SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to the Ask for a Skinny Podcast with a guest. I'm proud to present Margaret Chiavini. Margaret, welcome to the show. Please tell us more about yourself. What is your story?

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Thank you, Peter. I'm just so honored to be here. A little bit about me. I live in the United States, actually in Reno, Nevada. I'm in the mortgage business and I run a national sales team that focuses exclusively on banks and credit unions, so financial institutions. And my team, we do about $15 billion a year in annual originations. And most recently, I wrote a book. It's called It's Your Party: Design a Celebration of Life and a Life Worth Celebrating. And I'm really excited about it. It's a book basically about how to live a great life using your own celebration of life as a way to help you understand what you care about, how you want to be remembered, and the legacy you'll leave behind. Peter, it's basically a roadmap for joy and happiness.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

Amazing. I have so many questions. Before the great life, we usually have experiences with not so great life. We experience uh burnout, or we are on the brink of burnout, we experience some kind of midlife crisis. Um, do you have any experience like that? Because um you you're extremely successful, and I I do believe that your success is also built on experiences that are not um uh very pleasant. Can you share a bit more about uh your uh touch with the burnout? How how you uh become the the person that you are today that uh values um this uh party and uh uh so uh this part of life uh that the life should be a party and that should be full of joy. Can you uh explain us a bit more about this evolution of yours?

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Yes, I would love to. So I'm gonna just share a few things um that were very, very difficult for me, um, that actually helped me realize how precious life is. And I think part of the challenge with burnout is that burnout is a lot of times a frame of mind, and it's um, you know, we're just we're overwhelmed, we're exhausted, and our perspective changes. And um, about six years ago, I was diagnosed with stage two melanoma, and it was very serious, and my doctor basically said, um, we have to take care of this right away. Well, when you get a um a diagnosis like that, and I had just lost three people in my life to melanoma, so I was acutely aware that it was um, you know, that it was very serious. And I have to say, Peter, I was really down. You know, I was depressed, I was um, you know, gosh, I'm so young. Why is this happening to me now? And um thankfully I was able to uh beat that, and it changed my perspective. It really changed my perspective that life is fragile and that um we're never guaranteed tomorrow. And so it it helped with a shift as far as looking at it and saying, how can I really view life as a gift and then make every moment count? Not that we everything's peachy gym dandy and rosy, right? That's not the point. We all have challenges. And um, but the fact is, is that if we focus on um what's possible, I like to say that uh the the keys are being optimistic, that we're heading into a future that is a good future, regardless of what's happening now, being grateful that regardless of the challenges that we face, we still have so much to be grateful for right now, and then responsible. Basically, any change, it's up to us. I always I always joke around, Peter, and say, no one's coming to save you.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

You know? Yeah, I I have I have a question and I want to dive a bit deeper into gratitude. Um, you're extremely successful, and uh I can uh relate to that. Uh my reaction to success was entitlement. Um and how how how I I I don't say that you had the same problem or challenge, but how did you become grateful? Because uh when you're successful, we we we take a lot of things for granted, and we believe that we are on top of the world and that things belong to us, that we are entitled to things. How did you how did you exit this trap?

SPEAKER_00 5:08

So, first of all, it's an absolutely fabulous question because um I think everyone has a sense of entitlement. I think we live in a world where that is so permeated in our culture. Um, and it's very, very dangerous because what entitlement does is it doesn't allow you to see the possibilities. And so, um, first of all, I wouldn't say that I never feel entitled, because I certainly do sometimes, but I try as hard as I can, as soon as I recognize I'm feeling entitled, I try as hard as I can to get out of there and get back into gratitude. Because gratitude is a powerful thing, it has the ability to move us from entitlement to abundance. And so you asked, you know, why do I have this philosophy? So I'm a salesperson, I lead a sales team, but in my heart, I'm a salesperson. And there are very few things that you can control, especially in my business, in the mortgage business, right? We don't we don't control the inflation rate, we don't control the Fed funds rate, we don't control um the spread between mortgage-backed securities and the treasuries, you know, none of that we can control. But there are certain things we can control, and that's our mood. And when we're grateful, see, I'm always looking for a competitive advantage, and gratitude is a competitive advantage in any part of our life because what gratitude does is it allows you, I liken it, Peter, to a switch on a spotlight. That gratitude flicks on the switch for the spotlight, and you can see opportunities and possibilities that you would never see until you come to the conversation with gratitude. And you know, you asked me a question before of like burnout and all of that, and I'm I'm gonna tell you one other thing that happened to me that really also has me focus on gratitude. So when I was 60 years old, I'm almost 64, when I was 60 years old, my doctor diagnosed me with having to have a hip replacement, and I just felt like a failure. I was like 60 years old. Gosh, I'm young, I'm you know, joyful. How can this be? And um it got so bad, Peter, I could not walk without a cane and in in airports or anywhere where it had to be a long distance without a wheelchair. And so I finally ended up realizing I had to have the hip replacement, it was great, but I don't take walking for granted. So when I look at people and you know, they're they have a fabulous life. I mean, I'm not saying we don't face our challenges, I never want to come across like that, but I'm just saying after someone who couldn't walk, when you can walk, it's pretty darn amazing. So, anyway, that's a very short kind of answer about how I feel about gratitude.

SPEAKER_01 8:35

I would like to ask you another thing. You're one of the most successful uh people that are uh engaged in in business, and uh we're now uh bombarded practically daily through social media about grinding, do more, achieve more. Um and there's also this mentality the more you suffer, the more you show you really care. But you're talking about the joy. Is that the joy of suffering, or is that the joy that enables us to stop our suffering and decide uh against the suffering and for joy?

SPEAKER_00 9:17

I love the question, and of course, you know I love the topic of joy, so thank you for asking that. Um, so for me, constituatively, joy is not suffering. Joy is the assessment that you have a lot of wonderful things about your life, and that you're really moving into the next part of your life, and it's a positive thing. That that ultimately, if you kind of summed up joy, it's sort of that feeling that, gosh, I'm lucky, you know, and as I said, we all have a lot of challenges. I think what what joy does is joy transforms suffering. Because remember, suffering is philosophical, right? When someone suffers, it's because they have something in the background against which to compare. So let's just take a really easy example. I bought a lottery ticket and I didn't win and I'm suffering, right? Well, you're suffering because you had this narrative in the back of your mind that you were gonna win the lottery. So what if we turned that around? What if we said, wow, I had the $10 or the $20 to buy a lottery ticket? Wow, I had the ability to walk, to go and to buy it. Wow, I had that time to dream. What would I do if I won the lottery? And I had that chance to kind of flex that muscle of dreaming and um, you know, thinking about what I might do. So for me, joy is like a game changer because joy joy gives you a chance to reevaluate and to think about all the reasons that you have to be grateful, to be optimistic, and to kind of take responsibility for what you're what how you're gonna make your life turn out.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

You already answered my uh next question, but I will ask you anyway. Um do you believe that joy is our reward for the suffering and all the uh things that we have to persevere in in business, for example?

SPEAKER_00 11:46

I I wouldn't say it's necessarily our reward, I would say it's always a benefit to us. It it's always um something special that we get the honor of experiencing if we step into it. Joy is a choice. And I believe that when you make that choice, just kind of like what I was talking about as a salesperson, I just find that gratitude and joy are a competitive advantage. Think about think about your own engagement with people. You know, in general, we like working with people who are upbeat, happy, joyful, right? You just want them on your team. Because we're usually in life having to solve um uh a situation, a problem, a puzzle, right? And when we collaborate with those around us, it's easier to solve the problem. And it's easier from my point of view, it's easier when you have people that want to figure out how to solve the problem.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

Amazing. I know you are on a um on you have a time limit for this uh podcast, but I would like to uh use more time uh for your book. Can you please explain the story behind your book a bit more and what is your book about?

SPEAKER_00 13:17

Yes, thank you for asking that. So the book is, as I mentioned, the book is really about how to live a great life. And one of the things that um as I'm getting older, one of the things that is very important to me is how I can make a contribution. How can I leave the world a better place than the way I found it? And what I have noticed is that people need more joy and more happiness. So I began to think, okay, how could I deliver that message? And I thought, okay, so we want to have a great life, right? We want to have a great life, we want to have a joyful life. So how do we reverse engineer that? So, Peter, the book is really about reverse engineering your life so that you can live the best life you can design. So the book basically says, okay, let's start at the end of your life. Let's start at your funeral. You know? There's a room, there's a lot of people in the room, and somebody's gonna walk up to a podium and they're gonna start talking about Peter and Peter's life and the impact that you made on them and or Margaret, Margaret's life. And so, what do we want them to say? And so the book is basically giving a recipe of how to think about your life so that at the end of your life, you have created a legacy that you have intentionally designed. So, for example, one of the things in my legacy is I want people to say she contributed, she saw me, she inspired me, she believed in me, she encouraged me. That's what's important to me, Margaret. So I now am intentionally designing my life so that when I when it's the end of my life, that's what people will say about me. And so the book's all about how to do that, but how to have a blast doing it. One of the chapters is called Wouldn't It Be Cool If? And it's a chapter about dreaming big because one of my main messages, Peter, in the book is don't wait. Postponing is not a plan. We a lot of times we say, Oh, I'll get to that later. I'll do that when I have more time. Oh, I'll do that when I have more money. Oh, I'll do that when the you know kids leave the house. Oh, I'll do that when my career settles down. Well, that's a trap. It's a total trap. And so what I'm encouraging the readers to do is don't do that. Start right now. So that chapter is really, really cool because it breaks out how you dream big. So for me, our dreams, I believe that dreaming is a muscle that you have to work. And I believe that a lot of people don't want to dream big because they don't want to be disappointed. You know, they don't want to, they'd rather just not dream and then they don't have to deal with either their internal, gee, I didn't do that, or somebody else saying, Hey, you know, you said you were gonna go to Disneyland, or you know, you said you were gonna go to Paris and you haven't done it. You know, we don't want to deal with that. And and I kind of approach it a different way. So I like to think of dreams in three ways. One is your bucket list, the things you want to do. The next one is who you're becoming. So, like right now, I'm trying to learn French because on my bucket list is to go to the Codon Bleu in Paris and take their gastronomie class. And I think that I'm gonna have more fun with the French professors if I can speak a little French, right? And then the third way that I think about dreaming big is that ultimately what I want everybody to have is a life that they're deeply satisfied with, so that when they put their head down on the pillow at night, they can say, Hey Lord, if this is my last day, I've lived a great life. And so that's the third part about dreaming big.

SPEAKER_01 17:49

Amazing. Uh, Margaret, before I let you go, please tell us where we can buy your book and where can our listeners get in touch with you?

SPEAKER_00 17:58

Oh, fantastic. Thank you, Peter. So you can get in touch with me in my website, which is margaretchiavini.com. You can also buy my book on the website. It's a link to Amazon, and um it is uh available in you know almost all of the the uh book retailers, uh Barnes and Noble, of course, on Amazon. And I would love to um I would love to be in touch with any of your any of your listeners.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

Margaret, thank you, thank you for all these insights. Thank you for sharing your story with our listeners, and thank you for being my guest tonight.

SPEAKER_00 18:39

Thank you, Peter, and please, your work is so good. Keep up the good work. You're making a big impact. Talk about legacy. You're making an impact on a lot of people that you're giving them ideas on how to cope with burnout, how to cope with midlife crisis. So you keep up the good work.