Feel the Fear, Do It Anyway: Leading Through Discomfort

Speaker A: Feel the fear, but do it anyway. That's the motto that I live by. And I think Dale Carnegie really helped me kind of see through that.

Speaker B: Welcome to Take Command, a Dale Carnegie podcast. I'm Joe Hart, CEO of Dale Carnegie and if you're ready to grow your leadership skills, follow Take command now and never miss an episode of that could transform your career. Today's guest is a serial entrepreneur who helped bring Canada's online identity to life. She's built a multi million dollar company that serves some of the country's largest corporations, governments and global Fortune 500 brands. A Hall of Fame inductee among Canada's top 100 most powerful women, and a nine time Profit 100 honoree. She serves as Vice chair of the Royal Canadian Mint along with many other board positions. She is a columnist for Business in Vancouver, a TEDx speaker, and a second generation Dale Carnegie graduate. Please welcome CEO and co founder of Webnames CA, Sibel Negress. Cybelle. Welcome to the Dale Carnegie Take man podcast.

Speaker A: Thank you Joe for having me here and it's such an honor to be a part of this.

Speaker B: Well, uh, it's an honor to have you. It's exciting to have you. You've achieved so many amazing things. You're a surreal entrepreneur and a speaker and a writer, serve on many, many boards. You're also, and I always love this, a Dale Carnegie graduate, the second of three generations in your family of Dale Carnegie graduates. So certainly want to talk to you about that. You know what I also love about your story, which we'll talk about, is you overcame a lot. You overcame fear and different kinds of things to be as successful as you are. Tell us a little bit about you, Cybele, and just even your background prior to starting your businesses.

Speaker A: Absolutely happy to. So I think my journey really started, maybe I'll go all the way back to when I was a, uh, very shy, insecure kid that just didn't feel like I fit in anywhere. So from a mixed race family, grew up in Hong Kong in my early years and just didn't feel like I really fit in there. And then moved to Canada, to Vancouver, British Columbia with my family as a young kid and, and face quite a bit of bullying. Not so much for myself. I think girls are a little bit more sneaky about bullying, but boys, my younger brother faced a lot of bullying. So I found myself as the older sister, honestly in fist fights quite a bit trying to defend my brother. And I mean those are the times that that's how you took care of business. Right. Today, that would be unfathomable that you would have fist fights as young children. But back then, that's just the way it was. So ended up going a lot of that with my young brother. Maybe that kind of shaped a little bit of where my life became later on in terms of overcoming adversity. In university, I became probably a little bit more reclusive, and I was the kid that sat in the back of the class. I never put up my hands to ask any questions or to answer any questions. I had blue hair, so I was just isolating myself from everybody else and eventually dropped out of commerce. And it was very ironic. The reason why I did that was because I wanted to avoid public speaking. So I ended up with a psychology degree, which I think was very helpful, in fact, to help me understand myself and other people and the inner workings of the mind. And during the time at university, I worked full time and also did a lot of different things. So I worked in the department of finance in hr. I was a graduate secretary for one summer. I even worked in the hospital at the bone marrow transplant program. I was a medical secretary in the ophthalmology department. One summer I even shoveled bark mulch with eight burly guys from the landscaping department. So I did so many different things. So again, I think that shaped me from all the varied experiences to become that serial entrepreneur that one day I would become. I ended up working in the president's office after graduating and working as the faculty relations manager. And I used to work so hard. I ended up scaring the security people who came in to check on the office. And they said, what are you doing here? And I said, oh, I have so much work to do. And they said, girl, it's after midnight, you better go home. And they would walk me to the car. I realized at that point that if I was going to work in a public sector job, it wasn't really fulfilling what I wanted to be, and I wanted to do more. So that's when I took the Adele Carnegie program. Dale Carnegie, I think, was really my first path to set me on that road towards becoming that serial entrepreneur. And so I ended up working for a pharmaceuticals company first. And I think I was employee either three or four. And we built the company to about 40 people, took it public, and then I took an exit three years later. I then started a consulting company, built websites and wrote policies for a number of organizations. And then after that, I ended up starting a construction company with my then husband. And we ended up building that company into a Fairly large company building luxury homes and commercial properties as well. And it was during one winter that I think we had locked up the houses that we were building. It was rainy and it was Christmas and I was bored because I didn't have children then. And I decided that I needed to more to do. So I took up a contract again with the University of British Columbia where I had gone to school. And it was there that I met John Demko. John was this amazing guy who had founded the CA domain name in Canada. So he had run the dot ca registry for 13 years for free, never charging a single dollar. And that was because he wanted to have an online identity for all Canadians. And I thought, wow, uh, like who does that? But I think it was during a time when essentially the Internet was pre commercialization of the Internet. It was a time when it was the sharing of knowledge and expertise was what the Internet was all about. Right? It was people who just wanted to share knowledge. And John was one of those pioneers. So when I met him he had about 100,000 dot ca domain names under management and he was doing this seven days a week till I think two o' clock in the morning because he had a full time job already as the facilities manager at uh, the Computer Science Building. So in the end I ended up going to his office and realized that he had all these faxes stacked up behind his door because he ran out of filing space. And there was all these faxes that people faxed in to confirm that they were Canadian and ultimately that he was doing all this manually, either by email, fax, and processed everything manually. So between John and myself and the technology transfer manager at the university basically built up this new business to commercialize this technology and eventually sold it to the Canadian Internet Registration Authority.

Speaker B: That was Webnames ca. Yes.

Speaker A: Well, the registry was sold to Cira and they still run the registry today. But Web Names, we started it as a side business because we're still having so much fun doing this work. So we said, let's see what happens if we become one of the accredited registrars under CIRA when they launched. So we did and we built it from three people to 30 people in four months. We did two and a half million dollars on our first year of operations. And it was probably one of the times that we had the most fun in our lives. The team had an amazing time. We slept in sleeping bag, working every day, seven days a week. So that's how Web Names was founded. That was 26 years ago. Uh, and today we have over 800 products.

Speaker B: That's phenomenal. And you shared an awful lot, Sibela. And thank you so much for just taking us through that journey. I want to go back a little bit because I think a lot of times, especially when I talk to entrepreneurs, sometimes there's something that was a trigger for them. And, uh, I can't help but think about the different things in your background. On the one hand, you said I was kind of shy. On the other hand, you were courageous. You're standing up for your brother, you know, or you're sitting in the back of the room. But then ultimately you become the serial entrepreneur and so forth. And I know many people struggle with that. Even the identity of who am I and what am I about? And so forth. I'm curious, if you reflect on that journey, what insights would you share with people who are struggling with some of those kinds of things, especially the fear part of it and overcoming the fear. What would you recommend to someone who's trying to overcome fear to become really that better version of themselves?

Speaker A: Yeah, so fear is something that I felt was in some ways paralyzing me for a long time. But then I had this feeling that there was more in store of me. So jumping over that little point, that obstacle, I think many people struggle with that. Now. Today I live with this motto that I say, feel the fear, but do it anyway. That's the motto that I live by. And I think Dale Carnegie really helped me kind of see through that, because that idea of getting out of your comfort zone, and I remember that all the way back to the Dale Carnegie program, that stepping out of your comfort zone is one of the hardest things to do. And I try today to do that on a consistent basis. That feeling of discomfort, it's like a muscle that you have to flex and you have to keep practicing to do it. And speaking is actually not my first comfort. And it took me many, many years to get over that fear of speaking. And Dale Carnegie, again, help helped me do that. And even after that, it took me probably another 10 years of speaking at multiple, I would say hundreds of speaking engagements before I finally one day thought, oh, my heart isn't beating out of my chest and I'm not sweating and just stammering and feeling so uncomfortable that I just wanted to get away from this. And I think many people don't have that level of fear as I did. I remember being in the Gale Carnegie class thinking, this is going to help all of you. But my fear is so much worse than all of yours. I will never get over this. But I did.

Speaker B: What was it? What happened in that program that helped you change that?

Speaker A: Just the idea of that you have to keep doing it, and it's okay to fail. You're in a safe place to keep practicing. And there were many times after that that I didn't feel like I was in a safe place to keep doing it. In fact, every time I would drive to a speaking engagement, I would think, oh, boy, I would rather crash my car and be in the hospital than have to go do this right now. But then, okay, that's stupid. You're not going to do that. So just go and face your fears. And then I would do it. And then afterwards I would feel great. But it was during that I felt horrible. But then when you do it fifty, a hundred times, finally one day that comes and you're like, oh, okay. It actually feels okay. Now maybe I'll tell a story of my worst fear coming to life. It was at a TEDx event, and I was speaking, and it was one of those horrible weeks where I, um, mean, I was going through a divorce at the time. And so I had all these affidavits I had to respond to. I had very young children. I think my kids were about 4 and 6 at the time. So I was a single mom. And what does a person do but take on 20 speaking engagements that week to keep busy? So that's the way my life was going at the time. So needless to say, I had no sleep. I wasn't eating. And Friday came along, and we had a dress rehearsal for the TEDx. And they put you up in a hotel. And I went to the dress rehearsal and I thought, oh, wow, I really rock this. I did such a great job. So I'm going to take the time now to write out my speech for the Sunday event. I had 500 moms that I was talking to at the Mom Inc. Movement. So I stayed up that night doing that. And then I realized in the morning I hadn't slept and I hadn't eaten. And then I went straight to my TEDx event. So it was my turn to speak. I step up on the stage. It goes pretty well. I was speaking about the past and the future of the Canadian Internet. I started talking about my business partner John, who was such an incredible person. And then the room started to spin, and I thought, oh, my gosh, what is happening? And I started to sweat. I could feel it was probably the lack of sleep, lack of eating, the adrenaline. And I was wearing heels, which I'm not used To. And I felt like I was going to fall off the stage, so the only thing I could do was walk off. So I walked off the stage to the back, and I put my head between my knees, and I thought, oh, no, I've really screwed this up. And there were people out there. They thought it was part of the act because I was talking about John. They thought maybe I became emotional, and I had people knocking at the back door who had come to see me. And they thought, oh, my gosh. Like, is she okay? And, uh, my handler that was supposed to help me through the day, she's going, oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry. I should have given you juice. Like, here's some juice to drink. And they're like, what should we do? And I said, I don't think I can go back out there. Like, I'm feeling horrible right now. So I said, send out the next speaker. So they did. They sent out the speaker, tried to kind of erase what I was doing. And then I thought, oh, gosh, like, what am I going to do? I want to go back out. But I was still feeling horrible and faint and nauseous. So the next speaker finished, and I said, okay, send out the next speaker. And send out the next speaker until there were no more other speakers to go. And then the emcee, M. Came back to say, hey, what's going on? And I said, I want to go back out. And he said, oh, there, there. It's okay. You don't have to do this, and patted me on the back. And I said, no way. At that point, it kind of lit that fire inside me. I said, of course I have to go do this now. So I stood up and I marched back out onto the stage without thinking what I was going to say at this point. And I said, okay, I think people need an explanation. So I said, look, I'm not going to go into all the details of what happened to me, but basically, I'm a single mom. Um, I had all this stuff going on this week, and I wasn't taking care of myself. And let this be a lesson to all of you not to do the same thing. Take care of yourself. Don't let your life go out of balance. But I'm here to finish my speech. You could just see all the faces go, oh. So I just finished my speech. 17 minutes, and I was done at the end. I was just thankful that I'd finished it. And then you stand up there, they give you a plaque, and then people line up to come talk to you. And I was just going to walk off. I was pretty much done. And then I realized everybody came and lined up in front of me. And I thought, wow, what is going on? And the first woman who lined up, she said, sibel, I've been watching your career for years, but today you're my ultimate hero. And I just, like, I was shocked. And she started to cry. I started to cry. And the woman behind her came and she said, thank you so much for being human. And I thought, wow. So it was the authenticity, the way that I just came out and just recovered myself and I was just being real. People didn't need to see anybody truly inspiring or had great wisdom. The fact that I was open and told my real story and saw and was vulnerable is what connected with people. And then a guy walked by, he punched me on the shoulder, and he says, you've got balls. Uh, the guy response to that, which is funny.

Speaker B: The resilience. People necessarily expect you to come to do that, to go back in. Right. But you got back up on stage after that experience, not knowing what was going to happen. You could have fainted then. Yeah. You're still struggling. I think that's something I see in leadership, just in general. People appreciate that authenticity, just being genuine and being transparent and not trying to put on a facade like, I've got everything covered as a leader in business. It's like, hey, we're. We're all working together here. We don't have all the answers. Right. And you probably, in that moment, in that kind of microcosm, so to speak, represented that for everyone in the room.

Speaker A: Exactly. And I'm a huge believer that a CEO or a leader, you shouldn't always try to be the smartest person in the room. And I think it was Simon Sinek who actually said that. He kind of pushed it a little bit. He said, the CEO should be the dumbest person in the room. And I think what he means by that, and something that I've kind of aspired to, is to just hire really smart people and let them shine. So leadership is about empowering people around you. It's not just being authoritative and forcing people to follow you. I mean, leadership is really about inspiring people and to Dale Carnegie's point, influencing people to follow. Right. So I think one of my favorite quotes goes something like, if you think you're leading but nobody's following, then you're just going for a walk. Right. So that's something that always resonated with me because it's about influence and building Relationships and empowerment. But, you know, you should just never try to have that ego sit on top of it all. It's about listening, driving, consensus. And then when the time is right, then you need to step in and be the courageous one to make those hard decisions. But, uh, never just have your ego sit on top of everything.

Speaker B: That's absolutely true. I'm kind of curious because one of the things we talk about in Dale Carnegie is people should talk about the thing they've earned the right to talk about. And you clearly have earned the right. You've built multiple very successful businesses, you are on multiple boards, you've been very, very successful in business. And you were talking about the importance of inspiring others and bringing out the, the best in others. What are some of the ways that you did that in some of the businesses that you built? Or if there's a story that you'd share that kind of embodies that. We'd love to hear that.

Speaker A: For me, it's really about every business, whether, uh, you're in construction or you're in technology, it's just a different widget. Uh, it's always about people. So for me it's always about inspiring the team and letting them shine. So that's really, I think in terms of my success, that would be my gift is finding the right smart people to put around myself and understanding my own weaknesses and supplementing that with those smart people and just letting them shine. I don't like micromanaging and I think it was hard in the beginning to not try to be perfect and to do everything yourself. And that was something that I had to overcome because I would work till 2 o' clock in the morning. And the working hard part was something that was instilled in me from a very young age, from my father. I mean, his backstory is that with me and the family were immigrants to Vancouver. He was very successful in Asia. He was the president of Alcoa Asia. And when we moved to Canada, he couldn't find a job. He actually applied at the 7Eleven convenience store as a manager and he didn't get the job. The lack of Canadian experience at that time, today I don't think that would happen. We bring global people with executive experience all the time. But back then there was very little opportunity for somebody who didn't have Canadian experience. So I watched him kind of struggle to find work and he became an entrepreneur and that was something that really inspired me to do the same thing. So ultimately, I think bringing together the right teams and working through those hardships and the adversity and flexing that muscle of overcoming adversity was something that had really helped.

Speaker B: Your father is someone who also, I believe, is a Dale Carnegie graduate and someone I know you've talked very publicly about your dad and just about how much you've learned from him. I'm curious, particularly from a human relations standpoint, because he became a successful entrepreneur. What are some of the things that stand out to you that you learned from your dad that, uh, influence you even today?

Speaker A: Peter always talked about being a true kind of Asian family. Education, right? Education is something that no matter what you do in life, money will come and go, but education, somebody will never take away from you. So that was something that was instilled in both my brother and myself at a very, very young age. And the need to work hard. He told us that being a visual minority would be. Don't see it as a hardship, but you're going to have to work twice as hard as everybody else to get ahead. So that work ethic, again was instilled in us to the point that I did work twice as hard. When we first started web names, I think I slept maybe an hour and a half to two hours a night for the first year and a half. And people saw that and they followed. I had the teams in sleeping bags with me, and we had such a fantastic time. We'd order pizza, there was beer, and people had a wonderful time doing something successful together. And it wasn't something that I forced them to do. People just wanted to. So I think that's, again, work ethic was something that my father instilled. The other thing that he had taught me at a fairly young age, that I didn't listen until probably my early 30s, was that it's who, you know, I focus on the hard work part, and I didn't really think about the part about building connections and your network and all of that. That is something that I wish I thought about and did more of in my early years was the networking and finding a mentor, maybe using some of my dad's connections to help me succeed. Today, some people might call that nepotism, but truly, it is a world of who you know, and if you have connections that you can pass on to others, then why not? So I think as a mentor, whether it be your own children, I've been in mentorship programs myself. I've been a mentor for probably 15 to 20 years for others. It's something that I think is really helpful to the young generation. Very much something that I want to continue to do in philosophy.

Speaker B: It's great that you do that. I gotta say, one of the biggest challenges I see. And again, I've got six children who are all Gen Z, and I talk to them, I talk to their friends. In the meantime, there seems to be a reluctance to want to ask for help. People feel like, hey, I want to do this myself, which is a great noble quality. And at the same time, you talk about mentoring, there are lots of people who would love to help other people. Certainly you've had people. I've, uh, had people, many people who've helped me along the way. It just seems part of the journey. I don't know. Is that something you see also that many times people have a reluctance to want help or to think, I'll just do it myself?

Speaker A: Absolutely. And I was one of those people. I'm going to do it all on my own because I want to be independent. And, you know, I was definitely that way as a teenager into my twenties, I wanted to do everything on my own. And then I realized there are easier ways to go about this. So it's something that having had a mentor and then becoming a mentor, what you can learn as a mentor in terms of giving back. So I think for my son now, and I mentioned that he's the third generation Dale Carnegie graduate recently, is something that I talked about a big part of his life. And he finally felt ready when he was 21 to take it after the program. I've just seen his growth in terms of his confidence and the ability to now reach out for conversations with others. So I've connected to him with some of my connections. And at first he was very shy and didn't feel comfortable doing it. He didn't want the help. But now, after a few meetings now, he said, oh, mom, um, I'm feeling that this could be helpful now. And I'm much more comfortable having those conversations. Do you have anybody else that I can meet? And I think that reluctance, sometimes it's also that you don't think you are worthy of that person's time. And I know I felt like that trying to reach out to people, thinking, oh, they're too important. They won't want to help me because I'm not worth their time. But you'd be so surprised how many people at, uh, the most senior levels would be very much willing to give their time to help the next generation. I'd say to everybody who's listening, reach out if there's somebody that you think they will help you in some way. Reach out and they can learn something from you, too.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And it's interesting because, you know, you are talking about, I think, some head trash that people can have. Like, we think I'm not good enough. People don't want to hear from me, all these kinds of things. And one of the things Dale Carnegie talked about was that one of the biggest challenges we have is choosing the right thoughts. Right. What's our mindset? And why do we handicap ourselves, really, by assuming all these bad things about ourselves that just aren't true? I love what you talked about, even in the beginning of this conversation, Sibel, which is taking that first step, giving something a shot and you might have to work at for a long time, but then you start to realize, huh, huh, that really wasn't true. I can do this.

Speaker A: Absolutely. There are so many of those negative thoughts, and it depletes our confidence. And for many people, it gets to the point where it's imposter syndrome. And I think that term has been thrown around a lot in recent days. I'm hearing it more and more, particularly with women, but it's something that I've struggled with a big part of my life. So going back to probably it was 2011, I was informed by the Women's Executive Network that I had won their top 100 most powerful women in Canada award and that I would be going to Toronto to accept this award. And these are the dates. Congratulations. And I truly thought that somebody had made a mistake, that somebody was going to reach it back out to me in a week or two to say, oh, we're really sorry, but we made a mistake. Please don't come to Toronto. So sorry. So, funny enough, that never happened. I went to Toronto to accept the award, but I didn't realize what a big deal it was. There were 99 other women, many of them very, very, very senior people. And again, I started to feel, oh, wow, I don't belong here. I still remember waiting in the back part of the room. We were supposed to file into the big, gigantic ballroom that had, I think, thousand people in there waiting. Everybody was dressed in gowns and they were popping the champagne. And I had this, you know, kind of businessy dress on because I had no idea what a big deal this was. And so they start playing the music and we file in there and we're supposed to all go on stage and stand in front of everyone. And I'm not that kind of person. I'm very shy, so I felt kind of uncomfortable. We file in, everybody's doing a standing Ovation. They're all clapping and all this music. And we get on stage. I remember to this day, Lisa lisson, she's the FedEx Canada CEO. She grabs my hand. She's like, uh, let's dance. So we're dancing in front of everyone, and I'm standing in the front row, of course, and I'm going, oh, my gosh, I really feel like I don't belong now. And then we go and sit down in our seats, and I hadn't brought anyone with me, so I'm sitting there with the table. And There was Christine McGee, Sleep Country Canada. She was one of the fellow recipients. Then Jacqueline Shan, she was this inventor. She invented cold fx. So everybody knows cold FX here in Canada. When you get a cold. When you get some virus, you take cold fx. She's in every pharmacy. So I'm sitting there with them, and I thought, oh, gosh, now I really don't feel like I belong. And then we look up and who's speaking as the keynote speaker but Margaret Atwood, the iconic Canadian author who. I mean, she's published 50 books. She's famous for the Handmaid's Tale. So I thought, oh, my gosh, can you believe it? But she's a fellow winner. So I sat there, and instead of being proud, thinking, I belong here with these amazing women, I started to shrink. I felt so small. And I thought, wow, why am I here? Did somebody truly make a mistake? I don't belong. So the funny thing is, I went on to win that award four times. And then they induct you into the hall of Fame. And this time, you actually have to walk on stage. They have a video of you playing. You've had to walk on, um, stage to accept your award. And even then, I didn't believe that I deserved to win. And then I thought, why is that? And I started talking to a few of the other women, and one of them said to me, and she was this head of this large financial institution, and she said, wow, I never would have had the courage to start my own business. I wish I did. So she was looking at me thinking that I had this great achievement. I'm looking at her as being this leader of this huge organization. And I realized at that time that it wasn't just me feeling like that. So I started to look into and researching what this was all about. And I discovered the term imposter syndrome. So I started to read more about it. I wrote a couple of articles about it in the business in Vancouver and realized this long journey of Discovery that so many women, in particular some men, but many women, felt this thing called imposter syndrome. I had people who were PhDs and high executives reaching out to me saying, oh my gosh, I feel exactly the same thing. Then I met this woman called Dr. Valerie Young. She wrote the book on imposter syndrome and it was called the Secret Thoughts of Successful Women. And it talks about how difficult it is for people to recognize their own achievements. They feel like they've fooled somebody, that they don't really deserve to be there. And it's really very many successful people who have lots of confidence in their daily lives feel this thing called imposter syndrome. So I went on to write about how you would overcome it. Kind of feeling the fear and doing it anyways and then understanding that when you're a trailblazer, you're doing something new. Of course it feels uncomfortable. You should, because you're a trailblazer. Nobody else has done it before, but it's that feeling of discomfort that you should feel open to practicing and being okay with it.

Speaker B: Deville, thank you for sharing. I mean, such an authentic conversation and experience about what you went through. And this is not unique to women. I mean, certainly there are many, many men and many CEOs and friends and people I've talked to. It's like, I mean, this is something I spoke to a CEO not long ago, very, very successful, billion dollar kind of company who shared some of the same kinds of things you're talking about. So I think this is kind of a human condition issue and maybe even exacerbated a little bit by social media and by all the different things that put us in a position of comparing or seeing other people and so forth. So if you were to kind of distill down what you've learned to maybe like one tip that could do one thing to kind of help overcome it, what would that one thing be?

Speaker A: Wow. I think first of all, I would say take Dale Carnegie. That is one easy thing that if I didn't truly believe that it'd be helpful, I wouldn't have had my son do it as well. So being the third generation, obviously it's something that can help people in their careers and become leaders. The other I would say is to write down your long term and your short term goals. Because without writing them down, you don't know what you're aspiring to. And I feel that you do need to explicitly write things down if there's a problem that you want to address. If you're feeling the fear of Public speaking. If you have an issue around leading a certain, certain team of people, write it down and then start researching what the potential solution is. The only way to do it is to explicitly write it down to conquer it. So many people go through and they use exercises like the vision board or the painted picture, which was popularized by Brian Scudamore at 1-800-got junk. Eventually I think it became the vivid vision. I used something it was from the Verne Harnish books of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up Up. It's called on the business side, the one page strategic plan. On the personal side, the one page personal plan. And I revisit every year what my short term and long term goals are and things that are challenging me that I want to conquer. So those are two. But I think mentorship. We talked about mentorship as well. Finding a mentor who's gone through the same challenges and then helps guide you through the easier ways rather than you having to go through every step and making those mistakes. Somebody's already made those mistakes and have that mentor guide you.

Speaker B: That's great advice and thank you for sharing that. Uh, I mean, each of those pieces of advice, not least of which was JDL Carnegie, but naming it, I think is really important. And you also talked about intentionality and being intentional. And I would encourage people to. I mean, for me, I've always had a cadence. It's almost like a daily cadence to take some time and to reflect on the day, what's going well, what needs to change, what could do better. But really to have that kind of reflection and certainly not everything is going to go well every day and we're going to have fears and apprehensions, particularly I think about the business environment in the world right now. There's so much happening that is challenging and uncertain and so forth. So to create that time to have mentors, really, really great advice. I appreciate that. Sybille, anything else you'd want to, uh, share with our audience as we close?

Speaker A: I would just say that life is hard, business is hard, there's no easy way to get through a lot of things. But if you can turn things around from adversity and think about it as an advantage. So I'll give you an example. People have asked me my entire career, what's it like being a woman in technology? That must be so hard. There are very few women in it. And I say, wow, I've never really looked about it that way. I stand out in a room of 100 men if there's only three or five of us as women. Wouldn't that be an advantage? We stand out. Media wants to talk to us. That's a story. So I would say to everybody listening, how would you turn around that type of thinking from something negative to something positive?

Speaker B: Awesome advice, Bill. So much comes down to mindset and the way we see things. Thank you for your inspiring discussion today. Authentic discussion today. Really appreciate having you on the Dale Carnegie Take Command Podcast.

Speaker A: Thank you so much.

Speaker B: I hope you enjoyed this edition of Take Command, a, uh, Dale Carnegie Podcast. Check out our resources at www.dalecarnegie.com for more research, insight and tools that will support your success and help you take command of your leadership potential. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider rating it and following us on Apple Podcast, Podcasts and Spotify. For more exclusive content, subscribe to our Dale Carnegie YouTube channel and follow us on social media. As always, thank you for listening and we're looking forward to you joining us for the next episode of Take Command, a, uh, Dale Carnegie Podcast.