02:37] Wow. Janine: [00:02:38] And I was perfectly positioned to get on that ride, that dot com ride. But when I was in Africa, I saw poverty like I had never seen it before. And I decided that I wanted to use my life in a way that had meaning. And so I set out on a track to figure out how could I use the skills I had, technology and business knowledge, to bring change to the levels of poverty that I was seeing in Africa. And so that launched me on then what became a twenty-year career in international development and bringing technology into Africa, Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. And while I was on that trajectory, I got involved in something called microfinance, which is making loans to poor women, primarily in developing countries around the world. And in looking at what is the role that tech could play in really scaling microfinance, it was reaching 100 million people in the world when I started, and the need was to reach two and a half billion people. That inquiry, other people were involved in it as well, led to something called 'mobile money,' which is using the cell phone as a bank for the poor. Eve: [00:03:50] I was at the Bellagio Foundation in Italy, a few years back, with someone who was writing a book about the M-Pesa. Janine: [00:03:58] Exactly! M-Pesa, which was one of the first incidences of this, it actually started in the Philippines, but M-Pesa was the example that just shot off the charts within the first year. It came out in 2007, and within its first year it had a million people using the service. And in the second year it was many more millions. And it's now serving, over 85 percent of the population of Kenya uses M-Pesa now, and it has become a de facto way to move money. And now people are getting loans over it. It's being used as a financial mechanism for all sorts of things. So, it became an amazing industry. There are now over 250 incidences in more than 90 countries around the world. Eve: [00:04:44] But it really started because people had cell phones. Right? And they needed to move money. Janine: [00:04:51] They had cell phones, well, actually the way it really started was the people behind M-Pesa was Vodacom, and they were trying to apply the cell phone technology to microfinance. And they started in 2004 with a microfinance institution in Kenya. And it just didn't work for a lot of reasons that I won't go into. But what they found that was really interesting when they were trying to help this microfinance industry scale its business was that people were using the phone just to move money back and forth. And they saw a real opportunity. So, they retrenched. They rethought everything. They set up all the infrastructure that they needed. And then in ... February of 2007, they launched M-Pesa as we know it today, which was a money transfer service. Now, super-fascinating the way it all unfolded. Eve: [00:05:40] Yeah. Janine: [00:05:41] Yeah. And then so I had this great career for 20 years. I traveled all over the world. I've been to more than 80 countries. I worked all over the world. It was amazing. I loved it, but I was also traveling 50 to 70 percent of the time for 20 years. And the industry became huge. And I was always more interested in startups and new things. And so it just became time, a couple years ago, for me to leave that. And so I retired from that career. And along with being involved in all of that, so, I was sort of a social entrepreneur before that kind of word became a thing. And because I was in the Bay Area I was involved in all of these conversations around what has ultimately become known as impact investing. I was working at Hewlett Packard in the corporate social responsibility world. So, part of just that entire conversation about the new philanthropy and different ways of using our money. And about 10 years ago, even though I am not a high net wealth individual myself, I realized I'd made the choices in my life to live and lead from a life of value, and something where I was making a difference in the world, and I realized my money was working against me. And so I decided I was going to figure out how to invest all of my own money, from my cash to my public stocks to private stuff. If I could do that to real estate, all of it, how do I invest all of that in a way that lines with my values and is supporting the world I want to see. Eve: [00:07:18] That's a pretty powerful step to take, Janine. Janine: [00:07:19] Well, it just was really in alignment with who I was. And it was because I was watching, I was going to these conferences and I was seeing these ultra-rich people and financial, you know, foundations and institutional investors doing this. And I thought, well, why can't, why can't the rest of us do this? Why is this yet another thing that's just being left to the very rich? And so I decided to try on my own. And in the 10 years I was working super hard, so I had financial advisors. They didn't get me where I wanted to go. And so when I retired a couple of years ago, I took a lot of my assets back. And I've been working on this myself. Eve: [00:08:01] Wow. Janine: [00:08:03] And I have realized that in the 20 years that I was, have been sort of watching this space, it's really evolved. And I now think we've gotten to a point where the goal of investing your money in alignment with your values is becoming mainstream. At this point, one of four dollars that are invested by institutional investors are invested in socially responsible ways. It just hasn't trickled down enough to those of us who aren't wealthy. And it shouldn't be that way, because there are now products across virtually all asset classes that you can invest in a values-aligned way, even if you're a non-accredited investor, which means even if you don't have a million dollars in net worth, you can invest this way. And so I have corralled a bunch of the brilliant women I know who are now helping me develop a book, helping people, primarily women, because we have been really left out of the financial services conversation in a lot of ways, to help them think about how to be smarter about their investing overall and how to do this in a way that aligns with their values, too. Eve: [00:09:12] That's pretty fabulous. So, just shifting gears a bit, when we talked awhile back, you mentioned that you were interested in investing in impactful real estate, the next step in this process for you. And ... Janine: [00:09:25] Yes. Eve: [00:09:25] First of all, I'm wondering why that's an interest now? Janine: [00:09:28] Because, well, I currently own real estate. So, when I was a kid, I actually learned a lot about money from my mom, and my mom when I was a really young kid, we didn't have very much money. In fact, we were kind of poor. We didn't always know where we were going to get food. We were wearing secondhand clothes. My mom was a coupon shopper. And at some point along the way, she decided that she needed to find a way to make more money. And so she got herself into real estate. She became a real estate professional. And she started learning about buying property, buying and selling property. And so she, we're talking like back in the 60s, I think, she started going to the courthouse steps and buying foreclosed property and sometimes sight unseen. She would buy them and then she would turn my sisters and I into her crew and we would go ... we were, like, this is how I spent my summers, my teen years. Ripping up carpets, refinishing carpets, painting interiors, painting exteriors, cleaning, you know, all of that. We were her crew. And then she would rent these properties out. Sometimes she'd sell them. So, I learned about real estate and I'm in the Bay Area. This is a really hot real estate market. And so I've, you know, I've learned something along the way. And ... I bought my first house when I was 30, and have purchased real estate. So, I have those assets. Now, if I am truly aligning all of my money with my values, then that has to include my real estate. And so I've gotten to the point where I've pretty much figured out a strategy for all of my other asset classes. My cash has all been moved in alignment with my values. I'm working on doing that with my public equity stuff. My fixed income is moving that way. I'm an angel investor. I only invest in socially responsible businesses and I primarily am investing in companies that are started by female CEOs, because women get less than two percent of the private equity capital in this country. So, we need to support more women founders. So, I'm doing that with a lot of my money already. It's time for me now to start shifting my focus to the real estate. So how do I get out of, so I'm starting to think about, how do I get out of single family residences, and what might have more values aligned real estate set of opportunities look like. Eve: [00:12:02] That's really interesting. I have the reverse problem, so I'm going to probably ask for your help in dealing with my other assets. Janine: [00:12:11] Happy to do that. Eve: [00:12:12] So, you've been looking. And what does real estate impact investing look like to you? What does that mean? Janine: [00:12:19] Well, that's a really good question. And I have to be honest that I'm in the early days of this journey. And so I'm just starting to learn and that's how I found you. Actually, I was out on the Web and I was kind of searching around and thinking, well, who's doing anything out there in real estate? And that's how I found you. So, I know a little bit. So, and I've invested in a little bit. So, my last job was up in Seattle working through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And when I was up there, I heard about a company, that basically what they were doing was they were buying distressed property in Seattle, and they were single family, and they were gutting a lot of these places and then rebuilding them green. And could actually tell the buyer this is what you're energy saving is as the result of buying this house. So, green is one way of thinking about this. I'm also somewhat familiar with affordable housing. And my current financial advisor actually has me in an affordable housing fund. I forget the name right now. I apologize for that. But they had me in that kind of fund. I've been aware of the whole opportunity zone set of things that are cropping up around the country. Although I've heard varied things about those opportunities. And, you know, those are basically things that I know. I also am invested, a very small amount of money, this particular deal could only take a thousand dollars from each investor. But it's a woman here in Oakland, the city that I live in, who is basically raising down payments through gathering money from many, many investors. And then she's getting loans and she's buying multi-unit properties that already have tenants, low-income tenants, and what she's doing is, she's setting up structures where these tenants, as they're paying rent, are actually in basically a buy-to-own situation. And she's turning these buildings into cooperatives that are owned by the people that live in them. So, I think there's some interesting models out there. I just don't, I only have seen a smattering of them so far. Eve: [00:14:40] Yeah, actually, I think, I just interviewed Rebecca Foster, who is also in the Bay Area on the Housing Accelerator Fund, which is a different model, they are working on raising money to preserve existing affordable housing in San Francisco. Yeah, I think there's lots of ways to make impact and you're just really scratching the surface. Right? Janine: [00:14:59] Exactly. And there's a, yeah, there's a man that I met recently through something I'm involved in who's in the real estate business out here. And he's starting to think about building his career around socially responsible real estate. So, he and I have had a couple of conversations. And one of the things that he sort of suggested to me, although I don't know that I have enough assets to do this, but he talked about wouldn't it be cool to like have a building where you could have businesses in it and and tenants in it, residential and office space combined. But really determine that you want a certain kind of business. Like create a space where these are all businesses that are run by women, or these are, you know, so ... or these are all businesses that are in this kind of vertical and they're helping each other and that particular vertical is good for the world. That was kind of an interesting thought. Eve: [00:16:02] I think a lot of people are thinking about this in many very different ways. Like, I built a portfolio of what I believe are socially responsible projects, but really starting before green was the theme. And I focused on underserved neighborhoods and blighted architecture ... Janine: [00:16:26] Right. Eve: [00:16:27] And so what I think is interesting about the real estate impact investing world is there's really 1001 ways to make an impact. You just really need to figure out what matters the most for you. Janine: [00:16:41] I totally agree. In fact, that's one of the things that I'm talking about in this book I mentioned is I am moving away from the words impact investing and socially responsible investing and all of that, because I think so many people use those words and they mean different things by them. And what I and it's, so it's hard to get a clear definition on it. And what I've found is when push comes to shove and you talk to people who are thinking about impact investing, they're usually talking about private deal flow, private debt and private equity. And I'm really interested in looking across all of your assets. So, what I've come to realize is even though I believe that if enough of us move our money this way, we can change the economy. At the end of the day this is really about our individual choices and who we think we are as people and how we want our money to reflect who we are in the world. Eve: [00:17:35] Yes. Janine: [00:17:36] Right? Eve: [00:17:37] When you take money, you use it, you spend time on it as well. So, for me, it's even more than money. It's how I spend the time around it. Janine: [00:17:47] Exactly. In fact, I realized the other day, it's, for me ... so much of this conversation about values align or impact investing, it's always the extra thing that people have to talk about. It's, like, here's your financial issues and how you invest in all of that. Oh, and then there's this impact investing thing. And I realized, particularly for women and millennials, who the vast majority of us want to invest our money this way, it's not the extra thing. It's sort of like the icing on the cake. Yeah, you can go out and you can invest your money to maximize return or whatever. But it's really kind of boring, in a way, to do, at least to me, it's like, yeh, so my money is out there and it's doing whatever and I don't even know what it's doing, and all I really care about is the return? No, I want more from my money than that. I've worked hard to get it. I care about everything I do in my life. Why wouldn't I care about what my money is doing? And when I get feedback from the people that I invest in about how my money is being used and what it's doing in the world, that makes me so insanely happy. And it's really fun to be able to talk to people about the cool stuff that my money is doing. I love it. It changes the game. Eve: [00:19:08] Are you still getting your return? Janine: [00:19:10] Oh, my God, yes! This is not about giving up return. This has never been about giving up returns. I can meet or beat the return that you that any other investment is giving. So, for example, if you look at public equities markets, so, one of the things that I'm invested in is the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index. This is like one of the things that people talk about all the time. Go into an index fund, Vanguard is really cheap, blah, blah, blah. Right? Great thing to be invested in. Eve: [00:19:41] Right. Janine: [00:19:41] But if you actually look at that from the perspective of environmental sustainability, there is a website out there called As You Sow that ranks, if you look up As You Sow 'Invest Your Values,' you will go to a page that you can say, "I care about fossil free stuff" or "I care about gender diversity" or whatever. And you can put your stock tickers into this tool and it will tell you, it'll show you a grade that that particular holding gets across all of these different variables. And it will show you how much of that fund is invested in the things you don't want it to be in it. What are those holdings? And so that stock gets a D on As You Sow. Now, I did some homework on As You Sow and I actually found another Vanguard Fund, an FTSE Social Index Fund, and other funds that not only are getting a better grade like A's and B's, but they also get better returns over a 10 to 15 year time horizon than what I'm in, that's getting a D. Eve: [00:20:54] Wow. Janine: [00:20:55] So why am I in that? Eve: [00:20:57] Yes. Janine: [00:20:57] I'm going to get out. Eve: [00:20:59] Well, I have to ask, you spent a lot of time on this, right? Janine: [00:21:02] Yes. Eve: [00:21:03] What about those who are just trying to find time in between the cracks to figure out where to put our money? Janine: [00:21:12] Right. Well, that's why I'm writing a book, because I realized that this shouldn't be this hard, and people shouldn't have to do the level of work that I've had to do to figure this out. So, the book is going to tell you how to do it. It's going to basically, what it's going to do, it's going to have three different sections, and the mid-section goes asset class by asset class and tells you this is what this asset class is, here's how it works, here's how it's generally thought about, and here's all the ways you can invest in this asset class in a values aligned way. Eve: [00:21:42] Wow. Let's go back to real estate. So, on your journey to find impact impactful real estate ... Now I'm feeling very self-conscious about the word ... What information haven't you been able to find? What's missing out there for someone who wants to figure this out? Janine: [00:22:00] There is no place that really says these, this is what this space looks like, and here's all the different kinds of deals that are available. And, you know, this is what's going on, these are the cool things that people are doing. I mean, I think that you're trying to do that through your podcast, and I applaud you. And that's it. I mean, I realize in order to figure this out, I'm going to have to go do serious homework and talk to a lot of people and see what other people are doing and then start to piece together what feels like an interesting way for me to move forward. Finding the information is super, super hard. Eve: [00:22:46] Yup, it's very hard. There's a lot of high level information that I'm aware of that I, that is really for sophisticated investors. I find it difficult to follow myself and, there is sort of an ... exclusiveness around it ... investing that I agree with use a little bit disappointing. Janine: [00:23:10] So, there are financial advisers out there who are socially focused, but they don't share information about the things that they invest their clients in. Eve: [00:23:21] Oh. Janine: [00:23:21] Because that knowledge is sort of their intellectual property. Right? So, there has been an opaqueness around this for a long time. And I feel like it's time to blow that up, too, and just make this stuff completely transparent. There's no reason why this information shouldn't be easily available and easily accessible. Eve: [00:23:43] Well that's very exciting. So, have you found anything you want to invest in real estate? Janine: [00:23:48] Not yet, because I haven't gone far enough down the path. But I will say the other thing that has intrigued me is the idea of co-living or shared housing kinds of situations. I've been intrigued by some of the things that you've had on your show and, you know, have added them to my list of possibilities. But I've been so focused on the other asset classes and just trying to get this book, bringing this book to life, that I haven't had the time to do the real homework on real estate. Eve: [00:24:24] I mean, I think if I was starting out now, I'd be making a list for myself and not expecting to check every box, you know? Certainly if I think about moving other assets, top of my list would be women-owned businesses. You know, it's just things that you, that I care about, that really matter to me that the next person, you're about something else more. Janine: [00:24:48] That's exactly right. And there is there will be a chapter on this book, in this book about private debt and revenue-based financing and private equity and how women can get involved in that. Angel groups that are women-based angel groups, and some new innovative models that are coming out to bring women in, even at relatively small value points, and online platforms that are available now if you're not accredited investors. So, there's actually tons of ways to start investing in women, in businesses and things like that for anyone. Eve: [00:25:24] So, I'm in the early, right at the beginning stage of talking to a group about a women's development fund, a fund, not a huge one, a small one that would invest in women-led real estate projects. Janine: [00:25:36] Oh, interesting. Eve: [00:25:38] It's going to take a little while to develop, but I'm very excited about that. I think it's a, you know, a very strong purpose, right? Janine: [00:25:47] Yeah, no, it's great. So, I actually have a question for you. Because I seem to remember and I may have gotten this wrong, but I seem to remember in listening to one of your podcasts at one point that you talked about the fact that people who do impact real estate investing aren't necessarily going to see the same kind of returns as people would in regular real estate deals. So, first of all, did I hear that right? And if I did, could you say more about that and why that's the case? And also, what do you think is a good return? Eve: [00:26:21] I think that's not necessarily true across all types of real estate; affordable housing is the most difficult. Janine: [00:26:30] Ah. Eve: [00:26:30] And that's because the more you return to an investor or a bank, the higher rents are going to be for the tenants. Janine: [00:26:38] Right. I get it. Eve: [00:26:39] So, if subsidy goes away as it has been, and we get a bigger and bigger and bigger need for affordable housing, which we have, this gap, ok? And if investors continue to want to be, quite frankly, a little bit greedy and expect 20 percent internal rate of return, I don't know how you build those projects and keep housing affordable if that continues. So ... Janine: [00:27:09] Yeah. Eve: [00:27:09] There are many examples of affordable housing projects we've done on Small Change that are offering quite generous returns. But they can do that because they have, they are a mixed-use project, they have new market tax credits, they have a grant from the city, they have, you know, historic tax, they do public-private financing, maxxed to be able to squeeze out the best return they can for investors. Very difficult. And so I think that's not true for all real estate, but definitely for that class of real estate. I think a lot has to happen for it to be kind of a normal market driven ... Janine: [00:27:55] That actually makes a ton of sense. I totally hear what you're saying. And I think those kinds of things in real estate and other verticals like health and education, perhaps. That not everything is going to deliver market rate returns. I mean, I think one of the fallacies and the problems that have come out of the impact investing movement, if you want to call it that, is the belief, or that's come out of our very, the way we think about capitalism, is that everything has a market ... everything can be done through the market. And that's just totally not true. There's a, there are brilliant things that can happen, like what you're talking about with affordable housing that can deliver a good return to an investor. If there is a subsidy brought in, or if there is a recognition that, you know, this business model is not going to completely wash its face, it's not going to completely be able to return what it needs to return. But there's lots of ways that you can bring in guarantees or you can bring in first tranches of money that are willing to take a greater loss. Or very interesting things you can do with a financial stack. Eve: [00:29:23] But ultimately is it right for a private investor to get a 15 to 20 percent return on a project that will only move forward if there's tons of subsidy. Kind of wrong. Janine: [00:29:37] I'm not sure it is because, look at the alternative. The alternative, and this is kind of what happened in the microfinance world. So, in microfinance, it was reaching 100 million people. It definitely was shown to help bring people out of poverty. It was completely driven by grants. And there was, when I got involved in it in 2002, there was this huge battle going on between proponents of, like, the Grameen Bank, of keeping it completely the way it had always been and fully driven by grants, and a new group of players who were saying, yes, but we can actually commercialize these microfinance institutions and turn them into commercially viable institutions. And there was this huge battle between those two. They hated each other, actually. And what ended up happening is the commercial play actually got proven out. It was shown that you can, in fact, commercialize microfinance and you can reach a lot more, and the whole technology piece that I talked about came out of that as well. And now you've got, from the time I got started, so that two and a half, in a basically a 10 year span in that two and a half billion people who were previously unbanked. It's now gone below two billion. So, by bringing capital that was seeking a return into the mix, that whole thing was able to scale in a way that it would never have scaled just on grants. Right? Eve: [00:31:18] But I think when I'm talking about is, we had an offering on Small Change that was an homeless housing project in L.A., just a small offering. But the developers were determined to open it up to the community. And the funds they get, the rent they get is actually from the government. So, it's going to be affordable housing in perpetuity. It's not going to, you know, increase in value and be sold at a profit. So ... Janine: [00:31:48] Right. Eve: [00:31:49] ... was a fixed return, OK, return over years, which was a nine percent return, which I thought was pretty generous. And that offering actually filled up faster than any we've had. Janine: [00:32:01] Yeah. I'm not surprised. Eve: [00:32:03] So that question to me was, do you think we could offer a little less and still raise money, because that's hard, to add in a nine percent return to a project like that? And I don't know the answer. Janine: [00:32:14] Well, you try. I mean, I'm ... I think the thing is, you know, people are going to look at this like anything else. They're going to look at it from a risk returns scenario. So in my own personal portfolio, I have money in bonds that are returning me three or four percent. Right. So that's OK, because I know that those are pretty secure and chances are I'm not going to lose my principal. Eve: [00:32:42] Right. Janine: [00:32:42] So getting three or four percent is OK. But if I'm going to put money into a private business where in five years, 50 percent of private businesses will be out of business, then my risk is a lot higher because I don't know that that business is actually going to succeed and I could lose everything. Right? So I'm looking for a better return in a three to four percent. The same thing is going to be true in a real estate deal. I mean, if you're asking me to invest in something and I'm going to get a five percent return on it, then I'm going to need to feel pretty dang confident that I'm going to get that five percent return and I'm going to get my principal back. And that's not always possible in a real estate deal. Eve: [00:33:27] And you get to feel good because you'll be housing most people, right? Janine: [00:33:34] Yes. Yes, I get that. And I also get that people need to make enough return on their money to be able to retire and have the things that they want, too. And they're not going to put that at risk. So, I think there's a, but I, you know, I talked to a woman yesterday who's on the other side of this discussion, and I really liked her a ton. She was great. She's very committed. She is very, you know, in integrity with herself. And she really believes that people should be willing to make investments and get no return if they're doing good stuff in the world. And that that is the way the world should go and that we should stop even thinking about return at all. So, she's got a very different perspective on it. Eve: [00:34:19] I think if you have enough wealth that you can do that with some of your money, that's fantastic. But you're right, most people can't,. Janine: [00:34:26] No, they can't. Eve: [00:34:27] They need to live, too. Janine: [00:34:29] So, yeah, in fact, in doing the research on this book, I found that in the United States, there are 14 million people who are millionaires, about 14, 15 million people. Right? Five percent of this, five, six percent of the country. So, if that's true and if 95 percent of us aren't millionaires, then, you know, asking people to not get a return on their money is a pretty big ask. Janine: [00:35:03] Yeah. An I don't think, and I don't think that one percent of us who really have wealth are sufficient to solve this problem. Eve: [00:35:15] Yes. Janine: [00:35:17] So, we have to find ways that the majority of us can participate in solving this problem. And that means that we need to do this in a way that they can feel comfortable with the return they're getting. And I think subsidizing to help them do that is not necessarily a bad thing. And I actually think that's where the really rich people could come in, is that they could provide some of those subsidies, so they can take lower return to help other people's money come in at a higher level of return. Eve: [00:35:51] So do you think that these new crowdfunding rules, like my platform, Small Change, where we use regulation crowdfunding to let anyone invest? Do you think that is a path towards a solution? Janine: [00:36:02] I think it's one of them, and I think it's, Yes, I do. I think it's a really interesting path. And I think that people who are non-accredited, it's been kind of fascinating to me as well how differently wealthy people invest than people who aren't. And it's not right that people who aren't wealthy shouldn't be allowed to invest in vehicles that can provide them with more direct opportunities to have impact with their money and to provide them with greater return. I mean, there is way more risk, for sure. And some people could make bad decisions. You need to do your homework with this. But there are a lot of really smart people out there who are non-accredited who would put in the time and effort to make the right decisions and they should be allowed to. Eve: [00:36:56] No, you and I agree about that. And I also, I really don't like the idea of classes of investors. So that, you know, I've had discussions with developers who think that accredited investors want more, deserve more, and I ... Janine: [00:37:14] Yeah. Eve: [00:37:14] ... can't agree with that. I think money should be given the same opportunity. And unaccredited investors who had absolutely zero opportunity to get, you know, a half a percent return from your bank account if you're lucky. Janine: [00:37:26] Right. Eve: [00:37:26] That's just not OK. So ... Janine: [00:37:29] No, it's not. And you know, the truth is, there's a great book I read a long time ago by a guy named Nocera about sort of the evolution of money. And, you know, actually even before him, if you go back, San Francisco history. So, this is a story I absolutely adore. The Bank of America. Do you know the origin story of the Bank of America? It's sort of incredible. Eve: [00:37:53] No, I don't. Janine: [00:37:55] So, quick version. So, it started in before 1906. There was an Italian immigrant in the San Francisco, in San Francisco itself, actually, who decided that, at that time, the only people who could have bank accounts were extraordinarily wealthy people. J.P. Morgan, you know, that kind of ilk of person. And so he decided, you know what, I think the average man and woman should have bank accounts and be able to get loans. And so he started this bank. It was called the Bank of Italy. And nobody used him because nobody trusted banks. And so then came 1906, the famous earthquake of San Francisco. And he rushed to his bank. He took all the cash out of his safe. He put it in a wheelbarrow. He put, you know, fruit and vegetables over this thing that he had all his money in. And he carted it out of San Francisco. And then he met with the other bankers and they were talking about what they were going to do for the city. And the other bankers were saying, well, we've got to wait six months before we can open our banks. It's too dangerous. You know, bad stuff is going to happen. And so this man, his name is A.P. Giannini. He took that cart or whatever he had of money and he brought it to Fisherman's Wharf and he set up a little table using barrels and a log, and he started giving out money. Eve: [00:39:30] Wow. Janine: [00:39:30] People came to him and he gave them loans. And all he asked was their signature. He trusted them. And the people were so responsive to that, they had so much gratitude, that his bank grew and the Bank of Italy became the Bank of America. Eve: [00:39:50] That's a great story. Yeah. Janine: [00:39:51] Right? So, and if you look at the history of money and you look at, what you find is that time and time again, there was some innovator like him who said, "You know what? This shouldn't only be for the rich." That's how we got money, mutual funds, and that's how we got invested in, that's how anyone can invest in the stock market. It wasn't always that way either. That was also just something for the rich. So, time and time again, we have seen these things come online for wealthy people. And then some innovator says, you know what? It doesn't have to be this way. Eve: [00:40:32] Yes. Janine: [00:40:34] And then the rest of us can participate. Eve: [00:40:35] Fascinating. So given all of that, what do you think the future of real estate impact investing lies? Janine: [00:40:43] I'm going to take a step back first and say, where does the future of impact or values aligned investing lie first, and I believe it is going to become ubiquitous. I believe that ultimately this is the way people are going to invest writ large, that their values are going to matter to them as much as their return. And they're going to realize they don't have to give up both. And I think that the real estate piece of this, because it's more complicated for people, is going to be a little longer to come online. But I think there will ultimately be a lot of really interesting opportunities, for all of us, to invest in real estate, too, because it is a great diversifier. Eve: [00:41:23] Yes. Janine: [00:41:25] And I'm a huge fan. When I was a young girl, my favorite movie of all time was Gone With the Wind. And, you know, I totally love that she always goes back to the land and she realizes that regardless of what's happening around her, the land is something tangible and real. And it's something that she can hold on to. And I think that's still true today. Eve: [00:41:49] Well, that was some really fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining me, Janine. I'm sure we're going to be talking again soon. Janine: [00:41:58] My pleasure. Thank you so much. I enjoyed it, too. Eve: [00:42:03] That was Janine Firpo. Here are some of the things I learned during our fascinating conversation. First, not only can you expect financial return when you make a socially responsible investment, you can meet or even beat the market. Second, only five percent of the U.S. population is a millionaire. That means that 95 percent of the population does not have access to investment opportunities that are largely available for the wealthy. Finally, figuring out what impact means in real estate investing is difficult for someone starting out. It's impossible to find consistent metrics. You can find out more about impact real estate investing, and access the show notes for today's episode at my website, EvePicker.com. While you're there, sign up for my newsletter to find out more about how to make money in real estate while building better cities. Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. And thank you, Janine, for sharing your thoughts with me. We'll talk again soon. But for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.
Dr. Alan Wolfelt's website:centerforloss.comResource Optimization Network website: https://www.resourceoptimizationnetwork.com/Follow us on twitter: @KwadcastLike our Facebook page:https://www.facebook.com/Solving-Healthcare-with-Kwadwo-Kyeremanteng-103665294393881/Please send your comments/feedback to kwadcast99@gmail.comTranscript for this episode:Kwadwo: 00:37 Heather Bousada, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much. Um, do you remember how we met? Gosh, that was a long time ago. Long time ago. Cause if you off the hook, I don't actually remember how we met, but I do remember how I met your husband. So to the listener, I was playing hockey game and he, he didn't know, he didn't know who I was and I, I approached him after the game after a hard fought game, which I think we won by the way. You guys were dirty. We were done. And I approached Chris and I said, Hey, I know your wife. And he's like, what did you just say to me? Oh I really know your wife.Heather: 01:31 And then he did recognize you. Yeah. And that I explained that to everybody in the teleconference one. Yes. Unknowingly.Kwadwo: 01:40 Well thanks for doing this Heather. It means a lot. And so maybe we could start off with what does a day in the life of the Heather Bousada look like, whether it's at the hospital doing what you do or in your work with grief.Heather: 01:57 Yeah. Uh, well it's busy. It's very busy, but, uh, most of my time spent in the palliative care and the palliative care team and I also work in medicine and I've worked with you in ICU, but, uh, I, you know, my love and passion is palliative care and grief. So a lot of my days spent with the palliative care team, meeting families and patients and talking about terminal illness and impact it has on the family and their goals and their hopes and their dreams and basically what's happened to them and providing them support through that very difficult timeKwadwo: 02:32 and crazy hours long days is thatHeather: 02:36 they're long days, they're long days. And sometimes I walk out of here pulling my hair and other times I'm like, wow, I feel like I was able to make a difference, you know? And that feels good. Yeah,Kwadwo: 02:45 absolutely. One thing that I do appreciate that you guys do is, you know, I run into, I'll have a family meeting or two in the afternoon and I feel emotionally I'd, no, I actually just physically, emotionally and physically exhausted. You're doing this every day.Heather: 03:05 Yeah. Well we all are in healthcare, aren't we? We're having really difficult conversations all the time. I don't think, I think, uh, one of my colleagues I was talks about if we only had a GoPro, I don't think people would believe what we go through in a day in terms of the conversations that we have. They're really detailed. Intimate people are at their worst times often, right? And trying to make really serious decisions, um, on, not sometimes for themselves, but oftentimes families are having to make that for their loved one and they, they're not sure what to do when they're feeling stressed and scared and they're not understanding how, or, you know, looking for support. And feeling in a world that's not part of their typical day. Right? Yeah.Kwadwo: 03:49 Imagine you literally can't imagine being in the spots that and, right. Like, it's not something that you think about, dream about, it's just,Heather: 03:58 well, people don't get practice at this right now, let's say to people like, it's not something you sign up for. And then all of a sudden you find yourself in the hospital having to have conversations about end of life, either for yourself or your family. And it's, it's a, it's, you don't get practice at it. Right? Yeah.Kwadwo: 04:15 So we'll talk about some of the details of, you know, these difficult conversations in a bit, but you have a expertise in grief counseling and what are some of the things that you wish more people knew about the grieving process?Heather: 04:34 Yeah, that's a, it's a huge topic. You know, it's, it is my passion and not only for patients and families, but expecially for health care providers. You know, one of my passions lately is that, uh, as healers, we need to be okay, right? We need to, we're doing some really serious work here. And if we're not understanding, you know, for having to go through our own grief and mourning through loss of a family member, you know, I see it all the time, I see at the hospital and people are coming to me and you know, oftentimes they feel like what is going on. You know, I used to be able to take care of five, 10 people. Now all of a sudden just taking care of one person, I feel like completely overwrought and I don't know what's going on with me. Right. And sometimes just having conversation about what it is and what's happening to them, to their body, to their mind, um, really kind of helps take off.Heather: 05:21 Oh, OK. Cause we're not only a death denying culture, but we really, um, you know, there's that whole, whether it's implicit or explicit out there that you got to buck up, right? You got to buck up, you got to get on with it. Um, you know, have a stiff upper lip and you know, people are looked at as courageous if, Oh, they look so strong. They haven't even cried. Not everybody cries, but there's that sense of, you know, if you're only being strong, if you're, you know, just keep moving forward. But the interesting part about grief and mourning is it's not about moving forward. Everything we do in grief and mourning is about going backwards. So I mean, if you look at grief and mourning, and I think that's an important part, I, well one I want to start with a lot of my approach degree from morning is from dr Alan Wolfelt.Heather: 06:06 He has a companion and approach and that's where my training is from. Um, as a social worker, I've also, I've gone down, there's a center for loss and life transitions and it's actually really a wonderful approach. And I, I heard dr Wolfville years ago and you know, just working in this field, I, when he talked about what grief and mourning as in going from the head to the heart, really it was what it's about. And it's that, um, that journey that we experienced that it just resonated with me, but it's throughout our system, right? So like if you look at brief families or the hospices, the Canadian military, the American military, they have also adopted this approach because it's a, it's meeting people not from the head and the intellect. It's meeting people with the heart, right? It's companioning somebody and companion is means to break bread and it's like sitting down with somebody and actually saying, you know what, I'm not necessarily the expert in what your relationship was with that person or what you went through, but I have some tools and I have an open, compassionate heart to be able to explore. What was that loss like for you? Right.Kwadwo: 07:11 I feel like that's a big fear for a lot of people. It's like when you know somebody has experienced a loss, I can't count how many times people say, I do not know what to say to them. I do not know what to do. I don't know what to bring. I, you know, it's, it's awkward for awkward for some people, some people, and even as a palliative care doc that in certain circumstances where it's like, you know, I literally, I'm not sure what to tell this person.Heather: 07:41 Yeah. And there's actually, we can talk about that a little bit later, but I think it's important to start off with like, you know, there's a lot of jargon out there, you know, brave man grief, mourning, like people throw out the words, right? But it's really, it's important to understand what the concepts mean, right? So that you can make some sense of it. So when you're looking at at, for instance, bereavement, it's a loss of a loved one. But what, what's really fascinating about the word is it actually means that the Latin root word of it means to be torn apart. So, um, you know, it's amazing whether it's here or people would call me when I was doing my private practice with grief counseling and in some shape or form, they would be describing that their world has been blown apart. Right. Um, and that's basically what it is, is that your world's been torn apart.Heather: 08:28 But the, the, the grief is important cause it's the grief is there are internal thoughts and feelings. So unless you're a sociopath, you're gonna feel that loss, right? When you love somebody, I mean, grief and love are the flip side of the same coin, right? Cause if you love somebody, you're gonna feel that loss. So it's the thoughts and feelings. But where we get stuck is people just have that feeling, right? They have that feeling, but they're not sure. So they're not sure how to process it. Right? And we don't get taught that and everybody's teaching them to, Oh, just move on. Right? But where the real work is in the morning, right? And that's the part that, um, that I tried to help people understand and, and how to kind of go about doing that. Like the morning is the outward expression of that grief.Heather: 09:11 So emotions need motion. Um, so the more that you, it's a social, a shared response to loss. Sometimes it can be specific to one's culture or rituals that you might do. But unless you're sharing that loss and expressing it and um, and I see it all the time with patients and families, once you get them to start talking about that relationship and who that person was, you can see the movement, right? It's a natural unfolding. You know, people think of it as like mental health. It's grief and mourning is a natural thing that we all go through, right? Unfortunately we like to avoid pain and suffering, but we will experience it and it can't get people around it. You got to go through it. But in that journey is as a really kind of beauty in it in terms of recognizing what you've experienced and how you then integrate it. I mean, grief is, if you really look at it, it's, it's moving from one of physical presence, um, to one of memory. That's the ultimate shift that what you're doing in the morning work, right? So again, you're moving that from physical presence to one American memory and you're integrating that into your new life, right? There is no new norm. There's a new normal now, right? You can't go back to the old normal as a new normal. So you're integrating that.Kwadwo: 10:28 Wow. So there's a lot there. So one thing actually, so Heather maybe talk a bit about what to expect when you're going through that process. Yeah. Obviously there's going to be a lot of distraught pain, you know, there's that new normal as you described, but what are some of the things that people might expect?Heather: 10:57 Yeah. Like for yourself and other people. Yeah, and that's what I find fascinating is um, people don't understand, like people think, assume it's a, it's just an emotional response, right? But it's the totality of your whole being, right? It affects you physically, cognitively, socially as spiritual ritually. And especially if, if I make reference to the healthcare workers, we need to be game on, right? So like as yourself, as an ICU doctor, you need to be there. You need to be present. But if you're going through a lot, us, you are, um, not only physically your body, you get extreme fatigue. Uh, you exhausted your appetite. You know, 80% of people lose their appetite, 10% gain another 10% that are neutral sleep disturbance. You know, so often people will tell me, you know, they're quick to go to bed to sleep cause they're so exhausted, but they wake up frequently, right?Heather: 11:53 Um, so you're not getting a lot of sleep. Your immune system's down, right? Cause you're in this critical state, like you're in this hyper arousal because you've got this in either an impending loss or a loss, right? So, um, physically it's affecting you emotionally. You've got like multitude. There's no, you can find many different feelings at once and it comes in waves, right? Um, and cognitive is, it was interesting part, especially with healthcare is that healthcare workers is you, you know, we multitask, right? We're constantly multitasking and, and life and death. Like you're making life and death decisions. Um, and you all of a sudden you're, and it's, there's a lot of research on it and uh, people will start to, uh, you'll find it's difficult to concentrate. Um, it more irritable. Uh, the multitasking often goes right out the window. Um, so all of a sudden you're like, wow, you know what's, and that's where people often in healthcare come to me and say, I don't know what's going on, but you know, I was used to, I would could do this with my eyes closed.Heather: 12:54 Now I can't even, um, you know, concentrate on, on two patients that I have. Um, I mean I, for a personal example, I remember I've been in palliative care like for 19 years and I remember when my own mom was, um, uh, terminally ill and she was in the hospital and I went with my team to go meet a patient and the doctor and the nurse and myself when we sat down. And sometimes you're not aware of it, right? Cause you're so in grossed and what's happening that you're not really aware of how difficult it is for you. So I remember sitting there listening to the nurse and the doctor talked to the patient a conversation I have every day and I couldn't even process what they were saying. At least I had the wherewithal to go, wow, I shouldn't be here. Yeah, I need to step back.Heather: 13:42 And, and I did, I stepped back. I mean it cause it's cognitive that couldn't wrap my brain around it. Like what was going on, what was being said. Um, yeah. And this was fairly recent. Oh, about four years ago. Yeah. Um, and uh, recently with my dad. But uh, yeah, it, it, uh, it's, it's good to recognize it. Right? It's important for, uh, for people in general, but especially for healthcare workers that they're not doing a bad job. That there's nothing wrong with them. They're going to the natural processes of grieving. Right. Yeah. We talked a bit about this beforehand. It's a very unique scenario for health care providers to try and take care of others. Yeah. You definitely, yeah. You know, like for the reasons you mentioned prior about how unique it is for health care workers, you're literally taking care of people. You're seeing death and dying every, yeah.Kwadwo: 14:52 And then when they experienced the loss, when they're not able to think as clearly when they see that emotional tie to their dad or their mom or whoever might have experienced loss, you know, I don't know if we talk about that enough. I don't know if we support each other enough.Heather: 15:12 And I don't think, I mean, I don't think it's through bad intention. It's, again, it's a, it's a S a social, cultural Mileah of, of Western society in general. We don't tend to talk about pain and suffering. Dewey, you know, we talk about being happy, being independent and um, eh, so to talk about pain and suffering, we don't, when we don't often teach our children about it either. Right? So I'm often talking to families about how do you help children through the loss or the are about to lose someone important to them because we're not taught. Right? So all of a sudden when we're faced with it, we don't know what to do. And as health care providers in general, um, you know, whether your community or in a hospital, uh, we want to take it on. But if we're not understanding, we should be the very role models and understanding because we're going to be out there trying to heal others and if we are not healed ourself are not going to be up to speed. Right. Yeah.Kwadwo: 16:06 It's, it's very much that cause the culture in medicine. Like I try not to get too personal, but you know, when I, I found out my dad passed away, it was a Thursday while I was on ICU and it didn't even occur to me to get somebody to cover, you know, it was just sort of ingrained in me like that plug away. And I didn't even tell anybody. Okay. I told them one person actually TP, just a just thing. So I just want it to have that kind of, um, security in case things became overwhelming during that time period. But, uh, yeah, it's for whatever reason, it's that culture, it's that talk about it, let's grind away at what we're doing. Even, you know, healthcare aside, even had a conversation with somebody that, that recently relatively recently experienced a loss, you know, and it was kinda like you alluded to at the beginning where it's like, I just want to do a bunch of stuff that keeps my mind off it and all I think about this and maybe it's worth diving into more, what are the consequences of not letting things sink in of always running?Heather: 17:34 Well, I mean, when you look at, um, the six central needs of mourning, like through the companioning model, one of the things is, um, acknowledging, um, the reality of the death, right? And they're not stages, right? You can come back and forth, back and forth, but primarily initially you're trying to acknowledge the reality of the death, right? And depending on the circumstances, um, that may take weeks, right? So like for instance, if people don't actually get to see the body, you know, say somebody died overseas and they regret it, that acknowledging the reality, the reality of what that the person is gone. Again, remember, grief is about one of physical presence to one a memory. So you haven't actually been there to see it. It's hard to integrate it into ourselves. Right? So, um, and then, you know, and then we start to identify or start to, um, embrace the pain of the loss, right?Heather: 18:31 And our body and our mind has this wonderful ability to be able to do that. So like it's about encountering innovating. So it's okay. Like our mind can't take it all in at once. Right? So our mind has a guy call it nature's anesthetic. So when we need initially have the loss of somebody, we, our body has this way of kind of numbing us a little bit and it's just because it otherwise it's too overwhelming and it ends as that numbing starts to kind of wear off a little bit and the reality of that person gone starts to set in that the pain really comes out. And that's actually the hard part. Like that's actually when I would find, I would get calls for grief counseling was around that stage. So, you know, somebody passed on, they have all this family and friends coming to provide them with support.Heather: 19:19 Um, and their new normal hasn't really introduced themselves yet, right? Because they're still living in that world of that person being there. Cause everybody's around, right. And then as people start to go back to their normal day lives and people that are the person, the bereaved person's left and they just looking around going, Whoa, what happened? You know, where is that person? I'm, you know, I'm used to getting up every day and having a coffee and then we head off to work and then we come home and we do this. That's not, that's not there anymore. So then the pain starts to come in. And that's when people would call me and they'd say, I don't know what's going on. Like I thought it was doing okay, what? Now I'm just like, this is awful. This really is painful. And, and, and that's when I'd say, well, I can't get you around it, but you know what?Heather: 20:07 There's a way to go through it. Right. And that's where the remembering that, you know, the morning comes in remembering the person who's died, right? And it's that work. And I see it not only in grief like a post-death, but I see in palliative care, it's really kind of that wonderful transition, you know, where you see families initially like, wow, I can't believe this is happening. No, it can't be in there in crisis. Right? And they're questioning the diagnosis and the prognosis and what's going on and they're in this state of helplessness. Right? Um, and then as you develop this kind of, um, time to give them space, uh, to answer their questions, provide education and support and of honor the process that's going on. It's this beautiful movement that you see, right? As they shift from the head to the heart and acknowledging that person's about to pass. And I love that, you know, after like a while, and you walk in the room and they're all sitting around the bedside and they're sitting vigil and they're sharing stories and they're laughing and they're crying. You see that morning work coming in, right? And that starts there. And it's really quite a beautiful process. And it's not that they want their loved ones to pass, but they're, they're acknowledging it, right? And they're giving honor to that person. And that's a really wonderful thing to be doing.Kwadwo: 21:23 Yeah. And I mean, I could speak also from the clinical side. I think you would agree with me on this being part of that, being in that privileged part of being, of watching them go navigate through these tough times. And the very reason I got into palliative care was those moments and the life where you're sitting with the family, you're talking about uncle Gus funny jokes at Christmas and that funny outfit he wore at Halloween and you're laughing and you're crying in here and you're just, you're being present.Heather: 22:05 Yeah. You're honoring the joy. The love. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, it's, it's incredible. I know. Cause people haven't say, well, how can you work in palliative care? It's, I'm not, it's not about the dead, it's about the living, right. It's about honoring the living and uh, it's that, it's that it's life, it's life affirming. Right. And it's really quite life affirming. Yeah.Kwadwo: 22:26 So maybe we could speak to what to do to help our fellow employee, our fellow nurse or a fellow loved one, navigate through this process. Cause once again, come like I alluded to at the beginning, sometimes a lot of people just don't know what to do. They want to say to, you know, send them a song. Do you, you know, I can write a Paul, what do you do? What's the best advice that we could give people listening.Heather: 22:58 Yeah. Well, you know, whether you're talking to a colleague or families that are going through it is it's important just to meet them where they're at, right? That's the first step. Um, because again, like grief is about, I'm going backwards before going forwards. It's about saying hello before you ever say goodbye. And what we tend to do is in our society in general, we tend to want to move things forward, right? Sometimes that's because it makes us feel better. But really that person, like when you're working in healthcare, people will often notice that, uh, families will keep going back to questions and keep going back. Well, why did that happen? And did, did we do the right thing? And, and it can be frustrating sometimes cause you think, Oh my God, I've told them how many times. Right. But it's because mourning there actually. And that's where I say, okay, you know, just take a moment because they're going backwards.Heather: 23:51 I just had a family recently and lovely daughter's sitting vigil by the bedside and they kept going back and I kept going back. And then finally I just sat down and I said, can I describe a little bit about grief and mourning to you? And I did. I sat down and I talked about what is grief, what is mourning and what we need to do in that process. Um, and uh, I said a lot of it is about going backwards. And I said, and that's what you're doing. So I'm going to honor that and I'm gonna answer your questions, but I want you to know that that's what you're doing right now. And they just kind of went, Oh, okay. I see. Okay. Cause otherwise they think, well, why I'm going crazy. These questions are driving me nuts, you know? Yeah.Kwadwo: 24:30 That really is enlightening because I got to tell you, without knowing this as a clinician sometimes I'm like, I've answered this question three times. I'm like, what's happening? And I always related it to being in shock because of all the things I going through, which is totally understandable. But what you're saying makes a lot of sense. We James downer, he's initiating an ICU study actually on bereavement and this was quite eye opening for me. Like ICU. A lot of the families have tons of questions after they leave us and you know, not being on that side, like I've never had a loved one in ICU and I wouldn't know what it would be like to hear that information on, you know, your loved ones dying and trying to process all that, you know, and in that time frame. But hearing James speak to the matter, it's like a lot of these people are, have questions after they have all these kind of, uh, concerns that, you know, there's no real process to, to help navigate and, and my whole, I mean, the whole point of doing this podcast, the whole point of doing what we do is to help others and to help them reduce their pain.Kwadwo: 25:55 And so, you know, it's, I hope this is at least helpful also too, a lot of the clinicians out there hearing these things and, you know, it really comes down to being, making time, being present, not giving the bullshit answer of like, all you'll get through it and we'll move through this, you know, your warrior move forward. But to sit with them, you know, sit with them and hear them out and we don't need to give a rah rah speech every time we see them. It's just being present, acknowledging it's hard.Heather: 26:27 Yeah. It's especially difficult in ICU because the unexpectedness often, right. Right. So that's another flavor entirely around it. So, um, again, so they're in that unexpectedness and so moving from the head to the heart, it's not about what, you know, it's what you feel right in grief. So when you've got somebody in a try, usually a tragic situation in ICU and uh, that, that kind of reality of the loss is going to take them a little bit more time. Right. It's, you know, it's gone from zero to a hundred and like one minute of their lives often. Right. So, yeah, that's a whole other flavor as well. Um, and trying to, to help them through that. So yeah, they're going to have a lot of questions cause they're trying to kind of, their mind is trying to connect with their heart in terms of what just happened and just then trying to acknowledge that person. Right. So hadn't how that's transformed and transition for them. So sext or work for sure. Yeah.Kwadwo: 27:34 You've experienced loss in your life. You lost your both parents relatively recently, especially your dad was just December, December, coming up and coming up here and I want to know how it's affected you as a grief counselor or a social worker in hospital. Do you feelHeather: 28:00 it's changed?Heather: 28:03 Um, well, typical social worker is going to redirect it back to you, but uh, yeah, of course it does. It, it, uh, you know, that's when I talk about the beauty and grief and mourning, people go, wow, was she talking about, um, but when you've had a loss yourself, like we can all kind of relate to it, right? You know, there's empathy and sympathy, you know, sympathy is, you know, I feel sorry for you. Empathy is, let me understand what you're going through. And the big buzz word now is compassion is meeting somebody heart to heart. You know what? Suffering is a shared risk. We all go through it, right? We all so when you've gone through a loss, and if you don't mind me saying, so quad Joe, I remember in your Facebook after your, I think your dad's anniversary. Okay. To talk about, um, I loved what you wrote because you said, um, that it made you a better doctor.Heather: 29:00 And it's not like you're going to sit with your families and patients and like whale and cry, but you know what it is to be human and you know, what loss means and how painful it can be and that we all are in that together. You know, the world's a mystery. Do I have all the answers to everything? No. Do you know, but we, we recognize in our fellow man that that sense of pain and suffering and, you know, when I'd have like the F the patients or clients that I had in grief counseling, I think almost everyone said to me something along the lines of, you know, I never really understood it, you know, um, until I felt it myself and I feel more for other people. Yeah. I can relate to their pain more. Like one lady had said to me, uh, you know, so-and-so lost their mom recently at work and last year I would've probably thought, Oh, whatever, just hurry up and get back to work. Yeah. But she said, you know what, now I look at her and I, I go over and I give her a hug. And I said, wow, this is hard, isn't it? Yeah. You know, welcome to the club kind of thing. You know, the shared human existence. And uh, that's the beauty I'm talking about. Right. And to connect again to say, wow, you know, this is how we, this is what we go through. Right?Kwadwo: 30:20 Yeah. I, I gotta tell you the, after going through it, the way I see people that are now going through a loss is, I want to say it's a completely different, but I am, I'm there, I understand more where they're coming from until the empathy and the compassion. It's inevitable. And one thing that I did totally appreciate is you take it almost tell by how someone hugs you if they've experienced lost themselves recently or not. Like the like meaningful bear hug would usually come from people that like, I know what's going down, I know how you feel around. Um, but yeah, it's amazing. Like I that did give me personally a lot of solace knowing that you can make good out of the bad situation. I mean, it sounds cheesy, but I truly believe I'm a more compassionate, compassionate, dark. Now. I think I'm more present when someone's telling me about loss and now I give less of a damn too. I'm like, I don't think I'd be doing this show if it wasn't for experiencing loss and knowing how, you know, like can just be done. And so let's live nowHeather: 31:45 for [inaudible]. You did the, you, you took the time to do the morning work. Right? And that, that's where sometimes people get stuck because they don't know what it is. They understand they're feeling this awfulness but they don't know how to move it. Right. And what you did learn about that and you shared, you had a social response to it, right? You share to everybody what it was like for you and you worked with your family and you started to move in that process. And it's not that it wasn't painful, but in, in some respects you were able to move, right? You moved from that physical presence of your dad to want a memory. Cause I mean, death ends a life. It doesn't end a relationship.Kwadwo: 32:24 Interesting.Heather: 32:25 And yeah, that's, that's really powerful. And because it does it, you will forever have a relationship with that person. It's integrating into that your new normal and your new identity that they're not there in your life anymore physically. But they're still really powerfully there all the time. I mean, I know with your dad and even with my mom, as I get older, I can look back at my mom and go, Oh wow. Yeah, she's just, we're all just human beings trying to do the best we can. Right. You know, and as you evolve and you go through your own life transitions, you go back to that relationship, right. And you see it differently. It evolves just like as you evolve.Kwadwo: 33:05 Yeah, no, it's, it's true. This is why I want to do on the show. I like, I'm a bio to care doc. I'm an ICU doc. I see death all the time. And after experiencing it at a, with my father, it was, I didn't know all this stuff. I didn't expect all this physical, spiritual, mental difficulties that were to, uh, that I experience. And so I really think it's important to share this with people, to be able to be open, to be there for their fellow man or woman and be less of a denying culture. And I really think we will go a lot further if we approach this with open arms.Heather: 33:58 Yeah, absolutely. And by not only the, you know, the public, but especially as healthcare workers, we need to kind of honor that. What that happens to each other and to be, do we all have to be grief counselors? No, but do we all have a responsibility and maybe, uh, to be more aware so that when we see our fellow colleagues who would go, Hey, yeah, okay, I get it. I get it. Okay. They're not just being lazy or they're just, they're just self-pitying. There's actually something going on in there. Like, even like people just sitting vigil, like when they're sitting with their loved ones dying, I will say to them, you know, I talk a lot about self care to them because even though you're just sitting there, you're running a mini marathon inside, right? Because so much is going on and processing and there.Heather: 34:45 So I remind them, I said, you know, you're mint, your body's physically running a mini marathon. Make sure you drink, make sure you get some rest. You gotta be good to yourself. Um, and it's the same thing when we're grieving, right? There's a lot like it's, so if I, if you had a broken leg, I wouldn't be expecting you to be running around the hospital. Just, you can't see it. You can't see when somebody's grieving. Right? So, but I, it's what dr Wolfelt says, he actually gives out pins. I love it. It says, uh, if you're in grief, you put a pin called under construction. Yeah. And it just gets your mankind to say, Hey, you know, I'm slower right now. Be patient with me. There's a lot going on in here and you can't see it. But it's there. Right.Kwadwo: 35:26 So you, you even brought up a point too when we were talking earlier about the house, just some cultures, like, you know, they're grieving based on attire. So it's like part of the culture toHeather: 35:38 be able to whether visual or, um, take time with the loved ones. But that's part of, yeah. Well that's a fascinating part is that we've, we've moved away from that, right? People used to die in the home, you know, grandma and grandpa lived with us or extended family and uh, they didn't tend to die in the hospitals. Like what 70% of people die in the hospitals now it's often removed. So it's often away from us. So, um, you know, before people would die, the was a national part of life, right? And now it's kind of removed from us. Um, and before like, like maybe what, 80, a hundred years ago, uh, if you're a widow, do, you'd be wearing black and you'd be walking around. But what's wonderful about that is you'd be walking around in your black attire and you would start to do the morning work. Cause people would stop you and say, Hey, you know who passed away?Heather: 36:34 Was it George, your husband? Yeah, I did. And he started talking about George, right? And then you're that shared response to loss. It starts to evolve and you get to talk about that person. And so it's a wonderful thing, right? But we've moved away from, we're not supposed to talk about it, so I'm comfortable. Um, and that's healing. It's incredibly healing. That's incredibly healing. And you know, people often have, you know, just a little tidbit, like people are afraid to say, Oh, I saw so and so when I don't want to say anything. Uh, I know they just lost their mom, but, uh, I don't want to remind them of the death. Well, I'll tell you what, they know that person's died, but when you say something to them, what you're doing is you're reminding them that person lived and that's the part that really needs to be done.Heather: 37:21 I remember recently actually a shout out to cam on a five and medicine. Um, yeah, as I said, my dad passed away in December. And is this a, this is part of what I'm talking about is she did this, and I don't even think she knows, maybe she does now. Um, but I was sitting at the five nursing station just charting and uh, she came over to me and I forgot that she taken care of, both of my parents were in their hospital and then she started talking to me about travel or something and then she started to say, Oh yeah, your dad's from Scotland and you told me about this. And he said this. And he, she started sharing stories and I was like, wow, that's my dad. He was like, wow, he is in the room for a moment. It's like, I got a piece of my dad.Heather: 38:03 And I was like, wow. She just did some amazing morning work and she didn't even realize it. That's, uh, that's the funny part is when I talked to nurses or other healthcare providers about grief and mourning, it's just sometimes as simple as like going into the room of somebody who's, you know, terminally ill and picking up the photo frame and saying to the husband, Oh, I love this photo. What's going on here? And then you see that kind of often stiff and often I've, I don't think I've ever remembered anybody not wanting to share. Right. And then they start talking about that person and um, they're, they're moving, they're, you know, they're trans and that's what we, it's so important. So vital.Kwadwo: 38:41 Wow. I think, I hope it serves a little bit as a inspiration to a lot of people seeing patients out there like take that time. It doesn't, it's a little like, you think I'm learning about doing, we shows and so far it's like they really is a little things like literally looking up that picture and saying, wow, look at that. Look are from a few years back.Heather: 39:08 Yeah. Oh yeah. Do you see the smile on their faces when you do that? Yeah. Well, it's kind of like, you know, people don't really want to know what you have to say unless they know you care. And like more like for physicians that's really important, right? Cause you're sitting down giving really bad news and you're making recommendations and if you're doing it from a, you know, intellectual kind of, this is what it is and people aren't going to respond as well. But if you sit down and say, Hey, you know, this is tough, tell me a little bit about whoever it is in the bed and then start to work from there and say, okay, well this is what's going on. And they feel like that person's in the room, that they're not just a number and just another person to take up a bed. But they're real, that they mean a lot to them. Right.Kwadwo: 39:53 Wow. Some good shit. Yo, I hope you all are buying in. Um, last couple of things, uh, while I have you have there. Okay. So just to give some context, Heather's got like, I don't know how many guardian angel things on our, on our, uh, [inaudible] lanyard on your land planning yard when you're, yeah, she got about seven guardian angels on her lanyard, which is like weighing her down actually. She actually walks with a limp. It's crazy. Um, so just to give you a sense of how giving and how much love she gets at the Ottawa hospital, but can you share a story where, you know, you've been appreciated because we, you know, we appreciate you all every day, but like,Heather: 40:47 yeah. Um, yeah, I'm so bad at names, but I never forget a story. Like I almost remember stories when people tell me them, well, I guess recent, like I always, if somebody passed at the hospital, I always make a point of giving them a followup call because it's not part of my protocol, but I think it's essential because all of a sudden you've got all this support at the hospital, people are coming in and talking to you, and then your loved one dies and then boom, you totally disconnected. Right. And they may have questions and worries. So I always generally give them a call after. So,Heather: 41:24 and I love to hear about how they're doing. But I think recently I had a family. Um, if father husband was dying, two older sons and a lovely family, just, just beautiful the salt of the earth. And you can see how much they loved this man and you could see it walking in the room. And that, that journey I talked about where it was like, Oh my God, what's going on? Can't we do this? Can't we do that? You know, that like that helpless. I think one of my favorite quotes in grief is, uh, by C S Lewis, he wrote Narnia. I used to have it in my grief office. Um, no one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear. Wow. Cause it is, it's, it's absolute like, it's, uh, an insult to your identity. It's an insult to your safety and security. And it's an insult.Heather: 42:13 Well, men, since [inaudible] insults a strong word but affects your sense of meaning, right? So much unknown. People are terrified and you see that and there's no where in this world where you feel more helpless when you're not able to stop what's happening and you're watching this deterioration. So I S I witnessed this family, um, in that state and then as we evolved and we talked and we shared and they have some education and understanding of our own what's happening, that really cool family just kind of sat in this tight two bedroom in the hospital. But I would open up the curtain and I would just go, wow, this is so much sacredness right here. Wow. You guys haven't nailed. Like even though it was in a tight, awful kind of setting, they made it beautiful, you know, just that honor. And you could hear the stories and the children were coming and um, we actually, I got the kids to do a hug blanket, which is something I love doing with the kids.Heather: 43:11 So, you know, if the kids can't be there all the time or they need to feel part of it, you know, you're old enough to love your old enough degree. Right. That's very important. So I've got the kids do a hug blanket where they kind of draw their arms on it and write all over the blanket and then they put it over the grandfather. So they had done that. And so you walk in there and you'd see this beautiful blanket and all the kids riding on it and everybody just loving this man, you know? So when I called afterwards and I spoke to the family, uh, they had sat Shivah and they had brought out the hug blanket. So when people would come over and, you know, people come over and pay their respects and all that, they would bring out the blanket and they'd share about it.Heather: 43:50 I was so touched. I was like, wow, that's beautiful. Like that was really, uh, that just, yeah, that was really beautiful. Wow. Eh, before ending, I know there was another, speaking of about some pretty cool initiatives at a conference you went to recently. Yeah. The normal, if you want to mention that. Yeah. Well, grief and mourning in general is really misunderstood and it's, um, in a lot of myths and misconceptions about it. And oftentimes when you just really trying to sit and tell people about it, they really feel more understanding about what's happening. Um, and it's been kind of one of my, um, ones I want to bring more forward to the healthcare community cause we're supposed to be at, man, we're supposed to be the mentors. We're supposed to know what this is all about. This is what we deal with every day. But yet there is a loss in that.Heather: 44:45 There's, there's not a lot of understanding around it for, um, you know, especially for each other. Right. And we really need to bring that forward, um, to support each other as we go through these really difficult times. Right. Um, and not to feel that what's wrong with us and I'm going to lose my job and you know, we need to be supported and no matter where we are, what other, what agency or what company we work for, we all need to feel that way. Um, but when I went to recently the Canadian hospice palliative care, or did I have to say that Canadian hospice palliative care association, they had a conference recently here in Ottawa and, uh, because it's been one of my babies about, and, and I think it's partly because people like you and other doctors and nurses and managers have come to me because they are like, what is going on with me?Heather: 45:31 I don't understand this. Like, wow, like something I just assume everybody knows go. No, it's really not understood. And then we start to beat ourselves up. You know, what's wrong with me that I'm not moving on. And, um, so I wanted to bring this more to our workplace. Right. How can we help other, each other cause, and so part of this conference there was, I went to one of the workshops and I was really excited. Uh, it was a lady, uh, just spoke to her, Karen Brownrigg. Actually, I did ask her if it's okay to say her name on this. She said, yeah. So under the Canadian hospice palliative care association, they have something called Canadian compassionate companies. So they recognize that this grief and taking, you know, the stress of caring for somebody who's terminally ill, it's a chronic condition. So the policies and procedures that are in most institutions in places of work are behind the times because they're not aligned with how things are now in society.Heather: 46:28 Um, you know, modern technology, advancement of science. I mean, you see it all the time, how we people are living longer and often living longer though with chronic illnesses and often debilitating States, right? So not only are you, uh, trying to, uh, attend to your family member, your loved one, um, but this can be an ongoing issue, right? And our policies aren't in place to help support that. Um, and if you show you support your employers during those times, you're gonna have more retention of them. Uh, you're going to have, um, attract more people with, uh, good qualifications to want to be working there. When you maintain that good, healthy work life balance, people are happier. And when you happier employee employees, you're gonna have better care. Right? So it's, it's actually so the Canadian compassionate companies, I'm just learning about it, but um, they can actually come to the HR and start to educate and bring in policies to workers who are going through this. So when you have, when you have a policies and procedures around it, the culture starts to change, right? Because then it's normalized and validated that, yeah, this is hard. You know, I care about your psychological safety cause if you're safe, everybody else here is safe. Right. And that's important not just for our colleagues but for our patients and families. Right. So I was really excited about it and like that. Yeah.Kwadwo: 47:52 I think it's definitely worth mentioning because it's, I want to say innovative. It's, it's, I wouldn't say this is common practice in areas amongst companies and amongst healthcare providers. So anything that's going to help people get through these tough times and provide better, ultimately provide better care we should embrace.Heather: 48:14 Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So yes.Kwadwo: 48:21 Been a dream. I really, I can't express the work that you do and how meaningful it is that we see it day to day. I'm going to speak for, you know, like my ICU colleagues, my palliative care colleagues, my medicine colleagues, the work that you guys do, it's underappreciated, undervalued, and it goes in. It's one of the most important things we provide. And I just want to say that you do amazing work and whatever we could do to get the word out to how important these things are, including grieving, we need to do it. And I hope this is just a hopeless, I hope this helps.Heather: 49:08 I hope so. I hope it moves things forward. Yeah, that would be great. And I'm there to help it out as much as I can and vice versa. It's been so great working with you, Kwadwo over the years. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Thanks so much. .
Okay. We're back. Take two, I don't know what's happening. Oh, my God. All right. Okay. Hello people, are you coming back to me? I don't know what happened, Facebook just decided to finish the live stream. Hey Anna, okay. It's all under control, except for this sweat situation that's not remotely under control. Let me wait for a moment and let people jump back on. I kind of can't even believe how much I'm actually sweating right now. It's not like I don't control the time, I know what it's like, but my body is in total shed mode right now, I can just feel it. I think it's about to start dripping off my chin at any moment. Fortunately, I have a top here. Like I know none of this is really a big deal, it's just the live stream dropped out. But it's kind of like, it's exactly what I was talking about on the previous live. It's just like things just keep happening and you're like, "I'm really trying to fucking release this and not let it get to me, and I'm trying to be in surrender, but then more thing just keep happening. Somebody asked am I drinking water from here? No, it's French and amino-acids, which is what I drink through the morning usually before I eat. Like it's like nearly 12 noon now, I haven't eaten yet. I've done my hot yoga, I'll do another workout later, and I'm just in my kind of feel like fasting mode. Okay. Why was I even up to, I was going to talk about the Inner Circle. Mim, can you drop that link again? My Inner Circle is open for registration now. I was just mentioning that and then I was going to go into this thing about letting your message be what your message is for the day, and letting you be who you are. Inner Circle is 12 months mentoring with me one on one at the highest level, and you get to join the most badass and hot as fuck mastermind in the world with my other private clients. The results that we get in there, money results, alignment results, flora results, business, body, love, lifestyle, fun, adventure, all of that are freaking phenomenal. Right? So I'm so excited to be officially opening this up for applications and inquiries, and what that means is just message me from my personal page, and I'll get you a full written overview. A short live stream where I talk about the kind of work that I do with my clients, and some other cool stuff as well, for you to have a look at, and just feel if it's for you. It's a freaking phenomenal place. It is an anomaly and it's phenomenal. Its an existing place. Its been going for just over a year, and I don't promote it normally though. I just have never done a promotion, or a launch around it. 100% of people who are in the Inner Circle have literally just approached me out of nowhere. So many clients, like magic, and said I need to be part of this, and that's how its always happened. So this is the first time that I've ever been going like, "Hey, this is open. Did you even know about it?" Because a lot of people didn't even know about it. I realised I'm super under the radar, and that's always felt perfect, and aligned, and I'll probably go back to that, but currently I'm taking in the exact perfect women who are meant to be in there. If you feel that that's you, or you'd like to know more, or you feel that it might be you, message me. I'll get you the full overview and all the details of that. If you click on my Facebook cover photo on this page, or on my personal page, you can read some of the testimonials in there from some of my amazing clients. There's so many that we haven't even written up yet. I literally been hoarding all these incredible results to myself, and not sharing them. So I'm starting to write one up, and share one each day, and I'm going to be starting to do some conversations with Bad Asses. Interviews with my Inner Circle clients on joint Facebook live soon as well. So you'll get a chance to hear from some of the most amazing entrepreneurs and creators in the world about how they do business in life, and let them share their gifts and talent and genius with you. So, just something to keep your mind. But definitely message me now if you're feeling that. All right, so if you missed the first part of this live stream before it dropped out, watch the first part, the post of that is already on my page. It's already there for you, and I was talking about being fucked over energetically by Bali, and how that's totally a story, and I see that, but then how I also choose to lean into it. I choose to lean into it whether it's in Bali, when shits going on, and when shit's stirring up. Even like ... I did a live the other night about this, Friday night actually. About feeling triggered by something. Right? That's another example. We get triggered by something, or something feels uncomfortable, we're not fun in sight of this, and it's kind of like, "Oh, I don't like this feeling. I don't want this feeling, how can I push this away? How can I get back to super flow, or being high vibe, or lewd as fuck," whatever it is, and what I've learned, and what I've found, and Bali is such a great example of this, is that when that stuffs coming up from inside of us, there's a reason for it, and what if we allowed it to come up, and what if we allowed it to happen? So whenever you're triggered by something, whenever something makes you feel sad, or you feel uncomfortable, I'd be curious to know what you think. Comment, comment. Whenever you feel angry, or you're just frustrated, or you can't seem to quite connect, don't try and hide or mask that feeling. Allow yourself to be whoever you are in that day, and in that moment, and I feel like this is probably one of the harder things to learn, because its ... We're talking about allowing ourselves to sit in confrontation, or to sit in discomfort, or to sit in nausea, or to sit in your body expelling random weird shit from it, physically, or emotionally, or spiritually, or whatever it might be. But I found that when you can allow yourself to be with what is, firstly you take the fear side of it out of it, because you realise, "Hey, I'm actually okay. I can sit in this space of pain or discomfort, or extreme confrontation, or feeling sad, or feeling frustrated, or feeling down, or feeling angry or whatever. I can actually sit here and be here, and I'm still okay. Because I think that part of it is, we trample away from stuff like that. We think that it's not safe. That we want to avoid it. Ann Marie says, I did that over the weekend, I'm freaked out. I can't read the rest of your comment, I'll have to read it later. Michelle, yes it's true. Not good not to share. Yup. Exactly. Definitely good to talk about, and good to lean into. It's always temporary. That's right Debbie. One of my favourite sayings that I've used for years in my life is, "It is what it is, and this too shall pass." I think one of my mentors when I was in my mid 20's, he was way at the top of the company that I worked for at the time, the fitness company, and he would always just say, no matter what happened, he would say, "It is what it is." Or ... Is that the exact wording he said? It was something like, "It is what it is," and it was just this final answer to anything or everything. Like, shit would be going down, the ceilings would be crumbling, the sky be falling, and he'd be like, "It is what it is," and that's all it is. I really was like, "I like that," because it gives you back your power, and it gives you freedom, and it gives you realisation that, "So what? It is what it is, and that's all it is, and this too shall pass." It's the bit that I added onto it. But I remember in my relationship at the time, which was with my first husband, we'd have shit going on or whatever, money stuff or whatever it might've been, and I was like this wise old owl, I was like, "Well, it is what it is," I was just continually saying it, and he used to get super shitty with me, because no matter what was going on, I was like, "Well, it is what it is." Then now, I still say that all the time, continually. Even to my kids if they're freaking out about something. Or to friends or whatever, I'm like, "Oh, it just is what it is." Like, is there an action that I can take here? Is there something that I can do that is in alignment to do? That's not me running, or try to avoid, or numb? So is there an aligned action to take? Yes, if so great. Take it. But sometimes there's not. Sometimes you're just feeling all this shit going on, and you don't feel connected, and you don't feel like you really know what to do, and your message is not freakin' coming through you, and then sweat is dripping off your chin, and the WiFi's not working, and the the live stream keeps shutting down, and you vaguely feel like you might have to get up from the live stream at any moment and hurl into the pool, and it's like, "Let's just be here now then." It is what it is, and this too will pass. But meanwhile, what is actually the benefit and the purpose of this? Because if I come back to my underlying belief, I fully believe and know that everything happens for me, not to me. So this is happening for my greater good. So, if I can surrender to that idea, and that knowledge, I don't even need to know how or why right now. I don't need to sit here and figure out the answer. It might come to me later when I'm in a massage, or having a walk, or sleeping, or it might not come at all. Either way is fine, because I'm getting what I need from it. Feelings are facts I guess, if you make them facts. Jenna says, feelings aren't facts. Feelings yeah, they have whatever meaning you assign to them, so that's a great comment, I love it. It's about allowing yourself to be okay with what is. Then when you look at, being a messenger, and being this person in business and in life ... I don't know what to do with my hair ... Being somebody who feels, I guess, some sense of responsibility or obligation to your business, well fuck obligation anyway, do what's flowing through from your soul, but if you do feel that you desire to message and share something like a live stream, or a blog, or anything like that with your audience, then what if you literally just always gave yourself permission for the message to be the message that day, and for you to be who you are. So, your message for the day is a reflection of what's actually real, and what's going on inside of you. I'm literally just talking about shit that I've been feeling and experiencing, but I'm turning it into something that's motivating, inspiring, empowering. I wouldn't say super high entertainment value for today's particular show, but often times it's entertainment as well. Right? I don't know, you can tell me if it's entertainment. When I think of entertainment, I tend to think of [Ben Glariss 00:09:46], and I don't think I'm Ben Glariss today. But maybe it's entertaining in a different way. Anyway, I'm letting my message be what it is. I couldn't come back here to the villa now feeling the way I've been feeling. I'm feeling frustrated, and kind of like, "Ahhh. I want to rip the head off the world," and then all this random shit's happening in my body as well. I couldn't come back and just put that aside, and try to teach and preach on some other random point. I mean I could, but it wouldn't be real. It wouldn't have the real true power and fire in it, and you would feel that. On the other hand, if I just allow my message for the day to be a reflection of who I am today, then it's so easy. There's nothing I have to worry about. So today I'm being this person. This is what's going on, this is my truth. Maybe later tonight or tomorrow I'll be like random, silly, shenanigans version of me. Or another time I'll be going even deeper into the whole fire and [inaudible 00:10:32], but either way, I'm just going to be who I am, and I think this is one of the ultimate lessons that we all get to learn, and one of the ultimate shifts that we all get to drop into. Which is, always flow in ease if you just be who you are. So, this is not just with your free content though. Whatever you're putting out there for free, whatever you're sharing with the audience, even how you're communicating with clients, and then you're paid stuff and what you want to put out there into the world. It always gets to come from this place of, "This is just who I am, and this is what's real." It can be for the content side of things, and the actual stuff that you're putting together and delivering, but it's also the practical reality of what's going on in your world. Right? I used to think I had to hide the noise of my kids if they're around for example, or I would have never answered client audios, or having my hair blown out, which is what I was doing earlier. So then they can hear the noise of the hair dryer in the background. I listened back, you can still hear it. But it's more that I would have hidden that earlier, because I would have somehow thought that people would think that's unprofessional or how dare I multi-task by responding to messages while my hair's being done, or while I'm walking down a busy street, or being on phone calls with a client when I'm being driven to the airport or whatever. I just don't hide anything ever. This is my situation, this is my reality, or last night teaching my live stream trainings to my private clients. I did two live stream's late at night. I was pretty wrecked. I'd been going for already 17 hours, travelled from Australia to Bali, which is only a six hour flight anyhow, but more so that I was already feeling a bit energetically fucked around, and I was pretty tired, and I was just in my pyjamas, no bra on, no make up, shiny face, all that shit, and just being who I was. I didn't allow that to be like, "I should cancel live stream because I'm not really looking that great, or feeling that great. Or, I should doll myself up, and be somebody that I'm not. I've just let business be so easy by being who I am, and so that's what I wanted to come on and share with you today. If you feel like its hard, if you feel like its awkward, if you feel like you struggle to know what to say or how to get it out there, or that some days you're inspired and the message finally comes through you, and then other days you're like, "Man, I'm not feeling it today." You've got to recognise and understand that there's always something there to share, it's just that you got to give yourself permission to be who you are. Okay? So I think this is one of the biggest break throughs that you can have. It is what it is, that's all it is, and whatever it is will pass whether its high or low, up, down, crazy around, and in between, and you are who you are as well, and you get to be who you fully are in this moment. If you can give yourself permission to share who you truly are, day in and day out, with the world, and let it be that easy, and that real, that is when you build an unstoppable brand. So that's my little message for you today. If you'd like to know more about working with me one on one, having me in your side ... In your side, in your pocket, on your side, in your corner, wherever the fuck you want me, doing deep dive alignment work, you know, work on mindset, like I said, we do transformations on a soul and cellular level, as well as obviously all the ins and outs of building a multi seven figure, online, personal brand business. Message me over my Katrina Ruth page. I'll get you the details of the inner circle, let's talk. Have an amazing rest of the day wherever you are in the world, we'll see who I show up as tomorrow. And don't forget. Life is now, press play.
My wife, Tara, interviews me! What Writing Means to Me(Show notes: huntingthemuse.com/podcast/8) Welcome to HuntingTheMuse.com's Creative Writing Podcast. If you cannot see the audio controls, your browser does not support the audio element. Today's podcast episode is a special one. My wonderful wife, Tara, interviews me and asks that tough question: what does writing mean to me?We talk about my first writing experience and why I feel so drawn to writing. This podcast episode follows a conversational format, but under the surface of my own recounted experiences, you can see some of the underlying foundations of writing and what it takes to be a writer as it applies to your own story.We all come to the empty page with different backgrounds. And if storytelling has taught me anything, it's that there are hidden gems of truth within every story. Not subscribed to the podcast? Get it now!When did you first develop a desire to write?The first writing experience I remember was in Ms. Shupe's first grade class. We were supposed to write a short story and I wrote one that was very similar to The Lion and the Mouse. It was called, The Lion and the Turtle. It was a total knock-off.But my mom worked at Hill Air Force Base and they had computers. So she typed it up for me and printed it out and put it into this very professional looking folio. I took it to school and, probably more because it looked nice, Ms. Shupe put it on the bulletin board outside the classroom for the whole school to read. It blew me away and I was so excited about writing, you know, in first grade... with my knock-off story. So, where did it go from there?Well, for the most part, I only wrote for school assignments. There was something that went down in fifth or sixth grade. A couple of the guys in my class started writing a story about kids with super powers. But it got out of hand and nobody ended up wanting to finish it because we couldn't stop fighting about who had more super powers. So that didn't go very well.But then in junior high I started to write poems. I wanted to write stories, but I got hung up on using the correct punctuation. I had questions and I tried to ask my English teacher but it never came out right, so I never got the answers I was looking for. It was really stupid stuff like, do you put the period before the quotation marks or after the quotation marks. If somebody asks a question, is it a question mark and then quotation marks, and then if it's 'he said' or 'she said' is the 'h' or the 's' capitalized?We didn't have the Internet back then, so I couldn't just look it up and I never really got any good answers to those questions and I just felt kind of silly for asking them after a while so I stopped. But the stories that I did start writing, I would love to tell you that they were awesome, but they weren't. They were crap. I still have some of them. They were just utter crap, but what are you going to expect from a junior high school kid?At the time you thought they were awesome, though?I was pretty sure I was writing them with the punctuation wrong and I talked in the last episode about perfection and how that can be a total creativity killer and that totally killed it for me. Because I wanted them to be perfect. It was really bad cliche stuff. Yeah, I thought it was cool at the time, but it wasn't that great.And then, it was before the Internet, right? So we had the Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and we would, I called myself a modemer, you'd use the modem on your computer and dial in over the phone line and connect to the BBS. It was basically a simple chat program that brought in all sorts of different users across different telephone line systems and you could chat with people. You could post files. So I posted up some of my poems up there and you read some of them, didn't you?I did.It was before we met.Yeah, I was only on there because a friend who got me on. I wasn't computer savvy, even then. But I was just perusing the file section one day and came across them and the name 'Brady Frost' stuck in my head. And so when I met him later, after he mentioned he had written something, I... it was kind of crazy. Because your name had been stuck in my head.You were stalking me. No, I wasn't stalking you.I was really excited about writing in high school, very passionate. I took Creative Writing, Advanced Creative Writing classes. I ended up getting in a semester of Journalism and I did a horrible job writing articles. I didn't have any beats. I just kind of pumped out pulp crap. But it was fun. It was a lot of fun.I read some of yours, they were funny.They were humor pieces but there was no... nothing. So, yeah, my humor as a teenager was kind of borderline offensive... non-politically correct, slap and giggle type stuff. So, yeah, it wasn't great work, but I did enjoy writing a lot.Then we got married and I joined the military. And I remember that I wrote a few poems when I was in Basic Training. But that whole time period really took a lot out of me. We had a little girl on the way and the doctor said, well, first... they saw on the ultrasound a dark spot?There was an enlarged area in her kidneys.So, why don't you tell that side of the story since I was away in Basic.It was just during the routine ultrasound and I guess they kind of saw something. I got a phone call later that evening that she had been diagnosed with hydronephrosis. It just means that the middle of the kidney was enlarged and they thought it was filled with fluid. It could be something minor or it could be something very severe that required surgery and Brade was gone to Basic Training. So I had to tell him over the phone.Yeah and it was really tough because we didn't have a lot of time and I had a million questions and I couldn't ask hardly any of them. It was really tough because I was so far away and I was cut off. I couldn't just call whenever we wanted to. That was a really hard time for me. I got pneumonia in Basic and carried it for four to five weeks because I didn't want to flunk out or get washed back or miss any of my training because if I missed any of my training cycles because I might have to wait until the next training class of people came through.That isn't a bit deal in Basic, but when you go to your tech school that next block could be like three months, whenever they have enough people to fill their quotas. And Tara was due like a month after I was supposed to get out of training, so that would give us enough time to get my orders and figure out what we were doing.So with all that stress, I just kept pushing it and pushing it and pushing it. This included everything with the military normally.Even beyond then, you weren't very creatively driven during your time in the military.Yeah, but I'm just saying from that time period, running and everything with pneumonia. We had to run like five miles, we had to run three miles a couple times a week.. I can't even remember, it's been so long now. But by the time I finally collapsed after taking the first block test and getting a 96%, they took me to the emergency room. And I remember I was so hot and I hadn't eaten for days. It was all I could do to sip down some liquids and what-not.It was interesting, they got me a cab. It was at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas and they drove me from the school house for our tech school to the hospital. I must have looked like death, I don't know, the base taxi driver took one look at me and cranked up the AC all the way and turned all the vents toward me. By the time we got to the hospital I was feeling good, which was bad.Here I was thinking... they told ya, if you're trying to fake being sick, don't think you're going to get away with it because a million people before you have tried before you. And here I am at the emergency room and I'm feeling great after feeling like crap for weeks, so... yeah... I was like, okay, I gotta act sick. So I tried to act sick, but then they took my temperature and it was at 104 degrees. And then they took X-rays and my lungs were substantially filled with water, or liquid. So I had pretty bad pneumonia and I had to convince them not to keep me in the hospital because I didn't want to miss the next training block that was starting on Monday, and this was on Friday. But yeah, that whole time period took a lot out of me and then my focus became doing well in the military, as best I could, so writing really just fell off to the side. But I still wanted to write.You would still talk about it sometimes.We would go to Barnes & Noble and I would buy a new notebook and write in a few pages.Yeah, you did gather a lot of notebooks during those years.I subscribed to The Writer Magazine and I'd get Writers Digest every now and then. That's when I amassed a lot of the books on writing that I have. I've spent so much money on writing and really I should have just been writing.What would you say that writing means to you now?I think that I've learned a lot of lessons over time and I'm learning more of what goes into a story to make it work. And it isn't necessarily the punctuation things I was getting hung up on before. Because really, learning how to edit and doing an editing pass and then getting outside input can help resolve those issues. It's the story part. Even a poorly written book, grammatically speaking, can do very well if it's got a great story. And people will keep reading even though the writing, itself, isn't that great. Which just boggled my mind with as a reader. And maybe it's because the books I fell in love with seemed to be written very well. But over the years I've read books and thought, this is crap! How did this get past an editor? How is this a best seller, because here's an error, here's an error, and here's an error... and over years I just became more and more and more critical of these books. I would tell you a book that I liked and then you would start reading it and you couldn't even get through a bit of it. You would say, "How do you like this? It's so awful this way and that way." And I just stopped telling him about books I liked because he would just knock on them.It was really... a lot of that was probably an external manifestation of my insecurities as a writer on the inside, I would hyper-analyze. Because I wanted to be, and I still want to be, the best writer I can be. To see these errors and mistakes, all the books I had said "don't do this..." and there's thins book that's a best-seller that my wife loved and it does all the things the books I had bought said don't do... It... just... arrrgh.. it was so hard.It's like I would tell you, they told a good story.Yep, so that's one thing I've really learned, not just to make the writing as beautiful as I can (but not too wordy for some of the readers) and then encapsulate what really boils down to a great story. And that's a lot harder than it seems because you have to build a story so it's good.You can't just say, why did the story cross the road? I mean, there could be a great story in there, but it's the difference between just telling someone something and the art of story craft. Right? So I'm learning a lot more about what writing is. Writing is about storytelling and it's not just the words you choose to use, but it's also the point that you're trying to get across and how you can strum the emotions of the reader with a good story. We're all kind of programmed to speak the language of storytelling. But I've also learned that writing is hard work sometimes and that's a big difference between when I started out and where I am now. I'm learning to push through the resistance I have. Because for somebody who's thought about writing and dedicated a lot of their mind space toward writing for a very, very long time, I'm a horrible writer. I mean I think I can write well, but I don't do it regularly in a lot of cases. It's really about hard work for me. I know I have to overcome so much to get the story out. There are so many days when I can say, "Uuuuuhng, I'm tired," "My head hurts," "I'm feeling sad." There's a lot of excuses and if I really want to be a writer I've got to learn how to reprogram myself. I can really enjoy writing, then the next day I HATE what I wrote, but then if I put it away and I read it a couple weeks later after I forget the whole process, I'm like, "Hey, that's not that bad." There's this emotional rollercoaster from like in the moment, "Oh, I love this! It's so great." And then, "Aww, I hate it, it's so horrible!" To the point where I'm having nightmares.There are sometimes I wonder why you like it. Because you both love and hate writing from one moment to the next.Another thing I've learned, what writing means to me now is that writing is not cool new gadgets.You mean still, still learning?Hey, I've held off! I've held off for the most part.That doesn't stop you from looking at them all the time. "This would be good for writing, this would be good..."But it would! It would make the process so much simpler, until my technical brain... because I mean, I'm an IT Specialist by day so my whole thing is like figuring out computers and problems and setting up servers and programs and applications and whatever. So, whenever I get a.. it's the funniest thing... this, analyzing myself on this whole process. I get a new piece of technology like a tablet or a Surface Pro and I spend the next two weeks getting it set up perfect and that's two weeks of not writing. In some ways, they are your new notebooks. Although, you still get notebooks!You just can't beat a good looking notebook and a nice pen that flows well when you write and doesn't smear.Yeah, you are a pen snob.Mmmm, yeah. So, where do you see your writing five years from now?Well, I would like to be writing full-time. So, I've worked really, really hard to get to where I'm at career-wise. It was a lot of time spent going to school and taking on tough, challenging jobs, but at no point in my career or my life, did I stop working to go to school. So whenever I've gone to school it was full-time work and full-time school and then spending time with you and the kids.And it's been tough.Yeah.So, on one hand, I don't want to walk away from that, but on the other hand, I'm kind of burnt out. I want to write stories. I want to tell stories. I love telling stories.Now, I would say you're good at your job. It's just not a passion for you anymore.And, especially with some of the stuff I deal with after being in the military, I have days when it's really tough to do what I do and it takes a lot out of you. And those are the days when I come home and I say, "Yeah, if I were feeling better, today would be a good day to write. But my brain is just shot." I'm learning to overcome those because I know I have to overcome them if that's something that I want to end up doing.And those are the days, when you overcome, you feel best about.YeahAre you in-line right now with where you want to be in five years?Like effort-wise?Yeah, with what you're doing.Yes and no. So, I have productive days and I have not-so-productive days. But Chlorophyllium 9 and Final Hope, like that two-part story with the novella and the novel, this is the farthest I've ever got on a single project.By quite a lot.Yeah. I usually get really excited and there are different pitfalls I have. Like sometimes I tell you and it lets all the excitement out of what I'm wanted to do. I'm learning to do that better, though. And there's, like, I think the idea I had is stupid and I let those bad days overcome the good days and I let things go. But I'm really learning how to put a lot more effort into it and overcome.I would say that Chlorophyllium 9 and Final Hope are on track for being finished hopefully in October, maybe I'll give it a push back into November, but I don't want it going further than that. If I just have to sit down and crank out the words and come up with a horrible first draft just to get it done and then go back and slaughter it in editing, then that's what I'll have to do.Even though I've never seen you write a horrible first draft. You self-edit too much.I do. That's the biggest thing for me, is learning how to streamline my process. I spend way too much time trying to find the right words when I'm writing. It goes back to not comparing yourself to other writers, and I have to respect some of my own process, but if I can learn how to do things better, that would be really good.I've also released COMA: The Cataclysm, the first chapter on my blog. rbradyfrost.com/coma. You've read the first chapter. Yep.Do you remember that story?I do. I remember from when it was originally done.So, if there's enough interest, I will continue that. I'll just post a chapter at a time and I think spreading it out like that and only doing it if there's interest really helps free me from trying to do too much at once.It kind of goes back to something I did this last week. I was a part of a multi-author project. We each wrote a chapter to complete a novel and all you really had, there was no preplanning, we just had the chapter that came before ours. Mine was the second chapter and I wrote almost two thousand words in one evening and that was after a long day in the office and driving home from Dallas. I was pretty beat, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to be able to do it. But I had a 48-hour deadline and I ended up meeting it. And I thought I did pretty good.I enjoyed it.So, I think this is something I can do with COMA. And I really like seeing that old story kind of coming forward and getting some closure on that one. Because I think that one was actually a pretty good premise.So to answer your question, if I keep working really hard and I keep learning how to write better stories, then I do think that within five years I could seriously consider whether we want to just rely on my income as a writer rather than as an IT guy.Yeah.So that's where I am. That's what writing means to me, as of this week anyway.I think that's good.Okay. Well, I guess I'll give them their writing prompts.Sounds like a plan.Okay, stay tuned. You have this little intro and then you have seven writing prompts for the week.And now, for this week's writing prompts!What you'll find below is a series of creative writing prompts to help get you through your week. There are no rules as to how you should use them, but I recommend taking your muse's hand; wherever she may lead you. Whether you find yourself writing a descriptive scene or dialogue, a poem or prose, or anything else (even if it seems entirely unrelated to the prompt), you have won. Happy writing, and may you find success in hunting your muse this week. 1. Unknown CityA team of scientists have unearthed several rare artifacts from a construction site in a well-populated city. The discovery has all-but halted normal life in the area as experts from around the world flock to examine the unexpected discovery. All evidence seems to indicate the presence of a very prosperous civilization that existed tens of thousands of years ago in this location. The people of this era appear to be very advanced, using technology we can’t fully understand. This is all in direct conflict with everything we thought we knew. There are so many questions raised about the discovery. How did this civilization come into existence, where did they go, and what practical applications can we find for their strange devices? 2. The Inside JobYou’ve just discovered that someone very close to you might be a clandestine agent of unknown origin. You have no idea who they’re working for or what their objective is, but one thing is clear; they are not the person you thought they were. As tensions rise, you try to find out anything you can, all while pretending to be as oblivious and trusting as ever. What are they after? Why go to such lengths to get close to you?3. The ReversalPeople aren’t always who they appear to be. You’ve worked hard through the years and managed to amass a small fortune. Since you grew up in a disadvantaged situation, you always try to give back to the community and create opportunities for others to succeed. This means you can usually be seen out volunteering, and you save the fancy duds for special occasions. This has led to some very interesting misunderstandings, but today takes the cake. You’re running a little late on your way to the office after volunteering with a housing improvement project, when one of the candidates for a special fast-track program you just established literally runs into you on the street on their way to a one-on-one interview with… you. You’ve read their file and watched their application submission video, but the person yelling profanities and admonishments bears nothing more than a physical resemblance to the candidate you were sure you were going to pick. Deciding to allow things to play out, you apologize to them for being in their way and then slowly make your way to your building, stopping in a spare office to change into your business attire before walking in and calling them into a conference room.4. Creature ComfortsWhile on a solo vacation adventure, you decide to pay for a cheaper seat on a returning flight of a small charter plane instead of booking a seat on the normal airlines. When you board the plane, you’re taken aback by the luxury that surrounds you. Halfway through the leg; however, the small plane experiences a mechanical failure and the flight is diverted. The owner of the plane insists on compensating you for the inconvenience and puts you up in a five-star hotel while the parts for the plane are ordered and installed. This strange glimpse into a different world soon affords you with unexpected opportunities and you can’t help but think that this is a life you could get used to.5. Just a Little Bit LongerSomething is out there. You don’t know what it is or where it came from, but one thing is for sure. Where it goes, death follows. You’ve been on the run, dashing blindly through the dense overgrowth, for what seems like ages. The only thing you know for certain is that this creature, whatever it is, doesn’t like sunlight. With the first hints of dawn peeking over the tips of the mountains, you know you’ll be safe if you can somehow manage to stay one step ahead until the sun emerges in the east. But then you hear it somewhere close behind you. Without a second to spare, you don’t dare look back. Up ahead you see a small cave opening. If you can manage to squirm inside, you might have a chance. You just have to hold out just a little bit longer.6. Community SurvivalIn the aftermath of a terrible disaster, a community must overcome isolation and a lack of supplies to rebuild. Together, they work hand in hand. Strangers who largely ignored each other before the event now challenge their vast differences in order to survive. There are many things once taken for granted that are now in high demand and your diverse character ensemble must figure out how they will cope until outside help arrives. How will your characters handle outside threats to their small community? What happens if new parties arrive and old bonds begin to unravel the cohesiveness the group has worked so hard to form? 7. The Super-Secret AdmirerIt all started a couple days ago when you found a long-stem rose tucked under the windshield wiper blade of your car. There wasn’t a note and, as far as you can tell, there wasn’t a special occasion to celebrate. Another rose showed up on your doorstep the following evening. And now there’s an entire bouquet sitting at your desk. No one seems to know who they came from or why. Try as you might, you can’t think of anyone who would have a reason to shower you with gifts like this. Is this the beginning of something special, or are these strange gifts a small precursor to something darker than love? I hope you've enjoyed this week's episode and creative writing prompts. 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