115: Seeking a Rational Path to Happiness with Clinical Psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner

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Ep115 Seeking a Rational Path to Happiness Ellen Kenner TalentGrow Show with Halelly Azulay

Dr. Ellen Kenner isn't the first guest on The TalentGrow Show to argue that selfishness, properly understood, is essential to happiness and career success, but she offers her own unique insights into the subject from the perspective of psychology.

Dr. Ellen Kenner isn’t the first guest on The TalentGrow Show to argue that selfishness, properly understood, is essential to happiness and career success, but she offers her own unique insights into the subject from the perspective of psychology. Dr. Kenner is a licensed clinical psychologist and the host of a radio talk-show, The Rational Basis of Happiness, and she joins me to share her advice to those seeking a path that will make them happy or those seeking happiness in the path they’re already on. “Don’t put yourself in the shadows of your own life,” she warns, discussing with me why selflessness is a recipe for disaster both in the workplace and in your personal life. Listen to hear Ellen’s advice for getting out of an unsatisfactory career, dealing with abusive bosses, carving out a life and career you love even if it leads you down an unconventional path, and more. Plus, discover what Ellen means by “rational happiness,” and how that concept can help you in all of your pursuits! Listen and don’t forget to share with others.

ABOUT DR. ELLEN KENNER: 

Ellen Kenner, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist with a private practice in Rhode Island and host of the nationally-syndicated radio talk show, The Rational Basis of Happiness®. Her specialty is exploring how to apply the rational, pro-happiness philosophy of Ayn Rand's Objectivism to mental health issues. Dr. Kenner has been a speaker at Objectivist conferences for many years and has led workshops on romance and family issues, including "Romance: Bringing Love and Sex Together," presented in collaboration with co-author Edwin Locke. She makes frequent media appearances.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN: 

  • How Ellen overcame the pressures of working in her parents’ family business, and went on to pursue what she loved (5:09)

  • What are some of the biggest challenges Ellen sees others experience in the workplace? (9:10)

  • Ellen talks about envy in the workplace, and shares a personal story about someone she once worked with (10:46)

  • Ellen gives some advice for people who work under abusive bosses (12:47)

  • You can choose the situations you enter (16:01)

  • What Ellen suggests to people who feel stuck in an unsatisfactory career (16:58)

  • The inspiring story of how Ellen’s son eventually found the career he loved after many career-changes (18:01)

  • Halelly talks about her early passion, ballroom dancing! (20:45)

  • What Ellen means by “rational happiness” (23:10)

  • What are some practical next steps you can take to pursue and achieve rational happiness? (25:30)

  • Why selflessness is a recipe for disaster (27:09)

  • “Don’t put yourself in the shadows of your own life” (29:01)

  • What’s new and exciting on Ellen’s horizon? (29:30)

  • One specific action you can take to upgrade your own happiness in the career context (29:44)

RESOURCES: 

Transcript:

Episode 115 Ellen Kenner

TEASER CLIP: Halelly: What distinguishes the rational basis of happiness from how other people use the word happiness or make happiness a goal incorrectly?

Ellen: I think people just go by feeling. They say, “I want to feel happy,” and that leaves out the fact that you end up with unanalyzed feelings as your guide and unanalyzed feelings can still feel delicious, but you don’t get the data from them. So you need to do what you were talking about earlier – you need to introspect and ask yourself, “What do I love? What would make me happy in the main areas of my life? Career, romantic partner, family and friends?” And you only need family who are friends. You can keep boundaries between those who are and not too friendly, and you want to be very selective with family, and your hobbies and interests.

[MUSIC] Announcer: Welcome to the TalentGrow Show, where you can get actionable results-oriented insight and advice on how to take your leadership, communication and people skills to the next level and become the kind of leader people want to follow. And now, your host and leadership development strategist, Halelly Azulay.

Halelly: Welcome back TalentGrowers. So glad that you’re here for another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow and this week on the podcast I have a licensed clinical psychologist and a radio host. This is Dr. Ellen Kenner. She is going to share with you a story about a mean boss and what to do in that case. She’s going to help you think about are you in the right career and ways to right the wrong if you’re not. With a great story that she shares about her son, which then leads me to share a story about my own early career mis-choice, perhaps, where I would not be doing any of this if I had followed my early career aspirations as I probably should have. But hey, here we are. We also talk about how to be happy in a rational kind of way. I really, really look forward to you checking out this interview with Dr. Ellen Kenner on the TalentGrow Show. Here we go.

TalentGrowers, this week my guest is Dr. Ellen Kenner. She’s a licensed clinical psychologist. She received her B.A. from Brown University and her PhD from the University of Rhode Island. She’s the host of the syndicated radio show “The rational basis for happiness.” In 2018, this show began its 21st year, which is so amazing to me, and is heard on stations coast-to-coast. She has interviewed many prominent authors and has appeared as a guest on radio and television. She and Dr. Edwin Locke co-authored The Selfish Path to Romance, how to love with passion and reason, a guide for finding and nurturing romance, inspired by the ideas of Ayn Rand. And if that name sounded familiar, Dr. Edwin Locke was my guest on episode 95. So you heard in there a couple of key words like romance, which will not really be our foremost topic today, but happiness, which is always very interesting to most people in a professional career. Ellen, welcome to the show.

Ellen: Thank you.

Halelly: I didn’t ask you this, but is it okay to address you as Ellen or should I call you Dr. Kenner?

Ellen: Oh no, absolutely Ellen.

Halelly: Great. I’m really glad you took the time to join us today, and before we start to think about how listeners can become happier, have better workplace relationship, thinking about their career and lots of other topics related to that, we always ask our guests to give us a brief description of their professional journey. Where did you start and how did you end up where you are today?

Ellen: I started, you know, as a child I wanted to be in the theater. Dancing and singing in Broadway musicals. Then I loved the French language and wanted to be a French interpreter. And I went to biology and started in French, but I realized that it was incredibly boring. This was at Brown University. Incredibly boring there, and I realized it wasn’t French itself that I fell in love with, even though I loved the language. It was the content. My high school French teacher was having us read philosophers and the questions that they raised were so fascinating. So from there, at Brown, I actually veered off and got my degree in biology, and I worked in a lab where we were studying regeneration of different tissues, and then I veered again. This is a circuitous course, and I worked at a child’s research laboratory at Brown University. I was working in the hospital with day-old newborns and six-month-olds, all the way to six-months old. Then I said, “I know my dad has always wanted me to work in his business. Even if he doesn’t directly say anything, I feel pressure, I should give it a shot.” So I went into handbag design and making patterns for handbags. I knew I didn’t belong there.

But I didn’t know how to extricate myself, because if it’s a family business you feel some obligation and some respect for your parents. Had I not read two books that really turned my life around – and you could probably guess what they are – but The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Reading them, I realized I had never clearly identified what I wanted to do and I had never given myself permission to formulate it clearly and to think that I could pursue it. So that’s how I turned my thoughts to psychology. The dramatic change that I saw in myself was amazing. I know I’m talking about this a lot. I’ll pause for a minute and I can tell you where I went from there, but that was my early history.

Halelly: I’m very inspired and pretty amazed by it, because it sounds like it was covering so many different topics and so many different areas. It’s amazing. I’d like to do a whole show on this, now!

Ellen: It was very circuitous, but when I found out what I loved, I studied harder than I had ever studied in my life. And I was a very good student for my graduate record exams because I wasn’t a good test taker. I ended up doing phenomenally well on them, and then I set realistic expectations. I wanted to go back to grad school to get my PhD and I told myself, “It’s okay to get rejected five years in a row, because I’m coming in as an older student, and because it’s just difficult to get into the program I wanted, a PhD program.” I did get in my second year. The first year I didn’t. And I called up, asked them what could I do differently for next year. Just by having that mindset of five years, I gave myself five years to get in, and instead of feeling rejected it was just, “Oh, what could I do differently?” And they said I needed experience. So I got experience. I worked in a psychiatric hospital, a very good one in Rhode Island, and I got tremendous experience and ended up getting accepted and the day I got my interview, my very young daughter was in the kitchen with me and I was so elated – I was jumping up and down and carrying her and dancing around the room – so the achievement of a very hard value is so rewarding.

Then I’ll fast-forward it. I went for my PhD and then I taught at the college level, two different colleges. I taught psychology and at conferences. Then my husband helped me start a radio show and fast-forward, I wrote a book with Dr. Ed Locke on romance. How to Love with Passion and Reason. That’s a very quick tour through my life.

Halelly: I know, it’s always a challenge when you come to a seasoned person and ask them to encapsulate their entire career into a short story, but especially when you’ve had so many varied kind of waymarks along the way.

Ellen: Yes, exactly.

Halelly: It also is, I mean personally, I think it’s inspiring and helpful to people to hear that there is not from point A to point B and if you’ve done something different there’s something wrong. I love so many elements in our story that show you introspect when you come to a certain part in your journey and you introspect and you say, “How does this feel to me? Is it satisfying? Am I accomplishing what I sent out to accomplish? Is it using my strengths and what else could I do or how could I do this differently?” And you just set goals and go for it. It’s never too late and you can always pivot to a different place.

Ellen: Right. That’s exactly right.

Halelly: I know that in your radio show you have a feature where people can call in and ask questions and I looked at the amazing list. Goodness me, 21 years is just incredible. So you’ve had all kinds of topics and all kinds of questions and TalentGrowers know that our show is very focused on things that they can use as they’re growing their own leadership and workplace success and career success skills. For us it’ll be a little bit challenging to narrow it down from that broad expertise that you’ve built, but I know that lots of times, busy and successful professionals reach out to you and ask questions and seek your help on things that relate to challenges that they have in their workplace communication, in their workplace relationships, dealing with conflict, building trust and so forth. What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve seen, that they experience in the workplace?

Ellen: I think if they chose wrong, I think they didn’t know how to allow themselves to enjoy a career so they stayed with a career they didn’t like. That’s one category. I would say that’s the biggest, that they feel locked in. They can’t change. There are others that are anger management issues from both sides. I’ve had clients come in and they know that they’re too controlling, and to their credit, usually people who are controlling don’t seek therapy. They think they’re right and think the other people are always to blame. But they’d learn anger management issues and really respecting the autonomy of others, not trying to micromanage everybody. Another problem I’ve seen is co-worker issues. Co-worker issues can range from envy – I actually worked with a co-worker who was not envious of me but she was envious of the people that worked directly under her. She terrorized them, and that was very difficult. They were clueless. They didn’t know what hit them. They, unfortunately, suffered a lot of self-doubt and unearned guilt because of her.

Halelly: Wow. Let’s focus on that one, because it sounds terrible and intriguing at the same time. What did you suggest to her or what did she end up doing to fix it?

Ellen: She wasn’t a client. That example was someone that when I worked at the infant lab, actually. We worked with infants and we would have young college students who were very bright – they’re Brown University students – come in as research assistants. All they had to do is hold a nipple in a baby’s mouth for a half hour. Time and time again, I worked there for three years so I’d see her rotate through the different people and she goes, “They don’t know how to hold the nipple.” She would take small, little things and just pick on them. And they did know how to hold the nipple. There was nothing wrong with it. Just would attack them. She was not educated. I think she was very envious. She was a mean woman. She would use laughter as a weapon, mocking people, rather than as a joy to celebrate some fun thing. She was mean and when I finally had the courage – this was before I myself had a lot of self confidence – when I finally had the courage, I spoke to my boss, the professor that hired me, about her and he said, “You know, I always suspected that,” but it was too little, too late for the people who had been abused by her. But having an abusive boss is something that people have come to see me for too. Sometimes this abuse is just verbally, sometimes they want to cross the line and have a sexual relationship and you need to hold your distance there. Those are some of the issues.

Halelly: I know that you can’t give us the entire therapy session that you probably do with those folks, but what are maybe one or two of the suggestions you would give to someone who feels like their boss is abusive?

Ellen: I think they first need a lot of self-empathy. They need to see that it’s not fair that other people in their life who they value treat them very well and if their boss is unfair, they need to name exactly what the boss is doing. It helps them anchor the way that the boss is hurting them. Maybe the boss is making threats or laughing at them or giving them contradictory instructions or they’re expecting way too much of them, maybe way too much of their time. They expect them to work on weekends when the boss knows they know they have a family and they didn’t sign up for working on weekends, or the boss taking credit for something they did. They can name those things and then if they have assertiveness skills – they can’t go up to the boss and use what’s called finger-pointing language, you language, “You always, you never,” finger pointing and global. Always and never. Someone said to me, “Ellen, you always …” you can fill in the blank. Even if it’s positive, if you always do everything right, it’s insincere. It doesn’t fit. I think of the times I didn’t do everything right. So if they can name what it is, they can go up to the boss and say what they noticed. For example, “I noticed you told me to come in on a weekend. I recall telling you that’s not feasible with my family situation. Let me know how we can work with this so my weekends are free. Do you need someone else?” You might give some suggestions or just let the boss give you some suggestions at that point. But you can face them with it rather than just gritting your teeth and going in on the weekend and hating your boss, hating your job, and just being really frustrated around your kids. Because you’re feeling guilty around your kids because you weren’t with them. If they’re giving you contradictory information, you can just name it to them. “You tell me project A is your top priority, and then you came in and said B is your top priority. Would you give me some guidance? What would you like me to work on first?” And if they say, “Both, I want them both down in the next hour,” it’s like that’s not possible. “Could you help me? I want to focus on what your priority is.” You try to work with them. You give them the benefit of the doubt at first, but if they’re chronically this way, what would you suggest? If this is your boss and they’re chronically manipulating you or picking on you or abusive, what would you suggest?

Halelly: It’s not my situation, but I totally agree that you should try to speak to the person. A lot of times they’re not aware, or they could fix it, but if they’re unwilling to change once you’ve tried talking to them, and if you’ve given it your best shot, then I would say the next choice is you have to change your situation.

Ellen: Absolutely. You can choose the situation you enter. So you can either go to human resources and see if you could transfer to a different area in your workplace. If that’s not feasible, start the process of looking for a new job, a new career, or see what your networking is like. Maybe you know other people in the same career that could give you a new job.

Halelly: That’s right. Life is way too short to be miserable or be abused.

Ellen: You want to recognize this is not working and I need to cut my losses.

Halelly: I want to give real quick attention to the other two topics you mentioned too. You said the most common one was wrong career. This is something, actually, I just recently had Dr. Steve Orma on the show and he also is a psychologist like you. I think actually you had him on your show as well. He talks a little bit about how people can change career, but what do you typically suggest to people who feel stuck? I know I talk to people who feel like they are sort of, they’ve got the golden handcuffs on. They’ve got a mortgage. They have other responsibilities and so how could I just throw it all to the wind and try something where I’m going to go back to the bottom of the totem pole and some new career track and make a small amount of money or I’m going to start a business and I might not make any money, so it seems impossible. So they just stay put and miserable.

Ellen: You do have to take everything into context if you have a mortgage and a family. That factors in, and you may need to stay at the current job while you’re planning an exit strategy further on down the line. But sometimes I would love to tell the example of my son, who went to school and wanted to be an architect initially and then got into civil engineering and then shifted to management engineering. He found he was very good in management engineering. He could set up businesses from soup to nuts on the computer and integrate everything. So he tried that career and what started, what he was noticing, he’s a very gregarious, fun-loving kid, and as a management engineer he got a very good job. He got the whole golden handcuff for a company that was paying well, he could rise in the company and make an excellent living. All of the trimmings were there. And he discovered that it was very lonely. That he’s not that type of a person and he would be sent to Winnipeg, Canada, or around the United States to set up businesses and integrate them and even though he was very good at it, it wasn’t within his personality. It didn’t fit.

On weekends, he would come home and he would dance. Ballroom dancing, just as a hobby. Then he started entering competitions and he got a wonderful mentor or coach and he kept winning with her. She was actually asked to be on Dancing with the Stars second season as a professional. And she said no, and she said one of the worst mistakes of her life. But my son kept winning with her. At one point, one weekend, one comp after they won, she took him aside and said, “I’m not going to teach you anymore.” And he said, “Why?” She said, “Because I can take you to the top but I can’t do it if you’re working all week long. You have a choice to make, a career choice.” She just laid it out on the line. Within 10 minutes he decided to give up his career and to go into dance as a professional. And initially, as an amateur, and then he got an opportunity with one of his other hobbies to become a professional photographer for dance competitions, and now he travels all over. Tonight they’re dancing in Manhattan, but they travel all over the country, both photographing dancers and competing themselves. He and his wife. He met his wife through dance too. He was in the wrong career and he had the courage to make the change.

Halelly: Wow. Oh my God, that’s amazing. Of course this show is not about me and my personal life, but I have to say this is so eerie because my chosen profession, if you would have asked me when I was a teenager, what do I want to be, I wanted to be a professional ballroom dancer.

Ellen: Did you really?

Halelly: Yes. I spent all my time dancing, teaching, competing in ballroom. And I chose not to pursue it in part because it didn’t seem like a practical approach and my father said, “You have a smart brain. You should go into something that allows you to use that. This is not a viable career,” and I just sort of never tried. I’ve always had this nagging regret that I wish I could. It’s a youth oriented career, so …

Ellen: It depends. I mean, my son is doing photography. And he’s very well respected in the field. We love his photographs. And he grew his business from nothing. So sometimes, I always wanted to be – I didn’t mention this earlier – but when I was very young I wanted to be an Olympic ice skating champion, figure skating. I loved that. At the age of 14 I knew my life was over. I think the Olympics came around then and I realized I had lost all my opportunity to ever be an Olympic ice skating champion. I did figure skating. I enjoyed it very much. But when I transferred that to ballroom dance, my husband and I ballroom danced, although I think our son influenced us more than we influenced him. I think that you can take, if you love the dance, you can bring it back into your life. I don’t know if you do now as a hobby, or in some other capacity, to wake it up again and see if you still have that interest.

Halelly: Yes, and I have kept dancing as a hobby for all the years, although not consistently. I don’t currently have dance in my life and I need to put it back in, I’m pretty sure. As a profession, though, I missed that boat. But that’s a great story and I do appreciate you sharing it. Now I'm going to have to go and marinate on that and see if there’s anything else.

Ellen: I’d love that.

Halelly: The time is ticking, so I want to make sure that we get to, should we go with anger management or should we go with happiness?

Ellen: I think happiness.

Halelly: Let’s do it. Leave anger to the other folks. You chose the name “The Rational Basis for Happiness” for your show. And so I personally know, I think I know, what you mean by that, but I don’t know … that’s definitely not an accidental choice of words. What distinguishes the rational basis of happiness from how other people use the word happiness or make happiness a goal incorrectly?

Ellen: I think that people just go by feeling. They say, “I want to feel happy,” and that leaves out the fact that you end up with unanalyzed feelings as your guide and unanalyzed feelings can still feel delicious, but you don’t get the data from them. So you need to do what you were talking about earlier – you need to introspect and ask yourself, “What do I love? What would make me happy in the main areas of my life? Those areas are, number one, your career, because that’s where you get your self-identity. Your top social value would be your number two, your romantic partner, and these following are in no particular order, but family and friends. That’s another category to nurture your best relationships. You don’t need a million friends. You just want one or two or a handful of good friends who you feel close to and bonded to. And interest – what do you do apart from your career? We were just talking about dance, for me and for you. Dance or other hobbies or interests, art you might enjoy. Those are the key areas of your life. If you know to look at those areas, which again would be career, romantic partner, family and friends?” And you only need family who are friends. You can keep boundaries between those who are and not too friendly, and you want to be very selective with family, and your hobbies and interests. If you know to focus on those, and then you focus on being rational, looking. Rational doesn’t mean no emotions. It means you understand what leads to those delicious emotions in your life of happiness, joy, pride and earned pride, a celebration of your own life.

Halelly: Beautiful. What are some of the kinds of things that people that are listening now could do to help them? Let’s say they do some introspection, based on listening to this now, and they realize they haven’t really pursued their own happiness, their own rational happiness in one or two or more of those categories you mentioned. What would be really practical next steps they should take?

Ellen: Well, the first is that they need first to know that they have the right to their own life. That they can’t be thinking, “I need to do what my mom wants, the career my parents want me to go into or the career that my friends think I should go into or I think is good for me but I don’t like.” They need to give themselves the liberty to own their own life and have the conviction that they own their own life, and that they have the right to grow their own life. Then they want to look at their strengths. I always like to start with strengths. What am I good at? What do I enjoy most in the areas? What am I good at, career wise, of course you want to look at. What do I enjoy doing? You can look across your whole lifespan. What experiences have I had that I said, “Oh, maybe I’d like to do this when I am older or when I grow up?” You can look at when have I had really good friends? What are the elements of a good friendship that speak to my own character? How have I been able to keep a good friendship? You can look at your hobbies. What do you love in hobbies? So you’re planning. But you know you can’t do that if you don’t think you own your own life. It will be, “How can I volunteer? How can I be selfless? How can I be the good person who wants nothing for myself – don’t want to be selfish – I only want to do for others.” That is a recipe for disaster.

Halelly: Say a couple more words about this. I agree with you, of course.

Ellen: If you feel like you either have to live for others, in order to be a moral person which we pick up either through religion or in the secular world too, I certainly picked it up, that I’m good if I do for others all the time. Then we need to start to do something for yourself, you feel like you have to sneak it in or you feel guilty for doing it, for pursuing your own goals, your own happiness, or buying a ticket to a concert that you might want to hear. You feel selfish. And you never want to look at the world that way. You are not a “me only, my way or the highway person” if you value yourself. In fact, that is the top – in my philosophy – that is the top value that you have, to own your own life and to grow your own life. To grow it in areas that bring you a lot of satisfaction. The first place you start is with your own character. My uncle used to say, “I’m going to live with one person my whole life. Myself.” So why not make my own home, meaning it’s own psychological home, a place that I enjoy living in? Being honest with other people, being honest with yourself. Having integrity. Making your own life interesting. He loved science, so he was always reading scientific Americans and pursuing all different goals in his life.

Halelly: Sounds like a smart man.

Ellen: Right. You don’t want to live for others. We’ve taught that living for others is good. That doesn’t mean you’re not benevolent and kind to the people you love. They are your values, your kids and select family members and friends or a co-worker you really like and want to help out. But you don’t sacrifice yourself. You don’t put yourself in the shadows of your own life. You don’t sit in the back of the bus in your own life.

Halelly: Love it. I 100 percent agree. Ellen, real quick, what’s new and exciting on your horizon these days?

Ellen: Dr. Ed Locke and I are starting on a new project. We’re going to be writing a book on happiness.

Halelly: You mentioned that. It’s amazing. So what’s one specific action that listeners can take this week, today even, to upgrade their own happiness?

Ellen: If they’re thinking of their career, I love focusing on the positives. Because positives are much better motivators than negatives. What do they enjoy in their career? To name what it is specifically? Is it the camaraderie with people, the teamwork? Is it that they see their own skills being challenged and stretched and with their growing themselves and they see their own skills being used well and they feel efficacious? What is it that they love about what they do? Then they can broaden that out. What else do they love about their own life and the other areas we talked about? Focusing on the good. And when they find something that’s not working well, my suggestion – if I could give them one tip there or one actionable tip – is that whenever I find myself doing something that I think is, say I’m wasting time, instead of beating up on myself saying, “There I go again. I’m wasting time.” I say, “Good noticing, Ellen.” Just gentle. Good noticing. I’m not beating up on myself and I’m less likely to waste time. I’m more likely to use my time more effectively. When they find something, if they, say, yell at their child and they’re upset that they yelled at their child, they definitely want to make amends and know what to do differently. But first they want to commend themselves on the courage to face something they did wrong and want to repair or to fix. And so it’s just good noticing. I’m glad I noticed that I did that and I’m honest with myself.

Halelly: Yes. I love that. Be more kind and loving to yourself and don’t spend so much time beating yourself up?

Ellen: Because you’re more likely to improve.

Halelly: Exactly. I love it. I was going to say, I love that it’s not just noticing. You do need to take action, but you have more time to move toward action if you don’t wallow.

Ellen: Right, exactly.

Halelly: Perfect. I know people are going to want to stay in touch with you, learn more about you. I know you have, for example, the first chapter of the book with Dr. Locke available for free on your website. So what’s the best place for people to go to see that?

Ellen: The website is DrKenner.com. They can also go to Amazon, get the book on Amazon. The first chapter is free on the website, but on Amazon they can get the book. It’s called The Selfish Path to Romance, how to love with passion and reason and Dr. Ed Locke and I co-authored the book. We used the word selfish there, it’s what I’ve been talking about. It doesn’t mean the mean, rotten, my way or the highway to romance. It means the self valuing, self nurturing, self esteem way to romance for both partners, and then they’re much more likely to cherish each other.

Halelly: I know you focus in there on generosity and caring for others.

Ellen: And benevolence, right.

Halelly: Yes. Good. Well, of course, and that’s such an important distinction. We mentioned a little bit about this package deal we have about selfishness when I talked to Dr. Orma, in episode 99 if you’re interested, listen to that. And we will link to your website on the show notes and of course to your book. I hope and encourage TalentGrowers, I encourage you to go check those out. I know you also have Twitter, you’re active on Twitter and Facebook right?

Ellen: Facebook, yes, on both.

Halelly: I’m glad that you came on today. I’m sorry the time is up, and I enjoyed the conversation.

Ellen: Thank you Halelly.

Halelly: My pleasure. There you have it! Another episode of the TalentGrow Show is a wrap. What did you think, TalentGrowers? Did you get some insight here about your own happiness, your own career, your own life, that you can use to ensure your happiness? I hope that you take action. Your one life that you have is precious and I do want you to make the most of it. So I’d love to hear your feedback and I’d really, really want to hear about what you thought and what you did. Let me know. You can always go into the show notes page and drop me a comment there. You can share on social media. Or you can leave me a voice mail which is that little black tab on the right side of the page on my website, from any device. It’s so easy to leave me a voice message, and of course if you give me permission I can even use your message if it’s of good enough quality, I can use it on a future episode of the TalentGrow Show. Wouldn't that be fun? All right, thank you for tuning in. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow and this has been the TalentGrow Show. I thank you for listening and I hope that you make today great.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the TalentGrow Show, where we help you develop your talent to become the kind of leader that people want to follow. For more information, visit TalentGrow.com.