What would you advise folks who are in a job, you know, just again, justifying their existence or, you know, how do you soften that connection to your identity and the work that you do?

I think it's what I just said.

You kind of have to do some work with yourself to understand who you are outside of the job.

And it's not the traditional work-life balance.

I don't mean that.

It's not the, okay, I'm going to go take my kids to a game.

It's who are you really as a person? What is your purpose? What is your meaning in what you're doing outside of that job identity? So that's the first thing.

Yes.

What should they be looking for? Like, what are some of the signs of, hey, we might be a little too connected to our career and work? What do they need to be looking for there?

How often do you think of your job outside the office? Yeah.

How often is your mind constantly consumed by work? How do you describe yourself? Things like that, I think, are the big things.

For me, it was those small things that don't seem like a lot, but compound into really big things.

You guys sing family events? Yeah.

because I had to work or because the work took priority, letting friendships lapse, those types of things that just you think are little things at the time.

But it was that comfort, Julia, that was really driving me that I would rather do and miss certain things, even though the work probably could have waited.

What does slowing down look like? What can that busy professional who is very caught up in their work realistically do to start to understand their identity and make the connections and detach and do some of that work?

Tell us about that day.

Well, how long do we have, Noah? It was actually an interesting situation and I think it's important for the full context because it does factor into a lot of different leadership things as well.

So the acquisition was actually announced in December of 2022 and the acquisition was intended to close in May of 2023.

It just so happened that one of the government regulatory agencies decided to sue us and stop the acquisition.

And so that was a further delay until it actually closed in November, actually October of 2023.

And then I exited in November of 2023.

And why I like to tell just that timeline is because it was a process of not only trying to take care of a team, trying to understand emotions of team, a little bit of an emotional rollercoaster for the team, But also knowing that my role was going to likely be redundant and handling and trying to manage that at the same time I was managing a team's emotions as well.

Why do you think men in particular struggle to talk about these purgatory moments?

It was just got to grab a corn dog.

Yeah, well, I think the food piece is important.

And if we have time, I'd like to share a little bit of that.

I think this blends the whole fair experience with an experience I had.

as the ceo of the portland rose festival foundation involves food in a food court uh...

so and this relates to my experience and that is uh... ice try to say i don't go grab food run back to my desk i try to sit in the food court and just take it all in so a lot of fairs this one i could is there's table scene where you're sitting with other people So I sit down.

I'm at the Rose Festival.

Yeah,

How is it doing? Is it going to be challenged by AI where an executive can create a crisis situation action plan instead of hiring a firm to do that and foster the communications in a better way? It seems like this is fraught for disruption right now.

Yeah, I think just like any industry, I think there will be an impact.

However, I think there's one thing that PR and comms, you always need human input because...

It's even in your example of a crisis situation, sure, AI could develop a framework structure and a plan, but I don't know that AI is going to necessarily understand the exact crisis in the exact moment, who's impacted internally and externally, all of those things.

And so that's where you're definitely going to still need critical thinking, problem solving, really good writing to... influence that.

So yes, there will be some tactical things that I think AI can take care of.

You can always have AI do a good first draft of a press release.

What are sort of the trends overall in comms these days? Is there any new patterns or voices or just trends that we need to be aware of, things that are happening that only someone in the industry would know?

The part I'd like to understand is when did you realize that that was taking effect?

Well, I didn't realize it at the time, but I, I realized it through the writing, Steve, and I, I, I think the, the thing that stands out the most is when my father passed away in 2007.

And just for a little context, we thought he had a stroke.

He entered the hospital at the end of February in 2007 and never left, and passed away in March of 2007.

So he was only in the hospital for a month.

And in looking back on that time, and I didn't know when I was kind of in it, but I was trying to fix everything.

I was in, as I mentioned, in the healthcare communications space.

But do you hear kind of common stories, um, around the types of stories folk tell themselves, and, and why do they stick with them so much?