75: Jennie Armstrong on Knowing When it’s Time to Leave Elected Office
Jennie supports women who are ready to step into their legacy and maximize the impact they can have in the world. She has dedicated her life + career to building a more equitable world and supporting female founders and leaders at every stage of their journey.
🪩 At Wild Awake, she supports ambitious consultants who better the world through her signature program Consultant Catalyst, which centers on strengthening your systems and operations, elevating as a leader, and creating a magnetic brand + knockout website.
🪄 Delve is a mission-driven communications and creative agency that launches social good initiatives and works with nonprofits to make their work as impactful as possible.
🏛️ Outside of Wild Awake and Delve, Jennie is an elected state representative in Alaska, where she advocates for LGBTQ+ equality, paid family leave, mental health, and reducing violence against women, among other progressive issues. When not working, you can find her exploring Alaska with her family, cooking, reading a romance novel, or taking a course. She has lived, worked, and traveled across four continents + over 30 countries.
Main quote:
I learned and grew so much from the experience of having people who don't know you make judgments about you, make threats against you, come to your home. And if anything, it helped me step into my highest self and feel more confident in who I am and operate even more closely to my North star. Because if every day I knew I was acting in that way, what people said about me meant so much less because I couldn't be shaken. I knew the place from which I was working. I knew the values that I hold.
Additional Quotes:
Honestly, I just got scared. And I'm sad to say that because I didn't want to be scared and I didn't want them to ‘win’. But I just couldn't do it. If I didn't have kids, I would have just kept going. But I had my family to think about. Ultimately I just felt that it was going to erode me and age me in a way that was going to make me less effective.
To me, success is going to be when a single mom can run for office and be in the legislature. That takes support. It takes planning. It takes thinking.
Sometimes we have this thing where we want to look back. I think we need to just accept where we're at and then focus on what we're doing next because when we're holding on to the thing that we chose or didn’t choose to leave, it's taking away from the things that you can be doing and building right now.
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Transcript:
The episode today with Jenny Armstrong fills my bucket on so many different levels. We share some similarities in the work that we've done in the concept of running for office, although I didn't end up taking office, Jenny did. And so she talks a little bit about that during this episode. She also shares, which is the reason I wanted to have her on in the first place, about her intention behind leaving that elected seat.
I hope you enjoy. Bye. Jenny Armstrong supports women who are ready to step into their legacy and maximize the impact that they can have in the world. She's dedicated her life and career to building a more equitable world and supporting female founders and leaders at every stage of their journey. At Wild Awake, she supports ambitious consultants who better the world through her signature program, Consultant Catalyst, which centers on strengthening your systems and operations, elevating as a leader, and creating a magnetic brand and knockout website.
Delve is a mission driven communications and creative agency that launches social good initiatives and works with nonprofits to make their work as impactful as possible. Outside of Wild Awake and Delve, Jenny is an elected state representative in Alaska where she advocates for LGBTQ plus equality, paid family leave, mental health, and reducing violence against women, among other progressive issues.
We'll get into this a little bit later in the episode, but by the time you're hearing this, Jenny's status as an elected state representative will likely have changed. But we'll get to that a little bit later. When not working, you can find Jenny exploring Alaska with her family, cooking, reading a romance novel, or taking a course.
She has lived, worked, and traveled across four continents and over 30 countries. Jenny, I'm so excited to talk to you. And after reading your bio, we could talk about like 10 different subjects and have really, really good conversations. But we're going to focus today on running for office and your experience as a state representative.
Could you start? By talking a little bit about your decision to run for office and that experience, the decision, the campaign, the onboarding to that work. Yeah, absolutely. Well, first, thank you so much for having me. I love the work that you do. I'm very honored to be on your show today. So I. I have a background in policy, I've always been very politically active, but I swore the one thing I would never do is run for office.
But lo and behold, I have an 11 month old son, and, you know, it was in May, what was it, May 2022, the Roe decision came out, or leaked from the Supreme Court, that they were going to overturn Roe, and there was a formula shortage happening across the country, and my son was almost off formula, but it was the last weeks, and I'm racing around, and I'm like, we cannot even take care of the babies we have now.
And we're going to make it that much harder, and it's only going to hurt the women who have the least amount of access. And then the next day, I got asked to run for office. I made the decision over a couple of weeks, so I was asked within weeks of the deadline for filing. But when I got elected, I was the only mom with a toddler and infant in the entire legislature.
And the other crisis we were part of is the child care crisis, which I think is really important. impacting folks across the country. Um, and for us, we were on a wait list for 18 months. So my son was able to get into a program right before he turned two. And I was incredibly lucky. I had a mother in law who moved in with me.
I'm incredibly privileged. And so for me, the fight and going to the legislature wasn't about me. It was about every mom in my mom groups who were struggling and didn't have. That same level of privilege. So I felt very motivated to be a voice for moms and to stand up for the social issues I care about.
I also learned we had never had an open openly out LGBTQ elected official. So that was another motivator for me. I identify as pansexual and so yeah, there was just a lot of things where I was like. My husband was the one who ultimately said, if you can, you must. And it's a hard thing to go into politics.
In Alaska, you basically have to move to a town called Juneau for four months. It's like policy summer camp. Um, I had to commute every single week by plane between Anchorage and Juneau and my family spent time with me. It's, it's not an easy decision to make, uh, but we had the means to do it and we felt that there was so much on the line.
So ultimately I decided to go for it. That's so intriguing, even just to think about the differences between where you're running for office and where that experience happens. I had no idea that that was the case in Alaska, needing to do that for the intensive. Did you find that once you made the decision, and I love that you shared that your husband was like, if we, if you can do it, then we need to do it.
Did you find that when you made the decision, was the rest of the campaign, was the rest of the process getting elected, was it what you thought it was going to be? Was it wildly different? In so many ways, it was a brand new thing. I love being a beginner again. And so being inside of a campaign was a totally new experience, but I felt incredibly supported.
Everything went so well. And I knew by, um, choosing to run that my chance of getting elected was incredibly high. I'm in one of the most progressive districts in the state and I was running as a progressive. Very small chance it was going to to switch. So I I had a high comp a high degree of confidence of getting elected And so my campaign was a little bit more focused on how do I raise awareness about these broader issues?
How can I help support other candidates get out the vote for other things that are on the ballot? But I had some really intense challenges in my campaign as well So everything was smooth sailing and then the attacks began against myself and my family After I won my election, my opponent filed an election challenge against me in court, and it was really, really hard.
And then, you know, people latch onto things, and then I had only been in Alaska three years when I ran for office, and Alaska is a highly transient state. And in fact, I wanted to do the math, but a large proportion of the people who serve in our legislature are not from Alaska originally. But they were just like, she's a Chichaco, she's an outsider trying to import her values.
And I'm like, I'm literally just trying to help kids and those who don't have a voice in this building. And so it was really challenging. I learned and grew so much from that experience of having people who don't know you make judgments about you, make threats against you, come to your home. I really grew and learned.
Am mince amince ways and if anything, it helped me step into my highest self and feel more confident in who I am and operate even more closely to my North star. Because if every day I knew I was acting in that way, what people said about me meant so much less because I couldn't be shaken. I knew the place from which I was working.
I knew the values that I hold. And so, yeah, it was, it was a very intense rollercoaster of a time during the campaign for sure. Yeah. And I can, relate a little bit. I ran for office, did not win, but that was the one thing that I think I took away as the biggest moment was people's judgments and assumptions who didn't know me.
And it was on both sides. It was people making assumptions about who I was that I would have liked to have stepped into the role that they were assuming I was. And I wasn't those, you know, what they thought. And then, like you said, some really hurtful and harmful things. So I guess, first of all, thank you for running.
It is not an easy process and it's not also an easy process to be an elected official. And so. My next question for you is talking about your, your plans as an elected official. You decided early on that it wasn't going to be a perpetual effort, so I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about not seeking re election and making that decision proactively.
Yeah, so, uh, my term was for two years, and, and my first, it wasn't my plan to not run, um, right away. I was planning to at least do four years because it was easiest with my kid before he was going to enter kindergarten. It was easy for them to travel and come down without it being too disruptive to his schooling.
So the first session was incredibly productive. I filed a lot of, a lot of bills. By the end of my second year, I passed a bill, which there's folks who are in the legislature for six years and don't pass a bill. And my bill became law, which is like, there's so much that goes into making something become law.
Yeah. Thank you. I'm very excited. Um, so yeah, I went through that first session and It was great, like, collaborating with my colleagues, it was really important for me to operate from a place of love and building relationships, and, um, I just really wanted to move the needle on the issues I cared about. I work with non profits and launching social good initiatives is my day job, so.
Communication is my skill set. So with we don't have LGBTQ equality in our state. So I ran the bill for that, and I'm in the committee hearings. I'm tying into economic factors. I'm showing how we're not asking you to like us or even accept us. But here's how the policy decisions are negatively impacting our state in our bottom line.
And so I felt really proud of myself of what I was able to do and how we made history and the things I was able to achieve. But the Threats and attacks against me didn't stop outside of the legislature. And by that fall, we, there was someone who filed, basically you can file a complaint if you think something is wrong with somebody's, um, campaign filings.
And I turned it into this big moment because everyone has errors. And my, um, the person who did my, my books, my treasurer had an error and then fixed it. There was like no money that was out of place. And they tried to do this big gotcha and there was no gotcha. And I showed up at that hearing and I gave this.
whole speech about the impact that these types of frivolous complaints have on scaring people from running for office and from wanting to seek reelection and the decisions that are made in this room and how important it is and to look at the facts. And of course, I had looked up, this is someone who ran for office.
I was like, he has way more errors than me. So I outed him in the hearing. Anyway, I'm rambling a little bit on this, but It was kind of a breaking point for me, to be honest, and it's already so hard to run for office and be in elected office with a kid and a family, and I just realized that it's not something I wanted to do to my children.
Just being in the spotlight in that way, and being so vocal in issues that are seen as controversial, standing up for queer kids, standing up for reproductive rights, it makes people really uncomfortable. I'm pro income tax, like, these are things that really get under people's skin, and honestly, I just got scared.
And I'm sad to say that because I didn't want to be scared and I didn't want them to, you know, quote, unquote, win, but I just couldn't do it. You know, I think that if I didn't have kids, I would have absolutely just kept going, but I had my family to think about. We had to install security cameras around our house.
And ultimately, I just felt that it was going to erode me and age me in a way that was going to make me less effective. And I was like, I came here. I am so proud of the work I've done. I'm going to continue great work until the very end. And now I see the ways that I can make an impact and a difference outside of elected office that doesn't put my family at risk and allows me a different measure of privacy.
I'm so glad you said that. And thank you, Jenny, for being transparent and vulnerable enough to say that you are sad, um, about the feeling that you had a scared moment. I think it's so important to think about, like, when, for the person that's listening, if you're in a situation where you are thinking about leaving a thing, whether it's elected office or, um, a job, a relationship, whatever it is, there's a point at which you do have those conversations with yourself of, like, should I stay or should I go?
And I just think it's really, Incredible that you ran in the first place and that you navigated through all of the things that you did. Congratulations on passing that bill. And I think there's something really powerful about stepping back and leaving the thing. Someone else will come into the place or the space, or someone else has been impacted by the work that you've done.
Um, and so I, You don't necessarily need to hear this from me, but I just want to say you, your impact is, is far beyond, um, your years of being an elected representative. And I am thankful that you decided to leave. Thank you. Yeah, I wrote a letter to myself five years prior at Burning Man, actually. And I received it a couple months before I made the decision.
And the advice I gave my future self was, I hope you know when to stay. I hope you know when to leave. And so just on the topic of leaving, like, Sometimes the thing you need to do is stay, but sometimes the thing you need to do is leave. And I think that quitting and, or making that decision is not something that, like, my past self would have done.
I'm very grateful that I had done a lot of therapy and work on myself to get to a place of, yeah, being able to make that decision and hold multiple feelings of, like, I'm sad, and I'm angry, and I'm relieved. And I almost felt sad saying that when people are like, how do you feel? I'm like, honestly, I'm at so much peace, but you know, I, I still had those saboteurs in my head saying you're selfish and you should stay and all of that.
But I just knew that if I'm not at my best. full of self, I'm not going to be able to make that impact. There's no, there's no point in staying when your cup is empty. So yeah, thank you for saying that because it's not an easy decision, especially in something like this, when it feels like it's literally life and death, when there's literally bills on the line and things that are happening and you want to be in the room to stop it.
And so. Yeah, the stakes felt very high, but I feel very hopeful that all of my colleagues are going to continue that great work. It's not just about me. I'm just a vessel of representation. And I think that's another important thing to remember is that sometimes we feel, especially if we're perfectionists, that like, we have to like, Hold our finger here and put our foot up in this way or else the whole world is gonna fall apart and it's not you know, you can leave and The world's gonna keep spinning and the work will get done and you have to surrender and let go like once you make that decision To leave you have to leave You have to actually surrender what comes I also think a lot about The impact, you made a comment that you will still be able to fight for change or fight the system in different ways, and I think there's something really valuable too about you now know what it's like inside the statehouse.
You now know what it's like to write and pass and argue and collaborate and negotiate with your fellow representatives, and that I think that's Is information that you wouldn't have had it had you not run and now you can use it in whatever way you need to and I think there's there's something beautiful about having 10 years for the not 10 years, but 10 year T and you are E for the projects and the work that we want to see happen so that we also don't burn out in the in the meantime, and then we can use that education and whatever in the future.
What would you say about, like, once you made the decision, Did you do anything proactively or intentionally? I don't know what your team was like in terms of being a state representative, fellow colleagues perhaps. Did you have any conversations with them about your intention? Was it, was it out in the open?
Um, that you weren't going to, to seek re election or did you keep it closer to your, your chest? Everyone told me to keep it close to my chest and to not say anything until after my second term ended, but I would have just felt so out of alignment, effectively lying or dodging questions over and over again for several months.
So I made the decision in September of 2023, and then January through May was my last session, and then January 2025 is when I'm done. I told my staff, I told my family. And then I made the decision, I got invited to close out, um, a summit in Anchorage with a bunch of progressive leaders, hundreds of folks in a, in a gorgeous setting.
And it was like, Jenny, can you come in and just like rah rah and pump us up and send us out on a closing note? And I had a speech prepared. And then, um, my childcare fell through. My husband was out of town and my mother in law at the same time. And so, um, I had a couple of close girls who were going to come, who helped babysit Jack, my son, Jackson time.
And I was able to go for half a day. And so I arrived at lunch and I was like, so what did I miss today at the summit? And they're like, yeah, you know, a big focus today was helping more parents and more families run for office, which like my little antenna went up. I'm like, cause that's me, I'm doing it.
And, um, they were telling me a little bit about it. And I. stepped away because this is a summit that did not offer child care. And I went into a back room and I wrote a new speech and I got up at the end of the summit and I said, at first I started, I said, raise your hand if you were in, if you were in this room and you followed my lawsuit by my opponent when it happened and everything that the fallout from that and every single hand went up.
And I said, I'm not going to ask you to raise your hand, but if I asked you who reached out to me, two hands in this room would go up. And I said, it starts with us. We have to take care of each other. We need to prioritize mental health. I talked about how I'm the only goddamn mom in the legislature. With a toddler or an infant.
And you had a session this morning about wanting more families and I couldn't be here because there wasn't a consideration for child care for people with families. This is why families aren't running because they can't be in the room. To me, success is going to be when a single mom can run for office and be in the legislature.
That takes support. It takes planning. It takes thinking. And these are my people. I love my people. So I love my Alaskan progressives. Everyone's working so hard. We're in the minority. We're resource strapped. But I was trying to drive home the point of we got to take care of each other and we got to really step back and see how we might be holding up a system that is actually causing harm.
And I was like, next year summit, we need to be talking about self care. Do you know how hard it is to be a progressive in Alaska and to fight for these things? Do you know the threats I received? Do you know I have security cameras? I have a child. I have a baby at home. This is terrifying. And so we need to talk about the realities that politics is getting harder and harder and harder.
And I was like, I'm okay because I've had access for so long to tools and therapy and family and a support network that was able to support me. Kind of came out with not running for reelection with a bang. And it was like a surprise. And my chief of staff was in the room and he's like, Jenny. Whatever you do, we just got to keep this under wraps.
And I was like, surprise, but it was really important. I was like, I feel like I need to, it was, I wasn't trying to plan a mic, a mic drop moment, but I just really wanted to drive home. Like I am the ideal person. I'm much younger. I'm one of the youngest people in the legislature. I hit all of the things that you want in an elected official and I can't stay.
So how do we make sure that what happened to me doesn't happen again? Let's talk about that. Um, and I'm certainly not the only person who's gone through some hard stuff, but. Yeah, so that was how I came out to the progressives. I love that so much. I love that you changed your speech and rewrote a new one.
That is a badass move. There are two things that came up for me. I mean, a lot of things came up, but the two main things that I would love for you to dig into a little more. One is, Leaving something while you still have the perspective to be able to be fiery about it. I think so many times people stay to the point where they are burnt and crispy and they don't have another ounce to give to anything.
And so then there's that beautiful spot of like, when is the right time to leave? The other thing that's interesting is that by giving some space. between your leaving and the final time by not keeping it under wraps. I would imagine, and you might not be able to speak to this, but I would imagine it gave some other folks some time, really good time to plan and to be able to plan their own campaigns and their effort to run.
So I don't know if either of those two comments bring anything else up for you, but I'd love to hear. 100%. Yeah, especially on the planning because that was another thing I wanted to have the space for whoever was going to step in and run for this seat to plan and to set up a campaign. I filed for office when I ran on June 1 and the elections in November.
So it was basically five, a five month sprint. And that's exactly what happened. So I was able to take meetings with a lot. It was amazing. These women kind of came out of the woodwork and we're like, we want this to stay with like a younger woman. This feels really important to us. And a lot of them kind of worked among each other.
We, we met in my home, we talked through it. And, um, one woman came forward to run and it was just amazing. And so inspiring to me that I could have those conversations. And if I had kept this under wraps and been secretive and closed off, that wouldn't have happened. And I'm just really glad that. My community and everyone have this space to like, be like, okay, this is happening.
There's a transition coming. Um, I really, there's other elected officials who have kept things secret until the day of a filing and all of a sudden they walk into the filing room with their new handpicked candidate. It feels kind of secretive cause it's like, well, nobody knew. So nobody was preparing to run.
You know, folks were like, well, I would have run, or I would have liked to request this, but I wasn't given the chance. So being open about that just felt really important to me. Sorry, I forgot your first comment. The other comment was just around leaving before you're burnt to a crisp. Like leaving before you're so done that you don't have anything left to give back to, whatever it is, the movement, the work, the initiative, and that feels really important.
Yeah. Yeah. So I have experienced burnout before and I'm in my twenties. I had severe PTSD and I've struggled with depression and anxiety. And so I just knew I could tell that two more years was going to get me to a place of irreparable burnout, like truly. And I wouldn't be able to show up as the mom or the leader.
I was still running my companies. I'm still running my companies while I'm in the legislature. And so, um, so much sleep and self care only goes so far. And so for me, yeah. Yeah. I had had my really tough moments, but I wasn't burned out yet. And so it allowed me to finish my term and to finish my work as my best self and not feeling like I had nothing left to give.
And I was able to step into this last session really showing up, you know, I didn't leave anything on the line. I'm curious if there are departure practices or transition norms. Maybe it's that you learned through this process or maybe it's because you already had them going into your time as an elected representative.
But how do you utilize that maybe in your business life with Wild Awake or Delve or any of your other relationships that you have around transitions and leaving low? So, I think just open conversations, not gatekeeping. Um, I experienced a lot of gatekeeping and scarcity in politics. And I have always been very determined to be an open book and to help and to support in every way that I can, because you have to constantly remember that it's not about you, whether you're running a company or you're running for office or whatever it may be, there is a larger thing that you are serving.
And so I think it's just stepping outside of your ego and being willing to help and show up. And for me, that's always been really important. So with. The legislature, it's looked like the woman who is very likely to win my seat. Lots of voice memos, lots of answering questions, telling her I'm there for you.
I've got your back. And sometimes you just need to know someone's there. You don't even always need to reach out for every little thing, but you know that that person's there. And if they've been vulnerable in sharing their stories, if they've been honest and saying, here's the good and the bad, it just gives you more comfort.
You know, I think that sometimes we either try to see things through rose colored glasses and that. That makes transitions hard. You need to be honest in transitions. And for every woman who stepped forward and said they wanted to run for office, I was like, here's what's terrible. And here's what's wonderful.
And I just wanted to, I wanted them to make informed decisions. And I think when you're transitioning, you know, new staff in or new leadership, they need to know and be grounded in the reality of where things are. And when you're hiring a new person or bringing a new person on or recruiting, you might want to make it seem like everything's Great.
Come step into this magical place. We're doing all you, you show them all the shiny bits. But for me, part of that departure transition is also showing the things that like have room for growth and opportunity. Yeah. I love that so much. And I, it reminds me about, uh, when I finished, when the campaign was over, I got asked by a lot of folks to help them recruit.
More candidates, more women, more people that look like me, all the things. And I honestly, my immediate response was only if we can make sure that the, the village is going to be around them, that they have food coming every night during the campaign to make sure that they're not having to do the cooking.
Childcare was a big issue. The other thing that came up a lot during my campaign was having Uh, volunteers that weren't protected, um, when they were doing door knocking. And so it was like, until we're going to fix those kind of things, no, I'm not going to encourage other people to run. And I think that a lot of people took that as me being really bitter about it, but it was actually just naming the truth.
It was, we have to be better about taking care of each other. And you said that early on, and I'm so glad that you brought that up. And that goes into the workplace too. Huge with non profits as well, um, taking better care of each other, uh, in the leading. I'm curious if you would share what three words or maybe a phrase that you would use to describe your own relationship to change and transition.
Surrender. Just surrender. That is my keyword. That is like the great practice of my life, is letting go of outcomes, letting go in general. This is getting a little deep, but like through trauma and through childhood experiences. Uh, came up issues around control and perfectionism and, um, holding too tightly to things.
And so I have been unwinding that in my life of like, when, if someone is, is leaving me, if I am leaving a thing, how do I just let go and know, like, I have, I have severed that tie. It's like, When you break up with someone, don't obsessively stalk their Instagram, let go, you know, like whatever it is, it's just sometimes we have this thing where we want to look back, and I think we need to just accept where we're at, and then focus on what we're doing next, because any ways that we're holding on to the thing that we chose to leave, or maybe we didn't choose.
It's taking away from the things that you can be doing right now and building. So for me, it's just the more that I can let go. And I feel grateful for that because I think a different version of me could feel, you know, be shaking my fist at the newspaper every day and saying like, if I was there, I would do this, but I'm not there.
And I made the decision to not be there. And I have to, I can't control that. And so I need to just focus on stay in my lane. What can I do? What is in my control and and let go of that and I, so my clients are nonprofits, so I also have seen a lot of transitions. I've seen a founding executive director transitions, and I think that that can be really hard, especially the founding executive director who maybe wants to stay on the board.
It's tough because there's a change. There's a new season and you have to let go as, you know, a founding executive director. It's like, or, or any kind of leadership who's been a part of something, go build your next amazing thing, go do it and kill it and let this go and let new leadership come in. And maybe it's not going to be how you wanted, but you, the choice has been made.
And so, yeah, I just think that that is my best advice I can give to anyone, whether you're choosing to leave, or maybe you didn't choose just surrender and focus on what you can do next. I love that. And I also just want to elevate everyone who's listening that Jenny agrees with me that when you leave, you should not go from nonprofit ED or CEO to sitting on the board.
I say that all the time and I'm like, please just trust me on this. It's going to be better for everyone, including you as a nonprofit founder or ED to not sit on that board. Yeah. Is there anything we've talked about a lot, but there's more that we could probably talk about. I'm just curious as we start to wrap up if there's anything that.
We didn't talk about that you feel is relevant or that you want to share around your experience or the concept of leaving. Well, yeah, I think the one thing I'd want to leave everyone with, and I've touched on this a bit is how important it is to take care of yourself. Please. I know self care has been a buzzword for years now, but I'm talking about the basics.
Don't start an inner day with a cell phone. Please sleep eight hours a night. Be gentle on yourself. Love yourself. Care for yourself. Put the harsh critic in your mind to the side. Leave regret. Journal. Walk in nature. Anything you can do to care for yourself. It is hard on our nervous systems, and it is hard on our bodies, and our minds, and our spirits, even if it's something we want to go through transitions.
Even beautiful transitions. Marriage, and parenthood, and jobs, and growth. It creates, it churns things in us and just honor that and know that it's normal. And please use every tool you have to care for yourself in that transition to prevent that burnout and to feel at peace. Cause the last thing you want is to have that transition go in a less than ideal way and to have regrets.
So the more you can be at peace, the better. I thank you so much, Jenny. I would add to that. You, you talked about it early on, but I just want to make sure that it's on this list is therapy. Circle of Advisors, your own personal kitchen table, that has been something that has really kept me going, is having my small group, um, who knows when to check in, and that's another huge thing, is find at least one person who will check in on you, uh, from time to time, and prioritize therapy, if you can.
Jenny, thank you so much for all that you do for this conversation, and thank you for modeling Leaving Well in such a beautiful way. Thank you so much, Naomi. I really appreciate it. If you are an organizational leader, board member, or a curious staff member, take the Leaving Well assessment to discover your organization's transition readiness archetype.
It's quick and easy, and you can find it at naomi hadaway.com/assessment. That's Naomi N A O M I Hataway H A T T A W A Y dot com forward slash assessment. To learn more about Leaving Well and how you can implement and embed the framework and culture in your own life and workplace, you can also see that information on my website.
It's time for each of us to look ourselves in the mirror and finally admit we are playing a powerful role in the system. We can either exist outside of our power or choose to decide, to shift culture, and to create transformation. Until next time, I'm your host, Naomi Hadaway, and you've been listening to Leaving Well, a navigation guide for workplace transitions.