Welcome to Forum 360.

Thank you for joining us on our global outlook with a local view.

This is Leslie Ungar, your host today.

Come back with me to a past summer day at Cedar Point or Geagua Lake amusement park.

Remember the bumper car ride?

You sat in a car with little control over your ability to move forward, backward, or side to side.

The goal was to be bumped or to bump as many cars as possible.

You never knew where your next bump was going to come from, and you couldn't really get out of its way.

As a kid, I had no idea this 100 year old ride was a metaphor for life.

We don't know where the next bump is going to come from, and we often can't do much to get out of the way.

This is what I thought about as I read the book written by our guest today, Chrissy Myers.

She wrote Reluctantly Resilient.

After a few years of being bumped in most every imaginable personal and professional way to tell us about her tsunami and what she learned about resilience, even if reluctantly.

We welcome CEO and author Chrissy Myers.

- Well, hello, Leslie.

- So I do welcome you.

And I did think even though I never was crazy about those bumper cars - No, me either.

- But it did- Your story does make me think about that.

The bumps that we get in life.

- Oh, absolutely.

All the different challenges - That we can't really get out of the way of.

So let me first ask you, before we get to your tsunami, one of the the many.

I was just telling someone today, we kind of used to call them gold nuggets.

Now, you know, they're called Easter eggs.

That, you know, the Easter eggs that are hidden in a book.

One of your Easter eggs is the value of building resiliency from a business perspective.

- Yes.

-So would you first talk to us about the value of building resistancy?

- Yeah.

So building resiliency.

- I'm sorry resiliency, not resistancy.

Thank you - Yeah.

No problem.

So building resiliency sometimes we walk through storms not because we want to, but because we have to.

And especially from a business perspective, there are always going to be changes that happen that we don't necessarily want to.

We lose a key customer.

We have a major regulatory change happen in our business.

We have someone just quit turn in their days notice on the busiest day of the year that we have in our business, and they just decided that they needed to leave and never return.

So building the resilience, being able to have your distress tolerance.

So when things happen to me, how do I choose to respond?

I think can be really impactful as a business owner, especially a small business owners, because we tend to be all things to all people at all times, whether it's our customers or our employee and our team members for our community.

So building resilience helps us to be able to navigate the future as well as thinking forward.

What do we need to do next?

- So let me ask you before we get into your actual tsunami, you were in a family business.

Yes.

I refer to myself as a family business survivor.

Okay.

- Same - So family businesses have some unique advantages and disadvantages.

Would you just identify what you would consider a unique advantage of a family business, and perhaps a unique disadvantage?

- Sure.

I would say the unique advantage can also be the disadvantage in that, you know, everyone in that family, business and leadership generally.

Sometimes it's mom and dad and you're daughter.

And so you know how to have a direct conversation.

You know how you need to communicate to get your needs met in the family.

You don't always know how to do that in the business.

And what I would say is the challenge is what makes you scrappy and resilient as a family business is often the ability to dig in and have those conversations to keep moving forward.

At the same time, balancing those because at the end of the day, we're all family, so we still have to go have Thanksgiving with one another, have Christmas or Hanukkah with one another, and sitting around that table can be a little awkward when sometimes we're not getting along.

- So let me ask you, did you have rules if it's Thanksgiving or if it's Christmas Day or 4th of July or whatever?

Did you still talk about business or did you have any rules and on those days you didn't talk about business or did you just let whatever happen?

- So we were the family that didn't have healthy boundaries around business.

We talked about it all the time.

Now that I've transitioned into leadership, my husband and I are in the business together.

We put more boundaries around when we will talk about work and when we will not.

But when it came to growing up in the family business, it was a constant conversation between my mom and dad.

And I remember watching them model having conversations through business when we were younger and growing up, and then when I entered the business, continued to work with them.

It was like we never turned off.

We'd go to dinner together, continue to talk about the business.

We go to lunch on Sunday after church and continue to talk about the business.

There was never a moment where there was an on and an off switch.

Occasionally, when somebody was maybe in the hospital or really sick, we might not talk about it for about 15 minutes.

And then they still come up.

- So let me ask you if your magic wand worked.

And there was one change that you could make in family business.

What would that change be?

- My change would be that every family member in the business has enough interpersonal effectiveness skills to communicate their needs effectively, because getting your needs met, whether it's the familial relationship or the business relationship, they run on parallel tracks.

So it's really important that we have the communication skills, especially as we talk about transition, because oftentimes in family business, when we're talking about transition from one generation to the next, we're also talking about illness.

We're talking about death.

We're talking about some of those awkward things that as family members, we don't want to talk about either.

But we have to.

- Now, when you talk about the tsunami, it's part personal and part professional.

Yes.

So let's start with the professional.

Why was the Family Affordable Care Act going to change your business so much?

- Yeah.

So it took a significant amount of time to understand what was in the law.

So we passed the law and a lot of what was in, the initial bill that was passed said as the Secretary dictates, so Secretary of Health and Human Services was going to determine some of the parameters.

So we had over a year of waiting for what those rules and regulations were going to be.

And so we had a significant change in compensation and how we were going to be compensated for the employee benefits and the health insurance that we sold.

So immediately our revenue got cut pretty much in half.

So we had to learn how to sell a different product on a government website that didn't get released until almost two days before the launch date.

So we had a lot of unknowns that we had to navigate.

So, personal tsunami, or professional tsunami in that I had parents that didn't necessarily know how to navigate that change.

My dad was not a highly technical.

He was a great salesman, great at building relationships, but didn't always like the compliance and regulatory aspects of the insurance industry.

So as things started to happen and change within our industry, he kind of took a step backward and said, you know, I don't know that I want to deal with this anymore.

I'm going, wait a second.

I'm in this organization.

You've got me to the point where now I love it and I feel like it's my future.

we need to continue to move forward as an organization.

So he took a step back.

I took a step forward and we continued to navigate, but we had products that we didn't know how we were going to sell.

We didn't know if the website was going to work, and it didn't for a period of time, we didn't know what products were going to look like.

The whole industry had a whole different shift in, you know, what could be covered, what couldn't be covered, how we were going to underwrite policies.

All of that disappeared.

And so we're kind of navigating in the dark without a flashlight.

And I mean, sometimes the federal government gives you rules and sometimes they say, we're still figuring it out.

- Great.

So you have two young children.

You're working in a family business.

Changes are coming at you.

- Yes.

- And that's your professional side.

And then of course your kids are kind of both personal and professional.

Right.

Okay.

But then what happens in your personal life at basically the same time.

- Yeah.

So let me back up for a second.

So I married my high school sweetheart.

Both graduated from CVCA.

I was class of 99.

He was class of 2001.

His name was Michael.

We got married and we had two beautiful children, Maddie and Caleb, and Michael dealt with a debilitating mental illness so handed down genetically from, his family.

And so he had good days and bad days.

But I never knew that he had really dark days.

And so he was First attempt successful of suicide on August 31st of 2013, 30 days before the Affordable Care Act was going to go live, I lost my husband, my first love, the father of my two children.

I went from wife to widow in the blink of an eye.

- And this is within 30 days of the changes that you have to be prepared for - Yes, yes.

With the Affordable Care Act going live, a whole new insurance product that we didn't know how to sell yet that we just gotten licensed on.

So I was training our staff on what we needed to do to move forward and sell insurance in a different way.

And at the same time, I lost Michael.

- And you're basically kind of the only one that can do that at your business, right?

As you mentioned, your father kind of took a step back - Yeah, moving leadership forward - So you when you talk about your husband, you easily could talk about the death of your husband.

And we might not know heart attack or cancer or whatever, but you have chosen to talk and to write in your book, Reluctantly Resilient that it was mental health issues.

Now, a lot of people might say, gee, why?

Why do you talk about that?

Isn't that private?

How would you answer that?

- So I would say that if you would have asked me that 12 years ago, I would have said it is intensely private and I wouldn't have shared.

But when your husband takes his life and it's a public way because everyone knows he died, did he die tragically?

Yes.

But how did he die?

Well, it wasn't a car accident.

So there's always those questions.

So I kind of got forced into the light, and I could have, you know, backed up and continued to be quiet about it.

But then I thought, you know, this is- it's an opportunity to also share.

So, I mean, in our society, we have 1 in 4 individuals that has some form of mental illness, whether it's depression or anxiety.

And not everyone has the same level of diagnosis that he had.

But understanding that it's something that needs to be normalized and people should understand and treat mental health the same way that we treat physical health, I think, is something that has empowered me to move forward and be willing to have those conversations.

So now I'm not talking about it necessarily, because I have to, I'm talking about it because I want to.

Similar to being resilient, I'm now resilient because I want to be and I know that I need to be, not just because I have to be.

- Now you talk about the tsunami but it sounds like this tsunami with your husband is not one that's like one and done.

The aftermath has to continue to hit you over and over again of that tsunami of questioning you know, what didn't I see or what- so tell us, how do you resiliently get through the aftermath?

- Yeah.

So I think some of that is, you know, using the resources that you have.

I think when your husband commits suicide, you get a one way ticket to therapy, and whether or not you wanted to go, you have to.

So I worked through counseling immediately and triage.

And then a few years later, as my mom and I were kind of battling to transition the business, I went back and really did the hard work, of confronting grief, of really confronting the trauma of his death and then realizing that, you know, therapy, building skills because it's not just about talking about your problems, it's really about creating a framework and building a skill set to be able to live your life in a brighter way.

I think that that's been beneficial to me.

But also, I mean, there are going to be moments where you have waves of grief.

I mean, there's I can't remember who says it, but it talks about how grief comes in waves.

And there are times where, you know, you may be thinking about something and at a high point and you'll just get that little wave of grief or, you know, I wish he was still here.

I wish he could see this with the kids.

I mean, our kiddos now are 16 and 12 and we have a daughter who a couple weeks ago just had her first boyfriend.

So there's certain milestones that are happening.

She was the lead in the school play.

It would be wonderful if he could sit there and see her do those things, but I know that that he's not going to.

So how do we maintain memory as we continue to move forward as a family?

- Now in in your book, you give a shout out to several therapists.

- Yes.

- Now it sounds like you've had the good fortune of meeting and working with several, quote, good or effective therapists.

- Yes.

- But what would you tell someone if they were open to- How do you know if it's an effective or a good therapist?

- Yeah.

So I kind of equate it to finding the right therapist is kind of like dating.

You're allowed to interview a whole bunch of different ones, whether they work in your insurance or don't work in your insurance.

And so for me, it was finding someone that was skills based that would give me homework that wouldn't just allow me to sit and wallow.

But for some people it's different.

So I encourage people when they're starting to look for someone to ask them questions, to say, what is your approach?

Do what types of skills based therapies you use?

Do you use CBT?

Do you use DBT?

And those those are different buzzwords that the therapist is going to know and be able to answer for you.

And I think it's important.

The other thing that was key for me when I started working with with the one that I work with now, was I wanted to know, do people get better and is graduation possible?

And so she talks about that all the time that, you know, at some point in time the need to see someone is going to diminish.

And so you can graduate and occasionally visit back into therapy if you need to.

Or you can continue to to move along on your healing journey.

It's up to you.

But people do get better.

People do recover.

Today we are talking with Chrissy Myers, author and CEO, about, the value of being reluctantly resilient.

You talk about an incident, with your oven and a fire.

- Yes.

- What did you learn from that day?

Fortunately, no one was hurt.

But what did you learn from that day?

- So it was, I want to say, about three months after Micheal had passed, maybe a little bit more, was December, the night before Christmas Eve Eve.

And I wasn't paying attention.

I had received a card from family members that caught me off guard, and I had decided previous to, what had happened with Michael that holidays and everything was going to be exactly the same.

If not better, than it was when he was alive.

So I decided I was going to be Superwoman and invite 20 people to my house for brunch the following day.

And instead of making everything neat and kind of like just dealing with the mess, and I put everything in the oven, stored all of my dry ingredients in the oven.

And then when I got that letter, I wasn't paying attention, and I turned on the oven to make chicken nuggets.

And I wound up, you know, catching my entire oven on fire, my daughters running and screaming through the house.

I'm trying to grab our elderly dog.

My son is just eating chicken nuggets - Just let me get my nuggets.

- Yeah, he's not even two.

So he's just chilling out like eating a cracker.

No big deal.

The reminder was a wake up call to me that it's important to pay attention and be present.

And because I was so fixated on I wanted the the day to be perfect, the next day, I wound up not paying attention and it almost cost us our home.

So.

- So paying attention is one lesson.

But something else I found interesting in your book was Post Traumatic growth.

- Yes - Because we hear post traumatic stress.

Right?

But you, if I understand correctly, that you have to experience something traumatic before you can grow, is that an oversimplification?

Like can you grow without experiencing something traumatic?

- Oh you can absolutely grow without experience, something traumatic.

But post-traumatic growth is those sometimes it's those larger leaps of who we are.

Sheryl Sandberg talks about it in Option B.

You know, it's it's the big leap of going from Chrissy with Michael to now Chrissy, co-captain of team Awesomesauce, you know, continuing to grow and be a champion for resilience.

So I would say one thing that has changed significantly in my life is that I grew up with the mantra of show no weakness.

And when you lose your husband and you transition a family business in the middle, the Affordable Care Act, that's not my mantra anymore.

Now it is- - Is that related to don't let them see you sweat?

- Correct.

- Okay.

So tell us how that saying and your understanding of it, has evolved.

- Yeah.

So don't let them see your sweat or show no weakness was family like that was a I mean tenets of our family.

And we talked about you know, we don't talk about the things that are difficult.

We don't talk about the fact that things are are not perfect.

And so now I'm more willing to say, you know, I don't have everything figured out and I don't have to.

And I think that makes me more of a multifaceted person, someone that's easier to be seen and also to see others.

So, show no weakness.

Don't let them see you sweat was something that, I mean, I grew up saying, in our business now, it's not something that we say anymore.

We say sometimes life is hard, sometimes business is hard.

Sometimes we win and sometimes we learn, and sometimes it's both.

- Now when you talk about your tsunami, you know, you talk about the effects of the Affordable Health Care Act and you talk about Michael.

But after reading your book, it seems to me that there's another part of that tsunami that I would identify as a family business survivor that had a very strong mother.

Is another part of that tsunami is your relationship with your mom?

- Yes.

- And working through that, it seems that you've come out the other side of that, but any thoughts that could help someone that is in a family business or just working with a strong woman?

- Yes.

So I would say the family business transition is not for the faint of heart.

Anyone that tells you it is easier says that we had no problems in our family.

They're lying to you.

Every family business has their- - Totally unaware - Absolutely.

They may not be aware of some of the issues.

That they have.

And I would say to transition the family business, there's there's a couple of things that you need.

You need to build your interpersonal effectiveness skills.

So we went to therapy to learn how to talk to each other as we were transitioning, because my dad had passed away and we were transitioning the business at a time when we were both grieving and I was in transition.

too, I had gotten remarried.

We were working on growing the business in a different direction, and it was difficult for my mom because she had been in the business with my dad.

They had grown it together.

It was at that point in time they were second generation.

I was the third generation coming in and so transitioning, it was was a little bit of a challenge.

So and it was important as we were working through and we had some contentious moments, and there was a period of time where we did not speak to each other.

Our relationship now is very warm.

We get along really well.

She does a lot with our kids.

At this point in time.

She is more grandma.

She is not in the business at all.

She doesn't want anything to do with it.

She barely asks me questions about it other than making sure she gets her check every month.

But I would say what was really important was we realized as much as I didn't want to admit it, but my mom could see it, was that being family after the transition was really important.

So we went to therapy to learn how to talk to each other.

I went to therapy a second time so I could learn how to communicate in those meetings with her, but we wanted to make sure that we had a relationship after the business was was transitioned.

- Now you talk about, small business in general, spinning a lot of plates.

Can you just briefly talk about spinning a lot of plates?

- Yeah.

Leslie, as a small business owner there's so many different thing we do.

We do marketing, we do accounting.

Sometimes we're our own legal.

I wouldn't always recommend that.

But sometimes you have to be.

We’re our own HR we’re our own benefits advisor.

So as a small business owner, you wear a lot of hats.

You wear a lot of pressure when you have employees, how you manage those employees, making sure that you're taking care of them financially.

Because oftentimes those individuals spend more time with you during the week than they do in their own home.

So really making sure that you have that environment, that's a great place where they can grow and you can continue to grow your business, how you work in the community as well.

I think that you have the community hat, you have the business hat, you have the all of the other hats that go with the different categories of your business.

I think it's really important.

So yeah, as small business owners, we spend a lot of plates.

- You spin a lot of plates.

So one thing I found interesting and kind of related to spinning a lot of plates You talk about when you remarry and you marry Steve.

- Yes - Yes And you talk about a blended family with three last names, - right?

- Yes.

But you decide to have a team name, a mission statement, a vision statement, like really tell us a little bit about this because this sounds a little bit like a, you know, a hallmark movie of the, of the week.

- Yes - Tell us a little bit about your name and your vision statement and your mission statement.

- Yeah.

So we are team Awesomesauce.

Our purpose statement is we radiate awesome to the world.

Our motto is put more awesome in the sauce.

And we have core values.

Because remember we got a 12 year old a 16 year old now.

So we have everything that spells out team awesome source.

So we are creators, not consumers.

We take time to apologize.

So be grateful.

All of the different things that you would have in a family as core values.

We have them.

- Now, How does that how does that help your family?

- So a couple of different ways.

So the first is now we have a list of in essence how we want to behave in the world.

So it makes it easy when we're making parenting decisions, especially as a blended family who grew up in two very different situations So, I mean, my parents were married for almost 40 years.

Steve's parents were married to each other multiple times, so we had a very different type of childhood.

Mine was fairly congruent and his was very disruptive.

So having the framework of how we make decisions and how we live our lives makes it easy for us to make those decisions together as parents.

Because Maddie and Caleb are Steve's kids, too.

I mean, he legally adopted them in 2020, and it's been one of those things where we've continued to move forward and grow as a family.

But I think that the core values just help with the framework of making decisions as a family.

- So I'm going to ask you, in the two minutes we have left, I'm going to ask you for, just some 1 or 2 word answers to some, quick questions.

You travel a lot.

What is one tip that you could share with people who travel less often?

- Use a carry on - Only?

- Only.

- Oh God, I was afraid you were gonna say that.

You keep learning.

You're taking online classes, you're in different kind of online programs.

Why?

Why?

- Because it's never boring.

- Okay.

What would surprise us about loss?

- There's happiness too.

- What surprised you?

- How long it took to get better - What inspires you today?

- Community impact.

Who do you like to read?

- Brené Brown.

- Most recent binge on Netflix.

Amazon?

Any platform?

- House of cards.

- I tried to rewatch that the other day.

Who, alive or dead, would you like to be interviewed by?

- Margaret Thatcher - Oh, and what gives you hope?

- My kids - Now you belong to at least one if not more, groups of kind of C-level peers around the country.

Why?

What does that give you?

- Different perspective.

And how does that help you?

- Solves more problems and connections.

- And how does that help your company?

- Expands our growth and our outlook and our output.

- Okay.

Today we learned that a key word in life and a key life skill is the word resilient.

However we get to resilient that is our North star, our destination.

Our guest today has shared her journey and her book Reluctantly Resilient.

The key word being resilient.

whether or not you get there reluctantly.

Perhaps hearing about a fixed mindset, post-traumatic growth or that it's okay to let someone see you sweat will be the gold nugget that you can pack with you on your journey.

Thanks to Chrissy Myers, author and CEO, for letting us into her life and for touching ours.

I'm Leslie Ungar.

Thank you for joining us today on Form 360 for a global outlook with a local view.

And in one word, the relationship between grief and focus.

where the answer between focus and grief.

- Together - Thank you for joining us.

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