344: Navigating Workquakes in a Post-Career World with Bruce Feiler

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That story that you tell yourself is not a part of who you are. It is who you are in a fundamental way, but for whatever reason, it has been kept away from work. So the idea that you have a work story and in order to be happy and fulfilled, you have to identify the untold story, I call it your scripture, that you've been, in effect telling since childhood and revising over and over again. You need to take that from the silent, unspoken part of your life and bring it to the heart of the decisions that you make about what it is that you want to do.

What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Welcome back Pivoters. Jenny Blake here and I am so excited to be here today with Bruce Fieler. He is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers including Life is in the Transitions, the Secrets of Happy Families, the Council of Dads, and his newest book. The topic of today's conversation, the finding meaningful work in a post career world. Bruce, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much Jenny. I apologize for being late to this recording because I was running to my uncolor coordinated bookshelf to pull off one of the first books I read in this journey called Pivot. The only move that matters is your next. One by One, Jenny Blake and the way the world works. We have pivoted and boomeranged and here we are talking to each other. What a thrill.

Well, it's such an honor for me, I get to say. I shared the podcast stage with Gwyneth Paltrow because that's why I thought you were running late. You were fresh off your Goof interview.

I did have an interview with Gwyneth Paltrow, her gp, her own self, on the Goop podcast and she said this book, you know Arrived at exactly the right moment for me. And we're all wondering, ooh, what does that mean for Gwyneth Paltrow? She was so gracious, so warm, just so engaged in this topic, identified herself as a questioner. And I think that that just relates to so many of us who are constantly asking, you know, am I doing what I want to be doing? Am I living the life I want to be living? And she, like you, has a just a wonderful community that's engaged and wants to get in and wrestle with the kind of messy and beautiful questions of life. And that was fun. And this will be fun, too.

Oh, well, I'm so happy you're here. Did I hear it correctly in that conversation with her that you spent time as a traveling clown?

At one point I did. In fact, I rather chuckled because on the day that we're taping this conversation, on the previous day, the Wall Street Journal ran a review of the search, and it was just talking about the moment and the opportunities of the nonlinear life. And they pointed out that I have had a bit of a nonlinear life. Yes. I mean, my story is I grew up in Savannah, Georgia, and I left there and went to college and moved to Japan in the mid-1980s. And I when Japan seemed like the center of the world and I started writing letters, home of the you're not going to believe what happened to me variety. And when I got back to Georgia six months later, everyone said, I loved your letters. And I was like, great. Have we met? And it turned out that my grandmother had Xeroxed them and they went viral in a sort of 1980s sense of the word. And I thought I should write a book about this. And so I wrote this book about Japan. I sold my first book at 21, and I've never held a job since then. I went to England and spent a year and wrote a book about life inside Oxford and Cambridge. And I was at a moment in my life I wanted to kind of reconnect with America, having been away for a decade. So I came back and followed my childhood dream of becoming a clown. And I joined the Clyde Beatty Cold Brother Circus and did 501 circuses in 16 states and 99 cities in the course of one year and wrote a book called under the Big Top.

That's incredible. Well, I love your emphasis on storytelling. And a big part of the search is helping us recognize our stories and get better at telling our stories, especially as it relates to career, because I think that one of the big themes this has been eight years of this podcast now is the underbelly of change, the feelings of insecurity and even shame and blame when we're at a pivot point, or having a workquake, as you call it, which you say happen about every two and a half years now. That's what I was finding too when I worked on pivot. And what happens is our storytelling gets sad, I think, sometimes in these liminal spaces of our career and our life, where I think that that ability to tell our story in a positive way can sometimes take a hit. And I'm wondering if you can speak more to that, to this idea of workquakes, what they are. And why do you think it is that our confidence in our storytelling of where we've come from and where we're going gets so impacted sometimes when we're going through a workquake.

Well, first of all, I just love the empathy and your voice and the sharpness of your experience and being in this space. And let me just begin by saying how I made the pivot to start doing this work. So I, I told you about my life in my 20s and I had a sort of a non traditional life in the sense that it was very linear, right? I figured out what I wanted to do early. I did it for no money for much of my twenties. Then I had some success and I started writing books that made the best seller list and I hosted television shows and I got married and had children. And that is the classic linear life that we all dream of in a lot of ways. But then my life blew up in my 40s. 40s first, as you know, I got cancer as a 43 year old man and the father of three year old identical twin daughters 15 years ago to the month as we record this conversation. Then I had financial troubles in the last recession and then my father, who had Parkinson's at the time, got very depressed and tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. So here I was, a professional storyteller, right, who at this point had soldiers, literally millions of books, and I didn't know how to tell my life story. And I was ashamed to tell this story. And what happened was when I started telling the story, it turns out that everybody reaches these moments when they don't know how to tell their story. And I heard a bunch of these stories. Actually it was a college graduation six years ago now and I called my wife. It was actually this weekend six years ago. And I said, no one knows how to tell their story anymore and I want to do something to help and what I did was now create what has become, in effect, my life's work, which is. I called it the Life Story Project. And I have now crisscrossed the country collecting in the last six years, 400 life stories of Americans of all ages, all walks of life, all 50 states, people who changed homes and changed careers and lost limbs and lost loved ones and got sober and got out of bad marriages. And I have been coding these stories with a team of 12 people for years now, looking for patterns. And for the last three years, this became the basis of my last book. As you know, life is in the transitions, which happened to come out in the pandemic when, as it happened, the entire planet was in a life transition.

At the same exact time. When in history has that happened?

Exactly. I mean, it hadn't happened in a hundred years. I think that that was one of the reasons it was so baffling. And I think it reminded us that even if we all are collectively back to the pivoter community, even if we all individually are going through transitions, the transitions that we're all going through have different scripts. And that gets really to the heart of your question. So what happened was, when that happened back in 2020, I was like, you know what? This is going to blow up everything about work. Because me, like everybody else, I'm like, is this going to change what I do, where I do it, when I do it, right? Work from anywhere, commuting goes away, like the idea of leaving a job. And so I set out to do it again on work. And that's what led me to the search. And so I think that that brings us really to where we are today and to the heart of your question. So let's just set the stage here. 70% of Americans are unhappy with what they do. Three quarters of Americans, in a survey released just three weeks ago, as we taped this conversation, said they plan to look for new work this year. You add those numbers up, that means 100 million Americans will sit across from someone they love today, tonight, tomorrow, and say, I'm not happy with what I'm doing, and I want to do something that makes me happy. This turn has been coming for a while as. Cause you've been. As. What did you say? How many years you've been doing this? This turn has been coming for a while, but what's been lacking. What's been lacking is a way to think about this in narrative terms, because the idea that your life is a story began in the 1980s, and the fringes of psychology was called narrative psychology. But now in the last three decades, it's become mainstream, right? This is kind of what we're talking about you do every day, right? The idea that you have a story and that story that you tell yourself is not a part of who you are. It is who you are in a fundamental way. But for whatever reason, and we could get into this, but for whatever reason, it has been kept away from work. So the idea that at the heart of my book is that you have a work story and in order to be happy and fulfilled, you have to identify the untold story, I call it your scripture, that you've been, in effect, telling since childhood and revising over and over again. You need to take that from the silent, unspoken part of your life and bring it to the heart of the decisions that you make about what it is that you want to do.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I really appreciate your vulnerability in sharing your journey as well, especially those parallel simultaneous workquakes, Lifequakes of your 40s. Death, disease, financial disaster. You know, I'm just so curious how you were able to help your dad through that time, even because it sounds like he was really experiencing a period of despair. And you must have also been feeling so low because as you said, all those identity pieces, your health must have seemed fundamental up till that point, and your financial stability. And it's all hitting at once. What do you think were those small things that helped you kind of claw your way out of that uber crisis? It's not even a crisis. It's like conflated crises conf. Collapsing on each other.

Funny that you say conflated I love this because, in fact, in life is in the transitions. One of the things I talk about is the idea of a pile up. Because I kept hearing in my conversations is that these things clump. They do conflate in one way, and there was not a word in the literature. And so I spent, frankly, months, because I couldn't figure out what to call it. And I ended up calling it a pileup because I was thinking of that moment of those old black and white movies, like where the first car stops, then boom, boom, boom, boom. And I think the way to think about a pileup is that some of them is just coincidence, right? You crash the car at exactly the moment your grandmother or your mother is having cataract surgery, right? Like, you lose your job at exactly the moment that the tornado takes the roof off your house. So some of it is a coincidence, but a lot of the pileups tend to be. I've come to think of it like your flu season. Like, your body gets one contagion and then it's weakened, and so your immune system, so true, you get everything. The short answer to your question is storytelling. We'll come back to the search in a second, but to go back in the story. In 2013, I was writing a column in the New York Times about contemporary families. And I was working on a book called the Secrets of Happy Families. And the most interesting thing I learned was about research from two scholars at Emory named Marshall Duke and Robin Fiebisch, that the children who know more about their family history are able to navigate the twists and turns and, yes, pivots in their lives more effectively. And I wrote about this in an article in the New York Times called the Story that Binds Us. And it went crazy viral. And it's the idea that if, you know, think. And the questions in this do you know? Test are, do you know where your grandparents were born? Do you know an aunt or an uncle who had cancer? Do you know what was happening when your parents were born? You learn these oscillating stories, as they call them, of your own family history, and that helps you. So when my dad went through this suicide spree, as I call it sometimes, we were trying everything, right? We were throwing medicine, we were throwing professionals, and none of it worked. And I sat down one morning thinking of this research from the Secrets of Happy Families, and I sent my dad a question on a Monday morning, tell me about the toys you played with as a child. And he answered this question. And I sent another the next Monday morning. And this went on for what became eight years, until in 2021, eight years after that suicide attempt, just weeks before he died peacefully, he finished. Jenny, a 65,000 word memoir. One question, one week, one email at a time. That is the power of storytelling to give us meaning in times of despair.

It's kind of like in addition to him telling his stories, the placebo effect with doctors, where just the care and empathy and listening of the doctor alone is healing. Like knowing he was telling them for you and that you were asking these prompts, you know, that in itself was probably such powerful connection and healing for him to just know you were right there receiving it.

I love that point. And I think one of the kind of rules of life transitions that I talk about in life is, in the transitions is share your experience with someone. Like, find someone else to go through it. And I talk about in that book how some people like comforters, like, I love you, Jenny, you know you'll get through it. But some people also like nudgers like, I love you, Jenny, but you know, maybe you should try this or try that. And some people like slappers like, okay, I love you, Jenny, but get over yourself. Like, get off the couch right now's the time to call aa, or now's the time to go back into the dating pool, or now's the time really to begin reaching out and thinking about a new job. And so people respond to different things. And so when I set out on the search and asking people about how they manage work pivots and work transitions, I call them as, you know, work quakes. A work quake is a jolt, a disruption, something that causes you to reimagine or rethink or kind of question what you're doing. And the average person goes through 20 of these in the course of their lives. 20, that's one every two and a half years. And by the way, what's interesting is that women go through them more than men. Younger workers more than older workers, and diverse workers more than non diverse workers. So as the workforce gets younger, more female, and more diverse, the number of work quakes is only going to increase. And, you know, we can get into that. But one of the questions I ask people in the conversations that form the backbone of the search was, did you get a piece of advice from someone that was helpful? And if so, who was it? And what did they say on the who was it? Side? It was interesting. You mentioned doctors and then also family. It turns out that the number one answer was colleagues followed by friends and family, interestingly enough, came in Last, which is curious to me because I don't know if that means the family gave bad advice, which I think is possible, because the family often has, I don't know, stakes, for lack of a better term. Right. Maybe they're relying on the money and they don't want you to do something for meaning that kind of question, or just that we downplay our family, but we like having these outsiders. And professionals was pretty low on the list, you know, like religious figures or counselors. Right. Or therapists. Then I asked what was the advice? And here's where it got interesting. Three quarters of people said that the advice that they found most helpful in their work quake was listen to yourself. Keep doing what you already believe you should be doing. I'm a big believer in get off the should train. Don't do what your parents told you you should do or your culture told you you should do. Do what you want to do, write your own story. But in this case, most people don't want a kick in the butt. They want a pat on the back. And Mark Savickis, who's the dean of modern career construction, which is sort of a lot of what my book is popularizing, he told me in our conversation, which appears in this book, when people come to me and they don't know what to do in a transition, I usually know within five minutes what they should do. But I don't tell them because it's not what I think they should do, it's what they think they should do. How do you give yourself permission to. To make the change you already believe you should make?

That intuition piece is so huge, and it is such a skill we can build over time. I want to come to this idea of crisis because when I was working on pivot at that point, there was no language for work. Quakes, pivots, pivot points, I call them plateaus as well. Sometimes you just hit a wall, even if you have a perfect on paper job. At that time, it was known, oh, we might have a midlife crisis. And you say that was from the age of 39 to 44 and a half. And then in 2007, someone introduced the term of a quarter life crisis. And my thesis with pivot was, well, these crises seem to be accelerating. Either there's something wrong with me because I'm having a crisis exactly as you say, every two and a half years, or we're not just going to have two anymore. Here's my question for you. Having done all this research and all these interviews and your personal life experience, do you think we still have big crises? You're about to become an empty nester. Do we still have the big eight point on the Richter scale workquakes, life quakes that are truly quarter midlife, et cetera, crises? Or do you really think we're just experiencing crisis pretty much constantly now?

Okay, I love this question. We're gonna need a whole separate podcast to discuss it.

I know, right?

Let's do it in two minutes. You and I have been building Twitter's conversation for a long time. No and yes. Okay, let's move on. No. Oh, right. Explain.

Good answer. Yes, all of the above.

Let's start with the no. So the idea of the midlife crisis was born actually by a guy named Elliot jock in the 1950s. And when he first presented it, actually at a conference in London, he was laughed off the stage. And he came back 10 years later and he published this paper. He didn't talk to a single person. He only read biographies of famous men. He said, I didn't even read biographies of famous women because women have menopause. And that throws the whole thing off.

Oh, my gosh. As if that's not its own crisis built into our biology. Yeah.

Right away. Let's talk about. The origin story of midlife crisis is absurd. But what happens in the 1970s? Two scholars, one named Dan Levinson at Yale and one named Roger Gould at ucla, begin to pick up and dig into this idea. And the midlife crisis is sort of gets some credibility when a woman named Gail Sheehy, who was divorced and single and dating the editor of New York magazine at the time, writes an article in New York magazine about the midlife crisis. And by the way, she plagiarized and did not credit the work of Roger Gould. And Roger Gould sued her and won the lawsuit. And she had no money, so she gave him 10% of the book she was writing about it, called Passages, that went on to sell 20 million copies. And it was a disastrous financial decision. Her. But anyway, wow. Dan Levinson, in his research, looked at 40 men only in and around New Haven, Connecticut. And so the idea is flawed from the beginning. And the idea is that everyone does the same thing in their 20s and their 30s, and then, as you say, between 39 and 44 and a half, has a midlife crisis. This is bunk. But yet everyone has come to believe it. Why? Because it is the legacy of the linear approach to life. And most of history, there was no linear approach to life. Right. In the ancient world, they believed in agriculture, and there was no Time. So they thought life was a cycle. It actually is the Hebrew Bible that introduces it. And in the birth of the scientific age in the 1800s and the 19th century, introduces the idea that we all going to go like a conveyor belt in an assembly line in a factory. So all through the 20th century, we were given linear constructs. The eight stages of moral development, the five stages of grief, because that's how life was then. We now know that life comes at us in all directions. So it's fundamentally wrong that these events happen in and around birthdays that end in zero. Just look at the pandemic. If you were between 39 and 44 and a half, you were having a midlife crisis. But if you were between 57 and 71, you were having one. Or in the case of my children, 15. So, yes, the average person goes to a disruptor, as I call them, every 18 months. And a life quake, which we've been talking about here, three to five times in their lives. And the average length of a lifequake is five years. So three to five in a lifetime, five years. That means 25 years of our adult life, one half of our adult life. We are in a life transition. So if we fetishize it and say it's a scandal or a crisis, that's the problem. And that brings to me the second part of your question I want to quickly address, and that is the use of the word crisis. And I think you're dead on, not surprisingly, which is that most of the language that we've used around this is about catastrophe, okay? And that's a problem. In my research, half of life quakes are voluntary. And it's the same, right? I'm the parent of identical twins. We've been talking about this entire conversation. When they were born, trust me, it was a workquake. It was joyful, but it upended everything in our lives. So now let's turn to workquakes. The research, my research on workquakes, you know, and I lay it all out in the searches. You're going to go through 20. As we were talking earlier, women go through them more than men, younger workers, more than older workers. But here, Jenny, is what I think is the signature piece of data in the search. More than half of all work quicks, 55% of them, begin outside of the workplace. So what's a workquake in the workplace? You have a conflict with your boss, you're laid off. Okay? You decide to change jobs. By the way, 50% of people who change jobs change professions. But that's the minority of them. Most of them now happen because something happens in our personal life, with our family, our health, a change in our mindset. And that gets at what's going on here, which is in the battle between life and work. Life is playing a greater role because what these younger, more female, more diverse workers are doing to the history of work is they're saying, we don't just want work anymore. We want work with meaning that brings us fulfillment, makes us happy, fulfills our story. And the gap I believe in this is in this space, which I'm pleased to say the Wall Street Journal said in its review of my book on the day after it was published, was here. In these crises, if you look at diverse people from diverse backgrounds and diverse careers, what they have in common is that in each of these earthquakes they ask themselves, what is the story I want to be telling right now?

I also found that statistic so powerful, like the big one I highlighted as well, that 55% begin outside of the workplace. Foreign.

We'Ll be right back just after this.

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With everything you just shared, Especially debunking. I'm so happy to hear that debunking of the midlife crisis. What about the times like you had in your 40s where you have complete vertigo of the soul. You don't know which end is up. You are grasping at straws. I call 2013 was my Apocalypse year and I'm pretty much having another one as we record this 10 years later where it's not quite so voluntary. And it's really difficult to discern which end is up, what do I want, who am I, where all that gets almost razed to the ground. Like, I'm just thinking that period in your 40s, maybe even as you approach this new pivot point you're at. But what do you think distinguishes those from the rest that are more of a constant presence as you described?

Well, I think that what distinguishes them is how we react to them. First of all, the common thing people say about my work in this space, both with life, is in the transitions and now even in the early days of the search, the number one thing people say, and this is a technical term, is.

Like, you validate it. Like you give me a language for what I'm feeling. And my wife likes to say about me that I have hard knowledge about soft things. Usually people tend to do one of two things when they go through one of these moments that you're talking about. They make a 212 item to do list, and they say, I'm going to get through this in a weekend and I'm going to be the best ever. And they're going to write articles about me and I'm going to get blue ribbons and I'm going to get trophies and everyone's going to be impressed with me. And you can hear the slightly manic tone in my voice as I say it. Or they say, oh, woe is me. And they lie under the covers with a cat and say, I'm never going to get through this. But neither are true. And when you look at enough of these, they have a kind of structure. And the brilliant structure and genius behind life transitions is that they are the human response to these moments, right? We go through the life quake. The lifequake puts us on our heels. What the life transition is is precisely what puts us back on our toes and allows us to then take some agency and take some control over the uncontrollable. That is the essence of what a life transition is. So what do the people have in common that they do if they get through one of these successfully? First of all, there's kind of stages, and my last book has that. The long goodbye, the messy middle, and then the new beginning. But the essence of it at its core is what we've been talking about in this whole conversation. You add a new chapter in your life story in which you said, I was going through that, and then I did this, and then I became that, and that is the essence of it. And so in the workquakes that we've been talking about that are the heart of the search. The number one thing I learned, Jenny, is that the people who were happiest and most fulfilled in what they do, they don't just climb, they also dick. The story of success we've told in this country since Benjamin friggin Franklin is all about climbing up by your bootstraps. Rags to riches, higher floor, bigger salary, better view, bigger office. The people who are happiest don't just grab for that instinctually because they should grab for that. They dig. They go back to their past. They look at the inheritance they have from their parents like the childhood role models that they have, these dreams that they have been cultivating. They don't just follow the script, as I say it in the search. They follow their own internal scripture and realize at 20 different times in your life, you can change that scripture, you can write the story, but what we don't have is the toolkit to doing it. Which is why the essence of this book is what I call 21 questions to find work you love. How to perform the meaning audit. How to do what I call the personal archeology. Go on the treasure hunt in your own life to find the treasures, the clues that will tell you what you should be doing now and what it is that gives you meaning now.

I love that analogy. The happiest people don't just climb, they dig. And that personal archeology and mining how much gold we have in our archeology, and I find that that was so common with pivoters as well that they would look back on the moves they made and say, the answer was right under my feet all along. You know, it seems so obvious in.

Hindsight, the story comes to mind. Right before joining his conversation, I was on our radio show in Connecticut and I was able to tell the story and I got sort of emotional. It's a story of a man named Tim Pierrepont. He grew up in an adoptive family in Connecticut. He loved working with his hands and doing art, and his parents never really supported him. When he graduated from college, he opened a wallpaper and painting company, and his parents said this was not acceptable work to be done in this area of southern Connecticut. So he went to work in commercial real estate and stayed for the next 22 years, until one day, his seatmate, the person in the desk next to him, the boss, said, you don't look very good. I think you should go home. A year later, he died from cancer. And Tim said, I didn't want to be that person. So he went to a coffee shop. And he didn't call it a meeting audit, but it was precisely a meeting. On it, he sat down and he wrote a list of all the things he would rather be doing than what he was doing. The top three things on the list were being outside, working with his hands, and making his community a better place. So he said to himself, if I was running a painting company, I did. So he walked away from his white collar job and opened a blue collar company that paints houses. And the kicker to this story, Jenny, is later in his life, he was able to track down his birth mother, who, it turns out, was an artist. And by doing the personal archeology, by going back to his deepest dreams that he shunned because someone told him he should shun them. And by the way, with women, this comes up all the time. I did what my parents wanted me to do, not what I wanted to do. What do I tell my children about to graduate from high school? Don't listen to me. The answer is inside. You listen to yourself.

That's a beautiful story, and it's so powerful and encouraging to go back in the family history. My dad recently reminded me that my grandmother, his mom had a radio show. She would do astrology readings on air. And that's so similar to podcasting. I even got into astrology myself, even though my dad thinks it's kind of all made up, which is cool. I respect all opinions on the matter, but it's so encouraging to realize, oh, maybe there is something here. Oh, it kind of can run in the family a little bit. So I appreciate you sharing that, which.

Is why one of the first question of the 21 questions is, what are the upsides of downsides of work? You learn from your family because it turns out the number one upside we learned from our family is the power of hard work. Two thirds of us say that. And what was the number one downside? The burden of overworking, followed by unhappiness, followed by strain on the family. So you're just one question into the 21 questions here, and you're beginning to realize that you have all these ghosts that are hanging around your story. If you bring those ghosts and sit them down at the table, you're going to more effectively find the story that you really want to be telling now.

Ooh, powerful idea of the ghosts. And also, we don't have time to get into it now, but I'll just leave an open loop for listeners about ghost jobs that a lot of us are also carrying ghost jobs. If you're dealing with personal things, mental health, illness, caring for someone else in your family. So Bruce, you give a great little mad lib at the end of the book, at the end of the search of how to work on our personal archeology and tell our story. Of the 21 questions, which one is your favorite that we could leave listeners with?

My favorite in the context of this conversation is this one. The best advice I have for myself right now is blank because it echoes what we were talking about early that you have the answer inside you. And I have 30 seconds here, but I'm going to tell a quick story of a woman named Maroi park who joined the CIA against her father's wishes because he was an immigrant. He didn't like the CIA. She was on the Soviet desk, which was the top job. And she said, I think I can do better at the CIA by helping the place run better. So she left her job to run payroll, the least sexy job in the CIA. What happened to Maria Park? She ended up running the entire agency because every single story and you mentioned the end of the book. This is where the book ends, the search is. It has in it at some point a decision that feels like the unright decision that disappoints somebody. But the unright decision on the surface turns out to be the right decision for us at any moment. And you deep down know what that decision is. So if you're going through and I say listen to yourself and I say come on this journey with me because you will be inspired by these stories and you will be motivated to find the happiness you seek, the meaning you crave, and the success you deserve on your own terms.

Bam. So beautifully said. Thank you so much Ruth. This has been a delight and I'm just honored to follow in GP's wonderful footsteps and yours listeners. If you don't already have it, check out the Finding Meaningful work in a Post Career World. Bruce, you rock. Thank you so much.

This was a total delight. You rock. We've been waiting for this conversation for a long time and let's have another one soon.

I would love that. Thank you. And thanks so much everybody for listening.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist. Get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter Ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always?

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