How can we break free from the traditional job-centric identity? And how can we redefine ourselves beyond our professional roles?
Christina Wallace is a true trailblazer in the world of career and life design. She’s a Harvard senior lecturer and the author of The Portfolio Life: How to Future-Proof Your Career, Avoid Burnout, and Build a Life Bigger than Your Business Card.
In this conversation, we got into the nitty-gritty of how diversifying your skills and experiences can give you a unique edge in navigating your career. Christina revealed how taking solo trips helped her find comfort in her own skin, separate from her achievements and what she could offer others.
The Power of Saying Yes
Plus, we talked about the power of saying “yes” to unexpected opportunities, drawing from Christina’s own life-changing experience of jetting off to a new country with someone she had just met. The impact of that bold move? It’s been nothing short of transformative for her as an entrepreneur, parent, and creative soul.
Throughout our conversation, Christina dropped some serious wisdom about embracing a portfolio life. She shared practical steps for seeing yourself beyond your job, designing a business model for your life, and crafting a portfolio life that defies the conventional notion of “work-life balance.”
Find Your Personal Venn Diagram
So, if you’re ready to future-proof your career and build a life that’s as diverse, dynamic, and meaningful as you are, this episode is your roadmap. Join me and Christina as we challenge the status quo and inspire you to create a life that transcends your business card. We’ll show you how to turn the “F-word” (Failure) into a powerful tool for success, find your personal Venn diagram, and build your very own “Board of Directors” to guide you on your unique journey.
Here are Christina’s key takeaways:
- Identity Beyond Career: Does your worth go beyond your job? Learn how defining yourself outside professional roles can unlock your full potential and purpose.
- Diverse Skills Pay Off: How Christina’s experience in diverse fields enriches her unique perspective, enhances career opportunities and adaptability.
- Embrace the Unexpected: Why welcoming spontaneous choices can lead to profound personal and professional growth, broadening horizons and sparking innovation.
- Craft a Portfolio Life: Rethink work-life balance; design a dynamic, meaningful life aligned with passions and interests, fostering fulfillment and resilience.
- Personal “Board of Directors”: Develop a support network. Cultivate personal mentors for diverse life aspects to navigate your journey effectively and achieve holistic success.
Listen to Christina’s episode
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Links
- Learn more about Christina Wallace
- Read The Portfolio Life by Christina Wallace
- Interested in saying “yes” to adventure and leaning in to the unexpected? Check out my conversation with Shelby Stanger
- Sign up for my weekly newsletter!
Episode Chapters
- Navigating multiple identities and careers. 0:00
- Separating self-worth from achievements and finding identity. 4:13
- Finding courage and managing expectations for a fulfilling life. 11:15
- Prioritizing life goals and passions while balancing parenthood and personal growth. 15:25
- Prioritizing life goals and work-life balance. 21:01
- Finding agency in a rapidly changing world. 28:09
- Prioritizing commitments and saying no to balance life. 30:26
- Managing work and life with a focus on planning and diversification. 35:29
- Career diversity and associative thinking. 38:36
- Personal branding, expertise, and capacity. 43:45
- Time management and capacity during different stages of life. 49:23
- Prioritizing self-care and setting boundaries. 52:19
- Solo travel, entrepreneurship, and personal growth. 57:12
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Transcript
Sonya Looney 0:00
Christina, I’m so excited to have you on the show. Because whenever I read your book, I was like, this woman is able to describe my life.
Christina Wallace 0:12
I love hearing that. That’s, that’s always reassuring. Yeah, I think many of us can identify with doing a lot of different things in our lives and not knowing how to describe ourselves. When somebody comes up to you and ask you, what do you do for work? I know that for me, I kind of freeze when people ask me that because I do so many different things that I don’t even know what to lead with. So like, what advice do you have for people who do lots of different things when somebody asked them that question? Well, number one, have an answer prepared in advance, right? You know, this is something you’re going to get asked. So sit down and put a little thought into it. Rather than wait for that moment to be frozen. I faced this too. And, and that’s where I really came up with this idea of calling myself a human Venn diagram. Everyone seems to laugh when they hear it and but they immediately understand what I mean by it, right? It’s like, Oh, you do you do many things. They intersect in interesting ways. Like, okay, I got that. So it gives you that, that sense of my interdisciplinary that intentionality in doing that. And, you know, sometimes I’ll throw in there, my my Venn diagram, it has, you know, the arts technology business, so I’m giving you some of the fields that I work in. But I’m not telling you, my job titles for my resume, I’m not talking you through all of the bullet points, because depending on what you’re interested in, we could go out a very different path in that conversation. So I’m giving you just enough to understand my vibe, where I play, and and allow you to ask some follow up questions. And then we can take the conversation from there. And that would be my advice to anyone who, who lives in this multiplicity of lives. This is a bit of an off to Off topic question. But I was at this international Positive Psychology Association, World Congress a couple of weeks ago, and a bit about me, I’m a professional mountain biker, I have my master’s degree in electrical engineering. I’ve been national sales and marketing manager, I write like, I do lots of things, right. So I’m at this conference, and, and people ask me like, Well, what do you do? And I also coach, so I would think like, well, what well, what do I really lead with here? Do I lead with the coaching? Do I lead with a professional athlete. And it’s interesting, because people get impressed, impressed by what you do. And I don’t like leading with the things that are impressive, because I don’t want it to be about that. I want it to be about this identity piece. So if you don’t want to talk about necessarily your accolades, but you want people to give you time of day, because I noticed that if I experimented with different leading with different things like Oh, I’m a podcaster, or I’m a coach, and people would light up. Only whenever I told them something that they found impressive, which is usually like the athlete side of things. So for building connection with people, you know, how do you say what you do or who you are? But have them not over index on the accomplishment part? This one is tricky, right? Because, you know, and I don’t blame people, they’re, they’re looking for an easy way to evaluate, is this person worth an hour of my time or five more minutes of my time, right there? They’re looking for that quick signal of what they should, you know, invest in you. And, and it’s because they’re constantly meeting new people, right? It’s not because we’re shallow, it’s because we have to have some sort of signal to separate out from the noise. And so there’s, there’s always this tension, I have often found that what I lead with the part of me that is different from the room that I’m in, that it often will spark this. Oh, okay. There’s something very different going on here. And let’s have a conversation. Now, that different thing might be impressive. I worked at the Metropolitan Opera, well, I recognize that that’s impressive. Or that different thing might just be your room of artists, and I’m going to talk about the fact that I have a math major and you’re like, Okay, I don’t, I don’t entirely understand that. But like, Tell me more. Even though I also am an artist, I also am a theatre person and a musician, I could lead with what makes me the same. I find that leading with what makes me different in that Venn diagram, often at least will give them that signal. Okay, if I want to know more, and it’s not about impressing them, it’s just literally earning the right to have a conversation that follow up. So if you think the pro athlete piece is the piece that gets them to stop in their tracks and say, okay, so what are you doing here, then lead with that? It doesn’t mean that that’s the only part of you that’s interesting. It’s just the part that stands out. And standing out is what allows you to have their focus for a period of time, I think go with that.
Sonya Looney 5:01
I think that’s great advice, because I think a lot of us will try and look for similarities in people that we’re meeting to try to be like, Hey, I’m like you. But that doesn’t always make you stand out in a way that makes someone want to engage with you more.
Christina Wallace 5:14
And it also, obviously, is going to be based on context. If you’re at a conference where everyone probably has similar interests, I would absolutely lead with what’s different about you, because they’ve just met 100, potential coaches, or podcasters, or whatnot. But if you’re in a space where you might not fit in very well, and you’re trying to signal to them, no, I belong here, then maybe you lead with what makes you the same, right. So if I’m showing up to a Broadway networking situation, and I am a you know, find a job, I’m a professor of business, I’m probably going to lead with, I recently invested in a Tony winning musical of you know, production of parade, because that’s going to give them a okay, you do belong here, you’re not someone who like wandered in to try to find the bathrooms. But then I’m quickly going to follow up with but my day job is teaching entrepreneurship. And usually I invest in tech startups. Because then again, it gives you the what makes me different.
Sonya Looney 6:19
So something that we hear about a lot. And something I think about is your worth, your self worth is separate from your work. It’s separate from your achievements. And that can be very hard to decouple, especially with what we just talked about how people are actually extra interested in you because of this work that you do, or these achievements. So how do you work on separating those things?
Christina Wallace 6:40
That was tough. I mean, I would start with a lot of therapy. I’m totally serious. I, I’ve had years of therapy, and a fair amount of journaling and self reflection. You know, one of the reasons I started traveling by myself in my 20s, to be honest, was to learn to sit still in the silence of my own head of my own thoughts. And in doing that, really faced for the first time that I did not see my value separate from what I could do. Whether that was achievements or what I could do for other people. I thought, you know, if I’m out here not doing anything, I’m just traveling, I’m not contributing in any way. Like, what am I? And why would anyone want to meet me? And why would you want to be my friend and all of that, right? It’s sort of absent that box of achievement I really had to face okay, well, who am I separate from that. And it gave me a lot of opportunities to realize I’m resilient. When I go out and travel by myself without an itinerary without plans. And I figured out on the go, I’m funny, I can make friends, I can crack jokes and be you know, not just like the clown, but I can find the humor in situations. I am a good friend, like I show up for people, right, and you start to see these characteristics of who you are, that have nothing to do with your grades, or your work or your salary. And I think it’s nice to remind yourself that you’re a person who has a lot of value in the world, and only a piece of it is related to what you can do for money.
Sonya Looney 8:24
Yeah, I mean, it really sounds like identifying with your strengths, like you’re talking about resilience, and your humor, and your connection. And also what your values are, is what underlies all the things that you do,
Christina Wallace 8:35
for sure. And some people are really in touch with those things. And some of us kind of make it all the way through the rat race of school and college and don’t really have to sit and think about it. Until the moment where you say, I don’t think I’m living the life I want to be living. And how do I fix that? Well, it starts with figuring out what what do you want? Who are you? What do you care about? What do you value? And what do you want?
Sonya Looney 8:59
Yeah, I think this is a good segue into the four pillars and your button. Can you elaborate on those?
Christina Wallace 9:04
Sure. So these four pillars, basically, you know, prop up what I call the portfolio life, the title of the book, and it starts with identity. Because a lot of the limitations I have here, when I’m coaching folks, when I’m talking with friends about you know what, what you see yourself capable of doing starts from how you see yourself, right, that this is not so much a limitation of other people will give you the chance to try something new, is that you have told yourself, Oh, that’s not who I am. And we see this so clearly, in you know, people who grew up being told, Oh, you’re not a math person. Oh, you’re not creative. You’re not athletic. I was told you’re not athletic. And so I was just I believed it for years. I believed it until finally as an adult, I thought, Well, why don’t I try and let’s see if I’m not. Right. And so A lot of this starts with the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Who are you? How do you show up in the world? And what are you granting yourself permission to do as a result of that identity? And separating that identity from your job is this first step? Second, we get into diversification. Hold on, let me pause there, I think the second is optionality, it is. Second, we get into optionality. And this is a result of really understanding that identity piece, there is a credible illustration that I was able to reproduce in the book, created by Tim urban, he’s the blogs and posts on the internet under way, but why, and it’s this kind of meandering chart of paths that your life could take, right and, and I think he points out that many of us look backward, and say, Oh, I could have been anything, I could have been an astronaut, I could have been an NBA basketball player, but I made choices, I closed doors. And now I am what I am. And all I have is, you know, the straight line ahead of me. And what I love about this drawing is he shows you have just as many doors ahead of you as you had behind you. But you have to see them, you have to be aware that you can make different choices. So recognizing that as a result of you are many things, that means you can do many things. And that opens up the possibilities of what you even consider for your life. And I don’t just mean from a work point of view. I mean, from hobbies, and relationships, and communities, all of the pieces that make up your life, you have a lot of options, which becomes super helpful as we get to pillar three, which is diversification. The only way to future proof in a world that is constantly being disrupted, as we are faced with right now is to diversify. We do this with our financial portfolio all the time, we understand you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. And we’re taught with our finances is you not only diversify, you build out that allocation, according to the risk and reward that you’re looking for for that period of your life. When you’re younger, you can put more risk, you have more stocks and less cash, when you’re older, you might want to rebalance that to be a little bit less risky. And this is true with your life as well, that when you diversify across income streams, networks, skill sets, industries, it gives you that flexibility, which is the last pillar to to be able to pivot when the industry changes when the world changes when you change when what you need changes. So think about that from diversification. And then the last pillar with flexibility recognizes that we are going to go through chapters of our lives, we’re going through seasons, we’re we’re going to change, we’re going to change what we need, what we want, our priorities will shift. And you can and should rebalance your life to reflect that rather than say, Well, this is what I always said I wanted. Okay, but do you still want it? Are you in a place where those priorities still align? Or do you want to shake them up a little bit? It’s not being flaky. It’s growing and acknowledging the change that’s going on inside of you as much as planning for the change that’s going on outside of you?
Sonya Looney 13:31
Yeah, there’s a couple things that I think about whenever I hear you talk about some of these things. And I mean, this is basically the roadmap of my life. So I’ve lived all of this myself, so I can truly relate with the things that you’re saying. But I think about questions people have asked me, you know, like, how do you have the courage to go after the thing that you want? How do you have the courage to say, well, now I’m a math person, or now I’m a runner? How do you have the courage to pivot and go against what maybe somebody’s expectations were of you like an example is give your master’s degree in Electrical, electrical engineering, and you’re trying to be a pro mountain biker like it, that’s never gonna work. And you have this like, career that you could go after. But you’re, you’re doing this this weird hobby thing that you hope works out? Like, there’s expectations and judgment from others. So I guess the first question is, how do you find the courage? And the second question is, how do you manage expectations of others?
Christina Wallace 14:20
Yeah, I think from courage point of view, I think one of the things I mean, maybe related to both one of the things that I was, now I can say, Blessed with I would not have said that was as a kid growing up. My childhood, I didn’t have a lot of friends, I was a little bit of a loner, I was in a very small community, a very kind of tightly knit religious community that I didn’t really fit into. And as a result, I, I literally didn’t have friends until I was like 16. And then when I did start building friends, I was still a weirdo for a very long time. I mean, maybe I still am. And so as a result, the the notion of like getting people was approval, a fitting in to an expectation has been lacking for my entire life. Like that was never something that I could achieve. So I didn’t even try to. But I look back at, you know, some of the people I work with and they say, Well, you know, I, I do fit in I have followed the path, I did the things that were expected of me, I got the Econ degree and then went to Goldman Sachs. And now I have the MBA. And it turns out, I don’t want to know this. And so it starts with deciding, I think, and I would guess that you went through this exact same calculation, it starts the deciding will do I want it enough to make a change to take a risk to maybe let people down in their expectations. Do I want it enough to try? Or am I willing to keep going on this path? Because the costs of trying and maybe failing seems so high. And I’m willing to go to the end of my life not knowing if I could have done this? Right? Like, it sounds a little bit dramatic, to like, bring up the end of your life. But I think that’s a big part of this. Like you get one life yellow, reclaiming yellow, you get one life. What do you want for it? Not what your parents want, or your partner wants? Or your college friends? What are your LinkedIn followers want? What do you want? And if you want to go be a pro mountain biker, go do it. Man. If the whole thing fails, you still have that degree, you can always come back to and spin some story about a sabbatical.
Sonya Looney 16:36
Yeah, and, you know, you’ve talked about shuffling your portfolio as things in your life change. We both have toddlers. So you know, the way that you approach your work. Sounds like from other podcasts I listen to you on, you know, you’re traveling less, I’m traveling less. How do you shuffle that portfolio, but still stay fulfilled in your life? Because it can be really easy to look back at the things you were doing and say, Wow, that was so exciting. That was so cool. Or I used to be this person and be comparing yourself to a previous version of yourself.
Christina Wallace 17:09
It’s so true. The previous version of myself is the comparison I I faced the most I don’t like I don’t have a problem on Instagram of looking at my friends lies I’m like, That’s awesome for you. Yeah, I have a problem looking back on my own Instagram and being like all remember then? No, I think a big part of it is remembering that this is just a chapter. This is not the new normal. I think many of us as we went through the pandemic we’re always faced with, like, Is this the new normal. It’s not a new normal that I am grounded from international travel with me my passport and a backpack. It’s not, it is this chapter while my kids are in diapers, and requires 72 suitcases in order for us to go anywhere. It is for now, this is the truth. But this will end like there will be another chapter. And I don’t mean when I retire and my kids aren’t in the house. I mean, when they’re old enough to stay with the grandparents for a week and I hop on a plane to Japan at the last second, right? Like it will happen again. In the same way that I don’t have time right now to to make music in a formal way. I don’t have time to sing in a choir. I’m not part of an ensemble for literally the first time in my entire life since I started studying music at age four. And
Sonya Looney 18:25
sorry, I know I have to monitor up sorry. What’s that? What’s that like for you to not because that I mean, the sound and being a part of something like that you’re like a collective, you’re one voice in a collective like, how’s that?
Christina Wallace 18:36
It is? It is hard. I mean, I think singing choral singing for me has always been like as spiritual as like metaphysical as it has been a creative, right? I mean, there are all these studies that say like your your heartbeat, like syncs with all of the other people around you in this communal experience when you’re singing and I certainly missed that. I do feel that void. I don’t want to discount that. The flip side is I’m looking for every possible opportunity to make music One of the big upshots of moving to Boston After 12 years in New York is I have a car, which means I can sing in the car. Can’t do that on the subway without getting a dirty look. So I sing all the time. And if it’s my like three audition show tunes, that’s what it is. If it’s Elmo, I mean for Pete’s sake, It’s Elmo. Miss Rachel songs are very catchy by the way. If you haven’t discovered Miss Rachel, her husband is a Broadway or was a Broadway conductor and orchestrator and so they’re very catchy songs. But I I know that it is a top priority for me. When I reemerge from this in a year or two, that I will be joining a choir again, I know as I think through sort of triaging how I spend my time. I realized very early on into this parenthood journey that still Sleep. And my health, what was the number one thing I had to prioritize that in my former life, I could cut back on sleep, I could cut back on eating healthy and exercising, and make space for all these other things I wanted to achieve. And when it all added up, and I was flat on my back for a week, it’s fine, you recover, I don’t have that luxury. Now, with kids, I have to stay healthy. I say to this after a week of stomach flu with my family. So I have to prioritize sleep and my health first, my work. Second. And third is going to be all the fun things that I love the book deals and the singing and the traveling and the best friends who live in other states. And I’m just constantly assessing when and how can I find small bits to bring that back? And when do I think this chapter might end and move into a place where I can bring them back in more meaningful ways?
Sonya Looney 21:01
Yeah, it sounds like the perspective taking and the big picture thinking is really key to all of this. Like you mentioned the mental time travel of when you’re on your deathbed, what are what are the things that you wish you would have done? What is the life that you wish you would have led? And then also whenever you’re in a quote chapter of something where maybe your life looks different than it used to realizing that this chapter isn’t going to be permanent? And then how can you make the most of it? You know, even if that means singing almost songs in the car, which I have to say, in my bike races. I love singing out loud to myself while I’m racing. And wow, some of those songs have been children’s songs, which I don’t know. Yeah, I was going through this tunnel. And like it was it was like an actual tunnel. And there was people up in front of me and behind me, but they’re out of the tunnel. And I just started singing Fie, fie, foe fum. started laughing and people probably thought I was out of my mind. So fun. But I think people forget about the fun. They’re like, I’m in it. Yeah, this isn’t the way it used to be. And they lose that that piece of it.
Christina Wallace 22:01
Yeah, well, and there’s also the joy. I mean, I just took my kids to Scotland, my brother in law lives there with his girlfriend. And it was our first big international trip with two kids. And I was, you know, of course, freaking out of like, all the crap we have to bring with us, and how am I going to get them to adjust to the time zones and, and all of that I had so many things I was worried about. And they were fantastic travelers, they they were pros, they like slept on the plane on the way there. I mean, the flight home was a disaster. I don’t want to talk about it. But the flight there was great. And, and they were excited. And it was fun to see the world through their eyes. I mean, they’re like three and one, they’re not going to even remember it. But seeing them ask the questions and learn about a world that is very similar to ours, and yet very different. It was fun and, and imagining how I’m going to instill in them the love of travel, and the grittiness of like, throw it all in a backpack. And let’s see how many weeks we can go on the road, right? Like I get, I get that ahead of me, even if I have to slow down on my actual, you know, piece of that. That exploration right now?
Sonya Looney 23:08
Yeah, yeah, it’s funny, my kids are one in three as well. So something I wanted to ask you about you said, you know, what your priorities are you taking care of yourself is of utmost priority, because you can’t do anything else. Number two was work. And number three was all the other fun things. And when I’m envisioning a Venn diagram, a lot of people envision circles that are all the same size. But sometimes, you know, people’s, quote, balance or ability to prioritize one circle is massive. And it’s usually the work circle, and the self circle, and maybe the fun circle are miniscule. So how can how can people be aware that their work bubble is blowing up way too big, and you can’t even see the other little tiny bubbles in the Venn diagram? Yeah.
Christina Wallace 23:53
For this, I like to think about a pie chart. Because the nice thing about a pie chart is it has to add up to 100%. There’s no such thing as 110% in a pie chart, you only get as much pie as you have. So I imagined a pie chart. And for this, I literally did, at one point, a life audit where I went through my calendar, I live and die by my calendar. So if you can go and add up the time blocks, and it’ll tell you exactly how I spent my time. And I literally, I added it up over the course of a couple of weeks, and I bucketed it into the different categories. And I drew it out as a pie chart. And what I thought was really interesting was in that particular case, this this is before I had kids, the first time I did it, the the percentages of of these buckets, my work my primary job, and some of my other kind of commitments were far greater than I thought they would be. And they were far greater than what I said was my priority at that time. And so it was that first realization that what I said I want and how I was spending my time were not lining up. And then I had to think through okay, is this by x Didn’t is this like just a default that I have been following an old pattern? Or am I actively choosing something that I say I don’t want? And if I’m choosing it, is it because I don’t actually want what I say I want? You know, there are many people that say like, I want to be a health nut and you’re like, Yeah, but I see six Snickers wrappers on the floor of your car, like, do you want to? Or do you want to want to? And in reality, that’s not a priority for you. So So is it that I don’t want it? Or is it that I do want it but I’m not disciplined enough to choose, you know, where I’m going there. So there’s a little bit of like a, a teasing out through through the, I don’t know, the, the tree of of what the root cause is here, to really get to the bottom of it. But once you figure that out, then there’s the ability to say, Okay, well, how do I want to spend my time now let’s design from the bottom up. And I think about this, you know, a lot like like Marie Kondo showing your your house when you’ve got too much clutter. If you bring all like items together, that’s the moment when you realize you have 71, I was in Tupperware bottoms and two lids, and you’re like, it doesn’t do me any good to have all the bottoms if they only have two lids, so we’re going to clean them out. So bringing all the things together, why all of the one off coffee chats that I was doing, I was like, I’m giving away a lot of my time. And I’m not seeing any actual return on that, like, I never hear from these people. Again, I don’t know if my advice was worthwhile. Maybe that’s not how I want to be spending hours and hours of my time. At the time I did this the first time, I was really miserable in my job. And I was taking on all of these extra things. I was doing a master’s in computer science. And I was I joined the board of these two nonprofits, and I was singing this choir and I was traveling, I was doing all of these things, in large part because I hated my job. And I felt stupid, and I wasn’t loving it. And I didn’t feel like my best self. And so I added a bunch of stuff, where I could feel like myself, rather than fix the situation where I didn’t feel like myself. And because I kept adding, I was at the point of burnout, which I think a lot of people are you’re burning out because you’re trying to, to make up for it. These are band aids, when in reality, I needed to make a bigger shift of let’s just change the day job. And then I realized that a lot of these extra things I don’t need to be doing right now. Because I’m fulfilled and I’m happy. So it’s a long answer. But I think you start with a pie chart, and you can start to to actually see the proportions of how much time you give work, how much time you give your family how much time you give yourself. And you can say, you know, hopefully with some amount of honesty, like, I deserve a lot more time than I’m giving myself. So something’s gotta give, which bucket am I going to take it from, because it still has to add up to 100.
Sonya Looney 28:09
Thanks for sharing that story. I think that a lot of people might have had an epiphany when you were talking about adding more things on as a band aid. And I think that a sense of agency is something that is underlying all of this, we talked about having the courage to maybe shift what you’re doing, having the courage to say I say I say that I want this thing. But maybe I don’t, but I have the power to make these changes in my life. But I have to be the one that does that.
Christina Wallace 28:35
mean, I think that’s what many of us are, are feeling a loss for in a world that is changing this fast. When we’re constantly facing whether it’s technological disruption or ecological changes, or kind of all of the moving pieces of capitalism, there can feel like a loss of agency. And when you don’t feel like you’re in control of your life. You know, people react in different ways, depending on your own makeup psychologically, but that lack of agency is going to make you seek it elsewhere, and sometimes not in the most productive ways. So understanding the root cause, and then choosing to address that rather than seek the band aid is ultimately going to be the most sustainable, certainly, and I would argue the most fulfilling.
Sonya Looney 29:26
There’s this book that I read and I had the author on my podcast, it’s called subtract by Lady Klotz. Have you heard of that book?
Christina Wallace 29:32
I’ve heard of it. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet. But I’m going to add it to my list now that you’ve brought up.
Sonya Looney 29:36
Yeah, it really it’s a lot about what you’re just talking about. It’s like you’re doing all these things and these coffee chats Well, I’m gonna start subtracting things out of my calendar instead of adding them in. And that’s not what our natural tendency is to do. And in the book lady talks about how when somebody was making you know, a sculpture, they didn’t think what can I add to this chunk of rock? What can I take away from this chunk of rock to make it into a masterpiece? The same Know can be really scary, because now you’re missing, you’re potentially missing out on opportunity. And people just say yes, because they think there’s this scarcity, that there’s never going to be another opportunity like that. And I’ve fallen into that category before. So thinking about saying no, and actually saying no, our hearts like how do you prioritize subtraction? Like what to subtract? And a follow up question to that is, this is kind of a personal question. But like, I love all the different things in there. There’s nothing in there that’s draining me. But there’s just too many things, because I love them all. So if you have so much passion, and you want to do them all, but you can’t, you have to put something like how do you know what to
Christina Wallace 30:38
come? Man that I live with that day in and day out, you’re like, I love all the things I’m choosing to do. And it’s still too many things. So, you know, you start with the things that you love, I think, go back to, again, this this notion of chapters or seasons, or I, as a professor, I still live on an academic calendar, which I think is always been a model that my brain loves this idea of like, well, what am I choosing for this semester, I get four classes, maybe five? What is the mix for this semester semesters, four months long, you get three of them a year, as you are thinking through all the things you love to do. Maybe there’s seasons of your year where you have biking, and there’s the offseason. And during the offseason, you can add in this other thing you wanted to try for the first time, but you’re not going to do that when you’re in the middle of your, like intense racing period. Or you might choose, I want to go in and you know, have some travel that, you know, people I haven’t seen in a while I want to go off and do these trips. Well, where do they? Where do they fit in your year? And how can you intentionally design around those? You know, it’s almost like putting together a Gantt chart. I mean, I know that’s the nerdiest thing I could possibly say. But, but I literally do this, I plot it out, and how do these different commitments stack up? Because what you’ll see, and certainly what I saw is like not everything is all on all the time. Sometimes it’s like a week here a weekend there a week there, sometimes it’s 12 weeks, and then it’s off. Sometimes it’s gonna be a weekly thing for an hour. But if your soccer team makes it to the club playoffs, then you’ve got three weeks at the end where it’s going to be all hands on deck. So so actually visualize what those commitments look like and how they stack you can think of it as like Tetris, even how can you stack them? So they’re not piled up so high? They trigger you know, the game to be over? How can they fit in a little bit better? I forgot your first question. Oh, saying no. So saying no. One of the greatest gifts I’ve ever had from, there’s a network of women that I’m part of called the list where it’s mostly just like a Google listserv. It’s all over email. But part of it is you get to basically overhear each other’s advice to each other. So like you get this multi generational learning curve. And one of the best people pieces of advice I ever heard there was no one no one really needs to know or certainly cares about your reason for no, like, you don’t have to go into the seven paragraphs about why you’re saying no, you can simply say, that doesn’t work for my schedule. Thank you so much for thinking of me. Send Email, like send email, right? You don’t have to defend it. And if someone gets mad about that, well, they were feeling entitled to your time and like, maybe that’s not someone who should be entitled to your time. Most people won’t care. They’ll say, Okay, thanks. And at best, if you want to, you can always suggest someone else. That doesn’t work for me. Here’s a colleague that I think would be amazing. Very few times, will you saying no turn into and I’m never going to ask her ever again. Right? Most people fear that. That’s what that means that scarcity mindset you brought up. But I think for many people, it’s like you were top of mind. You said no. Okay, moving on. It’s not like you’ve been stricken from my list that I’ll never go back to. So I think if you say no, repeatedly to the same opportunities over and over again, you’ll probably get taken off of the list at some point. But any individual know is not grounds for you know, disaster. And I think if over time you say well, this is not a priority for me right now. I have a friend who has been a public speaker for a big chunk of her career, and now she’s moving away from that she doesn’t want to travel. She’s thinking more about board seats. And so she has just said to her her contacts like I’m not really investing in speaking right now. Thank you for the opportunity. I will reach out if that changes, but for right now you can take me off your list because that’s not what I prioritize
Sonya Looney 35:00
Yeah, something that you were describing earlier, is what I call intentional imbalance. People say, how do you balance all these different things that you’re doing? And I say, Well, I actually make a chart and I try and say, well, for this amount of time I’m really focused on this is my top priority. And then I know it’s going to shift and I’m going to be focused on something else for this part of the year. So having that intentional imbalance, and like this is another theme I see coming out is like having advanced planning of how you’re planning to spend your time instead of just reactively. Trying to do everything.
Christina Wallace 35:31
Oh, god, yeah, advanced planning is the name of the game. Like I map out my calendar three to four weeks in advance. And it’s not rigid, everything can move. But I start from a place of how are all the pieces going to fit. And I block everything, everything, from walks and lunches, to meetings, to big deliverables, I block out working time, so that when other people look at my calendar, they don’t see it as free, they see a big open calendar, they think, Oh, I can have some of that time. I’m like, No, that time is spoken for. Just because I’m in deep thinking and writing work doesn’t mean but that’s not work. So that that is taken. And my husband does this too. And we do our family commitments, we we map those out, we have visibility into each other’s calendars, we invite each other to things even if it’s just an FYI, I’m working late, he’ll get an invitation to that, FYI, when we have babysitters, they get on the calendar, and we clarify which of us is going to be running point for picking them up from daycare and getting them to the babysitter like we manage our family in the same way we manage our work, which is just there’s a lot of moving pieces. And they gotta all have a place. And if they don’t have a place on your calendar, that’s when you know I’ve overcommitted so it’s a nice way to see beforehand where the crunch periods are going to happen, where the stressful moments are going to be. I had my husband was looking ahead to I think October or November and said, Oh, I was thinking of, you know, maybe popping down to New York and doing this quick little weekend thing. And I pulled up my calendar, and I was like I’m teaching three out of five days, the week before two days, the week after, and I’ve got a big workshop on that Saturday, that’s going to be really stressful. If I’m solo parenting that weekend, he’s like, great, won’t do it. Like thanks for that visibility. So having this all mapped out is really helpful. And then once it’s there, everything can move around, you just know it has to have a place.
Sonya Looney 37:36
So something that you mentioned earlier was diversification. And you said that doesn’t mean that you lack focus or commitment in something. And I think that the previous generation, like the baby boomers, they work the job, they work the same job for 40 years in the same company. And that’s just not how it is anymore. But there’s so like this lingering judgment around well, this person does multiple things, or, you know, they move around a lot, therefore, they are not reliable or they are not focused. So can you demystify that for us?
Christina Wallace 38:07
Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s a really hard mindset shift. The nice thing is, I think in the last 10 years, we are seeing much more acceptance for this way of work purely because of, you know, not that this is all about gig work. But I think the rise of the gig economy has made it clearer that there is a number of there are a number of different models for how you can piece together work. And it doesn’t all look like join a company go up the ladder, stay there for two years. So we’re seeing a lot more of that multiplicity of paths. And as a result, it makes any new path a little bit easier to accept. I think the the challenge around this diversification, again, is going to be the story you tell. And, and so the struggle is if you’re not going to go the typical path, you can’t use the typical tools to communicate your work, write the resume, the LinkedIn, it works, if you’ve had the obvious, I had this job, and then I got promoted, and then I switched companies, but I got promoted and then right and they’re all in the same industry, they’re all have the same function. If you don’t do that, like me, that tool isn’t going to help you. So you’re gonna have to be thoughtful about well, how am I going to communicate my work, whether that is a personal website, where I group together, Hey, I am an author, a professor, a speaker and an investor. And here on each of those different pages, here are all of my like, work in that category. And let me then explain to you how those different things connect, to make sort of the broader strategy for how I see my life. So it’s gonna require a different way of kind of explaining that. And it also requires you to tell the story to connect the dots for whoever you’re talking to. If you’ve made a big shift because of a sabbatical because you realize you want it to go down a different path you went from electrical engineering to pro mountain biking, right? You’re gonna want to explain why it wasn’t just you woke up one morning and changed your mind about who you were, you probably went through a process to recognize I want something different. And I want to take on a different challenge. So give them that story. But you can also show how the things you did before might connect to what you’re doing now. And the more unexpected, the better, because then they’re like, mind blown, you’re bringing a completely different perspective here I hadn’t thought about. So I often will point out how my theatre major informed the work I did as a tech entrepreneur, and why now my experience as a tech investor makes me a really interesting Broadway investor, right, that connect the dots in in a diagonal way. And you might see something that other people don’t. So it comes down to the work you have to do to make those connections. And hopefully, the shifting acceptance that those linear careers literally don’t exist, whether or not we want them. They don’t exist anymore. So even the last of the Gen X and baby boomers are going to have to get on board if they’re continuing to work in the next 10 years.
Sonya Looney 41:15
Something that I’ve heard you say before is the the strength of associative thinking. And that was so cool to hear. Because, like I do so many different things. And I noticed that because of that I have a perspective. And I noticed things in different areas that somebody who’s very, like someone who’s doing a PhD on one topic might not notice some of these other things over here that’s related. So can you talk more about associative thinking and its power?
Christina Wallace 41:40
Yeah, so it’s one of the backbone pieces of work that Clay Christensen, who was one of my mentors at HBS, he did research with colleagues on the innovators, DNA was what were the traits, the characteristics of people who created things that were new, how did they come to, to their work and what was consistent, and across the five elements that they found, the backbone of them was this associative thinking. And that’s the ability to take ideas, concepts, insights from one world and translate them into an unknown, a seemingly unconnected, unrelated world. And I love that permission to say a lot of creation, a lot of innovation is not about invention. It’s not about something new necessarily. It’s about adapting something that exists elsewhere into a new world. And I’ll give you a perfect example of this. I been talking about my investing in Broadway, one of the frustrations I’ve had in my last few investments was the analog kind of paperwork and the number of steps that we have to go through to fill out to be part of like, the special purpose vehicle that they do to produce a show. And I got on a call with one of the producers and I said, you know, in tech, I have this platform called AngelList, where any startup who wants to take a roll up of small checks of small investors, they say, Well, this is smaller than I normally would take. But if all of you bundle your money together into a bigger check, I can take that they go into they use this platform, and the platform does all of the paperwork and you log in, you send them the check, and they take care of the tax paperwork, the updates, they manage all the investors. So the startup sees one investor angel list, and the investors have all of their information in one cohesive place. And the Broadway producer goes, Huh. I had literally never even thought that that piece of our process was broken until this conversation because I’ve never worked anywhere, except in Broadway. And it’s just the perfect example. Like sometimes if you just know a better way elsewhere, you might find the opportunities by bringing that into a different context.
Sonya Looney 43:56
I think that’s confidence building, because I think a lot of people believe that they have these skill sets, but it’s not unique, or there really aren’t. It really isn’t very meaningful, because everybody knows that because you know that and that’s actually something my husband has really helped me see is because I just make assumptions that because this is really apparent to me that everybody knows it. But that’s not the case.
Christina Wallace 44:17
No, that’s so true. I’ve often joked that I’m not. I’m certainly not the best best mathematician, but I’m often the best mathematician in a roomful of artists. And I’m not the best artists. I’m not the best theater director by far, but I’m definitely the best theater director in a roomful of mathematicians. And so often what you bring that’s different. It’s the same as I took a workshop called the Op Ed. Writers Workshop, I think and it was something about trying to get more women and people of color to write op eds for newspapers most offensive written by white men and they wanted to shift that and they said sorry, I got a cough was like whoa, They said often, women and people of color, they’re, they’re worried about saying, I’m not an expert. I don’t want to write this because I’m not the expert. And he said, we define expertise, as do you know the most on this topic of the people in this room? So, in this room, what are you the expert on? And he made us go around and say what we’re the expert on. And that was just so empowering. For me, it sounds like you’re right. I am not the world expert on literally anything. But in a room full of mathematicians, I am the expert on how to stand on a stage tell a great story that people are not going to fall asleep to write like that, that is incredibly empowering.
Sonya Looney 45:42
Yeah, that’s exactly what Matt said to me. He said, if you know more, a lot more than everybody else around you, then you are the expert in that room and to be confident being the expert in that room. But I think we compare ourselves to the very best, you know, especially in achieving types like, well, if I’m not number one, and I don’t know anything.
Christina Wallace 46:00
Hmm. Number one, number one is busy, you just have to be the most useful. And I think, I think part of this is also a mindset shift to say, this isn’t about you showing off what you know, this is about you helping the people around you, right. And if you can see that shift, you realize I don’t need to be number one in this topic, to add value to the other people in this room, who might be able to learn something from my experience. So it’s not about like an ego thing or about showing off your expertise. It’s literally about helping people out. And I think that’s true as well. When you when you figure out like how to talk about who you are and what you do. I know a lot of folks are like, I don’t want to brag. I don’t want to like No, no, no, this is not about bragging. This is literally I am your friend, and I want to help you. But I don’t understand what you do. I don’t get it. There are too many moving pieces. I don’t I don’t know how to talk about it. I need you to give me the language. So that when I’m in the room with someone that I think you should meet, I know how to describe you properly and can make that introduction happen. You’re helping me you’re not bragging.
Sonya Looney 47:11
Yeah, there’s this sports psychologists that I really enjoy. He has a podcast called Finding mastery, and his name’s Michael Gervais. And a really big thing for him is about what is your philosophy? What is your personal philosophy? And that was helpful for me because that personal philosophy is what anchors all the other things that I do. So I realized, Oh, my personal one of my one of my philosophies, especially in my work is I like to explore the intersection of high performance and well being and then from everything else, like all the things that I do kind of fall underneath that umbrella. So for those listening, you know, if you’re like, Well, I do lots of things. So I don’t want to pick just one of the jobs that I do. Like, what’s the theme? Like? What’s a general theme that you are interested in exploring? And then people can want to know more from that?
Christina Wallace 47:53
That’s exactly it. And I think this is true, as you’re trying to figure out, like, where do I play? And also, what do you do, right, you can find the through line of I’m a storyteller, I’m a connector, I’m an investigator, I’m someone who challenges the status quo. Right? You can think through from a thematic perspective there. As much as thinking through as I do. I care about the intersection of business technology and the arts. And that means everything from what is the business of creativity to what is the creativity of business, right, like how these things play together, and inform each other. So I love that idea of like, find the thematic connection, because you, you are the connection of all the things you do. You are that connection. So why are you attracted to these different things? What is consistent from one thing to another, that makes it possible for you to be able to do it to be interested in doing it? If there’s a through line for you, there is a through line, you just got to find it.
Sonya Looney 48:54
Something else that I wanted to ask you about was the idea of capacity? Because seems like you know, not everybody has the same capacity to handle a lot of different things. And you have a very high capacity. I know that I have a very high capacity. And I just assume that everybody else does as well. But that’s not the case. So how can somebody number one, I kind of realized what their capacity is? And then do you think that that capacity is something that can be adapted and grown?
Christina Wallace 49:19
Absolutely. And it can also shrink, right? Again, we go back to seasons, right? I look at the capacity that I had before I had children. And I am astonished with how much time I had. And I see this again in these little moments where I might have like a day where I’m traveling for work and I wake up in the morning and I realized I can now get from bed out the door in about seven minutes. Because that is literally how much time I get to myself in the hour that I currently spend getting my kids up and dressed and out the door. I’m like, Oh, I used to have an hour for me. And I figured out how to bring it down to seven minutes. So see you real lies that people have different capacities at different stages of life, depending on their resources, depending on their commitments and the other things that the people that might rely on them. And you know, if you have I say this in the book, if you’ve got a housekeeper, you’ve got more capacity than someone who has to clean their own house, if you’re taking care of your parents, you have less capacity than someone who doesn’t have, you know, parental or elder care responsibilities. If you have a two hour commute each way, you’ve just eaten up part of your capacity in that transportation. That’s why so many people are frustrated by this like pressure to return to work, we’re like, you’re literally stealing capacity from me, in favor of what you know. So. So there’s part of it is the acknowledgement that not everyone has the same 24 hours that Beyonce does, we just don’t, and you are going to have different capacities for different seasons of your life. So right now, I have a much more limited capacity than I used to. And I know it’s not forever. But part of ensuring I don’t burn out is to be realistic, about how much time I do have. And that means literally going back to the timeout and looking at how many hours do I have available to be allocated, and doesn’t mean 24 hours, my sleep non negotiable. The time I spend picking my kids up going bedtime dinner, bath time, all of that non negotiable. Every once in a while, we’ll have a babysitter or I’ll travel for work. And I’m I’m trading that time in. But that is on an average day not available. So I realized out of my 24 hours, I have closer to maybe 12 total hours available. And that’s not just for work, that’s for work, for friends, for exercise, for commuting for showering, or right and like, that’s out of seven days, 12 hours, that’s 84 hours. That means I can’t have a job to expect me to work 70 to 80 hours a week, I just can’t. It’s not possible given my current capacity. And that was part of my realization. When I decided to become a professor for this stage of life where I have young kids, I was working 80 hours a week in startups before I had kids. And I was like, I can’t be the type of parent I want to be and be the type of human I want to be. And also be an early stage entrepreneur for this season. So I’m choosing a different primary commitment, because now my work is 40 hours a week, maybe 35 in the summer. And then it’s it’s literally slotting everything else back in, and the acknowledgement that I cannot allocate a full 100% of those hours. That’s not realistic for the way life works. I need downtime, I need buffers for things to go wrong. I need the ability to say yes, serendipitously to something amazing and not feel like I lost out on it. To do that I cannot schedule allocate more than 85% of those hours. And that includes and I say this, like 50 times because no one ever quite gets it the first 49 that includes the time that you’re allocating to yourself. That includes the naps and the bads. And the yoga and the whatever else you need. 85% including the time for yourself, and the buffer is on top of that.
Sonya Looney 53:24
Yeah, and I think a challenge with that is you have that 85%. But then people don’t hold the boundaries around that time. And the first thing that to go is well, I got behind on this. So I’m going to skip this yoga thing, or I’m going to skip this, this thing that takes care of me.
Christina Wallace 53:37
Yeah. And that’s why everything like that it goes on my calendar, and it has the same weight of line and coloring in as every other block. Right? It has significance because it’s earned a spot on my calendar, and I say I can move it, but I can’t delete it. Unless I’m really in crisis mode. And I do have those weeks. I do have crisis mode weeks where everything that has to get stripped out gets stripped out. But that is the exception. It’s not the first place I go to when I’m looking for extra time. And look, this is my like, this is my my true north my like perfect version of the world. This is the piece of the whole model that I still struggle with. I’m not going to pretend that I have it down pat. It is hard. It is hard because it is deprogramming how high achievers have been trained. You Yeah, it’s hard. It’s going against everything we’ve been taught which is like put yourself last and get everything done and do it to 100% effort. And like there is no room for for good enough. And you’ll still never feel like you’re enough no matter what and you’re Yeah, you’ll never be enough no matter what. Like getting getting comfortable with good enough has been one of my best hacks as a parent.
Sonya Looney 54:54
Yeah, yeah. Parenting is such a good like rapid tests in and flexibility and acceptance and all the things that you’re mentioning. They all sound great. But the and the emotional side of it is very challenging to say, Okay, I can’t do as many things as I was doing before, this is something I talk about a lot. Like, I can’t train the same number of hours I was training before. So I have to shift my expectations of what those outcomes or potential outcomes might be. And I have to accept and be okay with that. And that is very challenging. Sometimes, we were used to doing your 80 hours a week, and now knowing well, I can’t put in the same time. So therefore, I can’t expect to get the same thing out.
Christina Wallace 55:33
It’s absolutely true. And I think it forces you to be ruthless in what you do put in, right, if I only get 40 and not 80 hours, I’m not saying yes to half the crap that I used to be like, Okay, well, sure. You’re like, no, if this doesn’t this is where having a real clarity on Well, what is the point? What is my goal? And when something pops up and say, Can you and I’m like, it doesn’t get me toward the goal. And the goal doesn’t have to be my own personal outcome. Part of my goals might be being a great collaborator with my colleagues, then if someone says, Can you do this thing, and it doesn’t further my goal, but it does help them and it builds my relationship? I’ll still say yes. But when someone says, Will you do this random thing that in no way contributes to any of my goals? That’s, it’s a very easy. That doesn’t work for my schedule at this time. Thank you for thinking of me.
Sonya Looney 56:23
Yeah, sometimes that initial growth part and the the change, like that’s, that’s going to be painful. And yeah, my friend, she has an X psychologists, she says that sometimes living by your values is actually a painful thing at first, because you have to start drawing these boundaries.
Christina Wallace 56:37
It does. But the easiest part about this is if you have friends, or a partner or colleagues that can do it with you. And you can hold each other accountable. You can balance that you’re like, I don’t want to say yes to this, but I feel like I have to and my partner’s like, but why do you have to like walk me through the half two part. And as I’m explaining this, he’s like, doesn’t sound like half two? Sounds like you just don’t want to say no. And I’m like, Ah, okay, okay. I’m gonna say no. Did you send that email? Did you say no? Good. That’s like
Sonya Looney 57:10
the next book saying no.
Christina Wallace 57:12
Oh, my gosh.
Sonya Looney 57:14
Well, unfortunately, we’re already out of time, I could chat with you all day about this stuff. Because there’s just I feel like there’s a lot of shared energy here around these topics.
Christina Wallace 57:23
I want to know, I mean, we have so many similar crazy adventures that we’ve gone on, I want to know what’s your favorite place that you’ve ever traveled to?
Sonya Looney 57:31
I were talking about this before we hit record. It’s Nepal for a number of reasons. Like it was the first place that I went, that really kind of shook me to the core and changed my perspective on life. And the race that I did, they’re like no woman had ever done it before. And it was me really having to be courageous and overcome really big challenges. And that event made me believe that I was more capable than I ever thought I was. So it basically opened up an entire world for me by going to that race. And that was in 2012. So that’s amazing. How about you? I
Christina Wallace 58:01
love that? Ah, I am torn I think probably Costa Rica, simply because Costa Rica and Panama and Nicaragua was sort of my second big solo trip, I tend to go to like, clusters of countries because I want to see and compare and contrast over borders. And I went to Costa Rica, by myself, I had a month before us starting business school, I had zero plans and a backpack and a Lonely Planet. And over the course of that month, I ended up making so many friends. And at the last the tail end of that trip, I did something that was completely out of character for me. And that was to say yes to a harebrained Do you want to go to Panama with me? The bus leaves and 20 minutes from someone I had literally met the night before at my hostel hotel. And she was super cool. She was so much cooler than I was just like, do you want to go? And I was like, I’m supposed to go home to New York and like six days, like, how are we getting back? And like all these reasons to say no, we’re going through my head. And instead I said, Yes. And I ran back to the hostel. I got my backpack. I was like peace out, like you already paid for tonight. And I was like, it’s all good. And I ran and got on the bus. And we made friends with like three other solo travelers. By the time we made it across the border to Panama, we ended up getting a house together and we hung out for the next four days, it was the most fun. I’ve had probably of all of my solo travels. And it all came from saying yes to something that on the surface was against all of my like, that’s not reasonable, rational, strategic, all of those things. And I have found that that that willingness to be open to things outside of your plans, has been fundamental to who I’ve become as an entrepreneur, certainly now as a parent, and as a creative, the like you can’t imagine all of the great things that might happen. So you have have to be open to stuff that are not in your plans. That it was the beginning of shaking me out of my some of the rigidity that I had grown up in.
Sonya Looney 1:00:09
Yeah, and I’m doing my master’s in applied positive psychology starting in September. So another oh my gosh undergrad at University of Pennsylvania revelations. Thanks. So there’s been a lot of studying I’ve done on my own over the last decade, because I love this stuff. And one of the things is that openness actually creates more positive emotions and positivity in your life. And I thought that that was really interesting, because you always hear we’ll just be optimistic or be positive, but really like being open is a precursor to that. And it sounds like that really kind of helped you a lot in that situation. And that also, you mentioned, you know, it was hard to make friends. And in this, like, up until age 16. And then in this situation, you had all these friends that you were making?
Christina Wallace 1:00:49
Yeah, I mean, it changed. It truly did rewrite some of that narrative because I, for most of my life was like, I’m a weirdo. No one likes me enough. You know, everything’s wrong with me. And then I realized, like, Don’t worry, I was just in a tiny, tiny little petri dish, and there just weren’t enough people that were normal that I could be friends with and put out in the real world. Turns out I’m a very friendly person. So kind of find your own brand, and we’re on. Exactly weird is great. Find the weirdos that like you’re weird. Yes. Oh,
Sonya Looney 1:01:17
that’s a good way to wrap it up. Where can people find your book and find more information about you?
Christina Wallace 1:01:22
Book is anywhere books are sold, you can head to portfolio life.com. And there are links to a bunch of different online retailers. You can go to your library, big fan of libraries, go ask for it there. And you could follow me on LinkedIn or head to Christina wallace.com. And sign up for my mailing list. I think I send like two things a year. So it’s very inbox friendly.
Sonya Looney 1:01:41
Well, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing all of this great insight with us.
Christina Wallace 1:01:45
Of course, thank you for having me. It’s been a really fun conversation.