← Jung On Purpose Podcast by CreativeMind
Jung On Purpose Podcast by CreativeMind
Why You Keep Repeating Patterns and the Secret to Change
00:34:40
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- [00:04]
Narrator
Welcome to Jung on purpose with CreativeMind, hosted by Deborah and Dr. Rob Maldonado, creators of the NeuroMindra coaching method based on Jungian psychology, non dual spirituality and social neuroscience. Join us each week as we explore personal growth for purpose seekers and the incredible inner journey of becoming your true self. Let's get started.
- [00:35]
Deborah Maldonado
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Jung on Purpose. I am Deborah Maldonado.
- [00:39]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
I am Dr. Rob. Welcome to the program.
- [00:43]
Deborah Maldonado
And we're with Creative Mind, and we are continuing our series on changing. Like what? What makes people change? What gives us people a transformation? I mean, that's what we're all about. We're not just here to just examine ourselves. We want our life to change. That's what draws people to personal growth. And last episode, we talked about why insight is not enough and why so many people just stop at insight and they're still stuck in the same patterns and how to get out. And so today, talk a little bit about how change happens in a Jungian model. But before we begin, I do want to remind you, if you're watching us on YouTube, click the button in the corner to subscribe to our channel. That helps us a lot. As well as if you're listening to us on any of the podcast services, make sure you subscribe to our podcast, Young on Purpose to get every episode. All right, so, Dr. Rob, if insight doesn't change us, what does?
- [01:40]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Does. I know. I mean, when I look back, right? The. The changes that I've been through, I could have never predicted them, right? Because you think when you're in a certain point, at a certain point in your life, you. You think, well, this is where I've gotten, and this is probably it, right? I'm gonna remain in this psychological space for the rest of my life. But that's not the case. Great. Transformation comes through self determination, self inquiry, which means just questioning yourself. Instead of accepting everything you're perceiving as a truth, you're questioning all those truths or all the apparent realities that come your way. So in depth psychology, we're not interested in just changing behavior, which is the aim of many, many models. And that's fine, right? If it's working for you and it works for you, keep, Keep doing it, of course. But it is the integration of the psyche.
- [02:45]
Deborah Maldonado
What does that mean to. Yeah, what does that mean?
- [02:48]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
So if you think about what needs integration, it's things that have been rent asunder, meaning they become two, or they. They're conceived as two different things. So what is the most obvious thing that we see as two different things in our. Our everyday experience. It's that we feel our conscious mind is separate there than our unconscious mind.
- [03:13]
Deborah Maldonado
And some people don't even know they have an unconscious mind or. Or understand it or have heard that idea.
- [03:20]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Well, yes, yes, But a lot of people know and understand that at night they have dreams, and that the dreams do not follow the rules of your waking consciousness or your waking awareness, and that they're completely different. That they are. They represent something alien to us.
- [03:42]
Deborah Maldonado
But we don't connect. You're saying we don't connect ourselves to the dream. We think the dreams are just like separate things. Yeah, separate things, but also too, Rob. I think what separates us is that we think we're an island in this world, that everything in this world, you know, is separate from us. Like, the people in the world that we interact with have separate, completely separate motivations and desires that are like we're only enclosed in our little bubble of our body and that that other person isn't showing me anything about my mind at all. We're very. Especially early in our life, we are our ego's pointed outwards. So we're always thinking the outer world is separate. And then we're separate from this, even our spiritual nature and our deeper selves. And so integration is integrating it all. And like, kind of instead of being split amongst ourselves, it's having some kind of unity with our experience.
- [04:43]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
That's a good way to put it. Yeah, yeah. And so Jungian psychology, you can say, is. Is the. A psychology or a model, a death depth psychology model of wholeness, that we're moving towards our human experience as a whole experience, not fragmented into conscious versus unconscious, inner versus outer. Yes, Us versus them, et cetera, et cetera.
- [05:10]
Deborah Maldonado
Us versus them.
- [05:11]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. Because that's a result really of an internal split in the psyche. You're simply rejecting that split onto the.
- [05:22]
Deborah Maldonado
Well, a really simple example is in main pop psychology and therapy, there's always blaming the parents for your life, you know, the childhood, and your parents weren't the way they should have been. And that's why I have these patterns. And in young psychology, he says that we project an archetypal image onto our parents. So we are the ones who are projecting onto them this divine, perfect mother, and with all those expectations. And then the human person just simply can't live up to that. And then we create an inner image of our mother based on our experience with our mother separate from our siblings or other people's mothers. And we have this kind of what we talk about the mother of Mago. And so we're experiencing our mother. She's not as separate from our mind. She's a part of our mind. And that is really fascinating to think about. I remember the first time I ever read that is that we're projecting that archetype onto the mother. Is that we're contributing to our experience of that childhood. Like we are a part of our psyches involved in it. It's not like everything happened to me and I'm this just helpless child. It's like our psyche is interacting with the environment and unconsciously helping us navigate.
- [06:40]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
That's. That's deep. Pretty deep.
- [06:43]
Deborah Maldonado
It's deep. But when we talk about. We're going to talk about complexes today and what they are, it's. The mother complex is one of those things. And we talk about in depth psychology.
- [06:54]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. And so let's pick it up where we left off on our last episode, which was the idea that insight is not enough as we want to change. Not after simply changing our learning or changing our behavior, but really creating structural change in that movement towards wholeness, towards integration. Right. So we. We got to the point where we understood the. At least in part, the role of emotion. The emotion is really the one that conditions us. And therefore Jung says, without the emotion there. There's no transformation. Because you have to turn the key the other way now. Use that same emotional component that the mind has been holding onto since we were kids now. Help it. Let it. Help us free our mind from that conditioning. Not by pushing it away, not by denying it, suppressing it, fixing it. We're not doing any of those things. We're simply acknowledging it, accepting it as this is part of what created me up to this point. Right. So it's. It's played an important role in my life. I'm not going to shame it. I'm not going to push it away. I'm not going to make it bad. I'm going to integrate it. Meaning, accept it. Ask the question of what can I do with it? How can I use this emotional energy to transform my life?
- [08:27]
Deborah Maldonado
So I love you say a lot that the outer conflict is pointing to an inner conflict. So you're hitting a wall in that area of your life. You're repeating a pattern. It corresponds to something inside. Again, beyond behavior fixing. We gotta go inside as like, what is the root cause? It's not what you're doing and it's not what you're saying. And it's not just what you're consciously thinking. It's this Energy that's moving. So let's talk about the. We talked a little bit about the child last week of being very emotional and not very rational. So the, the function of that emotion is to keep us alive, keep us safe, and read the room and make sure that we are conforming and aligning so we can survive not only physically, but socially. And so people had tougher childhoods than others. And so our patterns are all different. But I've noticed that even someone I would work with, someone who had very little drama in the childhood, like, but more of the parents just doted on them, but they were kind of made them almost expected too much of them, like, you're so perfect. And they kind of had a conflict around that. And then other people who've had tougher childhoods were more resilient. So it's not the, like, harshness of the childhood that dictates the level of work you have to do. For some people. It. It can be more difficult when you don't have all that resilience. And it's the first time you're really examining some of these things. So I know a lot of people, and I used to think that, like, oh, something really bad happened to me when I was young. It's going to take me longer and longer and more work to really have a transformation. And I want everyone to know who've had that experience that it's not necessarily so. And I've seen people who have had really tough experiences turn it around much quicker than some people who haven't. So it's not a depth of trauma or tragedy or drama that happened in the childhood. It's more of the person's resilience and willing to, you know, do the work and break free.
- [10:33]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, that's right. We're. We're powerful beings in that regard, that we're designed to survive. And we have great defense mechanisms externally and internally. We have a powerful immune system that protects us from all the viruses and bacteria in the world, as well as this internal ego that has ego defenses that protects our sense of self. The I, you know, and. And these defense mechanisms, of course, are what prevent many of us that are interested in personal growth and personal development. It stops us because the ego sees the unknown as bad, as dangerous. That's why a lot of people are afraid of their own mind, right? They're afraid to meditate or look inward or to examine their dreams. There's a lot of superstition about it. They think, you know, there's bad things in the unconscious mind and Freud obviously didn't help that with his formulation of the unconscious as a repository of violence, sexual desires, sexual desire. The egg kind of stuffed in there. Luckily for us, Young gave us a different picture of the unconscious mind. It's more a creative intelligence that lives deep in our psyche and helps us regulate our life in a creative way. Most of us are.
- [12:02]
Deborah Maldonado
And so it's very creative. The unconscious, like, as kids, like, we wouldn't rationally be able to figure out how to survive a situation. And the unconscious has this intelligence within it to help us with that survival. And I think it's the stages of where we're at is what we need as a child. Our unconscious gives us what we need that ego needs. Right? It is that the ego needs to kind of come up with these patterns. So there's nothing dysfunctional about them. They're actually very healthy adaptation. But then at different stage in life, those patterns, those functions don't help us anymore. So we have to evolve out of them. And we can't just evolve out of them, like you said, by just changing behavior. We have to go in and, like, almost untangle it. Almost like a tight piece of yarn that has all the thoughts and feelings and emotions and projections and then also narratives and an archetypal energy that's in there that is. Is driving those patterns. And we have to basically unwrap them through. Through the emotion. Because the emotion is really what. What locks it all together. It's like. Almost like it constellates all that stuff. Constellates emotionally.
- [13:14]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. I remember learning about. About learning theories. Learning about learning theories. So learning theories simply kind of create these models of how we learn to become human beings. Right. To fit into the. The family and the tribe and the culture and all that. So we're learning creatures, obviously. We learn really well through observation, through our own experience, through language, through culture, through. Even through art. Right. We learn just perception and things like that.
- [13:48]
Deborah Maldonado
We're always changing. We're always adapting. You're saying, right? We're always. I mean, we didn't. We don't remain a child. We learn and we learn from our mistakes. And we, you know, learn how to act in a. Different different cultures and different age groups, at different environments. A business environment versus, you know, on a softball field. And so we're always like. And then we're evolving too. But it's a very slow pace of learning. It's like, built into us. We're not meant to stagnate.
- [14:15]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Problem that I saw early on was that these models of learning are not taking into account our emotional life, which is what Jung emphasized. Right. That's what we were talking about last time, is that the emotion is such an important aspect of how the world imprints in our psyche. How does it leave its mark on us? It's through the emotion. It's not just through the visual language learning. It's through this feeling that we have, this feeling of meaning. What does this mean? What am I experiencing here? Those are the imprints that last forever and stay in our unconscious mind. So that when, you know, we were talking about, let's say, somebody's tendency to please, to be a pleaser and therefore kind of not really get what they need or want from social interaction. That pattern, we can pretty much bet, was imprinted initially emotionally. Because as young children, we're not thinking through things. We're not, you know, writing notes and then studying them and sitting and thinking.
- [15:28]
Deborah Maldonado
About contemplation like, I wonder.
- [15:31]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
We're simply experiencing the world directly. And that directness imprints on us emotionally. That's what stays with us for the rest of our life. Unless we do this. This inner work. It remains pretty much intact from those first nine years of life as the template for the way we do our life.
- [15:55]
Deborah Maldonado
Would you say that the. Like, we're kind of wide open, and then around 9 or 10, we start to, like, the rational mind kicks in and starts to kind of be a better filter for us. And so that's why people always say below nine is really the critical formation of our deep patterns. And that kind of, like, we have that rational mind starting to kick in. We start to become more of a young adult trying to figure things out. And it. It's a little. We're not as open and exposed as we were. And so the. The key, though, is, like, how do we change? So we have the emotion. How do we change? Do you. I don't know if you want to just mention what complexes are as a way to kind of talk about that.
- [16:40]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
So the Jung's model of a complex or the complexes is really interesting because then it helps us understand and reverse engineer a lot of our conditioning, our early childhood conditioning. We're not pushing it away. We're not denying it. We're not making it bad. We're simply saying, I can now make my own decisions in a conscious way. I do not need my early training of childhood to respond to life now, which is what most of us do when we don't do our work. We're acting pretty much based on our first nine years of life. As if we're still back there.
- [17:23]
Deborah Maldonado
The original template.
- [17:24]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
The original template, we're playing it out now in our relationships, in our work, in our own inner life. It's, it's. When you understand this principle, of course, it's, it's unacceptable. Why would we, why would we choose to act as we learn to act in the first nine years of life?
- [17:49]
Deborah Maldonado
And I think the insight part is interesting because when we talk about the emotion. Emotions are irrational. Insight is the rational mind. So the two of them are opposing in itself. And then the complex is like a group of systematic autonomous program. Like they have programs that happen in our life that kick in in certain situations, but the core of it is that early life. So we're reacting rather than creating in our life. We're always reacting to life versus making clear decisions. And you know, it feels like we're making conscious decision. It feels like I chose that job or I chose that relationship, or I chose this path of work that I wanted to do it all unconsciously. It's all choosing for us. It's choosing every partner you've had, your friends, the people you surround yourself with, your coworkers, they're all part of that field of, of, of collection of your mind and your psyche. So what we need to do to get to it is there's a lot of ways, and we talk about this a lot in our coaching, but it's really hard to do it directly for yourself because your ego is so, so easily help you to get distracted or get that insight and feel like you're done. And it doesn't want to go deep. So it's always like convincing you you've done enough work and you don't need to go there. And that's not it. So it's, it's always important to have a guide and, and to. To find someone to help you enter the unconscious. Sort of like a guide of a hero's journey. The guide is taking you on a journey of your own inner life. Not fixing you, not healing you, but. But helping you reveal what you can't see, what's not conscious. And when you talk about integration, that's what it is. It's making the unconscious. It's not healing the unconscious. It's not reprogramming the unconscious, it's making it conscious. And now the access you have to who you are is much broader because now it's not hidden from you. Now it's in front of you. And now you can make a decision. But before that, it's like running its own Little party underneath the surface.
- [19:58]
Narrator
You've spent years building success and achieving what others would only imagine. But yet something deeper is calling. A desire for work that's meaningful, transformative and rooted in who you really are. At CreativeMind, we train professionals to guide others through real psychological transformation using Jungian principles, Eastern spirituality and social media neuroscience. No cliches, no surface level tools, just depth, structure and purpose. Our ICF accredited Jungian Life coach training program provides a profound professional training in small cohorts that includes personal transformation with a dedicated coach and powerful tools to help you guide others in a deep, lasting transformation. Step into that next chapter of your personal and professional evolution. Join us by visiting creativemindlife.com and speak to an admission specialist today. That's creativemindlife.com.
- [21:11]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. So a simple definition of a complex, let's say, just so we're all on the same page. It is a constellation, meaning a kind of a conglomerate. Right. A putting together of memories, emotions, like we were talking about, you know, emotions. These early emotional patterns that we have, they can be part of a complex attitudes, behaviors too.
- [21:37]
Deborah Maldonado
Right? Like your condition patterns, your habits.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Compulsive behaviors, pattern of behaviors. So all these things together, the Jung identified them as complex axis. So we've all heard of inferiority, inferiority complex, Napoleon complex, the mother complex, mother complex, father complex. Those ideas are useful to us because now we can begin to understand where do these compulsions to act in a particular way come from. I don't mean compulsive in a, like.
- [22:14]
Deborah Maldonado
Overeating or smoking cigarettes, although that is a complex right there that we develop.
- [22:21]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Habits and like we always say, we're creatures of habit and that those habits are so difficult for us to change.
- [22:28]
Deborah Maldonado
Sometimes because they're the effect, they're not the cause. So changing behavior. I'm going. I was a hypnotherapist for a few years before I went into coaching full time. I, I really saw that this smoking had nothing to do with them. Like, I gotta, I just stopped smoking. It was like a deeper emotional need. Eating the same way. I wish I could just stop. All of it had to do with relationships and the emotions and the childhood stuff that came up during those sessions was really, wasn't about just thinking cigarettes are gross or don't eat any fatty foods and sugar's bad for you. It's. I'm choosing to feel to change my behavior. Those things, they may give you short term, you know, easy temporary fix, but you're right back to the pattern again every time.
- [23:13]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. So we can say or think about this. These complexes as we're embodying them, they became part of our. Or they were part of our environment, our emotional psychological environment growing up. And we internalize them, we absorb them into the structure of our cells, of our bodies, of our psyche. Therefore, they're very powerful because it feels that that's the way reality is according to the. The complexes in our psyche. In other words, our early experiences now become the shape of what we carry into the world and how we interpret the world. That's a powerful understanding. Right. Insight of the nature of the psyche. Which leads us then to, okay, how do we reverse that? Not again. Not pushing it away, not making it bad, but simply saying, if I'm ready now to decide and to make conscious decisions beyond my conditioning, beyond my. The structure of my complexes, how do I do that? How do I make those changes? And that. That requires that getting to the emotional layer of the complex so that we can accept these emotions and transform them. So here Jung says, this is how the emotion transforms the psyche from within. It communicates that the unconscious. That because it is an intelligence, like he says, it communicates through images and symbols with the conscious mind. So that it. In dreams, what is it doing? It's showing us these scenes that are powerfully symbolic. But because we interpret them literally, we miss the message. Once we start to decipher the symbolic meaning of these scenes in our dreams. It's like a code that transforms your conscious life. So it's being. Yeah, that energy is being communicated symbolically in the psyche.
- [25:32]
Deborah Maldonado
That's the beauty of working with a coach, because the coach will ask you a question. A young and coach would ask you a question that is not a typical question that your friends would say. And you get advice from your friends or your mother. They would ask you, well, what's so bad about that? And why resist that? And it's like the complexes are like this. Think of this metaphor is that you're trying to empty out like a pile of dirt, right? And you're creating a hole, and you're digging, and you want to create, you know, plant something. And you. You're digging and digging. But why you're not. What you're not seeing is another part of you filling up the hole again. So you're like. You're like, trying to empty the hole, but this other part of you is filling it up and you're getting nowhere. So it's like, rationally, you can work harder, you can maybe move it more, but that unconscious part of you is working against you. And it feels as though nothing is getting accomplished. And so that's why it's so important to go into the unconscious and, and see what's there. So you could say, hey dude, why are you keep filling out my hole? I'm trying to empty this hole here, what's going on? And, and it's like really having those symbolic through dreams. Jung used active imagination, which is sort of like an open exploration of your unconscious and dialoguing and exploring and spontaneous images appearing. Very intuitive. And then also just working and being with your emotion and what's that feeling of frustrate, what is happening? And so it's a. The complex is called complex because it's not simple. It's not as easy. I remember when I first started doing personal growth, it was all about limiting beliefs and you're good enough and just think positive and I'm confident and I'm going to make it. And don't, don't think negatively. Don't be critical of yourself. You know, the self talk needs to change and that was great and you need to go take action. But it really wasn't. It was kind of like just skimming the surface. And I did feel a little better. It's not bad. But it's not the whole picture. It's not going to get you to the promised land which is emptying that hole that you want to empty.
- [27:46]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. So the image that we get then from Jung's model is that the. These symbolic forms and communication that's going on between the conscious and the unconscious mind is the fuel of the psyche. It's the fuel. It's what makes it move. It's what, you know, motivational speakers talk about. Motivation, inspiration, creativity. Where does all that come from and what does that mean? It means there's great emotional energy in the psyche that's moving it, that's inspiring it. Right. It's. It's like the spirit within us that activates our will and our creativity. All that is impossible without the complexes. The complexes is simply. It's the. The question simply becomes am I going to live my life unconsciously? Meaning, let the complexes do whatever they learn.
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Deborah Maldonado
Automation.
- [28:40]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. In those early years and repeat the patterns. Of course now with more learning and more Persona and all this stuff. Or can I take the reins of my psyche and make decisions for myself? The kind of, kind of work that I do and the meaning that I derive from that work, the kind of relationships that I create. All that I can decide for myself. I don't need the complexes to tell me you Know what is the old pattern? Let me just repeat that. And that's what happens with most people, that they repeat these the same old patterns. Therefore they think that's as good as it gets. Right. I don't. You know, my life just turns out this way. They're not taking the reins. They're not consciously deciding who they are and what they want out of their life.
- [29:30]
Deborah Maldonado
And I could tell you, just working in. I've been the coach for over 23 years now. The first question people say is, I know my pattern. I know I want to stop this pattern. How do I stop this pattern? And I want to say that I think the biggest mistake I made early on is that resentment of the pattern. And I think we need to approach the pattern and the complex in a very friendly way because it had a purpose at some point. And instead of resenting or trying to run away from the pattern again, you're just pushing that in the unconscious again and you're resenting it. Versus let's work together. Let's make this conscious. Let's. Let's bring. Illuminate this part of my mind. So when we have. We work with Eastern philosophy, with our coaching, so it's very different than just the traditional psychology. We bring in the Eastern philosophy, which is this wisdom mind that we have, this conscious mind, this witness that's always there, that's untouched by our life. That powerful part of our conscious mind is.
- [30:34]
Narrator
Is.
- [30:34]
Deborah Maldonado
Is like a light that can break apart the delusion and it can be witnessing to it and in itself, when we start bringing it to that light versus our ego, examining our patterns. But having this witness kind of bring space to it without judgment, it really does something really transformational, just even being the witness to it without judging. So that's our approach with working with the emotions, and we're working with our work. We're not pushing anything away. We're not trying to fix a bad habit. We're trying to understand what's the motivation underneath it. So it frees up so much more than just the one thing you're trying to heal or fix. It's your life. Whole life changes. You see how this complex has ruled all parts of your life.
- [31:18]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
That's how transformation happens.
- [31:21]
Deborah Maldonado
Yes, make transformation happen.
- [31:24]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, it begins with this kind of just dissatisfaction, let's say, with the status quo.
- [31:33]
Deborah Maldonado
And one thing too is that you need both intellect and emotion. So you don't want to just dive into an emotion and have catharsis. And you also don't want to be hyper intellectual. You want to have both come together, the balance of the yin and the yang. The anima anatomist. For that transformation, you need both. I know that, you know, a lot of people in the 80s, they would have people have catharsis and they always thought that that was like, release your anger and release your sadness, release your. Your passions. But that just rewired your brain to be more angry. Like it kind of reinforced it. What we want to do is something a little different. And I know that a lot of people, especially in now we're very in our heads. We look at our online, we're maybe triggered about current politics and situations in the world that we're upset about and. But we're really kind of in our heads a lot. I think everyone needs to be invited to get back into their body and start feeling how we're feeling and not running away from ourselves and how we feel. That's an ego defense mechanism to keep you in intellect versus really feeling what you need to feel. We were at a call once and Rob, you were like, that's really true. When I said we're not really afraid of any event in our life. We're afraid of how it's gonna make us feel. And if we're not afraid of feeling, then we're unstoppable. But when we were kids, we were afraid of feeling bad. We were afraid of feeling, you know, powerless. And so we found ways to cope. And so what if we open that up again and ask a different question to ourselves of what is this really helping me do? Avoiding this feeling?
- [33:09]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Love it.
- [33:10]
Deborah Maldonado
Yeah. So the next episode we're going to talk about self improvement to individuation and the difference from fixing yourself to becoming yourself. And we're gonna talk about individuation and how it's a different model than most coaching models. So if you're interested in something new, trying something new, or a fan of young Always a great topic to learn about individuation. So we'll see you next week. In the meantime, just check in with your body. Am I feeling what I'm feeling? Allowing yourself to feel what you feel, it's a very powerful experience to be inside your body and everything's going to be okay.
- [33:49]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Embodied emotions.
- [33:50]
Deborah Maldonado
Embodied emotions. All right, thanks, Rob, for wonderful topic today. Good idea. And we'll see you next week on Jung on Purpose.
- [34:00]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
See you soon.
- [34:01]
Deborah Maldonado
Bye.
- [34:02]
Narrator
Thank you for joining us for Jung on Purpose with Deborah Maldonado and Dr. Rob Maldonado of Creative Mind. Don't forget to subscribe.
- [34:11]
Deborah Maldonado
Subscribe to our podcast before you leave.
- [34:13]
Narrator
And join us each week.
- [34:14]
Deborah Maldonado
We'll see you soon.