Learning To Ask for The Help You Need

Mindsets
Mindsets
Learning To Ask for The Help You Need
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Sometimes things happen and we need help. But, for many people, asking for help feels like a sign of weakness and brings up feelings of shame and guilt. So, how do we do it? How do we ask for the help we need and not place a burden on others? This episode explores that.

Sometimes things happen and we need help.  But, for many people, asking for help feels like a sign of weakness and  brings up feelings of shame and guilt.  So, how do we do it?  How do we ask for the help we need and not place a burden on others?  This episode explores that. About my guest: Marjorie Turner Hollman is a freelance writer/ editor who loves the outdoors, uses hiking poles to help keep her balance on the trail, and has completed four books in the Easy Walks guide book series. Her latest book, My Liturgy of Easy Walks, is a memoir, meditations on learning to live with a changed life. A native Floridian, she came north for college and snow! She has appeared on Boston’s ABC news show, Chronicle; Boston’s CBS Channel 4; the Boston Globe; local radio and cable TV shows; and been published in local, regional, and national publications. Social links: https://marjorieturner.com/ https://www.instagram.com/marjorieturnerhollman/?hl=en marjorie@marjorieturner.com https://www.amazon.com/author/marjorieturnerhollman 

[00:02] Bobbi: Welcome to UnYielded: Thriving No Matter What, where we talk about how to make your next chapter in life your best chapter. I’m your host, Bobbi Kahler, and I believe that the best is yet to come. Hello, everyone. Welcome back. I am so glad that you’re here. Today. We’re going to be talking about a topic that I think for a lot of people, it’s a little hard to do, and it’s asking for help because sometimes and you know, sometimes in life, things happen and we need help. But for many people, asking for help feels like a sign of weakness and it brings up feelings of shame and guilt. So how do we do it? How do we ask for the help we need and not place a burden on others? And this is what we’re going to explore in this episode. The other thing I love about this episode, this conversation, is that it really is a wonderful illustration of adjusting to the challenges or the waves in life and then being curious and allowing the next step and the next opportunity to unfold. My guest has done a fabulous job at that. So a little bit about my guest. Marjorie Turner Holman is a freelance writer and editor who loves the outdoors, and she uses hiking poles to help her keep her balance on the trail. And she has completed four books in the Easy Walks Guidebook series. Her latest book, My Liturgy of Easy Walks, is a memoir on learning to live with a changed life. She has appeared on Boston’s, ABC News Show, Chronicle, boston CBS, Channel Four, the Boston Globe, local radio and cable TV shows, and has been published in local, regional, and national publications. Let’s meet her. Marjorie, welcome to the show.

[02:02] Marjorie: Thank you so much for having me, Bobbi. It’s a delight to be here.

[02:06] Bobbi: Well, thank you. And as I told you before we started recording, I’ve listened to some of the other podcasts you’ve been on, so I’m excited to dive into this conversation and to help the listeners.

[02:18] Marjorie: Why don’t you?

[02:19] Bobbi: I guess let’s start with when you were 37. You were a single mom. And how many kids did you have? Two or three?

[02:28] Marjorie: I have two.

[02:29] Bobbi: So there you are, single mom at 37, and life throws you a pretty big curveball. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

[02:37] Marjorie: Sure. I was cleaning houses. That was my first entrepreneurial trip. I was cleaning houses to pay my bills. I had started being a performing storyteller and was getting more gigs that was becoming more successful. And one day I had a grandma seizure, generalized seizure, ended up at the hospital and was quickly diagnosed with a massive meningioma, which is a benign brain tumor. But it was in a malignant location, really dangerous location, right between your motor areas, arms and legs. And they said, we have to get this out, and surgery. But nobody said anything about what would happen after. Everyone, including me, was surprised when I woke up from 12 hours of surgery, nearly didn’t make it, that my entire right side was totally paralyzed.

[03:44] Bobbi: Wow.

[03:46] Marjorie: I did have feeling and they said, oh, isn’t this exciting? You might get movement back. What’s not so exciting is when muscles can’t move, which it sounds like you might know some of that. They Scream it’s really painful because healthy muscles need to move. That’s right. How we’re built to move. So that’s what I started. I figured out really quick that this was not going to get fixed quickly and I was facing chronic something and I wasn’t even knowing, but it was clear that I was not going back to my house cleaning business. Storytelling. I probably could have done some, but it’s usually in person as opposed to how we are now.

[04:37] Bobbi: That’s right.

[04:38] Marjorie: So that was really not the case either. So I was faced with financial, what am I going to do?

[04:46] Bobbi: Right.

[04:47] Marjorie: Had to make some really I now know what it’s like to be on welfare. I’ve been a welfare mom. I was on disability until I’ve gotten old enough that now I’m on Social Security. Really humbling. Experiences that made me be a lot less judgmental of people that we might say they don’t want to work or they just want to have kids or any of the things that you never know.

[05:24] Bobbi: You never know someone else’s story.

[05:26] Marjorie: We really don’t. I hardly know my own.

[05:30] Bobbi: I can completely relate. There well and I remember reading, I don’t know if it was on your profile on Pod Match, or if it’s just something that you sent me. When you and your husband got divorced, you started the cleaning business. Like a friend said, hey, you could do this. It’d be a way to take. Incredibly, that’s hard work, right?

[05:50] Marjorie: Deep cleaning is hard work. Maintenance, cleaning. I actually felt like I was getting a gym workout that somebody was paying me for and I could listen to music at the same time and it got me a break from my kids, so I didn’t go crazy. And in fact, I found it very relaxing because at the end I got paid, people were happy. I had set a home in order and it actually taught me how to clean my own house. What’s one more bathroom after you clean? Ten.

[06:25] Bobbi: That’s right. It doesn’t seem so bad after that.

[06:29] Marjorie: No, it doesn’t. And so I taught my kids how to. But honestly, when I started, I had never seen a person dust in my life. People don’t dust when their friends are around or when family’s around.

[06:42] Bobbi: That’s true.

[06:43] Marjorie: And I asked the woman who cleaned my mother’s house because she had had a house cleaner, I said, did you ever dust? And she said, oh, honey, I never tried. My mother’s house was very cluttered. There was nothing you could get to to dust. So I didn’t have a clue.

[07:02] Bobbi: Wow.

[07:03] Marjorie: And this friend said, I’ll teach you to dust.

[07:07] Bobbi: Oh, my goodness. So when you were 37 and you had to have the surgery, how old were your kids?

[07:15] Marjorie: They weren’t tiny. They were two and six when I got divorced. So very young. But at that point, they were ten and 14. So old enough so I could tell them how to cook. Not old enough to drive. And I live not really out in the country, but 3 miles from the closest door. So driving out and no public transportation, not even taxi service. So became very dependent on church friends and other friends to get me to anything. I learned this is where we were talking about asking for help. I got a lot of practice learning how to ask for help and learning how to respectfully ask for help, so I didn’t guilt people out. It’s an art. I’ve heard people say, yes, I learned from you. And I’ve taught other people that here’s how you ask for help so that you’re being respectful. And the biggest point I had was to give people permission to say no without feeling guilty. And there is an art to that.

[08:32] Bobbi: Yeah. So how did you do that?

[08:35] Marjorie: I call it spreading the net wide and getting as many potential people, but each person you ask and at that point, we didn’t have email. This was in 1993, so it was phone calls. And I just kept thinking, thank God I have my voice, because that could have been affected. And a lot of people it is that’s a whole other yeah. Every phone call I made, I said, I still have my voice. I can use my voice. So I would call each person in turn and say, you’re the first person I asked. I have other people to ask. I need you to say no if this doesn’t work for you. So I feel comfortable coming back to asking you another time when it might be better. But if you’re not honest and you just do this because you’re not good at saying no, I’m not going to feel safe to come back to you later. I’ll just know that you did this and you were uncomfortable and you hope I never call back.

[09:42] Bobbi: Right. Nobody wants that.

[09:44] Marjorie: Nobody wants that. So it’s actually a gift to me, to be honest. And then I’ll know that I can ask you another time. And people responded really well because lots of times they weren’t able to help then or for that particular ask, and for the people that said, call me anytime, ask me anything. Very quickly, I learned those were not the people I was going to call. Really? Oh, no. Because that was making them not feel guilty. It was the people who said, I could help you with grocery shopping. I can help you on Mondays. Wednesdays are a good day. In the mornings, I’m going to the bank or the post office. Call me when you need that.

[10:40] Bobbi: That is perfect.

[10:42] Marjorie: So being specific or else being general about a topic or even just a day that you know is a less busy day that you’re more likely to be able to say yes, that is.

[10:57] Bobbi: A great piece of advice for those of us who something happens and we want to help.

[11:03] Marjorie: Right.

[11:04] Bobbi: I had someone on the show, she was one of my very first guests and she had breast cancer. And some friends would show up and they wouldn’t say, hey, what do you need? They’d show up and say, hey, I’m coming by to clean your house or I’m going out to panera. What can I bring back for you? And that seems kind of in the similar vein to is it is so good because it’s such a is.

[11:32] Marjorie: It really is.

[11:33] Bobbi: Yeah. Now, it sounds like that was a change for you, like you hadn’t asking for help. I see your face.

[11:43] Marjorie: Being a single mother, I had needed to ask for help, but it was really hard and there was a lot of shame and my kids were quite young. I first off, had to get a car. I had no job, no money and no car. So I had to figure out and no job.

[12:06] Bobbi: Right.

[12:06] Marjorie: So I had to figure out transportation. I found a used car and borrowed money from my brother and my parents and paid my brother back. I don’t think my parents ever got paid, but I just bought a used car. And then I read a book that said you could start a house cleaning business was on a friend’s shelf. And I talked to some people and said, this is a crazy idea. And this other friend said, I’ll hire you and I’ll teach you. And she was my first job reference.

[12:42] Bobbi: Amazing.

[12:43] Marjorie: It was a process, but every time my kids got sick, it was a panic because what am I going to do? Everything has to change. Work schedules have to change, life stops. It was very scary. I didn’t have a lot more resources. And then when everything got pulled out from under me, that was a whole chronic illness that I had no experience with. And I knew that most of us are really good in a crisis, but that’s really short term. Many fewer people can help on an ongoing basis. That’s really hard for anyone.

[13:31] Bobbi: It is hard.

[13:32] Marjorie: People say, well, you find out who your friends are and I try to explain to them that it isn’t your friends that changed, it’s that you changed. And most people can’t change with us. It’s just the way it is. And for those chronic commitments, very few people can actually do that. It changes their life too.

[14:04] Bobbi: Yeah.

[14:05] Marjorie: There just isn’t there aren’t a lot of people in any person’s life that can sustain that.

[14:12] Bobbi: Yeah. And it doesn’t mean that they weren’t great friends. You know exactly when you were talking there. I was thinking about a friend I had back in Portland when I got sick, and I would have said that she was a really good friend. And now mine was the best way to describe it would be to think of someone with severe mono. And it lasted it didn’t go away for years, to the point where many times rick, my husband at the time, is my boyfriend, he had to bring me my food in bed because I couldn’t sit up unsupported. Like, I had to be propped up, couldn’t even brush my teeth sometimes. That’s how bad the fatigue could be. And people still wanted to invite me over and I wanted to go over for dinner. But the effort that that took, it was exhausting. And I had one friend, she was upset because I couldn’t go to her barbecue. And it’s like, do you understand how desperately I want to go to your barbecue, but I can’t get out of bed today? It is painful when you’re going through it with the asking for help. What do you think the difference was? Because you make a good point. Like when you were a single mom and all that was happening, you needed help then too. So what was the difference for you? What made it okay later?

[15:34] Marjorie: Denial. Because I could deny that I needed help when I was a single mother. I could drive, I could climb up and downstairs. I was physically active. I could get out and do things. I could get myself to church. I could reach out and make friends. I see it as denial. And once I was unable to walk, there was no more possibility of denial. I like to tell people that denial is really a good thing and it gets you through a lot until it doesn’t. That’s right. It helped me get through a lot. Yeah, but at some point, whether you’re an alcoholic or other thing that you hit bottom and denial no longer serves you, then you have to make a change.

[16:32] Bobbi: You got to make the change.

[16:33] Marjorie: Denial no longer served me. I use denial all the time. I live within what’s left of an inoperable brain tumor. I can’t change that. Maybe technology has changed, but for 30 years I have lived with an inoperable what’s left of a brain tumor and residual paralysis. If I focus on that and really let that reality get into me, sometimes I get low.

[17:07] Bobbi: You would.

[17:08] Marjorie: I feel sorry for myself on occasion, but if that was my everyday, I don’t think I could function. So I feel pretty cheerful about denial. I think it’s a pretty handy thing to have for lots of us, for lots of situations.

[17:29] Bobbi: And what you’re describing there, Marjorie, what comes to mind is that accepting what.

[17:35] Marjorie: Know or even just ignoring it and going ahead and doing what you need to, because I’m not always terribly accepting. I get very frustrated at times, and that’s I think, where the denial breaks down. But for the most part, I can mostly do what I want to do. But I’ve slowed my life down to about the pace of a turtle. So I don’t run. I can’t hurry without endangering myself. So I have a very slow life pace. So when I need to pick it up for any extra demand, that’s very hard. And that’s when I get frustrated. And that’s where I’m confronted with my physical, emotional, spiritual truth that I don’t have additional resources at the ready if I need to.

[18:36] Bobbi: Yeah, with the asking for help. We were talking about this before we started recording. And I think that’s a common thing for a lot of people. I’ve coached a lot of high performers, high achievers. And that is something that people are like, god, I hate to ask for help. And yet I think about when I first started my business in 2000, I was going out on my own and I was leaving the law firm I’d been at and I did training there. And one of the attorneys, he wrote me a note and he said, I know that you’re going to be very successful. And the one thing that you really need to learn is how to ask for help. Because I was so independent, so self sufficient. And it’s true. And help comes in a lot of different help comes in a lot of different forms.

[19:25] Marjorie: Right?

[19:26] Bobbi: It could be asking someone like, hey, how are you doing your marketing? Or how are you doing your sales? Or how are you doing whatever, instead of thinking that we have to invent the wheel every time from scratch. So the other thing I wanted to explore there, well, a couple more things of that. The asking for help is you said we have to overcome the shame of needing help.

[19:49] Marjorie: Yes.

[19:49] Bobbi: Can you speak to that a little bit more?

[19:52] Marjorie: Sometimes I talk about help needing help being a universal experience that none of us are born without help. None of us humans survive our early years without help. It may not be great help, it may not be ideal, but we are dependent on all of our needs. I wonder if that’s part of the shame as we get older and depending on how that’s taught to us to become more independent, if there is an element of shame of why can’t you do that? You’re old enough, you should know better. Lots of phrases that we have that I don’t really know. I can’t pinpoint where that shame comes from, but I know lots of people who feel that.

[20:52] Bobbi: So the other thing I wanted to explore then, the whole asking for help is you said the receiving was the receiving of help. The example with your priest, somebody’s got.

[21:02] Marjorie: To do the receiving. I mean, if all of us want to do the giving, be in that power position, because it does feel powerful when we help other people when it’s help that we want to do, when we’re in the helper position. It is a power position because somebody else needs us. But the other part of it, and I do write about that in my book, A Liturgy of Easy Walks. I was sitting in church, liturgical church. Priest was putting together the Eucharist, and what I knew was that he was dying of cancer, but he was still serving us as a priest. He had not stopped. So he was up in front going through the steps of serving us, even as he had less and less to give. This was still a treasured gift that he offered to each of us, the spiritual gift of receiving the Eucharist, but also his gift of doing the serving. And if none of us had been there, put our hands out and said, yes, I’m accepting that gift, how would that have been for him? What would he have had to give? What that did for him as the giver, if no one had said, yes, I’ll receive, it was very humbling.

[22:33] Bobbi: I love that illustration. I think that’s an important thing. And you mentioned your book. I wanted to make sure we talk about your book too. So tell us a little bit about the book, because you have a lot of books, but this is your latest, right?

[22:45] Marjorie: It is, yes. I’ve written other I call hyper, local trail guides that are easy walks for those of us with mobility challenges, people visually impaired, recently injured, older, looking for something that they can still enjoy the outdoors and be safe while doing it. The Liturgy of Easywalks, even the title itself came from a profile that was an interview with one of my other Easy Walks books. And I talked about the spiritual side of learning to ask for help. And this person wrote the profile and titled it A Liturgy of Easy Walks. And I said, I think that’s the title of my next book, but I wonder what it will be. And so I had the title, and then I had to figure out. But I had written all these essays over 30 years of healing, of just trying to tell my story. So a lot of them are reflections of being a child growing up, some kind of spiritual lesson. Basically in the last line, there was a lot of symbolism there, but it was really just stories. I was able to get help figuring out what are the themes. And the themes ended up being walking, healing, the strength of family and friends, not by bread alone and lessons learned and specific lessons of learning patience and wisdom as healing.

[24:29] Bobbi: Walking was, it seemed like a very big part of your healing.

[24:34] Marjorie: At first, my children would say stuff like, let’s take mom out for a walk, like, taking the dog for a walk. Well, let’s take mom for a walk. And they would just walk me up and down our street that it was a tough, acorn year. It was like walking on ball bearings.

[24:53] Bobbi: Oh, God, I know what that’s like.

[24:56] Marjorie: But then my house overlooks a lake and we would get down and walk along the lake. And that had been a solace for me even through my early years as a single mother, to just get down and walk, say hello to neighbors, or just see what was different about the lake in different seasons. Because people get bored walking the same place. And yet I try to point out to them that seasons change. Even days change. Morning changes from nighttime, from late afternoon. There are so many changes around us that we forget to pay attention to. And walking in the same place. I quoted in an article I wrote again, that’s in the book was Henry David Thoreau wrote about, I’ve taken many walks in Concord, meaning he didn’t really go that far. And I’ve taken many walks at Silver Lake for about seven years. I wasn’t able to drive. And so other than people driving me, where I walked was right here at the lake.

[26:07] Bobbi: Yeah.

[26:08] Marjorie: And that’s when I started learning to really pay attention and not just say, I’m walking for walking’s sake. I’m walking to open my heart and have new eyes. House cleaning was the same. I learned with dusting that I saw dust everywhere. I looked at houses differently, things I’d never paid attention to. Suddenly I couldn’t not pay attention. And it was a different level of awareness.

[26:43] Bobbi: It sounds like being really present.

[26:47] Marjorie: Try.

[26:48] Bobbi: Yeah, because Rick and I have talked about know, the different places that we’ve lived. We lived in Evergreen, Colorado, and where we lived, it was absolutely beautiful. It was up and down all these hills. And our dog Riley at the time loved going for walks. And every day we went on the exact same walk. Exact same walk, exact same route, everything. But every day it was a little bit different because sometimes you saw elk, and sometimes it was deer, and sometimes it was just that the weather was different. But every day, Riley was like, this is the most exciting thing. Like he was vibrating with energy, vibrating with excitement. And we’re like, that’s how we need to be.

[27:29] Marjorie: Instead of thinking, children do that too. Children do it too, because they’re bending present.

[27:35] Bobbi: They’re present instead of thinking, I have to go someplace new every day, make every day that someplace new by really being present with it. We’re not just thinking about what we have to do. We’re not thinking about our to do list. We’re not thinking about what’s next. We’re present with where we are, and that can be hard.

[27:54] Marjorie: We notice that on rail trails when we’re biking, and there’ll be people walking together and they’re just talking and chattering, or else they’re listening to their ear pods and they don’t hear us coming.

[28:07] Bobbi: No.

[28:08] Marjorie: Or they don’t even see what’s around. They’re so busy. And I understand that. I love to walk with friends and walk and talk. When I walk with my husband, he’ll finally say, that’s a really nice lake. We’re walking next. Do you think you could pay attention to the lake for a while?

[28:29] Bobbi: Let me be for a while. Very cool. And now we were talking beforehand, it seems like with your writing and the easy walks and everything this has become, you said it was a part of reclaiming your joy and your connection and really like revealing a purpose.

[28:46] Marjorie: Yes. I have written these, what I call hyper local books with this newest book that I’m collaborating with. I’m in New England, so it’s more densely populated. But at this point I’ve gone town to town, contiguous towns. The newest book will take us up to close to 200 towns and about no, let’s see, 180 towns and over 200 trails that are individual trails. And they’re all contiguous, town to town to town. So you can just say, what town? Nice. And where can I walk in this town? I know I’m learning to collaborate because I can’t do all that field work. It’s really quite a lot. And I’m also heat sensitive, which makes it hard to get out in the easiest parts of the year for walking. Right. But I started a Facebook group mostly just to market the first book. And what do you do when you’re marketing a trails book? You put up pictures of trails.

[29:58] Bobbi: That’s right.

[29:59] Marjorie: I started going to other local trails that I hadn’t been to and just put them up as a here I am, here’s another trail. And before I realized it, I had half finished another book. Who knew that’s?

[30:15] Bobbi: Right.

[30:15] Marjorie: I had to do the rest of it. And then somebody said, well, we want one for our nonprofit group. That’s a conservation group. So I collaborated with them and then I updated the other books and added more trails because they were really pretty small. So I made second editions of those first two books. Then I wrote, finding easy walks wherever you are in the pandemic.

[30:44] Bobbi: Oh, that’s good.

[30:45] Marjorie: Because people are always saying, how do you find all these books? How do you find all these trails?

[30:50] Bobbi: Right.

[30:51] Marjorie: And so that was making me quantify what is it that I do and what is an easy walk? And I finally figured out an easy walk is not many roots or rocks. Relatively level, firm footing with something of interest along the way. That’s it.

[31:11] Bobbi: That’s it.

[31:12] Marjorie: That’s an easy walk. Doesn’t mean it’s handicapped accessible. Doesn’t mean that it’s totally accessible. But the trail surfaces, most trail people neglect to tell you what’s the trail surface. And that excludes any of us with mobility challenges of any kind. We’re not prepared. We haven’t a clue. We know how long it is. That makes no difference because we with mobility challenges, walk as far as we can. I leave that up to people’s discretion. I give them as best I can, or I ask other people. I have a Facebook group with 13,000 people, easy walks, massachusetts, Rhode Island, and beyond. So I’ve got people all over New England and farther who contribute to a database, and I say, you got to tell us what the trail surfaces are like. Are there benches? What’s the address, what’s the name? What’s the town that it’s in? Is there a website link and show us a picture? That helps. And I’m pretty much a taskmaster about it. I’ve trained them well.

[32:24] Bobbi: But it’s a great point. What is the trail surface? And it doesn’t have to be paved, right? Is what it sounds like to me right now. You use hiking sticks, right? When you’re out?

[32:36] Marjorie: I do. Hiking poles.

[32:37] Bobbi: Hiking poles, sure.

[32:39] Marjorie: Hiking, yeah, hiking poles. Hiking sticks. And that made the difference. That was my husband’s influence. I remarried nearly 20 years ago now. My husband sort of knew what he was getting into. Does anyone? But he is the one that said, you really might have more independence with these. Because he wanted to show me all sorts of places. That’s right. Really hard. He didn’t recognize at first how hard it was, but he’s the one that said, I think you’ll do better with these. So I can say yes to a lot of just woodland paths that aren’t paved, that aren’t rail trails, but they’re clear. They don’t have too many rocks or roots. I could step over some roots, right? Step around some rocks. But if it’s all roots and all rocks, I’m watching my step. I miss what’s around. I can’t look up.

[33:38] Bobbi: That’s right.

[33:38] Marjorie: I don’t even see the branches that are going to hit me because I’m watching my step. Those aren’t easy walks.

[33:45] Bobbi: So you got into that, though, with the easy walks as a way to help others?

[33:50] Marjorie: I got into that. Maybe I’m a lifelong volunteer, Bobbi. I mean, I’ve always put my hand up too often. My mother was a professional volunteer. I learned from the best, and I wrote for newspaper. That’s how I learned to write was I started writing these little stories that ended up in the liturgy book, just as emails back when email was getting started, it was a way to connect with people when I was so isolated, and they’d write me back. And so I talked to the local newspaper editor and said, I’ve written these. Can I send them to you? And maybe you’d let me write a little for you? And that’s how I got started. 27 years later, I was still writing for her, and that was my writing training, was writing every month. It wasn’t onerous, it was just once a month and learning. She mentored me, and so through that I learned how to write. But then my preference ended up being writing profiles. That’s what I seemed to be best at was writing people’s. Stories. How did you get where you are? That’s why I asked these nosy questions. And with that, I learned about the world of personal history, which is helping people write their stories, letting them talk to you, recording it, transcribing it, transforming it into readable narrative, putting into self published books. That’s how I learned about self publishing. One of my newspaper articles was on Local Places to Walk. It was just a hiking series for a year, but I had this sense that it might have value. So I put it on my writing website, and after the 500th person came to my site saying, where is Joe’s Rock? I can’t find it. It’s a local trail. And I said, you know, I think there’s a need and I might be able to fill it, because most entrepreneurial businesses, they fill a need or recognize a need. And that was what I set out to say. Is there enough out there to write a book? Well, this is upcoming will be my fourth Easy Walks trail. Book will be coming out probably in September.

[36:19] Bobbi: That’s so cool.

[36:20] Marjorie: Field work is all done. I’ve drawn all the maps I need to do the fiddly stuff.

[36:26] Bobbi: What I love is that you’re just following your energy. Like, this is what interests me. And so that leads to this.

[36:31] Marjorie: Doors kept opening. It wasn’t that that’s what I thought. I had no inclination that this would take on a life of its own, but it really has.

[36:44] Bobbi: But I love that. I love how the curiosity and the exploring just keeps leading to a very organic what’s next?

[36:52] Marjorie: Yeah, I’m talking to somebody in Milwaukee that wants to do an urban Easy Walks.

[36:57] Bobbi: How exciting is that?

[36:59] Marjorie: It’s different.

[37:00] Bobbi: Yeah.

[37:00] Marjorie: Be different.

[37:02] Bobbi: Wow.

[37:03] Marjorie: I know.

[37:04] Bobbi: I just noticed the time, and I want to make sure I’m respecting your time. So where can people find you and your work and that kind of stuff?

[37:12] Marjorie: Marjorieturner.com. M-A-R-J-O-R-I-E. Lots of spelling. Marjorie. Marjorieturner.com. The books are on Amazon. Easy walks. Marjorie, you probably need to put my name in there’s. Lots of Easy Walks listings. But I’m easy Walks in Massachusetts. But it’s getting beyond.

[37:38] Bobbi: Yeah. That’s so cool. Yeah. I’ll put that in the show notes, and I’ll make sure the links are there too. Absolutely. Wow. Well, Marjorie, thank you so much for your time today and for sharing and for all the work that you’re doing.

[37:51] Marjorie: I would say that right back to you. Podcasts are a lot of work.

[37:56] Bobbi: They are a lot of work.

[37:58] Marjorie: And thank you for inviting me to share. Absolutely.

[38:02] Bobbi: One of the things that I loved most about that interview is that Marjorie is a really great example of following her interests and allowing the next step and the next opportunity to unfold. So that wraps up this episode. I just want to say thanks for tuning in and for supporting the podcast. I really appreciate that. And I appreciate all of you for listening. If you haven’t done so already, now is a great time to hit that subscribe or follow button so that you never miss an episode. I hope that you have a terrific week and I’ll see you again sooner.

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