Getting Better at Being Wrong | Self-Coaching with Jay Abbasi

Announcer Coming to you live from Glenwood Springs, Colorado, this is No More Mondays with your host, Angie Callen. Today’s episode: Getting Better at Being Wrong, self-coaching with Jay Abbasi.

Angie That new intro just still makes me so happy. Good morning, happy Monday to all of you. This is No More Mondays, the show where we believe three very important things: humans still matter, yes, that means you, mediocrity is expensive, and ownership will change everything. As usual, I am your host, Angie Callen, and I’ve got a loaded question to kick off your week. How much do you love being right? We all love to prove somebody wrong, which means we love being right. We also crave certainty, knowing what we’re doing, where we’re heading, knowing we’re making good decisions, and feeling confident those choices are going to work out in the end. But here’s the really inconvenient reality, y’all. This is life, and uncertainty is the one certainty in it. We are going to be wrong sometimes, and maybe even fail. My guest today is kind of an expert on this whole idea of being better at being wrong, not because he fails a lot, but because Jay Abbasi is a former Tesla leader turned speaker and coach, where he focuses on resilience, adaptability, mindfulness, and helping people navigate change and uncertainty without losing ourselves or our minds. As the final guest in this series about self-coaching, self-leadership, and personal growth, we’re going to look at something we don’t always think about. What happens when we’ve been doing something that all of a sudden doesn’t work anymore? What happens when we get it wrong? We’re tackling that ugly little four-letter word, fail, head-on, so buckle up. Jay Abbasi is here. Jay, welcome to No More Mondays.

Jay Angie, I am thrilled to be here. And you know what? I have failed a lot, and I will admit that. And I’m proud of it. I wear it as a badge of honor, because I have failed quite a bit throughout my life.

Angie Oh, you and me both, and some of it has been pretty ugly. I love that you just went there, because for me, fail is a four-letter word that is actually more toxic and deserves more quarters in the swear jar than the other four-letter F word that everybody thinks is taboo. For some reason, we’ve really come into this can’t-fail time of society, and to me it points back to this idea that humans are naturally averse to change. However, we both know through some ugly failures that failure and change are the only ways we can grow. But I also think so much is changing so quickly that sometimes we all of a sudden get to this point where, like you and I were talking about in the green room, what has worked for seven years suddenly isn’t working. We’re seeing it in life and leadership, and then a catalyst comes in and says, okay, it’s not working, you have to change. From all your experience with failing and catalysts and change, why does it often take that precipitating event or outside influence to finally get us to wake up to the fact that something needs to change?

Jay It’s because we can so easily be comfortable in what we’re doing, and we seek comfort. We seek out things that make us feel like we’re in control and we have security. I could go back to a time in my life when I was just riding autopilot, going through the motions. I went to college, did what I was supposed to do, went to this finance job, and I’m like, all right, I’m supposed to get promoted and do all these things. For me, it wasn’t until I experienced something really devastating that I started to make some changes, because if I’d just kept going, I probably would have been this really burnt-out, unhappy person who didn’t have a lot of fulfillment. The event was when I lost my father. It was very unexpected, back in 2014, and when he passed away, it really was the external event that woke me up to asking myself questions I never was even thinking about. While of course losing a loved one is hard, anyone listening knows how hard that is, it was also the thing that shifted the trajectory of my life. Ever since then, when I experience some hardship, something I never would have expected, I now look at it as, okay, this could lead me to something bigger, there could be growth from this.

Angie I find it so interesting that those events, and they can be all types, right? For me, moving to Colorado was one, and then there were some ugly ones since, losing a loved one, a layoff, something that really does shake you out of that autopilot. For those of you who’ve listened for a while, you know why Jay and I were quick friends, because similarly, we did everything right on paper, got the big expensive degree. It’s hanging on my wall, so I’m reminded of how lovely that nice piece of paper is on a daily basis, until something made us say, wait, I don’t know if this is what’s right for me. When I intro us and say humans still matter and mediocrity is expensive, this is what I’m talking about, because you could have been fine, which is, by the way, another four-letter F word. You’d have been fine. However, you wouldn’t be this whole self-aware human that you are now, and while it hasn’t been easy, I’m guessing you feel like you’re better for it.

Jay Of course. It’s the scars, the difficulty through life, that’s what molds you into the better version of you. I did a keynote just yesterday, and after I got off the stage, someone came up to me and said, I really related to the story about your father and that loss. He’d had some loss throughout his life, and he said, those are the times where I grew the most. I looked at him and said, have you ever grown from a pleasant experience? Have you ever felt like you developed into a better human being from delightful experiences? Of course not. That night, I had gelato at the sweet shop, and it was fantastic gelato. I didn’t grow from the gelato, I can tell you that.

Angie Oh, you won’t remember it. It’s memorable, but it doesn’t make you grow.

Jay It doesn’t make me grow. I enjoyed it, I’d do it again. When I look at my entire life, it isn’t those moments of great pleasure that were the leaping-up points, where I became the better version of me. It was the difficulty, the challenge I worked to overcome. So the shift I really hope to help people make is, when you’re experiencing any form of stress, to appropriate a better meaning to it, to not see it as this negative thing you need to get rid of, but rather this is the opportunity for growth presenting itself to you.

Angie Yeah, you want to do the opposite of what our human inclination is, because caveman roots tell us run back to the cave. However, we no longer live in the day and age of saber-tooth tigers, so doing the opposite is going to get you further. You feel stress, you feel out of your comfort zone, lean into that. What we’re talking about here is this idea of interrupting the status quo. I’m curious, from your experience, and you’re going to have to tell me what gelato shop that was so the next time I’m in that city I can get some, but why do you think, or have you seen, disruption creating this sense of clarity that it does?

Jay It was the Gaylord Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, a gorgeous hotel and convention center. They have this little spot in the lobby with these little houses, and that’s where the gelato was. But the other, less important question, is that what disruption does is it breaks us out of our mold and opens up our perspective. You’re looking at life all from one angle, and that’s how you see everything, and then something disruptive happens, and as long as you’re in the right mindset and able to see the opportunity in it, it opens up your perspective. It’s like this, Angie: no one goes to the gym and lifts the lightest weight possible expecting to have bigger muscles. You go to the gym knowing, hey, I’ve got to lift some heavier weight, there has to be tension, there has to be resistance, and the resistance is what’s going to lead me to be healthier and stronger. We know that, it’s logical, common sense, and yet it’s difficult for us to wrap our heads around that for things more in the space of mindset and emotional challenges. But the analogy holds. It’s those difficult seasons that are going to bring about more strength, more courage, to become the better version of you.

Angie Newsflash, pain is a muscle, and you just gave me a new analogy. I love bad analogies, it’s a dad-joke thing. My dad was my math teacher, the king of them, and I became the queen of them. To me it’s like, if you think about going to the gym and doing a one-rep-max deadlift to test how much your muscles can be under tension, hard things are like putting your brain through a one-rep-max lift to test how much you can do and prove to yourself. What I find so interesting about hard things is they make the next thing less hard, and all of a sudden the baseline of the comfort zone, and how far outside it we can go, and what we feel capable of, drastically changes. But you’ve sometimes got to have a catalyst to make you do it.

Jay Yeah, and you have to start by acknowledging whatever the difficulty is, to see it exactly as it is. I’ll tell you a quick story. After I lost my dad, one of the things I did a lot of was watch TED talks. I was a huge fan, and I felt like I got so much out of them, and I told myself, one day I’d love to be on a TED stage, I’d love to stand on that red dot. In 2024 the idea hit me, hey, I think I have an idea for a TED talk. So after 10 years of dreaming about it, I put myself out there for a few organizers, my application got accepted, and I was set to give my TEDx in September of 2025. I had a year of planning. I rehearsed, I had coaches with me, I recorded myself, I sent it to people for feedback, I put in so much work for a whole year. Then September 2025, I stand on that stage, I deliver it, and it goes so well. The crowd loves it, I receive such positive feedback, and I’m told that within a few weeks the video will be on YouTube. Well, a few weeks go by, and it’s not on YouTube. Two months, three months, four months. Now it’s January of ’26, February comes, and what they finally tell me is that the venue didn’t capture my audio, and therefore the talk wouldn’t be published. Angie, I was devastated. And I’m the resilience expert, right? This is my wheelhouse. Here’s what I did. After I heard that news, I sat on the floor of my office, right here, and I just sat in it. I sat in all the anger, all the sadness, all the grief, all the embarrassment too, because I’d told thousands of people my TED talk was about to come out, and I’d gotten them all excited about it, and now I had to figure out how to let them down and feel totally embarrassed that it wasn’t coming out.

Angie This is like a top lifetime moment. I don’t know if all of you out there know, you don’t just get accepted to do a TED talk, it can take people years to get in. So that already is a win, and now you’re sitting in the irony of what you talk about and what this milestone created.

Jay Exactly right. And I’m actually grateful I got to experience it, because I put my own formulas into place, I put my own teachings into practice. It always starts with acknowledging, acknowledging how you feel, acknowledging the reality. Then, after you can really say, you know what, I’ve acknowledged this, this is what it is, I’m not fighting it, I’m not resisting it, you can move to the next step, being curious, asking questions. What opportunity might this present that I haven’t thought about yet? How could I see this differently? What could I learn from this experience? One of the things I learned was how attached I was to it. If it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have realized how much of an attachment I had, so that was so valuable. And then the third step is, okay, how am I going to channel this into something good? How do I channel all that energy into something meaningful? Since that news, I became committed to writing my book, and I’ve been writing it, I’m in the process of editing. The reason I share that story is that I still deal with hardship, but these are some ways any of us can deal with whatever unexpected change happens. You acknowledge it first, then you get curious about the different ways you can look at it, and then you channel it into some positive action.

Angie In this moment, you had a choice. You had a choice to sit there and wallow, woe is me, or you had a choice to shift your perspective. This is where we come back to that four-letter word, fail, not because you failed, but maybe TED, or the venue, failed you, and you could have chosen to make that the definition of the moment, or you could make lemonade out of the lemons. Somehow, as a society, most people just look at the lemons. We’ve become so fail-averse, bad things happen to me instead of bad things happen for us, and I’m wondering how we can get better at it. The title of the episode is How Do We Get Better at Being Wrong? You weren’t wrong in this moment, but you could have approached the situation the wrong way. So where along the way did we become so failure-averse, so afraid of wrong things happening, and more importantly, how do we get better at it? There’s a loaded triple question.

Jay Yeah. If you really break down why we’re so hesitant to be wrong, it’s fear below the surface, and different people have different ways of explaining that fear. For some it’s the fear of failure, for others the fear of judgment, the fear of rejection, and it’s primal, it’s wired into our DNA, so it’s natural and human to have those fears. Now, the reason it’s so much harder today is that in our modern society it can be so easy to numb any of those uncomfortable feelings and distract ourselves through the little rectangular object we’re all carrying around everywhere we go. The studies on this are fascinating. This year, 2026, Reviews.org said on average we’re spending five hours a day on our cell phones, up from four and a half last year. If you extrapolate that over 80 years of life, that’s 16 to 17 years of our lives staring at a cell phone. And it was Arthur Brooks, the Harvard professor and researcher, who put it very bluntly. He said, the more time you spend on your cell phone, the more depressed, lonely, and anxious you become. So we’re using this device, all of the stimuli, as a means to distract ourselves and not have to face our fears, and what that leads to is that we actually feel worse.

Angie Yes.

Jay Right. We reach for the thing thinking it’s going to make us feel better, but it actually hurts you in the long run.

Angie For multiple reasons. So let’s just say what you and I are both thinking, the phone is a drug, because it acts like it, and it can be an addiction. I’m not sitting here being hypocritical saying I’m not guilty of it, that little how-much-time-did-you-spend-on-your-phone thing pops up every Sunday, and I go at it, and I think, how do I do less of it? But there are extra layers, because it’s the ultimate coping mechanism that’s within arm’s reach or already glued to our hands, and that in and of itself makes it a trap. What we’re consuming exacerbates the whole thing, because there’s never been an easier time to fall into comparison syndrome, and I feel like that’s one of the big reasons we’re afraid to fail, because it’s what will people think. Failure is so much more public than it was when all we had were cans and string to connect a telephone. What we see on social media is everybody’s good and no bad, so we hold ourselves to a standard that doesn’t actually exist, because you’re only seeing what people want to share, and now you’ve created this completely disconnected little ecosystem for yourself. How do we start to change that?

Jay You’re right about the comparison, it’s seeing everyone’s highlight reel, and thinking, oh, I’m supposed to be like that, and I’m not, therefore there’s something wrong with me. Well, I put it in two simple words for people: get bored. I want everybody listening to get so bored, crazy bored, because when you get bored, meaning you’re not reaching for your cell phone and you’re really sitting in it, or you’re in the middle of an activity where you’re not having to think hard, like being in the shower, you access what’s called the default mode network. The default mode network is the area of our brain that activates when we’re not in our task-positive network, when we’re not writing an email or focused on a task. It’s the source of your creative thinking, it’s what leads you to come up with how you solve problems, and it allows you to consider the fears that have held you back and work through them. I think we’re just not spending enough time in our default mode network, not spending enough time just being bored. So what I encourage people to do, if you’re like, you know what, I was wrong about something, I made a mistake, and I want to work through it, go for a really long walk without any headphones on, and just let your mind go. I’ve given this a term, Angie. I call it mind freeness. Everyone knows about mindfulness, but mind freeness is when you intentionally free your mind to explore new ideas. Mindfulness is when you’re walking your dog and you have the leash on, and the dog goes a little and you bring it back, that’s like your thoughts, they go a little and you bring them back. That’s great, it creates space to observe, and I practice mindfulness. Mind freeness is when you just let the dog off the leash and go wild. We need that at times, because when we don’t give ourselves the space to explore, we can’t work through whatever problem happened and come up with a creative solution. You need that time for yourself.

Angie And here’s the thing, boredom requires you to spend time with yourself, and we hate spending time with ourselves, because we’re so accustomed now to constant distractions that keep us from ourselves. But that’s where we work through the hard stuff, that’s where we come up with creativity. By the way, I loved your statistic about phone usage ticking up, because you and I like the same nerdy things. One of the studies I saw recently is that younger people are spending as much as two hours a day home alone more than older generations, so no wonder the phone is ticking up, we’re replacing the time we used to spend around a dinner table or with people. That keeps us from spending time with ourselves, and that is hugely impactful to connecting with yourself, being resilient, being adaptable, and knowing how to work through hard things.

Jay Yeah, and there’s a lie out there that we all believe, which is, if I reach for my cell phone, it’s going to make me feel better, when reaching for it actually makes you feel worse. And the other lie is, if I sit in boredom, it’s going to be terrible, when if you actually sit in it, you’re going to get more out of it. It’s the idea about something not being what it actually is. It’s interesting, my daughter is 14, and she’s always saying, I’m afraid to speak up in social settings, she’s a bit on the introverted side. We were down the shore this summer, and I said, sweetheart, for you to get better at social settings, you have to actually do the thing, you have to speak up. So we’re sitting there, it’s her, myself, my wife, and a bunch of people she doesn’t know, younger people, and everyone’s telling stories of school. Out of nowhere, my daughter chimes in and tells a story about what happened at school earlier that year, and it was great, it was relatable, funny, interesting. Then at the end of the vacation, I asked her what her favorite part of the trip was, and she only brought up the time when we were all sitting around telling stories. That was her favorite experience. The fear of it was so big that she was like, I don’t want to do it, it sounds terrible, but after she did it, she said it was the best of all the experiences she had on her summer vacation.

Angie You’re at the beach, and a 14-year-old chooses a personal growth moment as her favorite. One, love your kid. Two, great example of the word resilience I want to bring in, because we’ve mentioned it a few times, but it’s a huge part of your work and how we become more adaptable, and she gave herself permission to test-drive that activity. I also think we’ve developed a weird relationship with resilience in the world, because we basically just think of it as, take the hit, get back up, keep going, muddle, push through. We confuse resilience with grit. So tell me how you define resilience and why it’s so integral to this whole conversation.

Jay Resilience is not, I just keep going even when it’s hard, that’s not resilience, that’s not sustainable resilience. Sustainable resilience is, I am adaptable, I recognize when it’s time to rest and when it’s time to perform, and I can go between those two as needed to have sustainable performance. I often use the analogy of a cell phone. Everyone knows you’ve got to charge your phone every single day. You wouldn’t let your phone get to zero, die, and then charge it, you create plans to ensure it’s charged. We do that for our phones, but we’re not really good at doing it for ourselves. And we know that when our phones are used more, hotspot, navigation, YouTube, filming stuff, the battery dies faster.

Angie Battery dies faster.

Jay It dies faster, and we need to charge it more, we know that, it makes total sense. But when we’re in high demand in our work and our lives, and there’s increased pressure, what do we say? I don’t have the time. I don’t have the time to do those things, when it’s totally backwards. So for me, resilience is that balance of rest and recharge and performance, and it’s being self-aware enough to recognize whatever season you’re in and do enough to ensure you have enough charge to meet the demand.

Angie You used the word sustainable a minute ago, and I think that’s a really good way to think about it. Sometimes we think of resilience as a rubber ball, I bounce, and there’s some truth to that, you can become bouncier the more you put it to the test. But ultimately, resilience is the thing that helps us maintain some consistent baseline despite the waves and the seasons and the things that come our way, so it doesn’t become a giant emotional roller coaster that becomes exhausting, and we can ride those waves.

Jay Exactly, and the way I put it so people can create actionable strategies is through what I call the resilience formula. It consists of three parts: energy plus space plus choice. Are you protecting your energy, just like with the cell phone, are you charging enough? We have to have a plan, we have to make our energy-producing activities, our EPAs, very clear, and commit to protecting our energy. Space is what we already talked about, not just being on our phones all day, not just being in the task-positive network 100% of the time. Are you creating space to process, space to observe, space to explore, and is that something you’re committing to putting on your calendar? And then three is choice. This is where I bring up the quote by Viktor Frankl, between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space is our power to choose our response, and in our response lies our growth and our freedom. So if we have the energy, and we’ve created enough space, then we can choose our response, and choosing a response that acknowledges our reality and allows us to be adaptable and work through the adversity is where we find our superpower.

Angie I’ve got to meet this with a really nerdy moment, because this feels like the newest version of a Newton law. We know energy can’t be created or removed, we can just balance it, and what’s so interesting about your equation is it’s essentially a way to balance energy so it’s not wildly high or low, but maintained throughout whatever is demanding or depleting levels of it.

Jay Exactly, you’re absolutely right. Energy is always going to be expelled, always draining in some way, that’s just how it works. You go to sleep, you rejuvenate, you wake up with energy, and then it’s going. But if you’re in such high demand and you’re not balancing that energy, of course it’s going to drain you, and you’re going to end up in a state of fight, flight, or freeze. Your amygdala is going to perceive everything as a threat, and you’ll have no access to your prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain where you can look at things objectively, because you’re so depleted. Then it becomes a cycle, you’re in that state of distress all the time, and that’s what leads people to burnout.

Angie So let’s bring this all together, because burnout is an aspect of everything we’re talking about. If you’re constantly in fear of making the wrong decisions, or you’re doing the opposite, constantly in fear of making any decision and keeping yourself small, eventually you’re going to burn yourself out, because you’re expending energy and never filling it back. So when we think about this resilience piece, I’d love to hear how your relationship with it has changed throughout your experience with change, and in this whole idea of how we get better at accepting uncertainty, or being wrong, or failure. How does all of this intertwine?

Jay Yeah. It goes back to a story I often tell of when I was really struggling with a lot of change, years ago. I’m in a climate where there’s absolute chaos in my work, so many unknowns, we don’t know what tomorrow is going to look like, and I’m in the living room of my house with a friend and mentor named George. I’m talking to George and I say, George, there are so many things that are uncertain, and I guess I’m just afraid, I’m afraid of the unknown. And George looks at me and goes, no, Jay, you’re not afraid of the unknown. And I’m thinking, this guy, I thought he was listening to me. I say, George, I just told you I’m afraid of the unknown, clearly that’s the problem, why would you say that? He goes, Jay, you’re not afraid of the unknown, because no one is, everything is unknown. What you’re afraid of is losing the known. I get chills every time I tell that story, because it was the shift in perspective for me. Before, I would be so afraid to let go of things, so afraid of losing something I felt I had control or security over. When George said that, it made me realize, well, if everything truly is unknown, and uncertainty is the only certainty, then I really don’t have any real control over things I thought I did. I just have to let go of all of that, completely let go of any perception of control, and instead lean into the things that are coming, the quote-unquote unknowns, because that’s what life is. It’s more aligned with reality. Before, I was resisting reality, I want to control this, I want to grip it, hold on to it. Now I don’t feel that way. Now I’m just like, okay, I expect everything to change, I expect chaos, I expect uncertainty, and I just lean into it. I don’t fight it, I don’t resist it. It doesn’t mean I don’t get disappointed, of course I do, I’m human. It just doesn’t have the same grip on me it used to.

Angie Yeah, and the theme here is really about the shifted perspective and the mindset. Let the dog off the leash, and instead of this whole I survived that, or how do I survive that, looking at these circumstances, or even going into the uncertainty, as, hey, I could learn, and that might help me grow. I love this idea that it isn’t about the fear of the unknown, it’s about the potential loss of what you do know. That’s that mediocrity thing I go back to, because what if the very thing keeping you from that unknown could end up rocking your whole world and unlocking something you never would have imagined?

Jay Yeah, it’s like that old story, a Buddhist story, I believe, where you ride the horse to the lake, but the horse isn’t going to get you across the lake, you have to get off the horse and get on the boat. You have to let go of the horse in order to take the next step, and sometimes we’re holding on to the horse too much, holding on to what got us where we were because it made us feel safe. It really is about safety. People say, I want to feel safe, and it’s recognizing that you can’t invest your sense of safety into one specific thing you’ve relied on for years, instead invest your sense of safety into trusting yourself to be able to figure things out. And everyone listening, you have evidence that you can figure it out. How do I know? You’re here, you’re alive, you’re listening, you made it. So you have a lot of evidence that you’ve been able to figure things out. Go back to that evidence, remind yourself of what you’ve already figured out and already done. You’re not trying to figure out how to be resilient, you are already resilient, you just need to remind yourself that you are, and trust that you’ll continue to be with all the unexpected things that are about to happen after today, tomorrow, next week, next month, and so on.

Angie I don’t need a bring-it-home moment, because Jay just gave it to us. But I’m going to meet you with my own, because to me this isn’t about so much self-awareness that you always make the right decision, it’s actually the opposite. It’s knowing yourself and trusting yourself enough to notice and admit when maybe something isn’t working, when the horse is no longer the vehicle, when what got us here won’t get us there, and leaning into the uncertainty of what happens between those two things. You got here, how do I get there? There are going to be unknowns, and being willing to question those could take you to some pretty incredible destinations, but we’ve got to let go of the fear of wrong decisions or that those mistakes are going to define us. Adaptability and resilience, just as simple as Jay just made them, don’t overcomplicate it.

Jay Beautifully said. I have nothing to add, other than to say, trust future you.

Angie Trust future you. We might have to change the name of this episode. Now that we have nothing else to say, which I believe is never true in either of our worlds, it sounds like you have a few exciting things coming up. You mentioned a book. What is happening in that world of yours that you want to clue everybody into?

Jay Yeah, the book is definitely something I’m working really hard on. The working title is The Happy High Performer, and that should be out in early 2027, is what we’re hoping. Of course, we have our podcast, Unstuck, where we tell some interesting stories, we do two episodes a week. And I have my SOS newsletter, where every week I share a story, an observation, and a strategy. Anyone can go to my website, jbossy.me, click blog, and sign up for that free newsletter, with some cool resources we share as well.

Angie And we will, of course, as always, link all of those things and probably do some giant celebration for Jay when the book comes out over at No More Mondays. So if you want to track Jay down and pick his brain more, or get the updates on the book, definitely check it out there. I couldn’t imagine a better exclamation point on this little series about self-leadership and self-coaching than this. As we close out this mini-series, Jay, you get to be the last person to answer our series question. Are you ready for it?

Jay I’m ready, let’s go.

Angie Even in all your awareness about resilience and adaptability, how to navigate failure, in all of your awareness about mind freeness, what is something that you know about yourself that you still have to continually relearn?

Jay There is a natural fear of rejection and looking stupid and being criticized that comes up all the time, and for a keynote speaker, that’s a struggle. I just did a keynote, and I was telling my wife, even just reviewing the survey results is a difficult thing for me to do, even after doing it hundreds of times. So what I always have to work through is that sense of wanting to be liked, wanting to be accepted, and then reminding myself that there are always going to be people who dislike me and people who like me, people who reject me and people who accept me. What I have to focus on is adding value to others as best I can, as authentically as I can, and if I can really stay there, then that grip of people-pleasing and the fear of rejection begins to loosen.

Angie There’s always going to be the respondent who rates you a 97 on your Talkadot survey and then says they’ll never come see you again. There’s just always that person.

Jay Oh yeah. And some people just hit the wrong button by accident when they submit those surveys, and then there’s also that.

Angie But it’s also okay to not be everybody’s flavor, because the important thing is, for those whose flavor you are, you’re making a difference and adding value, and that’s the most important thing.

Jay Exactly.

Angie Jay Abbasi, thank you so much for being part of No More Mondays.

Jay Angie, this was amazing. Thank you for having me.

Angie I want this conversation to continue all day, but we’ll leave you with the reminder that there’s something freeing in remembering that being wrong or making mistakes doesn’t define us. Just like Jay said, even as speakers, we sometimes feel that’s going to become a definition, or become so prominent. But ultimately, mistakes and poor decisions and uncertainty are all just facts of life, and we can either look at them as defining, or look at them as information and possibilities, and most importantly, trust ourselves to guide us into the unknown. Resilience will take you far in this life, and Jay Abbasi is a great example. Once again, thank you so much for joining me. And to all of you out there, think about, where do you need to just let the dog off the leash? Until next time, here’s to fewer Sunday scaries and no more Mondays. I’m your host, Angie Callen.