Transcript
0:00:01 - Annalisa Holcombe
Did you know that the average human spends 92,000 hours at work during their lifetime? That's more than we spend eating, cleaning, driving, watching TV or even surfing the internet? In fact, work is what we do most. It comes second only to sleeping. Welcome to 92,000 hours, the podcast that believes in the integration of life and work.

I'm your host, Annalisa Holcombe. Before we begin, I wanted to tell you a quick story about why this podcast is so personal to me. I began practicing law at age 26 and learned many valuable lessons, including that I was deeply unhappy at work. Although I was on a path that looked like traditional success, I realized that I needed to quit my job in order to align myself with my passion and purpose. Now I am dedicated to making sure all of our 92,000 hours at work are spent well instead of simply spent.

How do we construct a working world that values and accommodates our humanity? How do we construct a life that is not separate from, but fueled by, the purpose we find in our work? In this podcast, we will explore those questions and more. In each episode, I will speak to someone that demonstrates meaning, passion and purpose in their work. Join me in discovering what happens when we bring our whole selves to our work, schools and communities. This week I am joined by Wendy Anderton. Wendy is the Marketing and Communications Manager at McDowell-Sonoran Conservancy and an experienced non-profit leader. She believes greatly in the power of interpersonal exchange. In this episode, we discuss how resiliency, privilege and equity play a role in her work and life. Hi Wendy.

0:02:07 - Wendy Anderton
Hi Annalisa.

0:02:09 - Annalisa Holcombe
I'm happy to be here. I'm really glad that you're here. One of the things I want to do as we get started is I want to start all of these interviews with a particular question. It's one that I am very fond of. If you remove any reference to work, school, sports, volunteerism, church-related activity all the stuff that we end up putting on our resumes I'll take it all of that away. What is your greatest accomplishment or what are you most proud of as a person, as a human being?

0:02:43 - Wendy Anderton
I think I'm most proud of the fact that I am resilient. I refer to myself. My superpower I should say not even myself my superpower is the superpower of bounce. I'm a super ball. I bounce from the lowest points in life. I have learned that resilience is key. You will bounce. Nothing is fatal until it is so resilience. I'm just proud of being resilient through things that have been thrust upon me challenges and challenges, more often than I place upon myself for no reason other than you know. That's who we are. As people. We tend to put our own blockades up and self-sabotage and make bad decisions. That's humanity. But I'm resilient and I think that's the thing I'm most proud of.

0:03:37 - Annalisa Holcombe
That's awesome. I think that we don't give enough credit to that specific value or that specific ability to be resilient and talk about it enough.

0:03:48 - Wendy Anderton
I don't think we do. I think a lot of things feel very bad and that we're never going to recover. And in that moment you do have a choice. You have a choice of saying, well, I'm never going to recover and giving up and allowing yourself down there, or you have a choice to bounce. That's really interesting.

0:04:11 - Annalisa Holcombe
I have a question that I hadn't even thought of before, but, as you're thinking about that, having that choice, how important is it when you're in that space where you have to choose to be resilient or not, to have strong connections with other people?

0:04:29 - Wendy Anderton
I think sometimes it's valuable, sometimes it's invaluable, and that's a skill that you learn. You learn very quickly to find out who around you are the people that you can actually rely on. When you don't feel like you have that bouncy strength, who do you rely on? You also need to be observant of yourself. What is your methodology of working through this? Because we're all a little bit different. For me, I have to have a complete and total breakdown and then I wake up the next day and I say, okay, now you've had your turn at breaking down. You've had your self-pity moment. You're allowed to have those feelings, but it's time to get on the horse again. It's time to get back up and start figuring out how you bring yourself back, how do you make the best of this, and it can be very, very self-affirming. I think that those practices make you stronger, no matter what obstacles you've put in front of yourself or other people have put in front of you.

0:05:38 - Annalisa Holcombe
Right, it seems like you've had to do a lot of self-reflection in order to get to that point where you can go oh. I recognize this hello. I'm going to do this thing. I know my methodology now.

0:05:49 - Wendy Anderton
Yes, I do know what my practice is, and it is that it's a practice. Life is a practice. They refer to yoga as a practice, or the practice of law, or the practice of medicine. It's because you never get it right and life is a practice. If you're expecting to get life right, you're going to be sorely disappointed, because we are human, above all, and we all have our failings, we all have our habits, we all have our addictions, we all have the things that we fall back on to feel safe, and lots of times, those are the things that we have to work through. They're the things that keep us safe, but they're also the things that keep us from excelling and from becoming better and from learning that we are resilient.

0:06:41 - Annalisa Holcombe
You talked about that. I don't know that in your bio you didn't use the word resilience, but you used the word you said do you consider yourself an example of success based on perseverance? And you use so many big issues that you actually talk about there that I never see in bios, and so people don't put this out on their biographies and I think it is incredibly courageous and I'm really interested in hearing you talk about that, in terms of both your decision to put that there, what the meaning of that is for you, how you move forward with that. Would you be willing to elaborate?

0:07:21 - Wendy Anderton
I am willing to share and it's things that I haven't really opened up For lack of a better, horrible analogy peel back the onion. But it's time, and it's time to peel back the onion. So I'm successful through resilience because I am the primary example of somebody who has created a lot of scenarios of self-sabotage in my life, some of which I was completely aware of at the time and knew exactly what I was doing and just the difficulties I was creating for myself did it anyway, some of which I wasn't quite aware of. So, for instance, one of those things is that I chose to drop out of college, even though I was under a full scholarship. Two weeks into it, I chose to drop out, never did get a college degree, and I look back and say, well, that was really dumb, that was a dumb decision. I'm still successful and I still do the things that in a normal world, in everyday world, would say master of X in the back. I look at it that way I just have my master's degree from life on the street to some degree, and it took me 20 or 30 years longer than it would somebody with that piece of paper. So let that be a cautionary tale to those of you out there, you do get the piece of paper. You're going to save yourself a whole lot of time and I'm lucky. I'm very lucky that life has placed opportunities before me that I could see.

You had me do a little exercise on identity and there's something I missed, which is I tend to delay satisfaction. It's something that I learned as a kid. You do your chores first and then you can play, and I do that throughout my life. You take care of the business and then you can play. You do the work before you get the reward. That leads to a lot of other issues, a whole bunch of other issues that delaying of your own satisfaction and I have tended to do. That feeling that's the only way I feel worthy of having good things is if I do the work. So when something comes easy, I feel jealous of other people, but they just don't have that blockade in front of them. They don't have that as part of who they are. This delaying of satisfaction to feel worthy.

0:09:59 - Annalisa Holcombe
I'm interested in that. In some ways, maybe it also helped you as well as hurt you. Do you know what I mean? Is there a way that getting the work done before you spend the money, Doing the you know whatever cleaning your, making your bed before you leave the house?

0:10:15 - Wendy Anderton
I feel like I have to do the work before I get the reward and, like I say, that's a great thing in some way, and in some way it also holds me back, because I face issues of jealousy around people who I perceive have easy success, and we all know those people where you look at and go. Why do they get to go on all the summer vacations? I have no idea what situation they're in, but it leads to my own anxieties and my own. Well, I need to work harder so that.

0:10:45 - Annalisa Holcombe
I can do that.

0:10:47 - Wendy Anderton
And is that a bad thing? I don't know, maybe, but it really leads me to work really hard, right, right, so, to get what I want and those and oftentimes I don't even know what that is I think I want X. It leads to something else and I end up with the thing that I really wanted, which was Y.

0:11:07 - Annalisa Holcombe
Which was Y.

0:11:08 - Wendy Anderton
Yeah, algebra you know, so, interestingly, yeah, I think that that delaying of satisfaction which sort of came to me this morning as I was thinking about this podcast, I was thinking I do tend to delay satisfaction. I think I'm hoping that it's a better satisfaction in some way, but in a way, maybe it's just that it's the right satisfaction.

0:11:33 - Annalisa Holcombe
Interesting. Do you think it turns into a more fulfilling satisfaction? Not always Interesting.

0:11:41 - Wendy Anderton
Sometimes I think the target that you're aiming for ends up being a little anticlimactic. I love that and that's what's disappointing in life. That's what the things that disappoint me. I can remember when I was married the first time. I was so excited for this big wedding and then it was over and I looked around and said that was it, that was it, that was.

It was so anticlimactic. Nobody cared about all the things that I worried about. Nobody cared that I was married. It didn't. I didn't change my whole presence and existence. I didn't walk down the street and people go ooh, you're married. No, it didn't work like that at all At all, Because I didn't know how to internalize any of those feelings. It wasn't right, but I was delaying the satisfaction and expecting some big thing and it wasn't.

0:12:35 - Annalisa Holcombe
Right. It wasn't that at all Is that, it's that it's the if only, or if if when right.

When I make my first, when I make $50,000 a year, when I make $100,000 a year, when I buy a house, we get that cool car and it's a goal to get to, and then, once you get there, it lasts. So the excitement, or the happiness, is fleeting. It is fleeting. I find it really fascinating. One of the things that we didn't even get a chance to talk about in terms of your bio is your activity in NABO, national Association of Women Business Owners. Yes, okay, I mean, you've done so much with that group in Arizona and even nationally.

And I saw in your bio you know that you came out of an abusive marriage and I believe from when I read it I thought, wow, you purposely make that part of your leadership platform with NABO. I don't think I've seen that in someone's professional bio before and I look I read them regularly. So I would be really interested in a couple of questions because I just want to sit with that for a minute Like to have you talk about your choice to do that. It feels to me like when I read it I thought, wow, it's almost like you're finding your own meaning and impact in your resiliency in terms of that part of your life.

0:14:01 - Wendy Anderton
Absolutely Coming out of an abuse of anything and let's face it, my entire life was probably in some way informed by men and the overshadowing of men. I grew up the first formative parts of my life with just a father. In an era when that didn't happen. My mother left, my birth mother left when I was two.

0:14:33 - Annalisa Holcombe
She just left, disappeared and that would have been just something that really informed me.

0:14:41 - Wendy Anderton
These are things that I didn't even know. I knew that I felt a lot of senses of not belonging or having fears of abandonment etc.

That brought me to throughout history, just brought me to a point where I chose poorly in a marriage. I wanted someone to not abandon me. I let them emotionally abandon me. I chose. I choose to make that part of my story and to be pretty open about it because I think it's very common. I think that the fear of abandonment and making wrong choices around that, the fear of being alone we as people are very social. We require the touch of other people, we require the love of other people. We just require that Right. Being alone is not healthy.

But then being with abusive people is also being with abusive people is also not healthy, but it's better than being alone, and we lead ourselves to believe that at least. Anyway, to go back to professionally, it does inform who I am, because it has given me a resilience. It has given me an ability to rely upon myself for a lot of things and to understand that, going back to it, that nothing is fatal until it is, and that you have choices to make. You can walk away from things that aren't working, especially in business. You're not locked in.

0:16:10 - Annalisa Holcombe
I'm not an entrepreneur. That's really interesting, though You're equating. You can leave a marriage, you can leave a career.

0:16:17 - Wendy Anderton
You can leave a career. You can leave a choice that you've made in that career.

0:16:21 - Annalisa Holcombe
How do you even think or frame those issues of power and privilege in for yourself as well as in your professional life?

0:16:32 - Wendy Anderton
Privilege, I think, is something that we're, just, as an American people, starting to understand and embrace. And it's really hard to say my success, my power, my privilege holds others down. And how does it do that? Because that involves some serious self-reconing, serious self-reconing, and it is not fun to do that work, to look at yourself and say what role do I have to play in racism? Am I giggling at the joke? Right. Have I in the past, when I'm approached by somebody, do I feel that? And those are not easy self-evaluations to have?

0:17:26 - Annalisa Holcombe
Right Really understanding our own biases.

0:17:28 - Wendy Anderton
Really understanding our own biases. I belong to a group online and someone mentioned that the other day of why do I want to automatically assign gender roles to my board of directors, why do I assume that the secretary, why would I ask first a female to take the minutes Correct? And I'm like. Those are the hard questions to answer about privilege. Those are the things that we all have to work through. We do it in a lot of different ways. We do it racially, we do it gender bias, we do it based on height. We know that tall men make more money than short men. Right People who are a suit make more money than people who don't.

It's physically fit. Yes, I mean, there are a lot of biases that we have and we're just starting to explore how those biases work, how they play a role today and in the past and in the future. Some of them are valued. Let's face it. You need to have a sense of am I safe, am I not? Do you need to cross the street when you see a supposed nefarious character to feel safe? Do you need to tuck your handbag a little bit further under your arm when you're being followed by someone? Those make sense. But then, if you stop and evaluate each one of those little interactions, you have to work around all the biases that go with that. Why did I feel that way about that person versus another person? If the situation would be different, how would I feel?

0:19:11 - Annalisa Holcombe
And we also have to think about it in terms of the privilege that many men have and that they often don't feel that at all.

0:19:20 - Wendy Anderton
Exactly, Exactly, but that, yeah, men don't feel that level of constantly having to think is my skirt too short? Should I be wearing a skirt? Right. Are my shoes appropriate?

0:19:36 - Annalisa Holcombe
Is this parking garage well lit? Is this parking garage well lit?

0:19:40 - Wendy Anderton
Do I hold my keys between my fingers so I can gouge somebody's eyes out, and most men don't feel that way. I'm going to say that there are men who feel that way, maybe men who don't identify in a gender role as well, and that their mannerisms are obvious in that way. I can imagine that they feel unsafe.

Or maybe men just feel unsafe too, when they're better at hiding it. I don't know, because I haven't bothered to ask, which is probably my own bias, and I think a lot of that has to do with asking. You do have to ask people. Was I offensive? I feel that I may have said something that was offensive and I think that's okay.

0:20:24 - Annalisa Holcombe
Have you done that before?

0:20:26 - Wendy Anderton
I have In a professional environment. I have actually I have said how I feel that that was offensive. Was that offensive to you?

0:20:35 - Annalisa Holcombe
Interesting.

0:20:37 - Wendy Anderton
From what happens. They will tell me, usually honestly. It almost makes them uncomfortable, though, to say oh yeah, it was kind of offensive. Yeah. You were a little bit off, because people don't want to say that to you yeah, they don't want to say yeah, no, you shouldn't have done that. We all want to be polite. Which is why we carry our biases for so long. We do want to be polite. We don't want to say mean things about other human beings or have a confrontation that feels uncomfortable.

0:21:06 - Annalisa Holcombe
Exactly. If this conversation has caught your attention and you want to join in on conversations like this, check out our website at connectioncollaborative.com. Welcome back. You're listening to 92,000 Hours. Let's jump back into our conversation with Wendy Anderton.

0:21:53 - Wendy Anderton
I call it the beauty queen moment and I say this a lot. You know those beauty queens who stand up and they're platformist. I want world peace.

0:22:02 - Annalisa Holcombe
That's my platform.

0:22:03 - Wendy Anderton
I just get to do it every day. I totally get to do that every day and it gives me the reason to wake up. And even when I'm challenged to my absolute level, where I just kind of want to throw my hands up and walk away, I don't because of that passion and purpose. I have a purpose and it is to change the world.

0:22:27 - Wendy Anderton
You just pie in the sky, almighty but I want other people to experience that too.

I want other people to have my beauty queen moment with me, and I convince people to do it and it's kind of fun.

I love that. So you say, where does your passion and purpose come from? How does all of this frame that? It all frames it? All of these things have led me to this place. Some of it is luck, just total luck. It's total luck that the CEO happened to want to retire and I was just standing there going hey, me, me, me, lifting my arm up. Had I not lifted my arm up and made that decision, which might have been dumb at the moment, because I really didn't know what the hell I was doing?

0:23:08 - Annalisa Holcombe
But you dared to raise your hand at that moment.

0:23:11 - Wendy Anderton
I dared to raise my hand because it was my passion and purpose, and I dared to look beyond the imposter syndrome. I dared to say nobody, no CEO knows what the hell they're doing. We just don't. We don't know what we're doing. Don't let them convince you otherwise.

0:23:29 - Annalisa Holcombe
That's what I have to say Everybody has Everybody's faking it, everybody's faking it.

0:23:34 - Wendy Anderton
We're just faking it till we make it. And that's what makes the world a better place. That passion for world peace and for a better world flows over into a better world for women. And specifically because I believe we can do it, I believe there's equity to be had and I believe we deserve it. I'm sorry, I hesitated because I wanted to say we just have to work for it, and that's not true. We deserve it. It should be now. There's no excuses.

0:24:07 - Annalisa Holcombe
I know that we had talked about the different identities that we have and I remember looking at one of yours and right in the middle of your core identities was you're a winner.

0:24:16 - Wendy Anderton
I am a winner. I love to win. I'm extraordinarily competitive, but I am a winner.

0:24:28 - Annalisa Holcombe
I would think that the resiliency that you spoke about is central to the ability to win Like. I think so, Like people overcome who win yes.

0:24:43 - Wendy Anderton
And I spent a very short period of time doing very slow plotting running, trying to get to a 5K, and through that I learned a lot about winning that winning isn't always coming in first. Winning isn't always getting exactly what you want which I would have loved to have had the gold medal but for me, winning was finishing, crossing the finish line and knowing that everyone around you has that exact same goal. Their goal isn't necessarily to win as we traditionally define that. Their goal is to win personally. There's something about running specifically, which I cannot do anymore that taught me that Interesting. That taught me that everyone has the same goal, which is just getting across the finish line in any way, or getting a little bit further than you did before, or getting 10 steps in that make a difference to you.

And everyone in that running community understood that like nobody I've ever seen, and we never had to talk about it. But I knew that if, for some reason, I went down on my knees, somebody would come along and pick me up and drag me across that finish line, because they alone understood that that was a personal challenge, that just finishing or just making the next 10 steps means something, because they'd been through it in their own way. Whether it was at mile one or mile 50, every one of those people had faced that same challenge and that same thing that you have to dig so deeply for, when everything you have, every support you have, and in running at your legs, when your legs give out. In business, it's when all of the funding falls away from your nonprofit, when your board isn't active in traditional business, for-profit business, it's when somebody's not buying your product. You have to figure out a way to stand up and do it again, or take that next step, or have the people around you who, uniquely, get it and will help you do that.

Oh, it's lovely and part of that is filling those gaps of who they are. It's having those people around you and we go back to you. You can't do this alone. You can't do life alone. It's not healthy. It won't further your purpose and your passion Right. And that's your passion, is to live alone, which some people do have that passion.

0:27:33 - Annalisa Holcombe
so I love the discussion about the different levels of challenge that people are having, even when they're running a 5K. It's a story that I often tell that people that I work with in my mentoring programs about unique challenges that we all have, as well as the courage that we show and sometimes courage for someone is something that's easy for you, but it would take everything they have to build up the ability to make that phone call or to raise their hand or to, whatever the thing might be, get out of bed that morning that there's little pieces of courage that we're all engaging in every day to become our full selves.

0:28:21 - Wendy Anderton
There are. I didn't used to be a believer in motivational sayings or in, I guess, motivational sayings encompasses that. I didn't used to be a believer in those but there's a meme out right now that says whatever your struggle is, if you've had to make that hard decision today, I support you and I'm here for you. And sometimes it is just getting the hell out of bed or taking a shower or stepping one foot out the door. Or maybe it's approaching a big donor and making the ask. Or maybe it's taking that big risk of asking for an investment or introducing a new product, asking for the promotion, demanding equal pay for what you're doing, demanding what you're worth, recognizing your worth within. These are all steps that we have to take that involve courage. Courage comes from the heart. We know that from Wizard of Oz, my least favorite movie. But we know that from Wizard of Oz. Courage comes from the heart and we all have one. So just dig and find the courage to move on.

0:29:46 - Annalisa Holcombe
So I, as you probably know, I'm very personally passionate about the role of mentors in our lives. So I'm interested in you telling me about if you've had any particular mentor in your life that was important to you, or if you learned something from one of them.

0:30:01 - Wendy Anderton
I have. I've had a lot of mentors. Nearly everybody within my professional circle I would consider a mentor to some degree. I have a particular woman in Phoenix who is extraordinarily passionate about women's entrepreneurship and and equalizing the playing field there, and she is an amazing mentor to me. Everything she says is is pretty much gospel For me. I'm not saying she's right, but I do take time to research what we're talking about. Gaining her approval is important, so I think that she's a mentor. She may not know it. We don't necessarily have a formal relationship.

0:30:45 - Annalisa Holcombe
She'd probably love to know that you think that way about her.

0:30:48 - Wendy Anderton
Oh, I tell her all the time. I have mentors in Washington DC who help me do my job better. Awesome, Pretty straightforward stuff. You know I have personal mentors. My wife is a personal mentor for me. That was a definer in our relationship of does this person make me better?

0:31:10 - Annalisa Holcombe
Did you guys actually speak about that?

0:31:12 - Wendy Anderton
Yes, we just speak about it all the time that we are better together. We are individually better together. We drive each other and we give each other a safe space to explore possibility. And that's how mentors and relationships should work is. Mentors aren't just teachers, or we'd call them teachers. They are people who inspire you to take the action that you should be taking that's right for you. They don't tell you what action to take, but they inspire you to dig deep and act upon the things you know you should do anyway. I love that.

0:31:50 - Annalisa Holcombe
Totally agree. Love, that I'm going to take that, I'm going to put it somewhere, put it on your website. Yeah, exactly, it's beautiful. And mentors come in all forms.

0:31:59 - Wendy Anderton
You can have educational mentors. You can have personal mentors. You can have a therapist who serves as your mentor. You can have recovery mentors. You can have like a spousal mentors. The best spouses, I think, are great mentors. They make you better.

0:32:14 - Annalisa Holcombe
Yeah, even your children can be your mentors, your children can be your mentors.

0:32:17 - Wendy Anderton
There is wisdom in the mouths of children. Yeah, sometimes they call you out on your bullshit like nobody else would ever dare. So mentors they're really important. It's important to embrace what they can give you. Mentors are that safe space. They're the people who let you be you with all your failings and flaws, and then sort of push you in the right direction to be a better you.

0:32:49 - Annalisa Holcombe
I agree. Not a perfect you, but a better you, both supportive and challenging at the same time.

0:32:53 - Wendy Anderton
Yes, supportive and challenging. Yeah, yeah, I love my state, I love my job, I love this work. None of us would do it in this field the thousands of people around the country who do this would never do it If we weren't passionate. It's not like it's a big moneymaker of a career. We're just passionate about the power of exchanges, about the power of student exchanges, professional exchanges, about the power of people to tear down those headlines, those barriers and make it a good day. Everybody can do that to some degree in your job. Yeah, you can find the thing to hang onto. Like I say, find the one thing there's many books and topics about. Find the one thing that works for you and cling, hang onto it like nobody's business.

0:33:51 - Annalisa Holcombe
My sincere thanks to Wendy for taking the time to speak with us. You can learn more about Wendy's work by connecting with her on LinkedIn. In the next episode we'll hear from Richard Chapman, professor of Economics and Resident Funny Guy at Westminster College. He talks about humor, joy and the values we profess to have versus the values we actually live. Join us, as always. Thank you for listening to 92,000 Hours. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review. We really appreciate your support. If you're interested in integrating the personal and professional through authentic conversation, just like you heard on our episode today, please check out our work at Connection Collaborative. You can find us at connectioncollaborative.com or send me an email at annalisa@connectioncollaborative.com. Thank you and see you next week on 92,000 Hours. 92,000 Hours is made possible by Connection Collaborative. This episode was produced and edited by Brianna Steggell and Lexie Banks. I'm your host, Annalisa Holcomb.