Just As Well, The Women's Health Podcast - How To Feel Confident + Connected in a Changing Work World

Episode Date: March 9, 2021

One message that’s come out loud and clear from the pandemic is the importance of other people for our health and happiness. And just as you nurture those ties with close friends, family members and your extended gang of pals, workplace relationships are worthy of your time and attention, too. Not only for the benefit of your social health and wellbeing at work, but also for success in your career. So says Carole Robin PhD - foremost workplace culture expert who taught the world-renowned Interpersonal Dynamics course at the Stanford Graduate Business School for 17 years and shares her insights in new book Connect: Building Exceptional Relationships with Family and Colleagues. In today’s episode she and Rebecca Seal, food journalist, cookbook writer and author of Solo: How To Work Alone Without Losing Your Mind, join Roisín to discuss practical ways to strengthen those bonds to perform better, stave off the creep of WFH loneliness and just enjoy your life - work, play, and the rest - a whole lot more. And whether you’re freelance and WFH for the foreseeable, a staffer whose organisation is planning to go back full-time once restrictions lift, or if you're set to navigate a blend between at-home and in-office working, there are many things you can take away from this one. Join Carole Robin PhD on LinkedIn Join Rebecca Seal on Twitter: @RebeccaSeal Join Roisín Dervish-O'Kane on Instagram: @roisin.dervishokane Like what you’re hearing? We'd love if you could rate and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, as it really helps other people find the show. Also, remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, so you’ll never miss an episode. Got a goal in mind? Shoot us a message on Instagram putting ‘Going for Goal’ at the start of your message and our experts could be helping you get where you want to be in an upcoming episode. Alternatively, you can email us: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Join the movement and donate now at Movember.com. What do we need to do in order to thrive at work, both in terms of our output, but also in terms of how we feel? It's a question that people have asked and will continue to do so for generations, but it's one that's gained a new sense of urgency in relevance, as many people's traditional ways of working have been upended over the past year. And even as authorities lay out the path towards a more opened up business-as-usual society, it's not like things are going to snap back into place, and nor do people. necessarily want them to. And one message that's come out loud and clear from the pandemic, lockdowns and pivot for many to work from home, is the importance of other people in our

working lives. You'll know what I'm talking about if you felt that sting of loneliness as you tap away on your computer in your kitchen, or that sense of disappointment and alienation after an awkward Zoom brainstorm that you know would have flowed if you and your colleagues be in the same room with the familiarity that comes from sharing tea rounds and belly laughs over silly YouTube clips of dogs at 4pm. The good news is that whether you're freelance and working from home for the foreseeable or if your organisation's planning to move to a blend between at home and in-office working, there are things you can do to strengthen those relationships

and enable you to perform better, stave off loneliness, and just enjoy your working life a whole lot more. Hello, I'm Rocheon-Dervichokane and this is Going for Goal, the weekly Women's Health podcast. On this show, we call on top experts to share the tools you need to make good on the health goals that really matter to you, and chat to our favourite celebrities and wellness heavyweights about what they do to feel and function at their best. Today we've got two experts. The first is a self-professed interpersonal guru, Carol Robin,

who taught MBA candidates the legendary Stanford Graduate School of Business course Interpersonal Dynamics, also known as Touchy-Feeley. And in her new book, Connect, which came out last week, she offers up those insights. The second is Rebecca Seal, who is a UK-based food journalist and author of new book Solo, How to Work Alone and Not Lose Your Mind. In this episode,

we talk about the importance of cultivating relationships in a changing work world, steps to get the most out of yourself and those you work with, how to feel less lonely when working from home, and crucially,

while spending time deepening those connections truly pays off in more ways than one. Enjoy. Rebecca Seal, and Carol Robin, welcome to going for goal. Oh, thank you. Thanks for having us. I'm so thrilled to have you both here to talk about how we can strengthen and maintain our working relationships to support our success and to help us look after our health and happiness while we strive in our careers, which is super important at this time. And we wanted to have this conversation because at the moment,

it's a time of great flux in our working lives, obviously in the UK, we've had news of the roadmap and companies are thinking about how they kind of return to the office, people who have been working at home for a while. And it feels like if there was a new normal of working from home, that new normal has been scrunched up in a ball and we're basically just all starting again. So it's a time of real flux. And I want to dive straight in and ask both of you, starting with Carol, and why nurturing your working relationships is so important.

And the key moment or set of experiences that's taught you that lesson. Well, let me start by saying people do business with people. They don't do business with ideas or machines or money or products. They do business with people. So my co-author, David and I wrote the book that we wrote. We started writing it well before the pandemic. Four years ago, in fact, even though it's only just coming out. That's a whole other story.

But the fact is that we are much more effective in business when we remember that human beings are doing business with human beings. Now, let's fast forward to what's happened over the last year plus. a lot of what we talk about as being necessary has become even more necessary. It's almost more important to double down on paying attention to the relationships. Some of the stuff that just happened more organically when we could be together doesn't, which means we have to be even more intentional about nurturing our relationships, building our relationships, deepening our relationships. And, you know, frankly, before the pandemic,

people weren't that great at it in the first place. Or our book would not have been necessary. But now it's even more necessary. And I think, to your point about now this mix that we're all going to move into, it's going to become even more important to understand what is it that builds connection? What is it that builds trust?

What is it that builds distance and closeness? How do those things happen? What do I do that either influences you more or less, brings you closer or distances you? So I think it's just never been more important. Rebecca, then, what about you? Why is nurturing working relationships so important? And how did you learn that?

I mean, it's so important to me because I think one of the things that writing the book taught me was that we need to understand that work is not the most important part of our lives, that we are a lot more than simply the jobs that we do. And I think that we quite often forget that. And I think that society kind of often operates as though we are our jobs. And, you know, that's something I repeat often is that we are not our jobs. You are not your job.

You are a much bigger and more interesting and dynamic thing than that with loads of different personalities and parts and we have to nourish that and part of nourishing that kind of bigger person is maintaining relationships that nourish and nurture that person. So that's kind of the bigger picture thing about why I think relationships are so important.

The way I learned that was by neglecting them. The reason I wrote the book was that six or seven years ago I was horribly lonely. and I was somewhere close to burnout, probably not burning out exactly, but very, very close because work had expanded to take up really my entire life. I didn't have much outside of that. I wasn't really socialising with friends. I was only socialising with work acquaintances and colleagues, and I was working six or seven days

a week in this sort of desperate hamster wheel pursuit of success, but without any clear idea of what success actually was for me. And that was so lonely. And in that moment, I was neglecting. There were people who needed me and cared about me and people who would otherwise have made me not feel lonely. And I forgot that that's a two-way street. I didn't realize that in helping myself be less lonely,

I would be helping other people be less lonely too. And that's one of the things that I've learned. over and over again in the last year is that every time I have a conversation with somebody which allows me to connect deeply with them when I ask them in the very real sense, how are you? They're alleviating my loneliness and I'm alleviating theirs. And that is possibly the most profound thing that I can take from this awful time that we've been through is that there's this beautiful circularity to the connections that we make and the deeper that we make them, the more profound they become and the less lonely that we are as a result.

I was just going to say how lovely it was to listen to your response, Rebecca, and what a wonderful reminder it is that, you know, human beings are social animals. We need each other. And we need each other if not only for nurturing at a very profound level, But we need each other to learn and grow. And when you said, you know, you are not your job. I was really struck by that. And none of us are our job.

And the reason we need people in our lives and the people at work in our lives is that they help us learn and grow. But if we're just one transaction after another, if all there is is contact and task and no relationship, then we're missing all of that. it's almost a cliche now when people think about bring your whole self to work, but you spell out in real detail and with a real kind of, I don't know, you really seem to show the return on investment of bringing your whole self to work. And I think something that's been very interesting in the pandemic, certainly in my industry, has been that whereas people maybe had, and I mean, I work in journalism and I work in a female-dominated team.

So we're probably more touchy-feely than many other industries. We're much more casual and we talk about women's health. So, you know, normal meetings for us talk about orgasms and periods and, you know, and life crises. Crams. Yeah, and all this kind of stuff. So we're pretty familiar with each other. But even so, I think people were able to have like a work persona before the pandemic. And I think something that's been really interesting is,

since the pandemic when people have been at home and you see partners running in, you see kids, you see mattresses behind people, you see washing, hanging out. And I think there's almost been this sense that people have gotten to know more of that person and there's been kind of fewer barriers. That's just an observation for me. But why do you think as someone who's, you know, you've had the sales background, like you've taught at Stanford Business School, why is it so important? Why are feelings so important when it comes to success in work?

Well, you're a journalist and you know that language is made up of two different, you know, it's cognition and emotion. If you talk only about thoughts and not about feelings, you're only having half of the conversation. It's like listening to music with only trouble. Some of it is off. You can sort of hear the music. And yet we've been socialized, especially in business, to leave feelings out of it. We've somehow been, and by the way, we socialize expression of feelings out of kids.

We value the rational and somehow devalue half of ourselves. And by the way, feelings are also rational. That's the problem. People think that I shouldn't be feeling. fill in the blank. If you're feeling, if you're feeling sad, you're feeling sad. Just because I wouldn't feel sad in that situation doesn't mean you're not allowed to feel sad. And so what's happened is we've lost the ability to empathize. Because if I can't, like I have felt sad, but if I decide that you're feeling sad over whatever you're feeling sad about seems silly, then I can't

empathize. Whereas if I just know the feeling of sadness, I can be with you. in the feeling of sadness, and we might actually connect in a different way. And how does that square, Rebecca, with your experience of, as you say, you've worked for yourself, you work solo, as you put it, it's title of your book, you've done so for 12 years now. How can you bring your whole self to work in that sense? Is that even possible? Give us your insight.

Yeah, that's interesting because as you were talking about the whole self, I was thinking that one of the aspects of working from home that I've struggled with particularly over the last year, and I think this will be a common experience. And I think it's also worth pointing out first that working from home in a pandemic is not the same as working from home.

It's not the same thing. Very salient point. And also, if you're working for an organisation which is talking about having a hybrid approach or a work-from-home approach in the future, and you think you're going to hate it because you've had a horrible experience of it over the last year,

it's worth noting that I think, think there's hope because working from home when it's not a pandemic is lovely. Like, it's great. You know, of course there are some difficulties and there's some stuff about loneliness, but all of that stuff is much, much more manageable when there isn't a pandemic on. So, you know, don't be frightened if that's what you're looking down the barrel of and you're worried about what the future is going to be like. It will get better. I absolutely 100% promise when pandemic stuff is over. But one of the things that I have struggled with in terms of whole self is that I sometimes feel as though my whole self is too much too many selves or something um in that like my day at the

moment can shift between so many different bits of identity and i can find that really exhausting like today what yesterday today i've had the rare option of working for an entire day but yesterday i did half a day of homeschool and then i um i went to my office and did a couple of hours and then i had to move rooms because i can only do podcast interviews from my bedroom because of the sound so i had to do do and that meant I saw my daughter for a bit and then I saw her childminder as well and we had a chat and then I came upstairs and tried to be an adult who could think really clearly about things to do with work and then I had to go and do nursery pickup so I had to you know there was just like this constant tiny pieces of me being kind of left in different places and and not really

having much transition time and I and I know from the research how important transition time is between different kind of modes of life. And that day in particular, I just wasn't getting any. So there's a kind of interesting tension, I think, between on the one hand, this whole self idea, which I totally am with in bringing your emotional self to work as well. But there are bits of myself that I would quite like to leave at the door and not take to work with me.

And I do think that's one of the challenges of working from home, is that kind of who you are when you're working? And a lot of the research shows that the better that you can establish boundaries between those different parts of your life, not necessarily in terms of your emotional, not emotional boundaries in as much as you don't bring your emotions to your workplace or your workspace, but boundaries between who you are at different times and allowing yourself transitional periods and transitional rituals between those different parts of who you are, that tends to kind of like oil the wheels as you're kind of moving through all. these changes. Can you give me some suggestions? Because that's something I, as someone that has started working home in a pandemic, not the same as working from home, that's something that I've personally found really tricky, that sense that you have to be everything within the same, within the same flat. You are a worker and then you're a partner and then you're consoling your friend on the phone, you're kind of, and yeah, I've massively struggled without those

transition times and that's really interesting that they're important. What do you do? What do you do to try and make space between Rebecca the mom and Rebecca the podcaster, Rebecca the food writer? So I would definitely want to point out that I'm a work in progress as far as all of this stuff goes. But so just because I know what to do doesn't necessarily mean that I can always do it. But one of the things that I do is I'm aware of the rituals that I already had in place. So one of the, some of the things that I already did, I'm just much more conscious of doing to

say to myself, this is a transition point. So I dress for work on the days on which I'm working. I do a face of makeup. That's highly optional. Eyeliner won't be as important to everybody as it is to me, but it serves a very useful purpose. I tend to have two cups of coffee in the morning, decaf as it goes,

because otherwise my anxiety is off the charts at the moment, so I've had to give that up. But I have, yeah, ritualistic two cups of coffee. If Woman's Hour comes on, which Carol comes on at 10 a.m. in the morning in the UK, that's, I'm late starting. I should have started by then. So it's a nice little marker point where I'm like, okay, hang on. You should be working by now. So it's useful having preloaded those decisions. Like I have always started work by 10 a.m.

That's the thing because by the time I've dropped my kids off and blah, blah, blah, that's when I can start. So it's nice to have that. It's not, I don't have to have an argument with myself about when or if I start. That's just a fixed point in my day. So that's useful. I also know people who have a candle that they burn during work time and then they blow it out at the end. Some people find it useful to go for a walk between work starting or work ending to kind of replicate the job that the commute used to do. There are loads of things. If you're in a really small space, then it's useful to just sit somewhere different. Like maybe you've only got one table at which to work. But if you don't sit in the seat that you would normally sit to eat, then that can actually have quite a positive impact on your well-being.

Other things you can do, and I did this for two years, this is really useful. is just hide your work when you're not working. So I had a shelf in a cupboard that all my work stuff went in because I was working at the kitchen table and I had two small children and it was hell, let me tell you. But at the end of the day, I would take it. It's an extra job for sure, but it's so useful. I would just shove it all in this cupboard and shut the door.

If you can't do that, then get a box and put everything in a box and then hide the box, like put it behind a chair or the sofa or something. And if you're working in your bedroom, then throw a sheet, over it you know just do something symbolic which says to your brain that period of time is is either starting or over and and then and then of course there's all the stuff about shutting down the applications on your phone and saying in slack that you're not available and or you know whatever apps you're using but any of these kind of ritualistic things are really really useful to help you to to transition in and out and if you can have a specific space to work in

and I know that's a massive challenge for a lot of us who are unexpectedly working from home, but if you can have a specific space in which you work and you try not to do anything else in it. And even if that's just, like I say, a particular chair rather than a room, then that can be helpful. And it also helps designate that you're working to the other people that you're around. You know, if you vocally say, this is my working space and time, it can help the people who are with you who might be struggling with their boundaries and their ideas of what work is and isn't. It can help say to them, you know, this is, this is time for work. And this you know, you cannot engage with me at this point,

or hopefully they won't. Depends whether they're toddlers or not, I don't know. Yeah, exactly. Or well-developed adults. Yeah. Now streaming on Paramount Plus, it's the epic return of Mayor of Kingston. Warden? You know who I am.

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Let me tell you this. It's got me consequences. Mayor of Kingstown, new season now streaming on Paramount Plus. I love what you were saying there about the, that really feeds in nicely to Carol's point about kind of being more intentional about things now. And Carol, I wanted to ask you about feedback and kind of disclosing the way you, feel and accepting the way that other people feel, because that can be tricky enough, even when you're in the same place, in a room. How does someone have an honest, connecting,

real constructive work conversation when they're either side of a screen? How does that, how would you recommend people go about doing that? The purpose of feedback, and I'm not talking about feedback with regard to something that's not working or something that's behaviorally problematic, because by the way, there's also feedback about something you really appreciate and love. And that's something people don't know how to do real well either. I'll come back to that one. But when it's feedback about something that's problematic, the purpose is to move into a problem-solving conversation, not to change somebody. That's the third time you've handed that report in late. And that is causing a bigger and bigger problem for me. It's making me feel less confident that I

can count on you. It's making me worried that we're going to miss a deadline. That's why, by the way, the behavior has to be very clear, and the feelings, your feelings, attached to the behavior, have to be part of the message. And that does not, by the way, let's hear the difference between that end. I feel that you're not committed. There is no feeling word in that statement. It's an attribution or an imputed motive. And that makes people defensive. So learning how to give feedback in ways that are effective, we have a whole model in the book about the net,

which is understand that there are three realities in any exchange between two people. There's my intent, there's what I do, and there's how it lands on you. And if when I give you feedback, when you've done something and it landed on me, I say that, you know, I feel that you're not committed or I feel that you don't care. I am on, in your reality, I don't know whether you care or not, unless you say I don't care.

And that's what makes people defensive. So the principles apply any time. And now I'm back to what I said earlier. You have to double down even more during COVID or during lockdown. And you're going to have, I think we are all going to have to be even more intentional when we're going back and forth between sometimes being at home and sometimes being in the office and sometimes being in person. Because I think the hybrid model is the future. And so being awareness, it all starts with awareness. And I think this goes a little bit back to what Rebecca was talking about too.

one thing that I have found really, really a lifesaver is a mindfulness practice. I meditate a half an hour every morning and a half an hour every evening. And what that does is it helps me be more aware on a more consistent basis. Not as much as I'd like to be, but more than I probably would be of what my choices are every minute. So, you know, Rebecca was talking about the pause. Until you pause, you don't even realize you have a choice. If you just go from thing to thing to thing, you know. And by the way, even if you pause at the end of the day,

you might recognize that there were some choices that you could have made that were different than the ones you did make. But if you don't ever pause, don't create some ritual. And by the way, you don't have to meditate for half an hour. you could just take 30 seconds to notice how you're feeling in the moment. And before you make a decision on what you're going to do next, you know, that can help a lot. And the last thing I'll say with regard to your question is a lot of people don't give feedback

because they hold mental models, beliefs, assumptions about what will happen if they do. Oh, if I tell you that, you're going to get all upset. and I don't want you to get all upset. So I'm not going to tell you. Now, if you're doing something that bothers me and I don't tell you, what are you going to do? You'll just keep doing it. You have no idea that it's annoying me. So you'll keep doing it.

And what will happen to me? I'll get more and more and more annoyed. So who wins when I don't say anything? No one. Nobody wins. And yet, we all fall into this trap because we have these big. beliefs and assumptions. One of the things that I want to just make sure that I underscore is if you say your intent in saying what you're saying, I'm telling you this because the reason that I want

you to know this is a problem is because I don't want it to become a bigger problem. I'm worried about what's happening to our relationship. I want you to know that I'm struggling because I want it to be okay for you to tell me that you're struggling. So, So I just, before we move off of what we were just talking about, the three realities I was talking about, it's really important for me to include the reality you don't know, which is my intent. Now I'd love to hear what Rebecca has to say to your question. You were talking there about the chapter in your book where you talk about working with other people because as a solo person, as a freelance person, you think.

you are working alone but you're definitely definitely not and by the sounds of it that's what you learned you kind of learnt that the hard way from working in such a siloed fashion and what what advice do you have well one of the things that came into my mind then when carroll was just talking was a funny conversation i had with a friend a few days ago because i interviewed someone i'm doing a podcast series myself and i interviewed somebody um for it who's a relationships and work expert in as much as she's interested in how couples who are successful manage their relationship um and and and both succeed in their careers. And she was saying she was giving me information about what couples need to do and we were extrapolating it in terms of what housemates need to do for each other when they're

working in the same space and, you know, all sorts of different relationships. And I said to my friend, I did this really fascinating interview for the podcast. And she was like, what's the answer? What do we have to do? And I was like, well, we just have to talk a lot. We have to talk a lot about all of the things. And sometimes we have to write lists of the things and then divide the things up and we just have to talk a lot and she was so disappointed. She was like, oh, oh, okay, great. And she was kind of joking, but I just thought it was really funny because the thing about this stuff was we all know the answers, like not as clearly and as intentionally

as Carol is saying, you know, there are skills and techniques that we can bring to bear on this stuff. But one of the big ways in which you stop being lonely is by connecting with other people. the way that you do that is by asking them if you can connect with them in, you know, either in very straightforward terms or more subtly than that. And that, you know, we have to have these conversations, whether they're in our working environments, our work, our offices, our teams or whatever, you know, the only way that we can get through this sense of isolation that some of us are feeling is by saying, as you say, Carol, intentionally

saying, I'm really struggling. And one of the reasons why I continually talk about how lonely I've been is because I want other people to feel comfortable with saying that stuff. Because the only way that you can alleviate it is by being honest and saying, I'm really lonely right now or I'm really struggling right now. This, you know, whatever isn't working isn't working for me. And that can be within your relationship, you know, not in a kind of way in which your relationship won't recover, but it can be, you know, I'm struggling with this juggle of childcare and work. I cannot, I'm not being the parent that I want to be. I mean, as if anyone's being the parent, they want to be, right now, but you know what I mean.

And yeah, so I think as freelancers, as solo workers, one of the things we have to do, which is really hard, is take responsibility for the way in which our little tiny kind of organisations of one are operating. And you mentioned choice earlier, Carol, like we have loads of choices when we work by ourselves. There's another chapter which is almost equally important in terms of its heading than the other people chapter, which is called,

be your own CEO. And I think that's really critical, particularly when you work for yourself, but I think also when you work by yourself, is that you have to accept that you've got these different roles in your tiny miniature organisation of one that you need to fulfil. And one of them is the HR manager who makes sure that you take holiday and leave the office at a good time. One of them's the CEO who has the kind of grand vision. One of them's the CFO who's hassling you to try and earn a bit more money. The other person is the cleaner who does the bins and the loos and orders the printer ink and all of that. You know, all of these things are part of who we are now. And you have to give each of one of them space to breathe. But, you know, I would argue that the

HR manager is actually an extremely important person because they're the person that's, you know, books the holidays and makes sure that the weekends are weekends and taps you on the shoulder at 8pm and says, why are you still here? You know, all of that stuff. So anyway, that's a slightly longer answer to your question. I just think we have to, we have to take responsibility. It's really hard right now. We're all ragged with the experiences that we've been through, but we do have the capacity and the knowledge already in terms of what we need to do to make ourselves feel better when it's hard. Absolutely. And so much of what is good for us in our working lives is, as you say, what's good for us as human animals in every other facet of our life. There's a way in which

we destigmatize vulnerability and disclosure when we start. It's a way. It's a way. It's a way. It's a way. It's a way in which we destigmatize vulnerability and disclosure when we start. If I tell you that I'm struggling, it's going to be easier for you to tell me you're struggling. And when there are power differentials, it's even more important for the higher power person to start. If you're the boss, it's even more important for you to make it okay and normalize the fact that we're all struggling. That's the first thing I wanted to say. The second thing I wanted to say is I loved your your friend's response. Talk about it. That's it. That's the whole answer. I want the, that's why we didn't write a book, and I'm sure you didn't write a book that was, we didn't write three easy steps to better relationships.

It just doesn't work that way. Everybody wants the answer with a capital T and a capital A. And people have said to me, my clients, thousands of students, thousands of executives have said, but it's so inefficient. All of this talking. You know, and when I talk about feedback and how to give it better, oh, it takes so much time. And so then I'm like, well, what's the alternative? You know, you can pay some now or you can pay an awful lot later for not having. having taken the time now. What makes more sense?

Yeah. So, you know, I was, I was thought, I thought of both of those things as you were talking, Rebecca, that I wanted to come back to and, and agree with. And that when you were saying that it kind of reminds me of a line that was in Rebecca, I can't remember if I read this on your book or whether I would list, I listened to your podcast at Emigannon, which I thought it was fantastic. Oh, thank you. And it was a quote that you said that you never stopped, you never stopped to think about what I wanted my life to look like for those kind of six years that you were going and I think that's so often the case when in whatever working setup

you are people can do and you just go and go and go and you feel like you're a hamster wheeled you feel like you can't get off but actually as you say carroll if you're not taking that time to pause and thinking how you could best do things then you might be circling into a wrong yes into a wrong direction yeah you're not aware about everything else that could be making your working life and your and your whole life so much better absolutely I think one of the things that I really wanted with the book to do was just to prompt people to ask questions. Like, is this working for me right now? Is this set up okay? Am I comfortable physically with how I'm working? Am I comfortable mentally? Is this piece of work that's come to me the bit of work that I want? Will it take me in the direct? What direction do I want to go in anyway? Where am I aiming for in 10 years time?

Like, I had no idea about that stuff. I just had this notion of, you know, I wanted to be successful and I had no idea what that was. And I equated it with money. I just decided that if I was earning a lot of money, then I was successful. And it turns out that that's a really poor way to pursue happiness, which other people had worked out before me. And so when I looked up after six years with, you know, no real sense of what I wanted, like, as you say, my life to look like, never having had a conversation with myself, well, really, even with my now husband. So I just, I just want to encourage people to have conversations with themselves and potentially with the people around them as well. Like, is, is this, is this what we wanted? Was this what you wanted? It's like, you know, all of that. And they're hard conversations to have, but as you say, Carol, they are so valuable having them now rather than looking back and wishing that you'd had them. You know, I'm, I feel very grateful that I had the experience that I did because it's allowed me to write this book and I think it's, I think it seems to be helping other people and that that's great. But, you know, I do look back at that, at that girl in her, you know, early 30s, late 20s, whenever it was. You know, and I just think, I wish that you had just taken a moment to think about what you wanted life to look like. Because if, if

I had taken a piece of paper and written down what I wanted, it was not work all the hours that they are and never see your friends. So just as a summing up, we're saying one of the most important things is to stop and pause and check out whether routines and ways of working are working for you and the people around you. That's super important. Number two, in whatever way as things change, remember that it's important to talk about the changes as much as possible. that conversation with yourself, but then you also have that conversation with other people. Be as human as possible. So flag when you're flag when you feel that something isn't right and hold space for other people to do the same thing. We talked about naming things that aren't working for

you in ways that create problem solving conversations. Yes, got that. And then also seeking, as you're saying there, Rebecca, seeking, looking at ways that you can perhaps enjoy those relationships a little bit better by having time, by having transition time, again, having those conversations and creating those boundaries. Yeah. And then looking for connection rather than just contact. Yeah. In fact, the through line is deepening, deepening connection to yourself and to others. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Even when it's hard and it feels hard to do that stuff, especially when you're lonely, especially when other things are hard. But I can promise that doing that will make the harder things easier in the rest of your life.

All right. Thank you both Carol, Robin and Rebecca Seal. Thank you so much for coming on going for golf. Thank you. It was really fun. And Rebecca, I'm going out and buying your book. Well, right back at you. So much food for thought in there.

I hope you enjoyed listening to that conversation as much as I enjoyed having it. And that was Carol Robin and Rebecca Seal interviewed by me, Rochene Derbyshire Kane. As ever, if you want to comment on, anything that we've raised in this episode, get in touch, all the details of how are in the show notes. And if you've got a different goal in mind and want to know how to achieve it, again, let us know and we can be helping you get there in an upcoming episode. That's all from Going for Goal this week. We'll be back next Tuesday. See you then.