Transcript of Regret, Grief & Moving Forward Without Moving On with Stephanie Renner

Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir Notes from a Certified Madwoman. Welcome to The Edge. Hey, hey, my friends, welcome back to an episode of Notes from the Edge. This is the place where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. You ain't talking about it, but we're gonna. And today's guest is Stephanie Renner, who's an attorney, keynote speaker, creator of Regret To Resilience method. Nobody likes living with regret. It's a 7-pillar framework that helps individuals and organizations resolve— release unresolved regret and finally move forward with clarity, self-compassion, and purpose, which matters so much. For nearly 25 years, Stephanie advised CEOs, entrepreneurs, organizations through complex decisions and difficult transitions. Through that work, she witnessed how regret can influence leadership, workplace culture, confidence, performance, and the ability to make decisions from clarity. Her understanding of regret became deeply personal following the death of her son Jordan by suicide. In the aftermath, Stephanie found herself navigating grief, guilt, and the painful question of if only.

Oh, such a powerful question. And it followed the profound loss, and her path through that experience became the foundation with which she teaches now. And she challenges the belief I love this, that moving forward requires forgetting, minimizing, or don't you love the words getting over it? What happened? Instead, she helps people distinguish responsibility from hindsight, separate personal worth from painful outcomes, and build a life that can still hold purpose with both grief and renewed purpose. She is also connected to Gilly's Friends and offers the free Seven Pillars Roadmap to help people start applying the principles right away, and we love that. Stephanie, welcome to Notes from the Edge. How are you doing today, my friend?

Thank you so much, Lisa. I'm doing great. It's great to be here with you.

Yeah, excited to have you. And I'm excited about this conversation because I think so many people are stuck in the what-ifs and if-only and a lot of regret. And it's a topic we haven't had on here yet. So thank you so much for being here for it. Take us back. We're just going to dig right in. You ready? Take us back to the moment that your understanding of regret stopped being professional and it became really, really personal.

Well, so my son Jordan passed when he was just a couple months shy of his 19th birthday, but the, this, um, battle with his mental health started long before that, since the time he was about 11 years old. He expressed thoughts of self-harm and suicidal ideation and, you know, sort of frustration, some anxiety, depression, those kinds of things. And we did all the things we thought we knew how to do to try to get him help. And he was such a good kid. He was really a rule follower when he was younger. But as he got older, this anxiety, depression, all of it started to play out. In him changing his behavior and, you know, drugs and some other bad behaviors. He started to skip school. Um, he just became a much different kid than I had anticipated him being, or anyone had anticipated him being, or honestly, that I think he wanted to be, frankly. So I would say my learning to— I don't know that I learned to deal with it then, but the regret started setting in then. Even before he died, because you start to beat yourself up about, well, what did I do wrong to get to this stage?

Why are my friend's kids, you know, and his peers that he's grown up with, why are they like getting college scholarships and going on college tours and, you know, excelling in sports and finding their, their place in whatever else it is? And why is he acting out in this way? Like, is you point back at yourself at, you know, what did I do wrong? Yeah, right, of course. Um, I think that's a normal thing for parents to do. And then, um, obviously when the horrible day came that, um, he did die by suicide, um, obviously it just all comes in a huge wave, right? Like, yeah, you just fall into this, um abysm of what I call if-onlys. If I'd only done this, if I'd only done that, if I'd only been there that day, if I'd only gotten him the right therapist, if I'd only put him in Boy Scouts, if I'd only, you know, I mean, I could make a—

it was endless. It sounds like it was endless, right?

Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you started with the if-onlys immediately?

Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, you're in shock at first. I mean, I would say after the dust of like, you know, all the people at my house and funeral service and all that settled. But yes.

Yeah. Yeah.

It sort of comes right away.

So you describe people as putting themselves on trial. So is that what you did? Put your own self on trial?

Yeah. I mean, that's an analogy that works for me. Sometimes I feel like it's a cheesy analogy because I'm a lawyer, right?

I like it.

And it's just you, you're a lawyer. Yeah.

I often say that.

It's like you're playing the prosecutor, judge, and jury all at the same time, right? You're not letting anyone else or any other considerations come in because it has to be your fault. And I think we all go through— we all want to find a place to place blame for the things that happen that are out of our control.

It's human, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, when it's not something like a car accident or something where like you, there's some explanation, then you, you try to find that, that, that person to blame. And we often want to take it on ourselves and we feel like it's like our job to punish ourselves.

Oh, self-abuse. It's self-abuse is what it is that we're doing. In our head.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah. And we can be on autopilot with it, right? Not even knowing that we're doing it to ourselves constantly. Because what do we have? 80, 90— it changes— 1,000 thoughts a day, and 85% of them are negative anyway. And you have something like this happens, and so then 100% of your thoughts are negative. So Many people are told to think positively, forgive them, forgive yourselves. Definitely, why aren't you over it yet? When are you going to get over it? Get over it. Why does that stick with you as if that's not the way?

Well, first of all, I mean, you're not going to get over it. I'm never going to get over the death of my son, right?

Right. I—

when I talk about grief in particular, I, I talk about something you carry with you. So it's not about getting like getting rid of it or getting past it or over it. It's about learning how to live with it in a different way and letting it propel you or serve a purpose in your life. But this whole idea of just, you know, be happy, think positive. I mean, that sounds great, but it doesn't work, right? It doesn't, does it?

I mean, lots of us have tried it. It actually sometimes can make it worse because then you start beating yourself up because you're not doing it.

You're like, why am I not doing it? It's like, what's wrong with me?

Yes. Yeah, it's not working. Why is it working for this chick over here? Because it ain't working for me.

Yeah.

So then the self-abuse starts again, right?

Absolutely. Yeah.

When people are just like, just be, or just do, or it's like, I would if I could. First of all, we would if we could, and it becomes an impossibility. But yeah, I think it creates more of the self-abuse in our own minds.

Yeah. So one of the things I talk about is You know, one of the things people say to you in my situation is you did everything you could and that's— they're comforting me and honestly, they're basically telling me I'm a good parent, right? Because I did everything, they saw how we struggled. But I really struggled with that phrase when people would say it to me because my like logical lawyer brain, right? It says, well, maybe, I mean, nobody does everything they can or What if I didn't do everything I could? Is that—

yeah, now did I question— did I, right? Did I?

But does it make it my fault, right? The reason we say that is to absolve people of guilt, and I think we should stop thinking about fault at all in, in these situations. I mean, that doesn't mean someone doesn't take responsibility when there's bad things, when people do bad things.

Accountability is necessary. Yes, that's part of self-consciousness and creating awareness and personal growth. And yeah, but I, I love that stuff.

But when you're trying to move on from these things you beat yourself up about, yeah, there's no purpose in trying to assign fault somewhere. Like, that just doesn't— it, it doesn't solve anything. It's not going to bring the person back. It's not going to put your marriage back together. It's not going to get your job back. You know what I mean?

Like, it's not where the healing happens because you're in— you're still in like this victim state. It's a— it's a— it keeps you in anger, it keeps you in resentment, it keeps you in the blame game, it keeps you—

yeah.

And, and I, I was in it. I was in it for years. It's all your— it's my parents, it's my ex, it's this, it's that. And until I— we will— in here we call it other focus. If you are other focused, you got to take that finger and turn it inward, because this is an inward journey. This is our personal human journey. And ain't nobody gonna do it for us but us.

Yeah, you know, so, and we have to focus on what we could and couldn't control, right? Like, at the end of the day, there— any of those if-onlys, any of those things that I focused on or beat myself up about, there's no guarantee that a single one of those would have changed the outcome. Yes, because I don't control the outcome.

Yeah, yeah. When did you get to a point where you realized with observation that I'm playing the if-only came in my head. What happened there? Where was that transition?

Oh, that's a good question. I think, um, I mean, I think it was pretty early on. And I, and I say this a lot, you know, it's just been a little over 2 years since Jordan passed, and a lot of people when they hear that say, oh my gosh, that's so soon, and it's still early, and all those things. And that's true on, in one sense, but When you live with this threat and this, this disease of mental illness for so long, it's kind of like if someone's diagnosed with cancer, you hope that you're going to get all the treatments and do all the right things and it's going to go into remission, right? But you always know what the potential outcome is. And that is our situation. I lived with this and started grieving and going through this regret process long before he passed. Not because I thought it was, it was going to turn out bad. I had a lot of hope actually at the end that it wasn't, but it's still a part of the journey. It's not like when someone—

I think that's a really important point that you had, because you had been going through it since he started showing symptoms at 11. So you were grieving the entire time.

Yeah, I mean, you grieve the loss of the child you thought you were raising. You grieve the loss of the future you thought he was going to have. Um, you know, there was all these things that happened along the way that changed what his future was going to look like. And that doesn't mean it couldn't have gotten better or turned out very differently, but it just isn't— just didn't go the way I thought or hoped it would go. And there is a grief process in that.

Yeah. Yeah. The entire time I could see that. I could see that. That's a very valid point. Well, when did you realize that regret was, was one? Okay. So you, you realized in yourself first, and then when did you realize, wow, there's a lot of people stuck in regret and they're playing the if only game. I can help them. With the, my, my framework. When did that come into play and turn your experience into your mission?

It was a little over a year ago. Um, my, my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, uh, probably a couple years before Jordan passed, and we were sort of going through that with her. She was in assisted living and we had to move her to memory care, and she eventually passed a year after Jordan died and It was going through the process of not only my grief over Jordan and then having my mother alive and not being able to talk to her about it because we elected not to tell her. That would just— would have— there was no purpose. We'd have to tell her over and over again. Um, and then after, I, I had to deal with sort of the 'if I'd only' if I'd only visited her more, if I'd only— maybe we put her in a different place, things would have gone differently. I don't know. We had a lot of regret about that too, right? So it was a lot of talking to other people in that process. I think that caregiving role as children brings up a lot of that. So it was talking to people in that process. It was talking to other moms and parents who've lost children, especially to suicide.

Yeah, I mean, it was, it was mostly just a collective, but you played the if only game with your mom too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, that makes sense, doing it again and then, and then, and then catching it. How did the framework develop? How did you, how did you create the framework?

Well, I, you know, I, well, first of all, I've been through a lot of therapy, obviously, and I, and I think that's important for anybody going through something like this, but I really had to sit down and think about what went through my head in this process. And the main, the, I don't know, like the tree trunk or whatever I'm trying to say, that it all comes from is really this idea of not controlling the outcome. So I think until we can— I think when I realized that, I had to think through, okay, if I can accept that I didn't control the outcome, what are the ways that I let go of each of these things, each of these things that I'm torturing myself about, and find the freedom to move forward? One of the key things for me was, well, first of all, I always call the if-onlys like um, bricks that you put in a backpack. So you're wearing this backpack full of bricks and it's just weighing you down. It doesn't serve any purpose.

Yeah.

And then I keep joking about this because, um, I've been saying this forever, and then I see that all the women in my neighborhood walking around with the weighted vests.

They're choosing to carry their backpack.

That's different.

I got a weighted vest. I wore it one time.

I was like, oh, Yeah, I haven't done it yet, but I'll just take a walk.

Yeah, yeah.

And this, you know, this carrying around these if-onlys, they weigh you down, they don't serve a purpose. And I talk about taking each of those bricks or if-onlys out and asking yourself— and I think you have to do it one by one. Like, you know, one of the things that I got really focused on is the day I believe this happened I found him the next day, but the day it happened, I had gone somewhere for the afternoon and I felt like I shouldn't go and I went anyway. And I don't know exactly what time it happened, but I think it happened sometime in that time period. And, you know, I had to let go of, okay, if I'd only been home, if I hadn't gone to that place that afternoon, then I would have been home and I would have seen that he was spiraling and I could have stopped it, right?

Um, so you started with the biggest if only, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, because that was the one that was right in front of me, you know, like that was the most logical one and it just isn't true. I mean, there's just no guarantee, there's no—

right, you don't—

there's no way to know. I don't know, if I was home maybe he would have left, maybe, you know, I mean there's just no—

yeah, exactly, I just can't Well, you just said something. You said the freedom to move forward. So let's talk about moving forward and moving on, because you feel like they're a little different. Like, I do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you know, people say all the time, oh, you haven't moved on yet, or you haven't gotten over that yet, to people who are grieving any kind of loss, whether it's marriage or—

do they, do they come to you and say, why aren't you over it yet?

No one said that directly to me about Jordan, except I would say when I was still working in law firm, um, there were versions of that. Like, no one was quite that, uh, harsh, but it was more like, okay, well, spend this amount of time, like, you know, work to do, get your billable hours back up, that kind of thing. Which, I mean, a job is a job. I get— I I partially get that, but it's, um, I just don't, you don't move on and you don't get over it. So to me, it's, I think, and I think a lot of people get stuck on that language. I think it's why a lot of people don't allow themselves to move forward because they're focused on this idea that they are somehow leaving behind the memory of the person or the thing or the experience. Yeah.

And so And then blaming themselves, right?

Right.

Can't move on, and then the self-abuse starts again, right?

Yeah, I gotta say it right so that I can hold on to them, right? Yeah. When the reality is you can move forward and carry that with you. You can carry the person, you can even in the, you know, an experience like a marriage or a job or whatever, you can take the good, you can take what you learned the validity of that experience and carry that forward with you without letting it keep you stuck by torturing yourself over why it went wrong.

Over the words. Words matter. And the words we use to talk to ourselves can— you're absolutely right— keep us stuck or help us. And I liked your wording, freedom to move forward. Not on, right?

Yeah.

The words we tell ourselves really do matter.

One of the keys for that, in that for me was when I started to let go of the if-onlys and I understood I didn't control the outcome, it was, I had this question that came up for me of, okay, well, did any of the things I did matter? Like if I don't control the outcome, then did all these things I try to do even matter? And what I say is, of course they matter, because your love or your worth is not measured by the outcome.

That's important— love and worth not attached to the outcome. Yeah, because so many times we are conditioned to believe that it does. Yeah, yeah. And it could be conditioning from something that happened when we were 5. And then we carry it into our adulthood. Yeah, I love that.

Yeah. Well, and we, we just in the society are obsessed with outcomes, right? Like you do X, Y, and Z and you get this, and you work hard and you get this, you love enough and you get this, right? Yeah. But that's not— and, and that those are all part of life, but it's, it's not a measure of who you are or your worth. And for me in particular, I really found I came to a place where I had to remind myself that Jordan knew he was loved. And I do. I know that for sure, for a lot of reasons, but the value of my love for him isn't dependent on what the outcome was. Yeah.

I love that. Don't tie your worth to the outcome, my friend. So that, and speaking of worth, your framework actually separates a person's worth from the outcome or decision. So talk about the framework and how you use it to help people now.

Yeah, so it's just a process. I mean, the first, like I've said repeatedly now, is you have to accept that control is only an illusion, that, you know, you only have control over a certain amount of things and really it's kind of a— we have a very self-centered view of ourselves, right? We think we control far more than we do and we have superpowers. Yes, and we don't, so we have to understand that and then I think you have to get honest with yourself and and own your part and not anything more or anything less, right? There are circumstances in which you can point to something that you did wrong, okay?

Fair.

You did it, we can't change it, so it is in the past, period. Like, letting yourself sit in that is not serving anyone, but you can't take on—

Oh, go ahead, go ahead.

No, no, but I always say the best apology is just changed behavior, right?

If you feel bad or guilty, right? Not shame, but guilt. I did something that I didn't like. I was an asshole to my— whatever. The best apology is change behavior. That's all you got. That's all you got. That's all you can do. Yeah.

We also don't have to own more than, than what then was our part, right? I mean, we, we so often want to take on what everybody else should have done or could have done or what other people's decisions were and we just, we don't have that control.

Right.

So then the third step is to let go of those if-onlys. Like I said, it's like you got to take each brick out of the backpack and ask yourself, you got to be honest with yourself and this is the hard one because there are people who are going to get really stuck in saying, "Oh, I do know this could have changed the outcome. I know it for sure." Right? And I don't know, and I think in rare instances maybe that's the case, but It is really rare if you're really honest with yourself.

Yeah.

And when you're honest with yourself and you can put those down, then you can start to feel that freedom. And then the next step is to stop prosecuting yourself. So when you do look at the things that you've owned now, okay, you've apologized for them, you've paid some kind of price for them, whatever it is, you're done now. Like, you got to stop beating yourself up. You got to stop holding on to that.

You are not identifying them to use it as further self-abuse. That was not the point of being brutally honest with yourself about where you're at.

Yeah, right. And you're not serving that person or thing or experience or whatever it is by continuing to beat yourself up about it.

Yeah. And I love the fact that you started with one if only. When I first started, uh, uh, an observation, my friends, is not neutral. It's quantum physics, quantum mechanics. The minute you observe it, it's already starting to change for you. So this work that we deny is not as hard as you think. It really isn't. But Stephanie, I started with the thought, one thought, and it was that I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid. It would be on a reel in my head, and I'd catch myself standing in the kitchen staring at a wall with this, such an F-up. I'm never going to have healthy— so I had to start with one thought, and I replaced it with a statement of fact, which is I'm actually a highly intelligent woman. Now, I never think that I'm stupid, but it was one thought, one thought at a time. Yeah. So I love your method of one if only at a time.

Yeah. I mean, you can't, you can't fix it all, all at once. The other thing I'll say is I am not— I don't contend for any, for a minute that this is some sort of magic trick that it's going to go away forever and you're never going to— it's never going to come back, right? I go down this path a lot still. Those if onlys start to come back. Yeah, and I just have to stop myself and, you know, be realistic with myself and set it aside. It's a process, and hopefully over time you get even better at it, and I don't know, maybe there's some magic day down the road where they don't ever come up, but I don't think that would probably be very human of me. So, you know, I think it's never going to completely go away, but knowing how to deal with it when it comes up.

Yeah. And you get better at it. You do. It's daily practice. You— and you— some things we will be managing for the rest of this Earth school experience. We just will. Yeah, we just will. But with the daily practice, we do get better at management of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it does, it does, my friends, it does get easier for longer periods of time. Right. So what if you practice this daily? What would have tanked me for 3 months now only tanks me for half a day. Right. So it does. But the hardest part, I think, is for in your framework is that step 3 is the brutal honesty. And then once you're there, it starts kind of snowballing on itself a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, what's the next step?

So the next is to accept that your worth isn't tied to the outcome or determined by the outcome, which we just talked about, right? Yeah. And then the moving forward is not moving on. You got to accept that part, and then you get to define what comes next. So, you know, there's, there's tons of stories of people who've turned their pain into purpose, right? And that can take a lot of different versions. It can be some— a total life change in what you're doing. It can be just living differently in yourself. It can be how you interact with other people. Whatever it is, you get to define what that is, and there's a whole world ahead of you. And that's— I think that's the way you honor whatever or whoever it is that you lost.

Hmm. Yeah. By moving forward in freedom, but taking them with you on your journey. On your journey. So what is like your ideal client? Who are you currently working with or wanting to work with in terms of people stuck in the regret cycle?

Yeah, well, so I'm doing some individual coaching. And I'm currently revising this on my website. So hopefully that'll be up in the next day or so. Some individual coaching around this, just 7-step process. It's probably going to be about a 7-week program. I've got a workshop that I'm working on. I do some workshops with, you know, the translation of this into the corporate environment can, can seem a little harder to some people, but honestly, like there are so many employees sitting in companies out there who are wallowing in some kind of regret. And it's, it's not just someone who lost someone. It's, there's all kinds of things going on. And even within the, you know, even within their professional lives of like beating some themselves up about the things they did or didn't do right. And I think if you can provide people with the tools to know how to set those aside then you are going to have a much more productive workforce.

So there are workshops because if they're playing the if-only game, it is affecting their work. Yes. Yeah, yeah, it's showing up somehow.

Yeah, my true love though is really public speaking. So, um, you know, keynote speeches and breakout sessions and that type of thing. I— that's what I really love to do. So, um, also available for that. Love it. And yeah, love it.

Love it. Well, how can people reach you? So you've got a new website coming up. You've got a new website. We won't launch because I launch these pretty quickly. We won't launch until your website comes up. So where can people find you?

The website's up. The website's up. I just— the part about individual coaching, I just don't have that piece in there. So it's fine. StephanieRennerspeaks.com or you can go to RegretToResilience.com and it will redirect you. Yeah. And there's also there is a podcast offer. So if you go to stephaniewinterspeaks.com/podcastoffer, there'll be a PDF that you can download that goes through all 7 steps with a sort of starter question for engaging in this process.

I love it. So they can start and then when they get stuck, reach out to you for help and handholding through the process because guys out there, Listen, please don't try to do any of this alone. Have a mentor, have a coach, have some support underneath you. Um, it's really difficult to do it alone. That's how my journey started, and, um, it was a lot harder. Became much easier when I did, uh, take some bricks out of my own backpack and start raising my vibration a little bit, and my inner circle started coming in, and now it's the healthiest circle I've ever had. So it will come. But the transition for me, after doing all kinds of therapy— I did the Therapy Rite of Passage. I think it is a rite of passage.

Yes.

What got me moving forward finally was working with a transformational coach. That's why I became one. That's why I support them so highly. I just think it's lovely to look backwards at what happened. It's a very important step. But if we don't have some support underneath us to help us move forward, we do get stuck in that blame game and in the if only game. So, yeah, we're going to have all the links for you. You don't have to write anything down. There'll be clickable links. Stephanie, we're going to get the link to your sheet, both of your sites. Guys, you can find Stephanie very easy, and she's available for speaking engagements. So definitely reach out after you do the worksheet. And if you feel super stuck, especially if you're grieving, if you're really stuck in grief and you're surrounded by people who are telling you, move on, it's been long enough, you need to suck it up, toughen up, you know, like I told her, man up. I mean, whatever it is you're being told that isn't working for you or helping for you. And I think, Stephanie, sometimes it just helps to have someone having our back that is validating our experience for us.

I mean, just that alone can, right, make all the difference in the world.

Absolutely. And you know, there, there's, there's value to someone having been through something that you haven't been through. I mean, even my own therapist said exactly what you said about therapy and coaching, right? That, that there's a real need for— there's a role that coaching serves or a role that therapy serves. And yes, coaching from someone who has actually been through the life experience is really valuable and can provide you tools that you don't get in a regular therapy session.

Yeah. And just remember, guys, grief can be anything. It can be the loss of a job. It can be moving to a new location. So grief can be having an accident that tanked you for a month or hitting a depressive wall. So do the worksheet if you feel like you're stuck reach out to Stephanie. Stephanie, we always close out with 2 questions for our guests. You ready? Okay. All right, the first one is: in your own life, what do you feel like you performed in order to survive, and what did dropping that role mask or performance do for you on your growth journey?

Hmm, so I performed— I mean, I, since I've been very young, just having it all together. I mean, that's just, um, sort of how I was raised. My mother's a wonderful, amazing mother, but she just sort of sucked it up and did what she had to do and always was polished and put together and had her life together. And, you know, I fooled myself into believing that I wasn't performing because I was so open about my myself to people, but it wasn't really, you know, I put stuff about myself out on Facebook or whatever, and I didn't try to create this false life, but I don't— I wasn't really vulnerable, and I wasn't really honest about what my own drawbacks and struggles were. And, you know, I didn't have anything left to perform after I lost Jordan, so it just I always say I, I lost the ability to care about the things I don't care about.

Ah, that's a— honestly, that's not a bad place to be because we don't need to be caring about the things we don't need to be caring about. And you hit something that I think is so important because I did the same thing in a different way. Nobody knew I was struggling. So my friends, if you are struggling please reach out for support and the right fit too. And it may take one or two humans, you know, working with people is a relationship. So, you know, therapists, you may have to go through 3 or 4. Life coaches, you know, talk to them, get on their calendar, get on Stephanie's calendar, see if she's the right fit for you. And, you know, if you're not the right fit for her, she'll let you know and you can let her know. But it's, it's worth checking out a couple to make sure that, um, that you're the right fit. But please, by all means, if, if you are struggling, uh, to use her word, vulnerable, you know, be vulnerable enough to let somebody know and make sure they're a safe person. Because if they're not a safe person, you're just going to shut down and probably never do it again.

So it's really important. So Stephanie, what do you feel like we need to be having more conversations about? That's the last question?

About human connection. They, you know, we're so— and this is so cliché, but we're so busy, we're so focused on all the technology and AI and all the things, right? But I just came from the National Speakers Association like annual conference, and there was this real feeling among all of the professionals who've talked to their clients that the— what people are really craving is human connection. And so there's like this fear that AI is going to take our jobs or whatever it is. I think we need to be talking about how to help people make those connections because we've lost that ability in a lot of ways.

Well, and there's a loneliness epidemic right now. I really feel we've never been so connected but disconnected. Yes.

Right.

So yeah, find humans, real humans. You're going to use your AI as a tool, but find— I wouldn't be able to produce webtoons without my AI tool, but this whole podcast exists. Because of a, of a transitional experience that I had because I needed more human connection and I wanted places for people to have more human connection. So yeah, and also I think our conversations deserve more than a 30-second TikTok clip because they are so nuanced. So I agree. Um, yeah, so all right, my friends, listen, I'm going to ask you the same question, all right? What are you performing? In order to survive? And what might setting the role mask or performance do to, to help you feel just a little bit lighter? And with that, I'm your host Lisa Lacey. This has been our guest Stephanie Renner. And when you find the answer, we will both see you at the edge. Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much, Lisa. Yeah, thanks.