Podcast: What Leaders Need to Know to Return to Work Successfully

“We’ve moved the line on the manager employee relationship during the pandemic,” says Karen Mangia, Vice President of Customer and Marketing Insights at Salesforce. “Work has become a lot more about embracing humanity.  There’s a lot more human connection regardless of your title or your tenure. This is an inflection point, and now that we've crossed that divide, we can't go back.”

In this episode of the Being Human is Good For Business podcast, the team at Trilogy Effect are joined by best-selling author Karen Mangia.

In her role at Salesforce, Karen serves on the company’s Work from Home Taskforce, where she is helping the company’s 74,000+ worldwide employees to adapt better to a work-from-home environment. 

She’s recently published her fourth book, Success from Anywhere: Creating Your Own Future of Work From the Inside Out.

Karen Mangia, VP, Salesforce

In this podcast you’ll learn that:

  • As a leader you must find a way to give your employees the flexibility, autonomy and choice they need if you are going to retain and recruit the best.

  • Despite the need for flexibility, today’s workers place high value on community and will commit to a return to the office only if there is a clear purpose. One good example is the opportunity for co-creation and it’s role in building a sense of community among workers.

  • Workers experience burnout when they are asked to live outside their values for an extended period of time. Leaders need to listen deeply to understand and support their employees.

Learn all this, and a whole lot more, from this fascinating discussion between the leadership experts at Trilogy Effect and Karen Mangia who is a Wall Street Journal best selling author, a TEDx speaker, a prolific blogger and regular contributor to Authority Magazine, Thrive Global and ZDnet.

To be entered into a draw for a copy of Karen’s new book, Success From Anywhere, subscribe to our newsletter here before April 30th.  We’ll announce the winner in the first week of May 2022.  

Links to information and resources discussed in this show: 

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Machine Generated Transcript

 

What follows is an AI-generated transcript.  It may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the podcast.

Interview with Karen Mangia

Sherrilynne: Hello. I'm Sherrilynne Starkie and welcome to Being Human is Good for Business, the podcast for business leaders who want to build high performance teams. Today I'm joined by the Leadership Team at Trilogy Affect, Heather Marasse, Wendy Appel, and Mary Beth Sawicki. Together we are welcoming Karen Mangia, Vice President of Customer and Marketing Insights at Salesforce. She's a Wall Street Journal, best-selling author, a TEDx speaker, a prolific blogger, and a regular contributor to Authority Magazine, Thrive Global and ZD Net.

00:35

Karen Mangia: What a pleasure to be among a group of leading ladies, it's wonderful.

00:39

Sherrilynne: Welcome to the show.

00:41

Karen Mangia: It's great to be here.

00:43

Sherrilynne: Yes and thank you for coming. Now, Karen has recently published her fourth book, Success From Anywhere, Creating Your Own Future of Work From Inside and Out. Congratulations Karen 

00:57

Karen Mangia: Thank you so much.

00:58

Sherrilynne: And your day job is helping 50,000 worldwide employees to adapt better to a work-from-home environment. So that sounds like it's an easy thing, a walk in the park.

01:12

Karen Mangia: Especially now that we're up to 74,000 employees. I mean it is amazing and, when you think about it, we are working in every possible configuration at this point.  As we've grown, so has the, the magnitude of the challenge of making sure we stay connected.

01:30

Sherrilynne: Wow, I bet. It looks like the timing is perfect for your book Success From Anywhere. So who do you think should be reading it?

01:44

Karen Mangia: Everyone with a job, or that would like to have one, would be my recommendation. Here's why, the premise of the book really is what would happen if we could change the game of life together because our work life is part of our life.

As I was thinking about this whole concept of reworking work and looking into the future, I realized that the future of work is really less about how we reconfigure cubicles. It's more about how we redesign our relationship with work and when we change our relationship with work, everything changes so that’s why I think the book is really relevant for any working person.

02:28

Heather Marasse: Yes, I think the pandemic really brought that to light for people if they weren't thinking about it before.  It gave everybody an opportunity to regroup and rethink what's my life about, and how I’m spending my time, and who is it with?

02:46

Karen Mangia: And based on what you said, one-top-of-mind question shows up for me, out of that, that I think everyone is asking, and that's ‘what matters.’ What people are giving themselves really permission to do this for the first time, en masse, and we're seeing momentum around people asking that question.  ‘What matters?’ Then having the courage to take action on the answer.

It's why we see so many people moving to new organizations, starting their own businesses, working as kind of these contract or gig workers, in the economy. It’s because when they asked that question, the answer was something different than what it was before 2020 for a lot of people.

03:28

Wendy Appel: It's interesting because there’s this organization that helps you find people to take care of your home and your pets while you're away. I use them, and the last four or five in row were all twenty-something, who work in tech and can work from anywhere. One of them was living in a van, but they're all experimenting with, ‘where do I want to be?’ So they're going from house to job and to house, to job, exploring the country and not really having a home base. Just having a very different kind of lifestyle than certainly when we grew up. So I'm just fascinated by this.

04:10

Karen Mangia: The rise of the road warrior is a real. What's so interesting about these folks who are making the decision to really put more flexibility into their life and incorporate the aspect of discovery. I mean, trying out these different arrangements is really thinking about, I think, in a sense what we are all seeking, whether we are choosing to stay in the organization that we're in or choosing to make an exit into a really exploratory lifestyle, which is flexibility.

We’re looking for flexibility, autonomy, and choice. So in our search for that, when we can't find that in our own organizations or in our own lifestyles, we're on the search together for that flexibility, autonomy, and choice to show up in new ways.

04:58

Sherrilynne: So what does this mean for leaders?

05:01

Karen Mangia: Leaders are now orchestrators and they are orchestrators of outcomes and experiences. If you think about it, most workers do not need an explicit directive of exactly what to do and when to do it and when to be at work. The highest level of leadership is about leading for outcomes and then trusting your employees to deliver those outcomes. Its about removing roadblocks when they encounter them, encouraging them and re-skilling them, wherever that might be necessary.

When I think about great leaders now, they're great listeners. They are also focused on the outcomes that need to be delivered and they are absolutely reinforcing all this with crystal clear communication. Because, what employees are saying is with that flexibility, autonomy, and choice, ‘what I'm really looking for you to do is to trust me, to do the work that I need to do.

So when you’re clear about the outcomes your employees are expected to deliver that role of the leader takes on an entirely different context. Now I'm looking for you to perhaps send me an article with some new ideas or research for a project, perhaps it's helping me broaden my network inside or outside of the organization.

You think about the leader as an orchestrator, a facilitator, and someone who's really offering you the tools to realize your potential and to reach those outcomes in much more of a self-directed way.

06:32

Wendy Appel: The orchestrator, I think that your spot on, absolutely. I've often thought that organizations kind of infantilize people. You can take them from home to work and we still kind of parent the people in the organizations and I'm hoping, and you seem to be saying that we're, we're witnessing a big change in that.

06:58

Karen Mangia: What we're seeing and experiencing now is that in many organizations and even inside of individual teams, there's a gap that's widening between what employers offer and what employees expect. What I'm observing from working with organizations of all sizes and all industries around the world is the ones who are stepping forward into the future of work in a thoughtful way and retaining and elevating their talent in the process are focused on how to close the gap between what employers offer and what employees expect. One critical tool that helps besides doing deep listening, is really understanding who are the employees in your organization now, how their needs and expectations have shifted, is also creating choices.

I mean exactly to what you were just mentioning, as opposed to with a child, where you might say, ‘you will wear this outfit to school’ or with an employee where you'll say ‘you will be at this office from nine to five,’ instead you might offer three choices that you as a parent are willing to live with in that outfit and the child chooses one, that same 

mentality shows up really well in the workplace.

We all like to be given a choice, particularly when we believe that choices that are available to us are favourable. So the way great leaders and great organizations offer favourable choices to their employees is based on deep listening and being able to step away and say, ‘out of this list of requests or ideas from our employees, which ones are we willing to live with, which ones work for us?’ Then offering a choice, and choice is

part and parcel with asynchronous work, right? I mean, asynchronous work says, ‘I'll give you a choice about when you do these work hours?’ to some larger, small degree, because it introduces choice. And within that set of choices should be a range of what you as an employer willing to live with.

08:57

Sherrilynne: I wonder where community comes into all this, because it seems to me that to a large proportion of the workforce, community is a big part of why they go to work. So all this asynchronous working might put that at risk?

09:14

Karen Mangia: What you're highlighting is a really critical inflection point that came to the surface in the Edelman Trust Index. If you're not familiar with that study, each year, this organization called Edelman studies, the organizations and entities that we trust the most and people that we trust the most.  During the pandemic, for the first time in the history of their study, which is pretty substantial, people reported that the entity in which they placed their highest degree of trust is no longer their government or their church, it’s their workplace.

That got me thinking, that's a responsibility, in addition to trust, and we're talking about topics like accountability and ownership. I believe we're at an inflection point where what people are messaging is a motion to shift us from companies as workplaces to companies as communities.

When you think about it, even within these discussions about something like diversity, equity and inclusion, what are we all adding on now to that?  Belonging and belonging is another way of saying community, right? ‘I feel a sense of belonging when I identify with the community of ideals and identities that are around me,’ whether that's in your workplace or outside of it.

10:43

Heather Marasse: And you can see community, it's been happening all along, but hasn't been highlighted or illuminated in such a clear way. Over the decades that we've been working with different companies, you see communities moving together. You see communities from one company, one moves to another, to maybe to a competitor or an adjacent kind of business and pretty soon a few others follow.

They have a network of relationships in terms of the vendor communities and the client communities. People move and live in community and being able to start to think about that in a way that has a real impact on business, and it always has, but to be able to think about it in, in this new way, I think is kind of exciting.

11:31

Karen Mangia: Well, we changed or moved the line on the manager-employee relationship during the pandemic. Suddenly our leaders are checking in with us about, ‘do we feel safe, how's our family doing?’ in a very authentic and genuine way. Now that that line has moved in a direction of companies embracing humans. Humans connecting to humans regardless of your title or your tenure, is an inflection point.

Now that we've crossed that divide, we can't go back. If your leader stops asking you how you're doing and how you're feeling and how your family is, you feel the shift because now that interaction becomes and feels much less human.

12:18

Wendy Appel: My guess is that people are going to be willing to go back to the office on a flexible basis if the connection at the office is meaningful and has some purpose. As opposed to, ‘I just need to show up in my seat because that means I'm here and I'm working and I'm accountable, or I'm sitting in a meeting where people are just blathering and giving me information. I think, ‘gee, I could have looked at a PowerPoint, read a book, read a PDF, whatever,’ that there's actually meaningful connection happening in the office.

12:51

Karen Mangia: Commit to gathering with a purpose, I mean, that is so critical. It's not that people are 100% opposed to going into an office. It’s what is the purpose of the

commute? What is the purpose of being together? When we, as leaders, are thoughtful and clear about why we are coming together. Now that could be to create something together and co-creation can be made easier or more energizing in person, not always, Maybe we are releasing a new product or future, and now we are going to have the war room and that knowledge sharing that happens together is really powerful and helps us do that activity well. Those are the use cases that people want to hear. I feel that we're making a shift from mandates to meaning. As opposed to the mandate of come to the office nine to five, three days a week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays are the required days.

Meaning says ‘the meaning behind us coming together on Wednesday is we're going to be brainstorming a new product that we're going to bring to market, and we want everyone's full attention, and we're going to do some fun activities that are best done in person.’ That's a difference between mandate and meaning and people constantly respond more favourably to meaning than to mandates.

14:17

Wendy Appel: Well, I'm curious because you are not at the mother ship, you're remote, so what gets you into the office, in your community? What would pull you to get on that airplane and go in?

14:34

Karen Mangia: The opportunity to co-create with colleagues. As an example co-creation is a powerful tool for creating community inside of companies and organizations. Even if you and I are in different teams or different departments, when we come together and create something. Whether it's the virtual volunteer activity or fun after hours social or a research project, perhaps, when we share an outcome and a set of values and purpose aligned to them, that's an incentive.

So I think co-creation is an opportunity to bring people together, to take a different spin on the outcomes and say, ‘Hey, let's get together and really create something where we're both going to share in the outcome or the success or the deliverable. That's an example of when it's compelling.

I think very few people, now there are some exceptions, depending on what the context of your living arrangement or preferences might be. Most people don't want to go through the process of their commute to sit in their office on zoom all day, you could do that from home. So I think about, is there a compelling purpose or reason for me that's very often co-creation and collaboration and, and that sense of community.

15:58

Heather Marasse: Yes, absolutely.

16:02

Sherrilynne: There are some really major global companies that, I don't want to name on the call, but big well-known brands that are actually bringing back the mandate to attend the office. What do you think the risks are for those companies?

16:17

Karen Mangia: The biggest risk is talent attrition. We have to live well to work well and work well to live well.  What strikes me is the contrast between organizations of similar sizes in similar industries. Where one CEO mandates a full return to office five, six or seven days a week, depending on what industry we're referencing. While another CEO in the same industry and an organization of approximately the same size as a competitor that offers no-video Fridays and you come to the office one day a week with

your team. I think, all things being equal, would you rather work in the place where you are mandated or where you have some choices, where you're told what to do versus where you have some autonomy.

Over time, those are the factors that will influence who attracts and retains the highest performing talent and ultimately that plays out in results.

17:19

Wendy Appel: I was reading your book and there was this topic of burnout that you wrote about. So, what are you seeing now with burnout and what's working and what's not working?

17:33

Karen Mangia: Burnout is brutal and when I think about a very practical definition of burnout, I think about burnout as living outside of your values for an extended period of time.

Here's the reason I offer that as a working definition. We all have examples in our careers, where we had a significant deliverable or project that required us to put in extra hours, extra effort and it took time away from our life for a period of time. What's different about that scenario is those projects and accomplishments that we look back on, where we had to work extra and give extra that resulted in that having a finish and

then we get a chance to reset our lives or are aligned with our values and our purpose. We typically find those energizing, those tend to be the stories that we tell inside of organizations. Those tend to be the moments in our career when we look back on and think we felt vital, we felt valued and we felt like we were contributing. So for a period of time it’s worth the trade-off.

I don’t think burnout is a function of the number of hours we spend doing something, it’s how we feel about the work we’re doing and how we feel about the hours were investing in what we’re going. So what do I think is the solution to burnout? I would point you toward the Stress Free Experiment. Doesn't that sound wonderful?

19:09

Sherrilynne: It does.

19:10

Karen Mangia: So here's how the Stress Free Experiment works. It was started by researchers at Stanford, with a group of university students who were reporting a high degree of burnout, and the holiday break was coming, so the researchers gave the students an assignment. Over the holiday break they were each supposed to spend ten

minutes using an actual pen and paper to write in a journal. They could write anything that came to mind, the only important factors were then minutes, pen and paper, that's it.

Then they took a small group of students and they said for you, we have a special assignment for you. You're going to use your ten minutes to write about your one top value and how that value shows up in your everyday life.  What they found was that journaling exercise was beneficial for all of the students, but the group who reported the highest reduction in burnout, an increase in new ideas and an increase in resilience, their ability to access resilience were the students who spent the ten minutes writing about their top value.

The Stanford researchers have gone on to conduct this experiment numerous times with corporate executives and not-for-profit leaders and everything in between, and the results are the same. Even if you only spend ten minutes writing about one top value and how it shows up in your everyday life, what happens is the way you see your circumstances change even if your circumstances don’t change. Think about the power of that. You see when we're clear on our values and how they're showing up in our everyday work life or not, we get some very strong clues about the source of our burnout.

21:00

Heather Marasse: It makes total sense with what we experience personally, but also with our clients.  So much of our work is about practicing coming back to yourself. Life has a way of pulling us away, our attention gets distracted and fragmented and what is important is to come back and reconnect with what's important to me. What do I value? Who am I in this situation and what do I have to say about it? Unless you develop that like a muscle, with no real destination in sight, it's simply a practice. Unless you develop that and practice with it, it's so easy to just get lost in the drift of life. It's the progressive tolerance that your book talks about. It's the boiled frog analogy where I'm in water that's getting hotter and hotter, but I'm still able to stay here, so I'm not going to jump out of this pot.

22:10

Karen Mangia: Success comes from the inside out and I know, so many times in my life, as I think back, I have looked to work to provide approval and acceptance and

belonging, and a sense of accomplishment or success. And what I realized was everything that I was looking for out there. Everything I was looking for work to do for me was all available right here.

So, when I started showing up differently at work as a result of that discovery, work started showing up differently for me. You talked about building that muscle of, taking a pause, taking a breath, returning to yourself and that's why I'm such an advocate for routines, rituals, and boundaries. What's your five-minute go to work ritual? What's your five-minute leave work ritual? How do you set a time on your clock that you commit to stop work?  By the way, constraints will teach you about your priorities very quickly and along with that, what is your ritual when you get off track?

I love what Gabrielle Bernstein has to say, she says reach for the next best thought. So if your thought is ‘that presentation was a total disaster.’ Okay, take a breath and what's the next best thought.  Okay, good news, there are only three people in the audience or whatever it is, reach for the next best thought, and that is a muscle you can build.

23:43

Mary Beth Sawicki: You're making me think of the story in your book about getting slapped across the face and saying ‘thank God that’s over with.’

23:54

Karen Mangia: I love when she says, ‘imagine a person walks up onto the stage and slaps me as hard as possible right now.’  What would your reaction be? For most of us, we go to, you're going to fight back or have some outlandish reaction.

I love that her response is ‘thank God that's over.’ I thought what would change for all of us, if we could move to a place of acceptance, that it was so authentic that, whatever the big slap across the face is for you, in any given moment or a day, you could look at that moment and accept what happened and say, ‘thank God that's over.’

24:36

Sherrilynne: Wise words, right?

24:38

Mary Beth Sawicki: It opens up a lot of energy that can be used more productively, than denying or justifying or just reacting, so acceptance is powerful.

24:49

Karen Mangia: Acceptance is powerful, but I like to take it a step further. I find people who really tap into their resilience in a powerful way, to embody and accept, to adapt and accelerate mindset. Accept what is not what I hope something would be, adapt my mindset, my strategy, my approach to the circumstances as they are, which is what allows you to accelerate.

25:20

Wendy Appel: What is the expression?  ‘See reality for what, it is rather than how we are.’

25:27

Karen Mangia: Yes, what we focus on. We're constantly creating our own reality by where we choose to put our focus.

25:36

Heather Marasse: Exactly, so that's why practicing where we're putting our attention and bringing it back over and over again is an important muscle to develop.

25:46

Sherrilynne: Karen, you must have a real workout routine around developing that muscle because you're an author, a blogger and you've got a very demanding day job and you have all these side projects.  How do you keep focused, how do you juggle all your priorities and how do you keep loving life?

26:08

Karen Mangia: Well, I've discovered three strategies that really work, and not just for me, I've coached numerous people to try them as well, even people who've been a little bit reluctant at first.  The first one is divest before you invest. While you are in a sprint for your major deliverable is not the time to learn a new language and start training for a triathlon.

So I say, ‘or’ is a powerful word, ‘and’ is a dangerous word, so divest before you invest. So at any given time, that means you need to be clear about your priorities so you know what to divest of and where to invest. The second is the routines, rituals and boundaries that I was referencing earlier.

In my case, my routine is I get up at the same time every day. I start my day with meditation, mindfulness and movement followed by some time writing in my journal, including offering gratitude in those pages and then I start, my day. The third is deep work and if you've read that book by Cal Newport, it really inspired me to think about, ‘what is the greatest value that I offer in these roles that I play and is that value creation a priority on my calendar?’

So I used to start my day with cleaning out email and getting things sorted and respond to people and these creation tasks of a blog, or a book, or a video, would happen at the end of the day. Now I do the exact opposite, I put my best energy now toward that value creation task. It's amazing when what's standing between me and my life is a series of emails and the News Roundup email that I get every day, how little importance I place on that, relative to choosing my life. If it's my next piece, that's due to Thrive

Global, then I feel differently about that trade off choice. So those three I have really found will set you up for success.

28:14

Sherrilynne:  I guess ladies, that's the kind of things that you help the leaders that you're working with.

28.22

Heather Marasse: Yes, I mean, anybody we work with has got way more to do, than they have time for it.  It's always a constant challenge to manage energy and attention. So I really liked the, the succinct way you have captured that. One of the things that we, thankfully, are able to introduce more easily now, than we used to be able to, is this whole notion of mindfulness.

That used to be ‘that's crazy talk’ in the business world, for the kind of folks we deal with. But more and more there's acceptance for it, and willingness, to experiment and practice with it. For some to admit, it's a little bit like ‘this is a private practice of mine and I'm not going to talk about the fact that I have I go to meditation sessions, I meditate’

Some people didn't feel comfortable talking about that, but I think it's something that has gained real acceptance. Our life is, it's going to end and the pandemic really brought that home, we're all going to die. So this whole notion of deep work and ‘what is my life about and what am I spending it on and why, and what do I value, and is that really how my life is being spent?’ All of that brings a lot more meaning to people’s work, to their relationships and to their connections.

29:52

Karen Mangia: What strikes me as another industry that we could learn more from, in corporate America, and all kinds of organizations, is the wide world of sports. There are numerous athletes who have mindset coaches as part of their professional training regimen. I mean, just like they have a strength and conditioning coach in the gym, they have a mindfulness and mental wellness coaches.

I was fortunate to interview professional race, car driver, James Hinchcliffe, for the book and he talked about how important being present, being mindful, and staying calm is. I mean, in his line of work, it's literally life or death. So I thought, what might change for all of us, if we could learn how to stay centered and present when our adrenaline is pumping and all these activities around us and we feel like they're happening so quickly.

So what might change if we had more programs inside of organizations to help us with our mindset?  If athletes have realized this is the key or a key to their peak performance, wouldn't it be the same for us as well? It's part of what I asked him and shared in the book and I come back to what you're saying. In the world of sports it's talked about in a much more common sense way, because there's a connection between mind, body, spirit, and performance that I think in many organizations, we're just now starting to come to that realization.

31:30

Wendy Appel: I think it relates to, I mean you talk about in your book, that ‘work is game and what game are you playing and being in the game.’ So you're talking about it and here we are connecting it directly to sports. I think the challenge, because we do work with our clients around mindset shift. That is our work it's mindset shift, it's transformation, it's change, and working with our own internal immune system to that, which we do.  You can say, I want to build this routine in my life and there's the immunity to change going on inside of us.

So in the sports world, it's a shorter game.  It's not an infinite game and there's a win and there's a finish line, but at work it's harder to find that.  So there's more incentive, there's more motivation in the sporting world, even though we use, in corporation, sport metaphors all the time.

32:23

Karen Mangia: Think big act small, right, we like to say that and I think about this more practically as the ‘five minute fix.’  How do you think about anything that you want to adjust or try, in terms of what could you try for five minutes?  What's amazing is that even if you only made a one percent improvement on a daily basis, you would have more than doubled your progress in 72 days.

Taking a big goal or aspiration or transformation and breaking it down into the smallest steps, I think about it in terms of, ‘what's working, what's not working and what's the smallest thing I can give myself permission to adjust?’  That could be taking a big project and thinking about it in five day increments. I mean the same mindset applies, the idea is the five-minute fix is about building momentum and creating upside that comes from momentum.

33:25

Mary Beth Sawicki: I loved that and I thought it was really useful when we're overcoming inertia.  I just think about myself if I have something that's overwhelming that I need to work on, I can make an impact, a big impact in five minutes. It makes it a lot less overwhelming in a time when, for me, it seems like there's a lot going on. So the five-minute fix, I think, is a great way to tackle something. What's that expression, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, and the five-minute fixes remind me of that and I thought it was really useful.

34:03

Sherrilynne: And to create upside.

34:04

Karen Mangia: I mean, if you do your five minutes of something that felt overwhelming, to use your word, give yourself a micro reward. Maybe that's walking outside for a breath of fresh air, reading, a book, or watching a Ted Talk, whatever that looks like for you, a little reward. I mean, the upside, when it's there helps us go, ‘okay, you can do anything for five minutes, ’ and then I'll give myself a miniature endorphin rush after that, as a congratulations for doing that five minutes and then it gets easier.

34:35

Sherrilynne: That's an interesting concept because what you described there, the five- minute fix, that's kind of what I use for writer’s block when you're staring at the blank screen. I just did this today and ‘I'm just going to write for five minutes and I don't care what I write, if I just get writing for five minutes, it'll flow.’ and it did and it all worked.

But what I didn't do was give myself the upside, I could have had a little cookie or something there and I feel like I missed out.  

35:03

Karen Mangia: I was going to say that you can always begin again differently and you choose differently next time. 

35:11

Sherrilynne: So I think we've pretty much covered everything. Was there anything else, any other last comments, Karen that you'd like to make if it was something that we didn't cover in the discussion?

35:21

Karen Mangia: I think this covers everything. I think the only other thing that I would offer is that success is not a destination, or a location, or a job title, or the balance in your bank account. Success is as you define it and therefore is available to anyone anywhere at any time, even in this exact moment.

35:46

Heather Marasse:  Yeah. I think that's really helpful because I think there is an inherited view of what success looks like. I think we're gradually challenging it and, again, the pandemic caused that to happen. If you don't have the opportunity to challenge that inherited, assumed subconscious unconscious picture of it, it will be driving you in a direction that actually has you abandoned your values and be disconnected from.

36:17

Sherrilynne: And when you achieve that vision, that dream of what you think success is, and it's not aligned with your values it's quite a hollow experience in achieving it and getting that corner office. Like you're all alone, your husband's left or won’t to speak to you.

36:38

Karen Mangia: And you have somebody else's definition of success and you end up with

someone else's life and that might not be very fulfilling.

36:46

Mary Beth Sawicki: Guaranteed not to be very fulfilling.

36:50

Sherrilynne: Does anybody have anything else they'd like to add just before we wrap it up?

36:56

Wendy Appel: Yes. Thank you for coming on, it was great to meet you, Karen and I love what you're up to.

37:00

Karen Mangia: Thanks for the opportunity and thank you for the great interview for Authority Magazine, that will also go to Thrive Global and other amazing places. So thank you for the work you're doing and thank you for an amazing interview. Thanks for all the work that you're doing to raise the vibration in the world and give people some new tools to enjoy their lives and to find some peace and happiness.

37:23

Heather Marasse:  And remember that we're human. We're all just a bunch of humans.

37:25

Karen Mangia: Being human is enough.

37:26

Sherrilynne: Thank you everyone for joining me on today’s show and thanks to all you listeners. I hope you never miss an episode by subscribing to our podcast and liking us and sharing us with your friends. Please leave a rating or review that really does help people find our podcast. Thank you, once again, for joining us until next time. I’m your host, Sherrilynne Starkie and this is the Being Human is Good For Business podcast.