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What a great episode and really what the Podcast is all about. Chris was referred to me by a friend and was super excited to come on but said "I'm just a normal dude". Well Im here to say no one is normal everyone has an amazing story to tell. Chris talks about his struggle between owning a gym and keeping his family life in check. He has went from owning a Crossfit affiliate to selling off everything to save his marriage. Once he got to NC by sheer luck he is offered an opportunity of a lifetime. Now Chris has a dope 9-5 working with some of the coolest guys in the business. His modesty impressed us and his openness humbled us. This dude will be on again. A great guest and now a great friend.

On this episode, I discuss the imposter syndrome and how at times we find ourselves feeling like a fraud, a fake or an imposter because we don't feel like we fit the bill. Well I'm here to say stop playing that broken record of lies and recognize you got this! So grab something to write with because I'm about to start dropping some gems and if anyone hasn't told you already.... you're not an imposter Sis.

Change is a necessity of life.  If you haven't been paying attention as of late, the podcast has been a bit different than usual.  I've been busy building other aspects of my business and have neglected things on 15 Minutes to Freedom.  Well I'm here to let you know, I'm back!  As with anything in life, things need to evolve, and that's what's about to happen.  15 Minutes to Freedom isn't going to go away, but it's getting a facelift.  Listen today to find out what's in store in the coming months. Ready to level up your business and join an incredible mastermind of high powered individuals?  Send me a message at ryan@ryanniddel.comto get more information on this incredible opportunity. Head to Amazon to pick up the Six Figure Blueprint now!  http://social.7fbs.com/SixFigure  

The Importance of Collaboration | C-Level What makes things good isn't just people it is people building off of each other, because a bunch of like-minded people are only going to get so far. What really pushes breakthrough thinking and innovation and creativity is building off what you bring versus what I know and adding and adding and adding and that's when the great ideas come. So today on C-Level I'm excited to have Lisa Fey as she is a TEDx speaker author and consultant and today we're gonna be talking about working together and collaboration. So Lisa welcome. - Oh it's great to be here. -So I'm really big on everybody's journey. I know a little bit about yours. Tell our audience how did you get into all this? How did you start? Where did you come from? That type stuff. - Well I'm a small-town girl from a farm community of about eight hundred. No wait, you don't want me to go that far back... I think it is relevant to my story. I mean, I am from a small town in North Carolina. I went to the University of North Carolina, talked my way into a job with NBC Sports. Ultimately talked my way into a job at the Coca-Cola company where I ended up spending 30-years. 10-years in sales, 10 in marketing and 10 in training and development and living all over the country and teaching sales training globally. When I had the opportunity to take the next step I decided to go out and become a professional speaker. But you know that's kind of a weird thing to tell people you do. What I really do is I help people in organizations that have identified that poor communication is a challenge to their business. #ChrisDeBlasio #CLevel #Agency850

Have you recognized life testing your willingness or ability to love yourself? Well I'm in the midst of a few major tests, all at the same time!

1st Thessalonians 4,5 & 2nd Thessalonians 2 David Berg —The Post–Trib Public Rapture!DFO 151513/4/81 1. PTL! HALLELUJAH! TYJ! AMEN! LORD, BLESS THIS VIDEO & help this little Family here & this team that are helping make it possible. Bless our study of Thy Word tonight‚ Lord, that it may search our hearts & our minds & clarify our thoughts so that we can understand these things‚ that we may study to show ourselves good workmen approved unto God, workmen that need not to be ashamed‚ rightly dividing the Word of Truth." (2Ti.2:15.) So we do ask Thee, in Jesus' name, to help us as we study Thy Word, Lord‚ to understand it, & to help these understand it, about these Last Days, in Jesus' name. Amen. PTL! TYJ! Amen! 2. WELL‚ OUR LAST STUDY WAS ON, AS YOU RECALL, THE 4TH CHAPTER OF 1ST THESSALONIANS, in which we were describing the coming of the Lord, or the Apostle was describing it, Paul, as he writes to the Thessalonicans—Thessalonians as it's called in the Bible—today's Salonica to the North of Athens, Greece, the church there, & telling them how the Lord is going to come. 3. AND I WENT OUT OF MY WAY PARTICULARLY TO EMPHASISE THE FACT THAT WHEN HE COMES HE IS NOT GOING TO BE COMING SECRETLY BY ANY MEANS, but that the whole World is going to know it! For He will come with a lot of noise‚ a lot of light! It will be like lightning shining from the East even unto the West, like continuous lightning! The whole sky is going to be lit up! And there are going to be several big noises! For it said there in Thessalonians that 4th chapter, that the Lord Himself shall descend from Heaven with a shout, & with the voice of the archangel!—There's two big noises! And the trump of God shall sound, there's the third! 4. NOW, I DON'T SEE HOW YOU CAN HAVE THE WHOLE SKIES LIGHT UP, Jesus Himself descending from Heaven with a shout & the voice of the archangel & the trumpet of God & not have the whole World know it! In fact, John later over in the first Chapter of Revelation tells us, 7th verse, "Behold, He cometh with clouds, & every eye shall see Him, & they also which pierced Him"—meaning the Jews. "And all kindreds of the Earth shall wail because of Him." 5. DOESN'T SOUND VERY MUCH LIKE A SECRET RAPTURE, DOES IT?—A secret coming? But that's what the false prophets teach, "a secret Rapture before the Tribulation to whisk you silently, secretly & unobserved out of this World! You just suddenly disappear & nobody knows where you went!" Well, it's just not going to happen that way! Because every place in the Bible that you read about the coming of the Lord, there's a lot of commotion going on, lots of light, a regular light show!—Stars falling from the heavens, sun & moon darkened & whatnot!—Big noises, earthquakes, voice of the Archangel, shout of the Lord, trump of God, all kinds of things! 6. AND THE GRAVES OPEN & THE SAINTS ARISING FROM THE DEAD! All these bodies coming out of the graves!—Not ghosts, mind you now this time, not just spirits, but actual bodies, the new bodies of the resurrected. And we Saints who are alive & remain shall be caught up together with them in the air, right in front of the eyes of the whole World! 7. NOW WHY SHOULD GOD WANT TO MAKE THAT A SECRET? Why should He want to hide that great final triumph of His Bride & His Church as she rises in victory?—Finally out of reach of her enemies in great triumph in the bridal march to Heaven to join her Bridegroom! Why should He want to hush it all up & make it a secret & hide it for some reason? Is He ashamed of it? Is He ashamed of His coming? Is He ashamed of His Bride? Is He ashamed that He's rescuing her right in front of all of His enemies & their enemies? Of course not! 8. THIS IDEA OF THE SECRET RAPTURE BEFORE THE TRIBULATION IS SOMETHING THAT WAS ONLY COOKED UP BY SOME FALSE PROPHETS ABOUT 200 YEARS AGO! Up until that time the Church had never heard of a secret Rapture, never even dreamed of a Rapture before the Tribulation! The Catholic Bible & all the Bibles from the very beginning taught that the Church at the Last Days was going to have to go through a period of terrible Tribulation. Every Prophet of God in the Old Testament taught it. Every Prophet of God in the New Testament taught it, that the Church was going to have to go through the Tribulation in the very End. 9. IT WAS ONLY WHEN THESE FALSE PEACE PROPHETS STARTED PROPHESYING A COUPLE HUNDRED YEARS AGO to tickle the ears of the Church with what they wanted to hear, that they wouldn't have to go through the Tribulation after all—as they'd always been taught & always believed & the Bible had always said—but that now Jesus was going to come secretly‚ quietly & nobody was going to know when He came & no one was going to know when they left! 10. IT WAS ALL GOING TO BE A BIG SECRET & all quiet & done so secretly & quietly & so slick that they used to illustrate that you'd be driving down the street & you'd just suddenly disappear!—And your car went on careening driverless down the street! Well, you're not going to just suddenly disappear, but you are going to leave your car! 11. YOU'RE JUST GOING TO GRADUALLY RISE RIGHT UP THROUGH THE ROOF OF THAT CAR IN GLORY, seeing the approach of your Lord Jesus Christ, & you're going to just sail right on up through the air right in front of everybody, & everybody will know where the driver went! "Where'd the driver go? What caused this accident?" the police will want to know. "Well, you saw where all the rest of them went!" Although I doubt if there are going to be too many who are going to be leaving any particular scene, because He says, "One will be working in the field, one will be taken & the other left. Two will be lying in the same bed, one will be taken, the other left." (Mt.24:40‚41.) 12. SO NOT TOO MANY PEOPLE ARE SAVED. " Strait is the gate & narrow is the way that leadeth to salvation‚ but few there be that enter therein. Wide is the gate & broad is the way that leadeth unto destruction, & many there be which go in thereat." (Mt.7:13,14.) So by comparison‚ the number of saved to the number of unsaved is pretty small. But there's going to be enough of us. 13. I BELIEVE BY THAT TIME PROBABLY STILL SEVERAL MILLION BELIEVERS WILL HAVE SURVIVED THE TRIBULATION & the persecutions of the Antichrist & his orders that no one can trade without the Mark of the Beast in their forehead or their hand‚ & no one can worship anybody else except the Antichrist & his Image. 14. BY THE WAY, WE STARTED TO TELL YOU THE OTHER NIGHT that we heard that someone in the United States had received a check from the IRS, one of these rebate checks, you know‚ refundable taxes or something‚ & at the bottom of the check it said in clear, plain type & print: "Do not cash this check unless the bearer bears this same number either in his forehead or his hand." And the person receiving the check took it to the Welfare office or wherever it was & said, "What is this?" "Oh", they said, "We made a mistake. We're not supposed to use those checks until 1984 or 1986," or something like that! 15.—BY WHICH TIME EVERYBODY WILL BE BRANDED WITH THE MARK OF THE BEAST, 666, & you won't be able to cash any checks or do any business or buy or sell—as God's Word says in the 13th Chapter of Revelation which we'll get to later—without that Mark. And they're already getting ready for it! They've already got 666 on the Social Security cards in the United States that are going to be issued in 1984! Somebody got one of those by accident & returned it. So they're getting ready! It won't be long now! 16. LIKE THE NEWSBOY ON THE STREET WHO KEPT SAYING, "IT WON'T BE LONG NOW!" Everybody always bought his papers because they wanted to see what it wasn't going to be long till! It wouldn't be long now! That was a good thing to say no matter what the news was. I think I remember that he couldn't even read, so that's all he'd say all day long, waving his papers up in the air. Well, I can wave this paper up in the air & tell you for sure: "It won't be long now! It won't be long now!" 17. IT'S NOT GOING TO BE LONG UNTIL THE ANTICHRIST IS GOING TO BE REVEALED, & his seven-year kingdom begun, the last three-&–a-half years of which are going to be the Great Tribulation! But these Pre-Trib Rapturists who teach that Jesus is going to catch His Church out of this World before the Tribulation & you're going to float to Heaven on flowery beds of ease & not have to suffer any persecution, no torture, no tribulation, God's going to relieve you of all that, you won't have to suffer it, are liars! It's not true! It's not according to the Word of God! I'm reading to you from the Bible! 18. JESUS IS NOT GOING TO COME SECRETLY SO THAT NOBODY KNOWS IF HE CAME & WENT & nobody's going to see you leave except you suddenly disappear. It just isn't going to happen that way, because that's not what the Bible says! I'm reading you Bible here! He's going to come with a lot of noise & a light show & fanfare of trumpets & all kinds of racket going on! Tremendous! The greatest spectacle the World has ever seen! 19. THE GREATEST LIGHT SHOW THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN! You know, these hippies & drug-users, they like their light shows to make'm really trip out—well boy, I'm telling you, we are going to trip out on that one!—Right out of this World! Praise God? Hallelujah? It's going to be the greatest light show you ever saw & it's really going to make you trip out, right out of this World! And that's the time when you can finally say: "Stop the World, I wanna get off!" Hallelujah! And we're going to take off to be with Jesus in the air! 20. EVERYBODY'S GOING TO SEE HIM COMING IN THE CLOUDS: Light, trumpet, voices, thunders, earthquakes, noises, dead rising from the graves, the live Saints rising from the ground‚ floating right up through the ceilings & the buildings & the cars & right up into the clouds to be with Jesus! That doesn't sound like a very secret Rapture‚ does it? No! And it's not going to be! Well‚ I'm sure some of you

1st Thessalonians 4,5 & 2nd Thessalonians 2David Berg—The Post–Trib Public Rapture!DFO 151513/4/811. PTL! HALLELUJAH! TYJ! AMEN! LORD, BLESS THIS VIDEO & help this little Family here & this team that are helping make it possible. Bless our study of Thy Word tonight‚ Lord, that it may search our hearts & our minds & clarify our thoughts so that we can understand these things‚ that we may study to show ourselves good workmen approved unto God, workmen that need not to be ashamed‚ rightly dividing the Word of Truth." (2Ti.2:15.) So we do ask Thee, in Jesus' name, to help us as we study Thy Word, Lord‚ to understand it, & to help these understand it, about these Last Days, in Jesus' name. Amen. PTL! TYJ! Amen!2. WELL‚ OUR LAST STUDY WAS ON, AS YOU RECALL, THE 4TH CHAPTER OF 1ST THESSALONIANS, in which we were describing the coming of the Lord, or the Apostle was describing it, Paul, as he writes to the Thessalonicans—Thessalonians as it's called in the Bible—today's Salonica to the North of Athens, Greece, the church there, & telling them how the Lord is going to come.3. AND I WENT OUT OF MY WAY PARTICULARLY TO EMPHASISE THE FACT THAT WHEN HE COMES HE IS NOT GOING TO BE COMING SECRETLY BY ANY MEANS, but that the whole World is going to know it! For He will come with a lot of noise‚ a lot of light! It will be like lightning shining from the East even unto the West, like continuous lightning! The whole sky is going to be lit up! And there are going to be several big noises! For it said there in Thessalonians that 4th chapter, that the Lord Himself shall descend from Heaven with a shout, & with the voice of the archangel!—There's two big noises! And the trump of God shall sound, there's the third!4. NOW, I DON'T SEE HOW YOU CAN HAVE THE WHOLE SKIES LIGHT UP, Jesus Himself descending from Heaven with a shout & the voice of the archangel & the trumpet of God & not have the whole World know it! In fact, John later over in the first Chapter of Revelation tells us, 7th verse, "Behold, He cometh with clouds, & every eye shall see Him, & they also which pierced Him"—meaning the Jews. "And all kindreds of the Earth shall wail because of Him."5. DOESN'T SOUND VERY MUCH LIKE A SECRET RAPTURE, DOES IT?—A secret coming? But that's what the false prophets teach, "a secret Rapture before the Tribulation to whisk you silently, secretly & unobserved out of this World! You just suddenly disappear & nobody knows where you went!" Well, it's just not going to happen that way! Because every place in the Bible that you read about the coming of the Lord, there's a lot of commotion going on, lots of light, a regular light show!—Stars falling from the heavens, sun & moon darkened & whatnot!—Big noises, earthquakes, voice of the Archangel, shout of the Lord, trump of God, all kinds of things!6. AND THE GRAVES OPEN & THE SAINTS ARISING FROM THE DEAD! All these bodies coming out of the graves!—Not ghosts, mind you now this time, not just spirits, but actual bodies, the new bodies of the resurrected. And we Saints who are alive & remain shall be caught up together with them in the air, right in front of the eyes of the whole World!7. NOW WHY SHOULD GOD WANT TO MAKE THAT A SECRET? Why should He want to hide that great final triumph of His Bride & His Church as she rises in victory?—Finally out of reach of her enemies in great triumph in the bridal march to Heaven to join her Bridegroom! Why should He want to hush it all up & make it a secret & hide it for some reason? Is He ashamed of it? Is He ashamed of His coming? Is He ashamed of His Bride? Is He ashamed that He's rescuing her right in front of all of His enemies & their enemies? Of course not!8. THIS IDEA OF THE SECRET RAPTURE BEFORE THE TRIBULATION IS SOMETHING THAT WAS ONLY COOKED UP BY SOME FALSE PROPHETS ABOUT 200 YEARS AGO! Up until that time the Church had never heard of a secret Rapture, never even dreamed of a Rapture before the Tribulation! The Catholic Bible & all the Bibles from the very beginning taught that the Church at the Last Days was going to have to go through a period of terrible Tribulation. Every Prophet of God in the Old Testament taught it. Every Prophet of God in the New Testament taught it, that the Church was going to have to go through the Tribulation in the very End.9. IT WAS ONLY WHEN THESE FALSE PEACE PROPHETS STARTED PROPHESYING A COUPLE HUNDRED YEARS AGO to tickle the ears of the Church with what they wanted to hear, that they wouldn't have to go through the Tribulation after all—as they'd always been taught & always believed & the Bible had always said—but that now Jesus was going to come secretly‚ quietly & nobody was going to know when He came & no one was going to know when they left!10. IT WAS ALL GOING TO BE A BIG SECRET & all quiet & done so secretly & quietly & so slick that they used to illustrate that you'd be driving down the street & you'd just suddenly disappear!—And your car went on careening driverless down the street! Well, you're not going to just suddenly disappear, but you are going to leave your car!11. YOU'RE JUST GOING TO GRADUALLY RISE RIGHT UP THROUGH THE ROOF OF THAT CAR IN GLORY, seeing the approach of your Lord Jesus Christ, & you're going to just sail right on up through the air right in front of everybody, & everybody will know where the driver went! "Where'd the driver go? What caused this accident?" the police will want to know. "Well, you saw where all the rest of them went!" Although I doubt if there are going to be too many who are going to be leaving any particular scene, because He says, "One will be working in the field, one will be taken & the other left. Two will be lying in the same bed, one will be taken, the other left." (Mt.24:40‚41.)12. SO NOT TOO MANY PEOPLE ARE SAVED. " Strait is the gate & narrow is the way that leadeth to salvation‚ but few there be that enter therein. Wide is the gate & broad is the way that leadeth unto destruction, & many there be which go in thereat." (Mt.7:13,14.) So by comparison‚ the number of saved to the number of unsaved is pretty small. But there's going to be enough of us.13. I BELIEVE BY THAT TIME PROBABLY STILL SEVERAL MILLION BELIEVERS WILL HAVE SURVIVED THE TRIBULATION & the persecutions of the Antichrist & his orders that no one can trade without the Mark of the Beast in their forehead or their hand‚ & no one can worship anybody else except the Antichrist & his Image.14. BY THE WAY, WE STARTED TO TELL YOU THE OTHER NIGHT that we heard that someone in the United States had received a check from the IRS, one of these rebate checks, you know‚ refundable taxes or something‚ & at the bottom of the check it said in clear, plain type & print: "Do not cash this check unless the bearer bears this same number either in his forehead or his hand." And the person receiving the check took it to the Welfare office or wherever it was & said, "What is this?" "Oh", they said, "We made a mistake. We're not supposed to use those checks until 1984 or 1986," or something like that!15.—BY WHICH TIME EVERYBODY WILL BE BRANDED WITH THE MARK OF THE BEAST, 666, & you won't be able to cash any checks or do any business or buy or sell—as God's Word says in the 13th Chapter of Revelation which we'll get to later—without that Mark. And they're already getting ready for it! They've already got 666 on the Social Security cards in the United States that are going to be issued in 1984! Somebody got one of those by accident & returned it. So they're getting ready! It won't be long now!16. LIKE THE NEWSBOY ON THE STREET WHO KEPT SAYING, "IT WON'T BE LONG NOW!" Everybody always bought his papers because they wanted to see what it wasn't going to be long till! It wouldn't be long now! That was a good thing to say no matter what the news was. I think I remember that he couldn't even read, so that's all he'd say all day long, waving his papers up in the air. Well, I can wave this paper up in the air & tell you for sure: "It won't be long now! It won't be long now!"17. IT'S NOT GOING TO BE LONG UNTIL THE ANTICHRIST IS GOING TO BE REVEALED, & his seven-year kingdom begun, the last three-&–a-half years of which are going to be the Great Tribulation! But these Pre-Trib Rapturists who teach that Jesus is going to catch His Church out of this World before the Tribulation & you're going to float to Heaven on flowery beds of ease & not have to suffer any persecution, no torture, no tribulation, God's going to relieve you of all that, you won't have to suffer it, are liars! It's not true! It's not according to the Word of God! I'm reading to you from the Bible!18. JESUS IS NOT GOING TO COME SECRETLY SO THAT NOBODY KNOWS IF HE CAME & WENT & nobody's going to see you leave except you suddenly disappear. It just isn't going to happen that way, because that's not what the Bible says! I'm reading you Bible here! He's going to come with a lot of noise & a light show & fanfare of trumpets & all kinds of racket going on! Tremendous! The greatest spectacle the World has ever seen!19. THE GREATEST LIGHT SHOW THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN! You know, these hippies & drug-users, they like their light shows to make'm really trip out—well boy, I'm telling you, we are going to trip out on that one!—Right out of this World! Praise God? Hallelujah? It's going to be the greatest light show you ever saw & it's really going to make you trip out, right out of this World! And that's the time when you can finally say: "Stop the World, I wanna get off!" Hallelujah! And we're going to take off to be with Jesus in the air!20. EVERYBODY'S GOING TO SEE HIM COMING IN THE CLOUDS: Light, trumpet, voices, thunders, earthquakes, noises, dead rising from the graves, the live Saints rising from the ground‚ floating right up through the ceilings & the buildings & the cars & right up into the clouds to be with Jesus! That doesn't sound like a very secret Rapture‚ does it? No! And it's not going to be! Well‚ I'm sure some of you

I hope everyone is safe and healthy. As you all are very aware we have been stayin in for some time. Well Im hoping that you are taking the time to restart after this virus is over. Because this is your rare opportunity to take the next step and prepare your self when this virus is over. Let’s talk about it. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/cashunt/support

Part 4 of our Wednesday evening Lenten series.For the season of Lent (Ash Wednesday to Maundy Thursday) we will be posting our midweek services. Our goal in these services is to go deeper into the words of Jesus and to learn how to how to abide in Him.Spiritual Discipline Resources we'd like to share:RightNow Media StudiesSpiritual Discipline InfographicFrom our presenter:"Does all of the craziness of this time feel overwhelming to you? Have you ever been wanting to find a way to connect more with God? Or maybe you've got more time on your hands these days and you want to do something more productive with it? Well I'm proposing an option for all those feelings! In this time of disruption and rhythms being broken, I'd love to invest with anyone who is interested in growing in the practices of Jesus and developing our spiritual disciplines (whatever stage you are in your faith)! If you're interested, feel free to join the Facebook group I've setup, and enjoy it however you feel led to participate. It'll be a place for daily discussion, sharing inspiring content and a platform for community discussion." Facebook Group - Practicing the Ways of Jesus Support the show (https://pushpay.com/g/cedarhillscr)

So yes- there's a so-called lockdown right now because of the Coronavirus. Maybe you've had to reschedule clients or postpone events and you're left wondering what can be done. Well I'm here to tell you that there's PLENTY that can be done!! In this episode, I share some practical and beneficial tasks you can do to "Spring Clean" and organize your business during this extra time at home.GET THE AMAZING BUNDLE I MENTION IN THIS EPISODE HEREI am also thrilled to announce something I have been working hard on- the Finding Your Focus Podcast is now The Tiffany Farley Podcast! New Podcast Website: tiffanyfarley.com/podcast Episode Library: https://tiffanyfarley.com/category/podcast/Instagram: @tiffanylfarley

Last week we talked about when to know if it's time to leave a long term relationship. This week, Bridie Tanner and Tanya Koens answer the question "Well I'm single, what the hell do I do now?". They talk getting back in the game, remembering how to flirt and reacquainting oneself with being the single version of you

Mason Taylor and Tahnee McCrossin, our lord and lady of SuperFeast, are back at it on the pod today, waxing lyrical on the juicy wonders of Schizandra berry. Our dynamic duo explore Schizandra's adaptogenic qualities, the herbal lore surrounding its historical use, its potency as a Liver and sexual tonic and so much more! Tune in for the full download. "If you want to be initiating into tonic herbalism long term we get out of, "I've got a symptom, I take tonic herb to solve it," but rather we're trying to bring a smooth flow of Qi through all of our organs” - Mason Taylor   Tahnee and Mason discuss: Schizandra as the five flavour fruit. Schizandra's actions on the Liver, Lung and Kidney channels. How harmonising your Liver Qi can aid sleep. The adaptogenic qualities of Schizandra. Schizandra as a potent sexual tonic for both men and women. Expressing reverence for the tonic herbs you are consuming and appreciating the lineage you get to be apart of by doing so. Schizandra; breast feeding and pregnancy. Schizandra and menopause.   Who are Mason Taylor and Tahnee McCrossin? Mason Taylor: Mason’s energy and intent for a long and happy life is infectious. A health educator at heart, he continues to pioneer the way for potent health and a robust personal practice. An avid sharer, connector, inspirer and philosophiser, Mason wakes up with a smile on his face, knowing that tonic herbs are changing lives. Mason is also the SuperFeast founder, daddy to Aiya and partner to Tahnee (General Manager at SuperFeast). Tahnee McCrossin: Tahnee is a self proclaimed nerd, with a love of the human body, it’s language and its stories. A cup of tonic tea and a human interaction with Tahnee is a gift! A beautiful Yin Yoga teacher and Chi Ne Tsang practitioner, Tahnee loves going head first into the realms of tradition, yogic philosophy, the organ systems, herbalism and hard-hitting research. Tahnee is the General Manager at SuperFeast, mumma to reishi-baby Aiya and partner to Mason (founder of SuperFeast).   Resources: SuperFeast Schizandra SuperFeast Website SuperFeast Instagram SuperFeast Facebook Qiological Podcast Episode   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast?   A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Mason:     (00:00) Hello everybody. I'm here with the beautiful Tahns.   Tahnee:   (00:02) Hi.   Mason:     (00:03) We're just going to have a jam today about herb of the month, Schizandra berry.   Tahnee:   (00:08) Ah. Schizandra, I love her.   Mason:   (00:11) We do love Schizandra. We've got the partnering herb of Schizandra sitting next to us as well.   Tahnee:   (00:18) Goji berry.   Mason:   (00:18) Our Goji dog is sitting here in the podcast as well. If you hear her having a scratch or having a yawn. Schizandra is absolutely one of my favorite herbs and I know in tonic herbalism and especially with myself talking about these herbs quite often, you can get me talking about 30 different herbs and I'll be just as excited about all of them because they are so incredible.   Mason:   (00:46) It's been over a decade that I've been into serious tonic herbal usage and there's only a few herbs which have really risen to become... They're real allies for myself. And I've noticed Schizandra berry is like that for a lot of people. Especially for those who can stick longterm to consistent usage and find Schizandra to begin with.   Mason:   (01:10) It's merely the mushrooms and then all of the herbs have their own little cult following. But the mushrooms and Schizandra are both up that people write to me when I talk about it and go, "That herb absolutely transformed my life." In the sense of just like you're at an integer and you didn't realize something that was a potential for your health and how you could feel needing to deal with a blockage of chi or something. Especially with the Liver with Schizandra. I'm just always really impressed with how many people come forward, men and women and talk about that herb in that way.   Tahnee:   (01:45) Yeah, I think I was drawn to the idea of Schizandra, it took me a long time to get around the flavor of it. It's a five flavor fruit and it has quite a distinct, and I think complex taste, which, I have quite a sensitive palate. And it was extreme when I first started taking it, but I just noticed so many benefits that I pushed through and now I find the taste fine. I actually enjoy it. But-   Mason:   (02:08) I'm really glad you bring that up though.   Tahnee:   (02:10) Yeah.   Mason:   (02:10) Because Reishi and Schizandra-   Tahnee:   (02:14) Taste horrible.   Mason:   (02:14) ... are generally... Well-   Tahnee:   (02:17) They don't but you have to adjust sometimes.   Mason:   (02:19) Sometimes you do and Schizandra especially is the one where you really either love it. You either love it, you're neutral or you hate it I guess, so that's not that unusual, but it's predominant... It's the five flavor fruit or five flavour berry wu wei zi is the name, the traditional name.   Mason:   (02:40) However, it's predominantly sour, which is showing that it's entering into the Liver, and salty, which shows that... And that's why for the benefits that we're going to and the reverence that it has. A lot of it surrounds around the Kidney and Liver dynamic. So there is that predominance in the flavor. However, there is that sweet, bitter and pungency. And for you, was it bitterness or was it a sourness?   Tahnee:   (03:09) No, I think honestly it was just the combination of flavors. I think I just have... I've word as a cook and worked in restaurants and things. I feel I've got a good pallet, a sensitive pallet, and it's such a complex mix of flavors at once that it's like when you get overstimulated with too much sensation, it's like, "Eh." So I just felt every time I took a sip I was like, "Ugh." And honestly I was quite addicted to the sweet flavor. If I think back over my life, I was vegetarian for a long time and so many things that are vegetarian are sweet like grains and pumpkin and sweet potato.   Mason:   (03:47) Or roots.   Tahnee:   (03:47) Yeah. A lot of the things I lived on were of a really sweet flavor and then I would drink lots of honey in my tea and lots of soy milk. I was eating what I thought was a quite a healthy diet. Obviously like now, know things that are different. Shout out to our commenter, he thinks we're carnivorous. But-   Mason:   (04:05) You're just referring to a-   Tahnee:   (04:07) A review-   Mason:   (04:08) A review that came through on the podcast. I assume someone who is vegetarian or vegan who perhaps... Considered us a bit critical or, can't even remember-   Tahnee:   (04:20) "Judgemental" I said-   Mason:   (04:21) Judgmental towards the diet and referred to us as carnivores which I think omnivorous is where we'd probably officially sit.   Tahnee:   (04:29) Yeah. Like humans are. But anyway, I feel for me, learning to appreciate in my diet, more complex flavors... I never had a problem with bitter. I've always liked coffee and Reishi and those things, really dark chocolate. I love all those flavors. I've never had an issue, but I find that, for me that real mix of strong flavors was intense.   Tahnee:   (04:53) But like I said, the benefits for me of Reishi... Excuse me, Schizandra, were just really incredible. One thing you didn't touch on then, but it's such a strong Lung tonic as well. And I noticed my skin through the Liver and Lung channels, when I take it consistently it really improves.   Tahnee:   (05:10) It just feels like it's really clear and less inflammation and any redness and all that stuff. And I remember that customer of ours sent us a before and after. Must have been two or three years ago.   Mason:   (05:22) That first... When we were first putting out the 100 days of Schizandra.   Tahnee:   (05:25) Yeah. And she was like, "I actually during the process didn't notice a change." I was like, "This isn't working." And she said, "I'm really glad I took a before and after" and she looked completely different at the end. And we were all-   Mason:   (05:36) That was insane.   Tahnee:   (05:36) Yeah, amazed.   Mason:   (05:39) Well and that was the hundred days of Schizandra is what I just said there and I just assume that everyone knows what that is, but of course you know, a hundred days Schizandra is initiation. There is quite often recommended in tonic herbalism a lot of the time. And you might want to touch on this. Can you just talk to how, when we are beginning and we have movement of coarse toxicity and chi and more hormones entering the system, why the Liver is necessary to have it a smooth flow of Chi.   Tahnee:   (06:05) Yeah. So basically your Liver is purifying the Blood and also responsible for measuring the levels and things in the Blood and telling the body what to produce. If the bile isn't flowing well... And so what the Liver will do is pass a lot of those toxins through to the bile to enter the digestive tract. If the bile isn't flowing well or is being recycled, which is what happens a bit further down in the small intestine, right at the end. The bile really ideally is pushed through with fiber and excreted, especially if there is a lot of toxicity in the body because you want that cleaned out. So what we're looking to do with Schizandra is to sort of increase the production. The Gallbladder and Liver are Yin and Yang to each other, in Chinese medicine, they're partners.   Tahnee:   (06:50) So, when the Liver starts to function better and the Gallbladder starts to function better, by default, the Blood becomes cleaner and the body becomes cleaner. This idea of very slowly harmonizing and regulating the hormone system through the process of improving the function of the organs.   Tahnee:   (07:07) And this is one of those things that people that criticize detox always say, they're like, "Ah, you know your body detoxes itself naturally." Well it does, but it needs support sometimes because we're exposed to so much stuff in our culture. We're all banging on about corona virus right now but there's a lot more insidious things going on every day in terms of the chemicals we're exposed to. BOC's from paint, the different types of sprays that they're using on the parklands around our country and many others, pesticides on food-   Mason:   (07:37) Like metabolic diseases being way more deadly than-   Tahnee:   (07:42) Yeah-   Mason:   (07:42) Coronavirus every year. Generally a virus has been historically.   Tahnee:   (07:48) Yeah and I think if we look at what is in our Bloodstream these days and we look at what the Livers job is and how stressed we are, because the other thing the Liver has to do, it has to produce bile, has to clean the Blood and has to support the making of Blood.   Tahnee:   (08:04) So in Chinese medicine it's crucial, like between it and the Spleen and the Kidneys, that's where Blood is formed in the body. So if we're stressed the Liver, again provides... This is Chinese medicine theory, but it provides that impetus for us to push through and keep going and that upward Yang energy. It's especially when we're trying to really bring something forth, bring, give birth to something creative or bring something into the world,   Tahnee:   (08:31) And anyone who's ever done a big project will know that feeling of just really hustling to get something out there. And that's all really Livery. And a lot of our culture is designed to really emphasize and support and promote that kind of behavior because it's good for the economy and whatever. So we're looking at, how do we take the pressure off this organ that does so much for us, so that we can actually feel more in harmony with ourselves as well.   Tahnee:   (09:01) When the Liver is out of whack all sorts of stuff goes on and we can have really poor sleep. We can have crazy dreams. I know when I've been through periods of Liver detoxification, I've had some insane dreams because in Chinese medicine, again, it holds a spirit that anchors us to our astral body. And so we can go through a lot of purifications as well. And we've seen that a lot with people, that take Reishi and Schizandra and the herbs that work on the Liver, they write to us and are like, "Oh my God, my dreams have gotten crazy."   Mason:   (09:29) And a lot of people, as you were saying, the Liver is really anchoring in... if we're not anchored in-   Tahnee:   (09:35) At po-   Mason:   (09:37) At po, if we're not anchored in through the Liver and have a smooth flow for when we're sleeping.   Tahnee:   (09:40) At the hun, sorry guys.   Mason:   (09:40) You're right. I was hanging out, sitting there going, "Hang on. One of the Tellytubbies doesn't live in the Liver."   Tahnee:   (09:48) No, the po lives in the Spleen, the hun lives in the Liver.   Mason:   (09:52) So our hun needing to travel while we're asleep-   Tahnee:   (09:55) Yeah-   Mason:   (09:56) And necessary to have a smooth flow of... Through the Liver. It's why, having enough glycogen as well. It's why people like having a spoonful of honey before they sleep. But, a lot of people... I'm not backing that, but that's something that, that occurs the same area and different in the sense that a lot of people will take Schizandra or the Beauty Blend in which Schizandra a core ingredient and the others revolve around the Schizandra, the Goji berry and the Longan with the Schizandra, the three beauty sisters. Then the pearl being that cold queen of the beautifying herbs, in the youth preserving herbs. But Schizandra combined with Goji especially brings that smooth flow through the Liver.   Mason:   (10:43) So a lot of people, even though Reishi has got that stigma for being the herb that's going to help you sleep, in within our range. Sometimes it's the Schizandra and Beauty Blend that help people drop in and have these incredible processes while they're sleeping. And these real astral dreams. Once the smooth flow of chi is occurring within your Liver, you don't necessarily need to keep on. It's not helping you get to sleep a lot of the time. It's just in the beginning, the Schizandra... What I find it's just bringing that smooth flow and then if you can generate that in your lifestyle, continue up with your Schizandra practice over the years. You don't have to have it before sleep every night in order to get that kind of work as well.   Tahnee:   (11:26) Mm-hmm (affirmative). You're saying have it before sleep?   Mason:   (11:29) For a little bit.   Tahnee:   (11:29) Yeah.   Mason:   (11:31) I never really got into that habit. It's still a morning one for me, especially lately we've had two or three people, write without ever having talked about it. They've just given us a testimonial and then they'll say, "Oh! My mother has been, having the Schizandra with the Beauty Blend before bed and she's been sleeping like a log and having really incredible dreams." Is that something that you've heard of? And over the years-   Tahnee:   (11:58) Yep-   Mason:   (11:58) It's been nine years working with Schizandra and giving it to people and it's one of those things that comes up.   Tahnee:   (12:03) Yep. Yeah well, I mean it makes sense. Again thinking about that Taoist energetics thing. And I think what's really... When you look at what... I was thinking about the Russians just then, with all those stress studies that they were doing. There was a bunch of studies done by the Russians in world war II, I'm pretty sure, where they were giving pilots high doses of adaptogens. So they were using Ginseng, Schizandra and something else.   Mason:   (12:37) It was more the cold war, when they were doing it, like in the 70s.   Tahnee:   (12:37) Sorry about that history, But anyway, sometime when there were people dropping bombs on other people... Um-   Mason:   (12:44) Or they were giving the bombs to other people to drop bombs on people.   Tahnee:   (12:45) Is that what they were doing?   Mason:   (12:47) No they were... The whole cold war, the nature of it was cold, that they were fighting through other forces and through, the hostile placing of army bases in places like Cuba and Turkey, I believe it was Turkey for the Americans. But all the while, a complete over decades, full wide kiting out of the military, which is what led them to adaptogens like Schizandra. Because they were just wanting to... And for their astronauts as well and their athletes   Tahnee:   (13:17) Mm-hmm (affirmative). Those Russians, they're wild guys. So Mason just told you all about the cold war. Thank you very much for the education. Yeah, so these guys were testing... and they're studies you can read online if you go on a little google marathon... Them using Schizandra... was it Ginseng? And What was the third one?   Mason:   (13:37) Siberian Ginseng?   Tahnee:   (13:39) Yeah. But anyway, they were using a couple of herbs-   Mason:   (13:44) And Rhodiola.   Tahnee:   (13:44) Rhodiola? Yeah. Okay. So they were basically testing the stress response of the soldiers. So you know, these guys under a shit load of pressure. Some of them flying planes, pilots, hours without sleep, hours in high stress situations. They were really impressed with the benefits these herbs were giving these guys because it was increasing their performance and their ability to focus and all of this stuff.   Mason:   (14:04) And in a nonspecific way as well. You didn't know, one guy might have no cortisol and the other guy might have raised cortisol   Tahnee:   (14:12) Yeah-   Mason:   (14:12) And it would-   Tahnee:   (14:13) Yeah. It balances-   Mason:   (14:13) Help them out no matter what.   Tahnee:   (14:15) It knows how to play, yeah. And that's what I think people, a lot of the time it's really easy to fall into that trap of being really linear. Things should be like this and you know, a herb does this. And it's actually one of the crazy things about tonic herbs and adaptogens is they do literally, give the body this capacity to respond in the way that required and appropriate for the individuals.   Tahnee:   (14:38) So, what does it mean to have a clean, healthy blood stream and a Liver that's able to functionally process that? Well it means that the hormone levels in the Blood are going to be, appropriate. So then the Liver isn't going to be demanding of the Kidneys that it produces more stressful hormones that are getting consumed. This whole flow starts ease and everything finds its homeostasis.   Tahnee:   (15:03) I think that's where any adaptogen or tonic herb can be really powerful. And they're not exactly interchangeable but in Schizandra's case, they are. Schizandra is adaptogenic and a tonic. In terms of stress, in terms of our immunity, which is such a huge topic right now. In terms of our looks and our aesthetic. I mean it's a super popular female herb. Not just for the physical, outside benefits, but also internally it really supports sexual function and the hydration of the vagina, in terms of sexual fluids and all these things.   Mason:   (15:39) Well, what you've just hit on there is the lore and reverence story around Schizandra berry. We were talking about, a little bit, before we jumped on. In terms of, when you look at the lore and how this got famous with those that eventually became labeled the Taoists, just people and herbalists, out there in the wild, grandmothers tuning into what's going to be the best for their family, best for the village. So on and so forth. Emperors eventually concubines, this and the elite, Schizandra became revered and it's up there. It's right up there.   Tahnee:   (16:14) Mm-hmm (affirmative) Well it's the top in some areas -   Mason:   (16:16) Absolutely-   Tahnee:   (16:16) This is the thing with all the different regions. They have preferred her, again based on what seasonal, or what's culturally significant to them. So yeah, there's several places where it's the top herb.   Mason:   (16:28) And what you hit on was amazing. You want to watch out when you're listening to this, because it was just really easy for the lore to be taken as shiny marketing and lead to, "I need that herb."   Mason:   (16:41) But what Tahns has just hit on... Were over thousands of years it wasn't rice and lettuce that got the reputation for being a youth preserver, a outer beautifier of the insides of the body, a herb that brings mental acuity longterm, and sharpness of the mind. And then what it does for our sexual vigor as Tahns is just talking about for regenerating the sexual fluids. It's also an astringent. So as an astringent... That's the Western term... But it's sealing in the fluids of the body and it's sealing in the Yang to an extent while it actually regenerates the fluids of the Yin.   Mason:   (17:22) So it's a regenerator of Kidney Yin Jing. Then, when you look at the offshoots of that, you see it's warming to the genitalia. So what we're pointing to here, is over thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years of usage and almost hundreds of thousands of herbs available, Schizandra is used for this intention probably as widely as any herb, with that reverence for bringing warmth... Especially for females to the genitalia... and sensitivity. For men restoring sexual essence and increasing staying power. So... Whether it's sexual essence... basically boosting the male essence. So boosting the male pollen, not the seed. That's the Kidney stuff you're talking to-   Tahnee:   (18:18) Yeah-   Mason:   (18:18) Especially there.   Tahnee:   (18:19) Well, I mean, you just described, Kidneys is all about sexuality and reproduction of everything from cells to humans. It's that same concept as Jing. It's that same concept in yoga as well, of Shakti and svadhisthana chakra, this area. It's all about, Fluids and reproduction and-   Mason:   (18:41) Fertility-   Tahnee:   (18:42) Yeah, juiciness and you know, these are all good healthy things, right? And so we need a certain amount of Yin to produce that. And the Kidney Yin is also the source of Yin and for the whole body. So if you have someone that's chronically stressed out, highly stung, tension everywhere, there's a pretty good chance more Yin is going to nourish you.   Tahnee:   (19:03) And that isn't obviously just herbs, it's lifestyle as well, but these are little sort of steps along the way that we can take. When we look at... Even what you're saying about the mind and the shen. Schizandra is one of those herbs that hits Jing, Qi, Shen. So that's another special thing about it.   Mason:   (19:20) Yeah. We haven't mentioned the fact that you talk to a lot of Taoists and you say you can have one herb for the rest of your life. What is it? They'll say its Schizandra because it enters all the five organs. It's Jing, Qi Shen herb. So all Three Treasures nourish, and enters into the 12 meridians.   Tahnee:   (19:33) Yeah. And so that idea of mental clarity comes out of the Shen, the Shun, depending on how you pronounce it. That ability to perceive with the Heart, instead of with the clouded vision of the mind and that ability to be really tuned in to our own sense of sovereignty and self identity outside of the projections of our culture and time and society and everything.   Tahnee:   (19:58) So, there's these multidimensional, metaphysical effect of these herbs. And we can talk about on the one hand, take it for a hundred days, great skin. On the other hand, take it for a hundred days, purify the astral body. And those are two very different experiences-   Mason:   (20:12) Yeah-   Tahnee:   (20:13) but they're both really valid and different people with different sensitivities will have different experiences. So I feel like so many of us come to herbs in the West with that real Western... I guess scientific, rational mind and that physical expectation of transformation, which you know obviously is what they do and that's great.   Tahnee:   (20:35) But my experience over time working with... Schizandra especially, I feel like, and Reishi are probably the two for me that have really cultivated something else. They've given me the capacity to perceive things on a different level that I don't think would have as easily developed without using them.   Mason:   (20:51) Um, well it's interesting-   Tahnee:   (20:53) I think it's just that sensitivity, that subtle-   Mason:   (20:54) Would you say... When you talk about that perception, that's an interesting one because when you... There's interpretations of the original... The Shen Nong's write up on Schizandra over 2000 years ago. There a lot of them, a little less convinced that it does get into all Five Organs directly. It's more like Liver, Kidney, Lung. And as you were saying in the Lung, as a tertiary, it's an incredible Lung invigorating tonic, but more about the fact that it's such an incredible Liver Wood, herb and the Liver is regulating as the general, of the organ army.   Tahnee:   (21:37) Yeah of everything.   Mason:   (21:37) Then and also doing so much for the regulation of Qi and the distribution of Qi. That's how it is entering into all the organs and all the meridians. But even more so than that because it is such a beautiful and gentle herb. It's not an aggressive Liver detoxifying tonic, although it is a gentle building, and then a tonifier for the various phases one and two of detoxification.   Tahnee:   (22:07) Mm-hmm (affirmative)   Mason:   (22:08) Then they love it so much because if you can have a smooth flow of Qi, you're on the money. Right? But then they also talk about the fact that how the fish lives in Water but is unaware of the Water. We live in Wind and we're unaware of Wind. That's what we live within, air and Wind. And then that was the Wind back then was directly the... what... how direct can we be, we don't know what they were talking about, but that was the translation... and the Wind being regulated, but more so the communication of Wind being regulated within the Liver. Just speaking to that, and that was written up in the Schizandra section. So Schizandra being a herb to nourish the Wood to an extent where we can start becoming aware of what we actually live within. We can start perceiving what's incasing us rather than just being housed in our mind. I thought that was really cool.   Tahnee:   (23:11) Mm-hmm (affirmative). If you think about... Like helping support Wei Qi as well and wind is a pathogen in Chinese medicine. So it's anything that we do, if we're unaware of its impact on us, it can have a negative impact-   Mason:   (23:24) Well that's-   Tahnee:   (23:24) Self aware-   Mason:   (23:24) The fact that it's an astringent-   Tahnee:   (23:25) Yeah   Mason:   (23:26) It's a Lung tonic and it's an astringent and so it... By tonifying the Lungs, the skin is able to regulate. However, being astringent in nature, it's sealing, it's protective in nature. And so in that sense if you have excess sweating, which can be something... You're sweating a lot, you get Wind touching you that's going to cool you down and you're going to get that invasion of Cold. Or your skin, your pores are too open, or whether or not they're too open you just have an excess exposure to Wind, that wind is going to get in and invade your body. And Schizandra, it's one of those herbs that's there tightening us up and helping protect us, which I love.   Tahnee:   (24:08) Yeah. And I had a really amazing podcast about, probably over a year ago now. But it was on the one that Rhonda was on, Mark someone's podcast.   Tahnee:   (24:20) Anyway, I can find the-   Mason:   (24:21) Chi-ological-   Tahnee:   (24:23) Chi-ological, thank you. And it was with a Bellingen based, acupuncturist actually. And he was saying that he uses Schizandra all the time for eye issues specifically detached retinas and corneal stuff. And again, if you look at Chinese Medicine, the Liver opens to the eyes. So it makes a lot of sense that it supports vision and all of these things, which again, I think it was one of the things the Russians were looking at for pilots that helped to keep the vision really sharp. And now we're doing long flights.   Mason:   (24:54) Yep, Combo-ed with Goji especially.   Tahnee:   (24:54) Yeah. And Goji is another Liver herb. So again, double Liver really. The Liver also supports the tendons. And so that's what I was saying before is that chronic stress and that feeling of tension in the body, when we work to release Liver Qi and get the smooth flow of Liver chi and we can start to feel like a softening and a release in the body as well.   Mason:   (25:14) Well additionally the Liver is regulating the peripheral nervous system. And so that's something, because the Spleen is directly nourishing the muscle tissue. When we have muscular tension and muscular neck tension, people think, it's a Spleen issue or they're working on stress in general but not realizing that it has a lot to do with the peripheral nervous system actually, which is regulating the contraction and release of the muscle. So that's where you can see a lot of tension in the Liver is going to head up and become that tension possibly through the neck.   Mason:   (25:55) Not saying all neck tension is the source of the Liver and you need to treat the Liver. I'm not going into treatment, but in general, in an initiation. If you want to be initiating into tonic herbalism long term we get out of, "I've got a symptom, I take tonic herb to solve it," but rather we're trying to bring a smooth flow of Qi through all of our organs and therefore tension in the body isn't going to serve.   Mason:   (26:20) So naturally, we want a smooth flow. We want to work on the Liver as well as working in our physical practice and consciously letting go of tension getting into a parasympathetic nervous system, which I find Schizandra, it's so adaptogenic. It's such, a powerful herb. If you need the will, it's not going to force you there... Unless you have a really big dose... But to get you into a parasympathetic state and approaching life in that way. It's super necessary to have strong Organ Qi, Liver chi and to drop tension from your muscles, and from your neck, and from your shoulders. And we don't live that way. Well you guys do, you should... We're at least moving in that direction.   Tahnee:   (27:06) Yeah. I think it's super interesting, when you think about the main requirements of... I guess what I'm thinking a lot about is this smooth flow of Qi idea. Most people in the West that I hear from and that we hear from at Superfeast, are struggling with hormonal stuff, with stress and fatigue and these kinds of things. And then chronic digestive issues, metabolic stuff like you were saying.   Tahnee:   (27:31) And when you look at what supports metabolic function, it's Kidneys, Liver, Spleen really. And the Lungs are super important, totally. The Heart is super important. But if we're looking at really what the issues of the west are it's those three systems and I find the emotions of them really interesting. The Spleen is anxiety and worry and mental overwork, which I mean, hands up, who doesn't have that going on sometimes, if not all the time.   Tahnee:   (27:58) The Liver is all about, frustrated, stuck energy that's unable to express itself fully. Again, I would argue that for most people in our culture have issues fully feeling expressed-   Mason:   (28:10) Resentment-   Tahnee:   (28:10) And seen. Yeah. Like irritation and frustration-   Mason:   (28:12) That's my organ-   Tahnee:   (28:14) And then the Kidneys, all around fear on a really primal level. Not just fright like a spider, but like "Holy shit! How am I going to survive?" And that's literally the energy of our time right now.   Mason:   (28:25) Yeah, especially with the news, the way it is currently-   Tahnee:   (28:29) It's everything, it's the way politics is set up. The way our system is set up. The way that the media chooses to portray things, to sell us things. The only reason the headlines exist is so that you click on that page and see the ads. I've been laughing because every time I click on a coronavirus link there's a hundred companies advertising face masks and buy this and buy this vitamin and do this. And it's like are we just capitalizing on people's fear? You know, and Superfeast hasn't had much to say about it because we don't want to buy into the mass hysteria. We want to be really conscious that we acknowledge that every single day is about immune function, not just when there's a virus outbreak and Schizandra is a part of that, for me, anyway.   Tahnee:   (29:09) I really noticed the difference if I take a lot of Liver supporting herbs in my immunity because I'm a Livery person as well. And so that supports me. And someone did ask what I meant by being a Livery person, and constitutionally I've been working with an acupuncturist and I've diagnosed with him, he's diagnosed me and I've come to that conclusion on my own before I saw him that I was a Liver constitution type.   Tahnee:   (29:34) When I first started seeing him, I was expressing Spleen dysfunction and I've moved now to Liver dysfunction. So I'm back where I want to be, which may not sound like it makes sense, but if you think about, we all have to have some weakness constitutionally that we can't be born perfect sadly.   Mason:   (29:52) And as he likes to put it, you're going to die of something.   Tahnee:   (29:54) Yeah. And so the idea is you want to live in your domain. You want to live where you've got strength and capacity and you have a tendency to already hang out, but you want to do so in a way that protects you from falling into some other constitution-   Mason:   (30:13) Negative patterns-   Tahnee:   (30:13) Yeah, that isn't serving you. So for me, when I live in a Spleeny land, I get fluidly and digestive stuff starts happening and whatever. So that's a sign for me that, Liver time. So I start supporting my Liver and it actually brings me back out.   Tahnee:   (30:27) And I still take Spleen supporting herbs, like Qi herbs because I think they're great. That's why Schizandra plays such a regular role in my life. I used to get really bad, seasonal allergies and stuff too and through cleaning out my Liver, with Schizandra and also with other detox practices. And I did those before I knew about Schizandra, but over time, none of that stuff happens anymore. And we've heard that from multiple customers of Superfeast over the years as well, that the allergies have gone away and those kinds of things.   Mason:   (30:55) Yeah. It's... I mean... Schizandra, it's pretty endless. And I don't really say this about many herbs either. I mean, I've tried a lot of Schizandra's. The Schizandra that we've been able to secure from up in Chang Bai-   Tahnee:   (31:10) Beautiful right?-   Mason:   (31:12) A lot of it is wild-   Tahnee:   (31:14) Yeah originally we were completely wild and recently-   Mason:   (31:19) Got a little less sustainable about a year and a half ago.   Tahnee:   (31:20) Yeah.   Mason:   (31:20) And where we're sourcing from these orchards... It's so magic-   Tahnee:   (31:29) Can you describe the vine because I don't think... I know when we first saw Schizandra together, we were traveling with Aiya-   Mason:   (31:35) We saw it in the Autumn, up in Oregon and I think it was fine.   Tahnee:   (31:38) A bit out of it's homeland-   Mason:   (31:41) Yeah, it looked a little bit sad. I mean it's a big fat leaf coming to a point and big red bundles, big long drip nub. More icicle shaped. They can bunch up a little more but they're bright, bright red, nice black seeds. Just absolutely popping with flavor. They're doing a lot of companion planting of pine in through the orchard there and there's weeds, spiders and bugs all through it. And, mushrooms growing all over the place, just right up through the entire orchard. And so it's got a real potent energy there. I just want to bring it... I just wanted to mention it because you guys have got something really special there.   Mason:   (32:34) This is a very special herb and it wasn't until a few decades ago, that this was actually this widely available. And so it's.. As always in tonic herbalism, it's important for you to cultivate appreciation and gratitude for the herb and try and tap into the reverence that a lot many have had. Rather than, let's just see what this herb can give to me.   Mason:   (33:04) Because if you can get into that place of having an appreciation, you will get those benefits. They will come and smack you in the face. You won't be able to... Especially if you are having a dose that's appropriate. So, starting off with quarter teaspoon, half teaspoon, but if you are feeling it, just get up to a teaspoon. If you're really feeling, I get up to a heaped teaspoon.   Tahnee:   (33:25) Yeah. I never do less than a heaped teaspoon, but I think you can definitely... It's a warming herb, so some people feel that really quickly. There's a warming effects.   Mason:   (33:35) If you're running hot.   Tahnee:   (33:36) Yeah. And so for some women toward menopause, if you're really hot, you try Schizandra, it can make you feel warmer. That is something to look at. It can again, regulate that over time for some people. It just depends on your symptoms and severity.   Tahnee:   (33:50) And it's better to wait with a practitioner to work out what you really need. Because that's a really complex transition for a lot of women. It's hard to know without looking at each individual case what's really going on. But for most people who aren't in a major transitory stage, just building up slowly to a higher dose is really effective.   Tahnee:   (34:12) And yeah, I've bought other company's Schizands just to try them and often not much flavor and some people are doing more the freeze dried berries, not the extracts. So were actually doing a 10:1 extract. So that means if you buy a kilo of our extract, you're getting 10 kilos of condensed, extracted, Schizandra berry for that one kilo.   Mason:   (34:35) And if you know, us guys, we don't boast about... we don't do comparisons. Really about all of our herbs, it's not-   Tahnee:   (34:43) What was that old ad on TV like in the 90s. Panadol versus-   Mason:   (34:47) Yeah basically we don't-   Tahnee:   (34:49) The white box? Like "Panadol so much better."   Mason:   (34:56) Yeah.   Tahnee:   (34:56) We do not endorsed Panadol.   Mason:   (34:58) So you know, anyone that's been tuning in, we don't really do this. But with Schizandra and the mushrooms, again to an extent it's like guys, just trust us. You are on to something very special. We've been taking herb... I've had the wild Schizandra. Obviously, that's the best. Wild and fresh Schizandra. I've had a lot of tinctures over the years. They've been effective. This powder that we have here is insane and not and 10:1, not going for a 20:1 or 30:1.   Mason:   (35:33) The whole point behind the 10 to one extract is when... based on the molecular mass of the Schizandra berry. If you take 10 kilos of Schizandra and you extract it thoroughly and then remove the liquid. If you want to be wasting basically nothing in terms of the constituents and many of the constituents and these active ingredients and these energies and these pigments, many that haven't even been discovered yet.   Mason:   (36:06) If you don't want to waste anything and throw anything away, there's only so much medicine to turn into powder that you can get. And what we find is with our herbs, you start with 10 kilos without wasting anything getting a full comprehensive... the whole spectrums of the rainbow in terms of the constituents. You can get that 10 kilos of raw dried herb to one kilo of powder without wasting anything. So you've got a real complete herb. We don't like, for us... We like it for clinic, but we don't like the reductionist method of focusing on particular constituents. Just so you know what you're getting because different products for different times. We take other brands 100% but for Superfeast you are looking-   Tahnee:   (36:57) We don't take other herb brands though-   Mason:   (37:00) Not tonic herb brands no-   Tahnee:   (37:01) But actually occasionally we'll buy Dragon Herb's tinctures, we like their tinctures. Sometimes when we're in the States we get them. Because they're good for traveling, sticky and fun.   Mason:   (37:12) Are there any other tonic herb things we get?-   Tahnee:   (37:15) Not really. We buy Loco Love chocolate, which sometimes has tonics it.   Mason:   (37:20) Yeah. I don't mind every now and then getting a Ginseng tincture from Dragon Herb's... like our Ginseng powder is-   Tahnee:   (37:29) Intensely flavored-   Mason:   (37:30) It's intense. I can't really do it. But with Schizandra, it is that full spectrum berry. It's like the Taoists would call the style of extraction, the "hou hou". It's just altering the temperature for each extraction to make sure you're getting basically everything out of it without... At each... Respecting each herb's sensibility within the menstruum, the extraction mediums, the water. And so that's what's going on as well. So just know that doesn't lend itself as much to an agenda, that longterm usage, which is the magic of tonic herbalism, which is like link arms with the beautiful Schizandra berry, and see where you can go together over the next couple of weeks.   Mason:   (38:24) And then the few years and then if you can, you can hit a couple of decades of Schizandra, maybe a couple a hundred days in a row, might have a period of a few weeks there that you do it every single week and perhaps there's times when it's twice a week. Perhaps six months off and then you're back on. That's the way it works with herbs.   Mason:   (38:49) And I like it just in hot water, big heap teaspoon, maybe a bit of lemon, stir, bang, first thing in the morning. I ingest after I've done all my clay and things like that, that's when I'll have Schizandra, half an hour to 45 minutes after that.   Tahnee:   (39:05) Yeah, I think I started doing it with lemon and honey to sort of hide the taste a little bit and now I just have it straight with nothing, in hot water. It's a tea I guess. And I drink it. Usually at work I'll have it, mid morning or afternoon. I rarely have it in the morning because, toddler life.   Mason:   (39:26) It's really nice that 2:00 PM and 3:00 PM.   Tahnee:   (39:29) Yeah, I'll have it.... I've been having Qi a lot lately at that time-   Mason:   (39:34) Well that's because it's afternoon Qi-   Tahnee:   (39:35) Yeah. So I've been having it more in the mid morning. But I don't notice for me a huge difference in time of day effects, I guess. It's not something that I've really-   Mason:   (39:47) We should have a couple before bed. Some people might be a little bit sensitive. And so the idea we were talking about doing a hundred days of Schizandra, you do it a hundred days consecutive in a row is because a lot of the time there can be a bottleneck, up in the Gallbladder or for your Qi as well.   Mason:   (40:01) And in the beginning it can be too much mobilization for people. And so that's why we do Schizandra or the Liver herbs. So that, we can process that Qi so it's not too much. So if you're in the beginning and too sensitive, sometimes before bed it might keep you awake a little bit because it's moving a lot. But for a lot of you it won't. I'm going to be... I'm actually... I might start that because it's such a beautiful flavour to go to sleep with but.   Tahnee:   (40:26) Yeah. And the hundred days is... you can think of that as about three months. So you can imagine that hormones for women take about three months to come into balance. For all of us, we're turning over cells all the time. It's this idea of giving yourself a consistent and decent amount of time, to really work on, just mobilising and cleansing and recycling and reproducing and doing all the things that the body does.   Tahnee:   (40:54) Like I said earlier, it's a natural process. It's part of what the body does. Schizandra is just supporting that. I think we probably do it once a year at this stage. Maybe we'll do it a couple of times this year. But other than that, once you've tried that you can live with it in your cupboard or whatever in your pantry or your fridge and just be taking it when you're called to. That's the relationship we have now with the tonics.   Tahnee:   (41:23) Personally I think as we both just work with what we're called to take, which is a luxury, obviously having access to everything. And our team are quite similar now because they've all got the tonic bars at work to just create. But yeah, I think it's really nice to just start to create, like you said, a companion for life through these things. I always think having watched the Schizandra for a while now. She's a she, it's a feminine energy to the plant. I feel very nurtured and supported by it and this is a really different relationship to other herbs that I have.   Tahnee:   (42:02) And so you can start to feel energetically that they each have their own signature and their own way of playing in our body and our cells. I also thought, it's fun to note that Ron Teeguarden, who was one of the granddaddies of tonic herbalism, he named his daughter, Schizandra. So that's a bit cute, he must love that herb.   Mason:   (42:19) And also saw that there's a woman who follows us on Instagram. What do we put up for Schizandra? I think I've put up... I can't remember what the post was about-   Tahnee:   (42:30) A recipe or something-   Mason:   (42:31) It must had been a recipe, but there's a woman called Cassandra Schizandra, and she was like, "I approve this message." And I think she approves of our Schizandra as well. So that makes me happy.   Tahnee:   (42:41) Shout out to Cassandra Schizandra!   Mason:   (42:45) Any closing comments on the schiz?   Tahnee:   (42:47) No, I mean the schiz is the schiz kniz, and we hope you enjoy it. If you have any questions obviously hit us up online or via email or you can call the Superfeast team on 1300769500, if you're in Australia.   Mason:   (43:03) Oh yeah, the only other contra indication I didn't mention-   Tahnee:   (43:06) Oh was pregnancy and breastfeeding. We got to talk about yeah.   Mason:   (43:10) Okay. Hit that.   Tahnee:   (43:10) Yeah. I would probably give it a miss in pregnancy. Just to be on the safe side. It can theoretically cause uterine contractions. In my opinion, that won't happen until the body's ready to expel the lochia after birth. But you just have to be mindful of these things.   Tahnee:   (43:33) So if you're pregnant, pause, wait until you have given birth and then start on Schizandra. It's going to support recovery. It's going to support the expelling of the Blood from the uterus, which goes on for a few months. It's going to support the Kidney and Liver relationship and obviously just keep you feeling great and functioning well, postpartum. It's an adaptogen for stress. So, start full time-   Mason:   (44:02) Postpartum. I mean we recommend a lot for the I Am Gaia, which has Schizandra as a supporting herb that you even feel free for a time to bring in extra Schizandra.   Tahnee:   (44:13) Well I didn't have Gaia when I had Aiya.. Because we hadn't obviously created it at that point. So I used Schizandra a lot, postpartum and I remember it really was amazing. I just had such a smooth postpartum that I feel all of the herbs must've been really helpful that I took. But yeah, so that's just one, we got asked a lot. Breastfeeding, it's fine. Again, don't go hard, high doses. We're not trying to mobilise a lot of toxicity-   Mason:   (44:44) Especially if you haven't done work on your Liver before.   Tahnee:   (44:46) Yeah, we're more just looking to support and nourish the body on a whole system.   Mason:   (44:50) And what I would recommend is if you are doing, all of a sudden amping up, and you're really focusing on Schizandra and moving that Liver Qi, get on a clay or a binder to support that phase three detoxification-   Tahnee:   (45:04) And some fiber-   Mason:   (45:06) And fiber. For me, it's especially a bentonite clay, first thing in the morning. And ideally I would've left it in water overnight so it can really hydrate. And then first thing in the morning drinking that, or last thing of the day before bed, drinking clay. If you want to go more aggressive charcoal or zeolite fine. But clay for me is just so time tested that that's going to help you remove toxicity. And so if you are, bringing it in during breastfeeding and you haven't done Liver work before and you're concerned about mobilizing toxicity, include a clay.   Tahnee:   (45:42) Yeah. And-   Mason:   (45:43) The other one was acute cough. Sorry for chronic cough, it's used clinically and... I've had quite a few people that have had really... And I always forget, it's one of the best ones for that cough. When you can't shake it.   Tahnee:   (45:59) Yeah. And we don't work with acute things typically. So that's one of the reasons, we don't talk a lot about that stuff. It's good to remember a lot of the herbs are really powerful. The tonics for short term acute things. So it's worth having a look and seeing that, but from a tonic perspective, from that longevity, sovereignty, sustainability perspective, in terms of our own energy and our lifetimes and managing ourselves over long periods of time. That's where I feel like this herb is most powerful and most effective. Definitely where my interest in it lies. So anyway, I hope that was enlightening to some of you.   Mason:   (46:40) Yeah thanks guys, just get on, try it, get a 50 gram jar if you're unsure, get it with a friend. If you're going to do 100 days of Schizandra, it's really fun to do with a mate as well. You don't have to do the 100 days of Schizandra by any means.   Tahnee:   (46:54) No, we just like it because it is such a great reset and sort of support.   Mason:   (47:00) Really good in springtime as well. Just in case you were looking and feeling for the right time to do it. So if you're listening to this in the Northern hemisphere, you might want to be ordering yourself a 250 gram bag, at least of Schizandra.   Tahnee:   (47:13) Yeah. And I mean I take it all year round. I find it really effective through winter.   Mason:   (47:19) Well it's because it's every organ.   Tahnee:   (47:21) Yeah. Well I'm a cold frog so I feel like it does just that little bit of nourishing and warming for me over winter.   Mason:   (47:28) I love it in ginger tea.   Tahnee:   (47:29) Yeah. That's the thing. If you find the flavour weird just go with something else that's complimentary but also strong and pleasant. So that's lemon and honey for me is a comfort thing from my childhood because my mum used to make me them when I was sick. So that plus Schizandra got me over the line with it and now I don't have any problem drinking it. I've noticed that with everyone in our team, they all start with it and they're like, "blah". And within a couple of months they're like, "Ah, this is fine'" and they just drink it straight.   Mason:   (47:59) And they love it.   Tahnee:   (48:00) Yeah. So sweeten it up at the beginning if you need to and then become a Schizandra head.   Mason:   (48:05) All right, love you guys. Hit us up if you have questions.   Tahnee:   (48:07) See you guys.

Join our "heroes" as they are rewarded by the Duke for saving the Duchy, meet a new comrade and make their plans for the coming days, where are they heading next? Find out now in Episode 1 of season 2 - Another Journey BeginsDo you want some new dice or awesome D&D accessories? Then head on over to dndice.co.uk/discount/MODIFIEDROLL and get 5% off all purchases!Or use the following code at checkout: "ModifedRoll"Podcast Recommendation of the day- : Try Not to DieA new D&D 5e Actual Play Podcast with only 2 players who have taken on the roles of a half orc fighter who wishes to become a hero the bards will sing of, and a goblin sorcerer who wants... Well I'm still not exactly sure what he wants but I'll be damned if it's not an entertaining listen! Go check them out for a ton of laughs!https://anchor.fm/try-not-to-dieMassive thank you to the Storm Weather Shanty Choir for the use of their song Drunken Sailor for our theme music.Thank you as well to @LixxieB for our wonderful logo, check out her work at lixxieberry.etsy.com Sound effects sourced from BBC sound effects library and Freesound.orgThe Tap Room/ The Kerryman's Daughter (reels) by Oisin MacDiarmadaAnd you can now join our Discord server to chat with us! Check out our Patreon for a selection of rewards! - https://www.patreon.com/ModifiedRollWiki for our game and others which take place in the same world.iTunes // Stitcher // Podbean // SpotifyFeel free to tweet us @ModifiedRoll on Twitter and share us with your friends!Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/ModifiedRoll)

Hello listeners. Welcome back for another creepy tale. Valentines day? Isn't it supposed to be filled with love and laughter? Well I'm laughing all the way over here while you suckers waste money on chocolate and "I'm sorry" rings. If you aren't already, follow us on social media. Facebook https://www.facebook.com/eerietalesfromthedarknesspodcast Instagram https://www.instagram.com/eerie_tales_from_the_darkness/ Twitter https://twitter.com/EerietalesDark?prefetchTimestamp=1574320386130 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/eerietalesfromthedarkness/message

Are you making assumptions in your business that are actually holding you back? Sometimes we just assume that someone wouldn't like our product or don't talk about a certain product as much because it's not OUR favourite. But everyone has different needs and different products to match these needs. Just because a product isn't our favourite, doesn't mean it won't be someone else's fave! By making these assumptions, you're actually putting limitations on your own business. I also talk about some of the assumptions we make when it comes to the people that are right for this kind of business. We may assume that someone wouldn't be interested, someone's too busy, someone doesn't need the money, etc, etc, etc. Well I'm here to tell you that there is always a way to flip that story and make this actually, the perfect business for those people.By not making these assumptions the possibilities are endless for our business!

Partner relationship management software provider Allbound is growing at 150% year over year largely due to the company's inbound marketing efforts. Here's how they're doing it... This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Allbound Director of Marketing Tori Barlow goes into detail about the company's inbound marketing strategy. From the tech stack, to team structure, metrics, paid ads strategy and more, Tori pulls back the curtain on what she's done to drive growth - and why collaboration with the sales team is key to her success. Highlights from my conversation with Tori include: Allbound sells partner relationship management software, which is designed to help companies manage their partner channel sales programs. When Tori took on marketing for Allbound, she started by building a strong foundation of KPIs, tech stack, performance monitoring and strategy. When it came to KPIs, she identified the company's Salesforce instance as the "single source of truth" and used it to establish what the historical performance had been. She used the data from Salesforce and the company's overall revenue target to determine how many marketing qualified leads (MQLs), demos and opportunities they would need to hit the revenue target. When it came time to define MQLs, Tori didn't want to simply define that as anyone who requested a demo so she worked with the sales team to create a scoring rubric based on the content her prospects were consuming. Any prospect that reached a score of at least 50 was passed on to sales for follow up. Once a lead is designated as an MQL, they become a "sales accepted lead" (or SAL) when a demo has been booked and a sales qualified lead (SQL) once the demo has happened and the sales team identifies that there is a viable opportunity. Once she had her lead stages defined. Tori focused on the tech stack. In Allbound's case, they set up Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, and then used Marketo and Salesforce to track their performance. Now, they are beginning to experiment with account-based marketing and buyer intent data, but Tori's advice for marketers is to focus on and really master the basics first. They are also using Sendoso to send out direct mail as part of their ABM campaigns. In tandem with all of this, they adjusted their paid ads campaigns to focus less on the top of the funnel and more on nurturing what Tori calls "hand raisers." All of these changes have contributed to Allbound's organic traffic increasing 40% year over year and their search engine rankings increasing by 23 positions. In addition, the company's revenue has grown by 150%. Tori accomplished all of this with a marketing team of two people (herself and Allie, her coworker). She is now in the process of hiring a third person and the company is also onboarding a marketing and sales operations specialist. Resources from this episode: Visit the Allbound website Request a demo of Allbound Connect with Tori on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn more about simplifying the messaging for complex products and services, and how, if done right, it can help you get better marketing results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and my guest this week is Tori Barlow who is the director of marketing at Allbound. Welcome Tori. Tori Barlow (Guest): Hi. Thanks for having me Kathleen. Tori and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I'm excited you're here, and I'm really excited about what we're going to talk about. Tori: Me too. About Tori and Allbound Kathleen: Yeah we connected because I heard that you guys were generating a ton of inbound leads and I'm always excited to pick apart how that's happening. Before we dig into this conversation though, can you just tell your story. Who are you? How'd you get where you are today, and what does Allbound do? Tori: Yeah, so I'm really excited to chat with you as well. Thanks again for having me. So I'm Tori Barlow. I am the director of marketing here at Allbound. And a little bit about me, I am originally from Atlanta, and currently live in Denver, Colorado. And I have been in marketing for, I want to say, over eight years now. I kind of started an agency life where I learned the ropes of paid search, SEO, email marketing. So kind of had my hands in a ton of different pots in marketing. And then moved in-house where I manage the SEO and paid search programs there, which was quite different from going from client relations to an in-house type of role. So that was a huge change for me at that period of my career. And then moved back into the agency life to get a little bit more hands-on with analytics and attribution from a marketing perspective. And really understanding how in order to have a successful marketing program, what are the key tracking metrics that you need in order to measure success and do your job. So that was kind of the beginning of my marketing career. And how I ended up at Allbound, I previously worked with our current CEO, Daniel Graff-Radford, who is amazing and anyone listening should reach out to him and connect with him. He has a wealth of knowledge throughout many industries. But I always told myself if I ever got the chance to work with him again, I would jump on it. And so that's how I ended up here. And so Allbound is a five year old company and we sell software that's called Partner Relationship Management Software. And essentially what that is, is a tool for partner managers to manage their entire partner life cycle. So let's say Zoom, for example, has distributors and resellers for their software. Zoom's partner manager would kind of manage all of their partners from training and onboarding to deal reg all in one platform. And Zoom is one of our clients as well. So that's a little bit about me and Allbound. Kathleen: That's great. Oh my gosh, a couple things. One, I love that you said, you had this person that you'd worked with and if you ever got the chance to work with him again you would, because that really resonates with me as a marketer. It's so important to have a great working relationship with the CEO. And to be really aligned in terms of your vision and how you do marketing and how the CEO participates in marketing, all of those things. So if you find a great relationship where you have that kind of alignment, it's like, yeah, jump at it every time to do it again and again and again. Tori: Oh yeah. And I think all marketers can relate to this. It's sometimes challenging bringing your ideas or budget requests or program requests to executives or CEOs. And if they kind of understand the working cogs and wheels of what you do, all the better. Kathleen: Yeah, totally. It's so much less exhausting. So the company is five years old. How long have you been there? Tori: So I started back in March and it's been a whirlwind. I can't believe it's already the end of the year. And I still feel like I'm learning everything every day. But yeah it's been several months. And when I first came on there was not really a consistent marketing strategy. So I was so lucky to be able to come in and work with Ali Spiric, my other marketing colleague, and kind of develop this entire marketing engine. How Allbound is growing with inbound marketing Kathleen: That's the part I was really excited to talk to you about is, you know you guys are growing pretty quickly. And to be able to support that kind of growth and not have things break and fall apart you need to have a really strong foundation. And this is something I'm very, very passionate about because it helps you do your job better. It's like, my husband always likes to say you, sometimes you have to slow down to speed up, right? And this is a great example of that. Like in the beginning, if you take the time to put the right engine in place and to get those things set up right from the get-go, you will go so much faster later. So let's talk about that. What kind of an engine are you building? Because you guys are getting great inbound marketing results. And I'm curious to hear what goes into creating a platform to deliver that. Tori: Yeah, I think that's a great question. And going back to your, you know, one day hopefully nothing will break. I wonder if we'll ever get to a day where all technology is smoothly running, but it's nice to think about. And I think there's different steps you can take to put into place of avoiding that, essentially. But when I first came on in March we kind of had carte blanche to figure out, okay these are our goals, these are our revenue goals. And as a startup it's pretty important to generate that net new revenue. So from a marketing perspective, you have to have all the pieces in place in order to support that from a sales perspective. So when we sat down and kind of understood the KPIs, we first understood and kind of worked backwards. Okay, this is our revenue goal as a company. How can marketing help facilitate that? And so our first step was kind of looking at historical data. Our source of truth is Salesforce. So we tried to identify, okay, month over month for the last one year, because that's all the data we had, was, how can we back into, how many MQLs do we need, how many first demos do we need, and how many opportunities do we need in order to get to that revenue number? So I know I was a little intimidated when I only had one year's worth of data to plug and play all these numbers. So that kind of took a little bit of the stress off with forecasting and backing into MQLs. And once we figured out, okay, this month we need 50 MQLs, or this month we need 40 MQLs. What are the programs in order to do that, to get to that number? And the way we defined MQLs, or a marketing qualified lead, was we sat down with sales and we talked through, okay lead scoring's a big part in our base of prospects in Salesforce. What do we define as a lead that's ready to be passed to sales? And so that was probably a very pivotal conversation and a very important one for us to tackle first with the sales team. Plus it kind of gave... Go ahead. Working with sales to define MQLs and SQLs Kathleen: Oh no, I was going to say I would love to talk more about that because I've actually seen a lot of marketers and sales people asking about this recently. Like, how do you define MQLs versus SQLs? And it's not the same everywhere obviously. Every company has to figure it out for themselves. But I'm curious, in your case, when you worked on defining, in this case a marketing qualified lead, was that purely based on demographics and firmographics? Were there behavioral aspects to it? How did you pin that down? Tori: Yeah it's a great question. And I think I would like to think of it as an ever evolving process specifically within startups or smaller businesses. Only because you want to grow that base, you want to grow the time on the phone with potential customers that we kind of decided, okay for our marketing qualified leads, anyone who submits a demo, regardless of company size, employee size, et cetera, we're passing them off to sales because we need to grow our base. So we kind of opened up the floodgates for just any sort of behavioral, if you cross this request threshold, we passed you to sales. On the other hand, if they fill out a piece of content or if they take one of our quizzes, that probably is not a very good indicator that they're ready to talk to a sales rep. So we created a scoring process based on priority content intent and then kind of going down the tracks of, this isn't really a priority so we're not going to assign a ton of points to this. But we came up with a method of once they hit 50 points within our marketing automation software, then we'll pass them to sales and they're deemed ready to talk to them. I think over time we'll want to revisit this every six months as we grow our base and say, all right, people who have 30 people in their company, or less than 50, we really don't really see any traction with them anyways so we're going to maybe negate that score or take away from that score. Kathleen: Then do you, beyond MQL, do you also have an SQL or sales qualified lead category? Tori: Yeah. So our process is, it goes MQL to sales accepted lead and that is a demo on the books and a calendar invite to the prospect. And then after that it's a SQL or sales qualified lead. Which kind of sounds confusing now that I think about it, with a lead verses opportunity, but our SQLs are deemed qualified opportunities by the AEs. Kathleen: Okay. Got it. All right, so sorry I interrupted you there because I wanted to learn more about your MQLs. Keep going, keep telling. Tori: Yeah it's a very important piece of the puzzle. Kathleen: Yeah. How Allbound tracks marketing performance Tori: So then our next question is, okay we have our metrics, we have our goals, now what? And how do we track this? So one of my favorite parts of a marketing engine, if you like to call it that, is what do we need to track and how do we prove our success? And I think every marketer's nightmare is, okay, I just got $100,000 for this year in marketing spend, now what? And I think this is an important piece to any marketer is, do you have your tracking set up? Do you have all of your firing implemented correctly from your marketing automation platform to your CRM and vice versa? Otherwise you could be spending good money on something that you have no idea if it's working or not. So our first goal was to set up something called Google analytics. And that is essential to, I believe, every digital marketer understanding website behavior, website trends, seasonality. When I first came onboard, I remember seeing so many different spikes and trends year over year. And kind of digging into the data a little further we realized, okay, this isn't even implemented correctly. So we needed to take a step back, and what you mentioned earlier of, take some time to slow down and then you can get there faster essentially. Kathleen: Yeah. Tori: So we stripped out all of our analytics and reworked everything to, again, what our goals are that we just sat down to define. So we were tracking goals incorrectly in Google Analytics. So we kind of reworked that puzzle to then match up to what our company goal was at the end of the day. So that was a first step. And then mirroring that and implementing that all the way through GTM, Google Tag Manager, and all of these other pieces to the puzzle for what Google Tag Manager can track as well, like Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook, all of those important channels from a marketer's tool set. So we started with Google Analytics and GTM, and then the second piece of the puzzle was our marketing automation platform. So in our instance we use Marketo. And within Marketo, we had to really sit down and think, okay, this is our new lead scoring, is it even set up correctly in Marketo? So that also was not aligned with the goals we just sat down to create with the sales team. So we kind of had to plug and play with what we were firing for behavior scores and what we were sending over to Salesforce as an alert to the sales team. So this sounds pretty easy to sit down and tackle in one day. It's very, I would like to say it's more of a manual process and more of a thoughtful process that I would recommend going through. Only because you want to make sure you're now tracking everything to the proper standard that you've just decided. So we sat down and we mapped out all of our ideal conversion levers from a source of truth or Marketo or Salesforce standpoint, and then integrated that within the platform. So that was the third piece of the puzzle. And then the final piece was making sure, okay, do Marketo and Salesforce talk to each other okay? And if not, we need to fix this stat. So that was another big undertaking of, okay, this field maps did that, do I need these Salesforce fields for my Marketo campaigns, et cetera? So working with our marketing automation specialist at the time was a very heavy piece to the puzzle on implementing all of that tracking. Kathleen: Yeah, I just went through that at a place I've been working and it's overwhelming at times. That's all I have to say about that. Tori: I know I'd like to feel like I'm a technical specialist now in Marketo, but it's so much more than that. And so cumbersome that it's a lot to handle. But it is- Kathleen: Now that Marketo-Salesforce combination, you really almost need just a marketing ops person. Tori: Oh for sure. Kathleen: To manage all that. My eyes glaze over when I just think about it. Tori: Yeah. Marketing ops I feel is a role that is so important for any marketer these days. And it's funny, we're actually about to hire a sales and marketing ops person that will kind of combined to one. And I already have like five pages of requests for that. Kathleen: Are you just like so excited for that person to start? Tori: So excited. Kathleen: They're going to walk in the door and you're going to be like, "I'm so happy you're here." Tori: I want to take you for the first week. Kathleen: Yes, yes. Let me buy you lunch because you're going to be my new best friend. Yeah, I totally agree with you. If you have somebody good who knows how to make the technology work, oh gosh, what a difference that makes. So you have Marketo and Salesforce, you have Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Are there other analytics platforms that you're using in combination with those things? Tori: Yeah, it's an interesting question. We currently don't have any implemented right now, but we are shifting a lot of our strategy to be more cohesive with the sales team. We're noticing that, to your point, what this podcast is about with inbound. You know, inbound is definitely a good chunk of our revenue source and lead source. But what we've kind of dabbled in this year is ABM. And I know it's such a buzzword and so hot right now, but it's been around for awhile as everyone said. But we just tried to implement a strategy that worked for us as a small company and we saw success with it. So what we were seeing was our SDRs would outbound these targeted accounts, at the same time marketing would upload these targeted accounts to LinkedIn and target them with gated content, for example. So we would get those buyer intent signals from targeted accounts. And what we were noticing was, essentially, if our SDRs were outbounding these prospects, someone else within the organization would come in and request a demo on the website. So it was this tag team initiative that truly spoke for marketing and sales working together, which was like a marketer's dream, right? So we talked to ourselves and said, hey, this kind of manual process is sort of working so far. Is there any way we can scale this? And so right now we are kind of looking at some technology for reverse IP lookup functionality or data enrichment functionality, as well as some better prospecting tools for our sales reps that will ultimately work in conjunction with marketing efforts. Kathleen: Have you looked at any buyer intent data? Tori: Yes we have. We've kind of looked at... You mean specific software or just what we are noticing? Kathleen: No, like specific software that would deliver a high intent leads to you. Tori: Yeah, so we're going through that vetting process now. We have looked at G2 Crowd, we have looked at Leadfeeder, Clearbit and so we're kind of still in the vetting stages. So if anyone has any recommendations, love to hear them. Kathleen: I will give you mine when we're offline because I try to stay very unbiased on this podcast. Tori: Okay. Great. Kathleen: But yeah, I think, that's something that I'm really intrigued by right now. I think the potential for it is tremendous. And there's not a lot of companies really using it yet. Tori: I agree. And I think even, we just signed on with this one tool that helps us automate direct mail and then you can track that into Salesforce as part of your ABM strategy. And so, I remember when I first started marketing several years ago, my company was sending out direct mail pieces and people were like, why are you still doing that? Like that's so last year. And now it's back. Like now it's this thing again. And it's cooler now. Kathleen: So I just had this rant on LinkedIn about that because it was funny, somebody posted a Marketoonist cartoon about all these different things being dead. You know, like email is dead and direct mail is dead and the role of the CMO is dead. And I feel like at this time of year in particular, there's a lot of those, "2020s coming, this is dead" proclamations. And I honestly believe, first of all, nothing is ever dead. If it's not working, it's because you're not innovating or you're not doing it right. Tori: That's a good point. Yeah. Kathleen: So it's funny with direct, I think there's always been a place for direct mail. It's just that it was not, it was abused. Right? Tori: Executed. Yeah. Kathleen: People didn't do it well. So done well it can be very effective, for sure. So there, I just did my rant again on the podcast. Tori: I'll supplement that rant. I saw a really good idea for a prospect gift that an SDR could maybe send that said, it was a pair of socks and the message was, let's start on the right foot. Kathleen: Oh, I love that. Tori: We thought that was cute. So yes, to your point, I think it's creative and how you use it is what matters. Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. So can you say the name of the company that's doing your automated direct mail? Tori: Yeah, we just decided to go with Sendoso. Kathleen: Oh, I love them. They're such a great company. Tori: I heard good things. Kathleen: And not only because somehow or another I won some sort of gift card to their swag store. I think I went to a webinar they did and they sent me this $50 voucher for their swag store. Tori: Nice. Kathleen: And their swag store is awesome. It's all pet related. So I have two Labrador retrievers and I got two Sendoso leashes, a Sendoso Frisbee, and a Sendoso tennis ball toy. And my dogs are going bananas over all of it. It's really cute. So thank you- Tori: I might have to go. Yeah, I might have to get a dog just for those swag gifts. Kathleen: There you go. All right, so any other elements to your tech stack that you think are important? Tori: For a tech stack, I think as a marketer I definitely get those googly eyes of, ooh, I really love this. Especially if someone is marketing to me in a smart way. Since we are marketers, we respond to good marketing, right? So I think I've had the tendency to say, oh, I really think this technology would be great. But I think something important that I've had to remind myself is, start with the basics. And if something's working, then find a technology to maybe scale that. I think that's been super important for us as a small company. So to answer your question, those are all the technology pieces we have right now, but I'm ready for more soon probably. Kathleen: But I think your outlook is really smart because I got excited about talking to you because you guys are not a huge company. You don't have an endless budget. And I don't think that there's enough information out there on when you're at that small but growing stage, what do you do? Like what needs to be in place? And I love getting into really granular detail about it. And you're right, if you have huge VC dollars, sure you can go out and buy every shiny penny technology solution that's out there. But if you don't, you really need to be judicious. And there are plenty of ways to do things in a scrappy manner and get great results until you're ready to make that big investment. And you know that strategy is working. Totally on the same page with you on that one. Tori: Right. Yeah. And I think sometimes you can feel like, okay, something's not working or maybe you have slow lead days and you kind of feel that altogether when those leads don't come through. And it's like, okay, what can I do now? Or what can I have now? And the reality is you just kind of have to sit it out and give it time to prove itself. And I know that sounds painful, but I agree. I think you kind of just have to do one piece of the puzzle at a time. And it's also important, you could have all of this technology and maybe the sales reps don't use it or they don't find it useful or they weren't onboarded correctly. So is it even useful at that point? So I think taking the technology steps one piece at a time and training is all the more important. How inbound marketing is fueling Allbound's growth Kathleen: Absolutely. Now you talked about getting results. Can you speak a little bit to how Allbound, like the kinds of results from inbound marketing that Allbound to seeing? Tori: Yeah, so we had to, once we got the marketing engine running and we had this year's worth of cleaner data than we've had before, what we started to see was an increase in MQLs and demo requests. And what I'll say for that, I'll kind of back up a little bit. At the same time of kind of getting all the tracking and the plumbing in place, we also started a new paid search program and a new SEO program. And what that entailed was, we were kind of looking at our keywords from a paid search perspective and we are really spending a lot of money on very top of funnel terms that these prospects would download content. Again, if we go back to when we sat down with sales and what was a good qualified lead, downloading content wasn't something of priority. So we re-swizzled a lot of our paid search strategy. We restructured our entire Google AdWords account and really focused on, okay, what are the keywords that the hand raisers are focusing on, and what types of ad copy and landing pages do they want to see? And so that was one piece of the puzzle of that fundamental building block. And then the second piece was the SEO strategies. So I'm kind of partial to both of them because that's my background and I have found tremendous growth just from having a set SEO plan. And so what we started with was the technical piece of SEO. So asking ourselves questions like, can Google see us from a code perspective? What is Google reading on our website that maybe we don't want Google to know about us? And by that I mean, maybe we're phrasing who we are in a way that we don't want to rank for organically. So we took an inventory of all of our top nav pages, what our title tags, what our code was saying from an SEO perspective, and really honed in on our top value drivers for our product. And then from there after the technical piece was in a good spot, we then focused on content. So our whole strategy has been laying that foundation from the SEO perspective, but then gradually creating content that's relevant to our buyer but also helps us rank organically for Google. So from that piece of the puzzle we were able to increase our year over year traffic by 40% from an organic perspective. And from a keyword ranking perspective we had increased 23 positions overall for our total tracked keywords in Google search console. So those incremental changes that we made just in these last several months have tremendously helped us with our visibility on Google. So that's one piece of the puzzle. And then from the ultimate goal from, how can marketing contribute to the revenue, we saw increases in month over month and quarter over quarter MQL volumes. Which ultimately resulted in more first-time demos for our prospects. What we got really excited about was once we piloted this ABM initiative, we started tracking something new for marketing, which is I think very important. And it's called marketing assist opportunities or meetings booked, which again, an SDR is prospecting and somehow marketing was involved in one way or another, whether that's LinkedIn ads or reading our content and self identifying through that. And so we started tracking marketing assisted conversions in Salesforce. And so the trend line is an interesting hockey-stick with how much marketing has assisted in opportunity revenue month over month just this year. Kathleen: That's so great. I'm so happy to hear that that's something you're tracking because I do find that a lot of companies look at attribution as a very binary. Meaning that they feel like it's either sales or it's marketing, right? And that does not in any way reflect the reality of the situation. You know? There aren't going to be a lot of cases except in really low touch, low price SaaS where it's all marketing, right? Or e-commerce. You know, if you're talking about a complex B2B sale, you're going to have a combination of both. Inevitably. And I feel like too many companies spend too many calories arguing over whether it's really sales or marketing that closed the deal. So it's nice if you can have that middle ground, look at assists or look at first touch versus last touch, and acknowledge that it's a combination of these things that leads to deals getting closed. Tori: Yeah, I 100% agree. I think every company struggles with the, no, this was an SDR deal. No, this is a marketing deal. We've struggled with that too. I think it's very common and natural. And I think what we are trying to for next year in 2020 is, we all have the same goal. So marketing goals are bubbled up into sales goals, which this year they really weren't. So we're kind of shifting that focus to really be on the same team and have that mentality of we're helping each other, how can you bounce back if leads are slow one month? You know, how can we help with outbounding with messaging or content? So we're trying to play that tag team game, and it's a learning game for sure. But to your point, we're all in the same company. Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah. You're all rowing in the same direction. So your organic traffic, it sounds like increased 40% year over year. What's happened with overall lead gen and company growth? Tori: Yeah, so our company revenue grew over 150% 2019 compared to 2018. Kathleen: That's awesome. Congratulations. Tori: Thanks. We have seen tremendous growth in our net new business and we are looking to double that even next year with all of our strategies in place. So it's been a very successful and also just fun year to be at Allbound. How Allbound's marketing team is structured Kathleen: That's great. Now what we haven't talked about, and I'm curious to know is, what does the team look like that's supporting all of this? The marketing team. Tori: Yeah. You're talking to 50% of the marketing team. So our team is very small. It's myself and Allie, and we are very nimble and agile with projects and what we're tackling. But if you look at all that's in our project base, we're tackling everything from webinars to paid social to paid search to reporting and email marketing. We're kind of tackling the whole gamut. So we definitely handle a lot that comes our way. But it's been so rewarding and I would say we've both learned so much and are so lucky also to have a wonderful CEO that says, you guys have carte blanche, test it, see if it works and let's find a new solution if it doesn't. So it's been really fun and we're excited to... We're actually in the process of hiring a third marketing person to join in January. So if anyone's looking, please send your resume to me. But I think this person would have a hand in the piece of the puzzle to be that marketing engine in 2020 as well. Kathleen: Wow, I am so impressed that you're doing all that with two people. That's a lot. And what amazing results too. That's great. Seriously, you guys are killing it. Do you have outsourced support as well or is it just the two of you literally doing everything? Tori: Yeah, so we outsource our marketing automation and Salesforce ops right now. So that is something that's, like we talked about, so key to the puzzle. And then we outsource some of our content writing. And so Allie does an amazing job managing the content strategy. We just put our first content marketing calendar together for 2020, so it's been great to have a plan for content which is good. But yeah, it's been primarily us tag teaming and then those outsourcing pieces. Oh, and we also outsource our paid search agency. They manage our, you know, they pull all the levers for AdWords and Bing, and then we have our SEO consultant as well. Kathleen: Okay, great. Well I'm super impressed that you've been able to do all that with a small team. That's amazing. Tori: Thank you. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Yeah. Well there's two questions I always ask my guests and I would love to know what your answers are. First, since you guys are doing so well with inbound marketing, is there anyone else, either a company or an individual that comes to mind that you think is really killing it right now with inbound? Tori: That's a great question. I would say I love the progress that a company called Terminus is doing, the ABM company. I remember when they were very small and their CEO was, several years ago, pitched to our CEO in an office and now they're this huge company. And I think it takes a lot of different types of marketing for something that successful to happen in a few years. And so I would say Terminus is kind of crushing it in that sense. And then I would also say, I've kept an eye on companies like Gong, I think Gong, the recording software does a tremendous job with relating and speaking to their target audience and they kind of nailed the messaging down. So I've had my eye on them and look to them as great inspiration as well. Kathleen: Yeah, I totally second those. Both of those. They're great examples. The other thing I like to ask people is that digital marketing changes so quickly, and as someone who is a master juggler working on all different aspects of marketing for her company, how do you stay up to date and keep yourself educated on everything? Tori: Yeah, well I love reading blogs like Search Engine Land and I keep up with the Google blog just to stay up to speed there. I'm really lucky with our paid search agency, they give us tidbits of what the Google betas are and what's coming up from a paid search perspective. And then we're really lucky at Allbound have something very special that's a monthly book club. And so we read sometimes the latest and greatest business books, but also other books that have proven to be successful in different frameworks like sales or marketing or product. So I stay up to date with that from that element as well. And I think that's great too because then everyone can kind of get in a room together and share their insights and share their perspective on certain things. And then from there you bubble off into different tangents and can research that on your own. So I love those blogs, but I also am a huge fan of just reading any sort of analyst reports like Forrester, huge fan of keeping up to speed with what the new tech reports are and who's entering the space from a technology perspective. How to connect with Tori Kathleen: That's a great suggestion. I love all those. If someone is listening and they want to learn more about Allbound or they have a question for you about what we've talked about today, what's the best way for them to connect online? Tori: Yeah, so you could just visit our website and fill out either a contact us form or if you're interested in a demo or a request a demo. We're also available to chat on our website as well if you have any questions. And you can reach out to me directly on LinkedIn as well. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Great. All right. Well, if you're listening and you feel like you learned something new or you enjoyed what you heard today, head over to Apple podcasts and do me a favor and leave the podcast a five star review. That's how we get discovered and more people can listen to these episodes. And if you know someone who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next interview. Thanks so much for joining me, Tori. Tori: Thanks for having me.

Make no mistake, who you're around on a day to day basis is just as important as the food you eat and content you consume. This is your circle, your group, your gang, your army........whatever. The big question is how do we know if we're around the right people? Well I'm going to tell you in 8 minutes. Just click play and I'll make this real easy for ya.

Amanda B. and Rony J. do the serious-book-club equivalent of hitting on a girl that's obviously...uh... not interested in you, by seeking to break down Babysitter's Club book #38, KRISTY'S MYSTERY ADMIRER. Y.A.? YNOT! Ok so here's why not:1.) Pretty dresses; 2.) fellatio; 3.) ????Treatise on being "interesting looking".Woman as object --> woman as subject.(Kristy's going to Smith, not Wellesley.)Babysitting over 18 = whoring minus the sex.The do's and don'ts of writing secret, anonymous notes to someone you don't know insisting that you essentially want to possess them.The do's and don'ts of sending body parts to crushes.Simmering class warfare in Stoneybrook, y'all.HEAVY frock talk.GET 'EM NANNIE.OK so obviously we're doing the quiz. Guess who we got!(Hand to God, there were drums.)Everyone's a little gay.But no seriously, Kristy's gay. And that's fine!Not even fine. It's distant.RURTHER FEEDING:BSC slash fiction?YES ("Changing Lanes", by user EmilyJade91, fanfiction dot net, last update Apr. 7, 2012)MUH (Curated fan list, by user Lioness Black, fanfiction dot net, Sept. 26, 2005)FUGGIN ("Fan Fiction Friday: 7 Baby-Sitters Club Femslash Fics to Take You Way Back", by Heather Hogan, autostraddle dot com, Jan. 23, 2015)YES****. ("Mary Anne Takes Charge", by user mayhap, Archive of Our Own, Dec. 18, 2014)"But Sophie, you're totally my type! Type 1 diabetes!""Scott, I'M more than just my diabetes!""Well I'm not. I'm Scott Malkinson."--clip from South Park, S23 Ep. 09, "Basic Cable"Putas Libertarias vs. Babysitter's Club-- same same but diffCootie-Catcher!There's a mobile version of friggin MASH.Like notes that Amanda got stax of from all the lil' boys whenever she changed schools.Wells for Boys, againWhich BSC'er are you? Quiz (one of them, anyway) from BuzzfeedTPBC Episode 9 - 8 Ball Chicks, by Gini SikesFollow us on social media!@2personbookclub on Twitter and Insta!

A goal of mine has always been to encourage people to take on an adventure, whether that's signing up for an ultra marathon, climbing a mountain, or simply stepping outside their comfort zone. More specifically I always joke that the secret intent of the podcast is to get people to sign up for their first 50k, the ultra distance that I believe is the perfect intro to adventure. Well I'm happy to say that recently I convinced (peer pressured) 4 of my friends to register for their very first 50k! In May, we will be taking on the Booneville Backroads Ultra, a fantastic race through the country roads south of Des Moines, Iowa. This episode is all about "what in the world did we get ourselves into?" We chat with all four of these gentlemen about their goals, expectations, and what they hope to gain by pushing themselves way outside their comfort zones! All of these guys have been on the show before and huge thanks to each and every one of them for sharing their perspectives. Matt Rackers, Sean Furlong, Thad Burkamper and Brady Manriquez, I truly cannot wait for May! MORE FROM BOONEVILLE BACKROADS ULTRA: Website: http://boonevillebackroadsultra.com Ultrasignup: https://ultrasignup.com/register.aspx?did=72917 "Reach for the Stars" Documentary: https://www.expandyourpossible.com/online-store/Reach-for-the-Stars-The-Booneville-Backroads-Ultra-Marathon-Digital-%26-Streaming-p139527512 MORE LIKE A BIGFOOT: Subscribe and Review on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/like-a-bigfoot/id1160773293?mt=2 Soundcloud Archives: https://soundcloud.com/chris-ward-126531464 Stitcher Archives: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/like-a-bigfoot Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/likeabigfoot/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/likeabigfoot/

Have you been feeling stuck? Maybe you can't seem to get out out this funk that you're in or maybe you haven't been able to move the needle forward in your business. You're feeling paralyzed. Am I right? Well I'm about to let you in on the ONE thing that is keeping you stuck in life. The one thing that is holding you back and keeping you from achieving your goals. I'm super excited to JAM on this topic and it's something that I figured out back when I was in middle school. Yuppp, I'm taking you way back... okay, maybe not way back and back far enough when I didn't even realize that this ONE moment would play such a pivotal role in my life. I hope that this episode is the gut punch that you need to make some major moves in your life or business! Episode Show Notes: aubreemalick.com/blog/16 Connect with me on IG: @aubreemalick   

Being single during the holidays can be daunting for a lot of people. I too have been with envy over the holidays of other couple's posting pictures of each other over Instagram. "Look how happy they are!" We can quickly fall down a dark spiral of single hood wishing and hoping and asking "When is it going to be my turn?" According to Psychology Today, "Lonely people dread the holiday season more than any other time of year. Watching everyone around them connect to those they love makes their own feelings of emotional isolation even more profound. Indeed, the holidays can make loneliness feel especially excruciating. Loneliness is not only painful emotionally but it can have a devastating impact on one’s long term psychological and physical health." Well I'm here to tell you that you can be happily single during holidays and I will share with you how I did it and from a Coach's prospective. Happy Holidays!! Join the Juicy Love community: WEBSITE: https://www.jimmyallencoaching.com INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/jimmyallen/ FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/jimmyallencoaching/ TWITTER: https://twitter.com/simplyjimmy COMMENT, LIKE and SUBSCRIBE For more support with your love life, join the conversation in our private Facebook group. https://www.facebook.com/groups/datingandrelationshipcoaching/ Gay men you find support with your love life, join the conversation in our private Facebook group. https://www.facebook.com/groups/loveandrelationshipcoachingforsinglegaymen/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jimmyallen/support

The infamous how-to meets self-help meets memoir-with-a-dash-of-stunt genre. It may be awkwardly named, but we love it.This week’s guest didn’t realize she was laying the groundwork for her first book when she decided to write 50 thank you notes to the people, things and places that shaped her in honor of her 50th birthday—but of course she was When you can define a thing and the time frame and the reasons for doing it so clearly, what else can you do but inspire other people to do the same? But the road from I’m doing this thing to I’m publishing this book isn’t clear (although in this case it was lightning fast). This week, Nancy Davis Kho talks to us about what it took to make her book saleable, then write the damn thing and make it really really good.Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, did you catch the #WritersTopFive that popped into your inbox Monday? (And if it didn’t, HELLO, you need to subscribe to our free weekly #AmWriting emails!) That was just a little taste. We do those every week. I just scheduled Top Five Reference Books for All Novelists, and Three More for Special Occasions, and you don’t want to miss it. (You won’t believe the kinds of things that can be turned into an encyclopedias or dictionary.) We also recorded the first of many #MiniSupporter episodes that will slip right into the podcast feeds of #AmWriting supporters everywhere. Support the podcast you love AND get weekly #WriterTopFives with actionable advice you can use for just $7 a month. As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it with the shownotes and a transcript every time there’s a new episode. LINKS FROM THE PODCASTAya deLeon, author of the Justice Hustlers series.#AmReading (Watching, Listening)Nancy: The Good Lord Bird, James McBrideJess: Sense and Sensibility, narrated by Kate WinsletKJ: What Should I Read Next—the podcast from Anne Bogel, aka the Modern Mrs Darcy. (I’m obsessed with it. I’ve found so many great new reads!)#FaveIndieBookstoreA Great Good Place for Books, OaklandOur guest for this episode is Nancy Davis Kho, author of The Thank You Project and host of the Midlife Mixtape podcast. Find the book, the podcast and all things Nancy HERE.This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work done. Check out their FREE (and epic) upcoming summit on the Business of Book Coaching if you’re intrigued, or visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwriting for details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)KJ:                                        00:02                    Hey there listeners, it's KJ. What with Jess starting in on a new project lately, we've been talking a lot about nonfiction and research. If that's your kind of work, our sponsor, Author Accelerator can help and you don't have to go all in with full on book coaching if you're not ready. Check out their new four week long nonfiction framework program that will help you nail down your structure before you start to write, or after your writing and realizing, dang, this thing needs a backbone. Authors of self-help, how-to, and academic texts will find the shape of their books, create a working one page summary that helps reveal that shape at a glance, and develop a flexible table of contents to guide you through the drafting and revision process. You can find a lot more, including previews of much of the material, by going to authoraccelerator.com/nonfictionframework. Is it recording?Jess:                                     00:02                    Now it's recording.KJ:                                        00:02                    Yay.Jess:                                     00:02                    Go ahead.KJ:                                        01:00                    This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone like I don't remember what I was supposed to be doing.Jess:                                     01:01                    Alright. Let's start over.KJ:                                        01:06                    Awkward pause, I'm going to rustle some papers. Now one, two, three. Hey, I am KJ Dell'Antonia and this is #AmWriting the podcast about all things writing - nonfiction, fiction, book proposals, essays, not poetry. I made that joke a few weeks ago, but I just can't stop because I feel like it's not all the things. I am KJ Dell'Antonia, your rambling host, and this is the podcast about getting your work done.Jess:                                     01:45                    And I'm Jess Lahey. I'm the author of the Gift of Failure and a forthcoming book. It won't be till spring of 2021, a book on preventing substance abuse in kids and you can find me at the New York Times, and at the Atlantic, and at the Washington Post. And we have such a guest today. We have such a guest.KJ:                                        02:05                    I didn't really introduce myself.Jess:                                     02:06                    Go ahead, please go.KJ:                                        02:08                    I just introduced myself as your rambling host and I am so much more than that.Jess:                                     02:13                    You go, and then we'll let that weird person who no one even knows, we'll let her talk after. But KJ, you go first.KJ:                                        02:24                    I am KJ Dell'Antonia. I am the author of the novel The Chicken Sisters, which you can't buy yet, but you'll be able to next summer and believe me, you'll hear all about it. Also of How To Be a Happier Parent. I'm the former editor of the Motherlode blog at the New York Times, where I sometimes still contribute and I am working on novel number, whatever it is if you count the ones in the drawer and we don't know if it will be published, that's what I'm doing. So that's who I am and why you should (or should not) listen to me.Jess:                                     02:57                    We have a guest today who you should definitely listen to. Because she's hysterical, and wonderful, and funny, and has a book coming out that is fantastic and very near and dear to my heart. We are talking today to Nancy Davis Kho. She is a writer. She's written for Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Adirondack Life, The Rumpus, all these various places. She's in an anthology called Listen To Your Mother: What She Said Then, What We're Saying Now. And Listen To Your Mother, by the way, is hysterical if you've never come across it before. Nancy has a fantastic book coming out this month that is, as I said, so near and dear to my heart because it's about thanking people. And so, thank you Nancy, for being on the podcast today.Nancy:                                03:41                    I pretty much wrote a book in order to be on your podcast, just so you know.Jess:                                     03:46                    Nancy has her own podcast, one of my very favorites. It's the Midlife Mixtape podcast and if you are not already listening, you should. Because it's wonderful, and fantastic, and it makes me very happy every single time I listen to it.Nancy:                                04:03                    You guys are so nice. Can I call you every morning, Jess, and just have you say, 'You matter.'Jess:                                     04:09                    I love this book, not only because thank you notes are really important part of not only my personal life but my professional life, but because I feel like KJ and I have had a personal stake in the project because we've gotten to hear about the process of you writing this book, and pitching this book, and how it all came about. So we usually like to start by talking sort of about how you got started writing, KJ often likes to ask what the first thing you got paid to write was, and we'll go from there.Nancy:                                04:44                    Oh wow, I'll have to think about the answer to that question. Thank you so much for having me on the show. And also you guys have been such tremendous cheerleaders and sources of real pragmatic information. I have listened to so many of your episodes and just scribble down as I'm going because this podcast is so invaluable in helping people as they're going into various, you know, the first time you're doing this, the first time you're doing that, you guys have had guests on who've talked about that. So it's such a great resource and I really am honored to be on the show.Jess:                                     05:20                    And you're going to have to listen to some of the publicity episodes - like the marketing and publicity episodes.Nancy:                                05:26                    Jess, am I brand new? I've already listened. I started listening to them a second time, please. The one where you guys were talking about your book launch plans. I listen to podcasts oftentimes when I'm hiking and I can picture the stretch of the Oakland Hills where I was, where KJ was talking about how many rows were in the spreadsheet and I was like, 'I can't do all of this. God.' But it was good.KJ:                                        05:53                    You're just lucky Jess didn't talk about how many rows in her spreadsheet.Jess:                                     05:58                    Tell us about how you got started.Nancy:                                06:02                    My background is in international business. I studied that in college. I got a couple of degrees in that, I picked up a husband in an international business program. So it all worked out. And I spent about 17 years doing that and I loved it. But whenever anybody would ask me, 'If you could do anything, what would you want to do?' I would say, 'Oh, I'd like to be a writer.' Here's my reason: it seems portable, I think I could do that from anywhere. That was my basic feeling about it. But I did always love writing. And you know, I've been an avid reader. All of us, right? Anybody listening to this show, we've all been reading since we were in short pants. And nothing like a 40th birthday to give you a bit of an identity crisis. And I thought, 'My God, I'm going to turn 40. And I tell people I want to be a writer. I've never tried. Maybe I should try writing. That would be a thing I could do.' So I took a class the summer before I turned 40 and by the time I finished (it was a class in creative memoir or I think it was just personal essays) and by the time I finished the class, I'd had two things published. And I was like, 'You know what? I love this.' I loved getting the byline and I just loved the process of writing. So that is now 13 years ago in the rear view mirror. And I thought at the time, as you do when you're a beginner at anything, I was like, 'Hmm, what's the hardest thing that I'm not qualified to do? I know I will write a novel of historical fiction that deals with race issues from the standpoint of a white woman. That's what the world needs now.' So I commenced to spending six years researching and writing a novel that is composting very nicely in a drawer. I can see which drawer in my office it is sitting in right now. And that was hard work. I told my husband, 'I'm a writer now, I'm going to quit my corporate job. Neglecting to factor in that I had two small kids who needed (we live in the Bay area, everybody needs to work) So it was a bumpy time - the writing I loved, the researching I loved, like the whole writing part of it was great. It was trying to figure out how to balance the lifestyle with that that was challenging. And also just realizing how much I had to learn as a writer. And I think one of the messages I try to put on the podcast all the time, so the Midlife Mixtape Podcast is about the years between being hip and breaking one. And I started it because I wanted there to be a counter narrative to midlife being a crisis because what I found was that it wasn't an identity crisis to become a writer. It was like I was adding something to myself. I was doing something that made me happy. And now it didn't work right out of the gate. I didn't publish a novel when I was 41, but I was challenging myself, and learning new stuff, and eventually I ended up going back to corporate work and doing that part time. And that's kind of been my gig ever since. I have a day job, I work in digital content licensing. I really like it, I have mastery at it, I've been doing it for years and years. And then I have this creative side where I can do the writing. So I think as a writer, I just feel like I've been pragmatic in terms of forgiving myself for not being successful right away. And so, I spent six years getting better and better and still not having a novel that needed to see the light of day. And then when I finished with that, I got frustrated and I had started the blog, Midlife Mixtape, and I realized that what felt very comfortable to me was humor writing. It came to me naturally. I'm the youngest of three in a family of very funny people and you really have to bring your A game all the time in my family. So, for me that was a much easier voice to write in. I always say my goal is to sound like Erma Bombeck meets David Sedaris, you know, not mean spirited but funny, and kind of poignant. And so after a little while writing in that voice on Midlife Mixtape, I thought, 'I know I'll write a book about my midlife music crisis.' And I wasn't really having a midlife music crisis, to be honest. What had happened is, I went to a concert and a bouncer said to me, 'Are you just here to drop off your kids?' I mean, I've been an avid concert goer since I was 14 and that shook me. So I was like, 'Oh, maybe I am too old to go to a Vampire Weekend concert. Maybe I should try to find more midlife appropriate music.' But the truth was, I still kept going to shows like that. I started going to the symphony, I started going to heavy metal shows, I was trying all different kinds of stuff. But I felt like I was manufacturing the arc of my story a little bit. And I think that always kind of stuck with me that I was telling a funny story people could relate to, this memoir that I spent only three years writing that one. So I doubled my speed from which I had written the historical fiction novel. But there was something about that story that never connected, even for me, because I just felt like, okay. As this one writing mentor of mine said, 'What, you wanted to go to a concert, you kept going to concerts. There's not a lot of character change here, you know. Any good memoir needs that needs that arc.' And so I got to see a lot of fun shows and I wrote about those on the blog. But that book also came closer to what I wanted to write, but it still wasn't quite the right thing. So that one went into a drawer and that was now I guess about three years ago, four years ago.Jess:                                     11:55                    Well, and I have to say you're definitely learning your lessons. Because all of the things you're criticizing about the early work that stayed in the drawer is like the antithesis of what I found when I opened The Thank You Project. So keep going with your story, but I just want to say that like all of these realizations, you're having, you know, the sort of there being no trajectory, there being no personal connection. Like that's what The Thank You Project is about from the very first page, a very personal project that came out of a very important moment in your life. I think even if I didn't know you personally, I would be very connected with you as a writer from the first page of this book. So, those lessons were really important for you to learn. I think that's how we get there, as KJ and I both know, you got to write a lot of bad stuff.KJ:                                        12:48                    We never talk about this, but you and I both, Jess, have memoirs in drawers.Jess:                                     12:53                    Yup. Yeah we do.KJ:                                        12:54                    I mean that just, it just doesn't come up. Like we talk a lot about my novel in a drawer. But it rarely comes up that I have, I can't remember if I wrote the whole thing, but I definitely have a memoir proposal in the drawer. And you have a memoir proposal and I think pretty much the memoir.Jess:                                     13:10                    Oh no, I have the whole thing. I sold chunks of it as essays and and that was sort of the thing I got out of it.Nancy:                                13:22                    Well, and I think this is really my message to anybody who's listening, and feeling frustrated, and wondering why the project isn't working. Fast forward to spring of 2018, which is when the idea for this book, The Thank You Project, came along and I know we're going to talk about it, but my message is every misstep I took was actually getting me closer to this book that I feel so strongly about, I feel so proud of, I feel like I'm the right person to tell this story that's in this book. And all that other stuff, all those years I wasn't getting published. What was I doing? I was meeting great writers. I was reading books by great writers. I was very happily sharing the work of other writer friends and promoting them and I was getting better at my craft. I was building my network of support. And so now I'm hugely gratified, but you know, there's so many people trying to help me with this book and that's because I put in 12 years of work that didn't feel at the time like it was amounting to anything. But now it's all paying off. So anybody who's listening and feeling frustrated, I would just say, please don't give up. Because there's a reason, there's a path.Jess:                                     15:03                    Well what's funny is before I wrote the proposal, as KJ well knows, for the book I just finished, I actually went through the trouble of writing proposals for a bunch of books that weren't quite right and what they were was sort of circling around the topic, but also really important work for me to do to figure out, Oh okay, so this aspect of this topic fits in somewhere, but I'm not quite sure how. So that finally when that idea comes, you have some familiarity with the things that aren't particularly interesting, or working, or whatever. So when you have that moment, it's super exciting when you have that idea for, Oh this is the thing. In fact, I pulled off the road and I texted Sarina and KJ right away and said, 'This is it. This is the thing, I know this is the right thing.'Nancy:                                16:26                    Well, and that's how it felt. So the book is called The Thank You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time. And what happened was I found an agent for that music memoir, it did not sell. And I really had a time where I thought maybe I'm not a writer, I know I'm good at writing these little blog posts and I get essays published, but maybe I don't have it in me to do a full length work. So I'm going to take this creative energy and I started the podcast and turns out I love podcasting; I'm a tech nerd at heart. A lot of the work I did the first 17 years of my career was in the software industry. So I love working, learning new technology, and everything. I was really struggling a little bit with this idea that maybe I'm not an author, I'm a writer, but not an author. I guess that's probably not an uncommon thing. And it occurred to me one day (and I was 49) it occurred to me that the reason my book didn't sell was because my character, myself in the memoir, wasn't unhappy. There wasn't a transition because she started off happy and she ended up happy. And I'm like, that's not a problem, that's something to be really grateful for. And this was at the end of 2015, and in 2016 I was going to turn 50. And I'm like, 'You know what, the thing I should do to honor and commemorate my 50th birthday is to thank the people that have made it possible for me to be where I am.' You know, my parents were alive, my husband's great, been married to him since forever, we've got two girls, you know, everything's fine. So I thought the way I want to celebrate my 50th year is I will write a letter every week, a thank you letter once a week, to somebody who has helped, or shaped, or inspired me up to this point in my life. And of course when you tell the universe that you're doing this because everything's going great, everything goes to s**t pretty darn quickly. So I started writing my letters and it was really great. I'd sit down every week and you know, write a letter to my nephew Tristan, or to my friend Kitty who lives in Australia. And it just was wonderful every week to sit down and think about this person who had been meaningful in my life and what lessons that I learned from them and how they'd help me.KJ:                                        18:44                    I'm going to interrupt, cause I know where you're going. At this point, this isn't a book?Nancy:                                18:49                    No, no. These are just letters.KJ:                                        18:51                    This is just something you're doing. So this is not like stunt journalism, in which you're, 'I don't know what I'll do. I'll write...' This is a genuine thing, right?Nancy:                                18:59                    I wasn't even an author at that point, anymore. I'd kind of tried it and not gotten through anything. So I was just writing thank you letters because that seemed like a good way to mark a period of my life. So halfway through the year, my dad gets diagnosed with cancer and he is gone in six weeks. We had no idea he was sick. My older daughter left for college a couple of weeks after the funeral and that was certainly not a sad thing, but it was a big adjustment to have your older kid to go off to school and she goes to school on the East coast. So she's far. And then it was the 2016 presidential election, so everybody's anxiety level was through the roof. And I realized the worse things got, the more I needed the thank you letters. Because it was just this moment every week where I could crowd out all this sadness, and this tension, and the worry, and I'd be like, 'Hmm, I'm gonna write a letter to the city of Oakland. Because you know what? It's not even just people who have shaped me, it's places I've lived. And then I had a period of writing letters to cities and then I started writing letters to dead authors. Like I love Jane Austen. I'm going to write her a letter, but I'm going to have to explain some things to her. And it got to be really fun. And anyway, I got to the end of the 50 letters, (took me longer than a year) printed them all out, bound them in a book, and flip through that book all the time. You know, you rifle through it and you go, 'Oh yeah, my Aunt Nooney is so nice to me.' You're having a bad day, read about what your Aunt Nooney did for you. You know, it'll cheer you up, it'll remind you that when you're in hardship, you've almost never been alone. That there's always people around you. So, just in and of its own self as a writing exercise, writing the thank you letters was really important. So now it's spring of 2018 and one of the people who got the letters, Ann Imig who is the editor of the Listen To Your Mother Anthology and the founder of that empire said, 'Nancy, that's your book. You need to tell people how to do this.' And I'm like, 'What? It's so straightforward. You write a thank you letter.' But then another friend of ours who knew that I had done it, sat me down and she's like, 'Okay, who did you write to? How long was the letter? What did you put in the letter? How did you organize it?' And I answered questions for her for like an hour. And I thought, 'Okay, maybe it's not as straightforward as I thought it was.' So I thought, you know, at this point, the podcast was cooking along, my day job's cooking along. My kids are, you know, I've got one in college, one in high school, nobody needs me around anymore. I got some free time. So I thought I'll just start writing a few chapters of this, just think about how I would write a book that explains to people how to do their own thank you project. And it poured out of me, I wrote that proposal so quickly. Why? Because I had two other book proposals that I'd already done. Yes, I wrote a book proposal for a fiction novel. Don't ask me, I know it's wrong. And now I know that. At the time when I was writing my historical fiction I didn't know. So, there's the reason I wrote two proposals because when I really needed one, I literally just could do a find replace, for the most part. So it was just kind of a proof of concept to myself that this could be something. And I wasn't going to get an agent, because agents hadn't sold my book before, so why would I bother? And then people like KJ, and Jess, and a couple other people said, 'You should talk to an agent.' So I started in April 2018, at the end of May 2018 I reached out to a few agents who I'd met in person and online, and three or four of them came back and said, 'I would love to see this proposal.' And I was like, 'Oh, that's weird.' And I got it out the door. And then the timeframe was I signed with our wonderful agent (we all have the same one, Laurie Abkemeier) who's been wonderful, signed with her in June, we worked on the proposal together in July, and I signed a deal with Running Press in the end of August. This is all last year. So I signed the deal with Running Press in August. My deadline was November 15th for the finished book.Jess:                                     23:16                    You had written parts of it -Yes? No?Nancy:                                23:19                    Well, I'd written the first three chapters that belonged in the proposal...Jess:                                     23:25                    So what had you been smoking to make you think that you could set a deadline that quickly? What was the thinking behind that?Nancy:                                23:33                    I knew how to write this book, I knew how to tell this story. I'd written the letters. I knew how impactful they could be. I really wanted other people to know. I am spiritual, I'm a church lady, I go to this Episcopal church. And I do think this is one of those cases where I was given a message to share because that's something I can do. I can tell like a funny, uplifting story. It's taken me 13 years, but I know how to do that. In the places where the other two books had been a struggle - I don't want to say I couldn't have told those stories, but this one just was easy for me. I just knew what I wanted to say, and I and I knew how to say it. And let's face it, I do use snippets of the letters and there were days that I needed the #AmWriting podcast, I'm like, 'Ooh, I need a burn chart. I need to know what my daily word count is. And there were days where I'm like, 'Well I'm talking about a letter to write to a doctor, maybe I'll include a snippet of the letter I wrote to my OB.' I just covered my word chart, like put in two paragraphs, and I'd be done, go get my coffee. So there was a little bit of source material in that I do include snippets of my letters to kind of get people started. But I didn't want it to just be my letters. I ended up interviewing a few people who had done something similar, so I've got some other people's examples. And then the thing that I loved about writing the book was that it gave me a chance to delve into the science of happiness and gratitude. Cause I didn't want it to just be, 'This is what I did, so you should try it.' I wanted to steep it in some quantitative research that talks about why gratitude letters are so magic. And you know, low and behold, during those 13 years when I was freelance writing, I interviewed a bunch of happiness researchers for various publications. So I had the Rolodex - does anybody listening know what a Rolodex is? I had the phone numbers, okay? So I called the researchers and I got to interview them and you know, again, that was not wasted time. All of that stuff is why I could do it in two and a half months.Jess:                                     25:50                    And it's why KJ, over and over again, insists that I'm not allowed to say, 'You know, boy, I got really lucky with Gift of Failure, right place, right time.' Well, no, it was a lot of work and it's that work that other people don't see.KJ:                                        26:04                    Preparation meeting opportunity.Jess:                                     26:06                    Yeah, exactly. There you go. There you go. The thing that I was really interested in - let's say you've got all of these letters, and you've got this idea about how you want to do this. In terms of organization, I really liked the way you organize the book and it was a little unexpected. I thought it was going to be like sequential, but you did a really interesting thing with the organization. I'm kinda wondering how you arrived at that particular sequence.Nancy:                                26:37                    Welcome to my brain, cause I do think it's sequential. I knew that I wanted the introduction because (I'm not gonna give away the whole introduction) but basically when my dad got his letter (I wrote to him and my mom first) and my dad was very cute and called me and he's like, 'Aww, Nance, I loved it. I put it in a frame and it's over my desk.' So I knew I wanted to start with the fact that my dad had this letter framed and sitting over his desk. And then I figured I would need to go through exactly all the questions that Melissa asked me on the porch that day. Like, 'Who did you write to? How did you...' So there's a first chapter that's all about how you can organize this. And I want to say at the outset, throughout this book, I say, 'But that's what I did, do what you want.' Like nobody is in charge of your pace, what you write, who you write to. And the amazing thing about gratitude letters (as I found out from the researchers) is that even just thinking about what you would put in a letter creates happiness benefits for you. So it's all about firing the neurons and getting the positive outlook kind of codified within your brain pan. That's how I would explain it. So writing it down is great, but even if you read this book, and just think about the things that I'm talking about, people will get benefits. But then, after that section, the whole rest of the book is, here's the kinds of people who you might want to think about writing. And I think some of the categories are obvious - from friends and family. Although less obvious, because do you ever write a thank you letter to your spouse, or to your kid, or to your parent? Probably not. You know, there's a whole category of people that we take for granted and so that's kind of where I start. And part of the reason is because it gets the juices flowing for when you're writing the thank you letters, you know, you have a lot of source material for those people. But as I went through my own process and I just kept coming back to this idea of, okay, who helped me, shaped me, inspired me. Well, one of the people who helped me was my German ex-boyfriend when I lived in Germany and didn't know how to file taxes. It didn't work out with him. But man, he made sure my taxes were done every year on time and properly, and I wouldn't have been able to stay in Germany if I'd screwed up, their bureaucracy is on it. Like I'm sure they would've found me and sent me back to America. So I wrote a letter to him and this is when I figured out that I could write letters and not send them. Nobody needed to know that I was doing this. So I could write a thank you letter to anybody. I could write it to my childhood bully; I was so sensitized to bullying because I had been a victim of it, that my kids from the minute they started school, we talked about bullying. What do you do if you see it? What do you do? How do you help somebody going through it? How do you make sure you're never the perpetrator? You know, I'm not sure I would have been so tuned into that if I hadn't known this person. Now, that was a letter I actually chose not to write. That was one where I was like, 'You know what, I don't want to spend any more time on her.' But you could. And so, it was fun to kind of expand and so I did that in writing my own letters. But in writing the book, what I loved was thinking about, 'Well, who's going to read this? Could be anybody.' So what other things, like what's outside of my world, that I should think about and prompt people to write about. Like, I've never been in the army, but I made sure to say like, 'You might want to write a letter to your drill instructor.' You know, there's so many kinds of people, and I just tried really hard in writing it to have as an inclusive tone as I could. And I had a few people read it who had very different experiences from me, and that's what I asked them to read for. I wanted to make sure that someone who wasn't heterosexual would also feel like this book spoke to them and somebody who wasn't white would also feel...So I was at a conference that I had the chance to hear Aya de Leon, do you guys know her? She's a Bay area writer and professor. She writes these really great crime capers with African-American heroines. And a lot of times her heroines are sex workers and she's really about like, they're very feminist, but they kind of they have a message that's a little bit hidden.Jess:                                     31:18                    I'm looking at the covers right now, they're so good. They're these women, sort of face forward at the camera, The Boss, and then another one called Side Chick Nation, and another one called Uptown Thief. They're fantastic covers, I love them. And really strong women with their shoulders back and sort of facing you like, yeah, bring it. I like it.Nancy:                                31:40                    Right. And she's really smart. And at this conference I went to, she was just saying, 'If you want to write diverse character well, have diverse friends.' I just thought that's so obvious. But as writers, if you want to reach out to a diverse audience, make sure you've got those people in your real life so that you can go to them. And that was, again, my 13 years of preparation. I knew who I could ask to read for different things. And so that was a part of the review process.Jess:                                     32:14                    One of the things that you said, you asked a lot of people who had experience outside of yours to help you, but the thing that you did really well in the book is to create these ideas about how you should think about the thank you notes. And one of the things you said was, 'Who or what has shaped me?' And that is such a personal question, but a question that is universal. Because as you said, it could be the ex-boyfriend that things didn't work out with. But everyone's got those people that you realize, Oh wow, I didn't actually thank that person. And it may not have been a particularly positive experience at the time, but that question alone right there, I think, makes the book nice and generalizes it for everyone. I love that question.Nancy:                                32:56                    Well, and I hope that given that it's coming out before we start another presidential election year, people are so isolated and people are so quick to judge now, and maybe we always were, but it just feels different. And part of what I think these letters can do is remind us the small ways that people in our lives have helped us. Even if we were on opposite sides of a divide now, they've made a difference for us. And just sending those letters (or even if you write and it's not possible for you to send it) even writing it to remind yourself of the humanity of the people on the receiving end, I think is really powerful. So I'm glad it's coming out when it does, I hope it is helpful for people next year. I'm just really excited for it to come out. Can I say one thing? Because of this audience, I think I can share this. The one thing that I wanted to mention is that the same week that I got the book deal, my mom was diagnosed with lymphoma. And my mom's 86, and she's in an assisted living place, and she's got dementia. And they initially gave my mom a two and a half month...I was going to say sentence. That's what it felt like, they said that's how much time she has left. And it was awful, because on the same week I got this amazing news, I got horrible news. And I'm not going to leave you in suspense, Mom's doing fine, we took her to a specialist a few weeks later who kind of said, 'It's not nearly as dire as the first guy said and here's a bunch of treatment options.' And so mom is hanging in, she still loves John Denver, we talk a lot about John Denver. No, but it was a real exercise in compartmentalization. That's why I bring it up, because I knew I had to get this book done, and my siblings are amazing. I would have probably said like, 'I can just not do the book.' and they would have never forgiven me. So they're like, 'Figure out what your schedule is, come home if you can, and you'll get it done.' So the shitty first draft was done in six weeks, and I flew to Rochester to visit with my mom, and spent a week with her, came back, and then I finished the book after that. And the whole time I just had to keep these two things separate, because I could not have finished the book otherwise. And when it was over, I completely fell apart for a little while. And the irony was, writing the thank you notes again, writing about thank you notes, I got to kind of use them a second time in just the same way that I had the first time I wrote the letters. You know, to kind of say, 'My mom's got an X-Ray today, and we don't know what it's going to find, but Hey, I'm writing about how funny it was that time I wrote a letter to so-and-so.' If you think of writers sitting in a cabin somewhere, and having all their diversions taken away, and there's nothing but good whiskey and the sound of this pounding surf, I think that's b******t. You know, you just have to write through what you have to write through. And I felt lucky to have the opportunity. Who's the biggest reader I know? My mom, you know, back when she could read, I was not going to let her down.Jess:                                     36:39                    Is she pretty stoked for you?Nancy:                                36:42                    She's pretty hilarious, my mother. She is stoked; she remembers that I have a book, that's landed somewhere, I don't think she knows what it's about. She's astonished that I told her I will bring her a book in person and hand deliver it to her. Well, she literally was the one who put the love of reading in me, so there you go.KJ:                                        37:06                    I mean we'd all like that cabin, but you know, both Jess and I had big deadlines this year, and we both also had big personal stuff that our families overall prefer that we left as as family. But yeah, it's part of being a pro, and it's also just part of like embracing that part of who we are. It's like, you know, I'm a writer, I'm a writer with the sick parent. I'm a writer with whatever other problem that you have. But I'm a writer and this is what I'm doing now, and then in three hours I'll be doing something else. And I think you're so right to shout that out, because I know frequently I will sit there with my personal problems and with my deadline and go, 'Other people don't have to deal with this.' But honestly, yes they do.Jess:                                     38:07                    Yeah. There were plenty of times going towards this deadline where I would hang up the phone having dealt with some of the personal stuff that was going on, and just take a couple of really deep breaths, maybe have a good cry, and then turn on my monitor, and get back to work.Nancy:                                38:21                    Did you both feel like the writing part was like safe haven? Because that's how I felt. And then I was writing from like five to seven in the morning, cause I still had the day job. But I was like jumping out of bed cause I knew the next two hours I'll be happy.KJ:                                        38:39                    Having the abiity to focus on it - like having spent, (you've been talking about putting in the work) having spent the past decade or more, turning stuff off, and turning to the keyboard or the paper or whatever, and saying, 'You know I got to get this.' So having that practice, the ability to just shut everything else down and focus on it, I've been so grateful - past-me for teaching present-me to do that. So thank you letter to her, I guess.Jess:                                     39:13                    It was also really nice for me occasionally to not feel guilty. You know, I feel like when other people need me or I'm supposed to be feeling a certain way about something, it's nice to have a pass to say, 'Nope, I can't do that. I can't spend emotional attention on that right now because this has to happen.' I have this deadline, so I get to turn that off for a minute and not feel guilty about feeling bad for someone else while I can focus on the words. And so for me, it was an incredible safe haven. It was license for me to focus on something else that really was about what I love doing. And if I hadn't had that, I think it would have been an even more challenging summer than it was. But this really gave me a way out of that.Nancy:                                40:02                    So the message is for writers, if you're having a terrible time, try writing, maybe that will cheer you up.Jess:                                     40:08                    Well, but we do have to move on to what we've been reading because we're running over, so let's talk about what we've been reading. Nancy, would you like to tell us?Nancy:                                40:33                    Yes. So I was visiting my mom two weeks ago, and even if she can't read anymore, she still demands that we do. And in the assisted living place, there's a giant bookcase outside her apartment, and she always makes me take a book when we go by, just take one. They don't care, just take one. So I grabbed one off the top. It was The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, which was a 2013 national book winner that I finally got to in 2019, it's been out for a while. Oh my gosh, I loved it so much. I actually just finished it last night. Ironically, one of the small characters in the book is the main character in my historical fiction novel in a drawer. So I think maybe that's why I avoided it. I didn't want to see him be alive in somebody else's book. But oh, it was fantastic. It was like Mark Twain on steroids. I loved it. It's all about John Brown and Harper's Ferry. I love abolitionist. You know, abolition is lit. And it's really, really well done. It's a fun story.Jess:                                     41:34                    Yeah, that shelf in the bookstore, it's the popular one, The Abolition Is Lit shelf. I have a whole shelf on fishing in New England in the 1850s or so. That's a whole section in my library cause I'm obsessed with the whole Gloucester, fishermen thing. That's a thing for me. I'm still reading away on some of the stuff that's on my Audible. But I will say, that I just found out and I had mentioned this before, that when I am writing stuff, I like to reread things that are comforting, and I had been relistening to a whole bunch of Jane Austen and I just found out that there is a recording of Sense and Sensibility with Kate Winslet. And so that is going to be a evening listen for me.KJ:                                        42:33                    We have recorded multiple episodes this week and I am out, but I have already shouted out the What Should I Read Next? Podcast, but I have to shout it out again. So it's What Should I Read Next? With Anne Bogle, who some might know as the Modern Mrs. Darcy, she's had a blog for a long time. So I listened to an episode of this podcast earlier this week and I ended up downloading samples of four different books and they only talked about like eight. Somebody goes on and says, 'These are the books I like and this is what I'd like to read next.' And it's just such an incredible joy. So, try the podcast and I guarantee that you will come away with something to read, even if I can't suggest anything at the moment. Yeah, it's a really good one.Jess:                                     43:34                    Alright, Nancy, do you have a bookstore you love?Nancy:                                43:38                    I very much have a bookstore I love, it's called A Great Good Place for Books, here in Oakland up in the Montclair neighborhood. And Kathleen Caldwel,l who owns it, is the neighborhood treasurer. Everybody's kid has worked at that bookstore at some point. And she pays them in books and it's just fantastic. In fact, Great Good Place is doing my launch party, which is on December 3rd, and she's just one of those people you walk in the door and she says, 'Oh, Nancy, I knew you were coming in this week, so I've put aside three books for you.' And my favorite story about her was the time I ordered Skippy Dies, it's very dark Irish boarding school, it's like a comedy tragedy. It's an amazing book. And she sold my husband a gift card for me for Christmas, cause that's what I get every Christmas. Andrew, if you're listening, I need a gift card. And I took it in and I said, 'Okay, I want to get Skippy Dies.' And she said, 'Well, I'm going to order you the three part version of the book.' And I said, 'I think it's just a novel. I've been reading reviews, it's one book.' And she goes, 'Oh, it's so much cooler when it comes in the case. So I'm going to get you this. And I know how much is on your gift card, you can afford it.' So I love Kathleen, she is always hustling for those authors. She brings in great, great authors for readings and yeah, so if you're in Oakland check out Great Good Place For Books.Jess:                                     45:08                    Alright, everyone needs to run right out and get The Thank You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time by Nancy Davis Kho. It is going to make such a good gift, that's my plan (sorry, spoiler alert to everyone who's getting presents for me this year) that's what you're getting. So get excited to read this book, it's fantastic. So congratulations on your long path to publication and thank you so much for being on the podcast today.Nancy:                                45:35                    Thank you guys so much for having me. And everybody out there - keep writing, you're on the path, you're doing it.Jess:   

Today we're in for a real treat, Mason chats to Dr Molly Maloof. Dr. Molly is a physician, technologist and entrepreneur. Dr Molly aims to cultivate a global wellness consciousness and promote a preventive, predictive, participatory and personalised field of medicine. One that creates health, increases quality of life, and enhances human resilience. Dr Molly is a passionate speaker and an abundant source of information in her area's of expertise. Tune in for the download.  Molly and Mason discuss: The medicinal use of psychedelics. Spirituality and meditation. Grounded "enlightenment". Clinical medicine. The importance of "Jing" herbs and "adaptogens" in our modern society. Holistic entrepreneurship and life satisfaction. The practices essential for bone health. Food preparation and sourcing. Sovereign health.   Who is Dr. Molly Maloof? Dr. Molly Maloof’s goal is to maximise human potential by dramatically extending human health span through medical technology, scientific wellness, and educational media. Her fascination with innovation has transformed her private medical practice, which is focused on providing health optimisation and personalised medicine to San Francisco & Silicon Valley investors, executives, and entrepreneurs. Molly's iterative programs take the quantified self to the extreme through comprehensive testing of clinical chemistry, metabolomics, microbiome, biometrics, and genomic markers.    Resources:  Molly's Website Molly's Facebook Molly's Instagram Molly's Linkedin Molly's Twitter   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast? A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus  we're on Spotify! We got you covered on all bases ;P   Check Out The Transcript Here: Mason:  All right everybody, joined by Molly Maloof, my new mate, who I met in Arizona earlier this year. Thanks for coming on the pod. Molly:  Thank you for inviting me. Mason:  Absolute pleasure. I really, really enjoyed your talk. There were a lot of interesting talks at that weekend event at Revitalize. I think the trippiest and weirdest, that left me just like, "Huh," and I got it in a good way from a couple of them. But the Whole Foods CEO, founder guy. Molly:  I loved his talk. Mason:  Yeah, that was a very interesting one. He's a, yeah, interesting guy. I kind of was a little put off by his, like how when Whole Foods saw Amazon it was love at first sight and they were swept off their feet. I was like, "What?" Molly:  And the funniest thing about the technology and the tech scene is just how many parallels there are to modern dating. And the best VC firms really court that 1% of startups that they really, really care about, but they ignore everyone else. There's literally so many parallels to how you date and how companies are founded and formed. It's like everything in life's relationships at the end of the day, you know? Mason:  I'm just trying to get my head around that, because I just didn't grow up in that world. Even when I was doing my international business degree, I just didn't listen and studied herbalism. I'm not... SuperFeast ... I'm just never, SuperFeast just isn't going to date anyone. It might have relationships. I might have a couple of little flings here and there, but because I'm not in that world it was so interesting. Mason:  Anyway, your talk was really cool. You guys, like you were on that panel talking about psychedelics. Molly:  Oh man. I mean I'm fully out of the psychedelic closet by now, and what's cool is that I was just at Burning Man and I saw some amazing, amazing talks by founders of MAPS. Rick Doblin spoke about being after this movement for 40 years. He has been working for 40 years to get psychedelics approved, and we are really close. Well, you know, mushrooms have been decriminalized in Oakland, and people don't know this, but they're selling mushroom chocolates in Oakland. Dispensaries are selling mushrooms. I think that's actually positive as long as people are safe with their dosing. But we're going to see I think the same kind of movement around the medicalization of these, as well as the- Mason:  Recreational. Molly:  Recreational use of these happening in America. I think both are needed and both are valuable experiences, but the important thing is safety. That's one thing I really wanted to get across on stage at the conference, was whether or not these are legal or not legal right now, whether or not you use them in ceremony or recreationally. Whether or not they are used for medicinal purposes or spiritual purposes, the whole goal of this is that no one gets hurt. Molly:  They can be dangerous drugs. If you're not prepared, if you're not in the right situation, right environment, right headspace, right part of your life span, they can be really damaging. So I was really happy that there was a place to talk about them with some pretty forward thinking people and some people who've also suffered from addiction. So it was important to have the balanced perspective, but at the end of the day I think the end conclusion was that there's definitely a place for these in wellness. Mason:  Where are you using them? Like is it clinical, is it just waving the flag? I feel like there's a because, because recreational came up, and I like your take. I think a lot of people keep it very clinical when they have these conversations, and of course it's not because we need to be having many types of conversations. We don't want them institutionalized as well, but almost you can start looking at the perceived social value and then the need somewhat of a structure. I mean you have the complete kind of somewhat like, say, left view that it's just open doors and it's just like whatever. Everyone goes nuts. Then there's that right view, which is a little bit more of that like, "Create a full solid structure and get the pharmaceuticals involved." Mason:  Then there's that middle ground, and a lot of the time, especially if you're going to be in a clinical setting, I can see how some things might be standardized and it can become under those regulatory bodies. But then almost it's the outside of that, when you go more recreational, it's like having the maturity as a society to create that somewhat of structure, for lack of a better word, rules that keeps everyone healthy and keeps everyone understanding it and not just separating it within society. So yeah, where are you falling with it? Why are you talking about it? Molly:  I mean I talk about it because I use them for spiritual purposes. I use them for social purposes, and I use them for medicinal purposes. I do refer people to healers who administer them ceremoniously in an environment of safety and security and careful dosing. It's not legal for me to currently administer them myself as a doctor, so I just make referrals to people. I just connect people and say, "Hey. This person I trust. You can trust them. They're good people. They're not going to harm you in any way." But it sucks, because they aren't legal yet I can't fully prescribe them, but I have prescribed ketamine for medicinal purposes. You can do that in America legally right now. They are psychedelic. It is the only legal psychedelic right now. Mason:  Is the research of ketamine around PTSD mostly, or what's going- Molly:  Actually it's depression and suicidality, which are frankly killing a lot of people right now. America is suffering from a lot of despair deaths is what they're calling them, which is deaths due to homicide, suicide, or self harm. That could be addiction or other means. So for me, I see a lot of that in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of misery, and it sucks because it's a place of so much abundance. You're like, "Geez, if this is the future, we're not heading into a good direction right now." But also a lot of panic. Molly:  People are definitely panicking in a lot of ways in America, for good reason. I mean there's like a mass shooting every week. A lot of people don't feel safe going into public spaces. A lot of people don't feel safe walking around San Francisco. A lot of people suffer from anxiety disorders, so people are turning to these medicines for panic and to feel ... For the tryptamine, they want to feel held and loved. For the ketamine, they want to feel like they can disassociate from reality because it's too much for them to handle at the moment. Molly:  So that's not necessarily a good thing. I mean it's not necessarily a good thing that we have an environment and society that's suffering so badly that people have to disassociate from it in order to maintain their sanity. But it's definitely a better option than taking opioids and dying from an overdose, which are killing a ton of people. Purdue Pharma basically said that they were going to be paying out something around the number of like $11 billion to 2,000 people for this class action lawsuit against them for especially misleading people about the addictive nature of Oxycontin and other Purdue Pharma opioids. Molly:  So shit's hitting the fan in America, and things are not good. So what I'm really interested in and fascinated by, and I just did a tour of New York, LA, and San Francisco, I live here, is just the number of people that are coming together in community and experiencing psychedelics in a space of ceremony. Which is really the traditional format of psychedelic use, in most indigenous communities and societies, is using them in the context of connecting with community. Frankly I think that's really a healthy and safe way, as long as the Shaman that's administering these knows what they're doing. Molly:  It could be transformative, but it could be problematic if people don't have a resource for integration or if they take the wrong dose in this environment. Which I recently saw happen, and I know a person who experienced a psychotic breakdown. So I think it's always important when we talk about these medicines to recognize the benefits and the risks, because they definitely go both ways. At the same time, I would say that largely what I'm seeing is 99% of people who are using these that I know personally, are using them in positive and healthy, fruitful ways. About 1% of times you're seeing casualties and you're seeing damage and you're seeing problems. Molly:  So I think they're largely carefully dosed and administered very safe, but if they're not, they can be really damaging. So it's important to mention that 1%, because that's what everyone sees in the news. But I just read a great article in Vice about how if everybody were to take psychedelics and think about the environment, we wouldn't be in this huge problem we're in right now, which is people not thinking about the effects of their actions on the environment. What's happening in Brazil is a great example of a lack of awakening in a large population of people. Mason:  Yeah. I think it's really important to remember just how low impact and low risk these psychedelics are, but that's in comparison to the gnarliness of the pharmaceutical industry of course. I think that's pretty evident at this point. It's not paranoid. I mean there was, just released in a journal was a study just on Paracetamol here in Australia for the 10 years, I think ending in like 2017. I'll have to look it up and see if I can find it, but I don't know exactly what the numbers were, but it was in that ballpark of like 400% up in heavy liver damage and deaths massively on the rise, and that was studying hospital administered levels. So that's happening here in Australia. Mason:  I think that kind of stuff hitting the news a little bit more is great, but then if we start looking at upgrading towards the use of psychedelics in many fabrics of society, I think the duty of care, I like that you mentioned that 1% because the medicine is in the dose and the medicine is in the efficacy, in the style of dosing. Whether it's going to be in a hospital setting hopefully eventually, but then outside when we're looking to psychologically center ourselves, most of the time people in a proper dosage and a proper environment are going to be able to find that. But I quite regularly ... It's been awhile since I've been in that world, since I've been in the Amazon experiencing [inaudible 00:10:48] up in the hills of the Andes and so on, so forth. Mason:  I've heavily integrated them, but I just think ... I don't know whether I've just got that, people have the memory of me doing that, but I still quite regularly get people writing to me who have gone way too far down the rabbit hole and essentially end themselves disassociating from reality. Which I definitely felt, I wasn't excessive, but I definitely felt myself having a disassociation from reality and just essentially flying with the condor most of the time. Molly:  Right, but you can see the same thing in meditation and- Mason:  Oh, for sure. Molly:  Any type of spiritual pursuit- Mason:  Dude, when you mentioned it on stage, I don't know if you heard, I was the one that cheered. [crosstalk 00:11:36] Molly:  Oh my God, I [inaudible 00:11:37] that was you. Mason:  We know people that have got into vipassana... Molly:  I'm in this whole place right now where I'm really on this spiritual path and I'm experiencing some really profound spiritual experiences, but I'm also aware that I need to keep one foot in reality. I've got a life to live, I've got patients to cover. I've got a book to write. I've got goals to achieve. So I think the real dance of this modern sort of enlightenment movement is figuring out how to be in the state of enlightenment and an effective person in real life. I'm like, "That's my goal," is I'm having these breakthroughs and I'm also getting back into my email and I'm getting back into my life. I have all this work to do, and it's like I want the work that I do in my spiritual life to benefit my actual life, and I want them to be integrated. Molly:  This word integration keeps coming up a lot, and I think it's this concept of psychological and spiritual balance, with what's happening internally and what's happening externally. That's the way that I would describe it, and I just made that up on the spot. But there's definitely a desire for spiritual pursuits in a world that's feeling really uncertain. Frankly, everyone's turning to astrology apps because they're all so confused about religion and who to trust and which institutions to talk to and what- Mason:  Yeah. What should I do with my life, there's an app for that. Molly:  Yeah. Exactly. And should we even reproduce in a world that doesn't seem like it's going to be around in 20 to 50 years. There's a lot of real serious scary questions happening right now in reality, and I think there's a desire for ... There's kind of two types of people. There's people who are going to seek answers, and there's people who are going to be like, "Whatever. I don't know if I'm ever going to find them. I'm just going to try to live my life as it is." Whatever way is fine for you to live. Molly:  I dated a guy who was the latter, and I'm more of the former. I think former's first and latter's second, right? Mason:  Yeah. I mean that's something interesting as well because I'm really, again, I don't know why I found myself doing that 1% as you are, trying to do that duty of care without trying to come across as a stickler. So I love the ability to seek, but then this is where I think people enter into that spiritual world, and I'm going to be very general here, I do love both of these realms where you're seeking spiritual growth and possibly heading into that psychedelic space. Again, the medicine is in the dose. How much seeking you're doing verse how much are you ... Even outside of hardcore, gnarly, long term mindfulness meditation camps, outside psychedelic world, how much are you doing your chop wood, carry water every day. Mason:  This has been something I kind of have struggled with is having my practice somewhat daily, that solid space where I'm consistently learning to come back to my center. What is my center, coming back to a state where I can possibly be parasympathetic when I'm activated, yet my muscles are calm. This is something I'm personally working on at the moment with my friend who mentors me in movement and everything that comes with it, and really expanding that capacity to not be permeated by all these external opinions and really find a place that's tangible and palpable you can sink your teeth into making those decisions. Mason:  Will I have another child, you know, and feel comfortable with those decisions. Because that incessive seeking, you know going to the app, going to astrology, what everyone is doing is just trying to scrape off the top without going right down to the source. Where is this, what the fuck is this philosophy? What does it mean? Molly:  Right, yeah. Right. They've got to take a lot more work to do that. Mason:  A lot of work, and it's not Instagram-able a lot of the time if you're going that deep, and there lies the problem. Molly:  I mean I'm going on a meditation retreat in two weeks, and I'm basically going to meditate for five hours a day. I'm not going to have a phone or a journal, and I'm going to have to deal with all of the desires that I have to write and to think and to produce and to integrate and to analyze, and all the things that drive me on a daily basis. I have to confront those and basically be like, "Molly, you just can't. You're just going to have to sit here. This is what you're supposed to do. This is a challenge, and it's going to be probably one of the hardest challenges." Molly:  I'm not fully prepared for it, but I'm also the kind of person who just likes to do things that she's not fully prepared for, see what happens. Mason:  Yes. Oh I love it. I'm like, "Can't wait to hear about it." Before we- Molly:  Hopefully I don't lose my mind, but I'm pretty sure I won't have one. Mason:  Maybe lose it just for a little bit. That's okay. Molly:  Usually what happens is I end up in a blissed out state and I'm just like ... Everyone's struggling and I'm like, "Ah." But I think this might be harder. I think this might be really hard, so we'll see. Mason:  I do love it. I like the integrated approach, to use the I word. Again, I'll just quickly leave, because since we talked about that psychedelic community, I absolutely love, don't get me wrong, I feel ... I don't know, I can speak for myself anyway when I was deep in it. There is somewhat maybe a subtle that, you know, we found the superior healing method. So whatever you seek, we will seek it in this world with the medicines that we drink. The plants will heal us. I guess you can sometimes maybe see a bit of disdain for any other healing modality kind of come up, that it might be supplementary but it won't be the biggest thing. Mason:  I think something as simple as therapy can be ... In meditative work, yogic work where you start really un-rustling everything, your plant medicine work, and if it really comes up, this work where I think it's going to take time to integrate that. I think for a lot of people, I think finding a nice level therapist or some other modalities to really bring you back off that arm of development that is the beautiful teachings of the plants and come back to your center. Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  Anyway, just wanted to kind of touch on that because I feel ... Yeah, I've had increasingly recently a lot of people are honestly on a soul retrieval journey after going down the rabbit hole. Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  So this kind of is all coming into a wider breadth of work that you do. Molly:  Sure, yeah. Mason:  You're an MD. I was talking to you about how your style of work ... Well, you mentioned it's really old school. Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  It's an old school kind of doctor. So you have a select amount of patients. You have a few patients as well you said who you've taken on special cases. Molly:  Yeah. I mean I basically have two types of patients. I have the personalized medical research on one end. These are like the weird cases that I just get paid to figure them out and figure out why they're sick and why they haven't been fixed yet by the healthcare system. Usually it's complex chronic disease, so it's got its roots usually in a severe health breakdown that was proceeded by usually some psychological stress that really damaged their immune system. Molly:  Usually when someone's under a significant amount of stress and physical threat or psychological threat, if it gets to a certain level, your mitochondria get damaged to a point where they can't defend you anymore. So your immune system is downstream over your mitochondrial function. It essentially just throws off your energy production systems. It throws off your immunity, and infections get in. Then they can further damage your body. Molly:  So usually it's always this horrible stress, massive infection, and then they were never the same after. So now you have to sort of reverse engineer their bodies to get back into a state of balance and health. It's a lot of work, but it's like the most satisfying work to do, because you're dealing with somebody who may have been sick for years. You're like, "Okay. I'm going to fix this." Or somebody who's got something that no one's figured out. You're like, "All right, we're going to figure this out together and we're going to get you better." Molly:  So I love those cases, but then I also have cases of people who ... Frankly, everyone in America wants more energy, okay? So I figured ... Funnily enough I was trying to study health over the last 10 years, like what is health, how do you define it, how do you measure it. In the process of studying health, I discovered that health is about capacity, and capacity is about capacitives. Capacitives is literally making and storing a charge in your cellular membranes, in your mitochondria, that is an electrochemical gradient generated by the food you eat and the way that you live your life. Molly:  It literally charges your cells with energy. That capacity enables you to do work, to run your genetic functions, to express your genes, to produce proteins, to do anything else that your body needs to do, like make hormones. So I've kind of just been going back and back and back and back ... First principles, like what is health, what is energy, what is capacity, and how does that relate to our daily life and our daily function. What are the things that damage that function? Molly:  So that's really where my research has come into play and why I started teaching at Stanford, because they were like, "Hey, our students are some of the most talented in the world, but they're also the most stressed out. So how can we give them a course that could actually help them produce more capacity to do greater and better work?" So I had a class of about 23 people, and it ended up being 20 hours of lectures. I read in I think the last two years I read about 1200 papers. So I've been digging deep into understanding how is energy made, how is it used, how are your energy systems destroyed, and really trying to marry this Eastern ancient philosophy of Chinese medicine and Qi, and then marry that with Western science and come up with my own beliefs around what I call and what's known in the literature as health span. Molly:  Which is how do you extend life as long as possible without disease. To me, it's all about understanding what are the major causes of disease, what are you most likely to get, and what are the things that you can do in your daily life now to avoid these things from happening. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I test everything on myself first. So I've learned about what it means to make a lot of energy, which is essentially making money in your body, but I've also learned how to spend a lot of energy and burn yourself out. Molly:  So I have had multiple rounds of burnout in my life. I had a pretty close call this summer where I was really overdoing it, and I had to take a step back and say, "Oh shit. I'm not living the example right now. I'm really doing too much." Funnily enough, the biggest signal to me this summer was actually the people I was working with were not feeding my energy, they were draining my energy. The thing that people mostly don't realise about health and life is that the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. So if your relationships suck, then your life is going to suck and you're going to die young. If your relationships are healthy, you're actually going to live a longer life. Molly:  So it's so fundamental to aging well, is like surrounding yourself with people that nourish you and doing work that makes you come alive, you know? Mason:  So yeah, hell yeah first of all. Molly:  Yeah, thanks. Mason:  I'm keen to dive a little bit into it. You know, well health span I like. I like that you bring that up. I mean that's something that everyone just looks at life in a block term. I don't know when I started hearing that term, maybe in the tellomere books, when that was getting really trendy. It was at the end of that term of life for the [inaudible 00:23:48] when you no longer can reproduce cells a lot of the time, along with other degenerative diseases, you enter into the death span. That's for the last however many decades of your life that the medical system can keep you alive. You're in the death span. So I like that, that's a very tangible goal, to keep yourself in that health span. So we'll get into those principles, but in terms of your work, I mean you work for like year long blocks, like a lot of- Molly:  Six months to a year minimum usually. It's because you need that amount of time to change someone's life. You need that amount of time to take someone around the corner, because behavior change is hard. Mason:  And you go to their homes and work, right? Molly:  Yeah. I go to them. I go to their offices. I email them every week. I talk to the client that is sickest on the phone every week. I just literally created a nine page report on the fly for a client who had like 10 questions for me. She's fairly healthy, but she just wanted some answers and she wanted to understand Ayurvedic doshas, and she wanted to understand ... I was like, "Well here, let's talk about why Ayurvedas might be useful. Let's talk about why it may not apply to a Western body, and why there's some major issues in some of the nutritional recommendations that they have. Also let's talk about how, no offense to India, but they're not doing so well in health." So if this worldview is so effective, why do I see so many sick Indians? I'm just not convinced that tons of grains and tons of dairy is the answer to health. Mason:  Well especially like it's not going to be raw dairy, right? It's not going to be raw fermented dairy. Molly:  No. We're not getting raw fermented dairy. We're not getting non GMO grains anymore. We're getting all this garbage food, so you can't always apply these ancient technologies to modern life unless you can actually have ancient traditional food preparation. And you need to soak and sprout those grains too, and people aren't doing that. So I should've mentioned that in that report, but yeah. It takes a lot of work to do. I'm not against it, and I actually think that the doshas are really valuable for fitness recommendations, because the endomorph, ectomorph, mesomorph is very similar to the ... The ectomorph is very similar to the ... I have to- Mason:  Kapha, Pitta, Alpha. Molly:  Yeah, exactly. So you can actually look at these types and you can- Mason:  Is it, no, not alpha, vata. Kapha, Pitta, Vata. Molly:  Yeah, Pitta is more like mesomorph. Kapha I believe is more like ectomorph, and endomorph is like the last one. Point is that there's body types, and there's those skinny people who have these amazing metabolisms who could literally just crush carbs and they're fine. Then there's the people who are like they even look at a carb, they gain weight, right? Those people legitimately have slower metabolisms than the person who's got the faster metabolism. Then there's people like me who are in the middle, where if I eat carbs I gain weight, if I cut the carbs I lose weight like that. So it's literally I'm lucky. If I lift weights, I get muscular. If I don't lift weights, I get lean. If I do cardio, I get lean. Molly:  So it's all about this balancing of your energy and your metabolism with these patterns that we're seeing with people, that can change by the way, depending on your genetics and your location where you're living in and what you're eating. But anyway, so yeah. So there you go. Mason:  Well I like that you're working ... So you're obviously working, because you've got executives and tech people and kind of high flying CEO kind of clients as well, so it's a nice balance. But obviously they're going to be dealing some of the time with something debilitating. But as well, like if they're not going to- Molly:  Oh yeah, sometimes they just want to be really healthy. So I was writing this book called The Hour Between the Dog and Wolf. It's about the biology of trading, and I am working with a hedge fund founder who is kind of like a character off of Billions, except for a lot nicer. So he was having a bad year, and when you lose, you have high cortisol levels and you're in a fear based state and your testosterone levels tank. Molly:  When you win, your testosterone levels go up and it's like, "Boom." So there's this effect on your body and your biology that can literally change your performance, and your performance can change your biology. So I was trying to get this guy back into a state of high testosterone. So I was like, "Look. Your testosterone sucks. You've had a bad year. We want to get you back into a place where you're winning again." Molly:  So I got him to start weight lifting. I got him on a different type of dietary style. I got him to start doing certain things with his supplements, and low and behold, his testosterone doubled and he's in a much better place right now. So it's cool when you can teach a person about what's going on inside their body, give them certain behaviors to do, have them implement those behaviors, see the labs change, and then the person's like, "Oh my God. This is fucking awesome." Now this [inaudible 00:28:45] Mason:  So with the initial testing, because I think it's like a lot of people ... As we talked about before, I like that you're offering somewhat of a bridge, but a legitimate bridge. Not just like a, "I'm a health coach," bridge- Molly:  I'm a data driven ... I mean I am looking at the body as a very complex machine that needs multiple ways of attacking different problems and balancing different energies. Some of the energies by the way are not always physical. Sometimes this stuff is spiritual, and I have a questionnaire to identify where in your health do you have the biggest problems. Sometimes a person's health is actually, it's a spiritual problem. They really have had some sort of awful life event that has just set them on a course of really bad luck and bad experiences, and they need to focus on that and not on biology. But a lot of what I do and what my bread and butter is is biological health optimization. Molly:  So looking at the body from a molecular perspective and saying, "Okay. This is your lipid panel. This is what your LDL particle numbers look like. This is what your diet looks like and this is why your diet has changed these numbers. This is what your carbohydrate metabolism looks like. This is what your amino acid metabolism looks like. This is why you have an imbalance in amino acids. This is why you need this one specifically versus that one. This is why your cortisol levels are off and you're completely exhausted and you need some Jing herbs to revitalize yourself because you're literally burned out." Molly:  Or maybe a person needs detoxification because they've gotten super high mercury levels from eating way too much sushi, which was me last year in Japan. Then sometimes I'm looking at the microbiome and saying, "Okay, we need to get you on some personalized probiotics because your microbiome is totally imbalanced and we need to get you back to a better state. If you don't get into a better state, you're gonna develop inflammatory bowel disease because you have early markers of that." So it's a lot about prediction. Molly:  This concept of P4 medicine, which I really like, that Leroy Hood coined, and it's personalized- Mason:  What's this called? P- Molly:  P4. Personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory. I really like it because it's a framework of thinking about medicine before things become full blown disease. Full blown disease is hard to reverse. I mean you are dealing with pathology on a molecular level that is like a broken building. It's a lot harder to fix that than a building that's got a water main leak that you're like, "Oh shit. We got to fix that water main leak, but if we fix it it's not going to completely collapse." Or like a building that has, like you're in the kitchen and there's a grease fire. You got to put that out now, because if you don't that's going to set this whole thing on fire. Molly:  It's really about ... Or maybe the building just has some ice and you're like, "Okay look, this building needs some upkeep. It needs some better cleaning." Just go fast, fast more often. Clean out the garbage and you won't have all this crap growing that shouldn't be growing. So I really look at the body as architecture, and I look at the architecture as like are you building your body out of marble and really good quality steel or crappy materials that are going to break down once a big storm hits. It's about looking at the parallels between nature and your own physiology, because you are a microcosm. You are in yourself a living, breathing organism that is basically changing constantly. Molly:  If you're not doing regular tuneups, you're not going to know when things are not working out well. So I did my own labs this summer because it'd been about six months since I'd done them. I was like, "Ah shit, my microbiome has been definitely affected by my stress levels and my diet. I need to increase my protein. I need to decrease my saturated fat. I need to change my probiotic regimen and I need to detox." So I started doing that about a month ago, and I'm already feeling like holy shit, so much better in one month. It's astonishing how just knowing what to fix and going after those areas is so much more effective than throwing darts at a wall and hoping something sticks. Mason:  Well I like that you're providing that service that's that bridge between you taking it on yourself and understanding the patterns of your body and being able to affect it, and basically get on top of little symptomatic responses and grease fires that come up. But the other side of that is where most people are trying to bridge between, is like the practitioner office, whether it's a naturopathic office or even possibly with a GP. Is MD just like, or is it GP? I don't know if you have GPs. Molly:  General practitioner. I'm a general practitioner. Mason:  Oh you are? Okay. Molly:  I'm the most general of practitioners, because I literally do so many things. I'm super broad. Mason:  Yeah. I think GP is that 15 minute stint in the office [crosstalk 00:33:44] Molly:  A primary doctor for the most part, but also anybody who's not board certified in one area is a GP for the most part. So I'm not a primary doctor. I'm not the doctor you call when you've got the flu. I am the doctor that you deal with when you want to improve your health or dig real deep into why you are so sick. Mason:  Well that is something I think a lot of people, yeah, you're providing that ... The amount of data that you go into, that bridge to go, "Right, you don't want to end up in any of these clinics or offices. You want to be taking complete understanding and responsibility for the patterns of your health." So you take people essentially through that program, and then when they come out the other side, from the sounds of it, they're incredibly informed about the way their body works. So I think- Molly:  Yeah. It's a lot of education. Mason:  Yeah. So you're using a lot of testing, which I really like. I think perhaps people listening ... I think it's something that is quite available. I think DNA testing, microbiome, and you're doing hormone panels, is that right? Molly:  Mm-hmm (affirmative). Hormone panels, microbiome testing, nutritional testing is probably the most valuable thing I do is literally just testing the body for vitamins and minerals and neurotransmitters and carbohydrate metabolism, fat metabolism, markers of dysbiosis, markers of oxidative stress. Like looking under the hood. Then just basic labs, like organ system function, anemia, hormones via blood and urine, and the whole hormone cascade. Then looking at certain specialty labs if necessary, like immune system function. What else am I doing? Molly:  I do some panels of infectious agents, just because viral infections are pretty common and yet overlooked by a lot of doctors. They just did not teach us to test for viruses when we were in medical school, even though they're super common. Mason:  Well I think that body of work is coming up in the literature. It's like there's been a lot on stealth infections recently. Molly:  Oh yeah. Mason:  The amount of times that it is going to be a stealth viral infection- Molly:  Oh yeah, or intracellular bacteria. Like syphilis, Lyme Disease, mycoplasma, those are nasty. Mason:  Well and I think what's happening a lot of the time for people who ... I was speaking to a practitioner over here, and she kind of solidified the idea that you start getting better on one front and you start feeling fantastic because you've gone after perhaps the spirochetes involved in Lyme, but then you've had a viral infection that's been sitting there dormant waiting for the health of a cell to get to a particular point that it can use it to reproduce its agenda. Then all of a sudden you start going down again. So that's for a lot of- Molly:  These things are nasty. You got to get their whole life cycle. You've got to look at the life cycle and be like, "Okay, how can I interrupt this? How can I interrupt this?" That's why antivirals concurrently with Lymes treatments are really important, because as your body starts activating and your genes start getting expressed, those viruses get into your genes. They get into your own genetic code, those assholes. Mason:  Yeah. Yeah, they are. They're opportunistic. Molly:  They're so smart. Mason:  That's why I think even with Lyme, it's like Astragalus, Japanese knotweed, Cat's Claw, that's why they're constantly being thrown out there. They have that cross section where they can be such effective antivirals. Even just having- Molly:  That's amazing. Mason:  It's just like even having that in your lifestyle, speaking of getting to understanding symptoms and understanding- Molly:  What are those called? Which ones did you mention? Mason:  Astragalus or astragalus. Molly:  Yeah, astragalus and- Mason:  And Cat's Claw. Molly:  Cat's Claw. I didn't realise Cat's Claw was an antiviral, but I think that makes sense. Mason:  Yeah, big time. I mean you can think like especially in the Amazon, if you're going to need an antifungal in your diet because you're going to have fungus bringing you down. So that's the Pau D'Arco. Then you combine that with the amount of viral activity that's going on there within that sopping wet jungle, that's where the Cat's Claw is probably ... It's one of the primary medicines if you get in there, especially one of the primary clinical medicines, but also for me it's one of the primary preventative medicines that I just kind of keep on rotation. Molly:  Amazing. Mason:  It's like I had to take it off SuperFeast, and this was- Molly:  Why? Mason:  It's just really hard to get a good source at the moment. Yeah, the quality's just getting a bit crap. I've now found someone that's working with some small tribes who are basically doing Cat's Claw in that Di Tao style. That's how we source herbs, Di Tao. It just means getting it from their spiritual homeland and crafting it in a way that leaves the environment better than when you found it, and also just like- Molly:  How do you pronounce that? What is that thing you said? Mason:  D-I, Di. Molly:  D-I. Mason:  And then Tao is T-A-O. Molly:  Tao. Mason:  Yeah, Di Tao. Molly:  Oh wow. That is the greatest thing. Mason:  Well I mean it's just a sourcing philosophy, I mean just being able to get the wild thing and procure it yourself, that's like if you're doing that yourself then that's essentially the most ... That's Di Tao to the absolute extreme. You don't need to label it Di Tao, that's just you getting your herbs. But in trying to describe to people how, like say we're sourcing Chinese tonic herbs, Di Tao it's kind of more of this living and breathing sourcing philosophy that's ever moving. It's not like organic is static. You tick boxes and then you can put a stamp on. Mason:  Di Tao, you're in constantly trying to get the growing or sourcing, whether it's foraging wild or growing it in a farm, closer to its original state. You're ensuring that you're not using irrigation, definitely not using anything like a pesticide or external soils or anything like that. But has a lot to do with making sure that you're in regions, whether they're mountainous or valleys or whatever it is, to atmospherically just make sure, and temperature wise to make sure that you're going to get a herb that has the most punch. Basically ensure that the herb has the Jing, Qi, or Shen within it. Then you constantly go down to make sure that you have the full spectrum extraction of the herb that just keeps it all together. Molly:  Amazing. Mason:  That's kind of like Di Tao. So yeah, hopefully we'll have a Cat's Claw soon, because we found someone basically doing it in that style over in Ecuador, which is like [crosstalk 00:40:29] Molly:  I mean, so I just got into Chinese herbs a couple years ago because I went to Erewhon Market in LA, and I was having a really exhausted week. I was just so tired, and I saw these elixirs. They were selling them for like $16.00, and I was like, "All right, well I'm in town. It's a fun thing to buy, an elixir from Erewhon, so we're just going to- Mason:  It's the funnest way to break the bank when you're in LA. Molly:  It's so great. You just drop $100 easy, like no problem. All the prepared stuff they make, that's the best by the way. They bake the best kale chips in the world. But the point is I had this elixir, and I remember just being revived, like totally revived. I was just like, "This is absolutely astonishing how good I feel right now." So I ended up buying all the separate ingredients of this elixir because I was just like, "I'm just going to have to make this regularly to get my Jing back." It was all about Jing herbs. I remember just feeling like, "This is the answer." Like as somebody who has the tendency to ... When I make energy, I just want to go and spend it. I mean my sister said, "Molly, if you're not working, you're partying." I don't party that hard anymore, but I have had a tendency to just burn the candle on both ends because I really enjoy life and I really want to feel alive. Molly:  I try to simmer down a little bit, but then I end up going back and doing stuff. But man these Jing herbs, it just revived me. I remember thinking, "This is so incredible that I just discovered this whole new world of medicine." There's apparently 50 Chinese herbs that are like the traditional- Mason:  The tonics. Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  A few more but there's like [crosstalk 00:42:09] It depends. There's a few official stories and things people have picked up and run with. Tonic herbalism and superior herbalism, it's wider than just like, "These are the top 50." It's a system. There are herbs which are considered superior that are there to basically ... That's about nourishing life, but some of them aren't the absolute top. Some of them are just somewhat supporting and bolstering to those and make it possible in that tonic herbal system. But basically, yeah. [crosstalk 00:42:41] Yeah, coming from that world of like Truth Calkins put together that Erewhon tonic bar. He worked with Ron Teeguarden. So yeah, that's like I definitely know that well. Molly:  Yeah. But I mean the hard part was, is actually I couldn't get ... For this tonic I couldn't get deer antler velvet. I was just like ... This is how I found out about your company, as I was like, "I can't get any deer antler velvet. There's literally no one in the world that I can get this from." Then I was like, "SuperFeast." I remember when a friend of mine from Byron Bay told me about your company. So I went online and I bought it and had it shipped. I was just like, "What is this magic?" I don't know the shelf life of it. Do you know the shelf life of it? Is it pretty decent? Mason:  Two years. Molly:  Okay, cool. I can still use it then. But yeah, it was this magical ingredient that I wanted to find. Then I saw you guys at the conference and I was just like, "Oh my God. His mushrooms are here for free. There was this whole room of free swag." I was just like, "Mason's Mushrooms are free? Like how come he is giving these away. This is so valuable. This is the most valuable thing in this room." I took like three bottles. Mason:  Yeah, good. I was hoping you would. I'm glad you got the deer antler. Molly:  I have a story for you. Mason:  Oh yeah? Molly:  I had a girlfriend who had not had her period in like a year because her husband is dealing with cancer and she was in a really serious stress state. She started taking your mushrooms and she got her period in a month. Mason:  So good. I love those stories. It almost brings a tear to your eye. Molly:  I know. Mason:  Because when you understand the repercussions of that that actually means- Molly:  Yeah. I was just like, "She needs adaptogens. She's in way too much stress. She's not in a state where her body can reproduce and she needs to get into a state of calm again." Honestly I saw her in a few weeks after she started the supplements I gave her, and she was like a totally different looking person. It was amazing. People don't realise that the stressed state, the body will always prioritize survival over reproduction. So there's a lot of women complaining of not being able to reproduce and having all sorts of hormonal dysfunctions, and you ask them about their lives and they're like, "Well I'm not stressed." It's like everyone is so complicit with the level of stress that we have that no one believes they're stressed anymore. Mason:  Yeah, that's it. Molly:  It's like, "I'm super high stress." Even I was in the state of denial even six months ago. Because I was doing a startup, I was working as a doctor and I was teaching at Stanford, and I was just like, "Yeah I'm not going to lower my stress anytime soon because this is what I do. I'm a top performer." There was a point where the world, the universe, my body was just like, "Oh just wait. Just wait. Give yourself a couple more months of this." I got around to the summer and I remember looking in the mirror being like, "You have exhausted yourself. You look exhausted, and it's time for you to take a step back and start recalibrating this stuff you're doing because you just performed a lot, but you just ran a marathon. You need to chill." Mason:  Yeah. You can never stop recalibrating and reading those patterns man. Molly:  You have to keep listening and listening. Mason:  There's so much clinically about stealth infections, stealth inflammation. Stealth stress isn't something, and you exactly said it, and I kind of sometimes just ... There's so much going on and I'll just run at a million miles an hour, and I know I have had the capacity to do that in the past, and especially when I've had my practices in place that I've been able to maintain that level, and at the moment ... I'm really reevaluating at the moment, especially I'm at the back of three weeks just with Aiya while Tahns is over studying in the States. Just with that, little things just get lost within the personal practice, and yet I don't take ... I just allow them to be eliminated and just, as you did as well, just a million miles an hour and all your projects and everything, and bit by bit that stealth stress starts to creep in. You go, "You know what? I'm okay. I'm actually not that bad." Mason:  Then the accumulation that starts to occur within your nervous system, within the endocrine system, and then if you have a high standard, which is what I like about your work in teaching this, understanding that optimal general high standard that you have for yourself, and that reading these subtle symptoms and then knowing that you have the ability to utterly change the flow of your lifestyle, that's where it lies in the begining. Molly:  This is the power of, and this is really the whole aim, is recognizing that there is no magical day where you're going to be optimally healthy. There's this constant rhythm of life which is always changing, and there's going to be times where you're going to be pushing it hard, and there's going to be times where you have to recover. If you don't, it's like athletes. I told everyone, "Look everyone, I'm on an off season right now." My off season involves writing a book proposal, traveling, speaking abroad, running my practice, but frankly, and I'm going to incorporate a company and get it started, but I'm not going to be overextending myself during this two month period. Molly:  This is about restoration. This is about recalibration. This is about reconnection with my community and my family, but it's not about always being go, go, go, go, go. It's about recognizing everybody can take a break. You can take a week long vacation once a quarter. You can take a day off once a week. You have to give yourself time to recover. That is the natural style of life. Life is not constantly always stormy. There's times of calm and there's times of stress, and if you don't follow those patterns and you're always in the storm, then how are you ever going to recover? Molly:  You're going to use up all your resources. This is really the core of health. It's about recognizing that you're going to build capacity and you're going to spend it. You're going to build it and you're going to spend it. It's like having money in the bank. But your major goal should always be, "How am I making compounding interest decisions that lead to better and bigger capacity so I can handle more and so I can actually do more without breaking?" This is how you level up in your life. It's like you don't push yourself and waste your energy completely, you reserve some of it in the back and you invest that energy in things that are going to build you up. Those adaptogens, the food ... They're not cheap, but they're worth investing in. Molly:  The food you eat, like I spend double what most people spend on food, and I also fast more often than most people do, so I probably spend about the same. But I'm doing these practices to build my capacity, and I'm doing these things that I know are going to lead to better health long term. So that's really the main message of what I'm trying to teach people. It's really about what is the minimum number of healthy things you can do to optimize your health so that you have this constant state of, "I'm still in the process of moving in the right direction of health," even though you're not always going to be at the highest performance state. Mason:  I completely agree. I always, again, whenever I talk about this ... It's absolutely true, and it doesn't matter how many times people hear this simple message, and I feel like you've put it quite a bit differently. But I always, I hear within myself the not possible-ness. I've worked with a lot of mums especially over the years, and you're feeling that's like ... If anyone's feeling that, it's not just mums of course, it's everyone, but that bogged down. For me it was a young man wanting to not grow a business but go and create the best educational resource. Mason:  I realised for me what was making it not possible, which was I feel like most people needed to kind of have on the side as an acknowledgement, when they hear this ability that you need to be able to maybe take a day off, do these kinds of things to keep you at optimal, is that you really need to go in and do some work to see where your societal or family programming has really put in some values that aren't actually yours. Because that's where, like the moment me and Tahns really realised that just, or for myself as well, I was just set to maximum velocity. Just in the business for example, I'm just like, "It's not possible to just slow down." It's just like there's so many things to do. It's just like, "Well how about we just don't do them as fast." Mason:  It's like with expanding to America, this is ... Tahns is like the GM of the company. She's copping that burden essentially if we go really quick, and for us to get to the point with a bunch of other decisions, we've over the last years realised, "Why are we trying to go so fast? We're not compromising our sourcing or anything like that, but why don't we just slow the fuck down? Why don't we just learn the real why of why we actually want to do these things?" I immediately just realised that that programming from the current entrepreneurial scene that I'd decided to take on myself, and it's- Molly:  Totally. It is. And everyone's miserable and they act like, "Oh look at me on my Instagram how fucking awesome my life is." Everyone's so unhappy underneath it all. You're like, "Actually the people I want to spend my time with are those entrepreneurs that are content, those entrepreneurs that are saying 'I do this because I love the work,' those entrepreneurs who basically inspire me to continue to grow in every direction and not be ..." The thing that really sucks about the entrepreneurship sort of mentality is that there's a lot of people who are just dopamine and novelty driven. So there's a sense of like it's never enough, and if you let that permeate your life of it's never enough, then you'll never be happy with your partner. You'll never be happy with any company you've built. You'll never be happy with your cofounder, and you'll always find a reason to find something wrong with your reality. Molly:  Frankly, no matter how big of a success you can have, you'll never be happy with that level of success either. So like when I finished teaching at Stanford this year, I thought, "Okay. The next obvious thing I should do is just found a tech company, because that's what you do in the Valley. You just found tech companies." I immediately- Mason:  That's so wild to me. Molly:  Oh totally, right? I was like, "Okay universe, I need this type of cofounder. Give it to me. I need literally someone to do this and this for me," and the next couple days I found these guys. They actually contacted me and they were like, "Hey we're looking for a doctor like you to work with." I'm like, "Well funny, I'm looking for co founders like you." You've got to be really careful with how you ask for things, because you may get them, and then when you get them you may not actually like them. You can end up ... I just think that there's this super fast mentality of everything has to go so fast, everything has to be so so quickly found. A lot of things in life take slow and tender caring and nurturing to build. Molly:  There is this desire I have of building something slowly and methodically, carefully, and not being chained to venture capital money, which I think is part of the reason why everything is so ... People think that they have to grow so fast, and they're so unhappy. There's frankly an unhappy relationship with venture capital. But at the same time, I think there's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur, so I'm not telling people not to do it, but I think the thing that I've learned from watching people is seeing who's doing it right and then who's maybe not doing it so right. Maybe who's doing it in a way that just isn't actually bringing them life satisfaction, you know? Mason:  Yeah. I like to think of it like who's doing it unique, because of course everyone's going to be [inaudible 00:54:48] Molly:  I love that, because I mean there's definitely enough people doing it in a way that's like, "Drain your energy. Drain your capacity. You'll deal with it when you exit." There's a lot of that. Mason:  I love it. Hey, since I've got a bunch of other things I want to talk about, but I know we're probably like- Molly:  Part two? Mason:  Yeah, maybe like ... We'll do a part two for sure. I've never done like this before, but how about like a fire found? Is that what they're called? Molly:  Oh yeah, sure. Mason:  All right. So everyone just know that these are huge topics and probably maybe on another podcast we'll get a little bit further into it, but I just want to get fire round recommendations and takes on first bone and teeth health. Molly:  Oh yeah, okay. Your bone and teeth health has everything to do with your diet, so if your diet is high in sugar, you're going to decay your mouth because you're going to grow the wrong bacteria in your oral microbiome and they're going to produce acid. That acid's going to break down the enamel, and that's how you're going to get cavities. So cut the sugar out of your diet. If someone hasn't told you to stop drinking soda by now, give me a fucking break. I'm sorry for cussing, but soda does not belong in the American diet or the Australian diet or any diet of human anywhere in the world, period, end of story. Okay, off that rant. Molly:  Minerals are really important. You get them from usually high quality sources of water. You get them from fruits and vegetables. You get them from meats. You get them from healthy foods. You need minerals. Shilajit's a cool source of minerals that I started taking, just be careful with the dose because if you have too much Shilajit you will get way too energized. [crosstalk 00:56:23] Mason:  Yeah, I mean it's a weird industry as well. It's getting pretty unsustainable that one as well. There's a couple of good ones, I think like Omica. But yeah. Molly:  Does Shilajit go bad, because I feel like it looks like it never goes bad like honey. Mason:  Yeah. I mean it's kind of like that. If you have the tar, then it's got like a long shelf life. Molly:  I don't think it goes bad. I feel like it's got to have years. Okay, other teeth things. People don't floss. Flossing is the key to good teeth. If you don't floss your teeth, you're going to have basically a large amount of surface area that's never been touched. So that's like not brushing your teeth. That's gross, so gross. I love oral health. I could talk about it for hours, but the quality of your diet will determine the quality of your teeth. Mason:  I love it. I saw on your Instagram that you're just making up a nice juicy broth for yourself, always going to help as well. Molly:  Yeah. Broth is so good because you need those minerals from the bones. Mason:  Well let's look really quickly, let's just like ... I wanted to talk about this a little bit more, but one of the things I really love about your, especially your Instagram, is your focus on food preparation. I assume it's something that you focus a lot in the work that you do. Molly:  Yeah. Food is everything, food prep. I mean sourcing, I source like a chef because chefs know where good food is made and sourced. So people don't understand that there's markets everywhere. Go to the market, get your best food, and then keep your plants alive. Plants want to live. Certain plants want to live outside the fridge, certain plants want to live in the fridge. Most plants that have stalks want to be in water, so you should put them into water and then put them in the fridge, because they want to stay alive. Molly:  Other plants like leaves want to be in like a greenhouse, so you put them in a bag with a piece of paper towel, and it'll keep them alive in a way that won't let them die. Make some sprouts. Sprout your own sprouts. They're super easy to do. Ferment your own foods. Mason:  Just get in there, yeah. Molly:  Just get into your community and get into local eating. Local produce is the highest quality nutrient value for your buck, and eat organic. Frankly it's just better for you. It doesn't have as many pesticides. But if you can't eat organic, still eat fruits and vegetables because it's still better for you than not. Just avoid the dirty dozen in America. Then with meat it's all about the sourcing. It's all about the quality. Grass fed, pasture raised, grass finished. Do not eat grain finished meat. Wild fish, know your fishmonger. Talk about where the fish comes from. Molly:  Choose sustainable fishes and don't over consume. We can all fast more. We don't need to eat every day, turns out. Humans don't have to eat every day. You can cut your grocery bill just by not eating as much. Nuts and seeds generally like to be soaked and sprouted, just be aware that you're going to get a lot of anti-nutrients. I overdo the nuts and seeds. This is a known problem. If somebody out there wants to give me advice on how to stop doing this, I don't know how ... I don't have the answer because it's my biggest issue right now and I still consume lots of nuts and seeds, and my Omega 6s are too high because of that, so that's a problem. Mason:  A lot of almonds in there? Molly:  Too many almonds. Mason:  Almonds, I think it's a thousand to one ratio of Omega 6s to 3s. Molly:  All right, I'm just going to cut out almonds. I'm going to cut out the almonds. That's the key is the almonds. Mason:  Yeah, just try the almonds and then see how you go. I love it. I mean I hit that message every time. Here everyone's integrating, like listening to the SuperFeast podcast, a lot of people are integrating tonic herbs into their kitchen. But what I like is for them to ... It needs somewhere to land within the kitchen. It needs a real culture. Just on, like crossing over to even psychedelics and Michael Pollan. His later book kind of rocked the world to change your mind, but he's a food journalist. I think we spoke about him. Are you a fan of his work? Molly:  I know him. Yeah, he's awesome. Mason:  You know him? Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  He's the legend, right? He's such a- Molly:  He's a legend. Mason:  After everything that he's researched, his whole thing comes down to just prepare your own food and know where it comes from. Molly:  And eat mostly plants and a little bit of meat if you want some meat. Mason:  But yeah, eat real food. Not too much, mostly plants. Right? I think that's it, unless ... Yeah, I mean I know there's a lot of contention in the diet scene no matter what, but that personal food preparation you can never come away from it. Molly:  The key is learning these basic techniques, like basic techniques. Get a blender, blending ... Everyone likes baby food, I don't care what you say. Purees make everything delicious. Broth plus vegetables equals magic. Just make baby food, just make it. You'll love it, I promise you. Just make purees. Mason:  I got to use my blender for something but hot chocolates one of these days. Molly:  Right? Make your own cacao. Make your own ... I don't know, just make your own stuff. It's not hard to make. Just learn to use a blender, learn to boil water, learn to roast, learn to saute. These are basic techniques. Mason:  Learn to slow cook. Molly:  Slow cooker. Oh yeah, slow cooker's got to be the easiest thing in the world. Mason:  Got to be the easiest thing. Molly:  Honestly just follow a recipe. Once a week learn a new recipe. Just teach yourself. Then make salads. Salads are dumb, I mean you just got to chop shit and make a dressing. Mason:  I love it. Look, final question before we bring this home. If people are going to start getting to understanding the patterns of their body, the symptoms of their body, I know you work with a lot beyond that. You look at emotional reactivity. There's a lot here for people when taking sovereign control of their own health to get on top of. Molly:  Yes, sovereign control of your health. Mason:  We've talked about the testing which people can go and find a practitioner. I know I'm kind of like back ... Need to kind of get on top of that, it's been a while since- Molly:  Try to find Genova Diagnostics. They're my favorite company. They're a global company. They're easier to find in England.

People always say if you believe it you're half way there. Well I'm not sure that's entirely true. I've recently been working with this thought and starting to "manifest" more. In this episode I talk about my beliefs on manifesting and what that means. I've seen it at work in my life and want to share what it means to me and how to implement it into your life. To connect please reach out on Instagram or my Website:Searchingforsloanesearchingforsloane.comFor more of my life subscribe on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPewrdGXAjrtIBZtqUR4Dug?view_as=subscriberAcoustic/Folk Instrumental by Hyde - Free Instrumentals https://soundcloud.com/davidhydemusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported— CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/YKdXVnaHfo8

Are you on the fence of using social media for your business? Are you about to start a business and want to know if social media is a good starting tool? Or maybe you've been told by many social media is not right for you but you don't want to believe them? Well I'm not going to tell you if using the social will be the right decision or the wrong decision for your business but I will say that it's been a success catalyst for many. Why? Listen to this episode and you'll find out. I even tell you the number one secret why most business fail and never seem to go anywhere, want to know? LISTEN TO THIS because I had to find out the hard way. Don't let my early mistakes be yours.

Part 1 of my Vanity Series where we are diving into how vanity effects society from an individual POV and from numerous standpoints. Are you vain? Have you ever thought about how it may play in to how we treat and see each other? Well I'm peeling back the layers in this provocative discussion series. So you better come ready to GET THIS D!

So you think that I'm the chosen one? Well I'm learning now's about the time to get things done. More on that and other ways Tim helped me to stop taking Adderall.

There are many ways to earn money online and one of the biggest platform that you can do that is through YouTube. YouTube has become an industry and a great source of income. In this episode, YouTube Producer Nate Woodbury will cover 3 ways on how you can earn through YouTube. Check this out! Would you like to know how to make money on YouTube? There's actually 3 different ways that I'm going to cover in this video my friend Marcel is here. She's got this question. So, as I'm coaching her, I'm going to be coaching you at the same time on how you can do that. Alright. So, the question I have first is how do you think people make money on YouTube? -Views, clicks... -Okay. So okay... So promoting our products, that makes sense. How would somebody get paid by views and clicks? -I've heard they get paid by YouTube? -Okay. -So, they do and I'll clarify. So, it doesn't really matter how many views or clicks you get technically. If somebody clicks on a video, you don't get paid for that. But what you'll get paid for is when an ad is put before a video and somebody sees the ad that's right next to your video. -Now, do you want to click on that? -Sometimes you'll get paid more. But sometimes not. Sometimes it's just if it plays for long enough without clicking on it. So, it's actually a really cool program. And I do make money from ads on YouTube. But I make a lot more money from the business side of things. Since all kind of explain both then I'll share with you a third way that's kind of a bonus. -Now does YouTube produce that that are on your video or those things that you put on their? -YouTube takes care of it all. -Okay. -But advertisers will pay money to YouTube to put their ads in front of videos. And the money that they pay to YouTube, YouTube gives out 55% of that back to the creator of the video. So, it's pretty cool. -Yeah. So, they call this the partner program. And it's actually a really good thing. Not just because you can make money but because if you know how to create videos that will make YouTube money, they will promote that video and obviously we get part of that add money. But it promotes our videos that then if it promotes our business, then our business grows. So, we're like getting free advertising because this partner program. -Okay. That makes sense. -That's really, really cool. -Yeah. -So that is one way. And simple math that relates to views is for every view that you get, you might make a penny per view. One of my channels that it kind of works out to like 0.9 seven cents per view that we're getting on that channel. So, let me see if I can remember the math. I know that we were getting like 1.3 million views in a month. And in that same month, we made about twelve thousand dollars in ad revenue. So, that's a lot of views. Millions of views to get thousands of dollars. And it took us about 4 and a half years to get to that point. So, if you're going to go full-time with YouTube and expect to... You know, eventually that could provide a living. But in the meantime, not so much. So, I like to consider that like icing on the cake. -So if I'm wanting to sell something on YouTube, do I need to make an ad type of video? How does somebody...? What do people like? What do you get the clicks? -Yeah. It's a very good question because that's what most people will do, is they'll just create promo style videos that adds that really show the benefits of their product or their service. And they'll put it on YouTube. But you don't get very many views. Because people aren't going to YouTube hoping to watch promos. So, those are important but those you put on your website or your sales funnel, right? What you put on YouTube is helpful content or just content that people really do want to watch. And like, I work with a lot of coaches, speakers, authors, mentors; And the products or services they sell is information. You know, they're coaching or they're helping people with business. Or just improve their life overall. And so what they'll do is they'll make how-to videos that really help people. Maybe a 10-minute episode. Kind of like in this one. We're making an episode on how to make money on YouTube. So, people will come here to learn how to make money on YouTube. And then if they want to know more about me and my services that offer, how I produce to YoutTbe channel so people that go to my website; And they'll check it out. So, the key is though to really give a ton of value. Just give away all your secrets for free in that 10 minute episode. Then at the very end, you can give people a free gift or something. So, at the end of this video, I might give away my keyword research guide. And if people want to get my key research guide that takes them to my website where they'll be able to download that for free. But now they're in my... They're on my email list. They're in my sales funnel. -Well I'm like brand-new, you know... And I'm just talking and maybe I'm empowering women or something, how do people even know that I'm doing that? I'm creating YouTube channel and then I'm putting videos on there... -A very good question. So, YouTube... One is the partner program which if you learn how to create videos that will help you to make money. But at the beginning stages, you're like, "How do I know how to do that?" So, that's kind of a step 2. The step 2 is to do keyword research to find what questions people are asking that you know how to answer. So, you have an expertise. You have experience and there's people all around the world. Not just United States. There's people all around the planet that are going to Google and YouTube typing in these questions. And so, if you find out what those questions are and then that's the title of your video, I'll just make some up that I know work like that we've done keyword research on. "How to get rid of strep throat without antibiotics?" Or "How to invest in real estate with no money?" Or "How to Trek fitness goals on your Apple watch?" Right? So, you make that question that people are actually searching for. The title of your video and then people all around the world who don't know you exist, they will  find your video and you'll start to get an initial traffic. Initial amount of traffic and views from that. That actually grows over time. You could post the video today. Have it ranked on YouTube today for those search phrases. And years from now, it'll be getting more traffic than it was before. -So, when you're doing keyword (What do you call it?) optimization, Is that the only place you can put it is in the title? -So, I've actually... I'm going to film another video with you that comes into detail on that. And I have an in-depth video about my tree analogy that you guys would enjoy. Just click that up there. The quick answer to the question is the title is the best place to put it. The keywords are a helpful place to put it. But because you did the keyword research first and now you know what the title of the video is, because you're going to to that question and all the things that you're going to say for those 10 minutes are going to be related to that topic, YouTube actually transcribed your video. And takes out all the words that you said. And they know what your video is about. So, that will really be the biggest thing to help it rank. -So, even in what I'm saying counts as keywords? -Yeah. -Wow. -Okay, so now the the job after you get somebody to go to your website is to sell. You know and if you've got a phone number, you call them. You call them and  you sell them something. Or you've got a sales funnel where it's you know, an opt-in page. Or an offer comes up. And so... You know, that's where the business side of it comes in.Aand you can really make a big amount of revenue there. My biggest channel... My client is actually making $600,000 per month just from the organic YouTube traffic we're sending to. -Okay. So wait. So, if I'm going to get started like step one, I'm putting stuff out there and I'm using the keyword stuff. And then I'm also... Would you say to start with selling something. So, selling a product or selling a workshop and so you're collecting customers information to be able to generate and income from that while your YouTube channel and your views are going up and up. -Yeah, definitely. I think that...Wwhat I've done I think is a simple system that anyone could could replicate. AVnd that's give away something for free of value. So, I've created... You know Google Docs, right? I created a Google Doc that I call my keyword research guide. And I've put step by step how to do keyword research. It's page is long. And when I get new questions, I can update it and make it even more valuable. More packed with information. So, when I when I make a YouTube video, a lot of them at the end I'll let people know that I want to give you my keyword research guide for free. And I'll have a way for them either to click a link or to text to opt-in. But they'll get a text link to be able to opt in to that. So, I recommend that you do the same. So, you might have a course down the road that you'll sell that's like, "How to live your life on purpose?" It's some real powerful course. Maybe it's a thousand-dollar course that you sell. From your video, you might teach different topics about living life to its fullest and living, you know, authentically and whatnot. At the end of the video, you say, "You know, I've put together this guide or this resource or this gift that I want to give you for free that's got these action items or these steps." And have people join your list. And then now, those are people that will want to know more about your course or whatnot. -So right now, I'm doing just little videos on my Facebook. You know, I've got all my friends on there and I'm trying to get people to go and watch these videos just on Facebook. Because that's all I know. -Hmm. -So, you would recommend I mean it sounds a lot more profitable to move those videos onto a YouTube channel and then to move those people to go to this YouTube channel. I could put a link into my Facebook. Would... Do you recommend starting kind of there or... -Kind of. -Okay. -So, I think what you're doing on Facebook is awesome. And I think you should keep doing that. It's great practice. You're doing a lot of them live, right? -Yeah. Not a lot live. But I do my big ones. -Either way. I think you should keep doing that and nurture your tribe there because when people are on Facebook, they want to have a Facebook experience. hey don't want to leave and go to YouTube. Facebook doesn't want them to leave either. Right. So, it'll bury your post if you try and tell them to leave. YouTube, the same thing. But I do recommend keep doing what you're doing on Facebook. If you had an idea, like you know what? I feel like talking about this today. That's a great video to put on Facebook. But then later, you can do keyword research like we're going to show you in the next video that we film. And find... "Okay, what are the questions people are  asking?" And then intentionally, you film those episodes that will go on on YouTube. And I would actually start building both. And if YouTube just takes off and you realize I've been doing this thing on Facebook for a long time and it doesn't work, then maybe stop that and put your energy where where you're getting results. But what we're teaching you here, what I'm gonna teach in the next episode, you'll definitely be able to get predictable results. -Okay. -So, I told you there's a bonus. There's a third way that you can make money on YouTube that you probably haven't heard before. There's a website called patreon. And it allows people to sign up as patrons of YouTubers or Podcasters or what not. So, I'll just give you an example. So, there's a YouTube channel called Sailing La Vagabonde. It's this Australian couple that live on a yacht and they travel the world and they vlog about their adventures. -It sounds like a really good job. -That's really, really fun. So, they post about 2 episodes per week. And they have an account with patreon where their fans can... They say, "We really like these videos you're making. Instead of paying for a cable TV  subscription, we're going to pay you a dollar per episode so that you keep making these great episodes or we're going to contribute 5." Maybe they're their moms like or the grand mom was like, "I'm going to contribute $100." I don't know. Right now, this is one of the biggest ones I know. They're making like $12,000 per episode just from their fans. -The fans are saying, "We want more of this." So the fans are able to pay in or contribute. -Mm-hmm -And basically fund them to make more? -Yeah. So, they're pointing out 2 episodes per week making $12,000 per episode. It's for making ad revenue as well. And they have merchandise like t-shirts and stuff that they sell. But they give their patrons perks. Like one of their biggest perk is they'll do a raffle of their  patrons to come join them for a stay on their yacht. -Ohm wow. -Yeah. So, they incentivize people to become their crew. -That's awesome. -So, anyway, that's just the third way that I've seen people make money on YouTube. -Oh, that's great. I love that. -So, if you would  find value in knowing the step-by-step process that I use to find these very specific questions that people are asking online, then text the number 415- 528-7403 and the message will just be HERO1 and that will give you access to download the security search guide. I'll see in the next episode.

Rooted Conversation: It's most definitely that time of the year again: Looking for someone to keep you warm on these chill nights? Looking for someone to spend the holidays with and show off to family and friends? Well I'm not. And it's going to be hard to avoid the "Mr.Lonely" mindset, so I just decided to make a playbook and run with it through this brutal, high contact, extreme sport of "cuffing". Reflection Point: Just go listen to the whole Crazy Faith series https://youtu.be/R_nnKbT2D_c GyneShine: Happy Breast Cancer Awareness Month rootedwithyams@gmail.com IG: yams_andpotatoes

The media, professional sports, and a shifty political class are all very much like a New England Piss Clam -- they squirt and then they burrow themselves in the sand so quickly that most people dig themselves to exhaustion and still end up empty-handed. Well I'm in the mood for some clam.... ....How's that for an episode description? Topics include: Joker, Dreams of A New Hollywood, NBA and China, Rob is Engaged, and much much MUCH more. Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/xcrB6naja2g Sponsor the Show: Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/QuiteFrankly One-Time Gift: http://www.paypal.me/QuiteFranklyLive SubscribeStar: https://www.subscribestar.com/quitefrankly BTC: 1EafWUDPHY6y6HQNBjZ4kLWzQJFnE5k9PK LTC: LRs6my7scMxpTD5j7i8WkgBgxpbjXABYXX ETH: 0x80cd26f708815003F11Bd99310a47069320641fC Episodes On Demand: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/301gcES iTunes: http://apple.co/2dMURMq SoundCloud: http://bit.ly/2dTMD13 Google Play: https://bit.ly/2SMi1SF Stitcher: https://bit.ly/2tI5THI BitChute: https://bit.ly/2vNSMFq Official WebSite: http://www.QuiteFranklyPodcast.com DISCORD Hangout: https://bit.ly/2FpkS11 Quite Frankly Subreddit: https://bit.ly/2HdvzEC Steemit: https://bit.ly/2FrNkyi Twitter: @PoliticalOrgy MINDS: @QuiteFrankly Live On: Periscope: https://bit.ly/2FmsOzQ Twitch: https://bit.ly/2TGAeB6 YouTube: https://bit.ly/2exPzj4 DLive: https://bit.ly/2PpY0k0

If you've ever been through Pre-Marital Counseling, you know generallly what's covered in that space: Communication, Conflict Resolution, Relationship Roles, Spiritual Beliefs, etc. Well I'm too cheap to pay for more counseling, so I'm crowd sourcing your wisdom! What was missing in your Pre-Marital Counseling?

Conflict in relationship is often viewed as a bad thing. It’s uncomfortable. It’s tense. It makes us feel bad, and often makes our partners feel bad too. But what if you’re missing out on an opportunity? Like two tectonic plates rubbing against each other, two people butting heads in relationship might be just the moment where something new forms within that relationship. And within you. That’s the view of this week’s guest, Viola Neufeld. She’s a coach, educator, therapist and facilitator, and she works to help those stuck in conflict to work through their difficult conversations to a place of profound inner transformation. Viola is also the author of “Grateful For The Fight: Using inner conflict to transform yourself and your relationships.” Her motto? “Don’t waste your conflict.” And today you’ll get a taste of how you can turn your conflicts into building and rebuilding moments within relationship.  Sponsors: Beautiful jewelry, exquisite craftsmanship, sustainable sources, and affordable prices. Get $75 OFF your purchase at hellonoemie.com when you use the coupon code "ALIVE". With free overnight shipping and free returns, you can see something online today, and try it on tomorrow risk free. Find a quality therapist, online, to support you and work on the places where you’re stuck. For 10% off your first month, visit Betterhelp.com/ALIVE to fill out the quick questionnaire and get paired with a therapist who’s right for you. Our final sponsor today is Audible. Audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet and now, with Audible Originals, the selection has gotten even better with custom content made for members. As a special offer, Audible wants to give you a free 30-day trial - which includes 1 free audiobook and 2 free Audible originals. Go to Audible.com/relationship or text RELATIONSHIP to 500500 to get started. Resources: Visit Vi Neufeld’s website to get her “enhancing relationship vitality” inventory. Read Vi’s book, Grateful for the Fight. FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide - perfect help for handling conflict and shifting the codependent patterns in your relationship Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner's Needs) in Your Relationship (ALSO FREE) Visit www.neilsattin.com/conflict to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Jeff Brown. Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out Transcript: Neil Sattin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host, Neil Sattin. We've talked a lot on the show about how to communicate. And we've dipped our toes into the water of how to have conflict in a productive way with your partner. But deep down I don't know about you, but I've always harbored this sense that conflict is best avoided or dealt with as quickly as possible. And yet despite that deep down held belief something in me knew that it wasn't quite right. It wasn't quite serving me. And I've had various attempts to put my finger on the reason why. And then good fortune brought today's guest my way. Her name is Viola Neufeld and she is the author of "Grateful for the Fight: Using Inner Conflict to Transform Yourself and Your Relationships." Her book is truly eye opening, in terms of helping you see how the conflicts that you have in your outer world, the conflicts with your partner, with your family, with your co-workers, or your boss, how all of those conflicts help point to the ways that you can grow within you, and transform your relationships. So it's a very powerful generative way of looking at conflict that almost makes you welcome the chance to have conflict with someone else because you're gonna be holding it in a completely different way. If you are interested in downloading a transcript for today's episode you can visit NeilSattin.com/conflict, because that's what we're gonna be talking about today. Or as always you can text the word "passion" to the number 3-3-4-4-4 and follow the instructions Vi Neufeld. Thank you so much for being here with me today on Relationship Alive.  Viola Neufeld: I'm so happy to be here and I really love the name of our podcast Relationship Alive, because that's what this whole thing is about. It's about, what do you need to do to keep relationships alive over a very lengthy period of time and I know, you know, you were talking about how our natural tendency is to want to avoid conflict and you know that's just makes all the sense in the world because think about each time you enter conflict. It's like you're on this teeter totter and you don't know which way it's going to go. Is it just going to keep getting worse? Or is there a chance that this time you're going to turn around and do it differently and do it better? But we most of us have such a track record already with things going badly, that we're frightened of starting it again, because we know what the chances are we're realistic about the opponent that we have and our opponent gives us a real run for our money because they're able to find those places within where we question yourself. You know I mean it's funny. We often say to our partner you know, "you're pushing my buttons," as though they shouldn't. But interestingly enough it's when they push our buttons that they take us right to that part of ourselves where we find that really restless part. And of course it makes us feel terrible. We don't want to stay there, because we're uncomfortable there already. And yet if we continue to avoid it then it just remains there in a chronic state for many, many years. And we keep having fights over and over. Just on a little bit of a different stage. But the underlying fight is actually very much the same.  Neil Sattin: Right. You talk about it basically being this cycle where each of you is poking at the others sore spots and that there's some way that we magically arrive at this dynamic in, in partnership around those perpetual fights where what they point to it hits us in our in our weakest most vulnerable places and then we in the way that we respond to them you call that "your M.O.," it does the exact same thing for them. And so it creates this vicious cycle that just gets worse and worse or never gets any better.  Viola Neufeld: Yeah, I don't know I was thinking about this yesterday I was thinking about the whole concept of chemistry and you know how we always talk about we, what is love and we have to have this, uh, thing that happens between us. They activate something inside us. And make us come alive. But then what I was really thinking about is like what is the chemistry. The very thing that draws you together. That gravitational pull often has something that also creates conflict between us.  I mean we love somebody because they activate that part of us that somebody else doesn't. And it gets us really, really excited but it also makes us just wild because we don't know what to do and we end up trying to sort through, while we're in the middle of it, this is where it gets really confusing what's your stuff and what's my stuff. But, Neil let me go back to that cycle that you were referring to because how I even came up with that and how I even started looking at things in relation to the book and writing things up was, at one point I had like about twenty 23....nah, it was even more than that. At least 30 different files that I had across my dining room table and I thought what are the similarities here? When do people get into such entanglements with each other that they just can't get out and are there some similarities? What are those similarities where people get stuck and stay stuck for years.  And then that's when I started when I came up with that cycle, and you realized that somebody in terms of what they say or what they do, maybe, they're critical maybe they're passive maybe they're withdrawn, but whatever it is they do, make you go back to the place where you question yourself. "Maybe I'm not enough. Or maybe I'm too controlling. Or maybe I'm too impatient or..." Whatever it is that either they're withdrawing or their attack makes you question yourself and and doubt yourself at very significant levels in terms of who you are as a person. Then when you come out, so you come back out fighting, and whatever it is you do makes the other person now question themselves. And face the part of themselves that they don't want. That unwanted self. And it's looking at how we feed that cycle and keep that cycle going, that I was really intrigued by and wondering how do people get out of that cycle. Because I think that so many of us live with more pain in life than we need to. Like if we could figure this out sooner and face the part of ourselves that causes such discomfort and we'll know, we'll recognize that part because it's always the part that makes us come out fighting. We have to defend ourselves. We have to protect ourselves because we think the other person said something that makes us look like an idiot or that we're unreliable or that we're not a contributor. All the things we don't want to be and that's when we come out fighting. And yet the interesting thing is that really the strange way out of that, is to face the very thing that you don't want to be like for me for a long time. One of the things I had to face was, 'I'm not enough,' and I keep thinking "No, I am enough." Well this is where the power of positive thinking doesn't always work because it can't wipe out truth. And so it's like you almost have to do a back and forth and go, "Where I'm not... Where am I enough and where am I not enough?" Because there are places where I'm not enough and what am I going to do about that. So then the hope lies in kind of finding a bit of a manageable change program. And if I can do more today than I did yesterday or feel better today about myself than I did yesterday, because of what I'm doing differently then that's already growth. I mean it's one of the things I absolutely love about conflict. I never liked to be in the midst of conflict. There's nothing easy about it. But if you can surrender to it and learn what you can then we learn so much more about ourselves. I think that we are all less self-aware than we really think we are. This is a wonderful way of getting to know who you are and who the other person is.  Neil Sattin: Yeah. There's there's so much here that I want to unpack. And I love how rich your book is with like really taking apart each of the dynamics that, that are at work there in conflict and as, um, as I was wrestling with this question of, "OK what is the truth about those sore spots in me?" You know when I look at... You know something I mentioned frequently on the podcast is how I'm maybe not the cleanest person. So what is the truth around when when someone approaches me, or when Chloe my partner approaches me and says like, you know, "This place is a disaster like you have to do something." And for me like the natural tendency being you know all these things that I saw spelled out in your book like I would get defensive or I'd have I just have excuses maybe I wasn't getting defensive, but I'd be like you know I was really busy recording that episode of the podcast and I didn't get that chance to do the dishes like I said I was going to. And then there's that uncomfortable place of recognizing, "OK there is some truth here. And one of the questions that comes up for me is how you arrive at the balance of when it when it's actually healthy for you to look at, let's say a criticism from your partner and to not like focus on the fact that they criticized you and they could have said it better, but just to say like alright, I'm going to take a step back and see what's true here. What's the balance between doing that, in a way that's healthy, and then it becoming its own negative cycle and your relationship where you just get victimized by a partner who isn't doing their part to shift? Viola Neufeld: Yeah. That's a really good question because you know I think it's almost like the sequence that's the most important. The natural tendency is to go back and start fighting immediately or protecting and defending self. Except that if you continue to do that it gets you nowhere.  Okay. So the first step is always going in and looking at what did they say about me? So that's true. Maybe I, you know I am messy or I am a control freak, or I'm a clean freak, or whatever it is. Whatever they have said about you, the first step, I mean this is a very courageous step right because you have to go inside and you go. How much of that is true. And once you start to look at that then you're no longer fighting or like pushing it away because you've actually brought it close. And I don't ever want to minimize the difficulty of this because the same way as a child balances down on heat and pulls their hand away we do the same thing with emotional responses. When something is uncomfortable we want to balance away but this is what is required is to actually stay there longer and go, "Is this true about me? Yeah you know what sometimes I am this way," or "Sometimes I'm not this way." So you're going back, you have to do a bit of an assessment, all along recognizing that you don't see everything about yourself, the other person is actually telling you something about how you are impacting them. And we're not always aware of our full impact on the other. But then after you've gone in I think that it's important to go up and you from a bird's eye view, you look down, and you go wait a minute what do I know about the way that the two of us interact? What do I know about when my partner is feeling uncomfortable, what do they do? And if they get to a place where they're blaming and I'm now feeling like a victim and this is I recognize this. This is, I easily fall into a victim. My partner usually blames that I go, Wait a minute what I've already looked at what's going on inside of me and what I need to do differently but now I'm also from the bird's eye view from way up top I'm looking down and going: I see this pattern between us and I know that my partner is doing that out of their own discomfort then because you're not being just reactive you are much more equipped to stand up and say, you know what you're going into a blamer, and you're doing the very same thing again, you're wanting to make it look like it's my fault and you're so, so it's a matter then of holding onto yourself and you are not as reactive. So you have a clearer mind and you can see what the pattern is between the two of you and begin to shift your pattern.  Neil Sattin: Right. I loved in one of the chapters where you were talking about ways to shift the interactions like once you've done the inner work and I want to spend of course a little bit more time on that process of of the inner diagnosis. But you were talking about like once you've done that work and then you face into a conflict with your partner or anyone, really, you might ask a question like, Are you... it seems like you're trying to blame me right now are you, is that true? Are you trying to blame me right now for what's going on? And how asking the question invites them to take a deeper look at what they're doing and they may say they may say, Yes. You know they may be like, "That's exactly what I'm doing because this is your fault." Or they may say, "Well I'm not trying to blame you. I'm trying to just show you the impact of..." And you get further than you would get if you were just like, you know, stop blaming me and you're always blaming me. And then you're off to the races with your typical relationship pattern or conflict pattern.  Viola Neufeld: Yeah, see, I love that because once you have looked at yourself and you've really seen it, when you go out now, because I think there's three steps you go in, you go up, and then you go out. When you go out you grow up very differently. So, my husband and I, we had this cycle that went on for many, many years and and it would be that I would end up feeling like I was, you know, how did I have to raise another issue? I'm a malcontent. I'm a flake for what I'm saying. And then what I noticed and I would go into a blamer, because I didn't want to be that person but once I got to see that it when I experienced his criticism I, would go to that very same place. It kind of just made me chuckle because I go, "Wait a minute. I'm here at the same place. And yes I realize that sometimes I caused trouble but I also don't want to be the person who sees trouble and doesn't do anything about it." And so then I was equipped to just stand there and go, "No no. We do have an issue with this. But I gotta find a way of doing this and be lovable at the same time." So going inside what it helps you do is, it equips you and you feel more confident to stand on your own. To speak from your truth. And the fight changes because it's not like you're just defending yourself. You're actually talking about what goes on between the two of you and what you'd have to do to change that pattern so that it becomes a healthier pattern.  Neil Sattin: Yeah let's go up even further for a minute and talk about differentiation, and the reason why conflict is so crucial for true intimacy.  Viola Neufeld: Yeah. Differentiation. I mean it sounds like a big concept but, but it's so it's what you have to do in conflict all the time, is that... And conflict takes you to a place where you have to be willing to stand on your own and for a little bit. I mean it's almost like you disconnect with that other person, because you're so connected with who you are, what's important to you, and then you also have to hold the other at the same time. So it's being detached and involved. Standing alone and standing together. Lot of people get that part confusing because they think that you know they'll say, many couples will come in and one person will say, "No, I have to leave this marriage because I can't be myself." Well, if you have to leave a marriage to be yourself. That's not differentiation. It's individuation. That's about you being able to hold on to yourself. Differentiation is much more difficult because how do you end up holding on to yourself, and being a full self when you're connected to the other who is different than you, who thinks differently who wants different things. And that can be a big challenge. But ultimately I think it's only when we bring our full selves to the marriage, and freely being who we are even when the other person doesn't get who we are, that's the best chance that we've got of having real intimacy and vitality. I think way too many people give up intimacy because intimacy is hard. Intimacy means that you have to be able to state what do you want. What's important to you. What you value even when you think that the other person doesn't get it. So one of the ways that I've described it over the years is that I think one of the hazards of a long term relationship is a, is a shrinking pie. And initially you came together and the two of you were you flowed freely and you were all you brought all of which you were what you are. And so when you bring the full pie it just feels really intoxicating because you're free to be yourself the other person is free to be yourself. You don't have the baggage. But then what happens over the years is that let's say, there's something that's really important to you. Maybe it's something that you value. Maybe it's it's what you want sexually or who you are spiritually or you know what you're looking for,  you need emotionally. And let's say the other person isn't there doesn't meet your needs and so, or even they think you're less than for some reason because you're too emotional or not emotional enough or whatever. And so slowly we start pulling back pieces of the pie and we no longer bring them to the relationship. And if we don't do that sure we've got less conflict. But you know what: we have a whole lot less vitality, a whole lot less intimacy. So the challenge is even when you don't we don't think the same. I got to tell you this is who I am. And remember that other person fell in love with you in the first place because you so freely flowed with of everything that you were. But just now you've got some challenges.  Neil Sattin: Yeah so the idea is that through this process you get to know yourself more. You get to grow yourself more. And then you get to bring that back to the conflict in a way that really it's like having the same conflict, but from a completely different place. So it's it's not gonna be the same conflict at least on some level.  Viola Neufeld: Neil, and that's true because you went once you've done all this inside work you go, and as soon as you get back out there with the same person you go, "Wow this is the same stuff." But then you notice then it actually feels so differently when you're in it because you're not being triggered. So the same conflict. But now you're responding differently within it which means that nothing can be exactly the same. You know how they tell you you can never change the other person and there's a part of that that's true but it really isn't the whole truth. You know because how do we change the other person we change the other person by changing ourselves. If I change my pattern my husband could no longer do the same thing and that's the way it is in all relationships. And therein lies a huge amount of hope.  Neil Sattin: Yeah. In fact I just released a communication course that is all focused on the things that one person can do, like, basically all the places where we alone have influence when we're communicating with another person, since that's really the only thing we can change in effect.  Viola Neufeld: Yeah. And also because like I think of, I don't know if you can visualize steps, you know, like, let's say you you enter at one level, but there was an action that came before. There's always an action that comes after. So think about how you change things. Because if you respond differently then the other responds differently to you as well and you get out of the vicious cycle and into a more virtuous cycle. And the power lies in one.  Neil Sattin: Right. Right. I am I'm getting this image in my mind of you know someone kind of going to battle and over and over again, with the same opponent, the same foe and they have, I mean let's just use Achilles right. So that we'll take a myth. So this dude has a weakness in his heel, it's the only place that he can be killed, because that was where you know he was held when he was dipped into the pool of immortality or whatever it was. And it's like, imagine him going into battle again and again and he's like fighting and all doing well. And then what do you know, like the person like, pinches his heel and he's like down on the ground again. And thankfully the person isn't actually trying to kill him. But no matter what, there he is helpless down on the ground and it's like if all he focuses on is like, "How do I keep people away from my heel?" Then the heel is always going to be there as a weakness. And everyone's going to keep going for it. Whereas if he gets to know that spot intimately well and you know, I'm talking about Achilles, but it could easily be "Achillia” - you know some women as well. You know like, then once they realize like oh this is my weakness and they really get to know it intimately. And then when, the other person goes for it, they actually have a way of responding that they never had before. That's part of what changes the whole dynamic. So, I'm wondering if you can talk for a moment about that process of going in and and I love the way in your book you have these great questions that help you kind of peel away your self delusions and denial in a way that's not destructive. You know that's constructive. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that process of you know, asking yourself maybe you've asked yourself what's true about this which is what you offered earlier. And then what's the next step? Like where do you go when you when you realize like well you know what, it's true that I don't prioritize the dishes and that is just true about me or whatever it is.  Viola Neufeld: Yeah. You know to even to go one step further back, because it's understanding. You know, I often think of that part of us that we don't like the unwanted self. I often think of that more and I relate to it as I would to a little child or to me as a little child because we all make sense. And that part of us that still needs healing was wounded somewhere along the line. And what I actually love about conflict is that conflict gives us a method to heal those parts that are the most sensitive. So so when we come to the self to the unwanted self in that way, and we warmly try to understand where the hurts lie, where the woundedness first started to show up, then it's a way of kind of... I don't know... embracing it really it really is... I don't know taking it on your lap and now you're not, you're not harsh with it which means you're also not unrealistic in what you're expecting of it.  So I understand that, "OK. Why is cleanliness not important to me? Or why is uber cleanliness important to me?" For instance. And I come to understand things that have happened in my life that have made me come to that conclusion. And the thing is that many times what worked earlier in life doesn't necessarily work anymore. So taking that cleanliness thing you know, before it was not a problem there are many other things that were more important. However if it becomes a problem, with your spouse, then yeah. Then it's something that you start looking at and you go, "Well, maybe now I would actually feel better if I had things a little more cleaned up or if I contributed more by getting the dishes done or any of those things. So. So, it's a matter of really first warming up to the unwanted self because you understand what role it played or how it came to be. And in facing that there is some healing and there is some freeing going forward.  Neil Sattin: Yeah. And I'm wondering when you look at yourself in that way like, what I'm hearing are these questions that help you get the underlying motivation. So if what you're looking at is a specific behavior that you do or don't do, what the motivations are beneath that to help you get more clarity on what, what's really driving the way that you act. Am I getting you? Viola Neufeld: Yes for sure. Because we always have... And making that connection is sometimes difficult. Because we have these behaviors that we do. But then you have to kind of go underneath and go, "Why is that important?" Now, the why question is always a bit dangerous right because it can take you into rationalization which is not where we're going. It's more of a question of what? What is it that's actually driving that. So...  Neil Sattin: Yeah. And I'm thinking about your chapter on I think you call it "self tripping." Maybe you can describe what that is before I say what I'm gonna say. So what's self tripping?  Viola Neufeld: "Self tripping" is when you keep doing something that you know isn't getting you where you want to go and yet you can't leave. You can't let it go. So, in the book it was Nadia and her negativity. And so she recognizes that even though she doesn't like her negativity, that it also plays an important role in her life. It's where she feels like she makes a valuable contribution. It's part of her sense of identity. She thinks that people who just are always happy are people who just skate through life and don't have enough grit to face reality as it is. And it's so become woven into her sense of who she is that if she if she didn't be negative some of the time or you know bring out the umbrella that she wouldn't even know who she was anymore.  Neil Sattin: Right.  Viola Neufeld: Cuz of the roles. It was a role that she played growing up in her family and it's how others have come to know her.  Neil Sattin: Right. So if it's okay, I'm just gonna go through these questions that you ask.  Viola Neufeld: Sure. Yeah.  Neil Sattin: So just to give you listening a flavor for this kind of inquiry. So, you identified the behavior then you might ask yourself why do you dislike this behavior? Because after all we're talking about the unwanted self, like this is a part of us that we don't necessarily feel good about. But we've come to accept it as just maybe just the way we are. Or just the way we're going to be. We haven't figured out a way out of it. What do you like about this behavior? And why are you attached to it? If you tried to change it what would you lose? Or how would the change destabilise you internally or destabilise your relationship externally? And how is it working for you to repeat this pattern over and over again? Is there anything else that holds it in place. So, you're really able to to look at it like almost a scientist would or at least an observer from another planet, who's really trying to get more familiar with what's, what's going on here? And do you find that that process of creating that insight in itself is what generates change? Or are there other things that you think are required for people? Viola Neufeld: Well for sure what it does, like, it's the second step right? It's of going up and looking at it. So what it does is, you see the patterns, it loosens it inside and then I think going out is actually that you have to end up implementing that and realize how different it feels, and actually be surprised by how good it feels. And it doesn't mean, and like Nadia for instance might never give up all her negativity but she might be thinking differently about how often she's going to use it or whether it's going to be a comfortable blanket. She's going to recognize when she's using it illegitimately and she'll open up options. That's the whole beautiful thing about looking at, or engaging conflict differently is that you recognize that you have a whole lot more options than you believed you had earlier.  Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. It really frees you up in that way. And I'm just thinking about how once you're in that place with a new like trying something new on, you talk about not necessarily going for the big shift. "Well, I'm just gonna be positive all the time." Like, that's not gonna be Nadia's approach, right? Viola Neufeld: No, no, no. I mean that has to be, it has to be, little, little steps. And I think you always measured today compared to yesterday. Are you happier with who you are today than yesterday? Oftentimes when I work with couples and I usually take the last 10 minutes to work on what kind of homework do they want to do and it's about together we figure out the homework, or they figure out the homework on their own, but oftentimes after a session people will be pretty motivated and they'll go, "Oh, I'm going to do this, this, this, and this." And I'm like: "How about we think about one thing you're going to do? So that you can be convinced, so that you know that you are going to actually succeed rather than setting yourself up for failure?" Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah. And I'm thinking now of that way of reflecting on changes in conflict with another person that you mentioned, where you might even say it's like in Nadia's case like, "Wow,, when's the last I was just positive, like when's the last time I was positive in the middle of a conflict that we were having?" As a way of helping your partner see that you are trying to make shifts in the dynamic. When you when you are trying to make those shifts, what are, what are the common obstacles that you find when someone brings kind of a renewed sense of who they are? They've gone, they've done the deep dive. They've gone up, they've gotten some perspective. They really want to shift this pattern for themselves and for the way that they have conflict and then, let's talk about kind of taking it into the arena with their with their partner? And how do you do that in a way that's most likely to be generative? And how would you know? Because we're talking about stepping into conflict which by its nature is uncomfortable.  Viola Neufeld: Yeah, yeah. You know what I think, for one, being really realistic about change and how it happens. And know that the old is like a magnet and it just sucks you back, so quickly, and so powerfully and I think the important thing is not to get down on ourselves when that happens just to kind of look and kind of chuckle a little bit, and go, "Oh, my goodness, it's happening. The same thing still has some power." But even the fact that you can go up and recognize it, that means you're not functioning totally from your alligator brain, your amygdala, you're actually operating. You've invited your neocortex in and you're recognizing it even if you catch it after the fact and you go, "You know what, I just did the same thing again." But that's more than you were doing previously, because previously you didn't even see it. So kudos to you. And then the next time when it happens you'll probably see it while you're in the middle of it, and go, "OK, just wait a minute. I got to do something differently."  And when sometimes, when people get lost I'll say to them just do something which is 180 degrees from what you normally do and see how different, it feels and see what the impact is. Because it's all about experimenting and then recognizing that the person who got to you before, when you are making changes, whether it's your spouse, whether it's a colleague at work. If you make a change know that the other person is going to continue to do more of what they did before. So you're actually going to up the ante. Be prepared for that. Not because they're wanting you to still do what you did before, but just because that's what they know. And so your commitment is to yourself, more than to the other person to stay the course. Just focus on who do I want to be so that I can sleep comfortably in my own skin. And what is another good thing is that life keeps giving us one opportunity after another. If we miss this one there's another one right around the corner. And again just keep practicing on being the person we want to be.  Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah. I like that image of your two brains learning how to work together because we have spoken a lot on the show about your limbic brain taking your neocortex off line basically for in favor of fight or flight. And so bringing your attunement, like your attunement within, to a conflict, that allows you to to bring them both online at the same time and to recognize your boundaries to recognize where you truly aren't safe vs. the illusion of not being safe which is often what your amygdala is responding to, right?  Viola Neufeld: Yeah. And that's what I love is because when you invite your brain back in, you can see that some of the things, cause conflict is all about your threats center going wild. And yet, when you bring your neocortex in then you can actually look at those fears and go, "Ok, they were real at one point. Are they still real? You know? I thought I couldn't do this on my own. And back then I couldn't. But can I do it now? Have I developed further? Or, I thought that you know I was not enough? Or, I thought that I spoke way too much. Do I still do that? I thought I was a drama queen. Am I still that or have I shifted? I thought people would reject me. But is that true?" So yeah it's always a question of checking where you are now compared to where you were then. And the many of the fears that were there don't need to be there any longer.  Neil Sattin: Let's talk for a minute too about how we might... Because I agree with you that so often we we start changing and the whole thing shifts. But are there ways that you find with your clients that are particularly effective for inviting your partner to notice, along, apart from what I mentioned earlier, to notice like the dance is shifting here. Or, hey, like this is this is me stating my truth and you can make a choice about that but I'm really clear about what I believe in this moment or who I am in this moment. What are some ways to help invite your partner to change their steps in the dance? And maybe the last part of that question, is how would someone recognize if that wasn't going to happen and whether or not that's truly, you know, you talk a little bit about the times when it's actually healthy to disengage.  Viola Neufeld: Yeah. Because you know I mean here's the sobering thing, is that we only have in our life what we tolerate. And so at a certain point it is that we go: This is who I am or I want to be sexually active, and that's really important to be in an intimate relationship. And if you're not there if that's not what you want, we're in real difficulty and I don't know what to do. Or let's say, "I want to be in relationship with somebody when I know that I have reason to trust them and I can believe them. And you have shown me on numerous occasions that I don't have evidence to trust you. And we are in a situation that I don't know if we can continue to go forward because this is what I need in my life." See, then you go back to differentiation where you really hold your own and you go. This is what I need from a partner. And if you're not that person, then I don't know where we're going to be in the future. So then there are other ones where, let's say you know, you know that the other person continues, regardless of how many times you say what's important to you and what really matters, it actually seems like the other person, if they really if that really doesn't matter to them then you are in a situation where you have to go, "OK. Am I going to continue on with this person or am I not?" Because you can't continue... Or let's say somebody continues to be hurtful and harmful in their actions towards you. And regardless of what you said they don't make the changes. Well then the writing is on the wall as to your future. You have to make decisions for your own safekeeping and for your own health. Going forward.  Neil Sattin: Yeah, and I think one place where that can get tricky is: I think we can be too quick maybe to make that decision, if we're in pain and that's the interesting thing about what we're talking about. Is like just because you're having conflict and uncomfortable that that isn't necessarily a sign that this isn't a healthy environment for you to be in. It may be that there's more healing for you to do or more growing for you to do. And I think that can be tricky to know, like, actually this isn't about me growing or healing something this is just about kind of a core place where I stand.  Viola Neufeld: Yeah, I mean, that's where it can get confusing for people to know whether it's just that it's theirs or if it has to do with the other person. I lost it there when I was going to say you and I'm sorry. Neil Sattin: That's OK. And I'm wondering if you have any hints for how someone can do that diagnosis about like have they gone deep enough in terms of their own inner work? Viola Neufeld: Yeah. So Neil I know what it was I was going to say because, what's the reason for moving on? So if you have not looked at your own stuff and you just think it's the other person then maybe moving out of the relationship is premature. If however you've actually looked at your part of the problem, your contribution, and still you're not getting from your partner what you need, then that's a different thing because you're not just leaving because of hurt and because of self blindness. You actually see it. You're doing the work. But the other person is not in a place where they're wanting to see more of themselves. And then maybe it points to a different future, but it's why are you leaving? Have you really seen what you need to see about yourself? Because then you can make a clear decision.  Neil Sattin: Right. I love what you just said how crucial it is to identify your contribution and to change to address that. That is what we've been talking about all along. It's the ways that we show up and we create the dance that's happening or do our part to create the dance that's happening.  Neil Sattin: Well Vi Neufeld it's been so great to chat with you about conflict and I feel like we should have argued more or something like that. I'm really appreciating your work. And so can you just tell us a little bit more about the different kinds of things that you offer? Obviously your book grateful for the fight is there for people on Amazon, it's a great read and really a useful tool for self discovery and transforming your approach to conflict. And I don't know about you, but if you can imagine like how tense and how much it can shake up your inner world to know that you're heading into conflict and just how different it can be to imagine stepping into a conflict knowing that you've got you, and that you can take care of yourself. This book is a really helpful part of creating that experience. So I appreciate your work in that way. But, what else are you doing with people? Viola Neufeld: Well I was just going to say that I think one of the real benefits of doing this work is that you end up liking yourself more and you have better relationship. That's the end result. So yes, you know if you... Other things I mean there's all kinds of work. It's always having to do with sorting through relationships and extended families and with couples and in organizations. If some of you want to have a little scale that you can work through and it would be a little handout on enhancing relationship vitality, if you want to do that you can contact me and I'll send you a concept or I'll send you a handout if you like to do that. It would be a way of, you know how you always have ideas about who you think you are in relationship and then who your partner is. This is a way of actually going through a number of indicators and you can do a scoring at the end, which will tell you you know it'll shine some light on who's contributing in what areas and see if your yourself perceptions are accurate or not.  Neil Sattin: Well I'm definitely going to to take your quiz. So, make sure that I get my hands on that as well. Yes. If you want to get a copy of the enhancing your relationship vitality inventory, then you can visit Vi Neufeld's web site which is transpectives.com, and I will have a link to that in the show notes, which you can get by visiting NeilSattin.com/conflict or texting the word "passion" to the number 3-3-4-4-4. And following the instructions.  Neil Sattin: Vi Neufeld thank you so much for being here with us today. It's been such a treat to chat with you.  Viola Neufeld: Thanks so much Neil.  

We all have a comfort zone and it's not until we step out of our comfort zone is when we know who we truly are. We have been programmed to see things a certain way, and we are taught that we go against the grain then we are a bad person. Well I'm here to challenge that. In the words of Jay Z "Love Me or Hate Me Need I All".

Shout out to Gear head society! First of all (Let em know gh3tto8uddha sent ya). Then to the food drive that me and my car club are in the process of trying to put together. I mention this in the episode, but if you're the LA area, and want to help out first hand? Or even if you're not in the area and want to know how you can help out? My instagram is @gh3to8uddha and my email is gh3tto8uddha@live.com . So whichever one of those you wish to hit me up on in order to see how you can help with our food drive, please feel free to let me know. Other than that...Keelan Andy is back! And on track! To be one of the best, on...the track. Well I'm not the best with rhymes clearly. Just listen in, and hopefully. You'll have a good time with this. Peace!  

Jett really must be behind on his sleep because that boy is out like a light! Good thing Miss Alice doesn't have any bombshells to drop this episode...oh wait.. Well I'm sure the Undertaker and the Clergyman are just gonna be burying bodi- wait what? The bodies are moving now..? And Ellie is on crutches... WHAT IN TARNATION?! Catch the Mercenaries of Mischief and all of their friends live as they work to rebuild the Avalon Knights Academy to it's former glory over at https://www.twitch.tv/mercsofmischief If you loved Baptiste in this episode, (and/or if you love Kithri from Too Many Warlocks), you can see more of their amazing work at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi9VLH0orFe54jkjgSaNTFw Some of the music in this episode was by the talent of Dan the Bard, find him at : http://www.danthebard.com/ A huge thanks to Pinnacle Entertainment group for sending us artwork, music, and other Deadlands content to work with, they can be found at: https://www.peginc.com/ #Deadlands #Roleplay #Yeehaw

Does your financial planner have your best interests in mind? Have they asked you about your goals for retirement or just your goals for your investments? Well I'm here to tell you that not all financial planners come equal. Join me, Bud Kasper, and JoAnn Huber, as we discuss the missed opportunities that can occur when your financial planner doesn't address all facets of a comprehensive plan. Find Episode giveaways here: americaswealthmanagementshow.com/this-weeks-show/ Listen to past shows here: americaswealthmanagementshow.com/recent-shows/

Today by popular demand, I'm starting a new series called Lighten Up about Friendship Over 40. Back when I wrote Women Are Scary, about finding mom friends during the early childhood years, I had women ask me when I was going to write a book about finding mom friends later in life, and finding mom friends when you have teenagers. My response was always, hold on lemme get there first. Well I'm here now and several of you have asked me about friendship over 40 so we're going to explore this over the next few weeks. I'm excited about this series because I've got some fantastic guests coming on to unpack all this with me. And this series is for everyone. If you're in your twenties and thirties, there's some relationship gold in here, so enjoy hearing people a little farther along prepare you for what's coming. If you're in your forties, you know what we're talking about, so pull up a chair and come help us solve all our problems. If you're out of your forties, send us all your thoughts and prayers and feel free to laugh at us behind our backs. Wherever you are in life, text a friend, grab a cup of coffee, and keep working hard at those relationships. To kick us off, my friend Elisha Beach, founder of The Mom Forum, is joining me. Elisha and I met on the set of Moms Everyday, a TV show we were on several years ago, and I just love her. She's so easy to talk to and open and honest - so open and honest in fact that a photo she posted of herself nursing while on the toilet went viral a few years ago. I knew we had to be friends immediately. She was on the show all the way back on episode 27, back when I think we both were still in our thirties, in fact, so let's welcome her 40 year old self back on the show. And I'm so glad YOU'RE here joining us today, so get comfy, listen in, and lighten up. Links from the show: The Mom Forum Find Elisha on social media: Instagram.com/mylifeisabeach Twitter.com/mylifesabeach Facebook.com/mylifeisabeach Want more Elisha? She was on episode 27 of Lighten Up, too! Handmaid's Tale Challenge Accepted! by Celeste Barber Big Little Lies What Alice Forgot _____________________________________________ As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

In this episode Lisa Tamati and Neil Wagstaff discuss the phenomenon of the imposter syndrome, of having a lack of self confidence and self acceptance, about understanding the power of your words and thoughts to change your attitude to yourself and to your potential as a person. How our perceptions of others always being better than us, diminishes our power and how that is a misconception of reality. Our everyones experiences colours the way they see themselves and the world and why you need to stand in your own power and own your own destiny. This is about shifting the self talk, about stopping apologising for not being an expert at every damn thing and understanding the power of self confidence to change what you can achieve. Hope you enjoy the show. We wanted to let you know we have another live weekend running seminar coming up on the 9th and 10th of November in beautiful Hawkes Bay in New Zealand so if you want to come and learn everything there is to know around running and upgrade your mindset and health while you are there visit our information page at:  https://training.runninghotcoaching.com/how-to-revolutionise-your-running-training We would like to thank our sponsors Running Hot - By Lisa Tamati & Neil Wagstaff If you want to run faster, longer and be stronger without burnout and injuries then check out and TRY our Running Club for FREE on a 7 day FREE TRIAL Complete holistic running programmes for distances from 5km to ultramarathon and for beginners to advanced runners.   All include Run training sessions, mobility workouts daily, strength workouts specific for runners, nutrition guidance and mindset help Plus injury prevention series, foundational plans, running drill series and a huge library of videos, articles, podcasts, clean eating recipes and more.   www.runninghotcoaching.com/info and don't forget to subscribe to our youtube channel at Lisa's Youtube channel  www.yotube.com/user/lisatamat and come visit us on our facebook group   www.facebook.com/groups/lisatamati Epigenetics Testing Program by Lisa Tamati & Neil Wagstaff. Wouldn’t it be great if your body came with a user manual? Which foods should you eat, and which ones should you avoid? When, and how often should you be eating? What type of exercise does your body respond best to, and when is it best to exercise? These are just some of the questions you’ll uncover the answers to in the Epigenetics Testing Program along with many others. There’s a good reason why epigenetics is being hailed as the “future of personalised health”, as it unlocks the user manual you’ll wish you’d been born with! No more guess work. The program, developed by an international team of independent doctors, researchers, and technology programmers for over 15 years, uses a powerful epigenetics analysis platform informed by 100% evidenced-based medical research. The platform uses over 500 algorithms and 10,000 data points per user, to analyse body measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home Find out more about our  Epigenetics Program and how it can change your life and help you reach optimal health, happiness and potential at: https://runninghotcoaching.com/epigenetics You can find all our programs, courses, live seminars and more at www.lisatamati.com    Transciption of the show 00:00 Well. Hi everybody. Lisa Tamati me here once again, fantastic to have you with us. I'm here with my wing man. Neil Wagstaff, sitting over in the beautiful Hawkes Bay. How are you doing buddy? I'm good. How are you? Oh, very good. And today we've got another fantastic episode for you. We have just come off the back of our weekend run seminar that we have them head on the weekend and have a lot north. And beautiful north island of New Zealand's, if you're listening to this from overseas. It's sort of in the north island on the, on the east coast. Beautiful place. And we had a fantastic weekend. We had a full house of city od runners come to learn everything about running, but they actually went away learning a heck of a lot about mindset and about motivation and about nutrition and everything else in between. 00:47 And was really, really a fantastic weekend. We are running another live event on the weekend of the ninth and tenth of November again, and have a lot more for if anyone's interested, I'm going to put a link in the show notes for you to register and you can find out all about it. We'd love to have you come and join us if you want a fantastic weekend with like minded people that are all into health and fitness and learning about upgrading the minds, the running skills and their bodies. So it's really a fantastic weekend. Neil, how did you find the weekend, right? Did you have a good time? 01:21 Well it was great, , it's always the energy at those things that is awesome. The excitement or the stories everyone brings to it. It's epic. It just makes me smile thinking about, It gets the hairs up on the back of my neck cause everyone's there for different reason. They're there for a common interest of obviously running, but they've got their own goals. They've got their own why. And it's those special stories that, that make it for me, it's just, yeah, it's so cool. And to see people evolve over the weekend and come in a little bit unsure about what they're capable of and realize by the end of the weekend that, wow, I can do a whole lot more than I thought I was able to do. 01:53 Yeah, it's really fantastic to see that. And you know, one of the main themes that keeps coming and reoccurring at these events and you know, with us dealing with hundreds of athletes and coaching, we get this common theme coming through, which is that people come to us and they go, they qualify everything. Like, Hi guys, I'm really interested in your one coaching programs, but I'm not a real runner and I'm only just a real slow, you know, middle of the pack or I'm just starting out and everything is qualified with the words. I'm not a real runner. And so we're going to do an episode today about, I'm not a real.dot dot. Because this is, this is a thing that's not just to do with running, but it's in every part of our lives. I find a lot of people are going around saying, I'm going to not a real ... , I'm less than what we think I might be. 02:45 And we're going around with this lack of self confidence really and who we are. And we're not sitting in our power in there, you know, confidence that we can really achieve a lot of things. You know, when I go, you know, I'm studying a lot at the moment, all about real estate investing and all of this, and this is a new area to me, right? So when I go to see an expert, I don't want to go in the qualifying myself saying, oh, I'm a complete numpty. I know nothing about anything. But I do go in there and say, look, I'm new to this and I'm really keen to learn, but I don't go and say that I'm, I'm a complete idiot because that sits me up for, for being in a lower position, you know? And so being not confident in what I'm actually going to do. 03:31 Yes, I might be new to a new skill, but that has nothing to do with where I can get to and that's nothing to do with how I should be seeing myself. You're just learning a new skill and each and every one of us is a new newbie in one area and an experience in another and we don't need to feel ashamed about this fact when we're starting something new and it's scary and we don't need to qualify this. Well I'm not a real runner or I'm not a real late or I'm not a real business person or I'm not a real real estate investor or whatever your area is that you are going to try to find out about. It's super that you are here to learn and it's really important to sort of stand in your own power and say, this is who I am. I'm an expert in x, Y, Z. I'm new to this area and not have to go, you know? So like you, you heard it again and again and the weekend day. Yeah. 04:25 Interestingly throughout the week with some people I've been working with at the gym and some some of our regular coaching clients as well. I've done a couple of coaching calls this this week and one of the things we've been working on with a few of the clients is, is really what are your, what are your strong words? So often ask people that were your strong words. So rather to start your sentence with I'm not, or I can't start with I am and I can, but what, what is the strong word? I am, I am strong, I am a runner, I am good, I am gray. I'm a superhero. So the minute you reframe that in your head and start a sentence with that, all of a sudden the whole direction of the conversation and the situation will, will change. The other bit. Just backtracking a little bit on what you were saying is is where the way you are approaching situations, which is gold, you people often forget that they've got a multitude of experience and a huge skillset that is very transferable into the new thing. 05:17 The renewed yet. So I might be a Newbie at certain things you were talking about. Obviously the property investing, but the the years of experience, you've got another aspects of life they're going to pull through to that and all of a sudden you start to understand that you're going to pull on that skill set and pull it through and go, actually I understand this is just looking at it through a slightly different, slightly different Lens, so it's really about how your, your entering a room, how you're entering conversation, how you're, you're, you're, you're setting yourself up. We had usually the weekends example, a group of unsure people who less feeling a whole lot sure about what they're able to do and what they need to do and how to do it. It's, it's almost like they've mapped, got the formula that allows them to go, I am a runner. 05:57 The, I'm one of the ladies I spoke to this week, she's, she's done more ultra marathons than I have more day stage races than I have because I haven't yet done one. And I'm sitting there telling and explaining this to us saying, actually, if we look on paper, you, we could argue that you're more of a run in the lamb. Who Do you think some more the way she is, she's like, you're the, you're the runner actually. You're, you're more of a runner. So I should be one. I should be the one. And I, I definitely think I'm a runner, so it's it's just, yeah, qualifying it in your head. So the, the, the confidence lists as you, as you move forward. 06:28 Yeah. And you don't need to be the absolute best in the world. So even be a teacher like your, your, you know, like you said, you're running teaching and you were my coach for a decade before you even got into business. Yeah. Did I go to you like you haven't run 150 ultramarathons or anything? Are you see for not as experienced or not logical enough to help me? No, the opposite because you can see it from completely different it's perspective. You come from the science and the whole logical thinking and almond and the sub, you know, athlete state of yes I have the experience and that's why what we do is a really super good combination of experience and science behind the whole thing. And this is, you know, just understanding who you are, what you're capable of and just see the transformation and the people over the weekend from coming in all nervous coming into this new environment and Ireton we go to a course or a conference or learning, it's, it's a scary, you know, uncomfortable feeling when you first arrive at the front door. 07:26 Hasn't had, nobody knows each other. And you sort of like, oh my God, what am I doing here? And, and I are going to be super athletes. You know, this is, this is some of the mentality of people coming into an afterwards that tell us this, you know, I came in and expecting everyone to be superheroes. You know, and expecting to be told you're going to train harder and go more, you know, Rara [inaudible] and all that sort of shit. And they, it wasn't what they got. They actually got a whole lot of amazing information on how to, for health, those of, of what they came for, but they asked that they lift understanding the why and they leave feeling empowered in the, the doubtful thoughts that they're having, the fears that they're experiencing, the guilt that they are experiencing is common to the entire room. 08:18 And that includes you and me too. Yeah, exactly. It's so powerful. I just to understand that she had experience instead of putting everybody else up on a pedestal. And I'm down here as the lowly beginner on any side and we tend to do that. We see, we tend, you know, to always see everyone else better than us and as having everything together. And when you look around the social media world that we live in, that's very much water's portrayed in, you're always comparing somebody's Instagram moment, which is a highly tier moments. Okay. Of the best moment during the run. At the top of the hill or the, for the camera, you're not seeing the grind and the shit and the tears and the stuff on the way to the top of that man's and you're only getting the snapshot and then you and your life are going wrong. 09:13 I couldn't do that. And that'd be the main, everybody else is running a hundred and ultra-marathons a week. You know, that's the sort of feeling you start to get. And you gotta remember like social media media is just so curated. So if I spoke with, for example, knows exactly what you're into and we'll feed you a thousand runners doing a thousand crazy suits things every week. So you get this, this misconception that the whole world is out there running bigger than you are when it started. You know, Facebook was just picking out what you're interested in and there therein lies the danger. And you know, this has been discussed before with the elections and things like that. You are getting feed what you are actually interested in and therefore skews your view of what you're seeing and what you're actually experiencing online. And just being aware of that whole dynamic. 10:03 And this isn't just in social media but very, you know, it's very prevalent in today's world that we see a lot of beautiful plastic people with lovely photos and then we think that what we're experiencing in our internal world, you comparing it now, bad moments and hard moments against somebody beautiful picture and it's, it's just completely an unrealistic perception of the world. And this is like the beauty of being something like a live seminar like we did. People have a perception of me, they have a perception of you and then when they actually get to meet you, it's nothing like that. They realize you're just as human as everyone else with the site. 10:42 Exactly. Exactly. And that that is the most, one of the most comforting things for everyone at the weekend. It was by far one of the most compelling things for them to just, you could see the relaxation come across their faces when they were like, these guys are normal. 10:57 Very unfortunate. 10:59 These guys, these guys are more that their normal stuff, they, they're there, they're like us. And then once you realize that you can stop, then it's people stop feeling like an imposter and they start feeling like they're at home. And that's, that's really what we want you to take away from today is that yet we're not imposters we can feel at home. We understand our why well enough and we can relax and do what we do. We need to. 11:21 Yeah. And they, and so imposter syndrome is the for when you, maybe you go through life and you're starting to feel like, oh, I shouldn't be here. I'm not good enough. I can't be teaching this cause I'm not the number one expert in the world. You know, like just if I want to go to the gym and build some muscles, do I go and engage Arnold Schwarzenegger now because he's like, you know, like so far out of my perception of what could possibly be then, you know, just having someone one or two steps ahead of you or three steps ahead of you is all need. You don't need to be the best in the world. So if you're that teacher too, you don't need to be 100 million steps are here, you know, and we talked with other run coaches too that are, you know, they have a special niche and they go, oh, we're not like you though. Like, you know, this is often the conversation I've had with people. I'm just taking absolute beginners and I go, y'all know, I'm taking absolute beginners to, Oh, I thought you'd only be working with the elite. No. 12:21 And everyone has the area with they feeling comfortable, you know, and I'm almost certainly not comfortable with Olympic athletes, you know, you have never been one. And I don't have, you know, that skill set or those genetics and I understand more the battles of the everyday person and therefore I'm comfortable in that area teaching to people that have these issues, you know, and I don't really give a shit about the top 1% but good on them. You know, they'll find better coaches than me for that. And so it's understanding we use it in the world and then setting in that power and then using those words as Neal, seeing those in your, in your thought processes saying, I am a master of this. I am a runner, I am strong. I am able to do this. Not, oh, I can't do that. And Oh my gosh, that's so amazing what you do. I couldn't even do that. And all that. If you hear yourself tight saying those things, just understand that that person's just a little bit further up the mountain than on top of the mountain either. You know, we're all on differing degrees of different mountains 13:26 And nice people we can learn so much from. And that's the, that's the thing I've got very, very comfortable with over the years is, as you said at the start or the start of the podcast today is the asking just go and, well actually that's, that's amazing. How'd you do that? Being very comfortable that you don't know and getting someone to explain to you how they've put there. That's exactly how we've moved through and how we've gone out is to go, oh, hang on a minute, explain that again. I don't, I don't fully get it. I don't understand it. And then all of a sudden you learn and realize that actually that person was in the same position as we were last year and all that and it's got no bit further ahead so we can try the information and move forward. I think as well to add into your why is just really drilling down, which is probably another podcast in itself, lesion really working out where your purposes, so really understanding what your purpose is, what your position is and purposes in life. 14:11 I want you to get comfortable with that and you understand what you want to be sharing, what you want to be doing and you want to be. It's really easy to be in your own skin and we're not falling into that trap of making the mistake of I should be this or I should be that to the company every day, just sit in their company going, this is me, this is what I want to be doing. I know what I'm doing, I know how I'm doing it and I'm not looking around again. You should do that. I'll try and do it and it just feels wrong. Move the really tight the times, work out what you, what you should be doing, the purposes 14:38 In life and where you will meet to be studying in life and they realize that you can't do everything. And this is the one of the beautiful things about getting older. You know like there's a lot of negatives about getting older and we all know those very well, but there's a hell of a lot of benefits to in, it's called wisdom and exactly yearning. And if you have an open mind and if you start to develop your skills set, then you, you know, just because you've been alive for a long time, you've got a lot more experiences to pull on and to share from. And if you keep an open mindset and continue your education, then you can end up feeling a lot more stronger as you get older then, you know, I know certainly I do. Like if I look back even 10 15 years ago where I was in as to her, I am now, as you know, 15:18 It's not there. It's night and day different. I remember from when we first met the language you used to use that and the language you use now is it's night and day and we will evolve. We will change and we should be comfortable. We should be counseled with doing that. Just to educate ourselves on an ongoing, under a hundred percent. And it's yeah, I mean there's a challenge off the back of this should be how many times this week and the listeners go out and say, everyone that's listening. I am. So I am.dot, dot. Yeah. I can.dot, dot. And I do that though. How many times should you get that in? And just the saying it that saying out loud or I am a runner or cam run, I do run. Is, is it just, it makes me feel, makes me feel better. Saying out loud. Yes, great. 16:00 And stop apologizing for existing. They would just go through the whole as all, sorry, I'm not an expert on this area or I'm love this and I'm not of that. Just having the confidence to say I am and even if you don't feel it, and the in the moment that you're saying it, you're suggesting to your subconscious and we did a podcast last week on reprogramming subconscious. Correct. We haven't heard that. Go back and listen to that because reprogramming your subconscious is what we're talking about here we are talking about and it's repeated use of that language where you want to be even if you're not the, now I am a master of x, Y,Z , that I might not be yet, but that's what I'm putting into my mind next for suggesting to my mind that I am to my subconscious that I am and it will become a self fulfilling prophecy. 16:46 It will if you keep saying it and if you keep understanding it and be going through that. The deep work last week, I've taught talk about, you know, self hypnosis and things like that that can speed the process up. And you know, like I was listening to another podcast today and it was all about, you know focusing on the end goal, you know. So even though it might seem ridiculously far away, I want you to give yourself permission to set a big audacious goal and sit there and visualize that future. Where are you gonna be in three years time? Where are you going to be in five years time? If you fulfill this dream and you're gonna, you know, be running new and B or are you going to be running Badwater, you know, and there can be a ridiculous strain seeing yourself, this, visualize the newspaper articles being written about, you visualize the, the stories being told, visualize the book that's going to come out. 17:45 This is the sort of stuff I do. And then I work backwards from air. Okay, that might be a pipe dream right now, but it's near as my, my indicator of where the hell I'm going. That's my true north. If you like. And then I have, I work back from the, so if I want to get to the year, what do I need to do in the next five years? What you'll typically find, so is that you'll go but this so far away, but if you in the first year just to one 10th of what it would take to get there, if you find that you gather momentum over the time. Okay. So the first year you might be just out of the blocks, you might just get your first 10 k done, your first half marathon done, you still dreaming of Badwater water. Okay. But the second year you might get to an ultramarathon in the Fuji, you might give to opt for marathons three ultra-marathons. I mean, Bang, you're there, it speeds up. And this is the power of like compounding interest, right? I'm learning all about compounding interests in regards to real estate. The power of it is that the interest gets the interest on the interest. 18:56 It really, really is gold. And the, I often say to people as well that if I, and when people are looking at it, if you could say 50% of this big goal that you've taken yourself in the next 12 months, would you take it and no one has ever said, no, I'll take it into your pull in. It's even taking that much and watching how that, that grow and that grow and that grow. Don't look for perfection and look for consistency. Yeah. You consistent. Then it's going to, it's going to happen. Most people that are looking for exact perfection, it falls over 19:28 If there's one for a commitment thing. Yes. If you do, you might think it's an unrealistic expectation to sit this lofty goal, but you've got, and you can't even see the pathway to getting there. But by taking those steps in, making a commitment to work on it every single day or every single week, depending on the goal and just doing half an hour every day on it, or you know, I'm going to commit to reading one book a week, or I'm going to commit to going to the gym three times a week, or I'm going to commit to a meeting with my friends and running for half an hour, you know, twice a week, whatever those micro commitments are that build it into a daily habits. And then that gets snowballs, a snowball effect so that you actually start to gather momentum and then all of a sudden when you look back what you've achieved in a 12 month period, say it's just like, holy heck, I really did that and that 20:22 All of a sudden you're saying, I am, I can, and I do. 20:25 Yeah, and you started the heat for the style. Getting out of the stat box is a really hard one. And then keeping that momentum in the first months when you haven't seen progress yet and you won't, you might get some quick ones. Like typically with runners, what we say is that it's like absolute beginners I'm talking about and they don't even know how to, you know, like run nonstop for minutes is that they get some really quick ones within a month we can have them running for half an hour straight through and the lot and then typically slows down a little bit. And so it's understanding the nature of learning and the nature of plateaus and understanding how to push through to the next level and not giving up on that allow, you know we don't, you know, working with my mum wants, again, to bring in an analogy from there, we would have times when she'd stopped to make leaps and bounds forward. 21:15 Not Literally, she's still not leaving valley anywhere, but she's, she's getting there. We would make really big gains in a very short time and then would have months of nothing, absolutely nothing, no progress. And when I look back over those months, I'm going, and those are the times when people give up. And those are the Times where you've got to push down, double down and keep going, keep it going. When you push through to the next layer, that's when you get another lot of, you know, last fall and Lisa spoken. Totally, totally agree. Yeah. So I think that's probably enough for today guys. I hope that there was a bit of a help for you. Another mindset up. You know, this is a running podcast and a fitness podcast and is, but there's a hell of a lot of mental stuff because to be honest, this is a big piece of the puzzle. Huge base of the puzzle with your runner, an athlete, a person and business. You know, in the corporate world there's all these same challenges that come across and this is why the crossing, but the crossover between all the disciplines, you learn it for running, but then you actually learn it for life or vice versa, you know? So it really helps. So Neil, any last words to end on? You know, phrasing things positively and not making excuses. You know, apologize, I am a runner, I am a runner. 22:40 I'm a master. I want you to go and write the list guys. I've got a list on my fridge over there. Let's go on. I am a master of like this 50 things on this list that I'd say oneself every time I go to the fridge, which is quite often cause I like date, I have to read three or four of them before I opened the door. And they reinforces in my mind on a subconscious level repetitively, repetitively, I am a master. And then I'll go around in my head saying I am this. And I am that in my mind, you know, and I, I haven't tire runs. Like we don't want to treat my leg, do this for example, where it's boring as hell on monetary mall. There's nothing to look at. Anyway, so I just go into this mantra and I'll pick a couple of things that I'm working on to reprogram my mind. 23:26 And I'll just repeat the mantra over and over and over for a good half an hour until I drive myself and sign. And then I'll go home and I'll start to see the fruit of that Labor, not from, not only physically from the training session, but mentally as well. So there's a quick tip for you to go and do that. Easy wins, easy wins. All right guys, we'll as usual, if you want to reach out to us, you can get hold of Neil and I, lisa@runninghotcoaching.com or neil@runninghotcoaching.com. Check out our website to Lisa tomothy.com and check out all their programs, their mindset university epigenetics program and running programs. Come and join us on our Facebook group. You can find it just a look up Facebook groups, Lisa Tamati. And hit us up on social media and we're really active on Instagram. You know, Facebook and Youtube. We have huge youtube channel on that point. 24:17 I just wanted to remind people, actually I've got about, I think it's eight documentaries on my youtube channel, full length running documentaries from places like running through the Gobi desert or death valley, the Himalayas, Australia, the outback of Australia. There's a whole lot of good stuff there. If you want some full length movies and you're sick of Netflix, come and check out my channel. Much more interesting. Certainly better than the Kardashians I can tell you that much. So yeah, check those out. Just hop on over to the youtube channel and put in Lisa Tamati. And I've got a playlist here of ultra marathon documentary, so check that out, right guys, thanks for your time today. We'll see you again next week. Thanks. Okay.    

Welcome to Episode 12 - Travelling Double Bill. The idea was to pick 2 films to watch while you're travelling and we did it. Well I'm happy with it anyway. The sound quality is much better this week, we remembered to close the windows and Albert left the mic in its stand so no more rattling or trains going by. Coming up in this episode:Anything GoesAlbert tells us about the emergency services he's been in touch with this week.Double BillTravelling Double Bill (The Beach & Blood Diamond) which coincidentally turned out to be 2 Leonardo Dicaprio movies so a Leo double bill is now off the table. We then pick our theme and double bill to watch for next week's episode. Stitch-UpAlbert lost the vote last week and had to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey and if you need a steer as to what his review will be like, here's a direct quote"I'm never watching that again because it is F****D"Then we'll announce the results of last week's poll which was:Albert to watch Gone With the WindDan to watch Lord of the RingsFinally, we announce our stitch-up picks for each other for next week's poll. Thanks to everyone for listening especially those from outside the UK. If you have any burning questions or would like us to pick a double bill based on a suggested theme let us know either at twinpickspod@gmail.com, on Twitter @Flick_Face or on Instagram at Flick.Face.  

FULL EPISODE EPISODE SUMMARY Conversation with Dr. Mardi Steere about Mission, Leadership, Emergency Medicine and Ebenezer Moments from her 8+ years at Kijabe Hospital. EPISODE NOTES David - So today, I'm talking with Mardi Steere. This is a conversation that I don't want to have. It's about leaving about memories, and about Kijabe.And I don't want to have it because I don't want you guys ever to leave. That is the hardest part of life in Kijabe. But amazing people come and amazing people go and you're gonna do amazing things and stay in touch. First, why don't you give the introduction you gave at the medical team the other day. Mardi - So this is bittersweet for me as well. We came to Kijabe in 2011 and planned to stay for two years and here we are eight and a half years later, taking our leave. And in some ways, it's inevitable. You can't stay in a place forever. It's been a real opportunity for me to reflect. David - Let me pause you real quick there. So when you first came, who is we? And then what did you come to do? Mardi - In 2011, I was a young pediatric emergency physician with an engineering husband looking for a place where we felt like God had said "To whom much is given, much is required," and we knew our next step was to go in somewhere with the gifts and the passions and the exposure and education that we've been given. And so I came as a Pediatrician, and the hospital hadn't had a long-term pediatrician in quite a while. Jennifer Myhre had just joined the team in 2010 and my husband Andy is a civil engineer and project manager, and now, theological educator as well.We moved here with our then two-year-old and four-year-old to do whatever seemed to be next. David - That's amazing. So give the theological introduction to the Ebenezer. Mardi - It comes from first Samuel Chapter 7 verse 7-12, where there's a battle between the Philistines and the Israelites and Samuel lays a stone to God for being faithful and to remember what God has done. When Andy and I got married in 1998, actually, it was a scripture that was read at our wedding. And we were encouraged when these Ebenezer moments come, take stock of them, step back, and acknowledge what God has done . Those moments will be key moments in your marriage. As I was talking to the medical division the other day, I felt like it was just another reminder that, as we have our professional lives and we work in a place like Kijabe and we serve, it's really easy to get caught up day-to-day in the daily struggles that we all have - with life and death and bureaucracy and not enough money and not enough equipment and team dynamics and conflict. But there are these moments when we take a step back and we see what God has done. This hospital has been around for 100 years, and I've only been here for a little over eight of them, but there are so many moments where I look back on where we've come from - and the journey that we've been on - and I see these landmark moments of God intervening. David - How do you see the balance here between medical excellence and spiritual - I don't know if excellence is the right word - between medical excellence and spiritual excellence. I think the origins of medicine were very intertwined with the spiritual, but at least in Western medicine, it's very divorced and I feel like in some ways, what I see happening here is not taught in classrooms anywhere else. Mardi - This is one of those things that I am going to be taking with me for the rest of my life. I don't know who's listening to this, but Americans have a cultural Christianity where it's acceptable in medicine, I think, to ask medical questions and maybe you ask a spiritual question and saying God bless you and bless her heart, and praying for people is somewhat accepted but still it's a parallel track to medicine. In Australia, it's completely divorced. There's almost a cultural fear of discussing the spiritual in Australia, a very agnostic country. So to be a Christian in Australia, you have to make a choice. But then when you go to medical school, it's taught to you almost don't bring that in. This is a science, and one of the things that I love about Kijabe is that they are inextricably intertwined. There isn't a meeting that we start here without prayer. When I'm covering pediatrics, as a clinician, we start with team prayer and depending how busy things are, if you're trying to see 30 patients on rounds, you might pray for the room, as you start. We ask the parents how they're doing, and then we pray for the mom with her permission, and for the baby or the dad or whichever caregiver is there. We ask God to intervene, we ask God to give us wisdom, we ask him to be a part of the science. We ask him to be a part of the conversations. When it comes to the even bigger picture, when it comes to strategically planning the hospital, and our core values again - they're inextricably intertwined, and it's a gift. One thing that I'm gonna take with me as a leader and as a clinician, is that it is not difficult to ask anyone, "What is your world view and what is your spiritual worldview? Because all of us have one in Australia. That world view might be... "I don't believe there's a spiritual realm." That's so important to know. But what if the answer to that question is," I believe in God, but I don't see him doing anything." What an opportunity we miss. What if we have immigrants in our population in our community, and we don't ask them "What is your spiritual and cultural world view? What do you think is happening beneath the surface?" and we don't give someone an opportunity to say without derision, "I think I've been cursed" or "There is a generational problem in my family," and we don't open up the opportunity to intervene in a way that's holistic, much we miss by not intertwining the spiritual and the physical? The fact is every one of our communities has a spiritual world view, and shame on us if we don't explore it with them. David - Amen. It's fascinating here because before coming here, I thought of missions as giving. The longer I'm here, the more I think of it as receiving. When you stop and pray for a family, the encouragement received from those family members is huge. The trust and the love, and you do see people who come in the halls and you ask, "Why are you here?" "Because my doctor will pray for me." Mardi - So what's interesting to me is there are some conversations going on in medicine around the world right now about this "innovative new concept of Compassionomics." And really it's exactly what you're saying, it's not new and it's not innovative. I think that Compassionomics is our fearful way of re-exploring the spiritual. It's taking the time on rounds to say, "How are you doing as a family, how are we doing as a team," and to take the opportunity to draw comfort from each other. It comes from a spiritual foundation, that I think that we've lost, and I think a lot of it comes from burnout and from the way that medicine has become a business and a commodity. We're starting to re-explore through Compassionomics, and I pray through exploring the spiritual, the deeper side of medicine that around the world I think people really miss. David - Right on. Mardi - And if that's not reverse innovation, I don't know what is. David - It's fascinating, this space that Kijabe fills and how we think about it and how we talk about it. I use a phrase - World class healthcare in the developing world - but when I use that, I don't mean that I want Kijabe to be the big hospital in the big city in the West, because there are certain aspects that we don't want to lose. Yes, absolutely, it would be super-cool to be doing robotic surgery, and some of these wild technological things, but really I feel like what Kijabe excels at is not fancy and not glamorous. It fundamentals of medicine. I remember Evelyn Mbugua telling me this one time. I asked her, "What do you think about medicine in general?" "When I have a challenge or when I'm stuck on a patient, I go back to their history." It's fascinating that that's fascinating! Some of the basic fundamentals of medicine are practiced here, just looking at your patient and laying your hands on them and touching them and talking to them. A conversation is both a diagnostic tool and it's actually medicine. If the numbers are true, I know it's different from orthopedic surgery than for outpatient, but, if half of medicine is actually placebo, this stuff is really important to healing. And it's not anti-science. It actually is science to care about people. Mardi - It's interesting when you mentioned the placebo effect. I think that the placebo effect is considered as nothing, but it's not the placebo effect, is actually a real effect. It's that time and conversation and compassion, truly do bring healing and the point of a control trial is to see in a drug-do better than that. But the thing we're doing, already makes sense. It's interesting to me that medicine around the world is getting faster and faster and more and more advanced. Time is money. I think that around the world, we wanna save money in medicine, we wanna do more with what we have, but we're willing to sacrifice time, to make that happen. And why is that the first thing that goes? Burned-out physicians in high income countries, the thing that they love, is when they have to see more and more patients in less and less time because they know what they have to offer is beyond a drug, and beyond a diagnosis and beyond a referral and beyond a surgery. The one of my favorite phrases in medicine that I truly don't understand but want to spend the rest of my life working on it, is a "value-based care." I think to define value you have to define what we're offering. If value is time, then one of the things I think that Kijabe and mission hospitals can continue to pioneer the way in is, "how do we cut costs in other areas but refuse to sacrifice the cost of time and make sure that our impact is helpful for our patients but that also helps our team members and our clinicians receive the value that comes from being a part of a meaningful conversation. I think that's what patients want too. They don't want the robotics, they come to us because they're helpless vulnerable and afraid, and those are the things that we're treating. They trust what we tell them and if we don't have the time to build up that trust, we've lost a lot of the value that we offer. David - What have you seen change about team? You guys have been part of this big culture change process, but I think it's something that's started long before long before either of us. What do you see is the arc of Kijabe and the archive teamwork and the arc of culture? Mardi - So, Kenya is an incredibly multicultural and diverse country and Nairobi is high-powered and it's fast and it's a lot of white-collar and highly educated people and Kijabe is not so far from that. I think we operate more in a Nairobi mindset than a rural, small town mindset, but that's actually been a huge transition, I think, is going from presenting ourselves as a rural distant place to a part of a busy growing rapidly advancing system, and so that comes with leadership styles that become more open and more I guess, more modern in style. And so that's been the first big thing that I've just seen a huge jar over the part of the decade that I have been here is that leadership is no longer just top-down, enforced. It's participational leadership and I'm a massive fan of that. Leaders do have to make hard decisions and make things happen, but the input of the team has become a much, much higher priority in the last decade. And that's huge because our young highly-educated, highly-aspirational team members have got some great ideas and shame on us as leaders, if we don't take the time to listen to their approach to things. So that inclusive style of leadership has has been a huge arc. And then I think the other thing is just our changing generations, millennials are not confined to high-income countries. We have a young generation of people here who aren't gonna stay in the same job for 40 years like their parents or their grandparents did, and that's the same globally. And so we've had to question, over the last decade, how do you approach team members who are only gonna be here for a little while? Do you see that is, they're just gonna go, or do you get the maximum investment into them and benefit out of them in the time that they're gonna be here and then release them with your blessing? And so that's been something that's been huge for me is when we've got these new graduate nurses or lab staff radiographers, to not be on the fact that three years after they come to us, they go it's to say, "You know what, we've got these guys for three years, let's sow into them, let's get the most we can out of their recent education... Let's do what we can to up skill them with the people that we've got here and then let's release them all over Kenya to be great resources for health care across the country and across the region. David - I would say, for healthcare and for the gospel. I've been wrestling a lot with what does it mean for Kijabe is to be a mission hospital. I think the classic definition - I don't know if we define it as such, I don't often hear people say it out loud, but I think it's an unwritten thing - that what makes a Mission hospital a Mission Hospital, is that it cares for the poor. Hopefully on some level, or on a lot of levels, that will always be true at Kijabe. But I'm really excited about the possibility of what you just described, that if these guys are here for three or four years and we are to training them with the attitude that they are going out as Christian leaders and as missionaries to these parts of Kenya that honestly, you and I will never touch. And a lot of the places I've never even heard of. But if we're equipping them to be the light that's the huge opportunity that Kijabe has to be missional. Mardi - This is a much, much longer podcast, but defining mission is really really important, isn't it? I think that there's a couple of things that stick out to me as you're talking and one is that, I think mission has a history that can be associated with colonialism. And one thing I love about my time in Kenya is seeing that we are a globe of missionaries. The church that we attended in Nairobi, Mamlaka Hill Chapel, these guys would send mission teams to New Zealand, which is fabulous. It's not that lower middle income countries are receiving missionaries anymore. All of us need the gospel, all of us need the full word of Jesus and when you're spreading the gospel, what are you spreading? I think that this is a much longer conversation, but I believe that we are called to go and make disciples we are called to serve the sick, we are called to serve the poor, we are called to serve those in prison. I focus on the parable of the sheep and the goats, it is one of my life scriptures, "when you are poor and sick and needy whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me." And what I hope for Kijabe does is that for whoever passes through our doors, whether it be patient, whether it be staff member, this is who we are, we love Jesus and we want you to know this incredible King who gave so much for us and who has an eternal life for us that starts now. And eternal life starting now means making an impact and restoring that which is broken, and it means restoring it now, wherever you are. As our team members go out to work in other hospitals, I would hope that one of the indicators of success for us would be a lack of brain drain, because it would show that we've shown people, "You know what there are people here that need you in healthcare. And this is why I'm here." If I had wanted to be an evangelist rather than a health care missionary, I should have stayed in Australia, for less people in Australia know Jesus that in Kenya. But I felt like my call in mission was to serve the sick in a place where I could help other people do the same. That's been my passion here, but I'm called to go back to Australia now. Does that mean my mission life is over? Absolutely not. It means that I'm going back to Australia to love Jesus and serve sick there and to do it in a different way. And I think that understanding that all of us, whoever is listening to this podcast right now, wherever you you have a call to mission, it's that sphere of influence that God's put you in. It's to take care of the poor or the sick, or to love the wealthy, who are lost around you that are never gonna step foot in a church but need a love of Jesus every bit as much as one of our nursing students here in the college. David - Amen again, that's fantastic. So back to Ebenezers, back to the the stones. What are things come to mind as you look back over on your time at Kijabe that were hallmarks or turning points? Mardi - There's a few of them. One evening sticks out to me because it's so indicative of the bigger picture and what we've been working towards. I'd been here for about nine months or so. . . One of the things that Jennifer Myhre and I noticed is we started out on pediatrics was that our nursing staff were incredibly passionate about their kids, but no one had really had the time to teach them about sick kids and how to resuscitate them, just basic life support, because they were so overwhelmed. You know, there was one nurse who was taking care of 12-15 patients at a time. That ratio is now one to eight, so it's much easier. But they just hadn't had the opportunity to learn some of the basic life-saving assessment in resuscitation skills, and so we started doing just weekly mock resuscitations with the nurses and as we got to know each other and they got to trust me and to know that I wasn't there to, to judge them, but to try and help them, we would do mock recesses every week, and people would stop being scared of coming and would come with by interested and actually came to test their knowledge. When I started in 2011, about once a week I would get called in, in the middle of the night to find a baby blue and not breathing, who was dead, and there was nothing that I could do. But what we worked together on was setting up a resuscitation room, and setting up the right equipment. And so after about nine months of this, I was called in for yet another resuscitation in the middle of the night, and by the time I got there, the baby was just screaming and pink, and I asked the nurse is what had happened and it was the same story as always, this baby choked on milk, they had turned on the oxygen given the baby oxygen done some CPR and they resuscitated that baby before I got there, they didn't need me at all. And the Ebenezer for me was the was the pride on their faces. "We are experts at this and we know what we're doing." That has just escalated leaps and bounds. Now we've got outstanding nursing leadership and they're being equipped and taught and up-skilled every day. But that was an Ebenezer moment for me that the time taken to build relationship and team and invest doesn't just bring a resuscitated baby and life is important, but it builds team and it builds ownership and pride in "this is what I've been called to do, and I'm good at it." It's interesting because it's what you would do is individual doctors with your teams and doing the mock code. But it's also very much a systems process for Kijabe hospital, right? A big part of solving that challenge was getting the right nursing ratios, but also setting up high dependency units to where children you're concerned about could be escalated. Did that happened during your time here? Mardi - So when we started here in 2011, children weren't really admitted to the ICU at all unless they were surgical patients who just had an operation, and then the surgeons would take care of them and transfer them down to the ward. So the pediatrics team wasn't really involved in any ICU care, extremely rarely. We didn't have a high dependency unit. And our definition of high dependency unit, here, is a baby that can be monitored on a machine 24-7. This is something that shows you how reliant we are on partnerships, David. So for example, the nursing and the medical team together decided, "Look, we think we need a three-bed unit, where at least the babies who were the more sick ones can be monitored on machines." And so, Bethany kids were the ones who equipped... We turned one of our words into a three-bed HDU in the old Bethany kids wing, and that was the first time we could put some higher risk babies on monitoring so that if they deteriorated we knew about it sooner. And we saw deaths start to drop, just with that simple thing. The other thing was that pediatricians who worked here in the past weren't necessarily equipped in how to do... ICU care. And so Jennifer and I said, "Well I'm a Peds-emergency physician, and she is an expert in resource-poor medicine, between the two of us, we can probably figure this out." We started putting some babies in ICU who we knew had a condition that would be reversible if we could just hook them up for 24 hours to ventilator. So we started ventilating babies with just pneumonia or bronchiolitis. Or sepsis, that was the other big one, something that if you can help their heart beats more strongly for a day or two, you can turn the tide. And so we just started working with the ICU team to say, "Look, can we choose some babies to start bringing up here? And four years later we were overtaking the ICU at the time and that's why we had to build a new Pediatric ICU, which opened in 2016. All of these things are incremental, and we stand on the shoulders of giants. The Paeds ward existed because a surgeon said "I don't want babies with hydrocephalus and spina bifida to not get care." And then we came along and said "We think that's great, but we think that babies with hydrocephalus spina bifida, who also have kidney problems and malnutrition, should probably have a pediatrician care for them." And over time, that degree of care, that we've been able to offer has just grown and grown. And we had Dr. Sara Muma as a pediatrician join us in 2012 then Dr. Ima Barasa - she was sponsored into pediatric residency long before I got here. That was the foresight of the medical director back then, to say "We are gonna need some better pediatric care". And then I stepped into the medical director role and people like Ima and Ariana came along and they've just pushed it further and further and further. None of us are satisfied with what we walk into, and we keep saying we can do better because these kids deserve more. David - That's fantastic, I think that's another way when you think about the influence and the impact of Kijabe, it's that refusing to settle. It's to say, "Yeah this is possible. Let's figure it out." And for all the team members to say that and commit to it, and for the leadership to support that I think that's what makes Kijabe special. I read something that the other day, it was just an interesting take, someone said [to a visiting doctor] "Why are you going to that place? It has so much." But Kijabe only has “so much” because the immense sacrifice of so many people over so much time. None of this showed up without the hours and the donations and years and years and years of work. I remember you saying that about Patrick with his ophthalmology laser? How did you phrase that? Mardi - Patrick, he's such a wonderful example of the kind of person that doesn't look for reward, but sees a need and just walks to the finish line. He started out, I believe, on the housekeeping team in the hospital. He's been here for 20 years at least, I think, and then went through clinical office or training, which is a physician assistant level training, and then received higher training in cataract surgery. He started our ophthalmology service in 2012. Since then he had nurses trained around him. He's been doing cataract surgery, and then he said, "We've got these diabetic patients and the care we offer isn't good enough, we need a laser." He went to Tanzania, and got laser training, and now he's going to start doing laser surgery on patients with diabetic retinopathy. He refuses to be satisfied with the status quo. And that's the heritage that we have here. You know, talking about even a moment I feel them enormously privileged to have been here in 2015 as we as a hospital celebrated our centennial. It took us a year to prepare for that, and I know you were a part of that process, David. David's job was find all of the stories and all of the photos and interview all of the people and make sure to document everything that might be lost if we lose these stories now. Being a part of that process... I was in tears so many times when we would hear one more story about somebody's commitment and sacrifice. We've been able to write down that story from 2015, with the Theodora Hospital as we were known then. The stories of not just these missionaries but these extraordinary early nurses, like Wairegi and Salome who worked here for decades, who were initially trained informally, because we didn't even have accreditation for the nursing program. David - We didn't even exist as a country. Mardi - That's a really good point! To hear those stories and to see our very first lab technician was just amazing. And then when these 80 and 90-year-olds came over and saw the scope of the hospital as it exists now, it just gave me a glimpse into whatever we do today, we have no concept of 100 years from now, the fruit that that will bear. And I think a missional life, is like that, isn't it? It's being okay with not seeing fruit. There's foundations positive and negative, that all of us lay in the interactions and the work that we do and I think all of us, our prayer is that those seeds that we plant would bear fruit. We have to be okay with not seeing the fruit with saying this has been my contribution. I've stood on the shoulders of giants and now I hand over the baton to you, who will come after me. Make of it what you will. It's not my dream and it's not my goal, I've done my part, and let's see where God takes it through you. David - And so, very shortly, you're about to become a giant. [laughter] I really appreciate you, I appreciate you bringing that up. That was one of the most important things that could have ever happened. It was in the 2015. It was before we started Friends of Kijabe. The realization for me I always come back to how long life is. It's both amazingly short and amazingly long. Watching Dr. Barnett and realizing that he worked here for 30 years, and then went back to the states, so now he's... I think he just hit 102 years old. It really does bring in a clear view what is legacy, what does it mean and what are we building? But also that this is very much outside of us. We get to pour everything we have into it for a time, but then others will take up that work. And it's both humbling, and amazing and... Mardi - And I think it's helpful to as many of us have a sense of calling on our lives, I think that this is what God has for me now. But we have to hold that with open hands because our view and our understanding of what God is doing is so small and what he is doing is so large. I think sometimes in this kind of setting, you come in with a dream and a passion and a goal, but you see that path shift and change during the time that you're here and that is good and that is okay. I think a danger is when we come in and think that we have the answers or we know exactly where God is going, and then things don't work out, and we burn out or are bitter or disappointed. To come into a sense of mission and calling... Saying "not my will but yours be done," and to just obey in the day-to-day and to see where it goes and to be okay with the direction being different at the end than it was at the beginning - I think that's how we lead a life led by the Spirit. We hold these things with open hands and say, "God take it where you will" and if it's a different place, let me just play my part in that. David - Okay, I gotta dig into that cause. How do you balance that? I would frame it as vision. I feel like a good example to look at, I don't know if it's the right one, so, you can choose a different one if you want to, but the balance between vision and practicality and reality. Because you say that, and you are walking in the day-to-day, but I just think of the Organogram that has been on your wall, which was on Rich's, wall, which is now your's again, which is about to be Evelyn's wall. And you had this vision back in, "this is how I think the organization should work to function well." But there's a four-year process in making that come to pass. How do the day-to-day and the long-term balance? Mardi - I think we're talking about spiritual and practical things combined aren't we? I think that anyone who's in organizational leadership knows that you, your organization as a whole needs a trajectory and a long-term plan. We make these five-year strategic plans which are based on the assumptions of today and every strategic plan. You need to go back every couple of years and say, Were those assumptions right? And just to be a super business nerd for a minute, you base things on SWOT analyses and you base things on the current politics and economics. David - What does SWOT stand for? Mardi - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Then you do a PESTLE analysis, you look at the politics, you look at the economy, you look at the social environment of the day, etcetera etcetera. In technology everything is changing quicker than we can keep up with. And so I think that when you're looking at a place like a happy, which is large and complex, you set yourself some goals, and you work with them, but, you know, so something's going to change. Politics are gonna change, the economy's gonna tank, maybe there's gonna be a war on the other side of the world and we’re the only source of this, that, or the other?Maybe India falls into the sea and we start doing all of the surgeries that India was doing? I just don't even know. One thing for me, I've been enormously privileged to have been the medical director for two different terms that were separated by two years. And so I think I have a slightly unique perspective because from 2013 to 2016, I set the way I thought that our division would work and I came back into the role, two years later and already it had changed, but Rich had made it a better. It's funny, I when I came into the role, my predecessor. Steve Letchford said, "Look, you're gonna need a deputy, you can't do this by yourself." And I looked at my team and said "Um, No, I need four deputies, four sub-divisional heads because this is too much for one or two people and I can't keep my ear to the ground without it. I came back after two years away and there were five deputies and my initial gut reaction was, "You changed my structure!" And then I realized that Rich and Ken had made a really wise call. It did have to be five deputies for lots of really good reasons and that team of five has been my absolute rock this year. David - Who is the team of five? So the team of five, I've got a head of inpatient medicine and pediatrics, and specialties and this George Otieno. There's a head of Outpatient Department, and Community Health and Satellite clinics, and that's Miriam Miima. I've got ahead of Surgery and Anesthesia, and that's Jack Barasa. There's a head of Pharmacy, and that's Elizabeth Irungu. Then there's a head of what we call Allied and Diagnostic that incorporates the Lab and Pathology, Radiology, Physiotherapy, Nutrition and Audiology, and the head of that, it is Jeffrey Mashiya who is a radiographer. What's amazing to me about that is when I instituted this framework in 2014, there were four people and they were all missionaries. And I've come back in 2018 and there are five people and they're all our Kenyan senior staff and they're extraordinarily talented and any one of them can stand in for the medical director, when the medical director is away. What a gift that has been. David - I can't imagine how important this is for continuity. Because you think right now, you're handing off your responsibilities to Evelyn, but she has five people that...those are the executors and they actually get to groom her in leadership. That's amazing and for the strength of Kijabe and the stability, it's indispensable. I don't think there's another way to build a strong, stable system other than to build that. Mardi - Yeah, that's actually one of the things that brings me so much joy as I leave is the team isn't going to notice too much the change in senior leadership because that level of day-to-day practical strategic and operational leadership is just so strong. I think it made Ken as my CEO, I think it made his job easier to say, "Look, who should fill the position that Mardi is vacating?" He was able to say, "Who's got institutional memory and who's got leadership expertise and wisdom, and who knows how the senior leadership team works?" Whoever that person is, they're gonna have a team around them that will mean that no voices get lost in the transition. When I took the job in 2013, hearing the voices of specifically missionaries and surgeons can be really noisy and you hear their voices, but who's listening to the head of palliative care and who's listening to the head of laboratory who's listening to the head of nutrition, which is a tiny team of four people, those voices are well represented by wise people who all listen to each other and make the system work around them. It's a tremendous gift and there's no way to do this job without a team of people like that around you. And you know what, that's one of my other Ebenezers, David. Thursday, we installed Evelyn as the incoming medical director. Seeing those five sub-divisional heads praying for Evelyn and as that took off, I will never forget that. David - Absolutely. I wasn't here the first time, but I remember I should print out a series of those [pictures] because I remember you handing the hat to Rich and I remember it going back to you and then watching you give Evelyn the hat and stethoscope. There's this legacy of people that care. It's interesting to think about... 'cause you are, I mean you’re building this remarkable team and your system and things that operate independently of you. But at the same time, you're unbelievably special, and have given a ton over the past years and you. As Rich phrased it, you walked in shoes that not many other people will get to walk in. It's special. I imagine is what it's like when the former presidents get together for their picture. There's things that only only you guys will know and only you guys will have experienced. Mardi - You know, one thing that is really special is I think a lot of leadership transitions come through pain, brutality and war. And one thing that I noticed on Thursday, is that in the room as I handed over leadership to evil and were Steve Letchford and Peter Bird, who have both been here for decades and who've previously been the medical directors. I think there's a beauty about the transition of leadership here in the clinical division that it hasn't come through attrition, war and burnout. I'm leaving with a lot of sadness, and I'm not cutting ties with this place to see. . . there has been a cost. Rich. I know, I would still love to be here in this position as the person who is my predecessor…but to see such strength of leadership that is here and sowing into the next generation rather than leaving when they died. They've stepped down and gone into leading other areas to ensure that the team that follows them is strong, I think that's a tremendous gift and something unique about Kijabe. People love this place and they love this team and they wanna be a part of its ongoing success in its broader mission. David - And they love and they love that above their own glory and their own desires. I think it's what makes an organization great, it’s what makes a country great. I think it's probably gonna be easier in a place of faith, honestly, that this is God's ministry, not our own, not any one persons's. FPECC What is FPECC? I think it's important for people to know a little bit about how hard is it to create a training program or anything new in Kenya? Mardi - So FPECC is the fellowship program in pediatric emergency and critical care. Ariana [Shirk] and I are pediatric emergency physicians, we trained in pediatrics, and then we did specially training in how to take care of emergencies and resuscitation. And were the only two formally trained pediatric emergency doctors in Kenya. Critical Care is taking care of kids in ICUs and currently in the country, there are four pediatric ICU doctors for 55 million people. I don't have the stats that my finger tips, but it's extraordinarily low. I think of the city where you live and how many ICU beds there are, and how many children's hospitals you have just in your own city if you're based in a high income country. For 55 million people, there's kids just can’t access that care. David - Recently, I'm sure it's gone up, but two years ago, it was 100 beds for the country. Mardi - For adults and kids. . . In the country, there are a 12 pediatric ICU beds. Actually no, that's not true, there are 16 and eight of them came into existence, when we opened up our Peds ICU here three years ago. David - And keep in mind, this is East Africa, of the 56 million people. . .33 million of those are under age 18. So 16 beds. Mardi - That's right. Think of anything that can cause a critical illness. Trauma, illness, cancer, you name it, that's not enough beds. So when I came to Kenyo, I had no dream of starting a training program that wasn't even remotely on my radar. But sometimes things just come together at the right time. It was actually University of Nairobi, where they have the only other Peds ICU, they had been working with University of Washington in Seattle to say, “Look, can you help us start some training?” This is really important, because in East Africa there is nowhere that a pediatrician can learn how to run an ICU. Think of the US, where every state has got multiple training programs, where pediatricians will spend three years to learn to be an ICU doctor. There is nowhere for 360 million people in this region to learn how to do ICU care for children. Just think about that for a second. 360 million people... No training program. There's one in Cairo, and there's one in Cape Town, but that's for 600 million people. So I'm just taking a few of them where there's nowhere to go. University of Nairobi was talking to Seattle. They've got two Peds ICU doctors in Nairobi and they were thinking of starting a program. Then just through several contacts, actually through the Christian mission network, one of University of Washington's ICU doctors grew up in Nigeria but she's involved with the Christian Medical and Dental Association, and so she knew about Kijabe. The University of Washington team came out to Kenya for a visit, and they said, "Hey we heard you doing some ICU care caring Kijabe. Can we come out and see what's happening?" That was in 2013. They came out and said "Hey what are you guys doing here?" And we showed them around, and their minds were blown, they didn't know there was any peds ICU happening outside of Nairobi at all. And so, we rapidly started some conversations and said "Look, why don't we start a training program in Pediatric Emergency Care and Critical Care and our trainees can train at both Kijabe hospital and Kenyatta hospital in Nairobi and they can get an exposure to two different types of ICUs. They can also take advantage of the fact that Ariana and I are here as Peds Emergency faculty, and we can split the training load. Training programs in the US have dozens of faculty for something like this, to rely on just two doctors in Nairobi was an incredible risk even though University of Washington is supporting with visiting faculty. So we said, "Look, we've got all these people in the country at the same time, let's just try and do it." So we started that process in 2013. We took our first fellows at the beginning of this year. It's taken us six years. That's how things work here. You've got to form relationships. University of Nairobi didn't know us real well when it came to our pediatric care. We had to get to know each other, we had to develop a curriculum. We had to let the Ministry of Health know. We had to get the Kenya pediatrics Association on side. The Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board, had to approve the program. The University Senate had to approve the program. We had to try and get some funding in place. None of that happens quickly. It's all relationship that's all a lot of chai. That's all a lot of back and forth and making sure that you don't try and skip anything to get through the hoops, any quicker than you need to, because if you try to go to quick it falls apart. And if University of Nairobi and Kenya doesn't own this program, it's not gonna last. And I think that's probably the first thing to take away for me is this program exists because University of Nairobi and Kenya wanted it I didn't come in here and say, "We need this.” University of Nairobi wanted it, and we said, "How can we support it?" And so Arianna showing up here for a short-term visit - which we rapidly recruited you guys as long-term - it was God's timing because Ariana and I couldn't have done this independently from each other. It's taken both of us to build those relationships over the last six years. Arianna and I are so proud of this program. Our first two graduates will finish this training at end of December 2020, and we hope and pray that we can recruit them to stay at Kijabe and University of Nairobi as our first home-grown faculty. What's been lovely about that, too, is that we've connected with people all over the world who want to support this kind of thing, they just didn't know how. David - Not did they not know how, there wasn’t a way. It literally did not exist until February 2019. Mardi - So now, we're actually talking to colleagues in Uganda and Tanzania, and colleagues in Sudan and other places about... “Hey, is this a good model for you?” I've got some contacts in Nigeria, they've got how many million people, 30 million people or something ridiculous? And there's no way to get this training there either. And people all over the world want to be able to support what a country wants to start in its own strategy. So that's something that I'm just thrilled to be leaving. Even as we leave next month, I'm hoping and planning to come back at least once a year to teach in the program for the forseeable future and to support Arianna from a distance in continuing to connect people all over the world to say, "Here's a way that your global health desires can interface with a local country's needs." David - You two are the only Peds Emergency Medicine doctors in the country and there's a realization. . .What actually is Emergency Medicine here and what is the difference between what it looks like here versus America? Mardi - Yeah, it's a really great question. First of all, Ariana and I trained in a country where there are multiple children's hospitals per city. So, Pediatric Emergency Medicine is the Emergency Department attached to a children's hospital. There are less than 10 children's hospitals on this entire continent, I think. So there are no Pediatric Emergency departments. What is really great is that Emergency Medicine combined adult and pediatric is a growing specialty here. There's been so much great work that's going on in so many countries around the region. Rwanda last year, just graduated their first class of emergency residents. Uganda just on the cusp, the great advocate there, Annette Allenyo is leading the charge for emergency medicine. Ben Wachira is an Emergency Medicine trained doctor here at Agha University, and they're on the cusp of starting an emergency medicine residency training program. You know Emergency Medicine's a funny thing. Emergency medicine in a high-income country, is a part of a functioning system. Emergency medicine in the US means that you've got ambulances that get your people to you and you've got an ICU at the other end that you send sick people to. Emergency medicine here is. . . people showing up on our door step, we don't know how to get them here and then where do we send them? I think that Emergency Medicine training here is so much more broad. We're training people not only how to provide Emergency Medicine, but how to be advocates in a broader system. And I think if you live in a high income country, you can't understand how much medical training is not about medical training. It's about advocacy and building access to care for people, no matter where they're at. What I see emerging here is…from the start, it's collaborative. Emergency Medicine training here isn't just training a doctor in a specialty to give you a certificate and leave you there. It's connecting you with people who are trying to get paramedic systems going and people trying to build ICU care. That's one of the reasons we realized that our Pediatric Emergency and Critical Care program had to be both. There's not enough places to work where you've got the luxury of staying in the ICU. Our graduates are gonna go out and work in hospitals where they will be expert trainers for the pediatricians running the ICU and the family medicine doctors running the emergency department and the surgeons who are doing pediatric surgery with just general training. Our graduates are gonna be those advocates drawing teams together asking "How can we improve the system from arrival at our doorstep till the day we send them home." It's a different focus in our training. Yes, the skills are necessary. You need to know how to run a ventilator and keep a heart pumping when it's not. But it's about building a team and being a part of solving systems issues and hopefully in a way that is affordable and sustainable. David - I love that word, systems. For me, this is the year of systems. Thinking broadly about each of these individual parts because it’s another way that healthcare here is very different from healthcare in the US. The US is just sub-specialization, that's what it's all about. And here, there's not a fine line between. . .for an Emergency Medicine doctor, you're not sitting out in casualty waiting for a kid to come in, right? If you want to find the emergency, you just walk around and lay eyes on every kid and there's gonna be one out of 70 children in that building, who is in trouble. So it really is a bigger and broader way of thinking about things. Mardi - I think another thing that's interesting to me just as we come back to the missional aspect of who we are... I think 00 years ago, a missionary was someone who would go into deepest, darkest wherever and be whoever they wanted to be. I think as we consider what is global mission, our question needs to be, “What is that country looking for, what systems are they trying to develop and how do we help them in it?" And that comes down to health…if you're a missionary, what does the local church want to do? What is their mission and how can we assist them? I think we need to ask better, what system is someone trying to build and how can we be a part of it. Because that's the key, isn't it? We're here to serve God who is restoring creation and he's doing it in lots of different ways already. We don't need to necessarily think we've got the answer, but to say "God, where are you working and how can I be a part of it, and what does it look like?" I think Mary Adam in her community health project, is a really lovely example of that. Community Health growth is a priority of Kenya. So she's gotten grant funding and she is just sowing in it, she knows every county Governor in the country, I'm suspecting. She knows how to get into the system, but how to be salt and light, and how to be the love of Jesus in making things functional and making all things new. I think that's one thing that I think Kijabe is doing well. We are looking at health strategy and saying How can we be a part of it and love that our FPECC program is in partnership with University of Nairobi. I love that our clinical offices have a program that we got accredited for called the Emergency Critical Care Clinical Officer program, that actually wasn't a part of hell strategy, but we did see a gap, and as soon as we trained people in that we went to the Clinical Officer of Council and said, "Hey you want to accredit this? This is a really good program. And they did, and now the Kenya Medical training training college has taken that program and they're doing their own program. I think those are lovely examples of saying “We're here to bring restoration but we don't want to be separate from the system. Where are you going and how can we help” David - What does that mean for friends of Kijabe? How do you see that working with Friends of Kijabe as an organization? Mardi - What's been really lovely, about Friends of Kijabe in the last year, and I know you're excited about this, David, is in what the core the Friends of Kijabe vision and mission. I think a core part of Friends of Kijabe that we've got the CEO, the CFO and the Director of Clinical Services on the Friends of Kijabe board. One question that I've heard you ask so many times in the last year is "Where are you going and how can we help, what are your priorities? Friends of Kijabe exists to help the hospital further its strategy, but also exists as a bit of a connector between people in high-income countries who really want to contribute and who have passions. Where does that intersect with the hospital strategy? So Friends of Kijabe is not going to take the whole hospital strategy and try and piecemeal help every part of it. They're gonna say, "Hey you're a part of your strategy that are happy resonates with and that's become very clear. A lot of Friends of Kijabe funding currently goes towards whatever the hospital thinks is important. The hospital has prioritized the theater expansion project this year and that's great. But, at its core, Friends of Kijabe also says, "We support the needy. We support education. We support sustainability. How can we get there?" And so [FoK] has prioritized putting money towards each of those areas which happened to align with the core values of Kijabe Hospital. So a large proportion of what Friends of Kijabe hospital is doing this year is helping us with an infrastructure project. But every year we're going re-ask "What are your priorities, and how can we help that?" But we're also going to say, "Here is where our heart beats. Can we help with this too?" I think one of the things about Friends of Kijabe is the trust that's developed since its inception. As Friends of Kijabe, we trust that the hospital leadership is following a strategy that is meaningful, that is sustainable, and that is in line with where Kenya is going and where the African Inland Church is going because that's who we're owned and operated by. As long as our missions intersect, I think Friends of Kijabe can trust that at the hospital is taking us in a good direction. David - Awesome, anything else I should ask you? Anything you'd like to add? Mardi - No. It's been an extraordinary eight years and it's been such a privilege to be here, and it's lovely to leave with joy, even as there's associated sadness. I really can't wait to see what the next few decades bring, and I'm gonna be watching both from a distance and also up close, when I come back to visit. David - Thank you Mardi.

Darrin: [00:00:00] Today my guest is a returning guest. Daniel Ameduri. He's the author and founder of the newsletter and the YouTube channel Future Money Trends. And also he's got a book most recently. It's called, Don't Save for Retirement. And we're gonna talk to Daniel a little bit about strategies that worked for one generation and maybe wrong for the next. But first a quick reminder if you like the show, CREPN Radio, please let us know. You can like, share or subscribe and you can also leave a comment. And we love to hear from our listeners. Also if you want to see how handsome our guests are, be sure to check out our YouTube channel. That's Commercial Real Estate Pro Network with that, I want to welcome my guest Daniel. Welcome back to CREPN Radio. [00:00:47][46.8] Daniel: [00:00:48] Well thank you so much for coming on the show. [00:00:49][1.1] Darrin: [00:00:50] Well I'm delighted to have you back and I'm looking forward to our conversation today. And before we get started if you could just take a minute and share with the audience a little bit about your background. [00:01:00][9.9] Daniel: [00:01:02] Yeah I mean it's the background is in the book. Don't save for retirement. So, I'd highly recommend that everybody everybody check that out. And it starts off with me and my wife at a bankruptcy attorney's office in 2008. And today we are financially free and traveling the world with our children. But like many people I went through all those other cycles I had I had a lot of credit card debt. I had housing mortgages. I had foreclosures. A lot of foreclosures in the '08 crisis and I just kind of stumbled my way through it and eventually came across all the right people. It's such a small world, building wealth and investing in real estate. And I've been doing this as a hobby for many many years. And then I started a Web site and that's pretty much my labor of love that I do and it does it makes a great living as well now. But I did it for free for a year. So I'm very lucky to be able to do my hobby which is anything and everything personal finance. [00:01:56][54.5] Darrin: [00:01:58] I love it. And as I recall your Future Money Trends you were one of the first YouTube would be the first to get paid doing YouTube. It was kind of like you were a pioneer if I remember right. [00:02:10][12.3] Daniel: [00:02:11] You know, I was well I was one of probably only two people talking about the economy in 2008 on YouTube and made some very successful predictions. It's funny I actually thought the predictions would happen earlier so I patted them well they end up having like dead on by patting them which was the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the Dow Jones. And the the Google had taken it over and eventually it contacted me and said hey we're starting a new thing called YouTube partnership and I end up getting paid by YouTube. So that was really cool because I was literally doing these videos every week for free and then all said I'm doing the same exact thing I was doing but I was making about twenty five hundred a month from Google which which was which was awesome at the time. [00:02:53][41.6] Darrin: [00:02:53] Now that's great. That's kind of love here. So let's talk a little bit about your book. The title is definitely an attention getting one Don't Save for Retirement. It's a little different than you know look both ways before crossing the street. Can you expand a little bit. I mean on on just the concept don't save for retirement. [00:03:15][21.8] Daniel: [00:03:17] You know the book could have been called Don't Save for Conventional Retirement. But I think the conventional would have been too much in the title. So we Don't Save for Retirement and you know specifically to the younger generation I think that saving for conventional retirement is it's an experiment that has pretty much failed for most of the baby boomers. Even the ones that were high income earners who live like peasants you know now they've conditioned themselves to save save save save save. And if you speak to many of them or if you read some of the data from Fidelity they're living in this scarcity mentality they're having trouble even spending the money because you can't you can't save for 30 or 40 years and then cut your active income out of your life and then all of sudden draw from this chunk of money. I mean it'll make you sick to your stomach when you think about it. And for young people today who would who would do that to themselves after we've already seen that it's not working. I don't understand why they would do it. So there is another way there is a way that's been proven for thousands and thousands of years and it's what the rich do. And so instead of being speculative with your money and putting it in a 401k and hoping it goes up. And by the way the most speculative part of the 401K isn't the stocks in it. It's the you have no idea what rate you're going to pay on withdraw. Nobody would take a loan from a bank and not know what your interest rate is. But that's what we do every day when we take that deduction on the 401K. We have no idea what the tax rate is going to be when we withdraw that money. All we do know right now is we have to pay a 10 percent penalty that extra money which is kind of frustrating. So the middle classes are very focused on speculation and appreciation. And the rich are focused on preservation and income. And if we simply adopt that lifestyle combined with sustainability, a sustainable lifestyle. You can be financially free and independent within five to 10 years. [00:05:04][107.7] Darrin: [00:05:06] I tell you it's something that's deffinately I guess kind of crystallized in my focus and and I know one of things I've recognized as both a you know, I'm getting older myself and aging parents and also clients as a as an insurance broker have clients that you know they get in the business they grow the business than they they get out of business. And I think that that the thought process for me has crystallized is that recognition of the people you know people work really hard to grow something but very rarely have a crystal clear idea how they're going to get out. Or how they're going to get their money you know out and whether or not that's fully understood. And like you just said I think that's for some member of her dad is that notion of not understanding the cost to get your money kind of thing as opposed to you know you've been working so hard to put this in put this in put this in put this in put this in. So that's that's awesome. [00:06:05][59.4] Daniel: [00:06:08] By the way Darrin, the the tax rates if you look at the federal income tax it was this low in 1931 and for a brief lip in the 1980s. But if you if you kind of look at the chart we're basically paying the lowest taxes right now since 1931 and then you gotta ask yourself a twenty two trillion dollars in debt and trillion our deficits do you think taxable going up or down. And I think it's pretty obvious tax are going to go up eventually. And so you're pretty much guaranteed to pay a higher tax than you are today. [00:06:40][32.1] Darrin: [00:06:41] Well you're saying that trickle down isn't going to work? What are you saying? [00:06:43][2.0] Daniel: [00:06:45] I'm saying, it doesn't matter what you what happened but it's been a long time coming. The United States is definitely on a trajectory of being in an unsustainable situation. [00:06:53][8.9] Darrin: [00:06:55] Gotcha. So let's talk about some of the aspects of the lifestyle or the different way of thinking. What do you see as some of the traditional ways of thinking that have gotten people to this point. [00:07:12][16.5] Daniel: [00:07:13] I think the normalcy bias of of the acceptance of so much debt in one's life. Financing a car for five to seven, eight years. If you if you make fifty thousand dollars a year buying a fifty thousand dollar car it makes no sense. But it's actually quite normal in our world. It's a perceived as normal but it shouldn't be. Same thing for a house. I understand the appeal of getting a three decade loan. Well why does it have to be ten times your annual income. Why are people buying things seven times their annual income. That's unsustainable it puts them in a situation where there is no room for error there's no room for living. And like most things in life a lot of times people are buying things to impress other people. When the reality is after the first day of introducing your new car to your friends, no one cares and you're stuck with a bill. I remember when I became financially dependent I was still driving a 2003 Nissan Altima and it was almost like a badge of honor. Now at the time I was in save and sacrifice mode and you know in the beginning and now I'm not going to lie to people Look the book will explain in the book you're gonna do this if you really want to become financially independent fast you could do it slow. I'm saying if you do that you're gonna have to have some upfront sacrifices for the first year to two years. But as you sacrifice and save and then have that mind shift say of living a sustainable life combined with instead of buying things for speculation you start buying things for income that those good decisions start to compound on themselves and all of a sudden your expenses are way down and you have multiple streams of income instead of just one source from yourself or two from yourself and a spouse. You might have six or seven sources of income coming in in the beginning it might be small it might be only fifty dollars a month but you'll use that to pay a water bill off, or you'll use that to buy more income. But I want people to understand that this is not income that you just save and save and save for you know 30 years and maybe it works out for you. This is income that is usable as spendable income and can also grow. But the main focus is having that sustainable lifestyle combined with multiple streams of income as much income as you can bring into your life. [00:09:28][134.8] Darrin: [00:09:30] The streams of income. What have you found to be the. The I guess the I don't the norm. But are there some go to points for you know buying a stream of income that you you find people go to? [00:09:43][12.9] Daniel: [00:09:44] You know conventional thought is dividend paying stocks and bonds and fixed things from banks. But the reality is as you're far better off being involved in the real estate market. And if you look at other countries who've gone through a crisis, the real estate investors always come out okay on the other side. It's a physical property. People no matter what happens in the economy people need a place to live. So I tend to have a heavy bias towards either real estate note investing, physical real estate, rental properties, commercial real estate. There's a lot of opportunities in commercial real estate because there's more seller financed deals than there are in let's say if you wanted to buy a single family home get credit or something. So I think there's a lot of opportunities to create passive income in real estate. And if you're like a I don't want nothing to do with that kind of stuff that's fine too. There is tons of crowdfunding type real estate vehicles like Fund Rise and Peer Street. And then there's also old money private REITS that have been around for 70 years and I love those because they've been around through multiple crashes including the 2008 crash. And these companies regularly are paying out eight to ten even twelve percent yields and you know people are like well what do you own. What do you own your own slivers of J.W. Marriott properties and you own fractional shares of a brand new Walgreens and beautiful golf courses. So a lot of times instead of buying a physical individual single family home where you have a lot of risk you can own some of that you can actually upgrade your income by partnering with some of these groups who invest in very quality projects and assets. [00:11:19][94.9] Darrin: [00:11:20] So may I ask you the comparison between the an income stream as opposed to the traditional 401K mentality of put your money in the stock market as a stock market you're 401K. What do you think there's more of a mentality shift is it taking control or is it just doing what's comfortable and presented to you as an option what do you see as kind of the the hurdle for people to get from. The traditional way to of an income stream. [00:11:54][33.5] Daniel: [00:11:54] The biggest hurdle is that they've all been conditioned that this is the way to go. And certainly the intentions were probably great for retirement and that's a great incentive to bring the best employees and give them a great retirement plan. But this is relatively new you can trace the pension system back. Do the Romans. But then it skips you know eight hundred years and jumps to Germany in the late eighteen hundreds. And you know the 401k the IRA, all this stuff, most people don't realize that this has been around. It was passed in the late 70s it's been around essentially since the 80s. And a lot of these things have become great vehicles for a Wall Street to make money. The fees the commissions the vehicles the ETF the explosion of mutual funds there's a lot more mutual funds and there are stocks. And so this has been a great time for Wall Street and there's a book I can't think of the guy's name but the title is Where are All the Clients Yachts? And I think that's what people should look at where all the clients yachts you know Wall Street. And if you look at hedge funds and Goldman Sachs what they're buying or what some of the richest and wealthiest institutions are buying. It's much different from what their clients are buying. And certainly anybody who's going to run a portfolio you have to run it like a business and businesses need cash flow. So it's just such a shame that most people just blindly throw the money at the 401K. 60 Minutes has done studies, all these hidden fees? Sometimes are taken up to a third of what you should have made. And they've got even worse ones now where you do these targeted things and they think you have even more fees. So everybody treats it like it's been a perfect world like Adam came out with the 401k plan and the Dow Jones has been around for a thousand years and it's not one of this is you can't just tell everybody that it's going to compound it's 12 percent for the rest of your life. That's ridiculous. And by the way one last thing was quick. No no nobody nobody compounds average returns. You know they're commonly saying the average return is 10 percent or 12 percent. But let's be real. No one's compounding at an average return. The stock market goes up. You might buy high then it's down. And you know look at if a stock stock doubles 100 percent one year and then goes down 50 percent they'll tell you about the average return. But you know where are you right back to where you started. [00:14:15][140.3] Darrin: [00:14:16] Right. Right. I've always wondered about that. How you can actually calculate the return and and it is. I mean conceptually saving for a future date for whether it be a purchase or some sort of a financially to be financially free. Concept makes sense. But I think that what I what I hear you saying is the where is the money going and how is the money work. Whereas on a like a real estate it seems like a little bit more clear or there's a direct line of if you can understand exactly. Money goes in there is a vehicle whether it be the the note you have to pay the income that's coming in from the rent. I mean it's it's a little more direct as a kind of what I'm hearing. [00:15:08][51.2] Daniel: [00:15:08] Yes. And I'm not all in on real estate. I own a lot of stocks too. And I'm going to teach them to buy stocks they own Disney and Costco and Kimberly-Clark. These great companies great businesses that over deliver. And the reason, they pay a dividend. So it's very important I train I train my children like hey if you're going to invest in a business they need to share in the profits. That's the entire purpose. If you remember there used to be a video back in World War 2 and it was on YouTube and it explains why people buy stocks and it explains about that. They companies are receiving capital to grow the business and then they share profits with investors. But somewhere along this journey companies stopped sharing the profits with investors and everyone just became a speculator. If the only way for you to make money is for the next guy to pay more than you you are speculating. So if you're going to buy a stock buy a stock but make sure they're sharing in the profits. That's the entire purpose of owning a business. [00:16:02][54.6] Darrin: [00:16:05] I love that. Because I think the you know a lot of what happened up up to the 2000s and that was more about stock split stock split stock split and it was more of like said just a speculative thing. And again I'm not the biggest in the stock market or anything. I don't fully you know keep an eye on him like others do. And I'm sure you do. But just the whole notion of the price per earnings and stuff now that has blown way out of the round of what was traditionally thought to be a a model and maybe speak to that even just as it is that it my speaking in relative terms or is it. [00:16:47][42.0] Daniel: [00:16:48] But you're right they throw that out on market watchdog comments CNBC about P E ratios or the Dow to gold theory that all these different things look it's all Fugazi. The game has changed there's algorithms involved there's more computer trading for half a penny than there are humans. So things have things have changed. And if we don't change with it and consider that all these changes have been have happened, we we will end up losing money. And we won't get any of it. We won't be able to retire. And I say again you know in the book Don't Save for Retirement which by the way I have for your listeners at future money trans dot com slash save. They can read the first chapter in the intro for free. And the book comes out on August 20th. But they can read that anytime right now. So you know if people just keep following these these metrics look it's it's we have no idea the last 20 years is going to look totally different than the next 20 years. Think about it some of the biggest companies on the planet; Netflix, Instagram, Facebook, Uber. Biggest company some of the biggest companies on the planet. They didn't exist 11 years ago. Some of them did these meetings 10 years ago. So a lot of things are going to change. So I don't like using any of those metrics in the end. How much am I going to invest and how much am I going to make every month or every year from the income. [00:18:11][83.0] Darrin: [00:18:13] Another reminder just to have nothing last forever kind of thing. And you know kind of drive home that speculative speculation. You know if you're if you're waiting for you're waiting for a way for it it may never come kind of thing based on you think about some of the companies that were you know that were so big and dominant my childhood that are no longer. But that's great. So you mentioned a little bit about your kids and you know working with them and getting them taught you know invest in the market, but know that they're going to get a return that the company is going to share in the profits. Are there any other kind of points that you recommend people talk in with their kids about. I mean I think that's kind of what do you think should you talk about this generational thing and that like for you know the baby boomers it may have worked but the the Gen Xers or the Millennials it's clearly not what they're looking for. Is there is are there some points that you make for young people for especially for kids. I mean I would say elementary you know kids haven't gotten started in the workforce yet. [00:19:24][71.1] Daniel: [00:19:25] So with my family I have a 5 year old 7 year old and a 9 year old. We regularly talk about money if we have on a property we go to an investment we look at we look at it together. There is an escrow closing. They come in the office and sit down on the floor. They're just around it just like you know if you want to teach your kid the construction trade you bring them on the job site. You to teach your kid to farm, you bring them on the job site. I want that. I want to know how to invest. It's very important to have this mindset of having a buying income bringing them come into your life. So Cambridge did a study that financial habits are actually developed by age 7. So absolute you mentioned elementary school kids as early as you can. We played Monopoly with the kids that very simple one when they were young. Now they play the regular one they pay the Cash Flow Game by Robert Kiyosaki. Instead of playing Uno there's a game you can buy called Net Worth very similar to Uno which kids love. However on Net Worth, you're paying off debt, you're paying off credit. So it's good to get the mindset into focusing on on those type of things and understanding it. Keep in mind parents they're not going to get any of this in school they're gonna get nothing. In fact they might even get some bad habits talk to them but so it's important for the parents to you know go over with them. I love when my kids have to buy something they pay for it at Target or something if they're buying a toy they have to look at the receipt and explain to me what's going on. You know I'll help them. Course the five or seven year old but they have to understand the value of money. And it's interesting I was at the store my son the other day and we bought just a handful of items and it came out to seventy nine dollars. He was he. He understood the values like. I'm surprised I thought that would be like 20 bucks and it's kind of helping him understand hey when you make you know when you save one hundred dollars from birthday parties don't go blowing 50 dollars on some toy. In fact we make our kids safe 50 percent of everything they make. Originally they were saving it in checking accounts and was like You know why aren't they buying assets that buy income. So we opened up a brokerage account for them and now they buy you know some very friendly stocks that they actually engage with because it's a twofold lesson there. If you let's just do it easy example. But if you get your kids the buy Disney stock not only are they understanding a little bit more about the stock market and business and fractional shares because that stock does pay dividends but they also understand it might even make them more interested when they hear about Marvel making a billion dollars or something or the park because they realize hey I'm making more money and they'll really start to connect but I even go like a step further when we interact with Disney on their cruise ships or their their parks. I always talk to the kids I'm like What do you notice about Disney versus another theme park or Costco's another stock. They only like what do you guys. Like going to Costco they love going to Costco. Do you like going to any other grocery store on the planet. No. Who the hell cares about going to Vons or Safeway or any Kroger? You don't feel anything when you go to those great stores. But the Costco has an experience and I and I always bring that up to them and I'm like What is this business doing? And it's very important to teach the kids to over deliver because outside of the investments kids need to understand that you don't make money from working super hard or being super smart or working for this guy that guy. You make money. The simple equation, you give value to other people and if you give more value than they paid for you'll make more money. So I'm very very focused on teaching them that no matter what you do whether you're a I have a job or a business you always over deliver for people and that will be your economic peace and security over delivering for whoever you're working with. [00:23:01][216.0] Darrin: [00:23:03] Now I love that I love the just the concept of money and getting them glued into it as soon as possible. I know my oldest just got his driver's license and we've had the conversation about the gas pump you know. And they're always surprised at what it cost to put gas in the car. You know kind of things like throw money. That's great. Hey Daniel if we could I'd like to shift gears here for a little bit. As I mentioned before we started I'm an insurance broker by day. And work my clients to assess risk and determine what to do with the risk. And there's a couple of strategies we typically consider and one is avoid the risk to is minimize risk and then three is transfer the risk which is what an insurance policy is. And recently I've started asking all my guests to identify what they consider to be the BIGGEST RISK. And just to clarify I'm not I'm not necessarily looking for an insurance related answer. [00:24:08][64.9] Darrin: [00:24:10] But if you could if you Daniel Ameduri could say what you see is the BIGGEST RISK? [00:24:20][9.8] Daniel: [00:24:20] I think my personal biggest risk at this point because of what I learned in the scars from 0 8. My biggest risk right now is simply myself. I have no debt. I am a big believer and having no debt I've surrounded myself with 21 sources of income. I have a great business. So I mean I'm well capitalized. I'm not leveraged. So all the missed all the big risks that I that blew me up the first time out are out of my life. So I would say the biggest risk is just me perhaps wanting to go on too many trips. Too many travelling trips. Not being focused. Losing my focus. Losing what got me here. And I'll give you a perfect example. I mean I just spent thirty five days in a trip that we went to Kenya and then we came on a week and then went to Japan for three weeks. So my biggest risk is just having too much fun in life at this point because I've done the hard stuff. You know if you if if everybody is not happy with that answer I could say the biggest risk to all of us is probably the bond market. You know I mean that could throw the real estate market into a tailspin it could totally implode the stock market could even affect the U.S. currency so my absolute real biggest risks are things I can't control. The biggest risk that I can't control is me sleeping in. [00:25:41][80.6] Darrin: [00:25:42] Yes. That's great. You know I recently I've been reading Howard Marks some of his books on. I think one of it's like the biggest or the biggest thing or the one biggest thing. [00:25:57][15.2] Daniel: [00:25:58] It's always the Most Important Thing. [00:25:58][0.0] Darrin: [00:26:00] Yeah The Most Important Thing. yeah, yeah, yeah. And just his is just how it's it's everywhere. I mean the risk it's not limited to one thing and what I think the theme that I keep hearing him come back to is people. You know it's none of it's you know the market is not mechanical. I mean you can set something on a on a path but it's the interaction of people and how they react and whether you know the emotions of the people of the market and like said things that you can't control that are really the things that that you know are out there. [00:26:36][35.8] Daniel: [00:26:36] So so true because think about when you buy like a smaller company you know I've invested in a lot of these cannabis companies and I hope they do well and they should do well. But you know what. Sometimes I go to bed thing I'm like Man the whole thing holding that company together is one guy. The founder and CEO who's working 16 hours a day. I'm like if that guy if something happens that guy across the street that company is going to zero. And it might not necessarily be as drastic for like your blue chip stocks, but there are some very very good CEOs who are the driving force of their businesses that have something happen to them. You can imagine a company might go into a tailspin or lose its focus like much like Apple did when they lost Jobs. Jobs literally when he came back the second time he pretty much pulled the company from saying they had like 1 percent of the market at that point I mean companies basically was going to die. And now it's you know one of the most popular companies and probably the most popular brand on the planet. [00:27:30][54.1] Darrin: [00:27:32] Right. Right now it is it is interesting and you don't realize it. I think a lot of times on the is things are starting and going. But just how much of the identity and momentum that a company has is tied up with the founder or you know one or a couple of people kind of thing and that's that's interesting. Daniel where can the listeners go if they would like to learn more and connect with you. [00:27:58][26.7] Daniel: [00:27:59] I would love for them to go to FutureMoneyTrends.com/save. They'll be able to subscribe to the free weekly wealth digest. You'll get letters about what the different experiences my wife and I went through as we were coming up as well as exactly what we're investing in right now and I'd like to bounce a lot of different cash flow ideas up some experts. So we're trying to introduce new cash ideas, because I'm selfish I want more I want to learn more and so I share it as soon as I get it with everybody. And you'll also be able to read the intro to the book as well as the first chapter and there'll be a link there if you want to continue reading the book. And you can buy it on Amazon. [00:28:34][35.4] Darrin: [00:28:36] And I will put on the show notes and I highly encourage any of the listeners to go check that out. I've read the first chapter or so and it's extremely well-written and it's a compelling story. And for anybody that's interested in you know how to take control of your money I highly encourage you checking out Daniel's stuff. So it's good stuff. Daniel I want to say thanks for taking the time I've enjoyed it. And as always learn a lot and I hope we can do it again soon. [00:29:04][27.6] Daniel: [00:29:05] I really appreciate your time. Thank you. [00:29:06][1.2] Darrin: [00:29:07] All right. For listeners if you like this episode don't forget to Like, Share, and subscribe. Remember the more you know the more you grow. That's all we've got this week. Until next time thanks for listening to Commercial Real Estate Pro Networks CREPN Radio. [00:29:07][0.0] For more go to: https://www.futuremoneytrends.com/ Book 1st chapter: https://www.futuremoneytrends.com/save

Everyone likes to say that your offer sucks without actually telling you what's wrong with it. Well I'm here to tell you little secret about what that could mean... and give you a little gift that can help you solve your offer post, engagement problems. Welcome to the CopySlayers Podcast, and in episode 15, I'll be talking about: 1) A free gift that I want to give you that can help you figure out if your offer really works or is a bust 2) and the crazy benefits you can receive when this gift gets your audience buzzing non-stop ------ Grab your Offer Test Post Template here: http://bit.ly/offertesttemplate ------ Remember to email me your questions to Tori@ShiftCopyCo.com with the #AskTori tag, and I'll answer them in a future podcast. ------ Click this link to join the CopySlayers community on Facebook -- bit.ly/copyslayers Subscribe to CopySlayer TV on Youtube to get different visual lessons and some special treat's from the Facebook community -- https://bit.ly/30yKFdB And to get more pro-tips about how to write mouthwatering copy that actually converts, subscribe to this channel! ------ You can find us on Anchor FM, Spotify and iTunes! - iTunes: https://apple.co/32uG91k - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2xYtDt2 - Anchor FM: https://bit.ly/2Sopqbw

Sheri is the Chief Strategy Officer at Gregory & Appel Insurance...and she received news of her breast cancer on her way into a client meeting. In this episode, Sheri tells her story of managing the demands of work, marriage, and parenting in the midst of fighting cancer. Sheri shares her coping mechanism of “putting things on the shelf”, imparts a host of helpful local resources, and reflects on how she now gives support in the workplace as a result of her diagnosis.   – Sheri Alexander When people are dealing with whatever it is and there are so many life events that can cause pain and heartache and suffering people go radio silent. Some people that would really surprise you can go radio silent and that. And I think people that do that do that for their own reasons. They don't know how or what to say. Make something up.   INTRO   Sheri Alexander is an accomplished woman.  She is the Chief Strategy Officer at Gregory & Appel Insurance in Indianapolis and her bio is full of awards and recognition.  She sits on a number of boards, is involved in the leadership of a mentoring organization, and is on the Board of Directors for organizations like the Cancer Support Community as well as Komen of Central Indiana. This is because Sheri was diagnosed with breast cancer in the middle of her life.  Today, we talk with her about her cancer diagnosis, treatment, and recovery, and how that journey affected her as a worker, manager, mother, and wife. Sheri offers insights for those going through a cancer diagnosis as well as the community that supports them.     Sheri loves being out on the waters of Geist with her husband.  Her love of the water comes from her history as a Florida native.  Sheri moved to Indiana after meeting and, eventually, falling in love with her husband, a Hoosier.    – Sheri Alexander I visited my mom, she had moved back to Indiana right after I finished high school, and I was up visiting her when I met my husband almost 40 years ago. So that explains it.   - Liesel Mertes Yes. Now do you remember that meeting. Was there anything about him that really impressed you on first meeting?   - Sheri Alexander Oh that is such a funny question because we both answer it the same way:  we didn't particularly care for one another when we first met, but we became very good friends and then we're not quite sure what happened.   Sheri is also a passionate grandmother.   - Sheri Alexander I like to play with my grandchildren and swim in the pool.   - Liesel Mertes Wonderful. How old are your grandchildren?   - Sheri Alexander I have a five year old granddaughter Clara and a 21 month old grandson named Carter.   And an avid reader   - Sheri Alexander I read a lot. I'm a voracious reader, whether it's for pleasure or professionally, just keeping up on trends and the employee benefit space where I spend a lot of my time it's ever changing and very complicated.   - Liesel Mertes So and tell us a little bit more about your role at Gregory and Apel.   - Sheri Alexander Sure. I'm the chief strategy officer, so I spend a lot of time on some key client relationships business development and I serve on advisory boards and other outside boards and just really spend a lot of time just trying to figure out what to do about the health care crisis.   - Liesel Mertes So have you figured it out?   - Sheri Alexander  I am working on it.   - Liesel Mertes Tell us tell us when you've got it.   - Sheri Alexander I know; you will be one of the first to know.   - Liesel Mertes It is billions of dollars.   - Sheri Alexander It is. It is. It's very challenging so well.   - Liesel Mertes And one of the things that we have you here to discuss is your own encounter with disruption in your working life. Could you set the scene for us where you were in life when you got your cancer diagnosis?   - Sheri Alexander Sure. It was almost 17 years ago I was 43 and I actually, literally, where I was when I got the diagnosis as I was trying to parallel park downtown to go into a venue where we were entertaining about 40 of our clients. It's a place that's no longer in business now but it was like a big arcade bar. You know, we were just doing some socializing with some clients after a conference. And I had had a biopsy you know an abnormal mammogram got the biopsy results. The doctor called my husband who then called me as I was parallel parking and said, You need to call your doctor right back but you have breast cancer.   - Sheri Alexander And I just kind of put it in park and I said, Well I'm half in this parking space and I can't leave. I have to I have clients to entertain. So, I parked the car called my doctor made the appointment and proceeded to kind of, I call it putting it on the shelf for a few hours, and went in and entertained my clients and   - Liesel Mertes How were you, how were you able to do that? I'm struck that people in the working world like this is asked of them in a number of different situations. You just received this horrible news. There's like the reality and even the metaphor for being stuck doing this parking and then you have to go in. Were you able to just?   - Sheri Alexander I actually was. Yeah, I was, you know, I had a couple of choices. I could either put it on the shelf, go in and it actually was a bit of a nice distraction. Kind of postpone, and gave me a little time to subconsciously process before I went home to my family. My daughter was only 15 at the time. And you know, my sweet husband and, you know, they both were just devastated. And so, it was a very emotional evening to say the least when I got home. So it actually, in a way, was that kind of gave me a little buffer between that shock and then the dealing with the emotional side of it.   - Liesel Mertes Oh yeah. Do you have pretty marked memories of that night when it was to tell your daughter what it was?   - Sheri Alexander Yeah she, she was terrified. I think, just terrified, but but even more so, I think after the surgery because it was a very quick, quick turnaround from diagnosis to, I had two forms of breast cancer show up in the biopsy because they actually biopsy three spots and two different forms and one was more aggressive. So ,there was really no time to mess around. So, I was in surgery probably within two weeks. And that was when my daughter could, you know, if she was 15 so it was it was very challenging and then you know and recovering from something like that.   - Sheri Alexander  It was about an eight hour surgery all told, because I had reconstruction done at same time and it just that, that wears on you and it impacts your mental stamina. You lose some memory, not permanently, but you just get a little fuzzy. I call it chemo brain. About the anesthesia also you know the longer you're under seems like the tougher it is to kind of get all the cobwebs out. So yeah it was. It was a challenging time but so many blessings came out of it. I mean I know we're recording you can't see this hair. But before, before cancer my hair was sticks straight. It's a blessing that's in by God's love. I have a ton of hair now which I didn't used to have.   - Liesel Mertes So even as you talk about your daughter and her processing it, I'm, I'm struck that as a parent, you're both managing what's happening in your own body but you're also aware of how this is affecting your child coping. Did that feel like a sort of a dual responsibility to be dealing with your own emotional load and then also helping her with the journey she was walking?   - Sheri Alexander What I have learned over the years is that cancer is a very unique experience for people and the way one person feels and reacts to it can be very different than another. My approach and the way I truly felt in my heart and still do to this day is I was so grateful it was me because I'm strong. I'm a first-born overachiever, I just go out get it done. You know, I missed very little work. I was probably sending e-mails sooner than I should have been. So, but that's just the way I'm wired. So I was very grateful that I had my family to focus on it kind of took the focus off of myself. But you know, to say that I wasn't terrified would, would not be truthful because it was a very terrifying experience.   - Liesel Mertes So are you still going and seeing clients and showing up to work?   - Sheri Alexander Yeah.   - Liesel Mertes Was that, were you tapping into that capacity again to put things on the shelf?   - Sheri Alexander Always, that’s what I've done that my entire life though, I mean, that's how I think that, at least for me, you know I've I'm fortunate to be married to my best friend. So things I need to talk through, I can talk through with him. I was very, very close with my mother; I'm very close with my daughter. So again, I have a great support system surrounding me all the time I have to just you know being able to put one foot in front of the other. I have this mental shelf and that's where if I can't do anything about it right now there's nothing I can do then I stick it on the shelf until I have time to pull it down you know and figure out what to do with it.   - Liesel Mertes So, for some people when they have a capacity to put things on the shelf things can stay there indefinitely.   - Sheri Alexander That's not healthy. Yeah.   - Liesel Mertes So, for you mentally there with this, there is this movement in your personality to say, for now when you put it there. Did you purposefully think a different moment, OK, this is the time where I'm now going to my sadness might overwhelm or when?   - Sheri Alexander  I did a lot of my thinking about it like commuting because I live pretty far out in the suburbs and commuted to downtown. And yeah, that's, you know a good 40 minute drive each way. You have lots of time to kind of process and then suck it up buttercup and go get it done. So that's kind of the way I operated.   - Liesel Mertes As you think about what moment you felt most weak or most vulnerable, even in the midst of being a high achiever and doing that, what did that moment look like for you?   - Sheri Alexander I think just the thought that outside chance that I wouldn't be around to watch my daughter grow up. Yeah I knew my husband could sally forth but you know my daughter was at an age where she needed Mama. And lord knows now that she's got those grandbabies, we are just thick as thieves so it's, you know, just the thought of having that cut short and that was pretty early in the process. But then you know I, my prognosis was very good.   - Sheri Alexander I mean, if you're gonna get breast cancer Indianapolis is one of the best places to get it. Because we have amazing physicians here. Amazing. And you know we're just right on top of the new and emerging medicine. And you know since my escapade I think I'll call it. I had a dear friend who was diagnosed with breast cancer and the treatment that they were able to do for her wasn't even available at the time for me and it's just you know it's amazing it's just rapidly advancing.   - Sheri Alexander I will say that you know when I look back on that time there are so many resources in our community for people who are dealing with this whether as a patient or a child or a caregiver it just there are so many resources that I think would have been really beneficial had I known about them.   - Sheri Alexander  So I've kind of been on a little mission to spread the word on what are some of the best resources. Oh my gosh. Wow. Little Red Door Cancer Agency for example. They, they catered to folks who have financial need and they do everything from getting people to appointments to providing nutritional supplements wigs for women who've lost their hair and prosthetic fittings. You know during the Breast Cancer Awareness Week they hang bras outside a building at 18th the and it's fantastic.   - Sheri Alexander You know I fortunately had great insurance and a great support system. But you know another firm that another not for profit that is amazing is Cancer Support Community of Central Indiana. They are fantastic   - Liesel Mertes They're fantastic.   - Sheri Alexander I've been on their board for a long, long time and they just do amazing work, you know from pitch-in suppers to all these support groups for people wherever they are in the journey. I've actually sat in on several of these support groups over the years and you know I've been with people who aren't with us anymore and it's just amazing. And you know, we have a youth group a Cancer Support Community now for the children of you know whose parents have had cancer and it's just invaluable battling is so beautiful.   - Liesel Mertes It is the invitation of the space and the classmates angle.   - Sheri Alexander They're amazing. And then, of course, you know breast cancer is what I'm so passionate about having a daughter and granddaughter and you know Komen central Indiana you know 75 percent of every dollar they raised goes into research right here so it you know it's a granting agency and it gives money back to folks who make a difference and it just great resources when you talk about being the person who is diagnosed with breast cancer and saying I was strong I was able to still accomplish a lot.   - Liesel Mertes So, is there anything that you feel people who have not experienced either cancer or a breast cancer diagnosis, as common misconception that people have about their journey?   - Sheri Alexander That it's, that it's a horrible thing because so much good actually does come out of it. And I've been able to help so many women and organizations with fundraising and such and it there's just a lot of good that comes out of it and probably the most impactful thing for me personally was learning not to sweat the small stuff because it's all small stuff. And I, my thought bubble above my head, you know what that's like. We all have one. It's not unusual for the words really. To be up there and, and a common phrase I use as well if that's the worst thing that happens to us today we are golden. So you kind of get an attitude shift and that's a real positive that comes out of it because when you're you know driven especially you know working mother and you're trying to be all that and do all things for everybody you kind of lose sight of the big picture sometimes.   - Liesel Mertes Were there things in your workplace that you felt like it was important for your manager or your co-workers to know about you or to step in to support you in the midst?   - Sheri Alexander I was. That's a good question. I was very open with my diagnosis and kept my friends, family and co-workers apprised of how things were progressing and what I just asked of them was to just I'm still me treat me the same. I'm still me. There's anything you want to know ask me. Don't act funny around me. I mean, I was wonderful at the time I reported to someone who gave me very broad flexibility to do what I needed to do and to work in a way that I could get my job done that where I could still keep my energy and if I needed to do client meetings, I could stay home in the morning and then go to the client meetings and so it had a lot of support. But it's very important; I know a lot of folks don't have that privilege.   – Liesel Mertes In the midst of people who were supportive and who met you well, if in the most ideal setting, if you think when I was going through cancer this is what I would have wanted from my workplace. What would you have wanted?   - Sheri Alexander Well I actually had a very good scenario at my workplace, so I would say it would be great if everybody had the ability to be flexible where and when they work, especially when they're dealing with something that's physically draining like any kind of chemo whether it's oral or infusion and just supportive co-workers. I love the, the meal train though. That's a great idea that we didn't do that back then that that just wasn't something that was common. That would have been awesome. Have food brought over. I mean we had a few people do it. But you know in more recent years we've actually gotten organized for people at work and people have shifts and it just takes that burden.   - Liesel Mertes You always need to eat. Yeah.   - Sheri Alexander I know and my husband worked a lot of hours back then it would have been great to have somebody offer to help cut the grass and stuff like that that things that I would typically pick up the slack on if he was working or out of town and just little things to help.   - Liesel Mertes Is there anything that stands out. I'm like, oh man this is stupid stuff that people say to people with cancer or that individual really missed me…is there anything that comes to mind?   - Sheri Alexander I think it's more like, when people are dealing with whatever it is and there are so many life events that can cause pain and heartache and suffering people go radio silent. Some people that would really surprise you can go radio silent and that, and I think people that do that do that for their own reasons. They don't know how or what to say. Make something up. Shoot a note drop a card something so they don't think you've forgotten about them because I think that you really, you learn her your true friends are when you go through crises like that.   - Liesel Mertes Has it altered the way that you feel like you encountered people when they go through a hard time?   - Sheri Alexander Absolutely. I have changed. That's a great question and it is so spot on, I am, I am conscious. I make sure I am reaching out. Phone call, email. What can I do to help? I don't ever say anything like, "Oh well it'll get better" or, "Oh, I know how you feel." If I don't know how they feel but is it's more what can I do to help you. What do you need? How can I help? Yeah, send flowers pick flowers drop them off. You don't have to spend a lot of money have to be president really tangible things that make a big difference. Yeah. Yeah.   - Liesel Mertes  Are there any other general words or thoughts, either from your perspective as someone who works in the benefits space thinking about how to care for employees well or does that out of your own managerial experience that you think, Yeah. I'd like to offer this to listeners who are added going through hard times or managing people in the midst of it?   - Sheri Alexander Well, I think the work that that you're undertaking is it's very intriguing to me, especially from my perspective, because I think folks, anybody, whether you're a manager or a co-worker or an employee of a manager who is going through something it would be nice to kind of have a roadmap of Best Practices and, other than calling EAP. You know, I mean, that tends to be kind of the status quo. We have an EAP and you get so many face to face visits while a lot of stuff happens between that event and when they may even get to talk to somebody about the EAP and there are lots of opportunities for those awkward moments and you know how to how do we how do we better address that in a way that's comfortable and safe for people.   - Liesel Mertes Yeah I think that's good. And I obviously resonate with the sentiment.   Here are three closing thoughts after talking with Sheri.   If you or someone you care about is dealing with a cancer diagnosis, look for support organizations in your community.If you live in Central Indiana, Little Red Door Cancer agency can help those in need of financial assistance with things like getting to appointments, wigs, and prosthetics.  The Cancer Support Community runs a center with support classes, cooking demonstrations, and a yoga studio.  The Komen Center hosts events and donates portions of every dollar raised.  These are just some of the resources available that we have linked in the show notes and our website.  As Sheri put it, don’t go radio silent. Do something.  Perhaps you worry about what to do or say to someone who is going through cancer.  You don’t have to have all the answers, a card or a note, some flowers, or simply a statement like, “I am sorry that you are going through this” communicates a great deal of care.  As Sheri worked throughout her cancer treatment, it was helpful for her to “put things on the shelf” until she had to time to process them with her family and her support network. She also worked through some of those emotions on the way to work. This is one way that people deal with difficult emotions.  If someone does not want to talk extensively about their cancer during a particular day, they may be putting those emotions on the shelf for the time being.  If that is the case, allow them the space to not discuss their cancer.  OUTRO   Resources mentioned: Little Red Door Cancer Agency: https://www.littlereddoor.org Komen of Central Indiana: https://komencentralindiana.org/ Cancer Support Community of Central Indiana: http://cancersupportindy.org/

Do you guys really read the show notes? Well I'm gonna type them in anyways. After an unexpected hiatus, TRB and Heather D are welcoming you back to Rantyville with a fun, yet slow burn episode. In this edition of WTR we dive into everything from bath water and Heather's side gig to TRB quitting the cigs and Area 51. And we don't blame you if you skip ahead to this week's Dear Abigail: 4th Grade Huar - it may be our best yet. So put in those earbuds because, quite frankly, TRB does his best (as always) to earn that explicit tag on iTunes. Also, remember to spend time with your loved ones. You never know when that time will be gone, so cherish every second you can. the twits - Heather D - @IB4ECeptAfterC TRB - @TheRantyBastard

What if I told you that you could create any feeling you wanted? You can. You are always the creator of your emotions but chances are you've never used that power to your advantage. Well I'm going to show you exactly how to do that! Also registration is open for Compassion Fatigue Rx, my online course. Check it out at www.rekindlesolutions.com/enroll.

The only one who is stopping you is you. ㅤ ... ㅤ Edited by: @benlionelscott Spoken by: Jocko Willink, Jordan Peterson, Eric Thomas, Tony Robbins, Dwayne Johnson Footage by: Buried, Filmpac, Ripunjoy B'yum, Cal Laird, Pain and Gain, Under Armour, Carole McCarty Music: Really Slow Motion and Giant Apes - Desmatter ㅤ ... ㅤ People have this reoccurring nightmare, that there's some thing, some force that's got a hold of them and it's holding them down, and they can't break free, no matter what they do, they can't break free from that force. Well I'm here to tell you that that thing in your nightmare, that thing that is holding you back, that thing that is dragging you down, that thing is you. There are two fundamental attitudes toward life and its sorrows. Those with the first attitude, blame the world. Those with the second, ask what they could do differently. It's much easier and much more gratifying to your basis desires to blame someone else for your misery. You know what's so funny? We want people to make guarantees to us, But we not willing to make guarantees to ourselves. And that's the problem with some of you, you always want to blame other people. You owe you an explanation. You need to look at yourself in the mirror and say, "Why are you only giving 50%? What's wrong with you?" You need to put yourself on punishment. You need to tell you, no more TV, no more snacks, no more desserts, no, we working out now. You need to tell you that you owe you something. Everyday I demand more from myself then anyone else could humanly expect. I'm not competing with somebody else, I'm competing with what I'm capable of. My number one competition is me. It's always you versus you. You're gotta be the one to get up every morning, be disciplined, put in the consistent daily hard work, because that gains success. No couch, no trainer, no mentor, no boss can do it. You verses you. I value myself enough to give 120% or don't do it. There is no excuse for not living up to your fullest potential. No excuse. You walk out of this room, you owe yourself. I didn't get here making excuses. What changed? I changed. And I stopped being a victim. I stopped saying, I've gotta wait for good things to happen to me, and I said I'm gonna grind. I'm going to fight. I'm going to work. I'm going to press toward. I'm going to learn. I'm going to do everything in my power every single day to become a victor and not a victim. Why? Cause I owe it to myself. And can't nobody stop me but me.

Well I'm fucked up and I can barely type this but here we are. I know my shit but friends will be friends. We also talk about everything about events and predictions, GET READY!!!!!

Ever wonder how your friend Kim and Lisa are doing it??? Well I'm revealing their secrets here of how to shed weight fast and forever!   www.slimbellysolution.com www.aprilmeracle.com aprilmeracle@gmail.com

[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent="no" equal_height_columns="no" menu_anchor="" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" id="" background_color="" background_image="" background_position="center center" background_repeat="no-repeat" fade="no" background_parallax="none" parallax_speed="0.3" video_mp4="" video_webm="" video_ogv="" video_url="" video_aspect_ratio="16:9" video_loop="yes" video_mute="yes" overlay_color="" video_preview_image="" border_size="" border_color="" border_style="solid" padding_top="" padding_bottom="" padding_left="" padding_right=""][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type="1_1" layout="1_1" background_position="left top" background_color="" border_size="" border_color="" border_style="solid" border_position="all" spacing="yes" background_image="" background_repeat="no-repeat" padding_top="" padding_right="" padding_bottom="" padding_left="" margin_top="0px" margin_bottom="0px" class="" id="" animation_type="" animation_speed="0.3" animation_direction="left" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" center_content="no" last="no" min_height="" hover_type="none" link=""][fusion_text]Watch the live interview below [/fusion_text][fusion_youtube id="https://youtu.be/IMEWAY-hdgI" alignment="center" width="" height="" autoplay="false" api_params="&rel=0" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" /][fusion_text] Transcription (was completed by automated process. Please ignore any speech-to-text errors) [00:00:22] Hey I'm Beatty Carmichael and welcome to the get sellers calling you real true podcast. And I'm excited today to visit with another wonderful agent actually a client of ours named Carrie George from Crimmins Colorado Carrie. Say hello and tell us where cribbing is. [00:00:40] Hi there everyone. Crumbling is located in the northwest portion of Colorado. So oftentimes I tell people we are in between Silverthorne and that's where the ski resorts like Breckenridge and Keystone are. so in between there and Steamboat Springs. Really beautiful valley of the Rocky Mountains. [00:01:03] Well you are definitely in God's beautiful green earth and I guess sometimes White Earth out there during the wintertime. So all of that I'm over here in short sleeves and it's warm outside. Well I'm really excited to visit with you Carrie because I know you got a real strong stable business. We talked and you got some really great balance in your life and I think there's a lot of things to share because having a stable business having balance still handling this challenges but managing them in a really great way is there's a combination that you don't always find. So I'm really excited about that. Thank you. And also just for a reminder of those who are on the call watching or listening. It is an Internet call so please pardon any Internet interruptions that may occur. So I guess to get started Carrie can you tell me a little bit about yourself as a realtor maybe. How long you been in business and just anything that gives people an idea of understanding who is this person we're talking to and why should I listen to you. Right. [00:02:18] Perfect. So I've been a realtor for 15 years. I got my license back in 2004. I kind of came into this business sort of by chance I never really thought that a real estate career was something that I'd want to do. But at the time I was transitioning from being the Chamber of Commerce Director here in our little town which was a very fulfilling job. But it was very hard and I got paid very little money. But I met a lot of great people and learned a lot about our area. So in hindsight it was a really nice segway to go far from in the Chamber of Commerce Director and moving into real estate because I already had connections with so many people. One of the things that I love most about real estate is the creative aspect of it the marketing the photography that the new technology that we are always seeing coming down the pike. I love that kind of ever changing aspect of our business. I work in a small community. Others for full time realtors in our town which is which is unusual. I think most people are. And bigger cities where there's a lot more saturation. [00:03:30] You don't have hardly any competition there. Right. [00:03:34] Really downs. I mean I have to pinch myself sometimes and thank God because a lot of ways there's parts of it that are really easy. And then a lot of ways there's lots that are very hard. I feel like sometimes a big fish in a small pond where I have sort of this one little area that I do real estate and that sometimes is hard to branch in to other parts of our county. So it comes with its bonuses and negatives being in this small community mainly mainly positive so well know what type of markets do you typically do. [00:04:10] I know we were talking a little bit before the call but what have you found to be kind of the real staple niche or focus that drives your business. [00:04:21] So lots of residential I'd say about half my business is second homeowners. And the other half is primary residence. I love doing residential real estate the most. I will also do vacant land and commercial but selling houses and photographing houses is way more fun than taking a picture of a piece of dirt. So I so because they're two very different markets the primary residence and the second homeowner you know you have to kind of have different marketing approaches to deal with those two different clientele. So you know my primary residence These are people that I know that I see all the time our kids go to school together. You know just building really strong relationships with them that have to do with real estate. And then I don't have to do with real estate. And then with the second homeowners finding other ways to reach them I'm usually through direct mail and in farming certain areas is is the way that I'm reaching out to those people. [00:05:19] I'd like to talk on the second homeowner Mark. First because it's kind of a unique niche. And for those that are in that niche there is always the question how do I grow it. OK. And and I know that there's probably going to be folks listening to this saying Well oh she's only competing with three or four other realtors so doesn't matter what she does she's going to. You know it's easy to get business. Let me in. Let me ask that question first. Is it really easy to get business because there's not that many realtors or are you still kind of find that there are things you have to consistently do if you want the business to keep coming in. [00:05:53] Oh there definitely is. You know one of the agents here in town she was born and raised in this community. She knows everybody and everybody knows her. And so you know even though there are just a few of us you still have to have your game. You know you still have to you cannot take a back seat to this business. Everybody who is in the business knows that when you're in sales your effort is 100 percent related to your success. So it's very much still and my personality is that I don't like doing a job halfway. I really care about what I put out there. I care about what my voice sounds like through my marketing and how my voice sounds in person. And so being authentic is very very important to me. And that has got to come through in the marketing as well. [00:06:47] Well let's talk about that because I know that was in our conversation before the call. That was the number one thing you mentioned is just that authenticity or being authentic. I'm not sure what the word is. I was trying to fill up. So talk to me about being authentic and talk to me. So after 15 years you've found you've gone through those things you You've experimented I'm sure with things that just didn't work and those things that did. What is the how does the impact of being authentic impact your business and what are you doing to be authentic. So people actually will come to business with you and repeat business. [00:07:27] So I have a perfect case study for this exact example. There's a couple of area subdivisions that are nearby and you know I'd have a buyer who hey I really want to be in this one particular area and say OK great Look send a letter out to all of the homeowners and see if anybody's been thinking about selling. So I'd write a nice letter. Hi Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so. I have a buyer looking in your area. Have you thought about selling your home. And I literally got zero response from these letters that I would send out. But I would still do them because I thought well you never know somebody might really be thinking about it. Just recently we have a new pastor coming to town and he found an area that was really attractive to him. And I thought you know what. I'm going to do a little bit of a different strategy this time I'm going to be really specific in my letter I'm going to use his name. I'm going to use his wife's name. I'm going to say that he has two kids. I'm going to say he's the new pastor at our church and I put all of that in the letter. I had him review it before I sent it out and off it went well I had 400 times more response from that letter than I did from all of my subsequent letters. Well I'm wondering how does what does that have to do with being authentic. [00:08:44] Well I think what it has to do with being authentic is. I think if I would have put my head in to a sellers head but just received a very generic letter from me it's possible they might have been thinking that I'm just fishing for listings and that is not part of my personality one of the things I pride myself on is integrity and honesty and so I knew I had a buyer for that specific area but those sellers didn't. And my letter sounded exactly like everybody else's letter Hey I have a buyer. Are you thinking about selling your house. And until I was using specific examples I was not getting the kind of traction that I wanted and so now I have totally changed my strategy with this. I've got another guy who's looking in the same area. I said Brian I'm going to use your name. And he said OK go ahead tell him exactly what I'm looking for. And I feel that that being authentic being honest being straightforward being what using the most integrity that you possibly can is a way that you will kind of bridge that gap from sales person to seller and actually start to create a real connection and a real relationship with somebody you know that's interesting because in marketing what we find is if you're very specific you're believable. [00:10:06] Yeah. It seems to me that what you're doing is you are being very specific with not I have a client but I have this particular client. Here's what he's looking for in so the more specificity you give the more believable in your words more authentic it is. And now they know this is a real solicitation for a real prospect who really wants to move in this area and is very legitimate. Yeah. [00:10:33] I love it. Yeah I was really pleased. I thought Wow it took me 15 years to figure this out but now this is my new strategy. [00:10:42] Well very good. Very good. So let's talk about is there any other examples or any of the things that you can share on what you do. You mentioned earlier and I want to come back to this your voice. OK. When you talk about your voice What are you. For those are listening. You. What do you mean by that. [00:11:00] So anyone who's in real estate or is then thinking about getting into real estate you'll if you google any of that like how to be a successful realtor you'll start to see some of these kind of bullet points like. Well you should call a call. You should call for sale by owners you should work the expired list. And to me all of those things are they probably do work. I don't think they work for me because they don't feel authentic to me. I am a very not pushy person and that has actually worked to my benefit because I have clients all the time who will tell me. Thank you for not being pushy. They also put that in their reviews that they do for me after a sale. And so I think then people choose to work with me because they know I'm not going to be pushy. I really feel that buyers and sellers are decision makers. I'm there to guide them to counsel them to provide as much information as possible so that they can make the decision that is most appropriate for them and their family. [00:12:08] I had me on mute. And that was great. I love it. [00:12:12] So now talk to me in terms of driving business from your second home owners. What type of things are you. Do you find that really the things that work those things that don't and and are you. So let's go down that road a little bit can we. [00:12:28] Because second homeowners OK so for a second homeowners I mainly do direct mail. I know a lot of agents are totally moving away from some of the old school marketing styles. I personally think that direct mail still works very well. If you use the right pieces I still really like giving an envelope and hand addressing it because I think people will then open it. So that's if I have something really important and specific to send to somebody in a certain area. like a second homeowner I will take the time and hand address envelopes. It well your hand is your hand is sore. Don't get me wrong but I think the open rate goes up so much when you take that extra time to to hand address on the loaves. So again I will sometimes do a market update if there is something that's been recently sold I'll do a quick analysis for them because again I think just sold and just listing postcards have their place but I know that sellers get a lot of those. And so instead of maybe sending a just sold postcard why not break it down and say you know here's a less for sales and why are these sales significant. Are these the highest sales in this subdivision in you know X number of years that's what we're finding in our market is that it's so strong that that's a great pitch that you can send out to sellers to say did you know in the past twelve months we've had the four highest sales that your subdivision has ever seen as a as a homeowner that would be something that would be really important for me to know I'm not just hey our market's really hot and everything's really great but give me something specific that I can work on so I'll do things like that and then I also try and do things that are really visually and design wise very appealing because that's another thing that's very important to me I'm I'm kind of like a marketing geek. [00:14:29] I love anything to do with marketing and the way something looks is really important to me. I recognize that sometimes I have analysis paralysis where I'll work so hard on something and I wanted to be just perfect. But then I heard a quote the other day that perfectionism is actually procrastination in disguise and I'm like Yeah oh that's me. That's totally me. So I've let go of some of that but I do really care about how how something looks because I want to be proud of what I send out. And I also want sellers to see a piece for me and say this person put a lot of thought and care into putting this together and then I equate that to the fact that I would also put a lot of thought and care into marketing their home. [00:15:17] So out of curiosity these. So you're talking about sending out sold or you know less for sales. Is that that's not a postcard you're actually doing that in an envelope. [00:15:28] I am. So those I do in a letter where I'll highlight you know I just did one for a condo complex actually at a little bit outside of my market but I thought what would be something that I would want to know about my area. And I did a little bit of research and saw that over the past 15 years we had the four highest sales in this complex in the last 12 months. And I thought well that's something that's really useful that I could write a letter about. [00:15:53] So now are you sending these to your past clients that are out of town owners who are using these to just prospective clients prospective clients. Yeah. Okay okay. Very cool. And so when you're sending in the letter are you are you putting photos of those sales or just kind of outlining it. I mean when I get the letter. OK it's going to be handwritten I'm going to open it. And then what's in the package. So I have a little paragraph at the top and then the sales are bullet points because I know that. [00:16:25] Our attention span is about eight seconds even if you get something open. I have about eight seconds to catch their attention. So I put the sales in the middle of the letter as bullet points no photos but just listing the sales what they sold for how big they were what the sales date was because I thought if they look at that and then they also see the name of their complex. I mean it hopefully hook them and they're going to read the whole letter because I still think at the end of the day if you own a property in any given area and somebody provides you something of value about the value of your property they're going to be interested. [00:17:04] So now in terms of. So is this one of the primary things you're doing for their second homeowners just mailing out these letters are you doing postcards with it as well. [00:17:13] At times I do a mix of postcards sometimes as well especially if I want to do something really big and I don't want to have to dress 500 on both camps right. I'll do a postcard for that but then sometimes I'll just like try and pick a really visually beautiful photo something that's maybe unique to our area so they know like oh yeah I know that mountain that's right in my backyard. So some kind of hook something where they say this is relevant to me that this is not just something that's gonna go in the trash. [00:17:43] So then help me help me quantify. You can you may or may not be able to but your mailing generally speaking to about how many people each time and what type of return is that producing in terms of people calling you say Hey Carrie I want to sell or I want to buy what are you what what do you get out of it. [00:18:03] So I there's two areas that I farm regularly and I'd say I send out about a hundred to one hundred and fifty pieces per area I reckon nice too that there are people who get my letters on a consistent basis who put it in a folder and say when I'm ready to sell I'm calling her I had a sale last year and that's exactly what the person told me. I've been getting your letters for years and I knew when the time came for me to sell you were going to be the person I called. So you know if you think of it some of this stuff you're filling a pipeline for years down the road. But I think consistency is also very important. I would say in general on average my response rate from those is maybe like three to four calls or emails per mailing which I think is still pretty good and well worth it to me now. They're not always ready to sell at that moment. It might be Hey I got your letter. I have some questions because you do a market analysis for me. You know I'm not ready to sell yet but I'm thinking I'm going down that road so they don't always turn into an immediate client and an immediate contract. Sometimes it's just the beginning of nurturing that relationship and making those connections. [00:19:22] Yes. So that's really good though. Three four calls for mailing because now you kind of identify who it is in the pipeline yet they get a chance to engage with you. I would assume that those people who are calling you when they do go on the market. Have you ever lost any of those to another agent. [00:19:42] I don't think so. Yeah. So really think about it but I don't think I ever have. [00:19:46] Well so that's the most important part in my mind is if you can just get them to engage with you even if it's early on then you pretty much have a habit. I want to switch topics real quick to your primary homeowners there in the because you're actually you're doing both types of marketing right. And I'm assuming that the marketing is different that you do for secondary home versus what you do for primaries correct. [00:20:11] It is. So one of the things that we've been I work in a small office and I have a couple of colleagues one of the things that's been really important to us is is supporting our community in any way that we can. So we do a lot of events sponsorships throughout the year. I'd say we prep locally we host a couple of our own and then we sponsor a couple of other events that the community does. So for instance we sponsor the summer reading program and my colleague and I will go to the library and do a craft with the kids and send them with a little gift when it's all done. We sponsor our local community festival every year we do a parade float and hand out popsicles to everybody. We sponsor our own pumpkin giveaway in October where we fill our office with hundreds of pumpkins and the kids come to pick out a. And for free we sponsor the mutton busting at the fair so we we really try and get our name out there with community events. We mainly focus around kids because my colleague and I both have young children. So it's something that's very very important to us. And so we're doing these events that have nothing to do with real estate but supporting the community that we live in and love. It's not just to generate sales. [00:21:33] It's something that we truly feel is important to give back to the community and in any way that we can. [00:21:41] And so if that because it is that about. So I'm curious because this is really cool. Are you doing besides has been involved in the community or are you doing anything special and either reaching out to people personally or marketing to them or is it simply just kind of being present. [00:22:01] Well it's kind of twofold. So I think there's sort of a natural residual good feelings that people get by knowing that you know Keller Williams top of the Rockies sponsors these great events in our community. Like it makes people feel good about what we do for a living because let's face it there are we get compared to all kinds of. not nice industries and some people are. not great realtors but most of them really are good realtors and they're good people. So we have that aspect of it where people feel good about what we're doing and feel good about us giving back to the community. And then in terms of like actual marketing to primary residents I do a combination of direct mail with them as well. I do handwritten cards to a J. I'm really getting disciplined about it Good job parts per day to my sphere and then a little bit even wider than my sphere doing Popeyes. That's been a little bit hard for me because it feels a little more pushy than I'm used to but I find too if I'm bringing something of value that I don't feel awkward about it. Let's see what else am I doing. Well the Monday morning coffee which is fantastic and I'm absolutely loving it and my clients are loving it too. [00:23:25] I guess I'll tell people because a lot of folks listening to this won't know the background of your handwritten notes or Popeyes or Monday morning coffee. So can you enlighten a little bit more on that so people know what you're talking about. [00:23:38] You're listening to the get sellers calling you podcast to increase sales from past clients and sphere of influence or from a geographic farm learn about Agent dominator. We guarantee your sales in writing or give your money back to learn more. Visit our website get sellers calling you dot com. It's like Agent dominator from the. [00:23:56] And now back to the podcast. [00:23:59] So Monday morning coffee is a program that Beatty does through MailChimp and there's a little blurb at the top about real estate because that is what we do but it's short it's easy to read it's nothing super technical and that this. Thirds of it really nice feel good story something inspirational something really you know touching about it just other human beings that are on the face of the planet with us. So I get feedback every single week. People say to me I love having Monday morning coffee with you or this made my day. I hear from people I haven't heard from in years that they reach out to me and say wow I'm sitting here reading your your email and crying like because it's such an emotional story that I've resisted doing like a newsletter for so long because I didn't want to send emails about how to clean your gutters and when to change your your furnace filter because again that feels so inauthentic to me. And so sales and so typical real estate nothing against anybody who does that. I mean if it's if it's your cup of tea that's fine. It wasn't something that I wanted to do. And so Monday morning coffee was such an amazing fit for me because it had a little real estate blurb but more than anything it was just something nice to read. And in this day and age where you get so much bad news and you're just bombarded with all kinds of garbage constantly. I love that there's one e-mail that comes out for me per week that is just a really fantastic story. [00:25:36] So these are just some great touches into your personal lives and you know I've got to ask you you did you just start doing pop bys from our conversation a few weeks back. [00:25:47] Yeah. And I had something that was kind of in the works too. But then our conversation sort of prompted being like I really should just do this. People are scared of me and I you know I don't know why I thought like they won't want to see me but they do. And I created a business and and B by being authentic I am friends with many of my clients after the sale we hang out on a social level we'll get coffee together so I think it was my own personal hang up about they won't want to see me. They won't want to talk to me. And that was really the complete opposite of what it really was. [00:26:21] I love it. I love it. Well I want to ask a crazy question or an unusual question out of everything you've done. What are the one or two things that just absolutely did not work for you that you tried it was just a bomb. Anything you can share with folks on maybe what not to do. [00:26:40] Well I would say that when you get those calls from people who are going to promise you a bunch of Facebook ads by pushing your listings out there and creating the ad for you personally I have found those to be a complete dud and be very very expensive. So. And again going back to being authentic I think if you want to do a Facebook marketing and you want to be reaching people that way I think it's so much more important for you to just create really valuable content versus paying somebody to build ads for you. So you know offer a you know you would host a free clinic at your office to talk about the market or to teach people about different loan types and invite a lender to come in and teach that class with you offer something of value. People see listings they can go anywhere. Real Talk on Zillow Trulia they can find listings anywhere if they're on Facebook and you they want to provide value and make clients client connections there. I would say offer something of value offer some kind of content. So that debt that tanked for me I spent a lot of money on those and I got nothing from them. [00:28:00] Local I. That makes sense. Well let me shift gears I want to talk about work family balance. Now you have a family is that correct. Yep. So tell me a little bit about your family. Just so we kind of have a perspective. [00:28:13] Sure. My husband Bill and I have been married for almost 15 years and we have two daughters. Elizabeth is eight and a half. And Ashley just turned five. [00:28:24] I love it. So you've got a busy household for sure. [00:28:28] We have a second grader and a preschooler so we're not like entrenched in those school sports yet. Like I know parents of high schoolers are but we're still pretty busy and the work and family life balance has always been a struggle for me. My husband is also a Realtor. He sells bigger properties so we're both in sales which is which is difficult. You know in a lot of times you know one spouse will be a realtor and the other one will have a real job where you get paid every two weeks and we don't have that in our in our home. So that sort of fear of missing out and feeling sort of very attached to your phone and feeling a little paranoid about not answering your phone call is a real thing for both of us both struggle with it. And I think setting really good boundaries for yourself and for your family life is very important. But it's it's hard. It takes work. It takes discipline. It takes. [00:29:32] You trying to be in the present in that moment and it's that's really hard for us to do in this day and age for always thinking about something that's already happened or something that's going to happen instead of just being here right now. And so it's almost like a habit you have to form. [00:29:50] Talk to me about those boundaries. What have you what have you and your husband put in place and I'm sure it's tempting to kind of break the boundary periodically and how do you hold to it. Tell me what it is a little bit more. [00:30:03] Well we're not always perfect of course but we do try and have a certain time of day where you know the business phone calls stop and you know replying to emails stops. I am really particular about my Sunday mornings. We go to church and I do not show property or meet with clients from ten to twelve on Sundays. Now after church is over I'm happy to catch people because I know a lot of my clients. That's the only time they're available so I do trying to accommodate them in the afternoons but I think you have to decide you have to decide what's important to you have to decide where your priorities lie. And when I look at my two young daughters and I know they still really like me and they still really want to hang out with me that might not always be the case when they get to be teenagers they might rather be with their friends and so and all of this that I do and real estate is still going to be here. So I need to as a mom and as a wife make sure that I make my family my priority. But like I told you earlier it's like we're training for a marathon. It does not happen overnight and you have to just really work at being disciplined and and creating really good habits for the health of your family and yourself. [00:31:16] I agree. It really takes a discipline and what I've learned for me is it takes scheduling it out you know knowing specifically I'm going to take this time off from where you cut off the clock at this point and literally almost putting in your calendar. And so the answer is No. During these times. Does that make sense. Yes exactly. So you mentioned church talk to me about. Talk to me about your spiritual life. [00:31:42] So my spiritual life has been kind of a crazy road. I grew up in Denver and my grandma my great great grandfather is actually the founding one of the founding members of the largest synagogue in Denver. I was actually raised Jewish but then I moved to the mountains and there's really no synagogues in the mountains. And so my spiritual life kind of like really just was very dormant for a really long time. And then I had some personal struggles and some business struggles that had come into my life and I was just kind of out of options like I don't know what to do here. One personal struggle in particular there was really no right answer to what I was going through. It was just extremely painful and extremely difficult. And I found myself just kind of on my knees like all right God if you're out there I really need your help right now like this. I don't know what else to do. And that was when my spiritual life like almost like a seed that goes dormant started to just blow up is not the right word but completely flourish and and grow. What started to happen at that point to say it again maybe what started to happen at that point. [00:33:04] What what were the things that just started to flourish. Can you give me some ideas on that. [00:33:09] So. I have like in my life dealt with a lot of anxiety and so and living in fear and this particular situation created a lot of anxiety and fear for me. And when I finally got to my lowest of lows and and asked God please you help me not only did he answer my prayer for what I really was praying for. but the amount of peace and calmness that he brought to my life was I can't even really compare it to anything. It was like almost like a light switch went off like oh I know what to do now I have peace I have calmness and I knew that he was in control and he was in charge. And then from there I just started to find the Lord and find my relationship with him. And you know the judeo christian religions very much cross over each other. But what I think is so amazing about being a Christian is having a relationship like a real relationship with the Lord. And like anywhere that you might be you can sit down and talk to him and tell him what's on your mind. And it doesn't have to be formal and structured. You can just say whatever is is going through that go at any kind of struggles you might be going through any kind of painful moments you might be going through guidance advice like what should I do about this. [00:34:38] And and that part of it has been so amazing because growing up Jewish. A lot of it was very hands off very much like just ceremony and and praying but not not having relationship. And that's just such a different ballgame. [00:34:57] If that makes sense for me it makes a lot of sense. You know some people is oh holy God. Yeah. For others it's dead. God. Right. Exactly. And having that relationship where you can just bring anything to him even the little things and the big things. So how has your relationship with the Lord impacted if you look at your business OK and how you live your life. What are the things that is impacted that if you did not have that relationship with the Lord you would probably do things differently. Does that make sense. Trying to ask. [00:35:35] I think so yeah. Well I think first of all like I've always felt like I was a person of integrity but knowing the Lord and knowing truly knowing the difference between wrong and right and knowing his way has guided me in so many different ways. [00:35:57] Like I'll use an example of sometimes you know what the right answer is it's not really what you want to do but you know it's the right answer. And when you have him by your side making that hard decision is so much easier because you just you you feel differently about your interactions with people. [00:36:19] It's not just so much about how much money he can make going to make. And can I go on this vacation or that vacation. I would say that through my relationship with the Lord my giving has expanded tremendously that I realize now how important that is to not just give money but to give time as well. There are situations that I pray with my clients. Yesterday I was at a listing appointment and I asked. I said Can we pray. And they said absolutely. And so we just prayed for God to light their path because they're not really sure if they want to sell or not. Would he guide them. And if their home does sell that the new people that live here that they would have peace and harmony and safety in this new home. So it's just it's like it's opened up a new sort of chapter of my business. I found connection with a lot of people because of our our spiritual values align with each other. Sometimes it will come up very randomly. I met a gal yesterday morning and she asked where my kids went to school and and I said they went to the local school and she said Oh yeah I know there's a couple of kids that go to the Christian school and so then that started us talking about oh where do you go to church so I go here you know. And so then then then you know like that you have that special connection and that you maybe see things somewhat the same personally. [00:37:43] So although the idea that you're praying at the listening appointment when we put a contract on our house and our realtor was a Christian you know first thing we did is we prayed over the contract. Yeah really cool. So in terms of your interaction with your clients from a Christian standpoint just like praying at that listing appointment are there anything else. Anything else for your relationship with the Lord kind of model. Is your behavior or how you reach out to people in those interactions. [00:38:16] I would say one thing that's been really cool about working with other Christians is their disappointment level when something doesn't work out. Is is is actually really graceful and beautiful. They understand that you know that maybe wasn't the right house for them because God's got something better. And I I try and be sensitive to other people's viewpoints and spiritual backgrounds and so I will have that conversation and maybe a more secular way with with clients that are not Christian AND I'LL I'LL SAY YOU KNOW EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON AND AND YOU KNOW MAYBE THAT'S that house isn't for you because there is a better one coming. But I know when I work with Christians that they recognize that right off the bat that we don't even really have to have that conversation there. They're acutely aware of the fact that that there's something better in fact I spoke to a lady yesterday. She has her house for sale in Estes Park and she said that our house has been on the market for three weeks and we haven't had an offer and that's so unusual. And she said but then my husband and I realized well God doesn't want us to sell our house yet because they don't have anywhere to go. They can't find a rental here and crumbling. So she said it makes perfect sense now that he's waiting for us to find a rental before he makes us homeless. [00:39:35] Totally a little bit of in your own personal life because there is that level of peace that was with your client the sense of being able to look at things and say it's OK because the Lord is guiding it. Do you share anything in terms of your business or how you manage life as a realtor where there's just that overwhelming sense of peace. [00:39:57] Yeah. And because most of my life I live with a lot of fear and a lot of anxiety. Again it's kind of like a heart that you have to break a bad habit. But knowing every day in any given moment that I'm not alone and that he's always there it's it's hard to describe. It's like what kind of blows my mind as I see people all the time that are searching they're searching for some thing that one thing that's going to bring them X Y and Z happiness fame fortune love whatever it might be. [00:40:38] And the one thing that's actually going to be the cure for what ails them is right there. And it's free. It's for the taking. It's it's there for anybody who wants it but I also recognize that I had to go on my own journey to get where I am right now and that in God's perfect timing all of that came about in the way that it did and that if it would have happened artificially or if I would have been pushed into something that I wasn't ready for it wouldn't have been him and it wouldn't have been what it is now. So I know his timing is perfect and I try and encourage and and blessed people as I can but I also recognize that that he has the ultimate plan and that he will bless people in the appropriate way. [00:41:28] Hey I'd like to ask you I don't know if there's an answer to this either because you may not have something to share or you may not want to share but is there been is there something specific you can share that you know that if you did not have the relationship with the Lord and this event happened in your life you would have responded just totally different. Is there anything like that that you can share and then what was the outcome of it ultimately. Does that make sense. I'm looking for kind of a testimony so to speak of how has the Lord and really good man in a time frame that someone else would have panicked. Yeah. [00:42:06] Well I do have one specific example and it was actually kind of in the midst of my of my spiritual journey. I mean we'll always be in our spiritual journey but it was at the beginning of mine. I had a situation come up at work in my own professional career that was very maybe very anxious. It was it was very difficult to kind of wrap my head around. It was scary. It was something that I couldn't really talk to anybody about it because of its confidential nature. And again and I found myself kind of on my knees like God I need your help I. I don't know what else to do. And I was just I couldn't eat. I was so nervous. I was just I was miserable really. And I remember that night I I I drank some calming tea it was like you're in the grocery store or they have all those that are for different ailments. And I found one calming tea so I drank this tea and I prayed and I got on my knees and I said God please help me through this situation. And when I woke up the next morning my first thought was. Wow t really works because I feel so calm right now and then I realized I was like oh no it wasn't the tea it was it was God and Holy Spirit descending on me and bringing me peace and I wouldn't necessarily say that immediately my problem was solved. It did eventually resolve itself but what was brought to me was just an overwhelming sense of peace and in the sense that it's going to be OK. Like I don't have to beat myself up about this problem. I can take it to him leave it at his feet and walk away. [00:43:49] They say because the Bible says the perfect love cast out fear. Yeah. And when we are in those situations where we can be afraid then you know God's love can push it out and we're no longer afraid in the outcome. If we're trusting the Lord is always always good. And you may not be easy but it's always good. [00:44:14] Exactly and that's what it was for me. I just took a deep breath and I said thank you God this is gonna be OK. And that was actually then that Sunday was the first time I ever stepped into a church. I had been a Jewish girl my entire life. And I thought Oh this is gonna be really weird. And it wasn't weird at all. It was exactly where I needed to be. It was beautiful. It was welcoming. And I've been going ever since and it was probably six years ago. [00:44:42] Well so you're just a six year old Christian. [00:44:46] I am. That's what I tell my pastor all the time I'm like you've got to treat me like a kindergarten I should be at Sunday school with all the little kids. [00:44:52] I love it. I love it. Well in wrapping up is there anything else you'd like to share either from your relationship with the Lord and how that's been in your life or anything in terms of your business that would help somebody. [00:45:07] Yeah I would say that my my pastor asked me to open prayer at our next service. [00:45:15] And at first I was super anxious about it. I don't like to speak in public. And he said I understand Carrie. But consider this you're speaking in front of family and you're speaking to God. And when you put it that way I thought I can do this. I would say to anyone out there who is maybe struggling who is doubting themselves who is who you may be in a hard hard place with your business or your personal life. [00:45:45] That then at the end of the day you have the fortitude inside of you and with God's grace and his strength and his love. If you keep putting one foot in front of the other that's all we're asking you to do is just don't give up. Keep moving forward. Challenge yourself sometimes step outside of your comfort zone of where you think that you need to be or want to be. Sometimes that's where our greatest growth is happening and then also to just one thing that's helped me so much and in my business and in my personal life to try and live everyday with gratitude to look around and see how we have been so blessed. I mean not just to to be able to live in this country and be one of the richest people on earth. [00:46:38] I think they said if you own two cars you're in the top eight percent of the richest people on the planet. Not just that but when you look outside and you see God's beauty the mountains the valleys the forests the ocean the deserts the plains that he put all of that here for us. I mean the fact that you can go to your sink and turn on the water and clean water comes out. I mean I kind of geek out about this a little bit because it's one of the things I'm super passionate about that we have so much bounty and so many blessings. And if you can hold on to those things the things that we ought to be grateful for instead of all the problems in your life it will turn I think turned things around for you almost like the snap of a finger because that is what perspective and gratitude can do. [00:47:28] You know I had to share a story so it's not my story third party but you know in the Bible it says that whatever is good what is your pure repute whatever is honorable you know all these things dwell on that. And there was a couple I was listening to teach many years back they'd gone through a almost certain point of divorce. He was always gone. He was always brash he was always go go go. She wanted him home and wanted more loving and compassion. And it got to be a real rift to the point that she was literally she had if I remember the story correct. She had the divorce papers in hand and the Lord put on his on her spirit just a little check in her spirit that this is not the rule to go. And she went back to the scriptures where it says to just like you you know focus on those things that you're that you can have gratitude for. Focus on those things that are good. She's actually made a list of everything that she loved about Bob and Bob and Cindy Harrison many years back. What she loved about Bob that she fell in love with. [00:48:39] What was interesting. Is those were the same things that she was now frustrated with. Right. But she started to focus on that. And every time she would get upset she would thank the Lord for these great traits and qualities of Bob. And she said it was just a matter of I mean so fast. She fell back in love and their marriage has been really super strong. So this whole attitude of attitude of gratitude and thanking the Lord and just being appreciative of all that he's done is really powerful. So I appreciate that. It really is. All right. Well I think we're pretty much at the end of this call. So Carrie thank you so much for sharing. And for those who are watching or listening if you do like this let me courage you to subscribe to our podcast. Be sure to like it on iTunes and on YouTube and in place also like our guest sellers calling you Facebook page if you want to learn more about us and how to grow your business. Just visit our website get sellers calling you dot com. So Carrie thanks again. And it's a real pleasure to visit with you. [00:49:50] Thank you. You too. All right. You'll be blessed. [00:49:55] If you've enjoyed this podcast Be sure to subscribe to it so you never miss another episode. AND PLACE LIKE OUR get sellers calling you Facebook page. Also if you want to increase sales from past clients and sphere of influence dominate a geographic farm or convert home valuation leads. Check out our agent dominator program. We create custom content that differentiates you from other realtors then use it to keep you top of mind with your prospects with postcards targeted Facebook ads email campaigns video interviews and more. And the best part is we guarantee yourselves or give all your money back. Learn more at get sellers calling you dot com and select agent dominator in the minute. [00:50:35] Thanks for listening to the get sellers calling you podcast. Have a great day. 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Transcription (was completed by automated process. Please ignore any speech-to-text errors)   [00:00:00] This is Beatty Carmichael and I wanted to just give you a quick introduction to this audio before you hear it so it starts to make sense. I try to reach out to our clients and just touch base with them make sure that they do the best practices to get results because best practices generate best results with our service. And so this is one of these what I call a client engagement call and the focus is how to do best practices in the personal touch as you do with your personal contacts. But I want to expand your thinking that it's not just your personal contacts if any contact that you're marketing to. What are the best practices to be able to reach out and touch them so that you can nurture the relationship. And that's what this call is about. And I hope you enjoy it. All right. Well very good. So what I want to do on this college is I just want to cover best practices to make sure yeah. Because if you do best practices you'll get best results. And if you don't do best practices you won't get results.   [00:01:02] It makes it right. Right now. Yes. So I'm familiar with the Popeye. What is it usually. I guess if you could. Elaborate a little bit I usually like popping by. Or is it kind of their home in the evening and just dropping off like a bottle of wine or what is the best practice for CROSSFIRE.   [00:01:27] The key with a pot buy is you're looking them face to face in the eye really kind of depends on what type of prospect they are what type of relationship they are. That would determine if it's a personal friend and they love wine might drop by an evening. Hey I was just at the grocery store I was thinking about you guys picked up some bottle of wine for you guys. Hope you enjoy it and they go Oh thank you that's so great Ryan. But if it's the teller at the bank that you built a relationship with but it's not that personal relationship I'd pop by at the bank rather than home home is going to be OK.   [00:02:04] Got it.   [00:02:05] Yeah of course I may say. I was just down the street I thought about you and the donut shop was there so I picked up some doughnuts for you guys and you just bring some doughnuts in and say no now these are your Suzy and you tell all the cash registers their cashiers at the bank. These are Suzy. If you want it you gotta ask her Is it only for her and her friends. Did I make a big deal and she laughed and laughed. And now she really feels special. Okay. That's the pot.   [00:02:39] By God it does help. Yes absolutely.   [00:02:44] Okay. Then let me also let me give you kind of a real short list of best practices. Yeah that'll be great. Okay. And they're all personal touches. Okay great. So number one make sure you have a list of all the people we're targeting so that you can strategically talk to everyone Don't just wing it. Make sure that Okay I need to be talking to Bill and Tom and Sue and I'm going to make a go this week that I'm going to talk with them so strategically you're going through the entire list every time you do a personal communication you speak with them. You see them at a party. You do a pop by. Anytime you're looking them eyeball to eyeball at the end of that day. Write a note on a thank you note or just a note card that you have. That's branded to you as a real estate agent. Okay so it's a personal note but it's on professional stationery and the personal notice is going to be hey I really enjoyed seeing you. That was a beautiful dress. I hope you guys enjoy the doughnuts and I hope you get a pay raise for giving them out or you know just do something fun and you drop it in the mail.   [00:04:07] And now it's another personal touch solidifying. You're a really neat guy and they appreciate you but now it's solidifying that you're real estate agents coming from your real estate. No card and you might even know one guy has some sort of a little sticker that he always sticks in his communication that says something like You know I love referrals please send me Please refer me. Anything like that. That just kind of prompts him to refer what you're doing is you're letting your professionally printed information say I'm an agent and I like referrals but the actual note is all personal. So you're not saying hey don't doughnuts please refer me and you don't want to do that that's self-serving but you just want to keep that relationship nurtured so anytime there is an eyeball to eyeball. Or better yet. Anytime there's a voice to voice that ball or phone. Always a quick handwritten note as a follow up. Drop it in the mail. And now you've gotten more than double whammy on that touch because they appreciate it.   [00:05:19] Right. And then you're Popeye's identify those people on your list that are strategic and strategic for the most part is likely going to be those people who are connectors.   [00:05:34] They deal with a lot of other people and can connect you with people like the cashier at the bank. Deals lots of people all day long and they're always the same people especially if it's a local branch then they are in tune. People come in and make deposits withdraw money. They're talking with investing Oh hey Julie how are you doing again. We're doing great. How's life. Oh you know it's getting busy we're thinking about selling their home this summer. So trying to figure that stuff out. So now you're a little cash register gal picks up the phone and says Ryan this is thinking about selling you need to call her and identify those who are the connectors on the connectors you want to then go out and stay do is do more pot buys. Really engage more and do what you can to really nurture that relationship because they're worth their weight in gold. They can one connector can send you several deals a year. I know one of my clients one of their connectors. You know it's like four or five or six or 10 deals a year. So make sure you nurture them. They're really good really important outside of that then just the handwritten note is not. Hey enjoy visiting with you. But just as another touch sometime just say Hey I was thinking about you I loved our time out on the golf course a few months back. Let's do it again just a little note. That is another personal touch that may not be tied directly to a foisted voice type of touch.   [00:07:12] Got it. Got it. And then I have a quick question that I was a little confused about to back up on the set eyeball to eyeball. We're going to write a thank you note that's branded to me as a realtor.   [00:07:27] Hi.   [00:07:28] My question is I am I am not going to put anything about I love referrals. These are for me.   [00:07:34] You're saying that self-serving not in your handwritten note but you want something that is preprinted. It could be a sticker that you stick on it. It could be a business card that says I love referrals. It could be anything but just not handwritten in other words when they get a handwritten note do you want to go. He thought enough about me. He wrote me a note. You don't want them to go Oh man look at this note he's just asking for business. It's okay to let your preprinted material ask for business just don't let your personal handwritten note directly ask for business. That's what I'm saying.   [00:08:17] I hear not not in that touch.   [00:08:20] Now obviously know some other day you may call him up and say hey you know anyone thinking about selling. I mean if you're if you're going to ask for business make it a business related call but don't accept personal touch for your nurturing and relationship with business because then it comes across as insincere. So make sure you nurture the relationship the most and only periodically if you do it all as your business. Most of the time. Okay so now if we look at what we do with Agent dominator here here's how people make decisions. Here's how a homeowner chooses an agent. They know and like you they know why did choose you and you happen to be top of mind at the time that they're thinking about choosing an agent. So those are the three legs to a stool if you take one of those legs off the stool doesn't work. So all of this nurturing is your part. They know you and like you. And then once they know you and like you and they know that the relationship is sincere then that's where then agent dominator picks up the other two legs of the stool. With our custom content we educate them why they should choose you. And we keep you top of mind so that they think of you all the time so when they're thinking of choosing someone you happen to be there. So it's all mixed in one big one big pool. Does that make sense right.   [00:09:46] Yes absolutely.   [00:09:49] It's great. And the last thing I was talking about is strategic. Let me give you some ideas on being strategic. Make a list carry a list with a list that is printed on paper that you can check off. I spoke to them. I did a pop by Mark the date so keep keep your records accurate basically that way as you go through that list. You know your first goal. So if you look at our guarantee you got to personally touch your list twice a year. First time right within your first couple of months second time in the first couple of months of the second half of the year. So that means you have to know who you need to be contacting and when you when you touch them and what you did because we asked you. Email us the list of people you spoke to or contacted the date that you contacted and what type of contact it was. So we can verify that you did it. So to be strategic you have your list. Maybe it's only 15 or 20 that you can carry on at a time and you've updated your entire list and whenever you have a free moment you're at a stoplight you're in a traffic jam. Pull up your list and say Who have I not personally touched that I need to be personally touching and that way you can strategically touch everyone. Make sure you highlight those people who are your connectors and your high value prospects and make sure you're touching them even more frequently. And that's strategically how you get it all done.   [00:11:23] Yeah what I have is a Google document that I have my I have on my computer and on my phone at all times. I don't.   [00:11:34] That way. I have a piece of paper. It's the chances of it.   [00:11:41] I love that Google sheepdog. That's perfect because it's always updated. And then you can simply copy and paste that to an Excel spreadsheet and email that to us. Okay here's what I've done and here's my validation on it exactly. I've always got it in front of you and you can sort it sort by date last contacted and anyone that hasn't come up. Those are the people you need to be contacting. I'd love Google Docs content.   [00:12:09] Yeah yeah yeah. That's just the way I was like How am I gonna do this. And you will see I was like Well I'm always on my phone with me so I'll always be able to you know if I get a hold of somebody I just put in the Google she made a call this day or if I send a note I have another column for notes date notes sent and I just when I send a note I put the date in there. So. That way yeah that way. It's all. Documented.   [00:12:43] I think that's brilliant I think that's a super way to do it. Now do you have any questions for me on anything.   [00:12:49] My only question for you is I've been working on also I know another aspect of the deal is also the app which I think is great.   [00:13:01] The most important use of the app is going to be with your active clients because you're active clients become past clients and your recent past clients are the ones most likely to refer business to you. Okay so let me rephrase that. Of all people are most likely other than your Connectors you're right. So make sure you do that personal visit get to your connectors on the app and then that way they can just be that little cashier at the bank. Oh well you need to call Ryan and be let me tell you this information because he is a great guy and if you're looking for an agent they call him. So now she is texting everything right then. So you use it with your connectors. That's great. But that's how you do it. P033

This week we get the podcast refocussed back toward it's original vision. (We got a little off track there the past couple months). Focus this week is on longevity and the key things people who live in the "blue zones" tend to incorporate into their lives. The book I'm currently reading related to finding your life purpose - Claim Your Power: A 40 Day Journey to Dissolve the Hiddlhttps://www.amazon.com/Claim-Your-Power-Mastin-Kipp-ebook/dp/B071GSFGX2/ref=sr_1_12?crid=2ZEF3M187R8FC&keywords=claim+your+power&qid=1561598601&s=gateway&sprefix=claim+your+po%2Caps%2C197&sr=8-12Here's a brief description of Ayervedic Medicine. It's a bit out there, a bit woo woo as they say, but it's been a practice for over 3000 years. There has to be something to this, right? Well I'm going to find out.https://www.webmd.com/balance/guide/ayurvedic-treatments#1 Podcast Email - pearls@whywaitpodcast.comPodcast Website - www.whywaitpodcast.com