PP 694: Effective Communication vs Cancel Culture, with Marie White

“You’re on mute.” -We hear that often on our zoom meetings. But today, we will talk about being “mute” in the business setting. In order to survive, we let our society force us to conform to a norm, which does not fully resonate with some of us. Many have muted their own story- the very reason they started their business- in order to survive. In this episode, Kim and author Marie White discuss why you should share your voice, and how you can keep sharing it in this modern world and how to achieve effective communication in this day and age.

Also, listen to tips and information you can use to protect yourself, your business, and your network even if the web decides to “de-platform” you. The call to go back to real conversations has never been more urgent. Find your voice and move forward with hope in today’s conversation. 

 “Hope can bring to light a lot of things that you have deep inside you. If you can keep that hope alive and feed it daily with something wonderful, you will find out that your avenues for growth are huge and available to you all over the place.” -Marie White

Highlights:
01:54 Keep the Hope
04:33 On Mute
08:09 Platform Troubles
16:07 Be Careful What You Google
20:16 Back to Conversations
26:22 Protect Yourself
28:19 Be Comfortable with Sharing Your Voice  
33:33 What Hope Can Bring

Has your social media account been taken down or your website hacked? Tune in as @thekimsutton and @MarieWritesBook shares how you can protect yourself and your business. Keep the hope and share your voice! #positiveproductivity#podcast #hope #deplatform #web #SocialMedia #network #shareyourvoice Click To Tweet

Resources Mentioned

Podcast

 

Inspirational Quotes:

08:18 “As a business owner, it’s not that you’re doing something that someone’s going to remove you for. It’s the fact that somebody could at any point.”  -Marie White

13:21 “We’re going backward in a good way. Instead of depending on larger organizations, we’re starting to find things that we can do so that we have more control.”  -Marie White

16:07 “Building a wide network of people and doing things more old fashioned way would be the best way we can do right now.”  -Marie White

21:48 “Even amazing technological advances can make other things obsolete. So, it’s always good to diversify.” -Marie White

33:40 “Hope can bring to light a lot of things that you have deep inside of you. If you can keep that hope alive and feed it daily with something wonderful, you will find out that your avenues for growth are huge and available to you all over the place.” -Marie White

About Marie White:

 

Marie was born to write, but it would take one horrific event to send her into full-time writing. When her youngest child was taken, her world turned upside down. Grieving with her husband and older children, she wondered how God could allow this to happen. Yet in the sea of pain, her family witnessed God’s unending love and purpose. 

I’m so happy to have you here joining us on the Positive Productivity Podcast. And I’m so happy to introduce you, or reintroduce you. If you’ve been with me for a while, to Marie White. 

I cannot believe that it’s almost been three and a half years since Marie was here for the first time, Episode 202, which you can find in the show notes for this episode. In that first episode of having Marie here, we were talking about her journey with God, her journey as a publisher, her journey with a child who had been abducted. And I’m so happy to say that since that first episode, her child has been returned to her. 

Once when we reconnected, just in the last couple weeks, we were sharing struggles that we’ve been experiencing with sharing our voice. So, this episode is for you, if you feel like you are being muted sometimes. 

About Marie White

Marie, I am so happy to have you back. I feel like it’s been a lifetime. Well, it has been a lifetime considering how much has happened for both of us. But welcome back.

Thank you, Kim. I’m so glad to be here. There should be an applause track in the background. Hahaha.

Oh, my gosh. Yes. Hahaha! 

And I’ve been on Clubhouse, so I keep on finding myself wanting to flash my mic for all of you, Clubhouse users. You probably understand, that’s our way of showing applause. I found myself doing it, I just don’t know how that would sound on Zoom, and I’m not ready to test it. 

But for people who may not have listened to the first episode, would you mind giving a brief introduction to you? And then we’ll jump right into the muting of our voices and the current issues to achieve effective communication in social media.

Absolutely! Well, I’m so glad to be on with you Kim. As always, it’s just a joy. 

We met years ago, and you had me on your show because I wrote a book called Strength for Parents of Missing Children, because our toddler had been abducted. It was the pain, the feeling of not being able to breathe and not be able to just survive life. Yet, making it through that, and out of that, out of the ashes. Really just rising up as a family and finding a way to continue on while not giving up hope has really been our story and our journey. And after four and a half years without our youngest child, our child was returned to us safely.

I got goosebumps. 

I want you to know, this is going to be the first time that I’ve shared with Marie, that I’ve listened to the episode numerous times about keeping hope. Because there was so much going on in our life when you and I recorded that first episode. And even for a good while afterwards, I just needed to remember to keep hope, because we didn’t know how it was all going to turn out. 

And then also, what really inspired me was keeping my eyes on God instead of on my wallet, and on influencers, and on all those shiny objects out there, which can easily distract us. So, thank you.

Oh, my goodness, that brings tears to my eyes.

I don’t think we often think about just how much people need to hear hope. 

Effective communication in the Digital Age

And to jump right into today’s episode, that was something that really struck me in the last couple years. I’m not going to name names, but somebody told me that my story had no place in my business.

Ah… Oh, my goodness. You’re stepping off point. That’s what makes you work hard, what makes you build your business, what gives you your why your story is so important.

Mm hmm. And then even past that, I felt like I couldn’t share my faith, because I didn’t want to be muted or kicked off platforms. Like, there wasn’t a resemblance of effective communication, so I couldn’t share my views on anything. 

And, without getting into details, listeners, I want you to appreciate the message of this episode and not necessarily dig too deep into the context. Because regardless of what your stance on any issue in your life, or that could be affecting the world right now: Your voice matters. 

What I’ve found, Maria and I were chatting about this, we didn’t know how to share a voice. We felt a little bit stifled. 

Do you want to address that a little bit?

Well, I think it’s really interesting that you were thinking the same thing because I started posting about it, and just kind of saying “What other options are there?” 

Because a lot of us have taken the easy route. We have said, “Okay, we have social media, we have these amazing platforms and we built our businesses on this rented space.” Which means, at any point, a landlord can get mad at you and kick you out. And we’ve now seen that happen to so many people. 

I actually posted about it on a Millennial Entrepreneurs Group, which I’m not a Millennial, and kind of just said, “What kinds of things are out there? What exactly could we be doing so that we’re not so dependent on?” There’s a couple of social media platforms or even multiple ones. 

And the feedback that I got was amazing. People were coming up with basically turning our current system of getting the word out about our businesses, gaining clients and staying in contact with them. Turning it backward and going, “We need to go back to almost like the PennySaver days where you’d get an Ad in the PennySaver.” That was in a laundromat, we’re not ready to go all the way back there. But we need to diversify.

What’s the main issue? The platform or the audience?

I just wanted to go back to the beginning of what you said, because you said that you’re not a millennial. I’m not going to ask you how old you are but, apparently, I’m a millennial.

Which surprises the heck out of me because, well, I’m just gonna put it out there: My birth years 1979. But I don’t feel like I can relate to either generation. 

Right?

I don’t feel like I can relate to either. I’m sort of just stuck in the middle, and trying to figure it all out. 

My son, by the way, he’s 15 right now, my second son. And I’ve heard so many times this week, “You need to be on Tik Tok sharing your story.” Well, I have avoided Tik Tok for various reasons. The first being that my son told me, I was not allowed to join since he is a man and need his space. 

Hahaha!

For all the parents out there: I acknowledge the fact that we need to be aware of what our children are doing on social media. But I am free to take his phone whenever I need to and view what he’s doing… Look at his pictures, look at his text messages.  And trust me when I say that this is vitally important: You need to keep an eye on what your kids are doing. I won’t say any more than that, because I don’t want to embarrass that kid. 

But I didn’t want to get into another social platform because I ran out of faith for the ability to share my story. We all need some hints of effective communication to do that.

Yes. When somebody asked me, well, you must have really controversial content, or a controversial business if you’re afraid of your business being taken down off of there. And I said: “No, actually, there’s a grandmother on Twitter whose account was taken down and she posted only Bible verses.” 

So, if you can take down a grandmother on Twitter because she posts Bible verses, then it doesn’t matter if you’re selling vacuum cleaners or oranges. If somebody wants to take you off, they’ll take you off.

Yeah, they could simply say that, “Vacuum cleaners offend me.”

Yeah.

And then every review board gets involved. And all of a sudden, gone. 

Welcome to Positive Productivity, where Marie was nice enough to remove her dog from the office. But I didn’t even realize that my dog was here and now she’s rubbing all over the carpet and making all these noxious noises.

But with that said, somebody could go into Apple Podcast right now and say that there were foul noises in the background of this podcast, like “You need to remove this.”

Yeah, because of poor quality. “We need to remember for quality purposes, this is not good enough.” It becomes arbitrary, and that’s really scary. As a business owner, it’s not that you’re doing something that someone’s going to remove you for. It’s the fact that somebody could, at any point. 

Diversification seems to be a fix, just not an easy fix

We need to make sure that our eggs are not all in the same basket. So, diversification has never been more important than now. And it’s actually something that, as business owners, we all should be doing. But we’ve invested our time and effort into building up these social media platforms, our presence and our audience there. And a lot of times, we have our clients that might have a Facebook group, or something like that. So, we don’t want to go off of those, and we want to continue to focus on something that’s really profitable. 

Instead, what we’re doing right now is we’re actually creating a monopoly that could, at any point, take away all of our business.

We were so excited about this idea, but we hadn’t really fleshed out exactly where we are gonna go with it. So, I’m just gonna jump in piggybacking on a couple things that you just said…

Yes, we can’t be building our business on Facebook or on Twitter, like so many people do. I’ve seen so many people whose pages were taken down off of Facebook for whatever reason, or their account was shut down for whatever reason, but they had built their whole business off of their Facebook page. Immediately, even though it’s not me, I consider myself to be empathetic in a good way or bad way, however you want to look at it, and it feels like a knife in my heart. 

I don’t even know if you know but shortly after we met the first time, my website was hacked out within a week of that first event. I flew home from that first event and my website was down. I didn’t have backups because my server was full. 

So, from a Tech perspective, I want to say: First, get people to connect with you off of social, get them onto your email list, get them over to your website. It’s so important that we constantly be downloading the customer files or our website, like getting backups that aren’t just through the web server themselves. 

Because your email service provider… I mean, I use Infusionsoft, and they could decide, I’ve never heard of them doing this but, “We don’t want to work with you anymore.”

Yes.

“We’re just going to close you out of your account.” 

Well, you know what? I haven’t been doing this. I haven’t been doing a regular backup, like downloading a CSV of my contacts. So, I’m going to put that in my calendar for today. 

Because my web host, shout out to WP Engine, they do daily backups, so I haven’t been doing my own download of a backup. That’s a bad idea. And we’ve seen that on social media lately where a big platform, I’m just gonna leave them unnamed, but I know you know what I’m talking about, all of a sudden, the whole platform disappeared.

Yep. 

Some risks of our Digital Age

On the news today was just a thing about Bank of America, and how they’re looking at people’s purchases and making decisions about what they’re going to do with their accounts. That’s really scary.

Are you kidding me?

No. I don’t remember his name, you can look it up, but there was some sort of NFL player or something. And he mentioned his personal opinions on a car insurance company, then he had his insurance taken it away. That’s the point that we’re at. 

And these people may not have anything to do with us. We’re not saying, “This is my best friend” or “This happened to us.” But we can see it, as we’re looking on social media, that there are people being deplatformed. 

While that isn’t something that you and I are going to have to deal with, because we’re not putting anything out there that people would need to deplatform us for… Knowing that it’s available, knowing that people could do that. There are lots of people that have their platform taken down by accident.

Don’t think for a second that I haven’t thought about how Google can see everywhere that I go.

Yes.

Just based on what news, or my look at, or what influencers I follow, oh, my gosh, are they just going to decide that my YouTube channel has to be taken down because they don’t like what news I’m reading?

Absolutely. 

And people are getting ostracized for things that they like on Twitter just by clicking that they like something. People are saying those likes and going, “Oh, they like so and so. And that person is known for saying this or doing this.” It might have just been a silly cat video that you thought was cute and don’t even realize who it was from.

Two fronts of effective communication: The entrepreneur, and their audience

So, what do you think we should be doing about this? Let me ask you that on two different fronts. What should we be doing for ourselves? And what do you think we should be doing for the public, as a whole?

I’ve heard a couple of things on this. One of the talks that you really hear a lot about right now is that people are trying to build a parallel economy. So, there are different strains that people can use, depending on what it is that they sell, or what it is that they do. 

That’s really great, but those things are down the line… As those things are presented, you can make those choices. As it is right now, we’re actually at a time when I think we’re going backward in a good way. You notice things, people are starting to grow their own food, they’re starting to do a lot of stuff themselves, they’re learning about how to use essential oils and things like that to cure things that might be going on in their bodies. 

We’re actually going backwards instead of depending on larger organizations, we’re starting to find things that we can do, very small, so that we have more control of it.

So basically, you want to buy your own real estate in the world of what you’re selling. We were talking about being on social media, if that’s something that you’re afraid could be taken down, then let’s go ahead and branch out more to your local chamber of commerce. And maybe you’re doing more local things so that you can go ahead and get the word out there.

Oh, my gosh, that’s huge. 

My husband was watching one of this people that he watches. And they were using a popular-on-demand service to sell their t-shirts. Somebody ordered one of his t-shirts and it was delivered, but it was all wrong. It turned out that somebody within the print on demand company had actually changed the shirt. 

In the meantime, the customer took pictures of it and it got posted to all of social media. To follow up on what you were just saying, this provides a great opportunity for me to support the local screen-printing companies rather than go to one of these big shops. 

It means that I might have to carry a little bit of inventory, but they’re also local, so I could just give them a call. Imagine that, just giving the company a call and say, “Hey, I just got an order, can you print one of those out for me?” 

And we haven’t done it.

But it’s keeping it in the local economy, which especially, or anywhere right now, all local economies could benefit from that, in person or sales.

It’s the stuff we should have been doing all along, and it just was more effort in the beginning. So, it’s something that we haven’t done, but it’s actually making a comeback. And I think that could really help to diversify our businesses so that we’re not stuck if something like that happens. 

If something accidentally happens and someone pulls down your page on Facebook, you don’t have to worry about that all being gone while you go through the process of contacting them and getting all worked out. You can know that, “Oh, well, that’s okay. I’m active in other places, I have an email list, I’m able to reach my customers, I’m able to reach my groups.” So those kinds of things are really important… 

I’m trying to be very careful in what we say so that we don’t call anybody’s names out. 

Hahaha, so that we don’t polarize.

Exactly!

At the same time, just building a wide network of people and doing things the old-fashioned way, I guess, would be the best way we can do right now. But it doesn’t mean that we have to stop with our social media, it doesn’t mean that we have to stop with all technology. 

About Getting Caught Out of Context

One of the responses I got on the millennial group was, “Do you know what year it is?” Because I said I wanted to do something off of social media, so I wasn’t so dependent. And people had some great ideas. 

We’re actually in the author world, I’m a director of publishing for Zamiz Press. So, we do funny things, authors look up things like, “How to kill somebody.” We do that on purpose because we’re writing a murder mystery, and we don’t know how to kill somebody, hahaha. But if someone, like you said, is looking up our Google search, that’s gonna look terrible!

I am laughing over here. I was muted, so you can’t hear me… 

But I’m finally getting around to writing that book that I’ve put off for seven years. I’ve been googling all sorts of ridiculous things just to get more details. I haven’t Googled how to kill anybody, just putting that out there.

Hahaha! That’s not yourself, maybe in your memoir.

I mean, it’s probably a good thing that I’ve stopped putting transcriptions on the show notes. Hahaha.

Oh, my gosh. Hahaha, yeah. 

It’s hard to make anybody a target, even when you’re not really a target of anything. It can mean there can be mistakes and errors. There are turns of phrases that we all use. “Oh, my gosh, you said that. That’s so funny. It’s killing me.” Okay, now, is that going to pop up as something inappropriate? No! It’s just a phrase. 

But these are things that are happening now, it just means that we need to be aware. Like you said, we need to backup everything, we need to make sure we have alternative ways of generating income. Because if that’s where all your businesses come from, from Instagram, and they take down your Instagram page, you have nothing.

Effective communication begins and ends with a conversation

I’ve noticed that a lot of social can begin a conversation, but I can stop the conversation too, because text is read differently. Texts can be read differently by so many different people, one person can read humor out of written text and see the author smiling while they’re writing it. And another person, well… 

I’ve been told that I have dry humor, which I had to Google to understand what’s that meant. But somebody might not understand that it’s tongue in cheek, so they might think I’m actually serious in the sarcasm. And then the conversation just ends. 

To you listener who’s tired of me talking about Clubhouse, let me just say, I resisted because I was so tired of my posts being misinterpreted. I didn’t want to go to the Clubhouse, I didn’t want another social platform where I would be misinterpreted, or people would assume what I was saying, and not even want to know more, and not even want to get into the conversation. 

And I guess, about what I’m hearing about your posts on Millennial Entrepreneurs, get back to the conversation! I think that’s where a lot of us have forgotten to go: It’s back to the conversation.

Yeah. And it was amazing too, the ideas people came up with. 

Nurturing your business through effective communication

One doctor responded, and there’s several of us on there that are not millennials, we welcome everybody. So, I was talking about, in the book publishing world, how would you continue to grow the exposure of your business if something were to happen to social media? I think it’s a psychologist, something like that, he actually gets publishing houses that send him books, because he’s got such a large audience himself. 

And these are amazing connections that never would have happened if I had not asked this question. So, I would encourage business owners to go ahead and put that out there, and kind of talk with their audience about it. If it is something that people are interested in, they might come up with some great ideas for your business that you haven’t thought of.

We’re also having this conversation in a really interesting time. Not to date status, but whereas a lot more in person conversations would be happening in years past, we’re stuck in the home.

Mm hmm. Somebody posted on that same post and said, “Do you realize where this post is?” Like… I get the irony of this post, I understand. I’m asking on social media how to use something besides social media. 

You and I are talking on a podcast, which would be on our phones. And at any point, like you said, Apple or somebody could take something down, somebody could, whatever could happen with things. Even good things, even really amazing technological advances can make other things obsolete. So, it’s just always good to diversify.

Cancel Culture & Co.

I’m so hung up on that bank, I’m just gonna not name them again, for fear that they hear it and find a way to ban us both. 

To take us both, yeah.

But I had never even thought about… Wow! Banks doing away with customers, because of where they were purchasing from. And, I’m just gonna put it out there, it’s not even necessarily that the customer was buying porn…

No, no. That’s acceptable. Hahaha.

Right, or buying bullets for their gun, because they have a permit to carry. Or, just because the customer decided to go to a religious bookstore or support their favorite political candidate… And bang, you’re done.

Yeah. I mean, a $10 donation to somebody that really is enthused about the cause, or that you really support, you want to encourage somebody who’s candidacy for Mayor or for whatever, even senator or something like that… That could be your undoing. 

And we have no idea where the line is drawn or what will happen in the future with that. So it’s become a time where you really just have to watch everything that you do, and that’s very unfortunate. I hope people will continue to stand up and not allow that to happen, by making their voices heard and just saying, 

“Hey, this is not okay. I don’t like that you’re banning these people. Or that you’ve done this thing to whatever social media platform is enacting those kinds of rules.”

So many people on YouTube are just losing their accounts, and that’s a huge part of my business.

Do you think anybody actually does know where those lines are drawn?

No, I think it’s arbitrary.

Whatever somebody is feeling on a particular day, they could have gotten into a fight with their spouse or significant other the night before and decided they didn’t want to support somebody whose beliefs were possibly in alignment with a significant other. So today, they’re gone. 

I see the Wicked Witch of the West thing a little bit, you know? “Begone!”

Yes! That’s a hard place for a business to live in, because you can lose your livelihood, if that’s all you depend on. So that’s really what you and I want to encourage people to do is to think about other ways, so you’re not so dependent on that.

Absolutely. 

Some boundaries of Effective Communication

I remember from our first conversation, you and I are both Christian, but you and I both support many things that are not necessarily looked at as Christian.

Mm hmm.

I love, pretty much everybody, unless somebody does me wrong. And I mean, really wrong. I still love them. And you might say that that’s not Christian. I hear you, I’m working on it. Okay? I forgive him, but I haven’t forgotten. Maybe that’s just a way of putting it. 

But regardless of sexual preference, sexual orientation, race… Race doesn’t have anything to do with Christianity, I just need to put that in there. But I can talk to anybody, but the moment that somebody tells me that my beliefs or my values aren’t valid, that’s where I have a problem because I consider the beliefs and values, anybody that belonged to anybody else to be valid for them. 

I can have conversations with anybody civilly, civilly, to talk to them about what their beliefs are, and maybe have a better understanding of where they’re coming from. I’m not going to tell them that their beliefs and values are wrong. Just as I would hope that they don’t tell me that minor wrong. But I also believe that we all have a right to put it out there without getting banned.

Yep. And that’s where we’re at. We’re at the point where you and I will just say “Live and let live”, and whatever people want to do as long as they’re not hurting somebody, we’re not going to say anything. 

And then you’ve got other people saying, “It doesn’t matter if all you’re doing is putting Bible verses up on Twitter. We’re going to take down your account, we don’t like to see them. Even though we don’t follow you, we’re going to take down your account.” And you’re just going, how can it not be that each of us allows the other person to contain to live their life?

So, with the same happen for Roomie. Like… I can’t imagine if they just decided, “We’re gonna take down this account because they have Roomie quotes going out.”

I don’t know. And really, we’re not seeing that. I do see the double standard there.

I mean, it could be happening as far as you and I know it could be happening, because somebody might have found a fence to it.

Yes.

But it’s like, Hello? Where’s the governing board for this? I guess what we’re saying here is protect yourself because we don’t know where the governing board is. We have an email list, download it, put it in your calendar, just like you do balancing your checkbook once a week. Download whatever assets you have, and make sure that you will be able to pick them up and move them to another platform should you need to. 

I’m here to support your voice. Marie is here to support your voice.

Absolutely.

I just want to put it out there: I’d love to hear what you, our listener, thinks about this. So, make sure that you head on over to the show notes and drop your comments down below. Let us know what you’re seeing, what’s your whole thought about all this experience that all voices deserve to be shared? I personally think they do, but I know that you might disagree. I don’t even know that I want to go there because, okay… I just don’t think there’s a place for hate and discrimination. I just don’t think that there’s a place out there for it.

But by me sharing my religious views, I don’t think that’s a place of hate. I think that’s just sharing what my beliefs are. It’s not saying that I hate other religious views at all, because that’s about as far from the truth as I could possibly go.

Overcoming censorship to achieve Effective Communication

What did you have to get over, or did you have anything to get over before you really felt comfortable sharing your voice before all this really started happening and the shutdowns?

Mm hmm. I think it was just a matter of what’s the priority. I felt like there were some things that I needed to share that were just too important to worry about censure.

Yeah.

I was very vocal for a long time. And right now, as we’re each reevaluating and trying to figure out how to navigate this new world of extreme political correctness, where it doesn’t seem to be two sides to every story, it seems like whoever owns the platform you´re on, their side is the only side. And that’s kind of scary. 

So yeah, just determining what was important. And if your business is supremely important, which our businesses are, then you have to make different choices. You have to decide, “Well, on this platform, maybe I’m not going to be so vocal. And that’s unfortunate.”

The contrast between Our Media, and The Media from Twenty Years Ago

If you thought at all back to your days as a child, and maybe the newspaper that your parents may have gotten and wondered, was it biased?

Yes.

Because I’d never thought about it until just recently.

Yes! If you’ve been lied to recently through the Media, then imagine how much lying was happening when you didn’t know about it? That’s a little scary.

It is a little scary.

It makes me reevaluate a lot of things, including the history that I know, the modern history. As I look at each of the people within the last 40, 50 years, I wonder how much of what I know about those people is accurate.

Right. And as parents, do you ever look at what your kids are learning in school and reflect back on what you learned and see, like the stark differences?

Absolutely. Yeah. I think this whole past year has helped all parents to kind of reevaluate that, which is great. 

That’s why I’m saying, some things are happening, things where we thought they were really bad could actually be a new beginning.

Absolutely. 

Assamese Press, a tool to reach Effective Communication and share

Could you tell listeners a little bit more about, and I want to make sure I’m saying it right, Assamese Press?

Yes, Assamese Press. We are publishing with integrity. It’s basically the kind of publisher that I wished had existed before Zamiz Press was formed. It’s just allowing people, business owners, influencers and just regular people with a great story to tell, to share their story and work with a publisher that helps you to do that. 

You don’t have to worry about being taken advantage of, or being steered in the wrong direction. You actually get somebody to mentor you and help you. And you get an above industry standard quality product to be able to share your message.

Thank you for what you do. And thank you for all the hope you inspired me without even knowing. It shouldn’t have taken three years to get back in touch with you, but thank you for, yeah, thank you just for your never-ending hope, and making me realize that keeping hope is like the best thing when times are the darkest. 

Maybe that’s what we all just need to have right now: Hope that someday, the barriers will come off and we can all share our voices again without worries about being taken down.

Yes. And all the wonderful people right now that are coming up with ways for us to do that. I can’t wait to see it.

Absolutely. 

Final words, and contact

Well, Marie, I want to thank you for coming back again. I look forward to many more conversations. I want to invite you back on the podcast again when we figure out what next great messages is, that we want to share. But in the meantime, where can listeners connect with you online and get to know more?

You can connect with me at mariewhiteauthor.com or zamizpress.com. I would love to hear from you.

Oh, my gosh, I’m cracking up over here, Zamiz. Did you know that I’m creating another brand?

I did not. Are you ever NOT creating something?

I’ve gotten a lot more under control since I’ve gotten my Chronic Idea Disorder under control. So right now, I have two things. Well, three things: I have my main business, I have the book that I’m finally writing, Chronic Idea Disorder. But my third thing is actually Zommy.me, it’s zombie mommies, and it’s the snarky side of motherhood.

Oh, my goodness. I love it. I will subscribe. I will watch. I will be on that website day and night.

Thank you. So when I saw Z-A-M-I-Z, it didn’t even occur to me that it was ZAMIZ, I’m used to looking at my own Zommy all the time.

Oh, my goodness. This is a divine appointment.

It definitely is. Yes!

I would love to end the episode with a parting piece of advice or a golden nugget that you believe will serve the audience today.

Wow, okay… Just throw that at me, Kim. Thanks a lot. Hahaha!

You’re welcome, hahaha. It’s the zombie curveball.

Exactly. Luckily, you and I are used to it, we can do this. 

I would think that it would be like you said hope. I think hope can really bring to light a lot of things that you have deep inside of you. There’s a hope for a brighter future, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better country, hope for a better life, a better family, a better marriage, a better business… If you can keep that hope alive and just feed it daily with something wonderful, then I think you will find out that your avenues for growth are huge and available to you all over the place.