On Taking Your Soul to Work with Dr. Erica Brown
About This Episode
What does it mean to lead with conviction in a time of crumbling certainties?
This week, Carrie sits down with Dr. Erica Brown, Vice Provost for Values and Leadership at Yeshiva University and a scholar whose work resides at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern workplace complexity. At first glance, this conversation seems to orbit around the familiar themes of leadership and purpose—but as with the best questions, the conversation keeps opening, folding in questions of identity, grief, joy, legacy, and resilience.
Erica’s latest book, Morning Has Broken: Faith After October 7th, blends the structure of spiritual meditation with the shock of collective trauma. Today, she offers a theory of leadership that begins not with bullet points or quarterly goals, but with the inner life. It’s about leading with a fully intact spiritual core, one that serves as a center of gravity that steadies you when your compass fails. And in a world where the compass seems to fail more often than not—politically, environmentally, interpersonally—her framework feels not only restorative but essential.
Together, they wrestle with one of the most slippery questions of the modern age: What is truth? Not in a postmodern, navel-gazing way—but practically. Tangibly. What truths do we inherit, and which do we pass on? How do we train ourselves to see the people in our offices, our communities, even our inboxes, not as roles but as souls? And what practices—tiny, daily, almost invisible—actually hold us together?
For anyone who has ever asked: am I doing enough—am I doing the right kind of enough—we encourage you to engage in this conversation. Through Erica’s deeply generous lens, we’re reminded that sometimes leadership is not about standing out but standing firm. It's not about clarity but conviction. It is not about knowing the answer but having the courage to ask a better question.
Links & Notes
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Audio:
The only thing that's going to matter. Look at what you're doing right now. The more we divide and silo ourselves, it's at our peril. Did we miss something?
Carrie Fox:
Hi, friend, and welcome to the Mission Forward Podcast. I'm Carrie Fox, your host and CEO of Mission Partners, a social impact communications firm and certified B Corporation. If you're new to listening, well, I am really glad you're here today. Because let's face it, we are all navigating uncertainty in one way or another in this very moment.
Whether that be at work, at home, in your community, or as you look out across the world, we are all in one way or another looking for voices who can calm us, maybe provide some perspective, and hopefully share some inspiration and wisdom to make sense of the uncertainty too. Well, today's guest is the person I have turned to many times in recent years for just that, for calm, perspective, inspiration, and wisdom.
Her name is Dr. Erica Brown, and she's the author of 15 books about leadership and spirituality, including one of my all-time favorite reads. It's called Take Your Soul to Work: 365 Meditations on Every Day Leadership, which my friend Samantha turned me onto many years ago, perhaps not knowing at the time how great of an impact it would have on my own approach to leadership.
Outside of her writing, Dr. Brown is the vice provost for values and leadership at Yeshiva University and the founding director of its Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks - Herenstein Center for Values and Leadership. She previously served as the director of the Mayberg Center for Jewish Education and Leadership and an associate professor of curriculum and pedagogy at the George Washington University.
And wow. Really, wow, what an honor it is to have her with us today. Erica, it is an awesome pleasure getting to talk with the person in person whose words have given me so much focus over the years. Thanks for being with us.
Dr. Erica Brown:
Carrie, it's so delightful. And first of all, thank you, Samantha. Hello, Samantha, and thank you. When you write books, you just never know if anyone reads them. And then to know that it's been helpful in some way in your life is really just my heart... It enlarges my heart, so thank you.
Carrie Fox:
Well, yes, your ripple effects in the world, Erica, are far beyond you may realize, but we use this often. I pick up your story at this publication, right? That's when I really started to learn about you when Take Your Soul to Work came out. But the story for how you got to where you are is one that I don't know. And I wonder if you can take me back a little bit to how you came to write such important books and to lead this incredible purpose-filled life that you lead.
Dr. Erica Brown:
Well, wow, that's such a big question, Carrie. I grew up in the home of a writer, a professional writer, so you see an old-fashioned typewriter behind me. So I grew up listening to that sound in the room above me, the ding used to get to the end of the typewriter line. So writing was a very natural experience for me, and it was a creative expression for me. I was a quieter kid, and I think that the world grew and blossomed in words and continues to.
I think for me, writing is a form of thinking and clarifying what I think. I think when you're a reader and you're a writer and you read broadly, you start taking in the world. And then the question is, how do you want to put something out in this world that you take in? And unfortunately, because of the saturation of social media and our news addictions and all the kinds of outlets that we have now that we didn't have when I was growing up, it's very hard to filter that.
And it's also hard to stay upbeat and to stay positive about the world. When you read as much, we're over-informed. It's not being well-informed. It's being over-informed. And so part of the question is for me, what is the spiritual filter that you put so that you process this news without losing hope in humanity? And I think we talked about navigating uncertainties, and we're all navigating uncertainties.
And we're doing so, we're negotiating with the world that's very slippery. It's very hard to get purchase on. And so part of it is saying, "I don't have a compass. If I had a compass, it might keep changing directions. What I need is actually a very strong sense of my core convictions." When I was growing up, we didn't talk about the core. We didn't have that language in our physical, the physical body. Now we do, and it's really helpful because it's a great spiritual metaphor for developing your spiritual core.
It's like what do you stand for? And if I pushed you over, you'd still be standing. And when we talk about strengthening the core, we expend a lot of energy, physical energy, mental energy, developing that physical core. And I look at the world today, children today, and I say, how are we developing their spiritual core, their moral core, their ethical core, so that they can have deep resilience that comes from within? I guess that's a driver for me.
Carrie Fox:
It's so interesting because on this season of the show, we are talking a lot about truth. What is truth? What do we trust? How do we know the difference between something that's true and not, and pushing at things we have long believed to be true that maybe aren't? And I think what you're touching on is so important. This idea of having core convictions and knowing that that can be our truth and how we hold that through key moments when we must make decisions and how we have to weigh those decisions against our core convictions.
Dr. Erica Brown:
And who gives those to you? It's interesting, if you're a student of the Bible as I am, many people are introduced to you by virtue of who came before them. And it's true in the Talmud also. I got this teaching from so-and-so who got this teaching from so-and-so. I am the child of so-and-so and the grandchild of so-and-so, and the great-grandchild. And I will be the progenitor of a child, a grandchild.
I think when you have a very long view of history, it forms part of your mission strategy, which is how do I honor what I've inherited? How do I filter and decide what I want to pass on? And I think sometimes it's the American way to be deeply individualistic. And sometimes that actually really hurts us because we don't see ourselves as part of this line saying, "I am a descendant and I'm also an ancestor."
What do I want to leave? What kind of name do I want? How am I stewarding this world so that I can pass it on to someone else? And I don't think we've done a great job of that. Not environmentally, not intellectually, not in terms of truth. I think it's hard to establish what truth is. So if you have, Carrie, if you've discovered that.
Carrie Fox:
Well, we are trying our best. But there's something interesting about this book that I am realizing perhaps in real time. So for folks who have not read it, and I strongly invite you to pick one up, that the beginning, the chapters, there's basically a chapter day, which is really no more than one page. It's a short entry. So each one is named something different, that in some cases you might say these are your points of view or reflections on core convictions.
So on goodness, on vitality, on originality, and it goes on and on, on public speaking, on meetings, on delight, just about everything under the sun, 365 reflections on these key issues. And some days I open the book and I go to the table of contents and I look for a word that resonates with me and I'll go read that passage. Other times I'll just literally open the book and whatever is there seems to make sense for me on that day. It is a tool for people to ground themselves in what their own points of view might be on those core convictions.
Dr. Erica Brown:
And actually one of the techniques that I use in the book, I try to pick a different figure, a religious figure, a political figure, an artist, some wisdom that that particular individual contributed to the world, to the world's conversation. And then it closes with a question. So if it's a chapter on compassion, there might be a question about who really needs your compassion today.
What I try to do is take the wisdom and just integrate it into a daily practice in your office, even if it's a home office. Because I think we spend so much time at work, and our notions of work, particularly post-COVID, have really changed dramatically, and they're changing dramatically even now. Both of us live in the DC region, right outside the nation's capital.
And the conversations about who is keeping a job, who is losing a job, going back to the office, there are all these questions that are coming up. And for me, part of that is what gives you spiritual conviction at work? What makes you say, "You know what? I was going to say that about a colleague." I call them close the door moments. Beware of the close the door moments.
Sometimes we close the door because we need to share confidences, but sometimes we close the door because we're going to gossip about someone. So you say to yourself, do I want people to gossip about me? What kind of environment? I've worked my entire career, almost 40 years, in the nonprofit sector. Now in university, but before that in nonprofits and philanthropic organizations. And culture matters at work.
Elevating the conversation, elevating the meeting space, it matters. It makes an environment where you might say, someone works in a nonprofit setting, "I'm not doing this necessarily. I bring a salary. It's noble to work, but I'm mission-driven at work. And I want to feel that the work culture is reflective of that higher purpose." And so that was the driver. I mean, that was Take Your Soul to Work. It's not only about who you are when you get in your car and you go home. It's really who you are when you're in that office.
Carrie Fox:
Who do you think sets the culture in an office?
Dr. Erica Brown:
So I would love to believe that it's the vast majority of employees, but I do a lot of work in leadership, Carrie, and I do think the personality of a space trickles down from the personality of the one who has the nicest office of the C-suite. I think that humane leaders create humane work environments. You can't always do right by everyone because then you wouldn't be leading.
But I do think there's a huge difference between the narcissistic leader, the generous leader, the thoughtful leader, the communicative leader. I think sometimes we work with people or for people who are not transparent in ways that are necessary for us or don't validate and affirm us. It's true that people like to... They like swag. They like to get recognized in those ways or a meal or a lunch.
But I think people really want to feel good about their work. They take pride in their work. And the affirmation of not, "Oh, you did a good job," but let me tell you... And in fact, I always say to people, try to do it in threes because it forces you to say, "Here are three things I love about the event you ran last night, or here are three things I really appreciated about the way you did that presentation at that meeting."
So that it's not a one and done. It's, I'm valuing you. I see you. I hear you. And I worry in the corporate layoff culture that's been created, that modernity has created, people, now we don't feel seen and heard. They feel that it's just too easy for them to disappear.
Carrie Fox:
That's a heartbreaking thought, just even to think about that. There's something at Mission Partners that we do inspired by some professors at Stanford University, Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao, particularly Huggy Rao has a process called Feed Forward. And it's similar to your threes that the idea of Feed Forward is most of the feedback we give is literally after the fact.
And so if we train ourselves to say, "One thing I love that you did last week is this. Now looking ahead, one thing I'd love you to try is this. And then the third piece is, what can I be doing to support you along the way, so that we're always thinking about looking back and looking forward at the same time."
Dr. Erica Brown:
Fantastic. Fantastic. I mean, I've read a lot on the feedback process. I think we get a lot of feedback. We get feedback starting in kindergarten. Parent-teacher conferences, that's feedback. You get feedback your whole life. I'm not sure that people are fantastic at listening to feedback, even when sometimes their jobs are at stake, sometimes a relationship that really matters to them is at stake. But our defenses are high. They're really high.
And even if you give good feedback and you do it constructively and gently, I think that there are jobs... And I want to note that in medicine, in academic medicine, and my husband is an academic physician, there are weekly meetings, M&M meetings, morbidity, mortality meetings, who got injured as a result of our care, of your care, who's no longer alive. And those are very close settings where you dissect the work that you do so you learn from it.
And I don't know that we've created enough learning cultures at work. When you create learning cultures, then a book like I wrote is helpful because you're thinking, how can I get better at this? But if I'm thinking about my work as how can I get out of here, just get this done, this to-do list, and get out of here, you're not in that Carol Dweck growth mindset. You're sort of here for the duration and the paycheck.
And I don't believe that that's the way human beings really work. Deep down we want to be good at what we do, at what we spend our hours in. I do caution people. Sarah Jaffe wrote a book, I think it's very important, called Work Won't Love You Back. I think we sometimes expect too much from work, and we also get disappointed when it doesn't provide all our social, intellectual, spiritual needs, or financial needs for that matter.
And then when people talk about my work family or my work wife, and then you leave your job or you're asked to leave your job, all of a sudden you feel very cut off from this emotional investment that you've made. So there is that space. How do I create this very robust, vital environment without investing too much emotionally so that I can get hurt?
Carrie Fox:
Maybe it's because I own a company and therefore it's almost impossible to know me as a professional or as a mom and a parent because those two things intersect so much. But what I often say is, I want you to know me as the same person. If you run across me in my sixth grader's classroom, or if you run across me as someone who is counseling your organization, you should see the same person there.
And that is so important and touches on what you're saying, which is we show up and we're so connected to our work environment that sometimes I think it's easy to forget who we are outside of it.
Dr. Erica Brown:
And vice versa. I think sometimes we show up for people at work because we have to or because we're trying to make a good impression or because we're looking for a promotion or whatever reason. And at home we're not getting promoted. Kids are great at demoting. My kids are older, so they're adults and it's very different. But when you're looking for affirmation at home and you're getting it at work, but you're not getting it at home because you might have expertise there and you might be struggling.
I think parents are seeking meaning and seeking support, and I think it's a lonely job. We struggle and we stumble, and it's very easy to make... I'll just speak as a mom. I was always a working mom, and it's easy to make a working mom feel guilty. And it could be, "You mean you don't pick up carpool? Oh, you mean you bought your child's lunch?" People get totally frazzled because we're trying so hard to be so many things for so many people.
I'm actually working on a book now called Stamina: Spiritual Leadership for Women Who Do Too Much. I've been thinking a lot about stamina, religious stamina, physical stamina, emotional stamina. I think men and women need it. But I've been having a lot of conversations with women about this recently and it's really interesting to me.
Carrie Fox:
That's interesting. So as you asked me to go find the truth, what I want to know is the answer to the Stamina book, because you're right, that is one that I think we'll all benefit from reading.
Dr. Erica Brown:
Yeah. Well, it's a long way from the nascent idea to the development and really created a survey to really find out how women are doing. How are you doing your life? What price are you paying? What energizes you and what depletes you? What do you do to protect yourself?
Carrie Fox:
What are you finding in that research that people have in common?
Dr. Erica Brown:
First of all, I think physically working out is extremely helpful because it's a stress manager and an energy creator and energy multiplier. I think people who... And I wouldn't call it self-care. I don't know what to do with the words self-care, particularly the hyphen, the self and the care. I don't work out every day for self-care. I work out so that I can support my mission in life, so that I have the energy to drive the mission that I have and actualize the purpose.
So I think that's a big piece of it. I think another big piece, and I think this feeds into an earlier conversation we were having, is aligning yourself with people who are positive and affirming and trying to distance yourself in some way from the people who are depleting. We can't always do that, and it's unkind to do that. But I think sometimes we exert a lot of energy on things that don't give energy, but take energy. That's people. That's the phenomenon of saying yes to everything.
I think just on my desk here is the book, The Power of Saying No, and I think that's an important mantra is when I say no to this, will I actually be protecting and preserving my energy so that I can say a bigger yes to the things that I really care about? And I think that's a problem for women. I think women have been socialized in many ways. I'm not a sociologist, but I think in my anecdotal experience, I think women have been socialized. I think I've been socialized to say yes, and I think you pay a price when you say yes.
Carrie Fox:
Does that come back in some way to those core convictions that if you know what they are, if you know what you stand for, that perhaps you'll have an easier time saying yes or no, because you'll have a framework by which to say yes or no to?
Dr. Erica Brown:
For sure, for sure. I think also when you don't have a strategy... I work with a lot of university students. I mean, I really think it's a privilege to be in their lives. And just this morning I was speaking to a student who's making a decision about graduate school and work, and she said, "Oh, I got a job offer." I said, "Fantastic." She said, "I handed my resume, my resume went somewhere, and someone called me and offered this job. And I think I'm going to do it." I said, "Is that what you want to do?"
And she said, "Well, I don't know." I said, "Well, what do you want to give your resume towards?" I think sometimes we're so excited when someone wants us that we don't ask, wait, do I want you? Is this a good job? And so it's true that on some level, I guess I do my work when I confuse people because trying to take them to a place where they question some of the assumptions about themselves in their lives. Sometimes I'll say to someone in a volunteer capacity, how did you get here?
Well, a friend called me and asked me. Do you care about this particular cause? Well, I think it's important. I said, "That's not what I asked you. Is do you care about this? Because your purpose is the nexus of where your talents and the needs in the world intersect." And I think a lot of people give their energy to things that they partially care about, but give so much more energy if they were passionate and they really cared about that. And it's hard.
Everything's important. So certain kinds of medical research are important. Meals on Wheels is important. Working with poverty, working in the food pantry, you got to figure out what is energizing you so that you can, again, have that multiplier effect with yourself.
Carrie Fox:
There are some lines in your book, particularly the... Is this your most recent book, Morning Has Broken?
Dr. Erica Brown:
Yes, yes.
Carrie Fox:
Which is like a book of poetry in so many ways. I mean, are these little... I feel like I'm inside your head when I read this. That it's just these thoughts and reflections that tie together a critically important moment in time to a broader history of time. The point you just made, I feel so strongly in this book of understanding who we are and how we got there and making sense of a really complicated time.
Dr. Erica Brown:
Yeah. I've written about death, and I've written about scandal, and I think this was a harder book. It was very personal. I've never written a book really quite in the first person in that way. I think our post October 7th world, and it predates this because we're looking at the war in Ukraine and Russia and we're looking at very powerful leaders across the world making very large decisions that will affect people they will never see.
I think if I were a young person today, I'd be pretty angry at my generation and saying, "Look at the world that you gave me. What am I going to do with this world?" So little is guaranteed, so little feels safe, and even less. I think there's a tendency when you feel betrayed is to withdraw.
And I've been in a process of withdrawal when I look at myself for a while, and being able to name it in the book helped me say, "No, no, no, no. You don't want to withdraw from the world that's hard. You just push harder on the goodness factor. You expect more of yourself. You expect more of others. You raise the bar. And you tell people, 'Don't be parochial. Don't be single-minded.'" Here I'm going to say something which is harder at work, but really not.
It's really the challenge, is who is a stranger in your office to you? And if you work remotely, who could you reach out to right now who might really, really need it? There's so many people who are really heartbroken, struggling, having a hard time. And just your noticing makes such a difference. That's when I almost always feel best is when someone I don't expect sends love my way. And it helps me understand that that's my responsibility to pass on love to strangers.
Carrie Fox:
That's a wonderful and practical reminder and recommendation for folks who are listening is, where's the greatest space? I love that question between you and your colleagues. And what might you do today to help close it?
Dr. Erica Brown:
And you know what? It can be every day going in and saying, "What kindness did I do today for someone who wasn't expecting it?" And that's, can I check that box? If you want to be as practical as that. Can I check that box? Can I name it? If you can't, then you say, "Well, what am I doing here?"
Carrie Fox:
So there is a little excerpt. If you don't mind, I'd love to read you back to you for a moment. And by the way, I held up your book, but I didn't say the name of it. Morning Has Broken: Faith After October 7th is the book that I'm referencing. And right in the beginning, literally page two, you say, "A few days ago, I left a wedding hall to watch a video of a hostage family. A few minutes later, I rejoined the dancing. It felt more honest to bring the suffering right there with me.
Under the bridal canopy, we closed our eyes and sang If I forget thee, O Jerusalem. I cannot forget, even amidst crystal and flowers and young love, the verse mandates that Jerusalem is put above my chief joy. To give a sliver of joy to the bitterness and a smattering of sadness to delight has taught us to live wholeheartedly in this short life. It enriches our faith. There is always suffering on the way. There is always joy on the way. It is good to be prepared."
Dr. Erica Brown:
I stand by that.
Carrie Fox:
Isn't that the moment we are in so much? We know there is suffering, and we know there is joy.
Dr. Erica Brown:
And I think we're overrun by the suffering, because the suffering is so much noisier, Carrie, much louder. It gets so much more attention. Newspapers aren't there to promote joy. So if we can't do it and we can't create the expectations of joy, I think that then there's really no purpose to being here. The transience of joy gives it depth. But you have to feel some kind of redemptive happy moments in the hurt. That's true in offices. You might be busy doing technical work and responding.
And the email world is not a particularly generative lovely world. It's a world where there's a lot of expectation, expectation of speed, expectation of responsiveness. Personally, it's my practice, I think I maybe even wrote it in the book, I don't check my phone for the first hour, hour and a half of the day. I write. I pray. I exercise. I find that on days when that doesn't happen, the rare days when that doesn't happen, that the world comes in too early and I am not prepared. I need to tank up.
Carrie Fox:
Yes. Yes.
Dr. Erica Brown:
So part of that tanking is not starting my day reactively, but starting my day creatively, starting my day spiritually. I will say that I don't take enough breaks during the day. And so I'm wondering in your life and the important work that you do and for your listeners, when do you need to take a break to recoup and say, "Okay, tank is low." Almost like a charger, right, a phone charger. I do this all the time. If I look on the phone and it says, oh, 50%, so I know, oh, I probably need to charge up a little bit. And that's the great metaphor.
Carrie Fox:
It's true. And listening to how your body feels versus ignoring it.
Dr. Erica Brown:
And how your mind feels and how your heart feels, when you say, "Wow, I just feel so down right now." I have a playlist, Erica's Happy Songs. So if I need a little three minutes, boom, I'm going to... So there's just some kind of energy that's coming in the same way that I charge up my phone or anything else. We need constant charging because someone is always taking away our energy.
Carrie Fox:
Folks who listen to the show know or probably have a sense that one of my favorite words is practice. I love practice on a lot of levels. I love to practice my craft. I love the art of practice. I love having practices that I follow. And for me, my faith, I'm Christian Episcopal faith, that it's Lent right now as we're recording this. And one of my Lenten practices is morning meditation and yoga. And I have always loved yoga, but I have never done yoga for 40 days straight. And Erica, it has been transformational in just these first several days of Lent to have that way to start my day.
Dr. Erica Brown:
Go on, girlfriend. Keep going.
Carrie Fox:
It carries me through.
Dr. Erica Brown:
Sometimes I do a leadership class in our business school and a values-based leadership class. So I give students different assignments, and one of them is exercise every day for 20 minutes for one week and then report back. And actually, it's been interesting for students to say, "This was so important to me that I kept going, or I've been walking for an hour a day, Dr. Brown. And I have to say, my work is getting done better. I feel so much physically better."
And then I'll give them another assignment. And this is harder, Carrie. I'll say, "Okay, this week's assignment is give 10 meaningful compliments to 10 different people every day and report back." The physical stuff they tend to do, but this issue of complimenting people. And I would try to explain is when I give a compliment and I'm putting a nice deposit in your daily emotional accounts, I feel much better about the world.
I feel that the world is an abundant world. I'm not running on scarcity. The rare students who actually do do this, they can see that just like exercise, it's a tank filler. I love the idea of practicing and getting better at something through continuous use of muscle. That's one of those I think practical tips for people to lead well at work is compliment often and generously.
Carrie Fox:
I love that. So I've shared that you are one of my greatest sources of inspiration and wisdom. Who are yours?
Dr. Erica Brown:
Oh gosh, I have so many. I would say there are two voices in my head, maybe three. One of them is my grandmother's. My grandmother is no longer alive. She died at 100. Celia, my grandmother Celia, she was a Holocaust survivor, and she was a very tough, but very compassionate person. And in order to survive, you really have to have a wonderful sense of humor. I'll often hear her when I'm making a decision.
I'll say, "What would she think about Rabbi Jonathan Sacks," who I had the privilege of having as a teacher. And he was a world-renowned faith leader, moral guide. And as a student of his and someone who runs a center in his name and teaches about him, so his teachings are very close to me. And I feel very privileged that I can hear his voice saying them as well, which I think is special. I would say I'm very blessed with...
My life's greatest blessing for me as my seven grandchildren. Although not all of them speak it, I think in that long-term way of handling a problem and saying, "I can handle this because someone in my past, my grandmother did, and look at the rich life that she built. And also I'm here so that I can give something to these beautiful people in the world." And so I think about that voice all the time. Maybe it's like a pixelated voice of all that. Just the simple joy of children.
Carrie Fox:
I love that. Thank you. And as we wrap up, because already it's time to wrap up, what's giving you? We've talked a little bit about this balancing. It's not one or the other, but balancing all that life gives us and how we respond and react and prepare. I love that word. We must be prepared for it. What is giving you hope as you look ahead?
Dr. Erica Brown:
I mean, I'm very blessed and it sounds like you're also blessed, Carrie, to do very meaningful work. And so for me, inspiration is not a one-time thing. It's this constant spring, this well. Because I work with young people, they keep me young. I think every day, literally every day, sometimes multiple times a day, I have a conversation or I get a text from someone and I see an act of goodness.
I see an act sometimes of heroism or something of courage. And I think, oh, well, that's charging me, that's filling the tank. And then I have a little bit more to give. I also, we haven't talked about it, but the power of friendship. When something's not going right or the day is hard, you say, "You know what? I'm going to put five minutes on a timer. I'm going to call a friend."
And just to hear someone else's voice and just to get that little lift. And I think that's really why I wrote the book. I guess each essay is somewhere between 250 and 400 words. It's a little more than the back of a cereal box, but something like that.
You just say, "What does it look like to keep something at work where you just turn in and you go, oh, let me just check in here, or let me just play one song, or let me just have one phone call, or let me just eat something that is delicious right now that I just saved for the hours of 3:00 to 5:00," which are always so hard for me. It's like something where you say it's a pick me up. And those things don't have to be of long duration. They could just be something short that just fills you.
Carrie Fox:
I love that. And you have reminded me, again, in this moment, there's so many reasons why I admire you and the work that you do, but the little bits of wisdom that come through in your writing come through so naturally in your words too. Not that you needed to know this, but you are exactly as you show up on the page, which I am just so grateful for the opportunity to ask you questions. I turn to your books. But to have this special time with you is truly, I mean, it's such an honor for me to be able to learn from you as you jump off the page.
Dr. Erica Brown:
Carrie, wow. What a lovely thing to say. That touches my heart. Thank you.
Carrie Fox:
Thank you. Well, it's been a real honor to spend some time with you today. We are going to link out to your books. I will keep an eye out for the new book. [Inaudible 00:36:49] You too. We will surely stay in touch, but really this has been such a wonderful way to spend my afternoon.
Dr. Erica Brown:
Reading. That's just so nice for you to read. Maybe when Stamina... I mean, it's probably a year or two out. But yeah, I'd love to check in with you. I have never written a book for women. I pull away from that because I don't think in such gendered terms. But I've noticed among a lot of women I talk to who are in senior leadership positions and their tanks are different. You feel differently.
Carrie Fox:
Right. We carry a lot through the world.
Dr. Erica Brown:
Yeah.
Carrie Fox:
I'm sure that book will resonate well.
Dr. Erica Brown:
Yeah, yeah, and there's a lot to work through, but I'm glad that your faith is important.
Carrie Fox:
Thank you so much. Such an honor. Talk to you soon.
Dr. Erica Brown:
Take care. Thanks, Carrie.
Carrie Fox:
All right, bye. And that brings us to the end of this episode of Mission Forward. If you heard something today that is sticking with you or you know someone who could benefit from this conversation, pass it along. And let me know that shows like this are benefiting you along your path to navigating uncertainty too by leaving a rating or a review on the podcast platform where you are listening right now. It makes all the difference and helps us get the content like this into the ears of people who need it. So my friend, thanks for listening and I'll see you here next time.
