CB LIVE! Courage to Leap & Lead with Sally Helgesen: part 1 - Episode 123

You've got courage to leap, courage to lead.

Be brave and be bold. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Let it roar.

Welcome to the Courage to Leap and Lead podcast, where each of our guests share the stories of courage that helped them become powerful leaders. Before we start today's show, please remember to visit courageconsulting.com where you can find all of the episodes and lots of other excellent resources. That's courageconsulting.com. Now here's your host, Leadership Courage Coach CB Bowman.

Hello everybody. How are you today? I'm sporting a new top from Free Something or Other. But, um, so I'm fiddling with it. I'm not used to it, so forgive me with these long sleeves, but I'm very fashionable, right? How are you today? It's CB. It's so good that you're here. You know, I miss you, you know, from show to show. I really miss you. And that's interesting for an introvert, right? Most introverts like me, we just want to curl up and do our thing. But I do my thing with you guys. So today we have a friend, a colleague, a brilliant woman who's so special. You know what? She's just like me. Sally Higgerson, who is The champion, the champion in fighting for women's rights, and she does it through some amazing writing. I know that you all know her first book, How Women Rise, but do you know her second book, Rising Together? And by the way, she's written 9 books. I mean, it's, it's just— I don't even get it. I'm just trying to get my first book out.

It's been Hair-raising.

Sally, welcome, welcome, welcome. Thank you for being here today.

Oh, thank you, CB. I always love an opportunity to be with you.

You know, we've got to get Sally laughing because she's very serious. But then she's dealing with very serious subjects. So we're going to get her, you know, laughing. Maybe I'll send a glass of wine to her through the camera. So Sally, you're a huge success. Huge. You're a great model for women. And the first thing I noticed about you is you don't shy from anything. You tell it like it is. Were you always like that?

You know, I think I was. I remember about 40 years ago, I was working in corporate communications in New York City, and I was in a meeting where I was the only woman and the youngest person. And I had an idea, and I raised it. I talked about it very briefly. No one responded. No one looked or said anything in response. And afterwards, my boss's boss came up behind me. And he said, well, you certainly aren't afraid to say what you think, in this really condescending way. Very nasty. And for some reason, I just responded. I said, no, I'm not. And my most natural thing would be to say, you know, oh, I'm sorry, maybe I shouldn't have spoken.

Yes.

Or, you know, I apologize, Your Highness, or something like that. Or else been very defensive and said, I have a perfect right to speak. But I didn't do either. I just said, no, I'm not, because I was so surprised. I just could hardly believe what had happened. So he kind of harrumphed, you know, and I walked out of the room and I thought, okay, I'm dead here. I'm completely dead. My boss's boss thinks I'm a jerk. And But nothing happened. And about a month later, I overheard him talking to someone in an office that I was passing by. And he said, you know what I like about Sally is she's not afraid to say what she thinks. So the guy got used to me. He adapted to it. I think I got a lot of points without realizing it by not trying to Manage his perceptions or apologize or back off. You know, as women, we often back off. Oh, I'm sorry. Whereas a guy, you know, well, I'll come back at you again.

Mm-hmm.

So I don't know what— it wasn't typical behavior for me at that point, but I saw the value of it. It was a great lesson to me that, you know, be respectful, don't yammer on. But say what you think. And if you say what you think, people resonate with it. And I found that in my books, that's really—

Well, you know, I know that you do that in your books and you just froze a little bit in your camera. But how did you learn to do that? I mean, we're in a sea of apologies. as a woman. We're a sea of step down, like, let the guy take it forward. In fact, I have to tell you a funny story. My husband and I are studying pickleball because we have to be with the in crowd, right? And so we have this woman who's teaching us. She is incredible. And she walked over after the second lesson. She said to my husband, Your wife is very competitive. Yes, she is. You haven't seen anything. Good.

Yeah.

Now, coming from an Italian man, this is, I think, praise. But I had to learn that. I had to learn that skill. I had to learn to be— well, I think I had to learn to be competitive. I know I had, I had to learn how to speak up.

Yeah.

So where did you learn it? And when did it start for you as a child? Or tell us about your parents. What were they like?

I think it was because of my parents, especially my dad, because my dad taught speech and communication at our local university. And one of the things, we had 5 kids. I was the oldest, which I think gives you a lot of confidence. You know, you're still, people still are like, what does Sal think? It was that kind of stuff. So, you know, when you're the oldest, you get some confidence. And to get the oldest kids out of my mother's hair sometimes after dinner, he would take us over to the university, over to the, they had a theater there, put us on stage and asked us to give speeches just as something to do at night. And he was not very judgmental. He didn't go like, oh, well, you should have— you know, he just was giving us practice. And what this showed me, what it taught me, is that just practice, just practice. And this is kind of the lesson in a lot of my books is that we learn by doing. We get better by practicing. So we want to do it. So if you want to speak up, try it. Try it in a low-stakes situation. Get used to being someone who speaks up. And that's kind of— I had that support from my dad. I know that's unusual, but it was great training. It was great support. It was incredible for me years later when I started giving talks back in the early '90s, being hired by organizations. If I was in Chicago, for example, my dad would come down and see me. And I felt like there was a straight line through. So it was, do it, just do it, just practice. And then the other thing is because I did speak up, because I, you know, said what I thought, and I think appropriately, Mm-hmm. Other women would say, you know, oh, we really need you in the room because you speak up. So on one hand, I found that a little irritating because I thought, you know, do I have to be the one who does it? But on the other hand, I felt a responsibility. I felt that I was to some degree, and this is very comfortable for an older sister, modeling what you do and how you do it, how you speak up. In a way that gets some, you know, that is resonant for other people.

You know, you said so much, and I wasn't taking notes, and I wish I was, because I want to come back and ask you a couple of questions. One specifically occurs to me, and I don't mean to take you down a rabbit hole, but you're an expert on women and culture. in general. So I want to ask you the tough question.

All right.

The ability to speak up, it appears to me to be crushed when you're dealing with people of color.

So what—

first question is, how do we as women of color deal with it? We meaning me, people that look like me. And second of all, because I know this happened to me, how do you keep your sense of being intact through all of this? Give us some thoughts. I mean, if I try to say what you said, because I know I've been in meetings with you.

Yeah.

If I say what you say in the environment that you say it, people would say, whoa, well, that one there, you know, that so-and-so of color, so-and-so, she thinks she's all that. So give us some coaching on how we can be ourselves and be more like you.

Well, first of all, I don't— being like someone else is never a great idea, but I'm very familiar with what you're asking because I have coached women of color through this with women from the dominant group. And I'm going to call it the dominant group. If I call it the white group or the Black group, you know, I do work all over the world. So talking about white men in Japan is kind of a It's a loser. So you don't do that. I mean, I've done programs, you know, in Africa and Asia and the Middle East, etc. So there are some fine gradations when you're part— when you're a woman, but you're part of the mainstream culture. And this isn't always true. There are exceptions. Japan is tough. Then you are— men who are uncomfortable with women speaking up. They're not— they don't encourage it among their wives, to say the least. They don't particularly prize it among their daughters. They just have not had that experience, and they don't particularly want that experience. When you speak up, when I speak up, they will think of you as arrogant and aggressive. And that's what they'll tell you, you know. And that's what that guy was telling me, you know, you're being pretty aggressive here. You don't belong. You shouldn't be speaking up. In my experience, when—

Wait, Sally, you said that's what they'll tell you. Sometimes they don't tell you, they act on it.

Oh yeah.

So it's just for women, don't always just listen for the spoken word. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well, that's absolutely true. So let's— we'll break it down. We'll deal with that afterwards. So, but that's, that's their narrative, I should say, whether it's spoken or not. Their internal narrative is, you're very aggressive, you're speaking out of turn, you're pretty arrogant, and I, I'm uncomfortable with that. I hope my wife doesn't do this to me when I get home. That's what they're thinking.

Yes.

For a woman of color, what it evokes in them is, you seem angry. And that's what they will often say. You know, you seem angry, or they're thinking of it. Well, she's certainly angry, you know. And why are they saying you're angry? Because they understand that you have cause to be angry, particularly because of how they're thinking about you. So that is their narrative.

Right.

Their narrative becomes, you are an angry Black woman. And, you know, we see that. I mean, Michelle Obama addressed it directly. But we see that. You know, seems pretty angry. What I think— so those are 2 kind of different things. Anger to them is more threatening because it feels violent. On the other hand, my guess is they're not married to a woman of color. So they don't feel in other ways kind of as threatened because they're not— fearful that suddenly their wife's going to start acting like you, which is what their underlying fear is if you're white or within their racial group. So they're two different things, but I think it's very similar in terms of how you address it. First of all, what you do not want to do is spend your energy trying to address or change their perception. It's their perception, and maybe you can change it over time like I managed to do with my boss's boss back there in that office 40 years ago. I managed to change his perception by just continuing to show up as I showed up. You don't want to invest your energy in trying to manage their perceptions, because that lies outside your circle of control. You can't address that. You don't know what the thinking was in their family of origin, in their church, in their family, the family that they have now, among their neighbors. You don't know what that is, so you can't necessarily control what their perceptions are, so you want to put your attention On not backing off prematurely, on using the incident to think about ways— and this is for all women, I'm not talking about women of color— but to think about how can I do that to maximum effectiveness? How can I speak up? How can I represent my point of view? How can I get— credit for my contributions in a way that is as effective as possible? So that becomes then your quest. So a very helpful way of doing that is trying it out on other people, not necessarily that person. You've got the information that this makes them uncomfortable. That is their We'll talk about retribution later. That is their problem. Their perception is their problem. You can't necessarily change it, although you may be able to change it over time. You want to make sure. You want to do a reality check. Am I being as effective as I can, as open as I can? You don't want to try, like, oh, well, my concern here Is, you know, how to not come off as overly aggressive or an angry Black woman. That is not your concern. Your concern is doing— representing what you have to say in a way that is effective and gains credibility. So then you want to practice on other people. Okay. I was in a meeting last week and I said X. And I got a response from one of the men in the room. You don't have to name him. You're not there for a gossip session. You're there to get better with yourself. So naming him is not important. I got a response from one of the men in the, in the room that I could tell that this had disturbed him. I can't do anything about that, but I want to make sure that I'm representing what I said. In the most effective and clear way possible. Can you give me some coaching on that? Here's what I said. Is there something you might recommend? You want to do that. You want to do that broadly. By broadly, I mean with a lot of people. You want to do that in a way that gives you ideas that may be effective So you can hone your presentation style without getting overly focused on, oh, what will they think? Or, you know, oh, that'll be different behavior than I've exhibited in the past, etc., like that. Now, if the people that you ask say, oh, who was that? Oh, I bet it was so-and-so, you know, which they will— people are interested in other people— say, yeah, I You know, we don't need to talk about that. I'm interested in how I can make sure I'm doing this effectively. And I've had real success in terms of coaching both women in the dominant group, whatever it is, and women of color in terms of that. Keep your focus on being effective in your presentation. Get as much feedback on that as you can. And don't try to manage what that person's perceptions are. Now, if that person is dug in, is a dug-in sexist, a dug-in racist, then you're interested in that information because this may be a situation where you're going to court retribution if you maintain who you are, and this may be a situation where you want to make a lateral move, you want to make an exit, you want to potentially in the long term over time talk to somebody about it if it's a pattern of bad behavior toward you. You'll want to talk to somebody, but that's way down the line. You don't want to put yourself in a position where you either suck it up or you go to HR. There's a whole range of actions you can take. So that's what I really, really encourage.

So this is— boy, I wish I had you as my coach when I was coming along.

So do I.

Here's my follow-up question to that. How do you manage your feelings and your ego in order to get to where you need to go?

2 ways. The first is make sure you build allies who will listen to you. And by listen to you, I don't mean listen to you complain, listen to you, you know, I mean, we all have moments we feel really bad and we want people who listen to that, but who are interested in having constructive conversations, who are interested perhaps in supporting us. We're in a meeting, you know, what we say never gets noticed. We ask somebody, we say, you know, in this meeting I noticed that what I say never gets endorsed, never gets noticed. Nobody ever says good idea. If you're comfortable and you think it's a good idea, would you do that? Because sometimes people are just clueless. The amount of cluelessness that causes problematic behaviors is really off the charts. You know, they don't notice. And, you know, a lot of guys aren't great at noticing. I mean, they're just not. I remember, you know, my husband, who's a very sensitive guy, I remember I'd just written The Female Vision, in which I talk about, you know, how women's capacity for noticing all the details. is one of their strengths, but it can destabilize them, that radar that we've got. And whereas men have a more laser-like focus. And so it was helpful because I had a lot of research on that, you know, neuroscience, looking at pictures of brain imaging, et cetera, to verify that. So my husband and I were watching the Super Bowl, and this is a couple of years ago, maybe 10. And, you know, it's long and there are a lot of commercials and some of them are good and some of them are bad. So during the commercials, I was sort of cleaning up after dinner. Usually he does, usually does the cleanup, usually does the dishes. But, you know, he was sitting there. So I was kind of doing it because, you know, I'm not comfortable just sitting around for hours.

Yes.

So I was doing it, you know, I even swept the floor and everything. And then at the end of the game, he turned to me and he said, Well, I guess we should clean up the kitchen now. You know, the dining room's here, the kitchen's there. You didn't notice that on most of the commercial breaks I got up and I did precisely that. I said, you didn't notice? And he said, well, I was watching the game. You know, that laser focus. I was watching the game. A lot of this stuff is is explained by that, you know, that sort of I was watching the game mentality. So a lot of it is cluelessness. We don't want to impute motives to it unless we have hard evidence or there's a pattern. And we want to try to address it, you know, as I said, in a certain way. And we want to, if we can, and I'll just say this very briefly, also rewrite a narrative. You know, we're maybe assuming that person you know, places no value on what I say. So that becomes our narrative in our head. We want to question that narrative a little bit. You know, I, you know, maybe he's distracted, maybe this. I used to do this early on when I was giving speeches, giving keynotes in the early '90s. I would get distracted by somebody in the back of the room who was staring at their phone. I was thinking, oh my God, I'm boring. You know, I'm boring the hell out of the audience. What can I do? Oh, maybe I I should be talking about something else. And I realized how destabilizing that was and got in the habit of just mentally saying, ah, he probably had a fight with his wife this morning. Oh, she's probably, you know, maybe her son, she just got a call from school and there's a problem with her son. So I would make up these stories in my mind on the spot, one second, that would explain why I did not have their, their attention. And then I could just shift my eyes to somebody who looked engaged as opposed to looking at them and wondering what was going on. Because guess what? I didn't know. So why not tell yourself a positive story?

You know, Sally, if you listen to my podcast, you see that I'm always interrupting and talking. But I'm so riveted by you that— and my mind keeps flashing back to, I should have done this. Based upon what Sally is saying now.

You know, CB, I've been at this a long time. I've been at this 50 years, so, you know, I've learned a lot.

Sally, oh my God, it's just— first of all, I love the story about your husband because we've just been married for 3 years and my husband does exactly the same thing and it drives me up a tree. And he— and I'm like, I just said to him, are you looking for me, please, a place to have the cocktail party for our conference, you know, conference? And he said, yeah. And I didn't believe him. And I said, really? What places have you looked at? And he named one. And I said, yeah, okay, I don't know that one. And he looked at me and he said, Darling, yes, you do. We went there for dinner, and that is where you said to the bartender— and he quoted me— bartender, that woman over there is flirting with that guy. And it turns out the bartender said, yes, that's my girlfriend. And I'm like looking at him, but he'll forget to get a carton of milk at the groceries. That's just— I mean, I'm like, what? In what century do you remember things like that with such clear detail?

Yeah, yeah, it's kind of remarkable. What— one of the reasons that was so memorable to me, the Super Bowl moment, was that if I hadn't just finished doing research that showed women have a broader spectrum noticing capacity than most men, you know, this is Obviously, there are differences in men and women. But in general, women notice more. And men are very laser-focused. If I hadn't just finished that research, I would have thought, boy, what, what BS this, you know, this is so convenient. You didn't happen to notice that I was doing this so you didn't have to get up and help me? I believed him.

Like me.

I believed him because I'd done the research. So I just said, okay, got it. You know, and then years later, he was— I was doing an in-person meeting with some high school— no, it was the college presidents. And the moment came up and I sort of told that story. And he was there. And he said, oh my, I can't believe you told that story. That's so embarrassing. I sound like such a jerk. I said, no, you sound like, you know, 80% of their husbands. That's what they're doing.

That's right. Absolutely. Marriage counseling is also in your life.

Exactly.

So Sally, with, with all that you've said now, um, tell us about— because clearly you're a master at mastering people— tell us about experiences you've had where you were not successful and you turned it into success. I am just so curious.

Well, turning the feelings that come with not being successful around so that you can chart a different path is, I think, much harder than most of us recognize. You can identify the how, and, you know, I sort of specialize in the how, how women rise, you know, how women see Rising Together, how we get better at building relationships across boundaries. So I sort of specialize in the how, but I recognize that in order to act on a how, you need the sort of emotional resilience to be able to do that. And it is not easy at all when you've been through something somewhat traumatic. And for me, this trauma was really, I think, what set me on the path I'm on today.

Tell us.

Was the recession. The recession. We had the worst recession, my husband and I. It was absolutely horrible. My work had slowed down. I'd had 2 books that were not particularly successful, that disappointed me, that disappointed the publisher. You know, coincided with a challenging period. My dad had died, 9/11. I was right, you know, down the road, etc. But so it was a hard time anyway. But my work was not very robust. And I— then the recession hit. And we were a little bit fragile as things were because of it already. And it hit us both so hard. He lost his job. I booked one event between the end of 2008, like November 2008, And I guess it was really August 2010. And so I had to do some ghostwriting for people because I had no income. I also had a book contract and I had to somehow manage all that. And it was incredibly painful for me, not just because We assumed so much debt that it took until 2 years ago to get out of the debt. We had so much debt. It was horrible. But also, I had been invited by my— our dear colleague, Marshall Goldsmith, to join a group of his called the Learning Network back in 1995. That got— where the people got together every year out in the West Coast, out in San Diego. And so I was part of this group, and the people in that group were incredibly successful and high profile. It was a small group, and the people were well known. They earned a ton of money. They got very well paid, far better paid than on my best days I ever had. than I ever had. And I watched all of them except for one guy who was vulnerable because he had like 5 ex-wives. Oh my God. Really. I watched all of them sort of sail through, you know, well, we're doing a little belt tightening, you know, we flew, you know, premium economy for our annual trip to— month-long trip to Italy, stuff like that. And I felt— I can't say I felt jealous, but I felt so humiliated. I felt very humiliated, like I'm a part of this group, but I am so not a part of this group because my experience of this recession is so painful. We You know, my husband started painting houses. You know, we live in the country. There's not a lot of work on the ground. So we had a ladder on our car out in the driveway. It was very, very difficult. He was actually too old to be doing it. But it was so painful. I tried to, and I was mostly successful in thinking, this is good because I'm really more in line with how most people are experiencing this recession than my colleagues are because there was so much pain, people losing their houses. You remember the whole mess in 2008, losing their pensions, etc. So I felt like, okay, this helps me understand what people are going through, but it was incredibly Humiliating, and I remember the a low point was when I had to miss my. I mean, this doesn't you know it sounds like a luxury problem, of course, but I couldn't go to the learning network meeting because I had to spend that money having a tooth repaired. There was no way I could do both, and of course I didn't tell anybody. You know, I've got my doctor said I've got an ear infection. I made up some. BS excuse. But the humiliation I felt was— that was keeping me stuck. It wasn't the circumstances. There were 10 things I could have done at that point, uh, not, not probably to earn much money, but there were things I could have done to feel better. But I felt paralyzed by the humiliation I felt and the, the profound and deep sense of failure that I had. I felt like, here I've done all this work. Here, you know, at that point I guess I'd written 6 books. You know, people know who I am. People say, oh yeah, I read your books in graduate school and you influenced me to do X, Y, and Z. And I thought, and here I am, schmuck, you know, worried about, you know, can we afford a second car? Should I drive around in a car with a ladder on In the Price Chopper parking lot. This was the level I was operating at. So what I saw was that the most important thing was to just accept what I was feeling, not pretend that I wasn't feeling it. I'm not talking about chatting about it to everybody. I had one or two people that I was really honest with who were very close friends. Share that. Have somebody to share with, not vent so much, but share and be real with, and then accept how I was feeling, accept that this made me feel profoundly inadequate and humiliated and like my whole career had been pointless, and just say, okay, I feel that way. It's a problem, but here we are, and what do I have to do today? What do I have to do today? What is on my plate today? Oh, I've got to write that article for this consultant. It's doing ghostwriting, etc. Grateful to have this work. Let me get at it, so what I was focused on was just today, just Today, just today. That was my mantra for almost 2 years. How am I gonna— okay, I'm not asking, how do I get through this? How? And I did that, took that approach also with the finances. Okay, what can we do to improve things at the margins? Can we refinance this debt? Can we this, that, or the other? So it was very, very, very tactical. And that's where I got my belief in the value of thinking tactically and focusing on solutions and trying not to buy into your story. My story was, I'm a failure, we're failures, here we are. I didn't want to buy into that story. It's how I felt. Acknowledge how it is. Awareness, acceptance, action. I use that in Rising Together, that template. Awareness: This is how I feel. Acceptance: I accept it. This is the situation. I don't need to go over and over, how did I get here? And then action: What action can I take today? So that helped over time, and Things got better and they got better slowly and it took years. And I was not— we were not young. So it was tough. But I wouldn't change that experience for anything. Nothing.

Wow, Sally. So let me ask you this. Why did you feel humiliated? Why that word?

I felt humiliated because my circumstances were so radically different from how I perceived my colleagues' circumstances. Now, did I ask them? Did I say— I asked, you know, are you suffering in this recession? And most people would say, well, no, you know, we own our house. You know, I have 5 regular clients, so I'm able to bring in X, Y, and Z. And, you know, they would talk about it, or, you know, no, I've got royalties from these bestselling books. That's what I was hearing. So I felt humiliated because I felt as if I had done my best. I had worked as hard as my colleagues, and that for some reason God had chosen me to not be as successful as they were, and that was embarrassing.

So in taking your, your 3-step approach— awareness, acceptance, and action— how do you figure out What actions to take when you're at an all-time low? In other words, don't you feel that— not don't— do you feel that each action you take, whatever action you're going to take, is not going to help?

You may feel that, and I did feel that. You may feel that, but you want to take the smallest action that is possible for you on that day, because I called it minimal coping, but it was more than coping, but it was more minimal action. Today, I can't do this, but I can do this. It was interesting because it was early on in the social media thing, And colleagues kept saying, you got to get on social media, you got to do this, you got to, you know, brand yourself and blah, blah. It was about the last thing on earth I could do was start branding myself when I felt that there was such a disjunction between how I was feeling and how I wanted to brand myself. It had to be— it has to be authentic. If it's not authentic, people know it. So I couldn't do that. And I kind of missed that wave because I didn't want to necessarily represent myself. I knew that those were actions that I was not yet emotionally ready to take. So I think that's a really important bit, and this is why the acceptance part is so important. When I see people who struggle with this kind of situation, they seem to want to pass From awareness, oh, this is really bad, or I did this, or whatever, to action. Awareness, action, awareness, action. You need that step in the way, in the middle of acceptance. This is how I feel. Because I accept that, I need to calibrate what actions I am capable of taking today that over time added together will begin to shift what I'm feeling and therefore make it possible for me to take different kinds of actions.

So what happens if the actions that you take don't help? Does that take you down further, or are you able to Okay. Especially at this moment, are you able to say, okay, that didn't work, let me try this?

This is why it's important to have a couple of people that you talk to and talk to very honestly. Because if you do, you can treat the fact that something didn't work, you're more likely to be able to treat that as information rather than further proof that you're a disaster or life doesn't work out for you uniquely. God has a grudge against you, whatever it is. So, it's really important. One of the most helpful things to me, so this recession hit at the end of '08, but in '09, Marshall, our friend Marshall Goldsmith, got very high on the whole idea of peer coaching, and he did a presentation about it at the Learning Network, this group of these high-powered people that I was part of and suddenly felt like I was very different then, so he did a presentation. He was talking about peer coaching and advocating it as something we could use in our lives to try to work on getting better at what we needed to get better at, And it was very explicit about, you know, here's who might engage and, you know, here are the questions you'll ask each other every week. It was pretty kind of quantified, you know, with being Marshall, you know, I have 10 questions, here are the questions, we do it every day. It's not how I do it. You know, I'm a woman, I have, you know, more conversations. But it— I decided that what I needed was a peer coach. I couldn't afford a coach. I couldn't afford anything. I didn't. really feel like I needed a psychiatrist because I didn't think it was a mental problem. I thought it was a situational problem that I had to learn to get out of. So I engaged a friend who is very oriented, at times too oriented, in fixing stuff. You know, okay, here's the situation. Let's fix it. Let's fix it. Let's fix it. And So I was able to work with her. She was going through hell with another thing that was immensely more problematic and tragic than what was happening to me, which was basically I was broke and felt like a professional failure. So I was able to help her with that because she had trust in me. But with that, having that peer coaching relationship, Instead of, you know, giving up, you know, here's where resilience and grit and all this stuff comes in. Instead of giving up, well, that didn't work. Okay, nothing's working. Nothing's working. I'm stuck here. This is my fate. You know, why don't I just, you know, get a job at the post office, whatever it was. Instead of doing that, I had to— I was in a position where, okay, I did this and here are the steps. And she said, okay, so when you did that, Tell me exactly what you did and break it down for me. And then we would identify where— why it had been— why it hadn't worked. And it was usually the same reason. I was rather desperately deluding myself that it was going to work, even though it probably wasn't. So it was very interesting, and I feel it was incredibly fortuitous that I had developed this peer coaching relationship right at this period of time and was able to work things through, so that model of awareness, acceptance, action combined, which I developed during this period because I needed something, and then it combined with working with a peer coach doing this informal engagement. which I advocate in both How Women Rise and Rising Together, and that Marshall describes as stakeholder-centered coaching. But this is informal. It is really— I think that was a great model for helping me to develop the emotional— I don't even want to call it resilience, but the ability— to deal with my emotions so that my actions at moving out of where I was became more effective and useful over time.