Season 2, episode 2: The Hidden Ship // Thursday, October 15, 2020

This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland, California to Hamilton, Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

Caroline: It's incredible how many crises we're all living in the same time. What's happening right now is a bit of a reset in the sense that we have a chance to rethink our work lives, our leisure lives, and the impact that it has on the environment. And so I do hope that we come out of it better by rethinking how we do things like how we work, how we commute, how we live.

Laura: I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, this idea that as terrible as 2020 has been, maybe it’s also a chance to reset. To get our priorities straight, to learn how to live better.

This isn’t just theoretical for me. If you’ve been listening, then you know that season one of Shelter in Place was an exploration of that reset; in season 2 we’re actually doing it. 

But this story isn’t just about me. It’s about you, and the people on your street, and the people across the country you’ve never met. Like it or not, we’re all on this journey together. Somehow we have to find our way home. So in each episode, I’m bringing you stories that can guide us. Stories that might even bring us together if we let them.

If you’re just joining us, I suggest going back to the beginning of season 2, starting with the prologue to this Pandemic Odyssey. You might even want to go back to season 1.

In the last episode I told you about our very first day of the journey, when we faced the Cyclops of Las Vegas. But to really understand why we left in the first place, we need to go way back to July, when we were wrapping up season one of Shelter in Place, getting ready to take a much-needed break and spend a week camping with our kids in the Trinity Alps of Northern California.

After four months and 100 daily episodes, we were ready to relax. 

Except that we couldn’t, because with school starting just a week after our camping trip, we needed to solve an impossible puzzle. 

In the original Odyssey, there’s a moment when Odysseus and his men arrive on a land where the people there didn’t sleep so they could work two jobs: one shepherding sheep and one herding cattle. 

Being a working parent in this pandemic has felt a bit like that; if only we could do without sleep, we could work and be good parents--or, as the case may be, administrative assistants managing our kids’ Zoom schedules. We tried, but about the only thing we could say for our efforts was that our kids now knew how to search for Kung Fu Panda videos on YouTube, which they did whenever we weren’t hovering over them. 

We needed help, and there were no easy or obvious solutions. 

Even so, I didn’t panic--not at first. Odysseus didn’t make his journey alone, and we didn’t either. We had relationships sixteen years strong--Sunday night dinners with families at our church, coffee dates and walks around the lake with other parents at our school, a neighborhood babysitting co-op where families watched each other’s kids for points. In over 8 years of being parents, we’ve almost never had to buy clothes or shoes; friends and neighbors dropped off hand-me-downs on our front porch. We live in a neighborhood wehre people say hello from across the street and know each other’s names. Even in seasons when we were squeezed financially, we didn’t feel like our life was lacking. We were rich in relationships. Usually that was enough to give us a sense of abundance. 

When COVID-19 came to California in March, the crew on our ship got smaller. There was no more babysitting co-op, no more dinners with friends, no more coffee in the kitchen. School and church went online

But as summer came, things began to open up. When our school district announced that our kids wouldn’t be going back to school in-person, there was a lot of talk in our community about helping each other out. 

The week before we went camping, I spent hours on the phone with a dozen different parents from our school. Most of them liked the idea of forming a distance learning co-op--but got stuck in the details. Our family had two kids, an added burden most one-kid families didn’t want to take on. Others were nervous about our 3-year-old going back to preschool, a decision we’d made out of desperation because our house was small, and distance learning to the backdrop of shrieks and photo bombing was not a great combination. There were concerns about equity and behavioral issues and differences in parenting styles. 

Families who could afford it had one parent stop working to watch the kids full-time. Others hired a tutor. Those lucky enough to have extended family in the area solicited help from grandparents. When a good friend suggested that maybe we should spend this season across the country closer to our family, we cast out the idea immediately. Even in a pandemic, Oakland was home. We didn’t want to be anywhere else. 

We left for our camping trip no closer to a solution. We spent the week hiking in the mountains, playing in the river, and sitting around the campfire obsessing about school. During this pandemic we had weathered job loss and cancelled family visits and even watched our plans to take a sabbatical year slip away--all without losing hope. But the prospect of doing distance learning alone brought a creeping panic that was new. Our sense of abundance had dropped away. For the first time in the pandemic, we felt alone.

In the Odyssey, there’s a moment where angry giants destroy Odysseus’s ships. One moment it seems like everything is fine; the next all escape routes have been destroyed--except one, a single ship hiding in a cove. It’s not a terrible metaphor for those final weeks in Oakland. It felt like the hands of fate had swept us away. We didn’t see the changes coming, and they happened fast. 

So I’m slowing that story down a little, and splitting it into two parts. This part is the story of how we lost the ships we were counting on, and finally found the hidden ship that would allow us to set sail. 

To help me tell this story, I’m turning to a couple of guides who have thought a lot about why we do the things we do when we lose our footing. They’re some of the world’s leading experts on the topic.

Caroline: I'm Caroline Roux. I'm an associate professor of marketing at Concordia university in Montreal, and I'm also the Concordia university research chair in psychology of resource scarcity.  

Kelly: My name is Kelly Goldsmith, and I'm an associate professor of marketing at the Owen graduate school of management at Vanderbilt University. We did not invent scarcity research, like Alan Andreasen and other authors had been working on this type of thing for decades. So typically they focused on more objective forms of scarcity, like chronic poverty and socioeconomic status. But we did come of age during a real flourishing of interest in the topic of scarcity. I like to tell people I study what happens when everyday people don't have access to everyday things. 

Laura: What happens when everyday people don’t have access to everyday things. Like, say, when two working parents who used to send their kids to school are suddenly faced with the challenge of working and caring for their kids--and maybe even teaching them a little. But unlike the mythical men in the Odyssey, they can’t survive without sleep.

I first came across Caroline and Kelly’s research in season one, episode 41, which is titled “Giving When It Hurts.” I’ve thought about their research a lot lately, during this time when I’m reminded daily of what I don’t have. I wanted to see if they could help me to find my way back to a feeling of abundance--or if not abundance, at least well-tempered hope. So last month, we all connected over the phone. 

Caroline and Kelly have been working together since 2009, and in that time they’ve become friends.

Kelly: Working with Caroline is a delight. She is the yin to my yang. She's whichever one is the good one, and I will be the bad one. When we showed that scarcity makes people more selfish, I was like, “yeah, that makes sense.” And Caroline was like, “no, no, no, not always. And we can reverse it, and let's have faith in people.” And I'm like, “why?”  

And I think some of our coolest results--maybe all of our coolest results--have come from a place where Caroline and I had different predictions or different perspectives that we brought to it, and trying to reconcile those perspectives led to some fun and some richer results. So I feel a sense of abundance in my heart and joy when I reflect on my collaborations with the lovely and talented professor Caroline Roux, and I hope you will collaborate forever.

Caroline: Oh ditto. All of this. 

Laura: Caroline and Kelly met when Caroline was a graduate student at Kellogg, where Kelly was teaching.

Caroline: I stalked Kelly for a while. No, actually I'm half serious about this one. So during my PhD studies, I ended up at Kellogg, where Kelly was a fabulous assistant professor there at the time. And a lot of the stuff that she was researching was all stuff that I was super interested in. But being an assistant professor, she was also super busy. So I  had to be a bit insistent at the beginning to try to get her to work with me. And then I finally managed to convince her, and it's been wonderful ever since.

Kelly: Yeah, I remember it differently. I feel like it was love at first sight. Caroline came to Kellogg and she was well-trained, which was excellent. And she was the first graduate student that I had ever worked with, because I was pretty early in my career at Kellogg. And so I think I was a little gun shy about taking on a mentorship role. But I soon got over my fears because she was so fantastic, and it's been love ever since. It's been great. 

Just to brag on Caroline a little bit, she had an excellent dissertation. Her dissertation was her 2015 Journal of Consumer Research paper, which is titled “On the Psychology of Scarcity.” And what she showed through a series of experiments was that people with scarcity on their minds  were subsequently more selfish in their decision making. They were really pursuing their own self interest.  We show that over and over again in this paper. 

But then Caroline really flips the script and says, “okay, well, if it's true that people are pursuing their own self interest when they have scarcity on their minds, then there's times when our self-interest is benefited by actually collaborating and helping others.”

So I think that paper kind of starts off in a dark place, that scarcity increases selfishness, but then it comes back around to say, “look, it doesn't always have to be that way.” It's those people who have scarcity on their minds that are actually excellent at identifying and responding to these win-win opportunities when you help yourself by helping others. 

Laura: Kelly has experienced this firsthand. 19 years ago, long before she met Caroline, she was a contestant on the reality TV show Survivor. Kelly did a Ted talk about this, and it’s fantastic. I’ll include in my show notes for today. 

I remember those early seasons of Survivor. There was a time when the show was a national obsession. I wasn’t a die hard fan, but when I think back on the episodes I saw, what I remember is how ruthlessly competitive the contestants all were. 

But Kelly said that behind the scenes, it was just the opposite. Everyone was bending over backwards to be nice to each other. They knew that their survival on the show depended on their teammates being willing to help them. 

It’s exactly what Caroline and Kelly have found in their research: when people realize that they can help themselves by helping others, they’re far more generous.

But Caroline and Kelly came to this research from very different places. 

Kelly: My dad's like a world's expert on coaching for behavioral change and leadership coaching, and so on. So I. I did not grow up with resource scarcity. And I said to him where I grew up was really nice. Okay. So I said it was, isn't it funny, like a girlfriend went to Santa Fe, started studying resource scarcity and he said, I'll tell you what, Kelly, no matter how much you had growing up, you never felt like you had enough.

Oh man, that is a good burn dad, because I think, I think there is, there's something true to that.

Caroline is Canadian, and she describes her family growing up as blue collar. She says that even though they didn’t have a lot of money, her parents never made her feel like they didn’t have enough. Caroline and Kelly both said that they didn’t go into this line of research because of their upbringing, but it’s shaped the way they see the world now. 

They started collaborating in the wake of the 2008 recession, when there were daily reminders of resource scarcity. 

Kelly: It just felt like you couldn't turn your head from one side to the other in a grocery store and not be reminded of what the world was running out of. Like the world is running out of ozone or corn or bees or various commodities, but also with the recession, there was a lot of news articles you'd see about job insecurity and financial insecurity. 

There's this notion of objective scarcity, which I think is really what comes to mind when most people think about scarcity. And that's when you actually are running out of something that you need. So if your car is running out of gas or your cell phone is running out of battery, that is objective scarcity. Right. But there's also this notion of subjective scarcity. And I think that's the realm that Caroline and I have spent a little bit more time trying to understand and subjective scarcity, it actually can exist independent of your resource level.

So maybe what you have is totally fine, but you can still be made to feel like you don't have enough. So that was really our interest is how being exposed to these everyday reminders of resource scarcity affected the way people thought and how they behaved.

Laura: This distinction--between objective and subjective scarcity--really helped me to put my own experience in context. Because even though the pandemic brought our family some objective scarcity, we weren’t in danger of being out on the street. We had food to eat. Our basic needs were met, partly because we had a community that supported us. And because of that support, we still had a sense of abundance. 

It was only when our perception of that support changed, when it seemed like everyone else had figured out a solution for a problem that we were still trying to solve, that we suddenly felt like we didn’t have enough. 

Kelly: It's weird to say that anything about the pandemic is interesting, because that makes it sound positive when it is unambiguously not positive. But I think for us, who have been speculating on how these factors related to scarcity might interactively combine and play out in the marketplace, it is interesting to actually be living through this phenomenon where we get to see what happens in practice. 

Caroline: It's a weird topic to study sometimes. But what COVID-19 did, interestingly, is it brought together these two types of scarcity and clashed them really hard. And it's funny because Kelly and I did write a paper where we put together these two types of scarcity and came up with all these interesting potential research questions. And then they came to life a year later in this crazy situation. 

Kelly: When the pandemic started, if you looked at any of the news media and the articles that were coming out, the pictures that they were showing of the stores with the empty shelves and no hand sanitizer, and “only take one,” those pictures they were showing and those articles were almost identical to some of the stimuli that we used in our experiments.

When you are exposed to those types of scarcity reminders, those empty shelves, those “one per customer” kind of limitations. people are motivated to pursue their self interest. And I think that helps explain why we saw what appeared to be irrational hoarding behavior among consumers, at least here in the United States.

Caroline: People were in this state of mind of scarcity, like “the world is falling apart, I have to hoard things!” But I also think there were  people that were prompted by the fact that the shelves were getting empty. Like I know in my case I would find myself in the grocery store--as a scarcity researcher--I would see, like, empty shelves of pasta and toilet paper and be like, “I need to buy some,” even though rationally I knew I didn't, and rationally I didn't have to do it. Like, I should know better than most people that are friends eat in this grocery store, but I just get sucked in like everybody else, which shows how powerful all these things are. you almost feel like I should be immune to this at this point. Nope. Not at all.

Laura: When the pandemic began, I did not hoard toilet paper or pasta. But looking back on the weeks leading up to the school year, I think something similar was going on. The distance learning pod shelves were bare, and we felt like we were the only ones with empty cupboards. Of course the problem of needing someone to help out with the kids was real--but it was the perception that we were the last ones to figure it out that kept us up at night and made us feel like our ship was sinking. 

I asked Caroline and Kelly if there was any way to snap ourselves out of that scarcity mindset, to stop feeling like we don’t have enough. 

Kelly: So if priming scarcity is getting people to reflect on times that they didn't have enough or imagine what it would be like to not have enough, priming abundance would be the opposite. So getting them to reflect on times they had plenty--which a lot of people, when they hear us present, they say, “well, can’t you just prime abundance?” 

There’s a woman named Ming Zhou that we're colleagues with, and she's out of John Hopkins. And her and vlad Griskevicius as well have looked at what happens when you prime abundance. But what Vlad would predominantly tell you--and he's really tried to do this a lot, like priming abundance to turn off a scarcity mindset--he would say that here in the United States, even among people that don't have a ton of money, we have a general mindset of abundance because we are accustomed when we walk into the store, there's 50,000 skews for us to choose from. Like we are used to living in so much that making us feel more abundance is really hard. Whereas making us feel like we're experiencing scarcity is really easy because that's so threatening to us--again, because our default here in the United States, if not most of the Western world, is this mindset of abundance. We don't often think about that reality, but it's true. 

But I will say one thing that should work is activating gratitude. I'm a little hesitant to recommend gratitude manipulations, because they're like the penicillin of social psychology. They do everything. They make you happier. They improve your behavior. You sleep better. So I don't want to be the 900th person to recommend, you know, writing down three things every day in your gratitude journal. We have never actually empirically validated that gratitude manipulations can successfully kill a scarcity mindset. 

But that said, I think there's a lot of good empirical data to suggest that that really should work. Knowing what we know about scarcity, those types of gratitude, journaling or reflecting exercises should help alleviate a sense of scarcity. Because really oftentimes when we're asked to write about what we're grateful for, we're not looking inwards, we're looking outwards and we're thinking about what other people have done for us, or if you're a religious person, you might think about, you have the gifts that God has given you, et cetera. And I think that shift in focus from looking at the internal and your own bank account and what you have versus don't have, to looking at the external and thinking about essentially what other people or, you know, divine forces have given to you--that can really activate a sense of abundance that can meaningfully help cancel out some of that scarcity threat. 

Laura: For years, I’ve had false starts with gratitude. I’ll try gratitude journaling for a little while, and then I’ll get busy or distracted and forget about it. But talking to Caroline and Kelly motivated me to give it another try. And so far, it’s stuck. 

It’s easy for me to feel like I don’t have enough. As Kelly said, I’m an American, used to a life of abundance. I just came from one of the wealthiest cities in the world, where even when you’re doing fine there’s always someone else who is doing better. It’s been good for me to start and end each day making lists of what I’m grateful for. It reminds me to look outward. It reminds me of how lucky I am just to be alive, to see the sunshine or rain, to have clean air to breathe. It helps me to not take those things for granted. 

Caroline:  Gratitude makes you recognize what you have, and I think that’s the problem with scarcity mindset is that you’re so focused on what you don't have, and gratitude helps recenter you. 

Letting go of social comparison also helps and it's not an easy ask. But if you always compare yourself to  your friends or your family members or Instagram influencers that look like they have the better lifestyle, the better house, the better trips, then you're always going to feel like you have less. And so if you're able to shift that point of comparison.  it can help again, , we center you on. What do you have and how well you're doing right now, rather than what could be better 

But I also don't want to obfuscate the fact that people that do experience poverty need societal change and support. And our little tweaks and things like that won't be enough. Like we can’t tell someone living  below poverty, “Well, just be grateful and change your social comparison mindset, and life will be great.” Our research applies to a very specific kind of context and people. And I don't want that to become like, “Oh, here's the public policy solution. Let's just tell all poor people to be grateful. And like, we don't have to ride them welfare checks anymore.” So that's something else important to keep in mind.

Laura: Both Kelly and Caroline were careful to distinguish themselves from poverty researchers. You can’t solve poverty or global hunger through gratitude. But that doesn’t mean they have nothing to do with each other.

If my view of the world is one of scarcity, then my focus is always on what I don’t have, or what someone else has that’s better. But if I can focus instead on what I have to be grateful for, then I’m in a better place to start identifying the kind of win-win solutions that Caroline and Kelly are talking about. Solutions that will make me more generous to those in need.

Kelly: I have twins. They're five years old, and they're always making comparisons to each other. Like if I say, “I love you, Avery,” then my son's like, “well, you don't love me.” Like literally 500 times a day, this happens. So I like to frequently remind them that comparison is the thief of joy. They do not understand this at the age of five, but I do think Caroline is right.

But I come at this from the perspective that social comparisons are inevitable. And Caroline's right. We can all try to tamp it down a little bit, take a social media diet or whatever. Psychologically, there are definite benefits. 

However, I'm never going to do it. I'm never going to get off Instagram. I'm never going to get off Facebook. I'm never going to go to LinkedIn. I'm never going to not check all of them before I go to bed. Or first thing when I wake up in the morning, right? That's just who I am.

So okay, if we're living in a world of people like me--which thank God we're not--but if we're living in a world where these social comparisons are inevitable, how can we still live our best lives even though we're constantly feeling a little bit less than due to these seemingly incessant social comparisons?

I've kind of adopted this mantra that scarcity is really just a goal with bad marketing. 

So when you're looking through your Instagram feed and feeling  jealousy or envy or feeling bad about yourself,  I try to get much more cognitive and clinical about it and say like, “okay, well, exactly what am I feeling bad about?” I tried to just pick one, and then just turn that into a goal. And that can kind of help undo that negative sentiment. Like, I haven't taken a vacation since my honeymoon in 2013.  I can say, “okay, well, what's holding me back from having a vacation?” If it's money, I can save money. If it's time, how can I make more time?

I would love to be able to do some empirical work that supports how can we take scarcity--which so many of us are going to inevitably experience a subjective sense of scarcity, if not objective scarcity or both--how can we take those everyday feelings of not having enough and actually turn them into a motivational force rather than something that's just detrimental to our sense of wellbeing?

Laura: What if Kelly is right? What if scarcity--that feeling that we don’t have enough--is actually just a goal with bad marketing? 

We came back from our camping trip no closer to a solution, but we tried to take Kelly’s advice. We identified the goal: we needed to find someone to be with our kids during the working hours--preferably someone who could help them with school. We did our best to quiet all of the other questions about how long our savings would last, or if forming a pod was equitable, or why the friends we thought we’d pair up with partnered with someone else. We tried to be open to the possibility that the solution to our problem might not be the one we’d gone looking for.

Caroline: It's incredible how many crises we're all living in the same time. What's happening right now is a bit of a reset in the sense that we have a chance to rethink our work lives, our leisure lives, and the impact that it has on the environment. And so I do hope that we come out of it better.

Kelly: Early in the pandemic and a lot of the press that I read, people used this word “reckoning,” like this could be a reckoning for us, which I thought was an odd and very Biblical word to be using in the popular press. But I think there's something to it. 

There's all this talk in the media about, you know, stimulating consumer spending and getting consumers out spending more, and “don't we need consumers to spend more to support the economy?” 

And as a scarcity researcher who has read a jillion papers that are designed around getting people to spend less and build up their savings, I'm thinking, “no, like we're not allowed to do that.” My early research was on goals and self control. And in that space you see tons of great academic work designed around promoting savings behavior and getting people to buy the cheapest thing and not overspend. So all of this popular press I'm reading that's talking about stimulating consumer spending and getting people to open their wallets, I'm like, “absolutely not. If what keeps the U S economy healthy is that the average American consumer couldn't afford a $600 emergency medical bill, that is not a healthy economy. There's lots of different things that keep this economy healthy, and the health of our economy should not mean crippling the individual American consumer to the point of debt, and to the point where every day it feels like they're in a scarcity mindset manipulation. 

So that's the kind of reckoning I'm really hoping for coming out of this pandemic. And that's a big ask, because I don't think historically our country has been set up that way. But I hope that moving forward, that's a goal that businesses and policy makers prioritize. So I think that's really important.  

I'm co-editing a special issue for the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research on the consumer response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And it's interesting because a lot of them looked at political ideology as a moderator. And if you look at this dependent variable, liberals respond the opposite of the conservatives. And if you look at this, liberals respond the opposite of the conservatives, and if you  put calorie counts on a menu, liberals respond the opposite of the conservatives.

And I think that transparency is good. I'm glad that people are feeling increasingly comfortable voicing their descent and dissatisfaction. But I also hope we can move towards better understanding and more compassion. There's so much polarization right now. Increasing polarization just does not feel sustainable to me for having an emotionally healthy country. So I hope that as these discussions progress, people are able to find new levels of tolerance and understanding that they can leverage to tamp down maybe some knee-jerk judgment, and to build a sense of understanding that we can use to carry us forward. 

Laura: As we’ve made this journey and cast the vision for season 2, the division Kelly is talking about came up a lot. We’ve seen it as we’ve driven across the country. We’ve even seen it in our own families. Sometimes it feels like the only thing we can all agree on is that we’re polarized. And that it’s not good. I think Kelly is right, that we can’t be an emotionally healthy country if we’re constantly pitted against each other.

I want to be clear here that I don’t think the answer is to ignore the past, or stop fighting against injustice, or silence our disagreements, or pretend that we don’t have them. We work out our identity both individually and globally by having those struggles and conversations. Working through disagreements and differences can make us wiser and more mature. It can give us more compassion for each other. It’s why you’ll hear a lot of different perspectives on Shelter in Place, including ones you might disagree with. 

It seems to me that the polarization we see so much of is just one more way that we’ve adapted a scarcity mindset. When we refuse to listen to the people we disagree with, our world gets very small. It becomes focused inward. There’s no room for the nuances and contradictions and paradoxes that make humanity so fascinating. We’re so busy thinking about protecting ourselves that we forget what we have to offer others.

But here’s the thing: that scarcity mindset is incredibly hard to break out of--even when we know better. Minutes before I recorded this episode, I left a message for my friend Jesselle, who is a leadership coach. I complained about how much I was struggling to get into a groove creatively. I blamed it on transition, on uncertainty, on not knowing when or if we’d go home. I tried to remember Jesselle’s advice to me, to quiet the naysaying voices, and to instead focus on possibility. 

It took going for a run in the woods and getting a little lost on a trail for me to realize what I’d just done. I was viewing my life from a place of scarcity. I was so focused on what I was missing that I forgot to be grateful for what I had. That the best way to help myself right now is to help someone else. To reach out to others and remind all of us that this transition--this pandemic--this year-- is a chance to reset--not just for me, but for all of us. 

What if we took a page from Survivor, and bent over backwards to be nice to each other, to help each other whenever we could, because we knew that our own survival depended on it? What if we really listened to each other--not because we thought it would change our minds, but because it might give us compassion in our perspective? What if we woke up every day looking for reasons to be grateful? 

When Odysseus finds that hidden ship, it’s not the end of the story. But it gives him what he needs to set sail.

There was no perfect solution to our distance learning problem. But after all of those conversations with other parents, there was one parent still in the conversation. She was a mom we didn’t know well. Our boys had gone to preschool together, and they’d hung out a couple of times. With only our two families in the mix, we’d have to hire someone to make the arrangement work. We were already spending down our savings sending our 3-year-old back to preschool. We felt anxious about spending more. 

But this other mom needed help, and so did we. And so she made us an offer that was nothing less than heroic: she offered to hire a teacher and pay more than us even though we had two kids to her one. She said it was worth it to her, because by helping us she was helping herself. 

So we said yes. We worked out the details and set up a table and chairs in our backyard. It wasn’t a perfect situation, but we’d found our hidden ship. It was humbling to be the recipients of that kind of generosity, but it also restored our sense of community, and made us hopeful that maybe things would be okay. We were still facing scarcity, but we felt grateful. 

I’m ending each episode of this season with an invitation. If you listen all the way to the end of the episode, you’ll also hear outtakes that I’ve included for the sole purpose of making you laugh, a little something to increase your sense of abundance. 

Today I want to extend an invitation I heard first from Kelly and Caroline: when you feel like you don’t have enough, pay attention to how it feels. Let that feeling be a call to action to help others by helping yourself. It’s not wrong to want to care for yourself--but it’s even better if you can do it in a way that will help someone else. And if you can’t come up with anything, then stop and make a list of what you’re grateful for. That simple exercise might just be the thing to get you back to a sense of abundance.

In the next episode, I’ll share the rest of this story--how it all fell apart. 

But before I go, I want to tell you about a podcast I found recently that I’m really enjoying. And I have to tell you, I’ve really needed it this week, when I’ve found myself obsessing over my work--and this episode specifically--because it’s not perfect. If you’re a bit of a perfectionist like me, then I think you’ll really like the award-winning podcast Brave, Not Perfect. 

It’s hosted by Reshma Saujani, the founder and CEO of Girls Who Code and the author of the international bestseller Brave, Not Perfect. Reshma’s TED Talk about teaching girls bravery instead of perfection has over 5 million views. 

Join Reshma as she shares her secrets about bravery and success…because she wants to help you fear less, fail more, and live bolder. Plus, she has some incredible conversations with other changemakers about their complex journeys, including people like Jameela Jamil, Hilary Clinton, and Melinda Gates.

You can tune in and subscribe to Brave, Not Perfect wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you check out her September 22 episode, you’ll even hear a shout out to Shelter in Place!

Finally, before I go, I want to thank a couple of our incredible supporters.

Carol Toninato, from banana bread to birthday cards to dollar store Christmas presents to driving hours in the car just to see us for a few hours, all my life you have reminded me that you’re in my boat. You’ve seen me through times of scarcity and abundance, and have witnessed me at my worst too many times to count. Thank you for loving me no matter what, and for always welcoming me home.

Teresa Miller, it’s a rare gift to have a friend who will walk through the dark moments of life with you and be willing to invite you into their own. Thank you for sharpening me when my instincts are getting dull, for forgiving me when I blunder through friendship, and for encouraging me through it all. You poets are the prophets of our time, and I’m thrilled to include a link in these show notes to celebrate you winning the National Poetry Series. Thanks for giving us something good to celebrate in 2020.