EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

What’s the story behind the story? We’ll find out on Dropping In. Our guests are today’s original thinkers. Conversations that spark new ways of seeing what’s going on. We bring it all to the table. Diverse perspectives, controversy, loving and singular voices. Magically stories reveal the common threads that link us. Experience the joys, the fist pumps, the detours and the hard-won truths of those who blaze the trail so that we might do the same and now here’s your host Diane Dewey.

Diane: Welcome to Dropping In everyone. Here we are in mid-October and we still face many unknowns. How long will the pandemic go on? How will the economy be impacted? When will Americans return to work if they do? Another unknown, what’s going on with women and jobs? Have women left the workforce in part because no one has their back in corporate culture? Is this a kind of disillusionment? How can women navigate a career that is more like tripping through a minefield? Here to talk about it is the author of Involuntary Exit: A Woman’s Guide to Thriving After Being Fired Robin Merle. Thank you and Robin, welcome. Great to have you with us.

Robin: Thank you Diane. I’m thrilled to be here.

Diane: It’s exciting to speak with you and I can’t wait to hear your take on things. You have such a grounded common sense bedrock in the book Involuntary Exit and I’d like to just dive in right away with the premise that we’re over invested in our jobs. When an employer decides it’s time for us to go not that we decided, it’s the equivalent of a trauma much less an identity crisis. I wonder if you could just speak to us and lay the groundwork for how invested we are with our identities and our job.

Robin: Diane, thank you for starting there because that really is the crux of what you call the trauma of sudden job loss. In Involuntary Exit, I interviewed many, many women across industries, across this country who had risen in their company or their firm or their non-profit to higher levels of responsibility. One of the common factors of the involuntary exit was that they didn’t see it coming. It was sudden. One of the reasons that they didn’t see it coming is that they were all what I call Type A loyalists. We all work very hard. We’re very dedicated to our companies. We’re dedicated to the mission. We set the goals. We go after what we need to do. We drive our teams to be as excited as we are.

What happens in that process is that we intertwine our identity with our job role and our title? When suddenly that is all taken away we are lost because suddenly we feel we have no value, we have no purpose and we’re facing an ocean of uncertainty that we’ve never faced before. This loss of identity which leads to what is my purpose, what am I doing was very common during the pandemic. I wrote the book prior to the pandemic but I spoke to a clinical social worker who said that people were just reeling from job loss because they were really starting to think about what am I doing, what do I want to do in life. The silver lining which was true for the women in this book was they had the time to step back, to reflect and really reinvent themselves and how they wanted to be spending their time.

Diane: It’s very cool I think. You really talk about it in the book about what we truly long for might be an expanded sense of self that’s more suited to who we’ve become and that the workplace hadn’t really reflected our values and the changing world around us. I thought this was really I mean fascinating in terms of a macro view.

Another implication that I think was shattered I think quite artfully in the book is the idealization of corporate management that somehow it’s over romanticized. This investment that you’re speaking to of ourselves with our jobs it’s not reciprocated necessarily by our employers. The corporate management as being somehow always right knowing what’s best when in fact you kind of blow the lid off that. Talk about how this surprising dismissal in Involuntary Exit management is benignly negligent at best knowing that they’re knowingly not appraising people that their services no longer will be necessary and yet we blame ourselves. Is that yet another aspect of this over-investment?

Robin: Yes and I’m glad that you picked up on that. One of my favorite pieces of research was from a woman who cited a study about people who, their mental health and their mental wellness and comparing those who worked very hard, those who really didn’t work and those who were indifferent. What she came out with was indifference may be underrated in terms of making sure that your own mental health is intact and that you understand how to value yourself separate from the workplace. I think that we don’t realize because we do invest so much of ourselves some of the priorities and pressures of management.

I do go into all the different levels of what I call dark leadership where there is a leader who and I think we’ve all experienced different kinds of leaders that have some of this in them where their most important part is really making sure that they themselves feel safe, that they’re still in command, that they can continue to keep their position of leadership. Unfortunately sometimes that doesn’t sit well with those that are trying to do their jobs beneath that leader. While that leader may come out with a lot of oh, I guess the window dressing of team building and employee morale and so forth. When there is an issue which requires some sort of reorganization or management structure unfortunately that it’s not always handled in the best way.

One starts to question gee, what was all that team building about? I thought I was a member of the family. I thought oh these were my work friends and then yet the next day you’re no longer part of the family. You don’t hear from your so-called work friends. It goes back to that concept about being indifferent because there’s no way that any worker today should stake their own value on what the corporation or the leadership says about them. We really have to be very strong in terms of looking inside ourselves, understanding our strengths, doing if you will our own version of a Myers Briggs on ourselves. We take lots of those kinds of, many of us have lots of those kinds of personality tests but before anybody taught us how to think what did we really think about ourselves and our strengths.

It’s really worth it doing that self-inventory. I have this phrase that I call attitude power. If you’re able to change your mindset to really reflect the positivity that we all have inside of ourselves. Your attitude affects others’ attitudes about you. When you’re happy other people around you will hopefully pick up on that and see the valuable person that you are rather than a reflection of the corporate organization.

Diane: Well I think what you’re saying is vitally important because there’s a lot of second guessing that goes on even when we hear a story from a friend who got fired. It’s always somehow undermining when we say okay well didn’t you see it coming. It’s kind of victim blaming. The other part of it is well somehow subconsciously we’re thinking well her performance must not have been very good. That is absolutely not the case.

That was the other alarming part about the accounts that you wrote about is how they had the numbers. They had the performance reviews in their file. These women were outperforming their peers but there were issues. When you talk about dark management I just love this concept. I’m thinking to myself well do we need infrared goggles to detect dark management in our midst but one of the things that you brought out is too is like it’s just business. That’s the thing. Business by virtue of its kind of succinct practicality is dark management. It’s not going to be the euphemism of human resources that is also euphemistic because you also find out look, the human resources office is reporting to management. They’re not reporting to you.

If you start to feel that you have an advocate at human resources you’re already going down the wrong lane. I think that when you talk about this difference and the beauty of this indifference it ties in so much with establishing boundaries. I mean boundaries around yes, your identity and also boundaries around how much you’re willing to invest. I loved that you talked about a self-inventory. I think what I’m going to do for our listeners is to give a bit of uh information about you because your biography is also incredibly impressive.

You’ve been a senior executive for billion dollar organization to the veteran of the power value and identity wars at the top ranks because you’ve raised more than a half a billion dollars in philanthropy during the decades working with non-profit organizations. You’ve served as a board member for three non-profits in New York City. No easy feat. You’ve been the vice chair of National Philanthropy Day in New York for three consecutive years. You’ve been named the Woman of Achievement by Women in Development for your leadership, fundraising and commitment to women in the field.

I mean you are this overachiever and yet you experienced this sudden severance. It’s what was the catalyst for writing this book. How has the catalyst turned into a resilience that you’ve documented in yourself but how much of that really does have to do with the self-inventory that you just touched on?

Robin: Well I think and thank you for giving that summary but I think that resilience is something that we learn and something we can be taught at any time. I love to tell this story that because somebody asked me were you resilient before you were in the various roles that you were in. I thought about it and I thought yes, I was but somebody showed me what to do. That somebody was actually my mother. I grew up in a tough neighborhood in Philly and Philadelphia. There was a neighborhood boy and I was about to go to school for the first time and he just bullied me.

He was terrible. He called me names and he was just a bully. My mother said to me the next time he does that you kick him in the shins and run like hell. So sure enough on schedule he started to do that and both my mother and his mother were watching. I could almost hear her cheering under her breath. Do it. Do it and I did. He collapsed in tears and I ran like hell. I tell you Diane I have never looked back because once you do something you say I have the power to really change this dynamic and I’m not going to forget that. That’s really important.

As I went through various roles I watched carefully and I watched men and women. I watched how they succeeded. I watched how they pushed back. Everything helped me gain resilience. When there was this sudden parting that I didn’t see coming in my own experience and I immediately started to reach out and talk to other women. That community gave me and them greater resilience and greater strength because I started to hear these stories. Then I would see how they had come back from it. Once you have that inspiration it is really like gold.

I would be talking to women and they’d say I came home. I sat in my kitchen for eight hours after I heard this news. I didn’t change my clothes. I sat there for eight hours without moving until my partner came home. I was completely devastated. That same woman is the CEO of her own company today and has been on global media but you hear what they said. They talk about vulnerability. I know Brene Brown talks a lot about vulnerability in her book and I just think it’s organic to be vulnerable, to listen to others that they were that way. Then to see how they are now. We can’t do better than talking to each other and building that community of strength.

Diane: Then I want to enter the not comfortable subject of shame and how that makes it almost you reach an impasse. You’re ashamed. You feel guilty. You can’t contact yourself inventory. You can’t even remember yourself because you’ve just been fired. It completely counteracts exactly what you’re talking about the greatest necessity being which is reaching out and allowing others to and being vulnerable to others and allowing others to help us. That there is an invisible force, an invisible network of people who would help if only they knew. It’s just that it’s so difficult to form the words, form any kind of thought at that moment.

We’re going to need to pause for a commercial break but I can tell that it is just such an interesting conversation to have that this idea of looking to others it so contradicts what a woman on the rise in corporate America would think of herself. I have to be strong as an individual. You build all these defenses and walls around you. Then you’ve got all this perseverance that allows you to put up with situations that are already ringing untrue. Most of the women in the book Involuntary Exit sensed a sense of dissonance with their employer. Truth be told just that it’s hard to access that truth but we won’t have a problem because we’re going to come back in a minute with Robin Merle author of Involuntary Exit: A Woman’s Guide to Thriving After Being Fire. Don’t go away. We’ll be right back on Dropping In.

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

Diane: Welcome back everyone. We’re here with Robin Merle author of Involuntary Exit and even if you haven’t been fired or been fired recently
Pick up the book uh when it comes out next week on October 19th from She Writes Press. It’s a way to come back to yourself whether you’re male or female to be honest but there’s a lot of good information pertaining to females in the workplace. I wondered Robin, if you’d even talk with us about my thought whether this is true. It’s a book whose idea, an idea whose time has come. Not just your pub date October 19th that’s coming too but and there’ll be a virtual book launch which will be super interesting but I mean you mentioned the pandemic.

We’re certainly going to touch on that broader scope but what about the idea that even these notions of women over identifying with their positions, not seeing it coming because of being loyalists as you say which in some cases means being a fabulist because the company is not got our backs. That’s a heavy disillusionment but also women were characteristically or historically the second income in the family. It was not necessarily the breadwinner role. That dynamic has changed. Is this conversation around women and identity with careers, is it coming more to the fore because of that seismic shift societally that careers are now, we’re at that same point where we always talked about it with men who am I after retirement. Well, who is the woman? Now it becomes an important conversation.

Robin: I think that’s a really intriguing question. I will tell you that almost I’d say every woman that I spoke with whether they were labeled primary breadwinner or not they felt that they were responsible for the financial stability of themselves and their families. One of the women who she’s actually going to be on my book launch October 19th. She stayed in a job too long. She knew she had outgrown it. She was what I call faux fired which is when you stay in untenable circumstances that you can’t take any longer. The company doesn’t really do anything about it or they start marginalizing you in the work. You eventually quit. You essentially fire yourself because it’s not a good role. You save them the trouble.

In Maria’s case the reason that she didn’t move forward was because the first time she lost her job is she said she had 40 dollars in her wallet. It just scared her the financial insecurity of going further but it also made her determined to put together a financial nest egg, a program to be strategic in planning for her financial future. She’s now part of an organization that helps women plan for their financial future because it’s very important that you have that sense of security whether you’re the bread winner or not. In today’s world it typically takes two to salaries to really support a family at a certain level. I do think that the changing aspect of women in the workplace has made this a more important topic.

Diane: I think you raised another point which is that it really doesn’t matter what the job is, what the percentage role is in the family income. A woman is we’re geared to perform. We’re geared to do our best. Sometimes that hanging tough has outlived its usefulness. As you say Maria she’s in a position where she knows she’s outgrown it. There was just this wonderful quote in the book where Mark Nepo asks in which in what ways do we shrink our world so is to not feel the press of our own self-imposed captivity.

I went like ouch. That hurts to realize that we do this to ourselves. We accommodate. We are now adjusting ourselves to the reality that we’re in and we feel that somehow that’s a survival tactic when in fact it might be totally destructive but we’re not supposed to fail no matter how badly this, we’re not supposed to fail no matter how badly this doesn’t fit. I wondered about this exploration because you brought it up about the pandemic how it’s given a pause for people to go back into themselves and access what do I truly want to do. You talked about something called the portfolio of passions. I wonder if you’d talk about that with our listeners.

Diane: Sure. I think the first thing I want to say is this is not easy. Like any loss you don’t recover overnight. It really is a grieving process and coming out of that small circle that Mark Nepo describes it takes a lot of work. I want to first go over the four stages of that grieving process so people understand what they’re looking at when they do have a sudden job off and they’re just facing a wide open frontier.

What I chose to do, I know that we’re all familiar with Cooper Ross’ stages of grieving and there’s six of them but I chose the stages of grieving from Bowlby and Parkes. They talk about children going through because it seemed more relevant to the bullying that goes on in firing. Those four stages are shock and numbness when we first hear the news. The yearning and searching when and by that I mean we yearn to get back to our comfort zone out of where we are now which is really the grieving zone. We yearn for news of our past life and the shared history that we feel has suddenly been lost.

The disorientation and disorganization and that’s when you’re really starting to feel as if there’s a dissonance. I don’t know how to orient myself because my day-to-day routine is gone. I can picture all the people I used to be with sitting in the office doing their work and what am I doing. Then the reorganization and resolution where you actually in a sense your psyche calms down. You realize that you have an opportunity, a possibility to do something new and that the way that you’re going to value this is going to be very different from the ways that you value your previous activities.

As you said Diane did you succeed? Did you fail? Did you exceed your goals? Did you not meet your goals? The women in the book who did find a new way to embrace uncertainty and I’ll tell you. Some of them right after they lost their job they didn’t just jump into recovery. They slept. They didn’t clean up their homes. They let it be. They all use different methods. Some of them went away. They changed their environment so they could think quietly. Some of them used vision boards. Some of them did journaling. Some collected material that they found inspiring. Some of the younger ones and I love this. They made a you video. They would just say something t themselves, record it on their phones and play it back whenever they felt whenever they felt down.

The other thing that touches on and you brought up Mark Nepo is the spiritual side of this and this is something that those of us that are loyalists and 110% working in tangible reality to get results this can feel very foreign and strange but there is a spiritual side. I promise not to get too out there where you just have to let people into your life. You have to be open to new opportunities. I will tell you a 100% it happens that the right people come into your life at the right time. You will be surprised at the number of people that you didn’t even know
Value to that send you cards and letters and tell you how much you meant to them as a person. All of that helps boost you and lift you up into an area where then you can then not be afraid because fear is the big stoppage that people have from going forward.

Open yourself up to see okay, this is a possibility. This is a passion that I have loved pursuing. I’ve always been concerned let’s say with helping climate change. I’ve always been concerned about finding a new way that we can do X, Y or Z. then you start to explore and with our digital economy now. It’s a lot easier to explore than it was years and years ago. Here’s the secret. It only takes one lead, one connection to start you down a cascade of new people, new connections and a new path.

Diane: I mean I think you really are in addition to being a shin kicker you are also a myth buster. You busted that myth wide open about networking, that vastness of that word. It’s so intimidating particularly when you’re in this mindset. I think as you mentioned in the book the apprehension, the anxiety about the unknown and what’s ahead of us is so much worse than actually taking on the unknown. There are ways where yes, you will attract or you will hear from people who want to help you. It is amazing. I think there is just a web of support that we don’t really give a lot of credit to because let’s face it. The bullies have the microphone a lot of the time.

I’ll just be political here for a moment. Our former bullier in chief was the firer in chief in our country. For him to say you’re fired was the epitome of his day. To kind of equate that with our sense of self when you realize that what’s at work here is an ego that it isn’t deserving of our investment. It isn’t something that we should take into ourselves the way that we usually do. I think now I’m just going to be very personal and say that there were two huge takeaways for me in the book. It concerns tormentors. The tormentor in ourselves who’s reviewing this so-called failure or this so-called loss of self, the passing judgment on our choices.

Of course the minute something like that happens, the end of the job, tenure we look back and say what could I have done differently. What did I do wrong? Not assessing our strengths and what we did right how it was successful for 15 years or whatever but the tormentor is this person that actually is in as you’ve pointed out you I’m glad you brought out the spiritual aspect because you also have wonderful quotes. Deepak Chopra is there saying your tormentor today is yourself left over from yesterday.

This tormentor okay can be very persistent. There’s another one that I think is a tormentor and that is idealism. The way we think things ought to be. To adjust to your new reality is very much difficult, that much more difficult because of that but I wonder if you’d talk about this this tormentor being that our leftover self if we actually move into the present. We don’t really feel that tormentor. We deprived that tormentor of their power. What kind of a process was that for you? I love that you can speak to this process now for others.

Robin: That process for me was very long. Took a lot of discipline and a lot of practice. I won’t lie and that’s why I say in that quote that you pulled out if you’re somebody like I am who writes down quotes like that. You need to revisit it every so often, revisit it. I definitely carry around with me a list of sayings that really I turn to when I feel myself slipping back into what I call the old way of thinking.

Another thing that I did and that I recommend is having people that you can speak with about different things who will also recognize when you’re slipping backward into that tormented frame of mind. You mentioned before how powerful women feel like or they have to do everything by themselves. It’s lonely at the top and all that mythology but the fact is the most important thing you can do when you are in power or you have responsibility is have allies. Have allies. They can be from years ago. They can be current allies but they’re people that you connect with who understand you.

I’m fortunate. I’ve always built allies as soon as I went to a company. I would be the one saying oh let’s go out to lunch. Now were the allies always the original folks that I grouped up with? Not necessarily but I always knew that I needed people who could help me at various levels. Help is not a terrible thing to ask for at any stage. Then I could help them back. My allies when they hear me say things I get a snarky response back like are you serious. You haven’t gotten over that yet. Really, you’re still going through that or somebody that will say you notice I didn’t respond to you because we’ve been through that. I’m not even going to give it the power to be part of the conversation anymore because what happens with that tormentor is that’s a script in your head that keeps going and going and going usually at night.

With loyalists and Type A’s it’s in between all the emails you’re writing in your dreams that you have to spend the next morning. I’ve talked to women that have emails that they dream about but you can imagine if your mind is going in the direction and it usually does what I did wrong. What happened here? What could I have done better? You really have to work at changing that narrative and changing that mindset. To quote Deepak Chopra again who I think is wonderful from the Seven Spiritual Laws of Success. He says in the wisdom of uncertainty lies the freedom from our past which is the prison of past conditioning. We really have to get beyond the conditioning.

One of the techniques that I mentioned that sounds kind of cheesy is the technique of affirming yourself. If you’re feeling ashamed and you’re feeling down and you haven’t been able to reach out to someone you may not think you have an affirmation that you can say but I say just start out with something really simple for yourself such as I have many years of experience. You can’t debate that. You do. You start there. You move on to I’m great at what I do. I’m valuable and anything else that you want to say to stop that other voice from we’ll use the term from bullying you and shouting over the new voice.

Diane: It’s extraordinarily and deceptively simple and hard to do but Robin Merle you have really shown a light on this in Involuntary Exit: A Woman’s Guide to Thriving After Being Fired. We’ll be right back after a short break with Robin Merle and we’ll talk about something growth, opportunity and hope. Don’t go away. We’ll be right back on Dropping In.

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

Diane: Welcome back everyone. We’re here with Robin Merle whose website is professionalguide.com. Robin, you have taken us through a process now where we’re being sapped the shoulda, woulda, coulda about a termination that comes out of the blue. You say this in the book. You can’t see what’s in front of you with a swarm of predators circling your heart and soul. You’ve just talked to us about linking with others who kind of call you on that when they see you descending back into predator land.

It happens to all of us but getting to that point of growth, opportunity and hope which is your motto that you live by and hold on to. You do have to defeat something which is called defeatist narcissism. Could you just explain that for us and what it has to do with self-recrimination?

Robin: Sure. That’s my term for behavior that I saw exhibited by a lot of women, primarily women of a certain generation. I’ll have to say that in their 50s and 60s who had really accomplished a lot. They felt that all of their accomplishments stemmed completely from them. They were responsible for both the accomplishments and the failures. When their career went awry they thought it was definitely something that they could have controlled better. It has to do with a level of feeling that you have control over so many things. They spent hours trying to go backwards and finding the clues of what happened. Why did they do this?

I helped them so much. I was so much more confident. In some cases it started to affect not just their emotional and mental health but their physical health because they were constantly striving to find out and it was all being referenced back to themselves as the controller in chief. The fact is that it is hard. It is hard to acknowledge that there are things that are just beyond our control. It has nothing to do with us. It might have to do with the narcissism of the leader in chief. It might have to do with a million other things but once you get into that frame of mind you sort of feel great because you think you’re in control. Then you feel terrible because you’re in control. It’s a frame of mind that I think is not very healthy though unfortunately too many people experience it.

Diane: A certain degree of detachment I think this is something it’s thematic in the book is trying to create a little bit of distance between yourself and your urgent sense of control. That’s not to say that getting fired isn’t personal because there is a way in which you kind of have to take it personally when people around you have betrayed you. They’ve betrayed your trust in some instances your colleagues have known that you were going to be terminated. I mean that’s a lot to take in.

There are certain people that you really just should cut out of your life as a result of that. There’s another kind of boundary writing just there but I mean you say that what you’re saying people have their self-interest at heart. They’re trying to survive as well. When you contextualize it your colleagues they are trying to win the approval of the management just as you were before when we’re all on the same hamster wheel. This is a trauma betrayal of trust, losing face, all of this, it is a kind of a trauma. It’s very hard to process but I love the fact that you gave us some stories of other women who have experienced it not in the sense of like wow, they bounced back in an instant. In fact you’re a great advocate for taking a lot of time for slowing down the expectation that you’re going to quote bounce back. I wonder if you can comment on how that’s actually radical self-care right there.

Robin: One of my pieces of best advice in the book and I have the book is sort of divided into five chapters and in each chapter there’s a pullout that is called best advice so people can just flip through it and find that advice at any point. This piece is don’t confuse moving quickly with moving forward. That’s very hard for Type A people to realize what we might start to do is fill our days with work on board, volunteer work so that our calendar resembles the comfort food of our calendar when we were with the company and suddenly you find yourself oh this feels the same. It sounds the same but it’s really not the same.

In some sense it gives you a sense to look at your activity with a new perspective and really value it in a new way. I think that the day-to-day activity and choices that you make should always if you can be thinking about your choices, be thinking about the people you’re with. What I say is suddenly you’ll start to see things through a new lens. It won’t happen at once but for example there was one woman who when she was very powerful and people were always trying to sell her business, the consultants were trying to upsell her all the time.

She realized when she started talking to them not as through the lens of her business but through a humanistic lens that they weren’t just consultants trying to upsell her. They were entrepreneurs. They really were the ones who had the great lives. They had absolutely shaped their lives and their careers in the way that they wanted to live them and have them. This particular person went on to speak to them and to ask them questions well how did you do this. How did you build your business? How did you get to this point and what I say is that when you’re suddenly thrust out of your routine and time is something that you worry about or what am I going to do and how am I going to make as if I’m busy and so on.

Again, it’s the same message. Reach out to other people not necessarily because they can help you get a job but because they have lives or paths or passions that they have followed. You want to find out how they did it. What choices did they make? I always said if I came away with just one new idea from a meeting with somebody and I would go into meetings without a planned agenda necessarily it was a great meeting. As a fundraiser and a rainmaker I’m pretty used to going into meetings with a goal but the best meetings that had results were ones where everyone started talking about themselves and what was really important to them. Then when you come away with that you come away with a little bit more strength about yourself and if they did it I could do it.

Diane: Absolutely.

Robin: You had you had mentioned this that anticipating leaving was much worse than leaving. She had a group of friends and they agreed to put the date that she was going to leave on the calendar together so that she couldn’t back out. She put the date on there and even though her boss didn’t come in she called her boss and she said it. The relief was momentous and immediate. What many people found is that they really did need to leave and the company sometimes did it for them.

Diane: I really want to emphasize this book Involuntary Exit. It’s full of the unexpected. It’s full of very interesting surprises and it’s full of great quotes. You mentioned affirmations and I’m a huge fan. There’s also a playlist. Yes, a musical playlist which we need to keep us going through these processes. There’s a great resources list. You’ve mentioned Soshan Alec and her quote same mind that created the problem can’t be used to come up with a solution. The context that you start to live in the world of the new you make new contacts rather than falling back on the old, falling back into the same old patterns.

It’s really very helpful. I can’t thank you enough for being with us. We have only a few minutes left. I wanted to ask you the best way for people to reach you Robin Merle as they’re becoming more authentic in inventorying their passions and becoming more of ourselves. What’s the best way to reach out to you?

Robin: The best way is to reach me at the professionalguide.com. There’s a way to contact me there and to submit any questions that you may have that you would like me to answer. You can also sign up for a 20-minute free consultation about your career goals and questions you may have on topics that we touched on here.

Diane: That’s great. That’s perfect. Growth, opportunity and hope, hold on to that. Thank you so much Robin Merle for being with us. Involuntary Exit is out next week published by She Writes Press. Thank you to our engineers Matt Weidner and Aaron Keller, to our executive producer Robert Giolino and most of all to you our listeners. Remember to stay safe and put together your portfolio of passions. Till next week thank you for dropping in.

Robin: Thank you.

Thank you so much for dropping in. Please join Diane Dewey again next Friday at 8 AM Pacific Time and 11 AM Eastern Time on the Voice America Variety Channel. We’ll see you then.