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Ben took a little break while Sue chatted with Lynn Meinders, a social work professional who works with the Employee Assistance Program at Ascension Healthcare.

Listen as they discuss shared trauma from the pandemic, processing grief, and how to tell if your holidays are helping or hurting your mental health this year.

Our Something(s) Awesome to Share:

Marty Rogers has handed out Free Thanksgiving Dinners for 44 Years

The Mental Illness Happy Hour Podcast

Has this year been as unpredictable as we think?

As 2021 is wrapping up, Ben and Sue are looking back at this blog post from February of 2021 to see if they and their Exclamation teammates accurately predicted what 2021 had in store.

Awesome things to check out:

Be an amateur stargazer like Ben with the SkyView app.

Get your history fix with The Dollop Podcast (NSFW, but awesome).

Ben and Sue answer questions about their career journey, giving philosophies, what makes them hit their heads against a desk, and more. Tune in and we're sure you'll find a little something you can use.

Awesome Things We're Watching Right Now:

Secrets of the Whales on Disney+

Only Murders in the Building on Netflix

Another of our smart friends, Josh Roberts from The Wisconsin Credit Union League, joins Ben and Sue to talk about the power of planning, no matter how large or small your organization is.

They dissect the process from start to finish, share tips, and demonstrate that they're exactly the kind of people that get really jazzed about strategic planning.

Awesome things to Share:

Josh's Recommendations-

(Book links to Amazon but also please consider supporting your local bookseller..) -

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond

Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance - Edgar Villanueva -

The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power - Deirdre Mask

The Hidden Brain Podcast

Bagman: The Podcast

Sue's Recommendation (she used to be a trainer, did she mention that? ;) )

CUNA: Creating Member Loyalty

In this episode, Ben and Sure dive deep into where to start, what to strive toward, and how you support your core values well into the future. And they do it all with integrity, which means something.

Awesome things we wanted to share:

Loved Before has a unique mission built on recycling the cutest, fluffiest friends.

Looking for something fun to do or see? Check out Only In Your State.

How do we keep that rosy outlook? By focusing on purpose, both project-by-project and as a guiding principle for what we do.

In this episode, Ben and Sue drive home the importance of purpose and, probably, achieve Ultimate Podcast Inception.

Ben's inspiration recommendations:

Design Week

Identity Designed

Masterpicks

Sue's book recommendation:

He Saw That It Was Good - Sho Baraka

Join Ben and Sue as they learn about the very different lived experiences of two AAPI credit union professionals, Mark and David, and the reality of the world today.

Ben and Sue are joined by Rich, Exclamation's VP of IT, to take a quick jog through the last 200+ years of Tech history, try their hand at computer trivia, and talk about what Rich sees in the future.

Besides being a dynamic presence in any Zoom meeting (from our personal experience), Kathy is an expert on leading people through change, and she's made it her life's mission to be an agent of positive change wherever her career has led her.

Along with this awesome conversation, we all had some awesome reads to recommend:

(We're including links to find these great books on Amazon, because that's easy, but we always encourage you to find them at your favorite local book store!!)

Out of the Silence: After the Crash

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

The Good Lord Bird

Learn more about the I3 program from Filene

An article about Samira Salem

The African American Credit Union Coalition's Hall of Fame

Ted Lasso, Josh's recommendation