198: Lisa Kline - "The Present Leader"

Lisa Kline of BreastCancer.org

Are you really here, in this moment?

"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT

Episode 198: Lisa Kline

Here’s a question. Are you really here, in this moment?

I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach their leaders to help them succeed where leadership has its greatest impact. The intersection of strategy and humanity.

This week’s guest is Lisa Kline. She is the Vice President of Communications for BreastCancer.org. They describe their mission as helping people make sense of the complex medical and personal information about breast health and breast cancer, so they can make the best decisions for their lives.

“And with young children, able to explain mommy's work is really important because there are people right now who are going through cancer, right? And so I need to be fully present for you, but sometimes I need to be fully present for these people because the work that we're doing really is life changing for them.”

Have we ever wanted more to be distracted?

Distracted from the chaos, the unpredictability, the anxiety and fear of the last two years.

Distracted from the relentless light of our computer screens.

Distracted from barely understanding the questions any more, and rarely, all too rarely, having confidence in our answers.

Faced by all that, it’s understandable and forgivable that our attention wanders, that our focus is shared, and that our interest often lies somewhere other than here, in this moment.

Leadership has always been an absurd expectation to place on human beings. See further, believe harder, fear less, act faster, be right, be perfect. Lead.

Happily, that view of leadership is dying by the hour in the world’s best businesses.

But as a new definition of leadership rises from the disruption of the last two years, it’s worth pointing out that it contains one expectation that will accelerate the gap between the alright and the great leaders.

The expectation that you are present.

Leadership begins and ends with trust.

When was the last time you trusted someone who wasn’t listening to you?

Here’s Lisa Kline.

Charles: (02:21)

Lisa, welcome to Fearless. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Lisa Kline: (02:24)

Thank you for having me, Charles.

Charles: (02:27)

When did creativity first show up in your life? When are you first conscious of creativity showing up in your life?

Lisa Kline: (02:33)

From a very young age, I feel like it was very much part of how my parents raised us, particularly my mother was really great at throwing out creative challenges to us as a kid. Probably as a way to keep us busy, I realize now. But she would do things like give us a word and say, “Okay, go take 10 minutes and write a poem about that,” or, “Write a story about that. Give us a situation.” And I think for my brother and I, that was just entertainment. It was fun. It's been a very much a part of our lives from the very beginning,

Charles: (03:09)

How did you express yourself growing up? Was writing always part of your childhood?

Lisa Kline: (03:14)

Writing was always part of my childhood. I think a lot of times I was writing apology letters to my parents or to my brother. That is a big… there's a very, very funny box of letters that we wrote as children that my mother has held onto for a long time and likes to now show us that we have our own children. Like, “Remember when you expressed yourself,” you know, “you expressed sort of why you were sorry for kicking your brother,” or doing what you know, or whatever he had done to me.

So yeah, I think it was it, you know, creativity and writing, imaginative play. I did dancing as a child. It was always there. And the funny thing to me is that I didn't really think about it as a career right away. I started off with a love of history and political science. I didn't make that natural transition from a creative childhood to that being a part of my professional life. It took a little bit of time to realize you could be creative at work, as well.

Charles: (04:14)

Where did the idea of writing apology letters to your parents and your siblings come from? I've never heard anybody doing that. I probably should apologize to my sister on this podcast right now for all the terrible things I'm sure I did to her.

Lisa Kline: (04:26)

I can help you, I can help you write the letters. I'm not… well, probably a combination of Italian guilt, and my mother just trying to channel our energy and channel our feelings into some sort of creative expression. For my brother, it kind of manifested in drawing and for me, it was always more about writing. And so, it was like, it's easier to write that you're sorry than it is sometimes to say it face to face. It kind of forces you to reflect on why it is you're really sorry, as opposed to that, I try it like, “Oh, I'm sorry.” You know, and then you move on from it.

Charles: (05:10)

Did it change your behavior? Are you conscious, looking back, that it moderated you in any way?

Lisa Kline: (05:15)

I think it did. I think it did, because it did force me to look at like, why was I sorry. I couldn't just write, you know, just writing, “I'm sorry,” on a piece of paper wasn't sort of an acceptable apology, right? It was like, “I'm sorry for what I did, and why did I do it?” And so I think it definitely made me think twice the next time. That's not to say I, you know, didn't do those same terrible little sister things to my brother more than once. If he were on the podcast, he would certainly tell you otherwise.

But it gave me an awareness, and I think it's something I, you know, I have two kids now and I try to do the same thing with like, don't just give that sort of real passive, “I'm sorry.” Why are you sorry? What would you do differently the next time and try to kind of prod them to feel their feelings, if you will, and express it.

Charles: (06:06)

Yeah. It's a wonderful idea. I have never heard anybody talk about it before. I'm fascinated by that.

Lisa Kline: (06:13)

I can read some of them to you next time.

Charles: (06:16)

Maybe next time I'll actually, I'll have you do that. I think that would be really interesting.

What got you into the marketing world?

Lisa Kline: (06:26)

I was starting out, I had a love of history. I started my career as a legislative aid. I was working in the Senate, and I was kind of very quickly… the shine wore off of what I thought it was going to be like and what the reality of the political process, and the politics of policy-making kind of got old. And what brought me to marketing was just looking for a change, looking to leave Washington, DC, and come to New York. I met with a recruiter and I was describing the things that I was good at. And the things that I enjoyed. I enjoyed the communications aspect, the writing. I enjoyed brainstorming, idea development. And she said to me, "Have you ever thought about a branding agency?"

And literally at the time, this was mid to late '90s. I was like, "A branding agency? I don't even know what that is." And she said, "I think you would be really interested in this. Go check it out." And that was really my first foray into marketing. I started as a marketing coordinator, kind of learned what it was to do marketing in that way from taking it sort of from legislative affairs and constituent communications into branding and marketing. And I've been there ever since.

Charles: (07:53)

What did you learn from your time inside the Senate about how decisions get made or often don't, I suppose?

Lisa Kline: (07:59)

I was going to say, often don't, or often how decisions are influenced and, and maybe I had a really naïve perception of policy making, but it was very much wheeling and dealing and sort of making compromises and I… and of course, you have to make compromises to get things done. But the purity of the process was kind of compromised. I started working for a member who I had similar political views to, but in some fundamental ways that I didn't realize, in my early 20s, that like I just disagreed and I didn't think that that would matter going into it.

And then, the realities set in of like, you need to believe in everything that you're doing to get the most out of your work. And I found that I wasn't. So I learned the importance of being true to who you are, and making sure that you can kind of embrace all of yourself in the work that you do.

Charles: (09:08)

Which is a perfect segue actually to how did you get involved with BreastCancer.org?

Lisa Kline: (09:13)

So another sort of life pivot for me. I had been in the agency world for a very long time. I had had two children in under two years and nothing sort of forces you to evaluate life and leaving your children than having two young children. And I was looking to make a change and just thinking about, okay, what matters to me as a woman, as a mother, as someone who was becoming more concerned with my health and my family's health?

And I started to talk to a former colleague and mentor of mine who had held many big positions in her career, about what mattered to me, and in kind of this weird kismet of timing, she had just learned about this role at BreastCancer.org, a communications and marketing role. And she said, “Lisa, you're saying, you know, what's happening at the intersection of health and technology really matters to you. You want to reach the sort of end user, if you will.” That was all sort of appealing to me, right? Because I had been with some really incredible agencies, doing great work on behalf of the agency, working on behalf of the clients who were serving their customers or users.

And I felt very removed from the process and I wanted to do something that mattered, and I wanted to be much closer to sort of an impact and have a more immediate impact on people's lives. And so this idea of BreastCancer.org being this 20-year-old organization that exists to educate and support people. But coming at it from an advocacy perspective and trying to stay relevant in a very competitive health technology landscape was a very exciting challenge for me. So I made the jump then from branding and marketing agencies and consultancies into BreastCancer.org.

Charles: (11:14)

And did you have a personal connection with the disease?

Lisa Kline: (11:17)

I, of course, like many people, have an aunt and a grandmother who both faced breast cancer, but I did not personally, or have not personally, had breast cancer.

Charles: (11:31)

So this was very much recognizing an opportunity to make an impact. But not one that was driven by a sort of, a personal crusade.

Lisa Kline: (11:41)

No, not, I mean, personal in the sense that I faced a diagnosis, but personal in the sense that as, you know, as a woman and a mother seeing how this disease impacts so many of our lives, right? Knowing that the science is getting better and better, and there are things within our power to prevent or reduce our risk or take early proactive measures. It just felt like more people should know about that. And this organization has, you know, both an innovation challenge and a communications challenge to get the word out.

Charles: (12:17)

How have the last two years affected the organization?

Lisa Kline: (12:20)

It's been really interesting. From an organization productivity, we were really in a good spot because we are a digital organization to begin with. So while many of the breast cancer advocacy organizations had to think about, how do you take real-world events and put them online. We were already online and reaching people, you know, through digital education and support. So we were able to make that change really quickly, but where it impacted us hugely was the content plan that we had to cover kind of went right out the window.

Because suddenly people who are immuno-compromised had a whole new set of concerns. They had new barriers to meeting with their, you know, surgeons or meeting with their oncologists. And so we very quickly scrapped the plan that we had for the year. And we began to cover from, I think two days after the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, we began to cover COVID and its impacts on breast cancer in pretty significant ways.

Charles: (13:23)

So did you see diagnosis and self-diagnosis falling by the wayside? Were people suddenly less focused on those kinds of issues and therefore suffering more illness as a result?

Lisa Kline: (13:34)

Well, screening and detection has definitely taken a hit, because if you remember, all non-essential surgeries or screening procedures were canceled. So that, I think, we will start to see sort of long term with the impact of that delayed screening is. But where we saw the most immediate effect were people who had their mastectomy or the lumpectomy put on hold, because it was not immediately sort of a scheduled surgery.

So the anxiety, the mental health issues are something that really have emerged in a big way over the last two years. You know, what happens when you're already facing something as frightening as a cancer diagnosis, your instinct as a person is to just want that cancer out of your body, right? Treat it, get it out. I want to move on. I want to get back to my full life or I want, you know, I don't want this to interfere with my life. And then suddenly, you're facing all of these delays, you have these fears and anxiety about even going to treatment facilities because you might get COVID and you might, right?

So the mental health issues I think were not surprising, but it's been a silver lining that it's brought so much of that issue to the forefront of how we talk about breast cancer or how we talk about diseases, or even quite frankly, how we talk about our own lives. That we're much more, you know, willing to express our own mental health and wellbeing concerns.

Charles: (15:06)

And how did you adapt your leadership given the incredibly fluid and dynamic changes that you were facing?

Lisa Kline: (15:12)

Yeah, so I went from having a hybrid role where I was part-time in Philadelphia and working, you know, remotely the rest - I'm based in New York - to really having my whole team be in that situation. So, you know, very quickly just got everyone comfortable with Zoom and Slack and all of these asynchronous ways we could communicate much better, and took everything into sort of this digital environment.

It's been, I think, really interesting to see how people in my organization have made that same change. I think a lot of things have been much better because we can be face to face, in working with each other. We can use digital tools to kind of collaborate and co-work in ways that we weren't necessarily fully embracing before. And so some of the things that I have been trying to spearhead with collaborative work were accelerated by the fact that we were now all working remotely.

I think one of the interesting things we were talking about recently too, is it's really changed the nature of our board meetings. So as a nonprofit, we have a board of directors. Those were always in person meetings and kind of squeezed in between very busy people, sort of like end of the day. But we made a change to have more frequent, shorter meetings, all done on Zoom. And the attention of our board, because we were really compartmentalized and focusing what we were talking about, has really just created this wonderful new dynamic of problem solving and working together through things, rather than a reporting out board meeting. And that's been, you know, a really, I think, great change over the last two years, something we'll keep going with.

Charles: (17:08)

One of the things that you and I have both experienced, I'm sure, is that when you're working in businesses that for whom innovation and creative thinking are the lifeblood of the company's success, it's easy to get caught up in the importance of what we're doing. And, very much it inflates how essential it is that we get this piece of work produced, or—

Lisa Kline: (17:30)

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Charles: (17:31)

—get this message out in the world. And, you know, the old adage within ad agencies and marketing companies and content companies is to try and remind people that, you know, let's take a step back, let's take a deep breath. After all, we're not here trying to cure cancer, or treat cancer or support people who have cancer. You are, in fact, doing all of those things. How do you maintain a balance where, there must be a sense every day that if I could do more, I could help more people. I'm literally talking about life and death situations. How do you find a balance with your own life in the middle of something that is as fundamental and as important as the work that you're doing?

Lisa Kline: (18:08)

Yeah, I think it's similar to just sort of balancing life, in general, when you're working, because whatever you're working on… you know, an agency campaign, you feel like that's the most important thing and you're trying to bring some balance to your life. So in that respect, it's not very different for me, but I have… I don’t know how to describe it. I have this sort of driving force for why I am juggling my time in the ways that I am.

And with young children, able to explain mommy's work is really important because there are people right now who are going through cancer, right? And so I need to be fully present for you. But sometimes I need to be fully present for these people because the work that we're doing really is life changing for them. It is a lifeline for them. And I think the last two years have helped really… it's helped in that we have more acceptance of that fluidity between our work life and our personal lives in finding that balance, right?

It makes you appreciate much more the ability to dip in and out of something. So if I can take a break in the middle of the day, sometimes you're just dealing with really emotional situations in cancer work. And so the ability to step out of that and that be okay with my colleagues, is like, I just need a minute where I'm going to go walk the dog, or I'm going to take a breath of fresh air and kind of reset myself. It's easier to do in the last two years, to move back and forth between life and work in those ways, I think.

Charles: (20:02)

Are you able to turn it off?

Lisa Kline: (20:05)

You have to. Yeah, you have to turn it off. You're not going to cure cancer in a day, right? So at some point, you need to turn it off. You need to come at it with a fresh, clear head. Again, you know, there are some very heartbreaking, emotional stories, and situations that we're dealing with and, you know, you have to sort of step back and have some perspective of that person's story. And then the greater good of an entire community of people with breast cancer or are facing breast cancer. So you have to, yeah. And, you know, life is busy enough that sometimes you just have to flip that switch. It makes it easier to do that, to compartmentalize.

Charles: (20:53)

Have you found it’s important to have an emotional limit to which you are willing to invest yourself in this? You could, I imagine, just get sucked in and pulled down into the very depths of people suffering if you're not careful. So I just wondered if you were conscious of sort of having a threshold by which you can continue to work with it objectively.

Lisa Kline: (21:15)

I mean, for me, I feel so fortunate that, for me, I don't have to set that threshold based on my own personal experience where so many of the people that I work with, they have that personal experience and I am in awe of how they can come to work every day and face, you know, often the most difficult and challenging time in their life again and again, to help other people through it.

And so I feel really fortunate that I don't have to set a threshold based on my personal experience. My threshold is more where… what is that line that if I cross, I won't be making the right decision for the greater good of the community that we serve, or for the organization and its wellbeing and success, right? Like, of course, you want to, as a human, you want to be sort of pulled in to helping each person individually. But that's not always going to lead you to, you know, the best product solution or the best innovation or the best, you know, outreach campaign.

Charles: (22:27)

Yeah, I think the ability to confront one's own trauma and do that by choice on a daily basis, as you've just described, in the people or some of the people around you is absolutely the definition of heroism.

Lisa Kline: (22:41)

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. It really, it really is. And that, I think, is just a remarkable thing to take in. And I try to sort of study and learn from how those people are able to move through it, because that is… and what we're trying to build, as a site and as a community, is that support, right? That perspective and education that somebody needs.

It's much easier after you've been through a trauma to say what would be most helpful or how to advise others to move through it. When you're in the thick of it, that's really hard. And so there's a lot that in my ability to observe and learn from my colleagues, I get to take in and think about, how do we translate that into an offering for the site.

Charles: (23:40)

Traditionally, the issue of breast cancer has focused on raising awareness and attaching itself to the color pink or owning the color pink.

You've taken a different approach. And the work that you've done with Work & Co to reimagine the site and the experience is radically different, from that standpoint. Talk to me about the choices you made strategically about what you want the site to be in terms of acting as a resource and a support center and information source.

Lisa Kline: (24:10)

Yeah. So I think, you know, with breast cancer, awareness is really high and yet knowledge remains low. So there is this notion that we are winning the fight against breast cancer. Both those words have been done, but the reality is that, you know, there is ‘no one size fits all’ solution for breast cancer. Each person, the genetics of the person, the genomics of their cancer mean very different things for how to best address the disease. And so we, as an organization, since Day One, have been really focused on how to help people in the here and now make the best decisions for their care.

So in doing the work and relaunching the site, we wanted to move out of this pink category that is, in many wonderful ways, associated with raising money for a cure. And we wanted to differentiate ourselves as being the education and support guidance that people need in the here and now. So the palette moved away from pink, although there's, you know, still elements of pink in the design. It's largely a female audience, but we didn't want to only speak to women. We didn't want to ostracize men with breast cancer. And we also wanted to just create an overarching calming palette. The information, the content of what we provide, is really heavy.

It is important and dense information, but there can be a lot of noise visually that starts to happen with bright colors and call to actions and shout outs going on. And so overall, the design of the site is intended to put a little distance between the awareness efforts, and the education and support people need, and really let what we do as an organization lead the conversation.

Charles: (26:10)

And what have you found that people need? Where on the site do people head first? What's the journey that people go through?

Lisa Kline: (26:18)

So most often, people… you know, you get a diagnosis, you know, first as a phone call, or you might be sitting in your physician's office and you go out to your car and you've just heard a ton of terms, right, that half of them make sense, half of them don't and you start to search. And so what people often need is just that baseline understanding of, “Okay, I heard this, this, and this about my diagnosis. What do those terms mean? What's my prognosis?”

So people typically start with trying to get that baseline understanding, which is why in the redesign, what we've done is create these persona pathways. So you're just diagnosed. Here's what you need to know. We don't want to scare and overwhelm you with, here's what recurrence looks like. You know, you're not yet there. We want to kind of meet people where they're at in their journey and give them that information. So that's typically the starting point.

You want good medical information, and then, of course, you want to talk to other people who have been through it or are going through it. Your doctor's advice and your sort of peer support network. And so, the other place people go to is the Community at BreastCancer.org. So they can talk directly, you know, with each other. They can talk with our moderators who are helping point them in the right direction.

Charles: (27:35)

How is the site funded?

Lisa Kline: (27:38)

We are funded by a combination of philanthropy, corporate, and foundation giving. And then we do have relevant advertising on the site.

Charles: (27:51)

And are you finding it harder to raise money with everything that's going on in the world? I mean, has the situation in Ukraine, for instance, affected fundraising on these kinds of issues, or do you find the support's pretty consistent?

Lisa Kline: (28:02)

Our support is pretty consistent in terms of the corporate and advertising revenue for the site. Obviously, personal philanthropy right now is, you know, is changing and going to a very necessary cause for supporting people in the Ukraine. That always sort of ebbs and flows, depending on what's happening in the world, what’s happening with the political situation. But we do have consistency through our other revenue sources.

Charles: (28:34)

I read somewhere that one of the criteria that was important for you was to create a safe space, I think, as you described it. What does that mean to you in a practical, from a practical sense? It's interesting because a lot of the people I've talked to on the podcast, and actually from a coaching and advisory standpoint over the last few months, are really focused on this idea of safety and creating safety for themselves as well as for the people around them. What does it mean to you to create safety within the site itself?

Lisa Kline: (29:02)

Yeah. Safety, you know, in the health space in terms of protecting people's privacy and being very transparent about sort of, you know, what data is being shared. I think the other place that people go to to form groups or talk about disease is often Facebook and Facebook Groups. People have expressed concerns with sharing, you know, some of the most intimate details about their lives in that way. And so our closed community is a safe space to talk about every issue that's affecting, you know, your life. From, you know, the fears about the end of your life to issues of sex and intimacy while going through breast cancer. It is the safe space that you can express any of those feelings. And it's a closed community.

Charles: (29:56)

When you think about technology in the world of healthcare, you typically think about it in terms of medical advancements and surgical methodologies and testing and so on. This is clearly a really powerful application of technology in the world of healthcare. What do you think that relationship looks like, going forward? What's the role of technology in healthcare as we look at the future, do you think?

Lisa Kline: (30:20)

I think some of the greatest advancements are going to come from people participating in the scientific discoveries. And I think technology is making that possible in ways that do protect people's privacy and safety, right? So how can you safely share your data and your experience, as part of a clinical trial or a research program to design new and better treatments for people? There's a lot of talk about patient centricity, but I think actually having technology empower patients to participate rather than design the system to put a patient at the center. Let patients lead that and participate in the research process in very individual and empowered ways.

I think that's going to propel the advancement that we can make, right? That this idea of, you know, curing cancer may not be possible, as a wholesale statement. But ending people's cancers or making cancer a treatable disease is something that technology in patients, working together, or patients enabled with technology, can, in fact, change.

Charles: (31:40)

Well, and to that point, I think giving patients more leadership, more authority, in their own care is one of the ways that you create safety for people. That sense of agency that people want to have over their own lives is going to make a massive difference, I think.

Lisa Kline: (31:55)

Yeah, no, absolutely we should, right? And, and we're entering this phase now where people have more access to information about themselves. We should have agency over how it is used and I think that's really key. And as we think about it for our organization, you know, when people have access to information, they need to understand how to use it and what it means for them. And so there is a, you know, an enormous education opportunity in that. You're empowered with your data. You can decide where it goes, but do you understand it to make informed decisions for yourself? How can we help support that, right?

Your care team, your physician is still going to have very limited time with you in office visits. There has to be supplemental or third place you can go to get reliable, trustworthy information to make sure, not only can you decide sort of how and when to use your data for good, but how to use it to make decisions for yourself.

Charles: (32:59)

You know, it's such an important point. I went to a new doctor yesterday for a totally routine checkup and A, was struck by how much online data I had to enter. B, how they then had to answer all the same questions again when I sat in the doctor's office with the paper form and the clipboard that we've all spent hours filling out.

Lisa Kline: (33:19)

Right.

Charles: (33:19)

And then reached a point where I had to either deny or allow for people to share data. And you don't know the answer to that question and you start to think about, will my care be impacted if I say no, is my privacy impacted if I say yes?

Lisa Kline: (33:34)

Right.

Charles: (33:34)

Who's going to take the time? And if you're in a crisis situation, as all of your audience are, the notion that you're going to spend one iota of a second thinking about the implications of that question, when you are worrying about, am I going to live or die through this—

Lisa Kline: (33:50)

Right.

Charles: (33:50)

—is, yeah. I mean, there is so much room to improve the level of care, just from an emotional standpoint—

Lisa Kline: (33:56)

Yeah.

Charles: (33:57)

—through technology.

Lisa Kline: (33:58)

Just for making the whole experience of being treated for cancer less burdensome on the patient, right? Because all of that information that you're filling out can, reside in your phone, right?

Charles: (34:09)

Yeah.

Lisa Kline: (34:10)

And the portability of that data to just say, hey, like one EHR, talk to the other, so that we can cut back on some of those questions that you're asking me, or that when the doctor finally does sit and talk to you about your situation, they have that history and that medical context of who you are and what you've been going through so you can make the most of your time. I think technology plays an enormous part making, you know, empowered patients and better doctors as a result, because that's the real value of the connection and the interaction, not exchanging information. And yeah, when you're in a health crisis that feels, you know, even less important, you know, and the stakes of getting it wrong.

That's another thing, as I've been in this health space, where you just look at some of the things that… you know, there is not consistency in pathology reports. It's on the patient to figure out, okay, well, this field here matches this field on this pathology report. How do you have the agency and make informed decisions without an understanding of what data about your life is being presented to you? It's such an important problem to first solve, in trying to solve the issue of cancer as society.

Charles: (35:34)

Yeah. I think it's a profound question and a foundational one for the evolution of society. Last two questions for you. How do you lead?

Lisa Kline: (35:45)

I like to lead by example and lead by really lifting up my team. It was taught to me really early on that the best role as a leader is to create the conditions for people on your team to do the best work of their lives. So I have always tried to follow that. What can I do to create the environment, for people to do the work that they've been asked to do? I've always used this metaphor of clearing the way, how do I clear the way for you to do the work you need to do?

I learned both sort of in the agency world, and especially at a small nonprofit organization, to create growth for myself and to create growth for my team, we need room to experiment. And so how do I create those conditions that people can feel like they can do their best work, they can learn new things in the process? So I try very hard to make sure that that is front and center in conversations.

Charles: (36:51)

And what are you afraid of?

Lisa Kline: (36:54)

Oh, I feel like as I get older, I'm afraid of less and less. I am afraid of disappointing people, in terms of the people that we serve because, you know, the work we're doing is very important, but what's happening in their lives is most important. So I'm scared of that, in sort of an every day, it keeps me motivated. I'm scared of, I guess, becoming stagnant in my career. Maybe that's why keep making these pivots in new directions.

And I think a lot about how do I take, you know, what I have learned and think of it as transferable skills that can move me on to the next thing. So I've been lucky that I've been able to kind of keep making those pivots into new areas and trying to solve new problems, just kind of doing the same thing every day doesn't appeal to me.

Charles: (37:56)

Lisa, I really want to thank you for joining me today. I am in awe of you and your team's willingness and a capacity to insert yourselves so willingly and generously and brilliantly in the service of the care and wellbeing and hope of thousands, millions of people worldwide. I hope the organization moves from strength to strength because we certainly need it to. Thank you so much for sharing today.

Lisa Kline: (38:24)

Thank you for inviting me to be here.

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