Communicating Across Generations with Corie Weathers

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Kalin Goble: Welcome to Practicing Connection, a podcast exploring the personal stories and collective practices that empower us to work together to improve our resilience and readiness in a rapidly changing world. Here to start the conversation are Jessica Beckendorf and Bob Bertsch.

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Jessica Beckendorf: Hi. Welcome to the Practicing Connection Podcast. I’m Jessica Beckendorf.

Bob Bertsch: I’m Bob Bertsch.

Jessica: Our guest today is Corie Weathers, author of the book Military Culture Shift. Corie is a licensed professional counselor and a sought-after speaker and consultant. She has focused her career as a clinician specializing in marriage, the military culture, special forces, and leadership development.

Bob: In addition to providing subject matter expertise on military culture, Corie consults organizations and institutions on building trust, creating impactful programming, and working within a multigenerational team. Hi, Corie. Thanks so much for joining us on Practicing Connection.

Corie Weathers: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

Bob: Let’s start with how we got to this moment. What led you to write Military Culture Shift and do the kind of work that you’re doing now?

Corie: It’s always such a big question. I’m a mental health clinician by trade. I’m also a military spouse. I think we’ve been in 16 years, but I feel like we’ve been saying that for like two years. [chuckles] I’m losing track at this point. I knew when we came in that I really wanted to devote my career to serving this population. For the last 16 years, but as a clinician for 20, I really thought initially that I was going to work in the counseling office and work with individuals, couples, and families, one family at a time. I did that, I do that, I enjoy it.

The more that I started to work with this population and also live in this community, the more I realized there were certain themes and trends that were happening with all of us. I just had this moment where I was going, “If this family could talk to that family, and is this thing that’s happening in the army also happening in the Navy? Is this something that only officer families are struggling with, or is this also the enlisted culture?” The more I wanted to expand and understand the culture as a whole, the more I started to take the clinical background that I have and really studying the entire culture.

Really taking almost a family systems perspective of looking at the whole culture, the whole tribe, 2 million is currently serving in their families. When I looked at it as a whole culture, I realized there are certain, just like any other family of different generations, some of that infighting that happens as well, some of the conflict that’s happening. I was seeing that in our culture. I think the shortest way to answer this is when I started to see the institution struggle with recruitment, retention was really starting to kick off as a problem.

I saw that the institution, very similar to how other institutions handle big internal problems, was really tackling things as singular problems, one thing at a time. Really seeing how complex a lot of the issues that we were struggling with, the more I wanted to hopefully help leaders understand how complex this is, how we can change unhealthy patterns, how we can reduce conflict, how we can really save this community that I’ve grown to love so much.

Jessica: I appreciate that you bring up the cultural aspects that you were talking about. One of the things that I’ve tried to do is to help some of my colleagues understand that military families are a distinct cultural group. I think thinking about them that way will also help that wider community support. Why do you think that understanding this multigenerational communication is important for military leaders? What about military family service providers as well? Why is it important for them to understand?

Corie: First of all, we are seeing so much conflict and so much confusion in the military culture right now as a whole. Leaders are really struggling with knowing how to lead the youngest generation. I’m going to speak with generational labels here, knowing full well that there’s a lot of variables that go into whether somebody actually identifies with this generational label. Pew Research just last year decided to no longer use generational labels. I’m giving that caveat to say even I agree that we as adults unlearn or outgrow some beliefs and behaviors, and we all learn to adult at some point. There’s also these ways of seeing the world, the ways that we see other people.

Really, what I’m seeing today is I’m seeing that we have generationally different perspectives of key values of work-life balance, of communication, of service, what it means to serve, what it means to selflessly serve, how much you’re willing to give to a career, whether or not you’re willing to give loyalty to a career over lifetime. All of these big values that shape decision-making, but especially for leaders trying to lead another generation that has differing values than you have, especially if your values were really ingrained in you during some very sacred moments of your time of service, that has created a lot of conflict where leaders are struggling to lead that generation to speak their language.

Some of them even asking, “Do we have to learn that, or is this something that in our culture, in our community where some of your young service members and families too, but mostly your young service members are indoctrinated into service?” There’s really this challenge right now of how much do we learn and empathize and get to know versus this hierarchical system that’s always just expected the new cohort to come in and just adjust themselves. That’s where we’re seeing a lot of conflict and frustration from leaders, but also from our youngest generation who are really questioning whether or not they want to join.

If they do join, what are they joining for? Many of them joining more to gain some sort of stability and financial security for a short amount of time temporarily until they decide what else they want to do for their career. We’re seeing a younger generation that is less likely to want to join and put in 20 years, and that is all creating just some very difficult dialogue and communication and paralysis too, is what I’m seeing. That was my goal, is to really help leaders understand. As a clinician, I feel like my role is to not necessarily have these political opinions about should we be changing standards, and is the military going in a direction they should go.

I really see this as a perspective of how do I help different generations communicate better, work through conflict better, but also what does it mean to lead and lead well, because everybody in this organization and outside of the organization wants to become a leader and lead well. That’s, I think the main goal that I have and also what I’m seeing from leaders, what they’re wanting to do too.

Bob: I’m wondering if we can talk a little bit about service providers, and you are a service provider for military families. I’m reminded that in the book you talked a little bit about your experience as a spouse and where you were and maybe what older generations or more established generations of military spouses experienced. I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what that experience was for you. Maybe, that will lead us a little bit to the conversation about service providers and dealing with different generations.

Corie: It’s been interesting for me to be a service provider. I’ve been a Military OneSource provider. I am a TRICARE provider. There’s a lot of different angles that I like to come, and I’m a volunteer. There’s lots of different ways to serve this community. To also be a spouse on top of that, there was so many just incredible challenges coming in. I know just from the very beginning, having to fight to have a license, having to fight the Georgia Board and then to have to fight the Colorado Board.

Then, at one point, I had five licenses in five different states, which is also why I eventually thought there’s got to be a more creative way to do that, which is a lot of what a lot of spouses did but are doing right now, is how do we create creative careers from a generational perspective. Gen X, when we came on the scene, it’s the most entrepreneurial generation to date. However, we believe Gen Z who is 12 to 25, are expected to surpass our entrepreneurial spirit.

For Gen X, a lot of the spouses really instead of investing into that community support, they were coming in during such a crazy operation tempo where we were just deploying for some of us year on, year off. Special operations could be even more frequent than that. It was just really intense. A lot of Gen X spouses and families started to figure out other ways to either offer support or to pursue their career or give support.

What we’re seeing now is this shift of the family perspective on how much are they willing to give an organization, an institution, or even a career that number one, some of them are saying, “It’s not my career. It’s my service member’s career. Should I be giving as much as previous generations have given?” You also have some that are finding that they have more creative opportunities for work through remote work. Just a lot of complexity there. I would just say from a personal perspective as a spouse, it was very challenging and has been very challenging at times. Where we currently are in Central Texas, this move at the time, it was our seventh move in nine years.

At one point, we were moving every year to year and a half, created so much stress on our family and even our kids, we have two boys, that we were having to make some very hard decisions about the mental health of our kids and trying to figure out how we could slow down. I couldn’t believe that me as a service provider and as a spouse who had been saying for years do not geo bach or do not live apart from your service member, unless there is either a financial crisis, a medical crisis, or something that’s just forcing you to make that decision.

We were then faced with this decision of looking at the mental health of our kids and their need for stability, was that something that we were going to have to consider too?

We as a family have been through a roller-coaster ride of serving ourselves, but that has made me even that much more passionate about getting to know some of these other families. What is their story? How is it similar? How is it different? How can we collect these common trends, these common themes, so that if we can all understand those themes and those trends better, how would we serve them differently as providers?

Bob: You mentioned earlier about generations and how they can be complex, and the terms can be controversial. I’m really curious about, in the workshops that you do when you’re there with leadership and service members or with families, how do you approach this idea of distinct generational cohorts? Doesn’t become words to throw at each other [chuckles] and increasing the conflict, how do you communicate that to them?

Corie: Oh, I love this question, and I love doing these workshops. I think part of it is, as a provider, as a clinician, I believe that it’s our role to have hope when other people don’t, when other relationships don’t, or when other teams don’t. My favorite is when I walk into the room and people are frustrated, people are unsure of how to handle the conflict that they’re in, and they’re feeling paralyzed. That’s when I get excited because that’s when it’s my turn to really carry the hope for them before they have it. I really just get right at, “Let’s talk about the truth of what is.”

I enjoy breaking the different generations into different groups, and I let them teach the rest of the group, teach each other like, “What are your values? How would you explain your values?” They go into these different groups, and they talk. They come up with a peer-based list, a peer discussion on what are your values, what is your communication style, and what are the historical markers that shaped you, especially if they were key historical markers from our military story. As they present that to the rest of the room, regardless of which generations are in the room, what we actually get to see is that we all value the same things. We just value them in different order.

I find that whether it’s conflict with a family or a couple or whether we’re talking about conflict in a whole giant cohort, we tend to experience conflict when we look at our values as if we throw them out on a table just horizontally and assume that they all have equal weight. When you think about making a decision of should I buy that pickup truck because I want to pull a camper behind me, this is a big topic for a lot of our transitioning families who are thinking about going off the grid, you’re looking at what you value when you’re making that decision. Do you value money? Do you value fun and recreation?

Do you value time with your family and how much time you’re going to spend in that camper? You’re looking at your value of freedom and retirement and what does that look like, and visiting family. All these things that you value, if you all value them the same on a horizontal plane, you’re going to get really frustrated. Most people, that’s where they’re at, is that we all value it at the same level. Really, honestly, we as humans all actually put our values and we rank them as what’s most important and what’s least important. That’s where conflict comes in.

One generation says, “I value loyalty to the institution and work for me,” so our boomer generation values giving your all and your loyalty to this institution and that when you play the long game, the institution is a really wonderful institution that will take care of you and will give back in a pension. Versus the Gen Z generation that also values work and loyalty. We all use these same words, but we use them differently. They value loyalty to their health and their well-being, and they’re willing to leave a job if it interferes with their wellness. They value family as well, but for them, they would consider leaving a job that takes away time that they could be spending with their family.

Here, we have generations that value the same thing. They just may value them either in a different order, or they manifest in the work environment in a different way. As these different generations are hearing from each other, what they actually start to realize very slowly over the course of a workshop is that we’re all using the same words. We maybe mean different things with those different words. It’s a reminder that we actually define our values and define the words that we’re using, but also that we are more similar than we are different.

How do we work together? By finding those similarities and leaning in with curiosity instead of assuming, let’s say that Gen Z doesn’t want to work or work hard, or that they just aren’t loyal at all.

Jessica: I appreciate that you shared the outcomes of those workshops, because I have experienced that the opposite is that we tend to then make assumptions and tell stories about others. An example that I have is I kept hearing from some local businesses that young people just have a terrible work ethic. One place was an electrician business, and they said, “Oh, my gosh, the young people, they just have a terrible work ethic.” I’m like, “Whoa, what is happening here? Are they coming late? Are they rude to the customers? Are they not following through? What’s happening?” They’re like, “No, they don’t want to work overtime.”

I’m like, “Well, that’s not a bad work ethic. [chuckles] That’s something different.”

Corie: Some would say that’s healthy boundaries. I would also say that millennials and Gen Z, in these workshops, they’ve said, “We’re willing to work overtime if you can explain the why, if you as a leader can vision cast the why.” Again, it’s not them necessarily saying, “I’m unwilling to do the job or do it well.” If it’s going to cost something outside of what they normally would give or what’s reasonable to give, they’re just asking for that vision casting or that why. Their key question is why.

For leaders to understand it’s not disrespectful just because those older generations never necessarily either needed the why, and I would actually challenge that, I think we all needed the why. We just didn’t know we could ask it, or we were in a different context of time where it wasn’t socially acceptable to ask it, especially in the military.

If we ask ourselves is what they’re saying or what they’re asking really that unreasonable, then usually for the most part, unless we’re talking about somebody needing to mature or the onboarding process and them needing to learn how to assimilate into the culture, unless we’re talking about those kinds of things, a lot of times what they’re asking is actually pretty healthy, or they’re challenging us to consider some healthy changes in our military culture. What I am seeing is that the older generation is really struggling to consider making those changes. Again, I’m not talking about standards for joining. That’s a whole other conversation.

I’m talking about work environment and all of that. What I’m seeing is that the older generation is really struggling to accept those healthy challenges because of what it says about their own story, their own struggles that they’ve gone through, or maybe not knowing that they could have also asked for the same thing and the feelings that come up for them of like, “I didn’t even know we were allowed to ask for that. Are you allowed to get this as young as you are when I just spent 20 years and didn’t get it at all?”

There’s a lot of feelings and a lot of opportunity to process through their story, their expectations, their expectations of others, and really leaning in with curiosity to see what they’re asking for.

Jessica: It sounds like so much of this is about building empathy for each other, really at its core. That said, are there some generations that seem to have a harder time understanding each other, or are there some that might have a little bit more affinity with each other that you’ve observed?

Corie: Yes. If you can picture concentric circles, you have, let’s say– If we start with the boomer generation, and we could go all the way back. The book goes all the way back to World War I. If we look at the boomer generation, each generation after is almost like a concentric circle where we adopt some of the values of that generation before us, but then evolve them a little bit more past what maybe boomers were comfortable. Gen X adopted that loyalty mindset, the hard work mindset, the put your head down and just do the work. Don’t expect too much feedback. We adopted some of those values.

Gen X picked up on this really deep down desire, but not very often talked about craving to want to be home and balance this work-family life as just one example. They didn’t really bring it up. They didn’t challenge boomers a whole lot. I don’t think they felt like they could challenge boomers, especially when you have that common shared value of keep your head down and just get the job done, and be loyal to the institution.

Again, by the time you get to millennials, we have another concentric circle where there are similarities with Gen X, similar childhood experiences, similar historical markers like playing Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers, and the video game industry coming into play, the internet really changing our most formative years. We have these common experiences that give us common values, so Gen X and millennials tend to really understand a lot or have that in common. Then, again, another concentric circle is that Gen Z having a lot in common with millennials. What we’re seeing today is that most of the conflict is happening between the older Gen X and boomer generation with Gen Z.

What I’m also seeing is millennials that are now in command roles, that are in leadership roles, and I’m not just talking about service members here, I’m talking about the family community as well who’ve been volunteering for a long time, who’ve been leading the way in family support or in some of your family providers, whatever generation they’re in, I’m seeing the millennial generation is really struggling because they feel sandwiched in-between these generations that have almost polar or opposite values and coming at things from a completely different perspective, and millennials feeling sandwiched in-between.

In fact, what I’ve heard consistently from millennial leaders is I don’t know how to lead and keep my supervisor happy when they’re an older generation that wants me to lead in a very specific way, but lead the way that they’ve always known leadership to be and also keep the next generation happy when they’re asking for something very different. I can’t be two different leaders at once. That is where I’m seeing we’re having a mass exodus of millennials and millennial families from the military culture as they’re dealing with that stress.

Bob: I am wondering where you’ve struggled. As a clinician, as a service provider of a certain generation, are there times where you felt yourself struggling to understand and empathize with a family from either an older generation, a younger generation? Where the challenge has been for you?

Corie: I’m a Gen X, and I have Gen Z kids. It’s interesting how often, even in these workshops, it comes to parenting, or at least the conversation around parenting comes up, because there’s a lot of older Gen X that have Gen Z kids. The more we talk this through, the more we realize it feels very similar to parenting. I could say personally for me, a lot of even writing the book, I would consult my Gen Z kids and making sure that I understand and try my best to practice what I’m preaching and asking other people to lean in with that empathy and curiosity to go, “Am I just judging, or am I leaning in with curiosity?”

Jessica, you use empathy. I love StrengthsFinder with Gallup. Gallup would say that not everyone has the talent for empathy, meaning it can be very difficult for some and very easy for others. My word is curiosity. We can lean in with curiosity and yet not feel the feelings or even value feelings as part of the equation, but if we could lean in with curiosity. There was so many moments that for me as a parent, working with my Gen Z kids, where they would even come home from school with a different work ethic, with different expectations of what school should be.

I would challenge that because I have my own story of school and academics as a Gen X, where I’m highlighting my textbooks. I’m not even having a mobile phone in my hand, but I am paying attention to the teacher. I’m combing through all of my homework assignments to memorize as much as possible for that test. I remember specifically, my older Gen Z son when he was still in high school, came home. We had just moved, and he was struggling with making friends like so many military kids do.

We said, “Put down your phone and just walk down the hallway, and just make eye contact with people. You’ve got to connect with these kids, or you’re going to really struggle with assimilating into the school.” He came home almost in tears and said, “I tried it, but no one else is looking up.” That was a moment where I was like, “I don’t even know how to parent you through navigating a system that I didn’t live through.” There’s been so many other conversations that we’ve had too about there’s no textbooks in school. It’s all digital, so reading your textbooks. I even substituted in the high school to even understand Gen Z further.

I would find, when I would give them their assignments, they were allowed to Google answers. My Gen X spirit is like, “We’re cheating here. This is not allowed,” that I finally had to think about it. What’s the difference between looking up an answer in a textbook and looking up an answer in a browser other than making sure that it’s a reliable source? You’ll see often, and I found this too, that when we are finding ourselves with that conflict, sometimes it’s echoes of what we’re also experiencing in our parenting.

It is sometimes an easier way to find that curiosity in the workplace or outside of your home, if you’re having these same conflicts generationally, whether it’s generationally with those older than you, it could be your parents are very similar to those supervisors that you’re working with, or the newest generation that’s maybe similar to other Gen Z. Maybe it’s your kids, maybe it’s friends’ kids that are around you. I think my point here is that, number one, parenting conversations come up a lot, the deeper we dig into the conflict in the workplace.

It also reminds us all that when we’re at home, we work so much harder, or we think we probably should be working so much harder on the relationships at home because we want them to last. It’s very easy for us to go out into the world or into the workplace and just want to hit an easy button, just want everybody to just work as hard as we are, just not bring any conflict, and don’t make it hard on me because I need work to be easier than home. The truth is, is that this is all people, and people are messy. In order to lead people well, in order for you to have healthy relationships outside of the home, we have to lean in with curiosity.

We have to learn how to work with people, even those that are very different from us who have different values from us. We can take the easy pass if we want to and just say, “I don’t feel like it.” At the end of the day, we’re going to feel the consequences of that, and we’re going to struggle either in the workplace or in our relationships. Really, the challenge here is, just like in parenting, the challenge is, do I want these relationships to be healthy? That means I can’t. As some boomers I’ve seen in some workshops, half-joking, have said, “We can’t look at another generation and say, ‘Shut up and color.’ It’s just not going to work.”

You know what? Chances are it’s never been a great leadership style. It just means we maybe didn’t have a lot of pushback a long time ago.

Jessica: I really appreciate that you’re bringing this up. One thing I’ve learned is that also, not everyone can lean into curiosity very easily. For some people, it’s very difficult. I’m wondering, if curiosity and empathy are a little bit difficult for you, that’s okay. There are other strategies, and I’m wondering if you have any recommendations there.

Corie: Yes. I hope I can answer that from a strengths– I’m not trying to sell Gallup strengths, but I think it’s just a really good framework to be able to picture and think about, and I agree with you. Thank you for actually holding me accountable on that, because from a strengths perspective, I’m a learner.

Jessica: I wasn’t trying to. [laughs]

Corie: No, no, no, I’m a learner. That means, of course I love to learn. Of course, I write a book that’s very research-heavy. Of course, curiosity is going to be one of the first strategic skills that I use to navigate my relationships. If I’m going to research the history of how the DoD came to be, I’m probably more likely to ask questions when I’m in relationships or in conflict. To your point, there’s a lot of people who also don’t have that strength or the desire to really learn a lot or lean in and want to learn. This is where I think from a positive strengths perspective, again, why I love it so much, is when you understand what your strengths are personally.

There’s so many people that have strengths that are more relational and have those more EQ or what we call soft skills. There are others that are very strategic or some that are more organizational-minded, that they’re really amazing at order, and when there is chaos, that they want to bring order. A lot of times those strengths, you’re applying it to literally organizing paperwork, organizing how you can physically organize your space better. When you can take whatever your strengths are and learn how to use them in your relationships, it’s actually the best way for you to lead in your own strengths.

Let’s say you are someone who craves order from chaos and you love to organize things physically around you. You can use that in these relationship dynamics to go, “Relationally, things are chaotic right now. How do I organize what’s happening between me and this other person? Maybe, I don’t understand them completely. Maybe, I don’t value feeling all of their feelings. Maybe, I don’t have time to even get to know what those feelings are, but how can I create more order and structure to our relationship?”

That can be simply like, “Can we meet once a month? Can we meet once a week where I can actually hear what your needs are, and I can explain what my needs are?” I worked with this one group where we talked about, as a leader, how can you explain your role? They were talking about how Gen Z is jumping chain of command and going straight to the commander when they actually need to be going through these chains of command to bring their concerns. I was explaining to them, for Gen Z, they see that chain of command as opportunity for efficiency. They see every platform as an opportunity for efficiency. In-person is also a platform that they want to use efficiently.

You’re going to use YouTube efficiently, Instagram efficiently, Facebook, email, all of those efficiently. In-person, why shouldn’t we be efficient that way too? Why should I come to you when really the top commander is the one that has that answer? We talked about, in that space, how can those leaders organize and help Gen Z understand this is why we do the chain of command the way we do. “I need to be able to understand what your issues are because you are giving me the opportunity to lead you better. That is my role. It’s within my box, if you will, my lane.”

It’s just one way that you can get to know what your own strengths are, whether you’re a service member, a family member, or a provider that’s working with military to understand what are your strengths, that we don’t have to be all like everyone else. What are your strengths and how do you apply those strengths to these relationships in order to reduce conflict and get to know that everybody is trying to bring their best version of themselves to the table? I find that very few people are trying to ruin their jobs, ruin their careers, ruin their relationships, or get it wrong. I think most people are trying to get it right.

If that’s true, how do we leverage that mindset, at the very least in giving people the benefit of the doubt?

Jessica: How can we also recognize that we need each other in our work? That’s a baseline feeling that I think would help us all.

Corie: Absolutely.

Jessica: Can you then share a personal practice that helps you with your own readiness and resilience?

Corie: Ooh, that’s a hard one because I’ll be honest, I’m going to give you a couple of vulnerable thoughts. First of all, I really struggle with the word resilience, and that is coming from my Gen X story. I think it’s really important to understand our stories and what we bring to the table. A lot of times it’s informed by our experiences. My Gen X story is that part of this military culture resilience was used for so long. In fact, I was talking with someone about it yesterday, that there’s value in post-traumatic growth or the idea of growth or even the idea of resilience.

I think that what especially Gen X and older millennials experienced, maybe even boomers too in our military story over the last 20 years, is that we never talked about the limits of that resilience. What we’re seeing in our culture is a lot of pushback towards not wanting to be resilient anymore. Now, can we give ourselves permission to hit the wall, which is really interesting because Gen Z is coming in asking for an authentic conversation of, can we just start from the beginning talking about our limits and that we all are human and flawed? It’s an interesting dynamic between the two, but I want to answer your question.

I want providers to hear that because we use that word so often and you might find generationally that they hear that word in different ways. For me, as far as resilience, I as a provider got so burned out, even walking my clients and families throughout COVID and self-care. I don’t know how many times that year I said self-care or was asked to speak on self-care. I think the deeper question is, is what is it that keeps us from doing these things that we know we need to do in order to be well? For me, going back to that order, I have to create order to my day.

I learned how to pick the three or five max, but usually three things that when I put my head on the pillow at night, what did I regret not doing that day? I usually found that those three things that kept coming up were the things that I value the most, that really bring joy and life to my existence and my day. I would get so frustrated when I put my head on my pillow, and I would say, “I didn’t do those three things again. What is going on that I’m allowing my day to rob me of these three things? For me, it was self-care things like exercise, having that devotional time or that prayer time or whatever that kind of quiet space to quiet my mind.

Then we were talking before we hit record that I’ve brought music back into my life, and cello was something that I wanted to learn and I really wanted to master. It is just for me, not for anybody else. That adds to my resiliency when I am investing in the things that bring me joy, but also bringing the things that calm my spirit, that ground me in what is good and what is true and what is healthy for me. When I can find those three things and I can test where they need to be put in my day so that they don’t get sabotaged, that is I think for me what I’ve learned to do, what I’ve learned to practice.

Those three things I’ve found have to happen first thing in the morning, or everything else runs over it. I really carve out and try. I’m not always perfect but every morning, those three things.

Bob: Corie, thanks so much for sharing that and for sharing your experience, and for joining us today. It’s been really super awesome. Thanks for joining us.

Corie: Thank you so much for having me.

Bob: Corie Weathers is a licensed professional counselor, speaker, consultant, and author of the book Military Culture Shift. You can find out more about her work at corieweathers.com.

Jessica: That’s it for this episode. Thanks so much for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, click the share button in your podcast app to share it with a friend. We’d love to hear what you’ve been thinking about and what’s inspiring you. You can share that with us by clicking the Send Us a Text Message at the top of the description of this episode. If you’re listening on a computer, you can email us at [email protected]. We can’t wait to hear from you.

Bob: Thanks to our coproducer, Coral Owen, our announcer, Caitlin Goebel, Maggie Lucas, and Terry Meisenbach for their help with marketing, and Nathan Grim who composed and performed all the music you hear on the podcast. We hope you’ll listen again soon. Until then, keep practicing.

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Kalin: The Practicing Connection Podcast is a production of OneOp and is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture, and the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy, US Department of Defense under award numbers 2019-48770-30366 and 2023-48770-41333.

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