Jamie Lee  0:02  
Welcome to risky conversations.

Anne Devereux-Mills  0:05  
I love risky conversations. Yes, about risky conversations,

Jamie Lee  0:12  
and the reason why is because I think everything that's rewarding is on the other side of a risky conversation. And I'm so glad to have you and Deborah Mills, who is the founder of parlay house, and my neighbor, I

Anne Devereux-Mills  0:27  
mean, and which is more important, I think the neighbor part,

Anne Devereux-Mills  0:29  
the neighbor part,

Anne Devereux-Mills  0:31  
I mean, founder parlay house happened because I moved to a new city and didn't know my neighbors didn't have any friends. I sort of left a huge career running ad agencies in New York, and my life was filled with intensity and competition and extraction and transaction. And when I had a sort of culmination of a health and career crisis, I moved to San Francisco, and I didn't know my neighbors and I didn't have friends, so I wish you'd been my neighbor then. But I ended up inviting 12 strangers into my living room, 12 women, because I felt like as a woman, I just had been through a whole bunch of stuff, getting fired, having a recurrence of cancer, having my last kid leave for college, and I didn't have anybody to talk about, and we don't talk to our neighbors so much anymore. So I created a new version of neighbors called parlay house.

Jamie Lee  1:25  
You know, it's a kind of a risky proposition to have your like when you don't know them personally, right, when you haven't yet been introduced, to have them into your home. So, you know, yeah, it's back to that moment when you first decided to take that risk of inviting your strangers, right?

Anne Devereux-Mills  1:47  
Yeah, totally, yeah. I they were strangers to me, but everyone that was part of the initial group I knew through a friend of a friend. So it wasn't like I asked a random person walking down the street who might have been a serial killer to come sit in my living room? You know, I knew from from some source of trust, that that these were women who might be willing to have an interested in having a conversation about the things, the risky conversations that we can't have in the rest of our lives. And it turned out to be true, and my only request of the people I was asking was looking for diversity. And the word diversity is so overused, a lot of us are kind of over the word. But by diversity, I didn't just mean racial diversity. I meant intergenerational diversity, because how often do we talk to our kids about intimate things and our grandmothers about intimate things? And I wanted diversity in backgrounds. So I was I had spent 25 years talking to other people who were running companies and in the C suite or who worked for me, and it was always in this sort of hierarchical context. And I didn't want that. I wanted people who had come out of foster care and not gone to college and gotten way more degrees than I had had and lived in another country and married someone totally unexpected, or decided never to marry for a reason. I really just wanted that representation of broad life experience that allowed for us to grow in our in our frameworks. And it happened,

Jamie Lee  3:28  
amazing, amazing. Yeah, yeah. And I would call, you know, when I also worked inside companies, you just don't have the mindset, you don't have the wherewithal, you don't have the bandwidth. And I think we kind of suffer as a result of that. It's like,

Anne Devereux-Mills  3:45  
don't have permission. You know, it makes people uncomfortable. That line between personal and professional has always been so hard to figure out how to draw it. And if you're someone in a position of managing people, figuring out how deeply to know someone and still be able to have expectations and be their boss and give them feedback. And you know, as humans, it's very hard in a especially in a business environment, also in a family environment, to figure out how to walk that line between personal and professional, professional in the sense of needing to achieve and meet goals and deliver and all of those things that sometimes get in the way of the humanity.

Jamie Lee  4:30  
Yeah, yeah. And I think so many things can be resolved when we can have we can inject more humanity back to our working lives, you know, 100% Yeah. So what do you think about that? What do you think about people? I mean, I now work for myself. I work from this home office. I mean, it's incredible privilege, you know, I get to host these conversations whenever I want. But most of my clients, all of my clients, right? They their working hours are devoted to someone else. Yeah, or,

Anne Devereux-Mills  5:01  
yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's funny. You say that because I just put together a board, because I've been doing this for 12 years, trying to create communities around the country and around the world that foster communications between women and it's been reasonably self reliant, so I have a fantastic team. I think my oldest team member is 35 and I'm 62 and they don't necessarily have the life experience to take us to the next level, and I don't necessarily either. And so forming a board, I sort of assumed that the board would meet after work hours, because in my career, you know, work hours were really intense. I would get up at 445 in the morning. I was a single mom, shovel the driveway in New Jersey if it was snowy, drive into the city, walk across town in my crazy outfit, which was half work and half workout to get to the gym, get to the office at 730 run the company, draw the line at 6pm and say, I have to get home because it's time for me and my kids to have our time together. Go to sleep at 10 o'clock and get up and do it again. And I did that for, you know, 25 years. And so my assumption scheduling this board meeting was people are going to have to fit it in after their commitment to work. And a lot of the feedback I've received so far is wait. I didn't know this was going to be after work hours, and I thought, wow, we've come a long way to be able to devote time for a board meeting during the workday. And many of the people who responded are like you. They have they work for themselves. They have their a little more flexibility, but I could never have imagined it in my day in the office, devoting an hour or two hours to something I believed in, but was not getting paid for.

Jamie Lee  6:46  
I'm just kind of looking at you with these, like Wonder eye and like, how do you do that for 25 years? You know, waking up at 445 I mean, I think without even, it's even necessarily unnecessary to say, but what am I trying to say? Needless to say, it takes some like iron grit, like, you know, I

Anne Devereux-Mills  7:14  
think it was a different time. You know, I'm a generation older than you, and, you know, being a being a baby boomer, that was what people did. I mean that just literally there. It wasn't a choice. It's literally just how what the assumption was about how you're going to live your life if you wanted to be successful. And I don't think I knew anyone I was I was a leader in drawing the line and saying, I'm leaving at six to go home and be a mom. Most people were working late and then going out with colleagues, because building relationships in the workplace helped them, maybe more than helping at home. And so I was, you know, a thought leader, then saying, Hey, I'm also a mother, and here's what I'm going to devote my time to. And I've had women who worked for me say, and you don't even know how meaningful that was at the time, and now it's like, you know, it's not only the norm. It's not enough.

Jamie Lee  8:07  
Was that a risky conversation for you like to be able to draw that line? Very,

Anne Devereux-Mills  8:15  
very, very, very, because it was a constant reminder that I was different from almost everyone else who ran companies at that time were male, and many of them had wives at home who were doing some of the things that I was doing, or had different expectations of what a father does versus a mother does in these traditional relationships, and it was very risky. I mean, I wish I had drawn more lines, but I was already sort of looked at as maybe not not working as long of hours as everybody else. And is she adding enough value? And, you know, I constantly was aware of myself as a woman in the workplace because of that. Yeah,

Jamie Lee  8:58  
I have clients who also struggle with them, who are in a place where they can draw that line, but they want to keep going higher. And then the concern is, if I go somewhere else and work for this guy, then that means I have to take back those lines, or I won't have the capacity to draw lines. And it's a real like a quandary for them, yeah,

Anne Devereux-Mills  9:21  
well, I think it's a scary thing when you feel you know you're the one trying to prove yourself to someone more senior, whether it's a new boss or a new company or whatever. Just say, here are my boundaries. But the more I see people doing it now, the more I think they're gaining respect from those around them who want to draw boundaries themselves and don't know how it's also, I think, much harder legally, to deny people the right to do that. There, I'm sure are still lots of places where you'd be penalized in a work space for doing that. And you know, for people who are looking for life balance and boundaries, you probably have. To pick and choose who your employer is, so that you can, you can have those risky conversations. But you know, for me, it's a risk worth taking. I was not willing to sacrifice my time with my kids for more work, and it was the right balance for me, and I did just fine. Could I have been even more successful, I don't know, maybe, but I certainly wouldn't have been more happy. And isn't that the right measure?

Jamie Lee  10:32  
Yeah, because now when you look back like you're so glad you had that risky conversation, you set the boundary like, in fact, you would have said, I

Anne Devereux-Mills  10:39  
actually didn't have the conversation. I just declared that's what I was doing. Got it. So I tend to be a don't ask for permission. Do what you think is right, and if you need to apologize, you can, but I never really needed to. Got it.

Jamie Lee  10:59  
What were some of the risky, riskier conversations that you did have to have as a sample, um, you

Anne Devereux-Mills  11:09  
know, some of the some of the risky ones were calling out inappropriate behaviors, male to female, inappropriate behaviors. I mean, I can't tell you the number of times that very powerful men would half jokingly hand me their hotel room key and say they'd see me later. You know, very demeaning, you know, writing little notes on napkins next to me in a meeting. Hey, when are we going to go and, you know, have a drink together, just yucky stuff. And so sometimes I would have the risky conversation of staying cut it out, and other times the risk would be just ignoring them and not giving them the you know, that's it's risky to say nothing as well. So sometimes the riskiest conversation is when you don't have, right. You know, many, many conversations like that. I also had cervical cancer, and had to have risky conversations of telling my bosses what physically was happening to me, something especially in my day. You didn't talk about your own reproductive system in a meeting, but I was, you know, going from Memorial Sloan Kettering, where I had something removed, and walking across town hoping I wasn't bleeding through things to go to a meeting with like I remember one time was with Magic Johnson and our creative director, and I walk in talking to these two very macho men thinking, Oh, my God, my insides have just been attacked, and here I am Trying to hold my shit together when I'm worried about my health, my life. You know, single mom, everybody depending on me, it was terrible to have those conversations which made the men uncomfortable and not have the conversations to be able to say, Hey, I'm not in a place where I can really be my best self at the moment, because that wasn't an option.

Jamie Lee  13:02  
Wow, that's all I can say. No again. Just tremendous amount of respect that you did that. And also, if we can go through the time, space continuum, could we, like send some compassion to that version of you? Totally,

Anne Devereux-Mills  13:19  
totally, totally, there wasn't compassion at the time. I mean, I did have some, a few equally successful female friends who I could commiserate with. I remember one time, my friend Nancy and I were in a board meeting together, and I think there were 30 some people on the board, and we were the two women on the board, and they're, you know, all the others were sort of different, non differentiated, white guys. I mean, I liked many of them. They were, they were good people, but I remember the guy running the meeting, Nancy. I'm about five, four, blonde, petite. Nancy is six feet tall with short, dark hair, and, you know, we're about the same age and we have similar value systems. We're not the same person, especially visually. And I don't know if it's intentional or subconscious, but he would call us by the other one's name, like the women in the room are interchangeable. And yet he never got, you know, Phil and Fred and Mark and Bob and you know, they never messed up their names. Never got confused about which white guy it was. But there were many times when we experienced things that couldn't really be talked about, except in the privacy of the ladies room.

Jamie Lee  14:37  
Yeah, yeah. I recall reading that, according to research, it takes at least three of you being in that room for you to be considered, not just like a minority entity, but like individuals who are different from the majority.

Anne Devereux-Mills  14:55  
I think it depends three, three compared to how many mm. And how, you know there, even within a board, there are hierarchies. So what's your role on the board? Like? Very, very often there's an HR person who's a woman on the board, and I have never, ever seen her when it's a her be given an equal voice, even though she is supposedly an equal board member, because people who are bottom line driven, profit driven, often view that as a cost center and a service center, and not of equal value. So you know, there, even when there are not stated hierarchies, there are hierarchies that affect power. I do think having at least three women in the room allows someone to voice and reinforce when an idea that came from a woman and is being sort of usurped by the next man who takes credit for it, allows the person to say, well, as Nancy first said, or as you know, you need enough people to be able to create that, that groundswell. And you know, if the number is three

Jamie Lee  16:03  
great, like a echo, echoing

Anne Devereux-Mills  16:07  
effect, or, yeah, supporting each other, or calling out without being rude, not saying, I'm so glad you're reiterating what she just said. You know, it's a nice way to tell them to stop taking credit when an idea wasn't wasn't theirs. Yeah,

Jamie Lee  16:23  
yeah. So I'd imagine, you know, all of that experience in the corporate world, the terrible parts, the toxic parts, the sexist parts, sort of create impetus, or desire, even like motivation, for you to do parlay house, not,

Anne Devereux-Mills  16:40  
not consciously. I mean, truthfully, I was not aware of it at all. I grew up with two sisters so and then had two daughters, and went to Wellesley College, and had all these experiences where the majority of my life was framed by women, but the mint the day I graduated and went into the work world, that was no longer the case, and I just accepted it as the norms of the real world. And so it wasn't until I lost everything, my job, my health, my last kid, had gone to college, I already had gotten divorced, and I was sort of sitting there with nothing that defined me left. I could no longer walk in the room and say, Hi, I'm Ann, I'm the CEO. Hi, I'm Ann. I'm the mother of these two girls. Hi, I'm Anne. Yeah, we're at the gym at 530 in the morning and working out before we I couldn't do any of those things anymore. So who was I? And that was the time that I started to think about what don't I want, superficial conversation, transactional relationships, things that can't be addressed. What do I need to not feel alone, to understand whether other people are feeling the same way, to finally say something out loud that I've never been able to comfortably say out loud. And so it was a it was a process of sitting in the nothingness and figuring out what to discard and what to double down on, and I doubled down on vulnerability, authenticity, openness, community, inclusion, growth, and it worked for me.

Jamie Lee  18:11  
Oh, you know, I just realized we've been talking for like 20 minutes. I don't think we've actually explained or defined parlay house. I just said

Anne Devereux-Mills  18:21  
That's right, because we both know what it is. Well, sorry, sorry. Listeners, so parlay house is a the only community I know of for women that we ask you to leave what you do at the door and walk through the door to talk about yourself in the context of who you are and what you feel and what you need and what you're celebrating and what you've been through. Because when we take off that robe of of work or of definition of what we do for a living, that robe covers up all of the truths underneath, and when we show those truths all of a sudden, no matter how old you are or what your path was to get into that room, that day, you find commonalities and strength and excitement to belong and to meet people who you would not have met if you had just kept on the cloak of keeping your work, Keeping your world to work, family and into, you know, immediate community. So, you know, I've developed more friendships, heard more stories of people who actually made me feel less alone in all the crap that I've had to go through, and it's just been wonderful. We're now 12 year old organization. We are live in cities around the country. We're virtual every other week for anybody who wants to join us for conversations, sort of like these, with phenomenal speakers and women who have Wisdom Insights, you know, stuff to share that we never have talked about before. And it's everything from how to deal with the narcissists in your life to. Someone who is a marketing person by day, in a dominatrix at night. And, you know, the we don't talk about any of those things, we might have curiosity. We might never have known how to deal with something until other women are willing to bravely share their own stories. And so that's that's all about. We've got a podcast called Bring a friend, which has been a super fun more than 100 episode conversations with women like beyonce's mom and Michael Pollan about psychedelics and how they've shaped his life. And you know, we've just had many great conversations. Senator Cory Booker talked to us during covid about what it was like to lead remotely and try to be in in a service world at a time when many people in politics aren't serving so well and so, you know, we hit every topic, even those that people say you shouldn't talk about. Just last week, we had a great virtual conversation about non traditional relation relationships, polyamory, and how that figures into people's lives, the effects that it has on the originally monogamous partners and on the new people and on the kids and yeah, I just I didn't know anybody who was living a life like that, and I learned so much and appreciated so much by having those open conversations. So that's what we're doing. It's we have an online community and support for each other, and it's just, it just feels so good at a time when our communities are so split, having one where we actually are coming together is such an antidote to all that frustration disconnection. Yeah,

Jamie Lee  21:40  
yeah. And I feel like there's a deep yearning for that sort of genuine connection, even more so since the pandemic. And by the way, you know another person who is, was it ethically not monogamous? Paul Edwards, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anne Devereux-Mills  21:58  
Totally do.

Jamie Lee  22:01  
Hmm, fabulous conversations hosted in Anne's home in New York with, you know, Cindy gallop, who talked about make

Anne Devereux-Mills  22:10  
Make Love, Not porn. Make Love, Not porn. I will

Jamie Lee  22:13  
say it in the opposite way, yeah.

Anne Devereux-Mills  22:16  
Well, you know, Cindy was an advertising person with me. We were on the board of advertising women of New York together, we were definitely the rebels of that group. And you know, Cindy sort of recognized that her path, her own unique path, was not traditional. She is older than I am, and has always loved to date younger men and does not want to be married or in a monogamous relationship. And so when she started talking about her sexual choices, she recognized how repressed society was in talking about sexuality. And so she launched this whole campaign to make not not anti porn, but to help people, especially the young men she was interested in, understand the difference between what a real relationship and a real sexual relationship is like compared to the acting and sort of goofiness that is part of the the world of traditional porn. And she, I think she says traditional porn, her Make Love, Not porn, is the documentary to the Disney version of pornography. That's That's what everybody else knows. I thought that was such a funny analogy. But you know, our conversations aren't just about sex. They're about everything. They're about disability. They're about pain, physical and emotional. They're about relationships. They're about that. We have women who have like the the woman who is the mom of Alex hunnold, who climbed he's a free solo climber. He's like the greatest known free climber in the world. His mother didn't have a relationship with him because he was always off on a mountain. Somewhere at 60, she decided to learn how to climb herself so that she could at least be with her son and have conversations. By 70, she climbed El Capitan herself, and she's been, she's been a speaker for us. I mean, yeah, we have just these amazingly inspirational women who do things that most of us wouldn't dare to do, do risky things that we wouldn't dare to do. And to her, it's not risky, it's normal.

Jamie Lee  24:18  
Yeah, and I recall you also hosted a former world champion of fencing who is, oh, she

Anne Devereux-Mills  24:27  
was phenomenal. Nazinga Prescott, yeah. I mean, she's, she's a woman from bed. Stuy, African American grew up with with no one thinking she was going to go and be a world champion fencer. It just wasn't a sport that was traditionally brought to her community, and she she fell in love with the sport. It fit her personality, it fit her skills. She went on to, you know, be one of the most most celebrated fencers, and then to open up a nonprofit to introduce fencing to towns like. Like the one where she grew up and she's just an amazing change agent. Did she talk to us while she was eight months pregnant? You know, it's kind of like, wow, she clearly can do, do everything and step out of her zone. Yeah, that was a very cool conversation.

Jamie Lee  25:13  
Yeah. And I love these conversations because they are, in a sense, the conversations that would be too risky to have in the professional or the public arena, but they're also vital for helping us feel less alone, more human, inspired, more connected. And you know, I'm really glad we talked about Cindy gallop, because she was she, I interviewed her on this podcast as well, and when you really hear her talk about it like she has a very revolutionary idea about she does, right? It's like the whole thing that makes sex taboo is the power dynamics, but the power imbalance. So if we were to correct that, if there was a power equality, then we can all talk about sex, you know, totally right. And so I think about how these types of risky conversations that you're hosting, right, that you're helping us have, like imagine a different world where it becomes less taboo to have them in our professional areas, in our absolutely right? It will be so, so much more different. And I think that's why I, you know, rebranded my podcast as risky conversations too.

Anne Devereux-Mills  26:25  
Yeah, yeah. Well, the other thing that I'm hoping we become, because I'm always looking at what's, what's our growth trajectory, is if companies can't hold these conversations themselves, A, B, it might not be the direction of their workplace or whatever. What added value can they give their female employees to help with retention and being seen and fitting in? There's no reason that they can't just send them to parlay house where we provide that content and those services that make employers better, employers in places where these conversations just can't can't happen for other reasons.

Jamie Lee  27:06  
Tell us more about your future vision for parley house, how you know you wrote the book The parlay effect, and you gave a tennis as well. And how would the parlay effect play a role in the continuing growth of parlay house.

Anne Devereux-Mills  27:21  
You know, the parlay effect was something that I noticed after a few years of having parlay house be non transactional, is I just sort of had the gatherings and people left, and I knew that they were liking them, because they came back the next month and they brought a friend, and that's how we grew was really women bringing other women to the table. But I started hearing these anecdotal stories of things that would happen, either during the event or after the event, that were exponential in their impact. So it might be that people found a common interest and one woman brought another to a totally separate learning event, where she either got inspired, got a job, brought more people with her, and the one plus one was starting to add up to way more than two. And I wanted to understand what was going on with this dynamic. Was it pay it forward? Because Pay It Forward has always been kind of a big thing, whether it's you buy Starbucks for the person in line after you, or whatever it is. So I partnered with Dr Serena Chen, who's the head of the Psychology Department at Berkeley, and we did a study that was part of my book. And the study was an online questionnaire where we divided respondents into three groups, and the in the three groups, we asked them a question, and the first group was, can you think of a time where something you something small, that you did for someone else, had disproportionate effect? And we called that group the givers, and those people told us stories of, sure, I did something for someone, and there it created this whole cascade where they did more and more things to for other people. And those, those people we sort of all know in our lives, the thoughtful, generous people who are inclusive or generous or whatever, and the second person, we called the receivers, and we said, Can you think of some time that someone did something for you, helped you in some way that had a disproportionate effect. And we heard similar responses, and then we thought, Okay, what about people who don't are not part of those systems of support and inclusion? And we called those people the observers, and we just said, you might not have done anything that you think is disproportionately helpful to someone else, nor do you feel anyone has done the same for you. But have you ever observed something and that group of people said absolutely, like I was sitting in my track outside of 711 and there were some homeless people across the street, and I saw someone walk out of 711 with an extra sandwich and give it to those people, and they went and shared. With each other, and four people had something in their stomachs as a result of one person observing. I saw that happen. And then when we probe deeper with those people, they said, and next time I went to 711 I did the same thing. And so what we saw was when there was a behavior that was kind positive, inclusive, helpful in a lot of it was teaching someone who didn't know how to do something, a skill, either in the workplace or in their community, using your superpower, something that comes super easily, editing a document whatever, whatever your spelling expertise is. When you started showing I have something that I do easily, that I can share with you, other people started seeing positive things in themselves and sharing them on a broader level, creating an exponential wave of community in this abstract sense. And that's really what the parlay effect is. It's that when we include each other, see each other open up to each other, unexpected Amazing things happen, things that are way better than when you go in expecting a transaction and extraction, something superficial. And so that's really what the the book is about. And we've grown nationally and internationally for the same reason that people have positive experiences that are unlike anything they have in any traditional networking group or, you know, corporate thing. And they say, I'm leaving, I'm leaving San Francisco, New York, you know, LA, all the places where we have Miami, all these places where we have organizations, and I'm now going to end up in San Antonio. And I want to start this there. I can't leave this this. And that's how we've started to grow around the country and around the world. And before covid, we were in Amman, Jordan, London, Paris, Dubai, all because we had people who felt the positive effects of what we were doing, and wanted to replicate it. So my My vision is that the the effect continues, that we have people who understand the value, not only from a individual level, where they want to join, but even leaders who are listening to podcasts like this, who say, How can I add value to my community without it being a huge cost or time burden that takes away from what we need to accomplish as a business and partnering up with us to bring more people to the conversation. Because you know, once you once you feel connected and seen and included, you perform better. You're happier. You know, all of all of the positive effects, ripple, ripple outwards, and so that's what I'm hoping keeps happening.

Jamie Lee  32:47  
I can just imagine there are people, there are women leaders listening to this, who are inspired by what you've just shared. And they're like, Oh, how can I create the parley effect, even if it's in a small scale, right? Whether I joined Harley house, or something that I can do today. You know, I

Anne Devereux-Mills  33:04  
think the biggest thing that women can do, and everybody, is a leader in in some form. You don't have to be in the C suite to be a leader, but this idea of living your life openly is probably the greatest gift you can give to everybody you work with. Acknowledging when things are hard, acknowledging when you're not sure what to do, soliciting help, apologizing because you didn't see something and made making a mistake, you know, taking responsibility for that. I just think a lot of this authenticity, which we think makes us weak, is actually strengthening us and the people around us to be human as well. And that's really the essence of what we do, is allowing for the messiness, imperfection and joy of our humanity.

Jamie Lee  34:00  
I totally second. I mean preaching to the choir. I think it's all about, how do you make your authority authentic? Because you're when you are truly in your power. It doesn't feel like you're faking it or trying to be something else. It is who you are. Yeah,

Anne Devereux-Mills  34:16  
I also think, you know, I look back, what do I wish I'd done differently in my life, and, you know, with my daughters, because I was a single mom and was trying to be everything to everybody. And we had my first husband was abusive, and so we were all very, sort of jittery as a result of many, many years with a scary person. And so I did not talk about my failures and fears enough with them, and I saw them grow into their own womanhood, and somehow compare their very real, valid uncertainties and fears with their mother, who seemed not to have any. And it was such a big mistake. You know, you want to give them stability, right? You don't want to say, I'm your only parent. And now I'm unsure, but you definitely want to say, Boy, I messed up, or I wish I'd handled that differently, or I thought about what I said to you yesterday, and what I wish I'd said was this, there's always room to go back and correct if you have the confidence to do that and it it's just a great lesson for the generation that's watching you. Yeah,

Jamie Lee  35:20  
to be able to do that so on point, because for many of us, it can feel like a risky conversation when we feel like we have to be a certain like, you know, mold ourselves into a certain role or an ideal, or be more masculine or tough, or whatever, unemotional, right? Yep, yeah, opposite of open, human, vulnerable, flexible, yep. So I think there's an

Anne Devereux-Mills  35:48  
awareness. I do have people in my life who err on the side of oversharing. There's a self awareness that comes. You know, if you overshare all the time or your your lead emotion is your lead. Thing you're projecting is emotion all the time. It's a little bit of crying wolf and people stop listening. So figuring out how you use those moments of openness and vulnerability to have the greatest impact, I think, is important. There's always a middle ground with all of it, but we're still far on the side of keeping our mouths closed when sharing would be so much better for everybody.

Jamie Lee  36:27  
Yes, where can people go to learn more about parlay house?

Anne Devereux-Mills  36:32  
Great. Well, you can go to parlayhouse.com it's actually we just relaunched our website. I'm very happy with it, and you can see the cool things that we've done. One of the things that I love for people who join us as a member is when we have these virtual conversations that we have every other week, they all get recorded, and we have a library of hundreds of incredible conversations with people that you're just like, wow, that hits the nail on the head for me. And so, you know, there's this that by going to the website and joining us, you'll be able to access regardless of where you are and what your time zone is and what your availability is, if you're, if you're a night owl and you don't have content for your two in the morning, you know, moment to yourself, we've got, we've got the content for you. So come, come check it out and join us. And I think for those who are in a city where we're live, it's so scary to walk into someone's house where you don't know anybody. I mean, I'm an introvert, so for me, if I hadn't started the organization, I think it'd be very hard for me to do that, because I'm inherently shy, but it's the kind of place that within five to 10 minutes of being in that room, you've had a conversation with somebody that made you feel not not like energized, not only less alone and seen, but it's just such a big exhale and relief that here is a place that's unlike any other, and finally feels like you're at the Top of the hierarchy of who's getting paid attention to and taken care of. Because, look, most of us are spending our lives taking care of others, whether it's partners, whether it's work, whether it's clients, whether it's whoever you know. Geez, give yourself a week a month where you're the queen.

Jamie Lee  38:17  
I can totally attest to that. It's been brought to parley house through a friend. A friend brought me there, and then I brought my friends. I even brought my clients who wanted to you know we're also like you and me introverts. And they're like, Yeah, I want, I need to be talking to more people, but I don't want to do the the stereotypical network, networking out bar, and people are barking like, come to parlay house,

Anne Devereux-Mills  38:43  
totally, totally. Well, thank you. You can be our spokesperson anytime,

Jamie Lee  38:49  
gladly. Well, thank you so much. Is there anything else that we haven't yet addressed, or any parting wisdom, or something you want to leave the listeners with?

Anne Devereux-Mills  39:01  
Just think it would be a really loving thing to do for yourself, to make a list of a few superpowers that you have, things that come really, really naturally to you, that you take for granted because there's such a core part of your DNA. And put them on a sticky note and put them on the mirror as a reminder to yourself of those strengths and as a reminder to yourself of the gifts you can give to other people that don't suck a lot of life out of you, because if we start sharing those easy gifts with each other, we're all going to be better for it, and you'll feel like the leader, that You are

Jamie Lee  39:38  
beautiful. Thank you so much. Anne,

Anne Devereux-Mills  39:41  
thank you. Bye.