Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service on the episode today, we have Pat Wetzel. Pat, welcome. Thank you. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a bit about yourself and what you do? Oh, how far back do you want me to go? Um These days, I am a storyteller. I have a podcast bump in the road and a book that just came out bump in the road. Uh 15 stories of courage, hope and resilience. My podcast started. Uh We were just talking about this actually, before we started recording my podcast started about, um during COVID, I had a film project that fell apart because it was partly travel. So with travel shut down, I really didn’t know what I was going to do. I developed a good social media following and I didn’t want to lose it. So after about two weeks of sitting in bed eating potato chips, totally depressed because everything I’d worked on in the last two years was totally gone. Money time. Everything I decided to start the podcast and the idea of calling A Bump In The Road just came to me and I, I think I chose the name for a few reasons.
One I’ve hit many bumps and there’s no, there’s no way to know how to navigate these things. It can be very, very difficult and very challenging. And I am fascinated by how people manage, navigate and experience that life’s bumps in the road. Why is it that some people manage to pull themselves out again and again and remake themselves, restart their lives and other people don’t. And I think the majority of people do not manage to make that transition very well. And they prefer to stay in the status quo either because it’s less threatening. It doesn’t involve change or maybe they’ve just been so beaten down by life that they’ve decided it’s ok. I’m just gonna stay here. But I think that in making that decision, you miss the wonder of life because life is really about evolution. That means getting out of your comfort zone. It’s about taking chances and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Well, thank you for the introduction. Um, it, it leads me to many, many follow up that I, that I’d like to ask you, uh, the bump in the road.
Uh, I hear that, um, kind of someone’s hit a bump in the road type thing. I think it’s a great name. But what does it mean to you? I’ve come to see life as a road trip. You know, there are twists and turns and ups and downs and bumps in the road. I’ve hit some very significant bumps. I’ve had health issues. When I decided to get my comfort zone. I decided to learn to fly, um, high performance sailplanes, you know, no long, beautiful wings, lots of glide. Um, no motor that led to some pretty interesting, um, situations. I, I think bump in the road appeals to me because it gives me a moment to reflect on my own bumps where I’ve managed them well and where I haven’t, and most importantly, what I’ve learned. So would you say it’s a type of adversity, a bump in the road is, is some form of, of adversity. It depends on how you look at it. Um Usually it presents itself as adversity, but it might end up being the best thing that ever happened to you. So, you know, when an event happens, you don’t control the event and when you’re in the middle of a major bump, it’s very, very hard to be calm.
It’s very hard to be optimistic. Sometimes it’s very hard to make a, an informed response. But I think as you go on in life, you start to realize that really you have the power in this situation, the situation does not have power over you. How will you use it to make your life better? How will you use it to pivot to say greater authenticity? Can’t change the event? So change your response. I think it’s a great answer. And I think it’s one of the things which, um, I think a lot of people miss meaning, although we might interpret it to be bad in that moment. We really don’t know that it’s bad until we look back on it. But the question is, have you been able to do that? Have you been able to use that piece of information to the, or something that you perceive to be bad? But then think ac actually hang on, I might not, that might not be bad for me. Yeah. Uh It took me a long time to figure some of this out. I don’t think any of us have instant wisdom, you know, wisdom. We is really just knowledge and, you know, in retrospect, really, I, I would say, um I went through a very difficult divorce.
Um and at the time I thought my world was just ending, but through a variety of circumstances, I happened into the sport of soaring. So I went from really just at the lowest point of my life and I was having some serious health issues as well and my day to day life was kind of kind of depressing really. I didn’t like where I lived. I didn’t like what I was doing. My dog had died, my exit right off to a new city, new wife, new dog. The whole thing I, we had just moved. So I didn’t have a really a network, a social network to support me and I kind of lived this bifurcated life for a number of years where my day to day life was, hm, not real promising, quite honestly, but I was learning to fly. So I had these two very different experiences going on simultaneously and the learning to fly piece was amazing. And it’s what I really needed. I needed some adventure back in my life. I needed a sense of competency. I needed a, a sense of forward movement and flying, learning to fly and then transitioning into better and better airplanes really gave me something that was missing from the rest of my life and really opened a portal to amazing adventure.
So that bump in the road, that divorce where um on an emotional level, I was very, I was very hurt and very had a lot of trouble moving forward, really opened the door to in a much better life than I ever could have imagined. But I couldn’t see that at the time. It was a lovely before and after and thank you for sharing it for someone who is going through the before part of this. Um What would you uh encourage them to do, hang in there? But most of all, I, I think the single one, I look at all these stories from my, my podcast and one of the traits that emerges from people who successfully navigate bumps in the road is they, they take the first step, they put energy into their situation. You don’t have to know where you’re going. You might be making the absolute wrong choice. It doesn’t matter, just putting energy into your life will open the right doors. If you go off on a tangent and it’s not working for you, it doesn’t work, you’ll find your way back. But that energy is critical.
You can’t stay mired in the muck. Moving forward in this particular instance is a type of hobby, um, doesn’t have to be flying presumably, but it would be something kind of like a passion project. Is that the way you describe it? No, not necessarily. Maybe it’s just deciding you’re going to, uh, pull yourself together after losing a job and you’re gonna go out and get your resume going and go do some interviews. A great example from, from my podcast. And actually, effi is effi Parks is in the book. She was a young mom who had a very disabled child and she was just beside herself. She ad envisioned the perfect pregnancy, the perfect child, the perfect motherhood experience and none of that was going to be. And one on the one hand, she really didn’t have a choice. She had to meet the needs of this child. But in doing that and moving forward, she started to shift and change her entire world and it was that energy in this case born of necessity that really started to get things moving for her. And really she made an amazing pivot from why is this happening?
And why is this happening to me? To really pivoting to love, appreciation and gratitude? That’s a huge personal shift. But it’s a shift that just, that totally remade her life. I love this topic. And I, um I really sort of agree with everything you’re saying. I, I can hear in the back of my mind some sort of objection if, if someone is struggling to see sort of like the positive side of things, have you got any, uh, let’s say, tactics or exercises that you go through or use when you’re, if you’re struggling to do this particular. So we say subject on a personal level. Um I go out and I get some exercise. I think exercise is really important to your overall mental well being. I really care about my mental well being. I went through six years of cancer treatments and I’ve learned that your mental health mindset is absolutely critical. Um, as a result, I meditate every morning, I find five things to be grateful for and then I meditate and I do that every morning, 99.999% of mornings without fail.
And I think that’s, um, a huge piece of dealing with difficulty for me is to find that mental peace because I think that mental peace is. And by piece, I mean, pe a ce is a critical part to mental health and it’s something that’s largely lacking in our world, we’re so externally oriented. We’re always responding to things or chasing things or measuring ourselves by things or titles or whatever. But really all of our satisfaction and happiness with life lies within us. And part of I think going within is, is finding that place of quiet. So I think hitting a, a major bump, it’s a time to maybe pause, reflect, pay attention to yourself. In the meantime, you have to put that energy out. You have to move forward. I mean, these things aren’t simple or linear, but I think that the advantage of a bump is self reflection and that is enormously beneficial for all of us. You, you mentioned um your health, health problems.
Uh Would you like to tell the story of that? Just because I, I feel like it will be beneficial for other people to hear it way back when I graduated from, from business school and went to work in New York in the bond market, you know, doing big deals reading about them in the Wall Street Journal and that kind of thing. And I was getting tired, really tired and I thought it’s a 90 hour work week, any sane person would be tired, but I started having troubles holding things. Um I had a lot of trouble swallowing. At one point I found myself in my office just digging a sandwich out of my mouth, so I wouldn’t choke. And I was lucky enough to find a, a neurologist at Yale who diagnosed me with myasthenia gratis, which is a very rare neurologic disease that causes voluntary muscle weakness. So things like the ability to see, to breathe, to walk are all compromised and they put you on these drugs that, um, help, they do some surgery. They take out your thymus, which is a gland in your chest. They put you on drugs and then you need drugs to counteract the drugs.
So you have to balance and titrate these drugs. But the problem is taking too much is gives you the same symptoms as taking too little. So you never really know where you are in terms of the spectrum of effective medication. So that really turned my life around. Bump number, significant bump, number one, major illness. Fast forward a decade. Significant bump number two, divorced and meanwhile, I’m dealing with all these disease issues and learning to fly. Don’t ask. It was not maybe the smartest thing to do. But, um, I started to realize that none of the doctors would do anything. I mean, they, they’re just like, you know, take your medicine, be quiet, be a vegetable in the corner or whatever. And, um, that’s not really true about the vegetable in the corner, but they weren’t willing to really consider any alternatives. And I decided to start weaning myself off my drugs. I, I did slowly and gradually, I always had them with me and seemed to work. I mean, to this day, I get a little tired and things, but I am on no medication.
So that was significant bump. Number two, significant bump. Number three, in terms of health was I was diagnosed with supposedly incurable cancer. A rare lymphoma, I went through six years of on again, off again treatment. And that was a significant turning point in my life because it made me stop for the first time. Really stop. I found uh this sounds so contrary to the cancer experience. But I found so much joy. I found so much joy in the little things in life, just, you know, the warmth of the sun and your skin, a a hummingbird in the garden. And I that was totally unexpected. I was also under a lot of stress and I learned to meditate during that period, which was a real game changer for me because in learning to meditate, you learn to still, it’s, it’s a habit, it’s a practice, it’s a discipline. And in disciplining your mind, there are so many benefits. One of them is that as you learn to experience quiet and peace, more and more that puts you in the position of actually observing your mind. And when you can observe your mind and observe your thoughts, now you’re in a position to make conscious choices rather than just having this um record running again and again, in your brain that comes from societal conditioning, maybe childhood trauma just your your inherent reactions aren’t always your best reactions.
But until you can stop and actually watch them, you can’t make a conscious decision. So meditation is, is powerful in that regard. I think from discipline comes awareness, from awareness comes observation. And most importantly, meditation is experiential. Uh I likened it to chocolate recently. You know, you eat, you can read about chocolate, right? But it doesn’t tell you what chocolate is like. But if you eat chocolate, totally different experience, wide range of different types of chocolate. I mean, the experience goes on and on meditation is kind of the same. You have an experience, an experience of silence of peace of expansion. There are all sorts of experiences that you have when you meditate and those experiences become part of you. Uh you, you bring that peace to everything you do. So if you’re driving and somebody is doing something stupid rather than losing, losing it and honking your horn or doing whatever you might do or just ranting in your own car, you can find peace in it. So it’s, it’s a game changer as it starts to translate into your life behavior to pick up on a particular point you made about actually making conscious decisions versus just um you know, reacting to things in a way that maybe you didn’t, you wouldn’t want to.
I think that’s well worth highlighting. Um You mentioned the fact that the cancer was incurable. I think that um, a lot of people, if they were to hear those words directed at them would be petrified or perhaps, um, I don’t know though, a range of emotions, I suppose. Um, what did you feel in that moment? And what would you say to someone who perhaps got the same diagnoses as yourself? Oh, I felt utter disbelief in denial, you know, just to start. Um, but I, I was told that, uh, my cancer was like, terrible. It was hopefully manageable, but 10% of the cases a year transform into a very aggressive, deadly cancer quickly. And does that does not preclude the original less aggressive cancer from coming back? So, as time ticks by, you’re like, hmm, what’s happening here, um I actually made the decision to just kind of walk away from medical care. I’m doing great. No. Um, I’ve just decided to live and enjoy my life.
Uh, except for the fact that I need a little more exercise these days, I’m really healthy. And have you been able to keep that, um, taking joy in the moment? Have you been able to keep that with you, um, in the, should we say the longer term? Yes, absolutely. It’s become a part of me and whenever I get too wrapped up in busyness or whatever, I, I recognize that I make myself stop. I think life is way too short. Not to have a lot of joy. Well, that’s great to hear. Um, I I think I may have got it from the Sopranos or something where, um, he, he said he wanted to stop and smell the roses more. But then, uh, the general kind of life chips away at it over time. So it’s good, good to hear that. You’re, uh, you’ve stayed with you essentially. Um, we, we talked about the, the, the podcast, your podcast before we started recording and you’ve been going, you said for four years in relation to the bump in the road. Have you heard any, um, stories that have really stayed with you in relation to, to this topic?
Oh, my gosh. There are so many, I hate to pick on Eric Weidemeyer too much because I talk about him. But he is truly one of the most inspirational people I’ve ever met. He went blind at 16. Um, so he’d had his sight. Uh, and he had a, a rare, uh, ocular disease, went blind. He went on to climb Everest, the seven summits and kayak, the Colorado River Rapids. And he trained eight years for that kayak trip. He’s just remarkable. And I think one of the stories that he tells that sticks with me. I think it’s really powerful is he divides the world roughly into three groups and these groups are fluid. We all move between all these categories. OK. We’ve all been there. The first group were quitters that’s kind of self evident. Um The next group are campers, campers are people who like the status quo. They don’t want change, they don’t want to get out of their comfort zone. And it’s not necessarily that they’re not capable of it. They may just have been beaten down by life to the point where they decide they’re staying in the rut because it’s relatively safe. And then very few people are climbers.
And the reason I like that story of his is that I am fascinated by what it takes to go from being a camper to a climber. Why do so many people decide to be campers in the cancer community? Um I learned a lot about 4040 to 50% of us will have a cancer diagnosis during our lifetime. Uh I thought that that would be such a significant life event for people that it would be a portal into a more conscious and meaningful life. I thought that that was really a sort of a societal opportunity. I was absolutely wrong. I think somewhere around 12% of the people probably use that significant a bump as a pivot into AAA better, more authentic life. Most people just do not want to deal with it. So when Eric told me that story, it really stuck with me in that. Why are so many people so terrified of getting out of their comfort zone? What is so terrifying about personal evolution and change? It’s really for your benefit?
Can it be a little scary? Yeah. Um can it be challenging? Yes. But what’s the option is the option just to stay stagnant? I think, um, based on what you gave us the answer, I think people have three options. Right. Is the quitting the camping or the climbing? Well, and climbers can be campers. I mean, you can sit around and eat ice cream. Right. You can’t be a climber all the time. It would just be too exhausting and I think we all quit on occasion or we want to quit, but something inside of us hopefully moves us forward. Some people really do stay stuck in, in the quitter category. Um But what is it that, that motivates us to move forward in spite of immense obstacles sometimes, you know, what is it that some people have the fortitude and perseverance to keep going when really it is so much easier just to camp. And that’s why I do my podcast. People hit extraordinary bumps in their lives and I am absolutely fascinated by how they muster the courage to move forward.
I interviewed uh Porsha louder recently. What an interesting woman. She’s kind of AAA realtor soccer mom, blonde, pretty woman. And back in 2008, she got caught up in the whole societal rush in real estate and there were some dubious um appraisals on some of the properties she was involved in. Well, as we all know, the banks went scot free, they got bailed out everybody and their mother got bailed out, but the justice system came down on Porsha and sentence sentenced her to seven years in a federal penitentiary. You know, from affluent suburbia to a federal penitentiary. You gotta be kidding me. She found somehow a joy and a deep spirituality in going through that and she’s so articulate in talking about it. She has a book. Uh Living Louder. Her last name is Louder. It’s a terrific book. Uh But the podcast I found to be just incredibly moving. It’s really a spiritual journey of transcendence and evolution. Ju just an amazing story. Uh There are just so many of them, Darryl Stinson, another great story.
His story really is about, do you let the outside influences in, in the world mold you or do you choose to mold your own identity? And we all particularly when we’re young dance to that outer tune of what we’re supposed to do what we’re supposed to be. And it is inevitably a recipe for disaster at some point in your life, whether it is achieving in business, getting everything you want and finding out it’s empty, whether it is trying to please a peer group and finding out that now you’re in trouble with the law or something like that, whatever it is making our identity dependent on something external never works. And Darryl has a remarkable story about his own evolution through that. He did a TED talk. That’s just terrific. Oh, gosh, I could talk all day about the, the people on my podcast. I am always amazed at how people, how these people, they’re so inspiring, were willing to stop and challenge their identity, challenge their beliefs and create something new.
A, a really good example of that is Mary Neal. She’s a spine surgeon. She was the head of spinal surgery at I think it was US C she went into private practice. She and her husband moved up to Jackson Hall and they love to kayak. So they went kayaking down in Chile and she went over about a 10 ft waterfall which is well within her ability, but she got trapped under the waterfall and she died and she had a near death experience. A, a number of unbelievable circumstances came together to rescue her. Uh when she finally got back to Jackson Hall, she spent the next year of her life trying to disprove her experience because she had, if she had a linear scientific mind, if you can’t touch it, it doesn’t exist. But the experience she had was very real and it did exist. And so after a year of question beliefs, trying to um disbelieve this experience, she had, she realized it was very real and her willingness to change her belief system was really significant. I think she has some words that always stick with me.
She said she went from hope to trust and that alone is such a pivot in one’s life. Think about that about how differently you would live your life in a spiritual sense if you had absolute trust. So I, I think that I look at how brave these people are in terms of challenging the very constructs of their life and being willing to change. And I think that’s something we, it’s learnable. We all need to learn to do this, to keep evolving to really always move towards what is the most authentic life for us. And our most authentic life often lies outside the linear world we’ve created. Well, I can certainly see why um You’ve been sha we say willing to go for four years because each one of them is fascinating. So, thank you for sharing them. You did mention in your first example uh about the quitting camping and climbing and h how someone goes from being uh a camper to a climber. Um And I think we, um we, we, we missed that, that detail.
So, um do you have an answer to that? I don’t think that there is a clear linear answer. I think part of the answer, I think it’s a multifaceted answer. I think that it has to do with introducing that energy that we talked about into the equation. I think it has to do with the ability to pivot your perspective about an event. Is an event bad? Is it happening to you or is it an opening into a, a different world? Uh I think in terms of pivoting your perspective. One exercise is to rewrite your story from several different perspectives. Write it from a perspective of anger, write it from a perspective of love, write it from a perspective of gratitude. When you start writing your story from different perspectives, you see it’s a very multifaceted story. There is no one way to describe your story and um frankly, it’s just a story. What do you wanna say? So, I I think that the ability that mental flexibility to pivot your story is really important. I think a search for authenticity is part of the equation and that takes years. It’s just peeling away those onions of your, those onion like layers of your identity to figure out who really are you?
What do you really like? Where, where do you wanna put your energy? I think that you have to learn to release a lot of your beliefs. Like the story about Mary Neal, she was able to release very well honed grounded beliefs that she had lived with for decades. I think part of moving from a camper to a climber is that mind game learning to find peace, to still your mind, to make more conscious movements and efforts. And I would say it all kind of boils down to be different color outside the lines. Be unique. You are unique, be your unique self and be willing to take the years that it takes to uncover it and mold it and direct it and then rinse and repeat because it’s an ongoing process. The reason why I picked up on it a couple of times is because I might be guilty of the, the middle, the middle option there being a camper in, in a certain context for a, for a fairly, fairly long amount of time. So I appreciate your answer. No, but we all are, we’re all campers too, you know, I mean, it’s not, we, we’re all in all these categories at different points in time and we can move into any category we want and we all become campers.
And I always say that if I’m bored, it’s because I’m becoming boring and I know if I start feeling bored or like a little too regimented in what I’m doing. I know it’s time to shake things up and it can be something so simple, it can be driving a different way, walking a different path metaphorically and, and actually, you know, just shake something up a little bit, get out of your routine and things start to get a little more fluid again. Well, this one is on your profile and I feel like um again, people can benefit from hearing the story and the lesson you took from it. So it’s about your business partner. And um yeah, if you wouldn’t mind sharing the story and then um perhaps what, how other people can look at a scenario of where they’ve had a business partner that has ended up perhaps not, um, I know losing a friendship or perhaps losing a business or some variation of that. Yeah, I had a business partner that took my intellectual property, registered it with the US patent office as his own and essentially said, sue me.
So my very expensive lawyers told me that it would cost me in increments of half a million dollars. Take at least three years and there was no guaranteed outcome. So at, at this point, I was a year out from the six years of cancer treatment. You know, I’m still just a little frazzled by the whole thing. Stressed beyond belief. I was, uh my hair was falling out from stress, not from chemo this time. Uh I was vomiting blood. I went to see my oncologist who suggested a whole host of very expensive invasive, absolutely awful expensive tests. And he never ever asked me what was going on in my life, you know, and I left that office and I walked by as you walk down a corridor and it’s kind of gray and on the right side is the billing department where they will suck every dime out of you. You know, to make sure you pay your bills beyond the insurance. I went down to the elevator gray again. I went down downstairs and I, I left and I just kind of thought about the whole thing and I thought this, this is just not where I’m going to be, I’m not gonna be tethered to the medical establishment for the rest of my life.
I, I just don’t wanna live like that. And if the past was any indication of the future I figured I had, 0, 16 to 24 months or so, 18 to 24 months before the cancer was just all over my body. Again, I had a, a rare lymphoma and I’ve seen some of my, uh, x rays and they, or cat scans, I should say pet scans and they were pretty awful. I mean, I had tumors wrapped around my aorta moving into my brain all over my body. And I just decided, you know, I’ve had it, I have so had it. I’ve had it with people who lie and are dishonest. I’ve had it with medicine. I’ve had it with illness. So I decided to sell my perfect, beautiful, gorgeous house. And, um, so very quickly all cash offer and I decided to just go traveling for a while and I hit the road and I started a blog called Cancer Road Trip and Cancer Road Trip. Got me back to my original love of writing. I won some awards, uh, writing and photography awards and, um, it really opened the door for what I’m doing now because I had to find my voice again.
I had to find my willingness to share things, my willingness to put it down on, on paper and it was a process. It didn’t happen overnight. Uh But it led me to my first book, Bump In the Road and many more Bump in the road books to come. I love your answer. Um But what have you learned about business partners as a result of this? Did you take any lesser away from it? It takes more than one person to do a lot of these things. I have a lot. I have people who work on bump in the road. Um, I have a terrific, um, post production guy. You know, I have a terrific tech guy but they’re all independent contractors and that’s how I, I have gone from that global view of the world doing big time deals to a much smaller view of the world where I wanna do my little thing. I wanna make a difference and I wanna do, I wanna be more solo. I don’t wanna count one of the lessons I have learned over the years is I always expect people to bring the energy intensity curiosity to the equation that I have and they don’t. And I find people often want to ride my coat.
Uh, they wanna ride my coattails is what it comes down to and I’m sick of it. So I really want to be in a situation where I can create more independently. I can go in some different directions and I am responsible for it for better or for worse and I will take that any day. So one of the things I’ve learned is be very careful about partnerships, be very careful about defining them up front, really know who you’re dealing with. And even if you think, you know who you’re dealing with, you may not, they may, may have stressors in their lives or things going on that cause them to behave unethically. And I think the biggest thing to come out of it is really believe in yourself, really believe in your own ability to move things forward. And it doesn’t have to be dependent on others. Now, I’m often dependent on others for technology, I don’t code and I can’t do these things. But I think there are, you can be smarter about the way you set things up and the way you proceed through business situations, definitely get a good lawyer, define things up front, be willing to talk about difficult things.
Ultimately, another lesson that came out of it for me is I realized when I remove my energy from the situation, things fall apart. I am the energy that creates a lot of things. So when I withdraw my energy, it’s profound and everybody has that energy, know that you have it and know that your efforts matter and depend on that. And as you go through transitions that may be difficult, know that you have that in you to make a difference in your in for in this example, in your business life. Well, the energy that you’re referring to presumably helped with uh the book Bump In the Road. Um Are you proud that you’ve become an author? Yeah, I am. Um If I could write the book now, I do it a little differently. That’s always the case. But um yeah, I am. And the reason I wrote the book was after about a year and a half or two years of listening to all these amazing stories, the wisdom that came out of these stories just had to be shared. And I was just so motivated to share that wisdom.
Still I am. I, I just cannot believe how amazing my guests are on the podcast. And their experiences really deserve to be put out in multiple formats out there. Whether it’s um on a podcast in a book and an audio book, people need to hear these stories because no one tells us how to navigate life, but we can learn from each other’s stories and stories are really important because they, they link us emotionally and it’s in our emotion that we’re likely to make changes or get that aha moment or grok a a real transcendental truth. You can read about things all day, but until you feel it, it’s not real. And do you have any advice for people who perhaps want to write a book? But haven’t do it? You know what I was just talking about this the other night with somebody? Um Actually, he’s been writing these, these essays and he wants to put them together a book and he’s really hesitant, will anybody read it? You know, will it be any good? It doesn’t matter, do it for yourself, write that book and, you know, have the courage to put it out there.
You don’t know where it’ll take you. But I think the, just the act of writing alone is so creative. It can be introspective, it can be full of curiosity, it can take you wherever you wanna go. I remember as a kid, I love to read still. I, I’m a big reader. I would rather read a good book than watch a movie. Generally speaking. And as a kid, I would ride my bicycle down to the library, I get six books, ride back home, read every book and return them before the due date and the I love to read for many reasons, but they take you, reading, takes you on adventures. It expands your world in so many ways for those reasons alone, writing a book does the same and I would urge anybody who wants to write a book, do it. Now, if you want to go to publication and you want to produce AAA reasonable quality book, I think that involves some more. You’re looking at getting some serious editorial assistance, you need a real copywriting, you need formatting and all that, um which can be simple or complicated depending on how your book layout is. But getting that editorial input and the input from people you’d like to have read the book, have them read a few chapters, have them get back to you, give you some feedback because what we see what any of us see or say or write that’s strictly from our perspective and it’ll be understood differently by different people.
And I think having a little sensitivity to how some things can be perceived is really helpful in putting a book together. Does that mean we’ll see number two at some stage? Oh, absolutely. The next book, it’s gonna be one of two. What I’m working on right now is how am I going to format the book? The next book, this book has some, my, some of my own stories in it. I’m not going to do that again. I did it to introduce myself and to create some connection between the experiences of my guests and my own experiences. But the next book will maybe bump in the road, strong women or bump in the road cancer. I haven’t decided. But what I’m really wrestling with is how to structure it. So that, that structure can carry through 68, 10 books in the future. And once I get that structure in place, oh my gosh, I have so much content. I mean, I could write 10 books. That’s not the issue. The issue is how do, how do I want to put it together? So as soon as I get that figured out. I’m hoping the books come pretty quickly. Well done. Um, I think it’s great. Uh, what you’ve created. Uh, is there, is there anything I should have asked you about today? No, this has been a great conversation.
I’ve really enjoyed it. I, I think we, we’ve covered a lot of territory actually. Well, um, I think, uh, anyone who listens will probably be sold on, um, listening to your podcast, which I’m sure there’s tons of wisdom there because you’ve just shared some, some great stories and also the book. So, uh where do people find you if they want to know more? Uh The best place to start is Bump In The road.us, which is my website. I’m on all major podcast platforms as well. Um, and on Amazon, uh the book is on Amazon in um both um, an ebook form and a paperback. It’s also distributed through Ingram Sparks, which gets it into bookstores and libraries and places like that. But Bump In the road.us is the best place to start your voyage. And I think you’ll find there’s a ton of information there and I hope you find it engaging. Well, I’m sure people will based on our conversation today. So, um, Pat, thank you for being a great podcast guest. Thank you very, very much. It was really fun.
