Constructing Our Future, Free from the Stigmas of Incarceration

Episode Transcript

Kelly:   Welcome back to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby, the podcast where we discover what skills can help you live your best life. I am your host Kelly Ryan Bailey, and each week I chat with inspiring visionaries about the skills that make them successful. You’ll get a firsthand account of how they develop those skills, as well as their innovative approaches to improving skills-based hiring and learning around the world.

Now let’s talk about skills, baby.

This week, I’m joined by Michelle Daniel. Michelle is a founding member and Chair of the Board of Constructing Our Future. She is currently a fourth year doctoral student in the American Studies program at New York University, while living in Indianapolis with her husband.

She is interested in the collateral consequences of [00:01:00] criminal convictions for people and families directly impacted by mass incarceration. Michelle’s advocacy beyond the classroom through collaborations and opportunities to speak truth to power. While incarcerated, she presented legislative testimony on a re-entry alternative she created, that was approved by the Indiana State Interim Committee on the Criminal Code.

As a subject matter expert, she serves in the development and operation of taskforces, think tanks, and initiatives to reduce harm end mass incarceration.

Michelle is currently under contract with the New Press to publish the history of Indiana’s carceral institutions for women, with fellow incarcerated and formerly incarcerated scholars. As an artist, Michelle is interested in finding ways to funnel her research pursuits into theater, dance, and photography. Her original play, the Duchess of String Town, co-authored with Anastasia Smith was produced in December, 2017 [00:02:00] in Indianapolis and New York City.

Her artist installation about stigma, Point of Triangulation, ran in September  to October, 2019 at NYU Galentine’s Gallery in New York, in March of 2020 at the Beyond The Bars Conference at Columbia University, in November 2020 through to January at the African-American Museum in Philadelphia, with a mural to follow in Spring 2021.

Wow, Michelle. I am so amazingly impressed and I’m so excited that you came to join us today. Thank you so much.

Michelle: Thank you for having me.

Kelly: My pleasure. So, I mean, I just want to jump in, I know like these highlights are absolutely amazing in your journey, but I would love to just hear a little bit more about sort of what’s led you here today.

Michelle: Sure. So  I was a girl who was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. I was born to a mother with a single parent home. My brother left home when he was 17 and I was [00:03:00] removed from my mother’s home as a teenager, and I grew up in the system.

I went from foster care to the guardian home and that ultimately ended up matriculating, turning 18 in a group home . And I had a son and I wasn’t able to parent well either. And as a result, my son passed as my failure there as a parent.

I spent 20 years in incarceration, over 20 years of incarceration for failing to parent my son while he died in my care. And that was some deep, spiritual and emotional trauma and work that took me years, decades, to deal with. I felt unworthiness, I felt self hatred. I felt shame and guilt.

I felt abandoned by my parents and family. And so coming back from all of that loss, I was also married at the time and near the [00:04:00] end I lost the husband. And I suffered significant trauma and abuse from him, and so climbing up that mountain of trauma, pain and loss and getting up to the other side so that I could look out to the world, required tremendous intensive therapy and support.

I found in my community, in the Black community, two Black women who became my mothers, in fact, and they helped me through the trauma. They parented me, they loved me. They helped me heal through all that occurred. Both of those mothers are still in my lives today. They are my mothers, they are my family.

I would not have made it without strong Black women in my life who came alongside me when I was most fragile, and most wounded from life. And truly, a woman who looked back at how she had failed everyone. And instead of them abandoning me as well, they were like, let us help you.

They both flew to St. Croix for my wedding in [00:05:00] 2020. And they stood by my side and they’re still in my corner, but they gave me a foundation. They helped reinforce the spiritual foundation as well as a community oriented foundation, that said to whom much is given much is required. And I was getting much from them.

I was able to, after 20 years of incarceration, not only just lift my head up and survive incarceration, I was able to do their support and their love. I figured out how to thrive in a carceral setting. I know would not have done that or been able to do that without those powerful Black women.

Kelly: Wow. Well, first off, thank you so much for sharing this story. I can’t help but just be more amazed at what things I’ve just mentioned that you’ve become today,  hearing this journey that you’ve had to go through. So thank you first off for just sharing that.  

Michelle: I usually don’t. But today I felt I felt comfortable to do so.

[00:06:00] Kelly: I’m so glad that you did. Sometimes sharing our  stories can help other people that, maybe it’s not the exact same place they are in, but they may be in a place of struggle as well. And just knowing that other people out there, it’s not always what we see from the outside.

Michelle: Absolutely. A struggle is relative. Someone can be completely, have their lives turned completely  upside down by a major illness, or a temporary incarceration, or a loss of a family member. So struggle is relative.

Kelly: It’s so true because it just depends on what your circumstance is.  I’d love to lean on this relationship with these women you mentioned. When did you meet them and your journey?

 Michelle: So I met them after my son passed, and I was very alone and they were part of the African-American community. I celebrate Kwanzaa and I went to one of those events and watched and took it all in. And ended up in a conversation with them at one of these events. [00:07:00] That conversation led to like a dinner, the dinner led to sitting on the floor of their home and listening to them and learning from them.

And yeah.

Kelly: That’s amazing. I can only imagine. Just the perseverance of going through what you had to go through,  that alone and imagining all the other things you must have learned through that is quite amazing.

Michelle: I know that I wouldn’t be the woman who I am today, had I not had their spirit and their support many times. I wanted to just give up and I would be in conversation with one of my mothers and  I would call her and I would be just overwhelmed by incarceration, and everything that had gone wrong, and feeling it, and living in it, and hurt and feel that.

And she would say, oh Lord, she would say, sweetie, you have two minutes to whine and [00:08:00] complain. And then I want to hear about what you’re doing.

Kelly: She helped to reframe your mind, it sounds like.

Michelle: Right. I was like, oh, okay. And then it made me like, what’s the worst thing I want to spend my two minutes on. It made me reframe but also when I would talk about those things she would be like, how big is your God?

And I would say, what are you talking about? She’s like, you need to grow your God. Obviously you feel that what you’re going through and what you’ve gone through, what has happened to you and where you fallen short, is beyond the capacity of your current God to help you through. What to handle.

And she said, it sounds like your God is too small. And I was that’s not what the average person would be saying to a human being, but like, you’re in our prayers, we’re going to help [00:09:00] you.

Your God is too small because she said, if you think about it, there’s absolutely nothing that God can’t handle. No situation, no failure in humanity, no failure in the planet that is incapable for God to redeem, heal.

And so today I have a spiritual foundation and I’m not a. Not my belief system. That’s something that you put in a box if it doesn’t fit. You can’t buy it off a shelf. It is a hodgepodge of traditions and practices that I have put into place over the years and have been proven to work for me. And so I don’t have a cookie cutter Christianity or cookie cutter faith.

Kelly: I actually love that you said that though, because you know the point of this, although the title of this podcast being about skills, right? The point of it is actually finding your unique the things [00:10:00] that work to build out, what is your situation?

Michelle:  It’s intimately related to my belief system. I had to believe that there was value left in me. That there was worth left in me, I had to believe that there was a God that believed in me and could help me. That could redeem me from my failure and my losses. I’m young, right.

At this, my life blows up and I’m 15 years old. 15, 16 years old. And you think that you’re never going to come back from these things, but working with my moms helped me reframe that. And that becomes a key thing that I build off of everything else. There are certain beliefs that I have. Number one, it is done unto me as I believe. Now that’s scriptural, but it’s also part of new thought and religious science background.

I read metal as much as I read king.

[00:11:00] Kelly: It really all comes down to the mindset. That is actually, as you can attest to, a taught skill. And is taught in the hardest possible way.

Michelle: Incarceration is one of the incubators of a compression out of stressors and trauma and re-inscription of criminality. I mean, I’m testing out these practices under the most extreme conditions. So if they worked for me in there then they’ll work for me, period.

Kelly: Exactly.

Michelle: One of the things I know that works for me is a vision board. One of the things that I know that works for me is affirmations on the wall. Affirmations that are visual.

One of the things that my mom told me, is that I always go back to the things that she –  she came to my wedding, and one of the [00:12:00] things we got to do is just kind of like sit out on the beach and talk about life.

I told her what got me through 20 years of incarceration. And often I would come back to these things that she said in a letter or things the other mom said in a visit, and they were just talking and I was getting like the pearls of wisdom to live by.

And the God bag. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the God bag. One of the things that I used to do was worry and stress and ruminate and wash and repeat about things that were out of my control.  I hate it when people would just say, oh, just pray about it, like that’s going to stop you from thinking about it.

And so my mom sent me in this thing called how to create a God bag and you just get a funky, old bag and you put a date. You put what the worry is, and you have this thing of [00:13:00] folding it up, put it in the God bag, tying the bag.

It’s literally the physical, mental hand push releasing things into God’s hands in this bag.  The practice of it actually took some of the day to day worry and strife, and uncertainties of life worrying, worrying, worrying, not knowing what is going to happen. It took it out of my physical body and this practice of using this God bag.

 Kelly: These are like the daily practices that help keep you from going down, is the way that I looked at it because life just has its ups and downs. And it’s funny that you say this, I actually really liked that idea. That physical motion of things and putting it somewhere in tying the bag makes such a huge difference in the physical writing of something down was just like, okay, it’s here now.

Michelle: Right, right. And then I decorate the bag. It had [00:14:00] God bag and glitter and it made it special, I literally still have it. I literally still have this bag that has gone through decades.

That’s the best part, right? Years have gone by. And I got to the point where I was like only putting it in there, the truly, I can’t solve this problem. This is out of my hands type of worries.

And it was amazing to come back and see things in there from 97-99, cause I really started looking at it when I got home. And its own joy. It’s own celebration moment to see how God will work things out and how people will be brought into your life.

Like, oh my gosh, this wasn’t solved the way I thought it was. But I met this person. This person came in my life and it’s an amazing way to look back. And I love seeing things with my handwriting. My handwriting has changed over the years, and that [00:15:00] was interesting to see, right.

Decades of just kind of like my journey in prayer.

Kelly: In my mind now that I know you’re so creative with things I can, 100% see you like writing the most amazing book I’ve ever read.

Michelle: I have a desire to write a book. I mean, we are writing a book on the history project right now, you know that, but I do have a desire to write a book.

Kelly: You know why? Because I think we talk a lot about young women needing to have people to look up to that sound like them and look like them and had struggles that they’ve had, so that they can understand that they’re not alone. Like there’s so much power in knowing that you’re not the only one.

Michelle: I totally agree. A key book that was transformative for me, was Susan Burton’s book, called becoming Ms. Burton.

 And it was the story about her life as a drug addict and her back and forth cycling in and out of incarceration, and the loss of her son and [00:16:00] how traumatic that was because he was killed by police.

And how her cycle of addiction kept destroying things in her life and she’d rebuild it and would destroy and rebuild. And then she got to good point where she was like done and she decided to create these transitional moving houses for women across California.  And it started with one. It was one plan to help one house of women get their lives together.

And now she has like 10 transitional houses across the state. She’s seating transitional houses across the country with her safe housing network. But I remember when I read her book, I read her book at a time when I was trying to step out, I was planning for my release. I had just signed my contract with NYU and I was in a moment of being shook by fear. Like crap , am I really going to do this?  From being inside to going out into the world?

I’ve signed this contract, it’s got out. It says that [00:17:00] I agree to certain things as a scratch with student, I’m going to go into this program in New York.

I have signed my name. This is real, real, real now.

And I was shook by fear and Dr. Kaufman had sent, Dr. Kauffman is the Founder of the Higher Education Program Inside, and she got this book through another lady and someone had given it to her and she was like, do you want to read this? And I was like, sure. And I took it and I read it in a weekend and it was transformative . So Susan Burton today, I consider her a mentor.  Constructing Our Futures are a part of her Safe House Network.

Kelly: I didn’t know that. That’s amazing.

Michelle: Yeah. I literally called her twice last week, and I’m a part of the community of formally incarcerated women, leaders who are doing transitional housing, but having her story out there was a very important encouragement at a time when I was feeling a little fearful. 

Kelly: Fear stops you.

Michelle: Yeah.

Kelly: And so to hear that story, that’s why [00:18:00] I think these stories are so powerful.

Michelle: Yeah. Yeah. And she’s a powerful woman and  I respect her so much and her example has inspired me. But yeah, you’re right. It is important to see ourselves out there and doing the work.

Honestly in the space that I’m in, the re-entry space, housing space. On the national level, there are other amazing African-American women that I can look to for inspiration, but I didn’t know that at the time. I was in Indianapolis, in this little space. And that book was the only thing that was really known to me. It helped me a lot. My copy is so dog-eared, it’s ridiculous.

Kelly: no, I bet. I was going to say you must have – whenever I have one of those books, I have like notes sticking out, things highlighted, all these pages.

Michelle: don’t know if you’ve heard of the Kennedy Forum?

Kelly: No.

Michelle: The Kennedy Forum is held by the descendants of the Kennedys.  Each year is a [00:19:00] theme and social justice and change and things like that. So I got invited to the Kennedy Forum to kind of talk about my story, but when they told me that I was being paired with Susan, I was so excited that I didn’t even talk about myself. I spent my entire panel interview.

Kelly: Yeah, but when you get to meet one of those, you just want to-

Michelle: I told her she was my hero. She was my hero. She signed my book. Little did I know we would be really working together now, but my first time meeting her in Chicago, I just total fan girl total like, oh my God, there she is.

Kelly: That’s amazing. Well, feel like you’re going to be that for so many women.

Because they will have been in a place where they needed to be able to connect to someone. And that’s the great thing, about having these ideas and going out there and pushing past that fear, which is also an amazing skill that is hard to learn. [00:20:00] But you’ve done that.

Michelle: One of the things that helps me is being prepared. I’ve done countless conferences and panels and things like that, and stood up in front of people and talk about various topics. But I also have sung, for years and year in choir. And there’s something about being prepared that takes away my anxiety.

Getting up there and singing a song that I know, or ad libbing on a song that I know, is empowering in a way. And it takes away the fear. So that kind of practice I take to this work as well.

One of the first big presentations I gave was to the entire Gear Institute for Justice. And I was very nervous because when I walk out, I know that I’m representing not only the incarcerated population, but also women, Black women.

So it’s like, are they [00:21:00] going to give other women like me opportunities if I mess this up.  But I preparation gets rid of my anxiety. If I have time to run through everything before, or if I’m really well-versed in a subject, if I’m well-read in a subject. I learned that if you know what you know, and you speak about what you know and you’re earnest, and you’re sincere, and you deliver very powerfully, then you can do it. I have told myself in the mirror, you can do this, you know this stuff, you do not need to be freaking out at this moment.

Kelly: Now that I’ve heard this and I feel like honestly we could talk forever, but I want to make sure that we hone in a little bit on Constructing Our Future because the work that you’re doing is amazing. Before you read Susan’s book, was this part of what was in your mind? Like how do I help other women that potentially are in my same place?

Michelle: Oh, absolutely. [00:22:00] The whole point of my spiritual understanding, my spiritual background, is service. The way in which I can understand, the way in which I can heal the rift in the spiritual universe, by the ways in which I have fallen short in the past. And let my son down, I let my family members down, is through service. I’m healing through service. So of course I thought get out here, getting my degree program and then get to see how I can serve.

I had always planned to be a part in Constructing Our Future. I was a part of the group that created it inside, developed the program inside. And so I didn’t know what particular role, but I definitely wanted to be a part. And then the existing board members suggested that I’d be voted in as Board President, because the leadership needed to be represented by formerly incarcerated woman leadership.

I was voted in. I took that position very seriously. From [00:23:00] the very beginning, we needed to figure out how to create an effective infrastructure for the organization. Because you don’t come out of your mother’s womb knowing how to run a board, or run an organization, or how to recruit people or staff, you don’t know how to raise money.

You don’t know how to run a business and nonprofit or otherwise. And so we spent a couple of years, we had an ED that we had ultimately let go because he wasn’t a great fit. But we actually contracted with an organization to teach us all of the infrastructure work that we needed to do. Fiduciary responsibility to the organization, all that stuff.

And so the organization today, having started through an idea of one incarcerated woman who is still in, she’s getting closer and closer to her outdate. I can’t wait till she’s home.

But it’s her idea and it was developed by the other women in the public policy class. And it came out from the facility and has been literally being plugged in and [00:24:00] implemented in real time, right now.

And we’re very proud of that. It helps dispel these notions about believing women about can incarcerated, former incarcerated people, problem solve for their own issues. I mean, it disrupts all of those narratives about what this population, what we can or cannot do or should, or should not reach for.

Kelly: Are you disrupting these notions, with the women themselves that are coming out or society at large?

Michelle: Because a lot of the women who are out, knew about us all along,  they heard about us in classes.They know who we are. But we also communicate with them on a regular basis. We have over a thousand members in our Post-Incarcerated Women’s Network Facebook group.

It’s a closed group, and we verify that every woman who’s in that group is formerly incarcerated.  And so we are already plugged in with our own [00:25:00] female and women community.

What we are trying to do is show that, and it’s particularly a very conservative, evangelical Republican state, like Indiana. We’re trying to show what is capable, what is the capacity of a formerly incarcerated woman to get done in this state and problem solve for themselves?

And that’s what it’s about. So what is Constructing Our Future? It is a home, it’s a transitional safe, welcoming home for formerly incarcerated women. That when they are in Constructing Our Future and living in our home, they have two options on the educational track or construction track. So that they can either get finished a credential that they started in prison or before, and didn’t get done, or they can go the vocational track.

Cause there are some vocational programs that are inside. But maybe they’re not in a place where they can go right into an apprenticeship or a journeymen situation. .We’re looking to partner [00:26:00] with local colleges that are doing vocational training to support women finishing that.

 And then in terms of their other needs, we’re partnering with local organizations like Pace Indie that will do, there’s substance use support, that will do some of their career assessment support. And so what we’re going to do is do what we do well, provide that safe, welcoming home environment, allowing them to do reunification with their children there.

Allow them to not have to worry about being unsafe at night and be living in a situation with living at home living situation that is it’s secure. And allow them to moment to breathe and then support them as they figure out how to create the capacity to sustain themselves. That is what Constructing Our Future is all about.

One of the things that we’re going to do then is in our partnering with one organization, we will partner with another to allow their women to come through us [00:27:00] and we become a place where women can funnel in through.

It’s all possible when you recognize what your strengths are and what your limitations are and you get yourself out there to meet people, learn what they’re doing. A lot of organizations out there are niche organizations and they’re not  large enough to supply all of the needs of a reentering person, but they do have a piece and you can plug into that.

Kelly: How do you guys find each other?

Michelle: So in our city, there’s a group called the Marin County Reentry Coalition. And this reentry coalition is composed of both state, but also local nonprofits are providing direct services to the population. And so those type  of coalitional hubs where you meet people. And then you also meet people through your funders, your funders know everybody.

Kelly: Yup.

[00:28:00] Michelle: One of our funders introduced us to my lawyers. Our lawyers introduced us to an organization that we are looking to get volunteer workers to come and help when it’s time to start looking at houses to renovate and stuff like that.

Kelly: Cool.

Michelle: The funders, particularly local funders, they know. I mean, to be honest, there’s a lot of people who don’t want to work with the formerly incarcerated populations because they have the needs of needing to report to probation and parole. Some of them might have cases that people don’t agree with and all this other stuff.

And so what Constructing Our Future does, is that we don’t allow any of those barriers to exist between providing services to our women. We’re not going to do that. And so this is why it’s important for formerly incarcerated leadership to be in charge of organizations [00:29:00] that are looking to serve that population.

KKelly: Cause they understand fully.

Michelle: They understand, and they’re not going to reinscribe criminality and traumatize people in order to give them access to resources and opportunity. In other words, I’m not going to need to know someone’s story in order to determine whether or not they get a bed.

So we’re not going to reinscribe harm. We’re not going to do it unless that individual wants to go there like today, I was felt comfortable in going that that was my choice. It has to always be the individual’s choice that’s inscribing reinscribing trauma on an individual who’s already gone through it. For what purpose? So that someone can eat it and consume it. It’s like, what is that about?

Kelly:  I think it’s so powerful when someone is comfortable at that point in their journey to share their story, because that’s the kind of way that we help others. Because they can see it for its true light and not [00:30:00] from an entertainment perspective.

 Michelle: I think that the way in which society is currently set up, there is the myth of doing your time. That you do the crime, you do the time. And once you’ve done that, then you’ve quote unquote paid your debt to society. And that is it.

Of course, you know because the collateral consequences of criminal convictions, the legal ones on the books, top over 45,000 in the country that are legal barriers to formerly incarcerated people reentering society.

So, you know there’s legal. Legal derives from the social, and the social collateral consequences of criminal convictions literally apply a taint of criminality upon formerly incarcerated people. That follows throughout the existence of your life. I met a woman who 20 years past her incarceration. 20 years since her outdate and she’d been home, she wanted to go for a real estate license [00:31:00] in her state.

Okay. 20 years. And after she’d done all her time, gone home, been home two decades. Okay. She still had to go back to her parole office and beg them for a letter saying, haven’t I been a good person for 20 years. Can you please give me a good person letter? Because I want to be a real estate agent.

What does that do for that human being in her mental, emotional, psychic self, to two decades past her being home, that she still has to go through this perpetual scription of criminality upon her, in order to get access to opportunity. It says that you are perpetually a criminal and you will always be It puts the myth that myth in the high relief and that it is truly more or less. Ms. Gilmore’s just straight up a lie.

And so my job is to not [00:32:00] cause any harm to women who are being served by our organization. To ensure that they don’t go through that as they seek resources and opportunity while they’re a part of Constructing Our Future, until we can change it.

Kelly: And I think this is such a good point.

You’re right. It can’t all be changed at once, but you keep going. Those incremental steps, when you all of a sudden turn around and look at them all together, it’s going to seem like a huge deal.

Michelle: We’re just putting our work in the God bag and we’re going to look back and see all the wonderful things that we would able to get accomplished. I mean, I have faith. I have faith in our ability to make radical change. If I didn’t, I’d go somewhere else and do something else.

The state of Indiana is one of the more tougher places to live in order to make this type of change. So if I wanted to have a little easier experience, I’d go somewhere else like California, maybe. I don’t know.

Kelly: The fact is, that’s where you grew up. And so I understand the [00:33:00] feeling of not wanting to leave people in a situation. all of the hardness of it.

Michelle: Well, and you have a heart for the place.

You care, you love a space. You believe in the people who are there. And so you work for those people.

Kelly: And I think what adds to the thoughts around how you’ve taken what you’ve learned in your life through a challenging situation into something that, again, everyone heard what I read at the beginning. And that is just this moment in time. I can’t even imagine how many more things will accomplish through your entire life. You’ve created your own version of success uniquely what is yours and I applaud you so much for this.

And I see this as being the way a lot of people are starting to reframe their own realities. It’s not easy, but as you can see, it’s so worth it.

Michelle: Your life work should also be hard work. It should be hard work. And so it should be doing some [00:34:00] spiritual heart for you. If it’s only drudgery and burden, you are going to shorten your lifespan.

Kelly: Yup.

Michelle: I have a lot to do every single day, but I remind myself that this is the life I wanted. I have the life I wanted, a life of advocacy and service and education and instruction and constant learning and partnership and collaboration and spirit and dance. 

Kelly: I love how you’ve just taken all the things and made that. And you followed all the things that warm your heart and it really does show. So if you could pass on to anyone that could possibly listen to this, what would be the last thing you would share to people? Whether it be on the personal or professional is up to you.

Michelle: I would say to whom much is given much is required. And if you look about your life and you see that you have, you are [00:35:00] required to give. Much as required of you, much as being asked of you. You haven’t been given just for your own personal enjoyment. Much is required of you beyond yourself.

And when you find what that saying is that you’re supposed to be doing for others, you will have a warmer heart and you’ll have a lighter heart and you will sleep better and you will get more joy out of life and you will laugh so much more and your life will be far more rewarding. My mother told me to grow my God and it was the best thing she could’ve ever told me to do.

But at one point it was the best thing I did for myself. I feel like I belong now in a way, which I didn’t feel before. I have taken up my space in the planet and it feels good. And so I think that that’s what I would tell people.

Kelly: I’m getting teary-eyed again, because it is so meaningful. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. [00:36:00] For those of you that would like to follow Michelle, I just want to let you know that she is available. Michelle Daniel, she’s on LinkedIn. She’s also on Twitter @cof_michelle.

And she’s also on Instagram @Michelle_thetruth.

Constructing Our Future, you can even find more information about them directly on their website, constructingourfuture.com. I highly suggest you check them out support them, you know, join them if you in a position to do so. I think it would just be amazing to continue to grow this.

And of course, as you said, to potentially other regions as well that could use this kind of help. 

Michelle: We’re on the verge of getting our first house and we are absolutely ecstatic. And so 2021 is our year.

Kelly: To 2021. 

 You’ve been listening to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby, a Growth Network Podcasts production. [00:37:00] If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and share it with your community. Ratings, reviews and suggestions are great sources of feedback and always appreciated. Please reach out and connect with me on social at Kelly Ryan Bailey.

I’d love to meet you and continue the conversation. We’ll be back next week with a new episode, so until then keep growing your skills and have a great day.