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Episode 70

Healing Your Relationship to Money

with Richard Friesen

No matter how good your business model is or how amazing you are as a creative, if you have money mindset blocks, you’ll never live the life you’ve been dreaming of. Whether you have deep-seated beliefs about the “evilness” of money, you are comfortable in the hustle and struggle, or you “simply” don’t think you’re worthy of charging more, there are ways to overcome every single money mindset issue you can imagine. On this episode, we talk about how to heal your relationship with money with expert Richard Friesen. Plus, get access to a FREE course, courtesy of Friesen, during this episode.

Richard Friesen

Richard is the author of “A Private Conversation with Money.” He has a therapeutic approach for professional money managers, entrepreneurs, and people who are struggling financially.

Show Notes

Jump To:

  • 00:30 – Richard Friesen
  • 1:14 – Our Relationship with Money
  • 3:05 – Common Beliefs Around Money
  • 4:33 – Awareness & Acceptance
  • 6:51 – Invisible Obstacles
  • 11:03 – Agency
  • 13:49 – Shifting from Realization
  • 16:15 – Negative & Positive Snowballs
  • 17:26 – Certificates of Appreciation
  • 22:24 – The Hole in our Heart
  • 25:36 – Subtraction THEN Addition
  • 29:06 – Our Survival Mechanism
  • 32:05 – Self Worth


Referenced Links:

 

Connect with Richard Friesen on:

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Rai Cornell 0:02
Welcome to Season 2 of the SOAR podcast, the place for creative entrepreneurs who want to build healthier, happier, more profitable, self employed businesses. I’m your host Rai Hyde Cornell, business mentor at Chiron Consulting and CEO & Senior Copywriter at Cornell Content Marketing. Get ready to soar!

Richard Friesen 0:30
Welcome to the SOAR Podcast! On today’s episode, we have Richard Friesen. Richard, tell our listeners what it is you do.

I work with professionals, hedge fund managers, money managers, entrepreneurs who want to excel. And one of the interesting pieces of this is our relationship with money. And sometimes our subconscious beliefs and attitudes or how we look at ourselves are out of rapport with our goals, well my job is to bring all that to the surface, create rapport with ourselves, money and our meaning, so that we can move forward with our lives.

You mentioned working with hedge fund managers, and these people who work with money on a day to day basis. But really our relationship with money is something that everybody is affected by, would you say so?

Oh, yeah. We grew up I mean, with beliefs about our parents, you know, some parents were easy come easy go, the money comes in, you just spend it. Other parents were really tight with it, you know, money is something that other people have, and we have to really guard it. Money is the root of all evil, depending on, you know, what your belief systems are, then we go to school, in today’s culture, our work ethic, especially with our political and economic divide, we see money as a symptom of some deeper philosophical, political, and even our deepest values were split there. So if we’ve internalized all that from our growing up, wow, it’s no wonder that we have issues and we found ourselves sabotaging ourselves. So you know, I have examples of clients – entrepreneurs who have sabotaged themselves, because they didn’t bring those deeper beliefs to awareness.

Yeah. And it’s, that’s exactly it, isn’t it? It’s-you’re not aware of the impact that these beliefs and these past experiences with money are impacting you. And particularly for our listeners who tend to be creative entrepreneurs who set their own prices, who send clients proposals with pricing in them, who look at a client and they go, man, I really want this client, so maybe I’ll lower my prices to hope to get them. And there’s so many dynamics that go into what’s happening for you internally and for the client when that happens. So, what are some of the most common beliefs and barriers that you see as insidious in entrepreneurs with regard to their beliefs and mindset around money?

Yeah, there’s the number of subconscious beliefs, you know, wealthy people are evil, even though and on the other hand, we all want financial security, we have the beliefs that I’m not worthy on the deepest levels. We have beliefs that, oh, I’m not capable or competent. And I have my own story about my own internal limits-how year after year, they prevented me from the life I wanted. So one of the things that I do is to uncover these because every one is different, is I have them- we do a guided visualization, and step in the success that they want. What is it like? we put it in the form of a house, or an image that they can literally viscerally feel, and what I find is, what is the hesitancy to step into there? And we all have survival mechanisms – when we were young, we, nobody’s perfect, no parents are perfect. No environment is perfect. I thought I could create the perfect environment for my own kids. Well, I’m a psychologist. I couldn’t agree. It turns out that Rich Friesen is just a little bit flawed himself.

So, we all have these issues and our survival mechanism is a way to compensate for it. For example, I had a very depressed mother. So I’m very sensitive to women. And if my wife, you know, wrinkles her brow at me, I go, Whoa! So we all have these reactive responses. So by stepping people into the future we’ll find out what is hesitancy. So for example, I had a client who was building HVAC, heating, air conditioning business, and his goal was to sell it to a large national company. He knew exactly what the criteria was. He knew what they needed. He knew how he needed to build, he knew all the ratios and everything to just fit them perfectly. So we did it. Now he’s in negotiations and he was sabotaging them on details and little stuff, that just didn’t matter. So we started working on it. And we got back to the place where we’re starting to look into that success. And his survival mechanism said, no, we don’t belong there. We’re not worthy, we’re not capable. If you’re there, then that means your relationship to you know, your family to everything changes, that means you’re more responsible. So all these niggling voices came up. So we just dealt with those voices one by one, and allowed him to step into that future, went backed into negotiations and completed it. So what you brought up Rai, originally was, you know, awareness. So my golden keys are awareness and then we accept what we learned. So rather than saying, Oh, I’m no hope, I didn’t handle that very well or I got really tight around that, “You’re a terrible person, Richard!”

Right and being self judgmental.

Awareness, acceptance, and then agency. From that higher level of awareness, we can look we can accept all our flaws, our reactions, our emotions, but we can also say, now, what would I like?

Feeling some of these pieces, some of these obstacles, these self sabotaging tendencies are easier to spot than others. So for example, someone’s saying, oh, yeah, you know, capitalism and money-it’s the root of all evil, and I just don’t want to be like those people. So I want to live a life of minimalism, and maybe even poverty in kind of a humble sense. That’s something that people, especially if they’re very passionate about it, they can identify, yes, I do have that mindset about the world. But how does someone go about developing awareness of issues that they’re not that are not readily visible, like, the beliefs that they inherited from their parents or their community that they grew up in? Or their schooling or their coaches who they were on athletic teams with in high school in college? You know, how do we go about really identifying the problems that we can’t see within ourselves?

Well, what you’re talking about and focusing on something that’s really important, and that is self awareness. Without self awareness, change is very difficult. So how do we do that? I have a process called the SET- Sensations, Emotions, Thoughts. In fact, we could do it right now I’m going to sensations is my physical sensation. So I’m going to take a trip through my body. I’m gonna start in my head, bone faces fairly relaxed, throat a little tight. Ah, chest tight. Mostly, my stomach is tight. I’m kind of excited to have this conversation with you. I’m kind of pushing a little fast maybe. Okay, is that what I want? I’m aware of it. I don’t judge myself. What would I like now? Oh, my gosh, that feels better. So here’s one of the criteria for change. If we can step into it, and say, Ah, that feels better then we know we’re on the path. If on the other hand, we have to discipline ourselves, we have to use willpower, then we know we’re setting up a struggle. So, my job as a coach is to set it up so people can step into an experience and feel better. So sensations is first, next is emotions. What am I feeling emotionally? Right now, I’m kind of happy I’m satisfied looking at your face having this conversation realizing that you are asking the right hard questions and this is really a challenge and wonderful so I’m feeling good. And then I look at the quality my thoughts, Well, while I’m talking it’s hard to think about the quality of my thoughts but in a quiet moment, am I being judgmental? Am I harsh on myself? Am I giving myself approval? Am I thinking through complex situations, so SET- Sensations, Emotions, and Thoughts and if we do this so one of the things or exercises I do I have my clients set alarm. For some people, it’s every 10 minutes, hour, once a day, whatever it is, the alarm goes off beep, beep, beep how’s my sensations? How’s my thoughts, how are my emotions? So that’s the start.

This is perfect. You just taught our listeners how to develop self awareness. You said, check in with yourself on these three important things, sensations, emotions, thoughts. Don’t be judgmental, just be an observer, be objective, be compassionate, that you’re a human having a human experience. Be aware, and don’t put up resistance. And then okay, so how do we even do those check-ins and develop that self compassion, set a reminder, set an appointment for yourself, set a timer, something to help trigger the check-in process. And that’s how you gradually build that muscle of self awareness.

Yeah, and here’s what’s that really gets exciting. You build that muscle of self awareness up here, you build the muscle, and eventually, that develops agency. So we move from awareness and if we’re, if we do that enough, eventually, rather than our behaviors come from just reactions, our behaviors now we can say, Oh, my wife just looked at me cross-eyed – my reaction is – “Oh, did I do something wrong?” I can say, Oh, um, that’s an old pattern from my mom. Do I want to-how do I want to experience that? Oh, no, I don’t want to experience it like that. I want to experience it as a male who can handle, absorb, be empathetic, and still stay in my own body without having a reaction. Oh, that’s how I would prefer to do that. Okay. So if we develop awareness, and we just get in the habit of it, eventually that awareness almost, we move our behavioral reactions from just the physical “Oh?” to what would I want now, what serves me the best.

So the more you practice this check in, self awareness process, it becomes-it takes less effort over time, maybe overtime, you don’t need to set the alarm on your phone, maybe over time, you don’t need to, you know, set aside a specific part of the day to do your reflection and introspection. And then what you’re saying is, when that happens, you then develop choice. So we don’t necessarily have a choice about what happened to us in the past, especially as kids-we’re growing up in certain situations with certain parents. But now, we do have a choice in terms of how we react to the programming that has been installed. And now we get to rewrite the program, if we choose to.

Oh you said a whole bunch of great things here. One is that, you know, at first you do the set score, oh, one of my sensations, you know, and you have to think about it. And while maybe my physical, it takes a while, then emotions and thoughts. But as you repeat that pattern, it’s almost millisecond-you’re through the whole thing. So it becomes just part of you on a regular basis. And then once that becomes regular, now, it’s-doesn’t take as much intention. So that’s, you know, that’s a great point. And I’m glad you emphasized it.

What is it like for your clients, when they start to realize that they do have a choice about how they feel about money and how they react to things in the world?

Well, you’ve just put your finger on a real important topic, and that is most-not one client has ever come to me and said, “Rich, I’m not really prepared to step into wealth, or be wealthy or be successful. You know, I-my mindset is fine. Oh, my gosh, I would love to be financially secure. Nobody’s ever come to me. But I’d say about 70% of the clients have some issue around stepping into success, either from their deepest identity, I’m not worthy. Their belief systems, I’m not skillful enough or I don’t deserve it or the world doesn’t just give that to me. Or we have all the responsibilities-I mean, people don’t realize that when you’re wealthy, it changes a lot of things. You can screw up a lot of people, you can make really big mistakes and lose a lot of money. Your parents, your whole culture can has a different relationship with you, your relatives might want to come to borrow money. So when the survival mechanism realizes, oh my gosh, Bob or Sally is going to be wealthy. Oh, we don’t know how to survive that we know how to survive the struggle. We know how to survive where we are in this conflict, because we’ve done it for years, but my gosh, can we really survive all the new issues and the survival mechanism doesn’t get, I was gonna say a swear word, our survival mechanism doesn’t care about the quality of her life, it just wants to make sure we’re surviving. So, what we do is we step into we do guided visualizations, we imagine it, we write down what it’s like, we look back at our families, our culture, who’s going to judge us? what could go wrong? And then we start to deal with this until stepping into that future feels like, “Oh, that feels better.” As soon as the client says that, I know we’re on our way.

Yeah, but there’s a heavy focus. And I think this is just the way the human brain is wired. There’s a heavy focus for us to go through all of the what if this goes wrong? What if that goes wrong? But what happens when your clients start imagining what could go right? I have a friend who she said she likes to say, good people with good money can do good work in the world. And I firmly believe that and if we always think about money in the context of okay, well, if I’m the wealthy one of my family, that everyone’s going to be coming to me asking for money, asking for loans, I’m going to be the primary breadwinner, that means all the responsibilities on my shoulders, we would go through this snowball of negative, but what if we went through a snowball of positive if, if I was making this much, oh, I could put this much into my kids college fund. And I could save this and oh, I want to do like a nature preserve. And oh, we could buy property over here and build our dream house. And then we could do this. And my mother wouldn’t have to be in a nursing home and we could afford to get her more competent help. And, you know, whatever the case may be, but what if we do that positive snowball?

Yeah, that is exactly the the process, we’re stepping into a new vision, what are all the positives in your life experience? And then the next thing is it comes up our identity, do we deserve it and all this stuff. So stepping into that, and all those positives, and then looking at all the subconscious voices that don’t want us to be there, all of a sudden, once we break through that, oh, my gosh, then our energy can be fully focused on getting what we want. And one of the things in the book that I talk about is, I don’t know you’re, you’re so young. But, you know, there used to be these vision boards, where you put the mansion, the fancy car, and all the things you want, and then you manifest them. Well, I turn the vision board into a value board. And the value board is what value do we deliver. So rather than concentrating on what we want, in terms of just things, we say, ah, what value can I deliver, then we work backwards to see the skills and all the things that we need to support structures to deliver that value. And once we make that shift of how what I can value, then-and this is going to is a real major rephaim-I was listening to the radio three decades ago and economist Walter Williams said it’s not money, it’s certificates of appreciation. So when I deliver value to you, Rai, you give me certificates of appreciation. So this is going to explode the brains of some people. The more certificates of appreciation you collect honestly, the more value you’ve delivered to the world. Oh my gosh.

I love this, and I want people to hit that rewind button once just tap that. So you go back 30 seconds and really listen to what Richard just said, because I’m gonna be quoting you for the rest of my life. I tend to explain a very similar concept to my clients but not nearly as eloquently I always say that money is an energetic exchange, and that energetic exchange has to be equitable. You have to feel like what you’re giving not just in terms of the deliverable or the project, but also your energy, your time how much you care about the thing, how much struggle you went through to create the thing, that energetic exchange has to feel equitable with what you’re receiving financially. And so when I talk to people about pricing themselves perfectly, we always focus on how does it feel energetically? How does it feel to think about this number associated with this service that you’re providing? But the way that you just said that? Certificates of appreciation? Not dollars, not bills, but certificates of appreciation-I love that. That’s brilliant.

Yeah. So, once you reframe that, then the question is, if I deliver value to you, Rai, I have to know what you value. Yeah, I am not selling what I have. I am learning what you value, and then delivering that value. I did a interview two/three weeks ago, and then the podcast interview just contacted me all excited. And he said, all of a sudden, I realized the certificates of appreciation I was getting was far less than the value I was delivering. So he tripled his income overnight.

By raising his rates.

Well, by getting more certificates of appreciation him and so so you know, he’s a guy with a really good heart, he really cares. And somehow in his mind, by giving people all this stuff, and not really appreciating the value it was there, he thought he was being a good guy. But when he realized that he was getting certificates of appreciation, oh my gosh, then all of a sudden, the more certificates we collect, the more value we’ve delivered. Now, there’s a whole world outside of the financial world, you know that our family are loving, our kids taking care of our spouses. The work we do, you know, you think of Martin Luther King, and people who’ve delivered just incredible amounts of value that had nothing to do with a financial system. So I’m not discounting that at all. In fact, I’d say that’s 90% of the values we deliver. But if we’re in a commercial world, God bless those certificates of appreciation.

And that brings up another really important thing for people to consider, which is, I usually refer to this as redefining what success looks like, you know, earlier, you were talking about some people think of success as monetary or material, they think of the big house or the fancy cars or the beautiful wardrobe. But really, we’ve seen-we’ve all seen this happen where people get to that level, and they’re still miserable. So really asking yourself, what does success actually look like, and most likely, there’s a monetary or financial element within that, but it’s probably not, oh, I want a house that’s this big, and then I’ll be happier, I want a car that has this horsepower, and then I’ll be happy. But more than likely, it’s-I want to feel free, I want to feel in command of my own time, I want to feel like I can get my work done quickly and efficiently and feel fulfilled by it, and then spend the afternoon with my children, whatever the case may be, success usually isn’t monetary and material. But the monetary aspect is the conduit of how can we get to a place where we can live the life that is actually success, in our turn.

You know, what you’re pointing to, is what I call the hole in the heart. So I grew up with a hole in my heart, I’m looking to say what can fill it. But what can fill it actually is a self awareness experience about the pain you’ve experienced, and dealing with that directly. But that is really challenging and I’ll say even in my own life, I spent a couple of decades trying to fill the hole in my heart with a substitute. So if we’re substituting money, and things, and prestige, and position, and power, and all that stuff to try to fill it, what you’ve just said is so important, that when we get there, the hole in the heart still there. So we do more, we stress ourselves, we try real hard. And we miss that important part. And that comes back to an awareness of what we really want. And you just pointed out some things about meaning in life. What is really meaningful? And is is that bigger house that requires all the main that’s meaningful. All the things that require all the lawyers, all the all this stuff. So coming back to where’s the hole in the heart and for that, for many of us, that’s really challenging because to do that-I mean, I was listening to a podcast the other day, and somebody touched that empty spot in my heart. A grown man, and I started crying. Why? Because he touched something that was missing really deep. So can we come to the place? Are we comfortable enough in our skin to be able to allow those feelings and that missing in that pain and suffering so that we can say, yes, it’s there? And then ask, okay, what would I like?

This goes back to something you were saying earlier. With regard to resistance. Oftentimes, we feel things-we start to feel things like sadness in the example that you just gave, where you started to cry, or we start to feel self critical or ashamed or sad, angry, any of those kind of low vibe emotions, and we immediately put up resistance and we go, nope, I’m not supposed to feel that, that’s a bad thing to feel and we try to go in another direction. But what you said earlier, and I think it’s important to bring it up here again is you need to feel those things, you need to let that energy and that emotion flow through you. Because otherwise, you’re just going to keep hitting up against that same wall over and over and over again. And when you actually allow yourself to non judgmentally. Feel the sadness, let yourself cry. On the other side of it, it sounds like what you’re saying is you had an epiphany, an aha moment about, oh, that’s also a hole in my heart. That’s something else that I now discovered, even as an adult, that this is something important to me.

Yes, so a lot of us have quarantined a lot of that early pain, and we had then have workarounds to try to deal with it. So, sometimes it helps to have a coach or a therapist, who is willing to slowly unwrap that with you, with confidence, knowing that you’re going to be okay on the other side, not only okay, but so much energy can be released once you experience it. Now, there are clients who want to experience it, and then experience it some more because all of a sudden, it becomes a therapeutic-it’s almost like the the pain they suffered becomes part of their identity. And so you know, to be a victim of that, and to stay in that mode. So, you know, I say, Okay, let’s experience it fully and completely, let’s experience the pain. Now, from that higher level, we can see that little child there in that pain. And now, where do we want to be in to step up so that we’re not just stuck when that identity as a victim, so that we can move forward with our lives and step into a life that works for us better?

Yeah, and as humans, we tend to not like subtraction, we don’t like when we feel like something is being removed from our lives or from our personal identities in this case. And so it’s really important to reframe this, and know that if you are removing these mindset barriers, these blocks to financial abundance, you’re not just-you’re not losing, that. You’re removing the victimhood and the things that are holding you back, and you’re adding in being a survivor being overcomer(I think I just made that word up) But you’re adding in the experience, the wisdom, the knowledge, all of the things that you’re gaining, we tend to focus on what we’re losing. And instead, we need to shift our focus to what are we gaining, by letting that anchor go?

Well, important, that’s so important because our survival mechanisms, all the old pain, the stuff we quarantine wants to keep us believe it or not in the struggle, because in that struggle, we’ve survived it. You know, I’ve survived the struggle of a depressed mother. Well, could I survive having a very different kind of relationship? My survival mechanism says no, no, no, we don’t Oh, we can do that, when you talk about is subtracting is letting go of that original survival. So but our survival mechanism is so powerful. We can either fight it and try to let it go. Or we can say “Hi, survival mechanism. So I’ll have my clients talk to it. Give it a name, and sometimes the survival mechanism is anger. I use anger as a way to win avoid dealing with any of that, because that’s what helped me when I was a kid. So okay, anger, how’re you doing? Let’s have a conversation. And sometimes that voice will say, I’m so tired. I’m so tired of trying to demotivate you and keep you safe. Can we find a different way. So once we recognize it, appreciate it, acknowledge it, accept it, then that old behavior may be ready to offer an upgrade.

And it’s funny because all of these things that tend to protect us or hold us back, whether it’s anger, or our perceptions about money-they’re very similar to us. They want to be acknowledged and understood and appreciated.

Oh, yes. I mean, they helped us survive when we didn’t have many options. I’d like to highlight that underlined it and put exclamations behind it.

And it’s not a it’s not a point of criticism for you to say, you know, when I feel this, it’s not a bad thing. You don’t need to criticize yourself for it, you need to say, oh, that’s been protecting me, that has been motivating me that’s been keeping me going that’s been of value in some way. That helped me in the past. And it was a value to past me. But present me and future me, we don’t need that anymore. So thank you for your time. Thank you for your service. You’re done now.

Yeah. Or how can we move forward with you in a new and productive way? So just in terms of language, you say we need to-so my preference is, I invite you to step into this. So need kind of is a subtle way of maintaining a bit of a struggle, versus an invitation to step into a better experience.

Yeah. Just one more thing I want to ask you before we finish up. And this is probably a pretty big question. But probably the most difficult to overcome money mindset barrier that I’ve seen people go through is worth self worth. And we’ve probably all experienced this in our lives where we have a friend or a family member, somebody we care about. And we’re saying, you deserve better, you deserve a better relationship, a better job, you deserve to be paid more, whatever the case may be. And we can tell that person all day every day and something just doesn’t sink in, then this is one of those things that really has to come from within. How do you help people develop a higher sense of self worth?

Oh Rai, you asked the hardest question- but the right hard questions. So when we come down to self worth, I have my own story about my own internal limits. And it was a voice that woke me up in the middle of the night. That said, Rich, you’re only worth 200,000 a year. And it’s a longer story, we won’t go into it now. But I realized I was done with that voice. And it was not in an intentional-it wasn’t rich figuring things out or being smart. It was just this voice that finally woke me up. How do we make that voice intentional? And what your experience is-how one of the exercises I do, and it’s a long two hour exercise. But basically I take people back to the day they were born in the hospital, have them compare that little baby with other little babies in the pot in the hospital and say, which of these babies isn’t a child of God who deserves to walk on this Earth, with their head high and their shoulders back which of these babies isn’t? And they’ll look at themselves and the other babies and they’ll say no, they’re all worthy, because they can’t point to their own self and say they’re not worthy. So once we have that, then we can go through a whole series of regrowing up and all the conflicts and issues where I’m being worthy, when they lost that worthiness, and so that is a reframing and or retraining of our brain. And that takes a little time, but oh my gosh, what you’ve just pointed out is that deepest level that once that gets shifted, oh my gosh, a whole bunch other things shift almost automatically.

Yeah. And I don’t want to minimize the value of taking the time to go through this exercise. and really see this through in detail. But I want people to be able to walk away with something that they can take action on right now. And you just illustrated it beautifully. And that is, when we’re born, we’re perfect. We always think with a-look at that little baby, we say that little baby’s perfect. There’s nothing wrong with him or her, she deserves the world, right? And so these feelings of thinking that we’re not worthy or we’re not worth a certain amount in terms of our rates are a financial receiving. That means that that idea was planted in us or came along somehow, after we were born. Which means it has nothing to do with who you actually are, and it can be removed.

I’m just gonna let that settle in. There’s-that doesn’t need comment, Rai. Everyone should go back and relisten to that.

On that note, Rich, this has been probably one of my favorite episodes we’ve ever done. Thank you so much for being here. Where can people check you out and learn more about all of the processes that you take people through and how you help people break through their money barriers?

You know, conversations.money And if you go to conversations.money/soar S-O-A-R. you have an access and a coupon to a free online course, that takes people through about 10 exercises, that kind of collect anything that is in that subconscious, all those things we’re not aware of, that brings them to the fore and gives you a reframe. So like you just said, you can walk on this earth with your head high. And so that’s conversations.money/spar. And you can also email me rich@mindmuscles.com And of course, there’s the book, private conversation with money that’s available almost everywhere in audio, ebook and paperback and hardback.

Amazing. Thank you so much for being here, Rich.

Always my pleasure. You just bring out. I mean, I’m sure everyone tells you, you bring out the best in everyone. So I really appreciate that.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

You’re very welcome.

Rai Cornell 37:43
Hey, Rai here again. Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, please subscribe and rate us in your favorite podcasting platform. Want to be a guest on the show or know someone who has an amazing story of entrepreneurship? Apply on our website at chironconsulting.us/podcast.

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