Diana Alt [00:00:04]:
Hey, Diana Auld here. And this is Work Should Feel Good, the podcast where your career growth meets your real life. Each week I share stories, strategies and mindset shifts to help you build a work life that works for you on your terms. Hey, hey, hey, everybody. Good morning and welcome to the Work Should Feel Good show. The show where your career growth meets your real life. I'm your host, Diana Alt, and today my guest Mark Foster and I are going to dig into the power of having a hopeful mindset even when it seems like your world is on fire. Mark is one of the very first people I knew I wanted to have on the show whenever I decided that I was going to launch it.

Diana Alt [00:00:53]:
He is a pastor, coach, writer, and public speaker. Speaker, which goes with the pastor thing, I think. Passionate about giving people this, helping people regain their sense of autonomy and break free of feeling trapped. He empowers individuals to see new responsibilities, new possibilities, take intentional action, and create meaningful change. As a father of four, Mark values resilience and hope. He believes no matter how challenging the circumstances, there's always, always choices and no one is as stuck as they might feel. Mark equips people with practical tools to cultivate autonomy and hope. And his mission is simple but profound, to see hope levels rise as individuals recognize their power and change their own stories.

Diana Alt [00:01:42]:
So welcome to the show, Mark. Hey, thank you, Diana. I. I just love you so much.

Mark Foster [00:01:50]:
Well, the feeling is mutual.

Diana Alt [00:01:52]:
I think that what you do, what you're trying to do is so important. And it was important. We met, what, like a year ago? Yep. In Vincent Puglies, his community. And it was important then, like, we hadn't even gotten into, like, the craziness that became the switching of the presidential candidates and, like, aftermath of concerns about elections which happen no matter who wins or who loses. Like, we weren't even in any of that. We were just in, like, going through life. And you started talking about hope on your page, on Facebook, and then have kind of grown it into a platform.

Diana Alt [00:02:32]:
So one thing I want to talk to you about first is what is one of the most impactful moments where you were able to personally transition from feeling hopeless to more, hopefully. How did that play out?

Mark Foster [00:02:51]:
So probably three years ago, we had a dryer just stop working downstairs. Or maybe it was the washing machine. It was one of those two.

Diana Alt [00:03:05]:
I didn't have the dryer on my bingo card. Like I always love. I love laying on me. Keep talking. I want to hear about the dryer.

Mark Foster [00:03:13]:
Okay, so it was. I think it was the washing machine. But anyway, My wife came upstairs and told me that the washing machine was kaput, and I absolutely lost my cool. I was really angry. I had been angry for a long time, primarily because I felt like I was trapped and stuck in some life situations. And it was really my wife who's like, we can't live this way. You got to find a way to deal with this. I can't even tell you when things break because you just get angry.

Mark Foster [00:03:42]:
Anger for. Not for everybody, but for a lot of people, is usually a sign of feeling trapped or in despair or hopeless. So it was. It was for me. And so I heard that took some time to think through it, and found someone that could help me think through the areas where I felt like I was trapped. One of the things that I tell people is that there's never nothing you can do. And that sounds really great, except I thought there was nothing I could do. And so we started putting together a list of, here are some options you could take.

Mark Foster [00:04:16]:
Here's how what that might look. Here's how the fears that you are facing might not be real, but you won't know until you try. And even if you do try, maybe it won't go so bad. And I just started with the smallest ones and started taking some specific actions, even though I was a little bit afraid. And what I found was when I set those smaller goals inside of a macro situation that I couldn't change, I started feeling like, wow, I didn't die, and so I'll try the next thing. And so I didn't change everything overnight. But what I learned was that I could start doing those things. And as I did them, this feeling started welling up inside me, like maybe I can actually take actions that can change both my present and maybe even my future.

Mark Foster [00:05:05]:
And so I always look back to the day that the washing machine, you know, went on the fritz as the start of that really pivotal journey for me.

Diana Alt [00:05:15]:
I love that story so much because a lot of times when I ask people this kind of thing, and I don't always use hope language like I use other language, but I like that you straight up come and talk about hope, which many people think of as a religious concept, but it's not just a religious concept. But a lot of times it's like, I got cancer, my mom died, my kid got something sick. My. You're like, I lost my job and couldn't find one for a year. Like, it's the. It's very, very big things like that. But to me, if you manage yourself so that you can handle when the dryer breaks. It makes it so much easier to handle whenever you get fired.

Mark Foster [00:06:00]:
Yes.

Diana Alt [00:06:01]:
Or when anything else kind of happens. Yep. And I've been working to cultivate a lot of this myself for a long time because I had, I mean, I've been through it. And in 2018, I was fearing, feeling very, very hopeless and burned out in a job that I was in. I had a boss that I loved, which was one of the things that kept me there. And somewhere in the course of that, I decided to take some miniature actions which will, you know, we'll get more into this as we go. But it ended up leading to me ultimately deciding to extract myself from a terrible situation about six months later or so and then build what I've been working on building now. So, yeah, I'll take happy any day over burnout, that's for sure.

Mark Foster [00:06:52]:
Absolutely.

Diana Alt [00:06:53]:
Yep.

Mark Foster [00:06:54]:
And it wasn't, it wasn't. I wasn't hopeless about dryers and home improvements. But that's the thing. If it's a job related, if hope levels are low in your job related and in your career related world, that overflows into everything and usually people that are closest to us. Yeah, absolutely.

Diana Alt [00:07:11]:
And vice versa. So here's a question I've got for you. Okay. You talked about this, a drier situation and how you were angry a lot three years ago. One thing that has come up for me a lot ever since I met you is that you're a noticer. Like, we were just talking right before we went on. Mark and I were at a conference a few weeks ago and he saw a tattoo. I have a tattoo that's a nautilus shell and a quote from a poem.

Diana Alt [00:07:36]:
And he asked me for my address, which we're close enough that that wasn't weird after the conference. And he sent me this nautilus shell necklace off of Etsy, which most people would never. They don't pay attention to tattoos or they would never think to take that kind of stuff. So have you always been a noticer? And were you a noticer during that angry part of your life? Tell me about that. What are some of your stories of noticing?

Mark Foster [00:08:04]:
Yeah, I think, I think noticing has always been something that I, that I've done. During the probably five or six years that I was really angry, I tended to be more self focused and less of a noticer because, you know, lack of hope, anger. I'm feeling sorry for myself. The world sucks, everybody's against me. So anger can minimize your ability to notice other people. So I Think it's always been something that I love to do. I love to do that. When I go out into and I'm trying to have conversations with people in the corporate or just out in public.

Mark Foster [00:08:41]:
I love to look for things that stand out, things that are a little bit different so that I can have conversations. Tattoos is actually one of those things. Most people get tattoos nowadays. They're very, very personal. There's a reason that somebody gets a tattoo. And so I love to look for those kinds of things to either have conversations or if it's someone that I know well, maybe let them see, know that I saw that and I know that that means something important to you.

Diana Alt [00:09:09]:
It's really nice too because it's like unexpected. There are so many people that work as pastors or other forms of ministry, regardless of what the religion is, that are against tattoos. There's a lot of religions that are against tattoos. So for many people, they might hear a pastor asking about their tattoo and assume they're about to get a sermon.

Mark Foster [00:09:30]:
I would get one, except I am such a sissy when it comes to needles and pain. There's no way. And you know what it was I get when I would change my mind.

Diana Alt [00:09:39]:
About was way easier than I thought about it. My guideline when my niece, I had wanted this for 20 years. My niece and I started talking about it in college and she wanted to go get one like as soon as she earned money. And like, you know, I'm saving up my money for it. And I said, wait until you've wanted the same approximate thing for one to two years.

Mark Foster [00:09:59]:
Yes.

Diana Alt [00:10:00]:
And then you're gonna be good to go on that. So tell us a little bit about your career journey. Where'd you start? I know you're a pastor now. You started your Hope Focus Community. Give us a little tour of that.

Mark Foster [00:10:17]:
Okay, so once upon a time in a land far, far away, when I was 25 years of age, I actually started as a senior pastor for the first time. Super young, probably way too young, very young for that. But the church was desperate and they would have taken anybody. And so I will always be grateful for them giving me that opportunity to make a lot of mistakes, to learn on the job. And so I've been doing that full time since I was 25 and I'll be 45 in May. So 20 years as a full time and then two years as an associate before that. And you know, I've worked part time jobs here and there to pay the bills because pastors make tens of dollars a month. Usually.

Mark Foster [00:11:02]:
And when I moved here to Main, which is the second church that I have pastored, I also started working as an EMT and chaplain for our local fire ems. So I did that for about six years. I'm no longer in that role currently right now, but I enjoyed that a lot and I got a chance to learn and see a lot of things going on in that role. So my career has been in service and forward facing people, facing type of work specifically in volunteer organization. So you know, a lot of churches you're managing volunteers, which is quite a bit different. I've held management roles in various, you know, other jobs that I've done to pay the bills over the years. But being a executive of a volunteer organization has been what I've done.

Diana Alt [00:11:55]:
That is very hard stuff.

Mark Foster [00:11:57]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:11:58]:
How did your time working as a chaplain for the fire Department Chaplain/EMT Inform what you're doing now? Because that is not a self selecting group of people the way that a church, congregation or other volunteer groups are. So what changed for you as a result of working in that environment?

Mark Foster [00:12:23]:
One of the things that changed for me was the recognition that easy answers didn't work in and churches are great at platitudes and easy answers. So you know when you're sitting, when you're, it's 2 o' clock in the morning and you're sitting in the living room of a mom and dad whose child's body is in the back room from a self inflicted gunshot wound, then all of the, all of the easy answers and platitudes that you've learned your whole life just are meaningless in those moments. And how do you step into a chaotic situation and begin to bring some hope and help in those desperate situations? And not then, not just that night, but in the days and weeks following that. How do you help people in the first responder world? Ems, sheriff's deputies, state troopers, who see this kind of stuff all the time and they become cynical and they be, they disengage emotionally. There's a lot of, there's a lot of mental health and substance abuse, high divorce rates in the first responder community because of what they deal with. No judgment, military to military as well. And so hope theory ties directly into that. And so I started having to scratch my head and figure out if I'm going to help these people, how can I help them? Because the message that I have isn't they're not, they're not in a place where this message is doing them any good.

Mark Foster [00:13:50]:
And if I want to be able to bring some real help in this situation. What can I do from the moment I walk in the door to the meeting I have a month later with. With these people? So that kind of started that process for me.

Diana Alt [00:14:05]:
Yeah. God has a plan. Doesn't work when, like, your husband is dead on the floor of a heart attack or something like that.

Mark Foster [00:14:13]:
You know, none of that stuff. Absolutely.

Diana Alt [00:14:16]:
It's really. It's really a very interesting thing. And then also chaplain, that's considered an ecumenical role. So you have to look at perspective not just from, is it Baptist or Methodist or Catholic, but is it Muslim? Is it atheist? Is it agnostic? Is it Hindi? Is it something else? Right. Yes. Yeah.

Mark Foster [00:14:36]:
And so I viewed. I viewed, and I had a lot of latitude in the small department that I started with. I could have been had. I just had. I wanted to. I could have been evangelistic, but I chose to use the chaplain title more in that I want to be able to help everyone with what they're dealing with. I'm always open to talking about my faith with anybody who wants to talk about it, but as a chaplain, I didn't view it as being a pastor. I viewed it as helping, as doing soul care in the community, wherever someone was.

Mark Foster [00:15:11]:
What I found is that the chaplains who are least effective there may be chaplains listening who would disagree. That's fine. But the chaplains who are least effective are the ones who can't disengage their personal positions when trying to step into those. Into that role and help in a department where there may be atheists or, like you said, people from other faith backgrounds.

Diana Alt [00:15:31]:
Yeah.

Mark Foster [00:15:32]:
And so, yeah, that's. I don't know if I answered that question or not.

Diana Alt [00:15:35]:
Oh, you did. I mean, we're just having a conversation. This is not this. We're just talking podcast. That's all. There is the name of our show here. It's Work. She Feels Good.

Diana Alt [00:15:46]:
That's an ethos I've worked by. So when you think about that phrase, what is it? What comes to mind for you? If you had to define what is work that feels good for Mark? What does that look like?

Mark Foster [00:15:59]:
For me? It's work where I feel like I'm able to do things that matter, do things that make a difference, have some degree of autonomy and control over how. How I show up and how I do what I do. And what doesn't feel good is being locked into a system where someone else is, you know, pulling all the strings, and I'm just a cog in a wheel. No one wants to Be a cog in a wheel.

Diana Alt [00:16:28]:
I don't know that I agree with that.

Mark Foster [00:16:30]:
Okay, well, this has been fun then. We'll talk later.

Diana Alt [00:16:34]:
Well, I think there's degrees to that. There are a lot of people for the work that I do as a coach. Like, it's very self selecting. Like the people that tend to come to me, especially the ones that I choose to work with, because not everybody is a good fit for me, but they are self selecting and they have a growth mindset and they're usually, they're always knowledge work people, which hits different. But there are people that I've known like they, they would like to just be told what to do and have a structure when they go to work, but they do want to be appreciated and heard. And so even if they're a cog in the wheel that mostly wants to fly under the radar, you still have to show appreciation to them. And it's sorely missing. I often talk to people about networking as part of my work as a coach because it's fundamental whether you want to network internally to work towards a promotion, network externally to build industry contacts or help find a job.

Diana Alt [00:17:37]:
And I always tell people the top thing to do is to think of somebody that you worked with in the past that you haven't talked to in a while and send them a note saying that you appreciated them for something back in the day.

Mark Foster [00:17:52]:
So I see your answer and I raise you this pushback.

Diana Alt [00:17:55]:
That is right on. Let's do it.

Mark Foster [00:17:58]:
That is, no one tells a cog that they appreciate them.

Diana Alt [00:18:02]:
So. Okay, that's fair.

Mark Foster [00:18:04]:
Yeah. So when I say no one wants to be a cog, no one wants to be truly invisible. So people sometimes, sometimes people want to work in a systematized environment, but if they, they want to feel like they're noticed, they don't want to be invisible.

Diana Alt [00:18:17]:
That's totally fair. That is totally fair. I'll. I'll take that.

Mark Foster [00:18:23]:
Okay.

Diana Alt [00:18:23]:
I think we were saying kind of the same thing.

Mark Foster [00:18:25]:
I think on the same wavelength.

Diana Alt [00:18:27]:
Yeah. So Hope, I mentioned this earlier. A lot of people think churchy gross has no place in a professional environment. Like your professional environment is a church. But most of us it's not. So what's your response to the idea that hope is only a churchy concept?

Mark Foster [00:18:47]:
My response is, you are wrong. And that's the end of this discussion. No, but it is. My response is to try to help people to understand what hope actually is. Because I understand, you know, it's a Hopi. It's a churchy type of concept. But hope isn't the property of the church. The word has existed a lot longer than that and in many contexts.

Mark Foster [00:19:16]:
First and foremost, for me, in that, in that Greek thought and in the Roman world, Seneca talked a lot about hope. Confucius even way back, longer than that, Confucius was talking about hope. And so hope existed long before the concept of a church. And it's a shame because the church has turned hope more into an escape hatch than what I think hope actually is.

Diana Alt [00:19:43]:
I think people gaslight with faith and hope in a lot of environments, both religious and especially religious environments. I've seen it used for gaslighting. So Confucius talked about it, Seneca talked about it. You know. You know, we're going to get to stoicism in a minute, but what is your definition for regular, old, mostly American people that are going to watch this podcast? Okay. What is your definition of hope? Yeah.

Mark Foster [00:20:13]:
So hope is the inevitable response to a person's perception of their ability to set goals and move towards them in specific ways, their ability to affect their environment and their future in at least in some meaningful way. That's what hope is.

Diana Alt [00:20:34]:
I love that. And I like that you've abstracted it out. What is the difference? So you've used, adjacent to this concept of hope, the word control a couple of times. And I have a complicated relationship with control for a couple of reasons. Number one, I grew up with teachers who. So we were kind of like a rule following, do your duty in my family of origin kind of thing. I'm also in a neogram 8, which for anybody that is unfamiliar with a neogram, it's that personality thing with the numbers. We can get someone on the show and talk about it more sometime if you want.

Diana Alt [00:21:18]:
But my enneagram number, basically the top fear is being controlled.

Mark Foster [00:21:24]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:21:25]:
And then there's this addiction that we have as a society, especially in Western culture, to controlling everything. So I have long felt, even before I started studying stoicism, which is the thing that brought me out of the big fat hole, that control, you can never control another person. Like, I figured that out early. But what else can you like? How do you see the difference between what you can control and what you can't control in your life? Because I think if you don't understand that, then the hope part gets to be hard.

Mark Foster [00:22:02]:
Yeah. So, you know, I. I think that you have to admit anybody that experiences life to any degree has to admit that there are things that we can't control. Maybe most things, maybe Mitch, as many things but certainly some things, that's not really the hard part for people. The hard part for people is when they start to believe that there's nothing they control or that nothing they can do. Whether that is, you know, pagan, deterministic, you know, heavily fatalistic mindsets, or in the church, the more deterministic or heavily sovereign type of view. Like everything's all part of a plan. You're just an actor, Shakespeare, you know, all the world is a stage and, you know, we're just extras in it or actors in it.

Diana Alt [00:22:54]:
Yeah.

Mark Foster [00:22:54]:
And so when you rob someone of the understanding that you can't. Saying you can't do everything isn't the same as saying you can't do anything. There's always something you can do. So one of my favorite stories is Anthony Ray Hinton and the book the Sun Does Shine. How he found hope and faith on death row. So Anthony Ray Hinton was convicted, wrongly convicted of a murder he didn't commit and spent 30 years on Alabama's death row. And I can't think of anything more hopeless than living in a 5x7 cell waiting to be killed for something you didn't do for 30 years. And nor can I think of a place where you have less control than that.

Diana Alt [00:23:41]:
Yeah, that's for sure.

Mark Foster [00:23:42]:
And Anthony in his book describes where he came. He was angry, he was frustrated, he was bitter, he wanted to lash out. And he came to the decision that there are many things I can't control about this situation, but I'm going to choose to focus on the things I can do and live in hope with the things that I can do, which was his mindset, which was how he treated other people, how he chose to live his day within the confines of the rules that were set for him, and just doing those things, he began to alter his situation. So your situation is a combination of your circumstances. And you.

Diana Alt [00:24:22]:
Say that one more time. I love that.

Mark Foster [00:24:24]:
Okay, so your situation is a combination of your circumstances plus you. So we focus on our circumstances a lot. And you can't always change your circumstances, but you always have an impact. And this is directly a stoic thought. You always have an impact on how you respond to your circumstances. When you do that, when you change something about you and your actions in those circumstances, you effectively alter your situation. So that's why I say there's never nothing you can do. Even in the most highly restrictive circumstances, you still retain the ability to do something that can.

Mark Foster [00:25:02]:
And when you see that you can do that and you do it, and you see the Change. Hope levels automatically rise inside of you when you see that.

Diana Alt [00:25:10]:
It's amazing the small things that can, that can impact hope. I think this equation of situation equal equals circumstances plus you. Or the other way around, like for a math problem. I think that's incredibly powerful. And one of the things that I took. Well, there's a whole lot to unpack there. Number one, please send me a link to that book later, okay. Because it sounds like an interesting one.

Mark Foster [00:25:39]:
It's phenomenal.

Diana Alt [00:25:40]:
Two other people that come to mind as well that were in impossible situations are Nelson Mandela, who was in jail for. He was in prison for I don't even remember how many years. Like 20 or something like that. And he got in solitary for most, if not all the time. And he got to see somebody like once a year for a half an hour. And then the other one is Viktor Frankl.

Mark Foster [00:26:09]:
Yes.

Diana Alt [00:26:11]:
I just read a very powerful story from my friend Kelly, who was writing a speech on this. Her grandfather actually was with the force that liberated, and that's where Frankel was whenever he got out. So, like those stories. But what do you say to people who look at that and go, okay, well, you got a head of state. You have. Basically, we're giving extreme examples. A guy on death row, a guy in a concentration camp, a guy in prison for political reasons for 17 years. What do you say to the person that is like, I'm just a regular person.

Diana Alt [00:26:53]:
I work at the IRS. I'm one of the 7,000 probationary employees that got let go last month as part of government downsizing. I don't have any idea what the heck I'm going to do. I don't know what I'm qualified for. Plus, there's 7,000 other people are qualified for the same thing. What do you tell somebody that feels like their life is falling apart due to something that major about hope and about how they can impact it?

Mark Foster [00:27:25]:
I would tell them first of all that it's appropriate to acknowledge the wrong that that's been done to you. You don't need to, you don't need to suppress that. That's, that's, that's appropriate to say what has happened to me is unjust.

Diana Alt [00:27:41]:
Yeah.

Mark Foster [00:27:42]:
But if I choose to get angry about it, if I choose to get bitter about it or rage against the machine and just kind of descend into that dark place, I can do that. That's my choice. That's something I can do. But you will miss opportunities that are out there. If you choose to live in anger rather than living with the belief that even when bad things and unjust things happen, I can still control what I can control and start looking for options. And there are options out there. You don't have to know what they are right now, but you do have to make a choice, first and foremost, that I'm going to choose not to allow this situation to make me angry and bitter because then I won't see the options that are. We all know that when you're angry, you can talk all the reason.

Mark Foster [00:28:33]:
All the reason and rationality you want to me, but when I'm angry, I'm not listening to you.

Diana Alt [00:28:37]:
No.

Mark Foster [00:28:38]:
And so.

Diana Alt [00:28:38]:
No.

Mark Foster [00:28:39]:
So an option could be right in front of you and you'll miss it if you choose to walk around in anger.

Diana Alt [00:28:45]:
So what I'm hearing is there's first a decision. You have to make a decision that you are going to be open and actively looking for even tiny reasons to feel autonomy and hope. Yes, yes, absolutely. I. I feel like I've been doing that a lot lately and I think a lot of people are. Well, I wish more people were. I think there's a lot of extra frustration right now for sure in the US because we're seeing all these changes in policy from the federal government come fast and furious. We don't even know what all they mean.

Diana Alt [00:29:24]:
Right. So when I think about that, if I ever get. I found myself a number of times in the last few weeks getting worked up because I didn't understand something. I was afraid what it would mean for me or for my family or for people I serve. But then I realized, like, I'm in my house right now, there's nothing around me that can hurt me. And I'll just literally sit there for like two minutes even and say, nothing can hurt me right now. Yeah, there's nothing that can hurt me right now. I can just sit here in peace right now for the next 60 seconds.

Diana Alt [00:30:04]:
And I don't know about you, but I found that incredibly powerful.

Mark Foster [00:30:08]:
Absolutely.

Diana Alt [00:30:09]:
So. Yep, absolutely. Let's see. You. You're. How. How long have you been into reading and learning about stoicism? Because it sounds like this is a big part of your Hopi stuff.

Mark Foster [00:30:23]:
Well, I'm a voracious reader and I don't read fiction, so that means I'm. And I love the ideas of epistemology, which is how we learn and how we know what we know as well as different. Different belief systems. And stoicism was attractive to me first and foremost because of its concurrence, at least in the Roman age of it Its concurrence with Jesus and the apostle Paul. Seneca was a contemporary. I don't know if he ever met them, but he lived at the same time that they did. I think he died in 65 AD or CE, however you want to say that. So probably, to answer your question, seven or eight years when I first was introduced to it, and I was first introduced to it through Ryan Holiday's book on the Obstacle is the way.

Diana Alt [00:31:22]:
I have this little guy, this Daily Stoic. For anybody that is interested in dipping their toe into what we're talking about and using some of these concepts that Mark has in place to inject hope and kind of calm your soul a little bit. The Daily Stoic Journal is a huge one. I'm on my seventh trip through it.

Mark Foster [00:31:46]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:31:47]:
And I think you and I found it at about the same time. You've done more reading than I have, but I have read the Obstacles. Okay.

Mark Foster [00:31:54]:
Have you read any of, like, Marcus Aurelius or Seneca's?

Diana Alt [00:31:57]:
I have not read any Seneca outside, like, things that I've read from, like, the Daily Stoic, like, on the blog or whatever in the journal, I have read some Marcus Aurelius. The thing that got that kind of started for me, I mentioned in 2018, I was having a very, very difficult time. But around that same time, the boss that I liked and I had this crazy conversation where we got on the topic of Rome, and part of what happened was I had worked with this person for a couple years in the company, and then they brought me in a different department, and then they brought me in to report to him in the product management team. And so I asked him, like, what's one of. Like, what made you want to pull me in to your team? Because I knew what was beyond my expertise. And he said, I watched you go from being very Greek to being more Roman over the time we worked together. And I was like, I'm gonna need you to unpack that for me. And so he talked about how the Greeks were very concerned with form and perfection and things like that, and the Romans were more concerned about practicality.

Diana Alt [00:33:10]:
Yes. And he had watched me evolve to be less. I want to do things because this is how we're supposed to do them and more how what are we trying to accomplish here?

Mark Foster [00:33:21]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:33:21]:
Comfortable with things that were a little more messy. And it ended up in a conversation about, like, well, who's your favorite Roman Empire? Which I like to jokingly answer that question with Caligula because he was horrible. And people go, that doesn't seem like You. But really he said Marcus Aurelius. And then we started talking about stoicism. I had a couple other friends that were kind of into it, and that led me to that handy dandy little book, which. The process of really digging through what I can control and what I can't control with the help of things like the Daily Stoic, helped me realize that the only thing I can control is me and my mindset. Like, you can't even actually control your own body, which people argue with me about all the time.

Diana Alt [00:34:08]:
You can't control your children. You can physically remove them and you can try to punish them. You can't control them.

Mark Foster [00:34:14]:
There's a difference between restraint and control.

Diana Alt [00:34:17]:
Yes. Yeah. Restraint or constraint and control are very different. And you can't really control your body because, like, what if your body decides you want some cancer? Like, it wants some. It's going to have some cancer. Like, you can't do anything about that. So I started picking through, like, which of these things are under my control and which of these things are not under my control. And I'm really stubborn.

Diana Alt [00:34:43]:
So it took a long time. And I still am discovering this all the time. But now it's one of the top things that I very practically talk about my clients with particularly unemployed people in a job search. I think it's the most important for me.

Mark Foster [00:34:59]:
Yes.

Diana Alt [00:34:59]:
To remind them which thing in this you can control and can't control. My shorthand for that is if someone else has to make a decision, then you don't control it. Right. You can influence it, though.

Mark Foster [00:35:15]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:35:16]:
So you can influence by putting your best foot forward.

Mark Foster [00:35:19]:
So.

Diana Alt [00:35:22]:
Your LinkedIn says you help leaders create a culture of hope in their organizations.

Mark Foster [00:35:28]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:35:29]:
A lot of times we say things like that on LinkedIn and they're like, sounds cool in your headline. What does that actually mean? So what does that actually mean?

Mark Foster [00:35:40]:
It means helping leaders who are the ones who have the ability to make the necessary changes. It means helping leaders create a workplace environment where people have a sense of autonomy, where they have a sense where they can make some decisions that can affect their daily routines, even in the most systematized workplace environments, like fast food, even. Because when people. Because when people have that sense of autonomy, that sense of if you want autonomy instead of control, when they have a feeling like, I can direct this, like my decisions matter, my voice matters, then their hope levels rise because they realize there are some things I can do here. And when their hope levels rise, employee longevity. Studies show that people will stay at work longer. Studies show People will be more productive and they'll actually choose to stay in a job for less money with more hope than a job with greater money. That's more restrictive or soul crushing.

Mark Foster [00:36:44]:
So it's one of the best things that a company or organization can do for their employees and for their company without spending, conceivably, without even spending a lot more money.

Diana Alt [00:36:56]:
Yeah. What is. So let's, let's talk about a scenario here. I think a lot of people have felt, let's say you're working with a leader, whether it's a company owner or like a team manager, a director. I don't think it really matters for this conversation. But you have someone that is a leader of people and they want to have. They have traditionally had a very tight amount of control on their team and they know they need to make changes to improve their team, but they are clutching on to all of the decisions and control. It's like with their, you know, you can take it from my cold dead hands vibes, what are some of the first things that you do to help that person shift so that their team can shift?

Mark Foster [00:37:50]:
One of the questions that I like to ask them is what difference would it make around here if everybody, if everybody came to work like they owned the police place?

Diana Alt [00:37:57]:
Oh, that's a great.

Mark Foster [00:38:00]:
Because normally the response, normally the response is, well, that's what they do now. Nobody's listening to me. That's not. See that's, that's the problem. Owners don't act like that. Owners are invested in the company. Like.

Diana Alt [00:38:11]:
Right.

Mark Foster [00:38:12]:
What difference would it make if everybody who came to work came to work like they had a stake here? Yeah, that's, that's what we mean by that. And so, and do you think they're showing up like they own the place now and if not, what do you think we could do to change that? Those are the first, those are the first three questions we would walk through.

Diana Alt [00:38:32]:
Oh, so then presumably you hear, oh my gosh, it would be so much better because that's really why you came up with those questions. As you figured out, the answer is, oh my gosh, that's going to make things so much better. How do you start to help that manager release decisions and loosen up the environment?

Mark Foster [00:38:59]:
I do that by empowering that leader or manager to actually make decisions that matter. A lot of micromanagers and people that are hyper controlling are actually feeling a sense, a lack of control themselves. So for example, real case scenario, instead of having a daily meeting where you tell everybody everything they have to do today, and then get on to them for production being down. And so we're going to do this, this, this and this. Instead, have a meeting where you give people the opportunity. I don't care if it's once a week or once a month, give them the opportunity, the people on the floor, to talk to you about what's working and not working. You don't have to promise that you're going to do everything they say, but that you're always going to look for one thing that that makes a difference and do your best to implement it. So the leader still gets to be the one saying, that's a good idea, let's implement that.

Mark Foster [00:39:52]:
The worker says, that was my idea that they implemented. And so now we're working together to increase. Now we're both showing up like we own the place. So you're not stripping a leader of their role as a leader. So it's not some kind of non leader leadership mantra, it's you are a leader, but here's one of the things you can do, here's the kind of decisions you can make that will empower the people that work for you as well, while you still retaining that leadership role.

Diana Alt [00:40:23]:
I think that's really important too, because a lot of people like they might be a manager, they want to be the VP someday. You don't make it to VP unless you have trained some people behind you on how to make good decisions of the types that you would make. Because fundamentally, at the end of the day, the top job of a manager at whatever level is to make decisions that impact their span of control. I'm also reminded as you talk about this, I worked in the software development world for a bazillion years, like almost 20 years before I left to just focus on my own business and in agile software development, which is what I did for most of my career. We have a methodology called scrum. It's centered around what's called a scrum team, which does come from the concept of a rugby scrum, where they're in football.

Mark Foster [00:41:18]:
I have no idea what you're talking about.

Diana Alt [00:41:20]:
Well, it's like a football huddle.

Mark Foster [00:41:23]:
Okay, okay, okay.

Diana Alt [00:41:24]:
It's a lot like a football huddle. There's a term in rugby that's called scrum, which is very much same thing. And so in the football huddle, yes, you might have the quarterback communicating things like here's what we're about to do, but the quarterback can't control anything. The quarterback can say. Our outcome is that we're trying to get the third the, the first down from this third and long situation, we're going to do this play like, and then you're crossing your fingers hoping that everything works and the defenders aren't too good at blocking you, Right?

Mark Foster [00:41:57]:
Yes.

Diana Alt [00:41:57]:
So that's kind of what happens. And that is designed. The principle behind it, when done well, is that the facilitator of the team in agile, which is called a scrum master or sometimes called like a team coach, things like that, they are helping people understand this is the outcome we're shooting for. And then asking the rest of the team, do you understand what you need to do? Do you have any blockers to us meeting that outcome over the next day or week or however long between meetings? So it's very similar to what you're talking about. So we have a sports analogy. We've got your real world world analogy. We've got the software development analogy. It can work in many different contexts.

Diana Alt [00:42:47]:
Nice. A lot of people are out of work right now.

Mark Foster [00:42:50]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:42:52]:
And what's one of the most interesting things about it is the number of people. It's often been called a white collar recession.

Mark Foster [00:43:00]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:43:02]:
So we see a lot of people that look like they're very fancy on the outside. They have a big house and a nice car and they just lost their $150,000 job with the fancy benefits. And they are not feeling hope. And in some cases it doesn't look that much different than the person that makes $15 an hour and had been barely scraping by in an apartment with a roommate and, you know, an old car. So what do you see as the similarities and the differences between those two situations? Like, are those really as much different as we think they are, or is there a lot of similarity between hope, lack of hope, and kind of capturing a sense of hope even when there's a big socioeconomic difference?

Mark Foster [00:43:51]:
I think the principles are the same. Wherever you fall on that continuum. I don't think. Yeah, I think the principles work. The details are different, but the principles are the same.

Diana Alt [00:44:04]:
Okay. I'm inclined to agree with you. Most of the people that I work with are kind of in The, I mean, 120 and up. You know, I've had people that. Clients that make insane money that I'll never see in my life.

Mark Foster [00:44:19]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:44:19]:
But the difference in my observation in my career is that success in, say, a job search in a weird environment like this current white collar recession and not success. It's not driven by whether people are better qualified, whether they applied for more jobs, whether they networked better Better Nearly as much as it is whether they had the mindset to keep going.

Mark Foster [00:44:51]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:44:52]:
And you can't keep going if you don't have hope.

Mark Foster [00:44:55]:
No, you won't keep going without hope.

Diana Alt [00:44:57]:
You just aren't going to. I have like a lightning round that's probably not really going to be a lightning around because it's not yes or no questions. But I want to. I want to run through this with you if you're open.

Mark Foster [00:45:07]:
Okay, well, I'll just answer yes or no, no matter what question it is.

Diana Alt [00:45:09]:
And then don't do that. That won't be fun for anyone but you. Okay. Okay. What's the worst piece of career advice you've ever received?

Mark Foster [00:45:20]:
The worst? Stay the course.

Diana Alt [00:45:23]:
Ah, Tell me more about that.

Mark Foster [00:45:28]:
Okay. I. I hate it because it's. It's two things. It's based on the sunk cost fallacy and the escalation of commitment fallacy. Just because something's not working if we just do more of it, you know, or that the most important thing in. In life is never to change, you know? And the truth of the matter is if something's not working, the sooner you change course, the better you're going to be.

Diana Alt [00:45:49]:
Yeah. But my. I used to work for a guy who was a VP direct. He was a product executive at a company I worked for. His name was Peter. And he. He used to say that one of his top jobs was to help convince people to stop doing the same stupid shit harder. So that falls in that bucket.

Diana Alt [00:46:11]:
What is a red flag in the job interview that people ignore too often? You might not interview as much. So if this is a hard question, but what's a red flag in picking a new job, let's call it that. That people ignore too often.

Mark Foster [00:46:29]:
I think if they can't tell you what place you're going to have why it's important that you're in this position? If they're just looking to fill a. Fill a spot and you're. You're a warm body. I, I wouldn't. I don't want to be a warm body in an empty spot if they.

Diana Alt [00:46:45]:
Don'T know what the role is for. Yep. They can't tell you the outcomes. Cool. What is a mindset shift that you wish more people would make so you can dig a little deeper on some of this Hopi stuff? If you would like. What's a specific mindset shift you'd like to see more people make?

Mark Foster [00:47:05]:
I'd like more people to change their mind on the tagline that I use that there's never nothing you can do that there's always. In any situation, no matter how hopeless it appears, there's always something you can do. And when you do that thing, other things start to happen.

Diana Alt [00:47:28]:
Yeah.

Mark Foster [00:47:28]:
And so just that. That being stuck in that mindset of there's nothing I can do. I'm trapped. I'm stuck. Like, if you tell yourself that, it's true, but I promise you there's something you can do.

Diana Alt [00:47:42]:
Cool. I'm inclined to agree. Even if it's sitting for two minutes and calming yourself down, that is something that you can do. The other day, I cleaned out my linen closet, and so I just have only. I have only the sheets that I actually want to own, and they are nice. What's a totally useless skill that you have that you're weirdly proud of?

Mark Foster [00:48:10]:
I can carve faces into golf balls.

Diana Alt [00:48:13]:
I'm sorry, what?

Mark Foster [00:48:14]:
I can carve faces into golf balls. Do you want to see one?

Diana Alt [00:48:18]:
Yeah, go get one. I gotta see this. I don't fall off. Here you have a harp behind you.

Mark Foster [00:48:27]:
That's a skill that I have that I'm actually proud of. So.

Diana Alt [00:48:31]:
Okay, you're weirdly proud of.

Mark Foster [00:48:33]:
So here it is. Here's a golf ball that I carve a face into. Totally useless, but I'm really proud of it.

Diana Alt [00:48:42]:
I like it. Who is that supposed to be? Is it just a character?

Mark Foster [00:48:45]:
Just anybody? Yeah, I'm not. I'm not talented enough to do, like. Yeah, it's just.

Diana Alt [00:48:49]:
You're not talented enough to, like, carve my face into it.

Mark Foster [00:48:52]:
No, I'm more like Michelangelo. I look at a golf ball and I see a face in there, and I just take away everything.

Diana Alt [00:48:57]:
Oh, you just take away anything that isn't the character. I love that. What is a common misconception people have about your work.

Mark Foster [00:49:06]:
That I don't.

Diana Alt [00:49:09]:
That's a real thing for pastors.

Mark Foster [00:49:11]:
It really is.

Diana Alt [00:49:12]:
I think people just wait around for someone to need something.

Mark Foster [00:49:19]:
Yep. Well, and it's true. A lot of pastors are just fat, lazy. They're just. They just are lazy. So it is an earned reputation. But it's not true in my case or in many cases.

Diana Alt [00:49:34]:
What is. What are two things that you are doing that people don't see but that matter as a pastor. Oh.

Mark Foster [00:49:47]:
That'S a.

Diana Alt [00:49:48]:
That is not on my piece of paper. I just came up with that one. So.

Mark Foster [00:49:51]:
Wow. Two things that I'm doing. I feel like Jeopardy. Music should be playing right now.

Diana Alt [00:49:58]:
I'm not gonna do that. If you only have one that's fine. But I just love for us to share an example, since a lot of people may feel like their pastor doesn't do as much. I feel so.

Mark Foster [00:50:09]:
I, I, I, I'm dreaming. I'm a. I'm. I'm dreaming. I. And a lot of people don't see that I dream constantly, both for the organization itself and for the people that are in it. Or I see potential and where things could be. And a lot of people don't see dreams.

Diana Alt [00:50:32]:
Yeah, they think that. They think much more closer and more tactical, especially in a small congregation.

Mark Foster [00:50:39]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:50:40]:
What's a question you have for me?

Mark Foster [00:50:43]:
What drives you?

Diana Alt [00:50:47]:
I hate seeing people waste their lives. So I am in a position. It's honestly my top fear and my ability to move forward and really commit to my business came about when I recognized that I was much more afraid of wasting my life than I was of any financial repercussions from maybe failing in a business. Okay. So that was the thing for me. And I, I see a lot of people who have a lot of money and family and stuff and opportunity, and they feel trapped. So you and I have that in common. Or they just spend their whole career on something that they either dislike or that's only okay.

Diana Alt [00:51:41]:
I think actually only okay is the most dangerous, because only okay chips away at you and chips away at you. Until one day you're like, what have I done with 20 years of my life? So what are you working on right now? Like what. What kind of project? Or I think you have a new community. Do you want to tell the people a little bit about that? Maybe. Maybe a little bit.

Mark Foster [00:52:04]:
I mean, so in the, in the hope space, I'm working on two things. One is working with individuals personally who may find themselves in a low hope setting. So I have a small membership group. There are 10 people in there right now where we're just. And they're just supporting each other. I put. I have video content, and I write in there inside of that Facebook group. And that's, That's.

Mark Foster [00:52:33]:
So I'm working on that. The biggest thing that I'm working on right now is building connections and developing a framework to be able to step into the corporate world or the non and the nonprofit world in a greater way to help those businesses and nonprofits build that culture of hope. Like, I'd love to be able to do that. When I hear managers say, I can't get people to stay, no one comes to work, I want to say, can we have a conversation? Because I think I might be able to help you if you're open to it. And there's a reason that people are that way. And I think we could make it. We could make an impact. We can't solve all the problems, but I bet we could solve.

Diana Alt [00:53:15]:
No, I think that's exceptional. It's very important right now, too. There's so much like. One of the. One of the interesting things for me as a coach has been that I work. I've worked with a lot of people where they might lack hope, they might need direction, they might need some perspective shifts, even therapy or spiritual counsel. But we've kind of known the construct that we were working in. And right now that feels like it's changing a lot very quickly.

Mark Foster [00:53:45]:
Yes.

Diana Alt [00:53:46]:
So even for me, like, do I actually know how to help people anymore? And then I go back and oftentimes it is the conversation for five minutes that matters more than anything else. So if people want to figure out what you're doing, like, if they wanted to work with you as an individual, where would you reach out? Where would they reach out to you?

Mark Foster [00:54:08]:
They could. They could go to. They could go to my Facebook page, my Facebook profile, and reach out to me. There's certainly in the professional space. LinkedIn would be also. I'm new on LinkedIn, but I'm building a network there. So I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn. And we can.

Diana Alt [00:54:26]:
LinkedIn. So that means he doesn't have as much spam in his inbox.

Mark Foster [00:54:31]:
And that's exactly right.

Diana Alt [00:54:32]:
Answer your dm. So go.

Mark Foster [00:54:35]:
Absolutely.

Diana Alt [00:54:35]:
For sure.

Mark Foster [00:54:37]:
And, you know, if someone. If someone reached out to you, I'd be happy to. I'd be happy to share, like, a phone number and stuff, too. Just not going to do that live on here.

Diana Alt [00:54:46]:
What? We're not putting. His phone number is 8, 6, 7, right? Yeah. His name is Jenny. Absolutely. Yeah. We can give that to them. So we've got. Again, you can also go to my.

Mark Foster [00:54:59]:
Website, strengthened by Hope.com and there's a. There's a contact form right now. There's just one page on that website. It's a landing page with a contact form. If you want to set. Fill that out, then we can. I can contact you that way.

Diana Alt [00:55:11]:
All right, fantastic. Thank you so much, Mark. Hey. This has been a blast.

Mark Foster [00:55:16]:
I love this.

Diana Alt [00:55:17]:
Your first. Did you say this was your first podcast?

Mark Foster [00:55:20]:
This is my. This is my fifth podcast interview, but the first one that's been live and so. Wow. So no chance to, like, undo anything if I say the wrong thing.

Diana Alt [00:55:30]:
Come on. That's like church on Sunday.

Mark Foster [00:55:32]:
That's true. I say a lot of wrong things then, too.

Diana Alt [00:55:35]:
It's the same. You probably talked to more people at church last week. Sunday, like, yeah, but just about every.

Mark Foster [00:55:40]:
Sunday I go home and I'm like, dang it, why did I say that thing?

Diana Alt [00:55:43]:
Yeah, it's the perpetual. I had the perfect thing and I thought of it 15 minutes after I was done with church, so. Or the conversation.

Mark Foster [00:55:51]:
My smartest things happen, you know, my smartest thoughts are in the shower when.

Diana Alt [00:55:55]:
No one can hear me. Mine are on road trips when you can't organize them.

Mark Foster [00:56:00]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:56:00]:
Like you'll be driving. And I don't road triple, but I'll be driving across I 70 to St. Louis. I have family that live in St. Louis, and I always think of the best stuff, and I'm like, I can't capture any of this because I'm driving, so I'm never going to remember that. I guess, really, if I do remember it, that means it was probably the most important thing, so.

Mark Foster [00:56:19]:
That's right.

Diana Alt [00:56:19]:
Well, thank you so much for coming on. Work should feel good today.

Mark Foster [00:56:23]:
Hey, I enjoyed it.

Diana Alt [00:56:24]:
I look forward to seeing how you continue in this work, especially how you help corporate leaders on helping their teens have more hope.

Mark Foster [00:56:33]:
Thank you, Diana.

Diana Alt [00:56:34]:
Have a great day.

Mark Foster [00:56:35]:
You, too.

Diana Alt [00:56:36]:
All right. And that's it for this episode of Work should feel good. If something made you laugh, think, cry, or just want to yell yes at your phone, send it to a friend, hit follow, hit, subscribe, do all the things, and even better, leave a review if you've got a sec. I'm not going to tell you to give it five stars. You get to decide if I earned them. Work should feel good. Let's make that your reality.