Gretchen Gagel shares her journey of overcoming insecurities and intimidation, making life-changing choices, and finding her passion for empowering women.
In this episode of the NEW You, Network for Empowering Women podcast, Christy Belz sits down with her friend Gretchen Gagel, a leader in the construction industry, promoting women’s empowerment and offering strategic construction advice for success. Gretchen is Chairperson at Brinkman Construction (US), involved with the International Women’s Foundation (AUS), and a member of the National Academy of Construction (US).
Throughout the conversation, they stress the significance of self-care and self-prioritization. Gretchen shares her personal journey of neglecting her well-being and the lessons she gained. She also talks about her challenging pursuit of a PhD, emphasizing critical thinking and continuous learning. They highlight the power of women supporting each other, emphasizing the importance of a strong network of friends and mentors for guidance and encouragement during tough times.
Tune in for valuable insights and inspiration in this episode, perfect for women on their journeys of personal and professional growth.
In this episode, you will learn the following:
- Gretchen’s experience of feeling intimidated by others and her journey to overcome insecurities.
- The importance of self-love and self-care, and putting your own needs first.
- Gretchen’s decision to leave a successful career to work for a nonprofit and later pursue a PhD.
- Her experience of moving to Australia and finding new opportunities for teaching and personal growth.
- Gretchen’s wisdom and advice for women, making choices that align with personal values and goals.
Visit Gretchen Gagel’ social media pages
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/gretchen-gagel
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GretchenGagel
Website: greatnessconsulting.com
Learn more about Christy Belz Social Communications:
Website: https://christybelz.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChristyBelzCoach/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christybelzcoach/
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christybelz
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Christy: Welcome to New You, Network for Empowering Women podcast. I’m your host, Christy Belz. Enjoy our array of talented, open-hearted guests and their willingness and courage to share their stories of second chances, life-changing choices and new perspectives. We’re here to uplift and empower you and your journey.
00:00:40 Christy: So do you ever get intimidated by somebody? Maybe it’s their looks, maybe it’s their smarts, maybe it’s their position. I really was insecure as a young person, as a young adult. And I really got intimidated a lot by people that I thought were mostly smarter than me because somehow I believed I was not smart enough. Actually, I didn’t believe there was enough of much about me in those days.
00:01:07 Christy: And when I met my next guest, I have to say I had a little bit of intimidation going on. Now I call her one of my dearest friends. She’s one of the most accomplished women I’ve ever met educationally, in business, in philanthropy, in supporting women and other women. And I’m a huge champion of hers and she of mine. I cannot wait for you to hear my conversation with the amazing Gretchen Gagel.
00:01:39 Christy: Welcome. I’m so excited about my guest, Gretchen Gagel, my dear, dear friend. Oh my gosh. All right. But before we start, we always start with permission to pause. So let’s just give ourselves a moment to take a deep breath. Oh, yeah, find the moment, find the quiet space inside. It only takes that moment to find our center, to catch a breath, to shift from before to now.
00:02:14 Christy: Alright, so welcome, Gretchen. I’m so excited to have you on my show.
00:02:21 Gretchen: Thanks, Christy. I’m excited to be here.
00:02:23 Christy: So Gretchen and I met, oh gosh, I can’t even tell you how many years ago, probably 20, when she was the president of the Women’s Foundation of Colorado here in Denver. And I was working in the nonprofit sector. And we met and then we started chatting a little bit. We found out that we grew up like, I don’t know, 10 miles from each other in Kansas City. So we were Kansas girls.
00:02:47 Christy: And then we both realized that we had a passion for concerts. We started going to music shows together and our friendship has just blossomed and grown over time. I really admire and respect this woman. I just got to journey, to Australia to be with her on a journey around the country for three weeks. It was a blast and I just didn’t, so grateful for you planning that whole damn thing. That was a lot, but it was epic on my house. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Yeah, so welcome.
00:03:18 Gretchen: You’re welcome.
00:03:18 Christy: Yeah, yeah. So we, I really believe in the power of our stories and sharing our stories. That’s what we did in the book. You and I pulled yours from the TED stage. I’d really like my guests to know a little bit about you and your story and are Kansas days to what brings you to this time and place in your life?
00:03:37 Gretchen: Gosh, I’m going to try and keep this short. I know I was inspired. I was inspired by my father telling me I couldn’t go to engineering school because girls didn’t do that and disowning me because I turned down Harvard to go to SMU instead. And boy, was that, it was a hard choice for me, but that interaction with him really sent me on this journey of wanting to be an empowered woman and to help other women be empowered women. And the story that I tell in the TEDx talk that we did together about being in the construction industry where I’ve spent most of my time for the last 40 years.
00:04:17 Gretchen: And when I became pregnant with my first child and people started asking me if my husband was going to let me keep working and just feeling like, why are they saying this to me? And telling my boss that people were saying things like this and him not believing me until we were at a cocktail party. This is the story I told him in the TEDx and someone turned to him, an owner of a construction company and said, have you started looking for Gretchen’s replacement yet? And I just looked at Lou thinking, Oh my gosh, this is gonna get really good. And Lou’s looking at me like, What’s going on? And he went on to proclaim that, you know, the yearnings that God put in me to be a mother, were going to overpower these feelings I had that I needed to have a career.
00:05:00 Christy: In the name of God.
00:05:01 Gretchen: Oh, yes. And I would understand where I belonged and lose, jaws on the floor. And I’m like, Yep, I told you people are saying things to me. And so it’s just been an interesting journey of being engineering, manufacturing, construction, except for that detour when I met you five years of running the Women’s Foundation, which was an incredible gift of carving my path in a male-dominated world. I’m now chair of the board of Brinkman Construction and a member of the National Academy of Construction. And I really try and be a role model to other things, to other women and help other women be successful.
00:05:40 Christy: Yeah, yeah. Well, along the way, right, there were a few things and choices that you made, right? So before we go there, please, please, please tell the story about the airplane and your kids.
00:05:52 Gretchen: Oh, well–
00:05:52 Christy: The strike cracks me up. So funny.
00:05:56 Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, I flew every week. I flew 100,000 miles a year. I had my first child, my son. I don’t know how I did that. And well, I know I did three cities a week, basically most weeks. And I flew until they were seven and eight years old. I cut back to two nights a week and people would see my 1K tag on my briefcase. I’d be sitting in first class and, Oh my gosh, you fly a lot, what do you do? And you know, 1K means you’re 100,000 miles a year. I mean I did and I’d say what I did and oh gosh, you don’t have children, do you? And I’d say, yeah. You know, Oh wow, how old are they? And I’d say one and two, two and three, however old they were and they’re 13 months apart and almost every single week, someone would say, Well, who watches them when you’re gone?
00:06:47 Gretchen: And so I started saying, Well, you know, I just put them in the trunk of my car with a little food and water at the airport. And so far it seems to be working out just fine. Like, Why are you asking me this? But I just decided to use humor to deflect what was a very annoying question every single week for years and years.
00:07:11 Christy: Like the stuff that we put up with, right? It’s the stuff that we put up over the years, but that’s the way you deflected that was so, I still crack, my cheeks hurt. I’m smiling so much because it makes me laugh. Like, yeah, I’m sure people are really like, not, like what?
00:07:29 Gretchen: Yeah, should I call the police when she gets up?
00:07:30 Christy: Exactly, yeah. Social services, 911. Oh my gosh. Okay, so you have this big career in engineering construction. You took some time off to get back, to be part of the Women’s Foundation here in Colorado, making a big difference. We did a lot of public policy work together, which I have to say was awesome, to have somebody have a lead on taking some of the legislation that we were able to create for women, particularly in my field, because I was working with low incomes, women with low incomes. But, you know, we worked on the cliff of facts, like helping women keep their benefits, so they didn’t lose their childcare, et cetera, at a certain level of pay. Yeah, we did some good work back then. That was awesome. Okay, so then you left the Women’s Foundation and remind me, where you went after that.
00:08:21 Gretchen: I went to the Women’s Funding Network, but the decision to come to the Women’s Foundation, I think, was one of the biggest forks in the road for me. And that’s what I tell my kids, life is a series of forks in the road and you just gotta pick one and have no regrets and go down it. And this flying job that I had, I was one of six managing directors for the largest investment banking strategy firm in the construction industry. I owned 2% of it. I made, Director in four years and very successful. And I just started to get to the point where I was asking the president at the time, How do I, how am I successful here?
00:09:06 Gretchen: And continue to cut back a little more on my travel because my kids are seven and eight and I’m, I don’t know anybody, their teachers like, Oh my gosh, they have a mom. Somebody makes a comment like that and/or another parent. And it’s really guilt producing. And they couldn’t, at the time, find a way. They had a paradigm about, you’re on a plane to be billable and you have to be billable. You can’t take another group of people and help them be twice as billable.
00:09:35 Gretchen: And so I went back to night school and got a master’s in nonprofit and didn’t really know what I was going to do with that. So I’m traveling and getting a master’s and managing director of this company. And then I got invited to throw my hat in the ring for that women’s founded… foundation position. And we made a lot of life decisions. We, because we didn’t know each other at the time. So you may not even know this. We moved. We left our beautiful home that I had remodeled to get our kids in public school.
00:10:06 Gretchen: Because as you can imagine, going to work for a nonprofit was a big downsize in income. And it’s one of the best decisions I made. And when I took the chairman of the firm, who was my mentor, who’s still my mentor, out to dinner to tell him I was leaving, interestingly, he offered me more stock and more money. And I said, I’m going to work for a nonprofit. This is not about stock and money and so really understanding what motivates people and how to keep people and how to have the courage to just go do something crazy you’ve never done before to run a nonprofit foundation. It turned out to be just a huge gift.
00:10:49 Christy: Yeah, yeah. I relate, because I quit my big job to put myself through school to be a social worker. So, the heart calls and when you follow, you can’t be led astray by the heart’s calling. You know, it didn’t last forever.
00:11:06 Gretchen: Well, and somebody was just talking to me about a decision they were trying to make. And I said, what will you regret more? That’s how I kind of think about it. I mean, will you regret not taking that chance? Or will you regret leaving what you have? And every person has to make that decision for themself, but… and having great friends, like you and I are great friends that you can talk to, that lift you up and help give you the courage to make those hard decisions in your life. Really meaningful.
00:11:39 Christy: Yeah, they happen. My book is all about falling down and getting back up again. Life happens. And it’s really about your choice of how, are you gonna deal with that? Whatever that is, right?
00:11:50 Gretchen: Well, and we can all look in the rear view mirror and beat ourselves up about mistakes or sometimes I look in the rear view mirror and think, and I have a great relationship with my kids, but oh my gosh, could I have been more present for them? This is not productive. I live the version of Gretchen that is walking the earth and I’m the mom that I was meant to be. And some days, I’m more accepting of that. And other days, I wanna beat myself up a little bit. But you have to be you, everybody else has taken, as they say.
00:12:26 Christy: That’s a great line. And I’ll tell you that not enough, mommy thing is real. I don’t know anybody on the planet that doesn’t, you know, I just interviewed Laura Thomas who’s also in the book and she was my ghostwriter for my book. She just has a brand new six week old baby, you know, and she’s already doubting herself. Like she just doesn’t know. I’m like, Well, you know, they don’t come with the manual and we don’t, we’re not gonna be perfect. We’re not supposed to be perfect. You know, we’re supposed to be us. And, but I remember us taking Charlie to school and just bawling when Fer got back in the car. I was like, I wasn’t a good enough mom. Oh my God. It’s just like.
00:12:59 Gretchen: Well, I actually just read a research study in the New York Times within the last, I’m going to say, six weeks, that there’s now research that shows why, that our brain, this is the, what do they call that, the primitive brain or the ancient?
00:13:16 Christy: Reptilian brain?
00:13:16 Gretchen: Reptilian, right, that’s been there forever versus our prefrontal cortex. It’s what we’re supposed to be doing our thinking with. It goes back to that, and that worrying about our children that we’re wired. Of course, we’re wired to worry about our children because that’s the continuation of our race, right, is to make sure that our kids are safe. And so I think that drives a lot of that guilt and feeling because it’s like, gosh. So that was good to know that, you know, I tell my kids, because I tell them it’s my job to worry about them. And I said, Now I have research to support that.
00:13:53 Christy: So right. Well, and I love that you wrote a book, “8 Great Steps of Being a Working Mother.” Right. We’ll talk more about that in the end where people can find that. But, you know, you have all the knowledge, you have all the wisdom, you have the consciousness to be at choice about what you were doing. And yet we still have, yeah, that reptilian brain that’s like, you know, now. You’re like, it’s brutal. It’s brutal. Yeah. Okay, so you’ve got your master’s degree now. You ran a really successful non-for-profit. You went and did some more philanthropic work. And then what, Gretchen?
00:14:27 Gretchen: Well, for two years, I was assistant dean. Well, so I went to work for the Women’s Funding Network and was commuting to San Francisco every other week.
00:14:34 Christy: I remember that, yeah.
00:14:35 Gretchen: Going through a divorce. A divorce, my mother had Alzheimer’s.
00:14:40 Christy: Really hard time.
00:14:40 Gretchen: Really hard to get any information, Alzheimer’s and they called me in San Francisco. She’d shoved three months of medication in her Kleenex box. It was a great, it was a perfect job. I was running Women Moving Millions globally to inspire women to give million-dollar gifts to support women’s causes. But at the absolute wrong time, I got recruited back to be assistant dean of the business school at the University of Denver. After two years there, I really wasn’t having fun. Little bit too much bureaucracy. Every university has bureaucracy.
00:15:16 Gretchen: Not revealing any deep dark secret, but my mother got really bad and she’d had dementia for 10 years. And luckily I had, and I’d just divorced, just written a check for half my assets to my ex-husband living in the big house still in Cherry Hills. And my financial advisor looked at me and said, You need to quit your job and be with your mom. And I was like, What? I’m like, I’ve got two kids about to go to college, feeling financially insecure, barely making ends meet, living in the big house by myself. And it’s the best decision I ever made, even better than going to the Women’s Foundation.
00:15:58 Gretchen: I quit in February. Mom was in hospice by July and died in October. And she said, We’re going to take this much out of savings, big gulp number. And you’re going to be fine. And I was, that was 10, 11 years ago. And once again, somebody giving you the courage to do something, to say, It’s all going to be okay. And the week after I quit, Clark Ellis flew to Denver and said, Will you be president of our company? Coming back into construction consulting. And I said, I will after my mom dies. And I did, and I was president of that company for five years. So it all worked out, but yeah, you got to jump off the cliff sometimes.
00:16:44 Christy: Always, right? They always have the, I had this big thing that says, Leap over the chasm of faith, right? This woman’s like jumping from mountain to mountaintop, right? So you got to leap. So I also want to point out here, it’s something that I love in my kind of mystical spiritual world is that I feel like the universe always gives us those opportunities. And what a blessing it was that even though you felt like you didn’t have the resources you had prior to the divorce, gulp, you know, all that. But you had somebody in your life saying objectively, You can do this and go be with your mom and that you were able to do that, right? That is a gift, right? Had there been other times in your life that may not have been possible?
00:17:28 Gretchen: Oh yeah, no, it was an incredible gift and this person is still on Team Gretchen. You know, all of us having our own personal advisory councils is really important for different people that we go to for different things. And I give her credit for it all the time, I talk about her that she’s an amazing person. Yeah.
00:17:51 Christy: Yeah.
00:17:52 Gretchen: Yeah. So that was a real gift.
00:17:53 Christy: Yeah. We women need each other, right? We do. This is how we grow and develop, is with each other, you know, and just being real and authentic. All right, Gretchen, we got to take a break here. We’ll be back in just a moment. You’re listening to New You, Network for Empowering Women podcast.
00:18:14 Christy: Hey, it’s Christy Belz. Many of the people you meet on my podcast have participated in my course called Uproot. This 15-week course takes you through my transformational process of understanding your roots, what’s down there in the dirt you’re not looking at. Reviewing your path and collecting the tools for life success, I would love to help you on your journey. Learn more about the Uproot course. Take my quiz and see where you might be stuck down there in the dirt and explore my transformational retreat opportunities at ChristyBelz.com/uproot.
00:18:58 Christy: Alright, Gretchen. So now you’ve had all these careers, been president, you’ve been running a nonprofit, you’ve been in construction, like all this cool stuff, got a master’s degree. This is where you really blew my mind. One day, we were having lunch or something and you told me, you were going to do what?
00:19:17 Gretchen: A PhD and I actually have two master’s degrees. I want to point out that my sister and I are first-generation college graduates.
00:19:23 Christy: Yeah, so am I.
00:19:26 Gretchen: I set a goal to get a degree every 10 years. I think I might be done now. But I always had a reason to go back.
00:19:32 Christy: What was your second master’s degree in, by the way?
00:19:34 Gretchen: Master’s in nonprofit management from Regis.
00:19:36 Christy: And what was the first one?
00:19:38 Gretchen: MBA in finance from DU.
00:19:39 Christy: Oh, of course. Yeah. Okay.
00:19:46 Gretchen: Yeah, I had to get the finance degree on top of engineering. I was running a $28 million operating budget without any finance or accounting background, so decided to go back and get an MBA, which is why it’s fun to go teach there now. So yeah, the PhD, that was another crazy decision. When I came back to be president of Continuum Advisory Group, I was basically doing what I’d done 15 years earlier. I was breaking us back in to consult, to General Motors and Intel and Procter & Gamble and United Airlines, anybody that was spending billions of dollars on construction.
00:20:24 Gretchen: And I’d started that business for FMI, the other company back in the late 90s. And which was fine. It was a great job. It was a great team of people, but I’m such a curious person. And I thought, what? What skills does a leader really need to create a nimble organization that’s change ready? And so I was looking for another master’s. I wasn’t looking for a PhD. I was looking for a master’s in, like change, change management, because that’s all you do as a consultant. You’re just trying, you know, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. You’re trying to convince people to change.
00:21:04 Gretchen: And I stumbled across this PhD at Colorado State University, that met in downtown Denver every other Saturday, year-round for three years. We all got to know each other really, really well. Well, and the scary part, so that the application was due in, I don’t know, I wanna say six weeks, and they only let people in every four years. And so I kind of went, Oh my gosh, well, I’ll apply. And then, you know, I feel you should always keep as many doors open as possible. Don’t let the door close that you can’t apply. Apply and then think about it. And then I’m like, Oh shoot, I’m in a PhD program. And I’ve got to create new knowledge in the world. I remember walking out of the orientation thinking, Oh my god, I’m never going to, I can’t do this. I can’t. It was crazy.
00:21:56 Christy: And look at you now.
00:21:58 Gretchen: Look at me now, yeah. I was the first to defend out of my cohort because I joked, I was also the oldest. I said I had to, my oral exams were the Monday after our last class on Saturday because you’re doing oral exams over 13 courses that you’ve taken over three years. And I said, I’m older, I forget things faster, but the gift of the PhD was really honing my critical thinking skills and taking even more into consideration around evidence and research. I went back 50 years in leadership, 50 years in org culture. That’s how I met the wonderful Edgar Schein, my former coach that passed away in January, and 50 years in change management and agility. And I really have much more of an understanding and admiration for social scientists, try and explain very complex things like inclusion. What does that mean? How do you create it? And do research to help understand these complex ideas.
00:23:06 Christy: Yeah, a social scientist I am, but I say I have enough inner nerd to be dangerous, but not near enough to get a PhD.
00:23:15 Gretchen: Yeah, I am, well, I’m not a detail oriented person. My disc profile is DI. And so, I use this example all the time with my students. Anybody can be anything. It’s not your natural tendency. So I went into it going, you’re going to have to be really detail oriented. I collected 10,000 pieces of data and wrote a 172-page dissertation with 33 pages of references. And it just about killed me. And if someone told me I had to do it again, it would kill me. But I did it once. I’m thankful. And as I said, the… really the honing of my critical thinking skills, because you actually, they told me this and it’s true, You come out of a PhD knowing that you know less than you did when you came in, because all these worlds of research are opened up. And you go, gosh, the massive amount of knowledge in the world, any one of us can only understand the tip of the iceberg.
00:24:14 Christy: That’s right, that’s right. I went through my bookshelves last, this weekend, I was trying to declutter. I cannot get rid of these damn books. Like I am attached to these books.
00:24:24 Gretchen: Well, ship 10 boxes of them to Australia and you become a lot less attached to them. As I’m now moving some of them back to, I’ve actually found a woman who’s about to do her PhD that took all my PhD books from me in Melbourne.
00:24:39 Christy: That’s awesome.
00:24:40 Gretchen: So it was good to find a good home for them.
00:24:43 Christy: All right, so you got your PhD. Oh, and then you moved across, around the world.
00:24:49 Gretchen: Yeah, 20 days after I defended my PhD, nothing like having a deadline. I learned a lot in that experience about how your amygdala actually grows when you’re under sustained stress in your brain. Because I don’t think I was living the best version of myself those last two months, trying to defend my PhD, transfer the presidency of a company and plan a move to a foreign country for the first time. But yeah, my then partner and I decided to, I was wrapping up five years as president of the company, which was my commitment and my PhD. And I’ve always wanted to live in a foreign country. And New Zealand, Australia was my first trip when I was 12 years old from Kansas. And so yeah, I didn’t know how I was going to earn a living when I got there. I was so burned out. I really didn’t care at that point. But yeah, I figured I’d… figure it out when I got there myself.
00:25:46 Christy: And you did. So five years later, what I know is you just got your citizenship in Australia, which is beautiful. Congratulations. And how many universities are you teaching in right now?
00:25:58 Gretchen: Well, one in Australia, the Australian National University, which… that was the first way I made a paycheck over there. And they will always be near and dear to my heart. And then I still teach at the University of Denver.
00:26:09 Christy: Pioneers. I’m a DU grad. I got my graduate degree there. Yeah, well, I talked a little bit. I was practicing doing a little precursor to you and I was like, Does anybody ever intimidate you? I was like, There was a day. Oh yeah, honey, good Lord. Like, I think people get intimidated by me but I think for different reasons, you just are so smart. And again, spending three weeks with you in Australia, I just, I’m just blown away. So I know you and love you and just, you know, I’m your champion for sure. I know you’re mine.
00:26:44 Gretchen: Right back at you.
00:26:45 Christy: Yeah, I know. So you have so much wisdom and so much experience, Gretchen. So I always like to give the listeners like nuggets, things that you like, if you gave your best advice to the women that are listening to this podcast, what are some thoughts that you want to share with the guest?
00:27:04 Gretchen: You know, it’s funny, I was reading something by another amazing woman last night and I wrote, down. I used stickies on my wall. It says, Who looks after you? And this, Love yourself first and put your own oxygen mask on. I talk about that in the book, “8 Steps to Being a Great Working Mom.” We… I had a health scare 14 years ago, the heart arrhythmia, a month in bed, five years on a beta blocker, not taking care of myself. And we’re no good to anyone if we’re not. So carving that time out, I insisted that my assistant cancel a meeting the other day because it was gonna interfere with my run. And it was an important meeting, but we could move it. And I’m gonna take care of myself.
00:27:51 Gretchen: So, and to put boundaries around that, because we can all say that we’re gonna do that, but like that, like I have a new assistant and green run means green run. And if you can move it, that’s great, but you can’t take it off my calendar. It’s gonna happen for my mental wellbeing as well as my physical well being. So I think that’s one of my big nuggets, Love yourself.
00:28:19 Christy: Yeah. And self care.
00:28:22 Gretchen: Yeah.
00:28:23 Christy: Yeah.
00:28:25 Gretchen: You’re worth it. Nobody is more important in your life than yourself. And we put everybody else first. We put the mom, the kids, the business partner that has a stroke, the, you know, the partner, we care for everybody and forget to care about ourselves.
00:28:43 Christy: Yeah. We’re very conditioned, right? In our lives as women, particularly, that other people’s needs come before ours. And I feel like, I don’t know, maybe it’s age, but I’ve gotten a lot more selfish with my time, a lot more selfish about who I’m gonna spend time with, right, that I do get to come first. I do come first.
00:29:05 Gretchen: Yeah.
29:06 Christy: Right. And–
00:29:07 Gretchen: Wouldn’t it be a great lesson if we could learn that?
00:29:10 Christy: No kidding. Yeah. Yeah.
00:29:12 Gretchen: Problem or something.
00:29:13 Christy: Yeah. Right. Because the body, on the body speaks. You’re pretty far down the road to like, oh, shit. I wasn’t listening. Right. Yeah.
00:29:22 Gretchen: Yeah.
00:29:23 Christy: Oh, friend. I love seeing you. And I wish I were there in Kansas with you. My hometown as well. You have big events coming up with the daughter getting married and all sorts of beautiful stuff. So I hope I get to see you sometime soon. I know you might be here, but I know you’re busy. And I’m definitely coming back to Melbourne. I love Australia. And first love, my husband loved it too. So yeah.
00:29:48 Gretchen: So fun to have friends come visit because I think everyone thinks I’m crazy that I live there and fly back and forth four times a year. And how could you pick someplace so far away? And it’s just, it’s a really magical place that I don’t know, always been in love with. So I really am glad that you came. And thank you so much for inviting me to come share a little bit of my history and whatever tidbits of wisdom are in there.
00:30:13 Christy: So we always want our guests to know how to find you. So what’s the best way for people to find you or reach out to you?
00:30:20 Gretchen: LinkedIn, Gretchen Gagel, rhymes with bagel, and G-A-G-E-L. LinkedIn is really the best way. I have a website, but LinkedIn is definitely more current and I love connecting to people. I’ve got about 10,000 friends out there. So.
00:30:38 Christy: And you are a connector. I was talking to a dear friend of ours this morning. He was talking about the connection that you just made through this person and that person from Australia to, I was like, Yep, that’s Gretchen.
00:30:51 Gretchen: It’s fun.
00:30:51 Christy: I love you so much. Blessings to you.
00:30:53 Gretchen: Love you too.
00:30:54 Christy: I’ll be in touch. Okay.
00:30:56 Gretchen: Thanks. Thank you, Christie.
00:30:57 Christy: Take care. Bye.
00:30:59 Gretchen: Bye.
00:31:03 Christy: It is my joy to showcase the voices, choices, and stories of women and the messy details of life’s journey. As you’ve experienced, my guests are thriving with purpose and authenticity, but that does not mean that their life is easy and without challenges. I’ve dedicated my life to you and your journey. Thank you for listening to New You, Network for Empowering Women podcast. Please subscribe and learn more at ChristyBelz.com/newpodcast.