Speaker 1: 0:00

Kids have left home. They're going off to figure out their own path. Your path doesn't stop. You could totally change it and do something different and be an example of what's possible for your kids, continually, in your 50s, in your 60s, in your 70s, even in your 80s and beyond.

Speaker 2: 0:14

Welcome to this Empty Nest Life. Join Jay Ramsden as he leads you on a transformative journey through the uncharted seas of midlife and empty nesting. If you're ready to embark on this new adventure and redefine your future, you're in the right place. Here's your host, the Empty Nest Coach, Jay Ramston.

Speaker 1: 0:33

Hey there, my Empty Nest friends. In today's episode I have the pleasure of welcoming the host of the After 40 podcast and the mentor project, dr Deborah Heiser, to the show. She's been featured in Forbes, the New York Times and Psychology Today and we're going to get into not only what we can look forward to as we age, but also how we, as empty nesters, can get into the mentorship as a way to bring generations together to solve challenges that we faced. Deborah, welcome to this Empty Nest Life. So good to have you here today. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 3: 1:04

I'm delighted to be here.

Speaker 1: 1:06

One of the things you talk about in your work is what we can look forward to as we age. What can we look forward to as we age? I think we all have probably different opinions about that.

Speaker 3: 1:15

We have a lot to look forward to. You know, most of us think of our aging trajectory as a physical one, and I used to think that too. And when you think of it that way it's scary because it's an inverted V. You have a steep incline and then a slow, steady decline, and that's scary for most people. But most people don't think of our emotional trajectory and that starts at the same place as our physical trajectory, but it goes up and it never declines. And so when somebody says what do you want for your kids when they grow up, we don't say I hope they can run fast. We say I hope they'll be happy. And really that's what we can expect is fulfillment, happiness, connectedness and meaning in our lives, and that is something that when I learned that was a game changer for me.

Speaker 1: 2:09

I love how you kind of just laid that out. One thing that people have mentioned before is, as we age, there's a go-go, the slow go and the no-go, you know kind of pieces of that aging process, especially when we get into our 50s and 60s and beyond. How does the emotional piece tie to that? Is it the same? Is it a little bit different?

Speaker 3: 2:30

So here's what I'll say. If I'm to look at and most people describe when they're talking about go or not go, that's talking about physical right. And so if I were to look at our inverted V of our physical life and if I were to put on that you know graph our emotional life, we intersect as we're starting to come down and we need reading glasses and our trajectory is getting higher and higher. So does anybody really notice the little things like that I can't run as fast or needing reading glasses? Not really. I don't know anybody who's like oh my gosh, life is just terrible.

Speaker 3: 3:07

Now, when I say slow, steady decline, that's what it is.

Speaker 3: 3:10

It's not really noticeable, but our happiness is. And so when it hits that midlife point right around between 40 and 65, when we're hitting that point, that's when we start to have the bandwidth that opens up. And that's when we start to have the bandwidth that opens up and that's when we start to see doors that open for us that weren't open before because we were caring for kids. Maybe we were also caring for our parents, we were working All of these things. Even if we're still working and the kids come back and the parents are still there, we still have bandwidth that's open, and that is for us the time that we get to take a deep breath in and get to know our partner again, that all of those emotional things come together. That's when we get an itch to do things that are generative, which means we're giving a piece of ourselves back to others. So I don't look at this as at all a no-go slow go. I look at it as emotional, full throttle, zero to 60, move ahead time period when we hit midlife.

Speaker 1: 4:16

I like that, like that whole, like okay, this is an opportunity for you.

Speaker 3: 4:20

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:21

The kids are going off doing their things and you can do things, but I like the emotional piece to it. It's like you said, the door is wide open to that. So what kind of things does that even look like for folks in your experience?

Speaker 3: 4:34

I mean, I just became an empty nester a couple of years ago, and so I got to feel it myself, and I will not deny that when you become, say, an empty nester, that you don't say, oh, things feel weird here, it's quiet, I had boys, I don't need to stock my fridge as much, there aren't dirty socks on the floor, but all of those things, though, that brought such warmth and joy into the house. I felt it right, but I also at the same time felt like, wow, there's more focus on me. I hadn't had focus on me in a long time. So that means for all of us, we get the opportunity to maybe start a new chapter of something we hadn't ever gotten to do before.

Speaker 3: 5:18

This is when people start to blog, they start to podcast, they may do a job shift, they may take on a side hustle, they may do something like, say, I'm going to travel where I hadn't traveled before. I'm going to volunteer and be a docent at the zoo. In one case, somebody who was an artist always wanted to go see all of the sporting events, and he found out that if he was the bus driver for college teams in the South, he could get onto the playing fields and he could see all the games for free. People get creative and they do things because they're not keeping up with the Joneses in the same way. It's such a really liberating time. So do we feel the emotions of the pull of other things? Yes, but at the same time we get this really excitement that happens.

Speaker 1: 6:04

Yes but at the same time we get this really excitement that happens. It sounds like this time in life is kind of like a motivator for people, but there's also some people who don't know what to do. So we're sitting here counting this as a motivating time of life for you, but people are saying they're listening to the show and they're like well, that's not me. What would you say to somebody like that?

Speaker 3: 6:29

When you hit that midlife stage, it's called generativity versus stagnation. I didn't make up the stage. It's from a well-known developmental psychologist, eric Erickson. But the real thing is, when you're feeling like I'm not motivated, I can't do that, you're in stagnation and that's okay. But what you should be aiming for is that feeling of what can I do for me? Now I've been doing for others.

Speaker 3: 6:50

I've been checking all those boxes which were things that I had to do. Things like maybe you had to go to college, maybe you had to get a job, you needed to buy a house, you needed to get a car. All of those things are things that we feel like we have to do. All of those things are things that we feel like we have to do and it has within it expectations and responsibilities. So now that you've reached midlife, you may not feel like how to do stuff for you, because you've been checking boxes back just a teeny bit and say what would I have done when I was 20 if I could have? Or what have I been doing or saying if only I had the time? So you just have to insert yourself in there and say I'm not checking another box, I'm going to look at myself now.

Speaker 1: 7:39

Shine the light inward. We spend so much time as parents shining light outward for our kids and even our partner and spouses, if we have them. We just kind of shine out and like, okay, if I shine it inward, what do I see? I think is what you're saying and how does that look? So, given all that we were talking about here, as we age, it can be a big motivating period. What's your biggest motivator in life right now, in the work that you're doing?

Speaker 3: 8:04

The biggest motivator for me is seeing people get connected. I felt like for a while I was talking into the wind. When I was talking about mentorship, I decided to look at it from a real, developmental, psychological perspective, whereas most people look at us and, oh, I just need to get a mentor. I'm going to go grab information from some nameless, faceless person and I thought, ooh, that sounds yucky. Like it feels like a burden on both sides, like I better go find the mentor that's going to change my life and if I don't, I failed somehow. And what a burden it is for the mentor who's now expected to. Ooh, somebody came and asked me to be their mentor. I better make their life better. So the thing that gets me going is seeing that in fact, we are all built to want to give back, and that's something that most people think. When you think, well, if I'm working with a mentor, most people think I can't even imagine what they're getting out of it. That's why we think we'll be burdening someone if we ask them for advice or guidance, and I was so shocked to find out that that wasn't the case, that in fact, mentors get to feel like their footprint is a little bit deeper that they got to make. It's not quite, people do feel a legacy, but they get to feel that they themselves have such value that somebody else wants that and that they internalize it and keep it going. And I'll give you an example of that.

Speaker 3: 9:29

I was speaking with the 2012 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry. His name is Bob Lefkowitz, and I was talking to him and he said to me I wondered why I became a Nobel Prize winner. And I was thinking to myself well, because you're super smart. And he said I'm not smarter than everybody else. But I couldn't figure out why. Why me, and why did I know other people who did so? What he did, which was really kind of cool, was he made something called the Legacy Tree and he put his mentors above him and he put himself there and then the couple of mentees that he knew of below him, so it looked like Ancestrycom, except mentors instead of family members, and he published it in a journal. And then he went to a conference a couple of weeks later and somebody came up to him and he said hey, bob, I'm six degrees Lefkowitz. And he said what do you mean? And he said well, I've been working six degrees away from you, five people working between you and me, and Bob said, well, what are you working on? And he told him, and he heard his own words and his own work six degrees away and he said it was the most meaningful thing to him outside of having his kids and being married.

Speaker 3: 10:39

And that's what we're craving is knowing that a piece of us it's kind of like a flame, a torch being passed makes it to somebody else who says I'm here because of this. The wheel didn't stop turning with us and I've been able to see that over and over with people. And it can be a recipe card that keeps a family tradition going every holiday, like Thanksgiving, the same meal If you walk into any traditional experience within your family. This is how religion gets passed down, values and culture. And this is what we crave. And to me, being able to see people get that satisfaction and know they got that. It's no joke, like Christmas morning every time. It's just fabulous.

Speaker 1: 11:28

Yeah, it's that desire to have kind of what we know and share, kind of live on is what I think you think you're you're alluding to. What you're talking about is like all right. So if that's the case, I know people are listening and we're going to be talking about mentors and mentorship, but they may be having their certain ideas of what that is Like. They like, oh, I know what a mentor is, or I know what mentorship is, but what is it and what isn't it in your experience?

Speaker 3: 11:55

That's a great question and I write about it in my book because most people get it wrong. They'll say, well, I'm a coach and a mentor, I'm a teacher and a mentor, and that's not true. So let me break it down. Mentorship is made up of five things, and it's kind of like if you were to make up brownies and leave out the sugar to look like brownies, but it wouldn't taste like it. So mentorship requires these five things and you leave one out and it's not mentorship. It might be close, but it's not.

Speaker 3: 12:31

So mentorship is the need to have somebody who's feeling generative and they want to give something of themselves to someone else. That can be tradition, culture, values, skill, expertise, whatever that is to somebody else. And then somebody has to want that. So you could say, hey, I want a mentor, I'm going to go ask you. I'm going to say, hey, jay, I'd like some information. You're like I don't even know about that or I'm not good at that, I don't want to give that. That's not mentorship right off the bat. The next thing is it has to be intrinsically motivated. So if I said to you would you like to go volunteer at a soup kitchen, you might say that makes me feel so good I would do that. And then you're on your way to the soup kitchen and I say, hey, hey, instead of going right, turn left and just go volunteer your time at Starbucks giving out food and beverage to hungry, thirsty people there, well, that is a totally different feeling because you're extrinsically motivated at Starbucks. And when you're in the work setting and someone says you must go have a mentor and you must be a mentor, that's an extrinsically motivated experience. That's a Starbucks experience. You're not a mentor, you're an employee who's being told to do something extra. You also have to have a meaningful connection. I have to like you and you have to like me.

Speaker 3: 13:45

If we don't like each other, I hear people saying well, how to deal with your toxic mentor? Well, if you have somebody toxic, they're not your mentor. Just say that is not my mentor, I'm not going to try to figure a way to work it out with them. They're not my mentor. You also need to have trust, and this goes both ways. If I'm a mentor, I need to trust that my mentee isn't going to steal my idea and run away and start their own company or something like that. We need to trust that they are taking my information and moving the wheel forward, like Bob Lefkowitz found happened with his work and the people that were six degrees away from him.

Speaker 3: 14:24

Also, if you're a mentee, you need to feel like that person, that you can be vulnerable and trust them. That if you open up and say I don't know something, they're not going to be like oh, no promotion for you. Or oh, I'm going to go tell everybody in town that you don't know how to do this. That is a really key thing for most people is the trust. And finally, you need a goal.

Speaker 3: 14:47

So if you are mentoring, you need to be able. It's different than friendship. You don't just chit chat and eat chips on the couch. You need to have a goal and it could be a one-off or it could be a lifetime of ever-changing goals. So that is what mentorship is and it's really organic. It happens all the time you are mentoring. For example, right now you are a modern mentor. That's what podcasting is. You're out there in a way that you are giving out a bit of your expertise and experience and wisdom to others, and those that download that and listen are the mentees. So people do this all the time. They just don't even know they're doing it.

Speaker 1: 15:29

When you said there were five components to mentorship, I was like, oh, I don't have this right. Right, I like my brain immediately went to what I thought it was instead of like all those different components. So it's helpful to see those different ones. I'm curious in your experience as a mentor I'm sure you've mentored people, since you have a program what's one thing you've learned about yourself through mentorship?

Speaker 3: 15:50

I've learned that I have more value than I ever thought I did. We all take for granted, myself included, all the stuff that I learned, and when, for me, I took it in, I just thought, well, that's something I know and do. It isn't until I see the value through somebody else's eyes that, wow, this makes a difference in my life, that I then can see that value in a new way in myself. It really makes me feel like I hold a special value and it's an emotional feeling for me. I've heard that from others too. I interviewed 45 mentors about their experience and I have never seen a general cry before from the Marines or the person who invented mass tort law ball like a baby talking about what it meant to him to be a mentor. It's so deep when you feel that you have value and you create value for others.

Speaker 1: 16:51

That's such an important piece because I think there are people probably listening who are thinking I don't have anything to offer. But I think you would probably beg to differ and say everybody has something to offer to somebody else.

Speaker 3: 17:03

Let me give you some examples, and I put this in the book because most people say I don't have anything or I'm not in a hierarchical situation. So our world operates by grandmas. In many ways they are the ones who have been passing down religion, culture and family values for centuries. They're the ones who, every Thanksgiving, when I get out my Thanksgiving meal, it's my grandmother's handwritten note cards. That is mentorship. Most of us don't think of that. We pull this stuff out of the closet every holiday and we decorate our houses. Why this makes us feel good. It's culture, it's values. This makes us feel good. It's culture, it's values. So that is powerful. If you think about what do you want, in the end you're never going to remember an accountant. You're going to remember the feelings that you get at holidays and family gatherings and when you engage in whatever your religious thing is, in whatever way or capacity. That's what you're going to remember. But the other thing is we have lateral mentors in our lives. Those are the people that, if we look to our left and we look to our right, we're engaging with all the time, and an example that I give of that that is an everyday thing is I was in graduate school at Fordham and we had a externship and one of my fellow students called me and this was when we had like cell phones that it costs like $10 for a phone call.

Speaker 3: 18:29

It was a long time ago and she called and she said I know you how to do Kappa statistics. I need to know this now because I have a project due and they can't know I don't know how to do it. So she said have a project due and they can't know I don't know how to do it. So she said can you teach me and guide me? So I did. I taught her how to do that on the phone. At that moment that was me mentoring her. I stepped out of my friend role, my student role, and I became a mentor to her. I helped her to incorporate that into what she was doing and do her project.

Speaker 3: 19:04

How many times has anybody been a student and helped somebody else out or asked somebody for help? You were being mentored or you were mentoring. We think it has to be some grand gesture. How often have you had a neighbor come over and say hey, I need help navigating some new part of this. I just moved in. I need to learn how to navigate this neighborhood. That's mentoring.

Speaker 3: 19:27

If you're new in the workplace and you are frightened. There was Irene Yacobus who was the lead in the mission of Mercury and she went and moved from that NASA position to IBM Totally brilliant. She got into her new workplace and said oh, I don't know the lay of the land here, it's so different from my former workplace. She sought out a mentor and said can you give me the lay of the land? And they ended up staying in contact for years with the other person mentoring her through. But these little things we slough off and we don't give ourselves credit for mentoring others and we also don't credit others with mentoring us. So we just start to leave these things as taking them for granted and that does not allow us to feel really amazing about it. Have that emotional give back that we're looking for.

Speaker 1: 20:19

So for those of you who are listening like that, like start going through your brain right now to see where were pieces where I may have mentored somebody, just like Deborah said. I think that's important. Like take a minute to do that right now. Press pause if you have to, even just to kind of figure out Ooh, how is this living out my life? And then the next piece is I love the part about the grandma's, the known as kind of passing things down. You talk a lot about in the mentor project, like how we can solve problems together generationally, and so that's to me that's like the perfect example of how you solve a problem generationally is like your grandmother wrote a recipe. You have it. How to do Thanksgiving. That solved a challenge that you may have had if you've never done it before. But what kind of things does the mentor project do and the type of things that your mentors tackle? I think it'd be important for my audience to know.

Speaker 3: 21:10

So what we've found is that students and we serve students kindergarten through university and that could be a PhD people don't know what they don't know. Myself included, I don't even know what I don't know, and it's sometimes it takes being around mentors, not that you say, hey, I would like you to be my mentor, but we'll put together panels so people can hear what people have to say. And they'll say I didn't even consider that as a job option or I didn't even know, wow, that exists, I want to do that. So we offer that as an opportunity that people can get to learn about what astronauts do, what people we have a seven-time Nobel Prize nominee. How does she navigate world peace? Like, how do people do these sorts of things? Because most of these things are so far from our everyday life that unless you've heard somebody talk about it, you wouldn't know how to incorporate it. That is one way. Talk about it, you wouldn't know how to incorporate it. That is one way. The other way that we get to that is we say, hey, let's see what need is out there.

Speaker 3: 22:09

Now, during the pandemic, we had all sorts of kids that were little, who were at home and they had nothing to do and they were at the poor parents. I felt so bad for all the parents with really young kids, because to entertain a kid without stimulating them from the outside is really hard. So we brought in world-class puppeteer and she taught kids online how to make puppets from like garbage around the house. That went along with stories, and it ended up that she was in libraries all over in laundromats and this ended up becoming something that was a pretty big deal, because people think that little kids don't need mentors, and they do.

Speaker 3: 22:52

So really what we do is we offer an opportunity for people to learn what they don't know from people who know something and then, if they so desire, they can have one-on-one mentorship or even group mentorship with these mentors.

Speaker 3: 23:09

So most people start out in a group listening to somebody talk and they'll say that person I want to meet with and then they get to meet one-on-one with them and that really helps students to figure out what kind of line of work they want to go in. We've had tons of jobs that have been. People have been able to be recommended for jobs and internships, universities We've had students patent with us. We've had students do peer-reviewed journal article author submissions, which were accepted in high school, which I didn't do some of that level in my PhD programs. So I'm very and so we've also learned that students have a much bigger capacity than we give them credit for. So that's really how we do it. We try to meet the students where their needs are, but really we're driving it from the mentor's desire to give back and how and where they like to do that.

Speaker 1: 24:04

All right. So if somebody's listening and they're like, oh, this is interesting to me, how would they become a mentor in your program?

Speaker 3: 24:11

So you just click the contact us button, you say, hey, I'd like to learn more about becoming a mentor, and it's super easy, it's not hard and if you want to become a mentee you click the button it's free and you fill out the paperwork and you become a mentee. Becoming a mentor is tricky though, because we do background checks on everybody. They have to go through a pretty rigorous vetting because they are going to be with minors in some cases, so it's pretty rigorous. But for mentees they just come in. If they're a minor, they have to have a guardian also sign the paperwork, but then they're off, they go.

Speaker 1: 24:45

I love that. What is there an age range with the mentees?

Speaker 3: 24:49

It's kindergarten through university, so we have people working on their PhD dissertations and we also have kids who are as young as kindergarten we have, which is kind of cool. Just pretty recently we had a nine year old who came to a talk and that was kind of young for him. He was like a nine-year-old amongst all adults and he was so interested in astrophysics and now he meets regularly with an astrophysicist who teaches at a university level and, you know, has written 21 books on what would happen if there wasn't a moon. But this kid's ready. It's really wild. That's the exciting thing is to find that person who needs this and then the mentor is right there, excited to give what they know that's amazing.

Speaker 1: 25:35

I love that and for folks who are listening, like if your kids are still in high school or going into college or in college now, like this is, this is what you're looking for is to get your child connected to somebody in the areas of where they're passionate about, and so I love that so much. You talked about being able to learn something new. Right, that's the mentor-mentee thing. It's like what's something you've always wanted to learn but haven't?

Speaker 3: 25:57

I'd like to learn more AI. I feel like I'm not as good at that as I could be. The thing is, I'm now around so many experts that I'm thirsty to learn so much of what they know. I'd love to learn more about writing fiction. I'd love to learn more about art. I'd love to learn more about physics. I have a lot of desires to keep learning. I am, I've realized, an eternal mentee. I'm always seeking guidance from others.

Speaker 1: 26:30

And I think that's another important point right as soon as we stop doing something, as soon as we stop being eager to learn something new, that's when life starts to go downhill. I talk about this frequently on my show is. This is like an important opportunity for everyone to reconsider. Are you continuing to figure out what you want to do? How do you want to do it? What do you want to learn? How can you make it work? There's so much open to us in this stage in life that circles back to where we were at the very beginning. At the top of the conversation is the door is open and the things are limitless. I'm curious. You have I mean, you've spoken to lots of different folks. You have lots of different types of mentors. How do you get them to do it for free?

Speaker 3: 27:12

People ask me to become a mentor. We went from people told me no one is ever going to want to sign up for this because they think that everyone's extrinsically motivated. But why do people go to a soup kitchen and not volunteer their time at Starbucks? Or why don't people demand to get paid if they are going to do work at a soup kitchen? They don't, they want to do it. We all want to do it and so people think it's different if it is mentorship and they think that because they think that someone else is getting a leg up and, like you, should get paid for that. But in fact, that is not the truth we all have.

Speaker 3: 27:50

When we see a win for a mentee, we feel the win just like they do, and the only way I can describe it to people that means that people won't take, don't want money is have you ever given a gift to somebody and they opened it up and it was just what they were looking for? Don't you feel such pride and joy in that? That's how a mentor feels when somebody says, hey, I got ahead some way, maybe I got an internship. Or oh, I learned more about astrophysics. Or oh, do you see what I made when I did this puppetry. This brings such joy. They don't want money, they want more hours. We all do. It's like you're a podcaster People who blog and podcast. Why do you not just do one and say, oh, I did it. It's because you're fueled by your own and seeing that it's making progress or helping others.

Speaker 1: 28:46

And also, I learn tons of stuff every time I talk to somebody new, which is amazing For the person who's out there saying, well, I'm retired now or I'm not in, I never was in corporate or I never had a job, I'm a full-time parent right. I think they're thinking that's hierarchical mentorship, but there's lateral mentorship too, right? Isn't that what the mentor project is all about? Is that correct? Both? Okay, tell me more.

Speaker 3: 29:11

So lateral is the kind hierarchical is the kind we've always thought of. Right, that's the kind where there's somebody above you and you're trying to climb up the ladder. Now, if I have any of the mentors who are working one-on-one with a mentee, that's hierarchical. Now here's where it's different, though, and we did not expect this. Lateral mentoring is when you are not somebody's, you're not the boss or you're not above somebody. You are at the same level and you're helping somebody that fellow student. That's lateral mentoring. We had these Fridays where people would get together on Zoom. We had no idea that all the mentors would start mentoring each other, so all the mentors would come on and then we had two of them started a company. We've had people co-author books, co-author articles, go off and do all kinds of projects together, and that is lateral mentoring. And so that was shocking. But when you look at lateral mentoring, that is the most explosive kind of mentorship.

Speaker 3: 30:12

Our country was founded by a bunch of experts in different areas who came together and formed our country. Those were all lateral mentors. No one was the boss, no one was the expert, everyone was. We also see that in tech and entrepreneurship. If you're an entrepreneur, you don't have a boss. Who are you going to look up to? You need to look to your left and to your right. If you're a hardware engineer, you're looking to a software engineer, and that's what is pretty cool. So anybody can do that.

Speaker 1: 30:42

I love it. I love it With all the things that you've done. You talk about the mentor project. You have your book. We'll talk a little bit about that in a second. What's been the most defining moment for you in this past? We'll call it 12 months this past year.

Speaker 3: 30:55

I think the most defining moment for me in the past year was doing the book, because I actually had to write down all of the things and put pen to paper that are actually research-based and that had been swimming in my head, that I talk about with people but that I didn't have on paper. And that was a defining moment because I really had to look at mentorship in a complete and new way and it isn't all captured in the book. I could do a whole nother book on lateral mentoring. It's really, it was. That was a defining moment for me in the book. I could do a whole nother book on lateral mentoring. It's really, it was. That was a defining moment for me in the past 12 months.

Speaker 1: 31:30

And that goes. It's perfect. It's like you shared right. You were passionate about something. You shared it right In that. In a nutshell, that's mentorship. There's other components to it that people have to. We talked about the five things before, but if people were interested in your book, it's the Mentorship Edge and I believe it's available on Amazon right now that people if they want it and it's audio also.

Speaker 3: 31:53

A lot of people like audio because they can listen to it in the car, and if you're a podcast lover like myself, I love books on tape, or whatever they call them audio books.

Speaker 1: 32:02

Now, I think the best part about your book is it's all about creating maximum impact, and I think that's the opportunity for empty nesters. You've had so much impact on your kids. How can you take what you've learned, what you've taught, and create impact for others now?

Speaker 3: 32:18

Yes, and I'll tell you, at least for me I don't know how it is for everybody else my kids look at me differently, knowing that I've been doing all of this and I have always been mom the mom that drives them to baseball, the mom that, like, makes sure there's peanut butter sandwiches in the car while they're going there, and all of these things like making sure that things happen in the house and with the family. But they're now able to see what I do outside of that, and that is part of parenting, in a way. The continued hey, see that this is what we're looking for you to do is some of this.

Speaker 1: 32:57

I'm jumping inside that you brought that up, because that's just such an important piece of this time in life is be an example of what's possible. Your kids have left home. They're going off to figure out their own path. Your path doesn't stop right Like you could totally change it and do something different and be an example of what's possible for your kids, continually in your fifties, in your sixties, in your seventies, even in your eighties and beyond. I fully believe that, a hundred percent, so I'm so glad that you brought that up Before I let you go. One of the things I always like to ask folks is if you had to have a motto for your life or your emptiness life, what would it be?

Speaker 3: 33:35

Look left, look right. You're looking at a connection who's either you're going to help or who they're going to help you.

Speaker 1: 33:42

Look left, look right. Great advice. I love that Kids hear it when they go into college too, right when they're sitting in orientation look left, look right. Some people will be here, some people won't, but these are your people and figure out who they are.

Speaker 3: 33:55

Exactly.

Speaker 1: 33:56

That never ends. So good, so good. Debra, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been an amazing conversation.

Speaker 3: 34:03

Thank you for having me. It's really been delightful.