114: "The 'How Do I Spend My Time' Leader" - Anne Devereux-Mills

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"The 'How Do I Spend My Time' Leader"

Anne Devereux-Mills is the founder of Parlay House, which describes itself as a modern salon for women. Their mission is to provide a safe and supportive environment in which women can have authentic conversations and build meaningful relationships.

Anne has been the CEO of multiple companies. She’s also a wife, a mother and a four-time cancer survivor.


Three Takeaways

  • Find what matters most to you.

  • Define your values and live by them.

  • Lead in the service of others.


"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT

Episode 114: "The 'How Do I Spend My Time' Leader" - Anne Devereux-Mills

I’m Charles Day.  I work with some of the most creative and innovative companies, helping their leaders maximize their impact and accelerate the growth of their business.

It’s become clear to me, that the most valuable companies are led by people who have something in common. They've learned how to unlock the most powerful business forces in the world - creativity and innovation. 

On this podcast, I explore how they do it and help you use their experiences to not only become a better leader  but become that leader  faster.

Anne Devereux-Mills is the founder of Parlay House, which describes itself as a modern salon for women. Their mission is to provide a safe and supportive environment in which women can have authentic conversations and build meaningful relationships.

Anne has been the CEO of multiple companies. She’s also a wife, a mother and a four-time cancer survivor.

This episode is called, The ‘How Do I Spend My Time’ Leader.

So I'm not saying give up work, but I'm saying be conscious and thoughtful about where your time is being spent. I was lucky in being sick not once but twice to know that any day could be my last day even though I was too young for that to generally be happening when you sort of know this could be your last day, you can do an assessment at the end of the day and say, "How do I feel about the kind of person I am and how I spent my time and do I want to do, do I feel good about that? Do I want to do more of that or isn't that not how I would want my last day to be?"

I had already thought a lot about my opening for this episode and was pretty clear how I was going to frame this conversation.

Then I talked to a friend who gave me some news. One of his children died recently. And that brought a lot of things into perspective.

I don’t have children. I can’t imagine that pain. That loss. I don’t know how that feels.

There are so many things we can’t control. So much that is beyond our influence. But there are things we can control and we should focus on those. There’s one question that I ask a lot of the leaders I work with.  

What does success mean to you? 

In her book, the five regrets of the dying, Bronnie Ware revealed that number 1 on that list is this: “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

Are you focused on titles, positions, power, public recognition, achievements, and awards because that’s what success looks like to you today? If so, it’s worth wondering how you’ll define success when all that is gone. 

Leadership is defined by driving forward. 

But to where and for what purpose?

And if you know the answer to the question, you’re in the leadership minority.

As the saying goes, when you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do.

Except, to the people you need to convince to follow you if your leadership is going to make a difference.

“How do I want my last day to be?” 

That’s a pretty good question for any leader. And any human being. It also happens to be a competitive advantage.

What’s your answer?

Here’s Anne Devereux-Mills.

 

Charles: (3:24)  

Anne, welcome to Fearless, thank you for joining me today. 

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Thanks for having me. 

Charles:  

When did creativity first show up in your life?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Probably when I was in high school and found myself totally in a creative zone, designing and sewing clothing to wear to school the next day, and I would stay up until three, four, five in the morning making perfect whatever creation that was until, you know, one of my parents would sleepily get out of bed and tell me to go to sleep, because it was enough of that creative stuff for one night.

Charles:  

Where do you think that comes from? What's the DNA of that?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Hard to know. I mean, we came from parents who were successful, both of them, but hippies sort of by nature and they allowed for incredibly creative exploration. So when I got my driver's license at 16, my parents said," Oh great, so what are you going to do now?" And I said," well, I think I want to drive." I was in Seattle, I think I want to drive to Vancouver for the weekend, and I want to bring Rachel and Susie with me. Now Rachel and Susie were 14 and eight, and my parents said great, go ahead. And I literally got in the family station wagon and drove to another country with my 14 and eight year old sisters. So, you know, we were clearly brought up in a household where creativity, exploration was encouraged.

Charles:  

Were you were a risk taker growing up as a kid?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

You know, my parents allowed us to be risk takers in the, in the sense that I would hop in the car and I was a terrible driver at 16 years old. And you know, but no, I don't think I was. I'm not a conservative person so I would always put myself out there, but you know, I wouldn't be the first to jump out of the plane, but I might be the first to think about talking about less physical risk taking and more creative, emotional risk-taking.

Charles: (5:23)

Did creativity play a role in your education?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Yes, I went to Lakeside School, which is where people that you would know, like Bill Gates went to high school, Robert Fulghum who wrote everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten, was the English teacher. And you know, so from a pretty young age I had very creative inputs. And Wellesley College where I went to college was creative on a different level, rules oriented, high standards, but did foster creative thinking in a more academic way.

Charles:  

What was your first job coming out of school?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Oh my God, it was the worst job for me ever.

Charles:  

(laughs)

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

I did what I thought I was supposed to do. I don't even know who's supposed to it was, because it probably wasn't my parents, but I sort of thought that I would become a lawyer as my dad is. And I thought I should study political science and economics, which I did and tried to get a job in the, the mid 80s, which wasn't a recession as bad as the one in 2009, but it was pretty bad. And the only job I could find was in the world of insurance. And so this feminist, creative, free spirit was at Marsh & McLennan, now called Marsh & Company, doing political risk insurance. And it was a, it was just a terrible fit for, for me-

But it allowed me to sort of think non-traditionally and try to extract from all the things that I was doing that were not right, what, what pieces of it did I love, what sung to me and I loved the communications piece. 

Charles:  

You described yourself as a feminist, was that a lens you saw yourself there?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Actually no. I don't think I was even, I was certainly aware that I was a woman because I love all of the creative pieces that came with being able to be a woman. You know, I talked about fashion design and I have a daughter who is a jewelry designer. I love design in all forms. But in terms of advocacy, I sort of went to Wellesley despite the fact that it was all women at the time. I was sort of boy crazy in high school and didn't really know and value what a community of women could mean. And truthfully, I think I took it for granted and didn't pursue it until pretty late in life when I realized that the most meaning I had, that the deepest connections that I had, the people that were there for me were not the people in my male dominated world of advertising, but we're actually sisters, daughters and female friends with whom I could be a, a much more version of myself.

Charles:  

You had a very successful career-

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

I did. 

Charles:  

In the agency-

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Yeah. 

Charles:  

In the agency world.

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Yeah.

Charles:  

You reached a moment, a week I think it was, where three events happened all at the same time. 

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Yeah. I was a single mom, and a cancer survivor and had my first daughter launch off to college in LA. My second daughter was gearing up to go to college. When I found out, I got a call from my oncologist who said the cancer cells were not actually gone and I needed to have more surgery. And so I am a very driven person, have never let anything get in my way. And so I walked up Madison Avenue and into my boss's office and said, sorry, I've got to take a few weeks off and have some more surgery, but I'll be back. It was, you know, this is 2009, I will run this thing. I'll, you know, we're, we're turning it around, we're going to keep going. And-

Charles:  

What, what role did you have?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

I was the CEO of one of the healthcare agencies, chairman and CEO. I, it was my third CEO role, no fourth CEO role. And he said, uh, don't hate me for this, but I'm going to have someone else run the company. And so I had just had my health threatened, my last kid was leaving to go to college and now I didn't have a job, and I didn't know who I was. I mean really when you think of how, those of us who are driven and achievers talk about ourselves.

You know, I would walk in the room and I'd say, hi, I'm Anne, I'm the CEO, or hi, I'm Anne, I'm Lauren and Cara's mom or hi, yep, we're at the gym at 5:30 in the morning because that's what we do before we get to the office at 7:30, and I wasn't any of those things. And so I got into this really weird space of having to think about at nearly 50 years old if I wasn't defined by my job or my role in the family or my physical ability, who was I? And that took creative experimentation to a whole new level.

Charles:  

When you got that call, and I was, as you said, that was, that was part of a chain of events in terms of your health history, how, how did you confront the threat to your mortality of being a cancer patient?

Anne Devereux-Mills: (10:06) 

I'd never accepted or defined myself in that way. So when I would go to Kettering for followups and biopsies and whatever, I would always, and I didn't have to go through chemo, so I would always look around and see these people who clearly their pads to me were more abstract but also seemed much harder than my own. So some of it was sort of denial, reframing, rethinking, but I also recognized that the health piece was only a segment of who I was. And so I would focus on the other pieces generally that were going well. Now at this one point in time that I just talked about, with the exception of the guy I was dating cross country, because he was in California and I was in New York, nothing was going well. You know, lost my job, my health and my last kid all at once. And so then it was really hard to sort of reframe and, and dodge the truth. And so then it was really hard to sort of reframe and, dodge the truth. 

Charles:  

But that, but that had always been your default, your ability to sort of take really bad news and say, this is not how I define myself.

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Yup, yup. 

Charles:  

I choose not to accept that definition. I will define myself going forward as-

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Yup, yup. 

Charles:  

A survivor, somebody who can-

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Well, I didn't frame it in the cancer mode at all, so I, it, was always an attempt to be super woman. So if you, if you frame it in a different way, I can achieve, I can love, I can lead, I can, you know, embrace, I can create, I can do these things, you know, then one piece is not, eliminating all that you are.

Charles:  

Were you ever afraid?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Yes, I was mostly afraid because my, my kids dad had disappeared and I was the only parent and with my parents being in Seattle and their father's mother being in Ireland, they had nobody around them if I was not alive. So I was afraid because they weren't grown up enough yet to lead lives without a parent. I wasn't afraid for me, I just was afraid that I would leave them in a terrible place.

Charles:  

So you have this convergent moment in your life. You have this realization that everything you thought was true needs to be rethought-

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Yeah.

Charles:  

How did you then decide what you were going to do at that point?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Probably the same way that most creative people -experiment. So I, I first started to look backwards and think about what was I missing in my life and how do, how do I create that in a new way? And you know, no surprise to many people here, but when I lost my job, I would say 90 plus percent of people in my life disappeared because I didn't have anything to offer them. And if we weren't talking about work, there wasn't a lot more meat to our relationships. And so with those people gone and maybe the five women other than my family who were there for me when I was sick, I, I had to think back further about the times when I'd felt real and meaningful connection because that's what I was lacking. 

You know, I ended up sort of in my risk-taking way, dropping my youngest kid off at college in New Orleans and continuing to head West and selling my old house, buying a new house with my boyfriend at the time who then became my husband and moving to a city where I didn't know one person. I mean I was in San Francisco and I didn't have one friend. And if I started to think back on, okay, what were the times in my life that I want more of? It was being one of three daughters, it was having two daughters, it was being at a college with 2000 women. Why? Because in each of those places I could be more of my authentic and vulnerable self.

And I was feeling incredibly isolated, lost, I felt like a failure, I felt lonely and I really at that stage because everything had fallen apart, I was prioritizing connection and relationships above all else. So I wanted more of that in place where I had (laughs) zero people. So what did I do? I asked friends of friends who do, you know, in San Francisco, I think it'd be really cool to have a content based gathering among female strangers in my home.

So there are a lot of weird, like why does somebody come up with that? And I was, I loved the beauty of my home and where I was living, you know, in San Francisco. And I love the idea of people, the age of my daughters and younger and of my mother and older and everybody in the middle getting together in a way that we were not talking to the same damn people who have the same experiences and the same thoughts and look the same. We were really, you know, bringing different perspectives to the table. So I ended up with sort of a dozen diverse women and we had a conversation, this, this one of the first ones was grounded in poetry. And it wasn't about poetry it was a friend of mine who is a poet but it was really just providing a platform for us to start talking to each other.

And at the end of the couple of hours with champagne and with food, we were all buzzing. And I don't mean buzzing drunk, although that might've been true, (laughs) but we were buzzing with having experienced something unlike anything most of us had ever experienced. And we thought, "Oh, it's pretty damn cool." And we all looked at each other and said, "Should we do it again?" Yes and we each thought of people, except me, who they could bring the next time. So 12 people became 30 and the next time became 50. And before I knew what we were, 3000 women in San Francisco coming together, you know, only in a group of 60 to 80 at a time. But coming together in my home, people that I didn't know had never met to connect and form not just friendships and I don't mean just in diminishing friendships, but the connections happened on a whole bunch of different levels.

And then my friends in New York, because I still am bi-coastal, said, well, why aren't you starting one in New York? And so I did. And then one happened in Oakland and L.A and Washington D.C. And we're now in 12 cities around the world, including London, Paris, and we'll be launching in Amman, Jordan next month.

Charles: (16:17)  

Hmm. What a story.

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Yeah.

Organic took on a life of its own and if, if you had said, picture what this will become, I could not possibly have imagined. I still actually don't know.

Charles:  

I'm struck by many things in that story. One of them is that your initial  focus was to be, was to attract women. Why do you think that was your focus? Why do you think it was explicitly through the lens of women that you thought this was how I wanted to establish a platform for myself?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

You know, I had cervical cancer that progressed and so part of my, even though I didn't frame who I was by being a cancer patient or cancer survivor, I think the attack on the female part of me was acute for me. Part of it was the times that I could look back on that felt the deepest and most fulfilling or female. And I think very truthfully, and I left at the advertising world almost 10 years ago, but it was a very male world. And, I was one of the few women and you know, the three or four other women personally that were also as successful as I was, there weren't many of us. 

And so I didn't have the adult experience of female connections and friendships. And in fact, I needed to understand how my experience as an outsider, as an other, as somebody who was not going for a five mile run around central park at lunchtime and going, you know, I just was not fitting into the core group of advertising and succeeding nonetheless. But I wanted to connect on levels where I felt like an insider.

Charles:  

If you were to project out five years from now, what would you like it to be?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

It's been wonderful seeing these conversations happen in the cities that I've named, which are all pretty sophisticated cities where people were already aware that there might not be a balance in voice and connection. But I've also done work in Uganda and I'm currently making a film about equal pay for women in Mississippi. And there are places both in our country and in our world where the disparity in access and connection and comfort is so much greater even than what we have in the Seattles and Denvers and New Yorks and Atlantas and you know, Paris's of the world. And so I would love to see, right now we have 12 parlay house locations. I would love to see thousands, especially in places where women are not empowered to have safe conversations that lift each other up. 

Charles:  

I'm struck by what happens when women come together to support other women.

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Yeah. 

Charles:  

How do we take that energy and turn it into a broader foundation for the kind of society that you and I would both like to live in where we don't have to worry about, it's not going to happen in our lifetime I suspect-

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Yeah. 

Charles:  

But we both like to live in a society I suspect where men and women have an equal role to play and are able...

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Absolutely. 

Charles:  

To contribute and support to each other and that women coming together or men coming together is not because that's where they feel safe, but it, but for other reasons, and we can come together mu-mutually supportively and to each other's benefit. How do we take the energy of the group that you're creating and leading and start bringing either male voices into it or bringing that understanding into a world that is still far too dominated by the male voice.

Anne Devereux-Mills: (19:55)  

I'd really love to see the beginning of collaborative male, female discussions in safe spaces that are not forced, where there's as much space for men to talk about their experiences as there are women. And I think that's a really healthy place to look to. And you know, we have to experiment. I don't know how we get there, because it's going to  need to be the right men taking the lead who can be the leaders to say, "Hey, it's okay to express these things and I'm not any less masculine or successful or strong for showing my vulnerability and admitting my fears."

I guest lecture at a number of places including Hult International School of Business in San Francisco, and Hult is almost exclusively non-American students. And I've been a lecture, guest lecture at a course on gender and diversity in the workplace. And three years ago when I started guest lecturing, there were no men in the class. And two years ago there were two gay men in the class who then ended up coming to a Parlay House event. And last year the class was 50/50 male, female. And when I got finished sort of talking about my journey and parlay house and the story, the first few questions that I got were from men, like a man from rural India who said, in my town and in my culture, it is not okay for me to be vulnerable and open about my fears. 

And there is nothing I would like more than to find spaces where I could share my experiences with other people, get advice from them, get support from them, give advice, give support, and, and create a more connected community for myself. How do I do that? And I loved that question because most men aren't even brave enough to admit that they would like to have (laughs) safety and, you know, be able to be vulnerable and to talk about what they are feeling and uncertain about. So we have had quite a number of male speakers and we've experimented with having events that are collaborative, and we haven't gotten there yet because there's a range of trust among the women that are there. I think there's something incredibly sacred that happens in our spaces right now with complete safety. You know, we're kind of like mini-Vegas, what happens there stays there, and we really do respect each other's shared secrets.

And so how do we create a society where we're not taking advantage of vulnerabilities and allowing for those things, especially for men in advertising, but men in our society are really expected to be so stoic and not, divulge worries and to provide and achieve and succeed and be, you know. Yes, your question is the best question ever, and I would love for the need for female communities to not be as sort of desperate as they feel now because there's more safe space for us all to share and respect each other. I think women are going to have to start modeling it for men. 

There are a lot of things that are so ingrained into how we're brought up as kids and how our parents behaved and how society behaves and how religious organizations behave. You know, we're having to rethink a lot of assumed truths, and that's hard to do, because you get to be an adult and you think you're supposed to know how everything works and all of a sudden you realize that what you've been taught might not necessarily be the only or best way.

Charles:  

I read or heard something you said though about when you reach that pivot moment in your life that you stopped using the, what am I doing today? What is success look like today as a reference point in the, you said, what do I want my life to mean?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Charles:  

What's that effect?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. 

Charles:  

Tell me about that evolution in your thought process. The going to the end and working back.

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Well, I spent a lot of plate of time in the place I call the space in between, which is after everything that was, that you knew that was certain, that was familiar, that was routine. And before I had decided what would be next. And for most of us who are on the path to achievement and leadership and whatever, it is very scary to not be in a familiar place, to not have a set daily routine, to not be working with the same group of people in the same dynamics, to not even have a, a work community.

I think we under rate the importance of our work communities, work, families, the people we spend most of our waking (laughs) lives with. And so I had to create a new sense of community to replace that and ended up loving it even more than I loved my successful career. Because it met needs that I had been ignoring for the first 25 years of my adult life.

Everything's, you know, the contents of my life handbag have just been dumped upside down. If I'm going to put things back in, what do I want to save? What do and I, and to, to continue the analogy, you know, I found in the work world that I knew thousands of people and yet very few were there for me. I want, when I put stuff back in my purse, I wanted it to be four quarters and not a hundred pennies. You know, I wanted it to be fewer, better, deeper, more valuable relationships and connections. 

So I'm not saying give up work, but I'm saying be conscious and thoughtful about where your time is being spent. I was lucky in being sick not once but twice to know that any day could be my last day even though I was too young for that to, you know, generally be happening when you sort of know this could be your last day, you can do an assessment at the end of the day and say, "How do I feel about the kind of person I am and how I spent my time and do I want to do, do I feel good about that? Do I want to do more of that or isn't that not how I would want my last day to be?" And then you can take the next day and iterate and bend it to be more and more like what you'd prefer. And so that's, I spent a lot of time bending and evolving until it became something that I did want to  do more of.

Charles: (26:40)

For people who don't have to go through that, do you have any advice for them in terms of how do you live a more intentioned life? How do you stop-

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Yeah.

Charles:  

And take stock of this is what I'd like the output to be. 

Anne Devereux-Mills:

I think that it's very important to do an, an internal tally of where you are based on your own value system. It'll help not only with decision making from, is this job right for me or is this relationship right for me or is this trip I'm planning right for me. 

But I think it, it helps you, you know, as you, as you want to  give back to society, there's so many things we care about in this world. How do you decide what your life contributions will be? There's no wrong answer, but I think if you can spend enough time to have clarity about who you are, what you naturally do well, what you inherently care about, what you'd like to see more of, it helps with all of the decision making and it helps control your reaction to things that you might not react well. And it helps you double down on opportunities when that door opens that is exactly aligned with whatever you were looking for next. And I think the more we really do that inventory of our own personal needs, the more we'll get the answer right as we move on in life on the small steps that are leading towards something that feels like, yeah, I lived a pretty damn good life.

Charles:  

Do you take that all the way through to developing a personal purpose? Is it that formalized-

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

No, but I know, I know where my lines are. I, I might know that I get people who ask me for help and advice and guidance and favors and money, a lot and I'm somebody who doesn't say no very easily because if I can, I often feel I should, but when you have a sense of purpose and a limited amount of time, it does allow for some prioritizing. And it also, you know, allows for you to say no in a way that feels better than, than a no without an explanation.

Charles:  

So you can connect the two pieces?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

I can. 

Charles:  

I'm, I'm here to do this and therefore I should be helping you or I need to help them before I help you.

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

I have five people asking me for my time and only two spaces of time today, the two that I'm going to  give them to, whether it's an organization or a person or whatever are the two that are aligning most with my value system and place for me on this earth.[1] 

Charles:  

True in life and true in business, right?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Yeah, exactly.

Charles:  

How do you lead?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

With heart, which, which I think is not so usual these days, but I'm doing, doing some research at the moment to see how, what the correlation is and I don't have an answer for this on kind leadership and success as opposed to iron-fisted, ruthless leadership and success. I think that we're missing a place for empathy and putting ourselves in someone else's shoes, because we're worried about getting sued or we're worried about, you know, legal constraints. Or we're worried about being viewed as, you know, not strong enough, especially as women being viewed as not strong enough because we're being judged by old fashioned male standards for what job requirements are.

Charles: (30:01)

Do you have any regrets?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

No. I mean I guess my regret is I didn't have the clarity then that I have the clarity now, but I, you know, you grow into those things and you sort of have to experience a certain amount of life before you know. I certainly wish I hadn't been such a perfectionist, I wish I'd been more open with my kids, especially, uh, about my fears and failures. Because you know, I always tried to present this super woman facade, which was really dangerous because it's impossible. And then when they felt vulnerable or felt like they failed, they didn't have someone who had openly talked about how that felt and so they felt less than. And, and like they'd let themselves down or me down worse. Yeah, I have those, those little regrets. But no I tend to not look back.

Charles:  

You have that relationship with them now with your daughters now?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Charles:  

Must've helped them.

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

I think so. Although, you know, so much of it is ingrained when they're little it's hard-

Charles:  

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

To get, get them out of the patterns of thinking that develop when you're 10 years old.

Charles:  

What are you afraid of?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

I'm not afraid of anything. Actually, you know, I'm afraid of the people I love not being around I'm married to someone 15 years older than me. But I don't really, I'm not really, I'm not afraid of failure. I'm not afraid of trying. I'm maybe afraid of letting people down because you don't want to promote whether it's Parlay House or me as an individual to be anything other than a human being.

Charles:  

Hmm.

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

So I get a little bit worried when I might be viewed as providing more than just one person's vision (laughs) and leadership. You know, I don't want to let people down and thinking that I'm something more than that. But I don't really have, I don't have huge, huge fears. If today was my last day, I would've done all right.

Charles:  

I wrap every episode with three takeaways. 

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Okay.

Charles:  

Let me throw these at you. 

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Okay.

Charles:  

So one, as we've talked about, you know, what you're doing here, you figured that out through an extraordinary journey and whether you call it purpose or otherwise, it is a real reference point for you-

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

Yeah.

Charles:  

Clearly. Second connected is that you understand how you want that journey to go, that you want, that you understand the values that you want to show up with you. You know, how you make decisions, you understand the context within which you're making decisions. I think that set of values is obviously a very powerful set of guiding references for you. And then third, you're in service of other people. I mean, you want to make a difference to the lives of other people. And that seems to me to be pretty core to what you do every day. That a definition of success that's really important to you. How do those resonate?

Anne Devereux-Mills:  

They completely resonate, you know, And so I think, yes, my takeaway from everything that you've said is that by living a giving focused life, it feels the most fulfilling and I can help other people get that natural high from lifting human beings around them. We all feel better as a society, and that's how those three takeaways are connected. 

Charles:  

Anne, thank you so much for being here. 

Anne Devereux-Mills: (33:25)  

Thank you. Thanks for having me.