Author of Beautiful Badass & Fearless Leader Chrysta Bairre Shares Her Unstoppable Journey

Pamela Bardhi
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of underdog. Today I have an amazing guest here with me, Krista, how are you?

Chrysta Bairre
I am Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

Pamela Bardhi
Thank you so much for being here. I’m just amazed. love your energy. And I can’t wait to get into your story today. So one of my very first questions. And of course, the most loaded one is what inspired you on your journey to where you are today.

Chrysta Bairre
So this might sound a little strange, but I’m okay with being labeled as strange. And something I wrote about in my book, and what inspired me most on my journey today. I had this clarifying moment when I was eight years old. I’m sure I’ll have a chance to dive deeper into my story a little bit later. But I did not grow up in the best of circumstances and I had this moment when I was about eight years old. And I remember very clearly thinking, this is not what I want my life to be, I don’t choose this. When I grow up, I’m going to choose something different for myself. That was really such a shift for me and changed the way that I approached my life from that point forward.

Because at that point, I was pretty young then. So there wasn’t a lot that I could do to change my situation yet. But I really started learning as much as I could learn about different ways that other people did. How did they handle situations, when I was a teenager. I started researching all these different religions and like going to different churches. And trying all these different things, like any opportunity that came up for me. To take some kind of extra class or some kind of personal development thing, you know. Working with the school counselor, like whatever it was, like every opportunity. I had to learn different ways and different tools to approach life, I was like, I’m gonna do it.

So as far as what has totally inspired me, it’s like that eight-year-old girl, it’s like remembering her, and that just despair and frustration. And then also that determination that I had, and that moment of just saying, This is not the life I want and when I grow up, I choose something different for myself.

Pamela Bardhi
I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. Chrysta. Thank you so much for sharing that. I mean, I could feel the power in your voice and the eight-year-old girl sort of comigo, if you will. So what did you actually want to be when you grew up? What was the goal?

Chrysta Bairre
Well, professionally I had a lot of ideas, although the one that I was most tied to most of my younger years was a veterinarian. Really wanted to be a veterinarian, because I absolutely love animals. But life really sent me in a different direction in particular. Because of the way I grew up, my family lived in poverty. And when I say lived in poverty, I mean, for a significant portion of my childhood. We were on welfare, it was really pretty dire, and that plus some other circumstances in my life. Actually shifted things I’d intended to go to college after high school. But that didn’t happen at all, some things happened. And I didn’t go to college. So that kind of took the veterinarian of the options or out of the options, you know.

Pamela Bardhi
Every story is so different and when you were sharing about basically going anywhere, to go into different churches. And going to different religions and trying out all these self-development things at a young age. I did the very same thing. My parents grew up in the communist era. So they didn’t know they believed in the universe. They believed in God. But they weren’t allowed to practice that. So I grew up and I’m like, what is the universe? What is God, what are all these things, and I would go to church and I was just, that’s a whole other topic. But I was always looking to go there. Even not just with my family, I would just go myself and I’m like. I want to learn more. What is there to learn here?

Chrysta Bairre
Yeah, exactly. I like you know, got all my friends at school and would ask them about what religion they practice or what churches they go to. And I would go to services with my different friends and learn about all these different things. Because I was really curious and because I genuinely wanted something better, a better life for myself. And that doesn’t necessarily come through religion. That’s just one example of how we can find a different path and find a different way. But that is one of the things that I tried. Going through all these different churches and being like, what can I learn here? You know, yeah, what is the universe? What does this mean? Like, you know, what other ways are people thinking about the life that they have in front of them?

Pamela Bardhi
It’s very profound to me that at eight years old, you were asking yourself these questions that not even grown adults at this stage. So it’s right to be able to say, you know, like, who am I? What is this life? And how can I improve it? I knew years ago and so when you started going to these churches, were you like a teenager? How old were you?

Chrysta Bairre
Yeah, at that point in time, that was in high school that I really started doing that. I did other things before, like I said, any opportunity at school for any kind of special summer program or after-school program. Considering that my family was living on welfare and poverty. Sometimes there was occasionally different types of programs that were available to us. And it was like every single one, I was like, yep, I want to try that. I’m going to try this when I was, I think it was around like 11 or 12. My mom read this book called women who loved too much. And that led my mom to start going to Al-anon. I don’t think she’d even gone for more than a couple meetings.

When I was like, Mom, I wanted to try going to Al-anon. And she explained to me that it was not for kids. It was more adults. But I was just like, I don’t care. I want to learn about this. What is this thing? And can I go and I and actually, she did it? I’m taking myself to Alateen. Which, but yeah, I mean, it was just like anything that I could try and learn different ways. Yeah, I want to learn about that, I want to explore that, I want to find that out.

Pamela Bardhi
That’s incredible. I came to the US when I was about five years old, my parents came with nothing. And we were on welfare growing up, I grew up in a very big, like scarcity, mindset type of environment. If you will and I remember too. I would always say, sign me up for whatever program is, I want to learn this, I want to learn that and you learn all these different perspectives. And all these amazing things that exist in life, because that’s the only way that you can almost pull yourself out of it. Because you can see different places. How will you know the world if you never travel it.

Chrysta Bairre
And for me, it just started with coming from a place of curiosity. It’s just like, I’m curious, I want to learn, I want to know more. I don’t know what the answer is. But I want to learn what it might be.

Pamela Bardhi
That’s incredible. Absolutely and that was like me too. It’s like I needed to know everything. I need to know everything, I just love the parallels, you’re so amazing. You’re so just super, super fun. And super, super cool. Because you went from welfare to wealth, which is really, really profound and incredible. And you’re an incredible speaker and I’m just excited to hear about your trajectory. So post-high school it was so you had mentioned that you didn’t have a chance to get to go to college, so what was that road like for you?

Chrysta Bairre
Yeah, I had intended to go to college and I was going to study biology, you know. Referring back to, I mean, at that point, I wasn’t sure still necessarily specifically on the veterinarian path. But I knew I was very interested in the sciences and animal science in particular. So I had been accepted into the college that I was going to go to. And I don’t know how I thought I was going to pull this off, honestly. Because my family was still in really bad shape. At that point. My mom was in and out of the hospital, she was a single parent and in and out of the hospital. I had a much younger sister at home. So I was 18, my little sister was 10.

And I got accepted to this college out of state and I was just going to go for it. But then they had a paperwork error, like an administrative error. Like they basically lost my financial aid paperwork. And then they ended up finding it later, after they’d already allocated all their financial aid for the year and they were like, of course, you qualify. But unfortunately, we can’t, you know, give it to you this year. So you can defer enrollment and it was $100 to defer enrollment for a year, and I didn’t have $100. At the same time, when I really sat down and thought about my situation.

Even though I wasn’t mostly an adult or adult-ish at 18. At that point in time, I realized that moving out of state. Without any family resources, without any resources I was like, yeah, this is probably not the best move. So I just started working and was like, I’ll figure out the rest of it. Like I just have to take care of what’s in front of me. And that’s what I was focused on, it was like taking care of. What was in front of me for several years? So then there were times that I was in a position where I thought, well, now. Maybe I could consider going to college, but my life just had a different trajectory. And I realized that just wasn’t actually where I was supposed to be.

Pamela Bardhi
What made you realize that?

Chrysta Bairre
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think there was definitely a level that was really scary to me. Obviously, my financial aid would not have completely paid for the type of school. That I wanted to go to and the type of degree I wanted to pursue. And the idea of taking on debt was really scary to me having grown up the way that I did. So that was a piece of it too. But there was a point in time in my early 20s. Where my little sister was talking about coming to live with me. And I was going to be the one taking care of her and I didn’t have the bandwidth to navigate my own life. Work, support my sister, and try to go to school as they did.

I just have to take care of me and what’s in front of me. And as it turned out, my little sister did not end up coming to live with me. But I felt very much like there was still work for me to do, they were still learning. For me, that was not necessarily academic learning. It was like learning about myself and learning, continuing to learn, continuing to honor that eight-year-old girl that I was. I choose a better life.

And it was just like, I don’t have this all, I mean, we’ll never have it all figured out. But I was still not in a good place in my early 20s and then into my mid-20s. I was still really on the path of learning better ways to live. And that was a priority over getting a degree. The call of the school of hard knocks. Which I think is much more powerful than any other degree on the piece of favorite could ever be.

Pamela Bardhi
Yes, absolutely. So what were some of the biggest challenges? And how did you break past them?

Chrysta Bairre
You know, I had a very unhealthy relationship with my mom from a young age. I had become like an emotional caretaker of my mom. And my mom has a very serious mental illness, dissociative identity disorder. Which people more commonly known as multiple personality disorder. That was the old name, the new name is dissociative identity disorder. So I became an emotional caretaker of my mom at a very young age. And so had a very unhealthy relationship with her and it was almost like I didn’t really know how to be my own person. Because I had spent so much of my life, really trying to manage her and take care of her, to make sure she was taking care of me.

When I was about, I think I was 16 years old. My mom was in and out of the mental hospital. So often that she had me added to her checking account as a signer, like that. I could be the one to make sure that all the rent got paid. And the bills got paid and everything got taken care of. So the biggest challenge for me was really navigating that relationship with my mom. And separating my identity and my well-being from hers. Allowing her well-being to be her own responsibility and allowing her to take care of herself to the best of her ability. Which honestly, is not very right. Her ability in that area is not great, but it was like I had to just let that be. I had to let that be okay.

Because my only chance to create something different for myself. To build something different for myself was to focus on myself. Not on her and how she was doing and what she was doing. And all of those things or even my little sister, you know. Being a little bit less of feeling, I was responsible for her and just allowed her to find her own path as well. I mean, I wish there had been another way, I wish there had been another functional responsible adult in our lives. That could have come in and helped any of my sisters or that was just not the situation we grew up in.

Pamela Bardhi
Right. So, thank you so much for sharing that. I mean, it’s a tough thing. Boundaries are very, very tough things, especially when it’s the closest people to us. It’s like, how do you not just want to swoop in, take all their pain, and then have them be free from it right. But we can’t like it again.

Chrysta Bairre
There was definitely a point that I realized that it didn’t matter what I did. That my mom’s journey and her experience was her own. So I could be trying as hard as I could, to keep things stable for her and to help her on her path. And it was like she was just having the experience. She was having, regardless of what I did and I was like. You know what, I can’t help her, but I can help myself and so that’s what I focused on.

Pamela Bardhi
Right? So how did you set those boundaries, because that is an extremely hard thing to do to learn as.

Chrysta Bairre
I did it, so imperfectly, as we all do, but especially in the beginning. Because I don’t think I included this detail. And in my book when I wrote about my story. But actually, in my 20s there was a point that I wrote my mom this letter. And I told her what I was thinking and what I was doing, and that I needed to take some time to focus on myself. I was having regular contact with her and it was really hard for me, to focus where I needed to focus and to make things better for me.

And so I told her I would not be in contact with her for a while. I expected this to be very temporary. But once I wasn’t having regular contact with her and I just had my own stuff to deal with. There was so much to work through there. So it actually turned out that I did not have any contact with my mom for eight years and I never thought it would be that long. But that’s what it was.

Pamela Bardhi
Wow. Because you had your own things that you needed to work through and I’m sure. You were paying attention to everything with her that you didn’t have a chance to even process. And then when that time finally came, I mean, that’s what you needed for the healing process and ironic that it’s the number eight.

Chrysta Bairre
Yeah, cuz, you know, I was eight when I made that decision. But you know, the thing is, that was a very hard boundary that I set with her. And it may be what I needed to do at the time only because I didn’t know any other way. I didn’t know how to have contact with her and not get drawn. How she was doing and her latest suicide attempt and all of these things. And so that was a very imperfect boundary, because it was all or nothing, right. But I did it and that’s, I think that’s how it works with boundaries, whether they’re personal boundaries. I think when we think about boundaries. We think a lot about more personal relationships.

But boundaries are all around us, we have professional boundaries and personal boundaries and they go across. And we’re not always going to do it perfectly. So it’s a little bit of just practicing and trying different things and seeing what happens and that’s how I started with my mom. It was a really hard boundary and it was very firm. There was no contact because I didn’t know how to manage anything in between. But that is not necessarily the way that I set boundaries. They’re not necessarily all or nothing, they’re not necessarily walls that disconnected me from people.

Because I believe that boundaries truly can be a source of connection with others like healthy connection. And can be a source of honoring ourselves at the same time. That we honor other people and that first boundary I set with my mom, had some elements of that in there. But it also had maybe even some unhealthy elements in it. Because it was so it did disconnect me from her completely right. It was such a wall that I put up as opposed to a bridge

Pamela Bardhi
Right. In perfect boundaries. And I agree with you, I did it myself so that I would just shut things out. Because I didn’t know any other way to deal with it. That’s what it was. But I love it. Thank you so much for sharing that. And so throughout your healing process after you took those eight years. So what happened during those eight years for you, and how was your healing process throughout that.

Chrysta Bairre
You know, for those eight years, one of the most significant things that happened for me was I got married for the first time. And it was not a long marriage. It was a marriage that had issues in it. Of course, because I was still learning how to navigate healthy relationships. I hadn’t a lot of examples of healthy relationships. And again, I wrote in my book, one of the chapters in there is talking about getting divorced and then filing for bankruptcy afterward, when I was at age 29. By the time that’s all wrapped up and fact that. I actually came to a place with that where that wasn’t a failure, that was actually a success.

That was really a version of me honoring myself both the decision to get divorced as well, as the decision to file for bankruptcy. Because growing up, I had very black and white thinking. And when you live in survival mode. I think it’s really easy to be in that black and white thinking. So getting married and realizing the flaws in the relationship and continuing my own personal work in a variety of ways. And then making the decision to leave that marriage that was borderline abusive. Like there were some elements of domestic abuse in there. That was present in that relationship. So deciding to leave was such an honoring thing for me.

I mean, it was really such growth for me and it was like, this isn’t about me making this mistake. This is about how I literally have no point of reference for what a healthy relationship should look like. And so this was me practicing and trying different things and learning and I came out of it because I made a mistake. I came out of it because it was like, oh, I learned a lot more than I knew before I went into this. About how I want to be treated and what I’m willing to accept. And what boundaries I set with the people in my life and all of those kinds of things. It was similar to filing for bankruptcy, I had not actually been not paying my bills ever, I had been keeping up with my bills.

But I had this moment of realization of just acknowledging. That is the most loving thing that I could do for myself. Would actually file for bankruptcy, because I did some estimations. And I was like, Okay, at this point, if I continue the way I have been paying off these debts. A lot of them were marital debts and some of it was stuff that my ex-husband had not told me about. There was a bunch of debts that he had racked up without my knowledge. So you know, I would just be punishing myself by trying to force myself, to pay this all off and thinking that I have to pay these dues. I’ve paid enough dues in my life already and I like this resource.

This option of filing bankruptcy exists for good reason. And this is an opportunity for me to make things a little easier for myself. I had enough up to this point as it stands, and then my decision to file for bankruptcy was definitely cemented. When I had an injury and multiple surgeries and even though I had health insurance, it was like 1000s and 1000s of dollars and co-pays. Like I said, I had not been paying any of my bills, I had been consistently paying my bills. I just realized I was never going to get ahead, doing it that way. And that the medical bills on top of that, really shook me. Because I was like not only do I have to navigate all of these copays right now with insurance.

But realizing that, if anything catastrophic happens, then I could very well be in a position that I can’t afford to pay for it. So I’m going to proactively make the decision that gives me the best possible chance for a better future. Again, going back to honoring that eight-year-old version of myself. Just saying I did the best I could with what I knew and the resources I had. And now I know better and I know that everything doesn’t have to be hard and I can take advantage of any kind of opportunity that makes things easier for me. It’s okay to do that and that comes from a place of self-love, and not from a place of shame.

Pamela Bardhi
I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that Chrysta. I mean, our journeys define us in so many different ways. And what I love is how you took this, and then you basically put your pain to purpose. Which I thought was the coolest thing ever and you’re speaking and all of that. So walk me through your transformative journey through that healing process. And that you just mentioned, then how you got to speaking?

Chrysta Bairre
So, you know, I mentioned I’d started working right after high school, instead of going to college. And I found out that I have a skill for bookkeeping and accounting and I didn’t know that I had the skill. So I learned on the job and I kept learning and I started dabbling in HR. And I was learning a lot of HR stuff on the job. So I was really building a very successful career for myself and that was awesome. And it was going really, really well, but I had so much toxic stress in my life. I wish I could say that it was all the job that gave me the stress.

But it wasn’t that it was how I showed up within my work. The level of responsibility that I took on, people didn’t even ask me to take on. Responsibility that people didn’t even want me to take on, I just took it on, right, like the weight of the world on my shoulders. I carried it around all the freaking time and so in my mid-30s, I had a series of health issues. And I had ended up having seven surgeries and six years, I ended up getting shingles when I was 35. I had this moment especially when I got shingles. Because the doctor said, okay, it’s someone your age 35 like this is 100% stress related. 35-year-olds don’t get shingles unless they have extreme stress in their life.

So it was a realization that there was more work for me to do. And I started writing a work-life balance blog and that was my way of integrating into my life. A lot of the tools that I’d already learned. But maybe I just wasn’t using it every day or as effectively as I could. So I started writing this weekly work-life balance blog, and I would talk about different things I was trying. And what I learned from these different tools and which ones were really working for me and which ones weren’t. This turned into a lot of people reaching out to me for advice about their work life. You know, and saying, well, I had all this great accounting and business knowledge and I had all this great HR knowledge.

And then I had all this on my own now, like, work-life balance knowledge that I was building. So people were coming to me asking me for advice a lot. They would say to me, I would have friends or co-workers come to me and say you should do this for a living. I was like, I didn’t even know what that was, he had no concept of what that could possibly look like or how that would work. And I just kept thinking what and so I wrote this blog for about 10 years, you know. Started doing some speaking around it just because I wanted to for fun.

Like not because I was trying to build a business or anything. It was literally just for fun. And then you know, I still like helping people out and giving people advice. It was when I had an opportunity to work with a coach that I realized, oh, this is what it could look like. The thing that people have been telling me, Krista, you should do this for a living. I was like, Oh, now I have this picture of what that could look like. So I quit my corporate job and with the intention of starting my own business, doing career coaching. Because that was really my main area of expertise.

And that’s what I did, I mean. It took a couple years for me to get you know fully into launching my business for real but I did when I was 40. I launched my business for real and coaching business and I started doing a lot of speaking associated with that. And I wrote a book called Beautiful Badass. How to believe in yourself against the odds, and it just keeps taking me to new and surprising places that I did not expect it to take me.

Pamela Bardhi
That’s incredible. So it started from a blog, then it turned into speaking. And then that speaking turned into a book which is so incredible. Oh my gosh can give us a couple or even one, whatever you want to share from your, from your book, cuz I want people to read it. So don’t tell us everything. But just like a little nuggets?

Chrysta Bairre
Well, I’ll tell you something that was really important to me in writing this book. So you know, I had a lot of advice coming at me, I should write a book that really aligned with the career coaching I was doing. Writing this book took me in a really different direction in my business and in my life. Because I really wrote the book I wanted to write, not necessarily the book that made the most business sense at the time. And the reason that was important to me to write this book and something I talked about in the introduction. Then it’s inner woven throughout the book is having grown up in poverty, on welfare, having mental illness in my family.

These things meant that I didn’t have access to the same opportunities. As a lot of my peers and things were harder for me. I had to work harder to achieve the same things that other people had a little more privilege. Maybe I didn’t have to work as hard and as I was doing all of this learning. And continue to do all this learning in this personal development work. Like trying to honor that eight-year-old version of myself and really finding ways to create a better life. One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of people are standing at the front of the stage. Or the people who are writing blogs, that people who are writing books, this isn’t across the board.

But many of these people are coming from a place of privilege, and they’re giving advice from a perspective of privilege. And I feel like there’s been so many times that I’ve sat in an audience or read a book, and felt very inspired by what I was hearing. But I also felt a little discouraged by it and there was the study that I read. It was a 2017 study on motivation that was done with these inner-city kids. And what they found is that when these kids were told, you can achieve anything you set your mind to. I’m paraphrasing, but this is essentially like these kids were told you. Can achieve anything you set your mind to, you just have to have the right attitude and work hard at it.

What they found in the study on motivation is that the kids with less privilege. All of the sudden started performing worse at school. They started engaging in risky behavior and they became demotivated. And when the researchers started to ask this question. What they found out is that when given the message that you can do anything, that you set your mind to. These students would encounter barriers, the less privileged students would encounter barriers. And instead of recognizing Oh, the reason I’m struggling is because of this barrier. That’s not the internal thought that the students have the internal thought that they had was, me, I’m wrong. There is something wrong with me that I can’t do this, I see other people doing it.

So the blame, the flaw is within me, I am inherently flawed, that I can’t make this work for me. And when I read about this study, I had such an aha moment and I was like, Oh my gosh. This is the discouragement that I have felt in my journey. And like listening to these amazing speakers and being inspired. But also feeling frustrated that I couldn’t necessarily get the same results as they could. So my book is all about acknowledging where you’re at, and not holding yourself to the standard that you like. Here’s where someone else’s, this is their journey.

I say, in the book, you can’t do anything, but you can do something. So what is that something that you can do? What is that something that you are uniquely positioned to do? But let’s take away this idea that like you can do anything, you can be anything, I just don’t believe that’s true. If you are experiencing systemic oppression, if you have mental illness, if you have a disability, you can’t do anything. But you can absolutely do something.

What Would Chrysta Older Self Tell Her Younger Self

Pamela Bardhi
I love that and it puts the realistic approach on it, because what barriers that people are going to face because if you tell them, you can do anything. And there will be no problems, you’re painting a flawed picture for them. But if you say, okay, acknowledge where you’re at, here’s what you’re probably going to face. And let’s smash through that. Like, that’s amazing. I love that. Oh, man, thank you so much for sharing that in your book.

So amazing. And I hope everybody who’s listening reads it, it’s going to be the link that is going to be in your bio and everything. So it’s going to be fantastic. But one of the questions that I have for you and it’s probably I’ve touched on it a few times, but I wonder if it’s anything different is what would your older self tell your younger self, based on what you know now?

Chrysta Bairre
You know, I find this question so interesting, because I really don’t know that I would tell that younger self anything different. Because I don’t know how that would shift and change her journey and my journey has not been simple or easy. It’s been painful, but it’s been mine, It’s been 100% mine. And it’s led me to where I am today and everything in my life isn’t perfect where I am today. But I don’t know that I would change anything. So if I was like, what would I want to say to her, I wouldn’t want to tell her anything that was going to change what she did. I think what I would truly want to say to her and something that I did say to her in the dedication of my book is, I love you.

And simply that just pour love on this girl. That didn’t necessarily experience a lot of healthy love and didn’t have a lot of that in her life. I just want to keep that on her. You know, I love you so much, you are so worthy of love. That’s true for all of your listeners and I say this a lot when I talk like you are enough, and you do enough. I say that a lot when I speak because I want us to all know that we are inherently valuable, we are inherently worthy. And there’s nothing that we need to do to prove that to justify that, to make that. So that is just within all of us.

Pamela Bardhi
I love that. Chrysta, I do have to ask you for, what your biggest tip for believing in yourself to being a badass Rockstar.

Chrysta Bairre
I love this question. Like, this is what my whole book is about. Because it is about believing in yourself and honestly you just start with one thing. You just start where you’re at and you start with one thing and you just focus on that thing. And you practice that thing until you get good at it. Whatever that thing is for you. That’s going to take you to the next level and the next level. I mean, to simplify that statement, it really basically boils down to do the next right thing.

And so you may not have that belief in yourself to start, you may not have total belief in yourself. But I suspect that if every one of us looks inward, there is some part of belief that we might have in ourselves. So it’s like, what’s that seed? What’s that seed of self-worth in you? And let’s start watering that seed and let’s start feeding that seed and let’s start tending to that seed. So it just starts really small and like one thing.

Pamela Bardhi
That’s amazing. I love that. Oh, thank you so much. Now, so what are you up to in your world in the next six to 12 months, what’s happening in Chrysta world.

Chrysta Bairre
So much is going on, I have stepped away from doing one on one coaching. And I’m totally focused right now on my speaking career and my writing career. So in the next six to 12 months, I want to start writing my next book. Also working on an audio version of beautiful badass. How to believe in yourself against the odds and getting out there more as a speaker. You know, I did a lot of virtual events last year during COVID. But I’m so excited now that we’re starting to come together in person again. In-person events are totally my jam. And so I’m looking forward to traveling, getting out in front of people, and talking to more and more people.

Because I want to help inspire people, I want to be that person that’s on the stage. That’s not just motivating the people in the audience. But it’s really allowing them to access a new way of thinking and a new way of moving forward. And helping them do the same thing that I was able to do for myself and what that eight-year-old girl likes. I want to choose something better for myself.

Pamela Bardhi
I love that. Krista, thank you so much for sharing that now. Where can everybody find you and your awesomeness?

Chrysta Bairre
So you can go to my website and find all about me as a speaker and author as well. I also founded and run an introverted friendly women’s leadership group called she goes Hi. So you can find all of that information on my website which is liveandlovework.com. You can find all of those things there and more you can find all my old blog posts. 10 years’ worth of work-life balance blog posts you can find there.

Pamela Bardhi
Love it. Krista, thank you so much for sharing all of that and where to find you and just your story, I absolutely adored it. You are a total badass rock star and I adore it. I can’t wait to see what you do in the world. Thank you so much for being here.

Chrysta Bairre
Thank you. I’m very grateful to be here and to get to share my story. And I know that you have listeners that are maybe feeling stuck or discouraged right now. I’m just going to repeat something I said before because I feel like I just can’t say it enough and that is you are enough. And you do enough.

Pamela Bardhi
You’re amazing. Chrysta, thank you so much.