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Pull Don’t Push: Julie Newman May 24, 2023

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You need to hear the bad news first. The results of STEM outreach to girls haven’t improved in 20 years. The good news, my next guest will tell you why, and how to fix it. Currently, dated narratives push girls away in fear and blind spots, resulting in missed opportunities to pull them in. While efforts to increase diversity in science and mathematics have succeeded, outreach has largely ignored engineering. Welcome to the Author Hour podcast. I’m your host, Hussein Al-Baiaty. I’m joined by author, Julie Newman, who’s here to talk about her new book called Pull Don’t Push: Why STEM Messaging to Girls Isn’t Working and What to Do Instead. Let’s flip through it. Hello, friends, and welcome back to Author Hour. I’m here with a special guest. Her name is Julie Newman. Julie, thank you so much for joining me today. I’m really excited to talk about you and your wonderful new book called Pull Don’t Push. How are you feeling today? Julie Newman: Doing great. Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yes. I got to tell you, when I was doing a little bit of research about you, poking around the internet, and I was blown away as I shared a little bit earlier. I immediately – when I find remarkable people like yourself, I immediately send them to like my nephews and nieces because they inspire me and I think they’re beautiful human beings. They always love those little texts and things that I send them. You started off — this was earlier this morning — you started the morning off really strong. One of my nieces is getting ready to go into university, and she’s trying to figure out what to do. So I know your work will sort of enlighten her path, so I just want to say thank you for that. Julie Newman: Absolutely. Connecting the content with girls like your niece who can utilize it to really learn all the information they need, to pick a really good path for them. That’s what we’re here for. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yes, I love that. Your book is filled with so many beautiful experiences and stories. But before we get into that, I would love for you to share a little bit about your personal background, perhaps where you grew up, and what got you on this remarkable path of becoming not only an engineer, but someone who is working at NASA, and SpaceX, and all the remarkable things that you’ve done. I want to know who inspired that or what inspired that. That’s beautiful to me. Julie Newman: Absolutely. Growing up, I had interests in a lot of things like most kids. I super – I enjoyed school, I liked my classes in general, and then I like doing sort of crafty projects and things in school. That grew into – I didn’t actually know the word engineering, but knowing where I am now and what the problem I’m trying to solve is that, honestly, a lot of girls don’t hear the term engineering and so they don’t know to even look into it. Growing up, I expressed a lot of the interests that really align with a future engineering career, but no one was using the word. Just going back to the beginning, I grew up in San Diego, California. Had two older brothers, lovely parents who were super supportive, grandparents that lived next door. Really a wonderful time growing up. One of my biggest activities, when I was younger, was a science competition called Science Olympiad. This is a nationwide competition where there’s a bunch of different events centered around sciences, and actually engineering things, even though it is called Science Olympiad and engineering is nowhere in the title of any of them. But building things like little robots, or model airplanes, or model rockets. That was my jam when I was little and really my entire extracurricular activity through both middle school and high school. Hussein Al-Baiaty: That’s amazing, yes. Julie Newman: Yes, it’s a fabulous organization. One of my top blurbs on the back of the book is Jenny, who runs the organization today nationwide, absolutely love them. I’m actually now a volunteer for them too, and so I’ll be flying out there for the national competition in a month. Hussein Al-Baiaty: So fun. What a full circle too. Julie Newman: Yes, exactly. The point of this book really is to give back and to make sure that more girls do learn about engineering and make sure that they can make those connections. Because in all honesty, we look at the current landscape and engineering – you look at the sciences, and everyone here is like, “Oh, we need to get more women into STEM. We need to get more women in STEM.” Most people read into that and think it’s scientists, right? What does a scientist look like? All those sorts of things and that’s great. But if you look into the numbers of it, actually, we’re already essentially 50% in most science disciplines. But by comparison, if you look at engineering; engineering, the workforce is still at 14% women. In all honesty, when you look at it, the characteristics of a career in engineering really align very well with what girls say they want out of careers, and it’s just that they don’t know that they can find that in engineering. The Importance of Role Models Hussein Al-Baiaty: That’s really powerful. In your opinion, what are those blind spots then in STEM, specifically around outreach? I know you talk a little bit about this in your book, which I thought was really cool. Those outreach efforts that result in those missed opportunities to pull those girls in. Where is the communication not happening and where can we strengthen that? Julie Newman: Absolutely. The classic I like to point to is, all the kids have science classes in school, but very, very few of them have an engineering class, right? Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yes. Julie Newman: So to that nature, they don’t, they simply don’t interact with it. But the strongest thing that we can do in this domain is the extracurriculars, is particularly these outreach events that are targeted whose goals, their stated goals are to help more girls find themselves in careers in STEM for their futures. These events can be so effective, and we’ve seen that – I work with the LA County Office of Education. We have an annual event called Engaging Girls in STEM Program, where we invite hundreds of girls from the local school districts. What we do is help them interact with professional women in STEM, and less largely a lot of engineers. The irony is that we push a lot of girls towards the sciences, and in reality, there’s more than double as many jobs in engineering for them than there are in the sciences. Not to mention that girls really in today’s market are a really hot commodity when it comes to having companies want to hire them into these roles. It’s because they excel at them, and it’s a really good fit for them. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yes, that’s really powerful. I mean, I think in the idea of positioning the messaging in a way that gets through, like – I think a lot about how, for example, I was reading a few articles last week about just how TikTok looks different than it does for us here in the US, than it does in China, for say. I know you’ve heard these stories before, but it’s not just TikTok. It’s just our social media in general, and how we’ve sort of positioned men, women, girls, boys, just all the different elements in where we’ve seen. I’ll be honest, as a young Arab kid growing up in America, and [being] very artsy I was like, that is how I communicated with people for a long time was art. One of my teachers brought me – I was literally in fifth grade, I barely spoke good – I came to America when I was in third grade and I didn’t know any English, right? Julie Newman: Oh, wow. Hussein Al-Baiaty: One of my teachers, because I was obsessed with drawing, and I would just doodle throughout class, because half the time I didn’t know what the hell is going on, to be honest. She was so cool in that she brought me this piece of paper that just said, “Write a book competition.” It was an illustrative, whatever, it was just this national – I didn’t even know that it was national. I thought it was just homework, you know what I mean? I literally made this book, drew out these kids, and character, and all these things. She even went ahead and submitted it for me. My book got chosen as like top 100 – it was crazy. Julie Newman: Wow. Congratulations. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Thank you. I was very young, and I didn’t know what was going on. But that opportunity would have not happened had I not had someone sort of show me the way, at least put the piece of paper in front of me. “Take this home,” those kinds of things. Then when I grew up, I started speaking at different high schools and middle schools because I wanted to see people like me who look like me and sound like me also go in front of a class and show the kids in the back who are refugees and immigrants, that they too can start doing things, going architecture school, go into graphic design. It was just like, how can you present? Julie Newman: Yeah. I love that so much. How to Talk About Engineering Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yes. For me, it was all about who you see do that thing can inspire you. We want to see in-person talk to in-person who we could potentially be. Because then, you kind of see yourself in them. I love your positioning and that we want to get these girls around who they can be like, who they can look up to. That is really powerful. Can share a little bit about that? Can you tell me a story about maybe a woman who was successfully around you, in your life, in your career that kind of helped you get to thinking about STEM? I know you’re obviously already involved, but someone that really pushed that out of you, if you will in your career. Julie Newman: Yes. I really want to bring it back to the importance of these role models, and the surprising impact that one interaction can have. You had your teacher helped you with this one task, and that really helped you along this path. That’s why I wrote this book – it’s not a book written to the girls. This is a book written to the teachers, to the outreach coordinators, to the school administrators, the museum coordinators, all that good stuff. These are the people where their efforts – if they can get the marketing right, they can have such an exponential impact on all of the kids that they interface with. That’s why this book really is written as helping teach the teachers so that they can be effective. I see when I interact with so many volunteers, and I have so many great friends who – their career, right? I’m an engineer coming in and volunteering. But for all of these teams, where it’s their career is running these outreach events. They are in their working blood, sweat, and tears, and they care so much. What I want to do is to help them so that they can work smarter and not harder. It’s no fun to have to work, and work, and work, and not see the outcomes of it. To give you some stories, we’ve been running these events and I have been involved in so many different outreach events. That’s what led to writing this book was, I saw what worked and what didn’t. Then I took that and I went deep into all of the academic research, that none of our overworked, and underfunded, and not enough time organizers have the time to read, because a lot of it’s so hard to digest. When you actually can take that information out, and putting it in a readable format, like I’m doing in the book, engineering just falls right out of all of the data. It falls right out of what girls say they want when it’s framed in the right way. For instance, you brought up creativity. When you were younger, creativity was so important to you. To be truthful too, that was very true for me when I was little. I actually also, I really liked arts and crafts style things. I really liked building things. I loved cutting out things in paper and making little origami stuff or whatnot. Engineering is actually an incredibly creative path. That’s something that never gets spoken to. It’s a career that is all about creative problem-solving, working in teams, and really taking on these interesting challenges that help you. Hussein Al-Baiaty: I love that so much. Yes. I just deeply resonate. Yes. Julie Newman: When you frame it like that, exactly. Again, getting back to the motivation for writing this book, I saw too many outreach events where they would focus on the negatives. That statement of what engineering is, that’s something that people can get behind. That’s something that gets them to look into it more, which is what we really care about the most. But if instead you go in and say, “Everyone thinks that girls can’t do STEM, and we’re here to tell you that that’s wrong, and you can totally do whatever you want.” Hussein Al-Baiaty: Right. That framing. Julie Newman: The number of events, where that’s the first sentence they say to a group of a hundred girls. And you wonder why some of the events really – they can’t see a measurable impact at all. When you focus on the positives and help give the highlights of why you would want to look into it, then that’s what resonates. I was at one of our events a couple of years ago, and I was the keynote speaker for this event. I was, of course talking to a lot of the topics in the book. This is actually predated me starting to write the book by about a month, was this particular presentation. But afterwards, and after speaking through the concepts in the book, it was actually a teacher who came up to me afterwards and she said, “Julie, absolutely loved your presentation. I never thought about it that way. Truth be told, I should have been an engineer. If I had seen your presentation when I was their age, I think I would be an engineer today.” Hussein Al-Baiaty: Wow. Julie Newman: That’s also who I’m writing the book for, is I don’t want there to be more women like her who, knowing the information realizes that it would have been a great field for them that they would have really enjoyed, but then to never have some sort of happy accident or interaction bring them there. Hussein Al-Baiaty: That’s so powerful. Engineers and Space Exploration Julie Newman: By contrast, I also have a really lovely story. This is actually something that came up during COVID. I’ve spoken to so many girls, I can’t keep track of them all anymore. Although I’ve had plenty of emails back and forth with a number of them. But one in particular stood out, I had talked to her at an event. She was really interested in space things and of course, my entire career is in space things. After talking to her, I gave her the quick breakdown of, if you want to work on these things, don’t become a scientist, become an engineer because there’s a 10 to one ratio of engineers working on space things compared to scientists. Probably more than that even. But that was at least the statistic I was able to pull out of NASA at the time. I got a LinkedIn message out of the blue, just even years later, I think from her event, and she just said, “Hey, I came across and found you again. I just wanted to let you know that we spoke a few years ago, and I remember talking to you about thinking about which college major I wanted to pick. I’m enrolled to start a degree in mechanical engineering this fall.” Hussein Al-Baiaty: Let’s go. I love that so much. Julie Newman: Yes. That was while I was writing the book too. So I printed it out, I’ve had it on my wall ever since. It was just the sweetest thing. We get so many of those success stories with these events, formatted in the way that I talk about in the book. You can have those really good one-on-one interactions that get people on the path to being able to discover for themselves if it makes the most sense for them. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Right. That’s just one of the young women who reached out and decided that she was going to reach out, and just kind of say thank you. Think about all the others that are maybe shy to. Julie Newman: They never did. Hussein Al-Baiaty: But also made…

Full show notes at the publisher

Burden of Pain: Dr. Jay K. Joshi May 17, 2023

Show notes

My next guest has one simple question when it comes to the political and clinical chaos of the opioid epidemic and that is, “Is anyone protecting the patients?” Welcome to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host Hussein Al-Baiaty and I’m joined by author Dr. Jay Joshi, who is here to talk about his new book, Burden of Pain: A Physician’s Journey through the Opioid Epidemic. Let’s flip through it. Hello friends and welcome back to Author Hour. I’m here with a special guest. My man, Dr. Jay Joshi. Jay, how are you doing my friend? Good to have you on the show. Dr. Jay K. Joshi: Thank you, sir. I’m doing well, how are you doing? Hussein Al-Baiaty: I’m doing well man, thank you for coming on the Author Hour. I know you just launched an amazing book, Burden of Pain, and man, I got to tell you, now I [was] just tell[ing] you before we got on here that I was telling my wife last night that this book is a little hard to put down. I just wanted to keep going into the story and really, in a way, watch you do the good fight, which I really want to talk about in the book. Before we get into the book, of course, I really want to share with our audience a little bit about you, your personal background, perhaps where you grew up, maybe a person that inspired you or an event that inspired you to be on the path that you are on today. I’d love to hear a little bit about that. Dr. Jay K. Joshi: Well, thank you. So as mentioned, my name is Dr. Joshi. I am a physician by training. I practice outpatient primary care in Northwest Indiana and I live in the Chicago suburbs. It’s one of those New York, New Jersey kind of things where people go across the state on a daily basis. I got the impetus to write this book, really, based on my lived experiences. I was the first primary care practice in Northwest Indiana to implement telepsychiatry for patients in the primary care setting that had been a real help with complications and comorbidities. I was also one of the first physicians in the last five years to be targeted by the DEA and it was an interesting juxtaposition because NPR featured my practice just days before the DEA came and targeted me. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Wow. Dr. Jay K. Joshi: I thought about writing this book when I started to realize that this was starting to become very serious and that they were looking at this as though I were behaving as a criminal conducting drug dealing transactions when I was providing medications for my patients and that really triggered a cognitive dissonance in me because, for the longest time I almost felt that I was doing right for the patients and my patients felt, I was doing right for them. But here we had the DEA coming in, making its own interpretation, taking their own actions, and in many ways, destroying the fabric of the patient-physician relationship. So to go to your original question about, “Who really inspired me?” I would have to say, it’s folks like Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, who through the perils that they went through, drew the inspiration to write about it. I think, when I was going through everything that I was going, there was a massive propaganda campaign. I mean, just Google me and you’ll still see some of these crazy articles about me, apparently, imitating somebody, apparently writing all these crazy opioids but when I realized I could write, that’s when I found my voice and it actually gave me courage to stand up to what was going on because I was able to write. Hussein Al-Baiaty: That’s beautiful man, I love that. I mean, I know you’re going through some things and I’ve gone through a lot of things, we’ll get into it a little bit more, but what I meant by saying, that’s beautiful is that you found the courage. Dr. Jay K. Joshi: Thank you. Hussein Al-Baiaty: In writing, I always feel like, for me, it was art. I always found [that] that’s where I found my voice. Whether it be through graphics and truly when I found writing that I was not afraid of it anymore, it was another way to express myself. I too found some liberation in that space too, man. So I’m glad you’re able to take your story and then of course, be inspired by the greats that lead us from the inside out, you know what I mean? I feel like those greats when you hear their stories, you’re just emotionally changed and it’s like, whatever you’re doing at the time and moment you realize man, they are telling me right now if they could do it, you too can stand up and at least, bring your voice, bring your vision, bring your idea and not allow someone else to speak for you, right? Especially and put you in a negative light, that is not acceptable, right? Dr. Jay K. Joshi: Exactly. Photo by Pixabay from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-a-stethoscope-40568/ The Practice Hussein Al-Baiaty: So I appreciate your courage man, I want to share a little bit more with our audience about the beginnings of your practice, and your work with your patients spawns from a place of really wanting to help. It spawns from a place that you see this epidemic happen all around us. Like I said earlier, I lived in Oregon, and man, it was exponential it felt like in the last five years, unfortunately, in so many ways. But I know you feel this pain all over the world, and especially in your community and we all know what drugs do in our communities. However, there are people who actually need these things for all kinds of reasons — and that’s not for me to say, you’re obviously the doctor. Can you tell me a little bit more about your practice? Dr. Jay K. Joshi: Certainly. One of the first things as a physician you have to realize is that is not your position to judge a patient. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Sure. Dr. Jay K. Joshi: It’s your responsibility to treat him or her to the best ability possible. So when somebody presents with chronic pain or acute pain following a work-related injury as is common in Northwest Indiana, you follow the CDC guidelines for what is appropriate care. That could include medications like Tylenol, it can include certain non-steroidal medications that help with inflammation but it can also include opioids. In fact, opioids are considered one of the most cost-effective forms of treatment for chronic pain and other forms of pain that do not have a neurological component and before the opioid epidemic and now as we call it, the overdose crisis, really changes your perception on these medications. They were considered frontline therapy for many patients. What I would focus on is really, the relationship with the patients. Yes, if they had certain conditions, I would prescribe opioid medications but I would not simply provide the medication and leave it at that, which is why I incorporated telepsychiatry into my practice because if I were to prescribe these medications, I would also want to follow up with them. It is a balance between trusting a patient and verifying that trust and that’s a fabric of a strong patient-physician relationship. A patient X presents with a chronic condition, physician Y treats that chronic condition. Anything beyond that is outside of the realm of what should be considered a proper patient-physician encounter. The situation that I found myself in is that you have this third-party entity, the DEA, looking at prescription medications as though they were drugs, as though the clinical encounter was a drug transaction. So they’re not focused on the underlying pathophysiology, the underlying disease state. They’re not focused on what socioeconomic constraints the patient is facing as he or she has to work in pain because their union dissolved and now, they’re independent contractors. That doesn’t matter to the DEA. What matters to the DEA is that you wrote an opioid to that patient, you committed a crime and it sounds almost bizarre when I phrase it that way. But really, that’s the genesis of the disconnect between the medical world and the legal world. In the medical world, you look at the patient holistically and provide medications as part of the ongoing relationship. In the legal world, they’re simply focused on, “Did you prescribe a certain medication and did you provide the legal documentation to justify that prescription?” It should be that those two align. But when you have these different interpretations of what level of legal oversight constitutes the appropriate transaction, you find yourself at odds with what would be considered good medical care and I’ll give you a great example of this. The urine drug screen. You know how much a urine drug screen cost if you don’t have insurance? Hussein Al-Baiaty: No idea. Dr. Jay K. Joshi: Yeah, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s in the hundreds, 400, USD 800. Hussein Al-Baiaty: For a pee test? That’s crazy. I was just like, you pee on a test and it tells you some stuff that—or like a little strip and it just—but I mean, I don’t know, what am I talking about? That’s insanity. Yeah, I didn’t realize it was so expensive. Dr. Jay K. Joshi:Google it. Google the cost of a urine drug screen, it’s unreal. If I have a patient who, let’s say, lost her job and is now in transit working as an independent contractor, she has a shoulder injury, she can’t take time off because she’s the breadwinner but she can’t afford surgery because she’s not going to get paid for her rehab time. If she loses her Medicaid because she’s no longer working and serving as independent contractor, am I to deny her continuity of care? Am I to deny her, her medications because she can’t afford a urine drug screen? Hussein Al-Baiaty: Right. Dr. Jay K. Joshi: So now the question becomes, how much does the legal oversight, a urine drug screen, checking the prescribed database, ordering imaging studies, outweigh the patient-physician relationship itself? Now, I get it, there should be certain oversights. Like, every time a patient would come into my practice I would check their prescription database to make sure that they’re not doctor-shopped, meaning, going to multiple physicians and asking the same medications. Hussein Al-Baiaty: I see. Dr. Jay K. Joshi: That’s easy, that’s free of charge. Anything that then subsequently requires a cost or a clinical barrier to accessing care for the patient, that must be weighed relative to what is good for the patient, and the moment those legal oversights overwhelm what is good for the patient, you are seeing a disconnect between the legal and clinical worlds. Photo by Pixabay from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-medicinal-drugs-159211/ Steps to Help Patients Hussein Al-Baiaty: That is really powerful, man. I mean, I don’t realize that. When I think [about] the DEA — and I feel like most of us out in the world who are just regular old peeps, that really aren’t in the legal or the medical world — I feel like has always been, I don’t know, I feel like there’s always been tension there, of course. Like in most industries, but I always thought the DEA was more drugs that weren’t going through the medical world per se but I guess I can see the line in where it’s blurry but I thought that was your right as a doctor, as a physician. You’re obviously, you’ve worked really hard, you’ve practiced at this thing. You understand your patient, what they may or may not need and you have, in a way, the law backing you up to help with those things but it sounds like that’s not obviously the case. It sounds like physicians and doctors out there, obviously, fighting this battle, trying to figure out where this line is. So in your opinion, what are some of the most important steps that could be taken and addressed? I know you talk about this a lot, the root causes of addiction and prevent future epidemics because I feel like we can fight about the legal stuff all day and we can fight about the medical stuff, it sounds like in the world, right? But the root causes are really what’s impacting your patients and those are the people that eventually got to this level of work and to serve, right? So how do we take these important steps? Dr. Jay K. Joshi: That’s a great question and I want to break it down into three points because you talked about some very important things. You first talk about the DEA’s role inside and outside of healthcare, you talked about what protections physicians have, and you talked about the root causes of addiction. Let me go one by one because I think those are all three critical points to address. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Beautiful. Dr. Jay K. Joshi: So true, the DEA is nominally understood to be the government agency that prevents drug transactions, whether it’s street-level drug dealing or whether that’s cross-the-border or international drug trading but they also have a role in healthcare. They oversee the prescribing of certain controlled substances. These can be prescription opioids, they can be prescription benzodiazepines, which are commonly used for anxiety and they can also oversee opioid abuse medications like Suboxone and methadone. What the DEA does is that they schedule these drugs according to risk. So schedule one are illegal drugs, not permissible to be prescribed in any capacity, schedule two have the highest addictive potential, and schedule five has the lowest addictive potential. Opioids, like Norco, Percocet, what have you, are schedule two medications, and what the DEA does is that it monitors the number of schedule two, three, four, and five prescriptions that are being written and its current strategy is to examine — and I’m using that word nicely — examine physicians who may have higher prescribing schedules and then determine whether there are some sort of illegality or lack of legal oversight to justify going after that physician. I think the DEA does have a role and should remain active in healthcare but they should focus on principles of harm reduction where the physician has the latitude to make the clinical decision, what is good and what is bad for the patient based on his or her clinical discernment and that’s where we get into the laws that protect physicians. I’m very passionate about this because I wrote a Supreme Court brief for a case involving a physician. It was the first physician case in decades that addressed this very matter of good faith. Can a physician, if acting in good faith, be legally protected against the actions of the DEA? And when I was indicted, I did not have that good faith provision, believe it or not. As a physician, I did not have the right to defend my actions clinically as saying they were in the best interest for the patient and that I was acting in good faith. Fortunately, in 2022, I was what is known as an Amicus party, meaning, a third-party advocate for the physician, Dr. Ruan and Dr. Couch and Dr. Khan, now established legally in the courts, federal courts that if a physician is acting in good faith, he or she cannot be prosecuted by the DEA, DOJ for prescribing outside his scope of medicine under the controlled substance act, which is the same statute that effectively all drug dealers at a federal level are target against and I think that’s very important because it transitions to your third point along the root cause analysis of addiction. Addiction really is a series of clinical decisions and actions that culminate into patterns of behavior, patterns of thought that create dependencies and addictions and I think it’s very important to make that distinction because if a patient has a dependency, as a physician, it is your responsibility to still care for that patient but to identify what dependency the patient has developed and that requires honest conversation, a trusting relationship. Now, if a patient has transgressed into the world of addiction, where he or she is behaving in ways that are harmful to society, then the clinical encounter has been violated because the patient is no longer acting within the sanctity of the patient-physician relationship and so when you start to look at the root causes of addiction, let’s sta…

Full show notes at the publisher

Girls Just Wanna Have Funds: Monica Allen May 17, 2023

Show notes

After you’ve earned your degree, established your career, and started a family, the last thing you anticipate is living paycheck to paycheck. In many American households though, financial security is a constant concern. Welcome to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host Hussein Al-Baiaty and I’m joined by author Monica Allen, who is here to talk about her new book, called Girls Just Want to Have Funds: Four Steps to Financial Freedom. Let’s flip through it. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Author Hour. Today, I have a special guest. Her name is Monica Allen and she’s here to provide some amazing context around her remarkable book, called Girls Just Want to Have Funds. Now, if that’s not a great title, I don’t know what is. Monica, it’s so great to have you on the show. Thank you for coming on today. Monica Allen: Hussein, thanks for having me. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, this is my pleasure because I’ve had the privilege of swimming through your book early, if you will, and I am just – I love the simplicity, the context, the stories were so rich and so relatable, and I can’t wait to get into all that. But before we get into the book, I’d really like to set the foundation and share with our audience a little bit about you, your personal background, your story of perhaps where you grew up, and what led you to the path that you’re in now. Monica Allen: Okay, thank you for asking. My story is really a story of “against all odds.” So if I can do what I’ve done in this book, then any reader is going to be able to also do it if they want to do it. I’m just going to give you a little picture summary of a few things that have happened in my life because I think it’s easy when you’re struggling to look at somebody on the cover of a book and think, “They have it all together, we’re really not in the same class, I’m struggling paycheck to paycheck. How is this going to help me?” I’ll just picture summarize it. When I was at the early age of 16, I had a teenage pregnancy, and this was what we called at that time a baby out of wedlock. I was not married. When I was 18, my father dies unexpectedly at the age of 44 of a heart attack, and at age 22, I’m going through a divorce that I did not want and I find out that baby number two is on the way. I like numbers but let’s just say here that the statistics for success were definitely not on my side. If you look at teen moms, less than 2% of them get a college degree by age 30 but even worse, only 51% of teenage moms get a high school diploma. We have to get out of school to take care of our child. The Breaking Point Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, I think the circumstances of certain situations in our lives definitely lead us down paths that we may not have seen for come, right? Then, it’s really trying to figure out, “How is it up to me to make better decisions and start to improve X, Y or Z?” This is a story where you share not only what happened throughout those experiences but also really practical tips and advice and management tools to help people, and it’s very easy to navigate. Can you tell us about a time when you felt really overwhelmed by financial burden and what you did to start to overcome that? Monica Allen: Yes, I sure can. I think we all have our times but then there’s the time. So we have times when we’re struggling and we end up making it. It seems like it works out. We’re just maybe getting by what they call the skin of your teeth but I thought that I had made it when I finally met my husband Brad and we both had two good jobs. I thought, “Finally, I made it” and then there was one night, and this changes my life, there was one night, I wasn’t really even thinking about finances but we both came home from work dead tired and we wanted to order a pizza. This is my north star of the book because, when I looked at our bank account, I realized that unless we took it out of – we had a measly savings – there was nothing really in checking – unless we took it out of savings that we weren’t going to get a pizza on that Wednesday night. Something snapped inside of me. You know, where you said, “Enough is enough.” After that – we ended up eating – we cooked the frozen pizza that night – but after that, I started reading everything that I could on finances. Everything I could get my hands on. Some of it good, some of it not so good, but I soaked in everything that I could get my hands on and we started living differently. So now, I can live differently and help other people and just pass it on. Hussein Al-Baiaty: There’s a breaking point, right? I think for me personally, it happened a few times I feel like. There’s like during college, after college, and starting a business, and the business part was where everything just snapped. I too, just like you, there’s something I’m not seeing here and I needed to figure out what I was doing wrong as opposed to I feel like the times before that, it was just like, “What’s happening around me and how can I control it?” That is obviously impossible, right? But what I can control is my actions, my behavior, and my methodologies. Yeah, so you went down this rabbit hole of financial literacy and really trying to understand where you stand and that’s what inspired you specifically though to write about a financial management tool, basically, you call it the kitchen table approach. What inspired you to write that specifically for women? Because I know there are a ton of financial literacy books and some are targeted towards women and some are targeted – you know? But I feel like, with your story, it’s more around moms, and correct me if I’m wrong, I feel that it’s maybe the book that you wanted to read when you were younger. Monica Allen: I think it was, yeah. I think one of the biggest things is that mom, and most of us will agree with this, she is the heartbeat of the household. That old saying that, “If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy,” it does hold true because mom, whether we’re in a bad situation or a good, her attitude kind of controls the pulse of the house. We’re not only the partner, if we’re lucky enough to have a partner, but we’re raising up little girls and little boys that look to mom like, “Everything is okay.” Even if you’re dirt poor, your mom can make you feel, in her mindset, that everything is okay. It can make these little lives better that are entrusted to you. Hussein Al-Baiaty: That’s so powerful. I mean, I don’t know anyone who can’t relate to that. I mean, personally, I feel like I could ask my mom today where I left something 20 years ago and she would probably remember. Monica Allen: I love that, yes. Hussein Al-Baiaty: It’s just her ability to, like you said, keep things together in such a beautiful way and yes, it is a shoutout to all those remarkable women who keep the things together. But there’s a missing element in financial literacy where the woman at some point really takes charge. I know, in a lot of people’s relationships, the woman is able to take care of the financials and just make sure things are sent out and on time. Of course, you’re keeping track of Johnny’s baseball game and his orthodontist appointment and all of these things. There is some science behind why women are able to sort of do multiple things. Monica Allen: There certainly is, yes. Hussein Al-Baiaty: I found that really powerful that you brought that to the table. How can women who feel the pressure to make money and manage it apply your kitchen table approach to their finances? What’s the first thing women need to start thinking about to start applying this approach? Monica Allen: We’re made to multitask and I love the science of it because, I’m scientific that I’m in the healthcare business. So before birth, they say that men’s brains are washed with testosterone. So they’re the, go hunt and kill and bring home and the lady was at home doing everything else. We are multitaskers. We can decide, we’re taking a vacation and it’s just going to be camping. We don’t say it to the kid that way, it’s just going to be camping this year or we’re going to go to Disney. Big difference in money there. The female controls the pulse of what happens in the house, whether a room gets redecorated, how many sports each kid can be in, and keeps the pulse going. So, the woman is the perfect person to decide, “Hey, if you’re the one deciding on all the bills,” whether your husband’s doing it or you’re doing it, somebody needs to jump in and take the reins. A lot of times, we’re so overwhelmed, both of us, the wives and the husbands, the men and the women in these relationships, that you just skate by. You want better but you feel like you don’t have the time to do better. Hussein Al-Baiaty: What are some of the common misconceptions about financial management that you feel like your book aims to dispel? Monica Allen: I think many people think that they need to go sit in a financial advisor’s office and they need to have a million dollars to do that. They just feel so overwhelmed when they think about that, that they do nothing. These steps are much easier than that. Four Steps to Financial Freedom Hussein Al-Baiaty: What are some of the steps you started taking when that snap happens and you went down that rabbit hole? What were the first few things that you started to do to really start making that shift? Monica Allen: After reading everything that I could get my hands on, I decided that we needed to get out of debt and that’s one of the biggest things that almost any financial advisor will tell you, to start digging out of debt, to free up that money, to put the money and tell the money where you want it to go. If you’re spending 700 bucks, which is easy now because of inflation, a month on eating out, and you put it down on paper, that’s great, do it. If you want to do it, great. Maybe more than that now, if you have a family with the cost of things. We’re not even talking five-star restaurants. You decide though when you look at it on paper, “Hey, I’m spending $700 a month eating out and I‘m putting $100 a month in my retirement.” You may decide to do something differently. When I looked at it on paper, we decided we were going to do something different in our house, so that we didn’t have to live that way and then eventually go into retirement that way, when our income decreases and have to own or ask our kids to support us. I don’t know what there is because I believe social security will be there. Many people question whether it will be there or not, I believe it will be there but it’s not going to be what it was when you were bringing home the paycheck. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, definitely, I agree with that. I think our culture and our society today, we’ve just been so misinformed for so long, especially around financials. I think it’s the least educated thing in our world really, to understand financials, credit, all that stuff early enough where we can actually make decisions and build habits because I feel like financial, from what I’ve gained and learned, no matter how you perceive it, it’s something around building, just improving and building better financial habits. Of course, that is limited to what you know and how you get to know it and so I love that your book really dives into that space where it’s just like, “Okay, here’s what I did, here are the things that I started thinking about. I started putting it to paper, I realized that I was overspending over here and perhaps I can bring that down and take some of that leftover money.” You brought it up in your van story, which I love. It’s remarkably written because this idea of, “This van is going to make us rich,” and it’s just, sticking it out with the old thing for a while until you start to get comfortable and build the habit of putting that money away as opposed to putting it into a brand-new car every other year or so. Some people can afford that, of course, and that’s part of their financial world and what makes them happy. But in some cases, when you have a family, when you have things you got to take care of and manage and it’s really on your plate, you got to make those choices. So mama starts making some choices, things started getting better, and you start taking control of that checkbook. Can you walk us through one of the four easy steps to financial freedom that you outline in your book and explain how it can benefit the reader and their financial future? Monica Allen: I would probably say that building the emergency fund, which is step one is one of the best steps that you can have because we already talked about getting out of debt, and that’s important to free up that money, but a lot of emergencies, depending on if you’re single or married, between about $1 and $2,000. When you have that emergency fund, when you’re getting out of debt, you don’t have to put it on credit. You’re going to have emergencies. I firmly believe, when you have the emergency fund and we say it’s like between $1 and $2,000, that you don’t have as many emergencies because you have it but when you do have it, then you are not adding more debt for when the furnace goes out and it’s a $500 bill, we hope, or when something goes wrong; the car breaks down, the kids need school clothes, that’s almost an emergency sometimes, but we learn eventually to start budgeting for those type of things. But when you have an emergency, it really is a big mental setback too because you are thinking to yourself, “I just paid all this off and now I’m taking a big, giant step backwards.” So you have that emergency fund, you deal with the emergency, and you go on your way and that’s one of the best things you can do for yourself. Women especially like having the emergency fund because it just gives us the sense of peace that we know if something happens, we’d got it. We got it covered. Hussein Al-Baiaty: It’s so powerful because and, again, that idea of freedom or just knowing that you’ll be taken care of if something were to arise, it does give you a sense of peace. I know it does for me and the more I’ve built up some of my savings and emergency funds and started getting better at allocating my budget and all those things over time and started building better habits, I definitely have a lot more peace of mind. I don’t know about you but I used to have, oh my god, at the end of every month I would just have such anxiety, especially around when I owned my own business, you know, paying the taxes, doing all the things, and making sure everybody is paid. It’s funny, even after I sold my business and moved onto other things in my life, in writing and more creativity, what’s funny is at the end of every month, I still felt the sense of anxiety. I’m like, “Wait a minute, I don’t have those worries anymore,” but the feeling and the pressures and the things are still there. It’s crazy because you realize, once I created that awareness, I was like, “Okay, during those days I’m going to just sit and meditate and just let these feelings pass because they’re not true anymore.” What’s interesting is the psychology of that at least for me, I’m not a scientist or anything or a doctor by any means. But for me, it was just like, “Okay, at this time, this used to happen but now I have this pad and I have the systems in place to take care of my money,” you know, all of these things. So, I started wondering, “Why am I feeling this way?” And that feeling started to dissipate and now at the end of the month, I’m more of like in a celebratory sort of phase as opposed to feeling anxious and not good inside. You talk about this a little bit in your book, which I found really relatable. I think that’s such a powerful thing, when you have systems in place or a system that you apply your money to, I think that helps with the mental wellbeing. Would you agree with that and would you elaborate on that a little bit? Spend with Gratitude Monica Allen: I totally agree with it and here’s the thing, your business, you conditioned your…

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The Adventure Advantage: Michael J. Boydell May 17, 2023

Show notes

We all share one story. We were born to adventure; it’s in our DNA. Lose that and your potency wanes, along with your relevance in our unpredictable, rapidly evolving world. Welcome to the Author Hour podcast. I’m your host Hussein Al-Baiaty, and I’m joined by author Mike Boydell. He’s here to talk about his new book, The Adventure Advantage: A Roadmap into Uncertainty, through Fear, and Onward to Your Heroic Life. Let’s live through it. Hello, friends, and welcome back to Author Hour. I’m here with a special guest, my friend Mike Boydell. Man, Mike, thank you so much for coming on the show. I’m already super excited to get into this conversation. The book is amazing. It’s called The Adventure Advantage. Mike, how’re you feeling today? Michael J. Boydell: I’m feeling adventurous, Hussein, I got to say. Your enthusiasm is already contagious. So, I’m glad to be here. Thank you for having me. Hussein Al-Baiaty: I love it, man. I just want to be the number one hype man in the world. That’s my goal in life, you know what I’m saying? So, I got to hype you up and make sure the audience is engaged, because man, it’s worth it. Because here’s the thing, books like yours really remind me of my own journey in life. They remind me of the things that I went through and how powerful they are and all of these beautiful people that come in and out of my life. So, I got to share that with you because having sat with your book, just for a few hours, I was engaged, I was inspired, and completely motivated. This is why you feel the enthusiasm because that’s just how I felt. I just want to be able to share that with you and give that feedback. But before we get into the juiciness of the book and your story, of course, I really want to share a little bit about your personal background, where you grew up. What was that like for you? Was there someone that inspired the path that you’re on? Or perhaps an event that inspired you? I’d love to go there first if you don’t mind. So, let’s go back in time a little bit and share about that. Michael J. Boydell: Yes, that’s a dangerous starting point, Hussein. My sons have trained me over the years, “Dad, when someone asks you a simple question, give them a simple answer. Don’t immediately jump into the two-hour answer.” So, I’m going to try to give you the simple answer. And then we can see how it goes from there. I can’t claim real conscious memory of this. But the first trip I took was with my parents. I was born just outside of Boston, Northampton, Massachusetts, and my parents took a trip to Hawaii when I was six months old. Again, I’m not sure they asked me for my permission to do any of that stuff. But just that feeling of travel, the feeling of being on the move, and that concept of adventure was probably planted in me pretty early. From there, we moved up to Canada, when I was just about two years old. I had a lot of change happen in my life early on. A lot of disruptive change. Divorce happened early on. My father got remarried quite early on, my mom got remarried quite early on and I was really sort of subject to a lot of turmoil. A lot of change. When I say turmoil, I don’t mean it all bad. Just a lot of disruption at an early stage. In some ways, I think I became practiced at the art of navigating change and almost anticipating it, and it’s all those skills we build in our zero to 20 years, really, that so much formulate our operating system or who we are later in life, and kind of who we’re taught to be by our parents or by influential people around us or by our circumstance, by our conditions. I was certainly taught a lot of lessons around the importance of moving through change and kind of keeping yourself whole or almost reinventing yourself as you move through change. So, lots and lots of disruption in my early life, which in my adult life I come back to look at as really positive influences, and not that they weren’t difficult at the time. But when I look at the whole arc of my story, I’m really happy about the whole thing, given that it landed me in this place today. Everything Is Perfectly Fine Hussein Al-Baiaty: So powerful, man. I’m so grateful that you shared that because vulnerability is a strength. It’s one strength that we get to understand later in life, I feel like, but I’m glad you share that, man. Because yes, all of us have this foundation of things that eventually channel us in how we become who we are. I’m grateful that you were able to navigate that world in a way that turned into something positive. But in your book, you talk a little bit about the practicing of “the art of everything is perfectly fine.” Man, I got to tell you that resonated with me so, so deeply, because here’s the thing, man. I grew up in America from 1994 onwards, and I had the privilege of coming from a refugee camp. Before that, it was war, right? So, for me, my experience was visceral on so many levels. But I was blessed, man. I had a good mom and dad who – they weren’t just good, they were great, right, and an amazing set of brothers and sisters, that, man, literally helped me become the man I am today, in so many ways, right? I’m forever indebted to them. However, those experiences truly shaped who I was to become, and I had to lean on those experiences, and my mentors, my father, my mother, to really understand who the hell I was because I was trying to figure out my identity growing up, right? Growing up in America, I had to like fake being perfect. Meaning, I had to kind of dress like my friends and talk like my friends and act like I didn’t live in the neighborhood that I lived in, which was like just a poor neighborhood where we could pay cheap, cheap rent. Things that you had to do to kind of cover up what was inside. For me, I had to cover up the fact that I was a refugee and the ugly stuff. So, you talk about this in a very unique way. Can you share a little bit more about what it’s like to live in this idea of the art of everything is perfectly fine? Tell me more. Michael J. Boydell: Yes. That’s sort of a choice, I think, that we’re all invited to. But it’s hard to jump at that and make that an easy part of your day-to-day, the art of practicing everything is okay. I think if I just pick up a bit on your story, and I might ask, so I can give this some context, what age were you, Hussein, when you came over? Hussein Al-Baiaty: I was like nine years old, like eight and a half, nine years old. Michael J. Boydell: I’m a big fan of really looking at those zero to 20 years, in the influences and so forth, and thinking about all those stories that we’re taught, who are we, what’s important in life, our relationship to money, our relationship to work, our relationship to change, like all these kinds of things. But they do kind of formulate a story that we all take into our 20s, and part of what I have such passion for is just talking with people about their own story and the journey through their own kind of arc. But we often hit that stage in our early 20s, where we’re ready to take on the world and we’re kind of ready to put ourselves out there. We either have a point of view that the model we grew up with was really good. The values were right. I’m going to follow the path that was set. It’s my responsibility to carry on the family tradition, whatever. In which case, we’re not actually that independent. We’re just living off somebody else’s script of who we’re supposed to be. Or we come on into that world saying, what I grew up with didn’t work for me. It’s my job to change that. I don’t abstract to those values. I don’t want to repeat those things. And I’m going to change it. In which case, we’re still not really living our script. So, often in our 20s, we’re making big, big life choices without even realizing it, right? Education, yes or no? Pursue work, yes or no? Where are we going to live? Are we dating? Are we getting married? Big, big decisions get made to sort of formulate a path. Somewhere in our kind of late 20s, early 30s, we’re sort of invited to that question about, is this the path that I want to be on? That’s kind of a scary question when you start to feel like you’ve got something to lose. It’s one thing when you’re out there and you’re playing with house money—you got nothing to lose. But when you started to accumulate, when you started to be in a relationship, when you started to have a reputation or a career or what have you, and it feels like your identity is attached to that, it gets a little harder to approach that question of, who am I really? So that notion, coming back to your original question of everything’s actually okay, that takes a while to get to that place of not yearning, not ceaselessly striving, not seeking, just to be comfortable where you’re at in this moment and know that there is an adventure path that you’re on. I would want to share just as super quick story about someone who was very meaningful in my life and in the lives of a lot of people. His name was Mark Alessio, and he was a teammate of mine in college, played on the same basketball team. For me, he was this adventurous man. He traveled around the world. He rode a motorbike. He taught English as a Second Language everywhere in the world. And his life very sadly came to a tragic end when he was living with his partner in Madagascar. Hears a break-in downstairs, some noise, goes downstairs, and is confronted by some burglars, and he is shot and killed instantly. It was such a senseless, tragic, random seemingly loss of life. But before he passed away, he put out this little video vignette, which I still have to this day. I watched frequently. I use it with clients or all kinds of situations. Just out for a walk, and he notices there’s some graffiti and it says, “Everything’s not okay.” And he just kind of says, “That’s an interesting thing. What does that mean? Everything’s not okay.” He just sort of contemplates a little bit, and then he comes back the next day, and the knot has been spray painted out. He says, “You know what? Everything’s okay. Everything’s okay.” So, whether we think about that little video vignette from my dear friend, Mark, or whether we think back to Shakespeare’s writing and talking about the choice to be happy or not to be happy. To be or not to be. These are the existential questions. But at the end of the day, we’re all invited to choose. Do you want to see everything is okay? Or do you want to see everything is not okay? Hussein Al-Baiaty: That is so deep and so powerful. I love that. Sorry to hear about your beautiful friend and the tragedies that feels like takes away the human beings that we connect to the most. I can resonate with that deeply. I’m glad you went there because I feel like this idea of creating this identity of a perfect, fine life resonates because we are tethered to, like you said earlier, what society wants for us, and how we should portray ourselves. How we should show up “professionally” or not, or whatever. Dude, for a long time, I didn’t even like my name, bro. My name is Hussein. And before 9/11, and after 9/11, brother, you can see where I’m going with this. You know what I’m saying? Sadly, I would come to my dad, man. Like your friend, my dad was that confidant. He was a remarkable human being. After he passed, it was like, everything he had ever said to me was in front of me. It was vivid. It was colorful. He always used to remind me. He said, “It’s not that your name is Hussein, and then that’s what people are afraid of. It’s what your name stands for.” I’m like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “I named you after a beautiful human being who was heroic, who stood for righteousness, who stood for freedom and free thought. He was like a revolution.” He’s talking about the grandson of Prophet Muhammad. He’s a huge character in Islamic world. The way he defined this personality, he said, “My goal with naming you that is that you would live some of those attributes in your life, and that your name is a constant reminder to how great you can be.” With that mindset, it makes that shift, right? It’s a shift of going from negative to positive. That has always been empowering, and God bless his soul. Those are the things that I’m always reminded by, not only his beautiful art that he left me but his beautiful messages that will always live with me. I just appreciate that you shared that story, and I’m so sorry about the tragic loss of your friend. But it’s funny how they live with us continuously, and here we are talking about them, right? Michael J. Boydell: You’re giving me so much good stuff. I want to riff off that a little bit because the idea of the name that you’re born with, I know I talked about this in my work a lot, is that we don’t even get a choice in that. We don’t get a choice where we’re born or gender, like age profile, socio-economic status, birth order. We don’t even get a vote on our name, and yet it’s this thing that’s just been kind of imparted on us. To me, it’s such a part of that journey to make it your own. Again, just to share a similar quick story back, the name on my birth certificate is Michael Jess Boydell, and the Jess is named after my grandfather, and I can trace our lineage back to the 1100 and see Jesses and Johns and James. So, it connects me back to that. But have always had in my mind, Michael, is the name that my mom called me. Mike is the name my dad called me. Always in my life. Because I had this split in my family very early on, and my mom moved away, and my dad was still with us, still very close to my mom, but she was in a different part of the world. But it meant that I almost had this identity split. Mike meant one thing. Michael meant another thing. And it wasn’t until recently, in my adult life, people would say, “Well, are you Mike? Are you Michael?” It was like a confusing question to answer because I hadn’t really come to my own sense of closure and identity with that. I flipped back and forth and, “Let me try Michael. Let me try Mike.” I really get what you’re talking about with that name, Hussein. Mike, Michael is a fairly easy one relative to the weight of what you’re talking about. But how cool that your dad kind of man to man, sort of invited you to really see it in a different context and make it what you wanted it to be at the end of the day. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Right. Exactly. Yes, man. There’s always those beautiful individuals, right? Whether it be my father or your friend or our mothers, whoever, that sort of remind us that we are more than what our society, our context wants us to be. We are more of what we want to create out of that. He said, “You can avoid it and change it or lean into it and embrace it.” I chose the leaning into it. It made me unique. It made me stand out. And it was just like, again, do you lean into that? Or do you fall back? So, that ultimately defines your character. So, that’s the beauty of those kinds of elements. You talked a little bit about, of course, the whole book is about this idea of advantage. Let me tell you something, man, going on adventures and traveling has dramatically changed who I am and how I see the world in so many ways, and the opportunities that I’ve been able to have growing up in the States, not just traveling in the States, but travels to India, and those kinds of things. Those are just adventures of life. But what is adventure advantage mean to you? What exactly does that mean to you? The Adventure Advantage Michael J. Boydell: It’s sort of the penultimate question. It’s, okay, what is the adventure advantage? I would start my answer off by saying, as kids, we know what it is. As kids, the idea of adventuring is built into our DNA. We all have stories, and it’s a fun one to ask people. What’s your first memory of adventure? What was your first adventure? I’ve got a bunch of mine, and I’m sure you’ve got a bunch of yours. But they generally tell the story of what adventure is all about. I’m going to go off i…

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A Fire to be Kindled: Kelly Smith May 10, 2023

Show notes

How would things be different if everyone adopted learning as a way of life? Can intentional, messy, audacious learning unlock the power to live meaningfully and contribute to the world? Welcome to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host Hussein Al-Baiaty and I’m joined by author, Kelly Smith, who is here to talk about his new book called A Fire to be Kindled: How a Generation of Empowered Learners Can Lead Meaningful Lives and Move Humanity Forward. Let’s get into it. Hello everyone and welcome back to Author Hour. Today, my guest, Kelly Smith has some amazing insights in his new book called, A Fire to be Kindled. Kelly, thank you so much for joining me today. Your book absolutely resonated with me so I’m going to get into it. Kelly Smith: Thanks for having me Hussein, it’s good to be here. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah man. So, every now and then, a book about education or learning or knowledge and all those kinds of things, come across my table and your book really resonated because I’m not from around these parts, man. I’m from the Middle East and I had to grow up in America and I was a refugee and so learning was — I always felt like I was on fire, you know what I mean? I had to absorb and adapt and adopt fairly quickly and my mind, I felt like, was always on fire when it came to that and your analogy about your book title, man, it just like hit me in the head because I just deeply resonated [with it]. I feel that way, I feel like there are so many amazing people who added to that fire but I’m excited for you to walk us through that a little bit. Before we get into the book and the goodness of it, I really want to give our audience a little bit of background about you and where you grew up, and what got you into the world that you’re in today? Perhaps, somebody that inspired you to go on that path, or maybe an event that inspired you, I’d love to know. Kelly Smith: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks again for letting me be here, it’s great to be able to talk about this. I think the thing people should know about me is pretty like middle America and I grew up in the Suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. I went to public school. I was one of those kids that school came relatively easily to me, I did pretty well. I have a brain that memorizes things pretty quickly and easily and so I found myself kind of getting this steady stream of positive reinforcement, good grades, and happy teachers and things like that, and over a period of time, I came to kind of believe these things about myself. Not necessarily – you know, what I look back on now was it wasn’t so much a fire for learning but it was a system that I understood and I knew that I was able to function well. So for me, the game became, putting the minimum amount of work in, getting the grades, and moving to the next stage. That’s ultimately what I was trying to do — and if you think in crude language, it’s, I was trying not to learn, you know? I was trying to do the minimum amount of learning possible, the minimum amount of work, risk, and effort that it would take. I would turn in a paper, for example, written exactly to what I thought the teacher wanted to hear, with no original thought whatsoever and it worked. I was able to get the grades but as I look back on it, I don’t feel very proud of it now. It’s sort of like, what could it have been if I had been excited about learning? So that’s my path. I went to undergrad to study physics, ended up at MIT studying nuclear physics, working on fusion energy in a lab, taking these crazy hard science and math classes and at that point, I recognize like, “Oh, I don’t know this.” I’m not the smartest person anymore and this is hard and not only is this hard, I don’t know how to learn. So that was kind of a terrifying moment, an existential crisis for me. To Drench or Kindle Hussein Al-Baiaty: Wow, that’s really powerful. I love that you displayed this idea that even though as a young person and being a student — let’s be honest, we’re kind of taught to stay within those margins, right? We’re taught to stay within those lines but it’s interesting because there is so much more there that could be tapped into. But it is the approach of course of our mentors, teachers, and all those things, and obviously later on, as you get more excited then to deep learning, I feel like, things start to shift. But real quickly, I want to talk about this idea of how you started your book. You talk about the – where the book title comes from is this amazing quote but I’d love for you to share that story and why that resonated with you specifically, then we’ll jump back into the career stuff. Kelly Smith: Sure, yeah. I wish I could take credit for the title of the book. I mean, I ripped it off. Hussein Al-Baiaty: I mean, you should, it’s the title of your book now. Kelly Smith: It is the title. Hussein Al-Baiaty: You take the credit. Kelly Smith: But it’s definitely pulled from the – when thousands of years ago, the ancient Roman/Greek philosopher Plutarch who said, “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” So you kind of fast-forward my story I left them IT, I did a bunch of tech jobs, I started a company. I ended up becoming a learner. You know, really getting to this place where I felt like I can learn whatever I need and it will help me succeed at my job, it will help me create new jobs, create new opportunities even outside of work. I started finding a lot of the meaning and purpose that was happening in my life was tied to my ability to go out and learn things. And what happened was, I got to this place where I had some time extra in my life and I started teaching kids to code. It was a volunteer thing. Once a week, I would go to the public library, kids would show up and I would help them learn the basics of computer programming. Well, this became my little learning laboratory, and what I got to see in this room was learning come alive, right? I’m watching kids who really wanted to learn, who were engaged, the stories were nuts, right? Parents were using code club, this after-school program, as leverage to get their kids to do chores. They wanted so badly to be there and to tackle these hard cognitive challenges. Meanwhile, these same kids are disengaged at school, they’re frustrated, they feel like failures, some of them are getting in trouble, getting bad grades, and so I’m looking at this and saying, “Man, what is the – what’s the problem here? Why is this not working?” So when I encountered this quote from ancient philosopher Plutarch, I just quickly immediately recognized that there are these two competing metaphors. If you think of education as filling a vessel, like pouring water into a cup — which is how so much of our system operates today and many well-intentioned great people inside of that system are thinking in terms of, “I’ve got this knowledge in my pitcher, let’s get it into that heads of these kids and we’ll have them repeat back to us through assignments or multiple choice test.” That’s one model or paradigm of education but what Plutarch was saying, and I think he was right, is that it’s much more like kindling a fire. If you’ve ever created a fire out of nothing, getting sparks and trying to catch these precious sparks and all of your dry kindling, you’re blowing air on it and trying to kind of hold it and get it started. It’s a delicate operation and it’s so amazingly cool when it happens, when you’re able to get to actual ignition. Now think, if my goal is to kindle fire and I pour water, like from the other metaphor, that’s the exact wrong thing to do. Don’t do that. That’s going to make it impossible and yet, that’s what’s happening for so many young people today, where I think the things that are done to them, all of the pressures and systems and structure is the equivalent of dumping water on them. And really discouraging them from asking a good question, caring about something, setting a goal, diving in a direction that they’re excited about and so you have these competing metaphors and that’s what I wanted to write the book about. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Right. Man, I love that. It’s so powerful because, I just can’t agree with you more, especially because I feel like in a lot of ways I’ve experienced drenching the person with water. Like, when we were in that refugee camp, we had a school, which was like in portables and it was just – it was – hands down, probably the worst place to “learn” because it was completely fear-driven. I was terrified. Because those teachers were allowed to hit you and I mean, punish. Yeah, it was so traumatic, but when you don’t know anything outside of that, you just think that that’s how school is. Well, guess what? I come to America and oh my God, right? I still had those internal fears about going to school but now they were different. They were based on social aspects as supposed to learning aspects. But I still had those traumatic experiences where you know, I would want to forget things at school because I wanted to forget them as soon as I left school. I saw kids being hit, I’ve been hit and so everything you learned was jam-packed around that traumatic experience and now you just want to forget it. Well, you’re not going to – learning is off the table. So coming to America, I had to unlearn that and relearn how to learn and that was a profound shift for me. I don’t think it happened until, honestly, my eighth-grade school teacher. She was just so amazing and saw so much in me and literally after school, she slowly start teaching me like, “Here’s how your memory potentially works so let’s work through that” and just getting me to understand, literally, how I learn. That completely changed my mind, because it is like you said, if you want to learn something — throughout your book, at least these are the things that I got, if you want to learn something, you got to go out and actually, it’s hard. You have to earn it to learn it, right? Kelly Smith: It’s messy, it takes time. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Exactly. So this is where I was going to go with this, you talk a lot about being intentional, being messy and audacious. Can you give me some examples that you’ve embraced in this type of learning to achieve the success that you have? Kelly Smith: Yeah. I mean, Hussein, first of all, thanks for sharing your story. It’s an incredible story and where you’ve been, you can see in that so much of what I’m trying to talk about, right? It’s that – Hussein Al-Baiaty: It resonates. Kelly Smith: For sure. I mean, to learn something at all, requires a mindset and an approach, and guess what? If a child is in a state of fear, we’ve got very strong, kind of biological responses that are going to step in and shut off the parts of our brain that are going to be open to taking risks and grinding through the hard stuff. It’s like my job is to put my head down and avoid getting hit by my teacher, in your case. In my case, it was more about getting a bad grade or getting in trouble, you know? I think, we’re in these modes too often of kind of fight or flight, like reptilian-mammalian, kind of brain modes. What we’re really talking about was learning as a loftier, bigger endeavor is saying, “Look, that’s going to require humans to step out of a safe place.” We now – many of us live in safety, no one’s physically – No, I’m speaking to somebody who has experienced, you know, being a refugee and some of these things, they still exists in the world but for many of my readers, it’s like, yeah, nobody’s chasing you down or trying to hurt your body. It’s like, you are safe but you don’t feel safe because of a combination of these things. One of the first things I point to — and I’m glad you brought this up — your eighth-grade teacher is to do this, right? To really get – invite a child into that space of taking those risks and doing the hard messy work of learning, really needs connection. Like, connection as a psychological concept. This idea of having an adult that’s there, that knows me, that literally can see me and hear me and understand me, and that I believe, has my best intention at heart. So as you put that together and really try to design around that, that one adult, that ability to provide that connection is so incredibly powerful, so incredibly foundational to kind of open that up for a young person in their quest to learn and I’ve been lucky enough to have that in various settings in my life. Some I might talk about in the book and some of them I don’t but I want that for every child, right? I want every child to have adults in their life that are completely there, safe, vested, and ready to provide that stable foundation on which the messy and risk-taking kind of endeavor of learning can happen. Learning is Inherently Collective Hussein Al-Baiaty: Hey man, that’s so powerful and honestly, I’m not going to lie, I sort of teared up because as you were speaking because I just recall how valuable that teacher was to my life, you know what I mean? The more I listen to you, the more I recognize how empowered I felt, which literally leads me to my next question and I’m saying this with pure authenticity. Because look, the way I want to explain this is that because of that empowered feeling is the reason why I was able to get to college and start a business and now get into publishing and become an artist. Bro, I feel like everything spawned from those moments of sitting across this remarkable teacher and, I love that and you talk about that and there are characteristics. But what would you say is the most important characteristics of an empowered learner? Can you go there a little bit with me? Kelly Smith: Yeah, I love to do that first of all, I hope this teacher is listening and I hope anybody out there – Hussein Al-Baiaty: Oh, I’m sending her this. Kelly Smith: Please do but honestly, I hope everybody that does the work of the day-to-day of this, the hard part about it is the return comes so much later, right? So you don’t know and Prenda, my company gets to work with lots of these people that are really making sacrifices and they’re making – it comes from a very pure place. They’re doing good for children and you don’t really know, at the end of the day, that kid maybe today was rolling their eyes and falling asleep and having a bad attitude. It’s like, I can’t see it but 10 years from now, they’re going to be sitting on somebody’s podcast talking about how I made a difference. So that’s a huge part and always has been in the education space but yeah, like what is it? Basically, what the book is about is an empowered learner. I mean, the two things that I say to be an empowered learner, it’s real simple. First, you have to make a decision. There’s agency involved. You have to make this choice that I’m going to be a learner and that sounds so trivial and obvious but if you look at our lives, so much of it is handed to us, especially nowadays, kids in Western society, I mean, we’ve got them programmed, right? Every single hour of their life is scheduled and we’re driving them around to these things and all of it is happening to them and so it kind of crowds out space for a human being making a choice but I am arguing that’s a huge critical part of this. Then the second one is, once you’ve made that choice, you’ve got to practice. It’s an art, a skill, it’s a life, right? To be a learner, there’s a set of habits and daily routines and skills that you can acquire and the book goes into all of that. I hope people read it and take a look but so much of this is about a shift in the way of being to where once you have made that choice, I’m going to be a learner. Now, it’s like, “I’m going to get really good at that” and you meet these people that are just incredible learners. I have seen them in every field, right? Music and sports and math and business and all these different places and as you watch them do their thing it’s truly inspiring. I mean, this is what’s going to change…

Full show notes at the publisher

Done With Broke: Latifat Akintade, MD. May 03, 2023

Show notes

As a physician, your skills help you earn an income well above the national average, but life is expensive. Between financial illiteracy and an increase in living expenses, financial education has never been more vital. And for women physicians facing systemic oppression, it’s often a rare commodity. Welcome to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host Hussein Al-Baiaty, and I’m joined by author, Dr. Latifat Akintade, who is here to talk about her new book, Done with Broke: The Woman Physician’s Guide to More Money and Less Hustle. Let’s flip through it. Hello friends and welcome back to the show. I’m here with my friend, Latifat Akintade today, and I’m super excited because her book is absolutely remarkable. It’s going to be so helpful to so many people, but first of all, I’d like to welcome Dr. Latifat. How are you? Latifat Akintade: I am doing fantastic. I am so excited to be here and glad that I get to chat with you today. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, me too. I was literally sitting at your table when you came to Scribe and started your work, and it’s such a privilege to watch authors come to the table, get their things together, outline their books, and have a vision and they bring it to life. I get to have the privilege of watching those journeys unfold, and your journey is obviously huge because you have a very unique story but also, a purpose. Your book, Done With Broke: The Woman Physician’s Guide to More Money and Less Hustle, is just that. It’s amazing because I hear so many physicians out there, or stories about physicians out there that struggle financially. Even though they’re making good money, at least, to society it sounds like being a doctor, make sure you earn good money and all that good stuff. However, I know I’ve learned it through business, it’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep. The way you go about your book and the stories that you share are so powerful. I’m so glad you’re here. Thank you for joining me. I really want to get into the juiciness of the book, but before that, I really want to talk to you about it and have you share about your personal background a little bit. Perhaps where you grew up, what it was like for you, and maybe a person or an event that sort of inspired you to be on the path that you’re on to becoming and working as a physician. Latifat Akintade: No, absolutely, thank you so much. I’m really excited to be here, and honestly, to say that I cannot believe that I’m having this conversation with you would be an understatement. And the reason why is because my journey to where I’m at today is not what I ever thought it was going to be. Me writing a book, me talking about money and, in fact, maybe even a physician, honestly, were not things that I thought — I mean, I hoped it would happen, the physician part of it, but if I look at my journey from where it started, and for those that do not know me, which I’m as human as a lot of your audience. I grew up in Nigeria, I moved to the United States about twenty-something years ago. I’ve always wanted to be a physician from a young age, which, to be honest with you, I have zero idea how that came about because my parents were not college educated. My dad had a business, my mom would stay home for a lot of our lives because she had seven kids; six girls and a boy. I remember her biggest fear was that the girls were going to get older and everyone’s going to get pregnant at the age of twelve. She [was] like, “I’d better keep an eye on this crazy kid.” So my mom was a stay-at-home mom, which I’m super grateful for, but I moved here to be a physician, really. But the path wasn’t one that was always straight. I didn’t know what the journey was going to look like. We first came here with my siblings to Los Angeles and had the privilege of being hosted by family members. My aunt, who’s now late, unfortunately, and my uncle. They played a huge part in my life, and I’m really grateful for how they impacted our journey. But they also were not physicians, so I didn’t know how I was going to get here. It’s literally through the impact of mentorship, and good advisors that I’ve been able to navigate this journey. And a dose, a huge dose of stubbornness and determination to be honest with you is what let me through learning how to be a physician. I went to UCLA for undergrad, UCSF for medical school, and I’m really just grateful for the path that has led me to where I am today, which is to be a physician and specifically, a gastroenterologist. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Wow, what a journey. I’m so glad you articulated that so beautifully. And it is a beautiful journey, and I’m so grateful because, in a lot of ways, I relate to that kind of journey, where I got to come to the States and have tons of people in my life and in my journey. I never thought I would go to architecture school or anything like that, but this is where I find a lot of connections, right? Because as we come from different countries, we see in the distance what the vision can be but man, it is not a straight road. Like you said, it is very windy and sometimes you feel like you end up in a cul-de-sac where you’re just like, “I’m stuck.” But yes, stubbornness and, of course, eagerness get to where you want to be. So congratulations on that journey, I mean, it’s beautiful and I’m glad I get to experience it alongside you here. I want to talk about a little bit the importance of not only becoming a physician but also the importance of financial education for physicians. What made you realize that that was an important factor in what you were doing? Was that something you were always good at or not so good at? How did you wake up to this realization? Latifat Akintade: Oh my goodness, I was horrible with money. I knew zero about money. In fact, I went through my entire medical education without any financial education. We’d learn a lot of stuff, amazing, helpful stuff in medical school but financial education isn’t one that is included in our training. I went through undergrad, med school, three years of internal medicine residency, and then another additional three years of training after that. The longer the training, literally, I should tell you that I was hecka broke. That was the whole point of that, so I knew zero about money, and because my entire goal was to be a physician. I wanted to be the best doctor that I could be and I’m really grateful for the path that I took, the education, the mentorship, the patience, everybody that taught me throughout my journey to be who I am today. But what happened though was at the end of my training — at that point, I had two kids, and I now have three. I remember looking around, and I’m so glad that for some reason, this was a time when people weren’t necessarily talking a lot about burnout in medicine. I looked around, and I saw that a lot of my attendants were burnt out. People were tired, shoulders slumped, and these were amazingly smart people. I always tell people that if you want to be inspired, go read the personal statement of a physician or someone that wants to be a physician. We go into this field because we want to change the world. We care deeply about people. Nobody in their right mind would sacrifice their twenties and thirties to learning, spending sixty to eighty hours in a hospital, missing out on a lot of stuff in their twenties, not going out clubbing, not partying when their peers were doing that, being broke, going into debt, and acquiring like USD 250,000 averagely in debt, without caring about the purpose and mission for which they’re doing it. We went into this to care about people but unfortunately, the way that the healthcare system is created, unfortunately, can lead to a natural path of disempowering physicians. I had this moment where — I’m so grateful for — where I just realized that if I did not have my money shit together — can I say “shit” on this podcast? Hussein Al-Baiaty: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Latifat Akintade: All right, great, I’m a GI doctor. I say “shit” all day. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, I mean this ain’t Disney, this is my show. Latifat Akintade: Okay good. Hey, just ought to be sure, just want to make sure I’m on the right channel here, right? I knew that in order for me to be the kind of doctor I wanted to be, in order for me to create the kind of impact that I wanted to be able to create, in order for me to be able to practice medicine with authenticity and courage and honesty, I knew that I had to have the power to be able to walk at any time. I knew that I had to have the power. You know, my roof, my shelter, my kid’s food was not dependent solely on someone walking into the clinic and saying, “I don’t like the fact that you’re taking too much time with patients and you’re not meeting some ridiculous metrics, you’re out of here.” And I wish that was false. I wish that was a myth but unfortunately, there are physicians that are amazing, that are excellent, that I will trust my entire life and my family’s life, and my family too that unfortunately, sometimes are fired for no just cause. Maybe they need to go take care of their health issues and they’re like, “Sorry, we cannot accommodate that, you’re fired.” Stuff like that should really not be happening. So for me, the way that I think about it, money is a tool that helps physicians be excellent physicians. Money is a tool that helps physicians stay in the game, not because they don’t have a choice but because they want to. And if you truly want to see someone that’s excellent at their art, they are the people that have a choice. They’re not there because that’s the only thing they can do, they’re not there because they can’t pay their bills, they’re not there because they’re afraid of their lack of voice. They are there because they’re like, “I want to be here with what I call two butt checks,” meaning like, with full authenticity and speak to you because it’s like, “I could be anywhere else, but I care about you, and I want to be here.” That’s the whole reason why I had to learn money for myself and that’s how and why I teach other physicians and specifically, women physicians to know money, to have money without hustle, without grinding but in the way that takes focus, commitment, intentionality. Because when we do that, it’s going to create a different breed of physicians, which I believe is what the world needs today. Photo by Pixabay from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/rolled-20-u-s-dollar-bill-164527/ Making Financial Moves Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, that’s so powerful. Latifat, you have such deep passion for not only your work but the craft of your work, and also other physicians, and over these airwaves, I could just feel your passion and energy towards wanting to help other people become free of this idea of, the idea of feeling like, “I have to do this” and it’s, “I get to do this.” And really, that fine line of financial stability, financial understanding. That’s how you become a great artist, like you said, you show up and not worry about this other thing, that that is taken care of and that you’re not forcing yourself to be there. That’s very powerful, and that mindset, that mind shift of thinking about your craft in that way and not walking around with slumped shoulders and feeling the burnout. So, how did you start making this move on your own to figure out, “Okay, this is something I have to do, and I have to understand my financial state, what it looks like” all these good things? How did that journey start? Take me down that story of making these moves. Latifat Akintade: The start was not fun at all because here I was, a physician who knew nothing about money. I had spent sixty to eighty hours in hospitals at that point, learning and taking care of patients. So for me, I had lots of thoughts, and the thoughts were not very helpful. The thoughts were, “I’m already too late, everybody else knows about money, and I don’t,” right? How am I going to say I know nothing about money and people are going to be able to trust that I’m smart enough to be a physician? I looked around and the only spaces that existed unfortunately at that time were hard for me to come out and say, “I need help with money,” because everybody looked like they knew it. So I thought that was a classic med school that I escaped, which that class didn’t happen, right? I had all those reasons in my head for why I couldn’t learn money, but then the reasons that I just shared with you right now were the reasons that I had for why I had to learn money. I wanted to be able to practice with authenticity. I wanted to be able to make sure that the sacrifices of everybody that had invested in my life, including my mother who I didn’t see for five years because she was in Nigeria then, I wanted to make sure that their sacrifices were not in vain. And for me, if I could not practice medicine by choice, their sacrifice was going to be in vain. Also, at that point, I had two kids. I did not want to be a parent that I would keep making excuses and saying, “I did not have a choice.” If I’m going to do something and not be there physically for my kid, it’s because I believe in it. It’s because I want to go there and take care of a patient. I want to go there and save a life. I want to go there and comfort someone, right? So I just did not want a life of excuses. So even though there were those fears, my why became strong, and it was those why’s that really became what pivoted me into going into what felt like a dark hole for figuring out how to do money. And honestly, the process wasn’t sexy. It literally was me going online and going, “Okay, people said I need to learn how to budget. Like, what is a budget? How to budget?” Especially if you hate math. I do not like math. I got 100% in calculus in college because I pretty much did every single extra credit that you could find in this world, and I did great, but it doesn’t mean I’m good at math, right? So I knew that I had to figure out how to do money in a way that didn’t take a lot of time because I’m like, “I’m busy, I don’t have time. I don’t like math, I don’t like spreadsheets.” So literally, I had to learn what was out there but then now go into figuring out, “Now that I know what people are doing, how do I create something for myself that makes sense in English?” How do I translate this jargon into what is not boring and going to put me to sleep, right? What is going to be interesting and what is going to be successful, despite the things that I thought I sucked at? And so that’s how I had to create it for myself. So it’s as simple as things like, instead of budgeting, what is a spending plan? How do I tell my money where to go? How do I redirect my – I literally had to change the communication of money in my head and do it for myself because, again, listen, I was so bad at this that I didn’t even for a second imagine that I would be teaching anybody how to do it. So that was not even on my radar at all, I was just there to fix my own shit, literally, and that’s the path that took me to learn money. I always tell people that the hardest part is starting. Once you start, you keep going, and you start to see wins, you start to get better, and then you’re like, “Oh, maybe my thoughts about this were not right.” You start to create evidence for yourself on why this is actually doable and possible for you, and that’s the path that has led me towards learning my own money, learning real estate for myself, investing in real estate, and now being the person that’s able to teach other women how to do this. Hussein Al-Baiaty: So powerful. I love that journey because in order for us to actually learn the thing that we most fear, we have to go to those dark alleys. And the funny thing is, when we get into those dark alleys, you realize, there’s a light switch, right? You flick this thing on, “Okay, I can learn this.” I was terrible at math, and I think there’s a fear around…

Full show notes at the publisher

The Obsidian Society: Keshara Moore May 03, 2023

Show notes

To turn within is to survive. After the collapse of humanity in 2211, Letty Valentine, her family, and the rest of Washington DC’s Black upper class sought refuge in the ruins of Salt Lake City. As the founders of The Obsidian Society, they turn inward, protecting their own against remaining colonies on Earth. My next guest just launched her debut novel and it’s amazing. Welcome to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host Hussein Al-Baiaty and I’m joined by my friend and author, Keshara Moore, who is here to talk about her new novel called, The Obsidian Society. Let’s flip through it. Hello everyone and welcome back to Author Hour. I’m here with a special guest, my good friend, Keshara Moore, who just launched her debut novel, The Obsidian Society. Yo, Keshara, I’m so excited to have you on the show. I’m really excited to get into this conversation but most of all, thank you for coming on, how are you feeling? Keshara Moore: I feel very – that was a really smooth slick intro. But yeah, no, I feel wonderful. I’m super excited to talk and be here and all the things. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, I’m super excited for you because — I got to tell you, I know we talked a little bit off air but — your book instantaneously pulled me in. You took me in this scene and I just felt like I know what that was like. Swimming is not like a strong suit of mine. Keshara Moore: I mean, I do not think that you are alone so that’s the feeling that I was going for. Hussein Al-Baiaty: No, it was perfect. You were describing something that I think a lot of people feel, especially when they jump in that water but again, that’s the power of captivating the audience [at] the very beginning. You did such a good job and I’m super excited to get into the novel, the behind-the-scenes but before we do that, I love to give our audience a little bit about who you are, where you grew up, your personal background a little bit and what led you down the path of getting into publishing and writing and creative stuff that you do now. Keshara Moore: Yeah, great question. I will start off by saying I don’t have any major credentials. I feel Scribe was like, “Oh, unlocking the world’s wisdom, everyone can write a book.” I am a great case of that in the sense of I didn’t have a ton of writing background and you know, “this paper” and “this dissertation” and all those things. But yeah, just from growing up, both my parents were in the military. So I moved around a ton, I moved around every three years. I got to experience a lot of great places, a lot of great people, ended up going to college and thought I wanted to be an attorney. I ended up becoming a paralegal, got into the law business and then very quickly was like, “I’m sure this is for some people but this is definitely not for me.” So all of that being said, that was kind of the background I was coming from as far as how I ended up in Austin and got my first job here. Turning Within Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, I love that. Just for those listening, Kesh and I work at Scribe Media and for the most part, we publish books that are expert-driven, knowledge share, or memoirs. So this one was a little bit outside that scope which is actually amazing. I love that you took on that lead of launching something that was creative. But all of together, I mean, even the theme of the book was actually really powerful — which we’ll get into but — I want to know, what inspired you to write, to turn within and this idea, this concept of turning within? How do you come up with the concept? Is this something that was planted within you when you were young? Or is this something that you started thinking up in the last couple of years and decided like, “I want to write this story, I got this concept.” How did that come about? Because a novel is obviously different than writing what we’re experts in, or a memoir, you know? Keshara Moore: For sure. No, great question. Where do I even start? Yeah, so as with a lot of things, as you know, the world is pausing, COVID-19 is going on, it was very fresh. I actually did work from home, probably for a total of two months when the courts kind of shut down. This was peak paralegal time, things were kind of shutting down and I just started doing some scribbling, just some ideas swirling around. I started playing around with those and it was mostly just for fun, and escapism, and just something that I like to do with my time and then, I was like, “You know what? How funny would it be if I just like turned this into a novel?” I wondered where that could take me. So to turn within — and turn within is actually a super funny phrase because — and I won’t spoil but once you get to the end of the book, hopefully, the reader will realize this, that turn within is actually kind of takes a transformation in the sense of, actually, the real power here is turning outside of yourself, turning outside from what you’re used to and looking at things from a different point of view. But very early in the book, the main character is very much in his mindset of, “Yeah, I need to turn within in order to deal with these problems and deal with my issues.” So the turn within is a funny-like transformative thing. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Talk to me a little bit about the writing process for something like this, like your novel. What kind of challenges came up for you while writing it? I mean, I feel like the research and thinking about these elements and people in my mind — because I haven’t written anything like this — it feels like there’s so many moving parts in a novel and you got to, in a way, suggest that where the dots will connect, right? But obviously, I don’t know, for me that could be challenging. For you, it could be where you’re floating downriver but can you talk a little bit about that process of how you start to gather your thoughts around these components? Keshara Moore: Absolutely, I could talk about this all day but since we don’t have all day, I’m just going to get the quickest of rundowns but obviously, again, just citing the fact that I am no expert. So for me, this was actually the longest piece of work I’d ever written. So I think that the number one thing that really helped was the fact that I was actually interested in building this world, interested in where the characters were going, interested in what motivated them, the actions that they were taking because I have several friends who are like, “Hey, I really want to write fiction but every time I try, it seems like I get a little bit of the way and then I get bored.” And it’s like, “Bro, if you’re feeling that way, imagine how your readers are feeling.” So I fully understand that. I think for me, the beginning thing was like, “Okay, let me just write about something that genuinely interests me and the rest will go from there” but I actually recently just had a conversation. Someone asked me — what’s the question they ask, “Are you a plotter or a punter?” I know it’s a common question in the community and that’s funny to me because like, “Oh, you got to be one or the other?” When in reality, you’re probably a little bit of both but I will say, shout out to Rose, shout out to Cal. They were some of the folks that helped me edit. Those first manuscripts were very rough in the sense of, yeah, it was literally me just having fun, not paying attention to formatting and structure and things like that. Those things came later on once I kind of got the validation of like, “Oh, this might actually turn into something. It could be something.” Hussein Al-Baiaty: I love that you approached it with this idea of like, “What is interesting to me? What resonates with me, what do I want to write about?” and what’s interesting about that concept, I feel like there’s an unknown, right? Because what’s interesting to you can always evolve as you grow and as you write, it’s going to bring itself out of you. I think that’s an interesting take because it’s trusting something that is going to be there but may not be there in the moment and that is really difficult, I feel like, for writers, right? But then, if we just write completely what we know, how we know it, all the past experiences, those things — I could tell you from personal experience, writing a memoir, there is parts of my life where I was like, “This is boring,” you know? And I’m like, “And it shouldn’t be here” but ultimately, a piece of that story is actually helpful for this long piece of the story or the bigger piece of the story but it’s almost like you don’t know what needs to come of it until you actually sit down and write. I think it’s really powerful that starting with, what’s interesting to me, that’s a very powerful question because then, you write everything kind of stacks on top of that. Because if you’re interested in it, then you got to write it in a way that gets the reader interested into it of course, which makes, I think, for a powerful perspective. So talk to me a little bit about how the story — it takes place obviously in a post-apocalyptic world and I know there are many types of stories that share this idea of far in the future and things are going down and the world isn’t what we think of it or we want it to be. But here’s an opportunity to be completely creative and everything is really open for your own translation. So talk to me a little bit about this world in which you create and maybe what kind of research did you do to create that world and characters. Keshara Moore: Yeah, so as far as it goes, the first thing you said about writing what you know and writing what you’re interested in, I fully, fully believe that everyone who creates stuff has like just the biggest ego ever because how much of an ego do you have to have in order to be like, “Hey, I’m going to create this thing and I know there’s one person out there, at least one person out there is going to vibe with this and read with it.” You’ve got to have like some bit of an ego for that but I definitely think it’s like a fine line between that ego and hubris and all the things. So that’s number one but to answer your question about research and the behind-the-scenes stuff, terribly-terribly-terribly was actually, ended up being helpful. Just all the things going on around us with COVID-19 at the time because a book doesn’t take place that far in the future from where we are currently right now. To where – and that was purposeful because I didn’t want it to be some insane amount of years in the future where it’s almost very hard to envision this thing happening but the fact that yeah, a lot of the fallout in this world is manmade in the sense of like nuclear bombs and sickness and things like that like those post-apocalyptic or apocalyptic themes that everyone’s familiar with and used to. Those are something that it’s super easy for us to envision because we are quite literally, and still are on the tail end of it, lived through a lot of those really hard things. So as far as research, there were definitely some ins and outs or just like wasn’t familiar with stuff because you brought up like the whole drowning thing. I cannot tell you, my Google search history is so questionable right now. But yeah, you Google the ins and outs of like — and something that I ended up finding out — I was like, “Yeah, drowning actually doesn’t happen that slowly.” It happens very quickly. So I took that into account when writing that like opening scene. So all of those little things, obviously, you research those. Bridge the gap of my own knowledge but even then, yeah, it just goes back to the fact that the ultimate goal is for other people to read this story but at the end of the day, I had fun doing that research and I had fun coming up with this world but yeah, I didn’t want it to be – I know the sci-fi and the fantasy publishing gatekeepers are going to be like, “Ah, this doesn’t fall under all of those like umbrellas.” And I’m actually not upset with that because it really was just me having fun, building a world that I hope entertains other people. Hussein Al-Baiaty: I love that. I’m glad you brought us there because I want to share a little bit about that world and the characters in it. You call them the main group, The Valentines, or the founders of The Obsidian Society, and correct me if I’m wrong. Can you tell us more about The Society and its sort of values and those kind of things that I feel like in a way, resonate with some of the things that we think about today but you approach them in a very unique way, which I love, can you share a little bit about that? Keshara Moore: Yeah, so you had it spot on. The Obsidian Society is the faction currently living in Salt Lake City and they are – I don’t want to say, necessarily run but a big portion of their leadership is this family, The Valentines. The matriarch, Regina, she is obviously overseeing this entire colony. Just because of the length of the novel, I didn’t really have time to go into the nitty-gritty. But the idea here with The Obsidian Society is I was like, “What does it look like for a group?” If you do your research and go back far enough, essentially, there are these groups that spring up after the Emancipation Proclamation and you have these freemen who are now free, these people who used to be slaves who are now “free”, they start to move to areas and one of those really big popping areas was Washington DC. If you do some research, I can’t think of the names of the top of my head, but there are a lot of these groups who would populate in cities like Washington DC; they would found these groups and the expressed purpose of those groups was the advancement of those Black families and Black settlements that were cropping up from these freemen groups. So the idea there is that — and this is mentioned in the book but — The Obsidian Society takes some ties from there, that it is the present-day version of those groups. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, it’s so powerful. I don’t want to give too much away, I feel like the book is so unique. I love that you draw from these sort of past experiences and how you intertwined them with modern and future outtakes, which I just love because I feel like in a lot of ways, unfortunately, history does repeat itself and it can repeat itself but improve, right? I think your battle between how the characters really come together and capturing this essence of, “Okay, here’s an opportunity for us to create a new world essentially but there is some stuff going on and we got to get through this stuff. I love that and I think your book sets it up for a potential sequel, maybe. Do you have plans to continue the story or the series? Keshara Moore: Ooh, that is the sweet question. I absolutely do. Yeah, I kind of went back and forth. I knew that one book definitely was not enough to tell the entire story that I wanted to tell. So I actually think it is going to be a trilogy, so kind of out of the box, yeah. The Black Monolith Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, I love that. Okay, I’m glad we shared that because I was — you know, as I was kind of perusing through your book, I was like, “Man, this is so powerful.” I want this to be a series selfishly and then the more I read, I was like, “Okay, yeah. I think there is a setup here for that potential,” which is really cool. So talk to me a little bit about your favorite part of pulling this book together. What did you learn from that journey? Keshara Moore: I love a well-built character. Like you have the plotting, [that]’s cool. You can do all these wonderful things with the plot. You can do all these wonderful things with structure but just like a genuine character whose voice you can hear in your head and who you can kind of start to paint your own mental picture of what that person looks like and their mannerisms and why they did this instead of that. I love me a good well-built character and I feel like one of the parts of the character, which I really try to emphasize a lot was just this ide…

Full show notes at the publisher

Speak Up or Stay Stuck: Pam Marmon May 03, 2023

Show notes

Your company is changing, whether you like it or not. As a manager, you’re expected to make that transformation happen. Yet, you feel voiceless, unseen, and unrepresented. Welcome to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host, Hussein Al-Baiaty, and I’m joined by author Pam Marmon, who is here to talk about her new book called, Speak Up or Stay Stuck: Get Your Voice Heard when Fast and Forced Change Happens in the Workplace. Let’s flip through it. Hello, friends, and welcome back to Author Hour. I have a very special guest and a friend of mine joining us today. Her name is Pam Marmon, and she just launched her second book out in the world called Speak Up or Stay Stuck. Pam, thank you so much for joining me. This is super exciting. Pam Marmon: Thank you for having me, Hussein. It’s a pleasure to be here. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Pam, you are such a beautiful case study in our Scribe world because man, you get in, you knock things out, and you keep it pushing, but I know having watched your journey sort of uncover, there was a few moments in time where there was some self-doubt and all those kinds of things, which I really want to get into. But of course, your book is so powerful. I had the opportunity to peruse through it in the last few days and I got to say, I mean, just like your first one, it was easy to get through, easy to navigate. The stories had such a good pace, and I didn’t feel overwhelmed, which is always nice to feel that in a book. But before we get into the book, I really want to give our audience who don’t know you and aren’t familiar with your work, to give just a little bit of personal background. Perhaps, where you grew up and what that was like for you, what got you on the path and the thought leadership that you’re in now as far as change and change making and development in the work culture. So just give us a little bit of a background if you will. Pam Marmon: Absolutely. I actually opened the book with the story of immigrating to America. I grew up in Bulgaria until I was twelve, and my family moved to America. That was a big change and it wasn’t until years later that I realized that change chose me. So instead of feeling like I was taken out of control or change was happening to me, it was a mindset shift, and I’d like to think that particular individual private change in my life really set me up to the career path that I’m on and I have taken over the years. I do change management consulting. I’ve been in the space for over a decade. I absolutely love what I do with clients; I find change joyful, satisfying. It brings me delight, and I encounter so many leaders who fear it, who are afraid of it, resist it, and so I’m on a mission to help people celebrate change and to see change as something that’s actually really good for them, both personally and professionally, and so my journey has been really interesting. I’ve had the chance to work with Fortune 500 clients, lots of executive senior leaders, and managers on the front line. Take Control and Remove Limiting Beliefs Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, I love that. I’m glad you brought us right in because, again, your work is very interesting, and it’s also kind of personal in a way because I feel like in engaging with these senior execs and all those things, you really have to get to the root of what those fears are. What are the most common — I guess you would call them lies, if you will — that people believe about change and how do you coach sort of overcoming them? Pam Marmon: Yeah, so this is really interesting. It takes me back about a couple of years ago. I was visiting a client of mine in Michigan, and I happened to be in town where I have friends from college. We all sat around the dinner table, and we went around, everybody went to give an update on what life has been like for them, and so I shared that my first book came out. It’s so great, I’m working with executive leaders, helping them change the world, and my friends paused me and said, “What about us? Who’s helping us? We feel like change is happening to us.” And really, that was a defining moment for the book itself because I felt like all this time I was coaching the executive leaders, and yet there was a whole group of people that was impacted by change and needed to understand how to navigate change. It made me really step back and say, “I actually have a solution here.” And I can really help not just my friends, I can help so many people in the world. So when I started writing the book, that was the premise of the people who I wanted to really address their pain point, and one of the critical areas that I recognized was these limiting beliefs, things that we think that are lies in most cases. But these limiting beliefs, one of them is, “My leaders don’t care about me.” And if you approach work with that kind of mindset, it’s very likely that’s all you’re going to see, but in the book, I talk about how I sit in the board rooms. I watch your executive leaders fight for you on your behalf. They’re actually good people, and then the absence of information, we make up all kinds of crazy stories that may not be true. So that’s one, we have things like, “If I don’t speak up, I will lose my job.” That’s a really important one to understand. Many people hold back from speaking up because they’re afraid of retaliation, and there are companies that have toxic cultures, negative consequences, and so my question to them is, “Is it worth it?” Can you find another position where you don’t have to be afraid of speaking up because you’re valued and the culture allows you to be who you are and bring information to the front? Another one is, “I don’t have much to add” or “If I speak up, it won’t make a difference” or “Nobody consulted me about this decision, this big change.” So, in the book, I unpack each one of these mindsets and help the reader understand what is in your control and what are some limiting beliefs that are not serving you well, and it’s best to eliminate them. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, that’s so powerful. I love that you brought that up because those limiting beliefs, I mean, they creep up all the way to the top of leadership, right? And they trickle back down all the way through, and those beliefs I feel like, like you said, are intertwined with just lack of information, lack of communication. So how can we sort of effectively communicate with senior leaders to ensure our voices are heard, as people who are in management are people who are just trying to seek change but do it in a way that again, doesn’t in fact impact our work or get fired or you get let go, or just impact how people see us at the work environment? I know that’s a tough conversation, and I know this is probably kind of a loaded question, but what has been your experience with that communication aspect of how to get our voices heard? Pam Marmon: Yeah. So one of the most important things that I teach in the book is how you can leverage your voice to make change your choice, and that’s really powerful because if you approach change in the workplace from a point of control and having authority and making decisions for yourself, you’re much more likely to be effective. But if you think change is happening to you and you have no control and you’re just a victim, then you will behave a certain way and you will get results that are subpar. So I hope the readers really understand what is in their control and how they can influence others. The first part of the book is about the past, and we uncover some of the things in the past that are holding us back. The main part of the book is about the present, and I introduce a model called “LESS” listen, empower, speak, and solve, and that’s truly the essence of the content that I want to teach people. Then the last part is the future about becoming more change resilient so when it comes to being able to speak to your senior leaders and be heard, it’s important to start out with listening. Listen to understand. Why is this change happening? How will this change impact you and your team, what is expected of you during that transition? All of these things are really critical to understand in order for you to be able to speak. First, we listen. Empower is all about influence. It’s you as an influencer, but you also extending your influence to others and having the courage to speak up and bring information to your senior leaders. But also being able to negotiate, and that’s a really important piece because life is full of negotiating opportunities, and we just have to get more effective in how we approach negotiations. Not to be fearful of negotiations but to really have an open mind. So introduce some concepts and some tools that the readers can really benefit from. Then as we look into speaking to your senior leaders, it’s understanding, first of all, who are they as an individual, what are they like, how do they prefer to communicate, what’s important to them, what do they value, and then, being able to bring that information, bring insights in the context of your organizational culture, so that you can really communicate effectively with your senior leader. Presenting your message in a way that will resonate with your senior leader, knowing when’s the most optimal time, whether it’s time of day, time of season in the year, and sometimes it’s actually not you necessarily that has to share that information. That’s a really important concept to understand, that sometimes you’re not the messenger and that it’s okay to get your message across, right? And then the last part of solving it. Demonstrating results, understanding data, being able to leverage data in a way that you tell a compelling story and really, to drive that change and the results that you’re looking for. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, I love that so much. I mean, you have so many great sort of stories that highlight these components in your book, and I love how simple it is less. It just stands sort of on its own, and you really effectively showcase not only how to think about change but where you fit in the whole realm of it and how you can perceive it in a more positive way, and I think that’s so powerful. Can you share maybe a success story or two of a team that was able to start thriving during a time of fast and forced change? I know, for example, there’s a lot of companies that merge. There’s a lot of companies that get bought out, those that created that fast and I feel like forced change, but I’m sure you have other examples. What’s a story of a team that was able to kind of navigate those waters? Pam Marmon: Yeah. Actually, that’s a great reminder, I have a wonderful client that did go through a merger, and they took time. First of all, they dedicated a resource to make sure that the transformation was done properly from a people perspective, so that’s really important. They understood the value of change management, the value of bringing your team along and integrating the culture, that was really critical for them, and we integrated the culture and was really the success story of how do you bring two different cultures together so that they learn and leverage each other so that there’s greater success at the end. A lot of that was the introduction, networking, being able to articulate what the cultures bring, what are some gaps, where we can add, what training we needed to do, and having those conversations. Sometimes tough but oftentimes, very positive conversations that just needed to happen so that people can really move forward and be successful. Hussein Al-Baiaty: You know Pam, I got to give you a shoutout because you’re one of those individuals that I just really appreciate, and again, I got to watch your whole journey unfold in writing your second book, but you’re the type of person that genuinely listens and has her ear to the concrete as far as like paying attention to the work culture environment. You, by just hanging out with your friends, you really listened to what they were asking for, and I just love that because not only do you talk about it and the importance of it throughout your book and last book, you really bring it out in this conversation as well. That listening really, in listening I feel like there’s answers sort of provide themself because you are able to see the challenges and opportunity. You are able to see that change is actually just building more resilience, and I just appreciate that about your perspective and how you’re able to sort of quickly and in a concise way not only understand what’s sort of needed but also really coming up with a solution, and that’s really powerful. Where do you think that drive to not only listen but listen for potential answers or solutions comes from for you? Pam Marmon: Oh, that is such a great question. I have a profound purpose, and that purpose is not rooted in organizations. This is going to sound so funny. I firmly believe that when a leader is successful at being able to orchestrate organizational change, that trickles into teams, it trickles into families, it has an impact on children, it has an impact in our communities, and so that is my outcome. It’s impact globally, but I know it starts somewhere, and the somewhere that I have influence over is in the change management space. I think we all have influence somewhere, mine happens to be in change, and yours happens to be elsewhere, and so if we all think of how can we have the greatest impact in the world in the most effective way possible, in the shortest amount of time, I think we will all uncover that for ourselves. Listening is key because if I don’t listen, I can’t solve the problem. I might solve the wrong problem, and I think being an effective listener really helps all of us to have greater relationships, more influence, more impact in the world. It is really the beginning of everything that we want to achieve in life. Photo by Pixabay from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photography-of-yellow-green-red-and-brown-plastic-cones-on-white-lined-surface-163064/ Adapt to Change with Resilient Teams Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, so powerful and just this idea of putting change in perspective and where it belongs in that, it’s like you need it. You need it like you need water, you need it like you need having your core personal values. It is a part of who you are, and it’s a really a part of becoming resilient, and I want to talk about that and the idea of scoping things out in the future and what that looks like. What steps can individuals and teams, perhaps, take to become, I guess, more adept to change and more in a way looking forward to it as opposed to resenting it? Pam Marmon: Absolutely. When I first started writing the chapter and the section on resilience, I thought this was all about the individual, and as my research piled on, I realized I was wrong. This is not about the individual; this is more about us collectively as a team than it is about me individually as a person, and so that was a bit of a revelation because I feel like so many of us focus on, “How can I build my own resilience?” And there is value in that. We should clear mental resilience, emotional, there is absolutely things that we can do, but I think the most ROI that we can get is when we think of our team resilience, and that goes back to culture because the resilient team can overcome a lot of challenges like the pandemic, like a recession, a competitor coming in and bringing in new products that maybe skew off your sales. A resilient team is really at the heart of it. It’s people who trust each other, who understand how to work together, who can navigate difficult conversations, who can negotiate, who can handle conflict, that’s resilience, and I think if we focus our effort in becoming better together, we can truly overcome whatever the future throws at our way. Hussein Al-Baiaty: That’s so powerful, and you’re right, I mean, it does happen to a leader that can really see the scope o…

Full show notes at the publisher

Be a Better Team by Friday: Justin Follin and David Butlein Greenspan May 03, 2023

Show notes

As your company’s growth accelerates, the heat turns up and teams break down. It gets harder to work together when things get tough. My next guests revealed surprisingly simple skills required to get your team to the top fast. Welcome to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host Hussein Al-Baiaty and I’m joined by authors David Greenspan and Justin Follin. We’re here to talk about their new book called, Be a Better Team by Friday: A Playbook for High-Performance Business Leaders. So let’s look through it. Hello friends and welcome back to Author Hour. I’m here with my two friends, Justin and David, who have just launched an amazing book actually. It’s all about getting your people, your team better by our favorite day of the week, by Friday. I call it Floral Friday but these guys are going to make your team that much more efficient and in so many incredible ways. Justin and David, thank you for joining me today on the show. Justin Follin: Thanks for having us, Hussein. David Butlein Greenspan: Yeah, thank you. Hussein Al-Baiaty: This is really exciting for me because, as I said earlier, I get to have the opportunity of reading so many different types of books, and yours just kind of stuck out to me today. I was reading a little bit last night just trying to craft the questions. I think what I came up with, you guys will enjoy. I really love this idea of choosing your mindset and practice and I want to get into that here in a moment. But first, I want to introduce to our audience. Justin, we’ll start with you. If you could give us a little bit of your personal background, perhaps where you grew up, maybe someone or an event that inspired you to be on the path that you’re on today. Justin Follin: Yeah, definitely. Well, my name’s Justin Follin. I’m the CEO of BLUECASE and author of this book. I was born and raised in Falls Church, Virginia. I moved to Texas probably almost 20 years ago. I live in Austin. I think a relevant story, it’s one that I tell in the book about how I got into this. I was a graduate from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and I was not totally sure what I was doing with my life at this point. It was right after I graduated, I was working in the banquet hall at the alumni center at the university and I had the chance to be a server for the UNC basketball team the night before their very first game. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Oh wow. Justin Follin: And if you’re familiar with the University of North Carolina, the basketball is— Hussein Al-Baiaty: Religion. Justin Follin: Pretty much, yeah. It’s religion. There’s two things that are important in North Carolina, religion and basketball. David Butlein Greenspan: And basketball, right, right, and you mush the two, yeah. Justin Follin: Uh-huh. So I had the chance to do this and now, this is the year that the coach, Roy Williams, had just come over from the University of Kansas to coach the team. So the year that I was at Carolina, it was the losing-est team in the history of the school and they brought in Roy Williams to take that team over. He took the same five guys that were on that team and in a matter of two years, they were national champions. And that night, when I was serving them on that very first night before their very first game under Coach Roy, I was standing in the back of the room and I was getting, kind of, secondhand get coached, hearing him talk and inspire the team. He was talking to them as if it was like he was talking to every single one of them personally. I was standing at the back of the room and I was getting fired up. You know, I was ready to win the championship. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, I love that. Justin Follin: That really stuck with me and I thought about that. Over the course of my career, I’ve really been interested in knowing what is that, that somebody has to be able to coach such high performance? I saw it, I experienced it, I felt it, and then the results were there. So I pretty much got into the field of high-performance psychology and became a coach and I’m doing what we do now and wrote this book after many years of learning. Hussein Al-Baiaty: That’s fantastic. What a cool story. I love hearing stuff like that, man. You never know when in life those moments hit you and they just, like you said, they fire you up. They get you intrigued about the human experience in such a unique way. That’s amazing. What about you, David? David Butlein Greenspan: Let’s see. I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and I also live in Austin, Texas right now. As a kid, something that really inspired me from the age of five was actually Superman. Back then, we had Underoos, which were like pajamas that looked like Superman. I had a cape. I actually practiced flying, I broke my leg once doing it but I was really interested from a young age in Superman. I also, growing up, was very nerdy. I had really thick glasses, braces, I didn’t know how to dress. Hussein Al-Baiaty: So you were Clark Kent? You just weren’t Superman yet. David Butlein Greenspan: What’s that? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Hussein Al-Baiaty: You were Clark Kent. David Butlein Greenspan: That’s right. That’s right, yeah, actually that’s perfect. I hadn’t thought about that. I was interested from a young age in extraordinary performers and that inspired me to go on and get my doctorate in the field of high-performance psychology, which looks at why do certain teams and individuals perform at exceptional levels even in suboptimal circumstances and how do we apply those behaviors, mindsets, and practices. So that’s part of what we have really shared because people are often asking, “Well, what are some of the basics? How do we do that?” That’s part of the reason why we wrote this book, so now people can just read the book. Hussein Al-Baiaty: So powerful. I know it’s taken you guys some time to bring these things together. Years and years of wisdom and knowledge and experiences, it takes time to put together a book that highlights all those components and I think you all did a good job, but what brought you two together? How did you all start working together? When did you all meet? Justin Follin: Well, David and I have been friends for many, many years prior to working together and over the years, we kind of talked about what might be possible if we did do some work together. There was a very specific time in our friendship when we were at Ojo Caliente in New Mexico, which is a really beautiful hot springs resort place where you just kind of soak in hot springs and hang out, talk to people who are in the pools. We were just sitting there and we were talking and there’s something about, for us, about being in that spot. It’s a real power spot for us and we just kind of get into the vibe. We were just talking and just asking the question, “Okay if anything were possible, what would we do together? How would we bring this sort of experience that we have when we’re together, which is that we want to make people better, we want to make the world a better place. And for some reason, when we’re together, we’re even more excited and we’re amped up so there’s something we have here. What might it look like if we did something together?” And at the time, David had recently founded BLUECASE and I was working in another job and I just thought we were having a conversation of just kind of dreaming. And then one thing led to another, and one year later, maybe a little less than one year later, we were business partners and we were taking BLUECASE from where it was to really create a big firm. We’re now working with clients that I think we never would have been able to work on together if we hadn’t taken those first steps in those early years. Results of Choosing Your Mindset Hussein Al-Baiaty: That’s amazing. What a cool story. Well, I’m glad you two have come together to work on something this powerful but I really want to talk about how you sort of define this idea of successfully implementing the “choose your mindset” practice. That was really cool, how you guys went into that chapter. Can you share a little bit about what that’s like for you all to sort of go around and basically implement, and what kind of results start to come back from this idea of choosing your mindset? Justin Follin: That’s a great question. We’re mentioning the term high-performance psychology and a lot of what leadership begins with is your psychology of how you’re thinking about the situation that you’re in. There’s a lot of talk out there about mindsets, about the different mindsets that you can have. Carol Dweck, who wrote the book called Mindset, she talked about growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. So when you’re in a growth mindset, you’re thinking, “I’m in a difficult situation but how can I learn from this, how can I grow from this? What do I need to learn to be able to overcome the challenge?” Whereas a fixed mindset, you’re stuck. So those are some basic mindsets that are very important when you’re a leader and when you’re in any environment where there are challenges. I think something that is often a surprise or just in a shift in a way of thinking is just this idea that literally in every moment that you’re in, you do have a choice about how to think about what’s going on and it’s the choice itself that’s so powerful. It’s the knowledge of choice because as a leader, when you’re running an organization, the amount of breakdowns that you’re going to be dealing with just get bigger and bigger and bigger as your company gets bigger and bigger and bigger. A lot of times, naturally, you can get stuck complaining about it. You can get stuck thinking, “If I wasn’t surrounded by C players, I’d do a lot better around here, things would be a lot better.” Yet there’s this way of going into these stories about, “Hey, there’s nothing I can do about this, it’s not my fault and I’m stuck.” And even if you’ve been trained in mindsets and you’ve learned about this, the concept of going from a victim mindset to creator mindset, a complaining mindset to being in a space of possibility, it is easy to get stuck where you are until you really get that, “Even in this situation that I’m in right now, even in the challenges that I’ve got right now, even with the team that I’ve got right now, even with the circumstances that I’m in right now, I actually do have a choice about how I can think about this.” I think anybody who is familiar with the idea of changing your mindset, once you change your mindset, you start to see new options for actions to take. And then once you see those new options for actions to take, you’re starting to take very different actions because you made that choice. When you’re taking those different actions, well, you win national championships and in a business environment, you start to achieve what you want to achieve a lot faster, whether you’re running a company, whether you’re a CEO, whether you’re an executive. Also, if you’re just a brand-new manager, leading people for the first time, that can be a real challenge to your mindset and be able to choose something different every day. That’s what’s important about implementing this. We make it a practice for teams, like, “Hey, everyone on this team, we’re going to prioritize.” It’s practice one, “We’re going to prioritize choosing a creator mindset when we’re stuck, getting out of complaint and we’re going to coach each other to help each other get out when we are.” Implementing Lessons Hussein Al-Baiaty: That’s so powerful, man. I mean, I feel like when I was trying to grow my little T-shirt printing company that is exactly what I leaned on, like, “Okay, I’m going to probably face a problem today and there’s two ways to approach them. I can go negative, which I could do all day or I can be positive and just figure out where the opportunities are.” I think that mindset, for me, came from my dad. But it could come from anybody of course. I mean, you could learn it in a course or a book. David, what do you think, as far communications with your teams, with improving how teams literally go about like you said earlier, Justin, this idea of coaching one another, really uplifting one another, what does that communication look like? You call it, I feel like, what is it? The “get real with each other” practice. This idea of just being 100, being open and transparent with your teammates. Can you share an example of how you all have gone about implementing that and how a company has responded to that? David Butlein Greenspan: Yeah, it’s a great question. Hussein Al-Baiaty: It’s kind of a loaded question, my apologies, but I hope you get my gist. David Butlein Greenspan: I got your gist. It’s a great question and it’s really common when we come into teams, when we’re working with executive leadership teams, the team oftentimes is having two different conversations. They’re having a conversation when the leader is in the room or when a large group is in the room and then they’re having a much more reserved conversation one-on-one or maybe they share about their wife or their husband or a friend after work after a few beers or something. What we try to do is, how do you actually have what we call a level 10 conversation, an extraordinary conversation? If you think about it, there’s like three levels, there’s like ordinary conversations that are just very polite and then there’s “nothing’s really at stake.” Then there’s medium heat conversations, where I might say something that’s a little challenging or really authentic and you might feel like, “Oh, it’s getting a little warmer in here.” And then there’s like extraordinary level conversations, where I might really challenge someone in that room and say, “Hey, I don’t think that’s the right strategy” to the CEO.” That would be an extraordinary conversation, a level 10 conversation. And so first of all, we have people score how the team’s doing and usually it’s like five. It’s like they’re not having the real conversation in the room and so it really puts the CEO at a disadvantage because he or she isn’t getting the full conversation. So we begin by acknowledging where the team is and then, we ask people to commit, to raise the heat, to start to challenge themselves to actually be more courageous and to bring it to a 10 or at least bring it to an eight. We ask the group but really, it’s an individual decision to decide who is going to be courageous and an example of where that happened was, we were working with a team several years ago and the CEO was feeling like, “Oh, we’re having a really honest and open conversations and that we’re doing a lot better than we were in the past.” When the team scored, it was still really low, it was like a six. And he was asking why and everyone in the room was silent. You could hear a pin drop and everyone was looking at their shoes. And then one person stood up and said, “Hey, the reason is because of you. The reason we’re not able to have these, and here’s kind of the specific behaviors that you do that kind of have us not fully share.” Hussein Al-Baiaty: How did that go? David Butlein Greenspan: And, well, actually, the CEO was great. He said, “You know what? You’re right.” He said, “You’re right. Thanks for saying that,” and after he acknowledged that and heard that feedback, he said, “Thank you and I’m going to work on that,” and from then on, the conversation was a lot more authentic and there were great conversations in the room and then they could talk about the real stuff. We sometimes call it the background conversation, like taking what’s in the background and putting it in the foreground, right? Hussein Al-Baiaty: I love that so much because by agreeing and just kind of opening up and letting his or her guard down, right? All leaders, once all of us put our guards down, especially in moments like that where you’re asking for something really specific and then that thing that you’re really asking for is kind of like somebody just needs to hold u…

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Your Multimillion-Dollar Exit: Wayne M. Zell, JD, CPA May 03, 2023

Show notes

My next guest has created a super meaningful and easy-to-follow guide, which is designed to help entrepreneurs build a strong foundation for exiting their businesses on their terms. Welcome to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host Hussein Al-Baiaty and I’m joined by author Wayne Zell, who is here to talk about his new book, Your Multimillion-Dollar Exit: The Entrepreneur’s Business Succession Planner, A Blueprint for Wealth Guide to Success. Let’s get into it. Hello friends and welcome back to Author Hour. I’m very excited today because I have a special guest, Mr. Wayne Zell. Welcome to the show, my friend. Wayne Zell: Hussein, it’s great to be with you, and thanks for having me on the show today. Hussein Al-Baiaty: Absolutely. Wayne, I know you just launched a book and I’m very excited for you and I’m excited to share with our audience all about your journey, how you got on this path of wealth management and not just wealth management but really just identifying this blueprint for how people exit a business or a succession plan. I just appreciate that because I once had a business that—I had over 16 employees and it got so big I didn’t know what to do and I told you earlier that your book is one of those ones that I wish I kind of had earlier. So I’m excited that it’s out in the world now but before we get into the book, I love to give our audience and listeners a little bit of a personal background of who you are, maybe where you grew up, and what led you down to the path that you’re on now. The Path to Business Succession Wayne Zell: It’s an interesting story. First of all, I’m from DC, Washington, DC, and I live in Northern Virginia but how I got to where I am today, it’s funny, I was thinking about that this morning. When I was a freshman in college, it was after my first year at the University of Virginia, I was driving home with my dad and he said, “Well, how did it go this semester?” I said, “It was great. I had a great year, grades were good.” I was co-lead in Godspell. I’m a right-brain guy, I was really into music, I was writing music, and it was becoming prolific. It was flowing out of me as a lot of people say and it’s just great. So I was totally focused and I said, “It was great” and he said, “What are you going to major in?” and I said, “You know, I’m thinking double major, music, drama, so that I can go into musical theater, maybe on Broadway.” Because I’ve gotten a lot of really good feedback from a lot of people over the years and I’ve never just taken that jump and there was this pregnant pause. Silence and my dad goes, “So how are you going to pay for school?” and I’m going, “Oh, what? What do you mean by that?” You know, “What do you mean, how am I going to pay for school? You’re going to pay for school.” He said, “No, you need to get trained in a profession in some kind of useful background so that when you graduate, you can support yourself and I don’t have to worry about supporting you” and that’s the key. Another pregnant pause ensued and I’m sitting there, thinking about “Wait a minute, he just dashed all of my dreams and I’m supposed to respond to this?” It was good advice because I said, “But what should I major in, Dad?” He said, “You need to go to the business school. The McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia is one of the best schools in the country.” That was 40 some years ago, you know? Almost 45 years ago. I said, “Okay, like what will I study?” He said, “You should study accounting because it’s the language of business” and you know begrudgingly, I applied to the school. I got in, it was a struggle at first because I really didn’t know what I was doing, and as a right-brain person, a creative person who did creative writing and getting into accounting and numbers and stuff like that, I wasn’t bad at it but I had to immerse myself in the stuff and I taught myself how to be a left-brain thinker. Analytical. Really digging into details as opposed to always thinking visionary, creative, and doing cool stuff and it was a big adjustment for me but I excelled at it and I succeeded. I got a job at an accounting firm and I worked in the big accounting firm, Arthur Anderson & Company, which is one of the big eight back then. I went into the tax department, which was hard to get into right out of undergraduate and I did that for two years. While I was there, I was realizing that I was surrounded by all these lawyers who had a background in accounting and law and they were so smart and they were so capable and so technically proficient and I felt like, in order for me to succeed as a professional, I’m going to need to go to law school so that I can learn what they learned to think like a lawyer and even further my analytical left side of my brain. So I went to law school. Again, it was a struggle. I got out, I excelled, I did really well in tax law and so I started out as a tax lawyer doing transactional work and then I—because I loved working with people one-on-one, I gravitated into both estate planning and business planning and for the last 37 plus years, that’s what I focused on and so it marries two very different areas of law together because of my background and accounting in tax, I’m able to work with entrepreneurs and businesses of various sizes. I represented some really big family companies, the name’s really well-known, I won’t say them to protect the innocent but some very big companies, family-owned businesses, and then entrepreneurs who are just starting up their businesses and over the last 37 years, I’ve worked in business. I actually left practicing law and worked for a George Saurus-backed company called News Reel, which was a spinoff of one of the first search engine companies called Info Seek. I did that for a couple of years. I was the CFO, the chief financial officer, and the general counsel of that company and I worked inside the company building their business model and working with all the employees. I did it once again back in the late 2010s when I worked for a company that was a registered investment advisory firm and I was general counsel, chief compliance officer and I was in the executive team and I did that as an experiment. I wanted to really immerse myself in different industries and different businesses and because of that, I have the skill set that is really unique for lawyers, accountants, and others that I can really see the whole picture of what it’s like to do business succession planning for entrepreneurs. I just loved what I do and love to take it out to them and help them succeed, help them realize their personal dreams of wealth and freedom. So that’s my story in a nutshell. Hussein Al-Baiaty: You know man, it’s a very powerful story but I know there’s quite a bit that happened sort of in between because there are so many transformations — I feel like for you and where you got to. Just how you brought this whole book together is actually pretty cool. But I want to go back in time a little bit and if you don’t mind, I mean, what you shared with me before we got on the recording that you had gotten cancer at one point in your life and that really woke you up to a specific realization. Can you go there a little bit and share about that sort of story? Wayne Zell: Absolutely. I talk about it a lot when I’m giving speeches and I’m talking to clients and friends. I mean, it was back in 2002, and I wasn’t feeling real good, I went to see my internist and he said, “Look, I think you had to go see this doctor and get tested.” So I went and got tested and it turned out, I had prostate cancer at the age of 43, which is really young. This is, you know, a long time ago. I’ll be 65 this year, so I’ve survived it but when you hear that and my wife was at home with my four young children and she had stopped working to basically take care of the family, there’s a bit of a stressor, you know? So, I’d find out that I’ve got cancer, I ultimately had surgery at Johns Hopkins and everything was successful but, it leaves a mark on you and after you have the surgery, you have a period of time— It took me about a month to recuperate and at the time, I was working for a big law firm, a firm out of Boston, which had 500 lawyers, 500 plus lawyers and I was a partner there and I was doing very well but, when you have the time to reflect and realize what you have in your life — much like what you had to reflect on, we talked before you were in a refugee camp. I can’t even imagine what that’s like. I was suffering from the angst of having had cancer, four young kids, and then, you start to realize, I came out of it okay but what’s the rest of my life going to look like? How will I react to this? I really started digging deep inside and, “Is it all about billing hours as a lawyer?” and the answer was no. “Why do I do what I do?” Well, I do what I do, to this day, it’s the stuff that gets me up, it’s the juice that gets me going in the morning, it makes me grateful for what I have is that I’m here to help people. I’m here to help my friends, my clients, my family, my employees realize their dreams of wealth and freedom. It’s my tagline, it’s what gets me going, it’s what got me going. I mean, I left that firm ultimately with some coaching in 2004, I opened up my law firm, and then I sold it to another law firm in 2011. I decided I needed to get back into this because I loved doing what I do and I love doing it the way I do it and it’s just—it’s my passion. So, going through a life-changing event like that always has some kind of impact on you and on me, it was like, “What am I going to do the rest of my life?” “Well, I’m going to help people” I’m going to help people realize their dreams and this is the way I can do it best. Hussein Al-Baiaty: It’s realizing that not just that you want to help people specifically but you also have a set of skills and a set of ways of doing, going about doing that, that really offers not only value but just like this—it feels like this commitment. This authentic commitment to really wanting to live something out for yourself but in extension, the outcome of that is it helps someone else and I think for me, I love that. I mean, in that state of creativity, whether we’re writing books, right? We talked about that or for me like, I love painting and art and just this, right here, this moment where I get to speak to someone about their life, about their work, about their commitments. We’re sharing deep things and let’s be honest, a couple of hours ago we were strangers, right? But the reality is, we are so interconnected in this idea that our beliefs in what we care to do, it feels kind of selfish like, “Oh, I want to put my time, energy, and resources into this” but the reality is, it is actually very unselfish because that thing, once it’s done or how it’s done or the way that it’s done benefits others. I feel like for me, that’s always been a battle just with myself in convincing myself that what I’m doing is valuable and worth it, and as creatives, we run into those blocks of like, “Does this even fucking matter?” and it does. It does, right? On a bigger scale, it does for yourself. Wayne Zell: It matters, you know why? You know why? Because you’re able to give yourself back to others. You give up your soul and then you give up your heart and your mind and the talents that you’ve got, use them to the best of your ability to help others and so to me, it’s the juice that gets me up in the morning and keeps me going throughout the day and probably makes me look a lot younger than I actually am so. Photo by Pixabay from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-human-hand-327540/ Succession Plan Hussein Al-Baiaty: I’m sure it does man, it brings you—makes you very vibrant, of course, but with that I want to get into the book a little bit because that also resonated with me, and owning a business for over a decade and then basically deciding of like a career change. I shift back into more of my own creativity. I had to sell the business, I had to figure out how to do that, I had to— There were so many — it was about a year and a half worth of really, almost weekly, trying to piece things together to prepare it to sell and that was a journey. I had a lot of help, you know? A lot of people that I love really help me with that and so, this is your work. This is your line of work and I appreciate that because it’s so important because it addresses such a huge pain point. But let’s first, can you share a little bit of a personal experience where you, having an exit strategy in place, saved you from unexpected losses? Wayne Zell: I don’t know, I don’t have that situation come up yet. I can tell you that I have— Hussein Al-Baiaty: You’re a good strategist, that’s why. Wayne Zell: Well, I’ve done it enough for so many people. I mean, hundreds of people over their careers that I now have my own business succession plan and because I get asked that, you know? I’m not getting any younger, I’m in my 60s. People ask, “What’s your business succession plan? What if you’re not around?” My answer is, I’m building and I’ve built my business succession plan, I’ve got somebody 20 years younger than me taking over part of the practice. I’m recruiting another person to come in and take over the other half of the practice, so that not only can I do more of the business succession planning holistically but I can also do speaking and I can also go out and mentor younger people, which I love doing and teach, which I do. I currently teach at George Mason University. So my exit is planned and it may not go exactly as I’ve planned it and that’s what I teach to the entrepreneurs that I work with—you don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, you never know what’s going to happen. In the intro of my book, I talk about a government contractor who died suddenly and his son who was friends with my daughter gave me a call. So, right around Christmas he called me, he said, “My dad passed away” and I said, “What happened?” He said, “He was a diabetic and he went into diabetic shock and he fell and hit himself and he died from the fall.” I said, “Oh my God, so sorry to hear that.” He was frantic, he said, “I don’t know what to do, I work at the business that he founded and I don’t know what to do. My mother doesn’t know anything about the business and what do I do?” I just said, “You know what? We got this, I’ve got this. Just give me some time, let’s talk about it and just spend some time thinking about your dad, making sure that your family’s okay, and then we’ll figure out what to do with the business.” So we did and it turned out, the guy had actually taken in some outside investment from two of his friends who were really well-known in the business and well-respected and fortunately, those people wanted to help as well. So we put together a board. I was on the board, these two investors were on the board and the mother and the son were on the board. We put together a board of directors and we created an exit plan where none existed before and fortunately, with those two investors and me involved, we were able to come up with a path to the success of the ultimate—everybody was telling us, “You’re not going to be able to sell this business.” The guy was a service-disabled veteran, he was subject to small business set-aside rules and everybody said, “The business might be worth $10, 11 million dollars max. You’re not going to sell it for any more than that” which is a lot of money but we brought in an investment banker. The guy was able to realize the value here. We brought in outside managers to run the business where the founder wasn’t—hadn’t—built his succession plan and these guys and the board helped navigate over the next two years, the company, to triple its size and revenue and we sold the business for close to $30 million dollars. The family was ecstatic and to this day, the son who called me on that day, he hasn’t forg…

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