Permission with Dr. Sherry Walling

Sherry talks about the importance of appreciating what is good about life and to honor, protect, and love things that are beautiful in response to the ugliness that is going on in the world.

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Webinar with Cory Miller

Rob will be at SaaStr next week

Sherry will be at the Bureau of Digital’s Owner Sumit

Sherry’s recent podcast interviews:

Freelance Transformation

Unemployable

Office Hours FM

Versioning Show

Episode Transcript

Sherry Walling:

Hi, folks. This is sort of the season of Rob and I being here and there and everywhere. It’s just me on the podcast today. He is getting back from one trip, and getting ready to go on another trip, and so we are sort of passing like ships in the night.

 

If you are at [Sastar 00:00:15] next week in San Francisco, then be sure to connect with Rob. He is there and I’m sure he would love to talk with any ZenFounder fans. Then I will be in San Diego in the middle of February, the 20th through the 22nd, for the Bureau of Digital Owner’s Summit. If any of you are heading that way, I would also love to chat and connect in person.

 

January was a busy month for me in the podcast world. I got to be a guest interviewee on several podcasts, several of my favorite podcasts. I got to talk with Brian Clark of Copyblogger. He interviewed me on his Unemployable podcast and we talked about psychology and entrepreneurship. I also got to be on the Versioning Podcast and talk about imposter syndrome and then had such fun talking with Carrie Dils on OffHours.FM and Matt Inglot on Freelance Transformation.

 

If you’re not totally bored of my voice and my perspective, then definitely check out those interviews, as well as check out some of the other episodes that those great folks are putting together for the founder community.

Sherry Walling:

So, we just returned from a family vacation a little bit north of Cancun. We had a lovely time together as a family spending lots of time in the pool, in the hot tub, and the resort where we were staying had a swim up bar. Which, my kids thought was the most amazing thing ever. And they had a whole kids menu with lots of different milkshakes, smoothies, d

Today there are so many ways to communicate and interact with people, either in person or digitally. In this episode Sherry and Rob share their insights and thoughts on why being in a room with people can be so powerful.

Today there are so many ways to communicate and interact with people, either in person or digitally. In this episode Sherry and Rob share their insights and thoughts on why being in a room with people can be so powerful.

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Sherry’s Webinar

Episode Transcript

Rob Walling:

In a couple of weeks, you’re co-hosting your first ever webinar and it’s with Cory Miller, who’s the founder of iThemes. What are you guys going to be talking about?

Sherry Walling:

Well, we’re going to be talking about all things mental health. Cory has a deep commitment to mental health in the founder community and has been really open about talking about his experiences with depression, which you can listen to I think on episode 97 of this podcast. And so, yeah, Cory and I just thought hey, we love talking about this, we care about this, let’s have a conversation and invite people to be part of it. I think we’ll focus on, as we tend to do, some strategies to really help build up resilience and wellness and hopefully people will get a lot of value out of it.

Rob Walling:

That’s cool. It’ll be I’d imagine a conversation and then some Q&A at the end? Maybe an hour?

Sherry Walling:

Yep. That’s the plan.

Rob Walling:

Sounds good. On February 7. It’s a Tuesday at noon central time. Where do people go if they want to sign up to hear about it via email?

Sherry Walling:

We will put the link in the show notes and then you can also keep up with what we’re doing on Zen Founder by signing up for our mailing list.

Rob Walling:

ZenFounder.com

Sherry Walling:

You have to forgive me. I’m a little bit under the weather; I have a little bit of a cold. Probably partially a product of having way too much fun this weekend and staying up late and running in the rain and, anyway, all kinds of shenanigans happened. So, my body’s a little bit like whoa, slow down, calm down, get some rest.

Rob Walling:

Yeah. And that was a result of you and I heading out to Los Angeles for a couple of days. We were invited out there by Karim who runs Crowd Favorite and you had met him at Copper Press. He invited a bunch of friends out and we didn’t think that we were going to be able to make it and then kind of last minute we were able pick up some cheap tickets and find somebody to watch the kids just for … You went out for, what? About four days? And I went out for just 48 hours and so we had someone stay a couple nights. And I think you and I both came away with the realization of the value of being in a room with people and that’s what we want to talk about today.

Sherry Walling:

Yeah. It was … You know, in addition to being just a delightful time with some really cool, smart, interesting people, I just felt like there was so much benefit to having taken the trip and spent the time sitting around in the living room chatting, sitting around in restaurants, sitting around at breakfast, going for walks. Even though we were really together quite a short time there was a lot of connection and I think both personal and professional benefit that came out of that time together.

 

One of the things that I think was really important in actually being in the room together as opposed to connecting in the digital world is that there’s an ability to not

In this episode Sherry talks about the science of touch. How it contributes to your mental well being and the well being of those around you. Also discussing the power of giving/receiving emotional comfort through touch.

In this episode Sherry talks about the science of touch.  How it contributes to your mental well being and the well being of those around you. Also discussing the power of giving/receiving emotional comfort through touch.

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Sherry’s Webinar Signup

References:

Berkeley researcher Dacher Keltner on Touch

Johns Hopkins neuroscientist David Linden on The Science of Touching and Feeling at TEDx

Episode Transcript

Sherry:

Hey guys, I’m super excited to announce that I’m doing my first webinar. I am going to be talking with Corey Miller, who is the founder of Ithemes, and who was recently a guest on this podcast. I think episode 97. Corey is really interested in mental health. He talks openly about his own experiences of depression. He and I are going to lead an interactive discussion around the topics we talk often about on this podcast. About mental health wellness, how to stay connected to yourself, to your family members, and we are doing this on Tuesday, February 7 at noon central. We will put a link in the show notes for you to register for this free webinar.

 

Another way to keep in touch with some of the things that Rob and I are doing right now, is to join the ZenFounder mailing list. We do not send a lot of email, I promise. It’s a great way to keep in touch with place that we’re speaking or different activities or events, like this webinar, that we might be involved in that you might be interested in checking out.

 

Sherry:

So I’m alone today on the podcast. I confess, I did a little bit of click bait on this episode, because the topic that I want to talk about is touch. I’m a little bit nervous everyone is going to say, “Okay, she has totally gone too far. This is the epitome of touchy feely and we’re no longer interested and we’re no longer gonna listen.” But, I promise that some of the content that I’m gonna talk about in the podcast today is super incredibly important to your own mental health and well being, as well as to the mental health and wellbeing of people around you.

 

So, please hang in there for my one sided conversation about the importance of touch as a wellness superpower. I started thinking about this over the last weekend. Those who listen to the podcast know that we are living in Minneapolis and it’s been cold and we’ve been inside a lot. Our youngest son, who’s six, was just really having a hard time with, I think, how little exercise he was getting and how little rough and tumble play he was getting. It’s been so cold they’ve kept the kids in at recess. So he’s been drawing at recess, which is fabulous, but this is a kid that needs to just move around.

 

So, on Sunday, I spent probably 45 minutes, maybe an hour, just tickling him and wrestling with him and throwing him up in the air, and just doing this big body play that involved a lot of touch. Over the course of that playtime, I could just feel his little body calming down. Almost like he’d been carrying a lot of tension and this was exactly the kind of play and contact with me that he needed, in order to be a

Rob and Sherry talk about how to teach your kids about money. They discuss the different money personality "types" and well as some learning goals including saving, budgeting, and investing.

Rob and Sherry talk about how to teach your kids about money. They discuss the different money personality “types” and well as some learning goals including saving, budgeting, and investing.

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The 5 Money Conversations to Have with Your Kids at Every Age and Stage

Rob Walling:

Episode 100. You’d think we would have thought of something more grandiose to do, like having 100 people on here giving us verbal testimonials.

Sherry Walling:

That sounds grandiose. What’s more important than talking about money honey?

Rob Walling:

Over the past almost two years we’ve been doing the podcast because we do it weekly and we’re up to episode 100. We’ve made our way to where we have thousands of unique downloads per episode. Tens of thousands of unique downloads per month. We have 42 worldwide iTunes reviews, all five star. We have folks who are helping support us via Patreon that support ZenFounder.com.

We really want to take this time to thank you our listener because without these numbers going up into the right people stop doing podcast. You lose the motivation to do it. Every week as we see the download numbers increase and we see new iTunes reviews come, and we see the money coming through to support the show, it feels great. We want to thank you as a listener and we just look forward to continuing to travel this journey that we’ve traveled over the past couple of years.

Sherry Walling:

As we mentioned at the beginning, our conversation topic today is about money, about dollars. We have been revisiting this part of our life with the new year, both in terms of thinking about our own family budget and our business budgets and what we want to accomplish financially this year. But the focus of this conversation is how to talk to kids about money, because our kids are 10 and six and they want stuff, believe me. So we’ve had lots of conversations lately, especially around the holidays around resources and how to use them, how to save them.

What’s a valuable expenditure when you have limited resources. It’s really inspired us to think carefully about how we’re getting our kids ready for money management as adults by getting them started now.

Rob Walling:

Yeah, and so every once in a while I’ll come across a book that is about how do you talk to kids about money and stuff like that. Some of them have been good, some of them have been not so good, but one that I read recently that I was pretty taken by, I felt like it did a really good job of helping me rethink the way that I view how our kids spend money, it’s called The 5 Money Conversations You Should Have With Your Kids at Every Age and Every Stage. I got it in audio format but it’s available in Kindle and in physical.

We’ll link up the Amazon link in the show notes. The idea and what I liked about this book is I’ve heard in the past allowance versus no allowance, chores versus no chores, how to teach them about investing, how to teach them the values and such. What I liked about this one is that the co-authors have already written a book for married couples about figuring out your own personality type, your spouse’s and then figuring out your compatibilities and incompatibilities and how working together you can figure out how to surmount those, because money obviously is

In light of the recent holidays and getting together with family members, Sherry and Rob talk about family systems and hierarchy. They give some strategies to help deal with any emotional angst of re-entering your family of origin.

In light of the recent holidays and getting together with family members, Sherry and Rob talk about family systems and hierarchy. They give some strategies to help deal with any emotional angst of re-entering your family of origin.

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Episode Transcript

Rob Walling:

Went home to California for the holidays. Minneapolis is a bit cold right now. In fact I think with windchill it was -26 today and so for the past, what nine or ten days we were staying in Santa Cruz and then in East Bay and we saw a bunch of old friends and a bunch of old family.

Sherry Walling:

Old family? I’m sure your mother is offended that you said that.

Rob Walling:

I was just saying that as a joke.

Sherry Walling:

Yaka, yaka. Yeah, so like 65 degrees when you’re a Californian is like, cold to be at the beach but when you’ve been in Minnesota for a while that’s a totally fine temperature to be at the beach.

Rob Walling:

Well you and our youngest were in wetsuits ’cause we packed our wetsuits. So we never check bags right, that’s our thing. We have small bags, we carry ’em on, but we had four wetsuits that we wanted to bring, and we checked the bag for that and you and our youngest were in the water, in Santa Cruz, in essentially end of December and the water was cold. But you boogie boarded for extended periods of time.

Sherry Walling:

It wasn’t that cold once you got moving. And it’s just so fun, and it’s this … it’s something that he and I love to do together, so I think a good wetsuit is a very good investment if you like to play in the water, in the Pacific.

Rob Walling:

Yeah, so that was fun. It was fun to get back to California for a bit and see family and that’s what this episode is about. It’s about post holiday recovery, but more than that it’s about family systems, and it’s about how to think about as you get older, you know, when you revisit and see family members or you know, our brothers, sisters, your parents. When you see them it’s pretty often that you revert back to kind of being a kid. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today, because it’s easy to fall into kind of the traps or the tropes of where you were when you were 15. And there’re plusses and minuses to that, and so we have a syn theoretical band, that’s the cool part of today, is like you’ve put together an outline as a trained clinical psychologist, who has studied this and who has experience in learning about family systems and the research on it.

 

And then we also have some very specific coping skills that you and I have developed to kind of get out of the house and have some alone time, especially if you’re an introvert, to be able to feel fulfilled. Because when there’s a lot of people around it’s often easy to get overwhelmed and to not give yourself time and space to basically debrief and mellow out and then come back more energized.

Sherry Walling:

Yeah, we probably should have recorded this episode before the holidays, that would have been more helpful to people, but I guess one of the values of this conversation is to normalize if you feel a little bit like your world has been rocked after spending time with family over the holidays. Even if you have the best family, that you just love and you get along with really well, it can be pretty tricky to re-engage with your family for a long period of time, a

Rob and Sherry review this past year, talking through both highs and lows, and some hopes they have for the new year.