Giving Yourself Permission with Jillian Reilly on The Way to College Podcast

Hi, and welcome to another episode of the Way to College podcast. This is episode two of season three. And my guest, my guest actually reached out to me. And she's the author of 10 Permissions. And my guest is Miss Jillian Riley. And Jillian has a fantastic story. But at the heart of the story, I think was something that I think a lot of us can connect with. And when she reached out, I found that, you know, what she wanted to talk about and her work aligned really well with the message that I like to share with my listeners and with students in that very few of us, very few of us have a linear path, right? We will experience ups and downs and setbacks and challenges. And it is from these things that we learn and we grow and hopefully we improve, we get better. And Jillian talks about that. And Jillian talks about sort of the struggle that so many of us have when we have to deviate, when our plans don't according to plan. So I hope you enjoy this next episode of the Way to College podcast with Ms. Jillian Reilly. I don't know. And I've got to be honest with you all. I never expected the podcast to grow as it has. I think it was kind of just a side hobby I wanted to do. I wanted to create this space to share people's journeys, to help others, to help my students primarily feel at ease with the idea that they didn't have to have life figured out, particularly at 18 and 19 years old. And so I've really enjoyed connecting with folks. And that network, originally that network was the people that I was closest to, people I went to school with and grew up with, has expanded considerably. And so today, today's a new addition to that network. But as always, I'm going to give my guests the opportunity to introduce herself. So Jill, would you mind introducing yourself to our audience out there? Yeah, absolutely. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm Jillian Riley, calling you, speaking to you from Cape Town, South Africa. So I don't know if your network has also geographically expanded at this moment. Originally from the States, came here a very long time ago, 1993, to be a part of this country's transition to democracy. And what was originally kind of, as you're saying, I never expected things to turn out the way they did. I was supposed to be here for six months and then got completely taken with the work of sort of social transformation. And that set me on a lifetime journey of working with people to navigate profound change in their lives. So, yeah, I'm sure we'll get into all of that a little bit more. But, yeah, I love the theme of sort of helping people find their way, particularly as young adults, into a very, very disorienting world. I couldn't have said it any better myself. Thank you, Jill. Jill, so you are my first guest. My guests have been all over the world. My first guest was in Africa at the time. So this is exciting. But Jill, as with all of my guests, I always start with the same question. And the question is, if you had to identify a starting point for your educational journey, what would that starting point be for you? Oh, wow. What a great question. My brain, I'm going to go with where my brain instantly went to, which was when I went on an exchange program in my sophomore year of high school. And I think what was a sort of latent curiosity in the world began to become much more of a driving force in my life. to use my own language of permission. I think it was one of the first times I gave myself permission to be the first person in my family to do something. Nobody else had a passport. And they were confused by my interest in going to France. And I wanted it and I made it happen, much to the dismay of others around me. And I think that was just such a perspective-expanding experience and such a rewarding learning experience outside of the normal classroom environment, outside of kind of academia in its most formal sense. And so I think for me, my love of travel as a learning hack, if you will, my love of other, of people out in the world who live nothing like I did. And, you know, my own realization that when you stepped beyond the known and familiar, there was something so amazing waiting for you out there. So, yeah, my own self-education process took a quantum leap on that trip. the um joe thank you and i can't imagine i think you're one of a few guests that have have talked about a study abroad program in high school and having that experience and help powerful and enriching and as you described to write this perspective expanding experience um you how exciting and one thing one you know i i'll often help students with college applications and colleges always ask about one's curiosity. What a, to decide, right? You said you were the first person in your family to get a passport, but to be so curious as to say, I want to go somewhere else. I want to leave my country and explore. um and and for me jill i always i of course i use my own experience as a reference frame of reference yeah you know i'm 16 17 year old me i think god i i was so afraid of leaving of leaving home um i think for me i i was able to to travel a little bit and i think that was had a profound experience on me and impression on me where did that curiosity come for you again a great question and one that i really honestly i'm not just saying this i've spent time thinking about um because i have a 17 year old son who turned down an opportunity to go on an exchange and i was sitting there barging my tongue going do you not realize what you're saying no to but you know i'm a firm believer that overriding somebody else's will never turns out particularly well. So, you know, he's got to follow his own path. My path was one of kind of being curious about the world beyond my very middle class Midwestern upbringing from quite an early age. And if I can tell the kind of backstory to the French trip, I would get up on a Saturday morning. I had a little black and white television with, you know, big antennas coming out of it. I'm dating myself here, but that's the truth. And Julia Child, her cooking show was on on a weekend morning. And I would sit there and be completely captivated by this woman who looked so different, who spoke so different, who was making these, you know, really complex dishes that were nothing like anything I'd ever eaten. And I was really curious about her story and where she came from. I mean, I don't necessarily know if I at the time was, you know, aware of that, but I was just really taken by, I think, a sense of possibility beyond. If I want to scratch a little bit deeper there. You know, I grew up with a mother who felt very limited by the story that she was handed when she was born, you know, everything she was never supposed to be. And I think I felt acutely aware of that growing up. And on some level, my desire to go beyond might have been driven by, you know, some of that too. I did not want to be stuck. I did not want to ever feel like I wasn't, you know, driving my own sort of, you know, growth and the word you use, which I use all the time, which is exploration. So, yeah, I think it's a combination of character, trait and context that probably led me to be quite driven to go out and pursue something beyond my own world. I appreciate you taking us there and providing some of that context. And I can relate when you talk about your mother and the story that she was given and sort of the limitations that are placed on us for a variety of reasons. So thank you for taking us there. So you go on this trip and before this trip, was college always part of your future? Was education? You know, what were those expectations? What was the story maybe that you were given? Yeah. And, you know, I talk about this in my book, that these stories are not things that are explicitly told to us, are they? Which is what makes it very challenging to kind of get your arms around and wrestle with, you know, how much of the story am I writing and how much of it was written for me. I never had anybody sit me down and say, you must go to college, but it was absolutely an unspoken expectation and one that I, you know, embraced completely. I was a good student. I loved learning. As kind of, I guess, implicit in this, I was always interested in going beyond. And at that point, college was the way that you did that. You know, it was your vehicle for growth, for movement, for progress, if you will. So I was probably of myself and my two sisters, the one that felt most ambitious in that regard. I was going to go to a quote unquote good school. You know, I would do well. And, you know, part of my own story that led to a lot of what I speak about in the book was that I sort of smashed a lot of those expectations upon completing college and, you know, decided I wasn't going to carry on a linear path. I was going to go to South Africa. So up until that point, I was I was all in. You know, I was going to go to a good school, get good grades, go to law school, which at that point was still, you know, a highly regarded career choice. And, you know, carry on from there and and keep elevating the the status of my family. keep, you know, that you know, when we were growing up, there was this story that every generation did better than the previous one And my parents had they both come from immigrant families you know people who come over and made something of themselves So I think that was part of this story that I would carry on with that. I would do even better. And so much of that was just built in. And so I think one of the things that I know, you're exploring now in these conversations is the fact that so much of that is unraveled, the fact that so much of that is now not a given and up for grabs, I think, leaves a lot of people wondering about their choices. But at that point, yeah, it was just a given that if you were wanting to, you know, continue to succeed in life, you would go to college. the um it's funny i love the way you kind of framed everything around the stories that were given the stories that were told and even the explicit the implicit um and and about going to college and doing better than the previous generation um in those expectations that are kind of laid out before us you said you um decided to go to south africa so what happened that led to that decision because here you are right you've got a it looks like a very as you said linear path you know this step one step two kind of thing and then you're like no i'm gonna go this way what happened yeah i i so i went to northwestern university which is a you know kind of liberal arts fine arts you had to take a variety of different courses you had to take history courses and one of them had to be a non-Western history course. So I took this course in modern Southern African history. And again, I've thought a lot about it, don't have a firm answer for why it really captivated me. I was so interested in, you know, this story, this post-colonial, post-liberation story that was playing out across Southern Africa and these people reclaiming their story. And I had a very good professor whose wife was South African. They were planning to come to South Africa the year after my graduation so he could work on a PhD. And they said, well, you know, and the election was happening in 1994. I graduated in 1992. And the first democratic elections were taking place in 1994. And I was sort of like, I mean, how can I not go there? How can I not be there for this, you know, tremendous experiment in social transformation? And so I decided I was going to go. And I can I can still remember, like, I waited a very long time to tell my parents actually too long. Now that I'm a parent, I can't believe. kind of sprung it on them. I was so afraid. And I can still see my father sitting across the table looking at me like, like, you know, this was the nuclear option of, and the world was a very different place, as you may know or remember, that it was very foreign. It was very far away. This was pre-Internet. This was pre, it was like I was going to the moon, and a very violent corner of the moon as well. So, you know, I feel like I gained a little bit of a superpower in that moment, which was to learn to deal with uncomfortable conversations that you fear might disappoint people. To learn that, you know, approval is desirable but not required. If you have the means to do the thing that you want to do, which I did, I earned my own way. I didn't ask them for anything. it's not great but it's also you know you you keep going so it was a while before we kind of came back together again around what I was doing they spent many years like really unclear and I couldn't make it make sense to them you know I couldn't pitch it to them and I think it's such an important thing that I say to young people which is you know most of your most unique interests, wants, desires, ideas, don't come prepackaged. Have a neat cell around them. So you will feel clumsy in trying to explain them to people. That is not a reason to turn back. That is not a reason to feel like, oh, this isn't a good idea because it's not slick and familiar. It's exactly the reason to keep going because this is something unique. This is something you, So keep following it. But all of it's really uncomfortable. And particularly when you're, you know, 19, 20, 21 years old and you're still trying to figure yourself out. So, yeah, those were some interesting years. it sounds like you know even the um deciding you wanted to go to france and you're going to get a passport and you're the first in your family to get a passport but it also sounds like that experience was kind of preparing you for this not just the the fact that you're leaving and you're you know flying across the world but telling your parents you're going to do this yeah um regardless maybe of their answer. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think up until that, I mean, that I was a little bit different was pretty clear. That I had no interest when they had none was obvious. I think they always, up until that point, had thought it would be a nice kind of pastime or hobby or sidebar interest for me. They had no idea that it was actually going to shape the trajectory of my life. But yeah, I was slowly kind of preparing them for the fact that I had interests and plans that would probably never make sense to them. And, you know, I reckon there are a lot of young people today who are going to be in that same position who might not be going off to some foreign country or be deviating as much from the expected path as I did. But their lives are probably going to unfold in a way that will be hard for their parents to understand. It's not going to look the same. It's not going to be a neat thing leads to another. I'm cushioned in a big corporate and I can expect to stay there if I just work hard. that's not the story anymore. So, you know, part of my work at this moment with my book is to kind of let young people know it's okay. It's okay, even if it doesn't feel that it's all right. Yeah, I love that. And I'm eager to get into your book. Before we get there, though, I've got to know, you said you've got a 17-year-old son, correct? Yeah. So how has your experience, how have all of these experiences and these difficult conversations and relationships, how has that informed or shaped your own relationship with your son? um i think you know having a mother who's not your average mom and has probably affected him in ways that i don't know i can't say um maybe he can't either but i think it's been a an ongoing reminder and, and I don't want to say lesson, but, you know, that you can, you are allowed to be yourself. What feels, particularly at that young age, is very dangerous in terms of, you know, stepping out, being, doing things that feel weird to other people, You know, finding your own unique path feels hard when you're a teenager. And I think that having my story and me as an example there is a constant reminder that maybe it's not as dangerous as it might seem. that, you know, there is so much to be gained from stepping into self, even at moments where it feels really uncomfortable as he, I mean, I've got two sons, I'm referencing now the older one, because as you know, they all kind of lead the way a little bit for you and learning how this works. But I've watched him sort of come into his own voice ever more in ways that surprised me, navigating his own combination of familiar and different and himself and everything else. And, you know, I'd like to think that I remain a constant, yeah, I don't want to say inspiration. God, is mom ever an inspiration? I don't think so. I still remember that there's a possibility beyond the default story that you're given. And I think I have and his father has always tried to tell him that, you know, you've got choices, so make them. Make them. And I say it in the book. Don't act like you've got two choices when you've got 20. Because there are people out there, and we live in South Africa, so we're acutely aware there are people out there who don't have great choices. If you've got choices, then really make them with some intent. And we're having that conversation now as he thinks about life beyond high school. So, yeah, it's an interesting one. And I'm trying to just create the space for him to find his own way. Oh, I love that. I love that. You know, Jill, you come to South Africa or you go to South Africa and you've been there now. Did you return home at all? I did. Yeah, that's a bigger. I did leave. I got very burnt out. I sort of got really deep into the world of international aid, kind of moved through it, climbed the ladder, was in charge of a project when I was an HIV AIDS related project when I was 27 years old and had millions of dollars at my disposal, if you will, in the middle of what was then the world's biggest HIV AIDS epidemic. and thought, whoa, this is great. I've got my dream job and was humbled hugely by the fact that it was far more complex. And I might have been in over my head. You know, I needed to, there was a lot of work that needed to be done to kind of, I think, do the work we were trying to do with more integrity. and at the time I just didn't have it in me necessarily to put up the fight that was required to really try and get there but that's a whole other story one that you know has has very a lot of relevance for what I'm doing today but yeah I left and moved to Europe actually which is where both of my kids were born in the UK and yeah so my life then went to there obviously still interested in traveling and exploring. But, yeah, and then we moved back after my second son was born. We decided my husband is South African. I met my South African husband in London. All roads were leading me back to this place. Yeah. Wow. So you spend time, considerable amount of time, doing international aid. What led you here, where you're at now and with your book? Hmm. Yeah. Well, that goes back to, I think, that moment of being in Zimbabwe and, and having then spent a decade sort of almost a decade if you will in this world of trying to make change trying to accelerate it trying to you know help people create new stories for themselves because they wanted to because they had to And, you know, trying all the incentives in the world, lots of money, lots of training, lots of commodities, lots of this, lots of that, and often coming up really, really short. and it was probably in Zimbabwe when we were sitting in the middle of this crisis situation and throwing tons and tons of money at AIDS-related programming and finding people very resistant, very afraid, and in fact actually kind of in the middle of this crisis reverting back to a sort of even more traditional way of being because they were so almost frozen by the scale of what was facing them. And I said to my boss at the time, we can give people all the money in the world. We can't give them permission. I can't make somebody change. They've got to make that decision for themselves. I had to be the one to decide that I was going to get the passport, using me as an example. That was mud I had to act on. And I think realizing that I thought I could run around and, you know, be a living permission slip to people to change the course of their lives. And I couldn't. They had to come to that decision on their own and no amount of money was going to get them there. So I started to get much more interested in sort of the relationship with self and self-limiting and the story, again, that we feel we're kind of stuck in, the one that we've never been prepared to rewrite or told that we were allowed. So, yeah, I kind of left. I was just I felt very disillusioned. And I felt like a fraud, if I'm honest, because everybody thought it was, oh, this is amazing. Everything's amazing that you're doing. And I was like, I'm not so sure it is. So, yeah, that set me on a long path of trying to figure out how I could play a role in the help to navigate change. And for me, it comes back to helping people engage with themselves with, you know, intention and courage. you know thank you thank you for that you one question i have now is is was that the greatest the biggest lesson you think you took from that experience was that you didn't you couldn't give people permission yeah i think what i took from it was um you know this the the way that we unconsciously replicate patterns of behavior and age-old ways of being and living without ever engaging with that with any degree of, you know, intention or attention. People just sort of, you know, move through their lives. We're coming back to the story that, you know, for me, for instance, working in Zimbabwe with these women who, they had a very restrictive story about who they were allowed to be like my own mom did. And, you know, the desire to change that, which is obviously something I had in me for a long time, I think realizing, yeah, my own limitations at a very young age, I'd realized my own power at a young age. I also then realized my own limitations that I wasn't going to save anybody. I wasn't going to do anything profound on behalf of somebody else. And it's so much of the work around activating agency and putting people in the driver's seat of their own lives was something that for me felt like a really yawning gap in the work that we were doing. And in fact, in education in general, that, you know, we don't really prepare young people and young adults to feel like they are their own authorities, Like they have the power to drive their own decision making. And that became something that really interested me much more after that experience. And Jill, how long have you been? Well, it sounds like you've been wrestling maybe with these ideas, these conversations for a long time. When did you decide? When did you decide? You know what? I think there's a book here and I need to share this with the world. During COVID, of course, which spawned so many things, good, bad, evil, otherwise, you know, we were all sort of in limbo. It had long roots in a series of things that I had experimented with and played around with from something called Courage Camp, which was just, you know, how to find the courage to drive your own life and write your own story. I started a local group called Troublemakers, which was, again, how to look for good trouble. And then during COVID, to keep myself sane, I was like, I just need to sit down and put some of this down on paper. And what I thought was going to be like almost a PDF became this book. It's sort of, you know, you hear about books writing themselves. And gosh, that was very much my experience. It might have been, you know, COVID probably heightened the surreality of all of the experience, but I really kind of found myself just letting things flow onto a page. And it was, yeah, decades of experience just coming out. And this theme of permission just cut through everything, which is who am I allowed to be? What am I allowed to do? And against a backdrop of a global pandemic, which I had experienced a pandemic before, and I knew that these things shift the way we think about ourselves. They shift the way we think about our lives. So was there some particular relevance for some of these lessons in some of my story right now? because it felt like, and obviously we couldn't even see into the future, that something fundamentally was changing about our world and that we would continue to struggle a little bit with how to find our way through it when it felt overwhelming and confusing, as I had experienced before in other contexts. So, yeah, and it took many years and many forms. And it was, again, I love the way you started this with how you didn't see this podcast becoming what it is. I don't think we can. I don't think we ever do. And again, what I'd love to say to young people is let go of the idea that you, which is one of my permissions, is forget about the future. You don't know. It's okay. start to create things and let them become um even when you have people yapping in your ear about what are you doing why are you doing this so yeah like you i sort of let it become something um over many years well um what do you what do you hope to do with this book um i hope to let me say um provide a support resource for people who feel inadequate because their lives don't look like the version that they imagined it would which is what i hear a lot of now that is we're starting to read it which is oh thank you so much I always felt like a loser because my path wasn't linear and one thing wasn't leading to another and I don't have the 401k or I don't have the apartment at the time that I thought I was supposed to have it. So sort of a mainstreaming and a normalizing the winding nature of life now so that we can get even more courageous and intentional about those lives. Like, I think there's a false nostalgia for a world where, you know, everything looked linear and predictable. And I don't think we necessarily want to go back to that. I think we just like the fact that it offered a formula. And right now there's no formula. There's no this, then you're going to be okay. And that leaves us feeling very anxious and insecure. But if we accept the fact that, okay, there isn't one, which means we get to make it up, we get to explore and discover and create, then isn't that a magical thing? Isn't that a wonderful thing? Not diminishing the real life challenges that it presents us, because it does, but in those challenges is space and room for unbelievable growth and aliveness. So I want to sort of, you know, help people feel like it's okay. And from that space, start to with more clarity and conviction, create lives that serve them and suit this moment, not with hesitation, not with apology, but go and do it because you have to and you get to. and hope that that sort of bubbles up into a broader social conversation about, you know, again, who are we allowed to be at a time when our sort of default understanding of that is unraveling around us? Yes. Can we allow ourselves to use our imagination and to think even wider about what's possible if we let go of a default script that's actually limiting our sense of imagination right now and possibility? and I think drowning us in fear. And as parents, you know, I see it all the time, the kind of, oh, no, my poor darling, he or she can't just go to college and be assured a job. No, they can't. But let's not treat that as a burden that they're bearing. Let's treat it as an opportunity for them to go out and explore. It won't look like our lives, and that's okay. Okay. Jill, you know, when I, when you reached out and I read about you and what you've shared with me, I was really excited because I didn't really know anything about the book except what you, the little you gave me. But I was excited because I was wanted to be, you know, the potential. I'm excited to have this conversation. I want to learn more about this book. And then hearing you right now. One, I'm glad that you were able to join me because I feel like I think where your book is coming from and where my podcast is coming from, I think they're coming from the same place. I think it is, they're both coming from a place of, you know, to, to challenge and to push on these expectations, right? The stories that we tell ourselves. And I think to date myself, I remember growing up, the lives that we were supposed to, that we aspired to were lives in magazine articles, lives in commercials, right? And the family that you saw in the white picket fence and the dog. And I feel like for young, particularly for young people, but really for all of us now, those stories, we're inundated with them because of social media. And you see like, why don't you have this? And this person has this. And I hear it from my seeds all the time. You know, I'm 20 and I feel like I should have already accomplished this or accomplished that. And so, one, thank you for this. Because I think we need to have these conversations. I think we need to push and we need to show people about the choices that they have and opportunities and seeing things as opportunities And hand The fact that taking the example of you go to college and that job isn guaranteed that's not a bad thing. I think you recognize that there are a lot of opportunities available now. What do we do with them, right? What are you going to do with them? So thank you for that. Thank you for this conversation. I'm eager to get into the book. I want to read the book and learn and share this with others as well. And I think, you know, I just think this conversation is so critical at the small net. Yeah. Yeah. I feel, you know, to kind of pull a little bit of a thread through my experiences, it's the corrosive effect of fear and the way that it cuts you off at your knees in terms of your sense of agency and your sense of what's possible. And what I see amongst my counterpart parents is a fear narrative that they either explicitly or implicitly pass on to their kids, that the world is a very hard place and it's a terrible place and you're lucky if you, you know, just get yourself through it. I see a doubling down on sort of old school ways of thinking about how to succeed. You know, you have to get even more A's. You have to feed those external metrics even more in the hopes that that will somehow immunize you against these realities. And, you know, I don't, back to my own children, it's like I don't want them to walk out into this beautiful world thinking that it's somehow unfair. and, you know, hard. The simple reality is that most of the people in the world have never been able to buy security. They never have. They've always been figuring it out. Always. And I think the myth that, you know, if I just do these three things, I can kind of coast for the rest of my life. That's a luxury that no longer exists. But fine then, you know, let us explore what's possible when we don't, as I often say to my own kids, put on a suit and sleepwalk. You know, let's go out and see what it's like when you've got to show up to a variety of different situations to put your best foot forward, to learn all the time, to adapt and to hustle. And I've had a few people kind of come to me with, well, isn't this for the privileged? You know, isn't this kind of self-permission that you're talking about to create a life that kind of works for this moment, isn't that just the ultimate privilege? And I was like, you know, I don't buy that anymore because I think the world is requiring us to come out with something that is unique and relevant and something we can own and something we can sort of create with others. But also, you know, the people I know who've sold fruit on the streets of Johannesburg or the women who've had, you know, five different careers during the course of their lives in order to support their families. Those are people who've never had the luxury of linearity, who've never had the luxury of a belief that their identity was fixed. They've been hustling their whole lives. So, you know, I don't think it's privilege. I think it's reality that we need to get a little bit more in the driver's seat of our lives and not believe that if we make a couple of really good choices were set. It's far more complicated than that. And it's about days, not years. And it's about, you know, so many things that I think are requiring us to show up differently. And that's okay. We can. We are born to be explorers. But we have to give ourselves permission to let go of an old way of thinking and sort of approach this quite differently. You know, I'm glad you mentioned that privilege because I think, I know there will be listeners or viewers that might see this and say, well, this is somebody who has the privilege and can do this work and can have these conversations maybe and is not recognizing her own privilege in the world, right? You're a white woman. And so what kind of privilege does that offer you? But, you know, and I've even asked that question of my students. So the majority of the students that I work with, a first generation, a lot of the majority Latino students. Um, um, and, uh, and I remember having this conversation where I said, maybe the, is it a privilege to dream? Is it a privilege to see beyond, uh, the stories that have kind of defined and guided us? And, uh, and, and I, I, I don't, I, I think, right. We have to give ourselves, right. It's up to, to give ourselves that privilege because I think about, you know, my own story and, and, um, you know, my parents didn't have means. And I often tell my students, I didn't know how little or how much money my parents had until I had to fill out the FAFSA. I recognize, wow, my parents did an amazing job with what they had. And, and, and I had opportunities that others didn't, but it wasn't because my parents made so much money, but it was just because they gave me, they encouraged me. And, And oftentimes, I think, encouraging me to give myself permission to do those things, if we're going to use those words. And so I remind my students, right, to give themselves, and I may not say give themselves permission, but that there's nothing wrong with giving themselves other opportunities, recognizing those opportunities, recognizing that it's not, it doesn't have to be linear. And that's a good thing, that they have many more opportunities than they realize that they do. Sometimes it's just a matter of recognizing them and acknowledging, I could do all of these different things. And I would only presume that that's what their parents hoped and dreamed for when they made their own very conscious decision to leave wherever they were from and pursuing something more, you know, to step off of whatever their default path was, which was not, you know, a decision likely taken with any, you know, sense of vast possibility. possibility. It was probably more of a survival decision, but it was full of aspiration and hope. You know, I start off the book by saying, you know, the rest of this book is about you giving yourself permission, but I want to give you permission to be optimistic because I think it's so easy right now to kind of slip into cynicism and catastrophism and, you know, these kind of ruminating conversations, but actually the best choices in our lives are built on optimism and belief that something better is possible. And every one of us is here to make our own unique contribution to whatever that looks like. So I wouldn't see any point in limiting my own possibility in service of, you know, a story about, again, who I'm allowed to be or not based on the past. I think we're all here to figure out how to make our best contribution. And whatever you came into the world with, whatever that looks like for you, that to me is the framing. How do I do that? What does that look like? Where am I going to be? Who am I going to be with when I do that. That for me is, are the kinds of conversations I want to have with young people that allows them to go beyond, get a good job. Because that is just, that doesn't even begin to cut it. And especially right now when nobody understands what that means anymore. Yeah. Jill, thank you. Thank you for your time today. A couple of things. One, as we transition out because I want to be mindful of your time. What last piece of advice do you want to leave our listeners and viewers with? To keep stepping out into the world. To keep actively exploring the world, which doesn't need to be the way I did it. It can just be their community, the other side of town. I think, especially right now, for young people. It's easy, as you've already referenced, to get sucked into a digital either echo chamber or just noise channel. And I think taking a conscious decision to put yourself in the world with real people doing interesting things, having real life experiences is so important in terms of the reality checking of it, the learning that comes with it, the reminder of what's possible. And, and yeah, to really kind of use time that isn't school or isn't, you know, duty bound to go out and live in real time and start collecting experiences with, you know, the mindfulness of somebody who's putting memories in a backpack and sort of going, this is what I'm building out. This is what I'm building is a lifetime of experiences that will determine what I think is possible. So the smaller you stay, the less you think is possible. The more you step into the new, the more you start to believe that, hey, maybe I have those options that I can't see from where I'm sitting. So don't overthink. Don't overplan. Don't try too hard to have everything figured out. Just go out into the world and let it teach you. I love that. I love that. Let it go out into the world and let it teach you. I love those words. Jill, if we need to, if we want to find, because we want to get out and get that book, where do we find your book? It's available on Amazon, at Barnes & Noble, through any of your local bookstores. You can go in and ask for it and order it, and they'll get it for you. If you want to know more, my website, 10permissions.com, has all the details around ordering it. And the other programs that I am creating to go along with it, because it's a set of ideas, but I absolutely know from my own experience that putting those ideas into practice is a different story. So, for instance, I'm building out a community of people who are trying to support each other to do this work, to explore together, to know that they're not alone in trying to find their way to be the first or the last. you know we're all figuring things out right now and you don't need to do it on your own so yeah that's all on my website 10permissions.com well I'll be sure to drop the links in the show notes but Jill thank you thank you for your time today thank you for sharing your story and thank you for putting this book out into the world I think it couldn't come at a better time thank you And thank you for inviting me into conversation. I would like to also express my gratitude to you for what you're offering through this podcast. I think the more voices that we put out there reminding people and particularly young people of a sense of possibility, you know, the better, the more hope we have for a better tomorrow. Thank you, Joe. Thank you. This concludes another episode of the Way to College podcast. Thank you to my guests. Thank you to our listeners and viewers out there. And remember to share the podcast with one other person. I'd appreciate it. And we'll see you again soon. Thank you and bye-bye.