Grand Slam Journey
This podcast discusses various topics around - sports, business, technology, mindset, health, fitness, and tips for growth. Topics range from what sports have taught us and how we transitioned from a singular focus and pursuit of our athletic goals and dreams to the decision to end our sports careers and move into the next phase of our lives. My guests share how they found their passion and purpose, tips for maximizing potential - holistically - physically and mentally, how they transitioned from one chapter of their lives to the next, and how to drive success in sport, business, technology, and personal life.
Grand Slam Journey
85. Abby Davisson ︱ How to Make Big Life Decisions — Without the Stress!
Abby Davisson shares a comprehensive framework for making life's biggest decisions, from career transitions to family planning, with a clear process that reduces anxiety and builds confidence.
• The Five C's Framework: Clarify what's important, Communicate with those involved, Consider broad choices, Check in with trusted resources, and examine Consequences across time horizons
• Rest is not something earned after work is done – it's essential to incorporate deliberate breaks to enhance creativity and decision-making
• Career success and family life can coexist with strategic outsourcing and focusing parental presence during truly critical developmental stages
• Who you partner with can be either a career accelerant or roadblock – early honest conversations about expectations and values are crucial
• Decision-making skills improve with practice – finding the right conditions for important conversations (like hiking or walking by water) can facilitate better communication
• Entrepreneurship requires letting go of one trapeze to catch the next – small experiments can build confidence before making the full leap
• Financial planning should align with your values – clarify your needs, wants, and wishes to make more intentional choices
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📖 Get the book: MONEY & LOVE: AN INTELLIGENT ROADMAP FOR LIFE'S BIGGEST DECISIONS
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I'll run through the framework quickly and I'll maybe use a couple of the C's to highlight the steps that were most meaningful for me. So the first C is to clarify what's most important to you. The second is to communicate with the person or people most involved in the decision. The third C is to consider a broad range of choices. Consider a broad range of choices. Few decisions are either or, and by expanding the consideration set you have a higher likelihood of making a good decision.
Abby Davisson:The fourth C is to check in with friends, family and trusted resources.
Abby Davisson:And the fifth C is to examine the consequences of your decision across different time horizons the short-term, medium-term and long-term consequences.
Abby Davisson:And it so speaks to your point about decisions being so personal and everyone's process is so different, because I am famous for being good at the check-in step, and so sometimes I think I've over-indexed on the check-in and let other people dictate a little bit too much my decisions, and so some of the things that I've had to learn a little bit too much my decisions, and so some of the things that I've had to learn a little bit more is to check in with my own intuition more than with trusted mentors or published studies. So I think it's very personal, but when it comes to all of these big life decisions, I think the hardest part and the most important is the clarify step, and for me, you know, it wasn't one clarifying moment, but there was a series of moments that helped me clarify what was important to me. One was I ended up getting recruited for a similar job at a bigger, more prestigious company and went through the whole interview process.
Klara:Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Grand Slam Journey podcast, where we discuss topics related to sports, business and technology, underlined by leadership. My today's guest is Abby Davisson. Abby is a social innovation leader and career development expert. Most recently, she spent nine years at global retailer Gap Inc, where she served as president of Gap Foundation and co-founded the company's employee resource group for parents and caregivers. Abby is the co-author of Money and Love an intelligent roadmap for life's biggest decisions. In this conversation, we cover a variety of topics mainly related to navigating our careers and framework for making some of the life's biggest decisions. For context, this conversation was recorded last fall.
Klara:I apologize to you, my listeners and Abby for releasing it just now. There has been a lot going on this past year and I'm trying to find a new rhythm, to get back to releasing episodes regularly. I may have a plan, but I have to test how executable it is. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing or dedicating one minute of your time to provide an official review on wherever you listen to this podcast, or perhaps you may decide to share this episode with someone you believe may also enjoy it. Thank you for tuning in and enjoy the listen. Hello, Abby, Welcome to the Grand Slim Journey podcast. So great to have you.
Abby Davisson:It's wonderful to be here, Clara. I'm excited for our conversation.
Klara:I am too, and I'm so thrilled you accepted my invite. I have came across your work through Annie. She organized a workshop, or you organized a workshop in partnership with Annie, and then I was able and privileged to join your class, making big life decisions with more ease and less angst, and so I'm super curious to dive into even your journey. What led you to this vast and in many ways, complex field of decision-making that we have to navigate through our life and potentially even your own career and decisions, and maybe many more things that we'll uncover along the way. And so quick introduction from my side you're co-author of the book Money and Life an intelligent roadmap for life's biggest decisions. You founded and currently lead the Money and Life Institute, which helps people make better decisions that lead to happiness, prosperity and purpose, and you have a fantastic background that seems quite diverse, and so let me just stop there and I'll give you an opportunity to add or introduce yourself anything you want to bring up for just the context of the conversation you would like listeners to know about you.
Abby Davisson:Well, thank you for that introduction and thanks so much for having me. The only thing I'll add is that I am also an aspiring tennis player. Well, I am a tennis player. I aspire to get better. Right now I'm fairly mediocre, but I know we share that with each other and with Annie Duke as well. I just listened to your wonderful interview with her, and so I am honored to be among great company.
Klara:I had a lot of fun talking to Annie especially. It stood out to me quite clearly that practice that she's taken from poker and decision making and how it applied to tennis. So I'm curious if that is true for you as well, because you have studied this field quite a bit. What does your tennis game look like, abby, or what do you enjoy about it?
Abby Davisson:Well, it's interesting, I have dabbled in tennis throughout my life, but I would say it was not until about a year ago that I got very serious about it and that was actually coincided with my starting the Money and Love Institute. I had a many year you know, two decades plus career before that, all around helping people in different sectors. So I've worked in all three sectors, most recently in the corporate sector, leading the foundation of the company Gap Inc. Which we can talk more about. But when I left to publicize my book and then launched my company, I really wanted to do things differently than I had in my career previously, where I was very relentless, frankly, about work and did not give myself a lot of room to play and rest during the work week.
Abby Davisson:A fantastic book called Rest by Alex Pong and it really changed the way I looked at how to be an entrepreneur and have really deliberately incorporated rest and active rest, so not just passive that's one of the things that he talks about in his book into my business plan, and so every week I force myself to take a break at lunchtime and go to my tennis class. I'm fortunate to live a 10 minute walk from an amazing, world-class facility and I get to go play tennis in the middle of the day and learn something new, and it's really been transformative. It's helped me be a much more creative leader, a better decision maker, and has just been a really revolutionary way to approach my work.
Klara:Wow, I love that beginning and we can dive into so many things, because resting is one of the things I suck at, including the quitting, which is what Annie and I talked about and I was so curious about, especially her last book, quit. And so tell me a little bit more about resting or the book, how you applying it even into entrepreneurship. I find it is so hard to plug yourself away, even maybe particularly for me, it's literally on point, as I started a new career journey three months in now yeah, minus one day I feel like a little bit drowning, and so especially the beginnings are very much time demanding, and I actually do have a quote that I wrote Pace yourself, life is not a sprint, and I'm hoping reading it every morning it will remind me. Just don't get locked into this wheel, and I still struggle with it so much. Anything else you want to inspire us with?
Abby Davisson:Yeah, that resonates with me too. I'm really bad at resting and at pacing myself as well, and I think that's what spoke to me so much about this book the idea that rest is not something to earn, that it is not something that you get to do after all your work is done, because, frankly, that you get to do after all your work is done, because, frankly, your work will never be done. And I work full time for myself. I also have two young sons, and so there's really not a lot of time for rest if I don't deliberately make it.
Abby Davisson:And so what Alex talks about in his book it goes through a lot of examples of really amazing people throughout history, from Nobel Prize winners to Supreme Court justices, to inventors that you've heard of you know they use their products every day who really prioritized rest and were deliberate about incorporating a walking practice, a sport, into their lives or something that gave them an outlet besides their work, and that they really dedicated significant time to it.
Abby Davisson:They didn't say, oh, what I've done in the laboratory will turn my attention to rest. It's really something that they did alongside their work, and it actually made them the powerhouse creatives and successful leaders that they were, and so I've really been adopting that and leaning into all the evidence that he cites to really run my own life, very differently from the way I was taught in my. I was a management consultant in my first job out of college and we literally had to track our hours and there was this notion of you know, this degree of excellence that you couldn't rest until you know every Excel spreadsheet was finished and it just has been ingrained in me so much and I've had to unlearn so much of that training in order to be the type of leader that I want to be.
Klara:I love that. And so what are you finding incorporating these breaks in? It seems like it's related to creativity. Are you more productive? Do you look forward to the working sessions more, that you know you have these hours sort of built in, or you force yourself in many ways to build them in, to step away and think about something else, even from your own practice? I'm curious what are some of the key benefits? Something else, even from your own?
Abby Davisson:practice. I'm curious what are some of the key benefits? Yeah, absolutely, I have actually very creative thoughts on my way to and from my tennis lesson. I've made connections actually through my class because, as you know, tennis is very social that have helped me in my work actually, and so I didn't go into it because I thought this will be a great networking opportunity. But I live in San Francisco. There are a lot of amazing people who also live in the Bay Area who also play tennis, and so it's had these wonderful benefits that have helped from a business perspective.
Abby Davisson:But really it is the chance to be outside, to move my body, to give myself a chance to step away from my screen. That also is something I look forward to, and I signed up for the lesson and paid, you know, a year ahead of lessons as a commitment device, you know, as a way to actually remove the ability to have to make the decision every week. Do I want to sign up for a weekly class? No, that decision has already been made once I signed up for a whole year and therefore I have to go. I've already made that commitment.
Klara:Yeah, you decided, you committed and now you're just executing on already having that part of your plan. I love that. I often find especially the things that we know are beneficial are really important to automate in life and then test it out for a certain amount of weeks ideally months and then measure success. One of my habits maybe now that we're sharing is recently I started implementing is adding some book reading in the morning, because I've had the worst habit that you wake up first thing and you check your this app and that app and what's on your calendar and your mail and it's automatically start driving my blood pressure up. I guess you already start thinking about things, and so my latest routine and I've been only doing this the past about five days minus actually a couple days I traveled.
Klara:I didn't take a book with me. I should have is when I get up, I set my phone away, I kind of look at it just briefly, but then I put it away and then I read book for 30 minutes with my coffee and I find it's been just such a nice way to get your brain going with the book. But don't be as stressed about sort of what the day brings. I've been experimenting with that and maybe I guess, now that I say that a lot, I haven't considered it as my way of building a little bit of early rest in the day before I dive into the back-to-back calls and schedule.
Abby Davisson:Yeah, reading definitely counts as rest and I love the idea of removing the choice of just saying I read for 30 minutes when I wake up.
Abby Davisson:I have a meditation practice and I read for 30 minutes when I wake up.
Abby Davisson:I have a meditation practice and I meditate for 10 minutes when I wake up.
Abby Davisson:And I was also, because I use a meditation app on my phone to do that, falling into the trap of, okay, I'll meditate, but then I'll sit on my cushion and check my email and write on sub stacks or check my sub stack, and I didn't like the fact that my meditation was this gateway into starting to check all these other things. And so I started using something called a brick, which is a device that you can use to touch your phone to it and it you set it and it can remove the access to certain apps removes these distractions again, taking out the willpower. I don't have to resist actively checking those, my email or checking the apps, because brick doesn't let me, and so I'm a huge fan of removing the need for willpower, just having something that you know you set once and then you know, now I just meditate and I go off and you know, then start my morning, you know rest of my morning and I agree it can be really empowering not to start your day with email.
Klara:I love. That makes me think about technology, and I've been sort of part of technology the past 15 years in various ways and it's fantastic. But it can be also so energy draining and just, I guess, so addictive in many ways that we have to put a real thought into creating time without the technology and sort of disconnecting from it Absolutely. And so let's dive a little bit to your upbringing. I'm always curious about my guests, where they grew up, what set them on a path and the passions that they have later uncovered themselves on this journey, and so curious about anyone who influenced you, even towards various breadth of experiences for your career, but now even the entrepreneurship Tell me about it.
Abby Davisson:I grew up with a mother who was a librarian and a father who was a public health executive, and so I always say I was born with a book in my hands and a desire to help people increase their well-being, because that is very much who my parents were, and I grew up in New Jersey. They were both from Wisconsin. They met in high school. Their first date was the senior prom, and they moved right before I was born.
Abby Davisson:We lived close to New York City, so I spent a lot of time with my parents going into the city to go to museums, to see performances, to take classes, and I love cities, and ever since I've gotten to choose where I live, I've been drawn to cities, and I think this idea of being a curious person pursuing things that you want to learn more about was very much in my DNA.
Abby Davisson:And so you know my parents. We didn't have a ton of money growing up, but I could always get any book that I wanted, and so I remember, you know, going to the bookstore and my mom would say, you know, pick out a book. We went to the library a lot, of course, but she also used to run book fairs for the schools where she worked, and so often that would mean, you know, I could get a bunch of books at the book fair. And I think that I just became this voracious reader because there were so many books around and books were really worshipped at my house as a source of information, as a way of pursuing curiosity, and so that was really ingrained in me throughout my whole upbringing.
Klara:And then did that inspire you then later on to writing your own book? Has that been ever top of mind as you were going through your different business career experiences, or that it sort of came later?
Abby Davisson:Well, it's interesting, I went to college and majored in history and then worked in the nonprofit sector and the public sector and I wouldn't say that I aspired to write a book.
Abby Davisson:But at one point after graduate school, when I was kind of trying to think about a lot of big life decisions whether I should start a family, whether I should look for a new job I hired a coach because I was having trouble getting out of my own way and I kept my thoughts were kind of swirling around and one of the exercises she had me do was write about a day in my life 15 years from that moment.
Abby Davisson:And as part of that exercise and you know, be very specific about you, know what are you doing in the morning, you know walk me through every step of your day and the idea was just to dream big, be very unconstrained about the way that you describe your future, don't think about how would I practically get there. It's just this thought exercise. And the first thing that I wrote in that journal entry was I grabbed a copy of my book to bring to a friend who I was meeting for lunch because I thought it would be helpful for her, and so at that point I didn't know what book I would write or how I would go about it, but it was definitely a dream of mine.
Klara:Wow, it's so interesting how sometimes we need this outside people to help us navigate our internal journey desires, maybe, or even things that we consciously can't comprehend, and the different areas of, I guess, your dreams that you're able to get to. So, from that point on, you've discovered writing a book as something that I would want to do. What was that path unfolding? This is something I actually truly want to do one day to help me connect the dots. I'm curious.
Abby Davisson:Well, first it was just like I put it out there in the universe and I didn't do anything with it. It wasn't like I said, aha, I want to write a book, let me write a five year plan to figure out how to get there. And that was a little bit uncomfortable Because as a consultant, I was very used to developing, you know, five clients and those habits die hard. But it was just like it was out in the universe. And then, once you start to put something like that out in the universe, you start to I don't know like. There's this wheels in motion thing. That is not even a conscious decision.
Abby Davisson:When I was in graduate school, I had studied with a professor who I had stayed in touch with after graduate school so that this is a spoiler alert you know she is my co-author for the book and she and I had stayed in touch. My husband had actually studied with her as well and in fact in her class we ended up writing a paper all about how we would deliberately combine our lives so that we would have a relationship that felt fulfilling and didn't require any of us to compromise our career aspirations and our future dreams, and so she had invited us back as guest speakers for several years 10 years almost and we were both working in different jobs and we had navigated job changes. And I think at that point we had had children and, again, didn't quite know what the book would be about or what it would look like. And I remember actually very clearly she had retired from teaching the class in 2018 and I had lunch with her about a year later and she had told me back when she retired that she was planning to write a book about the class and it was a class called Work and Family, all about how to make big decisions about your career and your life outside of your career. And I had said at the time like that's so important. Yes, more people should get access to this information. It really changed my life because of the time that I took it.
Abby Davisson:And when we had lunch, I asked her how's the book coming? And she told me that she hadn't written a word. And I said, well, maybe you need an accountability partner, because I had just started the employee resource group for working parents at Gap Inc, where I had been working for a number of years, and I did it with a lawyer, a working dad on the legal team, and it was so helpful to have a partner in getting a big project off the ground. So that was really what inspired me to tell her that. And then she looked at me and she said that's a great idea, but I need more than that. I need a co-author, and you have been putting all of this work into practice in your own life, in the trenches, over the last decade.
Abby Davisson:You'd be the perfect person to write it with me, and so I immediately said yes, even though one of the tenants of our book is to never make a big life decision in an instant. I violated that premise by accepting on the spot, but we had known each other for a decade. She was a mentor of mine. It wasn't an impulsive decision, but it was that moment that I knew okay, this is the book that I'm going to write, and I did it alongside my day job for many years, for several years. And then it just became clear that I was not going to be able to put the energy into promoting the book that I would like if I continued on with my day job, and at that point the book was pulling me more than the job was keeping me. And so I decided to take the leap and actually applied my framework for making big life decisions to my own life, which we could talk more about if you'd like.
Klara:Gosh, I love that and thank you for describing it. I want to dive all into the book and, before you do, want to touch base on your career, but just to connect. What really stands out to me is I often say, even on this podcast, steve Jobs quote we never know how our dots will connect, but they eventually connect in some ways. So it seems like everything you just described and even you mentioned. Well, there was a long time before I wrote the book, when I sort of knew I want to write something one day, but you didn't actively started thinking about, okay, what do I need to write now, didn't actively started thinking about, okay, what do I need to write now? It's almost like you trust it that at the right point it will appear and the right time will come, and at that moment you knew that was the right decision to make. And so I love sometimes these big decisions and maybe we can also dive into the framework is that often, or at least from my experience, I feel like we just want to decide and force it, but there's some decisions in life where you actually need to give it a space, and so the older I grow, the more I realize well, this is a really good thing.
Klara:I would love to decide, but I know it's not the right time to decide on this now. And so, giving yourself a little bit of the freedom, you know I'll trust that I'll make the right decision at the right time. But I just don't know now when, sort of putting it not completely on a back burner, but like parking with the trust that will appear in the future for you. I feel it's so important. Let me just pause there. I don't know. If there's anything you want to add. Abby is so important. Let me just pause there. And if there's anything you want to add, abby to your story or again, the framework you've developed, on decision making.
Abby Davisson:Yeah, no, I think that's a lovely way to put it that you have to trust that when you know there's the phrase when the student is ready, the teacher appears right. And so there is this sense of okay, I want this for someone. Just admit to myself that I do, which is a big part of it's vulnerable right To admit you're a deep wish or a desire, and so part of that is just admitting to yourself that you have it. And yeah, I think that I am not somebody who is very connected to my intuition by nature. I live in my head a lot and I think my academic and work training has even enhanced that natural tendency. Like I have really had to work to get in touch with my intuition and other ways of making decisions, but I've gotten better at it.
Abby Davisson:And so there was something about that step of letting myself admit it but not holding so tightly to that desire and letting it unfold. But then, in that moment, when we were having lunch at this beautiful cafe and it was a warm autumn day, and she said you know, would you like to write this book with me? I had this full body, yes feeling that was so hard to ignore and it was like, yes, this is it, this is the moment that you have been waiting for, and so I think that those of us who live in our heads can do a lot of things to tap into that intuition, and one of them is just by doing some of that unconscious writing. Just let it all come out. I'm a big fan of journaling. I've been journaling since I was seven years old. I think it really helped me get through a lot of setbacks and traumatic events in my life, and so I think that practice has really served me well.
Klara:Yeah, journaling, I've had it for a while now. I stopped, but I go back to it. It's like a thing that I add when I know I need to, but I'm always impressed what can come out on the paper when you just give yourself a little bit of space. I'm like what I just wrote this. Where is this coming from? It seems like there's some connection between the pen and the paper and the deeper subconsciousness that we're not able to always get to if we don't create that space for ourselves. And so, going back maybe to your career, briefly, you have worked in consulting, you've worked part of the New York public education system, you worked in the corporate gap. What was that transition like? And even as you were looking for different steps, I think hindsight is always smarter. So I'm curious how do you reflect on your career before you decided to take on this entrepreneurial journey?
Abby Davisson:You're absolutely right that everything makes sense. When you look backwards and you walk through the resume it's not always as clear as you're living through it, but the through line for my career has really been helping people and that's been done from different vantage points, but that is the thing that has maintained throughout all of the twists and turns, and I'm really grateful to that first consulting opportunity. It was actually a very new venture that bain and company spun out a non-profit consulting firm called bridge span, and it was there that this history major got a crash course in data-driven decision-making through Excel, through all the analytical tools that you learn in a consulting role, and also got exposed to some amazing mentors who had been growing their career alongside their families and kind of showed me what was possible. I had a mother who paused her career to raise kids where my father was the very clear breadwinner, and I didn't want that model for myself. I really wanted to blend the idea of being a parent and having a full career, but I didn't see an example of that in my own family. So I was really fortunate to have some early career role models who showed me that it was possible and how to do it. But I was very interested in education and young people and so when I had the opportunity to go from consulting into the New York City Department of Education assist with some school reform efforts that were underway there, I jumped at the chance to do that, got to work in a huge system moving the needle for 1.1 million kids and scale.
Abby Davisson:At that point my career was tremendously important to me and learned so many lessons and saw the power of partnerships, multiple sectors coming together. A lot of the schools were being run in partnership with community institutions or museums or law firms, and I saw the power in that. And at that point I had had nonprofit experience from my consulting firm. I had had public sector experience, but I hadn't spent any time in the corporate sector, and so that's what brought me back to get my business degree. I did a joint degree with the education school at that time as well, and that's where I actually first connected to Gap Inc. I did an MBA internship in between my two years of business school there and got to know the amazing work that was being done by the corporate foundation, and so I joined a couple of different other organizations after school because there wasn't a full-time role for me at the Gap at the time, but I had kept in touch with the folks who I met in my internship there and when there was a full-time role, they reached out to me and they said are you interested in applying? And it's so funny, clara. I was so.
Abby Davisson:Remember I had described how I was conflicted about having a kid or changing jobs. I actually happened to be six months pregnant at the time that they reached out to me and so I said you know, I'm very interested in this role. But, in the spirit of full disclosure, I am going to be having a baby and will be on maternity leave and won't be able to start right away. And, to their credit, they said well, if you're interested, put your application in. And I did, and I ended up getting offered the role. I sort of.
Abby Davisson:The way it happened was very head spinning. I was interviewing all the way up to 38 weeks pregnant. I got the offer on a Wednesday, I accepted it on a Thursday and my son came two weeks early, so I had him on a Wednesday. I accepted it on a Thursday and my son came two weeks early, so I had him on Friday. So I didn't even have time to quit my old job before I suddenly had a new job and a baby, and it was all a lot, but that's what I, you know.
Abby Davisson:I ended up staying there for almost a decade and it was a really tremendous learning experience for me. I scaled a workforce development program and then I had the opportunity to lead the whole foundation, and it was a, you know, an amazing experience, and one that really reinforced the importance of everything I had learned in my professor turned co-authors class, because the company was 70% women, so it was a very, you know, family friendly environment. But I saw so many people making decisions about stepping back from their careers, about not being able to, you know, in their mind, combine a career and a family, and I felt like, if they had access to the information that I had by virtue of taking this course, they might have made different decisions, and so that was one of the reasons that I started the employee resource group for parents and decided to spend so much energy working on writing the book and getting the information on how to make big life decisions out to a broader audience.
Klara:Wow, I love that description and there are so many different ways that I want to dive into. Maybe it was the first one because of your beautiful breadth of experience and, as you mentioned, the different industries and sectors, through consulting and nonprofit, the public education being part of the gap and driving some of the missions, obviously of the company part of that foundation, but also really this mission-driven purpose that seemed like you found to help other women grow their leadership in the corporate world and understand how to balance, it seems like, the work and personal life and still achieve their goals. What are some of the key things that you want to describe, or even, from your own experience, things that you would want to add that you feel like are maybe missing and people might be focusing or could be focusing more on in those specific pillars and industries? And I know that's like a really broad question and we probably can have three, four hours conversation just on that. But I'm curious if there's something that really comes to mind as you kind of look at your breadth of experience and expertise.
Abby Davisson:Yeah, I think that something that is just increasingly clear to me at this vantage point in my life is that you know your career fits into your life, not the other way around, but it will take up as much time as you give it, because employers are greedy and not just other people. I am greedy as an entrepreneur right, I am, you know, in some ways my own harshest boss relative to some of the other people I've worked for throughout my life. And so, first, the idea of just prioritizing things outside of work and that nobody's going to prioritize those for you, you need to do that yourself. I think that's something that I've really learned. I also learned that who you choose to partner with in life can either be a career accelerant or really a career roadblock, and I've actually personally experienced both. I'm fortunate that the person who I've been married to for almost 15 years is very much a career supporter and accelerant, and I think that, because we had the good fortune to take my co-authors class at the same time, we started very early on in our relationship.
Abby Davisson:At that point, we'd been dating for less than a year, having really tough conversations about whether we were going to accept jobs in the same city if we were going to live together in the same city.
Abby Davisson:If that happened, how much we were going to contribute to our rent, because while I went to go work for a nonprofit after graduation, he was going to work for a hedge fund, so we were earning dramatically different amounts. So we had to touch on all of these third rail topics very early on in our relationship. And it is a muscle, right. It's sort of hard but it does get easier over time, and we've now built that muscle up through lots of different conversations through the years that, even though they never get super easy, you start to get more practiced at having them and, more importantly, you try to figure out how you can support each other in all the twists and turns of your career, as opposed to having this sense of well, you're the person holding me back from all these things I want to do, and so I think a supportive partner is very make or break for career success of you and your, I guess, boyfriend at the time, being forced to talk about things and figure out early on on what is important and even the style of communication.
Klara:I feel like that's the one thing that differentiates us, or scientists say, differentiates us from animals in ways they communicate probably differently, but I feel like we still so suck at it, even though we have the words. I feel like often it's exactly where things get caught up, that we just can't figure out how to communicate with each other clearly, and that's either it's a personal life or a business life. I think it goes to all areas of our lives.
Abby Davisson:Well, I also think that we learn over time, and so I don't want to paint this picture that my husband and I have these like very calm conversations where we're very measured and we never get upset with each other, like that's not the case at all. We've just learned how to work through them and we've learned the conditions that work best for us, and so one thing we know that works best for us is to have these, have big life conversations on hikes, because we both like being in nature. It's one of the reasons we live where we do, and there is something about walking side by side, next to someone where you don't have to look deeply into their eyes. That allows you to be a bit more vulnerable. When you're outside the confines of your house, you're away from the stress of the dishes piled in the sink and the laundry that needs to be folded, and you can think more expansively and creatively.
Abby Davisson:And so, after a lot of trial and error, we've learned don't have the conversation when the thought strikes you Say hey, I'd love to talk to you about something, let's plan a hike this weekend or in a couple of weeks. We let our kids run up ahead of us and then we talk about. You know the thing that's on our mind and you know we've again, we've learned this over time. So it's not to say that you know those first efforts, or even the first 10 years of efforts, you know aren't going to be painful, efforts aren't going to be painful. But yeah, I think over time you learn what works for you both. Some people love to have conversations over cocktails at their local taco place. It really varies, but I think the key my co-author likes to be by bodies of water. She always found walking on the beach or by a lake very calming. So your mileage may vary, but there are conditions that support communication better than other conditions.
Klara:Yeah, and so before we dive full into the book, I do want to touch on one more thing that is also very personal for me is the women in leadership and that combination with being a woman leader and having a family.
Klara:So it's something you mentioned in your gap role. I've grew up in the tech world and I have seen very few women in leadership roles, or the ones who have been in leadership roles eventually have their husbands take care of the kids, so they kind of switch the roles and I think in life you can't have everything. I mean, people say, yeah, eventually you can, but you got to figure out how to sort of get there. So I don't think there's such a thing making your cake fully and eating it all at once too, like you got to space it out. So what are some of the key things that maybe this could lead to the book that you had uncovered? That maybe even us women have our own biases that are holding us back from being in leadership roles and having families at the same time Because, I have to say, that's my own bias as well.
Abby Davisson:Yeah well, and I don't think it's just coincidental. I think there's a lot of data that supports how challenging it is. And I agree with you that it's not about having it all. It's about making the trade-offs so that you have what you want most when you want it. And I remember very vividly being in a women's leadership event at Gap and having one of the CEOs of the brands along with another very powerful woman in conversation. I raised my hand and I said you're both very high-achieving women with children.
Abby Davisson:I'd love to know what it looks like behind the curtain in your personal lives that have let you lean into these roles. I remember very distinctly one of them said basically, her husband, after she started getting more and more advanced in her career, left his career to be the primary parent of their children, and the other one was divorced. And so I was like okay, so these are the options here. It's not looking good Because I had a husband I very much wanted to stay married to two young kids. He wasn't going to give up his career, nor would I want him to, and we were sort of like, well, how is this possible? What is this going to look like? I mean a couple of things. I would say that again I learned from my co-author and from other women role models along the way that have helped me is number one to outsource as much as possible and to not feel guilty about that. I remember lots of friends who had so much angst about hiring a nanny when it was almost as much as their salary and they would say, well, I'm barely covering the cost of childcare with my salary. And again, my co-author is a labor economist and she would say very clearly in her class you don't take the child care expenses out of one partner's salary, you add the salaries together, you subtract the child care costs and it's an investment in your careers. And so I always saw it that way, as this was an investment in our careers to have full-time child care, to outsource the house cleaning, all the things that we didn't want to be doing ourselves in our limited time that we had available. And so I have long been an advocate of throwing money at a problem to make it go away.
Abby Davisson:I'd say the other thing that helped is to be really clear about when it makes a difference to be a very present parent, and for me I felt like I got advice from older parents that it really wasn't the baby years that mattered so much. There is a lot of physical labor, you know, in terms of changing diapers, in terms of nursing. Certainly some of that is helpful for bonding. I did nurse my kids and did a lot of pumping on work trips for a lot of time after I had them Got advice that really it's the middle school years and the teenage years where they're actually forming values, where school gets more complicated, where friendships and social navigation gets more tricky, that it's helpful to be around.
Abby Davisson:And so the way my husband and I have designed our careers partly, we're both doing an entrepreneurial pivot now in order to have more ability to be present parents compared to when we were executives in the corporate world, and that may change in the future. I don't think it's a one-way door to become an entrepreneur, certainly not for me but it felt like this was a really critical time in my kids' lives, more so than when they were in infancy and toddlerhood and preschool, even in early elementary school, and I wasn't willing to give up the ability to show up for them now. And so I'm very discerning about the times that I travel. I'm discerning about what I give my energy to, because I value showing up for them in a different way now than I did earlier in my life and in their lives, in a different way now than I did earlier in my life and in their lives.
Klara:I love that. And you write a lot about sort of the different ways of parenting in your book. I mean, that book covers so much it seems like really all the life's key decisions, and when I took your class I actually was trying to remember the number. What's the amount of decisions that we go through Abby per hour of life? It seems like it's growing because we live longer. Is it somewhere around 35 decisions that we make during our life? I remember there was a number that stood out to me that was quite higher than I expected. Actually, are you?
Abby Davisson:talking about the research on life transitions. Yes, yeah, well, it's a transition every 12 to 18 months. So, yeah, it's very frequent. In terms of the major and these are not decisions about moving a few doors down, but these are either decisions you make voluntarily to change jobs or move cities or have a child.
Abby Davisson:But this is coming from Bruce Feiler's research on lifequakes. He calls them these major upheavals in our lives and, yeah, we experience them as adults every 12 to 18 months and either voluntarily meaning we choose to make a decision that turns our lives upside down or they're involuntary, meaning we get laid off from a job, or we experience the death or illness of someone close to us, or our own diagnosis, and I think that it is very common and I had experienced my own share of life quakes. I'd say they were compressed in a period of time in my 30s and early 40s, and those all contributed to me doing some more soul searching and introspection around how I wanted my career and my life to unfold that led me to the decisions today. So I think it can be very helpful to examine those and to do the reflection, even though they can be very painful, but they can also have some really meaningful lessons for us if we're willing to listen.
Klara:I love that you're sharing that, because it's actually been exactly the same time. That's been important for me. I stumbled somewhat accidentally on a coach and I've had that coach on and off for several years and I think that was right around I'm going to say maybe 32, 33. And I'm still actually in touch with her, like it's a lady that I found a connection and I feel like she's the one who can help me tap into my gut Cause. Like you, I just feel like I'm very head oriented person.
Klara:I find these biggest life decisions are not a head decision, they're actually gut decision and I always give this example like for different roles. I've actually had a spreadsheet and I calculated the options, because it's never just one job you have to choose from, they always align and I have like two, three or four to consider and I have like criteria and I created like a ranking and see what is the number that comes up and I feel like it never worked. So at some point I was like you know what the spreadsheet, a decision making for jobs, doesn't work for me. I gotta make a different decision.
Klara:Then I read Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink and he actually argues look, spreadsheets are good for some things, let's say, like buying a car, but when it comes to big life decisions, you have to more decide on how to tap into your gut, and so that's actually a lot about your book that you and my rec write about. Look, there's not just one thing to consider, it's not an equation, and that's across the full scale of important things that we're considering as we go through our life, whether it's moving to a new place, finding a new job, deciding who we marry, if we should have kids, in many different areas. So I know I'm super excited about it. I'm already leading in, but I want to give you an opportunity to dive deeper into the book and your collaboration with Mara. What would you like listeners or people to know about it and take away at its core? Before we dive into some more of the context?
Abby Davisson:Well, first of all, I would say I am right there with you with the spreadsheets, and what I have found over time is it's most instructive to see what the spreadsheet says and then to see how I feel about that answer, because that's how I get in touch. It's like I see what the data is saying and if I'm disappointed because I wanted the data to spit out something else, that is very informative. And so it's the old flip a coin and then see how you feel about the answer, which I try to teach my kids about that way of making decisions. It's like, yeah, see what the data is telling you and then play that against your gut and your emotions to see if you actually are really hoping that the coin lands on the other side. So, yeah, that resonates.
Abby Davisson:But I think in terms of our book, I mean we really wanted to develop a framework that people could use. That it was, you know, sturdy, meaning you could rely on it again and again, but flexible, meaning it could apply to a whole range of life decisions, because we are constantly facing them, as we just talked about. Everything from you know is this person my person, and so our book is laid out in this way where every chapter is devoted to a big life decision, from dating and mating all the way through the elder years around senior living facilities, divorce and, along the way, lots of choices about where to live and when to move, combining a career and family, and so on and so forth. And so the framework that we describe is called the five C's. It wasn't actually a part of the class originally when she taught it. It was something that she and I developed together based on all the research about decision-making.
Abby Davisson:I have historically had a really hard time with decisions, and so I think that's why I have also devoured all the decision-making books and research and kind of learned myself. It's not our fault that we're not good at it. We're certainly not taught in school how to make decisions. We're not taught, as women, how important the decisions we make in our personal lives will be to our careers and vice versa, and so the goal of the book is to give people a resource, a tool, lots of data and stories to use as they navigate their own big life decisions in a way that will help them find whatever is meaningful and fulfilling to them, because, again, we can't purport to say what everyone should do, nor do we want to do that?
Klara:Yeah, and decisions are super personal. That's the one thing. What might be right for me may not be right for the person next to me, and they can be also different than one year ago or two years later. So I think as we go through life, things change and catch different perspective and meaning, which makes me think about what's your view on making a decision, versus the mindset we carry after that decision is made.
Klara:Because maybe, just to even put it perspective, I recently made a choice to go on a new car journey and I had two options. Actually, both options were fantastic. It's like the best situation to be. In. Either one you take, you create a path. I felt like they could maybe take me different paths, but again, you never know. Let's see in a couple more years what the next point will be. But I also find, once you make that choice and commit, if you make that decision and commitment with a bad judgment or you have a bad attitude about it, it's not going to help you then take you in the right place. So the execution on that decision and the mindset that you carry from making the decision going past the next, you know, whatever it is one, two, three years until the next decision needs to be made is maybe equally, if not more, important than the decision itself. What's your view on that, abby, or just your experience in studying this field and how people react?
Abby Davisson:in graduate school who talked about love being a decision, and I think we are often, you know, expecting and sort of seeing the stories in the media and Hollywood that will be, you know, struck by some like Cupid inspiration, and just know, when you know the person for us shows up, that you know that might happen as a initial moment where you like lock eyes with someone and feel this lightning bolt, but that's certainly not the way you maintain a multi-decade relationship, right, it's. You know you get very quickly from that lightning bolt to like whose turn is it to make dinner and you know, take out the garbage If you aren't committed to making that decision over and over. This is the person I've chosen to be with. We're going to figure out a way through this disagreement, a way through this that doesn't involve my husband, and I like to say there's no off ramps.
Abby Davisson:Right, love has no off ramps, and so we are making this decision repeatedly that we are choosing to be with one another, even when that is very tough, and so I think that's similar to know, similar to a job. Of course, there's going to be things that you don't know about when you're making a decision about joining one employer versus another, but know that the grass is always greener. And of course there were things about the path not chosen that you didn't know. You know you certainly couldn't factor into that choice. So at some point it is about saying, well, I've made my decision and now I need to make the decision right.
Klara:And so, in connection to that, how do you think about regrets? Personally, I'm actually a little bit familiar with Daniel Pink and I know you brought it up in our class as well. I'm reflecting on some of my regrets, or maybe the one biggest regret I've had, actually in one of my other podcasts. But how do you, with much more experience again around decision making, think about it? Or you would like?
Abby Davisson:people to think about it.
Abby Davisson:I love the book the Power of Regret, as you noted.
Abby Davisson:I think it's fantastic and I think this idea of knowing what the most common regrets are can be really instructive and knowing that people don't regret the chances they took.
Abby Davisson:They regret the chances they didn't take right. And so always this idea of yes, and I'm somebody who's not necessarily a risk seeker, I'm not risk averse, but making the leap from the corporate world to the world of entrepreneurship was super scary. Right, I gave up health insurance, I gave up a stable paycheck, you know status, like all of this stuff, but I knew that if I didn't do this, that I would always regret not giving it a chance, and I knew that the research backed me up on that and that, plus using my framework, feeling good about the process that I followed to make the decision has helped me take that leap in a way that I can really say I don't have regrets about. So I think regrets are very instructive. I certainly don't think we should all strive to live lives of no regret, because I think that's impossible, but I think the idea is how can you learn from the regrets you've had, plus the research out there about regrets for the next decision you have to make.
Klara:I love that and love you mentioning just that transition. Somebody smarter than me said there's like the addiction of the corporate world, like the worst track is to seeing that money come in and then, when it's not there and you get on their entrepreneurial path, there's even like the mindset shift associated with that. Can you share a little bit more, if you're open to it, the 5C framework and then how it helped you to jump into the entrepreneurial world, because that decision is super hard for many, including myself. I've always have so many ideas of what I could create and, for whatever reason, I haven't fully unleashed, I guess, my entrepreneurial spirit. Maybe one day I will grow out of it and take a leap and be as courageous as you are, abby, but I'm curious sort of how that helped you navigate your decision.
Abby Davisson:I'll run through the framework quickly and I'll maybe use a couple of the C's to highlight the steps that were most meaningful for me. So the first C is to clarify what's most important to you. The second is to communicate with the person or people most involved in the decision. The third C is to consider a broad range of choices. Few decisions are either or, and by expanding the consideration set, you have a higher likelihood of making a good decision. The fourth C is to check in with friends, family and trusted resources. And the fifth C is to examine the consequences of your decision across different time horizons the short-term, medium-term and long-term consequences.
Klara:And I've actually used it for my last job decision. I was pretty good on the clarify, communicate, the choices and sort of the consequences, and for me it was the check-in that then decided, which I haven't much used historically, but I've checked in with a few and mentors and that actually swayed me in the direction that I'm at now. But how has that worked for you?
Abby Davisson:It's so interesting. Well, and it so speaks to your point about decisions being so personal and everyone's process is so different because I am, like, famous for the being good at the check-in step, and so sometimes I think I've over-indexed on the check-in and let other people dictate a little bit too much my decisions, and so some of the things that I've had to learn a little bit more is to trust myself like check in with my own intuition more than with trusted mentors or published studies. So I think it's yeah, it's very personal, but when it comes to all of these big life decisions, I think the hardest part and the most important is the clarify step, and for me, you know, it wasn't one clarifying moment, but there was a series of moments that helped me clarify what was important to me. One was I ended up getting recruited for a similar job at a bigger, more prestigious company and went through the whole interview process and then found out I was one of two finalists. I didn't get the job and, interestingly, instead of being disappointed, I was very relieved, and so that was a moment to check in with my gut and say, like that's interesting information. It's not about continuing on this path. I had also long held an entrepreneurial aspiration. In fact, I wrote about it in my business school essay many years before and so it was this idea of this risk that I, you know, had kept putting off. I mentioned these different lifequakes I'd been through.
Abby Davisson:Well, one of the things that happened as I was writing and publishing the book is that my mom ended up passing away, and that was a moment where she had an accident many years before and her last day of work before retirement. And so I think for us, we're so trained to think about well, maybe I'll do the responsible thing and work really hard and then, after I retire, I can do what I want. And I just saw this experience with her, where she actually loved her career. She would say I can't believe they pay me to do this, to work with kids and help them foster a love of reading. But she did not have this opportunity to pursue all the things she was interested in outside of her job until after she retired because she had this accident. And that was a clarifying moment to say I don't want to wait until it's too late to take this risk. And there were some other moments, but the clarify step.
Abby Davisson:It started to get very clear to me that I wanted to pursue something entrepreneurial. Interestingly, my husband also wanted to pursue something entrepreneurial at the same time, and we first felt like, well, that's not really financially possible. We live in an expensive city, we have two kids, a mortgage, etc. But we communicated with each other, we did a lot of math we're both MBAs, so we could crunch the numbers and we started to expand our set of choices and rather than think, oh, we have to do this sequentially, we started to say, well, what would this look like if we did this simultaneously? What would the trade-offs be involved? How would we know what our runway was for our respective businesses? And that gave us a little bit more information to be more creative about what our lives could look like.
Abby Davisson:And I think in my mind I always thought I wanted to have more flexibility when my kids were in middle school and they are now there, and so it felt like this time was approaching, that we were going to want that flexibility and I wasn't willing to only have my husband have it. I actually really wanted to share that and to be an equal participant in that parenting journey, and so I think that the biggest thing that was holding us up was the consequences, you know the financial consequences and so we took some steps to kind of mitigate that. I mentioned the check-in step and I didn't actually talk to a ton of people about this, but what I did was do small experiments. And so I started to say, okay, well, what would it look like if I left my YouTube job? I would want to do more paid speaking, I want to do teaching and I would want to do coaching. And so I took on many experiments that were low stakes experiments to. I taught a class through Stanford with my co-author. That was again while I was still fully employed through the career center, and I loved that experience.
Abby Davisson:I took on more speaking, you know engagements in my day job and outside of my day job on this topic, and so through those experiments I got more information that gave me the courage to say, okay, I think I could do this. Yes, I do want to do this. And then, you know, my husband and I had had a lot of conversations and did a lot of math and found ways to reduce, you know, the risk as much as possible. I gave lots of notice. I stayed until my bonus had been paid out, kind of all of these things that let us reduce the risk. We didn't eliminate the financial downside, but we were very clear on the runway we had. I had saved a lot of years of bonuses to be able to have that cushion, and so at some point I knew I had to take this leap in order to take the next step. The phrase I use is you have to let go of one trapeze to catch the next one, and I felt like if I didn't take that leap, I would forever regret it, and so I did.
Klara:Gosh, I love that. So how is the entrepreneurial journey? And I love you sharing that you actually both dove into it at the same time, because I find that so rare for people to do it. What do you want to share about? Either the excitement and or the anxiety of being entrepreneur now and not having sort of the corporate cushion.
Abby Davisson:Well, it's both. It's both the excitement and the anxiety, and I would say it is a roller coaster like the highs are higher, the lows are lower, and when you're doing this with a partner, you're both kind of buckled in to the roller coaster at the same time, and so we both tend to not have terrible days on the same day. So that's a good thing. And he's, you know, working in a very different field. He started his own investment firm, and so we're not doing the same thing, but we're both, you know, in this sort of risky working for ourselves thing.
Abby Davisson:One of the things that I have found very helpful is because you mentioned the idea of an outside party. We started doing some work with a financial advisor. Actually, it's a firm that hired me and my co-author to speak to their clients. They have a one-day university and they loved our framework. They loved our book. Their financial advisors work with clients all the time to make big money and love decisions, and so they reached out to us and I got to know the firm through that process and loved that. They took a very values-oriented approach to thinking about your financial life.
Abby Davisson:I'm very different from some of the other approaches that I had heard. I've been on a lot of financial podcasts and sometimes they're much more straightforward, and so we started working with them and doing a bit more deep dives into our financial needs, wants and wishes. We've crafted our family's financial mission statement All of the things that I think have been really clarifying for us, as we've already made the leap to get off of one conventional way of working. That itself leads to a lot of other decisions about why are you committed to making more money than you absolutely need? What is the reason behind that? What are the motivations? What do you really care about spending money on? What are you willing to trade off? And so we've done a much deeper dive into all of that introspection than we had even earlier in our relationship and in our lives. And so we've done a much deeper dive into all of that introspection than we had, you know, even earlier in our relationship and in our lives, and that's been tremendously helpful as well.
Klara:I love that and it seems like the dots continue to connect for you because you really seem to live and breathe, even through, as you shared, the MyRisk class, obviously writing the book but now applying even the lessons that both you and your husband have taken from how you manage your finances and reflect on what's most important and helping other financial institutions understand the framework and empower them to guide others through that decision. It seems like that could be a completely different, just a venture path, abby, like that's an aspect of your business that could apply to like a whole section of financial industry and teaching how to help others through making the big life decisions.
Abby Davisson:Yeah, well, I think it's been great to hear you know, see the framework resonate. The other place where the framework has really resonated is with career coaches, particularly folks who work with, as you mentioned. Maybe the coach that really resonated is with career coaches, particularly folks who work with, as you mentioned, maybe the coach that you've worked with high achievers, people who have graduated from prestigious business schools and other institutions, have gotten on a path and have just continued to climb higher and higher and then, at some point, you know, look around and say, wait, do I want to keep climbing this ladder? Is this, you know, the path I want to be on?
Abby Davisson:There are other things I want in my life that are not necessarily in my life right now, and how do I realign my career with some of those things outside of my career that I might've been ignoring, whether it's my health or my relationships or something else, and so doing more work, both with my own coaching and to share the framework and the tools with those who coach others? Because I think, to your point, there are a lot of frameworks out there, but it's such an individual approach to make a decision and no one framework is going to resonate perfectly with everyone. I think what we've heard about our framework is that it's really helpful for couples and so much of the coaching world it's. You know you have one client right unless it's a therapist, and so the tools and exercises have, it sounds like, been very useful for folks who are making career decisions in the context of a long-term relationship relationship, because two people are very affected by even one person's career decision in that case.
Klara:Yeah, and that also seems to me I mean my hypothesis on this whole COVID and people now being stuck at home, and the pandemic obviously creates fears. I think people reevaluate the importance of health and make them more realize the finite that we have, because maybe things may have happened to their friends or family who were impacted by this, and so this whole mental crisis, I think is one because we're locked in the houses and so when we get constrained between walls, I think we humans don't like to still be put in boxes that we don't know what to do with. So that's for sure one. But I think, again, it made people re-evaluate a little bit more of what's important and what they want to create next. So it seems like the timing is quite impeccable. Did you time it that way?
Abby Davisson:I mean no, we did not orchestrate that pickable. Did you time it that way? I mean no, we did not orchestrate that. My co-author taught her class for almost 50 years at Stanford and then she retired and then we started working on this and then, yeah, it did come out at a time where people were reevaluating all their big priorities. Maybe they had a grueling commute that they no longer had to take and then when that commute came back even a couple of days a week it felt like, oh, maybe this is not what I want to return to, or maybe I got to take a moment to think without being on, you know, planes traveling all the time, and that moment to think is causing me to reevaluate things.
Abby Davisson:So I think you're right, and I certainly know the importance of you know.
Abby Davisson:I think that health is wealth, and when you have a moment where you don't have health or someone that you love loses you know some of their abilities or health, it is very stark and it's a big reminder to rearrange your priorities.
Abby Davisson:And so that's also a reason that I made the shift, that, when I did, I really believe that your body is going to talk to you louder and louder if something's not in alignment until you listen, and so I've had minor experiences with that. I ended up getting shingles before I was 40 because there were things that I could not address with yoga, and you know the occasional massage alone, right Like there is accumulation of stress that you know you need to start to address head on if you really want to change things. And so I feel like I've been on this own personal journey and I know lots of others to your point who have been on that at this time, so we did not time it that way. But I'm really glad that our book is a resource for people right now who are making some of those big decisions about realigning their lives.
Klara:Yeah, maybe I need to go back and write down my list of priorities. Abby, I could talk to you for hours. I think this is a super interesting topic, but I know you treasure your time. I know we're already over, but maybe last few questions. Closing the world seems to be in turmoil. Hopefully we can get things under control even with the wars and the economy stabilizing, but there's lots going on in the world.
Abby Davisson:What would you want to inspire people to be doing more of or less of.
Abby Davisson:I mean, I think that that list of what's important to you is so critical, just to know right, because it's so often we get on autopilot.
Abby Davisson:There are times in your life where you have to just put one foot in front of the other.
Abby Davisson:I've certainly been in those times when all you can do is get out of bed and do what you need to do and like drag yourself in bed at the end of the day, not to say that there's not moments where you have to put your head down and do that, but especially when there's so much turmoil in the world, I think we owe it to ourselves to be crystal clear on the values that are important to us and to be taking action to get closer to those values.
Abby Davisson:And I especially feel the weight of that now as a parent to help my kids identify their values, to make sure that some of our values actually get passed on to them, and so we've started to do more in our own communities to show our kids that it's not enough to just show up and pay taxes, that you have to actually take steps to help the world become the kind of place you want to live in. So I think that, in order to do that for anyone else, you first have to get clear on what world is the kind of place you want to live in, and then think about what can you do to help shift that Love it.
Klara:And so, last but not least, people who want to contact you or follow you. What's the best way to reach you?
Abby Davisson:I have a newsletter that I write regularly on Substack it's called Practically Deliberate, and so that's a way for people to read more of my writing and new insights, and then I generally share tidbits of that on LinkedIn, as well as other things that I'm up to. So following me at Abby Davison on LinkedIn is another great place to stay connected.
Klara:I'll add those two links as well as the link to the book. Is there a specific website you prefer for the book to be purchased, or ideal place?
Abby Davisson:I love independent bookstores so I'm always a fan of trying to find it there. If you go to our book website, which is moneylovebookcom, there is a list of bookstores, including one that will allow me to personalize it at my local bookstore, so you can list that link and people can buy the book where they like to buy books. Excellent, thank you so much again for the book where they like to buy books.
Klara:Excellent. Thank you so much again for the conversation. This has been super fun. Thank you for your time. Likewise If you enjoyed this episode.
Klara:I want to ask you to please do two things that would help me greatly. One, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, spotify or any other podcasting platform that you use to listen to this episode Spotify or any other podcasting platform that you use to listen to this episode. Two, please share this podcast with a friend who you believe might enjoy it as well. It is a great way to remind someone you care about them by sharing a conversation they might be interested in. Thank you for listening.