Helena Gardner
Welcome to, here’s the story, a show that brings Student Affairs to life by sharing the authentic voices and lived experiences of those who are shaping the field every day as a part of the Student Affairs now family. We’re dedicated to serving and furthering the people who walk the walk, talk the talk, and carry the rock, all of us who find ourselves serving students and their Education and Student Affairs in Higher Education. You can find us at Student Affairs now.com, or directly at www student affairs now.com/here the story, or on YouTube or anywhere you enjoy podcast, we like to thank today’s sponsors evolve. Evolve helps senior leaders release fear, gain courage and take action for transformational leadership through a personalized cohort based virtual learning experience. I’m your host. Helena Gartner, my pronouns are she, her, hers, and I live as a mom, a sister, a daughter and a friend and a mentor, and I’m excited to be here today with my co host.

Neil E. Golemo
My name is Dr Neil E Golemo, and I’m the luckiest guy I know. I’m blessed to serve as the Director of Campus living and learning and Galveston’s campus of Texas, A and M. I’m a father, husband, son, and I’m over here just trying to do my best, do a little good or get caught trying.

Helena Gardner
Oh, I bet you get caught trying. I bet you get caught trying. Well, we are here today with Paul Brown, the famous Paul Brown, the well traveled Paul Brown, the good foods. Paul Brown, the yes, the wonderful educator. Paul Brown, you probably didn’t know I was going to say all these things. I had the luxury of doing a session or two with Paul a few years ago with the Institute on the curricular approach. And I’m excited that someone who has blessed so many of us in the field by developing us, training us, giving us materials to read and reflect upon, uh huh, made time for us this morning. So Paul, we know you got a story to tell. You. Introduce yourself. You go ahead.

Paul Gordon Brown
You’re laying it on thick this morning. You said, well, traveled. I traveled. I had a colleague that, like my former hall director when I was an RA, reached out, and she works at a university in Karachi, Pakistan, and she’s like, Hey, why don’t you come out here and help us out, do some things to Karachi last night as one does. Wow. Yeah, right, random, actually, that’s related to my story. So that’s actually like a little good tidbit. We’re going to talk about that. So excellent. Yeah, my name is so my name is Paul Brown, uh, he, him, his pronouns, uh. I’ve worked in student affairs, mostly within Residence Life, for for over 20 years Wilds. And I currently work at a software company called RIMPAC, which makes residence, life and education software. So I’ve been in that role for nine years now, but prior that, I was always a campus based professional doing great things, various things, and so that’s where I come into this. That’s awesome.

Helena Gardner
That’s awesome. I just recently printed off your, your latest published material. Oh, it’s, it’s good.

Paul Gordon Brown
You know, when you produce something and you you finish it, you’re like, This is good. Like, you know, it’s good. Like, you’re like, I put into this, and I feel like I did the things that I wanted to do, and it is good. I I’m excited for you to read it, because I feel really good about like, after that came out, I was like, Yeah, fantastic.

Neil E. Golemo
Yeah, the next morning, it’s usually the next morning, and I’m like, Ooh, did I write this? Wow, this is really, this is coaching. That’s great.

Paul Gordon Brown
Yeah, yeah, I’ll frequently present, and my my boss, he’ll be like, he’ll be like, Oh, that was really great. And I’m like, No, I messed this up. And he’s like, No, it’s fine. And I’m like, No, trust me, I know when it’s good and I know when it’s not good. It might have been fine for the audience, but in my head, I know I know when I can do better. And, like, then I nail it.

Helena Gardner
I’m excited to get into it. It’s on a pretty pink binder, and I think all your stuff is good. So there’s my fan. No pressure, right? No pressure, no pressure, right now, no pressure, because I know you got some stories to tell us and wisdom to give us this morning.

Paul Gordon Brown
Alright, we’ll try for them. We’ll. Aim for the wisdom. We’ll at least try to do that. So when I was invited me on here, I was like, what story am I gonna tell? You know, and I always feel like there’s this pressure to be something that’s, like, super inspirational, or things like that. And I was like, that’s, I’m not the inspirational motivational speaker type. And I came across the story that I want to tell today, because I was like, oh, it’s the question I get asked all the time. How did you get your job? I get asked that all the time. And so that’s the story that I’m going to tell. And so usually people will ask me, how did you get your job? Because they’re thinking, oh, I want to go higher ed adjacent, like, I don’t want to work at a campus anymore for all the various reasons we know that it’s difficult to work on a college campus. And so they’re like, I want a job like yours. And so I give advice. I you know, I’ve been around the space, but I also go my story is not a good model for how to get a good job. It was part luck. It was part being in the right place at the right time. It’s also a job that just doesn’t exist at other companies. It’s very unique to where I work. So that’s the story I’m going to tell today. So we’re going to have to go back a decade. We’re going to have to go back 10 years. At that time I was working at, I was at Boston College. I was a full time PhD student. I had done that, I went, decided to go full time because I wanted to go into the faculty. And I love teaching, and I loved it, and so we’re getting towards the end, I’m going to start writing my dissertation, and so I’m going to have to think about what’s next. And when I was thinking it through, I was like, Well, I love teaching in the classroom, but I do not want to go through the grind of being doing tenure and all that other kind of stuff. Like, if you could just let me teach and do that and light research, I’d be totally happy. And so I was like, maybe faculty is not the right route for me. Like, I could add junk, I could do it on a side basis, but like, full on. The other thing is, I had lived in various different places apart the country and geography was not with something that was going to be really important to me, and I wanted to be in a big city, and that’s where the competition for those jobs comes in. So I was not willing to go somewhere else that was not a big city for a while, to just get tenure and then move. I’m like, No, I’m, you know, 37 I’m not doing that. So then I was like, well, then I guess I go back and be a practitioner, right? Like, that’s the only other thing that you do. And I luckily, the folks at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City needed an interim dean of students, AVP, and because they that had left, and they just needed someone to, like, kind of bail water for a while, while they hired someone permanently. And I had flexibility. And so I went, and I did that for a while, and I very quickly realized that, since I had been, you know, a full time student, oh, right, Student Affairs work, it just sucks up anytime that you will give it right, like it’ll bleed into any hour of day, let alone a Dean of Students role or something like that, which is all problems and messy things. Generally speaking, you do a lot of that. And I’m like, I don’t want to do this either. And if I do this, I will never finish my dissertation, you know? And so I had gone full time, and then the whole point of that, and I don’t want to so many people, get all the way to that dissertation phase, and then just can’t get it over the finish line, because life takes over. And I say, I take this job, life’s going to take over. I’m never going to finish it. So I had applied for that job permanently, but I withdrew from that process. The other thing I think it taught me was, when I worked on a campus, you know, people, a lot of people who complain about campus politics, things like that. It never really phased me. I’m like, it’s just how it works and things like that. But when you leave it and then come back into it, I was like, Oh, I don’t like this anymore. Maybe I never did, but I just didn’t notice it. So, yeah, so I worked on the dissertation as like, Okay, well, then let’s, like, look at adjacent things. And my dissertation was on social media. And college students I would, you know, work a lot in tech. I was blogging a lot at the time. I was doing independent speaking, keynoting, things like that related to social technology and college students. So I was like, maybe there’s a tech angle. And so I loosely started to, like, look out for jobs. This is usually what I think motivates people. And they’re like, I want a job like yours. Is maybe they want to go into, like, a tech software space. If you look at those spaces, there’s a. Types of jobs, sales, programming. I’m not a programmer, so that’s out. There is some stuff of working with schools or clients or things like that, but they usually are umbrella under sales. I don’t do well in corporate environments. I don’t like selling. I feel gross. I just it’s not my thing, and so I need to find something that aligns with my values. And I can’t work for some corporation because it’s too far of a stretch to go from working at a nonprofit university to a corporate environment. So I put up a little flag on my LinkedIn profile. I think you can actually do this now, like, through the software, but it didn’t exist. So I ran into Photoshop, typed, I am job searching into the bottom of my profile photo and threw it up there. Oh yeah, yeah. I now I think you can just, like, click a toggle and it will do it. But, yeah, Matt, who’s my boss now still founder of the company, reached out to me and said, Hey, like, I’ve been reading your blogs and things like that, and I just kind of want to, like, pick your brain and, you know, see things. And so we got on a call and we chatted, and he’s like, I don’t know if we even have a job. So room packs for context. At this point, it had only existed for really two years as a company, so it’s very early on, yeah, held together with tape and string and things like, like, I mean, it was, it was startup. And he’s like, Well, I don’t know if we if we even have a job or things like that, but like, I’d love to, like, pick your brain about where you think the software should go. And I said, Well, how about this? Like, I’ll come visit you in Chicago, because we had a physical office in Chicago at the time, and I’ll kind of act as a consultant, and kind of be like, Hey, this is where you should go, or what you should do and things like that. And then that way, you know, even if there isn’t a job or it ends up in a hiring, you get something out of it, and it’ll be interesting for me to kind of learn about, like, what this company would look like. And so that’s how I got my job interview, which was not a job interview, right? It was almost like a consulting and so when I came in and I saw what they were doing. Room packed started at the time about roommate agreements. Hence the name, room Pat like that was pretty much the core of it at the initial stage. And then it started to go, oh, we could also do duty reports. And so it started adding on all these Residence Life Pieces. And when I went, I said, you know, there’s these cool people doing these, this stuff called residential curriculum, and they’re going to need specialized tools to do some of those things. And there’s no one out here who’s probably on their radar, and they’re at that time and still today, but less so, there’s only a handful of people that really understand it and know it deeply, and I happen to be one of those people. I think this is the direction that it should go in, is take that as the lead. You know, still work with schools that don’t use a residential curriculum, but if you focus on those things, it will help everyone. And so that’s how I got my job. He’s like, Great, okay, and I was living in New York City at the time, and by living, I mean sleeping on my friend’s couch in New York City. Had finished the dissertation at this point. And so Matt flies in. We went to the meatball shop for lunch, and he’s like, Yeah, I want to offer you a job. And so he slides this envelope over the table at me, right? And he but he keeps his hand on it, wow. And he says, so you know, I know that you are worth much more than this, but this is what we’ve got right now. And I tried to, I shook the couch cushion covers to find anything that I could give you, as far as a salary. And so, like, I mean, I knew, because, I mean, it was a startup, it was, you know, company of four people, I knew it was going to be low, but it was, it was low. Oh yeah. I mean, I was so remember, I’m 37 at the time, so I was, like, solidly had left, kind of like a middle to middle upper level position in Residence Life. And now I have a PhD, and so I open it up. And so this would have been 10 years ago, so this would have been 2015, this would have been 2015, and it’s $60,000 a year, no benefits, right? No health care, no retirement, nothing. Because that wasn’t a thing that we did at the time.

Paul Gordon Brown
Wow, right? Yeah, so you take that out, then it seems like. It’s just, you’re like, Okay, maybe. But then you take that out, you’re like, Okay, whoa, all right. So I took the leap. I was on Affordable Care Act health insurance, actually Cobra coming out of my student my student health insurance lasted for like, another year after I finished, wow. And took the job, and my job. What was my job? My job was to do things. So I basically created my own job. I said, here’s what I’m good at, here’s what I think the company needs, here’s the things I’m going to do. And so my job kind of very organically evolved. And at that time, in like a startup type area, you just did whatever you did. Like, we have to train our schools. Well, no one’s ever done that, so you just need to figure it out. Or like someone’s emailing about this, like, there’s no handbook, right? Like it’s not when you work at a university that’s been existing for a while, even if the procedures are messy, they exist. This was literally, this does not exist. You have to create it as you go, kind of a thing. And so that’s kind of how I ended up in my job. So when people ask me, like, oh, I want a job like yours, or how’d you get your job? Well, it kind of fell in my lap. I mean, granted, I was writing and doing the things to get me such that Matt would reach out to me, right? So I was doing things to put it in the universe, to do it so it wasn’t like it was complete random luck. There’s some bits to it. And then the other thing is, they’re like, your job, and I’m like, my job isn’t, isn’t like anyone else’s job. The other thing that part of what made me take the job at this company at a low salary when it was a startup, and who knew if it was going to fail, was Matt was very clear on why he wanted to start the company. He’s like, I want to create a small business that has fun and takes care of its employees, and that’s it. So, like, there’s a lot of companies out there that they take on all this investor money, they grow really fast, hire all these people, and then they sell it off to some other equity firm. They cash out, and then that equity firm goes in and, like, lays off people and, like, basically turns it into a cash cow. And Matt, what Matt had said, I’m not that’s not the model. I want to do, like that’s an I don’t want to cash out. It’s room pack was bootstrapped, which means that he basically asked his family and friends for money. So he had investors. But it wasn’t like it was an investor, it was his family, it was his friends. And that’s what was appealing to me, because the values that had gotten me into higher ed it was reflected in this company. And that’s also why I don’t work well in corporate I wouldn’t work well in corporate environments, because those values of like, well, this is the right thing to do, but the financial bottom line says this, so you do the initial bottom line, and at least in my role, yeah, I mean, we need to make sure that we’re making money, because we need to pay ourselves. But if it’s the right thing to do, I will just do it without even needing to check with anyone and being like, Yeah, this is going to cost us money, and it’s not like a financial return, but it’s the right thing to do, and this is what we should do. And that’s also why it’s unusual. When people like, I want your job, I’m like, well, good luck finding a company that operates like that. There’s a lot. And so that was, like, a big part of why I love my job, why I continue to work here, why I wanted to work here was just the values and being supported in that and all those kinds of things. And I can feel good about it. I can feel good about the way I think things that I do. That’s my story, that’s the wild. Wow. Why you should not use me as a model side of Student Affairs. And why, if you want my job, you’re not going to find it, because there’s not many that exist that look like what I do.

Neil E. Golemo
Well, I mean, I’m looking at this, you know, it’s a job where it started off with questionable housing, low pay, you know, a job description that’s essentially 80% duties as assigned. Like, I can see why you left Student Affairs for this.

Paul Gordon Brown
So, yeah, yeah. Like, just the complete and it fits well with, like, my work, like I deal well with, yeah. Just give me the sketch of things and let me go, yeah. You know, is also my personality and way of working. So, like,

Helena Gardner
and you still, and you still have the opportunity to educate, and you still have the opportunity to bring folks along and do all of those, like higher ed student affairs type things without the politics. Yeah. So what? What must we be like when you encounter us? What? What is that like when you, um, I don’t know, I guess I’ll say, feel the heavy on colleagues around the way. Do you see it on us? Do we look like it?

Paul Gordon Brown
You know, like you remember when I said after I had gotten out of it and then came back into it, then it felt differently. I think, when you get into the flow, and if that’s kind of all you’ve done, the things that are heavy, annoying, things like that, you’ve learned to adapt to it to a point where you don’t even notice it anymore, or, yeah, that’s annoying, but it doesn’t take up your whole brain space. I don’t think that happens to everyone. I think that’s when we talk, you know, about the great resignation and all that kind of stuff. I think there’s some people that walk in and just go, Whoa, no,

Unknown Speaker
yeah, which is

Paul Gordon Brown
totally valid, yeah, and then there’s people, you know, the people that are like, No, this is my I’m sticking with it. This is what I love to do, who through, I think, a mixture of maybe just their personality, but also their coping mechanisms, plus maybe their personal lives and the things that go on there that are able to juggle it and it doesn’t impact them in the same way that it might others. I think it would be interesting to flip the question around is, if you all stepped outside, did something else and came back into it, what would you think if, like, oh, I used to do that. Wow. I can’t believe I did that.

Neil E. Golemo
You’re talking, you’re talking to housing folks in late August. So yeah, right, if you’re asking if I’ve ever thought about doing anything else, like I would go into underwear modeling again. So yeah, but

Helena Gardner
it’s funny that you say that, because as a voyeur, following you on the socials, watching you move around, I think what I what I envy, is that flexible schedule and like you, you know, I’m wearing a little green today because, you know, we just first aid classes was yesterday, so I’m all in this affinity, and I like that about this work, whatever campus I’m on, I want to don the gear, the colors like I’m that whatever your mascot is, that’s my homeboy. But I do envy the freedom that it seems you have, though you know traveling and presenting that can be exhausting. Being amongst stranger danger all the time also be exhausting. But looking in, one of the things I think about is that, you know, you get to the Envy I have is that you have topics you I’m assuming you enjoy, so I don’t know, tell us about that, and you get to help do that or repeat and where today, you know, like, I’m like, I don’t know, I don’t know what today is going to bring. We’re going to see, we’re going to see what happens between now and five. And sometimes, like watching live, I do envy that. And so it’s not only the well traveled piece that I’m like, where, where it’s called today, but it’s also a little bit of and that continuity just seems like that feels good. What’s that like? For real, for real,

Paul Gordon Brown
it is good. It is, you know, I we’re remote. We’ve been remote since January of 2020, and you remember what happened two months after January, 2020, yeah, remote early, slightly early, and I was pretty resistant to us going remote for a while because I have on a campus. I’m like, No, you need to be present. You need to be here for RA training. You can’t miss a day, right? Like, I felt like we needed an office to hold things together. I was wrong, but we went remote, and like I mentioned, I have the freedom to do things in my my job where I’m like, Okay, we’re doing this, and I know what needs to get done. The other freedom that I have is because I work for a company like I said, or the financial bottom line is not the only and is not the primary thing that we look at. Sometimes I’ll be like, Oh, this is really interesting. I want to write about this, or I want to start a podcast, or I want to do this, and I don’t have to justify it through a full on room pack lens. I go, is this good for the field as a whole? Would this be good for the schools that we work with. Okay, then let’s do it, like, let’s try it, and things like that. So I have freedom to do things, because you’ll even look at some of the stuff that I produce out of my job. Yeah, it does not have a heavy sales fist on it, meaning, like, I’m gonna, you’re gonna read this book, and in the middle it’s gonna give you this pitch, and it’s gonna be really hard. Like, we don’t do that, and we don’t need to do that, and we don’t want to do that, and that’s what makes me feel good about it, is, I was like, what’s good for the field? Because what’s good for the field is good for us in the long run and long term play, yeah, and I get to do what I can go around, and I can do these things, and if it’s good for everyone, then it’s good for us

Helena Gardner
too. I love that, because, honestly, no, I’m sorry to have interrupted you the the reason, the thing that keeps me pulled in like I’m a learner, it’s not in my top five, but I’m a learner, and it’s free, like there’s nothing. I only have to engage with the materials. If it is published and produced, I have access to it and it, I don’t know that it was intentional, but it keeps me engaged, because I know that it’s, this is for my learning. This is for the betterment of the work. It is not for $25 and not that that is not sometimes what you know, the cost, but definitely I experience the things you produce and share and room pack as a whole, because there’s a lot of free stuff. So I experience it as for the good of the order, and not so much for retail. And that’s a it’s a different way of engaging with the material for me, I just know I can count on it. I know it’s there. I don’t have to worry about anything, because I know, okay, I know. Pause a couple of folks from I met, but I know that you have done the scholarly work with it. Yeah, like, you know what? I mean, it’s legit well.

Paul Gordon Brown
And so when we started, it was very much me producing all of the stuff. And what’s been kind of cool is, over time, as I’ve needed to do other things, or just my interests have slightly shifted and things like that, I still produce stuff, but my role has also become, how can I find good people that also produce good stuff and then pay them for it? Right? Like so we have bloggers that we refresh every year and we pay them. They write once a month for us. And, you know, now we have a podcast and so we have podcast hosts. So, you know, it’s more like, like, how can I find good people that are also doing cool stuff, elevate them, use the platform. I have a pot of money because I work for a company, so I can pay hosts. You know, I can pay people for their labor, and not just say, please do this, because it’s cool, which is sometimes okay, but sometimes not, you know, but like, I can do that. And so it’s kind of been fun that I’ve taken a little bit more of a slight back seat and been more now that I’m promoting the other folks that are doing good work, which then puts them in random situations, which then hopefully they have a story like, I do, yeah. In fact, it’s already happened where some of our bloggers, someone got a hey, you should apply for this job in a campus interview, all based off of the blog post that they wrote.

Neil E. Golemo
Yeah, wow. So Paul, what do you miss? Like, we talked about what you like or like, What do you miss?

Paul Gordon Brown
Uh, I can tell you, my pop culture knowledge is woefully inadequate. Fair when I’m around you’re on students. I knew what the hot songs were. I knew what memes were, things like that. I know nothing of that now, because I just don’t have the students around me. So, you know, I cliche as it is to say, like, you know, I miss the students, or it’s all about the students, but like that energy being around that, you know, I really, really miss that a lot, like that energy of a campus and the collegiality and and things like that. I worked at a lot of campuses that were really good in that regard, in terms of culture. And there’s just something that, especially working remote, you know, I might not even need to walk outside today. You know, that just compounds the fact that you’re not in a place. And I think that’s the thing that I miss most.

Neil E. Golemo
I think I would really miss the cycle, like being in the cycle. I guess one thing that I really, really like about what we do is, you know, every year you have a chance to get a little bit better, and, you know, to tweak and like, I tell people, I tell my students in the spring that I can’t wait to miss you guys. And then it seems like every year it takes a little bit less time for me to begin to miss them. So that’s comforting to hear you say that at least

Paul Gordon Brown
well. So here’s the fun fact, so I’m still on the cycle, but I’m just in a slightly shifted cycle, meaning right now we’re in the time period where move in is happening. So people are emailing us saying, hey, the students aren’t in the software and whatever, and then we’re going to go into a quiet period now when things open. So I actually still follow an academic calendar. My day job is very cyclical, but it’s like slightly shifted. So, oh, it’s January, which means people are doing trying. Training. So I’m visiting campuses during January, and then I won’t do any travel until the summer, in which case, everyone wants me to come last two weeks of July and first week of August. So I actually do kind of still follow that rhythm, let’s say of that a little bit

Helena Gardner
that I never thought of that, but yeah, that’s still the work. It’s still how it how it moves, that’s interesting. Well, as we round out your story, one of the things that we started doing, I think it’s a cool thing we do, where we we get the story that’s in a snapshot of time, right? You say it’s 10, about 10 years ago, decade ago, when you think about Paul Brown today, how? Has it served you? I’m gonna put a lot of things out there. You choose the adventure. How’s it serve you? Would you take the leap again in the today frame, on this day? How are you if you look back 10 years ago, how this story, how’s it impacted your life?

Paul Gordon Brown
It really freed me up. And I found something that, lifestyle wise, works really well for me. I think when, when I was always an overachiever, right? Honors student, that whole thing, and so it was always about achieving a next thing and promotion and things like that. And when I was in my student affairs work on a campus, that was how I viewed my career, when I walked away from it, and then came into this role, how I evaluated success and what I wanted changed. And this is more authentic to me and more organic, and I can move in different directions. But I’m not looking to, you know, I’m a department of one. What am I going to become? I’m not looking to climb up a ladder. I’m not looking to knock off these achievements in the same kind of way, in a formal way, that, wow, I think, yeah, I think that that has really shifted, shifted a lot. I also think I’m more comfortable with ambiguity than I was before. One of the things that was comfortable about higher ed is there was a path, and it was clear, this is what you do. You get your Masters right after your undergrad, and you do an internship, and you probably do an aku Hui internship over the summer, then you get an entry level hall director role. Then you do, you know, like, there’s, there’s a little bit of a script you can follow, yeah, and for me at that time, that was important to follow a script, yeah, like it was, it was easy to do to get me Yeah, and now I don’t have that same kind of

Neil E. Golemo
field need. So what? What Student Affairs skills lessons? Do you think that you learn from student affairs and working in student affairs that best serves you now,

Paul Gordon Brown
I think, you know, you always talk about the kind of Swiss Army Knife effect, especially of people working in Residence Life, and I think also the ability to shift through and say, here’s what’s most important. So here’s the things that we need to make sure happen, here’s the things that are nice to have, here’s the things and be able to size that up quickly and act on it almost without even thinking a little bit. I think that’s been the biggest thing that’s helped me in my in my role, the thing I unlearned, which is not what you asked, but I’m going to give you what from my student affairs work, is it’s okay to let go of things, meaning, oh, we’ve been doing it this way forever. And, or, This is my baby, and I’ve poured so much energy into it. Sometimes it’s, you have to let things go and move on to the next thing. Or it’s, it’s served its purpose, and you have to let go of it. And, um, I’ve learned that pretty heavily in this job, as things change. And, you know, we have to be more nimble, um, as a company, I’m much working at a company, I’m much more attuned to, okay, we need to move to where things are going to be, not where they are now. And I think in a higher ed setting, at an institution, there’s a comfortability to stay where you are, and you’re protected in doing that, and so I had to push outside that.

Neil E. Golemo
So you’re saying all the time I spent learning how to loft a bed by myself isn’t going to translate to the private sector.

Helena Gardner
There are people who cannot do it, and that makes you special. Neil, this

Speaker 1
is what I want, guys. I didn’t say you do it well, but I

Speaker 2
need you to it well enough, though, because it’s a band, it’s a bed.

Helena Gardner
Well, thank you for that. And that was Yeah, but I’m, I’m probably going to stay at my good day. Job, and though that’s a perspective like the unlearning part, that’s because it’s very hard to shake the tradition in a pattern, in the cycle. It’s very hard to free from that and to what do folks say if you bring in an expert to tell us to do it, we can shake it if we try to do it ourselves, we can find 70,000 excuses as to why we need to just keep assessing, tweak this part and do it again, and maybe, though, it’s time to let some things go. And on that note, I’m going to thank you for being with us today. I hope that, um, we don’t create another great resignation from folks.

Paul Gordon Brown
I already told you, my job doesn’t exist, so you can’t take it and, and I appreciate

Helena Gardner
because it because to that point, it’s, it’s not easy, it’s and, and what you’re looking for may not be in all jobs. And I think that’s that’s a lesson for any of us, is that it just may not be everywhere, even if Paul Brown makes it look good. So Dang, you do? You do? I’m going to watch where you go. I’m going to check out your hotel rooms, and I’m going to have that incredible envy of the opportunity to see the world and let me be super cheesy and change the world at the same

Paul Gordon Brown
time. Fiji, in two weeks, get ready for it.

Helena Gardner
I’m just going to be on the second floor. Of course, that’s all I’m doing, is going up the elevator. But I want to thank our guest, Paul Brown, for sharing your professional journey with us, tapping into a little bit of our envy and a whole lot of our hopes and dreams, because I just think it’s important that when we do these stories, is for all of us to be able to reflect on who we are and how we are and how we got here. Gonna give another shout out to our sponsor evolve. Evolve helps senior leaders who value aspire to lead on and want to unleash their potential for belonging and transformational leadership. Our own Dr Keith Edwards, along with doctors Brian Arroyo and Dawn Lee, offer a personalized experience with high impact value the asynchronous content and six individual and six group coaching sessions maximize your learning and growth and with a focused time investment, greatly enhancing your ability to lead powerfully for social change. This episode has been edited by the great Nat ambrosey. Thank you for making us listen. It’s like you’re the best. You’re absolutely the best. I want to give a shout out again to my co host, Neil. Any last words? Neil, I’m the lucky one. We’re lucky together today. Thank you, and this has been here’s the story part of the Student Affairs now, family, we are so glad you joined us to laugh, cry, learn, sometimes commiserate and always celebrate being a part of the Student Affairs experience. If you have a story to tell, and we all do, please consider sharing. If I can get these words out, sharing a story with us by leaving a two minute pitch via voice file at Student Affairs now.com/here the story. Or, you know what? You can reach out to Neil myself, our good friend, JT, and we’re happy to talk you through it and get you to it. Because even if you don’t feel like sharing your story, a lot of folks are sharing theirs, and we want to get yours with us. So on that note, we’re going to wrap up this episode. Thank you so much, Paul for being here with us today.

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