34: Charge What You’re Worth with Sarah White

 

Transcript of my conversation with Sarah White on changing our attitude toward money

Sarah White:                   I had no idea that I liked to teach or had any aptitude in this area until I got into doing personal history work and got interested in teaching memoir writing workshops, you know, my story writing. My very brief bio: checkered career in entrepreneurship, graphic design, writing, publishing; it left me feeling that too much of my work was about money and not enough about the heart. And when I discovered personal history, I really found the antidote to that. And so it was 2002 when I met a personal historian and realized that she was doing something that I had skills towards and would really like to do. In 2006 I launched my business, First Person Productions. Um, in 2012 I sort of re scoped from doing the oral history approach to more of a focus on coaching people to do their own writing.

Sarah White:                   It really gave me satisfaction to see people's confidence and their skills grow. And that's pretty much what I've been doing since in my personal history business. And I served on the Association of Personal Historians board starting in 2004 and was president of that group from 2012 to 2015. A service that I really enjoyed giving to the field. But it gave me a real background in, you know, the problems that personal historians face, whether I was working on what would we be having workshops at our conferences or building our education program. That was something I was involved in. I really began to see the need for the kind of money conversations that weren't happening.

Amy:                           If there's any listeners who don't know what the association that, that you just referred to is, that was the Association of Personal Historians. I've mentioned it on the podcast before it, it was one of the reasons that I started this podcast, the demise of the association, which was around for about 20 years and it was a great educational resource for people in the business. And they just shut down last year in 2017. I know that you were very involved with it and you know, you were a past president. So I wasn't even thinking about that part of it when I invited you onto the show. But you must really have an in with this business and the multitude of challenges that people face.

Sarah White:                   I think I would not be exaggerating if I said I was among the top 10 people in the world. Really. That sounds like such a braggy thing to say. But having talked to dozens and dozens of personal historians around the world, I've taught classes for people in New Zealand and Australia even online, and I feel like I do have my pulse on what's going on in the business and what people need to succeed in it.

Amy:                                        Sarah, you created a workshop specifically for personal historians, “Write Your Way to a Better Relationship with Money.” Tell us why. What is it about this profession specifically that we need this kind of workshop?

 

Sarah White:                   Well, it's because people with big hearts tend not to expend a lot of their time thinking about financial success and self promotion and getting comfortable with putting themselves out there, asking other people to spend large amounts of money on the service that they offer. And I'll tell you specifically how this came about, so connecting the dots from, you know, leading the Association of Personal Historians led to working with the International Institute for Reminiscence and Life Review. We just call it the institute and building a certificate program designed for life story workers, people who work in reminiscence settings in institutions and people who have independent practices like personal historians and I developed a business for that.

Sarah White:                   Other teachers do the modules on the field and the practice of personal history. But I do. So you want to start an independent practice, here's what you need to know. And as I was teaching the first year, we've done maybe four years of the program now, the first few times through my class I was seeing this huge fear and anxiety coming up in my students as I introduced the business stuff, particularly the marketing, the pricing, the sales. They love thinking about creating their products. They love thinking about having independent businesses and being able to be fluid in there, you know, managing their own work life. But all my gosh, the money stuff was a problem for them. Well, after a few years of teaching the class, I realized my students came into module three, my class knowing stuff I didn't know about the field of reminiscence in life review, so I asked if I could take the certificate program myself and I did.

Sarah White:                   I did it legitimately as a student and when it came time to design my capstone project, I said, well, you know, teaching is something that really interests me and I see this real need for training in this area. For my capstone. I will develop curriculum for a class about our relationship with money. And I did that and so the first time I taught the class it was as you know, earning my capstone degree and then I've done the curriculum one more time. Since then I'm getting ready now to launch another class and keep evolving the curriculum and refining it as we go. But it, it proved very valid, very helpful to people from the evaluations I got back even from that first time through

Amy:                                        “Write your Way to a Better Relationship with Money”: There's a lot of advice out there, especially for entrepreneurs or solo preneurs, you know, people starting off their own businesses or bootstrapping. There's an awful lot of advice out there given by authorities from on high, you know, sitting at the pulpit saying, This is how you should act. This is how, you know, the mindset that you should adopt. But it sounds to me like if you're using a, a method that was intended for people to look inside themselves and reflect and reminisce, you're taking that and you're applying it to attitudes people have towards money, but it sounds like you're asking people to really take a dive into their psyche and figure out their own particular tangles that they have or unexamined assumptions or you know, where things might go a little bit awry. Is that correct.

Sarah White:                   Correct. Correct. You right on. Um, and I should have mentioned it's based on James Berens guided autobiography method. His approach, which is a 10 week workshop format involving prompting questions and then writing you on the topics on those questions. And you move through eight or 10 different life themes in that and one of his themes is money. So my idea was really to take what he did with the one week about money and like work career stuff and unpack that and go deeper. So I basically started from the questions that he posed. I kept the format of the guided autobiography class pretty much the way you introduced with some discussion and raising some thoughts and then people read and share their work with each other each week. So it's based around that guided autobiography approach and workshop format. We just keep the focus laser sharp on our relationships and attitudes about money

Amy:                                        This sentence, I'm going to read it because I think it encapsulates it beautifully. You write, “We uncover old bad stories we've told ourselves and replace them with stories that guide us to earn, spend and save comfortably and in alignment with our values.” So you're talking about earning, spending and saving. And the earning part is the part that really interests me because I think that is where a lot of life story professionals, um, you know, get a little faint of heart. They don't know how to get over the difficulty of talking about these, talking about money issues, much less thinking about them. Somebody commented, I think it might've been one of your coaching students or, or maybe one of your workshop participants, made the really good point that through working through this, that opened up another line of questioning for doing interviews with our storytellers. Because I don't know if you're like me, but when you're sitting down and interviewing somebody who's, who's story you're going to be writing, money doesn't come up very often at all. I mean, I think we probably talk about sex and dying more often than, than money. It's terrible.

Sarah White:                   Oh, it's a total cultural taboo that we do not talk about money. You don't ask people what they are in, you don't ask them how they spend their money. And this keeps us in the dark. This is why we have old bad stories.

Amy:                                        And have you been surprised by anything that people have come up with or maybe have you faced any of your own demons regarding attitudes towards earnings specifically the earning part of it?

Sarah White:                   That's a good insight, amy. I mean the teachers choose topics they want to know more about. I, I've found putting together the curriculum was absolutely life changing for me. Um, I began asking for more money. I began earning more money as soon as I began asking for it and reached a comfort level that I really didn't know I could both in talking about money and in receiving money from my clients. So, um, and I think it life changing for the people who took it that first time too. I think there's curriculum really has some power to it and it's not so much that I have big insights I'm going to give you and wave my wand and now you know it too. It's that you do the work. It's the work of unpacking your own attitudes, realizing where they came from, whether they still have relevance for you or whether they don't and it's time to put them away.

Sarah White:                   And it's about writing some new stories and I mean that metaphorically as well as literally that guide you forward. Here's what I value, here's how what I do aligns with it, here's why it's valuable to my customers. And they should be, we'll. It's priceless. So they should be willing to spend a lot on it. That's my thought. And do you think that there is a certain value in actually right in the participants writing this stuff down rather than just hearing somebody talk about it or even just discussing it?

Sarah White:                   Oh yes. It's, um, it's the healing power of expressive writing. So you're pulling out areas of your life where you've maybe taken on some damage and maybe you've never examined that damage, but it is actively sabotaging. You have a thing called the upper limiting. It's from the work of Gay Hendricks. I read about it in a book called The Big Leap. And this has been out for decades. This is not new, but how we have a sort of regulator or thermostat that when we start to succeed a little too much, we have ways of keeping ourselves where we're comfortable. And uh, that's an example of the kind of information that I bring into the class and then we think about where are we upper limiting ourselves and we write about that, learn how to recognize and change that pattern. So the class is very much a mix of sort of, some don't quite want to see theory, but kind of some ideas about how to bring more affluence into your life and this writing to unpack what we feel and what aligns best with the values we want to go forward with. It isn't. I do very little touching on actual techniques of sales and stuff. I have a little bit in the curriculum about your brand and your presence because that comes straight out of this psychological base, how you, how you be in the world, how you display yourself. Um, you know, you need to have that at the level of the clients you'd like to attract to bring in caviar, going around with a cheese sandwich attitude about your own value.

Amy:                                        Right. Okay. I might get some flack from some male listeners or even female listeners, but you and I were both part of the association of personal historians. We, we saw the makeup of the membership and there's definitely men who do this kind of work, but I would say especially for the, for the book writing the people who actually write books. It's a female heavy industry and I'm wondering if that has something to do with the fact that many of us can be too timid when we're trying to create a business that will work for us from a financial standpoint.

Sarah White:                   Well, there's certainly a truth to that and um, you know, more women than men have signed up for the class. But I have had men in each cohort that I've taught and I've actually found that the same issues present because they are men who are interested in non traditional high earning fields. Um, so while in my assumptions are, this is a female problem and one of the books I've worked with Barbara Stanley's book Overcoming Underearning is pretty much entirely pitch to women. It's still something that men encounter in their lives. If they have an idealistic service orientation, so think about the professions that we reward financially, sales leadership, think about what we reward, uh, not so well. Social work teaching. I'm helping professions ministry, our culture is set up so that people with heart don't make money and then we teach this little myth that well is say you can have the money but you have to give up your integrity or you can have integrity but you'll have to give up the money.

Sarah White:                   And I'm here to say that is not true and here's something that I just have loved about this class as we get into kind of the looking forward part of it. I asked people if you did have all the money you needed, what would you spend it on? You know, if you had enough that you didn't have to worry about spending it down, what would you spend it on? And the list of things people say is so amazing. You know, they're all good things that would bring good into the world. They're not. I would buy a faster car. They are. I would open a nonprofit, you know, I would, I would bring storytelling to homeless people in. It's, it's all good from the heart stuff, personal historians reminiscence a life story workers or people with wonderful values that deserve to thrive in this world. And it just sucks, frankly, that we are in a cultural mindset where it's the sales that brings in the big money and the heart is something that should not be rewarded.

Amy:                                        So probably less a female attitude problem, and more about the type of character that is drawn to this kind of work. Right? Well, uh, when we're talking about money and you, you say, you know, it's, it's sort of a cultural mindset that we have around it. The thing that I've found is that when we go out and we meet with somebody who is, who's potentially going to become a client of ours, there are. So I, and I say this all the time on this podcast, there are so few of us who are doing this relatively speaking, you know, we're, we're spread pretty thin, so most people have never run into anybody like us. You know, most, most of our clients are calling us and they don't have anything to compare us with and really it is up to us to set the tone for that sales conversation, for that money conversation because they're not thinking, oh, this is, this is a social work, you know, this is a kin to a social worker and I know that they don't earn very much money.

Amy:                                        The clients don't know. I have no idea. Right. And I think that gives us, that gives us some power as long as we can face our own hangups and we can work through them and we can get to a point, a place where we are confident in the value of what we're delivering. You know, I, I think that's nine tenths of a word, nine tenths of the way there.

Sarah White:                   Yeah, I totally agree. And that's why people who survive the startup years, you know, get through that first three to five years when you're getting known in your community for doing this and getting your skills together and getting over your imposter syndrome. Oh, I'm faking it, you know. Oh wait, wait, wait. There's an end to the imposter syndrome. Take my class. No, it is true that clients have nothing to compare us with. And so we do set the tone and if we have confidence when we say this takes time and it takes expertise and you'll be paying for that and you'll never be happier with anything you've spent money on in your life. You know, it's, I really believe that. Um, so it's really about getting past the damage from your childhood or your family. And here's something I'd like to touch on here, which is epigenetics.

Sarah White:                   That is the way that DNA can actually be changed by trauma that we experienced. And then that gets passed along as tendencies in children and grandchildren. So think about the fact that, um, many people, um, and the people, you know, my age, baby boomers were raised by a generation of people who were damaged in their childhood by the Great Depression and by real severe money problems or at least the fear of money problems. And so I think that affected the people who gave birth to us and that we are undoing that damage now as we learned to be adults in the world. Um, so it's not a small thing to ask. What attitudes about money did you pick up from your family? Because most of us picked up some attitudes that came out of that severe depression and lack and want and are irrelevant in the incredibly comfortable material world we now live in. Even if we have modest means, we have all the takes to live a comfortable life. So really it's a time when we can worry more about living in sync with our values and having to do whatever it takes to bring home some food for the family.

Amy:                                        Right. And I like the fact that you are talking about, you know, this whole conversation centers around really discovering, I'm examining and discovering what your personal values are. So it's not about, it's not about some, um, you know, one, one size fits all, um, idea. It's really looking inside yourself and seeing where your values are. And I think that message probably speaks loud and clear to people who are engaged with a profession that deals with matters of the heart, um, because there's always that sort of shadow, um, that sort of shadowy fear that we shouldn't be charging for something. Um, and, you know, I've, I used to have a little conversation with myself before I went into sales conversations or you know, a sales meeting with a potential new client and I would just basically tell myself, if you're not charging enough to make a living, you can not serve this person. You will not be able to do it. Um, you know, only people who have are independently wealthy or have independent means, you know, then I suppose if you decide that you want to do this as a volunteer, then you can do that. But for the vast majority of us, um, we, we lose the ability to serve if we do not face up to these things about money and work through them and get to a healthy place.

Sarah White:                   Really well put, Amy and I absolutely believe that. Um, at first it was just something I held in myself. The, this, what you were just saying, I have to make this business thrive or I won't be here to serve people tomorrow. And I began to see, well, I charge people who can afford a lot, a higher price knowing it allows me to use some of my time to do pro bono work and to serve populations that don't have access to the money to pay for this kind of professional service. And I got to a point where I was even, you know, I'm comfortable saying that to my clients, yes, you're paying this rate. This is what I think this will cost and this is based on what I need to live on and to provide some of my services pro bono to people who need it. And how do people react when they hear that they like it. They will, you know, that that puts my values out there in a way that I think makes us both feel good about what we're doing.

Amy:                                        Okay. So if somebody is, you know, maybe thinking about taking your workshop, but they, they want to try to work through a little bit of this on their own first, do you have any tips or um, any maybe writing prompts that people can do to get started on their own to start examining their attitudes and assumptions about money?

Sarah White:                   Well, an easy way to do this, of course would be to find the Birren book that's got all the prompting questions. Just there's two questions that I use when I do the preview of the class. And one is, you know, really the looking as far back as you can, you know, the, what attitudes did you get from your family and that's realizing we each come from two different money stories because our father came from some of family setting and some story and her mother came from some setting in some store and if we're from a blended family or maybe there's two or three or four stories going on and they will have some areas where they conflict. And so we'll grow up with some kind of like, I don't get it. Or there's cognitive dissonance about this. I'm just asking yourself the question. You come from two different money stories. What are they, how did they conflict? And the other one would be looking forward. That question I mentioned before, imagine you had wealth. What would you use it for? Because that's the one that makes your values just pop into the foreground.

Amy:                                        I love hearing about this stuff and I think that listeners will enjoy it too because it's, it's an issue. It's an issue almost every time that somebody reaches out to me, um, it's, you know, it's something that we can't get around and we have to face up to if we want to, like you said, if we want to have a business that thrives, I would like to shift gears a little bit and talk about, um, a couple of things that you do with your business model. And so I'm not sure if this is old information or not. Um, but even if it is, I want to talk about it because I think it's so cool. You at one point had a monthly writing salon. Can you tell us about it?

Sarah White:                   Oh, I'm so glad you asked because next week is our fifth anniversary to learn where a child it would be going off to kindergarten now and they, this alarm came out of teaching workshops at local libraries and they got so popular that people would sign up and take it again and again and there wouldn't be any seats for new students. So I finally made a rule. You can only take the workshop three times, then you have to graduate and I started the First Monday, First Person I call it because we do it on the first Monday of every month and it's for people who are writing their own stories. So First Monday, First Person, I'll tell you where that came from in a moment, but I'm so you graduated from the start writing your memoir workshop to just come into the salon where we don't do any teaching.

Sarah White:                   We just get together and have a little light snacks and then people sign up to read first come, first served and you know, get anywhere, you know, 10 or 12 on a snowy night, you know, 15 or 20 on a good night. And um, you know, listeners are welcome as well as readers. Obviously you can't have 15 or 20 people read in the night, but it's sort of like pre moth, you know, these are stories that maybe you're just a first draft of something and you just want some feedback on whether it's working or not. Is there any kind of critiquing that goes on? Or is it really just sort of a open mic share your story kind of atmosphere? There is time for feedback for each reader and I basically say you've got 10 minutes, you know, if you read a piece of 10 minutes long, you're not going to get much feedback.

Sarah White:                   If you read a five minute piece, you'll get some feedback and that works and we will take the gloves off if something is really just confusing or not working. Um, but it's all done with such a spirit of love and interest. It really just helps people, I think just reading your story in front of an audience and you see where they lean in and where they look confused or where you hear a gasp or a giggle and it might not be where you thought you would, you know, the, the, delivering a story in audio, in oral format like that is really very instructive to a writer.

Amy:                                          Yeah, that sounds really fascinating. Okay. So I'm sure other people are having this question to do. Does it generate any business for you?

Sarah White:                   You know, how would you connect the dots on that? What it does is keep me visible to a group of people as someone who does this for a living. Every time I introduced the salon, I say who I am. I say I write, I teach, I work one on one, I coach people and it's sure, you know, I'd have to look at my client list and really think now where did this person here about me to connect those dots for you? But it sounds like this is a labor of love than for you. Well, to be visible in the community, but it sounds like you've really found something you're passionate about doing certainly is a labor of love. But, um, it, how do you promote a personal history business about all you can do is be visible because people don't know what the words mean when they want it. They don't know what to even Google for. So I do several volunteer things that keep me visible in this community as a person who writes and is interested in history.

Sarah White:                   And the result has been that I guess, you know, people contact me. People say, I got your name from so and so or I wasn't often people graduate from the workshop to working with me one on one. They so they hire you for your coaching services. It might be a year or two after they took the workshop, but they'll be like, I took your workshop a couple times. I've been working on it on my own. Now I'm up against this block. I don't know how to get around. Maybe it's material, it's too painful and they want a hand, you know, at their side. Maybe it's that they've written little episodic bits, but they don't know how to stitch it all together. Whatever it is. We figure out a way forward and we work together

Amy:                                        And it's fun, isn't it? I almost, I'm almost all of my business is me sitting in interviewing somebody and then writing the story 100 percent for them. But I have done some coaching for people who have the creative urge and want to write. You know, most people are like, no, I couldn't write my way out of that. And I think, well, if I could just for you people, but, but it's um, you're using different skills when you're, uh, when you're coaching somebody and it's just fun. I think it's, you know, I learned stuff when I do it and it makes you realize, um, I don't know if this is your, your, um, experience or not, but it makes you realize how much experience we've accumulated and how much we know about building stories, about telling stories.

Amy:                                        And, you know, I think we all suffer from this, uh, this delusion that if we know something, probably everybody else knows it too. See, there's the imposter syndrome again. But yeah, the thing is, it's an amazing experience. I started, right? I go in thinking, well, I want to have a liver come up with enough to talk about for this coaching session. My sessions are usually an hour and a half. I'm driving over there, you know, holding the person in my mind and thinking about our last session or what they've talked about and seeing how will I ever come up with anything you say about that, that it's still an hour and a half and then it's like, where did the time go? Exactly. It. I've, I've had the same experience where, you know, and I have so much where I feel like I'm going to kind of help you cover with them and we don't.

Amy:                                        We get to just such a tiny portion of it because they're beginning their journey with learning how to write and learning how to create stories. And um, and you know, I've, I've been at it for way longer than I've even been doing the story scribe my, my life story business. So that's, that's what I mean when I say, you know, we, we, we know what we know and we think that we assume that everybody else knows it, but we have some pretty specialized skills and it can really help people out in the world when we share that. Well, this has been great. I, I have other questions for you, but I know that we're kind of getting short on our time. One thing. Well, one thing I am going to backtrack, you said that you have several different ways that you volunteer in the community and one of them is the salon. I assume the salon is. There's no entrance fee or anything. It's all free. Okay. And then what are some of the other ways that you get out in the community and do volunteer work to raise your visibility? The other thing I do is for 10 years I just resigned from it, but for 10 years I ran what was called the East Side History Club and neighborhood community center was our sponsor, gave us the meeting room for no charge and manage the mailing list far as.

Sarah White:                   And other than that it was just me and another local historian convening people with. We met like nine times a year. We'd take a little time off in the summer, in the dead of winter, but we would have meetings spring and fall where we'd have a topic of local interest or else we just invite people to come and reminisce around a topic. And in Madison, Wisconsin. It's a city, you know, based on four lakes. So we'd ask people, you know, talk to me about lakes and water and what, what did you do in the sun, you know, swimming and the lifeguards, what did you do in the window? The ice skating, the subjects that made people reflect back on their childhood and their local experiences. It was really oral history technique, you know, gathering local information and sharing it.

Sarah White:                   But it was very popular. We ended up publishing a book of local history just last year. We published a second edition of it with more local history that had come to light micro history, you know, just one side of town, the east side of Madison. Um, but that really got, you know, my name out there as a person who knows the local history and is a good public speaker. And has this passion for bringing people together to share their stories and that's produced clients as well and speaking opportunities and other things. So that turned up. I mean, I just did it because it interested me in the neighborhood community center director asked me to do it. She said, you know, we're losing the stories of our oldest residence and one thing led to another.

Amy:                                        It's wonderful. It sounds like fun. I've, I've thought of trying to do something with the library because libraries, they're uh, they base their sales numbers if that's what you want to call it, on the number of people that they have through their door, how many people they're servicing.

                                    And, and I've often thought that that would be, you know, people know to go to the library for lectures and workshops and things like that. And I, yeah, I, I really liked your idea of it not being a genealogy group, not being, you know, about the, you know, the local history, that sort of above everything. It's actually people telling their stories. Um, and that's, that's just fun. It's fun to be involved with. It's fun to listen to. I mean, you know, that's why you and I are doing what we're doing, obviously.

Sarah White:                   Well, I want to speak to your point about libraries. I realized I used in the beginning offer my workshops through senior centers. Well, nobody under 75 is going to enter the doors of a senior center. They just don't identify with it. I began offering them at libraries and getting a much more diverse age range and other kinds of diversity as well, you know, if necessity and race and background economically, so I'm libraries really are people who care about words and books are connected through libraries, so they are, I think your best bet as far as offering workshops or speeches or any kind of.

Sarah White:                   Whether it's a one off or a multipart thing and the library has the means to publicize it, right? I mean they're, they're already connected into the community. They're already having the, you know, they have email lists. That's very valid when you walked through the door. Right. I should find out that when I teach three libraries, I get paid through an honorarium by the library and the workshops are offered free. That's part of life, it's our local library systems charter that events will always be free so they have programming budgets and that's what I get paid out of 'em, but that's worth talking about in terms of workshops and I've found it. It works for me much better than trying to manage my own marketing and mailing lists and collect fees and registrations. Library takes care of all that. I get my check and everybody gets a free workshop.

Sarah White:                   It's great and it really has been a great lead producer for me. Yeah.

Amy:                                        Oh good. Yeah, I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad that you shared that with everybody. Well, so what do you see in your future? Do you have any big changes coming up? Are you continuing on the course that you're on right now?

Sarah:                                    The reason I quit doing the east side history club is because I enrolled in an MFA program. I'm halfway through a degree in creative nonfiction writing through a limited residency program and I think something new and big will open for me as I finished putting my time into school instead of using what I learned to do better. A bigger book projects for my clients.

Amy:                                        Well, I was hoping that you would bring that up because I knew from looking at your blog and hearing you speak that I knew that you were in this MFA program and you know, that's one of my secret little things on my bucket list, but I hardly ever even admit to. I’m jealous.

Sarah White:                   Wonderful! Time to stop upper limiting myself. Like, oh, that's not something I could ever do. How could I find the time? How can I find the money? But I am seeing the power of my writing getting better week by week under this mentorship. And so I'm absolutely glad I'm doing it and I think it will be to my client's benefit and you know, I can teach and venues that, you know, university settings, once I have an MFA, that option opportunities that weren't available to me without it. So. And can you imagine a personal historian with an MFA, a personal historian being hired to teach at university. So that's what we need. Oh, absolutely. It'll help the profession get a little more recognition.

Amy:                                        Well, if, if listeners are interested in your workshops or hearing more about you or your business, where do they go?

Sarah White:                   Well, you go to First Person Productions. That's a is short for first person productions, but I sort of liked the prime because I am a prod to my clients, you know, I keep getting so prod that com and then you'll find an upcoming workshops tab and whatever I'm doing is there and there's a little link at the bottom of that page that's upcoming workshops for personal historians. So I haven't yet scheduled the next. I was getting ready to schedule a fall session and then some personal stuff intervened. But I would like to get another round of write your way to a better relationship with money going. So I'd be interested to hear from people who would like to take the class. Good. Well I hope you do. I tried to sign up for your earlier class and I had some conflicts, um, right at the very mid summers. Right. Exactly, exactly. So yeah, I, I, I'm eager to jump in whenever you get one going. So Sarah, thank you so much for, for being with us today. This is great. And um, I look forward to hearing when you finish your MFA program and let's do a conversation about that someday. That'd be fun. I would love to. Okay, well you take care. Alright, bye.