Rich Fernandez
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Return on Intelligence podcast. I'm your host, Rich Fernandez, and I'm thrilled today to welcome my dear friend, colleague, collaborator, chair of our Board of Directors at SIY Global. Cecily Mac. Welcome, Cecily. Welcome.
Cecily Mak
Thank you. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me.
Rich Fernandez
Absolutely. So great to have you. And we're going to have a really interesting conversation today. Let me tell you all a little bit about Cecily first. It's a really interesting biography. I feel like I can really relate to you, Cecily, because, perhaps we could say, like me, you took the scenic route in your career. had a really interesting career across media, technology, the music industry.
Rich Fernandez
latest, in blockchain. and then, now offering this body of work, called Clear Life that focuses on your latest, your upcoming book, Undimmed. But let me sort of backtrack a little bit and share with the audience. You know, you're trained as, as a lawyer and you kind of early on worked at Napster Rhapsody.
Rich Fernandez
working in the music industry. Super interesting, I'm sure. And then moved on, to be the chief counsel at Flipboard. and chief revenue officer as well. So, so that sort of social media side of things. and then moved on to the blockchain space at consensus. And then finally as the chief operating officer at Block Demon, which is a, crypto infrastructure company.
Rich Fernandez
scaling massively and rapidly and then stepped away from that, on your own personal journey as well as, you know, really looking to bring this other body of work that has been really there along since I've known you. The clear life work. yeah. Living a life that's undimmed. So I'm so excited to talk about that.
Rich Fernandez
So welcome. it's a lot of a lot of lot of interesting, you know, pivots.
Cecily Mak
Yeah. And thank you.
Rich Fernandez
In life and work.
Cecily Mak
Thank you. It makes me feel like I've lived a lot of years. Hearing you describe it that way. Some of those, roles felt like lifetimes ago, but they're all stepping stone, so I appreciate the the generous intro.
Rich Fernandez
Absolutely. All stepping stones, as you say. And, you know, life lived fully and well. yeah. Yeah, with a lot of interesting adventures. I think that would be a great place to pick up the thread, which is, you have journeyed through a lot of different industries and organizations, all of them high performing, you know, all of them doing pioneering work.
Rich Fernandez
So. And you've occupied some senior roles in those organizations as well. so I often experience, leadership, especially senior leadership, as something of a lifestyle choice. So what's your perspective on that? How has that been for you as not just, a professional in the role, but as a person?
Cecily Mak
Yeah. Like good question. I and your your reference to lifestyle choice is so interesting because I don't know that I would have ever described those roles that way, but looking back on it and what it was like living a life while holding those roles with the level of responsibility and accountability that came with them. Most certainly impacted my lifestyle.
Cecily Mak
So and I think, you know, kind of to go layer beneath the question, what is it that compels us to do these things, and what is it that made me embrace these opportunities? I mean, music to publishing, to crypto. Those were all over almost 20 years really tackling the issues of digitization of previously analog offerings. So Rhapsody, Napster was digital music.
Cecily Mak
Flipboard was really digital media. And then obviously blockchain and crypto's digital value, digital currency. And I think looking back on how I embraced those jobs, really, and how they they were a bit of a lifestyle choice ties to my peculiar appetite for challenge. I love finding difficult problems to solve and then working with teams to solve them. And so while I had my own personal life happening, while I was living and breathing in these roles, being married, having children, you know, building a family, I had this part of my person that needed to be fed by deep intellectual challenge every day.
Cecily Mak
And then as the years went by, I realized it was actually more than just an intellectual challenge, because I could have gotten that out of other means. It's also the the high emotional intelligence demand into personal relationships and navigating all the complexities of working within an organization, particularly a startup that's scaling and kind of having to redefine and reshape itself every couple quarters or so.
Cecily Mak
So the lifestyle was was really how to do that in a way that it it was a result of choosing challenge in each role and then also having to find ways to not let it completely eat up the rest of my life. So, it wasn't just the rigor of going into the chief exec role every day. It was also the rigor of how do I know to turn it off at 6 p.m., then be present for the kids.
Cecily Mak
And when we're not, how do we address that before it becomes too much of a problem? And kind of the full three dimensional rigor of that 24 hour cycle. And in staying in those positions.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah, that's tremendous because it is enlivening to your point, to have to solve and engage those really interesting questions, challenges. You know, pioneering work, like you said, digitizing a lot of analog domains previously. And that in itself is really enlivening. And there's also all these other aspects of life beyond work. Like you said, motherhood, family, etc. and yeah, really navigating all of that together in that same cycle.
Rich Fernandez
So a lot has been talked about work life balance. You know, burnout is a concern for folks maybe over indexing on work or work, creating an undue burden for folks where you're never really off. But how do you understand that? I mean, is it this will work life balance thing to deal with burning. What was your experience around that?
Cecily Mak
I will I'll start by saying I made a lot of mistakes. I was in my own learning journey of being regularly humbled by not doing a great job of balancing. I'm fortunate in that I was able to kind of, you know, some women come to me and say, how did you do it? You seem like you have it all right.
Cecily Mak
You've got a family and you've had this really dynamic, powerful career. you know, in some ways that's true. But I there's no guidebook for how to do this. And I, I, in the last several years in particular, have deepened my awareness around how I think I actually had kind of a core need for approval or acceptance or praise that drove a lot of my intensity around work.
Cecily Mak
And I could get that kind of positive feedback and input in a professional environment, with promotions and raises and pats on the head in front of the company or the board. That sort of fueled an inner confidence in me that I don't know that I would do today. Right? The ten years ago, me or the 20 years ago, me needed that kind of affirmation and approval that I think I do less now just because I've evolved and grown up a bit as a human being.
Cecily Mak
But those those years of, you know, early executive roles in Rhapsody in Napster and running even all the way through the beginning of my crypto chapter. I, I often struggle to find the balance. I, I often felt very torn between those roles. I, you know, I would regularly be in the office and have something really compelling and interesting happening at work, but then really want to get home and be present for the kids homework and dinner hour.
Cecily Mak
And I found myself often in the office feeling some guilt and shame for not being with my family or leaving work early to make it to the soccer game, and feeling a little guilt or shame for not being present for the important work meeting. And that never really got easier. that was that was very difficult. And so I think the, the key, you know, of survival for me during that period and ultimately growth was, really trusting myself, not discounting a and a core gut inner feeling when I felt compelled to say yes or no to something.
Cecily Mak
And there was no formula. There was no, you know, single way to do that. It was just really making sure I was in touch with my values and attuning to those. And to the extent that I could actually listen to myself. Then I seemed to make better decisions and struggle less with those outcomes. but the notion of work life balance is, it makes it sound, I think, a little bit too simple, frankly.
Cecily Mak
I don't know if it's a it's a term we should apply to folks.
Rich Fernandez
I agree with the dynamic thing. It's a very dynamic. And to your point, there's no formula around it. So I have my own experience around that. Right? I also worked in Silicon Valley, right at eBay, at Google, at executive level. And I remember also, I lived in San Francisco, so it was always a, shuttle bus commute.
Rich Fernandez
That was at least an hour. and I remember days of being, having to balance the decision point of, do I get home in time for Little League or dinner or, you know, can I do I need to stay here and sort of finish this out and get on a later bus? And there was no single answer.
Rich Fernandez
It was sort of like case by case basis. And I have to say, and I don't know what you're I mean, I'm pretty sure you had a similar experience. You know, I did manage to be there for my kid, you know, and to, like, really show up. and it's never a perfect solution because, yes, there are days where you're going to work late, but there are also days when I will leave early.
Rich Fernandez
and that was true. Even working in these, you know, in these big high performance organizations.
Cecily Mak
I think for me, it was really important to just extend to myself a lot of grace during that period. And have a really open conversation with myself and my family and my team about it as we were growing through it. And there there was a moment that I can see in in my career journey where that tension shifted a little bit, and I've spent some time reflecting on why why there was that shift.
Cecily Mak
And I, I think it was actually a moment of kind of like earned confidence or security in the value that I was able to contribute within my roles. So I really feel for young leaders in your first five, ten, 15 years of being in a in a position was a lot of responsibility and accountability. And maybe it comes with a fancy title or having to report to a board or whatever it might be, where you're just not quite sure if you're qualified for the job.
Cecily Mak
Like the impostor complex, as it's referred to so commonly, is real. Like, I'm going to be found out for not really being qualified to hold this responsibility that I'm holding. It's a kind of a constant fear. And there is a certain moment when I realized that that actually wasn't true, and it took too long. It probably took 15 to 20 years of intense work and intense roles to to reach that place.
Cecily Mak
But at a certain moment, I realized, no, the value that I'm contributing to this organization between the work hours of the day is absolutely worth how I'm being compensated for this time in this energy. So I have I have no, you know, ill feelings about being well taken care of by the organization. And I know I can kind of create a create a boundary where work doesn't bleed into my personal life.
Cecily Mak
And I'm not going to feel bad about it. And this was actually in my last role, my last COO role, the CEO and I together, because we had teenagers at home and our own lives that we were trying to protect from the sometimes invasiveness of this high growth startup. we felt really good about signing off at around 5:00 every day and knowing that the teams that we were hired were super capable.
Cecily Mak
And something really urgent came up. Other people could handle it, and it was absolutely acceptable for us to spend our evening time tending to our families, our own health or interests or hobbies or whatever those things might be. but it took a long time to get to that point. And, if I could go back in time and sort of speak to myself, I think I would encourage myself to get there a little bit earlier, maybe more like a decade ago.
Cecily Mak
And just realize, like, we are actually invited into the roles of responsibility that we, we assume because we're trusted by the people around us and doesn't mean we have to be perfect. but it's it's okay to learn a little bit as we go and admit and acknowledge what we don't have all the answers, and also not feel badly about taking the space that we need to do everything else that we care about.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah, absolutely. And so if we can underscore that for a moment, for if you're a younger leader, how might you kind of, accelerate that understanding that awareness, let's call it, of your own capabilities, of the own, of your own value. Add. Now, how can you know, kind of like folks in this part of their career journey where they're emerging leaders or establishing themselves?
Rich Fernandez
How can they kind of, upskill themselves to get there sooner?
Cecily Mak
So I'm a big believer in this notion of we go where we look. And, I actually also really in the big believer in the value of seeing ourselves and also our lives, how we desire them to be, how we expect them to manifest. And so there are two things I would say there. First of all. I think in general, if you're a young leader and you're struggling with confidence or security or feeling of stability in a role, take a little bit of time, ideally daily.
Cecily Mak
But maybe weekly, and just find a quiet place and actually visualize how you feel in your best version of yourself in that role. Don't have to uplevel. You don't think about, you know, what you're going to achieve or do differently or whatever, just that your current role today, how do you walk into a room? How do you communicate with your peers?
Cecily Mak
How do you answer difficult questions? How do you without being too shaken, acknowledge that you've made a mistake and just stand with yourself. Be with yourself in whatever that feels like in in your body and I've found that the more I could just sort of assume a position, even in like a basic visualization exercise, the more I clicked, I was to just energetically be that person as I went into the 3D world.
Cecily Mak
A great example of this was I was absolutely terrified when I started having to, or getting to attend quarterly board meetings as general counsel of one of my companies, and then in other roles and other organizations over the years. It just felt very intimidating to me. A boardroom was like, oh my gosh, do the investors, all the executives, and I'm often the only woman and I'm younger than everyone, and I just had all these stories about why I was less and I used to do this thing.
Cecily Mak
I still do it. Sometimes. I go into a bathroom stall. There's always a bathroom stall. No matter where you are. What's going on? You can find a bathroom stall within a 1 or 2 minute walk, close the door and just stand there in. You know, it could be referred to as a power position or whatever kind of posture you can assume that feels like the way you want to be in that room.
Cecily Mak
And just take a few breaths, like feel that in your body and then walk out and you can still be humble. You can still be of grace. You can still be kind, but you can also know that you have everything you need inside of you to fully show up for that role in that moment. I found this unremittingly helpful.
Cecily Mak
And again, as I said, I still do them all the time before going on a stage or doing something that's intimidating. And the second thing I would note is, this great metaphor, any of the, friend who's in her late 60s and she's a phenomenal athlete and she's still downhill skis and road bikes and does all these cool things.
Cecily Mak
And, we were talking a couple weeks ago and explaining, I was explaining to her how I was trying to visualize something or kind of set an intention for a place. I'm trying to go with a particular project and train my mind to not think about the bad things that could happen on the way. Just really focus on the desired outcome.
Cecily Mak
And she said, yeah, in skiing we call that aim between the trees.
Cecily Mak
I love this, I've been thinking about this so much. Like, yeah, like we're aware of our obstacles. We generally, as human beings, are wired to be anticipatory of the things that can go wrong and the things that could mess us up on our way or or, you know, in.
Rich Fernandez
Cecily Mak
Language.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah. You really fall into that. we have that negativity bias, as they call it. sometimes.
Cecily Mak
Absolutely
Rich Fernandez
Cecily Mak
And it's good. It protects us. It saves us. I mean, we we are a thriving species. And as individuals because we're aware of what could eat us right around the corner. however, if we spend too much time and energy thinking about all of those things and focusing on the tree, that if we hit it, we are going to hurt ourselves or die, that's where we're going to end up.
Cecily Mak
And so I think in those roles of kind of young leadership or earlier in a leadership career, we can tend to obsess over all the things that can go sideways with all of the what ifs. And it's really important to make sure we spend as much time, you know, focusing between the trees. Well, what happens if this all goes really, really well?
Cecily Mak
What happens if I just crush it in this role and I'm able to find the people I want to find to hire, and we nail it with delivering on our plan or our vision is an organization. The more we spend our energy and time thinking about what we want to find, where we want to go in between the trees, I really believe the more likely we are to get there.
Cecily Mak
And, yeah, just to kind of recap, I think two bits of advice would be try to feel in ourselves and embody the way we want to be, the way we want to show up in these roles, pick a few adjectives and focus on them. Try to embody them. And then the second one would be your tune, our awareness.
Cecily Mak
Tune our focus to where we actually want to go, and a little less on the bad things that might happen along the way. I definitely at times, you know, I worried about not having the skills needed to complete a project I had started or having a new leader or boss come on board and not know the history of why I was in my position, and then try to take it away from me.
Cecily Mak
This is not helpful, just like not a good use of energy. So yeah.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah, I think to name some of the trees also can be useful just to bring them into the field of awareness, but then to shift the focus. Right. So trees could be anything like worry, anxiety, judgment right. Judgment of self, judgment of situation, judgment of others, and to be aware of those, but not to focus on them because like you, not in between the trees, the attention, the awareness, the focus, we're in that sort of white area.
Cecily Mak
Which tree and land. And that's a little bit of a call to, I think, something which you and I share, which is our just kind of in the background and often in the foreground mindfulness practice, kind of self-awareness works that we do to make sure that we are as present as possible throughout all the twists and turns of the day.
Cecily Mak
And the more that we can kind of tune our ability to be self-aware and notice feelings and emotions as they arise, let them move through us instead of grab the steering wheel or the interaction. that can be very transformative and kind of yield this sensation of calm confidence that I think people really look for in their leaders.
Cecily Mak
Whether it's a team reporting up to somebody or an executive looking to appear, we want that kind of calm ease for, you know, we're tuned to the things that could go wrong, but we're prepared and we're going to handle this well. And with Grace.
Rich Fernandez
That's right. Because it's not to deny that, things are not challenging, difficult, intense. You know, there's this metaphor, I think, in the, in the world of meditation about, like, being like a mountain. Right? in the midst of all of the worldly winds that blow, and sometimes they howl. Right? But what's that source of stability? That source of groundedness?
Rich Fernandez
Yeah. In the midst of all of the challenge, in the midst of all the worldly winds. And we can do that for ourselves. We can create that for ourselves. Yeah. So in these practices.
Cecily Mak
And when we don't also know how to kind of address and amend or, or, or I should say address and mend from those moments, none of us are going to be immaculate and how we lead or show up every day, or whether it's at the breakfast table with the kids or at in the boardroom. And so when we do have those slip ups, are we do handle something in a way that we wish had had happened differently.
Cecily Mak
We then also have the ability to go into that discomfort, go into the communication, acknowledge something went wrong. What is the learning opportunity, what happened here that we would do differently next time? And I think that's also really particularly important for leaders to do. I think often I, I won't speak for others, I'll speak for myself. Early on in my leadership roles, I was much more afraid of admitting mistakes because I thought they would have some consequence.
Cecily Mak
And as I got a little older and a little more comfortable in leadership roles, I almost looked for opportunities to speak to oversights or speak to mistakes so that I could model that kind of behavior to people around me. it is totally unreasonable to expect ourselves or each other to go through our days with perfection and not have moments of emotional dysregulation or anxiousness that trumps our better judgment in a particular situation.
Cecily Mak
And to the extent that we can have the maturity to reflect and go back and go into the discomfort of the, hey, can we talk about what happened yesterday? I was not at my best. I had some things going on. I was hadn't eaten lunch yet, I was stressed, I just got an upsetting email, whatever it is. And in owning that, then we model that the other people with whom we work can do the same thing, and then you end up with a high functioning team that is authentic and candid and growing together instead of performing together, which can be really, a lot less fun and a hell of a lot less productive at
Cecily Mak
the end of the day.
Rich Fernandez
So helpful. And, you know, I think it really extends to what you were talking about, which is getting the results. Because sometimes we do get very often we get the results, sometimes we do not get the results. You know, I mean, in our or our own organization, as you're well aware, being on the board, you know, we missed plan last year.
Rich Fernandez
And yet I was bullish as a CEO. I was bullish because I knew what we had in the pipe. And knock on wood, so far this year, we're on plan. and momentum is gathering and it's going really well. So it's navigating those moments and also not letting the sort of alarming situations that do naturally arise. Now, sometimes you will be on target, sometimes you won't.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah. But being able to navigate those right.
Cecily Mak
We we see this a lot right now with a to two little quick stories to tell. One, I have a very, very vivid memory in my first Silicon Valley executive role, being on a walking one on one with my CEO, and he asked me to follow up on this very complex issue in our series C fundraising and I was so out of my comfort zone doing this work.
Cecily Mak
I had never done a venture raise before, particularly not as a general counsel for a startup. I was managing the law firm, the investment banks, the whole thing, and I had been kind of cobbling the work together with with whatever resources and tools and voices and advice I had available to me at the time, week over week. And we were on this one on one walk and he asked me this, you know, kind of next question.
Cecily Mak
And I turned to him. I said, you know what? I have no idea what the answer to that question is. And he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, Cecily, I need more of that out of you. And it was awesome because it freed up this whole next level of our ability to work together. I realized I'd actually been undermining his confidence in me because I seem to have all the answers all the time.
Cecily Mak
And truth be told, I only had half of the answers half of the time, and I was just trying to cover for my deep feeling of inadequacy in the role. So the more I could just got to own up to it, the better off we were. And it really opened up a whole next level of our working relationship.
Cecily Mak
The second story, I will say is now Wisdom Ventures. You know, we have 30 portfolio companies sending us regular updates on how they're doing, and it's always really interesting reading those emails. They reflect so much about the founder and the teams. They come in, even in just a few paragraphs. And my favorite ones, the ones that generate the most confidence and enthusiasm for me as an investor, it start with this is this is our biggest challenge right now.
Cecily Mak
This is what went wrong this quarter. Here's the bad news. We want to make sure you know first they just own it. Like this is this is what's hard. And then they go into the however we secure this and we manage that. And we achieved this and we hired so-and-so. And you kind of get the tough stuff out of the way at the outset with your chin up, and then you feel like you're actually getting a bit more of an objective, truthful communication about everything else.
Cecily Mak
If it's all sunshine and rainbows all the time, I kind of wonder, like what's really going on there? Because there's no way that building a startup is all sunshine and rainbows. Quarter over quarter.
Rich Fernandez
No way, no, no way. And you mentioned, this idea of covering. That's that's an actual, there's a wonderful book called covering, whole, sort of faking it. Right, because you don't know, and, as opposed to kind of embracing and owning the situation as is, in an empowered way. Right. And then navigating. So I love that, idea of covering and how to, not do so much of that and just, you know, bring that kind of authenticity, and clear eyed view, what the situation is, and then share that with your stakeholders, which then, as you say, instills a certain level of trust and confidence.
Cecily Mak
Yeah.
Rich Fernandez
And seeing and telling it as it is, as opposed to the way they think somebody else needs to see it.
Cecily Mak
Yeah. I found that to be also a work lesson that has cascaded into a life lesson, too. particularly in my role as a mom. It's super powerful. And I can say on my kids, I actually don't know what to do in this situation with you. You are the first teenager I have had in my household asking me to do this thing, and I don't know the answer, and so I'm going to think about it for a little while, and I'm going to get some advice from people I trust, and I'll get back to you within 24 hours.
Cecily Mak
But, you know, hands up.
Rich Fernandez
I don't know. But they will certainly feel like that engages them too. Like all right.
Cecily Mak
Yeah. They go like, oh, you're a human being. Not just the authority figure deciding on my curfew this weekend. It's like you're also trying to figure this all out. So let's figure it out together. It helps a bit.
Rich Fernandez
Thanks for being a partner to me. In some ways, I think that's what my teenage son essentially call. I told him, I don't know what we're going to do, you know? But like, let's figure it out. Yeah.
Cecily Mak
It's great.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah. So I think that's a really good place to maybe segue into this whole other, this latest kind of body of work, actually, you're doing two things are your, your, your a partner in Wisdom Ventures, which invests in companies focused on well-being. But also you have this other body of work you've been working on for for a number of years since I've known you or had living clear life.
Rich Fernandez
And now you have this forthcoming wonderful book under dimmed coming out. So just tell us about that as well, because I think it does intersect very much with what it means to live and work today. Absolutely. Tell us about your experience of clear life. And and Undimmed tell us about it.
Cecily Mak
Sure. So a little bit of history. I in 2017 popped my head up from my life at the time, which was very challenged with a number of personal things going on. my marriage was really struggling. I was in a pretty uncomfortable role professionally with health wasn't great. The confidence was at a all time low. And in taking the first step towards initiating the end of my marriage, I decided to take a 30 day break from drinking, which had been this kind of social professional slash, you know, kind of fun with friends way of letting off some steam at the end of every day and weekends.
Cecily Mak
For years, I was one of those high functioning people who was working really hard but could also play really hard. And in retrospect, I think I was using alcohol to just take the edge off. That's some of the tension in my life. So that was the beginning of what I now refer to as my clear life journey, that 30 days turned into 60, which turned into 90, and then all of 2018.
Cecily Mak
And I started to write about my experience of being the oddball, not drinking. And then as I got through some of those surface layers, some deeper and more interesting insights came to be around why maybe I was dimming myself in the first place. And what was it that I was trying to feel less or not feel at all?
Cecily Mak
And I started a Instagram handle around it. Clear life journey. I wasn't ready to use my real name, because I'm still a little bit embarrassed about some of these choices I was making to live dimmer, free or alcohol free. And over the last six years I have continued to write and develop really an offering. it feels like a body of content through my Substack, through the Instagram.
Cecily Mak
I've just released also my own podcast and end and then there's a forthcoming book, which I'm really excited about. And the body of work is really an invitation for folks to reflect on what we're doing, to feel less or soften parts of us that maybe we want to experience with more full presence and clarity. And dimmers are not all alcohol.
Cecily Mak
the the offering applies to really anything that we use to soften our edges. So that can include shopping, sex, work, exercise. And the book itself is going to be focused on what I refer to as the eight Awarenesses, which is really my rewrite of the 12 steps. there are almost 100 million people in America who are questioning their relationship with alcohol, but don't necessarily have an alcohol problem and are not abstainers either, but are wondering, what would my life be like without this thing?
Cecily Mak
Or again, maybe it's work, or sex, or social media or some other addictive behavior. and it's really an assembly of tight little mantras that we can start to reflect on and live by when we choose to change our relationship with a habit. So they start with, I choose that I consume or sorry they start with my life is better clear and go to.
Cecily Mak
I choose what I consume and they kind of cascade into attuning to intuition and healing relationships and how we spend our time and not being judgmental. And the idea is that it's not about a diagnosis or a stigma or a label. This is a really an invitation to, with curiosity, explore our relationship with something that might be holding us back from our best life.
Cecily Mak
So I obviously have a lot of passion for this work. It's something I wish was available to me when I started it. I couldn't really find a framework to to use from my own experience. And, I lost my mother to an alcohol related cancer 13 years ago. It's something I wish was available to her, so she didn't have to label herself to reframe her relationship with something.
Cecily Mak
So that's that's clear life that's undimmed.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah. It's fantastic. I've had the privilege of sort of seeing iterations, drafts and various things and just the notion of living life without dimmers and allowing you to be your best self, whatever that dimmer may be, could be relationships, right? Relationship, a friendship, whatever dragging you down. And it's so very powerful. set of precepts in a body of work.
Rich Fernandez
So I encourage folks to listen to these podcast. It's real, really interesting.
Cecily Mak
Thank you.
Rich Fernandez
Look for that book Undimmed. When’s it due out Cecily?
Cecily Mak
It'll be the very beginning of 26.
Rich Fernandez
And for it. Yeah. Yeah. And you have the Substack as well so they can find you there.
Cecily Mak
I, I've really enjoyed connecting with the community on Substack. It's a great, great kind of blogging and community platform. And it's also been a place for me to meet some of the people that I'm inviting onto the podcast. So the podcast is really conversations with people who are on some version of this journey, some famous well known, some lesser or not at all known.
Cecily Mak
And I really just try to create a place where they can tell us how they got to where they are today and what they learned. And there are a lot of relatable, really interesting different stories coming through that medium, which I appreciate. As you, as you know, the podcast conversation is it's it's, magic.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah. It's magic. So, thank you for making that offering the world. it's really, it's needed and, I think really supportive of, growth personally. Professionally, like, in all the other dimensions. And thank you for today as well. You know, I think we can probably conclude here. I mean, it's been so interesting. Of course, we've been friends for years, but it's just really fun and interesting, I think, to talk about, your trajectory, your work, your experiences, really bringing this human dimension to it.
Rich Fernandez
Cecily, which you always do. and tools, tools, ultimately, to live a life without intimacy and, you know, be your best self. I think people will really get a lot from your experience. And, you know, some of these offerings that you've made. So thank you so much for being here and joining us today.
Cecily Mak
Of course. Of course. Really happy to be here. And it's so amazing the work you continue to do. And as I read, not only the actual product and what the organization is bringing forth into the world, but I hope you are aware and are told often that the way that you're doing it is also really impactful. I think that, you know, we didn't speak to it explicitly today here, but the best thing a leader can do to help define an organization is to walk the talk and kind of be the embodiment of what we're encouraging within the team.
Cecily Mak
And I see you do that in so many different ways at SIY. And, I think it's it's been one of the great joys of supporting the organization this time and seeing how you do it and learning from you. So thank you. Thanks so much. And that it.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah, I really appreciate that. Thank you. And so onward together.
Cecily Mak
And work together as we say. All right. Amazing. Thanks everyone and have a great rest of your day. Ciao.
Cecily Mak
