The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Wild Pivot: Notes from a Political Life Rewritten by Jen Thompson

Episode Date: September 26, 2026

Wild Pivot: Notes from a Political Life Rewritten by Jen Thompson https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GPDB2LPY For fans of Educated and You Could Make This Place Beautiful, a memoir of powerful vignettes about a rock-star Republican strategist who gives up a life in politics after a near-death accident spurs her into a search for deeper meaning. Jen Thompson rose to the heights of politics in her early thirties as a celebrated Republican strategist—a rarity for a young woman. For years, success and power were her only ambitions, despite the drumbeat of her inner voice warning that her life was wildly off course. It was only when a car accident nearly killed her on the campaign trail of a nationally watched Senate campaign that Jen finally decided to walk away. Her sudden alienation from the life she had always known set into motion cascading events that carried her across the world and deep into a reckoning with her own soul. A memoir in vignettes, Wild Pivot explores how blind loyalty develops and shapes a woman with the craving to fit in and feel celebrated. With a piercing ability to explore just how jarring change and evolution can be, Thompson moves with unflinching honesty and razor-sharp wit between snapshots of her life as she grapples with the demons of her past and commits herself to doing what is required to live a life of truth and freedom—no matter the cost. About the author Jen Thompson is a former political campaign manager and counsel in the U.S. House and Senate. She successfully made up for a massive campaign deficit by orchestrating five events with the President of the United States and dozens of other key political figures. She has been quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chicago Tribune, and served for eight years as a political commentator for NBC and ABC affiliates in Virginia. After managing a nationally watched Senate campaign in 2002, Jen left politics and moved to Australia, an experience that transformed her politically and personally. Born in Chicago, she has lived in twelve cities, seven states, and three countries. Jen currently lives in Redlands, California. Wild Pivot: Notes from a Political Life Rewritten is her first book.

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Because you're about to go on a monster education role. rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Folks of Voss here from the Echristosh Show.com. Well, it's the only earliest things that makes official. Welcome to the big show. For 17 years, we've been bringing in the Chris Voss show podcast. We are the oldest living podcast still in existence at 17 years that still produces one to two

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FortresschastchrisVos, LinkedIn.com, YouTube.com, Facebook. And forward slash Chris Voss on all of that so you can check it out. Today, we're going to be amazing young lady on the show. We're going to be talking about her new book that just launched yesterday. So we're getting hot off the presses, as they'd like to say. I don't know if that's what they like to say, but I just said it. So it must be true.

Her book is entitled Wild Pivot. Notes from a Political Life, Rewritten by Jen, Thompson. We're going to get into some of the deeds with her. She is a former political campaign manager and council in the U.S. House and Senate. She successfully made up for massive campaign deficits by orchestrating five events with the president of the United States and dozens of other key political figures. She has been quoted in the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and served for eight years as a political commentator for NBC and ABC affiliates in Virginia.

Virginia, give a little Howard Stern, NBC shout out their voice. After managing a nationally watched Senate campaign in 2002, she left politics, moved to Australia. I think that's where we all feel we should do right now anyway in politics in America, an experience that transformed her politically and personally, both in Chicago, or born in Chicago. She has lived in 12 cities, seven states, and three countries. She currently lives in Redlands, California. Welcome to the show. How are you, Jen?

Oh, Chris. I'm great and I'm so happy to be here and honored and I'm excited about our conversation. Thanks for that generous introduction. I was just reading it, but people always tell me, can you follow me everywhere I go and read all that stuff? I'll take you up on that. If that's an offer, Chris, I'll take you up on that. I don't know that voice.

That works great. It's kind of when the president enters the room when they play the music up, right? So, Jen, give us your dot com's websites, where we want people to get to know you better. Yes, you can find me on my website, www. J. Jen Thompson, that's with one end. Jen Thompson writes things.com. And you can also find my author webpage on the Simon & Schuster site to read more about it and purchase the book. So give us $30,000 every what's inside your new book.

And congratulations on getting your first book out in the launch. Thank you. It's a big deal. And I'm just soaking it in, just soaking it in. Just soaking it in and doing the best I can to be out here and talking about it. I'm really proud of it, Chris. Yeah. So I'll give you that 30,000 foot overview and you can drill down and ask me any questions you want about it. So 20 years ago, I was managing really the most pivotal campaign, Senate campaign of that cycle in Missouri for a Republican, a conservative Republican.

This was in the George W. Bush years. And it was pivotal for many reasons. but one of the biggest was that if our campaign won, it would turn the tide of the Senate back to Republican control. So all eyes were on us, money was pouring in on both sides. And I was about eight months before Election Day, I was driving across the state to sponsor, host an event that featured, if you remember this name, John Ashcroft, former Missouri Senator after that, the Attorney General of the United States.

and I was about halfway to Springfield. And my car, I was driving an SUV. I was the only person inside. Thank goodness. It was struck by a massive tractor, trailer on the highway. And my car flipped three times. And it landed in the embankment, and it caught on fire. And they couldn't get me out.

Oh, no. They ultimately did, obviously, get me out. And as the firefighters were pulling me out of the car, they said they expected to find a corpse in that car. And I remember, Chris, sitting in the ambulance watching my car, it was engulfed in flames about 30 seconds after they pulled me out of the car. And I remember sitting in the ambulance watching that happen. And I had this sense just pour over me that I was a fraud,

that everything I had been doing throughout my career was not authentic to me. It did not align with my belief system. And it was so difficult. Let me just give you a little bit more context. And then, as I say, I'm really happy to answer any questions about this. I grew up in a highly Christian conservative household. My father was a very successful person. He really demanded that of me.

And so I really was wired in that way as a person who's a lawyer ultimately went into the Congress, promoting those Christian conservative values. And I'd been doing that for over a decade at that point. So those feelings that came over me in the ambulance were not only shocking, but terrifying to me. Because it was eight months before Election Day. I was feeling like I was having this massive crisis of conscience. And that's what Wild Pivot is about to explore what happened leading up to that, what happened during the campaign, and what has happened afterwards, Chris. So was that accident, then, if I understand correctly, a real pivotal moment in,

in, I don't know, looking at your life and some of the things you were doing, maybe politically, maybe just in your life. Did it give you a reassessment point? It was that? It was the pivot. It wasn't just a pivot for me, Chris. It was the pivot. It changed the entire trajectory of my life.

I mean, I got through the campaign. I started to take massive stock of who I was and what I was doing. And at the end of the campaign, George W. Bush's White House asked me to come on board and work for them. I got a job offer to work as a chief of staff in the United States Senate. And I still can't believe I did this looking back now. But I said no. I said no to both of those. And I moved to Australia for an unpaid visiting professorship in Melbourne, Australia.

And you've got free critters that can kill you. And I did a lot of traveling and saw a lot of those critters. And it was an amazing experience. It was a really silent experience for me. It just were the seeds were planted. from the accident and into Australia that changed the course of my life completely. So let me walk through a couple of these things here to validate them and respond. So when you had the accident, what was it about it that was a cathartic moment?

Was it like some people, a near-death experience can make them value life more? Maybe they'll reassess life and go, why am I wasting my time, spending more time with my family or whatever. What was it for you that was the changeover and and how did it trigger with you? Did you, all of you, fill it in? Yeah, I was focusing on the word you use cathartic and I don't think I would use that term because it was so painful to me and I didn't value my life more. I asked why on earth I, I'd been spared. Let me answer that a couple different ways. The first thing I would say is I mentioned when you asked me your first question, how I'd been wired through my childhood to really become something that perhaps wasn't authentic

to who I was. And that was really true. And what I had done for most of my adult life up to that point is I'd stopped listening to my own self. I was so focused on promoting me, my ego, achieving money and success and power. And I knew that my inside values did not align with what I was doing. I just shut down what was inside of me at that point. And I'd worked very hard to do that because I didn't like what my insides were saying to me. So the way that I responded to that was by shutting it down. And what happened in the car accident was that I couldn't shut that down anymore.

And I'll just say one other thing. You used the word cathartic. It wasn't cathartic to me because it was so painful what I had been hearing and couldn't shut down anymore. I had to begin to listen. And it did not happen overnight. This wasn't like I had this car accident. I was sitting in the ambulance questioning whether I was a fraud. And then boom, it all came to me.

That's not how it happened at all. It was long. It was messy. It was confusing. I've used the word terrifying. It was terrifying. Because I didn't, who wants to start having the realization that there are fraud? Nobody.

So it was difficult for me, really difficult. So it was a process that took weeks and months and years and even decades for me to unpack what happened there. And their trauma kind of has an overload component to it. And many times when we experience trauma at that level, probably nothing you're experiencing your life. And so, sometimes, when you're young, a lot of times it'll take, the mind will take trauma and bury it until you kind of develop later.

And it feels like, okay, this is a time where we can start sharing these memories of this person. And so it's just a protective thing because we're young, we don't have a way to process it. But when you're older, you kind of do have a little more skills to process it, even though it may be overwhelming. And it still takes a while to understand there's probably a bit of a grief process with that sort of trauma. I know my friend who was in a horrible car accident, they had to put the fire on the car, like in your case, but he was also pretty much to become the car. And so they spent hours, like I think two to three, four grueling hours carving him out of the

car. And he lives with the PTSD of any sound of that saw. the saw they used to cut people out of cars will trigger him and set him off. It's been 20, 25 years, and it still triggers him. And he lives with the BSD. He wakes up from nightmares and stuff. And it was just hell sitting there. And they couldn't give him pain meds because he would bleed out faster. It would make his blood thinner.

And so he just had to live there. I hope they gave him something. I don't have to ask him again. But I've seen the car accident. They carved him out of. But yeah, he still lives. with it and talks about to this day. And it haunts him. Of course, it haunts his body. It did a lot of damage to him. He's practically a bionic man for all the bones they replace with steel. But do you feel

like you got PTSD from it? And it took you a while of the process. But how did you process it? Did you go to therapy? Did you read some books over that time? What was that like? All of the above. And let me first say, I'm so sorry to hear about what happened to your friend. And I have such solidarity with how you describe that trauma. My circumstance is obviously different, but I really relate to the kinds of things that you said. And I didn't go to therapy for almost 20 years after it. I couldn't shut down what I was feeling in my mind for years, but I also didn't want to let it in. And it's just taken me a really long time.

And therapy helped an enormous amount. There's a book by Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk called The Body Keeps the Score. And he is a Harvard trained psychologist. It's a best-selling book. That book, it was life-changing for me. And I recommend it to anybody who's had a traumatic experience, especially one where their physical body was also impacted by that trauma. Because it is true, the body does keep the score. And I think sometimes the more we try to shoot it.

away or even pray it away, and I'm a very spiritual person, it still sits and resonates like an electric wire current in our body, and we can't break that cycle. So therapy helped me a great deal, and I did that for many years. And so healing has ultimately come from that. And one other thing I'll say about this, Chris, you didn't mention this about your friend, but for me, there was the body trauma, also hearing certain sounds that would be very triggering. Oh, yeah. But for me, it was also, there was something else. As you said, it's true for many people.

It certainly was true for me that my values changed, how I thought of myself really changed. And that is not an overnight thing. That's an evolution of growth and patience and listening that began to happen to me on that day, but has continued ever since. That's what Wild Pivot, my book that has been released is all about in so many ways. I say often, Chris, that my book is a book all about politics that has absolutely nothing to do with politics. It's about some of these really larger questions. My experience with my car accident being this high power Republican and then making this massive shift politically and spiritually and in almost

every aspect of my life. That's my story. And that's not, it might be very interesting. I hope it is to people, but it might not be as personally relatable. But the undercurrent of what Wild Pivot is about is about figuring out how to have the courage, find the courage to ask ourselves those really, really difficult questions so that we can show up in a more whole way politically, personally, spiritually, and in all the words. And I think that is something, and I've seen it as I've been on shows like yours, really resonates

with people because a lot of us shut that inner voice down. I think we all have it, but it's scary sometimes. Who wants to admit that the job isn't right or the philosophy isn't right or the marriage isn't right? We don't want to do it. It's too hard. I did that with my teenagers. I was like, yeah, these teenagers aren't right.

I'm going to put them up for adoption. No, I'm just kidding. I have two teenage boys. I get it. it, Chris. Oh, yeah. There was somebody, I think in my dating groups the other day, yesterday, where she has four or five, maybe it might have been a podcast guest on the show. She has four or five teenagers at once. Can you imagine? So, bless her. And she's not happy about, I think that's why I saw it. She's not happy about the inflation because they're eating.

I've, I dated someone who had teenagers and I remember we'd bring home groceries and her 12 year old would eat just about everything you brought home within seconds. And you just be like, that was, that was great. That's my experience. 100%. I have two teenage boys, one who's 16 and one who's 18. The 18 year old is now a freshman in college. But a thousand percent.

Yeah, I think sometimes I think half, half of my income goes to the grocery bill. It does now. That and gas bills. Welcome to 2026, folks. If you're watching this, so you're YouTube 20 years ago, I like you do. Now, let me ask you this. Did you find, I think you've alluded to some of this, but I'm just going to ask you the question, did you find that maybe you were living the life that maybe your father wanted you to live,

and you awoken and said, I don't want to do this, this isn't me, this isn't what I want to continue doing, or did you maybe find that within yourself? A lot of people, they do this thing in the world, and thank God I figured this out in my teens, that life was a giant catalog. One day I was looking at the Sears catalog, or JCPenney, that big, thick-ass thing you get. And I realize that life is like a catalog. When you're young, you have the ability to choose kind of what you want to be. You want to be a fireman, you want to be a yada, yada. And you could choose your life.

And society tells you, hey, you need to go to college, you need to go to school, you need good grades, you need to get married, you have kids, you need to, they have a whole pre-program format to have you do all the stuff. And there's nothing wrong with that, but you want to be able to choose what you want. Some people get married, like you say, they'll live in it for 10, 25 years, whatever. And they wake up one day and they go, I don't want to do this anymore. I never wanted to do this. I just copied what everyone else was doing, and I didn't give it any conscious thought. And so where were you at in that experience? Were you living your father's dreams in life and input? Or were you

living your own? And you just said, I don't really feel like this is congruent to me. Yeah. Oh, my boy, my book goes a lot into this, Chris. Okay, you got to buy the book, folks to find out. Let me try to summarize and we can keep going if you want. I'll answer any questions that you have. So I said when I was young, I was in this Christian conservative household. My father was a former Marine fighter pilot in Vietnam, went to Kellogg Business School at Northwestern, just a profoundly successful person who wanted that for me.

And when I was young, not only was I a tomboy who didn't give a patootie about school, his face fell with every C that I brought home, I also wanted to be a singer. You can hear that in my voice. And so I trained for years to be an opera singer, if you can believe that. And when I was 11 or so, he brought me in his office and he sat me down. And by the way, I never was invited into his office. unless I was in trouble, which I often was in those days. And he wanted me to map out my goals for the next 15 to 20 years.

At that point, I stuck to my guns. I'm going to be a singer as if you know at 11, right? But that's what I thought. So we mapped out my goals and I really stuck to that. And he wanted me to stick to it until I went to college. And he said, the singing thing's done. I put up with this essentially long enough. And so I became a lawyer.

and then I went to the Congress. Now, I will say I'm someone who really, it's important to me to take personal responsibility. By that point, I was an adult. I could make my own decisions, but I keep using this term that I was wired, and I was, and his influence on me was outsized, and how he thought of me was just incredibly important.

And I remember, so I went to the Congress, I was a lawyer in the house, ultimately became a lawyer in the Senate. And then I was a lobbyist for a time. And I bought, when I earned all this money as a lobbyist, I bought a sob. Do you remember that carmaker, the sob? This incredibly expensive, totally ridiculous.

Ridiculous is the understatement. That's who I was. And I remember he came and drove this car. It was a turbo. We had the top down. He thought I'd made it. He thought I had made it. And so, yes, again, always taking personal responsibility, but also being honest about my experience,

he was, he was a heavily influential person in my life. I wanted his praise. And so I ended up shutting off pieces of my own heart and my own self in order to follow a track that he really believed in and was proud of. And so that is my experience. Yeah. And so you decided, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but from the recalibration you did, the pivot, as it were, and recalibrating your life from the trauma of this moment that made you probably go, hey, this is my life, and I probably should value it more. You just survived. A horrible incident that just about took you out.

I can imagine that would definitely have someone look at their life and go, what do I want to do? And is that kind of where you ended up after the accident then? It's absolutely where I ended up, Chris. As I say, I don't want to be too Pollyanna. This wasn't an overnight thing where I saw the light and became this enlightened person. That's not my experience at all. It was very confusing to me because I had shut down sort of who I was for so long, that starting to listen to that again, I didn't really trust it right away.

It took me a long time in exercising those muscles of listening to my own heart and my own self to have confidence in that and the courage to follow through. I've always been an extremely strong person. I remember when I was in the house, my boss at the time, this amazing guy named Harry, he was the chief counsel on my committee. I was just a junior lawyer. He always said to me, Jen, you are a woman in man's clothing. And what he meant by that was that I appear feminine and as a woman, but I have the grit of a man. And that's always been true about me.

And it took me a long time to figure out the difference between strength and courage, because those are not always the same thing. And when you have strength and blind loyalty together, that leads you one place. Courage in listening to yourself and following, trusting, that is something, totally different. The other thing that a lot of women struggle with today is being as masculine as you

were. And they find, especially as they age, children, things of that nature, that it just doesn't fit well for them in the masculine. And I see this in a lot of my dating groups. In fact, one of the biggest problems we have in dating right now is we have so many masculine is women. A lot of single mothers, they have to be masculine because they have to play both parties if they're single. But the problem is they get stuck in that masculine for so long. They are like men. I've literally been sitting on dates with women and my back brain goes, I'm having a conversation with another dude. This isn't sexually interesting, attractive in any way, shape, or form. I'm sitting with another dude. You're shooting the shit. She looks like a woman, but she's a dude.

She talks like a dude, walks like a dude, all that stuff. And a lot of women are finding out that's not chemically working for him because it's not really their true nature of human nature. And it sounds like your father maybe raised you to be that masculine person or maybe you already were. But putting that onus of, I don't want to punch any man in the face who tries to get his daughter to be successful and chase the corporate thing because it should be her choice what she wants to do. If she wants to go be a mother, then she can be a mother. She wants to go chase to the corporate world. But the problem I see now is so many women, they're just miserable in their masculine because they're not supposed to be in their masculine. They're supposed to be in their

feminine. So I think that contributes a lot of it. A lot of these questions I'm asking you are more for the audience in seeing how you process this and how you went through it and all that stuff. So where are you at now, if you can give us a summary of that, people need to buy the book, but where have you found yourself now? Have you found your purpose, your whatever is fulfilling you now that you're choosing? Yeah, thank you for that. And I've been listening to your question and thinking through my own belief system and values on that. I'm not someone anymore who really believes in more traditional gender roles. And there's a lot of reasons for that.

I actually am really proud of my strength. I find that I continue to be a very strong person. But that has been matched with courage. And so I think that gives me a wholeness and my own sense of power that is much more real and deep and authentic. to me. And a lot of the reason I was so strong back then is because I had to be, I talk about, and I will get to your question about who I am now, and I'll try to answer it through some vignettes that I talk about in the book. When I was in the Congress as a young woman, there was a lot of

misogyny there. And this was at the time when Monica Lewinsky became a household name and her photograph and I'm a I'm a couple years younger than Monica. I also happen to be your biggest fan now, but the jokes comparing me to Monica were relentless and endless and cruel. And I don't know, Monica. I've never met her. We just happened to be the same age and in sort of similar, role. She was an intern. I was an attorney. But, you know, I had to be strong to get through that and also to not let it totally destroy me because it could have done that. So, you know, I view, I don't, I've done so many things wrong along my path, so many things. And I talk about that in Wild Pivot.

The only person who really looks bad in Wild Pivot is me, because I want to be honest about what's shaped me. And so that the reader has a true understanding of that. I've made so many mistakes, but I don't have a lot of regrets because all of those pieces, all of those experiences, all of my successes, and all of those failures are what shaped me into who I am. And I feel whole for the first time in my life. Writing while pivot was a huge part of that. And going through the lessons that I talk about in while pivot are a huge part of that too. So hopefully that answers your question, Chris. Yeah, it definitely does. I love how you're being self-accountable. and saying, hey, I could have done better. But we all have these broken, traumatic zigzags through life, right?

Where we've zigged and zagged, and we do make mistakes. But the pureness is that we hopefully recover from those mistakes. We learn from those mistakes. That's why I have people like yourself on the show who share their journeys in life. And there's probably someone out there that's going to listen to this show, if not more than one, who maybe had a similar experience or they're going through the same thing. And you've just given them a blueprint through your life. your book on how to recover from this. And so you're going to end up helping that. That was the point.

Yeah, that that was why I wrote it. I think there's a common thread in each of us about listening to ourselves being authentic, which requires asking difficult questions. It's not, it's generally not very easy, but what worth having is really. And I think the beauty of this is, is you can have a lot of regrets in life. You can make mistakes, but it can't fix the past. but we really wouldn't be who we are. My childhood trauma, some of the things I went through in life and did to myself because I wasn't aware of my trauma and other people. And a lot of the stories in my life,

if it wasn't for our stories, good, bad, and ugly, we wouldn't have anything to talk about and we really wouldn't have any summation of who we are. And, well, some of the things that happened to us in life, sometimes are very challenging, traumatic, or horrific, we probably wouldn't be the people that we have grown to become. We definitely wouldn't. Sometimes I sit and look through my life and I go, God, I wish that, I wouldn't,

wish I hadn't had to happen. But then I go, God, what kind of person would I be without it? That's the anvil that shapes you in a blacksmith hammer. And it's not pretty, it's not ugly, but the key is that we survive, that we have hope, that we continue to try and survive. and over time you learn through life that hopefully there's just a few bad times. And there's always a light at the end of the tunnel. You just got to keep moving through the obstacle.

And so it's a good resource to share there. That was the other question I have for you. Is the reason you went to Australia where you're sick of politics? Maybe some of that thing with Monica Lewinsky being called out and stuff. That's great. Yeah. To your, the point you were making before, something I always say is I believe life always catches up with us. It just does.

Life always catches up with us. For me, it caught up really early, but that's not true for everybody. For me, it did. And I had to have a reckoning with my own soul about that. But I think for everyone, life always catches up with us in some way. I went to Australia because, yes, I had to leave politics. I had to find a space where I could evaluate what had happened to me in a place outside of politics. and I went to Australia.

I got that job offer. It was the furthest place I could think to go. And when I got there, I know you speak to campaign leaders and politicians on this show. You know what campaigns are like. There's just this pounding, pounding, pounding. Your phone never stops ringing.

It's 24-7. And when I got to Australia Crest, it was silent, silent. That's what I thought, too, until I got there. But I did not know one. person on the entire continent of Australia. There were days that would pass where I would speak to literally no one. If I'd get on the tram and give my money, I might say something to that person, or if I'd buy some Diet Coke at the grocery store, I might talk to the cashier clerk. But I thought,

oh my gosh, I need the silence. But I found the silence terrifying. For someone like me who's a communicator and was in the thick of it for so long, I found it terrifying. Because when there's not activity and hustle and bustle, you have no choice but to listen to your own soul. And that, it was like this crack happened. And all of the stuff that I'd been holding in for so many years came flooding out. So while I found it terrifying, I also found that for the first time in my life, I think, I met myself in many ways. And I ultimately found that silence liberating. That was not an overnight thing. In the 20 years or so since I've been back from Australia on that trip, I've been to a silent monastery four or five times.

I still find the silence terrifying, but I also find it liberating in a way to really meet myself where I am at that time. It's a hard thing to do. A lot of people can't sit in that silence. And that's real power when you can sit in that silence, where you can be accountable, where you can think across your life, where you're in control of the narrative as opposed to, like you said, with campaigns, you've got press screaming at you 50 million times a day, probably in PR issues you have to address and trying to shape the narrative. It's a 24-7 crazy-ass process, especially now with social media, right?

Yes. But being able to sit with that, and that's what a lot of people can't do. A lot of people, they can't go to therapy because they might have to face themselves. Exactly. And so many people are afraid to do that, I think, to face themselves. to live in the quiet. This is why we see a lot of people. They never fix themselves.

They just hop from relationship to relationship. And when that person figures out what a P-E-O-S they are, they just tap out and go to a next relationship. And I've seen people that I remember one friend who married a gal who she had some sort of trauma in her childhood or father. Who knows what the hell went on? But she basically had this pattern where she'd been married four times and had just relentlessly beat every man that she'd had over the head because someone had cheated on her.

If he even looked in the direction of anything, there was another woman in that direction whether he was looking at her or just looking for an aisle thing on an aisle at the store, hell, hell would break loose. And she would accuse men of cheating until they finally cheated on her. I've had that happen one time before where you're just like, I might as well just cheat because I can't win. She thinks I've cheated. And of course, she was the one who cheated.

That's where that comes coming from. I say life always catches up with us. And I think most of us have, either from our childhood or when we get older, things that really guide us. And they're not necessarily the most attractive things. Often they're the worst things that have happened to us. And so the work that you have, I'll just speak for myself, the work that I've had to do to get to this place has been very intense, very intense writing and therapy and body work and tons of reading. but I think it's a continual process and it's one where I say I now have gotten to a place of wholeness. The journey definitely continues.

I'm not in some space where I think, okay, few, I'm done. That's not it at all. It's a daily and sometimes hourly process where I try to insert silence into pieces of my days even now. And I find that holds me in good stead, even though I'm still always making mistakes. Is it the battle, would you say, to be present and to control your experience where you're present? That was the hardest thing. And it's still a battle for me daily with massive ADHD is to be present. Be present with my dogs.

Be present and not waste the day. I'm getting to this point where the days are getting shorter and older and moving faster. And so I'm just grappling all the time with trying to get time to slow down and stop for me. And so being present, I don't know if you'd clarify it as that sort of experience. It is. The thing I found, Chris, is that I can't control my experience. Life happens. And I tend to be very type A, someone who wants to control the outcomes, wants to control the steps that lead to the outcomes.

And the older that I've gotten, the more I realize how little control I have. So, yeah, I just try to show up for my own life, show up for others. And presence is a huge piece of that letting go of the need to control. Do the best I can. Obviously, there are things that I want, and I'm not shy about those. But I also know that, you know, half the time it doesn't work out my way at all. And things come in sideways. And I'm not in control.

Presence, quiet, is what helps me release that and just accept life on life's own terms. Yeah, yeah. accept life on your own terms and make them your turns right because you don't want to you don't want to live the life of someone else there's so many people that do that now they mold themselves to someone else's life and they accept what society gives them so as we go out give people a final pitch out to pick up your book and where they can dot coms where they can find out more about you yeah thanks chris so much for having me i really appreciate it my book is called wild pivot it is out now you can buy it any any place books are sold from Amazon to Barnes & Noble to Target, even Shakespeare and Company in Paris.

Or you can find it on the Simon & Schuster website on my author page. Jen Thompson, my website is gen Thompson writes things.com. Thank you. Thank you. And thanks for sharing and being honest about your experience. It's tough to talk about these things sometimes. Yes. But when I was writing my book, I was really frustrated at the end.

My audience has heard this a few million times. And I would, when I was writing my book, I reached a point at the end where I was ready to just, just throw it all away in editing. It was a real nightmare of editing. I'm sure you know what that's like now. I do. I do. Yeah. It's a lot of fun. And yeah, so I was frustrated and I talked to one of my authors and they go, you need to finish this book. And I go, why? And they said, because there is somebody out there who needs your help and advice and the story you're going to share on how they can get out of the situation they're in. You may never meet that person. You may never know who you helped. And it may be a lot of people.

But there is someone out there who needs your message and your words. And you're the only one who's going to get through to them and help them. And so you've got to finish this book as a duty. And they told that to me and I went, okay, all right, we'll get this done because doing it for somebody else was a little easier. That's lovely and very relatable to me, Chris. So much. So love what you're sharing. Well, congratulations on the new book.

Thank you very much. We got your dot-coms, right? I think we did in there? Yep. All right. Jen Thompson writes things. com. Pick it up, folks.

Wild pivot. Notes from a political life rewritten by Jen Thomas. Thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss,

and all those crazy places in it. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. You've been listening to the most amazing intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain

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