Amy:
Welcome to Women in WP, a bimonthly podcast about women who blog, design, develop and more in the WordPress Community.
Angela:
Hi, welcome to Women in WP. Today’s episode is sponsored by Ninja Forms. I’m Angela Bowman.
Amy:
And I’m Amy Masson.
Tracy:
And I’m Tracy Apps.
Angela:
Our guest today is Cate DeRosia joining us from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Cate is an advocate and volunteer inside the WordPress ecosystem, helping others see how the WordPress platform can be used to create their lives they want to lead. That sounds amazing. Welcome, Cate.
Cate:
Hi. Thanks so much for having me.
Angela:
We’d like to start off each episode asking our guests how they got into WordPress. How did you get started?
Cate:
I’m married into it. It was kind of inevitable. So my husband began building websites in ’95. So before the internet had pictures. It’s always paid more than my English degree ever would, believe it or not. I know that shocks everybody. I mean, he loves it. If he wasn’t getting paid for it, he’d do it as a hobby. So this was always going to be a part of our life and I just kind of gave up and embraced it.
Cate:
So when I was getting near the end of homeschooling, the girls realizing I was going to get to do something else with the rest of my life. He’d been in WordPress for five or six years at that point and knew that that was just going to be where we were going to be that instead of trying to fight it again, I would just see if there was a place for me in there as well. A non-technical place because I didn’t want to be a developer and I’m not trained as a designer. So it’s been a really interesting adventure, kind of investigating what WordPress has to offer that’s not development design.
Amy:
Well, I think it’s interesting because a lot of people think you really have to be in a designer or developer if you’re going to work in WordPress and that’s just not the case. So what have you found to be the areas that you enjoy being a part of?
Cate:
Yeah, so my background is English, but really you’re focused on communications and journalism. So I am really big on the soft business skills side. I never really thought of myself as a sales person, but actually, I’m liking the sales and marketing side of things. Even just human resources. When it began, everybody had to be a developer and if you happen to be a designer, that was great. And then it got to a spot where you could be a developer who hired a designer. As development has grown, as building websites has grown, it’s moved from being that all in one kind of one person does it to a regular business where different people fill different with their different skills.
Cate:
So now you can get a job as a project manager without ever having built a website because you have good project management skills. You’re starting to see a lot more hiring across different industries and it’s making the whole ecosystem a lot richer.
Angela:
Yeah, that’s so interesting because my first job out of college, I had a degree in religious studies and I went straight to work in a software company as a project coordinator, project manager. Then I built some technical skills through that and more along the lines of technical writing and then became more technical. But my entry was that, and it’s interesting that WordPress is a software, but those other softer skills have been leader to come to the ecosystem as opposed to other traditional software companies that already embraced all those roles.
Cate:
Yeah. And it really is a sign of a successful company when they start embracing the softer side. It helps you stand out more inside the industry. It helps you have more successful projects because you’re having better client relationships, you’re getting more recurring revenue. Building those relationships, and it all comes down to relationships is really what builds a successful product and successful business in the end.
Tracy:
I mean, we go way back. I’ve just been… Because you’ve always, like, “Oh, I’m not technical. I just kind of like this.” But you have become such an important part of the WordPress community. I love it. And not only have you carved your own space for it, but your daughters just embraced it and took it and ran with it and speak at conferences and all this stuff. Who inspired whom on that?
Cate:
It’s such a funny story. I don’t enjoy technology, but I have built websites enough to know that that is really not what I want to do. Plus, I mean, it’s what my husband’s known for it and I’ve really liked to not just follow him. But it really has been just the core of our life. So the girls grew up in it. One of the things that we never did was make them do any of it. So if they were interested, they got to be involved. If they weren’t, that was fine. So it was actually, I think, when I met Tracy at WordCamp Chicago in 2014.
Amy:
That’s where I met her too.
Cate:
See? So I had been helping with WordCamp here in Grand Rapids. Brian Richards was putting it on. We were volunteers. The girls were helping because it’s just kind of like, we just do things as a family. It’s how I was raised. It’s how the girls were raised. If one of us is involved, everybody is involved, whether you like it or not. But at a level you want to be involved at it. So they got introduced and really it’s the community that sucked us all in. We didn’t really have a desire to build webpages. We didn’t need to build web pages. We didn’t need to run businesses. None of those things, but meeting the people and being involved in a creative atmosphere, that entrepreneur atmosphere, my girls were talking about starting their own business at 10 and 12, 12 and 14.
Cate:
There wasn’t a scary barrier of entry. It wasn’t something I ever considered at their age because you just couldn’t. You had to have so much upfront capital and so many different things. Where with the internet, it just changes all of that. So Chicago 2014 was the first camp I attended as an attendee. And it was also the first camp the girls attended as attendees at 12 and 14. We told them if we were going to pay for them to go into Chicago and spend the time having a fun weekend, they had to at least know a little bit about WordPress.
Cate:
Because we were homeschooling, I made them read Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s WordPress book and they actually… So they read it two weeks and had their own websites built and went on to do a ton of writing. She really thought she’d hate it. She’s the older daughter. Sophie hated it and didn’t want to do anything with it, and eventually has become… She’s the one who’s really much more involved at this point. She has spoke at WordPress conferences in her Captain Marvel suit about mental health.
Tracy:
I love it.
Cate:
So it’s just something that the community was so inviting. Tracy was the first talk of the day. But the first talk that girls went to, all three of us ended up there by accident because at 12 and 14 we could let the girls just go and go wherever they wanted. And we all ended up in Tracy’s talk. We all fell in love with her, of course. She’s been a member-
Tracy:
Everyone does.
Cate:
-of this family ever since.
Tracy:
I love it.
Cate:
So then from there, they got to deal with what they wanted within the ecosystem.
Tracy:
And they have. I love it.
Amy:
I don’t think we had talked to a lot of people that really have their children involved in WordPress and in the WordPress community. I’ve been to a number of WordCamps and I’ve seen kids, but it’s not that common.
Cate:
I think it’s harder. It depends a little bit. I’ve met a few. I think part of it is that we had kids pretty young. So there weren’t necessarily a lot of kids old enough. You still have to be a certain age to be able to appreciate and enjoy it. I mean, you can start doing more with it. Like kids camp is letting them do more of that at an earlier age, but 12 and 14 is really when you can kind of sink your teeth into it. And you’re functional as a human being enough to not be completely disruptive by WordCamp by yourself. There’s a different level there, but it is something I’ve really thought about actually is how to get more kids involved, because if we don’t bring in the next generation, no matter what good things we build, it’s still going to die.
Tracy:
Absolutely.
Cate:
Such a happy note.
Tracy:
I know, right?
Tracy:
This is where we cue the children of our future as something.
Amy:
Teach them well and let them lead the way.
Tracy:
There you go.
Cate:
And that’s where I actually think the headless movement is going to be a big benefit to us because it opens more doors for additional opportunities. I’m a huge fan of and. Just being able to do this and do that. So you don’t have to do it. It used to be so much you had to do this or do that. Where now you could use Shopify and WordPress. You could learn React and WordPress. There’s always a gateway drug that then pulls you into the others. Well, that’s a weird way to phrase it, it’s absolutely 100% the truth because you find that one thing and then you find the next big thing and the next cool thing. I’m really excited about the headless approach to WordPress and the options that that brings to it.
Tracy:
Yeah. I’ve had clients ask like, “Oh, well WordPress has been around for a bit. Is it on its way out?” And I was like, “No. I don’t see an end to it at all because of the fact that it’s transforming itself into more of this… It’s a tool. It’s a platform that can be used in any way, shape or form that you need it to be. And then it being open source even more so like that it’s going to just keep changing and growing, especially since it’s so popular. So I love that too. It also sometimes scares me because I’m like, I got into development back in ’96, right after images were all part of the web.
Cate:
Embedded, right?
Tracy:
But then I was like, if I hadn’t started that, I would be so overwhelmed right now if I tried to get into web development, because there’s so much. But I mean, it is. There’s a lot of opportunities and you can kind of create your own path, which is that’s actually what my HeroPress story was all about is that I can create my own job because when the recession hit, I just was like, “Well, going to make my own job.”
Cate:
We spent this last year looking at how I can best put my time into the project. I’ve stayed away from it for the original bit of it. I had enough else going on. It was also Tofer’s project that he was just really excited about. As a writer and an editor, the last thing I wanted to do was start moving in and doing anything with the essays, or it just seemed better if we wanted to stay married, if I stayed away from it. We’ve reached a spot where it’s much more reasonable for me to step in, and we realized that what we want to create is that understanding of how you really can build a life you want using this platform, which does allow you to then be like you can include it with your other things you already do.
Cate:
But if you want to be someone who… So I come from small town America. There are a hundred people in the town, five miles from my parents’ house. So it’s small and nobody lives there anymore. The grocery store just closed because there aren’t jobs. But now you can take something like WordPress back into that community and start working from there, and you can be near your relatives.
Cate:
I have roads up there that are named after my grandparents. My family has been there forever. But I could never live there because we needed to be two hours away in the city in order to do our job, where I would live, they’ll just show people how they can go back to where they came from, how you can choose a more simple life. How you can choose a more complicated life. How you can take it on the road and live out in the RV or out of a backpack, moving in from the city. You can really can create a job or build a job that grows with you, that goes with you, that wherever you are, you can do your job, then you’re not limited.
Angela:
I think part of that, being able to travel and go to these different places really has a lot to do with your network because my ability to travel and work is so dependent on the fact that I have all these clients and connections that are bringing me work. And part of that, I had to build locally, but then I have so many clients that are not local at all. Or even if they’re local, I’ve met with them one time. It’s fascinating.
Angela:
We’re literally 10 miles apart. We could get together and have a meeting. So that network is so important. How do you feel the network supports that lifestyle? How would you build a network like that to support that lifestyle, if you’re not in a place where you… If you do decide to go live more rural, do you feel like you’d have to travel or to meet people? How does that all fit together?
Cate:
That’s an excellent question because if we moved back to my small town and tried to run a business out of there, there would be no clients. I mean, it’s near a pretty big tourist town, and so we would get business from there. But if you’re looking locally for business, that’s not going to work. Absolutely true. So having that network, being involved online, building those relationships, which originally the best way to do it, is at WordCamp because it’s still nice to see people face-to-face. Still nice to be at face-to-face events.
Cate:
But at the same time, I think the pandemic has really helped us in a way and that so many things have turned virtual that have opened so many global doors to people that you just couldn’t have. We did the path of starting extremely local. Everything we did was face-to-face. Tofer often went and actually worked on site and then we moved into more of a regional, and then we moved to national and then global with our relationship building, as we hit different stages of our business, because you start running out of local work and you start running out of regional work.
Cate:
You have to keep expanding, but it also allows you to continue picking and choosing the work you want to do as opposed to being forced to take the work that you have. So much of that just comes from building the relationships. It can be attending meetups. It can be attending conferences. It can be getting involved in Facebook groups. There’s just so many options out there and it’s just finding the one that’s right for you.
Cate:
Some of them are awful for some people, but it doesn’t make them awful for everybody. I’m not a huge Facebooker, but I really like Facebook groups because I can really curate who I’m talking to. I just don’t do the rest of Facebook at all. It’s hilarious. I mean, I love Twitter because almost all of my WordPress friends are on Twitter. I do a lot of relationship building there. But not so much on LinkedIn. I’m still there, but it’s much more about just sharing content, which is fine because you need that too.
Cate:
So it’s about accepting what a platform is and working within it. But if you don’t build your relationship and you don’t build relationships and you don’t build your reputation, so I think that’s another big one, which is not about having any specific relationship. You don’t have to be a super nice person. You don’t have to be overly generalist. You don’t have to be somebody you’re not. You just have to be authentically who you are and consistently be who you are. You’ll get the clients that you’re supposed to have because they want to hire you. It’s always about hiring you.
Tracy:
One of the things that every single time where I’m like, “I’m struggling. I don’t know about clients. I don’t have anything in the pipeline. I don’t know what to do. I shouldn’t spend this money to go to this conference or this event. I should be working. I should be doing these other things. Every single time I invest in that and whether it is a WordCamp or just investing that time to go to a meetup virtually or in person, every single time it pays off like, “Oh, yeah, that’s right. You do this thing.” And I was like, “Yeah. It was like I didn’t go to the thing and tending to get business.”
Tracy:
But just by connecting with people and realizing in the WordPress community is such a collaborative and helpful community. It just kind of naturally happens as soon as you have, like you do, make that reputation and you’re reliable. You’re kind or whatever. You’re smart. Whatever it is, you’re authentically you as you say. And that is really valued in the WordPress community. Very much so.
Cate:
Yeah. It is really a huge part of it. And again, I really want to stress that authentic-ness. It’s okay if you’re crazy. It’s okay, even if you’re kind of a terrible person. Just be a consistently terrible person. Because you don’t always hire somebody just because you like them, you hire them… But it’s, I will hire an honest person.
Tracy:
Your known quantity.
Cate:
Right, exactly. That’s it. The more you interact in the community, the more you’re known. If I was looking for someone to say, put up a fence because I got a new puppy, it wouldn’t be, I would ask a friend and if you can ask a colleague. You’re more likely to go with that person because they are known as opposed to just opening… well, we don’t open phone books anymore. But instead of just Googling and picking the top results, because you’ll feel more comfortable and happy with your selection.
Amy:
Yeah. I think the world of the WordPress community has made remote work so much more palatable to people. I’ve been working at my home forever, but I was working here for many years, like six years before I went to my first WordCamp and actually met other people that do what I do. That is allowing people to go and live wherever they want, and I see these really cool countries offering these incentives to go, “Hey, move here and live here.” And I’m like, “If I didn’t have this ball and chain, I’d be up to Italy tomorrow. I can work anywhere.”
Cate:
Yeah. It’s so cool because you gain so much from… I like to think of it as being rich like brownies where the more people, the more depth there is to your individual world, but also to their world. And the ability to be able to travel someplace and meet another WordPress community because they’re everywhere. HeroPress is becoming huge. Like I said, I grew up in a tiny town. I would have never met people from India and we now have great friends in India. We have great friends all over the world.
Cate:
It changes everything about how you think and about how you approach your business and about how you consider product development or service development because you’ve got these additional resources that even if they’re not sending work your way, you’re getting information and education and digit, numbers and things to help you. I’m not a numbers and things person, but they’re giving you the information that you need to build the product that you want, that gives you more opportunity to reach more people.
Tracy:
I want to build on that like traveling because we always talk about the world is getting smaller, but really, especially if we are working on a medium that is global, it reaches to the ends and everywhere in between. That’s one of the things I tell my students when with design and user experience and even just digital strategy is that like, we’ll go and work from some other culture for a little bit, and just absorb… Because you’ll realize what things that you just were raised with, but that was conditioned in you by your culture or your family or your traditions, and how everyone thinks differently.
Tracy:
That’s what I love about the fact that the WordPress community is so global is that I feel like I can go to one of the other countries. I can go to the WordCamp. I still am going to know like a base level of these are people that know WordPress, but then that unknown of the culture and experiencing that every single time, especially when it’s like something hard to struggle with, it teaches me something that is super valuable for my design or for my sales or for my strategy, or helping out a client every single time.
Cate:
And it gives you a bit of a unique edge too because you know a little something that somebody else that your competition doesn’t.
Tracy:
Absolutely.
Angela:
We’ve repeated this benefit of these conferences and WordCamps. What’s interesting to me is that anything that you project that you might get from the conference is usually not what you get from the conference. You’re always going to be surprised, and I think you always have to be open to be surprised about what you’re going to get. So even if you think, “Ah, I don’t think this conference has much to offer to me or I’m not sure what sessions I’m going to go to or whatever likely the connection you’re going to make has nothing to do with the content.”
Angela:
We wouldn’t be here today had I not powered through horrible imposter syndrome to go to loop comp and meet Tracy and take refuge in her smile and everything in this conference where they were like, no women. Well, very few women. That was just like, “Wow. That was not what I was expecting.” Do you know what I mean at all? Or going to PressNomics, which was also kind of like, “What am I doing here?”
Angela:
I was also sick and not well, and I powered through and went anyway. I met the guys with BlogVault and they ended up becoming a sponsor of our show. So you’re always going to be surprised. So I do think those… and Amy’s talked about this a lot too. It’s those in-person WordCamps and opportunities to go to conferences, even if they’re not WordPress or they’re more of the premium things are well with it. Staying home will never build your network.
Amy:
Maybe not never.
Angela:
Well, I mean, you got to be out there some way in Zoom or whatever.
Cate:
Yeah. It’s kind of the off-camera times that really do matter the most. The sessions are great. I learned tons of things from the sessions. Almost all of them are recorded and you can find them later. It’s the conversation over a cup of coffee. It’s bumping into somebody in the lobby waiting for an Uber. It’s these weird, random little moments that just… Like you said. They’re completely unexpected that have the strangest impact. Our whole life has been that way.
Amy:
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Amy:
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Amy:
I wanted to ask a little bit for anybody listening that has not heard of it, can you tell us about what HeroPress is?
Cate:
Yeah. So HeroPress has been around for six years now, I believe, if I’m doing math correctly. It is inspirational stories from people in the WordPress community who have used the WordPress platform to positively impact their life in some way. There just are so many and one of my jobs soon is going to be going through and categorizing all of them. It’s phenomenal because it’s people who grew up small town, rural, like I did who didn’t go on to college, who still built a business and a career. It’s people who were in terrible relationships that had an out, that you don’t always just have one of those.
Cate:
It’s people who felt marginalized for whatever reason, all of the variety of reasons that we choose the marginalized people. It’s how they were able to take something and use it the way that they needed to use it, to make the changes they wanted to make to at least start the life that they want to be living.
Cate:
I think it’s such a part of who we are. I mean, it’s what we did. But that I forgot that that’s not something that everybody realized that can just be done. So that’s something that we really want to focus on through the expansion is creating more resources to make it easier for people to continue to do this with their life. Particularly now that the pandemic has brought remote working into such focus.
Cate:
So to be able to provide resources for even people outside of WordPress who are now remote working, which we all know has its ups and downs. It’s as great as it is. It’s really awful sometimes too. Just to be able to share our knowledge and to help each other grow stronger. I’m a big believer that we’re stronger from the bottom and we’re stronger together. You build a really solid base and it doesn’t matter what decisions other people are making, because you can just keep doing the thing that you want to be doing building the thing you want to be built. So yeah, definitely about relationships and networking.
Angela:
You’re also involved with the Big Orange Heart, Wordfest Live, Hallway Chats. Talk about those. Tell us everything.
Tracy:
All of the things.
Cate:
I get sucked into it a lot.
Tracy:
Cate is everywhere.
Cate:
I’m a writer. I’m a communicator, so there’s always a need. Right now is actually a huge time, if you’re a writer to be entering the WordPress community because there’s such a strong demand for quality content creation. Because I’m in a position where I can choose the work that I’m doing, I’ve been able to do some volunteer work for this last year and just love helping Big Orange Heart. It’s a mental health charity. It helps you in crisis, but it also helps you build the mental wellbeing so that you can have a successful remote working experience.
Cate:
It’s just so much more than just helping you when you’re down, but they help you when you’re down. I’ve been able to be a part of that. We started as the pandemic was hitting and everybody was just really sick and tired of being home with each other. We did WordFest, which was their first… it was a virtual conference. 24 hours long, completely global. Over 70 volunteers helped the core team. We had about five people who pulled it. Well, probably about 10 because I always forget about the guys in the back room doing all the technical stuff. But a ton of us pull that together. It was great. We just finished the second one. I’m finally recovered from that, and we’ve already got dates for both of them in 2022.
Cate:
It’s something I’m going to be involved with for a while, which I’m really thankful for. I was an original remote worker as a stay at home mom who had a husband who was busy all the time, and I really appreciate the challenges and the struggles of feeling isolated and feeling alone. I think the biggest one is not knowing where to turn. You don’t always have the resources, the finances to get help. It wasn’t as easy, 20 years ago to be able to talk to a therapist across the internet.
Cate:
I didn’t necessarily have a babysitter, I didn’t necessarily have a car. So to be able to work for something that helps provide these resources in a place that people can comfortably come get them at least start their wellbeing journey is a huge part for me.
Cate:
Hallway Chats is our podcast. We acquired it kind of unexpectedly in February. It’s been on hiatus a little bit as I’ve been struggling with Big Orange Heart and we’ve been figuring out the expansion. How do you take a group of essays and turn it into something else? There’s a lot of answers there. So it’s firing back up again this fall. It’s those conversations that we have in the hallway between conferences or between sessions or instead of sessions at conferences.
Cate:
Our heart is really in providing visibility for other people in the WordPress community. We’ve got the resources. Let us let you use them. So it’s really about introducing the community so you can build those networks, so you can find the people you want to work with so that you can have the stronger business that you want to have.
Tracy:
What’s this all about WordPress podcast network too?
Cate:
There’s so many things you can do with HeroPress, because it’s a community-based like just so many resources. One of the things that we decided to do as the part of the new WordPress networks. So instead of making HeroPress bigger, we’re going to add additional resources around it. So kind of like a solar system, I guess you could say for those who love that. So one of them is WP Podcasts, which we’ll be releasing here in the next week or two, I believe.
Cate:
It’s just a list of all the podcasts that are out there because I don’t even know many podcasts are out there. We found some that we didn’t expect, and we really want to… There’s some really great global ones that don’t get the recognition. So we want to have those on there. You can go there. You can find a list. You can find the first episode. You can submit your podcast. We’re also doing something called Find at WP, which is literally what it sounds like. It is a list of the things.
Cate:
So it is going to be a list of newsletters. It is going to be an additional, a second list of podcasts. It’s going to have plug-ins. It’s going to have themes. It’s not a repository, but you can go in there, whoever you are, no matter what your budget is. You can go in and you can list it for free. There’ll be some options for it. We’re working on ways to fund all of this because we are not independently wealthy in any way. In fact, we will literally be living in a van not too long from now.
Amy:
Down by the river?
Cate:
Hopefully. So we went through the entrepreneur days where life was just terrible. And there were times when I did not know how we were going to make the budget. I would cry myself to sleep at night wondering how we were going to live in our Jeep down by the river. Now, here I am actively pursuing this as a lifestyle.
Angela:
It’s stay around full circle.
Cate:
Just much irony in life. But Find at WP, there are so many great resources out there. Most people don’t have the time or the interest. I like to research things. Not everybody does. It’s why I research things instead of build websites. So we’re going to go ahead and create this resource for people to be able to submit what they’re doing in the WordPress community and then make it easy for people to find it.
Tracy:
I love it. I’m making notes because I’m teaching web dev for marketers. I keep saying, I’m like, “Okay. Well, there’s lots of resources here, but they’re hard to find.” That is so much a needed thing, so I love it.
Cate:
It’s so hard to do in a growing community because successful people are successful because they’re busy people who haven’t got to the successful stage are trying to… I’m generally busy trying to get there. And the third type of people have no idea where to even start. So part of what we want to do in a second expansion is start doing product reviews and plugging in theme reviews. But from the standpoint of, is this actually worth your money? Is this like a real look at it? So that when a struggling designer is wondering if they should spend a hundred dollars, which sometimes a hundred dollars is a huge amount of money, and you don’t just have that to throw around. So we want to take away some of those barriers of entry that help make things better for everybody.
Tracy:
I love it. It’s so great.
Cate:
I’m pretty excited.
Amy:
So with HeroPress and going back there, how are you finding the people that are being featured? I mean, I’ve read many of the essays.
Cate:
My husband talks to everybody. [crosstalk 00:35:53]
Amy:
Is he talking to strangers?
Cate:
Yes.
Angela:
He gives them a candy.
Cate:
He does. We are a terrible example to our children to be quite honest. Good thing, they’re 19 and 21, so they’ve got a little bit of an edge here, but it’s hilarious. We have an open signup that we haven’t really pushed, but that’ll be something that we want to get out there a little more, but he hears a story. He sees a story on Twitter. People bring him a story and he is not shy about stepping forward and saying, “Hey, this sounds really interesting. Please write.”
Cate:
We’re also looking at some ideas on some shorter stories, like giving people the option to write more. Instead of an entire story, more like a little segment or a little vignette of something positive from their work. So that we can then include more people. Not everybody wants to write a lot and not everybody feels comfortable. We’ve also started working when we have multi-lingual contributors, having them write their story in their local language or their primary language as well as writing it in English.
Cate:
We’ve been working with [inaudible 00:37:09] to figure out how we can improve the translations that we have on the website, but also how we can improve their translation services. Because we have such a huge pool of different language speakers to be able to test the quality of some of their more diverse languages.
Tracy:
I did notice all the different languages when I was looking on the website.
Cate:
It’s a big deal to us. I mean, we really respect the fact that we’re white people in Middle America who live on a reasonable income and that we want really have a heart for showing other people off and making sure that we’re using those resources to help as many people as possible, because it can be a big deal when you’re new at something.
Cate:
I think we’ve all been there. Seeing somebody else that’s like us do it, seeing it in our own language, hearing it in our own language can just change our learning level so much. So we’re really committed to putting as many resources as we reasonably can into creating as much diversity as possible. And equitable access to anything, everything.
Amy:
That’s amazing.
Angela:
We do try to, in our show notes when we know someone has a HeroPress story is linked to it. And in so many of our guests have had that. And Tofer has asked me and it came at a very difficult time, but I want to do it and I will do it.
Cate:
Oh, good. I’m the only one in our family who hasn’t yet, and it’s probably time for me to do it. But hat’s the thing is it’s okay for it to not be the right time. I’ve seen so many things that I’ve tried to do among all the things that I already tried to do where when I’ve said no, when I finally say yes, it was such a better time to have done it. Sometimes you need some time on the other side of something to let the rest of the story. None of our stories are complete and then they won’t be complete.
Cate:
I don’t even think that they’re complete when we die, because they just continue. But giving it a little time afterwards can just make such a huge difference to both letting our healing happen, because most of these stories have a pain to them. I mean that’s what makes a good story. But life is painful. I’ve been married for 23 years. I’m very aware of this. It’s so good to let yourself do it when it’s right for you. And that’s what we’re really focused on.
Amy:
Wow.
Angela:
Awesome.
Amy:
Well, on that note, I would love to ask you to tell us where our listeners can find you online.
Cate:
Yeah. So I’m @mysweetcate. My sweet Cate, and that’s Cate with a C. Because I’m Cathy with a C. A lot of people don’t know that, but I’ve been My sweet Cate for a long time, 22 years now. So Twitter and LinkedIn, and I’m Cate DeRosia on Facebook. But I probably won’t talk to you. So it’s nothing personal. I just don’t use it that way.
Amy:
Awesome.
Cate:
I’ve got some great groups if you want to join.
Amy:
Yeah. Well, we can put those in the show notes. So thank you for being on today and thanks to our sponsor for this episode, Ninja Forms.
Cate:
Thanks so much for having me. It was so wonderful. I’ve been waiting to talk to you ladies, and I just can’t tell you what a great part of my day this was.
Tracy:
Yay. Thanks for listening. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter or join our Facebook group. We would be honored if you subscribe to the show. You can find us on Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play, and iTunes. Finally, if you want to be on the show or know someone who would, visit our website at womeninwp.com. Until next time.
This episode is sponsored by Ninja Forms
