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Beth's book WorkJoy: A toolkit for a better working life

Helen guests on Beth's podcast The WorkJoy Jam

Transcript:

Helen: My guest this week is Beth Stallwood, who is a coach, facilitator, speaker, consultant and author, and the founder of Create WorkJoy, a resource hub and professional community focused on cultivating more joy in our working lives. Beth has spent 20 years developing her practical, passionate approach, helping both individuals who find themselves stuck in work gloom - more on that shortly - and also organizations with a people challenge to solve. Beth's expertise is in learning, development and organizational culture. She hosts large scale speaker events and her qualifications include an MA in Human Resource Management and an Advanced Certificate in Coaching and Mentoring.

Beth's first book WorkJoy: A Toolkit for a Better Working Life is out now and her podcast the WorkJoy Jam is available on all major podcast platforms. Welcome to The Business of Being Brilliant, Beth!

Beth: Well, thank you so much for inviting me to be here, Helen. I'm very excited to have a chat with you all about being brilliant.

Helen: Likewise, and being full of joy.

Beth: Oh yeah. Always full of joy!

Helen: A way to .... yeah, exactly. Find a way to combine it! And I, I too have been really looking forward to having the conversation. I've been obviously following your book launch success at the start of the year and read your fantastic book, but also because we both have quite a shared strong sense of purpose around creating better working lives and and better working environments.

Beth: Absolutely.

Helen: So let's get stuck in and at the beginning I normally ask my guests one of a couple of questions that are bit lighthearted and are about the kind of the person outside of the day job. And I thought for this occasion I would pick a question from your book, which you invite readers to ask themselves, which is, what are you famous for in life and work?

Beth: Ah, I love that question. It's one of my favorite ones, and it's one I ask my readers. It's one I ask all my coaches and I actually ask the organizations I work with as well because nobody is brilliant at everything, but everyone is brilliant at something. So what is it that you want to be famous for?

And I think I'm famous for bringing people a sense of joy and bringing that energy to the working world. And we talked about purpose there; my purpose is really making life and making work less miserable. There are so many, so, so many people who get through the week and just live for the weekend, and we spend at least a third of our entire lives working, and I just want that experience to be brilliant.

I want that experience to be fun. I want it to be engaging and interesting. So I try and bring to my work the joy that I want other people to have in there. So most people would probably say I'm smiley, very happy, very bouncy is how they would describe me.

Helen: Oh, well it's wonderful and you absolutely are a brilliant ambassador for having a fun work life; in the short time I've known you that's become very obvious. And so have you always loved your working life? Have there been times in the past where you've not loved it at all? Can you tell us a little bit about that career history and how you got to today?

Beth: Mm. Yeah. And I, I suppose the overall answer is yes, I have, and I really love work. I always have loved work, and I think it's about being able to find the things that you love within the work that you do. So my career history: my first job was I worked in Clarks shoe shops, fitting kids shoes, you know, back in the day, and it was really good fun, I absolutely loved it. I was like 16, I was doing my A Levels, that kind of thing, and did it all through university. And I did a degree in music at university and I went to the careers people in my third year of university, like, 'right, what can I do with this?' And they literally said the following words, 'well, you could be a music teacher.' And that was the only career option they suggested.

And I did think about that and I tried and went and tried out for a bit, and I was like, no, this isn't the thing that's going to work for me. So I got myself a temporary job in a local big business, which happened to be in investment managers and I was like, I'm just going to stay here until I work out what it is that I want to do.

Well, I'm 20 years later, I'm not entirely sure we ever really work out what it is we exactly want to do, but I started in the world of customer service. I then trained to be a trainer, a facilitator, and a coach while I was there. Always managed to find the joy. That was really hard work, we worked so, so hard in that job in customer service.

There was thousands of calls a day, trying to help people feel motivated. I was really lucky to work with a boss who felt that culture of the organization was really, really important. We invested a lot in making sure that people enjoyed what they were doing, that people were really well developed, really well supported.

After I worked there for about five years, I went to work in the opposite end. So I was in investment management in the world of finance, and then I went to the public sector for a couple of years and worked at the Crown Prosecution Service again, learning and development side of life.

I worked there for a couple of years as learning and development. Then I managed the shared services centre; I managed to end up looking after things like finance and health and safety and a whole world of things I'd never known before. So I'm always a big 'say Yes' person to any opportunity that comes along for your careers.

Like 'say yes, what's the worst that can happen? You can learn how to do it.' So it, it has got me into trouble many, many times and I've taken on more and more work because I do love to work. And it was really interesting going from that very financially driven commercial organization, global organization, to working in a regional public sector organization. And what I really found there is the sense of purpose that people had. People were really, really passionate about their roles as lawyers and as people who supported the criminal justice system which I is something I didn't necessarily see so much in the commercial world. People had different reasons and different values for being there.

And then after I did a couple years in the public sector, I went to what I call the middle ground, which was a not-for-profit sports organization. So I worked for the Lawn Tennis Association, I was their learning and development manager and latterly, their head of talent and development, which included things like recruitment and development and communications and engagement and the full spectrum of doing the people stuff really, really well.

And that is a really interesting organization as well because they combine the commercial element of sports, which is a very, very commercial world, but also with the grassroots stuff of actually growing sports and getting kids playing sport and a really interesting, different way of organization.

So I went from all over different places doing very similar jobs, which always involves culture, people, doing the people stuff well, helping people grow, helping people develop. And then nearly six years ago, so six years ago next month, I left the organization I was working for, which was the Lawn Tennis Association because I had a real passion and I wanted to work for myself. I wanted to create my own business, and I think this goes full circle. My mum had always worked for herself since I was a young kid. She had her own accountancy business; she worked from a little office in our house, and I almost think that's what I thought work was, because that's what I saw every day was my mum working.

And I always had a passion to do it and I was like, okay, I'm either going to do it now or I'm going to go and get another bigger job and then wait 15 years and probably do it in 15 years time anyway, so I was kinda like, if I start now in 15 years time, I might know what I'm doing! I might actually have worked out how to make this thing called working for yourself work.

And I since then have been working with lots of different types of organizations across lots of different sectors, doing things that help them do their people stuff really well, that help them get cultures that are engaging and supportive and developmental with things like projects around careers, projects around people strategies, I do facilitation, I do speaking, I do lots and lots of coaching and mentoring of people as well. And for me, i, I think I sat there at a desk in a little hired office in my second week of being self-employed. I think I had one very small client already agreed so I still didn't know what I was doing, I had no idea how to do it. And I sat there and I just knew this is what I was supposed to do. And I think now this is what I do, I love it, I have always, always loved my work. I love to work. I think it's massively fulfilling, but I also think there are so many things that come up that bring what I call work gloom, that annoy us about work that if we can move past them, if we can learn to manage them, and if we can build on the other side the things that make us joyful and there's loads of things that can do that, we can actually get through work in a way that is more positive, more interesting, more developmental, more engaging, and we don't have to be miserable about work.

Helen: Yes, I love that. And I imagine that a lot of people listening will be fired up and enthused by your love of work and all the opportunity you go looking for. And there will also be people, whether they're listening or not, who just, just don't love their work and would really love not to be doing it at all or to be doing something very different. So, we'll, we'll come on in a minute to talk about those situations people might find themselves in.

So I'm really struck, whereas you were talking about your career to date, about a couple of things. Firstly, you mentioned being in customer service and something I have in common actually with you, because in my early days when I worked in retail at Harrods, I dealt with the customer service department, managed customer service enquiries at the wine department at Christmas, which believe me, is a baptism of fire for any career. But it, what it did, it does teach you is, if you can thrive and find enjoyment in a role where you are dealing with 99% unhappy customers, you're onto a good thing, right?

Beth: Yes, and I have fitted kids' shoes at the back to school days in a shop where we've got a queue of 25 people. I've, I've been there with unhappy customers. I've been there when I was working in financing, in, in servicing, it was amongst the financial crisis that was going on back in the 2000's when people had literally lost all of their life savings or a big, big percentage of their life savings. And we had queues of a thousand people waiting for us to take a call. That kind of stuff, I think, people always say, you know, where should you start out?

And I think if you can do anything where you have to deal with customers on a frontline basis early on in your career, it really does set you up for amazing levels of success for the future because you have to learn how to relationship manage. You have to learn how to deal with conflict. You have to learn how to find a solution to a problem, and you have to be able to do it all while spinning about 3000 different plates in the air.

So I think for me it was a, a great start to my career. I really loved the retail space because you get to speak with people all the time; I love the customer service space. And often, you know, customer service is a massive part of most roles that people work in. We just might not call them that, but we all do customer service.

When I worked in HR, I was doing customer service, it was just internally to my colleagues to try and give them the service. So for me, and I can imagine the Harrods Wine Department at Christmas was also a very, very similar challenge, but there's so many amazing things that you can learn and, and one of the big things I talk about in the book, it's one of the chapters and one of the things I talk about in real life as well is that if you take all of these opportunities and these challenges as opportunities to learn and to go, how can I make the most out of this? We'll get into great places. So ' every day's a school day' mantra is one of the things I say all the time because it is, there is such great opportunity to learn and wherever you start in your career, whatever that route inwards to wherever you want to go is. And I think the other thing to think about with early careers, when people are thinking about how do I get into something and go there, it doesn't really matter because where you start isn't where you have to end up.

I started in, in retail then investment management then the public sector, then sport then I run my own business and I work with all kinds of different organizations now. You don't have to pick one thing and stick with it. Pick one thing, learn from it, and then move to the next thing that really excites you and see where that works.

But so often we get stuck. We get stuck and think, okay, well now I've done five years in investment management, I suppose I have to stay here and that's my only option. But it really isn't, and we can really open our minds to that.

Helen: Yeah, that's so true. And I'm always reminded of our habit to say to kids that we come across 'what you want to be when you grow up?' And in fact, I absolutely think it should be 'what do you want to do?' Because you can do so many different things and you don't have to pigeonhole yourself like that.

And the other question I was going to ask, so you've worked in different industries, you've worked in the private sector, in the public sector, and in the middle ground. So you've obviously been exposed to lots of different cultures, motivations for the people that work there, different value sets, et cetera. What would you say across all those different experiences about the thing you look for in a role, the thing that makes you want to stay once you've got into a role, particularly, what keeps you there?

Beth: Oh, that's really interesting and I'll probably have to put my historical 'as an employee' hat back on for a moment and think about what would keep me there now, but actually probably the same thing in every organization is what will keep me there for the period of time that's appropriate - and I think this is a good thing - is the people.

The kind of shared respect and understanding of each other's strengths and the organization and what they need from you and that you feel valued. And I think feeling valued is a really individual thing, but things like your boss needs to care about you as an individual. I think you need to be able to be shown that you're doing a good job.

I think that sense of learning and growth, I was very lucky in all the organizations I work with, they all enabled and supported that sense of growth and development. I managed to get promoted in every organization I've ever worked for, and I've been able in many of those to also shape what that role looks like.

To be able to go in, find your feet, be good at what you do, and then say, hang on a minute, this is what I want to do next, and this is the shape of the role I want to do next - to be able to make that happen.

Making me stay is a slightly different question actually, because I'm really big on knowing when it's time to walk out the door and knowing when it's time to move on. So there is no such thing as an organization that would make me stay. What there is is an organization who'd make me want to stay until I'm ready to go. So, and I think that's the bit that sometimes we forget is that sometimes you need to move on to do different things.

And I'm a person who, I'm really happy in the space of new, changing, transformation, disruption, making something better. I personally am not a big business as usual person. The operational, turning things around, et cetera is not really where I get my work joy from. So for me, once I've done the stuff I can make the big changes on, once I've moved some stuff, created the new things, got things set up, and I go, okay, am I going to add any more value of the same scale in this organization anymore? And when I'm not, when it gets to the point of I might have to break something to fix it because I fixed all the other bits before, that's usually when I know I need to go.

Helen: That's a good warning sign!

Beth: It's a really good warning sign. If you're thinking about fiddling, it's probably time to go.

Helen: Creating havoc or upsetting the apple cart!

Beth: Exactly. Like not, not healthy disruption just because I'm bored!

Helen: Yes, yes. Best spot that before your employer spots it. That's good advice.

Beth: Yes, definitely.

Helen: Great. And wonderful advice there from your own experience, about those questions: what am I enjoying about this role? What could make me enjoy it more? Should I move somewhere else? These are all questions you address head on in your book. So can you tell us a bit more about who the book is for and how it helps them and unpack these terms work joy, which I love but work gloom, which I love even more.

Beth: So I think work joy is really obvious, but it's not words you hear very often put together. We often hear about working hard; we hear about working smart; which are all great things. But we don't often hear about, let's work with some joy. Let's work in that space where we feel engaged and alive and interested and happy with what we're doing in our work. And I always say it just has to come with a slight caveat, work joy, in that it is an unrealistic expectation that you will feel joy 100% of the time when you're at work. Because let's think about life, we don't feel joy 100% of the time in real life either.

But actually what we can do is it's something that we can create, the habits we can cultivate, we can make our working lives more joyful. And I always say it's a bit like Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. Like you have the power to do it yourself. You already have the ruby slippers on, but we don't necessarily get taught how to do this stuff.

We get taught about you have to work really hard to have a good career. You have to, you know, slog, slog, slog, slog, slog. Now I'm all for slogging, like I love healthy striving. I am like a nerd. I want to be good at stuff. So, That's great but actually what about the rest of it? How do we bring it in?

Because when people are joyful, they're more productive, they're more engaged, they're more interested, they're more creative. When you're in a space of work gloom, and I think many people will relate to this, when you feel a little bit, I haven't thought of a better word, but a bit meh about work...

Helen: It is such a great word. It's so expressive.

Beth: It doesn't really mean anything but it's like meh! We know what it means. If you're listening to this, you have probably at some point in your life, experienced a bit of meh at work. You've probably also experienced that Sunday night pit of the stomach dread about going to work if you start your working week on a Monday. You've probably also had the want to throw your laptop out a window, you've probably also wanted to not ever have to work with that particular person or that particular team. Again, these are all what I'd call moments of things that bring us work gloom, and it's called gloom. At first it was called something slightly more unpublishable and slightly more not appropriate for a podcast, but it's like, no, it needs to be more publishable than this.

It can range from minor irritation, where you just feel a bit grrr about stuff to that proper sense of I am not valued here, I am not welcome here, I don't feel a sense of belonging here, to actually feeling like psychologically unsafe would also be a a, a factor of work gloom.

And what happens often is we start with minor irritations; we don't deal with them. We don't learn ways to counteract them or to balance them or to manage them, and they grow and grow and grow and grow until we're in a situation where we either want to do something that would be career ending. You know how if I said what I think in my head, this will be a career ending moment for me, or where we do the thing where we just like, I have to escape, so I'm just going to find the next job I possibly can.

I'm not going to do any due diligence and I'm just going to get out of here. And then we go to the next job, haven't done our due diligence, and we're like, oh, hang on a minute. These problems are still the same because this is real organizational life and actually what we need to do is learn as individuals how to deal with some of those challenges so that we can have less work gloom less often, more work joy more often and more importantly, I think is other than just the 'do I have more of it? Do I have less of it?' Is when you get the moments of work gloom, how quickly you can get yourself out of it, how quickly you can, put in place the good stuff that either replaces or balances out the bad stuff.

Because we all have negativity bias in our mind, it's a neuro scientifically proven thing, we have it. We are more likely to see one item of work gloom in a day and ruminate on it and talk about it and get annoyed about it than if we had 10 moments of work joy. So we have to start noticing where our joy come from. We have to understand that our work gloom may actually be put in better proportion if we were more aware of some of the joyful things.

And the most important thing, and I always talk about this, this is an active pursuit. It is not a passive one. It's not just about what comes at you and what you deal with in a day, it's what do you do about it? So people are often like, my boss is bad at this, or my organization doesn't do this and I don't like this.

I say okay. Some of those things you can't change. So focus on the stuff that you can, the things that you can control, and there are so many things that you can do and you may still end up going, do you know what, this organization I've worked out is not right for me, and I know it because our values don't match. I know it because it's not got the right sense of purpose for me. I know it because I'm no longer learning or growing, and I've actually just outgrown my particular role. But I'm going to my next organization knowing what I need so I can be a better investigator or in a recruitment process, is this going to be the right job for me? And I allow myself a career that is joyful in as many ways as it can be.

Helen: Yes. Thank you for explaining that, that's makes so much sense. And I love how you frame it. You use the words, we have to get more awareness and build our skills at dealing with real organizational life and that's one of the things I loved about the book. It's not rose tinted, it doesn't go in the pursuit of, as you say, 100% joy all of the time. And it's also quite straight talking when it comes down to, as you say, any one of us might find ourselves in a position where we're unhappy with our boss, our colleagues, our role, our workload, a particular situation, or an organizational change that may be forced upon us that we've had no say in and, and we think, okay, well, I, I don't love it. I've got to jump ship or just sit there and moan.

And interestingly, a piece of research I came across last year found there's such a thing as emotional contagion in workplaces and I'll pop the link in the show notes. So if you are in gloom mode and you are letting people know about it, it does really have a big ripple effect. And so you are, by whichever actions and mindsets you adopt, you are absolutely helping to shape and influence your team culture and the wider culture. So what I love about your book is that it's like a real, come on, let's wake up about this. Let's be honest, we have personal responsibility for owning our enjoyment amongst the things we can control, as you say, at work and also for engaging to our fullest potential at work and, and claiming the bits we can claim to enjoy and improve the bits that we have some control over.

Beth: Yeah, absolutely. And for me, the personal responsibility is such a big thing. I think sometimes when we walk through the metaphorical doors of our offices or hospitals or our schools or whatever, wherever it is that we work, whether we're doing that online now or not with the metaphorical doors, is we hand over some of our power, and we go, well, that's my organization's responsibility; that's my boss's responsibility. If you've never had a conversation with your boss, an open conversation with your boss that says, these are the things I need to make me feel great at work; this is what I need in terms of development, you don't actually know if they can offer you that or not. But we spend so much of our time thinking about what's going on inside of our head versus what's really going on in the conversation. Do you know what brings your boss loads of joy? Do you know what brings them gloom? Are you sometimes the person that's bringing the gloom? Are you bringing the joy? You know that emotional contagion is so important when it comes to work joy, we've all been around, I call them mood hoovers in the book. We've all been around the people who suck the joy out of you. Don't be one of those people, but I've been one of those people before, I'm sure you've been one of those people before because we don't know we're doing it. We've got stuck somewhere, and that feeling of being stuck, that icky, I dunno what to do, is one of the things that people. ...

You talked about who comes for the book. The people who come to the book are people who are at a transition point or know they're coming to a transition point in their career. They know they need to do something, they don't know what to do. People who are feeling that meh but don't want to be a mood hoover, they're like, 'I don't want to be one of those people, but I'm feeling it happening'. They're the people who have the Sunday night pit of the stomach dread. They're the ones who are maybe already feeling some work joy, like they know what it is, but they need to think about what do I do to either maintain this through a challenging time like a change, or to be able to supercharge it so it becomes more of a life habit that works wherever they go. They're the sort of people who come and read the book and get the most from it.

Helen: Yes, wonderful. And I know there's just tons of helpful guidance around mindset, but also frameworks and tools in the book to help you take stock of where you're at and what brings you joy; where you tend to slip into gloomy circumstances and and emotions, et cetera. And one of the things particularly you touch on, which I'm especially interested in, given my line of work around time, how we think about it at work, is how we can use our time more joyfully. And you talk about that in the book, about boundaries, about the lovely metaphor of balloons consuming different chunks of our time in a given day or week about the need to escape busyness so that we have some time and some space to just do nothing.

And I picked up a wonderful phrase from your book that I've not heard of before. Revenge bedtime procrastination. Which might, can you do a quick explanation what that means? Because I'm not sure!

Beth: Yeah. And it's not my phrase, it's a phrase that has been out there in the research around actually people's behavior around work. It's that people are so busy during the day and our lives are increasingly busy with stuff and all the things that we have to do.

What people are doing is they're not getting enough sleep because they're sitting there procrastinating or scrolling on their phone for hours on end because it's the only time they have for themselves and because they're not valuing rest time. I am the worst for this. This is like Beth, take your own advice.

Taking some time out, having some rest time, being bored: all these things are massively brilliant for us, but we forget to do them.  But when we forget to do them, when we don't sleep enough, when we have 'revenge bedtime procrastination', when we're in these spaces, we do not make sensible decisions. We don't engage very well with our lives, let alone our work. We end up getting more easily frustrated. Work gloom comes much, much easier when we don't look after ourselves. So there's a big thing for me. It's not a book about wellbeing, but it is a book around actually, you have to look after yourself if you want this stuff to work as well.

Helen: Yes. And whilst it's a book that's obviously, as you say, aimed at the individual in their own work lives, there's a business consequence of these things that you talk about, which is, and you alluded to them earlier, better productivity, higher levels of engagement, better creativity, more brilliant ideas sparking in our very alert brains, et cetera.

Beth: Better relationships amongst employees, better relationships with clients, more sensible thinking. There's all kinds of brilliant reasons for having it from a business perspective, as well as from an individual one.

Helen: Yes. And while we were talking about time, you also talk about how important it is to note and reflect on who you are spending your time with, and you call it your squad. Can you just give us a quick minute or two on squads and how to make the most of them? I know that's not doing it justice.

Beth: Yeah. I mean, obviously in two minutes I probably can't do the whole thing, but what I will say is that a squad is like your inner network. They're like the team of people that support you to get more work joy. They don't all have to be in your working world, they can come from your life outside work.

I have people in my squad who are previous bosses, mentors, people who I work with, people who've work for me, all kinds of different people. But what I suggest here is that you look for six different types of role.

So rather than thinking about I need someone who helps me with this particular skill, we go, okay, actually I need somebody who's really creative. I need somebody who's got a little bit of magic to them, a conjuror. I need somebody who's a really good connector to help me get with other people. And there's six different roles I suggest people look for and some individuals may fill more than wrong role; others, you might have more than one person because it's something you really need or benefit from.

And it's just a little bit of an assessment that you can do, and it's in the downloadable that comes with the book, to really look at who have you got supporting you in that close understand you, we talk about comrades who are the people who are in it with you, to really help you get to where you want to go.

Sometimes you need the person who's going to be a challenger, who's going to come to you and go, Helen, I need to give you this bit of feedback because what you need to change, there's something you need to do about this. And sometimes it's the person who comes along and gives you a massive injection of confidence just when you need it.

But how are you nurturing those relationships? We so often only think about our networks when we are like, oh, hang on a minute I want to change job. I probably should have done some networking to help this happen because we know that networks are a fundamental factor in whether you are going to be able to get the next job you want.

But actually really considering how you utilize your squad, how you work with them, how you are a person in someone else's squad as well. Because I call it reciprocal squaddifying. I can't even myself, but helping other people has so many proven psychological benefits and it's like how do you do both roles, have people in with you, and how are you supporting others?

Helen: Yes, fabulous. Thank you for summarizing that so well, it's a great way to think about our network and whether we are getting a real diversity of views and support from that network or whether it's actually a bit too narrow and we need to, to broaden it a bit. And so just coming towards the end, I'm going to ask you one more question from your book that you pose to readers, which is what story about yourself, as yet untold, would you like to be told? So it's related to a question I phrase differently, what unfulfilled ambitions perhaps do you have? But there something you'd like to be able to say about your work or life from a future standpoint?

Beth: Yeah, I mean, there's so many little things I'm big on, like making sure you have big goals. I think one of them that I'm working on right now is I'd love to be able to put 'a TED speaker' on my website, say I've done that. So that would be one that's in my mind of a story that is yet to be fulfilled.

And I think as well, there's something for me about continuing the growth of my business and my organization, but my thing is about doing it in a way that remains joyful. So when you think about scaling a business, you think about growing a business. I don't want to do that at the expense of my joy because then it's not authentic.

So it's scaling a business, but doing it really well and doing it where there is massive amounts of joy in it. So a massive big one and a really specific one.

Helen: That's great. You're allowed at least two stories. There are many, many more stories that we might live over the coming months.

And how can people get in touch with you or follow your work or find out more about WorkJoy if they want to after hearing the podcast?

Beth: Yeah. Fab. Thank you. Well, couple of things they can do. First one is my websites are createworkjoy.com or bethstallwood.com. So it's either my name or Create WorkJoy. So do go and have a look on those websites. There is a free download on the Create WorkJoy website which you might enjoy, which is a tracking experiment, which helps you look at where you get your joy and where you get your gloom from and it has loads of reflective questions in it. So definitely worth a download, totally free. And it gives you one week and so many people use this as a starting point for where they get their joy from.

Obviously they can buy the book: 'WorkJoy:, a toolkit for a better working life' on all good online book retailers, and if you want to get in touch with me, I'm hello@createworkjoy.com, just send me an email. We're on all the socials at @createworkjoy as well. Be lovely to hear from you all.

Helen: Fabulous. Thank you. And I'll put links to your business and the book, et cetera, and your podcast in the show notes as well. And thank you so much, Beth, for being a brilliant guest. It's been joyful talking to you, your infectious enthusiasm and also your very wise words of advice for listeners about creating workjoy have been just wonderful to share with listeners today. So thanks so much for helping us understand how we can make the most of our working lives. You've been a brilliant guest!

Beth: Thank you so much for having me.