Figuring out what direction you want your life to go into after a lay off is hard. Listening to this podcast to get some ideas is not.
In this episode, I spoke with Swapna Patel, a former IT Consultant turned Real Estate Maven. She was laid off twice while working in corporate before deciding she needed time to figure out the direction she wanted to take next. We talk about things to keep in mind when wanting to transition out of corporate, as well as the benefits and flexibility entrepreneurship has to offer.
Follow the podcast on Instagram: @rebootloadingpodcast
Interested in becoming a guest? Email me: rebootloading@gmail.com
Get in touch with Swapna here:
SwapnaPatel@kw.com
Mobile: 281-300-9823
Books Mentioned:
Shift By Gary Keller
Who Moved My Cheese? By Spencer Johnson, M.D.
Figuring out what direction you want your life to go into after a lay off is hard. Listening to this podcast to get some ideas is not.
In this episode, I spoke with Swapna Patel, a former IT Consultant turned Real Estate Maven. She was laid off twice while working in corporate before deciding she needed time to figure out the direction she wanted to take next. We talk about things to keep in mind when wanting to transition out of corporate, as well as the benefits and flexibility entrepreneurship has to offer.
Follow the podcast on Instagram: @rebootloadingpodcast
Interested in becoming a guest? Email me: rebootloading@gmail.com
Get in touch with Swapna here:
SwapnaPatel@kw.com
Mobile: 281-300-9823
Books Mentioned:
Shift By Gary Keller
Who Moved My Cheese? By Spencer Johnson, M.D.
00:04
Hi, welcome to the Reboot Loading Podcast. I'm your host, Stephanie. Hello everyone, on today's show I have Swapna Patel. She's a lifelong Texan, a mother of two girls. She was in IT consulting for about 15 years, traveling all over the country until she said that's enough and left the corporate world. She's also the person who helped me set up my very first email address back in the 90s. I didn't even remember that.
00:32
So Swapna, welcome to the Reboot Loading Podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's so great to get to talk to you. Swapna has been a long time family friend, hoping that you can shed some light on those of us who are currently laid off, looking to leave out the corporate world and what options we have. How do we keep our heads up? Help us out. So I have been through the corporate layoff cycle twice, once in 2001.
01:00
again in 2009. The first time, you know, it was a little scary. Like, oh my gosh, that was the whole time where everybody, the dot com companies were shutting down. There wasn't a lot in the IT world. At the same time, it's a crazy coincidence. My parents' house flooded in Houston. So there was a lot of stress going on. I think the first thing to keep in mind is it's going to be okay. You've got to take a deep breath. You've got to...
01:29
Give yourself a little bit of grace to freak out a little bit and then decide what your next steps are. What is it you want your next step to be? In 2001, I wanted to continue my career path as it was moving forward. It took a few months, but I did get another job with a different consulting company and continued to move forward. With my second layoff in 2009, I just had my, or was about to have my second child.
01:55
I didn't want to go back into that career field. And so I had to decide what I wanted my next steps to be. I did decide that for about two years, I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom and realized that was not the lifestyle I wanted. I couldn't do that. And I was researching, owning my own business, working for another corporate job that didn't involve traveling, various other options. And I think that is the key.
02:24
what do you want your next steps to be? You have to figure that out for yourself. That's very true. And I was going to ask about the freak out part, cause you said allow yourself some time to freak out. So what's a good length of time? Because I feel like I cycle through that and maybe there isn't a timeframe. I kind of go from, oh my gosh, what am I gonna do to, okay, now I'm hitting the ground running and I'm gonna do all these things and I have it all planned out and everything figured out. And then the next moment I'm like,
02:53
crying in a corner or something. So I think it's going to depend by person. Everybody's in a different financial situation when this kind of thing occurs. So that will definitely impact you. The first time I was very lucky, I was living with my parents. I didn't have any big financial things that I had to be concerned about. And then literally four days later, the house flooded. So.
03:16
I took a good three weeks to just deal with the house and not do job searching and anything, but I had the luxury of not having financial responsibilities. With the second one, I was again lucky I was married. I didn't have the constraints of needing a paycheck anytime in the near future. So I was able to make decisions a little bit differently. I think you have to look at your financial situation and say, hey, take a couple of days. Everybody needs at least a couple of days.
03:43
and then figure out your financial solution. How long can you last? How can you cut your bills? And I don't think you ever really stop freaking out a little bit each day. Because even if you're two months into your job search, and you're looking for something and you've sent out all your applications for the day, you've done your interviews for the day, you're going to be frustrated and annoyed that you haven't gotten an acceptance, that you haven't received a position possibly. And you need to be able to give yourself grace to freak out that day too.
04:13
It is like an up and down constantly all throughout the day. So sometimes you'll get those rejections and emails, you know, two, three times in a day, and then sometimes you'll have a lull or you might have an interview. So it's kind of, it's, it's really an emotional rollercoaster that you're going through. It is. And you need to give yourself grace. I'm still learning that. Still learning. I am so hard on myself. I'm like, gotta have all your stuff together, like figure it out now. One thing that I have learned that helps a lot.
04:43
And this took a lot of time for me to get to because being in corporate America, we have our outlook calendars and we have meetings scheduled. So everything is kind of planned for us, right? When you're home or you're self-employed, there's no calendar that you have to maintain or anything like that. So I highly, highly recommend you go out and get a big old planner. There's something about tactile, maybe it's just me, about having a piece of paper and writing and having that on paper.
05:12
saying, hey, I'm spending two hours of my day sending out resumes or doing this or doing that. Otherwise, phone calls are gonna come or whatever is gonna happen. It's gonna be very easily to get distracted because you're discouraged. In real estate, we do that a lot because you are self-employed. Every morning, no matter what, two hours is calling clients, cold calling, whatever it is that I need to do before I actually hit the ground running on my business.
05:41
I have friends that will call every morning. I will not take phone calls before 9 a.m. Period. End of story. And that means that because that's my time with my family, getting the kids off to school, whatever, it's important to time box that as well. Yeah, definitely. I'm glad you brought up real estate because what made you transition? So once you said, okay, this staying at home mom life, I mean, that takes a very strong person to do. I have tried to do it. It's not the life for me. I don't know. I don't have the patience of a saint. So there's that.
06:11
this structured corporate world and having those meetings, having everything kind of timeline out for you into now doing real estate. So I was very lucky in that I could make the choice to be at home for a couple of years. I really miss that personal connection with people on a day-to-day basis. My husband was traveling. So I was literally home by myself with two.
06:34
kids under the age of five, four days a week. You know, I needed those people to talk to and not just at home, on the phone. I needed to see people face to face. So I knew I wanted to do something. I really didn't know what something was. I did know I wanted a flexible schedule. I knew I didn't want to travel anymore. I looked into a company called Kumon, which is a tutoring center. I said, that's great. I pay for this for my kids. Now I don't have to pay and I can have my own business.
07:01
And it sounded great. It's a thousand dollars to start your own franchise. Sounds really cool. Till you realize, oh crap, when do you run the school? When your kids are out of school and you have to do that every week. And wait a minute. I wanted something when the kids are in school for me to work. So it was a little bit of hit or miss and trying to research what it is I wanted to do, but I think understanding what you want your next phase of life to be. I joke with my daughter, you know, she's 16. She's looking at career options.
07:31
I'm like, I'm doing the same thing. I'm trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up again. You know, I did that. I left IT. I tried to figure it out. I got into real estate. There's some changes coming in real estate that may make me have another career change. I should always be thinking, what is it that I like about this job? What is it I don't like about this job? And how can I grow to my next role that way? It's good advice, though, to always be looking. I think that's something that I am learning now.
07:59
Like I say in my intro to this podcast, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up either. And I feel like like you, I have a 16 year old and trying to encourage your kids to pick something or the old way of thinking that you have to just know what you want to do when you go into college or getting out of high school or whatever and just pick that career path and go with it. But it's not like that anymore. You do always have to be looking at different options, different things, especially in tech space. There's so many different ways that you can go.
08:29
that it's almost crazy if you say like, I'm going to be this. And you actually become that like, I don't know of anyone who's gotten to fruition on all of that. It's really funny because I have very high expectations of my kids and their grades and things like that. And you don't want them to go to university all of those things. But at the same time, I give them a little bit of grace saying, you know what, I did all of that.
08:56
And now I'm in a career where all I need is a high school degree. And I'm making about as much, if not more than I did with my degrees. Um, not to say that there's anything right or wrong about going to college or not going to college or whatever. It's just, the world is different. I remember when I first started working, I changed jobs and this was in IT again, back in the late 1990s. And I changed jobs after two years, two times, and my dad was freaking out.
09:23
What do you mean? No one's gonna hire you to keep jumping jobs because nobody did back then only IT people did and now every career seems to be you're jumping after two to three years to be able to move up. One of my friends had the perfect saying for it, you need your getaway car. You always have the car running. Let's say it's you're robbing a bank, there's always a car running outside. You never know what's going to happen. So you always have that running car outside.
09:50
if something happens like a layoff, you've got another alternative route to get out. You see a lot of times now, especially with social media and how prevalent things are there, you see a lot of people going for the approach of having multiple streams of income versus just that one. So that's something that's really changed over the last, I would say within the last couple of decades, tremendously, like a huge shift. A lot of us went into a career.
10:19
because it was the right thing to do, right? It's the career that give you money, the career that's gonna make you stable. We would all love to be dancers and, you know, social workers or whatever, but is that gonna pay the bills, right? That's what we were all taught. But you can open a dance school while you have your corporate job and do a dance school in the evenings and on the weekends. And that can become your running car even in a situation like we are in right now. If you're laid off, you still have a second stream of income.
10:47
That second life is something you wanted to get into, but you couldn't originally for whatever reason. And that's kind of how I got into real estate. I always loved real estate. I enjoyed real estate. And I was lucky in that my business partner was looking for somebody. He's a construction guy, didn't wanna deal with computers, didn't wanna deal with taking phone calls. I can barely tell the difference between a hammer and a screwdriver. So it was a match made in heaven.
11:14
And we started real estate development, started building houses, renting them out, flipping houses, things like that. But that's how I got into real estate is finding that right person and deciding that that passion that I had, that interest that I had and deciding that that's where I wanted to focus. I actually have a, well, I got a real estate license years and years and years ago when the market was super hot back in 2004, 2005-ish.
11:42
The thing that I learned really quick for myself is I'm not a very good salesperson. I feel like you have to be somewhat of a good salesy person to be in that field because I was like, I would take people into houses and they're like, I don't like the crown molding. Then I'm like, I don't either. It is ugly, I agree. I don't have a poker face in that sense. It was definitely the field to be in. For me, it was like, oh, that was one of the things I just did because that's where you should be, that's where the money was.
12:11
So what's your favorite part about what you're doing right now? Okay. So I was doing real estate development. I was doing it as investment, right? So what ended up happening is around 2017, 2018, a few friends came to me saying, Hey, how do you do this? Teach me how I definitely feel like I've got the heart of a teacher. I love explaining to people. I love watching people change their family trees and the direction that their, their personal wealth can go.
12:39
So I showed a couple of people, okay, this is how I evaluate properties, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Okay, now go to that agent and she'll help you buy it. Well, by the third one, I was like, well, that was stupid. She just made all the money, I did all the work. Why don't I become an agent? And that's really where it started, why I became an agent is it was for me to grow my development where I didn't have to pay commissions, where was my money not making me money, but I could still teach people. I still felt like I was contributing to
13:08
society. Even now, I give training classes on how to invest in real estate. I do, you know, on Zoom multiple times a year for people around the country. I don't have business cards, Stephanie. I don't have business cards. I don't have any marketing material. I strictly go off of referrals. I've never gone out looking for a client. So I get what you say about sales because there's real estate agents who will go knock on doors. There's people who put flyers on, you know, in your mailbox. I've never done that.
13:37
because I feel icky doing it. That's not me, you know? But I think what ended up happening is I knew enough about the market and I know my space and people felt a level of confidence in me. 2020 was bonkers in real estate. You know, we'd have 50, 60 offers on a house here in Houston. We'd offer 50,000 over asking and not win. Still, we were relatively successful in finding things for my clients. It was challenging. Real estate in general, you have to kind of know what you're getting into.
14:07
There's a lot of costs in being a realtor people don't realize. There is. I remember that. I definitely was paying more out of my pocket at the time than I was making, but it was an experience. You know, I'll share with you this. There's a big shift in real estate happening this summer. And is it going to impact real estate as a whole around the country? Absolutely. There is a book. It is a little bit more real estate focused, but it's called Shift by Gary Keller. I highly recommend that book. It just talks about.
14:36
Things shift. How are you going to deal with this? How are you going to make sure that you're ready for shifts? There's another book, Who Moved My Cheese, that's quite a bit older, very easy read, very short book, but, you know, talks about things change. How am I going to deal and be ready for that change, cope with that change? You know, I've got a very successful real estate career right now, but I'll be honest, I'm looking for another position right now myself.
15:03
Because I don't know how it's going to impact me this summer. Real estate is not constant income. That's another big shift. You're used to that paycheck every two weeks, every 15 days. Honestly, I'm not going to get another paycheck till October, but I've made huge sales this year, but they're new construction homes. I don't get paid till those homes are completed, which is October. So what do I do January to October for money? Even when I'm looking into
15:29
how do I want to shift into maybe doing my own thing? And that consistency of a paycheck always pulls you back in. You know, it's like the, they call it the what? The golden handcuff because you're tied to that, whether or not it's something you actually want to be doing, having that consistency is a big deal. The other big one, and this is a personal fear, is health insurance. Oh yeah. It is crazy expensive.
15:58
I'll tell you from my family of four, we're doing $2,500 a month right now. For many years, I kept telling my husband, no, you have to stay in corporate till we can till XYZ is in place because we just need health insurance. Doesn't matter if you can make more money. It's, it's, we won't be able to afford the really good insurance that the companies can buy, you know? So be ready for those two things. If you are looking to get out of corporate, those are probably the two biggest things to be scared about. Not, not scared to be prepared for.
16:25
And I wanted to ask, I've read some of the changes that are happening and I saw some news articles about it within the real estate space, what exactly is changing? Currently, the way you sell a home and purchase a home is the seller is obligated to pay a commission to their agent, the listing agent, the selling agent, as well as the commission to the buying agent, the person representing the buyer.
16:51
You have both agents because each person, each agent will represent those people and work in their best interest. There is a belief and the reason this lawsuit that is creating all of this came about was that there is a belief that there is a collusion that 3% is how much seller agents, listing agents, as well as buying agents are required to get. The change right now is stating that sellers are no longer obligated to pay the buyer's
17:21
So what that means is you have to have a separate negotiation with the buyer, which is fine. Again, it'll be 3%. So if you're buying a house for 500,000, normally the seller would have paid 15,000 to their agent and 15,000 to the buyer's agent. So they would have already built in 30,000 into their home price. So they were expecting to sell this house for 470 knowing that they had an expense of 30,000 coming in.
17:51
the buyer is paying the 15,000 for commission. The problem is what buyer has $15,000 cash once you've already gotten money for a down payment? How do you roll that into a loan? They're not gonna let you. So there's a lot of questions. So now do buyers just not use an agent? Well, now it's like going into court without a lawyer, representing yourself when the other guys got Johnny Cochran on the other side. What do you do? So there's still a lot of questions. There's still a lot of...
18:18
Settlement has not been approved by the judge. There's still a lot of loopholes coming through, or a lot of hoops to jump through, excuse me, till we get to this point in July. But it is gonna be harder to be a buyer, for sure. And there are a lot of agents that don't wanna be buyer's agents. If they can't guarantee that they're gonna get money at the end of this, they're just not gonna make themselves available to be buying agents. They're only gonna be listing agents. We have to pay taxes on this income. It looks like 3%, 1% is straight to taxes.
18:46
Yeah, and you're on a self-employment tax bracket, right? Self-employment tax bracket. You've got to pay your brokerage. You've got to pay for all your own marketing materials, even signs and to have your lock boxes and all of that. You still need to pay monthly to be on the MLS. You have to pay a monthly fee for that stuff. You don't sell a house this month, which I haven't. That's $3,000, $4,000 out of your pocket, even though you didn't do anything.
19:16
So if you don't sell a house in March, you're in the hole. I think going back to our topic of, you know, kind of the next steps, things look really good on HGTV and flipping houses. Things look really good when you see someone running a Kuman Center. Like I said, things look really good from the outside because we're in a social media world, right? Everybody shows you the positives. Nobody talks about the negatives.
19:44
So I highly encourage everybody, if you are looking for certain paths outside of corporate, yes, I love it. It's great. I can't imagine ever going back to corporate after being my own boss. My mom was diagnosed with cancer in September. I was able to be with her in the hospital all the weekdays because my sister's out of town. She would come and take care of the weekends. But we were able to do it.
20:10
do that because of my career choice. If I was in corporate America, there's no way I could have done that for my family. To be able to do that is priceless. So I would never go back to corporate ever again just to have that freedom. If you could do anything that would make your heart just explode with joy, what would that be? Money not being a factor, just pure satisfaction of what you're doing. You're gonna laugh. I would love to be on the board of a charity.
20:39
Okay. And to possibly something either medical or education related, usually education related, seems like education seems to be the, or lack of education seems to be the root of a lot of issues. So that's always been, you know, if money was no object, I would love to be able to create programs, opportunities for people to get more educated, for more research, those types of things for medical things, and to be able to make money goes where it's supposed to go. Because we all want to
21:09
But we hear about goodwill and some of these places where it's not really a charity, folks. And you don't know that. You find that out later. That's always a struggle. When I'm looking to donate or give to an actual good cause, you're always finding those things that you don't want to know about XYZ places. And it's discouraging because then you're like, well, forget it. I'm not going to do it. But I will share with you if you're interested.
21:37
As of today, what I would love to do, and it'll change tomorrow, I promise you. But what I would love to do, so I think yours is great, and you said I would laugh, and I did not laugh because I think it's amazing. You will laugh at mine, I guarantee you. I would love to open one of those cat cafes. It's one of those things. Yep, call me cat, I get it. I saw them everywhere. One of those where you're just surrounded by cats. Obviously, if you're allergic, take a Zyrtec or something.
22:05
I think that it would be just so much fun to just be surrounded by people who love cats. I can definitely see you doing something like that because knowing your personality is something that you would enjoy. And I think that's, you know, in this second phase of our work lives, that's something we have to take into account. You know, life is short. We've spent a lot of years doing.
22:31
the right job, the cubicle job, and there's nothing wrong with that. I loved what I used to do. I had a really hard time saying, okay, I'm leaving corporate America. That's how I defined myself. It was before kids, before marriage, that was me. I was Swapna the consultant. I wasn't anything beyond that, and I was really, really good at it. How am I defining myself now? What do I want out of life? What is important?
22:59
And literally sitting down and writing it down. I want to feel productive. I want to have flexibility in my schedule. I still want XYZ income. I still want this. Putting that down again on paper is important. Every year I sit down with my quote, real estate work wife, and we do goals. What are our personal goals? What are our health goals? What are our career goals? What are our sales goals? Will we hit them? Maybe, maybe not, but putting it on paper.
23:28
makes a big difference. There's a lot to be said about things like a vision board or just being able to see things how you were saying earlier about something being tactile. I like having the physical piece of something. So like my calendars are all I have everything in my phone, but I also have a paper calendar that a book that I write everything in. And that's just how I roll. I also want to say I like how you talked about the identity piece and how you identified
23:57
because that is something that I found myself struggling with because I've always identified as this full-time working mom. That's what I do. That's my identity. You know, in the corporate world, that's who I am. And this whole experience for me has been really finding who am I really? Because that isn't me. It's not me now. The other funny thing is how other people perceive you. And is that important or not? Being home and having what I consider a full-time real estate job.
24:26
because I definitely work more than 40 hours a week doing real estate. But people think you're just home. My mom will call up randomly. Okay, grapes are on sale at Kroger. Great, mom, I'm working. But you're home. Yes, mom, but I'm working. There are a lot of careers that people don't realize is working. So you have to be ready for that too. You know, older generations, yes, but even your own peers will think that you know, she just stays home.
24:56
No, I have to I'm up to two o'clock in the morning writing contracts sometimes. You know, that's maybe why I don't take your call at 730 in the morning. I know you're going into work, but I'm asleep because I work later night. And that's a good point, too, because with a lot of companies wanting to do this whole return to office thing and, you know, going from the remote environment to transitioning back into office spaces, I feel like I work way more when I'm at home.
25:25
Yes. Versus going into an office. It's great if you have to go into an office because you have a defined beginning and end time that you can just skip out and say, oh, I'm off the clock. This is a time to really be introspective. What is your goal in life? Yes, because that is something that I have been doing a lot. And that's when I realized, like, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. And I've been using that a lot lately because.
25:52
I really don't, I'm just realizing and trying to figure out every day what it is I want. And it's coming together. It's definitely better than where it was. It's a work in progress. But it's weird to say that at my age because I always thought I was going to have everything together. And I say this a lot as well, and I'm sure my family's sick of hearing it. Where I am right now in my life is not where I thought I would. Yeah, nobody is. And I guess I'm at that age now where I'm like, back in my day.
26:22
I say that a lot to my kids now and I just never thought I would get there, but I am. And it's just that realization of things that come out of my mouth. I'm going, oh my gosh, like this is me now. Trust me, my friend. I'm turning 50 this year and I never did what my degree was in. There's a lot of jobs out there that make great money. Maybe your passion may fit your lifestyle that you may not be considering because...
26:50
of what society says or preconceived notions. Even this real estate development thing, I never in a million years thought I would be in the situation I am today. I said, maybe I'll have a couple of rental houses, never have a business partner. I don't think I could ever trust somebody that much. But it really took me taking a step outside of my comfort zone and saying, okay.
27:15
How can I address that fear, that concern? Okay, we've got a great partnership agreement. It's very clear what everyone's duties are, who handles what. Okay, let's move forward. Let's take it in baby steps, but let's move forward. And my business partnership has been great. It's, you know, we've been partners for over 12 years now, never had an issue in the world because it was all defined ahead of time. Doing something I never thought in a million years I would be doing. I've never worked in anything my degree is in.
27:42
You know, I went straight into tech and a lot of companies ask for, what is it like engineering degrees and those sorts of things. I don't have that. I have a biopsych degree, nowhere close to it. It is what it is. One more point going back to the career thing. I did this when I was interviewing corporate, I did this in real estate, it's branding yourself. How are you different?
28:10
how I can meet your needs better than anybody else. Whatever it is that you are good at, brand yourself that way and people are gonna come to you because you are bringing something else to the table that others can't. And that's something that where we've talked about before as well, imposter syndrome comes in because you second guess yourself when going into positions like that because it's very hard to sell yourself because you're always going to. You have a lot of people, it's fake it till you make it. Or imposter syndrome.
28:39
It doesn't have to be one or the other. You can be confident because you've already done it. And I hate to pull my age into this because my kids call me old as dirt every chance they get. But I've been there, I've done that. Why am I so worried that people are not gonna have confidence in me? All I have to do is exude what I already know, be confident in what I know. It's important to have.
29:06
forums like this where you're hearing other people are struggling with the same things you are. And another thing that you had said earlier about going outside of your comfort zone, that is super important because that's what's going to keep you going forward. If you keep taking a step outside of that comfort zone, you're going to go somewhere up eventually in the right direction. At least that's my hope, but you have to take that first step to push yourself. Am I going to die and wish I spent more time in the office? Right. That's the quote we always hear. Of course not.
29:36
you know, we're gonna wish we spent even more time with our kids, even more time with our parents, whatever else it is, whatever is your passion. Agreed. Well, Supna, I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I really appreciate you coming on here talking about the challenges that you've had, where you are now, giving us a little bit of hope to look forward to appreciate the
29:57
info on all the things in real estate right now. I do want to give a shout out if anyone is in the Houston area. Is it just Houston or do you do all? It's the metropolitan area, but if you want to be a realtor, not just real estate needs, but if you want to be a realtor, I'm happy to talk to you about what a career in real estate looks like, how you can get free training without any obligations. Give me a shout. I know Stephanie is going to post out some of my information, so feel free to reach out to me.
30:25
So if you have questions, if you want to do these things, please talk with Swapna, she will help you. She's great at what she does. Fill her heart up and contact her. She wants to teach you. I will link all of her information in the show notes. Thank you. And you know, I love that you've got this forum because half of what I was saying was not just for your audience, but.
30:49
to keep myself in check and to remind myself these exact same things. And hearing others that are in the same boat actually helps a lot. Just keep at it. That's all we can do, right? We just want to keep at it and be the best versions of ourselves. And you're helping us all do that. So thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you. If you're interested in becoming a guest on my show.
31:12
All the information on how to contact me is available in the show notes. Would love to speak with other laid off individuals, mental health professionals, recruiters, business and career coaches, and resume writers. Also, if you're enjoying the content and would like a shout out in an upcoming episode, a link in how you can support this podcast is available in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening and until next time.