Maria Arpa

Show Notes

• How "war mentality parenting" can affect children
• How best to conceptualize compassion
• How to use compassion as a tool
• Why it's important to find common humanity within a dispute
• How the dialogue roadmap can be applied to conflict spaces
• What to do to be compassionate while still holding people accountable
• How to avoid compassion fatigue
• What are the emerging trends in compassion and DEI
• How to use compassion to discuss and debate the current US political climate

Transcript

Phil Wagner

Hello from the halls of the Mason School of Business here at William & Mary. I'm Phil, and this is Diversity Goes to Work. Buckle up because we're getting ready to take a deep dive into the real human lived experiences that shape and guide our diversity work in the world of work. Should be fun.

Phil Wagner

Welcome back to Diversity Goes to Work, everyone. As we approach one of the most heated and consequential elections in recent history here in the US, the question of how we talk to one another, and more importantly, how we listen, that feels more urgent than ever. That's why I'm beyond excited to have Maria Arpa with us today. Maria has spent her career helping people resolve conflicts from corporate boardrooms to street gangs and beyond. She's developed an incredible tool called the Dialog Roadmap to help bridge even the deepest divides. So today, we're going to dig into how her work applies to the tense, polarized climate we're living in right now as we listen to this and how we can find compassion and belonging amidst all the noise. So let's get into it, Maria. Thank you for joining us today. Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit more about who you are and the incredible work that you do?

Maria Arpa

Oh, thank you. I'm really delighted to be here. Thank you so much. So my name is Maria Arpa. I think that there are a few things that stand out about my life that I think inform what I do. The first thing is growing up to immigrant parents in the slums of London in the '60s. In fact, the housing I grew up in was declared unfit for human habitation. That's quite a big thing to take on as a child, but you realize you are poor and disregarded by society. Also, my parents are Maltese, so I come from a Maltese heritage, which I'm really proud of. That's led to a lot of thinking around colonization because Malt has been invaded by everybody. In recent years, I've spent a lot of time thinking about, actually, what is it like to be Maltese? Because I grew up being programmed that I was British. That's been some really interesting undoing and unlearning around that. My parents went through World War II. Of course, it was only when I was in my 50s, I realized that my mother had severe PTSD. I mean, the war never actually ended for her. She was still a 14-year-old girl with bombs dropping around. I say all this stuff because it informs the work I did. I came up with this phrase called war mentality parenting. That's a parenting that you receive when parents have been through atrocities or even natural disasters that are hard to recover from and then find themselves on the move. So, that hard background, and I think there's a bit of a fighter in me anyway, was just not willing to accept my lot in life. By the time I was 28, I was running my own advertising agency, and I was just moving through a world of what might on the outside of looked like success. But then I think later in my 30s, I started to ask, Well, how are we defining success? Is it the gaining of material wealth and privilege? But how does that work with the spiritual desert that's going on inside? I noticed that you had a podcast on executive loneliness.

Phil Wagner

Yeah, with Nick

Maria Arpa

What a wonderful way to describe it. Your podcasts have been really amazing. Good subjects. All of those things really came together to a big question for me, which was there has to be something completely different. I found that just before the year 2000, in the late '90s, I came into Marshall Rosenberg and his non-violent communication and Reiki healing. I became a Reiki master, which is the energetic work and neighborhood mediation, mediating neighbor conflicts, which is the real cold face in social housing or what in America you would call the project. I have this idea that if you could synthesize the practical, the spiritual, and the compassion, if you could synthesize all that, we probably could transform the programming that we've received in the mainstream, which I refer to as domination culture.

Phil Wagner

There's so much to unpack there. We share a communications background, and I think a conviction that good communications is the foundation of all change-making. I love how you lead with that focus on identity. If you know anything about the theories that undergird this work, identity is impossible to separate from this. But there's one thing you said, which is that I'm a little bit of a fighter, which is ironic because you talk a lot about compassion in your work, and those seem to exist in tension with each other. But you also talk about unlearning. I think we have to unlearn a little bit about compassion because we often see it as charity. I don't think that's what your work would invite us to see it as. Let's talk about compassion. That's one of those words that people think they understand, but it's a thought-terminating cliché. It's a buzzword, right? How do you conceptualize compassion? Then how does that apply to the themes that we're here to talk about, whether it be diversity, whether it be democracy, whether it be mediation? How does compassion factor in?

Maria Arpa

For me, compassion is a way of being in community. Community, for me, could be a workplace, or a family, or a neighborhood. It's a way of being in community where we start with the meeting point is our common humanity. Our common humanity is, you use the word identity, the first and foremost place is identifying as a human. In that place, it doesn't matter what our differences may be. You still need to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom, and so do I. Those fundamental things are caught into us. We start by saying we're meeting in our common humanity. Now, what is the business we need to attend to? The business could be who's cooking dinner. The business could be, are we getting the jobs done? Are we meeting our goals? Or it could be the divorce, or it could be anything. I started saying, We sit in our common humanity and then we attend to the business.

Phil Wagner

We talk a lot about compassion as I don't have the word here. I think of it, I should say often as an idea, or an ideology, or an ethos. But you talk about compassion as a tool. I want to dig deeper into that. Compassion is a tool to bridge, divide, and foster understanding. Okay, I see this common humanity. I sit into it. It's time to tend to the business. How do I use compassion as a tool, as a technique to navigate maybe tough conversations? Maybe that's the business. Work through this conflict. How do I use compassion as a tool, Maria?

Maria Arpa

I'd love to give you an example of that. Obviously, with the mediations, I started with neighbor disputes, but then I moved on to other disputes, gangs, everything. But one place in which compassion became really clear that you could give people what I call some just-in-time learning was boundary disputes. This is very practical because my work is spiritual, but it's not soft. If you took a boundary dispute and you've got two neighbors, and they're arguing over six inches or a foot of land, and someone's put the fence down or whatever it is, and this thing has escalated, and they've both gone to lawyers, and they've spent a fortune. What's going to happen is they're going to go to court, and they're going to bring an expert witness each, and somebody in the end is just going to draw a line. That's all that's going to happen because the value of your property does not increase or decrease over six inches of land, but the value of your property can increase or decrease according to the dispute you have with your neighbors that you must reveal if you want to sell your property. What I would do is sit with people and bring them to the place of saying, If a judge or someone is just going to draw a line, why can't we just hire one person, have compassion for each other, have compassion for our humanity, and all the mistakes that we've made along on the way in escalating this because they are mistakes. Escalating anything is a mistake. Let's just save the money that you're going to spend 20, 30, 40, 50,000 each and spend a few hundred dollars asking an expert to draw the line for us. Could you find it in your heart to do that? What's at stake for you? What is so important? It's helping people. I often talk about what are you attached to in this moment that prevents you from finding. Because it's not just compassion for others, remember, this is compassion for myself. If I have no compassion for myself, I can't be that for others.

Phil Wagner

Yeah, I really like that line of thinking, and I see how it applies to some of the blowback we're experiencing here, particularly in the States, particularly in this political moment related to the future of DEI, where there are a lot of questions about where's the line, how helpful, how hurtful, that self-compassion, that compassion to others, and then just being willing to stretch your thinking, to stretch the boundary conditions maybe a little bit more. It could help us solve some of this conflict we're experiencing here. I want to come back to boundary conditions, but I want to go to another tool. I'm a professor. I'm a tool guy. I use a lot of tools in the classroom, and I like your dialog roadmap. It's a really helpful tool. Can you share more about that, specifically, what it looks like, and then how it can be applied, particularly in those conflict spaces where, no, it's not two neighbors fighting over a boundary dispute? We're talking about big ideological, political division. Those are conflicts, too. How might the Dialog Roadmap help us out?

Maria Arpa

Thank you. I'd love to tell you that. When I started working with people, I mean, one of the things I was doing was working with gang members who were carrying guns. People in the US might think that that doesn't happen in the UK, but it does. What I started to understand is that the method of conversation that we have been programmed to use sits under the heading of debate. In academia, in the law, in government, in schools, all over the place, in the military, the model of conversation in the way we entertain ourselves with Hollywood blockbusters. It's all based in debate. You're a professor, so you'll get this. The purpose of a debate is for one argument to prevail over all others. Now, when we send kids to school, they get the most toxic form of debate, which is debate plus enforcement. So debate plus enforcement fed to the mind of a child is just. Even if you're the politest person in the world, it's got nothing to do with manners and politeness, it's going to generate something in you that means you lose the ability to listen, to think creatively because there's a pressure in the debate. Of course, debate in university, debate in the science laboratory, because all perfect, not when it's applied to our interpersonal conversations where emotions are at stake, where how I feel my humanity is at stake, how you see me is at stake. So I realized that, and the Dalai Lama says, dialog is the way forward. Could I find a manual on what a dialog is and how to conduct it? So, the closest work I found was Carl Rogers. He had some really interesting. Marshall Rosenberg was a student of Carl Rogers. In Marshall's Non-violent Communication, I did find some good clues, but I still didn't find how to. The move from debate to dialog is quite a transformational shift. It's not a technique. I can give people techniques in order to get themselves out of a situation, but if you try to use a technique without actually going on the journey, you're simply manipulating people. It's just a manipulation. You're still in the debate model. You're still in the winning something model. What I'm looking at are states of being. A dialog comes from a state of being because I accept that everybody has a piece of the answer. I have a contribution and so does everyone else, and we need to be able to put all of that in the pot first before we can get to any exploration. The state of being, the first state of being is listening. It's not listening as a technique. I use a technique to demonstrate that I'm listening, but the listening is in the soul. I do this. I touch my heart when I talk about this work because what we tend to do is think and then speak or hear and send it up to the brain. The transformative piece is I'm listening into my heart, and then it's coming up through my mouth, or I'm listening and taking, or I'm speaking from the heart up to the mouth. That's the really big difference that we're making, and that takes practice. It's like me handing you a violin and say, play something. Then, from that listening, we use the word compassion. I move to an empathic state. An empathic state accepts that you need respect, you need love, you need support, as I do. Can I give these things to myself? Because if I can only love another human being to the extent I can love myself. The more we do this work, the more it opens us up, the more we hit our own resistances. That's the joy of the journey is it brings me up to the next question and the next question about myself and my resistances and my tolerances, and then I can become expansive. Because listening and empathy on their own won't change anything. Listening and empathy then require this is a two-way street, or a three-way street, or a four-way street. So, we move to a state of feedback. And feedback, not in the corporate sense of giving people criticism. Feedback, for me, is the gift. What's the gift I can give you right now? I could give you an amazing, lovely example. This was a mediation between a man who had burgled someone's house and the woman whose house he'd burgled. He was in prison. Once they found that point of, she was just full of hatred, and she just wanted there to beat him up and make him feel bad. He just kept taking it and saying sorry and saying sorry, and I just felt they weren't moving anywhere. But they did find a meeting point. Then, when they found a meeting point, what he said to her, which really upset her, but it was the only gift he could give her. He said, You see, the problem, love, is your house is in this hidden anyway, and this isn't going to be the last time it happens to you. It won't be me, but because of the way your house is and where it is and the security you have, this is going to keep happening to you. Now, that's a terrible thing to say to someone, but could you say that was his gift?

Phil Wagner

I like this a lot. Does that make sense to you? It does. I'm thinking about how we've embedded a similar framework here at William & Mary. We're doing a lot in the area of restorative justice, specifically related to victims and survivors of sexual violence, sexual harassment, and beyond, and to see the way that it reinforces power and autonomy from those spaces and places and people where that's been stripped away, where dignity has been stripped away. It's a really powerful tool. I want to return to our conversation on boundary conditions because we're speaking a lot of love for self, compassion towards oneself. Compassion, I think, if we're not careful, can be seen as boundless. But there are those moments where compassion has to be balanced, standing up for yourself, standing up and reaffirming your own dignity or the dignity of others. Maybe that goes back to your fighter orientation that you teed up earlier. But how do we navigate the boundary conditions of compassion? Does that question make sense? Catch my vibe here.

Maria Arpa

For me, compassion is a state. It's neither boundary nor boundless. It's a way of being in the world, and it's a choice I make. The more I have compassion, the more I could go beyond just the human and into the plants and the animals and the environment and and all of that and have compassion for everything, every resource. It's a state of being. As I said to you, then also there's whatever business we want to conduct now in that compassionate state. Do I want to be an activist? If I want to be an activist, then I need to understand who I am, what I stand up for, and what I'm prepared to do in the name of that. The boundaries that I use, the boundary, and the measurement I use sits in the restorative justice world. What is the potential for injury, loss, or harm? That's the measurement. That's the conversation. What is the injury loss or harm or potential for? If I'm in a compassionate state, then I will be considering the injury, loss, or harm I am about to visit on others. If I'm not in a compassionate state and I just want to have a bit of savvy, if we're going to talk straight, talking gang members who are not listening to you love yourself, then the compassionate says, What is the injury, loss, or harm you are about to visit on others and yourself? What do you think they will do when you visit that on them? This is hard talking. The most compassionate thing I can do is let you know what I intend to do and how I intend to do it and give you the opportunity to respond. That's compassion in action.

Phil Wagner

I love this. In those situations where hurt, harm has been done, how do we balance? Is that the word? How do I balance compassion with the need for accountability? Or how do I operate in a compassionate state and hold others accountable? Because it's likely that the person on the other side of that accountability conversation, if they're not emotionally intelligent, they're not going to see that accountability as the gift that it can be. How do I be compassionate, hold people accountable? How do I be compassionate without letting people off the hook?

Maria Arpa

Yeah. No, don't let anybody off the hook. That's not a responsible way for us to live together or to be a community, at whatever size of community. No, the issue for me is at that point, I may be. Just because I mediate, facilitate, doesn't mean I don't get into my own disputes. Who am I calling on for support? Who is going to be that bridge? Who does the other side trust that they will talk to? Now, the work that I did was I got asked to give talks about what do you do when you're called to mediate, and it's a threat to life. That isn't the question. The question is, what was the 2, 3, 4 years of trust building that meant I was the person that would get the phone That came from being a compassionate person. Who is the other side going to trust? Who has the boldness to approach those people? We can't do things without support. You see, one of the biggest issues we have in the debate model and the punitive model is this belief that leaders, that people, whatever, are all these superheroes that take it all on and do it themselves. I've got people whose shoulders I cry on. I have people that know all my vulnerabilities that I can speak to and say, I've got this going on in my life. I don't want you to fix it for me. I just need to collapse for half an hour to find my strength and to remember that I'm a compassionate person, and to resist all those old demons that want me to go out and fight my way out of this. It's about who surrounds us and holds us in that place. When I want to stand up for myself, I find the people that can represent me can go to those other people with no agenda, but just to find out what's going on. Because bringing people to the table is an art, it's a skill, it's an art, and it requires someone who's not attached.

Phil Wagner

Yeah, it reminds me of we just had Cordell Carter on, and we were sharing book recommendations. My students know I recommend this all the time. I promise I have read more than one book, but it's such a good book, and it's Kim Scott's Radical Candor, where he talks about the ability to hold someone accountable and also, through doing so, demonstrate that you care personally. We hold those often intentionally with each other, and when they are coupled, it's very powerful. I agree with you. It is an art. It is a skill. It takes time. It takes extreme emotional intelligence, for sure. Skills we're trying to promote in our own students here. But I want to ask about something. You answered this, but I want to go back to it anyways, because we've got people talking about compassion in the public sphere now, particularly because we've seen rise to terminology that got us talking about it, and that's what happens when you exude too much of it. I'm wondering what you, as a scholar and an activist of compassion, think about compassion fatigue. In turbulent times, how do individual and leaders avoid just compassion so much that they exhaust themselves, deplete their tank, sacrifice their own dignity? How do you recommend people find a healthy balance?

Maria Arpa

Yeah, I think you're right. I think there was all I'll do some answers in that around who supports me. Because you see, you can't keep giving and giving without being given to. I did this in the spiritual energetic part of the work with breathing. For me, breath represents giving and receiving, and so they need to be in harmony. Then we move to our energy inlets and outlets. They need to be in harmony, energy in, energy out, breath in, breath out. And so, compassion needs to be received and given in balance. So that's really, again, about not believing that I'm superwoman or that I'm some superhuman person or that I have more capacity than anyone else. I am as fragile, as broken, as vulnerable, as scared, as worried, and anxious as anyone else. We're all that, and it's about not covering that up, not thinking that to be in the world, I have to cover that up. There are places for it, and there are places where it's not about me, but I have to keep myself in check. Just like, if you don't do any exercises, your muscles will atrophy.

Phil Wagner

One of the things I love about this podcast, we've brought people on from all walks of life, and it's amazing to me in recent months and years recording here, how often it's increasingly coming back to the spiritual. Again, we've had Jewish and Muslim and Christian and spiritualists and New Age and agnostic. It's often coming to the spiritual. I think even in secularized terms, the importance of just grounding ourselves back and affirming that self-dignity is key. It's such a deeply personal practice. I don't think we can lose sight of that. I think the DEI space is guilty of just manufacturing what we've needed to manufacture, and we've lost sight of the personal. I do appreciate you bringing back and sharing on that as well. I teach in the world of work, the business school here, and so we're often thinking, Okay, how do I take these principles that come from communities that come from all these other spaces, and how do I embed them in this space of organizations? I'm thinking, what are some of the key strategies for leaders who want to embed compassionate communication in their organizational culture? How can they do that? How can they lead by example and demonstrate compassion in these times we live, which they're tough? How do we do that in organizations?

Maria Arpa

For me, when I see you talk about that, what can leaders do. For me, there's a place of ground-up empowerment. The most success comes when you honor the people who are in the hierarchical structure at the bottom of the pile because those people are on the front line of your business somehow, even if they're the cleaner. They're on the front line of your business, and they are forming an impression. They're telling themselves something about how they're being treated about what they see. You want that information. We should be welcoming that. The people who we believe cause the most problems in societies actually have all the answers. They have all the answers. For me, there is a revolution in the way of an 180-degree, not an anarchic mad battle, but a sense of transforming to become facilitative of every person that is making some contribution because there are lots of people in organizations who just don't say anything. What a show.

Phil Wagner

I have a little bit of a strange question. I don't even know how to word it. How's that for some good preparation here? But I think you have the unique opportunity as someone who has sat and wrestled with the idea of compassion and applied it in so many contexts and in so many spaces and have taken interdisciplinary frameworks. I think you're uniquely positioned to think about what's coming down the pipeline. In DEI, for instance, there are many trends that are fleeting. I'm wondering, here's my question: are there any merging trends related to compassion? We're seeing more organizations do give back days to the community, embedding them in their corporate social responsibility or even DEI efforts. I mean, are there any trends in compassion that you see coming down the pipeline? If you can just say, Phil, that's a terribly worded question. That also works, but I'm not sure if you catch the intent behind that or not, but trends, that's what I'm looking at.

Maria Arpa

I do catch the intent, and it's a question that I think we just need to navigate between this if you know what I mean. What I see is that a lot of pressure is being exerted in all sorts of places. If I'm just going to take the standpoint of the business owner, business owner who started a business, probably never intended to hurt anyone but wanted to make some money. A business must make profit. Now, what the business owners do with that profit is what we determine them to be good or bad, to use the domination culture terminology. You take a business, and what I'm seeing is that there are pressures being exerted by law through laws. There are pressures being exerted through the younger generation coming up who have a much deeper understanding of how they want to be treated and what they will and won't put up with. Then you have lots of people, we I'm calling it diversity and the equity, but the people who are in that from different groups that have been harmed and ignored and colonized and all those other words, all exerting pressure to say, We want something different. We want something different. Now, I'm not so sure that the ways in which people are exerting those pressures are actually going to get the results we're looking for. I think that that's the trend. The trend is everybody knows that there's something has to change, but nobody's quite sure what it is. There's been a huge investment in coaching. There's been a huge investment in mindfulness. You get a buzzword, and then everybody does their training and becomes that, and then lots of investment. I see workplaces, and the word I want to use is community. We're looking at community, and you have to look at community and understand that there's a common goal. We come to work. There's a common goal. What is the contract between us? Not the written contract, not the one that's on paper that I can sue you for. What's the contract between us as humans? What's the honesty here? Because people can deal with honesty. If the honesty is, Come in, do your work, don't tell me anything, just leave, then I will do just that and go. You'll probably lose an enormous amount of richness your business won't go as far because you didn't invite all of me in, and I've got lots to offer. Most of what businesses are trying to legislate against, which I think is a mistake, they're trying to legislate against inviting people to bring all their trauma in. We all carry some trauma, and where are we depositing?

Phil Wagner

Sure.

Maria Arpa

But one of the questions I like to ask, which I don't hear being asked very often, is when people choose leadership positions that give them power, power to judge, power to punish, what's the trauma in those people that needs resolving, that meant that they could climb their way into those positions and pretend they don't have that trauma?

Phil Wagner

Which is a very powerful question and one that I would need to personally sit with as well. Your ideas here remind me of a book I'm finishing, Jacquelyn Novogratz, it's not new, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, which is really a great work that I think reminds us it is possible to build a better world. And business plays a role in that. We place a lot of blame, but there's also a lot of potential for the futures as well. And so, yeah, you definitely got the vibe of my question there, Maria. That's exactly what I'm after. I've got one more for you. This is getting ready to air. We're recording just a few weeks before the election cycle in the US. I don't know if you can feel our temperature from across the pond, but again, it is hot here. It is divided here, and we think it's only going to get messier in the weeks ahead. Like I said, we're just a few ways. One of the most consequential, turbulent election cycles of the last century. What compassion-oriented advice can you offer our listeners to help us navigate these next few weeks and then the realities that lie beyond the election? Talk to us and give us some good insights, would you?

Maria Arpa

I'll give you two or three things that I hope will be helpful. The first one is, as people are watching the polarization between the two people that, I don't really want to go into names, but the two people that are vying for presidency. I want people to remember there were only really three conflict messages in the world. The first one is, You changed to suit me. No, you change to suit me. No, you change to suit me. No, you change to suit me. No, you change to suit me. No, you change to suit me. Downward spiral. The second conflict message is, I'm worse off than you. No, I'm worse off than you. No, I'm much more worse. You have no idea how badly off I am. But the only conflict message there really is, so that's what plays out in the debate muddle, the only conflict message that really exists is, I need to know I matter. That's what this is about. I need to know I matter. Whoever I am, wherever I am, whatever argument is, I need to know I matter. Firstly, I would ask people to look at that and see and disengage from the debate model. Notice where it's like Velcro pulling us in and detach from the debate model and try to just hear through it all. Then I would say, when we find ourselves in situations, I mean, yes, we have a vote, and that vote can make a difference. But the truth is, on the bigger picture scale, we have very little influence. When we find ourselves in situations where I'm not going to be an activist, I'm not going to stop my life as it is. I'm not going to go and fight for something, for a cause. That's a whole other podcast. I have very little influence, very little control or power, then here's what I recommend. Work out how to lead your kindest, most generous, and most joyful life moment by moment because that is a gift to the entire ecosystem.

Phil Wagner

I love that. Such powerful words of wisdom. I almost can't even unmute myself fast enough because I just have to sit with your rich insight. Maria, this is really helpful. It's work that I believe so deeply in. I think that this is a lost art, it's a lost ideology, it's a lost ethos, and I think compassion really holds the key to the future. It's clearly missing in so many contexts. So thank you for reminding us it's not all hard to apply. It's not all that hard to find yourself in that state. It just takes that self-determination. I think there are great things that happen. Thanks for joining us today. This is a lovely conversation. What's next for you as we end this conversation? How can our listeners support you? How can they find you? What will you be doing in the months and years ahead related to compassion or any other topics? Care to share?

Maria Arpa

Yes, thank you. I've developed a particular interest in workplaces. I've been working with businesses for quite some time and having an effect. I run a one-year training. For people that really want to become this, I run a one-year training. We've had directors and CEOs and teachers and people who are in positions where what they've learned is a little punitive method, asking themselves a better quality question about how they want to interact. That training runs each year, and we've been running it for five, six years now, and it's really successful. But also what I do, I bring into businesses three modules. The first module is how do we have a conversation one-on-one. What are the components of a successful, compassionate conversation where we can all understand where we are, what's required, and what happens next? Then the second module is for anyone that has line management responsibilities, how do I have a conversation when what I really need to do is bang two people's heads together? Because you can't be a mediator when you have a stake in it. It's using the skills and facilitation of mediation, but you can't be a mediator if you actually have a stake in what's happening. Then, the third module for people with greater additional responsibility is how to see leadership as a facilitative role, where you're looking at a bigger picture, where you understand the limits of your own tolerances of when to get help, how to understand what you see, how it affects you, and therefore, how you're responding. Those are the things I do. I'm really interested in workplaces as communities because I think they could be an amazing source of transformative change in the world. I see that there's a place now where the punitive model is running out of steam. It's not working anymore.

Phil Wagner

Yeah. Time for a new model, and I'm glad that you could expose us to your work and share the work of others, too. Maria, thanks so much for taking time to chat with us today. It's been a great conversation. You've challenged me. I'm sitting with some deep thoughts, and so I appreciate that. Thank you for sharing with our listeners. Keep on the good work.

Maria Arpa

Phil, thank you. You run a really amazing podcast. Thank you.

Phil Wagner

Thank you.

Phil Wagner

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