Finding Brave 178: Wanting: How to Declutter Our Desires To Pursue What We Truly Want

Hello everyone, this is Kathy Caprino and welcome to my podcast, Finding Brave. I've created this show for everyone who longs to create something bold and brave in their life. To rise up, speak up and stand up for who they are and to reach their highest and biggest visions. Each week I'll be speaking with inspiring guests from all walks of business, leadership, entertainment, the creative arts and the entrepreneurial world. And they'll be sharing their intimate stories of Finding Brave and offer their best strategies for building your most rewarding, joyful and meaningful life, business and career. I so appreciate you being here. And speaking of appreciation, I am so thrilled to share that Amazon Music is now a sponsor for Finding Brave. So if you feel as I do that music is an important, enriching part of your life and you would like unlimited access to safety. 70 million songs today. I hope you'll hop on our special link which is getamazonmusic.com finding brave and get our 30 day free trial offer. Again, unlimited access to 70 million songs. That's a whole lot of music and a lot of listening. Joy. Thank you again so much and enjoy the show. Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Finding Brave. Kathy Caprino here and I can tell you I am so, so excited and I just can't wait to dig into this content we have and our amazing guest, Luke Burgess. Luke, look at this chair. I love it. I wish I had something I could rock in. Thank you for joining us from Washington D.C. so happy to have you, Luke.

It's a pleasure to be with you, Kathy.

Thank you. And we are talking about, I think something that probably everybody on the planet is going to want to understand. We're talking about wanting to the act of desiring, right? How to declutter our desires to pursue what we truly want. I cannot wait to hear. And your background. Let me share Luke's background with you. What an interesting. I'm sure that's a podcast in and of itself. Your journey through business and being Nate. Well, I'm not going to steal the thunder. Let me tell you about Luke. Luke Burgess is the director of programs at C Center for Principled Entrepreneurship and a professor of business at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. he co teaches a pop. How about this popular class for all incoming students? They're called the Vocation of Business. Why didn't I take that? And an anthropological investigation into the purpose and meaning of business itself. Everybody has to take that.

Everybody has to take it if you.

Want to, whether they're in the business school or not.

Only the business School. We try to reel them in from outside the business school whenever we can.

I really would love to see that. Luke has been the founder and CEO of multiple social impact companies. He was named one of the top 25 entrepreneurs under 25 by BusinessWeek after the early success of one of his first companies, Healthy Vending, which revolutionized the vending industry in 2005.

I should note that was a long time ago. I'm a little older than 25.

I didn't want to ask, but that's okay. You are currently the founder and managing partner of an organization called Fourth Wall Ventures that invests in incubates and advises companies that do the same. You know, your bio is long, so I'm not going to read it all. But your first book, Unrepeatable, which got so many rave reviews, explores how people can discover and live out their unique, unique purpose. I mean, we need all of your work. And that's it for now. But you will see Luke's amazing bio on the show Notes. So let's. Let's dig in here. Mimetic desire. That's what your book is about. And I'm guessing the root of that word is mime. Is that right? To imitate.

That's absolutely right. The root of the word is mime. Okay, so mimetic is a fancy word for imitation. It comes from the Greek word mimesis. And Aristotle and Plato were Talking about mimesis 2,500 years ago, usually in relation to art and culture and poetry, how art is typically an imitation of nature. And there was a long discussion about the creation of art. And they noticed from the very beginning that humans are extremely imitative creatures. Aristotle even said that humans are the most imitative creature in the world. So we've always known that humans are imitative at some level. We're able to imitate far more sophisticated things than animals do. Animals, you know, when you watch two dogs play, they kind of imitate each other's hunches. And, you know, we see this in nature all the time. But humans can imitate poetry, we can imitate language and writing and very sophisticated things. The role of imitation in human life has taken us a long time to really understand how deep it goes. And it wasn't until the late 50s that a French thinker named Rene Girard, who was the inspiration for my book, named this thing called mimetic desire. And he found in his study of literature and history and current events and the science that the neurological science was even starting to back up his claim that humans even Imitate the desires of other people that our desires are not. They don't come necessarily from this inner chamber. We don't generate or manufacture our desires from thin air because we're social creatures. From the minute that we're born, we come out of the womb, we're already looking to our mother for cues about what's important around us. We're following the gaze of the mother's eyes. And Girard sort of saw that this level of sophisticated imitation is just pervasive in human life. And at the deepest level, we're imitating not just accents and facial gestures and fashion. We're actually imitating what other people want without necessarily even knowing that we're doing it all right.

Now, this was the. I was poring over everything, and this. This got me. And I really want to go here if I could. So, you know, I'm a career coach, leaders coach for women, and there's something called that I give people a career path assessment, and it's not. Doesn't give you a number. I'm going to make this quick, people. But it's, you know, every job you ever had, what you loved, what you hated, biggest struggle, you know, what you really want, your biggest dreams, and why you want it. And to. To get to your point, often they'll say, for instance, I want to go to Disney with my family, with my kids. The why is to be a good mother. So often I'll say to them, whether it's about work or whatever, do you think that's the only way you can be a good mother? Is there another way without spending $2,000, that you can be a good mother? So what I want to ask you is, first of all, you're going to give us all sorts of ideas and understanding about how we get to our authentic desires. And you have something called thin and thick desires. But here's what I want to ask you. You mentioned I'm looking at your press kit, etc. We'll even mimic the desire of society, for instance, that a woman should be thin, right? That. That the. Or how I should look, or if I'm feminine, I should have long, long hair. So here's a question. How do we. How do we separate the pressure that society puts on us? Like, let's say, you know, I've struggled with extra pounds all my life, for instance. I really want to wear certain things and be certain ways. But society shames you for that. So how do we separate the pressure of society from what you're talking about? That I'm imitating the desire of society. Do you understand what I mean?

I absolutely understand what you mean. And I think we see this a lot with children that grow up in families where there's some high expectation to kind of, you know, go a certain career route or something like that. And, you know, how do you separate whether it's just the fear and the pressure to go that route from whether you actually want to do it? And sometimes it's not always so clear. They kind of, you know, the waters get muddy and you kind of forget how much of this is coming from these external forces and how much of this is actually what I want.

In some ways, you can't even tell when the programming is about conditional love. You're going to go to Harvard or we don't really love you, you know, which is the message for many people.

Oh, you're going to become a doctor. You're going to do the actual. Whatever it is that's a little bit different from the mimetic desires. I mean, I think we could attribute that to fear or pressure. The mimetic desire might be where there's a, you know, your older sister, who you really, really, really admire, wants to become a lawyer. And because you really, really want to be a little bit more like her, you really admire her and her life, all of a sudden you begin to desire to be a lawyer, too, because of that. Because of that mimesis. That's just a little bit different than the fear and the pressure. It's actually coming from a place of admiration. But separating why you want to become a lawyer is the really hard part. So the understanding. I want to become a lawyer because I would like to be a little bit more like this kind of a person. That's not necessarily the good reason to become a lawyer. It doesn't necessarily mean you love law. There's a lot of different ways to get there. So the key is tracing your desires back to their origin and trying your best to understand. Where did I first feel this need? Like, go all the way back to the beginning, as far back as you have to go, and try to try to sift through all of the different influences and forces once you've identified it. And the identification is really the hard part here. Once you've identified it, you know, we're talking about, you know, bravery. It's the name of the podcast. There's really. There's no substitute for just developing the courage and the fortitude to perhaps, you know, disappoint some people, to confound expectations and to really kind of Understand that I'm not going to do this because this. This desire is thin, is the way that I call it.

What is a thin and thick desire?

Yeah. So a thin desire is a desire that's kind of ephemeral. You might. It's here today, gone tomorrow, or when tested, when you. When you really get down into it and you chip away at all of the different reasons, there's not a lot of substance to it. It's not something that you've actually assimilated and integrated into who you are as a person. It's something you're kind of latching onto that. That could very easily blow away. A thick desire is the kind of desire that has probably been with you from an early age. Kind of these deep inner longings that we have that have. That have built layer upon layer upon layer. And the thin desires are almost like. Like a rock sediment, like building up this strong foundation. The thin desires are almost like the leaves that cover it up.

Oh, what a great image that we.

That we can't see it. We don't even know that they're there.

Wow.

Until we kind of excavate some of the. Some of the thin sediment and the leaves that obscure it.

All right, may I do something and see if this helps people? So we all have people working with people like me, like you. We all have, or many of us have developed a language frame metaphor, you know, to help people understand. Can I ask you this? I'll often talk about the essence of what you want versus the form of it. So I'm a career coach. It's about career. Right. So when you're saying people admire people and say, I want to be like that, what I see, for instance, is, Kathy, I want to be like you. I want to be a writer and a coach. But they have no idea the living reality of either of those. And Mo, there's this funny thing. For some darn reason, I can't tell you how many people, I mean, hundreds have told me I want to run in bed and breakfast. So I give them an exercise before COVID I want you to interview and stay at three bed and breakfasts and interview the owners. What is the living reality of running this bed and breakfast? Not one person came back and said they want to run in bed and breakfast. They're like, what? Oh, my. That's the last thing I want to do. So I ask them, what is the essence of what you want? The energy, the value, how you feel, the meaning, how you're of service. Then we'll figure out the form of it. Do you see that a little bit embedded in what you're talking about?

Oh, absolutely, Kathy. And I'll give you just a recent example from my own life, from my own memetic desire. So I have recently been following van life on Instagram. Do you know what that is?

I don't.

Van life. These are people that have decided to live out of vans, and they travel around the world or the country. They take pictures in beautiful places. They have little, you know, little kitchens inside the vans. And it's called Van life.

Is the hashtag Van life.

Van Life, Right. So I follow them on Instagram. There's a lot of different accounts. People that have just a lot of them, since the start of the pandemic, have decided to travel. They'll visit all the national parks. And there's these pictures where they're, you know, having tea and watching the sunset. And it's just. It's a simple life because everything unencumbered. Unencumbered. And I'm watching this, and I told my fiance at some point, I was like, wow, like, we should do this. Like, we should just travel around the country and just live like this for a couple of months. And I think the essence of what I'm craving, especially now, is, like, that sense of freedom and that sense of simplicity. It's not actually to live out of a van, because, to be honest, I think I'd be pretty miserable living out of a van. I'd probably miss my wifi. I'd probably miss my kitchen.

So there we go. The essence of it is freedom. Unencumbered, not materialistic. Can get up and be flexible and go where you want. The form of it is not van life for you.

Probably not. Probably not in the form of a van. No.

There we go. So perfect. So you know what? I'm always interested in how people get on the journey that they're on. And you have some background about why you got interested in it. Can you share this?

Sure. I think for me, it was an existential experience that got me interested in mimetic desire and theory. It wasn't an intellectual curiosity that I had. It was because I really felt it in my soul. So I went to a very competitive undergraduate business school where 90% of my classmates went to work on Wall Street. That was just what you did when you graduate from the business school at nyu.

So they were finding people. Just finding people.

They were Wall street investment banking.

Oh, investment bank. This is nyu.

This was nyu. The Stern undergrad business school was.

I didn't realize that.

Yeah. And the interesting thing was, first I wanted to be a doctor. And I've always had this real love for the liberal arts and humanities, classical literature. One of the funny things about undergrad is that people enter as freshmen. If you survey your typical freshman class, you'd find thousands of different things that the students want to do when they graduate. But by the time they're seniors graduating, those thousand have usually converged into, you know, a dozen or something like that, like primary career paths. Why is that? You know, what, what's happened in those four years? So that was certainly one of the things that happened to me. I sort of converged on the lowest common denominator, which was, you know, go the investment banking route. I went that route. I'm making a really long story short, I was miserable. So I left Wall Street. I didn't even make it a year. And I'm glad that I did. I left to enter the startup world in California and started a few companies. But even there I was amazing. Thank you. But even there, I had great success with one of my companies and achieved some level of financial freedom, but I really wasn't happy. And even in that startup world where I had so called freedom and autonomy, I was a founder, CEO. I could theoretically, you know, set my own hours. And that's kind of why I wanted to be an entrepreneur in the first place. But I felt less free than ever. And I realized that it was because I was constantly looking to my right and my left and looking at what the other founders and people in the entrepreneur Silicon Valley community were doing. And it was absolutely driving me crazy. I felt less free than I did when I was working 80 hours a week on Wall Street.

Oh, no.

And I didn't, I couldn't put my finger on what it was that was causing me such constant anxiety until I had one of my companies in 2008. It was not a good year, at least financially, it was not a great year. I had one of my new startups kind of had a blow up and we ran out of money and it forced me to take a little bit of time off. And it was in that time off turned out to really be a blessing. It was in that forced time off that I had that I was able to actually, for the very first time, slow down, create some distance from my work itself and to be able to look at what I was doing a little bit more objectively and to see that so many of the goals that I had set for myself, you know, wanting to be in this publication Wanting to be mentioned in this X, Y and Z were not things that I would have told you I wanted five, six years ago, even a couple years ago. Like, why was I so passionately pursuing these little totems of success that when I would get them, I would forget about them the next day? That's the definition of a thin desire.

Thin.

I didn't even care about them they talk about yet. So thin. So that was that process of me kind of getting back to those thicker desires that I had to really understand what it means to be human, to understand questions of purpose. To make a long story short, I ended up going back to school for a little while and studying philosophy. But it was that. That experience of, wow, I don't, I don't want my kids, I don't want my students to have to go through the seven or eight years that I did just to get to that place.

We have so many parallels. It's crazy. One thing that occurs to me when you speak, there's so much that today that catches our eye, whether it's vanity metrics or, you know, in the coaching world, I'm an entrepreneur, but everybody's telling you how you're supposed to do it. Everybody's telling you it's passive income. And I remember thinking, I don't, I don't know how to do that. I want to be with you, you know, once a week, helping. There is so much noise about any field you can imagine, but certainly entrepreneurship, what you should do to be successful, even. You know, my lens is gender, female versus male right now, or non binary. But I even noticed that in a male world, you're not successful as an entrepreneur unless you're over a million dollars in revenue. What about, you know, okay, half a million is good too. You know, there is so, so much thinness in all of this that what I'm trying to help people do is, you know, go back to who you always were. And usually you can see that even when you were young, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. Some people tell me, no, that's not possible because I was suppressed and my parents told me what to do. So I said, okay, well, when did you know something about yourself? But do you agree that one way, you said, start to go back to the beginning of when you had that desire? Can you, in the remaining time here, really help us? How do we, on our own, work this out? How do we even tease out what we really care about? How do we do it?

Yeah, one little tactic that I've used, and I was lucky to have A friend who did this for me. Ask yourself. Go back as far as you want. Go back to when you were one of your earliest memories. If you can, see if you can identify a time in your life when you accomplished something, you achieved something by your own definition, by nobody else's definition. Okay? So it could be the simplest thing. One of the examples that I used when my friend asked me to tell him one of these stories was I designed an orange peeling machine in my fifth grade class. Come on. I never actually made it. I just thought. I just ideated. Okay, all right.

That's pretty good. Fifth grade.

And I drew it, and I basically made like, a little presentation to my classmates about why this was a good idea for an invention. And to this very day, that is one of the accomplishments that I'm most proud of. And I remember it. Isn't it funny how we remember some things and not other things? So that little story I remember, and it's worth asking why. What was it about that specifically that was so meaningful to me? Another person? There were projects better than mine, I think, but, like, why was it that I remember that and the other kids in my fifth grade class probably telling this story?

What is it?

Well, why did you understand the reason? Right. You have to keep doing this. So, you know, go back and ask yourself, what are all of those different times in your life when you achieve something and it brought you a deep sense of fulfillment and meaning and satisfaction that that endured. That wasn't just a quick hit, you know, it causes you satisfaction just to remember it, even now. So if I do that in my life, there's a pattern begins to emerge in those stories. So I think about starting my first company was one of them. You know, getting in really good shape was another one of those stories. In all of the stories, I began to see a pattern. And it usually had to do with sort of bringing some ideal condition into being or like incarnating some idea in the world. But that's just the way that I'm motivated. But I didn't quite realize how deep that went until I kind of mined my life for some of those what I call fulfillment stories. And you begin to see a pattern in your core motivational drive. If you tell three, four, or five of those, I promise you, I think everybody has something. If you really reflect deep enough and you realize that we're not talking about what other people think is important, just what you believe is important.

I love it. I'm already doing it, and it's so good. Let me ask you this in fifth grade. I'll never forget this, but it doesn't end the way yours did. I was a writer even back then. And I won a poetry contest and it was about conservation. I remember the first sense. Conservation is a great, great thing that everyone should do for it helps every living thing, including me. And you look at me. I won the award and okay, this is not to blame. My beloved parents. I talk about parents a lot, but what I got was this little plant that looked like, you know, a Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown Christmas tree plant. You know, I mean, it was two leaves. And I'm so proud. I mean, I really believe that was a fulfillment story because, you know, I was nervous to write a poem and in front of everyone and I bring it home to my mom, my mother. And she goes, that's what they gave you? That was the response. Now, here's my question. I bet you when you, you know, I'm a former therapist, there are trigger emotions, trigger events that you can't forget. I mean, sometimes that's ptsd. I will never forget that because it was the height of pride and the slap down. And again, she didn't mean it. She didn't mean it. But this is how I interpret, internalized it. My question to you is, let's say some of your stories are punctuated with there was a part of a journey that was the fulfillment, but there was an emotional slap down from it. What do you do with that?

Yeah, well, it's what you've just. That's a really important realization. Because when something like that happens, what it can do for many people is it can cause them to forget the first part of the story.

That's it. And it erase it. Because it's painful.

It's painful. It obscures the joy that you actually did feel and you didn't care what they gave you. I thought it was gold.

I mean, yeah.

So you were able to separate those two things. And that's a really important realization. So doing this exercise really requires you to sit with your life for a while and to make some of those distinctions and try to remember what was it really that was important to me and not to anybody else? What was it that caused me that sense of fulfillment? I promise you that there are. We're all wired and motivated in such different ways. But I think that you will begin to see a pattern emerge if you follow the thread through as far as you can go. Go back to as early as you can go. And for you, it might not be fifth grade, maybe it's high school. Or something like that. Maybe it's. Maybe it's your first job after college. Trace it through. And then maybe your last one could be a project that you did just this year. But, you know, the more you do it, the more something will. An image of your essence, I think, should begin to emerge.

I adore this exercise. If I think of some of those, and I'm going to do this this weekend, I think for me, it was the feeling that somehow some idea I had helped someone, even though I wasn't trained as a therapist, you know, at 16 or. But people would call me up and say, can I talk to you? For me, I think that's a thread that I was able to somehow move someone forward. I mean, clearly. And I'm like, you. And then I had an 18 year. Yours wasn't 18 years, but I had a miserable corporate life experience. Successful on the outside, not successful on the inside. And I kept wondering, why. Why is this so lacking in meaning? But if I had done your exercise, I would have figured it out and I wouldn't have had to wait 18 years, I think.

Yeah. When you said something really interesting, Kathy, I mean, successful on the outside, but not on the inside. And that's. That's the key, because three. Three people can be doing exactly the same thing, but they can be motivated or find satisfaction in three completely different ways. You know, you imagine three artists standing there painting this beautiful sunset. One of them could be motivated by, you know, by the gift that she's giving to the person that she's painting this for. Right. Another one could be motivated simply because, you know, they've never done landscape before, and they're motivated by trying new things. Things. And the third one by something else entirely. So there were. From the outside looking in, you don't have any information about the essence of the person. Even though those three people are motivated by very different things. Right. And they desire three very different things. So we can only understand people from the inside out. And that's why narrative and story is really so important, especially the kinds of stories that people tell about these times in their life when something seems really kind of unique and unrepeatable to them and not to anybody else.

This is so good. I love it. You know, I have a deep curiosity, you know, you were an innovator way back then. And I always love the former therapist, you know, making a little genogram. You know, where'd you get this? Because, for instance, my dad was a GE guy for 30 years. Not entrepreneurial. And through osmosis speaking of thin, thick. Not, not understanding. The idea was you need to work at a company like General Electric to be happy. And I didn't even know I had that. Crazy. So this, this work, people is so, so, so important so that you're not living out someone else's idea of motivation and success. But I have to ask, were your parents entrepreneurs?

They were not. My, My father was a truck driver. Career truck driver. He was a skydiver for 10 years. And then when he had to get a real job, he became a truck driver. A professional skydiver for 10 years. And after, after he was in the army, he was a paratrooper. Then he just became a skydiver. And then he drove a truck. He drove a semi. And my mom was an art teacher. But neither one of them were entrepreneurs.

So we have. I was gonna say, have you ever thought. Of course you have. But this ability to create, to visualize and manifest, to innovate, where do you think it came from?

I think it came, you know, my mother was an artist, and I think being an entrepreneur is very much like being an artist. And so I just, I just do it in a different way.

How so? How do you think it is similar?

It's, it's. It's a form of self expression that comes out in, you know, brands and in a business model and in the way that you serve other people in the form of the business. But the essence is the same. I mean, that drive to create, that intense need to create, it was like why I wrote a book, which to me was a very entrepreneurial thing to do. It was very. It felt like starting a company to me. It actually did. It's like I have this thing inside of me that if I don't get it out somehow, I'm just going to go crazy. It's just like I have to give birth to this, to this thing. And for most of my life, it was some kind of a. Of a company, nonprofit and for profit. In this case, it just happened to be a book. Turned out to be one of the hardest things I've done. Harder than starting some of my companies. But it's not that. It's not all that different. It's that act of creation.

Boy, would I love to take your course. What is it on? What's it. What's it called again?

It's called the vocation of business.

Oh, go ahead.

Yeah, well, I'm working on making it possible because we're working on making it extend outside the walls of the university.

Oh, please do. I'll Suck that up in half a second. Tell us one other thing that we need to understand about mimetic desire and why it's so important. We, I mean, you said, let's just be clear. Human beings are imitative. That's, that's probably how we learn a lot and how we function and how we navigate through challenges. So we're not saying don't ever imitate, I'm guessing.

Absolutely not.

Yeah, we're, we're saying, let's see if I can paraphrase. The happiest, most meaningful, joyful, fulfilling, productive lives are not in pursuit of someone else's idea of what, what we should be pursuing.

Yeah.

Is that right?

Beautiful, Kathy. Yeah. And you know, the fact that we are imitators and we're very good at imitation is not, it's a beautiful thing. It's what allows us to have to enter into relationships, to be able to empathize with other people. So it's a powerful human ability that we have. So, you know, it's nothing to be ashamed of. It's something to just understand, you know, perhaps how to be a better imitator. Who do you want it? Who are the models of desire in your life that you do want, that you do, that you do want to follow? And since we are imitative, that we do affect what other people want. Every parent, I think, knows this. Like we affect our children's desires for different things, but also our colleagues and the people that we work with. So I think living with the understanding and the awareness and responsibility that we do, we have, we do affect what the people around us want. And I plan to meet somebody later on today and that person will either leave our beer wanting, you know, sort of having more positive desires for living out their career or, or not. And I have some part to play in their wanting, so to speak. So just thinking of ourselves as connected in this way was a powerful, almost like a Copernican revolution in my thinking. Right. That our desires are not independent, but that I have a responsibility for the people that I work with in terms of what we as an organization want, what my students desire, and, and, and they affect me too. So it's not a one way street.

That is so beautiful. Luke, I want to add one thing and see if you agree. You know, having been a marriage and family therapist, working with parents, and now working with mid life people who are still suffering from what their parents wanted for them, and we're not blaming parents, everyone's doing the best they can. I would ask every parent here and I think leadership is much like parenting. I do every leader. But let's talk about parent. Please be acutely aware of the conditioning you are offering that is making your child imitate you and try to back off from that is what I'm getting at. In other words, if you were a musician and you think it's the end of the world, your child doesn't like music. Look at yourself. If you were a sports, you know, fanatic and your kid doesn't play sports, that doesn't mean they're a failure. And so get really hip to what you are subconsciously asking of them to imitate. Does that make sense to you?

Absolutely.

If we can do that and we can really help people flourish for who they really are, it will be such a different world. A less rageful, less violent, less angry, less confused, less lost world. Do you think?

I couldn't agree more, Kathy. One small step at a time.

That's it. That one conversation at a time. We're not trying to change the whole world. Where do we get your book? Where do we get this potential course? Where do we read all about you?

Luke, you can get the book anywhere you like to buy your books online or at the local bookstore.

Give us the title again, the full title.

It's called Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.

Wow.

You can. My website is Luke Burgess dot com. If you're not ready for the 85,000 word book, I write a substack called Antimemetic which I try to put one out every week. And it's just small little things that we can do to be less reactive, to be a little less memetic in our daily lives.

You know, Luke, I gotta say, I certainly don't know everything about everything. I know you know a little bit of, well, who knows. But the point is, every time I speak to my podcast guests, I'm so blown away about what I learn in terms of a depth of understanding of a life changing concept. And that's what you're doing. Thank you for being here. I so appreciate it.

Thanks.

And everybody. Oh, pleasure. I want you to do that exercise. We want you to state it again, Luke. What are they doing this weekend? The fulfillment exercise. Will you share it again?

Yeah. So try to find three stories, three fulfillment stories. These are times in your life when you took some action and accomplished something, by your definition of the word accomplished, something that was meaningful and important to you, that brought you some degree of joy. And I have a template for doing this on my website. If you'd like to like to use that.

We will link to that. Can we link to that in the show notes?

You can. Absolutely. It's a Google Doc that I put together. It's free and it kind of just guides you through the right questions to ask. Perfect.

All right, everybody, you know that we love to hear from you. I'm sure Luke would too. Wherever you see this, you know, on all the social media, wherever you see it, please let us know what you learned from doing this exercise. I will too. I can't wait to do it. Thank you again, Luke. Thank you.

Thanks so much, Kathy.

All right, everyone, have a wonderful week and we'll see you next time. Thanks so much for joining us today. And please don't forget to check out findingbrave.org for more programs, resources and tips. And tune in next time for your weekly dose of finding brave.