The Causey Consulting Podcast

Toxic Optimism & #Blessed

November 11, 2021 Sara Causey Episode 103
The Causey Consulting Podcast
Toxic Optimism & #Blessed
Show Notes Transcript

#blessed
#livingyourbestlife
Always find a silver lining!

🤨 What do we do in situations where we aren't #blessed? Or where we've faced a senseless tragedy and there is no silver lining?

Key topics:

✔️ In 2015, Kate Bowler was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. This was after spending a chunk of her career researching the American prosperity gospel, the "#blessed" culture, and the "living my best life" crowd. So what happens when tragedy visits?
✔️ In the same way that "love and light only," "only good vibes allowed" can become a prison of toxic positivity, rushing to find some silver lining in the face of grief can morph into toxic optimism.
✔️Using phrases like "well, at least..." or "I guess it's good that..." to someone who is grieving is not helpful. Even if well-intentioned, it usually doesn't help.


Links I discuss in this episode:

https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_bowler_everything_happens_for_a_reason_and_other_lies_i_ve_loved?language=en

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/how-to-avoid-toxic-optimism.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10089201/Positivity-POISONOUS-says-author-KATE-BOWLER-provocative-new-book.html

Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. And now, here's your host, Sara Causey. Hello, Hello, and thanks for tuning in. Today I want to dive into the topic of toxic optimism. First and foremost, I want to say thank you to everyone who took the time to write in about last week's episode on grief. We've all been touched by grief, and loss. And even though we grieve individually, and our grief is ours, uniquely to deal with each time that it happens, we also grieve communally to, then we can be of so much support, and comfort and help and compassion to one another. So thank you to everyone who wrote in. And thank you to everyone who trusted me to hear your stories of grief and loss, it is extremely meaningful to me. So thank you for that. In the midst of my grieving process, a video popped up on YouTube by an author I actually hadn't ever heard of before, named Kate Bowler. And I know some people say the phones don't spy on us. I've heard it argued that the artificial intelligence and the algorithms are just that freaking good. They can predict at any given point in time, where you're at emotionally, what kind of content you're going to want to engage with, what types of products you're going to be most likely to buy and so on. Then you have people like Edward Snowden going, yeah, no, the phone actually is spying on you. Even if it's turned off. Even if the battery is taken out of it. It is still spying on you. So I'm just going to say not by coincidence, wink wink. This video by Kate Bowler popped up on YouTube. It was a TED Talk that she did. And it was titled something like, everything happens for a reason and other lies I have loved. And naturally I will be dropping a link to that TED talk in the write up for this podcast episode. But I just saw the title alone. And I thought, okay, YouTube, I'm interested, you predicted this one correctly, I will buy it I will listen. And after I listened to that TED talk, I went on to listen to some of her other like podcast episodes, and to really understand what she's been going through and the books that she's written and so on. Several years ago, she wrote a book called Blessed, where she chronicles the history of the American prosperity gospel movement. And this idea of measuring spiritual progress in terms of your finances, your physical well being, and how things like good vibes only and Hashtag blessed became so ubiquitous, you know, in the episodes that I recorded about toxic optimism, you can even find good vibes only on T shirts at Walmart Now, like all of these slogans, and sayings are just freaking everywhere. In the TED Talk, Kate talks about how she was 35 years old, had a wonderful marriage, very happy, had a young son, it was like life was on a roll. I mean, if you if you could make the argument that someone was, you know, hashtag living their best life, that's where she was at. And then she was given a phone call that she needed to go to the hospital immediately because she had stage four cancer. And in that moment, all she could say to the nurse, or the doctor that was on the phone was but I have a son. It was like life was flashing before her eyes and everything that had been on this positive role seem to come to this jarring halt. And in these moments of crises, in the midst of grief, loss, violence, so many platitudes that we tell ourselves or that we say to each other, fall so flat, it's all part of a greater plan. It all happens for a reason. This is going to turn around, everything's going to be okay. And another one of her videos, she talks about the pernicious phrase, well, at least, you know, people trying to comfort you by saying, well, at least you can get married again. At least the job market is good, you'll find something else quickly. At least you can still work you can make that money back at least one of your other parents is still alive. At least you still have other children, at least you could still get pregnant. And it's like that's not freaking comforting. Stop saying things like that to someone who's in bereavement. She also talks about the prison of gratitude. Like yes, sincere gratitude that comes from within is great and it can be downright magical. But when you're in a prison of gratitude, like it's fake toxic gratitude, I have to be grateful for everything. No matter how bad it hurts, no matter how unfair, it seems to me, I'm supposed to just grin and bear it and talk about how great Hashtag blessed, hashtag thankful it's like, Oh, yeah. And during her cancer battle, people would say things to her like, well, this is all gonna, this is all gonna come together, you know, you're, you're being allowed to have this cancer so that you can write books, you can help other people you can do these TED talks, like it's gonna all be for some higher purpose. And it reminded me of what Rabbi Harold Kushner said, he had written the book, when bad things happen to good people not if they happen or why they happen just when bad things happen to good people. He lost his son. And people would come up to him and say things like, Yeah, but you have these best selling books, you've helped so many people, you've been able to counsel other couples who've been through the loss of a child like, you know, maybe God allowed your son to die, so that you could have these best selling books and help all these other people. And his response was always, that's not a deal that I would have made. I never would have agreed to that. If anyone said to me, you can be a best selling author and a motivational speaker, or you can have your son, I'm choosing my son every single time. There's no scenario where I would make any other choice but him. So gratitude very much can become a prison, trying to pretend to be thankful for some heinous, hideous circumstance in your life. I saw a snippet of Kate's podcast episode that she recorded with Philip Yancey. And it broke my heart. I mean, just listening to him talk about his mother and his childhood, it, it was just so upsetting. So so profoundly sad to me, just talking about how his mother had trusted God to heal his father. I'm not sure what illness that he had. I don't know what the circumstances were, but his father passed away. And so his mother had the expectation that she would give both of her sons over to God, that they would be involved in the ministry and more specifically, that they would go into missionary work in foreign lands sort of fulfill the dream that the Father had not been able to fulfill. But Phillip said that his brother became like the quintessential 1960s hippie. And then he became a journalist and an author, even though he's a Christian author who writes about new topics of faith. It wasn't pleasing to his mother. So his mother actually did not speak to his brother for 50 years, and she had negative feelings about the path that Phillip himself had chosen. And I thought this is this is so heartbreaking to me. All all of the story, the loss of the husband, the crisis of faith, the disappointment that the sons were unable to fulfill the father's mission, the father's legacy, I mean, the the amount of pain in that is brutal. I found an article on The Daily Mail about Kate Bowler, and it got me onto this topic of toxic optimism. So not just toxic positivity, good vibes only, you're supposed to be in a good mood all the time. If you ever express sorrow or disappointment, then the universe is going to hex you, you know, you're going to be punished for having any authentic emotions other than happiness and gratitude all the time. I mean, that is one hell of a prison to be stuck in. So she talks about in this article that optimism can be toxic to in certain situations, especially when we expect others like it's almost like a gun to your head. You better be optimistic, no matter what you better find the silver lining in the situation. Damn it and it's like, okay, but what if there isn't one? What if maybe someday, perhaps I could but I can't right now. Or maybe there just is no silver lining. Maybe this was a senseless, tragic, awful thing. And there is no silver lining. There's no recompense there's no reward. It just is what it is. What then? And I want to read from this article that Kate wrote for The Daily Mail. For the last century, Western culture has been dominated by ideologies of positivity. Optimism is big business. It is the message of mega churches and fitness gurus, peloton instructors, and multi level marketing schemes selling leggings or essential oils. I'm going to end quote here just for a second to say I did get On Amazon Prime to watch that LuLaRoe documentary that they did and it was really quite something. I am planning to record an episode about that because anytime someone writes a book or an article or there's a documentary or an expo say about cult like tactics that are used in corporate America, I'm about it. Okay? We can call it confirmation bias because I already know that corporate America uses the same tactics as religious cults. I've lived it before. There are reasons why I wanted to escape corporate America and when I thought I couldn't escape it, I went into a dark night of the soul. It's like is this all there? Is this crap really? Well, so I do plan on recording an episode about that. But I think it's telling that in this article, she talks about you know, multi level marketing schemes selling leggings or essential oils, good vibes only Hashtag blessed look, I'm going to read again. It is the dominant commercial messaging for every glittering Instagram influencer in the billion dollar health and wellness industry. We can heal ourselves by mastering our minds just believe that the universe has your back. But what if the universe stabs you in the back? One day, I had my dream job as a professor at a top university, a hilarious toddler and a loving husband. And the next doctors were slicing me open in in search for invading tumors and suggesting that my life expectancy could now be measured in months, rather than decades. There is a little catchphrase that people began using to describe that approach to mastering your own destiny, your best life now, in quote, I want to read from a little further down in the article, addiction or bankruptcy or a pandemic up ins life as we know it. We all struggle against the constraints placed on our bodies, our commitments, our ambitions and our resources. While we're saddled with inflated expectations of invincibility. This is the strange cruelty of suffering. We are told that if we simply stay positive, all manner of things shall be well. But expecting people to practice optimism when the world around us has changed forever, or is always fragile, is toxic. Positivity becomes a kind of poison in that it expects that people who are suffering are somehow always supposed to find the silver lining or not speak realistically about their circumstances. It denies reality. And it drives home the false narrative that if we simply find the right formula, or repeat our mantras every morning, life won't interfere with our plans and quote, I'm sure you've probably heard me use the Yiddish proverb before man plans and God laughs there's also a great Mike Tyson, quote, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Oh, my God, isn't that true? I can remember so clearly the day that my existential crisis slash Dark Night of the Soul started, or at least I felt the ramifications of it. Having started, it really technically began much earlier than I was aware of it. Because when I knew that my first business was in the toilet, and wasn't going to be salvageable. And something had to be done. I was teetering on financial ruin. I mean, I knew that I had to do something this this situation that I had been in was just untenable. So I took all of my emotions, and I put them in a trunk. And then I locked the trunk, and I slid the trunk into the back of a very dark closet. And I locked the closet door and ran like hell. And at the time, in my mind, what I told myself was its punishment enough that I have to go back to corporate America with my tail tucked between my legs, I don't have time to suss out all of this crap right now. I don't have time for this. I don't want to go through sadness and depression and anger and these various stages of grief and loss F that, you know, I'm being cosmically punished by having to go back to corporate America, I'm gonna have to sit at yet another third party contingency based staffing agency, and do the same old song and dance I'm going to have to paste on a fake smile, and I'm going to have a boss again and co workers and accounts and monitored phone time and all that crap. That's punishment enough, my God, I don't want to have to go back through the grieving or the loss process. Oh, that's too much. A few weeks after I was back in the saddle and working a corporate job again. I had been on my lunch hour and I had a little time left before I had to go back in and you know, put on a fake smile, and pretend again, so sitting in the car, and here's taking a deep breath and trying to get ready to put my false face back on and do do the song and dance I was sitting there in the parking lot in the car, the gravity of everything just hit me it was like being hit all of a sudden in the face with a brick. And I just had this crippling feeling of is this all there is? I mean, really, am I going to do this? For the next 30 years, I'm going to have to go from one agency to another to another, always hoping for a bigger better deal always hoping for a better manager, always hoping that my production and my work ethic will make up I'm using air quotes here we'll make up for the fact that I'm not an extrovert. And I don't want to go to Billy Bob's pool party and I don't like being nitpicked and micromanaged. I just want to produce, I want to help people to find jobs, I want to help clients to fill open jobs with the best possible candidate and otherwise be left the hell alone. When is it going to be enough? So all these things are swirling around in my brain. And metaphorically, it was like, the trunk flung itself open, and the closet door flung itself open. And all of these emotions came out, like ghosts coming out of Pandora's box, and I was like, oh, no, not right. Now, you have to go back in, you have to work, you're gonna have to yet again, suppress all of these emotions to get through the workday. Because if you go in there and you're having an emotional breakdown, they might fire you, you're gonna have to just pull it together long enough to get through the rest of the day. And for me, that really kicked off the existential crisis, the existential depression of I don't feel like I'm competent at being an entrepreneur. I don't feel like I can work for myself. I mean, I tried it and I failed. And I went into deep debt trying to make everything work and the feast famine cycles, but I freakin hate corporate America. I hate being as Scott calls it a cubicle zombie. I don't like having a boss. I don't like having to not be in a real merit based situation like your production is great and all but we just hate your personality, because you won't put the bit in your mouth like a good little horsey and do everything that you're told, no matter how nonsensical it is, you know, and so I'm like, Oh, God, what am I gonna do with all of this? One thing I did was I checked out the book, The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus, the central question that Camus asks in that book is, when we realize the meaninglessness and the absurdity of life, should we just kill ourselves? Should we commit suicide? Or should we have a cup of coffee? It's kind of like the the the quintessential absurdist question, do we keep on going? Or do we just opt out of life, and then his conclusion, we have to imagine Sisyphus happy. So even though he's doomed to roll the boulder up the hill, only for the boulder to come back down again each night, we have to say all as well, and indeed imagine Sisyphus happy. So we're sitting there and I'm like, Okay, I'm going to try to imagine Sisyphus happy. I'm going to try to get some kind of meaning some kind of betterness out of this situation, what what can I do? But unfortunately, for me, I just wasn't able to find well for Okay, let's let me back that statement up a little bit. Fortunately, slash unfortunately for me, I just wasn't able to find any meaning in feeling like a cog in the machine feeling like I'm at yet another third party staffing agency job that makes me want to jump off the roof. Now with that said, there is one quote from the myth of Sisyphus that I love that has stuck with me and will always stick with me and it does help me at times. One of the things that Camus says is, there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. And there are times when anger can be really awesome, it can be helpful. Now, yes, there's times when anger can be scary, it can be icky, it can be channeled in the wrong direction. There are other times when we can summon up those reserves of scorn those reserves of anger and just say, I'm not defeated, you may have punched me in the face. The Boulder may have rolled down the hill in the middle of the night, despite my best efforts to keep it up there. But I don't care. I'm not down and out. I'm getting back up, I will fight another day. And in the late part of 2019, I started to ask myself a different set of questions. And I knew like Okay, I can't I'm not cut out for what I'm doing right now. So what are my options? And I got a blank piece of paper and a pen and just started writing like no do do the old school idea have no idea is a bad idea. Just free associate Put everything down on paper, you can start to mark out things that seem to be not feasible and desirable, whatever. But just when you're having some sort of creative burst, and you're brainstorming, get it all down, you never know what could turn out to be a great idea in hindsight. So it's like, okay, I can stay in corporate America and go on the quest for the Holy Grail. I can try to find a workplace that is introvert friendly, it's stable, it's a good environment. People are chill, it's a more laid back, not oppressive, not micromanagement. No nitpicking just a good, healthy, nice environment. And I worked at a company for several years where the environment was great, the people were awesome. And I had a really long commute. That was one of the things that was a downer about it. But the people were great. And it was introvert friendly. A lot of the other folks that work there were also commuters and also had a lot of windshield time. So there's never this pressure of like, let's all go to happy hour, you're going to be on the shit list. If you don't go, you need to go to Billy Bob's party over the weekend management will really think you're serious about your job here. If you give up all of your free time and sell your soul to this place. It wasn't like that. So I thought, okay, that's one possibility. You can go on this quest for the holy grail of trying to find an ideal workplace for you. You could also be a temp, you could go around and just do short term contract gigs. And, you know, if you get in the door somewhere and you're like, oh, this place sucks, or this boss is a jerk. If you're only going to be there for a month doesn't matter all that much. I mean, we can sort of tolerate almost anything if we know that we're, we've got short timer syndrome. That was one thing I wrote down. Another possibility is if you could screw up the courage to do it again, do you think you would try self employment, obviously with a different business model, different financial plan different strategies, but that's something worth putting down on the paper. And before I continue that story, I want to introduce an article from inc.com written by Jeffrey James about how to avoid toxic optimism. The byline says true optimism is always grounded in reality. I want to read a passage from that article now. It's been known for decades that optimists are happier and more resilient than pessimists. However, optimism and positive thinking aren't panaceas and can be downright toxic when they're harnessed to deny reality or used to bludgeon other people. Toxic optimism takes two forms, one denialism and two happy horseshit denialism consists of pretending that the world is as you wish it were, and then behaving as if your wished for world is actually real. Another way to say this is fake it until you make it. The ultimate archetype of denialism is this famous meme, and it shows the dog with a cup of coffee, everything around him is on fire, and it's like, this is fine. I'm gonna continue to read. The business world is rife with denialism, its most viable no excuse me, its most visible manifestation today is how the huge high tech firms seemingly don't get that the population is turning against them, and that it's only a matter of time before governments forced them to break into smaller firms. I'm going to scoot down a little bit here. The second type of toxic optimism is happy horseshit, which is when optimists foist their positivity valid or otherwise, on people who just aren't feeling it. For example, I know a woman who shared with a friend that she had just had a miscarriage. The Friend's response was well you can always try again. I'm going to interject something here this is like Kate Bowler's comment about well, at least it's like Please stop saying that to people with loss and grief. It's not freaking helpful. I'll continue to read. Needless to say this response well realistically optimistic was ham handed and hurtful. In business happy horseshit manifests in demands that employees smile and exhibit a positive attitude. This not only makes them more miserable, but also results in Messenger shooting, which essentially ensures the dog ie the manager never figures out that the house is burning. The cure for toxic optimism isn't pessimism which tends to make things worse. The true cure for healthy the true cure excuse me is healthy optimism, which is best expressed as a three step process. Number one, see things as they really are to envision something better. And three, do what you can to move from A to B. Looking at the world through these three steps is incredibly optimistic but never devolves into denialism or happy horseshit because healthy optimism both starts and ends with a reality check. And it focuses on what you can actually change to make things better, and quote, now listen, I'm going to be straight up with you here. I've seen miracles in my life. I've seen things that appear to be in possible longshots things that are just like I don't even know how this came together. But I'm glad that it did. I don't necessarily think that something being grounded in reality is always this prison that we want to make it out to be like, well, I can't see any way that I'm going to get out of bed or I can't see any way that I'm going to ever move up. I can't see anyone you know, like, you don't want to get bogged down in that I do think it's important to have big dreams, I do think it's important to have big goals, we want to make sure that we're tempering that out with not toxic optimism, not toxic positivity. And we also don't want to have this attitude of I'm going to pray to God that I'll win the lottery, but I'm never going to buy a ticket, you know, I'm going to pray and ask for the universe or the God that I worship the gods goddesses, whatever, I'm going to pray that these entities are going to help me find a new job, I'm going to find a new job. Now I'm not going to get on Indeed, or LinkedIn and do any looking, I just want them to bring the job to me in a package wrapped up with a nice red ribbon. And then I don't really have to do anything like, Okay, I enjoy what Jeffrey says in this article, like you do have to envision something better. And then you have to do what you can to move from A to B, I think we have to rely on things like law of attraction, magic, positive energy, God, Jesus, whatever it is that you believe in, to help us to bridge that gap, to go where we can't to do what we can't. But that's not absolving you from doing what you actually can. So as I was looking at this list, toward the later part of 2019, the most viable option and also frankly, the most desirable option to me, was to work up the courage to try entrepreneurship again, now I knew I would need to do it differently. I, I felt like Okay, the first business fail, I have some really great life lessons and really great business lessons on what not to do. I now need to start piecing together what I could do. And I played things conservatively, I made sure that I kept the day job and the steady paycheck and the benefits provided by someone else, while I pieced all of this together. And my initial vision for the business was that I would be doing executive coaching full time, I had really planned on getting completely out of HR and staffing related work. Another example of man plans, and God laughs because it was like, yeah, so not so much. I had a lot of visions and daydreams that were like, shiny, happy people holding hands. I knew what it was like to go through the failure of a business. And I knew even more intimately than that, what it was like to do that as a solopreneur. To be alone. And to feel like, you know, I want my business to take off, I'm stuck in a plateau. I don't know how to make a U turn and correct this. I don't feel like I have anybody to support me in what I'm going through. I don't feel like anybody else in my life really understands exactly how unique this is to be going through it completely alone. And I want it to be that for other people. And I have been, but I will tell you, I have out of necessity, had to get so incredibly picky and so clamped down on who I will take on as a coaching client, for what reasons and with what goals, because there are some people and if nobody else is going to step up to the plate and say this, I will you know, you deserve to know this, whether you're somebody that seeks out coaching yourself, or whether you are a coach listening to this broadcast. Some people are like Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club. If you ever saw that movie they went to from support group to support group and they pretended to have conditions they didn't even have just so they could sit in the support group and be around other people and drink the free coffee and the free Kool Aid and eat the cookies. Some people do that with executive coaches, they will go from program to program to program to program and they're always looking for somebody who's either going to tell them what they want to hear. And, you know, everything's sunshine and roses. Everybody else sucks. It's not the market. It's not your business model. It's not your tactics. You're You're great. It's everybody else that sucks. They're either looking for that constant ego stroking, or they're looking for someone who can wave a magic wand. I know that your business has stuck in a plateau but I'm going to do abracadabra alakazam and Yay, it's better overnight. There are also people who seek out business coaching or executive coaching that need to be in personal therapy. They need to be in a counseling situation. They need to begin to work through not just business related mindset issues, but psychological issues in their own personal life. But they feel a stigma about that, or they don't want to do that for whatever reason. And so they come to you, as an executive coach, like, I want you to be my psychologist, I want you to be my therapist, even though that's not your training. And that's not the program that they signed up for. Even though I hate the word pivot, it's gotten so overused in corporate America, I'm going to use it here anyway. Fortunately, I was able to read the situation quickly and pivot and say, Alright, I, this may be more emotionally and personally and financially than I want to delve into, I need to clamp down on who I work with, for what reason and with what kind of outcomes in mind. But I know this world of staffing and recruiting and HR work backwards, forward, sideways, inside out back around the corner again, I know that I can do it. And for me, it helped to stop trying to fight the path of least resistance to stop trying to climb Mount Everest, it's like, okay, you can either take this luxurious walk through the park, that's going to easily get you to the kind of money that you want to be making. Or you can go into the big scary forest and fight monsters and hope it's gonna all be okay, I'm like, You know what, I think I'm just gonna take the path of least resistance. The last time around in business, I was going through all of these uphill battles and dealing with all kinds of things that upset my cash flow. And I'm like, I just, I don't want that in my life. At this point, I enjoy being able to do work that I like, and then I find fulfilling, but that I also know I'm really capable of doing Yes, I have things that intellectually challenged me. But I don't take on project after project after project, especially all at the same time where I feel like I'm having to reinvent the wheel each time. There are days for me in my work life, where I like to get up and know exactly what's going what's going on, here's what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna be able to do it in a pretty good state of flow, it's not going to involve me reinventing the wheel, or climbing Mount Everest or trying to assemble a jet engine out here all by myself, like, I'm going to be able to do the work and give a high quality deliverable to the client. And it's good. It's all good man. And in its own way, for me, that has been an escape from this toxic optimism, like in Geoffrey's articles, see things for what they really are, envision something better, and then do what you can to move from A to B. It's very important to me to have a profitable business. And to know that I'm that I know that I know that I know, whatever happens, I'll survive it. I'm not overly dependent on social media. I'm not locked into platforms that I don't own or control. I've been able to establish a big enough network offline with people who know who what who I am, they know how to find me that I can continue on life is going to be okay, no matter what boomerangs or curveballs or, you know, giant wads of BS get thrown at me from time to time, I know that I can survive it. I know that I can provide for myself and my family. Even if it's a situation where I have to deal with the crisis demands. Maybe I'm working on a project that isn't very much fun. Maybe I'm working with a client where I feel like I kind of have to hold my nose through the process because they're a bit of a mike the micromanager and then the needy Nancy the nitpicker. Like, okay, well, I can get through this because I want the money, I will do this project to the best of my ability, and then I will collect my check and I will go on with my life you sometimes that happens. And for me, I would rather be in this place of having healthy optimism really expecting good outcomes, believing that good things are possible those sparks of magic can happen. Miracles can happen. Amazing things can show up in the day. To me those things are not denialism or the happy horseshit that Jeffrey James talks about. And nor is it toxic gratitude, feeling like when you do get a big wad of poop thrown in your face, you have to somehow be grateful for it. It's just really saying within my abilities, whatever those may be physically, emotionally, spiritually financially, within my abilities. I am going to try to create what I want. I'm going to try to be happy and make whatever I can out of my life so that when I get to my deathbed when all of this is over with I can look back on it and say, you know, it was worth it. We hope you enjoy today's episode. If you haven't already. Please take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.