Balancing Professional Success and Family Obligations: A Conversation with Ned Wellman

Speaker 1: 0:10

Hello everyone, thank you so much for coming to the Emotional man Weekly Podcast Today. I'm actually really excited to have with us Associate Professor Ned Wellman, or at the Management Department at ASU. I have had several classes with Ned and he is phenomenal. He teaches leadership and studies leadership, and I really benefited from them. He is a recently divorced dad. He has a 10-year-old son, 7-year-old daughter and 4-year-old daughter. So thank you, ned. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 2: 0:42

Thank you for having me, joseph. It's great to see you again and I'm excited to have the chance to talk with you.

Speaker 1: 0:46

The genesis of the idea that I wanted to bring you on is it was actually from one of the classes that we had and we were talking about life and balance and purpose. But before we get into that, I want to dive into why ASU and why leadership. Can you share a little bit about your professional background and why these topics are important for you?

Speaker 2: 1:08

Sure, it's not the common career path to become a professor, and sometimes people wonder how does one become a professor? So for me, I actually grew up in an academic household. My father is a professor a recently retired professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and growing up I was always participating in his research studies. So I guess it's in the blood to some extent. My brother is also a professor. But then I got really interested in leadership through my experiences playing basketball and in particular in high school.

Speaker 2: 1:38

I played for a coach who was a really dynamic leader. His name was Brian Townsend and he was a former University of Michigan football player who came back to coach basketball and when he took over, my high school basketball team was not very good. So we were one of the biggest high schools in the state. We had good players, we had no team chemistry and we had no belief. And he came in and he basically changed that right away. He put in programs of conditioning work. He had these practice jerseys printed up with motivational sayings on them. He's just a super charismatic guy. He works really hard. He made you want to be around him and he made you believe that you could do great things. So he said well, we're going to win the state championship, and that was. A lot of people dismiss that as pie in the sky. But actually two years after he took over, we did win the state championship and that opened my eyes to how is it that one person could come in and change a whole system and a whole group of people had to be leadership.

Speaker 2: 2:31

And I carried that interest with me through my college studies, where I went to the University of North Carolina and I majored in psychology and did a thesis on leadership. But then when I graduated, I thought I was done with school. For a while. I got a job as a consultant and I felt like I'm going to join corporate America, make the big bucks. And after a couple of years of doing that, traveling around and consulting I realized that leadership is just as important in corporate America as it is on the basketball court or in any other setting. And I had a chance to work as a consultant with a number of different leaders and see a number of different clients with different leadership styles, and some of them were really effective and others were really tough.

Speaker 2: 3:08

And in fact it was during my stay with a not so effective leader that I said forget this. I don't want to have a boss anymore. I want to go back to graduate school and learn how to understand leadership better and be my own boss. And so I enrolled in the PhD program at the University of Michigan, studied leadership there for six years and then ASU was my first job post PhD. So I've been at ASU for this is going into my 11th year. Really enjoy it. I've grown, as I've been here for longer, into doing more and more leadership teaching. When I first started, I was doing leadership research, but I was teaching negotiations and I felt I wanted more synergy. I wanted to be able to talk with students about the ideas that I was so excited about from my research, and that was what led me, after I received tenure a few years ago, to pivot to leadership courses and to have a chance to work with awesome students like yourself.

Speaker 1: 4:00

So which courses are you teaching currently? And so this year.

Speaker 2: 4:04

Last year I taught a ton. I taught too much, so we'll talk about work-life balance. I was not in balance last year. This year I'm teaching a little bit less. I'm teaching two courses in the executive MBA program the course that you took leadership to, and then the first year leadership course, leadership one. I'm teaching the required core leadership course in the full time MBA program and then I'm teaching a course that I'm really excited about called Mindful Leadership in the Evening MBA program. At the time I do research, so I'm a. Professors are different. Some professors just teach, I teach, but then actually 70% of my job is studying leadership at different companies. So I have 12 or 13 research projects. I'm going in any one time about leadership that I'm working on.

Speaker 1: 4:43

Wow, wow. Now you said something interesting earlier that I don't think a lot of people outside of academia would associate with being a professor. You said you wanted to be your own boss, so you became a professor. Yeah, so maybe let's dive into that, cause I don't think a lot of people outside of academia would perhaps recognize the context of being your own boss as a professor. Sure.

Speaker 2: 5:08

Yeah. So I think that honestly, the closest analog to being a professor is being an entrepreneur, because I'm basically self-employed. So I have a boss, I have a department chair, but he doesn't really do much to oversee my work. At the end of each year I just have to turn in a report that says here's the research that I've published in these journals, here's the courses I thought, here's the service that I've done. But on a day-to-day basis there's no one coming by my office and saying, hey, ned, how's that research project coming, or I need you to be at this meeting at such and such a time. So it's really up to me to schedule my work and to structure my projects and research in a way that I can get to those end goals. But when I say don't have a boss, it's that I don't have anyone standing over my shoulders on a day-to-day basis making sure that I'm getting stuff done.

Speaker 2: 5:54

And if we talk about work-life balance, it's actually been a blessing and a curse. I do have good flexibility. On the other hand, I think I'm a harder boss for myself than other bosses would have been, and so I'll often find myself in particularly early in my career when I was really busting my butt to get tenure, found myself working way longer hours than I did when I was a consultant at a pretty demanding consulting company and had a boss so managing that I could do whatever I want. But then I'm my own harshest motivator and I really like the work that I'm doing, so every week an email comes across. I'm like, wow, I would really like to do that, and being able to be selective about things has been a lesson that I've learned as well in terms of what to take off.

Speaker 1: 6:37

Yeah, I think that is the kind of the boon and curse of all entrepreneurs is that, generally speaking, they get to involve themselves in a project that they're passionate about because of all the opportunities they've taken, they are selecting this one, yeah, and they get to choose essentially how hard to work or what milestones to push for. So I want to get into that kind of realm of decisions in just a moment. I want to introduce and dive into a little bit about your family. Sure, so you have three kids. You recently divorced, and this is something that's everywhere. I don't care what profession you're in. These are all kind of realities of life. Is we have these dynamic family relationships?

Speaker 2: 7:19

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1: 7:20

And so talk to me what it's like having a family as a professor Sure.

Speaker 2: 7:26

One of the reasons that the professor job was appealing is because it does give you some flexibility to spend time with your family. That's always been important to me. My dad really modeled being an involved dad. He cooked meals, he was there for sporting events, he took us to different things, and that's the relationship that I wanted to have with my kids. And then we have the demands of the job, which are really extreme.

Speaker 2: 7:47

So when I was a graduate student, I was working all the time, and then when I became an untenured professor, the demands were a lot and so early on I wasn't able to be really the father that I wanted to be because I was so drained. Even when I did have time to spend with my kids. Emotionally I was just so tired from all the work that I had been doing. And I'm an early riser I think I may have mentioned that in class and so not uncommon for me to get up at like 430 or 5 o'clock in the morning, do some work, work a whole day, cook dinner, and then the kids want to hang out after dinner and I'm no, I just need to lay down here on the floor. And so part of my journey has been I didn't feel great about that. I always felt I could be, or wanted to be, doing more with my family and with my wife too, who's now my soon to be ex-wife. But just finding time to spend with her and connect was difficult at first. We moved here with young kids. We didn't really have a family or a support system here, and so it was just on us to figure it out. And then the job thing at the same time.

Speaker 2: 8:45

Now that I've got and I had to do a lot of work this is the impetus of the exercise that you were referring to in class Is it reached a tipping point for me where, about five years ago, my wife said what you're doing is not sustainable and you need to take a look at this and make some changes or not going to make it as a family? And so I did some pretty serious therapy and work on myself at that time to figure out why am I pushing myself so hard when in my heart I want to be doing less? And in doing that work I had to really confront some my own deficiencies of character in my pride that you know, and social comparison and all that and just come to peace with the fact that I had to let some of that stuff go and make my own decisions about things, and so the exercise that we did in class with the circles is based on an exercise that I did when I was going through my therapy, where I realized that in my ideal world, family would be at the center of my priorities, but in reality it was way on the outside. My job was taken up most of my time, and so since doing that, I've made some pretty intentional changes to put better boundaries up. Where I used to work both in the mornings and sometimes in the evenings and in the weekends, and I don't do that anymore, and I try to make sure that I limit the number of hours of work I do each week. I try to do email when I'm walking out with my kids and so, like when I do have time with them, I try to be really intentional.

Speaker 2: 10:06

And then also my family is undergoing a transition right now. So that's been. I'm still in the process of inventing what my role as a father and co parent now is going to be within my family, because, unlike other breakups I've gone through, when you break up or get a divorce with kids, I still feel, anyways, an obligation to the kids and to give them the best experience involves still working together, working as a team with my wife, my C and B ex-wife, and so that's been something I've been working through over the summer is figuring out what those new kind of family relationship is going to look like, and I'm really grateful that, because I'm academic, I didn't have a ton of work stuff to do. I could take a little bit of a step back this summer and attend to some of those more personal things that I got a lot of really great support from people at ASU and other colleagues of mine to help with that process you mentioned something here.

Speaker 1: 11:00

It's an interesting problem of self-awareness. So at first off, can you go into a little more depth about the circle exercises so our guests kind of understand what the exercise is? One of the things I sound and talking with entrepreneurs, and especially working with some clients, is that especially with entrepreneurs, people who are just very entrepreneurial and they've had success, so they have all this money laying around as they need to do something with that money, so they keep on picking up businesses or investment opportunities and it's just like this ongoing expanding behemoth that at the same time they feel it's a worthy goal because it's creating this financial legacy for their family and creating opportunity for their family.

Speaker 1: 11:49

But there's this dichotomy and this tension that's balanced right, that all this opportunity for your family is only worthwhile if you have a family, once those opportunities are available. Yeah, and I think the challenge here is you get so enamored with the vision, with the possibilities of everything you're doing and the accolades, and it's a good feeling to feel successful over here and success breeds success. But then you have this tension over here where you don't feel like you're being very successful or you don't feel all your hard work isn't being appreciated or XYZ.

Speaker 1: 12:24

So I want to dive down into this journey that you went through, as to how you came to this self-awareness of maybe everything I'm doing for my family is somehow I'm doing all this for my family and for my business and everything else like that, but my family isn't at the center.

Speaker 2: 12:44

That's the paradox right.

Speaker 1: 12:45

So I was hoping you could dive in and share that journey with us.

Speaker 2: 12:49

Yeah, I'll do my best. So to go back to the circles exercise, it's basically just a series of circles, one inside the next, and the idea is that the circles closer to the middle are things that you would prioritize more highly than things that are closer to the outside, and the exercise is just basically you divide the looks like a target in half, and on one side you write how you're ordering your life now. On the other side you write in an ideal world, how would you order your life? So for me it was like work was number one when I did this exercise, but in my ideal world, family would be number one and myself or my hobbies would be in there somewhere and then work would be further out. And so it's a way of comparing how you're prioritizing your different activities at present with your values, and for me at least, it exposed quite a bit of disconnect between what I actually wanted, what my values were, and what I was doing, and so then that can be a quick question.

Speaker 1: 13:45

Yeah, how do you tell? Did you tell what your current priorities were by the amount of time you were spending? Or if family is really important to you and you're working really hard for your family, you could say that, oh, my family is right here because I'm working so hard for them. Yeah, versus works right there because that's what your priorities are. How do you know what you were prioritizing? What was the kind of measurement rules to say, actually I'm prioritizing this more than this.

Speaker 2: 14:11

That's a really great question. I know they didn't give me a hard and fast answer for that and I think I just knew it in my heart, but the way that I think about values is, ideally, all of those things would be important, and it's what do we choose on a day-to-day basis that determines how we live our lives. And so, for me, I think I put work in there, because many days, like the days that I would describe to you, where I worked and I was too tired for my wife and too tired for my kids, I chose to prioritize the job over the family, and so it's not that I don't work hard now. I definitely still do. Given a choice between work and going to see my daughter in a play or showing up for my son's swim meet, I'm now choosing the family more of the time.

Speaker 1: 14:53

So you're segmenting the way that you show that this is a priority is you are time blocking certain events, and those are untouchables.

Speaker 2: 15:03

Yeah, and the choices that we make.

Speaker 2: 15:05

But I do think obviously everyone in my life understands I have a job and they don't hold that against me. But they do feel less important when, hey, I'm going to miss your birthday because I'm going to this work thing. And that was actually right. In the wake of the divorce, I was scheduled to miss my son's birthday for a journal retreat thing that I do. I'm also an editor at one of the journals and I canceled it because I just felt like that the message that I would send to him is your parents are getting divorced and your dad's not going to show up for you anymore. So I think being able to make choices like that now, where I wouldn't necessarily have made those choices in the past, is due to the work that I've done, and we live in a society, quite frankly, where you're often encouraged to spend a lot of time at work, and so for me it does take quite a bit of, and then in my field everyone works all the time, so it does take some intentionality to break away from that.

Speaker 1: 16:00

What would you say are some of the seductive sirens, so to say, or the poles that you're in that can be there when you're in a profession. Because you say a lot of people, you're encouraged to work more. How did that manifest in your life?

Speaker 2: 16:16

I think it's been stages in my career, joseph. Early on in my career it was just an existential fear, so similar to an entrepreneur that's starting up a new business. If I didn't get my academic career off the ground in graduate school and then early on in my time at ASU, I don't have a career. So you got to publish articles in graduate school to get the job and then when you get the job you have to publish articles quite rapidly to get tenure and if you don't do those things then there is a chance that you end up out of the field or in a really undesirable job. Asu is a really desirable job. I'm really lucky to have it, but it's rare and there are more PhDs produced than there are positions for them by quite a bit. So it's super competitive. And then the programs they get in the first place are super competitive.

Speaker 2: 17:01

So early on it was just in my life. School has always been something I've been able to do pretty easily and all of a sudden I found myself in this super competitive environment with everyone who was as smart or smarter than me and you got to sink or swim now. And so because the career was so important to me and I wanted to succeed and I decided that this is how I wanted to spend my life. I just went for it, that's how I am. I was like if this doesn't work out for me, it's not going to be because I didn't work as hard as I possibly could. And then I think the challenge is at that point I didn't know enough about taking care of myself, to where I actually pushed myself too hard, and that's something that I've learned. But then the sneaky thing is, and what I thought was okay, once I make it, once I get tenure, then the pressure to work less is going to go away, and that's not really what I found. I don't have existential worries, but there are certain milestones in the career that I aspire to, like my next promotion to full professor. That's out there, and so that can lure you right, like I'm just going to do this for a couple more years to get to that next level. And then what you realize over time is that there's always the next level, there's a treadmill you can get on.

Speaker 2: 18:12

The other thing that has been really challenging for me is social comparison, and so I shared with you in class I think, or maybe I did this in the first year class about Adam Brant, who's a really successful public academic who graduated from my same university, and it's tough for someone like me. So it's easy, very easy, to go online and I can look at everything Adam's done and he was the youngest tenured professor at Wharton and he's written a bunch of books and he's traveling the world and he's got a podcast and say, man, you should be doing more in that, like you are not keeping up with. And the problem is Adam Grant is like one in a 20 million, but in my field it's just, you just get visibility into the best of the best. It's really easy to feel like because I'm not there on some level, I'm not doing enough. So that's been.

Speaker 2: 18:57

Those have been the two biggest challenges for me, and trying to keep my work life situation manageable after the existential threat went away was just this pressure of looking around and see what other people are doing and then also wanting to make a difference. So I think I do the work that I do because I believe it's important, and teaching a class is as important right Do the research I enjoy, and that's another thing is sometimes I feel like this particular opportunity is too good to say no to you and I have to do it.

Speaker 1: 19:27

It brings up something really interesting in that you have these kind of existential crises or these thoughts like, well, I'll slow down once I reach this next milestone, or this opportunity is too good, or if I don't do this, I won't be able to provide or won't have a career, and those thoughts persist no matter where you go. So what do you do to counteract or counterbalance those thoughts? Or how do you? In my world we call them unintentional thoughts, thoughts that kind of creep up on you and you don't really realize they're there until you're acting on them a lot, and then we call them intentional thoughts. When you develop this kind of awareness, you realize no, I know where that leads. I need to pivot my mind over here. So getting to share what have you learned, or thoughts that you've now anchored to to help counteract that pull.

Speaker 2: 20:21

Yeah, I can and I'm still. This is, I think, an ongoing challenge for me, and I think it's ongoing challenge for any successful person. So I've spoken with executives and they say one of the guys in my executive mentoring program that I used to run said at the end of every year he would give himself a work grade and he would give himself a personal grade, and he actually ended up retiring from his job early because his personal grade was always an F. And there's a professor at the University of Michigan that shared that every year at the end of the year he would tell his wife I did too much this year. Next year I'm going to take a step back. And he shared he'd been having that conversation at the end of every year for 25 years. It's challenging.

Speaker 2: 21:01

Some of the tools that I've used, though, joseph, are just setting boundaries for myself around work. So one of the things that I liked when I was a consultant was there were certain times when I didn't feel guilty if I wasn't working. So, unless there was a go live or something, when I went back to Boston from my consulting career, I didn't feel pressured at logging to email on Saturday and do a bunch of work on Saturday and Sunday. And yet when I was a professor, I did those things. I worked all the time. It took some courage, but I just decided I'm not going to work on the weekends if I can possibly avoid it and I'm not going to work in the evenings if I can possibly avoid it, and I'm just going to accept whatever that means for my career. So a lot of it was also just surrendering outcomes and focusing on what do I want my life to look like, what do I want my process to be going forward, and so I think that was one thing. It's just when I got clear with myself that I could have the life that I wanted to have if I lived it this particular way, and I was going to take the risk to do that, regardless of what it might mean for my research productivity. That was a big step, and then, as it turned out, my productivity didn't suffer that much because I just ended up being a happier person and using the time that I was actually working much more productively. When you're in the office 80 hours a week, you'd have to be super human to really be working that whole time, and so I'd tell myself I've got to go to work and then you end up on ESPN or playing some game or like it's not productive. So the boundaries actually helped me by creating space for those sorts of things outside of work be more productive when I was at work.

Speaker 2: 22:29

And the other thing that I've just had to get really good at is mindfulness, like you were saying, and for me. I'm a people pleaser. I like to make people happy. When someone asks me to do something, I want to be able to say yes, and so early on in my career I just said yes to everything and then everything got unmanageable. So right now it's been really mindful every day about what are my goals for today, what do I want to accomplish today, what are the key things that I have to get done today that I need to prioritize first, and getting a lot better about telling people respectfully I'm sorry I can't do that. So being able to say no to some of these opportunities, say no to my teaching this year, when I got it to be a little too much, and feel okay about myself for doing that, has been another big tool I would say.

Speaker 1: 23:14

What would he say? Gave you the courage to say no Because you talked about being able to surrender certain outcomes for something else, and that can be really scary. So what gave you the courage to be like one? Ron Nussbaum, who was one of the people I interviewed earlier on, talked about his goals not to let the ship sink, but he was okay with fires, yeah.

Speaker 1: 23:38

And how do you gain the courage to move that direction, to release the outcomes that maybe professional dreams to live a healthier, more in tune, more aligned with your values life?

Speaker 2: 23:52

so yeah, that was hard, I think. For me it was an existential threat that I was facing. When my wife had that conversation with me, I could tell that she meant it. I could tell that if I didn't make changes, it was like the situation that you were talking about, where working so hard to provide for my family and then all of a sudden I realized that, hey, the family's not going to be there unless I make changes to how I work. And my wife, or ex-wife, was very clear. She said I don't care how successful you are, I want you to be here as a husband and a father. My kids, they don't care. So it was just me, it was the pressure I put on myself. And so I did some soul searching and I appreciated that my values were to be a better husband and a better father. That was what I wanted.

Speaker 2: 24:35

And so once I decided that, and I realized that if I didn't make fairly major changes, that piece of my life was going to go away or change, that's what gave me the courage to say OK, no matter what the implications are professionally, this is work that I need to do for myself.

Speaker 2: 24:50

And it's interesting now the marriage has ended and I feel at peace with that in a way that I don't think I would have if I haven't made those changes, because at this point I can look at myself and say I did everything that I could have to show up for my family and to make this thing work, and it just wasn't meant to work, and I think that gives me so much peace heading into this next chapter of my life as a co-parent.

Speaker 2: 25:12

My relationship with my kids is so much better than it was five years ago, like I was sharing with you. We just got back from a trip to the beach. I took out the beach by myself, which is not a thing that I would have wanted or been able to do when I first made this change, and so I think again, even though the reason why I made the change in the first place still ended up my fears still ended up being realized there I can now see that it was still for the best and that I feel a lot better about myself and more at peace with myself for having made that change then and having that not be the reason why I'm now getting divorced.

Speaker 1: 25:48

What would you say is your biggest obstacle that you're facing now, in this new phase of your life, to a healthy work life balance?

Speaker 2: 25:58

Yeah, I think the challenge is that I have more free time. So the way that we're doing co-parenting is my wife has the kids for a chunk of time and then I have the kids for a chunk of time. And so the way that shows up for me is I have times when I'm really busy, like today. I'm with the kids, so got them going in the morning, got them off the camp 4.30, I'll take over, we'll do dinner, and that time is really full and it's easy to bound the work during those days. But then I have three days where there's nothing on the schedule and there's work stuff.

Speaker 2: 26:31

The other challenge about transitioning from being a family man full time to being a family man half the time is, then you have half of your time where it's. How do I even start to be single again? That's just a weird experience and my initial tendency can be to say, okay, I'm just going to work during that time, that's what I'm going to do work. But I know for the long run that's not going to produce fulfillment Like that. I have to find other things to do during that time when I'm not with my kids, and so I've been experimenting with the playing more basketball now doing more traveling. Now I'm trying to make some friends to socialize with now, and this is all stuff that I just didn't have time for it, to be quite honest, when I was with my family. But that's the challenge, right? It's like with this other free part of my life now, how can I build that into something that's fulfilling and constructive, that doesn't 100% revolve around work, because I just know from experience would that lead me to a happy place?

Speaker 1: 27:29

Yeah, when the last questions I always like to ask all of my guests talks about measuring success in your family, measuring if your family is thriving, if you are thriving, and normally with businesses and just our professions, there's always some kind of KPI or metric. We can look at Revenue papers, published sales, number of clients and you can say that yep, winning the game. How would you know if you're winning the game in your personal life and your family life? What are some things or activities or just indicators that you would be able to look at and measure and say, all right, we're on track, we're off track, I feel good about where we're at. I think something needs to change.

Speaker 2: 28:16

Yeah, I think quality of relationship is one thing. When I look at my kids, I can say I have a good quality relationship with all my kids. That was actually one fear I had with the divorce is that relationship would change or be severed somehow, and I'm very grateful now to be appreciating that the only person that can sever that is me and that if I make an effort to be in a relationship with my kids, even if I'm only seeing them half the time, we're still going to have really awesome, strong relationships and I'm still going to be able to be their dad and be there for them in every way that I would want to be. So that's been great, and I think that's one thing is the relationships that I have with people who are important to me. What are those relationships look like? And I will also say my wife and I are not going to be married anymore, but we're going to have a friendly relationship as co-parents. That's something that I'm proud of. That's something I've been intentional about is trying to make sure that, although we're going our separate ways as a married couple, we're still very much aligned and helping each other raise these awesome kids that we have, and that, I think what I'm getting away from which is I'm guilty of this too is you look at a divorced person and you say that person failed at something.

Speaker 2: 29:28

They failed at their marriage and, to be honest, I stayed married, my wife probably did too and something that was not really helping either of us thrive for a long time. Just to avoid that outcome, that feeling of failure and I think I guess I would change now to define success and happiness is just to what extent do I feel like I'm living my best life? That's how I'll define it now is by doing the things that I want to be doing for the reasons that I want to be doing them. Do I feel good about how that's going? Are the people in my life people that energize me and support me on whatever path that I want to be on? Or do I have some hobbies and interests that bring me joy, and that's something that I'm definitely working a little bit more on now getting into music recently and playing, trying to get better at the guitar and listening to music and stuff playing more basketball. So I guess that's a tough answer, but that tough question to really answer because there's not a here's the bottom line are you succeeding. And I'll be quite honest pre-divorce, one of the ways I would have defined it is are you still married? And now that I'm going through that process it's forced me to look at it a little bit differently and probably appreciate that for both my wife and myself, we're going to these other indicators of how we're living our lives we're going to be probably better than we were before.

Speaker 2: 30:47

There is a stat I think it's 50% of people get divorced. But of the people that are married, about half of them are unhappily married, and so that's not. You have your values as to whether you stay in a situation like that. I was always of the opinion when things were great, hey, let's work out and try to make it better, but people make their choices there. But anyways, I guess the point is what I've learned is to not necessarily look at a divorce as a failure, as much as it is like a transition from the relationship being one way to a different way, and that you can still have a happy, fulfilling life on the other side of it. I hope We'll see.

Speaker 1: 31:25

No. When you're going through those transitions whether it's job transition or your company fails or your relationship transitions, like you have from being married to being separate there are so many easy ways to say I failed, or it really draw the energy down and just go down that spiral of I'm no longer worthy or this is going to happen again. Just being able to anchor to something and say no, this is now how I know I'm on the right track, where I want to be, is so incredibly helpful and I think am I living my best life? Being able to drill down what that means later on. It's really helpful.

Speaker 2: 32:07

Yeah, and I guess ideally we'd find partners that would help us and support us in living our best life. But the other thing that happened I got married very young and you just changed over time and I think both my wife and I have changed too to where maybe we weren't the right people for each other anymore. Who knows.

Speaker 1: 32:23

But yeah Well, Ned, thank you so much for being open and just being able to share your experience and just what you've learned with us. I've benefited a lot from it. I really appreciate your honesty and candor.

Speaker 2: 32:36

Thanks for having me on, joseph. Always fun to spend time with you. This is a great podcast you're doing, so wish you all the success in your life and career and with future episodes of this. Thank you so much.