Podcast Transcripts

The Role of Joy in High-Performance Leadership with Kate Bowler

Written by Andy Stanley | May 4, 2026 9:15:00 AM

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Andy Stanley (00:02):

Hey everybody. Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast, a conversation designed to help leaders go further faster. I'm Andy Stanley, and before we jump into today's content, I want to share a special offer once again from our friends at Belay. Every leader, every leader has parts of the job they love and parts of the job, well, let's be honest, that we don't. And for a lot of leaders, managing the day-to-day finances falls into that second category, or at least I know it does for me. But just because it needs to get done doesn't mean that you need to do it or that you're even the best person to do it. As we talk about all the time on the podcast, when we are working outside of our strengths and outside of our interests, we just lose energy. And there's an increased likelihood that we're going to make mistakes.

(00:49):

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(01:45):

So to claim this offer, just text the word Andy to 55123, that's A- N-D-Y, to 55123. And now let's jump into today's episode. So today we're talking about something we have never talked about before on the Leadership Podcast, because honestly, it doesn't sound like it has anything to do with leadership. I'll let you be the judge. And we're talking to someone we've never had on the podcast before. My dear friend, in fact, I've never said this about anyone on the podcast before. So I just want to say that Sandra and I absolutely adore our guest today. She's our first adored guest. Kate Bowler is joining us today. Kate, welcome to the podcast.

Kate Bowler (02:33):

Oh, I'm so glad to be with you.

Andy Stanley (02:34):

Aren't you glad you're adored?

Kate Bowler (02:36):

Oh my gosh. I could take all the compliments in the world. I'm a middle child.

Andy Stanley (02:40):

Yeah. I thought about telling John Maxwell he was adored. That just didn't feel right. Yeah.

(02:46):

Yeah. So anyway, so Kate, for those of you who don't know is a four-time New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning podcast host, an associate professor at Duke University. So she's definitely the smartest person in the room. And she studies the cultural stories that we tell ourselves about success, suffering, and whether or not we're capable of change. And after being unexpectedly diagnosed with stage four cancer at the age of 35, she pinned, this was my introduction to Kate, her New York Times bestselling memoir entitled Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved. And the title alone, I thought, this is a book I have to read. Everything that happens for a reason and other lies I've loved. Again, Sandra and I, this is one of the two books that Sandra and I read at the same time and talked about throughout. So anyway, her latest book and the topic of today's discussion is Joyful Anyway.

(03:43):

So this is a book about joy. And why are we talking about joy on a leadership podcast? Here's my answer. Then I'm going to let Kate do the rest of the talking because there's always a headwind for leaders, right? There's always problems to solve, staff issues to resolve, setbacks, surprises. And as we talk about all the time, even when things are good, things are generally hard. I love my job. I love the people I work with, but there are days I get home and Sandra looks at me, pauses, and she says, "Do you want to talk about it? " And I'm like, "No, not yet." There's just those things. There's always stuff, unresolvable stuff that has the potential to steal or erase our joy. So let's talk about joy. Kate, you make the point that experiencing joy does not depend on resolving everything that makes life difficult.

(04:33):

And you should know because of your cancer diagnosis and just your life in general. And those of us who know you and have watched you navigate an incurable illness through the years are so inspired by your tenacity, your honesty, and your joy, or as you title the book, your joy anyway. So let's start with the most obvious question. You make a really helpful distinction. Happiness has its place, but it's not the same thing as joy. What's the difference and why does that matter?

Kate Bowler (05:02):

Oh my gosh. Well, I can't wait for everyone to hate happiness alongside with me, Andy. But happiness?

Andy Stanley (05:08):

We won't. We won't.

Kate Bowler (05:09):

Happiness is great, but happiness is a sense of ease. Psychologically, neurologically, it feels relaxing. I mean, even the word happiness comes from that Norse word hap like happenstance, just meaning stuff that happens to you. So happiness will feel like the accumulated sense that things are kind of going your way and it'll feel pleasant. It'll kind of make sense that in a good vibes world, that everyone just wants us to be happy. And it really is that feeling like you might be just lucky on a lovely, good day. Now, those are beautiful moments in our lives and we treasure them when they happen.

Andy Stanley (05:46):

Well, yeah, we try to create

Kate Bowler (05:48):

Them. Well, we're all obsessed with like five steps to get there at all times. And we get very anxious when we feel like happiness is not always available to us. But I think that's why it will be very comforting then to know what joy is. Joy is not like a sense of ease. It's this bright enlivening feeling. It makes you feel suddenly awake. And just neurologically, it's interesting that it's connected to our reward system, our dopamine, but also our stress systems, which really helps explain why you can be in the middle of a really weird and difficult and complicated situation and think, "Well, I should only feel sadness or struggle." And yet somehow joy pops in. And that's because joy is our soul's yes or just for a moment, we feel like it is so good to be alive.

Andy Stanley (06:44):

As I was thinking about our conversation, that's what I thought of. When I think about moments of joy, they surprise us, they just pop in. And for me, and you can comment on this, those are moments that when I can think back on those moments, I do wish I could recapture them. And sometimes the memory elicits almost the exact same hit, right? Is that ... Yeah. Oh,

Kate Bowler (07:09):

Totally. And I think in this way, we have a very be present culture. I think this is a culture that's largely been infused by Buddhism's priority only on the present. And I think in this way, Christian theology offers us something quite lovely. It says, actually, God is in the past and in the present and in the future. And wherever you go, there can be little breadcrumbs there. And I find that very comforting when I'm going through a difficult moment. I can reach back for a memory of a temporary ... And if we think of joy as temporary wholeness, even just the memory of that temporary wholeness gives me hope that there's still beautiful moments like that now and in the future.

Andy Stanley (07:53):

How about pictures?

Kate Bowler (07:56):

I think memory is so good for us. Nostalgia is so good for us like that. And that's because the cousins of joy, one of them is gratitude. If you look back on something and it makes you think, "Oh, my life isn't just for surviving, it's for loving." Those things can really plug us into kind of like the preconditions of joy, something that might make joy pop up again.

Andy Stanley (08:21):

So for those of us in organizational leadership, it's like, "Oh, that's great, Kate. Thank you. "

Kate Bowler (08:26):

You're welcome.

Andy Stanley (08:27):

See ya. I got to get back to work.

Kate Bowler (08:30):

Yeah. You're like, "I'm busy."

Andy Stanley (08:32):

Right. But the thing is, because I know you and the context you work in, you are a very busy person with lots of pressure, not to mention you're an author and you travel. So it's not like you're just sitting around picking flowers, thinking lovely thoughts, even though you're a lovely person. So when leaders think about ... Let's go back to our context. When leaders think about performance, I think about any way, results, accountability, execution, et cetera. And you're suggesting in the book that joy belongs even in that conversation. Yeah, that's right. So how? And again, we tend to separate the two. Joy is in its own category when I'm out in the baseball field with one of my kids or something. But when I get to work, how do those two come together?

Kate Bowler (09:17):

It was actually that one of the reasons why I was so interested in doing this research in the first place was actually because of a busy leader. I know Gary Haugen who runs this unbelievably powerful and very emotionally heavy organization combating sexual slavery and really slavery of all kinds and really dark, heavy topics. And he told me one time, "Kate, joy is the oxygen of doing hard things." And I thought about that for such a long time. Wow.

(09:53):

Why is it that joy offers this kind of expansive lung feeling like maybe it's actually building your capacity to confront the world's great evils? How can he say that joy is the oxygen? And it was interesting to kind of research what it is that joy is doing to us. And I think what I landed on was another reason why it makes it so different from happiness. If happiness is just sort of accumulated nice things, joy isn't just a good feeling. Joy is a story. Joy says, yes, it is good to be alive. Joy is a refutation of despair. So it's not just like when we're busy, we don't have time for joy. When we start to burn out, burnout isn't just being tired. Burning out is losing the story that it is so good for you to be doing what you're doing as the person that you are.

(10:52):

So we need to keep joy in circulation, not just as a nice, frivolous thing, but because it's going to remind us of the big story of why we do things in the first place.

Andy Stanley (11:02):

So I want you to say that again slower for me. I want you to say that again. Talk a little bit more about it being part of the story. I think that's such a big idea because part of busyness causes us to lose our way. I'm forced to focus on what's right in front of me, more immediate than ultimate, but the story is ultimate. It's in the past, it's more of the future. So say that again about joy and the story.

Kate Bowler (11:30):

Well, let's separate out two kinds of ways that joy then can help a person in a high stress job. Let's just first talk about busyness. Busyness is about efficiency. It's about routines. It's about systems. It's about people. It's got a pace of life

(11:46):

That can keep us head down and frequently very task forward. The problem with being like that all the time is that it is very difficult for joy to break in. If joy is a surprise and you're in your routines, it's really hard to surprise somebody who's got the next 10 steps planned. So just a busy person, and we're all going to be really thinking through what pace of life is going to mean as AI is one of the great both confrontations and challenges for leaders going forward. AI is going to convince us that actually our robot selves are our best selves and we should just become more and more like all the machines that we have to make ourselves available to every day. And I think what's really important if you're very, very busy and that pace starts to feel like progress, it's really important.

(12:44):

Joy tells us, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We just need one. We need a breath in there because in that breath, joy is going to tell us a story about what actually is fundamentally deep down God's great gift to us. God's great gift is, thank you so much for serving. Our doing selves are great, but it's our deepest kind of goodness that joy will remind us of. Because

(13:12):

For example, what makes you joyful, Andy, and what makes me joyful is probably going to be slightly different.

Andy Stanley (13:18):

What?

Kate Bowler (13:19):

Joy is like ... Joy loves our weirdness. Joy is for you, which means it's going to need to be a reminder in your specific life, but why it's so good for you to serve. And I think just getting a sense that joy is your personality. Andy, what are your ... Mine is absurdity. I'm very curious what makes you joyful.

Andy Stanley (13:45):

Okay. See, this is my podcast, so I don't have to answer questions. That's why I like to be the host. No, no, no. This is an important question because you also say, and I'm not avoiding the question. Yes, I am. You say that this ... I'm just going to read this. So you said that joy is not something we have to wait for, but in my experience, there's moments that I'm surprised by joy. That's real. I think everybody has that. But you say it's something that we practice and it's what you just said for leaders who are busy and under pressure, we have to practice this. But what exactly does that mean? Is that pausing? So if somebody's listening today, they're like, okay, I get it. I love those surprise moments of joy, but how do I practice that? Not necessarily at work, but just the busyness of life.

Kate Bowler (14:35):

Well, and it can be at work. Like for instance, I know people who set aside one half hour in the middle of an absolutely insane schedule or a 15 minute or a 10 minute, and they pause there. They often, they can do it. Some people do it in a contemplative way. Some people set up something like if they're very moved by art or laughing with a friend, but they set up a time where they could have a breath that maybe they might be interrupted in some way by something lovely. I know for me that if I'm ... And I have, I think, six jobs at this point, joy because it's wonderfully not expensive. It's actually not even that time consuming. I just know that I have to, because I love absurdity. I love silly things. If I'm going through an unbelievably stressful time, I might set aside a hilarious, small window and taste test ketchups.

(15:37):

It's so dumb. I love ketchup.

Andy Stanley (15:39):

Did you just say what I think you said?

Kate Bowler (15:42):

I will eat...

Andy Stanley (15:43):

This is a serious podcast.

Kate Bowler (15:45):

Yeah. And I'm serious. I'm a serious person

Andy Stanley (15:49):

With you. I know. Wait, you taste, test, ketchup. Is that real?

Kate Bowler (15:55):

Yeah. Eight different generic kinds. It's totally fine. It's really simple. But I will say the crazier my life gets, the more uninterruptably busy it gets, the more I lose the reason, I lose the sense that I was good even before I became that busy in the first place.

(16:17):

And then if you add on top of that, that we're not just busy. And I think this is why I just want the two little parts set side by side. We've got one cultural story that tells us that we should be inexhaustible efficiency robots and that if you don't speed up, AI will take away everything that you thought you were good at. And then on the other side, we have fundamentally a global story about despair. If you poll people, most of them will not imagine that the things that are radically changing our lives in pace and are kind are for humanity's good. Most people have the sense that things are not progressing. That's a story about despair. So if you have a story about busyness and you have a story about despair, you end up with leaders that feel compressed on both sides to recover the reason why we do things in the first place.

(17:12):

That's why joy is not just nice, why joy gets into the foundation again. That's why for me, if I'm both busy and say having too many hospital days, I'm going to lose the story, I'm going to lose my song pretty fast.

(17:32):

So even if I needed an hour to do something open and silly or calling a friend, but that hour will be more precious to me because it reinvigorates the whole system to focus on the great why of our lives.

Andy Stanley (17:51):

This is so important. And tell me if I'm off, because this is now my version of what you just said. It's creating space to realign with the larger story. And the larger story is never what's right in front of me. The larger story is not the to- do list. I mean, I can't even remember the to- do list from yesterday or day before. So clearly that's not the story if I can't even remember it, right? And there's no joy in those things. And those aren't moments I think back and go, "I got four things done yesterday, not right." So that's not it. So there's a sense in which we have to find the thing, whatever the thing is that allows us to create space to realign with the story. For me, it's music. For me, it's in my car listening to, I'm not going to tell the artist, specific music loud.

(18:42):

And I've learned this and there's two times a week that I have found myself in this routine. I never set up the routine. I just go there and even Sandra has told me, she has noticed, and I don't want to go into specifics. She'll say, "I think you need to, " and she fills in the blank because coming out of those moments, that routine really, I'm lighter. And I didn't have the language until the book. I realigned with the bigger story because the bigger the picture, the bigger the story, that's where the joy is. The joy is not in the day to day. The joy is not in the details, but everything in my life pressures me into the day-to-day and the details. And it literally, again, I just never thought about this till the book squeezes out the joy and everybody has to find their routine, right?

(19:30):

The routine that allows for the space.

Kate Bowler (19:33):

Yes. And the funny part is why, and the reason why it makes a terrible self-help book is there can be no recipe for exactly what would elicit joy in any single person because joy is a surprise.

Andy Stanley (19:49):

Okay. But do we kind of set the table for it?

Kate Bowler (19:52):

Well, joy-

Andy Stanley (19:53):

Is that the part of the practice?

Kate Bowler (19:54):

Is an experience of transcendence, right? It's like if we're going to flick a cup and the difference between plastic and crystal, it's incredible that you know what's divine because it rings. And we're all just hoping that this lovely thing will visit us more and more often. But there is, as you say, there is preconditions, things we can do to set up becoming people who are joyful more and more often. And some of the best advice that I got about this was in watching people who found ways to find that magic more and more often. And I thought that the best advice was summarized by this advice that's often attributed to Emanuel Kant. And it's quite simple. He says, "Find something to do because there's a strange relationship between joy and service. The more you give, the more you get. "

Andy Stanley (20:44):

Yep.

Kate Bowler (20:45):

Find someone to love, just get out of your own mind and fall in love with other people's problems and joy is more likely to show up and then find something to hope for, which is tell this story against the story of despair and your own self-making. Be somebody who imagines the beautiful things in front of you. And those three things will make you into somebody who is more and more likely to be surprised by joy.

Andy Stanley (21:11):

Wow. Wow. And again, you hit on a big one. That others firstness, not just in our minds, not just appreciation, but doing something for me physically that's not for me. It's almost magical. It is transcendent. I mean, even for our listeners who don't necessarily believe in transcendent things, you've experienced that thing that doesn't make any sense, that it surprises you. And it rarely ever has anything to do with an accomplished task. Even finishing something huge. I mean, every week, not every week, but 30 times a year, I finish a sermon and there's a sense of relief, but not joy. That's different, right? Yeah. It's those other things that we learned. So the other thing I want to get to, and this is a little off the topic, but you write, "I have worshiped at the altar of productivity for too long. I have worshiped at the ... " I mean, this sounds like, okay, I'm not going to do that anymore.

(22:06):

I'm not going to quit being productive, but worshiping at the altar of productivity for too long. Can you talk about that a little bit and the relationship between that and joy?

Kate Bowler (22:17):

Yeah. I mean, I'm Canadian and I've often thought I felt so at home in America because of its overwhelming love of efficiency. This is a country that's largely been shaped by the metaphor of industrialization that we should always become break every task down into simpler and simpler robot-like emotions and streamline everything we do into this unbelievably gloriously efficient self. And I love the high of efficiency. I love feeling like I'm moving through the world quickly, and yet it becomes very, very easy to then confuse all of this doing with all of this with purpose and value. I will almost immediately lose the story that I was good before any of this started, that I am frankly, not just useful, but a creature that is simply meant to love and be loved. And this Christian story of that when we are weak, then we are strong and that in times of undoing and God showing up for us, that we recover really just the tenderness with which we're made.

(23:30):

And really, and we can feel it then when we can gather up all our gifts and give them to anybody else. But we have to know that our lives are beyond just what we're good for.

Andy Stanley (23:41):

But if we don't create space for that, it's just one thing after another.

Kate Bowler (23:45):

I just found that in the worst moments of my life, when you run out of things to do, like I can't cure cancer, I can't solve what takes my life apart or most of the people I love. When we come to the end of our doer self, what else is there for us? And I think that what we always have is to know that our life is a song and we still have to sing it. And that's what joy is. It gets to be the song in us. And for me, I notice it when I notice silly things. Other people notice when they go outside. My son notices it when he has a trash collector effectively in a metal detector and gathers horrifying things from our neighborhood and puts them in my house. But all of us need to find our language of joy.

Andy Stanley (24:34):

All right. So different topics. You cover so many of these things. In the book, you talk about toxic positivity. You say fake positivity just doesn't fail. It actually makes us worse. So talk about toxic positivity, pretending that things are better than they actually are. And as a cancer survivor, not just a survivor, but somebody who navigates that diagnosis constantly, I mean, that has to play in the back of your mind constantly because if you have figured out a way to overcome that, then the rest of us have no excuse, but to sit and listen.

Kate Bowler (25:07):

Well, most of our views on positivity actually are religious views that came from religious traditions about a hundred years ago. And they convinced a certain form of American Christianity that if they harness the power of their mind and the power of positive thought, that everything that comes out of their mouth will come into being. So you have to say only positive things because words are like boomerangs and whatever you put out then comes back to you. So most Americans really starting in the '70s and then particularly hilariously in the last 10 years, have started to use words magically to assume that everything you say has to be brightsided and everything's always going to get better, or else you've violated some cultural pact.

Andy Stanley (25:56):

Yeah. People will interrupt us sometimes and say, "Oh, don't say that. Don't say that like we're calling something negative into the world," right?

Kate Bowler (26:03):

Exactly.

(26:04):

Any kind of negative speech becomes a sign of spiritual failure. And what toxic positivity has done to us is it has so dramatically crowded all of the acceptable cultural emotions over to one side of the spectrum that it doesn't allow us to be honest anymore. The problem is then if we're not allowed to be honest, if we can't name the realities we're in, we're most likely to be unsure about how to respond. We keep ourselves on very shaky ground, and then we're unable to then reach out and solicit other people into helping us because every life is a group project. So toxic positivity has a way of keeping us fragile, lonelier than usual, and then secretly certain that everything that happened to us was because of us.

Andy Stanley (26:53):

Wow. And that's surprising to hear you say that you feel like the last 10 years it has come roaring back.

Kate Bowler (27:02):

Andy, I didn't want my career to be this way. I made my early career being the historian of positive thinking and toxic positivity. And then I thought, well, surely we will all have at some point, especially given our culture now, understand the importance of lament and honesty and even just like therapeutic being real with each other. But positive thinking in the last 10 years got rebranded as manifesting. And now Gen Zers who say manifesting all the time or have no idea that this is actually a competing religious worldview, and that will very likely make them increasingly lonely and confused.

Andy Stanley (27:47):

Wow. So back to leadership for just a minute. So what would you say, this is a question that I wrote. What would you say to the leader who hears all this and thinks, "That's great. Joy sounds nice, but I have to make my numbers. I got to bill my hours. I have a three-part series to create so people have joy in their life. I don't have joy creating it, but there's just so much to do. " Is your advice, okay, you got to find your thing for yours, it's absurdity, which I bet a very small part of the population can identify with that. How dare you? How dare you? Yeah. Sorry. So what do we do? Is it just space? Is it more introspection? As we think back, okay, what were the things, what were the environments? What were those moments that joy surprised me?

(28:35):

I need to look for more of those, create more of those. This really is important because joyless work, not only is it unhealthy and not only is it a grind, but if there isn't room for joy, then we're going to opt for creating happiness. And that often leads to bad habits, indulging, all kinds of stuff because I want to feel something positive and happiness are those moments that we create are no substitution for the transcendence associated with joy. We need it. It's fuel. Yeah.

Kate Bowler (29:10):

Well, I do think that somebody who just commits themselves to just the hustle and the grind is probably going to try to create a lot of happiness in the margins and find that very difficult because happiness has to add up. And if your life is mostly work, it's pretty hard.

Andy Stanley (29:27):

What do you mean happiness has to add up?

Kate Bowler (29:29):

Well, happiness is accumulated luck. It's just a bunch of nice things happening all at once. Which makes it frankly very financially expensive and very time expensive. And a lot of people then, and I think people don't have time to be happy. And so if you don't have time to be happy or you can't organize it in your life because say a lot of people go home from a busy job and then 130 million Americans are caregivers. If people are not largely taking care of other people's needs, It's very unlikely. So if we don't have time to be happy in that way, we need to somehow realize that our deepest selves want, need, have to say yes. Our souls need a second to say yes. And people who are overworking and or then chasing happiness will typically try to find then aliveness in some unhealthy way.

(30:30):

Joy is our soul's natural response to looking at the world and wanting to find our place in it. And so if we don't make a little breath or at least know that it's there to find us, we'll get very confused about whether life is fundamentally good and for us. So I think we need to make a little space. It doesn't have to be an afternoon. It can be an hour. But you do need to think of yourself as having like a deep hunger, like a deep need for it. And just ask yourself, are you trying to fill it by scrolling? Are you trying to fill it by looking up what other people are doing in high school? Are you using envy or comparison or fear to keep you from genuinely believing that joy is for you?

Andy Stanley (31:18):

Wow. That's a lot. Anything else? I mean, again, there's so much. I've kind of bumped along the service and tried to grab topics here and there that relate specifically to leaders, but what's your parting shot just to a general audience about this?

Kate Bowler (31:36):

I think we've all had moments in our lives where we felt like they were magic. And we wish they would happen more often.

Andy Stanley (31:48):

Or we wish we could recapture them, right?

Kate Bowler (31:51):

And I think we're always scared that they'll never happen again. But there is this inexhaustible thing in us to want to be alive. I had this funny moment. I was with my dad. We were traveling around Portugal and we were in this monastery and my dad decided he hated the architecture. It was this weird period called the Manuelian Art Period in which for about a hundred years, Portuguese architecture was obsessed with being like, "We should add more pineapples to this. Let's add hundreds of more pineapples to these walls." And my dad thought it was the stupidest thing he'd ever seen and he spent his whole time complaining. I saw one person absolutely marveling at where he was. He looked like he was entranced. So I was like, "Hey, what are you seeing that I'm not seeing?" And he said, "Just look around." And when I looked up, I realized there was no ceiling to that stupid cathedral because apparently everyone was so busy embellishing and keeping themselves busy and working on the walls that nobody actually thought about finishing the building.

Andy Stanley (32:51):

Oh my goodness.

Kate Bowler (32:52):

And he said-

Andy Stanley (32:54):

There had never been a ceiling in the cathedral.

Kate Bowler (32:56):

They'd never built a ceiling. It's not like it was made and broke, but kingdoms rose and fell and they never actually ... All we saw was endless ornamenting. And I think as he fussed and showed me every new detail, this person who was so enamored, my dad and I paused and we laughed and we said, "Isn't it so like us to be so busy, embellishing that we so busy adding a million pineapples to our lives that we don't stop and just look up and say, isn't this so good? Aren't we so lucky? Isn't this so beautiful? Isn't it exactly what it means in our own little hearts to know that it is good to be alive?"

Andy Stanley (33:39):

Wow. That was emotional, Kate. Goodness gracious. Well, that is all we have time for today. I appreciate you joining us and it's great to see you again. It's been too long. Last time I saw Kate, she was in town. She sat on the front row with me at church, which was so great. A little intimidating having you sitting there, but you've been a friend of both of us. And again, for those of us who know you and have read your books and have tracked along with you, you're inspiring and you take away our excuses because you really do. Anybody who knows you in iCourse, I'm looking at your face. Everybody else just listened to your voice. You just exude joy. I mean, you really do. And I just thank you for that and even this conversation. So anyway, for the rest of you out there listening to us chat, you can find Kate's latest book, Joyful Anyway, wherever books are sold, and we will also link it to the show notes.

(34:36):

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