‘ You can continually be choosing optimistic behavior even when you’re not feeling optimistic.’
Michelle Gielan is a positive psychology researcher married to a happiness researcher – wouldn’t you love to be at that dinner table?
In her latest book Resilient Optimism: The science of sustaining a positive mindset in tough times, she explores why optimism that lasts when reality hits is not based on an emotion, but on behaviour, and more particularly on the belief that our behaviour matters.
She also discovered that your behaviour matters way beyond your own mood and your own outcomes. Becoming a ‘positive deviant’ – actively expressing optimism, celebrating progress, spreading ‘positive gossip’ – can transform the outcomes of everyone around you.
We also talk about writing as sense-making, experimenting with ‘power leads’, and how to think of a book as a collection of beautifully connected two-minute stories.
A hopeful, practical conversation about agency, courage, writing, and resilience.
Michelle’s website: https://michellegielan.com/
Michelle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellegielan/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
Alison Jones: I’m here today with Michelle Gielan, who is a positive psychology researcher and speaker, the bestselling author of Broadcasting Happiness: The science of igniting and sustaining positive change. She’s an executive producer of The Happiness Advantage on PBS, and a featured professor in Oprah’s Happiness course.
She’s also a former anchor of CBS Morning News, and her latest book, and isn’t it beautiful?, is called Resilient Optimism: The science of sustaining a positive mindset in tough times. Obviously, if you’re listening to this, you haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about, but I suggest you go and look at it on YouTube because it looks really beautiful.
So first of all, welcome, Michelle. It’s lovely to have you here.
Michelle Gielan: Thank you. Thanks so much for inviting me. And yes, I think the team at Harvard Business Review did such a beautiful job with that starburst because it so perfectly reflects the book.
Alison Jones: What I love about it as well, it isn’t bright yellow, cheerful. It’s actually, it’s a black cover with this starburst in the middle of it, which I think is actually very resonant. I really liked that. So let’s start with that whole idea of resilient optimism, which is such a great phrase.
What is it? Why is it different to just pure old optimism, and why do we need it?
Michelle Gielan: So optimism is the expectation of good things to happen. Resilient optimism is optimism that stays strong when it’s tested. So it’s not that fleeting feeling of, “I’ve got this,” or, “I can do this.” Instead, resilient optimism is built upon a set of behaviors that help you stay grounded, hopeful, and optimistic when the first plan fails or the challenge lasts longer than we expected or we’re just exhausted.
What I love the most about this concept is you can continually be choosing that optimistic behavior even when you’re not feeling optimistic, which oftentimes in the midst of the messy middle, we’re not feeling optimistic. This gives a hopeful path forward.
Alison Jones: And actually, if you are trusting to emotion rather than behavior it’s quite a weak reed to lean on, isn’t it? Because we all start projects with this sort of blaze of optimism. You can’t sustain that feeling forever. So well, tell us a little bit about the five sort of behaviors that you identify that can turn that into something you can operationalize.
Michelle Gielan: Yes, so we’re so good at new beginnings, right? The new project or the new job, new marriage. Woo, we’re good. But when those challenges strike, those behaviors allow us to turn to something concrete. So we talk, you know, in the book I focus on things like recalibrating your mindset. So it’s how you get over the natural negativity bias that we have, and it allows you to see the progress and possibility in your environment that already exists, and then recalibrate your mindset so that you actually have a stronger brain to use to look at the problem, to problem solve, and to hopefully move forward.
All of the concepts in the book wrap around this idea of agency, where when your brain is feeling higher levels of agency, it just sees the world differently. You’re feeling less stressed, you’re feeling more engaged with what you’re doing. And ultimately I find over and over in the businesses that I’ve worked with or organizations, people just make better decisions and they move forward more quickly.
Alison Jones: And there’s something really interesting, like you used that word agency there. You also used a phrase in the book that really landed with me. You said about the idea about going first, even when nobody else is behaving like this. And there’s something really powerful about taking action, even if it seems like a very small thing, that as you say that mindset shift that puts you into a space of intention, a space of actually feeling your own agency rather than feeling helpless.
Michelle Gielan: Yes. Because it’s so easy when we’re bombarded by problems for our brain to dip into a state of what psychologists call learned helplessness, where we basically don’t believe our behavior matters. And when we are in that state, we see business health and educational outcomes decrease across the board.
I came to see the power of all of this when I had a really big event in my life. I’d already been studying optimism for about 10 years at this point, and I’m very grateful for that because it really did help me. But, so this was 2018. It was Super Bowl Sunday night. We were watching the Super Bowl, my husband and I, and at the time, our four-year-old son.
And then my water broke, except not like some dramatic thing in the movies where you know exactly what’s going on. So I didn’t know and my husband did what any loving husband whose wife’s water breaks during the big game he got me an Uber to the hospital. So yes his friends named him Husband of the Year, and they wouldn’t let him live it down.
But in his defense, it was almost Leo’s bedtime, and he did get me an Uber XL, so it was fine.
Alison Jones: That’s love.
Michelle Gielan: So I get to the hospital and that’s where I got a bigger picture on what was actually happening, how serious it was, and they said, “Let’s– We want to keep you pregnant as long as possible because every day matters for your baby.” Six days later, I end up with an emergency C-section. Our daughter Zoe was born at three pounds, seven ounces.
She was so small that if you can picture her entire hand wrapped around just the last little section of my finger. And so as I’m thrust into this 50-day journey through the NICU I’m just obviously, as anyone would understand, filled with anxiety and uncertainty. I’m listening to the beeping and watching the data on the monitors and trying to synthesize how this was all going to turn out. I wanted to predict what was going to happen next, how the story was going to end.
And it was in that moment that if I tried to be optimistic about it, to feel optimistic, to think positive, that was a losing game. There was so much going on. It wasn’t possible. And so instead, what I could do, and it took me a couple days to see this, but I eventually saw I could behave like an optimist.
So I asked every doctor, because doctors come on rounds, right? So there’s three a day. I asked them the same question. I get the ideas from all of them about what I should be thinking about. I took a notebook over to my neighbor’s house who had two preemie babies, and they were fine at that point, and I asked her every single question.
I read every single scientific journal article about preemies. And what I was trying to do in that moment was behave like an optimist that ultimately reminding my brain that my behavior mattered when I didn’t know how the story was going to turn out.
Now, spoiler alert, this story turned out really well. She’s eight years old and thriving.
But yes, it changed how I see optimism and it’s, I think it’s a fool’s game to rely on the feeling. Instead, the behaviors can carry us through.
Alison Jones: I’m just going to take a lesson for writers from there as well, because you have been studying this material for a long time. You have been working in the workplace, teaching and training and delivering this material for a long time. But the fact that you can talk about your own lived experience at the rawest moment too, and synthesize all of that, is really powerful.
And I think it’s, as a reader as well, this is one of the reasons we read books like this, because they make sense as you read them and you go, “Oh yes, that’s very wise.” But then they are part of your mental furniture when the steamroller hits and you don’t know when you’re going to need those lessons.
But if you’re putting them in, you’ve got a much better chance of coming out with them at the right moment.
Michelle Gielan: Oh, I love that expression, mental furniture. It’s so true because as I think about all the writing that I read from other authors before this, it becomes like a scaffolding that holds up your worldview. And yes, that’s beautifully said. Beautifully said. One thing I think is important is for us to level set on the definition of optimism because I have run into all kinds of definitions.
So I mentioned my husband, he came home from a talk one time and he said– Oh, and I should say he’s a happiness researcher as well, and I know we’re two married happiness researchers.
Alison Jones: Do you ever argue?
Michelle Gielan: Lots of people ask, and I’m like yes, we have our days.
Alison Jones: But we’re smiling when we do it.
Michelle Gielan: Yes.
No, we give ourselves ample chance to put this research into practice in our household. And so his name’s Shawn Achor. He’s very funny. If you’ve seen his TED Talk, it’s wildly popular. You just laugh for the entire time.
And so he came home from a talk one time and he says, “You won’t believe what happened.” I said, “What is it?” He said, “So I go to this company and I give this talk on the power of optimism. The CEO comes up to me after and says, ‘I love this research. I want to figure out how to more deeply embed it in my organization. Can I give you a ride to the airport so we can talk about it?'”
So Shawn, of course, was like, “Sure, yes. Sounds great.” Gets in this CEO’s car and clicks on his seatbelt, and the CEO gets in and doesn’t put on his seatbelt. So after a while, there’s a little seatbelt bell reminding him. And so Shawn, again, very funny, he thinks he’s making a joke.
He turns to the CEO and says, “Oh, so you don’t wear seatbelts?” The guy’s like, “Nah, man, I saw your talk. I’m an optimist.”
Alison Jones: There are other words for what you are right now.
Michelle Gielan: You are something else. So optimism doesn’t stop cars from hitting us. It doesn’t stop reality from negatively impacting us. What we’re talking about here in the research is rational optimism. It’s being able to take a realistic assessment of the present moment while maintaining the belief that our behavior matters, especially in the face of challenges.
So optimists, if they’re rational, they clearly see the problem for what it is. They just believe that the setback is just the start of the story. And meanwhile, pessimists, there’s been a kind of a glorification of pessimism sometimes at our offices. “Oh, we need people who are able to spot risks. We need people who are critical thinkers of ideas.”
Yes, and we absolutely do. I 100% agree with that. But if you are saying that pessimists are your team for that, it’s actually wrong because pessimists, they can spot the problems just like optimists can if they’re rational, but pessimists don’t believe we can do anything about it.
It’s much better to hire optimists, for instance, because– but critical thinking optimists who see things for what they are, but then they say, “Okay, if we team up with the people around us, if we brainstorm some good ideas, if we read up on the latest technologies that we can put into practice, we can put one foot in front of the other and actually create a positive outcome.
Alison Jones: And I feel like I interrupted you when you were talking about the behaviors as well actually. So talk about the mindset, but just give us a quick sort of gallop through the other behaviors that turn this into practice.
Michelle Gielan: Oh so some of the– so recalibrate your mindset. We also– I looked at the benefits of recovery, so I talk about recharging smarter and really looking at how to move the brain from what so many of us are in all the time, which is that task-positive network, ch-ch-ch-ch, clicking through everything, into the default mode network, which allows us to have those moments of true recovery and then come back stronger.
And actually, there was a study that we did a few years ago with the US Travel Association. We looked at folks who they were professionals who worked full-time, so 35 hours or more a week. I think the or more is probably more likely. And then they had, as part of their benefits package, paid time off.
And we found that people who took 11 or more vacation days as opposed to 10 or fewer, they actually came back to the office and had a 30% increase in the likelihood of receiving a raise or a promotion over that next year. A lot of people I know they’re like, “Oh, I…” And the– I talk about all the psychological reasons we don’t take the breaks that we need to be taking. But one of them is, “I don’t want to be seen as a slacker. I’m not going to be, I’m not going to make it up the corporate ladder.”
And this is literally scientific evidence that might not be true. And then I talk also about connecting the dots, how you can reframe the stories that you see, but it’s really either about finding the information in your visual field that’s true and good and reminds your brain your behavior matters, or you help manufacture some of that, and not in some fake way.
But we worked with Flint, Michigan, with the school district there, the superintendent. And Flint, Michigan, is an area which has high levels of poverty. There was a water crisis with lead in the water. Like literally every problem that could befall a community, they’ve been through it.
And the superintendent said, “I feel like the narrative here is not anywhere close to what we want it. I want to remind the students and educators that their behavior matters.” So she commissioned this idea called 1,800 Acts of Kindness in 18 Hours. They went all over the community handing out coffee to road workers in the middle of the night, and it’s freezing in Michigan, so that was really nice.
And they went to the Department of Motor Vehicles and gave them like happiness packages, and they actually got kicked out because they were like, “This is not how we roll here. This is not our culture.”
Alison Jones: Wow.
Michelle Gielan: Yes. But what she was doing in that moment, and especially for teenagers who can see all kinds of narratives online and whatnot, she was reminding them, “You can create good around you. The question is, are you taking the opportunities when you have them?” And in that case, they were.
So it’s things like that help us rethink our relationship with stress. Oh, and that’s another big one. Rethinking our relationship with stress is we did a– So Shawn and two researchers from Yale University did a study, and this was fascinating.
They split stressed-out managers into two groups, this is at UBS, and then they taught one group to process stress or think– it like basically just deal with stress. It’s a typical stress management training. The other group, they taught them that stress can actually be enhancing to the body and mind, and then– and so it improves memory, mental cognition, agility, and then they taught them how to see, own, and use that stress to their advantage.
Four months later, during a stressful time for everybody, the group that had rethought their relationship with stress, they reported a 23% drop in stress-related symptoms like headaches, backaches, and fatigue. This is one more example, and I will tell you, after studying positive psychology for 15 years now, it’s just one of so many examples that shows that our mindset is malleable at any time.
When we engage in positive behaviors, what we’re doing in that moment is we’re providing our brain evidence that this is working, that there’s good in the world, that people care about us, that we have agency, that our behavior matters, back to agency, all
Michelle Gielan: the good things, and that creates that upward spiral of success.
Alison Jones: Yes. And you have this lovely phrase about positive deviance. Is that the phrase? I absolutely love that because it makes it feel really subversive. Yes, “Oh, I’m just going to go and be so positively deviant.”
Michelle Gielan: This is the one that’s been resonating so much with people, and it’s so interesting as a writer to write what you think is important, right? But then put it out there, and then you see what comes back. And so people have been really resonating with this idea. It also tells me how far in the book they got…
Alison Jones: I’m like, “Why didn’t you put that sooner?” This is why, you want to know. Okay.
Michelle Gielan: Yes, that’s hilarious. So positive deviance in its original form, it’s taken from public health, from that domain, and it was something changed in the environment. It was due to one person. Let’s analyze it in the past. But the way I applied it is you can become a positive deviant at any point, and actually it’s all future-looking.
So when– To become a positive deviant, the idea here is to rewrite the social script around you. We are so much more influential than we give ourselves credit for, and I’ll just rattle off a couple studies that I love. At Cornell University, they found that if you walk into your doctor’s office and you put them in a good mood, they come up with a correct diagnosis 19% faster and more accurately than doctors at neutral.
As a manager, if you start getting your team to focus on all that they’re already doing right by praising one person new and different each day for a period of three weeks, the entire team’s level of productivity in that three-week period went up by 31%. And it’s– There’s study after study that shows that we are incredibly influential over the mood and mindset of other people.
The thing is, we’re oftentimes, we’re looking at the person who’s super negative, right? Like that guy on our team, he so easily influences us, and we forget our power to go back and influence for the good. So becoming a positive deviant is saying, “Okay, how can I transform this culture in a positive way?” And a lot of it wraps around the expression of optimism.
So I have to tell you, so I literally just a couple weeks ago, and ironically after the manuscript had already been submitted and the books were printed. I did a reanalysis of a data set. It’s 11,000 professionals, sorry, 25,000 professionals we’ve collected responses from over the past 11 years.
And I looked at the, I just wanted to understand where we’re at, because we hear all kinds of things about optimism, pessimism, the change over time, and we have been through a lot over the past decade collectively, right? And what I found was eight in ten people still consider themselves optimists.
But when you look at the data, their behavior tells a different story. It has changed over time, and specifically it’s about the expression of optimism. If someone presents a new idea at work, they’re less likely to meet it with encouragement. If they are thinking something optimistic, they’re less likely to tell anybody about it.
If they start a conversation, they’re less likely to start with something positive. This is significant because it’s not like someone all of a sudden turning the lights off, you walk into a dark room. This is like a dimmer switch that’s been slowly changing over time.
And optimism isn’t just a private belief. It is evidence, signals to other people about the things we value, the progress we’ve had, all these good things that we’ve been talking about today. And if we are keeping it to ourselves, we are not positively influencing the culture and no one is benefiting from our optimism. When optimists go quiet, pessimists get the floor, and that is not good for our culture.
So becoming a positive deviant, it’s doing things like I call it spreading positive gossip, but it’s you heard something good about Mark and Mark probably didn’t hear that compliment, go tell him.
Alison Jones: I love that idea about bragging. Bragging on behalf of everybody around you. I love that.
Michelle Gielan: Yes, because we have been socialized to believe that bragging is wrong, right? You don’t want to come in and tell everyone the good.
But I think with that, there’s been unfortunately a death of being able to celebrate progress. And, if I say that I’ve actually made progress on a project, maybe someone’s going to think, “Oh I think so highly of myself.” It’s like, no, this is a collective project that’s actually good for all of us, and there’s reasons why sharing that kind of information can be incredibly good for the social script around us.
Yes. So I think it’s fun to think like a scientist with all of this. So if you’re thinking about one idea to take away from today, it’s pick one, experiment with it, notice what happens to the people around you, how that changes how they show up. And because I think when we’re paying attention, it fuels us to want to do more.
Alison Jones: It’s so energizing and inspiring and hopeful, and thank you for that.
And, I want to talk to you about the writing because there’s people listening going, “Oh, how does she do that? How does she translate all that scientific learning and all those examples from business and her own life? How does she pull it into a book that’s so readable?” How do you do that?
Michelle Gielan: Yes. So, I am very grateful for the fact that back in 2015, I published another book, my first book, and so I had that experience under my belt. It made writing this book much easier. I will say…
Alison Jones: …you know you can do it.
Michelle Gielan: Yes, I knew I could do it. I will say the first book that I wrote, because I’m a former national news anchor here in the United States.
The longest stories I ever wrote were, like, two minutes. It was very short. And so to write these– a book, it just felt like a lot. So during that process of writing the first book, I came to understand that actually the whole book it’s basically a collection of two-minute stories that have some connection to one another and weave together a bigger argument.
So for me, what I find really helpful, for the types of books I write, is each chapter is basically a standalone chapter. It argues something. I start off with a story that I love to bring this research to life. These are stories that I’ve collected over time from the work that we’ve done, and then I love sharing what’s happening with the brain or taking a look at some of the science that relates to it.
And then very important is I give practical tools people can use. So you can read a chapter, learn some stuff, laugh, have a little fun, understand and then you go and experiment with it. So I find such joy in the writing process. I really love it.
Alison Jones: I love the way that you’re weaving together those different elements. You’re very clear about what your raw materials are and the rough order in which they’re going to go, and how you pull them together into each chapter. That gives you a rhythm for the book, doesn’t it? And a rhythm for the writing, yes, which is super helpful.
And the thing you had this time around, which you didn’t have before, was access obviously to AI tools. Tell us, how do you use those? How do you use them well without letting them interfere with the writing?
Michelle Gielan: Yes, I actually don’t use AI for writing because I feel like it’s cheating me out of the experience of it. Writing is such a good tool for us as authors, as thinkers, to think through ideas, to synthesize them and come up with it. And then, my favorite part is I write something and then I start to see it show up everywhere.
So it gives me more ideas and I come back, and so it becomes this iterative process. I think AI…
Alison Jones: just going to interrupt you for a second actually, because I loved that when you were talking about joining the dots and sense-making in the book as well. It’s like this is one of the reasons that journaling works so well as an intervention, as a therapeutic tool, because it forces us to do that, doesn’t it?
The writing, it forces us to make the connections, make sense of the random stuff that hits us each day
Michelle Gielan: Yes, exactly. I have found AI to be really helpful, and I’ve only started experimenting with it in the last few months, is like for instance, I can’t remember every last story that I included in the book, but to be able to have a reference sheet of those stories is helpful. If I’m drafting an article or whatnot, I can just quickly pull stuff.
So I was like, “Can you list all the stories from my book?” And I got two or three lines about each one. That was really helpful. I don’t– I’m just trying to streamline some of the stuff that, it’s not creative, it’s more administrative. But yes I don’t know. I know a lot of people are thinking, “Whoa, this can make me such a fast writer. I just plug in some ideas and…”
But you’re just, you’re missing out on that opportunity to really think through all this stuff. And also it pulls to the middle, right? It robs your writing of your own personal perspective. I can get all the information online.
What I want to know about is what does Manoush think about her writing process and how she met with her publishers and they discussed this and that. I want to know the nuance, the grit those details, the minutia of her life, right? Yes, so you just don’t get that with AI.
Alison Jones: Amazing. If somebody’s listening and they’re– I’m being really greedy. You’ve actually given us loads of tips already, but I’m still going to ask you.
Michelle Gielan: Oh.
Alison Jones: If there was a one tip that you’d give to someone who’s listening who’s maybe at the starting gate of their first book, what would you say to them?
Michelle Gielan: I would say to think about possibly using what I call best moments or the power lead. And I will explain both. Best moments I started in the busy blur of the pandemic. I was exhausted. I was had two kids at home, five and one years old, and I realized that I probably wasn’t recording all the small good moments of the day.
So I started to send Shawn a text message each night that was three to four good things. And why I think this is– it wasn’t like a gratitude practice per se, it was just writing small, simple, good things like, “Zoe hugged me and it made me feel so loved,” or, “I played pickleball with Leo,” or, “I tried a recipe and it was really– it tasted okay.”
Simple stuff
Alison Jones: It wasn’t awful.
Michelle Gielan: It wasn’t awful. I didn’t burn the kitchen down, thank goodness. But what I came to realize about this practice and why I love it so much is that first of all, it’s a bunch of memory triggers. For the rest of my life, I have this in writing, and otherwise I think a lot of that stuff would’ve been gone. I can’t hold onto every last thing.
The other piece is that I’m not asking, “Was today good?” I’m asking, “What was good today?” And that’s a very different question. So especially when I’m having a not so great day, I do best moments because then I’m like, “Oh, wait, yes, actually this was good and that was good,” and I’m recalibrating my day for my brain.
And then the other thing, and so this is along the lines of becoming a positive deviant. If you’ve got your own resilient optimism strong, then maybe it’s time to move it out to other people. The power leads taken from my days in media. Start conversations, emails, meetings, phone calls by sharing something positive and meaningful, and of course authentic because none of this stuff works unless we’re being our authentic selves.
When you start a conversation off with a power lead, like “Hey, how are you doing? Oh I’m great. I had breakfast with my son this morning. He was being so funny.” Simple, small. We are socialized to reciprocate, so that other person is thinking something good, they’re going to share it, and you are setting a social script around you that’s “Hey, we talk about good stuff.”
So I’m not saying do this all the time. That’s crazy. If you have a real problem, go to a friend. You can start with it. I’m just saying regularly, if we’re not starting with a power lead, we’re like those people who are saying they’re optimistic but not expressing it. And know this, eight in ten people are optimistic, and so the key is by you going first, you’re activating those people, and that’s a really brave place, especially these days when optimism is not in the environment as much as it could be.
Alison Jones: And what you have said there crystallizes something that I’ve been thinking talking to you, but also reading the book, which is that it takes some courage to write positively, to encourage people to be better, to see more, to feel that they have power and so on. And I think that each book that does that, that leaves the reader feeling more empowered, more positive, is invaluable today more than ever, actually.
So even just as a writer, knowing that of course you’ve got to tackle the big stuff, and part of your opportunity as a writer is to leave people feeling lifted, and that’s really important.
Michelle Gielan: Exactly.
Alison Jones: Brilliant. If you were to recommend a book to us, Michelle, what would it be?
Michelle Gielan: I’m partial, and for those watching on video, you can see all the– I have all my husband’s books around. He just came out with a new one called “The Power of Belief,” which I think it’s a transformative book. It looks at how our– we are– the placebo effect is growing stronger than we’ve ever seen it.
So if you’re intrigued by that and what our beliefs help predict in our lives it’s a phenomenal book. And then, actually, I am working my way through the Bible for the first time in my life as an intellectual practice, a spiritual one too. But I have just been so curious, and I can’t believe I’m the age I am and I haven’t read it yet.
So that’s been a really interesting journey.
Alison Jones: That’s a great challenge, isn’t it? There you are, people. There’s your recommendation. Just head off and read the Bible over the next weekend.
Michelle Gielan: Yes. I will say I found a– And actually he has a, a very nice accent, much like yours. I listen to it, so don’t think that I’m sitting there
Alison Jones: Oh, is it it’s David Suchet.
Michelle Gielan: Oh, it– I think so. Yes.
Alison Jones: David Suchet brilliantly has read the whole of the NIV edition of the Bible. It is absolutely brilliant. yes. People say, “I could listen to him read a shopping list.” It does make Leviticus a lot easier to get through when it’s David Suchet reading it to you, yes, absolutely. That’s so funny. Great. So Michelle, if people want to find out more about you, more about the work you do, more about resilient optimism, take the opportunity just to wave it at the camera again. There you go. Where should they go?
Michelle Gielan: Yes. I made it really easy, resilientoptimism.com
Alison Jones: Excellent. There’s a lesson in there for all you writers as well. Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you, and I do feel a little bit more optimistic.
Michelle Gielan: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.
